#white supremicist

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Steve Brodner

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 22, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 23, 2024

Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) called out his Republican colleagues on the floor of the House today for offering “stunts instead of solutions, extremism over bipartisanship.” It’s a shame, he said, because the Republicans’ narrow majority “could have given us a chance to work together in a bipartisan way.” Instead, Republicans have caved to their most extreme members, who have been “skipping their real jobs to take day trips up to New York to try to undermine Donald Trump's criminal trial.” 

McGovern suggested that perhaps they were trying “to distract from the fact that their candidate for president has been indicted more times than he's been elected” and “is on trial for covering up hush money payments to a porn star for political gain not to mention three other criminal felony prosecutions.” 

Representative Jerry Carl (R-AL), the temporary chair at the time, rebuked McGovern, who noted that the fact that the former president is in a court of law is the truth. Just last week, McGovern pointed out, a Republican member of the House was not admonished when he complained about “the former president of the United States being hauled into court day after day with a sham trial.” 

Carl reminded McGovern that members “must avoid personalities in debates.”

McGovern replied: “[A]t some point, it's time for this body to recognize that there is no precedent for this situation. We have a presumptive nominee for president facing 88 felony counts, and we're being prevented from even acknowledging it. These are not alternative facts. These are real facts. A candidate for president of the United States is on trial for sending a hush money payment to a porn star to avoid a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign and then fraudulently disguising those payments in violation of the law. He's also charged with conspiring to overturn the election. He's also charged with stealing classified information, and a jury has already found him liable for rape in a civil court. And yet, in this Republican-controlled house, it's okay to talk about the trial, but you have to call it a sham.”

Representative Erin Houchin (R-IN) demanded McGovern’s words be stricken from the record. The chair agreed to do so, saying that “it is a breach of order to refer to the candidate in terms personally offensive, whether by actually accusing or merely insulting.” Republicans banned McGovern from speaking on the floor for the rest of the day. McGovern observed: “You can only talk about the trial on the House Floor if you're using it to defend Donald Trump.”

It was curious timing for extremists to silence a Massachusetts lawmaker. 

In 1836, Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a resolution to table, or put aside without action or discussion, all petitions relating to slavery. Repeatedly thereafter, former president John Quincy Adams, now representing Massachusetts in the House, rose to read a petition and was silenced. But the First Amendment protects the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances—King George III had pointedly rejected the colonists’ 1775 Olive Branch Petition trying to avoid war, and the framers of the new government wanted to be clear that people had a right to be heard—and people in the North increasingly understood the silencing of those who were determined to stop debate over slavery as an attack on their constitutional rights. 

The House got rid of the “gag rule” in 1844, but just twelve years later, on May 22, 1856—exactly 168 years ago today—South Carolina representative Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate after Sumner criticized southern enslavers, particularly Brooks’s relative South Carolina senator Andrew Butler. 

The gist of Sumner’s speech was that a small minority of men were trying to impose their will on the majority of the American people by forcing enslavement on the territory of Kansas, much as enslavers like Butler forced themselves on the women they enslaved. Sumner’s speech was insulting, but beating him into a welter of blood while he sat at his Senate desk for representing his constituents suggested that enslavers would tolerate no dissent.

Jodi Kantor, Aric Toler, and Julie Tate tonight broke the story in the New York Times that the upside-down U.S. flag associated with the January 6 insurrectionists was not the only anti-American flag Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito displayed. In at least July and September 2023, over his beach house in New Jersey there flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag like the one carried by January 6 rioters. This banner is also known as the “Pine Tree flag,” but it is not the same one currently under consideration to become Maine’s state flag. 

This flag represents the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. As Ishaan Jhaveri of Columbia University’s Tow Center in the Graduate School of Journalism explained in 2021, in the days of the American Revolution, the flag “was meant to symbolize the right of armed revolution in the face of tyranny.”  

