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didanawisgi · 3 years

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Martin Luther King Jr., Guns, and a Book Everyone Should Read

BY JEREMY S. | JAN 15, 2018

“Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 89 years old today, were he not assassinated in 1968. On the third Monday in January we observe MLK Jr. Day and celebrate his achievements in advancing civil rights for African Americans and others. While Dr. King was a big advocate of peaceful assembly and protest, he wasn’t, at least for most of his life, against the use of firearms for self-defense. In fact, he employed them . . .

If it wasn’t for African Americans in the South, primarily, taking up arms almost without exception during the post-Civil War reconstruction and well into the civil rights movement, this country wouldn’t be what it is today.

By force and threat of arms African Americans protected themselves, their families, their homes, and their rights and won the attention and respect of the powers that be. In a lawless, post-Civil War South they stayed alive while faced with, at best, an indifferent government and, at worst, state-sponsored violence against them.

We know the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 refused to recognize black people as citizens. Heck, they were deemed just three-fifths a person. Not often mentioned in school: some of that was due to gun rights. Namely, not wanting to give gun rights to blacks. Because if they were to recognize blacks as citizens, it…

“…would give to persons of the negro race . . . the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, . . . and it would give them the full liberty of speech . . . ; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

Ahha! So the Second Amendment was considered an individual right, protecting a citizen’s natural, inalienable right to keep and carry arms wherever they go. Then as now, gun control is rooted in racism.

During reconstruction, African Americans were legally citizens but were not always treated as such. Practically every African American home had a shotgun — or shotguns — and they needed it, too. Forget police protection, as those same officials were often in white robes during their time off.

Fast forward to the American civil rights movement and we learn, but again not at school, that Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit. He (an upstanding minister, mind you) was denied.

Then as in many cases even now, especially in blue states uniquely and ironically so concerned about “fairness,” permitting was subjective (“may issue” rather than “shall issue”). The wealthy and politically connected receive their rights, but the poor, the uneducated, the undesired masses, not so much.

Up until late in his life, MLK Jr. chose to be protected by the Deacons for Defense. Though his home was also apparently a bit of an arsenal.

African Americans won their rights and protected their lives with pervasive firearms ownership. But we don’t learn about this. We don’t know about this. It has been unfortunately whitewashed from our history classes and our discourse.

Hidden, apparently, as part of an agreement (or at least an understanding) reached upon the conclusion of the civil rights movement.

Sure, the government is going to protect you now and help you and give you all of the rights you want, but you have to give up your guns. Turn them in. Create a culture of deference to the government. Be peaceable and non-threatening and harmless. And arm-less, as it were (and vote Democrat). African Americans did turn them in, physically and culturally.

That, at least, is an argument made late in Negroes and the Gun: the Black Tradition of Arms. It’s a fantastic book, teaching primarily through anecdotes of particular African American figures throughout history just how important firearms were to them. I learned so-freaking-much from this novel, and couldn’t recommend it more. If you have any interest in gun rights, civil rights, and/or African American history, it’s an absolute must-read.

Some text I highlighted on my Kindle Paperwhite when I read it in 2014:

But Southern blacks had to navigate the first generation of American arms-control laws, explicitly racist statutes starting as early as Virginia’s 1680 law, barring clubs, guns, or swords to both slaves and free blacks.

“…he who would be free, himself must strike the blow.”

In 1846, white abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, advocating distribution of arms to fugitive slaves.

Civil-rights activist James Forman would comment in the 1960s that blacks in the movement were widely armed and that there was hardly a black home in the South without its shotgun or rifle.

A letter from a teacher at a freedmen’s school in Maryland demonstrates one set of concerns. The letter contains the standard complaints about racist attacks on the school and then describes one strand of the local response. “Both the Mayor and the sheriff have warned the colored people to go armed to school, (which they do) [and] the superintendent of schools came down and brought me a revolver.”

Low black turnout resulted in a Democratic victory in the majority black Republican congressional district.

Other political violence of the Reconstruction era centered on official Negro state militias operating under radical Republican administrations.

“The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.” So said Ida B. Wells.

Fortune responded with an essay titled “The Stand and Be Shot or Shoot and Stand Policy”: “We have no disposition to fan the coals of race discord,” Thomas explained, “but when colored men are assailed they have a perfect right to stand their ground. If they run away like cowards they will be regarded as inferior and worthy to be shot; but if they stand their ground manfully, and do their own a share of the shooting they will be respected and by doing so they will lessen the propensity of white roughs to incite to riot.”

He used state funds to provide guns and ammunition to people who were under threat of attack.

“Medgar was nonviolent, but he had six guns in the kitchen and living room.”

“The weapons that you have are not to kill people with — killing is wrong. Your guns are to protect your families — to stop them from being killed. Let the Klan ride, but if they try to do wrong against you, stop them. If we’re ever going to win this fight we got to have a clean record. Stay here, my friends, you are needed most here, stay and protect your homes.”

In 2008 and 2010, the NAACP filed amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court, supporting blanket gun bans in Washington, DC, and Chicago. Losing those arguments, one of the association’s lawyers wrote in a prominent journal that recrafting the constitutional right to arms to allow targeted gun prohibition in black enclaves should be a core plank of the modern civil-rights agenda.

Wilkins viewed the failure to pursue black criminals as overt state malevolence and evidence of an attitude that “there’s one more Negro killed — the more of ’em dead, the less to bother us. Don’t spend too much money running down the killer — he may kill another.”

But it puts things in perspective to note that swimming pool accidents account for more deaths of minors than all forms of death by firearm (accident, homicide, and suicide).

The correlation of very high murder rates with low gun ownership in African American communities simply does not bear out the notion that disarming the populace as a whole will disarm and prevent murder by potential murderers.

Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated 1,900,000 annual episodes where someone in the home retrieved a firearm in response to a suspected illegal entry. There were roughly half a million instances where the armed householder confronted and chased off the intruder.

A study of active burglars found that one of the greatest risks faced by residential burglars is being injured or killed by occupants of a targeted dwelling. Many reported that this was their greatest fear and a far greater worry than being caught by police.48 The data bear out the instinct. Home invaders in the United States are more at risk of being shot in the act than of going to prison.49 Because burglars do not know which homes have a gun, people who do not own guns enjoy free-rider benefits because of the deterrent effect of others owning guns. In a survey of convicted felons conducted for the National Institute of Justice, 34 percent of them reported being “scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an armed victim.” Nearly 40 percent had refrained from attempting a crime because they worried the target was armed. Fifty-six percent said that they would not attack someone they knew was armed and 74 percent agreed that “one reason burglars avoid houses where people are at home is that they fear being shot.”

In the period before Florida adopted its “shall issue” concealed-carry laws, the Orlando Police Department conducted a widely advertised program of firearms training for women. The program was started in response to reports that women in the city were buying guns at an increased rate after an uptick in sexual assaults. The program aimed to help women gun owners become safe and proficient. Over the next year, rape declined by 88 percent. Burglary fell by 25 percent. Nationally these rates were increasing and no other city with a population over 100,000 experienced similar decreases during the period.55 Rape increased by 7 percent nationally and by 5 percent elsewhere in Florida.

As you can see, Negroes and the Gun progresses more or less chronologically, spending the last portion of the book discussing modern-day gun control. It’s an invaluable source of ammunition (if you’ll pardon the expression) against the fallacies of the pro-gun-control platform. It sheds light on a little-known (if not purposefully obfuscated), critical factor in the history of African Americans: firearms.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I highly recommend you — yes, you — read Negroes and the Gun: the Black Tradition of Arms.

And I’ll wrap this up with a quote in a Huffington Post article given by Maj Toure of Black Guns Matter:

https://cdn0.thetruthaboutguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/huffpo-maj-toure.jpg”

#books #black history #history #american history #Guns #civil rights #constitution #supreme court #gun control #martin luther king jr.#dread scott #concealed carry #concealedcarry #everydaycarry #gun confiscation

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rapeculturerealities · 3 years

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Ma Kyal Sin loved taekwondo, spicy food and a good red lipstick. She adopted the English name Angel, and her father hugged her goodbye when she went out on the streets of Mandalay, in central Myanmar, to join the crowds peacefully protesting the recent seizure of power by the military.

The black T-shirt that Ms. Kyal Sin wore to the protest on Wednesday carried a simple message: “Everything will be OK.”

In the afternoon, Ms. Kyal Sin, 18, was shot in the head by the security forces, who killed at least 30 people nationwide in the single bloodiest day since the Feb. 1 coup, according to the United Nations.

“She is a hero for our country,” said Ma Cho Nwe Oo, one of Ms. Kyal Sin’s close friends, who has also taken part in the daily rallies that have electrified hundreds of cities across Myanmar. “By participating in the revolution, our generation of young women shows that we are no less brave than men.”

Despite the risks, women have stood at the forefront of Myanmar’s protest movement, sending a powerful rebuke to the generals who ousted a female civilian leader and reimposed a patriarchal order that has suppressed women for half a century.

By the hundreds of thousands, the women have gathered for daily marches, representing striking unions of teachers, garment workers and medical workers — all sectors dominated by women. The youngest are often on the front lines, where the security forces appear to have singled them out. Two young women were shot in the head on Wednesday and another near the heart, three bullets ending their lives.

Earlier this week, military television networks announced that the security forces were instructed not to use live ammunition, and that in self-defense they would only shoot at the lower body.

“We might lose some heroes in this revolution,” said Ma Sandar, an assistant general secretary of the Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar, who has been taking part in the protests. “Our women’s blood is red.”

The violence on Wednesday, which brought the death toll since the coup to at least 54, reflected the brutality of a military accustomed to killing its most innocent people. At least three children have been gunned down over the past month, and the first death of the military’s post-coup crackdown was a 20-year-old woman shot in the head on Feb. 9.

The killings have appalled and outraged rights advocates around the world.

“Myanmar’s military must stop murdering and jailing protesters,” Michelle Bachelet, the top human rights official at the United Nations, said Thursday. “It is utterly abhorrent that security forces are firing live ammunition against peaceful protesters across the country.”

In the weeks since the protests began, groups of female medical volunteers have patrolled the streets, tending to the wounded and dying. Women have added spine to a civil disobedience movement that is crippling the functioning of the state. And they have flouted gender stereotypes in a country where tradition holds that garments covering the lower half of the bodies of the two sexes should not be washed together, lest the female spirit act as a contaminant.

With defiant creativity, people have strung up clotheslines of women’s sarongs, called htamein, to protect protest zones, knowing that some men are loath to walk under them. Others have affixed images of Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief who orchestrated the coup, to the hanging htamein, an affront to his virility.

“Young women are now leading the protests because we have a maternal nature and we can’t let the next generation be destroyed,” said Dr. Yin Yin Hnoung, a 28-year-old medical doctor who has dodged bullets in Mandalay. “We don’t care about our lives. We care about our future generations.”

While the military’s inhumanity extends to many of the country’s roughly 55 million people, women have the most to lose from the generals’ resumption of full authority, after five years of sharing power with a civilian government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The Tatmadaw, as the military is known, is deeply conservative, opining in official communications about the importance of modest dress for proper ladies.

There are no women in the Tatmadaw’s senior ranks, and its soldiers have systematically committed gang rape against women from ethnic minorities, according to investigations by the United Nations. In the generals’ worldview, women are often considered weak and impure. Traditional religious hierarchies in this predominantly Buddhist nation also place women at the feet of men.

The prejudices of the military and the monastery are not necessarily shared by Myanmar’s broader society. Women are educated and integral to the economy, particularly in business, manufacturing and the civil service. Increasingly, women have found their political voice. In elections last November, about 20 percent of candidates for the National League for Democracy, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, were women.

The party won in a landslide, trouncing the military-linked and far more male-dominated Union Solidarity and Development Party. The Tatmadaw has dismissed the results as fraudulent.

As the military began devolving some power over the past decade, Myanmar experienced one of the most profound and rapid societal changes in the world. A country that had been cut off from the world by the generals, who first seized power in a 1962 coup, went on Facebook and discovered memes, emojis and global conversations about gender politics.

“Even though these are dark days and my heart breaks with all these images of bloodshed, I’m more optimistic because I see women on the street,” said Dr. Miemie Winn Byrd, a Burmese-American who served as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army and is now a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “In this contest, I will put money on the women. They are unarmed, but they are the true warriors.”

That passion has ignited across the country, despite Tatmadaw crackdowns in past decades that have killed hundreds of people.

“Women took the frontier position in the fight against dictatorship because we believe it is our cause,” said Ma Ei Thinzar Maung, a 27-year-old politician and former political prisoner who, along with another woman the same age, led the first anti-coup demonstration in Yangon five days after the putsch.

That passion has ignited across the country, despite Tatmadaw crackdowns in past decades that have killed hundreds of people.

“That was the time I committed myself to working toward abolishing the military junta,” she said. “Minorities know what it feels like, where discrimination leads. And as a woman, we are still considered as a second sex.”

“That must be one of the reasons why women activists seem more committed to rights issues,” she added.

While the National League for Democracy is led by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, its top ranks are dominated by men. And like the Tatmadaw, the party’s highest echelons have tended to be reserved for members of the country’s ethnic Bamar majority.

On the streets of Myanmar, even as the security forces continue to fire at unarmed protesters, the makeup of the movement has been far more diverse. There are Muslim students, Catholic nuns, Buddhist monks, drag queens and a legion of young women.

“Gen Z are a fearless generation,” said Honey Aung, whose younger sister, Kyawt Nandar Aung, was killed by a bullet to the head on Wednesday in the city of Monywa. “My sister joined the protests every day. She hated dictatorship.”

In a speech that ran in a state propaganda publication earlier this week, General Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief, sniffed at the impropriety of the protesters, with their “indecent clothes contrary to Myanmar culture.” His definition is commonly considered to include women wearing trousers.

Moments before she was shot dead, Ms. Kyal Sin, dressed in sneakers and torn jeans, rallied her fellow peaceful protesters.

As they staggered from the tear gas fired by security forces on Wednesday, Ms. Kyal Sin dispensed water to cleanse their eyes. “We are not going to run,” she yelled, in a video recorded by another protester. “Our people’s blood should not reach the ground.”

“She is the bravest girl I have ever seen in my life,” said Ko Lu Maw, who photographed some of the final images of Ms. Kyal Sin, in an alert, proud pose amid a crowd of prostrate protesters.

Under her T-shirt, Ms. Kyal Sin wore a star-shaped pendant because her name means “pure star” in Burmese.

“She would say, ‘if you see a star, remember, that’s me,’” said Ms. Cho Nwe Oo, her friend. “I will always remember her proudly.”

#tw murder #state sponsored violence #Myanmar #activism

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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Do you think there will be another civil war in America? I’m afraid. Im trying to read about the first civil war to understand it more. What happened on both sides. What was the cost. What Americans can learn from then to help us now. But it’s so hard. There are so many screaming voices. Would love to know your thoughts as a historian and as an American.

