#that antisemitic fascist man.

[siobhanromee]

i hate ezra pound and im glad he's dead

[doikayt]

So beyond frustrating to see the term "antisemitism" co-opted to manufacture consent and stifle dissent for the genocide of Palestinians, all while real antisemitism carries no consequence whatsoever for the many, many American celebrities and billionaires who peddle it. Deeply radicalizing to watch Palestinian-Americans demonized for protesting the genocide of their people, to watch scores of anti-zionist Jews arrested for standing with Palestine, only for genuinely antisemitic voices to be propped up and bolstered because "censorship is bad" and "they have a point."

[euniexenoblade]

Tumblr zionists are so bewildering to me. They have an inherently right wing ideology that involves colonizing. Like, no matter what argument they want to spin, that's what it is, Israel did not naturally come to creation, it took the British and the Americans taking land they stole and making it Israel. Israel is factually committing genocide. Like by definition it is a genocide. But then these Zionists scroll the internet and find every left leaning group doesn't support Israel or it's like Dropout.tv (owned by a Jewish man and many people it employs activity speak out for a free Palestine) says it supports Palestine, and these people lose their collective shit. Every time a Jewish person says "I support Palestine" these Zionists are antisemitic to them or deny that they're Jewish. I watched a 14 year old who claims to be starting conversion to Judaism tell a Jewish woman in her late 20s she was a fake Jew for supporting Palestine.

It's just so crazy to me. They want to be the counter culture soooo bad. They want people to think their ideologies are "leftist" sooooo bad (they can never say which left leaning ideology though). But the truth is Zionism is a right wing ideology accepted by the fascist state and it's like sorry, you're not fighting antisemitism or whatever, you're just a bunch of racist Islamophobic antisemites who think war is cool. Y'all would have loved the Iraq and Afghanistan wars if you were old enough.

[vamptastic]

perfect vermin is very good 👍 for all that i love horror i very rarely play horror games other than VNs because im horrid at fighting games and most of the longer horror games are survival genre. forgot how much more visceral they can be than horror writing.

[shizucheese]

So about that Dropout Tweet...

There's a common trend in influencer/ content creator apologies, where the person doing the apology will say they are sorry for the harm that they did, claim they are taking ownership of it and using the whole situation to become a better person, etc. etc. Usually in a way that makes it sound suspiciously like it was written by ChatGPT.

And then they'll go on to say something along the lines of "But we've been getting a lot of death threats guys, and that's bad!" As if the fact that they're getting death threats somehow absolves them of at least some of the guilt of whatever it is that made the apology necessary in the first place. As if it means they're the real victims here.

Apparently Dropout decided to just skip the "ChatGPT apology" part and jump straight to the "We're getting physcal and legal threats" part. Followed up with them once again saying they support Palestiniens and ending it with "We reject antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of bigotry, and welcome all to our platform who treat others with respect, empathy, and human dignity."

And they did it on Twitter, and only Twitter. You know, the website that's notoriously overrun by Nazis. Nothing on Tumblr or Instagram, where the original statement that sparked all of this (which has since been taken down) were posted.

@dropoutdottv, @samreich, this is not listening to the Jewish members of your community who are speaking out about antisemitism. This is reinforcing the antisemitism that those Jewish members of the community are speaking out about. Because what this Tweet does is paint everyone who spoke out against the antisemitism in your original post with the same brush as the people who were sending you threats.

Which, let me be clear, they should not have been doing and I wholeheartedly condemn.

But the actions of the people sending you threats of violence and threats of legal action do not invalidate the things being said by the people who haven't threatened you with anything worse than a boycott. I have literally seen people say "the fact that they got threats just proves they were right." Is that the outcome you were trying to achieve with this?

People who did bad things get death threats all the time; refer back to the beginning of this post. Does that make their critics wrong then, too? Or is it only now, when the accusation being made is that a nerdy comedy network beloved by people on the left did an antisemitism?

I honestly can't tell if you have no publicist helping you out with one, a bad publicist that needs to give you your money back, or an evil genius publicist that knew that if you made a post like this one, it would distract from the fact that you're being accused of antisemitism, maybe even act as a dog whistle to to paint anyone who accuses you of being antisemitic of being "Zionists" (meant in the derogatory way, where people claim they're only talking about people who uncritically support the Israeli government and their actions in Gaza, but then in practice will use it against anyone who believes Israel has the right to exist, including those who want a two state solution, whose hearts break for the people in Palestine, and call Netanyahu a fascist and probably want him gone more than even the people calling them "zionists" do). Maybe even make up for all of the subscriptions you're losing over this and even gain a few by catering to the antisemitic leftist crowd.

