The Rise of Bigot America Thread

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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Thu Aug 17, 2017 1:27 pm

The moment I hear Jimmy Fallon wax indignant about how gun rights are a product of slave patrols and acknowledge the transmutation of slavery into the prison system, I will (attempt to) pull down at least one confederate statue all by myself.


Anyone holding up Jimmy Fallon as any kind of moral authority is seriously deluded. His musical parodies are routinely hilarious. Beyond that, I have no interest on his comedy, let alone his politics.
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Aug 17, 2017 6:08 pm

mentalgongfu2 » Thu Aug 17, 2017 6:27 pm wrote:
The moment I hear Jimmy Fallon wax indignant about how gun rights are a product of slave patrols and acknowledge the transmutation of slavery into the prison system, I will (attempt to) pull down at least one confederate statue all by myself.


Anyone holding up Jimmy Fallon as any kind of moral authority is seriously deluded. His musical parodies are routinely hilarious. Beyond that, I have no interest on his comedy, let alone his politics.


I'm no fan of talk-show-hosts as moral commentators - a proud tradition dating, in its current incarnation, back to Jon Stewart's post-9/11 puppy-op - Fallon's just a marker to me of how universal/palatable an anti-racism gesture as shallow as statue removal is. Keep them because what they represented is alive and well, not because their subjects deserve to be honored. Once the later permutations of slavery are widely and properly named - eg a truly popular prison abolition movement that acknowledges prisons are the successor to slavery - then by all means, tear down Robert E. Lee and all the rest.
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Thu Aug 17, 2017 6:35 pm

I sort of agree with the sentiment, except the legally-elected Charlottesville City Council voted to remove their statue. They had their debate and made their decision - I don't see the necessity for them to bring the corrupt prison system of the U.S. into the debate. A worthy issue, no doubt - but that's like saying vegans shouldn't oppose veal until they can first take down the entire factory farm system and outlaw all forms of animal cruelty, rather than going for an actually obtainable goal.
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby 82_28 » Thu Aug 17, 2017 6:58 pm

In Renovation of Golf Club, Donald Trump Also Dressed Up History

By NICHOLAS FANDOS NOV. 24, 2015

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STERLING, Va. — When Donald J. Trump bought a fixer-upper golf club on Lowes Island here for $13 million in 2009, he poured millions more into reconfiguring its two courses. He angered conservationists by chopping down more than 400 trees to open up views of the Potomac River. And he shocked no one by renaming the club after himself.

But that wasn’t enough. Mr. Trump also upgraded its place in history.

Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee of one of the club’s two courses, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly designating “The River of Blood.”

“Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,” the inscription reads. “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ”

The inscription, beneath his family crest and above Mr. Trump’s full name, concludes: “It is my great honor to have preserved this important section of the Potomac River!”

Like many of Mr. Trump’s claims, the inscription was evidently not fact-checked.

“No. Uh-uh. No way. Nothing like that ever happened there,” said Richard Gillespie, the executive director of the Mosby Heritage Area Association, a historical preservation and education group devoted to an 1,800-square-mile section of the Northern Virginia Piedmont, including the Lowes Island site.

“The only thing that was remotely close to that,” Mr. Gillespie said, was 11 miles up the river at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff in 1861, a rout of Union forces in which several hundred were killed. “The River of Blood?” he added. “Nope, not there.”

Mr. Gillespie’s contradiction of the plaque’s account was seconded by Alana Blumenthal, the curator of the Loudoun Museum in nearby Leesburg. (A third local expert, who said he had written to Mr. Trump’s company about the inscription’s falsehoods and offered to provide historically valid replacement text, insisted on anonymity because he did not want to cross the Trump Organization by disclosing a private exchange.)

In a phone interview, Mr. Trump called himself a “a big history fan” but deflected, played down and then simply disputed the local historians’ assertions of historical fact.

“That was a prime site for river crossings,” Mr. Trump said. “So, if people are crossing the river, and you happen to be in a civil war, I would say that people were shot — a lot of them.”

