#the coming storm over the supreme court

[odinsblog]

Musk reactivated the accounts of Brazilian far-right politicians Carla Zambelli, Gustavo Gayer, and Nikolas Ferreira. Ferreira, a Bolsonaro supporter, openly questioned the security of Brazil’s electronic voting machines, even though he won his local legislative race.

“All of these names have been problematic for years on social media,” says Flora Rebello Arduini, campaign director at the nonprofit advocacy organization Ekō. “They've been pushing for the far-right and election misinformation for ages.”

When Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, later renaming it X, many activists in Brazil worried that he would abuse the platform to push his own agenda, Arduini says. “He has unprecedented broadcasting abilities. He is bullying a supreme court justice of a democratic country, and he is showing he will use all the resources he has available to push for whatever favors his personal opinions or his professional ambitions.”

Under Musk, X has become a haven for the far right and disinformation. After taking over, Musk offered amnesty to users who had been banned from the platform, including right-wing influencer Andrew Tate, who, along with his brother, was indicted in Romania on several charges including with rape and human trafficking in June 2023 (he has denied the allegations). Last month, one of Tate's representatives told the BBC that "they categorically reject all charges."

A 2023 study found that hate speech has increased on the platform under Musk’s leadership. The situation in Brazil is just the latest instance of Musk aligning himself with and platforming dangerous, far-right movements around the world, experts tell WIRED. "It's not about Twitter or Brazil. It's about a strategy from the global far right to overcome democracies and democratic institutions around the world," says Nina Santos, a digital democracy researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology who researches the Brazilian far right. “An opinion from an American billionaire should not count more than a democratic institution.”

This also comes as Brazil has continued working to understand and investigate the lead-up to January 8, 2023, when election-denying insurrectionists who refused to accept right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat stormed Brazil’s legislature. The TSE, the country’s election court, is a special judicial body that investigates electoral crimes and is part of the mechanism for overseeing the country’s electoral processes overall. The court has been investigating the dissemination of fake news and disinformation that cast doubt on the country’s elections in the months and years leading up to the storming of the legislature on January 8, 2023. Both Arduini and Santos believe that the accounts Musk is refusing to remove are likely connected to the court’s inquiry.

“A life-and-death struggle recently took place in Brazil for the democratic rule of law and against a coup d'état, which is under investigation by this court in compliance with due legal process,” Luís Roberto Barroso, the president of the federal supreme court, said in a statement about Musk’s comments. “Nonconformity against the prevalence of democracy continues to manifest itself in the criminal exploitation of social networks.”

Santos also worries that Musk is setting a precedent that the far right will be protected and promoted on his platform, regardless of local laws or public opinion. “They are trying to use Brazil as a laboratory on how to interfere in local politics and local businesses,” she says. “They are making the case that their decision is more important than the national decision from a state democratic institution.”

Though Musk has claimed to be a free-speech advocate, and X’s public statement on the takedowns asserts that Brazilians are entitled to free speech, the platform’s application of these principles has been uneven at best. In February, on order of the Indian government, X blocked the accounts Hindutva Watch and the India Hate Lab in India, two US-based nonprofits that track incidents of religiously motivated violence perpetrated by supporters of the country’s right-wing government. A 2023 study from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard found that X complied with more government takedown requests under Musk’s leadership than it had previously.

In March, X blocked the accounts of several prominent researchers and journalists after they identified a well-known neo-Nazi cartoonist, later changing its own terms of service to justify the decision.

—Elon Musk Is Platforming Far-Right Activists in Brazil

[thesupreme316]

hiiii I’m backkkk

so I was wondering how the Aew boys react to they losing their short s/o In big crowds when they aren’t looking

AEW Stars React To: Losing Their Short S/O in Big Crowds

Pairings: Max Caster x Reader, Eddie Kingston x Reader, Santana x Reader, Kenny Omega x Reader, Ricky Starks x Reader, Hook x Reader

Word Count: 1K

Supreme Speaks: hi sorry for not posting, it's been a long two days. i hope you are well. thanks to anon for requesting again, i really do appreciate it. please remember that you are loved and appreciated.

Warnings: talks about big social crowds, not proofread, GIFS AINT MINE

Taglist: @wwenhlimagines @sheinthatfandom @cassie0sstuff @triscillal @eddie-kingstons-wifey @hooks-martin @hookerforhook

Max Caster (Concert):

He was there doing a concert as a special guest

As he was performing onstage, he saw you in the crowd and was immediately giddy

He was smiling and started to perform harder as he saw you were enjoying yourself

Max walks away for a second, entertaining the other side of the crowd, comes back, and doesn’t see you

Confusion takes over his face it is then replaced with fear

The crowd was a lil rowdy so he was afraid of you getting squashed or trampled; He damn sure didn’t want or need you hurt/uncomfortable

As he was about to ask the crowd to scoot back so he could see you; you were raised above the crowd screaming along with the lyrics

Max looked closer to see you were sitting on the shoulders of best friend, Anthony

He smiled and instructed the crowd to let you two come up onstage

“Let my baby up here….oh you can come too Y/N!”

Santana (Times Square):

YES MY BABY DADDY RETURNED SO I SQUEEZED HIM IN

You guys were walking around in Times Square and as Santana turned around to look at a pair of shoes through the window, you were gone

He immediately started panicking as there was a big crowd and New York itself is a dangerous place

Santana started pushing through the crowd looking for the top of your head while saying your name

Like Eddie, Santana doesn’t allow you to walk by yourself; but he doesn’t know how you slipped away from him

He finally found you cornered by some men (ew) and he scared them off

“Y’all betta back away from my significant other or I’ll stick my foot up your ass”

As y’all hug, you tell him that you were pushed by the incoming crowd and then cornered

“Aw mi cara, you don’t ever have to worry; I’ll protect you.”

Take extra precautions (not to Eddie’s extent) such as interlocking fingers and pulling belt loops

IMAGINE GETTING PULLED BACK BY THAT FOINE SPECIMEN

Kenny Omega (Tokyo Subway IT WORKS I PROMISE):

Okay for Kenny, you get off at a stop in Tokyo and you immediately get carried off the train

Kenny is going crazy at one minute you’re talking and the next minute he can’t find you

He’s constantly asking people if they’ve seen you

“Have you seen a person who’s hella short, has a cute face but an aura of a jackass? Possibly has different colored hair depending on their mood?”

People are looking at him like he’s crazy as he starts pushing people aside (politely)

Eventually, as the crowd diffuses, he sees you standing by yourself just like a ray of sunshine over a storm

He picks you up, glad to see you, smiling from ear to ear

That lasts until Kenny sternly tells you to never do that again

“Next time, I’m gonna put you in my pocket….little Polly Pocket.”

Hook (Mall):

He was looking at shoes in Foot Locker and he lost you

Yes, just like that

But he always managed to find you

At H&M, at Hot Topic, and even at the food court; Hook would always get back to you

After noticing this, you decided to play a game called “Is Hook a mind reader or is he just extremely observant?”

So you quickly lose him in a department store, but he finds you

Hook finds this activity to be quite funny and endearing

When he couldn’t find you he would text you with a smile on his face”

“Alright, you won…even though I see you at Spencers…whatcha getting?”

Overall, he’s never concerned he always will find you, no matter what

Eddie Kingston (State Fair):

I feel like that this is a trick question; that man would not allow you to walk by yourself as he takes your height under consideration all the damn time

So if he loses you; you and everyone is getting their ass cussed out

He would also cuss himself out as he feels responsible (cause he wasn’t watching you like a hawk)

“Damn it, you should have gotten that damn human book bag leash shit for their Sonic Hedgehog ass.”

But he has your location because of you running off like this and he finds you (in this case in line for turkey legs or lemonade)

IMO he would wait until you got your stuff to drag you to the parking lot (good thing you rode all the rides) to give you a “lil talk”

“I swear to god if you walk away from me without any words or warnings again, I will rain hellfire on your little flash ass. I TOLD YOUR SMALL ASS TO STAY STILL AND WHAT-“

He doesn’t mean to yell but he wants you to understand that he’s concerned for you

Does in fact get you the leash book bag from earlier; will never take his eyes off you

Ricky Starks (Basketball Game):

Ricky lets you walk away cause you’re a free person but sometimes you like to roam around

You walked away to get something to drink with him knowing

But because you were taking too long, Ricky got concerned (mildly not Eddie concerned) and he went looking for you

He tried calling you but you left your phone with him since your outfit didn’t have pockets

I also think he would be very calm cause you always come back, but he was starting to worry

Ricky had to keep calm but the thought of you being trampled or swooned by an NBA player was taking over

“What if they meet someone who’s better than me? More handsome, more ch- Nah, they could never.”

Walks back to find you laughing with Jade; and hugs you tightly

Ricky: I thought I was gonna lose you to an NBA player.

Jade: Well they did get Domantas Sabonis’ phone nu-

Ricky: Yeah well you can delete that cause Stroke Daddy is here

[thecurioustale]

A Supreme Court Ruling that Should Not Be Enforced

I think the Chevron Defense ruling last week is the most dangerous decision by the Supreme Court this year, as it will immediately begin to disrupt the the entire federal executive's ability to function and will directly lead in the coming years to the dismantling of environmental protections, worker protections, regulatory oversight, and much more.

But today's ruling on presidential immunity is, by far, the most unconstitutional ruling of this term, and one of the most breathtakingly unconstitutional rulings I have ever seen or learned about by the US Supreme Court. It is up there with Citizens United (corporations are people), Plessy vs. Ferguson (segregation in schools), and Dobbs (stripping people of acknowledged constitutional rights).

I understand the need for individual officeholders to have blanket immunity from civil litigation (so you sue the organization, not the person) and even some qualified criminal immunity for that officeholder's official activities. But what the Supreme Court did today, in its 6–3 ruling, is declare that the US president need only declare or construe or even simply believe that they are acting in an official capacity, and, therein, they are immune from all criminal liability unconditionally.

The President of the United States is now above the law. Full stop.

For years I have wondered where we should draw the line on lawless behavior and extremism from our courts, especially the US Supreme Court. The thing about our rule of law is that you have to accept the outcome of court cases; if you don't you are basically calling for violent revolution whether you realize it or not, and at an absolute minimum you are calling for chaos and unrest.

I have always asserted that Neil Gorsuch's votes on the Court should not be recognized, as his appointment to the Supreme Court was the result of a power grab by Mitch McConnell. But of course as more time passes this becomes more and more unlikely. And Kavanaugh and Barrett's appointments I have no choice but to accept as legitimate, so even if Gorsuch were not counted this ruling would still have been a significant 5–3 majority.

Citizens United was real close for me to delegitimizing the ruling majority on the bench at the time, and the more recent Dobbs ruling actually crossed my personal line and made all of the justices who signed it unfit to hold their offices, but I figured that it would still be better to resolve the problem by passing a federal abortion rights law when Democrats next have the opportunity and continuing to try to flush the fascist judge problem out of the judiciary through maintaining control of the White House and Senate and appointing new judges over time.

But this ruling, now, raises the possibility by at least an order of magnitude that our constitutional system of democracy and rule of law in America will be dismantled by the next sufficiently extreme or unscrupulous Republican president, be that Trump himself or whomever else.

Just to give you an idea of the landscape that we now live in, Joe Biden could, at this moment, order military special ops teams to assassinate Donald Trump. Hell, he could do it himself: He could walk up to Trump and pull the trigger. And he would be completely immune from criminal prosecution for it now or ever. And that's just the beginning.

If not corrected, this will be used someday to overthrow our democracy. And by then it will be too late for us to do anything about it through peaceful means.

In 2020 I worried that, even if Biden won the presidency, it would just be four years of calm before the real storm began. At the time I wasn't thinking about another Trump presidency but rather the committed fascists high in his party who want to succeed him. Cruz, DeSantis, the usuals. Trump is a buffoon with very little self-control, but a lot of these other people are smart cookies. In 2024 my worry remains relevant: We are one step closer today to handing the fascists our country.

If I were the president at this moment, I would declare this ruling invalid. Because it is. Not only does it have no basis in the Constitution, but it upends some of the most fundamental assumptions of our Constitution and our whole legal regime. I would go before the public and say "This ruling is illegal. This ruling gives me the power to assassinate anyone I want; to run criminal enterprises from the Oval Office; to commit fraud and extortion and embezzlement of your money as taxpayers; to imprison my political opponents, shut down the free press, and forcibly remove from office any judge or police officer with the gall to rule against my actions or try hold me accountable. This ruling makes me a king. That is what makes it illegal. As the leader of the executive branch of our government, I have a duty not to enforce an illegal and unconstitutional ruling, and I am directing all federal agencies to similarly disregard it. Neither I nor any other US president should be placed above the law."

And believe you me, I would be tempted to go a lot further, including appointing six new justices on the Court and no longer recognizing the old six. But for the sake of the country and the way we do things in this country I would limit myself to the above action of refusing to recognize this one ruling.