Is that really the kind of culture you want to cultivate? If not, then do better. Acknowledge the Jewish voices that are speaking out. Listen to them. And do it in a way that doesn't bring up any other marginalized group. Because like...fuck, man, I reject Islamophobia, and all forms of bigotry too. And I'm sorry you guys are receiving threats; that truly does suck and I hope everyone that works for you guys are staying safe.

But you're specifically being accused of antisemitism. Can you really not reject it all on its own without including other forms of bigotry in the same statement?

And do it on a platform that *isn't* run by an infamous antisemitic, and overrun by more antisemitics? (You can turn off comments and reblogs on Tumblr and comments on instagram, in the same way you disabled replies on your Tweet, you know.)

Here, I'll even write the statement for you: "Earlier this week, we made a statement regarding accusations that Dropout was platforming zionists. At the time, we made a statement focusing on our support of the Palestinian people. We stand by this statement. However, we have received feedback from several members of our community that some of the things that we said were inappropriate insensitive to the Jewish people. "Zionist" and "Zionism" mean different things to different people, ranging from "people who support the Israeli government's actions in Gaza" to "people who believe that Israel has a right to exist and the Jewish people have the right to self-determination." We had meant it in the context of the former definition, but we understand that many Jewish people identify with the later, including many people who are disgusted by the Israeli government's actions in Gaza, and we should have been more sensitive to this fact. Additionally, we would like to reiterate that, to our knowledge, nobody who has appeared on Dropout has openly stated support for the Israelie's actions in Gaza, and several of those accused have voiced their support for a free Palestine. We would like to take this moment to remind everyone that just because a person is Jewish, and may have ties to Israel, does not inherently mean they condone the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, and to suggest otherwise is antisemitic. We at Dropout reject all forms of antisemitism and are committed to providing a safe space to everyone regardless of religion or ethnic background. We apologize if we made the Jewish members of our community feel like that was not the case."

See how easy that was? I feel something like this is the bear minimum, and if you had said the things in the last three paragraphs from the start, you could have avoided having to say everything in the first two paragraphs and the apology at the end.

That's...pretty much everything I have to say on the matter. To anyone reading this: Do not use other Jewish people to silence Jewish voices.

Do not use people of other marginalized groups to silence Jewish voices.

Just...maybe just listen to what we have to say without twisting our words and putting words in our mouths? Maybe?

Thanks for reading.

I'm so tired.

[kick-a-long]

@terminalpolitics this you:

Since you know so much about what is or isn’t legitimate criticism of Israel, can you help me out?

What about this:

Sorry, I meant these:

Those were just off the top of my head, but I’m so confused. Are they antisemitism or not? I can really only rely on your superior judgement as a friend of truth and peace. 🙏🏻 🕊️

Dear @antisemitism-eu

I made a short chat post about how charges of antisemitism are used to deflect criticism of the state of Israel (top image). You edited the text (bottom image) to add:

“Saying that Israel should be wiped out is ‘criticism’ of Israel.”

I’m glad you didn’t attempt to accuse me of antisemitism for my post –that probably would have been too great a stretch– but you did invent a strawman in an attempt to undermine the argument that: Defenders of the policies of the state of Israel will use charges of antisemitism to silence dissenters.

Helpfully, you’ve given another example of what I’m talking about.

My post was clearly about the state of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians – which is objectively inhumane and unjust. There was no antisemitism to attack in that, but you still wanted to defend the state of Israel from even this modest criticism. And to do so, you tried in your example to once more conflate criticism of the policy of Israel’s government with general antisemitism.

As no one here had actually said “Israel should be wiped out,” I can’t say whether the statement was motivated by antisemitism or not – we would need to see a real example of it, instead of one that you invented.

But, for the sake of explaining, let me point out that the statement “Israel should be wiped out” is not inherently antisemitic – though it is the position of many antisemites. That’s because the nation of Israel is not interchangeable with “Jewish people.” It is possible to call for abolishing the state of Israel without having said anything about Judaism at all.

Now, if during apartheid someone had said “South Africa should be wiped out” people would generally think they were talking about the evil South African government – after all it would be silly to try to end apartheid by killing all South Africans including the oppressed. So, sometimes “Israel” is shorthand for “The government of Israel” – and not necessarily for “the Jews.” Just as when people call for the destruction of the United States, they are talking about the Imperialist entity and not the human beings who happen to live in it.

Of course, some Palestinians will call for “Israel to be wiped out” but that might have less to do with antisemitism and more to do with the fact that the state of Israel is illegally occupying their land and engaging in brutally repressive tactics against them. We aren’t surprised when a family whose child is “accidentally” atomized by an American drone has some pretty angry feelings about the United States – so why should we suddenly be able to understand anger toward one’s military occupiers?

I started my original post by saying that “oppressors depict themselves as victims” and that is true with Israel. If you look at the conflict between the state of Israel and Palestinians, you will see an enormous imbalance of power. Israel has one of the most powerful militaries in the world and may even have nuclear weapons. It also have the assured backing of the United States.

