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dumbestthingiveeverheard · 1 year

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Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 7/26/2023

Fifth Place: Elon Musk

Remember Elon's rather confusing move to change Twitter to "X"? Well Mediaite reports today that "There Is a ‘100 Percent Chance’ Twitter Will Be Sued Over New X Branding, According to Trademark Expert." You see, it turns out that nine thundered different companies use the "X" on their brand in some form or another, including both Microsoft and Meta. Meaning Elon not only decided to change one of the most highly recognizable logos on the internet to something present on my keyboard, but he also did so in such a way where he could get sued because it turns out everyone else had that same idea.

You know, there's a lot of speculation that Elon bought Twitter specifically to run it into the ground, I'm not going to say I believe it--some rich people are just crazy (Google Marville sometime if you want evidence of that)--but I see why so many people believe it.

Fourth Place: Ben Shapiro

I talked about Greg Gutfeld yesterday, whose comments have been condemned by other staff at Fox News, a Holocaust survivor, and the White House since yesterday's post. However, one person was perfectly willing to defend what Greg said, Ben Shapiro:

No one said there was anything good about slavery or the Holocaust. They said that resilient human beings sometimes are capable of making the best of their horrific situations. Which, of course, is true. That, of course, is true. That's the story of the heroism of the slaves making the best of one of the world's worst situations in human history. Same thing with Holocaust survivors. Like, trying to survive, trying to cultivate a skill set while undergoing the worst horrors a human being can imagine. But, of course, they have to lie. They have to lie.

Here's the problem: That's not what Gutfeld said. He didn't say that human beings used their already existing cleverness to survive this situation (although that would still be offensive due to the implication that those who died were somehow just less intelligent than those who did not) but that this gave them the chance to learn new skills which helped them in life.

And by the way Ben, you yourself say you have family members who died in the Holocaust. Are you telling me they just weren't clever enough and that's why they died? In that case, fuck you.

Third Place: Matteo Cina

Media Matters gave Ben Shapiro sometimes new to defend tomorrow with their reporting today "Fox News staffer: 'It is hard to talk about the Holocaust and rising anti semitism without discussing Jewish presence in banking.'" Specifically, the article takes aim at things the assistant for Fox News Digital and former writer for Texas Governor Greg Abbot has previously written on TikTok.

This is just nonsense: Antisemitism in Europe in the twentieth century had nothing to do with the amount of Jews who controlled the banks or whatever, it had to do with the longstanding tradition of that same bigotry which existed in Europe since its inception, largely due to the belief that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. The fact is, what this man said could only be seen as apologetics for antisemitism and it should be condemned by everybody who sees it.

Second Place: Glenn Beck

I think this headline from The Daily Beast sums up this situation perfectly: "Glenn Beck Demands Target, a Store He's Actively Boycotting, Sell His Book."

First Place: Ron DeSantis

Remember that ad a member of a DeSantis campaign retweeted with the fascist symbol on screen? It turns out a member of the DeSantis campaign also made the ad in the first place, said person being Nate Hochman who is also a contributor to National Review and a fellow at the Claremont Institute.

I talked yesterday about how DeSantis seems to be using the same platform as other second place religious right zealots, but I want to point out that he is the only person running a campaign with this problem. No other campaign--from either side of the isle--has had this many issues with fascists entering and spreading their views on the same level Ron has. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was beaten up by the media--rightfully so--for one antisemitic comment, but DeSantis's constant fascist problem is seemingly being ignored. This is, hands down, the friendliest Presidential campaign to fascists I've ever seen, and I think that anybody has ever seen if you look at post-World War Two American history and exclude openly fascist parties. Trent Lott was forced out of his role of Senate Majority Leader for praising his segregationist friend Strom Thurmond just two decades ago, now we have people running for President using openly fascist symbols and nobody seems to notice.

Ron DeSantis, you've done the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

#elon musk #ben shapiro #matteo cina #glenn beck #ron desantis

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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In early July, a video game writer named Jessica Price embarked on a lengthy Twitter thread about the storytelling differences between games meant to be played as single-player experiences and games meant to be played by lots and lots of people at once, like Guild Wars 2, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Price was a writer for.

Price’s thread received a perhaps too-haughty response from gaming YouTuber Deroir, who disagreed with some of what Price had to say. Price — who is, after all, a woman on the internet and thus is subject to a stunning amount of social media pushback and condescension — put Deroir on blast, first tweeting: “Today in being a female game dev: ‘Allow me–a person who does not work with you–explain to you how you do your job,’” and later following up with: “like, the next rando asshat who attempts to explain the concept of branching dialogue to me–as if, you know, having worked in game narrative for a fucking DECADE, I have never heard of it–is getting instablocked. PSA.”

The Guild Wars 2 community erupted in outrage at Price, who had either stuck up for herself against the endless onslaught of needling criticism that comes with being a woman online or had abused a position of authority to call a popular member of the gaming community an asshat by implication. (Price’s tweet didn’t directly call Deroir an asshat, but it was hard to miss her meaning.)

