#its the same as conservatives calling people woke

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conservatives are fringe outliers - and leftists could learn from them

The Republican Party, a coalition between Big Business farmers and turkeys who’ll vote for Christmas (Red Scare obsessed cowards, apocalyptic white nationalists, religious fanatics, etc) has fallen to its bizarre, violent, noisy radical wing, who are obsessed with policies that are completely irrelevant to the majority of Americans.

As Oliver Willis writes, the views of the radical right — which are also the policies of the GOP — are wildly out of step with the US political view:

https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/conservatives-arent-like-normal-americans

The press likes to frame American politics as “narrowly divided,” but the reality is that Republicans’ electoral victories are due to voter suppression and antimajoritarian institutions (the Senate and Electoral College, etc), not popularity. Democrats consistently outperform the GOP in national races. Dems won majorities in 1992/6, and beat the GOP in 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. The only presidential race the GOP won on popular votes since 1988 was 2004, when GW Bush eked out a plurality (not a majority).

But, as Willis says, Dems “act like it is 1984 and that they are outliers in a nation of Reagan voters,” echoing a stilted media narrative. The GOP’s platform just isn’t popular. Take the groomer panic: 71% of Americans approve of same-sex marriage. The people losing their shit about queer people are a strange, tiny minority.

Every one of the GOP’s tentpole issues is wildly unpopular: expanding access to assault rifles, banning immigration, lowering taxes on the rich, cutting social programs, forcing pregnant people to bear unwanted children, etc. This is true all the way up to the GOP’s coalescing support for Trump as their 2024 candidate. Trump has lost every popular vote he’s ever stood for, and owes his term in the Oval Office to the antimajoritarian Electoral College system, gerrymandering, and massive voter suppression.

Willis correctly points out that Dem leaders are basically “normal” center-right politicians, not radicals. And, unlike their GOP counterparts, politicians like Clinton, Obama and Biden don’t hide their disdain for the radical wing of their party. Even never-Trumper Republicans are afraid of their base. Romney declared himself “severely conservative” and McCain “put scare quotes around ‘health of the mother’ provisions for abortion rights.”

The GOP fringe imposes incredible discipline on their leaders. Take all the nonsense about “woke capitalism”: on the one hand, it’s absurd to call union-busting, tax-dodging, worker-screwing companies “woke” (even if they sell Pride flags for a couple of weeks every year).

But on the other hand? The GOP leadership have actually declared war on the biggest corporations in America, to the point that the WSJ says that “Republicans and Big Business broke up”:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-corporations-donations-pacs-9b5b202b

But America is a two-party system and there are plenty of people who’ll pull the lever for any Republican. This means that when the GOP comes under the control of its swivel-eyed loon wing, the swivel-eyed loons wield power far beyond the number of people who agree with them.

There’s an important lesson there for Dems, whose establishment is volubly proud of its independence from its voters. The Biden administration is a weirdly perfect illustration of this “independence.” The Biden admin is a kind of referee, doling out policies and appointments to its competing wings, without any coherence or consistency.

That’s how you get incredible appointments like Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division and Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureat — the progressive wing of the party bargained for these key appointments and then played their cards very well, getting incredible, hard-charging, hyper-competent fighters in those roles.

Likewise, Jared Bernstein, finally confirmed as Council of Economic Advisers chair after an interminable wrangle:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-06-16-team-biden/

And Julie Su, acting labor secretary, who just delivered a six-year contract to west coast dockworkers with 8–10% raises in the first year, paid retroactively for the year they worked without a contract:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/14/statement-from-president-biden-on-labor-agreement-at-west-coast-ports/

But the Biden admin’s unwillingness to side with one wing of the party also produces catastrophic failures, like the martyrdom of Gigi Sohn, who was subjected to years of vicious personal attacks while awaiting confirmation to the FCC, undefended by the Biden admin, left to twist in the wind until she gave it up as a bad job:

https://doctorow.medium.com/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband-4ce1ffb16dc5

It’s how we get key roles filled by do-nothing seatwarmers like Pete Buttigieg, who has the same sweeping powers that Lina Khan is wielding so deftly at the FTC, but who lacks either the will or the skill to wield those same powers at the Department of Transport:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

By refusing to stand for anything except a fair division of powers among different Democratic Party blocs, the Biden admin ends up undercutting itself. Take right to repair, a centerpiece of the administration’s agenda, subject of a historic executive order and FTC regulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Right to Repair fights have been carried out at the state level for years, with the biggest victory coming in Massachusetts, where an automotive R2R ballot initiative won overwhelming support in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#r2r

But despite the massive support for automotive right to repair in the Bay State, Big Car has managed to delay the implementation of the new law for years, tying up the state in expensive, time-consuming litigation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

But eventually, even the most expensive delaying tactic fails. Car manufacturers were set to come under the state right to repair rule this month, but they got a last minute reprieve, from Biden’s own National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who sent urgent letters to every major car manufacturer, telling them to ignore the Massachusetts repair law:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bbkv/biden-administration-tells-car-companies-to-ignore-right-to-repair-law-people-overwhelmingly-voted-for

The NHTSA repeats the car lobby’s own scare stories about “cybersecurity” that they blitzed to Massachusetts voters in the runup to the ballot initiative:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

The idea that cybersecurity is best maintained by letting powerful corporations gouge you on service and parts is belied by independent experts, like SecuRepairs, who do important work countering the FUD thrown off by the industry (and parroted by Biden’s NHTSA):

https://securepairs.org/

Independent security experts are clear that letting owners of high-tech devices decide who fixes them, what software they run, etc, makes us safer:

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2022/01/letter-to-the-us-senate-judiciary-committee-on-app-stores.html

But here we are: the Biden admin is sabotaging the Biden admin, because the Biden admin isn’t an administration, it’s a system for ensuring proportional representation of different parts of the Democratic Party coalition.

This isn’t just bad for policy, it’s bad politics, too. It presumes that if some Democratic voters want pizza, and others want hamburgers, that you can please everyone by serving up pizzaburgers. No one wants a pizzaburger:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/narrative-warfare/#giridharadas

The failure to deliver a coherent, muscular vision for a climate-ready, anti-Gilded Age America has left the Democrats vulnerable. Because while the radical proposals of the GOP fringe may not enjoy much support, there are large majorities of Americans who have lost faith in the status quo and are totally uninterested in the Pizzaburger Party.

Nowhere is this better explained than in Naomi Klein’s superb long-form article on RFK Jr’s presidential bid in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/14/ignoring-robert-f-kennedy-jr-not-an-option

Don’t get me wrong, RFK Jr is a Very Bad Politician, for all the reasons that Klein lays out. He’s an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracist, and his support for ending American military aggression, defending human rights, and addressing the climate emergency is laughably thin.

But as Klein points out, RFK Jr is not peddling pizzaburgers. He is tapping into a legitimate rage:

a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world — inflamed on every level — that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.

RFK Jr is campaigning against “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power,” against drug monopolies setting our national health agenda, and polluters capturing environmental regulators.

As Klein says, despite RFK Jr’s willing to say the unsayable, and tap into the yearning among the majority of American voters for something different, he’s not running a campaign rooted in finally telling the American public “the truth.” Rather, “public discourse filled with unsayable and unspeakable subjects is fertile territory for all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers.”

We’ve been here before. Remember Trump campaigning against a “rigged system” and promising to “make America great again?” Remember Clinton’s rejoinder that “America was already great?” It’s hard to imagine a worse response to legitimate outrage — over corporate capture, declining wages and living conditions; and spiraling health, education and shelter costs.

Sure, it was obvious that Trump was a beneficiary of the rigged system, and that he would rig it further, but at least he admitted it was rigged, not “already great.”

The Democratic Party is not in thrall to labor unions, or racial equality activists, or people who care about gender justice or the climate emergency. Unlike the GOP, the Dem establishment has figured out how to keep a grip on power within their own party — at the expense of exercising power in America, even when they hold office.

But unlike culture war nonsense, shared prosperity, fairness, care, and sound environmental policies are very popular in America. Some people have been poisoned against politics altogether and sunk into nihilism, while others have been duped into thinking that America can’t afford to look after its people.

In this regard, winning the American electorate is a macrocosm for the way labor activists win union majorities in the workplaces they organize. In her memoir A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey describes how union organizers contend with everything that progressive politicians must overcome. A union drive takes place in the teeth of unfair laws, on a tilted playing field that allows bosses to gerrymander some workers’ votes and suppress others’ altogether. These bosses have far more resources than the workers, and they spend millions on disinformation campaigns, forcing workers to attend long propaganda sessions on pain of dismissal.

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

But despite all this, labor organizers win union elections and strike votes, and they do so with stupendous majorities — 95% or higher. This is how the most important labor victories of our day were won: the 2019 LA teachers’ strike won everything. Not just higher wages, but consellors in schools, mandatory greenspace for every school in LA, an end to ICE shakedowns of immigrant parents at the school-gate, and immigration law help for students and their families. What’s more, the teachers used their unity, their connection to the community, and their numbers to get out the vote in the next election, winning the marginal seats that delivered 2020’s Democratic Congressional majority.

As I wrote in my review of MacAlevey’s book:

For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job. First, we fix the corrupt union, firing its sellout leaders and replacing them with fighters. Then, we organize supermajorities, person-to-person, in a methodical, organized fashion. Then we win votes, using those supermajorities to overpower the dirty tricks that rig the elections against us. Then we stay activated, because winning the vote is just the start of the fight.

It’s a far cry from the Democratic Party consultant’s “data-driven” microtargeting strategy based on eking out tiny, fragile majorities with Facebook ads. That’s a strategy that fails in the face of even a small and disorganized voter-suppression campaign — it it’s doomed in today’s all-out assault on fair elections.

What’s more, the consultants’ microtargeting strategy treats people as if the only thing they have to contribute is casting a ballot every couple years. A sleeping electorate will never win the fights that matter — the fight to save our planet, and to abolish billionaires.

If only the Democratic Party was as scared of its base as the Republicans are of their own.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

[Image ID: The title page of Richard Hofstadter's 'Paranoid Style in American Politics' from the November, 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine. A John Birch Society pin reading 'This is REPUBLIC not a DEMOCRACY: let's keep it that way' sits atop the page, obscuring the introductory paragraph.]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bridget Phetasy

Published: Jun 22, 2023

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably witnessed the backlash to Pride. There have been mass boycotts of Bud Light after the beer company partnered with trans woman and TikTok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, sending her a custom can to celebrate her first year of “girlhood.” Target was next to come under fire for its Pride display targeting children and their “tuck-friendly” bathing suits for women. 

This set the stage for the most divisive Pride month in some time. First, the boycotts. Then videos of angry parents at school boards went viral. Conservative radio hosts and commentators vowed to make Pride “toxic” to brands. But it’s not just conservatives who are pushing back; according to a recent Gallup poll, even Democrats have seen a drop in the acceptance of same-sex relations.

Which begs the question: what happened to Pride? After decades of progress for gay rights, growing acceptance of gay marriage and the normalization of same-sex relationships, Pride is unexpectedly political again. Why?

