Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,795]

18 minutes ago, Jap Si. said:

My English not great but I know u should start sentence with capital letter 🤨. I don't kno what a structural inequities is being is it a damaged building ?

Structural inequality occurs when the fabric of organizations, institutions, governments or social networks contains an embedded bias which provides advantages for some members and marginalizes or produces disadvantages for other members. This can involve property rights, status, or unequal access to health care, housing, education and other physical or financial resources or opportunities. Structural inequality is believed to be an embedded part of the culture of the United States due to the history of slavery and the subsequent suppression of equal civil rights of minority races.

Structural inequality can be encouraged and maintained in society through structured institutions such as the public school system with the goal of maintaining the existing structure of wealth, employment opportunities, and social standing of the races by keeping minority students from high academic achievement in high school and college as well as in the workforce of the country. In the attempt to equalize allocation of state funding, policymakers evaluate the elements of disparity to determine an equalization of funding throughout school districts.(14)^[1]

Combating structural inequality therefore often requires the broad, policy based structural change on behalf of government organizations, and is often a critical component of poverty reduction.^[2] In many ways, a well-organized democratic government that can effectively combine moderate growth with redistributive policies stands the best chance of combating structural inequality.^[2]

[Supermonkey 38]

How I Left Academia, or, How Academia Left Me

How I Left Academia, or, How Academia Left Me

Dr. Michael Robillard Jun 15 30 25

 

“Universities are madrassas for woke stupidity.” -James Delingpole

When I first encountered the discipline of Philosophy as an undergraduate at West Point some twenty years ago, I was put into a state of awe. Encountering the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hume, Berkeley and Russell for the very first time felt like I was being let in on some ancient and esoteric form of knowledge, some sort of secret language invisible to the uninitiated. Leaving the classroom each day, debating and conversing with other students over these new and earth-shattering concepts and questions felt like a kind of drug trip; like I was Neo being shown the code for the Matrix. For those years and for who I was at the time, it was truly a mind-altering and life-changing experience. And while the questions shook my sense of certainty to the core, filling my head with all sorts of doubts, I nonetheless remained certain of one thing; that Socrates was ultimately right and that the unexamined life was indeed not worth living.

I was compelled so much so by these philosophical questions and ideas that I would later be moved to terminate what was, at the time, a fruitful career as a U.S. Army officer, to turn down several lucrative white-collar jobs thereafter, and to shove all my chips into the center of the playing table, in hopes of one day becoming a professional analytic philosopher. Now, after a decade of being within the ivory tower, of seeing how the sausage is made and witnessing first-hand the business that academia really is, I’ve determined, quite sadly, that the discipline of academic Philosophy, and the university system more generally, has become little more than an indoctrination center for ‘woke’ leftist ideology and the antithesis of its original aim and purpose. That being said, this essay is my explanation of how and why I’m leaving academia, or, more appropriately, how academia ended up leaving me.

My cynicism towards academia was not always this way, however. Coming away jaded from the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war in my mid-twenties, believing that we as American citizens had some basic duties to look out for animals, the environment, and for the poor, and thinking that African Americans still had some reasonable and justified grievances because of slavery, I found myself entering into graduate school at the beginning of the Obama years as a self-described ‘center left’ liberal.

The beginning few years of my time in grad school were a combination of exhilaration, possibility, and most of all, vindication. Unlike my time in the stifling, hyper-conformist atmosphere of the military, now I was finally home, around my people; people who were thoughtful, open-minded, knowledgeable, worldly, lovers of ideas and appreciators of the life of mind. No longer the odd-duck soldier who thought too much, I felt, for the very first time in my adult life, like I was finally accepted.

For the most part, many of my professors and my graduate peers found me to be somewhat of a refreshing anomaly. I was the thoughtful, philosophical soldier, critical of our country’s recent wars. During that time period, I could also sleep easily at night with a clear conscience knowing I was now one of ‘the good people’ on the left, a proud ‘bleeding heart’, no longer immersed among the religious nut-jobs, the money obsessed corporate shills, the war-hawks, and the racists who comprised the ranks of the right. I was none of these things. Rather, I was the open-minded, compassionate, slightly left-leaning, ‘nuanced centrist’, who could just as easily have a chat with the frontline infantryman from Nebraska as I could with the Ivory tower academic from Oxford and serve as a kind of bridge between these two worlds, synthesizing a dialogue between left and right, mind and body, theory and practice. At least this was the story that I told myself.

In retrospect, the cracks in the liberal dam were always there from the very beginning, but I was either too distracted, too busy, too intimidated, too career obsessed, or just too willfully ignorant to truly see let alone acknowledge them or their ultimate ideological direction of travel. At first, such fissures were easy to dismiss or handwave away. Certainly, the more fringe versions of the left, what Richard Rorty referred to as the ‘cultural left’, I could openly critique with the tolerance or even support of my professors or graduate peers. “We do analytic philosophy here, arguments from arm-chair first principles,” I was re-assured, “not that postmodern nonsense you find on the edges of some anthropology or lit crit department. That’s the far left. We’re on the moderate, sensible left. Have you ever read Rawls?”

For a certain moment in time, I could arguably get on board with such thinking. What barbarian didn’t believe that we had some duty to animals and to the environment? To future generations? To fellow citizens who were most vulnerable? To soldiers and civilians alike? Somewhere around spring of 2017, however, amidst the cultural backlash against Trumpism, coupled with the mainstream explosion of transgenderism, intersectionality, critical race theory, and mass campus protests against perceived ‘far right extremist’ speakers, the academy I once knew and loved seemed to go completely off the rails. The mask of the ‘tolerant’, ‘open-minded’ left suddenly fell off and, for the very first time, I came to realize that the ivory tower and so-called ‘free market of ideas’ was not above and beyond or as immune to the present social zeitgeist as I once had thought.

With few exceptions, present-day analytic philosophy and academia more generally exhibit hardly any of the values and virtues that they explicitly profess to care so much about: tolerance, open-mindedness, regard for different perspectives, epistemic charity, a willingness to entertain pluralistic viewpoints, rational and dispassionate assessment of arguments, lack of ad hoc justifications, lack of ad hominem attacks, operating from arm-chair first principles, and a willingness to follow the entailments of premises to their logical conclusions come hell or highwater. Nearly all of these epistemic virtues are markedly and demonstrably absent in present-day academia and present-day academics save for a Hillsdale or a Claremont, a Peterson, Boghossian, Lindsay, or Sowell.

Rather, academics on the left now make their arguments primarily by means of social pressure and stigmatization, intimidation, group struggle sessions, virtue signaling, and online reputational assassination in the form of labelling their opponents as ‘extremists’, ‘racists’, ‘phobes’, ‘bigots’ or worse, rather than engaging with their opponents’ arguments on their own merits. More perplexing still, such folks often do so having fully convinced themselves that they are somehow oppressed victims, scrappy underdogs ‘speaking truth to power’ against impossible odds as part of some revolutionary underground resistance movement while garnering support from nearly every major western institution imaginable from Hollywood, to big business, to the Queen of England, to Oreo cookies.

Mark Bray, for instance, author of the Antifascist Handbook, nearly openly calls for overt violence against anyone who disagrees with his group’s political vision while promoting his work on Amazon’s bestseller list and enjoying the safety of a professorship at Rutgers. Feminist journalist, Laurie Penny, promotes her ‘radical’ viewpoints, too disruptive and controversial for everyday consumption, at the “Festival of Dangerous Ideas” officially sponsored by the Sydney Opera House and the city of Sydney. And LGBTQ philosopher, Rebecca Kukla, is able to tell her opponents on Twitter to ‘suck her queer cock’ while maintaining a comfortable tenureship as Senior Research Scholar of Ethics at (nominally Catholic) Georgetown while suffering zero professional backlash. Meanwhile veteran suicide rates in this country get shoved behind a superficial veil of ‘Thank you for your service’, but please someone stop the presses, because ‘trans people are dying’, whatever the hell that even means. Still these folks are somehow ‘the marginalized.’

If not actively taking part in ceaseless woke attacks as part of the small but highly vocal far left vanguard, the majority of academics, I’d wager even a super-majority of academics, have now been completely cowed into silence and complicity by the intersectional ideologues, burying their heads deeper in the sand, promising themselves that on some far-off future day, once the professional and social climate somehow improves, once someone else has stuck their neck out and cleared a safer path, once they achieve tenure, department head, emeritus status, enough grant money, etc. then the gloves will suddenly come off, then they will magically turn into a fire-breathing lion, then they will finally speak their minds.

If human psychology and human history are any guide, then the trend suggests that such a day will never come for such persons, since feeding that muscle of complicity and inaction only serves to strengthen it, and ‘tenure’ will most likely become swapped out with some new placeholder excuse to put off standing up and speaking the truth for just one more day. Maybe the cannibalization will somehow miss them if they just stay silent, just bend the knee, and just disavow long enough. The writings of Arendt, Niemoller, and Solzhenitsyn to name just a few, suggest the supreme folly and ultimate end-state of such a strategy of never-ending appeasement. This however, is the new normal within the ‘free market of ideas.’

Stay within the safe lanes of extremely clever, overly technical, and ultimately inconsequential intellectual discourse, and you will likely be able to make tenure and have a long and prosperous academic career. Say something the least bit critical of the current intersectional orthodoxy or conversely, say something the least bit positive about Christianity, men, the free market, liberty, merit, America, or the values of Western civilization and you are instantly relegated to persona non grata. Here is the blueprint for anyone seeking success within academia in 2021. Spine not included.

All this being said, it isn’t even as if these folks somehow possess arguments that are clearly and decisively better, more coherent, or sound. Indeed, some of the more blatant contradictions and hypocrisies found on the left warrant our explicit acknowledgement. Western science is an oppressive structure of the white male patriarchy that we are dutybound to oppose and deconstruct, but we must trust the latest Covid biomedical data. We must trust the latest Covid biomedical data, but the biomedical categories of male and female are just social constructs. The categories of male and female are just social constructs which can be chosen at will, but the category of race cannot be similarly chosen at will because race is ostensibly an objective natural kind. But race is also just a social construct. But neither of these previous claims are true since race doesn’t refer to anything at all because there is only one race, the human race. But whites oppress blacks.

Objective evolutionary data discredits God and objective morality, but that same evolutionary data as it relates to heritable features due to race is suddenly just a social construct again. We are in a radically relativistic, post-truth world, but we must guard against conservative fake news. There is no historical meta-narrative, but the events of slavery and colonialism are undeniable objective facts. The patriarchy of Christianity is bad, but the patriarchy of Islam, of the very same Abrahamic tradition, is to be lauded and venerated. Obesity is a social construct but also a marker of objective health at any weight. Atheist materialist science proves that life is fundamentally meaningless and worthless, but for heaven’s sake, will someone please think of the rights, dignity, and intrinsic value of animals and future generations threatened by climate change. A priori Mathematics and Logic are just socially constructed systems of oppression. There is no such thing as objective truth, but CNN reports just the facts. And what do we even mean by ‘truth’ anyway? And so on. The amount of mental gymnastics required for these folks to simultaneously hold such blatant and obvious contradictions all while walking, talking, and even sometimes operating heavy machinery is truly a sight to behold, impressive as it is horrifying.

What’s more, such arguments are often deployed from such folks with a self-satisfied air of condescension and a near total lack of gratitude for anything and everything their fellow countrymen or forebears have sacrificed on their behalf, making the luxury of sustaining such superfluous and nonsensical arguments even possible in the first place. I can honestly say now, having seen both sides, that during my time in the military I met folks who were markedly less conformist, far more open-minded, and far less vindictive towards peers and colleagues who dared to entertain or voice alternative viewpoints. My academic peers should reflect upon that last sentence carefully.

To quote H.L. Menken, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” This essay constitutes my best and most earnest attempt at communicating such understanding to my now former colleagues. Some may call me an alarmist, a bigot, an extremist, etc. So be it. Such ad hominem attacks do not constitute a counter-argument nor do they do anything to take away from the one-way intersectional steamroller and one’s own fixed position within the victim hierarchy. Those overly quick to dismiss what I’ve said here simply because I’m a straight, white, male should pause and take a moment to seriously reconsider their own presumed immunity from similar cancelling, silencing, and cannibalization later on down the line.

That being said, I sincerely apologize to my fellow American citizens, family, friends, comrades at arms, and former colleagues for my complicity and silence on such matters for this long. No longer. It is my hope that this essay will inspire others in academia, students and professors alike, to also begin speaking up loudly and vocally and to continue to speak up against this pernicious woke ideology until we bat it out the door of academia and society at large. Until then, I will continue to sound the alarm for any of those with minds and hearts open enough to hear. Listen to or dismiss these words at your own peril. However, when the woke mob comes to cancel you, when the HR department calls you into their office for mandatory remedial pronoun training, or when the agents of the pink police state come to knock at your door in the middle of the night, don’t say I didn’t warn you. So farewell academia,

I disavow you.

[Supermonkey 38]

The sexual counterrevolution is coming

America’s young elite is turning against free love

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/sexual-counterrevolution-liberation/

Charlotte is a 23-year-old Harvard graduate. Beautiful and willowy, she grew up in — her words — ‘a super-liberal environment’. You might expect to find her Instagram full of sexy, pouting pictures. But Charlotte has deleted all the bikini photos from her online life. And six months ago, she embraced ‘modest dress’: nothing that exposes her collarbones or shoulders and nothing that reveals her legs above the knee.

Narayan is seven years older than Charlotte. He is what matchmaking 18th-century matrons might have described as ‘very eligible’: a clean-living, highly educated and charismatic single guy with a well-paid job in tech. He’s the embodiment of Jane Austen’s famous observation that ‘a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’. And contra all the modern laments about single men preferring to play the field, Narayan actually wants to get married.

Narayan and his close male friends are all around the same age. They’re all elite guys working in tech and finance — and all either dating to marry, or already married. In what amounts to an informal 21st-century marriage brokerage, they and the wives of already-married members of their friend group collude to track down potential partners. But they’re picky — and Narayan is blunt about the criteria. It’s not just about being educated, ambitious or pretty. ‘Guys who say they don’t care about their wife’s sexual history are straight-up lying,’ he tells me. All the men in his group, he says, would strongly prefer their future wives to be virgins on marriage. Some categorically rule out women who aren’t: ‘No hymen, no diamond’.

Charlotte and Narayan are not the uptight fundamentalists or ugly, embittered feminists of stereotype: they’re members of the Ivy-educated jeunesse dorée. They’re pushing back against a culture of sexual freedom they see as toxic not just to individual wellbeing, but even to the long-term health of American society. They’re the forefront of what ‘Default Friend’, a Bay Area writer on sex and relationships, terms ‘the coming wave of sex-negativity’.

