#and the party that's fine with immigration if only said immigrants are white protestant

[testure-1988]

There are all these "Had Enough? Vote Republican" signs all over my town.

..yeah, I've had enough of Republicans.

[newstfionline]

Monday, September 13, 2021

UN chief: World is at `pivotal moment’ (AP) U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a dire warning that the world is moving in the wrong direction and faces “a pivotal moment” where continuing business as usual could lead to a breakdown of global order and a future of perpetual crisis. Changing course could signal a breakthrough to a greener and safer future, he said. The U.N. chief said the world’s nations and people must reverse today’s dangerous trends and choose “the breakthrough scenario.” The world is under “enormous stress” on almost every front, he said, and the COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call demonstrating the failure of nations to come together and take joint decisions to help all people in the face of a global life-threatening emergency. Guterres said this “paralysis” extends far beyond COVID-19 to the failures to tackle the climate crisis and “our suicidal war on nature and the collapse of biodiversity,” the “unchecked inequality” undermining the cohesion of societies, and technology’s advances “without guard rails to protect us from its unforeseen consequences.” In other signs of a more chaotic and insecure world, he pointed to rising poverty, hunger and gender inequality after decades of decline, the extreme risk to human life and the planet from nuclear war and a climate breakdown, and the inequality, discrimination and injustice bringing people into the streets to protest.

World marks 20th anniversary of 9/11 (AP) The world solemnly marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, remembering the dead, invoking the heroes and taking stock of the aftermath just weeks after the bloody end of the Afghanistan war that was launched in response to the terror attacks. Victims’ relatives and four U.S. presidents paid respects at the sites where hijacked planes killed nearly 3,000 people in the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil. Others gathered for observances from Portland, Maine, to Guam, or for volunteer projects on what has become a day of service in the U.S. Foreign leaders expressed sympathy over an attack that happened in the U.S. but claimed victims from more than 90 countries.

Phony diagnoses are hiding high rates of drugging at nursing homes (NYT) The risks to patients treated with antipsychotics—which understaffed nursing homes have often used as “chemical straitjackets”—are so high that nursing homes must report to the government how many of their residents are on these potent medications. But there is an important caveat: The government doesn’t publicly divulge the use of antipsychotics given to residents with schizophrenia or two other conditions. A Times investigation found a pattern of questionable schizophrenia diagnoses nationwide. The result: The government and the industry are obscuring the true rate of antipsychotic drug use on vulnerable residents. The share of residents with a schizophrenia diagnosis has increased to 11 percent from less than 7 percent since 2012. At least 21 percent of nursing home residents are on antipsychotic drugs.

Tropical Storm Nicholas forms in Gulf of Mexico (AP) Tropical Storm Nicholas strengthened as it headed for the Gulf Coast on Sunday, threatening heavy rain and floods in coastal areas of Texas, Mexico and Louisiana. Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami said tropical storm warnings were issued for coastal Texas and the northeast coast of Mexico. Nicholas is expected to produce total rainfall of 5 to 10 inches (13 to 25 centimeters), with isolated maximum amounts of 15 inches, across portions of coastal Texas into southwest Louisiana on Sunday through midweek. The storm was expected to bring the heaviest rainfall west of where Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana two weeks ago.

Britain decides against vaccine passports (AP) Britain’s health secretary said Sunday that authorities have decided not to require vaccine passports for entry into nightclubs and other crowded events in England, reversing course amid opposition from some of the Conservative government’s supporters in Parliament. Sajid Javid said the government has shelved the idea of vaccine passports for now but could reconsider the decision if COVID-19 cases rise exponentially once again. The U-turn came just days after the government’s vaccines minister and the culture secretary suggested that vaccine passports would still be necessary, despite growing opposition from lawmakers. Such passports are required in other European countries, like France. Members of the governing Conservative Party have objected to such passports as an unacceptable burden on businesses and an infringement on residents’ human rights.

Thousands of Catalans rally for independence in Barcelona (Reuters) Thousands of Catalans chanted, sang and waved flags as they marched through Barcelona on Saturday, calling for the region’s independence from Spain. The march, organised by the grassroots Assemblea Nacional Catalana ANC, was the first since Spain’s government pardoned nine Catalan separatist leaders who had been jailed for their role in a 2017 botched bid for independence, which was Spain’s biggest political crisis in decades. Most marchers wore face coverings. Police said about 108,000 people took part. ANC put the figure close to 400,000. The protests took place at a moment of lower tension between Barcelona and Madrid than in past years as the central and regional governments favour dialogue despite their opposing views on independence.

In Hungary, pope meets PM Orban, his political opposite (Reuters) Pope Francis arrived in Hungary early on Sunday, starting an unusually short stay that underlines differences with his political opposite, nationalist and anti-immigrant Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Francis, 84, who is spending only seven hours in the capital Budapest, went directly from the airport to a private meeting with Orban and President Janos Ader in the Museum of Fine Arts. Unlike nearly every other papal trip, there was no live television coverage of the preliminary greetings or the photo opportunities that usually precede and follow such meetings. The pope is making the brief Budapest stop to say a Mass closing an international Roman Catholic meeting, known as an International Eucharist Congress. On Sunday afternoon he moves on to Slovakia, where he will stay much longer, visiting four cities before returning to Rome on Wednesday.

Nine-cent taxi rides in rural South Korea are a “godsend.” (NYT) In 2013, Seocheon County faced a crisis. As its population declined, so did the number of bus passengers, which led to unprofitable routes being canceled, stranding those in remote hamlets who did not own cars. The county’s solution? The 100-won taxi. (Longer routes cost 1,500 won, or about $1.30.) Anyone whose hamlet is more than 2,300 feet from a bus stop can call one, and the county picks up the rest of the fare. The taxis carried nearly 40,000 passengers last year, which cost the county $147,000. Since the 100-won taxi was introduced, people in remote villages have traveled outside twice as often, according to a government survey. More than 2.7 million passengers used similar taxi services in rural South Korea last year.

Strong typhoon cuts power, causes flooding in northern Philippines (Reuters) Several communities remain flooded and without power after a strong typhoon battered the Philippines’ northernmost islands, the authorities said on Sunday, displacing thousands of people. Typhoon Chanthu, which at one point was categorised by the Philippine weather bureau as a category 5 storm, has weakened after powering into the northernmost region, including the Batanes island group, on Saturday, the weather bureau said. “It’s one of the strongest typhoons I’ve felt,” said Dennis Ballesteros Valdez, a resident of Sabtang town in the province of Batanes, which is often pummelled by powerful typhoons. Some 20 typhoons hit the Philippines on average each year, according to the weather authorities.

Taliban flag rises over seat of power on fateful anniversary (AP) The Taliban raised their flag over the Afghan presidential palace Saturday, a spokesman said, as the U.S. and the world marked the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The white banner, emblazoned with a Quranic verse, was hoisted by Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, the prime minister of the Taliban interim government, in a low-key ceremony. In a tweet, Afghanistan’s first president to follow the 2001 collapse of the Taliban, Hamid Karzai, called for “peace and stability” and expressed the hope that the new caretaker Cabinet that included no women and no non-Taliban would become an “inclusive government that can be the real face of the whole Afghanistan.”

Death and suffering in Iraq a painful legacy of 9/11 attacks (AP) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. But the terrorist attacks in the United States changed forever the lives of Iraqis. In their aftermath, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, swiftly deposing the Taliban regime that had been sheltering Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaida terror network blamed for the attacks. But it was not long before President George W. Bush shifted his attention to Iraq, identifying it, along with Iran and North Korea, as part of an “axis of evil” and asserting that its brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, was armed with weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al-Qaida. No evidence of either was found. What followed was a U.S.-led invasion of a country in the heart of the Middle East that spurred a decade of war, with consequences that reverberate across the region to this day. After decades of conflict, Iraq today has a relatively stable government, and the car bombings, suicide attacks and death squads have subsided. But the economy is in tatters, its infrastructure is crumbling and corruption is rampant. The government, with its fractious politics, is unable to control the dozens of powerful Iran-backed militias that wield enormous control.

[thisissparta789789]

On July 4th, patriotic Americans continue the struggle that began 244 years ago to protect the inalienable rights set out in the Declaration of Independence. Today, the rights that untold numbers of Americans have died defending are under assault, but not by a foreign power. They are under assault by a domestic force. Never before has each and every single civil right that we have fought for in those 244 years in multiple struggles dating back to the very birth of the United States been attacked by a Presidential administration that is hellbent on the destruction of our country.

He has consistently attacked any form of criticism against him levied by the media, and has threatened the media several times, undermining the 1st Amendment. He has also tried to specifically ban Muslims from entering the United States, a clear violation of this amendment.

He has invoked the 2nd Amendment, but only for a subset of white Americans. If nonwhite Americans or “the wrong whites” tried to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, he would most certainly try to crush them.

He has somehow managed to make the 3rd Amendment relevant again, by trying to turn the military on its own people.

He has violated the 4th Amendment by ordering unreasonable searches and seizures without any form of backlash due to the nonexistent spines of members of his own party except for a select few like the Lincoln Project.

He has deprived others of life, liberty, and/or property without due process of law in violation of the 5th Amendment.

He has granted nothing but unfair trials to undocumented immigrants, in clear violation of the 6th Amendment.

He has violated the 7th Amendment through his attempts at so-called “tort reform”.

He has kept undocumented immigrants in horrid conditions that violate the 8th Amendment.

He has violated other civil rights that were not laid out explicitly in the Bill of Rights, but still protected by the 9th Amendment.

He has tried to argue that he has total authority over the states, which is not true, and a clear violation of the 10th Amendment.

He has accepted help from a Foreign Power who has antagonized the United States for several years prior to his election and has trampled on the sovereignty of Ukraine and now the United States.

He has admired the leadership of another autocratic Foreign Power, this one expressing Communist ideals, and has also admired their brutal crackdown on the Tiananmen Square Protests. He also owes its bank, the Bank of China, tens of millions of dollars in debt.

He has expressed a fondness for fascist ideals, calling marchers who bore their symbols “very fine people” despite acts of violence committed at their rallies.

He has used memorials to the war dead of the United States and to our Founding Fathers as political advertisements, railing against his enemies and what he wrongly perceives to be the enemies of the United States.

He has discarded all notions of civility, and has repeatedly engaged in ugly attacks on his opponents, often not even attacking what they said about him, but cruelly mocking things that they cannot control, such as their race, sex, religion, disability, etc

It is not merely right to resist. It is in fact the duty of all Americans to protest these injustices. Your country needs you to say NO to your President and YES to your Constitution and your Civil Rights.

March on the streets. Write letters. Boycott businesses who support Donald Trump and his cronies.

Most important of all, no matter how much he may try to disenfranchise you or make it difficult for you, VOTE ON NOVEMBER 3, 2020 TO END THIS 4-YEAR NIGHTMARE.

[bountyofbeads]

Latinos, Sanders's secret weapon in Nevada, could make him unstoppable on Super Tuesday

https://news.yahoo.com/latinos-sanderss-secret-weapon-in-nevada-could-make-him-unstoppable-on-super-tuesday-015922411.html

BERNIE SANDERS SECRET WEAPON, LATINOS, COULD MAKE HIM UNSTOPPABLE GOING INTO SUPER TUESDAY

By Hunter Walker and Andrew Romano | Published February 22, 2020 | Yahoo News | Posted February 23, 2020 |

LAS VEGAS — Bernie Sanders’s Nevada caucus campaign ended with a convincing win Saturday afternoon, thanks in large measure to a 37-percentage-point victory among Latino caucus-goers. But the seeds of that victory were sown five years ago when a staffer on Sanders’s first presidential bid had trouble reading a Spanish website.

It was Memorial Day weekend 2015, about a month after the Vermont senator launched his long-shot challenge to Hillary Clinton. Sanders was short on resources; his staff was a skeleton crew, with no one who could translate Spanish. So the campaign summoned Chuck Rocha, the founder and president of Solidarity Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in reaching Latinos and blacks that was launched by Rocha in 2010. He charged Sanders triple his usual rate to work on the holiday.

“I remember sending him an invoice for $824, which was a big invoice for me,” Rocha told Yahoo News in an extensive interview five days before the Nevada caucus. “Little did I know that that $800 invoice would turn into millions and millions of dollars of work for Bernie Sanders.”

In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted two Sanders events, claiming the candidate wasn’t paying enough attention to racial issues. Jeff Weaver, the 2016 campaign manager, hired Solidarity Strategies to ensure that the senator’s work was, as Rocha put it, “reflective of the larger diverse communities.” Soon Rocha was consulting on minority hiring, outreach and advertising for Sanders. By the end of the race he was in charge of all of the campaign’s print communications.

Now Rocha, a 51-year-old self-described “Mexican redneck” who campaigns wearing a cowboy hat and driving a rented pickup truck, has become a leader of Sanders’s 2020 operation. While he remains in charge of his firm, Rocha officially joined the campaign last year as a senior adviser with a broad purview that includes general strategy, hiring staff and overseeing print ads and merchandise. Rocha also crafts the campaign’s Spanish-language ads on television, radio and the internet. If anyone is responsible for the huge Latino outreach effort that has helped propel Sanders to the front of the Democratic pack, it’s Rocha.

The innovative program is a dramatic contrast to 2016, when Clinton had highly specialized minority outreach operations and Sanders struggled to woo voters of color.

“This time around the Sanders campaign really has invested, and you see them everywhere,” says an operative who worked on Latino outreach for the Clinton campaign in 2016 and then worked with a 2020 candidate who left the race. “They are the ones who have consistently shown up at community events, in radio ads and newspapers. It’s very different from what they did in 2016. You have to understand the community first and then build your program around it — and I think they've done that."

That strategy could help make Sanders the nominee. The last time the senator competed in the Nevada caucuses, in 2016, he lost to Clinton by 8 percentage points. The defeat blunted Sanders’s momentum after his near-victory in Iowa and his New Hampshire landslide, and it put Clinton on a trajectory to win the nomination.

Yet there was an upside for Sanders that day: The Nevada entrance poll showed him beating the former secretary of state by 8 points among Latinos. The exact percentages were later disputed — the sample size was tiny, and precinct-level data suggested that Clinton did better than the poll indicated — but the larger implication was clear. In a race against America’s best-known Democrat, Sanders could hold his own in the Latino community.

The revelation took the senator’s own team by surprise.

“We didn't learn ’til the campaign was almost over how popular we were with Latinos,” Rocha said. “We had an idea, you know; 19-to-22-year-old Latinos thought Bernie was cool in ’16. But we didn’t realize that we could win their votes the way that we did, and we didn’t have enough time to take advantage of actually building the infrastructure to capture those votes.”

The lessons of 2016 gave Rocha an advantage heading into 2020 — and it was an edge that paid off Saturday, when entrance polls showed Sanders topping his nearest rival, Joe Biden, 53 percent to 16 percent among Nevada’s Latino caucus-goers. The same statistical caveats from 2016 still apply today. But this wasn’t an isolated incident. In Iowa, the entrance poll showed Sanders winning 43 percent of nonwhite voters; the next closest candidate was Pete Buttigieg with 15 percent. In New Hampshire, Sanders was nearly as dominant, winning nonwhite voters by 18 points and Latino voters by 22, according to the exit poll. Across the board, national surveys also show Sanders with anywhere from 30 percent to nearly 50 percent of the Latino vote.

To date, the Democratic Party has awarded only 2.5 percent of its 3,989 pledged delegates, so Sanders’s growing strength with Latinos hasn’t made much of a dent in the delegate math. But that’s about to change on Super Tuesday (March 3), when nearly 40 percent of the remaining pledged delegates will be doled out.

The good news for Sanders is that Super Tuesday’s two biggest prizes are California (415 pledged delegates) and Texas (228 pledged delegates) — states that also boast the largest Latino primary electorates in America (31 percent and 32 percent, respectively).

The calendar, in other words, is about to heavily favor the candidate who’s leading among Latinos. Mathematically, it could even make that candidate unstoppable.

The Sanders campaign has been preparing for this moment since last summer. On Saturday, the candidate skipped the usual in-state victory party in Nevada and traveled instead to Texas for a series of rallies. Two polls released this month show the senator leading in the Lone Star State for the first time. The day before the caucus, Sanders opted to leave Nevada to campaign in California, where the latest surveys show him ahead of the competition by more than 10 points overall and by more than 20 points among Latinos. Along with Texas and California, Rocha noted that Florida and Arizona primaries are both coming up, are heavily Latino, and are “loaded with delegates.”

“The math is right,” he said.

If Sanders wins both California and Texas, he will likely amass an insurmountable lead in the delegate count — and Rocha’s innovative Latino outreach effort will be a big reason why. Rocha believes campaigns have long botched their Latino outreach efforts by relying on largely white teams, insufficient investment and messages that aren’t “culturally competent.” He has sought to mount a push for Sanders that is historically diverse, large and involves a tailored advertising blitz.

“People say Latinos don’t vote. It’s because motherf***ers don’t ask them to vote,” said Rocha.

With his East Texas drawl and colorful sayings, Rocha is a natural raconteur who veers between swagger and self-deprecation. He’s clearly fond of telling his personal story. It begins in the town of Tyler, where he was born to two teenagers: a Mexican immigrant father and a white mother. After Rocha’s dad left five years later, he grew up eating “government cheese” in a mobile home on the grounds of his mother’s parents’ farm.

When Rocha was 18 years old, he had a child of his own. The experience led him to reconnect with his own father, who got him a job at the local tire factory. The gig ended up being Rocha’s entrée into union organizing — and ultimately, politics.

“Nobody in my family was involved in politics at any level,” Rocha said. “Nobody in my family had ever really graduated from high school, much less college. I was not a rabid activist in any way. I just wanted to get off my regular job to do union work, if I could, so I could drink more beer.”

Rocha became an officer with the local chapter of the rubber workers union, which merged with the United Steelworkers of America in 1995. Through the union hall, Rocha also began working on Democratic campaigns. In 1998 the national union summoned Rocha to Pittsburgh to serve as political director at the age of 30.

A decade later, Rocha left the union to start his firm. His career survived a potentially fatal setback in 2013 when he pleaded guilty to one felony count of embezzling from the union during his tenure as political director. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $2,000 after paying about $12,000 in restitution. Rocha describes the case as a partisan prosecution but also admits he “totally messed up” his expense reports, and he’s well aware the issue could have made him a liability for a presidential candidate.

“I am a convicted felon,” Rocha said. “And when you work in politics, that's not cool.”

