#Heather Heyer

[radiofreederry]

Happy birthday, Heather Heyer! (May 29, 1985)

Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, and raised in nearby Ruckersville, Heather Heyer developed a passion for justice and the dispossessed. She was vocal about inequality and a committed activist for social justice, in which capacity she attended a protest on August 12, 2017, countering the Unite the Right rally which had been organized to oppose the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a Charlottesville Park. In the midst of the clash between fascists and antifascists, a neo-Nazi drove a car through the crowd, striking several people and killing Heyer. She became a martyr and a lightningrod for the resurgent antifascist movement of the late 2010s.

[living400lbs]

"When I think about standing in the gap, I think about Heather Heyer. Heather was a young woman who went out to a counter-protest in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, to oppose the white supremacists who had gathered in the city to rally. She was killed for her convictions and her refusal to back down in the face of racism. Heather Heyer was not Black, she was not a person of color, she was not Jewish, she was not a member of any group of people that the neo-Nazis or the white supremacists were there talking about. But Heather went out to stand in the gap.

She wasn’t just an ally to those who were being attacked by the Unite the Right folks—she was more than that. She was an accomplice."

- from No, You Shut Up by Symone Sanders

[whitesinhistory]

On the evening of August 11, 2017, more than 200 members of white supremacist, alt-right, neo-Nazi, and pro-Confederate groups from throughout the country converged on the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a torch-lit march through central campus shouting slogans like “Blood and soil!” “You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” and “White lives matter!” The procession was the precursor to a planned “Unite the Right” rally scheduled to take place the next day to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s recent vote to remove a Confederate monument dedicated to Robert E. Lee. As the marchers paraded through the University’s campus, counter-protests quickly emerged and tensions escalated.

The next day, the rally began to form in recently renamed Emancipation Park, where the Lee statue stood. White nationalist rally-goers, many heavily armed, filed into the park amid the outcry of a diverse gathering of counter-protesters. Those opposing the white nationalists included members of anti-fascist groups, Black Lives Matter supporters, local residents, church congregations, and civil rights leaders. In the absence of police intervention, clashes between rally-goers and counter-protesters became more volatile and eventually led law enforcement to declare the rally an unlawful assembly.

As rally-goers and counter-protesters dispersed, sporadic clashes continued. Approximately two hours after the City of Charlottesville declared a local state of emergency, a neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car directly into a crowd of counter-protesters, wounding at least 18 people and killing a 32-year-old white woman named Heather Heyer.

The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked national press coverage and debate regarding race, white supremacy, and Confederate iconography.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sebastian Murdock at HuffPost:

Former President Donald Trump said a deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was a “peanut” compared to protests happening across the U.S. condemning Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians. “Crooked Joe Biden would say, constantly, that he ran because of Charlottesville,” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday night. “Well, if that’s the case, he’s done a really terrible job because Charlottesville is like a ‘peanut’ compared to the riots and anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our Country, RIGHT NOW.”

During the 2017 “Unite the Right” hate rally, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville carrying burning tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal and anti-racist demonstrator, was killed after a neo-Nazi attendee drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heyer and injuring several others. In 2018, the killer was sentenced to life in prison. At the time, then-President Trump downplayed the violence, saying there were “very fine people on both sides.” Pro-Palestinian protests have popped up across the country and at college campuses, with some critics calling the demonstrations antisemitic despite many Jewish people and organizations taking part in calling for a cease-fire in Gaza amid Israel’s military campaign in the region that has resulted in more than 30,000 Palestinians being killed.

[...] “The fact is that Crooked Joe Biden HATES Israel and Hates the Jewish people,” Trump said elsewhere in his Truth Social post. “The problem is that he HATES the Palestinians even more, and he just doesn’t know what to do!?!?”

No, Mr. Donald Trump, the 2017 Charlottesville Neo-Nazi "Unite The Right" rally was NOT a "peanut". It was a disgraceful scene that you gave praise to with your "fine people on both sides" statement.

Also, President Joe Biden does not "hate Israel" or the "hate the Jewish people" like what you falsely allege, unlike what you have done over the years with your anti-Jewish hatred.

