theconversation | The tense test of strength began when Biden was asked about Putin in an interview
with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and agreed he was “a killer” and
didn’t have a soul. He also said Putin will “pay a price” for his
actions.
Putin then took the unusual step of going on the state broadcaster VGTRK with a prepared five-minute statement in response to Biden.
In an unusually pointed manner, Putin recalled the US history of
genocide of its Indigenous people, the cruel experience of slavery, the
continuing repression of Black Americans today and the unprovoked US
nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war.
He suggested states should not judge others by their own standards:
Whatever you say about others is what you are yourself.
Some American journalists and observers have reacted to this as “trolling”. It was not.
It was the preamble to Putin’s most important message in years to
what he called the American “establishment, the ruling class”. He said
the US leadership is determined to have relations with Russia, but only
“on its own terms”.
Although they think that we are the same as they are, we are
different people. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code.
But we know how to defend our own interests.
And we will work with them, but in those areas in which we ourselves
are interested, and on those conditions that we consider beneficial for
ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it. They will have to
reckon with this, despite all attempts to stop our development. Despite
the sanctions, insults, they will have to reckon with this.
This is new for Putin. He has for years made the point, always
politely, that Western powers need to deal with Russia on a basis of
correct diplomatic protocols and mutual respect for national
sovereignty, if they want to ease tensions.
But never before has he been as blunt as this, saying in effect: do
not dare try to judge us or punish us for not meeting what you say are
universal standards, because we are different from you. Those days are
now over.
theburningplatform | What appears to be happening is the last dying gasps of an empire of debt
as it thrashes about using un-Constitutional means to control its
subjects, while injecting trillions of fiat dollars as an adrenaline
treatment for a terminal cancer diagnosis.
As a last resort, initiating a global war with Russia and China would
certainly distract the masses and keep them from realizing the true
enemy within. Turning Washington DC into an armed encampment is not to
protect the government from white supremacists. It is to protect the
traitorous creatures in Congress and the White House from the citizens
when this diabolical plan blows up in our faces.
Inflation is already raging, but the government and Fed tell you it is
1.5%. There are 261 million working age Americans and only 127 million
are employed full-time, but the government tells you the unemployment
rate is 6.2%, when more than 50% of those capable of working are not.
The government will tell you GDP soared in the first
quarter at 6%, when we are in the midst of a government created
Depression, and the GDP calculation is nothing more than the government
borrowing trillions from future generations and giving a minuscule
portion to current generations, with the vast majority going into the
pockets of billionaire oligarchs, Wall Street, and mega-corporations.
The “economic recovery” narrative is entirely false, but the jar shakers
know the plebs do not understand math.
The plumbing of our astonishingly crooked financial system began to
fail in September 2019, with overnight Repo rates soaring to 10%. The
Fed immediately leapt into action by restarting QE (aka No Banker Left
Behind) to keep the depth of our debt predicament hidden from the
public. A flu released from a Chinese bio-lab, which is highly
non-lethal to anyone under 80 years old, has been utilized by the jar
shakers to unleash a tsunami of digital fiat (aka debt) to prop up a system being smothered by too much debt.
Since March of 2020, our beloved legislators have added $4.5 trillion to the national debt,
a 20% increase in one year. The Fed has done their part by jolting
their balance sheet up by $3.5 trillion, an 85% increase in one year.
The current administration is saying hold my beer, as they are busy
adding another $4 trillion in the next year and the Fed will add another
$2 trillion or so to their balance sheet. Meanwhile, hundreds of
thousands of small businesses
have been permanently destroyed, while Bezos and the rest of his
billionaire buddies have increased their net worth by tens of billions.
At least your grandma is earning .015% in her savings account, while her
living expenses rise by 10%. Do you get it yet?
theburningplatform |“If you catch 100 red fire ants as
well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing
will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back
on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other.
The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice
versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar.
This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs.
Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti-Mask. Vax vs. Anti-vax.
Rich vs. poor. Man vs. woman. Cop vs. citizen. The real question we
need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar… and why?”Shera Starr
A few weeks ago, I saw the above quote in Jeff Thomas’ articleLearning from Ants,
and it has been reverberating in my mind ever since. It is a perfect
analogy for what has been happening in this country for years, with the
jar lately being shaken at a rate faster than a Biden vote count
increase at 3:00 am in a swing state. Everyone in this country, and the
world, is at each other’s throats. Who is shaking the jar? Why are they
shaking the jar? Why do they want us fighting each other?
