We Finally Know Why NASA Lost Contact With Moonbound Spacecraft

Posted on by

NASA dropped an update on its official blog detailing the causes of their satellite's dropout. In a nutshell? A bad command and a software error.

All Figured Out

Scientists at NASA let out a huge sigh of relief yesterday when NASA was able to successfully restore contact with its CAPSTONE satellite after it unexpectedly plunged into radio silence on Monday.

And fortunately for NASA scientists, CAPSTONE "is looking happy and healthy."

Now, thanks to their tireless efforts, we finally know what caused the dropout: a bad command and a software error.

Faulty

According to a NASA update, the issue arose during the commissioning of the CAPSTONE satellite, which typically entails establishing contact with the satellite and checking its systems, among other procedures.

While attempting to access diagnostic data to investigate an issue with CAPSTONE's ranging data, an "improperly formatted command" was sent to the satellite, rendering its radio inoperable, according to the update.

The onboard fault detection system failed to fix and reboot the radio, something it was designed to do, because of a "fault in the spacecraft flight software."

"And still, the small spacecraft survived," Ars Technica senior space editor Eric Berger tweeted in response to the news. "Hard not to root for the little guy."

Flying Solo

There are some positive takeaways from this brief blunder. Despite the delay, CAPSTONE's autonomous flight software was able to fix things on its own and bring the satellite back into contact, at which point the ground team were able to re-assume control.

It also managed to keep its antenna pointed towards Earth the entire time while simultaneously topping off its battery charge by keeping its solar panels oriented. Pretty impressive!

The Moon-bound satellite represents a major step forward in NASA's Artemis program, an ambitious program which aims to return humans to the lunar surface.

Assuming there aren't any other hiccups, the satellite will be the first spacecraft to perform a special kind of elliptical orbit around the Moon, laying the groundwork for NASA's Gateway station in the Moon's orbit.

More on CAPSTONE: There's a NASA Satellite Headed Toward the Moon Right Now

The post We Finally Know Why NASA Lost Contact With Moonbound Spacecraft appeared first on Futurism.

Originally posted here:
We Finally Know Why NASA Lost Contact With Moonbound Spacecraft

Former Japanese Prime Minister Assassinated With "Homemade Shotgun"

Posted on by

Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has died after being shot with a

Improvised Firearm

Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has died after being shot with a "homemade shotgun," Bloomberg reports.

It's a highly unusual event — especially considering just how rare gun violence is in Japan. The country has some of the most strict gun laws in the world, requiring potential gun owners to go through extensive background checks and paperwork, including information about the owner's family, and mental health.

In other words, it's the polar opposite of the situation back here in the US, where firearms can be bought at Walmart in some states, without even needing to register them or get a permit.

The numbers speak for themselves: there were more than four firearm homicides per 100,000 people in 2019. Japan had almost none. In 2018, when America had 39,740 gun violence-related deaths, Japan had 8.

Two Tubes

To that end: The assassin may have circumvented Japan's strict gun laws by building their own shotgun. According to Bloomberg, the suspect held a device made out of two tubes wrapped together with black tape, an improvised firearm — presumably created to escape detection.

"This actually shows the extent that Japan gun laws are working," Daniel Foote, a professor at the University of Tokyo specializing in law and society, told Bloomberg. "Very few people have the ability to create such a weapon."

Loose Security

According to experts, the rarity of the event may have actually contributed to the fact that it was relatively easy to assassinate Abe.

"Security was obviously too loose and this will prompt a tightening up of security, especially at open-air speeches, given we’re in the middle of elections," Hiroshima Shudo University criminal law professor William Cleary told the broadcaster.

The last time a Japanese prime minster was killed was in 1932, when Tsuyoshi Inukai was famously stabbed during his tenure by Navy staff after being accused of provoking war with the US.

Abe was seen by some as a polarizing figure, as The Washington Post reports, pushing Japan to expand its military defenses during his tenure. He resigned back in 2020 due to chronic ulcreative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease.

It's an unfortunate situation, given the fact that even with some of the strictest gun laws, people will find ways to gain access to illegal firearms. Especially with the rise of 3D-printed guns — and even rifles — we're bound to hear about more incidents like this one.

READ MORE: Shooting of Japan’s Ex-Leader Shocks Nation Where Guns Are Rare [Bloomberg]

More on gun laws: Drama Engulfs Plan to Zap School Shooters With Taser-Toting Drones

The post Former Japanese Prime Minister Assassinated With "Homemade Shotgun" appeared first on Futurism.

See the rest here:
Former Japanese Prime Minister Assassinated With "Homemade Shotgun"

Becoming-Transhuman: The Machine Is Us (And the dash is Deleuzian) | H …

Posted on by

Continuing an ongoing philosophical conversation about the order of rank and value, media theorist and evolutionary biologist Donna Haraway states inA Cyborg Manifestothat the classifications of human, machine, and animal species blur if one examines them at the genetic or molecular level; the order and rank of human supremacy dissolves. In the late 19th century following the acceptance of Darwins theory of evolution, how were the fuzzy lines between humans, animals, and machines drawn and by whom? At what point do we, as humans, become transhumanenhanced by technology? Can order, rank, and classification of species be challenged or changedwithin the human-nonhuman kingdom as the transhuman world evolves through representations in media and in perception? Taking responsibility for classifications and ranking means recognizing, in Haraways words, that the machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. There is no natural body in posthumanism. The cyborg figuration problematizes borders between semiotic and material aspects of the body (for example, gender/sex), pointing to untenable clear separations between biomachinic materiality and sociocultural dimensions.Becoming-Transhuman: The Machine Is Uscalls for papers focusing on how classifications of human, machine, animal species blur in the twenty-first century. Scholars are invited to present explorations of practical and controversial applications of transhumanism, such as vaccines, prosthetic extensions of the body, bioengineering of life, cochlear implants, transgender or transracial identity, sentient cars, communication with animals, and immortality research.

View post:

Becoming-Transhuman: The Machine Is Us (And the dash is Deleuzian) | H ...

Transhumanism: Expert exposes liberal billionaire elitists Great …

Posted on by

Tue Nov 10, 2020 - 7:07 pm ESTFri Jun 18, 2021 - 5:25 pm EDT

November 10, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) The COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by the worlds elites as part of a plan to globally advance transhumanism literally, the fusion of human beings with technology in an attempt to alter human nature itself and create a superhuman being and an earthly paradise, according to a Peruvian academic and expert in technology.

This dystopian nightmare scenario is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but an integral part of the proposed post-pandemic Great Reset, Dr. Miklos Lukacs de Pereny said at a recent summit on COVID-19.

Article continues below Petition

6420 have signed the petition.

Let's get to 7500!

Thank you for signing this petition!

Add your signature:

Show Petition Text

The American elections of 2020 has been thrown into chaos by 'statistically improbable' mail-in ballot dumps, and accompanying allegations of voter fraud in a few key battleground states.

With investigations and recounts now looming, what we nowneedis a lot of prayer!

Please JOINour urgent PLEDGE to PRAYfor justice to prevail in these elections and for the truth to come out, one way or the other.

Everyone should desire and acceptreasonable explanations forthe apparent discrepancies in the way ballots have been handled and countedin some states.

To guarantee the validity of these elections, there should be no hint of impropriety.

SIGN this pledge to pray for justice to prevail in theelectoral process.

You may, of course, use any prayer you find suitable for this intention.

Thank you!

Indeed, to the extent that implementing the transhumanist agenda is possible, it requires the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a global elite and the dependence of people on the state, said Lukacs.

Thats precisely the aim of the Great Reset, promoted by German economist Klaus Schwab, CEO and founder of World Economic Forum, along with billionaire philanthropists George Soros and Bill Gates and other owners, managers, and shareholders of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Finance who meet at the WEF retreats at Davos, Switzerland, contended Lukacs.

Transhumanism is far from a benign doctrine. Rather, it is at complete enmity with Christianity, Lukacs pointed out during the virtual in Truth Over Fear Summit organized by California-based Catholic writer and broadcaster Patrick Coffin.

Transhumanists take science as their religion and believe in a philosophy of absolute relativism that claims that individuals can change reality at will, and they seek to relativize the human being and turn it into a putty that can be modified or molded to our taste and our desire and by rejecting those limits nature or God have placed on us.

Transhumanism therefore requires the destruction of the Judeo-Christian morality, which is based on absolute principles and values.

Those raising alarm about the Great Reset often overlook the crucial role of technology in the plans of the meta-capitalists, contended Lukacs, who has Ph.D. in management from the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR) from the University of Manchester.

The COVID-19 pandemic was just another social engineering project deliberately planned and implemented by predatory meta capitalism to achieve the ultimate end: redefining and reconfiguring the human nature and condition, he argued in a presentation in Spanish.

I have the firm conviction that this pandemic has been manufactured and its purpose is none other than to initiate, as they say, or implement the Great Reset, which will open the door to the advancement of the transhumanist agenda, he said.

Indeed, WEFs Schwab has been promoting the Great Reset as a way to harness the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term he coined, which, he declared in January 2016, will affect the very essence of our human experience.

Schwab described the Fourth Industrial Revolution then as a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines among the physical, digital and biological spheres, Lukacs said.

Those technologies include genetic engineering such as CRISPR genetic editing, artificial intelligence (A.I.), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, and quantum computing.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is nothing other than the implementation of transhumanism on a global level, emphasized Lukacs.

Transhumanism as a political ideology and cultural movement was defined in 1998 by Swedish economist Nick Bostrom, then a professor at Oxford, and David Pearce, a British philosopher, who that year founded the World Transhumanist Association.

More recently, Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and author of Homo Deus, who is regarded as a great visionary, has been promoting transhumanism.

Transhumanists propose to use technology to alter human nature to produce human beings with super longevity, super intelligence, super well-being, Lukacs said.

They reject the Christian belief in absolute truth, and that God created human person in His image and likeness, and see absolute values as a brake for their pretensions of transhumanist and globalist progressivism.

Thats why the approval of abortion is key to understanding why we are entering fully into this transhumanist agenda of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Lukacs said.

When abortion was approved, the political, economic order and moral values on which Western civilization is based collapsed.

Abortion means nothing other than the transition of the human being from a subject of rights to an object of commercialization, to an object of experimentation, he said.

Life ceases to have an inherent value, an inherent dignity. It becomes an object of consumption, an object of production, and this aligns perfectly with the goal of transhumanists to experiment with the human being.

Transhumanism is a struggle against those propositions of absolute values, said Lukacs, and what it embodies in progressivism is absolute relativism.

Evidence that absolute relativism has caught hold in the Western world is the rapid and widespread rise in trangenderism.

Lukacs also noted cases of transspecisim, transageism, transableism, and transracism.

Examples of these attempts to reshape ones reality at will include the American known as Lizard Man, the Canadian man living as a six-year-old, the British woman who blinded herself because she wanted to be disabled, and the German woman who injected herself with melatonin to darken her skin to identify as black.

These are previous states of transhumanism, a kind of accustoming, especially of the new generations, to accept this diversity, Lukacs said.

While many transhumanist proposals are rooted in science fiction, Lukacs pointed out they now have the technology to attempt to realize their mad aspirations.

Transhumanists propose to increase longevity by using CRISPR genetic editing, which has been used to triple the lifespan of mice. Thus, using this technique on human beings, it is conceivable that people could live to the age of 200 or 300 years old, he said.

They propose to increase human intelligence by planting chips in people that have greater processing capacity than the human brain.

An example is Elon Musks NeuraLink, which is an interface that is applied to the cerebral cortex and which Musk says will help people with Alzheimers or epilepsy, but which Lukacs speculates could open the door to neuro-hackers.

There is also the post-humanist school of transhumanism, of which economist Bostrom is a proponent.

Bostrom proposes that at some point it will not even be necessary to have a physical body, but we will be a set of information, that we will be able to upload our thoughts to the Cloud, that we will be able to form a great collective intelligence with other human beings, Lukac said.

As for the promise of super wellbeing, philosopher Pearce said it was the hedonist imperative to genetically modify us to aspire to super well-being.

What Pearce is saying is that through genetic modification, were going to be virtuous human beings, and that we have to forget about pain and suffering, we have to get rid of those genes that make us aggressive, violent, jealous, that force us to fight and kill each other, said Lukacs.

When you put all these things into the balance, what you are realizing is what you are looking at is literally the destruction of human beings, of Homo sapiens, and their conversion to Homo deus.

But as with the Great Reset, the elites twist the language and disguise their transhumanist agenda behind vaguely benign phrases, so Schwabs Fourth Industrial Revolution is sold to us as an idea thats not necessarily going to affect us, or that it is progress that will benefit humanity, he said.

However, just as ordinary people will suffer in the Great Reset under the architecture of oppression, as Edward Snowden phrased it, so they will bear the brunt of the experimentation by transhumanists.

Its very worrying because for achieving that kind of dream, many, many mistakes will happen for sure. The burden will be carried by the people that get affected by this in their health, in their lives, in their economic situation and in their psychological or mental state, said Lukacs.

Its a very, very costly experiment. And [the elites] are not going to bear any responsibility for this. Trust me, he told Coffin.

For them, its wonderful. For the rest, this is just dystopian.

Lukacs also contended that the global elites encountered an unexpected roadblock to their plans in U.S. president Donald Trump.

Actually, the structure of power is not that complicated, he told Coffin in an online Q&A session.

At the top are the meta-capitalists or capitalists that have so much financial muscle that they can play beyond the rules of capitalism; actually, they make the rules of capitalism or remake them, he said.

And you have those guys on Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, Big Construction, everything big, the big corporate transnational world. Those are the billionaires who through their philanthropies, their billion-dollar pledges and all this kind of stuff, they funnel money downwards to all the politicians, who are basically rented politicians, they rent them, they run the world for them, he said.

Its really the privatization of power through philanthropy, added Lukacs.

And then, of course, you will have a layer of middle ground or middle level institutions, NGOs, universities, foundations, and then youll go down to grassroots local government. Its a pyramidal structure.

But Trump is one key public figure who could evidently not be rented.

It is so obvious that in the States right now for the past, what, four, five months, a state coup has been in the making. As simple as that. I have no problem in saying it openly, Lukacs told Coffin.

Thats the situation. They have tried to oust a president that was democratically elected because they are desperate. China is still progressing. And their partners in the West, theyre just not catching up. So, they are a little bit desperate. China is not going to wait.

For more information on Truth Over Fear Summit, go here. Premium passes are still available.

Related:

Abp. Vigan warns Trump about Great Reset plot to subdue humanity, destroy freedom

Time Magazine announces The Great Reset to usher in world socialism

Physicians: Masks dont control viruses, they control you, pandemic is over

Trump should prepare for possible imminent release of more dangerous COVID-20 or 21

Its child abuse for scientists to gene-edit human embryos and then destroy them: Ethicist

Meet the liberal billionaires trying to become cyborgs

Life is winning!

