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koreaunderground · 4 years ago

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(2021/04/09) Anti-war activist visited by police after posting embarrassing AOC video

[thegrayzone.com][1]

[1]: <https://thegrayzone.com/2021/04/09/anti-war-activist-police-aoc-video/>

# Anti-war activist visited by police after posting embarrassing AOC video | The Grayzone

Max Blumenthal·April 9, 2021

9-11 minutes

* * *

#### An anti-war activist was visited by California Highway Patrol officers after posting video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bumbling comments on Israel-Palestine. The action, which AOC denies triggering, was initiated by a call to US Capitol Police.

* * *

As he waited for a food delivery at his home in Los Angeles on April 8, Ryan Wentz, an anti-war activist and producer for the online viral program Soapbox, heard two men calling his name from over his front gate. When he approached, he realized they were not delivery drivers, but police officers flashing badges of the California Highway Patrol.

The cops informed Wentz that they had received a call from the Capitol Police, the federal law enforcement agency tasked with protecting the US Congress, about a tweet he had sent that allegedly threatened Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Wentz told The Grayzone, “The officers said, ‘We got a warning about a sitting member of Congress. And it was because of your tweet, which tagged them in it.’ And then they just wouldn’t back down from this accusation that I threatened to kill her.”

> (1/X) I’m really shaken up right now. I was just visited by two plainclothes police officers from California Highway Patrol at my home. They said they came here on behalf of the Capitol Police and accused me of threatening [@AOC][2] on Twitter yesterday. This is provably false. [pic.twitter.com/NGR8KViy93][3] > > [2]: <https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw> [3]: <https://t.co/NGR8KViy93>

— Human Rights Watch Watcher (@queeralamode) [April 8, 2021][4]

[4]: <https://twitter.com/queeralamode/status/1380284997785948162?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

The California Highway Patrol indicated on Twitter that it had acted on a call from Capitol Police.

_**Update:**_ A [spokesperson for AOC has denied to Intercept][5] reporter Ryan Grim that their office reported Wentz’s post, and has “asked Capitol Police to look into what happened here.”

[5]: <https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1380515841951797248?s=20>

The police visit Wentz received may have been [part of a wider trend][6] of post-January 6 law enforcement intervention in social media criticism of members of Congress.

[6]: <https://twitter.com/theoneronin1312/status/1380230580919484416>

> The CHP often assists in investigations at the request of allied agencies. Please contact the U.S. Capitol Police for additional information. > > — CHP Headquarters (@CHP_HQ) [April 9, 2021][7]

[7]: <https://twitter.com/CHP_HQ/status/1380337921086005249?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

Though AOC’s office has denied falsely informing Capitol Police of an online threat by Wentz, the Democratic congresswoman has in the past asked her supporters to report critics to social media censors.

Whoever called the police on Wentz furnished law enforcement with a patently false allegation, as he has never threatened violence against any member of Congress.

In the tweet that triggered the police action, Wentz merely posted video of AOC delivering a vapid and embarrassingly convoluted answer to a question about resolving the crisis in Israel-Palestine. Describing her answer as “incredibly underwhelming,” he let the congresswoman’s cringeworthy commentary speak for itself.

> On April 1, [@AOC][8] did a livestream with Michael Miller, the head of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. She was asked about “peace between Israelis and Palestinians.” > > [8]: <https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

Her response was incredibly underwhelming, to say the very least: [pic.twitter.com/qHdwTy5pVO][9] > > [9]: <https://t.co/qHdwTy5pVO>

— Human Rights Watch Watcher (@queeralamode) [April 7, 2021][10]

[10]: <https://twitter.com/queeralamode/status/1379879392642408448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

Asked by Michael S. Miller of the New York Jewish Community Relations Council about actions that could be taken to support movements towards peace between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, AOC responded as follows:

> Earlier just now you and I were talking about the what and the how. And I think that when we talk about peace, centering people’s humanity, protecting people’s rights – it’s not just about the what and the end goal which actually gets a lot of focus, but I actually think it’s much more about the how, and the way we are coming together, and how we interpret that what, and how we act in, you know, the actions we take to get to that what. > > So what this really is about is a question more than anything else about process. And we really need to make sure that we are valuing a process where all parties are respected and have, you know, a lot of equal opportunity to really make sure we are negotiating in good faith, etcetera. That being said, you know, I think there’s just this one central issue of settlements, because if the what – if the what has been decided on as two state, then the action of settlements, it’s not the how to get to that what. > > And so, you know, I think that’s a central thing that, you know, we center. And that we value Jewish and rather, we value Israeli, uh, uh, uh, we value the safety and human rights of Israelis, we value the safety and human rights of Palestinians, in that process that is similar, and that is on equal footing. And so all of that is extremely important in that process.

The video that Wentz tweeted of AOC’s long-winded dodge of a fundamental question about resolving the Israeli occupation of Palestine prompted a flood of online mockery and contempt, mostly from leftist Twitter users. Many derided AOC as a careerist who had abandoned progressive causes like Palestinian liberation in order to curry favor with Democratic Party power brokers, while others ridiculed her meaningless word salad.

> This is a very easy issue for a leftist, why is AOC struggling? > > Isreal is an apartheid state that should be Defunded > > — Nick is a Fred Hampton Leftist 🥋 (@SocialistMMA) [April 7, 2021][11]

[11]: <https://twitter.com/SocialistMMA/status/1379905138601684995?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

> I'm incredibly impressed with [@AOC][12]'s Obama-like ability to fill large amounts of time with words while saying absolutely nothing. I challenge anyone to tell me what she just said. <https://t.co/hIkWTNR5Rp> > > [12]: <https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) [April 7, 2021][13]

[13]: <https://twitter.com/AliAbunimah/status/1379883635743059971?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

Within hours of the online pile-on, someone reported Wentz to the Capitol Police for tweeting the video that embarrassed AOC. Because Wentz does not provide any information about his personal identity in his public Twitter profile, the social media giant appeared to have provided his private details to federal law enforcement.

“Another weird thing is usually I would get a report [from Twitter],” Wentz said, “because I’ve gotten my tweets reported before. But I didn’t get any notification about this.”

AOC’s staff has previously appealed to social media censors to suppress online criticism. On February 4, 2021, her campaign sent a mass email to supporters asking them to “scan your social media to find posts with misleading information” about the congresswoman, and “use the built-in report feature to flag them for moderators.”

![][14]

[14]: https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-09-at-12.30.18-AM.png?resize=1170%2C1067&ssl=1

Team AOC issued its appeal for supporters to police social media in response to right-wing mockery of a [dramatic livestream][15] in which AOC suggested that the mob which stormed the Capitol building on January 6 nearly assassinated her.

[15]: <https://www.instagram.com/tv/CKxlyx4g-Yb/?utm_source=ig_embed>

“I just hear these yells of ‘WHERE IS SHE? WHERE IS SHE?’” she recounted in the livestream. “This was the moment where I thought everything was over. I thought I was going to die.”

However, the source of the yells which had terrified AOC turned out to be a Capitol Police officer who had been dispatched to protect her. Further, the congresswoman’s office was located in the Cannon House Office Building, which had not been penetrated by any rioters on January 6.

Right-wing activists and other political foes of AOC [exploited these points][16] to launch a viral hashtag likening the congresswoman to Jussie Smollet, the actor who faked an attack on himself. After [attempting to challenge][17] her critics directly, AOC delegated her staff to dispatch its army of supporters to report critics en masse to Twitter and Facebook censors.

[16]: <https://nypost.com/2021/02/04/aoc-blasted-for-exaggerating-capitol-riot-experience/> [17]: <https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1357037568966217728>

Weeks earlier, podcaster Jimmy Dore had initiated a [“Force The Vote”][18] campaign to pressure AOC and fellow members of the progressive congressional “Squad” to withhold their votes for Rep. Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House until Pelosi agreed to bring a bill for Medicare for All to the floor for a vote.

[18]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrqTQd5rnwU>

In response to [incendiary criticism][19] from Dore for her refusal to buck centrist party leadership, AOC declared, “That’s not tone, that’s violence.”

[19]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyAXpYPA7C4>

> RT: briebriejoy “15 million people have lost their employer-based health care in the middle of a global pandemic, and barely half of House Democrats support Medicare for All even though 88% of their constituents do. > > That’s violence.” [#ForceTheVote][20] <https://t.co/fSD8qwsINJ> > > [20]: <https://twitter.com/hashtag/ForceTheVote?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

— Jimmy Dore (@jimmy_dore) [January 2, 2021][21]

[21]: <https://twitter.com/jimmy_dore/status/1345275897704640512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

According to Wentz, the police officers that visited him asked if he had any violent intent behind his tweet, then left. “If this was like a purely intimidation thing,” he reflected, “then I guess it did its job. It’s not comforting to be on the receiving end of that. But at the same time, they’re not going to shut the left up.”

Wentz’s disturbing encounter with law enforcement appears to be part of an emerging trend. On the same date law enforcement visited him, a Twitter user posted photos of alleged federal agents on their front lawn and claimed, “FBI just came by my house for a tweet to Ted Cruz.”

> FBI just came by my house for a tweet to Ted Cruz. [pic.twitter.com/cbwouoz4GC][22] > > [22]: <https://t.co/cbwouoz4GC>

— the1312ronin (@theoneronin1312) [April 8, 2021][23]

[23]: <https://twitter.com/theoneronin1312/status/1380230580919484416?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

#https://thegrayzone.com/2021/04/09/anti-war-activist-police-aoc-video/

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rabtownsend · 5 years ago

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CW for some slurs, and general small-town casual prejudices

sub-tumbling (is that a thing?) this post I just saw claiming that shows like Family Guy and South Park are directly responsible for eroding empathy and instilling alt-right belief structures in young people.

Here’s what I think about that. I’m a leftist. Definitely a socialist. Would not necessarily describe myself as radical. Am a feminist. Am anti-fascist. Am anti-capitalist. Hate libertarianism. Do support trans rights. Do support sex-workers’ rights. And I do have complicated, sometimes contradictory feelings about a lot of things in between any one of those subjects and belief structures.

I can attribute a lot of that to my upbringing, sure. My parents were both Canadian Liberals. Both teachers.

Maybe my mistake - before I even begin - is that when I was young, and I saw the other kids in my small, conservative town calling other kids “stupid jews” and “faggot” - I never had the sense that they actually hated jews or homosexuals. Rather, they had just found some new way to call someone (who, statistically speaking, was probably not jewish or gay) an idiot, in a non-sincere way.

I didn’t see them as being truly hateful toward anyone, just ignorant. And certainly I was bothered that they were so ignorant about the meaning and connotations of those terms. And I was bothered because when I’d asked my father what words like those meant, he had explained how they were used to hurt other people.

So, that was already the context I had before South Park premiered in 1996, when I was 10 years old.

I was not allowed to watch it until I was 12, and only then because my friend Leo watched it (presumably, his dad had watched it, and told my mother it was okay).

But very specifically, the thing about South Park is that the show was always punching up. And here, I have to make a distinction between the show and its characters. The characters you are supposed to identify with, are Stan and Kyle. They are the straight men. So when a character like Eric Cartman - who represents all of the kids I grew up with who called other kids “faggot” or made fun of them for superficial reasons, without truly knowing or understanding the origin or consequence of their words - calls Kyle a stupid jew, you are supposed to be outraged with Kyle, not thinking “this Cartman character is hilarious, and I should behave like him.”

And obviously, a lot of kids I knew, as I went on to high school, had taken Cartman as the role model, rather than the bad example.

Let’s talk about Family Guy for a minute. I have thought episodes of Family Guy were funny. But as it came out a bit later, when I was a bit older, I was more able to see it for what it was (and is still) - a platform for Seth MacFarlane to shit-disturb, and champion what my friends over on Mastodon have amusingly rephrased as “freeze peach,” free speech without consequences.

In Family Guy, Peter Griffin is supposed to be the Cartman character.

Wait, let’s scoot back a second. Both characters are supposed to be the Archie Bunker character. The character you love to hate. The character who says inappropriate things, while the good, but less developed characters react with outrage. You’re not supposed to sympathize with them, but some people - people who still believe what a character portrayed as an idiot/out-of-touch curmudgeon seems to believe - will think they are being catered to.

So, Peter is supposed to be that. Only there are no straight-men on Family Guy - except Lois and Meg. The two women on the show who are physically beaten on screen or constantly verbally abused by the male characters on the show. Punishing them for being straight-man characters, on the rare occasion that they are that. Not to mention that the humour in Family Guy is almost never situational. It is almost always a cut-away joke - a thing which South Park rightly criticizes it for, in the Cartoon Wars episodes.

And knowing that South Park’s use of Cartman as an Archie Bunker type has been misinterpreted, for whatever reason, why have I stuck with it for so long?

At the heart of South Park is satire. Like, real satire, not the “satire” that alt-righters claim to use.

The parents on the show are shown as largely incompetent and driven by impulse/fear. The boys are, by contrast, progressive and wise. Cartman’s offensive behaviour has consequences for him, in ways that Family Guy characters never face consequences. For every scheme he enacts, he is thwarted, either by one of the other boys, or his own folly (in a Seinfeld-esque kind of way). Characters he offends on the show are quick to make him face consequences.

And, unlike Family Guy, South Park’s political leanings are more anarchist than libertarian. While Family Guy’s creators would champion free speech in the name of a racist joke, South Park only champions free speech in the name of valid criticism or in the service of making a moral point.

The underlying theme of many South Park episodes is to think for yourself, or that blindly following authority or acting out of fear is foolish, and has negative consequences.

Stereotypes are used and sometimes stretched to ridiculous proportions on South Park, as a means of demonstrating how stupid and ridiculous it is that we believe or rely on those stereotypes in media.

I won’t say that South Park hasn’t made missteps, but I find it hard to believe that it could train anyone to be anything but a critical thinker with anticapitalist, leftist leanings.

As always, a great deal of media is made with one intention, and misappropriated by ignorant people, who don’t fully comprehend that they are seeing something critical of a certain way of thinking, because comprehending that requires the capacity for abstract thought, which the ignorant, typically, lack.

I could see how Family Guy might encourage alt-right beliefs in young people, because it is edge-lordy, and it champions free speech over good conscience. I don’t know that I’d place the onus on the show so much as on the viewers for failing to make a more discerning choice. After all, one of the most popular shows on television: The Big Bang Theory, routinely mocks higher education, interest in niche subjects, makes a joke out of sexual harassment, and plays with misogyny. And it was propped up by a laugh track it didn’t deserve. The majority of Americans decided it was their favourite show. Far more so than Family Guy or South Park, and definitely since at least the mid 2000s.

I dunno, guys. This just feels like another “video games cause violence” argument, from people who don’t play videogames.

You know what I don’t think? I don’t think eating squid causes peritonitis. I’ve never eaten it. I have no reason to believe that it would cause peritonitis. But I sure don’t like the idea of eating squid, so it sure would be helpful to pretend that I don’t eat it because it might cause peritonitis. If only I were willing to live that kind of lie...

#rab thoughts

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bigskydreaming · 6 years ago

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Like, I realize I was posting a ton encouraging people to vote yesterday, but now that midterms are over, let’s be perfectly clear that those posts were made urging white middle class liberals to vote. Because no person of color has ever needed a white dude to tell them why they should vote in the name of damage control even when they don’t like or ‘feel inspired’ by the ballot choices. And the fact is that many, MANY people don’t seem to get that the reason so many marginalized leftists on tumblr speak critically about the Democrats and liberals even at the height of election season is because they’ve fully mastered the art of doing whatever the fuck they have to while already having moved on to worrying about what comes next. And its patronizing as hell to basically expect them to put their training wheels back on until the rest of us catch up to that level of survivalism meets progressivism.

Which we’re never going to do if we don’t fucking start learning to speak with distinction about the difference between groups who are anti-voting or just critical of voting because voting doesn’t get them ENOUGH of what they want and the groups that are anti-voting or voting critical because voting doesn’t get them ANY of what they want and they’re still stuck doing it because at best its a speedbump in the way of making things WORSE than they already are, but hey even a speedbump helps, I guess.

But make no mistake, there IS a difference, and yet which groups tend to get blamed most for elections not going the left’s way? I’ll give you a hint. It’s NOT the groups that have larger platforms and louder voices than the others.

And which groups do you think actually have the MOST influence in whether or not elections go the left’s way? I’ll give you another hint. It’s absolutely the groups that have larger platforms and louder voices than the others.

We all know that trickle down economics doesn’t work, but some of us apparently are still trying to pretend that trickle down social economics somehow works any better. If you were on twitter last night or this morning, there was a MARKED distinction in attitudes from left-leaning users. And that distinction was between White Twitter and Everyone Else. White Twitter were the ones cheering and celebrating and going ‘we did it’ and ‘this is a victory’ and ‘dont let anyone tell you this wasn’t a win!’ Everyone else were the ones going ‘yes, this was good, but we’re not really celebrating because hey guess what? It still wasn’t GOOD ENOUGH.’

And that’s the real problem we’re facing, White Internet at Large. That’s what’s really holding us back. This thing where we’re all happy to sing ‘we’re all in this together’ when we NEED Everyone Else, when even WE’RE aware that things are dire and our most basic rights and freedoms are on the line....

But the second things take an uptick FOR US, suddenly, its fuck those guys, amiright, lol? Suddenly its ‘omg why cant you just let us have this for five seconds’ and ‘sometimes people need something to feel good about, for morale’ and a dozen other things that are basically us flipping off everyone who’s harshing our buzz by pointing out that however better things might have just improved for us, y’know, the ones who were already least affected and thus the latest to arrive at the We Should Totally Burn It All Down Party, that doesn’t exactly mean jack shit has changed for Everyone Else. Just that at most, things haven’t gotten actively worse over night, and guess what? That’s not something we should ever feel okay telling people they should CELEBRATE, especially not if the people we’re telling it to are afforded less privileges and advantages by their status quo than we are by ours.

