blackenterprise | White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday it’s important that “our money … reflect the history and diversity of our country, and Harriet Tubman’s image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that. So we’re exploring ways to speed up that effort.”
Former President Barack Obama initiated the effort during his second term in 2016, but the initiative froze during former President Donald Trump’s one term as he called the move “pure political correctness,” and suggested putting Tubman on the $2 bill. Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin added the change would not be made until after 2028.
Tubman, who was born into slavery sometime in the 1800s, eventually
escaped to Pennsylvania in 1849 and went on to make 13 missions on the
Underground Railroad to free more than 70 slaves.
In order to do this, Tubman relied on a bevy of trusted people, both
Black and white; disguises; and secret codes used in letters to others.
Tubman even carried a gun with her on missions to protect herself
from slave catchers and to intimidate runaways who changed their minds
about being freed, risking the safety of others.
In 2016, Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of African American History and Culture told NPR what it
would mean to see Tubman’s photo on a piece of U.S. currency.
“For me, having Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill really says, first of
all, that America realizes that it’s not the same country that it once
was — that it’s a place where diversity matters,” Bunch told All Things Considered. “And it allows us to make a hero out of someone like Harriet Tubman, who deserves to be a hero.”
medium | Fortunately,
we people of colour can now follow Cristina’s leadership. Will she hand
out “multiracial blackness” cards to white people who toe the line?
Should the people of colour who voted for Trump wear a mark (perhaps a
brand of some kind) so that we can identify and shun them? Does Cristina
plan to distribute a list of acceptable opinions so that us poor,
confused black folks don’t accidentally think something which costs us
our blackness privileges? I can’t wait to learn more about how all of
this works.
In
the meantime, I’m just happy to see people of colour being infantilised
and marginalised in this way. Surely we can all agree that the best way
to treat those with differing opinions isn’t to focus on our common
ground and try to understand each other but to discard them not only
politically, but racially. By erasing the identity of everybody we
disagree with, we can ensure that people of colour become the homogenous
mass of groupthink Cristina imagines us to be.
Only one small shred of doubt remains. It’s true that I don’t understand how anybody, of any colour,
believes Trump’s lies. I don’t understand why anybody would want him to
represent America on the world stage. And I certainly don’t understand
how anybody could be surprised that a president whose approval rating never made it above fifty percent
and who presided over the deaths of more than 300,000 Americans during
an election year, lost an election. But my first instinct when I come
across these people isn’t to invalidate them.
Sure,
sometimes it’s downright unpleasant to engage with people who think
differently. It’s tempting to take refuge in the idea that we have
nothing in common or that they’re hopelessly deranged. But if we find
the courage and decency to talk in good faith, even the most repulsive people can surprise us.
Speaking
of surprises, in a shocking turn of events (by which I mean a wholly
predictable turn of events for anybody who’s noticed the trend of white
guilt being twisted into deeper, more virulent strains of racism),
Cristina is herself white*. And learning that she must automatically be
invested in “a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section
of the population is premised on the debasement of others,” comes as a
huge relief.
Because
as revolutionary as the following statement might seem, I think people
of colour should be able to disagree. I believe that the colour of your
skin says nothing about the values and opinions you must hold. And while
I wish that we could all get along, I’m willing to sit down and debate
respectfully when we don’t. Because if I had to
choose, I’d much rather deal with a person of colour who I disagree with
than a white person who thinks we need to meet her standards to be who
we are.
NPR | The chairman of the hate group The Proud Boys identifies as
Afro-Cuban. One of the organizers of the pro-Trump extremist group Stop
the Steal is Black and Arab. Christina Beltran is a professor of social
and cultural analysis at New York University. And she uses the term
multiracial whiteness to explain why some groups who are disdained by
white supremacists embrace white power movements. And she joins us now
to explain. Welcome to the program.
CRISTINA BELTRAN: Great. Thank you so much for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what do you mean by multiracial whiteness?
BELTRAN: So there's been a whole lot of people thinking and
theorizing about white supremacy. And all of these scholars share a view
that I share, that whiteness is not the same thing as white people and
that whiteness is actually better understood as a political project that
has emerged historically, and that is dynamic and that is always
changing. And so whiteness as an ideology is rooted in America's history
of white supremacy - right? - which has to do with the legacy of
slavery or Indigenous dispossession or Jim Crow. And I think it's
important to realize just how long in this country legal discrimination
was not simply culturally acceptable but legally authorized. And so
we've only been practicing a more consistent form of legal equality for a
relatively short time since the 1960s. So Americans have often learned
how to create their own sense of belonging through violence and through
the exclusion of certain groups and populations.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what you're saying, essentially, is that
people of other races and ethnicities want to benefit from white
privilege by supporting it.
BELTRAN: Right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So we should note that you wrote an op-ed
recently in The Washington Post about this, and it stirred up a heated
debate on social media. (laughter).
BELTRAN: Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to read what you wrote in part. (Reading)
For voters who see the very act of acknowledging one's racial identity
as itself racist, the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their
desired approach to colorblind individualism.
WaPo | The
Trump administration’s anti-immigration, anti-civil rights stance has
made it easy to classify the president’s loyalists as a homogenous mob
of white nationalists. But take a look at the FBI’s posters showing
people wanted in the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol: Among
the many White faces are a few that are clearly Latino or African
American.
Such diversity highlights the fact that President Trump’s share of the Latino vote in November actually rose over 2016,
notwithstanding years of incendiary rhetoric targeting Mexicans and
other Latino communities. Yes, Trump’s voters — and his mob — are
disproportionately White, but one of the more unsettling exit-poll data
points of the 2020 election was that a quarter to a third of Latino
voters voted to reelect Trump.
And
while the vast majority of Latinos and an overwhelming majority of
African American voters supported the Biden-Harris ticket and were
crucial to its success, many Black and brown voters have family and
friends who fervently backed the MAGA policy agenda, including its
delusions and conspiracy theories.
One of the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” movement is Ali Alexander, a Trump supporter who identifies as Black and Arab. The chairman of the neo-fascist Proud Boys is Enrique Tarrio,
a Latino raised in Miami’s Little Havana who identifies as Afro-Cuban;
when he arrived in Washington for the Jan. 6 march, he was arrested for
allegedly burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a Black church
the month before.
