#for all the lies and the hatred and the bigotry

[spiltcandycoatedpunkblood]

my friend dealt with a multitude of mental health issues, but yes I fully 100% blame the election result even if it wasn't the exact thing to push him over the edge

it's absolutely horrifying that the end result of an election has people reblogging suicide hotlines and writing messages about who to blame if they die over the next 4 years

[hoodienanami]

once you actually start reading and learning things about malcolm mclaren you will quickly realize that half the shit ppl say about him is just straight up antisemitic lies

[jewish-sideblog]

I think people forget that the Nazis never said they were the bad guys. If someone says, hey, I’m evil! You don’t let them take over your country. They presented themselves as scientific, not hateful. By their own account, they were progressives, and the superiority of White Europe over the other races was a proven and immutable fact. They had scientists and archaeologists and historians to prove it. They didn’t tell people they wanted to kill the Jews because they were hateful. They manufactured evidence to frame us for very real tragedies, and they had methodological research to prove that we were genetically predisposed to misconduct. Wouldn’t you believe that?

Hollywood has spent the last 80 years portraying the Nazis as an obvious and intimidating evil. That’s a good thing in some ways, because we want general audiences to recognize that they were evil. But we also want them to be able to recognize how and why they came to power. Not by self-describing themselves as an evil empire, but by convincing people that they were the good guys and the saviors. They hosted the Olympics. Several European countries capitulated and volunteered themselves to the Empire. There were American and British Fascist Parties. They had broad public support. Hollywood never shows that part, so general audiences never learn to recognize the actual signs of antisemitism.

People today think they can’t possibly be antisemitic, because they’re leftist! They abhor bigotry! They could never comprehend Nazi ideology coming from the mouth of a bisexual college student wearing a graphic tee and jeans. How could they? The only depiction of antisemites they’ve ever seen have been gaunt, pale, middle-aged men in black leather trench coats with skulls on their caps.

If the Nazis time-travelled from the 1930s and wanted to take power now, they’d change their original tactics, but not by much. They would target countries suffering from an identity crisis and an economic collapse. They would portray themselves as the pinnacle of what that society considers progressive. Back then, it was race science. These days it’s performative wokeness. Once they’d garnered enough respect and reputation, they’d begin manufacturing propaganda and lies to manipulate people’s anger and fears at a single target— Jews.

If the Nazis made an actual return, they wouldn’t look like neo-Nazis. They wouldn’t be nearly as obvious about their hatred. Their evil wouldn’t give them yellow eyes, and no suspenseful music would play when they walked in the room. They’d be friendly. They’d look like you. They would learn what things your community fears and what things you already hate. They would lie and fabricate evidence to connect the rich elites and the imperialists you revile to a single source of unequivocal Jewish evil. It wouldn’t be hard— they already have two-thousand years of institutional antisemitism they can rely on to paint their picture.

If you’re curious why antisemitism today is coming from grassroots organizations, young, liberal college campuses, suburban neighborhoods with pride flags and All Are Welcome Here signs? That’s why. It’s because, as a global society, we’ve forgotten that the world didn’t used to see the Nazis as bad guys. And what is forgotten about history is doomed to be repeated.

[soup-of-the-daisies]

“Harry didn’t name any of his kids after Remus because he’s saving that option for Teddy!”

Wrong. Harry didn’t name any of his kids after Remus because it wasn’t personal enough.

James Sirius is named after his two fathers; Lily Luna is named after his mother and one of his and Ginny’s best friends. Albus Severus is named after two wizards who were incredibly influential for Harry’s development and safety (I have a HC on why on earth Harry decided to name his child after Dumbledore and Snape, but that’s a separate post entirely). None of his and Ginny’s kids are named after Remus, not (just) because they wished to save the name for Teddy, but because of Teddy.

Harry looks his orphaned godson in the eyes one day, a year or two after the Battle, and realises how fucked up it was that Remus, despite technically being able to, never visited him. He can’t imagine leaving Teddy all alone like that, in a family he might know doesn’t look favourably upon magic. There’s a chance that Lily may have told Remus about Petunia and Vernon and their bigotry, their hatred. And Remus, for some reason, didn’t come look.

Harry looks that little boy in the eyes and realises how weird it was that Remus didn’t admit to having been the best of friends with James Potter until late into Harry’s third year. Harry can’t fathom that, if Teddy was Ron and Hermione’s kid and both Ron and Hermione died, he’d be able to talk to the spitting image of Ron with Hermione’s eyes (but starved, intense, broken, thirteen years old and remembering his parents’ murders) and not say, “Your parents were my best friends. Let me tell you about them; let me tell you all that you want to know.”

Harry figures he’d move mountains to keep Teddy safe and happy. Harry figures that Sirius would’ve done the same, considering he mustered up the strength to break out of Azkaban after twelve years and swim to Britain to ensure Harry’s safety at the smallest sign of danger. Sirius lived in a cave and ate rats for Harry with dementors breathing down his back: Harry knows with utmost certainty that, if Sirius had had the freedom to do so, he would’ve burnt the country down for Harry.

Remus didn’t do that for him, wouldn’t have, be it for a lack of freedom or a lack of want. Remus was ‘Lupin’ to Harry even in death, even after being named godfather to his son. Harry had to convince thirty-seven year old Remus to stay with his pregnant wife at seventeen. Harry got blown into a wall for his efforts, was given the honour of becoming godfather months later. Harry liked Remus, still loves him even, but there’s nothing Harry wouldn’t do for Teddy and there was very little Remus did for Harry, and there’s that.

