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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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The Craft: How a Teenage Weirdo Based on a Real Person Became an Icon

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“We Are The Weirdos, Mister.” A phrase you’ll find printed over t-shirts, pin badges, mugs, earrings, tote bags, necklaces, and more all over the internet. It’s the most iconic line from The Craft, a film released 25 years ago that still has a rabid following today. For anyone unfamiliar with The Craft, it’s a line spoken by Fairuza Balk’s Nancy, an inferno in black lippy and sunglasses, the de facto leader of a homemade coven made up of outsiders who have taken the raw deal the world has given them and rejected it by learning to harness the power of nature. This line is everything. We are no longer going to be victims, it says. We will no longer be afraid. We reclaim our space, our power. That we are four teenaged girls will no longer mean we have to watch out for ‘weirdos’ – because it is us who are the weirdos. Mister.

“Nancy is the one everybody wants to be,” says Peter Filardi, the man who created Nancy, Rochelle, Bonnie, and Sarah all those years ago, chatting to Den of Geek from his home, an original poster for The Craft peaking out from behind him on the wall. Next to it is a poster for Chapelwaite, the series Filardi is currently showrunning with his brother Jason, based on Stephen King’s short story, “Jerusalem’s Lot,” a prequel to Salem’s Lot.

“Nancy is the one who is particularly put upon and who finds the power to get revenge or get justice and is going to do that with no apologies. I think it’s how we all envision ourselves or would want to see ourselves, I guess. Here we are 25 years later. Why do you think we’re still talking about it?”

It’s an interesting question because we very much still are talking about The Craft. With Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, A Discovery of Witches, His Dark Materials, and of course last year’s remake of The Craft, we appear to very much still be in the season of the witch, but none is quite as resonant and impactful as the original The Craft. Watching it back 25 years after its release, it’s still just as relevant.

The very first script that Filardi sold was Flatliners, the story of arrogant, hot-shot medical students who plan to discover what happens after you die by “flatlining” for increasing lengths of time. Filardi’s script prompted a bidding war and the movie became a big hit, starring Hollywood’s hottest: Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, and William Baldwin.

After Flatliners, Filardi had been working on a script about real life teenage Satanist Ricky Kasso, (“He was one of the first to really put the hallucinogenics together with the music and the theology and then sort of brew them all up into this really volatile cocktail,” Filardi explains), so when producer Doug Wick approached him about another supernatural project, Filardi was game.

“He said he would like to either do a haunted house story or something to do with teenage witches. And because I happened to be working on what I was working on I was pretty well-schooled in earth magic and natural magic and Satanism and all sorts of stuff. And we just started talking, and we hit it off, and we decided to develop and create The Craft together,” Filardi recalls.

At the time Wick had just two full producer credits to his name – for Working Girl and Wolf – but he would go on to produce swathes of heavy hitters including Hollow Man, Jarhead, The Great Gatsby, and win the best picture Oscar for Gladiator. Meanwhile, Andrew Fleming, director of The Craft and co-writer of the screenplay, had made horror thriller Bad Dreams and comedy Threesome, and would go on to make several comedy movies as well as many hit TV shows – he’s currently working on season two of Netflix’s popular Emily in Paris.

Filardi’s story was always going to be about women, and it was always going to be about outsiders, the memories of high school still fresh enough for him to remember the pain. “I’m sure it’s like this for every kid. You have memories from those high school years of horrible things that happened to people around you, or were said or done and just the petty cruelties,” he says. “I’m glad I’m an old man now!” (He’s not, he’s 59).

Rewatching and it’s certainly striking how much empathy you feel for the girls. Sarah (Robin Tunney), who is the audience’s way in to the movie, lost her mother during childbirth and has battled mental health problems, even attempting suicide. Recently moved to a new neighborhood with her dad and step mother, she is instantly the outsider at her new school, and is immediately treated abhorrently by popular boy Chris (a pre-Scream Skeet Ulrich), who dates her and then spreads rumors that they slept together. Rochelle (Rachel True) is a keen diver, subjected to overt racist bullying by a girl on the swim team, while Bonnie (Neve Campbell) hides away because of extreme scarring she has all over her body. Before Sarah arrives, the three dabble in magic and protect themselves as best they can from the horrors of high school by telling people they are witches and keeping them at arm’s length. It’s the arrival of Sarah, though, a “natural” witch with some serious power, that turns things around.

“I think that maybe traditionally Hollywood would have done a version where the women were witches like Lost Boys,” Filardi says. “The women were witches, and they had this power, and they’re the dark overlords of their school or something like that. And that’s exactly the opposite of what worked for me and how I thought magic works in general.

“Magic has always historically been a weapon of the underclass, for poor people… Think of England. People of the heath, who lived out in the country… The heathens, they didn’t have a king or an army or the church even behind them. They would turn to magic. And that’s kind of what I saw for our girls. For real magic to work, you have the three cornerstones of need and emotion and knowledge. And I hate magic movies where somebody has a power and they just do this and the magic happens. I think it’s much more interesting if the magic comes from an emotional need, a situation that really riles up the power within.”

These witches aren’t evil and they aren’t even anti-heroes. Instead, this is pure wish fulfilment for anyone who’s ever been bullied, or overlooked, or been dealt a particularly tough hand, and this level of empathy comes across hard in the film. Watching now and so many of the themes are so current with reference to issues of racism and the emergence of the #MeToo movement.

“I did not write it as a feminist piece per se,” says Filardi. “I really just wrote it as an empathetic human being, I think.”

There’s extreme empathy dripping throughout the script, but don’t mistake that for pity. The Craft deals in female empowerment and just plain fun. It’s here that one of The Craft’s enduring conflicts arises. Are you Team Sarah or are you Team Nancy?

The correct answer of course, is Team Nancy…

“It’s always harder to be the good guy or the good girl,” laughs Filardi.

After all, before Sarah shows up, the other three are doing fine – surviving, doing minor spells, and looking out for each other. The influx of power Sarah brings allows the group to up their game and together they each ask for a gift from “Manon,” the (fictional) deity who represents all of nature that they worship in the film. Bonnie wants to heal her scars, Rochelle wants the racism to stop, Nancy wants the power of Manon, but Sarah casts a love spell on Chris. Sarah is either taking revenge on Chris, or she’s forging a relationship without consent, and it’s a move which eventually leads to Chris’s death.

Meanwhile, Nancy is someone who just refuses to be a victim, despite the fact that of the four she’s clearly had the toughest life, living in a trailer with her mum and her abusive stepdad. Nancy won’t allow the audience to pity her. Nancy doesn’t let things happen to her, she makes her own choices, whether they are good ones or not. When newly empowered Nancy is running red lights, with Rochelle and Bonnie whooping in the back, and Sarah telling her it’s all gone a bit far, “Oh shut up, Sarah” feels like the right response. While Sarah might be technically correct, we are rooting for these girls to be allowed the pure joy of something they have created between them.

Nancy is an amazing creation, and Filardi says he couldn’t have anticipated how much the character would resonate.

“I did not envision the great look that Andy Fleming brought to her,” he smiles. “But Nancy was inspired by a real girl, whose older brother lived in a trailer in their backyard, and just had a hard go of it. She’s true to the one I wrote. She always embodied the earth element of fire. Each of the girls is their own earth element. There’s earth, wind, water, fire. And you can pretty much guess who’s who…”

We could speculate but it’s perhaps more fun to let the audience decide for themselves.

“Nancy in the beginning was always the constructive aspect of that element. She’s the light in the fire in the dark woods that draws the girls together,” he explains. “When she’s all passion and raw nerve, she’s very much like fire, but then when she crosses Sarah and gets overwhelmed with the power of her new abilities, she becomes the destructive side of that same element and burns the whole thing up. But she’s a fantastic character. I think that Fairuza Balk just elevated Nancy to a whole other level. I guess that’s what happens when you’re blessed with the right actor for the right part.”

Exactly who the true protagonist of The Craft is is something Filardi still contemplates. What is notable is that though, yes, Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle do at one point try to, um, kill Sarah and make it look like suicide, which isn’t a very sisterly thing to do, they never really become true villains. By the end, the only fatalities are sex pest Chris and Nancy’s abusive step father, and both deaths could reasonably be considered accidental. While Bonnie and Rochelle are stripped of their powers, they aren’t further punished, it’s only Nancy who gets a raw deal. Driven to distraction by her surfeit of power, we find her ranting in a mental hospital strapped to a bed.

Filardi’s ending was different, though he won’t be drawn on details.

“The original ending was different. I’ve never really gone into the detail of what the original ending was. Well, the original ending was just different…” he says, mulling over what he might say. “So, let’s see. Well, Chris always died… and it was just very different,” he hesitates. “I don’t really get into it because there’s no real sense. It is what it is. I always like in a movie… Having two different children and you love them both for different reasons, but I would have never wanted to be hard on the girls in the final analysis in any way thematically.”

One element of the script that saw slight changes was the motivation of Rochelle, after the casting of Rachel True.

“To be honest, I think she was the exact same character. She was picked on by the swimmers. There was an added element that she had an eating disorder. She used to vomit into a mayonnaise jar and hide it on the top shelf of a bedroom closet. But other than that, she was really the same character,” he says. “Andy Fleming and Doug Wick, I don’t know who came up with the idea, but they cast Rachel and she added this whole other element to it, the racial element, which I think it was great and I think totally appropriate.”

Though Filardi didn’t work on the remake and hasn’t actually seen it, he’s able to see for himself, first hand, how well the film has aged and how it continues to endure for young women – he has teenage daughters of his own.

“I see them going through all the same stuff that I watched girlfriends going through. And it hasn’t changed all that much,” he says ruefully.

“It’s funny. For years, they had no idea what I did for a living. I think they just thought I hung around in the basement. And one daughter was like… She was going to school with somebody whose father was in a rock band or something, ‘Nobody in this house does anything interesting. Everything’s boring.’ And it was around Halloween and they were showing The Craft at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. I took them to the cemetery and it was great. There were boys dressed in Catholic high school uniforms and women all in black and with blankets and candles and wine and snacks. Amidst the tombstones, they set up a huge screen and showed the film. So, that’s when they first saw it. And it was really fun. A really nice thing to share with my daughters.”

Things don’t change that much. High school is still horrible. Magic is still tantalizing. The outfits are still fabulous. And Nancy is still a stone cold legend. The Craft is an enduring celebration of outsider culture that we’ll probably still be talking about in 25 years to come. After all, most of us, at one time or another, feel like the weirdos.

“I think of it as the story about the power of adolescent pain and self-empowerment. I think of beautiful young people who are just picked upon or put in positions they shouldn’t be or don’t deserve to be, and having the ability to fight back and weather it and survive,” says Filardi when we ask him what he’s most proud of.

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“I’m also proud of all the great contributions that the other talented people brought to the script. All I did was a script, but you have actors and directors and producers and art directors and production designers who just… Everybody seems to me to have brought their A-game. I didn’t come up with Nancy’s great look. Other people get all that credit. Like you said, you see her on t-shirts. So, so many people just brought so many things. I guess I’m just proudest to think that a bunch of strangers come together and connect to the message of the piece, and together just make something memorable all these 25 years later.”

The post The Craft: How a Teenage Weirdo Based on a Real Person Became an Icon appeared first on Den of Geek.

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thankskenpenders · 5 years ago

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Archie presents Ken Penders’ Knuckles the Echidna: A Postmortem

At long last, we’ve come to the end of the Knuckles solo series. Again, this is far from the end of the Penders Knuckles stories, but he no longer gets a whole series to himself. And thank God for that

While a 32 issue run (or really, 35, counting the first miniseries) might pale in comparison to Sonic’s nearly 300 issues, it’s a pretty impressive feat. That’s a lot of comics! A lot of series these days don’t get to enjoy runs that long. Hell, a lot are lucky to even last a year. And assuming that’s 22 pages of story in each issue, that means Penders got a whopping 770 pages of Knuckles comics where he got to do whatever he wanted

What did Penders spend those 770 pages doing? Well, he sure introduced a lot of new echidnas, that’s for damn sure. Let’s break down the Knuckles series arc by arc and briefly summarize what each one actually contributed to the world of Archie Sonic

Sonic’s Friendly Nemesis Knuckles miniseries #1-3

Characters Introduced: Enerjak. Knuckles also first meets Archimedes, who had been previously set up

Summary: Knuckles meets and begins to work together with Archimedes, who he inexplicably trusts right away. Enerjak comes back and announces he still wants to take over the world. Knuckles beats him up

Lasting Impact: Archimedes and Enerjak/Dimitri stick around as important-ish characters

Knuckles #1-3: The Dark Legion miniseries

Characters Introduced: The Dark Legion, Kragok, Steppenwolf, Christopholes, Menniker

Summary: The Dark Legion returns. The founding of the Brotherhood of Guardians is touched upon, as is their dumb pro-/anti-technology feud with the Dark Legion. Locke uses some sort of Chaos Emerald magic from afar to stop the Legion’s guns from firing so Knuckles can beat them up

Lasting Impact: The Dark Legion and the Brotherhood would be major players for the rest of the story

Knuckles #4-6: Lost Paradise

Characters Introduced: Julie-Su, Lara-Le, Remington, Helmut von Stryker, Gerbil, Hawking, Sabre, Wynmacher, some other fire ant whose name I forget

Summary: Ex-Dark Legionnaire Julie-Su suddenly defects from her faction to seek out Knuckles, because they “soul-touched” and now they’re destined to be lovers or something. Echidnaopolis suddenly comes back because reasons, and boy do they sure still have a lot of technology for people who said they renounced it. The dingoes are apparently evil fascists, and Hawking explains how racist he is to Knuckles.

Lasting Impact: Julie-Su and many of the characters here become mainstays in Knuckles’ supporting cast, and obviously Echidnaopolis becomes the main setting of the comic

#7-9: Dark Vengeance

Characters Introduced: The Echidna High Council, High Councilor Pravda

Summary: Enerjak comes back (again) and immediately becomes the new leader of the Dark Legion. Hawking is on life support. Enerjak kills Knuckles, but then the Ancient Walkers bring him back so he can be a Christ metaphor. Enerjak is defeated and turns back into Dimitri, who ages rapidly. Mammoth Mogul shows up so he can be trapped in the Master Emerald in the following Sonic issue

Lasting Impact: Dimitri’s old now

#10-12: The Other Road Taken

Characters Introduced: The Lost Tribe, Yanar, Athair’s mom (I forget her name), Rob O’ the Hedge and friends, Mari-An, Zax, Raynor, Gala-Na. Athair makes his first appearance in a Knuckles comic

Summary: The Lost Tribe is introduced. They’ve apparently been searching for the ancient echidna homeland of Albion in a big caravan for centuries. The Day of Fury happens, which doesn’t amount to much here compared to the literal apocalypses that share the title in the lore. They make a pit stop over in Snottingham in the Sonic series for some Robin Hood shenanigans, then Knuckles walks on water to lead them to Albion and continue being a Christ metaphor

Lasting Impact: These characters and locations are EVENTUALLY revisited, but not in the remainder of the Knuckles solo series

#13-15: The Chaotix Caper

Characters Introduced: Harry the cab driver, Mello (while dying), Unnamed(?) Echidna Doctor and Nurse, Downtown Ebony Hare, his fox girlfriend, his bulldog goon, the scientist guy who was making the drugs, Charmy’s family, Saffron, Jeepers the Bee Butler, a bear biker gang, Bimmy

Summary: Charmy’s apparent best friend Mello dies of a drug overdose. To investigate, the Chaotix all go to an amusement park, eat the drug-laced food, trip balls, and almost die. Charmy’s past is expanded upon so that he can then go home and get written out of the series. Knuckles starts to show off his Chaos powers

Lasting Impact: Harry sorta stuck around. We know more about Charmy, who is now gone

#16-18: Reunions, Deep Cover

Characters Introduced: Tobor, Moritori Rex, Spectre, Sojourner, Thunderhawk, Tobor’s family

Summary: Knuckles finds out his mom is getting married to Wynmacher. We find out that Lara-Le had major problems with the way Locke raised Knuckles, which goes nowhere. The Brotherhood convenes. We find out that one of them has been replaced with someone evil for years through one of the dumbest twists in the history of these comics. Knuckles beats up Kragok in jail, then Kragok and Tobor fuck off into a “quantum beam,” apparently killing them both. I didn’t even realize they died when I first read this. That may be a retcon

Lasting Impact: Tobor and Kragok died I guess. Lara-Le and Wynmacher’s marriage is teased

#19-21: The Forbidden Zone

Characters Introduced: Prince Elias Acorn, Queen Alicia Acorn, the bulldog colonel and his wife, a baby

Summary: Geoffrey and pals show up from the main series to rescue the Queen, only to walk right up to the Acorn family compound on Angel Island with no trouble and meet Sally’s long lost brother Elias, who nobody knew about. The Queen, meanwhile, is in a pod. Locke and Lara-Le meet up and he tries to kiss her for some mindboggling reason. Knuckles gets mad about all the secrets and finally meets the Brotherhood, but his dad isn’t there at the time. He also fights Moritori Rex (fake Tobor), who gets away

Lasting Impact: Elias would become quite important... over in the Bollers stories in the main series. He had nothing to do with Knuckles.

