Pre-Modern vs. Modern Discrimination

africasacountry |  By pre-modern I mean the period before the establishment of the centralized structure of power known as the modern nation-state. This period differs from one part of the world to another. In Africa and the Middle East, the nation-state is a recent colonial creation. 

Before the development of centralized power, there were different forms of political powers that coexisted in society. The rulers, whether one calls them kings or emperors or sultans, held one form of political power, which we shall call royal power. In places like Buganda, this royal power could be further subdivided into the power of the kabaka (king), the power of the namasole (queen mother), the power of lubuga (royal sister), and so on. 

But there were also other society-based political powers held by the clans, the shrine, the church, and so on. In the lands of Islam, the mufti produced (i.e. interpreted) the Shari’ah (Islamic law), which coexisted with the laws made by the rulers. The mufti’s legal opinion, though nonbinding, informed many judgments in the courts of law. Thus the mufti was an important political authority even if he held no government office. Elsewhere, the church made its own laws that coexisted with the laws of the kings and emperors. 

This kind of political arrangement in which power was spread rather concentrated in one entity means that there was no single political authority that determined who should be included in or excluded from the political community. An outsider who was rejected by one clan could be admitted by another. A heretic who was persecuted in one village could find peace in a neighboring village. A cultural stranger who was denounced today could be accepted tomorrow. The terms of inclusion and exclusion were contestable, flexible and abstract. There was no permanent or universal outsider. 

The modern state, on the other hand, does two things. First, it centralizes and monopolizes all political power, including the power to determine who is a citizen and who is not. Even if a clan in northern Uganda admits a Somali as its member, the state of Uganda reserves the authority to revoke the citizenship of this new clan member. 

Second, the modern state institutionalizes and reifies the criteria for determining who is included and who is excluded in the political community. In Uganda, a full citizen must be a member of an indigenous community that was living within the borders of Uganda by February 1, 1926, as noted earlier. 

This makes the nation-state an inherently and extremely discriminatory form of political association with no precedent in history. It seeks to dominate society completely with specific emphasis on marginalizing and colonizing certain sections of society. 

To mitigate the marginalization of the minorities, liberals (such as John Locke) introduced the ideas of tolerance within the framework of secularism. The liberal nation-state creates two spheres, namely, the public sphere and the private domain. The private is the domain of religion and other cultural identities while the public is the sphere of reason. 

To ensure peaceful coexistence between the national community and the minorities, liberals prescribe that matters to do with religion, culture, and identity should be personal business confined to the private domain. Public principle, including state law, should be based on reason, not religion or any other cultural prejudice. The assumption is that reason is neutral and objective rather than being socially constructed. How can reason and public principle be neutral and objective in an identity-based state? How can an identity-based state produce a law that is detached from the cultural identity of the state? 

But there is even a bigger problem. If liberal tolerance appears to have worked, it has only worked where the minorities are too weak to threaten the dominance of the national majority. Where the minorities gain some power and influence, they are seen as a threat that must be dealt with. The rising popularity of far right parties in Europe is partly fuelled by the supposition that the minorities, including the Muslims and migrants, are purportedly gaining ground in these countries. 

Indeed, Zionist ethnic cleansing possibly seeks to reduce the Palestinians to small manageable numbers that could eventually be tolerated without threatening the dominance of the Jewish national community. The liberal notion of tolerance only requires the national majority to tolerate the minorities, but it does not ask why there should be a national majority in the first place. Thus liberal tolerance does not offer a meaningful solution to the fundamental problem of the nation-state, which is rooted in the distinction between the national community and the minorities.

All liberal interventions have failed to end ethnic cleansing because liberalism operates within the framework of the nation-state. Liberalism has no critique of the nation-state as nation-state—it only critiques certain manifestations of the nation-state. In other words, liberalism has no critique of the problem itself; it only focuses on certain manifestations of the problem. 

It is this conceptual narrowness of liberalism that prompts political actors to create more nation-states as a solution to the violence of the nation-state. When Jews were persecuted in Europe, the European powers could not think of a better solution than creating a separate nation-state for Jews. The consequence was to reproduce the violence of the nation-state, this time in the form of Zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It is for this reason that the ongoing problem in Palestine cannot be meaningfully addressed by resorting to the so-called two-state solution. 

If such a solution was to be adopted, what would happen to the non-Jews living in the Jewish state and what would happen to the non-Palestinians living in the Palestinian state? Considering that neither Jews nor the Palestinians are a homogenous category, how would the state deal with internal differences in the form of religious sects and ethnic factions of its national community?

Clever By Half - Elise Stefanik Now Caught In Her Vindictive Lie

politico  |  Elise Stefanik’s viral line of questioning of an elite trio of university presidents last week over how to respond to calls for the genocide of Jews didn’t just spark bipartisan outrage and lead to a high-profile resignation. It settled a personal score the congresswoman had with her alma mater, which had all but disowned her in the wake of Jan. 6.

Back then, in 2021, the dean of Harvard University’s school of government said the New York congresswoman’s comments about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election had “no basis in evidence,” and the Harvard Institute of Politics removed Stefanik from its senior advisory committee. Stefanik at the time criticized what she described as “the ivory tower’s march toward a monoculture of like-minded, intolerant liberal views.”

Mitch Daniels, the retired former president of Purdue University and a former Republican governor of Indiana, called it “higher ed’s Bud Light moment” — referring to the beermaker’s divisive ad campaign featuring a transgender influencer — “when people who hang out with only people who adhere to what has become prevailing and dominant ideologies on campuses and suddenly discover there’s a world of people out there who disagrees.”

Republicans, of course, have been the loudest voices defending Stefanik. Daniels, who has also testified before hostile lawmakers on behalf of his university, mocked that the administrators Stefanik questioned retained the white-shoe law firm WilmerHale to prepare.

