Monthly Archives: July 2020

President Donald Trump has a symbiotic relationship with white nationalists.

Its been a constant in nearly every element of his presidency: The white nationalist violence in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was followed by a pronouncement that there were some very fine people on both sides.

The election of Congresss most diverse class in 2018 ever was met with tweets demonizing women progressives of color, telling them to go back to the crime infested places from which they came. Even Covid-19, a disease spun out of the animal kingdom, has been cast as a foreign foe that was at best the fault of and, at worst, created by nonwhite people, with the president insisting on using racist language around it. And Trump arguably launched his political career by appearing on shows like Fox Newss The OReilly Factor in 2011 to speculate that maybe President Barack Obamas birth certificate says he is a Muslim.

As president, Trump energizes white nationalists on two levels: with his rhetoric and through his staffing and policy choices. In turn, many have given him their support. In doing so, Trump has given an overt platform to white nationalists in a way that is unprecedented in the modern political era.

The issue isnt just Trumps rhetoric. His administrations immigration policy has led to the separation of families, to children facing risk of exposure to disease like Covid-19 in detention facilities, and to the deaths of immigrants seeking asylum in the US. His criminal justice policy has led to a more punitive criminal justice system and to the weakening of police oversight, all of which disproportionately affect communities of color.

His economic policies have rewarded those already holding wealth (a mostly white group), and his much-vaunted greatest economy was not as great for people of color particularly Black Americans, whose unemployment rate has been at least 2 percentage points higher than the general unemployment rate for the entirety of Trumps tenure. In fact, a kinship with white nationalist ideas can be found in just about any part of the Trump administrations policy, from health care to foreign affairs.

All of this is not to say that the Trump administration has run the country exactly as the leader of a white nationalist group would. But they are doing a lot of things that are ideologically compatible, Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, told Vox. And I think it creates a road toward political action for a movement that might not have seen one in an earlier historical moment.

The white nationalist movement is a complex one, and it overlaps with other ideologies, particularly those of white power and white supremacy, that are brought up in discussions of racism, history, and the misguided belief that white people are superior to people of color. But the terms white nationalism, white power, and white supremacy each mean something different. And to understand how the Trump administration relates to white nationalism, its important to understand what white nationalism is and what it is not.

Nationalism typically refers to strong support for a country akin to patriotism, as in the nationalists who want to put America first. But nationalism can also refer to self-determination, such as the Scottish nationalists who want an independent Scottish state.

White nationalism has more in common with this latter form of nationalism: It advocates for a physical or spiritual white state.

The nation in white nationalism is imagined as the Aryan nation, Belew said. White nationalism is the idea that white people are going to unify together as one national polity either in a white homeland or a white nation or even in a white world through the violent killing or exclusion of other people.

There are many routes to accomplishing this vision, but Belew stressed white nationalists generally are not interested in the United States as a nation. Instead, they aspire to replace the United States with something like the white state imagined at the end of The Turner Diaries, a central white nationalist text describing a war against people of color.

This is why, Belew said, When we think about white nationalism, its important to remember that it is a deeply revolutionary and deeply anti-democratic project.

The overall white power movement, on the other hand, goes beyond questions of statehood and has little regard for borders. As Belew told my colleague Jane Coaston, it is what connects New Zealands Christchurch shooter to white nationalists in the United States, and is primarily a social, rather than strictly political, movement that she says is incredibly diverse in all ways other than race.

The white power movement is a broad-based social movement of interconnected groups of people that includes the Klan, Neo-Nazis, radical tax protesters; it includes some segments of boogaloo now; it includes some segments of militia groups, Belew said. Its all across the country: Its urban and suburban and rural; it has men and women and children in it, and people across class backgrounds.

As that list would suggest, white power is a movement that provides a home for white supremacists people who, as political scientists Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith write in Stay Woke: A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, believe that white people are inherently superior to people of color and should dominate over people of color.

This definition, Lopez Bunyasi told Vox, captures the ideological portion of white supremacy, but she noted there is also a structural facet.

Structurally, Lopez Bunyasi and Smith write, white supremacy is the systematic provision of political, social, economic, and psychological benefits and advantages to whites, alongside the systematic provisions of burdens and disadvantages to people who are not white. White supremacy isnt just an ideology; it is an actual system that has been used to build government and create policy in the real world.

Its this sort of white supremacy, Stony Brook University sociology professor Crystal Fleming told Jene Desmond-Harris in a 2016 piece for Vox, that has been a constant throughout history. The concept provided for the enslavement of Black people, the genocide of Native Americans, and the overall allocation of resources in manners that benefit white Americans. And it is a system that still exists today, keeping people of color out of jobs, universities, and political power. Which means everyone regardless of whether one subscribes to white supremacist beliefs lives in a white supremacist system.

Trump has embraced this system and has glorified some of its uglier moments, like its production of the Confederate States of America. He does not advocate for the sort of white nationalism depicted in The Turner Diaries, but his rhetoric has certainly elevated white Americans and sometimes white supremacists and nationalists over Americans of color. And as Belew notes, when it comes to the idea of white power, there is a lot of very concerning evidence that, if not Trump himself, there are people in his administration who really do understand what it means.

Its not only Trump who gives a voice to white nationalists. Key people in his administration champion their beliefs. Chief among them is White House senior adviser Stephen Miller.

A trove of more than 900 emails Miller sent to the alt-right publication Breitbart in 2015 and 2016 both while an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and a member of the Trump campaign suggests Miller has deep ties to the white nationalist movement.

The emails, which were analyzed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, touched on race or immigration. Some of the messages included links to white nationalist articles, while others included white nationalist slang. Miller also promoted The Camp of the Saints, a white supremacist book that casts immigrants of color as savages who subsist on feces, as well as praise for the nativist, hard-line immigration policies of the 1920s.

Those emails saw Miller citing in particular the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Historian and author of The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas Monica Muoz Martinez notes that act had quota systems to restrict immigration from nations deemed to have populations that were racially undesirable. Those quotas allowed more immigration of people from Western Europe and fewer people coming from other nations, while banning immigration from Asia. As Muoz Martinez explains, these policies were designed by eugenicists and are admired not only by Miller but by the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler.

Miller has emulated those eugenicists in his crafting of the Trump administrations immigration policy, and hes doing so with Trumps blessing. Muoz Martinez told Vox, One hundred years ago, Mexicans were called murderers and rapists and bandits, and now, Trump says Mexicans are murderers and rapists and drug dealers.

As Voxs Nicole Narea has explained, Miller designed the public charge rule that allows immigrants to be excluded from the US based on whether they are likely to end up relying on public benefits in the future.

More recently, Miller was reportedly involved in creating the executive order that froze certain green card applications and family reunification initiatives due to the coronavirus. That order was followed in June by another that blocked entry for a wider variety of foreign workers, as well as a Supreme Court decision allowing for expedited removal of immigrants seeking asylum.