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement needs a truthful voice in the media now more than ever. Please donate today to help our coverage reach millions around the globe. Pro-lifers around the world and the innocent unborn children are counting on you to give them a voice.

View post:

Transhumanism: Expert exposes liberal billionaire elitists Great ...

Dr. Carrie Madej: why vaccines alter the human DNA

Posted on by

This list is a mere starting point for you, to do your own research. Dr. Madej studied this for twenty years, so the actual basis of her knowledge is much larger than this list.

https://pubs.rsc.org/--/content/articlelanding/2015/ra/c5ra01508a#!divAbstract

Why “Operation Warp Speed” Could Be Deadly

https://www.facebook.com/1780584826/posts/10213711458378968/?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/

https://kenfm.de/bill-gates-predicts-700000-victims-from-corona-vaccination/

https://www.national-geographic.com/science/2020/05/moderna-coronavirus-vaccine-how-it-works-cvd/?fbclid=IwAR1EFM74n4ulVp8pEufYOA9vN13CCyYeKoXdnWpk-R_0gZoDgflr3w5N0T4#close

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2020/07/29/modernas-mysterious-coronavirus-vaccine-delivery-system/#2226d81562d9

Gene Drive Files Expose Leading Role of US Military in Gene Drive Development.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/30/gene-drive-research-fight-diseases-can-proceed-cautiously-un-group-decides/

https://youtu.be/iMl0ty6evhU https://steemit.com/life/@pranavsinha/bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-kicked-out-of-india

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=ksEVaO806Oo

https://youtu.be/Ofdd4ILdpVY https://scialert.net/fulltext/?doi=biotech.2011.136.148

http://ir.inovio.com/news-releases/news-releases-details/2020/INOVIOs-COVID-19-DNA-Vaccine-INO-4800-Demonstrates-Robust-Neutralizing-Antibody-and-T-Cell-Immune-Responses-in-Preclinical-Models/default.aspx

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232740966_What_you_always_needed_to_know_about_electroporation_based_DNA_vaccines

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-business/article-astrazeneca-to-be-exempt-from-coronavirus-vaccine-liability-claims-in/

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/20-things-you-didn't-know-about-dna

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/gene-editing-moderna-and-transhumanism/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200715095500.htm

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC33911/

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-potential-coronavirus-vaccine-could-be-as-easy-as-sticking-on-a-bandage-2020-04-08

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3675524/#!po=0.446429

https://www.genengnews.com/topics/drug-discovery/quantum-dots-deliver-vaccines-and-invisibly-encode-vaccination-history-in-skin/

https://newatlas.com/snake-fang-microneedle-patch/60868/

Scientists Propose ‘Tattoos’ To Solve Vaccination Issues

https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/references/gibco-cell-culture-basics/transfection-basics/introduction-to-transfection.html

Injectable Body Sensors Take Personal Chemistry to a Cell Phone Closer to Reality

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarwantsingh/2017/11/20/transhumanism-and-the-future-of-humanity-seven-ways-the-world-will-change-by-2030/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200715095500.htm

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invisible-ink-could-reveal-whether-kids-have-been-vaccinated/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338044557_Biocompatible_near-infrared_quantum_dots_delivered_to_the_skin_by_microneedle_patches_record_vaccination

https://sciencebusiness.technewslit.com/?p=36802

Read more:

Dr. Carrie Madej: why vaccines alter the human DNA

Iris Van Herpen Showed Otherworldly 3D Manicures At Couture Fashion Week – NYLON

Posted on by

After 15 years in the industry, and officially celebrating their 15th-anniversary collection, Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen is looking into the future. Her new collection imagines a world where ethereal aliens cohabitate the planet with us mortals. At the Fall Winter 2022 Couture show this past weekend, attendees were transported to a new galaxy for Meta Morphism amongst the hustle and bustle of Paris Haute Couture Week. Further experimenting with her signature 3D printing style, van Herpen also matched the collections multidimensional, architectural clothes with hair, makeup, and nails looks the appeared to have a life of their own.

The theme of the show explored how the body will change in the face of post-human realities (including the metaverse) and asked who we are beyond our physicality. The models highly detailed and dynamic-shaped white, silver, and earth-toned outfits were complemented with transhuman manicures. Created by nail artist Tomoya Nakagawa, the translucent, glowing nail art overtook their fingers, with long oval ends and jellyfish-like 3D detailing that pointed back at the top of their hands.

For makeup, Chiao Li Hsu gave models gold and silver leaves around their eyes and bleached eyebrows on an otherwise natural, dewy base. Like the intricate garments, every finer detail was futuristic, with some models walking the runway with translucent sculptures across their faces. When it came to hair, stylists Olivier Schawalder and Bjorn Axen channeled aquatic mythological creatures with tail-like braids across the models faces. Some also had their hair slicked back with crowns.

Like everything at couture week, these fantastical beauty styles are not something that can easily traverse from the runway into daily wear. But theres no doubt that the Iris van Herpen show has us looking ahead and excited for the future of beauty. Whether its mythological hair or ethereal nails, we could all benefit from inserting some more imagination into our beauty routines. With that in mind, expect to see more space-age, transparent manicures, 3D nail art, and experimental braids coming soon.

Style + Culture, delivered straight to your inbox.

See the article here:

Iris Van Herpen Showed Otherworldly 3D Manicures At Couture Fashion Week - NYLON

The Myth of Bodily Autonomy | Gene Veith – Patheos

Posted on by

Perhaps the strongest arguments on the pro-abortion side are the variations of the claim that women should have the right to control their own bodies!

The notion of bodily autonomy is invoked in legal briefs, in protests over the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and in public opinion.

But Tish HarrisonWarren, a priest in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA)a conservative breakaway from the Episcopalians, but not so conservative that they dont have female priestshas written a remarkable op-ed for the New York Timesentitled Dobbs, Roe and the Myth of Bodily Autonomy. Also remarkable is that the Times let her have her say.

The op-ed is behind a paywall, but you can access it here. She develops three arguments, which I excerpt here:

1. Bodily autonomy is limited by our obligation not to harm others. . . .Our desires to do what we want with our bodies must be respected, but they must also be limited by the needs and rights of others, including those who live inside our own bodies.

2. The term autonomy denies the deep interdependence and limitations of each human body. . . .The natural state of human beings is to be deeply and irrevocably interdependent with each other. The only reason any of us are alive today is because someone cared for us as children in the womb and then as infants and toddlers. . . .

A child in the womb depends on a mother for life in a way that places a unique burden on a mother. But this burden does not end at birth. Parenthood at any stage is a tough one. A one-year-old baby is dependent on adults for food, protection and care in ways that can be deeply distressing, but we cant invoke bodily autonomy as a reason for neglecting a babys needs. one year old child. Abortion seems to punish a fetus for its lack of bodily autonomy and negate the deep trust that all of us who have bodies hold.

This deep interdependence that we all share comes with obligations to one another. We dont always choose how our body depends on others. And we often dont choose the obligations placed on our lives by others who depend on us. . . .

3. The pressing question in abortion is whether championing bodily autonomy requires us to override or undo biological realities. . . .

Whatever one thinks of sex and what it is for whether it is a sacred act or merely recreational pleasure we can all agree that sex is the only human activity that has the power to create life and that any potentially procreative sexual act therefore carries a certain level of risk that pregnancy may occur. . . .Yet the state does not impose this risk to produce human life; biology does. Except in the horrific circumstances of rape or incest, which account for 1% of abortions, women and men both have bodily power and choices about whether they will have sex and therefore whether they are ready to accept the risk of a new life that ensues.

Our bodies undeniably place a disproportionate reproductive burden on women. There is an inescapable asymmetry between male and female bodies when it comes to creating and carrying life. . . .Yet the state, in the end, cannot and should not save us entirely from the known realities of human biology.

A sperm and an egg unite to become a human being inside a womans body. The state does not force this to happen any more than it forces aging or weight loss from exercise or forces the lungs to take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide.

Of course, the rebellion against biological realities and against the body itself can be seen also in the transgender movement, the acceptance of which, like championing abortion, has become another required dogma of progressivism. This amounts to the imposition of another religion, namely, Gnosticism. This worldview, which is also evident in Transhumanism, permeates much of contemporary thought. See, for example, Gnostic America by Peter Burfeind (an LCMS pastor).

Just as the early church had to battle the heresy of Gnosticism, the contemporary church must do the same, insisting on the reality and value of the physical realm and the significance of the body. Towards that end, we would do well to read John Kleinigs new book Wonderfully Made: A Protestant Theology of the Body.

At any rate, Tish Harrison Warren deserves credit for contributing to the abortion debate in an important public forum. My fellow Patheos blogger Jim Denison discusses her article and cites it as an example of how Christians can make persuasive arguments in the public square.

HT: Jim Denison

Photo by Charles Edward Miller from Chicago, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Continued here:

The Myth of Bodily Autonomy | Gene Veith - Patheos

Gorillas have very small testicles, you know – Freethought Blogs

Posted on by

. . .hes just doing his part to help humanity survive the loomingunderpopulation crisis?

++++++++Peter Watts: Attack of the Hope Police: Delusional Optimism at the End of the World?Apr 30, 2019Institute of Advanced Studies Koszeg (iASK) Felsobbfok Tanulmnyok Intzete

8:38 (/58:31)

Now the other assumption on the part of the give us solutions brigadeis that we dont already have solutions, that solutions have not beenstaring us in the face for decades. . .

(9:22)

And above all, stop breeding. I could fly back and forth acrossthe Atlantic every week for a solid year and my carbon footprint wouldstill not be anywhere close to the Godzilla-size bootprint thatpeople stamp onto the planet every time they have a kid.

But oddly, these do not seem to be the kind of solutions that theoptimism brigade are in the market for. . .

(23:14)

My fear isnt just that people will see it and deny the facts, myfear is that even if people accept the facts, they just wont act onthem. The current US administrations position on climate changeis a classic case in point. Now a lot has been made of Donald Trumpspersonal repudiation of climate change as a climate hoax and so on.The fact is, the Trump administration does not deny climate changeat all. The Trump administration is on record as admitting that theyexpect the worlds temperature to increase by 4 degrees Centigradebefore the end of the century. And they continue to dismantleenvironment protections not despite that insight, but because of it.Were already screwed, you see its already too late. Its toolate to save the planet, so why bother hobbling short-term economicprofits with a bunch of pointless environmental regulations that wonteven really change anything?

I said before that we werent scared enough. Why is that? Why arewe so blind to such an existential threat? Why is it that when afriend of mine, a university professor not a stupid man by anystretch of the imagination why is it that when he inseminates hiswife with twins, an act which is exactly as remarkable as two dogsfucking in the street and far, far more destructive ecologically he not only doesnt think theres anything wrong with that, heactually goes onto social media and brags about it? And why is itthat when he does that, everybody piles on with Oh my God, youregonna be a dad! and Oh, daddy times two! and Oh, you must beso proud!? Why is it that nobody ever says Wow, 7.6 billionisnt enough for you?? Why is it that nobody ever says Well done,dipshit! By the time your precious twins are in their 20s, theywill be fighting over the last government rations down at the armory,if they havent already been wiped out by some mutant strain ofmonkeypox, or starved to death because wheat rust took out theworlds grain supply.? And why is it that if anybody did doany of that they would be immediately set upon as an asshole anda jerk? Not because what they said was necessarily wrong, butbecause even facing an imminent environmental apocalypse, due entirelyto the weight of our own numbers and our own first-world consumption,producing more of us is somehow not only still considered an inalienableright, but somehow morally praiseworthy? Why is it that columnistsin progressive, climate-change-recognizing papers write snippy editorialsin which they insist that Not only will climate change not stop mefrom having kids, but shitting on people who have decided not toreproduce, calling them shamers and virtue signallers? Howcan Emma Teitelhttps://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2019/03/13/climate-change-will-not-stop-me-from-having-kids.htmlbe so goddamn stupid? How can all of us as a species be sogoddamn stupid?

Well, as it turns out, because nature kind of built us that way.Up until quite recently, delusional stupidity was a survival trait. . .

[Steven Pinker sez] Brains are not truth detectors.They are survival engines. They were shaped by natural selection.They are wired to promote immediate fitness. If believing a liehas helped you spread your genes throughout our evolutionary history,then your brain will probably continue to believe that lie withall its furry little heart. And the obvious biggie here isMy genes are more special. My child is the center of the universe.My family is the most important thing. And its trivially easyto see how natural selection would make us, shape us, to believethat kind of stuff, even though we now have evidence that statisticallyparents are more miserable with their lives than non-parents are.

But thats only one example out of a bunch of em. Heres anotherone. Give somebody a choice between five bucks today and twentybuck in two weeks, and most of the time they will choose the smaller,more immediate payoff. Now the technical term for this ishyperbolic discounting. . . You give somebody a choice betweena reduced standard of living today and environmental apocalypse in20 years, and you dont even have to guess what theyre gonna do.Cause the numbers are already in. Because its 20 years away.Because, you know, somebody will come up with something in themeantime. Because its all probably a Chinese hoax anyway. . .++++

On the other hand (from the Alt-Right, Intellectual Dark Webpoint of view):

++++++++Jordan Peterson Population Collapse Is ComingFeb 18, 2022Chris Williamson

Jordan Peterson responds to Elon Musks population collapse prediction.What is the global population doing? Does Jordan Peterson think there aretoo many people on the earth? Are Elon Musks population collapse andpopulation decline predictions going to happen?

Williamson: Rolling the clock forward, you and Elon [Musk]tweeted recently about population collapse. You think itsgonna happen, then?

Peterson: Oh, well, Ive thought for at least ten years thatthe biggest problem in 50 years is that theres just not enoughpeople.

Williamson: I remember hearing you say a few years ago that youthough wed peak about 9 billion. . .

Peterson: Yeah, we probably wont hit 9. Yeah. And Idont have stats, because. . .

Williamson: Think about how crazy it is to think that we mightbe living on Earth, right now, at the time with the most number ofhumans that are ever going to exist at one time, ever.

Peterson: Yeah, thats highly probable. And you know, and thepopulation. . .

Williamson: That blows my mind.

Peterson: . . .the population collapse in developed countries isprecipitous.

Williamson: Right.

Peterson: Its like we fall off a cliff, because theres no kids. . .

Williamson: Everyone knows this from the pandemic, the r-nought number.If fewer people are reproducing, next generation you have fewer peopleto reproduce as fewer people are reproducing, and they oof .

Peterson: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I. . .

