#get local. start supporting local politicians that are more leftist than what we got. but by god to not expose people in red states | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

things2mustdo · 3 years

Link

Face it, the mainstream media is not only full of contradictions, but deep-seated, institutionalized biases. When a male or conservative does something, it is often considered horrendous. Yet when a female, liberal or a member of another “special” group does the same thing, passes are given or journalists’ eyes are averted.

Social media users with common sense political opinions have already started to compile these glaring double standards. Return Of Kings and its supporters should continue doing the same thing.

So here are five of the most egregious recent examples of hypocritical mainstream media madness:

1. Use of dead veterans’ families at political rallies or conventions

When Khizr and Ghazala Khan appeared at the Democratic National Convention to lambaste Donald Trump for his views on Muslim immigration and supposed behavior, commentators and journalists went wild with fanfare. Their son Humayun, a Muslim soldier, had died in Iraq. Trump was attacked for allegedly grandstanding about and minimizing Humayun’s death.

Meanwhile, many of these same newsmen and women, including Rachel Maddow’s stooge Steve Benen, derided the Republicans for featuring Pat Smith, mother of Benghazi fatality Sean Smith, as a speaker at their own Convention. Mrs. Smith had laid into Hillary Clinton over the latter’s role in and perceived indifference to her son’s death in Libya. So one family became heroes to the media for going public after their tragic loss, while another was portrayed as so weak in their grief that they were manipulated by big, bad Republicans into talking.

Moreover, Trump had nothing to do with Sean Smith’s death. Compare this to Clinton, who was the Secretary of State at the time of the American deaths at Benghazi and whose State Department had received numerous calls for assistance. Considering that Sean Smith and others died alongside U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the first American ambassador to be killed whilst serving since 1979, the woefully insufficient security precautions taken by the Obama Administration and Secretary Clinton should not have transpired. But this spotlight on Clinton does not make for good (liberal) news.

2. Psychiatric records for a war hero vs. medical records of a pathological liar

Countless liberals, both in the media and within other leftist cabals like mainstream Hollywood, have attacked those questioning Hillary Clinton’s health as “misogynists,” “sexists” and other undesirables. When these tags are unable to be used, leftists claim that even piecemeal doubts about her physical condition are nothing but conspiracy theories on par with Roswell UFOs and lizard people running the world.

Yet eight years ago, these same people were frothing at the bit to out John McCain for his supposedly poor health. Most perversely of all, they homed in on his decorated military service, suggesting he had Presidentially disqualifying mental health conditions from his service in the Vietnam War and the multiple years he spent as a prisoner-of-war. “Where are his psychiatric records?” bellowed one piece from Salon, in addition to a number of other articles that more than hinted at the same topic.

Whilst I, like many of you, revile his putrid, watered-down “Republican” policies on many issues, McCain had gargantuan balls in Vietnam. Here is a man who spent more time as a tortured prisoner-of-war, including a stay in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, than Barack Obama spent in the US Senate. As the son of the commander of US forces in Vietnam, McCain received numerous offers of repatriation from the North Vietnamese. He refused and would only accept being returned home once fellow American soldiers captured before him were released. By contrast, Hillary lacks the mental fortitude to tell the truth most of the time, not even after she’s had seizures, coughing fits, and dramatic collapses on camera!

3. Sexualizing political candidates (and removing their genitals)

When an artist by the name of Lushsux painted a mural of a scantily-clad Hillary Clinton, a local Melbourne, Australia council and numerous global commentators derided it as “misogyny” and “sexual objectification.” “Take female politicians seriously!” was the crux of their shrill arguments against the rendering. Lushsux then trolled his critics by repainting the mural so Hillary was dressed in an Islamic burqa. Soon after, multiple statues of a nude and testicle-less Donald Trump appeared in American cities. Unlike the Hillary artwork, the proliferation created huge fanfare and delight amongst both prominent leftists and run-of-the-mill liberal voters. Why is one act so offensive and the other so funny, particularly in age where body-shaming and mocking someone’s appearance is meant to be so taboo?

Most of the critical commentaries about the Trump statues that appeared in the mainstream media, of which there were few, failed to take into account one glaring significance of the testicle-less Trump. Short of them being violently taken or hacked off, how exactly could Trump have no balls? Imagine the furore if a statue, mural or other representation of Hillary Clinton had lacked breasts or shown her vagina circumcised/mutilated. “They’re condoning violence against women!” would be the stock-standard answer from liberals and their even more deranged SJW cousins.

4. Lesbian’s Olympic marriage proposal vs. heterosexual male’s Olympic marriage proposal

This is bad and misogynistic:

This is love and should be applauded:

Leftists rejoiced when Olympic official Marjorie Enya asked her partner, rugby sevens player Isadora Cerullo, to marry her using a microphone. Love wins, right, especially when it’s gay love? But when Chinese athlete Qin Kai asked silver medalist He Zi to marry him, the knives from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) came out. The BBC, unfortunately taxpayer-funded, published an article insinuating that Qin Kai was attempting to control He Zi with the very public marriage proposal. Not only could it be control, it could be awfully pernicious “male control.” Coverage of Enya’s proposal to Cerullo, however, got the broadcaster’s tick of approval.

If either of the two proposals is a form of control or narcissistic, it was the lesbian one. Unlike the Chinese diver, who was competing individually, the lesbian proposed to was part of the Brazilian team, which had not even been awarded a medal. Brazil had come ninth and that night Australia had beaten New Zealand for the gold medal. He Zi may not have won the gold medal, but she had actually participated in the final. But do not let facts get in the way of a good male-bashing.

5. Objectifying men vs. objectifying women

Cosmopolitan has established itself as a dual enabler of both ditzy female airheads and SJW political freaks. Over time, the magazine has come out strongly against countless normal displays of male sexuality, admonishing men who appreciate female breasts and buttocks for being “horrible.” Of the many Cosmopolitan pieces to take this line, an article in mid-2014 takes the cake for its ridiculous shaming of harmless, healthy behaviors. Ironically, though, covers for this publication feature the same sorts of thin, healthy women that men desire most in the first place.

Fast-forward a mere two years and Cosmopolitan went to the extraordinary effort of cataloguing 36 men whose crotch bulges tickled their fancy. Of course, numerous other articles during that time had objectified men in a way considered misogynistic when males do it to women, but the timing was amusing. After so much talk of valuing female athletes, whose physical accomplishments are far less than men, for their work and not their bodies, Cosmopolitan celebrated the years of sacrifice of male athletes by effectively taking photos of their barely clothed genitalia.

We could keep on going

Many other hypocritical pieces were penned about these situations, not just the ones I have referenced. Then there’s the great number of other articles we could assess and critique on separate issues. You may be convinced, and rightfully so, that the mainstream media is inherently biased. But we need to take this to the next level and disseminate the proof to wider audiences.

Journalists and commentators will continue their bad habits, that much is clear. What matters now is fighting back. Complaining about double standards only goes so far. Exposing them in an organized fashion stands a better much chance in helping us to arrest and then reverse this institutional bias.

As Return Of Kings readers, you are our extra eyes and ears. If you find more examples of extreme leftist media bias, bring it to our attention.

https://www.returnofkings.com/19995/anti-female-stem-bias-a-bayesian-explanation

The New York Times recently ran a long piece exploring the history of women in STEM fields and attempting to explain the ever-present difference between men and women in performance and participation in these fields. The article begins by citing research on perceptions of female aptitude in math and science:

“Researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. “

She shares an anecdote that is supposed to display the prejudice of professors against females in the field, but instead illustrates one valid reason for the bias displayed by the Yale study:

“Other women chimed in to say that their teachers were the ones who teased them the most. In one physics class, the teacher announced that the boys would be graded on the “boy curve,” while the one girl would be graded on the “girl curve”; when asked why, the teacher explained that he couldn’t reasonably expect a girl to compete in physics on equal terms with boys.”

Enter Bayes’ Theorem

Bayes’s theorem is a foundational principle of statistics and probability that allows us to update our estimations about the trueness of a fact based on new evidence. The math of Bayes’ theorem is simple and elegant, and the overarching idea is powerful — we can use evidence in a formalized manner to change the probability that something may be true, and this can often have non-intuitive results.

The classic example of Bayes in action is medical tests — for example, if 1% of women have breast cancer, and a mammogram detects the cancer 80% of the time with a 10% false positive rate, what is the probability that a positive result means the woman has cancer? If a mammogram is positive, the chance of cancer is less than 8% due to the presence of false positives, as well as the low baseline population rate of cancer.

What does this have to do with women and STEM fields? Readers of this site are familiar with the allure that even a plain looking girl can have at the height of her availability and youth. This isn’t just a factor when getting free drinks at the bar – it extends to the classroom, hiring for jobs, treatment in everyday life, and many other areas. Girls in primary and secondary school are judged to be better students, despite boys showing a significant advantage in standardized tests starting around middle school. The article highlights the ways that women are supposedly discouraged by the system, but makes no mention of the advantages they enjoy.

Put simply, women are more likely to be handed accomplishments without having to work for them, both due to the power of their sexuality and as unconscious overcorrection for their supposed disadvantages in opportunity. Given an applicant with a certain pedigree – a Ph.D, say, from a top graduate program —we will have a certain estimation of that person’s intelligence and aptitude. However, the “false positive” rate on those qualifications identifying extremely high aptitude is likely to be much lower for a man, who has not enjoyed the advantages of a feminized education system, catch-up programs, and the hint of his sexuality influencing the evaluations of his superiors.

The bias against hiring a woman whose qualifications are equal to a man, and their subsequent lower salary offer, is simply a use of Bayesian inference. It accounts for the implicit probability that the female will not be as good as her résumé suggests, to say nothing of the chance that she will leave her job to begin a family and leave her employer empty-handed at some point in the future. If, as the example above states, both men and women implicitly behave as if men are superior in math and science, we must give some consideration that this is a possibility.

If Men Are Better At Math/Science — What’s The Big Deal?

The media is encouraged to sing the praises of women where they excel compared to men, and females indeed show demonstrated advantages in many cognitive areas. They are better at language acquisition, picking up on non-verbal cues, and we are all familiar with their evolved capacity for psychological manipulation. Many would suggest that women have better organizational skills. They are incarcerated for violent crimes less often, are less prone to risky behavior, and are more resilient to psychological trauma such as PTSD.

But when it comes to exploring why men have long-demonstrated advantages in certain disciplines, the media scrabbles to ascribe the boogeyman of injustice perpetrated on the protected class. The article is quick to dismiss the repeatable and longitudinal difference between males in females in standardized testing, a long-standing form of evaluation that every college and grad school uses to give out valuable admissions spots. It also does not mention the lack of female representation in technology entrepreneurship, a field that is less dependent on credentials and more on individual drive, creativity, and aptitude.

It could certainly be true that women are discriminated against AND that they are simply less common at the far right of the aptitude bell curve necessary for competitive positions in academia. But I challenge you to find this idea entertained in any mainstream publication despite the mountains of circumstantial evidence. Larry Summers was tarred and feathered for even mentioning research on population dynamics as a potential driver of this difference. The lesson here is that, when you begin an “inquiry” by presupposing the conclusion, you will end up with a politically correct and eminently intellectually dishonest worldview.

Read More: The Anti-Male Commercial

4 notes · View notes

rotationalsymmetry · 3 years

Text

My twitter experiences vary between “random mishmash of politicians, advocacy orgs, and random queer people that I happen to follow” plus the occasional “catching up on one specific user, just that one” so I was doing the latter just now, and the last time I’d done that was in late October, so I got to do a re-run of the election in reverse. Things ... could have gone a lot worse for the US than they did. Being a stressball from Tuesday through Saturday morning wasn’t great, and I’m sure it was a lot worse for some other people than it was for me, but it’s still much better than what could have happened. One thing to consider about activism, is that: skills learned on one campaign can often easily transfer to a new one. The momentum built up by the “silence = death” AIDS activism carried into lgbtq+ rights, most notably marriage equality (but also non-discrimination laws in employment, the military, adoption, etc.) And while to a large degree trans rights were sidelined in the initial push in the 2000′s, the trans rights movement has been growing and it now has dramatically more mainstream acceptance and recognition than it used to. (And there’s backlash. There’s always backlash.) People who were activated by this election cycle, may well stay active and turn their attention to other campaigns. Some of them are going to stay in electoral politics -- senate and house races, governor races, local races and state legislature races -- and some are going to find other ways to be active.* The Black Lives Matter fight continues. There will be waves -- especially there will be waves of, sometimes the protests get coverage and sometimes they don’t. “Police defunding” is on the table, and there’s going to be hundreds of local fights to see how far we can get. And there’s backlash. This is going to need a whole lot of sustained attention over time. And as long as police are arresting people for protesting, there will be a need for bail fund money, and as long as the police keep injuring protesters there’ll be fundraisers that need supporting. Biden has publicly gone on the record opposing police defunding. However, this could be a thing he “evolves” on if there’s enough public pressure, and even if he doesn’t actively interfere with defunding on state/local levels that’ll be a huge improvement over the last administration. Police are not primarily funded on the national level. There’s a scary rise in alt right stuff. And that’s hard to fight, because it’s to a large degree decentralized -- one person does a hate crime, it gets treated as an individual bad apple thing, the effect is still terrorism. I don’t really know what to do about it, but one thing is to pay attention and to call things what they are. There’s ICE. Biden’s been making noise about reuniting families, which is good, and restoring DACA, which is good. I’d like to see it go a lot farther. Open Borders isn’t a mainstream movement yet -- it seems somewhat more fringe than UBI right now, and UBI is still pretty fringe, but I think it could become mainstream with enough pushing. I think on the left that should be our clear end goal: no restriction on immigration whatsoever.** No human being is illegal. Student loan forgiveness and free public education, or at least reasonable half-measures on these things, are things it looks like we can reasonably expect out of the Biden administration. I’m getting the impression that full on single payer is not, but we can keep talking about it and building public support. We’re a lot closer than we were. And, Biden has made some serious promises to the disabled community, including an end to the SSI marriage penalty, which could be huge -- disability rights tend to be overlooked by most people and not considered mainstream, so it’s really helpful to have abled allies paying attention to this issue and being willing to make phone calls etc. Biden thinks the coronavirus exists and that it’s possible and desirable to prevent its spread, and he’s got a better attitude towards supporting people who are struggling financially due to the pandemic than the last guy did. This is a good thing. Ditto for climate change -- he’s made some noise about reducing fossil fuel emissions and signing on to carbon emissions treaties, and these are good things -- not enough goodness knows, but an improvement. Energy companies tend to be major players in politics, so it’s unclear how far we’ll actually get on this issue; how much public pressure there is could be a huge factor. It’s much too late to stop global warming -- it’s already started -- but what the US does now can have a huge effect on how much global warming we get over the next decades. More global warming = more natural disasters, which pretty much always hit marginalized people harder (including/especially marginalized people outside of the US) -- environmentalism isn’t some elitist white thing, it’s actually a huge frikkin deal for racial justice, anti-colonialism etc as well. (For all that, yes, there’s huge racial blind spots within the environmental movement, sometimes specific things the environmental movement does harm poc esp indigenous people, and white leaders from first world countries get too much attention while poc and people from third world countries get too little.) I think the fight against corporate power isn’t being named as such often enough on here. There’s a lot of talk about billionaires, and yeah, I’m not a huge fan of billionaires existing. But even if Bezos only had a few hundred million dollars, even if he had under a million dollars!, Amazon would still have too much power. Uber and Lyft have too much power -- look at how Prop 22 in California went, that’s terrifying. And it doesn’t matter how much either of their CEO’s personally makes. I’d like to see a bit less talk about billionaires and a bit more talk about corporations -- because when corporate boards of directors have a legal obligation to maximize profits regardless of the wellbeing of people or the planet, that’s the problem, not specific people. And politicians don’t mainly get their campaign money from individual billionaires (I don’t think) so much as from corporations -- that’s the primary way that money is skewing US democracy, through corporate donations. This isn’t a D&D game and our enemies are (usually) not specific people, they’re institutions and systems. *maybe that’s overly optimistic -- maybe it’s a lot easier for campaigns to start in the streets and end up with lobbying and election campaigns than vice versa. But. I know an awful lot of people who do both. They’re not really opposing strategies. They’re complementary, always have been. **OK, given that there’s a pandemic going on, no restrictions on immigration except under extreme public safety circumstances. But for most of this crisis, the US has been exporting the virus more than the US has been importing it. There’s a book btw (called “open borders”) illustrated by the SMBC guy, which, it’s very much not a leftist book, but that makes it good for handing around to people who aren’t leftists.