Rocha claimed he tried to work for Clinton’s 2016 campaign before Sanders entered the field but wasn’t hired because his conviction came up during vetting. He nearly choked up while recounting the early meeting where he told Sanders and Weaver about his background. According to Rocha, they were both adamant that he shouldn’t spend his life paying for a past mistake.

“I’m not politically afraid of this story at all,” Weaver said in 2016 after Politico highlighted Rocha’s conviction, adding that he wanted the world to see that Sanders believed in giving a former felon a chance. “Please, I’m asking you to print.”

Staff diversity has, in turn, become the cornerstone of Rocha’s Latino outreach efforts for Sanders. He said the campaign has “Latinos in senior management in every department of the headquarters and in every state” — including 76 Latino staffers in Nevada alone, where Sanders also opened 11 offices and spent more than $3 million on Spanish-language advertising. Despite the encouraging signs from 2016, not everyone on Sanders’s campaign thought that a substantial investment in the Latino electorate — which typically turns out at a rate of less than 50 percent — would pay off. But Sanders himself was a believer, according to Rocha.

“It's something he talks to me about every time he sees me,” Rocha said of Sanders. “‘How is it going? What are we doing?’ He wants to know because he’s such an organizer. … He wants new people to vote, and he knows that there’s a treasure trove in the Latino community.”

Rocha’s ads for Sanders aren’t straightforward translations of his English messages; they are written specifically for Latinos and focus on the aspects of Sanders’s platform that most resonate with that audience, including raising the minimum wage, eliminating student debt, reinstating the DACA program, breaking up ICE and the Border Patrol and placing a moratorium on deportations to allow for an audit of past immigration policies.

The pitch is also heavy on Sanders’s own immigration story, which has been much more central to his 2020 campaign than it was in 2016; in fact, the first Spanish-language ad that Rocha ran in each medium focused on Sanders’s father coming to the United States from Europe “broke” and unable to speak English.

“Guess what? That's my grandfather’s story,” Rocha said. “That’s Latinos … somebody in our family. It’s their story.”

But while the overarching messages may be similar, the Sanders camp also adjusts its ads for different audiences within the Latino community. Ads targeted at Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans have slightly different scripts; print and radio ads designed to reach older Latinos have a different emphasis than digital commercials. And some ads aimed at Latinos aren’t in Spanish at all. In Iowa, where the population skews toward more recent immigrants, the campaign largely spoke Spanish; on Spotify, where they’re aiming for young Latinos, many ads are entirely in English.

Because Rocha’s own Spanish is “horrible,” he mainly relies on a 30-year-old undocumented immigrant named Luis Alcauter to design and write them. (Sanders speaks the language haltingly; Rocha told The Hill that he discourages his Anglo clients from using Spanish on the trail “because it normally does not go well.”) Rocha describes Alcauter as his “right-hand man.” He may also be the brash Rocha’s polar opposite: a soft-spoken Mormon who came to California’s Central Valley from Mexico as a teenager.

“It’s an incredible opportunity and a lot of responsibility to make sure that I represent my community and I talk to them and they’re able to understand,” Alcauter told Yahoo News.

Alcauter and the other Latinos on Sanders’s team aren’t just helping with campaigning. They’ve also influenced policy and helped craft Sanders’s immigration platform.

“We care about the issue, and it affects our lives,” said Alcauter. “So we wanted to make sure that we gather together, we put our minds together and we work on something that we're going to be proud of.”

It’s a clear example of one of Rocha’s core beliefs — that minority outreach work should be fully integrated into larger operations.

“We do all of this without a Latino department,” Rocha explained. “I was sick and tired of Latinos being window dressings for campaigns ... of seeing Latino outreach programs that were siloed off, underfunded, understaffed and never listened to.”

According to Belén Sisa, another undocumented staffer, this integration is emblematic of Sanders’s approach to politics.

“It shows what a Bernie Sanders presidency will be,” Sisa told Yahoo News. “It will be the people who were in the frontlines fighting for these things for years who are going to be putting together the solutions.”

Besides advertising, the Sanders campaign is reaching out to Latino voters personally. Bilingual staffers and volunteers are deployed to voters’ homes and have mailed out handwritten notes. Rocha has used databases to identify phone numbers that likely belong to Latinos to receive bilingual texts.

Over the past eight months, Sanders’s Nevada campaign hosted a slew of community events while also dispatching its massive volunteer army to knock on doors around the state. The day before the caucuses, the Sanders campaign announced that it had visited 500,000 homes in the state.

Jose Mariscal-Cruz, a 23-year-old Mexican-American from Reno, told Yahoo News that he made at least 2,000 of those visits. He took a year off from college to work as a field organizer for the Sanders campaign in Las Vegas. On Monday, Yahoo News followed Mariscal-Cruz as he campaigned among the colorfully painted bungalows in the heavily Latino neighborhood of East Las Vegas. He was accompanied by José La Luz, a prominent Puerto Rican labor activist from New York who served as a surrogate for Sanders in Nevada ahead of the caucus. The pair visited about 40 homes to deliver their fluent, finely tuned message to potential voters.

At two of the homes, Spanish-speaking elderly residents indicated that they were from Guanajuato in Mexico. Mariscal-Cruz rattled off his own family ties to the region, and La Luz piped in with a few lines from a ballad about the area by the famed Mexican singer Pedro Infante. The song brought a smile from a woman named Maria who said she and her husband had already voted for Sanders.

“We have a lot of faith,” Maria said.

“With faith, we can move mountains, God willing,” La Luz replied. “We know that the vote of our people is the vote that will be the difference.”

The Sanders campaign has already set up similar ground operations in California and beyond. During a debate watch party Wednesday at Sanders’s East Los Angeles field office, L.A. County Area Director Daniel Andalon and L.A. County Area Field Director Lewis Myers stepped outside to discuss how the operation in America’s most Latino metropolis has expanded over the last eight months.

“I get goosebumps just thinking about it,” said Andalon, a longtime operative who managed Hilda Solis’s winning 2014 campaign for county supervisor. “In the summer it was just us. We were meeting at McDonald’s and Denny’s and working out of our homes, much to our wives’ chagrin.”

According to Andalon, “Sanders has not spared any expense here.” That means opening four offices in L.A. County alone — including East Los Angeles, where the population is more than 96 percent Latino.

“We’ve knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors and made millions of phone calls out of this office,” Myers explained. “Last weekend we knocked on 62,000 doors. The weekend before that was 58,000 doors.”

As a result, Andalon said, “we’ve been able to broaden Bernie’s base to include “a lot more brown faces.”

Both Andalon and Myers said they haven’t seen their rivals competing for Latino votes in the area, with less than two weeks until the vote.

“There is no one who is running a program this robust,” Andalon said.

For Sanders, the hope is that California as a whole is a similar story to Nevada. The campaign is the largest in the field, with 105 staffers and 22 offices statewide — “most of them,” according to California State Director Rafael Návar, “in heavily Latino communities,” with “more in the [blue-collar] Central Valley than any other region.” Sanders’s own travel to the state has followed a similar pattern. According to a tally compiled by the Sacramento Bee, Sanders has held far more public events (37) in the state than any other candidate.

“Bernie came to Coachella for an office opening — a place no presidential candidate has come to since JFK,” Návar told Yahoo News. “That’s just not a place you have a presence usually. We’re in every congressional district and we’re playing for every delegate in the state. We’re not just focused on the urban hubs.”

In 2016, Sanders hoped to make a last stand against Clinton in California’s June primary, but he lost by more than a dozen points in part because she trounced him in the state’s top Latino areas. Sanders’s team also wasn’t sophisticated enough to focus its efforts on the less-populated, less-contested inland areas where they could claim a disproportionate number of delegates, some of which are awarded by congressional district. Ultimately, Sanders carried just eight of California’s 53 districts, allowing Clinton to widen her delegate lead and clinch the nomination. But Návar insisted that “having that experience means we have a lot stronger strategy than in the past.

“In 2016, we weren’t here until a month before the election. This time we’ve been very strategic about where we’ve homed in and are building up our base,” he said.

And Sanders’s campaign isn’t just courting Latinos in states like California and Nevada. Latinos make up just about 6 percent of the population in Iowa, which was the first state to vote in caucuses on Feb. 3. Still, Rocha mounted a Latino outreach effort there. According to a report from the UCLA Latino Politics and Policy Initiative, Sanders won a majority of the vote at Iowa’s high-density Latino caucus locations. That edge helped Sanders win more votes than anyone else in the crucial first state.

Rocha said the results in Iowa helped soothe skeptics of the campaign and gave him “some job security” by demonstrating that the campaign had not “spent all this money for nothing.” Rocha and his team plan to continue targeting smaller Latino populations in other key states, such as Wisconsin.

For Rocha and the other Latinos on his team — particularly the undocumented immigrants — the effort is deeply meaningful. Over lunch at a Mexican café in East Las Vegas, Sisa said the experience was beyond her “wildest dreams” — an opportunity to make the case that “immigrants deserve better, regardless of being documented or not.”

“I think no one [else] has been bold enough to say, ‘You may be undocumented, but you deserve health care,’” Sisa said. “‘You may be undocumented, but you deserve tuition-free college’ — because we all deserve those things.”

With his decisions to limit legal migration, end the DACA program and separate undocumented immigrants from their children, President Trump loomed large over the conversation.

So, it turns out, did his plane. In keeping with his strategy to shadow the Democratic primary by holding rallies in each early voting state, Trump visited Las Vegas during caucus week. As Alcauter left the café, he pointed to the sky.

“Look,” he said. “It’s Air Force One.”

As an undocumented immigrant, Alcauter said he believes Trump “from day one has been fighting against me.” But if the campaign is successful, Alcauter could go from feeling targeted by the president to being on his staff and taking flight with Sanders on Air Force One.

“I definitely dream about it,” Alcauter said. “That’s the reason we’re doing the work we’re doing.”

_____

[blackfreethinkers]

A racial realist IS a white supremacist!!!

By Greg Miller

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”

When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”

In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.

Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.

His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.

With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.

After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”

The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.

Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.

“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

“Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” said Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sow division.”

No senior U.S. official interviewed could recall Trump uttering a racial or ethnic slur while in office. Nor did any consider him an adherent of white supremacy or white nationalism, extreme ideologies that generally sanction violence to protect White interests or establish a racially pure ethno-state.

White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.

But even those points fade under scrutiny. Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support.

And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years.

This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials, including some who have had daily interactions with the president, as well as experts on race and members of white supremacist groups. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a desire to provide candid accounts of events and conversations they witnessed without fear of retribution.

Coded racial terms

Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.

The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males.

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

Omarosa Manigault Newman, one of the few Black women to have worked at the White House, said in her 2018 memoir that she was enlisted by White House aides to track down a rumored recording from “The Apprentice” — the reality show on which she was a contestant — in which Trump allegedly used the n-word. A former official said that others involved in the effort included Trump adviser Hope Hicks and former White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

The tape, if it exists, was never recovered. But Manigault Newman, who was forced out after clashing with other White House staff, portrayed the effort to secure the tape as evidence that aides saw Trump capable of such conduct. In the book, she described Trump as “a racist, misogynist and bigot.”

Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has said that casual racism was prevalent in the Trump family. In interviews to promote her recently published book, she has said that she witnessed her uncle using both anti-Semitic slurs as well as the n-word, though she offered few details and no evidence.

Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, has made similar allegations and calls Trump “a racist, a predator, a con man” in a newly published book. Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.

In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.

Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.

These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.

In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.

“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. ���This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”

As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”

Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.

Biden has seized on the issue from the outset. In a video declaring his candidacy, he used images from the clashes in Charlottesville, and said he felt compelled to run because of Trump’s response. He has called Trump the nation’s first racist president and pledged to use his presidency to heal divisions that are a legacy of the country’s “original sin” of slavery.

Exploiting societal divisions

Trump has confronted allegations of racism in nearly every decade of his adult life. In the 1970s, the Trump family real estate empire was forced to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination against Black apartment applicants. In the 1980s, he took out full-page ads calling for the death penalty against Black teens wrongly accused of a rape in Central Park. In the 2000s, Trump parlayed his baseless “birther” claim about Obama into a fervent far-right following.

As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.

None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.

Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”

Studies of the 2016 election have shown that racial resentment was a far bigger factor in propelling Trump to victory than economic grievance. Political scientists at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts, for example, examined the election results and found that voters who scored highly on indexes of racism voted overwhelmingly for Trump, a dynamic particularly strong among non-college-educated Whites.

Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.

Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.

“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”

Nearly all said that Trump places far greater value on others’ wealth, fame or loyalty to him than he does on race or ethnicity. In so doing, many raised a version of the “some of my best friends are Black” defense on behalf of the president.

When faced with allegations of racism in the 2016 campaign, Trump touted his friendship with boxing promoter Don King to argue otherwise. Administration officials similarly pointed to the president’s connection to Black people who have praised him, worked for him or benefited from his help.

They cited Trump’s admiration for Tiger Woods and other Black athletes, the political support he has received from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and other Black lawmakers, the president’s fondness for Ja’Ron Smith, who as assistant to the president for domestic policy is the highest-ranking Black staffer at the White House, and his pardon of Black criminal-justice-reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson, expunging her 1996 conviction for cocaine trafficking.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Scott used his personal story of bootstrap success to emphasize the ways that Republican policies on taxes, school choice and other issues create opportunities for minorities.

Trump “has fought alongside me” on such issues, Scott said, urging voters “not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done.”

For all the prominence that Scott and other Black Trump supporters were given at the convention, there has been no corresponding representation within the Trump administration.

The official photo stream of Trump’s presidency is a slide show of a commander in chief surrounded by White faces, whether meeting with Cabinet members or posing with the latest intern crop.

From the outset, his leadership team has been overwhelmingly White. A Washington Post tally identified 59 people who have held Cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs including chief of staff, press secretary and national security adviser since Trump took office.

Only seven have been people of color, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who are of Lebanese heritage. Only one — Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — is Black.

Under Trump, the nation’s federal courts have also become increasingly White. Of the 248 judges confirmed or nominated since Trump took office, only eight were Black and eight were Hispanic, according to records compiled by NPR News.

Retreating from civil rights

Trump can point to policy initiatives that have benefited Black or other minority groups, including criminal justice reforms that reduced prison sentences for thousands of Black men convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes.

About 4,700 inmates have been released or had their sentences reduced under the First Step Act, an attempt to reverse the lopsided legacy of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which disproportionately targeted African Americans. But this policy was championed primarily by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and former officials said that Trump only agreed to support the measure when told it might boost his low poll numbers with Black voters.

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s---house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Manigault Newman was similarly excoriated when her efforts to boost funding for historically Black colleges failed to deliver better polling numbers for the president, officials said. “You’ve been at this for four months, Omarosa,” Trump said, according to one adviser, “but the numbers haven’t budged.” Manigault Newman did not respond to a request for comment.

White House officials cited other initiatives aimed at helping people of color, including loan programs targeting minority businesses and the creation of “opportunity zones” in economically distressed communities.

Trump has pointed most emphatically to historically low Black unemployment rates during his first term, arguing that data show they have fared better under his administration than under Obama or any other president.

But unemployment statistics are largely driven by broader economic trends, and the early gains of Black workers have been wiped out by the pandemic. Blacks have lost jobs at higher rates than other groups since the economy began to shut down. The jobless rate for Blacks in August was 13 percent, compared with 7.3 percent for Whites — the highest racial disparity in nearly six years.

Neither prison reform nor minority jobs programs were priorities of Trump’s first term. His administration has devoted far more energy and political capital to erecting barriers to non-White immigrants, dismantling the health-care policies of Obama and pulling federal agencies back from civil rights battlegrounds.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has cut funding in its Civil Rights Division, scaled back prosecutions of hate crimes, all but abandoned efforts to combat systemic discrimination by police departments and backed state measures that deprived minorities of the right to vote.

Weeks after Trump took office, the department announced it was abandoning its six-year involvement in a legal battle with Texas over a 2011 voter ID law that a federal court had ruled unfairly targeted minorities.

Later, the department went from opposing, under Obama, an Ohio law that allowed the state to purge tens of thousands of voters from its rolls to defending the measure before the Supreme Court.

The law was upheld by the court’s conservative majority. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that voter rolls in African American neighborhoods shrank by 10 percent, compared with 4 percent in majority-White suburbs.

The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

After the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, Congress gave the department new power to investigate law enforcement agencies suspected of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of systemic — including racist — misconduct. The probes frequently led to settlements that required sweeping reforms.

The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

The collapse has coincided with a surge in police killings captured on video, the largest civil rights protests in decades and polling data that suggests a profound turn in public opinion in support of the Black Lives Matter cause — though that support has waned in recent weeks as protests became violent in some cities.

A Justice Department spokesman pointed to nearly a dozen cases over the past three years in which the department has prosecuted hate crimes or launched racial discrimination lawsuits. In perhaps the most notable case, James Fields Jr., who was convicted of murder for driving his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.

“The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice is vigorously fighting race discrimination throughout the United States. Any assertion to the contrary is completely false,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “Since 2017, we have prosecuted criminal and civil race discrimination cases in all parts of the United States, and we will continue to do so.”

But the department has not launched a pattern or practice probe into any of the police departments involved in the killings that ignited this summer’s protests, including the May 25 death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who asphyxiated after a White policeman kept him pinned to the ground for nearly eight minutes with a knee to his neck.

The department has opened a more narrow investigation of the officers directly involved in Floyd’s death. Attorney General William P. Barr called Floyd’s killing “shocking,” but in congressional testimony argued there was no reason to commit to a broader probe of Minneapolis or any other police force.

“I don’t believe there is systemic racism in police departments,” Barr said.

Deport, deny and discourage

Days after the 2016 election, David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted that Trump’s win was “great for our people.” Richard Spencer, another prominent white nationalist figure, was captured on video leading a “Hail Trump” salute at an alt-right conference in Washington.

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

Michael Anton, who published a 2016 essay comparing the country’s course under Obama to that of an aircraft controlled by Islamist terrorists and called for an end to “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” became deputy national security adviser for strategic communication.

Ian Smith served as an immigration policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security until email records showed connections with Spencer and other white supremacists. Darren Beattie worked as a White House speechwriter before leaving abruptly when CNN reported his involvement in a conference frequented by white nationalists.

Stephen K. Bannon, who for years used Breitbart News to advance an alt-right, anti-immigrant agenda, was named White House chief strategist, only to be banished eight months later after clashing with other administration officials.

