#they designed a new flag for every nation and looked for the political parties and heads of state and dishes and everything

[al-mayriti]

loving maps and being an alternate history nerd is so complicated because just the other day i found this account on instagram that was doing an 'ideal world' map country by country, with tons of really cool information, so i spent a good amount of time going through all of their page, trying to see if they had done spain.

unfortunately, they had. and i had to see this so now you have to see it too (catalunya and euskadi are independent in their map so at least there's some positiives i guess)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez at Rolling Stone:

Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, is incensed about seeing rainbow Pride flags during Pride Month, according to a new recording obtained by Rolling Stone. If it were up to her, she would be flying a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag in response. Or she might design her own flag, one sporting the Italian word for “shame.”  In recent weeks, Martha-Ann Alito has been at the center of a national firestorm over two flags seen flying at their residences that have been associated with right-wing movements that question the legitimacy of the results of the 2020 election. Justice Alito has blamed his wife for flying those flags — and rebuffed calls from Democratic lawmakers to recuse himself from upcoming decisions in cases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Like her husband, Mrs. Alito is unbowed by the criticism and controversy — as she makes clear in comments recorded by liberal documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor. Windsor, posing as a Christian conservative, spoke at length with Mrs. Alito at a dinner reception hosted by the Supreme Court Historical Society last week. Windsor attended the dinner as a dues-paying member and bought a ticket; a colleague joined her.

Rolling Stone first reported on Windsor’s conversation with Justice Alito on Monday. While several outlets have recently relayed stories of Martha-Ann’s tense interactions with neighbors — apparently in response to a sign opposing Donald Trump — Windsor’s recording presents the justice’s wife in her own words. The audio, provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, paints a picture of a right-wing ideologue that matches with the private reputation that Mrs. Alito has developed in the Republican Party and judicial social circuits in the D.C. area and beyond.

In the most jarring moment in the recording, Windsor attempts to pose the same prompt that she presented to Justice Alito, about how, in order to take America back to “a godly place,” conservatives need to win. She doesn’t complete the thought before Mrs. Alito starts complaining about having to see rainbow Pride flags in June, Pride month.

“You know what I want?” Mrs. Alito says. “I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag, because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.” Referencing her husband, Mrs. Alito says, “He’s like, ‘Oh, please don’t put up a flag.’ I said, ‘I won’t do it because I am deferring to you. But when you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day, maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags.’ They’ll be all kinds. I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It’s white and has yellow and orange flames around it. And in the middle is the word ‘vergogna.’ ‘Vergogna’ in Italian means shame — vergogna. V-E-R-G-O-G-N-A. Vergogna.”  “Shame, shame, shame on you,” she adds. (Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority ruled that businesses can discriminate against LGBTQ customers.) In other points of the conversation with Windsor, Martha-Ann Alito agrees there is no negotiating with the radical Left. She claims “the Femnazis believe that [Justice Alito] should control me,” adding: “So they’ll go to hell. He never controls me.”

[...] Mrs. Alito has for years harbored a disdain and bitterness towards others in the D.C. elite, whom she has bashed for supposedly excluding or shunning her and her husband, and for being too mean about them and their unabashedly conservative beliefs. Sources add that Mrs. Alito also has a longstanding reputation in influential GOP circles for ranting about politics, the culture wars, the Left, and the burning grudges she’s nursed since at least the George W. Bush era.  

Rolling Stone’s report on Martha-Ann Alito’s unhinged temper tantrum about the LGBTQ+ Pride Flag and her whining about “woke liberals” is something to behold. She is just as much as a fanatical right-wing extremist as her husband Samuel is.

[huanjiao]

Journal Entry 8- Hannah

Triumph of the Will is a German propaganda movie from 1935. It was directed by Leni Riefenstahl and shows what happened at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1934. Many people think the movie is a gem of propaganda filmmaking, but it's also controversial and hard to understand because it praises Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Propaganda is the spreading of information or ideas in order to change or control public opinion, usually for political or ideological reasons. Triumph of the Will is a great example of advertising because it tries to make the Nazi Party and its leaders, especially Adolf Hitler, look like they are strong, brave, and attractive. One of the most obvious pieces of propaganda in the movie is how Hitler is shown as a messiah figure who will save Germany and make it great. This is done with carefully written talks that are given with a lot of feeling and passion and are supported by dramatic music and images. In one scene, Hitler gives a speech in front of a huge crowd, and the camera is placed low so that he looks bigger than life. The crowd is shown to be in awe and to hang on every word he says, as if they were watching a miracle. This is a clear example of how propaganda can be used to play with people's feelings and build a cult of personality around a leader. Design semiotics is the study of how signs and symbols in design tell us what they mean. 

Design semiotics are used a lot in Triumph of the Will to show Nazi ideas and propaganda. The swastika is one of the most important images in the movie. It is shown a lot throughout the movie. The swastika is a strong sign that represents the Nazi Party and its ideas of racial purity, nationalism, and authority. The swastika is used in different ways in the movie, like on flags, clothing, and in the way buildings are built, to create a visual language that supports Nazi propaganda. Color is another way that the movie uses design semiotics. The Nazi Party used black, white, and red as its main colors, and this is mirrored in the way the picture looks. When black-and-white video is used, it gives a sense of history, and when red is added, it gives a sense of drama and urgency. This color scheme is used the same way throughout the whole movie. This creates a strong visual language that supports the idea that the movie is Nazi propaganda. 

In Triumph of the Will, graphic design is used to make strong visual messages that support Nazi propaganda. Typography is one of the most striking examples of visual design in the movie. The film has a font that was made just for the Nazi Party and is used a lot. This font is strong and authoritative, with sharp angles and rough lines that give it a bold, aggressive look. Montage is another way that the movie shows how graphic design is used. Montage is a way of cutting a movie in which different shots or images are put together to make a new meaning. Montage is used a lot in Triumph of the Will to make the Nazi Party seem strong and united. For example, the movie shows shots of huge crowds shouting and waving flags, as well as shots of military parades and talks by Nazi leaders. This makes people feel like they are part of a strong, united group, which helps spread the message of Nazi propaganda.

[antoine-roquentin]

obliquely, this is in reference to how formerly working class bastions in the midwest that used to elect socialists now elect republicans. if we all gave up the theory that LGBT people are normal, we might once again go back to the days where we elected socialists across the country. thomas frank, what’s the matter with kansas:

But its periodic bouts of leftism were what really branded Kansas with the mark of the freak. Every part of the country in the nineteenth century had labor upheavals and protosocialist reform movements, of course. In Kansas, though, the radicals kept coming out on top. It was as though the blank landscape prompted dreams of a blank-slate society, a place where institutions might be remade as the human mind saw fit. Maps of the state from the 1880s show a hamlet (since vanished) called Radical City; in nearby Crawford County the town of Girard was home to the Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper whose circulation was in the hundreds of thousands. In that same town, in 1908, Eugene Debs gave a fiery speech accepting the Socialist Party’s nomination for president; in 1912 Debs actually carried Crawford County, one of four he won nationwide. (All were in the Midwest.) In 1910 Theodore Roosevelt signaled his own lurch to the left by traveling to Kansas and giving an inflammatory address in Osawatomie, the onetime home of John Brown.

The most famous freak-out of them all was Populism, the first of the great American leftist movements.* Populism tore through other states as well—wailing all across Texas, the South, and the West in the 1890s—but Kansas was the place that really distinguished itself by its enthusiasm. Driven to the brink of ruin by years of bad prices, debt, and deflation, the state’s farmers came together in huge meetings where homegrown troublemakers like Mary Elizabeth Lease exhorted them to “raise less corn and more hell.” The radicalized farmers marched through the small towns in day-long parades, raging against what they called the “money power.” And despite all the clamor, they still managed to take the state’s traditional Republican masters utterly by surprise in 1890, sweeping the small-town slickers out of office and ending the careers of many a career politician. In the decade that followed they elected Populist governors, Populist senators, Populist congressmen, Populist supreme court justices, Populistcity councils, and probably Populist dogcatchers, too; men of strong ideas, curious nicknames, and a colorful patois....

For a generation, Kansas has been the testing-ground for every experiment in morals, politics, and social life. Doubt of all existing institutions has been respectable. Nothing has been venerable or revered merely because it exists or has endured. Prohibition, female suffrage, fiat money, free silver, every incoherent and fantastic dream of social improvement and reform, every economic delusion that has bewildered the foggy brains of fanatics, every political fallacy nurtured by misfortune, poverty and failure, rejected elsewhere, has here found tolerance and advocacy.

Today the two myths are one. Kansas may be the land of averageness, but it is a freaky, militant, outraged averageness. Kansas today is a burned-over district of conservatism where the backlash propaganda has woven itself into the fabric of everyday life. People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and suburban Kansas City. Survivalist supply shops sprout in neighborhood strip-malls. People send Christmas cards urging their friends to look on the bright side of Islamic terrorism, since the Rapture is now clearly at hand.

Under the state’s simple blue flag are gathered today some of the most flamboyant cranks, conspiracists, and calamity howlers the Republic has ever seen. The Kansas school board draws the guffaws of the world for purging state science standards of references to evolution. Cities large and small across the state still hold out against water fluoridation, while one tiny hamlet takes the additional step of requiring firearms in every home. A prominent female politician expresses public doubts about the wisdom of women’s suffrage, while another pol proposes that the state sell off the Kansas Turnpike in order to solve its budget crisis. Impoverished inhabitants of the state’s most scenic area fight with fanatical determination to prevent a national park from opening up in their neighborhood, while the rails-to-trails program, regarded everywhere else in the union as a harmless scheme for family fun, is reviled in Kansas as an infernal design on the rights of property owners. Operation Rescue selects Wichita as the stage for its great offensive against abortion, calling down thirty thousand testifying fundamentalists on the city, witnessing and blocking traffic and chaining themselves to fences. A preacher from Topeka travels the nation advising Americans to love God’s holy hate, showing up wherever a gay person has been in the news to announce that “God Hates Fags.” Survivalists and secessionists dream of backyard confederacies out on the lone prairie; schismatic Catholics declare the pope himself to be insufficiently Catholic; Posses Comitatus hold imaginary legal proceedings, sternly prosecuting state officials for participating in actual legal proceedings; and homegrown terrorists swap conspiracy theories at a house in Dickinson County before screaming off to strike a blow against big government in Oklahoma City.

the problem with this simple story is that social liberalism actually grew in lockstep with an economic policy tailored to the poor. in the 70s, the most common place to get gender reassignment surgery was at a catholic hospital in small town colorado. in 2010, in response to deep opposition in the town, the practice was forced to move to california. the second most common place was at a baptist hospital in oklahoma city, where such surgery was viewed as routine until a number of religious leaders decided to oppose it in the 70s. at the same time, many other religious leaders spoke out in favour of the surgery, saying that it comported well with religious tenets.

likewise, colorado legalized abortion in 1967, as did states like kansas, missouri, georgia, and north and south carolina prior to roe v wade. today, these states are considered anti-abortion and anti-lgbt hotspots, yet prior to the late 70s, compassion for such people was viewed as paramount in the life of america’s christians. so what happened? it clearly wasn’t an emphasis on the social aspects of poor american lives that shifted the political arena in favour of religious conservatism. rather, as thomas frank points out in the same book:

Nobody mows their own lawn in Mission Hills anymore, and only a foot soldier in its armies of gardeners would park a Pontiac there. The doctors who lived near us in the seventies have pretty much been gentrified out, their places taken by the bankers and brokers and CEOs who have lapped them repeatedly on the racetrack of status and income. Every time I paid Mission Hills a visit during the nineties, it seemed another of the more modest houses in our neighborhood had been torn down and replaced by a much larger edifice, a three-story stone chateau, say, bristling with turrets and porches and dormers and gazebos and a three-car garage. The dark old palaces from the twenties sprouted spiffy new slate roofs, immaculately tailored gardens, remote-controlled driveway gates, and sometimes entire new wings. One grand old pile down the street from us was fitted with shiny new gutters made entirely of copper. A new house a few doors down from Esrey’s spread is so large it has two multicar garages, one at either end.

These changes are of course not unique to Mission Hills. What has gone on there is normal in its freakishness. You can observe the same changes in Shaker Heights or La Jolla or Winnetka or Ann Coulter’s hometown of New Canaan, Connecticut. They reflect the simplest and hardest of economic realities: The fortunes of Mission Hills rise and fall in inverse relation to the fortunes of ordinary working people. When workers are powerful, taxes are high, and labor is expensive (as was the case from World War II until the late seventies), the houses built here are smaller, the cars domestic, the servants rare, and the overgrown look fashionable in gardening circles. People read novels about eccentric English aristocrats trapped in a democratic age, sighing sadly for their lost world.

When workers are weak, taxes are down, and labor is cheap (as in the twenties and again today), Mission Hills coats itself in shimmering raiments of gold and green. Now the stock returns are plush, the bonus packages fat, the servants affordable, and the suburb finds that the princely life isn’t dead after all. It builds new additions and new fountains and new Italianate porches overlooking Olympic-sized flower gardens maintained by shifts of laborers. People read books about the glory of empire. The kids get Porsches or SUVs when they turn sixteen; the houses with asphalt roofs discreetly disappear; the wings that were closed off are triumphantly reopened, and all is restored to its former grandeur. Times may be hard where you live, but here events have yielded a heaven on earth, a pleasure colony out of the paintings of Maxfield Parrish.

america's workers and small farmers were saved by the reforms of the 1930s, as frank explains, then crushed as the wealthy found out how to squirrel away their taxes (in part thanks to the collapse of the british empire), accumulate wealth away from prying eyes, lobby the government for preferential treatment, and between 1976 and 2000, triumph completely in the political domain. mission hill donates more money to politicians than the rest of kansas combined. unions are swamped in state politics, and see declining fortunes. as a result, neoliberal social atomization takes effect, which sees even workers demanding beggar-thy-neighbour policies. and when thy neighbour is socially distinct from you, it becomes easier to justify voting for such politics based on a survival instinct. the majority of the working class tuned out and do not vote any more. among the rest, low skilled working class jobs in highly stratified and inequitable cities vote democrat, hoping for some patronage from the white collar creative class voters they serve, while blue collar skilled workers tend to vote republican, devoid of any examples of class politics in their lives with the death of unions and hoping to keep their share of wages against their only opposition, the tax man.

ultimately, any socially liberal politics sustained by donations from rich big city donors is unsustainable. on the other hand, the notion that “woke” politics is holding back leftism is, save for a few clearly absurd situations (robin diangelo, for instance) also wrong. economic leftism leads to social leftism, because respect to the working class leads to respect for its identities. neoliberal atomization is a much deeper force than can be surmounted at the ballot box, even in a primary, but it is always an economic force first and foremost.