#22-24: Dark Alliance

Characters Introduced: Lien-Da, Benedict, Xenin

Summary: Echidna/dingo tensions rise in the runup to the election. Dimitri is a cyborg now. Lien-Da is apparently the new leader of the Dark Legion, and she kidnaps and brainwashes the High Councilor so they can rig the election. Tons and tons and tons of tasteless allusions to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust are made. Knuckles shows off his Chaos powers a little more. The fact that Remington is Kragok’s son is alluded to, but Penders never actually remembered to reveal this in a comic

Lasting Impact: None

#25: Childhood’s End

Characters Introduced: Harlan, Rembrandt, Aaron, one of Robotnik’s ancestors

Summary: Knuckles finally finds his dad... because he didn’t run away fast enough when Knuckles spotted him. Locke tells him the baby microwave story. He also tells him about a vision of the future he had, which scared him into doing all the horrible things he did, but this future never actually comes to pass in the comics. Knuckles immediately forgives his dad for experimenting on him

Lasting Impact: Locke’s not hiding from Knuckles anymore

#26-28: The First Date (feat. Friend in Need)

Characters Introduced: Raynor (not to be confused with the other echidna named Raynor), a bunch of nameless furry girls for Vector to ogle; Nic the Weasel, the real Fiona Fox, Ray the Flying Squirrel

Summary: Julie-Su is mad at Knuckles, so she goes out with some other guy for half a day. Vector tries to get laid and acts like an incel. Locke gives Knuckles the talk. Knuckles finally actually asks Julie-Su out, then has his 16th birthday party. In the backup story, Mighty, Nic, and Fiona rescue Ray from a time anomaly, and Fiona’s past is explained

Lasting Impact: Knuckles and Julie-Su are dating now. Nic, Fiona, and Ray stuck around as important characters in the main series

#29: My Special Friend

Characters Introduced: None (but this is only one issue)

Summary: Sally tries to get help from the Brotherhood now that Robotnik is back in the main series, but they refuse because Sally won’t use guns. Knuckles is a centrist who won’t firmly side with Sally, so she leaves angrily. Along the way, Sally rationalizes her dad’s attempt at Robian genocide

Lasting Impact: None

#30-32: King of the Hill (feat. Espio the Chameleon)

Characters Introduced: Monk, Hunter, Snowpidgeon, Aryu One-Two; Barney, Liza, and several other unimportant chameleons

Summary: Knuckles’ childhood bully, a large purple gorilla, returns to Angel Island after being yeeted into the ocean by the Brotherhood years ago. A human hunter named Hunter shows up to reenact The Most Dangerous Game. Monk falls during the fight and dies. Hunter is captured. In the backup story, Espio has a run-in with the roboticized Valdez, his apparent best friend, who he then murders

Lasting Impact: Hunter eventually made a minor appearance in a Bollers story years later. Valdez dies

Are you noticing a trend? Things keep happening in these stories, but it rarely has much of an impact. One of the Guardians was a traitor all along? Eh, doesn’t affect much. The Dark Legion candidate in the election ends up being a robot and dies? Eh, they had a replacement ready--but also, the election didn’t matter anyway.

Rarely do we learn anything of value about the characters. Knuckles doesn’t grow much as a person, and he never gets much of a personality. Julie-Su’s whole life revolves around being soul bound to Knuckles with only the faintest hint of her own personality. The Chaotix never contribute anything of value. When something comes up to make us question Locke and the Brotherhood, Penders then goes “No, no, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Supporting characters and subplots that go nowhere keep getting introduced just so it can feel like a lot is going on, but it’s all shallow. Knuckles has like 12 grandpas, most of whom are still alive, and only maybe three of them are distinct in any way. They all just talk like Penders, just like every character in these comics (except for Vector, who gets to be Urban). Things just keep happening around Knuckles, often without his actual involvement, while Penders says that every other arc is the biggest most important thing that’s ever happened.

It’s the oldest trick in comics. End on a cliffhanger. Say that NEXT ISSUE something interesting will DEFINITELY happen. Promise that the story is going somewhere. Just keep buying more issues! But the payoff never comes

While Sonic’s better stories have him sprinting around the world, the Knuckles series just plops him down on a treadmill for 35 issues. In the background, he’s listening to a boring documentary about echidna lore and genealogies

His life is in shambles

#KtE 32 #tkp post #hall of fame

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postmodernmulticoloredcloak · 6 years ago

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Just realized tumblr is celebrating John Mulaney for saying the same thing you said two years ago and got so much doxxing for, how we suddenly have to worry about Nazis again and wtf. People on this website are loonier than loon.

Yeah, well, it was one or two months after Trump was elected and people were angry and scared, and it’s way easier to unload that frustration on a random stranger on the internet whose random post we can misinterpret to say the opposite thing that they meant to say, than to pick on Trump. I was hurt because I was just expressing the same fear and frustration by just rambling on my blog and instead I got accused of being exactly what I loathe. But I understand the place they were coming from, you know?

It’s pretty obvious that when people, especially shitty cowardly people like most Nazis are, realize that their shitty views are less taboo to the point that someone like them is elected to something like the presidency of the US, or as de facto leader of the government in Italy, they get bolder.

In Italy, there has been a sudden and dramatic increase in violence (verbal, physical, etc) against minorities, especially Black people and Romani people, since this government started. People who was racist before but felt it was taboo to express those ‘politically incorrect’ things... now feel legitimated to act on those racist views. People now know that a certain kind of language and expressions are “okay” because, duh, we elected a person who talks like that, it means that the majority of the country doesn’t have a problem with that. Look at what happened in Brazil right as soon as Bolsonaro was elected. France was obviously never free of antisemitism because when has Europe ever? But a lot of Jewish people have started feeling especially unsafe and considering leaving the country over recent years.

Racism and homophobia obviously existed before the Trump presidency or the Lega government because otherwise where did Trump of Salvini or Bolsonaro come from? It’s not like the king gave them their office, people voted for them. But now Nazis are emboldened because they feel supported by the people in power and by the fact that a large portion of the population shares their views enough to vote for those people.

Nazis are not a danger if everyone else shuns and rejects them. They’re just vermin. Nazis are a danger when the same crap they believe in gets normalized. I’m not scared of some dudes with a shaved head and black shirts. I’m more scared of all the “I’m not racist but” people. I’m more scared of the nice ladies and gentlemen who go to mass every week but agree with people who say that gay men should be sentenced to death. I’m more scared of how almost every person I know is genuinely convinced that the Nazi-supported stereotypes against Romani people are true facts.

But as long as we have decent government run by decent people, and by that I mean: governors who respect the rule of law and the constitutional state, we’re mostly safe. When these people - Trump, Salvini and all the like - start undermining the constitutional state and the basis of democracy, then - and this is what it means that suddenly Nazis are an issue when these people get elected - minorities are no longer safe, liberties are no longer safe, democracy is no longer safe.

And meanwhile kids bully other kids because they absorb the idea that it’s okay now.

#nazi cw #antisemitism cw #racism cw #homophobia cw #anon

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isas-identity · 6 years ago

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Lance Vs Shiro: Same ending??

Or what I like to call: Why you should be more mad about Lance’s ending than Shiro’s ending in the clusterfuck called “Voltron’s horrible writing”.

Shiro and Lance had very similar endings in the last episode of Voltron, to put it in simple words: They decided to live a quiet life after the war.

This is kinda long, so i will add everything under the cut, i just want to say sorry for any gammar mistakes beforehand.

How, Lance decided to live in a farm with his family and “Surround himself with The Things He Loves”. Meanwhile Shiro got last-minute married with a dude and “Found his happiness and left the War Efforts Behind”. There’s been a LOT of negative reactions from the fans though, because these endings seemed lazy, out of character, etc. But there’s always a big difference in the spectrum:

People who are upset over Shiro marrying a “nobody” who talked like 2 times, and after Shiro being so happy being the captain and leader of the ATLAS, was being pushed aside to live a quiet life, dont care about Lance’s ending.

People who are upset about Lance’s lackluster ending of working on a farm after being clear about his liking of adventure, giving him a clearly racist ending, and never forgetting or moving on from Allura, don’t mind Shiro’s.

Though they DO think the other’s ending wasnt executed nicely, they don’t think the ending itself is bad per se.

And i know it’s been almost a month since VLD finished, but i found myself wondering why is that i am madder about Lance’s ending tha Shiro’s. So let’s break it down point to point and compare them.

Execution:

When we get to the time-skip, before the explanations of what happenned in the rest of their lifes, we see:

Shiro working as an embassador between planets, still a captain of the ATLAS, traveling through the universe to try and unify planets alongside Hunk who uses his food to help leaders see eye-to-eye.

Lance talking to some kids, telling them about Allura’s sacrifice, and telling them he now works and lives helping out on a farm.

Wich, together with their end cards, gives us the conclutions that:

After their last fight with honerva, Shiro was still Captain of the ATLAS for a few years, he married and decided to retire. We do not know if he married BEFORE or AFTER retiring though. Also, we do not know if he kept working or not after his retirement, since it was only said that he left the “War efforts behind and found happiness”. You can see a lot of things happened during his life as he moved on though.

Even if we, as audience didn’t see it, Shiro spent a few years dating his husband before marrying him, and event though it was pulled out of nowhere as a band-aid, it didn’t felt rushed since it was something that happenned years down the line and out-of-camera. So we are left without any kind of opinion about his relationship with his husband. This also means he spent more time as a captain of the ATLAS than some people seem to believe.

After their last fight, Lance retired from being a paladin and started working on his family’s farm, who suddenly have a family farm,before the war was even completely gone. And then he...kept working on his farm and sometimes talked to little kids about Allura.... thats about it.

It is not said if he “found love” or “happiness” or did anything else than farm and plant junniberries.

Their struggles before retirement:

Now, In this one we need to take a minute to compare these two characters during the show.

There are two things people say when discussing about their endings: “He loved adventure, it was his dream to pilot!! why the heck would he retire!!!!” and the more understanding “Well, he went through a LOT during the war, maybe he had enough and wants to take it easy from now on!".

Let’s start with the “They want adventure!” point:

Starting off with Shiro, they say: “He left his fiance because he wanted to be in space that bad! he didnt care if he died!” But i think people misunderstand some things about Shiro in this regard, principally: he was fucking dying.

Shiro had an illness that would leave him unable to move his body before it killed him.

He wanted to prove himself, and go to space, before his body stopped working.

He wanted to leave his mark on history, before he was bound to be stuck on a wheelchair unable to even go to the bathroom, cook or dress himself, so he had something left behind.

So i think people are misplacing his “wanting adventure”, it was more of a cry to wanting to do something with his life before being a vegetable. He was scared of getting nothing done and live his life never doing anything that amounted to anything. Afterwards this problem was solved, wich is not to say he wasn’t happy being apointed being the new captain of the ATLAS and traveling the universe. He WAS. He is a responsible leader and he deserved that position, but he never gave up being a captain after the fight with honerva, again, he was the captain for a few years before retiring when he chose to.

Now, going to Lance’s side, now this kid DID love adventure, breaking the rules, attention, etc. During the series you could see:

Him sneaking out of the Garrison and breaking rules.

Getting inside of alien ships and proceeding to pilot them before the others could finish reacting to seeing an alien ship for the first time.

whooping and hollering while flying in battle.

Actually looking very happy to help others and not backing down at the oportunity to do so.

and that was... like, in the first 3 episodes.

Now to the “They went through a LOT, they want a quiet life now!

Ok, bear with me and let me just run a thing through you all first.

Shiro is in his late 20′s, probably already 30, an adult and was Captain of the ATLAS for a few years before retiring.

Lance is fucking 18, maybe 19, he’s still a fucking embryo, and probably still has a lot of things to figure out about himself, but still decided to run a farm the instant they defeated Honerva i guess.

Now, during the war Shiro:

Was taken against his will and made a slave in space, was made to fight in the arena for entertanment and fought monsters and probably other aliens, probably even had to kill during this time.

Lost his arm and was experimented upon.

Crashed into earth and lost his memories.

Became the leader of a rag-tag tem of teens in space that was the only hope for the universe.

Suffered of PTSD during all of this.

Almost died a lot of times.

Died.

Became a clone.

This clone proceeded to: Betray his friends, help and spy for Honerva, almost killed Keith, who’s the closest person to him at the time.

Lost his arm again.

Almost got killed by Keith too.

He got his consiousness trasspassed from the Black Lion into the body of his clone, wich, almost rejected him and made him die. Again.

Found out his ex-fiance died and earth was almost anihilated.

We never knew anything about his family, but im sure they died since they never appeared???

etc.

Now, with Lance:

He almost died once, and the fandom is pretty sure he died one time after that but since Allura’s powers are weird we are not even sure what the hell happened there.

He felt doubtful about his position on the team.

He missed his family a lot

The girl he liked didnt like him back...?

His girlfriend of a month and a half sacrificed herseld and died.

uhhh... yeah.

And, like, no. I dont mean to say Lance is a cry-baby because he didnt go through as many things as shiro, or the others. The problem with this, is that it makes no sense because fucking lance never had an arc. The writers never cared about giving him some usefulness, or something that made him shine through, and when he was left at the end, they had nothing for him to do. So they gave him a farm.

But like, even after all the bullshit shiro went through, he moved on with his life, he found happiness and love, was still the captain of the ATLAS for some time before retiring, etc.

But Lance, someone who was so cheerful and up to help other people, who didnt left anything bring him down, just... decided to work on a farm for the rest of his life. Not moving on or anything, wich... yeah, it’s weird.

Keith, who almost died in space 971283678 times, found out he was Fucking Galra, was left alone by his parents, found his mother, was stuck in a space whale’s back for 2 years, was stuck on a leadership position he didnt want?? after uniting the Galra and helping put an end to the war he made a Humanitary Relief Organization, to help people with low resources in the universe.

Pidge? She lost her brother and father, ran away from home, got stuck on a war at fucking 15, had to learn how to fight and pilor, since, you know, she wasnt even a pilot in the first place. Almost lost her father to Zarkon, and believed for some time her Brother was dead. Bue she founded a Space Defenders organization to fight for justice in fucking space, and kept inventing tech to keep helping the universe and fight for the weak.

Hunk? He was a coward, he didnt even wanted to sneak out the garrison, much less get stuck on a space war! He didn’t want to fight, he didn’t want to die. His family was even captured on earth, unlike Lance’s. But he learned to be brave, and fought for people’s freedom. He became a diplomat, and learned how to hone his cooking skills to bring people together, so he became a Culinary Embassador to keep the peace in the universe.

They all are doing something with their lifes to help heal the universe after the war. Even after all they went through together. Even shiro helped for a few years before retiring, exept Lance. Who’s a farmer for some reason.

And i’m not saying that fighting on a War isn’t traumatizing enough, I’m just saying that if someone deserves to find love, retire, and live in the fucking bahamas on eternal vacation for the rest of his life, is Shiro. poor guy needed a break a long time ago.

WICH brings me to the last point of this really long essay:

It’s Implications:

It is sad that the only reason we got a wedding with shiro was like a bandaid from the lash-back they had from Adam’s death and the constant Bury Your Gays trope. But let me tell you something: it wasn’t badly done. Yeah, I woul’ve liked to see more of Curtis to get to know him, or maybe see Shiro and Him having some kind of interaction before being slapped with a wedding a few years down the line, but that was it. The point of it (appart from rebuilding the bridge with the LGBT+ comunity) was to make it clear that Shiro found love and happiness in his life, wich im happy he did, and this does not contradict anything his character is about:

It makes it clear that it doesnt matter how dark things are right now, it will pass and you will be happy someday, you can still make your dreams come true, you have to fight for it.

It doesnt matter if you lost your arm, got a horrible scar across your face, got white hair, etc. You can find love, you can still lead a happy life.

Now with Lance is way more jarring. He has this “good boy” storyline with his girlfriend, wich sucks since he could’ve been made into an “anyone can be a hero, it doesnt matter if you’re not specially good at anything!” but alas they missed that mark. He really didn’t had any storyline for himself perse, he became The Boyfriend and stayed that way.

He went from “Ohh, I dont feel like i have a place in the team since everyone is awesome and has abilities and I dont” one season to “The girl I like doesn’t like me back!” on the next.

In the last season we got this “The girl I like is finally dating me!” to “oh no, the girl I loved died after dating me for a month”

Then proceeded to “Let me go work in a farm and plant her favorite flowers on it, while I never stop loving her and never move on and keep telling everyone about her sacrifice forever and ever! War who?? My girlfriend sacrificed herself for peace but let me just ignore the war exists still!”

Wich is... sad. They literally never gave anything to Lance to apport to the team or the universe apart from being there for Keith and Allura when they needed cheering up. And even if he himself says “oh im happy, i have a quiet life and that’s how i like it now!” when you think about his ending, you dont feel that way. He literally has nothing, exept his family and flowers.