And yet, apologists for Israel’s government will act like they are being bullied by people who say they want to boycott, divest from, and sanction the state – a totally nonviolent form of protest. Saying “stop supporting an apartheid state” is not as aggressive as being an apartheid state. In the case of the treatment of Palestinians, Israel is not the victim.

Fighting against antisemitism is very important. We are all called to fight against antisemitism. However, trying to defend the policies of the state of Israel by invoking antisemitism muddies the water and diminishes the power of other activists to speak out against antisemitism.

It is the antisemite who has traditionally blamed all Jewish people for the crimes of the Israeli government – and the occupation and repression of the palestinians is a crime. Attempting to defend Israel by saying “All criticisms of the policies of Israel are inherently antisemitic” plays into this antisemitic canard.

Many Jewish men and women, because of their faith and because of the persecution they have witnessed and experienced, are moved to speak out against the behavior of the government of Israel – It makes no sense to imply that once they disagree with Israeli policy that they have become antisemites.

I think the work that your blog does is important and necessary, but the next time you see a post that clearly and gently mocks “the state of Israel” I would hope that you don’t feel the need to run defense for an oppressive government.

[magz]

Edit: Stop send ask and tag say he native, magz have already respond here (post link) - Isaiah Merkin self-refer himself and consider himself white.

Edit 2: censoring screenshots more.

Edit 3: Turned off reblogs, but y'all can link to post.

The youtuber W*ndig*on, the youtuber, said that he was the originator of the term “boogaloo boys”. (original thread)

Which is also primarily known as the nazi alt-right extremist militia hate group movement.

He claims they strayed from his ideals by being “anywhere from antifa to fascist” instead of just about “freedom”.

He says he renamed himself from boogalooboi to his current username to rebrand.

That he is what the boogaloobois model themselves after, presumably as his fans.

So it’s not that he coincidentally looks and acts with fascist dogwhistles, it’s that according to him, the fascists model themselves after him.

And still for whatever reason, he keeps wearing and saying things the Boogaloo boys are known for after supposedly renouncing them. The hawaiian shirts, the gun collection and fanaticism, military fatigues, the fixation with “freedom”, using “boogaloo” to mean ‘revolution’, etc.

He is a white devout christian man that makes those long conspiracy theory iceberg videos, as he considers conspiracy theories to be fun and interesting, but barely if ever addresses the antisemitism of most of those conspiracies.

And named himself and his Youtube channel after the taboo winter hunger spirit of the Algonquian native peoples. It is a part of a closed-off religion where you aren’t supposed to mention the spirit by name or it will notice or manifest.

It also conceptually symbolizes the imperialism and colonialism and greed - “the consuming forms of exclusion and assimilation” - that affected the Algonquian peoples. The further cultural appropriation and misrepresentation of the taboo spirit into a quirky cryptid and using it for branding and merchandise is inappropriate. (forum thread with article links about the taboo spirit)

He has also said stereotypically transmisogynistic things just because it was about Chris Chan.

He was inspired by shoe0nhead, an “anti-sjw” youtuber that claims to be a “leftist populist”, but is an anti-feminist that believes in 9/11 conspiracies, and he regularly interacts with her.

Image shown: His tweet, “step on me @/shoe0nhead”. End of Image. (Tweet Here)

And is a Kyle Rittenhouse fan. Someone who killed three people at a black lives matter protest and is affiliated and supported by the proud boys - a white supremacist neo-fascist group. He follows his official Twitter and agrees with tweets defending Kyle. (reddit threads on his official subreddit, on the subject of him following all kinds of people and his community’s political stances, like him being anti-vaxx and following alt-right people)

Images shown: First is the Official Twitter account of Kyle Rittenhouse, followed by his twitter account.

Second image is his tweet saying “The moment it was announced not guilty on all counts”, with a 42 second video showing Kyle Rittenhouse scared then relieved when the court said he wasn’t guilty and believed his self-defense claim. (Tweet here)

End of Image.

Do with this information what you will, but he does not have good politics.

[beauty-funny-trippy]

• TALIBAN spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, told CBS News that the militant Afghan group admires Trump's views. A second Taliban leader said, "Trump might be ridiculous for the rest of the world, but he is sane and wise man for the Taliban." (source)

• Former KKK leader, David Duke, says Donald Trump promoted his racist propaganda about "white replacement" and made them mainstream. (source)

• Neo-NAZI Leader, Jeff Schoep, thanks Trump for promoting their fascist propaganda (authoritarianism, anti-lgbtq, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-democracy), for legitimizing their beliefs, and for bringing white supremacy into the “mainstream.” (source)

America has repeatedly rejected these groups because of their immoral, un-American beliefs, ...but they haven't given up.