The club does indeed lie a stone’s throw from Rowser’s Ford, where, as an official historical marker notes, Gen. J. E. B. Stuart led 5,000 Confederate troops including cavalry across the Potomac en route to the Battle of Gettysburg.

But no one died in that crossing, historians said, or in any other notable Civil War engagement on the spot.

“How would they know that?” Mr. Trump asked when told that local historians had called his plaque a fiction. “Were they there?”

Mr. Trump repeatedly said that “numerous historians” had told him that the golf club site was known as the River of Blood. But he said he did not remember their names.

Then he said the historians had spoken not to him but to “my people.” But he refused to identify any underlings who might still possess the historians’ names.

“Write your story the way you want to write it,” Mr. Trump said finally, when pressed unsuccessfully for anything that could corroborate his claim. “You don’t have to talk to anybody. It doesn’t make any difference. But many people were shot. It makes sense.”

In its small way, the plaque bears out Mr. Trump’s reputation for being preoccupied with grandeur, superlatives and his own name, but less so with verifiable facts, even when his audience is relatively small.

Members of what he renamed the Trump National Golf Club, and some former employees, said the plaque generally drew laughter or eye-rolls, much as when Mr. Trump periodically descends from his helicopter to walk one course or the other.

One member, a former history professor and a co-author of four Civil War novels, called the monument merely “strange.”

Much more important, he said, were the much-needed renovations Mr. Trump made to the golf courses.

“I am not going to lead a demonstration over this,” said the member, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker. “It’s a country club with a golf course, for Pete’s sake.


https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/us/p ... trref=t.co
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby norton ash » Thu Aug 17, 2017 7:59 pm

Maybe Trump the bullshitter was trying to pay homage to a fellow xenophobic fascist.

Back to the rivers of blood: Enoch Powell returns to a divided Britain

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/ ... -mcdiarmid

A nation divided. Two factions at war over foreigners. One side claims to tell it like it is. The other cries racism. Neither can agree. Brexit Britain? Well, yes, but also Birmingham in April 1968.

That was when the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West forced immigration on to the political agenda. His name was Enoch Powell and what he called his Birmingham speech would prove even more incendiary than he’d hoped. Reacting to Labour’s Race Relations Act, Powell argued that allowing mass immigration from the Commonwealth was “literally mad” and prophesied doom in the language of the Roman poet Virgil: “Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Aug 17, 2017 8:50 pm

mentalgongfu2 » Wed Aug 16, 2017 5:48 pm wrote:
My hope is that the gross absurdity of Trump's press conference might open the eyes of people who view the antifa with disdain to the reprehensibility of the "both sides" bullshit moral equivalency argument. One side held a rally to glorify bigotry, the other side came out to oppose that bigotry, a bigotry I might add that encompasses the historical justification for slavery and fascism. This is not an issue anyone with a conscience can fence-sit on or strike a Pontius Pilate pose. I'm glad you understand that.


I would like to believe this. However, after listening today to the number of callers to Tuesday's On Point program on Charloteseville (a WBUR Boston public radio program broadcast nationally by NPR, and hardly aimed at a typical Fox News audience), who repeated GOP/alt-right talking points about how there are more leftist hate groups than the right, how BLM is composed of even worse, more violent murderous thugs, who continued the moral equivalency and argued groups like BLM are actually worse than neo-Nazis and have brought this about with Obama's help, I am increasingly disheartened.


That bums me out too. Those don't sound like fence-sitters though, it sounds like Trump's base. They cheer him on now for metaphorically fulfilling a campaign threat, to quote Michael Ian Black: "Metaphorically speaking, yesterday the President stood in the middle of 5th Ave and shot somebody. Her name was Heather Heyer."
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 18, 2017 12:46 pm

Image

Image

Image


the same Russian artist that did this

Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 18, 2017 2:15 pm

Image

Report: Warrants Issued For White Supremacist Featured In Vice Film


Vice News
By NICOLE LAFOND Published AUGUST 18, 2017 12:08 PM
Charlottesville police have reportedly issued warrants for the arrest of Christopher Cantwell, a white supremacist prominently featured in a Vice News documentary.