But ties to white nationalism go beyond Miller to include figures like Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist and Trump campaign CEO who led Breitbart, described in 2016 by Voxs Zack Beauchamp as a leading light of Americas white nationalist movement accused of using misogynistic, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and barely hidden racist language throughout his professional life.

Bannon was fired in August 2017, but in his brief tenure, he seeded the White House with his economic nationalism philosophy, which has been criticized as rebranded white nationalism. And he helped develop the policies that defined Trumps early days most notably the Muslim ban. Bannons ideas about immigration remain entrenched due to figures like Miller, and his divisive rhetoric on domestic and foreign policy continues to come out of Trumps mouth.

Bannons thoughts on matters like staffing still hold weight. For instance, he has helped usher in his ally Michael Pack to run the US governments global news agencies, which include Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. We are going hard on the charge, Bannon told Voxs Alex Ward.

Pack, Ward notes, began his tenure by firing four top officials (after two others quit to protest his hiring) and by mandating the agencies promote editorial content that reflects the presidents worldview, leading to fears his tenure will see official US news networks become mouthpieces for the sorts of white nationalist-adjacent content that populated Breitbart.

Bannon is not the only former official whose ideology remains influential. Perhaps no fired member of the administrations presence is still felt as strongly as that of Millers old boss, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose tenure atop the Justice Department was marked by the enactment of policies that spoke to the line of thought laid out in The Turner Diaries.

Pursuing a tough on crime approach, Sessions crafted policies that actively endangered the lives and liberty of Americans of color, particularly Black Americans. These included mandating federal prosecutors to push for maximum punishment for low-level drug crimes, which Black Americans are disproportionately more likely to be charged with. He also pushed a failed attempted to have federal prosecutors more aggressively pursue marijuana cases. Black Americans are more likely to be arrested for possession than white Americans nationally, again despite marijuana usage being about equal across racial groups.

Sessions successfully limited federal oversight of police departments found to have engaged in civil rights abuses as well as discriminatory and violent policing and, like Miller and Bannon, pursued an aggressively restrictive immigration policy.

He, too, has spoken fondly of the 1924 immigration act, in discussing increasing immigration with Bannon on Breitbart Radio in 2015 while still a senator, saying, it was good for America.

Once in the Trump administration, Sessions emulated the policies of the 1920s by using every power he possessed as attorney general to ensure that the scales of justice tip toward punishment of unauthorized immigrants as often as possible, as Dara Lind wrote for Vox.

As is the case with Miller, Sessionss policies have achieved exclusionary white supremacist aims and fed white supremacists narratives about the dangers of Black people. Through Miller and through other former allies still in the administration like Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, who is currently the chief of staff of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Sessionss ideas live on in the administration despite his departure. His policies survive as well.

Trump tweeted that the phrase Black Lives Matter is a symbol of hate weeks after overseeing armed forces gassing peaceful protesters demanding equality for Black people and other people of color.

When these actions and all the other things Trump has done that align with white nationalist thought and values are taken together, the president begins to appear as someone able to unify traditional forms of white supremacy and more modern modes of white power and white nationalism.

The Klan would wrap themselves in Christianity, Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton University historian and author of The History of White People, told Vox. (Painter is also a signee of a letter criticized, in part, because of its association with prominent anti-trans figures and themes.) And in the American flag as well. So they were patriots and they were Christians in their own eyes. I dont see any contradiction in Trumps embrace of Confederate monuments and his embrace literal of the American flag.

As the Klan did, the president has cloaked himself in the symbols of Christianity. He posed with the Bible. He highlighted virtual church services on Sundays throughout the pandemic. And he has endeavored to signal he is an ally to Christians across the nation, from promising to prioritize Christian refugees to taking strong positions on matters from the celebration of Christmas to abortion, even though he has few personal ties to Christianity or religion in general.

Similarly, Trump has worked to use the flag sometimes even hugging it as well as other American symbols like Mount Rushmore, to signal that his policies, white nationalist aligned or not, are American. And to argue criticism of those policies is anti-American.

Even the presidents rabid defense of Confederate statues many of which were erected during periods of Black activism and serve as warnings to people of color to stop striving for equality is revealing. This is not to say that Trump is using the monuments as part of a campaign of terror and intimidation. But positioning himself as a champion of America allows him to cast their concerns as unpatriotic extensions of a left-wing cultural revolution that wants to overthrow the American Revolution.

In connecting and conflating white men who tried to destroy the United States with prominent Revolutionary figures like Thomas Jefferson, the president highlights the thing that connects them: the barbaric ways they treated nonwhite people.

There is a kind of white nationalism thats about infusing whiteness into the nation, Belew said. For the activists that are taking to the streets and training in paramilitary camps, the nation isnt the United States; they are not at all interested in defending the United States. They want to defend the white nation. And they want to do that, often, by overthrowing the United States.

This impulse mirrors the goals of the radical white nationalists of the Confederate States of America and is reflected in the presidents policies particularly around immigration and in tendencies his critics would call anti-democratic. To the extent that that ideology has actually crept into governance, its shocking, Belew noted. Because its a revolutionary thing that is attempting to undo the very government where they sit.

Trumps immigration policy is notable not just for the ways it excludes people of color but for how it deems white immigrants the right type of immigrants.

In 2018, Trump said hed like the US to have fewer immigrants from shithole countries in Africa and the Caribbean instead, he wanted immigrants from the majority-white Norway. In practice, he has put up barriers to immigration for citizens from countries with majority people of color populations, including those with Muslim majorities, while casting them as some of the most vicious and dangerous people on earth.

In June, Trump announced a temporary ban on green cards and the suspension of several work visas that are often used by immigrants of color, particularly those from India. Other countries that have been especially affected by Trumps immigration policy include Vietnam, China, Mexico, and South Korea. Stuart Anderson, the founder of the immigration think tank National Foundation for American Policy, noted those four countries saw drastic reductions in immigration during Trumps first two years in office, with immigration from China falling about 21 percentage points in that period.

Amid these declines, Trump reportedly hoped to find ways to fast track immigration from Europe with former US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland assigned in 2018 to work on the plan with Miller and Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Through exclusion and the push to recruit white immigrants, the Trump administration has advocated for a rigid border policy for nonwhite immigrants and a more porous, generous one for those who are white. This advances the aims of white nationalism that transcends border and that suggests the sovereignty of US borders matters less when the Trump administration is thinking of the role the country might play in advancing the global white nation than it does when thinking of the country as a discrete entity.

White nationalist goals can only be achieved by dismantling the US government, and there, too, Trump has appeared to align with a violent element, like when he called on armed groups to liberate their states.

There are countless other examples, but the point is, Trump has contributed to the political unraveling of the United States some modern white nationalists see as necessary to achieve their goals. He has not done so by violently overthrowing the government. But he has taken steps in the direction these white nationalists want to go.

As much as he has embraced it, Trump has made some attempts to distance himself from white supremacy and white nationalism. Following a racist mass shooting in El Paso (one perpetrated by a shooter whose manifesto mirrored some of Trumps rhetoric on Latinx immigration), Trump said, In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America.

