Obama: Now what i'm going to teach you is the Dap.
This will gain you the trust and respect of the black male community.
Biden nods, wide-eyed. “Am I ready?” Obama looks at him for a long moment.
“We can only hope.”
When you unexpectedly dap up the President at Waffle House 🫱🏾🫲🏻 pic.twitter.com/Fu5jsV46Gr
— IG: goodfeetatl (@4oh4dee) June 28, 2024
thecradle | Three months into Israel’s longest and costliest unconventional war, the country's armed forces have emerged as a significant indirect source of pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's extremist government.
This development comes at a crucial juncture, both politically and in terms of security, for Tel Aviv. Amid ongoing internal differences over post-Gaza war strategies and proposed resolutions for Hamas's prisoner exchange demands, the negative shift in international and regional public opinion over Israel's 13-week Gaza assault has generated further stressors.
At the same time, the escalating situation on the northern front with Hezbollah has compelled the Israeli army to establish a committee to investigate the political, security, and military shortcomings that led to the 7 October Al-Aqsa flood operation.
This decision by the Israeli army has triggered a political uproar, particularly from a faction uncertain about how to deal with intensifying Palestinian resistance activities brought on by the formation of Netanyahu's coalition government - which is marked by extremism and controversial decisions, even by Israeli standards.
During a recent cabinet meeting, far-right and nationalist Zionist ministers slammed army Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi's decision to probe intelligence and operational failures leading up to the 7 October resistance operation, claiming that forming an inquiry commission during the ongoing Gaza war damages army and soldier morale.
Some cabinet members rallied to scuttle the selection of former Minister of Defence Shaul Mofaz as head of the inquiry commission, largely because of his role in Israel's unilateral Gaza disengagement plan in 2005.
Cracks in the coalition
The timing of the investigative committee's formation is underscored by Defense Minister Yoav Galant and emergency cabinet member Benny Gantz's vigorous defense of Halevi's decision. They emphasize its importance in learning from past mistakes, addressing security gaps, and preparing for potential wider conflicts, particularly with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Less clear, however, is Netanyahu stance on the matter, despite the fact that he scheduled the session which was originally intended to be about post-war plans — a topic the prime minister appears reluctant to tackle given the potential risks to his political and personal future.
Netanyahu's right-wing cabinet members view the inquiry as a tool to further undermine an already precarious government. They recognize that the findings of the commission could be especially damning for their governing coalition, which, since its formation, has implemented an agenda focused on the oppression of Palestinians living under occupation and the strangulation of their national aspirations.
It is an agenda which security and military experts in Israel have consistently warned could heavily exacerbate the level of retaliatory violence against settlers and inflame the security situation, whether in the Gaza Strip or in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.
hotnewhiphop | These days, Dave Chappelle is known for standing by his non-PC approach to comedy, and his new special is no exception. The Dreamer arrived on Netflix today, raising eyebrows and getting social media users talking. The special features various jokes about the trans community, disabled people, Will Smith's infamous Oscars slap, and even Lil Nas X.
One of Chappelle's jokes centered around him meeting Jim Carrey on the set of Man On The Moon, in which the actor stars as Andy Kaufman. "I was very disappointed because I wanted to meet Jim Carrey and I had to pretend he was Andy Kaufman all afternoon. It was clearly Jim Carrey. I could look at him and clearly see it was Jim Carrey," he explained, citing Carrey's method-acting. "I say all that to say … that's how trans people make me feel."
He later joked that in an attempt to mend his relationship with the trans community, he wrote a play about a trans woman. “To be honest with you, I’ve been trying to repair my relationship with the transgender community cause I don’t want them to think that I don’t like them... You know how I’ve been repairing it? I wrote a play. I did. Cause I know that gays love plays. It’s a very sad play, but it’s moving," he described, "It’s about a Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n***a. It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play she dies of loneliness cause white liberals don’t know how to speak to her. It’s sad.”