Williamson: And you think. . .

Peterson: Well, I I worked on a UN committee, about its gotta be10 years ago now to help draft the UN Secretary Generals report onsustainable economic development, and so I looked at all sorts of things,like that. I was very curious, for example, about. . . Because,people have been beating the overpopulation drum since. . . well, itreally kicked in in the 1960s, you know, because there were direpredictions by the year 2000 the Club of Rome came out and saidwell, therell be riots and mass starvation and mass movement ofmigrants, and all the things you hear about climate change becausetheres too many people on the planet, and that just didnt happenat all. That was just it wasnt just wrong, it was anti-true.It was absolutely wrong. What happened instead was that everyone gotway richer. And the bottom section of the population in terms ofeconomic distribution got lifted out of poverty. Inequality stillexists, but thats that power-law phenomenon we already talked about.Not that thats trivial, its just unbelievably difficult to determinewhat to do with. There are solutions but, certainly getting rid ofcapitalism isnt the solution. And so, I looked at population trends,and first of all found not that this is an act of genius or anything that, as soon as you educate women, the size of the family shrinksprecipitously. Like below replacement. And thats partly becausewomen have other options, thats a huge part of it. . .

Williamson: Were seeing this play out, hm?

Peterson: Oh yes. I mean, all the countries in the West areway below replacement. Koreas way below replacement South Korea.Japan, way below replacement. Yeah, yeah.

Williamson: I think the number one, number one on the planet is might be Chad? Chad? Chad, the country? Uh. . .

Peterson: In terms of growth?

Williamson: Uh, eight children on average.

Peterson: Yeah, I think Nigeria will have more people in it thanChina by the end of the century. So, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and Musk you know, hes a far-looking man, and so hes looking around theapocalyptic corner, lets say: Oh, oh! Were running out ofpeople! And what that means, of course, is that you run out ofyoung people, right? You dont run out of old people first,cause everyone who is here now is gonna be 30 years older in30 years, and itll be young people we dont have enough of,and of course young people are the ones who do the innovation,and are going to do most of the heavy lifting, etc. And so, theresgonna be a terrible shortage of young people.

Williamson: Well, you see this with some of the things that Iposted with that O[ffice for][National][Statistics] data 50.1 percent of women childless by 30 and both men and womenare replying to that tweet saying Well good! Theres too manypeople on the planet in any case.

Peterson: Yeah. I know, I know.

Williamson: thinking how? . . this NPC [Non-Player Character, i.e. mindless]midwittery [someone who is around average intelligence but is so opinionatedand full of themselves that they think theyre some kind of genius:https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Midwit ]is so dangerous because it makes people believe that they actuallyhave something grounded backing up their claims.

Peterson: Yeah. Yeah, well, and this idea that the planet has toomany people on it, this is there is no sentiment more implicitlygenocidal than that statement.

Williamson: [laughs]

Peterson: So what do you mean too many people, exactly? And what doyou mean the planet? And what do you propose to do about that, exactly?Mass abortion, is that your answer? Or should we do something a littlemore dramatic? Maybe well just shame people out of having children.And Ive seen people do that. Literally I saw a professor, when I wasat a TED I think it was at. . . doesnt matter. There was a numberof professors talking to a couple hundred students. And one of theprofessors, who was an environmentalist activist type, and he got upon stage and shook his finger to the whole young crowd saying thathim and his wife had only decided to have one child which wasin my opinion one child too many for him. . .

Williamson: [chuckles]

Peterson: . . .and told all the young people there that if they hada shred of ethical decency that they would lim. . . severely limittheir reproductive potential, and. . . I stood up and said thatI thought that that was the most. . . one of the most appallingthings Id ever heard anyone in academia say to young people which is really something, cause they say plenty of appallingthings, and it was a very uncomfortable moment, and he huffed offthe stage. But, you know, in a frenzy, talking about how you couldnttalk about such things without being pilloried on ethical grounds,and yeah thats for sure. You come out as a, what emissary ofthe academic establishment, you tell young people that humanity isso corrupt that they should seriously consider not propagating becausethat violates the deepest of ethical norms, and you think thats agood thing and that thats your right and. . . It was just beyondcomprehension. Its beyond comprehension. But its associated with,like a deeply-rooted existential self-hatred. And I mean hatredat the level of: humanity is like a virus on the planet, that werea cancerous growth on. . .

Williamson: Alex Epstein calls this human racism.

Peterson: Hm. Hm. Right. Right.

Williamson: And its that.

Peterson: Yeah. Well, were a cancer on the planet, you know?Unchecked growth, just like a cancer. Its like thats us,eh, a cancer. Its OK, we know where your heart is located.Cause, whats the implications for a doctrine like that?What do you do with a cancer?

Williamson: Cut it out.

Peterson: Yeah, thats for sure. Poison it, or whatever, whatever.Theres nothing you dont do to a cancer. So are you gonna use ametaphor like that? Theres too many people on the planet?You gonna use a metaphor like that? You know. . . And then youregonna also decide that youre virtuous while youre using. . .Because youre on the side of the planet, whatever the hellthat means? So. . . yeah, its, its unbelievable, and a hugepart of its rooted in this existential shame and, and. . .horror at the condition of being human, and the fact that lifeis rife with suffering, and a lot of its unjustified, and. . .You know, its a Mephistophelian position, so. . . Mephistopheleswas laid out portrayed in Goethes Faust, um. . .thats the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil forknowledge. Its a story of intellectual pride, and Goethe standsin relationship to German literature in the same manner thatShakespeare stands in relationship to English literature.Goethes Mephistopheles says straight out, twice, in the play once in the first theres two books once in the first bookand once in the second Goethe has him restate it twice existence is such a foul thing because of all its suffering,essentially, that it would be better if it was merely annihilated.And thats the Mephistophelian stance this whole show should justcome to a halt, look at how corrupt people are, evil reigns everywhere,its nothing but will to power, were destroying the planetwith our unchecked ambition all rooted in greed and Machiavellianismand jockeying for position, and were so contemptible that weshould just roll up and die. And we should shame women into nothaving children, and we should shame men so they nevermanifest any planet-destroying ambition. And its unbelievablyappalling. It goes all the way down to the bottom. The bottomof things. Thats whats tearin our culture apart, thisdispute about the nature of existence at the most fundamentallevel. So and the universities have come out on thewrong side.++++

Well, you pays your money and. . .

I could almost imagine that Peter Watts was on stage when Jordan Petersongot up and objected. Theyre both Canadian. But Peter Watts isnta professor, hes a sci-fi author.

;->

See the original post:

Gorillas have very small testicles, you know - Freethought Blogs

The Most Powerful Characters In The Boys Ranked – /Film

Posted on by

Stormfront's Supe abilities are impressive for sure. She shoots purple lightning out of her hands to devastating effect, but can also use that gift as a propulsion system. So effectively, she can fly right alongside her one-time beau, Homelander. She's also invulnerable to ballistics, and like her contemporary Soldier Boy, seemingly immortal. She was an actual World War 2-era German Nazi and hasn't aged a day since, at least if you don't count the corrosion of her soul.

Stormfront's inexplicably good skin also gives her cover to rebrand as a Vought hero in Season 2, and team up with Homelander as a public couple. Like a lot of the worst people on "The Boys," she's got a real touch for manipulating the media. Secretly, of course, she wants to revive the Third Reich, and to that end, she does a great job of manipulating Homelander. He's not really interested in her cause, but it's not a turn-off for him either. Stormfront is probably the character who checks all the show's power player boxes: she's ruthless, physically powerful, deviously cunning, and great on camera. However, once her secret gets out, the public does turn on her. The biggest weakness a superhero can have in "The Boys universe is this kind of skeleton in the closet.

The rest is here:

The Most Powerful Characters In The Boys Ranked - /Film

NATO map: The three countries that could attack Russia first in WW3 – Express

Posted on by

Newly minted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz succeeded Angela Merkel in late 2021, after a campaign where he was conspicuously silent on NATO nuclear deterrent plans.

Germany is not a nuclear-capable nation, despite having the facilities to produce warheads, but is included in NATO's weapon sharing agreements.

Under the Scholz administration, the country has ramped up defence spending amid the crisis in Ukraine.

He pledged to raise defence spending to two percent of Germany's GDP and increased the annual defence budget from 50.3 billion to nearly 70 million.

As part of this push, German defence minister Christine Lambrecht announced the government would replace its Tornado bomber jets with US-made F-35A Lightning II aircraft.

While she didn't mention nuclear production, Ms Lambrecht said these planes could deliver nuclear warheads.

The German Chancellor has demonstrated a readiness to defend his country from potential aggression, meaning his forces would be well equipped to respond to active warmongering in Western Europe and beyond.

Read the original post:

NATO map: The three countries that could attack Russia first in WW3 - Express

Posted in Ww3

The Facts on White Nationalism – FactCheck.org

Posted on by

In the wake of the attack on two New Zealand mosques, President Donald Trump said he did not see white nationalism as a rising threat around the world, but rather a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.

Experts, however, say there are a number of indicators that suggest white nationalism and white supremacy and violence inspired by them are on the rise, in the U.S. and around the world.

The issue of white nationalism came to the forefront after a gunman opened fire at two mosques in New Zealand on March 15, killing at least 50 people.In a manifesto posted by the alleged shooter, he describes himself as an ordinary white man whose goal was to crush immigration and deport those invaders already living on our soil and ensure the existence of our people, and a future for white children. In it, he answers the question of whether he is a supporter of Trump: As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.

When a reporter told Trump on March 15 about the reference in the manifesto, Trump condemned the attack, which he described as a horrible, disgraceful thing and a horrible act.

The presidentwas also asked by a reporter whether he saw today, white nationalism as a rising threat around the world.

I dont really, Trump replied. I think its a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps thats the case. I dont know enough about it yet. Theyre just learning about the person and the people involved. But its certainly a terrible thing.

Shortly after Trump made his comment, a reporter askedNew Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern whether she agreed with Trumps belief that he did not think white supremacy worldwide was a problem that was rising in any way.

No, Ardern responded tersely.

On CNNs State of the Union on March 17, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib said Trump needs to pick up the phone and call the Department of Justice.

Tlaib, March 17: Theres real data and information currently right now of the rise of white supremacy right here in this United States of America. He needs to look at the data and the information and the facts and actually listen and understand the tremendous responsibility he has in being our president, our leader of our country.

He cannot just say its a small group of people. Theres too many deaths, not only from the synagogue to the black churches to the temples to the now the mosques. We need to be speaking up against this, and it has to start with him reiterating the importance of real information and data that says its on the rise.

You cant just say it isnt, when the facts say the complete opposite.

So, what do the data show?

Lets start with the Justice Departments FBI data on hate crimes, since that was specifically referenced by Tlaib.

According to the FBI, there were 7,175 hate crime incidents in 2017, a 17 percent increase from 2016and the third year in a row with an increase. The number of incidents in 2017 was also the highest yearly total since 2008. About 58 percent of the hate crimes in 2017 were motivated by race/ethnicity/ancestry.

Digging deeper into the numbers, anti-black or African American hate crime rose 16 percent to 2,013 incidents in 2017; anti-Hispanic incidents rose 24 percent, with 427 incidents; anti-Arab crimes doubled to 102 incidents. Anti-Jewish hate crime incidents also rose 37 percent to 938 in 2017, but anti-Islamic hate crimes dipped 11 percent to 273.

Experts, however, caution that the FBIs hate crime statistics are an imperfect way to track the rise of white nationalism. Not all of the hate crimes overall were committed by white nationalists (some of the documented incidents, for example, were anti-white). The data do not identify the perpetrators that way.

There was also an increase in the number of agencies participating in reporting hate crimes to the FBI and a subsequent increase in the population covered of 5.7 percent between 2016 and 2017. So some of the increase is likely tied to that alone.

Issues also have been raised about inconsistencies in the ways different jurisdictions report hate crimes, which skews the data. There are clearly differences in reporting standards used by different agencies, Heidi Beirich, who leads the Southern Poverty Law Centers Intelligence Project, told us. She noted, for example, that there was just one assault reported as a hate crime in Alabama in 2017, compared with 242 in California which she said suggests hate crimes are under-reported in Alabama.

Beirich said there is a lot of evidence pointing to a rising threat from white nationalism, but, she said, Im not sure FBI hate crime statistics prove the point. She notes that a Department of Justice crime victimization survey in 2015 found U.S. residents experienced an average of 250,000 hate crime victimizations each year from 2004 to 2015. But the survey does not show trends over time, Beirich said.

FBI hate crime data doesnt fit into a neat package when it comes to tracking the threat of white nationalism, John D. Cohen, a former counterterrorism coordinator and acting under secretary for intelligence and analysis of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama, told us in a phone interview. But Cohen, who also served in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under President George W. Bush, agrees there are other, more telling measures.

There is pretty broad agreement among law enforcement in the U.S. and the European Union that violence as a result of far-right groups, particularly white supremacists, is on the rise, said Cohen, who is currently a professor at Rutgers-Newark. Its a growing problem. We are seeing more hate crimes and targeted attacks by people who identify with that ideology.

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks domestic extremism, last month reported a 7 percent rise in hate groups in the U.S. in 2018, with 1,020 groups identified. White nationalist groups, specifically, surged nearly 50 percent, growing from 100 chapters in 2017 to 148 in 2018.

Last year marked the fourth year in a row that the number of hate groups increased, after a short period of decline. The rise, SPLC says, was fueled by political polarization, anti-immigrant views and the ease of spreading those ideologies through the internet.

Beirich noted that Alexa web traffic analytics show the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer site now gets about 4.3 million page views a month.

More and more people are interested in their ideas, she said.

In an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken just after the Charlottesville rally in August 2017, 9 percent of the respondents said they thought it was strongly or somewhat acceptable to hold neoNazi or white supremacist views. As ABC News reported at the time, thats equivalent to about 22 million Americans.

The Anti-Defamation League, meanwhile, reports that white supremacy groups have stepped up their propaganda efforts.

ADLs Center on Extremism (COE) continues to track an ever-growing number of white supremacist propaganda efforts, including the distribution of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic fliers, stickers, banners and posters, according to a recent ADL report. The 2018 data shows a 182% increase of incidents from the previous year, with 1,187 cases reported, compared to 421 in 2017.

The group said that level of activity far exceeded any of its previous distribution counts.

The ADL also reported that the number of racist rallies and demonstrations rose last year. At least 91 white supremacist rallies or other public events attended by white supremacist were held in 2018, up from 76 the previous year, with hate groups increasingly employing flash mob tactics to avoid advance publicity and scrutiny, the ADL reported.

We are seeing an increase in the public expression of far right, white supremacist ideological viewpoints, Cohen told us. It is more open in its expression, both online and in protests like in Charlottesville.