 

The Three College Presidents Were Right

popehat  |  Stefanik’s purpose was transparent. No matter how the college presidents answered, she won. If they answered accurately — that the question depended on the context - she could shriek neeeeeerrrrrrdddd like a football player bullying a kid with glasses, and credulous people would eat it up. If the presidents answered inaccurately but simply “yes,” she could make her next point: then why aren’t you punishing people who advocate intifada? Why aren’t you expelling students for saying “from the river to the sea”? Why aren’t you punishing people for accusing Israel of genocide? That was her express, explicit purpose:

Congresswoman Stefanik: Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no?  

President Kornbluth: If targeted at individuals not making public statements. 

Congresswoman Stefanik: Yes or no, calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment? 

President Kornbluth: I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.

Congresswoman Stefanik: But you've heard chants for Intifada. 

There’s the rhetorical trick. Calling for Intifada is not the same as calling for the genocide of the Jews, and it’s just dishonest to say it is. Not all Jews are Israeli. Arguing that a particular group has a moral right to violent revolution against the power over it is not a call for the genocide of a group. The argument about when violent revolution is morally justified is ancient. Whether or not you agree that Israel is tyrannical or the Palestinians are unjustifiably oppressed, you can’t outlaw arguments that they are and pretend you’re anything but an absolute censor. The hearing was full of gripes like that — contentions that the slogan “from the river to the sea” should be outlawed and complaints that colleges had invited speakers with radical pro-Palestinian views. The crystal clear message was we think protecting Jews from antisemitism requires suppressing a broad range of speech from Them.

And many people bought it, and now it’s being used as part of the culture war against higher education, and too many of you fucking fell for it.

You might say I am being more than usually uncharitable in this post. That’s because I think people falling for Stefanik’s gambit have been more than usually gullible. They’ve become useful idiots for evil. They’ve become the dupes of people who will wave the banner of “fight antisemitism” while pushing Great Replacement Theory. They’ve become the patsies of people who transparently want to use Jews as an instrument and excuse to suppress speech they don’t like. They’ve become the creatures of cynical, dishonest politicians who want to treat hard things like they are simple to rile up mobs.

Ben Shapiro: Deeply Conflicted Intersectional White Supremacist

dailysignal  |  First, the Left—and university presidents are almost the Platonic ideal of intellectual leftists—believes that Jews are not part of the intersectional coalition of the oppressed. By leftist logic, Jews are part of the superstructure of power, since all success is merely a reflection of hierarchies of power, and Jews are disproportionately successful. Thus Jews cannot be victims.

Then there’s the second reason: The hard Left hates Israel. The Left hates Israel because, like American Jews, Israel is too successful in the region in which it is located. Israel, according to the Left, is a colonialist outpost of the West, and the West is evil because it too is successful—which means that it is exploitative and oppressive.

Hence the Left’s rabid attachment to the idea that calls for Israel’s destruction are somehow not antisemitic, but actually a reflection of a more universalistic humanitarian creed.

Sure, that creed would actually materialize in the death of millions of Jews and the dominance of radical Muslim terrorism. But that doesn’t matter. After all, Israel is the real problem, because the West is the real problem—and we know that’s true because the West and Israel are successful.

According to the Left, radical Muslim regimes that impoverish their citizens aren’t worth one bit of attention. Israel, by contrast, ought to be destroyed.

So, what ought to be done?

First, donors ought to pull their money from such universities.

Second, businesses ought to start hiring directly out of high school and stop treating the bizarre credentialing process of major universities as worthwhile. It isn’t. Chances are better that you’ll get a great employee by selecting a high school graduate with 1500 SAT and a 4.0 GPA than by selecting a Harvard graduate with the same statistics.

Finally, parents ought to stop subsidizing this nonsense with their own children.

The universities are corrupt through and through. Their endorsement of DEI has been a curse to reason and decency. Their politics are vile, and those politics also make the universities corrupt factories of moral depravity.

It’s time to end the system.

Does Scott Adams Have Your Attention Yet?

bloomberg  |  Elon Musk called the media racist after a cartoonist he regularly engages with on Twitter faced blowback for encouraging White Americans to avoid Black people.

While discussing a Rasmussen Reports poll in which almost half of Black respondents disagreed or were unsure about the statement that it’s OK to be White, Scott Adams, creator of the long-running Dilbert comic strip, said during his YouTube show last week that his best advice for White Americans “is to get the hell away from Black people.” 

Newspaper publishers, including Gannett Co.’s USA Today Network, denounced the comments and said they’ll no longer publish Adams’ cartoons, which satirize office culture.

Musk waded into the controversy, first by responding to Adams, who quote-tweeted a Washington Post columnist encouraged by the newspaper dropping Dilbert. “What exactly are they complaining about?” Musk asked in a post he later deleted.

When another account on the social network Musk owns spoke out against coverage of Adams, Musk replied: “The media is racist.”

“For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians,” Musk said in another post. “Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.”

Musk unsettled many Black users of Twitter Inc. last year by repeatedly saying past management had gone too far in moderating content on the platform, and had infringed on free speech as a result. Shortly after taking over the company, he made fun of #StayWoke t-shirts he found at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters that dated back to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Tesla Inc. is facing a lawsuit by the California Civil Rights Department that accuses the company of engaging in a pattern of racial harassment and bias at its electric-vehicle factory. Tesla published a blog post responding to the allegations before the agency filed suit in February 2022.

In June, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a cause finding against Tesla that closely parallels California’s allegations, according to the company. Tesla said last month that it was in the process of setting up a mandatory mediation with the federal agency.