But words like these are nothing more than language uttered in between statements hewing closely to white supremacist and white nationalist ideals.

Just weeks before the El Paso shooting, Trump called the majority-Black district of former lawmaker Rep. Elijah Cummings a dangerous & filthy place and a rat and rodent infested mess, adding, No human being would want to live there. Its language that mirrors the characterization of people of color in The Camp of the Saints, and it not only casts a popular Black leader as inept, it implies he and his constituents are somehow less than human.

In the weeks directly after, Trump tweeted a campaign video featuring a logo associated with the white supremacist group VDARE, employed the anti-Semitic dual-loyalties trope in speaking about the political opinions of Jewish Americans, and claimed at a rally that sanctuary cities were releasing hardened and horrible criminal aliens ... directly into your neighborhoods.

Just a little over a month after saying hate has no place in America, Trump said of the gang MS-13, which was started by Salvadoran immigrants: They take young women. They slice them up with a knife. They slice them up beautiful, young.

All these things, which happened in the span of less than two months, ticked many white supremacist and nationalist boxes Jewish people as untrustworthy, people of color as predators with a predilection for young women, and Black people as subhuman rendering the presidents rejections of various white power ideologies meaningless.

Its a cycle Trump has trapped himself in, and one that continues even now.

After these atrocities, like when the George Floyd video came out, he didnt say anything for a long time, Painter noted. I mean, he said, Oh that was terrible, and then in the next breath, he went back to his race-baiting.

And it is a cycle that is difficult to escape. As Muoz Martinez said, We are living in a nation that was inspired by the principles of white supremacy.

So ingrained are those ideas, she pointed out, that even the first presidential administration run by a Black American reflected them, particularly with respect to immigration, with policies that incarcerated children in harsh conditions that spawned lawsuits.

We have to remember that the policies that the Trump administration created, and the kind of inhumanity that we see, built upon the infrastructure that had already existed, Muoz Martinez said, adding that white nationalist and white supremacist ideals shaped our society and shaped our institutions, and shaped our public societies and laws, our policing mindset. And we havent replaced that.

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What is white nationalism? Take a look at Trumps agenda. - Vox.com

This piece is a commentary, part of The Appeals collection of opinion and analysis.

In the fall of 2019, the governing board over Mississippis eight public higher education institutions, the states Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL), appointed a new chancellor at the University of Mississippi (UMiss) in Oxford. The new chancellor, Glenn Boyce, had previously worked at three predominantly white private schools known as segregation academies and was paid by the IHLs Board of Trustees to be a consultant for the chancellor search process, in which he was ultimately selected. To announce the appointment, Boyce was set to speak at a news conference held by the Board.

In response, a coalition of faculty and students organized a protest to call for more democratic university leadership. Hundreds of people, including students, faculty, and alumni, showed up in support. As students held signs reading Abolish IHL and Students and Workers Run This School, Ray Hawkins, the chief of the universitys police department (UPD) picked me up and wrestled me out of the room. This physically violent act was followed by members of the alt-right and neo-confederates harassing me for months. But it was not the first time that UPD forced a student into the frontlines of white supremacist violence and, as long as the department exists, it will not be the last.

Fifty years earlier, in 1969, Black students at UMiss officially chartered the Black Student Union (BSU). Unbeknownst to the students, months after charter, the FBI was surveilling them. Because of a recent Freedom of Information Act request by UMiss assistant professor of history Garrett Felber, we now know that the FBI worked closely with UPD to document the activities of Black students across campus. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover even recommended that the local FBI office take immediate steps to develop member informants in the BSU.

Over the course of the 1969-70 school year, Black students protested racism at UMiss and released a list of 27 demands, including a condemnation of the racist attitude and statements of members of the Board of Trustees, and a minimum wage for campus employees. In February 1970, the international singing group Up With People performed on campus. In an effort to have their demands met, Black students took the stage and raised their fists in a Black Power salute.

During and after the concert, 89 people were arrested. Some students were taken to a local county jail, while others were held at the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, home to the states death row.

A local prosecutor later dropped criminal charges against the protesters, but eight students were expelled. We did not have any weapons, and our protest was completely nonviolent, Linnie Willis, one of the expelled students, told the New Yorker this year. I went to jail in my hometown, not at Parchman; that was worse, since I became a marked person and could never be employed in Oxford. Willis had completed all the requirements for her degree when she was expelled, but UMiss did not give her a diploma for 50 years.

In the last five years, theres been another wave of student organizing on campus. In 2015, Dominique Garrett-Scott, then an undergraduate, was one of the leaders of the fight to remove the Mississippi state flag, which included the Confederate emblem, from campus. Their fight was successful: That year, the flag was taken down. (In late June of this year, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed a bill to retire the flag). The backlash, however, included hyper-surveillance and counter-protesting from neo-Confederates. In 2017, a student running for student government included the Mississippi state flag on his campaign sign. Taia McAfee, then a freshman, painted over the Confederate emblem with BLM and was later arrested by UPD.

Connecting multiple generations of activists at UMiss is the fight against the entrenched white supremacy and those who protect it: the police. Over several decades, this has not only subjected students to police violence, but also takes resources away from campus workers. In the 2019-2020 school year, UPD had an annual budget of over $3 million, and its chiefs salary was $114,130. At the same time, as the coronavirus pandemic began, dozens of workers at UMiss struggled to buy groceries and pay rent, which compounded the fact that an estimated 20-25 percent of workers at UMiss do not make a living wage.

Campus policing not only invites overt police violence, but by taking resources that could go to students and workers, inherently contributes to other acts of violence across campus. Between 2016 and 2018, there were 49 on-campus rapes reported, but excluding UPDs security report, support for sexual assault survivors is virtually nonexistent. In 2019, UMisss Violence Intervention and Prevention Office, which provided support for survivors, merged with another office, and the campus counseling center started limiting student appointments to 10 per academic year. University administrators have been consistent in what they have communicated to students and workers for the last 50 years: They care more about policing us than taking care of our needs.

This past month, as activists and city governments took down statues down across the countryincluding the removal of several Confederate statues in Richmond, Virginia the IHLs Board of Trustees unveiled their plans to renovate a Confederate cemetery and relocate the Confederate statue that sits in the middle of campus. The price tag for the proposed project is $1.1 million and includes security cameras around the premises for constant surveillance by UPD.

As UMiss continues to increase its investment in the police and promoting and protecting white supremacy, the coronavirus pandemic continuesand many workers at school struggle to make ends meet. This contradiction existed long before the global pandemic, but the level of suffering in our communities has been exacerbated by administrators continuing to prioritize capital and policing as the virus has spread. The funds for maintaining white supremacy at UMiss should be redirected to providing workers a living wage, to sexual assault prevention, and to the general well-being of people in our community. It is time to build on calls, begun in 1970, to defund UPD.

Cam Calisch is a graduate student and community organizer at the University of Mississippi.

