Need Another Reason to Denounce Nazis?

Here you go:

SCOOP: “Weev”, the system administrator for The Daily Stormer is planning on sending Nazis to #HeatherHeyer funeral. #Charlottesville.

“Yo, I need some research done,” Weev wrote. “What’s the location of this fat skank’s funeral.”

“Get on it, e-sleuths,” he added. “I want to get people on the ground there.”

This is appalling and shocking behaviour. Have we all become so damned weary and jaded that this too, is normalised? We cannot let this be. We cannot dare to enter the silence of complicity. We must keep standing up, we must fight, we must yell back. This cannot become acceptable. This cannot become tolerable, in any way.

Via Raw Story.

Denouncing Nazis.

Pearce Tefft recently wrote an open letter to his son. The other day, PZ posted about the fanatical racist relative he had. I grew up with a rabid John Bircher and bigot extraordinaire. While I was not completely silent in the face of that bigotry, I certainly did not speak up as often or as loudly as I should have done. It’s past time we stop playing all these little games with ourselves, pretending that these bigots aren’t really terrible people, because they are so and so’s Auntie Martha, or Uncle John, and so forth. It’s past time to stop pretending that all the nazis aren’t a problem. They are, and they have now descended into open murder. Conservative Christians are raging in their defense of nazism, and frantically attempting to pin blame everywhere except where it belongs. It’s past time for us all to gather our courage, and speak out. And to keep on speaking out. The more of this we do, the more will join in, finding support. Siobhan has an excellent reason to start yelling at the top of your voice.

My name is Pearce Tefft, and I am writing to all, with regards to my youngest son, Peter Tefft, an avowed white nationalist who has been featured in a number of local news stories over the last several months.

On Friday night, my son traveled to Charlottesville, Va., and was interviewed by a national news outlet while marching with reported white nationalists, who allegedly went on to kill a person.

I, along with all of his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate my son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions. We do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He did not learn them at home.

I have shared my home and hearth with friends and acquaintances of every race, gender and creed. I have taught all of my children that all men and women are created equal. That we must love each other all the same.

Evidently Peter has chosen to unlearn these lessons, much to my and his family’s heartbreak and distress. We have been silent up until now, but now we see that this was a mistake. It was the silence of good people that allowed the Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is the silence of good people that is allowing them to flourish now.

You can read the rest of Mr. Tefft’s letter here.

The Vatican vs Christian Conservatives.

The Vatican has fired shots across the bow, aiming at the heart of christian conservatives, and their current rule over politics in general, and Trump in the specific.

An article being described as “explosive,” written by two allies of Pope Francis in a Vatican-reviewed publication, is taking on the “spurious alliance between politics and religious fundamentalism” in the United States.

Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa call out the dominionist groups “composed mainly of whites from the deep American South” for their rejection of the “global ecological crisis” and their Armageddon-infused rhetoric, pointedly drawing parallels to Islamic fundamentalism.

They accuse these evangelical fundamentalists of seeking “influence in the political and parliamentary sphere and in the juridical and educational areas so that public norms can be subjected to religious morals.”

[…]

Thomas Williams, the former priest who has been called Breitbart’s man in Rome, called the article “rambling” and “bigoted.” He charged that it “caricatured white southern evangelicals as well as conservative American Catholics as ignorant, theocratic, Manichean, war-mongering fanatics anxiously awaiting the apocalypse.”

Yes, well, conservative American christians of any flavour are ignorant, theocratic, Manichean, war-mongering, and fanatics who happen to want to bring the apocalypse about.

You can read all about this at: The Guardian, Religion Dispatches, and Raw Story.

And in the “No shit, Sherlock” files, evangelical christians are the most intolerant of all!

Sunday Facepalm.

Oh, Michele Bachmann. She’s working very hard to get back into a spotlight again, any spotlight. As usual, she’ll say pretty much anything in her bid to garner attention and foment fear. In her compleat lack of wisdom, she has decided that hate crime hotlines are the very devil du jour.

Last month, Minneapolis announced that a hotline had been established to allow residents to report hate crimes, which include “any crime against a person or property motivated by prejudice against someone’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity. This includes prejudice-motivated property damage (including graffiti), stalking and assault.”

Oh my goodness, the horror! Why, that’s just awful, giving citizens recourse to prompt action in light of frightening crimes. Now, if they’d just work on getting all the murderers and would-be murderers out of the cop shops, we might have something good going here. Ms. Bachmann’s take is a bit, um, off:

“What we’re seeing is that hotlines are being set up by units of government for the purpose of encouraging people to call in and rat on their fellow man to report a hate crime,” she warned. “What they’re trying to do is implement anti-blasphemy laws. They’re trying to implement Islamic Sharia law locally in order to quiet churches and quiet anybody who would talk about what the truth is about Islam.”