Trickle down social economics is ‘wait your turn’ and ‘you have to be patient’, spoken obliviously to the ones who’ve been waiting the whole damn time, about things that nobody should ever have to be patient about because its 2018 and we’re still believing the hype that ‘inalienable rights’ are to be distributed at the discretion of the Ones At The Top.

Trickle down social economics is ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ and ‘hey this might not have improved things for you THIS time but it put the rest of us in a better position to make things better for you down the line, and you did that, so thanks, that’s why your vote counts.’

Trickle down social economics doesn’t work for the same exact reason trickle down economics doesn’t work: making the 1% flush with more cash doesn’t trickle down the social classes and make everyone else more money through the creation of more jobs and the introduction of more capital circling through the economy.....because the 1% have zero motivation to spend their newfound cash on anyone else, zero interest in creating new jobs and introducing more capital into the economy to boost and revitalize it. They got theirs and now they’re doing just fine. They see no reason to change things or expend any more effort than what they’ve already expended obtaining the Extra that they were after for themselves. The lower classes are of no further use to them at this time, so as far as they’re concerned, they see no further need to interact with or on behalf of the lower classes until the next time they need to make use of the lower classes in pursuit of their own self-interests again.

It’s the SAME DAMN THING here. White liberals, as a whole we are guilty of the exact same shit most of us have only lately found it fashionable to despise the 1% for, just in terms of social capital, WHICH WE ALL HAVE, 1% and 99% alike.

This is what we’re doing. Every election cycle. Without fail. Without deviation. Relying on people of color. Talking a good game. Saying how we’re all in this together, we are the future, we have to come together, democracy’s at stake for each and every one of us, blah blah blah.....and then the SECOND we see things turn around enough that WE personally are able to be optimistic again, take heart, see a light at the end of the tunnel, we don’t want to hear anyone else hampering our celebration with talk of the issues they��re still facing. Have been facing all along, that have in no way, shape or form improved along with the improvement of our fortunes. Who personally have ZERO reason to be any more optimistic than they were yesterday, to take heart, to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Suddenly its ‘We’re TIRED,” and “we’re only human” and “everyone needs to rest sometime” and “nobody can stay this energized 24/7/365, we need to encourage people to stop and appreciate the victories along the way when and where we can.” As though Everyone Else isn’t every bit as damn tired, most likely MORESO, because they’ve been fighting this uphill battle long before our own self interest finally dragged us into it. As though Everyone Else isn’t just as in need of rest. As though Everyone Else doesn’t find it just as hard to stay this energized 24/7/365, as though they too wouldn’t like to stop and appreciate the victories along the way, if they actually WERE victories for them too instead of at best a lack of worsening of their present circumstances.

White liberals and leftists, we have a fucking problem (well, we have a lot) but this one’s name is Taking Too Damn Long To Join The Fight, And Calling Timeout And Taking A Breather The Second It Looks Like WE Personally Can Afford To, Screw How Everyone Else Is Doing.

Crawling over to the sidelines and grabbing a water and waving over at everyone else and saying “You guys got this, you’re doing great, I’m just gonna catch my breath, but I’m totally right here, I’m with ya, I’ll tap back in annnnny second now, just....little winded....still need a sec,” only to stretch that second and drag it out until coincidentally, we only seem to actually tap back in right around the time our own Personal Interests are up for grabs again and the focus of the next battle.

You went out and voted yesterday? Great. Good. That was a thing that you did that helped not make things worse and hopefully gave us some more tools with which to make things better.

But don’t fucking celebrate. Not now. Not yet. Look around at everyone who isn’t White Twitter and White Tumblr and read the fucking room. Look at WHO specifically isn’t celebrating, and wonder why, and then stop fucking wondering cuz you don’t need to because they’re all more than willing to tell us, they’ve been telling us all along, we just don’t like to listen to depressing shit when we could be celebrating our own good fortunes instead.

If we’re really all in this together, then we don’t get to celebrate until ALL of us have reason to celebrate. And guess who doesn’t get to decide when EVERYONE has cause to celebrate? Give you another hint - its NEVER the first people to see their fortunes change or improve.

And if truth is, you’re really just looking out for number one and are secretly annoyed at having to care about how other people are doing when you just want to be happy for yourself? I mean, you do you, but maybe in the future keep that “we’re all in this together” line out of your mouth unless you’re totes cool with being a disingenuous exploitative asshole who doesn’t actually give much of a fuck about marginalized people or people with marginalizations other than yours. Y’know. When they’re not being directly beneficial to your own self-interests and circumstances.

But still. If you voted yesterday, good job. It wasn’t everything it could’ve been, but it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been either, so you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done at keeping things from actively getting that much worse. Your vote mattered. You did that. Well done.

Now let’s get the fuck back to work.

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gncrevan · 7 years ago

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/post/170127287928/sniper-at-the-gates-of-heaven-wild-how-some I found this post of yours really interesting; where do you see this undercurrent manifesting?

Hey, I left this question unanswered for a while because I wanted to give it the attention it deserves. I am currently on holiday, so I finally have the time to address it.

For everyone else reading: the original post was about the influence of Nazi ideology after 1945 and I voiced the opinion that you still encounter a lot of it, often masked differently. Most of the sources I will link are in German because this is obviously not something that is being dealt with outside of Germany a lot, and many are quite recent because it has taken this long for the public media to address this part of our cultural history. Critical voices were often silenced and are almost forgotten now. In fact, critical voices are still silenced if they dare to say that this recent history is still present our views today. I will translate passages that I quote or paraphrase.

To understand the real effects of Nazi ideology after 1945, we first have to look at the influence Nazis still had in the 50s and 60s. Here is a list of former NSDAP members who went on to have a political career in the FGR (Federal German Republic). Please note that membership in the NSDAP was never a legal requirement and that you only “had” to join if you had any political or economic ambitions in the Nazi state, which meant supporting the ideology at worst and accepting it for your own gain at best. There were absolutely no guilt-free NSDAP members. All of them were Nazis, either because they believed in it or because they considered it to be ok if it benefited them.

In 1951, the Bundestag decided that all civil servants had a right to re-employment. Over 90% of former Nazi civil servants made it back into civil service: as politicians, jurists, teachers, public officials. “Not a single judge and not a single state attorney has been legally convicted for their crimes as part of the NS justice system.”

After the occupation, the old jurisprudence was simply reactivated, with the same staff that had served in the Third Reich. Most of this staff had been members of the NSDAP, all of them had carried out their will. “The young, terribly capable NS jurists experiences the peak of their careers in the sixties. They shaped the young Republic.” They received promotions and political influence. Hans Globke, who wrote an annotation that put the Nuremberg Laws on legal ground, became Secretary of State. Hans Puvogel, whose dissertation advocated for racist cleansing and eugenics, became Minister of Justice in Lower Saxony. Edmund de Chapeaurouge, former judge for race defilement charges, and Rudolf Weber-Lortsch, former SS leader, resided at the Federal Administrative Court until the mid-seventies. Former Nazi judge Willi Geiger served as president of the Federal Court of Justice and associate in the Federal Constitutional Court until 1977.

Germany’s first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was literally a Nazi sympathizer. While he had shown contempt for Hitler and the NSDAP as a politician of the Weimar Republic, and openly denounced them (in favour of monarchism, I might add), he later had no qualms putting a lot of former Nazis in his cabinet, and called SS soldiers “decent people”. Notable Nazis and former Waffen-SS in Adenauer’s/Kiesinger’s cabinet:

Karl Carstens, member of the NSDAP and SA, who used his later position as President to give political positions to other former Nazis, such as Bernhard Hinrichs

Hans Filbinger, a former NS judge

Hans Globke, see above

Kurt Georg Kiesinger, NSDAP member and propaganda liaison of the Foreign Office’s broadcasting department, who went on to become Chancellor in 1966

Theodor Oberländer, SA-Obersturmbandführer, assistant to Erich Koch, strong supporter of the ethnic cleansing of Slavic countries

Franz Josef Strauß, Oberleutnant of the Werhmacht, Nazi educator and “Offizier für wehrgeistige Führung”

Ernst von Weizsäcker, served as Secretary of the Foreign Office and Ambassador to the Vatican in the Third Reich

Maybe the most sinister way Nazi ideology continued to fester was through education. In the 1950s, a large majority former Nazi teachers and professors were allowed back into schools. “Everybody had to fill in a “de-Nazification form”, then everyone who had joined the NSDAP before 1933 was dismissed from service. However, a majority would later be reinstated into schools. That was in part because about 95% of people were somehow conntected to National Socialism, and “you can’t make a state with only five percent”, as contemporary mayor [of Hamburg] Max Brauer once said. Of course many tried to wash their hands of it and denied their involvement in the Nazi system, or claimed they had been acting under duress. If you didn’t have a chance to re-enter teaching [in one Bundesland], you could often do so in one of the others, sometimes under a false identity.”

These teachers continued to work and influence children, often using Nazi disciplinary measures such as excessive violence, putting great emphasis on physical fitness, openly spouting racist, antisemitic and eugenicist ideology, harassing and abusing Jewish, non-white, disabled and leftist children under their “care”. Famous authors Ralph Giordano (Jewish) and Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi (mixed Black) who both had Nazi teachers later reported this made them suicidal, incited violence against them from other children, and affected them for their whole life. On the other hand, as part of the rising interest in pedagogy in the 1960s and 70s, there was also a revival of the teachings of Peter Petersen. The reform educationalist had created the “Jenaplan” which was now the basis for a school reform -- but he had also written about Hitler as the “educator of the people”, sung the highest praise to the SS and SA, vocally supported eugenics and biological racism.

Now I am not saying that every concept is tainted because of its inventor, and there are definitely good ideas in the Jenaplan, but the problem is that Petersen’s Nazi history was conveniently ignored and swept under the rug instead of openly discussed. This behaviour is a constant in the way we have dealt with our living history, and it is the breeding ground for Nazi ideology to go unnoticed, to weasel itself into our minds undetected, to make itself look harmless and totally detached from its violent history.

That is what I mean when I speak of an undercurrent of Nazi ideology in Germany today. Because as long as we do not confront where our ideas and teachings and cultural norms come from, and what might lie behind them, we will always repeat things that have been brought into the world by the Nazis. It was them who introduced Mother’s Day and built our autobahn and we have to be aware of why that is and what purpose that served in order not to romanticize their actions and accept their ideas. It was former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who told us that our history doesn’t mean we cannot be patriotic, and that we should be patriotic, and if you do not question why that rhetoric came from people who openly served Hitler and murdered Jewish people and was eaten up by all those “good and innocent Germans”, you’re really not using your head to think. We still use Nazi terminology like “Endsieg”, “Endlösung”, “Anschluss”, “ausmerzen”, “ausrotten”, “entartet”, “Untermensch”, “Sonderbehandlung”, “Umsiedlung”, “Schutzhaft”, “Führer” and we should really question why we don’t feel sick every time we hear these phrases, why we don’t change our language, what mindset this reflects.

There is a reason why the AfD is in our Bundestag now and why people have no qualms blaming the foreigners and refugees for everything that goes wrong. There is a reason why I hear customers at work openly proclaim that Hitler wasn’t all that wrong, that he did good things for Germans, and that we need a strong leader. There’s a reason why a client who is a Social Democrat is talking about how the immigrants are all criminals. There’s a reason why every week my boss reads news headlines to me about how immigrant men rape German women and how foreigners bleed the German state dry. There’s a reason why they feel perfectly safe doing that. Germany hasn’t changed all that much. Nazis, racists, antisemites, fascists have always been in our midst. And we have covered for them.

The only way to truly oppose Nazism is to be vigilant about the ways in which it still informs our society. To never let anyone forget. Always bring up our history, our crimes. Don’t let the people feel safe in their complacency. Everybody is all too comfortable pretending that this is “over” and we don’t have to care about it anymore. But we do have to care! We have to be critical of ourselves and others! These people were our grandparents, our politicians, our parents’ teachers. These people are still in part alive and those who aren’t made sure to pass on their legacy to the next generation. And we are only one generation removed from that. We are part of it, and that is why we need to confront it.

Further sources (also German):

A collection of news articles from Der Spiegel about Nazis after 1945

Baby rearing methods from the Third Reich are still common

About the recent history of pedagogy

The Nazi jargon of AfD members

German authors returning from exile were shocked that there was “no reaction to what had happened”

Feel free to add if you have any good reads!

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#nazi germany #history #gerpol #politics #antifascism #educational #german history #svartikotturinn

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chiseler · 5 years ago

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Theater of War

Towering at six and a half gangling feet, with a long face that drooped like a pensive sunflower over everyone he met, playwright Robert Sherwood loomed large in New York culture, in more than one sense, from the 1930s through the war and beyond. Between 1936 and the coming of war in Europe he gradually transformed from a writer of Pulitzer-winning antiwar plays to a gung-ho war propagandist and speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt. In his shift from isolationist to interventionist, he helped prod the rest of America in the same direction.

New York theater in the 1930s had a long conversation with its audiences about isolation and intervention, war and pacifism. Elmer Rice wrote what are said to be the first two Broadway dramas responding to what was happening in Hitler's Germany: We, the People, which ran at the Empire Theatre on 42nd Street in 1933, and Judgment Day, which opened at the nearby Belasco the following year. Rice -- born Elmer Reizenstein on East 90th Street in 1892 -- graduated from New York Law School in 1912 but preferred courtroom dramas to actual courtrooms. On Trial, his first play (1914), was a giant hit, as was the 1929 Street Scene, a realistic drama about tenement life in New York, which earned him a Pulitzer and was adapted as both a film and later an opera, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes.

In 1932 he visited Germany and was appalled by the fascism and anti-Semitism. He came home to write the sprawling We, the People, which dramatized the lives of working class and farm families being pulled under by the Depression. Rice's message was that unless the businessmen and politicians who ran the country did something, America could be heading for a German-style revolution and fascistic crackdown. Audiences who could still afford Broadway tickets in Depression 1933 didn't go to the opulent Empire Theatre to be hectored and depressed. The show opened in January and closed in March after only 49 performances.

We, the People was in the middle of its short run when the Reichstag in Berlin burned on the night of February 27. The Nazis arrested four Communists and tried them in Leipzig for arson and treason. In the internationally publicized trial, one of the last displays of a free court in Hitler's Germany, only one of the men was convicted (and soon guillotined). Rice used it as the inspiration for Judgment Day, about a show trial in a fictionalized Eastern European country where members of the "People's Party" are accused of trying to assassinate "our leader, Minister-President Grigori Vesnic" of the National Party. Unlike the Leipzig trial, this one ends with an appearance by the dictator Vesnic himself, and his assassination there in the courtroom. Judgment Day fared little better than We, the People, closing after three months.

One of the first Broadway plays to address the Nazis' abuse of Jews -- and the only one of the period that depicted Nazi violence onstage -- was Clifford Odet's one-act Till the Day I Die. The Group Theatre presented it and Odets' Waiting for Lefty at the Longacre Theatre on West 48th Street for 136 performances in the spring and summer of 1935. It was set in Berlin, where Nazis have rounded up some Jews and Communists. They smash one prisoner's fingers with a rifle butt, and kick and beat others. Audiences were shocked and horrified. In addition, Odets flirted with the idea, widely promoted by the left in the 1930s, that the Nazis' brutality and cult of extreme virility were twisted expressions of their homosexuality. One officer tells another that "it might be much better for both of us if you weren't so graceful with those expressive hands of yours. Flitting around here like a soulful antelope. I'm lonely, I've got no one in the whole world." The other replies, "You've got me, Eric."

Two of the most talked-about plays of 1936, when Americans were still almost unanimously isolationist, were outspokenly antiwar: Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead and Sherwood's Idiot's Delight. Shaw, whose actual surname was Shamforoff, was born in the Bronx in 1913 and raised in Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn College. He was 23 when he wrote Bury the Dead, a bitterly absurdist antiwar fantasy that ran from April to July 1936 at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre. It was set in "the second year of the war that is to begin tomorrow night." The corpses of six young soldiers who died in battle stand up in their shrouds and refuse to be buried. This causes all sorts of problems for the army brass, the warmongering businessmen, and the clergy, while the news media spin it as a sign of "the indomitable spirit of the American doughboy." In the play's best scenes, the corpses' wives and mothers try to convince them to lie back down. A twenty-year-old soldier tells his mom that he lived too little to be content with death. An angry wife berates her husband for only standing up to the generals now that he's dead. When no one can convince them, a frustrated general grabs a gun and tries to kill them all over again, but they simply walk off.

Bury the Dead was a critical sensation. In the Times, Brooks Atkinson raved about "the genius of Mr. Shaw's lacerating drama. It is a rebellious dance of scabrous death on the battlefield. Take it also as a warning from the young." Eleanor Roosevelt had just begun writing a nationally syndicated daily newspaper column, "My Day," which, amazingly, she would keep up until a few months before her death in 1962. After seeing Bury the Dead in May 1936, she wrote that "the thoughts hit you like hammer blows," adding that it would be "long be remembered by anyone who sees it and its strength lies, I think, in the fact that it is the expression of the thought and feeling of thousands upon thousands of people today."

She was right about its longevity: Bury the Dead remains one of the best-known of all American antiwar plays, and continues to be performed in revivals as the country goes from one conflict to the next.