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It's Time To Defund The University of Mississippi Police Department - The Appeal

In mid-June, on a sunny late afternoon, dozens of protesters led by Indigenous and youth organizers gathered in front of the Albuquerque Museum at the feet of La Jornada, a statue of Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Oate. They called for the statues removal, saying it was a monument to a genocidal colonial history. On the outer banks of the crowd, at least six militiamen from the New Mexico Civil Guard, a civilian militia, flanked the protest in a tight semicircle, some of them shouldering assault rifles.

When some of the protesters began taking a pickax and chain to the statue, a man in a blue shirt later identified as Steven Baca Jr. sprayed a cloud of Mace at them. Then he threw a woman to the ground. Her head hit the pavement with an audible smack, and Baca fled, with protesters trailing him, shouting at him to leave. Baca turned to face a man in jeans and a black hoodie, who tackled him. A bystanders video caught the scuffle that followed: Baca drew a handgun from his waistband and fired four shots. Theres a man down, someone shouted. Theres a man down!

Protesters call for the removal of the statue of Juan de Oate as an armed militia member looks on outside the Albuquerque Museum on June 15 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Throughout the hours-long demonstration, Albuquerque police had waited behind the museum with an armored car, some watching from museum security cameras. Meanwhile, members of the so-called Civil Guard, dressed in Army uniforms and helmets, tried to keep protesters from the statue. They were there, they claimed, to keep peace and enforce the law. After Baca shot the protester three times, the militia surrounded him, protecting him as he sat in the street. The nearby police took four minutes to arrive. The protester, Scott Williams, was eventually taken to the hospital in critical condition.

The shooting at La Jornada, Spanish for the expedition, occurred several weeks after the beginning of #BlackLivesMatter protests in Albuquerque. At those demonstrations, too, a disquieting camaraderie between official police and another militia, the New Mexico Patriots, emerged. Were all here for the same cause, man, an Albuquerque police officer said to a group of body-armored gym-goers and militiamen before a #BLM protest, according to a video taken by a militia member and shared online. Were here to help.

The incidents are in line with the deeper history of the Albuquerque polices behavior during the civil rights movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. High Country News unearthed archival documents from the Center for Southwest Research illuminating a history of police cooperation and cross-pollination with radical right-wing and vigilante groups in New Mexico. According to police and FBI reports, newspaper clippings and the testimony of activists, that cooperation included surveillance, harassment and misinformation campaigns against social justice movements by informants and radical provocateurs.

While community members and activists have long complained about excessive use of force and surveillance at protests and in minority neighborhoods, these documents clearly show that New Mexico law enforcement tolerates and at times embraces white vigilantism. And despite the Albuquerque Police Departments statement condemning the New Mexico Civil Guard after the shooting, militiamen with known white-power affiliations continue to patrol protests with the silent encouragement of law enforcement.

Theres this overlap between the people who populate militias and populate police departments.

THEY ALL TRAVEL in the same circles, said David Correia, associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. Correia has done extensive research on the cross-pollination that occurred between police, radical right ideology and vigilantism during the civil rights movement. These are all former police or former military, or former guardsman or current guardsman. Theres this overlap between the people who populate militias and populate police departments.

Police brutality and political repression flourished in Albuquerque throughout the civil rights movement. A 1974 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documented an array of alleged abuses and found that police in Albuquerque and across the state used unconstitutional and at times violent, even deadly, methods when policing minority neighborhoods and political dissidents, including the Chicano groups Alianza Federal de Mercedes and the Black Berets.

The militant Black Berets regularly faced death threats from the local Minutemen militia as well as misinformation campaigns organized by the anti-communist John Birch Society. According to Beret leader Richard Moore, the group sent an informant to the militias meetings in the late-1960s and created a roster of those who attended, including multiple police departments comprising the secretive Metro Squad, a police intelligence unit. Many members of the right-wing Minute Men [sic] organization were from the sheriffs, the state police, and the Albuquerque Police departments. So making a distinction between the two sometimes wasnt easy, said Moore in 2001. The group gave out the list at a press conference in Santa Fe, including to a New Mexico attorney general, hoping for an investigation. It never came.

In 1968 and 1969, a spate of bombings struck some of Alianza leader Reies Lpez Tijerinas relatives. In May 1968, William Tiny Fellion a paid assassin, demolitions expert and John Birch Society member, as reported by state police just two months earlier blew off his left hand planting a bomb at Alianzas headquarters in Espaola, New Mexico. According to a New Mexico State Police report, Fellion told an officer that he would kill Tijerina and his followers free of charge because he has no use for that type of people. After Fellions botched bombing, tips came in that led both Alianza and the FBI Albuquerque Field Office to believe local police were behind the bombings.

ON THE CLOUDY EVENING of June 1, two weeks before the Baca shooting, members of the New Mexico Patriots met with at least six Albuquerque Police Department officers outside the Jackson Wink Mixed Martial Arts Academy in downtown Albuquerque, before a #BLM protest. If you guys would see something, gives us a holler, an Albuquerque officer told the militia. But take care of each other and, the main thing, take care of the people in Albuquerque.

Jon Jones, an MMA fighter, explained that their goal was to stop protester shenanigans without brandishing their guns.

A lot of these (protesters), they just move from one block to the next block to the next block, an Albuquerque police officer responded. So even just being two blocks away because police are moving there from one side that would be helpful, just right there.

Militia groups regularly coordinate with police.

Emily Gorcenski, a researcher and founder of First Vigil, a group that tracks far-right violence, says that there is an extensive history of armed vigilante groups collaborating with police. Militia groups regularly coordinate with police, she wrote, over Twitter. From Portland to Charlottesville, weve seen armed paramilitaries working directly with police against protesters over and over.

During the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017, police circulated a false white supremacist rumor that antifa planned to inject police with fentanyl. That same year, at a Portland alt-right rally, American Freedom Keepers militiamen helped police arrest counter-protesters, allegedly at police request.

In New Mexico, the NM Patriots and the Civil Guard both claim to coordinate with local police, reported the Albuquerque Journal, while the Civil Guard also says it has current and former law enforcement and military within its ranks.

Members of the New Mexico Civil Guard militia group are apprehended after a protester was shot in Albuquerque in June.

THE ALBUQUERQUE POLICE DEPARTMENT did not respond to requests for comment or to questions regarding its officers potential membership within citizen militias,including the New Mexico Civil Guard a group which APD Chief Michael Geier proposed bestowing hate group designation after the Baca shooting. In an email, a spokesperson from New Mexico State Police said their Investigations Bureau is actively investigating possible NMSP membership within militia ranks.

The Albuquerque Police Department has released few details about the shooting at La Jornada. The departments criminal complaint reported that Steven Baca Jr. acted in a manner in which to protect the statue from the protesters. It failed to mention his violent provocation, and described the crowd ejecting Baca from the scene as maliciously in pursuit of him. Steven was similarly recorded, leaving the area of the statue toward the street interacting with the crowd, the report read. However, his specific type of interaction with the crowd is unknown at this time.