University Of California Unbroken And Unbowed To Chosen Whiteness's Small Minority

dailycaller |  “The biggest problem is that for Jewish students there are two standards for how universities treat harassment … but Jewish students have not been treated fairly,” Rossman-Benjamin said.

In 2022, a report released by StopAntisemitism, which describes itself as the “leading non-partisan U.S based organization” combating anti-Jewish hate, gave a failing grade to both UCLA and UC Berkeley because of past incidents and Jewish students reporting that they felt unsafe on campus.

UC Berkeley Asst. Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof told the DCNF that the university recognizes the “rising tide of antisemitism” and noted that is “one of the reasons we respond quickly to address antisemitic incidents and support our Jewish community.”

“Among the “robust programming” referred to above by the ADL, is UC Berkeley’s Antisemitism Education Initiative, launched by members of our faculty in 2019, “Mogulof said. “We also take great pride in our kosher dining facility—the first of its kind in the UC system; a vibrant Hillel chapter; the broad range of other Jewish student groups; and the aforementioned Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies; The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life; and our Center for Jewish Studies.”

Mogulof also pointed to a 2022 Anti-Defamation League’s statement praising the campuses Hillel community, Jewish program and “Israel-related course offerings,” and explained that the university has a “strong stance against BDS.”

UC Davis also struggled with several antisemitic incidents in the past year. In February 2022, during a Zoom presentation by Israeli chemist Sason Shaik, multiple individuals joined the call and started “broadcasting antisemitic messages,” according to a press release.

Later that summer, four men dressed in black holding antisemitic held banners on an overpass bridge claiming that “the Holocaust is an anti-white lie” and “Communism is Jewish,” according to the Times. Several months afterward in October, several swastikas were found in a first-year-student dormitory, according to a university press release.

A UC Davis spokesperson told the DCNF that the university’s Principles of Community reject all forms of discrimination.

“UC Davis is partnering with the city of Davis and Yolo County to create Hate-Free Together, a community-wide framework to combat the recent string of local hate incidents and prioritize the well-being and safety of all residents,” the spokesperson explained.

All of the incidents at UC Davis were condemned by university leaders, a step that Marcus noted was an improvement from the past, but he also pointed out that many of these statements by UC schools were “weak.”

“It’s a good sign that UC [campus] chancellors are condemning antisemitism, this is an improvement from past years,” Marcus said. “The fact is they need not only to speak in clear plain terms but also to back it up with action.”

Rossman-Benjamin also pointed out that those statements had done little to improve the climate for Jewish students on college campuses, particularly when the complaints had to do with Israel.

“I talked about the sympathy of the campus community when the antisemitism is motivated by classical sources … but when it’s motivated by anti-Zionism nobody cares,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “Not only does nobody care, they actually would get upset if the university were to address it … so there is no motivation, in fact, there is an incentive to complain when Jewish students say, ‘[anti-Zionism] is hurting me.'”

Teenvogue Marketing The Lifestyles Of Useless White Women To Black Boys....,

teenvogue  | The fast food joint where Zuriel Hooks worked was just up the street from where she lived in Alabama, but the commute was harrowing. When she started the job in April 2021, she had to walk to work on the shoulder of the road in the Alabama sun. She would pause at the intersection, waiting for the right opportunity to run across multiple lanes of traffic. 

It was hot, it was dangerous, it was exhausting – but if she wanted to keep her job, she didn’t have much of a choice. “I felt so bad about myself at that time. Because I'm just like, ‘I’m too pretty to be doing all this,’” Hooks said, laughing while looking back. “Literally, I deserve to be driven to work.” 

Hooks, 19, now works for the Knights and Orchids Society, an organization serving Alabama’s Black LGBT community. But the experience of walking to that job stuck with her. Though she’s been working towards it for two years, Hooks doesn’t have a driver’s license. 

For trans youth like Hooks, this crucial rite of passage can be a complicated, lengthy and often frustrating journey. Trans young people face unique challenges to driving at every turn, from complicated ID laws to practicing with a parent. Without adequate support, trans youth may give up on driving entirely, resulting in a crisis of safety and independence.

The most obvious obstacle involves the license itself. Teenagers who choose to change their names or gender markers face a complicated and costly legal battle. The processes vary: some states require background checks, some court appearances, some medical documentation. At times, the rules can border on ridiculous. Alabama’s SB 184 forbade people under the age of 19 from pursuing medical transition. Yet the state also passed a law requiring drivers to undergo medical transition in order to change their gender markers. Though that law has since been ruled unconstitutional by a federal court, the state of Alabama is appealing that decision, leaving trans drivers with no official resolution. 

“It creates this – I don't want to use the cliche, but – patchwork,” said Olivia Hunt, director of policy at the National Center for Transgender Equality. “Not just state-to-state, but even person-to-person, where every person's name change and gender marker change situation is different.”

The cost can vary widely, too. Documentation, court fees and other requirements can quickly tally up to hundreds of dollars. “If you've got somebody who's already in a situation where, due to financial problems, [who] doesn't have access to a car, that might make it just that more inaccessible for them,” Hunt told Teen Vogue.

This lack of access to name and gender marker revisions puts first time drivers in a dangerous limbo. If your name or gender marker doesn’t match your appearance, there’s potential for harassment. The fear of getting outed by an ID (and subsequent abuse) is what some researchers call “ID anxiety.”

“For trans drivers, this is a unique, personal embodiment of stress,” said Arjee Restar, a social epidemiologist and an assistant professor at the University of Washington, “given that the same ID anxiety does not occur to cisgender drivers.”

With that being said, ID law is not the only thing troubling young trans drivers. Public driver education programs have dwindled significantly since the 1970s, leaving much of the burden of teaching driver’s ed on parents. In most states, teenagers must practice for their driving exams under adult supervision, typically a parent or guardian. 