Welcome to the sexual counterrevolution.

The current they’re swimming against is strong. Charlotte reports that, when she got engaged in her senior year at Harvard, her peers looked at her ‘like I was crazy’ for expressing a preference for children over a high-flying career. Narayan tells me that his views on the importance of marriage and the qualities he seeks in a potential spouse have left him facing accusations of woman-hating.

‘Voicing any of this stuff openly is just social suicide,’ he says. So much so, in fact, that ‘Narayan’ is a pseudonym: there’s simply no way he can afford to be quoted about this under his real name without risking social censure or even repercussions at work.

Consider that for a moment. A 30-year-old American man holds the (until recently entirely conventional) opinion that men and women should refrain from promiscuity and that marriage, monogamy and family life are general social goods. And he will say so only under a pseudonym, for fear of destroying his career.

How did we get here? There have been multiple attempts at sexual revolution in America but, prior to the availability of reliable birth control, all failed to gain widespread traction. It’s not as though an unplanned pregnancy can be shared equally by both parties; historically the parent left holding the baby was most often the woman.

Under those conditions, Americans developed elaborate social codes to manage contact between horny young people — and to channel sexual desire toward commitment and child-rearing. In 17th-century New England, unmarried couples were strictly chaperoned, but the promenading Puritans were given a ‘courting stick’: a long, hollow tube they could use to whisper sweet nothings to one another. When a couple was close enough that marriage was expected, they were permitted to spend the night together – but with the woman clothed in a tight nightdress that rendered her (as it were) inaccessibly mermaid-like below the waist.

Less eccentrically, in A Young Lady’s Friend (1837), Mrs John Farrar advises young ladies to preserve ‘delicacy and refinement’ by never squeezing into tight spaces with a man, taking an unaccompanied carriage ride with one, or even holding a man’s hand. Such proscriptions aimed at foreclosing the possibility of physical contact, let alone anything more intimate.

In 1960 the FDA approved the first birth control pill. Abruptly, women’s most compelling motivation for not accepting an unchaperoned carriage ride fell away — and women rejoiced. Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s influential Sex and the Single Girl (1962) argued that women have as much right to sexual pleasure as men and offered women advice on developing an active sex life before marriage. In her radical feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Shulamith Firestone responded to new developments in reproductive technology by imagining ‘the freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction by every means possible’ so that ‘humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality’ in which ‘all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged’.

Firestone envisaged a utopia in which all forms of sexuality could flourish in freedom. Since her heyday, the progressive world has near-unanimously championed sexual liberation and openness as a crucial emancipatory cause. That ‘Narayan’ is only willing to criticize this consensus under a pseudonym attests to how decisively that battle has been won.

But what kind of victory has it been? Firestone dreamed of unmooring desire from reproduction in the interests of a joyfully sensuous new world. In practice, though, desire was no sooner emancipated than it found itself pressed into service again: first to sell entertainment or consumer goods and, increasingly, as the product itself. In the process, the idea of female empowerment has gradually fused with the demands of the market.

Helen Gurley Brown celebrated liberation from the risk of pregnancy by advising women to ‘get to a man by dealing with him on his professional level, then stay around to charm and sexually zonk him’.

But the dividends of America’s burgeoning sexual freedom didn’t go only to women who embraced this blend of professional and sexual aggression. In 1960, the year the FDA approved the Pill, Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy club in Chicago. By the end of 1961, Hefner’s Chicago club was the busiest nightclub in the world — with the role of ‘Playboy bunny’ marketed to young women as a glamorous and high-earning occupation.

By 1998, this convergence of sex, commerce and feminism had its own smash-hit TV drama, Sex and the City. Its high-achieving, sexually voracious thirty-something female characters glamorized the ideal that leveraging your sex appeal for power and pleasure was feminism. In its first episode, Carrie, the lead protagonist, uses a man for sex and reports ‘feeling powerful, potent and incredibly alive’.

To the victor, the spoils. Since 1998, pop-feminism has largely been concerned with setting acceptable boundaries for male responses to women’s sexual self-expression and rendering any holdout bastions of prudishness unacceptable in polite society. The ‘Slutwalk’ and #MeToo movements entrenched as orthodoxy the view that women can and should dress and behave as they please, without any fear of unwanted sexual attention. And the ‘sex-positivity’ movement painted tolerance of diverse sexual practices and preferences as a key social-justice issue. ‘Don’t yuck my yum,’ advises ‘sex educator’ Pamela Madsen in Huffpost.

Over the same half century, the pornographic empire that made Hugh Hefner a multimillionaire mushroomed into a $3 billion internet industry in America alone and accounts for some $97 billion worldwide. Pornhub alone is valued at over $1 billion. And OnlyFans, a website which allows ‘creators’ to sell their own pornographic images to ‘fans’, now boasts one million (mostly female) creators worldwide and over 30 million (mostly male) users.

Pornography is now a key plank of feminist empowerment, championed by ‘sex-positive’ activists under the slogan ‘Sex work is work’. This year, Ohio State University’s ‘Sex Week’ included classes for undergraduates interested in starting an OnlyFans. At the Grammy Awards in March, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s performance of their smash hit ‘WAP’ rejoiced in the artist’s power to make men ‘pay my tuition just to kiss me on this wet-ass pussy’. What began with the Pill, Cosmopolitan and Playboy has ended with feminism, desire and commerce indistinguishable from one another.

This fusion of sex and business has performed a reverse takeover of relationship formation in what is now called the ‘sexual marketplace’ — a term unheard before 1960 but now commonplace. And with sex thus subject to market logic, the main consideration in arranging it — as in any other transaction — is that both parties agree to the deal.

But the relationship between sex and ‘consent’ has long been ambiguous. One veteran of the sexual revolution, the British journalist Virginia Ironside, wrote of life as a young woman in the 1960s:

‘With every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say ‘no’ to sex… I mainly remember the 60s as an endless round of miserable promiscuity, a time when often it seemed easier and, believe it or not, more polite, to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat.‘

Half a century after Ironside ‘consented’ out of politeness to sexual encounters that she neither wanted nor enjoyed, women consent to considerably more. One outcome of the ‘sex-positive’ drive that reframes shame as oppression has been to render taboo the expression of any disapproval of another person’s erotic preferences. In progressive online youth cultures this is known as ‘kink-shaming’ and is a serious faux pas.

At the same time, though, growing numbers of young women are taking to social media to recount experiences of abuse perpetrated under the guise of ‘kink’. ‘Smokinfeds’, a young Twitter user, describes how, when she was a teenager, the 38-year-old man with whom she had a ‘consensual’ BDSM relationship introduced ‘breath play’: ‘he was piss drunk & put me in a rear naked choke & I passed out.’ On another occasion, she recounts, ‘I’d woken up to him shoving crushed up Adderall in my vagina.’

Louise Perry, 29, is a co-founder of ‘We Can’t Consent To This’, a British campaign against sexual violence. The campaign’s #WeCantConsentToThis hashtag has gained traction internationally as an online focal point for women with shocking stories of sexual violence, often experienced at a startlingly young age. Perry lists more than 60 cases of women killed since 1972, supposedly during ‘rough sex gone wrong’: victims who, before they died, had experienced violence including waterboarding, wounding, strangulation, beating and asphyxiation — acts to which they had, supposedly, consented.

In her forthcoming book on the sexual revolution, Perry argues that pornography is normalizing such abuse. Studies support this. A 2018 study of American youth identifies exposure to violent pornography as a key risk factor for engaging in real-life sexual aggression. Similarly, a British survey from 2020 finds that 71 percent of men under 40 have slapped, choked, gagged or spat on a partner during sex, with 51 percent indicating that pornography had influenced their desire to do so.

Pornography, Perry claims, is also degrading young people’s capacity for mutual pleasure. One young woman posts on Reddit’s relationships board about how her boyfriend can only reach climax by watching ‘blueberry porn’, a niche subgenre inspired by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which women turn purple and become grotesquely inflated. Another poster complains that her relationship is faltering because her partner has desensitized himself through repeated masturbation to the point where he cannot orgasm at all — a phenomenon known among young men as ‘death grip syndrome’.

Aaron Sibarium, a 25-year-old American writer, describes this mercenary, violent and atomized libidinal landscape as ‘sexual disenchantment’ in which ‘free love’ becomes ‘a sterile spin-off of the market’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this collective erotic ennui has coincided with what the Atlantic has called a ‘sex recession’. Between 1991 and 2017, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 percent to 40 percent. Today, people in their early 20s are twice as likely to be sexually abstinent as Gen Xers were at the same age.

The effects reverberate. According to the Institute of Family Studies, 26 percent of millennials aged 30-34 have not yet formed a family. This failure rate is double the 13 percent failure rate of the boomers at the same age. CDC data show that the American birth rate has been consistently below replacement since 2007 — something even the most liberal commentators acknowledge will have profound long-term economic and political consequences.

‘Default Friend’, the California writer, reports that marriage now seems so out of reach for the young men who write to her for advice it’s no longer perceived as stuffy and conventional but ‘a status thing’. In pursuit of that elusive goal, some are taking matters into — or rather, out of — their own hands. Unlike the 19th-century drive for ‘continence’, the anti-masturbation move- ment known as ‘#NoFap’ is driven not by doctors and parents but by young men. The 800,000-strong, 99 percent-male member- ship of the r/NoFap subreddit continually express their longing for real-life intimacy. They describe their chances of finding and forming relationships as profoundly damaged by habitually high levels of porn consumption. Success posts often cite finding a girlfriend as evidence of the transformative power of quitting.

On the other side of the looking glass are the young women who produce the images in question. They are encouraged by a nakedly commercial understanding of ‘sex-positivity’, and to view themselves as empowered entrepreneurs, not entry-level pornographers. Charlotte sees this as a toxic lie, as likely to undermine the prospect of real intimacy for the women who embrace it as compulsive masturbation is for men. ‘We have to ask ourselves: would I be the guy who’d marry the OnlyFans girl?’ For her, modesty offers a more lasting path to empowerment. ‘Being sexy is a huge dopamine rush,’ she explains, ‘but real feminism is about being able to develop an identity that’s bigger than just biology.’

Out there in the sexual marketplace, anything still goes. ‘Everybody’s relationship with sexuality, gender and romance is simply their own,’ Pamela Madsen asserts. Narayan disagrees. It’s not just about whether it’s OK to ‘yuck’ someone’s ‘yum’, he argues, when sexual disenchantment is ‘killing the West’. He sees the stakes as existential: ‘Civilization is going to fall apart if people can’t have families.’

No culture is monolithic. Feminism produced Helen Gurley Brown and Sex and the City; it also produced Phyllis Schlafly and Andrea Dworkin, two women from opposing ends of the political spectrum but both early critics of America’s burgeoning culture of sexual freedom. Are ‘sex-negative’ voices like Charlotte and Narayan just a contrarian minority?

‘Default Friend’ thinks not. ‘People are burned out,’ she says. As one male TikTok user recently put it: ‘I used to love ass gazing,’ but ‘y’all have shown me so much ass I’m numb to it.’ His advice? ‘Just keep it in your pants, man.’ ‘Default Friend’ points out that by the time a cultural shift becomes visible in online discourse, it’s already well-established: ‘The sex-negativity thing has been simmering for a long time,’ she says, ‘but now the house is burning down.’

She’s speaking figuratively. But on April 25 this year Feras Antoon, one of the founders of Pornhub, saw his $20-million Montreal mansion burned to the ground in what appears to be an arson attack. Commentators were quick to insinuate a link between this event and the ‘Exodus Cry’ anti-porn campaign, from a group the Daily Beast called ‘a shady Evangelical group with Trump ties’. Despite what this might imply about the religious and political affiliations of those hostile to the porn industry, American faith has been in freefall for a long time. In the last decade alone, Pew reports, the proportion of self-identifying American Christians has fallen by 12 percent — yet the campaign against Pornhub has mushroomed. Online supporters can be found not just on the religious right but among a broader coalition that includes radical feminists, former porn stars and growing numbers of young ‘kink’ survivors, #NoFap alumni and the sexually disenchanted.

When it comes to sexuality, the question is less how we can have it all than ‘what are we willing to trade?’ The sexual revolution sought to ease the burden of shame and social constraint — especially for women. Yet if we listen to its inheritors, the outcome has not been polymorphous pleasure but escalating degradation; not female erotic emancipation but violence masquerading as desire; not a garden of earthly delights but desensitization, loneliness and a collapsing birth rate.

The price of fusing empowerment and freedom with desire and commerce turned out to be human intimacy. The winners turn out not to be women, but porn barons like Feras Antoon. Now the counterrevolutionaries want intimacy back. If their numbers continue to grow, we may find that the price of victory is the death of sexual freedom. We may also discover that this proves as much a mixed blessing as its birth.

[Supermonkey 38]

Reflections on the Upheaval in France

What warnings of national disintegration say about our shared era of turmoil

I’ve been keeping an eye on Europe lately, and on France in particular. As I’ve tried to articulate here previously, the era of general upheaval underway is hardly a phenomenon limited to the United States. Instead, propelled everywhere by the same fundamental forces, it appears to be playing out in a more or less similar fashion all across the Western world, and perhaps beyond. In this regard France serves as an especially instructive example, as recent events have served to highlight in striking fashion.

In short, recent national controversy over a pair of open letters directed to the government by a collection of retired and active-duty military officers has not only spawned a month of political controversy in France, but revealed deeper dynamics at work in the country that may help provide a clearer picture of what’s happening everywhere.

On April 21, twenty retired French generals published an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron and the French government in the right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles (Today’s Values) denouncing “the disintegration that is affecting our country,” and explaining they were speaking out because “the hour is late, France is in peril, and many mortal dangers threaten her.”

This disintegration, they said, was proceeding as “the Islamist hordes of the banlieue [immigrant heavy city suburbs]” were succeeding in “detaching large parts of the nation and turning them into territory subject to dogmas contrary to our constitution.” For there to “exist any city, any district where the laws of the Republic do not apply,” would soon be fatal, they warned, citing rising crime and the swath of Islamist terror attacks that have struck the country, including the October 2020 beheading of middle-school teacher Samuel Paty by a Chechen refugee that many French viewed as a direct assault on the secular Republic’s deepest values.

