One Little Town, Three Thousand People, Two Starkly Different Realities...,

AP |  The newspaper hit the front porches of the wind-scarred prairie town on a Thursday afternoon: Coronavirus numbers were spiking in the farming communities of western Minnesota.

“Covid-19 cases straining rural clinics, hospitals, staff,” read the front-page headline. Vaccinate to protect yourselves, health officials urged.

But ask around Benson, stroll its three-block business district, and some would tell a different story: The Swift County Monitor-News, the tiny newspaper that’s reported the news here since 1886, is not telling the truth. The vaccine is untested, they say, dangerous. And some will go further: People, they’ll tell you, are being killed by COVID-19 vaccinations.

One little town. Three thousand people. Two starkly different realities.

It’s another measure of how, in an America increasingly split by warring visions of itself, division doesn’t just play out on cable television, or in mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.

It has seeped into the American fabric, all the way to Benson’s 12th Street, where two neighbors -- each in his own well-kept, century-old home -- can live in different worlds. 

In one house is Reed Anfinson, publisher, editor, photographer and reporter for the Monitor-News. Most weeks, he writes every story on the paper’s front page. He wrote that story on clinics struggling with COVID-19.

He’s not the most popular man in the county. Lots of people disagree with his politics. He deals with the occasional veiled threat. Sometimes, he grudgingly worries about his safety.

While his editorials lean left, he works hard to report the news straight. But in an America of competing visions, some here say he has taken sides. 

Nowhere in the Monitor-News, for example, will you find reports that local people are dying because they’ve been inoculated.

“There are no alternative facts,” Anfinson says. “There is just the truth.”

But whose truth?

His neighbor, Jason Wolter, is a thoughtful, broad-shouldered Lutheran pastor who reads widely and measures his words carefully. He also suspects Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic as a political tool, doubts President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and is certain that COVID-19 vaccines kill people.

He hasn’t seen the death certificates and hasn’t contacted health authorities, but he’s sure the vaccine deaths occurred: “I just know that I’m doing their funerals.”

He’s also certain that information “will never make it into the newspaper.”

Wolter’s frustration boils over during a late breakfast in a town cafe. Seated with a reporter, he starts talking as if Anfinson is there.

“You’re lying to people,” he says. “You flat-out lie about things.”

 

 

 

Since A Good Childhood Is Key To Everything In Life: Matthew 25:40-45 - Or Nah?

annehelen  |  The vast majority of societies on this planet still understand family as their primary, most cherished bond. Blood relation or not, there is an understanding that forsaking these bonds is a form of unforgivable treachery, understandable only in circumstances of abject trauma. Within this paradigm, all parties should do whatever possible to maintain the bonds of family, even if those bonds require continued suffering.

In some societies, this understanding is changing. There are several, overlapping reasons for this change — related to mobility, LGBTQ rights and visibility, access to therapy, and more — yet for people who are estranged, the experience can still feel incredibly solitary. Most people who aren’t estranged are very, very bad at talking about it; in society at large, estrangement remains something to be “sorry” about: a regret, a sorrow, a throbbing absence.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are so many reasons why people cut off contact with close and distant family. Some are immediately legible in description, others are not, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that contact became unendurable, damaging, or, in my case, brought out the very worst in who I was. As you’ll see in the answers below, it is rarely swift. It is rarely without pain. But that doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.

While putting together these responses, I was reading Rin Reczek and Emmy Bosley-Smith’s Families We Keep, forthcoming this May, which surveys the various negotiations of LGBTQ people who’ve chosen to maintain or cut off ties to family members. It’s a difficult book, filled with rejection and compromise intercut by flashes of stability and support. And their conclusions are bracing: they argue that “compulsory kinship,” in which we work to sustain bonds to family irregardless of the harm those bonds have caused, is at once insidious and deeply damaging.

“The compulsory relationship between parents and children might sound like a great deal to some—especially those with healthy parent-child ties,” Reczek and Bosley-Smith write. “Of course, the parent–adult child tie can result in a life full of positivity, love, and kindness. But for many people this is not the case. We believe if parent-adult child relationships aren’t good for everyone, then parents’ primacy in our social structure and in adult children’s social identities must be questioned. Even though there are some “good” parents, the fact that “bad” ones have so much power should provoke us to radically rethink our societal reliance on this kinship institution.”

Reczek and Bosley-Smith invite us to consider what an “ethic of care” might look like, in which all people, no matter their age or their existing family, could experience “a sense of belong and identity, alongside emotional, practical, and financial help.” That sense can come from community, but it should also come from the safety nets we put in place as a society. Put differently, your safety and nourishment as a child, as a young adult, as a parent, as someone with specific medical or emotional needs, as an aging person — none of it should be wholly contingent on the luck (truly!) of being born into a family that is financially or emotionally able to provide them for you.

All of these stories, as one of the respondents put it, are “beautifully complex.” If you’re estranged, I hope they make you feel less alone in some way. If you’re not, I hope they offer some insight into how to talk with and support those who are estranged — but more importantly, that they push you to think about what’s lost when we rely so fully on family as our primary source of support.

Houston Eviction Courts Back To Pre-Pandemic Levels

houstonpublicmedia |  The state rent relief program is out of money. The national eviction moratorium ended months ago. Pandemic unemployment benefits in Texas expired over the summer. While the pandemic isn’t over, most of the state’s court safety regulations have ended or are set to expire soon.

That means more eviction filings and, in some areas, crowded courtrooms that make it near impossible to stay safely distant indoors: So far this month, more than 4,600 eviction cases have been filed in Harris County as the omicron variant led to climbing case counts and hospitalizations.

During the week of Jan. 10, more than 2,033 cases were filed in Harris County, compared to 693 cases filed during the same period last year, according to Jeff Reichman, principal at the consulting firm January Advisors.