But trans youth often have fraught relationships with the adults in their lives . Hooks, who started practicing driving with someone close to her at 17, often felt like a captive audience while trying to drive. “As [they were] trying to somehow teach me how to drive, I feel like it was [their] way to try to… I would say somehow try to brainwash me back from being who I am,” said Hooks. “They’d turn [the conversation] from driving to, ‘why are you even transitioning?’”

In Alabama, teenagers must complete a minimum of 50 hours of driving with adult supervision in order to get their licenses in lieu of a state-approved drivers’ education course. Hooks tried to muscle through it. But navigating the roads while navigating the emotions in the passenger side got to be too much. One day, Hooks just gave up. “If I'm gonna have this much agony trying to get this done,” Hooks recalled thinking, “then I don't want to do it.”

The alternative wasn’t much better. She didn’t just feel miserable walking everywhere; she felt vulnerable. 

“I always got catcalled, I always got beeped at by a lot of men,” she said.

When Pretty Isn't Enough To Make The Woke Go Down

variety  |  However you might classify Cross’ tone, her particular brand of outspokennnes had helped her win a bake-off for the weekend host slot against two other hopefuls in 2020. She took the job that year — a seat that had been vacated by anchor Reid, who moved to weeknights. In announcing her eponymous show, Cross promised to “touch on politics, culture, humanity, and the inhumanity of some yet-to-be-addressed disparities.” She also pledged to place Black women at “the center” of her program. What followed was a series of blunt and headline-grabbing segments and appearances by Cross in a news cycle rife with discourse over (and outward displays of) white supremacy. Notable sound bites from Cross included an interview with radio personality Charlamagne Tha God calling the state of Florida the “dick of America,” one that should be castrated. Comments like these led to extreme reactions from media personalities on the right, including Megyn Kelly, who has called Cross a “dumbass” and the “most racist person on TV.”

By far the most incendiary reaction to Cross was from Fox News’ Carlson. On Oct. 19, four days after Cross aired her Clarence Thomas segment, Carlson accused Cross of inciting a “race war” with her commentary. He even likened her broadcast to the Rwandan radio station that played a significant role in the country’s 1994 genocide. In the days following Cross’ firing, reports speculated that Jones had handed Carlson and Fox News “a win” by terminating her.

“No other cable news show regularly examined the many ways that white supremacy is embedded structurally and historically throughout American society,” wrote Salon in an analysis of her firing. 

At the top of the year, “The Cross Connection” attracted around 4.6 million monthly viewers, according to an internal research document issued by NBCUniversal and obtained by Variety. Cross’ audience skewed 55% female and 35% Black, an audience intersection that MSNBC has been chasing, Variety reported earlier this month. All told, Cross’ program was MSNBC’s most-watched by Black viewers, second only to “Politics Nation With Al Sharpton.” The week before her termination, according to Nielsen media research, she averaged 605,000 viewers in her time slot and rated third behind competitors CNN and Fox News.

Jones’ defenders called her a fierce advocate for diversity, having hired or elevated journalists of color including Katie Fang, Alex Wagner and Symone Sanders to anchor roles. For many industry observers, the situation has been heightened by the fact that two prominent Black women journalists are at public odds.

“I don’t want to see someone like Tiffany move backwards, and I don’t want there to be a double standard for Rashida,” Rev. Al Sharpton, the host of MSNBC’s “Politics Nation,” told Variety.

Cross’ future is unclear. The question she has inspired — about the question of different standards surrounding Black voices on cable news — continues to inspire anxiety in the many sources Variety spoke with. Last Friday, the Washington Post ran an op-ed calling the “cancellation” of Cross a “chilling signal” to the wider industry.

“We feel the chill,” said one network anchor of color who, of course, spoke to Variety on the condition of anonymity.

Let's Talk About Pretty Privileges...,

glamour  |  GLAMOUR spoke to author and body-positive activist Emily Lauren Dick on the impact of pretty privilege, its' dangers, and why we need to be talking about it.

How does pretty privilege impact us?

“[Pretty people] are perceived to be happier, healthier, more confident, and successful. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy because those perceptions are why attractive people actually become those things. An attractive person is more likely to be confident because of their socially accepted looks, so they present well in interviews and stand out.”

Is pretty privilege dangerous?

“I think that any form of privilege can be dangerous if gone unchecked. The fact that a whole group of people can be treated poorly simply because they don’t look a certain way is extremely harmful to a person’s self-esteem and self-worth. Everyone is worthy of love, respect, and kindness.”

“It’s disappointing that anyone would be treated differently than someone more attractive, but it’s downright irresponsible when companies and marketers are upholding this concept by purposefully using it as a strategy to sell more of their products or services.”

Never afraid to use her voice, Leigh-Anne knows how to call out the BS!

"When companies provide free products to ONLY attractive people (not just high follower accounts) to amplify their brand, they actively exclude people who support them. Marketers must stop indirectly and directly telling their customers that they should be like “pretty people” to get them to buy their products.”

“Beauty and diet businesses have created a multi-billion-dollar industry that is built upon the lie that people need to change how they look to be accepted. It’s irresponsible to continue utilising marketing strategies that purposely leave people out and make them feel bad about themselves.”

What can we do?

“It’s up to all of us to challenge internalised biases about privileged people, especially if we are one of the privileged. We must actively challenge our inner thoughts about how unattractive people are less worthy than attractive people. We must ensure that everyone is on a level playing field, especially when they are not. This is inclusion!"

We must ensure that everyone is on a level playing field, especially when they are not. This is inclusion!"

"How is this possible? Question your beliefs, speak up when someone speaks badly about someone who is considered unattractive, recognise your own privilege, hold public officials accountable, and determine other ways to challenge systems of privilege.”