I understand that this opens a Pandora's box. That's how the fascist resurgence in this country has worked: Republicans will do something completely unreasonable (like gumming up judicial nominations), forcing Democrats to break norms just to get the people's business done (like eliminating the judicial filibuster), which Republicans then turn around and exploit to their advantage (as by using their time in power to appoint whomever they want to the courts). But I think this is the way it has to be. We can't let this ruling stand. The other problems—Citizens United, Dobbs—can be fixed through legislation. This one can't, except maybe by a law that specifically declares that a president is not above the law, which I'm not sure would itself be constitutional. In any case, another problem with that is that fascists are selective in their application of the law. They have no problem ruling in favor of conservatives, but will never permit that exact same legal reasoning to then benefit their ideological enemies.

But yeah, this is bad. The Chevron ruling will begin to erode our federal executive in horrible ways, and this immunity ruling sets the stage for nightmarish conduct by a future president.

I didn't watch the debate the other day, or any of the analysis after the fact. I know who I am voting for, and, on some level, I didn't want to have to watch Biden's inevitably uncharismatic performance. And then everyone started melting down and crying that the sky was falling, so I went and watched a short clip of Biden's worst moments, and I get it. That performance goes beyond the stutter that often wrongly gets conflated with dementia. But in this case he clearly lost his train of thought and he did it on-stage in front of millions of people. That's a rough day.

I still don't think the mate is senile. I have seen plenty of people have the meltdown that he had, and I have had that meltdown myself. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. But even if Joe Biden were hunched over in a wheelchair drooling out the side of his mouth, I would still vote for him, and gladly. Because not voting for him is a vote for Trump, and I would not vote for a candidate who spent the whole debate lying and who himself is a traitor, an egomaniac, a convicted felon, a con artist, a failed coup plotter, and an ethically bankrupt, intellectually stunted manchild. And because, moreover, he has run a good administration. He has good people around him, and can be ably succeeded by Vice President Harris if needed. When you vote for a president you are voting not just for an individual but for a team, and that team's ethos, and I have no doubt which team, which ethos, I support. We are asking the wrong person to drop out of this race.

Anyway! President Biden is going to speak to the public tonight about this court ruling. I don't know what he will say. I don't expect anything meaningful a la refusing to enforce the Court's ruling, but it sure would be nice. President Trump should be prosecuted for his alleged crimes on January 6 (which is the trial most directly impacted by this ruling), crimes of which Trump is unambiguously guilty and which are "alleged" only in the blindfolded eyes of Justice for the sake of due process. America needs this accountability, or we will suffer terribly for want of it in the future.

[belladonnabefore]

Im coming back to Tumblr, and as much as it's not important to anyone, the reason is actually socially and politically interesting and i wanna explain it.

So, some context before anything, im Brazilian, grew up a Tumblr kid in from 2016 to about 2018, left for a good while, then i got a Twitter ( i refuse to call it X ) cause of Animation School during 2022, and now im migrating back to Tumblr, and it's cause Brazil is actually banning Twitter, giving a 8,912 dollar fine to anyone who uses a VPN to acess it and to top it off blocked Starlink's financial resourses in Brazil, the reason being justified and absolutely nuts that it happened too, at least in my conception.

So, from 2018 to 2022 the Brazilian president was Jair Bolsonaro, basically the dummer and more openly facist Brazilian version of Trump ( and that's a whole can of worms that im not gonna get into cause this post is already bound to be massive ), and on the end of 2022 presidental elections were held and Bolsonaro lost to Lula, a left leaning guy that will 100% sacrifice his morals for money and power ( but ended up being, sadly, the least worst option on that election, kinda like Biden ). So Bolsonaro started discrediting the electoral results on the internet with the help of other far-right politians and surprisingly ( or not ) Elon Musk. Following these series of inflamatory accusations from Bolsonaro and the far-right there were a few riots and then his following ( and most recent facist movement of Brazil ) stormed the Capitol in January 8th 2023 with enabling from the Brazilian police and military forces ( which sadly kinda work as it's own conservative cell seperate from the government due to Brazil's badly resolved Military Dictatorship issues ), politicians were evactuated before they entered, but when they did they tore down and stole priceless diplomatic gifts and works of art all over, but since it was mostly elderly people they were detained and jailed pretty quickly, even with the police's unwillingness allowing tons of them to escape.

And a huge investigation was open to see if the Coup was organized by political figures or not, led by supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes. And well, from the involvement of the police force blocking highways so rural and poor communities couldn't vote, to a general testifying that Bolsonaro presented him papers detailing a organized planned Coup that didn't happen ( that were later found to be in a liutenant-colonel's house ), to Musk stepping in himself to discredit a deny Judge Moraes' requests to ban the accounts of people involved in the coup and in spreading missinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines back in the pandemic, it was obvious political figure's were neck in deep in shit, and Musk's box-shapped visage was no different.

So, cause of his involvement in this crazy mess, various personal attacks on Judge Moraes and the fact that brazilian facist cells are finding refuge on Twitter without any sort of reprimanding from the plataform, Judge Moraes threatened arresting Twitter's Brazilian representative. Elon Musk's response was to completely shut down Twitter's offices in Brazil, leaving them as a rougue agent with no representative on the eyes lf the law, and so Moraes responded by blocking Starlink's financial resources here and threatening to shut down Twitter for good in Brazil if Elon keeps disrespecting and delegitimazing Brazilian democracy and law, Musk responded to this by throwing more anti-democratic tamper tantrums and posting edited pics of Moraes as Darth Vader or someone of the sort ( i don't watch Star Wars ) like the little facist troll he is. And that's why Brazil ( Twitter's 6th biggest userbase ) is just gonna vanish from there today or soon enough, and why im here now again! And let me tell you something, not having character limitations and being able to say "FUCK YOU ELON MUSK" without getting kicked to the curb is absolutely FREEING.

So, prehaps expect a influx of Brazilians even though most will go to Bluesky, and don't expect me to cover politics anytime soon, maybe expect me to cover history though.

Thanks for reading. ♡

[dreadark]

Fresh Snow

some drabbles of kim dokja's company during a snow day, before the story of orv starts

-

One could say Kim Dokja was lucky for reaching his apartment before the snowstorm truly picked up. Another could say he was unlucky for the storm happening exactly on the night he meant to go grocery shopping. And the first would argue with the second, saying if he’d just checked the weather forecast a day earlier he wouldn’t even be in this situation, so that couldn’t be called bad luck, only a lack of forethought…

…Damn it, he really was hungry.

It was lucky he had time to eat lunch during work today, and unlucky he had literally nothing left in his fridge or pantry now for dinner. Clear proof that trying to cut himself off from instant noodles was a mistake.

The cold was worse than the hunger, though. Kim Dokja knew this building had terrible insulation, but now he was feeling the lack of it seep into his bones. Wasn’t it some building code violation to let the temperatures indoors drop this low? Of course, having the time or money to do anything about that was out of the question, but he could daydream taking his bastard landlord to court anyway.

For now, he just had to bear it. If the Iron-Blooded Supreme King Yoo Joonghyuk could withstand being plunged into the coldest depths of Poseidon’s ocean, then Completely Average Salaryman Kim Dokja could definitely triumph over a particularly cold Seoul night…!

Before he could cringe himself to death over that thought, a notification popped up on his phone. A new chapter of Three Ways to Survive in a Ruined World? tls123 had announced another hiatus earlier this week, which from previous experience would last a couple days longer, so he hadn’t expected an update today. Maybe, they’d come back early just to save him—?

>> lol there ws rly smn like this… s5gir antis r so sad

Unfortunately, it was only a reply to a comment he’d made years ago. Specifically, one on a chapter of SSSSS-Grade Infinite Regressor pointing out how obviously “Yoo Joonhyun” was ripping off his Joonghyuk-ie…

The person who replied had probably assumed his account was old enough to have been abandoned, especially with how much backlash his comments had gotten then. So they’d surely be in for a shock if the original commenter shot back with definitive proof of this so-called author’s plagiarism.

…Kim Dokja was twenty-seven now. Having graduated university despite all odds he now “contributed to society” by going through the motions of a meaningless QA job, so he would definitely be considered an adult. Definitely too old to participate in flame wars online. Definitely too mature to start typing up a cool reply (carefully composed, he couldn’t seem like he was letting emotion get to his head) on how much evidence he’d collected to support his point (all saved to a draft on his personal email account, so he could access it wherever) and how they should at least apologize to tls123-nim in place of this pretentious “writer” who still refused to…

And really, ‘s5gir’? With an abbreviation that clunky, no wonder they had to copy someone. Couldn’t even come up with a decent title.

Only after posting the reply did Kim Dokja realize he’d completely forgotten about the cold while typing.

read the rest on ao3 here

[mariacallous]

A symbol affiliated with former President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” fallacy was on display at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house in 2021, a New York Times investigation found Thursday.

The symbol in question was an upside-down American flag, which supporters of Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theory began displaying after he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020. Neighbors who saw and photographed the flag confirmed to the Times that it flew on Jan. 17, 2021. The conservative justice admitted it but said it was his wife’s doing.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” he said in a statement to the paper. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

The Times found in interviews with neighbors that Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, was having an ongoing argument with neighbors who’d put up an anti-Trump sign with an expletive on their front lawn.

You can see a photo of the flag in question in the Times’ story.

Jan. 17 was a little over a week after Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the ceremonial counting of electoral votes that gave Biden the presidency. More than a thousand people involved in the riot have been charged with crimes associated with that day.

While the flag was up, the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear several cases about the integrity of the 2020 election. Alito was in favor of hearing the arguments but was ultimately on the losing side. Currently, the court is set to rule on two cases related to the Capitol riot, including one that could give Trump presidential immunity from some of the dozens of charges he’s facing.

The Supreme Court’s code of ethics calls for the justices to avoid making political statements or sharing opinions on matters that might come before the court.

Take Back the Court, a group opposed to the conservative swing the court has taken in recent years, said this incident is proof Alito doesn’t belong on the court.

“Sam Alito has disqualified himself from legitimate service on the Supreme Court. It’s hard to imagine a more blatant f-you to the American public than proudly displaying a vestige of a failed coup attempt on the country you’re supposed to serve, right on your front lawn,” the group’s president, Sarah Lipton-Lubet, said in a statement.

Alito’s wife isn’t the only Supreme Court spouse to get caught up in an election conspiracy scandal. Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, promoted and attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House that preceded the Capitol insurrection. Her husband has refused to recuse himself from cases related to the attack on the Capitol.

“If the wife of one sitting Supreme Court justice helping incite an insurrection wasn’t enough for Congress to issue subpoenas to these extremists, perhaps another sitting justice proudly displaying memorabilia from that insurrection will be,” she said.

[ashs-cardboard-box]

Precious Treasures

~ King!Dragon hybrid!Erwin Smith/Male Concubine!Wolf hybrid!Reader

~ Fluff (Day 11)

~ Secret Romance

~ 2k words

Royal + Hybrid AU :3 Size and rank difference mentioned and welcomed. No TW (unless you get upset by they/them Hange ??)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the expansive nation of Paradis, there lies a castle among the vast lands, run by hybrids from all sorts of species. Yet, for centuries, the dragons reign supreme, of course. Being a dragon was widely associated with strength, wealth and status, typically only seen in noble bloodlines. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, most prey animals like rabbits or mice were what normally controlled the “lesser fortunate”. Everyone had their respective places, but you were the odd one out.

Usually, the wolf hybrids were deemed fitting for knighthood, regardless of background or gender. Their inherent need for a pack proved useful to past rulers in the instance of war or tragedy. Yet you were different. You were dubbed a concubine. Odd, yes..but to add insult to injury, you were the only male concubine in the palace.

King Erwin knew he had to have you the minute he laid eyes on you during an outing, spotting you whilst you were a squire, training to earn your rightful title as a wolf. His father before him, and his father before him, so on and so forth, they’d had many concubines, all women. But you? You were special to him. He’d requested you change your path from knighthood to be his concubine with no consequences. But surprisingly, you obeyed without the usual fear or defiance others would have.

He cared about you more than any noble should for a mere worker. He’d even gifted you the shiniest jewels from his hoard, dressing you up in them to really make you gleam. Shiny golden necklaces, bracelets, anklets, belts–purposefully avoiding any rings–all with his precious stones inside. In any other circumstance, he’d cut the arm off of anyone who tried to reach for his stash, but he loved you.

Your relationship with King Erwin was kept a secret. It had to be, even if you didn’t necessarily like it. No matter how obvious it was, just by the way your tail wagged each time he beckoned you into his chambers to fulfill your duty, it had to be kept silent. If the rumors were to be confirmed true, Paradis could fall to shambles with the knowledge that their king was courting not only a male concubine, but one out of his species. The King’s right hand, a black panther named Levi, strongly advised against it. He knew about your bond, albeit extremely grudgingly. He tried to stay out of it as much as possible…for his own sake.

During a particularly dreary morning, storm clouds overhead with the preparation for a heavy rain, your attention is pulled away from the window and over to the door as you hear a particularly chipper knock pattern, followed by a very familiar giggle.

Hange was the King’s stewardess, a hyena. There was talk that they’d made a deal with Erwin on his coronation that if they helped him out, they’d be allowed in the dungeon with the executioner for “experiments”, but no one could confirm nor deny. They didn’t even dare ask.

“I’m clothed, Hange. You can come in.” You call, turning just enough to face the door. Dressed in a lovely purple silken robe, gifted to you by Erwin himself, having just woken up after an absolutely restless night's sleep. Your room was one of many guest rooms inside the kingdom, since Erwin decided he couldn’t have you riding all the way back home in the middle of the night, especially if the people knew who you were to him. Each time you left, he kept himself up, sick with worry, before ultimately making a decision. One he knew would keep you safer in the long run.