What
are we to make of Tarrio — and, more broadly, of Latino voters inspired
by Trump? And what are we to make of unmistakably White mob violence
that also includes non-White participants? I call this phenomenon
multiracial whiteness — the promise that they, too, can lay claim to the
politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.
theintercept |Elly Page had never seen anything like
what’s happened in recent days. A senior legal adviser at the
International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, Page has been tracking the
proliferation of anti-protest bills across the U.S. since Donald Trump
became president in 2017. “The number of bills we have seen in the past
three weeks is unprecedented,” she said.
Since the day of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, at
least nine states have introduced 14 anti-protest bills. The bills,
which vary state by state, contain a dizzying array of provisions that
serve to criminalize participation in disruptive protests. The measures
range from barring demonstrators from public benefits or government jobs
to offering legal protections to those who shoot or run over
protesters. Some of the proposals would allow protesters to be held
without bail and criminalize camping. A few bills seek to prevent local
governments from defunding police.
The pushes by close to a fifth of state legislatures are part of a pattern that began to pick up speed after the summer’s uprisings
in response to the police killing of George Floyd, which in many
communities included significant property damage. In a handful of
states, lawmakers did what they often do: introduced new legislation —
however unnecessary — to show that they were responding to their
constituents’ concerns.
The rate of new bills being offered sped up dramatically this month as lawmakers kicked off their legislative sessions
at the very moment that Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Bills quickly arose in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota,
Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island.
“There has generally been an uptick at the beginning of odd-numbered
years, when most states begin their biennial legislative sessions. But
this year beats prior recent years,” Page said in an email. Since
January 1, she noted that 11 state legislatures have introduced 17
bills, including those filed before the Capitol insurrection. “Compare
that to 0 during the same period in 2020, 9 in 2019, 5 in 2018, and 13
in 2017,” she said, adding that the 2017 spike was mostly due to North
Dakota responding to that winter’s Standing Rock protests.
Because of state legislatures’ part-time schedules, most legislative
sessions were over by late last summer, leaving insufficient time to
pass bills that responded to the uprisings against police brutality. “We
expected to see some bills this month, as state legislatures
reconvened, but the number of bills and their severity is still
shocking,” she said.
In Florida, lawmakers have latched on to the insurrection at the
Capitol to justify a bill they’d been working on for months. “Lawmakers
may be trying to take advantage of the moment and the visuals of the
violent and destructive Capitol scene, to make their case — to the
public and to fellow lawmakers — that these draconian new measures are
necessary,” said Page.
summit |An academic study carried out by researchers in the US and
Germany has concluded that big-tech elites are completely different to
all other people on the planet, and can be placed in their own class.
“Our research contributes to closing a research gap in societies with rising inequalities,” note the authors of the study from two German universities and the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies in New York.
The research
centres around analysing language used in close to 50,000 tweets and
other online statements by 100 of the richest tech-elites as listed by
Forbes.
The researchers conclude that big-tech elites such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates
display a ‘meritocratic’ worldview, meaning they do not see wealth as a
source of their influence or success, but rather believe their innate
abilities and more altruistic beliefs have enabled them to achieve
power.
“We find that the 100 richest members of the tech world reveal
distinctive attitudes that set them apart both from the general
population and from other wealthy elites,” the study states.
The researchers noted that the study had limitations, ironically
owing to the fact that they were not able to access language used by all
the top 100 tech-elites because Twitter is banned in China.
The Twitter accounts they were able to access could also be managed
by PR professionals and are obviously public projections of how the tech
elites want to be thought of by the public at large, therefore the
language used may be ‘strategic’.
Nevertheless, the findings go some way to explaining why big-tech elites are so inclined to censor and de-platform those who hold world views at odds with their own.
The emergence of a new tech elite in Silicon Valley and beyond raises
questions about the economic reach, political influence, and social
importance of this group. How do these inordinately influential people
think about the world and about our common future? In this paper, we
test a) whether members of the tech elite share a common, meritocratic
view of the world, b) whether they have a “mission” for the future, and
c) how they view democracy as a political system. Our data set consists
of information about the 100 richest people in the tech world, according
to Forbes, and rests on their published pronouncements on Twitter, as
well as on their statements on the websites of their philanthropic
endeavors. Automated “bag-of-words” text and sentiment analyses reveal
that the tech elite has a more meritocratic view of the world than the
general US Twitter-using population. The tech elite also frequently
promise to “make the world a better place,” but they do not differ from
other extremely wealthy people in this respect. However, their
relationship to democracy is contradictory. Based on these results, we
conclude that the tech elite may be thought of as a “class for itself”
in Marx’s sense—a social group that shares particular views of the
world, which in this case means meritocratic, missionary, and
inconsistent democratic ideology.
WaPo | The
First Amendment prevents law enforcement from surveilling or
investigating Americans based solely on their political views, even if
the views are racist or anti-government. While the law makes it a crime
to provide “material support” to specially designated foreign terrorist
organizations, there is no parallel for domestic groups that harbor
extreme positions. There is not even a particular criminal charge for
domestic terrorism, though the concept is defined in federal law.
Some
analysts have suggested that the United States could try to pass a law
that criminalizes support of certain domestic organizations. Doing so,
though, would probably draw legal challenges. And many far-right
organizations that have demonstrated a propensity for violence are so
loosely organized that they might not meet the criteria for an official
designation.
“We
really do want to be very careful about criminalizing ideologies, no
matter how poisonous and awful,” said David Kris, a former senior
Justice Department official and the founder of Culper Partners, a
consulting firm. “You’re entitled to have an opinion and entitled to
express that opinion no matter how noxious. But when you cross the line
from having or expressing an ideology to acting on it in ways that are
violent, you’ve crossed the line.”
Neumann
said the government should formally study the issue, and focus on
public education to help dispel debunked claims — like those promulgated
by QAnon, an extremist ideology that the FBI has deemed a domestic
terrorism threat — that have enthralled Trump supporters. Charging and
publicly describing the evidence against those who participated in the
riot will help, Neumann said, but she asserted that Republicans must
take responsibility for their role in stoking the attack.