A few days later, ArenaNet, the company that makes Guild Wars 2, fired Price and her co-worker Peter Fries, who had defended Price in several Twitter threads. Price told Polygon that she was not given a chance to explain herself, or to apologize. She was simply fired, as was Fries.

The broad outlines of the controversy drew comparisons to Gamergate, the controversial movement that began in 2014 and involved a bunch of gamer and alt-right trolls using the cover of concern for ethics in video gaming as an excuse to harass women in the industry and to claim that calls for better representation and diversity within gaming were destroying video games.

Was Price’s firing a result of Gamergate’s actions? Not directly, no. Deroir was not a Gamergate adherent, and he wasn’t agitating for Price to be removed. Plus, plenty of people who found Price to be in the wrong weren’t Gamergaters.

But the answer to that question also has to be yes, because of how thoroughly the matter was discussed in Gamergate’s favored corners of the internet, which mostly jumped to Deroir’s defense, and because of how completely Gamergate changed the way games are talked about online and how women in the industry have to think about what might happen to them, something Price touches on in her Polygon interview.

In the years since 2014, Gamergate has metastasized and evolved into what feels like the entire alt-right movement, to the degree that many of the names boosted by the hyped-up controversy, names like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich, saw their stars only rise when they became central to online communities that backed the presidential candidacy of one Donald Trump. Gamergate went from a fringe movement that struck most people who heard about it as a weirdo curiosity to something that took over the country, as Vox’s Ezra Klein predicted it would with eerie accuracy in late 2014.

Gamergate didn’t manage to completely eliminate more diverse storytelling in games, as at least one silly controversy from this year would indicate, but it did slightly paralyze the video game industry. And that paralysis has begun to spread to other spheres of our culture.

Members of the movement have developed a tactic that they have deployed again and again to drive dissension in assorted online communities, using a mix of asymmetric warfare (in which they stage lots and lots of small strikes at giant corporations that don’t quite know what to do in response), the general lack of accountability applied to the movement’s various decentralized figures, and a tendency to turn progressive concerns inside out, in a weird attempt to reach parity. Gamergate didn’t really have anything to do with Price’s firing directly, but it also did, because Gamergate is now everywhere and everything.

The movement arguably elected a president. And just this past week, in a much higher-profile case than the firing of Jessica Price, it got director James Gunn fired from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.

James Gunn attends the premiere of Ant-Man and the Wasp. Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney

Perhaps the above mention of “Mike Cernovich” has already pinged some part of your brain that remembers keywords from the news and headlines of the past few days; it was Cernovich who helped engineer a push to have Gunn fired from the third Guardians of the Galaxy film, by dredging up and encouraging his followers to circulate several of Gunn’s old tweets. Many of the tweets contain jokes about topics like rape and pedophilia.

Gunn’s roots are in over-the-top shlock cinema (he began his career at the famed low-budget genre movie company Troma, and his first credit is for writing Tromeo and Juliet). He directed the first two Guardians movies to general acclaim, and both his overall positivity and his general disdain for Trump have earned him more than a few left-leaning fans on social media platforms.

But that same disdain for Trump — and, of all things, the widespread pushback against a tweet in which filmmaker Mark Duplass praised conservative writer Ben Shapiro, which inspired Gunn to chime in on the fray — made Gunn a target for folks like Cernovich.

To be clear, Gunn’s past jokes are awful. They have surfaced before — most notably in 2012, when Gunn was hired to helm the first Guardians film. A blog post he had written in 2011 about which comic book characters fans would most like to have sex with drew ire from numerous left-leaning critics and social media personalities. Gunn ultimately apologized for his comments, and vowed to do better.

Later, in 2017, he told BuzzFeed that in the early days of his tenure at Marvel, he’d abandoned the persona that aimed to be a provocateur and adopted the persona that evolved into his current Twitter self. As described by BuzzFeed’s Adam B. Vary:

“I protect myself by writing scenes where people shoot people in the face,” Gunn said, chuckling. “And if I have to think around shooting someone in the face, it’s harder, but I think it’s more rewarding for me.” He cleared his throat. “I felt like Guardians forced me into a much deeper way of thinking about, you know, my relationship to people, I suppose. I was a very nasty guy on Twitter. It was a lot fucking edgy, in-your-face, dirty stuff. I suddenly was working for Marvel and Disney, and that didn’t seem like something I could do anymore. I thought that that would be a hindrance on my life. But the truth was it was a big, huge opening for me. I realized, a lot of that stuff is a way that I push away people. When I was forced into being this” — he moved his hand over his chest — “I felt more fully myself.”

And what’s “this”?

”Sensitive, I guess?” he said. “Positive. I mean, I really do love people. And by not having jokes to make about whatever was that offensive topic of the week, that forced me into just being who I really was, which was a pretty positive person. It felt like a relief.”

Yet all those old tweets remained on Twitter. Considering both Gunn’s 2011 blog post and the way he talks about his old tweets, it seems hard to believe that neither Marvel Studios nor its parent company, Disney, knew of their existence.