It was a nice room, you had to admit. Probably larger on its own than all of the rooms in your entire house combined. Most of your personal belongings were taken from your residence and put into your new room with the help of a few cadet soldiers, who complained and dragged their feet, but you appreciated them anyway.

The large oak doors are pushed open with force, with Hange’s much smaller frame standing between them. Their tail was puffed up and wagging excitedly, causing any loose fur to fly off. “Y/N!” They beam, their voice carrying throughout the space, creating an echo that makes your ears twitch.

“Hi, Hange..” You grumble as you reach up to brush your hand over your ears, as if you could physically feel the tinnitus starting to blare. Your other hand remains around the strap that keeps your robe tied shut, not exactly wanting to flash them. “The King asked for you.” They inform, straightening themselves out despite the dramatic entrance. Their eyes locked onto yours over the rims of their glasses, a look you know that means “do this immediately”.

With a sigh, you nod, accepting your task and probably the punishment you know you’re going to receive. Watching Hange leave and close the doors behind them, you decide to head out as soon as possible, fully expecting a punishment for something you either did or didn’t do. Admittedly, dragon hybrids were a bit unpredictable, even worse during mating season; thank gods it wasn’t…you didn’t think.

Slipping your feet into your slippers by your door, adjusting your robe to make sure it’s completely covering your modesty, you pull open your door and step out into the grandiose corridor.

The long hallway stretched on both ways for what felt like hours, even if that wasn’t remotely true. The walls were made of various minerals like white limestone, with lovely marble flooring that Erwin likes to keep spotless and shining. Your room was fairly isolated from the others, since it was easier for Erwin to sneak in and out to see you without getting caught. Some of the castles’ daily keepers had their own spaces, with others needing to return back home for their families, but they weren’t nearly as grand as yours.

The king’s room was a floor above everyone else’s, heavily guarded by both experienced knights and soldiers, and less experienced squires and cadets. Usually, you had to shyly explain what you were wanting to enter Erwin’s quarters for if you weren’t being summoned, but to your surprise, the king was standing right outside the door. His arms folded over his chest and his spiny, scaly tail slowly swaying behind him. His face was a mask of indifference, as always. It was something you could respect. You found yourself having to grab your own tail just to stop its wagging from time to time.

“Your Majesty.” You greet, simultaneously calling attention to yourself. Stopping right in front of Erwin, you tuck your tail between your legs and bow your head, staring at Erwin’s feet. You could barely contain the grin spreading across your face, biting down on your inner bottom lip. You could feel the guards’ eyes on both of you, even if they tried to remain nonchalant about their eavesdropping.

“Y/N.” the king grunts, a plume of smoke leaving his mouth with an exhale, indicative of a dragon's irritation. Your ears flatten subconsciously. Part of you hopes he’s just keeping up the charade to take suspicion off of your relationship, the other part is rapidly racking your brain for any and all events you possibly could have missed.

“Come.” Without waiting for a response, Erwin steps past you and heads back down the hallway you just came from, tucking in his wings to prevent from accidentally hitting you with them. You follow along like an eager puppy, which technically, you were. As soon as you were out of eye and earshot of the soldiers guarding Erwin’s room, you let your ears perk up and your tail wag freely, if not a bit hesitant.

“You seem tense…sire…” You comment sheepishly, walking a bit faster to catch up with Erwin. You steal a brief glance up towards him, catching a sly look on his face underneath thinly veiled irritation.

“There’s just something I would like to show you in the garden.” He softens, glancing down at you momentarily before facing forward again. Despite Erwin’s softening demeanor, you tense immensely. You had planted an assortment of flowers that you’d purchased from the village market, just for Erwin. They were supposed to be a surprise for his upcoming birthday.

“Something?” You muse, your ears flattening again. You didn’t want to give away the surprise if Erwin hadn’t found out–you’d paid the gardeners to keep your gifts a secret–and found something else entirely.

Erwin hums in confirmation with a curt nod. His right wing expands just enough to curl up around you, keeping you as close as possible, discreetly taking your hand in his. Even if you two were a secret, he didn’t want any of his staff getting any funny ideas with you. Walking right through the throne room in silence, then out the open archway, right along the path into endless fields of land, just up the hill from the nearest Paradis village.

“Here– look!” He beams, his stoic demeanor crumbling entirely as he drags you along with him. Mentally complaining about your slippers getting dirtied from being outside, but it wasn’t like they couldn’t be cleaned. His tail begins to wag alongside yours, only slightly slower due to the large size difference.

Tugging you into the greenhouse, holding the door open for you, of course, he triple checks to make sure no one else is inside before ushering you over to the bed you’d tried to keep secret from him.

“Just look at them!” Erwin grins, sharp teeth on display. Kneeling down to gently caress the snowy white petals of a ghost orchid, his other hand interlaced with your own. “I can’t recall ever asking for the assortment, but they’re just beautiful.”

“Actually, I got ‘em for you..” You explain sheepishly as you slowly kneel down beside the king. With a brief glance down at your robe to make sure you’re not exposing yourself, you continue.

“Jade vine,” You point to a curved, bright turquoise legume. “Ghost orchid..” You pause on a bright red bunch of fire lilies. “I wanna say chile-something..” Erwin nods with a small huff of a chuckle, gesturing for you to continue regardless. While he was interested in your supposed gift, he also just wanted to hear you talk.

“Parrot’s Beak,” You wave towards an crimson “beak shaped” bud, followed by a turn to point at an unblossomed cactus flower that you also couldn’t quite remember. “That one blooms rarely at night.” You inform, returning your eyes to the king’s, only to realize he’d been staring at you all along.

Clearing your throat nervously, you give his hand a gentle squeeze as you stand back up, out of the curve of his wing. “I- uh.. I bought ‘em at the market a bit ago for your birthday… hadn’t really planned on you finding them before then.”

Erwin is silent as he copies you and stands up, pulling you into a sudden embrace, burying his nose into your hair. “Thank you.” He rumbles, his wings curling around you protectively as his tail begins to wag.

Slowly, you wrap your arms around him tightly, your face pulled right up against his chest. “You like ‘em?” You question, earning a slow nod that makes your own tail wag. “I love them..and you.” The king mumbles into the top of your head, hardly quelling the urge to bring you back into the castle and hoard you into his pile of jewels and gems.

“Love you too..” You whisper, just enjoying the warm embrace that you’d been craving all morning. You felt like you couldn’t get enough of Erwin, even if your surprise had been revealed a few weeks too early. “There’s also bismuth and garnet in my bedside table.” You add with a quiet chuckle, feeling the king’s muscles stiffen with excitement.

“Flowers and new additions to my hoard?” Erwin grins, picking you up with extreme ease and walking right out of the greenhouse with you in his arms, a bit dazed by the sudden move. “You treat me so well, my shining star.”

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Ive been craving to write a hybrid fic and this is my excuse 10/13 edit: I JUST REALIZED TOMORROW IS ERWIN'S BIRTHDAY </333 i've made a terrible mistake forgive me Commander happy birthday old man </3 Return to masterlist

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Rachel Poser

Published: May 4, 2024

Ibram X. Kendi has a notebook that prompts him, on every other page, to write down “Things to be grateful for.” There are many things he might put under that heading. First and foremost, his wife and two daughters, and his health, having made it through Stage 4 colon cancer in his 30s — a diagnosis with a 12 percent survival rate. Tenure at Boston University, where Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate in theology. A National Book Award, and a MacArthur “genius” grant for “transforming how many people understand, discuss and attempt to redress America’s longstanding racial challenges.” Then there were the millions of people who bought “How to Be an Antiracist,” the first of five of his books to take the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list. But he was particularly grateful to the readers who wrote to him to say his work changed them for the better.

These days, he could use the reminder. Four years have gone by since George Floyd was murdered on the pavement near Cup Foods in Minneapolis, sparking the racial “reckoning” that made Kendi a household name. Many people, Kendi among them, believe that reckoning is long over. State legislatures have pushed through harsh antiprotest measures. Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway. Last June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. And Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee for president, promising to root out “the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Kendi has become a prime target of this backlash. Books of his have been banned from schools in some districts, and his name is a kind of profanity among conservatives who believe racism is mostly a problem of the past. Though legions of readers continue to celebrate Kendi as a courageous and groundbreaking thinker, for many others he has become a symbol of everything that’s wrong in racial discourse today. Even many allies in the fight for racial justice dismiss his brand of antiracism as unworkable, wrongheaded or counterproductive. “The vast majority of my critics,” Kendi told me last year, “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”

Criticism of Kendi only grew in September, when he made the “painful decision” to lay off more than half the staff of the research center he runs at Boston University. The Center for Antiracist Research, which Kendi founded during the 2020 protests to tackle “seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice,” raised an enormous sum of $55 million, and the news of its downsizing led to a storm of questions. False rumors began circulating that Kendi had stolen funds, and the university announced it would investigate after former employees accused him of mismanagement and secrecy.

The controversy quickly ballooned into a national news story, fueled in large part by right-wing media, which was all too happy to speculate about “missing funds” and condemn Kendi — and the broader racial-justice movement — as a fraud. On Fox News, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo told the host John Roberts that the center’s “failure” was “poetic justice.” “This is a symbol of where we have come since 2020 and why that movement is really floundering today,” he said. In early October, a podcast affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, the conservative think tank where Rufo works, jubilantly released an episode titled “The End of Ibram X. Kendi?”

In December, I met Kendi at the Center for Antiracist Research, which was by then mostly empty, though I caught signs of its former life: Space heaters sat idly under desks, and Post-it notes lingered around the edges of unplugged monitors. On the frame of one cleared-out cubicle, a sticker in the shape of Earth read “Be the change.” Kendi welcomed me into his office in a pink shirt and a periwinkle blazer with a handkerchief tucked neatly in its pocket. He was calm on the surface, but he seemed to me, as he often did during the conversations we’d had since the layoffs, to be holding himself taut, like a tensile substance under enormous strain. The furor over the center, he said, was a measure of how desperate many people were to damage his reputation: “If this had happened at another center, it would either not have been a story or a one-day story.”

In “How to Be an Antiracist,” his best-known book, Kendi challenges readers to evaluate themselves by their racial impact, by whether their actions advance or impede the cause of racial equality. “There is no neutrality in the racial struggle,” he writes. “The question for each of us is: What side of history will we stand on?” This question evinces Kendi’s confidence that ideas and policies can be dependably sorted into one of two categories: racist or antiracist.

Kendi is a vegan, a tall man with a gentle, serious nature. “He’ll laugh at a joke — he’ll never crack one,” Kellie Carter Jackson, the chair of the Africana studies department at Wellesley and someone who has known Kendi for years, told me. He considers himself an “introvert and loner” who was chased down by the spotlight and is now caught in its glare. “I don’t know of anybody more ill suited for fame than Ibram Kendi,” said Stefan Bradley, a longtime friend and professor of Black studies at Amherst. There is a corniness to Kendi that’s endearing, like his use of the gratitude notebook — a thick, pastel-colored pad with gold spiral binding — or the fact that his phone email signature is “Sent from Typoville aka my iPhone.” Though he is always soft-spoken, volume sometimes seems to be a gauge of how comfortable he feels. The first time I met him in person, he greeted me so quietly that I worried my recorder wouldn’t pick up his voice.

Kendi had hired a pair of crisis-P.R. consultants to help him manage the fallout from the layoffs, a controversy that he believed had fed into dangerous, racist stories about Black leaders, and about him in particular. In the fun-house mirror of conservative media, Kendi has long loomed as an antiwhite extremist trying to get rich by sowing racial division. Kendi told me he received regular threats; he allowed me to come to the center only on the condition that I not reveal its location. “When it comes to the white supremacists who are the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time, I am one of their chief enemies,” he told me.

Boston University had recently released the results of its audit, which found “no issues” with how the center’s finances were handled. The center’s problem, Kendi told me, was more banal: Most of its money was in its endowment or restricted to specific uses, and after the high of 2020, donations had crashed. “At our current rate, we were going to run out in two years,” he said. “That was what ultimately led us to feel like we needed to make a major change.” The center’s new model would fund nine-month academic fellowships rather than a large full-time staff. Though inquiries into the center’s grant-management practices and workplace culture were continuing, Kendi was confident that they would absolve him, too. In the media, he’d dismissed the complaints about his leadership as “unfair,” “unfounded,” “vague,” “meanspirited” and an attempt to “settle old scores.”

In the fall, when I began talking to former employees and faculty — most of whom asked for anonymity because they remain at Boston University or signed severance agreements that included nondisparagement language — it was clear that many of them felt caught in a bind. They could already see that the story of the center’s dysfunction was being used to undermine the racial-justice movement, but they were frustrated to watch Kendi play down the problems and cast their concerns as spiteful or even racist. They felt that what they experienced at the center was now playing out in public: Kendi’s tendency to see their constructive feedback as hostile. “He doesn’t trust anybody,” one person told me. “He doesn’t let anyone in.”