[classic8media]

A Normies Guide to the Alt-Right, the New Right & Their Tactics for Recruitment

OPERATION PULL OUT THE WEEDS AT THEIR ROOTS Be warned: This is for research purposes only. Some of this content may be traumatizing as it shows extremist views and explains acts of violence. Originally published on Medium on Aug. 24, 2017, as a warning to all who had ignored the warning signs before the Unite the Right Rally, which ended in the brutal killing of Heather Heyer. On Aug. 12, 2027,…

[filosofablogger]

Violence Is NOT The Answer!!! EVER!!!

A couple of things in the news yesterday caught my eye and I jotted down some notes, thinking about writing a post today about elected officials and other public figures calling for violence.  Did we not learn a lesson on January 6th?  But this morning, a newsletter in my inbox by Lucian Truscott summed it all up much better than I likely could have done, so I’m sharing his words…

[whats-in-a-sentence]

He even planned to send Nazis to the funeral of victim Heather Heyer and posted:

All I want to see is [Jews] screaming in a pit of suffering on the soil of my homeland before I die [. . .] I don't want wealth. I don't want power. I just want their daughters tortured to death in front of them and to laugh and spit in their faces while they scream.

"Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists" - Julia Ebner

[leftistfeminista]

Gaza's women are just like any other women: they are wives, lovers, partners and feminine beings with desires, interests, drives and needs. The mocking of their lingerie by dozens of IDF soldiers isn't just a depraved and childish act; it's indicative of a dehumanization trend in which Palestinian women are viewed as entirely alien and otherized - that the presence of lingerie in their bedroom drawers is so shockingly surprising & unexpected, it is worth playing with and showing off as battlefield souvenir. I remember vividly how widespread lingerie stores were throughout Gaza City and how they were such a casual thing. In fact, I remember numerous instances of seemingly religious men with beards and the Quran playing in the background having or operating underwear and lingerie stores and stands, with their wives or female salesladies even helping them with customers.

These images by IDF troops will have long lasting consequences and will undermine de-escalation and de-radicalization efforts, particularly in a conservative society that views female-related spaces, items and topics as particularly sensitive and private/sacred. This isn't about worn out soldiers blowing off steam during battle; it is a sick lack of discipline & lackluster standards & operational security protocols. These images are deeply disrespectful and offensive and further alienate a civilian population that is paying the price for circumstances over which it has no control.

A Revolutionary Feminist Hip Hop collective released this diss track to the IDF. Inspired by the fierce lioness dignity of PFLP women commanders who have had their underwear publicly displayed. The IDF pigs have been hanging the lingerie of Marxist-Leninist women from the PFLP and DFLP to distance them from their Islamic comrades. Women from the secular leftist revolutionary organizations of Palestine have had their underwear especially targeted. The IOF had worked very hard to "otherize" Gaza as medieval, playing down Marxist-Leninists like PFLP who showed solidarity with Heather Heyer and BLM. They want to distance Gaza from western leftists. But women Marxists who dress like western women have their underwear paraded by IOF.

Yes it is mortifying for Marxist-Leninist PFLP commanders like Shireen Said to be waging guerilla war in the ruins of your homeland. While IOF pigs taunt that they can taste your juices on your stolen underwear. But she fights on with more determination in spite of it all. They can't take away her revolutionary dignity. And even if her panties are something very private, personal and intimate to the proud Marxist commander. It has been the IDF chauvinist pigs who have been more shamed before the world by their behavior.

Shireen Said's brave, dignified, courageous response to the IDF's attempt to humiliate her with her stolen panties, was turned into this hip hop anthem.

[edenfenixblogs]

I don’t think most non-Jews understand how disappointed we are in the left right now. How completely abandoned we’ve become. How our contributions to progress for other groups have been erased or disavowed or hidden. How the actual tangible things that Jews have contributed to black rights and civil rights are being ignored. How we’re being told we contribute and have contributed nothing.

How we are being told that the world has been kind to us when it never has. As if my mom didn’t grow up getting called a Kike and getting beat up for being Jewish. How I thought I had friends until I caught them saying “xyz was beautiful until Jews showed up.” How people told me I was pretty “for a Jew.” How I grew up hearing stories about bombs being set off in Israel in buses and markets. How I couldn’t even go two weeks without hearing that and how nobody cared and somehow, every time that happened, the whole world became more hostile to me for some reason.

I just don’t understand. I don’t understand what leftists are doing. Or why. I hate that I have to say—of course, I support a free and self determined Palestine (which I truly do)—in order for you to decide I’m worthy of care and support.