“We
can’t even agree to what happened on Jan. 6, and you have people
sitting in the Senate, sitting in the House, who helped it happen,”
Neumann said. “I would hope if they take the right step, and acknowledge
the wrong done, apologize to their constituents for being complicit in
the lie, then that creates space for unity. But if you skip the step of
accountability, if you skip the step of being introspective and
acknowledging your role in the deception, your role in not standing up
to Trump before now, then I don’t know that the people in the center and
on the left are that interested in fake unity.”
McCord,
the former Justice Department official, said she favors passing a law
that specifically makes domestic terrorism a crime, which could allow
the FBI to open more investigations and prosecutors to push for more
significant sentences.
But,
McCord noted, the FBI already can initiate investigations of suspected
domestic terrorists — including using wiretaps and other strong
surveillance measures — whenever they threaten violence or another
crime. And many domestic extremists, she said, are doing so in public
and online.
“Plotting
acts of violence is not First Amendment protected, and once any
criminal activity — even if it’s not violence — is discussed, that’s a
predicate for investigation,” McCord said.
MTONews | Kevin Samuels is one of most popular dating gurus on Youtube, and today he's going viral MTO News can report.
Kevin has a very unique style of offering dating advice. Much of his advice, which is aimed at Black women, centers around telling Black women they should lower their dating standards. According to Kevin, Black women have unrealistic expectations when it comes to dating.
But it's not Kevin's advice that has people talking, it's his new much younger girlfriend. Kevin, who is 55, posted new pics online suggesting that he's now dating a 29 year old IG model.
He posted pics of her online:
whispersofawomanist | Earlier this month, self-proclaimed image consultant Kevin Samuels went viral for an on-air session
he had with a black female client. In the session, Samuels responded to
his client’s want for a man that brings home a six-figure income. The
client, a thirty-five-year-old woman who makes six figures herself, has a
teenaged son. Samuels contended that the client did not qualify for the
men that she desires. To clarify here, Samuel’s use of the word
“qualify” speaks specifically to the client’s physical appearance and
her status as a mother— a status he deems social suicide to her desire
partner and lifestyle.
I will be honest and say that few things make me feel as disappointed
and upset as the inauthentic aesthetic that has engulfed much of the
black female optic. From weaves to the false eyelashes and nails, this
aesthetic betrays the drastic measures the western world has taken to
assassinate the African-descended woman’s natural aesthetic.
Nevertheless, participating in what I perceive as slave culture, is not
grounds for disrespect. Particularly, it is the critical gaze and
ridicule that Samuels renders that is the reason why black women don
this aesthetic. It is this pervasive and normalized scrutiny espoused
with general disbelief in black female beauty that creates an internal
void, a deficit fictively oscillated with weaves, eyelashes, wigs, and
other social depressants. Rather than using his words to lift a young
lady knocked down by imbalanced standards, Samuels contributes to the
epidemic facing black people with his words and ideology
This brings me to my next point. Black women remain held to
impossible standards simply non-existent to women of other races. When
African-adjacent women approach or interact with black men, the issue is
not whether they are average, a mother, overweight, a high earner,
under or “over” educated; rather, their appeal lies in their
non-blackness. Samuels upholds this imbalance with his praise of
mixed-race and non-black women of all ages and circumstances as better
romantic investments than black women.
Thus, telling a black woman he deems average that she does not
qualify for what women with less going for them could acquire with
non-blackness adheres to the racism embedded in gender. Gender is not a
sister to biology, it is kin to racism, and it functions as another
means to globalize racism under a seemingly autonomous category.
Moreover, Samuel’s implementation of gender as racism illuminates his
plight to actualize the ways of a white man in a black male body.
campusreform |Professor
Glenn Loury of Brown University shredded racial activists for
"bluffing" as they turn a blind eye to black-on-black crime and other
issues in the black community.
Loury
said that the forced silence of black people in talking about these
issues will prompt more non-blacks to speak up, eventually exposing
Ibram X. Kendi and others as an “empty suit.”
Glenn Loury, a Brown University economics professor,
shredded racial activists for "bluffing" as they fail to address
Black-on-Black crime and other issues plaguing the Black community.
On an episode of his podcast, The Glenn Show, Loury told co-host and Columbia University professor John McWhorter that certain issues in the Black community are neglected.
"We're
in an equilibrium, as economists might say,” explained Loury. “We're in
a stable, ongoing situation where there are tacit agreements not to
talk about certain things. Not to talk about Black-on-Black crime as the
scourge that it is. Not to talk about affirmative action as being
necessary because of Black mediocrity, not measuring up on the
competitive edge."
"People
don't want to talk about the Black family,” he continued. “It's an
absolute catastrophe that two-thirds to three-quarters of Black kids are
being raised in a home without a father present in the home, in terms
of the social cohesion of the community. People don't want to say that."
Loury
also explained that the forced silence of Black people in talking about
these issues will prompt more non-Blacks to speak up.
According to Loury, Americans will eventually realize that Boston University Center for Anti-Racist Director and author of How to Be An Anti-Racist Ibram X. Kendi is an "empty suit." At that point, "the jig is up, the bluff is called, and they don't have any cards."
In his book, Kendi teaches readers that "the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
tomluongo | I feel a lot like Amos right now finally realizing I’m walking
through a post-civilizational landscape where everything looks normal
but it isn’t. In his case violent Communists from the fringe of the
solar system dropped asteroids on Earth.
For him this was a step-function change. But for many in our world
the changes happening aren’t quite so profound yet. The lights are
still on, there’s still food in a lot of our fridges.
It looks from where I’m sitting, the markets haven’t woken up to
these changes yet. Because of the size and scope of the changes, and
just how much of their valuation is a reflection of the false
information being fed into them by stupid AI algorithms, the speed at
which this realization is happening is far slower than we want to admit.
Normalcy bias is real. Markets never want to believe that cooler
heads won’t prevail, because they always have before. But what happens
when someone drops a rock from space on us, metaphorically?
If you’re a fan of The Expanse (and if you aren’t you should be) you’ll be familiar with the term The Churn. The Churn is the controlling idea for Amos Burton, whose only defining ethos is survival.