However the problem is not only Islamism, the letter writers argued, but “a certain anti-racism” that in reality has “only one goal: to create on our soil a malaise, even a hatred between communities.” The “hateful and fanatical supporters” of this ideology, who “despise our country, its traditions, its culture, and want to see it dissolve by tearing away its past and its history,” might speak in terms of “indigenism and decolonial theories” and make a show of “analyzing centuries old words,”  but what they really want is “racial war.”

Meanwhile Macron’s government had used the “forces of order” [the police and military] as “scapegoats” and “auxiliary agents [of state power]” to suppress “French people in yellow vests expressing their despair” – a reference to the huge populist “Yellow Vest” protests against Macron’s economic policies, including higher fuel taxes, that exploded in late 2018.

“Those who lead our country must imperatively find the necessary courage to eradicate these dangers,” they urge, noting that “like us, a great majority of our fellow citizens are fed up with your wavering and guilty silence.” Fortunately, for the most part it would be sufficient a solution to “apply without weakness the laws that already exist.”

But, they grimly conclude, “If nothing is done, laxism will continue to spread inexorably in society, provoking in the end an explosion and the intervention of our active comrades for a dangerous mission to protect our civilizational values… Civil war will break upon this growing chaos, and the deaths, for which you will be responsible, will number among the thousands.”

Initially, the letter was dismissed as mere “eccentric nationalist nostalgia by octogenarian retirees,” as the British Financial Times put it, and the government appeared content to ignore it. The then head of France’s General Directorate for Internal Security, Patrick Calvar, had already warned that France was “on the edge of a civil war” as early as 2016, so this kind of thing was old news. But that changed as soon as Marine Le Pen – the leader of the right-wing Rassemblement National (National Rally) party who polls show is likely to again be Macron’s top rival in presidential elections next year – endorsed the letter, saying “it was the duty of all French patriots, wherever they are from, to rise up to restore – and indeed save – the country.”

Public conversation in France turned to politicization of the armed forces and whether the letter’s final lines were a call for a military coup d'état (the fact that the letter was published on the 60th anniversary of a failed generals’ putsch against President Charles de Gaulle in 1961 providing evidence for this in the view of many). General François Lecointre, armed forces chief of staff, stated that while “at first I said to myself that it wasn’t very significant,” at least 18 active military personnel had been found to have been among the more than 1,500 people who also signed the letter. “That I cannot accept,” he said, because “the neutrality of the armed forces is essential.” They would all be punished, while any of the generals still in the reserves would be forced into full retirement as part of “an exceptional measure, that we will launch immediately at the request of the defense minister.” Still, the government’s ministers emphasized that the signatories were nothing more than an isolated and irrelevant minority in the military.

But soon enough, on May 10, a second letter appeared, again published in Valeurs Actuelles, this time by more than 2,000 serving soldiers writing in support of the first letter’s retired generals, accusing the government of having sullied their reputations when “their only fault is to love their country and to mourn its visible decline.”  

They described themselves as being part of the generation that had served abroad in France’s fight against Islamist forces in Mali, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, where they said they have lost comrades who “offered their lives to destroy the Islamism to which you have made concessions on our soil.”

“Almost all of us,” the letter notes, also participated in “Operation Sentinel,” in which troops were deployed throughout Paris following the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre (many armed soldiers still protect sensitive sites, like subways, schools, and synagogues across France), and therefore “have seen with our own eyes the abandoned banlieues... where France means nothing but an object of sarcasm, contempt or even hatred.”

France, they argue, is fast becoming “a failed state”: “We see violence in our towns and villages. We see communitarianism [identity politics, as the French refer to it] taking hold in the public space, in public debate. We see hatred of France and its history becoming the norm.” Their letter, they say, is thus “a professional assessment we are giving, because we have seen this decline in many countries in crisis. It precedes collapse, chaos and violence. And contrary to what [others] say, chaos and violence will not come from military rebellion but from a civil insurrection.”

“We are talking about the survival of our country, the survival of your country,” the letter concludes, addressing Macron. “A civil war is brewing in France and you know it perfectly well.” For if an “insurrection” breaks out “the military will maintain order on its own soil, because it will be asked to. That is the definition of civil war.”

The second letter, this time open to the public to sign, attracted (as of the end of last week) more than 287,000 signatures.

Again came exasperated reactions from many ministers and observers. But what is most remarkable, in my view, is how little enthusiasm most seemed to have for challenging the basic premises of the letters: that France is in a state of growing fracture and even dissolution. Instead, the focus of controversy was once again on the military taking a political position.

Lecointre, the army chief of staff, said those who signed the second letter should quit the armed forces if they wanted to freely express their political opinions, but dropped his previous threats of punishment in a letter to military personnel discussing the controversy. Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said the letter was “a waste of time and offers no solution,” before adding “yes, there is a political Islamism that is trying to break up the country, and we are fighting it.”

Rachida Dati, Mayor of Paris' 7th arrondissement and another likely future center-right challenger to Macron flatly agreed that “What is written in this letter is a reality… When you have a country plagued by urban guerrilla warfare, when you have a constant and high terrorist threat, when you have increasingly glaring and flagrant inequalities... we cannot say that the country is doing well.”

But perhaps my favorite example was that of (retired) General Jérôme Pellistrandi, chief editor at the magazine Revue Défense Nationale, who prefaced his otherwise sharp criticism of the outspoken soldiers with: “Everyone agrees that society is breaking up, it’s a known fact, but…”

What was going on here? Since when do government officials reflexively agree that their country is falling apart? Well, it turns out that a rather shockingly high proportion of the French public seems to agree with the sentiments the letters expressed. The following chart, created from the results of a Harris Interactive opinion poll taken April 29, after the first letter, is in my view one of the most striking statements about the political mood in a Western country that you’re likely to see for some time:

Copyright: Financial Times

So, to break this down, not only do 58% of the French public agree with the first letter’s sentiments about the country facing disintegration, but so do nearly half of Macron’s own governing party, the centrist En Marche. Awkward. Nor are those sentiments limited to any one part of the political spectrum, even if the right is more sympathetic overall. Far-left party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon may have quickly declared that the “mutinous and cowardly” soldiers who signed the letter would all be purged from the army if he were elected, but 43% of his party seem to share their concerns.

But that’s not even the whole of it – an amazing 74% of poll respondents said they thought French society was collapsing, while no less than 45% agreed that France “will soon have a civil war.”

Qui vivra verra…

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Several aspects of this whole affair are especially fascinating, from my point of view – and not the talk of a coup, which everyone seems to agree is highly unlikely. Rather, the situation in France says some important things about the nature of the Upheaval that I’m trying to explore here.

The first is simply to demonstrate how the phenomenon is not at all limited to the United States, or even to the “Anglo-Saxon world.” Overall, despite many differences between America and France (e.g. in terms of size, geography, political structures, history, including racial history, language, culture, etc.) the set of simultaneous crises besetting both countries is remarkably similar. Both countries are home to liberal democracies produced by the European Enlightenment, the values of which are now being challenged. Both countries were once largely Christian in moral character – if not in law – but have since been secularized (France earlier), with unpredictable consequences. Both are in the process of coming to terms with a loss of international power and prestige (though this is much more advanced in the French case). Both are obviously influenced by the same technological forces, and by the tide of economic globalization. Both are experiencing growing income inequality, urban vs. rural divides, and distrust of the ruling elites. Both are facing growing social divisions, often along ethnic lines, as well as rising lawlessness. Finally, both are facing major political turmoil over uncontrolled immigration – though the issue lacks the hugely contentious religious aspect in the United States that it does in France.

And, in short, both countries are clearly facing at least one of the defining characteristics of the Upheaval: the collapse of any agreed upon and consistently accepted authority. It is notable that, in both countries (at least until recently) there is only one institution that still garners relatively widespread respect: the military. (And French generals aren’t the only ones trying to capitalize on this with controversial open letters.)

Second, there is the key detail – almost entirely skipped over in the English-language press in favor of focusing on the anti-immigration angle, as far as I’ve seen – of the “anti-racism,” “decolonialism,” and “communitarianism” decried in the two letters as contributing to national dissolution. This is rather unmistakably a reference to the amalgamated, zealously anti-traditional and anti-liberal ideology of the “New Faith” – alternately referred to as Anti-Racism, the Social Justice movement, Critical Theory, identity politics, neo-Marxism, or Wokeness, among other synonymous infamies – that I’ve previously identified as one of the key revolutionary dynamics of our present era.

Let me repeat this proposition again: no revolution has ever remained contained by national borders. The New Faith is a trans-national ideological movement, which can no more remain confined to the United States than it remained confined within the American academy where it matured (it was arguably born in, well… France). And it is more than capable of rapidly adapting itself to and flourishing within whatever national context it penetrates. But, wherever it goes, it’s just as disruptive to the foundations of social and political order.

What’s ironic in this case, however, is that France’s Macron has in fact been one of the only leaders in the West that has clearly recognized this fact and pushed back hard against the New Faith, saying in a 2020 speech for example that “certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ were prompting ethnic groups to revisit “their identity through a post-colonial or anticolonial discourse.” This, he warned, was aiding and abetting the “conscious, theorized, political-religious project” of “Islamist separatism” in France. The “ethnicization of the social question’’ by American-influenced universities, he claimed in another speech, was in effect “breaking the republic in two.”

Similarly, Marcon’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, has blamed “an intellectual matrix from American universities” for complicity in excusing and exacerbating Islamist terrorism, and in February the French government announced a commission to investigate the influence within higher education of “Islamo-leftist’’ tendencies that “corrupt society’’ – including by “always looking at everything through the prism of their will to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy.’’

Meanwhile this has all occurred amid the context of an explosive debate within the French academic world, where (totally unlike in the U.S. and U.K.) the New Faith has faced significant pushback from the establishment elite, with more than 100 prominent scholars banding together to support the government’s inquiry in an open letter decrying theories “transferred from North American campuses,” including the “cancel culture” of radical student activists.

They have popular support: the Harris Interactive poll finds that 74% of the French public think “anti-racist” ideology has only “the opposite effect.” To conceptualize this, one must understand that the French take great pride in their system’s theoretical ability to unite a multitude of diverse ethnic and religious groups under the flag of a single nation. The French state very purposely does not collect or compile racial statistics (doing so is literally illegal) as a function of its liberal commitment to universal rights and treating all citizens equally under the law. It is probably for this reason that Macron has felt emboldened to speak out against America’s ideological invasive species – along with the realization, perhaps, of how absolutely incendiary U.S.-style identity politics was likely to prove in a France already riven with its own social conflicts.

Finally, what’s striking about the situation in France is that every driving factor appears set to only get worse. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the divide between rich and poor; Europe’s economic recovery has been shaky; the ideology of the New Faith is likely to prove more difficult for the French to combat than they expect (the foundation of the established order having been hollowed out over a very long period of time); and the identitarian culture war is likely to only heat up, especially with elections approaching in which Le Pen appears to have a decent chance of actually winning (an outcome that could accelerate political and cultural fracturing, as Donald Trump’s election did in the United States).

In particular, the migration issue is almost guaranteed to only get worse for France. Europe’s declining demographics have created a vacuum that quickly growing populations from impoverished and strife-ridden part of the Middle East and Africa have understandably rushed to fill, and none of these factors have changed. Meanwhile, climate change is likely to rapidly accelerate migration as environmental stressors are expected to hit these regions particularly hard – leading to predictions of a “climate refugee” crisis. Very similar circumstances face the United States, but with Latin America substituting for Africa.

It is notable that every one of these trends, including climate-induced migration, is featured in the U.S. Intelligence Community’s rather ominous recent report evaluating where the world is headed over the next five years, which I’ve written on previously. (Several readers have written to me to criticize my lack of discussion of climate change as a factor in both that post and my essay introducing the Upheaval – well fair enough, though I am uncertain about how much the climate issue has actually driven the turmoil we’re already seeing so far today, as opposed to what we may see in the future.)

France thus seems set to function as an ahead-of-the-curve epicenter for the Upheaval in Europe. No wonder the French are so pessimistic…

In the end, however, I live on the other side of the Atlantic, and have a limited view of what’s going on. If any of you do in fact happen to live in France, or elsewhere in Europe, I’d be particularly interested to hear your thoughts on what’s happening and where you think things are headed – especially if you think I’ve got it all wrong. Go ahead and comment below.

Or, if you’d rather not comment publicly here, please feel free to email me at [email protected] with your thoughts.

And as always, if you’ve found this interesting, I’d appreciate it if you could share it with others who might as well, and of course remember to subscribe below:

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9 hours ago, Supermonkey said:

The sexual counterrevolution is coming

America’s young elite is turning against free love

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/sexual-counterrevolution-liberation/

Charlotte is a 23-year-old Harvard graduate. Beautiful and willowy, she grew up in — her words — ‘a super-liberal environment’. You might expect to find her Instagram full of sexy, pouting pictures. But Charlotte has deleted all the bikini photos from her online life. And six months ago, she embraced ‘modest dress’: nothing that exposes her collarbones or shoulders and nothing that reveals her legs above the knee.

Narayan is seven years older than Charlotte. He is what matchmaking 18th-century matrons might have described as ‘very eligible’: a clean-living, highly educated and charismatic single guy with a well-paid job in tech. He’s the embodiment of Jane Austen’s famous observation that ‘a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’. And contra all the modern laments about single men preferring to play the field, Narayan actually wants to get married.

Narayan and his close male friends are all around the same age. They’re all elite guys working in tech and finance — and all either dating to marry, or already married. In what amounts to an informal 21st-century marriage brokerage, they and the wives of already-married members of their friend group collude to track down potential partners. But they’re picky — and Narayan is blunt about the criteria. It’s not just about being educated, ambitious or pretty. ‘Guys who say they don’t care about their wife’s sexual history are straight-up lying,’ he tells me. All the men in his group, he says, would strongly prefer their future wives to be virgins on marriage. Some categorically rule out women who aren’t: ‘No hymen, no diamond’.

Charlotte and Narayan are not the uptight fundamentalists or ugly, embittered feminists of stereotype: they’re members of the Ivy-educated jeunesse dorée. They’re pushing back against a culture of sexual freedom they see as toxic not just to individual wellbeing, but even to the long-term health of American society. They’re the forefront of what ‘Default Friend’, a Bay Area writer on sex and relationships, terms ‘the coming wave of sex-negativity’.

Welcome to the sexual counterrevolution.

The current they’re swimming against is strong. Charlotte reports that, when she got engaged in her senior year at Harvard, her peers looked at her ‘like I was crazy’ for expressing a preference for children over a high-flying career. Narayan tells me that his views on the importance of marriage and the qualities he seeks in a potential spouse have left him facing accusations of woman-hating.

