Why the embodiment of il33t, suave, 1% panache like George Sanders - tryna get at Lucy's ravishing young fire-cro*** - have Mumm decanted into martini glasses? jes dayyum....,
tablet | More
and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the
new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class
Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional
elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the
passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the
universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class
majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the
media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue
them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on
Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able
to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the
“Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class
Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are
the least likely American voters to see.
Constantly
replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a
brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be
that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no
grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the
use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming
majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing
category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term
“Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be
updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and
successfully imitating their betters.
wired | Our chimeric infectious cancer analogy for white nationalism might
require something related but more focused: a war on white nationalism
that is much lower on empathy than we’ve ever treated it, and higher on
an appreciation for how large and disruptive a menace it truly is. Such a
war would include the same administrative and legislative heft that has
been given to the wars on drugs and foreign terrorism. (The latter
served as the motivation for an entirely new executive department.) It
would involve an intersection of experts from the intelligence, legal,
criminal justice, and scholarly communities. And these experts would be
charged with identifying all of the places that the infectious cancer
hides in society, addressing the vulnerabilities in the American immune
system, and cutting off the communication channels that serve as a
bloodstream (e.g., social media) for white nationalism to further
propagate, causing disseminated destruction. The Biden administration
has already outlined formal plans
for improved surveillance of emerging infectious disease in response to
Covid-19. A similar process to address domestic terrorism could just as
easily be activated.
Cancer analogies also have limits that oversimplify the blight of
white nationalism. For one, cancer is driven by an undirected process
driven by the laws of natural selection: Cancerous cells don’t know
they’re disrupting anything. The 2021 strain of white nationalism,
however, is engineered specifically for destruction. It is not a set of
ideas that undermine the laws of the land by happenstance. Their purpose
is to undermine them actively and directly.
These
distinctions are more than just semantic: Too many narratives of white
nationalism incorrectly depict its actors as exclusively low-class
and uneducated. This trope says that the white nationalists aren’t
really all that bad but are misguided, acting on ignorance, alienation,
or economic anxiety.
This
ragtag caricature of white nationalism evokes a cancerous cell blindly
fomenting catastrophe through directionless meandering. The reality of
white nationalism is closer to the opposite: It is a well-oiled machine,
driven by nefarious actors with very specific goals in mind. And in
this way, white nationalism isn’t much like cancer at all. There are no
innocent, guileless actors, guilty only of being short-sighted. The
purveyors of white nationalism live by a wicked creed that explicitly
dehumanizes others.
If white nationalism isn’t a birth defect, a
virus, or a cancer, should we dispense with disease analogies
altogether? Why bother with explanatory vehicles at all?
The
answer is that disease, in the abstract sense, does effectively capture
the rot of white nationalism in important ways (many people even felt
physically ill after seeing images of Charlottesville and the Capitol
insurrection).
The challenge resides in identifying the right
pathology. Finding one has no necessary allegiance to any existing class
of disease—we’re free to cut and paste features of different diseases,
even use our science-fiction mind to dream up one better fit to describe
this unique blight.
The chimeric, hypothetical disease most like white nationalism resembles an infectious cancer—a rare class of diseases where malignant cells can be transmitted between people. The most famous of these is the devil tumour facial disease
of Tasmanian devils. A grotesque illness typified by large tumors on
the face that eventually spread throughout the body, killing the animal,
the problem is so rampant it threatens the species with extinction.
Like
an infectious cancer, white nationalism offers mutant, bastardized
forms of American ideals and institutions like liberty, states’ rights,
freedom of speech, and the right to bear arms. And they prey on and
amplify existing white resentment, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia. And
most frustratingly, these sentiments are allowed to grow and fester
because of privilege: Law enforcement never treated white domestic
terrorism as aggressively as it has Black radicals or international terrorists.
WaPo | For the past four years, the United States was governed by a conspiracy theorist in chief. Whether by retweetingQAnon
accounts from the Oval Office or painting himself as the victim of
shadowy “deep state” plots at rallies, President Donald Trump injected
the toxin of baseless conspiratorial thinking straight into America’s
political bloodstream. On Jan. 6, America saw how far that venom had
spread, as a ragtag group of militias, racist extremists and flag-waving
disciples of Trumpism stormed the Capitol.
The
insurrectionists were unified by their support for Trump. But many of
them shared another crucial trait: They were conspiracy theorists. And
while hundreds of people stormed the Capitol, there are millions of Americans who share their views. There is no doubt: The United States has a serious problem with pathological political delusions.
So, do we have any hope of deprogramming the millions of Americans who are devoted to dangerous lunacy? Don’t hold your breath.
Psychologists
and political scientists have been interested in conspiracy theories
for decades, but their research has taken on new urgency. And what is
clear from their findings is this: Once people have gone far enough down
the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking, it can be nearly impossible
to get them back out.