Idiot's Delight followed Sherwood's first bona-fide Broadway success, The Petrified Forest. Sherwood grew up in Manhattan at the beginning of the century, son of a prosperous Wall Streeter and an artist. Just as the Great War broke out in 1914 he went off to Harvard, where he wrote for the Lampoon and the Hasty Pudding Club. When America entered the war in 1917 he volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force, but he was rejected as too tall for combat -- the standard depth for front line trenches was only six feet. So he crossed the border and joined the kilted Canadian Black Watch. On an infantry charge in France he was gassed and got hung up in barbed wire. Like many other young Americans, he went Over There convinced of the righteousness of the war, and came back shocked by its obscene futility.

In 1919 a family friend got Sherwood an entry-level job at Vanity Fair, where Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker took a shine to him. Despite an apparently complete lack of their flair for cunning repartee -- Parker called him the Conversation Stopper -- he joined them in the Algonquin Round Table, the "Vicious Circle," with regulars who included theater critic Alexander Woollcott; Harold Ross, who would start The New Yorker in 1925; the leftist journalist Heywood Broun; and novelist Edna Ferber.

It was Ferber who encouraged Sherwood to write plays. His first work on Broadway, the 1927 The Road to Rome, was a light historical fantasy in which Hannibal is talked out of sacking Rome by the emperor's amorous wife, who convinces him that love, sex and joy are preferable to war, death and pain. Sherwood assayed various topics and styles over the next few years before finding his mature voice with The Petrified Forest, which opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1935 with Humphrey Bogart and Leslie Howard in the roles they would reprise in the Warner Bros. movie that appeared the following year.

Sherwood's Idiot's Delight opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre in May 1936, when Bury the Dead was still running nearby, and ran for 300 performances. In a set-up similar to the one in Forest, an international gaggle of characters gets stuck at a ski lodge in the Italian Alps. Principle among them are a down-at-heels American showman named Harry Van, a wealthy arms merchant named Weber, and the mysterious Russian countess Irene, who is really a show girl and con artist Harry spent a night with years ago. Just as they congregate, war breaks out again among the European powers, giving Sherwood the opportunity to have the characters voice different points of view, from Harry's feckless American optimism to Weber's worldly cynicism.

Irene says to Weber, "I'm so happy for you. All this great, wonderful death and destruction, everywhere. And you promoted it!"

"Ask yourself: why shouldn't they die?" Weber replies. "And who are the greater criminals -- those who sell the instruments of death, or those who buy them, and use them?" He argues that she shouldn't blame men like him for war, but the millions of "little people" who allow themselves to be goaded into fighting with cheap appeals to patriotism and duty.

Sherwood was citing an idea that was central to the antiwar movement in the mid-1930s: the notion that international munitions dealers like Weber, the "merchants of death," had used propaganda and political influence to manipulate the world into the Great War. The remarkable Marine Corps General and twice Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler put this notion succinctly in his pamphlet War Is a Racket, published in 1935. He argued that modern war was choreographed by the arms dealers, steel companies, bankers and other capitalists for their own immense profit and everyone else's terrible loss. In 1934 this idea led to a Senate Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, better known as the Nye Committee for its chairman, the isolationist North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye. The later-infamous Alger Hiss served as its chief counsel. The committee not only put an official stamp on the antiwar movement; it helped prod Congress into passing a series of Neutrality Acts beginning in 1935 that prohibited the export of arms to warring nations; banned loans to warring nations; and forbade U.S. merchant ships from carrying arms to belligerents, even if manufactured elsewhere.

Idiot's Delight won Sherwood his first Pulitzer. He wrote the screenplay for the MGM film adaptation that appeared in 1939, with Clark Gable as Harry Van and Norma Shearer as Irene.

The situation in Europe had changed a great deal between 1936 and 1939, and the film was dated the day it opened. Hitler and Stalin had, each in his own way, made their intentions unmistakably clear, forcing Sherwood and Shaw to reassess their antiwar stances of just three years earlier.

Shaw's The Gentle People: A Brooklyn Fable premiered at the Belasco Theatre in January 1939, with Harold Clurman directing an extraordinary cast that included Same Jaffe, Franchot Tone, Sylvia Sidney, Karl Malden, and Lee J. Cobb. Shaw transposed events in Europe to the Brooklyn waterfront, where a pair of middle-aged fishermen, Jonah and Philip, are preyed on by a Hitleresque thug named Goff. He shakes them down for weekly pay-offs, and for a long while they give in, in effect appeasing him the way England and France appeased Hitler. "We are not all made out of the same material," Goff explains to them. "There are superior people and there are inferior people. The superior people make the inferior people work for them. That is the law of nature. If there is any trouble you beat 'em up a coupla times and then there is no more trouble. Then you have peace."

Eventually, Jonah tells Philip that the only way to rid their neighborhood of Goff is to murder him.

"All my life I wanted only peace and gentleness," Philip counters. "Violence. Leave it to men like Goff."

Jonah replies that "if you want peace and gentleness, you got to take violence out of hands of the people like Goff and you got to take it in your own hands and use it like a club. Then maybe, on the other side of the violence, there will be peace and gentleness."

They kill Goff, and not only get away with it, but get back all the money he extorted from them. In an introduction, Shaw wryly notes: "This play is a fairy tale with a moral. In it justice triumphs and the meek prove victorious over arrogant and violent men. The author does not pretend that this is the case in real life."

When the U.S. went to war two years later, Shaw would enlist in the Army and serve as a warrant officer. He'd put his wartime experiences into two later novels, The Young Lions and Rich Man, Poor Man.

Robert Sherwood was "sickened" when the Soviets invaded Finland late in 1939. Although he still considered himself a pacifist, he had now come to equate isolationism with escapism, reluctantly concluding that sooner or later the United States would be forced to defend itself and "save the human race from complete calamity." He had "consistently tried to plead the cause of pacifism," he wrote in a letter that December. "But the terrible truth is that when war comes to you, you have to fight it." As the outgunned Finns mounted a splendidly courageous defense that humiliated the Red Army through the winter, Sherwood churned out a play about a Finnish family and assorted others who join the resistance. His friends Alfred Lunt, who was of Finnish descent, and Lynne Fontanne agreed to star, and Lunt asked to direct. Montgomery Clift and Sidney Greenstreet were also cast. They were still in rehearsals when Finland finally capitulated in March 1940, but all felt the play should go on.

There Shall Be No Night opened on Broadway at the Alvin (now the Neil Simon) Theatre that April. In the Times, Brooks Atkinson was critical of the play's dramatic weaknesses but not its message, declaring that "the best parts of it speak for the truth with enkindling faith and passionate conviction." Life praised the "simple, poignant story" and said it had "chances of being an important hit."

Isolations from the left, right and middle attacked the play. The Washington Post assailed it as "a rank inflammatory job, pleading for intervention." The Daily Worker denounced Sherwood as a "stooge of the imperialist warmongers," while conservatives called him a stooge of international Communism (because the play theorized that the Soviets were merely Hitler’s tools).

The same month that Sherwood's play opened, Hitler's Blitzkrieg devoured Denmark and Norway. In May German armies poured into Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. Sherwood wrote a full-page ad that appeared in the New York Times and other newspapers nationwide, asserting that only "an imbecile or a traitor" could fail to see that if Britain and France fell too, America would find itself "alone in a barbaric world – a world ruled by Nazis."

France fell in June, and Hitler's Luftwaffe began bombing England to soften it up for a planned invasion. By the fall of 1940, Sherwood was helping to write Franklin Roosevelt's speeches explaining to the American people why the U.S. had to get involved. After America did enter the war at the end of 1941, Sherwood would run the foreign branch of the government's Office of Wartime Information, including the Voice of America, as well as continuing to help write FDR's speeches. He would not write another Broadway play until the war was over.

by John Strausbaugh

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d33-alex · 7 years ago

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The Problem of Identity Politics and Its Solution

The beginnings of identity politics can be traced to 1973, the year the first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago—a book that demolished any pretense of communism’s moral authority—was published in the West. The ideological challenge of socialism was fading, its fighting spirit dwindling. This presented a challenge for the Left: how to carry on the fight against capitalism when its major ideological alternative was no longer viable?

The Left found its answer in an identity politics that grew out of anti-colonialism. Marx’s class struggle was reformulated into an ethno-racial struggle—a ceaseless competition between colonizer and colonized, victimizer and victim, oppressor and oppressed. Instead of presenting collectivism and central planning as the gateway to the realization of genuine freedom, the new multiculturalist Left turned to unmasking the supposed power relations that subordinated minorities and exploited third world nations.

The original battleground was the American university, where, as Bruce Bawer writes in The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Politics and the Closing of the Liberal Mind:

The point became simply to “prove”—repetitively, endlessly—certain facile, reductive, and invariably left-wing points about the nature of power and oppression. In this new version of the humanities, all of Western civilization is not analyzed through the use of reason or judged according to aesthetic standards that have been developed over centuries; rather, it is viewed through prisms of race, class, and gender, and is hailed or condemned in accordance with certain political checklists.

Under the new leftist dispensation, the study of English became the application of critical and literary theory to disparate texts so as to uncover the hidden power relations they concealed. The study of history became the study of social history or “people’s history,” the record of Western Civilization’s oppression of various groups. And popping up everywhere were new departments of “studies”: African-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Chicano Studies, Gender Studies, and so on. “What these radicals blandly call multiculturalism,” wrote Irving Kristol:

is as much a “war against the West” as Nazism and Stalinism ever were. Under the guise of multiculturalism, their ideas—whose radical substance often goes beyond the bounds of the political into sheer fantasy—are infiltrating our educational system at all levels.

This revolution in American universities was accomplished swiftly and largely outside the public eye. What little resistance the radicals met was vanquished with accusations of racism. It was not until the late 1980s, with Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, the battle over the Stanford core curriculum, and the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, that the rise of identity politics on campus and the idea of “political correctness” became a page one story. By that time, however, it was too late. Alumni, trustees, and parents had no recourse. The American university was irrevocably changed.

There have been liberal critics of identity politics through the years. In 1991, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. published The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Schlesinger noted that the Soviet Union had collapsed in a heap of warring nationalities and that the state of Yugoslavia was in the process of doing the same, and asked whether America would be next. Presenting America as a nation of nations, a shared national culture whose diverse citizenry is united behind principles of liberty and equal justice, Schlesinger quoted Jean de Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Farmer:

He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.

In 2004, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington published Who Are We? Huntington examined the stunning immigration, both legal and illegal, from Mexico and argued that it was undermining longstanding notions of American national identity. America, Huntington said, has both a creed and a culture. The creed is formulated in the founding documents of our nation and in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. The culture derives from the Anglo-Protestant settlers who first peopled North America. Huntington worried about a “hispanicization” of American culture.

This book was controversial, to say the least. Nor was it without weaknesses. It is hard for this descendant of Irish and Italian immigrants to accept the notion that America’s culture is monolithically Anglo-Protestant. Furthermore, Huntington tended to underestimate the importance of the creed in shaping the culture. But such criticism should not obscure the fundamental point: Huntington, a Democrat who advised Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign, shared the same concerns one finds today among Trump supporters about immigration’s effect on American society.

This year another liberal academic, Columbia humanities professor Mark Lilla, has taken up the banner. “Identity politics on the left,” he writes:

was at first about large classes of people . . . seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions to secure their rights. But by the 1980s, it had given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow, and exclusionary self-definition that is now cultivated in our colleges and universities. The main result has been to turn people back onto themselves, rather than turning them outward towards the wider world they share with others. It has left them unprepared to think about the common good in non-identity terms and what must be done practically to secure it—especially the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort.

Lilla exhorts Democrats to replace identity liberalism with civic liberalism in the mode of Franklin Roosevelt. That Lilla’s opponents wasted no time in labeling his argument as racist is a testament to how divided the Left is on this issue.

Despite these intellectual dissidents, the Democratic Party and liberal elites appear committed to the idea that multiculturalism and identity politics, combined with the changing demographics of America, will bring about an enduring Democratic national majority. The two victories of Barack Obama strengthened their assumptions and set the template for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Lilla notes, for example, that a visitor to Clinton’s website could open tabs related to ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, but not one related to a shared vision of American community.

This approach has had catastrophic consequences for the Democratic Party. “The fatal conclusion the Clinton team made after the Michigan primary debacle,” Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg writes, “was that she could not win white working-class voters, and that the ‘rising electorate’ would make up the difference. She finished her campaign with rallies in inner cities and university towns. Macomb [County, Michigan] got the message.”

But the Democrats’ theory behind support for identity politics rests on shaky assumptions. Liberal journalist John B. Judis, who helped originate the theory with his book The Emerging Democratic Majority, has recanted his thesis. “The U.S. census makes a critical assumption that undermines its predictions of a majority-nonwhite country,” he writes. “It projects that the same percentage of people who currently identify themselves as ‘Latino’ or ‘Asian’ will continue to claim those identities in future generations. In reality, that’s highly unlikely.”

Intermarriage and assimilation will affect immigrants from these groups just as they have affected other immigrant groups. What’s more, voting allegiances can change as newcomers are integrated into the majority. There is also the problem that, as Democrats become more closely identified with identity politics, non-minority voters may swing even more decisively to Republicans—continuing the trend we saw in 2016.

Democrats fooled themselves into thinking that identity politics won Obama his two terms when in fact precisely the opposite had occurred. Obama made his debut on the national stage in the summer of 2004, during the Democratic National Convention that nominated John Kerry for president. The only reason anyone remembers that convention is because of Obama’s keynote address, where he repudiated the division of American society and famously said, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” From the start, Obama’s appeal on the campaign trail was to the noblest and most unifying aspects of the American political tradition.

This didn’t last. Shortly before Obama was reelected, he gave an interview where he said his top priority in a second term would be immigration reform that included an amnesty for illegal immigrants. The reason, he explained, was that Hispanic turnout would win him victory. Here Obama was wrong. Targeted appeals to Hispanic and black voters did not win him reelection. What won him reelection were his attacks on Mitt Romney for not understanding the economic condition of working Americans.

The most significant and effective advertisement of the 2012 campaign was a testimonial from a factory worker who had been laid off during one of Romney’s corporate downsizings. What came to be known as the “coffin ad” drove a wedge between the Republican nominee and the voters on whom Republican victory depended. Four years later, when the Republicans nominated a very different sort of candidate, these voters switched allegiances and backed Donald Trump.

It is no accident that identity politics is most rampant today in the academy, in entertainment, in the media, in Silicon Valley, and in corporate boardrooms. Identity politics is a veneer over the class politics that truly defines our society, and education is the best prism through which to view class in America today. Higher levels of education are not only correlated with higher incomes and better life prospects, but also with a greater acceptance of the theories behind identity politics—including the idea, rejected last year by the voters of the rural Midwest, that they are the beneficiaries of white privilege.

The condescension of liberal elites toward the white working class, evangelical Christians, gun owners, and supporters of immigration control and cultural assimilation is as pronounced as it is repulsive. It is summed up in Hillary Clinton’s writing off of so many voters last year as belonging in a “basket of deplorables”—the converse of Mitt Romney’s similarly destructive class-based dismissal of the 47 percent of Americans who do not pay income taxes. (They don’t pay income taxes because they don’t make enough money to qualify.)

Liberals seem blind to the connection between the high levels of income inequality they criticize and what they would otherwise call the hegemonic discourse of identity politics. This is why Clinton’s comment that breaking up the big banks would do nothing for the minority groups at the base of her campaign was so revealing. It might not do anything for them as members of identity groups, but perhaps it would help them as workers and as citizens.

Ensconced in affluent city centers and tony suburbs, liberal elites tell themselves that identity politics will carry them to the progressive future of their dreams. They appear utterly unaware that the radical cultural transformation they support—not to mention the insulting, dismissive, and self-righteous way they meet opposition to their designs—is seen from outside their bubble as provocative.

As political analyst Sean Trende has written:

Consider that over the course of the past few years, Democrats and liberals have: booed the inclusion of God in their platform at the 2012 convention . . . endorsed a regulation that would allow transgendered students to use the bathroom and locker room corresponding to their identity; attempted to force small businesses to cover drugs they believe induce abortions; attempted to force nuns to provide contraceptive coverage; forced Brendan Eich to step down as chief executive officer of Mozilla due to his opposition to marriage equality; fined a small Christian bakery over $140,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding; vigorously opposed a law in Indiana that would provide protections against similar regulations—despite having overwhelmingly supported similar laws when they protected Native American religious rights—and then scoured the Indiana countryside trying to find a business that would be affected by the law before settling upon a small pizza place in the middle of nowhere and harassing the owners.

We tend to view these stories as examples of the culture war. They are more than that: they are examples of a coastal, metropolitan, highly schooled upper class warring against the traditions and freedoms of a middle American, exurban and rural, lower-middle and working class with some or no college education. In short, examples of a privileged few attempting to impose their will on a recalcitrant majority.

Here is Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg again:

Obama’s refrain of building “ladders of opportunity” for those left behind in the economic recovery] was severely out of touch with what was happening to most Americans and the working class more broadly. In our research, “ladders of opportunity” fell far short of what real people were looking for. Incomes sagged after the financial crisis, pensions lost value, and many lost their housing wealth, while people faced dramatically rising costs for things that mattered—health care, education, housing, and child care. People faced vanishing geographic, economic, and social mobility. . . . At the same time, billionaires spent massively to influence politicians and parked their money in the big cities whose dynamism drew in the best talent from the smaller towns and cities.

The result of this class conflict is an America in danger of coming apart. “Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion,” writes Peter Beinart in The Atlantic Monthly. But despite the efforts of liberals like Beinart and Lilla, the Left faces obstacles to stitching America back together. The wealthiest and most energetic segments of the Left are committed to multiculturalism on the one hand and transnationalism on the other. What is more, the Left rejects the natural rights theory of the American Founding at the core of our tradition.

