Who Is Keith Raniere of ‘The Vow’ – Where Is He Now? – Men’s Health

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Over the next nine weeks, and as NXIVM founder and convicted felon Keith Raniere awaits sentencing for charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy, HBO will air its recent documentary, The Vow, which examines the founding of NXIVM as well as Raniere's own criminal behavior.

The documentary features interviews with former NXIVM members, most notably Mark Vicente and Sarah Edmondson, who discuss their membership to NXIVM and relationship with Raniere. The documentary's existence has already provoked current NXIVM members, many of who have called for other members to petition HBO to remove their likenesses from the documentary.

Though the activities of Raniere and the NXIVM organization are by now widely known, The Vow will provide viewers with additional footage from inside the organization's seminars and will feature more damning interviews.

In the documentary's first episode, we're clued into the early cult of personality, which quickly developed around Raniere, based on claims of aberrational I.Q. scores and musical and athletic abilities. Raniere wasn't merely a leader, members believed, but a genius and visionary. They referred to him, just as he asked, as "Vanguard."

Here's what lay behind Vanguard's veneer.

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Raniere grew up in upstate New York in the 1960s and 70s. His former partner, Barbara Bouchey, later told CBC that Raniere said he first became enlightened at age 13. Bouchey described manipulative behavior even then, with Raniere taking calls from multiple girls, telling each that he loved her. (Bouchey learned this through Raniere's mother.)

Even as he got older, Raniere apparently continued relations with this age group. When he was 24, Raniere had a sexual relationship with at least one 15-year-old girl.

In his 20s, Raniere began developing a personal ethos modeled, in part, on Ayn Rand's objectivismmost notably, the idea that individuals ought to aggressively pursue personal goals.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Raniere worked in marketing and founded his own company, which would later be shut down after a civil suit alleged the company to be a pyramid scheme.

In 1998, Raniere created the Executive Success Program (ESP), a motivational group targeting business leaders and rich professionals, offering something of that Ayn Rand-inspired egoism. Five-day lectures could run upwards to $10,000. Word of mouth helped recruit more than 3,000 people to the program over the next five years.

Amy Luke

In a 2003 cover story, Forbes wrote that Raniere had cashed in on the "high-profit fad of executive coaching." The story also noted troubling behavior, as reported by families of ESP members (the organization was by then called NXIVM). These behaviors included alleged psychological manipulation and separation of members from their own families.

NXIVM expanded worldwide. Members then began observing some of Raniere's darker, misogynistic practices. Witnesses at Raniere's trial said he began having sexual relationships with NXIVM members. The women were told that they could only have sex with Raniere, who also ordered women to starve themselves and, according to testimony, made women snort like pigs when eating.

In 2015 Rainere created a special division of NXVIM called "D.O.S.," the acronym based on a Latin phrase. It's rough translation: "Lord/Master of the Obedient Female Companions."

During Raniere's trial, various women testified how they were lured into NXIVM's D.O.S. They said they had been told it was a women's empowerment sorority and that it required "collateral" of them, including explicit photos and information on their families, which could be used to damage their reputations. These women were later branded in ceremonies with a cauterized pen. Their brand: Raniere's name.

According to testimony, Raniere had sexual relationships with more than 20 women of the NXIVM organization, multiple who became impregnated and required abortions. One girl was as young as 15.

Spencer Platt

Raniere then began recruiting "first-line masters," women who, according to witnesses, would help procure women for D.O.S. One notable first-line master was Allison Mack, an actor known for her role in the TV show Smallville. (Mack would plead guilty to federal charges before trial; Raniere would plead not guilty.)

In 2017, the Justice Department launched an investigation into NXIVM.

In March 2018, Raniere was arrested at a Mexican resort and brought back to the United States to face federal charges. Raniere would ultimately be charged with racketeering, forced labor conspiracy, sex trafficking, and human trafficking.

In June 2019, Raniere was found guilty of all charges.

After the trial, U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said the trial "revealed that Raniere, who portrayed himself as a savant and a genius, was in fact, a master manipulator, a con man and the crime boss of a cult-like organization involved in sex trafficking, child pornography, extortion, compelled abortions, branding, degradation and humiliation."

Keith Raniere Conversations via YouTube

Raniere has since been awaiting sentencing in New York. As of earlier this year, Raniere was being held in a federal jail in Brooklyn, with his sentencing pushed back from March due to COVID-19.

Raniere is now scheduled to be sentenced on October 27. He faces a potential life imprisonment.

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Who Is Keith Raniere of 'The Vow' - Where Is He Now? - Men's Health

Before Watching HBO’s The Vow, Here’s What You Need to Know About the NXIVM Cult – POPSUGAR

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An addition to HBO's library of powerful documentaries, The Vow takes a closer look into the unsettling world of NXIVM. On the surface, NXIVM had been known as a secretive self-help organization for its members, including celebrities and other well-to-do figures. But beneath the veneer of personal development were more sinister structures, namely, a sex cult and a pyramid scheme. Here's everything you need to know about the true story of the enigmatic NXIVM cult before catching the documentary.

Founded by Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman in 1998, NXIVM first started as a multilevel marketing company that celebrated ideas of self-empowerment. According to Rolling Stone, it blended together ideologies similar to Scientology, the self-help group EST, and Ayn Rand's objectivism. The company promoted personal-development courses and training workshops called "Executive Success Programs." Over the years, roughly 16,000 people flocked to its headquarters in Upstate New York. Classes were said to bring about greater self-fulfillment by removing psychological and emotional barriers, though some likened the program to a cult where Raniere psychologically broke down subjects. NXIVM especially attracted wealthy women looking to improve themselves. It touted Raniere, its founder, as an accomplished genius with an IQ of 240.

Beneath the surface, however, more disturbing activities took place. NXIVM's inner circle was DOS, an abbreviation for the Latin phrase "Dominus Obsequious Sororium." The phrase roughly translates to "master of the obedient female companions." DOS was, on the surface, touted as a self-empowerment group for women within NXIVM. In reality, women recruited other "slaves" and became their "masters." At the top of this insidious pyramid was Raniere, who the FBI said used this system to get women to sleep with him and do work for free. In court, former members testified that the leader controlled the women by dictating whom they dated, what they ate, and even how much they weighed. During the initiation process, women found themselves being branded after making vows of obedience. One could interpret the brand symbol as a combination of "KR" and "AM" the initials of Keith Raniere and Allison Mack.

Mack, known for her acting on Smallville, has been considered Raniere's co-conspirator and second-in-command. Mack recruited young women to join NXIVM and DOS, allegedly scouting at sororities. To join, women needed to turn over compromising collateral, such as nude photos. Other than being blackmailed, those who did not pay penalties for breaking orders in DOS were often forced to fast or undergo physical punishment. Raniere even ordered one member, an undocumented woman named Daniela, to be confined to a room for two years for taking interest in another man. Disturbing disappearances, suicides, and child pornography have also been linked to the organization.

The self-help courses also raised concerns about a pyramid scheme. In a lawsuit against Raniere and his associates, plaintiffs said that they were lured by false scientific claims into paying thousands of dollars for NXIVM classes. NXIVM performed illegal human experiments and claimed to have the cures to medical conditions. Members were subjected to psychological and verbal abuse, and their fears were used against them when they threatened to leave the organization. NXIVM promoted the idea that people could only take care of their problems through its classes. Eventually, members could even grow inside the company and create a career within it. However, only a handful ever made money, while most worked without pay and lost savings.

Today, Raniere and his accomplices, including Mack, have been convicted on various charges, including racketeering and sex trafficking. Raniere is set to be sentenced in October 2020 and faces the possibility of life in prison.

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Before Watching HBO's The Vow, Here's What You Need to Know About the NXIVM Cult - POPSUGAR

In Times of Crisis, Is Dystopian Media Dangerous or Inspirational? – Study Breaks

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Dystopian media has been incredibly influential since the genre was kickstarted by Jack Londons 1907 novel, The Iron Heel, and Yevgeny Zamyatins 1924 novel, We. These two works are known as the grandfathers of the futuristic, dystopian genre and have inspired some of the best-known dystopian literature that has come out of the 20th century.

They influenced books like 1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Anthem by Ayn Rand, who have all made a similar mark on the literary world with their compelling visions of extreme societal distress and protagonists that endure and, sometimes, dissent against those in immoral positions of power over them.

However, theres an accompanying stigma that marks works like these as exaggerated, near caricatures. These novels are seen as unrealistic by young people, becoming fantastical rather than cautionary.

That was until the resurgence of dystopian media in young adult fiction in recent years.

Due to works like The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth and The Maze Runner by James Dashner, this genre has become an integral part of entertainment. These titles made the early 2010s the start of the dystopian genre renaissance.

Their messages were popularized through their depictions of fascinating characters, compelling storytelling and captivating romances. These authors were able to simultaneously horrify their readers with their portrayals of corrupt governments and brutal mistreatment, while assuaging them with relatable protagonists.

As the 2010s have demonstrated, inserting like-minded characters as the rebellious heroes fighting against injustice has made these tales of woe more digestible to young readers. The novels accessed young peoples way of thinking about their own impact on society and how the righteous should always prevail over corruption. The fact that movie releases were usually coupled with these works allowed this message to reach even larger audiences.

As todays social climate takes a significant turn toward public unrest, young people have been making their voices heard on the streets, on social media and in their everyday lives. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) has gained massive traction in the past few months since the murder of George Floyd.

Though massive social change has become prevalent in the last few years, the BLM movement has incited an extraordinarily vocal response due to the publics unwillingness to lose any more Black lives to police brutality.

Though there have been cases of vandalism and looting, the majority of protests have stayed peaceful and have only escalated into riots when police have instigated violence at demonstrations.

Even with the threat of carnage, along with the risk of contracting COVID-19, thousands of young people continue to brave the streets to prove their dedication to the cause.

So, is this idealistic commitment to the movement a learned behavior from our favorite authors from our youth? Did dystopian media show us too many possibilities for a darker reality and turn our generation into extreme advocates for change?

Most importantly, should this relationship be something to fear?

As the country continues to take a turn for the worse and U.S. politicians resemble the oppressive forces that are depicted in these harrowing dystopian novels, a connection begins to form between young peoples activism and the media theyve consumed.

The Washington Post and Psyche Magazine documented a 2019 study based on an assortment of college students. They tested these students opinions on political activism and how they responded to acts of violence and riots in the name of a greater cause.

One group was exposed to aggressive scenes from The Hunger Games beforehand, another was subjected to excitable scenes from The Fast and the Furious franchise and the last one was subjected to no media.

Assistant Professor Calvert Jones wrote, Dystopian fiction shaped peoples ethical judgments. It heightened their willingness to justify radical political action compared with the no-media controls. Equally violent and high-adrenaline action scenes from Fast and Furious had no such effect. So violent imagery alone could not explain our findings.

Jones specifies that participants shown rebellious scenes were around 8% more likely to agree to view radical and violent protest as understandable. This focus groups revealed that the fiction made them feel ready for action that even ordinary people can challenge the status quo and rebel against the system.

While the study didnt necessarily prove that these students were more likely to overthrow the government, it proved that dystopian media increased their openness to extreme forms of political action.

So, is this reaction something to fear?

It seems that society considers this reaction a threat to maintaining public peace. This belief was evidenced in 2017 through the U.S. Department of Educations efforts to ban a multitude of dystopian books in schools. This collection included Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood as well as 1984 and Brave New World.

All these novels contain a message of defiance against repression and each has been continuously questioned by authority figures as too dark to be trusted in the hands of young people.

Dystopian media may play a role in young individuals acceptance of radical political action against tyrannical forces. However, that does not mean it is the only factor.

Though this is a generation that is out on the streets calling for change, it is a group of people that have been preceded by older generations. Before BLM, there was the civil rights movement, and before #MeToo, there was the pro-choice and womens suffrage movement.

Change was incited by our ancestors before us, just as it will be for our children and grandchildren.

There will always be a push for the betterment of society from those who can envision an improved future. Or, in this case, fear a graver one.