They know Trump is the candidate who can tear down the American dream and build the kind of America they desire — a nation where children can be raised in a culture of racism, fascism, and misogyny — immersed in a trifecta of hate. They want to normalize violence and repression against any group of people who are not like them.

The Nazis, the KKK, and the Taliban terrorists are standing with Trump.

Who do you stand with?

[odinsblog]

“Every time I talk to people, they talk about the economy. But I'm like, man, since World War II, the economy has always done better under a Democrat president. That's just a fact.

It's always been Democrats. There's been 11 recessions in this country. Ten of them have been Republicans.

So I don't know how they've hijacked that narrative. But I think the other thing that you just got to chock it up to is just good old fashioned racism. And I think in the case of Vice President Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton 2016, sexism.

I just really do, like it's still America at the end of the day. There are people in this country who are still just holding on to old ideologies. They don't want to see America be a great American melting pot where all of these different people from all of these different walks of life can live.

They like that racist, sexist, bigoted rhetoric that Trump spews.

Why is it so hard for her to say that?

I think because for whatever reason, like, you know, you hate these elected officials even when you say, is America a racist country? OK, you can't say America is a racist country, but you can say that, you know, there's systemic racism in America. I think that is a fair thing to say.

Like, I watched her on Fox News the other night, and I loved how she handled Bret Baer. When Bret Baer tried to push her, Bret Baer was like, are you saying the American people are stupid? I can't remember how he worded it, but she was like, ‘No, I would never say that because I don't want to disparage the American people. But my opponent has no problem doing that.’

And I understand that approach, you know, but I think that it is perfectly fine to acknowledge that those things exist because guess what? As a Black man, as a Black woman, you feel that.

As a woman, you feel that sexism. As a Jewish person, you think you don't feel all the antisemitism that's happening right here in our country. Like as a gay person, you think you don't feel the homophobia.

So you can speak to what people are feeling because you see it.”

There was an amazing moment in the interview where someone comes along and brings up the F word, fascism.

Kamala Harris: It's two very different visions for our nation. One mind that is about taking us forward and progress and investing the American people, investing in their ambitions, dealing with their challenges. And the other, Donald Trump, is about taking us backward

Charlamagne: The other is about fascism. Why can't we just say it?

Kamala Harris: Yes, we can say that.

Tell me about what transpired there and how you felt about it.

“Well, it was the same thing that we just said, right? Like, you know, she was saying what she's about, and then she was saying what he's about.

And I was just like, yo, just say it.

Like, he's a fascist. You just had General Mark Milley just said he's a fascist to the core, like a danger to the country. So for me, it's like the American people will never understand the threat that Donald Trump is if people aren't spelling it out.

They didn't treat him like he's a threat to democracy. They kept saying that he's a threat democracy. They kept saying that he's a threat to democracy, but Merrick Garland should have locked Trump up after the coup. Right?

I was literally watching something yesterday and there was a person talking and the person was like, if Donald Trump, you know, really let an attempted coup of this country, why didn't they arrest him? They did. They did charge him.

But there's so many people who don't even know because he's not treated like that. We know we live in a society that knows how to demonize people when they want to. Right?

You can look at it, and I'm just going to use this as an example. Not saying that it's not warranted that it's happening, but look at somebody like Diddy. Front page of every newspaper, all over the news.

You hear about every charge. Like you see it, you see it, you see it over and over. They don't villainize and demonize Trump in that way.

You've never seen Trump in handcuffs. You saw one Trump mugshot. Like they don't treat it like.

The media has continuously treated Donald Trump and his whole candidacy like it's normal, which is mind boggling to me.”

What do we have to... Not to be defensive, but jumping up and down, what do we have to do? I mean, how many different ways can you say it?

“You know why it doesn't penetrate? Because Americans are spoiled and we don't think it can happen here because it's never happened here.

Like if you talk to older people who were closer to that, who can remember things like, ‘Oh my God, he's doing a rally at Madison Square Garden.’

That's what happened in the 30s with the Nazis.

If you can talk to people who understand that, they get it. This generation doesn’t.

If you have a sense of history and you've read things like The Fall of The Third Reich, things like that, you can see the patterns that lead to somebody like Trump becoming a dictator. I just don't think people think dictatorship is possible in America, but it is, because our democracy is very fragile.”

—Charlamagne tha God, on election 2024

[rotzaprachim]

The thing is that I’m far to the left of the Democratic Party. I’m so far to the left of the Democratic Party. I vote for them because I have no other options for keeping fascists out of power.

but left democrats and back benchers and American leftists (although there are very similar issues in other countries, such as the uk) need to take a fucking look at ourselves and recognize that left politics in the U.S. are unpopular and unpalatable. No matter how you slice it, they are unpopular at the national scale, and they are unpopular no matter who sells them but in ways which become even more hated when people of color, Jews, lgbt people, and women are the ones involved in selling them. We live in a country that is systemically racist, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, and sexist. We can live in a world in which left wing politics become more popular and I have to believe that. But we cannot ignore the fact that the average conservative voter does not vote Republican because he would rather vote for universal healthcare or college debt forgiveness. The Republican response to basic infrastructure has shown that again and again. No, Tim walz was not popular for providing tampons to working class teenagers in public schools. No, promises of student loan forgiveness have not been popular.