Chappelle didn't stop there, however. He went on to joke that he'd now be targeting disabled people. "Tonight, I'm doing all handicapped jokes," he declared. "They're not as organized as the gays and I love punching down." What do you think of the jokes Dave Chappelle made about trans people in his new Netflix special?
thelastamericanvagabond | For those who have not closed their eyes to the integration of leading unreconstructed Nazis, Italian Fascist, and Japanese fascists into the Anglo-American intelligence complex after World War Two this celebration is bitter sweet to say the least.
In West Germany, the head of Nazi intelligence, Reinhardt Gehlen, was given a new job by Allan Dulles as the head of West German intelligence under CIA control.
As Cynthia Chung demonstrated in her book The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set, between 1958-1973, every single head of NATO’s central European command were former Nazi SS officers. And as Swiss historian Daniele Ganser demonstrated in his NATO’s Secret Armies, the Cold War served as the excuse to build a vast paramilitary complex using fascists from Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, and Germany in order to carry out a multi-faceted war on the people of Europe through the organization of terrorist organizations like The Red Brigade and the targeting assassinations of nationalist leaders unwilling to adapt to a new depopulation-oriented world order.
Sadly, this devil’s pact was not something that simply occurred in the wild days of the Cold War, but continues virulently to this day on a number of levels.
For example, modern expressions of fascism can be seen in the renewal of swastika-tattooed, black sun of the occult loving, wolfsangel-wearing Azov, C14, Svoboda and Aidar neo-Nazis in Ukraine today, on top of a whole re-writing of WWII history which has taken an accelerated dive into unreality during the 30 years since the Soviet Union collapsed.
Across the spectrum of post Warsaw Pact members absorbed into NATO, such as Lithuania, Estonia, Albania, Slovakia, and Latvia, Nazi collaborators of WWII have been glorified with statues, public plaques, monuments, and even schools, parks, and streets named after Nazis. Celebrating Nazi collaborators while tearing down pro-Soviet monuments has nearly become a pre-condition for any nation wishing to join NATO.
In Estonia, which joined NATO in 2004, the defense ministry-funded Erna Society has celebrated the Nazi Erna Saboteur group that worked with the Waffen SS in WWII with the Erna advance Guard being raised to official national heroes. In Albania, Prime Minister Edi Rama rehabilitated Nazi collaborator Midhat Frasheri, who deported thousands of Kosovo Jews to death camps.
In Lithuania, the pro-Nazi Lithuanian Activist Front leader Juozas Lukša who carried out atrocities in Kaunas was honored as a national hero by an act of Parliament which passed a resolution dubbing “the year 2021 as the year of Juozas Luksa-Daumantas”. In Slovakia, the ‘Our Slovakia Peoples Party’ led by neo-Nazi Marián Kotleba moved from the fringe to mainstream wining 10% of parliamentary seats in 2019.
Finland has become a new member of NATO which will possibly be joined by Sweden, both of whom share deep unresolved pro-Nazi traditions which are slowly coming to the surface once more as I outlined in Nazi Skeletons in Finland and Sweden’s Closets.
Across the ‘free and democratic’ Trans-Atlantic community, euthanasia programs are coming online at a startlingly fast pace with ever increasing access to ‘mature minors’, disabled citizens struggling with depression and other non-fatal illnesses. In the USA, Biden’s healthcare reforms have revived Hitler’s Tiergarten-4 ‘useless eater elimination’ program imposing cost-benefit accounting onto lives not worthy of being lived.
Eugenics has become once more a governing pseudo science of a fascist elite class of social engineers seeking to breed out undesired traits in the population while reducing the overall population levels to manageable numbers — using the same formulas adopted by Hitler and his collaborators in the 1930s -1940s.
The fact is that a certain something wasn’t resolved on the 9th of May, 1945 which has a lot to do with the slow re-emergence of a new form of fascism during the second half of the 20th century and the renewed danger of a global dictatorship which the world faces again today.
caitlinjohnstone | The superseding indictment containing these charges consists of a lot of verbal gymnastics to obfuscate the fact that the DOJ is prosecuting US citizens for speech and political activities in the United States which happen not to align with the wishes of the US government. The grand jury alleges that the aforementioned Ionov “directed” these Americans to “publish pro-Russian propaganda” and “information designed to cause dissention in the United States,” which is about as vague and amorphous an allegation as you could possibly come up with.