Stephen Miller, by contrast, has survived a series of White House purges and used his position as senior adviser to the president to push hard-line policies that aim to deport, deny and discourage non-European immigrants.

While working for the Trump campaign in 2016, Miller sent a steady stream of story ideas to Breitbart drawn from white nationalist websites, according to email records obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one exchange, Miller urged a Breitbart reporter to read “Camp of the Saints,” a French novel that depicts the destruction of Western civilization by rampant immigration. The book has become a touchpoint for white supremacist groups.

Miller was the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the so-called Muslim Ban issued in the early days of Trump’s presidency and the separation of migrant children from their parents along the border with Mexico. He has also worked behind the scenes to turn public opinion against immigrants and outmaneuver bureaucratic adversaries, officials said.

To blunt allegations of racism and xenophobia in the administration’s policies, Miller has sought to portray them as advantageous to people of color. In several instances, Miller directed subordinates to “look for Latinos or Blacks who have been victims of a crime by an immigrant,” then pressured officials at the Department of Homeland Security to tout these cases to the press, one official said. Families of some victims appeared as prominent guests of the president at the State of the Union address.

In 2018, as Miller sought to slash the number of refugees admitted to the United States, Pentagon officials argued that the existing policy was crucial to their ability to relocate interpreters and other foreign nationals who risked their lives to work with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What do you want? Iraqi communities across the United States?” Miller erupted during one meeting of National Security Council deputies, according to witnesses. The refugee limit has plunged since Trump took office, from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 this year.

In response to a request for comment from Miller, Matthews, the White House spokeswoman, said that “this attempt to vilify Stephen Miller with egregious and unfounded allegations from anonymous sources is shameful and completely unethical.”

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Miller is regarded warily by white supremacist organizations even as they applaud some of his actions.

“Our side doesn’t consider him one of us — for obvious reasons,” said Don Black, the founder of the Stormfront website, in an interview. “He’s kind of an odd choice to be the white nationalist in the White House.”

Trump’s presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.

Recent assessments by the Department of Homeland Security describe white supremacists as the country’s gravest domestic threat, exceeding that of the Islamic State and other terror groups, according to documents obtained by the Lawfare national security website and reported by Politico.

The FBI has expanded resources to tracking hate groups and crimes. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Thursday that “racially motivated violent extremism” accounts for the bulk of the bureau’s domestic terrorism cases, and that most of those are driven by white supremacist ideology.

Major rallies staged by white nationalist organizations, which were already on the upswing just before the 2016 election, increased in size and frequency after Trump took office, according to Brian Levin, an expert on hate groups at California State University at San Bernardino.

The largest, and most ominous, was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.

The event erupted in violence the next day, Saturday, when Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, tossing bodies into the air. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Virginia native and peace activist, was killed.

Trump’s vacillating response in the ensuing days came to mark one of the defining sequences of his presidency.

Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”

In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.

Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.

John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”

Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”

Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.

The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.

“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”

For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. Kelly remained in his job through 2018. Cohn stayed until March 2018 after being asked to lead the administration’s tax-reform initiative and reassured that he could share his own views about Charlottesville in public without retaliation from the president.

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

The most senior former administration official to comment publicly on Trump’s conduct on issues of race is former defense secretary Jim Mattis. After Trump responded to Black Lives Matter protests in Washington this summer with paramilitary force, Mattis responded with a blistering statement.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis said. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”

In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.

“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.

“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.

Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.

“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.

“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.

But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.

“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”

[rvexillology]

[Follow-Up] [TSSW] The flag of the state of Korea since 10th May 1961

from /r/vexillology Top comment: **Victory!** The 1945 Uk General Election resulted in the re-election of Winston Churchill’s caretaker government. Although War in Europe ended two months before the election, British troops were needed in order to support the American mainland invasion of Japan, the war effort was now focused on the pacific theatre. Despite the victory, Labour leader [Clement Attlee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee), was able to secure votes from the poorer north such as Jarrow, This resulted in an hung parliament and as a direct result, Churchill invited Attlee into the cabinet. In a public announcement, they announced that an national government was assembled, Although early resistance to the government was rapid, Tory and labour MPs were finally able to strike a middle ground, Its thanks to this wartime government, that the UK was able to rebuild and modernise the country after the destruction of the blitz, many public works project were created in this time, the introduction of nationalisation across British railways and coal industrials successful, however as the war in the pacific drew to a close, Many tory and labour leaders believed the national government was a force of good, as a result for the 1950 election, many MPs changed their party to the newly formed “Britain first” party. However not all MPs supported the new centrist party with the anti-centrist MPs being split up into the National Conservative Party (NATCON) and the Labour Party for the working class (LPWC). In 1950, [Clement Attlee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee) was elected Prime Minister. Historians uncovered secret letters between Winston Churchill and [Clement Attlee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee), they were dated shortly after taken power, however strangely the letters turn from formal to an informal around mid-1947, the rate of letters also increased. This suggests some kind of friendship, however no other written documents suggest this **A letter Home** Dear Hana, March 18th, 1947 This is my 3rd time trying to write to you, I’m just hoping your able to read this but I’m assuming you’re not allowed to reply back. I hoping you aren’t treated as a prisoner of war in those internment camps out west. It’s crazy to think about it, during the war you get sent out west because of a Japanese grandfather and a Japanese last name but now, that Japan is going to be a state, I can only imagine, how this could change the country’s race laws. It appears that Jim crows’ days are numbered, however the populace are mixed on the matter. While some praise it as the end of the empire’s regime, other nationalist folk started committing Seppuku in the streets saying that Japan has lost its honour by surrendering to the “American devil” (their words not mine.”) At least this nationalist mass suicide is causing the majority to stay away from the various groups and accept the occupation. Of course, not straight away and with the occasional assinastion, bombing and protest, I hear the Tokyo trails are nearly over. Some of the royal family have been shot or imprisoned for their crimes. “serves those bastards rights,” I was told that I may be sent home early, Remember that piece of farmland in Oregon? Well I was thinking about us and how it has everything for us when we return home. How it be a fine place to grow old and watch the sun rise with you in my arms. Thinking of you is the one thing helping me feel at home in this country. I’m sending a request to John Dewitt, pleading for your release, it may not go anywhere. However, it’s harder to say no to a surviving solder, especially if you were part of the Olympic Landings. With love, your future husband. John ***The Jack Eigen Show: The Japanese Question with Congressman John F Kennedy and Senator*** **James Eastland** Jack Eigen: The Truman administration announced its plans to grant statehood to the territory of Japan, however with such an announcement inter-party squabble was inevitable, joining me today is Congressman John F Kennedy and senator James Eastland; Gentlemen the motion is “Is Japanese Statehood beneficial for the country.” Congressman, the first point is the cultural effect of Japanese statehood. JFK: Thanks Jack, the great thing about this country is its ability to integrate diverse cultures within her borders, I predict a great mix of Jap-Americana, a mixture of people and their identity, we shouldn’t fear to integrate, and we shouldn’t fear integration. Eastland: While you hold such a “optimistic” view on culture, May I remind you congressman of the fact that these cultures all were of European decent. JFK: Is that the southern way of saying they were white, senator? Eastland: No, European cultures have so much in common with each other that integration between Each other goes smoothly, JFK: What about the many Chinese and heck even the Japanese immigrants who happily integrated into this country only for now it all’s claiming they were spies and sending out to camps out west? Eastland: Our country was at war and we were justified! Jack Eigen: Gentlemen! We are getting off topic. \[looks through papers\] Jack Eigen: Alright Senator, tell me how you believe the state should be governed? Eastland: Depends of your definition on governing, Government mandated chaos or a successful state government? Jack Eigen: What ever do you mean? Eastland: It is completely unreasonable for a state to have over 80 million people, I myself supported the plan proposed by [Sergeant Sam “Miles” T](https://www.reddit.com/user/SuperSMT/)homas to divide japan into 6 states. JFK: May I remind you senator of the backlash for said plan? It would have failed worse than the term limit amendment the republicans tried to push through. Besides the “Cpt Bill” plan has the potential to make a state in this scale possible! Jack Eigen: Congressman, the plan doesn’t get that much media attention, may you remind the people at home. JFK: Certainly Jack, The proposal states that while japan would have a strong state government, the various districts islands and regions, would govern fast amount of land and people to their needs, inter-region cooperation is highly encouraged, as my brother puts it “ A united states within the united states.” Jack Eigen: Alright gentlemen, how will politics change following statehood? Eastland: Slavery to the new state of course. The new state would have At least 106 seats in congress. How could this country allow an alien force to become a big player in how country is governed? JFK: while you hold “traditional views” on such a matter, I would argue this is just democracy at work because at least 80 million people need their voices and concerns heard in their new home. \[Producer comes enters stage left and talks to Jack Eigen in private\] JFK: I also remember you being quoted as saying in the times-picayune that “japan was the white man’s victory.” Eastland: that quote is nothing more than a vast exaggeration JFK: then what did you…. Jack Eigen: I’m sorry, gentlemen but we have to end this debate early as we have breaking news. Eastland: what could be so ground-breaking? Jack Eigen: Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union is dead, JFK: that would count. Jack Eigen: The ministry of foreign affairs has stated that the premier died peacefully in his sleep however internal sources claim a lengthy investigation is under way. A new premier is yet elected. [https://imgur.com/a/HQlSjuz](https://imgur.com/a/HQlSjuz) [https://imgur.com/a/YuvZ09B](https://imgur.com/a/YuvZ09B)

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Biden Effort to Combat Hunger Marks ‘a Profound Change’ (NYT) With more than one in 10 households reporting that they lack enough to eat, the Biden administration is accelerating a vast campaign of hunger relief that will temporarily increase assistance by tens of billions of dollars and set the stage for what officials envision as lasting expansions of aid. The effort to rush more food assistance to more people is notable both for the scale of its ambition and the variety of its legislative and administrative actions. The campaign has increased food stamps by more than $1 billion a month, provided needy children a dollar a day for snacks, expanded a produce allowance for pregnant women and children, and authorized the largest children’s summer feeding program in history. “We haven’t seen an expansion of food assistance of this magnitude since the founding of the modern food stamp program in 1977,” said James P. Ziliak, an economist at the University of Kentucky who studies nutrition programs. “It’s a profound change.”

Police, communities across U.S. fight back against anti-Asian hate crimes (Reuters) More than a dozen San Jose, California, police officers walked through the white arches of the Grand Century Mall in “Little Saigon” to reassure a Vietnamese-American community fearful over the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States. Across the United States, law enforcement agencies are scrambling to better protect Asian communities amid a wave of violence targeting them since lockdowns to cope with the coronavirus pandemic began about a year ago. A recent report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, showed that while hate crimes overall in the United States had fallen slightly in 2020, crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) had jumped by 145%. A vicious assault last week in which a man kicked a 65-year-old immigrant from the Philippines in New York City multiple times was captured on video and went viral, further stoking fears about anti-Asian hate crimes. New York City has deployed a team of undercover Asian police officers. Other major cities, from San Jose to Chicago, have boosted patrols in Asian neighborhoods and sought to forge closer ties with communities, some of which have sought to fill gaps the police can’t fill.

Florida works to avoid ‘catastrophic’ pond collapse (AP) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sunday that crews are working to prevent the collapse of a large wastewater pond in the Tampa Bay area while evacuating the area to avoid a “catastrophic flood.” Manatee County officials say the latest models show that a breach at the old phosphate plant reservoir has the potential to gush out 340 million gallons of water in a matter of minutes, risking a 20-foot-high (about 6.1-meter-high) wall of water. Authorities have closed off portions of the U.S. Highway 41 and ordered evacuations of 316 homes. Some families were placed in local hotels. Crews have been discharging water since the pond began leaking in March. On Friday, a significant leak that was detected escalated the response and prompted the first evacuations and a declaration of a state of emergency on Saturday. A portion of the containment wall in the reservoir shifted, leading officials to think a collapse could occur at any time.

Demonstrators protest a policing bill in England and Wales (Vox) Thousands of demonstrators marched across Britain on Saturday in protest of a massive new policing bill that would create new restrictions on protest in England and Wales and impose hefty fines for not following police instructions. The bill, officially known as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, was introduced in early March and has been met with widespread pushback in England and Wales since then. It also includes sentencing and court reforms, among other changes, but protesters are specifically incensed by proposed new police powers concerning protests. According to the BBC’s Dominic Casciani, the bill would criminalize violating restrictions that protesters “‘ought’ to have known about, even if they have not received a direct order from an officer,” and “intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance.” This weekend’s “kill the bill” marches aren’t the first. According to the Guardian, Bristol, in southwest England, has been the site of at least five protests over the last two weeks, including one that turned violent and saw at least two police vehicles set on fire earlier in March.

Marine Le Pen’s growing support (Financial Times) It would be a political earthquake as disruptive as the UK referendum vote for Brexit in 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as US president later that year. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s extreme right Rassemblement National party, is doing so well in the polls that she threatens to foil Emmanuel Macron’s re-election bid and could win next year’s presidential vote to become the country’s first far-right leader since the second world war. Only last week, she likened herself to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the UK’s Brexiters—and by implication former US president Trump—as a politician who could triumph with the support of all kinds of voters. “There’s no more split between left and right, there’s a split between the globalists and the nationalists,” she said.

Polish hospitals struggle with surge of virus patients (AP) Polish hospitals struggled over the Easter weekend with a massive number of people infected with COVID-19 following a huge surge in infections across Central and Eastern Europe in recent weeks. Tougher new pandemic restrictions were ordered in Poland for a two-week period surrounding Easter in order to slow down the infection rate. The country hit new records of over 35,000 daily infections on two recent days, and deaths have been in the hundreds each day. The aim of the new restrictions was to prevent large gatherings over the long weekend culminating with Easter Monday. Meanwhile, the government is also trying to speed up the country’s vaccine rollout, but the pressure on the country’s hospitals is still relentless.

Maoist Insurgents Kill 23 Indian Forces in Ambush, Officials Say (NYT) At least 23 Indian security forces were killed in an ambush by Maoist militants in the central state of Chattisgarh, officials said on Sunday, reviving concerns around a decades-old insurgency that appeared to have been largely contained in recent years. A large force of Indian security personnel had been carrying out a clearance operation in a densely forested area on the edges of the Bijapur district when they were ambushed by the insurgents on Saturday in a firefight that lasted four hours. Avinash Mishra, the deputy superintendent of police in Bijapur, said an additional 31 security personnel were wounded in the attack. The insurgents, who trace their roots to communist politics in the 1960s, use violence against the state in the name of championing the cause of India’s poor and marginalized. Their reach was once so widespread, and their attacks so frequent, that in 2006, India’s prime minister declared them the country’s “single biggest internal-security challenge.”

China is betting that the West is in irreversible decline (The Economist) Its gaze fixed on the prize of becoming rich and strong, China has spent the past 40 years as a risk-averse bully. Quick to inflict pain on smaller powers, it has been more cautious around any country capable of punching back. Recently, however, China’s risk calculations have seemed to change. First Yang Jiechi, the Communist Party’s foreign-policy chief, lectured American diplomats at a bilateral meeting in Alaska, pointing out the failings of American democracy. That earned him hero status back home. Then China imposed sanctions on British, Canadian and European Union politicians, diplomats, academics, lawyers and democracy campaigners. Those sweeping curbs were in retaliation for narrower Western sanctions targeting officials accused of repressing Muslims in the north-western region of Xinjiang.      China’s foreign ministry declares that horrors such as the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and the Holocaust, as well as the deaths of so many Americans and Europeans from covid-19, should make Western governments ashamed to question China’s record on human rights. Most recently Chinese diplomats and propagandists have denounced as “lies and disinformation” reports that coerced labour is used to pick or process cotton in Xinjiang. They have praised fellow citizens for boycotting foreign brands that decline to use cotton from that region. Still others have sought to prove their zeal by hurling Maoist-era abuse. A Chinese consul-general tweeted that Canada’s prime minister was “a running dog of the us”.      Such performance-nationalism is watched by Western diplomats in Beijing with dismay. Envoys have been summoned for late-night scoldings by Chinese officials, to be informed that this is not the China of 120 years ago when foreign armies and gunboats forced the country’s last, tottering imperial dynasty to open the country wider to outsiders. Some diplomats talk of living through a turning-point in Chinese foreign policy. History buffs debate whether the moment more closely resembles the rise of an angry, revisionist Japan in the 1930s, or that of Germany when steely ambition led it to war in 1914. A veteran diplomat bleakly suggests that China’s rulers view the West as ill-disciplined, weak and venal, and are seeking to bring it to heel, like a dog.

Minorities in Myanmar borderlands face fresh fear since coup (AP) Before each rainy season Lu Lu Aung and other farmers living in a camp for internally displaced people in Myanmar’s far northern Kachin state would return to the village they fled and plant crops that would help keep them fed for the coming year. But this year in the wake of February’s military coup, with the rains not far off, the farmers rarely step out of their makeshift homes and don’t dare leave their camp. They say it is simply too dangerous to risk running into soldiers from Myanmar’s army or their aligned militias. “We can’t go anywhere and can’t do anything since the coup,” Lu Lu Aung said. “Every night, we hear the sounds of jet fighters flying so close above our camp.” The military’s lethal crackdown on protesters in large central cities such as Yangon and Mandalay has received much of the attention since the coup that toppled Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government. But far away in Myanmar’s borderlands, Lu Lu Aung and millions of others who hail from Myanmar’s minority ethnic groups are facing increasing uncertainty and waning security as longstanding conflicts between the military and minority guerrilla armies flare anew.

Tropical cyclone kills at least 97 in Indonesia, East Timor (Reuters) Floods and landslides triggered by tropical cyclone Seroja in a cluster of islands in southeast Indonesia and East Timor have killed 97 people, with many still unaccounted for and thousands displaced, officials said on Monday. At least 70 deaths were reported in several islands in Indonesia’s West and East Nusa Tenggara provinces, while 70 others were missing, after the cyclone brought flash floods, landslides and strong winds amid heavy rain over the weekend, disaster agency BNPB said.