No. No and No again. I realize it’s more difficult to get a rational thought into a conservative christian’s brain than it is a rock, nonetheless, I wish to fuck they’d get it into their skulls that speaking out, critical or not, is not a crime. Not even in the same ballpark. So now it’s “ratting on their fellow man”? My, my, do I hear goosestepping? Since when is reporting a crime squealing on someone? I have no doubt Ms. Bachmann would trip over herself getting to a phone if she saw anyone less than pasty white near her property. Oh, but those aren’t “fellow men”, are they?

I note that no one has managed to shut you up, Ms. Bachmann, so you give lie to your own words every single time you open that mouth of yours. I don’t like what you have to say, and I dearly wish you would shut the fuck up, but that’s a far cry from showing up on your doorstep with a nice gag.

“What they want is civilization jihad,” Bachmann continued. “They want jihad through the court system to silence speech because when you take away someone’s speech rights to speak out—like we’re doing right now, to tell the truth about something—then it’s game over … There should be a lawsuit filed against the city of Minneapolis for doing this. They have violated the so-called separation of church and state that the left is so in love with because they’re preferring Islam over any other religion and, number two, they’re fascists. That’s what they are, they’re fascists; they want to shut down your right to free speech.”

Nice of you to confirm that you’re still a fucking idiot, Ms. Bachmann. “Race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.” I don’t see “Islam, Islam, Islam” in there anywhere. There’s the ever generic religion, which also applies to you, and other christians. Here in uStates, crimes against white christians are rare, so you don’t have much to worry about. It’s just everyone else who is in danger, primarily from … white christians. Interesting how idiots like yourself never, ever manage to shut the fuck up about your frozen peaches being taken away, and never once have an irony meter land on your head.

Via RWW.

The Talk.

(Short Version).

(Full Length).

This very short ad, which touches on the very lengthy history of parents having to talk with young children about the ugliness of bigotry, and the gnawing fear of never seeing their child again. This has been, and still is, a necessary talk for most parents of colour. If anything, given the open bigotry and hatred on the part of too many cops these days, and their willingness to murder, well, things might not be worse, but they sure as hell aren’t much better.

I’m sure it won’t be a surprise, the white reaction to this. After having much of my hope for humanity utterly destroyed yesterday by skimming comments, the same thing comes to mind, that so many white people are so terribly frail, and delight in being cruel. It’s all liberal lies! Black people are delusional! Christ. Be smarter than me, stay away from all those willfully stupid, frail, malice filled bigots. They won’t make your day any better.

There is, naturally, a whinging howl to boycott Proctor & Gamble, those horrible, awful people. Damon Young at The Root addresses the storm.

But for what??? What the hell happened in the video that made them so mad? Did they film Michael Vick walking a dog? What the fuck?
 
Apparently they were triggered by an extremely tepid acknowledgment that the world might be a bit harder for black people than it is for them. The articulation of racism is racism. And not just racism, but racism-racism. That real, uncut and raw racism. Not that stepped-on shit with baking soda and milk.

Damon Young at The Root.

The Prophetic Order of the United States.

Right Wing Watch has an in-depth breakdown of the Religious Reich which now has a great deal of control over uStates government. It’s in sections:

  1. Introduction
  2. Who Are These People?
  3. Trump and the Prophets: Made For The Era of Social Media?
  4. Overlapping Networks
  5. God’s Own Party?
  6. POTUS Trump and the Prophetic Order of the United States

I’m just going to have a few bits here…

Brody and Lamb’s book, “The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biography” is scheduled for publication in January 2018, but it won’t be the first. It will face competition from “God and Trump” by Stephen Strang, who heads the Pentecostal media empire Charisma. During the campaign, Strang gave a media megaphone to Trump-boosting prophets like Wallnau. Strang’s book, which promises to explore “what is God doing, now not only in Donald Trump’s life, but also in the life of the nation,” is scheduled for release in November.

Meanwhile, POTUS Shield leaders continue to personally assure Trump that God Himself put Trump in power, something Amedia told attendees at the March POTUS Shield gathering that Trump understands:

I said to the man’s own face, ‘If you didn’t see God got you elected, with all the mistakes you made, and how you should have lost this election 50 times, then you will never see God.’ And he said, ‘I know it was God.’

