Politics & Stuff

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The ‘culture wars’ are a symptom, not the cause, of Britain’s malaise

Polling shows that Britain isn’t as divided as the right claims. Our supposedly irreconcilable differences are driven by fiction

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/31/culture-wars-symptom-not-cause-britains-malaise

Boris Johnson in 1999, when he became editor of the Spectator. ‘A journalist by trade, a liar by nature, he is all too familiar with the energising power of some well-placed hyperbole.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

 

It’s often said that Conservatives and the rightwing press are good at stoking divisions. What’s perhaps less acknowledged is that they do so mostly by inventing them: those who campaign for more inclusive policies become “the woke mob” and “the looney left”; those who want students to learn about the darker parts of Britain’s history become “people who hate Britain”; judges and politicians who want to follow basic parliamentary procedures become “enemies of the people”, “saboteurs”, and “traitors”, and so on.

In every case, we’re told that the future of the nation is at stake. The relentlessness of this “culture war” narrative leaves us with the image of an irreconcilable rift at the heart of British society: between liberals obsessed with identity politics who live, literally or spiritually, in “north London”, and sidelined social conservatives who live – or rather, are “left behind” – everywhere else (most emotively in “the red wall”). These fantasy constructions are now the twin pillars of Conservative rhetoric.

 

But this image of an irreconcilably divided nation is just that: an image. A spate of polls have shown that we are not as divided as many would have us think. Views in the so-called red wall are largely consistent with the rest of the country and, nationwide, few people know what either the “culture war” or “wokeness” even mean. Yet the right still pushes this narrative relentlessly, railing against a lefty elite that somehow manages to both wield a hegemonic control over Britain’s culture and be hopelessly out of touch with it. The new rightwing television channel, GB News – one of many new ventures to pitch itself as an urgent corrective – will host a segment called Wokewatch, to illuminate and amplify examples of the loony left’s looniness.

As the sociologist William Davies has written, this is the logic of the culture war: “Identify the most absurd or unreasonable example of your opponents’ worldview; exploit your own media platform to amplify it; articulate an alternative in terms that appear calm and reasonable; and then invite people to choose.” Exaggeration is therefore intrinsic to culture wars: it is a battle waged mostly by straw men.

It’s no surprise that Boris Johnson thrives in this environment: a journalist by trade, a liar by nature, he is all too familiar with the energising power of some well-placed hyperbole. As the Daily Telegraph’s Europe correspondent in the 1990s, Johnson wrote all kinds of wild and made-up provocations about the EU’s regulatory overreach: before Wokewatch there was Brusselswatch. The aim of Johnson’s exaggerations wasn’t any particular political agenda, but rather to stoke animosity. “Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party,” Johnson recalled in his Desert Island Discs interview for Radio 4 in 2005, “and it really gave me this rather weird sense of power.” As prime minister Johnson pursues the same approach, but his plaything is now the nation at large.

The cynicism and bad faith that underlies so much of the culture war should warn us against one of the dominant tendencies within the vast and burgeoning literature on our polarised times: to blame evolutionary biology and an inherent “tribalist” instinct we share. “The mechanism is evolutionary,” New York Times writer Ezra Klein writes in his recent bestseller, Why We’re Polarised, because “our brains know we need our groups to survive”. But by conjuring up a primordial past as the source of our divisions, we lose sight of all the contemporary forces and strategies that are deliberately designed to inflame and exaggerate our differences. The climate crisis wasn’t destined to be such a divisive issue, for instance – it required, in the words of climatologist Michael Mann, “the most well-funded, well-organised PR campaign in the history of human civilisation”. The Flintstones might not have agreed on everything either, but at least they didn’t have Fox News.

The culture war is in this sense the ultimate fiction: what seems like a battle for the soul of our country is a pantomime where we are conscripted to play both gladiator and spectator and obliged to pick a side. The hope seems to be that, amid all the sparring and theatre, we lose sight of what truly frustrates us: in Britain, that is an increasingly harsh economy, imposed by a callous government, which has left us with the worst wage growth in 200 years, public services that are chronically underfunded and a third of children living in poverty – a misery offset by one of the stingiest welfare systems in the developed world. If society now feels coarser, it’s because it is – but the reason is not a sudden decline in civility.

Yet while the Conservatives, in power for over a decade, are the main architects of this dreary, resentful state of the nation, they are also its main beneficiaries. The Conservatives have always excelled at stoking resentment and redirecting it elsewhere; now is no different: they are clear favourites to win the next election, a record fifth in a row.

So even amid this total and unsettling ascendancy, the Tories will still insist that the blame for Britain’s woes lies elsewhere: with Londoners hoarding all the nation’s wealth, with university professors teaching “cultural Marxism” in their classes, or asylum seekers trying to cross the Channel, or any other phantom threat they can think of. This strategy goes beyond the usual “divide and conquer”. It was said of the Romans and their imperial dominance that they “make a desert and call it peace”. The Tories are trying a different tact: make a desert and call it war.

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The Tory fixation on wokeness is all about division. Labour must build bridges instead

The government’s version of identity politics has proved potent. The only response is to change the nature of the debate

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/25/tories-wokeness-labour-identity-politics-government

 

I never thought I’d miss the 2010s, but I do have some nostalgia for them. At least last decade’s “opposite world” meant what it said: whatever the truth was, ministers would blame the opposite. In the creation of poverty, the culprit was the poor rather than the rich; in the nightmare of Brexit, the problem was remainers rather than leavers; in a runaway climate crisis, the root cause was Extinction Rebellion rather than fossil fuels and all those who’d hitched their finances to them.