To Kendi, attacks from those who claim to be allies, like attacks from political enemies, are to be expected. In his books, Kendi argues that history is not an arc bending toward justice but a war of “dueling” forces — racist and antiracist — that each escalate their response when the other advances. In the years since 2020, he believes, the country has entered a predictable period of retrenchment, when the force of racism is ascendant and the racial progress of the last several decades is under threat. To defend antiracism, to defend himself, he would simply have to fight harder.

Not so long ago, Kendi thought he saw a new world coming into being. “We are living in the midst of an antiracist revolution,” he wrote in September 2020 in an Atlantic cover story headlined, “Is This the Beginning of the End for American Racism?” Nearly 20 percent of Americans were saying that “race relations” was the most urgent problem facing the nation — more than at any point since 1968 — and many of them were turning to Kendi to figure out what to do about it. They were buying his memoir and manifesto, “How to Be an Antiracist,” much of which he wrote while undergoing chemotherapy. “This was perhaps the last thing he was going to write,” Chris Jackson, Kendi’s editor, told me. “There was no cynicism in the writing of it.” (Jackson was the editor of a 2021 book based on The 1619 Project, which originated in this magazine in 2019; Kendi contributed a chapter to that book.)

Kendi confesses in the introduction that he “used to be racist most of the time.” The year 1994, when he turned 12, marked three decades since the United States outlawed discrimination on the basis of race. Then why, Kendi wondered as an adolescent, were so many Black people out of work, impoverished or incarcerated? The problem, he concluded, must be Black people themselves. Not Black people like his parents, God-loving professionals who had saved enough to buy a home in Jamaica, Queens, and who never let their two sons forget the importance of education and hard work. But they were the exception. In high school, Kendi competed in an oratory contest in which he gave voice to many of the anti-Black stereotypes circulating in the ’90s — that Black youths were violent, unstudious, unmotivated. “They think it’s OK to be the most feared in our society,” he proclaimed. “They think it’s OK not to think!” Kendi also turned these ideas on himself, believing that he was a “subpar student” because of his race.

Kendi’s mind began to change when he arrived on the campus of Florida A&M, one of the largest historically Black universities in the country, in the fall of 2000 to study sports journalism. “I had never seen so many Black people together with positive motives,” he wrote at the time. Kendi was disengaged for most of high school, as concerned with his clothes as his grades. His friends at the university teased him for joining a modeling troupe and preening before parties, particularly because once he got to them he was too shy to talk to anyone. “He would come out, and you could smell the cologne from down the hall,” Grady Tripp, Kendi’s housemate, told me. But experimenting with his style, for Kendi, was part of trying on new ideas. For a while, he wore honey-colored contact lenses that turned his irises an off-putting shade of orange; he got rid of them once he decided they were a rejection of blackness, like Malcolm X’s straightening his hair with lye.

Over long hours spent reading alone in the library, Kendi found his way to some unlikely conclusions. In “How to Be an Antiracist,” he describes bursting into his housemate’s room to declare that he had “figured white people out.” “They are aliens,” he said. Kendi had gone searching for answers in conspiracy theories and Nation of Islam theology that cast whites as a “devil race” bred by an evil Black scientist to conquer the planet. “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,” he wrote in a column for the student newspaper in 2003. They are “socialized to be aggressive” and have used “the AIDS virus and cloning” to dominate the world’s peoples. Recently, the column has circulated on right-wing social media as evidence of Kendi’s antiwhite extremism, which frustrates him because it’s in his own memoir as an example of just how lost he had become.

Kendi went on to earn a Ph.D. in African American studies from Temple University. The founder of his department was Molefi Kete Asante, an Afrocentrist who has called on the descendants of enslaved people to embrace traditional African dress, languages and religions. Kendi eventually changed his middle name to Xolani, meaning “peace” in Zulu; at their wedding, he and his wife, Sadiqa, adopted the last name Kendi, meaning “loved one” in Meru. Kendi has called Asante “profoundly antiracist,” but Kendi remained an idiosyncratic thinker who did not consider himself a part of just one scholarly tradition; he knew early on that he wanted to write for the public. In a 2019 interview, when asked about his intellectual lineage, Kendi named W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X.

Kendi became part of a cohort of Black writers, among them Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, through the sunset of the Obama presidency and the red dawn of the MAGA movement, argued that anti-Blackness remains a major force shaping American politics. They helped popularize the longstanding idea that racism in the United States is systemic — that the country’s laws and institutions perpetuate Black disadvantage despite a pledge of equal treatment. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended de jure white supremacy, but President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed it into law, acknowledged that it wouldn’t uproot a racial caste system grown over centuries.

“The next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights,” he said, would be to achieve “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact.” Kendi and others wrote bracingly about the failure of that promise. Far from economic redress, Black Americans were met with continued discrimination in every realm of life, while being told the country was now “colorblind.” Kendi and others argued that remedying the impact of hundreds of years of subjugation would require policies that recognize, rather than ignore, that legacy, such as affirmative action and reparations.

Far too many Americans, Kendi felt, still thought of racism as conscious prejudice, so conversations got stuck in cul-de-sacs of denial, in which people protested that they were “not racist” because they harbored no anti-Black animus. To convey this, he landed on the binary that would become his most famous and perhaps most controversial idea. “There is no such thing as a not-racist idea” or a “race-neutral policy,” he wrote in “How to Be an Antiracist,” published in 2019. “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’”

Black activists have long used the word “antiracist” to describe active resistance to white supremacy, but “How to Be an Antiracist” catapulted the term into the American lexicon, in much the same way that Sheryl Sandberg turned “Lean In” into a mantra. After George Floyd’s death, the book sold out on Amazon, which was “unheard-of,” Kendi said. Media coverage of Kendi in those days made him sound nearly superhuman. In a GQ profile, for example, the novelist ZZ Packer describes Kendi as a “preternaturally wise” Buddha-like figure, “the antiracist guru of our time” with a “Jedi-like prowess for recognizing and neutralizing the racism pervading our society.”

During the summer of 2020, Kendi sometimes appeared onstage or onscreen alongside Robin DiAngelo, the educator whose book “White Fragility” was also a No. 1 best seller. Kendi and DiAngelo write less about the workings of systemic racism than the ideas and psychological defenses that cause people to deny their complicity in it. They share a belief in what Kendi calls “individual transformation for societal transformation.” When Kendi took over Selena Gomez’s Instagram, for example, he urged her 180 million followers to “1. Acknowledge your racism,” “2. Confess your racist ideas” and “3. Define racism and antiracism.” Then they would be ready for Steps 4 and 5, identifying and working to change racist policies.

Kendi and DiAngelo’s talk of confession — antiracism as a kind of conversion experience — inspired many people and disturbed others. By focusing so much on personal growth, critics said, they made it easy for self-help to take the place of organizing, for a conflict over the policing of Black communities, and by extension their material conditions, to become a fight not over policy but over etiquette — which words to use, whether to say “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter.” Many allies felt that Kendi and DiAngelo were merely helping white people alleviate their guilt.

They also questioned Kendi’s willingness to turn his philosophy into a brand. Following the success of “How to Be an Antiracist,” he released a deck of “antiracist” conversation-starter cards, an “antiracist” journal with prompts for self-reflection and a children’s book, “Antiracist Baby.” Christine Platt, an author and advocate who worked with Kendi at American University, recently co-wrote a novel that features a Kendi-like figure — a “soft-spoken” author named Dr. Braxton Walsh Jr., whose book “Woke Yet?” becomes a viral phenomenon. “White folks post about it on social media all the time,” rants De’Andrea, one of the main characters. “Wake up and get your copy today! Only nineteen ninety-nine plus shipping and handling.”

Those who thought of him as a self-help guru, Kendi felt, simply hadn’t read his work. Like most scholars of race, Kendi believes that Blackness is a fiction born of colonial powers’ self-interest, not just ignorance or hate, meaning that combating racism today requires upending the economic and political structures that propagate it. But Kendi doesn’t like the term “systemic racism” because it turns racism into a “hidden and unknowable” force for which there’s no one to blame, so he prefers to talk about “racist policies.”

In The Atlantic, he warned against the country going down a path of symbolic change where “monuments to racism are dismantled, but Americans shrink from the awesome task of reshaping the country with antiracist policies,” like Medicare for All, need-based school funding and reparations. Changing policy was exactly what he aimed to do at Boston University. During the protests, in the summer of 2020, the university named Kendi the Andrew W. Mellon professor of the humanities, a chair previously held by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, and announced the creation of a center on campus to put his ideas into action. Donations came pouring in, led by an anonymous $25 million gift and a $10 million gift from the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, which the provost said would give Kendi “the resources to launch the center like a rocket ship.”

Kendi started the center from his home in Boston, while Sadiqa, a pediatric E.R. doctor, came and went from the hospital in full protective gear. Kendi ran a research center as part of his old job at American University, but he felt unable to make a meaningful impact because the resources were modest and he was diagnosed with cancer just four months after its founding. Now, granted tens of millions of dollars to enact his most ambitious ideas, Kendi was determined to create an organization that could be a real engine of progress. “We’ve got to build an infrastructure to match what the right has created,” he later told a co-worker. “We’ve got to build something equally powerful.”

Kendi’s two centers were part of a wave of racial-justice spaces being founded at universities, like the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard or the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton, that pledged to work in partnership with activists and community groups to achieve social change. Kendi envisioned an organization that supported people of color in campaigning for policies that would concretely improve their lives.

To reflect that mission, he designed a structure with four “pillars” or offices: Research, Policy, Narrative and Advocacy. He recruited data scientists, policy analysts, organizers and educators and brought in faculty members working on race from across the university. They set up a model-legislation unit, which would draft sample bills and public-comment notes; an amicus-brief practice, which would target court cases in which race was being overlooked as an issue; and a grant process to fund research on racism by interdisciplinary teams elsewhere at the university, among other programs. Kendi also struck up a partnership with The Boston Globe to revive The Emancipator, a storied abolitionist newspaper. “It was a really exciting time,” he told me.

That summer, however, Kendi found himself on the defensive beyond Boston as Republican book-banning campaigns revved up. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson denounced “How to Be an Antiracist” as “poisonous,” plucking out Kendi’s summary of the case for race-conscious policymaking, which sounded particularly maladroit when taken out of context: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Carlson read in mock disbelief. “In other words, his book against racism promotes racism.” This was around the same time that Rufo, the conservative activist, started to position Kendi as a leading proponent of critical race theory, a school of thought, Rufo told The New Yorker, that he discovered by hunting through the footnotes of “How to Be an Antiracist.”

Critical race theorists were a group of legal scholars in the 1970s and ’80s who documented ways that the American legal framework of racial equality was nevertheless producing unequal treatment. They elaborated the idea of systemic racism and the critique of “colorblindness” that inform much of the writing of Kendi’s cohort. Rufo wrote on Twitter that his goal was to change the meaning of the term “critical race theory” — to “turn it toxic” by putting “all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” In his attacks on Kendi, Rufo also amplified the left’s critique of Kendi’s corporate-friendliness, caricaturing Kendi as a grifter out to enrich himself by raking in speaking fees. The number of threatening messages Kendi received began to rise. “I don’t feel safe anywhere,” Kendi later told a colleague. “I’m constantly looking over my shoulder.”

By the time the academic year began, in the fall of 2021, Kendi decided to take extraordinary measures. Before the center began in-person work that September, Kendi sent the staff an email about “security protocols,” instructing them to conceal the location of the center even from other Boston University faculty members and students. “It is critical to not share the address of the center with anyone or bring anyone to the center,” Kendi wrote. The email included a mock script to be used in the event of an inquiry about the center’s location, which ended abruptly with, “I gotta go.”

Though such precautions felt necessary to Kendi, they were met with incredulity and frustration by some employees who were starting to question his leadership. Problems emerged within the first six months, according to more than a dozen staff and faculty members I interviewed. Some told me they had gone to the center because they considered Kendi a visionary; others had reservations about or flat-out disagreements with his work but believed he had brought much-needed attention to issues they cared about. They would be able to find common ground, they thought. They were ready for some chaos as they tried to spin up a new organization remotely, but they quickly ran into difficulty as they tried to execute some of Kendi’s plans.

Kendi emphasizes in his books that policies alone are the cause of racial disparities today. In “Stamped From the Beginning,” his 2016 history of anti-Black ideas from the 15th century to the Obama presidency — which won the National Book Award and was recently made into a Netflix documentary that made the Oscar shortlist — Kendi writes that blaming Black people for their own oppression, by implying that Black people or Black culture are inferior or pathological, was one of the oldest cons in America. He had witnessed it again during the early days of the pandemic, when the numbers suggested that Black people were dying from Covid faster than every racial group save Native Americans. Some pundits speculated about the “soul food” diet or posited that Black communities weren’t taking the virus seriously, even though a Pew survey found that Black respondents were most likely to view the coronavirus as a major threat.

Kendi wanted the center to build “the nation’s largest online collection” of racial data to track disparities like this one and do analytical work to understand each policy responsible. In the case of Covid, for example, Black Americans are disproportionately likely to work in low-income essential jobs, to live in crowded conditions and to lack access to high-quality insurance or medical care. The center might research these conditions and propose targeted interventions, like changes to Medicaid coverage, or more transformative measures, like a universal basic income. One faculty member involved told me that she was “initially incredibly enthusiastic” about the idea. “It seemed like an opportunity to do rigorous, well-funded social-science research that would be aimed at real policy change on issues that I cared about,” she told me.