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In Times of Crisis, Is Dystopian Media Dangerous or Inspirational? - Study Breaks

Readers Are Debating Over These 7 Books And Whether They’re Deadset Red Flags When Dating Men – Pedestrian TV

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Let me paint a picture for you. You go on a lovely Tinder date with a man who seems pleasant enough. You go back to his house because why not, youre an independent woman after all. You sit on his bed next to his acoustic guitar and record collection Radiohead Kid A, of course. He says Ill be one sec, stay there.

Your eyes begin to dart around the room and are immediately drawn to his abundant book shelf. Hemingway, Hemingway again and again Bukowski, Ayn Rand, Lolita? Ok this is getting weird. You hear footsteps. He opens the door. Hey, sorry about that. Anything wrong? You hold your breath and RUN

Ok a little bit extreme, but you get the picture. The above scenario demonstrates the literary red flags to look out for in a man, all thanks to this viral tweet.

The tweet highlights the Top 7 Warning Signs In a Mans Bookshelf and has certainly divided the internet. Why? Because no one likes to think their taste in literature is a red flag.

Other books mentioned in the comments were Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams and On The Road by Jack Kerouac. Personally, any talk of Nietzsche is a solid turn off for me, but thats a whole other kettle of fish.

The comments trying to defend themselves arent helping their cause either. If you want a prime example of this just have a look for yourself.

Other commenters defended the tweet saying that it was all too true.

So what can a man do to stop being ridiculed about his taste in literature? Just dont read. Plain and simple.

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Readers Are Debating Over These 7 Books And Whether They're Deadset Red Flags When Dating Men - Pedestrian TV

21 Quotes That Transformed My Life and My Business – The Good Men Project

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While remote work has become the norm for millions of people all over the world, if you were to walk into nearly every successful entrepreneurs office, youll likely see a photo with a quote underneath it framed on a wall where everyone can see it. Sometimes it acts as a reminder for the entrepreneur themselves, other times it serves as motivation for their employees.

Jim Rohn, the late great business philosopher used to say back in the 80s Every house over $250,000 has a library in it. Why do you think that is? I must admit as a young entrepreneur those words fell on deaf ears, but as I aged, I realized the wisdom contained in books.

T. Harv Eker tells his audiences that if he walked around with them for a day, hed be able to guess their bank balance. Put Rohns and Ekers concepts together, and I believe if I were to see someones library, Id be able to tell what areas of their life they are struggling with. Books, like the quotes on peoples walls at the offices, tell a story.

Over the last 20 years, I have read hundreds of books, filled with thousands of incredible ideas and powerful quotes. The following are 21 of my favorites and are deserving of a place on your wall, whether at the office or at home. To me, the greatest quotes are ones that make us think which is why I prefer to present these quotes with no commentary.

If I were sitting across from you right now, I would only ask you to do one thing. After you read each quote, just stop and ponder. Let it sink in.

How does it apply to your life? What did the person who said each one wants their listeners to get from it?

1. A small leak will sink a great ship. (Benjamin Franklin)2. What you do in the dark, puts you in the light. (Under Armour)3. Its not the lack of resources, its your lack of resourcefulness that stops you. (Tony Robbins)4. Ive missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. Ive lost almost 300 games. 26 times, Ive been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. Ive failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. (Michael Jordan)5. Begin with the end in mind. (Stephen Covey)6. Dont wish life were easier, wish you were better. Dont wish for less problems, wish for more skills. (Jim Rohn)7. If you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it. (Anthony J.DAngelo)8. Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. (Harry Truman)9. Problems are only opportunities in work clothes. (Henry J. Kaiser)10. The most effective way to do it, is to do it. (Amelia Earheart)11. The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is. (Winston Churchill)12. Invest three percent of your income in yourself in order to guarantee your future. (Brian Tracy)13. It takes but a few minutes to burn a house which may have taken years to erect. A single stroke of the artists brush will ruin a picture on which he may have been working on for years. (Orison Swett Marden)14. There are two things that change your life. Something new comes into your life, or something new comes out of you. (Brendon Burchard)15. Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. (Albert Einstein)16. The question isnt who is going to let me; its who is going to stop me? (Ayn Rand)17. The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sail. (Myles Munroe)18. If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, Id spend six sharpening my axe. (Abraham Lincoln)19. Bad excuses are worse than none. (Thomas Fuller)20. Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect. (Leonardo Da Vinci)21. Chains of habits are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. (Warren Buffet)

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Get Ready for a Week of Unhinged Attacks on Biden and Harris – The Bulwark

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While the left is showing signs of dissatisfaction with the Democratic partys candidate for president and arguing that the partys program is not progressive enough, the right has become positively unhinged, warning that the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket will lead to full-blown Soviet-style socialism, or even the collapse and destruction of the United States.

For his part, Bidens policy proposals are solidly within the center-left mainstream. He has proclaimed his opposition to Medicare for All, calling instead for an expansion of health coverage through a public option; he has condemned the violence that has taken place during protests, particularly on the West Coast; and his campaign publicly repudiated and condemned Linda Sarsours stance on Israel after the left-wing activists appearance at a virtual assembly associated with the convention.

The right, however, is not buying into John Kasichs claim that Biden will not capitulate to the left. On the contrary, they are certain that if Biden is elected, he not only will move the United States to socialism but will implement every far-left proposal from the Green New Deal to socialized medicine.

If Biden should win, they predict, Americans can expect Portland-style violence to be Americas future. On the Commentary website, senior editor Abe Greenwald writes that What were witnessing, day after day, is revolutionary violenceand it is tearing up the country at a furious pace. We cannot dismiss the violence because the rioters are young, Greenwald writes in the magazines September issue, because so were Maos Red Guards, and besides, the Russian Revolution was preceded by 12 days of protests kicked off by a Womens Day March. The stakes are as high as they come: The battle for the survival of the United States of America is upon us, Greenwald says. This is . . . most fundamentally a revolution against the United States of America and all it stands for.

Why should we take this seriously? His argument is as sane as when Attorney General John Mitchell looked out his window at protesters against the Vietnam War and said Its looks like the Russian Revolution. Greenwalds unstated conclusion is that, since the tyrannical mob poses the most danger to the nation, Donald Trump cannot be as dangerous as the Democrats want you to believe.

Others are even less sanguine. In David Horowitzs Frontpagemag website, scholar Bruce Thornton says boldly: the president has a faithful and energized base and a record of accomplishment compared to the Dems lunge to the lunatic left. Thornton agrees with the rest of the Trumpist right that the Democrats have abandoned their traditional center-left governing philosophy and embraced a socialist ideology that for over a century has serially failed everywhere it has been tried. Dont actually listen to what Biden says, Thornton implies; just proclaim Biden believes the opposite. When Trump says something outrageous, the response from his defenders usually is ignore what he says, followed by look at what he does. When Trump then actually does something extremely dangerous, the same Trumpists just say to let it pass, or offer apologias and argue that his steps were correct.

David Horowitz himself is even more vehement than his group of writers, claiming that Our cities are under siege by communists like Bernie and other self-declared enemies of America who have made eminently clear that they are Marxists and their goal is the destruction of our democracy, which they hope to replace with a communist gulag. The destructive and violent events in Portland, he writes, are acts of treason [that] have had the full support of the Democrat Party not only in the cities themselves but in Washington. That is why Portland, he knows, is the issue that will re-elect Donald Trump in November.

As for Obamas powerful convention speech warning about the potential end of American democracy should Trump be re-elected, Horowitz has already argued that Obamas White House engaged in acts of treason. These took place supposedly when the Obama team attempted to block and then overthrow the Trump presidency by falsely accusing it of collusion with Russia against the president and then to obstruct his administration and overthrow him. He quotes former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who said that Obama and his team tried to stage a coup, which is nothing but treason. Obama, Horowitz writes, waged a direct attack on the most fundamental institution of our democracyelections. As to the current presidents war on free elections, Horowitz has nothing to say.

This is tame compared to the attacks aimed at Kamala Harris, whom Trumpists claim will be the real president should Biden win. Thornton calls her one of the most progressive and aggressively woke members of the Senate. She has endorsed the far-left policies of the Sanders-AOC wing. Horowitz himself calls her a political opportunist and serial liar.

Writing for Breitbart, Jim Pinkerton calls her a representative of the woke left-libertarianism of the San Francisco Democrats once put in their place by the late Jeane Kirkpatrick. Harris stands with a group, he writes, that is a part Karl Marx, one part MSNBC, one part Michel Foucault, and maybeeven a little bit of Ayn Rand. She is part of a leftism that mostly leaves billionaires alone, free to further build their fortunes. To this reader, his complaint sounds like hes talking about Donald Trump.

If possible, American Greatness, the Trumpist website, takes this hyperbole and hysteria to new heights. Matthew Boose writes that the Kamala Coup that the Biden-Harris ticket has orchestrated is a swindle. In Harris we will have a regentess who is

merciless. If she is successful, the revenge will be merciless too, not only against Trump, but against his supporters. The country will suffer as a result.... [Harris and Biden] will give amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants . . . disarm Americans, even as they defund police . . . and leave citizens vulnerable to criminals and mobs. They have demonstrated that they have no sympathy for this country, its people, or its borders. There is no reason to suppose that their talking points on these questions are mere rhetoric. They will do these things.

Do not be fooled, Boose warns: Harris will be presented sympathetically by the Democratic party machine and the mainstream media will do everything they can to make her look benign, authentic, and moderate when in reality she does not believe in anything and wears her thirst for power on her sleeve. Harris and Biden are actual tyrants in waiting. (Note, of course, that Booses argument contradicts the arguments that Biden and Harris secretly stand for socialist revolution.)

So, as this weeks Republican convention proceeds, steel yourself for this sort of vicious attack on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Trump will go lower than his lowest point of attack yet. And his base, he hopes, will eat it up and come out to re-elect him.

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‘Imagine not just the end of prisons, but the end of a society that could have prisons’ – scalawagmagazine.org

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This week, the nation erupted once more in protest after officers of the Kenosha Wisconsin police department fired seven bullets into Jacob Blake early Monday morning as he tried to break up a fight. Residents have again taken to the streets, demanding justice as paramilitary police units unleash tear gas.

Our current system of policing is accountable for the deaths and exploitation of Black and brown people; it was not built for our flourishing or protection. Without the abolition of prisons and the carceral apparatus that demands and fuels state violence towards Black people, we may win accountability for the atrocities Blake and others have faced, but we will not have justice. We will still have more names to mourn.

Read about Abolition Week and Scalawags commitment to justice and liberation.

In a discussion of the often hidden but far reaching societal impact of policing and prisons in our everyday lives, Scalawag contributing editor Zaina Alsous sat down with two abolitionists and scholars.

Geographer and filmmaker Brett Story directed and produced the award winning prison documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. Felicia Arriaga is the North Carolina Statewide Police Accountability Network Coordinator and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State College, whose work investigates the criminalization of immigration.

This conversation, taken from Scalawags panel event Casting Shadows: the prison in our everyday lives, has been edited for length and clarity.

Zaina Alsous: What are some of your personal connections to incarceration and abolition, and how do these connections show up in your creative and political practice?

Brett Story: I come into prison organizing and activism mainly through work around housing and anti-poverty and anti-racism. I grew up in a small working class town in northern Ontario. I grew up poor and precariously housed, and so my earliest activist work revolved around the right to housing.

As soon as I started living in cities, I really started studying and doing organizing work around gentrification. And for me that was my entry into thinking about the function of police and the function of prisons and the criminal justice apparatus, really seeing that the police, as I encountered them, are almost always there to enforce and protect private property, develop the interests of real estate developers and criminalize people who were engaged in in poverty activities that they saw as being in their way.

See also: Where do the police come from?

From a young age, I also started doing kind of alternative media work and I became really involved in a community radio station in Montreal, which is where I lived throughout my 20s. One of the first shows that I started working on was a prisoner radio show that fielded calls from people on the inside. We didn't always talk about prison issues. Actually, we rarely talked about prison issues. We talked about environmental justice. We talked about housing, we talked about mayoral elections. But the point was that we were trying to break this enforced segregation and isolation of the prison regime and invite those voices to be part of public conversation.