For the record Omali Yeshitela, the founder and chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and one of the four Americans named in the indictment, has adamantly denied ever having worked for Russia. Earlier this month before charges were brought against him, the Tampa Bay Times quoted him as saying, “I ain’t ever worked for a Russian. Never ever ever ever. They know I have never worked for Russia. Their problem is, I’ve never worked for them.”
But it’s important to note that this should not matter. Under the First Amendment the government is forbidden to abridge anyone’s freedom to speak however they want and associate with whomever they please, which necessarily includes being as vocally pro-Russia as they like and promoting whatever political agendas they see fit, whether that happens to advance the interests of the Russian government or not. The indictment alleges that the four Americans engaged in “agitprop” by “writing articles that contained Russian propaganda and disinformation,” but even if we pretend that’s both (A) a quantifiable claim and (B) a proven fact, propaganda and disinformation are both speech that the government is constitutionally forbidden from repressing.
It’s not reasonable for the government to just dismiss the First Amendment on the grounds that it is being “weaponized”. You can’t have your government dictating what speech is valid and what counts as “agitprop” and “disinformation”, because they’ll always define those terms in ways which benefit the government, thus giving more power to the powerful and taking power away from the people. You can’t have your government dictating what political groups are legitimate and which ones are tools of a foreign government, because you can always count on the powerful set such designations in ways which benefit themselves.
Word on the street, and what I've witnessed with my very own lying eyes, information technology CHUDS and medical students alike have been crying like little bishes about the market failure to keep them supplied with their longtime legal drugs of dependency.
Bloomberg | Patients diagnosed with conditions like anxiety and sleep disorders have become caught in the crosshairs of America’s opioid crisis, as secret policies mandated by a national opioid settlement have turned filling legitimate prescriptions into a major headache.
In July, limits went into effect that flag and
sometimes block pharmacies’ orders of controlled substances such as
Adderall and Xanax when they exceed a certain threshold. The requirement
stems from a 2021 settlement with the US’s three largest drug
distributors — AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp.
But pharmacists said it curtails their ability to fill prescriptions
for many different types of controlled substances — not just opioids.
Independent
pharmacists said the rules force them come up with creative
workarounds. Sometimes, they must send patients on frustrating journeys
to find pharmacies that haven’t yet exceeded their caps in order to buy
prescribed medicines.
“I understand the intention of this policy
is to have control of controlled substances so they don’t get abused,
but it’s not working,” said Richard Glotzer, an independent pharmacist
in Millwood, New York. “There’s no reason I should be cut off from
ordering these products to dispense to my legitimate patients that need
it.”
It's unclear how the thresholds are impacting major chain
pharmacies. CVS Health Corp. didn’t provide comment. A spokesperson for
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. said its pharmacists “work to resolve any
specific issues when possible, in coordination with our distributors.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration regulates the manufacturing,
distribution and sale of controlled substances, which can be dangerous
when used improperly. Drugmakers and wholesalers were always supposed to
keep an eye out for suspicious purchases and have long had systems to
catch, report and halt these orders. The prescription opioid crisis,
enabled by irresponsible drug company marketing and prescribing, led to a
slew of lawsuits and tighter regulations on many parts of the health
system, including monitoring of suspicious orders. One major settlement
required the three largest distributors to set thresholds on orders of
controlled substances starting last July.
The
“suspicious order” terminology is a bit of a misnomer, pharmacists
said. The orders themselves aren't suspicious, it's just that the
pharmacy has exceeded its limit for a specific drug over a certain time
period. Any order that puts the pharmacy over its limit can be stopped.
As a result, patients with legitimate prescriptions get caught up in the
dragnet.
Adding to the confusion, the limits themselves are
secret. Drug wholesalers are barred by the settlement agreement from
telling pharmacists what the thresholds are, how they’re determined or
when the pharmacy is getting close to hitting them.
WaPo | Lisa Torres was glued to her phone, watching news reports on the kidnapping last week of four Americans in the Mexican city of Matamoros. She lived in the Houston suburbs, hundreds of miles away, but knew well the pain of having a relative snatched on the other side of the border. Her son, Robert, was just 21 when he vanished in 2017.