If this election was solely about the class rage of white working class man there would have been a national dick sucking of the white midwestern former public school geography teacher football coach and he would have destroyed the nyc billionaire. But there wasn’t. Because his ticket was tied to a Brown woman, and our country is very, very sexist and racist.

The democrats do not pander to their own Democratic base and they are further centrist than i would like- but you have to fucking acknowledge the reason that is, that America is so systemically fucking conservative that trump smeared Kamala Harris as a “Marxist” and people fucking bought it. You have to recognize that this is how the dems fight for votes so the entire country doesn’t go fucking conservative. You have to recognize that “deport all undocumented immigrants,” “ban abortion for rape victims,” and “climate change is a hoax and we shouldn’t waste money doing anything about it” are all common baseline positions among the American voting public. Harris did not loose their vote because she was offering too little socialism - she lost because in their eyes she was offering too much.

so this is for the Bernie bros and the backbenchers and everyone else. Shape the fuck up and hate conservatives more than democrats, and recognize what a minority we are in this country. Delusions of grandeur will do nothing to win it back.

[qqueenofhades]

The thing is, I think the republicans DID have a plan for if Biden dropped out. They just didn't have a plan for if Harris could instantly unite the party, which is why they're still feebly trying to pretend like Biden might try to take back the nomination or someone else will challenge her and the DNC will be a mess, and trying to insist that no one likes Kamala when she's putting up these huge rallies. If the stupid contested mini primary idea had gone through I'm sure the GOP would have been ready with knives out and I would have descended halfway into alcoholism by now. Fortunately we live in the Good Timeline where Biden endorsed her immediately and everyone rallied around her and none of the GOP's weaksauce attacks have stuck. Same with the veepstakes- they banked on Harris picking Shapiro on the advice of the dem consultants and hoped that would open up some weaknesses for her, and when she picked the guy better suited for this moment have tried and failed to make it a scandal that she picked a guy endorsed by everyone from AOC to Manchin.

In full fairness to the GOP strategists, the dems having their shit together and united on messaging is a new and shocking development that I still can't quite believe myself. The complete collapse of the GOP messaging in response though? Delicious.

Well, yeah. Of course the Republicans had a plan if the plan was "do nothing, sit back, and let the Democrats descend into self-inflicted chaos," because that required zero effort or initiative from them other than to continue their usual petty fascist manipulative bad-faith bullshit. And yes, the fact of the Democrats being in disconcerting levels of array and not doing the self-sabotaging thing yet again came as a complete shock to everyone everywhere, so this wasn't the worst gamble, but it also exposes the GOP's complete and utter lack of any other ideas or constructive strategies if that did NOT happen. Their only plan was "wait for the opposition to crumble and do the worst thing imaginable like we always do!" and like. At some point, you aren't going to get away with that anymore. Especially when your candidates are Donald Fucking Trump and the guy who's somehow managing to be even more unpopular than Donald Fucking Trump. I mean, Trump's cultists like Trump. They don't even like Vance. Ouch.

The simple fact that the Republicans had no strategy whatsoever except OOOH OOOH SCARY BROWN WOMAN if the Democrats did pull together and support Kamala, and OOH OOH GARBLE ANTISEMITISM GARBLE (from the literal Neo-Nazi Party who was gearing up to go Full Speed Ahead Antisemitic if she had chosen Shapiro) if she picked Walz, demonstrates that they're completely bankrupt, at the end of the end of the rope. They have nothing new to offer. It's the same litany of garbage grievance culture-war fear and hate that they've run on for 8+ years, and as I have said before, eventually people get tired of that. It doesn't work anymore, especially when a genuinely exciting and dynamic alternative is offered. And now Trump is having an absolutely gobsmacking meltdown of a press conference at the critical battleground state of Mar-a-Lago, which kind of sums up where this whole thing is:

Man, I almost feel bad for him.

(No, no, I don't.)

[kvetchlandia]

Time For...

One of My Occasional Rants.

So, we in the United States are on the verge of a presidential election. I'm sure all of you lovely people already know that. This particular election is beyond ghastly and grim in its implications. You have one candidate who is a representative of the long term status quo and another who is more dangerous not only to the people of the United States but to the people of the entire globe than my own meager command of words allows me to express.