Lawyer says mediation resolves feud among Jordan royals (AP) Mediation between Jordan’s King Abdullah II and his outspoken half brother, Prince Hamzah, successfully de-escalated one of the most serious political crises in the kingdom in decades, the palace and a confidant of the prince said Monday. The apparent resolution of the unprecedented public feud capped a weekend of palace drama during which the king had placed Hamzah under house arrest for allegedly plotting with foreign supporters to destabilize Jordan, a key Western ally. The announcement of the successful mediation came after Abdullah’s paternal uncle, Hassan, met with Hamzah on Monday. Hamzah was joined by his brother Hashem and three of their cousins. “In light of the developments of the past two days, I put myself at the disposal of His Majesty the King,” said the statement signed by Hamzah. He said he would remain loyal to the king and to Jordan’s constitution. Malik R. Dahlan, a professional mediator and a friend of the family, then issued a separate statement, saying the mediation has “been successful and I expect a resolution shortly.” He said that “this regrettable incident was the result of the clumsy actions of a senior security official and misrepresentation by a government official,” adding that “it should have remained a family matter.”

Netanyahu’s favours were ‘currency’, prosecutor says as corruption trial starts (Reuters) Israeli prosecutors accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of treating favours as “currency” on Monday at the opening of a corruption trial which, along with an inconclusive election, has clouded his prospects of remaining in office. Netanyahu, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of bribery, breach of trust and fraud, came to Jerusalem District Court in a dark suit and black protective mask, conferring quietly with lawyers as his supporters and critics held raucous demonstrations outside. Meanwhile, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin began consulting with party heads on who might form the next coalition government—a toss-up after the March 23 election, the fourth in two years, gave neither Netanyahu nor his rivals a clear mandate.

Pandemic Spreads Isolation (WSJ) A year ago when Japan was under a pandemic state of emergency, Seiji Saejima called his ex-wife for the first time since they divorced a few years earlier. He said she told him she was about to remarry and asked him not to call again. It was an unwelcome reminder of the isolation he was feeling. “I did not have many friends to contact even before,” said the 34-year-old, who works at a city government office near Tokyo. Then the pandemic forced reductions in activities that kept him connected, like going to singles’ mixers. “The coronavirus has made me realize I’m lonely,” he said. Recent data suggest many more people are having the same experience, and that is changing the thinking of some governments. Japan recently named a loneliness and isolation minister, following the U.K.’s example from three years ago. The U.K. named a minister after recognizing the impact of isolation on people’s health and its economy. One study linked deficiencies in social relationships to a 29% increase in heart disease. Another estimated that a chronically lonely person could cost the government, on average, the equivalent of an extra $16,600 over 15 years, owing to higher medical and other costs. “The magnitude of effect of social connection on mortality risk is comparable, and in many cases, exceeds that of other well-accepted risk factors, including smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day, obesity and air pollution,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a Brigham Young University professor of psychology and neuroscience, in 2017 U.S. Senate testimony.

[alexsmitposts]

Race Crime Opens Up Third Front in “Never Ending Conflict” The notorious serial killer Charles Manson was a fine salesman, very good at persuading people. According to the prosecutor at his trial, he persuaded his followers that there was going to be a race war between black and white people, which they would escape from by hiding in a hole in the ground. The murders his followers committed were intended to incite this war, which would end with them emerging to rule over what was left This crackpot theory has since been cited as evidence of Manson’s psychopathic nature, and the way he used it to manipulate people has been picked over again and again. It is therefore deeply distressing to see that he was right all along – and this time we cannot accuse a patently disturbed career criminal of manipulating us, because we voted for those who have proved him right, are of legal age, and had a choice. Orwellian Triangle Until the murder of George Floyd at the hands (or rather the knee) of that Minneapolis police officer, there were two highly polarised forces fighting for control of each Western democracy, and therefore the world. On the one side you had the traditional middle class, who run things a certain way, within their own institutions, and make the rules of conduct everyone has to live by. On the other you had the populist movements which have arisen because people feel those institutions and rules have failed them, and they want to be the opposite for the sake of it. One of the rules of conduct which has been imposed upon people is “multiculturalism”. We have all had the official anti-racist rhetoric rammed down our throats by those who rule what have often been institutionally racist countries and agencies, as if spouting it excuses their own crimes. But though we are told that racism is wrong, which it is, we are not given a way to understand the different cultures and their representatives in our midst. Consequently the uninformed are unable to bridge the divide between themselves and their neighbours. They are then excluded on the grounds of being racist or ignorant, with no place and no voice in the world of those who rule us. Obviously this generates a backlash against immigrants, who are perceived to be profiting from the exclusion of others from opportunity and cultural validity. But it also generates a backlash against natives of different racial origins – and in Western democracies–and that means black people. Even if a black person has lived sixty years in their white majority homeland, was born there and has known no other home, they still experience many forms of discrimination for being different. Those who rise above this by achieving success or celebrity are often the first to recognise this, indicating the depth of the problem. So, indigenous black communities are opposed to both the complacent white middle class culture which keeps them down, and the new populism which openly seeks to exclude them forever, as “foreigners”. This has always been a subliminal feature of politics and community relations. Now, thanks to George Floyd’s killing and the inadequate white establishment response to it, the opposition has broken out into open warfare, exactly as Charles Manson predicted. Fighting your future While white people vote for Brexit, attack immigrants and try and destroy parliament and police, black people loot shops, those symbols of discriminatory capitalism, attack white people and try and destroy parliaments and police. Neither side is achieving anything, or ever will, except to get angrier. But both white populists and black activists ultimately blame each other for the sins of the middle class elite, as they see them. Whites think they are too much in the pay of foreigners. And blacks think they are too much in the pockets of white people, Uncle Toms, who are inherently anti-black. As we have already seen with Brexit, winning an argument, or looting a shop, and it doesn’t make the anger go away. On the contrary, the worse things get, the more people look round for someone else to blame for them – the Brexiteers who turned on the EU are now turning on the UK itself, the very thing they said they were fighting for It is a truth is any democracy: the white middle class elite never goes away. In Portugal democracy was overthrown by the conservative military in 1926, and the subsequent dictatorship then overthrown by Marxist military in 1974. When democracy was restored, a key promise of the victorious Armed Forces Movement, the people voted for the middle class parties you find in any democracy, not Marxists. They even altered the post-1974 constitution to remove all the references to making Portugal a socialist state, even though the main political parties claimed to be socialist or social democrat. No amount of revolt against the “liberal elite”, by white or black populations and their sympathisers, will remove that elite or the system it operates. But as Michael Collins found in Ireland, when he was murdered by fellow nationalists for signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty which gave them a watered down version of which they had fought and died for, once you have gone so far it is more dangerous to turn back than to keep going, no matter what the consequences. Eventually white populists and black activists will have to turn on each other, and seek the protection of the elite when they do so. If they do not get that protection, they will accuse the elite of conspiring with the other side. This is precisely what happened within recent memory in Northern Ireland. Extensive collaboration between Protestant paramilitaries, the police and the British Army provoked Catholics, but many Protestants blamed those same police and army for not protecting them and their traditions when attacked by Catholics Charles Manson’s race war is being staged by proxy at present, with both sides attacking “the system” rather than each other. But it didn’t take long for the proxy Nazi-Soviet conflict of the Spanish Civil War to become World War Two, even though The Soviet Union wasn’t initially one of the allies. When “the system” doesn’t go away, the other two points of the triangle will attack each other for allegedly controlling the system, the common enemy. Neither does, so neither will be right, so no negotiated peace will be possible as there is nothing real to negotiate about. The only question is who has provoked this and why. Or perhaps there is a second question – why did we all see them provoking it, but give them the power to do so? Death Valley, D.C. Manson said that he and his followers would escape to a hole in the ground during this war. Groups of his followers went looking for this hole, inspecting various sites in Death Valley, California, to see if they were fit for purpose. So who went down into a hole in the ground when demonstrators were thought to be about to turn violent? Donald J. Trump, no less. He also said he was merely “inspecting” the bunker, not hiding in it. But his own Attorney General has contradicted him, even though he says it wasn’t Trump’s own decision. There have always been underground bunkers for key government officials, which have the same purpose Manson described: those who feel they are entitled to be the rulers hide in them so that when the crisis is over, they will continue ruling over what is left. They are not equipped as last resorts in a crisis but with all the facilities a ruler would need to continue doing their job, and monitoring the situation, from the safety of their impenetrable depth. Duck and Cover During the Cold War, with its ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, many such bunkers were constructed for defence institutions and also private citizens. Switzerland once made it a state policy to ensure that every citizen would have a place in a nuclear shelter. Since the Iron Curtain fell, many have been sold off to private citizens as accommodation, showing how many facilities they actually had. Trump should know all about the possibility of race wars. Like little brother Boris Johnson, he openly played the white populist card to get elected. He blames “the system” for everything the voters he courts don’t like, so none of them has responsibility for anything. Building the border wall to keep Mexicans out is one of a long litany of actions which demonstrate that he also blames people of colour, of any description, for drugs, crime and terrorism, though his own national statistics don’t bear this out. His message is clear: “the system” should be torn down because it has been hijacked by foreigners and foreign ideas. It needs to be replaced, along with all the people who have corrupted it. Yet he is very well aware that black activists who don’t like him and his voter constituency say exactly the same in reverse: that the system needs to be torn down because it is full of Trump’s voter constituency, who use it to project their cultural dominance and oppress blacks. If you want to get elected, you try and spread your supporter base as far as possible. But if you are in office and are being attacked, as Trump has been from day one, you go back to where you know your core support is. Even starting with Nixon, the War on Drugs was understood to mean a War on Blacks, especially young blacks. When Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate collapsed under his son Richard, it was torn apart by ex-combatants who had run out of steam arguing about who was the true upholder of the “good old cause,” because the ideology was incapable of embracing new ideas. More recently, when Robert Mugabe was threatened in Zimbabwe by the same black populations he claimed to represent, he talked about the guerilla war which had created his power, and relied for support on its veterans rather than attracting new constituencies of support with new policies. Predictably, Trump has used the violence following the death of George Floyd to call for more law and order. This is always a rallying cry for his faithful, who believe only they want it, and that the law enforcement agencies are there to protect them from those they consider different. He is currently being sued by a coalition of civil rights groups over one manifestation of his solution, the violent dispersal of a Black Lives Matter protest opposite the White House which was obstructing a photo opportunity in which he was depicted holding a bible. Using Flag and God as the last resort is a common move for political in deep up to their necks. As a sitting president Trump is in the same position once lamented in the famous quote by the 2nd Earl of Manchester – “If we beat the king 99 times, he is king still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall be all hanged, and our posterity be made slaves. May say he wants to overthrow the system, but when all this is over, which he hopes will be after he has cancelled the November election under “emergency powers,” only he will rule what is left. Fatal absurdity Since Manson committed his crimes, very few have wanted to live in a world where he really was a prophet, and the person to turn to if you wanted to know the truth. The lunatic has not only taken over the asylum, he has made it the hole in the ground from which he can issue his truth, and everywhere else the asylum. No one wanted to talk to black communities. Whenever they raised their concerns, whether legitimate or not, they were told in effect “you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Neither did anyone want to listen to the politically incorrect, the forcibly unemployed, the homeless or the out of fashion – their views weren’t good enough, they didn’t matter anymore than the life of a black man did. This is precisely what should not happen in liberal democracies, which exist to give power to “the people”, even if you don’t like what they want or think, provided those who disagree don’t face negative consequences. It is also what should never happen in a Christian country, as Christ died for us all, and racism or discrimination are direct contradictions of Christian teaching, strange though that may seem to some. Ballot or the Bullet The white populists and black activists are right: the system has failed them by discriminating against them unfairly. But they will never tear it down, as they will never resolve their problems that way, modern Africa bearing strong testimony to this. It is like Malcolm X, when he spoke of a different view of history for American Blacks, We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us. What is needed is to redefine what is acceptable in public life from within. The anti-racists who look down on those outside their circle will never achieve this. Not only another generation of blacks have been sold down the river, but minorities, and those of the former middle class with skill sets that are no longer needed, as those jobs are now in China and elsewhere. But all the conflict can be stopped by people displaying the basic humanity they do, when pushed, on an everyday basis, instead of expecting others to do it for them. That starts with electing people who represent what we are, not what they have made us into. If we did, we might just take back control – by keeping Mansonism in the asylum permanently, where we all know it really belongs.

[hiphopscriptures]

The Second Slavery: How the Democratic North Kept Their Foot on Your Neck

Our nation has erupted in days-long protest, sparked by the murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers. Cities across the U.S., and even across the world have taken to the streets to make their voices heard. Some of the most violent clashes between protestors and police have happened in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Atlanta where we saw two college students being pulled from their vehicle and attacked by police. What also can’t be ignored is the systematic lockdowns of cities where mayors along with local law enforcement have declared citywide curfews, oftentimes making these announcements within minutes of said curfews expiring. Chicago has even taken to shutting off their CTA public transportation, which left many essential workers and protestors stranded on the evening of May 31, 2020. Speaking of, May 31st is the anniversary of the bombing of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma which took place in 1921. As we commemorate the 99 year anniversary of the bombing of Black Wall Street where a town of successful Black families and businesses were not only terrorized but ultimately destroyed, Black people in America must dissect and investigate the other foot on their collective necks - the collusion of our government, politicians, and police organizations with immigrant populations enabling them establish wealth in the same way as our country’s forefathers - on the backs of Black people.

The south has an overt and often open racist history that has been on display for centuries, along with the legacy of slavery. The North, however, in places like Boston, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and many other cities is where the mob and mafia organized crime ran rampant and were also integral in institutionalizing racism against Black Americans. These same machines created unions that were politically connected to the Democratic party who aided and abetted in the financial rape of the African American community by denying them union jobs, adequate housing and worked with the police unions to keep Blacks ‘in line’. Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters routinely provided interest free loans to the Mafia. The movie Harlem Nights depicts many of how this was orchestrated, including purposely inundating Black neighborhoods with illegal activities such a prostitution and gambling, typically for about a period of 5 years or so before having massive raids to take down Black crime bosses, only then to evict the residents so that White immigrant populations could come in and buy cheap real estate that would almost always skyrocket in value. These same immigrants came to despise and discriminate against the very African Americans who made it possible for them to come to this country. 

It’s kind of disheartening to see the lengths that Ray, Quick, and their circle have to go because a White criminal, who has a dirty detective on his side, wants a piece of their pie.

(nerdist)

The Immigration Act of 1965 was a direct result of the Civil Rights movement organized and executed by Black / African Americans - “Over the next four decades, the policies put into effect in 1965 would greatly change the demographic makeup of the American population, as immigrants entering the United States under the new legislation came increasingly from countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as opposed to Europe.” This facilitated the acceptance of many immigrants of color to the United States. Once on these shores, parents of immigrant children often discouraged their children fraternizing, emulating or dating African Americans. 

https://twitter.com/keilahhhjd/status/1267199334296109056?s=21

 In addition, almost all of these immigrant groups profited from the same types of organized crime that had benefited their white immigrant predecessors such as the Irish, Italians, Russians and many more of European origin. Money laundering, bootlegging, prostitution and many other illegal activities directly funded many of what are now established businesses, suburban enclaves full of homes and lifestyles that their descendants enjoy. The origins of the Mob in America can be traced to the urban ghettos of the late 19th century where Irish, Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants struggled to survive amid poverty, overcrowding and discrimination. These immigrants could get only the most dangerous and low-paying jobs (source: themobmuseum.org). The movie, Gangs of New York depicts much of this history, “The Irish Bowery Boys soon formed in a nearby area known as the Bowery. Battles between the Bowery Boys and Dead Rabbits (claiming more than 1,000 members each) were legendary, each of which was supported by smaller gangs they had spawned...Shrewd politicians immediately recognized the potential asset that the street gangs might represent. In the early 1830’s, several politicians (ward and district leaders) bought grocery stores in Five Points and the saloons and dance halls in the Bowery, the gathering places for the gangs. In return for their assured protection of the gangs’ meeting places, and financial rewards offered to the gangs for their loyalty, gang leaders returned the favor by taking care of jobs like blackjacking political opponents and scaring unsupporting voters away from the polls” (source: sagepub.com).

Philadelphia and Boston could also lay claim to having substantial street gangs before the Civil War; [sic] Philadelphia’s Public Ledger identified nearly 50 Philadelphia gangs between 1840 and 1870. These gangs persisted; a New York Tribune reporter described the northern suburbs of Philly in 1948 and 1949 as swarming with gangs.

“If any nationality has been linked to organized crime in the UnitedStates over the years, it would have to be Italian-Americans, at least in popular perception...countless books, movies and TV shows, from The Godfather right up to the Sopranos, the image of the Mafioso has become synonymous with the face of gangsters in America.” However, the Irish Mob began as penniless immigrants in the mid-19th century battled their way to power and established the first crime syndicate in America, which lasted for at least 150 years (source: toledoblade.com). The first gang leader from the streets to achieve prominence was John Old Smoke Morrisey, who ran gambling joints, saloons, and brothels in New York City, ultimately aligning himself with Tammany Hall, the city’s corrupt Democratic political machine. Of course the best known Irish (democratic) family is the Kennedy clan. Boston native Joseph P. Kennedy, father of JFK and Robert Kennedy was a bootlegger during Prohibition who supplied liquor to a rogue gallery of crime bosses, including Al Capone. During his son’s presidential campaign, Joe reached out to mobsters for help and Sam Giancana, then the Mafia boss of Chicago, delivered the state of Illinois for JFK, helping provide his winning margin in the 1960 election. Decades later, the Russian mob, Colombians and Latin Americans became the face of organized crime in America.

While the Italian mafia was the largest and most powerful, other ethnic groups also had organized crime rings. On the west coast, especially there are Asian American gangs as well. In Koreatown in L.A. for example, the original gangs first came from Korea, and flourished by being involved in illegal activities such as drug dealing, organized crime, money laundering and prostitution. Since the liberalization of the immigration laws of 1965, Chinatowns in the U.S. have experienced a consistent increase in their crime rates. 

You will often hear the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren angrily tweet or disclaim aloud that their parents came to America AFTER slavery and that they “worked hard” to achieve financial and business success, therefore the idea of reparations is absurd and Black folks in America should follow suit and “work hard” as well. What’s so interesting is that all of this history of the corruption among immigrant organized crime and their collusion with politicians, government and law enforcement is not only documented but glorified in history, film and ironically rap music. Most recently one only has to look to last year’s The Irishman starring Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesce. The mob museum is literally an entire museum celebrating how these groups came to America, created a crime syndicate and created generational wealth, all while local politicians and police chiefs winked, shook hands, quietly collected their cut on their way to vacation in Miami with their families. These are the same cops with their foot on the necks of George Floyd, the same system that gave Jacob the Jeweler 2.5 years and a $50,000 fine while the BMF crime family serves 30+ years in prison. Who is really being protected and served? 