See also: Perspectives on incarceration and abolition you need to be paying attention to

Felicia Arriaga: I come into this work from the experiences of my family having to deal with immigration enforcement and the fear of immigration enforcements impact because of family members being immigrants and not being here legally.

That was something that I've known for most of my life, but really, I was able to start to think about how to organize around immigration or at least around how immigration enforcement was happening at the local levelwhen I was in college and started working mostly with foreign workers, organizations. I saw the very explicit intersection there between the need for labor and then the disposal of those farmworkers. especially if they decided to unionize and organize.

Being in Durham allowed me to work with Zaina and other folks to really think about the connection, at least locally, with our jail and how immigration enforcement was taking place there...And that sort of has led to all of these other pieces. I'm looking into contracts in jails in the prison system. And so really immigration partnerships are just one component of these other things that we can be monitoring as abolitionists and as community organizers, which is also very tied into some of the work that I do now around budget advocacy at the local level, concerning both police budgets as well as Sheriff or jail budgets.

ZA: Something that we found to be really striking about your film Brett, was the way it makes this point of emphasizing landscape and place in connection to this question of prison expansion and the existence of prisons. So why do you see the connections between ecology and incarceration as integral to our understanding of the current prison system?

BS: I came to making this film in part out of a dissatisfaction with a lot of prison films. People can disagree with this, but I feel like there's a real limit to what even the most well intentioned prison documentaries end up doing, which is suggesting or trying to appeal to kind of moral indignation, and then part of the audience has to say okay, here's a case one case, here's a person who's innocent, and we should be outraged. Here's a person whos faced too much punishment, and we should be outraged. And I do think we should be outraged. But I don't always feel like those films help us understand why prisons exist in the first place.

I felt like I wanted to make a film that was almost not so distracted by the architecture, the building, and the cells, that it could actually start seeing how integrated the prison is into the very organization of our lives and specifically, capitalist racial capitalists lives how integrated prisons are, how necessary they are to the functioning of the economy, the functioning of the racial order, the functioning of cities and gentrification and rural abandonment.

See also: What kind of landscapes should we build in the South? Hint: One without prisons.

I wanted to know could the film itself be inspired by the abolitionist maxim that we need to imagine not just the end of prisons, but the end of a society that could have prisons. And so trying to think about how to translate that visually and narratively meant that maybe we should explore these places that at first glance don't resemble what we normally expect to see when we see a prison film.

ZA: Thinking about the impact and devastation of prisons and migrant detention on social and communal life, but then also thinking about the resilient making and demanding of community that people on the inside are able to forge in spite of it, what were some of the most memorable lessons that youve witnessed in your work from that violent contradiction that people are navigating?

FA: I think some of the folks at least in North Carolina, who I've been really fortunate to work with and alongside are formerly incarcerated folks who are the ones that are now demanding people's freedom. I think thats been a way for us to consider how do we allow those folks to tell their own stories. And obviously, during this week, their thoughts are the ones that really should be setting the agenda.

BS: I have the scene in the film that takes place on one of the bus routes from New York City to Attica prison. And that bus rides really hard. It was really hard for me and I took it like eight times, and I'm a youngish, able bodied person. And there was no sleeping and [there were] breaks down, and you get treated like shit by the guards when you get there. So many people, mostly women, almost entirely women of color, are on that bus every weekend determined to say no, that person inside is loved. I love them. You do not get to brutalize them because you don't think there's anyone on the outside that loves them. I'm here keeping them alive through my love.

And then [these women] showing solidarity with each other. You know, it's not always perfect, like, we're starting a movement on the bus. People thought it was really stressful. It was really cramped. But the solidarities, even when they're small, are so powerful.

Abolition Week was just one example of how Scalawag continues to amplify the work of those on both sides of the fence working together for the freedom of those on the inside. As an act of solidarity, check out last weeks stories, which feature political and personal insights from members of our community currently incarcerated in Floridas prisons during the pandemic.

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'Imagine not just the end of prisons, but the end of a society that could have prisons' - scalawagmagazine.org

Abolishing oppressive institutions starts at home – Open Democracy

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"The calls for abolition are spreading, and the answers are not solely the defunding and abolition of the carceral states institutions, but in the ways of being that we create with one another that will replace those institutions." D. Hunter

Theres no shortage of snippets you could take out of context to sell D. Hunters new set of memoirs to an audience looking for the kinds of poverty porn or scandal rag fodder they wont find in his collection. Its got all the sex, drugs and violence of a Tarantino film...if it was secretly directed by Karl Marx and Marx had lived his life battling the sheer brutality of the sharpest edges of late-stage capitalism, before learning to read in his twenties and deep-diving into radical political theory to explain the inexplicable violence of his past.

Following the underground success of his first set of self-published memoirs, Chav Solidarity, Hunters second offering, Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors, takes us deeper into the trials of a life on the postindustrial margins of Nottingham and the English Northwest in the 1980s and 1990s. Hunter revisits the experiences he opened wide in Chav Solidarity - from hard drugs and sex work to child abuse and homelessness - bringing to light the humanity and social leadership of those who spend their days embroiled in these realities but who are typically reduced to caricatures by those outside of them.

This time though he goes several steps further, making space to explore the complexities of race and class, the inherent violence of social services, and prison abolition and transformative justice. His book is a critical offering to a political discussion that emerges from places we rarely look for such offerings. It breathes life, compassion and depth of character into perceptions of people who are all-too-casually discarded by many across the political spectrum.

While class is clearly at the forefront of Hunters writing, he avoids the old Marxist pitfall of attempting to reduce all forms of oppression to subsets of the class system - a trope which ends up glossing over both the harm of many-a-predatory male working-class leader, and the contexts that lead to wealthy people of colour being profiled and abused by police. His understanding of different identities keeps economics in the picture and vice versa.

Never does his brutal experience of class lead to a Not All White Men! defensiveness, making perfectly clear that, whatever traumas he has faced (and hes faced a lot), they could be a whole lot worse did he not inhabit the cis-white-male body that he does. Hunter moves between the lenses of class and identity politics throughout the essays with a seamlessness that gives the impression that the two were never at odds (an encouraging line that relatively few people manage to walk).

While Hunter fills much of his books introduction with a meta-exploration of the academic and theoretical underpinnings of his work, the pages that follow contain more than enough swearing and informality to avoid any serious consideration from the academy. For the few academics who choose to see past the colloquialisms and street slang, Hunter offers extensive citations to bolster the institutional credibility he seems simultaneously to mock and seek.

There are moments when the writing loses a bit of its flow and a gripping personal account feels abruptly jolted by a lecture in macro-political theory. The ideas are never bad ones - far from it - but the way in which Hunter presents them at times works against his aims, bludgeoning the reader with polemics when the relative subtlety of a first-hand narrative would have cut deeper than an ideological explanation. These moments, however, are relatively few, and the readability of the incredibly distressing subject matter is strong testament to Hunters prose as much as to his intellectual prowess.

One of Hunters themes is dispelling the idea that politicians or government institutions can bring about the kinds of change that poor and working class people need. People and communities facing the brunt of the violence those institutions perpetrate will never trust them to become vehicles of genuine progress. While Hunters writing never screams a Capital-A Anarchism, it hammers home how the oppressive nature of government is embedded in the DNA of the same welfare state that many parts of the Left - especially in times of austerity - defend unquestioningly.

"The cages I understood, but the bureaucracy was oblique and terrifying, something that I did not know how to resist, Hunter writes of his experiences of the more and less benevolent arms of state violence in his early life. The screws in [Youth Offending Institutes] hit you, spit at you, call you a cunt and keep you locked up, but I understood their power over me. The paper and pens, the benign smiles, gentle scowls, calm tones of shirts and blouses, was a bewildering matrix of manipulation that I could not engage with."

Children's services, social services, youth services - none of these escape Hunters razor-sharp pen, despite, or perhaps because of, his later employment as a youth worker. He casts aside the nuance that the objective privileged outsider typically affords themselves when observing these professions, instead offering a raw analysis gained through painful personal experience:

Ill be honest, whilst there were plenty of adults in office clothes who spoke to me during my trial, my sentencing, my stay in the YOI, the care homes that followed my time locked up, I do not remember which ones were social workers, which ones were solicitors, or any other roles that might have been involved in the processI only have memory to fall back on, and whilst I have vague recollections of the faces attached to the shirts and blouses, I have no memory of any shirt or blouse doing anything to persuade me that they were in my life to do anything other than to exert control over me.

More optimistically, Hunters writing also points to countless stories in which lives are saved by the small and large acts of solidarity and not-so-everyday-kindness of poor and working people in the early stages of his life. From neighbours bathing and feeding his mother when they found her unconscious in the lift of the building where she lived, to the free chicken a local Jamaican takeaway provided to him and his younger sisters for years when it was clear they couldnt afford to pay, Hunter illustrates a collective care that is rarely visible in wider social narratives of day-to-day life in post-industrial English urban centres.

Go to any poor or working-class neighbourhood community and you will find local individuals and community groups experimenting with trauma-informed processes to address the emotional and psychological wellbeing of the neighbourhood, Hunter states unreservedly. It is in these experiments - so critical to maintaining life under capitalism - that he holds hope.

While no one would accuse him of preaching lifestyle politics, Hunters commitment to change happening close to home is a powerful alternative to the top-down assumptions of much of the mainstream (and parts of the radical) left: "...we must also acknowledge that the inequality amongst us can not merely wait for the revolution, he declares in the books final pages.

Hunter pushes us to recognise the forms of power that exist within and amongst the broadly-working class, whether in terms of income, resources or personal connections. He also points to practical steps we can take to redistribute whatever resources we have amongst us in order to make life more livable and dignified for one another, while building up alternatives to the state and market structures that cause so much harm. Anything else, he argues, constitutes an act of class treachery, in which we choose to hold onto whatever money, power, connections or leverage we have for personal gain over collective liberation.

Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors is what radical politics might look like if those involved spent more time with the people hit hardest by the issues they stand for - or if more of us learned to truly step aside and make space for those voices to make themselves heard.

His book presents an implicit set of political beliefs, ideas and practices that emerge from taking the time to sit with exposure to incomprehensible levels of state and economic violence, and then to imagine what the alternatives might look like, based on the survival strategies of those at the sharpest edges of that violence. Its not an all-encompassing theory imposed from an ivory tower, but a praxis thats generalised from daily practices that allow people to stay alive amidst horrific levels of systemic abuse. While Hunters reference points are vast and varied, there is an implicit coherence to his politics that offers a clear direction to those looking for it, without hammering home a ten-point manifesto.

The imperative to actively transform how we do our politics doesnt always make for easy reading, but Hunters core ideas are hard to argue with. Some will be put off by the uncompromising onus for practical change that this book puts on its readers, while others may take the first awkward steps to begin to heed its call. Whatever peoples choices, it would be hard to remain unmoved by Hunters writing and the eminently practical choices towards which he points us.

Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors is published by The Class Work Project.

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Abolishing oppressive institutions starts at home - Open Democracy

Black Women Rock: Black New England Conference to take place virtually – Foster’s Daily Democrat

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PORTSMOUTH Leadership of Black women is the focus of the 14th annual Black New England Conference, titled "Black Women Rock: Leading the Charge for Social and Political Change." It will take place virtually Sept. 25-26.

The conference, presented each fall by the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, combines the scholarship of an academic conference and joyfulness of celebrating Black life and history.

JerriAnne Boggis, executive director of the BHTNH, explained the origin of the decision to spotlight this issue at this time.

"We select our program a year in advance," she said. "At the time, Stacey Abrams was doing great work on voter suppression. And Black women were starting to be recognized more for their activism and for their foundational role in so many movements. As we looked toward 2020 as an election year, we thought spotlighting Black women would be a perfect topic."