“That’s almost three times as many cases filed this January as there were last January,” Reichman said. “We’re really on trend with pre-pandemic numbers.”

In 2020, 2,180 cases were filed during the same time period.

Earlier this month, during the week of Jan. 10, more than 2,033 cases were filed in Harris County compared to 693 cases filed last year, Reichman said. During the same week of 2020, 2,180 cases were filed.

The increase in eviction cases is hitting some courts more than others: Just as some neighborhoods have far more evictions, certain courts take on far more cases.

Last Tuesday, Harris County Judge Lincoln Goodwin’s court scheduled 275 evictions to be heard on the same day — half of them at 9 a.m. and the other half at 1 p.m.

Every seat in the courtroom was taken. A line stretched down the hallway and into the parking lot. The judge and court staff weren’t wearing masks.

Eric Kwartler, an attorney with South Texas College of Law, said he feels at risk of getting COVID-19 when he’s there representing renters.

“Do I feel safe? No. I never do,” Kwartler said. “I never feel safe when I go into an environment like that.”

The court has cut back on virtual hearings, Kwartler added, only allowing virtual hearings for those who submit proof of a positive COVID test.

“I had a client cough on me at one point and then tell the court that his wife was at home with COVID,” Kwartler said.

The Role Of Mutually Transgressive Abjection In The American Apocalypse

notesfromdisgraceland |  The abject hovers at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable, but is itself unassimilable which means that we have to contemplate its otherness in its proximity to us but without it being able to be incorporated. It is the other that comes from within (so it is part of ourselves) that we have to reject and expel in order to protect our boundaries[3].

The abject is a great mobilizing mechanism. While the state of being abject is threatening to the self and others, the operation of abjecting involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability. Abjection seeks to stabilize, while the abject inherently disrupts[4].

When the mass of the excluded increases to a size impossible to ignore, they trigger rituals of abjection, which work themselves into identity politics.The repulsion and efforts to distance from the excluded — the abjection – which reinforces the self-awareness of the social standing of regular folks, are in conflict with the attraction by the powers the abject population enjoys and exudes. They are the power bottoms in this relationship as they define the location, robustness and porousness of the boundaries of the enclosure. Fascination with the abject’s power pulls the viewers in, while they remain at arm’s length because of the threats the abject exert.

This makes the excluded a tool that drives the wedge between different social groups and prepares the population for political usage of the abject as leverage.

Objectifying minorities has been institutionalized in America since its inception — from slavery and Jim Crow to ghetto and hyperghetto, prisons, wars, opioids, and other tools of soft and hard marginalization. However, with the rise of the white underclass in the second half of the 20^th century, American ideology has become highly nuanced around the questions of exclusion.

To a large extent, the Right wing has stuck to its white supremacists roots of yesteryear (either in a closeted form or explicitly) while centrists, both Left and Right, have shown greater initiative in modernizing the process. However, when it came to exclusion of the white underclass, the problem proved to be more difficult. Complicated by globalization, technology, the decline of American manufacturing, weaning off conventional energy sources and the general decay of demand for labor, low-skill jobs have been disappearing irreversibly, and the ranks of white underclass grew unstoppably together with their discontent.

Social outcasts and minorities are relatively easy to objectivize. Permanently excluded – criminals, drug addicts, homeless – they have already been cast out. The residual, white precariat, which has always been perceived as a building block of this country’s social fiber, remains still on the inside, but unable to get reintegrated within the context of modern developments.

In a white dominated/ruled society the marginalization of the excluded white subproletariat has been a political hard sell. They grew in size and have acquired a sense of entitlement minorities never could. Their sudden political awareness, no matter how fragile, has become an expression of pleasurable transgressive desires. As a new center of social subjectivity, they draw their power from this position, which serves as an inspiration for their own identity politics.

The emergence of 21^st century Right-wing populism represents the biggest innovation on that terrain. Right-wingers now recognize the abject as a source of political leverage and, instead of exclusion, their program revolves around subjectivizing them. Voluntarily casting oneself as abject — identification with the white subproletariat – has become a quest for authenticity, aimed at acquiring a stigma in order to become a credible voice of the marginalized. This is the core of the modern populist abject gambit.

Somebody's Gonna Stick Thiel In An Oven For His Degeneracy...,

thescrum  |   Peter Thiel made his initial fortune by cofounding (and then selling) the electronic-payments service PayPal. Since that time, Thiel has created various other enterprises, ranging from venture-capital firms such as Founders Fund to a data-analysis firm named Palantir. In addition to his success as a venture capitalist, Thiel is member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Meeting, an annual conference where European and American elites discuss how to maintain and promote free-market capitalism. He supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, a highlight of which was Thiel’s delivery of a pro–Trump speech at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. In that speech, Thiel explained Trump’s rise as a response to national decline resulting from the damaging consequences of free trade, out-of-control militarism, increasingly expensive health care, rising student debt, and stagnant wages. Jamie Galbraith, as noted in Part 1 of this essay, shares many of these concerns.

Thiel’s explanation for our national decline has been delivered, with much more detail, in various other formats over recent years. An essay Thiel wrote for the National Review (2011) elaborates his declinist viewpoint. In that essay, “The End of the Future,” Thiel argues that technological and scientific progress, the basis for economic growth, has stalled out. The lack of innovation in energy, agriculture, medicine, and science in general, he contends, has cut into standards of living that can no longer be attenuated by accumulation of consumer debt and cheap goods from free-trade partners, particularly China. Even gains in the digital tech sector, where Thiel made his initial fortune, he explains as having stalled out and now amount to illusory productivity.