Cantwell is wanted for his involvement in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, where a counter-protester was killed when a man affiliated with white nationalists allegedly drove his car through a crowd.

The warrants are for illegal use of gases and injury by caustic agent or explosive, the Boston Globe reported.

Charlottesville police did not immediately respond to TPM’s request for confirmation.

Cantwell posted a tearful video on YouTube earlier this week after apparently learning there were warrants out for his arrest.



“I don’t want to. I don’t think I should. I honestly think that I have been law-abiding,” Cantwell said in the video, outlining the work his group did to gain a permit to assemble for the “Unite the Right” rally last weekend.

The group claims they gathered to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville.

Another group that’s attempting to assemble in Boston this weekend — that claims they’re not affiliated with the “Unite the Right” group, despite advertising similar supporters and speakers — was given a permit to assemble this weekend.

The city set restrictions on the kind of activity that can occur, AP reported. No backpacks will be allowed or anything that resembles a weapon.

The city is allowing the Boston Free Speech group to assemble for two hours, from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m., and will only let 100 people into the gathering, though some supporters think as many as 1,000 could show up.

According to Cantwell, the FBI reached out to him to aide in efforts to keep the Boston rally from becoming violent like the one in Charlottesville, the AP reported. He said he would help, but said he did not know the organizers of the free speech protest.

In the Vice documentary, Cantwell explains his white nationalist views and his hatred for Jewish people. He said he thinks “a lot more people are gonna die before we’re done here,” responding to reports of the death of Charlottesville counter-protester Heather Heyer allegedly at the hands of a man who claimed to be an ally of white supremacists.

He told the AP he wouldn’t attend the Boston rally because he wouldn’t be able to carry a gun.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Aug 23, 2017 7:28 pm

The Spread of White Nationalism Is Taking Our Nation into Uncharted and Dangerous Territory
Charlottesville and its aftermath are proof we're in for a resurgence of America's oldest culture war.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet
August 22, 2017, 2:45 PM

America’s culture wars are back. Only this time it’s white identity politics supplanting the religious right. This is a step beyond the GOP’s formula of turning elections into a battle over faith and family, with non-Christian non-traditional values under threat, and the enemy identified as anyone embracing diversity and tolerance.

Maybe culture war isn’t the right phrase. Maybe what we're witnessing is a clash of American civilization, or the start of a national disintegration. But race-centric beliefs that have been kept under wraps by many whites for decades are breaking into the open.

This is seen in Charlottesville’s marchers, in President Trump’s false-equivalency defense of the “good” people on both sides, and in polls finding two-thirds of GOP voters were okay with his response. Somehow, racist, epithet-yelling white supremacists and neo-Nazi sympathizers didn’t upset Trump. These white power nationalist voices came from within his base—those who believe his "Make America Great Again" rants mean restoring their power and privilege.

It may be too soon to understand the scope or limits of the unraveling before us. But here are 10 concrete observations as we begin to take stock of this juncture. There surely are many more. But let’s mark this moment as a break from, as well as a continuation of, the past, even as we read the opening page of a chapter that’s still being written. (More marches are planned for this weekend.)

1. This is not yesterday’s culture wars. "Culture war" may be a media construct. Nonetheless, it’s shorthand for what Thomas Frank traced in his 2004 book, What’s The Matter With Kansas?, in which the author answered why those on the economy’s losing side in middle America were voting against their own self-interest. A big part of the answer was that the GOP strategically pushed emotional litmus tests, like limiting reproductive rights (starting with abortion) and embracing traditional (biblically defined) family values. These cries diverted voters away from simmering class issues to hotter-button moral ones. Vice President Mike Pence is today’s lead messenger for this agenda. But what the right's obsessions over sex, sin and subversion didn’t explicitly admit was that its core was angst over white identity, or its perceived disappearance. What’s new is that self-centered societal expectation has come out of the shadows.

