"The problem is — and I will keep banging this drum as long as I have to — Biden’s incoherence on Israel and Palestine is both morally unforgivable and bad political strategy. He is bleeding support not only from young people, Arab-Americans, and others incensed with his continued support for a genocidal war machine, but also from pro-Israel moderates and Never Trump conservatives who are enraged at his furtive and contradictory efforts to ever-so-slightly rein that war machine in. I’ll give more details about that incoherence below. For now, I’ll just say that by trying to make everyone a little happy, he is making no one happy, as the pile of Palestinian corpses grows at his feet.

But that’s the narrow part of the question in the context of American politics. The bigger issue for me is why Biden’s management of the human catastrophe in Gaza is so salient. My answer is that it points to the larger and even more consequential failures of liberal politics over the last four to eight years.

....the heart of Biden’s failure to both recognize and confront the actual danger facing democracy. In a recent In These Times essay titled “Antifacism after Gaza,” the Italian philosopher Alberto Toscano subtly tweaked leftist Democratic politicians for whom “the threat of Trumpian despotism blunted opposition” to Biden’s Israel policy: “There is a bitter irony in granting primacy to the national fight against fascism over the campaign to stop a U.S.-funded genocide when the current Israeli government — in its exterminationist rhetoric, patronage of racist militias, colonizing drive and ultranationalism — fits textbook definitions of fascism far more neatly than any other contemporary regime.”

The campus protests would have been another opportunity for Biden to show his commitment to democratic and pro-social ideals. I’m not saying he had to support the protesters or their aims — they are, after all, in large part protesting him. But no one made Biden take the further step of employing reactionary talking points about the protests being fonts of antisemitism and supposedly genocidal rhetoric, or repeating memeified claims about “Jewish students” being “blocked, harrassed, attacked, while walking to class” — questionable claims that have been weaponized to justify state and vigilante violence against demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights.2 Biden repeated those claims on May 7, Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yet he said nothing about the weeks of wanton anti-demonstrator violence by both police and unhinged pro-Israel counterprotesters. In fact, instead of condemning the episodic police state, he is pushing a new plan to funnel $37 billion more to police departments and hire 100,000 more cops.

The political problem here should be obvious. How do you explain to a student who just watched, say, the NYPD throw their friends down a flight of stairs for participating in a nonviolent protest — acts committed without so a peep of condemnation from the president — that a vote for him is a vote against fascism?

Nor is Gaza the only place Biden and the Democrats keep undermining their claim to being the antifascist party. The president has repeatedly pleaded with Trump to work with him in passing a MAGA-like immigration bill: one that prioritized enforcement, detention, and “shutdown” measures over, for instance, pathways to citizenship for undocumented migrants or those who came as children. When Trump didn’t take Biden’s obvious political bait, the president tried running even further to his right. Biden can insist, as he did at the State of the Union, that he “will not demonize immigrants” or endorse Trump’s Hitlerian cant about “poisoning the blood of our country.” But by adopting reactionary fearmongering about the need to “secure the border” above all else, all that remains of a message to voters is that even squishy libs think the fascists have a point about immigration — it’s just that they aren’t willing to do more to stop it.

The connection between state violence at home and genocide abroad isn’t lost on the students. Popular chants connect the dispossession and killing in Palestine to U.S. policy in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Latin America, as well as immigration policy here: “From Palestine to Mexico / border walls have got to go.” As Toscano notes, protesters at the University of Texas chanted at the Austin police: “APD! KKK! / IDF! They’re all the same!” — connecting domestic policing and racism to the Israeli military. And indeed, that connection isn’t purely theoretical: thousands of U.S. police officers have received direct training from the Israeli military on crowd control, use of force, and surveillance in recent decades, including the NYPD, and yes, the Austin police as well.

Men in black assaulted a woman on behalf of men in dresses

A trans activist was arrested yesterday at an event critical of gender ideology held in Newcastle, England, after he assaulted a female attendee. 

Speaking with Reduxx, Florence Waller recounted how she was attacked while leaving the public speaking event on January 15. Waller explains that as she was leaving the event with her banner rolled up under her right arm, several men wearing masks and dressed predominantly in black broke off from the group of counter-protesters to approach her.

“About three of them seemed to hang back a bit and then quite suddenly one pushed me and snatched my banner from my hand and ran off,” she told Reduxx shortly after the event had concluded.

She then described how she ran after the man in an attempt to retrieve her banner. Waller had just managed to corner him when a police officer arrived.

Waller then left the scene with the rest of the attendees of the event. Later that day, she pressed charges.

“I was informed that a police liaison officer had been there looking for me so I phoned 101 and reported the incident. I’ve been told the police will be in touch for a statement,” Waller told Reduxx.