So far, Galbraith and Thiel seem to be traversing similar paths, especially as regards the impediments to growth of rising resource costs and increased digitization. However, Thiel diverges from the progressive Galbraith and speculates that the decline in technological innovation has been concealed by battles over identity politics. It is here Thiel begins to bring questions of culture and psychology into his inquiry. As he puts it:

Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere.

Thiel fleshed out his proposal for dealing with this decline in a speech delivered at the first National Conservativism Conference, in July 2019. In “The Star Trek Computer Is Not Enough,” he retraces the ground covered in his earlier National Review essay while also exploring new themes. He assails Silicon Valley for its lack of innovation and its too-close-for-comfort relationship with China, while also attacking China for its unfair trade practices.

Later in the speech, Thiel also delivers a jeremiad against higher education for handing out overrated, grade-inflated educations and saddling students with debt. He claims that, as mentioned in the National Review piece, the American left ignores national decline by obsessing about identity politics, while the right is in a state of denial about national decline as it insists that the U.S. is “exceptional” and immune to such decay. This is Thiel’s argument for registering a psychological component in any effort to achieve the national solidarity necessary to channel government resources into reversing decline. Indeed, Thiel, who is known for his adherence to libertarian philosophy, acknowledges that government in the past was capable of achieving amazing feats, such the Manhattan Project and the Interstate Highway System. Its shambolic response to the Covid–19 pandemic stands as tragic testimony to the lapse of “can-do” America.

What, then, is this psychological factor that can reverse our national decline, so overcoming the hurdles on right and left? This is Thiel’s question. His reply appears to be the use of René Girard’s famous scapegoat mechanism to break a societal bottleneck.

 

Polarization And Tipping Points

scienceblog  |  As polarization has escalated in the U.S., the question of if and when that divide becomes insurmountable has become ever more pressing. In a new study, researchers have identified a tipping point, beyond which extreme polarization becomes irreversible.

The researchers employed a predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, to reveal what can happen when the country faces an attack by a foreign adversary or a global pandemic.

“Instead of uniting against a common threat,” said lead author Michael Macy, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology and director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory in the College of Arts and Sciences, “the threat itself becomes yet another polarizing issue.”

“Polarization and Tipping Points” published Nov. 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The model allows researchers to study the effects of party identity and political intolerance on ideological extremism and partisan division.

“We found that polarization increases incrementally only up to a point,” Macy said. “Above this point, there is a sudden change in the very fabric of the institution, like the change from water to steam when the temperature exceeds the boiling point.”

The dynamics resemble what physicists call “hysteresis loops.”

“We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially, but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue,” said co-author Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science and director of the Army Research Laboratory Network Science and Technology Center (NeST) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  “If we reach that point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society.”

The work builds on an earlier general model Szymanski developed to study the interactions of legislators in a two-party political system. Although the model isn’t specifically tuned to distinctive practices, customs, and rules of the U.S. Congress, it was trained using data, and previous research comparing model outcomes to 30 years of Congressional voting records demonstrated strong predictive power. In one finding from that work, the model accurately predicted the shift in polarization in 28 of 30 U.S. Congresses.

There Is No Common Conversation In The U.S. Today

strategic-culture |  COVID-19 is another revelation that there are two separate islands of opinion. Take, for example, the simple factual question – yes or no – did Dr Fauci’s organisation fund gain-of-function experiments in the Wuhan laboratory? A rather important matter, one would think. Snopes, that reliable defender of the status quo, says “unproven” in May in a long-winded piece. Denied by Fauci in May: “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Two Pinocchios said the WaPo. But finally admitted in October: “a top official at the National Institutes of Health has conceded that contrary to the repeated assertions of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH did indeed fund highly dangerous gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” And more: “The annual report described the group’s work from June 2017 to May 2018, which involved creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice in a lab in Wuhan, China. The work was overseen by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.” And so May’s conspiracy theory became October’s fact.

Did the virus leak from these US-funded experiments? No one knows but it cannot be ruled out. As to Dr Fauci himself, he may have overreached by telling his critics that he represents science; when even the WaPo carries a piece entitled “Fauci Can’t Use Science to Excuse His Missteps” perhaps his best-before date is nearing. Despite the prayer candles. In this respect, the fate of Robert Kennedy’s book, The Real Dr Fauci, is indicative; it’s Number One on Amazon with 96% five-star ratings. This is the more remarkable because of the full-scale attack on him from the establishment media: he is “the dumbest Kennedy“; “race-baiting ‘documentary’ and disinformation to advance bogus theories and seed anti-vaccine sentiment“; “documented history of promoting debunked theories about vaccines“; banned on social media. Tucker Carlson, in “a new escalation of his anti-science rhetoric”, had an interview “with longtime anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” Nonetheless, a lot of people are buying and reading it. These media campaigns don’t work as well as they used to. Indeed the 29% who had no trust at all probably believe the reverse of what the conventional media says. I know I do: if they’re all shouting the sane thing, I take it as a powerful indicator that the opposite is true. We should read Western media the way the Soviets read theirs.

However, there are unrelenting attempts to create conspiracy theories that all Americans can agree on. For years we have had the conspiracy theory that Putin is behind everything bad; in its current manifestation he’s about to invade Ukraine (or as the US Defense Secretary put it: “an incursion by the Soviet Union into the Ukraine“). Another fast-growing set of conspiracy theories focus on China, the “Wuhan lab leak” being one example. (Dangerous that because of Fauci’s funding of GoF research in Wuhan). China is about to invade Taiwan or starving Uyghers are forced to stuff themselves with pork or tennis players are disappeared; these conspiracy theories are safer. One of the principal pushers of the first conspiracy theory is switching to the other: he senses the change in the party line. And there’s always North Korea where the rats eat the babies and the babies eat the rats.