It was pretty tedious, but it was preferable to today’s opposite world, in which, despite whatever is important – from Covid rates to customs turmoil – ministers will be trying their level best to talk about what is petty. (A piquant, if tangential, example: Monday’s Daily Telegraph, the little drummer boy of the endless culture war, reported approvingly the idea of an “anti-woke Citizens Advice service”.) They create pantomimes, patriots battling straw men over trivia. This would make no sense if it came from a state in the grip of a crisis, but it makes every sense from a state with only one aim – the survival of its ruling party. To the modern conservative, all government business is party business.

 

A typical explanation is that it’s all distraction: while we’re blaming each other for wokeness or bigotry, that’s all energy not directed at the government. The more intense the debate, the more divisions it opens up within as well as between each side, so there is no oxygen for more productive discussions. This theory is true as far as it goes but, like the one about why planes stay in the air, it’s insufficient. An electorate fighting among itself will always be less challenging to its government – yet governments do not typically rely on disunity and sourness, still less work so hard to create them. The question is, what political capital does all this generate?

In the late 1990s, the sociologist Nancy Fraser described how “cultural recognition” – the recognition of difference, what we used to call identity politics – had displaced “socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice”. It was Fraser’s aim to try and knit recognition and redistribution back together, since justice required both: there was no point being culturally emancipated if you were still materially oppressed by low wages.

Over four grim Brexit years, William Davies, another sociologist, drew out the evolution of “recognition” politics to the present day. Our concept of different identities had shrunk to one: the “left-behind”, AKA the red wall, previously known as the white working class. All other banners that people might congregate behind – ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality – were collapsed into “metropolitan”, which was then elided with “elite” to become de facto inauthentic. Nobody had to recognise you if you weren’t real. It was a bit of a surprise, to be honest; not to find that I’m a despised elite (I knew that), but that so was my whole postcode.

In terms of the left-behind, which may have been newly prominent in 2016 but wasn’t a new construct, the Labour government had typically been good at redistribution but bad at recognition. This reached its apotheosis in Gordon Brown’s famous “bigoted woman” moment. As gaffes go, it would have passed without remark had it not been seen to contain some essential truth – that he and his predecessor despised the very people they claimed to prioritise.

Three Conservative prime ministers, meanwhile, have been very good at recognition and heartbreakingly bad at redistribution. They have systematically impoverished the very people whose worldview they say they champion. Their failure to redistribute needs little analysis: they don’t do it because they choose not to.

Yet this quest for identity-building issues – patriotism, British exceptionalism, nostalgia, monoculturalism – is much more than a simple balancing act: “Here, have this orgy of flag-waving in lieu of liveable sick pay.” It has proved extremely useful to them in neutralising the Labour party, which for more than 10 years has been unable to find solid ground on this matter.

Successive Labour leaders have essayed the acts of recognition that focus groups have told them were required, and either failed quietly, by shuffling away their inconvenient points of difference, or failed explosively – Ed Miliband’s “curbs on immigration” mug, Jeremy Corbyn’s bungled attempt to whip for abstention on a really ugly immigration bill in 2019. The problem is not that they disappoint their beloved liberal elite, but rather that nobody believes them; nobody ever bought that Miliband was anti-immigration, or that Corbyn supported Brexit, or that Keir Starmer has a union flag in his kitchen. If they’re not who they say they are, who on earth are they? They defy definition, and the blurring effect follows them even when they exit enemy territory to talk about the NHS or regional inequality, so that a soft Tory like Jeremy Hunt can sound more convincing on social care than any given Labour MP.

The Conservatives’ culture wars, as boring as they are, have been magnificently effective, partly because they are agile. The current fixation on “wokeness” is an adaptation to the fact that “elitism” as an idea was beginning to fray. Labour cannot carry on surrendering to a Tory version of recognition which will always shape-shift on demand, but nor can it go back to ignoring recognition altogether.

Instead, Labour needs to attack the foundational myth: the Conservatives haven’t done anything complicated; they have merely characterised the red wall exclusively by those features with which all the other walls – the youth wall, the tartan wall, the metropolitan wall – could not possibly agree. But there are other issues on which these constituencies would agree, ideas that may sound economic but actually form the cornerstone of identities: that one ought, for instance, to be able to sustain oneself with dignity and without hardship by working. This has much higher salience than what “woke” does or doesn’t mean. There is opportunity in the sheer silliness of the current debate for Labour to start building their red bridge.

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London is being scapegoated to boost the Tories’ ‘levelling up’ agenda

It may be electorally useful to portray the capital as an enclave of privilege – but for most people in the city, that’s just not true

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/30/london-scapegoated-tories-levelling-up-agenda-capital-privilege

The Chicksand Estate in Tower Hamlets: ‘[In terms of] housing poverty … London is a disaster zone.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

 

It’s fashionable to demonise London as everything from pampered and out of touch to an anti-British “enemy within” that actively keeps the rest of the country down. In this narrative, Labour has been pushed back to the supposedly privileged “metro-liberal” cities – with none more privileged, metropolitan or liberal than the UK capital.

But the notion of London as a city bathing in its own privilege is a ridiculous oversimplification. Tell it, for instance, to the six households from Grenfell Tower who are still stuck in temporary accommodation, four years on from the catastrophic fire, a lethal product of administrative corruption, ignorance and incompetence.