#political #us politics #long post #I'm probably missing a lot and may be getting things horribly wrong as usual #a lot of tumblr takes run heavily towards black and white thinking which I think is counterproductive however #if you personally have a position that you're not really going to pay attention to where politicians say they stand in your activism #you do you but tbh I've never had activism that was entirely separated out from electoral politics #even my food not bombs activism #due to sffnb's close ties to the sf coalition on homelessness and there being a horrific anti-homeless people local ballot measure fight #going on when I first really got involved in FNB #they've always been closely connected for me #and you really can make a difference in local politics #prop n passed by a huge margin unfortunately #but a few years ago there was a different ballot measure and basically one Haight Street business owner talking to one tech CEO #and then the CEO coming down hard on the right side swung the election #I don't remember the details but it was kinda a big deal #it started with a single person to person conversation #someone ask me about prop N I will go off about it #when you try to make an edit but accidentally post -- twice

1 note · View note

wumingfoundation · 6 years

Text

On #QAnon: The full text of our Buzzfeed Interview

Ryan Broderick of Buzzfeed just published an article on this #QAnon conspiracy bullshit titled It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters. The piece features quotes from an interview we gave via email. Here’s the full email exchange.

Can you tell me a bit about when and how your book Q was written?

We started writing Q in the last months of 1995, when we were part of the Luther Blissett Project, a network of activists, artists and cultural agitators who all shared the name «Luther Blissett». Luther Blissett was and still is a British public figure, a former footballer, a philanthropist. The LBP spread many mythical tales about why we chose to borrow his name, but the truth is that nobody knows.

Initially, Blissett the footballer was bemused, but then he decided to play along with us and even publicly endorsed the project. Last year, during an interview on the Italian TV, he stated that having his name adopted for the LBP was «a honour». The purpose of signing all our statements, political actions and works of art with the same moniker was to build the reputation of one open character, a sort of collective "bandit", like Ned Ludd, or Captain Swing. It was live action role playing. The LBP was huge: hundreds of people in Italy alone, dozens more in other countries. In the UK, one of the theorists and propagandists of the LBP was the novelist Stewart Home.

The LBP lasted from 1994 to 1999. The best English-language account of those five years is in Marco Deseriis' book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. One of our main activities consisted of playing extremely elaborate pranks on the mainstream media. Some of them were big stunts which made us quite famous in Italy. The most complex one was played by dozens of people in the backwoods around Viterbo, a town near Rome. It lasted a year, involving Satanism, black masses, Christian anti-satanist vigilantes and so on. It was all made up: there were neither Satanists nor vigilantes, only fake pictures, strategically spread rumours and crazy communiqués, but the local and national media bought everything with no fact-checking at all, politicians jumped on the bandwagon of mass paranoia, we even managed to get footage of a (rather clumsy) satanic ritual broadcast in the national TV news, then we claimed responsibility for the whole thing and produced a huge mass of evidence. The Luther Blissett Project was also responsible for a huge grassroots counter-inquiry on cases of false child abuse allegations. We deconstructed the paedophilia scare that swiped Europe in the second half of the 1990s, and wrote a book about it. A magistrate whom we targeted in the book filed a lawsuit, as a consequence the book was impounded and disappeared from bookshops, but not from the web.

This is the context in which we wrote Q. We finished it in June 1998. It came out in March 1999 and was our final contribution to the LBP.

I've been reading up about it, and it's largely believed that it's underneath the book's narrative it works as handbook for European leftists? Is that a fair assessment? I've read that many believe the book's plot is an allegory for 70s and 80s European activists?

Although it keeps triggering many possible allegorical interpretations, we meant it as a disguised, oblique autobiography of the LBP. We often described it as Blissett's «playbook», an «operations manual» for cultural disruption.

The four authors I'm speaking to now are Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo correct? The four authors of Q?

You are speaking with three of the four authors of Q, and you're speaking with a band of writers called Wu Ming, which means «Anonymous» in Chinese. In December 1999 the Luther Blissett Project committed a symbolic suicide - we called it The Seppuku - and in January 2000 we launched another project, the Wu Ming Foundation, centred around our writing and our blog, Giap. The WMF is now an even bigger network than the LBP was, and includes many collectives, projects and laboratories. Luca aka Wu Ming 3 is not a member of the band anymore, although he still collaborates with us on specific side projects. Each member of the band has a nom de plume composed of the band's name and a numeral, following the alphabetical order of our surnames, thus you're speaking to Roberto Bui aka Wu Ming 1, Giovanni Cattabriga aka Wu Ming 2 and Federico Guglielmi aka Wu Ming 4.

Can you tell me a bit about your background before the Luther Blissett project?

Before the LBP we were part of a national scene that was – and still is – called simply «il movimento», a galaxy of occupied social centres, squats, independent radio stations, small record labels, alternative bookshops, student collectives, radical trade unions, etc. In the Italian radical tradition, at least after the Sixties, there was never any clearcut separation between the counterculture and more political milieux. Most of us came from left-wing family backgrounds, had roots in the working class. Punk rock opened our minds during our teenage years, then in the late 1980s and early 1990s Cyberpunk opened them even more, and inspired new practices.

When did you start noticing similarities between Q and QAnon? I know you've tweeted a bit about this, but I'd love to get as many details as I can. I feel like the details around QAnon are so sketchy that it's important to lock in as much as I can here.

We read a lot about the US alt-right, books such as Elizabeth Sandifer's Neoreaction a Basilisk or Angela Nagle's – flawed but still useful – Kill All Normies, and yet we didn't see the QAnon thing coming. We didn't know it was growing on 4chan and some specific subReddits. About six weeks ago, on June 12th, our old pal Florian Cramer – a fellow veteran of the LBP who now teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam – sent us a short email. Here's the text:

«It seems as if somebody took Luther Blissett's playbook and turned it into an Alt-Right conspiracy lore. Maybe Wu Ming should write a new article: "How Luther Blissett brought down Roseanne Barr"!»,

After those sentences there was a link to a piece by Justin Caffier on Vice. We read it, and briefly commented on Twitter, then in the following weeks more and more people got in touch with us, many of them Europeans living in the US. They all wanted to draw our attention on the QAnon phenomenon. To anyone who had read our novel, the similarities were obvious, to the extent that all these people were puzzled seeing that no US pundit or scholar was citing the book.

Have there been key moments for you that made you feel like QAnon is an homage to Q? What has lined up the best?

Coincidences are hard to ignore: dispatches signed Q allegedly coming from some dark meanders of top state power, exactly like in our book. This Q is frequently described as a Blissett-like collective character, «an entity of about ten people that have high security clearance», and at the same time – like we did for the LBP – weird "origin myths" are put into circulation, like the one about John Kennedy Jr. faking his own death in 1999 – the year Q was first published, by the way! – and becoming Q. QAnon's psy-op reminds very much of our old «playbook», and the metaconspiracy seems to draw from the LBP's set of references, as it involves the Church, satanic rituals, paedophilia...

We can't say for sure that it's an homage, but one thing is almost certain: our book has something to do with it. It may have started as some sort of, er, "fan fiction" inspired by our novel, and then quickly became something else.

There will be a lot of skepticism I think that an American political movement like QAnon could have been influenced by an Italian novel, how do you think it may have happened?

It's an Italian novel in the sense that it was originally written in Italian by Italian authors, but in the past (nearly) 20 years it has become a global novel. It was translated into fifteen languages – including Korean, Japanese, Russian, Turkish – and published in about thirty countries. It was successful all across Europe and in the English speaking world with the exception of the US, where it got bad reviews, sold poorly and circulated almost exclusively in activist circles.

Q was published in Italian a few months before the so-called "Battle of Seattle", and published in several other languages in the 2000-2001 period. It became a sort of night-table book for that generation of activists, the one that would be savagely beaten up by an army of cops during the G8 summit in Genoa, July 2001. In 2008 we wrote a short essay, almost a memoir, on our participation to those struggles and Q's influence in those years, titled Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise. A copy of Q's Spanish edition even ended up in the hands of subcomandante Marcos. It isn't at all unrealistic to imagine that it may have inspired the people who started QAnon.

Have you seen anything in the QAnon posts that leads you to suspect any activist group in particular is behind it?

No, we haven't.

You think QAnon is a prank? Without some kind of reveal it's obviously hard to see it as that. If you think it was revealed that QAnon was actually some kind of anarchist prank, would it even matter? Would its believers abandon it or would they just see it as a smear campaign?

Let us take for granted, for a while, that QAnon started as a prank in order to trigger right-wing weirdos and have a laugh at them. There's no doubt it has long become something very different. At a certain level it still sounds like a prank, but who's pulling it on whom? Was the QAnon narrative hijacked and reappropriated by right-wing "counter-pranksters"? Counter-pranksters who operated with the usual alt-right "post-ironic" cynicism, and made the narrative more and more absurd in order to astonish media pundits while spreading reactionary content in a captivating way?

Again: are the original pranksters still involved? Is there some detectable conflict of narratives within the QAnon universe? Why are some alt-right types taking the distance from the whole thing and showing contempt for what they describe as «a larp for boomers»?

A larp it is, for sure. To be more precise, it's a fascist Alternate Reality Game. Plausibly the most active players – ie the main influencers – don't believe in all the conspiracies and metaconspiracies, but many people are so gullible that they'll gulp down any piece of crap – or lump of menstrual blood, for that matter. Moreover, there's danger of gun violence related to the larp, the precedent of Pizzagate is eloquent enough. What if QAnon inspires a wave of hate crimes?

Therefore, to us the important question is: triggering nazis like that, what is it good for? That camp is divided between those who would believe anything and those who would be "ironic" on anything and exploit anything in order to advance their reactionary, racist agenda. Can you really troll or ridicule people like those?

It's hard to foresee what would happen if QAnon were exposed as an anarchist/leftist prank on the right. If its perpetrators claimed responsibility for it and showed some evidence (for example, unmistakeable references to our book and the LBP), would the explanation itself become yet another part of the narrative, or would it generate a new narrative encompassing and defusing the previous one? In plain words: which narrative would prevail? «QAnon sucking anything into its vortex» or «Luther Blissett's ultimate prank»?

In any case, we'd never have started anything like that ourselves. Way too dangerous.

#QAnon #Luther Blissett #Q #novel #Wu Ming

50 notes · View notes

nothingman · 3 years

Link

Arizona GOP leader Kelli Ward with former President Trump in August. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

In the past week, extreme moves by Republicans in Oregon, Arizona, and Hawaii all point to a discouraging conclusion: The post-Trump GOP shows no signs of reforming.

Donald Trump’s departure from the White House left a giant question mark hanging over American democracy: Would the GOP reckon with its embrace of Trumpism or would it continue down the extremist path it has been traveling for years?

The evidence from the past few weeks has not been promising. But one of the most disturbing signs — and one of the most underappreciated — has been the wild behavior of certain state-level Republican parties in recent days. Three examples — in Oregon, Hawaii, and Arizona — really stick out

On January 19, the Oregon Republican Party passed a resolution condemning the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.

In that resolution, the state party ludicrously claimed that “there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump,” warning of “a frightening parallel to the February 1933 burning of the German Reichstag” and “Leftist forces seeking to establish a dictatorship void of all cherished freedom and liberties.”

This Saturday, the official account of the Hawaii Republican Party sent tweets defending Qanon believers and praising the “generally high quality” work of a YouTuber named Tarl Warwick, who has denied the Holocaust.

The party deleted and condemned the tweets; the communications official who sent them resigned. But this is not the first dance with extremism from the Hawaii state party: In 2020, the founder of the Proud Boys Hawaii, Nick Ochs, ran for a statehouse seat under the party’s banner. Ochs later participated in the storming of the Capitol and was arrested at Honolulu’s airport on January 9.

Also on Saturday, the Arizona Republican Party passed official resolutions censuring three prominent party members — Gov. Doug Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake, and Sen. John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain — for alleged deviation from GOP ideology.

The state GOP accuses Ducey — who is, again, the sitting Republican governor — of seizing “dictatorial powers” by imposing coronavirus lockdowns. They claim Flake, who endorsed Biden over Trump, has “condemned the Republican Party, rejected populism, and rejected the interests of the American people over globalist interests” — and encouraged him to switch parties. They charge McCain, who also endorsed Biden, with having “condemned President Trump for his criticism of her husband.”

Oregon and Hawaii are blue states; Arizona is a longtime Republican stronghold that has recently turned purple, voting for Biden in 2020 and sending two moderate Democrats to the current Senate. These state GOP parties should want to move to the center to win over the median local voters, people who are turned off by the hardcore Trumpism and extremism on offer from the national party.

But that is not what we are seeing. And these recent examples illustrate something important about the Republican Party’s years-long turn toward right-wing extremism: It runs deep, its reach goes well beyond Washington, and it’s going to take a lot more than Trump’s exit to quash it.

The state parties show how our national politics is broken

In the past, some observers have dismissed extreme statements from a few state-level GOP officials as irrelevant to the bigger picture of American politics. But these recent incidents aren’t isolated; in Oregon and Arizona, it was the official Republican Party that issued the strikingly extreme statements.

Moreover, new political science research suggests that what’s happening to these state parties is very much representative of broader national trends.

In a paper released on Monday, three scholars — Daniel J. Hopkins, Eric Schickler, and David Azizi — examined 1,783 Republican and Democratic state party platforms issued between 1918 and 2017. The goal is to identify the relationship between national and state-level polarization: to figure out whether state parties are getting more extreme and why.

What they found was fascinating. Starting around the 1990s, state-level parties rapidly nationalized: platforms started to deemphasize regional and local issues, like agriculture, and play up national ones like abortion. In each state, both Republican and Democratic Party platforms became less distinctive and more like each other.

“Parties that were once collections of local retailers are now clearly national brands, more McDonalds than mom and pop,” they write.

Now, you might expect that this is just a reflection of national parties, that the RNC and DNC began to polarize and the state parties just followed their lead. But that’s not what Hopkins and his co-authors found. They found that the state-level changes in polarization happened at the exact same time as measures of national polarization increased.

“If the state parties were simply taking their cues from national-level elites, one might expect a lag between the change in Congress and shifts in state-level platforms,” they explain. “The evidence instead suggests that both state parties and national-level officials were responding simultaneously to the same changes in the broader political environment.”

One of the major changes to the “broader political environment” on the Republican side has been the rise of a polluted national media ecosystem: Fox News, national radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, far-right websites like Breitbart, and conspiracy-minded networks on social media platforms like Facebook. These institutions have worked to convince the party faithful and activists of untruths like “Trump actually won the 2020 election” and “Joe Biden is the pawn of radical socialists,” giving rise to a party that is mainlining extreme thinking at every level.

John Moore/Getty Images

Trump supporters watch a video featuring Fox host Sean Hannity at an October 30 rally in Michigan.

These are the epistemic conditions under which the Oregon state party could claim that the storming of the Capitol was a “false flag.” It’s how a Hawaii Republican Party official got attracted to the work of a Holocaust denier. It’s how the Arizona GOP could come to denounce its own sitting governor for trying to fight a deadly pandemic.

It’s obvious that some of the party’s national leaders, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY), don’t actually believe in these conspiracy theories. But for too long, the party has been comfortable letting their rank-and-file supporters believe them because it’s politically advantageous. Now, true believers are rising up and capturing the leadership of state parties and local activist groups — putting pressure on national politicians to conform to extreme ideas or risk a serious primary threat.

This makes the GOP’s post-Trump trajectory look even scarier. No one person or organization is in charge of the party, in a position to fix the root causes of its continuing turn toward extremism. Reforming the party requires a fight on multiple levels and in multiple arenas: reforms to the local and national party, transformations of both the party and adjacent institutions like Fox News.

During the recent Arizona Republican Party meeting, CNN spoke with two local GOP activists named Barbara Wyllie and Corky Haynes. These women, lifelong Republicans who call themselves “the Grassroots Grandmas,” seemed delighted with the censure moves.