The China conspiracy theory seems to be working – a survey by the Reagan Foundation found that 52% saw China as the “greatest threat” to the USA (Russia well behind at 14% and North Korea just behind it at 12%). Three years ago Russia was 30% to China’s 21%. More striking is that China has gained twenty points since February. Can the Putin-won-2016/Trump-won-2020 divide be bridged by a Chinadunnit conspiracy theory?

But agreeing on a common enemy is one thing, the internal divisions are something else. In this respect the Reagan Foundation survey cited above is indicative. It finds that disbelief is spreading rapidly in the American population: trust in all institutions is dropping; confidence in the US military is dropping; support for active global leadership is dropping. A survey just now shows a slight majority of American youth regarding their democracy as in trouble. Not the strongest foundation for more foreign adventures.

A deeply divided country: there is no common conversation in the United States today – one person’s conspiracy theory is another’s truth.

Impotent Mask-Compliant Rage...,

theguardian  |  High among the unexpected, non-health compensations of masks is their value as shorthand. At the same time as they impede communication, they offer, anywhere that people exhibit extreme non-compliance, a rapid non-verbal personality indicator that is rivalled only, I would argue, by manspreading. Of course there are many other single but baleful inducements to run for the hills – personalised number plates, not tipping, devotion to the works of Ayn Rand or Judith Butler – but these may take time to discover or may even, on rare occasions, be redeemable.

Mask aversion once fell, just about, into that category. Last summer, anti-maskers could argue that they preferred the previous official guidance. Jenny Harries, now head of the UK Health Security Agency, had indeed treated the world’s mask-wearing nations to her superior, anti-mask theory in March 2020. “You can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in,” she said. Incredibly, or perhaps as a result if Johnson was involved, she was promoted.

As evidence has mounted to back mask efficacy, Johnson, even with this stimulus to lead by example, has treated masks as if they were a lefty plot against his face. A masked audience watching Macbeth recently noticed that the prime minister, squished into a crowded little theatre, preferred to follow the on-stage psychopathy with his face uncovered. In doing so, he perhaps revealed more about himself than idiot contrariness. Low compliance with containment measures was directly associated in one study with “antisocial traits, especially lower levels of empathy and higher levels of callousness, deceitfulness and risk-taking”. Though it’s too late to save us from Johnson, the psychology of mask behaviour might help to screen out another leader who shouts, when discouraged: “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

Meanwhile, we may be getting closer to understanding the MPs who last week voted, in defiance of scientific advice and majority opinion, against protecting public health. Weren’t they once great respecters of majorities, even narrow ones? But it’s pointless to expect logic. Like the Macbeths, they simply couldn’t help themselves.

Juicey WTF?!?!?!

 

When the Jussie Smollett incident hit the headlines in early 2019, anyone with a modicum of critical thinking skills could see it was an obvious hoax.

Yet, leftist networks, politicians and celebrities breathlessly amplified Jussie's claim, fueling racial division throughout the country instead of taking the 'wait-and-see' approach that much of the black community took at the time:

Now let's look at who didn't remain silent - and still promoted Jussie's lie.

Then there's this guy...

And this guy...

Katie Perry tweeted at the time: "Standing with and sending love to @JussieSmollett today... this is a racist hate crime and is disgusting and shameful to our country."

Cher tweeted a cryptic boomer message that only level-6 cat ladies can decipher: 

And yet, none of these race-baiting celebrities and politicians who used their massive platforms to promote Jussie's lie have deleted their tweets, or owned up to being an idiot. 

Is The Organized Looting A Political Statement?

twitter |  I'm starting to think that organized looting may represent a deeper ambition to make a political statement against capitalism and "the system."

Sharing some reactions to my thread on boarded up SF below.

(A 🧵, 1/x)

First - the thread. It has reached about 15 million impressions - driven primarily by critics and trolls.

Here are the stats just of the first tweet.

Linked here:

Unroll available on Thread Reader

https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1465393612577853440?s=20

I went through a few hundred of the replies and quote tweets yesterday morning.

It was a painful read.

The tweets are filled with anger and hatred. If you are easily triggered do not read this thread. I was very disturbed reading these.

If you want to see my notes they are linked in this Notion Doc.

However - to summarize there were a few categories of critical responses:
1. You are evil
2. Rich/businesses/property is evil
3. Gov/System is broken
4. This is justified
5. Misc/other

First up - "you are evil". The primary arguments were:
+ You just want to shop for luxury goods
+ You just care about money/things looking good
+ You are white (and have benefited from racism)
+ You are racist

A few more from "you are evil" theme (note - there were hundreds of these):

The second theme was that the rich/businesses/ property are evil (1/2)

It's One Thing To Loot Louis Vuitton And Nordstroms, But The SwapMeet Too?!?!?!

LATimes |  The spate of smash-and-grab robberies plaguing Los Angeles made its way to Rancho Dominguez this week, where authorities say cash, jewelry and other items were taken from the Del Amo Swap Meet.

The incident occurred around 11:30 a.m. Thursday, according to Deputy Grace Medrano of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Video provided to The Times showed several people making off with goods amid broken glass and blaring alarms.

The witness who took the video said there were several people shopping at the time of the robbery and that the thieves “faked a fight” to distract security guards before breaking the glass and grabbing the items.

“People were scared [and] running away because the glass-smashing sounded like gunshots,” said the witness, who asked to remain anonymous.

Two employees were shoved to the ground, but it was not clear whether they were injured, the witness said, adding that the robbers had multiple cars waiting outside with their engines running.

A representative for the Swap Meet did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

 

American Youth Senses The Darkness Just Around That Signpost Up Ahead...,

hks.harvard  | More than half of young Americans feel democracy in the country is under threat, and over a third think they may see a second U.S. civil war within their lifetimes, according to the 42nd Harvard Youth Poll, released by Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (IOP) on Wednesday. 