Later, Harry doesn’t even suggest naming a child after Remus. Ginny doesn’t even ask. None of their children are named after Remus, because Harry is a man who is quick to anger when it’s about innocents, a man whose forgiveness only goes so far. He’s never been truly bothered by his own situation, but he’s bothered by the mere idea of Teddy ending up in a similar one and him doing nothing.

Remus did nothing. That’s the crux of it. That’s why.

(After Lily Luna is born, Teddy asks if ‘Luna��� is for his dad. Harry looks at Ginny, and Ginny looks at him, and Harry does what Remus taught him: he swallows his apprehension and lies.

“Yes,” he says, raking his fingers through Teddy’s fluffy, turquoise hair. He thinks he’ll raze cities for this child. “But we saved ‘Remus’ for you.”)

[americansarentpeople]

You wonder why I never meet an American halfway.

This is a good example of it. They are liars. They operate 100% on emotions and feelings. No logic. No facts. If you give them your time, they will waste it. If you ask for a reason. They won't tell you. With a single exception. Dig down deep enough and you will always get to the core of the same lie. This is why No policy kamala or Clinton had would change anything. No slogan. No laws or bills. Yanks operate from vibes and vibes alone and are powered by the same lie. Note: The person in this thread was NOT the person I originally questioned. They were so butt hurt that I asked a single follow-up question, they had to jump in and make it their business

They have nothing. They are nothing. Every yank is 9 soundbytes around an empty shell. They cannot think. They cannot explain. No facts. No logic. Just blind, unstoppable hatred. Powered by cruelty. Lies. Selfishness and the delusion they're all John wick.

NEVER give an american your time. Never meet them halfway. Their halfway is 4 million innocent people into a genocide. Cruelty is the point. Ignore them. Call them names. Call them animals. Because they aren't people. It only took a few minutes to get them to admit the only reason they voted was because of bigotry. They're ALL like this.

So, when I call them faggots. It's not a homophobic slur. Be gay. Be trans. Be you. Do crime. Faggotry is a state of being and that being, is american.

And they get really mad when you wind them up only to ignore them after. They want nothing more than to hurt you. Hurt them first and Hurt them hard. Who cares? They'd watch you bleed to death right in front of you and then scream "election fraud" into a child's face. Fuck them.

[alishaaxo]

ive somehow gotten into marauders tiktok a lil…. and OMG some ppl r acc delusional and lowk mean for telling straight up lies to new fans….

like somebody asked what were regulus’ last words and a heavily-liked comment replies “oh its about him and james having a house by the sea” and then said its in the books…. TFFFF

regulus is only mentioned like 3 times i think…. by sirius, by professor slughorn maybe?? and then the moment the golden trio discover who R.A.B is and thats FINE and also ppl shipping jegulus is fine but the lies r not like at what point would be ever discover his last words or wanting a house w james when both of them are DEAD and havent written a letter mentioning it or anything😭😭

and like another post i saw this morning was about luna/barty having an interesting dynamic and the comments were like “oh its becuz he was besties with her uncle evan rosier” and i get thats the fanon but when somebody replies and asks if this is true in the books pls dont say “oh yes lunas mum was a rosier who loved barty jr and thats why he cared for luna”

it simply just NEVER existed 💀💀

im all for creating hcs and stuff cos thats what fandom is about but like having things so wildly out of canon (or plausible but not mentioned) just becoming generally agreed upon kills me becuz now there is no possibility of finding fics which go thru different routes (like pandora lovegood being originally a fortescue, ollivander or malfoy etc)…..

……or just follow canon (like with remus lupins whole characterisation! he’s not some soft uwu boy…. but he isnt some emo punk friends with slytherins…. hes a kind but cowardly guy who wasn’t naturally smart but became studious and who has some anger issues which occasionally pop out‼️)

(also like i remember before atyd got big and i cant imagine how ppl who r ogs in the fandom feel now…. like ive liked it as a kid but only got into the fandom like 2018-ish)

(and i didnt read atyd at first when it got big becuz of how they made remus be in an orphanage when i loved the idea of him having super loving but guilty parents esp cos his dad was an anti-wolf activist but him growing to love wolves but feeling ashamed for how his bigotry resulted in his son’s issue would be SO interesting….. and then it goes even more canon-divergent with the personality lobotomy of remus and then i gave up on both it AND the fandom becuz then everything kinda replicated it with the changing characterisation of the marauders 😭😭)

ALSO ALSO like the whole hatred of dumbledore goes way too far sometimes and it lowkey just takes me back to how pissed the aot, fmab and mha fandom would make characters like grisha jaeger, hohenheim and all might…. like they do have their issues but they aren’t some abusive assholes and i get making ooc fanfics cos do whatever but the sheer amount of fics making them that would kill me. and like grindeldore angst and the tragicness of dumbledores plot is so interesting to me

[thehollowwriter]

Something that I will say as somebody who's been raised in evangelical Christianity is that I find it very frustrating when people respond with "Well it was a mistranslation" "Well they just didn't interpret the bible right, a lot of Christians aren't like that" when there is discussion regarding Christianity and the severe harm and suffering it has called.

To be honest? Whatever the bible used to say is irrelevant in these conversations apart from being an example of how unreliable biblical translations are. This way of thinking frames Christian bigotry and hatred as a personal flaw, rather than a flaw of the entire damn thing, and waves off all responsibility in a classic case of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. It dismisses the harm Christianity has caused and it shifts the blame.

Maybe it used to be "Man shall not sleep with boy" but that doesn't matter because for centuries it has been "Man shall not sleep with man."