Well, nonnie, I don’t know if this will be comforting to you or not, but in my view, the war has been going on for years -- decades, even -- and just because it doesn’t take the traditional form of two uniformed armies on a battlefield doesn’t mean that it’s any less a war, and any less deadly. Americans live in the most deeply and violently militarized of any supposedly first-world country on the entire planet, and the recent protests have, if nothing else, made the actors in our present civil war explicitly visible. On the one side, cops in military-grade hardware. On the other, largely unarmed protestors and civilians. This intersects with a toxic political climate and runaway gun violence problem, which adds up to a staggering annual death toll comparable to any war. While this may seem to come from the Department of Duh, let’s drop some knowledge:

There have been 21,191 gun-related deaths in the U.S. already in 2020 (including 279 mass shootings).

There were 434 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2019, equal to approximately 1.19 mass shootings a day, killing 2,160 people.

Approximately 36,000 Americans are killed by guns every year (an average of 100 a day.)

In 2017, 39,773 Americans were killed by or killed themselves with guns, a trend which is on the rise.

U.S. police have killed 598 people already in 2020, and in all of 2019, there were only 27 days when they did not kill anyone. (I recommend clicking on that link, since Mapping Police Violence is one of the few free nonprofit databases dedicated to tracking the issue -- the animated map is also worth a look because it’s horrifying.)

U.S. police also kill civilians at grossly high rates compared to peer nations -- an average of 1,000 a year and 33.5 deaths per 10 million citizens. The next closest is Canada at 9.8 deaths per 10 million.

And just like everyone’s been protesting about, police violence and officer-related shootings affect people of color at grotesquely higher percentages relative to their overall presence in the U.S. population.

In comparison, 89 law enforcement officers died in 2019. Over half of these (48) died in accidents. Only 41 law enforcement officers, in a nation of 330 million people, died as a result of violence/felonious acts.

Just to recap, 100 Americans die from gun violence a day.

In other words, it’s a lot more dangerous to be an average citizen in America than it is to be a law enforcement officer in America.

By... a very wide margin.

The University of Chicago Law School recently completed a three-year-long study (2015--2018) and concluded that not one of the police departments in the 20 largest American cities meet basic human rights standards/the rules of international warfare in the Geneva Convention.

So while the 21st-century political structures of America make it highly unlikely that we’d ever have a Union and Confederacy fighting each other on the battlefield a la the first Civil War, the people of this country have already been under attack for decades from a private army that, I repeat, does not meet basic conventions for international warfare used against our enemies. The events of 2020 have also, if nothing else, proved that the extreme-right gun-nut rhetoric about “rising up to defeat a tyrannical government,” which they have cited forever as the reason why they need all their weapons, is exactly as much bullshit as we all thought it was. (Spoiler alert: they don’t mean the tyrannical government as long as it’s Trump’s, and they want license, such as the two white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, to kill people of color at any point and without punishment.) They’ll put on their AK-47s and picket courthouse steps in the middle of a pandemic to whine about not being able to get haircuts and being forced (like communists, evidently) to wear masks to protect the health of other people. They’ll also run their cars into protestors and point guns at them for variety. But when the president tear-gasses peaceful protestors for a photo-op at a church, the kind of thing that should really piss them off for all their talk about religious freedom? Crickets.

That’s because at heart, these people are cowards, and all their talk of “defending America” are based on wildly militarized fantasies that, like most fantasies, they’re never going to carry out. This is not in the least to downplay the threat from organized white terrorism groups -- in fact, white terrorism is currently the biggest and most ignored threat in America. (I recommend reading that document, from a former white skinhead testifying in front of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security last September, in full.) They are the militants who are very deliberately preparing for a “race war” and who embody Nazi and white supremacist ideology, and if there was a new Civil War, it would be divided by ideological, rather than geographical (North vs. South) lines. That is exactly what these people want, and they would be more than happy to have. That’s also why we keep having these fake reports of “Antifa terrorists,” which result in heavily armed white supremacists rushing to counter a threat that doesn’t actually exist. There are plenty of reasons to be scared of that. But we’ve also seen that, again: they are cowards. They’re never going to openly present themselves because they can’t take it when their identities are exposed to the public and they suffer some miniscule amount of consequences for their actions. That is because these identities are often based on what is known as white rage. Any impetus toward being forced to examine white privilege, or acknowledge racial discrimination, literally sends them off the deep end. So if they’re ever actually put in the position of risking something, they... don’t. That doesn’t make them any less toxic and dangerous, but it does mean that all the hateful rhetoric and promises of uprising on the internet are far from the actual truth of their collective behavior.

(You can and should also read White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson, which examines this topic in more detail, and Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew, which examines how this movement began as an organized force in the 1970s and expanded to its current incarnation today.)

In short: punching Nazis works, fuck the police, and abolish white supremacy. This has been your TED talk with Salty Internet Auntie Hilary for the evening.

#gun culture #tw gun violence #politics for ts #police brutality for ts #history of racism #a cheery ask i know #anonymous #ask

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talltalestogo · 4 years

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Trolling Trump

Opinion by

Dana Milbank

Columnist, The Washington Post

Oct. 20, 2020 at 6:43 p.m. EDT

When President Trump was in the hospital battling covid-19 two weeks ago, he devoted one morning to making the case for his reelection in a series of 15 all-caps tweets, such as:

LAW & ORDER. VOTE!

BIGGEST TAX CUT EVER, AND ANOTHER ONE COMING. VOTE!

FIGHT THE CORRUPT FAKE NEWS MEDIA. VOTE!

SPACE FORCE. VOTE!

It was mostly nonsense, of course, but it had an appealing, playground-style brevity — a feverish, steroid-fueled closing argument of sorts for Trump.

Now, less than two weeks from Election Day, Americans are voting in almost every state. At least 33 million have already cast their ballots. What better time to borrow Trump’s literary device and deploy it against him? Here goes:

LETTING 220,000 AMERICANS DIE FROM COVID-19 — WORST IN WORLD. VOTE!

LOSING 3.9 MILLION JOBS IN FOUR YEARS — WORST IN RECORDED HISTORY. VOTE!

KNOWING PANDEMIC WAS “DEADLY STUFF” ON FEB. 7 BUT OPTING TO “PLAY IT DOWN” AND MISLEAD AMERICANS. VOTE!

PROPOSING BLEACH AS A COVID CURE, MOCKING MASK-WEARING, HOSTING WHITE HOUSE SUPERSPREADER EVENT AND SUGGESTING ANTHONY FAUCI IS AN “IDIOT.” VOTE!

Our Democracy in Peril: A series on the damage Trump has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term

ADDING $7 TRILLION TO FEDERAL DEBT, MAKING IT LARGER THAN U.S. ECONOMY FOR FIRST TIME IN 70 YEARS. VOTE!

BALLOONING CURRENT BUDGET DEFICIT TO ALL-TIME RECORD $3.1 TRILLION. VOTE!

ENDING HEALTH COVERAGE FOR MILLIONS AND SUING TO ELIMINATE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT, INCLUDING PREEXISTING-CONDITION PROTECTIONS. VOTE!

VIOLENTLY DISPERSING PEACEFUL CIVIL RIGHTS PROTESTERS OUTSIDE WHITE HOUSE FOR A BIBLE-WIELDING PHOTO OP. VOTE!

PROPOSING TO POSTPONE THE ELECTION, TRYING TO DISCREDIT MAIL-IN VOTING AS FRAUDULENT AND REFUSING TO COMMIT TO PEACEFUL TRANSFER OF POWER. VOTE!

DEFENDING DEADLY VIOLENCE BY WHITE-SUPREMACIST SUPPORTERS AND WINKING AT MILITIA PLOT TO KIDNAP MICHIGAN GOVERNOR. VOTE!

SEEING “VERY FINE PEOPLE” AMONG VIOLENT NEO-NAZIS IN CHARLOTTESVILLE. VOTE!

VALIDATING A CONSPIRACY THEORY ABOUT PEDOPHILE RING CONTROLLING U.S. GOVERNMENT. VOTE!

CALLING SWATHS OF AFRICA AND CARIBBEAN “SHITHOLE COUNTRIES” AND TRYING TO BAN ENTRY FROM MUSLIM-MAJORITY NATIONS. VOTE!

TAKING MIGRANT CHILDREN FROM PARENTS AND LOCKING THEM IN CAGES. VOTE!

FALLING “IN LOVE” WITH NORTH KOREAN DICTATOR KIM JONG UN. VOTE!

SIDING WITH VLADIMIR PUTIN OVER U.S. INTELLIGENCE ON ELECTION INTERFERENCE. VOTE!

GETTING IMPEACHED FOR WITHHOLDING MILITARY AID FROM A VULNERABLE ALLY TO EXTORT CAMPAIGN HELP. VOTE!

EXCUSING SAUDI PRINCE’S DISMEMBERMENT OF U.S.-BASED JOURNALIST AND ADOPTING JOSEPH STALIN’S “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE” PHRASE FOR AMERICAN MEDIA. VOTE!

APPEASING THE TALIBAN AND ABANDONING KURDISH ALLIES IN SYRIA. VOTE!

PRAISING “VERY GOOD FRIEND” XI JINPING FOR HANDLING OF CORONAVIRUS AND TRANSPARENCY. VOTE!

SHOVING A PRIME MINISTER AND PUBLICLY DISPARAGING LEADERS OF FRANCE, GERMANY, BRITAIN AND EVEN DENMARK BECAUSE GREENLAND WASN’T FOR SALE. VOTE!

BELITTLING “LOSERS” AND “SUCKERS” WHO DIED FOR OUR COUNTRY, POSTHUMOUSLY INSULTING JOHN MCCAIN, SKIPPING MEMORIALS FOR THE FALLEN AND DERIDING TOP GENERALS AS WAR PROFITEERS. VOTE!

ADMITTING TO PAYING OFF A PORN ACTRESS FOR SILENCE ABOUT AN AFFAIR, OFFERING KIND WORDS FOR CHARGED CHILD-SEX TRAFFICKER, AND TALKING ABOUT WOMEN AS “BLEEDING,” “DOG” AND “MONSTER.” VOTE!

ENRICHING HIMSELF AND HIS FAMILY BY FORCING TAXPAYERS AND TRYING TO FORCE FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS TO SPEND MILLIONS AT HIS PROPERTIES. VOTE!

PAYING ONLY $750 IN FEDERAL INCOME TAXES IN 2016 AND IN 2017 AND PERSONALLY OWING $400 MILLION TO UNKNOWN CREDITORS. VOTE!

HAVING HIS FORMER CAMPAIGN CHAIRMAN, PERSONAL LAWYER, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, CHIEF STRATEGIST AND AT LEAST SIX OTHER CLOSE AIDES ARRESTED OR CONVICTED. VOTE!

USING THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT AND PRESIDENTIAL POWERS TO COMMUTE AND REDUCE SENTENCES OR DROP CHARGES AGAINST FRIENDS AND TO HARASS CRITICS. VOTE!

BEING PROTECTED BY POLITICAL APPOINTEES AFTER SPECIAL COUNSEL FINDS EVIDENCE OF OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE. VOTE!

USING THE PRESIDENCY TO MAKE MORE THAN 20,000 FALSE OR DUBIOUS STATEMENTS, TO INSULT PEOPLE BY THE HUNDREDS AND TO TRASH INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION ON CLIMATE, TRADE, HEALTH AND SECURITY. VOTE!

INDUCING THE LONGEST GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN IN HISTORY, THEN DECLARING FAKE EMERGENCY TO SPEND MONEY WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL. VOTE!

SUFFERING TURNOVER OF 90 PERCENT AMONG CABINET AND TOP WHITE HOUSE STAFF, AND NOW ON FOURTH CHIEF OF STAFF, FOURTH PRESS SECRETARY, SIXTH COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR AND FOURTH NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER. VOTE!

FIGHTING IN COURTS TO DISCOURAGE MINORITIES FROM VOTING AND PARTICIPATING IN THE CENSUS AND DESECRATING RUTH BADER GINSBURG’S DEATH BY ATTACKING HER GRANDDAUGHTER AND RUSHING A REPLACEMENT BEFORE FUNERAL. VOTE!

MAKING THE WORDS “MOTHERF-----,” “BULL----,” “ASS.,” “SON OF A BITCH,” “HAMBERDER,” “SMOCKING GUN” AND “COVFEFE” PART OF NATIONAL DISCOURSE. VOTE!

SABOTAGING THE POSTAL SERVICE FOR ELECTORAL GAIN, ROUTINELY ACCUSING OPPONENTS OF TREASON AND USING A SHARPIE TO REDRAW A HURRICANE FORECAST MAP. VOTE!

THINKING FREDERICK DOUGLASS ALIVE, FINLAND PART OF RUSSIA, BRITAIN NOT YET A NUCLEAR POWER, WINDMILLS CAUSE CANCER AND “RAKING” PREVENTS FOREST FIRES. VOTE!

There’s more — much more. But to list all the damage would take more than a column. It would take four years, and who would want to relive that?

Had enough? VOTE!