Cohen said he prefers to look at the issue from the perspective of an overall threat assessment. In todays climate, he said, its not just a matter of tabulating the number of members of various white nationalist groups. The internet and social media have changed the game. People self-connect with ideologies espoused by hate groups online. They often act independently of those groups, he said, though they may be inspired by their messages.

So while the number of white nationalists could have remained steady, the threat they pose may be increasing, Cohen said. Whereas people with these ideas used to be isolated geographically, they are now able via the web to reach people who are disaffected and mentally unwell, inspiring them to commit violent acts.

A November report called The Rise of Far-Right Extremism in the United States from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that the number of terrorist attacks by far-right perpetrators rose over the past decade, more than quadrupling between 2016 and 2017. There has also been a rise in far-right attacks in Europe, jumping 43 percent between 2016 and 2017.

The threat from right-wing terrorism in the United Statesand Europeappears to be rising, wrote the reports author, Seth G. Jones. Of particular concern are white supremacists and anti-government extremists, such as militia groups and so-called sovereign citizens interested in plotting attacks against government, racial, religious, and political targets in the United States.

Another indicator is the perception among minority groups about the threat they face. Cohen pointed to a December 2018 report from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights that surveyed nearly 16,500 individuals who identify as being Jewish from 12 European Union countries and found widespread fear of being targeted for harassment and attacks.

Trump may be correct that those who are members of white nationalist groups, compared with the overall population, are a small group of people, Cohen said. If one looks at the number of gun crimes in the U.S., for example, the number of violent attacks carried out by white nationalists is a relatively small subset, he said. But law enforcement officials are concerned about the rising threat of white nationalists, their growing influence through social media and the devastating impact hate-inspired attacks have on the public.

The House Judiciary Committee plans to hold a hearing in April on the rise of white nationalism in the U.S. According to the Daily Beast, the committee expects to bring in officials from within DHS and the FBI for questioning on the rise of white nationalism in the U.S and the efforts the agencies are currently adopting to combat it.

See the original post:

The Facts on White Nationalism - FactCheck.org

In the Fight Against White Nationalism, White People Are Key – American …

Posted on by

White supporters of racial justice around Buffalo have watched white nationalist ideologies creep into their communities. Theyve mobilized to convince people that white nationalism is not the answer.

SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:

The mass shooting that killed 10 Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., has renewed the focus on white nationalists and racism as a growing threat to American life. Its also left officials and the public struggling with how to fight that threat. Buffalo, it turns out, is a place where activists have been working for years to do just that by trying to use their influence as white people. NPRs Adrian Florido reports.

ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: When Erin Heaney learned that the white gunman in the grocery store massacre felt white people were threatened by the growth of the countrys non-white population, it all sounded familiar.

ERIN HEANEY: The white replacement theory Ive heard less intense versions of that here in Buffalo my entire life.

FLORIDO: Heaney is national director of a group that mobilizes white people to support the fight for racial justice. She was born in Buffalo around the time its last steel plants were closing.

HEANEY: For those of us who are white, weve grown up with these stories that it was communities of color, not, you know, people in power or policy decisions by elected officials that has caused so much suffering in our communities.

{snip}

FLORIDO: Its the story of many Rust Belt communities struggling to recover from deindustrialization. Its a story, Heaney says, that white nationalist groups know they can seize upon to make inroads in places like this. We drove to a white working-class suburb near Buffalo and took a walk. A couple of years ago, Heaney said, the Ku Klux Klan and other supremacist groups canvassed this and other nearby suburbs with flyers.

Why are white nationalist groups flyering these neighborhoods?

HEANEY: Because this is a majority white community, they assume that they can recruit and maybe build more support in this community. Its a place where, you know, folks are working hard. Some folks are struggling, and, you know, people are trying to find a reason for why theyre struggling. And a lot of these extremist groups think they have the answer to that.

FLORIDO: When they learned about this, Heaneys group, known as SURJ short for Showing Up for Racial Justice decided not to ignore it. The group did its own door-knocking, asking people how they felt about white supremacists coming into their neighborhoods. Some people were angry.

HEANEY: You know, some people didnt want to engage at all. And some people were conflicted.

FLORIDO: And it was those people, the conflicted ones, that SURJ knew they needed to focus on white people who might not realize theyre inching closer to white nationalist ideas, drawn in by the internet or by family or by politicians or by right-wing media {snip}

{snip}

FLORIDO: The philosophy that SURJ applies to its work across the country is that fighting white nationalism requires shaming and calling it out wherever it shows up. In 2017, they campaigned against the Buffalo sheriffs reelection after he refused to denounce people who waved Confederate flags during one of his speeches, and they disrupted local school board meetings demanding the removal of a board member who made racist comments.

{snip}

FLORIDO: This is the sort of organizing that Black and brown people do all the time. SURJs director Erin Heaney says white people do it less, but when they do, its harder for other white people to dismiss them.

HEANEY: And so we think its really important that there are white people showing another way to be white that is not racist and white supremacist.

{snip}

Read the original here:

In the Fight Against White Nationalism, White People Are Key - American ...

Jemar Tisby: White Christian nationalism fueled Jan. 6 attack

Posted on by

The House select committees hearings on the 2021 Capitol insurrection, which begin on June 9, should not neglect a key driver of the attack: white Christian nationalism.

White Christian nationalism is the belief that Americas founding is based on Christian principlesand that Christianity should be the foundation of how the nation develops its laws, principles and policies, as my co-author defined it in a report we wrote earlier this year for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

This ideology played a crucial part in fomenting the insurrection, from the buildup and dry runs that occurred immediately following Election Day in November 2020 to the attack itself. It was clear the terrorists perceived themselves to be Christians, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges testified before the House in July 2021.

Luke Mogelson the New Yorker journalist who filmed the shocking video of the attack from inside the Capitol similarly remarked: The Christianity was one of the surprises to me in covering this stuff, and it has been hugely underestimated. That Christian nationalism you talk about is the driving force and also the unifying force of these disparate players. Its really Christianity that ties it all together.

The white Christian nationalist version of patriotism is racist, xenophobic, patriarchal and exclusionary. And it celebrates the use of violent force, as dramatically seen on Jan. 6, 2021.

But white Christian nationalism is not the only way Christians have understood the link between religious commitments and political activism. In contrast to those who preach white Christian nationalism, many Black Christian communities have historically embraced a different kind of patriotism, one that leads to an expansion of democratic processes, the inclusion of marginalized people and nonviolent calls for the nation to live up to its foundational ideals.

Historical leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as contemporary leaders such as Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., civil rights activist and lawyer Bernice King, and LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter have been outspoken about their Christian faith as the foundation for their pursuit of a multiracial, participatory democracy.

And yet, despite Black Christians and other inclusive religious communities alternative visions of faith, white Christian nationalism remains the most dominant force of religion in U.S. politics and represents an urgent risk to democracy in the nation. Networks of power and money prop up white Christian nationalism and give it outsized influence in national civic life and discourse.

Its sway over political leaders depends largely on its ability to deliver significant numbers of votes in a consistent way. While there are several ways that white Christian nationalists mobilize voters, perhaps the movements biggest draw is that it reconciles two seemingly contradictory notions: that our nation, a Christian nation, is the greatest on Earth and, at the same time, it is overrun with alien and evil forces.

White Christian nationalism, for its role in the Jan. 6 insurrection alone, is a harmful and extremist belief system that deserves more public alarm. At present, it is the greatest threat to democracy and maintaining the peaceful transfer of power in the United States. We neglect this dangerous ideology at our own peril.

Jemar Tisby, Ph.D., is a New York Times bestselling author, national speaker, and public historian. He is the author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Churchs Complicity in Racism and How to Fight Racism.

2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Read more:

Jemar Tisby: White Christian nationalism fueled Jan. 6 attack

Buffalo gunman’s racism appears linked to mainstreaming of white …

Posted on by

Amid the outpouring ofgrief and heartache following Saturday's massacre in Buffalo that left 10 people dead and three wounded, critical observers say the racial animus which evidence shows motivated the killer must be seen in the larger context of a white nationalist mindset that has increasingly broken into the mainstream of the right-wing political movement and Republican Party in recent years.

Taken into custody at the scene of the mass shooting at the Tops Market was Payton Gendron, the white 18-year-old male who has charged with murdering the victims. Gendron live-streamed his attack online and also posted a detailed, 180-page document that has been described by those who have reviewed it including journalists and law enforcement as a white nationalist manifesto rife with anti-Black racism, antisemitism and conspiracy theories about "white replacement."

RELATED:Mass shooting in Buffalo: Tucker Carlson and other right-wing conspiracy theorists share the blame

According tolocal outletNews 4in Buffalo:

The document, which News 4 has reviewed, plotted the attack in grotesque detail. The writer plotted his actions down to the minute, included diagrams of his path through the store and said he specifically targeted the Tops Markets location on Jefferson Avenue because its zip code has the highest percentage of Black people close enough to where he lives.

"This was pure evil," said Erie County Sheriff John Garcia during a press conference on Saturday. The attack, he said, "was straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community."

A senior law enforcement official in BuffalotoldNBC Newsthat officials were working to verify the document's authenticity and confirm Gendron was behind it.

"We are aware of the manifesto allegedly written by the suspect and we're working to definitively confirm that he is the author," the official said.

NBC, which reviewed the document, reports:

The manifesto includes dozens of pages of antisemitic and racist memes, repeatedly citing the racist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory frequently pushed by white supremacists, which falsely alleges white people are being "replaced" in America as part of an elaborate Jewish conspiracy theory. Other memes use tropes and discredited data to denigrate the intelligence of non-white people.

In the manifesto, Gendron claims that he was radicalized on 4chan while he was "bored" at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.

The document also claims "critical race theory," a recent right-wing talking point that has come to generally encompass teaching about race in school, is part of a Jewish plot, and a reason to justify mass killings of Jews.

The manifesto also includes repeated references to another mass shooter motivated by racial hate, Brenton Tarrant, who in 2019 live-streamed his vicious Islamophobic assault on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he murdered 51 people and wounded dozens of others.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

With these and other facts established about Gendron's apparent motivations and ideology, many of those horrified by Saturday's killings responded by saying the brutal and deadly attack in Buffalo cannot and should not be separated from the growing embrace of the far-right nationalism that has increasingly found a home inside more mainstream institutions in the U.S., including right-wing media outlets like Fox News and a Republican Party enthralled by the xenophobic and fascistic conspiracy theories of Donald Trump.

"We are horrified, heartbroken, and enraged at the news of the vicious attack on our neighbors and loved ones in Buffalo, New York," said People's Action, the progressive advocacy group, in a statement.

"This racist attack is a pure example of evil," the group added. "It's also the predictable result of the relentless onslaught of white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories spewed from the far right, increasingly distributed by major corporate news outlets like Fox News and the extremist politicians their billionaire allies have cultivated."

"In Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas and Poway, California and now again in Buffalo, New York, a gunman motivated by a white nationalist conspiracy theory about invading immigrants shot and killed people of color," saidSumayyah Waheed, senior policy council for Muslim Advocates, in a statement referencing a series of mass shootings carried out by white supremacists in recent years.

"In Christchurch, El Paso, Poway, California, and now in Buffalo, a gunman. motivated by white nationalist conspiracy theory ... shot and killed people of color."

"Just like in Christchurch," Waheed continued, "the alleged Buffalo shooter both posted a manifesto about the 'great replacement' conspiracy theory and also livestreamed his massacre on social media. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims and to the people of Buffalo."

In a statement on Sunday, Kina Collins, a gun violence prevention advocate and Democratic congressional candidate running for Congress in Illinois' 7th district, made similar arguments.

Calling the shooting a "devastating and sickening display of the racism, white supremacy, hate, and gun violence that plague this country," Collins said, "Black people in Buffalo were targeted for no reason other than that they are Black."

"This was an act of terrorism and it should be treated as such," she added. "It is another reminder that white supremacy has and will always be America's greatest threat. White supremacy has infiltrated our military and police departments. It was also on display on January 6th last year as insurrectionists, fueled by white supremacy, attacked our Capitol and threatened the lives of sitting members of Congress."

Journalist Sam Sacks also made a connection between the Buffalo shooter and the "Big Lie" movement that drove the Jan. 6 insurrection last year.

Waheed in his statement said, "This hateful, white nationalist rhetoric is not just being spread by lone gunmen."

Such rhetoric, he said, "can also be found on cable news and in the rhetoric of politicians today. On his cable news show, Tucker Carlson said that 'the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.' In campaign ads, Donald Trump described Latino immigrants as an 'invasion.' In a speech, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called the election of Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib 'an Islamic invasion of our government.'"

With Republicans and major media personalities "normalizing white nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Latino, antisemitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories," and gunmen like the one in Buffalo carrying out such attacks, Waheed said it is now "clear that white nationalism is the greatest threat to our nation's security and we must hold everyone who spreads this hate accountable before anyone else is harmed."

Read more on white nationalism and the "great replacement" theory:

Read the original post:

Buffalo gunman's racism appears linked to mainstreaming of white ...

White supremacy poses increasing threats in the U.S.: We are dealing with a massive movement. – WBUR News

Posted on by

The presence and visibility of white nationalism are rising in the U.S., and the Patriot Front is one of the groups responsible.

Around 100 members of the group a rebrand of neo-Nazi group Vanguard America known for its role in the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 descended on Boston on July 2. They marched along Bostons Freedom Trail holding a banner that read Reclaim America and have been accused of attacking Black artist and activist Charles Murrell.

In June, 31 members of the Patriot Front were arrested in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on conspiracy to riot charges. Members arrived packed into a U-Haul truck with plans to disrupt a Pride event at a local park.

The group has chapters in 40 states. Patriot Front and other neo-Nazi groups have been tied to ideas of accelerationism, a theory that calls for violence to spur societal unrest.

The threat is large, says Pete Simi, a professor at Chapman University who testified in a trial that led to a $26 million verdict against organizers of the rally in Charlottesville. It's been large for a long time. And the near future poses a lot of risk.

On whats concerning about the groups beliefs

Their basic underlying beliefs while they may claim publicly that this is not the case support violence and support the necessity to use violence to, as they say, reclaim the country, to reclaim America, and to defend the white race. Patriot Front is active nationwide. These folks are leafleting. They're holding these kinds of marches across the country. They're on social media. So I think we can do a lot more to be prepared for when these folks come to town.