So yeah, i dont mind Shiro’s ending. It was one of the last things wrong with the ending of the show, even if it was made for the wrong reasons. And i do believe, people should stop hating on it only because they wanted him to happy his little brother whom is almost 10 years younger than him

And yeah, I do think Lance’s ending was racist. I myself am latina, even have a grandfather who owns a farm. Would i go work in his farm for the rest of my life after losing someone i loved? Fuck no. I do not know shit about farms, or farming. He isnt even shown to be specially good with animals, no more than the rest of the gang. And sincerely, that he cut’s himself from the universe and his friends anddoesnt even do anything to help or reconstructing the universe only sounds like depression to me.

But alright then, to each their own in what they want to believe.

#lance #shiro #voltron season 8 #vld spoilers #klance #because i know the klance fandom feels this #I JUST HAD TO GET THIS OUT OF MY CHEST OK BYE

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megacircuit9universe · 5 years ago

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Ejector Seat

I’ve been thinking about the previous entry for a few days now... the idea of a self driving economy kept on the rails by the collective smarts of all the learning algorithms out there, whose prime directive is to keep the money moving...

And then it occurred to me yesterday that, even if this were true, things could still be screwed up by something like an arbitrary and pointless trade war with the nations who produce most if not all of the stuff that keeps this modern economy moving... namely, the smart phones themselves, as well as all the products we can use those phones to buy at low low prices.

Trumps insane tariff policies, will eventually result in a fairly painful (if totally artificial) inflation on the cost of all those things, which will eventually result in far less consumer spending... which in turn will result in a recession.

And because he is not sane, Trump will respond to the recession by doubling down on the tariffs... turning that recession into a global depression.

Now, before I go any further, I have to address an elephant in the room here... And it’s that the current economy, which has been doing so well for so long, has been pretty bad for many parties involved... such as the low wage global workforce who produces most of the stuff we buy for those low low prices, and also wage stagnation here in America... not to mention the huge education bubble... the growing problem of rent inflation... and of course, climate change!

But outside of America, we were, and still are, working on those problems. There is an argument that low wage factory work in developing nations, while not ideal, in terms of wages or working conditions... still lifts those people out of poverty and... can be seen as a stepping stone to their future prosperity much as factory work during the industrial revolution paved the way for the following generations to enjoy better working conditions, wages, and general quality of life.

That’s far from a guarantee, but it’s possible with the right focus.

Other issues, such as wage stagnation, and the education, rent, and healthcare bubbles... are purely American problems. Most if not all other first world nations either never had those problems, or have solved them by now.

Which leaves climate change... where again, most of the world is on board for addressing the problem, both short and long term.

So... excluding failed states that aren’t really in the game right now... the global economy, while far from perfect, is a work in progress that could become far more fair and equitable over time...

...with the exception of America (and I guess, England too) where legacy political issues such as racism and unbridled corporate greed are currently fighting tooth and nail to stay relevant in this new century that is leaving them behind.

But, putting them to one side for a moment, we can see that our self driving economy... such that it is... could be bad, if it refuses to allow any further change... keeping rent and education forever too high, and foreign factory wages forever too low, while we blindly destroy all the planet’s resources and turn the atmosphere into an oven.

However... because this is ultimately an economy driven by social media... there is a built-in flexibility to accommodate the ever shifting desires of a collective human population, around the globe, who very much want life to become more fair and equatable... from the top of the ionosphere, to the street level, down to the bottom of the underground mine.

So if you accept that premise, as I do, then the collective AI acting as an auto-pilot for this economy... is a good thing... that will not become a bad thing down the road.

TLDR: Even if our modern economy is problematic, the self driving aspect does not damn it to remaining problematic forever, because the self driving aspect is designed to learn and change according to the collective will of all global consumers, rich and poor alike.

In fact, the poor, I would argue, have more leverage than the rich, because... well, they vastly outnumber the rich, for one thing... and they spend those pennies as fast as they get them... while the rich mostly sit on their piles of cash.

Those collective pennies from the 99% amount to far more money, pulsing through the veins of the economy on a daily basis... with the number of individual transactions being... what... in the quadrillions or something a day?

When your self driving feature is a learning algorithm... it can only learn from a transaction.

They literally look at your transaction history, to try and suggest more things you’re likely to be interested in, and if that leads to another transaction... bingo! It has learned!

Far more of that is going on with low income consumers every day... than with the rich... who often try to launder their money and mask the few fat transactions they do make... leaving them out of that cyber learning loop.

Their fat cat financial decisions, more and more as time goes on, will be determined by the nuanced concerns of the 99%, who determine which investments are sound, and which are folly.

Alright! So, lets get back to Donald Trump, noted racist and friend to the greedy... who is also batshit crazy.

He’s in power because of the first two things, but his tariff policy is all that third thing. It’s not really racist or greedy. The racists and the greedy never asked for any tariffs. It’s truly just... batshit lunacy coming out of the cartoonish depths of his plaque ridden synaptic structures.

He heard somewhere that tariffs are a thing bossy presidents used to do, a hundred years ago, and then he heard some other lunatic on AM radio say they were some kind of a solution for white supremacy and... he just seized on that and now he will just never let it go.

As I said in the opening, this is the one kind of thing that could short circuit the self driving economy and cause it to crash like all other economies before it.

However, in the previous entry, I noted that thus far, the economic auto pilot has been doing a freakishly good job of just ignoring his inputs to the pedals and the steering wheel.

I say, “freakishly,” because the result has been huge stock market spikes one day, followed by huge dips the next... for a year now... with the net result that nothing much has changed, because the spikes and dips cancel each other out.

It’s terrifying to watch from one day and week to the next... but on the other hand... it’s been a whole year of this and... we’re still fine!

To be clear here, these are spikes and dips on a stock market chart... they are not spikes and dips in your or my bank balance... or in the prices for the things we buy... because they are happening waaaay to fast.

An apt analogy would be... I come into your living room and flip the lights on and off, fifty thousand times per second, for a whole hour. Will you notice?

Well, considering that your alternating current cycles them on and off already at the rate of sixty thousand times per second (if you live in the US) no! You will not fucking notice any change in the brightness of your lights in the living room.

Okay, yes!.. your light switch would break if I did that... possibly leaving you in the dark. But your light switch is a mechanical component.

The switches and buttons Trump is exercising like mad every waking minute with his daily tweet storms and policy contortions... are all digital... powered by redundant servers all around the planet, sitting in air conditioned rooms, with surge protectors and back up generators.

So... simply overheating the self driving mechanisms our economy, by working them to death trying to compensate for an unending barrage of violent inputs... is not possible.

AI algorithms exist independent of any one server, drive, card, or chip... and the internet as a whole is built to withstand daily attacks from global electrical storms and natural disasters, solar storms, and a never ending assault on the power grid from the world’s squirrels.

So, the economy is quite safe from his day to day insanity.

The question is... is that self driving infrastructure clever enough to deal with the long term, artificial inflation that his tariffs will impose upon the system from the outside?

With the tariffs... Trump is side-stepping the computers entirely, and fucking with the underlying economic math itself!

That’s... what a tariff is!

It’s a way for a leader to arbitrarily change the fundamental math that underpins the economy.

So the answer to the question... if the self driving economy can correct for such a root level attack... depends on how intelligent it actually is.

All of these learning algorithms, working in concert toward the one objective of maintaining and improving the circulation of money... are ALL black-box algorithms, as touched on in the previous entry.

It means... all of them have evolved to survive inside our internet jungle of multiple such species of AI... and while we do not know how any of them think or work... it’s a safe bet they will all work together to isolate and neutralize the same existential threat.

Now, that last paragraph echoes the two-parter on cyber sentience... specifically the fear of such destroying humanity in an act of self preservation... but that fear was fairly well resolved in that two-parter... and the echo to it here, is not intentional.

Instead... and now we are down to the grit of tonight’s entry... I believe it may just be possible that a self driving economy, such as our own, could actually posses, within the cryptic depths of it’s curious, collective mind... a primal awareness that all the, “off the chart,” alarms which have been plaguing it recently, are tied back to one single “agent” known as “President Trump.”

This would seem to make sense, given that the same collective of economic bots are able to identify random teenage girls who are pregnant, even before the girls know it themselves, and start marketing baby products to them.

Would it really be such a leap to imagine that a self driving economy, would not figure out that it was under attack by a worm, introduced through social media, that went by the name of “President Trump.” and... through trial and error... figure out how best to defend against this destructive parasite?

If so... then flashing the all powerful warning signal of an inverted yield curve last week, has proven to be very effective... rattling him to the core, and rattling his greedy enablers hard enough to start trotting out Republican primary challengers against him.

What this would amount to is nothing less than... a self driving car which is learning how to eject an abusive driver... even when the cops are giving that abusive driver a pass... without destroying itself... by turning that abusive driver’s friends against him... by threatening their lives.

And that’s pretty damn clever, if you ask me.

Of course, at this juncture you’re surely thinking, “all of this is has to be bullshit and the inverted yield curve was real! That’s all there is to this! The rest is just your own madness trying to get rid of Trump without suffering an economic downturn.”

And maybe you’re right.

But the larger theme of this blog IS... that we are living in very strange times... like nothing we’ve seen before.

And all of this is just an attempt to try and explain such insanity... by tying together the newest branches of established science, tech, and sociology... into a kind of braided rope to climb?

Okay, time for bed.

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lodelss · 5 years ago

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Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 45 minutes (9,790 words)

Part 5 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. Catch up on season one of Bundyville here.

Stella Anne Bulla was born in November 1949 in Asheboro, North Carolina to Dorothy Ann Lemon and Brinford Bulla, a man who served in the Navy and worked for the federal government as a postal employee most of his life. Stella — who, at some point, preferred to be called by her middle name, Anne — was one of five children: brothers, Artis, John and Brad, and a sister, Cara. The children were raised devout Southern Baptists, attending church meetings once during the week, and twice on weekends. Anne wanted to grow up one day and live in a place where she could ride horses.

By high school, Anne adhered to the “higher the hair, the closer to God” school of thought: Where other girls of Grimsley High School smiled with youthful innocence from photos, Anne grinned knowingly, hair teased high and wide into a flipped bouffant.

Later, Anne met a man named Barry Byrd, and the two married, had a daughter, and moved to Stevens County, Washington in 1973, after Barry got out of the Air Force. He took a job in a Colville body shop — finally starting his own in the tiny town of Northport. The Byrds started a band called Legacy. Anne’s brother, Brad Bulla, joined them, playing mandolin, lead guitar, and banjo along with the Byrds’ vocals. The group released two records: Sons of the Republic and, in 1984, Judah’s Advance — which were sold via mail order by Christian Identity groups as far away as Australia. “Legacy is unique in that their music is designed with the Israel Identity image, and is an excellent way to introduce the subject to thousands of people,” the Australian group wrote in a newsletter.

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

The Judah’s Advance cover features a drawing of a ship bearing down on a rocky coastline, where a stone tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments sat amongst a pile of rocks that had fallen from the sky. In the center, an American flag — bearing just 13 stars and the number 76 — whips in the wind.

On Judah’s Advance, Dan Henry, the pastor at The Ark — the Christian Identity church where Byrds worshipped, but that has also helped produce violent acolytes — read a line of scripture, and the band thanked him in the credits. The producer for the album, they said, was YAHWEH.

The back of the album is even more Christian Identity than the front. Alongside a photograph of the grinning musicians, the band lays out its beliefs: “Our forefathers understood that the establishment of this country was the fulfillment of the prophecy concerning the re-gathering of the nation of Israel,” it explains. The savior, the band writes, was a descendant of the “Judahites”, while “the true children of Israel,” after being freed from captivity, migrated westward, settling in “Scotland, Ireland, Britain and every other Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation in the world today.”

It reads like the liner notes to a Christian Identity concept album, and it made Legacy a popular feature on the Christian Identity and white supremacist conference touring circuit. In 1986, the band played the Northwest Freedom Rally in Richland, Washington alongside a bill of racist speakers. And from 1987 to 1989, the group reportedly traveled yearly to Colorado to play Pete Peters’ Rocky Mountain Bible Camps. Peters had been a guest at The Ark and the Aryan Nations, lecturing on the end of the world, and his hatred for Jews and homosexuals.

But Legacy was more than a band providing musical accompaniment to racists: In 1988, Barry Byrd and his brother-in-law and Legacy bandmate, Brad, were two of just 15 men who deliberated for about a week about their beliefs, and authored a document entitled “Remnant Resolves.”

The document elaborates that the men felt a “spiritual burden”: “This burden was the need and desire to see Biblical principles of government once again established in our nation,” it reads. The men agreed that if they could not come to a consensus on solving that burden, they would not proceed with writing the document.

What comes next are resolutions to fix society for “the remnant” — the way for the chosen people to live in the fullest realization of liberty. Biblical principles should be put into practice at every level of government. The band maintained that in the home, women should be submissive to their husbands. Locally, the civil government should punish evil and protect the good. And at the federal level, taxes need to stop, since you can’t tax what God created.

“It is blasphemous to regard antichrists as ‘God’s chosen people’ and to allow them to rule over or hold public office in a Christian Nation,” it reads. “Aborticide is murder. Sodomy is a sin against God and Nature. Inter-racial marriage pollutes the integrity of the family. Pornography destroys the purity of the mind of the individual and defiles the conscience of the Nation.”

At the end, when it was all down on paper, there they are smiling wide for a picture — as if someone had said “say cheese” when they took it — and all fifteen men signed their names.

A year after the Remnant Resolves, Legacy (now named Watchman) was back on tour, scheduled to play a Santa Rosa, California church affiliated with Dennis Peacocke, a self-described political activist turned leader in the “shepherding movement” — a religious movement in the 1970s and ’80s that involved congregants turning over all personal decisions to a spiritual leader, and has been criticized as cult-like.

The Byrds made more than one trip to Peacocke’s church for Fellowship of Christian Leaders (FCL) conferences. During one visit, they stayed with a church host family: the Johnsons. Rick Johnson would eventually move his family north to Marble in the mid-1990s, and still lives there today.

At the time, Johnson’s son Jesse was just a kid, but he still recalls meeting the Byrds. Something about Anne immediately stuck out to him. “She has these piercing blue eyes,” he recalls. “I remember kind of being off put by that and … just by her presence. Because she didn’t smile very much. She was really intense and when she talked to you it was about what you’re doing to have a better relationship with the Lord. And I was, like, 8.”

Within a week of living at Marble, Jesse Johnson says he and one of his brothers “made a pact that we were leaving as soon as we were old enough.”

But back in 1992, when the Byrds were still working on bringing their vision of a “Christian covenant community” to life, people in Stevens County were nervous, citing concern over the couple’s connection with Pete Peters. People called the group cultish; the Byrds made a brochure that said they weren’t “the least bit cultish or isolationist.” In that same brochure, the couple predicted “cataclysmic events.” At a city council meeting, they claimed to their neighbors that they weren’t racist, and didn’t “condone hatred”— in fact, Barry told the Spokesman-Review that they wanted to create a ministry and a working ranch to “take youngsters” of all races in. The couple claimed they’d severed ties with Peters and that their attendance at the Rocky Mountain Bible Camp was only to play music. They didn’t mention the “Remnant Resolves.” Debate about the Byrds and Peters raged for months in the pages of the Colville Statesman-Examiner.

In May, a Colville man expressed concern in the paper: “We would love to have our fears allayed,” he wrote of the Byrds. “But the trail back to Pete Peters appears to be pretty warm.”

The Byrds attempted to shoot down a list of rumors they were asked to address by Northport’s mayor at a May 1992 city council meeting. They said they had no relationship with Peters, never held white supremacist beliefs, and concluded that people with concerns should come to Marble. Barry Byrd “advised that reading newspapers was not a worthwhile way of attaining accurate information,” according to a report on the meeting.

Meanwhile, in nearby North Idaho, Bo Gritz — a former Green Beret who once ran for President, and who famously served as a liaison between federal agents and Randy Weaver at the end of the Ruby Ridge standoff — attempted to create his own Christian covenant community, called “Almost Heaven.” Some said he modeled it after what the Byrds created at Marble.

Paul Glanville, a doctor, liked the idea, too, when he heard it. He brought his family north to Marble in 1992, several years after meeting the Byrds. He was delivering a presentation on low-cost or free medical care at a Christian seminar when he encountered the couple, who were giving a talk on establishing covenant communities. “They are very charismatic,” Glanville recalls. “I really was interested in this idea of a Christian community where I could practice medicine in what I considered a very Biblical way.”

Once at Marble, he says he enjoyed the close community, the focus on church and family. It felt like his family had moved to the promised land. People would get to church early, chattering with the company of the other people who lived there, hurrying downstairs to stake a claim for the casserole dishes they’d bring each Sunday for a potluck, before rushing up again for church.