There
are a few reasons conspiracy theories are so “sticky” once they’re in
someone’s head. First, conspiracy theorists are far more likely to have a
Manichaean worldview,
meaning they interpret everything as a battle between good and evil.
That makes it harder for dispassionate evidence-based arguments to break
through. (For QAnon believers, Trump is the central superhero in an
epic saga to vanquish a shadowy cabal.)
Second,
those who seek to debunk conspiracy theories are precisely the people
that true believers distrust. If someone believes the media is
controlled by sinister but unseen puppet masters, fact checks from CNN
will never convince them they’re wrong.
WaPo | Months-long lockdowns.
Entire city populations herded through the streets for mandatory
testing. The people of China could be forgiven for thinking they had
seen it all during the coronavirus pandemic.
But
now they face a new indignity: the addition of anal swabs — yes, you
read that right — to the testing regimen for those in quarantine.
Chinese state media outlets introduced the new protocol
in recent days, prompting widespread discussion and some outrage. Some
Chinese doctors say the science is there. Recovering patients, they say,
have continued to test positive through samples from the lower
digestive tract days after nasal and throat swabs came back negative.
Yet for many, it seemed a step too far in government intrusions after a year and counting of a dignity-eroding pandemic.
“Everyone
involved will be so embarrassed,” one user in Guangdong province said
Wednesday on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. In a Weibo poll,
80 percent of respondents said they “could not accept” the invasive
method. Fist tap Dale.
pitt.edu | For a long time, philosophers of science have expressed little interest
in the so-called demarcation project that occupied the pioneers of their
field, and most now concur that terms like “pseudoscience” cannot be
defined in any meaningful way. However, recent years have witnessed a
revival of philosophical interest in demarcation. In this paper, I argue
that, though the demarcation problem of old leads to a dead-end, the
concept of pseudoscience is not going away anytime soon, and deserves a
fresh look. My approach proposes to naturalize and down-size the
concept, anchoring it to real-life doctrines and fields of inquiry.
First, I argue against the definite article “the” in “the demarcation
problem”, distinguishing between territorial and normative demarcation,
and between different failures and shortcomings in science apart from
pseudoscience (such as fraudulent or faulty research). Next, I argue
that pseudosciences can be fruitfully regarded as simulacra of science,
doctrines that are not epistemically warranted but whose proponents try
to create the impression that they are. In this element of imitation of
mimicry, I argue, lies the clue to their common identity. Despite the
huge variety of doctrines gathered under the rubric of “pseudoscience”,
and the wide range of defects from which they suffer, pseudosciences all
engage in similar strategies to create an impression of epistemic
warrant. The indirect, symptomatic approach defended here leads to a
general characterization of pseudosciences in all domains of inquiry,
and to a useful diagnostic tool.
jeanettecespinoza | I
grew up in a predominately white suburb and as a child and teenager, I
wasn’t immediately aware of the racism I was experiencing. On the
surface, it appeared we were all on a level playing field. I lived next
door to white people, had white friends, was a cheerleader along-side
white girls, acted in plays with white people, and even had sleep-overs
at white people’s homes. To me, I was welcomed into white spaces so my
exposure to white supremacy was minimal.
But this bubble of protection was broken during my sophomore year when I began to reflect on my high school experience.
I was a cheerleader, but I was the only Black girl on the squad.
I was an actor, but the roles I played were designed for white characters.
I
was invited to sleep-overs but was often either the only Black girl or
one or two out of the fifteen or twenty girls in attendance.
Of
the white friends I had, I could probably be counted as their only
Black friend. While I knew many white people, for most of them I was
their only exposure to someone of a different ethnic background on a
regular basis.
The playing field was anything but level.
When
this became evident to me, I approached our guidance counselor to ask
about creating a Black studies group where Black students could come
together and share experiences and white students could come to learn
more about our culture and world views. The counselor, who was a white
woman, welcomed my suggestions and offered to facilitate the group. I
was beyond excited that we would be doing something to make a positive
difference and couldn’t wait to get started.
But
when the group began, only a few Black people showed up, and no white
people came at all. It was great getting together with my Black friends
to discuss our experiences, but this was something we did all the time
when we got together. My objective was to help create a space where
white people would begin to understand our stories and use their
privilege to create more all-inclusive spaces, but there was zero desire
to make this happen.
After
one meeting, I stayed after to talk to the counselor about my
frustration with the lack of white participation and her answer has
stayed with me for decades:
“It’s
a brave effort, Jeanette, but realistically, it's hard for white people
to reckon with racial disparity. It’s a lot to ask young white people
who have been sheltered from adversity to talk about the difficulties
Black people have to deal with. Most probably aren’t equipped to deal
with that much pain and trauma.”