The poll also found approval of President Biden has plummeted, and a majority of respondents are unhappy with how the president and Congress are doing their jobs. In addition, many of the respondents feel strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are worried about the threat of climate change. Half of all respondents also said they struggled with feelings of hopelessness and depression. 

The Harvard Youth Poll—which is conducted twice a year, in fall and spring, and has run for over 20 years—captured responses on these topics and others from 2,109 people between the ages of 18 and 29, from across the country. Students from the Harvard Public Opinion Project (HPOP) organized the survey, under the supervision of John Della Volpe, director of polling at the IOP. 

“After turning out in record numbers in 2020, young Americans are sounding the alarm. When they look at the America they will soon inherit, they see a democracy and climate in peril—and Washington as more interested in confrontation than compromise,” Della Volpe said. “Despite this, they seem as determined as ever to fight for the change they seek.”

Jing-Jing Shen, a Harvard College undergraduate and the HPOP student chair, said, “Right now, young Americans are confronting worries on many fronts. Concerns about our collective future—with regard to democracy, climate change, and mental health—also feel very personal.” Shen noted, however, that “young people have come to even more deeply value their communities and connections with others” in this challenging time.

The survey found a striking lack of confidence in U.S. democracy among young Americans. Only 7% view the United States as a “healthy democracy,” and 52% believe that democracy is either “in trouble” or “failing.” This concern is echoed in the fact that 35% of respondents anticipate a second civil war during their lifetimes, and 25% believe that at least one state will secede.

Armed Black Radicals Epically Failed Because They Targetted Tools Rather Than Sources Of Oppression

plough |  This article is part of “The Beginning of Understanding,” a symposium in response to Ashley Lucas’s report “The End of Rage” in Plough’s Autumn 2021 issue.

In one sense, it was just refreshing to encounter a careful, detailed recounting of a chapter in the Black liberation struggle that is typically redacted from the official civil rights chronology. The stories of the Black radicals who were willing to kill for the cause are indeed full of shady detours and dark dirt roads that many of us would rather avoid. Yet they are part of the legacy and have earned their place in the annals. In “The End of Rage” Lucas gives Shoatz’s story its due. In a world of hot takes and swift rebukes on social media, she tells an unflinching, often unflattering tale of a man whose commitment to liberation conjured the full force of the American justice system. Even more, she brings coherence and clarity to a life that, at a distance and absent context, appears to have been ruled by chaos and compulsion.

While most of us moved on (and up!) from the movement, some of those who put themselves at greatest risk are still wading through the debris.

But after a second read, I also can’t ignore the perception that Lucas’s utmost objective is to tender a requiem – and referendum – for a failed revolutionary whose violent, rage-filled choices shattered dozens of lives, most notably his own. In a piece otherwise beautifully crafted to inspire empathy, Lucas’s tone is strikingly intolerant whenever the matter of armed struggle surfaces.

On the police killings that led to Shoatz’s conviction, she chides: “Apparently, the ethos of this war did not lead this combatant to distinguish between individual officers or take into account the context that one of the victims had been simply sitting at his desk and the other had been helpfully offering directions.”

On the ultimate effect of his tactics, she chafes: “Whatever he believed then or now, Russell’s revolutionary actions as a member of the BLA did not free his people or prevent future harm. Instead, they called forth further violence from state institutions in ways that would brutalize the Shoatz family for decades to come.”

These are the two most glaring examples of Lucas’s contempt for political violence but elsewhere subtle jabs pierce her narrative.

Lucas is within her rights to question whether being a militant revolutionary was worth all it cost Shoatz, his family and the families of those whom he harmed. But to suggest that his choices yielded only suffering, as she does throughout the piece, misses a different role that armed resistance plays in an oppressed minority’s struggle for freedom against an oppressive majority that uses state violence to maintain its grip. In 1965, Malcolm X, who Lucas tells us inspired Shoatz to become an activist, framed the utility of political violence for an audience of militant young activists in Selma. “If the White people realize what the alternative is,” he counseled, “perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”

My question for Lucas is this: Is it possible that the revolutionary worldview and radical actions of the BLA made space for more moderate views and appeals? And if that’s true, does that not count as an important, albeit costly, contribution to the freedom cause? Is this not at least part of the reason that Assata Shakur remains a beloved freedom symbol and potent terrorist threat four decades after her escape to Cuba?

 

Newspapers Will Have You Hating The Oppressed And Loving The Oppressors

greenwald |  It continues to be staggering how media outlets which purport to explain the Rittenhouse case get caught over and over spreading utter falsehoods about the most basic facts of the case, proving they did not watch the trial or learn much about what happened beyond what they heard in passing from like-minded liberals on Twitter. There is simply no way to have paid close attention to this case, let alone have watched the trial, and believe that he carried a gun across state lines, yet this false assertion made it past numerous Post reporters, editors and fact-checkers purporting to "correct the record” about this case. Yet again, we find that the same news outlets which love to accuse others of “disinformation” — and want the internet censored in the name of stopping it — frequently pontificate on topics about which they know nothing, without the slightest concern for whether or not it is true.

"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X. pic.twitter.com/mPboLhg3QQ

— COMMON (@common) November 16, 2020

Those who continue to condemn Rittenhouse as a white supremacist — including the author of The Post op-ed published four days after the paper concluded the accusation was baseless — typically point to his appearance at a bar in January, 2021, for a photo alongside members of the Proud Boys in which he was photographed making the “okay” sign. That once-common gesture, according to USA Today, “has become a symbol used by white supremacists.” Rittenhouse insists that the appearance was arranged by his right-wing attorneys Lin Wood and John Pierce — whom he quickly fired and accused of exploiting him for fund-raising purposes — and that he had no idea that the people with whom he was posing for a photo were Proud Boys members ("I thought they were just a bunch of, like, construction dudes based on how they looked”), nor had he ever heard that the “OK” sign was a symbol of "white power.”