But in 2013 the flag was the symbol of a group working to put Christians into public office to create a government based on their ideology. In 2015, those trying to stop the Supreme Court from legalizing gay marriage flew the flag; in 2016, supporters of the militias that occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge did so, too. In 2017 the flag was behind Trump when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and in 2020, those opposed to Covid shutdowns carried it. 

More recently, the January 6 rioters carried it, and so have neo-Nazis. It is the same flag that House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) displays outside of his congressional office. Scholar of religion Bradley Onishi noted: “It’s a flag symbolizing Christian revolution. It’s used by extremists.”

These extremists appear to have turned to Trump, who is, as McGovern pointed out, facing 88 felony counts and is currently on trial for paying off a sex partner in order to prevent voters from hearing about their encounter and then violating the law to hide the payments, because they believe he will crash through the laws and bureaucracy that are designed to protect the democratic institutions that would stop them from seizing power. 

And now it turns out that a flag representing the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, that the people should engage in armed revolution against tyranny, and that the United States should be a nation based in Christian theology has been flying over the home of Justice Alito, who is supposed to be defending the United States Constitution impartially. Alito wrote the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.

Election columnist Laura Bassett of The Cut wrote: “The [A]lito flag story does not teach me anything new about his politics but it does reveal how confident he is that nobody can do anything about him.” 

There is indeed a sense of power and entitlement coming from MAGA Republicans as they impose new limits on their fellow Americans and call those constraints freedom. Lori Rozsa of the Washington Post today noted that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is rewriting the history of the summer of 1964, made famous as Black and white organizers fanned out in Mississippi to register Black Americans to vote, by launching his own, new “Freedom Summer.” From May 27 through September 2, bridges in the state are prohibited from displaying rainbow colors for Pride Month in June, orange for National Gun Awareness Month, or yellow for Women’s Equality Day. The only colors they can display are red, white, and blue. 

“Thanks to the leadership of Gov[ernor] Ron DeSantis,” Florida Department of Transportation secretary Jared Perdue wrote on X, “Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ladymunson]

🤣

Just when I thought I couldn’t love Stephen King more, he gets booted off Twitter (I will never refer to it as X) for calling Elon Musk the First Lady.

Guess money can’t buy you everything huh Elonia? Sure it can buy you votes but it can’t buy good character or decency.

[ionlylikemycat]

where’s the option for “i am american but i would rather die slowly and horribly than ever convey that much nationalism even as a joke” bc like sorry but no? i am not clicking that?

Pick 'It's complicated' if you have spent significant parts of your life both in the US and outside of the US, for example if you grew up there but then moved.

I'm not American, and sometimes it really seems that this website is dominated by the US. I've seen a couple of polls asking which continent/region you're from, and there's one going around at the moment about whether you're white or non-white, but I haven't seen one just asking about the US, and I'm curious!

Also I'd appreciate it if you reblog for greater sample size (but no pressure!)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Christopher Weyan :: @ChristophWeyant

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 17, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

DEC 17, 2023

It seems that former president Donald Trump is aligning his supporters with a global far-right movement to destroy democracy. 

On Saturday, in Durham, New Hampshire, Trump echoed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s attacks on immigrants, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country”—although two of his three wives were immigrants—and quoted Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attacks on American democracy. Trump went on to praise North Korean autocratic leader Kim Jong Un and align himself with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the darling of the American right wing, who has destroyed Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship. 

Trump called Orbán “the man who can save the Western world.” 

Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, explained in The Conversation what Trump is talking about. Autocrats like Orbán and Putin—and budding autocrats like Trump—are building a global movement by fighting back against the expansion of rights to women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people. 

Russian leaders have been cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights for a decade with the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, claiming that they are protecting “traditional values.” This vision of heteronormativity rewrites the real history of human sexuality, but it is powerful in this moment. Orbán insists that immigrants ruin the purity of a country, and has undermined women’s rights.