It's about time we all take some notes.

Never Forget That BLM Was/Is A Warren Buffet Production (Originally Posted 10/13/20)

 Obama's The Poster Child And His Cousin Warren Buffet's The Money Behind Black Lives Matter

tabletmag  |  Tides was founded in 1976 by Drummond Pike, a California real estate investor who named the entity after a Bay Area bookstore popular among left-leaning activists. From the beginning, according to their own documents, Tides was designed unlike most other nonprofit institutions. Rather than building up or spending down an endowment, it sought to become more like a sophisticated piece of software—a financial instrument that would allow wealthy individuals and donors to contribute to the causes of their choosing with more anonymity than is generally allowed by the laws governing ordinary nonprofits.

Recently, after Pike stepped away, the Tides network has taken on a distinctly political role, whose guiding star appears to be Barack Obama. The secretary of the Tides board is Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Obama administration; board member Cheryl Alston was appointed by Obama to the advisory committee of the federal pension program. Peter Buttenwieser, the heir to the Lehman Brothers fortune who passed away in 2018, financed a fund in his own name which is administered and distributed entirely by the Tides Foundation. A “major behind-the-scenes supporter of Democratic candidates,” Buttenwieser was one of President Obama’s earliest high profile backers, helping the then-senator organize his bid for the White House.

Moreover, Atlantic Philanthropies, a nonprofit created by billionaire retailer Chuck Feeney in the 1980s, has directed more than $42 million in grants through the Tides network since 2000. Based in Bermuda, Atlantic Philanthropies was able to participate in political lobbying efforts in ways that continental United States nonprofits cannot. Atlantic became increasingly aggressive under the Obama administration. As Gara LaMarche, Atlantic’s president, said in one think tank address, when Obama was elected “we saw opportunities to assist our grantees in moving forward more rapidly and broadly in a number of areas central to our mission.” In return, Atlantic dispensed $27 million to help push Obamacare through Congress. At the ceremony to sign Obamacare into law, LaMarche stood beside President Obama in the East Room of the White House.

In any case, what’s clear is that there is now a sophisticated and complex structure underneath what many assume to be an organic and spontaneous social movement, one with deep pockets and ambitious goals. “After over fourteen years of learning and over 700 million dollars invested ... the collapse we have been expecting is surely underway,” reads the NoVo Foundation’s website. Right now there’s only this one statement on the site, which is under construction as noted: “Working on solutions now so old patterns of power can’t, once again, re-form to rebuild and continue to repress.”

Who Knew Reinhart's A Jew Until Dan Rather Made It An Issue?

steady  |  Amid the discussion around the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and what it might mean for Trump and the rule of law in America, there is a detail that I worry isn’t receiving enough attention but that points to a dangerous reality in the United States today. 

It centers on Bruce Reinhart, the magistrate judge who signed the FBI's search warrant. As his name became public, he has faced a withering volume of threats from those who believe Trump should be above the law. In today’s America, with the MAGA crowd revved up for attack, that was to be expected. But that attacks were to be expected should not obscure the fact that they are dangerous. Very. The possibility of their leading to violence should not be underestimated. 

Many of these threats focused on the fact that Judge Reinhart is Jewish. It got to the point that the synagogue where Judge Reinhart sits on the board had to cancel Shabbat services:

Antisemitism is on the rise in America, as those who track such nefarious trends will tell you. It can be found in some form across the political spectrum, but it has become a particular hallmark of elements of the Republican Party, especially in the age of Trump. 

In the wake of the FBI search, the New York Young Republican Club resorted to well-worn antisemitic tropes, for example. “Internationalist forces and their allies intent on undermining the foundation of our Republic have crossed the Rubicon,” read their statement, in part. The conspiracy theory that Trump is being thwarted by a global cabal of “elites” funded by “George Soros” in ways that will undermine traditional American “values” represents coded language (and by "coded," I mean as subtle as a marching band through a library) that is pushing a dangerous line of attack. Dangerous on a personal level and dangerous for our country as a whole.

While there are extreme fringe groups who speak bluntly and declaratively of hating Jews, most American antisemitism is less obvious. Republican supporters of Trump say they can’t possibly be antisemitic because Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is Jewish, as were many members of his administration. They say Republicans have strong supporters in Israel, including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They point to Democratic politicians who have been critical of Israel, or others with ties to more overt antisemites. 

All of this is true. But it is not an excuse for what is taking place now. 

It should be noted with emphasis that antisemitism isn’t limited to one political party or ideology. Furthermore, the Israel issue complicates the discussion, because criticism of Israel as a country is not necessarily antisemitic. Many American Jews object to Israeli policy. But there are also ways Israel is spoken of that clearly cross into antisemitic language.

 

Woke Imperium: Identity Politics Co-opted By Neoconservatism To Justify Empire

 

peacediplomacy | The advocates of American primacy within the United States foreign policy establishment historically rely on prevailing ideological trends of the time to justify interventionism abroad. The new ‘woke’ face of American hegemony and projects of empire is designed to project the U.S. as an international moral police rather than a conventional great power—and the result is neo-imperialism with a moral face.

• This is an iterative and systemic process with an internal logic, not one controlled by a global cabal: when the older rationalizations for primacy, hegemony, and interventionism appear antiquated or are no longer persuasive, a new rationale that better reflects the ruling class norms of the era is adopted as a substitute. This is because the new schema is useful for the maintenance of the existing system of power.

• The rise of a ‘woke’ activist-driven, social justice-oriented politics—particularly among the members of academia, media, and the professional managerial class—has provided the latest ideological justification for interventionism, and it has become readily adopted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. These groups now have an even greater level of symbiotic relationship with state actors.