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maplecatra · 4 years

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i am back for a brief moment!!! so, i live in the USA, if you are curious about the current political situation, here’s what’s going on:

several politician figures who are running for elections for positions have been using social media to say that the blm organization should be caterogized as a terrorist orginization, using the fact that the website says they are looking to disrupt the nuclear family idea and raising their kids in “villages” of friends and family. this way of raising kids, by the way, is very good for them because it gives them a strong community of role models that will help raise the kids and give them a more varied experience with people early on.

antifa, or antifascist, has now been classified as a terrorist orginization.

president trump is continuing to send armed police to peaceful protests, it has been appearing less in the media now. the peaceful protests for justice that aren’t disrupted by the police are not reported on making many americans who haven’t actively been following in support of the the cause believe that there are no longer any protests and that the only protests that happened were turned into riots by bad civilians supporting blm. in truth, most of the violence and rioting is started by either undercover cops or people who came to make the movement look bad.

the current black lives matter protests spurred by the death of george floyyd and pushed on by the police brutality that has killed many innocent black people is now the biggest civil rights movement of all time. there are protesters in most places now, and even the news channels, which are largely supportive of the police and avoid supporting anyone that is a victim of the police recognized the death of george floyyd as completely unwarranted and an outrage. some news channels who had not suported other innocent black people who died from police because of an excuse the cops made have taken a complete 180. others have used the chance to take videos of the riots and censor them to not show what the police have done. at one point, the news broadcasted a video that was cut off of the protests. it cut off right before the police car drives through a group of civilians.

police so far, both in past riots and current peaceful protests have:

blocked ambulances from areas in the riots where people have set up first aid kits.

driven past peaceful protests with a gun out their window

killed a black shop owner who had supplied them with free food previously and left his body in the streets for over 12 hours

gotten extremely physical with peaceful protesters, grabbing people who have done nothing wrong aggressively and forcing them down, or in painful positions.

used excessive force even with a crowd and many people recording, using violent action of protesters not resisting arrest and only not causing possibly long lasting injuries because another cop or another person the cop seems to deem an ally lifts them off at least 2 times

have taken photos with protesters faking peace for the media and tear gassing them immediately

shootig rubber bullets into crowds, which are lumps of rubber a little less than the size of your palm with metal shrapnel designed to ricochet outward. these prices of metal shrapnel have enough power to go through a persons leg, and are lethal as they are. in close range, however, they become even more dangerous and cause more damage and also panic.

used teargass to clear out an area where trump was scheduled to have a photo shoot. after teargassjng all the protesters out he took photos and said some things about how proud and brave he was.

they have gone to the supply tents of some peaceful protests and have broken all the water bottles and ruined the food so they had no supplies

currently, the US is becoming a facist nation. our president has stated that he is against antifa, has quoted hitler in a speech, has set up borders that send immigrants back into dangerous conditions or just take their kids into dangerous conditions. ICE has begun spraying harsh chemicals on and around the detention camp that is irritating the eyes, lungs and skin of the immigrants inside sometimes 3 times a day or more.

closer to the start of donald trumps term, he had disbanded the pandemic response team, and now refuses input from actually doctors and scientists. when they suggested they pause meat plants, donald trump refused and stated that they should keep working. after people started suing meat companies because of covid cases, they brought up an article with a subsection that they stated allowed them to keep working. millions have been wasted on this. upon closer inspection of the article, which was implemented by donald donald trump who stated that meat plants would keep running, does not say that meat plants are legally allowed to stay open.

our current political climate is incredibly right leaning, and bernie sanders is the only current candidate who has somewhat centrist ideas. most people in power are right wing, which means that many ideas donald trump proposes will be approved and anything that the other branches proposed will be approved by trump.

trump has a past of sexually harrasing women. it was leaked by a well known hacker that donald trump had been prosecuted for raping a 13 year old girl. he and jeffery epstein, a pedophile who ran a child sex trafficking ring for high profile people on a private island, had been fighting over who would take the virginity of the young girl. it was said that jeffery epstein killed himself before he could go to jail, but the leading theory and the most likely as well is that one of his high profile clients had him killed so he wouldn’t tell anyone their name.

trump has consistently harmed and mocked many race minorities in the US, and while parading that he has many avid minority supporters. the reality of it is that if you attend a single trump rally you will find only white people.

donald trump has made people feel more confident about being open in their racism. this appeals to many white people who believe minorities want to actively harm them when they try to gain justice for themselves, and especially for white people who were shoving these feelings down because they recognized that it was not a popular opinon but who still felt constantly motivated to share it. trump supporters are always bigoted, even if they don’t believe they are. they believe their opinion is not biggoted despite it showing incredible hypocrisy. for example, some say they support the lgbt community but don’t think they should be in kids media. that shows that they believe that only cishet characters are appropriate. and even if you haven’t heard them say anything biggoted or they say “i don’t support him but he shares my political alignment so i have to vote for him” they are bigoted. simply by supporting a person like donald trump you are supporting his ideals, his action, and a person who acts like that in a seat where he can access much more people who can become victims and can use his position to spread his biggoted opinions on every inch of news

as a result of the protests, donald trump now has a bunker. he has called trump supporters who were yelling and acting rudely “nice people” and peaceful blm protesters “savages”

the government is currently trying to make it harder for local post offices (the USPS) to function. they’re trying their best to pass things and many people haven’t noticed. taking out the USPS would take out local newspapers, which are a very reliable source. they share the voice of the people and do not have a reason to not give unbiased information. this means we will be fed mostly propaganda if this happens.

to bring up old news, i would like to take a moment to remember the time donald trump put the government in lockdown (?? he just basically pressed pause) for i think 60-70 days till the officials were begging him to stop. i don’t remember what happened to spur that on but i certainly still think that the response was inappropriate.

the US is becoming a facist nation. donald trump is putting markers on his supporters by giving them a free gift and mass emailing how to get them. the US is becoming a facist nation and it feels like my world is burning down and collapsing in on itself. people often ask why no one noticed that hitler was a horrible disgusting monster, but the reality of it is that they don’t show it until they’re in power, and then they slowly start to coax people into the idea that he is not bad. even if many americans recognize that donald trump is horrible, a devoted group of many aggressive registered voters just keep falling for it because they are tired of holding their ugliness and hatered toward others in check. no one noticed until minorities started to be put in camps and be killed by the people in power.

i’ve lived in the US my entire life and was always fed on the idea that places in the middle east were always poor and less than the US, that they were pitiful and needed the protection of our armies. i know that’s not true now, but action movies and media keep on circulating the idea that the USA is better than everywhere else and that everywhere foreign (other than canada, no one talks about canada really, and russia, the uk and australia are pretty safe) is strange and gross and any food that comes from them is censored and dulled to fit into one aisle. it’s not right, and young children are still constantly being fed these harmful ideas that they have to unlearn later in life.

the US is becoming a facist nation and the older people in my life, even if just by 2 years, refuse to recognize it.

if your outside of the US, ask any friends there if they have a plan to leave if they need to. it’s heading into a direction where it might become dangerous, the best thing to do is to be prepared.

if you can add on anything about the situation, please do. If youre from the US you can share your feelings on the situation and ways to help as well

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nicklloydnow · 3 years

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"In 1910, the last year of his life and only a few years before World War I put an end to the long European peace, William James wrote a pamphlet for the Association for International Conciliation, one of the many pacifist groups whose prominence in that period convinced many people that war between nations, being so obviously irrational, was therefore impossible. James’s essay, titled “The Moral Equivalent of War,” is a work of supreme pathos and wisdom. James himself was a pacifist, a founding member of the Anti-Imperialist League, a group formed to protest America’s military interventions in Cuba, Haiti, and the Philippines, and one of the most humane and generous spirits America or any other nation has ever produced.

James understood perfectly the folly—the “monstrosity,” as he called it—of war, even in those comparatively innocent, pre-nuclear days. But he also acknowledged the place of the martial virtues in a healthy character. “We inherit the warlike type,” he pointed out, “and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank [our bloody] history.” “The martial virtues,” he continued, “although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods.... Militarism is the supreme theater of strenuousness, the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood; and human life with no use for strenuousness and hardihood would be contemptible.” “We pacifists,” he wrote with characteristic intellectual generosity, “ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetic and ethical point of view of our opponents.” To militarists, a world without war is “a sheep’s paradise,” flat and insipid. “No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more!” he imagines them saying indignantly. “Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!” This, remember, was the era of Teddy Roosevelt, preacher of the strenuous life and instigator of splendid little wars. James’s pacifism may be common sense to you and me, but when he wrote, the common sense of Americans was mostly on Roosevelt’s side.

How to nourish the martial virtues without war? James resolved this apparent dilemma with a suggestion many decades ahead of its time: universal national service, every youth to be conscripted for several years of hard and socially necessary physical work, with no exceptions and no class or educational discrimination. This army without weapons would be the moral equivalent of war, breeding, James argued, some of the virtues essential to democracy: “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command.” I am sure James would have agreed that these are not the only virtues essential to democracy—he himself, with his anti-imperialist activism, exemplified an equally essential skepticism and resistance to authority. But I wonder if our contemporaries, who mostly need no convincing about the necessity of skepticism and resistance to authority, would also agree with James about the importance of valor, strenuousness, and self-sacrifice.

James wrote in America before World War I, a situation of almost idyllic innocence compared with that of the next writer I want to cite, D. H. Lawrence. The Great War, as contemporaries called it, was a soul-shattering experience for English writers. The complacent stupidity with which Europe’s governing classes initiated, conducted, and concluded that war, the chauvinism and bloodlust with which ordinary people welcomed it, and above all, the mindless, mechanical grinding up of millions of lives by a war machine that seemed to go of itself—these things infuriated Lawrence almost to madness. Like many others, Lawrence saw the facelessness, the impersonality, the almost bureaucratic character of this mass violence as something new and horrifying in human history. But more than all others in the twentieth century, Lawrence was the champion of the body and the instincts against the abstract, impersonal forces of modernity. Like Nietzsche, he marshaled torrents of impassioned prose against the apparently inexorable encroachments of progress. Here is a passage from “Education of the People,” published posthumously in the two volumes of Phoenix.

We are all fighters. Let us fight. Has it come down to chasing a poor fox and kicking a leather ball? Heavens, what a spectacle we should be to the ancient Greek. Rouse the old male spirit again. The male is always a fighter. The human male is a superb and god-like fighter, unless he is contravened in his own nature. In fighting to the death, he has one great crisis of his being.

What is the fight? It is a primary, physical thing. It is not a horrible, obscene, abstract business, like our last war. It is not a ghastly and blasphemous translation of ideas into engines, and men into cannon-fodder. Away with such war. A million times away with such obscenity. Let the desire of it die out of mankind.... Let us beat our plowshares into swords, if we will. But let us blow all guns and explosives and poison-gases sky-high. Let us shoot every man who makes one more grain of gunpowder, with his own powder.

And then let us be soldiers, hand-to-hand soldiers. Lord, but it is a bitter thing to be born at the end of a rotten, idea-ridden machine civilization. Think what we’ve missed: the glorious bright passion of anger and pride, reckless and dauntless.

(...)

Modernity imperils another set of virtues, which are a little harder to characterize than the martial virtues, but are even more important. I don’t mean the bourgeois virtues, though there’s some overlap. I suppose I’d call them the yeoman virtues. I have in mind the qualities we associate with life in the early American republic—the positive qualities, of course, not the qualities that enabled slavery and genocide. In 1820, 80 percent of the American population was self-employed. Protestant Christianity, local self-government, and agrarian and artisanal producerism fostered a culture of self-control, self-reliance, integrity, diligence, and neighborliness—the American ethos that Tocqueville praised and that Lincoln argued was incompatible with large-scale slave-owning. Today that ethos survives only in political speeches and Hollywood movies. In a society based on precarious employment and feverish consumption, on debt, financial trickery, endless manipulation, and incessant distraction, such a sensibility seems archaic.

According to the late Christopher Lasch, the advent of mass production and the new relations of authority it introduced in every sphere of social life wrought a fateful change in the prevailing American character. Psychological maturation—as Lasch, relying on Freud, explicated it—depended crucially on face-to-face relations, on a rhythm and a scale that industrialism disrupted. The result was a weakened, malleable self, more easily regimented than its pre-industrial forebear, less able to withstand conformist pressures and bureaucratic manipulation—the antithesis of the rugged individualism that had undergirded the republican virtues.In an important recent book, The Age of Acquiescence, the historian Steve Fraser deploys a similar argument to explain why, in contrast with the first Gilded Age, when America was wracked by furious anti-capitalist resistance, popular response in our time to the depredations of capitalism has been so feeble. Here is Fraser’s thesis:

During the first Gilded Age the work ethic constituted the nuclear core of American cultural belief and practice. That era’s emphasis on capital accumulation presumed frugality, saving, and delayed gratification as well as disciplined, methodical labor. That ethos frowned on self-indulgence, was wary of debt, denounced wealth not transparently connected to useful, tangible outputs, and feared libidinal excess, whether that took the form of gambling, sumptuary displays, leisured indolence, or uninhibited sexuality.

How at odds that all is with the moral and psychic economy of our own second Gilded Age. An economy kept aloft by finance and mass consumption has for a long time rested on an ethos of immediate gratification, enjoyed a love affair with debt, speculation, and risk, erased the distinction between productive labor and pursuits once upon a time judged parasitic, and become endlessly inventive about ways to supercharge with libido even the homeliest of household wares.

Can these two diverging political economies—one resting on industry, the other on finance—and these two polarized sensibilities—one fearing God, the other living in an impromptu moment to moment—explain the Great Noise of the first Gilded Age and the Great Silence of the second? Is it possible that people still attached by custom and belief to ways of subsisting that had originated outside the orbit of capital accumulation were for that very reason both psychologically and politically more existentially desperate, more capable, and more audacious in envisioning a non-capitalist future than those who have come of age knowing nothing else?

If this argument is true—and I find it painfully plausible—where does that leave us? An individual’s or a society’s character cannot be willed into or out of existence. Lost virtues and solidarities cannot be regained overnight, or even, perhaps, in a generation. Even our ideologies of liberation may have to be rethought. A transvaluation of values may be in order: faster, easier, and more may have to give way to slower, harder, and less—not only for ecological reasons but also for reasons of mental and moral hygiene. And even if we decide, as a society, to spit out the poisoned apple of consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path back—or forward, for that matter? If individual self-sufficiency and local self-government are prerequisites for human flourishing, then maybe it is too late.

(...)

Do my apparently disparate-sounding worries have anything in common? Possibly this: they all result from one or another move on the part of the culture away from the immediate, the instinctual, the face-to-face. We are embodied beings, gradually adapted over millions of years to thrive on a certain scale, our metabolisms a delicate orchestration of innumerable biological and geophysical rhythms. The culture of modernity has thrust upon us, sometimes with traumatic abruptness, experiences, relationships, and powers for which we may not yet be ready—to which we may need more time to adapt.

But time is short. “All that is solid melts into air”—Marx meant the crust of tradition, dissolving in the acid bath of global capitalism. Now, however, the earth itself is melting. Marx’s great metaphor has acquired a terrifying second meaning."And so has Nietzsche’s. If we cannot slow down and grow cautiously, evenly, gradually into our new technological and political possibilities and responsibilities—even the potentially liberating ones—the last recognizably individual men and women may give place, before too many more generations, to the simultaneously sub- and super-human civilization of the hive."

#nietzsche #zarathustra #marx #modernity #virtues #values

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day0one · 3 years

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Donald Trump's Far-Right Extremist Army Has Turned On Him

The monster that Trump created doesn’t need him anymore.

For months, President Donald Trump’s message to his supporters was clear: The election was being stolen from him, and they needed to fight to take it back.

So on January 6, during a Trump-promoted rally to “Stop the Steal,” thousands laid siege to the US Capitol in a stunning attempt to do just that. The fallout of their failed insurrection, which resulted in five deaths, was swift: Trump was de-platformed from nearly every major social network and, on Wednesday, impeached for a historic second time.

When he emerged on camera a short while later, tail tucked between his legs, to condemn the rioters whom he himself had incited, and to call for a peaceful transfer of power to president-elect Joe Biden, his base felt betrayed.

“So he basically just sold out the patriots who got rounded up for him,” one person wrote in a 15,000-member pro-Trump Telegram group. “Just wow.”

In online havens for MAGA extremists, including Gab, CloutHub, MeWe, Telegram, and far-right message boards such as 8kun, the tone toward Trump is shifting. HuffPost reviewed thousands of messages across these platforms and found that a growing minority of the president’s once-devout backers are now denouncing him and rejecting his recent pleas for peace. Some have called for his arrest or execution, labeling him a “traitor” and a “coward.” Alarmingly, many of those who are irate about Biden’s supposed electoral theft is still plotting to forcibly prevent him from taking office – with or without Trump’s help.