[ramblingrachell]

Have You Read This? The Election of 2020

Like many of us, I watched Hamilton on July 4th, 2020 – our nation’s birthday. I met the day with mixed emotions as the spirit and character of our nation as of late did not seem appropriate to celebrate.

As I watched the story about many of the nation’s founding fathers and first leaders unfold, I was struck by the parts of their personal trials and tribulations that went beyond their contribution to the nation. Hamilton was the first politician to be involved in a sex scandal; Layfette – an immigrant, unafraid to step in and become America’s favorite fighting Frenchmen; Washington – a slave owner willing to admit “it probable that I may have committed many errors;” Jefferson – gained wealth profiting from the work of slaves, one of which he fathered six children with after making her his mistress. Burr – the untried murderer of Alexander Hamilton, whom he killed while still holding office as the third Vice President of the United States. In short, a hot mess of moral contradictions. I have been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack ever since my first viewing on July 4th, and realized a number of lines in various songs could be strung together to reflect my perception (key word: my) of the current political climate. Over the last week or so, I finally sat down to string all of those poignant lines together (with a few liberties for relevant context), a lyrical short story I have dubbed, The Election of 2020 (seen further down, further down). The beauty of democracy that is reborn during election seasons is our ability to get a fresh start, gain new perspectives, correct past wrongs, and continually better this land of the free for generations to come. I saw a quote recently that described voting as not so much like trying to find the perfect partner for marriage, but rather like using a bus for public transport. Voting is a map of bus routes that you must choose from in order to get from point A to point B. There may not be one specific bus that is going to your exact destination, but that doesn’t mean you stay at home and give up on travel entirely. Voting is not about waiting for “the one” candidate who is absolutely perfect. Instead, you choose to get on the bus that gets you closest to where you want to be. I know and love many republicans and democrats that have used the privilege of voting to get us all closer to where we want the nation to be. To me, where we are right now does not seem to fit under either traditional party umbrella – no, it’s much more like an umbrella that has been turned inside out and torn apart by a calculated hurricane of divisive and selfish endeavors. Perhaps more than ever before, this is the time to reassess our voting bus routes that will get us from point A to point B. Are we moving from indifference to tolerance? Hate to love? Despair to hope? Chaos to consistency? Negligence to protection? Moreover, before you get on your bus of choice, remember the route is designed to get the whole of our nation where we want it to be. Not just for me and not just for you. For all of US – as in, all of the United States. We will never all agree, I know this, but in spite of these disagreements, I am reminded of the hope that comes from the story of Hamilton. Even 244 years into this nation’s story, despite many dramatic peaks and valleys, the journey to our shared, happily ever after epilogue lives on. It lives on in me, in you, and in every vote cast to get us where we want to be. Regardless of how your vote is cast, the courage to reexamine your route and get on that bus… well, that would be enough.

The Election of 2020

“America, you great unfinished symphony A place where even orphan immigrants Can leave their fingerprints and rise up We’re running out of time Eyes up Time's up Wise up He's not the choice I would have gone with History will prove him wrong Winning was easy for him Governing's harder Welcome, folks, to a dysfunctional administration! He stands only for himself It's what he does I can't apologize because it's true Have it all, lose it all The President is gonna bring the nation to the brink He’s the villain in our history Frankly, it's a little disquieting that so many are blind to this reality He doesn’t have an ounce of regret He accumulates debt, he accumulates power Yet in our hour of need, he forgets Ardently abuses his post It's hard to listen to him with a straight face Watching the tension grow He cannot be left alone to his devices Indecisive, from crisis to crisis Stay alive 'til this horror show is past We're gonna fly a lot of flags half-mast Chaos and bloodshed already haunt us How many died because he was inexperienced and ruinous? We're too fragile to start another fight Where do we draw the line? Someone oughta remind him We're running a real nation Him and his words, obsessed with his own legacy His sentences border on senseless And he is paranoid in every paragraph How they perceive him Let future historians wonder How he tore so much apart And watched it all burn I wish I could say what was happening in his brain He's not very forthcoming on any particular stances Ask him a question: he glances off, he obfuscates, he dances I will not equivocate on my opinion I didn't say anything that wasn't true His father's a scoundrel, and so, it seems, is this dude He is uniquely situated by virtue of his position Though 'virtue' is not a word I’d apply to this situation He seeks financial gain, straying from his sacred mission And the evidence suggests he’s engaged in speculation Why does he assume he’s the smartest in the room? Soon that attitude will be his doom He knows nothing of loyalty Smells like new money, dresses like fake royalty Desperate to rise above his station Everything he does betrays the ideals of our nation See how he lies Look at his eyes Follow the scent of his enterprise If we don't stop him, we aid and abet it Watching him grabbin' at power and kissin' it Somebody has to stand up to his mouth What do we stall for?  If we stand for nothing, what'll we fall for?

Be careful with that one He will do what it takes to survive No one knows who he is or what he does His pride will be the death of us all God, we hope he’s satisfied This man has poisoned our political pursuits Destroyed our reputation I can almost see the headline, his “career” is done Ya best go run back where ya come from! This dude is out! You ever see somebody ruin their own life? History obliterates In every picture it paints It paints him and all of his mistakes It's him against us, the world will never be the same He better get ready for the moment of adrenaline Try not to crack under the stress When he finally faces his opponent They’ve fought on like seventy-five different fronts He smacks others in the press and doesn’t print retractions We're breaking down like fractions But when all is said and all is done I have beliefs, he has none Gotta get us out of the mess he’s got us in There’s a reason no one trusts him No one knows what he believes I get no satisfaction witnessing his fits of passion The way he primps and preens and dresses like the pits of fashion Our poorest citizens, our farmers, live ration to ration As Wall Street robs 'em blind in search of chips to cash in He’s askin' for someone to bring him to task While we were all watching, he got Washington in his pocket But the sun comes up And the world still spins I hear wailing in the streets There is suffering too terrible to name This is not a moment, it's a movement Are we a nation of states? What's the state of our nation? The issue on the table: We are engaged in a battle for our nation's very soul I’m past patiently waitin'. Let’s passionately smash every expectation For the first time, I’m thinkin' past tomorrow. We're gonna rise up - time to take a shot This nation better rise up Raise a glass to freedom Something they can never take away No matter what he tells us Look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now But we'll never be truly free Until those in bondage have the same rights as you and me Seek out injustice in the world and correct it Life doesn't discriminate Between the sinners And the saints It takes and it takes and it takes And we keep living anyway We laugh and we cry And we break But can l be real for a second? For just a millisecond? We gotta make an all-out stand Get him out of power So he holds no office We are a powder keg about to explode We gotta stop 'em and rob 'em of his advantages Let's take a stand with the stamina God has granted us We pick and choose our battles and places to take a stand We will fight for this land Summon all the courage that’s required Be a part of the narrative The story they will write someday How we emerged victorious Leaving the battlefield waving Betsy Ross' flag higher No one has more resilience Let’s move under cover and move as one We have one shot to live another day Don’t throw away this shot We will fight up close, seize the moment and stay in it And so the American experiment begins again We bleed and fight for the next generation We'll make it right for them If we lay a strong enough foundation We'll pass it on to them, we'll give the world to them For a strong central democracy We may never all agree, but There's only one man and woman Who can give us a command so we can rise up Throwing verbal rocks at his mediocrities What do you stall for? What was it all for? We studied and we fought For the notion of a nation we now get to rebuild Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness We fought for these ideals; we shouldn't settle for less I don't pretend to know All the challenges we’re facing But this once, take a stand with pride This is not the time to stand to the side Stand with us in the land of the free To get the people that we need to lead We need the votes We need bold strokes When there’s skin in the game, stay in the game We don't get a win unless we play in the game We may get love for it We may get hate for it We get nothing if we wait for it I wanna build something that's gonna outlive me I dream of a brand new start I want real leaders that can save the day We won't be invisible We won't be denied If we get this right The nation can start to move on It outlives us when we’re gone We are the one thing in life we can control We are inimitable, true originals We can’t stand still Or lie in wait We don't wanna fight, but We won't apologize for doing what's right Together we can turn the tide If we manage to get this right They'll surrender by early light We have no control Who lives, who dies, who tells our story But I know that we can win I know that greatness lies within us But remember from here on in History has its eyes on me and History has its eyes on you”

(All Lyric Credits: Hamilton: An America Musical. Performances by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff, Christopher Jackson, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Leslie Odom Jr., Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos  Phillipa Soo, and Original Cast Company. Atlantic Records, 2015.)

[handeaux]

Frustrated Thespian Powhatan Beaty Was A ‘Landmark Of Cincinnati’

The reviews were exceptional in 1884 when Cincinnati’s Powhatan Beaty took his Shakespearian show on the road. In Philadelphia, he was described as “a gentleman of rare culture and great ability.” The reviewer for the Washington (DC) Bee [10 May 1884] opined that “Mr. Beaty made a hit in Macbeth.” The Colored Patriot, as quoted in the New York Globe [3 May 1884], effused:

“Mr. Powhatan Beaty’s rendering of Spartacus was a gracious surprise. It had been some time since we heard that gentleman, but we were not prepared for the evidence of study and cultivation he manifested. All the emotions of the piece were depicted in his countenance and when he actually changed color and his face blanched with pallor, we could scarce realize it. Powerfully built, rugged and strong in his general appearance, he looked every inch a Roman gladiator. The audience leaned forward and eagerly listened to catch every word of his impassioned delivery, and when he finished they fell back in their seats with a sigh of relief that plainly expressed how they had been affected. Mr. Beaty is indeed a grand artist and has wisely selected the tragic muse for the shrine of his artistic devotion.”

It was rare to find a black man on the stage at all in those days, and rarer still to find white people in the audience for a performance by African Americans. The Indianapolis Leader, in an article [15 January 1881] about Beaty took note of this:

“The advent of colored men upon the stage has opened a new field of opportunity to them, and we are glad to find them reaching out for the profitable distinction which assured success must give.”

Beaty’s performances in Philadelphia and Washington earned him a place of honor at a dinner given for abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass. Also in attendance were some esteemed veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. For them, Beaty’s Civil War exploits were just as exciting as his theatrical triumphs, because Powhatan Beaty had been voted a recipient of the Medal of Honor by act of the United States Congress.

At the Battle of New Market Heights, during the siege of Petersburg, Beaty’s regiment was all but wiped out while attacking Confederate position. Out of 85 men in his unit, only a dozen or so survived the attack and subsequent retreat. According to the Cincinnati Post [3 September 1898]:

“Beaty started on the charge carrying a knapsack and a canteen of water. Bullets cut the knapsack off, carried his hat away and tore the sole off one of his shoes. He went to give a dying comrade a drink, when he found that the water had drained out a bullet hole.”

Beaty, a sergeant, saw his unit’s flag lying in the mud, discarded in retreat. Under heavy enemy fire, he ran back 600 feet to recover the flag, then rallied what was left of his unit to successfully attack and overcome the rebel fortification. General Benjamin Butler witnessed Beaty’s bravery and recommended him for the Medal of Honor. Butler also awarded Beaty a silver medal of his own design. Despite brevet promotion to lieutenant, the U.S. Army was not ready for black officers, according to the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [6 June 1886]:

“Only strong prejudice embodied into law prevented his promotion to the rank of a commissioned officer, though twice recommended for it by Colonel [Giles] Shurtleff.”

While national acclaim may have turned Powhatan Beaty’s head, he made this trip East while on a leave of absence. After a couple of weeks, he had to return to Cincinnati to take up his position as a janitor.

To be fair, a “janitor” in 1884 was a position of some responsibility, more like what we would call a building superintendent these days. The janitor or custodian oversaw the cleaning, maintenance, furnishing and equipping of a building. Beaty probably supervised a small staff. Additionally, Beaty’s appointment as janitor of the Lincoln Club was political. The Republican machine of Boss Cox supported several elite social facilities for the party faithful, and the Lincoln Club on Garfield Place was top notch, boasting more than 800 members. Equally ostentatious was the Young Men’s Blaine Club on Eighth Street, where Beaty was later employed.

Although Beaty was born free in 1835, he would have been considered a slave in the Southern states, because freedom was not considered hereditary. Although his parents had earned their freedom, their children were still considered enslaved. Beaty’s parents brought him from Virginia to Cincinnati around 1849 when he was a young teenager and apprenticed Powhatan to Henry Boyd, a successful African American furniture maker. Young Powhatan received a solid education under the guidance of abolitionist and educator Peter H. Clark. Although employed as a lathe operator, sawyer or cabinet maker for 20 years, Beaty’s name appears regularly in descriptions of amateur theater projects and in the political columns.