‘Voicing any of this stuff openly is just social suicide,’ he says. So much so, in fact, that ‘Narayan’ is a pseudonym: there’s simply no way he can afford to be quoted about this under his real name without risking social censure or even repercussions at work.

Consider that for a moment. A 30-year-old American man holds the (until recently entirely conventional) opinion that men and women should refrain from promiscuity and that marriage, monogamy and family life are general social goods. And he will say so only under a pseudonym, for fear of destroying his career.

How did we get here? There have been multiple attempts at sexual revolution in America but, prior to the availability of reliable birth control, all failed to gain widespread traction. It’s not as though an unplanned pregnancy can be shared equally by both parties; historically the parent left holding the baby was most often the woman.

Under those conditions, Americans developed elaborate social codes to manage contact between horny young people — and to channel sexual desire toward commitment and child-rearing. In 17th-century New England, unmarried couples were strictly chaperoned, but the promenading Puritans were given a ‘courting stick’: a long, hollow tube they could use to whisper sweet nothings to one another. When a couple was close enough that marriage was expected, they were permitted to spend the night together – but with the woman clothed in a tight nightdress that rendered her (as it were) inaccessibly mermaid-like below the waist.

Less eccentrically, in A Young Lady’s Friend (1837), Mrs John Farrar advises young ladies to preserve ‘delicacy and refinement’ by never squeezing into tight spaces with a man, taking an unaccompanied carriage ride with one, or even holding a man’s hand. Such proscriptions aimed at foreclosing the possibility of physical contact, let alone anything more intimate.

In 1960 the FDA approved the first birth control pill. Abruptly, women’s most compelling motivation for not accepting an unchaperoned carriage ride fell away — and women rejoiced. Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s influential Sex and the Single Girl (1962) argued that women have as much right to sexual pleasure as men and offered women advice on developing an active sex life before marriage. In her radical feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Shulamith Firestone responded to new developments in reproductive technology by imagining ‘the freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction by every means possible’ so that ‘humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality’ in which ‘all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged’.

Firestone envisaged a utopia in which all forms of sexuality could flourish in freedom. Since her heyday, the progressive world has near-unanimously championed sexual liberation and openness as a crucial emancipatory cause. That ‘Narayan’ is only willing to criticize this consensus under a pseudonym attests to how decisively that battle has been won.

But what kind of victory has it been? Firestone dreamed of unmooring desire from reproduction in the interests of a joyfully sensuous new world. In practice, though, desire was no sooner emancipated than it found itself pressed into service again: first to sell entertainment or consumer goods and, increasingly, as the product itself. In the process, the idea of female empowerment has gradually fused with the demands of the market.

Helen Gurley Brown celebrated liberation from the risk of pregnancy by advising women to ‘get to a man by dealing with him on his professional level, then stay around to charm and sexually zonk him’.

But the dividends of America’s burgeoning sexual freedom didn’t go only to women who embraced this blend of professional and sexual aggression. In 1960, the year the FDA approved the Pill, Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy club in Chicago. By the end of 1961, Hefner’s Chicago club was the busiest nightclub in the world — with the role of ‘Playboy bunny’ marketed to young women as a glamorous and high-earning occupation.

By 1998, this convergence of sex, commerce and feminism had its own smash-hit TV drama, Sex and the City. Its high-achieving, sexually voracious thirty-something female characters glamorized the ideal that leveraging your sex appeal for power and pleasure was feminism. In its first episode, Carrie, the lead protagonist, uses a man for sex and reports ‘feeling powerful, potent and incredibly alive’.

To the victor, the spoils. Since 1998, pop-feminism has largely been concerned with setting acceptable boundaries for male responses to women’s sexual self-expression and rendering any holdout bastions of prudishness unacceptable in polite society. The ‘Slutwalk’ and #MeToo movements entrenched as orthodoxy the view that women can and should dress and behave as they please, without any fear of unwanted sexual attention. And the ‘sex-positivity’ movement painted tolerance of diverse sexual practices and preferences as a key social-justice issue. ‘Don’t yuck my yum,’ advises ‘sex educator’ Pamela Madsen in Huffpost.

Over the same half century, the pornographic empire that made Hugh Hefner a multimillionaire mushroomed into a $3 billion internet industry in America alone and accounts for some $97 billion worldwide. Pornhub alone is valued at over $1 billion. And OnlyFans, a website which allows ‘creators’ to sell their own pornographic images to ‘fans’, now boasts one million (mostly female) creators worldwide and over 30 million (mostly male) users.

Pornography is now a key plank of feminist empowerment, championed by ‘sex-positive’ activists under the slogan ‘Sex work is work’. This year, Ohio State University’s ‘Sex Week’ included classes for undergraduates interested in starting an OnlyFans. At the Grammy Awards in March, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s performance of their smash hit ‘WAP’ rejoiced in the artist’s power to make men ‘pay my tuition just to kiss me on this wet-ass pussy’. What began with the Pill, Cosmopolitan and Playboy has ended with feminism, desire and commerce indistinguishable from one another.

This fusion of sex and business has performed a reverse takeover of relationship formation in what is now called the ‘sexual marketplace’ — a term unheard before 1960 but now commonplace. And with sex thus subject to market logic, the main consideration in arranging it — as in any other transaction — is that both parties agree to the deal.

But the relationship between sex and ‘consent’ has long been ambiguous. One veteran of the sexual revolution, the British journalist Virginia Ironside, wrote of life as a young woman in the 1960s:

‘With every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say ‘no’ to sex… I mainly remember the 60s as an endless round of miserable promiscuity, a time when often it seemed easier and, believe it or not, more polite, to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat.‘

Half a century after Ironside ‘consented’ out of politeness to sexual encounters that she neither wanted nor enjoyed, women consent to considerably more. One outcome of the ‘sex-positive’ drive that reframes shame as oppression has been to render taboo the expression of any disapproval of another person’s erotic preferences. In progressive online youth cultures this is known as ‘kink-shaming’ and is a serious faux pas.

At the same time, though, growing numbers of young women are taking to social media to recount experiences of abuse perpetrated under the guise of ‘kink’. ‘Smokinfeds’, a young Twitter user, describes how, when she was a teenager, the 38-year-old man with whom she had a ‘consensual’ BDSM relationship introduced ‘breath play’: ‘he was piss drunk & put me in a rear naked choke & I passed out.’ On another occasion, she recounts, ‘I’d woken up to him shoving crushed up Adderall in my vagina.’

Louise Perry, 29, is a co-founder of ‘We Can’t Consent To This’, a British campaign against sexual violence. The campaign’s #WeCantConsentToThis hashtag has gained traction internationally as an online focal point for women with shocking stories of sexual violence, often experienced at a startlingly young age. Perry lists more than 60 cases of women killed since 1972, supposedly during ‘rough sex gone wrong’: victims who, before they died, had experienced violence including waterboarding, wounding, strangulation, beating and asphyxiation — acts to which they had, supposedly, consented.

In her forthcoming book on the sexual revolution, Perry argues that pornography is normalizing such abuse. Studies support this. A 2018 study of American youth identifies exposure to violent pornography as a key risk factor for engaging in real-life sexual aggression. Similarly, a British survey from 2020 finds that 71 percent of men under 40 have slapped, choked, gagged or spat on a partner during sex, with 51 percent indicating that pornography had influenced their desire to do so.

Pornography, Perry claims, is also degrading young people’s capacity for mutual pleasure. One young woman posts on Reddit’s relationships board about how her boyfriend can only reach climax by watching ‘blueberry porn’, a niche subgenre inspired by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which women turn purple and become grotesquely inflated. Another poster complains that her relationship is faltering because her partner has desensitized himself through repeated masturbation to the point where he cannot orgasm at all — a phenomenon known among young men as ‘death grip syndrome’.

Aaron Sibarium, a 25-year-old American writer, describes this mercenary, violent and atomized libidinal landscape as ‘sexual disenchantment’ in which ‘free love’ becomes ‘a sterile spin-off of the market’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this collective erotic ennui has coincided with what the Atlantic has called a ‘sex recession’. Between 1991 and 2017, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 percent to 40 percent. Today, people in their early 20s are twice as likely to be sexually abstinent as Gen Xers were at the same age.

The effects reverberate. According to the Institute of Family Studies, 26 percent of millennials aged 30-34 have not yet formed a family. This failure rate is double the 13 percent failure rate of the boomers at the same age. CDC data show that the American birth rate has been consistently below replacement since 2007 — something even the most liberal commentators acknowledge will have profound long-term economic and political consequences.

‘Default Friend’, the California writer, reports that marriage now seems so out of reach for the young men who write to her for advice it’s no longer perceived as stuffy and conventional but ‘a status thing’. In pursuit of that elusive goal, some are taking matters into — or rather, out of — their own hands. Unlike the 19th-century drive for ‘continence’, the anti-masturbation move- ment known as ‘#NoFap’ is driven not by doctors and parents but by young men. The 800,000-strong, 99 percent-male member- ship of the r/NoFap subreddit continually express their longing for real-life intimacy. They describe their chances of finding and forming relationships as profoundly damaged by habitually high levels of porn consumption. Success posts often cite finding a girlfriend as evidence of the transformative power of quitting.

On the other side of the looking glass are the young women who produce the images in question. They are encouraged by a nakedly commercial understanding of ‘sex-positivity’, and to view themselves as empowered entrepreneurs, not entry-level pornographers. Charlotte sees this as a toxic lie, as likely to undermine the prospect of real intimacy for the women who embrace it as compulsive masturbation is for men. ‘We have to ask ourselves: would I be the guy who’d marry the OnlyFans girl?’ For her, modesty offers a more lasting path to empowerment. ‘Being sexy is a huge dopamine rush,’ she explains, ‘but real feminism is about being able to develop an identity that’s bigger than just biology.’

Out there in the sexual marketplace, anything still goes. ‘Everybody’s relationship with sexuality, gender and romance is simply their own,’ Pamela Madsen asserts. Narayan disagrees. It’s not just about whether it’s OK to ‘yuck’ someone’s ‘yum’, he argues, when sexual disenchantment is ‘killing the West’. He sees the stakes as existential: ‘Civilization is going to fall apart if people can’t have families.’

No culture is monolithic. Feminism produced Helen Gurley Brown and Sex and the City; it also produced Phyllis Schlafly and Andrea Dworkin, two women from opposing ends of the political spectrum but both early critics of America’s burgeoning culture of sexual freedom. Are ‘sex-negative’ voices like Charlotte and Narayan just a contrarian minority?

‘Default Friend’ thinks not. ‘People are burned out,’ she says. As one male TikTok user recently put it: ‘I used to love ass gazing,’ but ‘y’all have shown me so much ass I’m numb to it.’ His advice? ‘Just keep it in your pants, man.’ ‘Default Friend’ points out that by the time a cultural shift becomes visible in online discourse, it’s already well-established: ‘The sex-negativity thing has been simmering for a long time,’ she says, ‘but now the house is burning down.’

She’s speaking figuratively. But on April 25 this year Feras Antoon, one of the founders of Pornhub, saw his $20-million Montreal mansion burned to the ground in what appears to be an arson attack. Commentators were quick to insinuate a link between this event and the ‘Exodus Cry’ anti-porn campaign, from a group the Daily Beast called ‘a shady Evangelical group with Trump ties’. Despite what this might imply about the religious and political affiliations of those hostile to the porn industry, American faith has been in freefall for a long time. In the last decade alone, Pew reports, the proportion of self-identifying American Christians has fallen by 12 percent — yet the campaign against Pornhub has mushroomed. Online supporters can be found not just on the religious right but among a broader coalition that includes radical feminists, former porn stars and growing numbers of young ‘kink’ survivors, #NoFap alumni and the sexually disenchanted.

When it comes to sexuality, the question is less how we can have it all than ‘what are we willing to trade?’ The sexual revolution sought to ease the burden of shame and social constraint — especially for women. Yet if we listen to its inheritors, the outcome has not been polymorphous pleasure but escalating degradation; not female erotic emancipation but violence masquerading as desire; not a garden of earthly delights but desensitization, loneliness and a collapsing birth rate.

The price of fusing empowerment and freedom with desire and commerce turned out to be human intimacy. The winners turn out not to be women, but porn barons like Feras Antoon. Now the counterrevolutionaries want intimacy back. If their numbers continue to grow, we may find that the price of victory is the death of sexual freedom. We may also discover that this proves as much a mixed blessing as its birth.

 

oh goody, I cannot wait for scarlet letters to come back into fashion

🤢

pretty ironic for The Sextator to start hectoring about the sexual activity of others

but rules/mores are for the little people, eh

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The GOP’s Sharia Law Liars Are Hyping Critical Race Theory Now

This is the only script Republicans know how to act out now, the same one that they’ve used to demonize Muslims. Here’s how it works, and how to counter it.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-sharia-law-liars-are-hyping-critical-race-theory-now?ref=home

 

Save yourselves! Run from the latest menace unleashed by the Marxist forces of wokeness to indoctrinate our children, replace our democracy, and threaten our cherished American values! Critical Race Theory is right around the corner!

If we don’t immediately cancel and ban it, it will soon take over the country and transform our innocent, naive youth into anti-American socialists who reject the gospel of capitalism, believe structural racism exists, empathize with BLM, call out white privilege, kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality, and acknowledge that the founding fathers were also slave holders. If you’re not careful, it might even eat your baby and make you pray towards Mecca!

Thankfully, the GOP is here to stop CRT and protect our American Judeo-Christian civilization.

The trailer for the latest conservative horror movie is a derivative remake. They switched the villains but remained loyal to the same tried and true script, because why mess with a winning formula?

Over a decade ago, I remember seeing a similar movie called “The Sharia Threat” as a non-existent problem was transformed into a national “crisis” within a few months.

That bogeyman was used to rally voters, mobilize support for anti-Sharia bans across the nation—a useless solution in search of a mythical problem —and fuel hateful conspiracy theories against innocent Muslim American communities.

Conservatives are now relying on the same strategy to attack CRT as an insidious, unpatriotic movement that seeks to attack white people and “dismantle the United States.” Here’s the four-step script that they’re using, and how progressives should respond this time.

Step 1: Manufacture the Bogeyman

Every good story needs a crisis, a disruption in the normal routine that threatens the protagonists and their community. It is usually orchestrated by a villainous force representing sinister values that are affront to decency and virtue.

You need to warn the masses of this threat.