In search of an answer, I spoke to prominent LGBT thinkers and writers, many of them dissenting voices when judged against the views of many LGBT advocacy groups. Their answers surprised me. Across the board they all said some version of “this was inevitable.”

“When it comes to gay issues, conservatives largely lost the culture war,” Katie Herzog observes. “But something about recent trends has reignited that passion — and issues that seemed resolved are up for debate again. I guess the Nineties really are back.”

“The core reason for the backlash is pretty simple: children,” Andrew Sullivan explains. “The attempt to indoctrinate children in gender ideology and to trans them on the verge of puberty has changed the debate. Start indoctrinating and transing children… and you will re-energize one of the oldest homophobic tropes there is: ‘gays are child molesters.’”

Glenn Greenwald largely agrees: “What destroyed the culture war consensus was their cynical and self-interested decision to transform the LGBT cause into one that no longer focused on the autonomy of adult Americans to live freely — which most people support — but instead to demand the right to influence and indoctrinate other people’s children.”

“They are calling them ‘trans kids’ and medicalizing them at an early age. Lying about puberty blockers. Lying about young girls getting irreversible surgery and so on,” says trans man Buck Angel.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriages, and with bipartisan support it seemed there was a consensus on this one culture war issue, as well as broad support for the legal rights of trans adults to be free from discrimination. The war was largely won. But rather than shutting up shop or refocusing their efforts on parts of the world where gay and lesbian people faced serious discrimination, activists and NGOs moved onto the transgender issue.

“There are countries in the world where you can be executed for being gay,” says James Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. “That’s what the Human Rights Campaign [America’s foremost LGBT campaign group] should be saving its ire for.”

An average person will likely refer to this shift as “woke” and wonder how “the trans stuff” is suddenly everywhere, all at once. Parents are baffled when three out of four of their twelve-year-old daughter’s friend group “identify” as boys or, even more confusingly, nonbinary. People started putting pronouns in their social media bios, on their work résumés and in their email signatures. Biological men are competing in women’s sports and being placed in women’s prisons. In medical magazines and birthing classes, women are suddenly referred to by dehumanizing terms such as “birthing persons” and “uterus havers.”

“It’s like a new enforced public holiday thing and people smell a rat,” says Douglas Murray. “The wiser people realize that something weird is being smuggled in. This isn’t just like, ‘don’t beat up your gay neighbor.’ It’s like ‘there is no such thing as gender.’ ‘There is no such thing as sex.’”

We’ve arrived here thanks to a confluence of forces. Perpetual victimhood pushed by activist groups that need a reason to exist and continue collecting money. The corporatization of Pride. The hijacking of the movement by gender ideology.

“You can’t dress toddlers up in extreme political propaganda while lecturing the parents on committing child abuse for not transitioning their kids and expect everyone to keep quiet,” trans writer Chad Felix Greene tells me.

To a normal, not especially political person going about their life, it can seem like gay culture is everywhere. Pride was once just a day to have fun, go to a parade, and “for those who have just come out as a way to cement their self-confidence in public” as Sullivan says. Now every June it becomes “the Holy Month of Pride” as Murray dubs it. Corporations change their social media logos to rainbows (unless, of course, it’s their Saudi account). Pride™️ has become so accepted it’s inescapable. 

On the surface this might look like capitalism at work. These companies just want the gay dollar! Though there’s some truth to that, there’s also an undertow dragging these huge corporations down. They aren’t making decisions that are in the best interest of their shareholders; they are acting out of concern for their social credit score.

“These corporations aren’t getting any gay dollars from these fiascos. Gays hate corporations at Pride,” said publicist Mitchell Jackson. “Worst of all, these corporate campaigns just backfire on LGBTQ people. Gay rights are now being threatened again because big-box stores needed to sell tucking underwear.”

Jackson is exasperated that corporations listen to the advocacy groups in an attempt to do the right thing: “Corporations go to these groups for advice, hoping to avoid a woke controversy, and they get led into a hornet’s nest — and then these non-profits can fundraise off of the Bud Light controversy of the week.”

“What changed is that LGBT activist groups could not afford to obtain victory,” Greenwald says. “When activist groups win, their reason for existing, and their large budgets and salaries, dry up. They always have to push debates into whatever places Americans resist. They also have to be losing, have a claim to victimhood, a reason to assert that they are righting the bigotry of Americans.”

“It’s so tragic because we’ve reached this moment when gay people have finally won mainstream acceptance for the first time in, like, 2,000 years of history,” Kirchick said. “It’s OK to be gay pretty much everywhere in America — and there are obviously pockets where it’s still a problem, I’m not gonna deny that — but majorities of Republicans support gay marriage. I’ve seen it in my own life as a thirty-nine-year-old gay man: it’s a lot easier to be gay now than it was six years ago. And just when we’ve reached this moment, these activists have decided, in our name as gay people, to just piss off America and to make them think that we are a threat to their children.”

“I am so upset that my community has been co-opted and has been used for some other agenda,” Angel told me. “The work we have done to get here is profound and should never be forgotten. All we want is to live our lives just like you, but of course that’s not what you see now with the people driving the LGBTQIA+++++ bus.”

The real slippery slope hasn’t been the gay rights movement, as right-wing pundits often say. “When I see some of them going after Pride, they appear to blame gay people for the nonsense peddled in the name of Pride today — when in truth gay people are the victims of it,” comedian Andrew Doyle said. 

At the heart of the problem is the fact that LGBT was never the package deal that most people consider it to be. “LGBT people don’t exist,” says Sullivan. “We’re very different from each other.”

Generally speaking, it’s “the Ts and the Qs” that insist it’s all or nothing. Trans activists demand acquiescence to all their demands no matter how insane and pseudo-scientific, push to allow men in women’s shelters and allow kids to be put on puberty hormones or you’re committing genocide. People are are increasingly saying, “OK — it’s nothing then.”

“I think gays and women in general are bearing the brunt of the gender ideology nonsense,” Murray said. “And it has itself piggybacked like some kind of parasitic entity onto gay rights.”

“Gender identity ideology is essentially anti-gay,” said Doyle. “Gay rights were secured through the recognition that a minority of people are instinctively orientated towards members of their own sex. Gender identity ideology seeks to break down the very notion of biological sex and claim that it is unimportant.”

Underneath the rainbow facade are illiberal forces such as “queer theory” that have been eroding the classically liberal foundation of the original civil rights movement that won gay and trans folks the rights they have now. We’ve gone from “love is love” to trans women insisting if a lesbian doesn’t want to suck their lady dick, they’re a fascist. 

If you’re confused, that’s the point; confusion and contradiction are features, not bugs. In order to understand how this happened, and why, you need specialized knowledge. The average person can’t explain exactly what’s going on, because it’s nonsensical, you can only intuit it; but call it out and you’re dubbed a bigot — and so you retreat, keeping your head down while the gender borg marches on.

The temperature has been raised further by the Biden adminstration’s unambiguous embrace of this ideology. The White House is quick to paint anyone doubting the wisdom of what they euphemistically call “gender-affirming care” for minors as a knuckle-dragger, even though the overwhelming majority of Americans support a ban on such care and many liberal, tolerant European countries have banned it or scaled it back.

No wonder dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who disagree with the idea of biological men in women’s spaces — or are confused about the pseudo-religious idea that you were born in the wrong body, and wonder whether or not pausing puberty is even possible — are terrified to speak out. 

“It was once ‘live-and-let-live’ said Sullivan, “Now it’s ‘embrace the ideology — or else.’”

Herein lies the problem with Pride. You can no longer opt out of the ideology. The trans activism changed everything. It is coercive. It is everywhere. Big Tech acts as an enforcer, in conjunction with the state, policing language, pronouns, exacting punishments for refusing to repeat the mantras “trans women are women” and “gender-affirming care is reproductive freedom.”

“I know many gay activists from yesteryear who are coming out of retirement to address this new anti-gay movement which has usurped Pride,” said Doyle. “It doesn’t help that all criticism of Pride is interpreted as homophobic or transphobic. These are important conversations. Like most culture-war issues, we need to stop thinking of this in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’. These things are irrelevant. There are left-wing gay people and right-wing gay people — and all of them are harmed by Pride in its current form.”

The backlash is veering into a full-blown moral panic. “I’m seeing a lot more people online talking about gay people as though we are all pedophiles who want to groom children into becoming cross-dressing strippers, and a lot of what’s going on feels like good old-fashioned bigotry rearing its ugly head once again,” said Herzog.

Might the public backlash to Pride push moderates and independents to the left the way the overturning of Roe v. Wade did? From an optics perspective, attacking Pride can often look like attacking the whole LGBT community; just from what I’ve witnessed online, an unsettling amount of homophobia is rearing its head, using boycotts as cover for bigotry. Last week a video went viral that showed Muslim children stomping on the rainbow flag while their parents cheered them on.

“I don’t want to name names but there are certain conservative commentators who are using the backlash against LGBTQIA plus to include a backlash against gays,” says Murray. “But I think it’s inevitable because not enough gays try to do the decoupling that I’ve tried to do myself in recent years and say, ‘Sorry, not my party.’”

Yet the decoupling has begun and it seems to be the only way to navigate our way out of this moment without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. #LGBwithouttheTQ and the #LGB have been trending on Twitter almost every day in June. Even if people don’t understand the forces at work, I think most Americans are smart enough to make the distinction between their gay loved ones and friends and some of the more insane gender stuff.

Like most things, this requires nuance. “You have to say, ‘we respect the rights of adults to undergo a gender transition,’” says Kirchick. “And ‘we want full equality and non-discrimination for transgender people in society, but there are real live debates about at what age it’s appropriate to administer these sorts of medical treatment to kids.’”

“Keep biological sex as a central characteristic in the law and culture,” Sullivan says. “Gender can be added, but can’t replace.”

“I think many LGBT people see this mess but are scared to lose friends and community if they speak up,” said Angel. “But it’s our duty as LGBT members to call this out. To show the world that these people are not a representation of us.”

[decolonize-the-everything]

Thinking about Project2025 and how it's at every level and branch of government. How entire cities are now under their thumb.

How Biden is saying "Israel has a right to defend itself" while calling Cop City protesters terrorists for not wanting a more deadly police force to be trained. But didn't stand with rail workers when they demanded better treatment when it was freezing and trains were being derailed.

How an epidemic on par with HIV ravaged the globe and Biden allowed pharma companies to exploit the world with price tags after promising it'd be public access.

Thinking about how in all this Israel and the USA are said to test tactics and weapons on Palestine.

How the USA stands with Zionists and how many people have told me, a native American, that Palestinians are in the wrong.

How the last 75 years don't matter. Only the last 2 weeks.

And real fucking talk?

For all the "progress" liberals pretend we made how are we here?

Americans and several of the Allied countries would not hesitate to conduct Manifest Destiny 2.0 and have blatantly stated as much.

Americans are saying things that my great grandmother heard about reservations and then later about native liberation. They're saying things the pilgrims told us before that. We're animals. Savages. That we are to blame. That when we die out it'll be because we didn't fight hard enough. That we don't deserve to even be here.

And you know what, I would hope this post would reach some of them but I genuinely feel as if liberals are as far gone as MAGAs are.

They will read this and just go and on and on about how bad the other guy is.