 

Even so, such narratives are likely to intensify in the wake of this month’s local elections, with the political right glorying in its claimed role as the new tribune of “left behind” areas, and the government pushing ahead with its vaguely defined “levelling up” agenda.

Since the end of the second world war, government attitudes to regional inequality have tended to mirror their approach to inequality more broadly – be it postwar Labour’s top-down redistribution, Thatcher’s inegalitarian neoliberalism, or Blairite redistribution by skimming the proceeds of growth.

Boris Johnson and members of his government seem likely to depart from that. Their attitudes to regional inequality sit uncomfortably with some of their other values.

Across large areas of policy, the old Tory instincts prevail. Ministers recently insisted, for instance, that the £20 uplift to universal credit must be withdrawn because “we need to try to get people into work” – implying that without the whip of financial hardship, the unemployed will just sit around on their backsides.

Similarly, the government seems more interested in downplaying or even redefining racial inequality than actually tackling it, as evidenced by the botched Sewell report. Even with socioeconomic inequality, which the government is very keen to contrast with racial inequality as being an Actual Problem, its focus is on the schooling of white working-class boys. Why? Because it sees the government’s role as limited to creating equality of opportunity through the education system. Once those white working-class boys are white working-class men, it’s time to cut their entitlement to benefits.

But with regional inequality it’s different. The government acknowledges it rather than denies it, highlights it rather than downplays it, and promises to shower economically “left behind” areas with taxpayer largesse – especially if those areas vote Tory. Ministers would not now dream of telling the people of Darlington to get on their bikes and look for work; instead the Treasury is getting on its bike and looking for Darlington. Levelling up implies not equality of opportunity but equality of outcome, a historically leftwing approach to inequality that the Tories continue to eschew elsewhere.

Much of this is electoral expediency – ministers follow the marginals, much as they did when the key marginals were in the home counties. But there is also a legitimacy the Tories are willing to grant to regional grievances that they won’t to others. Brexit, after all, descended into a battle of legitimacy based on supposed authenticity – the “industrial” north is considered authentically British, its concerns legitimate; London is deemed inauthentic, and its migrant communities foreign.

Inequality is a power relationship, and in this regional inequality frame London is cast as having the power. Whether or not this is true, there is a difference between a centre of power and the people who live there. The official measure of geographical deprivation – the Indices of Multiple Deprivation – underplays poverty in London by using a formula that attaches far more weight to unemployment measures, where London has scored well in recent years, than to housing poverty, where London is a disaster zone.

But even with unemployment, London is now struggling. The city’s boroughs, hit by the shift to working from home and the enforced closure of the culture and hospitality sectors, have seen some of the biggest rises in unemployment, with universal credit claims from unemployed people trebling in Brent and Newham between February 2020 and March 2021.

In fact, of the 20 British local authorities with the highest proportion of working-age people claiming universal credit while out of work, six are now in London – before the pandemic, none were. More than half the boroughs in London are above Darlington in the table. Islington is worse hit than Coventry, Boston and Bridgend. Meanwhile, job creation in the capital appears to be lower relative to pre-Covid times than any other region or country of the UK.

London’s unemployment will undoubtedly end up concentrated among young black people. Figures published this month show unemployment rising fastest among ethnic minorities, with one in 10 black, Asian and minority ethnic women unemployed in the first quarter of this year. Before the pandemic, unemployment was higher among black people than other ethnic groups.

This leaves London at the confluence of a number of pernicious political trends. First, it is an easy target for the Tories, the capital caricatured as elite and out of touch, and resented as a beacon of privilege in other parts of the country. Deborah Mattinson’s depressing book, Beyond the Red Wall, showed that for many of the “red wall” voters in her focus groups, levelling up is a zero-sum game – London must suffer for other regions to prosper.

Second, the Covid-era increase in public empathy for benefit claimants may not last – particularly regarding those who are out of work. The context matters – in this case being the widely accepted difficulty of finding work during the pandemic and the public health imperative to stay home. As Britain unlocks and the economy recovers, that context will change rapidly.

Finally, there is the racial element. When they’re not portraying it as the home of a gilded, woke elite, London’s rightwing detractors cast it as full of violent black criminals or swarming with Muslim radicals. In a country whose government is trying to downplay the prevalence of racism and undermine the concepts of institutional and structural racism, unemployment among young black Londoners may provoke limited empathy among the public at large.

The fact that Shaun Bailey, the Conservative candidate for London mayor, was not totally humiliated in the election may at least convince Tory HQ that the capital is not a city lost to it in the long term. But even that could play out a number of ways. Yes, the Conservatives could ditch the metro-liberal bashing and try to actually win those voters over – but equally they could double down, ramping up the culture wars to whip up the white, more Brexity suburbs.

The Tories routinely seek scapegoats for their own failings – recently they have used vaccine refusal to shift blame for the spread of Covid variants. If London is hit by long-term unemployment as a kind of economic long Covid, it can expect little sympathy from the media or the wider public. A government with a genuine interest in tackling inequality would provide the necessary support regardless. That is not this government.

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Here is video of former general and National Security Advisor Mike Flynn calling for a Myanmar-like coup to replace the sitting U.S. president with Donald Trump. The talk of war is very real.