Rittenhouse's denial about this once-benign gesture seems shocking to people who spend all their days drowning in highly politicized Twitter discourse — where such a claim is treated as common knowledge — but is completely believable for the vast majority of Americans who do not. In fact, the whole point of the adolescent 4chan hoax was to convert one of the most common and benign gestures into a symbol of white power so that anyone making it would be suspect. As The New York Times recounted, the gesture has long been “used for several purposes in sign languages, and in yoga as a symbol to demonstrate inner perfection. It figures in an innocuous made-you-look game. Most of all, it has been commonly used for generations to signal 'O.K.,’ or all is well.”

But whatever one chooses to believe about that episode is irrelevant to whether these immediate declarations of Rittenhouse's "white supremacy” were valid. That bar appearance took place in January, 2021 — five months after the Kenosha shootings. Yet Rittenhouse was instantly declared to be a "white supremacist” — and by “instantly,” I mean: within hours of the shooting. “A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15,” was how Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) described Rittenhouse the next day in a mega-viral tweet; her tweet consecrated not only this "white supremacist” accusation which persisted for months, but also affirmed the falsehood that he crossed state lines with an AR-15. It does not require an advanced degree in physics to understand that his posing for a photo in that bar with Proud Boys members, flashing the OK sign, five months later in January, 2021, could not serve as a rational evidentiary basis for Rep. Pressley's accusation the day after the shootings that he was a "white supremacist,” nor could it serve as the justification for five consecutive months of national media outlets accusing him of the same. Unless his accusers had the power to see into the future, they branded him a white supremacist with no basis whatsoever — or, as The Post put it this week, “despite a lack of evidence.”

Devils Calling Tigrayans A "Terrorist Group" For Defending Themselves Against An Attempted Genocide...,

medium |  The West’s Horn of Africa experts have been meeting with a TPLF leader and TPLF/OLF supporters in secret, even as its governments claim to be impartial — TPLF’s Berhane Gebre-Christos speaks as TPLF member, proposed head of “transitional government” (limo/Uber drivers) and Washington-based Ethio-American diaspora.

Donald Yamamoto, recently the U.S. Ambassador to Somalia who just retired this year, to TPLF official Berhane Gebre-Christos:

“Abiy is not listening… Obasanjo has not been extraordinary helpful or very active, and so are there any other opportunities that you see?”

Vicki Huddleston, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs and US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa to Berhane Gebre-Christos:

“I couldn’t agree more that you know, Abiy should step down, there should be an all-inclusive transition government.”

Former ambassadors and current diplomats for the United States, Britain and EU had a Zoom meeting this past Sunday with an official for the TPLF in what amounts to a green light from the West for the terrorist group’s attempts to overthrow the democratically elected Ethiopian government. And there’s evidence to prove it: a phone-cam video of the two-hour meeting.

“I hope that you’ll have military success fairly soon, because it seems as if the situation is only becoming more drastic,” said Vicki Huddleston, who was Chargé d’Affairs ad interim in Ethiopia during years the TPLF were in power.

France’s retired diplomat and writer Stéphane Gompertz openly speculated on the potential for Abiy to be forced from power. “Even if Abiy sticks to his guns, which unfortunately he seems to be doing, you either hope that people around him either in government or in the military realize that this is going nowhere and might force him to, well, accept the cessation of hostilities or force him to step down?”

The Western powers — Britain, the EU and especially the United States — have been posturing for months that they have not taken sides in the conflict and are pushing negotiations only in the interests of peace. But the Zoom talk rips away the façade, revealing a chummy circle of foreign policy elite, both retired and still active who mostly know each other and are in sympathy with TPLF objectives. They include Donald Yamamoto, one of the U.S. government’s most senior Africa experts who just retired this year as the American ambassador to Somalia, and Spain’s diplomat Carmen de la Peña.

Former EU ambassador to Ethiopia Tim Clarke admitted that all of the attendants “maintain contacts with our former employees. Just the other day I was talking to the existing EU ambassador to Ethiopia.”

The Tigrayans Are The Most Formidable People On The African Continent

NC |  There’s a simple lesson here: Tigrayans are the bulk of combat power in the Highlands of the Horn. You’d think that would lead to the conclusion that you shouldn’t mess with Tigray unless you’re ready to get in a long, nasty war, even when the conventional military wisdom is that the Tigrayans don’t have a chance. They weren’t supposed to have a chance against the Europeans in 1896, either–or the Ethiopian Derg in the 1980s. If you’re running a war-nerd bookmaking business, put a sign on the window: “No bets on wars in Tigray.”

One reason we all underestimated Tigray is that no one outside TPLF circles seems to have admitted to themselves how much of the combat power of both Eritrean and Ethiopian forces came from ethnic Tigrayans. Admitting that would be politically unwise, especially in Ethiopia. Officially, Ethiopia is a federal, multi-ethnic state in which all ethnic groups are equal. But that’s a polite fiction. The Ethiopian state is the product of 19th-c. conquests by the “Habesha,” which is what the Highland Orthodox peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara, call themselves. Ethiopia was created by Habesha armies pushing south and east, absorbing Somali, Afar, Oromo, Sidamo, and dozens of other peoples who became Ethiopian citizens, but had very little share in ruling the country.

The real struggle for power was always between the two Habesha peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara. Since Menelik II moved the capital southward to Shewa, the Amhara seemed like the stronger of the two groups. Amhara are a much bigger group, for starters. Tigrayans are only about 6% of the population, Amhara about 26%.