“However Trump rolls is how the Republican Party’s gonna roll. This is the Trump Republican Party,” said Wyllie. “And the RINOs [Republican In Name Only] will fall off.”

The fight over the GOP’s future isn’t over. There are leading figures in state-level Republican Parties, like Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who are actively working to de-Trumpify their party.

But the early days of the post-Trump era suggest that the smart money isn’t with Hogan, but the Grassroots Grandmas.

via: https://ift.tt/3a3KixX

#IFTTT #Feedly #Nothingman uses Feedly #Internet

0 notes

conservativemalarkey · 6 years

Note

Okay, now I'm curious about what you saw of the Tea Party. (Not a new follower, if that matters?)

Hey, it’s fine! I’m mostly just trying to get some Content (TM) here, so... any questions are welcome. Caveat here: I was a teenager for the brunt of this, and I was a young teenager at the beginning of this. (I was only a sophomore in high school when it really kicked off and I started following it.) In my head, some things are mixed up- I did a little bit of fact-checking to make sure I got the dates right, and it turns out I didn’t at all. Also, I was never involved on the ground level, because I was a young teenager in a rural area and didn’t have the opportunity to do things like ‘go to protests’; most of my involvement was liking things on facebook.

WARNING: Long post is long, and I don’t want to put this under a cut in case I have to change my URL. If you don’t want to read this, you can press the ‘J’ key to skip down (or just... swipe, I guess. Sorry, mobile users.)

...So. Around the time President Obama got elected, a lot of conservative types were angry in the same way we are about Trump, and for nearly the same reasons (though, of course, they were wrong). They thought, thanks to right-wing media/propaganda, that Obama was an illegitimate president who was hiding all kinds of things from the American people and that he should never have gotten into office at all and that he was going to send the country to hell. And that was the people who weren’t flagrantly racist.

This was right after the 2008 financial crisis and no one was happy with how the government was handling the situation on either side of the political fence. Everyone wanted to see the banks punished for screwing people over, and under both Bush and Obama, that ... wasn’t what happened. The government in general let the banks off easy and gave them what they asked for so that the economy didn’t crash even harder. People were pissed off.

A number of grassroots protests happened. Most of them were not very successful, but the one that caught people’s attention was an anti-tax, anti-bank-bailout, anti-government-meddling-in-the-economy libertarian deal. It was technically ‘bipartisan’ - in that libertarians on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide were involved. I don’t remember too much about this one in specific- I was honestly more interested in the ‘juicy’ culture war stuff- but everyone on both sides of the fence talked about it for months.

The movement that sprung up around it was called the Tea Party-- after the Boston Tea Party, but TEA also stood for ‘Taxed Enough Already’. People started using Revolutionary-War imagery, hanging tea bags off their hats, that kind of thing. I think this is also when libertarians started using the Don’t Tread On Me flag, though that could have been just ‘I was a wee babby and this was the first time I was seeing it’.

...And at the time? I was really hopeful. It was really obvious that things were wrong, and anyone that had eyes to see could see it, even if we blamed different things for it. I thought this would be a thing that would get liberal and conservative people to come together to fight the Real Evil of taxes and bad government regulation. I thought that maybe it really would be bipartisan and people would do the ‘right’ thing and make a change in the world.

...of course, that isn’t what happened at all.

What happened was, conservative news media picked up on it and started touting it as an example of how much people hated Obama. People who hated Obama for other, much more dubious reasons glommed onto the Tea Party as a way of expressing their displeasure. Conservatives who hated Bush for ‘compassionate conservativism’ also glommed onto the Tea Party- they wanted the government to get out of the business of even pretending to help people. Then conservative media started going ‘see? see how p o p u l a r this Totally Bipartisan movement is? clearly everyone hates Obama as much as we do.’

A lot of Very Serious Moderate-Conservative people started freaking out about the Tea Party and trying to discredit them- as far as I remember, some of this may have been true. There were all kinds of rumours that the Koch brothers were funding them or that they were taking money from kooky right-wing candidates everyone hated or- in general, that there was some evil mastermind behind all this, that people weren’t rising up on their own because they were pissed off, that’s not a thing that HAPPENS, right? But happen it did.

So what happened was... a libertarian, vaguely-populist movement quickly spiralled out of control. Egged on by conservative media-- and by the general disdain they got from more ‘liberal’ media outlets-- it turned into a ‘I’m More Conservative Than Thou’ heckfest.

If the American right has learnt anything from the American left, it’s purity politics. This is when you started seeing the term RINO sprout up. RINO stands for ‘Republican In Name Only’ - in plain English, an actual conservative rather than a right-wing radical. The Tea Party popularized the term ‘RINO’ as meaning ‘anyone who doesn’t support the Tea Party or doesn’t support the increasingly radical direction it’s going’.

The Tea Party, at its various levels, started funding state and local elections- going against moderate Republican incumbents, and putting more right-wing candidates in their place. At the time, I thought this was great too- it was Putting Strong Good People who Believed All The Right Things In Places Where They Could Change The World.

...the thing was? The Tea Party is directly responsible for how crazy the Republican party is right now. And I’m horrified at even the little bit I did to cheer it on, but no one thought things would wind up like this. At least, not in 2008.

There’s a slang term in politics- ‘red meat’ - that means ‘the stuff your political base, your True Believers, rabidly care about that no one else really gives a damn about’. For instance, most people would not care about a proposal to tear down a statue of Columbus in the middle of town and replace it with.. IDK, a Little Free Library. For liberals/leftists, that might be a piece of red meat- replacing a statue of a genocidal maniac with a library? How wonderful! On the flip side, for conservatives, this might be a piece of red meat- how DARE you replace a statue of a NATIONAL HERO with some Weird Liberal Thing that will COST TAX MONEY!!!1!! But no one else really gives a damn, or has mixed opinions.

The Tea Party was all about giving conservatives red meat. And very little else, to be frank, because it was a populist movement. The conservative base had never really chosen candidates on how effective they’d be, they were always more focused on what their candidates believed than what they actually Did- but the Tea Party made them go nuts. They didn’t have to care about the candidates their party chose (based partly on how effective they’d be)? They could pick whoever they wanted? Well, that guy believes aliens built the pyramids, but he also says he’ll outlaw abortion and gay marriage, so why the hell not?

Tea Party candidates got crazier and crazier until you wound up with people like Sarah Palin seriously being considered for high office- candidates who would never wind up on the national stage before. Moderate Republicans were terrified. People thought the Tea Party was gonna become its own third party and be a real threat to the Republicans-- moderate ‘pubs either quietly became Democrats or started making the same kind of promises the Tea Party candidates were making.

I’m not sure if the Tea Party is still extant- I stopped hearing much about them in 2011, but that’s also the year that I stopped obsessively reading conservative news media, so they could still be around. As far as I know, the movement as a movement has basically quieted down. Maybe it was that people realized they looked silly wearing tricorne hats with tea bags hanging off them; maybe it’s that they were sick of getting called ‘teabaggers’; maybe it’s that the conservative media/mainstream media just stopped reporting on them once they stopped being new and shiny. Maybe they just switched to wearing MAGA hats.

...but the thing is, whether or not they won enough battles to stick around? They won the war.

Trump is the ultimate Tea Party candidate. He is all red meat and no vegetables or vitamins. He promises people the universe and then gives them a load of hot air for their trouble- and he puts on a great show. He gives them all the right words; all the best words. He hates taxes and government regulation-- he must, because he’s a successful businessman, right?

Ugh. That got depressing quick. Let’s just get to...

THE TAKEAWAY, for anyone who’s read this far.

The Tea Party is 99% of what radicalized the mainstream Republican party. I don’t think the alt-right would even be relevant if the Tea Party hadn’t paved the way for them. The Republicans started moving farther right by degrees long before the Tea Party, but the Tea Party accelerated the crazy- conservative pundits today say things that would be unthinkable even during the Bush administration.

Voting can and does have measurable effects; it’s just that voting for President and Congress once every four years does not. You have to be willing to vote for local and state candidates, to primary candidates you hate, to be picky about who you support, but also to vote for candidates within one of the major parties.

The Democratic Party does not give their base enough red meat. The Republican Party gives their base way too much red meat. This is why both parties are FUBAR- not giving your base enough red meat results in a shirty, disloyal, angry base that will betray you; giving your base too much red meat makes them stupid, petulant children.

As a voter- watch out for red meat. Try to think critically about what politicians are telling you and whether they’re playing on things that you care about to get your support. If a politician is promising you lots of things that you care about that most people have no reason to care about, are they trying to manipulate you? Odds are good the answer is ‘yes’.

#conservative malarkey #general malarkey #tea party #not the good kind unfortunately #politics #us politics #recent history #signed-me-again

85 notes · View notes

caroltheman · 3 years

Photo

Read at your own risk. These are MY thoughts and MY feelings and they do not cater to the leftist idealism, so if you are afraid of getting your feelings hurt, STOP HERE.

--------

Today is a big day. I’ve never been so involved with politics EVER in my life than this year. In 2016, I was with the Democrats, the left, and whatever ideas were pushed towards me to stop Donald Trump from winning. I hated him. I hated the way he spoke. I was against my husband’s political stance (yes, the hubby and I can have different opinions and get along PERFECTLY). I thought he was a terrible example of what our nations leader should resemble. I was ANTI-Trump.

When he won, I didn’t care too much. I got over it. But... I kept an eye out on events after his election. I never really understood what was happening but I did hear whispers of what was going on in the white house every so often. As issues kept coming up... Build the Wall, ending of DACA, Large amounts of people running from other countries (mainly Latin American countries) trying to get into our southern border, Individuals from the cabinet slowly being replaced or resigning, impeachment, school shootings, banning of firearms, court cases (don’t really know much of that, but now I know its about individuals getting seats on the Supreme Court), etc. etc. etc. BLM, Antifa, more civil unrest, shooting of cops, burning of poor democratic cities, etc etc etc.. I started to wonder.... WTF is going on?? And demos still crying about the same shit...

I started to do research. I don’t really care to listen to local news and big news stations like Fox or CNN or whatever. Yes, sometimes I tune in to both sides, but seriously, I was sick of watching things set on fire. American flags burning. Looting. Violence. I was searching for perspectives outside of my overly democratic run social media feed. I’ve watched probably hundreds of videos of different people of all different walks of life. I started discourse with more right-winged individuals. I started to become more open minded about things on the right. And when I think about my only personal values, I kept finding myself more and more on the right side of things.

Today, this is where I stand:

1. I stand for strong border protection. I do not support shouting “Build the Wall” out loud, but I do support what that message means. To me, the wall is analogous to our house door. For all the people against strong borders, I challenge you to keep your door unlocked at night. Would you feel safe knowing that anyone can come in at any time? Anyone, as in people we don’t know. Any sane person with rationale would say NO. We must lock our doors at night. We must secure our house (just think of all the tech we buy to keep out houses secure) to keep people outside and keep our families safe. An open border sounds like chaos and the most unsafe place to stay. People are confused that building a wall means no immigration. That’s not what that means. It means that we are against ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. I am an immigrant for heavens sake. I naturalized. I was not born an American Citizen and in order for me to receive benefits of an American Citizen, first, my dad served 12 years of his life in the United States Navy. He brought over my mom, my kuya, and myself to start a new life in a country with opportunity. I am thankful for his service and my moms sacrifice and bravery for leaving everything she knows and loves behind in order for my siblings and I have to an opportunity to be successful. People don’t understand that you cannot have a country as successful as the U.S. without protecting our land from outside forces. I do believe that we desperately need immigration reform. I would like all people of all different backgrounds and economic status to have a chance at being able to immigrate to our land, but I believe there is a right way to do it... and it definitely isn’t let everyone in anytime they want. I have kept my mouth shut about my stance on border protection because I am aware of my audience. I know that I have hundreds of students watching me. I know that a lot of them are low income. I know some of them are illegal. But as a teacher, it was never my mission to out undocumented students or families. I sympathize with my students who’s families face deportation, but I stand my ground that illegally penetrating our borders is not the way to do things. I don’t have a full on answer on how the country should handle it (obviously, I have my own life and I am not a politician - although I do have some ideas) but I know the difference between wrong and right. Entering this country illegally, to me, is not the right way... AND ESPECIALLY with the thought of my own family in the Philippines who also face the same struggles that others who flee their country face. It is unfair that due to physical proximity, some can just come through while others from PI and countries from all over the world are waiting for their turn. To me, that is unfair. Moving to Hawaii and having spoke to Aunties who have immigrated from PI has added even more support to my stance. I spoke to an Auntie that said she waiting 21 years to get her Visa. She is petitioning over her son who may wait about a decade before being looked at. I stand my ground on illegal immigration for people who are in line waiting patiently, yet desperately, to come here for their opportunity. I stand my ground for all the other people in the world who are also waiting for a way in to this country the legal way.

2. Law and Order. I mean, how is this even a topic of confusion? like WTF? This is one of the reasons that literally pushed me away from the left. You’ve got Antifa and BLM rioters burning cities and businesses down. (and yes, I know, I know.. the response is, “but that’s not ALL of BLM” or “those people are not even BLM”, or blah blah blah. BULLfuckingSHIT. They are all ANTI-trump and some of them (actually most that I’ve seen) do wear BLM shit. They tag BLM shit everywhere and they don’t care about who they hurt or what they bring down with their anger.) I’ve seen videos of these groups harassing people who are minding their own business and eating lunch as protestors are yelling in their faces and forcing them to leave. They surround elderly who are merely walking down the street by blocking their way and yelling at their faces. I’ve watched countless videos of small business owners trying to protect their property and life’s work by getting jumped or die trying to protect their store fronts. And you know what gets me ever more riled up, SOME (if not most) OF THOSE PEOPLE ARE BLACK!!!!!!! Black owned business burned down. Black business owners crying about their life’s work totally gone at the expense of the anger of the wrongful death of another black person (who happens to be criminal). I empathize with the anger and sadness of the wrongful death of George Floyd. I agree that justice for his life should be served. I agree that Police Brutality needs to be addressed and police accountability and training needs reform... but how the left handles their emotions of anger is un-excusable. I’ve seen posts from my liberal friends, “Let them show their anger the way they want.” WTF? Seriously? So, if I’m mad, I can just go burn shit down? go beat somebody up? Go shoot cops? Like every field, I believe there are bad apples. Any one who denies that, I’d be very cautious to believe, but I have faith that the majority of our police officers are not racist. I believe that the majority of them are trying to do the right thing. I hate to admit that police presence is probably more prevalent in communities with higher numbers of people of color, but I’m curious to know WHY are communities with high numbers of POC are more prone to gangs, violence, drugs, and inevitably higher presence of law enforcement. I wonder why? ...and that leads me to the next reason:

3. Accountability. Leaders like Candice Owens, the Real MAGA Hulk, Kingface, and many many many many many many more Black Americans talk about it all the time. They talk about why nothing has changed in our Black American Communities. They have been voting Democrat for YEARS... and its still the same! Biden and Kamala Harris have been in politics for soooo long, but whats going on in these democratic cities? More tents of homelessness. More criminal activity. More drugs. More human trafficking. But instead of acknowledging the issues that minorities face and holding ourselves accountable for the changes we want to see, what do we do? BLAME TRUMP. The guy has been in office for less than 4 years and everything is his fault. Trump this, Trump that. Trump is the reason everything is going wrong. Trump divides us. Trump makes me mad. Trump, Trump, Trump. Jesus Fuck. Sooo OVER IT. People want to blame him for their shortcomings, for the racial tension, for every single challenge we face as a nation. As an individual I hold myself accountable for where I am today. Every accomplishment I’ve successfully completed has all been to holding myself accountable for making goals, whether for my career or for romantic relationships, and making sure I make no excuse to meet these goals. Yes, I grew up disadvantaged! I’m a victim of living in low-income housing and a victim of an unstable household to include divorce, domestic violence, and exposure to gang life. Yes, we had Section 8. Yes, my mom used food stamps when we were young. Yes, my dad was not around due to the military and my mom practically having to hold shit down with three children in a country she knows nothing about with a language she barely knew with NO HELP as all her family is in the PI and my paternal side being pretty much evil and hated her. Yes, we moved a million times as a child - from an apartment near Kimball Park... to Meadow Brook Apartments... to my uncle’s house... to my other uncle’s garage...to the same uncles house... to a rent a room near where Joann/Erika used to live... to a house on M street... to the apartment on 2nd street (in the front)... to the same apartment complex but another apartment in the back... to an apartment behind Suhi... to an apartment on Highland Ave bordering Chula Vista... to the apartment on 1st Street... with pockets of staying in Welfare housing to staying at Rvy’s house to staying at Apryl’s house to staying at Josie’s house. Schools: from Kimball to John Otis to Daniel Boone to Las Palmas to El Toyon and finally, Granger Jr. High and Sweetwater. I remember having to use candles because we had no electricity. I remember no christmas tree during the holidays and instead using a sorry ass fake plant to replace it. I remember going on our show choir weekend trip to SF where my kuya and I literally exchanged looks as we decided which meal at McDonald’s we should share keeping in mind we have to budget for the rest of the meals we have to pay because thats all the money my mom gave us - while everyone around us could order much more than what we had. I remember hanging out with gang affiliated individuals and realizing how lucky I am to have separated from that lifestyle. Recently, I’ve been challenged to remember my upbringing, yes, my dear friend, I remember. I remember sitting outside your front door, peeking into the black metal screen door as my siblings and I watched you play the coolest and latest console gaming. I remember you hanging out after school at the Boys and Girls club while I hung out with the Mexicans and Samoans and the other crips whom were my neighbors. We can sit here and compare our sad stories and struggles but for people to ask me to reflect on the shit I’ve been through, brother you have no fucking clue. Have you watched your mom beat to colors black and blue? And I whole-heartedly am not trying to discount the struggles you’ve faced, but please don’t lecture me on why I should be angry or sad about my upbringing, because you have no clue what I’ve had to endure. My story is sad. If I had let that this shit bring me down and cry “Woe is me,” I have no doubt I wouldn’t be where I am today. Ever since I can remember, I’ve volunteered to be part of the change. Any positive change. I’ve dedicated my high school career trying to make school life as enjoyable as possible - but what happens? - the majority is still upset and hated the ASB (People have NO idea how many hours I’ve spent on the Suhi campus as a student trying to make things better). I’ve dedicated my post secondary life to become a teacher in the community I grew up in to affect change for the future generations. I stand as living proof that despite all the shit we all go through in life, we can be successful. WHY? Because we live in the land of opportunity. America is probably one of the only places (I can’t think of no other, but sure, lets pretend there are other countries like ours), where you can be poor and go through tons of shit and despite all of it, can still come out and be successful. But blaming others and being upset is not the key. It’s about HARD WORK and PERSEVERANCE, not blame or bull shit. This is the same kind of accountability that haunts communities with majority POC and I will not support the “Woe is me” or the “Endless Circles of Victimhood” mindset. I want out of that shit and into something better.

4. National Security and all its benefits. This is the only country that I’ve seen where there are people who hate it and refuse to leave. Like damn, you hate our country so much, you want to burn it down, and you REFUSE to get the fuck out. Must not be that bad? Our borders are closed for random people to be able to come in without a Visa or Citizenship, yet we do not stop people from leaving this country if they really wanted to. The fact that everyone is trying to come in proves that people would die to be here. The scariest part of this election (to me) is losing our freedoms. I’ve watched a video of a testimony from a Cuban guy who risked his life to wind surf from Cuba to land on the Keys of Miami to seek asylum. Thats how great Socialism is. He says, socialism sounds great in text book. It may even feel great the first few years, but after a while, it starts to suck when you realize the government controls what you eat, when you eat, when to shop, where to shop, where to go for medical, etc. etc. He says, he wakes up very early in the morning to line up for food for his family to receive some mediocre bread, rice, and beans or whatever he said was the glamorous meal of the day. He says, when he finally got to America, he cried at the sight of being able to eat steak because he never had an opportunity to do so in his home country. He says medical attention sucks because since everyone gets treated the same, everyone must wait in line. Anyway, if socialism was so great, why’d he risk his life to leave it? They say Socialism is the step before Communism (places like China). You’ll never find anyone in China burning Chinese flags because if you do, you’re dead. I think at this point in the election, everyone has already chosen their sides. You’re either left or right. I don’t care to change Leftist perspectives but this is the side I chose for myself. Trump didn’t need to become president. Why the fuck would he want to do that? He had it all. He doesn’t even take a salary. He’s been attacked for the last 3-4 years, event after event. He’s attacked for being a racist, yet Dems support Joe Biden who LITERALLY said, “If you don’t know who you are voting for, me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.” That is literally the most racist shit I’ve ever heard and if we flip the script and Trump was the one who said that exact same line, the media will be having a field day!!!! But it was Biden who said it, so let’s forgive him, blame trump, and sweep it under the rug. Trump is not the best speaker, I’ll give you that. I can barely stand his voice sometimes. I too, need to take a break from his rallies of screaming and shit lol, but I admire that the guy is NOT a politician. He doesn’t need to listen to lobbyists who want him to do things because he doesn’t need money. He cannot be bought. On the other hand you have long time politicians like Biden and his family who have made money through and through by running for political spots promising things he’s never delivered. Black people look to him for some deranged idea of “hope” like he’s going to affect change when he himself wrote the 1994 Crime Bill which incriminated many people for petty crimes, primarily POC. Kamala Harris did the same thing according to many black testimonies I’ve seen - they are LITERALLY running away from her. Trump stands for America and its values. As a so-called racist, he signed a bill giving Historic Black Universities funding for not one year, but many years! I think 10, is it? (i’ll leave the dems to fact check it). He has created opportunity zones in democratically ran cities. He has pardoned POC to finally escape from prison for non-violent crimes. I mean, you have to wonder.. yes there are black people that hate him in the spark of BLM when they come out, but there are a lot of black people who love him too. Trump stands up to other nations and his “bad-ass” attitude may not be attractive to our soft demo’s who prefer to vote personality over policy, but it’s the same attitude that demands more from other countries in terms of financials and their fair share in world-wide peace. Trump is not a political puppet that can be swayed and pressured into selling out our country’s soul at the hands of other countries who are so called out performing us in every possible way - military strength, education, and financials. No one wants to talk about Biden’s ties with China but that shit is literally scary. It’s not that “impossible” to believe that we could be attacked at anytime (Hawaii and SD would be huge targets). Trump expects more from other countries and only makes deals that will benefit our country, not theirs. As the demos look up to Biden/Harris for whatever they are crying about, others are looking to Trump/Pence to literally MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. I have never been so proud and patriotic as a proud Republican Female Immigrant voting for Donald Trump. A long time ago, I let my teacher know (Mrs. Hall or Mrs. Rose) know that I was agnostic and asked, "Will I ever find my reasoning to believe?”. She said, “One day, you will find one. Some day. Just Wait.” I think it’s today, lol. If Biden wins, I’ll start praying our nation doesn’t get sold along with it. I thank my husband and Josie for helping me keep it together through this ever emotional year of 2020. I pray that all this is in my head. I look to House of Cards for a reminder that maybe... all this political shit is exactly that - just politics. I pray there is nothing to fear and that our national security is at no risk if Biden wins. I pray that if Biden wins, my demo friends or ex-friends are right - that he’s gonna do the right thing for the our nation and it’s citizens.

5. Hatred FROM the left. Honestly, I started to secretly doubt the left, but kept my mouth shut about it especially on social media - knowing that more than 90% of my feed were leftists. I only spoke to people I trusted who would help me create logical thought processes on how to absorb the things I was seeing realtime. Little did I know that my social media silence bothered a black person and he called me out for not saying anything. So I pursued research. I watched videos of the cries of BLM and found that besides George Floyd’s death (and a few others), I don’t see the same things other Demos see in these cases. Breonna Taylor died in the hallway of her own home, not in her bed when she was sleeping, unless she sleeps in the hallway, but idk her so who really knows? Coming to find that her bf is the one that shot at the cops first and shot a cop in the leg to be answered my gun shots leading to Breonna Taylors death but not the BF who hid behind her. Ya’ll want to protest that?? What about the cops that are trying to do their jobs? They were there due to continuous investigations of drugs that BT’s bf was involved in. What about the families of the cops? Are they expected to just come home dead? I would NEVER allow my husband to be a police officer. It is a bad time to be one. They risk their lives everyday to do what’s right and yet they get shit thrown at them, deal with rioters that hate them, etc etc. If my husband had to chokehold someone (IDGAF if he or she was white, black, asian, mexican, WHATEVER race bait you want to bring up), I authorize my husband to throw it down however the fuck he felt necessary to come back home to me and my future family. I stand with the spouses and families of all service members that sacrifice everything for the common good and safety for the people and their communities. AND I KNOW, that there are BAD COPS out there. I agree with you that they should be addressed and be pushed to resign, but I believe that the majority of our service men and women are here to do the job the right way. I back the blue 100%. If you don’t, I better not hear or see of any demos calling cops when you need help. I hope you win your battles with your pitchforks cause ya’ll won’t even have weapons to defend yourself if ever you had to because Demos are trying to take your guns away. lol Yea yea, pretty dramatic, but not “impossible” in my eyes. *DEEP BREATH* After sporadic days of emotional wreck, I made a decision on where I stand, I posted, “TRUMP 2020″ and here they come!!!! “If you vote for Trump, you are a racist” Really bro? All of a sudden, I’m a racist? “How can you vote for him? You are a female, asian immigrant!” What does that even mean???? Because I am a female, or because I am Asian, or because I am an immigrant, are you telling me that I only have ONE WAY TO VOTE?! That is the most UN-FREE-ING thing anyone has every told me. There’s only one way. Sounds like a fucking trap. The left made it clear to me - that is not the side I want to be on. Easy choice. AND EVEN THEN... My black ex-friend, says... “Ohhhh, your husband is white and in the miltary. Makes sense.” MOTTTHEEERRRRFUCCCKKKERRR. Did you just discredit my position because my husband is a white man in the Navy? Pffft. I’ve walked away from the left with no intent to return. I’ve learned that I need to have thicker skin when it comes to losing friends because we can’t see eye to eye with politics. I won’t initiate separation but I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about the kinds of people and ideology I’m leaving behind in 2020 and looking forward to cultivating relationships with those who still accept me despite our differences and especially those who share the same ideology.

6. Hate for America and Disrespect for our Armed Forces. I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I see American flags burning or football/basketball players kneeling during our National Anthem, it doesn’t make me want to join you. I asked my husband, “How do you feel when people kneel during the National Anthem?” He said, “I joined the military so they have the freedom to do what they want.” WTF?! My dearest hubby, I love you for your humble stance because you are right.. Americans are free to do what they want... and this freedom is protected by the men and women who sacrifice their lives to defend this country from outside forces! Don’t you guys fucking remember World War II??? We barely won this war. Some say by luck of the creation of the atomic bomb from someone from our side. If we had lost that war, we would probably be owned by Japan? maybe Germany? (Seriously, I wished I paid more attention when I was enrolled in history classes. lol) In my eyes, we wouldn’t have our current freedoms or our current lives if the brave men and women of our armed forces didn’t sacrifice their lives to preserve it... and ya’ll have the balls to kneel for what???? racial injustice for criminals?? GET. THE. FUCK. OUT. OF. HERE. There are plenty of mothers who give birth to babies who’s dads can’t be there because they are overseas. We’ve got people crying about COVID? << (don’t even get me started on that shit) Countless fathers miss their babies births, birthdays, graduations, weddings, etc. etc. to protect our great nation so that you can, in turn, burn the flag and disrespect what it stands for. People can’t be with their friends and families during COVID?? I sympathize with you but now you’ve had a small taste of what military families go through. Then you got people who respond with, “But that’s your choice. Your choice to join the military. Your choice to marry someone in the military.” FUCK YOU. Are you telling me that people like my husband don’t deserve to be loved and supported in fear that we will be separated for months at a time while he is over seas?? Fuck you. I’m actually VERY LUCKY that I met a man that has worked his way up that I didn’t have to feel ALL the sacrifices that other families have made. Do you know what military families have to go through to keep their families together?? There are plenty of families broken because spouses are not together, and to say - “oh that’s their choice” is the most selfish thing EVER... and I don’t (completely) blame the family members that are left behind when they can’t hack it, because seriously, it’s hard. Countless nights alone and separated from loved ones. Trying to do a two person job alone ALL THE TIME, not just a couple days, but MONTHS. Sometimes YEARS altogether. My husband may not care about the donk donks that disrespect our military and everything they’ve done and to all the lives sacrificed, and to all the service members who come back with no families, no love, and no one to support them, I STAND WITH YOU. Oh! Oh! Don’t even get me started with the VA and the medical that is provided to our service members. People want Free Healthcare?! Veterans have Free HealthCare and its one of the worst! We provide our service members with maybe “par” sometimes SUBPAR healthcare. I technically have free healthcare, but in fear that I won’t be seen on time or seen with proper care when I get pregnant, we have opted to pay the extra fees for better care.

7. Personal Health and Sanity. To discuss all the controversial things that the right vs left argue about sounds mundane and tiresome. It really is. I’ve invested so much time and emotions deciphering where I stand to include conversations with handfuls of people who say, “I respect your opinion and I’ve always respected you as a person and am curious to know why you’re voting for Trump.” I’ve questioned my position many times. I’ve watched and read (although, I’ll admit, I hate reading and it was never something I was strong in. I am a visual person and I prefer to hear and watch videos of other’s personal thoughts and experiences.” I appreciate my friend, Cassie, who reminded me, it doesn’t always have to be about policies. It is okay to vote for Trump based on my own experiences - just like how she see’s things. She a Mexican trump supporter who legally immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico and attended SYH. She watched her school cater to undocumented students putting their needs before hers when she is an Mexican-American who’s single mom pays taxes and wanted to learn curriculum in English, not Spanish, but was taught in Spanish because the other kids didn’t know English. Cassie, you literally lifted tons of weight off my shoulders. Thank you! I thank my long time friend Paulos, who responded to my recent post of me wearing a Trump hat with, “You’re about to piss off ALL your friends. Good job though. Fuck em lol” I responded with, “I fucking love you!!” Always have and always will. I’ve never in my life felt like I couldn’t be myself out loud until 2020, a time where leftists shame you for having a different opinion and basically delete you if you support Trump. But I thought to myself, this is the WORST TIME to stay quiet. I am worried that our youngsters who live in democratic cities like National City are only exposed to what the left exposes them to, triggering hate and fear that may or may not be real, and despite my very democratic social media feed, I figured, I’ll be the first to stand for what I believe in with pride and without shame. I have always done what I believe is right, even if its not the most popular opinion, and even if that meant standing my ground against people I thought loved me - especially coming from California, and especially coming from National City. I have ALWAYS told the hubby that after he retires from the Navy, I only see us living in SD. This is the first time in my life where I did not want to come back to CA. In fact, CA was third on my list after Texas and Tennessee. I want to thank my bf Jo, for reminding me of why I should reconsider and remember where my roots are. To remember our upbringing and remember that the people we are most close with today are those in proximity to us. Thank you for taking me out of my very emotional mental state and bringing me back to rationale about why it is important to me to live near my closest friends and family and I truly thank you for investing time to make sure I am always considering all my options rationally and not emotionally. I thank my family, although we are 3vs2 lol we still love each other despite what we value politically. I thank my husband who protects me, my thoughts, and my values. I thank you for being patient with ALL my emotions throughout this year. You have NEVER EVER EVER pushed me to be one way or another. You have ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS let me decide things on my own and in my own time, including the move to Hawaii and my recent change in political views. You truly are the BEST person I know and I will love you FOREVER!!!!! Lastly, Thank You Donald J. Trump for ruffling feathers everywhere and shedding light on the bull shit going on with politicians. Thank you for sacrificing your life as well as your families’ lives and businesses for the sake of preserving American values and American Life. GOD BLESS AMERICA.

1 note · View note

alphaomegaenergy · 5 years

Photo

https://steemit.com/blockchain/@aoecoin/the-nikola-tesla-of-our-generation-still-is-not-funded-after-2-875-tech-creations-how-can-this-be

The Nikola Tesla of our generation still is not funded after 2,875 tech creations. How can this be??

Imagine if an innovator rose out of the ashes from seemingly out of nowhere with 2,875 Breakthrough Clean Energy Technologies.