Fortunately, Waller was not injured, but she was upset over the incident as she had spent a significant amount of time hand-making the banner, which read Let Women Speak and Protect Women’s Single Sex Spaces.

“I went to the event to highlight the importance of same-sex care for vulnerable elderly women as I am myself a carer, and I have no doubt that this individual has absolutely no concern about anything … I wonder if he had even seen the very simple message on my banner as it was rolled up under my arm.”

Waller said that another woman retrieved her banner and returned it to her and she proudly displayed it after the incident. 

The event was part of a series of “Let Women Speak” events organized by women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen, also known by her moniker Posie Parker.

Keen has hosted events in major cities across the United Kingdom and even recently traveled across the United States. The events are open to the public and allow women to come forward to speak about issues that impact them. In particular, many women take to criticizing gender ideology and the consequences it has had for women’s single-sex spaces and care.

The events typically attract a crowd of angry trans activists, primarily young males, who often dress in masks and don all-black clothes. The counter-demonstrators are often affiliated with or organized by Antifa and “Transgender Action Block.”

This is not the first time a trans activist has been arrested at an event critical of gender ideology. 

Back in September of 2022, Reduxx was on the scene of a Let Women Speak event in Brighton where three men were arrested.

One of the trans activists, 19, was detained on suspicionof assault and another, 20, was arrested on suspicion of obstructing a police officer. 

A third man, Craig Thomas, was initially arrested on charges of sexual assault, but was later found to have been in possession of a knife as well. However, since the event there have been debates about whether he was part of the counterprotest, or if he was a random member of the public.

Following the event in Brighton, Keen was threatenedwith arrest if she did not attend a “voluntary” police interview to address an investigation into her committing a “hate crime” for her speech.

“The crime is use of words or behavior to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation,” the police officer, a Police Constable told Keen during a recorded phone call. Keen posted the video of the phone call to her Youtube channel. She did not attend the interview.

In October of 2022, Keen took her public speaking tour to the United States where trans activists were even more violent and aggressive, leading to several events being cancelled due to security concerns. The final stop of the tour was in New York City, where seven counter-protesters were arrested. Keen was unable to safely speak at the event after police refused to provide her escort through the crowd to the podium. 

Despite the threats she has faced for holding her pro-woman events, Keen is not deterred and already has plans to visit other domestic and international destinations throughout 2023.

By Shay Woulahan Shay is a writer and social media content creator for Reduxx. She is a proud lesbian activist and feminist who lives in Northern Ireland with her partner and their four-legged, fluffy friends.

for this month's recommendations, i decided to go with the theme KISSES GALORE in honour of valentine's day. all of the below works have been posted in the month of february 2021 and hand selected by me <3

Sowing Discord by @chronologicalimplosion

A group of hyper-religious, homophobic protesters on campus ruins David's post-lunch good mood and he sends a half-joking message to the LGBTQ+ Discord server about staging a counterprotest. Constant lurker Patrick comes running.

Rated T for TEEN & UP AUDIENCES; 4,089 words; M/M; TAGGED for Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Original Characters, Alternative Universe, Alternative Universe - College/University, Homophobia, First Kiss, Epistolary, kind of

"This work features the inclusion of messages sent in Discord channels, a social media app I've never seen interrogated into a fanfiction piece before. The perfect balance of humour as well as tenderness makes this the ideal read to round out the month of love."

falling into place like dominos by @davidbrewer

Alexis spins the bottle and Stevie doesn’t know if she wants it to stop in front of her, or if she’s hoping it points literally anywhere else. She thinks she’ll figure it out when it stops moving, but… even with the neck of the bottle unmistakably pointing at her foot, she still can’t identify what the feeling is. Is that happiness or dread settling in the pit of her stomach? Since when do those completely different things feel exactly the same? If she’s being honest, though, it feels like a combination of things. It’s that feeling you get right before you do something you know you might regret later… like throwing back a jello shot (which she wishes she had done), calling an ex at 3am, or maybe jumping out of a plane.

David and Patrick hold a second housewarming party, this time at their newly-renovated cottage. For old times' sake, they decide to play spin the bottle. Meanwhile, Stevie has been wrestling with her feelings for Alexis since she left for New York... and it never occurred to her that those feelings could flow both ways.

Rated M for MATURE AUDIENCES; 4,897 words; F/F; TAGGED for Stevie Budd & Alexis Rose, Stevie Budd/Alexis Rose, Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Post-Canon, Lesbian Stevie Budd, First (Real) Kiss, Alcohol, Spin the Bottle, Queer Themes, Sexuality Crisis, (Although it's more of a frustrated confusing than a crisis tbh)

"The author's ability to voice every character (but specifically Alexis) will never fail to astound me; their inner voice for Stevie is the most notable in this work, however. Even the friendship/sibling dynamics between David and Alexis and as well as Stevie and Patrick are absolute perfection. One of the best 'Housewarming' codas I've ever endulged in and I can confidently says so."