If they keep us focused on fighting each other, they believe we will
not notice their reprehensible criminality, as they manipulate the
masses through psychological engineering
and the employment of propaganda techniques to push their desired
narrative. If you ask someone – who is shaking the jar? – they will
likely answer based on the standard left vs right, liberal vs
conservative, white vs black paradigm which has been created by those
benefiting from conflict. It is always a safe bet to follow the money
when trying to identify the culprits.
The elevated intensity of manipulation by those pulling the strings
of societal discontent reveals much about their level of desperation in
creating more chaos, because the awakening of more to the truth,
endangers their wealth, power, and control. They have turned the shaking
power up to eleven in the last year, as an implosion of the Ponzi
financial system was looming as we entered 2020, and the Deep State
oligarchs needed cover to implement a massive injection of liquidity
into the veins of Wall Street bankers, the medical industrial complex,
and mega-corporations like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target.
The weaponization of a contagious, but highly non-lethal to anyone
under 80 years old, flu became the perfect camouflage of fear to bailout
the teetering financial system and creating turmoil, chaos, and
distrust among the populace. The non-stop fear mongering was purposely
ramped to keep the public distracted while the national wealth pillaging
operation proceeded at a breakneck pace behind the scenes. $600 for you
and $10 trillion for them.
The monstrous effort to polarize the country by the psychopaths in
suits pulling the strings of societal disgruntlement has the ultimate
purpose of subjugation and dominion over every aspect of our lives. They
no longer feel the need to conceal their treachery, as they openly
proclaim their Great Reset, where you will own nothing and be happy –
living in a 200 sq ft shipping container, eating synthetic meat,
drinking Gates endorsed reprocessed piss, snacking on bugs, and praying
their windmill and solar power works on calm cloudy days as a frigid
winter storm front arrives.
LATimes | In late January, when protesters shut down the vaccine site at Dodger
Stadium, his research team tracked a surge in online new world order
activity, including posts tagged with #greatreset, #scamdemic and
#agenda21, a theory based on a 1990s United Nations resolution that some
consider proof of a plot to depopulate the Earth.
The reasons why
some Southern Californians have latched onto new world order rhetoric
are complex. Finkelstein’s organization found a correlation between
places with high incidence of both Black Lives Matter activity and what
he terms as pushback against it in the form of anti-mask, anti-lockdown
rallies — a mix that fed new world order activity online. Los Angeles
County had the greatest abundance of both types of protests, followed by
San Diego and Orange counties.
“Where
the Black Lives Matter protesters showed up, the quarantine became sort
of a counter-cause,” he said. “This idea that ‘we are the ones being
victimized.’”
Mia Bloom, professor of Communication at Georgia State University and
an expert on QAnon, also pointed out that Southern California is a
hotbed of wellness culture, where anti-vaccine sentiment has found a
foothold. Last summer, conspiracy theories jumped to Instagram, she
said, where women previously more interested in lifestyle content were
drawn in, creating an unlikely bridge between liberal and conservative
movements.
Levin, Blazakis and others said regardless of why they
took hold, new world order theories will likely play a role if the state
holds a recall election for Gov. Gavin Newsom this fall. Newsom is
already being featured in recall-related memes that portray him as
“puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party and complicit in the global
takeover. At rallies, he has been portrayed as Hitler and called a
tyrant.
Recall supporters have posted on Twitter with hashtags
such as #nwo, #trumpsarmy and #Agenda21 among others. Another recall
meme posted online showed Newsom with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San
Francisco) with “Nuclear Powered Satan,” written below them. A commenter
on an official recall Facebook page called Newsom an “idiot communist,”
and a recall founder recently posted about “Beijing Biden.”
A recent analysis of articles by the Network Contagion Research
Institute about the California recall for a six-month period from
September through March found about 800 articles from just more than 300
sources. Of those sources, 177, or 57%, were classified as
disinformation sites or uncategorized. That designation, said researcher
Lea Marchl, usually means they cannot be trusted. Similar numbers held
true when it came to videos about the recall.
“What’s driving the
recall is not merely an honest difference on policy but something that
is framed in a deeper and more dark matter,” Levin said. “I’m concerned
that people with legitimate, fact-based reasons for wanting to recall
the governor are now mixed into those whose currency also is aggression
and conspiracy and that is a problem because each feed on each other.”
teenvogue | Last Tuesday, a suspect entered three different massage parlors in
the Atlanta area, killing 8 people. The next day, 21-year-old Robert
Aaron Long was charged with eight counts of murder. Most of the victims
were Asian or Asian American women. Although the suspect’s motives are
still under investigation, he claimed to have had a “sex addiction” that
prompted the rampage, according to the New York Times. In a recent report by Stop AAPI Hate,
there have been about 3,800 reports of hate incidents across the
country since March 2020, with women reporting hate incidents 2.3 times
more than men.