Energy technology so great invariably they obsolete everything. Imagine an innovator so great certainly his peers would have to be those of the category of innovators & scientific minds like Nikola Tesla, Maxwell, and Faraday. Someone talking about making monuments, building new wonders of the world, massive new energy power plants to bring humanity into the alpha omega energy era in made statement form. From electric planes fully powered flying over 2,000 km able to replace all of their pollution that the aviation industry is creating everyday. Over 350 all new Range extending Technologies for electric vehicles, new batteries, entire new drive trains and charge trains for electric vehicles, the best fuel cells in human history across every class, the best power generators with over a hundred New Energy Technology categories for megawatt power plants that no one else has even spoken about to date.

Imagine that as he rose from a few techs to a hundred to a few hundred over years as soliciting everyone for investment support to commercialize, he still went unsupported but then 1,000 then 1360 then 1500 then 1800 then 2,000 finally 2,875, imagine a possible world in some dimension where he still would not be supported.

As millions of people are goaded into the streets for political theater as politics, and politicians do the unimaginable the unthinkable and the unconscionable until this generation at least, which was to use the children for political theater, as millions of them are dragged into the roads indoctrinated into our streets for political usury, used as political human shields, yelling and screaming. “We only have 11 and 1/2 years to all die”. They’re calling it the “climate emergency” the “climate crisis” and crying in the fear stoked in them. They’re calling it a literal imminent existential threat. They are literally telling you me and everyone else that this is the literal end of the world. They aren’t talking that this is some political deadline they are telling you 100% that this is the end of the world, and no different than the radical religious leaders said that the world is ending in 2012. They say this one is for real that it’s really ending in 11.5 years.

You would think every last one of these politicians, climate talkers, agenda pushers would have already long ago inundated an innovator like this with support & of course they could never and would never ignore someone like that.

As all the globalist organizations are continually pumping “climate change” then “Climate emergency” then “Climate crisis” and pushing and supporting the radical extreme leftist communist agenda which they author, the World Economic Forum States “We need 4.5 trillion a year invested into SDG innovators just like this guy and you all need to throw all of your money and support behind this guy, but it has to be private capital because we don’t invest in anything nor support startups like we tell you all you need to do.”

This is going on as also the International Finance Corporation effectively says “26 to 290 trillion dollars are waiting on the sidelines to pile in on top of your early stage investment with this guy and his start up.” You would think then everyone’s investment greed would in full fear of missing out mode, be piling in in unprecedented fashion.

You would think that every VC that got ever got a message would already have every staff on a watch list, a readiness list, just waiting for this one to miraculously contact and with a significant amount of their effort scouring the Earth literally to find him.

It would seem unimaginable that a Nikola Tesla could be unfunded in this generation where we have countless documentaries about the man you would think that we have learned the lesson. He died alone and unsupported unfunded, the greatest innovator the world ever knew. His technologies were more influential on our lives than any other innovator in history. You would think that every human being would be learning this in school you would think that every venture capitalist would be putting that lesson to work for all of their LPs and all of humanity. You would never believe it possible nor would I, that such an innovator would just be completely and utterly ignored just like Nikola Tesla was after they took down his tower.

So, what went so wrong? How is it possible today that humanity has such a man who has created nearly 3,000 Breakthrough Clean Energy Technologies and still goes unfunded and still goes unsupported after soliciting every major climate org & propagandist & Globalist org that seemingly ever walked?

Imagine if the World Economic Forum, as they propagandize the political climate change agenda and state that the 4.5 trillion SDG goals is their number one priority, but then when he showed up for their invite to the forum, that they stiff-armed him at the door when he arrived and ignored every contact from him thereafter. Why did they invite him in the first place then? But then as WEF has gone on for years to ignore his every contact, instead of promoting him and his technological world changing breakthrough startup, they decided to put up a well groomed child propagandist, talking about the end of the world. Fear and politics from a child who’s never invented a single invention. No solution, instead, radical political theater. They have invited in the politicians but blocked out the Innovation and solution makers & developers. Some, even many, would consider that a clear litmus test of what the WEF is really about.

Imagine if he went to the top 50 globalist organizations and offered them all free electricity for a year at his cost thinking that he would get support from their organizations if he did such. Imagine then if instead they all ignored, completely blocked, and never responded to him even for years and years. I’m talking organizations like the UNCC, the IMF, the IFC, the World Bank, World Wildlife Foundation, the Climate Change Coalition and Alliance, Economic Development Boards, Even Climate Change Departments.

Imagine if he went to a venture capital company from Silicon Valley called Plug and Play Ventures who literally told him “We don’t care if you have the Holy Grail of energy, only in our Silicon Valley incubator!!”

Imagine if 15 countries requested a project, a pilot from him, but not a single one of them was willing to put even a single 1 Dollar in or even make the first single name drop to a Real Investor who would until it’s all done first without them. Included are “Low Carbon Cities” Energy Ministers, Chairmen of Industrial Engineer’s Societies, Singapore and Berlin’s so called “Clean Energy Disruption incubators” demanding only locals, discriminating against anyone in the Impact nations. Even the so called “Social stock exchanges” refuse to support anything but local, including London’s. Shocking is one word, shameful might be one also.

Imagine if over 300 climate change organizations like Al Gore’s so-called “Climate reality”, Greta Thunberg’s “We don’t have time” “Extinction Rebellion” “Sunshine movement” Greenpeace, and every actor or celebrity propagandist ignored him also. Bill Gates, Al Gore, AOC, Dianne Feinstein, Dicaprio, Harrison Ford, absolutely all of them completely ignored this guy’s Innovations, advertisements, solicitations, and not just one, but by the hundreds.

Imagine if Fakebook blocked their pages, ordering instagram to do the same, LinkedIn blocked them out also, merely because they have a slightly centrist conservative viewpoint, or put his startup on the Blockchain.

The Fact is that everything I just said to you happened, is true, and is real, and nothing is being done by anyone in the establishments to change it no matter who you approach about it.

The World Health Organization States 92% of humans do not breathe safe air. They also state that over 15 million people are being killed each year just from breathing from air pollution and air pollution related illnesses. In 20 years that equates to over 300 million people will be dead. A pile of corpses the entire population of America.

We need 10 to 20 times the energy production we have now just to get the people of the world the same amount of electricity per capita as the United States.

By 2100 this equates to over 3.2 billion dead at today’s toxic energy levels & the pollution it makes.

So, the important question is, What really is going on? Why are the global organizations, the establishments, the government’s, the climate organizations, & Silicon Valley all Blocking, Banning, ignoring endlessly these kinds of people?

And, the most important question is, are you going to invest or not, to change it?

Breakthrough clean energy doesn’t fund itself. Breakthrough clean energy startups don’t and can’t fund themselves.

In order to solve climate change you need to take your money and invest to the innovators who made the solutions and have them to make.

In order to solve The World’s energy problems you need to take your money and invest to the innovator who made the solutions & is ready to manufacture & deliver

In order to qualify to talk about Change The World, your investment dollars need to be going to the Impact Nations which are the Undeveloped Peaceful Culture Nations not the richest 25 cities in all of human history. If you are avoiding investing in those places you don’t qualify to talk about Change The World and you may not so easily qualify to be talking about “social justice”.

To begin the change that Humanity deserves, to see the solutions delivery, to see real Social Justice, to begin, what you need to do is invest to and support this innovator, Alpha Omega Energy.

Alpha Omega Energy is doing a Seed round on the blockchain. Their Pre-sale is open and you can invest now. They are raising 2.6 million and they’re paying you a 300% rate of return fixed as a debt note. Venture capitalists, blockchain investors, hedge fund investors, you’re very existence is supposed to be about supporting innovators like this.

To invest contact them on aoecoin.io

The Alpha Omega Energy Era, it’s far beyond time.

You can also contact or support on their social medias who didn’t discriminate against them blocking them out.

Telegram = @alphaomegaenergy

Telegram channel = https://t.me/AOECOINCHANNEL

Telegram chat = https://t.me/AOECOIN

Steemit = @aoecoin

Dtube = @aoecoin

Medium = https://medium.com/me/stories/public

Twitter = @aoecoincrypto

Minds = https://www.minds.com/alphaomegaenergy

Gab = https://gab.com/AlphaOmegaEnergy

Vimeo = https://vimeo.com/alphaomegaenergy

Wedonthavetime = https://app.wedonthavetime.org/profile/AlphaOmegaEnergy

Tumblr = https://www.tumblr.com/blog/alphaomegaenergy

Parler = @alphaomegaenergy

Reddit = https://www.reddit.com/user/AOECOIN

Website = aoecoin.io

Original Website = aomegaenergy.com

Financial Platform Website = ficleanergy.com (95% complete)

blockchain cryptocryptocurrency bitcoin

If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM! Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post. Sign up. Get STEEM!

https://steemit.com/blockchain/@aoecoin/the-nikola-tesla-of-our-generation-still-is-not-funded-after-2-875-tech-creations-how-can-this-be

Climate Change

Cryptocurrency

Venture Capital

Crypto

Blockchain

CCTWO - Chief Engineer 2,875 New Energy and Energy Related Technologies. Small Private Innovator of Change. #1 In Breakthrough Energy Solutions. Charge It All!!

#blockchain cryptocryptocurrency bitcoin crypto technology venturecapital impact impact investing impinv socent climate climatechange

0 notes

marcjampole · 7 years

Text

Why some left-leaners like charter schools & why they shouldn’t. It comes down to confusing Alinsky & Friedman

Whenever I contemplate the fact that many leftists and left-leaning centrists believe charter schools are a good idea, I am reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr’s premise in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness that it is not the evil children of darkness who cause most of the world’s problems, but foolish, misguided or uneducated children of light, i.e., well-intentioned good people.

Make no mistake about it, from day one the charter school movement has been a darling of contemporary children of darkness, very wealthy families seeking to lower their taxes or make more money by privatizing public schools and the right-wing ideologues who support them. People like the DeVoses, the Princes, the Anschutzes, the Bradleys, the Kochs. I think you get the idea—the selfish ultra wealthy, as dark a group of people as the average leftist or lean-leaner could imagine. These are the people who originally funded the charter school idea, set up think tanks and grass roots associations to campaign for charter school funding and got public relations agencies to make sure the mainstream news media thought this failed idea was more successful than it actually was. These people know in their greedy little hearts that the charter school idea is the big right-wing lie in education policy discussions, similar to the big lies in other important policy areas, such as climate change denial, intelligent design, voter fraud claims, abstinence only training, budget deficit panics and the idea that lowering taxes on the wealthy stimulates the economy. All are discounted ideas of America’s children of darkness that persist and, in the case of charter schools are thriving, in practice and public discussion.

One reason more charter schools are popping up around the country despite their widespread failures and scandals is because of support from well-intended children of light, including a good number of left-leaning centrists and leftists, such as President Obama, Hillary and President Bill, Andrew Cuomo, Howard Dean and Marian Wright Edelman. A survey by Stanford’s Hoover Institute found that 58% of Democrats liked charter schools in 2016.

The advocacy of charter schools by left-leaning politicians can’t be because of charter school performance, since studies show that the students in more than 70% of all charter schools across the country perform at lower or the same level as the students in the competing public school, 31% performing worse. Many of the approximately 29% of charter schools whose students manage to do better than those in their public school alternative have fixed the game. They discourage kids with disabilities from applying or weed out students who are less successful; for example, one Arizona charter school that U.S. News & World Report placed in the top 10 of all high schools across the country starts with 125 students in sixth grade but has a mere 21 in the graduating class. The administration presumably weeded out low performers, who then returned to their traditional public school, artificially raising the performance of the charter school and lowering the performance of the traditional public school. Improvement at a mere 29% of schools, up from a miniscule 17% in 2009, makes charter schools a failure. Only ideologues who prefer to create their own reality would continue a program that fails to work 71% of the time and actually makes things worse about a third of the time. On top of all that, it turns out that charter schools are more segregated than regular public schools. I have an article in the autumn issue of Jewish Currents that goes into greater detail on the disadvantages of charter schools and other right-wing educational reforms such as cyber schools and school vouchers, but I think you get the idea: charter schools are bad.

I can understand why many desperate parents of modest or little means with children in schools of few resources in poor districts might be attracted to the line of bull professed by charter school operators, many of whom are for-profit companies whose investors will make their dough by spending less on the children and lowering compensation for their teachers. Just like subprime mortgages, payday loans and for-profit vocational schools, charter schools target the most vulnerable and sell them a bill of goods.

But what about sophisticated left-leaners, policy wonks like the Clintons and Obama? I think there are three reasons so many mainstreamers seem comfortable with charter schools: First, out of respect for minority communities among whom they think there is a lot of support for charter schools, mainly because the mainstream news media and charter school lobbyists tell them so. In point of fact, there is an organization that purports to represent African-Americans who like charter schools, called the Black Alliance for Educational Options, but it receives most of its support from the ultra-right, ultra-white Bradley Foundation. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Movement for Black Lives, an umbrella group for 50 organizations, have come out vehemently against charter schools.

Secondly, embracing charter schools is part of centrist Democrats’ slow dance away from unions. It’s not that Democrats don’t like unions, it’s that they don’t think about them as a central part of their core constituency anymore. Union issues have become an afterthought. Centrist Dems don’t consider the impact on unions when deciding how to shape policies, in or out of power; e.g., NAFTA. When unions protested that the impetus behind charter schools was to kill public school unions and thereby lower teachers’ salaries, the centrists probably thought it was more union obstructionism, or perhaps veiled racism since charter school folks were falsely touting how minorities could take hold of and thereby improve their children’s education. Maybe they have vague memories of accusations of union racism that marred the first controversy over locally controlled schools, in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1968, long before conservative billionaires started funding the charter school movement. On the one hand, who can blame the centrists Dems, given that so many union members abandoned the Democrats for Trump? On the other hand, it’s inconceivable to imagine a progressive movement or a large middle class in this country without a vibrant, large and politically active union workforce.

The last reason is the most subtle, and perhaps the most important. Leftists and left-leaners who have supported charter schools look at its superficial features and see the model for community organizing advocated by the sainted Saul Alinsky. In his Rules for Radicals and elsewhere, community organizer Saul Alinsky proposed to effect progressive change and empower people by organizing them around existing community organizations or symbols for direct nonviolent action against a well-known (“useful”) enemy. The Alinsky model asks the community itself to determine the precise goal of the organizing.

That does seem a lot like charter schools, doesn’t it? The existing organization or symbol is the public school. The community as represented by the school’s board of directors—all community members and parents at the school—determine the goals. The enemy is the public school/union bureaucracy. The nonviolent direct action is to take over the school. The empowerment results when the community has more control over how its children are educated.

No wonder charter schools excited sixties and seventies radicals turned establishment types like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It sure does sound like solid gold Alinsky.

But it’s not even cheap brass plating. It’s an illusion. Underneath the radical left exterior, the operation of a charter school is a conveyance for privatization by which control of all decisions rests in the hands of private businesses, either for-profit companies or non-profit companies whose administrators make big bucks. Since state and national standards drive virtually all curriculum decisions, virtually all the decisions the community boards make come early and involve window-dressing, e.g., make it a Spanish-language school or mandate uniforms. The board can’t dictate that the school not teach evolution or teach that the South won the Civil War. The board can’t restrict minorities or those with handicaps from attending the school, although the for-profit school administration has been known to do so by where they market the school and what they require of applicants. Maybe that’s why charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools.

Everything else is driven by the administration installed by the charter school operator with whom the community board has contracted. Like many boards of directors in the private sector, the community board becomes a rubber stamp for the senior management. As long as the operator fulfills the terms of the contract, it can pretty much do what it likes. And that almost always involves hiring less experienced teachers and fewer certified teachers, nonunion in most cases, paying them less, and providing them with fewer professional development opportunities. Cut and take profit. It’s how government privatizers make a living, be it in education, prisons or the military, and it’s central to the crony capitalism practiced by the contemporary Republican Party.

In a sense, much like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the charter school movement is Milton Friedman masquerading as Saul Alinsky.

Charter schools have proven to be a failure. It’s time to move on, to shut down all existing charter schools and reintegrate those schools and the students in them, into their traditional public school district.