How justified they are to keep voting blue. Just like MAGA's whine until their privileged lives being "ruined" by "woke lies" justified them voting for Trump. Just like Israel is justified. Like every fucking war criminal ever has been.

BUT

I implore you to STOP trying to fucking justify everything! Nobody fucking cares about the reasons you use to support a genocidal war monger who's legacy before this was signing one of the most racially marginalizing bills in US history.

How about you try justifying taking a fucking risk, instead?

People in Palestine are being bombed every fucking day and you want to twiddle your thumbs about NOT voting for the guy who said it was okay and for what? Because your life might not be as comfortable as it is right now? That's your concern from your home with a roof?

Call me a fucking conspiracist but I haven't been wrong yet: Biden is a fucking Project2025 plant. And him and Hillary both have done nothing but make the democrats more and more conservative by catering to the "centrist" votes for decades.

Now we're here. They've compromised so much and want to look so "fair" that a genocide is being paid for on American tax dollars and what are liberals tellings us, what are they saying? ITS JUSTIFIED???? AND TO VOTE FOR BIDEN AGAIN

Y'all are so worried about everyone voting blue to avoid republican fascists that you don't even CARE how bad the people youre voting in are. You haven't even noticed the fascists you put in office yourselves.

You forgot your boundaries.

And isn't it funny how rad/fems and TERFs got mainstream around the same time? You know, the white supremacists based ideology that seeped into the mainstream because nobody was critically consuming or gatekeeping what was "empowering to women" for fear of being 'cancelled'?

Why? Cuz if you hate them you hate women. Just like if you criticize america then you're an anti-american Russian/spy/plant. Like if you support Palestine then you hate Jewish people. If support BLM then you obviously hate white people.

And that's it, isn't it. That's what it all boils down to.

White supremacists are and have been manipulating & gaslighting us en masse.

You know your friends that learned to gaslight an audience with therapy speak? The one that makes you afraid to call them out cuz they're better with words than you and could just as easily turn everyone against you if they use enough buzzwords?

That's the tactics white supremacists are using.

"I must be quiet so I don't say something wrong and look like a bigot" "if I speak, I may say the wrong things" "I may say the right thing the wrong way"

They have made you AFRAID to speak against genocide!!! Wake the fuck up!!!!

They aren't event trying to hide it! The IDF made a post that straight up says "you are an anti-Semite if you speak against Israel"

WHICH IS JUST STRAIGHT UP UNTRUE!! So may Jewish people have come forward against Israel and against Zionism and to support Palestine!

Israel's government is Zionist and that is not an inherently Jewish trait! Making you you believe otherwise is part of the propaganda and manipulation so you Stop speaking up. You can support Jewish people and Palestinians both.

Israel and the USA want you to believe that it is one or the other and that's not true.

The only people who benefit from trying to make you choose between which humans get to live are the white supremacists who cheer when this rhetoric starts to normalize conversation about which people are more worthy of living than another.

You have been gaslit into supporting genocide.

Gaslit into going down a white supremacist pipeline.

Gaslit into giving your silent consent.

Snap out of it.

[alpaca-clouds]

Why do "conservatives" love the middle ages so much?

Let me talk about this one topic regarding the middle ages and how they are portrayed in pop culture, but especially how a certain subset of people are very, very loud about it. And I with that I mean conservatives, or - let's be honest - right wingers.

We all know "sword guys", right? As someone, who was for a time part of the LARP scene, I knew actually several "sword guys". Like, nerds that collect sword replicas, at times even armor replica and then spend their weekends running around and playing "medieval knight".

In of itself this is not a problem. Everyone needs a hobby, right? But... I think that sword guys are actually a good window into what is happening the entire thing with the conservatives/right-wingers and the middle ages.

See, whenever anything medieval related is released anywhere - no matter whether it is pseudo-historic or outright fantasy - there is gonna be a wholeass army of nerds who will then come along and decry all sorts of stuff that they do not like as "ahistorical".

You know. Stuff like women getting shit done, or being in a position of power. Queer people existing. Or people of color doing the same: existing.

And yes, in fact there is a whole subset of "nerds", who are very vocal about what can only be described a "mythic past". As in, a past that has never existed. This is not really a new phenomena. This is something that mostly has its origin in 19th century Europe and it is called Medievalism.

I am not really interested in going into the origins of medievalism and how it is connected partly to the romantic movement. All you need to know is, that the Nazis were really, really into it - as were other fascist movements in medieval Europe.

There is a reason for this, of course. And this is linked to one of the cores of rightwing mythologies: A very toxic nostalgia and the idealization of that mythic past. Which is, ironically, also closely linked to capitalism.

Let me explain: A core part of both conservatism and ideas that are even further right are based on the idea that they want to either conserve a status quo - or more likely return to a past status-quo. And this is something that became more attractive specifically to a certain subsect of men under capitalism.

Under capitalism most people kinda feel alienated from their work and even society. Because most people feel like there is not much use in what they do and their work is not valued in all the important ways. And let me be clear: This is true. And this was true from the very beginning of capitalism. The working class is exploited, was exploited and always will be exploited.

This is also one of the core reasons for why right wing ideologies are so attractive to certain people is, that they give them an easy scapegoat in all the minorities they are blaming for... everything. "No, the problem that you are exploited is not capitalism, it is a Jewish conspiracy!" - "No, the reason you feel so alienated is not capitalism, it is 'the woke mob'." And so on.

And here is where medievalism comes in. Because it provides these people with a fantasy for them. A time where all was right (from their point of view) and where they would have been honored and could have been heroes. A time when they would have been knights and would have saved their distressed damsel. A time at which the gays were hung or burned, in which there was no feminism and of course Black people did not yet exist.

Of course, the reality is that in the medieval times they would not have been a heroic knight, but a peasant working on the field or - if lucky - maybe a tradesman. They might have been called in to fight, but it would have been a rather miserable and not at all heroic affair.

But they want that fantasy of that past in which all of the problems, they perceive in the present, have not existed. A past, in which they would have been seen as more valuable than capitalism sees them. In which they would have been honored just for being white guys.

This is a past, that never existed. But they want to believe in it - because right wing ideologies of course do not offer them any actual solutions for their problem. Because again: Their actual problem is capitalism, and right wing propaganda exists precisely to distract from this fact.

[electricbathsalt]

HELLO HI YOU MENTIONED CHISAKI HAVING A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP WITH HUMANITY AND I AM HERE TO HAPPY RANT ABOUT IT

it's like 2:30am and i should have gone to bed a while ago so this is gonna be a lil incoherent probably but anyways. yes. 100% yes i love that. i have so many ideas bouncing around my head about chisaki not being human, or like getting some secondary quirk in a secondary quirk wave that *makes* him (in his eyes) less than/not quite human, and also i sometimes use it/its pronouns for him because Reasons (i am projecting my own use of it/its onto him), and I also headcanon him as a) FtMtX (third gender/maverique), b) aroallo and gay and romance-repulsed, and c) autistic + low emotional empathy, and all of those things would 100% play into having a complicated and not-entirely-positive relationship with humanity in general (and his own humanity!) ESPECIALLY given that he spent formative years in the yakuza, which is bound to be a wildly conservative organization and an environment EXTREMELY hostile to several of those core immutable traits. ykno?

anyways you mentioned him having a complex relationship to other people/humans and humanity in general like he doesn't consider himself one so that's what prompted this. also please rant back i want to hear e v e r y t h i n g

Oh my god oh my god YES!! Okay I actually just woke up (yes my sleep schedule is fucked rn) so this is most definitely not gonna be coherent either buuut bro that is SO SIMILAR TO EXACTLY WHAT I WAS THINKINGGG

Okay this is by far the most difficult topic for me to try to articulate/explain bc I don’t really know how to, but I will try my damndest!! Yes. I think Chisaki has a very, very complicated relationship with both his own humanity and humanity as whole, in the way that he like. Does not view himself as human, and does not think of humans as the same as him, because they are on, like, separate playing fields. It’s not that he necessarily thinks of everyone else as worthless, or that he’s above them inherently (unequal)—he believes himself to be in a sort of limbo. He is neither worthless nor worthy. He is not human, therefore he cannot adhere to the same principles and standards of humanity. He is not human, and that is why he is never treated like one.

I think he subconsciously detached himself from it. He hated how the one person he (subconsciously) thought would one day view him as human and accept him, called him a monster and outcast him, like everyone else. The one person who showed him kindness with no catch (in his mind, because… yikes). That’s when he fully accepted that he’ll never be seen as human, that he is not human, and will never be treated like something with value/emotion, like something mortal and thinking and multi-dimensional, which is why he finally decided to just take matters into his own hands, with no regard to anything else. Why follow the morals of humans if he is not one? You don’t expect a wild animal not to maul you. Because for an animal, it is necessary. There’s no malice. They hunt and kill you because they need to eat and feed and protect. Is that not him? Is he not doing all this out of necessity? To keep himself and his family alive?

(Although, he doesn’t perceive himself as an animal. Just as not human). He believes he can’t be human. He believes he can no longer allow himself to be human anyway, because being human is too large an obstacle to his goals. He has to be a monster.

And kinda on the side of how he perceives other humans—it’s like, he’s more vital than them to the plan (which is the most important thing in the world), so he is above them in the way they are pawns whereas the plan cannot happen without him and Eri. But it’s dependent on his quirk, bc without his quirk, he is no longer Overhaul, who is the one who is vital to the plan; he is just Chisaki Kai. Chisaki Kai was not vital to anything and was just some not-really-human with a debt to pay off. Chisaki Kai is not worthwhile. Chisaki Kai is below other, real humans. So it’s split—Overhaul is above everyone else (in importance, in the fact he is not human. He is a monster). Chisaki Kai is below everyone else (he is indebted and clinging to the dregs of humanity he wants to have). The common ground is that both Overhaul and Chisaki Kai are inhuman accessories to the Shie Hassaikai. The Shie Hassaikai is more important than them.

He does not yearn to be human, he yearns for the casual acceptance and belonging that comes alongside being human. Humans have never treated him like how they treat other humans. He is not human.

Uggfhhhh I can’t tell if I’m explaining this exactly how I mean it. My vocabulary is just lacking I fear 😭 I have trouble streamlining my thoughts a lot. I feel like I have more to say but no way to properly express it, I guess. Also all your headcanons are extremely real and definitely add onto this/play a part in it!! I cannot imagine that the Yakuza would be all that accepting/an at all safe environment (ah. Well. That’s not true bc I have lol. I don’t like making sad stories 💀 but in canon… definitely not. Especially with Pops’ apparent falling-out with his daughter over her marriage 😒).

I don’t know if this all is what you had in mind or not but I think it has at least some semblance to what I think some of his mindsets are. My brain is a lil fried though. Also please please please elaborate. On everything. I wanna hear all your takes

[cherrytea556]

It's wild at how hypocritical right leaning/conservatives are

They say that they advocate for free speech yet be the ones to ban books they find 'inappropriate for children' (even if its a public library) and be against someone's mere existence (trans/lgbt people)

They criticize liberals/left leaning people for 'spreading propaganda/politics to children' yet do the exact same thing, just align with their viewpoints and is actually more propaganda than what they were complaining about.