[…]

For many Religious Right leaders, support for Trump is transactional: Trump promised them the Supreme Court, attacks on legal abortion and Planned Parenthood, and legal changes to make conservative Christians more politically powerful. But POTUS Shield members believe that something even greater than the Supreme Court is at stake: the future of the church and the reign of God on earth. They give Trump assurance that he’s on a divine path, and they give their followers a sense of playing an important role on the world stage, warring with the devil to take political and culture power away from liberals and secularists and establish the kingdom of God in the United States and around the world.

If you’re inclined to laugh, or shrug, don’t. Instead, think. This is terror. This is terrorism. This is a regime of sweeping oppression waiting in the wings, trying to take the main stage. This has been at work for many a year now, and this is the one and only chance they have, and they know it. I see in my own referrers here, how many people search for things like “Trump tackles elite satanic pedophiles” and the “prophecies” of this, that, and the other self-styled prophets. The Religious Reich has the perfect puppet, and Donny does not dare dismiss them, or spurn their desires, they are about the only thing keeping his arse firmly in the white house.

If there should be a face to atheism, to humanism, to the benefits of a secular society, it should be centered here, in direct and open opposition to these people who, in their pettiness and need to subjugate others, are climbing to ultimate power.

You can read the whole thing at Right Wing Watch, recommended.

Sunday Facepalm.

Magnum Chaos represented by Lorenzo Lotto, at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo.

Rick Joyner is exulting in the chaos of the white house. Personally, I don’t think such dysfunction is anything to celebrate, but Joyner seems to be under the impression that this is exactly how Jesus operated, so it’s okay.

“I’m expecting some chaos in the White House team for the duration of Trump’s administration,” Joyner said, “and I am saying this is because he is such an extraordinary leader. It’s not a lack of leadership; it’s a different kind of leadership.”

“Jesus is the best leader there will ever be,” Joyner said, but even his “cabinet” of apostles was rife with infighting. “Why were they fighting? Because they are stallions! These are serious leaders. They’re the real thing and they’re going to jostle and they’re going to fight, they’re going to position themselves. Trump has chosen those type of people for this cabinet.”

Y’know, I’ve read the bible, more than once. I’d dearly like to know if Mr. Joyner has, and what the fuck he was smoking when he did. Muscular Christianity isn’t new, but it isn’t apostolic in nature. Even the kindest of descriptors couldn’t work what’s going on in the white house as any type of muscular christianity, either. A surplus of strong leaders is not our problem. We don’t have any leaders at all. Those things are a bit different.

Via RWW.

Sam Fulwood III has a much more accurate assessment of what’s going on right now, at Think Progress. We’re dealing with the fallout of a toxic tide of white privilege. Oh, don’t be rolling your eyes. Given the current circumstances, it really can’t be denied. There was a never-ending barrage of bullshit thrown at the Obama administration, for eight bloody years. Every single move was questioned, in spite of the fact that it was one of the calmest, most scandal-free administrations ever. Look at what’s going on now, and imagine if this was happening with Pres. Obama in office instead of the Tiny Tyrant. Do you suppose people would just be shrugging? No.

[…] But the worst part of the racist vitriol directed at Obama and his family was the impact it had on everyday black Americans, who saw putative political attacks on the president and his polices as proxies for how many white Americans view African Americans.

By contrast, no such stigma of bad-boy behavior from the White House is deemed representative of white men or their kinfolk. For anyone who doubts its existence, the stench emanating from the Trump administration is a textbook definition of white privilege. Despite displaying a level of incompetence and moral deviance that is uncommon in rational democracies, the phalanx of white men surrounding the Oval Office bear no burden or shame as white Americans; their despicable behavior rests solely with them as individuals, not representatives of a race.

Click on over and have read, recommended.

Lauren Machen: Elemental.

© Lauren Machen.

The name of Lauren Machen’s premiere art photography series was almost Finally. As in, “I am finally addressing something that is at the very core of my being,” states the artist, who has previously worked in art direction for musicians such as St. Vincent and Rihanna. “Finally because a lot of subtle racism that people of color have had to struggle [with] are bubbling to the surface. People who aren’t of color just simply thought it didn’t exist or we were past that.”

Instead, Machen named the series Elemental, as in, “The very basis of my being. What my soul feels. My truth. Being mixed race, I was left to just sort of float in space because we didn’t really talk about race and ethnicity in my household… This is about peeling the layers away. Taking a moment to identify as I am rather than how others think I am or what I should be.”

Machen cites the 2016 election as a turning point for how she sees her racial identity, and even more specifically, Grey’s Anatomy actor Jesse Williams’s knockout acceptance speech for the BET Humanitarian Award. One of Williams’s most prominent lines from that speech was, “Just because we’re magical doesn’t mean we’re not real,” and its resonance is felt in Machen’s photos that capture surreal insertions of earthly elements into stark, honest portraits of people of color.