2. The internet has emboldened political tribalism. This isn’t only true of white supremacists. This pertains to everybody with a specific point of view, as Fortune.com accurately noted in a piece about how the rise in tribal politics accelerated the spread of fake news. “Facebook’s pushing of our emotional buttons is part of the picture—since it is blamed for helping distribute a lot of fake news—but so is what some researchers say is an increase in political tribalism,” Fortune wrote. “How is this related to the rise of fake news? Because the researchers argue that this powerful desire to be seen as a member of a specific group or tribe influences the way we behave online in a variety of ways, including the news we share on social networks like Facebook. In many cases it’s a way to signify membership in a group, rather than a desire to share information.”

There’s no disputing that many Charlottesville white power marchers came from across the country, connected by grievances touted by websites and alt-right forums. These lines and connections in cyberspace are creating new political identities and fault lines, which, as we have seen, are hastening the return into the open of once closely held prejudices and racial animosity. Saturday's planned "free speech" rally in federal parkland in San Francisco, where militias are saying they will attend to "keep the peace" by toting military-style weaponry, is another example of transitioning from chatroom whispers to public pronouncements.

3. Internet advertising is throwing gas on this fire. Anyone who has looked at far-right websites knows they often look a bit amateurish—such as publishing on the same templates. But below the surface are super-sophisticated user-tracking and behavior-predicting analytics set up by advertising networks to share and refer content to the like-minded (and hence targeted online ads). Since 2016’s election, there have been a handful of reports and analyses mapping how the far right acquired audiences and influence equal to mainstream media. Breitbart, as the New York Times Sunday Magazine just reported, supplanted Fox News in fall 2016. (It's since lost 2,600 advertisers and audience share.) Nonetheless, deeper looks from academia revealed how online advertising networks fed and fortified the right’s echo chambers, which continues today. This infrastructure is not going away, even if far-right websites like the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer are kicked off web publishing platforms, as Go Daddy and Google did post-Charlottesville.

4. Communities nursing grievances now back each other. The white power umbrella means different things to different people, and its many groups are notoriously splintered and unruly, even if the unifying feature is whiteness. As the Guardian reported in one example, gun-carrying militias from six states, all with Facebook pages, went to Charlottesville seeking to “defend free speech” by marching in combat uniforms and carrying military-style rifles. Their stated aim was to keep the peace, the Guardian said, not carry Nazi and Ku Klux Klan flags. However, the notion that self-appointed white posses should supplement police as other militant whites march is jarring. This boldness reflects a stewing far-right rage, shared by those who believe society cannot take care of them or itself; that norms—like local police—are insufficient, and that new order, rules and displays of power are necessary.

As Daryl Johnson, a former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in a Washington Post commentary this week, the threat of white nationalists has been underestimated and is growing. "The mere existence of so many heavily armed citizens filled with hate and anger toward various elements of American society is troubling enough in its own right," he wrote. "They number in the hundreds of thousands. More troubling is the violent convergence now underway within right-wing extremist movements—sanitized with the label 'alt-right.' Largely under the media radar, disaffected extremist groups with long histories of squabbling have been independently pooling resources, some even infiltrating our government through the outreach efforts of right-wing extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Over the past year, we’ve witnessed political violence erupt between right-wing extremist protesters and counterprotesters at pro-Trump rallies in Minnesota, Washington, California and now Virginia. This rebranded alt-right extremist movement has the ultimate goal to disrupt civil society, undermine government institutions and pick which laws—if any—they will abide by, and what supposed 'justice' they will administer on their own authority."

5. White insecurity is the oldest issue in America. In many ways, the resurgence of white supremacy Daryl Johnson describes is anything but a new story. It’s among the oldest narratives in America. Ever since the European colonizers landed, whites have been scared of Native Americans and then rebellious slaves. The white fears of losing their lives and livelihoods (now fears of losing privilege and place) to non-whites date to the 1790s, when Haitian slaves overthrew the French. In 1807, the Congress responded by banning slave importation. That was a half-century before the Civil War, making Virginia the increasingly powerful center of a slave-breeding industry and decreasing the power of South Carolina, the major Atlantic port for slave importation.