“We don’t follow you,” another Telegram user wrote, addressing Trump after the president put out his video urging calm and order. “Be quiet and get out of our way.”

It has become apparent that now – after his mass radicalization campaign of voter-fraud disinformation and conspiracy-mongering – even Trump can’t stop the dangerous delusion he’s instilled across the country or the next wave of violence it may soon bring.

Authorities are urgently warning of armed protests being planned in all 50 state capitals in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration. Politically motivated extremists “will very likely pose the greatest domestic terrorism threats in 2021,” according to a new joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and US National Counterterrorism Center. The document, first obtained by Yahoo News, attributes this threat to “false narratives” that Biden’s victory “was illegitimate, or fraudulent,” and the subsequent belief that the election results “should be contested or unrecognized.”

Ahead of last week’s riots, Trump supporters openly planned their attack on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other mainstream platforms, where they shared materials including flyers titled “Operation Occupy the Capitol.” These sites have since cracked down aggressively on such behavior, causing extremists to migrate to lesser-known corners of the internet to plan their next move.

While this has hindered their ability to spread propaganda and enlist new recruits, their new social channels are subject to less scrutiny and have already exploded in reach.CloutHub, MeWe, and Telegram shot to the top of the charts of popular free apps on the App Store and Google PlayStorein the wake of the siege. Gab has also reported a massive surge in new users, with about 10,000 people signing up every hour.

In these spaces, HuffPost has observed calls to “burn down” the Capitol, launch “an armed revolt,” “pop some libtards” and “TAKE THIS COUNTRY BACK WHATEVER IT TAKES!!” Some posts are more specific:“Civil War is here. Group up locally. Take out the News stations,” one person declared. “LET’S HANG THEM ALL,” another implored. “LET’S FINISH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.”

The Boogaloo Bois, a far-right militia organizing to foment civil war, is capitalizing on the unrest to issue online a renewed call to arms. The FBI has warned specifically of potential Boogaloo violence during planned rallies at state Capitol buildings in Michigan and Minnesota on Sunday.

“There's a war coming, and cowering in your home [while] real patriots march with rifles ... will make you a traitor,” commented a member of an encrypted Boogaloo chat.

Some extremists, however, are urging each other not to attend any of the upcoming armed protests. The Proud Boys, a rabidly pro-Trump neo-fascist group that helped storm the Capitol, is cautioning its followers that such demonstrations could be “fed honeypot” events set up by authorities in order to seize attendees’ guns.

It seems that even the Proud Boys are losing faith in Trump: a Telegram channel run by the group reposted a message with Trump’s video along with the text “The Betrayal of Trumpist base by Trump himself continues.”

For four years, the president’s supporters have worshipped him like a god. His rallies have been likened to cult gatherings. Nearly half of his campaign donations came from small donors, trouncing Biden’s 39%. For most of his presidency, Trump enjoyed strong support from the Republican base, polling well above 90% with that group. But after the Capitol riots, his support is plummeting at record rates.

MAGA world has stood unwaveringly by Trump’s side through multiple allegations of sexual assault (including rape), an impeachment for abuse of power, revelations that his administration literally caged children, a historic rise in national debt, countless lies, blatant self-enrichment by him and his family members, a pandemic that has claimed close to 400,000 American lives under his leadership – nearly a fifth of all deaths worldwide – and more.

So to see his “America First” army suddenly begin to turn on him is truly remarkable. It’s happening broadly among his supporters, and even among the far-right extremist communities that have flourished online during Trump’s presidency.

Among the recent messages excoriating Trump in dedicated pro-Trump networks:“tbh I hope they hang Trump at this point”; “He deserves what’s coming to him”; “he is literally done he will die in jail”; “Seriously hoping they’ll lock him up or lynch [him]”; “Guy is the biggest cuck ever at this point”; “Can’t wait til the left locks up his bitch ass. Rot in prison.” Several people have proclaimed that at this point, Trump can only redeem himself by declaring martial law to maintain power by force.

After losing to Biden, Trump systematically attacked the allies that propped up his presidency in a desperate effort to keep his re-election fantasy alive.

He first turned his adherents against Fox News, which stoked his ire by accurately projecting Biden’s electoral victory in Arizona before a few other networks did so. Then, when some Republicans – including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell – declined to play along with his unsupported claims of mass voter fraud, Trump urged his base to turn on them. After that came Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, who refused Trump’s unconstitutional demand to reject votes in favor of Biden. (“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution,” Trump tweeted on the afternoon of January 6, provoking chants of “Hang Pence” during the riots.)

Now that Trump himself appears to finally be backing away from his “Stop the Steal” hoax, a growing faction of his supporters is through with him, too.

But after the dramatic failure of his slow-motion coup, as he counts down the days until his return to life as a private citizen, Trump presumably has more pressing concerns than maintaining his followers’ devotion. Aside from the hundreds of millions of dollars in personal debt hanging over his head, it seems increasingly likely that he could face criminal prosecution, from which he will no longer be immune. And following his latest impeachment, if the Senate convicts him, it can also vote to disqualify him from ever running for office again.

With so much at stake and no sane hope of clinging to power, it’s now in the president’s best interest for his base to avoid further violence, which could increase his chances of conviction. But the reality is that the monster Trump created doesn’t need him anymore.

“He can promise and call for peace all he likes,” one Gab user wrote. “Won’t make a blind bit of difference.”

#donald trump #politics #2020 election #extremism #capitol riot

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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

According to the pundits, the revolution, if you would call it that, began with video. The first and foremost was the excruciating recording of George Floyd’s last moments as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin1 publicly pinned the life out of him. That was on May 25, but more than a month later, the recordings have continued to disseminate. Protesters uploaded photos of rubber bullets, their wounds and their mangled faces, while journalists and other concerned members of the public aggregated footage of police brutality into lists and websites.

The compilation of evidence has seemed to jar something loose, for now. Corporations are pledging to donate millions to racial and social justice causes,2 legislators have proposed tentative yet unprecedented restrictions on the police, and the Marines and Navy have banned the Confederate battle flag3 some 150 years after the ending of the war that sparked its creation.

But is this really going to be what commentator Van Jones has called a “Great Awakening of empathy and solidarity”? And if it is, is it really appropriate to claim that video has been the catalyst? I work with civic data and teach about the power of data collection, so I want to believe that data (in the form of video footage depicting police brutality against Black people) can effect social change. Just as it is comforting to see corporate and institutional pledges as revolution, it is comforting to attribute power to the millions of glowing screens that have been called as witnesses.

Data showing racism might be useful in clarifying the things we already know to be true, but it is far more limited in terms of shifting them.

But it is precisely because of my attachment to the power of data collection that I’m unconvinced video footage can solely, or even primarily, lead to meaningful change. I know too well the stories of a century of Black Americans who have presented evidence of violence and racism only to have it summarily denied or ignored. The idea that structural racism can be proven and overcome by gathering just enough or the right kind of evidence is nothing more than a myth. Historically, it has rarely been the case.

Consider, for instance, the study that the Bureau of Labor commissioned famed Black scholar W.E.B. DuBois to complete in the early 1900s. Determined to employ sound sociological methods to disprove racist beliefs that Black people were inferior, he and a team of researchers spent three years in Lowndes County, Alabama, gathering data from 5,000 Black families (approximately 25,000 individuals). It detailed the conditions of life in the region, and was one of the largest sociological studies of rural Black life ever conducted. When DuBois submitted the final manuscript, it was a handwritten document full of charts and infographics.4 Not only did the government bureau refuse to publish the study, but it destroyed the document entirely, claiming it was rejected due to technical matters. DuBois made the case in his correspondence and autobiography, however, that the bureau rejected the document because it revealed the inconvenient political truth about conditions for Black Americans.

In the case of Sam Faulkner, an innocent 20-year-old Black man who was shot in the head inside his sister’s home by Los Angeles police in 1927,5 evidence came in the form of testimony from the other cop on the scene as well as bullet fragments. Yet this was not enough to bring about a conviction, and the officer who killed Faulkner continued to work in the LAPD for two more years.6

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress appealed to the United Nations for help, asserting that the history of disenfranchisement, lynching, and police brutality that Black people faced in the United States was tantamount to genocide.7 The CRC’s petition8 documented years’ worth of atrocities against Black Americans but was ignored by the U.N., which at the time was heavily influenced by the U.S.

In 1969, Illinois Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, 21, was gunned down9 in his Chicago apartment after being sedated by an FBI Informant. A target of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, he was perceived to be a threat to the nation for negotiating a truce between street gangs, organizing rallies and instituting free breakfast programs for children. A coroner’s jury ruled the killing a justifiable homicide.

And even more recent incidents including video footage of police brutality have been doubted. When Philando Castile was pulled over and shot by police in 2016, the dashcam footage revealed that Castile, who had been stopped by the police at least 46 times prior for minor infractions, had followed all the instructions that officer Jeronimo Yanez had given him. Regardless, an NRA spokesperson still blamed Castile for the incident, while conservative commentator Sean Hannity criticized Castile’s girlfriend, who was seated beside him in the car, for live-streaming the interaction in the first place.

These killings, and the many more that reveal just a glimpse of how totalizing anti-Blackness can be, are part of a longer trend. It is a trend that has claimed countless more names, and still more stories. By nearly every statistical measurement possible, from housing to incarceration to wealth to land ownership, Black Americans are disproportionately disadvantaged. But the grand ritual of collecting and reporting this data has not improved the situation. American history is lined with innumerable instances of what scholar Saidiya Hartman bemoans as “the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible,” only for very little to change.

If the data hasn’t undone the bias, then surely we must acknowledge that there are deeper forces that tug the levers of change in America. I am reminded of James Baldwin’s response to the 1954 Supreme Court case that ended segregation: “Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet.” Love, justice, data — alone, none have been enough.

But perhaps we have asked too much of the evidence in the first place. Or perhaps we have asked too much of those who wield evidence, and too little of those presented with it. These are two different groups. After all, evidence is not intended for the people who have been harmed — why show proof of a fire to the person it burned? In most cases, evidence is used to convince an Other of a thing that they did not encounter. Ironically, data is not very good at this.

In 1949, two psychologists, Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman, designed an experiment to test people’s responses to anomalies, or moments when they faced events that deviated from what they had expected to encounter. In the experiment, participants were shown sets of playing cards and asked to identify the cards’ color and suit. The catch was that, in addition to regular cards, the sets contained irregular “trick” cards in which the color and suit of the cards had been reversed to create incongruities (like a black three of hearts or a red two of spades).

In the early rounds, the participants were quick to identify the cards, in part because they simply could not see the anomalies. When presented with a trick card like a red six of spades, they would confidently misidentify it as a red six of hearts or a black six of spades. But as they were exposed to the cards for longer periods of time, some participants began to notice that something was off. They could sense strangeness but could not determine what caused it. It was only with further exposure that some participants finally experienced what the psychologists called a “shock of recognition.” Abruptly and quite clearly, the participants were able to recognize what they had not seen before. Suddenly they could see that they had been looking at a red six of spades the entire time. From that point on, they were more easily able to identify the anomalous cards, having developed a new perception.

The conclusion: When confronted with something that does not fit the paradigm we know, we are likely to resist acknowledging the incongruity. This is because we see what we have been primed — through shared education and culture, and our own lived experiences — to see, so that new evidence that we encounter is immediately, as philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn would explain it more than a decade later, “fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience.” Kuhn applied this reasoning to explaining the tumultuous nature of scientific revolutions, where he argued that the conceptual categories that ordered scientific research were precisely those that made it so difficult for scientists to accept information that could challenge the frameworks they operated within. In such moments, logic and experiment alone were not enough to settle the matter. Kuhn noted, too, that the more time and effort a scientist had already invested in a research paradigm, the more resistance he or she was likely to exhibit toward accepting change. In other words, the higher the stakes, the greater the resistance.

If wider society recognizes data’s limitations, it, too, can move on from overly relying upon it as the only proxy for evidence.

You can see how this is a useful metaphor for considering the United States, racism and the role that data has historically played in unraveling the latter’s hold on the former. Data showing racism might be useful in clarifying the things we already know to be true, but it is far more limited in terms of shifting them. To those who have not experienced the ever more creative forms that structural racism can take, even when presented with evidence of racism, the world may still appear to be full of regular playing cards. This is complicated, too, by the fact that in life we face different likelihoods of encountering anomalous cards, depending on factors like the color of our skin (whiteness, of course, lowering frequency of exposure) and proximity to the affordances promised by wealth, influence and cultural/political capital. Regardless, any exposure to an anomaly card is more likely to be dismissed if it does not support the expectations of the receiver.

Of course, as in the experiment, there is the opportunity for change. Perhaps one part of what has characterized this current moment is that some sections of American society have experienced their own moments akin to when the experiment participants first squinted at the trick cards and felt that something now felt off. At some point, America will have to confront head-on the fact that the country not only has long educated its children to deny anti-Blackness and to treat any conversation of racism with silence or wariness but also has exported this worldview around the globe. For some, that point may have come.

But regardless, a luckless great many of us know that the deck has been stacked from the beginning. And because we know that no amount of shouting, pleading, calculating or visualizing will persuade those who have been educated and raised to deny this, we have put our efforts in other places.

If wider society recognizes data’s limitations, it, too, can move on from overly relying upon it as the only proxy for evidence. That which can be captured on camera is always incomplete. It is never the totality of what occurs in our lives, let alone what occurs in our communities. By considering the vast context and evidence present in the nation’s history, we can save ourselves from tacitly reinforcing the idea that structural violence matters only when it can be compressed into a form that fits what we recognize as evidence. And, in doing so, we give ourselves new frames for thinking about the many people who have died at the hands of brutality and whose deaths were not recorded. As we find a fluency in addressing the greater mass of life that is lived outside of our data, we can begin, finally, to fully address the living.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Mimi Onuoha

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

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By Niles Niemuth

10 August 2019

Friday marked five years since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot at least six times, including once through the top of the head, and left for four-and-a-half hours to die in the street by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson. Brown’s father, Michael Brown, Sr. used the grim anniversary to call for a reopening of the investigation into his son’s death. The killer cop has never been charged.

“Justice has not been served,” Brown, Sr. said at a press conference Friday morning outside the St. Louis County Justice Services Center, not far from where Michael Brown was killed. “My son deserved to live a full life. But a coward with a badge… chose not to value his life. My son was murdered in cold blood, with no remorse and no medical treatment.”

Brown’s killing on the afternoon of August 9, 2014 sparked popular protests in the small working class suburb of St. Louis, which were met with a paramilitary police occupation and deployment of the National Guard by a Democratic governor. The scenes of riot police with body armor and military grade weapons, backed by armored vehicles with mounted machine guns and military helicopters, facing down peacefully protesting men, women and children shocked the whole country and the world. Protestors were shot by rubber bullets, bean bags and flash bang grenades. More than a dozen journalists were arrested as they attempted to cover the police crackdown.