As Torres flicked through social media posts describing the Biden administration’s rapid response to the abductions, she grew increasingly upset. Finally, after the Americans were found on Tuesday — two alive, two dead — she took to Twitter.
“I’m so angry I couldn’t sleep, thinking about how my U.S. government acted in Matamoros with the kidnappings,” she wrote in Spanish. What happened to the Americans was sad, she wrote. But at least they were recovered. “This only confirms that my U.S. government can help, and they didn’t, in the case of my son. WHY?”
More than 550 Americans are reported as missing in Mexico, a little-known facet of a broader tragedy that has honeycombed this country with mass graves. Soaring violence and government dysfunction have fueled a crisis that’s left at least 112,150 people missing, according to government records here.
Americans make up a small part of that ghastly toll. And they are a tiny percentage of the millions of U.S. citizens who travel to Mexico every year for tourism, work and family visits. But just as there’s been an uproar in Mexico over the government’s all-out effort to find the four Americans, compared with its far more limited search for its own abducted citizens, relatives of the Americans still missing are asking why their loved ones haven’t been a higher priority for Washington.
“We see that when the U.S. government makes strong statements, there are results,” said Geovanni Barrios, a lawyer whose 17-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, was abducted in the border city of Reynosa in 2008. “But there aren’t only four Americans disappeared in Mexico. We don’t see [the U.S. government] making these statements about the hundreds of other missing Americans.”
The kidnappings on March 3 in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Tex., drew attention in part because a passerby recorded men in bulletproof vests dragging three of the victims into a truck a few blocks from the Rio Grande in broad daylight. The video quickly went viral, and the abductions were swept up in a turbocharged American political debate. Lawmakers in Washington were already expressing alarm about Mexican cartels’ exports of fentanyl, which accounts for two-thirds of overdose deaths in the United States. Some Republicans have called for military strikes on the armed gangs.
Slate | The race-and-IQ debate is back. The latest round started a few weeks ago when Harvard geneticist David Reich wrote a New York Times op-ed in defense of race as a biological fact. The piece resurfaced Sam Harris’ year-old Waking Up podcast interview with Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, and launched a Twitter debate between Harris and Vox’s Ezra Klein. Klein then responded to Harris and Reich in Vox, Harris fired back, and Andrew Sullivan went after Klein. Two weeks ago, Klein and Harris released a two-hour podcast in which they fruitlessly continued their dispute.
I’ve watched this debate for more than a decade. It’s the same wreck, over and over. A person with a taste for puncturing taboos learns about racial gaps in IQ scores and the idea that they might be genetic. He writes or speaks about it, credulously or unreflectively. Every part of his argument is attacked: the validity of IQ, the claim that it’s substantially heritable, and the idea that races can be biologically distinguished. The offender is denounced as racist when he thinks he’s just defending science against political correctness.
I know what it’s like to be this person because, 11 years ago, I was that person. I saw a comment from Nobel laureate James Watson about the black-white IQ gap, read some journal articles about it, and bought in. That was a mistake. Having made that mistake, I’m in no position to throw stones at Sullivan, Harris, or anyone else. But I am in a position to speak to these people as someone who understands where they’re coming from. I believe I can change their thinking, because I’ve changed mine, and I’m here to make that case to them. And I hope those of you who find this whole subject vile will bear with me as I do.
Here’s my advice: You can talk about the genetics of race. You can talk about the genetics of intelligence. But stop implying they’re the same thing. Connecting intelligence to race adds nothing useful. It overextends the science you’re defending, and it engulfs the whole debate in moral flames.
I’m not asking anyone to deny science. What I’m asking for is clarity. The genetics of race and the genetics of intelligence are two different fields of research. In his piece in the Times, Reich wrote about prostate cancer risk, a context in which there’s clear evidence of a genetic pattern related to ancestry. (Black men with African ancestry in a specific DNA region have a higher prostate cancer risk than do black men with European ancestry in that region.) Reich steered around intelligence where, despite racial and ethnic gaps in test scores, no such pattern has been established.