“I chose to incorporate the classical elements in the photographs: water, earth, fire, air, and also used falling sand as a symbol of passing time,” Machen explains. “There’s a mystery and magic to these elements, yet they are very real.

© Lauren Machen.

A brilliant series. You can read and see more at The Creators Project and Lauren Machen’s website.

Remembrance: The 1917 Silent Protest Parade.

Photograph of the 1917 NAACP Silent Protest Parade by Underwood and Underwood (courtesy James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library).

The call to the march by the organizing committee of the 1917 NAACP Silent Protest Parade (courtesy James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library).

In a petition to the White House, the marchers called on President Woodrow Wilson to take action, stating that in the “last thirty-one years 2,867 colored men and women have been lynched by mobs without trial. … We believe that this spirit of lawlessness is doing untold injury to our country and we submit that the record proves that the States are either unwilling or unable to put down lynching and mob violence.”

The organizers ended their list of “why do we march” reasons with:

We march because the growing consciousness and solidarity of race coupled with sorrow and discrimination have made us one: a union that may never be dissolved in spite of shallow-brained agitators, scheming pundits and political tricksters who secure a fleeting popularity and uncertain financial support by promoting the disunion of a people who ought to consider themselves as one.

It’s not possible to read about this march, or look at the images without seeing all the terrible parallels from 1917 to 2017. Lynch mobs may not roam at will now, but murderous cops are allowed to roam, and they are not punished for the thousands, every single year, of killings of Indigenous, Black, and Hispanic people. People are still marching. People are still taking a stand. And it’s beyond sadness that in all this time, these things are still needed.

You can see and read much more at Hyperallergic.

Speaking of Neo-Nazi Assholes…

Tucker Viemeister.

In the previous post, Richard Spencer’s sugar daddy was revealed. Now, Spencer and his nazi buddies are busy talking themselves up again, and just loving the current regime in all its chaos and idiocy.

As Salon reports, Michael Peinovich, the creator of alt-right podcast network The Right Stuff, spoke with leader Richard Spencer and an anonymous former GOP staffer ‘Jazzhands McFeels’ on Sunday about the administration’s lack funding for domestic terrorist groups.

“He’s going to give us space to operate, and frankly, it is space to destroy,” Peinovich said of Trump.

“Now is the time that we have to make hay while the sun shines,” ‘Jazzhands McFeels’ argued, insisting the alt-right should take advantage “while these investigations of ‘domestic terrorist groups’ are not being funded by the government, they’re not being pushed by the Department of Homeland Security.”

Contrasting Trump’s administration with a hypothetical Hillary Clinton presidency, Peiovich added the alt-right would “probably be facing f*cking [racketeering] charges or some shit like that,” adding the movement has “to use these four years to grow into something that can’t be defeated by that kind of thing.”

[…]

“I hope the way that [Trump] is looked back on in history is that he was the vehicle that moved the alt-right movement, the white identity movement in the United States, back into the forefront of the political scene,” Peinovich said.

And that alone should be reason enough for impeachment. Via Raw Story.

“The velvet tyranny of political correctness.”

Richard Spencer and William H. Regnery II.

Lance Williams at Reveal has an absorbing article up about the person and money behind neo-nazi Richard Spencer. For many years, Regnery’s notions about race got him kicked out of one organization or another, but the rise of the Tiny Tyrant has made many of  his dreams come true.

Long before Donald Trump’s election ushered in an era of resurgent white nationalism, a disaffected Republican named William H. Regnery II was brooding about the demographic plight of white people and plotting their rescue.

Like Trump more than 20 years later, Regnery, the wealthy scion of a famous GOP family, had an increasingly dark view of a changing America: As he wrote, the U.S. had become a crime-ridden society with bad schools, high taxes, an intrusive government and a penchant for political correctness that was “morphing into an intellectual tyranny.”

Worse, “a flood of immigrants were changing the look of America from a palette of prime colors to a third-world monochrome,” he wrote in a rant that would be at home on the bookshelf of Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. “Instead of a lingua franca, the country clanged with many foreign tongues.”

By 1999, he had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States.

[…]

Through his family’s famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.   

Now, he’s back. Working behind the scenes, the retired Chicago business executive has played an important role in making his ultra-right views a part of America’s political conversation in the era of Trump.

In what he has described as his crowning political achievement, Regnery discovered Richard Spencer, the mediagenic agitator who invented the term “alt-right.” In 2011, Regnery made him the frontman for his white nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, providing Spencer the platform to launch the alt-right movement.