But ending a school-reform-gone-bad is not enough. We also have to address what made the charter school attractive in the first place—not the racism, but the lack of resources in public schools. We need to invest in more teachers in elementary schools, where it is well-established in the real world that smaller classes are better for the students. We need to buy schools more computers, updated non-Texas-vetted text books, more enrichment such as music and art materials and teachers, equipment and supplies for special magnet schools and other resources that public schools now lack in many areas. It might be helpful to tax rich school districts statewide to support poor school districts, to in a sense, mandate equity in public education.

There are lots of things we can do to improve our public schools and make sure that every student gets the best and most appropriate education. Virtually all of these ideas involve increasing spending. The only thing that will really help our education system that doesn’t involve spending more money is to end all charter schools.

#charter schools #saul alinsky

1 note · View note

automatismoateo · 7 years

Text

Why I became an atheist (Ex-muslim) via /r/atheism

Submitted July 03, 2017 at 04:23PM by bob951 (Via reddit http://ift.tt/2tJ7jDN) Why I became an atheist (Ex-muslim)

I am from Lebanon, I was born and raised as Muslim, as a young boy my father started taking me to our local mosque and taught me how to pray to Allah, here when the indoctrination started. My parents along with the Imam, told me many things, that just did not add up, that women who show skin are condemned to hell, I asked myself as a 5-year-old “These women are not harming anyone, then why would Allah punish them?” I also asked my parents: “Who created God?” They replied: “You are not allowed to ask this question, it will make step towards hell.” Imams also taught me about hell, it really scared me, and I got nightmares because of it, the concept of hell in Islam as described by most Imams would make an awesome horror movie. Ever since I was little boy, I am an individualist, I do not like people telling what to do and intervening in my personal freedom, I still am now.

However, my parents are open towards unorthodox views like they reject the Hijab, and don’t think that apostates should be executed, or adulterers/fornicators should be stoned, and think that honor killings are criminal. But unfortunately, they support blasphemy laws, and think that homosexuality is a mental illness and should be rejected by society.

On one hand, one of my maternal cousins is a member of The Committee of Islamic Scholars, this committee is socially authoritarian and want the government to walk all over other people’s personal & civil liberties in the name of Islam, morality, and traditionalism. A few months ago, when the Supreme Jurisdiction Council declared that homosexuality is fine, and that the state should not intervene with what people do in the bedroom, the committee got pissed off with the Council’s decision. The rest are pro-Hamas and pro-Muslim brotherhood.

On the other hand, my paternal uncle’s wife works for Dar Al Fatwa, a government institution run by The Grand Mufti of the Sunnis, the institution has political influence on government policy and is backed by Saudi Arabia, and the committee mentioned above.4 years ago, liberals, leftists, secularists, and feminists demanded the Lebanese Parliament and Government to legalize optional secular civil marriage, the Mufti scared the politicians by issuing a fatwa “Any Muslim politician , from the government, Parliament, or member Jurisdiction Council who supports secular marriage even if optional is an apostate. This made the politicians reject the demand, including Christian and Druze members. The rest of my father’s side is collectivist, tribalist, extremely traditional, they hate it when on their members marries someone from another religious sect, like Shia, Druze, Christian, or Alawite.

Lebanon, had suffered a devastating 15-year civil war from 1975-1990, it has damaged us socially, economically, and politically, and our Military, and gave rise to the terrorist organization Hezbollah backed by Iran. Lebanon is now divided into 4 major religious sects; the Sunnis, Shias, Maronite Christians, and Druze. Each of the 4 groups have politicians in the state, all 4 hate each other, and the politicians take advantage of the status quo to keep us fighting over ridiculous things.

I was not a very religious person, but at the age of 14 almost 15, my brother lost his job in UAE, and came to Lebanon in the summer, he used to very devout and dragged me to pray 5 times a day, I slowly started becoming more religious, by the end of the summer I devoted myself to Allah, suppressed my sexual urges but because of my raging testosterone levels, I still watched porn, masturbated to girls, and had sex with them, but I felt a sheer amount of guilt, and regret, I used to lecture my closest friends that they must not drink alcohol, have premarital sex, even shake hands with female, they got annoyed by me, and started hanging out less with me. But at the same time, I wasn’t feeling that I am being myself, I was repressive, consumed by those bad ideas. In geography class, we were discussing the universe, and the teacher said that the milky way galaxy has an estimated 160 billion planets , she also added that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, I came to the conclusion that we may not be alone, and the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations is highly probable, I asked my Imam “ Our universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies, and every galaxy has hundreds of billions of planets, so according to the laws in probability in Math, the we could not be alone in the universe, Do you think extraterrestrials could exist?” His answer was : “No, that is a bunch of nonsense regurgitated by the evil Americans.”

At the age of 16 my devotion started slowly diminishing, but since I love The Simpsons, I started watching it more, through it I came upon Family Guy, and then South Park. I fell in love with the other two series, they were more than just comedy and satire, they were very well convincing. These shows make fun of everything, through this show I started being exposed to new ideas, even if I didn’t like them, also did offend me, I dismissed many of their arguments, but they did shed some light. But I couldn’t resist I still watch them more. One of the Episodes that made fun of atheism and evolution, when they explained evolution it made a lot of sense.

At the age of 17, I started losing my faith, I isolated myself in my room for a few days and asked myself these simple questions, “The Christian thinks I am wrong, so does Shia, and many others and I think Sunni Islam is the right one, what if they are right, what if the atheists are right, what if I am wrong?” “If god is omniscient, why did he create satan, he knows certain people are going to heaven and other are going to hell, then why pray?” “In the Koran, it written that God created life and death to test you, and judge you. But If life is limited, and the punishment and reward are eternal then why did god created us?” “Why is religion geographical?” “Why is consensual sex, masturbation wrong if they are harmless?” “What is wrong with homosexuality?” I remember as a young kid, that I was taught humans were the first creatures to inhabit the earth, but I discovered that there were dinosaurs and ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years, and got extinct 65 million years. And the question from my childhood which was silenced “If everything needs a creator, and god created us then who created god? And who created god’s god?”. I decided that religion is bunch of bullshit created to control minds.

But I still needed to do further research, I started reading more about the universe, and evolution, watching more documentaries. I stumbled upon great thinkers Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bill Maher, Stephen Hawking, and also atheist Youtubers like thunderf00t, TJ Kirk, Seth Andrews, DarkMatter2525, and. I found their arguments extremely convincing, encourage critical thinking, challenge adopted ideas, I did listen to religious clerics and had conversations with Pastors, Imams, Mullahs, Ayatollah I even watched Zakir Naik’s lectures, they seemed ridiculous, and unscientific.

I decided to read the Koran and The Bible critically, and I saw that these books are filled with unscientific claims, unethical, misogynistic, and homophobic bullshit. And above all else it contradicts itself. I also made an analogy, that Muslim majority and Islamic countries and dystopian and extremely backwards, and wherever there is Islam there is dysfunction. And look what is happening now in European countries they are now suffering from a security crisis.

From the 1920s to the 70s, Arabs, Persians, Afghanis, used to be much more progressive they got influenced by western culture and Attaturk who secularized Turkey, the hijab was rare only older women wore it, Arab women used to wear bikinis and short skirts sexual harassment & rape were almost nonexistent unlike now in Egypt. Saudi Clerics nagged former Arab & Persian leaders to control what women should wear, but Arabs ignored them. Arabs used to go to European countries to earn their degrees. After overthrowing monarchies and Fedualists, the middle class was established because of free market capitalism, and they ruled the Arab world holding progressive and liberal values. But soon after KSA started getting rich with oil Arabs started going to work there coming back with regressive and reactionary values about the world since the 80s. In addition, the Muslim brotherhood gained more influence. Making Arab culture become one of the most backwards in the world. Plus, the Islamic revolution of Iran also affected us negatively which gave birth to Hezbollah triggered by Zionism, and western neo-conservatism.

And what really pisses me off is the western regressive left, feminists, and social justice warriors defending Islam and telling others that “The hijab is liberating”, If someone mentions that atrocities against women and gays in the name of Islam or Islamic countries they will reply “But it’s their culture”, and what is worse is that in the women’s march almost everyone was cheering for Linda Sarsour who wants to bring Shariah (Islamic Law) to America which is anti-women, and homophobic. By the way Sarsour means cockroach in Arabic.

I now I am an atheist, a de-facto kind, I don’t agree with religion or the hijab but it can be helpful to the unfortunate providing some escape fantasy, and hijab can sometimes protect from the scorching sun. PS: Excuse my English, it isn’t my first language. Thanks, in Advance.

#reddit

2 notes · View notes

jurgan · 7 years

Text

ACA Repeal: Stage Two

The ACA, also known as Obamacare, is vitally important to my family. My wife could very likely die if insurance companies were allowed to turn away people with pre-existing conditions. We also rely on Medicaid to pay for doctors’ visits and medications (thankfully we now live in Colorado- South Carolina still refuses to accept free money, so it was much more expensive in our previous home). Aside from climate change, health care is the most important issue to me. Naturally, I’ve spent a lot of time fighting to slow the GOP’s attempted repeal. I’ve repeatedly called my representatives. I went to Mike Coffman’s local office on a Monday morning to ask one of his assistants not to cut Medicaid, and there’s video of me telling him our story at his last town hall. It seems to have paid off, as he did eventually vote against the hideous monstrosity known as AHCA. Still, the damn thing passed the House by two votes, and now it’s up to the Senate to decide what to do. Health care has largely fallen off the radar in the wake of Trump’s alleged treason and confessed obstruction of justice, but it’s still a live issue. In back rooms in D.C., thirteen (male, mostly white)senators are writing their own version of AHCA, including my state’s Cory Gardner. It’s possible that they decide there’s nothing that will satisfy enough people to pass and quietly shelve the issue, but I wouldn’t count on it.

If I were Mitch McConnell- if I were a soulless Machiavellian who would stop at nothing to deliver for my corporate masters- what would my strategy be? Because he definitely has one. Paul Ryan and Donald Trump may be a pair of bumbling con artists who are in over their heads, but McConnell is a canny operator, and he plays the long game. Last year, he pulled off an unprecedented blockade of a Supreme Court nomination, and now we have Gorsuch on the bench, perhaps for decades. He knew how to ignore the short term media blowback and focus on the future. In that way, he was a perfect foil for Obama (the difference is that McConnell disdains compromise, while Obama was often conciliatory to a fault).

McConnell infamously started Obama’s presidency by devising a strategy of 100% obstruction. He knew that if any Republicans voted for an Obama policy then it would be seen as bipartisan, but things that pass with only Democratic votes could be portrayed as extreme leftist. Thus, we have the situation where Obama, Pelosi, and Reid desperately tried to compromise with Republicans to create a law that could get buy-in and still got no Republican votes. Anyone who understands policy knows it’s absurd to think of the ACA as ultra-left, especially compared to the health systems in other developed countries. Many still complain the the ACA is not leftist enough, which is probably true but it was also probably the best that could get through at the time, thanks largely to McConnell’s filibustering and the need to buy off corporate whores like Lieberman. Policy doesn’t matter in politics, though, so much as perception of policy. Many people do see anything that is supported only by Democrats will be seen by many as extreme left. On the other hand, the House’s repeal bill is extremely far right by any standard. It would take away health care from over twenty million people, possibly causing thousands to die. It was something of a relief when the Senate said they aren’t even considering passing the House bill, but they’re still going to try to pass their own. By design, the Senate is more moderate than the House, since senators have to appeal to whole states instead of gerrymandered districts. Still, I would assume whatever McConnell comes up with will be bad for a lot of people. Again, perception is what matters: the ACA will be perceived as far left, the AHCA will be perceived as far right, and McConnellcare will be somewhere in between. And we all know the mainstream media’s most infuriating framework: Both parties are to blame, and the truth is in the middle.

When I thought of that a few days ago, it was an instant epiphany. Of course that’s the strategy, and it shows that McConnell’s 2009 plan is still paying dividends. By portraying his plan as the sensible compromise between Barack Obama and Paul Ryan, fence-sitting politicians will be encouraged to vote for it. The media will say that Democrats are being partisan and obstructionist by fighting it. These pressures will make it that much more likely that the Senate passes whatever awful law they come up with. Then the House will feel even more pressure to accept a compromised version of their seven year long dream of repealing the ACA. It’s possible the Freedom Caucus will declare that it’s too moderate to accept the compromise, but I wouldn’t count on it. The ACA was passed in the Senate as a compromised version of the House bill, and then the House had to accept and vote for the Senate’s bill or else the whole enterprise would die. It would be fitting if the repeal happened the same way.

I am not writing this to say we’re doomed, though. The resistance has done a great job already. Remember Trump’s promise to repeal “on day one?” We’re four months past day one and the ACA is still law. Everyone credits this delay to the fierce pushback at town halls and through phone lines. We beat them once, but to do it again we need to focus on principles and not politics. If the focus is “save the ACA and beat Ryancare!” then I think we’re following a losing strategy. It might work, but that framing treats it as a game that we want to win, and that’s not a persuasive argument. Again, we don’t want to be portrayed as one side of a partisan tug-of-war with Paul Ryan, or else Mitch McConnell looks like the serious adult in the room. So I say we always emphasize why we’re fighting. Colorado has Medicaid expansion, and Cory Gardner has said he doesn’t want a law that cuts Medicaid. I plan to remind him of that. We don’t want Medicaid cuts, we don’t want people turned away for pre-existing conditions, and we don’t want any of the tons of other problems that the ACA fixed. We need to keep saying that now. We need to let them know that, while we’re not against any and all changes to health care, there are certain principles that cannot be compromised. Our ideas are popular. Let’s make sure we keep talking about them.

#Health care #Obamacare #stop the ahca #Paul Ryan #Donald Trump #original content

5 notes · View notes

usnewsaggregator-blog · 6 years

Text

Faces of the Future: Stories From Generation Z

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/faces-of-the-future-stories-from-generation-z/

Faces of the Future: Stories From Generation Z

To come of age in 2017 in America is to enter adulthood in a time of often overwhelming turbulence. The country is deeply divided, technology is reshaping the world at a breakneck pace, and the future seems filled with uncertainty. As each day appears to bring with it another crisis, from unprecedented natural disasters to horrific mass killings to violent and vehement ideological clashes, questions lurk in the background: Who will inherit this world? And what will they do with it?

They are the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with smartphones. Jean Twenge, author of “iGen”

Enter Generation Z.

Loosely defined as those born after 1995, this new wave of soon-to-be grown-ups—also dubbed the iGeneration, Centennials, Post-Millennials, Founders, Plurals and the Homeland Generation, depending on whom you ask—picks up where millennials left off. True digital and social media natives, they’re ever-connected, multitasking on many screens and more comfortable sharing on Snapchat than IRL. “They are the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with smartphones,” says Jean Twenge, author of “iGen,” who has studied the group extensively. “That really rapid adoption of smartphones has had ripple effects across many areas of their lives.”

Birth of a Generation Major moments in modern history

Generation X

Generation Y

Generation Z

Challenger disaster

Obama

elected

Moon landing

Fall of the Berlin Wall

September 11th attack

Moon landing

Challenger

disaster

Fall of the Berlin Wall

September 11th attack

Obama elected

Source: socialmarketing.org

The 2016 election marked the first time many Gen Zers were able to vote, in an event that has served to spotlight and magnify the fractures and fissures in the nation. Decisions made by this administration will have ramifications for years to come, and many of the top issues that drove voters to the polls can be interpreted as de facto battle lines along which the country is dividing itself: Health care. Guns. Immigration. Abortion. The treatment of gay, lesbian and transgender people. Climate change.

So how do young people growing up in today’s chaotic environment feel about their country, their cities and their lives? We’ve spent the last few months following a handful of teenagers on the frontlines of Generation Z: five students who graduated from high school in 2017 and are full of big dreams. For these individuals, the issues facing the country aren’t just hypotheticals to see on the news or be debated by politicians onstage, but their daily realities.

Here are their stories.

Aidan Destefano

Pottstown, PA

At first meeting, Aidan Destefano projects nothing but pure teenage boy.

The 19-year-old is cookie-cutter handsome, with olive skin, dark hair, sparkling green eyes, a firm handshake, and a big, magnetic smile—the kid is always smiling.

But Aidan hasn’t had the typical teenage boy experience, exactly.