Like Kendi, his staff believed that historical oppression and ongoing discrimination explained why Black Americans fared comparatively poorly on so many measures of well-being, from education to wealth to longevity, and that centuries of injustice demanded a sweeping policy response to remedy. But understanding that past and present racism is the underlying cause of Black disadvantage is different from the work of assessing its role in any single policy, let alone figuring out how to change the policy to eliminate it. That takes careful analysis. “You have to have specificity,” the faculty member said, “or you can’t measure.”

Kendi pushed back at staff members who argued that the center should constrain its focus. There were plenty of academic centers and researchers that tracked data on racial disparities in one policy area or another, he said; he wanted to convene that pre-existing data, bringing it together in one place for easy access by the public. In a 2022 meeting, when the team tried to get a better sense of his vision, Kendi told them that he wanted a guy at a barbershop or a bar to be able to “pull up the numbers.” To many employees with data or policy backgrounds, what Kendi wanted didn’t seem feasible; at worst, they thought, it risked simply replicating others’ work or creating a mess of sloppily merged data, connected to too many policies for their small team to track rigorously. In the midst of the pandemic, the center struggled to hire a director of research who might have been able to mediate the dispute.

In November, a confidential complaint was filed with the university administration raising concerns about Kendi’s leadership. The anonymous employee told a university compliance officer that Kendi ran the center with “hypercontrol” and created an environment of “silence and secrecy” that was causing low morale and high turnover, claiming that “when Dr. Kendi is questioned, the narrative becomes that the employee must be the one with the ‘problem.’” The employee warned the university that the situation “is potentially going to blow up.”

One of Kendi’s refrains is that being antiracist demands self-criticism. “If I share an idea that people don’t understand, I’m to blame,” he told an interviewer in 2019. “I’m always to blame.” Kendi told me that his most productive conversations with critics of his ideas often happened in private, including one with a prominent Black thinker who inspired him to make a change in the revised edition of “How to Be an Antiracist.” “This person talked about how the goal should not just be equity,” Kendi said. “The goal should not be the same percentage of Black people being killed by police as white people. The goal should be no one being killed by police.” But some Black scholars, as the right-wing backlash strengthened, debated whether to make their criticisms in public. The philosopher Charles Mills, after listening to a graduate-student presentation about Kendi and DiAngelo at a conference in 2021, asked the presenter: “Are their views now sufficiently influential, or perhaps sufficiently harmful, that we should make them a part of the target?”

Kendi was frustrated to be constantly lumped in with DiAngelo, whose ideas diverge from his in important ways. DiAngelo considers “white identity” to be “inherently racist,” while Kendi argues that anyone, including Black people, can be racist or antiracist. That puts him at odds with an understanding — common in the academy and the racial-justice movement — that Black people can’t be racist because racism is a system of power relations, and that Black people as a group don’t have the structural means to enforce their prejudice; this notion is often phrased as a formula, that racism is “prejudice plus power.”

Kendi thinks of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple word of description. His reigning metaphor is the sticker. Racist and antiracist are “peelable name tags,” Kendi writes; they describe not who we are but who we are being in any particular moment. He says he opposes the censoriousness that has become the sharp edge of identity politics, because he doesn’t regard shame as a useful social tool. But he has no intention of taking the moral sting out of “racist” completely. “I wouldn’t say that a person is not being condemned when they’re being called a racist,” he told Ezra Klein in a 2019 interview.

Rather than replacing one definition of racism with another, Kendi is really joining two senses into one. For much of the 20th century, the white mainstream considered racism a personal moral issue, while Black civil rights activists, among others, argued that it’s also structural and systemic. In his definition, Kendi aims to connect the individual to the system. A “racist,” he writes, is “one who is expressing an idea of racial hierarchy, or through actions or inaction is supporting a policy that leads to racial inequity or injustice.”

Kendi’s focus on outcomes is not new. For decades, civil rights activists have brought lawsuits based on the legal theory of “disparate impact,” which holds that unequal outcomes prove that certain practices (by, for example, an employer or a landlord) are racially discriminatory, without evidence of malicious intent. Kendi’s definition urges us to perform this sort of disparate-impact analysis all the time. In Politico in 2020, Kendi proposed the creation of a federal agency that would clear every new policy — local, state or federal — to ensure that it wouldn’t increase racial disparities. But as his team at the center knew well, policies can have complicated effects. Let’s say that a local environmental policy would improve the air quality in Black neighborhoods near factories but would also lead to hundreds of lost jobs and worsen the area’s racial wealth gap. Should it be cleared? Is such a policy racist or antiracist?

The question is made even trickier by the fact that the racial impact of many policies might not become clear until years later. The legacy of desegregation, for example, shows that even a profoundly antiracist policy can be turned against itself in its implementation. This is what the term “systemic racism” captures that can be lost in Kendi’s translation of “racist policies.”

In “Stamped From the Beginning,” Kendi writes that “racist policy is the cause of racial disparities in this country and the world at large.” Mary Pattillo, a sociologist at Northwestern, told me that Kendi’s focus on race didn’t fully capture the complexity of social life — the roles of class, culture, religion, community. “No one variable alone explains anything,” she said. But she thought there was value in simplifying. She understood Kendi not as an official making policy but as a thought leader making a “defensible, succinct provocation.” “We live in a country whose ideology is very individualistic, so the standard response to any failure is individual blame,” she said. “Those of us who do recognize the importance of policies, laws and so on have to always push so hard against that that we have to make statements like the one that Kendi is making.”

I came to think, after months of talking to Kendi, that this was the key to understanding him — to remember that he is trying to push so hard against that. To shove back the anti-Black stereotypes he documented in “Stamped From the Beginning,” the racist ideas that poisoned his own mind and sense of self-worth. His aim, at every turn, is to blame the policies that create unequal conditions and not the people enduring them. But Kendi is so consumed by combating the racist notion of Black inferiority that some of what he says in response is overstated, circular or uncareful, creating an easy target for his critics and discomfiting his allies. Conservatives were far from the only ones alarmed, for example, by his proposal for a constitutional amendment to appoint a panel of racism “experts” with the power to discipline public officials for “racist ideas.” (Kendi told me he modeled this proposal on European countries like Germany, where the bar for hate speech is much lower.)

Some of Kendi’s ideas are softer than they appear at first. Kendi told me that people who believe that his binary applies to “everything” are misreading him. Though he writes that “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas,” he says he never meant that sentence to apply to the whole universe of ideas, only to ideas about race. When I asked him whether the environmental policy above would be racist or antiracist based on his definition, he qualified that “policies can be like people, both racist and antiracist,” and went on: “By improving the air quality in Black neighborhoods near factories, the policy is being antiracist. By exacerbating the area’s racial wealth gap, the policy is being racist.” Many of his critics might find this a more reasonable position, but it also leads to a question about how useful or powerful a dichotomy it is in the end.

Kendi wanted to remain open to criticism, but so much of what he encountered was racist mockery, lies, professional jealousy, misreadings and threats. “I have thought many times about exiting my vocation as a scholar who studies racism,” he wrote in the revised edition of “How to Be an Antiracist.” “After the experience of the last three years, it does not feel safe for me to be publicly self-reflective or self-critical. It feels dangerous for me to be vulnerable.” Though he commits to doing so anyway, the onslaught brought on by celebrity seemed to cause Kendi’s introversion to harden into distrust. “Fame can be defeating and depleting,” Stefan Bradley, Kendi’s friend, told me. “Every word he puts into the atmosphere will be chopped up a hundred different ways, and that takes a toll on somebody’s mental health.” Bradley continued: “I think that if he were a lesser spirit, he would have been destroyed.”

That Kendi felt under siege became clear to Yanique Redwood when she started her job at the Center for Antiracist Research. Redwood had met Kendi once, in 2017, and she remembered him as soft-spoken but burning with big, exciting ideas. In the fall of 2021, when she interviewed to be the center’s executive director, Kendi told her he felt as though he was failing. Fund-raising while also running the center was too much for one person, and he wanted Redwood, a Caribbean American health and racial-equity researcher who had spent nearly a decade running a small foundation, to take over internal operations. Redwood was prepared to find some disorder, but the state of the center’s finances was a mess unlike any she had ever seen. “Nothing was in place,” she said. “It was unbelievable that an institution like that, with so much spotlight on it, just did not have systems. I understood why I was being brought in.”

Before starting, she conducted a round of entry interviews with faculty and staff members, and by her 27th and last conversation, she was exhausted from absorbing their frustration. “There’s something really wrong here,” she told Kendi. Much of the staff was relieved when Redwood was hired. There had been widespread confusion as employees were asked to do “damage control” by performing jobs for which they weren’t hired, or even qualified. “Everyone was overwhelmed,” Redwood told me. “There were too many promises being made to funders. Products were being promised that could never be delivered.”

Redwood designed a process to help get researchers going on pilot projects tracking disparities relating to felony murder, the health and social safety net, reparations and student-debt forgiveness. She wanted to share some takeaways from her round of entry interviews with the staff, in a tactful and encouraging way, to start the work of repairing the center’s culture, but Kendi worried that whatever she wrote might leak. A reporter from a conservative media outlet was reaching out to former employees, asking about problems at the center. “This media storm was coming,” Redwood told me. “It was brewing.”

Employees said Kendi’s fear of leaks slowed the work and created confusion and unease. The first time Rachael DeCruz, the head of the Advocacy office, asked Kendi about the center’s finances to help her budget, in 2021, he reacted “bizarrely,” she told me. “Why do you need that information?” he asked. (Kendi denies that this conversation took place. DeCruz says that after asking repeatedly, she received the information about six months later.) The threat of outside scrutiny exacerbated what employees described as Kendi’s tendency to withhold information to avoid interpersonal conflict. “He doesn’t understand people, how to nurture them, how to make them want to do their best work,” Redwood told me. “It’s not his strength, not even a little bit.”

During her entry interviews, Redwood asked each employee what the organization’s values were, and many of them responded by saying something along the lines of “I’ve been wondering that myself.” She encouraged Kendi to hold a retreat to talk through the mission as a group. Kendi was hesitant because he found work retreats “uncomfortable” — “sitting in a room with a large group of people all day long is exhausting for me,” he told me — but he committed to holding one anyway and solicited staff comments on a document he wrote laying out his theory of social change and the center’s role in it. “I was happy to receive all this great feedback,” he wrote to Redwood. “I think the changes will make the document much stronger and clearer.”

On a spring day in 2022, the staff met at a conference center a half-hour’s drive from campus. The day’s agenda, though couched in the gentle jargon of nonprofits, contained hints of the mood: The organizers on staff had scheduled time for an acknowledgment of the center’s growing pains, for a “healing justice moment” and for a period of “wicked questions” when concerns or challenges could be raised. At the start of the day, Naima Wong, an outside facilitator, encouraged the staff not to hold back. “We’re here to really get into this,” she said.

Late in the afternoon, when it was time to wrap up, the group assembled at tables arranged in a circle. Saida Grundy, a sociologist, was seated across from Kendi. She had never been on board with Kendi’s understanding of racism, subscribing instead to the “power plus prejudice” view. Grundy had forwarded Kendi’s email about security to colleagues with the note “The paranoia is INSANE.” “Ibram is so lily-livered he probably jumps when the biscuit tin pops,” she told me. Grundy was the one who, back in November, had made the anonymous complaint, in which some charges carried a hint of paranoia of her own, like the idea that Kendi “despises academia” and had “gotten satisfaction out of pulling academics out of their own research.” She had accused the center of being an exploitative workplace and, after having conflict with her supervisor, had already mostly stepped back from her role. Grundy had told the compliance office that the center might explode, and now she was ready to blow it up herself.

Her voice raised, Grundy laid out an indictment of the document Kendi wrote. “This is a mile wide and an inch deep,” she said. She argued that the center needed to be more specific about its goals; “fighting racism” was such a broad mission that it felt cynically strategic, allowing the center to take in money for all sorts of projects. “If there is a grant for antiracism on Jupiter, great,” she said. “We do extraterrestrial antiracism.” Grundy, unlike most of the staff, thought the center should become a resource for university faculty members and students; her parents were Black student activists in the 1970s, and she believed that real change starts where you are. “If you lined up 99 Black students at B.U.,” she said, “99 will tell you the center’s made no difference to their experience.”

When she finished speaking, the room was silent. Several people were crying. Dawna Johnson, the center’s financial director at the time, called it an “explosion.” “People didn’t know what to say after that,” she said. “It just left you so unhappy and uptight.” Kendi, his face inscrutable behind a Covid mask, said nothing, and the facilitator wrapped up the session. “Scholars who study the experience of Black leaders find that the No.1 racist challenge Black leaders face is contested authority, even from other Black leaders and staff,” he wrote to me later. I asked him what he remembered from that day. “It’s almost like trying to remember a day in which you were really happy, but then something horrible happened at the end,” he told me. “It’s hard to remember anything else other than that horrible thing.”

Grundy had admittedly come in hot, many staff members agreed, but it didn’t seem to matter how they couched their concerns. Employees continued to push to make sure that the center’s research projects were both rigorous and responsive to community needs, but the issues they raised in response to Kendi’s “theory of change” document never seemed to get fully resolved. “He’s communicating one thing,” one person said. “Behind the curtain, he’s behaving a very different kind of way.” Redwood and several others said that if someone was too persistent about a concern, Kendi would slow or stop his communication with that person. “If someone disagrees or someone is being vocal, you can’t just get rid of them,” she wanted to tell him. “Like, this is how you breed distrust.”