It is drilled into your head over and over that being queer in any way is a sin, a temptation from the devil to turn you against Jesus that you have to resist. The "mistranslation" thing? It's quite conveniently taught to us that those claims of mistranslations are LIES. We are told that it's nonsense made up to try and "change our heavenly faith into a worldly faith that allows their sin"

On mass it is taught that being queer is a monstrosity born of the influence of Satan, and that any possibilities of that being wrong is lies to try and sway you to sin. Laws stripping queer people of their human rights have been justified by pointing at the bible. Non-Christains are constantly referred to as "the enemy" or as "lost sheep".

History has been warped by Christian scholars, and the history of Christianity as taught by Christian institutions is just straight up WRONG.

That is NOT just one person "not being a real Christian" or "misinterpreting the bible." It is not one person's misinterpretation if that's how it is commonly interpreted all over the world. It is hatred and propaganda and fearmongering. Those are core aspects of Christianity, and just because some Christians are queer or "Don't hate, just disagree", doesn't change that

(Btw this is just a general post so it's not specifically in regards to the situation going on)

[jewish-vents]

Cw for mentions of the current war, and general i/p stuff

There’s this growing narrative in Jewish spaces that we can’t be mad when Palestinians, especially Gazans, do or say something Jew hating because they’re traumatised, and I just… I can’t anymore. I just saw a Jew say it’s fine if a Gazan calls a Jew a kike because ‘do what you need to do’. NO. I am NOT going to tolerate the most blatant fucking Jew hatred just because it’s coming from traumatised people. Like, I get it, be lighter, make sure to critically evaluate the statement and see if it’s actually bigoted or if it’s just in an iffy tone. Trying to tone police very recently and deeply traumatised people IS bad, but saying that they’re allowed to be as bigoted as they want?? What the fuck???!!!

It’s like how there are a few big Palestinian bloggers here who are very Jew hating. People who literally spreading things like blood libel with ‘Israelis kidnap blonde kids from Gaza’, updated well poisoning, saying Zionists need to fucking die, and then on top of that refuse to talk to Jews who aren’t there to tolerate the rhetorics that are being spread by them. And these people are fucking Jew haters. And they’re harming Jews and radicalising a LOT of people into Jew hatred because their audience is so big.

Palestinians can be Jew haters. Bigotry is never acceptable, no matter the status of the perpetrator. Jewish safety is not less valuable than Palestinian safety, they’re fucking equal because everybody in danger deserves to be safe. Fuck all of you in Jewish spaces who try to spread this shit.

It's worth remembering that, while Jews currently have systemic privilege over Arabs in Israel, there is a history of over a thousand years of Jewish oppression in the Muslim world, and antisemitism is just as baked into Islam as Christianity.

Jews have been ethnically cleansed from the entire Arab and Muslim world, and Arab and Muslim governments frequently deflect attention form their own abuses of their citizens by blaming the Jews. This is as true in Palestine as it is in Egypt and Iran.

The situation is complicated, and grace does need to be extended to those currently suffering because of Israeli action, but blatant antisemitic lies cannot be tolerated.

-🐞

[mariacallous]

“The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep,” Gore Vidal once wrote of the resurgence of the far right in the United States. In the case of the rioting that has erupted across England and Northern Ireland this week and last, old hatreds have been stirred up using new technologies.

The initial spark for the violence that has plagued British towns and cities was the sickening murder of three young girls last Monday in the seaside town of Southport, stabbed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga session. It was the sort of horrific crime that is mercifully rare in Britain. The last comparable attack on children occurred almost 30 years ago.

The only suspect in the Southport murders, 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, was immediately arrested. We know Rudakubana’s name only because the judge in his case lifted an anonymity order—imposed as standard when the accused is a minor until legal proceedings begin—because false claims about the suspect’s origins were helping to fuel the racist violence. Social media posts claiming that the attacker was a Muslim, a refugee, a migrant, or a foreigner received 27 million impressions on Twitter/X in the 24 hours after the Southport killings.

Far-right groups descended on Southport the day after the stabbings. We know little about Rudakubana, but on Aug. 1 we did learn that he is a British national who was born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda, a country with a large Christian majority. This has not prevented far-right thugs from rampaging through towns and cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Sunderland, Rotherham, Tamworth, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Aldershot, and Belfast, targeting Muslims

Many on the right have rushed to attribute the mobs to a sense of disillusion and a supposed social gap between the working class and the “elite”—a group in which they are never keen to count themselves. A few left-wingers have shared similar opinions. It is true that material factors have created a propitious environment in Britain for unrest. After 14 years of Tory government, before the recent Labour victory, the country is a poorer and more resentful place, its sclerotic and creaking public infrastructure barely functioning after years of neglect.

There is much to be angry about. Yet this does not adequately explain the nature nor the scale of the violence, much of which has been driven by a bourgeoning alliance between a right-wing elite and the mob—an alliance that, as Hannah Arendt once put it, rests on the “genuine delight with which the former [watch] the latter destroy respectability.”

For its part, the mob has attacked mosques, set buildings on fire, looted shops, violently assaulted ethnic minority bystanders, attacked cars on residential streets, and thrown bricks at the police. “We want our country back,” they yelled over the weekend while attempting to set fire to a hotel in Rotherham because they believed it was housing asylum-seekers. “P**i Muslims off our streets,” they yelled in Leeds. Footage from elsewhere showed men adorned with swastika tattoos, arms thrown up in Nazi salutes, voices yelling at anybody with brown skin to “go home.” This is not a rage that can, or should, be appeased.