Even as a fifteen-year-old I remember thinking if it's too much for them to just discuss it, what about those of us who have to deal
with it and will experience it for the rest of our lives? That day it
became clear to me that the feelings of white people took precedence
over my actual pain and suffering, and at that moment, my innocence and
open view of the world was forever compromised.
The article is almost incomprehensible. There’s an academic-style jargon at work about anti-racism that is so post-modern that it’s impossible to penetrate unless you’re reading the latest and greatest books about your own privilege.
Like a lot of post-modernist rhetoric posing as scientific, these passages could benefit from saying what they mean. It’s unreadable otherwise:
tressiemcphd | These explicit white racial identities are kind of what we wanted to have happen. Only an explicit identity can be named and negotiated, ideally to better social outcomes. The confusion seems to be a latent belief that white racial identities are only progressive, that is that they get better as they are surfaced. Which, uh-oh. Nope. We are watching clashes of white racial identities, between explicit and implicit frames, worked out through implied loyalties of kinship and resource-sharing.
A poor woman on Twitter last night was crying in response to this similar story, from the Associated Press. It featured a series of gut-wrenching nut graphs like this one:
Democratic
voter Rosanna Guadagno, 49, said her brother disowned her after she
refused to support Trump four years ago. Last year her mother suffered a
stroke, but her brother — who lived in the same California city as her
mother — did not let her know when their mother died six months later.
She was told the news after three days in an email from her
sister-in-law.
I have been mildly surprised by their surprise,
whether the shock is knowing that families are not infinitely resilient
or that politics can matter more than kin, I’m not sure. I put together
a string of thoughts on Twitter in response to one such story:
I have a 3/4 baked argument about what’s going on with these “a nation/family divided” stories. Maybe I should jot it down quickly.
I
want to focus a bit on the break-up with whiteness thing. I want to
focus on that bit because I fear it has gotten lost in the recent racial
awakening among white Americans. I am not being cute when I say that I
do not know if the “how to be a better white person” genre of books,
articles, reading groups, and self-help communities cover “the
break-up”. I really do not know. I do not pay that genre a great deal of
attention because I am not the audience. It is not, as I say, my
ministry.
Despite
not being my ministry, I do empathize with citizen-learners who are
struggling with the course material. It is the pedagogue in me. If no
one else has mentioned it (or, you missed that day in class), I want to
be very clear: breaking up with whiteness is absolutely the end game of
all anti-racist, humanist, post-racism work.
blackenterprise | White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday it’s important that “our money … reflect the history and diversity of our country, and Harriet Tubman’s image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that. So we’re exploring ways to speed up that effort.”
Former President Barack Obama initiated the effort during his second term in 2016, but the initiative froze during former President Donald Trump’s one term as he called the move “pure political correctness,” and suggested putting Tubman on the $2 bill. Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin added the change would not be made until after 2028.
Tubman, who was born into slavery sometime in the 1800s, eventually
escaped to Pennsylvania in 1849 and went on to make 13 missions on the
Underground Railroad to free more than 70 slaves.
In order to do this, Tubman relied on a bevy of trusted people, both
Black and white; disguises; and secret codes used in letters to others.
Tubman even carried a gun with her on missions to protect herself
from slave catchers and to intimidate runaways who changed their minds
about being freed, risking the safety of others.
In 2016, Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of African American History and Culture told NPR what it
would mean to see Tubman’s photo on a piece of U.S. currency.
“For me, having Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill really says, first of
all, that America realizes that it’s not the same country that it once
was — that it’s a place where diversity matters,” Bunch told All Things Considered. “And it allows us to make a hero out of someone like Harriet Tubman, who deserves to be a hero.”
medium | Fortunately,
we people of colour can now follow Cristina’s leadership. Will she hand
out “multiracial blackness” cards to white people who toe the line?
Should the people of colour who voted for Trump wear a mark (perhaps a
brand of some kind) so that we can identify and shun them? Does Cristina
plan to distribute a list of acceptable opinions so that us poor,
confused black folks don’t accidentally think something which costs us
our blackness privileges? I can’t wait to learn more about how all of
this works.
In
the meantime, I’m just happy to see people of colour being infantilised
and marginalised in this way. Surely we can all agree that the best way
to treat those with differing opinions isn’t to focus on our common
ground and try to understand each other but to discard them not only
politically, but racially. By erasing the identity of everybody we
disagree with, we can ensure that people of colour become the homogenous
mass of groupthink Cristina imagines us to be.
Only one small shred of doubt remains. It’s true that I don’t understand how anybody, of any colour,
believes Trump’s lies. I don’t understand why anybody would want him to
represent America on the world stage. And I certainly don’t understand
how anybody could be surprised that a president whose approval rating never made it above fifty percent
and who presided over the deaths of more than 300,000 Americans during
an election year, lost an election. But my first instinct when I come
across these people isn’t to invalidate them.