It’s also fine to discuss the genetics of IQ—there’s a serious line of scientific inquiry around that subject—and whether intelligence, in any population, is an inherited social advantage. We tend to worry that talk of heritability will lead to eugenics. But it’s also worth noting that, to the extent that IQ, like wealth, is inherited and concentrated through assortative mating, it can stratify society and undermine cohesion. That’s what much of The Bell Curve was about.
The trouble starts when people who write or talk about the heritability of intelligence extend this idea to comparisons between racial and ethnic groups. Some people do this maliciously; others don’t. You can call the latter group naïve, credulous, or obtuse to prejudice. But they might be open to persuasion, and that’s my aim here. For them, the chain of thought might go something like this: Intelligence is partly genetic, and race is partly genetic. So maybe racial differences on intelligence tests can be explained, in part, by genetics.
wired | Mahesh Vikram Hegde’s Twitter account posts a constant stream of praise for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. A tweet pinned to the top of Hegde’s feed in honor of Modi’s birthday calls him “the leader who brought back India’s lost glory.” Hegde’s bio begins, “Blessed to be followed by PM Narendra Modi.”
On January 7, the account tweeted a screenshot from ChatGPT to its more than 185,000 followers; the tweet appeared to show the AI-powered chatbot making a joke about the Hindu deity Krishna.
ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI
— Mahesh Vikram Hegde 🇮🇳 (@mvmeet) January 7, 2023
ChatGPT is allowed to comment on Hindu deities
But it is not permitted to speak on Isl@m & Christi@nity
Amazing hatred towards Hinduism! pic.twitter.com/ev0LTrhPU6
ChatGPT uses large language models to provide detailed answers to text prompts, responding to questions about everything from legal problems to song lyrics. But on questions of faith, it’s mostly trained to be circumspect, responding “I’m sorry, but I’m not programmed to make jokes about any religion or deity,” when prompted to quip about Jesus Christ or Mohammed. That limitation appears not to include Hindu religious figures. “Amazing hatred towards Hinduism!” Hegde wrote.
When WIRED gave ChatGPT the prompt in Hegde’s screenshot, the chatbot returned a similar response to the one he’d posted. OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, did not respond to a request for comment.
The tweet was viewed more than 400,000 times as the furor spread across Indian social media, boosted by Hindu nationalist commentators like Rajiv Malhotra, who has more than 300,000 Twitter followers. Within days, it had spun into a full-blooded conspiracy theory. On January 17, Rohit Ranjan, an anchor on one of India’s largest TV stations, Zee News, devoted 25 minutes of his prime-time slot to the premise that ChatGPT represents an international conspiracy against Hindus. “It has been programmed in such a way that it hurts [the] Hindu religion,” he said in a segment headlined “Chat GPT became a hub of anti-Hindu thoughts.”
Criticism of ChatGPT shows just how easily companies can be blindsided by controversy in Modi’s India, where ascendant nationalism and the merging of religious and political identities are driving a culture war online and off.
"In terms of taking offense, India has become a very sensitive country. Something like this can be extremely damaging to the larger business environment,” says Apar Gupta, a lawyer and founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights and liberties advocacy group in New Delhi. “Quite often, they arise from something that a company may not even contemplate could lead to any kind of controversy.”
Hindu nationalism has been the dominant force in Indian politics over the past decade. The government of Narendra Modi, a right-wing populist leader, often conflates religion and politics and has used allegations of anti-Hindu bigotry to dismiss criticism of its administration and the prime minister.
amidwesterndoctor | One of the tremendously frustrating experiences I have had during my lifetime has been watching an amazing candidate run for president, be widely liked by the voting base because of their excellent track record in standing up for the working class, and then watch the media systematically torpedo each and every one of their campaigns.
The only person I have ever seen who was able to address this dilemma was Donald Trump, as he took a rather unorthodox approach where he campaigned on the basis of the media being evil. As a result, each time the media gave him negative attention it helped rather than hindered his campaign, and before long he was able to pull the mass media into a symbiotic relationship where it could not help but continually provide oxygen to Trump’s campaign.