They say that 'woke' comedians aren't funny yet their comedy is the most laziest types of comedies one ever has to endure, with making caricatures of left leaning/liberals saying in your face stuff while being left with a punchline that will have you confused. It's just straw man arguments being disguised as 'comedy' and if you reverse their comedy with left leaning/liberals, i guarantee you they will be complaining instead of laughing.

They say that they judge people by the content of their character and not by skin tone, yet judge people by their sexuality, gender and politics (assuming lgbt people, especially trans people, are sexual deviants grooming children while left leaning/liberals are assumed to be overtly emotional/aggressive, alien and out to 'cancel' you). Not to mention of how they too judge race/ethics (like how they portray blm as well as acting judgy towards certain ethics, like portraying arabs as terrorists), those qualities arent so much of the content of their character, arent they? Well, you can argue on politics but if thats the case, then the left leaning/liberal people should absolutely have their right to portray right wing/conservative people the same way too. Whats that, you dont think so? Oh, okay then it further proves my point that right leaning/conservatives definitely dont judge by content of character.

They call left leaning/liberal people 'snowflakes' when their the ones up in arms over an old disney princess being raceswapped or an lgbt person on screen for a few minutes (and again, get offended over a mere persons existence just because they dont understand it!)

They say that they promote bravery when their the ones dismissing kids questioning their values and just expect them to obey it without any discussion.

They say that they care for children yet ban books informing kids of sex in order to not be taken advantage of/understand their own body, be prolifers despite how children of people who want abortion would have a miserable life, dismiss trans/lgbt children and shove their political values onto kids throats, doing the exact same thing they were complaining about.

They act exactly of what their constantly complaining about, it is funny as it is stupid.

[mariacallous]

I crept into the inaugural Westminster meeting of The Future of the Right, a Policy Exchange project from a bygone age of Tory ascendancy. I admit it: there’s a certain schadenfreude in observing the remnants of what was the “natural party of government” for most of my lifetime as it tries to adjust to its worst defeat in history. The programme from the group that still calls itself “the UK’s leading thinktank” will mark next year’s 50th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher becoming party leader, and the 100th anniversary of her birth. Are the Conservatives capable of grasping how profoundly they have lost any sense of the country they used to govern or why their eviction was the single, clear-as-a-bell voters’ imperative? Are they willing or able to do so? Not from what I heard.

This is a project of “the right”; its commissioners include Rupert Lowe, Great Yarmouth’s new Reform MP, sitting alongside new Tory MP Katie Lam, a former Goldman Sachs vice president and special adviser to Suella Braverman. Charles Moore is their august keeper of the Thatcherite flame. They are led by Paul Goodman, a Tory grandee, who writes a column that warns: “Unless the right changes course, Britain is dooming itself to perpetual Labour rule”. Their Tory-leaning pollsters include Rachel Wolf – founder of Public First, No 10 adviser and author of Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto – and James Kanagasooriam of FocalData, coiner of the phrase and idea of the “red wall”.

“We in the Conservative party absolutely deserved to get thrashed,” was an opening burst of reality from Wolf. She excoriated almost everything about the party. Without change, she said, “we deserve to be consigned to oblivion”. That began to sound hopeful, alongside Lam’s “We have no divine right to exist.” Pollster Kanagasooriam also laid out their dread state. With the Liberal Democrats winning Britain’s erstwhile most rightwing seat, Surrey Heath, he said, the Tories must decide if they are for economic conservatism or social conservatism, which has recently meant fighting anti-woke wars.

The room was full of old troupers, rightist thinktankers, ex-MPs and young besuited wannabes waiting for a someday right revival. But they offered scant daylight as the floor and platform echoed with the old sounds: small state, “freedom”, “let people keep more of their money” and “make their own choices”, and “deregulate” the nanny state.

MPs selecting their sixth leader in eight years revealed the depth of their dysfunction in their round one choice of the very essence of their unelectability. Robert Jenrick topped that poll. Who is he? A man whose outings in the public eye include fast-tracking a £1bn planning application by Richard Desmond, a party donor and former purveyor of top-shelf magazines, which could have deprived needy Tower Hamlets council of £45m of revenue had it gone ahead. As immigration minister he ordered staff at an asylum reception centre for children to strip illustrations of Mickey Mouse and Baloo from The Jungle Book from the walls, warning that this was “not a welcome centre”. He would leave the European convention on human rights, though most voters want to stay. He’s anti-net zero, defying the 77% of voters who are worried about climate change. He believes any protester shouting “Allahu Akbar” should be arrested. He would vote for Trump (only 20% of British voters would do the same). As “best prime minister”, the public rate him 20% against 48% for Keir Starmer. (The other leadership contenders do scarcely better.) If his views are closest to those of the party members making the final choice, they are sunk.

Here, at the right’s ideasfest, the water is already flooding in. There are no signs of new thinking, quite the opposite. In this forum, Moore is an anchor, the original old fogey reprising the happy days of Thatcher’s arrival 50 years ago as he read from his noted biography extolling her values and convictions, and her wily politics. These days, among the post-Brexit Tory mayhem, he passes for their saner wing: at least he is not pro-Trump or Putin. Next to Lowe of the Trump-Farage party, Moore was enlightenment itself.

And yet Moore represents the core of the Tories’ problem. When he says of the Thatcher era that “it is time to stop squandering that inheritance”, he embodies the anti-state religion that makes his party unelectable. Until they think the unthinkable and escape the Thatcher fetish, until they understand that she has finally been proved wrong on almost everything, they will stay lost to modern Britain. Privatisations have collapsed into spectacular unpopularity – water, energy, rail, mail, social care, children’s homes and council homes. The “left behind” ruins of her de-industrialisations scar the social landscape. The inequality that soared under her leadership remains an economic as well as a social disaster. Deregulation’s crusade against red tape was tragically exposed in the Grenfell horror. And most people now know all this.

Thatcher used to say, “You will always spend the pound in your pocket better than the state will”, but most people would rather pay more tax than see the underfunded public realm buckle. Even if it means personally paying more tax, 40% of Britons want public services improved, compared with 27% who choose tax cuts. “The right needs a programme that will address the fundamental problems facing the country,” said one of the more sensibles. Yes indeed. But there is no sign of that on the horizon.

From the floor I asked the last question: none of those problems can be solved by less government, only by more, so how will they address them? (“AI” was the empty reply from one panellist.) Voters want more from the state, not less: better NHS, schools, environment, police and everything else. How does the Conservative party adapt to that?

The only coherent reply came from Wolf. “If Labour fails, then we can say that proves the state can’t do everything. The public will move to the right.” OK, but flip that coin: if Labour succeeds in steadily improving public services, then this party has nothing to say. Escape from Thatcher idolatry and Brexit fantasy looks unimaginable, but until someone dares to make that break, they are lost. The only comfort, said Kanagasooriam, is Labour’s victory on just 34% of the vote. And the electorate’s new volatility.

All governments fail in the end. Failure comes in infinite varieties, from events out of the blue, to loss of grip, losing touch, exhaustion of ideas and hubris. Labour is learning on the job that rational policies, such as taking the winter fuel allowance from better-off pensioners, are not necessarily good politics. (Expect a finessing mitigation soon, such as cheaper social energy tariffs for all on low incomes.)

The new volatility threatens the old duopoly from all sides. Plausible populists can spring up: never say never. But in the here and now, it is simply implausible that they could succeed on any platform resembling small-state Thatcherism. Until the budget, we don’t know how expansive Labour will be, but its greatest risk would be failing to set the public realm back on its feet after the austerity years.

Starmer removed that portrait of Margaret Thatcher from his No 10 study - and riled the right by doing so, but if ever a group needed to deradicalise itself from her, that group is the Tories. She looms, she haunts, she is ever-present. It is a debilitating deification they will have to address if they are ever to get near power again.

[himedanshicult]

a deeply frustrating element to talking about the 2024 elections and voting in the us is that the democratic party as told by its PR officials is treated as one and the same with the democratic party as an actual governing body and the idea that the democrats are actually, on the balance, pretty conservative and right leaning is treated as this insane ivory tower holier than thou art stance and not like, calling water wet. like, yeah, the democrats are feverishly xenophobic, they're constantly sleepwalking into a new armed conflict or coup or imperialist confrontation, they're so terrified of being seen as Woke that they urge candidates to not even talk about trans people, they oppose the overturn of roe v wade but they'll be six feet under before they oppose the current supreme court (and before they stifle the god given legal proceedings of the states), they are eagerly extolling their anti-immigrant and pro-police bona fides not just to woo "swing voters" but because they are also genuinely proud of buttressing ICE and the police. they cant even have the most milquetoast palestinian-american politician give a defanged condemnation of israel's genocide because they need to appease a small handful of extremely racist donors and also because they, too, hate and despise palestinians and were barely comfortable sharing a party with muslims in the first place. democrats are constantly letting you in on where their leanings actually are, and when you accept that, a whole lot of their behavior is readily legible. "but they're still not as right wing as the GOP!" yes, sure, but also they would rather work with a far right MAGA ethnonationalist to pass stricter immigration laws than work with a social democrat who doesnt want to pass more arms funding to israel, so you better ask yourself how much that works out in practice.

[personnotfound]

if you don't vote, someone still gets to be president

idk, i see a lot of people talking about the election and criticizing the democratic candidates, which is great, please do that, but please also acknowledge the stakes and the context here. If you're saying talking about something horrible the dems have done/are doing, and saying not to vote for them because of it, then at least let it be a criticism that does not also apply tenfold to the republicans. Because SOMEONE IS GOING TO BE PRESIDENT. It's one or the other. Realistically, it is Trump, or it is Harris. Convincing people not to vote for Harris is advocating for Trump to win. Period. End of. That is what you are doing.

Since I am going over project 2025 - which was written by some very good friends of Trump, and which the man himself has tried to distance himself from without actually addressing any of the contents of the document itself, which align quite well with how he talks about his values and intentions - here are some quotes i have selected to contextualize the stakes of this election (under the cut for length and tw for transphobia, misogyny, )

If you are trans, here is what they think of us, "Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries" (from the foreward by Kevin D Roberts, PhD, on page 1. Kevin is the president of The Heritage Foundation, which describes itself under the 'membership' tab of their 'about' page on their website as the "most influential conservative group in america")

and here are a few of the policies they would like to inact in regards to us, "Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended." (Page 104),

"Reissue a stronger transgender national coverage determination. CMS should repromulgate its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination (NCD) regarding “gender reassignment surgery” for Medicare beneficiaries. In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans." (Page 474)

"Restrict the application of Bostock. The new Administration should restrict Bostock’s application of sex discrimination protections to sexualorientation and transgender status in the context of hiring and firing" (Bostock in this context is a legal case regarding workers protections against discrimination in the workplace, this is page 584 saying that they would like it to be legal to fire people for being trans)

Or how about this from pages 4-5, "The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civilsociety hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion(“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi-tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists." Still the foreward there, same author. Literally calling to restrict speech in the name of 'freedom of speech'. Some irony there. The next paragraph starts by describing 'transgender ideology' (the existence of trans people) as 'pornography'.