Despite volleys of tear gas and the imposition of a curfew, protests continued night after night, demanding that Wilson be charged and arrested for the murder of the African American teenager.

Four months later a grand jury delivered its decision not to indict Wilson, reigniting protests that were again met by a police crackdown and the deployment of more than a thousand National Guard troops. This was followed by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department announcement in March 2015 that it would not bring federal civil rights charges against Wilson, completing the whitewash of Brown’s murder.

The killing of Brown, along with the police murder of Eric Garner, choked to death less than a month earlier on Staten Island in New York City, sparked a nationwide wave of protests demanding an end to police violence. The popular slogans “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” and “I Can’t Breathe!” were taken up by crowds across the country protesting one police killing after another.

Despite popular protests and increased scrutiny in the aftermath of Brown’s killing, US police officers have continued to kill at a rate of more than 1,000 people every year, amounting to more than 5,000 since Brown was gunned down. According to data collected by Mapping Police Violence, police officers were charged in less than 2 percent of all 6,836 killings recorded between 2013 and 2018. In only 0.4 percent of cases (28) during this period was an officer charged, convicted and sentenced.

Police murders that have provoked significant protests since Brown’s death include: [accompanying videos omitted]

The murder of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice (December 2014): Rice was shot within two seconds of police arriving at the park gazebo in Cleveland, Ohio where he was playing with a toy handgun. He died the following day in the hospital. Neither officer involved in the shooting was ever charged.

The death of Freddie Gray (April 2015): Gray died after being given a “rough ride” in the back of a Baltimore police van. His killing sparked a social eruption that was suppressed by 2,000 National Guard soldiers. While six officers were charged in his death, none was convicted.

The shooting death of Philando Castile (July 2016): Castile, 32, was shot and killed during a traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota. His murder was live-streamed on social media by his girlfriend to the horror of millions. The officer, Jeronimo Yanez, was charged with second degree manslaughter but found not guilty at trial.

Little more than a year later, on July 15, 2017, a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed 40-year-old Justine Damond in the alley behind her home. Officer Mohammed Noor, who had fired his gun from the passenger seat of the squad car his partner was driving, was found guilty of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter and sentenced in April to 12.5 years in prison.

Stephon Clark was shot at least seven times, including multiple shots in the side and back, in his grandmother’s backyard by two Sacramento, California police officers on March 18, 2018. While Clark was holding only a cell phone, the district attorney declined to bring charges and determined that the officers were justified in using deadly force.

The reign of terror has continued this year with at least 544 people shot and killed by police, according to the latest tally by the Washington Post. Under Trump, the police operate without even the fig leaf of federal oversight provided by the Justice Department under Obama. Trump has counseled the police not to be “too nice” when arresting people.

The Black Lives Matter organization and slogan were promoted in the aftermath of the Brown killing to corral opposition behind the Democratic Party and divide the working class by promoting identity politics. With the backing of the corporate media and the Obama administration, Black Lives Matter was championed in order to present police killings as essentially a racial issue, obscuring the more fundamental class issues. The illusion was promoted that police brutality can be resolved by means of various reforms, including more minority officers, racial sensitivity training, body cameras, “community oversight” and federal consent decrees.

Having won positions of privilege and influence, including $100 million from the Ford Foundation, the leaders of Black Lives Matter have since worked to keep popular protests under wraps, seeking to prevent another popular uprising like Ferguson or Baltimore while advancing the agenda of black capitalism.

While African American men and boys have been the focus of many national protests and are disproportionately the victims of police violence, the largest number of victims continue to be white. What unites all of those who are killed or wounded by the police is that they are working class or poor and among the most vulnerable elements in society, including the homeless and those suffering from mental illness. [emphasis added]

Since the urban rebellions of the 1960s, police forces across the US have been militarized, with the establishment of SWAT teams and the deployment of armored vehicles to crush any sign of opposition from the working class. Under Obama, record amounts of weapons and equipment were doled out to local police forces by the Pentagon under its so-called 1033 program, which was established by another Democrat, President Bill Clinton.

The fundamental cause of endless police violence is the capitalist system, which the police operate to protect and serve, along with all of the dire conditions it produces for the working class—poverty, social inequality and war. Police killings can be fought only through the unification of the working class in the US and internationally, across all artificial racial, ethnic and national lines, in the fight for a socialist society based on human need and not the profit interests of a rapacious ruling elite, which controls the entire political system and both big business parties.

#acab #kill all cops #racism #black lives matter #obama #democratic party #bill clinton #freddie gray #tamir rice #michael brown #ferguson #baltimore #ford foundation #justine damond #stephon clark #police brutality #eric garner

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.nbcnews.com/think/amp/ncna1041246?__twitter_impression=true

Two years ago white supremacists gathered in #Charlottesville. How many more deaths have been caused by “very fine people on both sides” as Trump continues to pound his racism? Poway, Puttsburgh, El Paso- the list is filled with tragedy. #RIPHeatherHeyer

#TrumpBodyCount

“By holding the perpetrators accountable in court, we have the potential to bankrupt and dismantle the groups at the center of this violent movement.” There is a morally bankrupt man in Bedminster New Jersey who could renounce his racism and attempt to end this slaughter. But,no.

Charlottesville's white supremacists are being targeted by a law that took down the KKK (Videos)

Suing those responsible for hate crimes has the potential to bankrupt and dismantle the groups at the center of this violent movement.

By Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America | Published

Aug. 12, 2019, 4:29 AM ET | NBC News | Posted August 12, 2019 9:52 AM ET |

Two years ago Monday, hundreds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, in the so-called“Unite the Right” rally. What they came to do was not peacefully protest the removal of a Confederate statue as advertised, but orchestrate a weekend of racially motivated violence and hate.

By holding the perpetrators accountable in court, we have the potential to bankrupt and dismantle the groups at the center of this violent movement.

The bloodshed and animus did not end there. Instead, the cycle of white nationalist violence has continued to this day, devastating

Pittsburgh, Christchurch, Poway and, most recently, El Paso. Law enforcement is finally intensifying its work to track and disrupt these groups, and legislators are considering stronger laws to combat domestic terrorism. But already, citizens themselves possess tools to fight back. And that’s what my organization, Integrity First for America, is doing.

A number of federal and state civil rights statutes allow victims to file suit against those who commit hate crimes. Integrity First for America is working with a coalition of Charlottesville community members injured in the Unite the Right rally to sue the two dozen individuals and organizations responsible. By holding the perpetrators accountable in court, we have the potential to bankrupt and dismantle the groups at the center of this violent movement. Even before going to trial, we’ve already won monetary sanctions motions against some of the defendants, leaving the door open to even harsher penalties.

The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 is central to our case. It’s one of the few legal remedies intended to deal with private — rather than government — conduct that violates civil rights.

In the aftermath of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the country was grappling with a wave of violent attacks by the KKK and other racist vigilantes against recently freed slaves seeking to exercise their new rights. The Reconstruction-era Congress and President Ulysses S. Grant acted to protect these former slaves from extralegal violence by passing the KKK Act.

Among other provision, it specifically took on conspiracies between people that intend to deprive a person or class of persons of equal protection under the laws — providing a civil remedy to individuals who are the victim of private acts motivated by discrimination and racial bias. Following its passage, the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan organization was effectively dismantled and did not resurface until decades later.

It is stunning that, nearly 150 years later, we are still fighting the same kinds of conspiracies. Sadly, the KKK statute’s relevance to what happened in Charlottesville is all too clear. As the lawsuit describes in great detail, “Defendants plotted, coordinated, and executed a common plan to engage in violent intimidation in the streets of Charlottesville … in furtherance of a conspiracy to violate the rights of Plaintiffs and other black and Jewish people and their supporters.”

Specifically, in the months leading up to the rally, the Charlottesville organizers utilized Discord, a social media platform used by video gamers, other online platforms and in-person meetings to recruit others to the cause and methodically plan how the violence would unfold. “Next stop Charlottesville, final stop Auschwitz,” they wrote.

Their plans were meticulous. In private chat groups that summer, they broke down everything from the banal — what to wear, what to bring for lunch, and whether mayonnaise would spoil in the summer heat — to the evil: which weapons to bring; how they were going to “crack some skulls”; and whether they could claim self-defense if they drove over protesters with their cars.

And that’s exactly what they did.

Over August 11 and 12, 2017, they marched military-style on the University of Virginia and downtown Charlottesville. They carried semiautomatic weapons, swastikas and other hate symbols— as well as torches to evoke the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. They chanted “Jews will not replace us,” “blood and soil” and “white lives matter.” They violently attacked students, clergy and other community members.

And, ultimately, just as the online chats promised, James Fields drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others. Afterward, the organizers called the weekend “a huge moral victory.”

Within days of this violence, our legal team — led by Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn — was on the ground in Charlottesville meeting with our plaintiffs. The suit was filed in October 2017, seeking significant damages, injunctive relief and other remedies for the violence and horror the plaintiffs suffered.

The defendants have tried every trick in the book to block this suit — and failed. Most notably, they tried to claim that their violent conspiracy was protected by the First Amendment, an argument the court rejected, writing, “Plaintiffs plausibly allege that the Defendants formed just such a conspiracy to commit violence, and so the First Amendment does not protect Defendants.” The trial is expected next year.

While our case is, we believe, the only current legal effort to take on the coalition of individuals and groups at the center of this violent white nationalist movement, the strategy is not new.

The Supreme Court struck down parts of the Ku Klux Klan Act as the era of Jim Crow took hold, but the ability of private individuals to sue those who violated their rights remained on the books. These provisions were invoked to hold accountable the white men who in 1966 stopped a car and assaulted an African American passenger they believed to be a civil rights worker.

Over the last few decades, other civil suits similar to ours have successfully taken on those responsible for racist attacks. In one particularly instructive case from the 1980s, a lawsuit brought by the family of lynching victim Michael Donald against the KKK organization involved delivered a $7 million award from a federal jury. The perpetrators’ property and assets — including the KKK’s massive headquarters in Tuscaloosa, Alabama — were seized, ultimately putting an end to the United Klans of America.

If everything they own now and in the future can be jeopardized, it makes it much more difficult to recruit followers for these horrific causes.

That legacy continues here. In addition to collecting on bank accounts, wages, property and any other assets of those involved to help compensate the victims in Charlottesville, should we win, we will also demonstrate the serious legal and financial consequences for participating in such a conspiracy. If everything they own now and in the future can be jeopardized, it makes it much more difficult to recruit followers for these horrific causes. Some defendants cited the lawsuit in deciding against returning to Charlottesville last August.

The last two years have proven that Charlottesville was not an isolated incident but a flashpoint in the rise of extremist violence that’s connected to the attacks that followed. Before killing 11 Jews in a synagogue last October, the Pittsburgh shooter communicated with some of the Charlottesville leaders. The shooter who massacred Muslims in Christchurch painted onto his gun a symbol popularized by another one of our defendants.

On and on the series of attacks has gone, each fueling the next as other white nationalists look on and fantasize about how they, too, can take part. With this trial — and the judgments we expect to win against these extremists — we can help reverse that deadly and hate-filled cycle.

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bakwoodzman-blog · 6 years

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September 4, 2018 Antifa Terrorists Forming 'Red Army': Call For Civil War - Quote Biggest Mass Murderer Of 20th Century As If He Were A Saint - Deep State Tools Also Call For Conservatives To Be 'Bombarded From All Sides'