 

 

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Roflmaooooo

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A Mississippi high school had two black female students as their valedictorian and salutatorian. Then suddenly, hours before the graduation, they announced two additional students, both white, were ALSO the valedictorian and salutatorian for a total of four. The school has since deleted their social media accounts.

 

https://blavity.com/mississippi-school-under-fire-for-seemingly-reneging-on-top-honors-given-to-black-graduates-and-giving-to-white-students-instead?category1=news

 

Edited June 1, 2021 by Vesper

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Belarus bans most citizens from going abroad

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57316838

Belarus has temporarily banned most of its citizens from leaving, including many foreign residency permit holders.

There are some exceptions, such as for Belarusian civil servants on official trips and state transport staff.

The State Border Committee's tightening of the rules follows international outrage over Belarus's recent diversion of a Ryanair flight and arrest of a top dissident and his girlfriend on board.

Many dissidents have left Belarus since a disputed election last year.

In its statement on the Telegram messaging service, the border committee says it has received "many requests to leave Belarus on the strength of residence permits [issued] by foreign countries".

Only those with permanent residence in foreign countries - not temporary - are allowed to leave Belarus now, it says. The border committee blamed the measures on the coronavirus pandemic.

President Alexander Lukashenko's harsh crackdown on opponents since his disputed 9 August election victory has sent many into exile or to jail.

His main rival, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who insists that she won, moved to neighbouring Lithuania with her team. Poland also hosts many Belarusians.

Her foreign affairs adviser, Valery Kovalevsky, posted an angry tweet, saying President Lukashenko had "severely limited the right of Belarusians to travel, asserting that certain grounds (residency abroad) aren't sufficient to leave Belarus".

"Yet the Constitution stipulates no conditions at all. Outright violation of the law," he said.

Belarus was gripped by huge anti-Lukashenko demonstrations last year after the election, broken up brutally by the police.

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Should Fear Of MAGA Terrorism Keep Trump Out Of Jail?

Put aside highminded ideals like the rule of law and never giving in to terrorism. Trump has to face justice for this reason above all others.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/should-fear-of-maga-terrorism-keep

Things are looking grim for Donald Trump. Aside from the numerous civil suits proceeding against him and his organization, Trump is facing several criminal cases as well, some of them quite serious. At 74 years old, the leader of the Republican Party is potentially looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison.

As you can imagine, this is not sitting well with his cult who fully expect their messiah to either re-take the White House when he “proves” the 2020 election was “stolen” or to triumphantly win the 2024 election in a JAY-zus-ordained biblical landslide. We already saw the violence that resulted from Trump losing an election. How much more can we expect if (when) he ends up in jail for his many, many crimes? 

Should that be a consideration in the pursuit of justice? 

Just How Much Trouble Is Trump In?

That depends on who you talk to. He’s facing a lot of civil lawsuits ranging from defamation to fraud to more fraud to damages stemming from Trump’s incitement of the 1/6 riots. None of these will land Trump in jail but they could cost him tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. 

But then there are the criminal cases. Any of which could hand Trump a prison sentence:

1. NY AG Letitia James has been investigating the Trump Organization’s alleged habit of lying about the value of properties to secure loans and lower their tax bill.

2. Manhattan DA Cy Vance has Trump’s taxes and an outside group of specialists is going through them with a fine tooth comb. Vance is also currently pressuring Trump’s money man, Allen Weisselberg. If Weisselberg cracks, Trump is screwed.

3. DC AG Karl Racine is hoping to bring Trump up on incitement charges for the riots on 1/6. As of right now, it looks like that would only be a misdemeanor but it’s early.

4. The Fulton County DA’s office in Georgia has an ongoing criminal probe into Trump’s attempt to coerce election officials into tampering with the election. 

The misdemeanor charge in DC wouldn’t get Trump much jail time, if he got any at all. I’m a little unclear how inciting a riot is a misdemeanor, though, especially a riot in which people died and over one hundred cops were injured by a rampaging mob. I’m pretty sure if I incited a mob to attack the police over the death of an unarmed Black man and a single cop was injured, never mind killed, I would not be facing a misdemeanor charge.

Still, the other three investigations are not going to produce misdemeanor charges. Fraud, tax fraud, and election interference are all serious crimes, especially at the level Trump is alleged to have committed them at. People get arrested for voting twice. Donald Trump tried, repeatedly, to get the state of Georgia to illegally change the results of an entire election. Slightly more serious. 

Trump is in enough trouble that Florida Republicans were seriously talking about shielding him from extradition to another state.

Trump’s next move

Eyes wide open here. Trump was not supposed to win the 2016 election. Even he knew it. For Trump, running was almost certainly a way to make money and fulfill his obligations to those who had financed his business dealings . His “victory” was a combination of voter apathy, Russian interference, media arrogance, politicization of the FBI, and the sheer stupidity of the not-at-all progressive Brocialists who insisted Hillary was somehow worse. But Trump’s victory came with public scrutiny, a kind he had never endured before.

Trump has been famous for most of his life. As a malignant narcissist, Trump craved the public’s attention the way a junkie craves their next fix. The press however, had their own agenda and began asking the questions most of them hadn’t bothered asking throughout his entire presidential run. 

Worse, law enforcement, long held at bay by Trump’s many “donations” to powerful political figures, started to look at Trump’s real estate empire. New York real estate is phenomenally corrupt and Trump has almost certainly been laundering mob money for decades. Don Jr. even bragged about all the Russian money pouring into the family business.