Page 5, literally the next paragraph. "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."

How are we feeling? But what about foreign policy? What about Palestine?

Page 94 reads, "Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively"

That does not sound like pulling support from Israel to me.

Oh, also on page 94 is this, "Implement nuclear modernization and expansion. The United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal. Russia maintains and is actively brandishing a very large nuclear arsenal, but China is also undertaking a historic nuclear breakout."

Because what we definitely 100% need is more military spending on nuclear weapons. I also cannot help reading that in connection to Palestine, Israel, and our country's allyship with Israel.

I'm getting stressed. I have linked the full document below. Please look up these quotes yourself, check my work, read the context for yourself. Decide for yourself if you feel I have been unfair. Decide for yourself which of the two sets of options is going to do the least damage. Because remember, it's not just the one person you're voting for. The president gets to appoint the people who run the rest of the government. The people Trump likes very much wrote this document.

Please do not play games with weather or not I can be fired from my job for being trans. Please do not play games with my access to healthcare.

It is horrific that we do not have a choice that will end US support for the genocide going on right now. But that choice isn't on the table. Our choices are genocidal fascist or a lot less genocidal fascist.

[mitchipedia]

Cory Doctorow: “If only the Democratic Party was as scared of its base as the Republicans are of their own.”

Progressives need to learn from the lunatic wing of the Repubican Party.

The GOP is wildly unpopular among Americans and maintains power due to voter suppression and antimajoritarian institutions such as the Senate and Electoral College. The Republican Party has only one one Presidential election on popular votes in the last 36 years, in 2004, when GW Bush won a plurality (not a majority).

36 years!

Doctorow:

The GOP’s platform just isn’t popular. Take the groomer panic: 71% of Americans approve of same-sex marriage. The people losing their shit about queer people are a strange, tiny minority…. Every one of the GOP’s tentpole issues is wildly unpopular: expanding access to assault rifles, banning immigration, lowering taxes on the rich, cutting social programs, forcing pregnant people to bear unwanted children, etc. This is true all the way up to the GOP’s coalescing support for Trump as their 2024 candidate. Trump has lost every popular vote he’s ever stood for, and owes his term in the Oval Office to the antimajoritarian Electoral College system, gerrymandering, and massive voter suppression…. … Dem leaders are basically ‘normal’ center-right politicians, not radicals. And, unlike their GOP counterparts, politicians like Clinton, Obama and Biden don’t hide their disdain for the radical wing of their party. Even never-Trumper Republicans are afraid of their base. Romney declared himself “severely conservative” and McCain “put scare quotes around ‘health of the mother’ provisions for abortion rights….. The GOP fringe imposes incredible discipline on their leaders. Take all the nonsense about “woke capitalism”: on the one hand, it’s absurd to call union-busting, tax-dodging, worker-screwing companies ‘woke’ (even if they sell Pride flags for a couple of weeks every year). But on the other hand? The GOP leadership have actually declared war on the biggest corporations in America, to the point that the WSJ says that ‘Republicans and Big Business broke up’.

Meanwhile the Biden administration has no coherent policy and governs by doling out favors to the coalition of wings of the Democratic Party.

This isn’t just bad for policy, it’s bad politics, too. It presumes that if some Democratic voters want pizza, and others want hamburgers, that you can please everyone by serving up pizzaburgers. No one wants a pizzaburger. The failure to deliver a coherent, muscular vision … has left the Democrats vulnerable. Because while the radical proposals of the GOP fringe may not enjoy much support, there are large majorities of Americans who have lost faith in the status quo and are totally uninterested in the Pizzaburger Party.

This opens the door to someone like RFK Jr., who is the Democratic Party’s version of Donald Trump, tapping into the party rank-and-file’s legitimate outrage at their party elite and the US government.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Chantelle Bilson at PinkNews:

John Deere has faced the wrath of conservatives who are hitting out at the company for supporting a Pride event and encouraging staff to be inclusive by using pronouns. The backlash follows agricultural retail company Tractor Supply facing boycott calls last month for, amongst other things, donating money to diversity and inclusion causes, which included projects that support LGBTQ+ youth. Right-wing activist Robby Starbuck, who directed the controversial, gender-critical, anti-LGBTQ+ documentary The War on Children, is working to “expose woke companies” and is encouraging supporters to email John May, the CEO of John Deere, in a bid to “end woke programs”. 

Bigots call to ‘end wokeness’

Comments under Starbuck’s X post, which promotes the pre-written email, feature countless people reporting that they have hit out at the company through email.  One person wrote: “Thank you Robby. John Deere needs to know that customers like myself cannot support a company that priory woke policies.” 

[...]

John Deere has embraced inclusivity by encouraging staff to use people’s chosen pronouns in its work to strengthen diversity in the company and ensure “inclusiveness so every employee can make the greatest impact as their true self”.  The company also introduced staff training which uses a “genderbread person” to explain gender identity, expression, biological sex and people’s preferences for sexual and romantic attractions. 

Right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ faux outrage farmer Robby Starbuck, fresh off his (sadly) successful campaign to force Tractor Supply to end its pro-inclusion policies, is trying to do the same to John Deere due to its support for LGBTQ+ causes.

John Deere should NOT cave in to that bozo’s demands!

[walls-actual-ly]

hanging out with my brothers drunk friends (I gave them water and more political education than school lmao)

yesterday i came home to my moms place spontaneously and well, my 16 yr old brother was throwing a party. greeted me and went "Oh you re out of rehab you can get drunk with me now!"

bc somehow he forgot/didnt know that I went to rehab for severe substance abuse/light addiction lmao

anyhow, I didnt drink (still proud of me for that), but I almost immediately started to chat with some of his friends because I was active in the same student group than them back when I was in Highschool and we talked about how the group changed (it became centrist, basically. they took a youth group called "pro individuality" and turned it into a group organizing basic school events. still fuming at the mouth.)

anyhow, I went back inside and took my birth control and immediately one girl was like "hm I dont like the pill bc its bad for you, so many side effects :("

and then we had a conversation about how important birth control is for the liberation of women, and once the girl and I finished the chat another incredibly drunk 17 yr old girl entered the kitchen and went "omg I hate birth control!!"

so we had the same conversation again, she settled on "well I just dont want to take it but I also want to spare up my virginity for my potential future husband."

you see, my brother has many friends, kids grow up fast, I didnt know her name, but once I heard her say it I put a name and stories to her face and holy fuck, this 17 yr old girl has literally send pornography of her body to adults on a discord server we re both on. "every time you have sex with a guy you leave a part of yourself behind" baby there is literal child pornography of you on the internet. you deserve help. the adult man on the server talk about the different nudes they have of you.

anyway I had no idea how to bring up that, I m only her friends older brother and I dont want her to feel uncomfortable, and she was super drunk. so somehow we ended up talking about Hitler vs. Stalin. No Sex-Girl thought that Hitler and Stalin are both equally horrible, and I tried to explain to her that political massmurder is different than industrialized genocide, she is such an adorable centrist.

meanwhile a boy joined the chat and we shift towards discussing the European election, those teenagers are just openly discussing who they voted for and apparently my brother is running around flaming everyone who didn't vote for a party he likes :((((( I love this boy so much but omg one of the kids literally said that my brother is bullying conservative voters lmao and, even better, one of the girls told me that she thinks my brother is only politically based and left-leaning bc of me 🥹🥹🥹 all the exhausting debates I had with him back when he was kinda antifeminist anti woke are paying off!!!!!

but yeah so turned out No-Sex girl voted conservative bc she thought they are "the political middle", and that was actually super eye opening. I was always wondering why so many young people voted cdu, but she openly said that she has no idea what they are actually stand for, what their goals are or their values, but she thought that they are neither left nor right, the centre, the democratic middle.

and that is a major failure of the media, but I can understand how she came to this conclusion - it's been told to us over and over and over since the day we were born. the cdu is the middle, the Spd is left wing. meanwhile right now both parties are undermining our constitution and enacting severely rightwing policies - but you would not know that if all you know about politics is the commonly spread word, usually spread by the parties themselves.

and its so illuminating, I m hanging out in fairly political circles so I just... forgot that most people have no clue about politics. all they hear in the media is "current government bad, only one other Democratic Party", so ofc the normal non-nazi-adjacent youth votes cdu on mass. and that sucks. but its something we can base our actions on.

i have been thinking about making political germany focused content for literal years now, I even made a few YouTube videos when I was like 18, they were cringe as fuck ofc. and I dont really want to make YouTube videos now, video essays arent really my thing. but I ve been thinking about streaming / "reaction content" in which I watch normal media shit and talk about whats actually going on.

one of the girls told me that I should become a politician, that I say what she means but in words she doesnt have, and tbh its not the first time that people told me to get into politics.

yesterday the Berlin state attorney deported Maja, a non binary German citizen to Hungary while knowing fully well that the Supreme Court will oppose the deportation if given time. so they did it in a hurry over night, and when the Supreme Court ruled that Maja can not be deported to Hungary for the next 6 weeks... well, by then they had already handed Maja over to the Hungarian police, and despite the orders of our Supreme Court the Berlin police refuses to bring her back to germany.

shit is getting rough here, our judicial system is being disrespected and ignored over and over and over again. our constitution gets undermined, our rights are being spit on by those in the government. and I feel powerless - but the conversations yesterday reminded me that I m not, that there are countless people out there who literally dont know better and who need someone to sit down and explain stuff in an engaging way, and I think thats something I could do

but I m also scared and worried, I am afraid to show my face bc I know how much hate id get, I m afraid to use my voice bc of how bad the oppression is getting in the recent months. but thats what the government wants, I guess. if there is no vocal opposition they can do whatever they want. shit s scary, but maybe No-Sex girl wont vote conservative again if she remembers our chat lmao

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Allan Stratton

Published: Jul 23, 2023

Toronto is one of the most tolerant, multicultural cities in the world. And yet, according to many of its progressive journalists, academics, and politicians, it’s actually a den of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Unless you’re a straight white man, daily life is supposedly an exhausting and dangerous struggle. If you live in the United States, the UK, Australia, or elsewhere in Canada, I’m guessing you’ve been told similar things about your own society.

I’m a gay man for whom these reports bear no relationship to the real world. Certainly, hate-crime statistics show a sharp increase in physical and verbal abuse against specific demographics, including my own. And there are even rare incidents of murder and arson. But to suggest that minorities live under constant threat from a bigoted majority is apocalyptic nonsense. This is especially true of Canada, an especially open, diverse, and welcoming country. Western nations, more generally, are incontrovertibly the most tolerant on the planet.

My heretical view (among fellow progressives, at least) may be due to my “positionality” (this being a faddishly woke jargon term that most English speakers would call “perspective”). The Holocaust and the internment of Japanese North Americans ended a mere six years before I was born. The pass system that turned Canadian Indigenous reservations into open-air prison camps was still in force. The United States was segregated by Jim Crow and redlining. Cross burnings and lynchings went unpunished. Marital rape was legal. Spousal abuse and unequal pay were commonplace. Gay sex and cross-dressing were criminalized, with outed individuals losing their jobs and children. “Fag bashing” was treated as public entertainment.