Due to COVID-19, the BHTNH, headquartered in Portsmouth, moved the two-day conference online, with the assistance of its partner Southern New Hampshire University, which will produce the event.

"Theres a silver living with the virtual platform since we will be able to broaden our reach beyond an in-person New England conference to embrace a national and international audience," Boggis said. "And, beyond the vital conference topic itself, we expect that well be able to introduce a larger audience to the important work of the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, that of promoting awareness and appreciation of African American history and life in order to build more inclusive communities today."

Boggis said she believes attendees will appreciate hearing about BHTNHs signature events spring symposium, Sankofa walking tours, Juneteenth celebration, Frederick Douglass community readings, the Black New England Conference each fall, and winter tea talks.

The conference will celebrate, examine and make visible Black womens leadership and activism in fights for political and social change. Panelists will discuss Black womens leadership and activism in a variety of social and political arenas the classroom, the courtroom, business and economics, technology, the environment, the arts, religion, government and others.

Six panels anchor the conference on the following topics: Black Women as Purveyors of Change; Body Politics and Movements Toward the Sacred; Black Womens Present-Day Leadership and Activism; Activism Through The Arts; Black Women in Electoral Politics; and The Next Generation.

Attendees will hear three keynote addresses. Lunchtime presentations will be given by Sheryl Lee Ralph, a Tony nominated actress (Dreamgirls) and activist who created the DIVA Foundation devoted to AIDS advocacy; and U.S. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, the first Black woman elected to Boston City Council and to the U.S. Congress from Massachusetts.

Friday evenings conference keynote will be delivered by Susan L. Taylor, founder and CEO of National CARES Mentoring Movement and editor-in-chief emerita, Essence Magazine.

As artists and activists, politicians and pundits, Black women continue to stand on the front line and lead the charge for social and political change. From Sojourner Truth calling for the abolition of slavery and for womens rights, to Tarana Burke coining "Me Too" in 2006, Black women have played a vital role in the political and social (re)formation of the United States, even as their leadership and activism has often been eclipsed and erased.

For registration information and the conference schedule visit http://blackheritagetrailnh.org/2020bnec/.

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Black Women Rock: Black New England Conference to take place virtually - Foster's Daily Democrat

After restricting a group critical of Thailands monarchy, Facebook says it will take legal action against the government – TechCrunch

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After restricting access to a popular group with posts critical of Thailands monarchy, Facebook is planning legal action against the Thai government, which the social media giant says forced it to restrict content deemed to be illegal.

On Monday, Reuters reported access to Royalist Marketplace had been blocked within Thailand. Users there who try to visit the group, which has more than a million members, now see a message that says access to it has been restricted within Thailand pursuant to a legal request from the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society.

In a media statement emailed to TechCrunch, a Facebook spokesperson said, After careful review, Facebook has determined that we are compelled to restrict access to content which the Thai government has deemed to be illegal. Requests like this are severe, contravene international human rights law, and have a chilling effect on peoples ability to express themselves. We work to protect and defend the rights of all internet users and are preparing to legally challenge this request.

The spokesperson added, excessive government actions like this also undermine our ability to reliably invest in Thailand, including maintaining an office, safeguarding our employees, and directly supporting businesses that rely on Facebook.

The group was started in April by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a dissident living in self-exile in Japan, where he is an associate professor of political science at Kyoto Universitys Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

Pavin told Reuters that Royalist Marketplace is part of the democratization process, it is a space for freedom of expression. By doing this, Facebook is cooperating with the authoritarian regime to obstruct democracy and cultivating authoritarianism in Thailand.

The geo-restriction of Royalist Marketplace comes as thousands of pro-democracy protestors in Bangkok demand reform of the monarchy, including abolition of a strict lese-majeste law that mandates prison sentences of up to 15 years for people who defame members of the monarchy.

Pavin has been openly critical of Thailands monarchy. In a piece published on the Council of Foreign Relations website earlier this month, Pavin wrote that for several decades now, the supposedly constitutional monarchy of Thailand has often proven to extend its powers beyond constitutional norms and rules, intervening in politics as the current king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, established closer ties with the military.

In a 2014 New York Times opinion piece, Pavin described having a warrant issued for his arrest by the military junta that overthrew the democratically elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. He was also attacked by a intruder in his Kyoto apparent, which Pavin believes was a warning for my continuing to hold, and express, my positions.

The restriction of Thai users access to Royalist Marketplace took place three weeks after Thailands Minister of Digital Economy and Society, Puttipong Punnakanta, threatened to take action against Facebook because he said it did not comply quickly enough with the governments requests to restrict content.

In 2016, Thailand enacted the Computer-Related Crime Act, which the Human Rights Watch warned gives overly broad powers to the government to restrict free speech, enforce surveillance and censorship, and retaliate against activists.

Facebook is also under scrutiny in India, its biggest market by number of users, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Ankhi Das, the companys top public policy executive in India, had opposed applying the platforms hate-speech rules to a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modis party.

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After restricting a group critical of Thailands monarchy, Facebook says it will take legal action against the government - TechCrunch

The Abolition of Man and the Advent of the Posthuman – Discovery Institute

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Editors note: Published on August 16, 1945,C. S. LewissThat Hideous Strengthis a dystopian novel that eerily reflects the realities of 2020, putting into a memorable fictional form ideas expressed in Lewiss non-fiction work, The Abolition of Man. To mark the former books three-quarter century anniversary,Evolution Newspresents a series of essays, reflections, and videos about its themes and legacy.

James A. Herrick is the Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope College in Holland, MI. His books include The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition.

This post is adapted from Chapter 10 ofThe Magicians Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, edited by John G. West.

[Professor Filostrato:] The work is more important than you can yet understand. You will see.

We are at the start of something quite new in the scheme of things.

Professor Julian Savulescu is the head of the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and a leading proponent of human enhancement, the school of thought that promotes the progressive use of biotechnologies to improve human intellect, moral reasoning, and other traits such as physical strength. Savulescu has argued that deep moral flaws and destructive behaviors point indisputably to the need to employ technology and education to change human nature; either we take this path or we face extinction as a species.

In Savulescus view, rapidly advancing brain science will provide some of the data necessary to shaping a better human race: Once we understand the basis of human brain development, we will be able to augment normal brain development in a way that couldnt naturally occur. But smarter people are not necessarily better people, and so another key to better people is found in a deeper understanding of human biology. [T]here is reason to believe that even aggression is something that can be understood in terms of its biological underpinnings. A clue to human aggression is discovered in a mutation in the monoamine oxidase A gene, which in the presence of early social deprivation has been linked to criminal behavior in at least one study. Savulescu also notes that [w]eve been able to manipulate human moral behavior and cooperation through the administration of drugs, Prozac providing one prominent example. Other drugs have been shown to promote trust and willingness to take risks and recovery of trust after betrayal.

According to Savulescu, genetic treatments, improved pharmaceuticals, and moral education will hasten the emergence of a new and better human race. However, more is needed, including worldwide cooperation in a way that humans have never so far cooperated. We live in dangerous times, and greater dangers lie ahead. Weapons technology makes possible the annihilation of the human race. At the same time liberal democracy fails to promote any particular set of values or particular moral education as it seeks to guarantee maximum freedom. Why are personal freedoms a risk factor? The answer is found in a condition theologians might call fallen human nature: We have a human nature that is severely limited in terms of its origins and in terms of its capacity to respond to these new challenges. Human nature thus requires restraint, modification, or both. Our predicament is deep and complex: weapons of mass destruction, a fragmented political scene, excessive devotion to individual freedoms, and an unreliable nature.

Only aggressive research aimed at helping us to understand our moral limitations and the ways to overcome these will produce the scientifically grounded ethics needed to decide how we should reshape our nature. Employing a vivid analogy, Savulescu affirms that Western culture is entering a dangerous Bermuda Triangle with liberal democracy in the position of Miami, radical technological advance in the position of Bermuda, and human nature and its limitations in the position of Puerto Rico. To avoid entering this triangle will mean reducing one of our commitments to these points. It is neither likely nor desirable that we would restrain technology, so Bermuda remains on the map. Savulescu continues:

We could reduce our commitment to liberalism. We will, I believe, need to relax our commitment to maximum protection of privacy. Were already seeing an increase in the surveillance of individuals, and that surveillance will be necessary if were to avert the threats that those with anti-social personality disorders, psychopathic personality disorders, fanaticism represent through their access to radically enhanced technology.

So, liberal Miami is threatened and the dubious Puerto Rico of human nature is clearly targeted for radical change. Of the three points of the Savulescu Triangle only technological Bermuda is safe, a contemporary manifestation of Francis Bacons island of Bensalem.

Moral education founded on a new ethics is critical to the task of rescuing lost humanity. I believe that we should be promoting certain sets of values and engaging in moral education, says Savulescu. Tacking away from Miami will require reducing consumerism and accepting a lower standard of living. Political and economic austerity are also necessary. Well need to accept an ethics of restraint, and well need to adopt long-term strategies that go beyond a typical electoral term of three to five years. What Savulescu terms the very extreme adherence to liberalism that weve so far enjoyed may also have to go.

Of course, human nature will not quickly abandon a comfortable life for a new austerity. After all, we possess a set of dispositions that make us very ill-disposed to give up our standard of living, to collectively cooperate to solve the worlds global problems. Ultimate answers may lie not only in terms of our political institutions and the degree to which we curb our commitment to liberalism, but also inside ourselves. But, help is at hand because Bermuda survives: The genetic and scientific revolution that were a part of today represents a second great human enlightenment. We now possess the means of understanding the human condition, and we are moving toward an understanding of our nature as animals, of our dispositions to act, why some people will kill, why some people will give.

Stopping at nothing, we should adopt whatever strategies are most effective at protecting our future, which includes moral education, the inculcation of various values and ways of living are no doubt an important part of this. But the greatest obstacle to our survival and advancement is human nature itself; it must be changed. As impossible as such a transformation might seem to a layperson, Savulescu is hopeful. [I]t may be that as science progresses, we have at our fingertips the ability to change our nature. The power to transform humanity at the genetic level is in our hands, but its up to us to make a decision whether well use that power.3

This chapter compares certain warnings in C. S. Lewiss The Abolition of Man (1944) with recent arguments about our obligation to deploy biotechnologies to alter or enhance the human race. I begin with Julian Savulescu because he articulates clearly the values of a growing scientific and cultural phenomenon known as the human enhancement movement or Transhumanism. Not at this point a coordinated effort, human enhancement nonetheless represents the convergence of powerful cultural narratives, mind-boggling technological developments, and a progressive agenda with an improved humanity as its focus. Savulescus comments serve as an entry point for familiarizing ourselves with the goals and the reasoning of the human enhancement movement.

In order to understand Lewiss objectives in The Abolition of Man, particularly the most commented upon third lecture from which the book takes its title, it will be important to set the work in its historical context. To what specific threats was the great Christian apologist responding in the 1940s? Answering this question makes clear that Savulescu and other enhancement proponents did not invent the agenda they advocate. Todays proponents of biotechnological and ethical improvements to the human race write in a tradition that includes such intellectual luminaries as the eugenics theorist Francis Galton, playwright George Bernard Shaw, scientists such as J.B.S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal, and science fiction writers H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, all figures with whom Lewis was quite familiar. A crucial historical development, however, separates todays advocates from their intellectual predecessors and from C. S. Lewis. No longer are technological alterations to the human constitution a matter of speculation only; they are now vigorously promoted scientific realities awaiting the political and cultural conditions that will allow their implementation.

In an almost uncanny fashion Savulescus comments reflect key elements of the educational, ethical, and scientific planning that Lewis was concerned to answer in The Abolition of Man as well as in his fictional work, That Hideous Strength (1945). Proposals by Savulescu and others who share his concerns thus provide an ideal opportunity for assessing the prophetic nature of Lewiss concerns about applied technology in the context of an ascendant Western science operating outside the limits of widespread traditional values Lewis dubbed the Tao.