The upside of this approach
was that it provided Trump with the freedom to advance populist
positions that went against the vested interests of the financiers of
the corporate media, something very few other presidents have done. The
downside of this approach was that it was incredibly polarizing, and
divided the country to the point that the left was willing to force
through vaccine mandates as a way of getting back at the right. While
it is important to advance populist positions that go against entrenched
interests (and to expose the systemic corruption within the media),
there was a tremendous cost to the political polarization this approach
created we will likely be stuck with for years to come.
Something
that is often not appreciated about the media is that their business
model is based upon getting as much viewership as possible and to
provide content that appeases their advertisers. For this reason,
content that is critical of any sponsor is never allowed to air. As a
result most media programming is meaningless stories that do not
challenge any vested interest and are emotionally hyped up as much as
possible to antagonize the audience so that the audience is drawn into
caring about them.
Given that the largest sponsor of
the mainstream media is the pharmaceutical industry, it is not
surprising that all news content aggressively promotes the
pharmaceutical party line (the only occasional exceptions I know of are
Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham). One of the ethical journalists who
has spoken out the most on this issue is Sharyl Atkinson, who in one
interview specifically noted that she observed a variety of major
changes occur in the media that coincided with her suddenly being
forbidden from ever discussing vaccine safety concerns on air.
It
is difficult to assign blame for the botched pandemic response to any
single party. However, if I have to identify the key culprit, I would
argue that the rigid censorship by the mainstream media, big tech and
the academic publishing institutions was what allowed the insane
pandemic policy is to march forward despite being clearly in opposition
to most existing scientific evidence. In the same way that
pharmaceutical corruption has gradually taken over the legacy media (the
Gates Foundation for example frequently gives media grants to ensure
their massages dominate the airwaves), these other media venues are
likewise highly susceptible to pernicious influence, which is why
independent media platforms are so critical moving forward.
natyliesbaldwin | This article was published by the Atlantic Council – which is basically NATO’s think tank – in June of 2018. Keep this in mind when media and commentators today try to bend over backwards to deny or downplay this. – Natylie
By Josh Cohen, Atlantic Council, 6/20/18
It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote “national patriotic education projects” in the country. On June 8, the Ministry announced that it will award C14 a little less than $17,000 for a children’s camp. It also awarded funds to Holosiyiv Hideout and Educational Assembly, both of which have links to the far-right. The revelation represents a dangerous example of law enforcement tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups willing to use violence against those they don’t like.
Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.
International human rights groups have sounded the alarm. After the March 8 attacks, Amnesty International warned that “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and Front Line Defenders warned in a letter that radical groups acting under “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values” were allowed to operate under an “atmosphere of near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to commit more attacks.”
To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity. Whether this is due to a continuing sense of indebtedness to some of these groups for fighting the Russians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real problem and we do no service to Ukraine by sweeping it under the rug.
The anti-democratic ideology these groups espouse runs counter the values of the Euromaidan. Ukrainians took to the streets to confront former President Yanukovych because they wanted to live in a democratic state where everyone is held accountable. Honoring the values of Euromaidan therefore requires Kyiv to protect all citizens, regardless of ethnicity, sexuality, or political views.
Far-right impunity also represents a dangerous threat to Ukraine’s statehood. It’s been long understood in Western political and legal philosophy that the state must have a monopoly on violence in order to be a legitimate state, and when a state loses this monopoly, society starts to break down. Ukraine’s certainly nowhere near this point, but it shouldn’t take any chances either.
thenation | The DC establishment’s standard defense of Kiev is to point out that Ukraine’s far right has a smaller percentage of seats in the parliament than their counterparts in places like France. That’s a spurious argument: What Ukraine’s far right lacks in polls numbers, it makes up for with things Marine Le Pen could only dream of—paramilitary units and free rein on the streets.
Post-Maidan Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces. The Azov Battalion was initially formed out of the neo-Nazi gang Patriot of Ukraine. Andriy Biletsky, the gang’s leader who became Azov’s commander, once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” Biletsky is now a deputy in Ukraine’s parliament.
In the fall of 2014, Azov—which is accused of human-rights abuses, including torture, by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations—was incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard.
While the group officially denies any neo-Nazi connections, Azov’s nature has been confirmed by multiple Western outlets: The New York Times called the battalion “openly neo-Nazi,” while USA Today, The Daily Beast, The Telegraph, and Haaretz documented group members’ proclivity for swastikas, salutes, and other Nazi symbols, and individual fighters have also acknowledged being neo-Nazis.