During the Civil War, Beaty, like most African Americans in Cincinnati was dragooned into digging trenches in Northern Kentucky while the city awaited a Confederate assault. He later helped organize the 127th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, reorganized as the 5th United States Colored Troops. In addition to the Petersburg campaign, Beaty distinguished himself at several later battles.

Back in Cincinnati, few philanthropic gatherings in Cincinnati failed to include Lt. Powhatan Beaty on the program. His dramatic readings and recitations inspired his audiences to generosity. At a time when the Democratic Party was virulently segregationist, Beaty was a vital link from the Cox Machine to black voters.

Beaty’s passionate and loyal support of Cincinnati’s Republican Party led, eventually, to positions as superintendent at some of the most prestigious addresses in the city. Prejudice and segregation kept Beaty confined to amateur stages. He wrote a play about the end of slavery, but could not find a producer and he tried a second eastern tour without success. When he died, in 1916, the newspapers called him “one of the old landmarks of Cincinnati” and remembered his military service. The obituaries made almost no mention of Powhatan Beaty’s true love – the theater.

[newagesispage]

                                                                            JUNE    2020

PAGE RIB

FX and Ryan Murphy will bring us season 10 of American Horror Story next year. The cast includes Mac Culkin, Kathy Bates, Sarah Paulson, Evan peters, Billie Lourd, Lily Rabe and Finn Wittrock. There will also be a spinoff called, wait for it, American Horror Stories. Woo Hoo!!

*****

Reno 911 is back

*****

I happen to have a clementine in my butt. –Jimmy Kimmel

*****

NASA got their dragon launch. It is unfortunate that they had to compete with the current cycle.

*****

Sam Springsteen (son of Patti and Bruce) has been sworn in as a Jersey City firefighter.

*****

Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood is great. I don’t know how to feel about the fast and the loose and the nice made up endings like Once upon a time in Hollywood.  Will this be a trend??** Another great one on Netflix is, Have a good trip.

*****

Are there biopics in the works for Michael and Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, the Bee Gees and Bowie?? That is the word.

*****

Days alert: Look for Lani to become pregnant. Eli and Justin are both thinking marriage. Claire is back which will bring Shawn and Belle back. Gabi may be kidnapped. Word is that July will have a wedding every week that will lead to a funeral.  Allie Horton is all grown up and heading back with a secret. Will she be like Mom, Sami?? Brady thinks that ruining Titan will get back at Victor. Sonny and Will may get a chance at another child. Eve may be back later in the summer. And, C’mon Xander, do something wonderful to get your woman back. Lucas may be on the way back and Orpheus is leaving. ** Judi Evans (Adrienne) had a serious horseback riding accident on May 16. She had broken ribs, a collapsed lung and 2 chipped vertebrae. The good news was in the hospital they discovered a blood clot so the whole thing saved her life.

*****

Morton Buildings is being sued by 2 women for harassment and discrimination. One incident claims an employee said, “God created women by lining up all the men and castrating the stupid ones.” Another lawsuit was filed in 2009.**Thanks for the tip, Di.

*****

If you expect elementary school children to endure the trauma of active shooter drills for your freedoms, you can wear a mask to Costco. –Sara Elizabeth Dill

*****

House republicans have sued Pelosi to block proxy voting.

*****

Seth Rogan, Steve Carell and Ben Schwartz are donating funds to bailout Minneapolis protestors after the death of George Floyd.** The country has been turned upside down as another cop kills another black man. No need to rehash, we have all seen it. I wonder if those four horrible cops are proud of what they have done to their city. Could we finally have a tipping point in this time when racism is spotlighted with our racist President? After many incidents in just the past couple of weeks and everyone on edge with coronavirus, it has boiled over. Scary Clown threatens to start shooting as Minneapolis burns down. Burn down a police station, get a cop arrested (finally)? Seems worth it to me. The way the killer looked into the camera as if he was just so proud is gonna stick with us as it should.  ** A CNN crew were arrested live on the air but released later after Jeff Zucker spoke to Gov. Walz.**  Liberate Minnesota was the Trump tweet, well, they are working on it.** I am hearing people saying in all sincerity lately that it is time for the humans to go, we are ruining each other and the planet.

*****

If you have not seen the Killer Mike speech from Atlanta, you need to check it out.** Netflix, Hulu and Paramount are taking a stand and showing support for the Black lives matter movement.

*****

John Cusack put out video of police coming at him with batons and pepper sprayed him as he protested in Chicago. More than 1000 were arrested and it continues.** In Flint, Sheriff Chris Swanson and other police put down helmets and joined the protestors. Police in Schenectady took a knee and joined the march. The behavior is spreading and look what a difference it makes, could they be starting to get it?

*****

Never thought I’d say this but in light of everything that is happening, the DNC made a big mistake in not backing Berne Sanders. –Pete Buttigieg ** Ok, first, of course he is right but you helped set this all in motion. It is a bit late for that …or is it? Biden is not the OFFICIAL nom, the deal is not done yet. Will Bernie jump back in the race?? Perhaps we will soon see BERNE FOR PRESIDENT again.

*****

American carnage was a self -fulfilling prophecy, alas. –Susan Glasser

*****

Scary Clown 45 has designated Antifa a terrorist organization. ** There is no legal authority for designating a domestic group, any such designation would raise significant concerns. –ACLU

*****

In any season, police violence is an injustice, but its harm is elevated amidst the remarkable stress people are facing amidst covid-19. Even now, there is evidence of excessive police initiated force and unwarranted shootings of civilians, some of which have been fatal. –American Medical Association.

*****

Washington Week had a great discussion about how all the ills in US history have played out in 2020. Impeachment, pandemic, depression and civil unrest are all here at once.

*****

Word is that Trevor Noah has been proven much more popular than the other late night hosts since they have been at home.

*****

I predict the picture of the upside down flag with the backdrop of the burning liquor store will be the lasting image of the Trump Presidency.

*****

This is the Presidency George Wallace never had. –Max Boot

*****

Spanish flu, Polio, Aids, Covid-19: Why don’t people get any smarter? The masses (and sometimes those in charge) can get it wrong over and over again. From Dr.? Phil and Dr Oz and their cavalier attitude toward death to Rosie wanting her son to take a leave of absence from the grocery store, we just do not learn. Even before that, I can’t forget the woman who wanted to change her vote after she found out Buttigieg was married to a man. Is she even a dem? Do your research people! Respect others, people!! Have compassion, stop being so selfish and use your brains!!** Puerto Rico was a pre curser to the pandemic response.

*****

Amy Cooper Chris Cooper? WTF? Another liberal who is not really liberal.

*****

Crime in general is down and police shootings are up. And yes, now the opportunists are out of control and anger is boiling over but protests against police brutality causing police brutality is WRONG!

*****

Check out the book, What makes a marriage last, from Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue.

*****

Ben Taub, Barry Blitt and Colson Whitehead have won the Pulitzer Prize.

*****

Word is that Nick Cage will play Joe Exotic of Tiger King fame. Of course he will.

*****

I refuse to wear a mask because God did not have us born with one.- Nino Vitali** How many people have you heard say, “The President isn’t wearing a mask, so I don’t have to.”

*****

It looks like Apple will partner with Paramount for Scorsese’s adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon.

*****

Oh my: Scary Clown is having a twitter feud with twitter!  He has to, of course, lash out and now signs an executive order targeting social media. He is going on about section 230 which gives immunity to social media companies against being sued over content.  It could curb liability protection. Experts say it will only encourage lawsuits because he does not want to be edited.

*****

If Native American tribes were counted as states, the five most infected states in the US would all be native tribes. –Nicholas Kristof

*****

Did ya see that Jeff Epstein doc from James Patterson. It is lays blame in all directions. Why does it seem like all these old guys on there with all that money have such yellow teeth?

*****

Lindsey Graham is urging Federal judges in their mid to late 60’s to step down so they can fill the spots with republicans.

*****

Richard McGuire tried to live at Disney World in a zoological park that was closed down.

*****

Caterpillar, Levi, Black and Decker and others have cut jobs but gave millions to shareholders.

*****

Axl Rose and Steve Mnuchin had a twitter feud.

*****

China announced plans to introduce a National Security law in Hong Kong. The law enables mainland Chinese National security agencies to operate in the city for the first time. Using a rarely used constitutional method, they bypassed Hong Kong legislature. Since the former British colony became a semi-autonomous region of China more than 20 years ago, they have manages its own affairs. The law will affect media, education, politics and international business. Many acts will now be criminalized. Hong Kong is party to international treaties guaranteeing civil liberties that China is not. The U.S. is urging Bejing to reconsider. Pro- democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong were tear gassed as they yelled, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

*****

The Michael Flynn charges were dropped.

*****

Holyoke soldier’s home in Massachusetts lost 70 souls to Coronavirus. AP photographer David Goldman got a projector and cast big pictures the vets onto the homes of loved ones. Each one had a story including one vet who was sent to Nuremberg to guard Nazis. He claimed to have filled Hermann Goring’s glass with toilet water.

*****

The swimming Dinosaur, Spinosaurus has been getting a lot of attention.  The Sahara desert which was once massive rivers kept the first intact aquatic dinosaur.  With a snout, teeth and jaw like a croc, it is so far the only known kind of dinosaur that lived in the water.  The 50 foot long bizarre fin-like tail is like a giant paddle.  Paleontologists encourage others to have a look at other fossils to see if there are more.

*****

Octavia Spencer is said to have been telling everyone she is a year younger than she is. She is turning 50.

*****

The $69 million ventilator scam. Really? The White House heard from a guy who told them he could supply the product so the WH told NY to order them and stood behind the guy but it was a scam. Scary Clown sure loves his shady people, intentional or not.** A Florida woman, Rebecca Jones claims that she was asked to fudge the numbers to make reopening look better. ** Georgia moved their dates around on a graph to make their cases seem flattened. ** For 17 months, Florida investigated voter fraud for Trump and Gov. Scott. They found NOTHING!!

*****

Amazon stock price is up 25% yet they have become notorious for the terrible way they treat their workers. Bezos is set to become a trillionaire.

*****

We have to remember that order comes from chaos. True enhancements can come from large scale crisis. What will we learn from this one? This is a warning!!** Universal health care? No more buffets? ** Prices will probably go up everywhere what with the closings and all the extra cleaning. I hope this means that hotel bedspreads will be cleaned after every stay.  It looks like there may be no cocktails or food on planes.

*****

Take a virtual tour of the statue of liberty. All the fun without all the swaying.

*****

Local PBS stations are making it easier to learn. Students will be able to put on a channel for lessons that does not need cable or internet. Woo Hoo!!

*****

Insiders say that Trump threatened to sue his campaign manager because he did not agree with his assessment and the poll numbers in a 2 day rant.** Just one more example of Scary Clown double talk. Then: Less testing, less positives. Now: So much testing is a badge of honor.**Doctors without Borders are now here, not the third world countries that they usually help, it is US.

*****

Haven’t we had enough of powerful men being accused? A female Dem candidate would have been nice and Bernie did not seem to have any baggage that way either.

*****

Will the Senate see fit to ok some more stimulus $? 4 trillion to prop up Wall Street seems per the usual. Enough for them, let’s take care of those small businesses and those really in need.

*****

Thao and the get down stay down is one of the best in this internet entertainment era.

*****

Check out Stars in the House with Tony Shalhoub and others.

*****

The Detectorists on Acorn TV is a great little show!!

*****

Happy Day! There is a new season of At Home with Amy Sedaris!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*****

It looks like Pier 1 will permanently close as well as JC Penney, J Crew, Sears and Neiman Marcus.

*****

Check out the wonderful, This is about Humanity!!

*****

Have U seen the trailer for The King of Staten Island?? OMG Pete Davidson, Steve Buschemi and Marisa Tomei , just to name a few!! I can’t fucking wait!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*****

Bill Maher looked really high on his 5-22-20 show. This working from home makes him much more mellow!!

*****

3 Russian doctors treating coronavirus have fallen out of windows in about a weeks time.** Russia boasts that it has more ventilators per capita than the U.S. After they made fun of us, on May 22, the first shipment of U.S. ventilators headed to Russia. They are a gift from Trump and the U.S. taxpayers. –Julia Davis

*****

State Department Inspector General Steve Linick is out.  Was he investigating Pompeo?  Trump never knows anything about any of it. Why are all the protectors of the rule of law thrown out?  ** Was Pompeo throwing lavish foreign policy dinners with Reba, Dale Jr. and the owners of that horrid chicken sandwich place? ** The clean water rule has been suspended which cuts protections for most of the country’s wetlands.

*****

The market facilitation program has been helping small farmers over the last few years in a $28 billion bailout. Trump’s sanctions brought this on and the corona virus has made it worse.  Mostly the money has helped bankers and bigger farms. Much like the stimulus $ that was earmarked for small business, there are loopholes that screw up the ‘rules.’ The cap is not being followed like they may say because the $ is going to “investors” in the farm and often not the actual farmer who works on a smaller scale. A small farm run by family members may not get the bailout. It seems to be more important to get a good lawyer who can manipulate the paperwork.  Sad that taxpayer $ is used this way.

*****

Just in time, the Space Force flag and plans for the super duper missile have been unveiled. WTF??

*****

Paula Poundstone is a woman I knew I liked. She was recently talking about not liking couches. I thought I was the only one, People are always telling me how much they love their couches and I don’t get it.

*****

Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore are upset after Youtube pulled their doc, Planet of the Humans. After 8.3 million views, there was a copyright claim by Toby Smith of about 4 seconds of footage.  Now , this is not the first time that Moore has had problems with content in one of his movies.  Many have claimed there is a lot of fiction in this latest venture. I think I would just remove the possible copyright infringement and move on. It can now be seen on Vimeo.

A Florida law that restricts felon voting is found unconstitutional by a federal judge.** The RNC filed a lawsuit against California to stop mailing ballots to registered voters.