But when Cernovich surfaced a whole bunch of them last week in a graphic designed to strip them of as much context as possible, more and more conservative and alt-right personalities started passing them around, and Disney’s Alan Horn finally announced on Friday that Gunn would no longer be working for the company. (Gunn, for his part, made one of the better, “Yeah, I fucked up!” statements in a decade that seems to provide a new one every other week.)

Then Cernovich and his friends turned their sights on other comedy figures with provocative jokes in their past, like Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswalt, and Dan Harmon. Few of these men suffered consequences as severe as Gunn did for past jokes. But all were hounded endlessly on social media. Harmon even left Twitter.

I don’t particularly want to defend Gunn here. A lot of his old Twitter material is truly awful. It often takes the shape of a joke without actually being funny, which is deadly to anybody playing with comedic land mines like gags about child molestation and rape. Meanwhile, it’s also hard to believe that a white dude who directed two of the biggest movies of all time won’t get another chance in Hollywood, even if he has to step back and spend a year or two making indie movies.

But the way Gunn was fired sticks in my craw, just a little bit. It’s the biggest example yet of Gamergate and its ilk forcing a major public figure out of the job that made them a major public figure. By stripping events like this of their context, Cernovich and company might think they’re forcing the left to confront its own hypocrisies, or winning smaller battles in a larger culture war, or simply driving critics of the president off social media.

But make no mistake, they’re also destabilizing reality.

The cancellation of Roseanne in the wake of Roseanne Barr’s offensive tweet has been compared to Gunn’s firing. It shouldn’t be. ABC

The recent event that Gunn’s dismissal has drawn the most comparison to is ABC’s firing of Roseanne Barr from the now-canceled TV show that bore her name. (The series will live on as a spinoff titled The Conners, sans Barr.)

In that case, too, an awful tweet (in this case, a racist remark about former Obama staffer Valerie Jarrett) led to somebody who seemed protected by recent success being removed from the franchise that had yielded said success. And in that case, too, the person fired had worked for the Walt Disney Company, the biggest behemoth in the entertainment industry, one that’s about to swallow another behemoth like it’s a tiny little goldfish.

But pull back some of the layers and the two events couldn’t be more dissimilar. The most obvious difference is the timing. Gunn wrote his tweets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, before he was hired by Marvel and long before he became a critic of Trump. Barr’s tweet was published the morning she was fired.

This is not to say that Gunn’s tweets are excusable but, instead, to point to all the instances in which Barr posted horrible tweets shortly before ABC picked up a new season of Roseanne, only for Disney and ABC officials to laugh them off. If Disney meant to establish a precedent with what happened with Barr, it was essentially, “If you have skeletons in your closet, whatever. Just don’t add any new ones.” Gunn, if nothing else, had seemed scrupulous about the “not adding any new ones” part (that we know of so far, at least).

An even bigger difference between Gunn’s and Barr’s tweets concerns the context of the tweets and the intention behind them. Most of us might judge Gunn’s tweets as bad jokes, sure, but they’re mostly recognizable as jokes, and jokes in the style of 2000s Gen-X comedians trying like hell to provoke a reaction by being as “edgy” and offensive as possible.

What’s been interesting, too, is watching many of the comedians in question — including Gunn and Black but also folks like Sarah Silverman, Sacha Baron Cohen, and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone — try to figure out how to navigate an era when the ironic offensiveness they trafficked in has been co-opted by a movement that insists they always meant it, deep down. Most have become vocal Trump critics. But few have managed the transition very easily.

This is the danger in making jokes rooted in ironic offensiveness, even when you’re a master of the form (like Silverman is). At a certain point, somebody is always laughing right alongside you and taking from the joke the message that racism is okay if it’s funny, or that provoking a reaction from someone by joking about rape is funnier than the joke itself.

Ironic offensiveness is far too easy to twist into the idea that nothing is worth caring about, and that getting those who do care to lash out is the funniest thing possible. That idea is now the basis of an entire internet culture that kept splintering, with one of those splinters becoming dedicated to trolling above all else. It eventually got to a point where nobody was sure who was serious and who was joking, or if there was even a difference.

Start to unpack the comedy of the figures listed above, or of their modern comedic descendants and fellow travelers like the terrifically funny hosts of the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, and you’ll find that somewhere, deep down, they care deeply. The ironic offensiveness and shocking humor is meant to spur a reaction that hopefully guides you to a similar sense of caring and sincerity. But that requires genuine engagement and thought, and it’s easy to opt out of genuine engagement and thought when you’re laughing, in favor of taking the joke at face value.

This, I think, is what happened to Barr, who went from being an incisive comedian to being a millionaire many times over to being someone who promoted some of the same conspiracy theory nonsense that Cernovich peddles. (It’s no mistake that many of the tweets Cernovich surfaced to try to tank Michael Ian Black’s career involved him simply talking about pizza — in the worldview of Cernovich and Barr, there is a massive left-wing conspiracy to engage in pedophilia and protect fellow pedophiles, often using “pizza” as a code word for child sex.) Gunn didn’t really believe what he was saying; Barr did.