Enter Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute, whose sole expertise on critical race theory seems to be that he’s against it. Regardless, CRT provides the former documentary filmmaker a perfect bogeyman for his political agenda. He admitted that he paired CRT "with breaking news stories that were shocking and explicit and horrifying, and made it political.” He boasted of manufacturing a “salient political issue with a clear villain.” Like a stereotypical Bond villain, Rufo gave away the plot: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”

“Something crazy” is any and all endeavors that seek to educate people about systemic racism in this country and elevate marginalized people of color. Historically, such attempts have always triggered “economic anxiety” among many in the white majority, who see equality as oppression. It shouldn’t be surprising that racial anxiety was the main driver for Trump voters.

Recent examples of “clear villains” include the 1619 Project, a Pulitzer-winning endeavor led by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah Jones and published in 2019 that acknowledged the 400th anniversary of slavery in America as central to America’s national narrative. It also includes the BLM movement, marches to protest George Floyd’s murder, and any and all diversity, equity and inclusion trainings in government or educational institutions that might, God forbid, mention and criticize the Voldemort known as white supremacy.

Historian Carol Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, told me CRT is being attacked to maintain “that everything good that has ever happened to Black people has been through the benevolence of hard-working, God-fearing, white people.” She says this literal whitewashing of history is “a myth making exercise to justify and rationalize the systemic inequalities that undermine American democracy."

Author and academic Jared Yates Sexton told me right-wing attacks on these measures are “misdirections” and are instead about creating “safe harbors for people wishing to be left in their convenient mythologies, and, over time, preparing them for pre-emptive violence should marginalized voices be heard, recognized, or even acknowledged.”

We saw this violence during the 2018 midterm elections when the right incessantly warned about another manufactured bogeyman: the caravan. That fear inspired Robert Bowers to kill 11 Jews in a synagogue to punish them for allegedly helping the “invaders,” including undocumented immigrants and Muslims. We are seeing a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, who are being blamed for the coronavirus, a pandemic that has no ethnicity or zip code that was rebranded by Trump as “the China virus” and “Kung Flu.”

In 2010, we saw it with Muslims and Sharia.

Rufo has taken a page from attorney David Yerushalmi, who the ADL says has a history of anti-Black, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant statements. In 2007, Yerushalmi wanted to criminalize Sharia, which is loosely defined as Islamic religious law, and he proposed legislation that would make practicing Sharia a felony in the United States punishable with a 20-year sentence. In 2010, he teamed up with right-wing hawk Frank Gaffney and his think tank Center for Security Policy, a hate group according to the SPLC, where he helped co-author a document, “Sharia: The Threat to America,” written almost entirely by people with no expertise in Islam or Arabic.

A few months later, right before the 2010 midterm elections, conservative activists warned that Sharia, a term that even most practicing Muslims don’t understand and most Americans had never heard of, was about to infiltrate and overtake American courts. In 2011, the ACLU reviewed and debunked the “mythical sharia threat” in a report titled "Nothing to Fear" and concluded these right wing warnings were “based both on misinformation and misunderstanding of how our judicial system works.” Instead, they said the Sharia threat was a “red herring” meant to distract and denigrate Islam and deny Muslims their rights and equal access to the judicial system.

It didn’t matter. The right-wing ecosystem had successfully created a fictional bogeyman to rally their base. By 2015, President Trump promoted a complete and total ban on Muslims from entering the United States.

Step 2: Re-define the bogeyman as an existential threat

After naming the bogeyman, you have to define it. Don’t worry about facts, citations, accuracy or expertise. Misinformation and vagueness help the confusion. That’s the point. Rufo admits that conservatives have “decodified the term” CRT and will now “re-codify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

It’s like painting on a blank canvas. CRT can be whatever you want it to be. It’s the ideal villain, all of conservatives’ worst fears embodied in one simple package and introduced to the public as a horrific monstrosity about to take over America.

Critical Race Theory, which most Amerians are just hearing about now, is an academic movement that is nearly 40 years old, taught in post-graduate studies, and examines how racism and racist policies have intersected with the law to negatively impact people of color. I took my first CRT class in law school with 20 other students, and not a single class was dedicated to killing whitey, replacing the Constitution or creating a branch of antifa to overtake the government.

Most Republicans who oppose CRT can’t define it. All they “know” is that it’s being used by liberals to teach their kids to hate America and white people—and that’s enough to ban it. Republicans now parrot Rufo as he spews a nonsense word salad, warning that CRT is a “cult of indoctrination" and the “default ideology of the federal bureaucracy” that is supposedly being weaponized against the American people and has “pervaded every institution in the federal government.”

According to Rufo, CRT “prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution” and seeks to displace the Christian God. Well if that's been CRT’s goal for 40 years, then take comfort in knowing it has failed miserably.

These same broad conspiracy theories were used to promote the Sharia threat. In the 2010 document, “Sharia: The Threat to America,” the authors misdefined Sharia in a way which is entirely unrecognizable to any practicing Muslim.

They defined it as “the pre-eminent totalitarian threat of our time” and a “legal-political-military doctrine” that is “incompatible with our Constitution and a threat to freedom here and around the world.” Frank Gaffney furthermore said Sharia is “sedition.” So, next time you see a friendly neighborhood Muslim abstaining from alcohol, praying in the mosque, fasting, or giving money to charity, and basically following Sharia, please know that’s sedition and worse than a mob violently overtaking the US Capitol to cancel a free and fair election.

“I don’t hold myself out as an expert on Sharia law," Gaffney admitted, “but I have talked a lot about that as a threat.” Just like Republicans who are talking about CRT. In 2010, 70 percent of Oklahoma voters voted for State Question 755 barring state courts from considering international or Islamic law when deciding cases. No Republican proponent of the measure could cite one instance where Sharia had replaced U.S. law in Oklahoma.

For Yerushalmi, the ultimate purpose of the anti-Sharia movement was not to ban Sharia law but rather “to get people asking this question, ‘What is Sharia?"

Along with the Islamophobia network, an incestuous coterie of conservative funders, activists and grassroots groups, he was successful in redefining Sharia for the majority of 2012 Republican Presidential candidates. In 2011, Rick Santorum said Sharia represented an “existential threat” and is “antithetical to American civilization.” By 2015, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said he wouldn’t accept a Muslim as president until they renounce Sharia.

Step 3: Galvanize the base

Leading up to the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, conservatives mobilized protests against the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York City, which was neither at Ground Zero nor a mosque. The event was headlined by Pamela Gellar and other anti-Muslim bigots to stop the “Islamic takeover” of America. It was funded and supported by a tight network of connected conservatives who created the threat and then warned their base about it through media platforms and local grassroots groups. A non-issue was manufactured into a national scandal right before the 2010 midterm election.

In 2011, David Yerushalmi wrote the model anti-Sharia bill at the behest of a conservative non-profit group, American Public Policy Alliance. ACT for America, a leading anti-Muslim hate group with chapters all across the country, worked with conservatives to promote the supposed Sharia threat and provide Republican lawmakers with anti-Sharia legislation. They even offered helpful online tool kits for grassroots anti-Sharia activism.

In 2021, a “Reject Critical Race Theory” toolkit was created by the conservative group Heritage Action for America to help parents “stop CRT in your school district” and limit schools’ attempts to promote conversations and education about racial justice, diversity and equity.

Concerned parents are now rallying and packing school boards in Loudoun Country, Virginia, holding up posters, repeating GOP talking points, and demanding their educators stop indoctrinating their children with CRT. They could save their outrage, anxiety and time if they knew that CRT is not taught in elementary schools. But fear and loathing leave no room in the imagination for caution, restraint and calm.

On Tuesday, police declared an unlawful assembly at a school board meeting and arrested two people. Attendees loudly opposed an inclusive policy for transgender students, which asks teachers to use the child’s preferred gender pronouns. At the same event, a former Republican state senator, Dick Black, was cheered when he criticized the board for allegedly supporting critical race theory.

Just like the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy in NYC, Loudoun County has become a laboratory and test case for conservatives seeking to galvanize angry white voters across the country around CRT. GOP candidates in Virginia are supporting Republican activists and conservative parents working in tandem to eliminate racial equity initiatives. They've also initiated a lawsuit that could be used as a model moving forward.

Step 4: Make laws to ban your bogeyman, and sell voters on the threat

The Sharia threat playbook still works. The talking points that were once considered fringe and extreme ten years ago are now mainstream and commonplace in conservative circles.

In the past 10 years, over 200 anti-Sharia law bills have been introduced in over 40 states.

In 2020, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville warned Alabama voters that “Sharia law has taken over" parts of America. Presumably talking about Muslims, Tuberville said, “it is wrong to come where and [not] go by our Constitution and go by our laws.” Meanwhile, Tuberville was unable to identify the three branches of government and incorrectly thought the inauguration date could be moved. If he had read the Constitution, he would have known better. Regardless, his base doesn't care and applauds his ignorance.

Thanks to the conservative media ecosystem, most Americans who have heard of CRT have an unfavorable view of it, even though many still can’t define it or even knew of its existence until recently. Fox News mentioned CRT more than 1,300 times over a three-and-a-half-month period.

Republican lawmakers, the alleged champions of free speech and opponents of cancel culture, have jumped on the bandwagon and are currently proposing legislation to ban critical race theory and prevent educators from discussing topics such as systemic racism and white privilege. Mitch McConnell and 40 Republicans called on the US Department of Education to cancel a federal plan that would give money to schools that would teach The 1619 Project. Sen. Tom Cotton, who said slavery was a “necessary evil,” is one the most vocal leaders of this movement, but he’s perfectly fine writing op-eds encouraging the military to intervene with an “overwhelming show of force” against BLM protesters.

Meanwhile, Nikole Hannah Jones, a MacArthur Genius recipient and Pulitizer winner, was offered and then denied a tenured position at UNC at Chapel Hill based on the objection of very wealthy and influential conservative donors.

These snowflakes are following in the footsteps of their Chosen One, Donald Trump, who tried to get his government to stop SNL from mocking him. During the waning days of his presidency, Trump issued an executive order banning the use of critical race theory and racial sensitivity training in federal agencies. Instead of embracing the 1619 Project, Trump and Republicans created the 1776 Commission Report that gaslights American history to placate white anxiety and elevate white men as icons of enlightenment, patriotism and mercy.

Robert Jones, author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, told me reactionary measures like this “always appear precisely when the old hierarchies and inequalities are threatened.” He said attempts to ban CRT and the 1619 Project ultimately “reveal the inner fears of a former [white Christian] majority who are losing their sense of ownership of the country.”

If only they could be afraid of ignorance and stupidity, this country would have a better chance of moving towards progress and racial equity. Until then, it will take all of us arm ourselves with education, awareness and a loud voice to push back and inoculate ourselves against the right-wing merchants of hate.

To confront this threat, allies should take it seriously but they shouldn’t take the bait.

The GOP believes their bad faith attack on CRT will mobilize voters and help galvanize a victory in the 2022 election. They have an entire conservative ecosystem, from media platforms to grassroots groups, that are activated across the country and spreading talking points and toolkits to concerned parents. Progressives were often behind the eight ball during the anti-Sharia offensive and ignored the concerns of Muslim communities. Don’t accept the GOP’s terms, definitions, conditions, and rules of engagement, which is what they want to gain more legitimacy, mainstream media platforms, and confuse the majority. But that doesn’t mean ignoring it without an appropriate response. They have their script; here’s ours:

Step 1: Punch back hard and concede nothing

I’ve often said Democrats bring a knife to a gun fight and Republicans bring a bazooka. They allow Republicans to mainstream extreme messages with little pushback in order to win over “moderate” voters and Independents who might think they’re soft on crime and border security. Democrats need to attack these hate merchants, call out their lies, reveal their agendas, and flip the script to discuss how their obsession with CRT is a distraction from the GOP’s massive failures and descent into extremism, from their embrace of white nationalism and antisemitic conspiracy theories, to their repeated attacks on Black and brown voters. Both on a national and a local level, progressive leaders must be prepared to attack the GOP and ask them why the party that is allegedly against cancel culture and for free speech is trying to ban an academic movement and censor teachers. Ask them why the GOP isn’t concentrating on real threats, such as white supremacist terrorism, and investigating the violent mob that stormed the capitol. Ask them why they’re proposing massive voter suppression efforts across the country. Put them on the back foot.

Step 2: Create and unleash diverse allies

Back in the day, Muslim communities often felt we were left to defend the right-wing blitzkrieg against Sharia by ourselves, with little help and infrastructure to back us up. People of color need white allies, especially in national security, to step up and speak out against the GOP’s authoritarian efforts. People like Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At a House hearing, he defended curiosity, open-mindedness, and gaining knowledge, specifically when it came to service members learning critical race theory to gain a more informed understanding of how systemic racism has shaped and affected the country they've sworn to defend.

As predicted, Fox News immediately responded by tarnishing him as teaching a “far-left, Marxist, racist ideology” and recommended defunding the military as punishment. Allies also include educators across the country who are fighting back, civil rights organizations, anti-racist movements at local and national levels, influencers with media platforms who reach and educate large audiences, and millions of diverse Americans who marched against the murder of George Floyd.

Step 3 Inform the public and connect the dots

In addition to separating fact from fiction about CRT, keep reminding Americans that this latest manufactured threat is just another step in the GOP’s assault on equal rights to maintain minority rule and white power. It’s just another hateful conspiracy theory that seeks to divide us along racial lines, an extension of Trump’s xenophobia, racism and defense of “very fine people.” The right-wing ecosystem will confuse and mislead about a third of this country, but that doesn’t mean we have to lose the majority.

Instead, we have to do our part to connect the dots. “Discussing issues of race in criminal law, voting rights, health, education, housing, immigration, and virtually any aspect of U.S. social life is unsettling, to say the least,” Kevin Johnson, dean of UC Davis School of Law, told me, but he said one way forward is to actually promote more discussions to confront these existing racial injustices instead of engaging “in the equivalent of a modern book burning by banning CRT in our schools."

By informing the majority, we can inoculate them from future lies and conspiracies.

Step 4: Force Democrats to fight

Political change can happen when people, especially voters, demand it. By focusing on racial justice and equity, the majority can remind Democrats that this isn’t a back-burner issue that can be casually ignored. They’ll have to show up, stand up and fight back against the GOP’s active assault on our democracy, our freedoms and people of color, or else we will replace them with those who will.

At the end of her book, White Rage, Professor Carol Anderson wrote, “This is the moment now when all of us—Black, white, Latino, Native American, Asian American—must step out of the shadow of white rage, deny its power, understand its unseemly goals, and refuse to be seduced by its buzzwords, dog whistles, and sophistry. This is when we choose a different future.”