Simply put, The Churn is that moment when, “the rules of the game change.” Which game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. Guys
like you and me, we end up dead. Doesn’t really mean anything. Or, if
we happen to live through it, well that doesn’t mean anything either.
Embedded in Amos’ idea of The Churn, however, is that while
the rules change society itself keeps on keeping on. So many people
right now are trying to analyze the political situation in terms of The Churn, the normal ebb and flow of who has the upper hand in the power struggle.
militarytimes | National Guard troops forced to move out of the Capitol complex told
Military Times they were finally allowed to return late Thursday
evening.
“Because of the MASSIVE backlash over this, we are now being allowed
back into the Senate building,” one National Guard soldier told Military
Times. “We’re going to make a big show of marching back into the
building.”
Another soldier told Military Times that “we were in the Thurgood
Marshall Judicial Center parking garage and they kicked us out of that
parking garage to make us walk half a mile away to the Hart Senate
Office Building parking garage where we can’t be seen.’
Both soldiers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.
The move back to the Capitol came after a tremendous reaction by lawmakers and the public.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, announced in a Tweet
posted at 11:39 p.m. Thursday that she “Just received text from Guard
Commander: the last Guardsmen will clear the garage by 2330 tonight.”
Duckworth earlier tweeted that she just “made a number of calls and have
been informed Capitol Police have apologized to the Guardsmen and they
will be allowed back into the complex tonight. I’ll keep checking to
make sure they are.”
Duckworth said she made her statement after reading a story in Politico, which first reported about the situation.
alt-market | The strategy seems to be this: Demonize conservatives as much as
possible as quickly as possible so that our purge from social platforms
can be rationalized. When we are incapable of defending ourselves in the
public sphere because we have been removed from the internet, the
establishment and leftists can blame us for everything going wrong. The
public would have no access to any other points of view or contradictory
facts and evidence because the alternative media will be gone. We
become the monsters, the bogeymen and the source of all American
suffering.
We didn’t fall into the trap of supporting martial law measures during the BLM riots, so this must be Plan B.
Will their plan work? I doubt it. Just as the globalist rollout of
the pandemic lockdowns and medical tyranny is failing to gain traction
in the US as huge numbers of people refuse to take the questionable
vaccines, I suspect millions upon millions of Americans are already
savvy to the propaganda schemes of the establishment and will not buy
in. But, that doesn’t mean the elites won’t try it anyway.
In early November in Issue #47 of my newsletter, The Wild Bunch Dispatch,
I war gamed the Biden scenario extensively and concluded that if he was
to enter the White House it would have to be followed by a massive
erasure of conservative media platforms from the internet. I stated
that:
“If Biden does indeed enter the White House and take control
of the presidency, expect certain consequences right away: A complete
full spectrum censorship campaign of conservative news sources will be
undertaken by tech companies and government. There is no way Biden and
the democrats could keep control of the situation while conservatives
are able to share information in real time. Do not be surprised if web
providers suddenly start kicking conservative sites off their servers,
just as Bitchute (a YouTube alternative) was kicked off their server for
24 hours on election night.”
This is already happening, and Biden hasn’t even stepped foot into
the role of “commander and chief” yet. The coordinated effort by Big
Tech to remove Parler, a Twitter alternative, from the web completely
was not all that surprising. Luckily, Parler will be back up and running
by the end of the month, but the censorship campaign is only going to
get worse from here on. Biden WILL support and defend the censorship
efforts by Big Tech and the fascist marriage between government and the
corporate world will be complete.
To summarize, the globalists have to silence us before they can
effectively demonize us. The truth is on our side; facts and logic are
on our side. They can’t win the war of ideas if we are allowed to speak;
this is why they are so desperate to silence us.
Sweeping gun control measures will be issued by Biden, but only after
the conservative purge from the internet is close to finished. If
conservatives are isolated from one another in terms of communication,
this makes it harder to organize a defense against aggressive gun
confiscation. Biden will most likely try to exploit Red Flag gun laws
first, this would allow federal agencies to declare anyone to be “a
threat to public safety” without due process, and have their guns taken
away preemptively.
There is an obvious outcome to all of these actions and I don’t think
it’s far fetched to suggest that conservative counties and states will
demand secession. At the very least, conservatives are going to continue
to relocate to red states and red counties, just so they can continue
to do business and make a living without government interference.
There’s no way that most conservatives controlled states or counties are
going to submit to federal lockdown mandates or medical passports, and
economies in conservative regions are going to remain stable because of
this while blue states are going to crumble.
Biden will seek to retaliate against conservative controlled areas of the country in response.
There comes a point when it is impossible for those that value
freedom, logic and reason to live side-by-side with those that are
irrationally obsessed with control. The American constitutional
framework in particular was designed to prevent collectivism from
overriding individual liberties, but if the system is sabotaged through
subversion and the Bill of Rights is violated, then maintaining the
system is no longer plausible.
The best option for a number of reasons is to separate. Secession is
often referred to as “running away” from a cultural problem, but this is
an ignorant way of looking at it.
We are reaching a stage right now in the US where it will be
virtually impossible to voice political concerns without risking
retribution. If you are a conservative, you will be targeted.
thehill | In October, Thomas Weiss and I urged all of us to keep calm
in the face of what might be a violent election and transition season.
We foresaw the need to say, among other things, that the military should
affirm the rule of law and their oath to the Constitution. Sadly, the Joint Chiefs felt the need to do just that last week.
When President Trump extolled “strength”
to a nascent mob in Washington on Jan. 6, he wasn’t talking about moral
force. In militarized societies, the model of political change is often
military. War is the assertion of “might makes right,” the negation of
the rule of law.
Political scientists worry these days about
democratic erosion, when the norms and institutions of previously stable
representative democracies decline. We usually ponder the causes of
erosion in other countries.
Democracy is, on one hand, democratic elections where the people
decide who will govern them, and processes for horizontal and vertical
oversight and accountability. There is also a deeper conception of
democracy — the norms of citizen deliberation, and human and civil
rights that guarantee expression, inclusion and collective action.
Democratic legitimacy depends on the ability of citizens to engage in
public reason. The more democratic a society is, the greater the limits
it has on the use of force both at home and abroad. We don’t take out
weapons to resolve our disputes.