What has traditionally held Americans together is the idea that each of us is made in the image of our Creator and endowed with certain unalienable rights. But not only that idea. We are also held together by the culture that emanates from the intermingling of dynamic peoples and unchanging principles. To combat identity politics, we must emphasize an American nationalism based on both a commitment to the ideals of the American Founding and a shared love of our national history and culture—a history and culture of individual freedom and religious pluralism, resistant to centralized authority and ever expanding into new frontiers and new possibilities.

The American people are united by our creed of freedom and equality, and also by our habits, our manners, our national language, our territorial integrity, our national symbols—such as the National Anthem, the Flag, and the Pledge of Allegiance—our civic traditions, and our national story. We should tell that story forthrightly and proudly; we should continue our traditions of local government and patriotic displays; we should guard the symbols of our heritage against attack; and we should recognize that the needs of our citizens take priority.

We should also remember the words of a great American nationalist, Abraham Lincoln, at the close of his First Inaugural Address:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

By Matthew Continetti, the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon. His articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

#identity politics #sjw #politics

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illionoisprelawland-blog · 5 years ago

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The Failure Of Law And The Weimar Republic

By Justin Xu, University of Chicago Class of 2022

September 3, 2019

Established after the defeat of Germany during World War 1, the Weimar Republic was the German nation’s first experiment with democratic government, but tragically went down in history as an example of how a republican government could fall prey to autocratic machinations and cause a massive nation—today one of the most prosperous countries in the world—to engage in crimes against humanity on a scale that shocked the world. Yet in between the moment the Weimar Republic ceased to exist and its creation lay several critical flaws with both its laws and legal system on both the constitutional and lower levels. Although some of these flaws were inevitable given the transition of the previously monarchist German Empire into the democratic Weimar Republic, many others were avoidable mistakes that arguably set the stage for the eventual downfall of the interwar government and the rise of Nazi Germany.

Although the German nation did in fact possess a parliament even before the end of World War I, it had mostly been a ceremonial position up until the fall of the German Empire. This was due in large part to the sociopolitical theory which developed in the 19th century called “Sonderweg”, which stated that Germany’s path from an aristocracy to a democracy would differ from the rest of the western hemisphere, and especially the paths that other European nations had tread. In reality, this theory was quite similar to the idea of enlightened absolutism. The authoritarian German government would implement social reforms before the populace would actually start demanding them, thereby supposedly fighting both the threat of autocracy and the perceived weakness of other forms of democratic government. In the wake of the formation of the Weimar Republic, however, what this theory spawned may have given birth to some of the most critical flaws within the newfound republic: unequal enforcement of the law, concentration of power in the hands of the executive branch, and mistrust of democracy within the legal system.

At perhaps the most visible level to anyone who walked the streets of the Weimar Republic, especially in its final years before the democratic government was usurped by Hitler and his Nazi regime, was the relative bias in enforcement of the law. Although this slant manifested itself in more than a few levels of the German legal system during this time, to the average observer walking down a German street the most obvious way this bias showed itself was in the way they dealt with leftist groups in comparison with right-wing groups. Having been trained during the era of the German empire to view political groups such as social democrats and liberals as enemies of the state, many officers of law—from the average beat cop to judges of every level— kept to these views even as they served the new government. In contrast, right-wing groups were treated much more leniently, as Weimar legal officers tended to view them as having committed their crimes out of love for their country. These biases allowed for a fairly smooth transition of the Weimar Republic’s legal system and law enforcement into new branches of Nazi Germany and—even before Hitler solidified his control of the government with the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933—showed when both leftist and rightist groups engaged in rioting and other criminal acts. For instance, in January 1919 when radical leftist workers demonstrated against the nascent Weimar government, Chancellor Friedrich Ebert swiftly summoned the Germany army to put down the revolt, which became known as the Spartacist Uprising. In the aftermath, the radical leftist group responsible was virtually annihilated, with its members arrested and imprisoned and its top leaders extrajudicially executed by right-leaning German paramilitary forces. In stark contrast, the leaders of the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup by the then relatively-unknown Nazi party, received far more lenient treatment after the initial fighting and bloodshed had ended. Indeed, despite being accused of high treason, Adolf Hitler turned the proceedings into what was essentially an extended propaganda rally, with the judges both sentencing him to a mere five years in prison and refusing to deport him back to his native land of Austria. At any rate, leftist and rightist radical political groups could expect very different treatment from the Weimar Republic’s legal system if they engaged in rioting. Perhaps it is not a stretch to say that the ultimate suppression of non-Nazi political groups after 1933 was the natural conclusion of this bias in the legal system of interwar Germany.

Although the German government as a whole was an arena where different political parties could coalesce into more organized groups—as opposed to the frequent occurrences on the streets where both leftist and rightist supporters fought amongst themselves (for instance, social democrat groups could fight against communist groups)—here too suspicions of democracy were rampant. Unlike in the legal system, however, which could only enable but never truly spawn on its own the autocratic system which eventually engulfed Germany, the Weimar Republic’s government managed to set itself up for Hitler’s eventual rise to power through two missteps: entrusting too much power to the executive branch and failing to set effective regulations on the process through which political parties could earn a seat in the German Parliament. With regards to the underregulation of political parties, perhaps all that needs to be noted is that over 40 parties had representatives in the Reichstag during less than 20 years of existence. And because many of the parties refused to form coalitions with one another, this led to the frequent use of “emergency decrees” to get laws passed. In this regard and in regards to excessive executive power, perhaps no article in the Weimar Republic’s constitution more exemplified this flaw than Article 48:

“In the event of a State not fulfilling the duties imposed upon it by the Reich Constitution or by the laws of the Reich, the President of the Reich may make use of the armed forces to compel it to do so. If public security and order are seriously disturbed or endangered within the German Reich, the President of the Reich may take measures necessary for their restoration, intervening if need be with the assistance of the armed forces. For this purpose he may suspend for a while, in whole or in part, the fundamental rights provided in Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 [These articles constituted civil rights like freedom of assembly. The President of the Reich must inform the Reichstag without delay of all measures taken in accordance with Paragraphs 1 or 2 of this Article. These measures are to be revoked on the demand of the Reichstag. If danger is imminent, a State government may, for its own territory, take temporary measures as provided in Paragraph 2. These measures are to be revoked on the demand of the President of the Reich or of the Reichstag.”

Although there are numerous flaws regarding this article, in the era of the Weimar Republic, the fragmentation of the German Parliament essentially meant that the president or chancellor ruled by emergency decree and frequently called upon the army to put down any possible threats to the government. Naturally, when the inability of the political parties to work together—especially those of the leftist side which refused to form coalitions to oppose growing Nazi power inside Parliament—was combined with successive presidents or chancellors skeptical of democracy and vast constitutional powers granted to the executive position, the environment was effectively a row of dominos waiting for a despot to come and grab the reins of government, and one did indeed come and plunge German and the world into a decade of vicious conflict and many more decades of geopolitical ramifications.

The events that culminated in the destruction of democracy in Germany in the 1930s and led directly to World War 2 and the suffering that unfolded can be directly—albeit not entirely—attributed to the failure of law on multiple levels within the Weimar Republic. The German Empire had cultivated an attitude of mistrust in all levels of the German government of democracy, and when this combined with authoritarians in the executive branch, a dysfunctional parliament, and a legal system inclined in both proceedings and enforcement to treat suspects differently depending on their political affiliations, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi regime was really in the end only the logical conclusion to all of these gaps in the German legal system.

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https://www.britannica.com/place/Weimar-Republic

https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-4/law-disorder

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-weimar-republic

https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-democracy/readings/choices-and-consequences

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-police-from-democracy-to-dictatorship

https://alphahistory.com/weimarrepublic/weimar-constitution-1919/

Photo Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild

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the-record-columns · 5 years ago

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Aug. 21, 2019: Columns

The candy cooler is wedged between Coca-Cola and Pepsi coolers at the offices of The Record and Thursday Printing.

From NASCAR to Whitman Chocolates

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

A couple of years ago I received a call from the folks at NASCAR Race Hub about a piece they were producing on Junior Johnson.

It had to do with the 50th anniversary of Thomas Wolfe’s article in Esquire dubbing Johnson as “The Last American Hero.” Since Johnson and Wolfe were still alive and kicking at the time (Thomas Wolfe died in May 2018), it seemed like a good idea to me, too, and one with plenty of folks to interview.

Which brings me to me. They asked if they could interview me, to which I replied “Why?” When they said that someone had suggested me to them, I said “But, I am not a NASCAR fan.” They said that didn’t matter, and, to make a long story short, I told them to come on, and they did.

On the appointed day, the crew arrived and it was clear they had been to the rodeo before. They set about making my mess of an office suitable for an interview, and soon it began. I politely explained to them that, when they took the race away from our speedway here, I was through with them; that they had “…gotten above their raising” so to speak; “…forgot who brought them to the dance,” well, you get the idea.

The interview lasted nearly an hour, but I want to share just two items with you today. When asked what I admired most about Junior Johnson I quickly told them it went right back to my comment about losing our race in Wilkes. Junior Johnson is still loyal to those who made him famous and has not forgotten where he came from. He is still humbled and thankful for it all. I told them how Junior would take a phone call from anyone, that The Record has asked him to make an appearance off and on through the years, and he never turned us down if he could possibly schedule it-even to coming to the retirement of a rural mail carrier whose only request for his special day was to shake hands with Junior Johnson.

The other part of the interview I want to share concerned the author of the Esquire piece, Thomas Wolfe. The NASCAR folks told me that Wolfe had referred to the people of Wilkes County as standoffish and unfriendly. I quickly took great exception with that, and recommended that they tell Wolfe to keep his happy ass in New York where he belonged. I went on to suggest to the TV crew in my office to pull their van off on the 421 By-Pass as they left town, and cut on their emergency flashers. I assured them that not three minutes will have gone by until someone stops to see if they need some help. I ended that part of the interview by telling them that if someone in Traphill answers the door at midnight with a shotgun in hand, “…that’s not standoffish-that’s just cautious.”

And now to Whitman’s Chocolate.

There will be more on the the machine pictured on this page later, but today I want to focus on getting it into the offices of The Record. There is still no substitute for dumb luck, but a chance encounter with a collector friend of mine led me to this beautiful late 40’s edition of the Whitman Chocolate company’s refrigerated answer to being unable to sell chocolate year-round in the South. It is an amazing piece, 100 percent intact, six feet long, 30 inches wide, five feet tall, top-heavy and as awkward as can be to move, and weighed what seemed to be a ton.

Having done the work to make a place for something this large in my somewhat crowded offices, I was determined to move it in the same day. I enlisted one of my helpers at the time, who I had personally seen pick up a washing machine by himself and carry it across a large warehouse floor without even taking a deep breath. However, when he hunkered down to pick up one end of this cooler, he stood right up and said, “I’ve got to call by buddy, Hoss.”

Well Hoss is named right and, along with the help of another total stranger who randomly saw we had a struggle going on, the beautiful, historic Whitman’s Chocolate cooler/display case, originally in the Horton’s Drug Store on Main Street, was installed in its place of honor here at The Record.

Bear in mind that these two guys who made this move bearable were total strangers to me, one of which I didn’t even get his name. When the job was done, and, I must add that the inside the office part of the job was no piece of chocolate itself; neither of the two Good Samaritans would take a penny for helping and even turned down my offer of taking them to lunch.

Just glad to help, they both said.

I am convinced that these two Wilkes County guys would have been the very ones who would stop to give assistance to the NASCAR Race Hub crew in their white van on the 421 By-Pass.

Or even Thomas Wolfe.

Bibi, RIGHT for Israel. LEFT to disaster

By AMBASSADOR EARL COX and KATHLEEN COX

Special to The Record

In politics as in life, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things. Moses expressed it well just prior to leading the people of Israel into the Promised Land. To Moses it was clear. There is a way leading to blessing and a way that brings a curse.

Times have changed, but the Torah has not. A unique phase for Israel having an unprecedented second election within a year, means this is a momentous time for Israel to get it right just as in the old days. This is a time to forge together, to form the necessary coalition, and to forge ahead in congruence with the prime minister.

Yet, Israel is not a Torah-run government. This is reserved for only certain segments of Israeli society and the government must accommodate them as well as those who are not Torah observant, including middle-of-the-roaders. Additionally, those on the left where the gas gauge reads empty (meaning they have nothing beneficial to offer), these citizens are also represented by the government though they are more difficult to appease. This is due, in part, to the left being less realistic about the real world and especially about Israel. Worse yet is a circulating report alleging Israeli police are being controlled by political leftists and in collusion with the media. According to a political analyst, they have a type of agenda to bring down Netanyahu and his government. If this is the case, then Netanyahu has formidable leftist opponents who have brought indictment and fraud charges against him that may be considered frivolous. How far do such hijinks go?

The current prime minister continues as a very favorable leader, standing on his long-proven record of solid leadership bringing Israel among the top tiers of the world in agriculture, technology, business, medicine and others. He is rational during emotional, national crisis such as the handling of Gaza and other potentially explosive situations yet people are quick to criticize him. The highest leaders of any government always have more intelligence information than the popular press and therefore are better positioned to call the shots. The prime minister is not weak nor fearful of Israel’s enemies. He consistently chooses the path which will cause the least amount of harm to the Israeli people while at the same time leading the world’s most moral army in defensive conflicts.

Given the unusual complexity of geopolitics, he is careful and has deftly made his way through the complex and tight web of international relations. He has positioned Israel in such a way as to be on speaking terms with those who, just a few years ago, would view this as unthinkable.

The most vociferous dissent against Netanyahu might be his handling of domestic issues. This is an issue not uncommon in many other countries. With a steady hand, Netanyahu has adroitly handled societal and cultural issues that pop-up unexpectantly during any administration.

As with other nations, Israel’s domestic issues include citizenship, cultural and ethnic issues, and fiscal issues that realistically cannot satisfy everyone. These things always have a way of being chronic and worthy of news stories everywhere. A major difference between Israel and her neighbors is that Israel permits opinions to be freely expressed and not suppressed.

When engaged in battle or conflict, the old adage that it is better to know the person you’ve got than to take a chance with the person you don’t know, is particularly pertinent to Israel. This tiny nation, surrounded by hostile enemies on every side, cannot afford to lose even one war. Netanyahu’s has been steady and very statesman-like. His opposition possesses no similar record of experience. One wrong move to the left could lead to disaster. Leftist views tend to keep going left, too bizarre to be realistic.

U.S. President Trump has not released his version of what is being called the most comprehensive Middle East Peace plan to date. Though there is obvious synergism between Netanyahu and Trump, Netanyahu has been quiet prior to hearing and reviewing the full version. This is a sign of both deliberation in judgment and wisdom as taught in Pirke Avot, commonly known as Ethics of the Fathers.

All Israeli voters should also be deliberate and consider that going right trumps moving to left in order to avoid disaster.

A visit to the Rosemary House

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

Not long ago, we were filming on location in Pittsboro, at the Rosemary House Bed and Breakfast.

We were on the front porch capturing a scene of a couple in rocking chairs; they were enjoying the calming effect of rocking, a refreshing beverage, conversation, and the gentle awareness of life passing by. Everything was going well, and as soon as we finished, I heard one of the people in the rocking chair say, “A big bird just landed behind Carl.”

Being mindful of the idea that if a big wild bird had indeed landed behind me, I should move slowly. So, I did, and while turning, I retrieved my cell phone from my pocket and turned on the camera so that as I turned, the camera would see what I was seeing. As I turned, I saw a healthy full-grown hawk within six to eight feet away. He had landed with a squirrel, and the power of the talons of the bird was evident as the squirrel had lost whatever battle the two may have had.

We witnessed a hawk having dinner rather than the keen hunting skill of this raptor. None the less it was a captivating moment in time. I was able to capture about six minutes on my phone, and we were also able to move one of the professional cameras in place to capture the moment. We were amazed at the hawk’s ability to keep an eye on everything going on and not fly away. That is until Wilma the cat came sneaking around the corner. When Wilma was within striking distance; the hawk took to flight with his remaining dinner.

The hawk would continue his meal elsewhere, Wilma went from stalking mode to cute kitty mode, and we humans would talk about the wonders of nature. We would go on to have a good evening of production along with the following day. It’s always amazing at how many hours we work for a four- to six-minute segment on TV.

Producing a destination segment always involves at least two trips, and sometimes more. It all depends on the angle of the story. The first trip is always about getting to know the property and the owners or managers.

Travel adventures take many forms, and when we discover a new place, we are not entirely sure what we are going to experience. It’s when we wake up that first morning after what was hopefully a restful night that we begin to form our opinions. That would be, of course, if the rooms were adequately cleaned and comfortable when we first check-in.

When you travel often, there are times you need a place to shower and get some rest before you get back on the road. Then there are times that our lodging needs to be a place to relax and rejuvenate.

Maybe it’s your home base for exploring an area or a destination family reunion. In those cases, the importance and expectation of lodging are elevated to a much higher level. It may not be that you need a five-star location. However, you may need a space that offers a lot of flexibility.

The Rosemary House is exceptional for a variety of reasons. The home has historical significance, the rooms are clean and comfortable, and breakfast is fresh and tasty. Breakfast is made with you in mind.

If you have specific dietary needs, they do their best to meet your expectations. That’s reason enough to make me want to stay again. But they have something extra special. They are also home to Kindred Art Gallery. Folk Art from several noted artists are on display throughout the house, so if you enjoy folk art you are in for a big treat.

I love the idea of being able to live with art for a few days. If you like what you see you can buy a piece and take it home with you. The owners, Jamie and Heather Buster, do have a few personal pieces on display; however, everything else is for sale as part of The Kindred Gallery collection.

You may or may not see the hawk when you visit. You can enjoy the walkable streets of Historic Downtown Pittsboro. You can enjoy the delightful Rosemary House B & B and Kindred Art Gallery and now and then I’ll be around, and we can have a cup of handcrafted Poppysol tea.