• Professional selection and advancement under these conditions require elite signaling of loyalty to ‘progressive’ universalism as the trending state-sanctioned ideology, which further fuels the push towards interventionism. This combination of factors encourages a new institutional and elite consensus around trending shibboleths.

• The emerging hegemonic posture and its moral imperialism are at odds with a sober and realistic appraisal of U.S. interests on the world stage, as they create untenable, maximalist, and utopian goals that clash with the concrete realities on which U.S. grand strategy must be based.

• The liberal Atlanticist tendency to push moralism and social engineering globally has immense potential to create backlash in foreign, especially non-Western, societies that will come to identify the West as a whole with niche, late-modern progressive ideals—thus motivating new forms of anti-Westernism.

Read the full paper at the download link.

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If Your Political Identity And Pride Celebrations Are Inherently Sexual....,

reddit | Yes, exactly- someone being the minority doesn't mean they should be out of sight, and it doesn't mean that the majority's rights are being infringed by seeing it or having to (the horror!) explain it to kids. One, kids are a lot less fragile than people think, and two, you can't shield them from everything. Like you pointed out, the same people would probably hate to explain the existence of black people, Jews, the disabled/people in wheelchairs/people with amputations/people with heavy scarring, pregnant people... Actually, really take a long think about that last one. Pregnancy is about the closest it gets to explicit sex, because pregnancy is proof sex happened at some point. And sure, you can explain the baby's presence without sex- but you can also explain attraction towards the same sex without sex, too, by describing it the way you would a straight relationship. They're in love, they're holding hands, they're kissing. If you can do one, you can do the other. (Worth noting: the same Texas GOP platform that declared LGBT identity abominations, also says that all children must be taught that fetuses are people and that live begins "from fertilization". How do you explain fertilization without explaining what sex is? The GOP's own platform undercuts their claim that this is about protecting children from sex.)

I understand your reluctance to think of children having sexualities. This is why the split attraction model is used. Have you ever heard terms like "homoromantic asexual"? The model was used for people like that, who don't experience sexual attraction but do have romantic, but I think it would help for you to think of everyone in those terms to understand this. Most adults are heteromantic (fall in love with adults of the opposite sex) and heterosexual (want to have sex with adults of the opposite sex.) Most kids are heteromantic, but don't have sexual feelings yet, which is why they're okay with movies like Beauty and the Beast. But some kids are homoromantic. They don't have sexual attraction yet either, but they do have romantic ones. If you can understand a 12 year old girl having a boyfriend, you can understand a 12 year old girl having a girlfriend, too.

I think you are falling into a fallacy of fundamental attribution error. You, and other heterosexuals, have feelings which may or may not include sex. But LGBT people are sexualized so severely that people try to assign sexual meaning even to us just holding hands or kissing each other on the lips. Our motivations are stripped away by people who insist we are driven only by sexual desire. That's part of the reason "love is love" has been such a big part of our messaging; because we have had to convince people that we even experience love and other emotions separate from sex in the first place.

When we get accused of "grooming" kids (and note that they chose a word associated with child molestation, when they could have, if they really felt we were changing kids into something else, used "converting" which would have worked just as well- this is deliberate) we are being made out such that our existence is inherently that of a sexual deviant predator.

Truth be told, that's another insidious layer to the denial that LGBT youth even exist. If they occur naturally, it weakens the argument that children are being preyed upon. Only by furthering the narrative that this is an unnatural behavior that occurs only in either adults or in children who have been "tainted" by a perverted adult can the narrative be upheld. In other words, people don't call LGBT people groomers because they are truly worried about the kids; they mention the kids because it supports the narrative they have already created.

I hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but as a Jew, I thought I would bring up some similarities in the genocidal language and actions used.

1. You are probably familiar with a certain picture of a Nazi book burning immediately before Hitler rose to power. What you are likely not aware of is that this was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexuality institute, that studied LGBT people extensively. The first successful gender confirmation surgery was performed there. The books being burned in that photo? They were years of studies on LGBT people.

2. Weimar Germany, in the years leading up to Hitler seizing power, was known as the best place in the world to be LGBT. Transgender people were even allowed to get special markers on their IDs to exempt them from gender-restricted dress codes. When Hitler seized power, those IDs were used to imprison trans people. Trans women were treated the same as gay men and given the pink triangle. Trans men were treated as lesbians and, while persecuted, were not sent to concentration camps.

3. After WW2 ended, LGBT people in the camps were sent back to prison to serve out the remainders of their sentences. Some weren't freed until the 1970s.

4. LGBT people, leading up to the Holocaust, were accused of grooming and molesting children. Not coincidentally, Jews were also depicted as stealing and converting children to Judaism and sinful lifestyles, particularly in political comics and caricatures.

5. The current anti-trans movement is symbiotically fused with antisemitism. There are countless conspiracy theories that Jewish elites- particularly George Soros- are funding pharmacies to "trans the children" so they can make money from the medications and surgeries. Anti-semitism and transphobia almost always occur clustered together.

6. The rise of the Great Replacement Theory is also linked to both of these. Jews are accused of bringing the immigrants into this country to replace white people. They're also accused of pushing "the trans" so that white children will be rendered infertile (despite the huge numbers of trans people of color, which they ignore) and drive down their numbers. An Idaho legislator who penned an anti-trans law explicitly says she sees it as an extension of the pro-life debate due to her worries about "teenagers losing perfectly healthy reproductive organs."

7. In Nazi Germany, the role of women was primarily to make more good little Aryans and raise them properly. While abortions were often performed involuntarily on Jews and other undesirables, they were forbidden for white women. There was a high stigma for infertile women.

Taking all of these facts into account, I think you can see how it's hard for a lot of people to believe that the concern over children is actually genuine. It's something much more sinister and linked to a lot of other forms of bigotry, and we are seeing echoes of it now.