It’s
no coincidence that Asian women are the most vulnerable when it comes
to these attacks. This historic wave of anti-Asian racism is frightening
and tragic, but its connection to Asian representation, especially
Asian women, in America is disturbing.
Let’s start with the fact that there’s clearly a lack of Asian representation in Hollywood. According to the U.S. Census Bureau,
about 5.7 percent of people identify as Asian or Asian American.
However, in 2016, they only made up 3.1 percent of film roles according
to UCLA’s 2018 Hollywood Diversity Report. Because of this lack of representation, oftentimes portrayals of Asian women in Hollywood have been harmful.
The oversimplified depiction of Asian identity has a deep-rooted history
of racism and violence. Often pop culture (films, musicals, TV, operas,
etc) has portrayed Asian women as incompetent and fragile foreigners,
exotic femme fatales, and subservient “mail-order” wives.
"Consider the heartbroken Cio-Cio San of Madame Butterfly (1904),
a Japanese woman who commits suicide after she is abandoned by her
white lover,” says Dr. Stephanie Young, an Associate Professor of
Communication Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. “Madame Butterfly
epitomizes the Lotus Blossom (sometimes called the China Doll) trope —
feminine, shy, fragile, subservient, and sexually submissive. We see the
Lotus Blossom trope in Miss Saigon (1989) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005).
Another popular trope is the Dragon Lady who is cunning and deceitful.
She uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation, but often is
emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity. A contemporary
example of the Dragon Lady is with the Japanese Yakuza leader O-Ren
Ishii (played by Lucy Liu) in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003).
realclearpolitics | Before the next of kin were even notified in the horrific shootings
last week at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, the narrative was
established: The fact that six of the eight victims were Asian women
provides the proof that a “surge in hate crimes”
against Asian Americans has bubbled up in the U.S. in response to the
coronavirus pandemic. That fits neatly with the view of some Americans
that our society, at its heart, is racist.
For contrast, consider the mass shooting this week in Boulder, Colo.,
in which the suspect is Syrian American. Even though all the victims
were of the same race, no one assumes without proof that he was acting
out of racial animosity because, of course, they were white. In Atlanta,
the shooter killed two white people and injured a Latino. But the
killings must still be motivated by anti-Asian hatred, right?
“Racially motivated violence must be called out for exactly what it
is -- and we must stop making excuses or rebranding it as economic
anxiety or sexual addiction,” Rep. Marilyn Strickland (pictured) told
members of the House a day after the Atlanta shootings. In a CNN
interview, Strickland, whose heritage is both African American and
Korean American, called the incident a racially motivated hate crime.
None of the evidence to emerge thus far supports that speculation.
Like Strickland, I am Korean American, and the idea that someone
might randomly attack me at the gym or hurl racist invectives at me in
the grocery checkout line makes me uneasy. So I looked into the numbers
being used to support the so-called “surge” in attacks. They turn out to
be thin, with data points cherry-picked to invoke fear and bolster the
wobbly claim that the Atlanta shooter was driven by racism.
A report
by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism drew national media
attention for identifying a 149% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in
2020 compared to 2019 in 16 of our largest cities. A startling number --
until you learn the actual number of hate crimes in those cities rose
from 49 to 122 – in a country of 330 million people.
In my hometown, Houston, there were three last year. The year before, there were none.
And what about the 3,795 incidents of harassment
and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
documented by Stop AAPI Hate? The group’s data point is even more
useless than the 149% increase figure. Stop AAPI (shorthand for Asian
American and Pacific Islander) Hate was formed as the coronavirus
pandemic took hold in the U.S. and its data has no baseline for
comparison.
But it may be sufficiently frightening to open a line of federal
spending directly to Stop AAPI Hate’s member organizations. The group
was on Capitol Hill last week to urge lawmakers to address the kind of incidents it tracks and to fund programs supporting the victims.
CJR |Meanwhile,coverage
of the shooting by national media outlets remained vague; reporters
seemed reluctant (or were unable) to find details about the victims or
pick up reports from the Korean press. Instead, the mainstream press
published profiles of the shooter. And when the Atlanta Sheriff’s Office
held a press conference on Wednesday morning, the press raced to take
down the official statement, whichuncritically
echoed the suspect’s claims that he suffered from sexual addiction, and
which minimized the role of racial animus in his motivation for the
killing spree.