Wilma, I don’t think he’s going to let you have that squirrel.

Carl White is the Executive Producer and Host of the award-winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In The Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its 10th year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday’s at noon and My 12. The show also streams on Amazon Prime. For more information visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com. You can email Carl at [email protected]

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peaceful-politics · 5 years ago

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The “Pro-Life” Party Does Not Have a Monopoly on Morality- Especially the Pro-Life Party of Trump

By: Kaylee Williams

7/20/2019

Donald Trump has secured a voting base among evangelical Christians, in spite of the fact that he is antithetical to basic Christian values such as humility and compassion. This, I presume, is a result of his manipulation of the pro-life movement to galvanize socially conservative Christians. People across the political spectrum share sadness and reservation concerning a difficult issue that many Trump Republicans claim a monopoly on morality for. The fact remains, however, that illegality does not bar behaviors from occurring, and victims of abuse must reserve the right to make peace with their creator however they see fit, not be coerced into taking desperate measures as a result of government mandates. This holds especially true when considering that abortion bans will disproportionately affect poor women who don't have the financial means, backdoor channels, and legal representation of women the likes of....let me think....Stormy Daniels?

I find it difficult to contain my exasperation with a man who I believe to be so utterly God-less using a sensitive and complex issue for political utility. Let’s be honest about the hypocrisy of Donald Trump, once outspokenly pro-choice, all of a sudden championing the unborn. I implore you to ask yourself: who would be more likely to encourage their sexual partner to have an abortion- Barrack Obama or Donald Trump? Trump is two years younger than his (third) wife’s father, leaving me to question if Mr. Trump courted Melania for her impressive conversational ability or for less holy desires. Trump has been with numerous porn stars, has children with multiple women (all of whom he is alleged to have cheated on), and is on tape bragging about grabbing women by their genitals. Now I personally don’t care about any of this; frankly, if he were a champion of universal healthcare, putting an end to the private prison system, and abolishing the Electoral College, I would likely vote for him in spite of his personal indiscretions. I simply cannot, however, fathom the cognitive dissonance required of Christian conservatives to hail Trump as the chosen one - someone fit to represent Jesus’s teachings and mobilize his agenda. Conservative Christians the likes of Pat Robertson have sanctioned a hitman. Trump is not David; he is Goliath, and he’s been contracted by wealthy televangelists who have more in common with the Pharisees Jesus opposed than Christ himself. Obama has been married to only one woman with whom he shares both of his children. There is no indication that he has ever been unfaithful to his wife, and excluding those which Fox News or Trump himself engineered, has not been linked to any major scandal. I ask again: who would be more likely to encourage their sexual partner to have an abortion? Yet who between the men publicly denounces a women’s right to choose? Who between the men has sought to address the systemic reasons for abortion, such as limited access to contraception?

One can be personally (not politically) pro-life, as I surmise Obama was, yet grasp that the architects of these newly introduced abortion bans (most of them Trump’s allies) are hypocrites. Republicans are often, after all, accused of Christian hypocrisy. They are criticized for their support of Trump’s immigration policies, for example, which encourage the blatant mistreatment of illegal aliens who, according to one doctor, are living in “torture facilities” (Marshall, Metz, Zac, 2019). Trump Republicans respond with assertions that their indifference is a result of their desire for sovereignty, rule of law, and economic stability. When pressed on why they habitually scapegoat welfare recipients and the poor to distract attention from corporate exploitation, they respond arguing that handouts dissuade hard work and promote complacent reliance on government at the expense of working people. When confronted with rates of uninsured Americans or the monetization of human health, Republicans persistently vilify universal health care, a feature of virtually all other developed nations, as “socialized medicine” and attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Trump’s cohort of socially conservative Republicans present the following counterargument: how can you accuse us of lacking morality when you allow for the slaughter of the unborn, or in more common vernacular, infanticide?

Excuse this public service announcement, but infanticide is not legal and those who claim that it is are modern-day propaganda ministers who hardly have the interests of women or children in mind; rather they are leveraging people’s sense of morality for political gain. Yes, the Reproductive Health Act passed in New York did permit late term abortion….in cases where the life of the mother is threatened OR fetal abnormalities would ultimately end the unborn child’s life within days of birth; the fetus would have to be deemed “non-viable”. Any baby who is in fact born alive is not euthanized, but rather given post-natal care immediately. If infanticide is happening in this country, it has not been sanctioned by law and certainly is not supported by Democrats. I encourage anyone who doubts me to read Senator Liz Krueger’s responses to frequently asked questions regarding the RHA. (https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/articles/2019/liz-krueger/faqs-about-reproductive-health-act).

Furthermore, some-though not all- pro-life Republicans manipulate the issue of abortion to appear as though they are of higher moral standing. Democrats, through their reckless liberality and moral relativism masked as progressivism, are willing to slaughter the most vulnerable population among us. Leftist organizations, they charge, disseminate propaganda allowing women to believe that their choice is somehow morally permissible and establishments providing abortion, namely Planned Parenthood, are masking their nefarious agenda behind female reproductive rights. What about the rights of unborn girls they plea, or boys whose gender is no fault of their own?

To many political civilians (those not in public office or in elite roles) this appears to be the ultimate Trump card of argumentation, an atomic bomb of infallible reason dropped on liberals everywhere, causing those too stubborn to change their minds to desperately crawl into their safe spaces and mourn their defeat.

I will not pretend as though these emotionally charged arguments are of no import to me. I was raised by a religious family, attended catholic school until grade eight, and went to church weekly. At age twelve I wrote a scathing essay in defense of the pro-life movement, though in hindsight I find it rather peculiar that a class of mostly pre-pubescent kids would be prompted to not only contemplate such an issue, but have their opinions of it mechanically engineered. I am outnumbered in my family by Republicans, and while my grandmother has democratic leanings, her devotion to Catholicism and belief in protecting the unborn often preclude her from voting for liberal candidates she would otherwise support. Given my upbringing, the institutions within which I have been socialized, and my privately held feelings about having an abortion personally, one would expect me to be an ardent pro-choice advocate and a constituent of a reliable voting bloc, yet I am neither. To clarify, I personally oppose abortion, I wouldn’t encourage a loved one to have one (though I wouldn’t love them any less), and I earnestly desire for abortion to become a vestige of the past. How then does my moral compass, my decision making apparatus, permit me to hold such passionate, unwavering pro-choice sentiments?

I believe there are many ways a person can be effectively pro-life, but I remain unconvinced that legislatively interfering with a women’s right to choose is realistic or morally sound. People can call it moral relativism, but I don’t see how pragmatism and compassion should be-or can be- mutually exclusive, and I am equally unconvinced that a victim of rape or abuse should receive their reproductive directives from a legislature comprised disproportionately of white men (i.e. Alabama), the historical ruling class of America. I’m not advocating for “reverse discrimination” –if that even exists- but the optics here are hard to ignore. I don’t have a crystal ball that allows me to discern men in Alabama’s true motives, but to me the abortion bans sweeping the country reek of government intrusion, a diminishment of boundaries between church and state, and white male supremacy (I’ll elaborate on this later for all my conservative naysayers).

Like others, I remain politically pro-choice largely because I do not believe that anti-choice legislation will exponentially diminish rates of abortion. In the United States today, approximately one in four pregnancies will end in abortion according to the Guttmacher Institute (2019). While I’m sure this may dishearten even some pro-choice advocates, it is important to consider the nature and prevalence of abortion before Roe V. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized the procedure nationwide. While scholars can’t offer precise figures on abortion rates prior to 1973, given the fact that the procedure was not only illegal but often considered socially undesirable to admit, it is estimated that 20% to 25% of pregnancies ended in abortion before Roe V. Wade, as cited in a 2019 NPR interview with Karissa Haugeberg, assistant professor of history at Tulane University. According to the editors of History.com (2019), in the 1950s and 60s alone “the estimated number of illegal abortions in the United States ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.”

So what were these illegal abortions like? Karissa Haugeberg explains that about 200 woman died “officially” each year from methods of “self-inflicted induction”. In other words, women physically injured themselves or consumed dangerous chemicals in attempts to end their pregnancies and in doing so inadvertently killed themselves. Other woman turned to the undercover market, seeking out doctors who risked their livelihood and even personal imprisonment. Today in countries where abortion remains illegal, such as Chile and El Salvador, Michelle Oberman (2018) writes that “abortifacient drugs have become so readily available…. that it has become impossible to enforce abortion bans”- which leads to me to my next point.

An additional reason that I remain a reliable pro-choice voter is my belief that eliminating abortion would likely create prosecutorial loopholes which allow for poor and minorities to be disproportionately affected, as Oberman (2018) explains is the case in countries where it remains outlawed. Just weeks ago an Alabama woman, Marshae Jones, lost her unborn child as a result of being shot in the stomach. She was later indicted on charges of manslaughter for allegedly provoking her shooter, who received no charges at all (Brice-Saddler, Horton, 2019). Many perceived this to be indicative of what a post Roe V. Wade America might entail for women of lower socioeconomic standing. Unlike the poor, women of means will always have access to abortion. Sometimes, they will even receive encouragement from “pro-life” congressmen themselves. It is not my desire to smear any given member of congress, but a simple Google search will reveal the hypocrisy to which I refer

Equally concerning is the possibility that strict abortion laws could lead to patriarchal norms being reintroduced. Would rape victims now be forced to prove abuse? Would they face a statute of limitations for reporting rape? Would states even qualify rape as a legitimate reason for getting an abortion following the lead of Alabama, a state where rapists have paternal rights (Wax-Thibodeaux, 2019)? Would women whose lives are in danger be denied medical help because of zealotry permeating the medical system? Would miscarriages be investigated? Would desperate women who pursue an illegal abortion die or be imprisoned for resorting to back ally-procedures? Would the states currently proposing these abortion bans, states with some of the highest rates of both infant and maternal mortality, namely among women of color (Panetta, 2019), revamp their healthcare standards?

As a quick interlude, I certainly don’t mean to imply that men are solely to blame here. Many woman contribute to systems of patriarchy, often under a religious pretense or because their rung on the social ladder isn’t necessarily worth risking. Heck, over half of white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016 (Ruiz, 2018). Conversely, there are numerous men who, excluding circumstances in which they are personally responsible for a pregnancy, mind their business, who are supportive of prospective mothers, and who themselves would make better caretakers than their female counterparts. It was ultimately a female governor, Kay Ivey of Alabama, who signed a bill for which twenty-two male senators voted against exemptions for rape or incest. My primary grievance, moreover, is not with men. My main concern is government involvement (government actors being both men and women) in what should be a private matter.

Finally, one must wonder if the states denying abortions will offer affordable birth control and comprehensive sexual education, or if they’ll maintain antiquated philosophies surrounding sexuality thus causing teen pregnancies to rise and/or medically unsafe abortions to skyrocket? This may sound like a false dichotomy between prudence and pragmatism, but it should be noted that Abbey Johnson, creator of the documentary “Unplanned”, opposes birth control methods which do not consist of “natural family planning” (as cited in her 2018 interview with Mary Rose Somarriba).

Trump himself attempted to: “restrict the ability of some women to get birth control at no charge because their employers object on religious or moral grounds” (Goldstein, 2019). As Pam Belluck (2018) explains in her article titled “Science Does Not Support Claims That Contraceptives Are ‘Abortion-Inducing’”, there is not credible evidence of abortifacient effects from contraception upon which spiritual groups should be asserting their religious liberty at the expense of others’. Furthermore, the sexual revolution has long passed and the vast majority of adults will have pre-marital sex, as will adolescents regardless of their state legislature’s willingness to educate them or their parent’s willingness to guide them appropriately (on using condoms to prevent against STDS, healthy relationships, methods of contraception, etc.). It is imperative that those who wish to end abortion on both sides of the political spectrum approach sexuality through the lenses of modernity.

If pro-lifers sought to convince me against abortion (as sensible people define it) they succeeded, but I’ve also lived a privileged life and I refuse to thrust my personal views on the world at large. That is dangerous, ineffective, and belittling of women whose burden I have never carried and whose pain I have never known. Like many of the voters Trump secures through his professed stance on abortion, I’d truly love to see its end. However, I do not believe that barring safe and legal access to the procedure is an appropriate way to get there. It’s not practical and it’s not compassionate (as I see it). How about we destigmatize sex between consenting adults/adolescents, offer first rate sexual education nationwide, make medical advancements so no woman would ever again face a health crises related to pregnancy, offer birth control 100% affordable and accessible to all people post-pubescent, and make advancements in science so as to ensure that this birth control is not 99% but 100% effective in order that every young woman might reach her full economic potential? Making abortion illegal won’t make it cease to exist outright; it will only cease to exist as a medically safe procedure that can be discussed openly without fear of legal prosecution. People of good faith mustn’t be swayed at the hands of God-less man using their religiosity for political expedience.

It is my sincere hope that well-meaning Christians follow the example of Jimmy Carter. One of our most outspokenly devout presidents, Carter sold his peanut farm after winning the presidency so as not to risk perceptions of impropriety. He can be traced to no major scandal and has always responded to criticism with tact and decency. He remains a proponent of internal church reform, namely the ordainment of women as priests, yet as president staunchly supported the separation of church and state. He has never invoked what many people insidiously refer to as “religious liberty” to discriminate against gay people, even stating: “Jesus would approve of gay marriage. Carter elaborated: “I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else” (as cited by Birnbaum, 2018).

As it pertains to abortion, Jimmy Carter’s stance reveals not only his deep intelligence (as evidenced by his capability to discern nuance) but his steady moral barometer. He does not conceal his personal reservations in an effort to conform to party expectations, but rather differentiates what his spiritual predilections are concerning abortion from what he believes the government’s role is in legislating reproduction. He plainly states: “I have a hard time believing that Jesus would approve abortions unless it was because of rape or incest or if the mother’s life was in danger. So I’ve had that struggle….. but my oath of office was to obey the Constitution and the laws of this country as interpreted as the Supreme Court, so I went along with that” (as cited by Birnbaum, 2018). Carter, while vocal about his apprehension to condone abortion during his presidency, rejected the creation of a constitutional amendment which would ban it. Instead, he sought to minimize the prevalence of abortion as much as possible. Carter stated during his third presidential debate with Gerald Ford: “I think abortion is wrong. I don't think the Government ought to do anything to encourage abortion, but I don't favor a constitutional amendment on the subject. But short of a constitutional amendment, and within the confines of a Supreme Court ruling, I will do everything I can to minimize the need for abortions with better sex education, family planning, with better adoptive procedures. I personally don't believe that the Federal Government ought to finance abortions, but I draw the line and don't support a constitutional amendment. I honor the right of people to seek a constitutional amendment on abortion, but I won't actively work for its passage” (as cited on ontheissues.org)

Moreover, Jimmy Carter does not seek to make people feel warm and fuzzy as a way of gaining political constituents. He does not conflate the issue of abortion with women’s rights alone (although that is certainly one dimension of the debate) and is himself an ardent feminist who has used his position of power to enhance the rights of women both domestically and abroad. He expresses personal reservation, as is his right, but demonstrates respect for rule of law and when given the opportunity refused to support a constitutional ban on abortions, instead working vigorously to minimize the perceived need of women to seek them out. Jimmy Carter is a real disciple of Christ, not an imposter who claims to revere him for political support.

I’d like to conclude by sharing a Facebook post I recently came across. A now adult woman reminisces on the abortion she had as a teenager, and the painful circumstances which led her to terminate her pregnancy. I implore all self-proclaimed Christians to read the post, which I attached below, but to first consider this. During his life, Jesus showed mercy to prostitutes, thieves, and murderers (even his very own); he did not condone or encourage recidivism but empathized with people in desperate circumstances and forgave those who demonstrated humility before God. Christ loved the down-trodden and wayward souls of society. He encouraged his disciples to provide aid for the poor, to welcome foreigners, and to tend to the sick. Furthermore, I ask my fellow followers of Christ to ask themselves this. Would Jesus, who shared with us the beautiful parable of the Good Samaritan, condone Donald Trump’s treatment of Ilhan Omar? Would Jesus permit the mistreatment of migrants at the border? As I see it, how we are treating these immigrants is disgraceful, antithetical to Christ's teachings, and cannot be displaced through making flaccid arguments about sovereignty, safety, and economics. A policy of family separating does not enhance national security. Demonizing people fleeing desperate circumstances on the world stage is not pragmatic or economically advantageous. Making it virtually impossible to claim asylum status and reducing aid to countries from which these migrants are originating is not shrewd, but rather completely counterintuitive to U.S interests.

Who is better at emulating Jesus’s teachings? The publicly pro-life Donald Trump and his ardent supporters on the religious right the likes Franklin Graham? Graham, a prominent Christian evangelist, responded to Jimmy Carter’s acceptance of gay people by stating: “He is absolutely wrong when he said Jesus would approve of gay marriage. Jesus didn't come to promote sin, He came to save us from sin” (as cited by Warren, 2018). Graham even described the Equality Act as catastrophic (Badash, 2019).

Equality!?! Protection from discrimination on the basis of what one does with their own body or who their sleep with in the privacy of their own home! Yikes! Say it isn’t so, Franklin!

....or could it be that pro-choice politicians the likes of Barrack Obama are actually better representatives of Christ than the hypocrites on the religious right? I, for one, do not fear for Barrack Obama, or Jimmy Carter, or even Tara Dove (whose post is provided below) on Judgement Day. Donald Trump, a man of immense privilege who leverages his power over the vulnerable…well, I am not so confident.

This picture was taken a month or two after my abortion. I was 16 and in an incredibly abusive marriage. You see that wrap on my hand? My wrist was sprained because he threw me out of our bed and onto the floor, to "sleep like the dog you are." When I had my abortion, I still had braces on.