I'm no particular fan of Kamala Harris. As a lifelong socialist, I see her as a candidate of capitalism, and a socially moderate one at that, essentially a Clinton Democrat, the sort of Dem who would have been a Republican 60 years ago. In other words, the sort of candidate that under normal circumstances I'd never consider for one moment voting for. However, her opponent is a veritable monster; a multiply convicted felon; a man found civilly liable for sexually assaulting a woman and then libeling her after his conviction; a serial liar of astronomical proportions; a man who is supported by open fascists and KKKers; a man whose own open racism and antisemitism is decades old; a man who bragged on television about assaulting women; a man who coddles autocrats and openly aspires to be one; a man who urged his brownshirt wannabe followers to commit a putsch against the legally elected government then referred to those putschists as "heroes" and has promised, if elected, to pardon those convicted of their violent crimes; a man so self-interested that the only thing he really accomplished during his previous presidency was to give himself (and, as an after effect, his fellow billionaires) a whopping tax cut, paid for by raising taxes on the working class; a man who bragged about depriving women of their right to control their own bodies; a man void of culture and knowledge and one so ego-damaged that his own aides admitted that they had to place his name in huge all caps in his daily briefing books to get him to even skim them, since the only thing he was interested in was himself; a man who completely botched the response of the United States to the COVID epidemic and who then recommended to his followers that they inject bleach and that they shine lights on their bodies to cure the virus while he, when he contracted it, of course got state of the art medical care; a man who will reshape the courts, as he's already done to the Supreme Court, so that they're little more than a voice of medieval religious obscurantism and political reaction and a man who has already promised to use the military to quash demonstrations against him and his policies and to go after those who have or who continue to oppose him. I could go on and on, but you get the point. If Trump is elected, which is a distinct possibility, that's the end of American bourgeois democracy, always a limited and partial thing at its best.

Trump has promised to drill for even more oil and to end this country's investment in alternative sources of energy, thereby all but ensuring that complete environmental collapse due to global climate change will take place in the next few decades, if not sooner. It's already an ongoing process.

If Trump is elected, he's promised to deport more than 10 million people. That, of course, is nearly impossible, but that won't stop him from trying. Should he really undertake that blind, racist endeavor, it would of course be politically and morally wrong, but it would also cost trillions of dollars to do (where would they be placed before they were loaded on trains and deported? Camps would have to be built. Who would guard those camps? Tens of thousands of people would have to be hired, trained and armed). And then, of course, the American economy would collapse, since it's those people who do so much of the work that keeps the economy running. I don't see many Americans lining up to harvest the fields or work in the garment sweatshops for starvation piece-work wages, nor do I see many Americans willing to work at the tough, usually non-union, low skill construction jobs that keep the economy rolling. Needless to say, those millions of deportees won't be buying any of the commodities they now purchase on a daily basis to support their families. Bye bye, profit.

All of this is well known. None of it takes any research to uncover. The voting age population has lived through it and everyone is aware of it. Nonetheless, and this just boggles my mind, the polls keep telling us that the race is a toss up. That means that tens of millions of people either don't care or support the horrors that Tump embodies and stands for. That is truly frightening. I'm not convinced that Trump is a fascist, for a number of historical and analytical reasons that I'm sure none of you are interested in, although a number of his supporters are members of fascist organizations. Fortunately, as of right now, the United States still doesn't have a mass fascist movement and I don't see one developing soon, for reasons related to why I don't consider Trump a fascist. He is, though, openly disdainful of the bourgeois democracy that is represented by the American status quo and he's both expressed his desire to be a dictator and has said he made a mistake by leaving office in 2020, despite losing the election (which he pretends was rigged, although he damn well knows it wasn't). If he's re-elected, the only way he'll leave the White House is when he's rolled out on a gurney. Yet this is all OK with millions of Americans. I don't like to draw inappropriate analogies with the catastrophe that befell Germany starting in 1933, but it's hard not to see similarities despite the very significant differences. One of those similarities is the passivity of that part of the population that might not be hardcore MAGA cultists and worshippers of their bloated demigod, but will nevertheless vote for Trump, for whatever reason they cite. That's how Hitler came to power and many of those passive non-nazis had no problem when the Nazis began the roundups of Jews and political opponents of the regime. As a person who has long been politically active, I don't think I'm being at all paranoid when I say that I fear, soon after a re-elected Trump took office, that we would quickly start having those midnight knocks at the door and disappearances into the night and fog.

OK, rant over. Now I've managed to depress and terrify myself even more. I need a stiff drink.

[beardedmrbean]

A 25-year-old man has become the first person convicted in the Australian state of Victoria of performing an illegal Nazi salute.

Jacob Hersant, a self-described neo-Nazi made the gesture and praised Adolf Hitler in front of news media cameras outside the Victoria County Court on October 27 of last year after he had appeared there on an unrelated charge.

A magistrate dismissed the defense's arguments that the legislation was constitutionally invalid.

He made the salute just six days after the Victoria state government outlawed the gesture.