Lee, who had worked the police beat
in Korea earlier in his career, was in disbelief. “I’ve never before
seen a case where the police suggest: ‘The suspect said it wasn’t the
case, therefore it’s not the case,’ ” he says. Worse, the press
replicated the official statement in headlines and presented it as breaking news.
In most news pieces, the spokesperson’s words were treated as
self-explanatory, without additional context or questions. “It was
almost as though the press believed what was said to be correct, like
they wanted it to be the case,” Lee says.
To Lee, the official statement was
“clearly too absurd to repeat.” He felt no obligation to cover the press
conference or to recite the spokesperson’s words. Instead, Atlanta K ran a story that recounted the community response to the official statement, titled: “ ‘Does a bad day mean you can kill someone?’: white police officers’ protection of a white murderer.”
The press corrected course a day
later, but already, public perception of the suspect’s racist and
anti-Asian motives had been muddied. The shooter’s explanation for the
murders—sex addiction—had been widely circulated, giving weight to
long-standing associations between Asian-owned massage shops and illicit
sex work. Investigations into the spas in the past week cited
suggestive customer reviews and a history of police raids (some of
which had been undertaken wrongfully, Lee says), in effect imputing
criminality to the women. The media should ask if it is meaningful to
determine whether the victims had been offering sexual services, and
whether such questions are worth stigmatizing the deceased women and
risking harm to family members and other spa workers. This also means
that survivors, who have long lived under the radar—fearful
of losing their livelihoods and immigration statuses—feel discouraged
from talking publicly. “Unless they have immense courage, it’s
improbable for these women to want to put themselves out there,” Lee
says.
From the beginning, Lee had feared
this sort of scrutiny. Reporters for national media outlets had asked
him about criminal activity at the spas, to which he declined to
respond. Why speculate on a question that lacks clear relevance to the
story at hand? Already, the women have been unfairly immortalized in
association with their place of work. The spas could never be a full
reflection of who the women were; they were survival jobs—jobs the women
might have worked tirelessly to retire from, had they been allowed to
live out their lives.
NYTimes | Sue-ling Wang prided himself on being a self-made businessman.
The
son of a farmer in Taiwan, he attended a vocational school that trained
students at a factory producing zippers and ballpoint pens. But he made
his ascent after arriving in America on a scholarship and obtaining a
Ph.D., then starting his own company in the Atlanta area three decades
ago.
He appeared at civic events,
donated to Republican candidates and ensconced himself in an exclusive
country club community northeast of Atlanta where he bought two stately
homes, each valued at about $1 million.
Later
this year, he will assume the role of head of the World Taiwanese
Chambers of Commerce. It is a prestigious post: Taiwan’s government
recently produced a 14-minute video of him discussing his life that included a photo of him with the island democracy’s president, Tsai Ing-wen.
“When
we go abroad, we are not afraid of hardship, because we must raise our
children, we want to glorify our ancestors,” Mr. Wang, himself a father,
said in the video.
In telling his immigrant success story, Mr. Wang, 68, did not mention
his tie to a business whose employees had little opportunity to follow
his path: Gold Spa, one of the three Atlanta-area massage parlors where a
gunman last week killed eight people and wounded another.
Six victims were of Korean or Chinese descent, fueling outrage and
despair about the surge of anti-Asian violence, particularly against
women, in the United States.
But as details about the employees emerged, so too did another narrative: the story of the wealth divideamong
people of Asian descent in America — a community often viewed by
outsiders as monolithic and whose economic disparities have long been
misunderstood.
The income gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is, in fact, greatest among Asians, who are considered the most economically divided group in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.
fearlessj1111 | Sociologist Tamara K. Nopper argued against depicting these Black-Asian conflicts as “mutual misunderstanding” in a 2015 article.
“The use of ‘mutual’ misunderstanding suggests shared status or power,
with each group contributing to each other’s vulnerability and
suffering,” Nopper wrote. “The employment of the mutual misunderstanding
framework suggests Asian store owners desire identification with and
from Black customers across class and race lines. Yet many studies of
Asian immigrant storeowners show they hold racist views of Black people
and associate them with negative qualities purportedy absent among
Asians.”
Asian Americans must admit and rectify the
ways we uphold white supremacy, namely our anti-Blackness. Much like
the U.S., Asian countries suffer from colorism and caste systems within
their own societies. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to the creation of
America,” said Diane Wong, an assistant professor and faculty fellow at
NYU Gallatin, whose research has focused on the gentrification of
Chinatowns and Afro-Asian solidarities. “It’s no secret then that
anti-Blackness is reflected in Asian immigrant families, businesses,
institutions and interpersonal relationships on a frequent basis.”