We showed up for you. All of you. And the entire movement is abandoning us at best or targeting us at worst. Celebrating our deaths. Saying we deserved it. How are we supposed to trust you ever again? How are we supposed to feel safe ever again?

A very few select people who are in my life have taken the chance to actually learn about and dismantle their own unconscious antisemitism during this time. And I’m eternally grateful for them. But most people haven’t reached out at all. Most people are still sharing hateful things that could get me hurt and they don’t care. Most people Reblogging my posts are still Jews. Because we are alone. And it sucks. You need to be as loud about antisemitism as you are about Palestine or you’re an antisemite (unless you’re Arab/Muslim/Palestinian—I totally get that these groups are also doing damage control in their own communities just like Jews are).

But we are all in tremendous pain right now.

This moment will pass. And when it does, I will remember how many people let me down. I will remember that when I needed support more than I’ve ever needed it in my life, people fucking vanished. They pretended violence against my people wasn’t happening. They ignored and rewrote the history of Israel to suit their own narratives.

You don’t know what it feels like to be hated this much for opposite things. PoC hate us for being too white. White supremacists hate us for not being white enough. Europeans hate us for being middle eastern. Middle easterners hate us for being western/European. Everyone hates us for being settlers but continually kicks us out of their countries so that we have to settle somewhere else.

I saw a post going around from a Black person who said that the reason he and his fellow black activists go protest for Palestinians instead of fighting antisemitism (as if it’s a binary, which it’s not) is that Jews don’t show up. Muslims and Palestinians do. And honestly? Fuck that guy. Heather Heyer died standing shoulder to shoulder against racism in 2017. [CORRECTION: When I first wrote this post I was under the impression that Heather Heyer was Jewish. I want to correct to avoid spreading misinfo. She was just the first (and incorrect) Jewish civil rights activist I thought of. However there are plenty of other actual Jewish civil rights activists to choose from. If you have reblogged this post from me, please feel free to add a link to the permalink version of this post with my correction to your reblog.]I have devoted substantial time and effort and money that I don’t even get paid a lot of because I don’t get paid a living wage. I have continually reached out to PoC people in my life of all religions to ask how they are doing and what I could be doing to help more—both for them personally and how they would best like me to help their community. I have elevated their voices at every opportunity. And not one person I checked in with has done the same for me or for my community.

And it’s bone chilling. It’s awful. And it’s even worse knowing that when it’s over, people will want to go back to normal. They won’t apologize. They won’t self reflect. They’ll just live their lives, maybe a little more aware of how much they hate us and completely indifferent to the harm they’ve caused us. How disposable they made us feel. And the thing is…it’s not hard for you to know. You just have to ask.

Too many people are cowards. Too many people care about looking good than actually learning something or making the world better. And to those people: you should be ashamed of yourself.

I don’t have any hate in my heart. Truly. Not a drop for any group of people. But I have a tremendous lack of trust that anyone would actually lift a finger to keep me safe.

[crimethinc]

Last Saturday, Charlottesville’s Black history museum melted down the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The statue had been a rallying point for fascists, including the "Unite the Right" rally in 2017 during which one of them murdered Heather Heyer and grievously injured many others.

For years, anti-racists had fruitlessly requested the removal of Confederate statues around the country. Far-right politicians responded with laws making it illegal to remove them. Only after anarchists and other abolitionists used illegal direct action to pull down statues—starting in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina and spreading all around the United States—were liberal politicians forced to remove some of the statues that remained.

https://crimethinc.com/StatuesDown

The struggle against white supremacy continues. Direct action plays an essential role.

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

There are two related things I've noticed coming from the left that I really want people to examine deeply in themselves, because it's a major problem that I see happening over and over again. The whole I/P issue is the most currently salient example, but it is one of many.

1. There's this tendency towards retributive justice, wherein the solutions proposed fail to take into account whether the proposed punishment is at all proportional to the alleged crime, but rather is just treated as the natural consequence of that action.

2. This same principle is also extended backwards in time and used to excuse violence post hoc that they might not have chosen as an ideal punishment but have nevertheless decided was deserved because that person [allegedly] did something bad.

Both betray an underlying punitive or retributive justice mentality, where the goal is not restoration or reconciliation + accountability, but rather punishment. (There are some interesting religious and cultural aspects to this I could get into but don't want to derail this post.)