*****

R.I.P. Little Richard, Roy Horn, Jerry Stiller, Sam Lloyd, Ann Sullivan, Mike Cogswell, Michael Keenan, Shirley Knight, Irrfan Khan, Hana Kimura, Forrest Compton, Jimmy Cobb, George Floyd, Ken Osmomd, all the corona victims, Lynn Shelton, Richard Herd, Larry Kramer, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Anthony James, Fred Willard and Carolyn Busch.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson:

June 10, 2020 (Wednesday)

“We’ve made every decision correctly,” the president said Friday about the coronavirus, “and now the trajectory is great.”

In fact, our Covid-19 numbers are up. They had begun to level off as hard-hit New York brought its infections under control, but now other hotspots are emerging. Arizona, Florida, and Texas, along with fifteen other states, are seeing increases in Covid-19 cases. Already, more than 112,000 Americans have died and more than 1.9 million are infected, and from now until July 4, epidemiologists predict 5,000 to 6,000 Americans a week will die from the disease.

The pandemic was not on the president’s mind today.

Today the Trump campaign delivered a cease and desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker demanding that CNN retract and apologize for its recent poll showing Trump 14 points behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The letter says the poll is “designed to mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling.”

This is clearly the work of Republican pollster John McLaughlin, whom Trump hired on Monday. McLaughlin’s career is based in the (false) concept that political polls showing Democrats ahead of Republicans are deliberately skewed toward Democrats in order to discourage Republicans from voting.

CNN’s lawyer responded to the letter by noting that this was the first time in its history that CNN had been threatened with legal action over a political poll, and that “to the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media.” He noted that McLaughlin had little credibility, and concluded: “Your letter is factually and legally baseless. It is yet another bad faith attempt by the campaign to threaten litigation to muzzle speech it does not want voters to read or hear. Your allegations and demands are rejected in their entirety.”

Virtually every reputable poll shows Biden leading Trump by double digits, so why is the Trump campaign picking this fight? The cease and desist letter might be a way to calm down the president, who is apparently on edge these days. But it might also be a way to try to rally the Republican base around the idea that, as recent fundraising has said, the “Trump Army” must fight off “the Liberal MOB.”

The campaign seems to be embracing military language as opposition to the president intensifies. Today the retired federal judge who was asked to examine the Justice Department’s unusual request to abandon the case against Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn-- after Flynn had pleaded guilty-- filed his report. Judge John Gleeson accused Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department of “a gross abuse of prosecutorial power, attempting to provide special treatment to a favored friend and political ally of the President of the United States. It has treated the case like no other, and in doing so has undermined the public’s confidence in the rule of law.”

More than 1,250 former members of the Department of Justice also wrote today of the need to defend the rule of law. They asked the DOJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, to look into Barr’s involvement in last week’s attack by law enforcement on the peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square before Trump’s walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church.

A rift between the administration and the military became clear last week when prominent military leaders opposed Trump’s use of force against demonstrators, supported the protesters’ concerns, and pointedly defended the Constitution. Trump deliberately widened that rift today, siding with white reactionaries rather than with current military leaders.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both of whom had been caught in Trump’s walk across Lafayette Square, are eager to unify their troops, 43% of whom are people of color rapidly becoming disaffected. The idea of renaming Army bases named for Confederate generals has been on the table for awhile, and they talked of actually doing it in this tense moment, even as protesters and city officials are pulling down Confederate monuments.

To historians, this is a no-brainer. Confederate leaders tried to destroy the United States and succeeded in killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, so the idea that we have any federal recognition of them is wild. And they were fighting to enshrine human enslavement in the laws of a new nation, and from there to spread it across the world, so for a country founded on the idea of human equality to honor these men seems particularly self-defeating. As General David Petraeus, the retired Army commander in Iraq and Afghanistan said, “The irony of training at bases named for those who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention.”

Politico reported that the military leaders thought the idea was an obvious move, but Trump shocked them with a series of tweets saying “These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a… history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom. The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds, and won two World Wars. Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations… Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!”

Trump was clearly siding with his base, which is quite keen on Confederate imagery, rather than with those calling for equal justice. But that base is apparently getting smaller. Within hours of his tweets, NASCAR had banned the Confederate flag from its races and its venues because it “runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry,” NASCAR said.

The decision was announced before tonight’s race in Virginia, where Bubba Wallace, NASCAR’s only African American driver, was to compete in a Chevrolet with a #BlackLivesMatter paint job. Wallace, born in Alabama, had said there was no place for Confederate flags in the sport. Tonight he was wearing a black “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt, and applauded the decision. “This is no doubt the biggest race of my career tonight,” he said. “There’s a lot of emotions on the race track.”

Not everyone approved. Helmet artist Jason Beam tweeted: “ignorance wins again, NASCAR you realize the North had slaves too, lol not just the South, you want to remove the American Flag as well, idiots.”

It seems that the lines of Trump’s election campaign are solidifying. Two days ago, the Washington Post reported that Trump was trying to figure out how to turn calls for racial justice into a fight over “LAW & ORDER”-- as he keeps tweeting-- but Republican Party leaders were trying to figure out how to keep that shift from turning into offensive race baiting. Trump’s announcement today that he is resuming his rallies makes that point now appear moot.

The first rally will take place in Tulsa, Oklahoma—where coronavirus cases are spiking—on June 19. This day is also known as “Juneteenth,” a day commemorating the end of slavery in America because it was that day in 1865 that African Americans in Texas finally learned they were free. Tulsa is also the site of the 1921 race massacre, in which white mobs destroyed the wealthy Black neighborhood of Greenwood (aided by firebombs dropped from private airplanes), murdered as many as 300 of their Black neighbors, injured hundreds more, and left 10,000 people homeless.

[ruminativerabbi]

Hatred, Fear, Hope

Like most Jewish Americans, I was caught off-guard back in 2017 by the sight of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, and carrying aloft the flags of the Confederate States of America and Nazi Germany. (That they were also carrying the so-called Gadsden Flag that was originally used by the Continental Marines during the American Revolution—the one designed back in 1775 by Christopher Gadsden featuring the words “Don’t Tread on Me” beneath a coiled-up, scary-looking rattlesnake—struck me primarily as a sign of how little these people know about the values upon which the nation was founded in the first place.) The sight of those flags being held aloft proudly and defiantly was beyond upsetting, but not particularly confusing. But what was confusing—to me and I suspect to most—was the chant “Jews will not replace us,” which I hadn’t ever heard before and which I now realize I misunderstood, taking it to mean something entirely different than what it apparently does mean.

Taking the slogan at what I thought was face value, I understood the marchers to be declaring their determination not to allow themselves to be replaced by Jews eager to take over their jobs and leave them without work and eventually destitute.  In other words, I imagined this somehow to be tied to the marchers’ skittishness about the job market and their need to find someone to blame in advance for losing jobs they fear they only haven’t lost yet and in which they fear they will eventually, to use their own word, be “replaced.” It hardly seems like a rational fear, but that’s what it felt like it had to mean, and so I ended up taking it as just so much craziness rooted not in anything corresponding to actual reality but in the malign fantasy that, left unchecked, we Jewish people will somehow take over the world and install our own people in whatever jobs we wish without regard to where such a move would leave the people currently holding them. And that is what I sense most Jewish people—and maybe even most Americans—hearing this chant took it to mean.

But now that I’ve read more, I see that that is specifically not what “Jews will not replace us” means and that the slogan specifically is not about Jews replacing Christians at work at all. Instead, the chant encapsulates the marchers’ fear that we Jews are working not to take over their jobs ourselves but to replace them at work with third-party others chosen specifically to deprive them of their livelihoods and their places in society. And who might these other people be? That, it turns out, is where anti-Semitism and racism meet: the hordes of jobseekers the marchers fear turn out not to be Jews at all, but hordes of dark-skinned immigrants feared already to be pouring over our borders and insinuating themselves into an already-tight job market. And it is those people who, because they are presumed ready to work at even the most menial jobs for mere pennies, are imagined to be threatening the white (i.e., non-immigrant) people who currently hold those jobs and who earn the American-sized salaries they use to support themselves and their families.

To say this is crazy stuff is really to say nothing at all. Yes, we have a huge and so-far-unresolved issue in this country with illegal aliens living in our midst and I’m sure that those people do take jobs that legal residents might otherwise have. And lots of non-crazy people, myself definitely included, are eager to find a way out of this morass that we ourselves have created by failing to police our borders adequately and by allowing the number of undocumented illegals in our midst to grow from a mere 760,000 or so in 1975 to something like 12.5 million today with no obvious solution in sight.

So wanting a reasonable solution to be found—one that is fully grounded both in settled U.S. law and in our national inclination to be just, fair, kind, and generous, and one that doesn’t make after-the-fact chumps out of all those countless millions of people who followed all the rules and immigrated here fully legally—is not crazy at all. What is crazy is the fantasy that Jewish Americans somehow possess the secret power to order Walmart’s and Costco and every other American business to fire specific employees and replace them with pre-selected others regardless of whether those others are or are not here legally. Crazier still is the contention that American Jews somehow control American immigration policy, and that we are somehow able imperiously to issue instructions that must be obeyed both to Democratic and Republican administrations. But craziest of all is the belief that, precisely because American Jews are so supremely powerful, we must be attacked violently before we order the administration to let even more immigrants into our nation. That, after all, was the specific reason the Pittsburgh shooter gave for his savagery in a comment posted online just before the attack: to give the officers of HIAS pause for thought before they work to bring in any more “invaders [to] kill our people.” My post-Pittsburgh proposal is that we stop dismissing that line of thinking as aberrant looniness that no normal person could actually embrace and start taking it far more seriously.

It feels natural to consider the various kinds of prejudice that characterize our society as variations on a common theme. And in a certain sense, I suppose, that is true. But these pernicious attitudes are also distinct and different, both in terms of their root causes and the specific way they manifest themselves in the world: misogyny, racism, and homophobia, for example, are similar in certain cosmetic ways, but differ dramatically in terms of the specific malign fantasies that inspire them and thus should (and even probably must) be addressed in different ways as well. And we should also bring that line of thinking to bear in considering anti-Jewish prejudice: similar in some ways to other forms of prejudice, anti-Semitism also has unique aspects that it specifically does not share with other forms of bigotry. Indeed, the fact that the anti-Semitism put on public display in Charlottesville was rooted in the haters’ groundless yet powerful fantasy about the almost limitless power imagined somehow to have wound up in the hands of the hated is all by itself enough to distinguish anti-Semitism from other kinds of prejudice. And not at all irrelevant is that it appears not to matter at all how impossible it feels to square that fantasy about Jewish powerfulness with the degree to which powerless Jews have suffered at the hands of their foes over the centuries, and particularly in the last one. In that regard, I would like to recommend a very interesting essay by Scott A. Shay, the author and Jewish activist, that was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a few days after the shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue and which readers viewing this electronically can access by clicking here.

Nor is this a problem solely of one extreme end of the political spectrum. In the wake of Pittsburgh, the spotlight is on the anti-Semitism that characterizes the extreme right, but the same light could be shone just as brightly on the anti-Semitism of the extreme left…and particularly when it promotes hostility toward Israel’s very right to exist and to defend itself against its enemies. Indeed, the assumption that Israel—instead of being perceived as an outpost of democracy smaller than New Jersey trying to survive in a region in which it must deal with nations and political terror groups that openly express their hope to see Israel and its Jewish population annihilated—is perceived as an all-powerful Goliath seeking to eradicate its innocent opponents militarily rather than to negotiate fairly or justly with them, is part and parcel of this fantasy regarding the power of the Jewish people. Coming the week after Hamas fired over five hundred missiles at civilian targets in Israel, each capable of killing countless civilian souls on the ground, the image of Israel as the aggressor in its ongoing conflict with Hamas sounds laughable and naïve. But maybe we should stop laughing long enough to ask ourselves how this myth of Jewish power—whether focused on American Jews imagined to be in control of American foreign policy or Israeli Jews imagined to be intent on crushing their innocent victims for no rational reason at all—perhaps we should ask ourselves how we might address, not this or that symptom of the disease, but the disease itself.

Distinct (at least in my mind) from theological anti-Semitism rooted in the supersessionist worldview promoted for so long by so many different Christian denominations, this specific variety of anti-Semitism seems rooted not in messianic fervor but in fear. And that, I think, is probably how to go about addressing it the most effectively: by pulling that fear out into the light and exposing it as a fantasy no less malign than inane. By forcing young people drawn to the alt-right to look at pictures of the innocents murdered in Pittsburgh and to ask themselves if they truly have it in them to believe that U.S. government policy was until two weeks ago being dictated by 97-year-old Rose Mallinger or by Cecil or David Rosenthal, both gentle, disabled types whose lives were built around service to their house of worship. By forcing young people poisoned with irrational hatred of Israel to look at the portraits of the 1,343 civilians murdered by Palestinian terrorists since 2000 and to see, not predators or fiends, but innocent victims of mindless violence. By insisting that young people drawn to fear Jews and Judaism be exposed to the stories of Shoah victims—and, if possible, to surviving survivors themselves—and through that experience to understand where groundless prejudice can lead if left unchecked and unaddressed.

To hope that no one is drawn to extremism is entirely rational, but it really can’t be enough. Just as young people who seem drawn to a racist worldview should be forced—by their parents and their teachers in school, or by society itself—to look into the eyes of those poor souls gunned down in the Emanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston on June 17, 2015, after welcoming their murderer into their midst for an hour of Bible study, so should society itself rescue young people from themselves once they are perceived to be embracing the kind of anti-Semitism that led directly to Pittsburgh…and be forced to confront the bleak hatred that has taken  root in their hearts and to see it for what it is: a fantasy rooted in fear that can be overcome and eradicated by anyone truly willing to try.