Sure,
sometimes it’s downright unpleasant to engage with people who think
differently. It’s tempting to take refuge in the idea that we have
nothing in common or that they’re hopelessly deranged. But if we find
the courage and decency to talk in good faith, even the most repulsive people can surprise us.
Speaking
of surprises, in a shocking turn of events (by which I mean a wholly
predictable turn of events for anybody who’s noticed the trend of white
guilt being twisted into deeper, more virulent strains of racism),
Cristina is herself white*. And learning that she must automatically be
invested in “a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section
of the population is premised on the debasement of others,” comes as a
huge relief.
Because
as revolutionary as the following statement might seem, I think people
of colour should be able to disagree. I believe that the colour of your
skin says nothing about the values and opinions you must hold. And while
I wish that we could all get along, I’m willing to sit down and debate
respectfully when we don’t. Because if I had to
choose, I’d much rather deal with a person of colour who I disagree with
than a white person who thinks we need to meet her standards to be who
we are.
NPR | The chairman of the hate group The Proud Boys identifies as
Afro-Cuban. One of the organizers of the pro-Trump extremist group Stop
the Steal is Black and Arab. Christina Beltran is a professor of social
and cultural analysis at New York University. And she uses the term
multiracial whiteness to explain why some groups who are disdained by
white supremacists embrace white power movements. And she joins us now
to explain. Welcome to the program.
CRISTINA BELTRAN: Great. Thank you so much for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what do you mean by multiracial whiteness?
BELTRAN: So there's been a whole lot of people thinking and
theorizing about white supremacy. And all of these scholars share a view
that I share, that whiteness is not the same thing as white people and
that whiteness is actually better understood as a political project that
has emerged historically, and that is dynamic and that is always
changing. And so whiteness as an ideology is rooted in America's history
of white supremacy - right? - which has to do with the legacy of
slavery or Indigenous dispossession or Jim Crow. And I think it's
important to realize just how long in this country legal discrimination
was not simply culturally acceptable but legally authorized. And so
we've only been practicing a more consistent form of legal equality for a
relatively short time since the 1960s. So Americans have often learned
how to create their own sense of belonging through violence and through
the exclusion of certain groups and populations.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what you're saying, essentially, is that
people of other races and ethnicities want to benefit from white
privilege by supporting it.
BELTRAN: Right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So we should note that you wrote an op-ed
recently in The Washington Post about this, and it stirred up a heated
debate on social media. (laughter).
BELTRAN: Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to read what you wrote in part. (Reading)
For voters who see the very act of acknowledging one's racial identity
as itself racist, the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their
desired approach to colorblind individualism.
WaPo | The
Trump administration’s anti-immigration, anti-civil rights stance has
made it easy to classify the president’s loyalists as a homogenous mob
of white nationalists. But take a look at the FBI’s posters showing
people wanted in the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol: Among
the many White faces are a few that are clearly Latino or African
American.
Such diversity highlights the fact that President Trump’s share of the Latino vote in November actually rose over 2016,
notwithstanding years of incendiary rhetoric targeting Mexicans and
other Latino communities. Yes, Trump’s voters — and his mob — are
disproportionately White, but one of the more unsettling exit-poll data
points of the 2020 election was that a quarter to a third of Latino
voters voted to reelect Trump.
And
while the vast majority of Latinos and an overwhelming majority of
African American voters supported the Biden-Harris ticket and were
crucial to its success, many Black and brown voters have family and
friends who fervently backed the MAGA policy agenda, including its
delusions and conspiracy theories.
One of the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” movement is Ali Alexander, a Trump supporter who identifies as Black and Arab. The chairman of the neo-fascist Proud Boys is Enrique Tarrio,
a Latino raised in Miami’s Little Havana who identifies as Afro-Cuban;
when he arrived in Washington for the Jan. 6 march, he was arrested for
allegedly burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a Black church
the month before.
What
are we to make of Tarrio — and, more broadly, of Latino voters inspired
by Trump? And what are we to make of unmistakably White mob violence
that also includes non-White participants? I call this phenomenon
multiracial whiteness — the promise that they, too, can lay claim to the
politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.
theintercept |Elly Page had never seen anything like
what’s happened in recent days. A senior legal adviser at the
International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, Page has been tracking the
proliferation of anti-protest bills across the U.S. since Donald Trump
became president in 2017. “The number of bills we have seen in the past
three weeks is unprecedented,” she said.
Since the day of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, at
least nine states have introduced 14 anti-protest bills. The bills,
which vary state by state, contain a dizzying array of provisions that
serve to criminalize participation in disruptive protests. The measures
range from barring demonstrators from public benefits or government jobs
to offering legal protections to those who shoot or run over
protesters. Some of the proposals would allow protesters to be held
without bail and criminalize camping. A few bills seek to prevent local
governments from defunding police.