Bacas charge for the shooting was dropped, leaving multiple other battery charges. He was an Albuquerque City Council candidate in 2019 and is the son of former Bernalillo County sheriffs deputy, according to Albuquerque Journal.

Given the departments history, Correia said, It's not clear where the line is between police and right-wing fascist militia in New Mexico.

We know it led to violence directed specifically at individual activists (and) should make us suspicious of the way APD operates today when it confronts social movements like (#BlackLivesMatter), Correia said. Because they've done this before, we shouldn't be surprised if they're still doing it.

After the June 1 meeting between Jon Jones, NM Patriots and the police, thebearded militiaman filming the meeting turned to address the camera directly. Were going to be out patrolling in a little bit,he said. See you guys out there.

Kalen Goodluckis a contributing editor atHigh Country News.Email himat[emailprotected]g or submit aletter to the editor.

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Count Jonathan Capehart, the openly gay Pulitzer Prizewinning columnist for the Washington Post, as one of those in her corner. Until 2012 they were merely casual acquaintances. Then came the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Each night they would meet at a local Hooters for dinner. Over wingsHooters has great wingsthey spoke for hours while tank-topped, short-shorted waitresses moved around them. Though they shared a similar worldview, Capehart, a regular MSNBC contributor, found Reid more liberal. Since then, the two have been intellectual sparring partners and close friends.

The person who wrote those columns is not the person I got to know sitting across from her at a table in Tampa at Hooters, Capehart says of Reids previous LGBTQ remarks. I dont know that person. I dont know that person who wrote those pieces.

Look, he continues, do you know how many people would be out of my life if I did not, one, learn to forgive and, two, give them the room to evolve?

Over the past few months, Reid has witnessed an entire nations belief system on race radically evolve. Following the killing of George Floyd in May and the worldwide protests that followed, America seems ready, finally ready, to take in the very things shes spoken on for years. Before the hoodie became a menacing totem for the alt-right in Florida, Reid fretted over her childrens clothes. She wasnt worried about other kids. She feared something else.

I think its important to have somebody who looks like you, who can empathize with what you feel, Reid says. For the most part, white Americans have traditionally been very trusting of the police. The police are Barney Fife. Theyre your friend. They get your cat out of a tree.

Im a law-abiding citizen, she continues. Ive never been arrested or committed a crime. But when I see those blue lights, I feel sick. I feel my heart racing. Even though I know I havent done anything wrong, Im afraid of the police. Im successful. I work at a great company. I have health benefits. And Im afraid of the police.

Matthewss swift retirement proved a shock to the network. It also offered a reset. It allowed room for something, someone different in different times. In the months that followed, Reid was one of a series of people who held down the 7 p.m. hour as MSNBC sought out a replacement. But there remained no clear choice.

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MSNBCs Joy Reid Makes Cable-Network History With the Debut of The ReidOut - Vogue

Conservative political cartoonist Ben Garrison has sued the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for allegedly defaming him by labeling one of his cartoons anti-Semitic, reported Newsweek on Tuesday.

The lawsuit, filed last Friday, seeks $10.35 million in damages.

It claims that the ADL caused Garrison insult, embarrassment, humiliation, mental suffering, anguish, injury to his name and professional reputation, and loss of business by alleging anti-Semitism in a 2017 cartoon featuring liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soros, a frequent figure of scorn by the Garrison claims additional anguish when an invitation to a 2019 White House social media event was rescinded after the ADL alerted the administration to the charge of anti-Semitism.

Described in Newsweeks report, the cartoon in question depicts Soros as a puppet being controlled by a green-tinted hand emerging from a curtain labelled Rothschilds, an apparent reference to the wealthy Jewish family that has long been central to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Former General David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster -- Trumps former national security adviser who was forced out of his position after a tumultuous tenure that included criticism from the right and policy disagreements with Trump -- both appear as puppets being controlled by Soros.

The cartoonist is an avid supporter of President Donald Trump, with several of his cartoons depicting the 74-year-old Trump as a noticeably more youthful figure who often boasts a bodybuilder-like physique while vanquishing his political opponents with ease.

The ADL published an article on its website criticizing the cartoon, describing it as blatantly anti-Semitic after it appeared on a website titled McMaster Leaks run by alt-right commentator Mike Cernovich.

"The anti-Semitic theme of the Garrison cartoon is impossible to miss and individuals on social media complained about it," the ADL wrote, before mentioning that Cernovich later posted an edited version of the cartoon that cropped out the "Rothschild" reference.

The lawsuit claims that "The ADL is engaged in a targeted campaign of defamation to destroy Garrison's reputation and livelihood. ADL operatives throughout the country have excessively published the false and defamatory statement that Garrison is anti-Semitic." It also defends the cartoon by insisting that the conspiracy theory it depicts is, in fact, true.

Of note, Newsweeks post said that Garrisons cartoons have remained popular among conservatives regardless of claims of anti-Semitism and links to evidence-free conspiracy theories.

On Monday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Daniel Scavino Jr. shared a Garrison cartoon seemingly disrespecting infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci as "Dr. Faucet" for advocating preventative measures to counter skyrocketing COVID-19 cases, that has drawn the ire of some conservatives.

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Pro-Trump cartoonist sues Anti-Defamation League for calling him anti-Semitic - PennLive

You want a toe? I can get you a toe. Believe me. There are ways Dude, you dont wanna know about it believe me. Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 oclock this afternoon, with nail polish.

-Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski

Hey feds, you want net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 on new infrastructure? I can get you net-zero by 2050. There are ways Dude. You dont want to know about it but there are ways.

As this bizarre century continues to unfold, where blindly succumbing to groupthink is now viewed as leadership, Canadas ivory-towered, uncalloused, regionally ignorant, dismal circle of ruling elites has found a way to make a minority government work subordinate all future infrastructure development to a heavy and hazy requirement to be net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Theres nothing wrong with an emissions goal, they are of course laudable if real, like insisting on acceptable parts per million of whatever noxious substance we want to limit. But burdening industry with a political, shapeless millstone is something else entirely. The risk to industry is the beauty to the government the target is ambiguous and nebulous, which makes a great sound bite, but yet still has enough leeway that governments can suck and blow at the same time, saying one thing to appease activists and acting another way to keep the wheels of the economy from falling off. Is that Scope 1 emissions, or Scope 2, or Scope 3? Scope 1 are direct emissions from owned or controlled resources; Scope 2 are indirect emissions from the generation of acquired energy; Scope 3 are all indirect emissions in the value chain including upstream and downstream emissions. Agreeing to net zero at any time without understanding how the requirements fit in this framework requires a lobotomy.