Until I Lose My Breath by @the-kellephant

How could she have missed the fact that she was in love with Twyla?

Rated T for TEEN & UP AUDIENCES; 814 words; F/F; TAGGED for Stevie Budd/Twyla Sands, Friends to Lovers, First Kiss, Femslash February, Bisexual Stevie Budd, Lesbian Twyla Sands

"A lovely introspective piece about sapphic feelings and how they can often be blindsided by denial if not provided with the proper care or attention."

You can Stand Under my Umbrella by @agoodpersonrose

David thought the day couldn't possibly get any worse. But then it started to rain.

43. You both reach for the last umbrella in the store on a rainy day.

Rated T for TEEN & UP AUDIENCES; 2,721 words; M/M; TAGGED for Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Alternative Universe - Canon Divergence, Tumblr Prompt, Meet-Cute, First Kiss, First Meetings, Awkward Flirting, Kissing in the Rain, Umbrellas, Fluff and Humour, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Prompt Fill, One Shot

"I have nothing to say besides this is hands down the most cute way this prompt could've been filled and I applaud Becca for her ability to write such tender moments in a way underlined with laughs."

Ten Tender Kisses by @cheesecurdsgravyandfries

Ten drabbles featuring ten tender kisses.

Rated G for GENERAL AUDIENCES; 1,110 words; M/M; TAGGED for Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Fluff, tender kisses, Canon Compliant

"Reading this was pure joy. The happiness I felt from the first drabble continued to grow the longer I scrolled which is truly a beautiful feeling. Their banter is so perfectly in character and the dynamic the author has created between David and Patrick is a skill I envy."

I Didn't Know it was a Crush, David by squigmistress

David and Patrick arrive home after The Premiere and David wants to talk more about some of the wild stuff Patrick said when he was high on pain meds. What he doesn't expect is Patrick's big, gay feelings. But damn, does he love him for it. OR Patrick needs emotional safety to process some feelings and, of course, David is more than happy to hold him through it.

Rated T for TEEN & UP AUDIENCES; 1,548 words; M/M; TAGGED for Patrick Brewer/David Rose, david rose - Relationship, Queer Themes, Coming Out, Episode: s06e05 The Premiere, Coda, Feelings, Feelings Realisation, Gay, Canon Gay Character, Family Issues, Intimacy, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Anger

"Now, I've always been a sucker for introspective works, but this took it to a brand new level. It's such a fine needle to thread; however, the author does an astounding job at cataloguing the growth/development of Patrick's emotions."

Be your remedy by @jessx2231

Patrick closes his eyes and brings to mind all the times David has put on music while Patrick is engrossed in a book or his phone or even the occasional weekend work task. Eventually, David will slink into his space, just enough to rest his head in Patrick’s lap. He doesn’t always do so with the intent to fall asleep, but it’s usually not long before Patrick’s fingers involuntarily find their way into David’s hair — much like they are now — and David’s breath will even out for a while.

He can definitely make an abridged version of that happen.

Or, David can't sleep and Patrick helps.

Rated G for GENERAL AUDIENCES; Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings; 2,048 words; M/M; TAGGED for Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Fluff, Established Relationship, Canon Compliant, Post-Canon, Married Life, very mild descriptions of depressive symptoms, but really just some very soft sleepy boys

"A warm hug is the best way I can describe this. Also, I already knew I need a Patrick Brewer in my life, but this solidified that."

the paths that your eyes wander down by @anniemurphys apart of falling in love at a coffee shop by them, @thankstwy, and @landofsonlali

Written for the prompt: "Twyla and Alexis reunite in NYC."

Alexis finds Twyla at a tiny corner table.

Rated G for GENERAL AUDIENCES; 568 words; F/F; TAGGED for Alexis Rose/Twyla Sands, Post-Canon

"The absolute perfect romantic comedy moment paired with some of the most in-character Alexis dialogue I've seen in awhile, not to mention how beautifully the mutual pining is broken."

a sense of expectation hanging in the air by Anonymous (i'll add the author once reveals are out for the Season 7 collection !)

Stevie starts to realize she has feelings for Ruth. How long though, will it take for her to tell Ruth that?