We encourage all of you, especially those that live in major cities across the U.S. to do your own research of the history of organized crime and cross reference wealth and ownership of land and businesses in those same cities. It is only then that you will truly connect the dots, especially as you fully realize how those actions contribute to denial of home loans, redlining, poorly performing school districts etc. It was just prior to the murder of George Floyd gripping the nation that we were largely discussing the upcoming presidential election, an ornery white woman in Central Park. The south’s history of slavery, terrorism at the hands of the KKK and segregation are well documented, but the largely Democratic stronghold of the North has produced structural racism that is just as sinister if not worse. In the words of Joe Biden, “You Ain’t Black” if you don’t comprehend the second slavery created by the North which has largely contributed the conditions we now find ourselves in.

  Other sources: csun.edu, repository.upenn.edu, pbs.org, wikipedia

[imbumkyung]

I Saw It In A Movie One Time (ch.2) - reincarnation

Chapter 1

Chapter 3

“She’ll be okay,” the man said

Kaileia lay on a towel that CJ and Miko set up. A man that was out surfing saw Kai getting washed up by the ocean and quickly pulled her out

“She probably just took in some water and passed out from shock but she’ll be good,” He finished, offering a nod to her friends.

“Oh, okay. Thank you so much,” Miko smiled before he went on his way, his wetsuit and board leaving a wet trail behind him. She was thankful they didn’t need 911 because to be real honest here, they were all broke as heck.

Not too long later Kai coughed a few times before waking up.

“Dude are you okay?” CJ asked

“Yeah I’m fine I just have a headache right now,” Kai replied, her voice filled with fatigue.

“Oh my god I thought you died,” Melissa said, half joking.

-

Kaileia didn’t remember what happened the rest of that night, only that Miko let her sleep over at her place. So when she awoke the next morning in a room that wasn’t hers, it wasn’t alarming at all.

What was alarming though was that she was asleep way longer than she thought she’d be. Usually she slept in until it was about ten to eleven a.m. Now, it was already two p.m. She stayed in bed for a little nonetheless, her inner monologue explaining the tasks of the day: walk the dogs, go to the gym, get that TB test and fingerprint scan done so you can start working soon. Mustering up as much leg strength as she could, she got up to go get ready for the day. She searched for her backpack with her change of clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste and all her other things, the only thing missing was her phone for her morning music. Puzzled, she couldn’t find it anywhere in her bag and come to think of it, she’d never seen this room in Miko’s house before. And the day looked a lot more glum than the usual Kauai sun.

“Miko? Have you seen my phone?” She questioned aloud enough for her to hear if she was downstairs. To no avail, she tried again, “Miko?”

Silence

Did Miko have somewhere to be this morning? She couldn’t call her without a phone so she figured she’d find a house phone and made her way downstairs. As soon as she openned the door of the bedroom, she froze

I have no idea who’s house this is.

A white hallway with a room straight across, a bathroom to the right and a staircase to the left. Carefully going down the staircase she was even more shocked and afraid— I really don’t know who’s house this is.

She found a smaller sized kitchen and a living room next to it, big enough to fit two couches and a TV, the front door on the upper right corner.

She picked up the house phone hanging right by the kitchen, only to realize she didn’t even know Miko’s number— it was saved to the cell phone she couldn’t find. Was I kidnapped? Am I in a murderer’s home?

Call mom, you idiot

Her hands scrambled in panic as she dialed her moms number,

“You have reached the voicemail box of pause Susie May, please leave a message! At the to—”

Who the fuck is Susie May? Spotting a pair of car keys on the table, Kaileia didn’t know where she was going, or what she would do, but she needed to get out of this murderer’s house as fast as she could. She ran up the stairs, her knees quivering from fear she paid as least mind to as she possibly could, grabbed her backpack, took the keys and ran outside. Walking as fast as she could, she smashed the lock button until she heard a beeping from one of the cars. Discovering which car the key belonged to, she put it in ignition and drove.

Nothing was familiar. Absolutely nothing. The island she lived on was small enough for her to have explored it all as she lived there for a whole 19 years, so it made no sense she’d never seen this place before. Her conclusion: the kidnapper took her to a land unknown. And she couldn’t go back to that house. Ever.

She made a right, and a left, and another right, trying to find something familiar. It took one wrong right at a stop light she didn’t realize— and a cop was right there. He signaled for her to pull over, most likely to ticket her for this minor mistake. Kai sighed— this is the last thing right now. I’m literally fleeing my kidnapper.

She rolled down her window, “Is there a reason you didn’t stop at the stop sign, ma’am?” The officer in black sunglasses asked. There was no reason for the sunglasses, really.

She shook her head, still in shock from everything that’s happened, especially from being questioned by a cop— the last time something like this happened, she had to pay so much money to fix her own car, and still needed to pay because the lady she crashed into went to physical therapy— taking the advice of her claims assistant, even tho Kai had left nothing more than a crack of paint on said lady’s car. In short, Kai wasn’t ready to be broke all over again.

“License, registration and insurance, please,” He requested.

She nodded, and scrambled the compartment to look for the information she knew she didn’t have. It surprised her though, she did find the registration and insurance. She left that into her lap to find her license in her backpack. She froze. It had her name and her picture but it was missing the rainbow and the blue letters reading “Hawaii”. It was instead a normal creme colored background and read “Washington” across the top. She scrambled back to the registration and insurance in her lap— both under her very own name. She couldn’t think. Shakily and obviously very nervous, she handed all three documents to the officer.

He received them with a nod, then took them to the police car, most likely to run her records. But how is this car under her name? How did she end up in Washington, and why Washington? What the fuck was here, that brought her here? Theres literally no reason to be here. It’s cloudy, it’s cold, it’s depressing.

He brought all three back to her, “Well there’s nothing on your record, and I’ve decided I’ll let you off with a warning,” he concluded.

Kai sighed gratefully, “Thank you so much Officer”

“You be careful now,” he advised, and his radio went off

“Chief Swan, do you copy?” A man said over the system

He nodded to her before dismissing her. She let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

Washington. I’m in Washington. What am I doing in the mainland? How is this car mine? Everyone here dresses weird. Could it be, that the house is also mine? Don’t be stupid. You might fall into the murderer’s trap. You should have told the officer while you had the chance. I mean you still do, technically. They haven’t moved and neither have you.

Maybe we could just check? You’re seriously gonna take a chance on death? Maybe.

Without thinking, she circled around the town before going back to the house she woke up in. It was now 6pm. If the murderer was to return, they’d have surely been home by now, right? But the sight she saw in front of her house was anything but a murderous aura. It was a father and his son riding on his little tikes bicycle in front of the drive way, just passing through. Warily but quickly, she walked to the front door, the umbrella she found in the back seat now in her right hand, ready to stab whoever it was that was gonna grab her as soon as she opened the door— only there was no one. All she saw was the house with everything in the exact position it was left.

I should call 911

She quickly searched for any cabinets until she found one filled with documents, proving ownership of the house, so she’d have an address and hopefully a name to provide whoever would assist her on the other line. Only for her heart to stop after reading the name of the homeowner: Kaileia Mahelona

Brows furrowed and eyes wide, she read the name over and over again, searching for any documents to prove otherwise but— nothing. Did this house belong to her? She stood frozen in that spot, no reaction, no other thoughts, just her trying to grasp onto the concept that this is either all some sick joke, a dream, or she is actually in another reality. Maybe I was reincarnated early?

Kaileia stalked across the kitchen and grabbed the remote, turning on the TV. None of the news was out of the ordinary— well at least for someone who didn’t pay too much attention to the news regularly. Immigration protests, some world cup final, tainted spinach and the shocking news on the Crocodile Hunter’s death. Surely they meant his death anniversary.

No. It was his actual death. With a photo of him and the words underneath reading “Steve Irwin, 1962-2006”

Two-thousand what now?

“This ain’t it, sis” she whispered, hands of stress running through her hair. She shook her head in disbelief.

Definitely not real. Wake up Kai, come on wake up. If it’s 2006, you’re literally six years old right now.

Her peripherals caught a computer she hadn’t seen there before. From there, she discovered that she was actually in Forks, Washington, it was definitely 2006, and that the Marvel universe exists here. So talking about Spiderman wouldn’t make her look like a mad man. Which is great, because she loves Spiderman. Also Deadpool. Okay that’s besides the point.

“What am I to do? I don’t think I have a job and I’m definitely not in school,” she thought to herself. Without a second thought, she left the house yet again and drove.

“Another hiker presumed dead, searches still going on for the killer animal—” a voice on the radio spoke. Killer animals? What the hell is going on, Forks? Distracted by her thoughts while driving along the never ending path along the mountain, a wolf suddenly ran across about 50 feet from her, still close enough for her to register that this was in fact NOT a normal sized wolf. It was about five times the size of what she’d expected.

She rounded a corner and caught sight of a party. “Forks High School Prom” a giant banner read across the entrance of the venue. She decided to park here, the lights were a pretty sight as she tried to pay no mind the awkward couple dancing in the middle of the lawn. The girl wore a purple dress with a boot and the boy with a suit on, skin paler than the Korean pop stars her friend Miko was obsessed with. It looked like that scene from Twilight. She was unknowingly staring— he dipped her low and placed a soft kiss on her neck. Another action that reminded her of the twilight movie. Kaileia hadn’t seen it since Elementary school.

The couple were about to exit the canopy when Kai thought, “careful girl, he’s probably a vampire”. It was only a joke, alluding to the Twilight movie that happened in Forks with this exact ending scene when the boy froze. He turned in the direction of Kaileia’s car and— ah shit.

“Can he hear me? How did he know to look exactly where I’m at?” She panicked

There’s no way this is happening. Hurriedly, she started the car and drove off.

Was that Edward Cullen? Was that really them? It has to be a real coincidence. Twilight is fiction. It’s literally cringe culture. But it could also explain that big ass wolf that jumped out of nowhere. It would explain why that girl looked so much like Bella.

Kai decided she couldn’t say or think anything about what she knows anymore. Edward can definitely hear her thoughts.

I can’t change the storyline. Everyone made it out alive at the end of Breaking Dawn. Don’t change that. I could die here. But if I died here would I go back to my old life? Possibly. It happened to that girl in Scarlet Heart: Ryeo.

Kai, that was a kdrama.

Twilight was a movie series!

Touché.

All I have to do is survive. Don’t change the story lines. Try not to get involved.

She parked the car in the driveway this time instead of across the street, rounding the corner to the door but froze as she saw the same boy who was just dancing at the prom.

“Can I help you, sir?” She asked him, trying her best to project her voice and mask her timidness

He turned, his eyes going first then the rest of his body behind him, “Hi, I’m Edward Cullen”

She nodded, “Hi. What are you doing here?” She asked, wanting to get straight to the point

He paused, realizing he didn’t prepare a lie to tell her and having no real justification besides “I heard your thoughts. How do you know what I am?” Of course, he didn’t say this out loud, he can’t jump to conclusions and expose his kind. Instead, he excused, “I must have gotten the wrong house.”

Kai nodded, keeping her thoughts silent and slipping past him, rushing to get inside and lock the door. She let out an exhale of relief after being inside.

He’s onto me.

Tags: @sunflowerspectre

Thank you for reading!

[dippedanddripped]

One afternoon in 1999, when the designer Shayne Oliver was in the sixth grade, he came across a magazine ad for Dirty Denim, a line of “pre-soiled” jeans by Diesel. The ad featured a collage of faux paparazzi photographs documenting the meltdown of a fictional rock star. Oliver was struck by the campaign’s tagline: “The Luxury of Dirt.” “That blew my mind,” he told me recently. “Spending money on something that looks dirty? I was, like, ‘This is genius.’ ” He informed his mother, a schoolteacher from Trinidad named Anne-Marie, that he needed a pair immediately.

Oliver’s father had abandoned Anne-Marie before Shayne was born, and she had struggled to raise him on her own. They lived in a tiny apartment on Halsey Street, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Oliver, who attended some rough schools—he witnessed knife fights in the halls—was highly intelligent, and Anne-Marie was determined to nurture his gifts. She stood up to people on the street who heckled him because he was effeminate, and fought with school officials who wrote him off as a rowdy black kid. She didn’t have the money for the jeans, which cost three hundred and seventy-five dollars, but she respected Shayne’s sense of urgency. “How are we going to afford Diesel clothes?” she asked herself. She soon began working evenings at the Diesel store at the corner of Sixtieth and Lexington. She got an employee discount, and her kid got his jeans.

Oliver began accompanying Anne-Marie on her shifts at Diesel, folding shirts, examining seams, and offering customers unsolicited style advice. Although his suggestions were impeccable, after a few weeks the management told him to stay home, noting that it was illegal for twelve-year-olds to work in retail. Undaunted, Oliver walked a few blocks to a Roberto Cavalli store. Employees there were so charmed that they offered him an unpaid internship. He didn’t take it, but he continued to visit the store—and pester the staff. “I would just be in the shop, hanging out all the time and talking shit,” he recalls. “It was fun.”

Oliver was a recent arrival in New York. He was born in 1987 in Minnesota, where Anne-Marie had immigrated to pursue a teaching degree, and he had spent his childhood shuttling among female relatives in St. Paul, St. Croix, and Trinidad, before settling with his mother in Brooklyn, in 1998. In St. Croix, at the age of five, he had begun making his own fashions out of scraps of fabric scavenged from his grandmother, a dressmaker. After moving to the United States, he started cutting up items in Anne-Marie’s wardrobe. In an effort to discourage this practice, she took him on regular trips to Jo-Ann Fabrics. He kept looting her closet.

When Anne-Marie rode the subway with Oliver, she noticed him staring at men who were wearing streetwear brands like Mecca and FUBU. “Why are you looking at all of these guys?” Anne-Marie asked him. “You’re all up in their Kool-Aid!” Oliver protested that he was inspecting them for their clothes, which was only half a lie. He began cutting up his jeans and ripping out the crotch, which made him a target at the Pentecostal church that he and his mother attended. “I was being expressive!” he recalls, adding that other parishioners expressed themselves by speaking in tongues. At thirteen, he quit the church.

That year, Anne-Marie sent Oliver to a public school in Long Island City which focusses on the arts. For weeks, he came to class wearing a head scarf, and was often mistaken for a Muslim girl. (“I should’ve played that up a little bit,” Oliver told me. “Muslim girls get a lot of attention.”) Shortly after he enrolled, Anne-Marie rented for him a videocassette of “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 documentary about voguing competitions in New York. A year later, he became a member of the House of Ninja, one of the groups featured in the film. “The Ninja people were all offbeat and not glamour kids,” he recalls. They encouraged him to explore various looks, and in competitions, he said, he “swayed between ‘vogue femme’ and ‘runway.’ ”

As a teen-ager, Oliver began applying his ingenuity to his hair: “There was one point where I was mixing textures—it was, like, a mullet of dreads and then permed on the sides. I’m sorry, that hairstyle was so nasty! It was ridiculous. It was so good.” He went out most nights, commuting between the largely white electroclash scene centered on Club Luxx, in Williamsburg, and the mostly black and Latino scene on Christopher Street, where he liked to “smoke, go to the pier, and then vogue.”

Before entering the tenth grade, he transferred to Harvey Milk, the country’s first high school for L.G.B.T. youths. Many of the students there wore three outfits a day: one for their neighborhood, one for school, and one for going out. It could be dangerous to wear the wrong thing in the wrong place, so kids kept outré clothes in their backpacks and changed on the subway platform. Oliver, though, prided himself on assembling outfits that worked in all three environments: butch enough for Bed-Stuy, smart enough for school, glam enough for the club. He devised subtle, colorless ensembles, the drape and shape of which sent coded messages to the educated eye. “If you have on all-black, you can go unnoticed on the block,” Oliver explained. “Then you go intothe city, and someone who’s thinking about clothing in a different way notices all the cuts and layering.” Styling choices helped him adapt his look to different contexts. Oliver liked wearing tight poom-poom shorts, but on his way to school he pulled them low, so that they sagged “in a masculine way.”

At Harvey Milk, Oliver made friends with another boy who was obsessed with fashion, James Garland. Each was an only child, raised by an indulgent single mother who had given her son the master bedroom. They recorded television broadcasts of runway shows and pored over the designs. Garland liked the debonair luxury of Tom Ford; Oliver preferred the forbidding moodiness of Rick Owens. Before long, the boys began making clothes, conducting photo shoots in Fort Greene Park, and staging runway shows at school. They generated new pieces through collage, stitching together items from vintage shops, children’s jackets from thrift stores, and treasures from their mothers’ closets.

After creating their first line of T-shirts, named Ammo, and their first collection, Cazzy Calore, Garland and Oliver graduated from Harvey Milk and enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Garland flourished there, but Oliver chafed against the curricular constraints and dropped out in his freshman year. In 2006, he diverted the tuition money that Anne-Marie had saved for him, and launched a fashion line with his friend Raul López, who also hung out on Christopher Street. Oliver called the new line Hood By Air. The phrase suggested a style that was proudly ghetto and proudly élite (“putting on airs”). Within a few years, the label had become the most prominent high-fashion brand to have emerged authentically from street culture.

Oliver’s original mission with the label was to bring to fine menswear what he calls the “thug silhouette”: the shape created by a long T-shirt paired with saggy pants, as if the wearer had a very long torso and very short legs. He also believed that he could turn streetwear basics such as oversized hoodies and multipocketed jackets into high-concept luxury items.

By 2007, Hood By Air clothes had begun showing up in boutiques in downtown Manhattan. The collections cannily combined the audacious (trousers with a dozen pleats) and the accessible (silk-screened T-shirts). The first Hood By Air T-shirts featured bold graphics and slogans like “Back to the Hood.” Oliver and López had the shirts custom-made by Dominican tailors, and they were expensive: two hundred dollars apiece. From the start, they sold well.

In the aughts, Manhattan boutiques were awash in designer hoodies (many of them by Jeremy Scott and Raf Simons). Oliver judged their stitch too fine, their length too short, their colors too bright, their patterns too busy. He felt that designers who appropriated streetwear had a fascination with urban men but were also afraid of them—he considered their skittish engagement to be “peckish,” “gross,” and “disconnected from the real masculinity” driving street culture. He told me, “It’s, like, ‘I think that guy is really hot, but I don’t know how to approach him, so I’m going to put elements of myself in him.’ There’s a power play where you’re inspired by something but you don’t want to give it credit.” Turned off by these “fey” imitations of streetwear, Oliver made clothes that were aggressively harsh and masculine. The graphics on his T-shirts often played with urban-horror imagery: a panorama of a prison yard, red marks evoking blood spattered by gunfire. At the same time, instead of hinting at homoeroticism, he foregrounded it. The first Hood By Air editorial video, uploaded to YouTube in September, 2007, featured a model repeatedly grabbing his crotch.