Scope 3 is a concept so outrageously academic that it cant survive in the wild (e.g., what are the downstream emissions of any infrastructure? A bridge? A pipeline? Is a bridge different than a pipeline? Why? What about a new rail line what are the emissions that will be created by the freight that is hauled over its life? If cars are hauled, do you know what kind of car and where it will go in its lifetime? If food is hauled, are you presumed to know who it will feed, how many kids in the families (big families are a climatic disaster, dont you know), will it go into dishes that include meat, and if so what kind of meat, and if its fuel, what will that fuel be used for, and will it go into solar panel manufacturing or. you get the picture). Or do we just plug in academic variables for all these things? Because dont worry, some economist somewhere has modelled this to perfection, and their model has been vetted by peers and stamped with approval, and its all you need to know and shut your alt-right mouth if you disagree because youre not a Ph.D. and they are, and look, things can go very smoothly for you or very difficult, which would you prefer?

And you might think well, thats ridiculous, no one would ask for Scope 3, and yet Export Development Canada has set up a program to access EDC emergency funding for oil/gas companies, which as it turns out is like being able to access a sasquatch, and it is made clear that to access funding a TCFD climate change report must be submitted along with the application, and the guidebook for completing a report includes a suggestion that oil/gas applicants estimate Scope 3 emissions of their products. You want funding, we suggest you do this. Is that the same suggestion that Energy East had to comply with? So there are your marching orders: when you send a barrel/gigajoule down that pipeline into the great big world, do tell us what it where/how it will be consumed, in what manner, what the resulting emissions will be, for good or evil, for pleasure or necessityHow hard can that be? (One climate industry website, Greenhouse Gas Protocol, offers this fecal gem of a reason as to why businesses should care about this maniacal request to guess-what-your-hydrocarbons-might-be-used-for screwball scheme: Businesses have found that developing corporate value chain (Scope 3) inventories delivers a positive return on investment. (Sorry, conservative readers, but if that statement doesnt make you say WTF out loud at least a dozen times you have likely ceased breathingCan you imagine the sheer nerve it takes to put a statement like that out on the web? Its like me writing a textbook on surgery because I cut up my own pork chops, and then lecturing surgeons who are too obtuse to listen.)

A ray of light does shine into this insane asylum though. One outlet is available to anyone wanting to build any infrastructure ever again while meeting these regulations a loophole of sorts exists that all the business-hating modellers have yet to figure out how to close. We will be able to meet net-zero targets by planting trees, apparently. That is fantastic news, because it is a real phenomenon, and everyone from a squirrel to the Dalai Lama would admit that more trees are better than fewer. Of course, there are pockets of resistance; some politicized academics insist that that is not an emissions reduction strategy, because it may allow hydrocarbons to survive as a fuel source. As such, there will be pressure from some circles to disallow hydrocarbon development to be offset by planting trees, you can bet on it.

This conundrum does twist the likes of Green New Deal advocates in knots, to the extent that there is now academic handwringing about whether more trees will indeed help fight the climate change battle. Consider this NASA piece on the topic in which scientists pose the following questions (and a great many more): Is the concept of planting trees to help combat climate change feasible? Is it scientifically sound? Is it cost efficient? What are the risks? How realistic are recent studies estimates of how much carbon can be sequestered through reforestation? How long will this approach take to make a dent? How do the costs of adopting this strategy stack up against potential benefits? What are the benefits? How will global climate models respond to massive forest reforestation? Will an additional billion hectares of forests actually cool the planet? Or make it warmer? And, ultimately, (this is my question, not the scientists, as you may well deduce w/o me telling you) considering this list of questions posed, do they understand thing one about the whole idea?

It really is a farcical article, or turns that out way, soon after the valid and scientific questions are raised. The author of the study referenced in the article, despite asking all these questions (and therefore obviously not knowing the answers), is quick to assert in the article that planting trees will never be a substitute for decreasing fossil fuel emissions. There is apparently no need to quantify how much of a decrease in fossil fuel emissions, or even state whether hes talking about coal or natural gas, in order to make a statement so blindingly political that it invalidates his whole ethos of scientific rigour (true fans will notice I sourced ethos from the Big Lebowski also, who used it in a way (while weighing Nazis vs. nihilists) that is weirdly relevant to the climate change debate: Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism Dudeat least its an ethos. Or in other words, is a bad ethos better than no ethos?) . Its a generic CYA statement to make sure that, like Galileo, he doesnt commit heresy. Oddly enough, for a topic in which the science is resoundingly settled, other scientists, quoted in the Guardian no less (a bastion of anti-fossil fuel hyperbole), state that New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities.

Hang on a second, it gets even more demented. Recall that it was in 2015, five short years ago, that yet another group of scientists concluded that the world did not, as had been rigorously estimated in 2014, contain 400 billion trees; it contained more than 3 trillion. Seven times the estimate that was acceptable the previous year. Oops.

We can surmise then that the path to net-zero 2050 will be a tortuous (if youre building anything) and comical (if youre not) feeding frenzy of political machinations and whimsical declarations as the next dead-certain projection is revealed.

Nevertheless, as fuel providers for the motor of society, we will need to leave that group to fret about the politics required to skate through these next few decades. While they do that, we will get on with it, like we always do. You want a tree? I can get you a tree. I can get you a tree by 3 oclock this afternoon. I can get you a million trees.

Herein lies opportunity, and a very good one at that. If the price of admission for building new infrastructure is planting trees, hallelujah. That is fantastic news. Bring it on. There will be challenges down the road, when, say, a new pipeline gets approval on the condition the owner plants 2 million trees (or whatever) and the usual suspects say hey, wait a minute, we still hate pipelines. Then, assuming Trudeau will still be in power (though he may violate three-quarters of the criminal code, not enough people seem to want to get behind whomever the conservatives put up, and the NDP/Green clearly scare the hell out of Canadians, so our Canuck Zoolander it is for the foreseeable future), he and his gang will be in a tough spot. Well let them worry about that; we have work to do, and, apparently, trees to plant.

Hurry, before COVID-19 is resolved! Pick up a copy of The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity to while away the time, available at Amazon.ca,Indigo.ca, orAmazon.com. Thanks for the support!

Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etamhere,or email Terryhere.

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Column: You want a toe? I can get you a toe. An unlikely path forward on the way to net-zero 2050 - BOE Report

In 1962, Bertrand Russell finally responded to Sir Oswald Mosleys letters, which were badgering him into a debate about the merits of fascism. He replied: It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to ones own.

Russells words can be reflected in a more recent political tennis match, indirectly concerning Greta Thunberg. There should be nobody who does not know this teenagers name.

She already has proven herself to be articulate, precise and powerful beyond her years, as her 2019 address to the World Economic Forum proves: I dont want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire because it is.

Throughout the past year, she has broken through the political fishing nets designed to keep us immobile and now excels in the fact that, to quote her own book title, No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference.

Like any great thinker or shaker of established norms, there is kickback from the normally politically ambivalent. The vitriolic responses to Greta range between mild-mannered questioning to vicious ableist attacks due to her autism, her being a child and, while not as explicitly, a woman speaking more than is socially acceptable (as any woman ever will confirm).