Democratic erosion or backsliding
occurs when democratic institutions, norms and values are gradually —
and sometimes almost imperceptibly — reduced. Democratic erosion
includes the decline of competitive elections, the reduction in forums
where citizens can deliberate and form policy preferences, and the
diminished ability for accountability. The indicators of erosion also
include constraints on freedom of the press, which reduces transparency
and accountability, the unchecked accretion of power in the executive
branch, and the loss of civil rights, including the right of assembly.
Democratic
erosion has various causes. Some blame power-hungry executives who
don’t want to give up power. The question, here, is why democratic
institutions aren’t able to stop power-hungry elites who would
concentrate power and economic resources.
Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman, in their book “Four Threats,”
also highlight excessive executive power but then add political
polarization, racism and nativism, and economic inequality that prompts
the wealthy to mobilize to protect their position.
War and
militarism exacerbate all those things. But more than that, war and
militarism are antipodal and undermining of democratic norms,
institutions and practices.
The goals and their ordering are not encouraging.
Particularly not liking the choice of Goal 1, the lack of any
clear commitment to financial support, and the continuing emphasis
on Magic Covid Vaccines without pursuit of treatments like Ivermectin and others:
Goal One: Restore trust with the American people
Goal Two: Mount a safe, effective, equitable vaccination campaign
Goal Three: Mitigate spread through expanding masking, testing, data, treatment, workforce, and clear public health standards
Goal Four: Immediately expand emergency relief and exercise the Defense Production Act
Goal Five: Safely reopen schools, businesses, and travel while protecting workers
Goal Six: Protect those most at risk and advance equity, including across racial, ethnic and rural/urban lines
Goal Seven: Restore U.S. leadership globally, advance health security, and build better preparedness for future threats
About a week ago I posted thus: Oh Yes, but you have
guns you say. Well those pasty faced, namby, pamby West Coast
transgender wokeists, as you call them, may not be able to shoot
straight but they have drones, swarming drones, robots and God knows
what else in the way of weapons. They have satellite data and almost
perfect intelligence regarding your behaviour. They don't have to shoot
accurately, they have machines to do that. They can and will commit
unspeakable acts of murder and destruction before they turn off the
monitor and jog off for a Latte. After all if you are not with us you
are a domestic terrorist aren't you? There is no middle ground. smdh...., this is on a grad student's budget with open source technology. DAYYUM!!!
wired |When hackers exploited a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform's contents
last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and
videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the
site's users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before.
But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive
bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked
faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website
has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces
in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.
Late last week, a website
called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast
grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a
string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it
appeared. The site's creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source
machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract,
and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to
Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the
day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot
that resulted in five people's deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot
says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled
from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who
took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against
FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot
someone.
"Everybody who is participating in this violence, what
really amounts to an insurrection, should be held accountable," says the
site's creator, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation. "It's
entirely possible that a lot of people who were on this website now will
face real-life consequences for their actions." Fist tap Dale.
newrepublic | These Christians apparently believe that they
had no choice but to try to overthrow the Congress. For months, various
evangelicals have claimed in sermons, on social media, and during
protests that malicious forces stole the election, conspired to quash
Christian liberties, and aimed to clamp down on their freedom to worship
and spread the Christian gospel. They felt sure that the final days of
history were at hand and that the Capitol was the site of an epochal
battle. As one evangelical from Texas toldThe New York Times, “We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light.”
Much
has been made about the evangelical community’s relationship to Donald
Trump. And typically, observers tend to view this alliance as purely
transactional, with nose-holding evangelicals pledging their support to
this least Christian of men in order to get something in return—most
notably, a trio of religiously conservative Supreme Court justices. This
dominant interpretation also treats Trump as the apotheosis of a
shape-shifting brand of grievance politics that unites and permeates all
factions of the right, very much including the evangelical movement.
But what is less understood—and what the Capitol riot revealed in all
its gruesome detail—is the extent to which Trump channels the
apocalyptic fervor that has long animated many white evangelical
Christians in this country.
For the last 150 years, white evangelicals
have peddled end-times conspiracies. Most of the time their messages
have been relatively innocuous, part of the broader millenarian outlook
shared among most major religious traditions. But these conspiracies can
have dangerous consequences—and sometimes they lead to violence. Every
evangelical generation throughout American history has seen some of its
believers driven to extreme conspiracies that blend with other strains
of militant political faith. This has meant that in the Trump era, with
the destabilizing impact of a global pandemic and a cratered economy,
white evangelical Christianity has become enmeshed with, and perhaps
inextricable from, a broader revolution against the government.
And
so an insurrection in the name of Jesus Christ broke out in tandem with
the Trump voter fraud putsch. The action is also, in all likelihood, a
prophetic foretaste of where this group might go once Trump is finally
out of office.
Evangelical
apocalypticism is grounded in a complicated and convoluted reading of
the biblical books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, some of the most
violent books in the Bible. When read in conjunction with one another,
and overlaid with some of Jesus’s and Paul’s New Testament statements,
they reveal a hidden “plan of the ages.” The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apokalypsis—an unveiling or uncovering of truths that others cannot see.
greenwald |The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new
domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism”
that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on
Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of
receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The
opposite is true: it is intensifying.
We have witnessed an orgy of
censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more
aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C.
featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,”
vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new
anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,”
“treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens.
This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement
to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one
work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.
Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone
questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy
for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology.
Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons
and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU.
The more honest proponents of this new domestic War on Terror are
explicitly admitting that they want to model it on the first one. A New York Times reporter noted
on Monday that a “former intelligence official on PBS NewsHour” said
“that the US should think about a ‘9/11 Commission’ for domestic
extremism and consider applying some of the lessons from the fight
against Al Qaeda here at home.” More amazingly, Gen. Stanley McChrystal —
for years head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the
commander of the war in Afghanistan — explicitly compared that war to
this new one, speaking to Yahoo News:
I
did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a
whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a
powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better
place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their
violence. This is now happening in America….I think we’re much further
along in this radicalization process, and facing a much deeper problem
as a country, than most Americans realize.”
mtracey | Question:
does anyone with a media job find this situation to be worthy of some
further inquiry? Or in other words, worthy of questioning the premise of
why such an extravagantly intensive military presence is allegedly
necessary? Is it proportionate to the scale of the purported threat? Has
the nature of the threat itself — whatever that might be, exactly —
been adequately probed to determine whether it is grounded in reality?