If we do all this, maybe we won’t have to write an article in 10 years about how Republicans have successfully introduced another anti-bogeyman bill mobilizing voters for the upcoming election to protect this country from woke antifa members dedicated to putting a hijab on the Statue of Liberty.

Edited June 27, 2021 by Vesper

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Batshit crazy and another sign of eventual civil war in the US.

This frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic was one of Trump's 'religious' advisors, and has tens of millions of fanbois/girls in white power cray cray QANON-land.

 

another one

Trump ‘Spiritual Adviser’ Paula White Imitates Queen Bee Dance to Declare End to the Coronavirus Pandemic

[Vesper 28,795]

Nazi Catfishing Operation Plagues Left-Wing Activist Group

Slack messages and emails show how a seemingly routine event on behalf of a popular left-wing cause went horribly wrong.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/medicare-for-all-group-besieged-by-nazi-and-garfield-catfishing

 

The Medicare For All activists knew something was amiss when a man joined a Zoom meeting posing as an organizer who was already on the conference call. Their suspicions were only heightened when the interloper started talking about licking balls.

It was Sunday, and the activists—who are trying to organize a nationwide Medicare For All event—were already on edge. Earlier that day, they’d come under fire for accidentally announcing a notorious neo-Nazi (as well as, unrelatedly, “Garfield” cartoonist Jim Davis) as keynote speakers.

Now the group says it’s being attacked by infiltrators, including trolls and an unsanctioned chapter of the Green Party. Messages from the group’s Slack channel obtained by The Daily Beast reveal activists urging the organization to get its cybersecurity act together before its July 24 rally with former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.

March For Medicare For All (M4M4A) is a new organization, assembled from left-leaning activists around the country and a handful of local political groups like Portland, Oregon’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter and Washington state’s Green Party. The coalition plans to host pro-Medicare For All rallies in cities across the country next month.

But M4M4A drew unwanted attention this weekend when it announced an event in Muncie, Indiana, featuring a speaker named “Matt H. Bach.”

As other activists were quick to note on Twitter, the bespectacled man in the event flyer appeared to actually be Matthew Heimbach, a former leader of multiple neo-Nazi groups. Heimbach became one of the country’s most recognizable faces on the far right after he participated in 2017’s deadly Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has more recently appeared in the news for assaulting a relative during an intra-familial love quadrangle. (M4M4A also announced a far more innocuous character, Jim Davis, the creator of the “Garfield” comics, as the Muncie event’s master of ceremonies.)

To activists who noted Heimbach’s picture on the M4M4A flyers, his presence at a left-leaning event was not impossible to believe. In 2018, Heimbach reportedly tried making inroads with Tennessee Democrats, without disclosing his white supremacist activities.

After hours of furor, M4M4A released a Twitter statement condemning Heimbach and white nationalism. The group pinned the blame on people “who acted independently and purposely tried to derail and infiltrate our movement.” The organization said it had voted to shut down the Muncie march.

Reached for comment, Heimbach told The Daily Beast he had never been invited to the rally. Davis could not be reached for comment. There is no evidence either individual was party to the group’s internal chaos.

Messages from M4M4A’s Slack channel suggest the group was catfished. In one conversation, provided to The Daily Beast by a person with access to the channel, M4M4A’s graphic designer was contacted by a person with the username “Ethan Rae Steele.” Steele sent the graphic designer pictures of “speakers” for the Muncie march, presumably including Heimbach and Davis, though Steele later deleted his account, wiping his messages. Steele also appeared to request access to M4M4A’s social media accounts.

It is unclear if Steele or other poseurs obtained the group’s social media logins. M4M4A did not return repeated requests for comment. With or without the logins, however, the trolls’ Nazi-promoting graphics hit M4M4A’s Instagram this weekend, alongside headshots of more earnest activists who were scheduled to speak.

When the blowback began, not all M4M4A organizers were convinced they’d been duped. “How sure are we that it’s not Matt Bach from Monmouth Cardiology,” one activist asked in the M4M4A Slack, suggesting that Muncie organizers had accidentally downloaded the wrong photo from Google. And while some seized on the situation’s urgency (“the post needs to be removed NOW,” one wrote), others also took issue with their Twitter critics. One leader suggested the group look into the apparent catfishing effort, but also suggested that a prominent anti-fascist who’d called attention to Heimbach’s picture was secretly working with the CIA.

A Zoom call to discuss the infiltration only underscored the group’s concerns.

“A young male voice with a Midwestern accent kept joining the Zoom call we set up to discuss this,” Nick Iannone, an activist with M4M4A, told The Daily Beast. “He pretended to be the lead organizer, asked for credentials, and then asked about ‘ligma’ as a joke. We knew he was a troll because the person he was impersonating was in the call already." (“Ligma” is a gotcha joke where someone tries to trick people into a conversation about “ligma [lick my] balls,” etc.)

Later, on Slack, activists sounded off about what they said was M4M4A’s iffy cybersecurity.

“I’m actually VERY concerned now,” wrote the graphic designer who’d apparently been tricked into making the Muncie flyers. (The graphic designer could not be reached for comment because they only used a common first name in Slack conversations.) “I recall this person who submitted the photos also expressed interest in access to the social media accounts. I’m not sure anyone gave them out, but it is something to escalate.”

“We need a new slack that is invite only,” suggested another.

“Honestly,” an organizer responded, “we don’t have time for all of that. But if that is what people want to do I guess I am fine with it.”

More publicly, on Twitter, M4M4A took a hardline stance against infiltrators.

On Monday the group posted a link to a now-deleted Twitter for the Las Vegas Green Party. “Infiltration is everywhere,” M4M4A tweeted. “This is not an official Green Party account. This person tried to infiltrate our movement. This is one that was caught. Spread the word.”

Nevada’s Green Party issued a similar statement, announcing that the Las Vegas Green Party and its leader were “not affiliated with the Nevada Green Party or the “M4M4ALL” (March for Medicare for All) event in any way, shape or form. Furthermore, the Nevada Green Party does not have a Las Vegas nor a Clark County chapter. Any representations otherwise are fraudulent. Unfortunately, infiltration of political organizations and parties is widespread.”

Alex Williams, the regional director of the would-be Vegas Green Party, refuted allegations that he’d infiltrated the group. He claimed the fight was spillover from an older feud he’d had with M4M4A organizers when they’d all tried working together on “Force The Vote,” an ultimately doomed attempt to force Congress to hold a Medicare For All vote earlier this year.

“I was only regional director for about a week. I was actually the one who connected the Nevada Green Party to the March For Medicare For All people,” Williams told The Daily Beast. He said that he had understood himself to be a Nevada Green Party member-at-large, allowing him to establish his own local party branch and start fundraising on its behalf, and on behalf of M4M4A.

Emails between Williams and the Nevada Green Party suggest that the group parted ways with him in recent days amid conversations about M4M4A organizing, clarifying that his actual title had been that of an intern (Williams said that was the first he’d heard of the title), and that his fundraising efforts appeared to go beyond his remit.

“I would like to let you know, setting up a donation account under the guise that you are working with/ for the green party is illegal,” a Nevada Green Party leader emailed him.

Williams denied any misconduct.

“It’s actually not illegal for me to create a fundraising page as a local Nevada Green Party chapter, since there’s not a local Nevada Green Party chapter already,” Williams told The Daily Beast, adding that he hadn’t actually raised any funds. A Nevada Green Party spokesperson reaffirmed to The Daily Beast that the Vegas group was illegitimate.

The social media commotion has estranged at least one group of Medicare For All advocates from M4M4A: Activists in Fort Lauderdale, who had independently planned a July 24 march that was promoted by M4M4A, now plan to hold a different event, a local activist told The Daily Beast.

Still, much of the group is soldiering on. Iannone, the activist who participated in the Zoom-bombed Sunday call, said the Medicare For All fight was personal for him. Though he lives with severe ADD, he lost access to his medication for eight years, after an insurance cut caused him to lose his coverage. Other people, he noted, struggle to afford even more critical care.

“Behind each stat is a family or loved ones who miss them. These are human lives,” he said. “We spend so much time worrying about cost and who owes what to whom, that we've allowed the ‘death panels’ the Republicans have feared become real, in the form of debtor’s prisons that medical debt has become.”

In its Twitter statement, M4M4A said it was investigating the circumstances that led to its infiltration.

“Our Rules & Ethics committee will be holding a meeting to investigate, discuss security procedures, and put forth a strict vetting process so we can ensure this will never happen again,” the group wrote.

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‘Right-Wing Death Squad’: Active-Duty Marine Plotted to Bomb DNC, Murder Black People, Feds Say

The feds investigated USMC Private First Class Travis Owens for discussing the unrealized plan with two others, including one person tied to neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/active-duty-marine-travis-owens-plotted-to-bomb-dnc-murder-black-people-feds-say

An active-duty U.S. Marine came under federal investigation for allegedly plotting with at least two others to assassinate minorities, drug users, and employees of the Democratic National Committee with explosives, rocket launchers, and automatic rifles.

That’s according to a newly unsealed FBI search warrant affidavit obtained by The Daily Beast, which indicates USMC Private First Class Travis Owens and his partners in the unrealized murder plot were influenced by Timothy McVeigh, the former U.S. Army soldier behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead and injured nearly 700. The document also states that one of the suspects had links to the Atomwaffen Division, a violent neo-Nazi group linked to at least five murders. A handful of active service members and veterans have been identified as being members of Atomwaffen, which calls for the armed overthrow of the U.S. government.

The investigation began in late August 2019, when a tipster contacted the FBI about disturbingly violent conversations they had observed in a private Facebook Messenger chat group named “Right Wing Death Squad.” According to the FBI, three men were behind the troubling chats: James Wisdom of Arkansas; mechanic Jason D’Juan Garfield—also of Arkansas—who went by the noms de guerre “Moon Man” and “Jugger Bugger;” and Owens, a Marine Corps E-1 from Arkansas stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

“Rhetoric in the private chat messages was consistent with racially motivated extremism ideology, to include aspirational violence against religious and racial minorities,” states the affidavit, which was signed by Special Agent Ryan Crump of the FBI Little Rock Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The only one of the three who has been charged to date is Garfield, who in May 2021 was sentenced to 78 months in prison for illegal gun possession. Charges against Wisdom and Owens have not been filed, a DOJ spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Beast, and neither has a lawyer listed in court records. Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Jennen, the prosecutor handling the case, declined to comment.

Owens, however, was kicked out of the Marine Corps in April 2020, “after news of the NCIS/FBI investigation came to light,” USMC spokesman Capt. Andrew Wood told The Daily Beast.

“Participation in supremacist or extremist organizations or activities is a violation of Department of Defense and Marine Corps orders and will lead to mandatory processing for separation following the first substantiated incident,” Wood said in an email. “The Marine Corps is clear on its stance as it relates to racial hatred or extremism: There is no place for either in the Marine Corps. Our strength is derived from the individual excellence of every Marine regardless of background. Bigotry and racial extremism run contrary to our core values.”

During its inquiry, the FBI reviewed numerous exchanges between Garfield, Wisdom, and Owens. In one, Wisdom allegedly messaged Garfield, saying, “We can take care of druggies anytime. We need to get rid of Jews ASAP though.”

According to the warrant, Garfield replied: “Do both at the same time. Clean up the white community and show them who’s controlling and manipulating and our numbers go up… We don’t have the time to do one goal at a time.”

“I’m aware,” Wisdom allegedly responded. “Doesn’t mean we need to be too hasty though. We need at least a rudimentary plan and proper resources before we try anything big.”

The trio seemed to be preparing for a full-blown race war. Their goals were laid out in group chats underneath exhortations such as, “WISDOM: WE CAN ACCELERATE TODAY FOR A NEW WORLD TOMORROW,” and, “SP**CS AND NI***RS NEED TO HANG FROM TREES,” the warrant states. In one conversation, Garfield allegedly wrote, “Racism isn’t real, whites are the only humans.” In another, he discussed assassinating Arkansas state Sen. Stephanie Flowers, who is Black.

“Just fucking McVeigh the DNC,” Garfield, who boasted of his Atomwaffen connections, wrote in one message.

“You know what to buy,” replied Wisdom, who also discussed constructing “knockoff Panzerschreck [rocket] launchers” out of PVC pipe. “Call me up when you’ve got it and I’ll be more than happy to help.”

Getting those supplies, at least in part, would come from Owens, the men hoped.

“I want a full auto Scar H.,” Garfield wrote to Owens in one chat, according to the FBI, referring to a fully automatic assault rifle used by Special Operations forces. “Travis, hook me up with some goodies from the armory. I’ll pay you $100 worth of McChickens.”

“Lol I can’t do that with how the security is now in the military,” Owens allegedly replied. “[It’s] ridiculous to get your issued M16A4 service rifle.”

However, Owens told the others that he could obtain enough C-4 explosives from other service members to do the job.

“I have access to 300k lbs of anhydrous ammonia,” Garfield allegedly wrote in an Aug. 16, 2019, message. “Just need a container to store it.”

“Nice,” wrote Owens, the warrant states. “I have combat engineers as friends with access to c4.”

“BOMBS AWAY MR. MCVEIGH,” Garfield allegedly wrote back.

“Yes kill them all,” Owens allegedly replied. “I have access to so much hahaha we can make it rain bullets for days.”

Garfield pushed the others hard, seeming to get impatient at one point.

“I’m really tempted to act soon,” Garfield wrote. “I can’t stand by and do nothing.”

In October 2019, Garfield sent the group photographs of a handgun decorated with hand-drawn dates, symbols, and markings that gave winking nods to neo-Nazism, and a reference to “Saint Tarrant,” which the FBI affidavit states was a shoutout to New Zealand mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant.

Also among them were references to the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist group; coded anti-Black messages; an acronym associated with the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian National Guard Unit with neo-Nazi ties; and “42089,” which the FBI affidavit described as “a reference to Adolf Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1889.”

Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said the men seemed to be “accelerationists.” The notion of speeding up the creation of a white ethnostate drives certain extremists of a certain stripe, who use it to justify violence.

“Within the doctrine of accelerationism, we see a clear trend not just in violence for the sake of violence, or violence in the name of collapse, but actions that can be linked to the deification of individuals held up as 'martyrs'—from Anders Breivik and Patrick Crusius to Brenton Tarrant,” Lewis told The Daily Beast. “The iconography on the firearm within the search warrant, for example, highlights both established accelerationist and white supremacist motifs, as well as shows direct inspirational linkages to the symbols and icons on the weapon used by Brenton Tarrant in the Christchurch massacre.”

In short, the investigation provides “a grim reminder” that violent extremism often begets violent extremism.