[statetalks]

Were The Confederates Democrats Or Republicans

Th United States Congress

Were The Democrats That Founded The Confederacy, KKK & Jim Crow CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERAL? Lets Go!!!!

As of September 13, 2017, 16 Senate Democrats cosponsored the Medicare for All Act of 2017. As of September 26, 2017, 120 House Democrats cosponsored the Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act. This was all for naught, as the Republican majority made sure that the Democratic minority remained impotent.

National Democratic Redistricting Committee

On January 12, 2017, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a 527 organization that focuses on redistricting reform and is affiliated with the Democratic Party, was created. The chair, president and vice president of the umbrella organization is the 82nd Attorney GeneralEric Holder, Elizabeth Pearson and Alixandria “Ali” Lapp respectively. President Obama has said he would be involved with the committee.

Protests against Donald Trump

At the inauguration of Donald Trump, 67 Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives boycotted the inauguration. This was the largest boycott by members of the United States Congress since the second inauguration of Richard Nixon, where it was estimated that between 80 and 200 Democratic members of United States Congress boycotted.

Democratic Party PACs

In November 2018, the Democrats gained 40 seats in the House of Representatives, retaking the majority in the chamber. Nancy Pelosi was nominated to retake the speakership in January 2019.

Southern Democrats Split With Republicans Over Confederate Symbols Is More Recent Than You Might Think

Following the recent police killing of George Floyd, recent months have seen Confederate monuments and symbols removed;from public display;in parts of the Southern US and elsewhere. And while Southern Republicans generally oppose Democrats who are pushing for these changes, this is a relatively recent development, argue;Christopher A. Cooper;and;co-authors. By;analysing;public opinion data, they find that up until the 1990s, there were no partisan differences among white;southerners on opinions toward Confederate symbols.;

In the ongoing;and contentious;conversation about;Confederate;symbols, one thing is taken as a given:;compared to Republicans,;Democrats;are;more likely to support;removing displays of the Confederate past;which had been publically approved in the past. This;fact;is;evident;in public opinion polls and in the results of recent;votes;in state legislatures,;like the one in;Mississippi;where every Democrat voted to remove the Confederate;emblem;from the Mississippi state flag,;while;Republicans split on the issue.

How The Democrats Became Socially Liberal

The Third Party Democrats began to change from social conservative to social progressive in the 1890s at the end of the Gilded Age under the;progressive populist Democrat;William Jennings Bryan. Under Bryan, the Democratic Party became;increasingly socially progressive and necessarily authoritative. From Bryan to Wilson, to LBJ, to Clinton the Democratic Party;increasingly favored progressive social liberalism regarding government enforced social justice and economic intervention over;laissez-faire governance, this attracted progressive Republicans and drove social;conservatives from the party over time.

TIP: See History of the United States Democratic Party.

Also Check: Why Did Republicans Hate Obama So Much

Why Democrats Avoid Confederate History While Republicans Embrace It

Governor Bob McDonnell made a proclamation to recognize April as Confederate History month, which caused an outcry from the very same people who are vilifying those attending tea parties as terrorists. These are citizens who are invoking the spirit of our founding fathers, reminding current lawmakers of the original intent of the Constitution and suggesting that an 8-year war to end tyranny and guarantee liberty for all should never be forgotten. But the left is always keen to distort history, or just ignore it all together as they want to do now, by denying a closer look at Confederate History.

It is not a huge surprise as to why Democrats react so viscerally to anything dealing with the history of the Civil War, the role of the Confederacy in that war, and why racism is still a hot topic in the country. It is because their very policies are at the heart of what caused the Civil War, and have kept racism alive to this day. They dont want people to learn the truth about the founding of the Republican Party and that its first president was Abraham Lincoln, and that within 11 years of the founding of this civil rights party, a war was fought and won to end slavery. It would be a bigger surprise to see a Democrat governor proclaim a Confederate History month since their history, as it relates to race and slavery, is not one to be proud of.

A Reconstituted Early 20th Century Kkk Attracts Members From Both Sides

After Reconstruction, and as the Jim Crow period set in during the 1870s, the Klan became obsolete.;Through violence, intimidation and systematic oppression, the KKK had served its purpose to help whites retake Southern governments.

In 1915, Cornell William J. Simmons restarted the KKK. This second KKK was made up of Republicans and Democrats, although Democrats were more widely involved.

The idea that these things overlap in a Venn diagram, the way they did with the first Klan, just isnt as tight with the second Klan, Grinspan said.

Don’t Miss: How Many Republicans Voted To Impeach Trump

Progressive Era And The New Deal

As the 19th century drew to a close, the Republicans had been firmly established as the party of big business during the Gilded Age, while the Democratic Party strongly identified with rural agrarianism and conservative values.

But during the Progressive Era, which spanned the turn of the century, the Democrats saw a split between its conservative and more progressive members. As the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, William Jennings Bryan advocated for an expanded role of government in ensuring social justice. Though he lost, Bryans advocacy of bigger government would influence the Democratic ideology going forward.

Republicans again dominated national politics during the prosperous 1920s, but faltered after the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first Democrat to win the White House since Woodrow Wilson.

A Century Of Jim Crow But Otherwise Lots Of Progress

From 1877 to at least the 1960s, the Solid South KKK-like;Progressively Socially Conservative Democrats remained a formidable faction of the Democratic Party.

This is true even though the party was increasingly dominated by Progressives like William Jennings Bryan. We can see in Wilson that both factions held sway in the party, Wilson was both a progressive liberal and a son of the Confederates.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow | PBS | ep 1 of 4 Promises Betrayed.

TIP: During the late 1800s and early 1900s Eugenics was a popular theory. In this era, we might find;Margaret Sanger, liberal economists and social scientists, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, a young Hitler, and the KKK all agreeing on aspects of eugenics. There are many sides;of the eugenics argument, and one must study its history in earnest before making a judgment call. Very;radical right-wing propaganda equated birth control with;genocide, but there was a wide range of beliefs. An espousal of;negative eugenics is part of the dark history of the Democratic party.

You May Like: What Is Republicanism And What Does It Value

Presidency Of John F Kennedy

The election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 over then-Vice President Richard Nixon re-energized the party. His youth, vigor and intelligence caught the popular imagination. New programs like the Peace Corps harnessed idealism. In terms of legislation, Kennedy was stalemated by the conservative coalition.

Though Kennedy’s term in office lasted only about a thousand days, he tried to hold back communist gains after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the construction of the Berlin Walland sent 16,000 soldiers to Vietnam to advise the hard-pressed South Vietnamese army. He challenged America in the Space Race to land an American man on the Moon by 1969. After the Cuban Missile Crisis he moved to de-escalate tensions with the Soviet Union.

Kennedy also pushed for civil rights and racial integration, one example being Kennedy assigning federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders in the South. His election did mark the coming of age of the Catholic component of the New Deal Coalition. After 1964, middle class Catholics started voting Republican in the same proportion as their Protestant neighbors. Except for the Chicago of Richard J. Daley, the last of the Democratic machines faded away. President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

Andrew Johnson And Presidential Reconstruction

Democrats became the Confederacy, NOT the Republicans!

At the end of May 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction, which reflected both his staunch Unionism and his firm belief in states rights. In Johnsons view, the southern states had never given up their right to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the state level. Under Johnsons Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmens Bureau reverted to its prewar owners. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery , swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.

As a result of Johnsons leniency, many southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known as the black codes, which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples activity and ensure their availability as a labor force. These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states.;

Don’t Miss: Where Are Republicans On The Political Spectrum

The South And The House Go Republican

“I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” President Johnson said shortly after signing the Civil Rights Act, according to his aide Bill Moyers. And indeed, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican specifically for this reason.

Yet party loyalties take a long time to shake off, and the shift of white Southerners from being solid Democrats to solid Republicans was in reality more gradual.

And while race played an important role in this shift, other issues played roles too. White evangelical Christians became newly mobilized to oppose abortion and take stands on other “culture war” issues, and felt more at home with the conservative party. There was that suspicion of big government and lack of union organization that permeated the region. And talented politicians like Ronald Reagan promised to defend traditional values.

Still, Democrats continued to maintain control of the House of Representatives for some time, in large part because of continued support from Southerners, as shown in this map by Jonathan Davis at Arizona State University. But in 1994, the revolution finally arrived, as Republicans took the House for the first time since 1955. And many of the crucial pickups that made that possible came in the South.

The First Party System: The Federalist Party And The Democratic

To start, the founding fathers can be put into two groups: the;Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party .

Alexander Hamilton favored central Government and had ties to Britain, and wanted centralized banking. He favored national power over state power. He is todays Washington Liberal/Conservative. Hamilton wanted free-market capitalism and globalization with Britain/America, as a world leader hundreds of years before his time. He is an impressive character.

The Democratic-Republican Party, headed by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, generally opposed Hamilton and his views . In simple terms, they are todays Social-Libertarians . They are more in-line with what people think when they think rebelling from the authority of the King to be free.

In this scenario we can say the big government aspect of the current American left is with the Federalists, and the socially liberal of left, and anti-big government of the right, part is with the;Democratic-Republicans. But remember, the who far-right thing simply doesnt exist yet. So the divisive politics of today arent anywhere to be found .

The duality of the;Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party;is well displayed in the clip below in a discussion between Hamilton and Jefferson .

Read Also: How Many Senate Seats Do The Republicans Have

Republican Voters Turn Against Their Partys Elites

The Tea Party movement, which sprang into existence in the early years of the Obama administration, was many things. It was partly about opposing Obamas economic policies foreclosure relief, tax increases, and health reform. It was partly about opposing immigration when Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson;interviewed Tea Party activists across the nation, they found that “immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern” those activists expressed.

But the Tea Party also was a challenge to the Republican Party establishment. Several times, these groups helped power little-known far-right primary contenders to shocking primary wins over establishment Republican politicians deemed to be sellouts. Those candidates didnt always win office, but their successful primary bids certainly struck fear into the hearts of many other GOP incumbents, and made many of them more deferential to the concerns of conservative voters.

Furthermore, many Republican voters also came to believe, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, that their partys national leaders tended to sell them out at every turn.

Talk radio and other conservative media outlets helped stoke this perception, and by May 2015 Republican voters were far more likely to say that their partys politicians were doing a poor job representing their views than Democratic voters were.

Rural And Urban Population

A Home on the MississippiCurrier and Ives

The CSA was overwhelmingly rural. Few towns had populations of more than 1,000; the typical county seat had a population of fewer than 500. Cities were rare; of the twenty largest U.S. cities in the 1860 census, only New Orleans lay in Confederate territory; and the Union captured New Orleans in 1862. Only 13 Confederate-controlled cities ranked among the top 100 U.S. cities in 1860, most of them ports whose economic activities vanished or suffered severely in the Union blockade. The population of Richmond swelled after it became the Confederate capital, reaching an estimated 128,000 in 1864. Other Southern cities in the border slave-holding states such as Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Wheeling, Alexandria, Louisville, and St. Louis never came under the control of the Confederate government.

The cities of the Confederacy included most prominently in order of size of population:

#

The CSA was overwhelmingly Protestant. Both free and enslaved populations identified with evangelical Protestantism. Baptists and Methodists together formed majorities of both the white and the slave population . Freedom of religion and were fully ensured by Confederate laws. Church attendance was very high and chaplains played a major role in the Army.

Read Also: How Many Electoral Votes Do Republicans Have

An Overview Of The Party Systems

The party systems, AKA eras of the United States;political parties, can be described;as follows :

In other words, as the Democratic Party became more progressive in the progressive era, it attracted progressives from the Republican party and alienated the Democrats of the small government socially conservative south. Meanwhile, as the Republican party conserved toward Gilded Age politics in the 20th century, and embraced socially conservative single-issue voter groups and individualism, it attracted the solid south and alienated progressives. These two factors, and many more explained in detail below, substantially changed the party platforms, seats held in Congress, and the voting maps over the course of the 20th century .

To sum up and connect all of the above, the switches we see that change the parties and define different eras include things like Teddy Roosevelt or Strom Thurmond switching parties , the Democratic Party platform becoming more progressive in the progressive area , the southern Democrat southern bloc tending toward the Republican party after the Civil Rights era , all this impacting which regions of the country tend to support each party , and all of this affecting which party has a stronghold in which region as new elections occur .

Babe Didrikson Zaharias Wins Final Lpga Tournament Of Her Career

Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the Souths first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs .

READ MORE: The First Black Man Elected to Congress Was Nearly Blocked From Taking His Seat

You May Like: How Many Republicans Voted For Impeachment

Better Understanding The Changes In American Politics

Above we summarized the switching of ideologies and platforms;between the parties by looking at the party systems and Presidents.

Below we explore;details, clarify semantics, answer questions, present curated videos, and illustrate some of the key telling moments regarding the changes described above.

Please consider sharing your insight below, our summing up of the history of American politics is an ongoing effort, see the videos for supplemental content from other authors.

For deeper reading:

Also, see a breakdown of each party and President and how they would be placed on the left and right.

Effect On Women And Families

Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?

About 250,000 men never came home, some 30 percent of all white men aged 18 to 40 . Widows who were overwhelmed often abandoned their farms and merged into the households of relatives, or even became refugees living in camps with high rates of disease and death. In the Old South, being an “old maid” was something of an embarrassment to the woman and her family, but after the war, it became almost a norm. Some women welcomed the freedom of not having to marry. Divorce, while never fully accepted, became more common. The concept of the “New Woman” emerged she was self-sufficient and independent, and stood in sharp contrast to the “Southern Belle” of antebellum lore.

Recommended Reading: How Do Republicans Feel About Donald Trump

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/were-the-confederates-democrats-or-republicans/

[hillaryisaboss]

8/25/2016: Hillary was the first to call out Trump's racist history and dog whistling to racists.