Already a bunch of purported threats
initially trumpeted across the media with the usual five-alarm-five
hysteria have dissipated in short order, so there is perhaps some reason
for doubt in that regard.
Instead
of applying a modicum of skepticism to this gigantic show of military
force, much of which appears to be “security theater” in its purest
form, our vaunted media is doing little other than cheering it on. And
of course, inflating the threats being cited as justification for it.
They can repeat over and over again that what occurred on January 6 at
the Capitol was an “attempted coup,”
and therefore everything and anything is justified to retaliate, but
everyone with a brain by now should be able to recognize that the
government was never at a greater than 0% risk of being overthrown that
day. Fear-inducing terms like “insurrection,” “domestic terrorism,”
“seditious conspiracy,” “armed rebellion,” and others have been
marshaled intentionally to inure the public to extreme actions such as
the swiftly-executed corporate censorship purge and now, the
transformation of the country’s capital into a military fortress.
It’s
doubly odd because the deployment of military personnel to various
cities last summer, though generally welcomed by locals and intended to
quell what had genuinely been a sudden outburst of destructive chaos, was depicted by media members at the time as the rawest incarnation of violent fascism. The New York Timesnearly imploded
in a spasm of wild outrage. Suddenly though, this unprecedented
militarization of DC is greeted by the same media hive-mind as the
triumph of good over evil, light over darkness. It’s almost like the
ultimate variable is not principled apprehension about the force of the
state, but whose political priorities are being defended by such force —
and who is being punished.
As the republican party detonates before our eyes the core of the right which has deeply bought into the above is not going away. So what are they going to do?
Remember in 2015 Mike Pompeo said: “‘America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We’d endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.'”
So how do you get from that to jointly running a country? You don’t unless folks like him change their minds as the only other option is to give up your identities. Democracy is a very fragile thing and unnatural in the light of history. We are in serious trouble……
A tweet from Mike Pompeo today:
Woke-ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms — they're not who America is. They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. Our enemies stoke these divisions because they know they make us weaker. pic.twitter.com/Mu97xCgxfS
Having a fair amount of direct experience in helping foment revolutions (to overthrow an existing govt that the US wanted removed – frequently democratic in nature), helping suppress anti-government movements (normally seeking what we consider ‘freedoms’ – thus keeping an authoritarian/dictatorial regime in place), and spending about half of my US govt career (in one of ‘those’ orgs) working operations targeting various terrorist groups…I can say Mr. Black Ant is dead wrong.
The Juan Cole article is very accurate. If one has experience in these things it is pretty obvious it is real and about what stage it is in – we who live here in the US can be thankful it has not progressed to much more violent acts, but it is likely they are on the horizon.
I understand the strong desire for it not to be true and the natural reaction to deny its existence – it is frightening. To someone who has been there and done that it is clear America is in the early stages of a civil war. Whether this development continues is to be determined of course and we need to reverse it if possible – personally I am not optimistic. There are a host of actors in the nascent right wing terrorist groups in the US who are determined to further its progress. They are backed up (or led to some extent) by visible media personages, politicians, some from the 1% who are helping formant in many minds the beliefs which will help gain supporters, structure a mythology around their movement, and so on.
What is happening is not an overreaction in any way. It is actually an underreaction – govts almost always react slowly to internal dissolution and that gives a big advantage to those trying to overthrow them. When you have not been burrowed into these kinds of activities you don’t see the steps being taken as being serious and incremental progress towards that break. Not being a citizen of the culture means one does not pick up the subtle clues as to what some things actually mean as opposed to what they might be interpreted from an outside perspective. As someone who has direct experience in these things and who also has lived for decades in right wing American culture I can guarantee this is very serious. There were people in the Capitol building who would have killed Pense, Pelosi and others should they have caught them. That kind of action is one of the next most likely steps in this kind of process.
Political assassination is clearly on the table – I have heard some of my militia neighbors talk about killing ‘liberals’ many times down at the local gun range. It is common talk among those types and as one should be able to see from recent events they are serious about the ‘need’ to do this. And that makes it likely there will be some level of such actions soon as there are people in these groups who are very committed to changing how America is run.
What makes it more likely is when it is not directly addressed. The perpetrators/supporters always say something about getting on to the ‘healing’ process, or not to overreact as they are just blowing off steam and such. We are way past that here in the US. The citizenry is very broken and divided. That families are broken to the point that they are taking actions against each other is a perfect example of that. It is much easier to take action against strangers than family. Family frequently will protect members who are way out of line and even into serious criminal activity. But that only goes so far. In the American Civil War it was not uncommon for family members to fight on opposite sides as we are seeing signs of here now.
The linkages to outside (non-US based) organizations that the article details is actually very important and should not be discounted. Thinking that the very limited number of Americans who went to the Ukraine and have come back add any meaningful amount of military expertise to the these radicals is just mistaken. They are a drop in a giant bucket. American is chock full of men (and a some women) who are combat veterans (far more than any other country on earth). Counting up just those who have been in the military and wars since 9/11 is in the millions and when you go back further there are millions still hanging around from Vietnam (and if you watched the videos of the Capitol attack some of them were there), not to mention the huge numbers from in between those 2 large scale events. And these people are NOT separate at all from the ‘gun-nut Trumper in Omaha’ as they are all part of the same mozaic. America is armed, trained, has experience, and is motivated and it is ripe for real disruption.
It is not relevant to this discussion but I cannot help it since you brought it up. Having been involved in the immediate response to 9/11 and having friends who hit the ground in Afghanistan within days and having knowledge of the state of Afghanistan at the time the Taliban was in no way a spent marginal force (they were totally in charge of the country for all intents and purposes). Now it certainly did not take long before that situation changed. But the only relevant thing about Afghanistan to this discussion is the lesson we need to keep in mind about how terrorist groups can use contacts in other countries to garner support for their activities elsewhere – a key point of the article.
