Politics & Stuff

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Musk’s net worth decreased by $29bn yesterday alone, and has fallen by $132bn over the past 12 months, as Tesla shares’ gains have been wiped out.

Tesla shares have declined every week since Trump took office, declining 15% on Monday alone.

He remains the richest man in the world with a fortune of more than $320bn, according to Forbes.

[Fernando 6,512]

7 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Musk’s net worth decreased by $29bn yesterday alone, and has fallen by $132bn over the past 12 months, as Tesla shares’ gains have been wiped out.

Tesla shares have declined every week since Trump took office, declining 15% on Monday alone.

He remains the richest man in the world with a fortune of more than $320bn, according to Forbes.

Still believe it will go up soon. 

Especially if the war in Ukraine ends. 
Today seems like a first step, waiting of Russia response now. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,045]

25 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Still believe it will go up soon. 

Especially if the war in Ukraine ends. 
Today seems like a first step, waiting of Russia response now. 

Good news if Russia agree to a peace deal

I think no way Tesla shares will recover to what they were -  it seems most of the World are not happy with Musk and reckon hes bit of a fascist cunt

[Fernando 6,512]

Trump tariffs

Canada backs down from 25% electricity surcharge after Trump threats

Ontario Premier Doug Ford had placed a 25% duty on electricity imported by the U.S. Trump responded by threatening to raise steel and aluminum tariffs by 50%.

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-canada-doubles-tariffs-national-emergency-electricity-rcna195810

 

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,045]

During his election campaign last year, Donald Trump promised Americans he would usher in a new era of prosperity.

Meanwhile, analysts say the odds of a downturn are increasing, pointing to his policies.

A JP Morgan report put the chance of recession at 50%, up from 30% at the start of the year, warning that US policy was "tilting away from growth", while Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, upped the odds from 15% to 35%, citing tariffs. 

Tech analyst Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management wrote on social media this week that the chance of a recession increased "measurably" over the past month.

"The bottom line is that if we enter a recession, it will be extremely difficult for the AI trade to continue," he said.

AP

[Fernando 6,512]

5 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

During his election campaign last year, Donald Trump promised Americans he would usher in a new era of prosperity.

Meanwhile, analysts say the odds of a downturn are increasing, pointing to his policies.

A JP Morgan report put the chance of recession at 50%, up from 30% at the start of the year, warning that US policy was "tilting away from growth", while Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, upped the odds from 15% to 35%, citing tariffs. 

Tech analyst Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management wrote on social media this week that the chance of a recession increased "measurably" over the past month.

"The bottom line is that if we enter a recession, it will be extremely difficult for the AI trade to continue," he said.

AP

I have my doubts about the recession, as it's as good as gold. 

The same was said when FED started to rise interest rate and nothing happen. 

Same here the fear and monger is the same. Until we see some concrete info on Job this is more fear and monger. 

The possibility that market goes higher and to all time high again is there, and then all this fear and monger will go away. 

[Vesper 29,343]

 

[Vesper 29,343]

Why Are AOC and Bernie So Much Better at This?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-are-aoc-and-bernie-so-much-better-at-this.html

Last month, as Elon Musk’s malevolent influence on Donald Trump’s second term was coming into focus, a friend DM’ed me a clip of Chuck Schumer leading a protest against Musk’s efforts to access sensitive Treasury Department data. “We will win! We will win!” croaked the Senate minority leader, the crowd clearly reluctant to join this confused approximation of what impassioned resistance might look like. My friend wrote, “We’re all gonna die.”

Being uninspired by the Democratic Party is a national pastime, but 2025 has ushered in new levels of loathing, with the party’s approval rating sinking to record lows. Schumer’s efforts have been so limp that a group of liberal governors in January begged him to grow a spine in opposing Trump’s agenda and cabinet nominees. Schumer’s counterpart in the House, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, has fared no better, alternating between sphinxlike nonresponses to revelations that Trump had essentially bought New York City mayor Eric Adams in a quid-pro-quo deal with the Justice Department and bizarrely menacing anti-GOP diatribes performed in sweats in empty rooms. Congressional Democrats were widely mocked for the little protest paddles they held up during Trump’s State of the Union, while Representative Al Green was kicked out for a disruption that was derided as pathetic and unconvincing.

Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom has started a podcast to interview conservative influencers and throw trans athletes under the bus, Representative Elissa Slotkin’s official rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address was a paean to Ronald Reagan, and Connecticut senator Chris Murphy has appeared on any news outlet that will have him speaking in a very loud voice about how mad he is. It can often seem that, when it comes to opposing Trump, Democrats have no idea what to say or how to say it.

This has not been the case, however, with the two most prominent leftists in the broader Democratic tent. Bernie Sanders has spent the first month and a half of Trump’s second presidency doing what you’d expect Bernie Sanders to do: raging against the corrosive influence of billionaires on politics. “I fear very much that under President Trump, we are not seeing a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ but rather a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class,” the 83-year-old warned his Senate colleagues last month. He has sounded the same alarm during his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, which has drawn thousands of attendees across the Midwest in recent weeks, including 2,600 people at a rally on Saturday in Altoona, Wisconsin, a town of only 10,000.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been even more combative toward the administration, boycotting Trump’s swearing-in ceremony and State of the Union address while feuding with everyone from border czar Tom Homan to White House adviser and virulent xenophobe Katie Miller. Ocasio-Cortez’s critiques, in which she has called Musk “a leech on the public” for threatening to overhaul Social Security and immediately condemned the detention of pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil, feel both precise and cathartic and regularly go viral. Ocasio-Cortez will join Sanders on the road soon while launching her own solo appearances in Republican-held districts.

There is solace to be found in these familiar spectacles, reassurance that, even with the government and civil society exploding around us, some Democrats can be counted on to fight back and fight back well. But it also raises a question that will define the next four years in American politics: Why are Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez so much better at this than their colleagues?

One answer is that they have credibility and devoted followings built over the years they’ve spent at odds with not only Republicans but more moderate factions within their own caucus. They are as disappointed with the Democrats as seemingly the rest of America is. Sanders is a grizzled relic of the kind of class politics that was swept aside by genteel liberals like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and his diagnosis that the party was undone in 2024 because it abandoned the working class lines up with analyses that have been offered up by gloating MAGA Republicans and disillusioned anti-woke liberals alike. Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, has proven deft at integrating herself with the Establishment but remains a go-to scapegoat for the party whenever something goes wrong. When the centrist think tank Third Way urged Democrats to move “away from the dominance of small-dollar donors” in its post-2024 autopsy, it was hard not to interpret it as a shot at Ocasio-Cortez.

Broadly speaking, each has a track record of standing by principles and beliefs that make their protests against Trumpism both coherent and believable. This is one of the advantages of belonging to one wing of the party, as opposed to bearing responsibility for the coalition as a whole — the purview of congressional leaders like Schumer and Jeffries and potential presidential aspirants like Murphy and Newsom. But it does put a glaring spotlight on the fact that mainstream Democrats have been so consumed by a desire to triangulate that they seem to have no idea what they believe in.

No wonder thousands of people in Republican districts are lining up to see Sanders while so many Democrats are begging his colleagues in their own districts to do something. Which has some intriguing implications for who will lead the Democrats going forward, since it is the moderates who own the conventional wisdom on what’s best for the party but the leftists who have the energy. The liberal pundit Matt Yglesias interpreted the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour as a ploy by Sanders to get the last laugh in the ongoing, never-ending fallout from the 2016 primary. “Is Bernie running in 2028?” Yglesias tweeted over the weekend. “Is he going to endorse someone?” Ocasio-Cortez retorted, “Believe it or not, some people’s everyday actions aren’t motivated by some long-term career ambition, but out of a genuine love for people and a desire to do right by them.”