But after the Eritrean/Tigrayan insurgents destroyed the Derg in the late 20th c., it was the Tigrayans of the TPLF who really ruled Ethiopia. Their domination was so clear that the TPLF tried to minimize their power, dutifully talking about their multi-ethnic coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). No one was fooled; it was the TPLF who had the power in Ethiopia.

The TPLF leader Meles Zenawi was the ultimate power in the country all through the first two decades of this century. Zenawi knew that the TPLF was so much better organized than the other members of the EPRDF coalition that he and his fellow Tigrayans could let the EPRDF make a show of ethnic equality while keeping Tigrayan control. Henri IV went through the motions of converting to Catholicism in return for the throne with the line “Paris is worth a mass or two,” and Zenawi seems to have decided “Addis and the whole GDP is worth letting those weaker militias from other ethnic groups share the credit.”

Zenawi’s PR campaign worked so well that Ethiopians forgot the hard truth that it was the Tigrayans who had the real combat power.

The Tigrayans’ only rival in terms of military power was the Eritrean army (EDF.) The “Eritrean” label made people forget that the EDF is also dominated by ethnic Tigrayans. Tigrinya-speakers are the majority in Eritrea, not only the dominant but the biggest ethnic group.

That has never stopped Eritrean Tigrayans from killing other Tigrayans. That shouldn’t be a surprise — when have people of the same ethnic group ever fretted about killing each other? — but it does underline what seems like the dominant fact at the moment: The Tigrayans are the most formidable people in the Horn.

What End-Stage Civil War Gaslighting Looks Like...,

Minorities, working class females, refugees, indentured 1099 gig-serfs - none of these people are in any kind of position to “tear each other’s faces off” in American Civil War 2.0.

The working class is the most integrated sector of America. Most of the black folk I know don’t have much interest in BLM. Most are likely to ask “What do you have to say about the violence in the hood?” None of the black folk I know have any interest in the race baiters at CNN. MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, NPR, those jokers are for idiotic comfortable white folks, the pretty people.

Most of the white working class folk I know aren’t interested in any of that gas either. They're too busy trying to get by, take care of family etc. Now find a politician that doesn’t have a platinum tongue, who walks the talk about forcing industry to come back to America, and who threatens the rich with high wages for those folk or watch your holdings get repurposed. See what happens then. Watch as the pretty people show their true colors as the real race baiters.

We’ve got a family friend who is a shift manager at a local Starbucks. The chain closed 8,000 stores in 2018 for a day of racial sensitivity training. The sensitivity trainer surveyed the group of workers at our friend’s location. They stared back at him. After a moment, everyone broke out laughing. There was nary a marginalized minority who was not represented among them.

1% Media/Social Network Activists and White kids’ co-opting movements or appropriating and spinning the utter HORROR of being poor and Black in America has precious little to do with Black Lives Matter.  Conflating this with Comcast-ATT-Fox-Disney-Viacom - again monetizing poor worker deaths by cop, OR, prodding the working poor into hellish gig-serfdom, to intentionally infect vulnerable loved-ones, flip their apartments; then further break them down into homelessness - IS what Taibbi, Greenwald… basically all your HEROS studiously ignore. 

Civil War Bubbling In The Witches Brew Of Unprecedented Corporate Profits

taibbi |  Compared with how often you heard pundits rage about the “insurrection,” how regularly did you hear that billionaire wealth has risen 70% or $2.1 trillion since the pandemic began? How much did you hear about last year’s accelerated payments to defense contractors, who immediately poured the “rescue” cash into a buyback orgy, or about the record underwriting revenues for banks in 2020, or the “embarrassment of profits” for health carriers in the same year, or the huge rises in revenue for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, all during a period of massive net job losses? The economic news at the top hasn’t just been good, it’s been record-setting good, during a time of severe cultural crisis.

Twenty or thirty years ago, the Big Lie was usually a patriotic fairy tale designed to cast America in a glow of beneficence. Nurtured in think-tanks, stumped by politicians, and amplified by Hollywood producers and media talking heads, these whoppers were everywhere: America would have won in Vietnam if not for the media, poverty didn’t exist (or at least, wasn’t shown on television), only the Soviets cuddled with dictators or toppled legitimate governments, etc. The concept wasn’t hard to understand: leaders were promoting unifying myths to keep the population satiated, dumb, and focused on their primary roles as workers and shoppers.

In the Trump era, all this has been turned upside down. There’s actually more depraved, dishonest propaganda than before, but the new legends are explicitly anti-unifying and anti-patriotic. The people who run this country seem less invested than ever in maintaining anything like social cohesion, maybe because they mostly live in wealth archipelagoes that might as well be separate nations (if they even live in America at all).

All sense of noblesse oblige is gone. The logic of our kleptocratic economy has gone beyond even the “Greed is Good” mantra of the fictional Gordon Gekko, who preached that pure self-interest would make America more efficient, better-run, less corrupt. Even on Wall Street, nobody believes that anymore. America is a sinking ship, and its CEO class is trying to salvage the wreck in advance, extracting every last dime before Battlefield Earth breaks out.

It’s only in this context that these endless cycles of hyper-divisive propaganda make sense. It’s time to start wondering if maybe it’s not a coincidence that politicians and pundits alike are pushing us closer and closer to actual civil war at exactly the moment when corporate wealth extraction is reaching its highest-ever levels of efficiency.

We Are Clearly In A Pre-Civil War Situation

NC |  My read at this point is that we are in a pre-civil war situation, with conservative and libertarians just itching to get on with killing the liberals (just like sothorons were itching, by spring of 1860, for a war to begin killing Yankees). This is the true context in which to view the Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha. The drift into a second civil war should properly be understood as the end result of the past 90 years organizing by rich reactionaries against the New Deal, and their attempt to restore the preponderance of power to capital versus labor. For all the short termism of a financialized economy, the rich reactionaries have had a stunning lomg game in mind, and the most impactful part is probably going to be the creation and propagation of “law and economics” and the (anti)Federalist Society seizure of control of the judiciary.