But over time, cracks emerged in the smooth veneer of the Marble promise. Nothing drastic, just small fissures that, over time, built up. In the spring of 1997 Glanville noticed a strangely competitive drive behind — of all things — Marble’s softball teams. He says he felt there was a need to win, to conquer all of the other church teams from the area, as if to prove Marble’s superiority. Glanville sometimes skipped the adult games to watch his kids play softball. Soon after, the leaders called an emergency meeting to chastise anyone who skipped the adult games. Glanville found the suggestion that he watch the Byrds’ team over his own child’s bizarre.

After a few years, Glanville started to feel that he hadn’t made a covenant with God so much as with the Byrds. “What they mean by ‘covenant’ is total, absolute obedience to the leadership without questioning, and that the leadership eventually has your permission to question you and scrutinize your life in the most invasive ways that you can possibly imagine,” he says. “They might not start that out from the beginning like that, but they will end up that way.”

From the pulpit, the couple preached about “slander,” about never questioning their leadership, and turning in anyone who did. The Byrds gave sermons about submission, obedience. The word “individual” was sinful — individuality being a sin of pride.

The church leaders would encourage the families there to turn against their own blood — parents reporting on children, children reporting parents, neighbors against neighbors — if that meant preserving perfection at Marble.

Glanville says his own children went to Marble’s leadership and told them that he was skeptical of their intentions and teachings. By the summer of 1994, he says, “My kids and wife had been totally brainwashed.” He continues, “They were turning me in to Marble for negative talk.”

But even he didn’t understand how quickly he’d lost them: When he finally decided to leave, Glanville was shocked that his wife and family refused to come with him. “My wife filed for divorce when I left. And my kids basically all signed the divorce papers,” he says.

“I could do a lot of things in this church,” Barry Byrd said in one 1994 sermon. “I have the authority. I could misuse it. I could manipulate you and intimidate you, which you know, I’m sure we’ve done some of that. Not meaning to, but that’s just part of the deal.”

The pulpit too, was Barry Byrd’s megaphone for talk of a country ruled by Biblical law, of the sins of the government, about the entire reason Marble was here at all.

“We’re fighting for something that much blood has been shed for, beginning [with] the blood of Jesus,” he said. “If the spirit of the Lord does not reign supreme and this book is not the law that governs all of life and living, then there is no peace and there is no liberty!” He spoke of righteous anger and “holy hatred” for those getting in the way of “the government of God.”

Byrd even glorified martyrdom as a way to achieve the church’s goals: “So you see, I don’t have any problem being martyred if I know it’s what God’s called me to. If I know that my blood is going to water the tree of Liberty and build for future generations, I would gladly give my life today.”

Two decades since he left Marble broken-hearted, alone, Glanville still sometimes hears the Byrds’ words in his head, nagging at him, pulling him back to that time, making him question how he could have fallen under the place’s sway.

His mind goes back to the moments he still blamed himself for not being perfect. Times when Marble convinced him he was the problem, meetings when Barry Byrd stood over him shaking a fist, making him believe he was lucky they were being so patient with him.

“And you could say ‘well why did you put up with that?’” he tells me this spring. “A lot of people who are trying to leave a cult have magical thinking. That if they just could say the right thing, or do the right thing, the leaders will suddenly see the truth and repent and everything will be alright.”

***

Back in 1988, when the Byrds’ band was on tour, Anne Byrd’s own brothers, too, were positioning themselves as chosen ones.

The Bullas were a family of prophets. It was as if they believed their ears were calibrated to pick up the unique pitch of the Lord’s voice.

Anne’s eldest brother, Art Bulla, at the time, was living in Utah and had converted away from the family’s Southern Baptist roots to his own racist interpretation of Mormonism. He found himself maligned from the mainstream LDS church in the early 1980s when he called himself “the one mighty and strong,” claiming he was receiving revelations. He also expressed his belief in polygamy, but admitted he’d had trouble recruiting women to marry him. He split from the church when it started ordaining blacks.

Art Bulla, who I reached by phone at his Baja, Mexico home, says he visited his siblings Anne and Brad Bulla, and his brother-in-law Barry, in the early days of their Marble community. And though he says his sister and Barry were still practicing racist Christian Identity beliefs — which he points out he actually agrees with — he thought the couple seemed to be controlling the people who would form Marble.

“Barry had a very strong personality, and Anne did too, and so they were able to hornswoggle if you will, the gullible,” he says. “I had suspected that Anne had gone too far with the controlling thing.”

Art Bulla tells me he’s the only prophet in the family — not Anne and not their brother I found who pastes notes that say “God’s only priest” to cutouts of naked women and posts the pictures to Twitter. Art says he is the chosen one.

“[Anne] always felt that she had to be in competition with me. And since I’m receiving revelations, then she’s got to receive revelations, too,” he says, “You see what I’m saying?”

***

By the late 1990s, Paul Glanville, the doctor who had come to Marble hoping to bring God into his medical practice, was hardly the only person questioning Marble’s leadership, and the Byrds’ true intentions for the community. According to letters written during this time, between 1997 and 1998 Anne Byrd excommunicated her brother and Legacy bandmate, Brad, and his family. (Requests for comment by Brad Bulla were not returned.)

The excommunication drew the attention of Jay Grimstead, an evangelical scholar who had briefly lived in the Marble community and become known for pushing dominionism. Grimstead wrote several letters to the Byrds detailing his concern for what he saw as the community’s increasingly authoritarian structure.

In one letter to Barry and Peacocke, from September 1997, Grimstead wrote that Marble “is a clear, ‘top down’ monarchy that is governed primarily by a queen, ‘Queen Anne,’” he wrote. “The people at Marble live in great fear of displeasing the Byrds, particularly Anne.”

Grimstead also excoriated Barry for not publicly condemning Christian Identity, which he referred to as “weird, unbiblical stuff.” He was even being told by Marble members that the ideology was still being discussed in 1997.

In January of the next year, he wrote to Anne and Barry: “Please respond in some way to the letter of grave concern wherein I told you I was receiving an increasing amount of evidence that Marble, under your leadership, was fast becoming an authoritarian cult,” he wrote.

Grimstead, with each letter, begged for answers, and grew more suspicious. “I am having more and more concern about the mental health (sanity, ability to process reality, etc) of both Anne and Barry, but Anne in particular,” he wrote in a letter to Peacocke.

That same year, letters came to Grimstead, too — not from the Byrds, but from families who’d left Marble. They wrote of financial manipulation, of tithes that went to the Byrds (one person told me their partner tithed tens of thousands of dollars without their knowledge, and racked up a credit card bill of $55,000), of public confessions of sins that would later be weaponized against members. “No one was ‘forced’ to do it. Yet we all did,” one person wrote of these public confessions, where even children would allegedly confess dark thoughts. “What else could any of us done? Barry and Anne knew best. We trusted them. They were hearing from God, they told us.”

People who’d gotten away still feared Christian Identity was the agenda driving the church, despite what the Byrds had said about leaving the ideas of Peters and the Ark behind. One man, who had adopted non-white children, wrote to Grimstead, recounting a meeting with the Byrds. “Barry stated he did not believe in interracial marriage and that our non-white children would not be allowed to marry any of the sons and daughters at Marble, and that we would have to have faith that God would provide them with mates of their own race,” he wrote.

But by the fall of 1998, 15 men signed a letter on FCL letterhead saying that Grimstead’s questioning of Marble’s intentions forced the organization to “mark him.” They called him a “factious and dangerous man” and sided with Marble. Among those signatures were Peacocke’s and — in the same loopy letters that marked the Remnant Resolves — Barry Byrd’s.

I wrote Grimstead this past spring, to see if he’d talk about that time, about those letters, that mark placed on him by his good friends. Grimstead’s response was curt: “If you have any of my letters from those years … my opinion of the Marble Fellowship under the Byrds has not changed,” he wrote in an email. “What I said in those letters is still true and provable as far as I know and I was never proven wrong in what I said.”

He declined to comment further. He is “too busy with positive work for the Kingdom.”

***

Jesse Johnson is 33 years old now, and for years he lived in Los Angeles, where he attended art school and came out as gay. He lived at Marble until he was 17, when he was excommunicated, and left to live with his maternal grandmother. For years prior, Johnson says his grandmother begged his mother to leave, believing Marble was a cult. She didn’t listen.

I meet Johnson in the spring of 2019, at a small house in Northport, Washington. A dog gnaws at a bone under the table. We’d been talking on the phone for months about his time at Marble. He tells me about a childhood dictated by fear of the Byrds, and an exclusion of the outside world. “The world is evil and the government is evil, and their whole thing is wanting to get back to Puritan America,” he says. “They would talk about that all the time: the founding fathers and how this isn’t what they wanted.” Johnson says leaders continually reminded the congregation of what happened to the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas — how something like that could play out at Marble, too. He recalls being told the community was on a federal watchlist. “I’m pretty sure that was all made up,” Johnson says, “but they were telling us that, so it was almost like stirring up the fear … are we next? Maybe we should prepare. That was definitely talked about from the pulpit, like, what we would do when — it wasn’t if — it was when the world collapses.”

Church was a harrowing experience: In one instance, Johnson says he was locked in a basement with all of the other children, who were told only to emerge only when they were speaking in tongues. “One of my friend’s dads whispered in my ear ‘just make something up,’” he remembers when he was one of the last in the room.

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Teenagers were expected to follow stringent courtship rituals, which condemned even the smallest displays of affection, like hand holding, and punished offenders by garnishing their wages or with physical labor making repairs or cleaning leaders’ homes. Every year, a “purity ball” celebrating chastity was held for teenagers, and formal etiquette lessons were given. Homosexuality was not tolerated in the community — Johnson tells me stories of boys who were sent to conversion therapy. I hear stories of suicide.

Punishment for children was constant and rules were always changing. Johnson says one day, he suddenly found out the Byrds had been made his godparents. “When I found that out it was kind of off-putting because if anything ever happened to my parents, the hope was that we wouldn’t have to be at Marble anymore.”

When families left or were forced out, “they were basically dead to God, dead to the community,” Johnson says. “To have contact with them would be hurting Marble.” Some people wanted to leave, but couldn’t sell their homes. Marble had the first right of refusal.

Several women who were raised there spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, expressing fear for the safety of family members still involved in the community. From all of them, I got the sense that to be a female at Marble is a particularly cruel experience: a life of shaming, abuse, and fear. They weren’t allowed to show skin — even swimsuits were deemed inappropriate. “We couldn’t show our arms. It was our job to protect the men from having bad thoughts, so we had to cover ourselves,” one woman said. I heard stories of physical and sexual abuse. Another shared a journal entry with me. “It was called Marble, and like the stone, it was beautiful and soft to touch and wrapped you up in its pure form,” she wrote, “But held the capacity to crush you under its cold weight, so that even if you escaped, the scars would never heal properly.”

One woman claimed that when she was 4, she was molested by an older boy in the community, but her parents were told not to go to the police, that Marble would handle the problem on their own. Confused about why she felt the community didn’t take action, she swallowed a bottle of pills one day when she was 12 in a suicide attempt — but survived. “I didn’t tell my parents until a year or two later,” she told me. “I definitely did not want to continue living like that.” Today, she says she can’t even walk into a church without feeling overwhelming, paralyzing fear.

“I’ve gone back [to Marble] once or twice,” she said. The people “literally look like zombies walking around. They look like… just zombies. They don’t have a soul. They don’t have any control of their lives. They’re just being little robots for Barry and Anne.”

Children allegedly grew up handling firearms — something that is not unique or strange about living in a place as rural as Marble. But “most people around here with guns aren’t talking about the end of the world or having to protect themselves from the government,” Johnson tells me. “I don’t think tomorrow they’re all gonna take up arms… my concern is there are certain people that are impressionable, especially some of the younger people, and they do have access to quite a lot of guns.”

But not everyone sees harm in the way things are run at Marble. Zion Mertens moved there when he was 6 years old, leaving briefly. He moved back as an adult with his own children, but doesn’t attend the church. He says today about half the community is like him. I ask him if Marble is a cult, and he says no but then offers this: “I prefer to avoid groupthink,” he says about the church. “I try to avoid it. So it’s not really so much that I disagree with them, it’s that I don’t really like sacrificing my own identity to the identity of a larger group.”

Mertens says he’s never caught a whiff of Christian Identity there, despite volunteering that the Byrds used to attend the Ark. “That place is, without a doubt, a white supremacist group,” he says. But things like homosexuality definitely are condemned. He doesn’t disagree completely with the Byrds on that, and he says it’s grounded in the leaders’ hope to make society “better.”

I ask about how the outside world is supposed to reconcile his feeling that Marble isn’t racist with the guest appearance of a neo-Confederate racist preacher, John Weaver, in 2015. He says that surprised him, too. “I actually really don’t have an answer on that one,” he says. “I had never encountered anything like that there, so when I ended up finding out that was his background, for me it was kind of like a little bit of a shock.”

But it’s clear it didn’t bother people in the community enough for them to speak up. I get the sense that maybe it’s just easier to turn a blind eye. Pretend it’s not there — to only see the place for the Christian, patriotic flowers pushing through the surface, not the roots of where they come from.

Jesse Johnson was excommunicated for not attending “prep school,” what Johnson describes as a religious pre-college program held at Marble to prepare young people to rebuild society after an “inevitable global and national conflict.” Later, when he came out as gay, he received a barrage of scornful emails from the Byrds and people still living at Marble. He changed his email address, but his family continued to shun him.

“I was informed by my family that I wasn’t allowed contact with any of my siblings,” he says. “One day I called just like crying and begging if I could just talk to one of my brothers and sisters. And [my mom was] like ‘yeah, change your lifestyle and come back to God and we can talk about it. But I’ve got to go to church,’ and then she just hung up.”

Life on the outside was not easy for Johnson. He says he was homeless for a while. “They say ‘you’re going to leave and everything’s gonna go wrong for you and everything is gonna be horrible until you come back,’” he says.

“Were they right?” I ask.

“No, not at all,” he says. “I don’t think anyone who’s left has had an easy time. And I think the majority of people I’ve talked to they say they felt like we were part of a psychological experiment… we were the guinea pigs.”

Paul Glanville, the doctor, agrees. Today, he’s reconciled with most of his children, but his ex-wife and one of his sons still live near Marble. He says he believes Marble is a cult that took away his family.

Johnson, too, has gone to great lengths to open communication with his parents again. A few years ago, Johnson moved back to the rural area after spending 14 years away. By then, his siblings had left Marble. His family was talking to him again. But his parents remained in the Marble community. “My mom and I had to come to an agreement that she wouldn’t talk about my sexuality and I wouldn’t critique her religion,” he says. “I wouldn’t say it’s worked well but it’s definitely allowed us to have more of a relationship.”

I wanted to understand how Johnson perceived Marble’s growing association with the Patriot Movement, with politicians like Shea. Johnson told me he suspected the Biblical Basis for War was from a Marble sermon. And he says the group is now filled with vehement Trump supporters — which flew in the face of everything he’d told me about how the Byrds felt about the federal government.

“There’s an underlier of something that’s a little more sinister,” he says. It isn’t about loving the government, suddenly, but loving what might come next. “I think it’s more of the fact that [Trump] is destroying everything so quickly. Like maybe this will progress to their revolution that they’re waiting for.”

Trump is, potentially, “bringing the apocalypse,” he says. “They definitely have thought the world was ending a few times and were super excited about it.”

This reminded me of something Glanville had told me, about how people at Marble were always talking about what to do when the end times came. And it sharpens something Matt Shea — their friend and acolyte, who sees the end times as an “opportunity” — has brought up in the Biblical Basis for War and the state of Liberty. They’re the blueprints for a rebooted nation.

***

I ask Johnson about what Tanner Rowe and Jay Pounder — the guys who made the Biblical Basis for War public — advised me: I’d need to be armed and in body armor to go to Marble. He was excommunicated, but he still offers to take producer Ryan Haas and me there that afternoon. He said that since his parents still live there, it’s not strange for him to be on the property.

When we pull under the gates of Marble, there’s not a person to be seen. Up ahead there’s a street sign: “Liberty Way,” it reads. There are signs for a bunkhouse, a hitching post.

Admittedly, I’m nervous, afraid to have my notepad out, and Haas tucks the microphone away as Johnson’s car crawls up a rocky road, up a hill where he says you can see the whole community. At the top, a group of people are out for a stroll. They stop and stare at the car. For a second, it feels like maybe we’ve been caught.

But Johnson throws the car into park and pops out. He knows everyone here. “Hey, Barney!” he yells and struts toward them with a big smile across his face. They talk for a minute or two, and Johnson comes back. Everything’s just fine. “Have a good one guys!” he calls to them.

We keep driving up the hill and stop at the place a big white cross has been mounted, overlooking the community. Johnson says groups pilgrimage up the hill from Marble, down below, every Easter Sunday.