When we found out I was pregnant, no one was happy and I felt like dying. There was no question. The pregnancy would be terminated. His parents paid.

We had to cross state lines and he was speeding (he got pulled over and you can bet I was punished for that). At the clinic, he got angry because he wasn't allowed in the back with me. I was punished for that too.

Because I terminated my pregnancy, I was able to leave him and cut all ties later. I was able to get a restraining order. I was able to move, go to college, have a career, and start a family on my own time. Because I terminated my pregnancy, no child was raised with an abusive father.

Also, as I found out with my planned pregnancy some ten years later, I have a clotting disorder that, without medical intervention, has a high chance of killing any child I carry (I've miscarried twice and my daughter's placenta was clotting at 39 weeks) and throwing a clot in me (I've had one DVT already). This would not have been known when I was 16.

Having an abortion saved my life, in more ways than one. I have not and will never regret it.

#YouKnowMe #IAmNotAshamed #1in4

Works Cited

Abortion. (2019, July 01). Retrieved from https://www.guttmacher.org/united-states/abortion

Badash, D. (2019, July 17). In Insane Diatribe Franklin Graham Calls Equality Act 'Catastrophic' and Warns if Passed US 'May Never Recover'. Retrieved from https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2019/07/in-insane-diatribe-franklin-graham-calls-equality-act-catastrophic-and-warns-if-passed-us-may-never-recover/

Belluck, P. (2018, September 07). Science Does Not Support Claims That Contraceptives Are 'Abortion-Inducing'. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/health/kavanaugh-abortion-inducing-contraceptives.html

Birnbaum, E. (2018, July 09). Jimmy Carter: 'I believe that Jesus would approve of gay marriage'. Retrieved from https://thehill.com/homenews/news/396058-jimmy-carter-i-believe-that-jesus-would-approve-of-gay-marriage

Brice-Saddler, M., & Horton, A. (2019, June 28). A pregnant woman was shot in the stomach. She was charged in the death of the fetus. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/27/pregnant-woman-was-shot-stomach-she-was-indicted-her-babys-death/?utm_term=.393e088b1a94

FAQs about the Reproductive Health Act. (2019, February 19). Retrieved from https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/articles/2019/liz-krueger/faqs-about-reproductive-health-act

Goldstein, A. (2019, January 14). Judge blocks Trump effort to roll back birth control mandate nationwide. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/judge-blocks-trump-effort-to-roll-back-birth-control-mandate-nationwide/2019/01/14/abba97e4-181f-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html?utm_term=.4d14463f720f

History.com Editors. (2019, March 27). Roe v. Wade. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/topics/womens-rights/roe-v-wade

Jimmy Carter on Abortion. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Jimmy_Carter_Abortion.htm

Marshall, S., Zak, L., & Metz, J. (2019, June 23). Doctor compares conditions for unaccompanied children at immigrant holding centers to 'torture facilities'. Retrieved July 19, 2019, from https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/doctor-compares-conditions-immigrant-holding-centers-torture-facilities/story?id=63879031

Oberman, M. (2018, May 31). What Happens When Abortion Is Banned? Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/opinion/sunday/abortion-banned-latin-america.html

Panetta, G. (2019, June 01). The states passing strict abortion bans have some of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the country. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/states-passing-abortion-bans-have-highest-infant-mortality-rates-2019-5

Ruiz, M. (2018, November 08). Will White Women Voters Ever Be Who We Want Them to Be? Retrieved from https://www.vogue.com/article/white-women-voters-conservative-trump-gop-problem

Somarriba, M. R. (Ed.). (2019, March 18). Abby Johnson on the Benefits of Natural Family Planning. Retrieved from https://naturalwomanhood.org/abby-johnson-interview-former-planned-parenthood-director-nfp/

Warren, S. (2018, July 12). Franklin Graham: President Carter 'Absolutely Wrong' on Jesus Approving of Gay Marriage. Retrieved from https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/july/franklin-graham-says-former-president-carter-is-absolutely-wrong-nbsp-on-jesus-approving-of-gay-marriage

What Abortion Was Like In The U.S. Before Roe V. Wade. (2019, May 20). Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2019/05/20/725139713/what-abortion-was-like-in-the-u-s-before-roe-v-wade

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militant-holy-knight · 6 years ago

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When Libtards Take the Terrorist Side

Leftists used to champion women and LGBT’s rights. How long until they are okay with wife-beating, hand-chopping, child marriage, FGM, slavery and polyandry?

I used to believe that those in the PC culture sphere that identify themselves as “democrats”, “Labour”, “liberals”, “leftists”, “communists” or whatever that have consistently rebuked anyone who dares to criticize Islam have done so out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness mixed with ignorance. But at this point, we can’t remain blind anymore that some self-described “liberals” are now malicious in their intent, and makes me wonder if the same Left who used to champion women’s and LGBT rights will soon say its fine for Muslims to throw gays off buildings, for women to cover themselves up or they will be splashed with acid, for Christians to pay protection money or be crucified.

I am not necessarily putting the “Left” or “Muslims” as a whole under the same blanket, I will get to this later on, but I refer to an specific alliance between far-left activists with a genocidal hatred for anything “conservative” (anything to their right-wing, including liberals who disagree with them) and those who genuinely believe ISIS was completely justified and they want to repeat the same process in the West. And worse, this rot is seeped deep into politics for anyone who sees it. The more recent examples I could think of are:

A Canadian resolution that would have recognized the persecution of Assyrians, Yazidis and Shias by ISIS as genocide was blocked by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party.

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has consistently called terrorist organizations like Hamas as “friends”. Hamas is an terrorist organization dedicated in turning Israel into a Islamic state and has systematically implemented Shariah law in the Gaza Strip.

Muslim Labour member Aysegul Gurbuz have been suspended praising Hitler on Twitter.

Linda Sarsour is an activist that has been embraced by American feminists for criticizing Donald Trump but has a history of promoting Sharia law and saying Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Her fellow Women’s March Tamika Malory got into hot water for praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and refusing to say Israel has a right to exist.

Iranian feminist Masih Alinejad condemned female SJWs for using the hijab in solidarity after campaigning so hard to be free in the Iranian regime.

Despite factual evidence to the contrary, ABC’s Matthew Douwd believes Muslims in America are far persecuted far more than Christians worldwide.

That last point is the key issue the Western left has when it comes to perspective. Recent statistics show that liberals seem to be completely divorced from reality when comparing the genocide of Christians in the Islamic world when compared to the “persecution” of Muslims in the West.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats, however, believe most Muslims in this country [America] are mistreated, a view shared by only 22% of Republicans and 39% of voters not affiliated with either major party. Fewer Democrats (47%) think most Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world, compared to 76% of GOP voters and 64% of unaffiliateds...Women are more likely than men to think most American Muslims are mistreated here but less likely to believe Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world. Nearly as many voters under 40 think most Muslims are mistreated in America (51%) as think most Christians are mistreated in the Muslim world (57%).

It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of Muslims persecuting Christians are not "terrorists" (at least not formally), but rather come from all rungs of Muslim society. Take Egypt, for example (the 17th worst nation according to Open Doors, an organization that tracks persecution of Christians world wide). According to the report, along with "violent religious groups," two other segments of society are "very strong[ly]" responsible for the persecution:

"non-Christian religious leaders" — meaning Muslim clerics, sheikhs, imams, and the rest — "at any level from local to national"

"normal citizens (people from the general public), including mobs."

Similarly, "officials at any level from local to national" are "strongly responsible" for the "oppression" of Egypt's Christians, particularly "through their failure to vindicate the rights of Christians and also through their discriminatory acts which violate the fundamental rights of Christians." Now, compare all this to the supposedly worse — in liberal minds — "mistreatment" Muslims suffer in America. According to a November 2017 Pew report: "In 2016, there were 127 reported [Muslim] victims of aggravated or simple assault." In the preceding decades, assaults on Muslims averaged around 50 a year.

Even if this number were accurate, it pales in comparison to what millions of Christians — not 127 — are experiencing under Islam. But the fact is many of these anti-Muslim hate crimes are later found to have been fabricated or grossly exaggerated. Note, for instance, how the Pew report conflates "assaults" with "simple assaults" — even though the latter "does not involve physical contact with the victim."

Moreover, Muslims in America do not experience institutionalized persecution — that is, persecution at the hands of governments, authorities, and police — as Christians under Islam do...Nonetheless... all these actual facts have little to do with what a significantly large segment of the American voting population — mostly liberals and Democrats... believe. Why they are so misinformed becomes apparent when one understands that the liberal media is dedicated to maintaining liberal narratives at all costs: in this case, that Christians are always the aggressors, while Muslims always the misunderstood victims.

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Hamed Abdel Samad is an Egyptian political scientist and a former Muslim who made a scathing remark about the Western left when it came to cuddling up to Islam:

"The beginnings of the European left included principles like criticism of religion… Karl Marx was the first leftist, and he said that religion was the opium of the people. The left founded feminism and fought for women's liberation. Nobody fought for freedom of expression more than the left. The left said that nobody is above the law, and that nobody – not Moses, nor Jesus, the queen, the king, or any celebrity – is above criticism. They criticized, drew [cartoons], and made comedies about all of them. Nobody defended homosexuals more than the left, and the same is true of women's rights. But when it comes to Islam, the left morphs into the conservative right. You can draw [cartoons] of Jesus, of Moses, of anybody, but don’t draw Muhammad, because that's racism… Why is it racism? When you say that the immigrants have problems in their neighborhood, the [left] says: 'Don’t talk about the immigrants. They are victims of the West.' Man, the [immigrants] are killing one another. Their neighborhoods have become dreadful. No, you cannot criticize the immigrants, or else you are labeled racist and Islamophobic. They picked up the term 'Islamophobia' from the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, and they keep talking about Islamophobia all the time.”

"In Denmark, when a Muslim kid comes to school with bruises on his face or neck, nobody says anything. They leave him alone. But if they see bruises on a white Danish kid, they report it to the police and the social services, so that they will come and investigate his family. But when the Muslims beat their kids, it is viewed as part of their culture. This is a despicable leftist approach. I call it the racism of low expectations. They look at a Muslim and say: He will never be like us. He cannot be expected to uphold human rights, to accept criticism, or to accept dissenting views. They view Muslims as barbaric savages. I saw to my Muslim brothers: Don't be pleased that these people are defending you. They are looking down on you. It's true that I myself criticize you and your religion, but I respect you and your intellect. I want you to be better and to gain your rights. I don't want you to be satisfied by someone who pats you on the back.” (...)

"The [leftists] have a psychological complex towards their Western countries. They hate capitalism. They hate America. They hate the West. They see the West as the worst thing in the world, and they embrace and defend anything that is anti-West. They always wanted to defend the working class, but there are no working classes in the world anymore. (...)

With the working class gone, the leftists were looking for someone to defend, so they got us the 'Third World' – our beloved people of the 'Third World,' who are persecuted by colonialism, imperialism, and whatnot… Bring me a 'Third World' to defend… But the 'Third World' is no longer what it used to be, and nobody uses that phrase, so along came the immigrants, especially the Muslims ones. They come to the West... How nice! Come, I will defend you. Be quiet, and let me defend you. Don't say a word, and I will get you your rights. Some Syrian refugees who come here to Germany are young and eager to work and learn German. They want to make something of themselves before it's too late. They know that things in Germany might change, and they would be sent back, just like that. If economic or political conditions change, or if a right-wing party comes to power… So the young want to start… But you see that the leftists who help them say to them: 'You are still traumatized. You are still affected by the war.' Traumatized? They want to work. But they are told it’s not time yet. They want to keep them in the role of the victim. They want to keep them in a jar or in a zoo cage, like monkeys.

"This is the left that deals with the Muslims. These leftists defend the hijab and make a hijab-clad Barbie doll. The leftists are very happy, even though the company did it for gain: 'How wonderful. They made a Barbie doll!' I will dedicate an episode of my show to this subject. I will talk about how they are promoting the hijab in Europe these days. In the past, they would say that the hijab represents modesty. But the Muslim Brotherhood realized the West would not go for that modesty business, so they changed their rhetoric. They began to say that the hijab symbolizes freedom, self-determination, and emancipation. Now they are saying that the hijab means empowerment of women. Seriously?! The hijab means empowerment of women? To hell with this deception. And the leftists willingly buy anything the Muslim Brotherhood sells them. They are oppressed… They are all victims of the West… I should dedicate an entire episode to this psychological issue. The European left has created a hierarchy of victims. The best victims are the victims of the West, of Israel, of imperialism, and of capitalism. But a Muslim who kills his wife is a 'poor little thing'… The West drove him to this…

"When a terrorist says in his message that he is killing infidels because he was told to do so by the Prophet and the Quran, and that he must cleanse the land from abomination and corruption, and he even quotes Quranic verses in support of his point of view – the leftists say to him: 'No, you didn’t do it because of your religion. You are marginalized. You are a victim of the West. You are a victim of racism. You are a victim of colonialism. You probably applied for a job and was rejected by the West. You must have tried to become part of society, but was rejected.' [The terrorist himself] cites the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran as the reason, and in his last testimony, he writes that he did it because of his religion, because he wants to break bread with the Prophet Muhammad in Paradise… But it’s to no avail. The left has him pegged as a victim. For the leftists, any Muslim or African is a victim of the West. That's pure racism. It means that they do not see Muslims or Africans as people responsible for their own lives. No, the leftists want someone to defend. They like to play the role of the advocate. They have a sort of 'mother complex' and want to protect someone – even if it is from the leftists themselves."

It hasn’t been no surprise that our biggest academic institutions have been funded by Saudi petro-dollars, which gave an open space for Islamists to infiltrate it and disseminate their ideology. The most moderate liberals are usually indoctrinated into believing that past Islamic societies were more advanced and progressive than the European West, which is why they frame things that we would consider discriminatory like the jizya and dhimmitude as some kind of enviable status where religious minorities are protected and respected when it was factually untrue.

The most shrewd of these far-leftists see this as an game against their political opponents and Islamists like Muslim Brotherhood members make the more natural allies since they share one thing in common: being control freaks. They work side by side to ensure their power base, say liberal memes in public to rally the useful idiots and the public with their media as propaganda arm. This way they can hope to get people they disagree with de-platformed, silenced or maybe even killed.

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Case in point, Islamist apologist (and possible terrorist sympathizer) Omar Aziz has recently penned an article in response to the Christchurch attack denouncing atheist author Sam Harris for having emboldened the NZ terrorist into carrying out his attack. Harris pointed out that Aziz’s article is dishonest because he is aware of Harris’ political positions as someone who opposes fascism and identity politics of any kind, yet writes such an article wasn’t tailored at refuting his points, but to discredit him in the eyes of the masses who don’t know anything about Harris. Aziz is even more dishonest by the fact the terrorist manifesto doesn’t mention Harris once the whole time, but since the public will be discouraged from reading it (and it constitutes as an crime in New Zealand), its very fortunate into misleading the audience.

The most frustrating thing about this is that Muslims and liberals themselves that disagree with the collective are rebuked and persecuted by their own rather than by “the other side”. I can’t keep keep track of the number of Muslim reformers (adherents or atheists) that are criticized by the left such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maajid Nawaz, Mohammed Tawhidi, Ed Hussein, Zineb El Rhazoui or Tarek Fatah, I don’t even dare Google them to see what is the latest hit piece written by some leftist retard. On a even more serious note, some of these might actually have their lives in danger.

Zineb El Rhazoui was a writer in the Charlie Hebdo magazine who survived the 2015 massacre due to receiving a Holiday extension and being at her home in Casablanca when the attack took place where twelve of her friends were killed including Charb. After the massacre, extensive security routines became a part of Rhazoui's life. She avoids eating at restaurants, taking the train and later moving from place to place because Islamists have issued fatwas calling for her death.

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali used to be a Dutch politician before having to move out of the country after her close friend Theo van Gogh was assassinated by a Moroccan Islamist for making a movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies. Considering that two years before van Gogh’s death, Dutch politician Pym Fortuin (a gay Catholic mind you) was also assassinated by an jihadist, Ali’s safety could not be ensured in the Netherlands and she had to flee.

Tarek Fatah is a liberal Indian Muslim who advocates for secularism, gay rights, opposes shariah law and other things. He regularly clashes with Canada’s Muslim community and in 2017, has been nearly assassinated by a man hired by Muslim mafioso Dawood Ibrahim.

Rather than drawing condemnation for, the left has been at best silent or ignorant, or at worse unsympathetic if not downright cheerleading for their deaths to happen:

When van Gogh was killed, Rohan Jayasekera made light of his death for “overusing his freedom of speech” to criticize Muslims (yet, Jayasekera gave a platform for Holocaust denier David Irving).

Former Charlie Hebdo employee Oliver Cyran said his former employees brought their deaths on themselves and also accused Rhazoui of being anti-Muslim racist, without revealing her name or gender to give the impression everyone in Hebdo were all white bigots. She further goes to own him by saying that (from Wikipedia):

if she were raped "the websites that posted your article will definitely say I was asking for it because I don’t respect Islam," she observed that Cyran himself had implicitly endorsed all of this by embracing the "whole moralizing discourse about how one must 'respect Islam,' as demanded by the Islamists, who do not ask whether Islam respects other religions, or other people.”

How are we supposed to expect the people to uphold liberalism that can’t even protect their own free-thinkers and politicians who dare to speak out against Islamic radicalism, are going to protect the average individual. I live in Brazil where no-go areas are a sad reality of our lives, but when I look at what happens in places like Europe (specifically Sweden), I get terrified. Our drug dealers are really crazy, but none are willing to go as far as carrying out bomb attacks or are that much in a rush to get into Heaven.