Redwood ultimately decided that Kendi wasn’t interested in building consensus around a shared mission. “Only he had the ideas,” she said. “We were there to execute on his ideas.” Redwood resigned in October 2022.

In a memo to The Times, Kendi disputed many of the staff’s recollections of his leadership. “This is not me, and anyone close to me, who has worked with me for a long time, knows that I’m open to constructive criticism as a writer and a thinker and a leader,” he wrote. Many progressive advocacy groups, Kendi pointed out, have been torn apart by internal clashes in recent years, conflicts that he said were driven by employees who “care more about performing their radicalism” than working to “improve the lives of everyday people.” “Former employees constantly deauthorized me as the director of the center — not because they were against hierarchy — but to assume authority for themselves,” he wrote.

Even before Redwood’s departure, Kendi told me, he realized the center was in financial trouble. He was far from the only nonprofit leader caught short as funding for racial-justice work collapsed after 2020. Funders that doused organizations with cash in the wake of George Floyd’s murder proved unwilling or unable to sustain their commitment, and layoffs were taking place across the sector, even at large nonprofits like the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The center had gone from raising $40 million in 2020 to a fraction of that — $420,000 — the next year.

In June 2023, after he went on parental leave, Kendi approached university leaders with the idea of switching to a fellowship model, which could adjust its number of awards to fluctuations in fund-raising. He told the staff only that he would be announcing some major changes when he returned from leave. Dawna Johnson, who succeeded Redwood as executive director, was left to manage a staff frustrated by being kept in the dark. “I think the staff thought I knew more than I actually did, as far as what the future of the center was,” she told me. “He’s like, Just don’t spend money, essentially, which is kind of difficult in an organization that needs to move forward.” (Kendi denies that he said anything like this to Johnson, who remains in her role today.)

Kendi spent the next three months taking care of his newborn daughter, Imara, and his wife, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer while pregnant. In his absence, at another staff retreat, four employees stood up and spoke in turn about the problems at the center. Much of the staff had just learned that the center agreed to partner with the D.E.I. arm of the consulting company Deloitte, which does work for the police and prisons, on designing an antiracism training for corporate workplaces. “Why wasn’t this shared with the broader staff sooner, as a potential high-risk partnership that could impact the relationships we are forging with movement leaders?” one person said. “Why are we contemplating this partnership that arguably goes against our values?”

Kendi, who identifies as a police and prison abolitionist, suggested that donations from corporations could be seen as a “form of reparations,” and he stressed to me that the Deloitte agreement “allowed us to control the products from design to delivery.” He once again dismissed the critics at the retreat as “performative radicals” of the sort that have been “causing all kinds of havoc in Black-led social justice organizations for years, claiming that they are against hierarchy when they really are against being directed by a Black person.” He thought they were being hypocritical in objecting to the Deloitte partnership because they “do not object to personally having profiles on social media corporations that platform copaganda, or buying goods from retailers employing incarcerated labor in their supply chains, or using technology from corporations providing carceral states with technologies of surveillance.”

When I asked the employees about this, one of them called Kendi’s comments about hypocrisy a “deflection tactic.” She stressed that the staff was not making a demand but asking for an open dialogue — or at least a clearly articulated rationale — about decisions that affected them. His response fit a clear pattern, they thought, of believing that employees were trying to undermine him when they really just cared about the work. “I understand he’s coming from a place of trauma,” another told me. “He’s criticized unfairly and through a racist lens constantly. I do understand it. But then to distort that into an inability to receive feedback that’s going to ensure the success and usefulness of the center — that’s where it becomes a problem.”

In September, Kendi fired 19 of the center’s 36 employees in a series of Zoom meetings. Many told me they could understand the layoffs given the financial climate, but to change the model from an ambitious organization that had pledged to drive social change to one that handed out academic fellowships felt like a betrayal of the mission. The abruptness of the decision forced the staff to scramble to find other homes for projects, including a research program supporting Boston-area organizers on a campaign to challenge family policing in schools, for which they were in the midst of sensitive interviews with affected parents and caregivers. Breaking promises they’d made to grass-roots partners was what bothered her team most, said DeCruz, the head of the Advocacy office, because equitable and sustained relationships between communities and advocates build a strong network — a movement aligned on its goals. Pulling out damaged those relationships.

Though some staff members told me they appreciated Kendi — “My life forever, forever changed because I worked for someone who pushed me to envision what’s possible,” one said — many others had become darkly cynical about him. The most vocal among them was Grundy, who took to Twitter calling Kendi a “grifter” and fueling the rumor that he might have stolen funds. Redwood tried to have empathy. She imagined what it must be like to be constantly attacked — to have your intelligence insulted, your motives questioned. “I wonder if some of the secrecy and paranoid behavior came about as a result of that,” she told me. “I have no idea, and I had to just eventually stop trying to figure it out and just move on, because I couldn’t understand how the person I met when he was at American, when I sat down with him for lunch, the person who appeared to be so humble, so committed — and I still think he is committed — could be the person that I worked for. It is not something that I have ever been able to understand.”

Several people stressed to me that Kendi’s weaknesses as a leader were not as important as the larger forces that surrounded his leadership — the opportunism of white-led institutions, the boom and bust of trend-chasing nonprofit funding, the commodification of Black thought and activism. I asked Boston University to comment on a complaint I heard from the staff, that its administration had failed to provide adequate oversight. “Boston University provided significant financial and administrative support to Dr. Kendi and the center. Dr. Kendi did not always accept the support,” a spokesperson wrote. “In hindsight, and with the fuller knowledge of the organizational problems that arose, the university should have done more to insist on additional oversight.”

The spokesperson also said that the decision to end the center’s projects was Kendi’s choice. “Several different models were discussed with Dr. Kendi, including bringing many of the projects to completion over the next two years and lessening the impact on staff,” he wrote. “However, Dr. Kendi’s preference was to terminate the ongoing projects and ask the funders to repurpose the funds for his new endeavor.” (In a written response, Kendi accused the interim university administration of trying to undermine the center’s work. “The center has faced more oversight and scrutiny than every other center at B.U. from the Office of Research and this interim B.U. administration,” he wrote. “I’m disappointed that this interim B.U. administration is giving The Times a version of events that doesn’t reconcile with the facts.”)

The last time I saw Kendi in person was in January, when he came to New York to promote his newest book, a young readers’ adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon,” based on her 1927 interviews with Cudjo Lewis, one of the last survivors of the Middle Passage from Africa. That night, Kendi was doing an event at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn Heights, where the streets were salt-streaked after a light snowstorm and white string lights glowed on a tree outside. One of the three personal-security officers he brought with him — bearded Black men in black peacoats and dress pants, fitted with earpieces — was checking bags at the door.

Kendi was standing by a wall of books in a teal blazer, his pocket square in place. For a while, he said, he stopped doing many public events because of his security concerns, but he realized it had contributed to his feeling alienated and embattled. “Not doing live book signings prevented me from engaging with the people who were reading and appreciating my work,” he told me later. Going on tour again had “helped tremendously,” he said. But he didn’t want to be away from home long while Sadiqa was in treatment. “It’s incredibly difficult to witness someone you care about deeply facing so much pain and loss,” he said. “I’d much rather just be the one facing that pain.”

Boston University had cleared him and the center of grant mismanagement, but he was still waiting for Korn Ferry, the management consulting firm hired by the administration, to finish its culture inquiry, and he continued to attribute any dysfunction at the center to the hardships of the pandemic and employees who repeatedly contested his leadership. He was coordinating with the university on the center’s next phase, he said, but the work that felt most meaningful to him at the moment was “getting back to my roots as a writer.” He was at work on his next big project, a contemporary political history.

Kendi has spun out 13 books since “How to Be an Antiracist” in 2019, 10 of which are adaptations of his or others’ work for children. Since becoming a father, he told me, it has become even more important to him to reach young readers — particularly Black kids like him who may have internalized racist ideas about themselves. Earlier that day, Kendi spoke to 250 kids at a middle school elsewhere in Brooklyn, taking questions from a panel of seventh and eighth graders. “Barracoon” was the latest in a series of books he was adapting by Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance ethnographer he has called the “greatest antiracist novelist of the interwar era.” “I wanted it to read like a grandparent sharing their difficult life story with care and love to their grandchild,” Kendi wrote on Instagram.

During the talk, Kendi told the audience that there are some Black people who, from the way they maneuver in the world, you can tell are spiritual maroons. “This is the person who truly is living and navigating from the standpoint of a freedom,” he said. “They’re unafraid or not worried at all about the white gaze. They’re operating and navigating the world based on their own destiny, based on what they want.” Hurston, who traveled throughout the South, Jamaica and Haiti collecting folklore from the descendants of slaves, was one of those people, Kendi said.

Listening to him, I wondered how often he felt like one of them, too. I got the impression that Kendi spent a lot of time in his head, in that defensive pose, anticipating or parrying attacks from his critics. When I asked him later where he and Sadiqa had gone on vacation over the New Year holiday, he declined even to name the country for fear that “bad-faith people” would try to figure out where they had stayed and how much their hotel room cost. I told him it seemed as though he devoted a lot of thought to how something he said or did could be used against him by the least generous person on the internet. “I certainly don’t want to provide fodder for it,” he told me.

Kendi is right that there’s a mess of misinformation about what he believes. He has become a cipher for the unfinished national conversation about the post-George Floyd moment — the outrage and wild hope of the protests, the reactionary anger, the disillusionment. In tying together racism’s two senses — the personal and the systemic — Kendi has helped many more Americans understand that they are responsible not only for the ideas in their heads but also for the impact they have on the world. But this gap between intention and action, so core to his thinking, is where all the hard work takes place, DeCruz told me. That’s where organizing and movement-building happens, where you practice the kind of world you want to live in. “Having a shared language is important,” she said, but “it’s just the first step.”

[beardedmrbean]

April 8 (UPI) -- Elon Musk called for a judge on Brazil's Supreme to quit or be impeached after Justice Alexandre de Moraes launched an inquiry into his X social media platform in an escalating row over misinformation dating back to the Jan. 8 riots in Brasilia in 2023.

In a post on X on Sunday, Musk, the owner and chief technology officer of the company, said court decisions forcing X to "block certain popular accounts in Brazil" along with a gagging order preventing X from talking about the action were unconstitutional and that the company would no longer comply.

"Coming shortly, X will publish everything demanded by de Moraes and how those requests violate Brazilian law. This judge has brazenly and repeatedly betrayed the constitution and people of Brazil. He should resign or be impeached," Musk wrote.

"These are the most draconian demands of any country on Earth!"

But in a response to a late Saturday night post by Musk threatening to unblock the accounts, Moraes announced Sunday he was adding Musk to his ongoing investigation of "digital militias" and the opening of a fresh inquiry into Musk to "prevent the eventual practice of obstruction of justice, a criminal organization and incitement to crime."

Accusing Musk of mounting a disinformation campaign against the Supreme Court, he imposed daily fines $19,775 for each profile reactivated by the platform.

X's Global Government Affairs team said in a post that many of the details supporting the action had been obscured.

"We do not know the reasons these blocking orders have been issued. We do not know which posts are alleged to violate the law. We are prohibited from saying which court or judge issued the order, or on what grounds. We are prohibited from saying which accounts are impacted. We are threatened with daily fines if we fail to comply," it wrote.

"We believe that such orders are not in accordance with the Marco Civil da Internet or the Brazilian Federal Constitution, and we will challenge the orders legally where possible."

The accounts in question are thought to be connected to posts on X by far-right activists and figures that may have helped fuel the January 2023 storming of Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace by thousands of rioters supporting former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Moraes is also investigating Bolsonaro and his supporters for their alleged involvement in an abortive coup to overthrow the result of the October 2022 presidential election that brought President Lula da Silva to office.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jodi Kantor at NYT:

After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag. One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors. The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times. Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there said in interviews.

While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.

The mere impression of political opinion can be a problem, the ethics experts said. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia. This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said. Interviews show that the justice’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, had been in a dispute with another family on the block over an anti-Trump sign on their lawn, but given the timing and the starkness of the symbol, neighbors interpreted the inverted flag as a political statement by the couple. The longstanding ethics code for the lower courts, as well as the recent one adopted by the Supreme Court, stresses the need for judges to remain independent and avoid political statements or opinions on matters that could come before them.

“You always want to be proactive about the appearance of impartiality,” Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge and the director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute, said in an interview. “The best practice would be to make sure that nothing like that is in front of your house.” The court has also repeatedly warned its own employees against public displays of partisan views, according to guidelines circulated to the staff and reviewed by The Times. Displaying signs or bumper stickers is not permitted, according to the court’s internal rule book and a 2022 memo reiterating the ban on political activity.

Asked if these rules also apply to justices, the court declined to respond. The exact duration that the flag flew outside the Alito residence is unclear. In an email from Jan. 18, 2021, reviewed by The Times, a neighbor wrote to a relative that the flag had been upside down for several days at that point. In recent years, the quiet sanctuary of his street, with residents who are Republicans and Democrats, has tensed with conflict, neighbors said. Around the 2020 election, a family on the block displayed an anti-Trump sign with an expletive. It apparently offended Mrs. Alito and led to an escalating clash between her and the family, according to interviews.