Rated M for MATURE AUDIENCES; 6,548 words; F/F; TAGGED for Stevie Budd/Ruth Clancy, Stevie Budd & Alexis Rose & Twyla Sands, Stevie Budd & David Rose, Stevie Budd & Patrick Brewer, Alexis Rose/Twyla Sands, Post-Canon, Getting Together, Sharing a Bed, Cuddling & Snuggling, Making Out, Fluff, Texting, Female Friendship, Episode: s07e08 RMG, Workplace Relationship

"The support from Stevie's friends—Alexis, Twyla, David, and Patrick—is so incredibly lovely. Despite the secret crushes, Stevie and Ruth refuse to let anything get in the way of them getting together and it's such a wonderful thing to see them immediately all-in the relationship."

got a fistful of four leaf clovers by iphigenias

Two weeks before Christmas Alexis calls David.

“So I think I like someone,” she says.

Rated T for TEEN & UP AUDIENCES; 1,754 words; F/F; TAGGED for Post-Canon, Getting Together, Femslash February, home is a place AND a person!

"Alexis's slow burn of building feelings for Twyla melts my heart. That being said, the realistic depiction of the difficulties that come with change provides a certain depth to this story it needs."

Next baybee, is Mirta Wingert, in her pink punk barbie Enchantix, glow-ing! 

In this AU, she is the Fairy of Emotional Illusions and very, very gay. Let’s hear the rest below! 😁

Krystal | Diaspro | Mirta | Galatea | Nova | Miele 

Mirta is the same age as the Winx, but through her mid-year transfer to Alfea that only got finalised after the Trix’s megalomaniac attack had been dealt with, she repeated a year and graduated while the girls were away in Gardenia. 

Mirta is from an influential family in Magics that has brought forth many a council member, industrial and landowner. All of them witchcraft users, though. When Mirta manifested with magic it was not a question which stream she would pursue and that she would do it at one of the top schools of the Magic Universe. Mirta’s parents don’t immediately belong to the creme de la creme, but have enough influence to make things like this happen for their daughter. 

Being part of the upper class industrialists, but at the same time being removed enough from them to allow independent thought shaped Mirta’s personality greatly and contributed to her explosive rebellious teen stage. She wholeheartedly believes in what the punk anti-capitalist philosophy stands for and has alternately tried either to change her family’s ways from within, or to break away and distance herself. Her generous allowance was always spent on local youth groups, anti-discrimination organisations and personal drives for people in need. Many a times had her parents have to drag her off the streets where she chilled with punk buskers and their dogs before they could set an end to it by sending Mirta off to Cloud Tower.

Could Tower, now that was something else. Despite growing up in a family of witchcraft users, her home was still just basic, good old Adquistes. She has never lived in an exclusively witchcraft using society like the Cloud Tower coven, so a lot of things came as a culture shock to her. The school preserved a lot of things that modern witches in an integrated society don’t observe anymore, just for the sake of teaching history. Not all of it became Mirta, especially not the antagonism towards the fairies. Her heart is huge and as a true punk she stood up to the system and what she believed was not right. This didn’t make her many friends among the hard-core traditionalist witch*ers and combined with her very short statue, got her pushed around a lot.

Her only comfort and friend was Lucy, a childhood friend of hers. They met in an LGBT youth shelter organised event where Lucy had been tentatively seeking help for transitioning. Mirta was there to volunteer and the two girls hit off really well complaining about the world and uplifting each other where they could. After that they stayed online friends and talked on various forums, not having much of a face-to face relationship before becoming dorm mates at Cloud Tower. There it became obvious that some of their attitudes towards life and witchcraft were very different.

Mainly the Trix, they argued about them incessantly before Mirta left. Despite their horrible treatment of her, Lucy saw an opportunity in staying in the good graces of the Trix, as there weren’t many career opportunities open to witches at the time, so she thought it would make more sense to conform to the stereotypes. She was tired of fighting just to be recognised as a girl, why add to that plate? Mirta empathised with that to some extent, but she had unwavering faith in that she could do good, and she would do good regardless of what people thought of her magic stream. She decided to start that by passing on what she knows about the Trix’s doing in and out of school to the Winx. They met at the start of the year at the school’s joint ball that very few witch*ers actually showed up to. Flora immediately swept Mirta under her wing and the five girls frequently invited her to hang out. Mirta knew how the Trix have made Bloom’s life hell and wanted to help out to give the girls an upper hand. Until then she had been under the impression that their antagonism was nothing more than bulling, but the Trix pretty openly discussed ripping stuff from Bloom’s chest, so she felt they needed to know and warn teachers. Not Cloud Tower teachers though, them Mirta didn’t trust. She was discovered sneaking out and the Trix cast an advanced spell on her turning her into a pumpkin. 