The U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment’s purpose, in part, was to allow southern slates to have slave-catching militias. After the Civil War, they became the Ku Klux Klan, whose goals were disarming blacks and sending a message of who was in charge. The history and examples go on and on, decade after decade, century after century, with white fear of non-whites a primal force. Trump’s 2016 campaign was another example, starting with demonizing Mexicans and Muslims. There’s nothing new here, as disturbing as that may be.

6. Like past culture wars, it’s a useful distraction. The takeaway from Frank’s book was the early 21st-century culture wars led by the religious right allowed the Republicans’ other major base—predatory capitalists—to exploit the electorate electing Republicans. The same can be said of the resurgent white supremacists, who are praising and being praised by a president whose policies seek to hollow out societal equalizers and social safety nets by privatizing education, environmental deregulation, dismantling health care, gutting labor law, defunding Planned Parenthood, and not enforcing civil rights. The Charlottesville marchers were united in their defiance and aggression, but didn’t have concrete agendas other than elevating their race and power above others.

7. The white supremacists aren’t anti-big government. This is a different twist than recent GOP dogma. If anything, leaders like David Duke said they liked that Trump is validating their grievances. Moreover, they are not explicitly anti-big government. They want Trump and government to put them at the front of the line again via pro-white affirmative action. That is what Trump’s administration is doing, by taking steps to stop enforcing civil rights laws in voting, education and discrimination. It’s a return to the 1950s and many eras before, when the political class was white, society was segregated and non-whites knew and kept their place.

8. These whites have always been there. There is a spectrum of conservative-to-right-wing households that fall under what linguist George Lakoff calls the “strict father” morality and worldview. Those on the left of this spectrum might be conservative Christians who oppose abortion and women’s rights and back gun ownership, but are not racist. Going further to the right, however, are those who believe in white power and racial superiority and feel an increasingly diverse America, demographically and culturally, threatens them and society. Lakoff has said strict-father households account for 35 percent of the country, which is just below Trump’s current national approval rating of 38 percent. In other words, the moral universe where male-led white supremacy thrives is rooted in a significant portion of the country, even if the Charlottesville marchers represent a small subset of that cohort.

9. Trump grew up in a strict-father, racist household. Trump has an affinity for white supremacy because he was raised by a strict father in a segregated New York City—the very paradigm Lakoff describes. Fred Trump prospered when New York was not a “melting pot,” as its school-age children were taught in the 1960s. As a native New Yorker with family going back a century there, I can tell you it was wall-to-wall ethnic ghettos, neighborhood silos where identity was a major factor in business and social circles. Bernie Sanders, who didn’t interact with blacks until he went to college in Chicago, was from this milieu. Trump’s father became rich building high-rise rental apartments for non-whites after World War II, when the government wouldn’t make home loans to returning black and brown veterans. As the suburbs grew and whites left the inner city, Trump entered a family business built on segregation. This is where his values come from, which are racist, hustling and in your face—echoing Charlottesville's white power marchers.

10. The response? Empathize but don’t sympathize.That’s Lakoff’s prescription for dealing with this cohort of America, including its white supremacist elements. That sounds hard, but Lakoff says the white power marchers and the strict-father mindsets are due to the way their brains are wired. For progressives who want to challenge and change that, it means knowing your moral compass, trying to hear where their grievances are coming from, and then pushing back by stating what is true and what is not. That’s the only way to rewire unconscious thinking, Lakoff says. “Empathy is not necessarily being sympathetic to someone else, but it has to do with really putting yourself in their shoes so you know what they're doing and what they could be doing to you.”

Where Are We?

What unfolded in Charlottesville and its aftermath is not a normal political or cultural moment—not since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It is a stark watershed, suggesting in discouraging ways that the more things change, the more they stay the same—as the cliché goes. Lakoff’s assessment that one-third of America is predisposed to the kind of thinking that leads to racism and white supremacy like we saw in Charlottesville is sobering.