To sum up (this explanation/discussion could go on for hundreds of pages obviously) what is happening in the US is typical of events which have occurred in other countries which fell into open violent civil war. We are on the cusp of it right now and there are a large number of actors who are trying to make it happen. The current state of the situation is in their favor, but not by a huge margin (I think). The country has to track down everyone it can who is actively trying to overthrow the government (it is breaking the law after all) and to put lots of pressure on those supporting it to stop (with in generally legal guidelines – but be careful not to fail at this). Our security services must get a handle on the leaders and members of the organizations who will be the troops which go violent and be prepared to stop them.
This is their duty and one of the prime reasons for their existence – and yes I know that this activity will be problematic and there is no way to avoid that. The other side is bent on revolution and what they are doing is treason and will lead to great suffering. Thus my pessimism about getting out of this intact. One cannot fight an active insurgency except by fighting and this always hardens both sides further. Once the real fighting starts (and it hasn’t yet) there is no viable solution other than defeating the opposition – you have to choose sides at that point. So let’s treat this with the seriousness it deserves and try hard to contain it short of open warfare. That is the only option we actually have.
I’m leading the call for national security powers to not be expanded in light of the attack on our nation’s Capitol that occurred two weeks ago, as such measures often lead to the erosion of Americans’ civil liberties. pic.twitter.com/K6IHTPQzne
In Juan Cole world right now, he and I are living in different universes. In mine, I go to work, see family, and interact with Trump voters and supporters on a regular basis, all of whom, and I do mean that I haven’t met any, are far from radicals.
In Dr. Cole’s world, the US is now struggling with an al-Qaeda/Taliban insurgency at home that is made up of violent revolutionaries that are planning massive actions to destroy the republic.
It can be a frighteningly effective tactic. Accelerationism, what I call “sharpening the contradictions,” was the tool that al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and then ISIL used to take over 40 percent of Iraq. They have also had some success in pushing France to the far right and in damaging French traditions of civil liberties and tolerance. … Not all anti-government groups are organized on a paramilitary basis. They estimated that there are 181 militias. It was members of the militias who were dressed in military garb as they invaded the Capitol, and who appear to have contemplated violence against our elected representatives.
The SPLC has gathered information on 25,000 militiamen. The capabilities of the militiamen have been vastly enhanced by the veterans of Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, who have joined them in significant numbers and have brought with them tactical and firearms and explosives expertise.
So in Juan Cole world, there’s 25,000 people preparing RIGHT NOW to destroy the United States. That’s a remarkable claim.
His two main sources for these arguments are the FBI and the SPLC. The point of these stories is not to get the facts right, but to establish a narrative that, by dint of repetition, becomes accepted as common sense by the targeted audience. In the past few days, there have been *lots* of comments by and interviews of current and former FBI and CIA, etc. officials on network and cable news that tend toward this same direction.
This tells me that the legislation is coming, whatever we think of it. The task between now and February or March is to sufficiently saturate corporate media outlets with the official narrative so that bipartisan establishment support for the legislation becomes accepted and even expected. Some liberal-left Democrats like Rashida Tlaib will be allowed to voice mealy-mouthed objections to the legislation, but none will actually expend political capital contesting it. It will pass by large (nearly unanimous) majorities in the House and Senate and will involve further restrictions on the open internet, independent platforms, etc. and will further merge the interests of establishment Washington with the tech monopolies.
The one wrinkle in the above is whether enough Republicans can be convinced to turn on Trump and his voters, because the true Trumpists will reject the coming legislation (for mostly the wrong reasons).
caitlinjohnstone | A
new viral video calling on liberals to form “an army of citizen
detectives” to gather information on Trump supporters and report their
activities to the authorities has racked up thousands of shares and
millions of views in just a few hours.
The hashtag #TrumpsNewArmy is trending on Twitter as of this writing due to the release of a horrifying video
with that title from successful author and virulent Russiagater Don
Winslow. As of this writing it has some 20 thousand shares and 2.6
million views, and the comments and quote-retweets are predominantly
supportive.
“On orbefore
January 20th, Donald Trump will no longer be the Commander-in-Chief: he
will lose control of the Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Special Forces
and America’s nuclear arsenal,” Winslow’s voice begins ominously. “On
January 20th Donald Trump will become Commander-in-Chief of a different
army: this army.”
Viewers
are then shown footage from Trump rallies while being told that they
are looking at “radical extreme conservatives, also known as domestic
terrorists”.
“They
are hidden among us, disguised behind regular jobs,” Winslow warns.
“They are your children’s teachers. They work at supermarkets, malls,
doctor’s offices, and many are police officers and soldiers.”
Winslow
talks about white supremacists and the Capitol riot, warning that Trump
will continue escalating violence and fomenting a civil war in America.
“We
have to fight back,” Winslow declares. “In this new war, the
battlefield has changes. Computers can be more valuable than guns. And
this is what we need now more than ever: an army of citizen detectives.
I’m proposing we form a citizen army. Our weapons will be computers and
cellphones. We, who are monitoring extremists on the internet and
reporting our findings to authorities. Remember, before the Navy Seals
killed Osama Bin Laden, he had to be found. He was found by a CIA
analyst working on a computer thousands of miles away. It’s up to you.”
The
viral video is being loudly amplified by popular #Resistance accounts
like Majid M Padellan (better known as Brooklyn Dad Defiant) with
frighteningly paranoid and HUAC-like rhetoric.
WaPo | The
fiery rallies that preceded the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan.
6 were organized and promoted by an array of established conservative
insiders and activists, documents and videos show.
The
Republican Attorneys General Association was involved, as were the
activist groups Turning Point Action and Tea Party Patriots. At least
six current or former members of the Council for National Policy (CNP),
an influential group that for decades has served as a hub for
conservative and Christian activists, also played roles in promoting the
rallies.
The
two days of rallies were staged not by white nationalists and other
extremists, but by well-funded nonprofit groups and individuals that
figure prominently in the machinery of conservative activism in
Washington.
In
recent days, as federal authorities rounded up those involved in the
Capitol riot, promoters and participants of the rallies have denounced
the violence and sought to distance their events from the events that
followed.