As a society, we have “progressed” from
lynchings to viral videos of violence against Black people, from
police killings and brutality to baseless accusations of criminality. In retail spaces, Black people continue to experience racism and antagonization.
When Asians internalize and perpetuate anti-Black racism and violence,
we are reifying our complicity and driving a deeper wedge between the
minority groups.
It’s important to note that two groups are
not equally positioned in larger structures of power, especially when
one racial group is profiting off the other, which is oftentimes the
case in these violent clashes between Black people and Asians.
“Race is certainly a factor, but it is not
the only factor,” Kang, an associate professor at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, said in an interview. Kang’s research has
focused on Asian-owned nail salons and their racially diverse customers.
“Many nail salon workers are under pressure to work quickly and keep
costs down, which does not create the best environment for building
customer relations.
The potential for tensions is heightened
by the intimacy of the service, which involves direct physical contact,
and the fact that many of the workers and owners are immigrants who do
not speak the language or understand the culture of their customers.” In
these scenarios, the tension is stoked by economic stress: the salon
workers who often work for low wages under poor conditions, and the mostly working class clientele who cannot afford to waste money on subpar service.
Kang stressed the importance of putting
these largely publicized conflicts in context. “I have observed hundreds
of interactions in salons in this neighborhood that were very cordial
and where workers and customers were very respectful and appreciative of
each other,” she said.
Our perspectives are largely shaped by the
way Black-Asian conflict is covered in media. “There is a lot of
misinformation when it comes to reporting on salient issues that affect
both Black and Asian communities,” Wong said. However, when videos of
Asian business owners and workers inflicting violence on Black customers
go viral, when Asian American activists protest in support for Peter Liang,
an NYPD officer who shot an unarmed Black man in a stairwell, the
message received by the public is that Asians do not care about Black
lives.
These acts of violence are only a
microcosm of the conflict between the minority groups, moments when the
tension bubbles up to the surface and pops. There have been many ways
statistics about Asian American achievement and the “model minority”
myth have been used as a wedge between Asians and other minority groups, most notably through Ed Blum’s anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard.
Many Asian Americans have thrown their support behind ending affirmative action and in support of standardized testing in
school admission, placing their own concerns ahead of the communities
marginalized by these systems, namely Black, Brown, and indigenous
peoples.
KRON4 | San Francisco school board members will move forward to remove Vice
President Alison Collins from the board and other committee positions in
a special meeting later this week.
This comes after derogatory tweets Collins made in 2016 recently resurfaced.
On Tuesday night, the school board held a regular meeting where we heard an apology from Collins for the first time.
Despite this apology, Collins still made no suggestion of plans to step down from her position.
That’s why two other school board members plan to introduce a
resolution at Thursday’s special meeting, calling for Collins to be
stripped of her titles.
The San Francisco School Board met on Tuesday for the first time
since derogatory tweets resurfaced from the board’s vice president,
Alison Collins.
While Collins gave no indication of plans to resign, she made a public apology.
“I’d like to reemphasize my sincere and heartfelt apologies and I’m
currently engaging with my colleagues and working with the community for
the good of all children in our district,” Collins said.
Fellow school board member Jenny Lam called for Collins to make this
apology several days ago and stands behind demands for Collins to
resign.
“I am not alone when I say I don’t have confidence in Commissioner
Collins’s ability to fairly govern a school district that is almost half
API with no bias. Restorative justice begins by acknowledging the harm
and making the intentional effort to connect with those in the community
that has been harmed,” Lam said.
Lam and board member Moliga will introduce a resolution at a special
meeting on Thursday, calling for Collins to be stripped of her VP
position and committee assignments.
tomdispatch | For the next 40 years, Washington’s secret Cold War weapon, the
Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, fought its largest and longest
covert wars around the rim of Eurasia. Probing relentlessly for
vulnerabilities of any sort in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the CIA mounted a
series of small invasions of Tibet and southwest China in the early
1950s; fought a secret war in Laos, mobilizing a 30,000-strong militia
of local Hmong villagers during the 1960s; and launched a massive,
multibillion dollar covert war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in
the 1980s.