On Patriot Fronts recruiting measures and attempts to grow

The estimates back in 2019 put [Patriot Front at] around 300 members. It seems to be growing since then over the last few years. In terms of the recruitment on college campuses, we've seen their propaganda where I work at Chapman University on several occasions. That's happening across the country as well. We're seeing the recruitment of folks in the military. And I think it's important to understand the Patriot Front is part of a larger threat landscape. It's not just the Patriot Front in the singular. It's the plural that they represent in terms of this threat to democracy.

We are dealing with a massive movement. It's a global movement. There's certainly a national context to it. We saw it manifest itself in terms of the Jan. 6 insurrection. We saw it in Charlottesville, at the deadly rally there. We're seeing it with these single-actor attacks all over the country: Buffalo, El Paso and Pittsburgh. Time and time again, we're seeing those incidents of violence kind of written off as a single, lone, deranged actor instead of an actual movement that's promoting this kind of violence.

On the goals of the white supremacist movement at large

Accelerate the violence. Accelerate the destruction of society. Deconstruct the society, as Steve Bannon has advocated as former White House adviser to President Trump. The accelerationist ideas run deep across a wide web. This is a very broad web and we need to see the connections. This is not isolated to a singular group or set of individuals, but the accelerationist ideas have been prominent for quite some time among white supremacists and are taking hold more broadly.

Lynn Menegon produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Gabe Bullard.Grace Griffinadapted it for the web.

Read the original here:

White supremacy poses increasing threats in the U.S.: We are dealing with a massive movement. - WBUR News

Guerrero: Im officially reclaiming the U.S. flag from the fascists – Los Angeles Times

Posted on by

A few days ago, I stopped by CVS to buy cheap U.S. flag gear: a headband with two small flags glued to it, LED flag-themed glasses and a hat in red, white and blue. I wanted to see if I could rediscover my former enthusiasm for the flag.

Long before I was called anti-American (by devotees of the white demagogue), you could say I was a kind of patriot. The flag inspired in me a sense of pride.

But the flag has changed meaning for many of us. At the drugstore, I grabbed the patriotic items quickly and used self-checkout, hoping nobody would see. Though Donald Trump lost reelection nearly two years ago, the marketing master left a mark on the flag. Many Latinos and other people he scapegoated still recoil upon seeing it. It has become a stand-in for the GOPs white nationalist agenda.

Opinion Columnist

Jean Guerrero

Jean Guerrero is the author, most recently, of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.

The hopeful sense in November of 2020 that wed reclaimed the flag has died as the GOP deals blow after blow to hard-won equal rights, including womens right to bodily autonomy. The euphoria of a spontaneous dance party I joined at a Los Feliz gas station on Nov. 7, 2020 as Angelenos twerked with abandon amid U.S. flags is long gone.

How can we celebrate Independence Day, with its flags and belligerent displays of patriotism, when so many in our communities feel terrorized by such rituals? I dumped the flag merchandise on my sofa and squinted. The stuff looked clownish and sinister, like the authoritarian himself. I picked up the LED flag glasses and put them on. Stepped in front of the mirror. Disturbed, I took them off.

How had Trump come to live inside this symbol I once believed represented me?

As a child, Jean Guerrero proudly wore her American flag shirt.

(Courtesy of Jean Guerrero)

When I was 7 or 8, my mom bought me a T-shirt patterned like the flag. I wore it proudly, including on a visit to New York City when I posed on Ellis Island, with the Twin Towers in the background. The Statue of Liberty was spectacular, calling outcasts to our shores. My mother, who paid for medical school in Puerto Rico by enlisting in the National Health Service Corps, told me we lived in the land of opportunity.

A few years later, I watched the towers fall on TV from home in San Diego. President George W. Bush said we were attacked because were the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. My mother bought U.S. flags for our house. I joined a large human flag formation at Qualcomm Stadium. I painted flags on my face and waved patriotic pompoms.

It wasnt long before the fiction began to fray. I dreamed of becoming a journalist; early experiments in it taught me skepticism. Moreover, Id always sensed a conflict at the heart of my mothers patriotism. Where she cited a land of opportunity for all, I saw a Sisyphean topography for her.

In Greek legend, Sisyphus is doomed to roll a boulder up a mountain for eternity. My single mother seemed to be in an endless struggle for me and my sister. While raising us, she was also taking care of her elderly parents who had moved in with us from Puerto Rico. And she had developed a painful auto-immune disorder most common among women of color. Her license plate read: CLIMING.

The land of opportunity had a sinister side. Some people were condemned to climb forever.

Soon I learned Bush was using 9/11 as a pretext for war against innocent Muslims. I read about Mexicans dying at our militarized border. Later, as a reporter, I saw the bodies. I saw the U.S. guns displacing people in Latin America.

Then a Mexican-hating, Muslim-barring bully became president and raised a mob to attack the Capitol after he lost four years later. His Supreme Court paved a path to Gilead.

After all these horrors, how could the flag mean the same as it had before?

When I asked Myriam Gurba, a Long Beach activist and author of the coming essay collection Creep, whether she thought the flag was redeemable, she said: Some things need to be burned. I found myself agreeing with her.

U.S. protesters have a long tradition of burning the flag to demand change. Its a form of protected speech. But I personally couldnt do that. The flag has been at the center of so many courageous scenes in our history, not only shameful ones.

Later, while driving to see friends, I saw the small U.S. flags splayed on my car floor. They looked pitiful like trashed, once-treasured mementos. The sight triggered a reflexive protectiveness.

I didnt want to give up on the flag. Still, I had a hard time seeing past the moguls mark. I tossed my flag merchandise in my car, wanting it out of my place but unsure what to do with it.

I pulled up photos of the 2006 immigrant rights marches, when hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly Latinos, demonstrated in more than 140 cities. The U.S. flag was everywhere.

It must have been nightmarish to the nativists reading Samuel Huntingtons mad ravings about Latinos as a threat U.S. identity: a sea of U.S. flags among Latinos. (The dreaded reconquista, accomplished!)

It was a political maneuver and very strategic, said Toms Jimnez, a professor of sociology at Stanford University who studies American and racial identities. You saw Latinos and immigrants in general claiming it as a symbol for their lives.

Spanish-language radio host Eddie El Piolin Sotelo encouraged listeners to carry U.S. flags. We wanted them to show that we love this country, Sotelo told the Los Angeles Times. Bringing the U.S. flag, that was important.

In the flag-studded sea, Latinos saw a country that included them. The 2008 elections saw historic Latino voter turnout. Repurposed, the flag had a striking power: strengthening democracy.

Mythology is more useful as a political tool than rationality, the British Indian writer Rana Dasgupta told me. In those marches, pro-immigrant forces tapped into a powerful myth of American identity. However, Dasgupta argues, the political right lately shows the greater mastery of myth, fueling nationalism.

Democrats have shied away from boldly pro-immigrant policies and rhetoric. Theyre the party of moderation, mythologys kiss of death. But were a nation of immigrants. We can reimagine how inclusive a flag can be.

A Pew Research Center survey last year found that views on national identity here and in Western Europe are growing more inclusive despite xenophobic politics. As people meet more foreigners, their fear abates. And most Americans believe openness to the stranger is essential to who we are.

The U.S. flag should not belong to the fascists, who fail to grasp our strength. The flag should belong to the people carrying the boulder of this country on their backs.

Theyve been giving and giving and giving. They have every right to take back the flag.

@jeanguerre

See the article here:

Guerrero: Im officially reclaiming the U.S. flag from the fascists - Los Angeles Times

The Soviet Union never really solved Russian nationalism – Aeon

Posted on by

On 19 November 1990, Boris Yeltsin gave a speech in Kyiv to announce that, after more than 300 years of rule by the Russian tsars and the Soviet totalitarian regime in Moscow, Ukraine was free at last. Russia, he said, did not want any special role in dictating Ukraines future, nor did it aim to be at the centre of any future empire. Five months earlier, in June 1990, inspired by independence movements in the Baltics and the Caucasus, Yeltsin had passed a declaration of Russian sovereignty that served as a model for those of several other Soviet republics, including Ukraine. While they stopped short of demanding full separation, such statements asserted that the USSR would have only as much power as its republics were willing to give.

Russian imperial ambitions can appear to be age-old and constant. Even relatively sophisticated media often present a Kremlin drive to dominate its neighbours that seems to have passed from the tsars to Stalin, and from Stalin to Putin. So it is worth remembering that, not long ago, Russia turned away from empire. In fact, in 1990-91, it was Russian secessionism together with separatist movements in the republics that brought down the USSR. To defeat the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachevs attempt at preserving the union, Yeltsin fused the concerns of Russias liberal democrats and conservative nationalists into an awkward alliance. Like Donald Trumps Make America Great Again or Boris Johnsons Brexit, Yeltsin insisted that Russians, the Soviet Unions dominant group, were oppressed. He called for separation from burdensome others to bring Russian renewal.

The roots of nationalist discontent lay in Russias peculiar status within the Soviet Union. After the Bolsheviks took control over much of the tsarist empires former territory, Lenin declared war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism and proposed to uplift the oppressed nations on its peripheries. To combat imperial inequality, Lenin called for unity, creating a federation of republics divided by nationality. The republics forfeited political sovereignty in exchange for territorial integrity, educational and cultural institutions in their own languages, and the elevation of the local titular nationality into positions of power. Soviet policy, following Lenin, conceived of the republics as homelands for their respective nationalities (with autonomous regions and districts for smaller nationalities nested within them). The exception was the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or RSFSR, which remained an administrative territory not associated with any ethnic or historic Russia.

Russia was the only Soviet republic that did not have its own Communist Party, capital, or Academy of Sciences. These omissions contributed to the uneasy overlap of Russian and Soviet.

It was Joseph Stalin, a Georgian, who promoted Russians to first among equals in the Soviet Union, confirmed by his postwar toast that credited most of all, the Russian people with the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. Nikita Khrushchev continued the Soviet commitment to the formation of a multiethnic community that would eventually converge in a shared economic, cultural and linguistic system. In this Soviet melting pot, Russia was a kind of older brother, especially to the purportedly less-advanced peoples of Central Asia. Russian remained the Soviet language of upward mobility, Russian history and culture were the most celebrated, and Russians generally thought of the Soviet Union as theirs. Like white Americans who marked other groups as ethnic, Russians saw themselves as the norm in relation to national minorities.

By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union was a majority urbanised, educated society whose legitimacy had come to rest on its status as a stable welfare state. Freed from the terror, war and mass mobilisation of the previous decades, Soviet citizens spent their leisure time watching TV and listening to records (some officially banned, but easily available thanks to state-produced consumer technologies). After the horrors of the Second World War, in which 20 to 28 million Soviet citizens died, the hard-won stability of the postwar decades led some to wonder what a meaningful life looked like when the era of epic struggle was over. The question was particularly acute for the generation that reached adulthood after Stalins death in 1953. They inherited the Soviet states crowning achievements victory over Hitler, the conquest of space but lacked a unifying world-historical cause. Like their peers in other highly developed societies of the 1970s, they sought answers through self-improvement quests, spiritual awakening, aimless hedonism and environmental activism. Some Soviet citizens idealised the inaccessible West. Still others looked for roots in different national pasts. The Soviet empire subsidised distinct ethnocultural identities that were subordinate to a universalising Communist (Russian) one. As the latter grew hollow, the former was ready to fill the void.

The village prose writers expressed various nationalities sense that they were losing their patrimony. These authors, who were born in rural areas and studied in Moscow, framed village-dwellers as authentic bearers of tradition, in an elegiac key equivalent to foreign contemporaries such as Wendell Berry in the United States or the Irish writer John McGahern. The most catastrophist feared that Russias land and people were imperilled by forces beyond their control. Valentin Rasputins apocalyptic novel Farewell to Matyora (1976) was inspired by the flooding of his native village to create the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station. In the novel, the old widow Darya condemns the project as an ecological and spiritual catastrophe. She mourns the destruction of her ancestral home but, rather than relocating to the city, she and several others stay behind and drown.

Solzhenitsyn saw Communism as a foreign ideology that separated Russia from its Orthodox heritage

The village prose movement was not alone in perceiving Russian identity as under existential threat in the Soviet Union. Their concern was shared by Russian apparatchiks such as the Politburo member Dmitry Polyansky and members of the intelligentsia such as the October magazine editor Vsevolod Kochetov. In their view, the Soviet Union was the reincarnation of the Russian empire, destined to take up its historic mantle as an anti-Western autocracy rooted in a revitalised peasantry. It was supposedly held back by Jews (and, increasingly, people from the Caucasus and Central Asia), who leeched off Russians labour and resources, and impeded their advancement. Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet party-state turned to co-opting Russian nationalist sentiments in order to fortify its weakening legitimacy. Official institutions such as the Young Guard publishing house and the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Culture and Monuments served as key recruitment centres for the Russian nationalist cause.

Much of the culture that Russian nationalists produced was compatible with the Soviet Unions self-image. The painter Ilya Glazunov glorified figures such as Ivan the Terrible and St Sergius of Radonezh alongside portraits of Leonid Brezhnev, the Communist Partys General Secretary. The Slavophile critic Vadim Kozhinov declared that Russia had saved the world three times: from Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler. Importantly, praise for Russians achievements was sometimes paired with indignation about their mistreatment, and more radical materials circulated in samizdat (self-published form). Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who viewed Communism as a foreign ideology that separated Russia from its Orthodox heritage, was stripped of his Soviet citizenship after a vicious press campaign that accused him of choking with pathological hatred for the country and its people.

While Russian nationalists such as Solzhenitsyn were punished for directly challenging the Soviet claim to rule, Soviet rulers were punished for directly challenging Russian nationalism. In 1972, Alexander Yakovlev, the acting head of the Central Committees Propaganda Department and later a top advisor to Gorbachev, published a letter in a Soviet newspaper that attacked both dissident and officially aligned forms of Russian nationalism. The article led to Yakovlevs demotion to an ambassadorship in Ottawa.

The most popular and broadly relatable image of Russian victimisation was created by the writer, director and actor Vasily Shukshin. Shukshin was born in the Altai region of Siberia to a peasant father executed during Stalins forced collectivisation of agriculture (a fact that was excluded from his official biography as unbefitting for a Communist Party member). After moving to Moscow, he became known for playful short stories about eccentric rural men who resist conforming to modern life by playing the balalaika or steaming in the bathhouse. By the early 1970s, however, his characters were increasingly lost and marginalised. Shukshins last effort as a film director and his biggest hit, Kalina Krasnaya (1974) released in English as The Red Snowball Tree was centred on Egor, an ex-convict who struggles to find his place after fleeing hunger in the countryside as a young man. I dont know what to do with this life, Egor tells the saintly pen-pal who takes him in after his release from prison. Egor ultimately reconnects with his rural roots and takes up a new life as a tractor driver, but his redemption is cut short when his former gang shows up and shoots him dead in an open field. Dont pity him, Egors murderer says coolly as he smokes a cigarette. He was never a person he was a muzhik [peasant man]. And there are plenty of them in Russia.