Up to a year in jail

Imitating the Victoria state decision, the Federal Parliament passed the law two months later, outlawing the performance of the fascist salute in public across Australia, or to publicly display, or trade in, Nazi hate symbols.

Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich, a leading opponent of antisemitism in Australia, said the verdict was "a historic and thundering day for justice and decency."

The man is due to be sentenced on Wednesday and could face up to 12 months in prison for the offense.

[hero-israel]

Here's the thing about this narrative that Palestinian resistance no matter what form is acceptable. Jewkilling cannot exist in a bubble. It cannot be politically neutral. 1000 years of European (and Arab) antisemitism culminating in genocide have ruined that. Sorry to Palestinian activists but that's just how it works. You can't murder a Jew without it being a tragedy, without it contributing to the continued global oppression of Jewish people.

And all that said, that's just if Hamas and others only targeted soldiers and police (or at least tried as best they could). The IRA didn't go out of its way to purposefully target noncombatants. Why? Probably because there isn't thousands of years of history of English people being seen as subhuman, there isn't thousands of years of anglophobic propaganda showing English people as twisted monsters preying on children and secretly undermining Irish society. The Irish national movement was not born because English refugees returned to their historical homeland and challenged the notion of Irish Supremacy. It was a pragmatic liberation movement. Resist military occupation, undermine military infrastructure designed to oppress the people. The descendants of English and Scottish settlers would even be allowed to stay if they had won. Imagine that.

These things are all tied up in each other. I'm against police brutality, I'm against the escalation and the militarization and the mistreatment of Arabs in Israel and in Judea & Samaria and Gaza and Golan and everywhere. But killing Jews can never be righteous. Sorry to anyone who feels that way but it can't. Antizionists NEED to understand that. Jews will always feel defensive and ready themselves for retaliation because of history, because of that context. Jews keep saying "prove to us a post zionist society where we all share the land won't be antisemitic" and their concerns are completely brushed off.

There's no empathy at all. A little girl can be stabbed to death and antizionists celebrate because she was a "settler," and that brave Palestinian man was defending his indigenous homeland, by targeting the weakest of his enemies. And since Israel has mandatory military service the antizionist can surmise that no Jews are Innocent. An Israeli Jew cannot be a noncombatant. They have to, otherwise the only other explanation for why Jewkilling is acceptable to them, or even feels good to them, is that they hate Jews. And as of right now, the optics are still against that. I have a sinking feeling the optics won't be against them much longer. I inherently don't trust a "liberation" movement that's all too eager to make murdering Jewish civilians praxis. I'm sick of the internet falling for this bullshit.

One of the best asks I have ever received. Thank you for sharing it and I agree with every word.

The entire progressive intersectional social-justice frame has failed Jews (or, alternately, has succeeded in excluding them), due to being intellectually colonized by a clearly fascist ideology of incessantly hating the Jew as a poisonous alien. Try to get an online activist to critically deconstruct the social assumptions they were raised with about Jews in their Muslim, Christian, or very slightly post-Christian society... it won't go well. Funny how Jews have lived in India and China for thousands of years yet you will look in vain for examples of bitter bloodthirsty kill-your-nextdoor-neighbor antisemitism in those societies. That's because the origin, the core, of Chinese and Indian societies was not "We're the people who are better than Jews."

From a review of Richard Landes' new book "Can the Whole World Be Wrong?":

[During the Second Intifada] Israelis were described at the time as the new Nazis. But the malice that was unleashed was even worse. As Landes writes, “It was mostly about being freed from a sense of obligation to the Jews, a chance to take up again the Jew-baiting so long denied Europeans by a politically correct post-Holocaust sobriety.” Landes quotes a poisonous comment made by a member of the House of Lords and reported in the Spectator, “Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.” During that time, I was told something horrifyingly similar to my [=the reviewer's] face.

Your example of Irish nationalists not going out of their way to murder British children is a good one. The oft-reached comparisons between Palestine and South Africa are frivolous for many reasons as I have explained here before, and the ANC advocating and normalizing a vision of enduring racial diversity and equality is high on the list of reasons (made possible because black African identity is not predicated on a thousand-year history of hating and oppressing whites). The case of Rhodesia is even more instructive. Robert Mugabe - ROBERT MUGABE! - pleaded with the whites to stay, to live as equals, as brothers, and work together in building a better society in Zimbabwe. Ian Smith, last white PM of Rhodesia, agreed with him and stayed in Zimbabwe. If a so-called "liberation" movement is more openly dedicated to straight-up exterminating their enemies than Robert Mugabe ever was, maybe, just maybe, it shouldn't be described as "liberation" at all.

[sunbeamedskies]

I've seen a lot of troubling antisemitism in the Our Flag Means Death fandom lately regarding Taika Waititi. Please hear me out.