Flora and Miss Faragonda cared for her while she was in that form at least for a few weeks before Faragonda was able to turn her back using her fairy dust. After reporting what she had intended to, which has by then become outdated, Mirta was hesitant to return to Cloud Tower. For one because of the Trix and the bullying, but also because of how she and Lucy had broken off. By that point Mirta had been nursing a giant crush on her friend and their angry parting words to each other broke her heart. While at Alfea she learned more about fey magic from the Winx basically by osmosis. She even had success with a few basic spells that absolutely amazed her. She was never the best student and she had to work so hard to keep up with witchcraft. This in comparison was a piece of cake. Faragonda then sneakily slid her a transfer slip before sending her home to her family in Adquistes. It took some convincing for them to come around to the idea of Mirta being a fairy, but Mirta was allowed a trial period which she aced with stellar notes, much to her parents’ surprise. She became a full time student the next semester, starting fresh with a new leaf.

She fell out of tune with the Winx a little bit after that, as their curriculum diverged greatly and they had each their own social circles to stay involved in. Tough a bit distrustful of her at first, Mirta’s room and classmates turned out to be good sport and she often hung out with them even after graduation. Mirta patched things up with Lucy eventually, both of them overcoming their shame over what had happened. As Mirta continued her work trying to bring the two schools together, their relationship seemed to grow even closer than it had been before and Mirta flirted with the idea of flirting with Lucy, before inevitably chickening out of it every time too afraid to ruin what they had. The year was over before they knew it and Lucy and Mirta went on their first sort of date at the end of the year ball. It was sweet and sapphic and filled Mirta with hope for the future. Then of course Valtor struck and everything went to shit. 

When Valtor and the Trix took over Cloud Tower, Mirta was ready to bang down the Winx’s door just as they were coming to her to do the same. Inspecting the castle they of course stumbled into the monsters left for them and the brain-washed Lucy. Mirta was horrified, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t free her from the trance. Lucy herself seemed to resist the pull though and her eyes clear, momentarily looking at Mirta. Later, when the horror was over and Valtor had been defeated, Lucy shared that hearing Mirta’s voice cut through to her and made her fight against Valtor’s control. She felt like she had to come back to Mirta, to see her, to fight for her. There was only so much a girl’s heart could handle and before she knew it, Mirta was kissing Lucy. Lucy broke an incredibly powerful witcher’s spell on her because she loved Mirta so much, how could she not? How could she not love her back? They laughed it out telling each other about all their insecurities and pining, thinking the other didn’t feel the same and decided to go on a lot of dates to make up for that.

In the S6 AU timeline, she is settled in Magics City with Lucy, who is pursuing further magic education at Cloud Tower as a teacher assistant, ready to get her Master Witch exam and become a potions teacher. Mirta is therefore at the front line when Lucy’s voice message comes in telling her that the Trix have returned to Cloud Tower with a strange new witch and something about them being different. More sharp and dangerous. Mirta spends the rest of that story arc trying to free Lucy, then survive in a hostile witch infested Cloud Tower after she becomes trapped in there. (wink a good ending is in sight for her however)

Magic wise she is definitely competent, though not as battle hardened as the Winx. She gained her Enchantix in a very characteristically her situation. During the time of the reawakening of magic on Earth Magics was also experiencing unrest with a lot of people protesting how Magics planned to handle the situation, leaving Earth magic users to their own devices once again. Counterprotesters crashed the scene and escalated the violence, endangering bystanders and protesters alike. Mirta stood her ground way before peace keepers responded and her initiative saved a lot of people, triggering her Enchantix. With emotional illusions she could pacify people for the time being and allowed for vulnerable people to scurry away. Mirta’s powers don’t change someone’s heart like Believix powers do (though after she hears what Believix can do, she becomes keenly interested in it), however it overlays an overpowering layer of what Mirta wants them to feel in the moment. If her concentration fades, so will the feeling. In that way, her power is actually very similar to Darcy’s psychic illusions. Using witchcraft with this aspect always made Mirta feel predatory, offering power bearing items in order to control someone else’s emotions. With fey magic, it is more like she extends what she feels into the mind of other people. All her spells turn out stronger if she herself is feeling the emotion and has an immediate reference to draw on what it feels like to experience it. Unconsciously she sometimes spreads her stress or dread, which took Lucy a while to figure out after they moved together. Now she isn’t as freaked by it and just tuts when she recognises that the jaw-clenching stress isn’t actually her own. Mirta is working on it, she swears! The two of them then cuddle it out, though they always look for excuses to spend the day on the couch, so that doesn’t say a lot. :)

--

I have a lot of love and plans for Mirta, I think this has been going on for a while. All of this is also poured into my S6 AU, which is a “coming soon” kind of project atm.

The clashes in Charlottesville catalyzed the American public’s reckoning with the budding white nationalist movement, which had accelerated after Donald Trump’s election. Afterward, the wave of public shaming of the violence in Charlottesville led at least one “Unite the Right” marcher to insist his participation in the rally was misinterpreted as racist. Others who attended quickly lost their jobs after online campaigns exposed them.