The pushes by close to a fifth of state legislatures are part of a pattern that began to pick up speed after the summer’s uprisings
in response to the police killing of George Floyd, which in many
communities included significant property damage. In a handful of
states, lawmakers did what they often do: introduced new legislation —
however unnecessary — to show that they were responding to their
constituents’ concerns.
The rate of new bills being offered sped up dramatically this month as lawmakers kicked off their legislative sessions
at the very moment that Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Bills quickly arose in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota,
Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island.
“There has generally been an uptick at the beginning of odd-numbered
years, when most states begin their biennial legislative sessions. But
this year beats prior recent years,” Page said in an email. Since
January 1, she noted that 11 state legislatures have introduced 17
bills, including those filed before the Capitol insurrection. “Compare
that to 0 during the same period in 2020, 9 in 2019, 5 in 2018, and 13
in 2017,” she said, adding that the 2017 spike was mostly due to North
Dakota responding to that winter’s Standing Rock protests.
Because of state legislatures’ part-time schedules, most legislative
sessions were over by late last summer, leaving insufficient time to
pass bills that responded to the uprisings against police brutality. “We
expected to see some bills this month, as state legislatures
reconvened, but the number of bills and their severity is still
shocking,” she said.
In Florida, lawmakers have latched on to the insurrection at the
Capitol to justify a bill they’d been working on for months. “Lawmakers
may be trying to take advantage of the moment and the visuals of the
violent and destructive Capitol scene, to make their case — to the
public and to fellow lawmakers — that these draconian new measures are
necessary,” said Page.
summit |An academic study carried out by researchers in the US and
Germany has concluded that big-tech elites are completely different to
all other people on the planet, and can be placed in their own class.
“Our research contributes to closing a research gap in societies with rising inequalities,” note the authors of the study from two German universities and the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies in New York.
The research
centres around analysing language used in close to 50,000 tweets and
other online statements by 100 of the richest tech-elites as listed by
Forbes.
The researchers conclude that big-tech elites such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates
display a ‘meritocratic’ worldview, meaning they do not see wealth as a
source of their influence or success, but rather believe their innate
abilities and more altruistic beliefs have enabled them to achieve
power.
“We find that the 100 richest members of the tech world reveal
distinctive attitudes that set them apart both from the general
population and from other wealthy elites,” the study states.
The researchers noted that the study had limitations, ironically
owing to the fact that they were not able to access language used by all
the top 100 tech-elites because Twitter is banned in China.
The Twitter accounts they were able to access could also be managed
by PR professionals and are obviously public projections of how the tech
elites want to be thought of by the public at large, therefore the
language used may be ‘strategic’.
Nevertheless, the findings go some way to explaining why big-tech elites are so inclined to censor and de-platform those who hold world views at odds with their own.
The emergence of a new tech elite in Silicon Valley and beyond raises
questions about the economic reach, political influence, and social
importance of this group. How do these inordinately influential people
think about the world and about our common future? In this paper, we
test a) whether members of the tech elite share a common, meritocratic
view of the world, b) whether they have a “mission” for the future, and
c) how they view democracy as a political system. Our data set consists
of information about the 100 richest people in the tech world, according
to Forbes, and rests on their published pronouncements on Twitter, as
well as on their statements on the websites of their philanthropic
endeavors. Automated “bag-of-words” text and sentiment analyses reveal
that the tech elite has a more meritocratic view of the world than the
general US Twitter-using population. The tech elite also frequently
promise to “make the world a better place,” but they do not differ from
other extremely wealthy people in this respect. However, their
relationship to democracy is contradictory. Based on these results, we
conclude that the tech elite may be thought of as a “class for itself”
in Marx’s sense—a social group that shares particular views of the
world, which in this case means meritocratic, missionary, and
inconsistent democratic ideology.
WaPo | The
First Amendment prevents law enforcement from surveilling or
investigating Americans based solely on their political views, even if
the views are racist or anti-government. While the law makes it a crime
to provide “material support” to specially designated foreign terrorist
organizations, there is no parallel for domestic groups that harbor
extreme positions. There is not even a particular criminal charge for
domestic terrorism, though the concept is defined in federal law.
Some
analysts have suggested that the United States could try to pass a law
that criminalizes support of certain domestic organizations. Doing so,
though, would probably draw legal challenges. And many far-right
organizations that have demonstrated a propensity for violence are so
loosely organized that they might not meet the criteria for an official
designation.
“We
really do want to be very careful about criminalizing ideologies, no
matter how poisonous and awful,” said David Kris, a former senior
Justice Department official and the founder of Culper Partners, a
consulting firm. “You’re entitled to have an opinion and entitled to
express that opinion no matter how noxious. But when you cross the line
from having or expressing an ideology to acting on it in ways that are
violent, you’ve crossed the line.”