This is not the first time rioting in the U.K. has been driven by bigotry. In Notting Hill in 1958, a mob of 400 white people attacked West Indian residents and their property. In the same week, racially motivated riots also broke out in St. Ann’s in Nottingham. Going further back, the Gordon Riots of 1780 saw an eruption of violent anti-Catholic sentiment.

Despite the atavistic nature of the hatreds unleashed this week and last, many who have taken to the streets this time around are creatures of social media. Several prominent far-right influencers have come out on social media in support of the mayhem with all sails unfurled. Others have been whipped into a near-homicidal frenzy by misinformation on apps such as X.

The kudzu spread of incendiary falsehoods began with the lie, first promulgated on X by the managing director of a clothing company, that the suspect in the Southport murders was an asylum-seeker named “Ali Al-Shakati.” The misogynist influencer Andrew Tate shared the false claim while asserting that the attacker was an “illegal immigrant.” The far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as “Tommy Robinson,” has used X to call for “mass deportations” and described Islam as a “mental health issue.” Meanwhile, disgraced actor Laurence Fox reacted to the stabbings by calling for Islam to be “removed from Britain.”

The mob responded accordingly. The day after false rumors about Ali Al-Shakati had began swirling around on social media, a group of white men attacked a mosque in Southport. The street violence has continued ever since.

Lurking in the background while disinformation is spread is a wealthy right-wing elite that has started to flex its political muscles. Some of the worst purveyors of misinformation have accounts on X only because right-wing billionaire Elon Musk has reinstated them—together with numerous other white supremacist accounts—under the guise of “free speech.”

Musk has spread misinformation about the riots on the app, claiming in one post that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain and amplifying one of Robinson’s posts. Robinson was reinstated by Musk in 2023 and today has more than 800,000 followers. Similarly, though he was banned from X in 2017 for claiming that women should bear “some responsibility” for being sexually harassed and assaulted, Tate was reinstated by Musk in 2022.

The takeover of media platforms by wealthy elites is driven by a right-wing adoption of the Gramscian belief that the conquest of power comes only after the conquest of culture. Musk, the world’s richest man, purchased X for $44 billion in 2022 in order to combat what he calls the “woke mind virus.” Together with renaming the platform, one of Musk’s first actions was to do away with legacy blue checks and open up verification on the platform to anybody with $8.

The move thrilled Musk’s sycophantic fan base, which had previously chafed with resentment at the status differential on the app between themselves and what they contemptuously referred to as the “legacy media.” But it also turned X into the world’s largest vector of misinformation. It is also of a piece with former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s idea of “flooding the zone with shit”—i.e., destroying the traditional media’s ability to give the public accurate information by letting it sink in a deluge of bullshit.

It isn’t only social media where influential right-wing figures have been allowed to blur the distinction between legitimate protest and far-right violence. Ever since the riots began last week, the British television station GB News has often sought to excuse them. Launched in 2021 and co-owned by the multimillionaire hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, since the murders in Southport, GB News has given airtime to an assortment of cranks, demagogues, and grifters. On more than one occasion, the station’s language has come dangerously close to incitement. The leader of the Reform U.K. party, Nigel Farage, who has his own show on GB News, also took to X in the aftermath of the Southport attacks to ask whether “the truth is being withheld from us” by the police about the identity of the suspect.

Earlier this year, Marshall—who as well as owning the reactionary website UnHerd is believed to be trying to purchase the Spectator and the Telegraph—was caught liking and sharing content close to the material that has been circulated this week by paranoid fascist weirdos. In February, the anti-extremist charity Hope not Hate revealed that Marshall had endorsed tweets calling for mass deportations and which suggested a civil war between “native Europeans” and “fake refugee invaders” was imminent.

Many of the presenters and guests on GB News have spent this week mocking Prime Minister Keir Starmer for labeling the riots as far right. Instead, the channel has sought to portray the street violence as driven by the “legitimate concerns” of disenfranchised members of the working class. The idea that the thuggish behavior of recent days is somehow representative of the working class is itself a form of middle-class prejudice—rooted in the unspoken assumption that working-class people are inherently stupid, racist, and violent.

GB News operates on familiar right-wing populist lines. Its prolier-than-thou presenters make superficial overtures to the masses while its modus operandi is to ensure that power is never truly shared or redistributed. But let’s not be too partisan about it: GB News is pushing at a door that has already been loosened by more “respectable” media coverage of migrants and asylum-seekers.

There is a self-pitying refrain on the right that you “can’t talk about” immigration. Yet the big mouths and shock jocks of the right-wing media seldom shut up about it. This time last year, the broadcaster James Whale suggested on Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV that the U.K. “should point weapons” at migrants in the English Channel. Even talking about migrants in this sort of bloodthirsty language is no impediment to getting on. A few months later, Whale was made an MBE.

The suggestion that the violent protests represent the last resort of Britain’s forgotten majority is, of course, laughable. When polled, nearly 50 percent of Britons wanted harsher-than-usual sentences for the rioters, 39 percent the usual norms of sentencing, and just 4 percent more lenient charges.

Less than five weeks ago, Starmer convincingly won a general election against a Tory party that campaigned on the slogan of stopping the boats carrying asylum-seekers to the United Kingdom. In truth, the ghouls who have haunted television studios this week making excuses for the rioters see any Labour government as equivalent to an occupying power. They want their country back because, after 14 years, they feel as if it has been lost at the ballot box.

But if anybody has a right to think of themselves as the voice of the people at the present time, it is the newly elected Labour prime minister. He may not own a television station or a social media app, but he does have a 174-seat majority in the House of Commons. The rule of law—and democracy—must prevail.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Tom Slater

Published: May 1, 2024

The Columbia cranks rant about killing Zionists one minute and demand hot meals the next.