This speech should be required viewing. Required reading. The woman who got 3 million more votes called it. She was 100% right. She had the crystal ball. If only a few more of us had listened.

This speech needs to be burned into our memories forever:

"After all, it’s hard to believe anyone – let alone a nominee for President of the United States – could really believe all the things he says.

But the hard truth is, there’s no other Donald Trump. This is it.

Maya Angelou once said: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Well, throughout his career and this campaign, Donald Trump has shown us exactly who he is. We should believe him."

~Hillary Rodham Clinton; 8/25/2016

She warned us.

"Everywhere I go, people tell me how concerned they are by the divisive rhetoric coming from my opponent in this election.

It’s like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for President of the United States.

From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.

He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.

His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous.

...

It takes a lot of nerve to ask people he’s ignored and mistreated for decades, “What do you have to lose?” The answer is everything!

Trump’s lack of knowledge or experience or solutions would be bad enough.

But what he’s doing here is more sinister.

Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.

It’s a disturbing preview of what kind of President he’d be.

This is what I want to make clear today:

A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.

If he doesn’t respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?

Now, I know some people still want to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

They hope that he will eventually reinvent himself – that there’s a kinder, gentler, more responsible Donald Trump waiting in the wings somewhere.

After all, it’s hard to believe anyone – let alone a nominee for President of the United States – could really believe all the things he says.

But the hard truth is, there’s no other Donald Trump. This is it.

Maya Angelou once said: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Well, throughout his career and this campaign, Donald Trump has shown us exactly who he is. We should believe him.

When Trump was getting his start in business, he was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black and Latino tenants.

Their applications would be marked with a “C” – “C” for “colored” – and then rejected.

Three years later, the Justice Department took Trump back to court because he hadn’t changed.

The pattern continued through the decades.

State regulators fined one of Trump’s casinos for repeatedly removing black dealers from the floor. No wonder the turn-over rate for his minority employees was way above average.

And let’s not forget Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called “Birthers.”

He promoted the racist lie that President Obama isn’t really an American citizen – part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black President.

In 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for President with another racist lie. He described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.

And he accused the Mexican government of actively sending them across the border. None of that is true.

Oh, and by the way, Mexico’s not paying for his wall either.

If it ever gets built, you can be sure that American taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.

Since then, there’s been a steady stream of bigotry.

We all remember when Trump said a distinguished federal judge born in Indiana couldn’t be trusted to do his job because, quote, “He’s a Mexican.”

Think about that.

The man who today is the standard bearer of the Republican Party said a federal judge was incapable of doing his job solely because of his heritage.

Even the Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, described that as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

To this day, he’s never apologized to Judge Curiel.

But for Trump, that’s just par for the course.

This is someone who retweets white supremacists online, like the user who goes by the name “white-genocide-TM.” Trump took this fringe bigot with a few dozen followers and spread his message to 11 million people.

His campaign famously posted an anti-Semitic image – a Star of David imposed over a sea of dollar bills – that first appeared on a white supremacist website.

The Trump campaign also selected a prominent white nationalist leader as a delegate in California. They only dropped him under pressure.

When asked in a nationally televised interview whether he would disavow the support of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump wouldn’t do it. Only later, again under mounting pressure, did he backtrack.

And when Trump was asked about anti-Semitic slurs and death threats coming from his supporters, he refused to condemn them.

Through it all, he has continued pushing discredited conspiracy theories with racist undertones.

Trump said thousands of American Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t.

He suggested that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps in Trump’s mind, because he was a Cuban immigrant, he must have had something to do with it. Of course there’s absolutely no evidence of that.

Just recently, Trump claimed President Obama founded ISIS. And then he repeated that nonsense over and over.

His latest paranoid fever dream is about my health. All I can say is, Donald, dream on.

This is what happens when you treat the National Enquirer like Gospel.

It’s what happens when you listen to the radio host Alex Jones, who claims that 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings were inside jobs. He said the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre were child actors and no one was actually killed there.

Trump didn’t challenge those lies. He went on Jones’ show and said: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

This man wants to be President of the United States.

I’ve stood by President Obama’s side as he made the toughest decisions a Commander-in-Chief ever has to make.

In times of crisis, our country depends on steady leadership… clear thinking… and calm judgment… because one wrong move can mean the difference between life and death.

The last thing we need in the Situation Room is a loose cannon who can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, and who buys so easily into racially-tinged rumors.

Someone detached from reality should never be in charge of making decisions that are as real as they come.

It’s another reason why Donald Trump is simply temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States.

Now, some people will say that his bluster and bigotry is just over-heated campaign rhetoric – an outrageous person saying outrageous things for attention.

But look at the policies Trump has proposed. They would put prejudice into practice.

And don’t be distracted by his latest attempts to muddy the waters.

He may have some new people putting new words in his mouth… but we know where he stands.

He would form a deportation force to round up millions of immigrants and kick them out of the country.

He’d abolish the bedrock constitutional principle that says if you’re born in the United States, you’re an American citizen. He says that children born in America to undocumented parents are, quote, “anchor babies” and should be deported.

Millions of them.

And he’d ban Muslims around the world – 1.5 billion men, women, and children –from entering our country just because of their religion.

Think about that for a minute. How would it actually work? People landing in U.S. airports would line up to get their passports stamped, just like they do now.

But in Trump’s America, when they step up to the counter, the immigration officer would ask every single person, “What is your religion?”

And then what?

What if someone says, “I’m a Christian,” but the agent doesn’t believe them.

Do they have to prove it? How would they do that?

Ever since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, America has distinguished itself as a haven for people fleeing religious persecution.

Under Donald Trump, America would distinguish itself as the only country in the world to impose a religious test at the border.

Come to think of it, there actually may be one place that does that. It’s the so-called Islamic State. The territory ISIS controls. It would be a cruel irony if America followed its lead.

Don’t worry, some will say, as President, Trump will be surrounded by smart advisors who will rein in his worst impulses.

So when a tweet gets under his skin and he wants to retaliate with a cruise missile, maybe cooler heads will be there to convince him not to.

Maybe.

But look at who he’s put in charge of his campaign.

Trump likes to say he only hires the “best people.” But he’s had to fire so many campaign managers it’s like an episode of the Apprentice.

The latest shake-up was designed to – quote – “Let Trump be Trump.” To do that, he hired Stephen Bannon, the head of a right-wing website called Breitbart.com, as campaign CEO.

To give you a flavor of his work, here are a few headlines they’ve published:

“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”

“Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”

“Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield”

“Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage.”

That one came shortly after the Charleston massacre, when Democrats and Republicans alike were doing everything they could to heal racial divides. Breitbart tried to enflame them further.

Just imagine – Donald Trump reading that and thinking: “this is what I need more of in my campaign.”

Bannon has nasty things to say about pretty much everyone.

This spring, he railed against Paul Ryan for, quote “rubbing his social-justice Catholicism in my nose every second.”

No wonder he’s gone to work for Trump – the only Presidential candidate ever to get into a public feud with the Pope.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas.

Race-baiting ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-Immigrant ideas –– all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”

Alt-Right is short for “Alternative Right.”

The Wall Street Journal describes it as a loosely organized movement, mostly online, that “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.”

The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the “Alt-Right.” A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.

This is part of a broader story -- the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world.

Just yesterday, one of Britain’s most prominent right-wing leaders, Nigel Farage, who stoked anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum on leaving the European Union, campaigned with Donald Trump in Mississippi.

Farage has called for a ban on the children of legal immigrants from public schools and health services, has said women are quote “worth less” than men, and supports scrapping laws that prevent employers from discriminating based on race -- that’s who Trump wants by his side.

The godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In fact, Farage has appeared regularly on Russian propaganda programs.

Now he’s standing on the same stage as the Republican nominee.

Trump himself heaps praise on Putin and embrace pro-Russian policies.

He talks casually of abandoning our NATO allies, recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and of giving the Kremlin a free hand in Eastern Europe more generally.

American presidents from Truman to Reagan have rejected the kind of approach Trump is taking on Russia.

We should, too.

All of this adds up to something we’ve never seen before.

Of course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment. But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.

On David Duke’s radio show the other day, the mood was jubilant.

“We appear to have taken over the Republican Party,” one white supremacist said.

Duke laughed. There’s still more work to do, he said.

No one should have any illusions about what’s really going on here. The names may have changed… Racists now call themselves “racialists.” White supremacists now call themselves “white nationalists.” The paranoid fringe now calls itself “alt-right.” But the hate burns just as bright.

And now Trump is trying to rebrand himself as well. Don’t be fooled.

There’s an old Mexican proverb that says “Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.”

We know who Trump is. A few words on a teleprompter won’t change that.

He says he wants to “make America great again,” but his real message remains “Make America hate again.”

This isn’t just about one election. It’s about who we are as a nation.

It’s about the kind of example we want to set for our children and grandchildren.

Next time you watch Donald Trump rant on television, think about all the kids listening across our country. They hear a lot more than we think.

Parents and teachers are already worried about what they’re calling the “Trump Effect.”

Bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools, especially targeting students of color, Muslims, and immigrants.

At a recent high school basketball game in Indiana, white students held up Trump signs and taunted Latino players on the opposing team with chants of “Build the wall!” and “Speak English.”

After a similar incident in Iowa, one frustrated school principal said, “They see it in a presidential campaign and now it's OK for everyone to say this.”

We wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior in our own homes. How can we stand for it from a candidate for president?

This is a moment of reckoning for every Republican dismayed that the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Trump. It’s a moment of reckoning for all of us who love our country and believe that America is better than this.

Twenty years ago, when Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination, he pointed to the exits and told any racists in the Party to get out.

The week after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a mosque and declared for everyone to hear that Muslims “love America just as much as I do.”

In 2008, John McCain told his own supporters they were wrong about the man he was trying to defeat. Senator McCain made sure they knew – Barack Obama is an American citizen and “a decent person.”

We need that kind of leadership again.

Every day, more Americans are standing up and saying “enough is enough” – including a lot of Republicans. I’m honored to have their support.

And I promise you this: with your help, I will be a President for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. For those who vote for me and those who don't.

For all Americans.

Because I believe we are stronger together.

It’s a vision for the future rooted in our values and reflected in a rising generation of young people who are the most open, diverse, and connected we’ve ever seen.

Just look at our fabulous Olympic team.

Like Ibtihaj Muhammad, an African-American Muslim from New Jersey who won the bronze medal in fencing with grace and skill. Would she even have a place in Donald Trump’s America?

When I was growing up, Simone Manuel wouldn’t have been allowed to swim in the same public pool as Katie Ledecky. Now they’re winning Olympic medals as teammates.

So let’s keep moving forward together.

Let’s stand up against prejudice and paranoia.

Let’s prove once again, that America is great because is America is good.

Thank you, and may God bless the United States."

~Hillary Rodham Clinton; 8/25/2016

The woman who warned us.

Trump is a con-man propaganda artist:

Never Normalize Trump.

#strongertogether

[josuezhbe410]

The Which suggests And Symbolism Of Flags From All Over The Globe

The orange circle in this green, white, and orange flag stands for independence and the sun. The Irish flag waves excessive in its tricolour of green, white, and orange. Acting as an emblem of house, devoid of political stance, the Irish flag is understood worldwide, with holidays such as St. Patrick’s Day only further spreading the spirit of the Irish throughout the far stretches of the globe. A nice national flag ought to be iconic, which truly presents some problem.

What makes a flag colourful tends to be a subjective determination, nonetheless.

That this hope has not been disappointed, Albert of Belgium and George of England join Poincare of France at present in assuring Woodrow Wilson.

If utilizing the flag for a particular objective, remember a three ft. x 5 ft. flag frame to properly show your flag after the ceremony or occasion.

These months embrace nationwide holidays like Carnival, Easter, May Day, the Battle of Pichincha (an essential conflict in Ecuador’s struggle for independence from Spain), and the summer season solstice.

The background of this flag may be very much to do with the geography and nature of the country whereas the Irish tricolor has a method more political twist. The second African nation after Ethiopia to adopt the Pan-African colors of red, gold and green, Ghana’s flag symbolises the country’s battle for independence, its mineral wealth and its wealthy forests. The black star is a logo of African emancipation and is the place the Ghana nationwide football group received their nickname, the Black Stars. Representing the 2 leading parties of Panama, the overall design of this flag symbolises the model new Republic of Panama after its separation from Colombia.

Flag Related National Anthem Lyrics Proposal

Liberia has just one star and horizontal strips are six instead of seven. Malaysia has the Islamic moon and star instead of fifty stars of the United States. Although each country’s flag depicts its philosophy, custom, and values, there are numerous nations whose flag closely resemble one another. They have a very refined distinction or are strikingly identical.

What is the flag of India?

The National Flag of India (Hindi: Tiraṅgā) is a horizontal rectangular tricolour of India saffron, white and India green; with the Ashoka Chakra, a 24-spoke wheel, in navy blue at its centre.

Flag of India.NameTiraṅgā (meaning "Tricolour")UseNational flagProportion2:3Adopted22 July 19475 more rows

The flag is in a curious mix of revolutionary fighting for independence from Spain and Incan solar worship. The color of the flag has three horizontal bands, The high and backside are light blue and the center one is white. The blue stripes were placed on the flag by Manuel Belgrano, and are stated to be symbolic to the sky above. The flag shade and symbols are put in there for a cause, this is the most effective description Manuel Belgrano placed on the Argentina flag. RojKurdistan isn't a rustic however a large geo-cultural area in Western Asia the place the Kurdish folks make up a majority of the population.