You don't call a group of people "groomers" if you want to live peacefully with them. Pedophiles are seen as subhuman, as dangers to society. Not one person on the planet wants to coexist peacefully with pedophiles. (And despite your insistence that they mean "grooming" as in converting, they never try to invoke that imagery. It's always claims of perversion, of sexual abuse- pedophilia without ever actually touching a child.) Once a group is perceived as being a front for pedophiles, it takes decades of advocacy for them to be seen as human beings again- if they are so lucky as to not be targeted for extermination instead.

This is genocidal language. It doesn't have to mean genocidal as in trains and gas chambers. It can also mean things like forcing them in the closet (which is to say: if you let Jews live, but said them going to temple was banned, and didn't let them wear their traditional clothing on the grounds that this was upsetting to children, that would be a form of genocide), taking their children away (there is a growing sentiment that LGBT couples should not be allowed to have or adopt children, and there is only one place that line of thinking leads. If it's grooming to tell someone else's kids it's okay to be gay, then it's grooming to tell your own kids, too, which means any LGBT adult with a child is now a groomer. Not to mention Texas's new initiative to have parents of trans kids investigated by CPS, which DeSantis has indicated he is interested in bringing to Florida), and otherwise making their lives unbearable in an attempt to drive up suicide rates (Trans people already have a 40% rate of attempting suicide, and this is higher when they are in unsupportive environments or those in which they can't access gender-affirming care, which both Abbott and DeSantis have said they want to ban in all circumstances in their states).

Further, there are increasing calls for pogroms against LGBT people from elected officials, those running for office, and/or people with heavy influence on elected officials. This has resulted in a sustained campaign of terror against LGBT people from the alt-right. Just twenty minutes from my hometown, two weeks ago, a U-Haul full of Patriot Front members was stopped on their way to attack an LGBT Pride event. At the same event, there were instances of harassment perpetrated by other groups, including, you guessed it, parents with kids being called groomers.

The LGBT community is in danger right now. I understand people like you who may have concerns, but the problem is that those concerns are often used as a pretext for the alt-right to radicalize people against LGBT people. The entire "groomers" rhetoric, for reference, started as a campaign on 4chan a year or two ago. And look how effective it has been just in the last six months. Five years ago, anyone who objected to LeFou being gay in the new Beauty and the Beast movie was laughed off the internet; if that movie was released now, there would be riots in Anaheim. This is getting out of hand at an alarming rate, and this really isn't a good time to be on the fence or "have concerns."

If It Makes You Sick And Kills You - You May Want To Reconsider Making It Your Identity

rnz  | Days before her death a fat studies conference chaired by academic Dr Cat Pausé was parodied by American conservative figure Steven Crowder.

In a YouTube video watched more than a million times, Crowder pours scorn on Pausé's work and her field of study.

Pausé, who died aged 42 of medical causes 10 days ago, was a fat studies scholar at Massey University in Palmerston North.

Her research and activism attracted controversy and sometimes vitriol.

Shortly before she died Crowder, an American comedian, actor and former Fox News commentator, posted a video to his YouTube page where he, in his words, infiltrates a 2020 fat studies conference hosted by Massey.

Posing as a gender-queer scholar and fat pride activist with a made-up name, Crowder wrote a bogus paper and was accepted to the conference, held online, as a speaker.

A presentation about the paper included false stories of sexual assault.

At the end of his video, Crowder said being accepted without question showed the idiocy of the field.

Comments below the video on YouTube are heavily critical of Cat Pausé and that has continued after news of her death.

Pausé's friend and former Tertiary Education Union Massey representative Heather Warren is not surprised.

"A lot of Cat's research is around how fat bodies and fat people are dehumanised in our society, and the comments online further go to validate that even in death fat people are dehumanised by society and discriminated against by our society."

Warren said her Twitter post about her friend's death attracted only supportive comments, but that was not the case when public figures such as MP Deborah Russell and microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles posted to the platform.

Warren and Pausé had held discussions with Massey about how institutions could better protect academics from online abuse.

It was an issue institutions had to grapple with, because they encouraged academics to use social media to promote their research, yet had social media policies focusing on the conduct of their staff.

 

The Week The Trans Spell Was Broken

unherd |  Not very long ago, the fear of being denounced as a transphobe meant that doubts about extreme gender ideology were confined to private WhatsApp groups and quiet conversations among friends. This is very much no longer the case. Two weeks ago, the Times’s chief sports writer, Matt Dickinson, wrote on Twitter, “Are we really talking about fairness in sport in the transgender debate – or fear and prejudice?”

“Fairness” replied hundreds of women, including some from his own paper. The only replies agreeing with Dickinson were from other male sports writers, insisting that the way the trans women athletes had been treated was “horrendous and disgusting” (John Cross, Daily Mirror ) and “awful” (Martyn Ziegler, The Times) It’s sweet how males always stick together, isn’t it?

Gender ideologues complain that this shift in public tolerance is merely a conservative backlash against trans rights, but they are wrong. What we are seeing is the inevitable result of trans activists – and, most of all, Stonewall – pushing far beyond civil rights for trans people and insisting instead on unpopular and unworkable policies, such as trans women in sport, child transition and any open acknowledgement of female biology.

This third issue caused the Labour Party to have one of its regular internal breakdowns, as its politicians – and leader – became unable to answer the question, what is a woman? And not only could they not answer the question, they couldn’t think of a way to not answer the question, hemming and hawing about it being a “gotcha” question. Yes, it is, interviewers replied, and what we’re trying to get is an answer that a three-year old could provide. Last month, Angela Rayner came up with a solution: “I think we should be taking it off social media and taking it away from commentators,” she intoned solemnly. Ah yes, censorship from the left. That always plays so well! Oddly, only a month earlier Rayner had been loudly insisting that the next leader of the Labour party will be a woman. Presumably that kind of woman-chat is permitted by Rayner, just not what a woman actually is.