Trump is acutely aware of this fact which explains pretty much everything he did while in office. Corrupting the DoJ, pressuring Ukraine to fabricate an investigation into Joe Biden, crippling the Post Office, the Big Lie, and, finally, the attack on the Capitol on 1/6. All of this was to remain in office, preferably for the rest of his life, where he would remain beyond the reach of the law.

Knowing this, is there any doubt whatsoever that if Trump finds himself facing arrest, he won’t call on his cult of violent fanatics to defend him with their lives? Or, if he’s arrested before he can summon his mob, that he won’t have them out in the streets burning America to the ground, demanding the release of a “political prisoner” of Biden’s “tyrannical dictatorship”?

There is zero chance that the propaganda networks Fox and OANN, AM hate radio, and right wing hate sites won’t frame Trump’s arrest this way, as Biden trying to stop Trump from running in 2024. They’ll claim it is the same thing the dictators of Russia, Georgia, and Venezuela do when they arrest their opposition leaders. It won’t matter how clear and provable the evidence is, it will all be “fake news” and Trump will be a victim of political persecution. That is when the violence will kick into high gear and Republicans will try to use it to their advantage. 

That this will happen in some form is almost indisputable. He literally staged a (failed) coup to stay in power to avoid the consequences of his criminal activity and has shown, time and again, that he will go to any lengths, including setting off mass civil unrest and terrorism, to stay out of jail. 

Knowing this, should we “move on” as a nation? Should law enforcement treat Trump with kid’s gloves? Should fear of domestic terrorism keep Trump out of jail?

Hell. No.

At the very least, the rule of law has to hold sway. It is true that America’s system of justice is multi-tiered. There is one tier for the poor and another tier for the rich. One tier for White people and another for Blacks and so on. Being rich, White, male, connected, and a Republican makes one almost immune from prosecution for all but the most egregious of crimes.

There are limits to the protection these obscene privileges provide, though, and Trump has far exceeded them. We hope.

Privilege aside, a red line we simply cannot afford to cross is letting the threat of violence, or actual violence, from the right to make our decision for us. No matter how many riots or bombings or mass shootings are carried out by the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers or Boogaloo Bois, Trump’s arrest and court case has to play out just like it would for anyone else.

The very second we abandon this, we sign a death warrant for our democratic system. There will never be another real election because anytime Republicans lose, the violence will start until we cave and let Republicans “win”. Republicans are not going to do anything to stop terrorism when it is keeping them in power.

But ignore high minded ideas like the rule of law and not giving in to terrorism. There is a single, overriding reason for Trump to face the consequences of his crimes no matter the threat from his cult: If Trump escapes accountability, the next Republican president will destroy America.

The worst mistake Obama made was not throwing half of the Bush regime and their enablers in jail. They abused the power of the government in truly grotesque and obvious ways, but very few of them paid the price for their corruption and lawlessness. Instead, they were allowed to either ride off into the sunset or find extremely lucrative corporate, media, or lobbying jobs.

This signaled to Republicans that they could do anything they wanted and it wouldn’t matter. So when Trump won the election, and they controlled both chambers of Congress, the GOP went hog wild. Republicans have been getting steadily more corrupt as gerrymandering and voter suppression made their seats more secure but even by historical standards, the last four years were something to behold. 

By the time President Joe Biden was sworn in, Republicans were already openly calling for using the military against protesters, lustily cheering as unmarked secret police snatched people off the street, and had so thoroughly infected the Department of Justice that, without question, another fours years of Trump would have seen the arrest of his political enemies on fabricated charges. 

And that’s aside from the attempted violent coup, several attempts at election interference, and the ongoing plot to steal the 2024 election.

If Republicans manage to put another one of their soulless monsters in office, they will pick up where Trump left off. The only reason Trump didn’t immediately continue George W. Bush’s erosion of the Constitution is because he was incompetent, didn’t know anything about how to run the country, and was too busy grifting to even try until he realized how much trouble he was in. President Tom Cotton will not have that problem. 

President Cotton will immediately replace all of the generals with loyalists who will be more than happy to order their troops to fire on protesters in New York City or Portland or Los Angeles. He’ll have learned the lessons of the Trump era in which Republicans discovered that the United States military is not as Republican as we thought. There will be no repeat of that. When President Tom Cotton orders his handpicked generals/lickspittles to violate their oath to the Constitution, they’ll do it.

President Cotton’s secret police force will be massive and eager to “disappear” anyone President Cotton designates an “Enemy of the State”. That will include activists, community leaders, and journalists. Also, just random people in minority communities to keep them living in a perpetual state of terror. A beefed up ICE will take care of the immigrant communities. Fear is a great way to keep people in line.

That’s just the barest hint of the nightmare that awaits if Republicans are not taught that they are not above the law. If we do not rein in their corruption, lawlessness, and fascism, they will set America to the torch. It really is that simple.  

If Trump stands trial and is acquitted, so be it. He would be far from the first scumbag to get off on technicalities, having really good lawyers, or just being famous. Our system of justice kind of sucks, to be honest. But it’s the one we have and we have to let it run its course no matter what the right threatens to do or how many riots and attacks they stage. They’ve already developed a real taste for political violence and all it will take is one true win and they’ll never stop until America is the fascist hellhole of their dreams.

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1 hour ago, Vesper said:

Should Fear Of MAGA Terrorism Keep Trump Out Of Jail?