Neumann
said the government should formally study the issue, and focus on
public education to help dispel debunked claims — like those promulgated
by QAnon, an extremist ideology that the FBI has deemed a domestic
terrorism threat — that have enthralled Trump supporters. Charging and
publicly describing the evidence against those who participated in the
riot will help, Neumann said, but she asserted that Republicans must
take responsibility for their role in stoking the attack.
“We
can’t even agree to what happened on Jan. 6, and you have people
sitting in the Senate, sitting in the House, who helped it happen,”
Neumann said. “I would hope if they take the right step, and acknowledge
the wrong done, apologize to their constituents for being complicit in
the lie, then that creates space for unity. But if you skip the step of
accountability, if you skip the step of being introspective and
acknowledging your role in the deception, your role in not standing up
to Trump before now, then I don’t know that the people in the center and
on the left are that interested in fake unity.”
McCord,
the former Justice Department official, said she favors passing a law
that specifically makes domestic terrorism a crime, which could allow
the FBI to open more investigations and prosecutors to push for more
significant sentences.
But,
McCord noted, the FBI already can initiate investigations of suspected
domestic terrorists — including using wiretaps and other strong
surveillance measures — whenever they threaten violence or another
crime. And many domestic extremists, she said, are doing so in public
and online.
“Plotting
acts of violence is not First Amendment protected, and once any
criminal activity — even if it’s not violence — is discussed, that’s a
predicate for investigation,” McCord said.
MTONews | Kevin Samuels is one of most popular dating gurus on Youtube, and today he's going viral MTO News can report.
Kevin has a very unique style of offering dating advice. Much of his advice, which is aimed at Black women, centers around telling Black women they should lower their dating standards. According to Kevin, Black women have unrealistic expectations when it comes to dating.
But it's not Kevin's advice that has people talking, it's his new much younger girlfriend. Kevin, who is 55, posted new pics online suggesting that he's now dating a 29 year old IG model.
He posted pics of her online:
whispersofawomanist | Earlier this month, self-proclaimed image consultant Kevin Samuels went viral for an on-air session
he had with a black female client. In the session, Samuels responded to
his client’s want for a man that brings home a six-figure income. The
client, a thirty-five-year-old woman who makes six figures herself, has a
teenaged son. Samuels contended that the client did not qualify for the
men that she desires. To clarify here, Samuel’s use of the word
“qualify” speaks specifically to the client’s physical appearance and
her status as a mother— a status he deems social suicide to her desire
partner and lifestyle.
I will be honest and say that few things make me feel as disappointed
and upset as the inauthentic aesthetic that has engulfed much of the
black female optic. From weaves to the false eyelashes and nails, this
aesthetic betrays the drastic measures the western world has taken to
assassinate the African-descended woman’s natural aesthetic.
Nevertheless, participating in what I perceive as slave culture, is not
grounds for disrespect. Particularly, it is the critical gaze and
ridicule that Samuels renders that is the reason why black women don
this aesthetic. It is this pervasive and normalized scrutiny espoused
with general disbelief in black female beauty that creates an internal
void, a deficit fictively oscillated with weaves, eyelashes, wigs, and
other social depressants. Rather than using his words to lift a young
lady knocked down by imbalanced standards, Samuels contributes to the
epidemic facing black people with his words and ideology
This brings me to my next point. Black women remain held to
impossible standards simply non-existent to women of other races. When
African-adjacent women approach or interact with black men, the issue is
not whether they are average, a mother, overweight, a high earner,
under or “over” educated; rather, their appeal lies in their
non-blackness. Samuels upholds this imbalance with his praise of
mixed-race and non-black women of all ages and circumstances as better
romantic investments than black women.
Thus, telling a black woman he deems average that she does not
qualify for what women with less going for them could acquire with
non-blackness adheres to the racism embedded in gender. Gender is not a
sister to biology, it is kin to racism, and it functions as another
means to globalize racism under a seemingly autonomous category.
Moreover, Samuel’s implementation of gender as racism illuminates his
plight to actualize the ways of a white man in a black male body.
campusreform |Professor
Glenn Loury of Brown University shredded racial activists for
"bluffing" as they turn a blind eye to black-on-black crime and other
issues in the black community.
Loury
said that the forced silence of black people in talking about these
issues will prompt more non-blacks to speak up, eventually exposing
Ibram X. Kendi and others as an “empty suit.”
Glenn Loury, a Brown University economics professor,
shredded racial activists for "bluffing" as they fail to address
Black-on-Black crime and other issues plaguing the Black community.
On an episode of his podcast, The Glenn Show, Loury told co-host and Columbia University professor John McWhorter that certain issues in the Black community are neglected.