But the eventual identification of the man in the white tank top and red hat shook many: He was revealed to be a 33-year-old Puerto Rican resident of Georgia, originally from the Bronx. “I’m the only brown Klans member I ever met,” Alex Michael Ramos joked in a Facebook Live video before he turned himself into police Aug. 28. The Facebook post has since been taken down.

But Ramos wasn’t the only “Unite the Right” marcher with a Hispanic background.

Christopher Rey Monzon, a 22-year-old Cuban-American, is associated with the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a neo-Confederate hate group. Monzon was arrested weeks after Charlottesville for charging at protesters in a separate Florida demonstration. And Nick Fuentes, a 19-year-old student who hosts an alt-right podcast called America First, said he had to leave Boston University in the aftermath of the Charlottesville protests after receiving death threats over his participation.

The presence of these Latino men at the largest white nationalist event in recent memory underscores the complicated racial position of Latinos in the United States. Latino white supremacy, it turns out, might not be a contradiction in terms.

Increasingly, Latinos are identifying racially as white. In fact, more than half did so in the 2010 U.S. Census. A March 2016 report from Pew Research Center found that 39% of Afro-Latinos also identified “as white alone or white in combination with another race.” With a current population of around 58 million, Latinos make up the second-largest ethnic group in the U.S., just behind whites.

Another Pew Research Center study from December found that 59% of U.S. adults with Latino heritage who identify as white believe others see them as white, too. Over time, the study found, descendants of Latino immigrants stop identifying with their countries of origin and consider themselves more and more American.

Fuentes — who says he’s about 25% Mexican — identifies as white, not Latino. In an interview with Mic, Fuentes also said he believes multiculturalism threatens white national identity. Monzon, meanwhile, has called for South Florida to secede from the U.S. His ties to the League of the South are generational, as his parents have also protested with the white supremacist fringe group, according to the SPLC. In a Facebook profile the SPLC has attributed to him, Monzon goes by “Ambrosio Gonzalez,” the name of a Cuban general who fought as a Confederate colonel in the Civil War.

Ramos, however, rejects any notion that he’s racist, insisting he went to Charlottesville in defense of free speech and as a show of force against left-wing groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

During the nearly hourlong video Ramos posted to Facebook, he became agitated at users who challenged him for marching with the KKK and jumping a black man.

“Yeah, I stood side-by-side with racist people, but they weren’t racist to me,” Ramos said. “They did not call me a ‘spic,’ they did not call me a ‘fucking wetback,’ they didn’t say nothing as such. We stood for the same common goal.”

Alex Michael Ramos has been charged in connection with the beating of a black man during violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the “Unite the Right” rally Aug. 12.

Uncredited/AP

Despite his stated goals, the brutal violence in the video from that day was enough for judges in Charlottesville to twice deny Ramos bond.

“The victim was defenseless,” Judge Richard Moore of the Charlottesville General District Court said at Ramos’ bail hearing in November. “Mr. Ramos rushes into something where people are pummeling Mr. Harris. He is an unreasonable risk to others.”

Ramos is facing a malicious wounding charge and could spend up to 20 years in prison if convicted, according to local station WVIR-TV. Through his attorney, Ramos declined to be interviewed.

Other alleged perpetrators include Daniel Patrick Borden of Ohio, who was identified online and arrested in connection to Harris’ attack. Like Ramos, he was also denied bond. Authorities arrested another suspect, Arkansas man Jacob Scott Goodwin, in October and extradited him to Charlottesville the following month.

Harris himself was later forced to turn himself in when Harold Ray Crews, an attorney and resident of Walkertown, North Carolina — and the state’s chairman for League of the South — claimed Harris injured him in the same scuffle. Though Harris’ felony charge for unlawful wounding was dropped in December, “there are still misdemeanor charges pending,” according to the Root.

Fuentes is, in many ways, representative of the ideas of the so-called alt-right, which the Anti-Defamation League defines as a “loose network of racists and anti-Semites.” His Twitter feed shows equal disdain for conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and the South Side of Chicago, which has seen a sharp increase in gang-related murders in recent years. Though he decried Heyer’s murder at the “Unite the Right” rally during his interview with Mic, he also equated it with antifa violence.

Fuentes did acknowledge there isn’t much reconciliation between his stance on multiculturalism — simply put, it’s bad and should be avoided — and his own cultural background: His Mexican ancestors immigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. Intermarriage has created a “beige, rootless mass,” he said, and he rejects any notion that Latino immigrants can assimilate.

“I don’t buy the idea that if you come to a country and your kids learned the language, you’re from that country,” Fuentes said. “You have to understand that America is an exceptional nation; it’s the proposition nation. That’s why the identity question is so big here. America was obviously settled only very recently. If I moved to China and I filled out the paperwork, would that make me Chinese? Of course not. I would maybe be a part of the People’s Republic.”