Put aside highminded ideals like the rule of law and never giving in to terrorism. Trump has to face justice for this reason above all others.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/should-fear-of-maga-terrorism-keep

Things are looking grim for Donald Trump. Aside from the numerous civil suits proceeding against him and his organization, Trump is facing several criminal cases as well, some of them quite serious. At 74 years old, the leader of the Republican Party is potentially looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison.

As you can imagine, this is not sitting well with his cult who fully expect their messiah to either re-take the White House when he “proves” the 2020 election was “stolen” or to triumphantly win the 2024 election in a JAY-zus-ordained biblical landslide. We already saw the violence that resulted from Trump losing an election. How much more can we expect if (when) he ends up in jail for his many, many crimes? 

Should that be a consideration in the pursuit of justice? 

Just How Much Trouble Is Trump In?

That depends on who you talk to. He’s facing a lot of civil lawsuits ranging from defamation to fraud to more fraud to damages stemming from Trump’s incitement of the 1/6 riots. None of these will land Trump in jail but they could cost him tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. 

But then there are the criminal cases. Any of which could hand Trump a prison sentence:

1. NY AG Letitia James has been investigating the Trump Organization’s alleged habit of lying about the value of properties to secure loans and lower their tax bill.

2. Manhattan DA Cy Vance has Trump’s taxes and an outside group of specialists is going through them with a fine tooth comb. Vance is also currently pressuring Trump’s money man, Allen Weisselberg. If Weisselberg cracks, Trump is screwed.

3. DC AG Karl Racine is hoping to bring Trump up on incitement charges for the riots on 1/6. As of right now, it looks like that would only be a misdemeanor but it’s early.

4. The Fulton County DA’s office in Georgia has an ongoing criminal probe into Trump’s attempt to coerce election officials into tampering with the election. 

The misdemeanor charge in DC wouldn’t get Trump much jail time, if he got any at all. I’m a little unclear how inciting a riot is a misdemeanor, though, especially a riot in which people died and over one hundred cops were injured by a rampaging mob. I’m pretty sure if I incited a mob to attack the police over the death of an unarmed Black man and a single cop was injured, never mind killed, I would not be facing a misdemeanor charge.

Still, the other three investigations are not going to produce misdemeanor charges. Fraud, tax fraud, and election interference are all serious crimes, especially at the level Trump is alleged to have committed them at. People get arrested for voting twice. Donald Trump tried, repeatedly, to get the state of Georgia to illegally change the results of an entire election. Slightly more serious. 

Trump is in enough trouble that Florida Republicans were seriously talking about shielding him from extradition to another state.

Trump’s next move

Eyes wide open here. Trump was not supposed to win the 2016 election. Even he knew it. For Trump, running was almost certainly a way to make money and fulfill his obligations to those who had financed his business dealings . His “victory” was a combination of voter apathy, Russian interference, media arrogance, politicization of the FBI, and the sheer stupidity of the not-at-all progressive Brocialists who insisted Hillary was somehow worse. But Trump’s victory came with public scrutiny, a kind he had never endured before.

Trump has been famous for most of his life. As a malignant narcissist, Trump craved the public’s attention the way a junkie craves their next fix. The press however, had their own agenda and began asking the questions most of them hadn’t bothered asking throughout his entire presidential run. 

Worse, law enforcement, long held at bay by Trump’s many “donations” to powerful political figures, started to look at Trump’s real estate empire. New York real estate is phenomenally corrupt and Trump has almost certainly been laundering mob money for decades. Don Jr. even bragged about all the Russian money pouring into the family business.

Trump is acutely aware of this fact which explains pretty much everything he did while in office. Corrupting the DoJ, pressuring Ukraine to fabricate an investigation into Joe Biden, crippling the Post Office, the Big Lie, and, finally, the attack on the Capitol on 1/6. All of this was to remain in office, preferably for the rest of his life, where he would remain beyond the reach of the law.

Knowing this, is there any doubt whatsoever that if Trump finds himself facing arrest, he won’t call on his cult of violent fanatics to defend him with their lives? Or, if he’s arrested before he can summon his mob, that he won’t have them out in the streets burning America to the ground, demanding the release of a “political prisoner” of Biden’s “tyrannical dictatorship”?

There is zero chance that the propaganda networks Fox and OANN, AM hate radio, and right wing hate sites won’t frame Trump’s arrest this way, as Biden trying to stop Trump from running in 2024. They’ll claim it is the same thing the dictators of Russia, Georgia, and Venezuela do when they arrest their opposition leaders. It won’t matter how clear and provable the evidence is, it will all be “fake news” and Trump will be a victim of political persecution. That is when the violence will kick into high gear and Republicans will try to use it to their advantage. 

That this will happen in some form is almost indisputable. He literally staged a (failed) coup to stay in power to avoid the consequences of his criminal activity and has shown, time and again, that he will go to any lengths, including setting off mass civil unrest and terrorism, to stay out of jail. 

Knowing this, should we “move on” as a nation? Should law enforcement treat Trump with kid’s gloves? Should fear of domestic terrorism keep Trump out of jail?

Hell. No.

At the very least, the rule of law has to hold sway. It is true that America’s system of justice is multi-tiered. There is one tier for the poor and another tier for the rich. One tier for White people and another for Blacks and so on. Being rich, White, male, connected, and a Republican makes one almost immune from prosecution for all but the most egregious of crimes.

There are limits to the protection these obscene privileges provide, though, and Trump has far exceeded them. We hope.