And if you think the creation of Islamic states backed by the Left is unlikely, you are sorely mistaken. Islam makes up only 3% of the population in the USA, mostly concentrated in Minnesotta, yet the local politicians want to enforce blasphemy laws in response to the Christchurch attack. Minnesotta, the same state where Ilhan Omar came from and is buddies with Linda Sarsour. The people reading this and believing it to be pure paranoia would have been shitting bricks if a evangelical Christian conservative was making similar prepositions.

The first people hurt by this of course will be liberals themselves; surely they have already been. Maria Ladenburger for example was the daughter of an top European Union official who was raped and drowned by an Afghan asylum seeker who was already arrested before for trying to rape a Greek woman and admitted in prison to have raped a girl in Iran even before that. More recently, two Scandinavian girls Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and Maren Ueland were beheaded while in a trip to Morocco by ISIS militants. Several people on the far-right were specially unsympathetic, specially in the latter case it surfaced that the girls were pro-migrants themselves.

It’s easy for certain heartless individuals on the right-wing to say “they had it coming” or “burn the coal? Pay the toll” with glee, but this is an symptom of Western liberal pampering where women in particular are raised to believe everyone will be as open-minded as they were. Even though Morocco is sure a nice to place to visit, its far from an ideal place to live if you are a Christian, a woman or specially a Scandinavian liberal. I’ve seen Scandinavians saying that liberal virtue-signalling is just an natural and innocent thing to do in their countries in order to fit in better.

I am sad to say that its not just exclusive to Scandinavia. Ever since 9/11, vast portions of the Western Left have disgraced themselves by their failure to acknowledge the threats posed to security and social cohesion by radical and fundamentalist Islam, and a craven willingness to align with Islamists in opposition to American foreign policy, entangled in an obscurantist web of moral relativity, postcolonial theory, identity politics, anti-Zionism, and general moral confusion. Even back then, many leftist ideologues argued that the World Trade Center attack was a “justified” action because of the USA for supporting Israel and their actions in the Gulf War, never mind those weren’t related - bin Laden repeatedly used the sactions against Iraq to rally Muslims against the West but never had any love for Saddam Hussein and Ba’athism. The most infamous incident was an essay made by Ward Churchill where he basically called the 9/11 victims “little Eichemanns” (in reference to Adolf Eichemann, one of the architects of the Holocaust) because they were bureaucrats working for the “genocide in the Middle-East”. Not a very wise move.

I am for one sick and tired of their collusion, but I am afraid this won’t be the last time I write about such topic. While the outrage against Brunei applying sharia law appears to show that liberals will draw a line at somewhere, I don’t think this will amount to anything and I personally find their outrage hypocritical. I close this off with something for you to ponder: if you think the Muslims you know personally are moderates just ask them if they would like Sharia law to be legally enforced, then you will discover the truth about how moderate they claim to be.

#terrorism #rants #politics #persecution

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ryankelley · 6 years ago

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I really had high hopes for Trump's economic policy. Early on, I felt we needed some protectionist measures and some gutting of our governments profligate spending--particularly by the DoD. Some good things are happening according to indicators of employment and wages. But honestly, my working-class family is now paying more taxes than before, and I suspect this market growth is largely short-sighted gorging, PR-fueled and wishful thinking. Of course rah-rah nationalism is going to draw some positive speculation and investment, but it's not real growth.

Eventually the chickens will come home to roost. Our R&D funding is decelerating and becoming more centralized. We're trapping more money at the top, increasing inequality, continually squeezing dwindling natural resources without incentivizing environmentally-sustainable technology development. Trickle-down economics has its merits. It's wise to make rich people and business owners comfortable so they store money in your banks and invest more capital your nation. Unfortunately, we haven't done that. We've made them richer at the expense of the working class while they've continued to move their funds overseas into more liberalized nations. We gave their corporations control over markets like airlines, telecommunications, health insurance, bankings--eliminating competition and creating ineffeciencies.

What we should be doing is cutting taxes for the working-class. They actually take their savings and reinvest large portions of it into the local economy--via openning new businesses, purchasing more goods and services etc...One thing the working class does is work--so it makes sense that putting extra money in their pocket will result in extra money being reinvested into the economy.

The working class is the most productive segment of the economy per dollar. Unfortunately, they're already loyal tax payers, so the bureaucrats and crony businesses don't need to focus on them when campaigning. Instead, they offer sops of bread to the poor masses in order to get their policy across. This is why inner cities have stayed poor despite being dominated by leftists over the last 40 years, and why the welfare state is so inefficient. The aim is to pacify their desperation with some small gift in the short term, like a needle exchange or more money into a bad public school. In return, the leftist demagogue gets their vote and passes more policy funneling money into the businesses they're affiliated with. Wall Street loved Hillary, not Trump.

Thus, we've actually squeezed the working class more in recent years. While some tax cuts and some positive PR has led to economic growth and higher wages, it hasn't done so in a sustainable fashion. Furthermore, middle-class homeowners are now enjoying less tax cuts under Trump, the Drug War is now being waged against veterans wrought with chronic pain and health insurance has increasing per capita. Illegal immigration persists, and there's now policy on the ballot proposing that felons and illegal aliens will vote. Meaning, net resource takers will be given more power vis a viz tax-paying citizens. The middle class will effectively pay more for the same amount of public goods they received before under this policy. While this policy comes from the left, I suspect it is here because the left has been inflamed in hysteria over Trump's rhetoric. After all, every action has a reaction. The left is only becoming more radical and desperate with every loss. The cyclical nature of politics and economy leads me to believe the next president will be a democrat.

My ballot was red in Florida, but honestly, I regretted watching Rick Scott shut down sewage treatment plants, pollute the everglades and Tampa Bay, and drill offshore...He traded some short-term growth for long-term economic health--also sacrificed the beauty of the area. This is the typical conservative policy prescription. Keep doing what you're doing until it stops working. Well, it's going to stop working--we're overpopulated, our natural resource stores are quickly dwindling and the earth is telling us we're in trouble with a more extreme climate. Worse, it's economically irrational to trade tourism—e.g. clean beaches--and real estate—e.g. clean water and fertile land--for his friends at the oil companies. Tourism and real estate, most likely, are sectors that have far more growth potential and offer long-term stability in a state like Florida. Jeopardizing these sectors along with commercial fisheries to drill off shore is unlikely to be a net gain.

Unfortunately, I just didn't see any more promising options on the left side of the ballot. Frankly, I'm not surprised. That side has become the anti-science side. They're waging a war against the entire field of economics. They feel bought, and in every policy prescription are attempting to take away our individual freedoms. They want our right to self-defense, they want our free speech, they want our free markets and they want control over our critical goods--safety, telecommunications, water, arable land...Simply put, while the right may be misguided, the left has become dangerous to the citizen's future. I work in STEM, and I worked very hard to get there. I got a degree in economics (hard!) and I have spent the last 6 years working tirelessly as a software engineer (hard!). In response to the high wage I"ve earned while their voters chose easy, liberal arts degrees that have a poor return in the work force, they're forcing policy that funnels STEM jobs away from me and towards less-qualified people because of their race or gender. 51% of the US population is female--the law of supply and demand means my wage will fall if we're hiring less-qualified women just because they're women. And can I speak out? No. They're the party against free speech--they despise so-called "Hate Speech". In essence, they despise any non-polite speech, and therefore, free speech. Their rhetoric increasingly aligns with authoritarian police states that have total control over the populace.

Because they suffered a loss, the left is becoming more tyrannical. Essentially, anyone they can draw votes from they want voting. Most recently, they started pushing policy to allow felons and non-citizens to vote in elections. I saw this on my ballot in Florida. Already, they want illegal aliens sharing public goods despite so many impoverished and homeless US citizens not having enough access to them.

Both sides have become out of touch with our nations' needs. We might've had a few sops of bread under Trump, but ultimately, the inflammatory rhetoric from his regime will undoubtedly lead to a harsh reaction in the opposite direction.

#trump economics government policy politics

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judedoyle · 8 years ago

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Basics

A lot of debate, in the past year or so, has come down to putting a label on people’s politics. So-and-so is A Liberal; thus-and-thus is A Leftist, or A Socialist. Mostly, this serves as a reason to dismiss somebody, whether or not they’re right — you would say that, you’re a liberal, or well, that’s just purity politics talking. But, as a feminist, it’s also my job to at least try to have solidarity with women who disagree with me. In the process of trying that, I realized I’d really never tried to write down a coherent description of my politics before. I’d called myself a “socialist” until maybe 2015, found myself called a “centrist” from 2015 through 2017, took a bunch of stupid political-compass tests where I always wound up on the same square as Jill Stein and/or anarchists (pretty far left, all the way at the bottom toward the “anti-authoritarian” end, to answer your burning question) and still really had no idea how to communicate where I stood or why I stood there in discussions with other women.

Here, just because I imagine the question will come up again, is an attempt at a description of my politics — economic, identity-wise, role-of-Nazi-punching-wise, what have you. It’s not much, but as women increasingly have more good-faith arguments on the direction of our movements (which is lovely; I would rather do that than hear some man explain Why Identitarianism Is Ruining The Left any day of the week) it might give some grounds for an assessment of what I’m saying and why I’m saying it. I mean, assuming an “assessment” is the point, and not a Twitter fight — my optimism is boundless, I guess.

1) The center point of my political engagement, the thing everything else revolves around, is feminism — ending misogyny and default male power in America. I don’t think it’s inherently superior to any other locus; your activism could center queerness, black lives, economic inequality, and be just as meaningful, if not more so. But I choose feminism, because feminism chose me. By the time I left elementary school, I had seen two instances of near-fatal domestic violence within my immediate family. In one of them, a woman was shot in the spine and left paralyzed for life. I knew about other cases where women’s boyfriends or husbands controlled what they ate, or “accidentally” killed their pets. I knew two girls who had been raped by my sophomore year of high school, and that count only increased once I got to college. And, of course, I experienced my own share of violence. Basically, by the time I was sixteen, I knew I lived in a world that violently hated women — that hated us enough to kill us, and that did kill us more often than anyone wanted to admit. I have spent the rest of my life figuring out what to do about that. It’s what I care about, and I admittedly care about it more than anything else, including my own self-interest at times. You’re free to choose your focus. This is mine.

2) There is no useful feminism without intersectionality. In fact, feminism, arguably more than any other cause, is bound to intersectionality, just because every single group in the world has women in it. This makes it practically impossible to craft a universally true statement about “women,” or to issue a blanket call for “women’s solidarity.” Women will probably always have opposing interests, or disagreements, and (as long as we live in an oppressive society) some women will always be able to oppress or exploit other women. I’m pretty obviously a flawed vehicle for intersectional feminism, given that I’m white, and straight, and cisgender. So I try to stay educated about the interests and experiences of other women, to reflect on those in anything I write as best I can, and to keep those women in mind before assuming my own experience is universal. I try to fight for the interests of all marginalized groups — or at least to support fighters, where I’m not qualified to speak up myself — because all of that is essential to supporting women as a whole.

2a) One place where you might disagree with me: I do believe that even extremely privileged women experience misogyny. Misogyny is a structural factor that impacts women because they are women, and for no other reason; I also believe that misogyny alone can ruin or kill a woman, even if she has everything going for her. So I don’t necessarily view even very privileged women as “enemies” — any woman can, potentially, be enlisted to the cause — and I try to frame any criticism in a way that steers clear of misogynist tropes.

2b) Another place for good-faith disagreement: I believe that getting women and other marginalized people into positions of power has real, positive impact on its own. Of course, you have to take into account what those women believe — no-one is saying Sarah Palin or Ivanka Trump are feminist sheroes — but if a woman is reasonably progressive, she represents a concrete improvement over the white man who currently occupies that position. There are different value levels to this: Getting women into government is far more important than getting women into corporations. But giving women higher-paying jobs matters, too. Sexism, like everything else, is economic; the reason women face economic discrimination is the same reason that over 90% of all abusive relationships involve financial abuse, which is that patriarchy wants to instill dependence in women. Patriarchy wants to make it impossible for a woman to survive without a man’s patronage and approval, and thereby render those women passive, submissive, and (this is important) unable to resist violence or walk away, because they cannot survive outside of the relationship. Ideally, all women would have equal access to resources. In the meantime, women should be supported in building bases of economic power within the world we have.

3) And, speaking of economics: I believe that American socialism is the goal, but that it’s not exactly a short-term goal. Which is to say: Everything I’ve read suggests that structural and identity-based oppressions are in fact improved under socialism, because the marginalized have that base of economic power from which to resist their oppressors. And, in America, class is deeply tied to identity; poverty is reliably caused by bigotry, and fighting poverty therefore fights bigotry. Yet I’m skeptical about getting there quickly, and don’t think any of us should live as if “the revolution” is going to happen tomorrow, or in five years, or in ten. The nation that elected Reagan in a landslide within my lifetime, the nation that made George W. Bush a two-term President, the nation that recently elected Donald Trump, does not seem like a nation that’s going to turn into Scandinavia (or even Canada) before I turn 40. I think we are more likely to get there via a gradual leftward culture shift, and pragmatic policies aimed at increasing the social safety net in specific ways (like the FAMILY Act or Obamacare) than we are through one huge victory or grand deluge that changes everything.

4) And, speaking of the deluge: I would prefer my activism to remain as non-violent as possible for as long as possible. Yes, I know the state is violent — more violent than any black bloc or riot could be — and I know that intolerable conditions inevitably generate violence. Still, my activism has its roots in resisting violence, and in witnessing violence, so I can’t romanticize physical force easily. I think violence tends to generate chaos and harm as many innocent people as it helps, and I can’t participate gladly in hurting or killing people.

4a) I do, however, make a distinction between violence and self-defense. Edward Crawford is not “being violent” in this picture — he is throwing a weapon that was intended to harm him back to his attackers, sparing himself from their violence. A woman who speaks up about being raped, harassed or abused is not “being violent” if that man loses his job or goes to jail, nor is she “being violent” if, in a one-on-one confrontation, she fires a warning shot into the ceiling; she needs to get the abuser or harasser away from her, to stop him, and if he will not respond to requests, she will have to use force. Taking Milo’s check mark or book deal away is not an act of aggression. Nobody reasonable has a problem with Nazi-punching. I believe that the oppressed must sometimes use force to limit or contain the oppressor’s violence, basically. Where that fits into the greater picture of limiting or containing state violence, or of “revolution,” I don’t know, except that I don’t want to shoot people.

5) Because those most impacted by economic oppression are women, people of color, and other marginalized folks, any leftist movement should be led by women, people of color, and other marginalized folks. In many cases, like Black Lives Matter (which is largely led by women, including queer women) this is already the case. But if I look at a group of “leftists,” I should see mostly women — or, at least, 51% of the attendees should be women. The reasons for this are practical, not ideological. For example, I recently saw a leftist say they supported the “Norwegian model” for abortion. Norway limits abortion at thirteen weeks. This is before any substantive genetic testing to ensure the viability of the fetus can be done (even the most expensive cell-free fetal DNA testing, which is normally done at around ten weeks, would take a while to return results) let alone before the 20-week test when many fetal abnormalities are first detected. It’s eight weeks earlier than Donald Trump’s proposed 20-week limit, which is already barbaric. Norwegian women & trans people can theoretically get an abortion at up to 22 weeks (still only two more weeks than a ban endorsed by Donald Trump, for fucksakes) but they need the government’s permission, and doctors are allowed to flat-out refuse at any point in the pregnancy for reasons of “conscience” — not exactly “pro-choice.” This is a socialist paradise, and their abortion laws are worse than America’s. There are other instances of this, like the racism of the New Deal, which have been rehashed endlessly. In short: The reason for leadership by oppressed people is that, if your socialism or leftism doesn’t specifically take their concerns into account, it will end up specifically leaving them out.

6) There are also a lot of old-school, probably “liberal” values I hold dear: I think people have a god-given right to disagree with each other, or with The Movement. I ultimately believe in democracy, no matter how frustrating it gets. I believe that it must always be safe to note that the Emperor has no clothes — and it doesn’t matter who this week’s Emperor is, or how “progressive” he claims to be. Hate speech and abusive speech needs to be checked, but “unity” isn’t a positive goal if it means you’re not allowed to make your own choices or say what you think.

7) But she voted for Hillary Clinton! Yes, I did. I grade a candidate on gender politics first (see Item #1) and didn’t much like those of her opponents. I also just like her, as a woman, for reasons I’ve gone on about before. But Hillary Clinton lost four months ago, and won’t run again, so she’s really not the most important part of my work to anyone except people who hate Hillary Clinton. More generally, I believe that voting for mainstream, left-of-center candidates in a general election is not incompatible with further-left activism. I think the two are interdependent. You vote for the candidate who has a chance of winning (which means taking into account all Democrats, not just your own stripe or social group), who will preserve gains rather than rolling them back, and who will be at least somewhat responsive to leftward pressure. Then you apply the pressure through protesting, marching, striking, and creating media and culture change. Some people understandably harbor anger toward those politicians (my husband is intense about Obama and drone strikes, for example) but I mostly don’t — they work in a system designed to limit them, and it’s our job to alter that system. Electing Clinton, or Obama, or whoever, isn’t the end goal of progressive politics. It’s the beginning, setting an acceptable battlefield in the ongoing work of activism — which belongs, not to our elected officials, but to us, and which will not end within our lifetimes.

Well, those are the basics. I imagine there are a thousand points I’ve left unaddressed. But this is the core of what I believe, so that we can argue about that, rather than someone else’s fevered imagination about what I believe, the next time we talk.