While that may be true, Yglesias was right to identify a proxy battle for the party’s future. Mainstream Democrats intent on sidelining leftist insurgents seem to have not so much surrendered as fallen into self-defeating inertia, treating Trump’s popularity as such an article of faith that they have willingly sacrificed both their own popularity and the health of our society to avoid alienating his voters. It’s becoming harder, as Trump continues his rampage, to imagine spending the next four years taking cues from leaders whose principles are this difficult to ascertain.

[Vesper 29,343]

America’s Christian Right Is Coming to the U.K.

The Christian nationalist movement has undertaken a vast worldwide expansion. Hello, London? Texas calling.

https://newrepublic.com/article/192101/american-christian-right-coming-united-kingdom

The red-white-and-blue world of Christian nationalism is a fascinating place, but it can also get claustrophobic. After a dozen years of reporting on the subject, I began to feel restless and perhaps at times a little unsafe. When I relocated, temporarily and for family reasons, from the United States to the U.K. in 2021, I therefore welcomed the distance. Though I planned to continue my reporting with regular return trips and a seemingly permanent virtual presence, I felt lighter and more carefree. London was my escape.

We found lodgings through an old friend in the Clerkenwell neighborhood, a jumble of Georgian row houses and converted warehouses that, almost two centuries ago, provided the setting for Charles Dickens’s novels Oliver Twist and Great Expectations and that now serves as a hub for media, design, and technology firms. It felt as far from MAGA-land as seemed decent to imagine. In those first days after the move, I set off on late-summer morning walks past eclectic restaurants and pub staff sweeping out the remains of the previous evening. I was elated. Here was a faraway perch from which to gain some perspective on the madness back in the homeland.

On a Sunday morning shortly after moving in, I step outside our new apartment for another exploratory ramble, and I hear singing. Humming along to a familiar-sounding tune, I discover a church at the other end of our very short block. The Clerkenwell Medical Mission is an elegant, square-shaped Victorian structure, and as the plaque outside explains, it was built to evangelize the disabled. A newer banner overhead announces the current incarnation of the building as GraceLife London.

The tune that I’m humming, I belatedly realize, is “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” a twentieth-century worship classic at America’s evangelical and nondenominational churches. One artist who popularized it, Chris Rice, was something of a celebrity until 2020, when a church in Lexington, Kentucky, launched an investigation following accusations from a former student that Rice had sexually assaulted him on multiple occasions at youth retreats. (The church’s pastor issued a public statement deeming the allegations “credible because of the source of the allegations and corroborating evidence we have discovered.”) No matter, I think; the church on my street can’t be blamed for Rice’s misdeeds, and likely they don’t even know about it. I decide to take a look.

A friendly woman who appears to be in her mid-twenties, wearing a blue dress and box braids with a toddler at her side, waves me in at the door. “Are you new here?” she asks. She introduces herself as Dorcas and invites me to take some literature at the front table. I pick up several titles: Your Local Church and Why It Matters; Answering the Hard Questions About Forgiveness; and The Believer’s Armor: God’s Provision for Your Protection. Opening the latter book to the last page, I read: “Every time God’s Word leads a person to salvation, it demonstrates its power to cut a swath through Satan’s dominion of darkness and bring light to a darkened soul.”

The interior of the church is as olde-world as the outside. Time-worn rows of wooden pews face an elevated pulpit in the old style, and a dozen arched windows line the second story. The crowd inside is alive with smiles and hugs, and groups of congregants are engaging in boisterous conversation before the service. Perhaps the majority, like Dorcas, are Black, but I also see a mix of white, East Asian, and South Asian congregants, too. On the surface, I think as I look around the light-filled room, this gathering bears little resemblance to some of the traditional Southern Baptist services I have attended in the U.S., with their suburban settings and often racially homogeneous congregations. Then the preacher ascends to his pulpit, and I take my seat for the sermon.

The preacher is Black, and he speaks with an American accent. From the literature I gather his name is Adam Waller. He is telling a story about a conversation he once had. “Some years ago,” he said, “an older lady said to me, ‘Wouldn’t you be happy for it all to be over?’” She meant, he explained, this whole fallen world. He answered his own question: “Yes, I do wish this was over. Yes, I do wish it was over, we didn’t have to deal with the sinful world.”

Waller continued: “The lights will go out.… The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give us light, and the stars will fall from heaven. The powers of the heavens will be shaken.” He appears to read from the Bible in front of him: “There will be wars all over the earth, nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom, famines, pestilence, earthquakes.” He inhales audibly, and I realize that this is the windup. He is just getting started with the end of the world: “It will be massive. It will cause great destruction, great death. And it will be interrupted by the lights going out. This tribulation is so great that no man will be able to stop what is happening.” Mountains will tremble, we are told, the earth may come off its axis, and indescribable pain will be inflicted on all the men, women, and children who do not believe with their whole hearts in Waller’s preferred version of the Christian religion.

The sermon at the end of time continues for almost an hour. The only interruptions come from the pew behind me, where a young boy, who looks to be about eight years old, punctuates the gore with loud sniffles and the occasional cough. Now he clings to his mother, eyes at half mast, resting his head against her shoulder, his cheeks streaked with tears.

The former Clerkenwell Medical Mission building is now home to GraceLife London.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON ODDY FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC

While the talk of global annihilation continues, I discreetly scan the literature in my hands. I find a piece titled “The Church Must Confront Homosexuality as a Sin,” in which I am informed that “unrepentant homosexuality excludes one from inheriting the kingdom of God,” and that “Christians are under obligation to confront the sinfulness of homosexuality … nor can they stay silent about the terrible consequences that await those who practice homosexuality.”

Then comes an essay on “Marriage Myth Busting #2,” by Tom Drion, a pastor who helped to establish GraceLife London. “By examining God’s word, we can see that gender equality was not a foundational cornerstone God used to create paradise,” he writes. “In contrast to our twenty-first century ideals, God did not make men and women equal.” In Drion’s view, it all goes back to the Garden of Eden. “Eve’s role in her marriage was to be Adam’s helper. She was to help him carry out his will.” Lucky Adam, unlucky Eve: There isn’t much nuance in the theology of gender here. “To help anyone complete a task, we must submit ourselves to sit under the authority of the one who was commissioned to do the job. We must allow ourselves to be guided by the person who is leading the task … Eve’s God given role was to help [Adam].”

While Waller continues his catalog of the horrors that the earth’s people will endure on account of their failure to respect God’s gender order and other alleged moral crimes, I discreetly pull out my iPhone to check up on his Twitter feed (his account has since been deleted). One of his retweets from the previous summer gives a flavor of his social media presence: “Black Lives Matter (BLM) is inspiring a generation of young people to be angry, hateful, violent, rebellious, destructive, covetous, and envious under the guise of ‘justice.’ But true justice (impartial equity) is not what BLM wants. It has never wanted that and never will.” As a Black pastor from the States, Waller must know that he has strategic value for higher-ups in a church that is widely thought to be complicit in the racist demagoguery of right-wing American politics. In his sermon, however, he leaves no hint of self-awareness on the point.