Privilege aside, a red line we simply cannot afford to cross is letting the threat of violence, or actual violence, from the right to make our decision for us. No matter how many riots or bombings or mass shootings are carried out by the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers or Boogaloo Bois, Trump’s arrest and court case has to play out just like it would for anyone else.

The very second we abandon this, we sign a death warrant for our democratic system. There will never be another real election because anytime Republicans lose, the violence will start until we cave and let Republicans “win”. Republicans are not going to do anything to stop terrorism when it is keeping them in power.

But ignore high minded ideas like the rule of law and not giving in to terrorism. There is a single, overriding reason for Trump to face the consequences of his crimes no matter the threat from his cult: If Trump escapes accountability, the next Republican president will destroy America.

The worst mistake Obama made was not throwing half of the Bush regime and their enablers in jail. They abused the power of the government in truly grotesque and obvious ways, but very few of them paid the price for their corruption and lawlessness. Instead, they were allowed to either ride off into the sunset or find extremely lucrative corporate, media, or lobbying jobs.

This signaled to Republicans that they could do anything they wanted and it wouldn’t matter. So when Trump won the election, and they controlled both chambers of Congress, the GOP went hog wild. Republicans have been getting steadily more corrupt as gerrymandering and voter suppression made their seats more secure but even by historical standards, the last four years were something to behold. 

By the time President Joe Biden was sworn in, Republicans were already openly calling for using the military against protesters, lustily cheering as unmarked secret police snatched people off the street, and had so thoroughly infected the Department of Justice that, without question, another fours years of Trump would have seen the arrest of his political enemies on fabricated charges. 

And that’s aside from the attempted violent coup, several attempts at election interference, and the ongoing plot to steal the 2024 election.

If Republicans manage to put another one of their soulless monsters in office, they will pick up where Trump left off. The only reason Trump didn’t immediately continue George W. Bush’s erosion of the Constitution is because he was incompetent, didn’t know anything about how to run the country, and was too busy grifting to even try until he realized how much trouble he was in. President Tom Cotton will not have that problem. 

President Cotton will immediately replace all of the generals with loyalists who will be more than happy to order their troops to fire on protesters in New York City or Portland or Los Angeles. He’ll have learned the lessons of the Trump era in which Republicans discovered that the United States military is not as Republican as we thought. There will be no repeat of that. When President Tom Cotton orders his handpicked generals/lickspittles to violate their oath to the Constitution, they’ll do it.

President Cotton’s secret police force will be massive and eager to “disappear” anyone President Cotton designates an “Enemy of the State”. That will include activists, community leaders, and journalists. Also, just random people in minority communities to keep them living in a perpetual state of terror. A beefed up ICE will take care of the immigrant communities. Fear is a great way to keep people in line.

That’s just the barest hint of the nightmare that awaits if Republicans are not taught that they are not above the law. If we do not rein in their corruption, lawlessness, and fascism, they will set America to the torch. It really is that simple.  

If Trump stands trial and is acquitted, so be it. He would be far from the first scumbag to get off on technicalities, having really good lawyers, or just being famous. Our system of justice kind of sucks, to be honest. But it’s the one we have and we have to let it run its course no matter what the right threatens to do or how many riots and attacks they stage. They’ve already developed a real taste for political violence and all it will take is one true win and they’ll never stop until America is the fascist hellhole of their dreams.

Best thing for someone with that 'notice me' mental disorder, is to ignore. It's like the kid playing up in class. Giving him the oxygen of publicity over jail or anything just encourages the spoilt child mentality

[chippy 342]

So now we have the head of the Met Police asking the government to change the law so they can racially discriminate against white people applying for jobs with the Police.

WOW! JUST FUCKING WOW

Yet again, actual concrete proof that it's now those on the left (show me someone right of centre coming out with such extremism) who are the real extremist, shit stirring racist cnuts. 

It's time the Government started to stand up and fight back against this evil and start by firing Cressida Dick and revoking her peerage.

 

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

If you have guns you will shoot one day.
It's not like that in the army. The guns are locked and are issued only under orders.
But the civilians if they have guns they will go crazy one day.
There are two newspaper cliches:
One is "policeman shoots fiance while cleaning gun".
The other is "mistakes friend for wild boar".
So as long as the civilians possess guns they shoot.

Also it offers no security whatsoever.
I took part in the great manouver "Parmenion" and with my automatic rifle I entered a hut and captured 10 men inside.
How ?
The element of surprise. They raised their hands above their shoulders and they said "ok we surrender".
So if a burglar enters your house and your gun is in the kitchen drawer, what are your chances ? Infinitessimal.

 

[Vesper 30,224]

47 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

If you have guns you will shoot one day.
It's not like that in the army. The guns are locked and are issued only under orders.
But the civilians if they have guns they will go crazy one day.
There are two newspaper cliches:
One is "policeman shoots fiance while cleaning gun".
The other is "mistakes friend for wild boar".
So as long as the civilians possess guns they shoot.

Also it offers no security whatsoever.
I took part in the great manouver "Parmenion" and with my automatic rifle I entered a hut and captured 10 men inside.
How ?
The element of surprise. They raised their hands above their shoulders and they said "ok we surrender".
So if a burglar enters your house and your gun is in the kitchen drawer, what are your chances ? Infinitessimal.

 

'Murica

🤢

Edited June 2, 2021 by Vesper

[chippy 342]

It's a wildly OTT exaggeration to say that if you have a gun you will shoot one day and that civilians  will go crazy one day.