But does that context matter? Or does the statement itself matter? The fact is, both Barr and Gunn said horrible things. If we draw hard moral lines in the sand, if we insist that certain things matter to us and are important to uphold as ethical guidelines, does it ever matter that somebody might genuinely move past something bad they did in the past, might become a better person? Or are we all, always, defined by our darkest, worst moments?

Gamergate briefly devoured the internet in 2014. But it never really went away. Shutterstock

A little over a week ago, the most popular Gamergate subreddit, Kotaku in Action, briefly went offline. The user who had created the subreddit in the first place, david-me, then posted to r/Drama (a subreddit dedicated to tracing internal Reddit action and excitement) saying that he had shut down KIA. Explaining his logic, he wrote, in part:

KiA is one of the many cancerous growths that have infiltrated reddit. The internet. The world. I did this. Now I am undoing it. This abomination should have always been aborted.

So in this moment with years of contemplation, I am Stopping it. I’m closing shop and I can’t allow anyone to exploit my handicap. I’ve watched and read every day. Every single day. The mods are good at what they do, but they are moderating over a sub that should not exist. The users have created content that should not be. Topics that do not require debate. And often times molded by outside forces.

We are better than this. I should have been better than this. Just look at the comment history of any users history. The hate is spread by very few, but very often. Overwhelmingly so.

Reddit and it’s Admins are Me. They are the stewards of hate and divisiveness and they let it go. They go so far as to even claim there is nothing they can do about it. Those with upvotes could have been stopped by others with equally powerful downvotes. Fallacy. 100 evil people with 100,000 upvotes can not be defeated by 100,000 with 100 downvotes.

Reddit stepped in. It restored Kotaku in Action, and by extension restored one of Gamergate’s most prominent platforms. The subreddit hadn’t directly violated Reddit’s hate speech rules, even if it was constantly dancing on the very edge of them. If Kotaku in Action is a cancer, as its founder alleges, then it is one that remains free to spread unchecked.

When I was covering the early days of Gamergate, I believed the core of its argument was, in essence, that caring is a waste of time — that wanting video games to have more diverse characters and the industry that makes them to have better representation across the board was a pointless exercise. Gamergate adherents seemed to believe the focus of the industry should be making better games, an argument that ignored that for many, having more diverse games was necessary for having better games.

I was wrong. The core argument of Gamergate, and of the alt-right more generally, has always been that caring is hypocritical. Deep down, both movements believe that everybody is racist and sexist and homophobic, that the left, especially, is simply trying to lord a moral superiority over everybody else when, in secret cabals, they kidnap babies and run child molestation rings out of the basements of pizza restaurants. This idea is referred to as “virtue signaling,” meaning that there is no such thing as real virtue, only a pretend virtue that people deploy to try to win points with mainstream society, when everybody would be better off dropping the pretense and letting their most offensive freak flags fly.

And it’s tricky to combat the idea of virtue signaling, because of course we all virtue-signal all the time. Parents virtue-signal to teach their children, and corporations virtue-signal to make their products seem more palatable to a rapidly diversifying America, and I virtue-signal every time I tweet something that says I’m supportive of, say, the Black Lives Matter movement without joining affiliated protests.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want the broader goals of BLM to be realized immediately, or that corporations won’t take your money regardless of color or creed, or that parents shouldn’t teach their children not to resort to violence when others say or do something they don’t like.

Virtue signaling is still virtue, even if in your heart, you’re so angry or upset that you feel like punching someone. Cynicism about the motivations behind good acts doesn’t erase that the acts are good. We all do all sorts of things for a variety of complicated reasons. It doesn’t erase the fact that the net result of those actions ultimately has very little to do with our motivations.

The argument of Cernovich and his cronies is, ultimately, that none of us is actually good, that we are all venal and horrible, and that we live in a world where we should all, always, be pitted against each other, defined only by our worst selves. And because nobody is ever going to fire Cernovich for all the times he’s tweeted about rape, because he’s a self-made media personality, the war becomes ever more asymmetric. The only people who can hold Gamergate and its adherents accountable are members of the movement, who will occasionally toss someone out but almost always do so under the pretense of a game or, worse, a joke.

There are real people whose lives are ruined, each and every day, by Cernovich and his ilk, and our modern corporate media climate continues to have no idea what to do about it, because the battles are deliberately constructed to strip away context and to predetermine their outcomes from the first.

Twitter isn’t actually everywhere, but it feels like it can be everywhere. Andrew Burton/Getty

I began this article with the story of Jessica Price instead of the story of James Gunn for a reason. It’s entirely possible you haven’t heard of either, but if you’ve only heard of one, it’s almost certainly James Gunn. Yet the devastation to Price’s career will be much more substantial than whatever happens to Gunn, who will at least be collecting residuals from the Guardians movies for the rest of time.

Price’s situation is a valuable lesson in how so much of this works because the circumstances of her firing are muddier and harder to prosecute. Yes, the representative of a corporation that sells a service probably shouldn’t be calling her customers asshats. But any woman with a large enough social media profile knows just how quickly a seemingly innocuous, “Actually…” can turn into a massive dogpile of Twitter yahoos with nothing better to do. What happened to Price ostensibly has nothing to do with Gamergate. But its shadow lurks nonetheless, because it is now everywhere.