After the service, I chat with Dorcas. She joined the church nine years ago, shortly after it was established. She lights up when I tell her I used to live in California. “We traveled to the Master’s Seminary in Los Angeles, which is where this church comes from,” she explains. “It’s where our pastors went through training before they started this church.” I smile and pretend I didn’t know that already.

 

GraceLife London is what is known as a “church plant.” It is one of hundreds of affiliated churches and ministries scattered around the world. It belongs to a church-planting parachurch network headquartered at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. John MacArthur, who took over the pastorate of Grace Community Church in 1969, is a lion in America’s Christian nationalist circles but little known outside of them. His Sun Valley church draws thousands of weekly attendants, and the Master’s Seminary in Los Angeles, which he has led since 1986, has trained some of the most politically influential and connected of America’s Christian nationalist preachers in the same hyperpatriarchal, homophobic, end-times religion on display at GraceLife London.

MacArthur’s insistence on male domination over women leaves no room for any hopeful reinterpretation. He has instructed male seminarians not to speak at conferences with female speakers because it is “a total violation of Scripture.” His ministry has instructed victims of abuse to “submit” and remain with their abuser. In a typical 2012 sermon titled “The Willful Submission of a Christian Wife,” MacArthur instructs women to “rank yourself under” husbands. “A woman’s task, a woman’s work, a woman’s employment, a woman’s calling is to be at home,” he explains. “Working outside removes her from under her husband and puts her under other men to whom she is forced to submit.” In other writings, MacArthur turns repeatedly to familiar passages from Ephesians (“Wives, be subject to your husbands”) and Colossians (“Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord”). In another representative essay, MacArthur announces, “Biblical love excludes homosexuality because of its sinfulness. Christians can best share the gospel with homosexuals by calling their lifestyle what the Bible calls it—sin.” In yet another typical effort, this time on “Theology of Creation,” MacArthur offers a series of Bible verses that appear to condemn the theory of evolution and favor instead creationist doctrine.

Nominally, MacArthur and his church subscribe to Calvinist theology that purports to base its teachings on a literal reading of the Bible. But lumping his group in with “evangelicals” in general would be to overlook some subtle but important distinctions among those who fall under that label. The main-line Protestant denominations in the United States are shedding members, and the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention has trended toward decline. But MacArthur appears to represent a variety of hard-line, reactionary religion that is actually growing. Indeed, as far as MacArthur is concerned, the more conventional evangelicals are part of the problem. “Sadly, the broader evangelical church finds itself unprepared for the storm clouds of persecution gathering on the horizon. The net effect of weak theology, shallow preaching, syrupy sentimentalism in worship, and a consumer-driven approach to ministry has left the church vulnerable and infirm,” he has preached. “The world is indeed spiraling down at breakneck speed; and to a significant degree, the church is going with it.”

Setting aside the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation, the Bible is of limited help in understanding the doctrines and appeal of the style of religion that MacArthur represents. Perhaps a better guide can be found on the daily talking points of conservative propaganda platforms. When MacArthur came out against COVID-19 vaccines, he cited Scripture, to be sure, but his arguments came straight from the disinformation mills of right-wing social media. The “government,” he claimed, had cooked up a pandemic, exaggerated the threat, and then pushed fake vaccines.

“There is no pandemic,” he said.

In America, Christian nationalism has thrived in the same disinformation space that has sheltered the MAGA movement and will host its inevitable successors. The religious leaders in this sector have their eyes fixed on the political leaders of the nation. One of the Master’s Seminary graduates, Ralph Drollinger, the president and founder of Capitol Ministries, led prayer sessions attended by some of the most powerful members of the Trump White House even as he built a missionary network aimed at high government officials across dozens of countries.

The politico-religious ambitions of reactionary religion extend far beyond U.S. borders. Grace Community Church in America may appeal to the America First crowd, but as with Capitol Ministries, it has undertaken a massive worldwide expansion. Its website offers a helpful map function, which lights up its affiliated church plants in multiple international locales, and of course my temporary hometown of London.

What exactly are they doing in the U.K.? This is a country where nonbelief appears headed for an absolute majority of the population. A survey by the Church of England found that less than 1 percent of the population can be found in church on any given Sunday. According to polls from YouGov and Gallup, only 9 percent of Britons reject the concept of evolution, as compared with the 38 percent of Americans who believe God created humans in their present form.

MacArthur and his seminarians don’t mind the long odds. When they look at the U.K., they see a lost country that needs to be retaken. And they plan to participate in the conquest using methods developed and tested in the United States.

MacArthur and his seminarians don’t mind the long odds. When they look at the U.K., they see a lost country that needs to be retaken. And they plan to participate in the conquest using methods developed and tested in the United States. Alongside its English founders, GraceLife London has now received reinforcements in the form of two additional ministers sent over from the United States. Adam Waller is one, and Michael Dionne of Faith Bible Church in Spokane, Washington, is the other.

“The vision of GraceLife London is not the revival of England, but the re-evangelization of England,” Dionne explains in a blog post. “What the country needs is a resurgence of faithful ministers and families ready to plant churches and preach the gospel, which is what GLL longs to do. The encouraging thing about this vision is that it is strictly biblical.” The goal, he adds, is to plant enough churches so that every inhabitant of Greater London is within 45 minutes of salvation—“meaning that almost 1/4 of England can be reached with sound, expository preaching, faithful shepherding and discipleship, and clear biblical evangelism.”

If there is a statistical grain of hope for ambitious churches seeking to re-evangelize the homeland, it is this: While the mainstream forms of Christianity in the U.K., primarily the Church of England, have declined precipitously over the past two decades, the Pentecostal and charismatic varieties that are on the rise around the world are up by double digits. The hotter and harder forms of evangelical religion are also gaining traction, often setting up shop by renting underutilized religious facilities, such as the Clerkenwell Medical Mission. And influential evangelical organizations in the U.K. are pursuing their agendas through a range of religious organizations as well as political strategies.

This, of course, is happening alongside the steady growth of Islam, which is up 44 percent in the U.K. over the last decade and now makes up at least 6.5 percent of the U.K. population. If there is religion in the U.K.’s future, it’s probably not going to center on the stately, museum-quality rituals of the Anglican church.

On my Sunday morning in London, I say goodbye to Dorcas and leave the church. I feel in need of some fresh air. The sight of the Australian fusion restaurant across the street, with its stylish clientele and fanciful coffee options, somehow offers relief from the lingering visions of damnation. Not more than two hundred yards to the west of GraceLife London I spot the storied St. James Church on Clerkenwell Green. Founded as a nunnery in the twelfth century, it rose to fame as a burial site for clergy, playwrights, and other colorful characters. It served as the venue for the 1632 wedding of Pocahontas’s and John Rolfe’s son, Thomas Rolfe, to his bride, Elizabeth. The churchyard, with its charming coffee kiosk, now functions as an unofficial community center and dog park. As I stroll over to St. James, I notice a bright, modern-looking banner over the door: Inspire St. James Clerkenwell.

St. James Church turns out to be now occupied by a group that delivers “biblical teaching” in a different flavor of the evangelical tradition. A separate group from GraceLife London at the Clerkenwell Medical Mission, but a parallel message nonetheless.