There's well over 100 million gun owners in America. Out of those, some will have one a gun for use in their criminal activities and end up killing one day. No law will ever stop criminals posessing guns! 

Then there are those sad/mad/evil individuals who completely lose the plot and go out kill. 

Out of the 100 + plus, that leaves 99.9...% who will never go out and shoot someone.

[cosmicway 1,333]

11 minutes ago, chippy said:

It's a wildly OTT exaggeration to say that if you have a gun you will shoot one day and that civilians  will go crazy one day.

There's well over 100 million gun owners in America. Out of those, some will have one a gun for use in their criminal activities and end up killing one day. No law will ever stop criminals posessing guns! 

Then there are those sad/mad/evil individuals who completely lose the plot and go out kill. 

Out of the 100 + plus, that leaves 99.9...% who will never go out and shoot someone.

So it's a wild exaggeration then when soldiers are not be allowed to take a tank out for a ride with their girlfriends.

[chippy 342]

Yeah,  highlight white people shooting at targets and ignore criminal scum shooting dead kids and even babies.

A recent YouTube video by The Officer Tatum, going by the title of The Video BLM do not want you to see.

12 year old girl shot dead in Hazelcrest Chicago.

14 year old boy shot dead near an Aldi store in Springfield and Madison.

7 year old girls shot dead, shot 6 times in parking lot outside a Macdonalds in Laundale 

15 year old boy shot dead in Little Village 

9 yearl old boy shot dead while playing with his friends in Chicago.

9 year old girl shot dead near 47th & Union in Chicago.

12 year old boy shot dead in Chicago.

21 MONTH old shot dead in Lakeshaw drive.

3 year old shot dead in North Central Ave.

All Black children, all shot dead by Black men, and that's just a sample of what's going on.

 

Protests and riots galore when criminal scum come to a sticky end by the Police, yet nobody from the left gives a flying fcuk about the innocent children and toddlers being murdered.

I'm the exact opposite. Don't give a fcuk about what happens to criminals who use guns or knives, be they any colour or nationality.  On the side of every single, decent, law abiding citizen and support any measures aimed to stop serious crime.

 

 

[chippy 342]

20 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

So it's a wild exaggeration then when soldiers are not be allowed to take a tank out for a ride with their girlfriends.

🙄

[Vesper 30,224]

‘The party is in big trouble’: How Swedes would vote if an election were held today

https://www.thelocal.se/20210602/sweden-voting-poll-election-results-statistics-may-2021/

The Liberal Party and the Greens would lose their seats in parliament if Sweden went to the polls today, according to a major party preference survey. Here's why it matters.

The survey, published on Wednesday by Statistics Sweden, estimates that the governing centre-left Social Democrats would still win the largest share of the votes, with the conservative Moderate Party coming second, and the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats third.

The minority Liberal Party suffered an overall decrease of 3 percentage points compared to Sweden’s last election in 2018. The survey estimates that 0.5 percent of voters would switch from the Liberals to the Centre Party. 

Nicholas Aylott, associate professor of political science at Södertörn University, told The Local: “The Liberals are suffering because the party is split along the new fault line of Swedish politics which is the question of immigration and integration and relations with the Sweden Democrats.”

“If a party finds itself evenly split on such a central question, one that stirs up so much sensitivity on both sides, then it’s likely to be in trouble,” he said.   

Liberal leaders recently voted to stop propping up the country’s red-green coalition government and campaign alongside the right-wing Moderate party in the run-up to next year’s September general election.  

“This manoeuvre seems to have had no pay off at all or been swamped by its costs,” Aylott said.  

“The party is in big trouble, there’s no doubt about that.”

• EXPLAINED: What does the Liberals’ switching of sides mean for Sweden’s next election?

Because of Sweden’s political model, one of the larger parties would need the support of smaller parties in order to form a government. But the threshold for getting a seat in parliament is 4 percent – a threshold the Liberals and the Greens are currently at risk of not making. If only one of them gets in, it could tip the election either in favour of the left (if the Greens get in, but the Liberals do not) or the right (vice versa). 

According to this latest poll, the Greens are only missing the 0.2 percent needed to make that threshold, while the Liberals would need gains of 1.5 percentage points.  

The results did not differ significantly from the last survey conducted by Statistics Sweden in November 2020. After significant losses at the end of 2020, the governing Social Democrats have maintained the same points.

“There are signs of politics getting back to normal to some extent after the pandemic,” according to Aylott. 

He said that the return of criminality, violence and instability to front pages could favour parties of the right or that the return to a pre-pandemic “normal” would benefit incumbent parties of the status quo. 

Compared with the 2018 parliamentary election, the Sweden Democrats took about 0.6 percent of votes from the Social Democratic Party, and saw overall gains of about 1.4 percent in these survey results. The Moderate Party would gain significant points from the last election. 

Aylott said: “It’s difficult to see from these results what would happen with the next government. It’s so unpredictable.”

There is also a level of uncertainty around rumours that the current Prime Minister Stefan Löfven might resign as leader of the Social Democrats this summer.

According to Statistics Sweden, just over 13 percent of the electorate is still unsure about who to vote for.

A general election will be held in September 2022 to elect the 349 members of Sweden’s parliament, the Riksdag.

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

21 hours ago, Vesper said:

'Murica

🤢

Absolutely mental by the NRA - get kids hooked on guns at an early age for profit.