Could Price have handled things better? Probably. Should she have been fired for how she did handle them? I find that a lot harder to argue. It suggests that every employee of every organization with a vaguely public-facing persona has to be 100 percent perfect all of the time across all platforms, or else. And if you remove enough context from just about anything, you can make somebody look as bad as you want, unless they’re anodyne and milquetoast all of the time, which leads to sitting US senators suggesting that perhaps James Gunn should be investigated for pedophilia “if the tweets are true.”

The idea, I guess, is that we should all just turn off the internet and step away from social media when things get too hairy. But I would hope we all realize how impossible that is most of the time, and it’s in that imbalance that Cernovich and his pals forever create dissension and uncertainty.

I said above that what Cernovich wants to do is destabilize reality; that might seem like a big leap, but think about it. We’ve already gone from “these are bad jokes” to “if the tweets are true,” from carefully examining the thing in context to quickly glancing at the thing with as little context as possible, so that it looks as bad as it could possibly be. And when you’re fighting a culture war, and grasping for requital, I suppose that’s fair. Culture wars, too, have their victims.

But this still leaves us with a world where the terms of the game are set by a bunch of people who argue not in good faith, but in a way designed to force everybody into the same bad-faith basket. They are interested not in finding a deeper truth but in the easy cynicism of believing that everybody is as dark-hearted and frightened as them, that the world is a place that can never be made better, so why even try? Flood the zone with enough bad information and turn reality into enough of a game and you can make anything you want seem believable, until bad jokes become a dark harbinger of a horrific reality looming just over the horizon.

I’ve never believed that approach can win in the long run. I’ve always believed that in the end, some sort of truth will hold fast, and the fever will break. But sometimes, of late, I wonder if I’m wrong — and the only thing that stops me from convincing myself is the fear that accepting even guarded optimism as futile would only turn me into one of them, forever spiraling and never reaching bottom.

Original Source -> James Gunn’s firing shows we’re still living in the Gamergate era

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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elizabethleslie7654 · 7 years

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Red Pill 101: White Supremacy

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The left is forcing ordinary Americans to side with White supremacy whether they want to or not.

by Gaius Marcius

Woke leftists have had a difficult time in 2017. The list of ordinary acts that are called covert White supremacy has been growing exponentially since the Trump presidency began, and, as the widening divide over NFL protests shows, the racially tinged culture war is only gaining momentum.

Conservative media loves the liberal obsession with declaring innocuous activities White supremacy because the wild headlines are red meat for talk radio and email newsletters, but mainstream right-wing commentary on these stories is amazingly shallow. Republican lawmakers use a standard soundbite comprised of an indignant denial of GOP racism plus a preemptive disavowal of conservative racists. This earns them precisely zero credit with the media and the left. Conservative pundits lament the loss of common sense American values without offering any explanation for why those values have been in free fall since around 1965. The mainstream right seems to regard declarations of White supremacy as isolated incidents and politically foolish acts perpetrated by rage filled progressives; the GOP is genuinely surprised every time they lose ground in the culture war to such seemingly ridiculous attacks. By declaring such attacks madness, conservative pundits absolve themselves of the responsibility to analyze and counter these assaults on Whiteness. The mainstream right is not curious enough to track the progression of allegations of White supremacy, but the left does have a clever method to their apparent madness.

Appeal to logic, while you still can

The left begins an anti-White attack by condemning some distant act of racism so that moderate Whites can comfortably agree. Once Whites have shown their willingness to concede a minor point, the left rapidly moves the goalposts until those tolerant, progressive Whites are themselves accused of racism. Let us use the symbol X to represent any White institution or activity. X could be sports, higher education, Hollywood, the music industry, or local government. The left’s attacks will follow the same general pattern no matter what X represents. Using this Alt Right guide to White supremacy, you will be able to not only understand the leftist tactic being used, you will also be able to predict for friends and family the next stage of White supremacy outrage.

Whatever topic is selected for forced reeducation is first attacked through its history. There is a legacy of racism in X, therefore the modern version of X must be made more inclusive and diverse. The politically correct White dupes, be they liberal or conservative, will then make an offer of support in good faith. The most powerful institutions and individuals will bend over backward to get non-Whites to the front of the line in X. The changes implemented in the name of diversity lead only to decline in the quality of X, but guilt-ridden Whites are willing to accept that if it means they are immune to charges of racism. Unfortunately, at this point the totally-not-racist Whites have accepted the basic premise of a historical legacy of racism, so they are powerless to object when the institutional change that merely adds some diversity to White organizations is declared not good enough. At this stage of the attack there will be a spate of headlines alleging that there is “more work to be done” to overcome racism.