In the relatively few decades since, western governments have implemented universal civil and human rights protections for racial and sexual minorities. The speed and depth of this transformation has been so remarkable that it seems inconceivable that we ever lived as we once did. Has any other culture critiqued its failings and set about reforming itself so quickly?

This is not to suggest that everything is sunshine and lollipops. Human nature has not been repealed. Police departments without effective civilian oversight, for instance, continue to invite corruption and abuse. Nonetheless, we now have the tools to press for accountability, such as human rights tribunals and whistleblower protections.

It’s also important to acknowledge that while the relative increase in reported hate crimes may seem shocking, that rise is based on a remarkably low baseline. For instance, 2021 saw a 65 per cent increase in incidents (over 50 per cent of these comprising verbal slurs) targeting Canada’s LGB and T communities. But that still represents just 423 cases in a country of 40-million people. That’s hardly a “tsunami of hate.” The number is infinitesimal compared to the 114,132 domestic assaults and 34,242 sexual assaults recorded against women.

One often hears that a reversion to the backward ways of the past is just around the corner. And it is true that abortion rights now hang in the balance in many conservative U.S. states. But the idea that any Western country (especially Canada) is on the cusp of a wholesale rejection of liberal principles is absurd. Women will never again need their husband’s signature to open a bank account. Racial segregation is unthinkable (except, ironically, in certain progressive institutions). Marriage equality for same-sex couples is constitutionally protected in North America, and enjoys a historic 70 per cent level of support in the United States.

So, unlike those on the left who came of age in the 90s and the decades that followed, I don’t see an intolerant society destroying civil rights and minority safety. Rather, what I am now witnessing is a period of progressive overreach, led by ideologues with no (apparent) historical memory or understanding of how our liberal social contract evolved. They have turned language inside out so as to render words such as “woman,” “safety,” and “genocide” essentially meaningless; pursued policies that lock one-time progressive allies in a zero-sum culture-war conflict; recast free speech as hate speech; confused wishes (and, in some cases, fantasies) with rights; and punished dissenters from their Borg-think with social exclusion, “re-education,” and firing.

This radical attempt to unilaterally impose a new social order based on race and gender essentialism has ignited a widespread public backlash, which has been weaponized by the far right, destroyed public goodwill, and done more damage to the progressive cause than anything its reactionary enemies have done in recent years.

-

The civil-rights movements of the last century won victories by liberal means based on liberal values. This included an insistence on free speech and civil liberties; and an appeal to the universal values of dignity and equality, which in turn underpin the case for protecting individual human rights and freedoms.

In part, this was because we liberals understood math. We needed white, straight, male legislators to support our causes, a project that could only be engaged through free and open debate. Empathy-based co-operation enabled us to create bridges among our diverse groups: The Gay Liberation Front raised money for the Black Panthers. In turn, its leader, Huey Newton, supported the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements. Meanwhile, Jewish groups applied their historical understanding of discrimination to help lead the fights for women’s rights (Betty Friedan), gay rights (Larry Kramer), and black voting rights, with some even giving their lives as Freedom Riders

By contrast, today’s illiberal left explicitly rejects the principles of free speech and universality. It ignores the lessons of past civil-rights successes, often denying that such successes even took place. After all, how can one insist on the dismantling (or “decolonization”) of a system that has shown itself capable of self-correction and continuous improvement? The only framework that validates the progressive narrative of ongoing oppression and white supremacy is one that ahistorically presents mainstream liberal values as a failure.

The switch in social-justice circles from liberal to authoritarian ends and means has at least three major causes. The first is structural: As (originally) liberal rights groups such as the ACLU achieved their objectives, they were required to rewrite their mission statements and pretend away their past successes — this being the only way to justify their ongoing existence.

Far from seeking to “burn it all down,” most of us within the original LGB and T movements simply wanted equality within existing social structures. We used liberal “respectability politics” to make our case, and (for the most part) folded our tents when we achieved our goal. The unwitting effect of this was to leave our old organizations to the radicals, who had long condemned us as sellouts to the patriarchy. Their goal is nothing less than the remaking — or “queering” — of society, a vaguely defined project infused with a deep suspicion of, or even hostility to, capitalism and the nuclear family. The liberal LGB and T wish to live and let live is now the authoritarian “live as we live.”

The second factor is generational change. Just as children separate from their parents in their passage to adulthood, so does each generation define itself in contradistinction to its immediate predecessor. Without personal memory of past struggles, present conditions are taken for granted. And so the battle against current injustices (real or otherwise) is seen as humanity’s defining and timeless struggle.

My generation mocked our parents’ conformity and stoic, suck-it-up ethos, forgetting that these traits had been necessary social adaptations during the Great Depression and World War II. Similarly, activists of this generation attack our commitment to free speech and integration within society, forgetting that these strategies were necessary for us to be heard during the Cold War, when outsiders were suspected as potential fifth columnists.

But perhaps the most significant factor has been the academic trend toward postmodernism, which instructs adherents that neither objective reality nor human nature exist in any certain, provable way. Reason, logic, and objective facts are rejected — or at least put in scare quotes — as are appeals to history and science. These are all held to be mere artifacts of language, which is itself presented as a reflection of existing power structures. And since these structures are presumed to systematically oppress the powerless, they must be deconstructed, dismantled, and decolonized, root and branch.

This kind of thinking isn’t just claptrap that flies in the face of day-to-day human experience. It also encourages a kind of intellectual nihilism that precludes amelioration of the injustices and power imbalances that supposedly concern many postmodern thinkers: After all, what could possibly replace our current power-based intellectual constructs except new power-based intellectual constructs?

Nonetheless, postmodern habits of mind (often flying under the banner of “critical” studies of one kind or another) have infected academic humanities and social science departments all over the west, much like the fungal parasite on The Last of Us. Its professorial hosts now work to dismantle their own institutions, attacking the “colonial” concepts of science and empiricism in favour of undefined and unfalsifiable “ways of knowing.” Meanwhile, their students have incubated its spores and spread them into the wider society, including corporate human-rights offices.

Progressives (rightly) have denounced Donald Trump and his supporters for their paranoid belief that the 2020 U.S. election was “stolen.” But these right-wing conspiracy theorists are not so different from campus leftists when it comes to their à la carte approach to accepting or rejecting reality according to passing ideological convenience

In particular, the idea that pronouns serve as magic spells that can turn a man into a (literal) women is no less ridiculous than anything Trump has ever said. The same goes for the mantra that while girls who cut themselves need therapy, girls seeking a double mastectomy require “affirmation.” Likewise: Racial segregation is a bigoted practice … except when it represents the very acme of progressive enlightenment. “Defund the police” doesn’t mean abolish the police, except when it means exactly that.

And then there’s Schrödinger’s Antifa, which presents these street thugs either as a very real force that rose up as a morally laudable reaction to fascism … or as something that exists only in Tucker Carlson’s fever dreams, depending on context.

But postmodernism and critical theory have done more than just damage our societies’ intellectual cohesion. Their denial of universal human nature eliminates empathy as a tool to bridge differences among groups, which are instead presented as warring sects prosecuting unbridgeable race (or gender) feuds. Since power is presented as the singular currency of the realm, the ability to shut the other side up is valued more than the ability to persuade it.

Gay men such as Andrew Sullivan and Andrew Doyle have been among the most prominent dissenters against wokeism — in part because we instinctively recognize the destructive nature of this power-fixated mindset. Our experience suggests that empathy and reason are far more important than threats and cultural power plays.

Dave Chappelle has said that the LGBT movement won public support more quickly than its black counterpart because of racism. But I believe the truth is different: Unlike racial and ethnic minorities, we exist in every demographic, every family, every ethnic category. When we gay men came out en masse during the 1980s AIDS pandemic, all communities realized that we were among its children, parents, and siblings. People have a harder time discriminating against their own than against outsiders.

Traditionally, the left has appealed to a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose. The resulting project of alliance-building has entailed negotiation among different groups, all of which may have different priorities and perspectives. But that alliance-building project becomes impossible when one sect or another demands that disagreement be treated as a form of thoughtcrime. Deplatforming doesn’t just hurt the target; it also hurts the movement, since the summary excommunication of dissidents means that adherents never need to acknowledge or address counterarguments, internal logical inconsistencies, or the off-putting nature of their message.

Indeed, ideologues such as Nikole Hannah-Jones claim that politics has a colour: Blacks who aren’t “politically black” are traitors who collaborate with “whiteness.” As seen through this lens, Asian-Americans who fight anti-Asian discrimination in the context of affirmative action are supposedly puppets of white supremacists, and the LGB Alliance, by standing up for same-sex attraction, is smeared as a transphobic hate group. (For asserting that biology is real, Stonewall UK even tried to destroy the career of one of the LGB Alliance’s founders, Allison Bailey, a lifelong social justice advocate who happens to be a black, working-class lesbian, and the child of immigrant parents. Thankfully, Stonewall did not prevail.)

Opponents of cancel culture often focus on its negative effects on conservatives. But it’s often woke organizations that end up imploding under its strains, typically due to internal battles over victimhood status and linguistic control. In recent years, many of these groups have been driven off the rails by single-issue gender activists who are willing to support misogyny and homophobia in the name of trans rights; or BLM activists willing to permit racism directed at “model minorities.” Even antisemites have been allowed to infiltrate left-wing political parties, the arts establishment, and anti-racist education initiatives. No wonder everyone involved with this movement is always complaining about how emotionally “exhausted” they are: They’re surrounded by toxic fellow travellers who gaslight them as right-stooges if they dare raise a complaint.

Another notable feature of militant social-justice movements is the sheer joylessness of their leaders and supporters, a condition that often seems to blur into a collectively embraced state of clinical depression and paranoia. This posture flows from their presupposition that they suffer endlessly due to the malignant primordial character of “whiteness” and heteronormativity (or, yet worse, cisheteronormativity). The language of individual agency and hope, which animates liberalism, is replaced with a soul-dead idiom by which the activist presents as a self-pitying victim of oppression, constantly at risk of suicidal ideation, erasure, and genocide.

Even privileged “allies” are encouraged to dwell on their whiteness, straightness, cisness, “settler” status, and other marks of intersectional Cain. By erasing the possibility of redemption, the movement alienates liberal allies who are seeking to build bridges with others en route to living successful and fulfilling lives in a way that escapes the politics of identity. The social-justice puritan, being primarily concerned with advancing his status within a cultish inward-seeking subculture that’s constantly inventing new grievances, on the other hand, finds such a goal unthinkable.

The use of words such as “harm” and “violence” to describe the microaggressions known to the rest of us as “daily life” is a particularly unattractive feature of social-justice culture. In the 1980s, gays and lesbians responded to daily discrimination with the chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Today, the children and grandchildren of that generation, now enjoying full civil rights and perches within elites sectors of government, culture, and high society, instead tell us, “We’re here, we’re queer, and … we’re terrified to step outside.” As a gay man, it’s humiliating to hear this kind of maudlin rhetoric uttered in my name.