During those same four decades, America’s only hot wars were
similarly fought at the edge of Eurasia, seeking to contain the
expansion of Communist China. On the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953,
almost 40,000 Americans (and untold numbers of Koreans) died in
Washington’s effort to block the advance of North Korean and Chinese
forces across the 38th parallel. In Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975,
some 58,000 American troops (and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and
Cambodians) died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the expansion of
communists south of the 17th parallel that divided North and South
Vietnam.
By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1990 (just as China was
turning into a Communist Party-run capitalist power), the U.S. military
had become a global behemoth standing astride the Eurasian continent
with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters,
more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships,
including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked together by a
global system of satellites for communication, navigation, and
espionage.
Despite its name, the Global War on Terror after 2001 was actually
fought, like the Cold War before it, at the edge of Eurasia. Apart from
the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force and CIA had, within
a decade, ringed the southern rim of that landmass with a network of 60
bases for its growing arsenal
of Reaper and Predator drones, stretching all the way from the
Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily to Andersen Air Force Base on the
island of Guam. And yet, in that series of failed, never-ending
conflicts, the old military formula for “containing,” constraining, and
dominating Eurasia was visibly failing. The Global War on Terror proved,
in some sense, a long-drawn-out version of Britain’s imperial Suez
disaster.
By grasping the geopolitical logic of unifying Eurasia’s vast landmass —
home to 70% of the world’s population — through transcontinental
infrastructures for commerce, energy, finance, and transport, Beijing
has rendered Washington’s encircling armadas of aircraft and warships
redundant, even irrelevant.
greenwald |A report declassified last Wednesday by the
Department of Homeland Security is raising serious concerns about the
possibly illegal involvement by the intelligence community in U.S.
domestic political affairs.
Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report
from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared
“in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland
Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC),
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”
Its primary point is this: “The IC [intelligence community] assesses
that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of
ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the
United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” While
asserting that “the most lethal” of these threats is posed by “racially
or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent
extremists (MVEs),” it makes clear that its target encompasses a wide
range of groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and environmental
activists, pro-choice extremists and anarchists: “those who oppose
capitalism and all forms of globalization”) to the right (sovereign
citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those deemed motivated by
racial or ethnic hatreds).
The U.S. security state apparatus
regards the agenda of “domestic violent extremists” as “derived from
anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,” which includes “opposition
to perceived economic, racial or social hierarchies.” In sum, to the
Department of Homeland Security, an “extremist” is anyone who opposes
the current prevailing ruling class and system for distributing power.
Anyone they believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or
coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a “domestic violent
extremist,” subject to a vast array of surveillance, monitoring and
other forms of legal restrictions:
It
goes without saying that violence of any kind — including that which is
politically motivated — is a serious crime under U.S. law, and it is
the proper role of the U.S. Government to investigate and prevent it.
But there are real and important legal and institutional limits on the
authority of the intelligence community to involve itself in domestic
law enforcement, or other forms of domestic political activity, that
seem threatened here, if not outright violated.
consentfactory | So, according to Facebook and the Atlantic Council,
I am now a “dangerous individual,” you know, like a “terrorist,” or a
“serial murderer,” or “human trafficker,” or some other kind of
“criminal.” Or I’ve been praising “dangerous individuals,” or
disseminating their symbols, or otherwise attempting to “sow dissension”
and cause “offline harm.”
Actually, I’m not really clear what I’m
guilty of, but I’m definitely some sort of horrible person you want
absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read,
whose books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose
Facebook posts might get your account immediately suspended. Or, at the
very least, you’ll be issued this warning:
Now, hold on, don’t click away just yet. You’re already on whatever
website you’re reading this “dangerous,” “terrorist” column on (or
you’re reading it in an email, probably on your phone), which means you
are already on the official “Readers of Mass-Murdering Content”
watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.
Also, don’t worry, I’m not going to just whine about how Facebook was
mean to me for 2,000 words … well, all right, I’m going to do that a
little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how “reality” is manufactured
and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the
corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and
PayPal, and “think tanks” like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”).
First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.
What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried
to share it, so Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their
accounts, or just prevented them from sharing it, and sent them the
above warning. Facebook didn’t suspend my account, or censor the post on
my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially
deemed me a “dangerous individual.” Instead, they punished anyone who
tried to “boost” my “dangerous” post, a tactic anyone who has been
through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene from Full Metal Jacket) will be familiar with.
Writing in 2014, Gurri foresaw that the Establishment would respond
by denouncing all evidence of public discontent, as lies and
disinformation. The Establishment would, in Gurri’s telling, be so
constrained within their ‘bubble’ that they would be unable to
assimilate their loss of monopoly over their own confected ‘reality’.