The Tories have certainly not been spared from all this. On 30 March, at 2:48am, the Tory MP Jamie Wallis posted on Twitter to say that he’d been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and would like to be trans. Suddenly, his long history of dodginess – from running companies that attracted more than 800 complaints, to being affiliated with a sugar daddy website, to fleeing the site of a car crash – was instantly forgotten and his honesty and courage were trumpeted to parliament’s rafters by, among others, the Prime Minister. It was strikingly reminiscent of that time, in 2015, when Glamour magazine named Caitlyn Jenner Woman of the Year, two months after she was involved in a car accident in which a woman, Kim Howe, died. The district attorney ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Jenner, but Glamour decided they had all the evidence they needed to cite her as the year’s best woman. At least Caitlyn bothered to make an effort: in the sobering light of day, Wallis tweeted, “I remain the same person I was yesterday, and so will continue to use he/him/his pronouns.” So no change at all, then, other than the identity of being trans. Or wanting to be, anyway.

 

The First DNC Attack On Joe Rogan Came In 2020

CNN  |  Bernie Sanders is facing a backlash from some Democrats after his campaign trumpeted an endorsement from comedian Joe Rogan, a popular podcast and YouTube talk show host with a history of making racist, homophobic and transphobic comments.

The Sanders campaign touted the endorsement in a tweet on Thursday afternoon, featuring a clip of Rogan's supportive remarks. 

 

"I think I'll probably vote for Bernie. Him as a human being, when I was hanging out with him, I believe in him, I like him, I like him a lot," Rogan said on an earlier episode of his show.

 

"What Bernie stands for is a guy -- look, you could dig up dirt on every single human being that's ever existed if you catch them in their worst moment and you magnify those moments and you cut out everything else and you only display those worst moments. That said, you can't find very many with Bernie. He's been insanely consistent his entire life. He's basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from."

Rogan, a libertarian-leaning broadcaster with a public persona in the mold of Howard Stern, is a divisive figure who has said the N-word on his show and in 2013 questioned -- using offensive language -- whether a transgender MMA fighter should be able to compete against other women. 

 

"If you want to be a woman in the bedroom and, you know, you want to play house and all of that other sh-t and you feel like you have, your body is really a woman's body trapped inside a man's frame and so you got a operation, that's all good in the hood," Rogan said. "But you can't fight chicks.". 

 

The decision to highlight Rogan's support has divided opinion among Democrats and activists, particularly online, where it has sparked a heated debate over whether Sanders should have aligned himself with Rogan in any form or context. 

 

Sanders' strategic targeting of young, unaffiliated and working class voters often takes him to places, and onto platforms -- like Twitch -- that most Democratic candidates rarely venture. But that practice, when it brings a figure like Rogan into the political spotlight, also carries the risk of alienating parts of a liberal base that, especially in the Trump era, has become increasingly cautious about the company it keeps -- and what that signals to marginalized communities. 

 

On Saturday, the progressive group MoveOn called on Sanders "to apologize and stop elevating this endorsement."

 

"It's one thing for Joe Rogan to endorse a candidate," MoveOn said in a tweet from its official account. "It's another for @BernieSanders' campaign to produce a video bolstering the endorsement of someone known for promoting transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and misogyny."

Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2020

 

Less than an hour later, former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to enter the fray.

 

"Let's be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time," Biden tweeted. "There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights."

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.

 

Stigmatizing The UnVaxxed An Egregious "Identity Politics" Overreach And Governance FAIL!

opendemocracy  |  Neoliberalism was the form of capitalism that came, chronologically, after colonialism, driving markets back into the public sectors of the former colonial powers, allowing capital to monetise and extract wealth from their soft underbellies. Surveillance capitalism, led by the data giants, is taking its place.

As academic and writer Shoshana Zuboff has argued, under surveillance capitalism, the new biggest companies on the planet make money from drilling markets into our souls. Facebook, Google and Amazon profit by turning each of us into an individual cell of their vast, multidimensional spreadsheets, and pinning us into these corners with endless streams of advertisements telling us who we are and what we need to buy to make us whole.

As cultural politics lecturer Ben Little points out to me, it shouldn’t be any surprise that people respond to a breed of capitalism that exists to sell them new versions of their own identities by pushing back, by insisting that that’s not who they are, nor what it means to be who they are.

Data giants, Little says, want our identities to be hard, static and regimented, so we “align more neatly with commodities”. Anything that challenges this, he argues, “becomes a form of resistance not just to traditional forms of conservative hierarchy” but also to the very logic of modern capitalism.

Largely, this resistance isn’t done individually: it’s done through collective exploration and expression. Because while social media tries to profit by selling people versions of who they might be, it also creates opportunities for connections that allow people to discuss and discover other versions of themselves.

Ultimately, identity is never an individual matter. It’s always about how we relate to each other and make sense of society: if I was the only person I’d ever met, I wouldn’t see myself as having a race or a class or a gender. But it’s also about how we’re related to, and made by, society. The construction of how we see ourselves in the world is always an iterative process – Facebook imposes its algorithm and we build our own groups.

And this isn’t new. National identities were largely invented when capitalist printing presses convened communities in the 19th century. Social media allows people to gather from across the planet in their own communities. Gender roles were foisted on people by church, state and capital. More than ever, we are getting together and reinventing them. The class system was built to facilitate control, and racial hierarchies to justify empire, and people like the Common Sense Group feel a deep sense of moral panic when these identities are prodded, poked and pulled apart.