In a November 2023 talk on “God’s Good News for Our Sexuality,” Inspire St. James Clerkenwell’s vicar, Mark Jackson, offers a “biblical overview” of human sexuality. Among the consequences of Eve’s sin is that “He [Adam] will rule over her,” as Jackson says. Good news for whom? Inspire St. James Clerkenwell is a member of the Gospel Coalition (TGC), cofounded by the late Tim Keller. TGC-affiliated churches are required to conform to the organization’s theological doctrines. Marriages should be “complementarian”— which is a rather nicer way of saying that men are entitled to control and women must submit. God loves everyone, even gay people! But make no mistake, being gay is a sin. Above all, every person who fails to believe as they do will endure conscious torment for all eternity.

“Why are some people born with sexual attraction to those of the same sex?” Jackson asks. “It is all a consequence of the Fall. It’s Adam and Eve, turned from God’s goodness to their own way.”

That evening I stop in at a local pub, hoping to revive my spirits with a pint and some conversation. My new friends prove to be as convivial and reassuring as I had hoped. But one tells me he heard a rumor that a blizzard that struck the United States earlier that year, leaving four million Texans without power, had been generated by the government; he seems unsure as to whether or not this is true. I overhear a man at the next table haranguing his friend about another, supposedly liberal plot: “fifteen-minute cities.”

On my walk back to our apartment, I wrestle with the reality that the move to London will not offer quite the kind of escape I had anticipated. Surely the U.K. is not going to descend into the kind of culture wars that afflict so much of political life in the U.S., I tell myself. Some time after, I come across a promotional link to “Rethink Abortion Day,” a seminar aimed at training antiabortion activists in England.

 

On an early February morning, I ride the train to Birmingham and head to St. Mary’s College Oscott, a Catholic seminary. I enter an elegant building, adorned with stained-glass windows, elegant wooden carvings, and marble sculptures, which dates from the early nineteenth century. Passing through the somber stone hallways and serene cloisters, I make my way to the gathering spot for the day’s activities.

Several dozen attendees are already assembled in the cozy, wood-paneled conference room, and I take a seat on one of the fold-out chairs. An older lady in a colorful sweater smiles as she makes room for me. To my right is a young woman with auburn hair and thick glasses. She seems a bit nervous. As we chat a bit before the program begins, I begin to grasp the source of her anxiety; she feels out of step with her peers. “It’s good to be here with people who share the same views,” she tells me. Recently, she says, one of her closest friends, impregnated against her will by a guy she dated only briefly, decided to have an abortion. She now regrets that she didn’t interfere. “I just didn’t know what to say,” she tells me. She’s here today in hopes of learning the tactics of persuasion.

Overhearing our conversation, the older lady leans over. “I’ve joined some clinic pickets, but the young girls don’t pay attention to me. One of them said something rude,” she adds; the memory clearly stings. “But you’re young,” she adds, smiling encouragingly at the auburn-haired woman. “They’ll listen to you.”

With fifty or sixty participants settled into our seats, the day’s presentations begin. Much of the training is focused on the how-to of mounting demonstrations outside women’s health centers. Long a feature of abortion politics in the United States, antiabortion protests outside U.K. clinics and hospitals have surged in recent years, and the presenters at the Birmingham event can claim much of the credit. They include Ben Thatcher, director of March for Life U.K., a satellite of the U.S.-based March for Life, the organization behind the annual antiabortion demonstration that draws tens of thousands of participants to Washington, D.C. Another speaker, Dave Brennan, is the director of Brephos, which claims to help “churches respond to abortion” and is a spinoff of the U.S.-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR). Apart from the Catholic entities cohosting this event, the key speakers delivering presentations at the Birmingham event are working with U.K. affiliates of U.S.-based organizations, and several of the presenters are associated with or have worked with other organizations that play key roles in America’s Christian nationalist movement.

Leading the discussion on demonstrations and antiabortion messaging are representatives of 40 Days for Life U.K., an affiliate of the U.S.-based 40 Days for Life. Founded in 2004 in Bryan, Texas—a small city that antiabortion activists have described as “the most antichoice place in the nation”—40 Days for Life specializes in training and organizing protests in front of abortion clinics and other providers. The stated aim is to dissuade women from going through with an abortion, though the usual effect is simply to bully and shame them for doing so. The group also runs a “university,” that is, an online program where, for $497, users can access multiple training videos on recruiting fellow protesters and, for just $29, performing sidewalk “counseling.” Participants can also obtain antiabortion signs and materials and receive personal coaching.

California’s Grace Community Church now has global ministries in multiple cities across five continents.

MAP BY HAISAM HUSSEIN

Forty Days for Life claims to operate in more than a thousand cities in sixty-three countries. The U.K. branch kicked off with campaigns in Northern Ireland in 2009 and now boasts at least fifteen chapters in the island nation. As I started to examine its origins in the U.K., I was not surprised to discover links to the Leadership Institute, a right-wing training powerhouse with revenue around $40 million per year that claims to have nurtured the careers of hundreds of thousands of right-wing activists. It is the same parent organization that offered training and support to Moms for Liberty and that hired Bridget Ziegler as their director of school board programs before she resigned in disgrace. Forty Days for Life’s U.K. leader, Robert Colquhoun, as it turns out, received assistance for his work in the field when he enrolled in the Leadership Institute’s International School of Fundraising.

At the antiabortion recruitment gatherings that I have attended in the United States, there is invariably the moment where speakers treat the audience to a slide show involving gory images of aborted fetuses. Birmingham does not disappoint. Taking the podium in a navy sweater and jeans and cheery attitude, Dave Brennan of the U.K. branch of CBR delivers the goods. The CBR is known in the U.S. for its use of graphic images, which are often enlarged and displayed as placards and billboards near playgrounds, schools, and other places where children congregate. The organization also attracted notice when some of its leaders compared aborted fetuses with victims of lynching and Nazi genocide.

But it’s not just abortion that they’re coming after; CBR has a much broader and more radical agenda. In line with its predecessor, Brennan’s U.K. affiliate opposes the most effective forms of contraception, including birth control pills and mini pills, implants, IUDs, and vaginal rings. Any method that prevents a united sperm and egg from implanting into the vaginal wall, Brennan’s group maintains, would “end human life.”

We must acknowledge, he tells the gathering as we take in a stream of gory images, that “our enemy is more powerful than we are, factually speaking, and he”—that is, Satan—“is determined.” He sketches a theology according to which saving the unborn is the greatest moral issue of our time. Implicitly acknowledging that the activists gathered in Birmingham represent both Catholic and Protestant traditions, he calls for “co-belligerence.” The idea—crafted in America over a period of 15 years and enshrined in a key 2009 document titled “Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience,” which was signed by a broad range of reactionary activists and theologians—is that Catholics and Protestants should set aside centuries of theological differences in order to fight their common enemies who support abortion, same-sex marriage, and other liberal causes.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, co-director of March for Life U.K., introduces a handout on the “ABC of Abortion,” which amounts to a series of rebuttals of counterarguments one is likely to hear while harassing patients at health centers. “We need to take back control,” Vaughan-Spruce says, her voice animated with a ­can-do lilt. “We want them to acknowledge it’s a baby, it’s a human, it’s a child.” She nods and smiles. “We’re not trying to bring our religious values in at this point. We’re not talking about anything political. We’re just talking about the scientific.”