If you want to know what’s driving the Israelophobic protests and occupations at New York’s Columbia University – and many more elite campuses across America – get a load of this clip that has been doing the rounds on social media over the past 24 hours.

In it, one Johannah King-Slutzky – spokesperson for the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, which was forcibly ended by the New York City Police Department last night, with around 100 arrests – issues her and her comrades’ demands. On top of Columbia ‘divesting’ from Israel and such, King-Slutzky also demanded meals and water.

Apparently, Columbia was refusing to allow the students who were then breaking windows and barricading themselves inside Hamilton Hall to access their usual canteen grub. ‘We’re saying that [Columbia is] obligated to provide food to students who have paid for a meal plan here’, King-Slutzky told a sceptical press conference.

When pushed, she said they were only asking that supplies be allowed to be brought in:

‘Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you?… I mean, it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?’

It’s all there. The whinging cadence, the ‘like’-strewn patter, the obligatory keffiyeh, the industrial-strength victimhood, the bloke in a crop top stood behind her… King-Slutzky and Co are the picture of trustafarians in revolt. Their anti-Israel bigotry is matched only by their profound sense of entitlement. How dare the university not provide adequate refreshments while we are smashing shit up?

There are plenty of people today likening the Columbia meal-planners to their Sixties forebears – in particular, to the Columbia radicals who mounted their own disruptive demos in 1968. Sadly, even some veterans of Sixties activism are flattering today’s privileged brats with the comparison.

But it’s bollocks. When Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall and other buildings in April 1968, they did so to oppose the Vietnam War and university plans to build a gymnasium in nearby Harlem, which students argued would effectively be segregated. After a week, police moved in and arrested 700 students.

Today, Columbia students and their off-campus heavies aren’t opposing war exactly. Yes, they oppose Israel’s assault on the genocidal lunatics of Hamas, following the Islamist terrorists’ vicious pogrom on 7 October. But they seem pretty relaxed about warfare against the state of Israel. ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’, they chant. ‘Never forget 7 October… 7 October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?’, screeched one racist cunt outside the gates.

Therein lies another crucial difference between ’68 and today. Today’s students aren’t fighting racism, they are luxuriating in it. Khymani James, a leader of the Columbia protests, posted a video to social media the other week saying ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’. ‘I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill’, he said, fantasising about having a scrap with one of those awful Jews. (Given the vast, vast majority of Jews are Zionists, that’s really not overegging it.)

Elsewhere, we’ve seen protesters chant ‘Go back to Poland’ at Jewish Columbians and hold up homemade signs, stating ‘Al-Qasam’s [sic] next targets’, pointing to a group of Israeli-flag-waving students. The Al-Qassam Brigades being Hamas’s military wing. An Arab Israeli was also punched outside Columbia recently, by activists brandishing the pro-Hamas triangle symbol.

I’m willing to concede that some of this unvarnished, violent hatred is being carried out by off-campus antifa types, as is routinely alleged by the protesters’ apologists. Not least because King-Slutzky and yer man in his crop top look like they couldn’t fight their way out of a ball pit. But activists’ alarmingly high tolerance for virulent anti-Semitism, their total lack of condemnation of Hamas or its many campus fanboys, speaks volumes.

As does their expectation of water and spag bol and their apparent shock and horror when the police were called in. The Columbia protesters and their supporters are now trying to portray the clearance of Hamilton Hall as an affront to freedom of speech. Free speech is ‘supposed to be prized’ on campus, one student told Al Jazeera last night.

Being concerned about a heavy-handed response to these demos is one thing. The governor-ordered crackdown on protests at University of Texas at Austin, for example, has been nakedly authoritarian and censorious. But there is no inalienable right to break into and occupy university buildings. (Nor is there an inalienable right to constantly harass Jewish students as they try to move around campus.)

As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, civil disobedience is not the same as expressing an opinion or engaging in peaceful protest. The whole point of it is to break the rules. Indeed, it ‘derives expressive power from the willingness of participants to accept the consequences of breaking the rules’. That these students and junior academics are shocked to be handcuffed for breaking the law reveals a profound sense of entitlement among young ‘radicals’.

We shouldn’t be surprised. FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has pointed to two dispiriting, parallel trends in American universities: a willingness to curtail free speech, all while giving a green light to violent, intolerant protests. At the University of California, Berkeley, where students rioted in 2017 because that tiresome weirdo Milo Yiannopoulous was speaking, the university ‘showed cowardice in its unwillingness to punish the rioters’, writes Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo in a recent op-ed. We saw a similarly rank capitulation at Evergreen State that same year, where marauding students were effectively allowed to chase professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying off of campus. Since then, ‘shutdowns and shout-downs have become commonplace’, they write.

Some critics of campus cancel culture have been caught off guard by the pro-Hamas protests. Almost a decade ago, they observe, we were all gawping at the ‘Yale Snowflakes’, those absurd Ivy Leaguers who went into open, teary-eyed revolt because academic Erika Christakis sent them an email saying they should chill out about offensive Halloween costumes. How did babyish offence-taking give way to open support for anti-Semitic terrorists?

But it all makes a perverse kind of sense. Students taught that freedom of speech is a form of violence have begun to see violence as a form of free speech. Young radicals reared on a crude, conspiratorial racial identity politics have begun to apply it to geopolitics, with predictably anti-Semitic results. A new generation of elite youth, overprotected and indulged in equal measure, have come to think they can do no wrong.