I’m finally me; the next step is to live my life as me. Aidan Destefano

Born biologically female, he first encountered the term “transgender” while watching a YouTube video in the seventh grade, and that’s when the feelings he’d had his whole life suddenly had a name. In 2015, before his junior year of high school, he posted a Facebook video announcing he was transitioning from female to male, then started testosterone, changed his name, and had surgery to remove his breasts. While he’d entered high school on the girls’ cross-country team, by senior year, he was running with the boys.

Aidan now stands among other trailblazers at the crossroads of transgender rights in this country. When his high school was sued for allowing transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their gender identity, he testified as a witness, sharing his experience of how important it was to be allowed to use the men’s facilities. (While a judge’s decision this summer upheld the school’s policy, the case is now headed to a higher court on appeal.)

Since taking office, President Trump has issued two blows to the transgender community: announcing a ban on transgender troops in the military and rescinding Obama-era guidance that instructed schools to allow transgender students to use facilities that aligned with their gender identity. In June, Aidan met with Gavin Grimm, the transgender student whose lawsuit over access to the bathroom at his Virginia high school was headed to the Supreme Court until the court ultimately declined to hear it this spring. These rights are currently being decided on state and local levels, leaving much up in the air.

As for Aidan, he doesn’t spend too much time thinking about politics. He’s more concerned with his day-to-day life and working toward his future.

“I’m finally me,” he says. “The next step is to live my life as me.”

Breann Bates

Clermont, FL

Breann Bates voted for Donald Trump, but she wasn’t happy about it.

“I’m pretty critical of President Trump,” says the 19-year-old Florida native, who supported Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz during the primaries before ultimately casting her ballot for the president. “I think that it’s important to stay critical and not just be a fan of any politician—to hold him accountable.”

I want to sit down and have a calm, cool and collected conversation and figure out why people believe what they believe and where that comes from. Breann Bates, age 19

She’s no passive political observer. Breann is a key member of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that trains and organizes conservative activists on high school and college campuses. The group has made headlines for protests against “safe spaces” and for controversial initiatives like its Professor Watchlist, which keeps tabs on educators who “advance leftist propaganda.”

“I do believe there is an ideological battle or war being waged,” says founder Charlie Kirk, 24. “What does this generation stand for?”

Breann is passionate about fighting for her beliefs. She’s staunchly pro-life, a strong supporter of campus carry laws, which would allow guns on college campuses, and wants the government to be less involved in people’s lives. While her political passion may make her something of an outlier among her generation—Twenge says that among this group “interest in government is at an all-time low”—Breann’s skepticism of big government seems to align with her peers. In a study by the Center for Generational Kinetics, a millennial and Gen Z-focused consulting group, only 26 percent of Gen Z respondents said they trusted elected officials.

Now a freshman in college, Breann is hopeful that the country can move past its current division and that people like her will be able to communicate across the aisle. “I want to sit down and have a calm, cool and collected conversation,” she says, “and figure out why people believe what they believe and where that comes from.”

Destiny Robertson

Northfork, WV

McDowell County, West Virginia, has the unenviable distinction of being one of the poorest communities in the country.

But Destiny Robertson wants you to know it’s also one of the strongest.

“We have some of the best people in the whole world,” says the 18-year-old, who grew up in the county in the town of Northfork. “I wouldn’t be who I am without where I am.”

West Virginia got a lot of attention on the presidential campaign trail from candidate Trump, who promised to bring mining jobs back to a state struggling with unemployment. People have been leaving McDowell County, once the top coal producer in the state, ever since coal production started to decline decades ago. Since its peak in 1950, the region’s population has dropped by over 80 percent. The unemployment rate is now more than double the national average, and more than 1 in 3 people live in poverty.

I wouldn’t be who I am without where I am. Destiny Robertson, age 18

Destiny, whose grandfather was a coal miner, believes in her community, but doesn’t think the future lies in trying to chase the past. “A lot of my friends—my male friends—that’s their dream, to become a coal miner. That’s where you can make the most money here, when you can get a job,” she says. “I’m definitely in the minority. My views are that we have to move on from coal.”

Meanwhile, the county, like the rest of West Virginia, is in the throes of the opioid crisis. The overdose rate here is nearly five times the national average. “You have a big problem in West Virginia and we are going to solve that problem,” President Trump said on a visit to the state in August. In October, he declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency.

The president is popular in McDowell County. Seventy-five percent of the votes here went to him in the 2016 election, but Destiny’s wasn’t among them – at 17, she was still too young to vote at the time. She doesn’t like to get too public with her political beliefs, but she’s passionate about voter registration and encouraging people to make their voices heard. “Being a black woman in this town, it’s important to me to exercise my right to vote,” she says.

And she hopes President Trump will come through for the people of her county, who desperately need help. “This place has an epidemic going on…I’d hope that this new administration will bring awareness to that and help us figure out a way to get rid of the addiction.”

Isaiah Charles

Newtok, AK

If you haven’t already been to Newtok, Alaska, you might never have the chance: The tiny coastal village won’t be around much longer. It’s being swallowed—an early casualty of the world’s changing climate. Newtok is built on permafrost, or ground that’s been frozen for a long time, and as the earth’s temperatures have risen over time, that land has started to thaw. The village now loses roughly 70 feet a year as the river erodes the weakened shore.

“The land used to be really far,” explains Isaiah Charles, who grew up here. “It is dangerous to have land falling off and a village of 350 people that are terrified from it.”

For Isaiah, 19, Newtok’s endangered status has long been a fact of life. Boardwalks throughout the town are sinking into the mud. During powerful storms, the damage can be even greater. Residents are actively worried for their homes as the coastline creeps closer.

It’ll be like a memory to never forget. Isaiah Charles, age 19

“The general trend is quite unmistakable,” says climatologist Brian Brettschneider, who notes that Alaska is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the country, and what’s happening here should serve as a warning. “This is really the canary in the coal mine.”

In typical teenage form, Isaiah has other pressing concerns. The former star basketball player graduated from high school in May and will start college in a few months. He’s focused on his friends, family, community and finding a path toward a successful and steady career.

But the reality of what’s happening to his hometown is impossible to ignore. Newtok must relocate, and in a few years, the place Isaiah has always called home will be gone. The village is moving to a new site called Mertarvik, 9 miles across the river, and the relocation team hopes to get everyone there by 2020.

In its current state, Newtok is an often jarring mix of tradition and modernity. A subsistence community, the people hunt, fish and gather most of their food. Though they speak English, most also speak Yup’ik, the tribal language of their ancestors. They don’t have running water in their homes and the erosion has impacted the community’s ability to safely dispose of their waste and maintain clean drinking water, raising health concerns. At the same time, thanks to services like a “lifeline” plan from a local cellphone provider, most young people are often heads-down texting, sending messages on Snapchat or talking to far-flung friends on FaceTime. They get Amazon deliveries, watch YouTube and stream Top 40 hits. “When I was a little kid, it was a lot different,” Isaiah reflects, wistfully. “Kids playing outside, having fun. But now that I’m older, everybody’s inside, just being on their phone or iPad. Everything’s changing.”

Isaiah knows that one day, when he comes home, his village will be gone. But he struggles to describe how it will feel to say goodbye to this place. “It’ll be like a memory to never forget.”

Rasmi Moussa

New Haven, CT

When Rasmi Moussa arrived in the United States in 2016, he only knew one word of English: “No.”

One of the 12,587 Syrian refugees who were resettled in the United States last year, Rasmi, now 19, moved to New Haven, Connecticut, with his parents and three of his siblings. They’d fled their homeland five years before to escape the ever-escalating violence, and had been living in Jordan, where Rasmi hadn’t been able to go to school, and instead worked odd jobs to help support his family.

Almost two years after coming to America, Rasmi has almost fully acclimated. He taught himself English through a combination of translation apps, videos and trial-by-fire experience working at a gas station. He graduated from high school with honors in June, and this fall he started taking classes at a local community college, where he’s pursuing a degree in radiography.

I was thinking I would be back after one month, three months or four months. That was six years ago. Rasmi Moussa, age 19

But behind his smile, Rasmi hides a deep sadness. He lost relatives in the war, his home was destroyed and many of his siblings are still trapped overseas. Those who are still in Syria are in too much danger to escape, and those who made it to Lebanon and Jordan were in the process of applying to the United States for refugee visas until their plans were thrown into limbo when President Trump announced his travel ban in January. With the situation in Syria still dire, Rasmi doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to go home.

“It’s hard to think about,” he says. “I was thinking I would be back after one month, three months or four months. That was six years ago.”

Rasmi talks to his family as often as he can, staying in touch via video chat. It’s been so long since they were together that he has five nieces and nephews he’s never even met. He holds out hope that one day they will all be reunited.

“They ask me every day: What’s happened?” he says. “When can we come? Why’d they close the way to come to the United States?”

“If I had to sum up the generation in one word, it would be ‘terrified,’” says Twenge, whose research has found that Generation Zers are reporting higher levels of anxiety and mental health issues as well as lower self-confidence than the millennials before them. CGK’s Gen Z research found that only 23 percent of the cohort believe the country is headed in the right direction.

And with the typical teen spending an average of six to eight hours a day in front of a screen, their person-to-person communication will almost certainly be impacted. “They just don’t have as much practice interacting with each other face to face,” says Twenge. “I think it’s a pretty good educated guess that social skills are going to be different.”

Yet Rasmi, Breann, Isaiah, Destiny and Aidan all exhibit one defining characteristic that also defines their generation: determination to succeed. “They are very interested in finding good jobs and working hard at them,” says Twenge of Gen Z, noting that the group’s attitudes toward work are more positive than millennials at this age. And when they do relax and unwind, they’re doing it more safely than the generations before them, statistically getting into fewer physical fights and car accidents, recording fewer teenage pregnancies, and drinking less alcohol.

“It’s not like they’re buckling down at home with the books all the time,” says Twenge. “It’s that the party is on Snapchat.”

Original Article:

Click here

#faces #future #generation #stories

0 notes

rotationalsymmetry · 3 years

Text

Oh, that’s what the dress thing is about.

You know, I think it’s really fucking annoying when Democrats don’t stand by their alleged convictions. When they refuse to stand by “defund the police” and instead use “tough on crime” language. When they refuse to stand by the vision of a less militaristic America and talk about wanting America to be “strong”. I think it’s annoying when they refuse to challenge the idea that the stock market doing well is the same as average people having secure, well-paying jobs, and I think it’s annoying when they buy into the idea that people should have to earn necessities through working for them, rather than things like food and shelter and health care and education being inherent rights. I think it’s annoying when they play up their Christianity to avoid offending religious conservatives, when they talk about how abortion should be “rare” to avoid offending conservatives, when they engage in the pretense that racism is primarily a result of poor rural whites getting left behind (granted, poor rural people getting left behind is a very real problem, it’s just… not why Trump got the election in 2016. Nor is that problem fixable by backing off on things like queer rights and immigrant rights. Anyways.)

So when a Democrat does the opposite of that and makes a clear, unambiguous, and indeed controversial statement about what they’re for? That’s a good thing.

AOC can’t win for losing. She’s simultaneously dismissed for being from a working class background (“go back to being a bartender”) and also demonized whenever she wears clothes that are typical of and appropriate for someone in her position. It’s bullshit and regressive, and it’s hard to imagine it’s not connected to her being a woman of color.

AOC isn’t some profound traitor to the cause or whatever. She’s not a demon. She’s not our savior either. She’s a human being like the rest of us with strengths and weaknesses who is attempting to make a certain type of change through the political process. People who are in favor of making that sort of change through those sorts of methods tend to like her and talk her up and that’s good and appropriate and consistent with their worldview. (And…while there are limits to the political process, there are also matters of life and death significance that happen though it whether you are engaging with it or not. There is a difference between someone like AOC being in the House and someone like, idk, whatever conservative is trying to pass the worst fucking laws right now.) People who are cynical about the method do best to give her as little attention as possible and focus on other things — union organizing, protesting, mutual aid, guerilla gardening, sharing info about where to get textbooks for free, figuring out how to show Bezos’ debit card number in Times Square, whatever.

(Obviously I am not advocating doing anything illegal because that would be breaking the law, and breaking the law would be breaking the law. Ahem.)

Realistically most people aren’t radical, and it is as irrational to expect progressives to be radicals as it is for progressives to expect radicals to have the same politics as them.

If you’re following a lot of people who aren’t personal friends and also don’t share your worldview, you’ve got a call to make over whether it’s worth putting up with them expressing opinions based on a different worldview. If there’s someone you have a good relationship with that has a different opinion on the effectiveness of the political process than you, or who thinks it’s ineffective but is stanning AOC anyways because sometimes people are inconsistent, maybe have a direct one on one conversation about that. But there’s really no reason for people on the left to get mad that AOC is making a political statement that at least approximately corresponds to our priorities.

(And there is no way to criticize someone who is making a political statement while doing a normal politician thing that she was going to do in any case, for, you know, wearing an expensive dress or whatever, without it coming across as you’re actually criticizing the statement.)

Sometimes people come to radical politics by a slide from liberal to progressive to radical. (I would have thought that was the only way, but from what some people say on tumblr I guess some people go straight from being raised conservative to radical with no in between? And some people do get raised radical. Anyways.) I think when people slide in the other direction, which can happen, it’s because of things like lack of community support and perceived ineffectiveness. Yelling at progressives isn’t really going to change those issues. Focusing on making the left strong and interconnected and effective is.

“Strong,” just shoot me now. Sigh.

There are some big differences between liberals/progressives and radicals/leftists. I think the core one is liberals/progressives tend to basically trust the system. I think it is actually really important for people with radical politics who were raised trusting the system, myself included, to intentionally unlearn that trust. Maybe for some people that involves a period of demonizing politicians to overwrite a basic tendency to trust the politicians that are on “your side”, idk, maybe this is somehow helpful for someone. For me I think it’s more effective though to take a mellower approach, and go back to core values. AOC is advocating wealth redistribution, and that is a value I share. I also have values that are not anywhere near the Overton window: open borders, land back, police and prison abolition, abolishment of corporations and nation states and capitalism and very specifically the United States as an imperial power, and I’m not sure how many of those AOC is in favor of on a personal level (I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s for open borders anyways), but definitely there is only so far the political process is going to be able to go in moving towards those goals. So regardless of what I think of her as a person or politician, there are some things that she’s not going to be with me on, and that’s ok. Most people aren’t. I can focus on the ones that are, and with the rest I can either focus on other values that we share or I can let them go their own way when they’re not actively standing in opposition to what I’m for. It’s ok.

It’s important to not swing back and forth between “this politician is amazing and the best and is going to change everything for the better” and “this politician is the literal worst” (when they’re actually better/less bad than most.) It’s important to see differences. There is a narrow range of what a given politician is likely to be able to do, and they act within those ranges and can only be sensibly evaluated within those ranges. If you want to go “but fuck all politicians though” that’s fine, there’s something to be said for seeing politicians as a class whose interests don’t align with the interests of people with less power — like landlords, like cops, like bosses. But if that’s your take there’s still no real reason to single out one specific politician who happens to be 1. a woman of color and 2. for that class, about as non-shitty as they come.

I mean, you can fundamentally not like bosses and still notice when a boss who’s a woman of color gets a lot more hate directed at her than the white male bosses, and find that kinda weird and concerning and probably reflective of how people saying those things treat women of color who aren’t in positions of relative power. Same for politicians.

Like yeah “we’re not going to girlboss our way out of this one” sure, but also…how relatively powerful women get treated and how powerless women get treated is not entirely unrelated. And if I can’t dance I don’t want to be a part of your revolution. (=misogyny (and racism and the intersection thereof) within leftism is still a problem actually.)

Anyways: you’ll notice I almost never post about politicians including AOC on here. I’m certainly not going to start stanning her. I don’t think that’s constructive. Democracy, to the extent that it’s a useful concept, isn’t about which horse you back. It’s about organizing and coming together and coalition building and taking to the streets and an awful lot of phone calls and mailing parties and meetings and talking and listening and research and attempting to translate legal text into something that makes sense and figuring out how to phrase things persuasively and supportive infrastructure like local newspapers and hashtags and days of action and petitions and saving your elected officials’ phone numbers in your contacts and showing up. (And so much fucking fundraising, endless fucking fundraising.) It’s often more about stanning laws and policy concepts (“green new deal”, “Medicare for all” etc) than stanning politicians. People who focus on politicians do not know how to do democracy IMO.