For a few minutes, we stand there overlooking a patchwork of green fields, under a sky that feels bluer and wider than anywhere I’ve ever been. The sound of chickens clucking carries its way up the hill. It’s the opposite of the Branch Davidian compound or the remote cabin at Ruby Ridge. It’s a sparse community of houses. Some are big, beautiful homes — the type that rich people might call “the cabin.” Others are rickety shacks melting back into the earth. The Byrds don’t live on the Marble property, but instead, in the nicest house of them all up one of those side roads Rowe told us to stay away from. Johnson doesn’t disagree with that advice.

“It’s beautiful,” Johnson says, standing there, looking out over it. And it’s striking to me that someone could look out over a place that caused them so much pain, and still see a kernel of good in it. By the end of the day, we’ll have driven all around the property for two hours, and Johnson keeps hopping out of the car to say hello to someone, to tell them he’ll stop by soon, to ask how they are.

He says he figures if he’s nicer than anyone here, no one can hate him anymore — no matter what the Byrds say.

II.

Just before I moved to Spokane, Washington as a college freshman, at age 18, in 1999, a girl at my high school jibed that the place was filled with Nazis — living, breathing white supremacists. I ignored her, figuring that, like myself, she didn’t know what she was talking about.

In fact, both being Oregon-bred white teenagers, we’d both been living around white supremacists our entire lives. The state of Oregon was a haven for Confederate ideas even after the Civil War, a place that, from its very start, was built for whites and whites alone — a part of the state’s history that was omitted from our education. We didn’t learn that the KKK once had a strong presence among Oregon’s state officials. We didn’t know neighborhoods where our friends lived — only decades before — had exclusion laws discriminating against who could own property there.

In January 2011, I thought of that conversation with that girl again.

It was a cold winter morning in Spokane: the day of the Martin Luther King Jr. Unity March, a parade that went right down Main Avenue through the center of the city, and was always filled with kids and people with their arms linked. Sometime that morning, a Stevens County white supremacist named Kevin Harpham planted a backpack bomb on the parade route near a metal bench and a brick wall, a block away from my apartment.

Before the parade could begin, as marchers gathered, milling in the streets, filling the city with energy, Harpham — armed with a remote detonator — strolled amongst the crowd taking photos of himself. But before it detonated, several city workers saw that black backpack, thought it seemed out of place, and they called it in.

Inside the backpack was a six-inch long pipe bomb welded to a steel plate. The bomb was packed with more than a 100 lead fishing weights coated in rat poison and human feces. The backpack also contained two T-shirts commemorating events that took place in small towns in nearby Stevens County.

If those city workers had continued on, ignored the backpack, and that bomb would have gone off, it would have immediately twisted that metal bench into daggers of shrapnel. Those shards and the fishing weights would have rocketed at that brick wall, ricocheting off and firing into the marchers’ bodies. The rat poison — which contained an anticoagulant — would have made sure the people hit wouldn’t have stopped bleeding easily; the feces was likely there to cause an infection in every wound.

At the time, most of my day-to-day life happened in the two city blocks surrounding the bomb site. Police tape closed off the entrance to my apartment building. Traffic was re-routed. When it happened, I remember looking at all the guys in hazmat suits, the bomb robot, the closed streets, and figuring it was a big fuss over nothing. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Violence like what was narrowly missed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day has plagued this part of the Northwest for decades. But that history was something I’d had the privilege to navigate around as a white person living in a majority white city in the whitest part of the country. When I was a kid I had an excuse: No one told me. But as an adult, I’d come to believe that good always had, and always would, prevail.

But white racism in the American West was not a rumor or a chapter of history that had been solved and tied up with a bow. Racists weren’t burning crosses over there, in some other place, wearing KKK hoods, and performing Nazi salutes, wearing swastikas so they could be easily spotted. It seems like such a cartoon image of a racist now, when I think about it. What willful ignorance to think the enemy is always one you’ll recognize, that they’ll always look and act the same.

Those history books I read as a kid never talked about weapons made of rat poison, fishing weights, and human shit. But when Kevin Harpham chose my neighborhood to try to commit mass murder, he didn’t bring a burning cross or a Nazi flag. His hatred had him making that bomb for who knows how long. Investigators later found he bought those weights in batches. Piece by piece. That attempted bombing was my introduction to this entire subject.

I started devouring books and documentaries on the history of North Idaho and the Aryan Nations compound that had, for years, sat within an hour of my home. I read about the militias that had long thrived here in the Northwest, and the conspiracies that inspired them to action. I learned about Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Montana Freemen.

I needed to understand how hate had stayed so alive in America, what the fuel was that kept it burning — not just in the hills of some faraway place, but right here. Hate happened here. Hate happened in the morning. It happened on a Monday.

Five years later, on another cold January morning, another explosive event occurred in my backyard. By then I was in Oregon, back in my hometown.

A group of armed men took over a wildlife refuge in the far southeastern corner of the state. Among them were militias and white racists who had really radical ideas about the federal government, race and religion.

My editor at the Washington Post asked if I could help with coverage. My life hasn’t been the same since.

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III.

In late 2016, I started asking people about the bombing in Panaca — a thing I’d read about, but never heard much about what happened. Finally, in May of 2019, I got some answers.

I’d asked the Kingman Police Department, in Arizona, for documents about the raid on Glenn Jones’ trailer — that’s the guy who blew himself up and the Cluff’s house in Panaca, Nevada. Kingman was Jones’ last address before the bombing. Police reports had talked about his journal, about some writing about LaVoy Finicum — so I asked if I could see it.

They sent over photos of a spiral bound notepad of graph paper with a bright red cover. Inside, Jones had carefully written a note in black marker: “This is for the murder of LaVoy Finicum and all the other Americans who have died for freedom.”

He had flipped the page, and written it again: “This is for the murder of LaVoy Finicum and all the other Americans who have died for freedom.”

He’d done it a third time, and had written the same words.

I needed more pages. I asked Kingman police for more photos, more pictures of his trailer. I wanted everything I could get so I could try to answer this one question I’d had rolling around in my mind: Was Glenn Jones a suicide bomber for the Patriot Movement?

I asked for web searches on his laptop, GPS waypoints on his Garmin. I wanted photos of journals, photos of the trailer, photos of the storage unit. I couldn’t stop thinking about how no one really knew Jones. How people in Panaca just called him “the person” or “the suspect” because, even though he lived in the tiny town for years, no one seemed to really know him.

They said he was quiet, shy, forgettable. They were the same words people used when TV reporters descended on Stevens County, Washington to describe Kevin Harpham — the Spokane MLK Day parade bomber, who was eventually sentenced to 32 years in prison. They’re the same words people used to describe Stephen Paddock, the man who killed 58 people in a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017. Or Dylann Roof, when he murdered black parishioners in a church in South Carolina. They’re the same words used to describe people who’ve spilled blood in the name of an ideology from Virginia to Colorado.

Kingman officials told me I’d have to get all that from the FBI. They’d handed most of their files over. For months, I sent requests for comment. Calls went nowhere; I couldn’t tell if my emails were reaching anyone. Finally, I got a response. The FBI said, “It is the policy of the FBI not to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.”

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

But two departments had told me the FBI had taken everything over. I knew it was an investigation — wasn’t it? Still, no comment.

I couldn’t believe the story of what really happened there was solely one being kept by Josh Cluff — who had also declined to talk to me. So, in a journalistic hail mary, I told Kingman officials that, well, since the FBI says maybe no investigation even exists, I guess you can send me that evidence now.

On a rainy Saturday, two weeks later, a CD filled with photos arrived in my mailbox.

There was no manifesto, no clear explanation of why Glenn Jones did what he did. They didn’t even send most of the things I’d asked for. But the photos did make the story clearer: Jones was not just a nice guy who blew up a house one time, but a guy who was so invisible to the rest of the world, no one had any idea who he really was. He had navigated nearly six decades on the planet like a specter who’d been walking in the shadows his whole life. No one noticed the guy living in the RV with very little else besides bombs.

At the end, he lived inside the type of camper a family of four might take on a tour of national parks. It was a tight, cramped space — not a place someone appeared to be living, but a space used as a workshop to build explosives.

Every window was covered, and every surface was covered with wires and gun powder, fuses and power tools. If he was truly living there, it was like he was existing inside a junk drawer. The only food in his cupboards were cans of soup, some chips, and some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The silverware drawer had no forks or spoons or knives, but pliers, scissors, and wire cutters. The fridge and microwave were spotless. The shower floor was crusted with black gun powder; there was no showerhead.

Investigators hauled bucket after bucket of supplies outside. They stacked huge antique bomb shells on a picnic table, and several metal ammunition boxes that were filled to the brim with gunpowder, fuses snaking out of holes drilled in the sides. There were guns — some modern, some antique. White briefs and socks were folded neatly in one cabinet. A pair of puffy white sneakers sat next to the bed.

Next to denture cleaner and cigarette butts, they found some of his journals: They contained shopping lists, to-do lists, notes about cars for sale, phone numbers for realtors. There were also drawings of bombs, complete with careful measurements of gunpowder, what charges were needed.

I kept flipping through the photos again and again, trying to absorb what story they told about Jones. I did it again: dirty trailer, no food, handwritten notes, stacks of materials.

I was idly staring at a photo of an open notepad, a note telling some unnamed person they’d better watch their back, when I realized the dark handwriting on a previous page was showing through to the other side — a page the police department hadn’t sent me. I zoomed in, flipped the image so I could read it.

It was a letter — a letter written to Josh Cluff, dated July 3, 2016.

Hay Stoupid [sic] —

Remember the $8,000-$10,000 I needed?

I could have leveled out the whole BLM Building — But, NO, you had to get greedy and not pay back any of the $60,000 you borrowed.

Plus, you bet the “farm” you went “All In,” You almost had this Bomb delivered to your houses. Never bet your family on a desperate idiot. Don’t ever assume somebody won’t shoot you + wife + kids over money.

Fuck You, Josh.

Glenn

I wish I had 2 Bombs. You would [illegible]

But the thing was, ten days later, he had two bombs. He delivered them to Cluff’s house, and told his wife and children to leave before they went off.

I started flipping all of the pages, looking for more shadows left by an invisible man. “We are different than Iran and Syria,” he wrote in one note, “… Another generation doesn’t need to see [illegible] of Waco and Ruby Ridge.” He wrote the word “ranchers” at the bottom of the page, but I couldn’t read the rest. On yet another page, he wrote the name of the man who baptized LaVoy Finicum in the 1960s. It’s Josh’s grandfather.

The letter Jones never sent to Cluff made it clear that he was planning to commit an act of terrorism that would destroy a Bureau of Land Management building. And then, the day before the bombing was supposed to happen, the plan fell apart. Something — or someone — got in the way of that plan. He turned the bomb on Cluff.

But the journal showed Jones was thinking like so many other people I’d interviewed over the years across the West, from a Nevada rancher to a Utah militiaman, to an Arizona widow, to people in Washington who grew up being told the government was out to get them. Jones was writing about revenge and martyrdom and all the things the Patriot movement thrives on.

But he wasn’t always like this. When investigators called his ex-wife, Kathi Renaud, and told her that he died in such a violent way, she was shocked. They hadn’t spoken in years, but it didn’t sound like the guy she’d been married to. She had a hard time even believing it was true — her daughter demanded proof, she tells me, “whatever to make sure that’s really him. You know? Because this is not his demeanor.”

But it really was her ex-husband. And I asked her why she thought Jones changed.

“I think somebody, in my own opinion, I think had to put that into his mind to make him think that, cuz like you know. No, he never talked bad about the government or anything. Nothing bad. At all.” I asked her for names of more of Jones’ family, friends. She gave the name of one guy — who never got back to me — but no one else. No one really knew him.

But someone, she says, along the way must have gotten to him. Put an idea into his head.

***

The Jones bombing showed me that extremist violence, in some ways, is changing. I talked to one extremism expert after another, asking if they’d ever heard about a Patriot suicide bomber. All of them said no. Some people had committed suicide by cop, trying to go out in a blaze of glory. A guy even once crashed a plane into a building that housed IRS offices on purpose. But a suicide bomber? That would be new.

Adam Sommerstein, who used to be an analyst with the FBI, told me, “that is a particular phenomena I have never seen in either the Patriot movement or the overall right-wing terror movement.”

A suicide bombing is saying something different than an attack. It’s a sign of devotion to an idea. And it says that this idea is important — more important than my life. And by blowing myself up, I believe this idea will reach more people.

But domestic terrorism still seems to be a thing lots of Americans aren’t even aware exists. And now here — with Jones — it was changing, evolving, maybe becoming even more extreme. And yet his bombing barely made the news outside Nevada.

After so-many high profile shootings, the violence at Charlottesville and other ideologically motivated killings in recent years, lawmakers in Washington are pushing for change. They’ve held hearings on white supremacy — even introduced legislation to create a better response to domestic terrorism. They say the government needs more power to stop extremists in this country.

“But that’s absurd,” Mike German, from the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. He’s the one who infiltrated and helped take down white supremacist and militia groups as an undercover FBI agent in the ’90s. He says this discussion about passing new terrorism laws as a way to stop extremist violence is a huge red herring.

“There are 57 federal crimes of terrorism. That’s what they’re called in the United States Code. Of those 57 federal laws of terrorism, 51 of them apply to domestic terrorism as well as international terrorism,” he says. “And if there is a group of intergalactical terrorists, it will apply to them too. It just applies to terrorism. But the fact that it doesn’t say in the law — domestic terrorism — the Justice Department is using that as an excuse to argue for new powers.”

In German’s view, the more of a power grab law enforcement can pull off, the more the government can become like the thought police. And that’s not just anecdotal: He says the government has been doing it against Muslims regularly since 9/11. Someone gets a label and their rights are gone. Historically, those people are brown or black, not white.

German says it’s a flawed thought pattern to want to snatch away the civil liberties of someone who holds racist or radical anti-government views, and thinking that couldn’t also be done to you with the next shift of the political winds. People can hold despicable views — politicizing what thoughts are OK normalizes the continual pushing of the envelope that’s been common since the Twin Towers attack. It’s “the opportunity to target people who you don’t like,” he says.

And I can’t help but think that making the issue of radical violence something that the government needs to fix as a new way for people to make it someone else’s problem. If that law doesn’t pass, things just stay the same. We say, ‘god, why don’t lawmakers do their job?’

But, see, I think that’s a misdirection — putting the onus on powerful people, who benefit from power structures that have just one definition of terrorist. It ignores that radical violence is the end result of the extreme ideas that have crept into our daily lives.

Where, once, conspiracies were stories someone had to seek out, or that came to a person on a flyer at a militia meeting or a gun show, they’re now commonplace in everyone’s home. They come through Facebook feeds, Twitter posts and YouTube videos. And maybe you don’t click on them. You already know they’re crazy. But maybe one of them you do, and so do 1000 other people. A video on guns leads you to a fake news story about firearms regulations, which leads you to Agenda 21, or theories about the New World Order. And maybe something there speaks to a certain pain that feels familiar. You agree just enough — so you post it to Facebook. Your friends like it, and that feels good — so you keep posting things just like it.

And then conspiracy theories aren’t fringe anymore. Online, they become prevailing arguments — things worth entertaining, at the least. They’re noise — noise we’ve all gotten used to drowning out. They’re posts your uncle or your neighbor or brother-in-law is sharing, that your family is liking and re-sharing. And none of those people consider themselves members of the Patriot Movement. They’d never take over a wildlife refuge. They wouldn’t drive away from cops if they got pulled over. But, in daily life, they’re indulging the ideas that have led to instances of violence.

Sometimes those ideas get in the wrong person’s head, and turn violent. And unless it’s directed at you, it feels like someone else’s problem to fix.

It seems like the real battle here is over the narrative. The prize is to get your version of things on top — at the top of politics, at the top of search results — no matter how based in falsehoods and hatred it is.

***

After I found everything in Glenn Jones journal, I called Sheriff Lee, back in Panaca. When we’d sat down in person over the winter, he really couldn’t tell me much about the motives behind the bombing. But as I reported, people kept asking me ‘hey, if you find something out, will you let me know?’ I got the sense they felt a little forgotten — like the biggest thing that had ever happened in their town was the smallest concern to the rest of the world.

Sheriff Lee hadn’t heard of any of the evidence I uncovered — so I read him the entries from Jones’ notebook over the phone.

“My first words are: Wow,” he said, a solemness to his voice I hadn’t heard in any previous interviews I’d had with him. “My second words are: It sure would have been nice to have that shared with another law enforcement entity whose conducting an investigation on this.”

He’s shocked that the target really was supposed to be a BLM office. “And it looks like he had more of an intention than just putting bombs, talking about shooting people,” he says. “This could have been a hell of a lot worse than it was.”

For such a nice guy, Lee sounds pissed — I get the sense he’s not a guy to throw the word “hell” around willy-nilly, too. But I get it: A bomb went off in his tiny town, a place that was always supposed to be this perfect haven of purity in a wild state. And even he can’t give people answers about what happened. The feds never told him.

“Who radicalized him?” he asks.

Glenn Jones said he could have “leveled out” a government building because he believed so much in the story of LaVoy the martyr. He was willing to die for it.