[...] During Mr. Trump’s quest to win, and then subvert, the 2020 election, the gesture took off as never before, becoming “really established as a symbol of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign,” according to Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. A flood of social media posts exhorted Trump supporters to flip over their flags or purchase new ones to display upside down. “If Jan. 6 rolls around and Biden is confirmed by the Electoral College our nation is in distress!!” a poster wrote on Patriots.win, a forum for Trump supporters, garnering over a thousand “up” votes. “If you cannot go to the DC rally then you must do your duty and show your support for our president by flying the flag upside down!!!!”

Local newspapers from Lexington, Ky., to Sun City, Ariz., to North Jersey wrote about the flags cropping up nearby. A few days before the inauguration, a Senate candidate in Minnesota flew an upside-down flag on his campaign vehicle. Hanging an inverted flag outside a home was “an explicit signifier that you are part of this community that believes America has been taken and needs to be taken back,” Mr. Newhouse said. This spring, the justices are already laboring under suspicion by many Americans that whatever decisions they make about the Jan. 6 cases will be partisan. Justice Clarence Thomas has declined to recuse himself despite the direct involvement of his wife, Virginia Thomas, in efforts to overturn the election. Now, with decisions in the Jan. 6 cases expected in just a few weeks, a similar debate may unfurl about Justice Alito, the ethics experts said. “It really is a question of appearances and the potential impact on public confidence in the court,” Mr. Fogel said. “I think it would be better for the court if he weren’t involved in cases arising from the 2020 election. But I’m pretty certain that he will see that differently.”

SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito's house had an upside down American Flag on their flagpole in the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential election in protest of President Biden's win and in support of what Big Lie proponents falsely believe the 2020 election was "stolen" from Donald Trump.

This is a downright treasonous move from a SCOTUS justice!

[newstfionline]

Sunday, October 6, 2024

When will the power return? Weary Carolinas residents long for relief (AP) The weary and worn residents of Julianne Johnson’s neighborhood in Asheville have been getting by without electricity since Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeast last week and upended their lives. They’ve been cooking on propane stoves and using dry erase boards to keep up with local happenings while wondering when the lights would come back on. Johnson, who has a 5-year-old son and works for a land conservation group, received a text from Duke Energy promising her power would be restored by Friday night. But as of midday, utility poles and wires were still draped at odd angles across the streets, pulled down by mangled trees. “I have no idea what’s next,” said Johnson, whose family does have some power thanks to a generator. “Just the breadth of this over the whole region, it’s kind of amazing.” Nearly 700,000 homes and businesses—mostly in the Carolinas and Georgia—were still without electricity Friday, according to poweroutage.us. That’s an improvement over the more than 2 million customers without power five days ago.

Tropical Storm Milton forms in the Gulf of Mexico, expected to make landfall in Florida this week (Yahoo News) Tropical Storm Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday and is forecast to bring “life-threatening impacts” to Florida—a state just ravaged by Hurricane Helene—next week. In its latest advisory, National Hurricane Center (NHC) meteorologists warned the forecast shows the system nearing near “major hurricane strength” when it makes landfall along Florida’s west coast. “An intense hurricane with multiple life-threatening hazards is likely to affect the west coast of the Florida Peninsula next week,” the advisory stated.

A Pentagon Debate: Are U.S. Deployments Containing the Fighting, or Inflaming It? (NYT) As the Israeli offensive in Lebanon expands to include ground incursions and intensifying airstrikes, senior Pentagon officials are discussing whether the enhanced U.S. military presence in the region is containing a widening war, as they had hoped, or inflaming it. In the 12 months since Hamas attacked Israel, launching a conflict that includes Yemen, Iran and Lebanon, the Pentagon has sent a bristling array of weaponry to the region, including aircraft carriers, guided missile destroyers, amphibious assault ships and fighter squadrons. The Pentagon announced this week that it would add a “few thousand” more troops to the equation and essentially doubled its air power in the region. President Biden says the U.S. hardware and extra troops are there to help defend Israel and to protect other American troops on bases throughout the region. But several Pentagon officials expressed concern that Israel was waging an increasingly aggressive campaign against the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy, knowing that an armada of American warships and dozens of attack planes stand ready to help blunt any Iranian response.

Supreme Court will weigh Mexico’s $10 billion lawsuit against U.S. gun makers (AP) The Supreme Court said Friday it will decide whether to block a $10 billion lawsuit Mexico filed against leading U.S. gun manufacturers over allegations their commercial practices have helped caused much bloodshed there. The gun makers asked the justices to undo an appeals court ruling that allowed the lawsuit to go forward despite broad legal protections for the firearm industry. A federal judge has since tossed out the bulk of the lawsuit on other legal grounds, but Mexico could appeal that dismissal. Mexico argues the companies knew weapons were being sold to traffickers who smuggled them into Mexico and decided to cash in on that market. The government estimates 70% of the weapons trafficked into Mexico come from the United States.

Brazil’s Largest Mafia Is Entering Politics (NYT) The city of São Paulo, Brazil, is about to elect its next mayor, but the talk of the town is about a party that’s not on the ballot on Sunday: The “party of crime,” or as it’s formally known, the First Capital Command (P.C.C.). Police officials recently claimed that the criminal group moved almost $1.5 billion through fintech companies, using some funds to finance candidates around São Paulo State. And one of the front-runners for São Paulo mayor, the far-right fitness coach and influencer Pablo Marçal, is running under a small political party whose president was caught on tape bragging about his P.C.C. ties earlier this year. (The party president has denied the audio is of him, but reporters from the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo say they confirmed its authenticity with six independent sources.) While organized crime has long played a substantial role in local politics in countries such as Colombia and Mexico, this was not as much the case in Brazil until recently. Now Brazil faces a reckoning: Curb the criminal organization’s power or watch its influence grow. Once organized crime money floods into politics and the private sector—as it did in 1980s Colombia and in Mexico in the decades since—it’s difficult to reverse. It can make politicians more beholden to mafias than voters, judges more responsive to crime bosses than their victims and firms allied with crime more profitable than their rule-abiding rivals.

Floods inundate Thailand’s northern tourist city of Chiang Mai (AP) Chiang Mai, Thailand’s northern city popular with tourists, was inundated by widespread flooding Saturday as its main river overflowed its banks following heavy seasonal rainfall. Authorities ordered some evacuations and said they were working to pump water out of residential areas and clear obstructions from waterways and drains to help water recede faster. Dozens of shelters were set up across the city to accommodate residents whose home were flooded. The Chiang Mai city government said the water level of the Ping River, which runs along the eastern edge of the city, was at critically high levels and was rising since Friday.

One year in, war casts a shadow over every aspect of life in Israel (AP) At a busy Tel Aviv entertainment district, diners spill into outdoor seating and clink glasses as music fills the air. There’s laughter, there’s life. But all around the patrons, staring down from lampposts and shop windows, are pictures of hostages held in Gaza, stark reminders that Israel is at war and forever scarred by the deadliest attack in its history. As Israel’s war with Hamas reaches its one-year mark, it can seem on the surface that much of life in the country has returned to normal. But with many still reeling from Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, hostages remaining in captivity and a new front of war with Hezbollah in the north, many Israelis feel depressed, despondent and angry as the war stretches into its second year. Uncertainty over the future has cast a pall over virtually every part of daily life, even as people try to maintain a sense of normalcy.

Israeli airstrikes rock southern suburbs of Beirut and cut off a key crossing into Syria (AP) Israel carried out another series of punishing airstrikes Friday, hitting suburban Beirut and cutting off the main border crossing between Lebanon and Syria for tens of thousands of people fleeing the Israeli bombardment of the Hezbollah militant group. The overnight blasts in Beirut’s southern suburbs sent huge plumes of smoke and flames into the night sky and shook buildings kilometers (miles) away in the Lebanese capital. Additional strikes sent people running for cover in streets littered with rubble in the Dahiyeh neighborhood, where at least one building was leveled and cars were burned out. Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported more than 10 consecutive airstrikes in the area. Some 1,400 Lebanese, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians, have been killed and some 1.2 million driven from their homes since Israel escalated its strikes in late September aiming to cripple Hezbollah and push it away from the countries’ shared border.

Lebanon's Christian cities become havens (NZZ/Switzerland) Even several days after the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, an all-important figure in Lebanese politics, the country seems paralyzed by fear. Christians are worried that they will once again come under attack. Most of them did not want this war. Now they have to watch powerlessly as their country goes under. This is particularly noticeable in Zahle. The city on the eastern edge of the Lebanon Mountains is considered the last outpost of Lebanese Christianity. The flat landscape beyond is mostly home to alternating Shiite and Sunni villages. “Zahle has always been on its own,” says Assad Zogaib, the city's mayor, while he sits on the second floor of a palatial building and smokes a thick cigar. Because of their exposed location, the residents have developed a special sense of community: “We look after our own affairs. There is cleanliness and order in our city.” Zahle is indeed a sparkling clean city­—in stark contrast to the poor, rundown villages in the nearby Bekaa. There's a Dunkin' Donuts, freshly paved roads, neatly trimmed trees, and cafes where people can sit on the banks of a bubbling mountain stream. In addition, Zahle is the only city in economically devastated Lebanon that produces its own electricity and almost always has power. It is also the temporary home of around 15,000 desperate refugees from other parts of Lebanon. Neither East Beirut nor the mountains north of it—where the heartland of Lebanon's mostly Maronite Christians lies—or Zahle have been the targets of bombs so far. Instead, these areas are becoming a place of refuge for the now one million displaced people.

Relatives say a whole family was killed in Israel’s deadliest West Bank strike since Oct. 7 (AP) An Israeli airstrike on a West Bank cafe that the military said targeted Palestinian militants also killed a family of four, including two young children, relatives told The Associated Press on Friday. The strike slammed into a three-story building in the Tulkarem refugee camp late Thursday, setting it on fire, destroying a popular cafe and killing at least 18 Palestinians, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. It was the deadliest strike in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war nearly a year ago. On Friday, paramedics searched the rubble inside the blasted-out coffee shop, gathering human remains into small boxes. Among the dead was the Abu Zahra family: Muhammad, a bakery worker; his wife, Saja; and their two children, Sham, 8, and Karam, 6, according to the man’s brother, Mustafa Abu Zahra, who said the family lived above the coffee shop. He added that one of Muhammad’s brothers-in-law was also in the apartment at the time and was killed.

Solar power companies are growing fast in Africa, where 600 million still lack electricity (AP) Companies that bring solar power to some of the poorest homes in Central and West Africa are said to be among the fastest growing on a continent whose governments have long struggled to address some of the world’s worst infrastructure. The often African-owned companies operate in areas where the vast majority of people live disconnected from the electricity grid, and offer products ranging from solar-powered lamps that allow children to study at night to elaborate home systems that power kitchen appliances and plasma televisions. Central and West Africa have some of the world’s lowest electrification rates. In West Africa, where 220 million people live without power, this is as low as 8%, according to the World Bank. Many rely on expensive kerosene and other fuels that fill homes and businesses with fumes and risk causing fires.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

The January 6th riots were obviously a national embarrassment. The January 6th theatre we’ve witnessed since is a global, historical, unadulterated farce.

Yesterday’s partisan committee hearing on January 6th was nothing short of a national embarrassment. No doubt the January 6th riots were, too. Had pipsqueak Pence done his job, the country would look far different today. But two wrongs don’t make a right. How Democrats continue to abuse their power for the partisan persecution of their political opponents will remain a stain on America’s body politick for generations to come.

The most humiliating moments – especially for the audiences watching from around the world – saw all four “stars” of the “show” crying for the television cameras.

Crying over havoc.

Harry Dunn, Adam Kinzinger, Aquilino Gonell, and Adam Schiff all boo-hooed on international television, signaling nothing but weakness to America’s adversaries. But why should they care? These men are more concerned about climate change activist shaman than they are about the Chinese Communist Party. More on that, later. Schiff, recall, was once the latest in a string of purported titans who were set to “take down Trump,” in the failed impeachment proceedings. Yesterday, he reverted to his natural state of sobbing little manlet, keen to play up his “human” side for the cameras. A crock, if ever there was one. ‘The Worst Attack EVER!’

The narrative has suggested that January 6th was “the worst attack” on the United States since, like, ever. The moderate position appears to be that it was the worst attack since my people (the British) burned the White House down. And yet, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of American history would righty guffaw at such claims. Hell, anyone with a functioning memory should be able to see through the pantomimish postulation. Consider 1954, when four armed Puerto Ricans took positions in the gallery overlooking the chamber of the House of Representatives and opened fire. They wounded five Members of Congress: two Republicans and three Democrats. It was a pretty heinous attack. Of course Jimmy Carter commuted the terrorists’ life sentences later on.

Or how about in 1971, when a left-wing protester planted an actual bomb that actually exploded outside the Senate.

“The Congressional reaction was generally restrained,” the New York Times reported at the time. No such luck this time.

Or consider 1983, when a massive blast tore through the Capitol building, luckily killing no one, but leading to the modern identification requirements needed to enter the building. In a way, this attack killed the openness of America’s legislature, which had been almost totally open to the public prior. The culprits – Laura Whitehorn, Marilyn Buck, and Linda Evans – were all radical Marxists.