Riccardi-Swartz explains that this rhetoric appeals to those in far-right movements around the world. In the United States, “family values” became tied to patriotism after World War II, when Chinese and Soviet communists appeared to be erasing traditional gender roles. Those people defined as anti-family—LGBTQ+ people and women who challenged patriarchy—seemed to be undermining society. Now, as dictators like Putin and Orbán promise to take away LGBTQ+ rights, hurt immigrants, and return power to white men, they seem to many to be protecting traditional society.

In the United States, that undercurrent has created a movement of people who are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore their vision of a traditional society, they’re in. 

It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood for.

The White House today responded to Trump’s speech. White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said: “Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety…. It’s the opposite of everything we stand for as Americans.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[gutsfics]

in just a few lines Hunt says that this whole place is curated to give off a specific vibe as a live art project so like

do you think this guy's tattoos are fake also

[chaos-coming]

Every time i think i should take a break from sharing pro-palestine posts on ig, one of my braindead cousins posts some zionist bullshit and i have a compulsion to counter it

[chzdavmpr]

For the record I normally wouldn't use memes of this guy but...

This time I will make an exception

[connanro]

while i don't want to minimise the danger of the white replacement theory its focus on anglo-saxons really cracks me up as a very white (celtic) person who has little to no anglo-saxon blood. these guys love to act like Saviours of the White Race while ignoring every other white ethnicity and it is sooooooo funny

[sentinelleblr]

"Even more troubling was the tweet from Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) attributing to founder Patrick Henry a false quotation saying that “this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Historian Seth Cotlar noted that the quotation actually came from the April 1956 issue of a virulently antisemitic white nationalist magazine, The Virginian."

Extremist Republicans are constantly trying to push their agenda.

[existentialcrisis-24-7]

Someone telling me that wearing blue laces in a ladder style will get me arrested because they train cops to do that in America and I’m just sitting here in a village in fucking Ireland having never once heard that before.

[neverborncollective]

Wanna adjust our hairline and jaws.. maybe brows. Love yeah we're self conscious about our nose but... is that our comfort or societal pressure (hint it's for sure the second one)

i wish ffs didnt come with a rhinoplasty 99% of the time what are we doing to our beautiful queens………….

[runrundoyourstuff]

not posting about what’s going on in i/p, but I am a Jew from Pittsburgh, and I’m thinking about how in the aftermath of the shooting at Tree of Life—where eleven people I knew personally were murdered by a white supremicist—I saw people on this website asking if anyone knew if the murder victims were zionists because if they were, it was inappropriate to mourn them. as if their lives only mattered if they were Good Jews TM.

the fifth anniversary of the shooting is on Friday, and on top of everything else happening right now, that’s something that is really sticking around my mind.

[anamericangirl]

I think the most infuriating thing about the way the left are is that they completely refuse to look at evidence proving them wrong. I have a few liberal friends, right? And one of them reblogged a post about "These are harmless books that the right wing nazis are trying to ban because they say they're child porn, but they're just harmless LGBT books that teach kids it's okay to be LGBT" Well, I literally bought one of the books on Amazon, and it literally has drawings of child characters sucking each other off, masturbating and having anal sex, it is literally drawn. I went to my friend's house and showed him the book and I said "This is child porn" and he got super mad and started screaming at me, and I opened the book to show him and he slapped the book out of my hand, screamed at me about how "Trump fucks kids" apparently, and shoved me out of his house and threw the book at me. Absolutely nobody believes me when I say this. Absolutely nobody. But it happened. And this isn't even the only story. Another is my friend saying "Trump said there's good people on both sides" and I linked the full video where Trump immediately says "Not the white supremicists, they have no place in this country and I disavow them" and my friend flat out said "I'm not watching that I've already seen it" and I said "You clearly haven't" and he said "Will you fucking drop this I don't want to have to block you for being a fucking bootlicker okay? I already suspected you were racist but this is going too far" It's so goddamn infuriating. They literally just refuse to look at evidence against them.

It’s incredibly infuriating. They’re not interested in evidence or the truth. All they are interested in is hating Trump.

If they wanted the truth they wouldn’t refuse to look at things that might contradict what they think.