Ultimately he didn’t bomb the BLM. I don’t know why he didn’t carry out his original plan. I don’t know what the FBI knew about him. I do know, though, that during that very same summer, the feds “wanted to push [Keebler] outside his comfort zone to take his temperature” on a bombing… when right here, just a few hours away, Glenn Jones was sitting in an RV making a bomb so large it would shower a town in a mile’s worth of shrapnel.

Lee thinks somebody knew — Panaca’s too damn small for people not to — he thinks they just didn’t say anything, says people might consider it not their business, or figure “nah — not my problem,” he says.

I think until Kevin Harpham’s bomb arrived just down the street from me in Spokane, maybe I was like that, too. Nah, not my problem. Figured domestic terrorists were over there, white supremacists over there.

But now I know, I just wasn’t letting myself see what had always been around me. Until that happened, I think I was trying to protect myself from the from the messy business of dealing with hate, unwilling to acknowledge that white supremacist structures support white people who are willing to be violent in the name of ideology and how those people are rarely called terrorists.

Americans think terrorists are these fictional people streaming over the borders, when in reality, most terrorists are already here — they are white, they are Christian, they were born in America. According to the Anti-Defamation League, 2018 was one of the deadliest years for domestic extremist violence since the Civil Rights era — and almost every attack had some link to a type of right-wing extremism, especially white supremacy. A government assessment of mass attacks in public spaces from that same year also showed that about a third of those attackers believed in a violent ideology — from white supremacy to conspiracy theories, to sovereign citizenry.

But transparency could change how Americans see terrorism. So when instances of violence happen, the government could tell people what homegrown terrorism really looks like. Because every time the feds cover something up, or use questionable tactics, or don’t say anything at all, it hands the Patriot Movement a new victory. It helps them tell their story. The narrative is in their hands. One more thing they could point to and say ‘look, the government always lies to you.’

I think that’s one step in fixing all this, in creating new Patriots — just not the kind in the Patriot Movement.

Maybe real Patriots are the ones who can look at themselves, their own communities, and have some uncomfortable conversations about who they really are. Maybe they’re people who can say something is out of place in their own community.

Like the city workers in Spokane who saw that backpack and trusted their guts to say something, likely saving hundreds of lives.

Or Tanner Rowe and Jay Pounder, who leaked the Biblical Basis for War: two conservative guys who used to work for Matt Shea but weren’t so hypnotized by a belief system that they couldn’t recognize when it was turning into something dangerous.

Or Jesse Johnson, who didn’t turn anyone in, but instead simply turns a cheek again, and again, and again to the people at Marble. Extending a hand out to the people who hurt him, killing them with kindness. Or trying to. They can believe what they want, but he doesn’t have to hate them back.

Because Johnson knows that hate takes work. He was raised in a place where anger and violence were preached as virtues, but grew up to be a man who knows those weren’t the words of God. They were words of people trying to play God.

So each of them took a risk. They all stood up. They all exposed a problem. They stopped living in fear.

They know that in the light, there can be no shadows.

***

Listen to the audio version of this series.

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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Republicans' choice: Stand with Trump or risk his wrath

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/republicans-choice-stand-with-trump-or-risk-his-wrath/

Republicans' choice: Stand with Trump or risk his wrath

“I know we are consumed by this here, but it doesn’t consume my constituents when I go back home,” Sen. John Cornyn said. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

2020 Elections

Trump has already informed at least two GOP lawmakers of his dissatisfaction with their defense of his racist tweets.

Sen. John Cornyn prides himself on winning a large share of the Latino vote in Texas, campaigning in the Asian American community and running ads in three languages. It’s a crucial strategy for a Republican in a diverse state — and one that is sharply divergent from President Donald Trump’s approach.

So as Cornyn seeks reelection next year with Trump on the ballot, he’s making sure that he isn’t dragged down by the president’s more inflammatory politics, exemplified again this week by his racist tweets telling four liberal Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from.

Story Continued Below

“I don’t have any trouble speaking to any of my constituents. They don’t confuse me with what’s happening up here in D.C.,” said Cornyn, who has gently criticized Trump’s battle as a “mistake” that unified Democrats. “I know we are consumed by this here, but it doesn’t consume my constituents when I go back home.”

It’s a common refrain for Republicans trying to deflect a Trump-fueled firestorm and highlights the dilemma that the party will face for months to come.

GOP lawmakers, especially those facing potentially tough reelection bids, need to create independent identities to win over Trump skeptics. But if they break too fiercely with the president, he and his grassroots supporters might turn on them, with disastrous political consequences.

In fact, Trump has already been angry about what he sees as a weak defense by Republican members of Congress and has informed at least two lawmakers of his dissatisfaction, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

That reaction explains the ginger response to Trump by Republicans up for reelection in difficult races, who are caught between condemning the president’s words and facing his wrath.

“I wouldn’t have done it. That’s not what we ought to focus on in this country,” said Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) of Trump’s tweets. Gardner is up for reelection in an increasingly blue state. And while he’s endorsed Trump in 2020, he says he disagrees with Trump’s rhetoric: “We should focus on ways to bring people together.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has not endorsed Trump, has called on the president to withdraw his “way out of bounds and offensive” tweet.

But Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), who hails from a diverse state and is also vulnerable in 2020, declined to discuss the matter. Others who did take on Trump’s comments have made clear that their distaste for the president’s style of attack does not affect their support for him.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said Monday that Trump’s tweets are racist because the four congresswomen under attack are “American citizens.” But she made clear that otherwise there is no daylight between her and the president.

“I’d love for you to make that clear. While I don’t appreciate the tweets, but I still support the president,” Ernst said on Tuesday. Their political alliance is unharmed “because if you just look at his policies and what he’s been able to do. Our economy is booming, and we’re really doing quite well as Americans.”

Four House Republicans voted with Democrats on Tuesday to condemn Trump’s remarks as racist, and there is no appetite in the Senate to take up the issue. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who criticized Trump repeatedly on Monday and Tuesday, said he would likely not join Democrats as a co-sponsor in the Senate.

And even though Romney might not support Trump, it’s not because of the president’s incendiary battle with the House Democrats: “I’ve said for several months now that I may not endorse now in the presidential race. And I haven’t considered the tweets in that regard.”

Meanwhile, others rallied behind Trump as strongly as possible, sensing an opportunity to stand with a president who loathes criticism from his own party.

“These are radical leftists in the House,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who faces reelection next year. “Their silence on issues of domestic terrorism with antifa and so forth has to be confronted.”

That Trump faced no congressional GOP defections from his 2020 campaign and scattered criticism this week amid his fight with Democrats who he says “hate our country” is no surprise. There are plenty of political headstones to remind Republicans just how difficult it can be to survive without Trump’s support.

Former Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina lost his primary in 2018 after launching much criticism against Trump, and former Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee retired rather than try to juggle their elections with their dislike for the president’s brand of politics.

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis began building a brand that was sometimes at odds with Trump, writing an op-ed, slamming the president’s border emergency and working with Democrats on legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller. But after facing the possibility of a primary challenge, Tillis is now one of the president’s toughest defenders, and Trump’s tweets did not rattle him.

“No, I don’t think he’s a racist, and no, I don’t think he’s a xenophobe. He’s got a mom and a wife who are immigrants,” Tillis said Tuesday. Trump’s frustration stems from “a lack of attention to some of the most incredible statements coming out of the mouths of some of the folks in the liberal progressive wing of the Democratic Party.”

Yet at the same time, those who hug him too closely can lose independent voters: The GOP lost its House majority in the nation’s Trump-skeptical suburbs, and Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) was defeated after converting himself from a Trump critic into a cheerleader.

That’s why Republicans say they want to talk issues, not personalities, in the run-up to the election.

“I really think that if we can just focus less on people, more on policies, Republicans are going to be in a very good position in these Senate races,” said Indiana Sen. Todd Young, who chairs the Senate GOP’s campaign arm.

Democrats seem wary of making their 2020 campaigns to take the Senate, hold the House and win the White House all about the president. Their attempts to make 2016 a referendum on Trump failed, and party leaders seem eager to run a replay of their successful 2018 races, with health care as the centerpiece and Trump secondary.

“The president has his own agenda, which clearly is chaotic and at the same time is racist and bigoted for his own political gain,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, who chairs the Democrats’ campaign arm. Voters “don’t like it. But they also want somebody who is going to be calling that out and at the same time is fighting for what they care about.”

There’s another factor at play: If Trump’s battles with the four women of color in the House came in October 2020, the reaction would be quite different in both parties. That there are 16 more months until the election is a reminder that Trump could still unleash a dozen new controversies before then.

“The thing I think we’ve learned from experience with this president and the administration is that the news cycle changes pretty quickly,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the GOP whip. “I don’t expect we’ll be talking about this.”

#Foreign #Politics #Trump #wrath

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reneeacaseyfl · 5 years ago

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Trump says Ilhan Omar ‘hates Jews’ to defend against racism claims

President Trump speaks outside the White House on Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

President Trump, unrepentant after hurling racial invective at four nonwhite lawmakers, accused one of the first two Muslim women in Congress of harboring animosity toward Jews in an apparent attempt to claim the moral high ground in an explosive contest over identity, patriotism and bigotry.

Trump asserted that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali-born refugee who fled civil war when she was 12, “says horrible things about Israel, hates Israel, hates Jews.”

“Hates Jews,” the president repeated from a lectern at the White House on Monday. “It’s very simple.”

The tactic demonstrated how aggressively the president has courted Israel and its most fervent American supporters, as well as his willingness to use that base of support as a bulwark against accusations of intolerance. So, too, it highlighted divisions within the Jewish community between those who look skeptically on a newly vocal left-wing flank of the Democratic Party and those who see these voices as natural allies in the struggle against religious prejudice.

Wrapped up in the protest against Trump’s language is discontent about how non-Jewish commentators have appointed themselves guardians of Jewish interests in a moment of rising anti-Semitism.

“I was disturbed by the president’s weaponization of people’s indignation about anti-Semitism from some of these women to cloud the accusations of racism against him,” Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

[Trump says they ‘hate our country.’ The Democrats he attacked say the country ‘belongs to everyone.’]

The charge of anti-Jewish animus was especially noteworthy because the quarrel’s basis — the dissent of the four freshman Democrats against an emergency border aid package and their criticism of Trump’s handling of immigration enforcement — bore no obvious relation to accusations of anti-Semitism that have dogged certain members of the liberal cadre. Omar apologized in February for comments suggesting that politicians were motivated by money to support Israel. She has also faced backlash for discussing the “allegiance” of Israel’s American proponents.

But the two issues — the fate of migrants detained at the southern border and the mounting incidents of anti-Semitism — have now been mixed together in a politically toxic brew.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, compared migrant detention centers to concentration camps, Trump’s allies in Congress accused her of minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust. Hundreds of historians have since signed an open letter defending the use of analogies to the Nazi genocide, though not all agree with the accuracy of the freshman lawmaker’s claim.

It was again the accusation of anti-Jewish bias that became prominent in Trump’s escalating war of words this week with the progressive women of color. In addition to verbally attacking Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, he appeared to target Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Omar and Tlaib are the first two Muslim women in Congress. Pressley is black, and Ocasio-Cortez has described herself as a “Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx.”

Trump initiated the feud when he tweeted on Sunday that the Democratic women, only one of whom was born outside the United States and all of whom are American citizens, should leave the country if they were unhappy because they “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”

The comments were roundly condemned, with some in his own party chiding him while many others defended him against accusations of racism.

Trump, speaking at an unrelated White House event on Monday, said the women were the ones at fault. And the alleged wrong he chose to highlight, focusing in particular on Omar, was anti-Semitism. He also asserted that the women “hate our country,” in addition to Israel, and made the baseless claim that Omar sympathized with al-Qaeda. Trump previously called President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black commander in chief, a terrorist who was born in Africa.

Omar has been critical of the Israel lobby, at times using language widely seen as inflected with anti-Jewish conspiracy. Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, had advocated for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which Jews and Arabs would jointly govern. Both women support the movement known as BDS, for boycott, divestment and sanctions. Modeled on the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the campaign aims to leverage economic pressure on Israel to win Palestinian rights. It bitterly divides American Jews, notably on generational lines.

These positions have brought the freshman lawmakers into conflict with some Jewish members of Congress. One of their especially outspoken Republican critics, Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, did not take issue with the president’s remarks on Monday, instead writing on Twitter that the onus of “self reflection” was on those with a “blame America 1st mentality.”

The charge of anti-Semitism lobbed by Trump was echoed by other congressional Republicans, some of whom said they regretted the president’s style while making clear that they sided with him against the Democratic women.

Monday morning on “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) advised the president to “aim higher,” but suggested that the more grave transgressions were those committed by his colleagues on the other side of the Capitol.

“They’re anti-Semitic. They’re anti-America,” he said, also accusing the congresswomen of being communists.

Sen. Susan Collins, the self-styled moderate Republican from Maine, called Trump’s initial tweets “way over the line,” recommending that he “take that down.” But she began her statement on the matter by chiding the freshman congresswomen. Among the issues where she disagreed with them, she said, was “their anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

Trump relished the support from fellow Republicans. He quoted Graham in tweets on Monday, adding, “Need I say more?”

The Republican Jewish Coalition also promoted Graham’s statement, writing on Twitter, “He isn’t wrong.”

Meanwhile on Monday, speaking at a forum on combating anti-Semitism, Attorney General William P. Barr said a “body politic must have an immune system that resists anti-Semitism and other forms of racial hatred” and condemned “identity politics” for breeding hate.

Some American Jews have objected to the injection of concerns about anti-Semitism into partisan contest.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) drew on long-simmering resentment about the way accusations of anti-Semitism were being deployed when he responded to the president’s remarks.

“I have been pretty polite about this and so have other American Jews,” the lawmaker wrote. “But you really have to leave us out of your racist talking points.”

He protested, “Your racism is your thing and we are not your shield.”

I have been pretty polite about this and so have other American Jews. But you really have to leave us out of your racist talking points. You are not helping us, you are not helping society, you are not helping Israel. Your racism is your thing and we are not your shield.

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) July 15, 2019

Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, struck a similar note when he observed on Twitter that Trump was harming “the Jewish community” by “using Israel to defend his blatant racism.”

“He doesn’t speak for any of us,” wrote Greenblatt, who has previously spoken out against Omar, calling statements from the freshman lawmaker plainly anti-Semitic and urging House leaders to pass a resolution clarifying that the chamber prized different values.

#AntiSemitism is on the rise.@realDonaldTrump using Israel to defend his blatant racism only hurts the Jewish community. He doesn’t speak for any of us.

We call on ALL leaders across the political spectrum to condemn these racist, xenophobic tweets & using Jews as a shield.

— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) July 15, 2019

Still, others saw danger in dismissing complaints about anti-Semitism as self-serving politics. While he hardly thought Trump’s accusation absolved him of blame, Amos Bitzan, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said he worried about describing the invocation of anti-Semitism as a shield employed by racists.

“I don’t want people to say that everyone who levels the charge of anti-Semitism is racist, or on the far right,” Bitzan said, pointing to the example of Britain’s Labour Party, which has been roiled by complaints of anti-Semitism. The concerns, the historian said, have been dismissed as a conservative attack on the party’s left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

But Lipstadt, the Emory professor, said Trump was brazenly attempting to pit those most concerned about racism against those most concerned about anti-Semitism. Jews, she said, should be alarmed by the president’s rhetoric about foreign loyalty, and his suggestion that the congresswomen leave the country if they are unhappy.

“One of the tropes of anti-Semitism is that Jews don’t belong, that they’re more connected to each other than to the country in which they live,” she said, also noting that it was the denial of citizenship, under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, that paved the way for the Nazi extermination.

The “terrible irony” of the conflict over race and loyalty pitting Trump against the minority lawmakers, Lipstadt said, was that the president was “hoisting Omar on her own petard” — using a racist trope about loyalty similar to the one that she apologized for enlisting earlier this year against backers of Israel.

If the controversy were to have a positive outcome, the historian said, it would be Omar gaining greater insight into how the rhetoric of loyalty and belonging is deployed. By the same token, she said, Jews who were upset by the congresswoman’s comments about loyalty to a foreign country “should be equally outraged by this comment from the president.”

“Don’t weaponize your indignation and only see it on the other side of the political transom,” Lipstadt said.

More from Morning Mix:

A neo-Nazi unleashed a ‘troll storm.’ Now he could owe his Jewish victim $14 million.

A graphic suicide scene in ’13 Reasons Why’ drew outcry. Two years later, Netflix deleted it.

Credit: Source link

The post Trump says Ilhan Omar ‘hates Jews’ to defend against racism claims appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

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hoopslab · 7 years ago

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White supremacist riot, Trump, fringe Domestic Terrorism or societal cancer?

Yesterday, there was a national tragedy that was utterly predictable and eminently preventable. In theory. But in practice, it was a tragedy that was very consistent with the times that we are living in, the likelihood of which has grown every year since Barrack Obama became president, and that was tacitly supported by the leadership of our country both before and after the event.