So let’s retire the Sixties comparisons. In 1964, when Mario Savio – civil-rights activist and student leader of the Free Speech Movement – was leading a campaign of civil disobedience, aimed at liberating Berkeley students from censorship, his cause was just and he was happy to suffer the consequences of his methods. ‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious’, he famously said, ‘you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… you’ve got to make it stop!’. Meal plans did not get a mention.

At the same time, let’s not pretend that today’s revolting students just appeared, fully formed, from the womb. They are the products of an academic and upper-class culture that has kindled their prejudices and inflamed their intolerance. They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats. And they’ve been pandered to for far too long.

==

Students taught that freedom of speech is a form of violence have begun to see violence as a form of free speech.

This is an important point. The people who insisted that "words are violence" and that "misgendering" someone is as good as murdering them, are busy trying to pretend that their violence and destruction is merely a form of protected free speech and opinion expression.

It's not. They're trying to gaslight society.

If you're too stupid or too ideologically compromised to stand up and go get a glass of water, you probably should remove yourself from the gene pool.

[leogichidaa]

Lovable Except for that Terrible Period: The Upbringing of Remus Lupin

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the Pottermore information on Remus, in particular the narrative around Greyback biting him and his childhood before Hogwarts.

I'm going to start with addressing the most absurd thing to me in the whole write up: "[Lyall] had parroted what was the common view of werewolves in his community".

Hmm. Did he though? Because if we look back at what was actually described a few paragraphs up:

It sure seems like Lyall's statements were so extreme and hateful that even his coworkers at the Bigotry Against Magical Creatures Department, whose job it was to round up werewolves and place them on a registry, were shocked and offended enough that they kicked him out of the room. His statements clearly fell pretty far outside the norm.

It's important to note that Lyall's bigotry was extreme even for the society he was in because I think it's critical to Remus' development and all the internalized bigotry and shame that Remus carries with him. Lyall did not, imo, go from declaring that all werewolves were soulless, evil, and deserving of death to being completely accepting of werewolves just because his son was bitten. I imagine that he did his best to be a loving parent to Remus, but that he projected his bigotry onto Remus in subtle, covert ways. This line describing his perspective on Remus really drives that home for me: "his son was what he had always been – loveable and clever – except for that terrible period at the full moon".

His son was his son, except when he was a monster. It's explicitly stated that during transformations, Lyall no longer sees his loveable and clever son, he sees a dangerous beast. And I think that absolutely impacts the way Remus sees himself. Remus has such a potent sense of hatred for that aspect of himself and he does everything he can to repress it, run from it, and make amends for it (except when he's with the marauders, who give him a taste of true unconditional acceptance and allow him to enjoy himself even when he is transformed). He cannot accept and integrate his condition into a whole, stable sense of self and I think that is in no small part because Lyall cannot accept and integrate it either.

(As a brief aside, I also think it's important to highlight the minimization of Lyall's actions in the text because I think the way Remus is positioned in the narrative is very telling. This could really be an entire other post, but I do think the way this Pottermore write up falls all over itself to try to make Lyall's bigotry seem minor and sympathetic is...revealing.)

The write up also states that Lyall lied to Remus for years about why Remus was attacked because he worried Remus would blame him. Reading that was a bit of an "aha!" moment for me. Because isn't this what Remus does in PoA? He withholds critical information about Sirius from Dumbledore because he feels so much internal shame and he worries that Dumbledore will think less of him if he tells the truth. Learned behavior.

Final thought:

"Remus was not allowed to play with other children" has me all the way fucked up. I am sure that such an extreme tactic seemed justified given the potential harm that could occur if Remus' condition was discovered, but it definitely impacted the way Remus functions in relationships, i.e. abysmally. He is paranoid that he will be found out and that this will mean that his friends will hate and abandon him because that's what his parents raised him to fear. A justified fear, perhaps, but a debilitating one all the same.

Also, while it maybe makes sense to keep him isolated from other children when he's five and the risk of him letting it slip is very real because he can't understand the potential consequences, his parents keep him isolated up until he is invited to Hogwarts and if Dumbledore hadn't fought above Hope and Lyall's protests to bring him to Hogwarts they might have kept him isolated...forever? It is not surprising that Remus struggles to form and maintain intimate connections when he was taught that even interacting with others was potentially dangerous.

[aelestora]

My takeaway from the debate:

Vance did a very good job of pretending to be a Real Boy and using lies to sane-wash his and Trump's fascist rhetoric without actively acknowledging the bigotry and hatred inherent to it in any way

Also, remember: It's not illegal migrants' fault that housing costs are high. It's Kamala Harris's fault, because she let the illegal migrants in (who then proceeded to make housing prices go up) 🤮

Walz on the other hand, made an impassioned plea to the American people to choose NOT to destroy our democracy after spending an hour and a half being called a liar-liar-pants-on-fire by a man who very recently admitted to making up stories so that the media would mention his wild fascist conspiracy theories

I'm really not sure who I think won. If CBS hadn't caved at the last minute and had allowed the moderators to fact-check them in real time, I think it would have been a slam dunk for Walz. But since the network allowed Vance to run a lie-a-thon, essentially unchecked, it was a lot closer than it should have been.

That's not to say that Tim Walz did perfectly and was a paragon of truth of course, there were certainly questions he avoided answering with varying levels of deftness. All I mean is that basically every sentence out of Vance's mouth was either untrue, irrelevant, or directly contradicted something he'd said 30 seconds earlier, and that should have been made more apparent by the moderators.