“I
support the right of Americans to peacefully protest,” wrote Georgia
Attorney General Chris Carr, chairman of the Republican Attorneys
General Association (RAGA), “but the violence and destruction we are
seeing at the U.S. Capitol is unacceptable and un-American.”
Organizing
warm-up events is not the same thing as plotting to invade the Capitol.
But before the rallies, some used extreme rhetoric, including
references to the American Revolution, and made false claims about the
election to rouse supporters to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s
victory.
Unless
Congress responds to the protests, “everyone can guess what me and
500,000 others will do to that building,” tweeted Ali Alexander, a
former CNP fellow who organized the “Stop the Steal” movement. “1776 is
*always* an option.”
On Jan. 5, at Freedom Plaza in D.C., Alexander led protesters in a chant of “Victory or death.”
Alexander
did not respond to a request for comment for this story. He previously
told The Washington Post that he had “remained peaceful” during the riot
and said his earlier speeches “mentioned peace” and were being
misrepresented.
“Conflating
our legally, peaceful permitted events with the breach of the US
Capitol building is defamatory and false,” he said in an email to The
Post. “People are being misled and then those same people are fomenting
violence against me and my team.”
In
the days and hours before the riots, Alexander and his allies attracted
tens of thousands of protesters from around the country — a crowd that
included white supremacists, Christian activists and even local police
officers.
Events
included a “Patriot Caravan” of buses to Washington, a “Save the
Republic” rally on Jan. 5 and a “Freedom Rally” on the morning of Jan.
6. A little-known nonprofit called Women for America First, a group run
by Trump supporters and former tea party activists, got approval to use
space on the Ellipse for what they called a “March for Trump,” according
to the “public gathering permit” issued on Jan. 5.
dossier | In the wake of the Capitol Hill melee last week, the news media has been
breathlessly reporting on the possibility — citing an intelligence
bulletin from the FBI — that there will be widespread armed protests in
all 50 states on and leading up to Inauguration Day. If the FBI is to be
believed, there is a serious, deliverable plot in motion that involves
armed insurrectionists simultaneously storming each and every state
capitol.
The hysteria has reached new heights this week, with prominent pundits,
politicians, reporters, and other personalities claiming that a wave of
pro-Trump right wing violence is right around the corner.
Security is being ramped up in capital cities across America, with many
states announcing that they are bringing in National Guard units to
prepare for the chaos that they’ve been told will meet them on or before
the 20th.
The FBI, which has not gone on the record publicly to speak about
this potential massive national security issue, has decided to
communicate it to the public by leaking this bulletin to select
individuals in the news media. As shown above, it has been the source
for blaring, intense headlines across the legacy media landscape. The
details within this “internal FBI bulletin” have now been shared by a variety of news sites such as CNN, Yahoo News, ABC News and other establishment outlets.
CNN reports on the FBI intel report:
The
FBI has received information indicating "armed protests" are being
planned at all 50 state capitols and the US Capitol in Washington, DC in
the days leading up to President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration on
January 20.
ABC reported on the memo:
Starting
this week and running through at least Inauguration Day, armed protests
are being planned at all 50 state capitols and at the U.S. Capitol.
WaPo | The
FBI privately warned law enforcement agencies Monday that far-right
extremists have discussed posing as National Guard members in Washington
and others have reviewed maps of vulnerable spots in the city — signs
of potential efforts to disrupt Wednesday’s inauguration, according to
an intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post.
The
document, a summary of threats that the FBI identified in a Monday
intelligence briefing, warned that both “lone wolves” and adherents of
the QAnon extremist ideology, some of whom joined in the violent siege
on the Capitol on Jan. 6, have indicated they plan to come to Washington
for President-elect Joe Biden’s swearing-in ceremony.
The
FBI also said it had observed people downloading and sharing maps of
sensitive locations in Washington and discussing how those facilities
could be used to interfere in security during the inauguration.
But
the intelligence briefing did not identify any specific plots to attack
the inaugural events that would be akin to the Jan. 6 siege on the
Capitol and noted that “numerous” militia and extremist groups are
publicly denouncing any violence targeted at the transition of
presidential power.
While
the FBI has picked up “suspicious traffic” in monitoring the kinds of
communication systems used by some participants in the Capitol siege, it
includes “nothing that points to any specific action.”
The
FBI on Monday declined to characterize the credibility or gravity of
the threats it outlined for law enforcement in advance of the
inauguration.
The
agency instead pointed to remarks FBI Director Christopher A. Wray made
last week, when he said the agents were monitoring a “extensive amount
of concerning online chatter” and noted the challenge of “trying to
distinguish what’s aspirational versus what’s intentional.”
“We’re
monitoring all incoming leads, whether they’re calls for armed protest,
potential threats that grow out of the January 6 breach of the Capitol,
or other kinds of potential threats leading up to inaugural events and
in various other targets. So we’re latched up with all of our partners
in that regard,” Wray added.
A
spokesman for the Secret Service also declined to comment on the threat
report or to characterize the agency’s level of concern.
theatlantic | The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by
today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence that now seems
out of reach for all too many Americans. I refer, of course, to the
Simpsons. Homer, a high-school graduate whose union job at the
nuclear-power plant required little technical skill, supported a family
of five. A home, a car, food, regular doctor’s appointments, and enough
left over for plenty of beer at the local bar were all attainable on a
single working-class salary. Bart might have had to find $1,000 for the family to go to England, but he didn’t have to worry that his parents would lose their home.
This lifestyle was not fantastical in the slightest—nothing, for example, like the ridiculously large Manhattan apartments in Friends. On the contrary, the Simpsons used to be quite ordinary—they were a lot like my Michigan working-class family in the 1990s.
The 1996 episode “Much Apu About Nothing”
shows Homer’s paycheck. He grosses $479.60 per week, making his annual
income about $25,000. My parents’ paychecks in the mid-’90s were
similar. So were their educational backgrounds. My father had a two-year
degree from the local community college, which he paid for while
working nights; my mother had no education beyond high school. Until my
parents’ divorce, we were a family of three living primarily on my
mother’s salary as a physician’s receptionist, a working-class job like
Homer’s.
By 1990—the year my father turned 36 and my mother 34—they were
divorced. And significantly, they were both homeowners—an enormous feat
for two newly single people.
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