Yesterday’s riot was terrifying. But, in reality, it was just a symptom of where we are. And, in the scheme of things, a relatively small symptom, compared to what could and (extremely unfortunately) likely will happen moving forward. There is a movement of people that, at their hearts, are incredibly scared about everything that President Obama represented, everything that having a black man as president said about our country, and were actively looking for someone like Trump (read: a white man that would publicly go on record and say all of the things that they feared about non-white-males). And this group of people, which counts in the millions, won a huge victory and felt incredibly empowered by the election of Donald Trump.

I wrote about this nine months ago, just after the election, in pretty distinct detail:

The White Nationalists just won a HUGE victory, in the election of Donald Trump.

This is the group that Trump was pandering to, even before announcing his run, by making himself the face of the Birtherism movement. I suspect that Trump never REALLY believed that Obama was born outside of America, and that Trump never REALLY cared one way or the other if he was…but by playing to that base from the start, by cutting his political teeth by making that absurdity an issue, he guaranteed that he had a key constituency upon which to build his political future.

In a purely Machiavellian way, this was a brilliant catapult into political life for Trump. Because there were millions of these people, each of whom have a vote, that passionately and with every fiber of their beings feared what President Obama represented and would absolutely latch onto a White Male leader who publicly fought their fight.

Ironically, this same White Nationalist group was once one of the pillars of the Democratic Party in the South, before the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon pulled them into the Republican party. And as the stated cultural norms of our society made racism a dirty word, a feeling to be hidden and no longer expressed publicly, this part of society felt more and more powerless and dispossessed. To the point that, when a black man named Barrack Obama became the president of the United States…became THEIR leader…they longed for a way to fight back.

And Donald J. Trump gave them a voice. That was step 1.

And fulfilling Step 1 was enough for Trump to burst onto the scene like a bolt of lightening. He doubled-down on that constituency as he came down the elevator to announce his candidacy and said that Mexican immigrants were often rapists and criminals. He tripled down when he suggested that Muslim-Americans should have to register their religious affiliation in a database. He later quadrupled down when he referred to the entire African-American and Hispanic communities as Hell, where if you walk down the street you just get shot. Completely outside of policy, Trump was able to pull this group’s heartstrings by publicly saying all of the things that they had believed.

I wrote about it again 6 months ago, right before the Inauguration, when Trump’s public spokespeople were denying that they empowered racists at the same time as we were seeing a nation-wide rise in hate crimes by those that fit the demographic of Trump supporters.

All around the country, numbers of racist incidents were reported on college campuses and schools. I went to the University of Michigan and still have people there. So these are the incidents I’m most familiar with. But these types of things were in NO way isolated to UM. But at UM…

White nationalist flyers and graffiti were all over campus (started before the election, continued after). “Alt Right”. “Be White”

A female UM student was forced to remove her hijab under the threat of being lit on fire

Another female student was pushed down a hill by two men after being accosted over religion

And here’s a list of a cross section of 13 racist incidents from all around my area, including three white students threatening to hang a Wayne State University student by her hijab, swastikas drawn on apartment doors, and of course, a police officer posting “go home monkeys” on Facebook in response to black protestors. Good old primate jokes, they just never get old, do they?

This is the kind of stuff that many don’t see. Because it doesn’t happen to national figures and doesn’t get much run on CNN. But it happens, just the same. All around the country.

And not just a rise in activity from so-called fringe racists (which is what many seem to be trying to characterize the driver from yesterday’s tragedy as...more on that below), no. But instead, a rise in this craziness up to the upper levels of politics and society. Like when an elected mayor participated in social media conversations with city officials calling our beautiful, dignified former first lady an “Ape in Heels”. Or when Carl Paladino, honorary co-chair of Donald Trump’s New York campaign, had this to say about the outgoing president and his wife:

“I’d like (Michelle Obama) to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla,”

Oh, and he wasn’t done…and he didn’t want to only target Mrs. Obama. Of course not. Here’s a snippet of what he had to say about President Obama, and what he’d like to see happen to him in 2017:

“[Barack] Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Her[e]ford,”…“He dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to [senior Obama adviser] Valerie Jarret[t], who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a Jihady [sic] cell mate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.”

So, again, yesterday’s tragedy in Charlottesville wasn’t in any way unpredictable or unexpected, or even unusual. These 30 injured people, and the terrible death of 32-year old Heather Heyer, are more fruit of the poisonous tree that has been watered by our president and his supporters. I’m watching CNN right now, and just saw former KKK head David Duke again gushing about Trump’s promises to “take the country back”:

youtube

Duke would later go on to remind Trump that “it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

Is this just “fringe”, “Domestic Terrorism”?

There’s a montage of political leaders on CNN right now, calling this event “domestic terrorism” by fringe White Supremacist groups. Trump, meanwhile, is being criticized because of his ridiculously lukewarm public statement about “both sides” being at fault. But, as just pointed out, Trump can’t completely disavow those White Supremacist/white nationalist groups...because they are an important kernel of his base!

It has to be said, of course, that not all Donald Trump supporters are racist. If you go back to my article about Trump being president, I clearly break down the four groups that I believe got Trump elected, and only one of those groups was clearly racist. But. The opposite needs to be said, and not minimized...

ONE OF THE FOUR GROUPS THAT HELPED GET TRUMP ELECTED PRESIDENT IS VERY CLEARLY RACIST!

And it’s NOT a small group!

Racism is an incredibly slippery slope, because it’s all about shades of gray inside individual people’s psyche. And it’s not always necessarily expressed, or even believed. Our economy and government have built in inherent, institutionally racist structures for hundreds of years, and this allows for dangerous “reconfirmation” of dangerous stereotypes in a type of self-fulling prophecy. Many people that may not believe that they hate black, brown, female, LGBT or foreign would still acknowledge that, on some level, they see these groups as “other”...and that very other-ness plants the seed for racist and mysogynist reactions.

I had a huge public debate with one of my colleagues, and best friends, about what the correct size of the so-called white nationalist block is in America. In that discussion, I cited FiveThirtyEight’s estimate of tens of millions of Americans in the white nationalist voting block...but my friend stated that he believed the white nationalist vote was more like 30 thousand...a pure fringe of crazy, not a core part of the country.

This is, in my opinion, an incredibly important distinction. Because it speaks to how this issue of racism should be addressed in our public psyche. If racism can be confined to just a handful of fringe people, than it’s a “them” problem. It’s a relatively minor problem, where the solution can be primarily about identifying those “thems” that wear their racism on their sleeves, and ostracizing or defeating them (both terms I’ve seen used on CNN in the last hour).

But.

If (as mentioned in the link above) FiveThirtyEight.com’s off-the-cuff estimate of 15% of the voting block being identifiable as white national based on their voting pattern, is correct. If TENS OF MILLIONS of people, whether they consider themselves to be racist or not, can predictably be said to vote based upon white nationalist tendencies. Then this is NOT a THEM problem.

It’s an US problem.

And if it’s an us problem, then it’s a much, much more involved problem. Because it’s not easy to identify, not easy to legislate, but it’s incredibly pervasive to all levels of our society. And it’s a continuation of the racial struggles that go back hundreds of years.

There was a public push around the 1980s and after, that America had become a so-called “post racial” society. That the Civil Rights Era, and the problems that it was built to address, was over. Barrack Obama’s election in 2008 was seen as the ultimate proof that racism in America was no longer a thing...after all, how racist could America be if we elected a black man as president?

Well, the answer turns out to be...still very racist. It’s not my grandfather’s racism, when Billie Holiday was singing about Southern Trees bearing strange fruit.

It’s not my Father’s racism...when brave people had to Sit at a Counter, and Nina Simone was singing about those same trees bearing those same strange fruit.

youtube

But there IS still racism in this generation. So when Jill Scott sings about those strange fruit, she may be singing more about police brutality than lynchings on trees. And maybe the issues are more subtle...when the Justice Department is looking into whether Affirmative Action discriminates against white men, as opposed to looking into ways to try to break down institutional racism that affects far more people in a far more negative way. Or maybe it’s a question of degree, when small events can be seen by some as a braying jackass being put in his place while others see the seeds of dangerous White Privilege. On every level, from seemingly minor to devastating loss of life, we as a people need to really consider the part that racism may play, and how we (both individually and as a people) want to address this problem moving forward.

So yes, I agree with the talking heads that what James Alex Fields did in Charlottesville, Virginia, is Domestic Terrorism and should prosecuted as such.

However, Fields was not a “lone gunner”. He is another example of this generation’s version of Strange Fruit, but he’s the fruit of a much larger vine. There is a cancer of racism in this country, there always has been, and it still infects our country down to our core. If we isolate Fields, the cancerous growth on our country’s skin, as a fringe terrorist and remove him...while not in any way addressing the disease that led to him as a symptom...then the results will be predictable. And preventable. And terribly, terribly tragic.

Other miscellaneous articles of interest

Sometimes you have to speak up…We matter too!

A black man and a police detective walk into a bar…

A Black Man Sits at a Counter in 2016

My first lady is dope

From Slave to Hashtag: 13th, Kap, Race Relations and the Election

My president is Trump

Moving Forward in a Trump presidency

Hidden Figures Change Our World

A Black Man venting at 3 AM about racism and the new president

Is a little bit of racism that bad? (East Coast Offense Pod II, 2/16/17)

Denzel & Fences always have a place in my history

Lavar, Kristine, Jason, Charlamagne & Emmett: an on-air spat becomes teachable moments on racism, mysogeny & white privilege

#misc #Black Lives Matter #president #Donald Trump #racism

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surly01 · 7 years ago

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This Week in Doom: A Crack in Everything

Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on November 13, 2016

"Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.… " -Leonard Cohen 1934-2016

Many of the bells I listen ring discordantly or not at all this week, as the improbable has occurred, and serial pussy-grabber Donald J. Trump has been elected President-elect. That alone is enough to recommend the reappearance of this infrequent franchise, heralding as it does the apocalypse.

The pervasive story retailed in the weeks leading up to the election was that "Hillary had a durable three to four point lead." Repeated on cable newz and the better boutique websites, like fivethirtyeight.com, where even on election day, they moved a story titled,Final Election Update: There’s A Wide Range Of Outcomes, And Most Of Them Come Up Clinton. Now hiding behind the hedge known as "margin of error," they are pretending that this was not the narrative they marketed, quickly moving to shove all that down the memory hole with stories like, Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else. You can't make this stuff up. If indeed "The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice", Nate Silver will be stocking shelves at a Wal-Mart by Christmas.

And the punditry of the execrable cable "news product" networks certainly did their part.

Since election day, I have not watched the "news" shows on CNN or MSNBC, which both gave Trump millions of dollars of free advertising over the past 18 months, while constantly preaching, as experts do, that at best he had a "narrow path" to victory. It's funny that Trump keeps lambasting the press; it played a major role in his electoral college victory. With news networks giving him billions in free publicity (Phil Griffin in particular should roast in hell), the Fox "News" entertainment net gave him millions more in sheer advocacy. And let's not allow Les Moonves' quote on Trump to be forgotten: "It May Not Be Good for America, but It's Damn Good for CBS." This is what happens when news becomes entertainment and has to sing for its supper. Shareholders' interest uber alles.

Trump drew 60.1 M votes, compared to Romney's 60.6M in 2012. Clinton underperformed Obama by 9M from 2008 and by 5+M from 2012. Dems stayed home in droves. Michael Moore noted that 90,000 Michigan voters voted a complete ballot but left President blank. Your margin in Michigan was 11,000. In Michigan and Wisconsin, county after county that went twice for Obama went for Trump. And yes, now we get to enjoy AG Giuliani and Secretary of Interior Palin along with our new retrograde supremes.

I blame the DNC on tipping the scales away from an electable candidate and for their preferred insider. They ran a status-quo candidate in a change election, and turned a continued deaf ear to the plight of people in flyover country. They didn't listen- now we all inherit the wind. And yes I know about voter suppression, and that remains a problem, but the so-called Obama coalition did not turn out. Putting the lie to "elections don't matter." If you continue to believe they don't matter, prepare to enjoy life under Trump, Pence and Ryan. And lose my number.

Perhaps William Rivers Pitt has said it best:

“Trump didn't win because your friend criticized Clinton on Facebook, or because your sister likes Jill Stein, or because Bernie sold out to Hillary or because of any of the galaxy of stupid self-destructive pissy pissant excuses I've been hearing and reading today.

“Unfuck your brain pans, folks. Trump won because millions of people have been getting jackhammer-fucked for decades by nearly a half century of trickle-down economic thievery. Millions of people live paycheck to paycheck, and pay through the nose for health insurance, and have no equity in their homes any more, and have an expensive degree that can't get them a job, and they think they have no future, and maybe they're fuckin-a right. Economic inequality has been mother's milk for bigotry and hate since before the pharaohs built those big pointy grain silos.”

People are justly pissed because America has been a shell game since before Reagan, a long con to extract wealth and resources, and the people never get to find the pea under the pistachio. So along comes this gifted grifter from the TV who tapped into that angst and ran wild with it. THAT'S why he won, because he cannily capitalized on a decrepit system, and millions who don't know where else to look or who to blame after years of trying said fuck it, why not. They're not stupid. They're exhausted and fed up because they've been let down over and over again. It worked.

Reaction has occurred in many cities, with people marching in the streets. While mobilization is important, my brief experience with Occupy has taught me that ad hoc assemblies let off steam but do little more without a more extensive agenda. Strategy is what is needed. There will be time for that. Also, let's not forget that we are about to turn over the immense surveillance power of the NSA to a serial tweeter who maintains enemies lists.

There has been some violence, much dramatized by the alt-right. During Occupy. It was pretty obvious that anybody exhorting people to violence was probably collecting a government paycheck. After all, in activist politics, the FBI plant is the guy who offers to get the dynamite.

They call it "political correctness" when the oppressed tell the privileged they're tired of putting up with their shit.

Marchers and others are amazed that the people of the US voted to elect a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women, and who tweets gleeful posts about deporting families, other examples of casual cruelty, and thinly veiled, dog-whistle racism. Plenty of Trumpeters demand that the unhappy line up behind the new "President of all of us," when they never returned the favor. We are supposed to forget the plotting in a DC steakhouse on Inauguration night of 2009, where R s plotted to obstruct Every. Single. Thing. Obama proposed. And then was the demonization of him and his family, the birtherism. The reflexive racism, the monkey memes… we're supposed to forget all that. I promise a President Rich Asshole the same tender consideration that his fellow travellers offered Barack Obama.

Many survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault awoke on Wednesday morning to the realization that a man who said his accusers were too ugly to assault was endorsed by nearly half the country as a leader. They woke up to newspapers splashed with pictures of a man who said that he could “grab women by the pussy” without their consent because he’s a "big, big star." Friends of color saw a man elected as their president who was willing to hire as his campaign CEO one of the most vile racists that exists, and who began his campaign by calling them, their friends, and their family members who face racial violence every day “rapists” and “drug dealers.” They watched a man become president who called the first black president “evil” and illegitimate, and heard him tell them they were “living in hell,” accuse them of dupes for voting Democrat for several decades now, and demonize the only movement working toward ending the murders of their sons, mothers, brothers, fathers, and friends at the hands of police. And those that are gay, or Muslim, or Latina, or undocumented fear for their lives and for their children’s safety. The simple fact is that the vast majority of those not part of the one per cent and living off investments or trust funds are hurt and grieving, and the half of the electorate that voted for Trump don't realize what is about to happen to them.

My neighbors, co-workers and family helped elect that man. And we all have to live with that. Some of us are more prepared than others.

Meanwhile, The Fed/Wall Street elite and private military contractors have never been happier and rub their hands together at the feast about to unfold. They have thoroughly divided and propagandized the American public and in Trump have a camera-ready stooge to turn over the keys to the Treasury. Meanwhile, the D vs R, liberal vs conservative divide and conquer techniques continue, and the same interests make off with the boodle. Wash, rinse, repeat.

In other news, Ku Klux Klan announces Trump victory parade in North Carolina. It was on the website of the kkkknights but is no longer on their main page. It was scheduled for December 3 at an undisclosed location in NC. Perhaps they have had second thoughts- or have been encouraged to have them. And I was ready for a road trip.

As Trump puts together a transition team, we receive early word that one of his selects is one Myron Ebell, described as one of seven “climate criminals” wanted for “destroying our future.” This means a reversal of the tepid Obama climate change policies and an unshackling of energy companies' plunder of public resources and public waters. From the NT Times:

In looking for someone to follow through on his campaign vow to dismantle one of the Obama administration’s signature climate change policies, President-elect Donald J. Trump probably could not have found a better candidate for the job than Mr. Ebell.

Mr. Ebell, who revels in taking on the scientific consensus on global warming, will be Mr. Trump’s lead agent in choosing personnel and setting the direction of the federal agencies that address climate change and environmental policy more broadly.

Mr. Ebell, whose organization is financed in part by the coal industry, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the linchpin of that policy, the Clean Power Plan. Developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the plan is a far-reaching set of regulations that, by seeking to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation, could result in the closing of many coal-burning power plants, among other effects.