Like most insults, those that are used most searingly tend to be that which the insulter fears the most; a female child who is deemed lesser due to her medical disability, and who has embarrassed the norms of the right wing establishment. Having no good argument in response, the manner adopted by those who conform to established norms becomes that of Harry Wormwood, the father in Matilda. Matilda has realised he has been mechanically lowering the mileage clock on cars he is about to sell.

Matilda: Daddy, youre a crook. [] This is illegal.

Harry: Do you make money? Do you have a job?

Matilda: No, but dont people need good cars? Cant you sell good cars, dad?

Harry: Listen, you little wiseacre. Im smart, youre dumb. Im big, youre little. Im right, youre wrong. And theres nothing you can do about it.

Greta is doing something about it, and well.

Naturally, there must be a response. Naomi Seibt, a 19-year-old German teenager, spoke on Friday 28 February at a smaller side event of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a prominent right-wing convention in the United States. She is described as the anti-Greta of climate change, and describes herself as a climate realist. Her views have already had to be defended due to being allegedly anti-Semitic. She has described Stefan Molyneaux, an alt-right spokesperson, as an inspiration for his views outside the mainstream. If this isnt enough, Seibt has been hired by the Heartland Institute, and the less said about them, the better.

Her views on climate change are as follows: Today climate change science really is not science at all. [] The goal is to shame humanity. Climate change alarmism at its very core is a despicably anti-human ideology and we are told to look down at our achievements with guilt, with shame and disgust, and not even to take into account the many major benefits we have achieved by using fossil fuels as our main energy source.

It is moments like this I wonder of the nerve of those who use snowflakes as an insult. Much like the phrase victim mentality, the goal is to simply be so obtuse as not to listen or care for anyone else other than oneself, that calling the other side weak is seen as a strength.

The denial of our climate crisis and the fact there is even a climate belief system shows how, for some, engaged debate is simply as useless as Mussolinis hairbrush. The question soon becomes one of overwhelming political fighting. It is another battle of left-wing versus right-wing, progressive versus traditionalist, new versus old. It is hard to ignore how commonplace this is nowadays. You will remember the protests against Greggs vegan sausage rolls last year. At football matches every other week I hear fans frothing with similar rage when the referee gives a free kick to the opposite team. I realise now that its nothing at all about football or pasties.

It is about an attack of the old order by the new. The old order has rejected modern ideas that told them, directly or otherwise, that they and, by extension, their ways of thinking, were wrong.

This fundamental fact must be understood if the progressives are to combat more products of Seibts ilk. To present a new idea that shakes grounded beliefs, one must expect a response that will reach higher levels of depravity depending on the gravity of topic.

The only way to defeat this is to stick to truth harder than ever. Greta Thunberg is doing the work for those who would not, or cannot, speak for themselves, and she is holding to account those who have long hidden from their crimes by sticking to truth. Naomi Seibt, and those like her, do not provide solutions to the problems they find in thinkers like Thunberg.

The negative effects of not calling out their astounding lack of sense and logic, and lending debate to those who have no intention of changing their own ways has been proven tenfold by the two blonde haired fellows in charge across both sides of the pond. It becomes a shouting match that entirely damages the name of intellectual debate, and soon, to paraphrase a famous saying, you will not be able to argue with them, as they will beat you with experience of inarguable incompetence.

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Anti-Greta and the challenges faced by young activists | Forge - ForgeToday

The word was out: Antifa was coming for the Winco in Coeur dAlene.

At least, thats what Brett Surplus hunting TV show host, Idaho state Senate write-in candidateand a former police officer and sheriff's deputy was ready for on the evening of June 1.

And so Surplus stands in the Winco parking lot, dressed in a tactical vest and armed with his AR-15. It wasn't vigilantism, he believed. It was patriotism.

He pans his camera to show a crapton of Idaho boys he estimates about 150 armed with an arsenal of high-powered weapons. And he says he's already had success.

Facebook video screenshot

Brett Surplus

"Just so you know, if you're planning on coming over here and trying to be a piece of trash over in my city, feel free. Because we will unleash the beast," Surplus boasts. "Freakin' slugs for thugs, all the day long. And Ill take your damn crowbar. Bring it. This aint Spokane."

Today, his Facebook live video has racked up more than 28,000 views. There ain't nothin' that's going to happen," he continues. "Try to come over here. Ill take the A out of your tifa in a heartbeat.

And then he says he hears that five more vans are coming down the freeway.

"Sounds like we're going to have company," he says. "I'm going to see if we can ruin some people's days real quick... I think it may get hinky."

Sam Rowland, a progressive Army veteran who showed up supporting Black Lives Matter in the Coeur dAlene Winco, says that antifa had become an obsession in North Idaho.

And so that made it all the more interesting when someone shows up who looks a lot like witch: A protester with a crowbar on his belt loop, walked up to Surplus and Rowland, wearing flannel, an Ice Cube T-shirt, and a skull mask. And on the mask, hes drawn three diagonally facing arrows, the "iron front" symbol often used by antifa activists.

"The minute I saw it, I knew in my gut this stupid shit was going to happen," Rowland says.

Antifa far-left, mostly anonymous activists who take a militant approach to opposing who they see as racist or fascist groups have brawled repeatedly with far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer in liberal havens like Portland and Berkeley.

And yet for years after President Trump's election, the right-wing rumor mill churned out claims that antifa activists or even super soldiers were also plotting to hold riots in tiny towns, like North Idaho's Bonner's Ferry.

Year after year, the antifa riots never arrived. But this year, when some protests over the murder of George Floyd turned violent and destructive, it fell neatly into that ready-made narrative.

Surplus says he saw the rumors that antifa was driving Mercedes Benz vans with foreign plates. He claims that antifa communicates using PlayStation 4 gaming systems, because they know they're being watched. He claims antifa "scouts" showed up to check out the June 1 protest Winco event, though he doesn't show any evidence. He claims he has his sources inside law enforcement, but won't say who.

As the Intercept recently revealed, the FBI was internally sharing the claim that "antifa" protesters were supposedly traveling from Spokane to Coeur d'Alene to protest, and then supposedly planned to road trip to Minneapolis. So far, nothing has been released to substantiate this report.

In fact, Detective Mario Rios with the Coeur dAlene Police Department says his department never had any actionable intelligence that antifa or other radicals were traveling to Coeur dAlene

The ISP has NOT intercepted a semi loaded with people and weapons, the Idaho State police wrote in a tweet. This is a lie being spread on social media.

And yet, the day before the June 1 rally at the Winco Coeur d'Alene, Spokane's rally had been marred by violence, looting and vandalism and the Spokane County Sheriff blamed antifa with absolute certainty. Coeur d'Alene noticed.

What had taken place over in Spokane, everybody was thinking the same thing was coming, Surplus tells the Inlander.

Except this time, as Surplus and dozens of other right-wingers stood outside Winco near a handful of Black Lives Matter protesters, it looked like antifa had shown up.