"We're
in an equilibrium, as economists might say,” explained Loury. “We're in
a stable, ongoing situation where there are tacit agreements not to
talk about certain things. Not to talk about Black-on-Black crime as the
scourge that it is. Not to talk about affirmative action as being
necessary because of Black mediocrity, not measuring up on the
competitive edge."
"People
don't want to talk about the Black family,” he continued. “It's an
absolute catastrophe that two-thirds to three-quarters of Black kids are
being raised in a home without a father present in the home, in terms
of the social cohesion of the community. People don't want to say that."
Loury
also explained that the forced silence of Black people in talking about
these issues will prompt more non-Blacks to speak up.
According to Loury, Americans will eventually realize that Boston University Center for Anti-Racist Director and author of How to Be An Anti-Racist Ibram X. Kendi is an "empty suit." At that point, "the jig is up, the bluff is called, and they don't have any cards."
In his book, Kendi teaches readers that "the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
tomluongo | I feel a lot like Amos right now finally realizing I’m walking
through a post-civilizational landscape where everything looks normal
but it isn’t. In his case violent Communists from the fringe of the
solar system dropped asteroids on Earth.
For him this was a step-function change. But for many in our world
the changes happening aren’t quite so profound yet. The lights are
still on, there’s still food in a lot of our fridges.
It looks from where I’m sitting, the markets haven’t woken up to
these changes yet. Because of the size and scope of the changes, and
just how much of their valuation is a reflection of the false
information being fed into them by stupid AI algorithms, the speed at
which this realization is happening is far slower than we want to admit.
Normalcy bias is real. Markets never want to believe that cooler
heads won’t prevail, because they always have before. But what happens
when someone drops a rock from space on us, metaphorically?
If you’re a fan of The Expanse (and if you aren’t you should be) you’ll be familiar with the term The Churn. The Churn is the controlling idea for Amos Burton, whose only defining ethos is survival.
Simply put, The Churn is that moment when, “the rules of the game change.” Which game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. Guys
like you and me, we end up dead. Doesn’t really mean anything. Or, if
we happen to live through it, well that doesn’t mean anything either.
Embedded in Amos’ idea of The Churn, however, is that while
the rules change society itself keeps on keeping on. So many people
right now are trying to analyze the political situation in terms of The Churn, the normal ebb and flow of who has the upper hand in the power struggle.
militarytimes | National Guard troops forced to move out of the Capitol complex told
Military Times they were finally allowed to return late Thursday
evening.
“Because of the MASSIVE backlash over this, we are now being allowed
back into the Senate building,” one National Guard soldier told Military
Times. “We’re going to make a big show of marching back into the
building.”
Another soldier told Military Times that “we were in the Thurgood
Marshall Judicial Center parking garage and they kicked us out of that
parking garage to make us walk half a mile away to the Hart Senate
Office Building parking garage where we can’t be seen.’
Both soldiers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.
The move back to the Capitol came after a tremendous reaction by lawmakers and the public.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, announced in a Tweet
posted at 11:39 p.m. Thursday that she “Just received text from Guard
Commander: the last Guardsmen will clear the garage by 2330 tonight.”
Duckworth earlier tweeted that she just “made a number of calls and have
been informed Capitol Police have apologized to the Guardsmen and they
will be allowed back into the complex tonight. I’ll keep checking to
make sure they are.”
Duckworth said she made her statement after reading a story in Politico, which first reported about the situation.
alt-market | The strategy seems to be this: Demonize conservatives as much as
possible as quickly as possible so that our purge from social platforms
can be rationalized. When we are incapable of defending ourselves in the
public sphere because we have been removed from the internet, the
establishment and leftists can blame us for everything going wrong. The
public would have no access to any other points of view or contradictory
facts and evidence because the alternative media will be gone. We
become the monsters, the bogeymen and the source of all American
suffering.
We didn’t fall into the trap of supporting martial law measures during the BLM riots, so this must be Plan B.
Will their plan work? I doubt it. Just as the globalist rollout of
the pandemic lockdowns and medical tyranny is failing to gain traction
in the US as huge numbers of people refuse to take the questionable
vaccines, I suspect millions upon millions of Americans are already
savvy to the propaganda schemes of the establishment and will not buy
in. But, that doesn’t mean the elites won’t try it anyway.
In early November in Issue #47 of my newsletter, The Wild Bunch Dispatch,
I war gamed the Biden scenario extensively and concluded that if he was
to enter the White House it would have to be followed by a massive
erasure of conservative media platforms from the internet. I stated
that:
“If Biden does indeed enter the White House and take control
of the presidency, expect certain consequences right away: A complete
full spectrum censorship campaign of conservative news sources will be
undertaken by tech companies and government. There is no way Biden and
the democrats could keep control of the situation while conservatives
are able to share information in real time. Do not be surprised if web
providers suddenly start kicking conservative sites off their servers,
just as Bitchute (a YouTube alternative) was kicked off their server for
24 hours on election night.”