And it’s just like if you don’t agree them or foam at the mouth with hatred for Trump, no matter what the truth is you’re a racist.

This is why we shouldn’t be bending over backwards to please these people. They don’t care about the truth and they will never be happy no matter what.

They aren’t good people.

[a-roguish-gambit]

Using my AU to vent some election frustrations and anxiety. 1912 saw the end of the progressive era after all with the woodrow wilson presidency, the first southern since the civil war to become president, and he was very much a lost cause supporter.

I do want to clarify that Woodrow was a much more progressive president for his time than our current elect(which is fucking sad all things considered), by a longshot, I don’t want to diss him unduly because he did help out a lot of people in unions and protect workers from trusts and was generally not antagonistic to immigrants, vetoing several anti immigrant bills. He did a lot of things early in his presidency that were upsetting to marginalized people however, such as supporting anti immigrant sentiments towards south asians, being pro segregation, endorsing birth of a nation, believing women voting was a states rights issue, and being buddies with a lot of white supremicists. His election would’ve been scary for a lot of people at first, so I’m sort of venting my current worries through them aswell as disappointment at this nation not being so progressive as i thought. Hope this helps bring others catharsis. Take heart in knowing that other people felt similar fears over 100 years ago, and that we can fight back and take care of ourselves.

[queers4years]

"we must learn to hang together or we'll surely hang separately"

The state of queer discourse is this: We're a herd of beef cattle being driven down a chute into an abottoir, a couple of head are trying to make the "Have we not horns?" speech, but they're being drowned out by the Judas cow at the head of the chute who's loudly complaining that the farmer should've better sorted the herd

[pinkcrocss]

On Cate "Apologists"...

Okay... It's gotten to the point where the Cate Infantilization and apologia is getting annoying.

I thought the show did a decent job of portraying a sympathetic and complex character, but... she is still a villain. People are allowed to dislike her and she is not the biggest victim in the show by a long shot.

Also, people that keep saying "she's just a kid"... she's a college junior. She's supposed to be like 20-21 years old.

I get that that is still pretty young and a lot of her trauma happened when she was a kid. But she is still an adult that can be accountable for her actions.

She shares the exact same coded yt-supremicist ideals as homelander (similar blonde haired/blue eyed features are not a coincidence), and even if it came from trauma, so did Homelander and Shetty's actions... so?

Y'all hate Shetty cuz she tortured supes and wanted to enact a genocide due to her trauma and misplaced hatred? Wtf was Cate doing in the last episode?

Most of the human staff at Godolkin are not aware of the woods. They are also victim to Vought's propaganda and Cate is aware of this. Yet she intentionally massacres them and uses her powers to influence people to do it for her.

She continuously violates people's consent and bodily autonomy (despite being a victim of SA herself). If she had been able to touch Jordan and cause them to hurt Marie (or Marie to hurt them in self-defense), what do you think that would have done to either of them psychologically?

I actually don't hate Cate (although her growing fandom is starting to push me in that direction), and I was fine with the "Yass queen! Villain lady iconic!" type of discourse when I thought y'all were just kidding...

But now that it's starting to bleed into racism towards Marie and Andre, transphobia towards Jordan, and just the most pea-brained, no nuanced misinterpretations of the show's themes and messaging, I think we need to step back for a minute. Y'all are starting to sound like the gender-swapped version of the boys fans that worship homelander and think *he* is the actual hero of the story.

It also doesn't surprise me that the worst offender of this is a Swiftie. Because when we talk about the infantilization of a powerful, white woman as a precursor to racism... 👀

That being said: No hate to normal T-swift fans (I actually grew up on her music too) but the coincidence was too obvious to not point out.

And I have no issue with like MarieCate shippers, fan artists or anyone that's engaging with Cate's character in a normal, nuanced way... but a good chunk of y'all need to get a grip.

I've really been enjoying the Gen V fandom (small as it is), and i would hate to see it go the way of the greater boys fandom.