“They demonize the ‘other,’ but the irony is that they were once the ‘other.’”

Fuentes’s own standard — that learning English and settling in the U.S. does not make you American — disenfranchises himself and his parents, a fact he acknowledged. From the perspective of someone who sees the U.S. as a foundationally European nation, as Fuentes does, being anything less than white is the same as being a nonentity.

“You rob children of something very fundamental when you take away a common and coherent identity,” he said. “I look at my Eastern European people from high school and they have their food and their special clothing from their home country. But when you have race mixing, you rob them. I do pause at that. This is not an experience I wish to replicate. I don’t know if I wish I could turn back the clock and change things, but ideally there wouldn’t be mixing.”

Joanna Mendelson, senior investigative researcher and director of special projects for the ADL, sees growing anti-immigrant views from the descendants of Latino immigrants as a unique conundrum.

“It’s this idea that, ‘we did it right, we did it legally,’” Mendelson said in an interview with Mic. “They’re not just addressing illegal immigration — which would be one thing — but they’re against refugees and Muslims and legal immigration. They demonize the ‘other,’ but the irony is that they were once the ‘other.’”

On Aug. 20, days after the Charlottesville protests, Juan Cadavid, a Colombian-born Californian who now goes by the name Johnny Benitez, led an “America First!” rally in Southern California he described as a vigil for victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Dozens of supporters were drowned out by nearly 2,500 counterprotesters, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In an interview with NPR in December, Benitez shared how he went from Occupy Wall Street protester and Bernie Sanders supporter to alt-right nationalist, claiming he was exiled from Occupy and called a bigot after he questioned the need for the group to support transgender people. He insisted he was not a white supremacist, but an advocate for what he called “white identity politics” — which includes embracing the 14 Words slogan used by white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Benitez also told NPR he pushes for a United States that is “Italo-Spanish” white, to make room for the descendants of southern Europeans (which he considers himself to be). White nationalists such as Richard Spencer have said white Latinos could theoretically be part of a white ethno-nationalist state, but they still have mixed feelings about assimilation.

“In some instances you are rejected from the host culture, made to feel not American,” Benitez said of being an immigrant in the U.S. “And if I go back, I’m definitely not Colombian. You know, I didn’t live there, you can hear that I have an American accent, things like that, when I speak Spanish.”

Benitez’s girlfriend, Irma Hinojosa, cohosts The Right View, a YouTube talk show hosted with four other women who call themselves the “Deplorable Latinas.” The show features conservative Latinas commenting on the news from a point of view that conversation about Latinos and immigration focuses on the undocumented versus those who entered the country legally. Hinojosa also has her own YouTube channel where she livestreams protests and alt-right events. She was the only woman to speak at a June “Freedom of Speech” rally featuring Spencer and other alt-right figures.

two articles I request you read: "muellergate and the discreet lies of the bourgeoisie" by craig murray, and "new studies show pundits are wrong about russian social-media involvement in US politics" by aaron maté. I'm more than a little perturbed by people on the left applying no critical scrutiny to the russia narrative and never asking themselves who it benefits

Okay I have read your articles.

And I request that you re-read my post.

Particularly this part of it:

I don’t know if these are real bloggers who don’t care about the potential negative impact of their tweet thievery or if they’re weird psyops blogs that are intended to make you feel hopeless about your place in the political process. Whatever they are it doesn’t matter when they continually post misinformation and don’t seem to care about stopping so please be cautious. 

There are two mentions of Russia in my post - one in the “is this a pigeon” meme and one in a quote from Vanity Fair. I made sure that I didn’t accuse anyone of being a Russian psyops blog because I have no proof of that.

What I do have proof of is a network of blogs with unusual posting behavior that share misinformation. The Vanity Fair mention of Russians was necessary because (even according to the articles you shared) the IRA was an organization in Russia (whether it was effective, organized, or successful doesn’t change the fact that it also included a network of 84 blogs on tumblr with unusual posting behavior that shared misinformation).

My concern is not that Russia is interfering with American politics - I am personally convinced that some level of international pot-stirring shit like this is and has always been in the background of our day-to-day lives.

My concern is that there is a network of blogs with unusual posting behavior that share misinformation and that deliberately target a largely young and black audience and these blogs post a lot of misinformation that seems calculated to increase racial division and intergenerational division and inculcates an attitude of helplessness.

-------------------------------------------------

I’m going to take a break here to point out that you know this is also targeting white people, right? After I reblogged my addition to it I got a nifty collection of racists to block because a bunch of shitheads got on the train and decided to say that *my* post proved that black bloggers were making up lies in order to make white people look bad.