This is already happening, and Biden hasn’t even stepped foot into
the role of “commander and chief” yet. The coordinated effort by Big
Tech to remove Parler, a Twitter alternative, from the web completely
was not all that surprising. Luckily, Parler will be back up and running
by the end of the month, but the censorship campaign is only going to
get worse from here on. Biden WILL support and defend the censorship
efforts by Big Tech and the fascist marriage between government and the
corporate world will be complete.
To summarize, the globalists have to silence us before they can
effectively demonize us. The truth is on our side; facts and logic are
on our side. They can’t win the war of ideas if we are allowed to speak;
this is why they are so desperate to silence us.
Sweeping gun control measures will be issued by Biden, but only after
the conservative purge from the internet is close to finished. If
conservatives are isolated from one another in terms of communication,
this makes it harder to organize a defense against aggressive gun
confiscation. Biden will most likely try to exploit Red Flag gun laws
first, this would allow federal agencies to declare anyone to be “a
threat to public safety” without due process, and have their guns taken
away preemptively.
There is an obvious outcome to all of these actions and I don’t think
it’s far fetched to suggest that conservative counties and states will
demand secession. At the very least, conservatives are going to continue
to relocate to red states and red counties, just so they can continue
to do business and make a living without government interference.
There’s no way that most conservatives controlled states or counties are
going to submit to federal lockdown mandates or medical passports, and
economies in conservative regions are going to remain stable because of
this while blue states are going to crumble.
Biden will seek to retaliate against conservative controlled areas of the country in response.
There comes a point when it is impossible for those that value
freedom, logic and reason to live side-by-side with those that are
irrationally obsessed with control. The American constitutional
framework in particular was designed to prevent collectivism from
overriding individual liberties, but if the system is sabotaged through
subversion and the Bill of Rights is violated, then maintaining the
system is no longer plausible.
The best option for a number of reasons is to separate. Secession is
often referred to as “running away” from a cultural problem, but this is
an ignorant way of looking at it.
We are reaching a stage right now in the US where it will be
virtually impossible to voice political concerns without risking
retribution. If you are a conservative, you will be targeted.
thehill | In October, Thomas Weiss and I urged all of us to keep calm
in the face of what might be a violent election and transition season.
We foresaw the need to say, among other things, that the military should
affirm the rule of law and their oath to the Constitution. Sadly, the Joint Chiefs felt the need to do just that last week.
When President Trump extolled “strength”
to a nascent mob in Washington on Jan. 6, he wasn’t talking about moral
force. In militarized societies, the model of political change is often
military. War is the assertion of “might makes right,” the negation of
the rule of law.
Political scientists worry these days about
democratic erosion, when the norms and institutions of previously stable
representative democracies decline. We usually ponder the causes of
erosion in other countries.
Democracy is, on one hand, democratic elections where the people
decide who will govern them, and processes for horizontal and vertical
oversight and accountability. There is also a deeper conception of
democracy — the norms of citizen deliberation, and human and civil
rights that guarantee expression, inclusion and collective action.
Democratic legitimacy depends on the ability of citizens to engage in
public reason. The more democratic a society is, the greater the limits
it has on the use of force both at home and abroad. We don’t take out
weapons to resolve our disputes.
Democratic erosion or backsliding
occurs when democratic institutions, norms and values are gradually —
and sometimes almost imperceptibly — reduced. Democratic erosion
includes the decline of competitive elections, the reduction in forums
where citizens can deliberate and form policy preferences, and the
diminished ability for accountability. The indicators of erosion also
include constraints on freedom of the press, which reduces transparency
and accountability, the unchecked accretion of power in the executive
branch, and the loss of civil rights, including the right of assembly.
Democratic
erosion has various causes. Some blame power-hungry executives who
don’t want to give up power. The question, here, is why democratic
institutions aren’t able to stop power-hungry elites who would
concentrate power and economic resources.
Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman, in their book “Four Threats,”
also highlight excessive executive power but then add political
polarization, racism and nativism, and economic inequality that prompts
the wealthy to mobilize to protect their position.
War and
militarism exacerbate all those things. But more than that, war and
militarism are antipodal and undermining of democratic norms,
institutions and practices.
Celebrating 113 years of Mama Rosa McCauley Parks
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*February 4, 1913 -- February 4, 2026*
*Some notes: The life of the courageous activist Mama Rosa McCauley Parks*
Mama Rosa's grandfather Sylvester Ed...
Monsters are people too
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Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
where. I do know that 1I/Oumuamua is heading for the constellation Pegasus,
and ...
Remembering the Spanish Civil War
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This year marks the 90th anniversary of the launch of the Spanish Civil
War, an epoch-defining event for the international working class, whose
close study...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...