This untethering of crime to punishment in terms of (a) due process, (b) proportionality of punishment to the crime, and (c) a failure to consider restorative justice, reconciliation, and teshuva processes instead of retribution leads to monstrous and morally bankrupt results.

Put another (blunter, crasser) way: the left's longstanding hard-on for vigilante violence is a critical failure that undermines the entire movement.

You cannot base your politics on humanism, compassion, and due process out one side of your mouth and then cheer on vigilante violence, cruel and unusual punishment, and mob mentality out the other. It doesn't work like that.

Now I understand that sometimes armed resistance is necessary. People living under authoritarian and inhumane conditions may, out of necessity, turn to guerrilla warfare and unofficial armed resistance in self-defense. But even that has limits. When leftists fantasize about death by curb stomping or slitting someone's throat as a good thing, they are imagining this happening to armed fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, or possibly other categories of irredeemable people such as domestic abusers who maim or kill their partner &/or children, pedophiles, human traffickers, etc.

What they aren't imagining is the other side of that coin, which is the alt-righter who murdered Heather Heyer with his car, abortion clinic bombers, violent Q-anoners or terrorists. Each of those people also believe in the justice of their actions and their entitlement to act as arresting officer, judge, jury, and executioner.

"But those people are wrong!"

So? Why do you get to decide that for everyone? What about the people who think YOU are wrong?

There's a reason courts and due process exist. It's the same reason why "free speech" protects the speech you hate, why freedom of the press protects that rag whose opinions you hate, and why free exercise of religion protects shitty religious groups you wish to see gone. It's because we live in a society and you aren't the arbiter of justice for everyone. If you give in to that mentality, you will inevitably end up in a "might makes right" society, which never ends well, particularly for marginalized people.

If you wouldn't accept l'chatchila a certain punishment being administrated by a court of law without outcry and protest for human rights abuses, then don't cheer it on b'dievad. Either rape is unacceptable or it's not. Either torture is unjustifiable or it isn't. Either maiming is an acceptable punishment for certain crimes or it isn't. You either support the death penalty by certain methods (beheading, burned alive, strangled, hacked apart, stoning, hanging, etc.) or you don't. Collective punishment is either acceptable or it isn't. Vicarious punishment is either acceptable or it isn't.

All of those things are either human rights abuses, or they aren't. All of them fall outside even the rules that might permit self-defense or guerrilla warfare or other uprisings of the oppressed.

Due process is the same - either you believe in due process and the right to a fair and timely trial, or you don't. The moment you support one extrajudicial punitive killing, you have opened the door to the justification of murder, provided the killer has sufficient justification.

It's true that the rules of armed conflict and war are different, but that they exist at all is relevant here too. The reason they exist is to minimize suffering during an event that is guaranteed to cause great suffering. It's the same reason why the laws of self-defense are different than the laws of intentional murder.

The truth is that in order to live in a just and civilized society, there must be specific rules that govern the administration of conflict resolution and harm. These rules must be enforced consistently and equally, and the decider of fact must have reasonable access to the evidence that exists. The state or any court of law or other tribunal must render its decision in the most impartial way possible, even for the worst, most obviously guilty people. Even those that commit heinous crimes must be given those same rights. Without those safeguards, you create the opportunity for bad faith actors to label their undesirable groups or individuals as whatever category people find so despicable that they fall out of being considered human and lose their claim to human rights protections. It must therefore be impossible to forfeit your right to due process and freedom from vigilantes and mobs.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 7 June 2020, the brother of a Seattle police officer drove his car at high speed into a Black Lives Matter protest in the city, then shot a Black protester. The driver ploughed into the protest at high speed, in an act reminiscent of the white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlottesville which killed Heather Heyer in 2017. One of the protesters, Dan Gregory, confronted the driver and grabbed his steering wheel, trying to protect the crowd. The driver then sped up, forcing Gregory to let go and give chase on foot. He soon caught up to the car and punched the driver, who then shot Gregory and fled, then handed himself into police. Gregory, himself the son of a former Baltimore police officer, survived and later told Sara Jean Green of the Seattle Times: "I would do it again. I would die for people I don’t know. That’s me." In 2023, the shooter was sentenced to just 24 months of probation and had his driving licence suspended for 30 days, having played guilty to reckless driving. Charges of first-degree assault were then dropped by prosecutors. Amidst a wave of protest in defence of Black people's lives, scores of people began ramming their vehicles into demonstrators. The Boston Globe found 139 rammings between May 2020 and September 2021, which killed at least three and wounded 100 people, including multiple attacks by white supremacists. Fewer than half of these incidents resulted in criminal charges. Meanwhile, Republicans in 15 states around the country attempted to introduce laws to legalise or prevent lawsuits against attackers who killed protesters with their vehicles, successfully introducing them in states such as Florida, Iowa and Oklahoma. Pictured: Gregory after being shot https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=640107084829177&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[dyke-terra]