By Stefan Stanford - All News Pipeline - Live Free Or Die Two very important stories came across our radar this weekend that led to this story. In the first from Spiked-Online titled "Now We Know: The 'Resistance' Is The Establishment", they perfectly illustrate for us America's present day situation where people like Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton and George Bush endlessly trash talk President Trump at John McCain's funeral (finally!) while considering themselves 'the resistance' according to this New Yorker story. Yet going back decades, they were THE establishment! The second story, which ties in perfectly with the first, from The Truth About Guns, was titled "The Violent Left Says They Want A Civil War: Antifa Forming A 'Red Army'" within which they take a look at one possible glimpse of the future with one group that has sprung up that is supporting the Obama/Bush/Clinton establishment actually having the nerve to call themselves 'anti-fascists' when they resort to fascist tactics to silence their critics. And as the Truth About Guns story tells us, now they're arming up for war. The Truth About Guns story references this story over at Red Guards Austin titled "Oppose The Counterfeits: Antifa Must Take On A Paramilitary Character!" which argues: Let’s look at the event from a military perspective. Many from the right-wing side, including the fascists, were well armed and equipped. While this makes them dangerous, their tactical strength is overshadowed by their strategic weakness. All their weapons and their fighting condition mean absolutely nothing without support from the broad masses of people. Regardless of their current lack of popularity a fascist populist movement is still a threat and backward elements of society are moved to become fascists during economic crisis. This is the main reason why we oppose fascist’s presence or any attempts on their part to organize. Our principle is that when you go against a class enemy you hit him—that if you do not hit him he will not fall. The fact that no fascists were harmed in the making of this “counter-protest” only proves that the main organizers have no stomach for antifascism—for us antifascism is concrete—it does not mean simply voicing a disagreement it means stopping fascists in their tracks and hurting their efforts to the point where they stop organizing. On the basis of our principled united front work, fascists and their collaborators can be drowned out, run out, routed, beaten bloody, and even annihilated. These are our principles and we aim to hold them to the very finish. If you think the remarks from the Red Guard Austin, Texas sound just like something a fascist would do, attempting to silence their opposition by using force, you're not the only one. And as we see from the next excerpt below taken from the 'antifa' story, they actually reference Mao Zedong who carried out a mass genocide upon tens of millions, killing landlords and redistributing land to peasants, almost just as we're seeing in South Africa today. And while none of us really like 'landlords', the fact that Zedong had nearly 20 million slaughtered, with some saying he killed more than 65 million, and antifa is referencing him as if he is some kind of saint is alarming. From their story.: What does antifascist unity look like? It is time for Austin to stand up, to shake off bad leadership trying to impose itself on antifascism and come together under a better model of actual resistance and not token performance. When we organize and lead actions the fascists do not march every step they take is met with physical confrontation and they are bombarded from all sides. We are willing to work with, and accomplish temporary unity with anyone who can be united with; we simply will not liquidate our leadership behind anti-communists, Democrats or social-democrats. Antifascism is in and of itself neither Socialist nor Communist but it must not be Anti-Communist. Communist leadership of a united front must not be liquidated. According to Chairman Mao: “Capitulationism must be strenuously opposed. When we make concessions, fall back, turn to the defensive or halt our advance in our relations with either allies or enemies, we should always see these actions as part of our whole revolutionary policy, as an indispensable link in the general revolutionary line, as one turn in a zigzag course. In a word, they are positive.” That is, our collaborations with those who genuinely wish to defeat fascism must not come at the expense of our own ability to fight fascism, or our ability to grow and expand strategically. While understanding the need for certain tactical unity against fascism we understand that antifascism is just one part of our overall revolutionary work. We will not change our color as Communists; we will not liquidate our program or allow cessation of ideological and political struggle. While we will unite first, we will not fail to criticize second. Those who are worthy of the sharpest criticism are the very same ones who frame any and all critique as a personal attack and cannot self-criticize. On September 2nd on ANP, Susan Duclos put out a story titled "What The Heck Is Going On At CNN? They Are Now Promoting Violence And Claiming Antifa Is 'Perceived As An African-American Organization,' Which Is Fake News" within which she broke down for us several different recent attempts by CNN anchor people to paint Antifa as not only an 'African American' organization but justifying antifa violence against President Trump supporters because 'antifa is on the side of what is right'. Actually going so far as to claim that there is a distinction between violence carried out by antifa and that carried out by President Trump supporters, we get an outstanding breakdown of CNN's attempt to justify antifa violence against law-abiding President Trump supporters in the first video below. Mixing clips from a recent CNN show segment in which they attempted to 'normalize' antifa violence against so-called 'white supremacists' by claiming 'fascism' must be stopped now with many antifa members claiming violence is absolutely necessary to do so, as Susan pointed out within her story, CNN and the mainstream media rarely report upon white antifa violence carried out upon black or gay President Trump supporters because that would destroy their narrative. Yet as our videographer tells us within his video, if we continue along the same track that we are on, with more and more members of antifa calling for arming up and violent resistance, there may be nothing that can stop a civil war from breaking out in this country in the months or year ahead. And as our videographer tells us, that may be exactly what 'the resistance' at the top, Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic party, want and need, to get rid of President Trump and bring back their slowly crumbling 'new world order'. With antifa and 'the resistance' quite literally backing the outgoing establishment as the previously mentioned Spiked-Online story reports, must it also be true that Conservatives are the new 'counter culture' as Paul Joseph Watson from Infowars has argued and Canada Free Press reported within this February of 2017 story? So we'll close with this excerpt from the Spiked-Online story.: So now we know what ‘the resistance’ really is. It’s the establishment. It’s the old political order. It’s that late 20th-century political set, those out-of-touch managerial elites, who still cannot believe the electorate rejected them. That is the take-home message of the bizarre political spectacle that was the burial of John McCain, where this neocon in life has been transformed into a resistance leader in death: that while the anti-Trump movement might doll itself up as rebellious, and even borrow its name from those who resisted fascism in Europe in the mid 20th-century, in truth it is primarily about restoring the apparently cool, expert-driven rule of the old elites over what is viewed as the chaos of the populist Trump / Brexit era. The response to McCain’s death has bordered on the surreal. The strangest aspect has been the self-conscious rebranding of McCain as a searing rebel. In death, this key establishment figure in the Republican Party, this military officer, senator, presidential candidate and enthusiastic backer of the exercise of US military power overseas, has been reimagined as a plucky battler for all that is good against a wicked, overbearing political machine. ‘John McCain’s funeral was the biggest resistance meeting yet’, said a headline in the New Yorker, alongside a photo of George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and soldiers from the US Army, the most powerful military machine on Earth. This is ‘the resistance’ now: the former holders of extraordinary power, the invaders of foreign nations, the Washington establishment. In the 2nd and final video below, our videographer takes a long look at antifa, their fascist tactics and what he believes is their overall purpose, to destroy anything related to Western civilization, with many antifa clearly not understanding that what they're doing is the work of fascists and the outgoing establishment.

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xtruss · 2 years

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US Capital Attack

Trump Has Birthed a Dangerous New ‘Lost Cause’ Myth. We Must Fight It

The lie that the election was ‘stolen’ from Trump is building its monuments in ludicrous stories, and codifying them in laws to make the next elections easier to pilfer

— David Blight | Saturday, 08 January 2022

Supporters of Donald Trump displayed a gallows as they gathered outside the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

American democracy is in peril and nearly everyone paying attention is trying to find the best way to say so. Should we in the intellectual classes position our warnings in satire, in jeremiads, in social scientific data, in historical analogy, in philosophical wisdom we glean from so many who have instructed us about the violence and authoritarianism of the 20th century? Or should we just scream after our holiday naps?

Some of us pick up our pens and do what we can. We quote wise scribes such as George Orwell on how there may be a latent fascist waiting to emerge in all humans, or Hannah Arendt on how democracies are inherently unstable and susceptible to ruin by aggressive, skilled demagogues. We turn to Alexis de Tocqueville for his stunning insights into American individualism while we love to believe his claims that democracy would create greater equality. And oh! how we love Walt Whitman’s fabulously open, infinite democratic spirit. We inhale Whitman’s verses and are captured by the hypnotic power of democracy. “O Democracy, for you, for you I am trilling these songs,” wrote our most exuberant democrat.

Read enough of the right Whitman and you can believe again that American democracy may yet be “the continent indissoluble … with the life-long love of comrades”. But just now we cannot rely on the genius alone of our wise forbears. We have to face our own mess, engage the fight before us, and prepare for the worst.

Protesters, with one wielding a Confederate battle flag that reads ‘Come and Take It,’ clash with police at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Our democracy allows a twice-impeached, criminally inclined ex-president, who publicly fomented an attempted coup against his own government, and still operates as a gangster leader of his political party, to peacefully reside in our midst while under investigation for his misdeeds. We believe in rule of law, and therefore await verdicts of our judicial system and legislative inquiry.

Yet Trumpism unleashed on 6 January, and every day before and since over a five-year period, a crusade to slowly poison the American democratic experiment with a movement to overturn decades of pluralism, increased racial and gender equality, and scientific knowledge. To what end? Establishing a hopeless white utopia for the rich and the aggrieved.

On this 6 January anniversary is it time to sing anew with Whitmanesque fervor, or is the only rational response to scream? First the scream.

On 6 January 2021, an American mob, orchestrated by the most powerful man in the land, along with many congressional and media allies, nearly destroyed our indirect electoral democracy. To this day, only Trump’s laziness and incompetence may explain why he did not fire Vice-President Mike Pence in the two months before the coup, install a genuine lackey like Mark Meadows, and set up the formal disruption of the count of electoral votes. The real coup needed guns, and military brass thankfully made clear they would oppose any attempt at imposing martial law. But the coup endures by failing; it now takes the form of voter suppression laws, virulent states’ rights doctrine applied to all manner of legislative action installing Republican loyalists in the electoral system, and a propaganda machine capable of popularizing lies big and small.

The lies have now crept into a Trumpian Lost Cause ideology, building its monuments in ludicrous stories that millions believe, and codifying them in laws to make the next elections easier to pilfer. If you repeat the terms “voter fraud” and “election integrity” enough times on the right networks you have a movement. And “replacement theory” works well alongside a thousand repetitions of “critical race theory”, both disembodied of definition or meaning, but both scary. Liberals sometimes invite scorn with their devotion to diversity training and insistence on fighting over words rather than genuine inequality. But it is time to see the real enemy – a long-brewing American-style neo-fascist authoritarianism, beguilingly useful to the grievances of the disaffected, and threatening to steal our microphones midway through our odes to joy.

1861-65 civil war with a blue army and red army fighting pitched battles. Photograph: AP

Yes, disinformation has to be fought with good information. But it must also be fought with fierce politics, with organization, and if necessary with bodies, non-violently. We have an increasingly dangerous population on the right. Who do you know who really wants to compromise with their ideas? Who on the left will volunteer to be part of a delegation to go discuss the fate of democracy with Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy or the foghorns of Fox News? Who on the right will come to a symposium with 10 of the finest writers on democracy, its history and its philosophy, and help create a blueprint for American renewal? As a culture we are not in the mood for such reason and comity; we are in a fight, and it needs to happen in politics. Otherwise it may be 1861 again in some very new form. Unfortunately it is likely to take events even more shocking than 6 January to move our political culture through and beyond our current crisis.

And if and when it is 1861 again, the new secessionists, namely the Republican party, will have a dysfunctional constitution to exploit. The ridiculously undemocratic US Senate, now 50/50 between the two parties, but where Democrats represent 56.5% of the population and Republicans 43.5%, augurs well for those determined to thwart majoritarian democracy. And, of course, the electoral college – an institution more than two centuries out of date, and which even our first demagogue president, Andrew Jackson, advocated abolishing – offers perennial hope to Republicans who may continue to lose popular votes but win the presidency, as they have in two of the last six elections. Democracy?

And now the song? Well, keep reading. Of all the books on democracy in recent years one of the best is James Miller’s Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World. A political philosopher and historian, Miller provides an intelligent journey through the turbulent past of this great human experiment in whether we can actually govern themselves. He demonstrates how thin the lines are between success and disaster for democracies, how big wins turn into reactions and big losses, and how the dynamics of even democratic societies can be utterly amoral. Intolerant new ruling classes sometimes replace the tyrants they overthrow.

“Democratic revolts, like democratic elections,” Miller writes, “can produce perverse outcomes.” History is still waiting for us. But in the end, via examples like Václav Havel in the Czech Republic, Miller reminds us that the “ideal survives”. Democracy does require the “best laws”, Havel intoned, but it must also manifest as “humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural”. Miller does the history to show that democracy is almost always a “riddle, not a recipe”. Democracy is much harder than autocracy to sustain. But renew it we must.

Members of a militia group, including Michael John Null and Willam Grant Null, right, who were charged for their involvement in a plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, stand inside the capitol building in Lansing in April 2020. Photograph: Seth Herald/Reuters

Or simply pick up Whitman’s Song of Myself, all 51 pages, from the opening line, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” to his musings on the luck of merely being alive. Keep going to a few pages later when a “runaway slave” enters Whitman’s home and the poet gazes into his “revolving eyes”, and nurses “the galls of his neck and ankles”, and then to his embrace of “primeval”, complete democracy midway in the song, where he accepts “nothing which all cannot have”. Finally read to the ending, where the poet finds blissful oblivion, bequeathing himself “to the dirt to grow from the grass I love”. Whitman’s “sign of democracy” is everywhere and in everything. The democratic and the authoritarian instinct are both deep within us, forever at war.

After 6 January, it’s time to prepare thee to sing, to scream, and to fight.

— David W Blight is sterling professor of American History at Yale and author of the Pulitzer-prize winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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What Cities Are Run By Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-cities-are-run-by-republicans/

What Cities Are Run By Republicans

Democrats Outnumber Gop Voters About 6 To 1 But Republican Candidates Think People Will Cross Party Lines Over Recent Crime Wave

New York City GOP mayoral candidates Curtis Sliwa, left, and Fernando Mateo have sparred over their qualifications and past missteps.

Two longtime New York City fixtures are enmeshed in a hotly contested primary fight for the Republican nomination in the race to succeed Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat.

A poll released last week by WPIX-Channel 11, NewsNation and Emerson College showed Curtis Sliwa, founder of the crime-prevention group Guardian Angels, ahead of Fernando Mateo, a politically connected entrepreneur and longtime advocate for taxi drivers and bodega owners, by 33% to 27%, with 40% of those Republican registered voters who were polled still undecided.

Despite its closeness, the June 22 Republican primary between the former friends turned foes hasn’t garnered much public attention. Democratic voters outnumber Republicans citywide by more than 6 to 1.

The lack of competitiveness in political races over the past decade spurred a voter-outreach effort earlier this year to get Republican and independent voters to re-enroll as Democrats so they can have a say in the . During the outreach, Democrats saw a net gain of nearly 12,000 registered voters, according to the city’s Board of Elections.

Still, both Republicans insist they can win the general election. They said they think enough voters—especially moderate Democrats—will vote across party lines because of the crime surge that has plagued the city since the Covid-19 pandemic struck last year.

Trump Keeps Claiming That The Most Dangerous Cities In America Are All Run By Democrats They Arent

With the economy hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic and protesters in the streets targeting America’s systemic racism, President Trump has been forced to revise his reelection strategy. What was once going to be a triumphal declaration of his effectiveness at keeping the economy afloat has been reworked as a reiteration of his 2016 run: a focus on making America great and, more specifically, on law and order.

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Over and over, Trump has shared that terse phrase with his tens of millions of Twitter followers, including on Wednesday and Thursday. And over and over, he has tried to imply that Democrats broadly and former vice president Joe Biden specifically are soft on crime. That his likely general election opponent and other leaders in the Democratic Party are happy to have social structures collapse into anarchy for some unclear reason.

To make that case, Trump has repeatedly lifted up a statistical factoid, as he did during an event at the White House on Wednesday.

“You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run,” he said. “Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of 20. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run.”

It’s not clear how Trump is defining “most dangerous” in this context. So let’s look at two related sets of data compiled by the FBI: most violent crime and most violent crime per capita.

Well, reader, I have a surprise for you.

Opinionhow Can Democrats Fight The Gop Power Grab On Congressional Seats You Won’t Like It

Facing mounting pressure from within the party, Senate Democrats finally hinted Tuesday that an emboldened Schumer may bring the For the People Act back for a second attempt at passage. But with no hope of GOP support for any voting or redistricting reforms and Republicans Senate numbers strong enough to require any vote to cross the 60-vote filibuster threshold, Schumer’s effort will almost certainly fail.

Senate Democrats are running out of time to protect America’s blue cities, and the cost of inaction could be a permanent Democratic minority in the House. Without resorting to nuclear filibuster reform tactics, Biden, Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be presiding over a devastating loss of Democrats’ most reliable electoral fortresses.

Max Burns is a Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies. Find him on Twitter @themaxburns.

Rand Pauls Claim That Cities And States Led By Democrats Have The Worst Income Inequality

“We ought to look where income inequality seems to be the worst. It seems to be worst in cities run by Democrats, governors of states run by Democrats and countries currently run by Democrats. So the thing is, let’s look for root causes.”

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— Sen. Rand Paul , Republican debate on Fox Business News, Nov. 10, 2015

Several readers wanted to know whether this statement was true. We looked into a portion of the statement for our debate roundup and determined that the claim lacked context, although the data supported his claim about Democrat-led cities. There was more to explore here, so we decided to dig further. How accurate is Paul’s claim?

Essential Politics: Democrats Scramble To Combat Rising Homicide Rates In American Cities

David Lauter

This is the June 25, 2021, edition of the Essential Politics newsletter. Like what you’re reading? to get it in your inbox three times a week.

A rise in violent crime in the nation’s cities poses a threat to the Democratic Party that little else could rival; finding a way to address the problem has posed difficult challenges for the party’s leaders.

Over the last two decades, America’s politics has divided more and more along lines of city versus countryside. Democrats built an urban-based coalition that unites progressive whites — mostly young and college-educated — with a Black and Latino voter base that’s more often working class.

That happened only after years of sharp declines in crime opened the way for the transformation of urban neighborhoods from Crown Heights in Brooklyn to Silver Lake in Los Angeles.