“The references to Attomwaffen and Timothy McVeigh suggest that the individuals involved looked to the acts of violence and terrorism inflicted by other ideologically-driven killers as an aspirational goal,” Jared Holt, an extremism researcher at the Atlantic Council, told The Daily Beast. “Though extremism can morph and change its form, the underlying motives and philosophies driving these movements are a constant.”

[Vesper 28,795]

The MAGA Delusion Is Escalating Dangerously

It is extremely important to grasp how dangerous the moment we are in actually is.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/the-maga-delusion-is-escalating-dangerously

As the Republican Party continues to spread the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, they’re also continuing to spread terrorism in their wake. But while Republicans seem to be free to wreak havoc at will, their MAGA foot soldiers/useful idiots, convinced they are going to “take back America”, are paying the price for this war against democracy, decency, and the rule of law. You’ll be shocked to know these fine, upstanding “patriots” are appalled they are being held accountable and find it extremely unfair there are consequences for their actions.

It’s tempting to simply indulge in schadenfreude as MAGA moron after MAGA moron flushes their life down the toilet, but there’s more to it than that. It’s important to understand the mindset underpinning their behavior because without that understanding, you cannot grasp how dangerous the moment we are in actually is.

Citizen Accountability

Right now, the federal government is gearing up to tackle right-wing extremism. This has come as quite the shock to MAGAs who were smugly enjoying the prospect of a second Trump term during which the Department of Justice would go after Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Tucker Carlson’s audience of fascists were drooling at the idea of the federal government destroying the people they hate.

Now that the government is, instead, going to target the domestic terrorism that MAGAland thinks is their birthright as White Americans, it’s all “tyranny” and “political persecution.” But this effort is going to take time and until then, the work of doxxing Nazis continues. 

I’ve been writing since the inception of the Trump administration that being a racist asshole still has consequences. The revolting racist march at Charlottesville for example, saw doxxing used systematically to out dozens of Nazis and ruin their lives.

The First Amendment protects hateful people from the government. It does not protect them from us. 

Not having learned anything from the past four years, MAGAs have been steadily escalating from verbal harassment to regularly assaulting journalists and protesters. The Big Lie has only emboldened them. Reports the Washington Post:

In a flash, Laura Jedeed was surrounded by screaming men. The freelance journalist was filming a group of Trump supporters walking the streets of the District after the “Million MAGA March” on Nov. 14 when a man wearing an American flag gaiter mask approached her, stepped on her toes and began yelling.

“What’s up, you stupid b----?” the man shouted, his mask slipping down his face.

Jedeed uploaded the video and the man, Edward Jeremy Dawson, was quickly identified. His name and publicly available information were blasted all over the internet and reported to his employer, who fired him two days later. C’est la vie.

It is 100% legal to be a white nationalist. It is also legal to inform all of your friends, neighbors, and coworkers that is who you are. No company wants a Nazi employee. It’s bad for business. MAGAs, though, labor under the fantasy that they have the “right” to be awful people with zero consequences. This right wing delusion was bad enough. Now it is getting worse.

“I Just Wanted To Make Her Feel A Little Bit Scared”

Take Mr. Dawson, for example. After traveling to D.C. to protest a free and fair election in which Republicans were unable to suppress enough votes to win and had already started to lie about the election being stolen, Dawson was extremely angry. This was a week after Biden defeated Trump, well before the attempted coup on 1/6. 

Dawson and a group of his fellow terrorists attacked Jedeed. I use the word “terrorists” quite deliberately because they were, in fact, trying to terrorize people. Here is Dawson in his own words:

“I mean, I wasn’t harassing anyone. I just wanted to make her feel just a little bit scared.”

Put aside the fact that those two sentences directly contradict each other. If they sound familiar, it’s because every time MAGA terrorists have to face the music, their defense always seems to be the same thing: It wasn’t a big deal. Stop overreacting.

That’s why Republicans keep telling us that the attack wasn’t really an attack but rather a “peaceful protest” or “tourists” just visiting the Capitol. There are hours of video of this “peaceful” mob of “tourists” beating police officers unconscious and rampaging through the halls of Congress screaming for blood. But, no, really, it wasn’t a big deal. Stop overreacting.

Republicans, of course, are doing this so they, as a party, will not be held accountable. But the rank and file are offended by the idea of any kind of accountability for a very different reason. They believe, sincerely, that they have the god-given right to be terrorists. And they believe being made to pay for that is unjust:

The Dawsons installed a security system at their home, moved their firearms to spots with easier access, deactivated their social media accounts and stopped answering their phones. When Dawson’s wife left the house to attend rallies, she wore a bulletproof vest.

“I was terrified for my life,” she said.

“It’s just not fun. And it’s not right,” Dawson said. “It should be illegal.”

“It’s just not fun.” Dawson sure was having fun when he and his fellow MAGAs were threatening two journalists, though. It’s always fun when the people you hate live in fear of you but when there is a price to pay for that fun? Well! That is outrageous!

Has Dawson learned that spewing his hate in public and threatening people is maybe not the way to go? Has he grown as a person? Of course not. 

Dawson said he is upfront with potential employers about his online reputation and has struggled to find work. His current job pays considerably less than his old one, he said.

But he said he has no regrets and would do only one thing differently.

“I’d do it all again,” he said, “but with the mask on.”

In other words, he is going to go right back to being a terrorist but hopefully not get caught this time because, in Dawson’s mind, he didn’t do anything wrong. This is the mindset gripping millions of Republican voters. This is why we are in such a dangerous moment.

Everyone Is The Hero Of Their Own Story

No one ever really thinks they are the bad guy. The insurrectionists that attacked the Capitol on 1/6 were overcome with racism and hate but still told themselves they were “saving America.” They were prepared to murder elected officials and violently overthrow a presidential election for the first time in American history but were convinced they were the heroes. 

It is critical that you understand that this is precisely the same mindset that gave rise to the Klu Klux Klan and the violence that ended Reconstruction in the South. Those southern white conservatives also believed that terrorism in the name of white nationalism was proper and just. 

During the decades of racist terrorism that gripped the South, White conservatives “patrolled” Black communities to keep them from voting. They burned Black families out of their homes, raped Black women, lynched anyone that stood up for civil rights. Entire communities were burned to the ground.

We have all heard about the Tulsa race massacre but we have not really started to talk about the Wilmington race massacre, which was arguably worse. In Tulsa, White conservatives burned a Black community to the ground because it was a thriving, successful community. They were bitterly envious of “Black Wall Street” so they found a reason to destroy it.

But Wilmington was more than just a successful community. It was a city with a fully racially integrated government, with over 100 Black government officials. The threat this posed to white supremacy cannot be overstated. Accordingly, White conservatives staged a coup, murdering dozens, if not hundreds of Black people and removing all of the Black office holders from power. No one was ever arrested for these crimes and the coup was allowed to stand.

This is the history people like Dawson are trying to recreate. Dawson himself may not be aware of that history but I promise you, some of his friends are and they know that racial terrorism can work in America to rewrite the political landscape. These are people who have convinced themselves that there is no line they cannot cross because they are the hero of their own story. 

For them, openly rigging elections is democracy. Overturning an election they lose is freedom. Violently seizing power and murdering the people they hate is patriotism. They are the good guys, after all. 

That mindset is what allowed the KKK to murder thousands in the name of God. It’s the mindset that allows Edward Jeremy Dawson to join a mob in terrorizing journalists. The entire world saw that mindset when several hundred Republicans attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow American democracy. This is the mindset that will, inevitably, lead to more violent attacks until Republicans either topple the government or are put down for good. 

Terrorists do not just wake up one day and realize they are terrorists. Now that Dawson and his fellow extremists have a taste for violence, they will never stop until the price becomes so high they are not willing to pay it. We have to be willing to make them pay that price. The alternative is the white nationalist fascism Dawson and his Republican enablers dream of. If they win, the cattle cars start rolling.

[Fulham Broadway 16,839]

Meanwhile....Every year 3,575,000 people die from water related diseases. This is equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing every hour. Most of these people are children (2.2 million)

844 million people lack access to safe drinking water. This is more than the combined populations of the United States, Brazil, Japan, Germany, France and Italy. (UNICEF)

The good news is that it is possible to do something about it. Many organizations work to improve water conditions in developing countries. From 1990 to 2006 the number of people with access to safe drinking water has risen by 1.6 billion people.

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,839]

Transmissions Part One: Origins (sub.media)

[Vesper 28,795]

still relevant 11 years later

The Daily Mail Song

 

[Vesper 28,795]

Democrats Have 1 Option Left

Today’s 6–3 Supreme Court decision is a hinge point for American democracy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/supreme-court-voting-rights-filibuster/619341/

Today’s Supreme Court decision further weakening the Voting Rights Act affirmed that the only way Democrats can reverse the wave of restrictive voting laws in GOP-controlled states is to pass new federal voting rights by curtailing the Senate filibuster.

Congressional action has long seemed the only realistic lever for Democrats to resist red states’ surge of voter-suppression laws, which are passing, as I’ve written, on an almost entirely party-line basis. In the state legislatures, Democrats lack the votes to stop these laws. And while the John Roberts–led Supreme Court—which opened the door to these restrictions by eviscerating another section of the Voting Rights Act in his 2013 Shelby County decision—always seemed unlikely to restrain the Republican-controlled states, today’s ruling from the six GOP-appointed justices eliminated any doubt.

Republicans will understandably view Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion upholding two disputed Arizona statutes as a green light to pass voting restrictions that could disproportionately limit the ability of minority groups to vote: “Even if the plaintiffs were able to demonstrate a disparate [racial] burden caused by [the Arizona laws], the State’s ‘compelling interest in preserving the integrity of its election procedures’ would suffice to avoid [VRA] liability,” Alito wrote. Republican legislators will likely interpret Alito’s repeated emphasis in his decision on the importance of stopping “fraud” and his somewhat gratuitous swipes at voting by mail, both of which echo themes from former President Donald Trump, as much more than a wink and a nod of approval for the laws that are proliferating across red states. (“Fraud is a real risk that accompanies mail-in voting even if Arizona had the good fortune to avoid it,” Alito insisted at one point.) If anything, Alito’s decision, which all the other GOP-appointed justices joined, underscores how thoroughly the determination to restrict voting access in the name of combatting illusory “fraud” has permeated every corner of the GOP. (Even the rare GOP critics of Trump’s discredited fraud claims, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have also defended the restrictive new state laws.)

Read: Watch what’s happening in red states

While the ruling signals long odds for the Justice Department’s effort to challenge those laws (starting with Georgia’s) in court, civil- and voting-rights advocates might welcome the clarity the decision provides. It makes plain that if Congress doesn’t establish new federal standards, the nation is headed toward a two-tier voting system, with red states imposing ever-tightening restrictions that especially burden Democratic-leaning constituencies—young, minority, and lower-income voters.

It’s no coincidence that red states are imposing these restrictions precisely as Millennials and Gen Zers, who represent the most racially diverse generations in American history, are rapidly increasing their share of the total vote, as I wrote earlier today. The rise of those younger generations especially threatens the GOP hold on Sun Belt states such as Georgia, Texas, and Arizona, which Republicans now control through their dominance of older and non-urban white voters; in that way, the voting restrictions Republicans are enacting amount to stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change.

After a Republican filibuster blocked their sweeping voting-rights bill, Senate Democrats are working to unify behind a more limited plan—and to persuade holdout Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (and perhaps others) to change the filibuster rules to pass it. Following today’s decision, the demands from civil-rights groups on Senate Democrats and Biden to change the rules will grow even more intense.

Read: Manchin and Sinema now face the weight of history

“Our elected leaders need to wake up and start acting like the house is on fire—because it is, and this ruling pours more gasoline on the flames,” Nsé Ufot, the CEO of the New Georgia Project, said today in a statement that was echoed widely by other groups. “Black and Brown communities gave Democrats federal power to protect the vote and passing bills like the For the People Act is what we both expect and deserve.”

With more measured (though no less passionate) language, the fierce dissent from Justice Elena Kagan and the other Democratic-appointed justices seemed to be sending the same message. They obviously never endorsed any legislation, but their tone reminded me of the pleas to the Senate majority (particularly Manchin and Sinema) from Democratic legislators in the states passing these restrictive laws. We’ve done all we can here, the justices seemed to be saying: Now it’s up to Congress whether to protect democracy at what Kagan called “a perilous moment for the Nation’s commitment to equal citizenship.”

[Vesper 28,795]

Meet the Anti-MAGA Trolls

Inside the Reddit communities that can’t leave the right-wing internet alone

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/07/meet-anti-maga-trolls/619332/

Late in the evening on Christmas Day, the lawyer and Donald Trump loyalist Lin Wood tweeted an elaborate infographic stating his views about the upcoming U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia. The final tally would be corrupted by Dominion voting machines, it said, and the only way to expose the fraud would be to boycott the election. That would “break the algorithm” by producing a result in which the GOP candidates would receive fewer than zero votes—and then the Supreme Court would have “no choice” but to overturn the presidential election, while someone would have no choice but to arrest Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, as well as Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and the other GOP candidate, David Perdue. “I just want an HONEST election,” Wood wrote above the image. “Don’t you?”

The next day, on Reddit, the members of a vaguely leftist community called r/ParlerTrick started celebrating. One of them had created the infographic out of whole cloth, with the hopes that it would be picked up in right-wing internet spaces and persuade Trump supporters not to vote in the runoff. That Wood had come across it and shared it himself was a far wilder result than they could have hoped for. Still, most of them avoided breaking character in their posts. “We must have fair elections. We must know the Truth!!!” one wrote. “Let every nasty democRAT vote while true patriots stay home and trust the plan!” wrote another. The fact that Wood was calling for the arrests of various Georgia political figures was soon covered by Yahoo News, Business Insider, and other bloggy mainstream outlets, with no mention of the way the thought had been incepted into his tweets.

That wasn’t an ordinary day in r/ParlerTrick, but it is representative of the group’s culture. Members of the forum—which was created shortly after the 2020 election and is named after the social-media app Parler—pretend to be prototypical social-media “patriots” in order to sow confusion in right-wing online spaces. They boosted the hashtag #DeleteParler as part of an effort to convince other Parler users that the app is a “wholly-owned project of the FBI” and that everything posted there is subject to surveillance by the “Deep State.” In the days following the Capitol riot, they spread a rumor that anyone who attended would be pardoned by Trump if they turned themselves in before the end of his term. Recently, r/ParlerTrick subscribers signed up for free tickets to an event hosted at the Iowa Corn Palace by the MyPillow CEO and Trump loyalist Mike Lindell in order to limit actual attendance, and then congratulated themselves on their choices of fake names: Harry Sach, Yura Dumas, Ann T. Fa.