The drift into a second civil war is also the context in which to view the “left’s” demands for censorship, which Taibbi, Greenwald, and a few others have assailed repeatedly and, imho, unwisely. We must build the cultural capacity to limit the free speech of the rich, in much the same way the there are cultural limits on speech by military officers. It bears repeating that the ascendancy of the reactionaries, who are now poised to deploy the authoritarians they have cultivated within the population, has been a 90 year project. At various points, severe penalties and a cultural disapprobation of free speech would have avoided the present drive to war. For example, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North should never have been allowed to become stars of right-wing TV and talk radio.

And, a subject of the British crown, Rupert Murdoch, should never have been allowed to have control of major American media. The case of Murdoch points to the real vulnerability we face: there is no understanding of what a republic is, and how a republic must be defended. Hence, Madison writing about “aristocratic or monarchial innovations” sounds very strange to us today. But Ganesh Sitaraman, in his excellent book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic (2017), points out that Americans were culturally hostile and suspicious of aristocracy and monarchy up until World War Two and the Cold War, when the new foe to be guarded against became fascism, then communism.

This lack of republican culture allows Gitlin, Isaac, and Kristol, in their “An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy,” to purvey a series of frauds on public opinion. They write, ““Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse.” This is certainly not untrue, but what they omit is crucial. First, this is supposed to be a republic, not a democracy. While a republic should have a democratic form of government, a republic is different because a regard for the General Welfare must be balanced against individual freedoms. There used to be a consideration of public virtue, in which citizens were expected to abandon their self-interests when they conflicted with the public good. For example, citizens should be expected to wear masks and embrace vaccine requirements in a pandemic, and any refusal or disobedience should be properly seen as an assault on the republic.

Second, in a republic, there is a positive requirement to do good. The exemplar of this is Benjamin Franklin, and the various organizations he helped create: a fire company, a library, a hospital, the American Philosophical Association, and so on. All of these resulted in the network that fought the Revolutionary War, then attempted to codify republicanism in the Constitution. But the compromise with slavery was a fatal flaw.

President John Quincy Adams, in his first annual message to Congress, summarized this positive requirement to do good:

The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established. Roads and canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of men, are among the most important means of improvement. But moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man.

Law journal articles on the Guarantee Clause:
Bonfield, Arthur E., “The Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4: A Study in Constitutional Desuetude”, [On the Constitutional guarantee of the federal government that each state shall have a republican form of government]
46 Minnesota Law Review 513 (May, 1961)
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/863/
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217205534.pdf

Erwin Chemerinsky, Why Cases Under the Guarantee Clause Should Be Justiciable,
65 University of Colorado Law Review 849-880 (1994)
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/787/

The Yale Law Journal
Vol. 97, No. 8, Jul., 1988
Symposium: The Republican Civic Tradition
[12 articles on republicanism]
https://www.jstor.org/stable/i232687

With The 14th Amendment Fully Gutted - The Guarantee Clause Don't Stand A Chance...,

NYTimes |  But what, exactly, does it mean for the federal government to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”?

As James Madison explains it in Federalist No. 43, it means that “In a confederacy founded on republican principles, and composed of republican members, the superintending government ought clearly to possess authority to defend the system against aristocratic or monarchial innovations.”

He goes on: “The more intimate the nature of such a Union may be, the greater interest have the members in the political institutions of each other; and the greater right to insist that the forms of government under which the compact was entered into, should be substantially maintained.”

Of course, there’s no real chance in the modern era that any state will become a “monarchy” or “aristocracy” in the 18th-century sense. So why does the Guarantee Clause matter, and what does it mean? How does one determine whether a state has maintained a “republican form of government”?

Ordinarily we would turn to the Supreme Court for an answer to a question of this sort. But here, the court has deferred to Congress. In Luther v. Borden in 1849 — a suit that concerned the authority of a Rhode Island government that still operated under its original royal charter and which rested on the Guarantee Clause — Chief Justice Roger Taney (later of Dred Scott infamy) declared:

Under this article of the Constitution, it rests with Congress to decide what government is the established one in a State. For as the United States guarantee to each State a republican government, Congress must necessarily decide what government is established in the State before it can determine whether it is republican or not.

Taney’s ruling held strong, a little more than 60 years later, in Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph Co. v. Oregon, when the court rebuffed a claim that the Guarantee Clause rendered direct referendums unconstitutional by stating that it was beyond the scope of the power of the Supreme Court to enforce the guarantee of a republican government. “That question,” wrote Chief Justice Edward White in his majority opinion, “has long since been determined by this court conformably to the practice of the government from the beginning to be political in character, and therefore not cognizable by the judicial power, but solely committed by the Constitution to the judgment of Congress.”

This remains the court’s view. But it’s not the only view. In his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan cited the Guarantee Clause in his brief against Louisiana’s Jim Crow segregation law. If allowed to stand, he wrote,

there would remain a power in the States, by sinister legislation, to interfere with the blessings of freedom; to regulate civil rights common to all citizens, upon the basis of race; and to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a part of the political community, called the people of the United States, for whom and by whom, through representatives, our government is administrated. Such a system is inconsistent with the guarantee given by the Constitution to each State of a republican form of government, and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the land, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

In this vision of the Guarantee Clause, the touchstone for “a republican form of government” is political equality, and when a state imposes political inequality beyond a certain point, Congress or the federal courts step in to restore the balance.

In a 2010 article for the Stanford Law Review, Jacob M. Heller called this a “death by a thousand cuts” approach to enforcement, one where lawmakers and courts understand that “anything that impedes on the state’s republican form is one step closer to eventual unraveling of a state’s republican form of government.”