Oliver also embarked on a conceptual exploration that he calls “formalizing sloppiness”—highlighting the transitional phases between dressed and undressed. “It’s like when someone is horny and in a T-shirt, and it’s dropping off the shoulder,” Oliver explained. He liked conjuring those alluringly awkward moments when an amorous couple still has a few items of clothing on: “The idea of that being so open and so vulnerable—it’s, like, ‘Where’s my pants? Where’s my underwear?’ ”

By the end of 2009, López and Oliver had put Hood By Air on hiatus. López founded his own clothing line, and Oliver focussed on hosting a new dance party called GHE20G0TH1K (Ghetto Gothic). Held in various spaces in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, the gatherings united disparate musical tribes—urban, goth, queer, punk. Oliver ran GHE20G0TH1K with his friends Jazmin Soto (a pansexual Latina) and Daniel Fisher (a straight white Jew). Soto was in charge, but Oliver sometimes took a turn as d.j., and he favored a dark sound. “At the time, no one was playing Marilyn Manson, and I was playing records that resonated that way—the idea of, like, fear of the world,” he recalls. “I was prying into my past—all my history of being provoked.” Many of the party’s charismatic attendees wore Hood By Air T-shirts. Interest in the brand was so strong that Oliver decided to relaunch it.

This time, he had crucial help from Leilah Weinraub, a filmmaker who was working on a documentary about a lesbian strip club in South Central Los Angeles. (The film, which she plans to release in 2017, comes off as a female-focussed update of “Paris Is Burning.”) Weinraub, who was Soto’s girlfriend at the time, began doing projects with Oliver, and one day they shot a look book for the designer Telfar, a mutual friend. Oliver was among the people cast, and Weinraub was unafraid of challenging him. She recalls, “He was wearing the wrong piece—a shawl—and he refused to be styled. He said, ‘Style me like a lady’—he had on this I’m-a-demure-woman voice. I asked, ‘Can you stand a little more like a man?’ The room stopped.”

In 2012, Oliver asked Weinraub to work alongside him on the relaunch of Hood By Air. (The partnership with López was completely dissolved.) She said yes. Weinraub, who is eight years older than Oliver, told me that she felt protective of Hood By Air. “It was at the point where other people started seeing it as a success,” she said. “And at that point people start to rob you—blind. They start to trick you.” She was wary of mainstream cultural figures looking for a quick way to acquire edge—of invitations to, say, “work on Katy Perry’s team.” Shortly after Weinraub became Oliver’s partner, investors offered to buy Hood By Air and put Oliver and Weinraub on fixed salaries. She was appalled. “This isn’t fucking Motown!” she said. Hood By Air, she declared, would remain closed to outside investors while it was in its “incubation period.” (To date, the company hasn’t accepted any outside investments—an arrangement that is virtually unheard of in the fashion industry.)

In order for Hood By Air to maintain control of its intellectual property, Weinraub believed, it had to grow quickly and attract media attention. Otherwise, the company’s designs would be pirated by bigger labels, which treated avant-garde street culture as a resource to be plundered. In a 2013 article in the Times, Guy Trebay suggested that Riccardo Tisci, the creative director of Givenchy, had referenced Hood By Air designs “without crediting them.” (A spokesperson for Givenchy said, “Hood By Air has never been a reference for our brand.”)

Around the time that Weinraub joined Hood By Air, it presented a runway show at Milk Studios, on Fifteenth Street. One of the models cast for the show was the rapper A$AP Rocky, a friend of Oliver’s at the time. Rocky’s participation helped the brand reach a wider audience, affording it a measure of protection against fashion-world vultures. Rocky also boosted Hood By Air’s reputation by incorporating endorsements of the label into his lyrics. His devotion eventually cooled, though, and in 2014 he released a diss track that included criticisms of the brand. He gloated to a reporter, “I birthed it, so I can kill it.” But Rocky was too late. Hood By Air had established a cult following among affluent teen-agers, avant-garde adults, and pop stars like Rihanna, Justin Bieber, and Kanye West. The label was critically acclaimed, too, winning the Swarovski Award for Menswear, from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and a six-figure prize from L.V.M.H. Although Hood By Air remained rigorously experimental, it also became profitable, as fans lined up to buy T-shirts with the H.B.A. logo, which cost as much as six hundred dollars each. According to Hood By Air, its sales have doubled every season since 2013. The brand’s reach remains unimpressive by Gucci standards, but business has been good enough to give Oliver “the ability to do whatever the hell I want” in the studio. (He still shares an apartment with his mother, in Prospect Heights.)

Last September, I visited a cramped office that Hood By Air was renting on Hester Street, on the Lower East Side. The space, crowded with garment racks, could have been mistaken for a costume shop, were it not for the giant poster boards propped against the walls, which were covered in mini-Polaroids of harsh, alluring faces. Attached to each photograph was a Post-it scrawled with a concept: “spanish hustlers,” “obscure fetish.”

A dozen men and women, including Leilah Weinraub, sat in a circle, with only one subtle sign of hierarchy: Oliver was the only person not taking notes. Since 2012, Hood By Air had grown into a small collective, and its members were meeting to finalize plans for the Spring/Summer 2016 runway show. They had been joined by an outsider, Rich Aybar, a freelance stylist. Born on the Upper West Side to Dominican parents, he looked like a cross between a Rastafarian and Rasputin.

Oliver was dressed in jeans, a black vest, and a Hood By Air necklace—a chunky chain and a padlock—that he never removes. “Ooooooh!” he said. He had just received a text. “Connie just got confirmed for the door.” He was referring to Connie Girl, a doorwoman who was famous for being impossible to get past and impossible to book. “Taste that,” he said. “Ta-a-a-aste.”

“What’s the lighting like at the space?” Akeem Smith, Hood By Air’s chief stylist, asked. His hair was in small braids gathered into pigtails, and he wore a T-shirt bearing the words “The Black Genius.”

“Bright,” Weinraub replied. “White-blue.”

“Clinical,” Oliver said, approvingly. The show was being held at Penn Plaza Pavilion, a cavernous, fluorescent-lit building, opposite Madison Square Garden, that was slated for demolition. Hood By Air shows are traditionally held in unglamorous spaces.

Several people got up to leave, and a smaller group began discussing the casting of models. Each season, labels compete to book them, and Cathy Horyn, a critic at large at New York, told me that Hood By Air had some of “the best casting of the season, and I mean anywhere.” The brand is known for “streetcasting”—enlisting people who aren’t professional models.

The group stood and went over to a casting board, which was crammed with photographs of prospects. “We have to edit,” Oliver declared, inspecting the images. “We have to be really hard right now.”

“I think your story up there is really strong,” Aybar said. “It’s, like, Undernourished Retards—in a beautiful way.” He liked the “living-under-the-bridge vibe.” Then Aybar started ripping photos off the board. One boy, a Ryan Lochte type, was deemed “too dopey—a white guy in the most boring way.” Oliver asked that another male model be removed for having a swishy walk that struck him as off-brand. “It’s gay-y-y-y-y,” he said. After thirty minutes, a dozen pictures had been taken off the board.

The designing of clothes follows a similar group dynamic. Paul Cupo, the brand’s fashion director, told me, “The top concept is Shayne’s concept, and there’s a very select group of people that are allowed to contribute to this concept. Shayne then comes up with some shapes and silhouettes he wants to show, and then I plug in fabrics and colors.”

Cupo, an Italian-American from Bensonhurst who favors loose tank tops and sneakers, showed me a creation for the upcoming show. “The basic idea is a bomber,” he said. Instead of using nylon for the shell, however, he had used taffeta—a material often fashioned into ball gowns and wedding dresses. It was a surprising choice, he acknowledged with a smile: “It’s sort of a weird fabric for ‘young edgy cool designers’ to be using.” A Hood By Air bomber jacket sells for nearly a thousand dollars.

few days later, at Penn Plaza Pavilion, Hood By Air sent a male model down the runway in a tight bun, a shirtdress, and black heels. The shirtdress, made with black silk, was divided into sections, which had been loosely lashed together with chainlike zippers. The bottom had a feminine band of ruffles, as one might find on a dress worn by Michelle Obama to a state dinner. The middle was a wraparound panel of fabric that, from a distance, resembled high-waisted athletic shorts. The top was a button-down shirt with a crisp collar and oversized chiffon sleeves. Like a chimera, the shirtdress was incongruous but beautiful.

The model, who had been spotted on Instagram, was a twenty-seven-year-old from West Harlem named Mello Santos. He had a thin mustache and a goatee, and as he walked down the runway he allowed the zippers holding the outfit together to start coming undone. Dark silk was peeling off his torso like a rotten-banana peel, and the garment threatened to self-destruct at any moment, revealing Santos’s many tattoos (and parts of his anatomy). From some angles, Santos looked like a cross-dressing gangster; from others, like a futuristic pop star.

Subsequent models showed off equally mongrel creations: bomber jackets recut into togas, backpacks made from tufted sofa pillows. Some models looked like bullies, others like prey. A recording of the Jamaican dancehall performer Buju Banton roared over glitchy speakers. “Circumstances made me what I am,” he sang. “Was I born a violent man?” For the finale, each model took a seat on a raised platform, as if posing for a class picture. Together, they looked scary but sexy, butch yet femme.

The collection was called Galvanize, and the idea for the runway show was to evoke the ramshackle school that Oliver briefly attended as a youth in Trinidad. To galvanize is to electrify—to shock and inspire. But it also means to coat scrap metal with a layer of zinc; it’s the poor man’s version of gilding. Galvanized steel is a common roofing material in Trinidad, and the show’s name suggested a duality about growing up in the West Indies: Oliver claimed that the education he received at the school was exceptional—“college-level English in fourth grade,” he said—but the building was decrepit. This duality extended to the students’ clothing. Oliver and his classmates modified tattered, hand-me-down uniforms so that they became fashionable looks. The Galvanize collection—manufactured in Italy from sumptuous materials but with roots in a Caribbean schoolyard—was gilded streetwear whose aim was to electrify the audience and inspire a new generation to carry the countercultural torch.

The show impressed many critics. Sally Singer, the creative digital director of Vogue, told me that Hood By Air had presented one of the season’s top collections. Cathy Horyn, the New York critic, who was seeing a Hood By Air show for the first time, wrote that the clothes represented a “shock from the future” and a “fist in your face.” She told me that Hood By Air’s startling designs were welcome mutations in an era in which high fashion is controlled by bland international conglomerates.

Several critics described the clothes in the Galvanize collection as “deconstructed.” Deconstruction—whether of a novel, a soufflé, or a shirt—means breaking down a concept into its constituent parts, often with an eye toward destabilizing our vision of the whole. In fashion, it’s traditionally associated with accentuating raw edges and functional elements like seams. Hood By Air’s collection, however, riffed on the modifications that wearersmake to those designs—details like slashing, cropping, and sagging, which typically define a look only after professionals have finished their work.

Galvanize was an homage to the expanding cohort of shoppers who use clothing to revise standard images of race and gender. (Weinraub calls such consumers “modern people.”) In blunt terms, a rich white woman can wear a Hood By Air garment and feel modern because it makes her look like a poor black man; a poor black man can wear it and feel modern because it makes him look like a rich white woman. Whereas other labels had merely broken down design, Hood By Air was breaking down identity.

A classic deconstructionist turns garments into sculptures and models into scaffolding; Martin Margiela often covered his models’ faces. In the show for the Galvanize collection, the models’ faces—adorned with splotchy, wraith-like makeup—were key visual elements. The splotches paid homage to YouTube makeup-contouring tutorials, evoking the moment just before blending tools transform a painted monster into a Kardashian.

Despite the show’s triumphant reception, it did not unfold without flaws. There was a monumental error in the execution of the choreography: the models failed to crisscross, as directed, along the venue’s multiple catwalks, with the result that much of the audience saw only half the collection. It was a mistake that might have sent a tyrant like Coco Chanel or Alexander McQueen into a rage. Oliver, though, was unfazed. After the show, he appeared briefly at a bar on the Lower East Side, and spent only fifteen seconds conferring with Weinraub about the mistake before moving on to a more vexing problem: someone had given Oliver’s mother the address of a rented penthouse where the Galvanize collection had been put together, and where a post-show gathering would be held. (The Hester Street office was too small to accommodate dozens of models.) Anne-Marie had just arrived at the penthouse with pink hair and an entourage of younger Afro-Caribbean women. Oliver was forlorn. “This is exactly the moment I want to turn up!” he moaned, rubbing his cherubic head, which was shaved, and clutching at a floor-length sweater-dress of his own design. “Now my mother is there with her friends!”

I happened to know the identity of the culprit who had supplied Anne-Marie with the party’s address. It was Weinraub, who enjoys seeing Anne-Marie at every runway show. Her own parents have never come to one.

In late March, items from the Galvanize collection began to arrive in stores. Barneys New York installed life-size silicon replicas of six Hood By Air models in its four windows on Madison Avenue. Two of the models were Hood By Air regulars named Chucky and Sunny—Angelenos whose bodies (and faces) are covered in tattoos. In the window, the fake Sunny wore a pleated pant-dress, and his mouth was held open by a guard typically used in dental surgery. Chucky wore a padlocked baby pacifier and a purple leather shroud that might look good on a Jedi. It was the first time that the windows had featured mannequins in menswear. When I stopped by to see the display, in April, crowds of tourists, joined by local one-per-centers, had gathered to gawk. Many observers reacted with baffled revulsion. Inside the store, meanwhile, none of the radical clothes worn by the mannequins were for sale. The Hood By Air racks were instead filled with logo tees. The runway pieces may have blown fashion critics’ minds, but it was the T-shirts that had changed the way people dressed.

Leilah Weinraub studied film as a graduate student at Bard. Before joining Hood By Air, she had no experience in business. Her official title is C.E.O., but she told me that the designation is “fictional.” She recoils at any suggestion that she is Oliver’s Pierre Bergé—the commanding executive who helped Yves Saint Laurent become an international brand. She took the title of C.E.O. in part so that she would be taken as seriously as a man would be: “If I were just Shayne’s friend, and a woman, and me, people would just be, like, ‘O.K., bitch, get the fuck out of the way.’ ”

As Hood By Air has expanded into a collective, she explained, everyone with authority is essentially a creative director—even if, like her, they don’t literally design clothes. The early phases of the label’s design process take place in group texts that unfurl over weeks. For the Galvanize collection, eight employees contributed to what she calls a “running personal diary.” In addition, the label has an iCloud folder for sharing found images—Hood By Air’s equivalent of a mood board. Weinraub wouldn’t let me examine the entire folder for the collection, but she sent me a selection of the materials. There were photographs of Ike and Tina Turner, a jpeg of Aunt Viv, from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” and a picture of a Chinese acupuncturist who stuck two thousand and eight needles in his head, in honor of the 2008 Summer Olympics. “It’s memes,” Paul Cupo, the fashion director, explained to me. “It’s never really literal—you’ll never see a jacket on our reference board.” In 2015, when Women’s Wear Dailyasked Hood By Air for an “inspiration photo,” the label sent back a screenshot of porn.

Weinraub is one of only a few lesbians in high fashion. (Others include Patricia Field and J. Crew’s Jenna Lyons.) She grew up in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, the daughter of an African-American textile designer from Compton and a Jewish pediatrician from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She is small with squinty eyes, broad shoulders, and an almond-shaped face. The skin around her eyes is darker in tone; these raccoon-like circles are so formidable and stylish, and presented with such aplomb, that strangers often can’t decide whether the coloring is congenital or cosmetic.

Rebellious from the start, Weinraub ran away from home several times as a teen-ager. In response, she claims, her parents threatened to put her in foster care. (Her parents deny this.) As a compromise, Weinraub went to high school in Israel, through an exchange program.

After a year, Weinraub returned to L.A., legally emancipated herself, and looked for a job. Her uncle knew a buyer at Ron Herman, an upscale clothing store, and helped Weinraub secure a shopgirl position. “It was in Brentwood,” she recalls. “There would be kids shopping there that were my same age. I hated it.” She soon took a job at Maxfield, a boutique with a more progressive bent. Its owner asked her to help oversee the books section, where she befriended a regular who liked to linger in the store and discuss topics such as slavery, America, and Judaism. It was the director Tony Kaye, who had just made a film about a white supremacist, “American History X.”

One day, Weinraub saw Kaye’s face on the cover of a magazine. She read an interview inside and noticed something: many of Kaye’s answers borrowed language that she remembered using during their conversations at Maxfield. Weinraub sensed an opportunity. She called Kaye and said, “I want to do this for you full time. I’ll be your voice, I’ll answer all your questions, I’ll do your research.” There was a catch: Weinraub was feuding with her family again, and she needed money to pursue higher education. She told Kaye, “If you send me to college, I’ll be your professional student, and you can own all my papers.” Kaye agreed, and began paying her tuition when she enrolled at Antioch College, in Ohio. When Weinraub returned to L.A. for breaks, she assisted Kaye on commercial shoots and chauffeured him around the city. The arrangement lasted until Kaye got a girlfriend who demanded an end to the tuition payments.

Kaye famously lost control of “American History X” in the editing suite, when New Line Cinema allowed Ed Norton, the film’s lead actor, to do the final cut. (Kaye disavowed the version that was released.) The incident left a lasting impression on Weinraub: if you don’t control celebrities, they’ll end up controlling you. She was happy to leave people like A$AP Rocky behind. As she put it, she preferred to go it alone and make Hood By Air’s “own world happen.” She was adamant that she would not temper the label’s provocations. “People are into high concepts and respond well to them,” she assured me. “People want drama. They love it.”

The penthouse that Hood By Air rented in the weeks before the Galvanize show had cathedral ceilings, a vast terrace, and an eight-person hot tub overlooking the Lower East Side. An apparent extravagance, the penthouse was leased in order to save money on hotel rooms by providing a live-and-work space for collaborators flying to New York. This frugal-luxury strategy would succeed, though, only if the palatial digs survived the week intact. (The label has a history of losing hotel damage deposits.) To keep the proceedings professional, alcohol was banned from the penthouse until the work was finished.