There’s something about the level of tragedy that’s reached when it’s no longer physically possible for one person to know the names of everyone who died. Every massacre is a tragedy, of course, but we could learn the names of everyone who died in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. We could dedicate our life to memorializing them. Everyone who loved someone who died there and everyone who survived probably knows every name of every other dead. Same with most mass shootings. Same with Charlottesville— Heather Heyer was murdered, and we know her name. We remember her with every act of antifascism we do.

That’s not the case with October 7th. There’s so many bodies that’re so mutilated that they’ll never be laid to rest. There’s so many families that can only assume. Jews are supposed to see the body before we can start to grieve. We’re supposed to put it ~all~ to rest, not just bits and pieces. There are families that won’t be able to even start for years, and I can’t even learn their names. That thousand— they’re all just victims. Each family will know some of the scale of the grief and maybe some of them will know each other because of this, but no one can comprehend this.

And it’s really, really, ~really~ not the case with the Holocaust. 6 million. Where would you even start?

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Pedro X. Molina :: @newcounterpoint :: @pxmolina

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 1, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 02, 2024

On Tuesday, March 26, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s election interference case, put Trump under a gag order to stop his attacks on court staff, prosecutors, jurors, and witnesses. On Wednesday, Trump renewed his attacks on the judge and the judge’s daughter. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton took the unusual step of talking publicly about what threats of violence meant to the rule of law. Walton, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, told Kaitlan Collins of CNN that threats, especially threats to a judge’s family, undermine the ability of judges to carry out their duties. 

“I think it’s important in order to preserve our democracy that we maintain the rule of law,” Walton said. “And the rule of law can only be maintained if we have independent judicial officers who are able to do their job and ensure that the laws are, in fact, enforced and that the laws are applied equally to everybody who appears in our courthouse.” 

On Friday, former president Trump shared on social media a video of a truck with a decal showing President Joe Biden tied up and seemingly in the bed of the truck, in a position suggesting he was being kidnapped. 

A threat of violence has always been part of Trump’s political performance. In 2016 he urged rallygoers to “knock the crap out of” protesters, and they did. They also turned on people who weren’t protesters. Political scientists Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers studied the effects of Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric against marginalized Americans and found that counties where Trump held rallies had a significant increase in hate incidents in the month after that rally. 

Trump’s stoking of violence became an embrace when he declared there were “very fine people, on both sides,” after protesters stood up against racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and other alt-right groups met in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they shouted Nazi slogans and left 19 people injured and one protester, Heather Heyer, dead. 

In October 2020, Trump refused to denounce the far-right Proud Boys organization, instead telling its members to “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys turned out for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, where they helped to lead those rioters fired up by Trump’s speech at The Ellipse, where he told them: “You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”

Trump’s appeals to violence have gotten even more overt since the events of January 6. 

And yet, on Meet the Press yesterday, Kristen Welker seemed to suggest that there is a general problem in U.S. politics when she described Trump’s attacks on Judge Merchan as “a reminder that we are covering this election against the backdrop of a deeply divided nation.”  

But are the American people deeply divided? Or have Trump and his MAGA supporters driven the Republican Party off the rails?

One of the major issues of the 2024 election—perhaps THE major issue—is reproductive rights. But Americans are not really divided on that issue: on Friday, a new Axios-Ipsos poll found that 81% of Americans agree that “abortion issues should be managed between a woman and her doctor, not the government.” That number includes 65% of Republicans, as well as 82% of Independents and 97% of Democrats. The idea that abortion should be between a woman and her doctor was the language of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, overturned in 2022 with the help of the three extremist justices appointed by Trump. 