At the same time, the photographer might depend on an inter-iconic reception; that is, he might count on the media to attract the connection to old footage of flag use and different photos coming out of Mali. Only two days earlier than his picture of “liberated Timbuktu,” jubilant scenes had occurred when Malian and French troops entered the town. The population of Timbuktu was ready, and waved the flags of France and Mali—many of which appeared as makeshift because the one in the boy’s hand. Joe Penney’s image of the child in Douentza emerged nearly sixty-three years after the photograph of Diouf Birane on the quilt of Paris Match. The place and the perform of the flag have modified in some ways.

Kurdistan stretches across 4 countries, from southeastern Turkey to northern Iraq and from northern Syria to northwestern Iran. Because they aren’t united beneath a single chief or passport, the red, white, and green striped flag with a golden sun shining at its middle is a crucial symbol of unity to the Kurdish people. Filling the center of the “v” are ribbons of white, blue, and black with a yellow sun rising on the horizon. The shade white represents the sandy seashores of this Caribbean island nation whereas blue signifies hope and black its African ancestry.

Team Canelo Mexico Alvarez Mexico Flag Aguila Tricolor Field Png File

Denmark holds the Guinness world record for the oldest steady use of their national flag, since 1625. The Danish flag is called the Dannebrog, or Danish Cloth — as legend has it, the Dannebrog ‘miraculously’ fell from the sky in a battle in the course of the Northern Crusades. Like most of the oldest flags, the Japanese flag’s origin is shrouded in myths and legends.

(Well, possibly should you added a star.) Also, this flag has survived half a century, in spite of Chad’s less-than-stable political scenario. It’s all the time good to include a little history into your flag design. Yup, it’s our second in a trio of flags primarily based off the design of the Gran Colombia flag, the opposite two being the aforementioned Colombia and the it-will-be-awhile-before-we-get-to-it Venezuela. A subtle tricolor with — and I can’t consider I’m going to say this — a nice-looking coat of arms in the middle. Depending in your pc monitor the blue is way darker within the above flag (in reality, it’s known as “dark blue” whereas the blue within the flag initially of this post is generally known as “reflex blue”). Which blue is appropriate is a bit of a thriller, as each colors are used.

Why do flags have 3 colors?

A tricolour or tricolor is a type of flag or banner design with a triband design which originated in the 16th century as a symbol of republicanism, liberty or indeed revolution.

Finland, Italy, Luxembourg and Spain all hold the 4th place whereas Austria and Denmark spherical up the top 5 with a visa-free rating of 189. The last time Japan didn’t maintain the primary place was back in 2017, when it shared the 5th spot with nations like the United States, New Zealand, and Switzerland. The rankings are based on the visa-free rating of a particular country. A visa-free score refers back to the number of international locations that a passport holder can go to with no visa, with a visa on arrival, or by obtaining an electronic journey authorization . According to Austrian legend, the country’s flag was invented by Duke Leopold V of Austria as a consequence of his combating in the course of the Siege of Acre (1189 – 1191).

While you are probably used to the red and white look of the Canadian flag, you won't have identified that the red is symbolic of England whereas the white represents France. All these international locations have red and white horizontal strip flag. These flags have almost every thing identical, the only difference you'll be able to sight is the slight difference in the shades of blue, yellow and pink vertical strips. Have you additionally felt what the distinction between the flags of these nations is? The only distinction is the flag of Australia have six white seven-pointed stars whereas New Zealand has 4 red five-pointed stars with white borders.

[crimethinc]

Confronting Escalating Repression in Germany: In the Aftermath of the G20, a Call for Resistance from the Rigaer 94

Following the popular rebellion in Hamburg during the 2017 G20 summit, the German state has sought to crack down violently on dissent. In August, the police shut down the most widely used German-language platform for radical politics. In September, the neo-fascist party Alternative für Deutschland secured seats in the German parliament. On December 5, police carried out 24 raids on leftist and autonomous infrastructure across Germany, seizing laptops, cell phones, and other means of communication. On December 18, the police published photos of people they accuse of participating in the G20 protests. Four days later, an anonymous threatening letter arrived at various autonomous centers around Berlin. Together, these events indicate a rapid descent towards tyranny. Yet German anarchists are resisting every step of the way. The Rigaer 94, a social center in Berlin, is emblematic of their courageous defiance. Here, we present some background on the Rigaer 94 and share translations of two statements on the conflict unfolding in Germany.

Background: The Rigaer 94

The Rigaer 94 is an autonomous housing project and social center in the Berlin neighborhood of Friedrichshain. The house has been at the center of many conflicts with the police, especially over the past two years. In 2016, the police declared the area immediately surrounding the Rigaer Strasse to be a “danger zone.” This designates a zone in which the police do not have to obey the law, where they may act according to the supposed imperatives of “security.” Berlin police regularly carry out illegal searches and set up control checkpoints in the neighborhood to harass inhabitants of the Rigaer Strasse.

In summer 2016, a 500-officer SWAT team raided the Rigaer Strasse and occupied the building’s social center, The Kadterschmiede. Police held the social center for three weeks. In response to this siege, hundreds and hundreds of luxury cars were burnt in night actions all over Germany. A 5000-person demonstration mobilized people from all over Europe to defend the autonomous center. The demonstration clashed with the police, receiving support from the neighborhood and from autonomous centers across Europe.

The fate of the Rigaer was to be decided in a court battle. Yet on the night before the verdict was to be announced, a car belonging to the state’s prosecutor caught fire. As a result, the prosecutor failed to appear in court the next day. The prosecution thus forfeited the case and the Rigaer Strasse won by default. Since then, the police have tried numerous times to provoke the autonomous center into conflicts.

This statement by the Rigaer gives a more in-depth look at the challenges it currently faces.

5000 people gathered in front of the Rigaer 94 on July 9, 2016 to defend it. The banner on the left reads “Government doesn’t create order—only subordination.”

Rigaer 94: Call for Resistance / Release of Manhunt Photos of Berlin Police

This text appeared in German on December 17, 2017.

The police state has set its forces loose: on Monday, December 18, the police published photographs of the faces of one hundred people who took part in the resistance to the G20 summit in Hamburg. The state has discarded the pretext of criminal prosecution entirely. Instead, it has made a major provocation against our movement by launching a new campaign of repression. This campaign is intended to strike fear into the hearts of those who participated in the G20 summit in order to crush all resistance. We will not be silent about this attack. The task of dragging this society of police collaborators, murderers, and fascists onto the funeral pyre remains before us.

It is clear to every reasonable person that the resistance in Hamburg was necessary. The forces of repression and the right-wing media have failed to reframe the narrative of the outpouring of defiance against the G20 summit. In a country that proclaims itself to be among the most democratic in the world, a country that presents itself as invincible, a country equipped with a sophisticated apparatus of violence, and in the face of enormous risks and serious consequences, tens of thousands of people dared to rise up. A mix of protests and offensive actions turned the summit of the ruling class into a disaster. A disaster for the city of Hamburg and a disaster for the powerful 20 leaders themselves, whose most important meeting now faces an uncertain future.

The summit was also a disaster for the police. In the Kaiser’s Germany, in fascist Germany, and today in democratic Germany, the police have never limited themselves to a merely executive function. They have always served as the front line for this nation of murderers. We all know how deeply anchored the ideology of the police is in our society. A society that threw Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse into the canal; that hunted Anne Frank behind her bookcase, to throw her into the extermination camps alongside millions of other “subhumans”; a society that ends up crowning the German-national military as the resistance1—this is a fascist society. The security apparatus of Germany, which was established during those slaughters and is now used to relentlessly hunt rebels and anti-fascists in the name of the German people, is also fascist. Just a few years after its “liberation,”2 this society and its executives were able to unite in the hunt against communists.

The German security apparatus was refined to perfection when it was used against guerrilla groups like the Red Army Faction, which carried out the long-overdue execution of Hanns Schleyer,3 a member of the Nazi Party. The faces of rebels were posted on every corner on manhunt posters; at every intersection, heavily-armed police maintained checkpoints. The death penalty was re-introduced and the nature of police work shifted. A new social discourse devised by a coalition of media, politicians, and police paved the way for state assassinations, psychological torture, and new special laws to be used against a large part of the population. The police state, still in its infancy when it murdered Benno Ohnesorg4, had to reckon with the permanent threat of insurrection.

Over the years, the German police have developed into a state within the state. Following the end of the urban guerilla groups and the new social movements of the 1980s and 90s, we are confronted with a society that can no longer generate any relevant opposition to the system. Not even when people are tortured and murdered in the bunkers of police stations, like Oury Jalloh from Dessau, who was burned alive by the fascist pigs. At the moment, the only factor inhibiting the completion of this totalitarian police state is its hesitance to scandalize civil rights activists too much. These civil rights activists, who like us are continually deprived of resources and support from civil society, have made their decision—whatever the state does cannot be wrong, whatever the press says is true: resistance is futile.

The time of comfortable protests is long gone. Today, German society has arrived at an extreme it hasn’t reached in over 80 years. Those who resist face the following challenges:

-Mere presence at a demonstration can mean receiving a prison sentence of many years.

-The police can designate zones in which their own laws are valid.

-The police can designate anyone as dangerous in order to lock them up and surveil them completely without approval from a judge.

Already in the lead-up to the G20 summit, sanctions were made against rebels. People who were designated by the police as “dangerous” received notice that they were forbidden to travel to Hamburg. These people were required to sign in every day at the police station while the summit was taking place, and were threatened with fines and jail time if they failed to obey. In a bid to intimidate rebels, police made their surveillance of certain people extremely obvious, not to mention the extensive secret surveillance that surely took place.

During the G20 summit, people undermined police control throughout the entire city of Hamburg, leading to the “adjustment” of citizens’ rights and massive amounts of violence by heavily armed troops of police.

portrait The mass demonstration on the final day of the G20 summit. Such scenes were significant because the image of the Kurdish leader Öcalan is banned in Germany. To see so many people bearing banners and flags with his face was an inspiring confirmation that the state had lost control.

The police activities before and during the summit were not qualitatively new. For many years now, the security apparatus has utilized every major event as an opportunity to mount new attacks on social conventions. What was exceptional this time was the number of attacks and how shamelessly they carried out these attacks against protesters.

What began after the summit was a qualitative leap. Some people invented conspiracy theories, claiming that the riots were carried out by the state in order to draw radical infrastructure into a final repression campaign in which it could be defeated once and for all. This kind of thinking is idiotic. We know precisely that the political disaster we created in Hamburg was desirable for us. In order to end this conspiracy theory, we claim full responsibility for everything that happened in Hamburg: from the first citizens’ protests to the very last stone that flew at the police.

As a part of that radical infrastructure, shortly after the summit we organized a demonstration in solidarity with all of those who were targeted by repression. In the future, we will not shirk our responsibility to take revolt further. Those who can only see state conspiracy behind every act of struggle deprive resistance of all its characteristics; they have no legitimacy to speak in the name of revolt.

It is clear that the state is fighting to ensure that its narrative of the events is the definitive one. It must conquer the narrative as it conquers everything else: our lives and our social structures, the environment and technology. In this battle for capitalist and nationalist ends, the state will always end up demanding fascism. With the same tactics, they try time and time again to delegitimize resistance by branding it criminal, antisocial, and apolitical. For this purpose, the German state can rely on its police, its media, and the German people, as well as its representatives.

It’s difficult to say who is the sleaziest of all participants in this process is. The boss of Soko schwarzer block,5 who would hunt everything he could get his hands on with the same fervor; or the nauseating Scholz,6 who represents the rotten bourgeoisie of Hamburg and their fancy cars; or the representatives of the press who serve to carry out PR work for the police; or the craven police collaborators, who deliver people up to brutal repression with the pictures they took with their cell phones, who would rather march behind every Hitler figure than take their lives in their own hands.

Some laughed at the latest wave of raids, which we saw coming far in advance. Others laughed because they knew that Fabio,7 a nice young man from Italy, would be a problem for the state’s strategy of repression. However, we should not underestimate the police strategy. An essential part of this strategy is to use PR to achieve long-term sovereignty of interpretation over the events in Hamburg.

All the same, who would have thought that so many months later, thanks to their regular appointments with the press, the G20 would still be a top theme on the daily news? And who would have thought that despite having almost unlimited resources at their disposal, their professional press work would fail without our doing anything?

Shoppers experiment with post-capitalist economics during the G20 summit in Hamburg.

For these reasons, and on the occasion of the manhunt for participants in the Hamburg riots against the G20, we want to emphasize anew the importance of our struggle against the state—against fascist organizations like the police, the secret services, and the right-wing structures—and also against the collaborators and informants within the population and the press. Fabio and everyone else who remains defiant in front of the judge are role models demonstrating a dignified approach to dealing with repression. The same goes for everyone who sends messages of solidarity to those targeted by repression, despite the intimidation of the state.

On the occasion of the police manhunt and the state’s call for a new wave of denunciations against 100 people, we have decided to release photographs of 54 police officers who took part in the eviction of the Rigaer Strasse last year. We would be glad to receive any tips, including where these police officers live and where we can meet them in private. Aside from taking part in the eviction, they should also be held responsible for all the violence they unscrupulously perpetrated during the three-week-long siege of our neighborhood in Freidrichshain.

It is important that we stop hesitating and put our strength into mobilizing solidarity and structures that are capable of action. The demonstrations8 after the raids were a beginning. After the next raids, we must become even more numerous. It is important that when all else fails, we take the streets to show our solidarity with all the comrades who are hunted by the henchmen of the ruling class.

So—out into the streets! Determined and angry, despite the repression, we will fight against the ruling order!

Burning barricades erected by demonstrators filled the skyline of Hamburg with smoke during the G20 summit.

Response to the Rigaer 94’s Call for a Police Manhunt / Threatening Letter Received from the Police State

This text appeared in German on December 30, 2017.