There's a faint hope, he says, to change how people think. But most reactions to Charlottesville are disgust, not empathy. As new white power marches are planned for San Francisco this weekend, vehement counter-protests are being planned. It may take three or more decades for American demographics to change (when non-whites become a majority) to surmount this latest eruption of white supremacy. Between now and then, and especially with Trump as president, the country is entering uncharted and dangerous territory.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Sat Aug 26, 2017 10:08 pm

Ever since the horrific events in Charlottesville two weeks ago, I've been aching to get out and protest. This weekend, my wife and I attended the Indivisible March in Los Angeles to rally for women's rights and honor Heather Heyer, who was brutally run over and murdered by a Nazi terrorist in Charlottesville while counter-protesting against white supremacy. It was an extremely hot afternoon, but we enjoyed meeting with friends and seeing so many people stand up against hatred. I hope you enjoy the video we made of our time there.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKBhBTMcJd0
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby Morty » Sat Aug 26, 2017 10:55 pm

stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Aug 24, 2017 9:28 am wrote:
The Spread of White Nationalism Is Taking Our Nation into Uncharted and Dangerous Territory
Charlottesville and its aftermath are proof we're in for a resurgence of America's oldest culture war.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet
August 22, 2017, 2:45 PM
.
.
.
These white power nationalist voices came from within his base—those who believe his "Make America Great Again" rants mean restoring their power and privilege.


Rosenfeld completely ignores the economic issues, which is just as our economic overlords would have it. They'd much prefer a culture war to an economic war, and so that is what they have chosen for the USA.

The working class has been hollowed out over a period of decades. It's a choice. You can pay the people who clean the offices and serve you coffee $7/hr, or you can pay them $15/hr. It will never be possible to pay the equivalent of $15/hr in a society that has significant ongoing illegal immigration and allows undocumented people to work indefinitely. This is something the left doesn't seem to want to get its head around. Valuing ALL the members of your community necessarily means protecting them from having their conditions undermined by outside forces.

The only way to have "open borders" throughout the world is to have economic justice throughout the world. The universal economic justice has to come first though, otherwise the result will be a race to the bottom and universal economic injustice.
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Aug 31, 2017 7:24 pm

Md. man accused of firing gun into a crowd at Charlottesville rally a member of the KKK
Richard Preston was arrested on Saturday
Skyler Henry
6:19 PM, Aug 28, 2017

ROSEDALE, Md. -

The leader of a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan is being extradited to Virginia after he was arrested in Baltimore on Saturday.

Authorities believe he’s the man responsible for shooting a gun into a crowd of people during protests and rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Richard Preston could be in jail as early as Tuesday after waiving his extradition during a video conference on Monday.

Video shows who’s believed to be Preston shouting racial slurs and then firing a shot into a group of people.

Police say Preston is charged with discharging a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school.

After speaking with his neighbors in Rosedale, residents there say police surrounded Preston’s home on Saturday.

Some people said he had Confederate flags in his windows until right after the Charlottesville protest when he took them down.

Preston is the leader of a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, the group has a headquarters in Rosedale.

Preston also worked at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore from 1996 to 2001.

While acknowledging the gap in time from when Preston was employed, the school still sent a statement:
Dear Bryn Mawr Community,

With the start of school just a few days away, we hoped that our next communication to you would be a celebratory one. However, we've learned today the disturbing news that a former Bryn Mawr maintenance worker, Richard Preston, who was employed from 1996-2001, has been criminally charged with discharging a firearm into the crowd during the protest in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12. Additionally, we have become aware of media reports that Mr. Preston is allegedly associated with the Ku Klux Klan.

Though his employment was in the distant past, we are deeply disturbed by Mr. Preston's alleged actions and associations. Hatred and racism are completely antithetical to our values. We stand united against bigotry, prejudice and violence of any kind. We are ready to respond with support or counseling for any community members who are adversely affected by this news. Additionally, we will continue a dialogue with employees, parents, students and the extended Bryn Mawr community around current events and issues of injustice. We ask parents to consider age-appropriateness in sharing this information with your children. If anyone has questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us directly.