Just as white flight from cities helped power the Republican rise from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, the urban resurgence of the last 20 years, despite all the attendant problems of gentrification, helped make possible the coalitions that elected Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Rising crime acts like kryptonite on such coalitions, sapping their strength and laying bare their flaws.

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The latest news, analysis and insights from our politics teams from Sacramento to D.C.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Rising Violent Crime Is Likely To Present A Political Challenge For Democrats In 2022

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President Biden hosts a White House meeting about reducing gun violence on July 12. Violent crime is on the rise in many U.S. urban areas, and Democratic political strategists believe the White House needs to take on the issue of crime directly.

Violent crime is on the rise in urban areas across the country.

Many small cities that typically have relatively few murders are seeing significant increases over last year. Killings in Albuquerque, N.M., Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh, for example, have about doubled so far in 2021, while Portland, Ore., has had five times as many murders compared to last year, according to data compiled by Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics.

Most cities in the United States, including each of those named above, have a Democratic mayor. After protests last year over police violence against Black Americans — notably the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis — there has been a push from the left to “defund” police departments.

As a result, several cities, including Austin and New York, have reduced or reallocated police budgets — though some cities have looked to restore funding in recent months.

That debate over funding, coupled with the rise in crime, has given Republicans what they believe is an opening in key swing districts that could decide control of the U.S. House next year. The GOP needs to pick up just a net of five seats to do so.

List Of Rioted Cities And Their Political Affiliation Wait Until You See These Stats

List of cities where riots, looting & violence were reported, their mayors, governors and their political affiliation.

Which cites are burning, and what political party runs them? Check out the list below.

I’m just here to state some facts. I am not getting into the whole debate about racism, George Floyd, or anything other than the cities the violent riots and looting are taking place in. We’ve all watched the videos of rioters looting, smashing windows, burning buildings, assaulting police, assaulting private individuals and a whole slew of other horrendous things. I do have some questions though; In many of these cities, the police are being told to ‘stand down’; WHY? .. In some cities, the mayors are even encouraging the riots. WHY? .. Why have some cities called in the nation Guard, but have NOT given them the GO signal? Why are locals in each rioted city telling us that most of the people doing the damage are out-of-towners? Where are they coming from? Who’s bringing them in? Are they being paid? … Lot’s of unanswered questions here folks. Feel free to comment below.

The list contains 29 cities; of which 26 have Democrat Mayors and 3 have Republican Mayors. The # of states may look skewed because some states are listed more than once , but there’s no doubt that even the Democratic run states out number Republican ones. Check out the list below, and don’t forget to Comment.

The Top 10 Cities For Mass Shootings: All Of Them Are Run By The Democratic Party

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 By Stillness in the Storm

The American news media reports every “mass shooting” that fits its political narrative. But a check of the statistics for mass shootings shows that overwhelming majority are committed in Democrat-run cities, including those with strict gun control laws and “gun-free zones.”

The number of mass shootings in the last three years is mind-boggling. There was a total of 424 in 2019; 612 in 2020; and 105 so far in 2021. A mass shooting is defined as an incident in which four or more subjects are shot by a firearm.

The following are the top cities for mass shootings, according to a verifiable database called Mass Shootings Info.

Image Credit: Mass-shootings-info

The top cities for mass shootings: Chicago ; Philadelphia ; New York City ; Houston ; and Baltimore These cities are all run by the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party’s “solution” to the surging crime in America’s cities is to blame the police or to outright defund them. It is only fueling a crime surge that is reversing decades of overall decreasing violent crime.

The following Democrat-run cities are now seeing massive spikes in violence, including mass shootings.

Did Record Gun Sales Cause A Spike In Gun Crime Researchers Say It’s Complicated

“Democrats across the country spent the last year defunding police departments, so they shouldn’t be surprised when voters hold them responsible for the spike in violent crime,” said Mike Berg, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which recruits and advises GOP congressional candidates.

Republicans are already going after Democrats with a three-pronged strategy that includes attacks on crime; the economy, particularly rising inflation and labor shortages; and border security.

Meet The Republicans Representing Cities With A Higher Murder Rate Than Chicago

5 years old

As Democrats escalate calls for tougher gun laws, conservative House members offer pushback but few alternatives to gun control laws

Tue 12 Jul 2016 11.45 BST Last modified on Wed 26 Feb 2020 18.01 GMT

In the wake of a sniper attack on Dallas law enforcement officers that left five officers dead and nine wounded, House Democrats have continued to push for a vote on gun control legislation before the congressional session ends on Friday.

“If this Congress does not have the guts to lead, then we are responsible for all of the bloodshed of the streets of America, whether it be at the hands of the people wearing a uniform or whether it’s at the hands of criminals,” Louisiana congressman Cedric Richmond, who represents parts of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, said on Friday.

House Republicans are refusing to allow an up or down vote on Democrats’ gun control bills, including a bill to expand background checks on gun sales, which some researchers believe could help reduce urban gun violence. At least 11 House Republicans represent large cities with murder rates even higher than Chicago’s. All of them have A ratings from the National Rifle Association, earned from a record of supporting gun rights and opposing gun control.

A few of these representatives offered alternatives to gun control that they believe will do more to reduce gun violence: better re-entry programs for formerly incarcerated Americans, job creation or improvements to the mental health system.

Eric Holder: There Is Still A Fight For Democrats Against Gop Gerrymandering

In McConnell’s Kentucky, for instance, Republicans are divided over how far to go during the upcoming redistricting process, which they control in the deep-red state. The more extreme wing wants to crack the Democratic stronghold of Louisville, currently represented by Rep. John Yarmuth. More cautious Republicans like McConnell are willing to settle for smaller changes that reduce Democratic margins while stuffing more Republican voters into hotly contested swing districts.

Make no mistake: McConnell’s caution isn’t rooted in any newfound respect for the integrity of our electoral process. Instead, Republicans are mainly worried about avoiding the costly and embarrassing court decisions that invalidated their most extreme overreaches and potentially turn the line-drawing over to the courts. So McConnell’s approach doesn’t reject partisan gerrymandering — it just avoids the type of high-profile city-cracking that could land the Kentucky GOP in federal court.

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For instance, in 2020, Yarmuth won his Louisville district with a comfortable 62.7 percent of the vote. By turning Yarmuth’s single district into portions of two or three new districts, Republicans could turn his safe blue seat into swing districts and safe Republican strongholds. But the naked politicking of that kind of move would invite dozens of court challenges from outraged Democrats and election integrity organizations, tying up GOP time and treasure in the middle of campaign season.

Yet relying on the Republican-aligned Supreme Court to find a remedy is a gamble that could just as easily backfire on Democrats. In the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, the conservative majority ruled 5-4 that Congress, not the federal courts, must address partisan gerrymandering. As a result, half a dozen Democrat-filed federal cases were tossed out and the gerrymandered district maps allowed to stand. More outcomes like that would be catastrophic both for Democrats and democracy.

For now, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee is fighting back against Republican efforts in a flurry of high-profile lawsuits. The organization, chaired by former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., has said it is committed to countering the Republican plan to split up blue cities.

Hope For Normalcy Is Growing Here’s What Americans Are Still Worried About

He continuously reiterated a version of that response as he faced pressure from the left and criticism from conservatives. Biden won, despite accusations from the right that he was merely a Trojan Horse for progressives and a socialist, police-defunding agenda.

But crime continues to be a nagging issue for Biden. He gets high marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic — undoubtedly the top issue of concern when he took office six months ago. But crime is rising in importance for many Americans, and they’re split on his handling of it.

That has led the White House to make a show of doing something about the issue, despite the decentralization of police departments across the country, which are controlled at the municipal level.

“It seems like most of my career I’ve been dealing with this issue,” Biden said earlier this month while convening a meeting of law enforcement and local officials. “While there’s no ‘one-size-fit-all’ approach, we know there are some things that work, and the first of those that work is stemming the flow of firearms used to commit violent crimes.”

Biden and crime have gone back decades. During the 2020 presidential primary, he had to fend off criticism from the left for writing the 1990s-era crime bill. Violent crime then was at a high, but critics have said the bill helped lead to the mass incarceration of many Black men, and often not for violent crime.

Elleithee echoed that.

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When It Comes To Big City Elections Republicans Are In The Wilderness

The party’s growing irrelevance in urban and suburban areas comes at a considerable cost, sidelining conservatives in centers of innovation and economic might.

When Jerry Sanders finished his second term as mayor of San Diego in 2012, he was the most prominent Republican city executive in the country. A former police chief close to the business community, Mr. Sanders appeared to be a political role model for other would-be Republican mayors, a moderate who worked with the Obama administration on urban policy and endorsed gay marriage at a pivotal moment.

These days, Mr. Sanders said, Republicans are out of touch with diverse metropolitan areas. He said Republicans appeared to lack “real solutions” to issues like crime, and lamented the party’s exclusionary message that drives off young people, Hispanics and gay voters in cities like his.

“I don’t think the right has kept up with the times,’’ Mr. Sanders, 70, said in an interview. He said he renounced his party affiliation on Jan. 7, the day after the mob attack on the Capitol.

Across the political map this year, Mr. Sanders’s diagnosis of his former party appears indisputable: In off-year elections from Mr. Sanders’s California to New York City and New Jersey and the increasingly blue state of Virginia with its crucial suburbs of Washington, D.C., the Republican Party’s feeble appeal to the country’s big cities and dense suburbs is on vivid display.

“They go back to that stuff, I’m in trouble,” he said with a laugh.

Rogue City Leaders: How Republicans Are Taking Power Away From Mayors

State lawmakers are preempting the ability of city leaders to enforce their own regulations. The moves represent a sharp ideological shift for a party that has long championed local control.

Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey arrives for a news conference to talk about the latest Arizona COVID-19 information in Phoenix on Dec. 2, 2020. | Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo

06/23/2021 04:30 AM EDT

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Mayors and city councils across Arizona issued face mask mandates during the pandemic to prevent the spread of Covid-19, angering conservative state lawmakers who decried government overreach. So the legislators turned to the newest Republican playbook and passed a law allowing businesses to ignore those public health requirements.

The one-line “preemption” law signed in April by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who refused to issue a statewide mask order, won’t make much of an immediate difference now. It doesn’t go into effect until later this year, and local officials have lifted mask mandates in compliance with CDC guidelines as the threat of the virus subsides.

But the bill’s main sponsor says it was needed to ensure “rogue city leaders” can’t impose mask mandates again, should another outbreak occur.

An usher holds a sign to remind fans to wear masks during a spring training baseball game between the Oakland Athletics and the Arizona Diamondbacks in Scottdale, Ariz. | Ashley Landis/AP Photo

Is There Currently Riots/looting *only* In Democrat Cities In The Usa

So pathetic to watch the Fake News Lamestream Media playing down the gravity and depravity of the Radical Left, looters and thugs, ripping up our Liberal Democrat run cities. It is almost like they are all working together?

Not being an American, I am unsure what “Liberal Democrat run cities” are. I will guess those having a Democrat mayor, but am willing to be corrected.

Irrespective of your politics and whether you call them protests or riots, are there currently “large street gatherings”only in Democrat run cities?

Mawg says reinstate Monica

No.

Cities are generally democrat-leaning – 35 with democratic mayors vs 13 republican in the 50 largest cities.

But cities with republican mayors also had protests which resulted in property damage. An incomplete list of examples:

List Of Current Mayors Of The Top 100 Cities In The United States

Municipal partisanship in 2021

This page lists the current mayors of the 100 largest U.S. cities by population.

As of 2013, an estimated 62,186,079 citizens lived in these cities, accounting for 19.67 percent of the nation’s total population.

In most of the nation’s largest cities, mayoral elections are officially nonpartisan, though many officeholders and candidates are affiliated with political parties. Ballotpedia used one or more of the following sources to identify each officeholder’s partisan affiliation: direct communication from the officeholder, current or previous candidacy for partisan office, or identification of partisan affiliation by multiple media outlets. As of August 2021, the partisan breakdown of the mayors of the 100 largest U.S. cities was 63 Democrats, 26 Republicans, four independents, and six nonpartisans. The affiliation of one mayor was unknown.

Of these cities, there are 47 strong mayor governments, 46 council-manager governments, six hybrid governments, and one city commission.

At the start of 2021…

HIGHLIGHTS

Based on 2013 population estimates, 76% of the population of the top 100 cities lived in cities with Democratic mayors, and 15% lived in cities with Republican mayors.

Allen Joines , mayor of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had been in office the longest; he first took office in 2001.

This page includes:

Select a topic from the dropdown below to learn more.Submit

100 Largest Cities By Population Rank Strong mayor No

The Ten Most Dangerous Cities In The Us Are All Run By Democrats

United States

Aug 28, 2020 3:16:00 PM

While the cities with the highest crimes have Democrat mayors, studies show little correlation between party affiliations and crime.

During the 2020 presidential election race, President Donald Trump has claimed on multiple occasions that Democrats run the most dangerous cities in the U.S.

Preliminary data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report covering the first half of 2019 shows the ten cities with the highest overall violent crimes in decreasing order are: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Memphis, Detroit, Dallas, Phoenix, and Baltimore. Based on the number of crimes per 10,000 residents, the top ten cities are Memphis , St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Springfield, Little Rock., Stockton , Cleveland, St. Bernardino, and Oakland . All the mayors of the cities with the highest overall violent crimes are Democrats. The cities with the most violent crime per capita have Democrat mayors except Springfield, which has an independent mayor.

Hence equating surging crime rates with certain party affiliations in cities does not count as a realistic picture of the reasons why certain cities have high crime rates, thus making this claim misleading.

Reference links

Map: Republicans To Have Full Control Of 23 States Democrats 15

In 2021, Republicans will have full control of the legislative and executive branch in 23 states. Democrats will have full control of the legislative and executive branch in 15 states.

Population of the 24 fully R-controlled states: 134,035,267Population of the 15 fully D-controlled states: 120,326,393

Republicans have full control of the legislative branch in 30 states. Democrats have full control of the legislative branch in 18 states.

Population of the 30 fully R-controlled legislature states: 185,164,412Population of the 18 fully D-controlled legislature states: 133,888,565

This week, Andrew Cuomo’s star went down in flames. While the smoke clears, let’s take a moment to sit back and reminisce about the governor’s long history with ethical and legal violations.

Cuomo’s controversies regarding sexual harassment and nursing homes deaths were far from his first abuses of power. In fact, his administration has a long history of it, ranging from interfering with ethics commissions, to financial corruption.

In July 2013, Cuomo formed the Moreland Commission to investigate corruption in New York’s government. At first it was a success, giving Cuomo good PR. Yet as it went on there were rumors that, contrary to his claim that “Anything they want to look at they can look at,” Cuomo was interfering with the Commission’s investigations. There was friction within the Commission, itself with two factions forming: “’Team Independence’ and ‘Team We-Have-a-Boss’.”