On December 22, an anonymous letter was delivered to various locations that the authorities have designated as “left-extremist meeting points.” The nine-page letter, double-sided with three photos on each side, contains threats against 42 people whose full names are listed. For 18 of those people, their photos were taken from the Berlin police department’s records or from people’s ID cards and are accompanied by partly relevant, mostly slanderous commentaries. This information can be directly traced to the data records from the state security departments. In addition, 24 people were named without their photos.

The letter, reproduced below for the sake of documentation, is signed by a fake organization called “The Center for Political Correctness.” The letter claims to be a reaction to the behavior of the radical autonomous house project Rigaer 94: “Your presence annoys an entire neighborhood.” The letter proves that the people who sent it were directly affected by the publication of the Rigaer 94’s call for a manhunt against the police. In the call, photographs of 54 police officers who took part in the summer 2016 eviction of Rigaer 94 were publicly released.

The letter threatens to publish more information about the individuals it targets. It is highly likely that the information and data records listed in this letter were passed on to Nazis. Many Nazi organizations are named in the letter, including “Autonomous Nationalists” and the “Identitarian Movement.” For the time being, we do not know to what extent this personal data has already been sent to Nazis. The letter makes nebulous threats—for example, against people’s cars or families, or that lawyers or investigation committees will become involved. The letter also threatens to send the data records to the police. This particular threat is an alibi that proves the letter’s authorship. An initial evaluation by a number of those targeted by the letter has confirmed that the information can only have been made available to the “scene-aware” state security officers (LKA 5) that work within the Berlin police department. The data records are pulled from approximately the last ten years. We are certain that the letter was created and sent by the Berlin police, since no one else would have access to these photos or the biometric information and investigation files.

The fake moniker reveals more about the authors. “Center for political correctness” is a play on “Center for Political Beauty.” The Center for Political Beauty is a leftist organization that uses publicity campaigns to fight against racism and fascism. Their last action was directed at the Alternative For Germany (AfD, the far-right German party) politician Björn Höcke. Höcke made a name for himself with his pro-fascist remarks about the Holocaust memorial in downtown Berlin: “We Germans, our people [Volk], are the only people in the world that has planted a monument to shame in the heart of our capital.” In addition, he complained about the “stupid” coping policy (Bewältigungspolitik)9 and demanded that the “memorial policy shift 180 degrees.” In order to stigmatize him and the AfD, the Center for Political Beauty secretly rented the empty lot adjacent to Höcke’s home and set up concrete slabs or “stelae” that looked exactly like those of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. They also publicly threatened to publish the results of their 10-month-long observation of Höcke from near his house. From this much, we can conclude that the letter that was sent to us was sympathetically received by the ranks of the Berlin police with their fascist activities and sympathies—to say the very least.

The official Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

Observing the house of the anti-Semitic politician Björn Höcke from the Holocaust memorial set up beside it by the Center for Political Beauty.

The threat to forward the data to extra-parliamentary Nazi organizations such as the Autonomous Nationalists shows that the authors of this letter are actively involved in far-right organizing. Furthermore, sending such a letter demonstrates that the authors have a great deal of confidence in and support from the police department. This is shown not only by the downright fascist ideology that the letter expresses, but also by the means itself. Slander and the sending of anonymous threats are known in all parts the world where political tension is high and regimes entrust their stability to security organizations. These techniques were developed in the 1960s in the US, where the FBI used similar methods to target the Black Panther Party. Named COINTELPRO, this program was exported to all dictatorships. The East German secret service, utilizing their strategy of “decomposition,” employed similar measures.

Cooperation between organized Nazi groups and the police is nothing new. During the siege and eviction of the Rigaer 94 in the summer of 2016, the personal information of people recognized by the police at the demonstrations was leaked to a Nazi blog in the “Halle-Leaks.” In addition, fliers illustrated with SS symbols were distributed in the area expressing support for the police. We also recall the right-wing activist Marcel Göbel,10 whose false testimony about the Rigaer 94 and the Kadterschmiede 11 was enough for the secret service to classify these places as “Autonomous strongholds.”

Lastly, the threatening letter confirms the claim made by the Rigaer 94 in their call for a manhunt against the police: fascist ideology lives inside the police departments, especially the secret services and state security. This is cause enough for us to renew our struggles.

We are not shocked that the police are carrying out this kind of repression. We are talking about the same police that murdered Oury Jalloh. The same police that made headlines throughout Germany because of its contacts with neo-Nazi groups and its escapades with individual Nazis.12 The same police force that let one of their officers be killed in order to prevent the full investigation of NSU activities.13

To everyone involved in our movements: we must prepare for further acts of disinformation, slander, false reporting, psychological and physical attacks, and “inexplicable” fires like the one that occurred in October 2015 at the entrance of the Liebig 34.14 The ones responsible for these acts are members of the Berlin Police department. The police figured out a long time ago that anarchy cannot be fought with legal means; they have decided on a strategy of direct escalation in the conflict with the Rigaer 94.

One final detail: the letter was sent from the post office in Tempelhof-Schoenenberg, the same district as the police precinct. We could never imagine that the police would make such an amateur mistake, even though they tried to conceal traces that would reveal who sent the letter. As can be seen in the photos posted with this statement, we were able to make the fingerprints on the letters visible. To do so, we made a solution composed of ninhydrin, ethanol, and acetic acid. We used a spray bottle to mist the letter and hung it up on a shelf to dry at 80 degrees Celsius. After about 10 minutes, the results were developed, as seen in the photos.

–Some of those targeted by the letter.

The threatening letter delivered on December 22 with the fingerprints on it revealed.

The German military is so unpopular that it has to portray joining the military as an act of “resistance,” as nobody wants to join. The military released a new youtube series which is an example of this. ↩

The end of World War II and subsequent occupation of Germany by Western powers and the Soviet Union is usually referred to as Germany’s “liberation,” implying that Germany was successfully cleansed of fascism. ↩

Hanns Martin Schleyer served in the SS during World War II. After the war, he became an important industrial leader in West Germany. The fact that prominent Nazi figures could still hold power after WWII confirms that de-Nazification never took place in Germany. This helps to explain why the RAF kidnapped and murdered Schleyer in 1977. ↩

The university student Benno Ohnesorg was murdered by German police during a demonstration in 1967. His death was an important moment in the German student movement; the June 2 movement was named after the date of his death. ↩

Soko Black Block is the official name the German police gave to their campaign of repression against G20 participants. ↩

Scholz is the Mayor of Hamburg, famous for suggesting that the police give people poison to make them vomit in order to prove that they took drugs. ↩

An 18-year-old Italian arrested at the G20 and held in prison for 4 months. ↩

On December 5, police raided several homes belonging to people accused of participating in a black bloc that the police brutally attacked during the G20 summit. Demonstrations took place all over Germany in response to the raids. ↩

This concept is specific to Germany and means “the politics of coming to terms with the past.” ↩

Marcel Göbel was a right-wing activist who infiltrated leftist movements. During the summer of 2016, when the Rigaer Strasse was being evicted by the police, luxury cars caught fire every night for months on end to protest the eviction. The police only caught one person committing arson—and that person happened to be right-wing activist Marcel Göbel. Göbel tried to light a poor person’s car on fire to make it appear that leftist activists were indiscriminately burning cars. In fact, left activists only burn luxury cars. After Göbel was arrested, it was revealed that he had worked extensively with the police. ↩

A social center and event space associated with the housing project Rigaer 94. ↩

In October 2017, police officers in Rostock came under fire for their involvement in a Nazi plot to murder left-wing activists. ↩

The National Socialist Underground [NSU] carried out a series of murders between 2000 and 2006, mostly against people of Turkish background. ↩

– Another leftist housing project in Berlin. ↩

[nothingman]

>

Arizona GOP leader Kelli Ward with former President Trump in August. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

In the past week, extreme moves by Republicans in Oregon, Arizona, and Hawaii all point to a discouraging conclusion: The post-Trump GOP shows no signs of reforming.

Donald Trump’s departure from the White House left a giant question mark hanging over American democracy: Would the GOP reckon with its embrace of Trumpism or would it continue down the extremist path it has been traveling for years?

The evidence from the past few weeks has not been promising. But one of the most disturbing signs — and one of the most underappreciated — has been the wild behavior of certain state-level Republican parties in recent days. Three examples — in Oregon, Hawaii, and Arizona — really stick out

On January 19, the Oregon Republican Party passed a resolution condemning the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.

In that resolution, the state party ludicrously claimed that “there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump,” warning of “a frightening parallel to the February 1933 burning of the German Reichstag” and “Leftist forces seeking to establish a dictatorship void of all cherished freedom and liberties.”

This Saturday, the official account of the Hawaii Republican Party sent tweets defending Qanon believers and praising the “generally high quality” work of a YouTuber named Tarl Warwick, who has denied the Holocaust.

The party deleted and condemned the tweets; the communications official who sent them resigned. But this is not the first dance with extremism from the Hawaii state party: In 2020, the founder of the Proud Boys Hawaii, Nick Ochs, ran for a statehouse seat under the party’s banner. Ochs later participated in the storming of the Capitol and was arrested at Honolulu’s airport on January 9.

Also on Saturday, the Arizona Republican Party passed official resolutions censuring three prominent party members — Gov. Doug Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake, and Sen. John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain — for alleged deviation from GOP ideology.

The state GOP accuses Ducey — who is, again, the sitting Republican governor — of seizing “dictatorial powers” by imposing coronavirus lockdowns. They claim Flake, who endorsed Biden over Trump, has “condemned the Republican Party, rejected populism, and rejected the interests of the American people over globalist interests” — and encouraged him to switch parties. They charge McCain, who also endorsed Biden, with having “condemned President Trump for his criticism of her husband.”

Oregon and Hawaii are blue states; Arizona is a longtime Republican stronghold that has recently turned purple, voting for Biden in 2020 and sending two moderate Democrats to the current Senate. These state GOP parties should want to move to the center to win over the median local voters, people who are turned off by the hardcore Trumpism and extremism on offer from the national party.

But that is not what we are seeing. And these recent examples illustrate something important about the Republican Party’s years-long turn toward right-wing extremism: It runs deep, its reach goes well beyond Washington, and it’s going to take a lot more than Trump’s exit to quash it.

The state parties show how our national politics is broken

In the past, some observers have dismissed extreme statements from a few state-level GOP officials as irrelevant to the bigger picture of American politics. But these recent incidents aren’t isolated; in Oregon and Arizona, it was the official Republican Party that issued the strikingly extreme statements.

Moreover, new political science research suggests that what’s happening to these state parties is very much representative of broader national trends.

In a paper released on Monday, three scholars — Daniel J. Hopkins, Eric Schickler, and David Azizi — examined 1,783 Republican and Democratic state party platforms issued between 1918 and 2017. The goal is to identify the relationship between national and state-level polarization: to figure out whether state parties are getting more extreme and why.

What they found was fascinating. Starting around the 1990s, state-level parties rapidly nationalized: platforms started to deemphasize regional and local issues, like agriculture, and play up national ones like abortion. In each state, both Republican and Democratic Party platforms became less distinctive and more like each other.

“Parties that were once collections of local retailers are now clearly national brands, more McDonalds than mom and pop,” they write.

Now, you might expect that this is just a reflection of national parties, that the RNC and DNC began to polarize and the state parties just followed their lead. But that’s not what Hopkins and his co-authors found. They found that the state-level changes in polarization happened at the exact same time as measures of national polarization increased.

“If the state parties were simply taking their cues from national-level elites, one might expect a lag between the change in Congress and shifts in state-level platforms,” they explain. “The evidence instead suggests that both state parties and national-level officials were responding simultaneously to the same changes in the broader political environment.”

One of the major changes to the “broader political environment” on the Republican side has been the rise of a polluted national media ecosystem: Fox News, national radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, far-right websites like Breitbart, and conspiracy-minded networks on social media platforms like Facebook. These institutions have worked to convince the party faithful and activists of untruths like “Trump actually won the 2020 election” and “Joe Biden is the pawn of radical socialists,” giving rise to a party that is mainlining extreme thinking at every level.

John Moore/Getty Images

Trump supporters watch a video featuring Fox host Sean Hannity at an October 30 rally in Michigan.

These are the epistemic conditions under which the Oregon state party could claim that the storming of the Capitol was a “false flag.” It’s how a Hawaii Republican Party official got attracted to the work of a Holocaust denier. It’s how the Arizona GOP could come to denounce its own sitting governor for trying to fight a deadly pandemic.

It’s obvious that some of the party’s national leaders, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY), don’t actually believe in these conspiracy theories. But for too long, the party has been comfortable letting their rank-and-file supporters believe them because it’s politically advantageous. Now, true believers are rising up and capturing the leadership of state parties and local activist groups — putting pressure on national politicians to conform to extreme ideas or risk a serious primary threat.

This makes the GOP’s post-Trump trajectory look even scarier. No one person or organization is in charge of the party, in a position to fix the root causes of its continuing turn toward extremism. Reforming the party requires a fight on multiple levels and in multiple arenas: reforms to the local and national party, transformations of both the party and adjacent institutions like Fox News.

During the recent Arizona Republican Party meeting, CNN spoke with two local GOP activists named Barbara Wyllie and Corky Haynes. These women, lifelong Republicans who call themselves “the Grassroots Grandmas,” seemed delighted with the censure moves.

“However Trump rolls is how the Republican Party’s gonna roll. This is the Trump Republican Party,” said Wyllie. “And the RINOs [Republican In Name Only] will fall off.”

The fight over the GOP’s future isn’t over. There are leading figures in state-level Republican Parties, like Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who are actively working to de-Trumpify their party.

But the early days of the post-Trump era suggest that the smart money isn’t with Hogan, but the Grassroots Grandmas.

via: https://ift.tt/3a3KixX