Lewis employed the term scientism when discussing science characterized by principles and practices tending toward controlling rather than investigating nature. Science joined to modern ideologies also encouraged the kind of kind of centralized planning he targets in The Abolition of Man and elsewhere. Finally, this pivotal distinction between science and scientism, his derisive fictional portrayals of some though not all scientists, and provocative comments in letters and essays all raise the question of Lewiss attitude toward science and scientists. Examining The Abolition of Man in its historical context will provide help in answering this persistent question.

Lewiss arguments regarding technological modifications to human nature merit attention even urgent attention in an era in which human genetic structure may soon be shaped according to the moral vision of a relatively small group of decision-makers. Moreover, his suspicion of scientific planning cut free from traditional values needs to be understood in an age in which technology is advancing at an exponential rate while moral knowledge in the West is declining almost as precipitously.

Tomorrow: Why C. S. Lewis Wrote The Abolition of Man.

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The Abolition of Man and the Advent of the Posthuman - Discovery Institute

Trump is faking it on the economy, just as he’s faking it on the pandemic, just as he’s faked everything his whole life – MarketWatch

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You need 270 electoral votes to be elected president.

When my daughter was about 4 years old, she had a great friend who would lead them on wonderful adventures. Lets fake that we are grown-ups, shed say in a memorable phrase. Lets fake that we are explorers. Or lets fake that were having a tea party.

It was my job to go over after a couple of hours and gently tell her: Make-believe time is over. Lets go scrub the real dirt off your face, put some real food in your body, and get you ready to have more wonderful adventures in your dreams.

Donald Trumps father never told him to stop pretending. Hes been faking his whole life. Faking that he built successful companies. Faking that he is a strong leader. Faking that he is a good family man. Faking wisdom and expertise and reverence. Faking that he loves America more than himself.

Faking it is the only thing Donald Trump has ever been good at. Were finding out more of the details of how he built his real estate empire on a pile of lies and a mountain of unpaid taxes. His career in show business was built on faking being a boss. His political career was built on lies about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, immigrants, Gold Star parents, his Republican primary opponents, and the help he sought and got from Russia.

His economic policies have been just like Trump himself: Loud, brash and largely ineffective.

And his presidency has been an endless deep fake, especially the lie that the economy, which hundreds of millions Americans built, is his achievement alone.

Now read: Why presidents shouldnt get credit or blame for the economy

Donald Trump did not build that economy. His signature policiesa hugely irresponsible and unnecessary tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, a mindless trade war with all of our trading partners, and the wholesale abolition of regulations that keep workers, consumers, the environment and the economy safehad almost no effect on the growth rate or the number of jobs or the stock market.

His economic policies have been just like Trump himself: Loud, brash and largely ineffective.

Now read: Trump didnt transform the economyits mostly the same as it was under Obama

Here are the facts, using the same metrics that Trump himself brags about:

Not only did Trump not build the best economy ever, he didnt budge it from its trend. Until the coronavirus hit.

The coronavirus has exposed all of Donald Trumps fakery. He doesnt understand the economy any better than he understands the pandemic. Thats part of the reason the U.S. is failing so badly, with than 5.7 million COVID cases and 28 million people collecting unemployment checks.

Prophetic: Audaciously, Trump is running for re-election as the Hero of the Coronavirus War

Whats more, he doesnt understand the presidents role in a crisis, which is to be a steady leader who inspires us all make the necessary sacrifices to achieve success.

Such a leader must level with the people about the task ahead while at the same time giving us hope and strength. He or she must not be afraid to show humility in the face of new and unexpected challenges. She or he must not be afraid to admit mistakes, or to ask for help.

In other words, a crisis is no time to fake it. Character counts in times like these.

You dont have to fool all the people all the time; you just need 270 electoral votes.

Trumps responses to the pandemic and to the economic crisis it created have been a failure. Trump has failed to grasp what almost everyone else has: That the economy cannot recover fully unless the pandemic is brought under control. There is no trade-off between the public health and a strong economy, because the economy can never recover until its safe to go about our lives again.

The economy had to be locked down to give public health authorities time to prepare to defend the nation against the virus. But that time was squandered. Hospital capacity was beefed up as required, but the other essential steps to control the pandemic werent taken, in part because Trump failed as a leader.

A crisis is no time to fake it. Character counts in times like these.

His failure began with his lack of empathy for those stricken, and it continued with his attempt to shift the blame for his own failures onto China. He refused to coordinate the complex task of quickly testing for infections, tracking possible vectors and isolating the infectious, which is the only way to contain the virus absent an effective and universal vaccine.

When he did try to lead us, it was mostly in the wrong direction. He denied the severity of the virus, he promoted quack cures, and he fought against and politicized the common-sense measures that would have made a difference, such as wearing masks and avoiding large crowds. He undermined the authority of his own experts and even questioned the value of testing.

He still brags about the one bold step he took, but that was ineffective, because his ban on travel from China and Europe didnt stop U.S. residents from bringing the virus into the country.

His response to the economic crisis was nearly as bad. He wisely kept out of the way in the early days when Democrats and Republicans in Congress actually agreed to the large CARES relief package, which gave or lent billions to small businesses, families and unemployed workers to bide them over.

Soon enough, Trump began to agitate to reopen everything before the testing, tracking and isolation regime was ready. Under his direction, governors prematurely removed the restrictions on social distancing and allowed the virus to spread further.

Then Trump began to promote quack cures for the economy, such as a payroll-tax holiday that would do nothing for those suffering the most, or a capital-gains tax cut that would further reward the wealthy, who have largely escaped the worst of the pandemic, both physically and financially.

He expressed no interest in renewing the relief measures that had already worked. And so we still dont have a relief package, a month after many effective measures expired. Its no surprise that job growth is slowing and consumer confidence is tumbling.

Trump denies the depth of economic misery, and blames those whove been laid off for not rushing back into unsafe working conditions. He demands that schools and sporting events return to business as usual without taking any precautions. He insists that everything will be OK, but does nothing to hasten that day.

And yet, Trump gets his best marks from voters on his handling of the economy. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many still believe that hes the genuine article, not a fake.

Trump may be a lousy president, but hes a great salesman and he knows better than most that if you boast with confidence, theres almost nothing you cant persuade people to believe. Some people run on their record, but Trump knows its better to lie about your record and run on that.

People often confuse confidence for competence. You dont have to fool all the people all the time; you just need 270 electoral votes.

Trump is running for re-election, but he has no concrete plans for his second term, just a list of wishes. He still doesnt have a strategy for getting the virus under control, or for reopening the economy safely.

For the first time ever, the Republican Party is refusing to adopt a party platform. The party that made its mark fighting against slavery and communism and in favor of freedom and limited government now finds itself unable to articulate what it believes in beyond blind loyalty to the supreme leader.

Trump himself has no idea what he would do in a second term. Friendly interviewers have given him softball questions about what he hopes to achieve in the next four years, but he always comes up blank.

Instead of a party platform, Trumps campaign has released a list of 50 core priorities for a second term, but the list is remarkably short on specifics. It reads like a list of New Years resolutions, with lofty goals such as creating 10 million jobs, returning to normal in 2021 and wiping out global terrorism, along with garden-variety graft such as expanding opportunity zones. The only things missing are the vows to lose 10 pounds and to call your sister more often.

In other words, Trump is still faking it. He knows what people want to hear, but he has no clue how to make any of it happen.

Unfortunately, Trumps presidency is not a game of make-believe. Its as real as 24 million people out of work, and as final as 177,000 deaths.

Im here to tell you gently: Make-believe time is over.

Rex Nutting is a columnist for MarketWatch who has covered economics and politics for 25 years.

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Trump is faking it on the economy, just as he's faking it on the pandemic, just as he's faked everything his whole life - MarketWatch

Cyprus Accused of Selling Golden Visas to the Corrupt and Criminals – SchengenVisaInfo.com

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Cyprus Government has faced accusations for selling Golden Visas, granting European Union citizenship and residency to persons included in criminal activities, corruption, and money laundering.

According to Al Jazeeras Investigative Unit, named The Cyprus Papers, a total of 1,400 wealthy internationals and their 1,100 family members have bought Cyprus citizenship, from 2017 to 2019 through the Cyprus Investment Program.

Thirty of these persons have been accused of illegal actions, while 40 of them are politically exposed persons, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

In this regard, the Transparency International, a global civil society organisation leading the fight against corruption, has stressed that the European Commission must take decisive action against Member States scandal-ridden golden visa schemes, which a new leak of documents shows remain vulnerable to corruption and money laundering.

The latest Al Jazeera report, once again brought to light many of the corruption and money laundering accusations that have been previously mentioned by a large share of European countries, including the European Union Commission.

Some of the persons on the list appear to have brought their passports, after the Governments decision to tighten the criteria.

Soon after the publication of the report, the Cyprus government denied these accusations that passports have been granted to the wealthy internationals involved in crime and corruption accusations, adding that they were all legitimate at the time.

According to the Interior Ministry of Cyprus, 12 internationals mentioned in the report accepted their citizenship under the scheme only after being approved by Cypriot and foreign agencies tasked with vetting such applications.

Former Gazprom official Nikolay Gornovskiy was one of the persons who bought EU citizenship in 2019. He has been included in Russias wanted list for corruption.

Russian national Igor Reva, who once was a deputy minister for economic development, and Pham Phu Quoc, who represents Ho Chi Minh City in the Vietnamese Congress, also bought Cyprus citizenship.

The speaker of Afghanistans Lower House of Parliament Rahman Rahmani, as well, bought EU citizenship, not only for himself but for his wife and three daughters, as well.

Through the Golden Visa Scheme, persons from around the world are eligible to buy citizenship of Cyprus, if they make a minimum of 2.15 million euros ($2.5m) investment in Cyprus.

Persons who make such an investment will be able to live, travel and work in any of the 27 European Union member states.

In April, the European Union Commission criticised Cyprus, Bulgaria and Malta for their Golden Visa schemes.

European Commissions criticisms were addressed during a video-hearing of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE).

Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders emphasised that these three countries need to phase out these programmes.

European Parliament members had previously adopted a recommendation, urging EU countries running Golden Visa schemes as well as passports, to terminate them.

In February, members of the European Parliament from the European Peoples Party also demanded the abolition of the Golden visa schemes.

Even though the Cypriot Government approved some changes to its golden visa scheme, the report shows that the door for money laundering and other illegal actions is sill opened.

In February, Cyprus became the first country to update the golden visa scheme, after being criticised by the European Council.

These changes to make the program more specific, applied by Cyprus authorities included:

In 2019, Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades admitted that errors might have occurred in granting Golden Passports after he repeatedly denied there were any problems.

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Cyprus Accused of Selling Golden Visas to the Corrupt and Criminals - SchengenVisaInfo.com

Secret Philly: Fair Hill examines the 19th Amendment’s meaning and history – Billy Penn

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There may not be a living, breathing American place that so poetically captures the moment in which the nation finds itself as Philadelphias historic Fair Hill Burial Ground.

The North Philly cemetery was a backdrop for the movements for people of colors civil rights and for womens suffrage, with advocates who fought for both causes buried there. On the centennial of the 19th Amendments ratification, Fair Hill provides a reminder that the anniversary commemorates what was a celebratory occasion for some, but confirmation of a bitterly disappointing reality for many others.

The nonprofit that maintains the site, Historic Fair Hill, will pull on its past to highlight this connection and discrepancy at a free outdoor play and community event.

Under the Bonnet will run from 3 to 4 p.m. and again from 4 to 5 p.m. on two upcoming Saturdays (Aug. 22 at Fair Hill and Aug. 29 at the Arch Street Meeting House.) The show is about Lucretia Mott, James Mott and Frederick Douglass, with a plotline that explains how the womens rights movement came straight out of the abolition of slavery movement, said Executive Director Jean Warrington.

Though it had a rough time in the 1990s, Fair Hill is a special place, with a history of giving back to its community.

Lucretia Mott is buried there. She stood out among her peers, who include famed New York suffragist Susan B. Anthony, for her staunch commitment to abolitionism alongside feminist activism. Also there are Harriet Forten Purvis, cofounder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and husband Robert Purvis, a Black businessman who dedicated his life to abolition work and has been called president of the Underground Railroad.