During a break in the activities, the older lady to my left confides to me, “I read that now Satanists are getting pregnant on purpose so that they can have abortions.” I ask her where she picked up this idea. “I think it was Eternal Word,” she replies, referencing Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), a worldwide media empire that some of its critics refer to as “the Fox News of Catholicism” and Pope Francis has suggested is “the work of the devil” because of its criticism of the Church from the right. She furrows her brow. “We’ve got to do something, because things keep getting worse and worse.”

The next speaker, Rachel Mackenzie, takes the stage. With her short pink hair, oversize poncho, and recurring scowl, she looks like she would fit right in at an Extinction Rebellion demonstration.

Mackenzie is affiliated with Rachel’s Vineyard, a faith-based U.S. organization dedicated to “healing the trauma of abortion.” It appears her specialty is promoting the trope that frames abortion as a harm to mothers and fathers. Dr. Theresa Burke, the founder of Rachel’s Vineyard, built her activist career as a pastoral associate of Priests for Life, whose national director is the provocateur and defrocked priest Frank Pavone. A zealous supporter of President Trump, Pavone drew attention to himself by actively promoting the Stop the Steal movement that spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

“I’m just going to focus on truth and love and how to balance that … if truth is going to be communicated without love, it cannot and won’t be accepted,” Mackenzie advises us, her eyes flashing with righteous fury. Then her presentation takes a bizarre and sadistic turn. Mackenzie insists that even a ten-year-old rape victim should be expected to carry a pregnancy.

“You don’t get unraped by an abortion,” she sternly admonishes the Birmingham audience.

If a ten-year-old is raped, she says, “of course this situation is absolutely horrific. Of course that child deserves love. And it’s far from ideal. But considering the alternative is to go through an abortion then the most loving solution that we can offer is life.”

Rounding out the speakers in Birmingham is Father Sean Gough. With a steady demeanor, Gough echoes the messages of the earlier speakers, though he seems to want to soften the edges. Participants should avoid being “aggressive” in promoting their views, he tells us. Abortion is the “single greatest social justice issue of our time,” but we should never use words like “murder” or “murderer.” We want, he admonishes, to win souls.

 

The U.K. remains far behind the United States in the vigor of its culture war over women’s health-care rights. Indeed, the growing antiabortion activity around reproductive health facilities has sparked a backlash that appears to be limiting the movement’s policy gains for now. In early 2023, the U.K.’s highest court recognized that harassment around health-care facilities violates the rights of those seeking reproductive and sexual health services. Even many regional courts are enforcing clinic buffer zones. The courts frame these decisions as a means of protecting women from harassment, rather than casting clinic protests as a “free speech issue,” and the U.K. Parliament recently moved toward legislating the establishment of buffer zones around abortion clinics.

Even so, ritualized harassment and humiliation of women seeking medical care is hardly the only American contribution to the budding culture war over reproductive services in the U.K. U.S. organizations are also contributing to the establishment of antiabortion counseling centers. Billed as “crisis pregnancy centers,” these organizations attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions, often by giving misleading or unethical advice. In the United States there are thousands of such operations, many affiliated with large networks like Heartbeat International and Stanton Healthcare. These organizations and others have now established multiple international affiliates.

According to a February 2023 investigation by the BBC’s Panorama broadcast, at least 57 such centers, operating outside of the auspices of the National Health Service, have opened in the U.K. The investigation asserted that over one-third were providing unsound or unethical medical advice.

The U.S.-based Stanton Healthcare, which operates a clinic in Belfast, recently expanded into Scotland. A reporter for The Times of London visited the Belfast clinic in 2018 and recorded a conversation, during which she was advised that abortion would make her breasts “fill with cancer.” She was told, “You could get your womb perforated, you might be left sterile.”

To get a better sense of these developments, I check in with Katherine O’Brien, a spokesperson for the nonprofit British Pregnancy Advisory Service.

“We’ve seen a real uptick in protest activity over this year,” she tells me. O’Brien cautions that it would be dangerous to underestimate the potential impact of these groups. “We know that antiabortion groups are well funded, well organized, and well connected with influential parliamentarians,” she says. “They are going into schools, into universities, and have a real drive to recruit the ‘next generation’ of antiabortion activists. They know they are playing the long game, and ... they believe that they will win, even if it takes decades.”

The American leaders of the antiabortion movement are well aware of the long-term potential of utilizing their resources to build up the movement overseas. A joint investigation by the U.K. publications The Observer and The Citizens, published in 2023, revealed that Right to Life U.K. increased its Facebook advertising budget more than ten times from 2020 to 2023.

At the U.K. March for Life in September 2022, Shawn Carney, the U.S. CEO of 40 Days for Life, stood in front of a banner bearing the slogan, “life from conception, no exception,” and referenced the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“If we can do it,” he told the cheering crowd assembled in London’s Parliament Square, “you can do it.”

 

The U.K. Christian right is increasingly drawing on a U.S.-forged playbook. It is also drawing on U.S. money. But the U.K. has its own cadre of super-wealthy individuals committed to investing their money in the culture wars and reactionary transformation.

The longer I stayed in London, the more I became convinced that you cannot simply map the politics of one country onto another. But there are some distinct similarities. The U.K. Christian right is increasingly drawing on a U.S.-forged playbook. It is also drawing on U.S. money. But the U.K. has its own cadre of super-wealthy individuals committed to investing their money in the culture wars and reactionary transformation.

Take, as an example, the U.K. hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, who is reportedly worth £875 million, according to the London Times. Marshall is determined to use his wealth to combat liberalism, which he believes “has lost its moorings,” in religion as well as politics. He and his wife worship at Holy Trinity Brompton, a large and extremely well-funded church with a strong evangelical and charismatic slant. HTB, as it is known, is home to Alpha, an evangelistic organization with a global reach. In recent years HTB has been more forthcoming on their antipathy to liberal reforms—opposing, for instance, blessings for same-sex couples.

Marshall has invested in a range of religious initiatives, including a scheme to place a Bible in every state school in the U.K. and support for a theological training center that inculcates in its pupils a more conservative form of theology and the culture war positions that accompany it. He has also invested in church-planting initiatives which the writer Andrew Graystone described in Prospect as “a Marshall Plan for the beleaguered Church of England, [that] is widely loathed in other parts of the Church for its flatpack formula of guitar music and easy certainties.”

But Marshall’s efforts go well beyond support for religion in the U.K. His aims are clearly political. He has forged alliances with number of conservative politicians and launched an organization called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which draws in right-wing activists and personalities. He made an initial investment of £10 million into GB News, a conservative media outlet that frequently veers into right-wing culture war territory, and has subsequently invested millions more. He has also invested 18 million pounds in Ralston College, a tiny Savannah, Georgia–based liberal arts school with a robust online platform, whose chancellor is the right-wing culture warrior Jordan Peterson. In 2024, he purchased the conservative-leaning U.K. publication The Spectator for 100 million pounds. In doing so, he will play a pivotal role in shaping conservative politics in the U.K. for years to come.

For now, of course, people like Marshall are swimming against the U.K. tide. Most American-style culture wars remain unpopular in the British Isles. I still find it difficult to imagine a movement to end abortion or same-sex marriage erupting here and taking aim at democratic institutions. Most British people were stunned when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. One friend, a Tory Brexiteer, asked me in genuine confusion, “Why would anyone want to ban abortion?”

But, when I consider that the U.S. religious right has found willing U.K. partners and is carefully laying the groundwork, I consider the possibility that I’m making too many assumptions. I wander in my memory back to my childhood in 1970s Boston, and it occurs to me that Americans then might have had equal difficulty imagining what has become of our national politics today.