[sciralta]

Not asking to be a jerk, genuinely curious. I have never understood how the Raf death plot was racist. There were 3 other live interests and only 1 was white. It never made sense to me.

I think that whole thing led to PB not having the balls to do things. So instead of stories like It Lives or Endless Summer where there were real consequences and drama, we get Wake the Dead, where every love interest is safe and it is so dumb.

Oh god why are you asking the white person this.

So there are kind of a concerning amount of people that have this view that racism is just blue in the face, spittle flying, MAGA-type people shouting slurs and crying about CRT. But that really only just shows a limited understanding of what racism is. Racism isn’t just direct hatred or bigotry. When a system functions so that one race is biased for and others disadvantaged, that system is racist.

It had been quite clear well before Open Heart that white (particularly white male) love interests were favoured in the writing over love interests of colour. These white characters received preferential treatment, had more diamond scenes, were better developed, and were often almost ‘pushed’ onto the player character, regardless of whether the player had expressed interest in the past or not. The white male LI was treated as the default.

And why? Because the white male LI sells the best. A biased society that favours whiteness bought the white LIs scenes the most, making the white LIs ‘perform’ the best, and so PB favoured them in the writing. PB would later admit as much in their June 15th 2020 blog post following the massive outcry after the Rafael plot was leaked.

The fact that Ethan was the only white LI (and the only canon white character in the main cast) is precisely the point. His preferential treatment in the story, to the detriment of the other LIs, is probably the most egregious example of this bias in Choices.

And you have to realise that while 3/4 of the love interest were people of colour, Rafael was the only black LI. It’s important to understand just how pervasive antiblackness specifically is. PB had a history of treating its black characters, particularly its black female characters, poorly. Even compared to the other POC LIs in Open Heart, you could quite fairly make the argument that he got the worst treatment of them all. And it’s a history like that that feeds into a pervasive racist notion that black characters are more disposable.

When you combine that notion with PB’s data saying to do more Ethan content and that Rafael is ‘underperforming’ (because they’re not giving him equal focus/treatment), you finally get to the point where PB is willing to inexplicably fridge the sole black LI to create drama and add fuel to the white man’s angst.

Also, I would hope that the implications of a man of colour dying in what is essentially a gas chamber plot are not lost on you.

[vuutarros]

*sigh* Can't sleep...

My brain won't stop, keeps obsessing, in what could be described as a compulsive manner, as if I have some sort of disorder. Am I a good person? Or am I secretly a horrible person?

3:00 am: I lay cradled in her arms, safe, loved and at home. "Love, am I a good person?" Asked desperately, afraid of the answer to come. The truth that, no, I am a horrible, cruel, selfish bitch, wholly irredeemable, completely unlovable. But what comes instead is a sleepy, "my love, you are one of the best people I know. You get so upset with yourself when you are not able to give a homeless person a whole twenty dollar bill. You are a good person." Oh no. How have I lied to her, fooled her so completely that she actually believes that? How could I be so horrible, that I'd convince her of something so obviously untrue? "Okay," I say quietly, "thank you..."

5:00 am: Sleep eludes me still, thoughts churn in the silence, recriminations for heinous, unforgivable actions past: cruel words spilled carelessly; bigotry learned in the church pew, passing through lips as though the gospel truth; insults and jibes tossed by a quick mouth with a wickedly sharp tongue, tearing down "friends" in moments of frustration; petty cruelty upon petty cruelty. Truly, these are sins that will damn me forever, regardless of the fact that I turned my back on a church that taught me so much hatred in the guise of "love" when I grew tired and disillusioned by all the petty backstabbing and infighting that Christ's loving children did to each other weekly, while claiming moral superiority in his name. Damned no matter how hard I try to be kind, caring, compassionate, because now it's all an act, obviously. That cruel boy? He is who I truly am. There is no escaping this truth. The kind woman is a lie.

6:00 am: Still, my mind refuses to quiet. "Love, are you still awake? I'm sorry you're having so much trouble sleeping..." She says this with such a sleepy, caring voice. I sigh as I try to find the words to explain, "it's stuck on a loop. I am a horrible person. I cannot get it to stop." "We've been over this, you are th-" "I know, but, obviously, I must have you so fooled, that you can't see the truth. Oh, I know, that's just my brain lying to me. Again, as it loves to do. I know this. I am screaming this to myself. But it doesn't help..." I need to sleep. Sleep will... for lack of better words, force a reset. Sleep will break the loop and allow me some peace. For a time, at least. But the loop is preventing sleep. I must wait until my body can finally override my brain, until the exhaustion exceeds the insomnia.

My brain has been my worst enemy this week. I'm finally free of the horrible roommate. But each morning I am manic and hyper, yet unable to accomplish anything. Then the mania ends, only here for an hour, maybe two, and then it's the come down and I'm depressed and listless for the rest of the day. I know this is my brain's way of resetting and purging after all the stress and anxiety of living with the horrible roommate for so long (three and half months? That's it?! But it felt like years), but goddess, I am dreading consciousness each day. Yet, I cannot sleep forever. I cannot even sleep tonight. Hopefully, it will be only a few more days and I'll regain an even keel.

[fandomtrumpshate]

2024 Supported Org: Never Again Action

Anti-immigrant hatred, antisemitism, and other forms of bigotry uphold one another—and safety lies in the collective struggle against white nationalism and white supremacy. For many American Jews, honoring their heritage means standing with vulnerable people of all kinds in their struggle for justice and recognition. When they stand up for themselves as Jews, and for their allies in the immigrant community, they recognize that we are all in this together. Never again means never again for anyone —not in the United States, and not in Palestine.