The broad public, long sympathetic and accommodating, has had it. People have no time for hysterical activists who whine, bully, and hector them about things they didn’t do and over which they have no control. This is particularly true when those same activists demand the elimination of women’s sex-based rights, the medical sterilization of children and teens, and the explicit exclusion of job applicants by race. The more that ordinary men and women came to learn about gay marriage, the more they accepted it. By contrast, the more that ordinary men and women come to learn about trans-activist demands and critical race theory, the more they’ve become repulsed.

Support for Black Lives Matter collapsed when the woke trivialized the arson and looting that accompanied the George Floyd protests. The public was completely onside with the left’s demand for police reform, but horrified by the extremist push to dismantle public security, and enraged that the left justified breaking pandemic restrictions for protests while insisting that grieving families be kept from their dying relatives in hospitals.

Likewise, Lia Thomas tanked support on gender radicalism. The public had long welcomed trans civil rights, sympathized with those suffering dysphoria, and accepted that even non-dysphoric trans-identified individuals should be able to live and present as they wished. But the sight of a strapping, butch male taking women’s prizes and opportunities was a breaststroke too far.

Facing resistance, the woke doubled down, insisting on automatic gender affirmation for everyone, including rapists and children. The result gifted social conservatives an issue of concern to majorities across the political spectrum. Now, progressives in the U.S. face a raft of bills that, among other things, resurrect false charges of Alphabet paedophilia. No wonder LGB groups are jettisoning the T: In the space of just a few years, trans activists have undone the good work that gay activists did over multiple generations.

The progressive movement must stand up to its extremists. We must restore the liberal social compact that won our civil and human rights. That means we should root our claims in areas of common ground, demanding fair treatment, but not the right to dictate what others think.

The most intense theatres of culture-war combat involve the education of children, an area in which liberal attitudes must be allowed to hold sway. Popular free speech principles should be applied to school libraries and curricula — which means opposing campaigns to root out books demonized by both the left and the right alike. In classrooms, an open exploration of history can provide a context for kids to discuss how injustices were overcome in the past and how they might be handled in the present. Students can be taught to brainstorm how to use their advantages to help the less fortunate, and how others in their situation have dealt with adversity. But they should never be taught that personal relationships and moral hierarchies are determined by the colour of one’s skin.

Likewise, boys and girls should be allowed to play and dress free of gender stereotypes, with a no-bullying policy strictly enforced. They should learn who they are by themselves, and be taught that they are more than the sum of their parts. They should not be labelled by ideological adults consumed by a mania for gender theory. In school, I skipped with the girls, had a lisp, and liked to play with china elves. That didn’t make me a girl, just as dressing butch and dreading the effects of a puberty doesn’t turn a lesbian into a boy. (I shudder to think what might have happened were I a child today.)

We should also return to the left’s traditional focus on class. Diversty, equity, and inclusion initiatives enrich the small group of well-educated profiteers who proselytize the DEI faith, but they’re actually worse than useless when it comes to workplaces, exacerbating intolerance among the hapless workers forced to submit to tedious seminars and questionnaires. Resources from the DEI industry’s rapidly metastasizing bureaucracies should be redirected to programs that materially help the poor: Unlike affirmative action programs, investments in deprived neighbourhoods disproportionately assist minorities without the creation of double-standards and racial left-behinds that serve to energize white nationalists. They also support social mobility and economic inclusion.

“I just want to say—you know—can we, can we all get along?” is how Rodney King put it in 1991. While many of us might read the underlying sentiment as self-evident, the militant social-justice left now treats it as a forbidden lie, since the entire movement is based on the conceit that peaceful and harmonious coexistence is impossible within a pluralistic liberal society that doesn’t forcibly “queer” itself, endlessly hector citizens about their bigotry, and segregate workers and students by skin colour.

I believe we can all get along. As a progressive, a gay man, a Canadian, and a liberal, I want no part of any movement — whatever it calls itself — that insists we can’t.

[ Mirror: https://archive.is/es3Q4 ]

==

To the extent that liberal principles are actually being rejected, it's coming from both the authoritarian reactionary right, and the authoritarian postmodern left.

[papirouge]

Ive heard some people say that Candace Owens husband is gay, that the right basically "let her have him" as a consolation prize because they don't really give a fuck about her unless its to use her as the woman against feminism or the black person against blm or other black causes... is that true?? Or are people just making shit up?

Candace is a bird, but this whole assumption she was desperate to marry this White man is silly. She's has been spouting anti Black pickme nonsense for years before getting married + was openly conservative/MAGA. She significantly had lower chance to marry a Black man than a White man based in her strong & outspoken political views.

There's no shortage of men to marry among conservatives and there's no way they would remotely "control" whoever they marry. White Conservatives are often racist but let's no forget Candace was very popular among them (she was their favorite diversity token lol), so it's not like she'd need any help or handout from the party to bag one of them🤷🏾‍♀️

This narrative of assuming a Black woman marrying a white man is the result of some arrangement instead of genuine attraction is rooted in the misogynoir standpoint of thinking that 1)Black women owe allegiance to Black men when it comes to their dating choices 2) Black women are not attractive enough to attract men from other race.

Notice there's hardly the same energy when it comes to Black men (who are literally breeding out their extinction in the NBA and many other industries).

Peep the name of the account. Black MEN are pressed, because an influent Black woman married and procreated with a White men. Black men are pathologically jealous of White men and their power. That's why they're so obsessed to breed with White women : bc it's a way to take back a bit of that power back by taking 'their' women. That's why dating/marrying a white woman is a social achievement for (successful) Black men. It gets them closer to whiteness= peak of the social & economical ladder.

It's funny they take a dig at her statement about the black family, when many woke pro black black men/hotep who won't shut about the Black community #BLM who are themselves dating/married with White women... But these same Black incel accounts are NEVER seen calling them out like they do with Candace. They're full of shit. They just want to control Black women and their dating choices. That's it

Btw, it seems her husband allegedly SAed other men, but those accusations didn't seem to go anywhere (the thread is from 2022)

I believe the rumors about her husband being gay/bi though. I wouldn't be surprised Ben Shapiro/The Daily Wire clique has some shit on her or her husband and that's why she's been so meek with them despite how badly they disrespected her by firing her like she was trash.. I personally find VERY suspicious that Candace had more energy to go off at the family of some random Black men killed by the police she had no real connection with (pulling up at their house while being very pregnant, which has to be her most ghetto stunt ever), than against the very people who professionally & personally harmed her...🤔

I think Andrew Tate also has some dirt on her husband (considering his "job" I wouldn't be surprised he still has snitches to dig up dirt about everyone around him to protect his own tracks - didn't he admit on some shitty podcast with Sneako that he did a whole background check to have him in his podcast???) and use it as a form of blackmail or coercion to keep Candace on his side. Sorry but she doing the most about Epstein and then caping for Andrew Tate a few months later never made sense to me. I see french moids hail her "courage"for covering the Macron/Brigitte open secret of their pedophilic relationship + transness of Brigitte(whose real name was Jean Michel) when she defended Andrew Tate who openly sexualized/compelled men to hook up with underage girls who were barely older than when Jean Michel started sexing Macron (14 years old). She's a raging hypocrite, and I can't stand ppl who don't have any functioning brain cells to realize she's full of it.

I'm 80% positive there's some shady shit going on with her. Candace Owens ain't as "free" as her stupid stans think she is. She's still a conservative shill. She simply got humbled and cannot speak the whole truth. Just because she called out Zionism doesn't mean we should support her in any or her endeavor. She's not a reliable ally. Her moral compass is wack. She's a grifter and only care about herself.

[ausetkmt]

Active Clubs: Will2Rise Sells Activewear to Fascist Brawlers – Rolling Stone

This Activewear Brand Wants to Be Lululemon for Fascists

Will2Rise is marketing “militant active wear” to white nationalist Active Clubs, which train members for street combat

Conservatives opposed to shopping at “woke” corporations have launched their own lines of pillows, piss beer, and mobile phone service. Now, unabashed white supremacists are setting up shop in this so-called parallel economy. 

Consider the fascist fashion house Will2Rise.

Will2Rise makes sports gear for white nationalists — including muscle-tees, track jackets, “militant active wear pants,” boxing gloves, and hoodies emblazoned with “Cultured Thug.” Leaving no doubt about its politics, the company’s gear is branded with stylized silhouette of a fasces — the ancient Roman symbol (consisting of a bundle of wood with a protruding ax head) later embraced by far-right Italian militants, spawning the term “fascist.”

The company specifically markets to members of Active Clubs, a global network of white supremacists who “tribe and train.” The members of these tight-knit local chapters pursue street-fighter fitness in advance of an anticipated race war, or other violent confrontation. Rather than the Hawaiian shirts and AK-47s that characterize extremists like the Boogaloo Bois, the Active Club aesthetic is gym-wear and mixed martial arts prowess. Will2Rise sells training hoodies and tight-fitting ringer tees labeled, “ACTIVE CLUB.”

Will2Rise is also playing the role of a corporate sponsor for white supremacy events. The company staged a second-annual MMA tournament this August, in a Huntington Beach warehouse decorated with white-power flags. Hosted by the SoCal Active Club, the contests featured fighter representatives from the Tennessee Active Club, Big Sky Active Club, Great Lakes Active Club, Evergreen Active Club, as well as from Patriot Front, another high-profile, white-nationalist group. Many of the fighters sported Will2Rise boxing gloves and other apparel. 

Think of the brand as Lululemon for white-power bros. The company touts its commitment to “bringing high-quality goods to Our guys.” Its white-power symbols are often coded. Many items for sale carry the Roman numeral XIV, or 14. For the neo-Nazi set, that’s a reference to the “14 words,” a dark oath about securing “the existence of our people and a future for white children.” A video montage on the slick Will2Rise homepage is more explicit. It flashes the words “white youth revolt,” “white unity,” and the slogan “action today, victory tomorrow.”

The company’s whites-only ethos extends to what Will2Rise dubiously labels its “Ethical Supply Chain” — with products exclusively “made in Eastern Europe, so not a single hand touches the production that is not of like mind.” The copy continues: “We keep Our people employed and keep all funds within our ranks.” The company takes Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, and Stripe.

https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Will2Shop-screenshot-shop.jpg?w=1024

Will2Rise represents an attempt to monetize the Active Club movement by the same folks who founded it. Active Clubs are the brainchild of Robert Rundo, a white nationalist from Orange County, California. Rundo previously led a street-fighting group called the Rise Above Movement, whose brawlers made a practice of roughing up antifa at social justice protests. Federal prosecutors have described RAM as “a combat-ready, militant group” that’s part of a “new nationalist white supremacy and identity movement.”

Rundo was indicted on federal charges of “conspiracy to riot” in 2019 stemming from RAM actions in Huntington Beach, Berkeley, and San Bernardino. The charges were dropped for a time but reinstated in 2021 after an appellate process ruled that the charging statute is constitutional. However, Rundo eluded capture, decamping to Eastern Europe where he continued to organize around his violent brand of white supremacy — including morphing RAM into a decentralized network of Active Clubs.

The Active Club movement is growing exponentially. A new report by the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project, reveals that there are at least 46 active clubs across 34 states in the U.S. The “transnational” network also has chapters in 15 countries, including Canada, and across Europe, with 23 chapters in France alone. 