This Establishment denial would be made manifest, he argued, in a
delusional, ham-fisted authoritarian manner. His predictions have been
vindicated with Trumpist dissidence denounced as a threat to ‘our
democracy’ – amidst a media and social platform crackdown. Such a
response would only confirm the suspicions of the public, thus setting
off a vicious circle of yet more “distrust and loss of legitimacy”,
Gurri concluded.
This was Gurri’s main thrust. The book’s striking feature however,
was how it seemed so completely to nail the coming Trump and Brexit era –
and the ‘anti-system’ impulse behind them. In America, this impulse
found Trump – not the other way around. The point here essentially being
that America no longer saw Red and Blue as the two extended wings
belonging to the bird of liberal democracy. For something around half of
America, the ‘system’ was rigged towards a profiteering 0.1%, and
against them.
Continued ‘westification’ of the globe – the principal component to
‘old’ liberal globalism – though tarnished and largely discredited,
remains mandatory, as made clear in the cogent reasoning recently advanced
by Robert Kagan: Absent the justifying myth of ‘seeding democracy
across the world’ around which to organise the empire, the moral logic
of the entire enterprise begins to fall apart, Kagan argued (with
surprising frankness). He thus asserts that the U.S. empire abroad is required – precisely in order to preserve the myth of ‘democracy’ at home. An America that retreats from global hegemony, he argues, would no longer possess the cohesive binding to preserve Americaasliberal democracy, at home either.
There may indeed be some truth in this latter observation, yet what
is happening today in the U.S. is but one ‘battle’ (albeit a key one) in
a longer strategic war, reaching far back. The notion of a New World
Order is nothing new. Imagined by globalists today, as before,
it remains a teleological process of the ‘westification’ of the globe
(western ‘universal values’), pursued under the rubric of (scientific)
modernism.
taibbi | When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to
the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as
great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Ageis
known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s
choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal
Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new
administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”
Wu’s
appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he
has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced
the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster
— is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic
circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential
September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era.
Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview,
is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis,
speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed
judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First
Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like
watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”
If
you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does
imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:
nbcnews | While authorities said Atlanta-area spa shooting suspect
Robert Aaron Long, 21, told investigators he was motivated by "sexual
addiction" and claimed he had no racial motivation, health specialists
say the explanation falls short.
Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesman for the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office, said Long — who is accused of killing eight people,
six of them Asian women — indicated that the spas were "a temptation
for him that he wanted to eliminate." However, experts say such
rationale has been used before in attempts to exonerate white men. The
explanation also discounts racial dynamics and can “cause harm” in the
way the public understands these issues.
White
men have traditionally been given a pass when they say it — and have
the privilege of overlooking how race is a factor, experts say.
“Historically, the term ‘sex addiction’ has been used by
white males to absolve themselves from personal and legal responsibility
for their behaviors,” Apryl Alexander, associate professor in the
Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of Denver,
told NBC Asian America. “It is often used as an excuse to pathologize
misogyny.”
The defense of sex addiction itself, Alexander
said, is a highly controversial one as those in the fields of
psychology, psychiatry and sex research continue to debate whether to
formally recognize it. Currently, the idea that sex addiction is a
disorder is not supported by research, nor is it accepted as a clinical
diagnosis, she said.
“A lot of individuals who are doing
this kind of self-reports of sexual addiction are having normative
sexual behaviors and urges, but they might be excessive. Or for a lot of
people, it's rooted in shame that ‘I'm having these attractions and
emotional desires that are normal, but I don't recognize them as
normal,’” Alexander said.
Though the American Psychiatric
Association added the concept of sexual addiction to its Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987, it later retracted the
term and has since rejected the addition of the idea to its later
editions including the DSM–5, which is widely seen as the definitive
resource on mental disorders, on the basis of a lack of supporting
evidence.
Alexander said this sexual behavior doesn’t
affect the brain in the same ways other addictions, including substance
use and gambling behavior, do, either, calling the characterization of
Long’s behavior “concerning.”
The self-identification of
sex addiction, she said, is often seen in individuals who are raised in
conservative and religious environments, “where there's a high level of
moral disapproval of their natural kind of sexual urges and desires.” Many of these populations are overwhelmingly white.
twitter | I
keep seeing "sex addiction" used as a term of agreed-on meaning,
whether the speaker believes it explains the murders or not. But nearly
all of what the conservative evangelicalism of the murderer describes as
"sex addiction" is what the rest of the world calls sexuality...
nbcnews | The only time I was ever in Atlanta, where six Asian women were shot dead
on Tuesday, a young white man shouted "Me so horny" to me at the
airport. And as the only Asian woman in the space, I knew he was talking
to me. I locked eyes with him for a second and then rushed off to catch
my flight back to Los Angeles. I was in Atlanta to attend the annual
meeting of the Association of Asian American Studies, presenting a paper
there for the first time. It was a big deal for me professionally. But
what I remember most about that trip were a white man's racist, sexist
words.