It won’t stop until every nominee is non-White

Once the accommodating Whites have done everything possible to make X more inclusive, short of dismantling X altogether, they unexpectedly find themselves under attack for their very efforts at inclusion. Everything a White person does, including giving undeserved help and affirmative action to non-Whites, is classified as White supremacy. The institution X is entirely taken over by non-Whites, which means that X ceases to perform its stated function and is reduced to a wealth transfer program in which Whites silently provide the money and managerial skill to facilitate their own decline. This process does not merely condemn Whites for protecting their own interests. You know that old saying, “if you can’t beat them, join them”? Well, if you are White, even joining in the erasure of your own race is not good enough.

The final stage in the White supremacy gambit is the open condemnation of Whiteness itself as inherently evil. To review, first an institution Whites invented is declared racist, next the diverse version of the institution is declared insufficient, then all actions of Whites become racist, and finally the mere existence of Whites is declared White supremacy. That last stage is quite a compliment when you think about it. People of color are so intimidated by the achievements and potential of Whites that our very existence on earth is de facto supremacy and an inherent hate crime.

.@tanehisicoates @ShaunKing @deray I am seeing these all over Seattle. I reported to the police. This is disturbing. #HateCrime ? http://pic.twitter.com/NzZVmIZE1B

— Kathleen A. Hinojosa (@kathleehinojosa) November 1, 2017

The White supremacy gambit clearly shows the inadequacy of GOP political philosophy. When a Republican talks about common sense, American values, or the Constitution, they are merely trying to avoid identity politics. But identity politics are inextricably linked to all the values that Republicans hold so dear. The mythic age of common sense was just a time when the social norms that conservatives like were the dominant force in society, and American values can only be conservative to the extent that America is peopled by White European Christians.

Non-Whites are nearly twice as likely to oppose the First Amendment.

The Constitution was never intended to be the governing document for a heterogeneous country of Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Africans, and Hispanics. If anyone had asked the Founders to write a governing document for such people, the result would have been more extreme than anything advocated by a 21st century White supremacist, but the modern GOP cheerfully and suicidally persists in applying European governmental norms to every Third World group that can be imported to the United States. A cursory glance at voting patterns and opinion polls shows where this approach will lead.

Future voters will be less white. What will the GOP prospects look like?

The GOP track record on attracting the Black vote.

The modern GOP is committed to the mutually exclusive goals of maintaining the civic virtues enshrined by the Founders in the Constitution and also treating the United States as a demographically amorphous country where paperwork, not blood and culture, makes people American. When Ben Shapiro tweets that he is not concerned about the browning of America, he typifies the foolishness of all conservatives and reveals which of the two goals will take precedence. In a few decades, conservative’s appeals to the Constitution will be seen as a version of Will Rogers’s quip about stupidity, “If following the Constitution got us into this mess, why can’t following the Constitution get us out?”

And by the way, I don't give a good damn about the so-called "browning of America." Color doesn't matter. Ideology does.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 16, 2017

After America has lost its White majority with no resistance from Shapiro or other conservatives, and the promised ideological conversion of non-Whites fails to materialize, the few conservatives who are left will argue that the new Hispanic and Muslim cultural norms are just as American as the Christian, European traditions they replaced because all the Muslims and Hispanics are legal citizens of the United States. The absurdity of this ideology is egregious. The politicians who claim to be conserving American culture will be praising totally different cultures and just calling them American. Accepting the infinite malleability of America and the universal applicability of the Constitution means that conservatives can never make a principled objection to any demographic or cultural change proposed by the left. Republicans may object out of habit, or because they are stodgy old men temperamentally opposed to change, but they fundamentally cannot explain why it would be good for America to remain a majority White country and preserve its White supremacist history.

The Alt Right fundamentally agrees with the left’s assessment of Western Civilization. Shakespeare is White supremacy. Free speech and meritocracy are White supremacy. Math, logic, and science are White supremacy. All of these civilizational attainments can only thrive, indeed, can only survive, within a White European Christian society that seeks its own interests without worrying about the hurt feelings of non-Whites. As John Derbyshire has said, there must be something good about White supremacy because a few billion non-Whites are desperate to move to White countries. Every attempt to exploit White guilt or redress racial grievances, no matter how innocuous and justified it may seem, leads eventually to the condemnation of Whiteness itself.

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stopkingobama · 7 years

Text

Here's how Soros is fighting Trump with European-style domestic terrorism

Photo: CC0

When self-described anti-fascists showed up in force Saturday to oppose a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, some of them turned violent, according to media reports and eyewitness accounts.

President Donald Trump did not specify radicals who operate under the banner of Antifa, an abbreviation for anti-fascist or anti-fascist action, when he said Tuesday that “both sides” bore responsibility for the violence and bloodshed that left three dead and dozens injured.

It is hard to know at this juncture how many of the hundreds of counterprotesters considered themselves affiliated with Antifa. Nor is it clear how many of them were among those who squared off against the white supremacists marching in downtown Charlottesville, trading punches and blows, some with lengths of wood.

The full facts await the findings of a Justice Department investigation of the Charlottesville violence announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“Antifa is a coalition of hyperviolent activists who are far-left anarchists or communists,” said Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the Washington-based Capital Research Center. “They could be considered domestic terrorists. They are not legitimate actors in the democratic process.”