Please be assured that in making hiring decisions, The Bryn Mawr School follows all state mandated protocols, requiring fingerprinting and a criminal background check of state and FBI databases for all employees. This vetting process was in place at the time of Mr. Preston's hire and continues today. The School continually adopts best practices in this field to ensure the safety of our students, which is paramount.

Our hearts go out to the victims of the Charlottesville tragedy. As a school and as a country, we have important and challenging work to do to ensure that equity and justice apply equally to all people. These are the values for which Bryn Mawr stands.

Preston is one of four people that have been arrested for their roles during the protests in Charlottesville.

Police are still asking for information that can help in their investigation.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby Morty » Wed Sep 06, 2017 3:59 am


How should we protest neo-Nazis? Lessons from German history

August 22, 2017 11.57am AEST

Author
Laurie Marhoefer
Assistant Professor of History, University of Washington

After the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, many people are asking themselves what they should do if Nazis rally in their city. Should they put their bodies on the line in counterdemonstrations? Some say yes.

History says no. Take it from me: I study the original Nazis.

We have an ethical obligation to stand against fascism and racism. But we also have an ethical obligation to do so in a way that doesn’t help the fascists and racists more than it hurts them.

History repeats itself


Charlottesville was right out of the Nazi playbook. In the 1920s, the Nazi Party was just one political party among many in a democratic system, running for seats in Germany’s Parliament. For most of that time, it was a small, marginal group. In 1933, riding a wave of popular support, it seized power and set up a dictatorship. The rest is well-known.

It was in 1927, while still on the political fringes, that the Nazi Party scheduled a rally in a decidedly hostile location – the Berlin district of Wedding. Wedding was so left-of-center that the neighborhood had the nickname “Red Wedding,” red being the color of the Communist Party. The Nazis often held rallies right where their enemies lived, to provoke them.

The people of Wedding were determined to fight back against fascism in their neighborhood. On the day of the rally, hundreds of Nazis descended on Wedding. Hundreds of their opponents showed up too, organized by the local Communist Party. The antifascists tried to disrupt the rally, heckling the speakers. Nazi thugs retaliated. There was a massive brawl. Almost 100 people were injured.

I imagine the people of Wedding felt they had won that day. They had courageously sent a message: Fascism was not welcome.

But historians believe events like the rally in Wedding helped the Nazis build a dictatorship. Yes, the brawl got them media attention. But what was far, far more important was how it fed an escalating spiral of street violence. That violence helped the fascists enormously.

Violent confrontations with antifascists gave the Nazis a chance to paint themselves as the victims of a pugnacious, lawless left. They seized it.

It worked. We know now that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes like the one in Wedding. It looked like a bloody tide of civil war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis themselves were fomenting the violence didn’t seem to matter.

One of Hitler’s biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence.

The left takes the heat

In the court of public opinion, accusations of mayhem and chaos in the streets will, as a rule, tend to stick against the left, not the right.

This was true in Germany in the 1920s. It was true even when opponents of fascism acted in self-defense or tried to use relatively mild tactics, such as heckling. It is true in the United States today, where even peaceful rallies against racist violence are branded riots in the making.

Today, right extremists are going around the country staging rallies just like the one in 1927 in Wedding. According to the civil rights advocacy organization the Southern Poverty Law Center, they pick places where they know antifascists are present, like university campuses. They come spoiling for physical confrontation. Then they and their allies spin it to their advantage.

I watched this very thing happen steps from my office on the University of Washington campus. Last year, a right extremist speaker came. He was met by a counterprotest. One of his supporters shot a counterprotester. On stage, in the moments after the shooting, the right extremist speaker claimed that his opponents had sought to stop him from speaking “by killing people.” The fact that it was one of the speaker’s supporters, a right extremist and Trump backer, who engaged in what prosecutors now claim was an unprovoked and premeditated act of violence, has never made national news.