Shukshins allegory of emasculation and deracination reflected his darkening outlook: in private remarks, he lamented the poor and depopulated state of Russias countryside, noting that most of his male relatives were alcoholics or in jail. Theres trouble in Rus, great trouble, he wrote in his notebook. I feel it in my heart. But his work was wryly sentimental rather than angry or accusatory, and his rise from the peasantry to the intelligentsia modelled official myths of upward mobility. Shukshin won top prizes and benefited from extensive state support.

However, when Shukshin died of a heart attack shortly after Kalina Krasnayas release, some nationalists whispered that he, like his most famous hero, was the victim of predation. The village prose writer Vasily Belov, a close friend, wrote in his diary that if [Jews] didnt poison [Shukshin] directly, then they certainly poisoned him indirectly. His entire life was poisoned by Jews. Shukshins cinematographer Anatoly Zabolotsky claimed in the draft of his memoirs (written in the early 1980s) that Shukshin had read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion before his death and was shocked to learn that a genocide was being committed against the Russian people. Zabolotsky suggested that the actor who played Egors killer and his (Jewish) wife had murdered Shukshin to protect the secret.

Until the late 1980s, Russian nationalists paranoid xenophobia (which included broadsides against disco music and aerobics) was semi-covert and irrelevant to most. During Gorbachevs perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness), however, when everything from Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago (1973) to astrology was openly permitted, nationalist intellectuals concerns found freer and wider expression in political life, where they latched on to broader dissatisfaction. As activists in the Caucasus and the Baltics began demanding greater cultural and political autonomy, in April 1989 Soviet troops crushed a large demonstration in Tbilisi.

Denunciations of this repression kicked off the opening sessions at the televised First Congress of Peoples Deputies of the USSR in May 1989. Valentin Rasputin, author of Farewell to Matyora, was among the delegates. After listening to Baltic and Georgian deputies complaints about Russian imperialism, Rasputin took the floor to bitterly suggest that

Under the influence of other republics demands, Russian nationalists long-running resentment was rapidly turning into separatism.

Enough feeding the other republics! he exclaimed in a speech to industrial workers

Gorbachevs political and economic devolution of the USSR produced chaos, including severe food shortages. The suddenly uncensored media exposed violence and degradation ranging from Stalinist repressions to the flailing war in Afghanistan. In response to the rush of bad news, the intelligentsia lamented Russias total ruin. The cultural historian and Gulag survivor Dmitry Likhachev said that the communist regime humiliated and robbed Russia so much, that Russians can hardly breathe. In Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2021), Vladislav Zubok recounts how the separatist idea gained momentum in the first half of 1990 thanks to three mutually hostile forces: Russian nationalists inside the party and elites; the democratic opposition that dominated Moscow politics; and the masses behind Gorbachevs rival, Yeltsin, a charismatic apparatchik who transformed into the peoples tsar.

Yeltsin, who was elected the first head of the Russian Supreme Soviet, riled up crowds by declaring that the Soviet Union was stealing from Russians to subsidise Central Asia. Enough feeding the other republics! he exclaimed in a speech to industrial workers, who responded with a chant against Gorbachev. Yeltsin called for Russias democratic, national, and spiritual resurrection and promised to redistribute resources to the people. Though Yeltsin adopted elements of conservative nationalists ideas, he was also pro-Western and pushed for further democratisation and marketisation, which they opposed.

In contrast to Yeltsin, Gorbachev dreamed of creating a common European home that would include all peoples of the USSR in a closer relationship with the West. By the end of 1990, all of the Soviet republics had responded to the vacuum of central authority and the example set by former Soviet satellites in eastern Europe by declaring themselves sovereign (and in several cases independent). Yet the future shape of their relationship with the union remained unclear, and possibly still compatible with Gorbachevs vision of a more equal federation.

In November 1990, Yeltsin travelled to Kyiv as part of a strategy to undermine Gorbachev by building a new union from below based on horizontal ties between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Like other political elites at the time, Yeltsins use of the word sovereignty in his speeches and promotional materials was ambiguous. According to his advisor Gennady Burbulis, Yeltsin was under the heavy influence of Solzhenitsyns recently published essay Rebuilding Russia, which claimed that the Russian people were exhausted, and proposed dissolving the USSR while retaining a Slavic core of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, along with Russian-populated parts of Kazakhstan. Solzhenitsyns view that all three of these peoples sprang from precious Kyiv was shared by many Russians who did not necessarily identify as nationalists but assumed they would stay together.

Yeltsins expectations for a rapprochement with Ukraine were soon disappointed. In August 1991, the Communist hardliners failed coup put an end to Gorbachevs hopes for a revitalised union and consolidated the power of Yeltsin, who was now the first elected president of the RSFSR. The Verkovna Rada, Ukraines parliament, passed an act proclaiming an independent state of Ukraine with indivisible and inviolable territory. Particularly panicked at the thought of losing Crimea, Yeltsin had his press officer announce that the Russian republic reserved the right to reconsider its borders, angering the Ukrainian leader Leonid Kravchuk. Yeltsins administration backtracked and recognised all existing borders, and in December 1991 Yeltsin joined the heads of Ukraine and Belarus in the Belavezha forest to officially dissolve the USSR. Conservative Russian nationalists were outraged by the sudden end of Moscows control over the region but, as Zubok notes, it was they who had initially raised the question of Russian sovereignty and opposed Gorbachev when he was struggling to save the union.

The Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev learned about Belavezha only after the fact. Yeltsin thought that Kazakhstan should be part of a new commonwealth of independent states but wanted to keep out the Muslim republics of Central Asia. Nazarbayev insisted on their inclusion, and prevailed. According to Adeeb Khalids book Central Asia (2021), full independence from the Soviet Union was unexpected and, in many ways, unwanted by both the people and the political elites of Central Asia. As a supplier of raw materials, the region was ill-served by isolation from the unions economic structures. However great their enthusiasm for strengthening national identity and autonomy, some politicians and members of the intelligentsia still saw weaker union with Russia as preferable to separation. The surprise dissolution at Belavezha was the final irony of Soviet empire: for peoples seen as inferior, even freedom was dictated by Moscow.

Yeltsins administration announced a contest for a new national idea. It never chose a winner

As other countries in the former Eastern Bloc celebrated a return to Europe, the fusion of the Russian and the Soviet prevented the creation of a national identity based on casting off an oppressive foreign yoke. Yeltsin expected that Russia would be welcomed into the West with a massive aid package and NATO membership. Instead, it was left in the East and received meagre humanitarian assistance. After decades of being told that they represented the worlds leading civilisation, Russians were reduced to eating expired US military rations. The Yeltsin administrations economic shock therapy, carried out in consultation with Western advisors, brought an atmosphere of brutal lawlessness that enriched a few and impoverished many others. The neoliberal Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs and the Harvard Institute for International Development in Moscow helped design Yeltsins market reform and privatisation package, and implement it at dizzying speed. Crime and mortality rates skyrocketed as savings vanished overnight.

Reeling from inflation and shortages, several Russian republics and regions developed sovereignty movements aimed at achieving political and economic advantages over other territories (including Yeltsins native Sverdlovsk Oblast, which briefly declared itself the Urals Republic). These were largely brought to heel by Yeltsins December 1993 constitution. The republic of Chechnya, however, pressed for full independence, prompting Yeltsins disastrous decision to invade in 1994. The Russian Federation was a web of nationality-based republics, autonomous districts and territorial regions without a unifying concept. In June 1996, Yeltsins administration announced a contest to generate a new national idea. It never chose a winner.

Russian nationalist politicians attempted to turn poverty and disillusionment into votes against Yeltsin. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a racist and antisemitic provocateur and head of the misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), argued for the re-establishment of an autocratic Russian state within Soviet-era borders. Gennady Zyuganovs Communist Party of the Russian Federation offered a Stalinist brand of Russian imperialism influenced by Lev Gumilevs concept of Eurasianism. These parties achieved moderate electoral success: LDPR performed well in the 1993 elections, and Zyuganov trailed Yeltsin by only three percentage points in the 1996 presidential race. But most Russians, especially in the younger generation, were more interested in the problems and possibilities of the present (including foreign travel and consumer goods) than chauvinist messianism that looked to the past.

Through the 1990s, visions of national disempowerment and revenge gained more traction in Russian popular culture. The lost men of Shukshins stories, for example, morphed into action heroes who offered redemptive masculinity through violence. Danila, the protagonist of the hit movies Brother (1997) and Brother 2 (2000), is a young veteran of Yeltsins war in Chechnya from a poor provincial town. In an early scene, his grandmother tells Danila hes a hopeless case and will die in prison like his father. She sends him to Saint Petersburg to be mentored by his big brother, who turns out to be a contract killer for the mafia. Rather than falling victim, Danila becomes an earnest vigilante who hurts the bad guys (especially men from the Caucasus) and protects the weak (poor Russian women and men).

In the sequel, Danila travels to the US to rescue the victims of an evil empire run by American businessmen in cahoots with Chicagos Ukrainian mafia and new Russians in Moscow. Stereotyped Others embody the threats facing the Russian people; in Chicago, he meets a sex worker named Dasha who is controlled by an abusive Black pimp. In the climactic scene, Danila takes revenge by committing a mass shooting at a nightclub in the citys Ukrainian district. Moral righteousness is clearly on his side: Danila declares his love for the motherland and repeats Second World War-era slogans such as Russians in war dont abandon their own. At the end, he and Dasha drink vodka on a flight back home as the song Goodbye, America (sung by a childrens choir) plays in the background. Brother 2 was released in 2000, the year that Vladimir Putin ascended to the presidency.

Putin kept his distance from nationalists, affirming that Russia was part of European culture and cooperating with the US invasion of Afghanistan, while maintaining LDPR and the Communists as a loyal opposition in parliament. Like Yeltsin, he selectively incorporated aspects of their ideas, for example, in his decision to bring back the Soviet national anthem. He rejected other Russian nationalist hobby horses, including open racism and antisemitism. The booming oil and gas prices of Putins first two terms (2000-08) significantly improved Russians quality of life. Putin increasingly espoused the countrys mission as a bastion of traditional values that was ready to seek payback for the indignities of the preceding years.

An ex-convict considers killing a man he feels has humiliated him, but takes his own life instead

Putins 2014 annexation of Crimea pushed his approval ratings to record highs among ethnic Russians as well as Tatars, Chechens and other groups in the Russian Federation. Yet public enthusiasm for further expansionism remained limited. In January 2020, a poll by the Levada Center found that 82 per cent of Russians thought that Ukraine should be an independent state. Annual surveys have consistently shown that Russians prefer a higher standard of living to great power status (except in the post-Crimea afterglow of 2014). Now, as Putin tries to channel national aggrievement into support for a full-scale war against the neighbour who was once promised freedom, the late-Soviet case serves as a reminder that resentment is an unpredictable tool. Russians sense of pride and victimisation propped up the Soviet empire when Communist orthodoxy lost the power to convince. But it ultimately fuelled claims that imperial ambition came at too high a cost for the Russian people, turning them into a disposable resource.

Shukshin died in the relative torpor of the Soviet 1970s, when a sense of national disorientation wasnt necessarily hitched to a political programme. His work didnt idealise a vanishing past or a bright future. There are no scapegoats or saviours, and attempts at revenge end in self-destruction. In Shukshins short story Bastard (1970), an ex-convict from the countryside considers killing a man he feels has humiliated him, but takes his own life instead. During his final moments, he feels the peace of a lost person who understands he is lost.

Putin came of age in Shukshins heyday and knows of his work. Like the Russian nationalists who once whispered about murder, he has tried to appropriate Shukshins memory for his own ends. In November 2014, he made an appearance at a theatre adaptation of Shukshins stories in central Moscow. The occasion was the Day of National Unity, an imperial holiday brought back by his administration, marking the expulsion of Polish-Lithuanian forces from the Kremlin in 1612 and the founding of the Romanov dynasty. In his onstage remarks, Putin praised Shukshin for showing a simple man, for this is the essence of Russia.

Its a shame that Shukshin is no longer with us, Putin concluded. But at least we have his heroes.

Russia depends on them.

Link:

The Soviet Union never really solved Russian nationalism - Aeon

Ndabaningi Sithole: Zimbabwe’s forgotten intellectual and leader – The Conversation Indonesia

Posted on by

Ndabaningi Sithole was one of the founding fathers of the modern state of Zimbabwe in southern Africa. In August 1963, he became the first president of the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), the militant liberation organisation that fought against white minority rule that he led for a decade before being deposed in a palace coup engineered by his rival Robert Mugabe. Mugabe went on to become the post-independence leader of Zimbabwe.

Sithole was the most prolific black writer in colonial Rhodesia from the 1950s until the country gained independence as Zimbabwe in 1980. In that period he published nine books (one serialised in African Parade magazine). He also left an incredible archive of the liberation struggle that was generated in real time. Surprisingly, most of Zimbabwes liberation figures did not leave behind a lot of their own writings. Sithole is unique in that regard.

His most important book, African Nationalism, which has recently been republished, is part autobiography and part polemics that provides a history of the liberation movement in Zimbabwe at its nascent stages. It was first published in 1959 and then in 1968.

A third edition of African Nationalism is timely. It was released by his family through the Ndabaningi Sithole Foundation which was launched last year to honour and perpetuate his legacy as an advocate for civil rights and pan African democracy through republishing his books and hosting events.

Its timely because there is a reconfiguration of the politics of Zimbabwe. Mugabe, who was a dominant force for almost four decades, has since died. There is currently a vigorous contestation for power and legitimacy going on in the country. Figures like Sithole who have been sidelined in Zimbabwes history offer us an opportunity to reconsider suppressed views and perspectives.

More than six decades after the publication of African Nationalism, it remains a critical text to think about topical subjects such as self determination, political representation and decolonisation. Sitholes foray into active politics was primarily through his writings and thus his bona fide credentials as a leading intellectual were embraced. His books wide critical acclaim and translation into half a dozen European languages earned him respect among his peers.

Sithole composed the book in the US where he was a student of theology. He explained his impetus in his introduction:

I was confronted by what some of my American friends said about African nationalism, which at the time was just beginning to be felt throughout the length and breadth of the continent of Africa, and which was also beginning to make fairly sensational international headlines. The big question which everyone was asking: Is Africa ready for sovereign independence? The majority greatly doubted that Africa was ready. Some regarded the rise of African nationalism as a bad omen for the whitemen in Africa.

As historian David Maxwell writes, nationalism supporting the interests of the nation-state has been a powerful force in Zimbabwean history as a mobilising ideology. It continues to play a key part in the arena in which political ideas and participation are imagined.