Never Again Action is a Jewish-led mobilization against the persecution, detention, and deportation of immigrants in the United States, taking direct action to raise the alarm about the current system and disrupt its operation, and to catalyze a popular movement for permanent protection for all undocumented people. They work by empowering the public, not making compromises with the powerful. They don’t negotiate with candidates, politicians, or companies–but welcome them to move to the right side of history. They act to change the common sense among the American public, to create the political conditions that politicians will have no choice but to follow.

Continuing their work to fight antisemitism and anti-immigrant bigotry, for the past several months, NAA has also worked in cooperation with other organizations to mobilize in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, working to challenge the narrative conflating Jews and Israel, staging protests and demonstrations in support of Gaza and calling for a ceasefire. NAA and its partner organizations argue that the culture and values of Judaism require them to stand up against injustice and oppression everywhere.

They imagine a world where people of all races, identities, and origins come together to tear down the walls that have kept us apart from each other and build a new world.

You can support Never Again Action as a creator in the 2024 FTH auction (or as a bidder, when the time comes to donate for the auctions you’ve won.)

[ausetkmt]

Commentary: Trump is using his racism to regain power. Silence will let him ride bigotry to another term

Donald Trump's closing campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday was a stunningly racist display where speakers mocked Latinos, Jews and Palestinians, likened the event to a "Nazi rally" and called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage." It was capped by a 78-minute speech in which the former president repeatedly attacked the intellect of the first woman of color to lead a major party presidential ticket, calling Vice President Kamala Harris "a vessel” who “can’t put two sentences together."

In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump is treading dangerously familiar ground, spewing a torrent of racist and xenophobic insults, threats and lies as he escalates his attacks on immigrants and non-white Americans.

As a U.S.-born Latino and white man whose father came from Central America, I am angry and disappointed that so many Americans, from everyday people to the most powerful figures, are willing to ignore or downplay Trump's dehumanizing language and behavior. It is incredibly distressing that so many in our country still don't think that Trump's litany of racist remarks, his embrace of neo-Nazi conspiracies, his dictatorial plans for a second term and his vile attacks on immigrants are enough to disqualify him.

As a member of The Times' editorial board, which has repeatedly and fearlessly made the case that Trump is uniquely dishonest and dangerous to American democracy, it especially stings to see The Times now among those institutions that have chosen the cowardly path of silence.

I am writing this under my own name, and not on behalf of The Times' editorial board, because of Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong's decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. A five-part series of editorials making the case against Trump that was supposed to be published with the Harris endorsement was also spiked. I agree with Mariel Garza, who wrote in her resignation letter as editorials editor last week that in these dangerous times, silence is complicity.

Now is the time to stand resolutely against Trump's racism and xenophobia, which flows more freely than ever, from the falsehoods he has spread about Haitian migrants eating pets, his calling Harris “retarded” and "low IQ," and his threats to use the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 wartime statute, to get rid of migrants. His former chief of staff, John Kelly, revealed that while in office, Trump repeatedly made comments praising Adolf Hitler, such as, “You know, Hitler did some good things, too.” Kelly recently warned that Trump meets the definition of a fascist and would rule like a dictator. That should set off every conceivable alarm bell.

Despite it all, Trump is polling within a few points of Harris, who, as a former senator, state attorney general and prosecutor, has spent her career upholding American ideals and is exceptionally qualified to lead. It's infuriating that so many neighbors, coworkers and peers support a man who has called his political enemies “vermin" and said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the same language that Hitler and the Nazi Party used to justify the Holocaust.

History is full of examples of authoritarian leaders who used xenophobic and racist rhetoric to stoke fear and hatred and fuel their rise or return to power. Trump is turning up his bigotry because it works.

Trump launched his political career by stoking the embers of white racial resentment. He announced his candidacy 10 years ago by attacking Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” He then called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” and he used his executive authority to begin carrying it out one week after taking office. President Biden revoked those actions on his first day in office.

A second Trump term would be worse, with fewer checks on his power. He's already said he would bring back his Muslim ban, including barring refugees from Gaza and other "terror-infested areas" and he wants to round up and deport millions of immigrants and even target the removal of people who entered the country legally. He wants to end birthright citizenship.

One-quarter of the U.S. population is either foreign-born or has at least one immigrant parent. That figure, by the way, includes Trump himself — his mother was an immigrant from Scotland — his first wife and his current wife and four of his five children from three marriages. But when he blames immigrants for society’s woes, he’s not referring to white people.

He has questioned why the U.S. should accept Black immigrants from Haiti and “shithole countries” in Africa rather than from “nice” majority-white countries like Norway, Denmark and Switzerland. U.S. citizens, and even members of Congress or the U.S. military, are not spared. He has told four American congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries, and according to recent reporting in the Atlantic, complained in an Oval Office meeting about fulfilling his promise to help pay for the funeral of murdered U.S. Army Private Vanessa Guillén, saying “it doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f— Mexican!”

Trump has a decades-long record of racism and discrimination, and of belittling and demeaning non-white people as dumb, inferior and not real Americans. His political rise came from peddling the racist "birther" lie that the nation’s first Black president was not a natural-born citizen, forcing Barack Obama to release his long-form birth certificate. He has followed the same pattern with the insults he has flung at Harris and by questioning whether she is really Black.

I fear deeply for our country if Trump succeeds in fanning the flames of racial resentment and hatred to regain power. And it pains me that still others remain undecided or stay silent at a such a perilous moment for our nation. With the race alarmingly close, it's time for all Americans of conscience to use their votes and their voices and to stop a hateful demagogue.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.