The lush field at Germantown Avenue and Cambria Street also holds graves of many formerly enslaved Philadelphians. Fair Hill was one of the citys first racially integrated cemeteries.

Today, the burial ground offers a nearly five-acre oasis for residents of Fairhill, the surrounding neighborhood. In addition to its four community gardens, employees and volunteers connected to the historic site have restored nearby school libraries, run school partnership literacy programs and hired neighbors as bilingual educators.

Fair Hill was founded in 1703 as a Quaker Friends meetinghouse and graveyard, which still provides inspiration.

This historic site, burial ground of great abolitionists and early womens rights activists, is a real beacon for us now, said Warrington, the director. So we asked ourselves, what would those ancestors be doing right now in Fairhill? They were active in education, in promoting equality and justice.

The cemetery got its start more than 300 years ago, thanks to Philadelphias semi-problematic fave William Penn.

In the early 1700s, Penn left the land to Fair Hill founder George Fox, a fellow Quaker. Its ostensible use was to be for horse stables, a meetinghouse and a burial ground. Documents show it was also intended as a playground for children of the town, garden to plant with physical plants [and] for lads and lasses tolearn to make oils and ointments.

At first, the grounds were well kept, and they would stay that way for more than a century. In 1896, the City of Philadelphia officially celebrated Arbor Day at the picturesque park.

Newspaper mentions of actual burials there are scant. It was very quiet for a long time, Warrington said. People got buried there and they were quiet about it.

Historic Fair Hill maintains a database of the more than 3k people interred at the site from the 1840s onward. The last person buried there was laid to rest nearly a century and a half later.

In addition to Lucretia Mott and Harriet Forten Purvis, some other notable Philadelphians at Fair Hill include:

Their headstones are simple and similar, made of nondescript arches of marble, after traditional Quaker ideals.

Lucretia Mott, a Massacussets native who moved to Philadelphia, was one of the five women who organized the first Seneca Falls convention in 1848. Mott co-wrote the conventions Declaration of Sentiments, outlining the purpose of the political gathering of women.

The convention is sometimes touted as the catalyst for the passage of the 19th Amendment, which was ratified on Aug. 18, 1920, giving women the right to vote nationwide. But thats only part of the story.

State and local governments swiftly enacted measures designed to keep women of color and poor women out of the ballot box. The 19th didnt outlaw poll taxes or literacy tests, two measures governments put in place after the 15th Amendment had extended the vote to Black men decades earlier.

Indigenous women wouldnt even begin to be able to vote until the Indian Citizen Act of 1924, and the last state extended the right to vote for Indigenous people in 1962.

Black people didnt gain the full legal right to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and still face voter suppression today.

As part of the Under the Bonnet performance at the burial ground this weekend, students who work with Fair Hill will read their essays about Lucretia Mott, Harriet Purvis and another woman of color who inspires them.

The thriving greenspace Fair Hill visitors see today is a recent iteration.

Warringtons organization, which helped bring it to fruition, is officially known as Fair Hill Burial Ground Corp. It bought the lot at 2901 Germantown Ave. from Ephesians Baptist Church in 1994. The latter had acquired the property from the Quakers in the 1980s and promptly let the sacred space go to hell.

For about a decade in the late 80s and early 90s, Motts and others graves were repeatedly desecrated as the crack-cocaine epidemic swept through the area.

In a 1990 Inquirer article that highlighted the burial grounds disrepair, one fed-up neighbor explained. This cemetery is a hotel, the neighbor complained at the time. You can spend the night here. You can do drugs here. You can do anything you want.

That same year, nearby residents started to rally. They organized cleanups and beautifications. In 1999, Fair Hill Burial Ground was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

There wasnt any news, Warrington observed, until the cleanup in the 1990s.

More than two decades later, Warrington and her team of 15 employees and many more community volunteers keep the sites community spirit alive.

While the Fairhill neighborhood continues to be affected by drug use, poverty and gun violence, the burial ground and community gardens were last year officially recognized by local religious leaders as zones of peace.

Its very encouraging, Warrington said. Anybody works hard and its wonderful to have somebody appreciate what you do. And it made us thinkhow can we extend that?

The answer: by helping other people bring peaceful green space to their areas. Historic Fair Hill assisted several people and one organization in starting their own gardens this year. And Fair Hill volunteers have planted 110 trees in the last year through the Tree Tenders program, Warrington said.

The nonprofit does a lot. It raised money to restore school libraries in nearby Julia DeBurgos and John F. Hartranft schools, with plans to bring the program to Cramp and Potter Thomas schools next. It offers mural tours and burial grounds tours, though those have been suspended by the pandemic.

Just as important as the programs and education, in the middle of a concrete jungle, Fair Hill provides a green getaway.

Many of our kids have a nature deficit disorder, Warrington said. Seeking kids in the gardenwhen they just are taking care of a plant and picking tomatoes or picking the melons, they just love it.

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Secret Philly: Fair Hill examines the 19th Amendment's meaning and history - Billy Penn

Public Health England: the implications of this restructure go well beyond Covid-19 – Prospect Magazine

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Hancock has given PHE the chop. Photo: Erica Dezonne/EMPICS Entertainment

Last week Public Health England got the unceremonious chop from Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock. Theres a well-worn tradition followed by successive governments of setting up, then disbanding national public bodies, and replacing them with something looking suspiciously like a previously abolished bodythe kind of thing youd expect in The Thick of It. In PHEs case, is this just another act of casual vandalism (as Lord Warner described the abolition of its predecessorthe Health Protection Agencyin a Lords debate in 2012)? Or is there method and could something good come of it?

The demise of PHE follows a similar pattern to that of many now-defunct national agencies: a sudden decision; no set-out diagnosis of the problem or justification for change; an orchestrated trial by a baying set of on-side media commentators; no apparent acknowledgement of the costs involved, nor the demotivating effect on staff or follow-on risks. News breaks often on a bank holiday weekend, or at a time with other media distractionsin the PHE case it was of course the weekend of the A-level grades fiasco. Then comes the official announcement at a friendly think tank, with an invited audience, where awkward questions to the minister can easily be deflected. Job done onto the next policy announcement

For sure, PHEs record in the pandemic is mixedon testing, tracing, even counting the number of deaths. But the government must take its share of responsibility. As an executive agency, PHE is already directly accountable to the Department of Health and Social Care and the secretary of state, and thus reflects their own performance. Looking back at the priorities for PHE set by ministers in 2019, preparing to leave the EU was top of the list, rather than pandemic preparation.

Hancocks decision to axe it carries high-stakes risks, with such a distracting reorganisation in the middle of a pandemic. The reorganisation will consolidate the work of three key public health organisationsPHE, the Joint Biosecurity Centre and NHS Test and Traceinto a new National Institute for Health Protection. One objective, according to the secretary of state, is to provide greater focus (repeated eight times in his announcement at think tank Policy Exchange) to the governments response to Covid-19. There is logic to linking these functions, and governments surely must make the reorganisations they think will be effective. The timing is presumably because theres a lull in Covid-19 infections and hospitalisations (down from 17,000 at the peak to 545 now).

Theres a well-worn tradition of replacing public bodies with something like what was previously abolishedthe kind of thing youd expect in The Thick of It

But three ironies. The first is that PHE in part replaced a similar institution seven years agothe Health Protection Agency. The rationale was to create an executive agency that would bring central government closer to its core role of protecting citizens and integrate action on the related issues of infection control and broader public health. Second, the successor body is to be modelled on Germanys Robert Koch Institutea poster child internationally because of its successful response to the pandemic. Unlike the seven-year-old PHE, the Robert Koch Institute has been in existence for 125 years, its mandate hasnt changed since 1994, and it has always been headed by independent scientists of distinguished pedigree. Third is that a review of PHE by a respected set of international peers in 2017 was glowing.

Time will tell whether the upheaval is worth it. Surely this will be the subject of extensive scrutiny in any subsequent inquiry, alongside of course the record of the government and the Department of Health and Social Care itself.

But just as important will be what happens to the other things PHE does apart from infection control, in particular health improvementsuch as the promotion of healthy lifestyles and tackling health inequalities across the population. No surprise that the outriders trailing the PHE announcement were quick to argue for an end to its role in nanny statism. But the continuing burden of ill health and death from inequality in England is far greater than that from Covid-19and growing. This also affects red wall areas disproportionately, and might therefore have been thought a government priority.

To his credit the secretary of state, in announcing PHEs demise, reconfirmed his commitment to prevention. He needs tothe health gap between rich and poor is wider than in most other European countries. If nothing else its burden will be a huge drag on economic recovery. The government is beginning to recognise this, for example publishing an obesity strategy in July, which the prime minister supported publicly. Beyond that, it remains to be seen whether the levelling-up agenda will extend beyond the economy and infrastructure and into health. There will be opportunity in the Autumn spending round to make more progressalthough radical measures will be needed to have any impact on health by the next election in 2024.

So while all eyes are on how the new arrangements post-PHE will work to fight the pandemic this winter, the real area to watch is how the wider programme for health improvement takes shape. The huge opportunity to design something intelligent alas will take more thinking than tinkering with national agencies.

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Public Health England: the implications of this restructure go well beyond Covid-19 - Prospect Magazine

Governor Cuomo Announces Unveiling of Sojourner Truth Statue at The Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park – ny.gov

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Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced a seven-foot bronze statue of eminent abolitionist and suffragist Sojourner Truth was unveiled at the Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park in Ulster County to commemorate the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage.

"Sojourner Truth's passionate belief in equal rights for all made her an enduring role model for the reformers of the civil rights and women's equality movements," Governor Cuomo said."As New York celebrates the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage, it is fitting that we recognize this courageous and pioneering New Yorker and look to her for inspiration as we continue striving to makeNew York State a beacon for equality and inclusion for all people."

"The unveiling of the Sojourner Truth statue at the Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park is a fitting way to honor the abolitionist and suffragist as part of the 100thanniversary of women's suffrage,"said Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, Chair of the NYS Women's Suffrage Commission."The granting of the right to vote in New York in 1917 as the first major state to do so helped lead the way three years later for the 19thAmendment. But often missing from those decades of struggle is the stories of strong African American leaders like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and others. This monument finally expands representation of all who have contributed to New York's rich history. We have made great strides in the fight for women's equality, but we still have more work to do to achieve true equality and justice for all."

Isabella "Bomefree" Baumfree was born enslaved in Ulster County among Dutch people. She freed herself from slavery one year before legal enslavement ended in New York. Following her deeply held religious views she traveled as an itinerant preacher, speaking 'truth' to the harsh inequities people of color and women suffered while calling for systemic change. Naming herself Sojourner Truth, she became one of the nation's leading voices for abolition and universal suffrage in the 19th century.

Created by Yonkers sculptor Vinnie Bagwell, the statue includes text, braille and symbols to encourage viewers to walk around it and study its surface. The folds of her skirt act as a canvas to depict Sojourner's life experiences, including images of a young enslaved mother comforting her child, a slavery sale sign, images of her abolitionist peers, and a poster for a Women's Suffrage March.

In support of the sculpture installation, New York State Parks has added educational content to its website, including information and videos on Sojourner Truth, Vinnie Bagwell's sculpture, the women's suffrage movement, and current voter registration information. To learn more, visit:https://parks.ny.gov/history/women/.

State Parks Commissioner Erik Kulleseid said, "New York State Parks is proud to be the home of this stirring Sojourner Truth statue at the Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park, which advances our mission to tell a more complete version of our state and national history. Thanks to Governor Cuomo and Lt. Governor Hochul for their commitment to recognize and support people past and present who fight for equality and freedom."

Senator George Amedore said, "As we celebrate the 100thanniversary of the ratification of the 19thamendment, it is fitting that we memorialize the remarkable contributions and legacy of Hudson Valley native Sojourner Truth. I'd like to thank Lt. Governor Hochul, as well as New York State Office of Parks, for this wonderful addition to the Walkway Over the Hudson."