Five days before the Penn Plaza Pavilion show, I visited the penthouse, which was fragrant with expensive leathers and gleaming with racks of lustrous silks. Models began to arrive, lining up like supplicants to be dressed by the label’s clergy. Hirakish, a twenty-two-year-old African-American artist and musician from New Orleans, was one of the season’s most charismatic new models. He was walleyed and skeletal—you could see every bone in his cranium. For the show, he was to be dressed in a slashed wedding gown and accessorized with a strip of gauze affixed to his forehead, as if he had just survived a street fight. He was in drag, but the effect wasn’t campy: he looked mutilated but threatening, like a zombie. Hirakish had moved to New York a month earlier, after breaking up with his girlfriend, and this was his first fashion show. “This is what I dreamed of,” he confided, gazing at the penthouse’s occupants, who included several d.j.s whom he followed on Instagram. “This is the modern-day Andy Warhol.” (I never heard the principals of Hood By Air compare their workplace to the Factory. Instead, they referred to the label as a “family company.”)

As evening fell, I spoke with Ian Isiah, Hood By Air’s “global brand ambassador” and an in-house muse. Isiah can pull off the label’s clothes with confidence—or, as Oliver puts it, with “a lot of swag.” Isiah wears the brand exclusively, and between runway shows one of his responsibilities is to attend events where he will be photographed. He also coaches celebrities on how to wear Hood By Air properly. Six feet tall, he shaves slits in his eyebrows and styles his hair in tendril-like dreads.

Isiah went out to the terrace. Disrobing and getting into the hot tub, he said, “Now, this is a fashion interview.”

Isiah had been helping to recruit other models for the Galvanize show. The label, he said, had sought to create a unique tableau: “Black doll-babies. Transgender babies. Little skater boyish-boys. Boys with rashes on their face—less albino, more scabs everywhere. Braces! There’s a braces girl on the board.”

Isiah told me that the more established fashion brands were trying to keep current by copying Hood By Air’s streetcasting (and, sometimes, by poaching models with the promise of more money). But he wasn’t worried about the competition. “All the grannies of the ten-year anniversaries”—he was disparaging Alexander Wang, who was celebrating his label’s decennial—“are trying to latch on to what’s happening now, which you can’t do by getting a random model. You need a culture behind it.”

Oliver appeared, and Isiah urged him to get in the tub.

“What, you want me to do Mariah?” Oliver asked, alluding to Mariah Carey’s passion for swimming fully clothed.

“Yas!” Isiah squealed. “We got a dryer.”

Oliver decided to forgo clothes. A casting associate named Walter Pearce walked onto the terrace. A frenetic twenty-year-old with sixteen thousand Instagram followers, Pearce looked like a member of the cast of “Kids,” but he had come to the Lower East Side by way of Chappaqua, where he graduated from Horace Greeley High School. Like Oliver, he had dropped out of F.I.T.

“I started interning for Shayne when I was fifteen,” Pearce said. “They literally raised me.” A gifted streetcaster, Pearce was responsible for bringing on Hirakish, the New Orleans model. “He’s a legend,” Pearce declared. “And it’s not only because his look is unreal; it’s because he lives the life—he’s a maniac.”

Oliver confirmed that Hirakish was “extremely H.B.A.” He grabbed a towel and took a seat on a nearby bench. “I have conversations with him, and I’m, like, ‘Whoa, his mind is so insane—I want to work with this person.’ ” Hirakish’s mind was so insane that, later that night, he urinated inside the penthouse elevator. The mishap panicked Oliver until he discovered that there were no security cameras to record the violation. Oliver admired Hirakish’s uninhibited spirit, and felt a duty to place people like him under Hood By Air’s wing: “It’s almost, like, not orphanage-y, but I want to see these energies succeed.” (Later, he added, “New energy is very intimidating—it rewrites what has been created. We all get jaded by experiences in life, but I try to create environments for younger kids.”)

Pearce, who is gaunt and pale, got into the hot tub, and Isiah cooed, “Oooh, we got trade in the water.”

Cupo and Akeem Smith, the stylist, joined the group, along with several interns. Weinraub eventually got in, too. Many of the people in the hot tub, if viewed from behind, would be hard to identify in terms of race and gender. Oliver and Weinraub had complained to me that fashion critics often described their work with terms like “unisex” and “gender-fluid,” which evoked shapeless androgynes. Oliver hated “unisex,” because the word was unsexy. Weinraub had a similar problem with “gender-fluid”—in her estimation, it was “not hot.” She had come up with a syntactical solution, though. “You can say it differently, and it could be hot,” she said. “Like, ‘Wait, I smell gender fluid.’ ‘I’d like a little gender for my coffee.’ ”

By now, more than a dozen Hood By Air employees were in the hot tub, and the gathering looked at once absurd and utopian: creative directors splashing and laughing alongside their junior associates. At one point, Weinraub spoke ruefully of how Hood By Air was perceived by outsiders. She said, “People are, like, ‘The super-gender-bending, nonconforming, all-day-all-night party that’s coming at you so windy! Who’s a boy? Who’s a girl?’ Then you’re embarrassed by your own life.” ♦

[fratboykate]

You say white bitches age like curdled dairy, are disgusting, need to die... and yet. Yet you still love ADC, EJT, and Olson. Nvm the plethora of etc. Js, hate on the gross ass ppl who deserve it and not on the race as a whole. Same as the white supremacists who hide behind "I'm not racist! I have a (insert) friend!". I know, I KNOW, you think you're exempt or better. But you're not. You're just the flip side of the coin

Me, joking: "Damn, white people age like cheese lol"

Me, while it's statistically proven that the overwhelming majority of white people voted for a fascist and still support him despite the fact that he's a lying, racist, xenophobic and misogynistic piece of shit: "Damn, white folk are the worst lol"

Me, when white people really and truly did put a lying sack and a LITERAL rapist in both the White House and the highest court in the land: "DAMN, WHITE PEEPS WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ARE YOU DOING? lol"

Me, while the obvious majority of straight white men and women in Congress and the House try to eradicate affordable healthcare/any and all type of government subsidies to reward the billionaires, while they rip women of their reproductive rights, while they make LGBT second class humans, while they squelch any sort of dissention by making protesting illegal, while they disenfrancize minorities and gerrymander in a bid to retain power at all costs, while they militarize a police force that is not only known for killing brown + black bodies but is also notorious for having been infiltrated by real life white supremacists, while they keep toddlers in cages, and while they try their damndest to purge America of all immigrants: "Damn, old straight white people need to hurry up go extinct already lol"

Me, while straight white men continue to be terrorists who go on killing sprees of women, brown people, black people, Jews, Muslims, and anything else that doesn't look like them: "Damn, straight white men ain't shit lol"

Me, while white people commit the ever rising tide of hate crimes around the world: "Damn, them white folk at it again lol"

Me, while white people are out there being actual nazis: "Damn, white peeps really do fucking suck lol"

One of you flaming demons: "bUt WhY Do YoU bELieVe In ThE gEnOcIdE oF tHe WhItE rACe YoU bLaCk SuPrEmAcIsT???!!!"

It's astounding to see the lengths some of you will go to discredit minorities directly pointing fingers and assigning blame to those responsible while highlighting the systems that are designed to not only keep them at a disadvantage but in addition to that literally kill them. We all know it's white men and women who do this. Who am I going to refer to? The Tooth Fairy? Would it make you more comfortable if I said: "Shit, there goes the fucking Easter Bunny again with the racist and misogynisct legislation!!! Ahhhh crap, Big Foot went and called the nazis 'really fine people' again!!! Shucks! What will we ever do about that? Nothing I guess since someone's feathers might get a little rustled." Fuck out of here with that nonsense.

It's white people who are trying to cling to power all around the world in the most egregious ways and when you see history starting to repeat itself you call a spade a spade because we don't have the time to dance around it. We won't stop the rise of fascism, racism, and xenophobia seemingly everywhere now while beating around the bush. That's not going to fix it. You attack the problem head on and the first thing you need to do is call out those responsible so maybe they fucking do better next time. Go open any legitimate news source you want and look at where the far right is rising and who is voting for them: SURPRISE, ITS WHITE PEOPLE! But no, apparently me referring to the verifiable truth is just as bad as chanting "we will not be replaced" while marching down the street with tiki torches. Obviously.

Are there decent white folk? Of course, but facts seem to prove they are currently outnumbered. They exist but I don't need to throw a party for them. There's no reason to celebrate basic human decency. Congratulations, you don't want to kill me. Have a cookie.

These whataboutisms and false equivalencies are what got us here in the first place and I hope you are very aware that your white self is absolutely part of the problem so next time, do better.

[batsandbloodmoons]

Pagan Origins: Christmas

WARNING: LONG POST

So I’ve always had a love for knowing why we as people do certain things, it’s kind of a strange marriage between history and psychology. This really blossomed when I became a witch and started working on my craft. As part of developing my Sabbat traditions, and I plan on celebrating the pagan origins of Christmas as well as Yule, I figure I should learn about the history of them.

One of the things that baffled me were the major holidays that are celebrated in the United States. I was raised Roman Catholic, and have long since became disillusioned with the Church and ultimately switched to paganism. But I remember as a child, wondering about why we gave and received presents on Christmas when it was supposed to be Jesus’s birthday, why did we believe in a jolly fat man that delivered the presents, and why did we have a tree in the house? When I posed these questions to my family as a child, I never got a satisfactory answer... until now.

*Note* the following is for how Christmas is celebrated in the United States and are not universal to all cultures. Nor is it a hit at any religion.

❄️☀️🎄🎁🎅🎁🎄☀️❄️

GIFT-GIVING AND MERRYMENT

This custom started as far back as Ancient Rome and thier festival of Saturnalia. Originally, a farmers’ festival that was dedicated to Saturn, the god of agriculture and the harvest. According to Roman Mythology, Saturn was a titan and the father of Cronus, thus grandfather to Jupiter. Saturn was eventually overthrown by Cronus and moved west into the Italian peninsula. He then taught the people he meant there how to farm the land. In Greek Mythology, Saturn doesn’t have a name.

Saturnalia starts on December 17th and lasts until the 24th. Homes are decorated in wreaths and greenery. Feasts and parties werr thrown. People would overeat, overdrink and burst into songs in the streets (origin of caroling). Originally, the festival was only one day but grow longer and longer over time. By the time Rome converted to Christianity, Saturnalia now incorporated other festivals including Sigillaria, the day of gift giving which was on 12/23, and Died Natalie Solis Invicti, the birthday of the sun god Sol Invictus, which was on 12/25 because that is when it is noticeable that day is getting longer.

Saturnalia was so popular with the people that cancelling it was unthinkable when the Christian Coversion happened. So Saturnalia was transformed into a Christian holy day instead by replacing the sun god with baby Jesus. Despite the fact, that the Bible gave references to the time of Jesus’s birth being around the lambing season, in other words springtime. (bbc.co.uk)

SANTA CLAUS

Santa Claus has a number of origin stories and a number of different forms depending on the country in question. This will focus on the American version of Santa.

He can be traced back to a monk named Nicholas, later St. Nicholas by the Church, who was born around 280 A.D., in modern day Turkey. According to St. Nick’s legend, he was born into a wealthy family but gave away all of his possessions to travel the country and help the sick and the poor. One of his best know of these stories was when he raised enough money to cover the dowries of three sisters so they could marry instead of being sold into slavery or prostitution by thier father who couldn’t afford to care for them.

Over the course of the centuries, he became the protector of children and sailors. He died on December 6th, which became the day of his feast. It is also said to a lucky day for making a big purchase or getting married. By the time of Renaissance, he was the most popular saint in Europe and remained so during the Protestant Reformation, especially in Holland.

St. Nick was introduced into mainstream American culture at the end of the 18th century. In December 1773 and 1774, a New York newspaper reported that groups of Dutch families have gathered to celebrate St.Nick on the anniversary of his death.

The name Santa Claus evolved from his Dutch nickname, Sinster Klaad, which is a shortened form of Sint Nikolaas.

As his popularity grew, St. Nick was described as everything from a rascal with a blue three-cornered hat, red waistcoat, and yellow stockings to a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a “huge pair of Flemish Trunk hose.”

The Santa that most Americans know today didn’t emerge until 1822, when Clement Clarke Moore, an Episcopal minister, wrote a poem about Santa. He described Santa flying from house to house on Christmas Eve in a sleigh led by eight reindeer, leaving presents for deserving children. He gave Santa the ability to magically squeeze down the chimney and his love of milk and cookies.

In 1881, Santa got his iconic look from political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who used Moore’s poem as inspiration. His cartoon depicted Santa as rotund, cheerful man with a full, white beard, while holding a sack laden with toys. It was Nast who gave him his famous red suit trimmed with white fur, the Northpole workshop, the elves, and his wife, Mrs. Claus.

Other versions of St. Nicholas:

-Christkind or Kris Kringle was believed to deliver presents to well-behaved Swiss and German Children. Meaning “Christ Child”, Christkind is an angel-like often accompanied by St. Nick on Holiday missions.

- In Scandinavia, a jolly elf named Jultomten was thought to deliver gifts in a sleigh drawn by goats.

-English legend says that Fathrt Christmas visits each home on Christmas Eve to fill children’s stocking with treats.

-Pere Noel is responsible for filling the shoes of French children with treats that were left by the fireplace.

-In Russia, it is believed that an elderly woman named Babouschka purposely gave the three wise men the wrong directions to Bethlehem so that they couldn’t find Jesus. Later, she felt remorseful, but could not find the men to unto the damage. To this day on, 1/5, she visits Russian children leaving gifts at their bedsides in hope that one of them is the baby Jesus and she will be forgiven.

-In Italy, a woman called La Befana, a kindly witch who rides a broomstick down the chimneys of Italian homes to deliver toys into the stocking of lucky children. (History.com)

RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSE REINDEER

Rudolph was created over a hundred years after the other eight reindeer, in the 1920’s, by Robert L. May, a copywriter at the Montgomery Ward department store.

In 1939, May wrote a Christmas-themed story to bring holiday traffic into his store, which is the story Americans know today. In 1949, one of May’s friends, Johnny Marks, wrote a short song based on the poem. It was recorded by Gene Autry. The television movie, narrated by Burl Ives, was released in 1964. (History.com)

CHRISTMAS TREES

Plants and trees that remained green year had a special meaning for ancient people. One myth I heard, but couldn’t find a source for, for the reason Evergreens stay green was that. During the first winter, the sun spoke to the trees and told them that he would be resting for a few months and told them not to loose faith in his return. Months later the sun had not returned yet, many trees and plants began to lost faith and dropped thier leaves in thier despair. All except the Evergreens. When the Sun finally returned he saw what had happened, disappointed in those who lost faith, he cursed them to lose thier leaves every year while the Evergreens were allowed to keep their needles.

Another belief is that Evergreens would keep away witches, ghosts, evil spirits and illness when hung in the home.

In the Northern hemisphere, the winter solstice is the shortest day and longest night of the year, which falls on December 21st and 22nd. Many ancient people believed that the sun was a god and the winter came very year because the sun had become sick and weak. They celebrated the solstice because it meant that at last the sun would began to regain strength. Evergreens remind them of all the plants that would grow again when the sun was strong and summer would return.

Even ancient Egyptians worshipped the sun, in the form of Ra. At the solstice, when Ra began to recover from the illness, the Egyptians filled their homes with green palm rushes to symbolized the triumph of life over death.

Early Romans knew that the solstice meant that soon farms and orchards would be green and fruitful. They decorated their homes and temples with Evergreens. In Northern Europe, the Celtic Druids also decorated their temples with Evergreens as a symbol of everlasting life. Vikings would bring whole trees inside to preserve the spirit of nature.

However Germany is credited with starting the Christmas tree tradition as we know it. In the 16th century, Christians would build pyramids out of wood and decorate them with evergreens and candles. It was widely believed that Martin Luther, the 16th century Protestant reformer, first added lighted candles to a tree. The story goes that while walking home one winter evening, composing a sermon, he was awed by the brilliance of the stars twinkling amidst the evergreen trees. To recreate this for his family, he hung a tree’s branched with lighted candles.

In 1659 the General Court of Massachusettsenacted a law that made any observance of Christmas illegal because Christmas was too pagan in thier Puritan eyes. People were fined for hanging decorations, singing carols, decorating trees or any other joyful expression. That is until the 19th century when an influx of German and Irish immigrants came to America.

Before the then, Americans found Christmas trees to be an oddity m. The first record of one being on display was in the 1830’s by German immigrants in Pennsylvania, although the trees had already been a long standing tradition in German households. But as late as 1840’s, Christmas trees were still seen as pagan symbols and not accepted by most Americans.

That changed in 1846, when Queen Victoria and her German husband, Prince Albert were illustrated in a London newspaper, posing with thier children around a Christmas tree. Due to her popularity, Christmas trees became fashionable through out British and American societies.

By the 1890’s, Christmas ornaments were arriving from Germany and the tree’s popularity was on the rise in the U.S. It was noted that Europeans used small trees about, 4 feet in height, while Americans liked tall trees reaching from the ceiling to the floor.

The early 20th century saw Americans decorating their trees with homemade ornaments, while German-Americans continued to use apples, nuts, and marzipan cookies. The invention of electricity brought about Christmas lights, allowing trees to glow for days in end. With this, Christmas trees began to appear in town squares across the country and having a Christmas tree in the home became an American tradition. (History.com)

MISTLETOE

Mistletoe is actually a poisonous plant and its use as a peaceful symbol is rooted in Norse Mythology.

Baldr, the son of Frigg and Odin, was one of the most beloved of the gods. But he was plagued by dreams of his own death. So in an effort to protect her son, Frigg made everything: plant, animal, or rock, living in or growing in the earth, swear never to harm Baldr. As a result, he became invincible and the other gods began to use him for target practice because he always survived. But Loki, being his usual mischievous self, realize that mistletoe had been missed by Frigg, as it didn’t actually grow on the ground. He fashioned a weapon from some mistletoe. Whether that weapon was an arrow, dart, or spear depends on which version is told. But Loki persuades Hod, Baldr’s blind brother, to strike Baldr with the mistletoe weapon during a target practice session. This ensured that Hod took the immediate blame. Baldr died from a single wound and he was mourned deeply by all, especially his mother. Some versions say he was brought back to life, but most agree about what happened after his death, that Frigg‘ tears became mistletoe’s pearlescent berries, and in her grief, Frigg decreaded that mistletoe shall become a symbol of peace and love. Which is why now, people kiss under it today. (Mistletoe.org.uk)

HOLLY

Holly is another evergreen that is believed to ward off evil spirits when planted outside the house. When brought indoors, it increases fertility. Holly is believed to be linked with masculinity and most people use the holly bushes that produce red berries. But it is female holly bushes that produce said berries. Ivy is often the female equivalent to holly’s masculinity.