Fox News Channel’s Doug McKelway, on the scene in Charlottesville, was among reporters who described individuals in clashing groups wearing helmets and padded clothes, carrying shields, and brandishing lengths of wood.

Initially, the network of radical activists did not attract as much media attention as the white nationalists and neo-Nazis they were confronting, but this has begun to change.

This short video from the pro-Trump outlet Very Fake News, which contains strong language, documents some Antifa members’ behavior toward media organizations reporting on events in Charlottesville:

The liberal media outlet Slate, however, reported that clergy and other peaceful protesters of the white supremacists credited Antifa activists with trying to protect them from violence.

Absurd Suggestions

There is no cohesive, centralized structure to Antifa. Instead, it appears to be set up as a network of anarchists, communists, and socialists who say they are opposed to “racism, sexism, homophobia, and capitalism” and take inspiration from a European movement in the 1930s called Anti-Fascist Action, as The Economist explains in a brief profile:

Antifa groups are not as widespread as they might seem. Their lack of coordination and endorsement of violence hinders their appeal as a mass movement. In America, their ongoing guerrilla war with the alt-right has helped bring more publicity to white supremacists and nationalists while doing little to advance their (somewhat unclear) cause.

Prior to its clashes with white supremacists in Virginia, Antifa—often rendered in lowercase as antifa–gained some notoriety June 4 after confronting Trump supporters in Portland, Oregon, which resulted in violent clashes.

Antifa allegedly had a hand in threatening violence against Portland’s 82nd Avenue of Roses Business Association if the business group allowed the Multnomah County Republican Party to participate in its annual Rose Festival. The business group canceled the event.

Arthur Milikh, associate director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an interview that Antifa has avoided spelling out its positions and goals in an effort to evade scrutiny.

“They have been very careful to avoid laying out what precisely they desire to obtain, or what fascism means,” Milikh said. “Whatever one may think of President Trump, his rhetoric, or his policies, it’s absurd to suggest that he intends to or could dissolve Congress, cancel elections, shred the Constitution, and name himself dictator, as a fascist would.”

Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart—who has written before about Antifa in an essay titled “The Rise of the Violent Left”—suggests that adherents are hard to pin down, noting:

Antifa activists are sincere. They genuinely believe that their actions protect vulnerable people from harm. Cornel West claims they did so in Charlottesville. But for all of Antifa’s supposed anti-authoritarianism, there’s something fundamentally authoritarian about its claim that its activists—who no one elected—can decide whose views are too odious to be publicly expressed. That kind of undemocratic, illegitimate power corrupts.

Beinart points to Portland’s Rose Festival confrontation as an example.

Muzzling Milo at UC Berkeley

Antifa has been connected with other far-left organizations such as one with the unwieldy name of Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, & Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary, or BAMN.

Antifa activists sometimes stand out from the pack by dressing “head to toe” in black, a style and tactic known as “Black Bloc.”

Antifa has operated with a heightened profile since Trump’s election. During official festivities surrounding Inauguration Day in Washington, Antifa was part of anti-Trump protests and engaged in destruction of property, The Washington Post reported.

In February, Antifa activists took part in fiery protests at and around the University of California, Berkeley.

Antifa joined with others to aggressively oppose a scheduled appearance at UC Berkeley by Milo Yiannopoulos, a British-born libertarian commentator, making Antifa part of the movement to suppress free speech on college campuses.

CNN reported:

Black-clad protesters wearing masks threw commercial-grade fireworks and rocks at police. Some even hurled Molotov cocktails that ignited fires. They also smashed windows of the student union center on the Berkeley campus where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.

UC Berkeley, which reported $100,000 in damages, canceled that speech.

‘Stir Up the Debate’

In many respects, Antifa appears to exist mostly as a conduit for social media organizing strategies, as opposed to a single organization. Using Facebook, Twitter, and other tools, the network attracts participants in its activities, including its role in the Berkeley protest and the counterprotest in Charlottesville.

The Economist notes:

The biggest impact of American Antifa groups has been to stir up the debate on free speech through their insistence on preventing so-called fascists from expressing themselves, such as at Berkeley in February, where Antifa groups staged violent protests against Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right provocateur. Shutting down speech is hardly anti-fascist.

Coverage of Antifa appears to focus narrowly on its opposition to white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations, but a significant number of Antifa members appear to regard Trump and the Republican Party as fascist and racist.

A growing number of videos supporting and attacking Antifa pop up on YouTube and other social media outlets, including this example, a 10-minute video in which two masked young members call themselves socialists.

In an Aug. 8 post about Antifa on the Capital Research Center’s website, four days before the violence in Charlottesville, Jacob Grandstaff wrote:

In Sacramento, California in June 2016, hundreds of Antifa rioters attacked 30-odd members of the white nationalist Traditional Workers Party (TWP). Although Capital Research Center does not support the goals of the TWP, the group had obtained a lawful permit to demonstrate when Antifa protesters violently refused to to allow the group to express its First Amendment rights. In the ensuing melee, 14 people received stab wounds, and two were sent to the hospital in critical condition (they both survived).

Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro posted a video Thursday questioning the left’s embrace of Antifa, which he calls “a violent, communist, anarchist organization”:

‘Vibrating With Anger’

Antifa’s source of funds is as murky as its leadership.

The Capital Research Center’s Vadum told The Daily Signal that the Alliance for Global Justice, associated with hedge fund manager and leftist financier George Soros, “acts as fiscal sponsor for Antifa groups.”

Heritage’s Milikh described two main tactics the left has employed against the Trump administration.

“Since the left currently controls neither Congress nor the White House,” he said, “they decided they will try to rule the public mind and preserve their own power and respectability through two means.”

The first tactic is to propagate and circulate accusations, Milikh said.

“Right now, they have no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” he said. “But they have made it their biggest issue, which is used to undermine the president’s powers by turning public opinion against him.”

The second tactic is “deploying well-organized and well-funded protests on the ground,” Milikh said, adding:

Protests are often successful for the left because a willing press often assists their cause by leaving the impression that the entire country—not just a handful of protesters—is vibrating with anger. This in turn teaches viewers the lesson that the bigger and angrier the crowd, the more just their cause. This tactic aims to prevent serious, reasoned public deliberation and debate.

‘Cultural Resistance’

The New York City branch of the Antifa network says on its website that it is keen on using social media to galvanize support.

“NYC ANTIFA is an autonomous blog that is trying through different media (news, videos, and information in general) [to] help to build, defend, educate, and create an effective cultural resistance against fascism,” the website says.

The New York group recently marked its third annual International Day of Solidarity With Antifascist Prisoners, an event detailed and described on its website:

The July 25 International Day of Solidarity With Antifascist Prisoners originated in 2014 as the Day of Solidarity with Jock Palfreeman, an Australian man serving a 20-year sentence in Bulgaria for defending two Romani men being attacked by fascist football hooligans. Whether acting as individuals or as part of larger organized demonstrations, this is the kind of bravery and solidarity which defines antifascist actions against the forces of hate.

Since the day of solidarity last year, we have seen this spirit all over the world—in Indonesia, Czech Republic, Brazil, Poland, England, Greece, the United States, France, Syria, Australia, Japan, and all points in between.

Among the fringe groups on the right participating in the so-called “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, as chronicled on Wikipedia, were clubs of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, the neo-Confederate League of the South, the National Policy Institute, and the National Socialist Movement. Other involved groups include the Ku Klux Klan, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, the Traditionalist Workers Party, Vanguard America, the American Guard, the Virginia Minutemen Militia, the Nationalist Front, and Anti-Communist Action.

Among liberal and leftist groups identified on Wikipedia as on hand in Charlottesville were Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Anti-Racist Action, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, Redneck Revolt, and Showing Up for Racial Justice.

Report by Ken McIntyre and Kevin Mooney. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

#Trump Protesters

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americanlibertypac · 7 years

Text

Here's how Soros is fighting Trump with European-style domestic terrorism

Photo: CC0

The full facts await the findings of a Justice Department investigation of the Charlottesville violence announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Initially, the network of radical activists did not attract as much media attention as the white nationalists and neo-Nazis they were confronting, but this has begun to change.

This short video from the pro-Trump outlet Very Fake News, which contains strong language, documents some Antifa members’ behavior toward media organizations reporting on events in Charlottesville:

The liberal media outlet Slate, however, reported that clergy and other peaceful protesters of the white supremacists credited Antifa activists with trying to protect them from violence.

Absurd Suggestions

Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart—who has written before about Antifa in an essay titled “The Rise of the Violent Left”—suggests that adherents are hard to pin down, noting:

Beinart points to Portland’s Rose Festival confrontation as an example.

Muzzling Milo at UC Berkeley

Antifa activists sometimes stand out from the pack by dressing “head to toe” in black, a style and tactic known as “Black Bloc.”

In February, Antifa activists took part in fiery protests at and around the University of California, Berkeley.

CNN reported:

UC Berkeley, which reported $100,000 in damages, canceled that speech.

‘Stir Up the Debate’

The Economist notes:

In an Aug. 8 post about Antifa on the Capital Research Center’s website, four days before the violence in Charlottesville, Jacob Grandstaff wrote:

Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro posted a video Thursday questioning the left’s embrace of Antifa, which he calls “a violent, communist, anarchist organization”:

‘Vibrating With Anger’

Antifa’s source of funds is as murky as its leadership.

Heritage’s Milikh described two main tactics the left has employed against the Trump administration.

The first tactic is to propagate and circulate accusations, Milikh said.

The second tactic is “deploying well-organized and well-funded protests on the ground,” Milikh said, adding:

‘Cultural Resistance’

The New York City branch of the Antifa network says on its website that it is keen on using social media to galvanize support.

The New York group recently marked its third annual International Day of Solidarity With Antifascist Prisoners, an event detailed and described on its website:

Report by Ken McIntyre and Kevin Mooney. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

#Trump Protesters

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