A lot of people want everyone to comment about the Israel/Palestine war. It's understandable. What Palestinian civilians are going through in Gaza is a nightmare that no one deserves. They are overwhelmingly paying the price for Hamas' actions- a group they have no control over and are also harmed by. Thousands have been killed.

After October 7th, Taika signed a letter asking for the Israeli hostages to be released. It did not endorse any specific actions taken by the Israeli government- it was simply in support of the hostages.

But you know what he was immediately accused of?

Supporting genocide. Even though what he signed was about Israeli civilians- including the elderly, disabled, and children- who were being held captive by Hamas.

On October 7th, Jews died in a single day in numbers that hadn't been since the Holocaust. Israel contains half the world's entire Jewish population. The majority of its population are descendants of Jews from middle eastern and north African countries who were forcibly kicked out in violent pogroms and had nowhere else to go. Many are descendants of Holocaust survivors as well.

I think most non-Jews would be astounded at how much the majority of the worldwide Jewish community is still mourning and reeling from October 7th. It triggered a lot of intergenerational trauma in many of us, yet I hear barely any non-Jews talk about it.

And yet you immediately accused Taika, a Jewish man, of supporting genocide just because he didn't support hostages being taken and random civilians being murdered. Do you really think he trusts people not to twist his words if he attempts to talk about Palestine too, when you turned a moment of legitimate pain for members of one of the persecuted groups he's apart of into accusing him of being a genocide-supporting monster?

We Jews not only have to deal with the memory of October 7th, but also with people conflating any support for the hostages with support for the Israeli government. When we say that criticism of Israel can at times get antisemitic, this is the kind of thing we're talking about.

Many of us are simultaneously mourning for Palestine and horrified that a right-wing fascist government that has little care for Palestinian lives has taken over Israel. Innocent lives taken shouldn't justify the killing of other innocent lives, and we are watching it happen, feeling powerless.

And it gets worse, because targeting Taika specifically because he's a person of multiple marginalized identities, when you don't attack white members of the crew nearly as much, is ironically racist.

Unintentional antisemitism and unintentional racism is still antisemitism and racism.

Take a deep breath and please reflect on how you have no idea what it's like to be Jewish right now, and how some of your own antisemitic criticism about his signature has likely contributed to his silence about Palestine. If no matter what he says his words and actions are twisted by so many of his "fans", he might think there's nothing he can say that will do any good.

[anexperimentallife]

JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing That Progressives Are Subhuman

As I keep pointing out, anyone who has studied 1930s-40s German history will tell you that today's GOP is cribbing directly from the Nazi playbook. Even their "support" of Israel's genocidal colonialist settler state (and lip service "support" of non-Israeli Jews) is primarily rooted in a combination of antisemitism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia. (Gift link at the bottom of the article excerpt.)

Michelle Goldberg writes:

---

In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”

Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.

Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.

Vance provided the first blurb on the “Unhumans” book jacket. “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people,” he wrote. “Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Other endorsements come from Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., a key figure in his father’s presidential campaign. The foreword is by Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist.

Now, it is always possible that Vance recommended “Unhumans” without actually reading it, a practice that’s not unheard-of in book publishing. But unless and until he credibly distances himself from it, we should take him at his word that he shares the book’s analysis. After all, some of the language in “Unhumans” resembles his own rhetoric.

“The great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists must occur on all terrains of society they currently possess and on those they aim to seize,” write Posobiec and Lisec, adding, “It is achievable but only with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” (They mean Joseph McCarthy, another of the book’s icons.) Compare that to what Vance said on the alt-right podcast “Jack Murphy Live” in 2021, when he argued that Republicans, upon taking power, should purge their opponents the way Iraq’s government once purged members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left,” said Vance. “We need like a de-Baathification program, but like a de-wokification program in the United States.” He argued that “we don’t have a real constitutional republic anymore,” suggesting that Donald Trump need not be limited by the norms of republican governance. Trump, said Vance, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” And if the courts try to stand in his way, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

You can and should laugh at Vance’s melodramatic self-importance and creepy subcultural fixations. (On “Jack Murphy Live,” Vance respectfully references Curtis Yarvin, a right-wing blogger popular in reactionary Silicon Valley circles who calls for replacing democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy.) It’s good that Democrats have found, in the epithet “weird,” simple language to describe the 4Chan side of the Republican Party. But in the Venn diagram between “weird” and “dangerous,” there’s a lot of overlap.

“Much like the United States founding fathers, Franco and his fellows saw themselves as rebels intended to overthrow a corrupt, tyrannical government that aided and abetted murder and rape as well as other repugnant sins,” write Posobiec and Lisec. We should take seriously the possibility that Vance and his fellows see themselves the same way.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opinion/jd-vance-fascism-unhumans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.A04.-t6I.Jie2a3Abas5a&smid=url-share