Remember the plunder of the EPA, the selloff of national parks to private interests, and poisoning of the nation's fresh water when your grandchildren curse and spit at the mention of your name.

As of this writing, we hear from Trump that that wall thingy might have been a little overreach. Future Secretary of State Newt Gingrich gave us a new term for deception. Describing Trump's now deleted pledge to have Mexico build a wall on its border, he dubbed it a "great campaign device." Trump and his advisers have backed off major campaign pledges, including Obamacare and the wall.

President-elect Donald Trump and key advisers in recent days have backed away from some of the most sweeping pledges that the Republican candidate made on the campaign trail, suggesting that his administration may not deliver on promises that were important to his most fervent supporters.

Trump built his campaign message around bold vows to, among other things, force Mexico to pay for a massive border wall, fully repeal the Affordable Care Act and ban Muslims from entering the United States. But in the days since his upset election victory, he or his advisers have suggested that those proposals and others may be subject to revision.

Trump also avoided answering whether he would follow through on a campaign vow to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. "It's not something I've given a lot of thought, because I want to solve health care, jobs, border control, tax reform," he said.

That ambivalent tone is a far cry from Trump's sweeping rhetoric on the campaign trail, where he repeatedly vowed to repeal and replace the ACA and led crowds in chants of "Lock her up!" in reference to Clinton. His lack of clarity on these and other issues has added more uncertainty to an already chaotic presidential transition, as he scrambles to build a team.

And in other Gingrich news, Newt Gingrich wants new House Un-American Activities Committee. Put me on record right now that I will be deeply offended if not named on a list.

And in breaking news Sunday night calculated to make one yearn for the good old days of George W. Bush, Trump chose Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff, and Steve Bannon as top adviser. "Draining the swamp" directly into the Oval Office. This is what we get for failing to have hanged 5000 seditionists at the end of the Civil War. Now we have a Republiconfederacy.

What could possibly go wrong?

The passing of the great Leonard Cohen this week reminds us of some of his most poignant lyrics. Those quoted above seem apt. At such a moment of darkness, we are called to remember that there is, indeed, "a crack in everything." And we must remember that the light always gets in. Whether the light can penetrate in time remains to be seen.

Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, articles and spittle-flecked invective on this site, and quit barking and got off the porch long enough to be active in the Occupy movement. He shares a home in Southeastern Virginia with Contrary in the triumph of hope over experience, and is grateful that he is not yet taking a dirt nap.

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deareffie · 8 years ago

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19 April 2017

Dear Effie,

After every BBC politics news alert these days:

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, political party in-fighting. Thrilling stuff, eh? So UKIP are born, and nothing really happens with that for a while. In fact, there were a bunch of small parties that sprung up in the early 1990s to contest elections on the basis of opposition to (at least some element of) the EU, and UKIP was probably the least successful.

Meanwhile, the Conservative party get beaten by the Labour party at the 1997 general election, so Tony Blair become Prime Minister, big Donald Dewar gets his Scottish Parliament, and we finally get a national minimum wage. That’s right, more than 100 years after New Zealand introduced minimum wage legislation, right up until you were about 18 months old, the UK still had no minimum wage. Don’t believe anyone who speaks fondly of the good old days.

And then there was also Iraq. But we’ll get into that another time.

Anyway, ‘New Labour’ arrives (so called as this government said they weren’t *really* socialists, not like the crazy Russians, they just thought that capitalism needing reigning in sometimes, and that businesses were usually a good thing because jobs, and if someone’s making loads of money, that’s fine because then they have to spend it and that means other people get some too. Or something.) and the Conservatives do what every political party does when it loses an election - it takes a good look at itself, does some soul searching and tries to find someone to blame.

Of course, like every other time a political party does this (ahem, Scottish Labour, ahem), they don’t seem to realise that ‘talk amongst yourselves’ is an instruction that a teacher gives a room of students while they’re fannying about fixing a projector, not a viable election strategy.

Political parties’ obsession with introspection and navel gazing is one of the reasons ‘ordinary people’ (vomit) hate them. To any unaffiliated voter, it seems blindingly obvious that the main reasons political parties lose elections are either a) lack of money/media pals, or c) being horrendously out of touch. You don’t become more in touch with voters by locking yourself in a cupboard, having a leadership crisis and accusing each other of factionalism.

Like, I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve taken a long hard look at myself in the mirror, I just become convinced that I should really start taking better care of my skin and that maybe it’s time for a haircut. If I talked to other people instead, maybe I’d find out that no one else really cares about my skin or my hair and most folk are actually much more concerned about employment, education, health and welfare. Maybe. Who can possibly say.

(And breathe)

So the Conservative Party is banished to the opposition benches at Westminster for 13 years, and doesn’t even make it as far as the opposition benches in the new shiny Holyrood for almost 20 years. We’ll definitely come back to Holyrood and devolution and all that another time, but I’m trying(ish) to get through Brexit first (aren’t we all, eh?).

Between 1997 and 2004, a bunch of semi-important people die, a bunch of other people are born, and somehow, as the Conservative Party tries to work out how they’ve suddenly become irrelevant, UKIP fail at making any inroads at general elections, but get three MEPs elected in the European Parliamentary elections of 1999, and start making headlines. Partly because they’ve attracted semi-famous, old people celebrity, talk show host and former Labour MP, Robert Kilroy-Silk. He joined UKIP in 2004, about the same time he got his show cancelled by the Beeb for writing a controversial article headlined “We owe Arabs nothing”. Weirdly, Joan Collins also got in on this action for a bit.

Hanging out with UKIP, that is. Not writing inflammatory articles generalising varied and diverse peoples. As far as I know.

However, as Kilroy-Silk resigned from UKIP, formed his own party, and then resigned from that in the space of the next 15 months, the more important thing to note about UKIP in 2004 is that they beat the Conservative party in an election for the first time (hilariously, an election caused by someone resigning as an MP to go and work in the EU).

“Ah-hah!”, thought some members of the Conservative party. It was UKIP’s fault that they had lost the 1997 and 2001 elections! Of course!

And when people still didn’t elect a Conservative government in 2005, even though Iraq, and even though Gordon Brown, it must be because those baddies over at UKIP were stealing traditional Conservative votes, right?!

A few more years pass. Nigel Farage becomes leader of UKIP. He gets a disproportionate amount of airtime on the BBC despite the party (initially) not having any MPs. What he does have are opinions. Loads of them. And the reason he got on the Beeb so much is because they have a legal duty to provide 'balanced' coverage of issues.

Presenting two sides of every story sometimes means that the BBC is actually not very representative of UK majority opinion. Or sometimes it has to look quite hard to find someone who’ll present what is a minority view. For example, take “equal marriage”. A majority of people in the UK agree with the statement “Gay or lesbian couples should have the right to marry one another if they want to” (and have done since 2012). However, the way the BBC fulfill their “balance” duty means that if they want to discuss gay marriage on a news, current affairs or comment show, they need to find someone who disagrees with that statement.

Enter one Nigel Paul Farage. This BBC “balance” throws up a diverse cast of characters, but most of them fade into obscurity again relatively quickly, or they have limited interest in party politics. Farage however, is relatively articulate, not afraid of saying controversial things (often for the sake of it, as far as I can tell) and available for all your Question Time booking needs. Viewing levels spike, because we’re all complicit in this mess, and suddenly Farage and UKIP have a way bigger platform than expected, and a heap of cash from some grumpy former Tories.

So, the new version of the Maastricht Rebels in the Conservative Party start rumbling that maybe they’ll join UKIP if the Conservatives don’t start listening to them about the big bad EU, and that maybe the Conservatives will keep losing votes to UKIP.

Meanwhile, David Cameron’s all “I’m a cool young guy, stop crushing my big society vibes with all your crotchety old man shouting. Nobody cares about the EU apart from crazy Scottish fisherman and Welsh farmers!”

Turns out he was wrong and Davey’s vibes continued to be crushed until he agreed to include a cheeky wee manifesto pledge for the Conservative Party’s next general election manifesto in 2010.

A referendum on EU membership. A surefire vote winner, that will be easily won by the majority of the Conservative party who want to stay as members of the EU because it’s where all the holidays and champagne comes from.

The Lib Dems put it off for five years but are ultimately ineffective.

MASSIVE EDIT BECAUSE I FORGOT A REALLY KEY EVENT AND TOTALLY LIED ABOUT THE 2010 CONSERVATIVE MANIFESTO BECAUSE I’M AN IDIOT SORRY. I realised on reading this back that I had missed a couple things.

The 2010 manifesto pledge was actually to “amend the 1972 European Communities Act so that any proposed future Treaty that transferred areas of power, or competences, would be subject to a referendum – a ‘referendum lock’”. My bad, sorry Dave.

And in fact, the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto did include a commitment to an in/out referendum on the EU, but only if a British government signs up for “fundamental change in the relationship between the UK and the EU”, including joining the Euro.

But the really rather big thing that I missed, that just sort of passed me by because of all the excitement of #indyref1 in Scotland at the time was the 2014 European elections. In 2014, UKIP won the European elections in the UK, with 24 seats to Labour’s 20 and the Conservatives’ 19. Last time (in 2009), the Conservatives won as many as the other two put together (26 v 13 and 13).

Know how I’m always going about how Scotland isn’t the cool, internationalist socially-liberal, economically left-wing paradise it kids on it is? Well, in the first example of many, even the Glorious People’s Republic of Haggisland elected a UKIP MEP (Member of the European Parliament) in 2014: the baffling David Coburn (see previous and below caveat re: legit reasons for not being keen on the EU that may have prompted folk for vote for him), alongside two Labour MEPs, two SNP MEPs, and one Conservative MEP.

It’s worth noting that Labour gained seats in this election. Under David Miliband, Labour increased their percentage of votes by almost as much as UKIP (around 10%) and they also won the most number of votes in the English local authority elections held the same day. Although only about a third of the people eligible to vote actually voted, and a lot of people who voted Lib Dem in 2010 had pretty much abandoned the party by this point, it’s a nice wee stat to keep on hand when anyone says that Labour has to do more to appeal to UKIP voters.

Anyway, that 2014 European election, although overshadowed up here by all the flag waving, seemed to be the final straw for the Conservative Party. This led to the 2015 manifesto commitment (I checked this time) for “the British people – not politicians – to have their say... over whether we should stay in or leave the EU, with an in-out referendum by the end of 2017″.

And so, in June 2016, the entire UK is asked to vote on remaining or leaving the EU basically because the Tories were having a tiff with themselves. A tiny number of very loud, very entitled people managed to be annoying enough that we literally had a referendum to try and get them to shut up.

Now, we talked before about how there are some totally legitimate, reasonable and not-racist reasons for opposing the EU. A really good example of this is in Scotland, where the fishing industry has had a long standing scepticism about the EU. It’s based on criticism of a EU rule called the Common Fisheries Policy that decides who can fish what kind of fish (and how much fish), and where. The EU policy is meant to protect the sustainability of fishing for the future (i.e. stopping someone accidentally catching all the fish, and there being none left), ensure all EU countries share their fish/fishing waters (e.g. Spain can’t stop Portgual fishing off its coasts), and ensure that fishing is carried out in a relatively environmentally friendly way (i.e. don’t throw loads of dead fish or gross chemicals back in the sea). However, the Scottish fishing industry says that in practice, the policy means that Scotland does not get a fair share of its own fishing waters, and that they love the environment as much as the next guy but that following the rules is cripplingly expensive. This means that people lose their jobs, or put up with terrible working conditions to make up for the policy costs, and/or that the price of a fish supper goes way up. See? Totes legit, not racist. Essentially about jobs and fish suppers.

That is not why the Government held this referendum.

Another totally legitimate, reasonable and not-racist reason for opposing the EU is that some of the trade deals the EU negotiates look like they might damage workers rights in the EU. Criticism of an agreement called TTIP ( which stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, not just me spelling T in the Park wrong) between the US and the EU suggests it’ll mean that companies will be able to sue governments if their health and safety or environmental rules are seen to affect that company’s profit. Leaving the EU could be a way to ensure companies don’t have that power, and have to respect things like national minimum wage and trade union membership.See? Again, totes legit, not racist.

That is not why the Government held this referendum.

The Government held this referendum to stitch together its Frankenstein’s monster of a party for a bit longer. The driving force behind all the decisions leading to this referendum was internal party politics. Whatever the fallout is (and we still don’t know because they literally didn’t even consider the possibility it might happen so didn’t draft any plan), it’s being imposed on 64 million people as a result of the Conservative Party playing chicken. With itself. Except we’re the ones who somehow get run over. And that’s partly why Brexit makes me grumpy.

I swear I’ll try and get onto Scottish independence at some point.

Big love,

P.S. If I seem to meander a bit when I’m meant to be talking about Scottish independence, I’m sorry…

Except mine are all about politics. I do want to bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles though. I feel that’d be one initiative that could muster cross-party support.

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lodelss · 5 years ago

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Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Five: The Remnant

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 45 minutes (9,790 words)

Part 5 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. Catch up on season one of Bundyville here.

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

At the end, when it was all down on paper, there they are smiling wide for a picture — as if someone had said “say cheese” when they took it — and all fifteen men signed their names.

Within a week of living at Marble, Jesse Johnson says he and one of his brothers “made a pact that we were leaving as soon as we were old enough.”

In May, a Colville man expressed concern in the paper: “We would love to have our fears allayed,” he wrote of the Byrds. “But the trail back to Pete Peters appears to be pretty warm.”

The pulpit too, was Barry Byrd’s megaphone for talk of a country ruled by Biblical law, of the sins of the government, about the entire reason Marble was here at all.

***

Back in 1988, when the Byrds’ band was on tour, Anne Byrd’s own brothers, too, were positioning themselves as chosen ones.

The Bullas were a family of prophets. It was as if they believed their ears were calibrated to pick up the unique pitch of the Lord’s voice.

“[Anne] always felt that she had to be in competition with me. And since I’m receiving revelations, then she’s got to receive revelations, too,” he says, “You see what I’m saying?”

***

He declined to comment further. He is “too busy with positive work for the Kingdom.”

***

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

“Were they right?” I ask.

Trump is, potentially, “bringing the apocalypse,” he says. “They definitely have thought the world was ending a few times and were super excited about it.”

***

When we pull under the gates of Marble, there’s not a person to be seen. Up ahead there’s a street sign: “Liberty Way,” it reads. There are signs for a bunkhouse, a hitching post.

He says he figures if he’s nicer than anyone here, no one can hate him anymore — no matter what the Byrds say.

II.

In January 2011, I thought of that conversation with that girl again.

Five years later, on another cold January morning, another explosive event occurred in my backyard. By then I was in Oregon, back in my hometown.

My editor at the Washington Post asked if I could help with coverage. My life hasn’t been the same since.

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

III.

In late 2016, I started asking people about the bombing in Panaca — a thing I’d read about, but never heard much about what happened. Finally, in May of 2019, I got some answers.

He had flipped the page, and written it again: “This is for the murder of LaVoy Finicum and all the other Americans who have died for freedom.”

He’d done it a third time, and had written the same words.

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

But two departments had told me the FBI had taken everything over. I knew it was an investigation — wasn’t it? Still, no comment.

On a rainy Saturday, two weeks later, a CD filled with photos arrived in my mailbox.

I kept flipping through the photos again and again, trying to absorb what story they told about Jones. I did it again: dirty trailer, no food, handwritten notes, stacks of materials.

It was a letter — a letter written to Josh Cluff, dated July 3, 2016.

Hay Stoupid [sic] —

Remember the $8,000-$10,000 I needed?

I could have leveled out the whole BLM Building — But, NO, you had to get greedy and not pay back any of the $60,000 you borrowed.

Fuck You, Josh.

Glenn

I wish I had 2 Bombs. You would [illegible]

But the thing was, ten days later, he had two bombs. He delivered them to Cluff’s house, and told his wife and children to leave before they went off.

But it really was her ex-husband. And I asked her why she thought Jones changed.

But someone, she says, along the way must have gotten to him. Put an idea into his head.

***

Adam Sommerstein, who used to be an analyst with the FBI, told me, “that is a particular phenomena I have never seen in either the Patriot movement or the overall right-wing terror movement.”

Sometimes those ideas get in the wrong person’s head, and turn violent. And unless it’s directed at you, it feels like someone else’s problem to fix.

***

Sheriff Lee hadn’t heard of any of the evidence I uncovered — so I read him the entries from Jones’ notebook over the phone.

“Who radicalized him?” he asks.

Glenn Jones said he could have “leveled out” a government building because he believed so much in the story of LaVoy the martyr. He was willing to die for it.

I think that’s one step in fixing all this, in creating new Patriots — just not the kind in the Patriot Movement.

Like the city workers in Spokane who saw that backpack and trusted their guts to say something, likely saving hundreds of lives.

So each of them took a risk. They all stood up. They all exposed a problem. They stopped living in fear.

They know that in the light, there can be no shadows.

***

Listen to the audio version of this series.

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

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