At first glance, the forum’s whole deal can be difficult to discern. When I first reached out to its moderator team, r/ParlerTrick’s creator replied, “Can you please stop being racist about reddit and swearing about it thank you.” Several weeks later, after he agreed to an interview, I asked him what that message even meant. “We kind of wanted to keep it a little cryptic,” he told me, also sort of cryptically. Then he asked to go by his middle name, Michael, because he and the other moderators are often harassed and sometimes receive death threats.

Michael and his compatriots are targets on account of their participation in one of the most visible and active forums in a new online ecosystem dedicated to surveilling and poking the MAGA universe. (In other subreddits, members boast of messing with those on the conspiracy-theory-hotbed platform MeWe and the QAnon-favored chat app Telegram.) These forums signify an important cultural shift: For the past five years or so, internet trolls have been among the most hated and feared actors in American politics, blamed for the rise of Trump and the sad triumph of ironic bigotry. Then an upswell of leftist trolling started attracting attention last summer, when the hacking collective Anonymous returned after years of dormancy and coordinated, internet-based pranks were adopted as part of the political tool kits of K-pop fans, TikTok kids, and random coalitions of Twitter users.

The question is whether all of these anti-MAGA trolls represent a corrective counterforce or a misguided reaction. “Even the most ethically oriented troll is always going to be controversial because it uses deception,” says Gabriella Coleman, a cultural anthropologist known for her research on Anonymous. Trolling is also chaotic as a rule. “These campaigns spiral,” she told me.

---

The Parler trolls on Reddit first got together in a forum called r/ParlerWatch. It was imagined as a small space for like-minded Redditors to share the most out-there things they’d seen on Parler, and to come up with ways to mess with the people who were sincerely posting on the app. But it grew quickly, gaining about 16,000 members in its first week, and its creator, Sloane—who asked to go by his middle name for the same reasons as Michael—decided to steer the forum in a more serious direction. Now, instead of hatching practical jokes, its 150,000 members focus on surveilling the Trump-loyalist internet and organizing moments of “armchair activism,” such as combing through Parler data scraped from the site after the Capitol riot and sending tips to the FBI. “Monitoring right-wing spaces online has always been kind of a hobby of mine,” Sloane told me.

Members who still wanted to do anti-MAGA trolling, led by Michael, went on to form a spin-off group with Sloane’s blessing: r/ParlerTrick. The members of the smaller forum discussed their forays into far-right spaces, where they posed as caricatures of liberals and riled people up to no real end. Later, they experimented with using the language and framing of a MAGA diehard to push their own politics, including support for unions, but this ended up confusing everyone. Their messages on Parler would sometimes get reposted as screenshots in r/ParlerWatch and discussed as if they were authentic right-wing activity. Eventually, the whole subreddit became a role-playing game, Michael told me. “We started having people coming in not knowing if it was real or not, which is perfect,” he said. The members now call themselves “patriots” and disavow liberals with every sentence. As role-playing games go, it’s low-effort: At the time of the Georgia runoff election, they made a meme of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue that said simply, “They know what they did to Donald Trump.” It was shared by Trump fans on Parler hundreds of times, though no one actually had any idea what Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue might have done to Donald Trump.

Read: The first troll

Trolling used to be the pastime of a subculture that considered itself apolitical, and that claimed to be interested in provoking everyone. But for Michael and Sloane, the jokes are part of how they practice their politics—the only fun part, they say. Similarly, many politically minded young people have come of age with an innate understanding of how antisocial behavior online can be used to win attention for and participation in a chosen cause. “Trolling has a long and noble history, and shitposting can be useful,” says Talia Lavin, the author of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. She took part in an attempt to troll Trump’s “Voter Fraud Hotline,” she told me, by submitting a long video in which she described being intimidated by the sexual attractiveness of an antifa operative at her polling place.

But trolling can have especially unpredictable results when it engages with hateful rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking. It might even help spread and amplify misinformation or extremist beliefs. Some r/ParlerTrick members, for example, created memes that, per Michael, had “some racist stuff” in them, or might have stoked “unnecessary hate.” The forum has struggled with this issue, he said. “It’s a thin line. You have to really pay attention to what you’re doing.”

---

The problem that needs fixing, say the people who spend hours monitoring the MAGA world, is that the MAGA world has gotten so hard to see.

The more radical of Trump’s supporters were largely pushed off mainstream social-media platforms last summer and fall, as the result of an industry-wide crackdown on election misinformation and QAnon activity. They joined sites such as Parler, Telegram, MeWe, and TheDonald.win because that’s where other, further-right actors had gone when they were banned from Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. With that, an ideological divide became a literal separation across platforms. “The Balkanization of the internet is what led to r/ParlerWatch,” Sloane said. “That’s exactly why these watchdog groups started around the 2020 election cycle.”

While the sequestering of the MAGA internet has made surveillance of far-right ideas seem more important, it has also made trolling MAGA diehards easier (and, for some, more fun). An excursion onto a platform like Parler can be exactly that for pranksters—a quick trip behind enemy lines, where you know you’ll find a target-rich environment, and where your mischief might be less likely to cause collateral damage. (Parler, for its part, seems to welcome the additional activity. An updated set of community guidelines added in February specifically allows “trolling content.”) But constant engagement with the ideas that gain the most traction on Parler and similar platforms might still have risks for the people who are trolling. When I asked Michael whether he thought r/ParlerTrick members could ever role-play themselves into having actual hateful beliefs, he expressed concern but in an unconcerned tone of voice. “You have to be aware of that,” he said. “You have to really be thinking and conscious in the moment and know what you’re looking at.”

Read: The return of Anonymous

Some of the anti-MAGA trolls’ motivations are obscure. In a smaller subreddit called r/MeWeTrolling, created in February, one highly active user who calls himself a “trolling expert” regularly shares dramatic confrontations he’s had in character with right-wing users of MeWe. This poster is the star of the show, and he receives accolades from commenters who suggest that he upgrade his title to “trolling legend” or “trolling god emperor.” Recently, a new member pointed out the high degree of absurdity in this troll’s exploits, and cautiously suggested that he might be playing both characters in his “interactions.”

This ambiguity could be the biggest problem with trolling as a political tactic. It’s obviously a game, but what are the prizes? Lavin said that when trolling is publicly coordinated, it tends to work better; Coleman added that campaigns like that are more transparent—they’re built less on sustained deception than on participatory spectacle. A public call to spam a militia-recruiting site or to humiliate a politician who’s blaming “woke ideology” for ruining the military invites a different sort of game, with clearer boundaries than an online space for posing as nationalism-addled “patriots.” When I asked Michael if he ever feels overwhelmed by the subterfuge and irony, he said yes. Sometimes when the r/ParlerTrick people go out to troll, they come back confused. “We’re probably in communication with other trolls, who are trolling back to us,” he said. “It’s like seven layers of troll, and there’s actually no real discourse happening at all.”

 

Edited July 2, 2021 by Vesper

[Supermonkey 38]

https://unherd.com/2021/07/the-fightback-against-critical-race-theory/

 

The fightback against Critical Race Theory

Its creators thought America was on their side — they were wrong

 

 

Douglas Murray is an author and journalist.

July 2, 2021

 

 

---

One of the most irritating terms of our time must be “gaslighting”. It sounds so serious, but is just another of those pseudo-criminal charges that people fling around online, as though it has a well-known application in the real world. Loose in definition, assumed by the user to be understood by all, it is merely a form of elite jargon, known and understood only by a few.

But when a word gets used so relentlessly, it begins to take on a certain legitimacy — and even begins to crop up in the minds of people who loathe it. Indeed, it even happened to me recently after I read a number of pieces in the American press claiming that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) was a bogeyman of the Right. Now here, I thought, is something that is definitely gaslighting. Surely these people must be trying to drive readers mad by making assertions that are so clearly untrue; presenting one vision of the world and then denying that it even exists. If this is not “gaslighting”, then what is?

In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg claimed that the current wave of concern across America about CRT had simply been whipped up by a clever propagandist — and that, as a consequence, CRT had become a maddening debate. In particular, she said, “the phrase itself had become unmoored from any fixed meaning”. Elsewhere she criticised people of being guilty of a “moral panic” and said that she was “highly sceptical” of the idea that CRT is being taught in schools, before going on to explain that “antiracist education” isn’t “radically leftist” but just “elementary”.

This slew of claims demonstrates the problem at hand. For in CRT we are not talking about some hidden theory; we are talking about a school of thought which was openly heralded within American academia and has now been forced upon the wider world. Yet just at the point that it has infiltrated the public sphere, Goldberg and others claim that our understanding of CRT has become confused — as if an ideology that is wilfully obscurantist ought, in fact, to be straightforward and agreed upon.

In the Washington Post and elsewhere, this debate has come to define American politics in recent weeks. Most prominently, Joy Reid of MSNBC has taken to claiming that CRT is not being taught in schools, is not what its critics say that it is and is both too complex for people to understand and also an exceptionally obvious demand for social justice.

What prompted such a desperate defence? Well, American parents have finally woken up to what is being taught to their children. At one prestigious Manhattan school, the headmaster even resigned after a group of parents complained about a number of school initiatives, ranging from “racist cop” re-enactments in science lessons to classes about “decentering whiteness” and “white supremacy”.

But now, just at the moment that the American public are starting to push back, supporters of CRT are stepping away from their creation, pretending that concerned citizens have misunderstood it, or are railing at a mirage.

The aforementioned Reid, for instance, recently interviewed a leading CRT scholar — indeed the person who reportedly coined the term — Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has described the backlash against CRT as an effort “to reverse the racial reckoning unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime”.

There is, to put it simply, a lot going on here; clearly, today’s discussions about CRT are unclear and disingenuous. But if there is a reason for this, it is that CRT’s decades-long advocates are no longer being honest. In their 2001 work Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic described CRT as a “movement” consisting of:

“A collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power… Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

So this is not a hidden campaign. Its thought leaders did not try to hide the revolutionary, activist nature of their “discipline”. They boasted about it; the activism was the point. The purpose of CRT was never simply to throw around ideas — it was to change America, and by extension the wider world, by applying these new racial rules in the widest possible way.

So why the sudden reversal? Why the sudden retreat into contradictory forms of self-defence? The reason, I suspect, is clear: the ugly little game that has been playing out in American academia is — like many a theory before it — not surviving its first encounters with the public.

In that sense, at least, it faces a similar problem to that experienced by Marxists. On paper, Marxist academics were able to make grand claims about how to make an equitable society. But try it out on the public and they soon learned that what worked on paper did not work in practice

A similar, if so far less bloody, discovery is being made with CRT. Yes, its advocates may believe that they have come up with a system to create universal justice. But applied in American schools, for instance, all they come up with is a system which causes untold pain and ugliness.

Earlier this year when Grace Church School in Manhattan was in the headlines, people could see this for themselves. In private the headmaster conceded that there was a problem with the racial games he was forcing on all of his students. “Problematising whiteness” may seem fine in theory, but in practice it creates discord. As its headmaster reluctantly conceded, there are a lot of white children at his school; and if you “problematise” whiteness then you problematise them. Crenshaw, Reid and their fellow CRT supporters failed to account for that — and now this failing of theirs has plunged America into chaos.

In the meantime, their response has been to run for cover, camouflaging themselves with every technique possible. They say we don’t understand them. They say that CRT doesn’t really exist — or that it is all too complex to explain to ordinary people. But the simple fact is that CRT does exist, as a very large number of Americans have discovered. As for CRT’s bad reception, there is only one group to blame: its creators. It is their fault, not ours, that their ideology’s first mass encounter with the general public is proving such a failure.

[Supermonkey 38]

Metadehumanization erodes democratic norms during the 2020 presidential election

https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/asap.12253

 

Abstract

The present research directly replicates past work suggesting that metadehumanization, the perception that another group dehumanizes your own group, erodes Americans’ support for democratic norms. In the days surrounding the 2020 US Presidential Election, American political partisans perceived that their political opponents dehumanized them more than was actually the case. Partisans’ exaggerated metadehumanization inspired reciprocal dehumanization of the other side, which in turn predicted their support for subverting democratic norms to hurt the opposing party. Along with replicating past work demonstrating metadehumanization's corrosive effect on democratic integrity, we also contribute novel insights into this process. We found the most politically engaged partisans held the most exaggerated, and therefore most inaccurate, levels of metadehumanization. Moreover, despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans. This suggests that political ideology can at times be as much an expression of social identity as a reflection of deliberative policy considerations, and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance.

[Vesper 28,795]

On 02/07/2021 at 22:51, Supermonkey said:

Metadehumanization erodes democratic norms during the 2020 presidential election

https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/asap.12253

 

Abstract

The present research directly replicates past work suggesting that metadehumanization, the perception that another group dehumanizes your own group, erodes Americans’ support for democratic norms. In the days surrounding the 2020 US Presidential Election, American political partisans perceived that their political opponents dehumanized them more than was actually the case. Partisans’ exaggerated metadehumanization inspired reciprocal dehumanization of the other side, which in turn predicted their support for subverting democratic norms to hurt the opposing party. Along with replicating past work demonstrating metadehumanization's corrosive effect on democratic integrity, we also contribute novel insights into this process. We found the most politically engaged partisans held the most exaggerated, and therefore most inaccurate, levels of metadehumanization. Moreover, despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans. This suggests that political ideology can at times be as much an expression of social identity as a reflection of deliberative policy considerations, and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance.

If you take the time to actually read the study (I did), it not only is quite silly, simplistic, and arbitrary, BUT also uses a (self-admitted) skewed sample (many RWers refused to participate) of self-selectors for the study groupings.

Of course you are going to have people on the so-called left (or simply Democrats, plenty of US Dems are hardly lefties at all, many would be right wing in many EU nations, but in the US it is so artificially skewed to the right you have people like Manchin being laughably called 'commies', ffs) identify the extreme RW in a negative manner, when that extreme RW, with its overt white nationalism/racism, violent rhetoric (open calling on their media outlets for mass executions of tens of thousands of Democrats, for but one example) violent actions (January 6th attempted violent coup d'état culminating in the storming of the US Capitol, etc etc etc), and batshit insane meta conspiracy theories  (Q ANON, the thousands of false claims about election fraud, etc etc, and its christofacist attempts to implement draconian anti-human rights hate laws (like the Missouri state legislature now trying to ban all birth control for single, divorced, and gay women, etc etc) is running riot and taking over (literally) the US Republican party.