#long post #political #discourse

0 notes

samanthasroberts · 7 years

Text

Redneck Revolt: the armed leftwing group that wants to stamp out fascism

There are several commonalities between the far left and the far right including a disdain for liberals but the biggest divide is on the topic of intolerance

The cookout offered free food, a face-painting booth and a protest sign-making station a pile of cut-up cardboard boxes, paint markers and rolls of packing tape. A group of neighborhood boys, each no older than 12, gathered around. They wanted signs to tape to their bicycles, so they could ride around and tell Trump what they thought of him.

One grabbed a piece of cardboard and wrote in big letters: TRUMPS A BITCH.

Max Neely quickly stepped in.

Im not sure you should use that word, he said, his voice taking on a fatherly tone. At 6ft2in, he towered over them. That word isnt very respectful to women, and there are a lot of women around here today that we should be respecting. Maybe you can think of another word to use.

The boys conferred. Eventually, they settled on a different, less offensive protest sign at least in Neelys eyes. FUCK TRUMP, it read, followed by four exclamation points.

A 31-year-old activist with long hair and a full bushy beard, Neely had a full day of political activism ahead of him: Donald Trump was in Harrisburg to mark his 100th day in office with a speech at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex. In other parts of the city, the liberal opposition were also readying themselves: organizations such as Keystone Progress, Dauphin County Democrats and the local Indivisible group planned to march in protest.

Neelys group were not among them. Instead, they had set up a picnic site in a small park, offering a barbecue and leftist pamphlets. Someone had planted a bright red hammer-and-sickle flag in the grass. On a nearby table hung a black banner that bore the words Redneck Revolt: anti-racist, pro-gun, pro-labor.

Activist Steve Hilditch, who runs a chapter of the Redneck Revolt group. Photograph: Cecilia Saixue Watt

If you havent noticed, we arent liberals, said Jeremy Beck, one of Neelys cookout friends. You know, if you keep going further left, eventually, you go left enough to get your guns back.

Wooly liberals, theyre not. Redneck Revolt is a nationwide organization of armed political activists from rural, working-class backgrounds who strive to reclaim the term redneck and promote active anti-racism. It is not an exclusively white group, though it does take a special interest in the particular travails of the white poor. The organizations principles are distinctly left-wing: against white supremacy, against capitalism and the nation-state, in support of the marginalized.

Pennsylvania is an open-carry state, where gun owners can legally carry firearms in public without concealment. Redneck Revolt members often see the practice of openly carrying a gun as a political statement: the presence of a visible weapon serves to intimidate opponents and affirm gun rights. Many of the cookout attendees owned guns, and had considered bringing them today but ultimately they had decided to come unarmed, in the interest of keeping the event family-friendly.

Redneck Revolt began in 2009 as an offshoot of the John Brown Gun Club, a firearms training project originally based in Kansas. Dave Strano, one of Redneck Revolts founding members, had seized upon what he saw as a contradiction in the Tea Party movement, then in its infancy. Many Tea Party activists were fellow working-class people who had endured significant hardships as a result of the 2008 economic crisis which, in his eyes, had been caused by the very wealthy. And yet, Tea Partiers were now flocking in great numbers to rallies funded by the 1%.

By supporting economically conservative politicians, Strano thought, they would only be further manipulated to benefit the already rich.

The history of the white working class has been a history of being an exploited people, he wrote. However, weve been an exploited people that further exploits other exploited people. While weve been living in tenements and slums for centuries, weve also been used by the rich to attack our neighbors, coworkers, and friends of different colors, religions and nationalities.

Now, eight years later, more than 20 Redneck Revolt branches have sprouted across the US; the groups range widely in size, some with only a handful of members. Max Neely is a member of the Mason-Dixon branch, which encompasses central Pennsylvania as well as his native western Maryland. Many members are white, but the organization seeks to build on a redneck identity beyond race.

I grew up playing in the woods, floating coolers of beer down a river, shooting off fireworks, just generally raising hell, all that kind of stuff, said Neely. Things most people would consider a part of redneck culture. Were trying to acknowledge the ways weve made mistakes and bought into white supremacy and capitalism, but also give ourselves an environment in which its OK to celebrate redneck culture.

The group draws a great deal of inspiration from the Young Patriots Organization, a 1960s-era activist group consisting primarily of white working-class Appalachians and southerners. Im very impressed with Redneck Revolt, said Hy Thurman, one of the early founders of the Young Patriots. I think theyre right on with what theyre trying to do.

The group opposed racism and worked closely with the Black Panthers, but they did make use of the Confederate flag in their recruiting. Thurman explained that it was used only strategically, to start conversations with poor white people who might identify with the symbol.

In the same way that the Young Patriots once used the Confederate flag, Redneck Revolt seeks to employ another emblem of rural America: guns.

Redneck Revolt groups work on providing an explicitly anti-racist presence in rural areas, and focus particularly on gun shows. Many members are from places where guns are relatively normalized, and Neely wants Redneck Revolt to serve as a viable alternative for people who might otherwise join the growing right-wing militia movement.

Since the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege, the US has witnessed an increase in anti-government paramilitary organizations. Oath Keepers, for example, is a militia group that strives to defend the US constitution, which the group believes is under threat by its own government. They claim to be nonpartisan, but its members politics tend to skew far right. During last years presidential election, they announced that members would be monitoring voting booths to prevent election tampering, stating he was most concerned about expected attempts at voter fraud by leftists.

But groups like Oath Keepers have much in common with far leftists: concerns about the infringement of human rights, objections to mass surveillance and the ever reauthorized Patriot Act, anger at the continued struggles of the working poor.

We use gun culture as a way to relate to people, said Neely, whose grandfather was an avid hunter. No liberal elitism. Our basic message is: guns are fine, but racism is not.

Officially, Oath Keepers bylaws prohibit anyone associated with a hate group from joining, though their background checks have proven to be inconsistent at best. But there are other rightwing groups around the explicitly racist kind.

Im worried about Pikeville, said Neely. Ive got friends out there.

KKK members salute next to a pickup truck at a private campground in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Photograph: Pat Jarrett for the Guardian

Pikeville is a small Kentucky town deep in the heart of Appalachia. It has no major airport or interstate, a population of less than 10,000 and an abundance of idyllic mountain scenery. Mining has long been the major industry here, though Pikeville also attracts tourism: mid-April draws over 100,000 visitors to the annual Hillbilly Days festival, a celebration of Appalachian culture and music.

In the week after the festival ended, however, Pikevilles atmosphere had taken a distinct turn. Neo-Nazis were coming to town the same day as Trumps appearance in Harrisburg.

The Nationalist Front an alliance of far-right white nationalist organizations was planning a rally in front of Pikevilles courthouse. Take a stand for white working families, read an invitation that circulated online.

This begins a process of building and expanding our roots within white working class communities to become the community advocates that our people need and deserve, wrote Matthew Heimbach on the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.

Pike County chronically impoverished, overwhelmingly white is seen as a fertile setting for spreading their ideology. The city of Pikeville itself has actually experienced some growth in the past few years, but the greater area is struggling. Pike Countys unemployment rate is one of the highest in the nation: 10%, more than twice that of the US as a whole.

Trump successfully tapped into this desperation with his pro-labor, anti-immigrant rhetoric and successfully won more than 80% of votes cast. Citing this figure, Heimbach hoped to develop existing pro-Trump sentiments into full-blown national socialism.

Were doing this because we care about the people of Pike County, said Jeff Schoep, head of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, in a video promoting the rally. Weve seen factories shut down, weve seen people losing their jobs, weve seen families getting desperate and reaching out for drugs or other things that they shouldnt be doing. We want to give people hope again. Something worth fighting for.

That something happened to be a white ethno-state, and many Pikeville residents were not interested.

The city approved a permit for the Nationalist Front to gather downtown, citing the constitutional right of free speech and assembly, though Donovan Blackburn, the city manager, also issued a statement promoting peace, respect and diversity.

Students at the University of Pikeville planned a counter-protest, but the event was quickly canceled due to safety concerns: university officials feared that a conflict between the Nationalist Front and members of the antifascist movement or antifa could escalate into violence.

An anti-fascist counter-march to #MarchAgainstSharia in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Sean Kitchen

Developed in Europe over the past few decades, antifascists represent the lefts own united front: a conflux of anarchists, communists, social democrats and others, dedicated to stamping out fascism by any means necessary, including violence which they see as a justified response to the inherent violence of fascism. They often employ black bloc tactics, where individuals wear masks and all-black clothing to avoid police identification.

Antifascist groups have never been as prominent in the US as they have been in countries such as Greece, where masked individuals recently smashed the windows of the Golden Dawns headquarters. But in the wake of Trumps election and the ensuing spate of hate crimes, they have swiftly mobilized. A masked man famously punched white nationalist Richard Spencer in Washington DC on Inauguration Day; two weeks later, antifascists lit fires on UC Berkeleys campus in protest of rightwing ideologue Milo Yiannopoulos.

We live in a historical moment where theres unprecedented wealth inequality, and the average person is struggling to get by, said Sidney (not his real name), an Appalachian antifascist who has been keeping a close watch on white nationalist activity in his area. When governments, as they characteristically do, fail to step in, people look to other institutions for an answer. Fascism is having a resurgence because were in that moment. Its not a problem thats going to be solved by leaving it alone. Thats like leaving an infection alone.

A 27-year-old native of West Virginia, Sidney comes from a coal mining family. He splits his time between installing drywall and organizing with Redneck Revolt.

Pikeville really caught my attention, said Sidney. The Traditionalist Worker partys been making real efforts to organize in Appalachia. Im not a Kentuckian, but Im a working-class Appalachian, and it really sticks in my craw.

Rednecks against racism: Anti-fascist protesters in downtown Pikeville. Photograph: Pat Jarrett

To dissuade antifascists, who often wear masks during demonstrations, the Pikeville city commission passed an emergency ordinance that prohibited the wearing of masks or hoods in downtown Pikeville. Anyone above the age of 16 wearing a mask or hood would be subject to 50 days in jail and a $250 fine.

Antifascist demonstrators would have to show their faces, which could be potentially dangerous: neo-Nazi groups have been known to use facial recognition software and other tactics to identify counter-protesters, acquire personal information and subject those identified to further harassment.

At Redneck Revolt, we tend not to cover our faces anyway, said Sidney. We want to make inroads with the community, and its easier if they knew who you are.

But Sidney had a greater concern: Kentucky is another open-carry state and Heimbach had encouraged members of the Nationalist Front to come armed, ahead of possible leftist attacks. At least, however, he would have his own firearm: his Smith and Wesson semi-automatic pistol, which he decided to carry concealed.

A couple locals had expressed to Sidney that they wished they would all go home both neo-Nazis and antifascists.

I cant blame them for feeling like that, said Sidney. Theyve got this huge ideological fight on their doorstep that they didnt ask for.

Regardless, some time after noon, a large group of antifascist protesters some armed, some wearing bulletproof vests headed to the courthouse, ready to face the Nationalist Front.

Instead, they saw only about 10 white nationalists, waiting in a little area that had been fenced off by police. They were members of the League of the South, a group that promotes a renewed attempt at secession from the US. The two major Nationalist Front delegations, the Traditionalist Workers party and the National Socialist Movement, were missing.

Rumor soon spread that they were lost.

Given that theyre not from this region, and they dont represent the people here, its not terribly surprising, said Sidney.

A Pikeville resident argues with Redneck Revolt protesters. Photograph: Pat Jarrett

Back in Harrisburg, a group of six young white nationalist men wearing a uniform of white polo shirts approached Neelys cookout site; they looked like missionaries, clean-shaven with neatly combed hair.

Max Neely approached them and asked, cautiously, whether they were interested in socialism.

No, they responded. They identified themselves as members of Identity Evropa, a white nationalist group that endorses racial segregation and only admits applicants of European, non-Semitic heritage. They had initially supported Trump as a presidential candidate, but were now in Harrisburg to protest him; they were disappointed that he had not yet created a white ethno-state.

Neely wanted to keep them away from the cookout. On another day, in a different setting, some of his associates might have come ready for a fight. But today was meant to be family-friendly, and many of the picnic attendees were young black activists from a local high school. They could handle themselves, Neely knew, but the task of arguing for the legitimacy of your existence against those who deny your humanity is an arduous one.

So while his Redneck Revolt friends kept a careful watch from across the street, Neely let the Identity Evropa members talk more about their ideology about how the US was a nation meant for white people, how white culture was under attack. Neely debated them as politely as he could, hoping his quiet listening could diffuse the situation. They thanked him for being so calm and civil.

Its easy to be calm when youre a white man, said Neely. Its easy when its not your life or your familys lives at stake.

They could not see the back of his shirt, which depicted a hooded figure dangling from a tree, and the words HANG YOUR LOCAL KLANSMAN.

The encounter ended rather decisively: three local teenage girls had chased off the white nationalists.

Resist: a eight-foot-tall sign made by the Redneck Revolt group in Harrisburg. Photograph: Cecilia Saixue Watt

By mid-afternoon, the cookout was in full swing. Nearby residents filled plates with barbecued chicken and strawberries. A neighborhood man looked at the pamphlets that Neely had laid out. Piece Now, Peace Later: An Anarchist Introduction to Firearms, read one title.

Yall trying to overthrow the government? he asked.

Its more about community defense, answered Travis, one of the Redneck Revolt members.

I just wanted to warn you, the man continued. West Philadelphia, 1985. Look what happened to them.

He was talking about the lefts own Ruby Ridge moment: in May 1985, a Philadelphia police helicopter dropped a bomb on to the row house that had served as a headquarters for Move, an armed black liberation group. There were 11 casualties, including the groups founder, John Africa, as well as five children. The resulting fire destroyed 65 houses. A special commission later appointed by the mayor to investigate the incident concluded that the bombing had been unconscionable.

When Neely and other white members of Redneck Revolt claim allyship with movements like Black Lives Matter, they are compelled to acknowledge their whiteness in particular, their ability to carry weapons with impunity.

When Oath Keepers began to patrol rooftops during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, their intention was to protect protesters from the police but many activists were alarmed and intimidated by the appearance of heavily armed white men. When Redneck Revolt members show up at black-led protest events, they are generally invited.

They are our security, said Katherine Lugaro, an organizer with This Stops Today, Harrisburgs local iteration of Black Lives Matter. Theyre a wall between us and anyone hateful. They put themselves on the line.

A neo-Nazi demonstrator in Pikeville. Photograph: Pat Jarrett

Back in Pikeville, a full hour after the rally was scheduled to begin, a caravan rolled into the parking lot down the street. Matthew Heimbach and the rest of the neo-Nazis had arrived. Close to 100 people, dressed in head-to-toe black and carrying Nazi insignia, marched up to the courthouse building. Many in the front were visibly armed; others carried wooden shields decorated with swastikas and Norse runes. Someone had brought a shield featuring Pepe the Frog and the words Pepe ber Alles. They sieg-heiled to Heimbach.

They were outnumbered by protesters two-to-one.

Then came a few hours of scheduled neo-Nazi speeches. This turned into a few hours of shouting, as the antifascists attempted to drown out the sound system with drums and jeers. From the midwest to the south, they chanted, punch a Nazi in the mouth.

A handful of Pikeville residents lingered on the other side of the police barricade, listening to the Nationalist Front speeches. But most locals present had trickled in along with the protesters, eventually making up a third of the crowd, and had joined in with the jeering.

They were absolutely the most strident antifascist voices there, said Sidney. Im assuming most of these folks were apolitical, or maybe conservative, but they were drawing a line in the sand.

No injuries, no shots fired; the Nationalist Front finished their speeches and returned to their caravan. A heavy police presence had kept the two groups separated and prevented any opportunity for confrontation. It was over.

Cathi Lyninger of Louisville protests the neo Nazis in Pikeville. Photograph: Pat Jarrett

In Harrisburg, night fell. Max Neely and his band of companions eventually regrouped at a

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/23/redneck-revolt-the-armed-leftwing-group-that-wants-to-stamp-out-fascism/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/redneck-revolt-the-armed-leftwing-group-that-wants-to-stamp-out-fascism/

0 notes