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The Man in the Antifa Mask: Who he is and why he regrets showing up at a Coeur d'Alene protest with a crowbar - Pacific Northwest Inlander

Sign-carrying anti-mask protestors chat with bystanders on Sunday. Photo: Yvette dEntremont

The Halifax Examiner is providing all COVID-19 coverage for free.

A dozen anti-mask protesters who gathered on the Halifax Waterfront Sunday afternoon were met by an equal number of mask-wearing counter protesters determined to push back on the messaging.

March to Unmask: Halifax was organized by Sandra Saunders and was part of a nationwide campaign against what the unmasking group is calling an unjustified push for mandatory masks. In addition to protesting masks, one brandished an anti-vaccine and anti-5G technology sign and another noted that Bill Gates wont save you.

Shortly before the 3 p.m. event started, a group of mask-wearing counter protesters showed up on-site with signs of their own. As Saunders spoke to reporters, they began raising their own signs and shaking homemade noisemakers.

Veda Wynters (centre) was one of a dozen mask wearers who showed up to counter Sundays unmask Halifax event. Photo: Yvette dEntremont

Halifax resident Veda Wynters was one of those who showed up to counter the anti-mask group. Sporting a Wonder Woman mask, she said she felt compelled to show up.

I decided to come here after reading all the comments on their (Unmask Halifax) Facebook page that has outdated numbers, incorrect information, conspiracy theories up the wazoo, and we just wanted to represent the saner side of Halifax, Wynters said.

Im immunocompromised. I have severe asthma, I have chronic issues, so if anyone shouldnt need to wear a mask, Im asthmatic. I shouldnt need to wear a mask and yet Im wearing a mask.

One of the other women who joined her added that mask wearing was about compassion for other people and she too felt they needed to push back.

Its not really for your protection, its for other people and it just infuriates me that there are people that wouldnt have that same compassion that all of these lovely people have, she said, gesturing broadly to the people wearing masks around her.

Both groups were generally respectful and calm, with the exception of one man aligned with the anti-mask group. He angrily yelled at a CTV cameraman for not interviewing him and got into a heated yelling match with two mask-wearing teenagers.

In an interview, Saunders said she became involved with organizing the March to Unmask Halifax event because her daughter is asthmatic and works in an industry that recently made them mandatory. She said she wanted to create awareness about what the group claims are the harms caused by masks.

She added that people shouldnt be listening to what mainstream media or the government has to say about wearing them during this pandemic.

We should never, ever be mandated anything, especially a medical device that poses harmEspecially cloth masks. Cloth masks, when you have the moisture from your breath coming out, your C02 is actually your waste product, Saunders said in an interview, pointing to this reporters cloth mask.

Seriously. So its kind of like eating your own poop, man, you know, because seriously the CO2 has virus and bacterial particles that your body is trying to expel and get rid of.

This is not accurate, and contrary to the scientific consensus on masks.

The fact that so few people showed up for a protest against masks was no surprise to Howard Ramos. The former Dalhousie University sociology professor recently took up a new post as chair of sociology at Western University.

Hes worked with the Association of Canadian Studies and their polling with national market research and analytics company Leger. Last week, Leger released a survey that showed 67% of Canadians believe wearing a mask in all indoor public spaces should be made mandatory.

When asked if requiring people to wear a mask in public places is an infringement on their personal freedoms, 70% surveyed disagreed.

The super majority of Canadians believe in the public health practices that have been happening and recognize that weve sacrificed a little bit of our freedom in order to have more freedom, Ramos said in an interview.

Wearing a mask gives us the opportunity to be able to go shopping, to be able to make sure that our friends and relatives and neighbours arent getting sick.

He said there will always be a minority who arent supportive, adding that those who are unsupportive often hold extreme alt-right views.

I think that were importing some of the narrative from the US, and within political views theres always a chunk of the population who prides liberty and libertarian values over other values, he noted.

So to me as I hear about this kind of event its to recognize that yes theres going to be this kind of group of people. Its not new, its something that always exists within society, but its important for us to put it into context that this is a minority of people.

Ramos said public health officials have done a great job, particularly in Atlantic Canada, with informing the public about why theyre implementing various measures in order to protect the health of the community at large.

I think that what ends up happening with a lot of the anti-vaxxers and the alt-right and why they often pair together is because of this prizing of individuality, he said.

If you look at Atlantic Canada, weve done very well because weve embraced the messaging from public health, and its important to remember that this is going to be a long term marathon that were running and that its not over.

On Friday, Nova Scotias chief medical officer of health announced that non-medical masks will become mandatory on public transportation as of July 24.

In a media briefing he stated that evidence around wearing non-medical masks has evolved throughout the pandemic. That evidence now clearly shows that non-medical masks are an effective tool in helping to prevent the spread of COVID-19. He added that before a second wave or resurgence of the virus, we need to normalize mask wearing and make it much more of a habit for Nova Scotians.

Strang also stressed that the vast majority of Nova Scotians are able to wear masks. He said although there are exemptions for medical reasons, there are very few valid medical reasons to not wear non-medical masks and they are primarily related to anxiety.

The Canadian Thoracic Society clearly states that there is no evidence that wearing a non medical mask worsens a chronic lung condition such as asthma or chronic obstructive lung disease, he said.

But I do recognize that for some people with chronic breathing conditions wearing a mask can create anxiety.

He urged people to try and overcome that anxiety by getting used to wearing masks for short periods in a safe environment, such as in the confines of their own homes. He also noted that while people with cognitive or developmental disabilities may also be unable to wear masks, there are very few medical reasons not to.

So if you think about it we have medical professionals that wear masks all day long every day. So what Im asking is that Nova Scotians wear non-medical masks for much shorter periods of time, he said.

Strang described masks are part of a package of personal protective measures that include frequent handwashing, good cough hygiene, physical distancing, cleaning common surfaces and objects, and staying home when youre feeling unwell.

He also encouraged Nova Scotians to seriously think about the role masks play in helping us protect each other, adding that wearing masks in public spaces where physical distancing isnt possible shows that you care about others and are taking a relatively simple step to keep them safe.

Theres a lot of misinformation and downright mistruth being circulated about masks. Wearing a non-medical mask is safe and effective, he said. Our response to COVID-19 has highlighted that in many ways we need to think more about putting others first ahead of ourselves.

Strang also noted that face shields or other types of eye protection are not a replacement for masks as they dont protect others.

Ive seen too many circumstances where people are making choices or organizations are making choices thinking that a face shield, that eye protection, is a replacement for masks, he said. Its not. Where we need to have masks on we need to wear masks. Theres no replacement for them.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US called on Americans to wear masks to prevent COVID-19 spread.

CDC reviewed the latest science and affirms that cloth face coverings are a critical tool in the fight against COVID-19 that could reduce the spread of the disease, particularly when used universally within communities, the CDC states in its press release. There is increasing evidence that cloth face coverings help prevent people who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus to others.

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Anti-maskers bring their misinformation to Halifax - Halifax Examiner