Alexander Ritzmann, who conducted the CEP research, describes the groups as “trying to build a militia” in plain sight. They foreground a broad ideology of “white unity” — both to prevent infighting and to appear less threatening to law enforcement. The exact purpose of the fight-training remains ambiguous, but Ritzmann insists this is on purpose, following the philosophy that a violent white supremist movement needs more “fighters than thinkers.” The endgame, he warns, is for these Active Clubs to be the tip of the fascist spear when the next “Day X” — think: a redux of a Jan. 6 — requires the services of a fighting force: “It’s about building that militia for the day a leader shows up … that needs some sort of army.”

Rundo was also “a driving force in the creation” of the Will2Rise clothing brand, according to the CEP report. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently included Will2Rise among entities it labels “white nationalist hate groups.” The shop serves many purposes: reinforcing the public-facing aesthetics of the Active Club movement, raising money, and aiding in recruitment. According to Ritzmann’s research, the shop gets about 10,000 visits a month, with visits lasting about 15 minutes, “indicating shopping.”

Rundo’s life on the lam in Europe came to a halt this year. The 33-year-old was collared in Romania in March, and his extradition to the United States was announced Aug. 2. He has pleaded not guilty to the conspiracy to riot charges, and is expected to go to trial in December. 

Not surprising, Rundo has become a cause célèbre in extremist circles — especially for Will2Rise. A banner at the top of its website demands “Free Rob Rundo.” The company is also selling Shepard Fairey-esque art posters reading “FREE RUNDO,” and is even raffling off a wood carving of its fasces logo, fashioned by supporters at the “Austrian Art Academy.”

Following his vision, the groups Rundo set in motion are continuing to act without him — including by holding the Huntington Beach MMA fights. Extremism experts insist this is in keeping with the leaderless “open franchise” model promoted by Active Clubs, but note that SoCal Active Club has been effectively stewarding the movement in Rundo’s absence.

Will2Rise has not responded to an email request for information on its business, revenue, and profits. The company lists its address as a P.O. box in Virginia. It also features a non-working telephone number with a Georgia area code and one too many digits — ending in 88. That number is often used by white supremacists as a numerical correspondence to the letters HH, short for Heil Hitler.

[canichangemyblogname]

There are more planned student walk outs in Chicago & the Chicago Land to protest the Biden Administration’s foreign policy in regards to Palestine. And ahead of the protests, the JUF/JFC is sending out talking points to counter the narrative and paint these as “anti-Israel” protests as opposed to pro-ceasefire, pro-peace, and pro-Palestinian.

And they’re using the Republican’s narrative playbook. For the last many years, Republicans have launched a national campaign against the “woke agenda” in schools as a way to marginalize queer voices and black and brown voices, culminating in Florida’s massive book ban. Their main narrative? That teachers are filling our children’s heads with “woke” propaganda to hate the US.

This has been the narrative of conservative media for years now:

But now the JUF is also taking advantage of the “parental rights” fears sweeping the county and the “teachers are brainwashing kids to be woke” narrative. Teachers and “outside influences” (Who? Hamas? Hamas is in CP schools? Who are these nebulous, shadowy “outside influences”? And why does this talking point remind me so much of anntisemitic conspiracies?) are teaching your children to be anti-Israel and are encouraging this protest behavior among the young.

What’s truly insidious, however, is that they are mixing this message with legitimate acts of antisemitism to make it seem like teachers are out here teaching and endorsing antisemitism. “This is extremism masquerading as activism.” This is what these protests looked like last time, btw:

Look at that violent, extreme… *checks notes* sit in at… *checks notes* City Hall. “Peaceful,” in quotation marks, according to the JUF. (BSFFR, please)

(This isn’t to say that there is and has never, ever been antisemitism within any movement. Or to say that antisemitic bad actors cannot take advantage of a pro-peace movement to spread their propaganda. Do not “bean soup” this post.)

And— of course— they’re hammering home the idea “Palestine will be Free” is a call for the genocide of Jews.

These are some of the “contextual” talking points they suggest people use when talking about these walkouts:

Did you know it’s not genocide when— hold up. Let me check something. Okay. 1 in 4 Gazans are starving. Over 33,000 dead and over 61,000 injured according to Euro Med. In 100+ days, 4% of Gaza has become a casualty statistic. At the beginning of Israel’s bombing campaign, they expected 15,000 babies to be born into crisis. We know that some of those 15,000 have been murdered in the occupation. But that seems— and then we have the hike in maternal mortality, the hike in emergency hysterectomies, the hike in uterine infections from a lack of sanitation, and IOF soldiers in the enclave choosing to let newborns die… and— hold on. Yeah, their math isn’t mathing.

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When Israel shoots civilians at point-blank and rounds up unarmed men en masse and bombs UN schools and raids hospitals and bombs residential buildings with non-precision missiles and cuts civilians off from food, water, and medical supplies and destroys water tanks and salts the earth and films itself chanting and cheering and applauding for the death of Arabs, it’s because they care about civilians and are doing EVERYTHING in their power to protect civilian life. Really? Okay, sure, and I’m the King of England.

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Also, did you know that having ancestors in a region 3500 years ago and the existence of Mizrahi Jews gives Israel the right to displace Palestinians whose families have lived there for the same time? It also apparently excuses Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian children. Amazing logic, truly.

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I also want to make it ABUNDANTLY clear that this is a summary of what the ICJ said:

“Alarming signs of genocide in Gaza, and Israel’s flagrant disregard for international law highlight the urgent need for effective, unified pressure on Israel to stop its onslaught against Palestinians. An immediate ceasefire by all parties remains essential and – although not ordered by the Court – is the most effective condition to implement the provisional measures and end unprecedented civilian suffering.”

“The stakes could not be higher – the ICJ’s provisional measures indicate that in the Court’s view the survival of Palestinians in Gaza is at risk. The Israeli government must comply with the ICJ’s ruling immediately. All states – including those who were critical of or opposed South Africa’s submission of the genocide case – have a clear duty to ensure these measures are implemented. World leaders from the USA, UK, Germany and other EU states must signal their respect for the Court’s legally binding decision and do everything in their power to uphold their obligation to prevent genocide. Failure to do so would be a grave blow to the credibility and trust in the international legal order.” X

Yes, the ICJ ruling did not immediately find Israel guilty of genocide as such a decision will likely take years. Yes, the ICJ did not order a ceasefire; it strongly suggested a ceasefire as the court has no enforcement mechanism. HOWEVER, the ICJ found cause for great concern for the Israeli military’s actions and the statements of Israeli political leaders. They found that “At least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention.”

That is an incredible preliminary blow to Israel. The court ruled that South Africa has standing and that the case can proceed as Israel’s actions could constitute genocide (only further pursuance of South Africa’s case can lead to a verdict).

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Hamas has also offered yet another ceasefire proposal that was rejected by Israel. They both keep rejecting each other’s ceasefire proposals. But the JUF’s rhetoric conveniently ignores the fact that a ceasefire and exchange has been the only measure successful at getting the hostages home. This is not some Hamas apologia. It’s admitting that this single-minded and narrow focus on Hamas, their war crimes, and their ideology has given many organizations tunnel vision when it comes to solutions to get Israelis home. They’ve been so blinded by anger and grief that they forget you do in fact have to negotiate with terrorists to get hostages home. It also purposefully ignores Israel’s culpability and responsibilities in all of this. It’s a “whataboutism” fallacy.

“Israel needs to stop carpet bombing Gaza.” “What about Hamas? That ignores Hamas’ crimes.”

First. No, it doesn’t. Second. What about Hamas? No. Seriously. Let’s talk about it. After 100+ days of bombing, Israel clearly has not prevented them from continuing to rule the enclave. They still have the means and forces to engage militarily and diplomatically. This “total eradication” campaign has been a complete failure (only 7% of terrorist organization globally have been quelled by military force, ever; you cannot “war” against a tactic, no matter how brutal the tactic or the response). So, what about them? They’re still militarily capable and still holding onto power. The carpet bombing has not worked. Israel is once more failing to “eradicate” a threat to Israeli Jewish safety, as it always will.

“But if we negotiate and Hamas remains in power, Israeli Jews and Palestinians will not be safe.” Yes. And if Israel— the country that long funded Hamas and let them gain power and train in Gaza— also remains in power, both Israeli Jews and Palestinians will not be safe. Israel has proven that the Zionist project is a failure. Oct. 7th proved that Israel is categorically incapable of doing exactly what it was (supposedly) established to do: protect Jews from pogroms. And rather than admit that Zionism will not protect Jewish people— because that would mean admitting Israel has no ideology to continue standing— Israel would rather massacre Palestinians in retaliation. They’d rather continue their 75+ year campaign; their settler colonial project, of ethnically cleansing the region of its inhabitants.

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Zionism will continue to fail to protect Jews in the levant and will continue to lead to Jewish and Arab death and radicalization. For fuck’s sake, Zionism— and the Israeli settler project, specifically— is why Hamas exists. Both literally and politically. And it is what is ultimately responsible for the plight of the Palestinian people.

The world needs to help this region work toward implementing a completely new system. There needs to be a ceasefire & humanitarian aid, first and foremost. There needs to be hostages exchanged, too. Bibi needs to step down. There need to be serious deradicalization programs in Israel for parties like the Likud and their supporters. And— yes— there would need to be deradicalization programs in Gaza and the West Bank; these would primarily focus on resilience, rebuilding, and addressing the Palestinian mental health crisis (deradicalization among a disenfranchised people is oft best achieved by meeting their needs). There needs to be a global effort to rebuild Palestinian enclaves FOR the Palestinians who were living there. There needs to be a global effort to facilitate the right of return. There needs to be mega constitutional reforms to ensure Palestinians have the rights they MUST have and Jews immigrating to and living in the levant have the security and recognition as a people that they want. It is *impossible* to have one without the other. This reform will require a “dismantling” of the Israeli state as it currently exists. That reform *is* a “radical” revolution. The parliament and national bureaucracy will cease to exist in its current form as a new one will replace it. Hamas will not remain in power (before or) after this. Neither will Zionism. <<This is all a very simple summary of a way forward, as none of this addresses Iran’s influence on regional militias.

This is complex in the sense that a solution will not be easy and there are many powers and interests at play. This is not complex in the sense that carpet bombing civilians is wrong.

And this is not so complex in the sense that— no— Chicago teens are not calling for the Genocide of Jews. Please use common sense as opposed to inflaming tensions and fears. They are clearly marching because they want violence to stop. And, no, the reason they’re opposed to violence has nothing to do with teacher “woke” propaganda, but thank you for spreading right-wing conspiracies among traditionally progressive voter bases. This is a generation of kids who grew up with mass shooters. They’ve been conducting walk outs over violence and weapons for years now. They are staunchly opposed to weapons manufacturing and sales *because* of their history of suffering under the onslaught of gun violence. And— shit— they see Gaza and are reminded of Tulsa. They see IOF soldiers and citizens filming themselves stopping and harassing Palestinian children and are reminded of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Elijah McClain. They hear of Palestinians being shot dead in their sleep and are reminded of Breonna Taylor.

This isn’t some grand conspiracy, but it’s easier to argue it is than contend with your worldview. You’d rather silence speakers and ban books than challenge power.