In January 2018, Azov rolled out its National Druzhina street patrol unit whose members swore personal fealty to Biletsky and pledged to “restore Ukrainian order” to the streets. The Druzhina quickly distinguished itself by carrying out pogroms against the Roma and LGBT organizations and storming a municipal council. Earlier this year, Kiev announced the neo-Nazi unit will be monitoring polls in next month’s presidential election.
In 2017, Congressman Ro Khanna led the effort to ban Azov from receiving U.S. arms and training. But the damage has already been done: The research group Bellingcat proved that Azov had already received access to American grenade launchers, while a Daily Beast investigation showed that US trainers are unable to prevent aid from reaching white supremacists. And Azov itself had proudly posted a video of the unit welcoming NATO representatives.
blackenterprise | Previously, BLACK ENTERPRISE reported that an all-Black armed group was marching through Stone Mountain Park in Georiga in July for the removal of a Confederate monument honoring Jefferson Davis. Since then, a video of the large group marching with their guns in hand has gone viral on social media.
The group has become more active within the last couple of months leading up to the election, along with recent police shootings of unarmed Black civilians, and they are ready to let the country know who they are: Meet the NFAC.
The heavily-armed NFAC, or Not F*cking Around Coalition, is led by John Fitzgerald Johnson, also known as Grand Master Jay, who started the group in 2017 in Atlanta. Johnson has said that the group marches for racial equality and ending police brutality in response to white-armed militias that have come out in light of the heightened racial tension.
“We’re not ‘effing’ around anymore with the continued abuses within our community and the lack of respect for our men, women, and children,” Johnson said in an interview with CNN. Johnson has posted more about the trauma Black people have endured and how important it is for those in the Black community to arm themselves.
“It ain’t never been grateful Black people in this country,” said Johnson at one of the group marches in a video he posted on his Twitter account. “You can’t fix 400 years of f*cking people over in 150 years!”
The group has also been able to avoid any conflicts with law enforcement
usually coordinating with local officers on the scene to peacefully
march. While many have compared the group to the Black Panther Party who
formed a similar militia to protect Black neighborhoods, the group sets
itself apart by avoiding violence and working with police officers.
Johnson says it is important for the Black community to exercise their
Second Amendment right, touching on the double standard between Black
and white gun ownership within the United States.
jezebel | On Tuesday, a group of activists interrupted the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners meeting, calling for Police Chief Rick Smith’s resignation. One of those activists, Keiajah “Kj” Brooks, delivered a truly incredible speech where she called out the police department for using photo ops with Black children for good PR, and then proceeded to drag every single member of the Board of Police Commissioners individually.
Brooks started talking and got straight to the point.
“Fair warning, I’m not nice and I don’t seek to be respectable. I’m not asking y’all for anything because y’all can’t and won’t be both my savior and my oppressor. I don’t want reform. I want to turn this building into luxury low cost housing. These would make some really nice apartments.”
“So I’m not here begging anything of soulless white folks and self-preserving Black folks. You get one life, and you all in this room have chosen profits over people. And that’s pathetic.
So I’m going to spend the next two minutes reading y’all for filth, something I’m sure nobody has ever done.”
And then she fucking DID.
I can’t decide if it was better when Brooks told one man that he had “nothing but pure apathy seeping through the bulging veins of your paper colored skin” or when she completely skipped over one board member, saying “had I not spent the entirety of the last six months dragging you I would have more to say, but I don’t.”
They ended their time with an almost poetically perfect Bible verse.
“Anyways, I’ll leave you soulless, profit-driven, avaricious, greedy, godforsaken humans, including ANYONE who works in this building, with one Bible verse. From the Bible. Detailing the life of Jesus. Jesus Christ, who was another unarmed Black man murdered by authorities in the book you Hellbound people claim to love so much. ‘What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit its soul?’”
Watch the whole video on Brooks’ Instagram here.
politico | The Washington Post on Friday announced it will no longer endorse presidential candidates, breaking decades of tradition in a...