Whitehorn served 14 years and is now a lauded figure on the left. Buck served 25 years before being released to die from cancer a month later. Evans served 11 years, got parole, and then had her sentence commuted by Bill Clinton.

You could also take the 1915 bombing, carried out by Harvard University professor Frank Holt aka Eric Muenter. Or perhaps more contemporaneously, the storming of the Senate by hundreds of left-wing activists intent on stopping the confirmation of a Supreme Court judge.

Over 60 Secret Service personnel were assaulted and injured when far-left activists descended on Trump’s White House in 2020, frustrated at the then-President’s seeming cruise to re-election. Shortly after, Democrats would abandon plans to “storm” or “besiege” the White House and fixated their efforts on changing election laws around the country, as The National Pulse originally reported. Of course, there are a number of similar incidents, none of which attracted the condemnation nor the committee hearings as January 6th.

(Hat-tip to Yossi Gestetner on Twitter for assembling this list of incidents).

Friends in High Places.

Much like some of the Marxist revolutionaries who found comfort in the arms of Carter and Clinton, some of yesterday’s characters have friends in high places, too.

Police officer Harry Dunn, who spent a not insignificant amount of time in yesterday’s hearing ragging on America and “racism,” appears to be represented by long-time Democrat lelgal creep Mark Zaid.

Zaid, if you recall the name, is the guy who very much enjoys frequenting Disney Land alone, as a grown man. His YouTube contained videos such as “Top 10 prettiest disney channel stars” and “Selena Gomez from child to women.”

(Zaid’s creepy YouTube page.)

Zaid – who once declared that a “coup” against President Trump was underway – is one of the most critical lawyers in Democratic Party circles. But he’s nowhere near as important as Dunn’s other mates: Nancy Pelosi and Jamie Raskin.

Raskin was another of the Democrats’ failed impeachment managers, against Trump. Pelosi, we all know, is drunk Satan.

Crooks and Dunn.

It boggles the mind how lawmakers and police officers can cry about feeling threatened during a committee meeting, but then make their partisan preferences so abundantly clear. No Republican on Capitol Hill could possibly feel safe again, after yesterday’s display. Not least because Dunn appears to be an ardent support of a Marxist movement, linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Black Lives Mao-tter.

Dunn’s Twitter page is adorned with BLM propaganda.  He doesn’t even try to hide it.

The same group that terrorized Washington, D.C. including the Capitol Hill neighborhoods Dunn is supposed to concern himself with is one of Dunn’s faves.

After they burned St. John’s Church, besieged the White House, lay waste to businesses across the Capitol, and injured and killed dozens across the country, Dunn endorsed BLM. Who’s the real danger to America?

(Dunn and daughter pose at ‘BLM Plaza’.)

But Dunn’s links to the group aren’t just concerning given their recent, domestic terrorist activities. BLM is a front organization for radical communists inspired by and working with the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, hostile foreign actors now have guns on the ground on Capitol Hill. Refresh your memory, if you need to, about the hardline Marxist authoritarian goals of the group: from praising mass murderer Mao to launching blatantly genocidal attacks on Israel. Forget just Republicans feeling unsafe around Dunn. Jewish Members of Congress and staffers on the Hill should probably watch out, given his subscribed ideology and thought leaders. Critical race theory proponents have also been on Chinese Communist-sponsored trips, as reported by The National Pulse.

Crying-on-Crying-on-Crying.

Naturally, in response to my live online commentary about the farcical nature of yesterday’s events, left-Twitter went mental. Again. Especially Luke O’Brien – himself a Chinese Communist-linked researcher who attempted to intimidate me by giving away where I like to drink in Washington, D.C., which is hardly a secret but O’Brien was obviously dog-whistling to his violent followers. In other words, their response to the children crying on television yesterday was to cry at me some more on Twitter. Truly a meta-pathetic American altercation. I hesitate to say it since this country has been so kind to me, but folks, the whole world is now laughing at you. From your Women’s Soccer Team celebrating a 3-0 loss, to your athletes winning awards for dropping out of the Olympics, to your elections being an evident farce, to your lawmakers and elected officials crying on television. This isn’t the America anyone from abroad falls in love with. This is a national and international embarrassment. And it’s only just the beginning. Full Fraud Farce.

We know the full fraud farce is coming into full effect. As I posted to GETTR at the unreasonable hour of airport-o-clock this morning, “One of the most deeply concerning parts of the political establishment’s stupidity-arrogance complex is how easily fooled they’re going to be when nefarious actors and foreign agents plant fake, malicious “evidence” about political adversaries writ large. The state will rush to deny their own citizens the most fundamental rights. Trump/Russia was a very basic test case and US institutions totally failed.” Not only are Democrats willing to take the knee – even when they’re draped in the cloth of literal slavers – they’re willing to use the apparatus of state to aggressively and violently persecute the opponents of foreign, Communist, hostile powers.

China doesn’t need to start a war with the United States. They’ve started a war within the United States.

In search for intellectually unachievable omnipotence, Democrats are more than willing to fight it for them.

The January 6th riots were obviously a national embarrassment. The January 6th theatre we’ve witnessed since is a global, historical, unadulterated farce.

[climatecalling]

Honolulu has lost more than 5 miles of its famous beaches to sea level rise and storm surges. Sunny-day flooding during high tides makes many city roads impassable. ... The damage has left the city and county spending millions of dollars on repairs and infrastructure to try to adapt to the rising risks. ... Unwilling to have their taxpayers bear the full brunt of these costs, the city and county sued Sunoco LP, Exxon Mobil Corp. and other big oil companies in 2020. Their case – one of more than two dozen involving U.S. cities, counties and states suing the oil industry over climate change – just got a break from the U.S. Supreme Court. That has significantly increased their odds of succeeding. At stake in all of these cases is who pays for the staggering cost of a changing climate. Local and state governments that are suing want to hold the major oil companies responsible for the costs of responding to disasters that scientists are increasingly able to attribute to climate disruption and tie back to the fossil fuel industry. Several of the plaintiffs accuse the companies of lying to the public about their products’ risks in violation of state or local consumer protection laws that prohibit false advertising. ... It is unlikely that even substantial verdicts in these cases will come close to covering the full costs of damage from climate change. ... But for many of the communities most at risk from these disasters, every penny counts. We believe establishing the oil companies’ responsibility may also discourage further investments in fossil fuel production by banks and brokerage houses already nervous about the financial risks of climate disruption.

[joe-england]

- If you enjoy my work, PLEASE consider supporting me on Patreon! -

It seems like a good time to post some more of what I've been doing! I'm working on ten commissions in all, but these are clean enough to show off as works in progress.  Character portraits of Philomela for our good friend Simone Spinozzi, the mysterious Ze for SueZeev, a curvaceous demoness for Hat, and MihoshiK asked me to revisit Sally Southpaw as she leaves the shower.

This is fun and fulfilling work, though things are a little tough right now, to be honest.  I'm not moving as fast as I wish I could.  The time I find to create seems to shrink, and I honestly don't know how I can start the new comic with my current budget.  At the moment my Patreon campaign makes less than half of what it did at Zebra Girl's peak, which of course is perfectly understandable since the comic ended.  I was hoping to attract patrons and start earning more once I began producing Witch Warp, but right now I'm not sure I can even get started while money's this tight.  Certain issues have increased my familial responsibilities over the last few years, and I'm kind of scraping by.  These commissions were a way to make ends meet, but the comic's what I'm really aiming for.

I'll make a new post soon devoted to fundraising.  If I can elevate the bar to a thousand a month then I'll have breathing room and Witch Warp will finally get off the ground!  And more Pook pages!  And the Zebra Girl Omnibus, too!  Yes, I've been writing the commentary for three and a half years.  It took longer than I expected.  Everything does.

Anyway, thanks for being here.  For checking out my work!  There's more to come.  Some of these will be in color, and a couple have crazy backgrounds.  I gotta make 3-D models for reference.  And hey, thanks for listening!  It's good to get some of this off my shoulders.

You're listening, right?  Oh, of course you are.  You're cool.

Charity Shoutout:

Doctors Without Borders

Save the Children

GlobalGiving

Cheddar Storm for Wisconsin - Flip Wisconsin’s Supreme Court!

- Joe

[corndoggod]

Summer Storm Gumbo

“Have you heard of Meyer v Nebraska,” Charles asked. “It was a Supreme Court case from about 100 years ago….No. Ok. So shortly after World War I…”

Charles loves to talk so let me interrupt to tell you about Charles -- the best-dressed, most cosmopolitan man in all the Midwest. Whereas Cale prides himself on wearing the same shirt every day until it disintegrates, Charles is almost always immaculately dressed in a three-piece suit. The only time I didn’t see him in a suit I was horrified. Ghostly stalks emerged from his shorts as he emerged from the car, sunglasses and lotioned to replace me on a kayak trip on the Elkhorn river. (I was on deadline and panicking, and had to rush back to finish a cover story). Charles is a worldly man and has a working knowledge of many languages, has visited more countries than I could name, and has a nuanced command of world history and international politics, not to mention local politics. He has opinions, too, and loads of recommendations for wherever you might set foot, specializing in Portugal and Brazil. (he once described the Portugese diet as a drunk man let loose in a kitchen dead set on giving himself a delicious heart attack.) I never understood what he did or how he financed his lifestyle, but he was a globetrotting Cadillac of a man, reminding me of a time when writers lived in hotels for months on end.

Anyway, in Charles fashion he went on to explain how a Nebraska teacher plaintiff of German descent challenged a school policy directing teachers to teach exclusively in English. But the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional because there’s no national language and you can’t compel speech.

This anecdote capped off a conversation about language and identity in the courts. We’d been talking about pastagate, a scandal in Quebec involving an Italian restaurant that used the English word for pasta on their menu rather than the French pâtes.

Graham had invited me and half the town over for a cookout, and we congregated on the porch with dollar beers and bowls of gumbo. Graham could be president if he wasn’t so cynical and glued to the bar stool. Everybody loved him and every time I went to his place there was someone new in attendance. He was generous to a fault, inviting random people he saw on the street to come over, especially if they looked like they needed a friend. And this sometimes got him and us in trouble. Like when he invited a guy from a halfway house over and handed him a beer only to learn after he took a long gulp that he was in recovery. Graham laughed and said, “Well shit, you want another?”

The rain glittered in and out of the jaundiced street lights and lightning knifed through the night sky. Aside from gumbo, there was also cheeseburgers, though we arrived too late to taste, and perfectly crisped sweet potato fries and chicken wings my brother seasoned with his grubby fingers.  

Three summers ago I moved back home to live on the lam and get serious about the writing thing. And by serious, I mean I woke up when I wanted, read magazines for an hour, pecked at my computer for a while at the coffee shop and then biked to Love Library to peck some more before going to climb with my brother and then sit at the bar waiting for anyone I knew to show up. That never took long. But after a few weeks, I lost faith in my novel and started writing personal essays instead. It was one of the happiest, most carefree, least productive periods of my life. I biked through England, France and Spain with my brother. I met Celina. I wrote the best, most personal thing I’ve ever written.

Anyway, within the first week of moving into Max and Cat’s extra bedroom a tornado warning sounded. I ran over to the gas station to buy some Modelo’s and plopped down on the porch swing to wait for the wind and for Max and Cat to get home from work. But first came a full trash can flying down the alley, which spooked me enough to crawl down into the basement.

Back at Graham’s, we drank all the beers, like we always do. But it was Sunday and most people headed home to work the next day. I had work too and it was stressing me out, but I stayed to drink a twisted tea and talk about Graham’s cyst he got kayaking the entire length of the Missouri River last summer. “I either gotta lay flat on my belly for a couple of weeks or they’re gonna sew up my cheeks,” he said. “But how would you shit?” “I don’t know.”

He also told me he was on the chopping block at his job where he’d worked for thirteen years. The day before he was up in Omaha orchestrating a protest outside the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting to pressure Warren Buffett, “the oracle of Omaha,” and his worshipers to eliminate their investments in coal.

Then we went to the basement where I played the two best ping pong games of my life. I won’t the first against Janelle and lost the second against Josh, who won a tournament at the Hot Mess earlier that day.

Days like these I feel like everything is worth writing because I finally feel like I know something. My friends are famous and I know as much trivia as any super fan, but no one else knows about them. I also know these burnt skies, this deep thirst and the smells of clipped grass and upturned soil and manure.  

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Déjà coup: How election lies sparked the violent attack on Brazil’s government

Election lies lead to election violence.

Horrifying images careening out of Brazil are reminding Americans — and the world — of the high cost that election disinformation brings with it as mobs of people, fueled by conspiracy theories, stormed the South American country’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential offices in a violent outburst of chaos that overwhelmed authorities over the weekend.

The scenes that played out on January 8 shared a striking commonality with those that played out in the US on television screens almost two years to the day earlier. And, like in the US, the warning signs were apparent for some time, with election deniers mobilizing on social media ahead of the attack.

“We did see this coming,” Wendy Via, the president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Associated Press. “This doesn’t just happen in Brazil, or the United States. This is a global problem. Should we compare what happened in Brazil to Jan. 6? I say 100%, because it’s the same playbook.”

Continue reading.