At that time, abortion was thought to be of concern mainly to a subset of Catholics, and it didn’t divide along partisan lines. In 1972 the popular television show Maude, executive-produced by the late Norman Lear, featured two segments in which the lead character faced an unintended pregnancy and chose abortion. Lear later remarked that this storyline generated no controversy when it first aired.

Many conservative Protestants and their institutions, including the Southern Baptist Convention, had welcomed the Supreme Court ruling that for half a century secured the right of American women to reproductive freedom. Even after the religious right succeeded in convincing conservatives that all evil came down to abortion, the issue was initially thought to be a social one, to be resolved by democratic means within the existing institutions.

Few people at the time would have imagined that antiabortion activism would become an indispensable tool for mobilizing large groups of people to join in an assault on democracy itself. The recent developments in the U.K., I realize, are like a window on the American past. This is how things must have looked before the antidemocratic reaction really took hold.

[KEVINAA 110]

Edited Friday at 15:42 by KEVINAA

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Australian Doof Culture Has a Zionist Problem

In Australia, outdoor dance parties — known colloquially as “doofs” — are billed as progressive events that value peace, love, unity, and respect. So why do organizers keep booking artists who celebrate Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/australia-doofs-zionism-idf-palestine

The crowd at the Rainbow Serpent festival in Lexton, Australia, in 2013. (Asher Floyd / Wikimedia Commons)

 

For many Australians, there is nothing that epitomizes high summer more than the doof (for those unacquainted with the local dialect, doofs are outdoor dance parties similar to raves). Although pioneering parties like Rainbow Serpent and Earthcore are no longer running, festivals like Esoteric, Wild Horses and Rabbits Eat Lettuce have stepped into the breach, pulling in thousands of punters looking to dress up, drop acid, and lose their minds to psytrance for a few days.

Smaller, underground doofs are advertised to limited social networks and usually fly under the radar. Larger doof festivals, however, are professionally promoted, feature international artists, and evince a typical and replicable psychedelic aesthetic. Whether a semilegal gathering of mates or a festival with five stages and 15,000 punters, doofs are meant to offer an escape from the day-to-day worries of work, rent, bills, and general late-capitalist precarity. To many, they’re also an opportunity to temporarily take part in a genuinely horizontal set of social relations, and to experiment with new ways of being together where exploitation and oppression are absent. Whatever the flavor, the combination of electronic dance music (EDM), entheogens, and nature is potent and popular.

Cultural studies scholar Susan Luckman explains that “the term ‘doof’ resonates in Australia with sub-cultural capital,” which means in practice that many doofers understand their scene and its values as a way of life and not merely an opportunity to get wasted on the weekend.

The principles of Peace, Love, Unity and Respect (PLUR), which emerged from the 1990s US rave scene, are fundamental to Australian doof culture, and many participants see doofs as a vehicle for personal and social transcendence. There’s undoubtedly a utopian element to this, but unlike festivals such as Burning Man, Australian doofs are largely free of Silicon Valley tech moguls and still offer a relatively egalitarian, progressive atmosphere. That’s why they’re marketed — and often idealized — as spaces for free expression, individual empowerment, spontaneous community, and psychedelic exploration.

Over the last year, however, the trip has threatened to turn bad. This summer, artists who actively support Israel’s genocide have performed at major doof festivals. Others are slated to perform at festivals to be held later in the year. Last summer, the organizers of one festival encouraged attendees to boost and donate to coming_home4life, an Israeli pro-war campaign group. It’s not just an affront to PLUR. It’s something that the vast majority of doof attendees would — and should — reject. It’s one thing to enjoy a temporary escape facilitated by dance music (and substances.) It’s another thing entirely to get down and high to tracks played by artists who publicly and actively support war and genocide.

The Soundtrack to Genocide

Of the international artists at large Australian doof festivals, a significant number have always been Israeli, as have plenty of attendees, many of whom are backpackers fresh from finishing their compulsory military service. In and of itself, this is both inevitable and not a cause for alarm; no festival should bar artists or attendees based on their nationality, let alone ethnicity.

It also makes sense that Israelis are well-represented. Australia has a vibrant outdoor party scene centered around various “psy” genres. And according to anti-Zionist Tel Aviv–based DJ Niv Hadas, psytrance is “the truest form of Israeli folk music.” Metallic bleeps, acid squelches, 148-bpm kick drums, and samples from science-fiction films are core components of what has become one of Israel’s most popular genres.

Psytrance is the soundtrack to Israel’s genocide.

Numerous factors account for this, not least among them the connection between electronic music and Israel’s highly militarized society. For young Israelis, a period of often hedonistic travel after military service is customary. As a 2023 history of psychedelic culture by Ido Hartogsohn and Itamar Zadoff notes, “The founders of the Israeli psytrance scene were recently discharged male soldiers.”

The emergence of a psychedelic trance scene in Israel — as “warrior backpackers” brought the music back from Goa — was contemporaneous with the First Intifada. The emergence of psytrance as a “truly popular music” by 2000 aligned with the beginning of the Second Intifada. Periods of intensified violence seem to spur the cultural dissemination and popularity of psytrance, offering citizens of Israel an opportunity to unite and forget the violence committed by their state against a racialized enemy. This can appeal to both hard-line Zionists and people who just want to escape “the situation” by way of the drug-fueled pseudo-spiritual transcendence and collectivism characteristic of psytrance parties. As Hartogoshon and Zodoff explain:

The reception of trance culture into Israeli society was facilitated because it contained many cultural components that resonate with Zionistic youth movements and military life — camping in nature, navigation, and male camaraderie. Trance founders repurposed practices acquired during their army service toward participation in the new psytrance culture.

Indeed, as anthropologist of electronic music Graham St John documents, “Psytrance music and culture has permeated everyday life in Israel, where it emerged as a popular music by 2000.” Over the same period — and since — young Israelis have shifted further to the right.

There is of course a spectrum within Zionism, ranging from religious and openly ethnosupremacist Zionism to liberal Zionism, which aspires to a more progressive — but still ethnocentric — Israel. Recent decades, however, have seen the center of Israeli politics shift so far to the right that the liberal Zionist antiwar movement of previous decades is entirely absent. This shift has flowed through into Israel’s music scene. While many Israeli DJs evince a kinder, gentler, more liberal Zionism, what matters is whether they support war and genocide. Whether Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombs fall in the name of LGBTQ liberation or the total elimination of Palestinians as a people is immaterial to the lives they destroy.

Similarly, psytrance isn’t an inherently militant or nationalist genre or one that openly glorifies violence. Nevertheless, Israeli psytrance has evolved to the right, in step with Israeli culture in general. As anthropologist Giorgio Gristina argues, there is a

more dark, disturbed, militaristic or violent tone that can be found in Israeli psytrance, in the names of albums, artists or events like Expression of Rage, Psycho Sonic, Deeply Disturbed, Becoming Insane, Smashing the Opponent, Conquering the Israeli Desert, Groove Attack, We’re Dangerous, We Must Evacuate, Ground Zero, NuClear Visions of Israel and so on.

Of course, the political aesthetic of Israel’s psytrance scene also encompasses everything from apolitical ambivalence to hippie-flavored Zionism that decries the “cruel darkness” of “people [who] want to kill each other” while expressing faith that “the lights of hope, unity and love are lit.” Meanwhile, at least 61,000 Gazans are dead, and the strip lies in ruins while Israeli politicians — with support from the White House — discuss ethnic cleansing. And while some Israeli psytrance fans and artists may prefer to look away from the IDF’s violence, the reality is that psytrance is the soundtrack to Israel’s genocide.