We saw this play out after Charlottesville, too. President Donald Trump said there was violence “on both sides.” It was an incredible claim. Heyer, a peaceful protester, and 19 other people were intentionally hit by a neo-Nazi driving a car. He seemed to portray Charlottesville as another example of what he has referred to elsewhere as “violence in our streets and chaos in our communities,” including, it seems, Black Lives Matter, which is a nonviolent movement against violence. He stirred up fear. Trump recently said that police are too constrained by existing law.

President Trump tried it again during the largely peaceful protests in Boston – he called the tens of thousands who gathered there to protest racism and Nazism “anti-police agitators,” though later, in a characteristic about-face, he praised them.

President Trump’s claims are hitting their mark. A CBS News poll found that a majority of Republicans thought his description of who was to blame for the violence in Charlottesville was “accurate.”

This violence, and the rhetoric about it coming from the administration, are echoes – faint but nevertheless frightening echoes – of a well-documented pattern, a pathway by which democracies devolve into dictatorships.

The Antifa

There’s an additional wrinkle: the antifa. When Nazis and white supremacists rally, the antifa are likely to show up, too.

“Antifa” is short for antifascists, though the name by no means includes everyone who opposes fascism. The antifa is a relatively small movement of the far left, with ties to anarchism. It arose in Europe’s punk scene in the 1980s to fight neo-Nazism.

The antifa says that because Nazism and white supremacy are violent, we must use any means necessary to stop them. This includes physical means, like what they did on my campus: forming a crowd to block ticket-holders from entering a venue to hear a right extremist speak.

The antifa’s tactics often backfire, just like those of Germany’s communist opposition to Nazism did in the 1920s. Confrontations escalate. Public opinion often blames the left no matter the circumstances.

What to do?

One solution: Hold a counterevent that doesn’t involve physical proximity to the right extremists. The Southern Poverty Law Center has published a helpful guide. Among its recommendations: If the alt-right rallies, “organize a joyful protest” well away from them. Ask people they have targeted to speak. But “as hard as it may be to resist yelling at alt-right speakers, do not confront them.”

This does not mean ignoring Nazis. It means standing up to them in a way that denies them a chance for bloodshed.

The cause Heather Heyer died for is best defended by avoiding the physical confrontation that the people who are responsible for her death want.
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby Morty » Thu Sep 07, 2017 5:49 pm

The thing I found interesting about the "Lessons from German History" article I posted a few days ago was that the author seemed to be saying that it is common knowledge among professional historians of the Nazi period that the violent resistance of the German communists and antifascists made the rise of the Nazi party possible. That the Nazis would have remained a minor party but for the tactics of the violent antifascist opposition.

For all the attention paid to Hitler and WWII in society at large - the defining story of the 20th century, no less - this "lesson," isn't something that I've ever even heard of...barring far right anti-communist or anti-semitic conspiracy theories for a moment.
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Re: The Rise of Bigot America Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Sep 11, 2017 4:14 pm

PewDiePie may not be American, but the vast majority of racist gamers rushing to his defense probably are:

Highest paid YouTube star shoots ‘f*cking n*gger’ in live video stream — and gamer dudes rush to his defense
David Edwards
11 Sep 2017 at 12:00

The worlds most popular and highest paid Youtube star Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie, was caught using the N-word in a live broadcast of a video game.

According to Tech Crunch, the YouTube star with 57 million subscribers was live-broadcasting the game “Player Unknown Battlegrounds” when he complained about an opponent, who he called a “n*gger.”

Writing for The Guardian, Chella Ramanan insisted that the slur could not be excused as a joke or a mistake made in the heat of the moment.

“Casual use of racial slurs needs to be condemned wholeheartedly, every single time,” Ramanan wrote. “There is never a good reason to use the language displayed in this video. Playing a video game is not an excuse, just as being drunk or angry does not give anyone free reign to use racist insults.”

But hordes of male gamers took to Twitter to express support for Kjellberg.


more at link above
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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