Senator Sue Serino said, "A revered abolitionist and suffragist, Sojourner Truth's legacy is one of resilience, hope and freedom for all. This breathtaking work of art is a fitting tribute to such a remarkable woman. Her statue here on the Walkway Over the Hudson will serve as a ready reminder to all who pass that we all have the ability to overcome adversity, unite our community, and do our part to create a better and more just world."

Assembly Member Didi Barrett said, "As this year marks 100 years since the 19th Amendment was ratified, I'm proud to celebrate one of New York's most courageous and persevering leaders, a woman who fought for both women's suffrage and racial equality," said Assemblymember Didi Barrett, who chairs the NY State Legislative Women's Caucus. "Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist, feminist and a trailblazer on whose shoulders all New York women stand. This monument will honor her legacy, reminding us and future generations to use our voices for change and to stand up for what we believe in."

Assembly Member Jonathan Jacobson said, "The Walkway Over the Hudson is the perfect location to recognize an Ulster County native who broke all barriers in her quest for voting and equal rights for women of all races which was a daring and courageous battle in the 19th Century. It is so fitting that the statue of Sojourner Truth was dedicated on National Women's Equality Day as we celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote in our country. Having the statue at the Walkway on the Hudson means that thousands of people every year will be inspired by this great American hero."

Ulster County Executive Patrick Ryan said, "Ulster County is honored to recognize the life and the legacy of Sojourner Truth. Placing this statue at the entrance of a walking bridge is a fitting tribute to a woman who in 1826, only a few miles from where this statue is located, started her own famous walk to freedom. During her life, Truth was quick to note that she made the conscious choice to walk away from a life of slavery. She knew her actions were justified, even if it violated the law, and thus she refused to run. Sojourner Truth shared her experiences and her quest for freedom with our nation and her story continues to inspire many to this day. I want to thank Governor Andrew Cuomo, Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, and all of those involved who have helped create a monument to one of the most enduring figures of our county, state, and nation."

Poughkeepsie Mayor Rob Rolison said, "What a fitting and wonderful accomplishment and tribute. "Sojourner Truth has long been recognized as an abolitionist and women's rights leader - as well as a human rights crusader. Born into slavery in Ulster County, she has long served as a stark reminder to the Hudson Valley that the fight for equality and justice had be to won everywhere -- and, in some ways, that fight continues today. Now when tourists and area residents alike cross the Walkway Over the Hudson, they will see this shining example, this statue of a woman who has become a symbol of freedom, of hope and of resiliency."

Lloyd Supervisor Fred Pizzuto said, "The Town of Lloyd is honored to be the home of this amazing statue of Sojourner Truth. The first 30 years of her live spent here in Ulster county were full of struggle and hardship but she overcame and her strength became an inspiration to so many. It is our hope that this beautiful statue becomes a visual celebration of her achievements and inspires those who come to visit to learn more about her life and the African-Americans who helped build this county."

Artist Vinnie Bagwell said,"On the 100th anniversary for Women's Suffrage and the 19th Amendment, I am delighted to mark it with the permanent installation of 'Sojourner Truth'. It has been an honor for me to create this work because this is amoment when the Empire State of New York turns the protest into progress. This public artworksited in such a public placewill enlighten and unify the community-at-large in our values and commitment to fight for justice and equality." - Vinnie Bagwell, Sculptor

Executive Director, Walkway Over the Hudson Organization, Elizabeth Waldstein-Hart said,"We are tremendously pleased that this iconic statue of Sojourner Truth has a home inWalkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park," said Elizabeth Waldstein, Executive Director, Friends of the Walkway. "The Walkway is a place that inspires thought and reflection, and it is our hope thatthousands of visitors will become familiar with one of the Hudson Valley's most courageous leaders. They will leave knowing the Sojourner Truth story and support her life's workas we continue to come together to create a more equitable and just society for future generations."

New York State is the home of the women's rights movement. It hosted the first-ever Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Sixty-nine years later, on November 6, 1917, women in New York State secured the right to vote. Three years after that, the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting women across the United States the right to vote.

The New York State Women's Suffrage Commission, chaired by Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, is supporting and promoting programs to commemorate women's suffrage through 2020, which will mark a century since the 19th Amendment was ratified. The Commission's programs celebrate the accomplishment of women's suffrage and the central role of New Yorkers and New York State in this milestone, while also helping shape the future to ensure a more just and equitable society for all. To learn more, visitwww.ny.gov/suffrage.

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Governor Cuomo Announces Unveiling of Sojourner Truth Statue at The Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park - ny.gov

Want to Abolish the Police? The First Step Is Putting Them Under Democratic Control. – In These Times

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This article is aresponse to Community Control Wont Fix Whats Wrong with Cops by Carl Williams and ChristianWilliams.

We need community control over the police to abolish the policebecause the police state wont dismantleitself.

Community control over police is an unfinished project begun by the Black Panther Party. Fifty years ago, the party worked in Northern California across San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond and Berkeley to try and win community control through ballot initiatives (though the initiatives failed). They even held amajor Community Control of the Police Conference in Chicago in 1973, featuring Fannie Lou Hamer and Bobby Rush. Today, that work is continued by organizers like Jazmine and groups like Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Pan-African Community Action (PACA), of which Iam amember.

The idea behind community control is simple: We oppose state violence itself along with what enables state violencethe fact that disinterested elites and outsiders control what happens in our communities. Community control over police is the only demand that addresses both the symptoms and thedisease.

Carl and Christian argue that policing is fundamentally tied to white supremacy and therefore unreformable. Its true; the police are white supremacist. But so is the government that policing defends, the same government that abolitionists are petitioning to make change. In the absence of community control, the demand to abolish police is functionally arequest for the state to reorganize itself and reshuffle its resourcesbut the powerful stay powerful and the disempowered stay disempowered. The question is not whether to abolish, then, but who we can trust to do theabolition.

Massive networks of institutions, across jurisdictions, combine to incentivize and stabilize policing as we know it, from prosecutors to prisons to legislatures. Many of these institutions operate most powerfully after the point of arrest. Community control intervenes, surgically: By taking public control over the police who handle the bulk of arrests, we act before other parts of the system can get involved. Without community control, abolition just means asking alarger set of white supremacist institutions to restructure asmaller set. Instead, we are asking ourneighbors.

One difference in PACAs proposal is that community control boards would be staffed by residents selected at random and rotated through temporary terms of service. This process would actually eliminate elections while being more democratic (similar to the jury duty system), preventing elites from recapturing police control through campaign contributions. Putting communities in the drivers seat whether or not they choose to abolish policecreates afundamentally different power structure than the current authoritarian chain ofcommand.

Carl and Christian are confusing the ideas of community policing and civilian oversight (both, essentially, public relations strategies) with actual community control over police. Other than the word community, the concepts are unrelated. Those first ideas change only what the power structure looks like; the latter flips the power structure upside down, putting the community in charge. The ruling class desperately wants us not to notice thedifference.

We do not need police officers and police departments. We do need community safety and the power to design and protect alternative ways to achieve it. If acommunity controls its police department and its resources, then nothing stops the community from firing every officer, hiring EMTs and tutors in their place, and directing resources toward mutual aid projects. That turn of events is rather obviously abolitionist in effect, whether or not the word police ever changes (though perhaps community control over public safety is amore aptphrase).

Community control over police is just one version of abroader commitment to community control and self-determination. The Black Panther Party, for example, also organized for community control over housing, education and land. The ultimate goal, as Jazmine puts it: that every action, policy and budget must be subject to the will of the people. If thats not abolitionist, Idont know whatis.

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Want to Abolish the Police? The First Step Is Putting Them Under Democratic Control. - In These Times

Much of the credit for John Hume’s campaign wrongly attributed to SDLP – The Irish News

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At the end of his Westminster parliamentary career, the member for East Mayo, Michael Davitt, stood outside Parliament buildings and declared: No worthy cause can succeed here unless backed by massive agitation.

Until the 1918 general election when Sinn Fin won a landslide victory by winning 73 seats, Ireland sent over many capable, skilled and articulate political orators, including Charles Stewart Parnell, Davitt and Joe Devlin. Despite their best efforts they could never achieve anything of benefit. Massive protest and passive resistance organised by Davitt and the Fenians eventually won the right of the tenant farmers to buy their cottages.

In the 1960s the Civil Rights movement took to the streets when all parliamentary means to achieve civilised standards of human rights proved to be futile. Following the passing of John Hume much of the credit for this campaign has been wrongly attributed to the SDLP. Contrary to this historical revisionism John Hume was not the leader of the Civil Rights movement. And this is not to detract from his contribution to the peace initiative between him, Gerry Adams, Albert Reynolds and Fr Alex Reid. The movement was initiated and driven by republicans and was broadly based. At its inception in 1968 there were leading republicans, prominent nationalists, communists, students, socialists and even some unionists. When it took to the streets it diverged into two distinct groups, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the more left-wing Peoples Democracy.

It had no particular leader, but prominent spokespersons were Michael Farrell, Kevin Boyd, Bernadette Devlin, Eamon McCann and the late Madge Davison. The late Gerry Fitt and prominent nationalists Austin Currie and Cllr Brennan were on the first march from Coalisland to Dungannon. Some of them formed the SDLP political party and effectively gave up politics. In the absence of republican political opposition they enjoyed electoral success in both Westminster and European elections for many years. During all of that time they have never been known to achieve any redress of the grievances including murder, collusion, internment, torture and the whole spectrum of human rights abuse. The SDLP certainly didnt create or lead the Civil Rights movement. On the contrary, the Civil Rights movement was a launching pad for this political party. They have been punished by the electorate for those wasted years.

Today, effective legislation exists to stop discrimination in employment. The Orange Order cannot decide who gets jobs or houses any more.

None of these rights were ever secured by the SDLP, but by the sacrifice and endeavour of those people who listened to Michael Davitt. It is unfortunate for them that they are punished at the polls for the failure of their much and wrongly acclaimed founder members and rightly so.

JACK DUFFINBelfast BT11

Transfer test has to go

Patrick Murphy is right when he says that our education system represents a form of madness (August 15). It perfectly fits Einsteins definition of madness where you continue to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

Once again the Education Minister Peter Weir has appointed yet another expert panel to examine the links between poor academic outcomes and social deprivation and the first question that springs to mind is why? In the last 10 years there have been numerous reports examining the links between educational underachievement and social deprivation which have recommended an end to academic selection. All of these reports have been ignored by the DUP. You get the impression that the minister is just going through the motions and that really he and his party are quite happy to maintain the status quo.

The DUPs continued support for a system of selective education at 11 has led to what is known in education as the Matthew Effect, taken from Matthews Gospel: For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away (Matthew 25: 29). Simply put children from more advantaged backgrounds can use the education system and their parents knowledge of how the system works to forge ahead while children from disadvantaged backgrounds get further and further behind.

I think that its only fair that this new panel of experts is told by the minister that they can make an unlimited number of recommendations as long as they dont recommend abolition of the transfer test. The education system is falling apart, the economy is falling apart but nothing will change because the DUP wants the education system we have. The transfer test has to go.

JIM CURRANDownpatrick, Co Down

Watered down study of literature

I read with dismay CCEAs plan to water down the GCSE English Literature syllabus yet further. Students studying literature no longer have to read a novel. What on earth is the study of literature, if it isnt to acquaint the student with the great classics? When I was a student, many years ago, O-level English was two subjects language (with an intensive study of grammar, and written and oral expression) and literature. I wonder how todays student would react if faced with our O-level English Literature syllabus? We had a list of 12 great novels of which we had to be intimately acquainted with four. (I read all 12 before deciding which four I wanted to study.) We had two Shakespeare plays one of the great tragedies, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; an 18th-century play Goldsmiths She Stoops to Conquer; a book of modern essays by GK Chesterton; a book of 18th-century essays by Joseph Addison and four poetry books at least two of which we had to be intimately acquainted with. (No, this was not an A-level syllabus; just O-level) And this on top of nine other subjects. And yet, we had no problem doing the reading that was required of us. By what stretch of the imagination can todays GCSE English Literature syllabus be called a study of literature?