Last week, the Congressional Management Foundation, which works with Congress to make it more efficient and accountable, released its study of the state of Congress in 2024. It found that senior congressional staffers overwhelmingly think that Congress is not functioning “as a democratic legislature should.” Eighty percent of them think it is not “an effective forum for debate on questions of public concern.” 

But there is a significant difference in the parties’ perception of what’s wrong. While 61% of Republican staffers are satisfied that Congress members and staff feel safe doing their jobs, only 21% of Democratic staffers agree, and Democratic staffers are significantly more likely to fear for their and others’ safety. Women and longer-tenured staffers are more likely to be questioning whether to stay in Congress due to safety concerns. Eighty-four percent of Democratic staffers think that agreed-upon rules and codes of conduct for senators and representatives are not sufficient to “hold them accountable for their words and deeds,” while only 44% of Republicans say the same.

Republicans themselves seem split about the direction of their party. Republican staffers were far more likely than Democrats to be “questioning whether I should stay in Congress due to heated rhetoric from my party”: 59% to 16%. “The way the House is ‘functioning,’ is frustrating many members,” wrote one House Republican deputy chief of staff. “We have to placate [certain] members and in my nearly ten years of working here I have never felt more like we’re on the wrong track.” 

One Republican Senate communications director blamed extremist political rhetoric for the dysfunction. “[W]ith the nation being in a self-sort mode, it is easy to never hear a dissenting opinion in many areas of the country. People in DC, who work in the Capitol, generally have a collegiate approach to each other. The American people don’t get to see that—at all. From the outside it appears to be a Royal Rumble and bloodsport. It’s reflected in the [way] people, regular citizens, now view one another.” 

A Republican House staff director wrote that Congress is “a representative body and a reflection of the people writ large. When they demand something different of their leaders, their leaders will respond (or they will elect different leaders).”

Burgess Everett and Olivia Beavers of Politico reported yesterday that nearly 20 Republican lawmakers and aides have told them they would like Trump to calm down his rhetoric. They appear to think such violent commentary is unpopular and that it will hurt those running in downballot races if they have to answer for it.

It seems unlikely Trump will willingly temper his comments, since threatening violence seems to be all he has left to combat the legal cases bearing down on him. Over the course of Easter morning, he posted more than 70 times on social media, attacking his opponents and declaring himself to be “The Chosen One.”

Tonight, Trump posted a $175 million appeals bond in the New York civil fraud case. He was unable to secure a bond for the full amount of the judgment, but an appeals court lowered the amount. Posting the bond will let him appeal the judge’s decision. If he wins on appeal, he will avoid paying the judgment. If he loses, the bond is designed to guarantee that Trump will pay the entire amount the judge determined he owes to the people of New York: more than $454 million. 

Trump and his campaign are short of cash, and there were glimmers last week that the public launch of his media network would produce significant money if he could only hold off judgments until he could sell the stock—six months, according to the current agreement—or use his shares as collateral for a bond. The company’s public launch raised the stock price by billions of dollars. 

But this morning the company released its 2023 financial information, showing revenues of $4.1 million last year and a net loss of $58.2 million. The stock plunged about 20%, wiping out about $1 billion of the money that Trump had, on paper anyway, made. The company said it has not made any changes to the provision prohibiting early sales or using shares as collateral. 

Tonight, Judge Merchan expanded the previous gag order on Trump to stop attacks on the judge’s family members. Trump has a right “to speak to the American voters freely and to defend himself publicly,” but “[i]t is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings,” Merchan wrote. “The threat is very real.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Michelangelo Signorile at The Signorile Report:

Yesterday, as the sensational corporate media continued to focus on campus protests, Republicans pushed through another piece of political theater in the House, the Antisemitism Awareness Act. While there has been some unacceptable antisemitic rhetoric reported at protests, often from opportunistic haters who are not students—just as there has been anti-Muslim rhetoric from some people mingled among pro-Israel counter-protesters, though it gets less reported on—the vast majority of the campus protests across the country have been civil and peaceful, and a great many of the protestors standing up for Palestinians are Jewish students themselves.