Three Democrats Three Republicans Advance In City Council Race

Hannah Manley hands her ballot to election judge Joann Vioda during Tuesday’s primary election at Southview Baptist Church.

Margaret Reist

The three incumbents on the Lincoln City Council, two Republicans new to politics and a Democrat on the city-county planning commission advanced to the general election Tuesday night, narrowing a crowded race.

Twelve candidates vied for three at-large City Council seats — the largest field of candidates in 16 years, which included a host of newcomers to politics.

Tom Beckius

Mary Hilton

Three of those newcomers will advance: Tom Beckius, a Democrat who works in real estate and construction and serves on the Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning Commission; Mary Hilton, a Republican and issues advocate; and Eric Burling, a Republican and software engineer running a study-abroad company.

Lincoln City Councilman Roy Christensen

Sändra Washington

The three incumbents who advanced: Roy Christensen, a Republican and audiologist seeking his third term; Bennie Shobe, a Democrat and program analyst at the Nebraska Department of Labor seeking his second term; and Sändra Washington, a Democrat and retired National Parks Service employee who was appointed after Leirion Gaylor Baird became mayor in 2019.

The top three vote-getters were the incumbents, with Democrats Washington and Shobe taking the top spots.

Washington said she’s very pleased, especially since this is her first campaign.

Beckius said he was thrilled to have such a strong turnout.

List Of Mayors Of The 50 Largest Cities In The United States

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This is a list of mayors of the 50 largest cities in the United States, are ordered the estimated populations as of July 1, 2017. These 50 cities have a combined population of 49.6 million, or 15% of the national population. Louisville, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Nashville, and Honolulu have consolidated city-county governments where the mayor is elected by residents of the entire county not just that of the main city; in these cases the population and respective rank are for the county.

In some states, mayors are officially elected on a nonpartisan basis; however, their party affiliation or preference is generally known, and where it is known it is shown in the list below.

The breakdown of mayoral political parties is 36 Democrats, 11 Republicans, and 3 Independents .

Party Affiliation Of The Mayors Of The 100 Largest Cities

Municipal partisanship in 2021

In most of the nation’s largest cities, mayoral elections are officially nonpartisan. However, many officeholders are affiliated with political parties. Ballotpedia uses one or more of the following sources to identify each officeholder’s partisan affiliation: direct communication from the officeholder, current or previous candidacy for partisan office, or identification of partisan affiliation by multiple media outlets.

Democratic mayors oversaw 64 of the 100 largest cities at the beginning of 2021, 64 at the beginning of 2020, 61 at the start of 2019, 63 at the start of 2018, 64 at the beginning of 2017, and 67 at the start of 2016.

This page includes:

Who runs the cities?: A chart tracking mayors by party affiliation.

List of mayors: A list of mayors of the 100 largest cities.

Mayoral partisanship: 2016-2021: A chart showing the partisan breakdown of mayors from 2016 to 2021.

History of local nonpartisanship: A look at the history and debate surrounding local nonpartisan elections.

Mayoral partisanship and preemption conflicts: An overview of preemption conflicts between state and local governments.

The following pages track municipal partisanship by year:

See also: Partisanship in United States municipal elections

As of August 2021, the mayors of 63 of the country’s 100 largest cities are affiliated with the Democratic Party.

Americas Top 20 Cities For Crime And What Party Runs Them

President Donald Trump cites Detroit as one of the high-crime cities run by Democrats. Pictured: A Detroit police officer uses tear gas during a May 29 protest over the death four days earlier of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Annoyed that Senate Democrats are blocking a police reform bill, President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the 20 U.S. cities with the highest crime rates are all run by Democrats.

“The Senate Republicans want very much to pass a bill on police reform,” Trump said during a Rose Garden press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda. “I would like to see it happen. We won’t sacrifice. We won’t do that. We won’t do anything that is going to hurt our police.”

The president added:

We have a record positive rating on crime, a record positive rating on crime this year. The best. You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other cities, all Democrat-run. Every one of them is Democrat-run. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat-run.

A quick fact check shows that Trump is at least mostly correct. One ranking says the top 20 most dangerous cities are run by 18 Democrat mayors and two mayors who were elected in nonpartisan races.

According to the website Neighborhood Scout, which in January published a list of the 100 most dangerous cities in America, heavily Democrat Detroit tops the list. At No. 20 is Chester, Pennsylvania, also with a Democrat mayor.

Homicides Are Up But Gop Misleads With Claims About Blame

Some police organizations and Republican politicians are blaming Democrats and last year’s defund the police effort for a troubling rise in homicides in many cities across the country

Senate Republicans set to block Jan. 6 commission bill

WASHINGTON — “SKYROCKETING MURDER RATES,” claimed the National Fraternal Order of Police. “An explosion of violent crime,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “Democrat-run cities across the country who cut funding for police have seen increases in crime,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C.

On social media and in political speeches, some Republicans and pro-police groups say last year’s calls to slash spending on law enforcement have led to a dramatic rise in killings in cities overseen by Democrats.

The increases they cite are real, and several big cities did make cuts to police spending. But the reductions were mostly modest, and the same big increases in homicides are being seen nationwide — even in cities that increased police spending. At the same time, the rates for burglaries, drug offenses and many other types of crime are down in many cities across the country.

The effort to blame Democrats for crime may offer a preview of Republicans’ strategy for upcoming elections: a new twist on an old “law and order” argument from the party’s past, harkening back to President Richard Nixon.

Top Republicans have taken up the claim, too.

Yet homicide rates are also increasing in cities that didn’t cut spending.

———

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Saturday, July 24, 2021

Virus’s impact (AP) The eruption of COVID-19 last year caused the proportion of people working from home in the U.S. to nearly double. The share of employed people working from home shot up from just 22% in 2019 to 42% in 2020, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was among the striking findings of an annual government survey that documents the far-reaching impact the viral pandemic has had on Americans’ everyday lives since it struck in March of last year. Because of the pandemic and the widespread social distancing it required, people on average spent more time last year sleeping, watching TV, playing games, using a computer and relaxing and thinking—and less time socializing and communicating in person—than in 2019. Adults also spent more hours, on average, caring for children in their household. The survey also lends support to concerns that the pandemic worsened isolation for millions of Americans. With people working from home or attending school online, the time they spent alone increased. Among Americans ages 15 and over, time spent alone each day increased by an average of an hour. For those ages 15 to 19, it rose 1.7 hours per day.

Medical debt (NYT) A new study put the amount of unpaid medical bills held by collection agencies at $140 billion last year, up from $81 billion according to a similar analysis carried out in 2016. The analysis looked at 10 percent of all TransUnion credit reports and found that about 18 percent of Americans have medical debt that has been sent to collections. Over the period from 2009 to 2020, the largest source of debt owed to collection agencies became medical debt. The $140 billion, to be clear, is not an estimate of medical debt; that figure is far higher, as the $140 billion is merely the debt that has been passed along to the vultures.

Crews make progress on huge Oregon blaze (AP) The nation’s largest wildfire raged through southern Oregon on Friday but crews were scaling back some night operations as hard work and weaker winds helped reduce the spread of flames even as wildfires continued to threaten homes in neighboring California. The Bootleg Fire, which has destroyed an area half the size of Rhode Island, was 40% surrounded after burning some 70 homes, mainly cabins, fire officials said. The fire, which was sparked by lightning, had been expanding by up to 4 miles (6 kilometers) a day, pushed by strong winds and critically dry weather.

Thousands of bullets have been fired in this D.C. neighborhood (Washington Post) Markeith Muskelly, a barber who has spent half his 52 years cutting hair in Southeast Washington, has seen people get shot on the street outside the shop where he works. Last fall, he saw a man die there. The shop is tucked into a corner of the Benco Shopping Center, a mainstay in the Marshall Heights neighborhood for six decades. Its plate-glass window has long offered a view of one of the most dangerous streets in the District. In the neighborhood where Muskelly works, gun violence has affected generations, bringing a sad realization that, for some, that the danger may never end. A Washington Post analysis shows that in a recent period of a little more than three years, crime scene technicians found 2,759 bullet casings—byproducts of shootings involving rifles, pistols and shotguns—in about a one-square-mile area that includes Benning Road in Marshall Heights, with Benco between them. Bullets have struck people, pockmarked parked cars, embedded in walls of homes and shattered windows of businesses filled with patrons. Patrol officers carry “quick clot gauze” used by troops in war.

Volunteers hunting for Mexico’s ‘disappeared’ become targets (AP) The mainly female volunteers who fan out across Mexico to hunt for the bodies of murdered relatives are themselves increasingly being killed, putting to the test the government’s promise to help them in their quest for a final shred of justice: a chance to mourn. Those who carry on the effort tell tales of long getting threats and being watched—presumably by the same people who murdered their sons, brothers and husbands. But now threats have given way to bullets in the heads of searchers who have proved far better than the authorities at ferreting out the clandestine burial and burning pits that number in the thousands. Two searchers have been slain the past two months. Fear has always accompanied the searchers. They go to wild, remote, abandoned places where terrible crimes have been committed. But up to now, they mostly shrugged it off.

Cuba’s communist authorities have long feared change. Street protests show the risk of resisting it. (Washington Post) On a farm not far from the town where Cuba’s protests first erupted this month, police investigators last summer carried out a major sting operation. Their target was not a dissident activist, but a dairyman nicknamed El Rey del Queso: The King of Cheese. His offense? Operating a clandestine factory that produced tire-sized hunks of cheese for private sale in Havana. Authorities arrested the King, confiscated hundreds of pounds of yellow queso and produced a news report about the bust on Cuban state television depicting him as a villain. Cuba’s communist authorities have for decades treated private entrepreneurs as a threat to be contained, not encouraged. Long after China and Vietnam embraced market reforms, using material prosperity to buttress authoritarian rule, Cuba has clung to an economic model based on centralized planning and state control. The July 11 protests that shook Cuba’s rulers showed that model might be their biggest vulnerability, as its weak foundation is further eroded by the decades-long U.S. embargo, additional Trump-era sanctions and now the coronavirus pandemic. The country’s economy contracted 11 percent last year, according to government data. Cubans are spending hours in lines to buy basic goods they can barely afford. Hospitals have been overwhelmed by covid patients, and medicine is scarce. Power outages are turning stifling summer heat into an explosive fuse. “Unless the government makes profound changes, I think people will take to the streets again,” said Camilo Condis, a Cuban entrepreneur and business advocate.

Haiti leader’s slaying exposes role of ex-Colombian soldiers (AP) As the coronavirus pandemic squeezed Colombia, the Romero family was in need of money to pay the mortgage. Mauricio Romero Medina’s $790 a month pension as a retired soldier wasn’t going far. Then came a call offering a solution. When Romero answered the phone on June 2, another veteran, Duberney Capador, offered what he said was a legal, long-term job requiring only a passport. But Romero had to make a decision fast. “Talk about it with your family and if you are interested, see you tomorrow in Bogota, because the flight is the day after tomorrow,” Romero’s wife, Giovanna, told The Associated Press, recalling the conversation. A month later, Romero and Capador were dead and 18 Colombians were reportedly in custody, accused of taking part in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. It’s a case that dramatizes Colombia’s role as a recruiting ground for the global security industry—and its murkier, mercenary corners. Colombia’s Defense Ministry says about 10,600 soldiers retire each year, many highly trained warriors forged in a decades-long battle against leftist rebels and drug trafficking cartels. Many—including a number of those involved in Haiti—have been trained by the U.S. military. Those soldiers make up a pool of recruits for companies seeking a wide range of services—as consultants or bodyguards, in teams guarding Middle Eastern oil pipelines or as part of military-like private security in places like the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. The UAE paid Colombian veterans to join in the battle against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Italy makes health pass mandatory for many leisure activities, in bid to pressure the unvaccinated (Washington Post) Italy on Thursday significantly ramped up pressure on its unvaccinated population, announcing that a digital or printed health pass would be necessary for accessing a range of everyday leisure activities, from theaters to indoor dining. The decision puts Italy in a rare category along with France among Western nations that have been willing to leverage certain freedoms and equalities now that vaccines have become widely available. Italy is essentially betting that it can revive its slowing vaccination campaign—and avoid future, onerous restrictions—by creating heavy incentives for inoculation, in the kind of step that would be politically unthinkable in the United States. Italy is looking for ways to avoid a new round of closures and curfews. For now, every Italian region is “white”—meaning that life proceeds almost as normal, and people can stay out as late as they want. That has made for a joyful Italian summer.

‘Messy’ fight (Washington Post) KUNDUZ, Afghanistan—Around 3 a.m., a small team of elite special forces were halfway through an operation to retake a sliver of territory along the city’s northern edge when a police unit assisting them refused to advance. Hours later, the police fled, ceding the territory back to the Taliban. For weeks, the Afghan military has struggled to hold provincial capitals such as Kunduz after a surge of Taliban attacks that came as U.S. forces withdrew and U.S. air support dropped. Afghan ground forces are increasingly used to fill the void. Their capabilities are uneven, however, resulting in government advances that often rapidly evaporate. Experienced and motivated elite units are leading the battle to retake territory. But the troops called up to secure those gains—army, police and irregular fighters—often have little training and are less inclined to fight. First Lt. Abdullah Ansari, 30, led the elite unit retaking territory house by house in Kunduz earlier this month. He said the debacle on Kunduz’s northern edge made him miss working with U.S. troops. “Now everything is just messy,” he said.

Death rates soar in Southeast Asia as virus wave spreads (AP) Indonesia has converted nearly its entire oxygen production to medical use just to meet the demand from COVID-19 patients struggling to breathe. Overflowing hospitals in Malaysia had to resort to treating patients on the floor. And in Myanmar’s largest city, graveyard workers have been laboring day and night to keep up with the grim demand for new cremations and burials. Images of bodies burning in open-air pyres during the peak of the pandemic in India horrified the world in May, but in the last two weeks the three Southeast Asian nations have now all surpassed India’s peak per capita death rate as a new coronavirus wave, fueled by the virulent delta variant, tightens its grip on the region. The deaths have followed record numbers of new cases being reported in countries across the region which have left health care systems struggling to cope and governments scrambling to implement new restrictions to try to slow the spread.

Typhoon to bring heavy rains to Taiwan, China over weekend (AP) A typhoon is forecast to bring heavy rains to Taiwan and coastal China over the weekend, days after the worst flooding on record in a central Chinese province caused at least 51 deaths. Forecasters say Typhoon In-fa is moving toward China and expected to make landfall in Zhejiang province either Sunday afternoon or early Monday morning. Zhejiang’s bureau of emergency management said on its microblog Friday that it is raising its risk warning to the second-highest level and calling on all localities to take preventative measures. Those usually include recalling fishing boats to port and relocating people living in vulnerable coastal communities. Fujian province to the south has issued similar orders. On its current track, the eye of the typhoon is expected to pass north of Taiwan while still bringing considerable rain to the island.

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