BRIAN OHARENewry, Co Down

Irresponsible actions

Despite breaking government guidelines EU Commissioner Phil Hogan reckons, All of us must display solidarity as we try to stamp out this common plague. He then goes on to offer, a fulsome and profound apology etc etc. This seemingly reluctant apology, thankfully instigated by Taoiseach Martin and Tanaiste Varadkar, only serves to make the slogan we are all in this together sound mawkish. What we are dealing with here is entitlement, people like Phil Hogan, Deputy First Minister Michelle ONeill, Dara Calleary, Dominic Cummings and numerous here today gone tomorrow UK government ministers regard it as their right to do as they wish and airily issue cliched apologies such as unreservedly and fulsome. Their irresponsible actions undermine the noble work of the medical profession. It may sound trite but people like Phil Hogan roaming about the country to attend social events goes to prove that there is a set of rules for them and something different, like a lack of respect, for the rest of us.

WILSON BURGESSDerry City

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Much of the credit for John Hume's campaign wrongly attributed to SDLP - The Irish News

Perspectives on incarceration and abolition you should be listening to – scalawagmagazine.org

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While so much of the work around abolition concerns stopping the harms of prison systems that profit off of the criminalization, caging, and theft of labor from Black and brown people, incarcerated folks are finding creative ways to contribute to larger systems of culture and knowledgeboth inside of prisons and beyond their walls.

Artists and scholars have always had to forge their own intellectual pathways while incarcerated. That process crafts a certain level of intellectual rigor free from the alienation and inaccessibility that often accompanies traditional academic training.

Learning directly from those caught in the crosshairs of the prison industrial complex is necessary to challenge political structures and address the ongoing harms propagated under the guise of law and order.

Heres a spotlight on some of our favorite thinkers, activists, and writers whose writings and experience with the criminal justice system continue to evolve our ways of thinking.

New Orleans native Albert Woodfox is a brilliant scholar, memorialist, organizer, and Black Panther. One of the Angola 3, Woodfox endured 44 years and 10 months imprisoned in solitary confinementthe longest consecutive period of solitary confinement in U.S. history.

His sentence to solitary confinement resulted from the fact that Woodfox and his comrades were known Black Panthers organizing, teaching, and mobilizing inside the walls of Angola State Prison. So when a guard was killed, prison officials framed the Angola 3 so that they could punish and quell Black political dissidence.

"I just loved the boldness of the Party; African American men and women standing up knowing what the repercussions could be and deciding to take control of their lives, take control of the lives of the Black community, and resist oppression, economic exploitation, and exclusion of Black people."

Only in 2016 was Woodfox finally cleared and released. By then his and others advocacy and protesting had led to significant improvements in the treatment of people in solitary confinement.

Since his release, Woodfox has spoken extensively about his experience for all manner of audiences. Hes even featured on a British music album, alongside names like Stormzy and Idris Elba, on a track called Whats the cost of freedom?

Organizer, abolitionist, and Scalawag contributing editor Zaina was over the moon when he agreed to an interview with her, calling it the highlight of her tenure at Scalawag.

What is significant about Woodfoxs work is his insistence on the unwavering individual and collective commitment to social change.

[P]eople have to see social struggle as a way of life, not an event [not like] you get to a certain plateau or you achieve certain things and everything is over. There will always be challenges in civil society, so when you make a commitment to social struggle it has to be a lifetime commitment, not just for a particular person, but for humanity as a whole.

Read: Solitary, Woodfoxs award-winning memoir

Attend: A conversation between Woodfox and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka

In 2016, Scalawag began its relationship with Lyle May, a writer incarcerated on North Carolinas death row. It is entirely possible to have a regular contributor on death row; it just takes patience from both the reporter and editor, but the resulting impact is well worth it.

Scalawag Race & Place editor Danielle on working with Lyle May: In the four years Ive worked with Lyle May, a writer incarcerated on North Carolinas death row, weve only seen each other behind thick glass and spoken by phone. On a Friday afternoon, after walking through metal detectors and passing the dress code and the wall display of Central Prison t-shirts for sale, I walk into the tiny cell where were allowed to speak for two hours, and immediately he grins and tells me something weird that happened to him that week. Our visits and calls are delightful and interesting and also sad as hell.

Over the last four years, May has written eight stories for Scalawag, working directly with our editors through regular calls, visits, and letters. His 2018 essay on anti-death penalty policy, Life without parole is silent execution, is still one of our best-circulating articles, and is taught in courses on criminal justice reform at UNC, and a writing seminar at Duke.

See also: Lyle May, Beyond the Wall: A couple of guards muttered incredulous comments about the cost of an ambulance while I stared at the splint, trying to keep my face neutral. Rattling in my head like a pair of carelessly tossed dice were two words: outside hospital. Then one: outside. Through the haze of oxycodone, I focused on the waves of pain instead of what outside meant, but this failed as a long-forgotten beacon lanced through it all. Outside. Outside. Outside.

The insights provided by incarcerated correspondents like May are critical because too often media and journalists take the police record and state transcripts at face value without doing due diligence. May has paid the price personally for writing articles on policy issues and prison abuses. For publishing unfavorable reports with Scalawag, hes had privileges revoked and even been denied access to educational classes necessary for the completion of his degree. Nevertheless May continues advocating for the freedom of the press within prisons. The public has a right to know.

Read: Mays memoir Waiting for the Last Train

May serves as an outspoken voice for sentencing and parole reform and higher education in prisons. Beyond writing for Scalawag, May has gone on to give university lectures and write for outlets like Inside Higher Ed. Most recently he appeared in an interview with CNNs medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta about the impacts of COVID-19 in prisons. Through his writing, May is able to advocate for and shed light on not just his experience but the experiences of the thousands of people thrown into cages by the state.

See also: Jacob Davis, Whether Fences or Not: I need to know Nashville better because I love people there. We desire a shared context which the system tries to deny us in order to satisfy those who want prisoners to die a social death, to disappear and to stay disappeared.

Guggenheim fellow, author of four books including the recently released and critically-acclaimed Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and essayist who brings his experience as a teenager sentenced to 9 years in a maximum security prison and his experience as a public defender to bear on the conversation around mass incarceration and its octopic effects.

Scalawag Arts & Soul editor Alysia: Betts and I overlapped during our time at Yale, and though we did not know each other well, poetry circlesno matter where you goare indeed quite small. I remember pouring over his second collection in graduate school and being struck by the way he wove legal language in with a no-punches-pulled vernacular, sometimes breaking the rigidities of syntax in order to really express a thing. One with little patience for PC language and neoliberal signifiers, Betts makes no allegiances to systems, benevolent or compromised. I remember his commitment to truthtelling in a keep-it-100 Facebook post he wrote about how Howard Law School had retracted his acceptance after finding out he had a felony record. He later went on to Yale Law.

Read: Bastards of the Reagan Era, Betts journey from prison to law school

Betts work is not limited to the page or the courtroom. His collaboration The Redaction with another New Haven local, famous visual artist Titus Kaphar, whose tar-dipped icons of incarcerated Black men appear on the cover of Felon, recently debuted at MoMA PS1. From his website, Drawing inspiration and source material from lawsuits filed by the Civil Rights Corps (CRC) on behalf of people incarcerated because of an inability to pay court fines and fees, The Redaction features poetry by Betts in combination with Kaphars etched portraits of incarcerated individuals.

We Knew Where The Power Was: Interviews with members of the North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union.

If free people are not allowed to have unions, how are prisoners to have unions? Robbie Purner, NCPLU organizer who worked diligently to support incarcerated worker resistance and became the unions lead union organizer on the outside.

Prisoners organizations were thought to be dangerous. Chuck Eppinette, arrested for draft resistance, made preparations to unionize inmates behind bars.

'A voice locked up is not a voice unheard!' Jim Grant and two other Black men were accused of setting fire to a riding stable near Charlotte. While protesters marched in the streets for his release, Grant continued to agitate for change on the cell block as a union organizer.

Leroy Mann, former Scalawag contributor and resident of death row in Raleighs Central Prison, where he is a witness to the injustice of capital punishment. He is the author of a memoir and an unpublished novel titled Concrete Seeds, and he has blogged at Word to the Masses for more than six years.

HugsAn American family structure: "When someone tells you, Ill be by your side forever, then they just stop writing or visiting... Its like being in love and having your heart broken; it hurts! Ive developed a thick skin because I dont like getting hurt.

Three shifts of an 11th hour: [T]hird shiftwhen prisoners stand still and prison officers work late into the nightis the states designated time for the compulsory transcendence of a soul.

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Perspectives on incarceration and abolition you should be listening to - scalawagmagazine.org

Greek Lifes History of Racism Is Catching Up to It – Teen Vogue

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When Ellie, a graduate of a California state school, was told that she and her fellow sorority sisters had to wear nude heels for rush, she figured she would have to buy a new pair of shoes that fit her skin tone. But when she came back with tan heels, she was told to exchange them for a lighter pair. She said it was clear to her that to the chapters recruitment chair, nude really meant the shade of white skin tones. Even though the lighter color didnt match her darker skin, Ellie had to replace her new heels to fit in with the rest of her predominantly white sorority.

Throughout the next three years, Ellie, a biracial, first-generation Chinese American student who asked to use a pseudonym to speak candidly, says she became used to biting her tongue when witnessing such microaggressions as well as more blatant forms of racism. While the friendships she eventually gained gave her good enough reason to avoid dropping, she, along with hundreds of student leaders across the country, are now calling for the abolition of Greek life, citing pervasive racism within the system.

Ellies shoe ordeal is just one example of the exclusionary attitudes that she says are commonplace in sororities, particularly during rush week, when houses present themselves to prospective members hoping to snag the most desirable freshmen girls. She recalled hearing members say that their house needed more blonde girls since they looked better in photos; that the ethnics belonged in other sororities.

While even more egregious instances of racism within the institution dominate headlines blackface, cultural appropriation, and bigoted hazing rituals come to mind it is the smaller exclusionary acts, such as those Ellie experienced, that many say expose the racism behind these houses intimidating doors.

Greek life is not a broken system; its exclusive because it was built to be exclusive, Maya, a member of a sorority at Washington University in St. Louis who is now leaning toward the abolishment of the Greek system, tells Teen Vogue. Birds of a feather flock together. You end up breeding these groups of people that are predominantly white and predominantly wealthy that are going to inherently exclude people of color.

This kind of privileged segregation has historically helped carry members to positions of power long after theyve left campus. As University of Kentucky professor Alan DeSantis noted in his 2007 book on the Greek system, at the time of publication, 85% of Supreme Court justices since 1910, 85% of Fortune 500 executives, 76% of U.S senators, and 18 presidents since 1877 were fraternity men.

Greek lifes lack of diversity is no secret. The hefty price of joining a chapter is reason enough for low-income students not to rush in the first place. Maya says her dues amount to $459 per semester, while Ellie paid $310 per quarter to be part of her California sorority. Some of the students we spoke to said the dues essentially work as a filter, resulting in many chapters across the country that are, to put it simply, white and rich. A 2011 review Princeton University conducted of its own Greek system found that 77% of sorority members and 73% of fraternity members were white.

But what if houses took away the costly barrier of dues, allowing for increased diversity and more inclusion? What if they lowered membership prices, made scholarships more accessible, or did away with the costs altogether? Such reform efforts are examples of what Interfraternity Council (IFC) and National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) leaders are currently proposing. The IFC president at one university, who served on the branchs board throughout 2018 and requested anonymity, says that they discussed increasing inclusivity in the rush process. We set up ways to make rush free and figured out ways to get chapters to pay, he says. However, this strategy never ultimately panned out. In the end, they did succeed in increasing the number of scholarships offered to members to around eight to 10 per year. He adds that they would have given out even more money to scholarship pools if it were within their budget.

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Greek Lifes History of Racism Is Catching Up to It - Teen Vogue