Bush Doofs and Zionists

Australian doofs have a very different political aesthetic, which reflects the more progressive outlook of most organizers and participants. Most doofs begin with a welcome to country or smoking ceremony given by the traditional indigenous owners of the land on which the festival is held. Festival organizers draw on indigenous Australian practices and traditions to impress upon patrons a connection to the land and support for Aboriginal sovereignty, to encourage respectful behavior, and to showcase progressive politics.

However, this show of support for indigenous sovereignty — and the tacit anti-colonial stance it implies — is undermined when doof organizers book artists who are active partisans for an ongoing settler-colonial movement. Take Wild Horses, for example. As its website states, Wild Horses is “founded over basic human principles: LOVE and RESPECT. We encourage acceptance, we encourage love, we encourage you to be all you can possibly be but make sure you do the same to all the ones around you.

Wild Horses takes place at Carapooee West in Victoria, and last year it ran from December 6 to 8. Israeli psytrance artist Skizologic headlined the festival, and a cursory search of his social media accounts makes plain his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As one post reads, “If you are silent when terrorists murder Israelis, stay silent when Israel defends itself.” His one-sided focus on October 7 is typical of Israel’s basic justification for war, and his outspoken criticism of those who have stood against genocide is hard to reconcile with the Australian doof scene’s avowed commitment to PLUR.

In the case of Wild Horses, there’s reason to believe that the decision to book pro-genocide artists is not simply due to naivety. In 2023 the festival solicited donations for coming_home4life, a Zionist group formed after October 7 that campaigned for the IDF and Israeli government to wage war with the aim of rescuing the hostages and prisoners taken by Hamas. Wild Horses organizers also linked attendees to the hashtags #bringthemback and #bringthemhome, which overflow with racist and pro-genocide material. Wild Horses did not promote any equivalent campaign or charity aimed at supporting the people of Gaza, despite the horrifying hardships they continue to endure. And at last year’s Wild Horses, organizers introduced and enforced a policy prohibiting “political demonstration and disruption.” This is hard to square with anything other than the festival organizers’ fear at a backlash against their support for pro-war artists and charities.

Most Australian doofs begin with a welcome to country or smoking ceremony given by the traditional indigenous owners of the land on which the festival is held.

The problem is not restricted to one festival. Rabbits Eat Lettuce, planned for April 17 to 21 this year, features Israeli psytrance legend Astrix, who has shared videos justifying civilian deaths in Gaza, including of children. Other Astrix posts praise the “healing power of music” for Israelis impacted by October 7, in line with the purportedly progressive, peaceful, and apolitical attitude toward genocide characteristic of liberal Zionist psytrance artists.

While such views are commonplace, they also point toward solidarity between the Israeli psytrance scene and the IDF. Take, for example, the 2024 drone light show “renovation” of “Invasion,” a track by psytrance duo Invisible Reality. Or as reported by Turkish news outlet TRTWorld, an instance of IDF soldiers doofing to psy-pop monstrosities amid rubble, to promote a dance party they planned to hold in Gaza. In another case, video footage emerged of IDF soldiers dancing in the ruins of a bombed-out school that had previously sheltered displaced Gazans.

The explicit nexus between the Israeli psytrance scene and the IDF is added impetus for Australian doof organizers to refuse to book pro-war artists. And when they fail, knowingly or unknowingly, doof attendees have an important role to play in ensuring that festivals do not endorse ethnic cleansing and war.

Esoteric Festival is probably the most prominent Australian doof festival. Last year, a major boycott campaign led by ordinary punters pressured Esoteric organizers to rescind the booking of pro-genocide Zionist DJ Antinomy. Shamefully, Estoteric’s organizers soured this decision by also dropping Juman, the only Palestinian artist on the bill, on the grounds of hastily concocted “safety concerns.”

This year, Esoteric was canceled at the last minute after building surveyors for the Buloke Shire Council refused to approve necessary permits, on public health and safety grounds. However, festival organizers had booked several Zionist headliners to play at the event — and at least one, Animato, played anyway at a smaller, consolation event held on March 9, at Melbourne Pavilion. Animato is not an artist who attempts to position himself as apolitical, and he has made his support for the IDF’s campaign in Gaza very explicit. Animato is also explicit in his anti-Arab racism. In one reply to a post on Threads, he asked what “Arab country [sic] contributes to the world beside terror?” It’s a stance decidedly at odds with Esoteric’s self-portrayal as “an environment safe for everyone, free from negative energy that’s filled with love.”

The explicit nexus between the Israeli psytrance scene and the IDF is added impetus for Australian doof organizers to refuse to book pro-war artists.

Invisible Reality — mentioned earlier — and their side project Sorin and Shamil were also slated to feature at Esoteric. The duo have shown consistent enthusiasm for the genocidal campaign waged by the IDF. There is no ambiguity in video posts that uphold “peace, unity and love” while claiming that “Israel never targets civilians deliberately,” arguing that “if you think they do, you have been fed fake news.” They are, essentially, wartime propaganda.

Boycott Pro-Genocide Festivals

While the bombs have stopped for the moment, the Zionist state is pivoting toward ethnic cleansing in Gaza and land seizures and home demolitions in the West Bank, with the blessing of President Donald Trump’s White House. This is the context that festival organizers must take into account when making decisions about which artists they book. As Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni argues, festivals cannot claim to uphold progressive values while remaining silent or claiming neutrality. Rather,

progressive spaces like music festivals have a moral obligation to refuse to platform artists who support or justify genocide and the oppression of marginalized peoples. When festivals knowingly provide a stage to Zionist artists who publicly back the genocide of Palestinians, they perpetuate the normalization of apartheid, war crimes and crimes against humanity. These spaces cannot claim neutrality while supporting the very systems of violence they purport to oppose. Silence in the face of genocide is complicity, and these events must stand in solidarity with human rights, liberation and Palestinian justice.

At the same time, as Mashni notes, the “normalization of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia is rampant, often unchallenged and deeply ingrained within institutions, including the arts.”

So far, organizers of Wild Horses, Esoteric, and Rabbits Eat Lettuce have not heeded the call to boycott pro-war, pro-genocide artists. The organizers of Wild Horses declined to respond to questions about the types of speech or action prohibited by their “no politics” policy. Similarly, organizers of Esoteric and Rabbits Eat Lettuce refused to answer questions about the steps they took to avoid booking artists who support genocide or whose commitments and actions compromise the ethos espoused by both festivals.

Regardless of whether this stems from conscious support for Israel’s war or a head-in-the-sand attitude, it’s at odds with the values of the vast majority of doof attendees. It’s also a stance that threatens to undermine what is genuinely progressive about Australian festival culture. To experience the unity of shared rhythm amid lights among friends is beautiful. To remain true to that experience, festival attendees have a responsibility to pressure organizers when they make the wrong decisions.

This isn’t to argue that festivals should boycott all Israeli artists, nor is to suggest that organizers should vet every artist’s social media profile for misplaced likes. Nor should it apply to artists who oppose the genocide despite supporting Zionism in some abstract form. Rather, the boycott should apply to all artists — regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or religion — who explicitly endorse and support Israel’s war crimes, racism, and genocide. Because in the case of Israel’s war on Gaza, there is no ambiguity. It was — and is — an open and obvious violation of international law. To dance to music performed by artists who support these crimes is to dance to the soundtrack of genocide.