Zimbabwean nationalism, a version of which historian Terence Ranger called patriotic history remains central to debates about who belongs, and who has the right to speak, to vote and to own land.

Sitholes tenure as leader of Zanu was mostly from prison, between 1964 and 1974. It was a treacherous time. Most of the black political leaders had been rounded up, detained, killed or forced into exile. Besides directing Zanus insurgent activities from his prison cell, Sithole also filled up time writing books: novels, poetry, and political tracts. He considered writing as a revolutionary tool.

His manuscripts, smuggled from prison with the help of guards and sympathisers, were mostly published abroad to avoid censorship. Two of these included The Polygamist and Obed Mutezo the story of an African Nationalist (Christian) Martyr. Sithole was also a leading contributor to the Zimbabwe News, a newsletter that was published by Zanu to convey its revolutionary messages.

As if he knew history was not going to be kind to him, Sithole spent considerable time writing his ideas, but also about people he met as a leader. He partly coordinated the liberation struggle through the barrel of the pen. Sithole writes himself into history. He is not just a chronicler of the liberation struggle, as it is happening in real time, but also acts as an archivist for the future.

Sithole was a primary school teacher at home before studying theology in the US between 1955 and 1958. He had been mentored by the revered missionaries Garfield and Grace Todd at Dadaya Mission. This relationship was formative to his politics and civic interests. Despite later political disagreements, they maintained a cautious allyship and respect.

While in the US, Sithole published AmaNdebele kaMzilikazi in 1956, the first published novel in Ndebele in Zimbabwe. It was released by Longmans, Green & Co. in Cape Town before being republished in 1957 as Umvukela wamaNdebele by the newly established Rhodesia Literature Bureau. The book is inspired by the events of the Ndebele uprisings of 1896.

Sithole was the product of an unusual progeny a father from the Ndau clan and a mother from the Ndebele clan. As such, he was not easily contained by the Shona-Ndebele binary that has informed much of Zimbabwes modern politics. Growing up in rural Matebeleland, he was raised under Ndebele tradition and culture. It is not surprising that his first published book was inspired by Ndebele traditions.

To look at Sitholes life and career in retrospect is to wade through so much hubris, of his own making and of others. His fall from grace was spectacular. He has been for the modern Zanu-PF a persona non grata. But a figure like Sithole cannot be easily expunged from history, which he actively contributed to as a leading actor and as a writer.

At a time when a young generation of Africans are calling for decolonisation, Sitholes ideas resonate even further. In the preface to the new edition of African Nationalism, former Kenyan prime minister, Raila Odinga posits:

Reading African Nationalism evokes mixed feelings of sadness and joy. It is sad to imagine that a whole book had to be written to try and explain to fellow humans why Africans were agitating for and deserved self rule.

It is always important to look back to the past, in order to navigate the present and the future. His ideas aside, Sithole is also a reminder of the fickleness of politics and history.

Go here to read the rest:

Ndabaningi Sithole: Zimbabwe's forgotten intellectual and leader - The Conversation Indonesia

In May, a Month of Mass Shootings, One After Another – The New York Times

Posted on by

In a Buffalo supermarket, 10 people died. In a Texas elementary school, the fatality count was 19 students and two teachers. Those were the mass shootings, only 10 days apart, that attracted global attention in May but there were many others that passed in a quick staccato, devastating families and communities but streaming past everyone else in a blur. They seemed to fade from the headlines in days, having become too frequent, too dismal, too commonplace to absorb.

In the same month there were mass shootings at a Taiwanese church luncheon in California, a flea market in Houston, a nightlife district in Milwaukee, a park in Lexington, Ky., and a high school graduation in Hot Springs, Ark., to name only a few.

Rarely did these episodes involve a heavily armed lone gunman like the one who fired dozens of shots from a rooftop at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Ill., killing seven people. Rampage shootings get the most scrutiny, but they account for only a tiny proportion of gun violence victims. Lesser-known episodes often were just as random, just as public and just as scarring for those affected.

After a shooting at a church in Laguna Woods, Calif., a security company was hired to guard the church. Mark Abramson for The New York Times

There is no single definition of a mass shooting it can be targeted or indiscriminate, based on number of deaths alone or injuries as well. Some researchers, like those at the Gun Violence Archive, count any shooting with four or more people wounded or killed; others begin at four fatalities. Some researchers count what the F.B.I. calls active shooters or mass public shootings separately from gang or drug-related violence or domestic family annihilators.

However these episodes are defined, they are on the rise in the United States so much so that horrific events that might once have dominated the news now slip quickly out of the public eye. In Phoenix, the police have had very little to say about a shooting episode, reportedly outside a house party, that left one teenager dead and five others wounded. In Goshen, Ind., almost no details have been released about a gunman who shot a family of four siblings in their home, killing one, who was 17.

And that was just in May, during which the Gun Violence Archive counted 63 mass shootings; a small number are described below. The archive counted 65 mass shootings in June, and 25 already this month, as of July 7.

In Buffalo, Zeneta Everharts son is still healing from injuries after being shot at the supermarket by a gunman who the authorities say was motivated to kill Black people. For too long, weve always just gone, These things happen now theres another one, so well move on, Ms. Everhart said. We all need to keep talking about this.

Audra Melton for The New York Times

The Brannon Hill condos, near the Atlanta suburb of Clarkston, Ga., are a place where suffering has become commonplace.

You see sort of this crescendo of murder, the buildings burning, people dying in fire, people dying from gunshots, a tremendous amount of dumping, said Ted Terry, who represents the area on the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners.

But a shooting on May 8 was a tragedy of a different degree.

Police officers arrived at Brannon Hill that evening to find three men Alsadig Awad, 43; Masi Maybay, 22; and Jory Fasse, 23 dead in the living room of a condo. Three other people were wounded. An obituary of Mr. Fasse described him as a former high school football player with a great smile who was about to become a father.

Jory Fasse

Mr. Terry, a former mayor of Clarkston, said the 14-building Brannon Hill condo complex had been decaying for about 20 years. Some buildings were demolished a few years ago after fires, and the others have persistent problems. The condo board is functionally nonexistent, and many of the units are separately owned and rented out, which makes it difficult for the government to force changes.

Erica Williams, who does volunteer work each week at the complex, assisting residents with chores like taking out the trash and cleaning up common areas, said the residents were good people. Many are immigrants from Africa, struggling to pay rent and make their way in a new country. They are victims, Ms. Williams said, of outsiders who come to the complex after dark to dump trash, commit crimes and terrorize residents.

The recent killings, she said, only added to residents fear and helplessness. They were lost after those murders happened, she said.

Kenny Holston for The New York Times

Saturday afternoons are slow in one quiet section of Buffalo: Traffic is light, older residents rest on their front porches and neighbors meander through a local grocery store. But on May 14, that grocery store became the scene of the deadliest racist attack in the country in recent years when a gunman fatally shot 10 people.

The accused gunman, Payton S. Gendron, had written that he chose the area because it had a large percentage of Black residents. In so doing, he espoused white supremacist ideology that has been a driving factor in other mass shootings in recent years, from El Paso to Poway, Calif.

On Buffalos East Side, where the grocery store remains closed, Black residents have struggled for decades with the effects of the citys severe segregation. Homicides across the city rose about 40 percent during the pandemic, and Black neighbors have borne the brunt. But to some Buffalonians, racism seemed to quickly disappear from the national conversation after the May shooting.

Celestine Chaney

Roberta Drury

Andre Mackniel

Katherine Massey

Margus Morrison

Heyward Patterson

Geraldine Talley

Aaron Salter, Jr.

Ruth Whitfield

Pearl Young

The truth of the matter is, nobodys talking about white supremacy, said Garnell Whitfield Jr., a former Buffalo fire commissioner whose mother, Ruth Whitfield, 86, was killed at the grocery store. The conversation, he said, devolved into mental health, school security, gun legislation it was anything but white nationalism.

Ten days after the grocery-store shooting, another high-profile tragedy unfolded when 21 people were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, pulling national attention away from Buffalo. The lights and cameras turned off, Mr. Whitfield Jr. said. But theres a whole community thats traumatized that never got any help.

One of the victims of the shooting, Katherine Massey, was buried at Forest Lawn cemetery. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

When the news broke in Uvalde, one Buffalo family had just returned home from a repast after burying their relative. Six others still awaited funerals. And Zeneta Everhart tended to her son Zaire Goodman, 21, who had a bullet strike his neck and rip through his back.

My ancestors, the first currency of America, were stripped of their heritage and culture, separated from their families, Ms. Everhart said in recent testimony before Congress. Sold, beaten, raped and lynched. Yet I continuously hear after every mass shooting that this is not who we are as Americans and as a nation.

This is exactly who we are, she said.

Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Barely 24 hours after a gunman opened fire at a Buffalo supermarket, a Las Vegas man drove hundreds of miles to Southern California and shot at a group of Taiwanese Americans as they ate lunch inside the Geneva Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, Calif. The gunman killed a 52-year-old physician and wounded several other people, including a 92-year-old man, before he was subdued by congregants.

John Cheng

Officials called the shooting a politically motivated hate incident, saying that the gunman attacked the group because he hated Taiwanese people. Unlike many of the hate crimes targeting Asian Americans in recent years, the perpetrator was an Asian man whose heritage was similar to his victims, underscoring Taiwans complicated political and cultural history and the way such complications can endure in the United States.

The episode was also a reminder that a community of retirees with an astonishingly low crime rate was not immune to the horror of a mass shooting.

Inside Geneva Presbyterian Church, where the shooting occurred, the church has started repairing the walls where stray bullets landed. Mark Abramson for The New York Times

It really is impressive how relatively low our rates of this kind of stuff is, in light of our population characteristics, said Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine.

Orange County, which includes Irvine and Laguna Woods, has a population of more than three million people, and almost half its residents speak a language other than English at home. More than half of its residents are Asian or Latino. Dr. Kubrin, who has studied the relationship between crime and immigration, has found that the two are inversely related.

Places that have the highest concentrations of immigrants have some of the lowest crime rates, Dr. Kubrin said.

Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

On a weekday night in the middle of downtown Chicago, a gunman opened fire from the steps of a transit station. Within seconds, prosecutors said, he sprayed 21 bullets into a crowd, hitting nine people and killing two of them. Anthony Allen, 31, was fatally struck in the lower back. Antonio Wade, 30, who also died, was hit by several bullets.

In Chicago, 344 people were shot during the month of May. Most of the citys gun violence has long been concentrated in some neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. During the pandemic, though, downtown has increasingly struggled with crime, and episodes like the one in May have started to feel common.

Anthony Allen

Antonio Wade

Young people, coming together, getting into a fight, and the difference-maker is someone had a gun and that someone used it, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in the hours after the shooting.

At least 14 people have been killed so far in 2022 in the two police districts that encompass downtown Chicago. It is a small fraction of the citywide total, but more than twice the number who were killed downtown during the comparable period in 2021.

Less than a week before Mr. Allen and Mr. Wade were killed, on a block near a brand-new Whole Foods store, a teenager was killed just over a mile away at Millennium Park, a tourist showcase, prompting the installation of metal detectors and a more restrictive curfew for unaccompanied minors. The next day, a man who refused to go through the new security checkpoint at the park was wounded in an exchange of gunfire with an off-duty sheriffs deputy, officials said.

Despite relatively restrictive gun laws in Illinois, violence has remained a fact of life in the city, and officials have often blamed the traffic of guns across state lines from places where weapons are easier to obtain. Prosecutors said they believed the gun used to kill Mr. Allen and Mr. Wade had been acquired in Indiana, where many weapons used in Chicago originate.

Emily Elconin for The New York Times

A report of shots fired brought sheriffs deputies to a home in rural Western Michigan on the afternoon of May 27. They found three young children and their mother dead. The father, who prosecutors said would be charged in the killings, was airlifted to a hospital with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Dawn Gillard

Katelynn Gillard

Ronald Gillard

Joshua Gillard

Becoming a mom was a pinnacle of Dawns life, read the obituary of the mother, Dawn Gillard, 40. It said she loved to take the children Katelynn, 6, Ronald, 4, and Joshua, 3 on nature walks. The school district where Katelynn was a student sent out a letter to parents to quell rumors of a school shooting, and held a vigil on the high school football field.

Katelynn was in first grade at Morley Stanwood Elementary School. A vigil was held for her family at the Morley Stanwood football field. Emily Elconin for The New York Times

The authorities have not released details of the killings, the weapon or a motive.

Researchers have found that a majority of mass shootings are linked to domestic violence. Looking at 110 shootings that resulted in four or more fatalities, a 2021 study at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions found that almost 60 percent were cases of domestic violence, and in another 9 percent the perpetrator had a history of domestic violence. A woman is six times as likely to be killed by an abuser if there is a gun in the home.

Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times

The town of Taft, founded at the turn of the 20th century, is proud of its status as one of about a dozen historically Black towns in Oklahoma. Though its population is well under 200, on Memorial Day weekends the town swells with former residents returning to see old friends, eat barbecue and dance near a gazebo in the center of town.

This year, though, the festivities held for the first time since the pandemic began were derailed when gunfire broke out during an argument that townspeople say was between two groups from out of town. One local woman, Sherika Bowler, 39, was killed, leaving behind a 5-year-old daughter. Eight people were injured, including a 9-year-old girl. The police found shell casings from four different firearms. One suspect turned himself in; there have been no other arrests.

Sherika Bowler

DAntai Wallace, 28, a cousin of Ms. Bowlers, was heading for his uncles food truck for a baked potato when he was shot. The bullet is still lodged in his leg, and Memorial Day weekend will never be the same for him.

You used to be able to go down there and be at peace, he said. Now you go down there and this is where your cousin passed away.

Sarah Pitts was injured during the Memorial Day weekend shooting. Chase Castor for The New York Times

Sarah Pitts, 19, had been eager to see Taft with her boyfriend, who is from there. The town is not big enough to have a supermarket or a police station, she said, and you just dont think about small towns like that having something like that happening.

Ms. Pitts was taken to Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa with gunshot wounds to her abdomen and foot. While she was there, on June 1, a gunman killed two doctors, a receptionist and a patient on the hospital campus, in a completely unrelated episode.

Excerpt from:

In May, a Month of Mass Shootings, One After Another - The New York Times

Baseball, barbecue and losing freedom this Fourth of July – ESPN

Posted on by

The drive home away from the city, is, as always, gorgeous. Get off of the turnpike, wind through the back roads; the small, New England towns with drystone walls and 17th century monoliths, directional signposts affixed to each along the way. You always notice the beauty, but today it is more so because the trees are no longer bare. The sun is warm. People are out. It is finally summer.