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superdweebs · 8 years ago

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Noticed someone citing that Kirby vs. Fascist Phone-Trollers anecdote on your other page, and I think they missed a crucial bit: Jack was not *initiating* violence. He wasn't trawling the block with a crowbar, intent on clubbing the next blue-eyed kid who sorta seemed to fit the bill. He was *responding* to a mealy-mouthed calling-out, and while I'm sure he would've thrown down if said shitheads had stuck around, that still isn't the Righteous Pre-emptive Aggro(C) being flogged by this pundit.

I generally try to avoid politics on this blog, but since this current situation is tied into comics as well as politics, I give to you a comic history lesson:

Back during World War II, the majority of the American public was in fact initially opposed to punching Nazis.

Seriously! The fighting over in Europe was viewed as “those silly Europeans are at it again the way they have been for the past several centuries really”. It was Somebody Else’s Problem Certainly Not America’s Problem.

Meanwhile, the Holocaust was at the time not something widely known outside of the populations being affected, and even those who did know often didn’t believe it was true or as bad/extensive as it was claimed to be. Plenty of countries, including America, were resistant to taking in Jewish or other Holocaust refugees.

It was not until Pearl Harbor got attacked that the Americans switched to approving of punching Nazis, because at that point it was a matter of literally self-defense. That is when punching Nazis became seen as OK: not because Nazis were horrible people, but because they punched us first.

So when the folks at Marvel created that iconic picture of Captain America punching Nazis? That was a radical statement back then. That was a very, very ballsy, controversial thing to do. That was Jewish creators saying before Pearl Harbor, “This should be America’s problem to address, dammit!” at a time when they were the only Americans being affected and so the majority of Americans didn’t care. It was not something taken as granted to cheer on, and if the Jewish folks had gone around back punching Nazis just for being jerks they would have been viewed unfavorably and arrested for assault and battery.

And as you say, even that iconic moment people talk about wasn’t Kirby going around punching Nazis just for saying rotten things, that was Kirby threatening to engage in self-defense towards someone who made a threat of violence against him first.

Plus ironically that threat was made in response to the statement of a Captain America punching Hitler, because, again, the majority of the American public didn’t see that as a thing we should be doing, though only a minority were as big jerks about their disapproval as that guy who threatened Kirby.

Because you see, the thing is: Superhero comics are a fantasy. They are a fantasy where generally the bad guys are obviously bad guys you have a moral license to punch and the good guys are the people with the moral license to do the punching. ***

But the real world doesn’t work that way, especially in this era. Social, political, and economic power often matter more than physical power. And too many the people with social, political, and economic power are morally terrible people. And those terrible people can and will wield that social, political, and economic power against you, successfully, if you ever punch them in a way that doesn’t look good to the general public that fuels their power.

Because, I mean, Nick Spencer is left-wing! Like, the guy has constantly showed left-wing sensibilities and politics. A large part of his Sam Wilson run has involved sticking it to the right and promoting leftist ideas, to the point where he even pissed off Fox News for a time, and Nick Spencer has frequently expressed left-wing sentiments on his own time. Making Cap a Nazi was even borne in part from the classic far-left belief that all patriotic white people must be white supremacists. So this sudden idea that Nick Spencer is right-wing is totally and utterly bizarre when compared to the facts of what Spencer has historically stated and promoted.

No, the fact that Nick Spencer is saying punching people for talking is bad should tell you “the majority of the American public will view you as morally bad for engaging in violence for reasons other than self-defense”, not “Spencer somehow got a magic brain transplant and did an instant 180 to become right-wing”. ****

People like to complain about respectability politics, but the cold hard truth and reality is that politics is in the end a PR game. It’s a PR game where the people who get the best PR among people who go out and actually vote are the people who get into office and become able to pass policies. And it’s a PR game where the politicians choose to pass or veto policies based in large part on what will curry favor with the people who get them into office.

So the cold hard truth and reality is that being morally and/or factually right does not always mean anything. No matter how morally and factually right it might be to punch Nazis, if it’s not seen as socially right (and therefore usually also politically and/or economically right), you will lose and be punished.

So you then have to ask yourself whether the consequences of your group losing and being punished are worth the satisfaction of “morally justified” violence. And since the consequences for this round of the left losing socially was putting into power Republicans who fully intend to do things that will badly harm lots of people, I feel the answer is no, losing socially is not a fair trade for being morally right.

Then add onto all of that the problem that the group of people calling for violence against terrible people are often the same group of people notoriously terrible at discerning who is and isn’t really a terrible person. This is a group of people which has a historical record of continually strawmanning and twisting things people say, of profiling people based solely on their headgear and clothing and facial hair, of doing things like hypocritically saying that your skin color or sex or orientation alone automatically makes you inherently bigoted or other negative assessments. So on top of going around punching people for reasons other than self-defense being generally not a good idea, these people who want to punch Nazis these people may not even necessarily correctly discern who should be punched.

So all in all, please don’t invoke the ghost of Kirby to go around saying you should punch people for speech alone, especially since one more point: That iconic Kirby moment people talk about is Kirby having to respond to someone wanting to punch him for speech alone.

No, the real, successful way to fight the Nazis and other scum right now is to build your own social, economic, and political power high enough to fight them on their own battlefield unless they degenerate things into physical violence. Because only then will you get to punch awful people and still come out of it on top in the ways that ultimately matter logistically.

I won’t respond to any replies on this account to this specific post, FYI, partly because I don’t want political discourse to take over this blog, and partly because quite frankly most of what I’ve said here is simply reporting fact and the rest I feel logically follows from that fact, so there’s very little of this I view as up for debate anyway.

And anyone who would want to make any response about my being right-wing, a Nazi, a Trump supporter, justifying violence, victim-blaming, or so on, would do nothing but prove my point above about a certain group of people being prone to strawmanning/twisting and generally being bad judges of character, since I would hope it would be obvious from how often I post about minority characters, have lamented about comic titles promoting diversity not doing well, and was despondent after Trump got voted in, that none of those things are the case.

*** To address the people using the specific argument: “Nick Spencer writes comics about people punching bad guys, how can he say we should use polite discourse instead of punching“: Well, you see, Nick Spencer is this thing we call “an adult of sound enough mind to tell the difference between reality and fantasy” which is a concept the people who are asking that question should really look into.

**** And yes I am aware of Spencer’s “SJW Brigade”, which should, again, tell you how even left-wing people view stereotypical SJW behavior, not, again, that Spencer somehow magically became right-wing out of nowhere. It should be an informational lesson about some of the negative ways average people perceive leftist causes, not as a reason to knee-jerk classify people who are on your side as “the enemy” just because they criticized you, even if you feel it was unfair criticism.

#t: questions #Rants #n: now that I've probably pissed off a number of people who follow me #n: even though ironically the sort of people who'd get pissed are the sort of people who really need to see this message

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republicstandard · 6 years ago

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I Am Not Your Mule: 4 Reasons for the White Identity Movement

Dear Open-Minded People of the Left,

This is an open letter from a self-described White identitarian, an advocate of pro-European racial identity.

You may condemn me, but I ask you to hear me out. I have criticized you in the past, sometimes savagely, but today I come to you with an olive branch—and an explanation.

Today, I would like to help you understand the movement for White identity from the perspective of a pro-White advocate.

You have almost certainly been taught to regard our movement, whether branded as Dissident Right or Alt-Right, or by some other name, as “hateful” and “racist.” I do not blame you for this error, and I yet retain a belief, however optimistic, that some of you are open enough to hear me out.

Openness is important to me: openness to new ideas, new beliefs, new arguments. I do not always change my mind, but I have nevertheless done so many times, and it is always refreshing to have my thinking challenged.

I talk about openness because it was openness that led me to the Left as a young adult, and openness, among other things, that ultimately led me away after many years. I don’t expect you to be impressed or surprised that I was a Democrat-voting anti-war leftist during most of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, but I mention it because, for me, it was profoundly significant.

So, what transformed me from a Kerry and Obama voter to a right-winger and pro-White identitarian?

The short version: I came to the conclusion that the Left’s political strategy is to exploit Whites, and especially White men, while simultaneously seeking to guilt-trip and deride us.

For all too many on the Left, Whites and especially White men are expected to carry the burdens of building a new and “progressive” order, at the same time as we are derided and shamed for representing the old order.

We are not your mules, beasts of burden for you to exploit even as you complain about our stubbornness.

With this in mind, here are 4 reasons I have found for the existence of the White identity movement.

Reason 1): Welfare State Parasitism

For many on the Left, the welfare state is at the heart of their vision for what government should be.

It’s also largely funded by White people.

As a group, on average, non-Hispanic Whites are responsible for a public budget surplus which, by some estimates, reaches $553.52 billion, or $2,795 per capita.

By contrast, Hispanics run a budget deficit of $411.95 billion, or $7,289 per person. Blacks run a budget deficit of $389.71 billion, or $10,016 per capita.

Overall, non-Hispanic Whites paid at least 75.86% of all taxes in 2014—not bad for a group that numbered 62.1% of the national population.

Not only do Whites pay for more than their “fair share” of the welfare state, they pay into it even though it disproportionately benefits other groups. By one back-of-the-envelope estimate, Blacks alone have received $8.3 trillion extra in disproportionate welfare payments since 1971.

Spare me your cries of Not All X Are Like That. If you are an adult, you ought to be able to comprehend the concepts of trends, averages, and broader patterns, while also recognizing that of course people are individuals.

White identitarians may differ about what should be done regarding the welfare state. Some may favor reform, while others, including yours truly, favor abolition. However, this is one of the most important areas of public policy that is relevant to White identity: as a racial group, Whites are paying for “diversity.”

Reason 2): Mass Migration and White Replacement

Whites are the only group whose replacement in their own lands is something to celebrate, according to many on the Left and in the Cathedral media. I note that most of these same people and entities – those of the non-dual-citizen variety – show no discernible desire to leave White-majority lands.

“The US will become ‘minority white’ in 2045, Census projects,” William Frey writes for Brookings. The subtitle is “Youthful minorities are the engine of future growth,” and the picture shows a smiling group of people from various racial backgrounds.

In the interests of transparency, allow me to observe that not everyone agrees: there is a counter-argument that Whites will not become the minority if one takes a more inclusive definition of White people, one which incorporates people of mixed White heritage who identify as White and one or more other groups.

Writing for the New York Times, Niraj Chokshi explains that a new study on Trump voters found, and I quote: “White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.”

I completely agree with Chokshi, and I believe that this played a part in my own journey from voting for Goofy Gary Johnson in 2016 to supporting Donald Trump.

Think about this for a moment – and I mean really think about it: why in the world would anyone want to lose status in their own country?

Do you, dear open-minded reader on the Left, want to be replaced? Before you try to rebut me, realize that I am not only talking about matters of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion but also about literally any other source of identity – including political and social views, for example.

Now, let me ask the question again: how did you feel when Donald Trump won the election?

Did you perhaps feel that someone who represented the Other, a different identity, a different group of people, was trying to replace you?

Before you object that there is no comparison between a political ideology and a racial identification, allow me to observe that race has become rather politicized in this country.

In fact, this brings me to my third point.

Reason 3): Whites Are Blamed for Everything

White male-bashing is a stock in trade for the Left, and if you have been paying attention you know this to be true. I will openly admit that all too often, Whites are masters of racial masochism. White guilt is mostly our fault, and we need to take responsibility for ending it.

The removal of statues commemorating various figures of the Confederacy has become a flashpoint in the Culture War, and since I see the Culture War in substantially racial terms I would be remiss not to talk about it.

Besides, this New York Times article, “Monuments for A New Era” landed in my feed:

“It has taken a tremendous effort to remove the Confederate statues that have been taken down so far. This is a great beginning. I’d like to replace the 68-foot-4-inch column and base that for 133 years provided a platform for a figure of the white supremacist general Robert E. Lee with an anti-monument. I’d call it ‘The Legacy of Slavery Is in the Way of Progress and Will Be Until America, Which Benefits From That Legacy, Has Been Replaced With a Completely Different Society.’”

Even without the aforementioned points about welfare parasitism, and even if we did not have the convenient FBI Table 21 and other interesting information about the color of crime, there’s still an interesting historical argument to be had here.

I’ll note that national institutions are the key reason a nation ends up rich or poor, and the reason the United Kingdom jump-started the Industrial Revolution had everything to do with the invention of invention – in other words, being able to invent something, patent it, and profit from it.

African slaves in America would have been slaves in Africa if not for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and there’s even an argument that on net and on average, Whites did not benefit from slavery at the time (read it for yourself and tell me what you think).

To take another example, one I posted to our Republic Standard Facebook page the other day, consider this New York Times piece (are you sensing a pattern yet?) about White guilt:

“I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of color. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.”

Does this sound like a healthy mentality to you? Do you see the problem? This person cannot escape from their negatively internalized White identity, the consequence of toxic anti-White narratives they have absorbed from the anti-White media and culture.

Now, I am much more than an identitarian. I do not think that this person simply needs a positive racial identity instead of a negative one – indeed, it is obvious to me that they need a healthier approach to their identity that is less reductive and essentialist.

I would advise this individual to cultivate their hobbies, spend time with friends, and stop taking themselves so seriously. The world is both more tragic and more wonderful than they are giving it credit for, and they will not begin to appreciate that subtle poetry until they have unburdened themselves.

I would also tell them that it’s okay to be White.

Not bad, not good, but definitely okay.

Here’s the thing: we’re not advocating for racial hatred or supremacy. Those things are terribly destructive forces – that’s actually a big part of my thesis here.

One of my own priorities in this movement is pushing back against the notion that the so-called far right represents “hate,” which is what the entire Cathedral media would apparently have you believe.

But of course, we’re also arguing against racial masochism.

What we’re arguing for is the right of Whites to an identity and to collective interests. I accept that we will hold different views: the entire broader landscape of the Dissident Right and Alt-Right has fault-lines between Christians and Heathens (capitalization intentional), traditionalists and secularists, and (simplifying a bit) libertarians and authoritarians.

Human beings evolved to live in groups, and it is entirely natural to prioritize one’s own groups – family, community, tribe, ethnic or racial group, nation, religion, fraternal organization – over others.

You may not have a strong racial identity, and you may not have any desire for one. Perhaps for you, the whole of humanity constitutes one human race, and you feel a sense of attachment and loyalty to them.

And you know what? That’s all well and fine. I completely respect your preferences. Are you willing to respect mine?

Reason 4): The Double Standards

Whites are supposed to be responsible for the actions of our forebears, even when these were not exceptional by the standards of past eras. And if we dare to question the egalitarian dogmas about race, we’re “White supremacists” no matter how much we say the opposite.

However, non-Whites with social media histories of anti-White rhetoric land jobs at the prestigious New York Times – just look at Sarah Jeong.

Meanwhile, VICE reports that police in Chicago were using “bait trucks” loaded with Nikes to catch criminals – until they stopped, because of community outrage.

Why, you might ask, were some in the community outraged? Was the tactic not effective in catching criminals? Were the trucks taking up valuable parking spots? Were the trucks somehow drawing crime into particular areas?

If you watch the video, you will see that some in the local Black population were outraged that the police would leave bait trucks full of Nikes in the hood, because of course people are going to steal them! There was even an apology.

This, and the ridiculous spectacle of the Starbucks frame game, demonstrates the absolute state of race relations in America today: Whites have to be responsible for everyone, but Blacks are not expected to even be responsible for themselves.

Contrary to popular belief, police shoot more Whites than Blacks – not only in absolute numbers but proportionately if one takes crime rates into account. And yet, the justified shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in 2014 produced the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” myth… which begat the destructive Ferguson riots, which were defended by the Left.

Climb into the wayback machine, and we see Trayvon Martin: shot dead while attacking George Zimmerman, turned into an instant martyr even as his killer was tried and hung in the kangaroo court of Cathedral media-manipulated public opinion. Martin was posthumously awarded an honorary degree in aeronautical science by Florida Memorial University.

This is how race relations in this country, and in so much of the Western world, currently stand:

Whites must be responsible for everything and everyone, and most of all for our individual and collective racial sins.

Blacks may act like irresponsible, hysterical, and even violent children and their misdeeds will be minimized, denied, or lionized, as the case and the narrative may demand.

Do you begin to understand how very absurd this world looks to us?

And it is we, the White race, who are supposed to bear all the burdens, from the economic to the cultural, of diminishing ourselves.

Can you imagine any other group being the target of Qatar’s “woke” agitprop outlet AJ+?

Can you imagine any other group being described as too abundant, and therefore not diverse enough?

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Can you imagine any other group being denied a sense of racial pride?

Can you imagine any other group taking all of this denigration from anybody, and not standing up for themselves?

If race relations in the U.S. and the West are ever to truly progress, they must do so on a foundation of honesty and mutual engagement.

White ethno-masochism offers only a compromised foundation, one which has contributed to the warped and perverse narrative that rules this culture today. This narrative has served no one but professional grievance-mongers and other parasites, and it must be replaced.

It is true that many Whites remain immured in White guilt, willing to wear the proverbial saddle and carry the load. That is to their detriment, and to the detriment of the very people they claim to be trying to help, since it promotes a false narrative of racial victimization, childishness, and learned helplessness.

Some of us, however, have woken up. We are no longer intimidated by the false cries of “racism,” and we will no longer apologize for defending our own interests and taking our own side. We do not preach animosity, only honesty about our interests and our priorities.

This is an olive branch. You, Open-Minded People of the Left, have the power to de-escalate the racial conflict that some among you have done so much to stir. You can push back against the anti-White rhetoric and model good behavior that will win you the admiration of reasonable people across the spectrum.

You cannot assimilate us to the standard leftist narratives on race, because we have self-respect and because we keenly understand that they run counter to our interests. Accept this, and we can move toward a better future built on honesty and the respect that is accorded to people who refuse to be exploited and derided.

We are not your mules, and the sooner everyone understands this, the better for us all.

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