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Yanis Varoufakis: How the EU Is Fueling War, Austerity & Authoritarianism

Europe is spiraling into crisis—its democracy under attack, its people abandoned, and its leaders fueling war, austerity, and authoritarianism. In this explosive speech in Brussels, Yanis Varoufakis exposes the truth about the EU’s dangerous shift, the rise of the far-right, and the corruption of so-called centrists. The EU is turning into a War Union, prioritising military spending over its people.

Austerity continues for the many while the elite benefit from unlimited money printing. Elections are being canceled, censorship is rising, and democracy is fading. The far-right and neoliberal elites fuel each other’s power, silencing real opposition while pretending to fight one another. We saw this coming. In 2016, DiEM25 warned: Europe will be democratized, or it will disintegrate. Now, we are at a tipping point.

This is not just a crisis; it is a deliberate transformation of Europe into a militarized, oligarchic system that serves only the few. The only way forward is resistance. We must reject Military Keynesianism, fight for economic justice, demand a real Green Transition, and defend democracy against those who seek to erase it. There is no time to wait. We must act now.

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About 1/6 of the total population of Serbia protested government malfeasance today. In the US that would be more than fifty seven million people.

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Texas Bill Will Ban 'Furries' In Schools Because No Dumb Conspiracy Ever Dies

https://www.wonkette.com/p/texas-bill-will-ban-furries-in-schools

Just to demonstrate that no truly stupid idea ever goes away, a Texas Republican lawmaker, state Rep. Stan Gerdes, has introduced a bill to prohibit “non-human behavior” by kids in public schools, because apparently he either 1) believes there are actually kids being given litter boxes to poop in; 2) is literally stuck in a time warp from 2022-23; or 3) believes it will get him attention and donations from rubes who think option 1 is real. (We initially wrote “#1,” but that’s what the kitty litter is for.)

We assume the astute readers of Wonkette, at least three-quarters of whom are furries anyway, already know that the rightwing freakout over “kids identifying as animals” is simply an ugly myth that was made up to mock transgender folks. It’s very much a fake outrage based on the idea that trans identity is as absurd as insisting you’re a cat.

Of course, in the real world, outside the rightwing bubble, there aren’t any children insisting they’re animals (beyond the occasional very imaginative preschooler for a few days). But there are trans kids and adults, and they stubbornly insist on existing even if you torture them with “conversion therapy” or make it impossible for them to access life-saving gender affirming care.

Texas has already banned gender-affirming care for minors, and seeks to relentlessly pursue parents and medical providers who help trans kids, so apparently, with nothing else left to ban, Rep. Gerdes decided to address the nonexistent threat of furries in schools. Goofy teens hopped up on anime and clowning around might lead to dancing, for gosh sakes.

Gerdes even came up with a clever acronym for his bill, calling it the “Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education (F.U.R.R.I.E.S) Act, which you have to admit is more memorable than “Texas HB 4814 (2025).” So the hell with Gerdes, we’re calling it HB 4814.

The bill would amend Texas’s education code to prohibit “any non-human behavior by a student, including presenting himself or herself … as anything other than a human being.”

There are exceptions for school mascots, Halloween, school plays, and school dress-up days, just as long as there are no more than five such days in a school year, and the days are themed around “an era in human history,” a holiday, or a school event. So Fifties Day is fine, and we assume kids could dress as Nixon’s little dog Checkers or the late cosmonaut dog Laika.

But there’s one more disqualifier, because this Gerdes dipshit or whoever helped him write the bill really thought this stuff through, and wanted to rule out sneaky loopholes from pro-furry educators: Those theme days absolutely must NOT be “solely or primarily related to the history or celebration of a biological or artificial species other than homo sapiens.” This is a blatant swipe at I Am Not A Human Being, I Am An Animal Day, on which we atone for the sufferings of Oswald Cobblepot.

The bill explains that “non-human behavior” means “any type of behavior or accessory displayed by a student in a school district other than behaviors or accessories typically displayed by a member of the homo sapiens species,” and the examples of course lead off with those goddamn litter boxes, which may not be used for “the passing of stool, urine, or other human byproducts.”

Here is where we remind you that the grain of sand of truth in these fucking “child furry” stories is that some schools keep kitty litter on hand in the case of children being locked down in their rooms because of a school shooter, which Texas has done less than nothing about.

Ha. Ha. Fuck you Texas, and fuck you Rep. Gerdes.

Also banned are tails, leashes, collars, or other pet accessories; fur, “artificial, animal-like ears”; and “other physiological features that have not historically been assigned to the homo sapiens species through a means of natural biological development,” which comes perilously close to endorsing evolution, egad. And to be on the safe side, such non-human accoutrements are banned whether they’re simply worn, or “through surgical means,” because wouldn’t it be just like a Woke Lib to have a doctor add a long striped tail to their child, oh won’t someone please think of the children?

To cover all the bases, banned behaviors include “licking oneself or others for the purpose of grooming or maintenance,” so kids with a cowlick on photo day will have to find a comb, not lick a couple fingers to smooth it out.

And just try enforcing this in a middle school: The list also bans “barking, meowing, hissing, or other animal noises that are not human speech,” although it appears agnostic on making armpit farts.

Students could face penalties including suspension or even expulsion, since the anti-furry stuff is shoehorned into a section of the state education law that prohibits real things like bullying, sexual harassment, and threats of violence. Talking about shooting up your school, wearing a cat ear headband and clip-on tail, both are bad.

This gets especially gross when the bill addresses adult conduct: A completely serious list of prohibitions on causing or allowing kids to be harmed by bullying, assault, neglect, sexual assault, and the like suddenly has added to it the crime of “allowing or encouraging the child to develop a dependance (sic) on or a belief that non-human behaviors are societally acceptable.” Violations of that last could bring a penalty of $10,000 for a first offense, $25,000 for subsequent criming.

None of these pretended threats is real, but in a speech to a group of pastors in Austin Thursday, Gov. Greg Abbott endorsed HB 4814, claiming that the furry threat is “alive and well” in schools, and needs to be snuffed out by legislation.

“In some small rural sections of school districts in the state of Texas, they have in their schools, what are called furries. Y'all know what this is?” Abbott asked the crowd, which responded with a smattering of “yeahs.”

“Kids go to school dressed up as cats with litter boxes in their classrooms,” Abbott said.

Abbott insisted that he knew of cases in two rural school districts that parents had complained about, but didn’t name them. Just one more reason that the crazy radicals in Texas education must be brought to heel. But if they’re wearing dog fursuits, they just might like that.

OK, that’s enough of that nonsense. Here’s much nicer nonsense, from the wonderful absurdist anime Nichijou. Enjoy 8-year-old genius inventor Hakase Shinonome and her robot housekeeper Nano just saying “It’s me-ow!” and “It’s cute!” to each other again and again. This is the future libs want.

What IS this world coming to?

Edited Sunday at 04:57 by Vesper

[Vesper 29,343]

The #maga resentment toward #federalworkers is misguided. #Reagan #Trump #heritagefoundation

 

[Vesper 29,343]

[Vesper 29,343]

Dictator shit

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114175908922736427

Edited yesterday at 06:25 by Vesper

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