Tuesday's killings
occurred at three spas in the Atlanta area. Two other victims, a white
man and a white woman, were also killed. Investigators said the white male suspect told them that he has a "sex addiction" and targeted the spas to "take out that temptation."
"He
was fed up, at the end of his rope," Cherokee County sheriff's Capt.
Jay Baker said. "He had a bad day, and this is what he did."
Asian women, along with Black and Indigenous women and other women of
color, endure racism and sexism in intersectional ways constantly, and
they have throughout history. As lawyer Jaemin Kim
argued in 2009, prosecutors and police may be even less likely to add
"hate crime" charges in cases of rapes and sexual assaults targeting
Asian women.
In 1875, Chinese women were targeted by a federal immigration law called the Page Act.
This law effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women to the
United States based on a morals clause that considered all of them
prostitutes at the time. There were apparently specific racist and sexist concerns
that Chinese "prostitutes" would bring in "especially virulent strains
of venereal diseases ... and entice young white boys to a life of sin."
Sound familiar?
jonathanturley | We previously discussed
the controversial position of Alison Collins, Vice President of the San
Francisco school board, in her campaign against meritocracy and effort
to shut down the gifted programs at Lowell High School. The Asian
community was particularly opposed to Collins’ efforts since Asian
students composed 29 percent of the students but 51 percent of the
Lowell student body. Now Collins is under fire for prior tweets
attacking Asians as promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS” and of using
“white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”
These do not appear recent tweets but their content is obviously insulting for any Asian American. The Yahoo News story included
such tweets as accusing “many Asian American Ts, Ss, and Ps” —
teachers, students, and parents — of promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS”
and of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get
ahead.’” It also include a demand to know “[w]here are the vocal Asians
speaking up against Trump?” and statements on how Asians are deluding
themselves by not speaking out against former president Donald
Trump: “Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?”
Collins continued. “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled?
beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r. You’re still
considered “the help.”
While the use of the censored version of the “n word” has led to calls to terminate academics,
I do not believe that such objections are fair in this or the prior
cases. Indeed, this controversy should not take away from the campaign
against meritocracy and the effort to eliminate programs for advanced or gifted students in the public school system. As I have previously discussed, I long been a supporter of public schools. These advanced programs are needed to maintain broad, diverse, and vibrant school systems for cities like San Francisco.
Race politics seems a focus on every level in the school system, even in the regulation of student elections.
Likewise, the controversy in San Francisco follows another controversy
in Los Angeles where United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) Cecily
Myart-Cruz has also criticized “Middle Eastern” parents
in joining “white parents” in seeking school re-openings. The UTLA was
criticized after Maryam Qudrat, a mother of Middle Eastern descent, was
asked by the UTLA to identify her race after criticizing the union’s
opposition to reopening schools despite overwhelming science that it is
safe. This effort to racially classify critics of the teachers followed
Myart-Cruz attacking critics by referring to their race
WEF | Global companies are increasingly taking up
their role as responsible trustees of society and investing in actions
for racial and ethnic equity in the workplace – not as an option but as a
business imperative.
The World Economic Forum has convened a
coalition of global corporations and their C-suite leaders committed to
building equitable and just workplaces for professionals with
underrepresented racial and ethnic identities.
Partnering for Racial Justice in Business as a global initiative, launched today Monday 25 January, during The Davos Agenda 2021,
is focused on eradicating all strands of racism in the workplace
against professionals with underrepresented racial and ethnic
identities.
Professionals of colour and minority ethnic backgrounds continue to face
racial injustice and inequity in the workplace, and they have been
severely underrepresented in leadership. There have only been 15 Black
CEOs over the course of the 62 years of the Fortune 500’s existence, and
currently only 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Black. Below the top level,
Black employees form approximately only 4.7% of executive team members
in the Fortune 100 and 6.7% of the 16.2 million managerial level jobs.
To drive systemic and sustainable change
towards racial justice, this initiative has been designed to
operationalize and coordinate commitments to eradicate racism in the
workplace and set new global standards for racial equity in business. It
also provides a platform for businesses to collectively advocate for
inclusive policy change.
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