The bill that passed in Congress is a sham, as it conflates being against Israel’s leaders’ actions and its policies with being antisemitic. Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York—my representative, who is Jewish—voted against the bill, saying it would put the "thumb on the scale" in a way that could "chill" constitutionally protected free speech. The worst part of this theater is that the Republicans who spearheaded the bill, like New York’s Mike Lawler, and those like New York’s Rep. Elise Stefanik, who are attacking university presidents they claim are condoning antisemitism (all part of the GOP attack on higher education and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs), have embraced in their votes and/or their rhetoric white supremacist Great Replacement theory as they rail against policies at the border. The antisemitic, racist conspiracy theory, which, as the American Jewish Committee describes it, posits that there is “an intentional effort, led by Jews, to promote mass non-white immigration”—an “invasion”—has gone from the fringes of the racist far right to the heart of the GOP in Congress, as Republican politicians openly claim an “invasion” of migrants (Brown and Black people) is occurring, fomented by Democrats, to “replace” (White) Americans. 

[...] Trump this week also attacked the protests as antisemitic—and said Biden has abandoned Jews and Israel—while he claimed several times this week and last week that the campus protests make the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 “look like a peanut.” Trump is actually embracing and promoting—once again—violent white supremacist actions in which a woman, Heather Heyer, was killed, and where racist marchers promoting Great Replacement theory and carrying torches were literally chanting, “The Jews will not replace us!” Trump also gave an interview to Time magazine this week that is not getting enough attention—as the media is laser-focused on every detail of Trump’s New York trial or the campus protests—in which he lays out many of his authoritarian plans, using the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, if he wins the presidency again. Just like at his rallies, he’s saying it all out loud.

Donald Trump's plan to deport 11M+ undocumented immigrants is based off the racist Great Replacement Theory conspiracies.

Antisemitic maniac Trump also falsely called the college protests over the Gaza Genocide "antisemitic" and baselessly accused President Joe Biden (and the Democratic Party by extension) of "abandoning" Jews and Israel.

[blueiscoool]

Foundry Workers Melt Down Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee Statue

Eventually, an artist will be chosen to transform the bronze bars into a public art installation

The controversial bronze statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that stood for nearly a century in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been melted down so that it may someday be transformed into a public art installation.

On Saturday, at a foundry in an undisclosed location in the American South, workers cut the infamous figure into small pieces, then fed those pieces into a 2,250-degree furnace. They poured the metal into molds for ingots, or rectangular bars, imprinted with the words “Swords Into Plowshares.” That’s the name of the project that will transform the divisive monument into a new piece of public art.

Only a small group of people, including a handful of journalists, was allowed to watch the melting. They were invited on the condition that they didn’t disclose the name or location of the foundry—or the identities of its workers—over fears of retaliation.

“The risk is being targeted by people of hate, having my business damaged, having threats to family and friends,” says the foundry’s owner, a Black man, to the Washington Post’s Teo Armus and Hadley Green.

Even so, the man added, “When you are approached with such an honor, especially to destroy hate, you have to do it.”

One particularly poignant moment occurred when foundry workers removed the statue’s face from the rest of the head.

“A man in heat-resistant attire pulled down his gold-plated visor, turned on his plasma torch and sliced into the face of Robert E. Lee,” writes Erin Thompson, an art historian at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments, in a guest essay for the New York Times. “The hollow bronze head glowed green and purple as the flame burned through layers of patina and wax. Drops of molten red metal cascaded to the ground.”

The 21-foot-tall statue’s journey to this point was a long and complicated one. Commissioned in 1917 and installed in 1924, it loomed over a downtown Charlottesville park for decades.

In 2017, amid a broader national debate over Confederate monuments, white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville to protest the statue’s removal. During the “Unite the Right” rally, a man drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring many others.

After years of legal battles, the statue finally came down in July 2021. The city donated it to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which has been responsible for it ever since and leads the Swords Into Plowshares project.

Organizers had wanted to melt down the statue sooner, but they waited until a judge dismissed a lawsuit against the plan.

Because of the statue’s size, the melting process will take weeks. Once that work is finished, project organizers will move on to the next phase of their plan: choosing an artist who will transform the metal into something new.

“Humpty Dumpty couldn’t be put back together again,” said Reverend Isaac Collins, a Methodist minister in Charlottesville who spoke at the melting ceremony, per NPR’s Debbie Elliott. “We still have a lot of work to do, but this statue that has cost us so much, so much violence, so much hurt, so much bloodshed—it’s gone. And it’s never going to be put back together the way it was.”

By Sarah Kuta.