WREATH

It was difficult to find a definitive source about wreaths but the general consensus is that wreaths were made in a circle out of evergreens (holly, Laurel, or pine) to represent either the sun and life, or the wheel of the year. In fact the word Yule is believed to have stemmed from the Norse word “Jol” meaning wheel.

CANDY CANES

These are entirely Christian and were invented in 1670 when a German choirmaster at the Cologne Cathedral bent all white sugar sticks into canes for the children who attended the ceremonies. The shape is believe to represent a shepherd’s cane or the letter “J” for Jesus. After the advent of mass production, in the 1950’s, the red stripes were added. The red represented the blood of Jesus and the white was his purity. The three finer stripes were said to be the Holy Trinity (God, Jesus, and the Joly Spirit). The hardness is to symbolize the solid foundation of the Church. The peppermint flavor is supposed to stem from an herb called hyssop because, according to the Old Testament, hyssop was used to symbolize the purity of Jesus and his sacrifice. (Candyhistory.net)

ANGELS AND STARS

These refers to the debate of the tree toppers, angels or stars. The angel is represent the angel Gabriel, who came to Mary to ask her to bear God’s son, Jesus. The star refers to the Star of Bethlehem that wise men supposedly followed to find.

However since it was discussed above that Christmas lights are representations of the nighttime stars, then it could be argue that the star on top of the tree and being the largest, could be the sun, as it is the closest thus largest star to Earth.

🎄Please feel free to add to this as I tried to get most famous symbols of Christmas!! 🎄

[moonwalkertrance]

Trump’s Caravan Hysteria Led to This

The president and his supporters insisted that several thousand Honduran migrants were a looming menace—and the Pittsburgh gunman took that seriously.

On Tuesday, October 16, President Donald Trump started tweeting.

“The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!”

“We have today informed the countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador that if they allow their citizens, or others, to journey through their borders and up to the United States, with the intention of entering our country illegally, all payments made to them will STOP (END)!”

Vice President Mike Pence also tweeted:

“Spoke to President Hernandez of Honduras about the migrant caravan heading to the U.S. Delivered strong message from @POTUS: no more aid if caravan is not stopped. Told him U.S. will not tolerate this blatant disregard for our border & sovereignty.”

The apparent impetus for this outrage was a segment on Fox News that morning that detailed a migrant caravan thousands of miles away in Honduras. The caravan, which began sometime in mid-October, is made up of refugees fleeing violence in their home country. Over the next few weeks, Trump did his best to turn the caravan into a national emergency. Trump falsely told his supporters that there were “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” in the caravan, a claim that had no basis in fact and that was meant to imply that terrorists were hiding in the caravan—one falsehood placed on another. Defense Secretary James Mattis ordered more troops to the border. A Fox News host took it upon herself to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsenwhether there was “any scenario under which if people force their way across the border they could be shot at,” to which Nielsen responded, “We do not have any intention right now to shoot at people.” 

Pence told Fox News on Friday, “What the president of Honduras told me is that the caravan was organized by leftist organizations, political activists within Honduras, and he said it was being funded by outside groups, and even from Venezuela … So the American people, I think, see through this—they understand this is not a spontaneous caravan of vulnerable people.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account “confirmed” that within the caravan are people who are “gang members or have significant criminal histories,” without offering evidence of any such ties. Trump sought to blame the opposition party for the caravan’s existence. “Every time you see a Caravan, or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our Country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws!” Trump tweeted on October 22. “Remember the Midterms! So unfair to those who come in legally.”

In the right-wing fever swamps, where the president’s every word is worshipped, commenters began amplifying Trump’s exhortations with new details. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida wondered whether George Soros—the wealthy Jewish philanthropist whom Trump and several members of the U.S. Senate blamed for the protests against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and who was recently targeted with a bomb—was behind the migrant caravan. NRATV, the propaganda organ of the National Rifle Association, linked two Republican obsessions, voter fraud and immigration. Chuck Holton told NRATV’s viewers that Soros was sending the caravan to the United States so the migrants could vote: “It’s telling that a bevy of left-wing groups are partnering with a Hungarian-born billionaire and the Venezuelan government to try to influence the 2018 midterms by sending Honduran migrants north in the thousands.” On CNN, the conservative commentator Matt Schlapp pointedly asked the anchor Alisyn Camerota, “Who’s paying for the caravan? Alisyn, who’s paying for the caravan?,” before later answering his own question: “Because of the liberal judges and other people that intercede, including George Soros, we have too much chaos at our southern border.” On Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, one guest said, “These individuals are not immigrants—these are people that are invading our country,” as another guest asserted they were seeking “the destruction of American society and culture.”

In the meantime, much of the mainstream press abetted Trump’s effort to make the midterm election a referendum on the caravan. Popular news podcasts devoted entire episodes to the caravan. It remained on the front pages of major media websites. It was an overwhelming topic of conversation on cable news, where Trumpists freely spread disinformation about the threat the migrants posed, while news anchors displayed exasperation over their false claims, only to invite them back on the next day’s newscast to do it all over again.

In reality, the caravan was thousands of miles and weeks away from the U.S. border, shrinking in size, and unlikely to reach the U.S. before the election. If the migrants reach the U.S., they have the right under U.S. law to apply for asylum at a port of entry. If their claims are not accepted, they will be turned away. There is no national emergency; there is no ominous threat. There is only a group of desperate people looking for a better life, who have a right to request asylum in the United States and have no right to stay if their claims are rejected. Trump is reportedly aware that his claims about the caravan are false. An administration official told the Daily Beast simply, “It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate … this is the play.” The “play” was to demonize vulnerable people with falsehoods in order to frighten Trump’s base to the polls.

Nevertheless, some took the claims of the president and his allies seriously. On Saturday morning, Shabbat morning, a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people. The massacre capped off a week of terrorism, in which one man mailed bombs to nearly a dozen Trump critics and another killed two black people in a grocery store after failing to force his way into a black church.  

Before committing the Tree of Life massacre, the shooter, who blamed Jews for the caravan of “invaders” and who raged about it on social media, made it clear that he was furious at hias, founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish group that helps resettle refugees in the United States. He shared posts on Gab, a social-media site popular with the alt-right, expressing alarm at the sight of “massive human caravans of young men from Honduras and El Salvador invading America thru our unsecured southern border.” And then he wrote, “hias likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

The people killed on Saturday were killed for trying to make the world a better place, as their faith exhorts them to do. The history of the Jewish people is one of displacement, statelessness, and persecution. What groups like hias do in helping refugees, they do with the knowledge that comes from a history of being the targets of demagogues who persecute minorities in pursuit of power.

Ordinarily, a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower. But ordinarily, politicians don’t praise supporters who have mercilessly beaten a Latino man as “very passionate.” Ordinarily, they don’t offer to pay supporters’ legal bills if they assault protesters on the other side. They don’t praise acts of violence against the media. They don’t defend neo-Nazi rioters as “fine people.” They don’t justify sending bombs to their critics by blaming the media for airing criticism. Ordinarily, there is no historic surgein anti-Semitism, much of it targeted at Jewish critics, coinciding with a politician’s rise. And ordinarily, presidents do not blatantly exploit their authority in an effort to terrify white Americans into voting for their party. For the past few decades, most American politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, have been careful not to urge their supporters to take matters into their own hands. Trump did everything he could to fan the flames, and nothing to restrain those who might take him at his word.

Many of Trump’s defenders argue that his rhetoric is mere shtick—that his attacks, however cruel, aren’t taken 100 percent seriously by his supporters. But to make this argument is to concede that following Trump’s statements to their logical conclusion could lead to violence against his targets, and it is only because most do not take it that way that the political violence committed on Trump’s behalf is as limited as it currently is.

The Tree of Life shooter criticized Trump for not being racist or anti-Semitic enough. But with respect to the caravan, the shooter merely followed the logic of the president and his allies: He was willing to do whatever was necessary to prevent an “invasion” of Latinos planned by perfidious Jews, a treasonous attempt to seek “the destruction of American society and culture.”

The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election. There is no political gesture, no public statement, and no alteration in rhetoric or behavior that will change this fact. The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day. But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread and that his followers chose to amplify.

As for those who aided the president in his propaganda campaign, who enabled him to prey on racist fears to fabricate a national emergency, who said to themselves, “This is the play”? Every single one of them bears some responsibility for what followed. Their condemnations of anti-Semitism are meaningless. Their thoughts and prayers are worthless. Their condolences are irrelevant. They can never undo what they have done, and what they have done will never be forgotten. 

[rotationalsymmetry]

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.

[newstfionline]

Saturday, October 24, 2020

Migration has plummeted during the pandemic (Economist) If there is one thing that people remember about the covid-19 pandemic, it is the experience of sheltering in place. Those looking to move abroad have had little choice but to stay put, too. A new report from the OECD, a think-tank, shows that travel restrictions introduced in response to the pandemic caused migration to rich countries to fall by half in the first half of the year, compared with 2019. The sharpest declines occurred in East Asia and Oceania. Rich countries there have succeeded better than most at stopping the spread of covid-19. This is in part because they were quick to recognise the threat and institute strict travel restrictions. Some countries in the region, including Japan, South Korea and New Zealand have just about stopped accepting new immigrants entirely.

Couples doing fine (Washington Post) While lots of the early pandemic and quarantine led to speculation about a spike in divorces that would ensue following couples being crammed into close quarters for extended periods, couples are actually doing pretty okay according to the latest edition of the American Family Survey: 58 percent of married men and women aged 18 to 55 said the pandemic made them appreciate their spouse more; while 8 percent said that the pandemic weakened their commitment to one another, 51 percent said it’d deepened it. The numbers bear it out too: five states report divorce stats in real time, and on balance filings are down for 2020. Year-to-date, divorce filings are down 19 percent in Florida, 13 percent in Rhode Island, 12 percent in Oregon and 9 percent in Missouri. Only Arizona, as of now, is up.

Faulty password security (Foreign Policy) A Dutch “white hat”—or ethical hacker—claims to have logged in to the Twitter account of U.S. President Donald Trump … simply by guessing his password. Victor Gevers, a security researcher, discovered the vulnerability last Friday before alerting U.S. security authorities. Gevers allegedly gained access using the password “maga2020!” but did not succumb to the temptation of tweeting to the president’s 87 million followers. Gevers attributes the lack of account security to Trump’s age. “‘Trump is over 70—elderly people often switch off two-step verification because they find it too complicated. My own mother, for instance.”

IMF concerned over post-COVID social unrest across Latin America (Reuters) The International Monetary Fund is concerned that social unrest will make a comeback in “lots of countries” across Latin America once the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, a top IMF official said on Thursday. Economies across Latin America and the Caribbean are forecast to contract as a group by 8.1% this year, with an uneven 2021 bounce at just 3.6%, and most countries are not seen returning to pre-COVID output levels until 2023, the Fund said earlier on Thursday. “Some of the determinants of social unease are going to worsen and that generates our concern for the region, for lots of countries in the region,” Alejandro Werner, the Fund’s director for the Western Hemisphere, said in an interview with Reuters. “Coming out of the pandemic, we will have a level of economic activity and employment that will be much lower than before, a level of poverty and income distribution that is worse,” he added. Protests that sometimes turned violent rocked countries including Chile, Ecuador and Colombia even before the pandemic hit, fueled by anger over inequality, corruption and government austerity policies.

In hard-hit Peru, worry mounts over both COVID-19 and dengue (AP) PUCALLPA, Peru—Two of Lidia Choque’s close family members had already gotten sick with the new coronavirus when the mosquitos arrived. The 53-year-old woman lives in a wooden house near the airport of a Peruvian city in the Amazon rainforest. City fumigators usually visit several times during the rainy season to eliminate the pests, but this year, because of the pandemic, they were absent. When she went to a hospital after coming down with a fever and body aches, doctors delivered a double diagnosis: COVID-19 and dengue. “I couldn’t even walk,” she said. As Peru grapples with one the world’s worst SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks, another virus is starting to raise alarm: dengue. Health officials have reported over 35,000 cases this year, concentrated largely in the Amazon. The rise comes amid an overall dip in the number of new daily coronavirus infections, though authorities worry a second wave could strike as dengue cases rise.

French PM says 2nd virus wave is here, vastly extends curfew (AP) French Prime Minister Jean Castex announced on Thursday a vast extension of the nightly curfew that is intended to curb the spiraling spread of the coronavirus, saying “the second wave is here.” The curfew imposed in eight regions of France last week, including Paris and its suburbs, is being extended to 38 more regions and Polynesia starting Friday at midnight, Castex said. It is likely to last six weeks before a review, he said. The extension means that 46 million of France’s 67 million people will be under 9 p.m.-6 a.m. curfews that prohibit them from being out and about during those hours except for limited reasons, such as walking a dog, traveling to and from work and catching a train or flight.

Putin: Russia-China military alliance can’t be ruled out (AP) Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday there is no need for a Russia-China military alliance now, but noted it could be forged in the future. Putin’s statement signaled deepening ties between Moscow and Beijing amid growing tensions in their relations with the United States. The Russian leader also made a strong call for extending the last remaining arms control pact between Moscow and Washington. Asked during a video conference with international foreign policy experts Thursday whether a military union between Moscow and Beijing was possible, Putin replied that “we don’t need it, but, theoretically, it’s quite possible to imagine it.” Russia and China have hailed their “strategic partnership,” but so far rejected any talk about the possibility of their forming a military alliance. Russia has sought to develop stronger ties with China as its relations with the West sank to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, accusations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and other rifts.

China hopes for change if Biden wins, but little likely (AP) Chinese leaders hope Washington will tone down conflicts over trade, technology and security if Joe Biden wins the Nov. 3 presidential election. But any shift is likely to be in style, not substance, as frustration with Beijing increases across the American political spectrum. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and their constituents seem disinclined to adopt a softer approach toward China, possibly presaging more strife ahead, regardless of the election’s outcome. U.S.-Chinese relations have plunged to their lowest level in decades amid an array of conflicts over the coronavirus pandemic, technology, trade, security and spying. Despite discord on so many other fronts, both parties are critical of Beijing’s trade record and stance toward Hong Kong, Taiwan and religious and ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the ruling Communist Party has detained Muslims in political re-education camps. The American public is equally negative. Two-thirds of people surveyed in March by the Pew Research Center had “unfavorable views” of China, the highest since Pew started asking in 2005.

Myanmar’s second lockdown drives hunger in city slums (Reuters) After the first wave of coronavirus hit Myanmar in March, 36-year-old Ma Suu closed her salad stall and pawned her jewelry and gold to buy food to eat. During the second wave, when the government issued a stay-home order in September for Yangon, Ma Suu shut her stall again and sold her clothes, plates and pots. With nothing left to sell, her husband, an out of work construction laborer, has resorted to hunting for food in the open drains by the slum where they live on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city. “People are eating rats and snakes,” Ma Suu said through tears. “Without an income, they need to eat like that to feed their children.”

Bloated public salaries at heart of Iraq’s economic woes (AP) BAGHDAD—Long-time Iraqi civil servant Qusay Abdul-Amma panicked when his monthly salary was delayed. Days of waiting turned to weeks. He defaulted on rent and other bills. A graphic designer for the Health Ministry, he uses about half his salary to pay his rent of nearly 450,000 Iraqi dinars a month, roughly $400. If he fails to pay twice in a row his landlord will evict him and his family, he fears. Iraq’s government is struggling to pay the salaries of the ever-swelling ranks of public sector employees amid an unprecedented liquidity crisis caused by low oil prices. September’s salaries were delayed for weeks, and October’s still haven’t been paid as the government tries to borrow once again from Iraq’s currency reserves. The crisis has fueled fears of instability ahead of mass demonstrations this week. The political elite have used the patronage system to entrench their power. A major part of that patronage is handing out state jobs in return for support. The result has been a threefold increase in public workers since 2004. The government pays 400% more in salaries than it did 15 years ago. Around three quarters of the state’s expenditures in 2020 go to paying for the public sector—a massive drain on dwindling finances. “Now the situation is very dangerous,” said Mohammed al-Daraji, a lawmaker on parliament’s Finance Committee.

Israel warms to Sudan (Foreign Policy) An Israeli government delegation visited Sudan on Thursday, in the latest sign of warming ties between the two countries. Israeli officials reportedly met with Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s head of state during its transitional government. Reuters reported on Thursday that Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok is ready to normalize relations with Israel as long as the country’s parliament approves the move. That approval may be some time in coming, as Sudan has yet to form a transitional parliament.

Gunfire and barricades in Guinea as President heads for third term (Reuters) Gunfire rang out across Guinea’s capital Conakry on Friday and security forces dispersed protestors after results showed President Alpha Conde winning re-election in a poll that the opposition says was unconstitutional. Conde won around twice as many votes as his nearest rival, opposition candidate Cellou Dalein Diallo, with 37 of 38 districts counted, preliminary results from the election commission showed on Thursday night. The president’s decision to run for a third term has sparked repeated protests over the past year, resulting in dozens of deaths, including at least 17 in skirmishes since Sunday’s vote. Conde says a constitutional referendum in March reset his two-term limit, but his opponents say he is breaking the law by holding onto power. Diallo’s camp said it has found evidence of fraud and will contest the result in the constitutional court.

Resentment, smoke linger in Nigeria’s streets after unrest (AP) Resentment lingered with the smell of charred tires Friday in Nigeria’s relatively calm streets after days of protests over police abuses, as authorities barely acknowledged reports of the military killing at least 12 peaceful demonstrators earlier this week. President Muhammadu Buhari in his first comments on the unrest didn’t mention the shootings that sparked international outrage, instead warning protesters against being used by “subversive elements” and “undermining national security and law and order” during a national address Thursday night. Soldiers remained in parts of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, on Friday. A 24-hour curfew had not yet been lifted. The protests turned violent Wednesday after the shooting as mobs vandalized and burned police stations, courthouses, TV stations and a hotel. Police battled angry crowds with tear gas and gunfire. The looting, gunfire, and street blockades continued Thursday.