The full article is here, recommended.

Sunday Facepalm: The Destruction of All Media.

At yesterday’s Phyllis Schlafly Collegians D.C. Summit, an event for college students hosted by the late Schlafly’s group Eagle Forum, Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matt Boyle boasted that his publication’s goal is to completely destroy and eliminate the “mainstream media,” leaving Brietbart and other fringe organizations as the only available media outlets.

“The goal eventually is the full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media,” Boyle said. “We envision a day where CNN is no longer in business; we envision a day where The New York Times closes its doors. I think that day is possible, I think that we can get there.”

No subtlety there. Unfortunately, I think that day is all too possible too. Perhaps not probable, but still, I think we are far more weighted towards the fascism side these days. Certainly the Tiny Tyrant and the rethuglicans wouldn’t have much of a problem with this scenario.

“But when that happens,” he added, “the public still needs an information stream. And again, as much as we love Trump’s Twitter account, as much as we love the White House press releases and briefings and all that, there needs to be an independent and strong media in the United States, and that’s where we come in.”

Independent. Is that what toadying and the fostering of hate is called now? I think we can stick with propaganda, as that one is accurate.

Via Right Wing Watch.

The Wisdom of Rick Joyner, Fucking Idiot.

 

WISDOM IN THREE PARTS:

Part I:

A. Back off and let those men who want to marry men, marry men.
B. Allow those women who want to marry women, marry women.
C. Allow those folks who want to abort their babies, abort their babies.

In three generations, there will be no more Democrats.

Part II:
10 Poorest Cities in America (How did it happen?)
City, State, % of People Below the Poverty Level

1. Detroit, MI 32.5%
2. Buffalo, NY 29.9%
3. Cincinnati, OH 27.8%
4. Cleveland, OH 27.0%
5. Miami, FL 26.9%
5. St. Louis, MO 26.8%
7. El Paso, TX 26.4%
8. Milwaukee, WI 26.2%
9. Philadelphia, PA 25.1%
10. Newark, NJ 24.2%

What do these top ten cities (over 250,000 pop.) with the highest poverty rate all have in common?

Detroit, MI – (1st on poverty rate list) hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1961

Buffalo, NY – (2nd) hasn’t elected one since 1954

Cincinnati, OH – (3rd) not since 1984

Cleveland, OH – (4th) not since 1989

Miami, FL – (5th) has never had a Republican mayor

St. Louis, MO – (6th) not since 1949

El Paso, TX – (7th) has never had a Republican mayor

Milwaukee, WI – (8th) not since 1908

Philadelphia, PA – (9th) not since 1952

Newark, NJ – (10th) not since 1907

Einstein once said, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’
It is the poor who habitually elect Democrats… yet they are still POOR.

Part III:

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”
~Abraham Lincoln

“Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him had better take a much
closer look at the American Indian.”
~Henry Ford

Okay, all this idiocy can be distilled right down to: kill off all political parties except for conservative republican, always support the rich, and if you’re poor, go fuck yourself, because that’s your fault, natch. I’ll just briefly note that a good many white people on the poor side of life voted for the Tiny Tyrant, and many of them are now crying in their beer, because he hasn’t done one thing for them. At least the ones bright enough to figure out what a scam it all is. That last quote by Ford is pernicious, to say the least. After a partially successful genocide, and massive theft, no, the government didn’t do much for Indians, because they were busy stealing every fucking thing they could, and really didn’t want those inconvenient leftovers getting in the way. This would be Joyner’s way of expressing that ol’ white supremacy: white is might is right, yessir.

Let’s take a brief look at what some of those brilliant republicans have been saying about all us peons:

Paul Ryan says people just don’t want insurance, that’s all.  All those millions who would lose healthcare, ah, that’s their choice.

The Regime has threatened the insurance of low income people if Trumpcare isn’t passed, but hey, they care about you, they really do!

Sen. Ron Johnson explained how people with pre-existing conditions don’t deserve health coverage, because it’s like crashing a car.

Rep. Pete Olsen was laughing over prenatal and maternity care, pointing out that since people with those nifty X chromosomes didn’t need that shit, why should they pay for it?

Now, the vote on Trumpcare has been canceled. (Yay!) Don’t get over excited though, because this is far from over, and McConnell will not give up easily, nor will Ryan, Trump, or all the other empty bags of flesh who are utterly devoid of empathy.

Yes, I’m sure we are all so darn impressed with how republicans care for people, especially those pesky poor people. Rick Joyner’s “wisdom” can be found here.