The drive is pretty, but long, and within the tedium your mind drifts. The Fourth of July nears, and through these Massachusetts towns and villages -- Three Rivers, Palmer, Belchertown -- you see the annual preparations for its arrival. The current American flag, the old Betsy Ross flag, line each side of the main drag. Your mind drifts, backward to family. Technology has sharpened the memories, turned them quaint, so quaint your son laughs at the antiquity, calls you a dinosaur when you tell him your parents rushed feverishly to the bank to cash their paychecks before the holiday weekend -- direct deposit took care of that long ago. You remember the years the Fourth fell on a Monday and the panicked Saturdays that preceded them, the urgency to make sure there was enough booze for the barbecue because nothing was open on the holiday and, back then, Massachusetts Blue Laws kept liquor stores closed on Sunday.

July 4th was the best day of the year. Everything was centered on family. In some ways it was even better than Christmas because the entire family showed up -- the Fourth was a de facto family reunion. The massive barbecue, the pool at one uncle's house, even though you nearly drowned in it not once, but twice. All the cousins. The older ones who brought the cherry bombs and bottle rockets, the younger ones like you who were content with a strip of firecrackers. The Boston fireworks displays at the Esplanade, or later, at Stephens Field in Plymouth. The touch football games. The math reminds you just how young everybody was. When you were 40, your boy was in preschool. When your mother turned 40, you were a freshman in college.

You look out the window. The towns pass and so do the memories. Don't think about them. Your mother is dead. Long dead. Fifteen years now. Your father, ravaged by dementia, is breathing, but he's not alive. Hasn't been a presence in years. The young family is now old, a small family getting smaller. Look ahead. Look at the road. Look at what has replaced the memories. The Fourth is coming. Look at what it has become.

ONE YEAR, THERE was no bash. You don't remember why. No extended family. No barbecue. No pool to drown in -- you had learned how to swim by then. It was 1983. The only thing you remember about that day is sitting in your room watching your black-and-white TV. Sox-Yankees. Channel 38. Ned Martin and Bob Montgomery on the call. The Yankees' Dave Righetti threw a no-hitter. Wade Boggs struck out swinging to end it. If black-and-white televisions and a world before direct deposit feel ancient, you smile at the memory of Righetti pitching nine innings, these days a feat that feels as rare as a no-hitter, as contemporary as the dead ball.

Last month, Major League Baseball and its partners again released Independence Day-themed baseball hats that each of the 30 teams will wear. This year's version features a flush of stars across the front against a blue and white backdrop, offset with a shaggy shock of red. The Toronto Blue Jays, located in a country that does not celebrate American independence, were also issued the caps -- even though the Canadian flag does not contain stars nor the color blue. Public outrage prompted a redesign of the Toronto caps. Next is the USA-themed socks, the marketing, the freedom-inspired spikes, gloves, wristbands, the inevitable paeans to the armed forces.

1 Related

By now, we're all numb to the spectacle. At least publicly, the emphasis on the Fourth of July shifted from family to symbols years ago -- Sept. 11 did that. Two decades of paid patriotism has made it ever harder to center the Fourth on reconnecting with your favorite aunts and uncles. No backyard barbecue and badminton game could compete with 20 years of military tributes and unquestioned nationalism. You think back to Righetti. Cosmetically, there was nothing about that July 4, 1983, that said patriotism. All Yankee Stadium said that day 39 years ago was baseball. Ninety-four degrees. Sox-Yankees. The Stadium looked as it did every other day. The crowd came because it was July 4, a Monday day game -- a great day for baseball and family -- and, along with Bat Day, the biggest giveaway day of the year: Yankee Cap Day. You smile a little at the victory in that, because only a few decades earlier, the Yankees were most resistant to a brilliant piece of marketing. In the 1950s, the Yankees did not want fans wearing Yankees caps. George Weiss, the Yankees' general manager at the time, thought a million New York kids wearing the team cap cheapened the brand. Yankees hats were a piece of a professional uniform. They were for players, not fans.

Grilling, baseball and fireworks, first replaced by symbols -- and now by a country tearing itself completely apart. July 4, 2022, falls in the midst of devastation. It is Independence Day in America with independence under current and relentless assault. From Miranda rights to the environment, to the separation of church and state, to guns -- so many guns -- people are reeling. The U.S. Supreme Court has run a chain saw through what two generations of Americans had known to be the legal baselines of their lives. Tens of millions of women today do not feel freedom and certainly are not celebrating independence. The people who can become pregnant who feel celebratory toward the Court may do so from the victory of their position, but it nevertheless remains true that the power of choice -- and the right to privacy -- has been taken from all of them.

You look at the Betsy Ross flag, and then you look at it again. As a kid it was your favorite version of the American flag because the 13 stars in a circle looked kind of cool, reminded you of "Schoolhouse Rock!"-- the old Saturday morning cartoon. As an adolescent, you associated the 13 circular stars with sports -- Dr. J, Andrew Toney and the Philadelphia 76ers. Today, as an adult, you see how the flag has been co-opted by white nationalist groups, some of the same ones who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

"Schoolhouse Rock!" A cartoon short birthed during a period of Congressional concern in the early 1970s that children devouring Saturday morning cartoons required some balancing educational component. ABC voluntarily created the legendary three-minute cartoon focusing on math, science, grammar -- and civics, the basic tenets of the American democracy. There is no pretense of basic civics today.

YOU WATCH TV, even though you swore to not pay attention to the Jan. 6 congressional hearings. It was not a decision made from the perch of elegant privilege, of too rich to care, but from a full dissidence -- a weariness of the gaslighting and false equivalencies, the whataboutisms, the goalposts moving that have defined the past several years. The spectacle of all-white juries acquitting proud, admittedly guilty white killers of Black people largely predated your birth, and thus for the past 18 months you've held on to a truth: The events of Jan. 6, where Americans stormed the most symbolically important legislative building in the free world -- and a sitting president reportedly enraged he was not taken to the Capitol to join them -- are the most unforgivable betrayals of the American ideal in your lifetime.

You said you were not going to watch, but inner conflicts aside, you are an American -- so you watch. You revisit the images of police barricades being knocked down, of Americans climbing through windows trying to breach the U.S. Capitol, of elected American officials sheltering in place and of police running from Americans lest they be trampled by them. Think about the people chasing them, the ones over past decades who always told your people to obey, the ones so quick to call others anti-American. You tell yourself to not think about the utter, enraging hypocrisy, to resist the useless and flaccid equivalencies. (Imagine if Black people did that...) It all falls flat. We are post-hypocrisy. The equivalencies don't hold up. They never did.

Instead, you drift back into sports, to the players over the past decade, the Black ones who knelt silently, who appealed for better with a momentary gesture -- and for it, they were called unpatriotic. They were called sons of b------. By the fans who paid to see their wondrous abilities. By the then-president of the United States. They lost their careers for it. They were traded for it. A Supreme Court Justice, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called the protest by Colin Kaepernick and others "stupid," as well as "dumb and disrespectful" before the eventual unsatisfactory apology. These Black players were the subject of constant news stories dissecting the appropriateness of their actions. Recall the individual moments; CC Sabathia, as a Yankees pitcher, on the team plane trying to explain the Black communities and their tense relationships with police after one of his white teammates asked of Black suspects, "Why don't they just obey?" You think about John Mara, a co-owner of the NFL's New York Giants, and Steve Bisciotti, majority owner of the Baltimore Ravens, who indirectly reached the same conclusion: The majority of their fan bases just simply would not accept a kneeling player. That crime was that great, a line too far. Both publicly said they supported Kaepernick's right to protest, but neither dared even let Kaepernick try out as a backup -- even after several productive conversations between Ravens coach John Harbaugh and Kaepernick. They said the right words, but their deeds, along with the other 30 owners, told a different, far more truthful story.

You always wondered how the players would react to Jan. 6, knowing that the people who stormed the Capitol, threatened congressional leaders and the vice president of the United States, and were part of a riot that led to a police officer's death, reflected the same constituency of Americans who told the players to obey, to respect the flag, to find a better way to protest.

You think about Tony La Russa, manager of the Chicago White Sox, who always has so much to say about who is doing what and how they're doing it. Kaepernick was just seeking attention, La Russa said. He was disrespecting the flag, La Russa said. You think about John Tortorella, who as coach of both the NHL's Columbus Blue Jackets and the U.S. National Hockey team, said in 2016 -- before changing his stance in 2020 -- that any player who took a knee or made any sign of protest against the flag wouldn't play. You think about Boomer Esiason, the former NFL quarterback turned broadcaster who criticized Black players for their protest, which consisted of a silent gesture. You think of Ray Lewis, the Hall of Fame Baltimore Ravens linebacker, who said Kaepernick needed to shut his mouth if he wanted to play in the NFL.

When the barricades were overrun, and elected officials of both parties hid under their desks, and the cops were killed, and the very people who told Black people to respect the law and obey did not obey, where was La Russa? Where was Tortorella, who believed so much in America? Where was Esiason, and Ray Lewis and all the commentators who demanded law and order and respect?

They were silent.

One man who wasn't silent was Washington Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio, who lit the gas lamp -- and dismissed Jan. 6. He called it a "dust-up." There was the outrage. Internally. On Twitter. But you get it. If the past several years have reinforced anything, it is that there has always been a separate set of rules, a concierge lane, a front door exclusively for white America. Jan. 6 crystalized this truth.

You know that what you think is not controversial, or speculative, or worthy of the hapless, inevitable hourlong TV town hall specials. ("Does America have a racial problem?") It is as uncomplicated as reading a rsum. Black people have always lived in this country in service to -- and not with ownership of -- the United States. The message is unhidden: A significant percentage of white America believes this country belongs to them. It explains the difference between the reaction to San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler's decision to protest the paucity of gun control laws in this country after the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings by not appearing on the field for the national anthem, and the weight of the federal government landing on Colin Kaepernick -- where legislators enacted anti-protest laws around the country, a revered Supreme Court justice called his actions disrespectful and the then-president called any NFL player who kneeled an SOB.

You wondered what the players would do, how they felt when they saw the images of Eugene Goodman, the lone Capitol police officer running from the Jan. 6 rioters to protect members of Congress and their staffs, alerting them to take cover. Would they react to years of being told to shut up and play, of backing the blue, or respecting the law? Physical protest is unsustainable for long stretches of time, but values are constant. Whatever the players may feel, however, emboldened or vindicated, they have publicly turned inward. Protest post 2020 is on the wane, in favor of empire, and for the grassroots, the people on the street who have needed allies in the fight, they see the juxtaposition clearly: During a time of rights being taken, or Jan. 6 hearings, the big news in sports was LeBron James being crowned a billionaire.

There are two rules in the United States, never directly articulated but rife with consequence when broken: Beyond what the mainstream, which is to say white America, determines to be acceptable, it is forbidden to express humanitarian compassion and concern for the people of Palestine -- just ask Dwight Howard. And it is unacceptable to unequivocally advocate for Black people. The former is in general violation of the nation's foreign policy, the latter is universally understood to be career threatening for the simple fact that any Black athlete that stands up for his people is routinely referred to as "brave."

Kapler through direct gesture asked his country to do better by challenging its most powerful symbol. He did against guns what Kaepernick did in support of Black people. He was not fired. He is not a pariah. There are no incessant news cycles demanding him to explain his position, no president calling him a son of a b----, no whisper campaigns that whenever his managerial term with the Giants comes to an end, he has managed his last big-league baseball team. Nor should he have been. He made his statement and, like an American ostensibly should, kept on living.

And that, you know so painfully well after more than a half-century in this land, is the difference. Black people have known it for centuries, and the alarm will always ring for the ones who have forgotten. You participate in the American dream at their pleasure. This is theirs, not yours, and thus they can trash the Capitol if they want because the Capitol building is theirs. After all, they came here to build a better life. The laws enacted in that building, before your ancestors fought to undo them, were in protection of them.

You? You were brought here to work.

NO ONE WHO cares will ever forget where they were on June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court ended legal, federally protected reproductive choice the day after the 50th anniversary of Title IX, the same week Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson settled sexual misconduct lawsuits with 20 of 24 women -- the remaining four will go to trial -- the same week that Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington Commanders, is resisting a subpoena by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform regarding the "toxic workplace culture" at his football team, including "allegations of sexual harassment, spanning multiple decades."

Some prominent male athletes offered public support, as did the social media accounts of some teams, but you think about the players, the teams, the games, and all of the performative nature of support. Just the word support is incorrect, for it suggests the abortion option did not affect men, was not their fight. You think of the hideous mendacity of it all, that Roe saved the futures of as many men as it did women. Careers continued. Dreams were not derailed. Privacies were maintained. You think about the enormous gap between the fashionable statements, where the adversaries profit by saying the right things, and the actually committed people who will march and support and do the work. And while you contemplate another example of gaslighting in this country, it reminds you of USA Today columnist Nancy Armour's piercing question the day Dobbs replaced Roe: Where are all the girl dads?

Race, class and gender. They are the third rails of American life and cannot be separated. You think about the pandemic, when so many of the girl dads, in the clubhouse, the press boxes and in the stands, gaslit their girls by stealing their language because they did not want to wear a mask or be vaccinated. "My body, my choice," they would insultingly say. The term of empowerment that belonged to the pro-choice movement for a half-century became a rallying cry for people who could not bear the horrors of wearing a mask.

You see sports supporting Pride month. The corporate sponsors love that. They can sell hats with team logos and rainbows. They can talk about inclusion. They can hire people who will tell the world that institutions are committed to everyone, and you see another gas lamp lit, for the billionaires who sign the checks and hire the inclusion people to the big jobs who order the hats with team logos and rainbows on them also bankroll the political movements that have led to the stripping away of rights from citizens with the strength of a tsunami. Gabe Kapler protests, but his employer, like so many of them, is actually the adversary. Having maxed out his contributions to far-right causes, Giants billionaire owner Charles B. Johnson, contributes money that supports the candidate and enables the Court, which has telegraphed the coming assault on Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell. Daniel Snyder owns the team that fined Jack Del Rio $100,000 for his comments about the Jan. 6 riot, but in 2016, Snyder was among a handful of NFL owners who each gave $1 million to Donald Trump's inaugural committee -- in support of the man now accused of inciting the whole thing.

But at the ballpark, there will be hats for sale. Aspiration spray painted on the field (End Racism). And online? Hashtags.

You can stop drifting now. You're home. Pull the car into the driveway. Home. For a moment, you are unsure exactly what that word means -- or perhaps more accurately, on this Independence Day and during the crushing weeks that preceded it, you are 100% certain that you do.

See the article here:

Baseball, barbecue and losing freedom this Fourth of July - ESPN