White people *absolutely* point to things like the “original statue of liberty” post and say “see, they’re making us look bad, they lie about us, history isn’t that bad, I bet they’re making up lies about slavery too!” 

This is the same shit that radical feminists pull - they’ll say something ostensibly pro-women that’s pretty fucking harsh toward men like “The universal female experience is that all women know what it is to suffer under men” and women will go “OMG I know right” and men will go “Okay so feminists hate men, this is what I’m reading here, right?” and then women will go “see, it’s you saying things like this that make people hate men” and men will go “so it’s true! you’re admitting you hate men!” and it’s all a bunch of bullshit put together by a tiny subset of feminists who DO hate men and who are female separatists and it pollutes the entire discourse around gender equality and it’s fucking bullshit

So, yeah, this is a tool for division aimed at white people too that targets white people by making them uncomfortable and angry at black bloggers and makes them afraid of engaging on the subject of race. (Exactly the same way that radfems make men afraid to engage on the subject of gender)

Do you know how long I sat on my post because I didn’t want to be That White Person calling out black bloggers for criticizing white supremacy? I’m not criticizing people calling out white supremacy, I’m criticizing a network dedicated to spreading misinformation, and I’m still That White Person to a lot of people right now.

Back to the other rant

-------------------------------------------------------

The second article you list did admit that part of the campaign spread by the IRA was successful - and wouldn’t you know it, it was the part that tried to start a street fight between white nationalists and antifascists.

Sugar, I gotta tell you that I’m totally okay with getting a bunch of people together to counterprotest white supremacists. That is my jam. I love this song.

But, Babydoll, I gotta say - “outsiders getting people riled up to go to a manufactured protest where there’s a possibility of violence and police are going to be focused on arresting anarchists” reminds me of a totally different conspiracy that I’m also super-duper not cool with.

So I’ll reiterate:

I don’t know if these are real bloggers who don’t care about the potential negative impact of their tweet thievery or if they’re weird psyops blogs that are intended to make you feel hopeless about your place in the political process. Whatever they are it doesn’t matter when they continually post misinformation and don’t seem to care about stopping so please be cautious.

White People: Stop Talking About “All Lives Matter”

As well-meaning white people continue to talk about race, some of this talk can center around their desperate attempts to reach their “All Lives Matter” friends and family or others that may make such comments that are anywhere from microaggressive to super aggressive on race. But, for myself and likely other people of color, the “All Lives Matter” individuals are long gone. We have come to the realization that the shouting of “All Lives Matter” is yet another moment in the long history of covering up the work of Black people.

In the creation of “All Lives Matter” (I am not sure who created it nor do I even care as it’s not worth my time to want to know), we once again have an example of white people attempting to steal Black progress or accomplishment out from underneath Black people. “All Lives Matter” shifts the conversation away from Black people. All of a sudden, a conversation focused in on civil rights and the ability of Black people to gain true equality becomes a question of “Why can’t everybody matter?” Now we’re fighting over that question as opposed to fighting for the change and the original purpose and goals of Black Lives Matter.

The reality is that “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” is actually White Lives Matter. First, white people are so confused and looking to stifle this movement that they came up with both “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter.” Well, which one is it? Also, no one is born a blue person so what are you even talking about? At a recent protest I went to, a limited number of counterprotesters wore “All Lives Matter” shirts and on the back of them it said “Back the Blue!” So we now understand how this warped version of intersectionality works. It really means that only white people’s lives matter and that we support police who are brutalizing Black people and no reform is necessary. How else are we supposed to perceive it if such individuals tried to take away the name of one movement by creating two different phrases, can’t properly define either phrase, and are unwilling to even come into a reasonable discussion on the issues associated with Black Lives Matter? “All Lives Matter” people are willing to criticize race but not even talk about it.

You know who “All Lives Matter” people don’t want to hear from? Me! I’m a person of color. I’ve held up a “Black Lives Matter” sign in their face. I’m their opponent. If you’re a well-intentioned white person who sides with Black Lives Matter, your attempts to reach “All Lives Matter” people are only giving them and their warped catchphrase more power. The approaches by white people are all failing and I, certainly as a person of color who these people want nothing to do with, have no suggestion for white people. The well-meaning white person keeps identifying the hypocrisy of “All Lives Matter.” It’s not working with their “All Lives Matter” family and friends. If “All Lives Matter” people can’t understand how the Confederacy in U.S. history is a problem, how in the world will they understand the basic concept that they’ve attempted the purely white supremacist move of quieting Black Lives Matter with their own phrase?

This is a strange inclination of all white people. They enjoy taking over a popular phrase or movement and make it their own and for their own agenda. Donald Trump popularized “Make America Great Again,” a vague but catchy phrase that got Americans excited for a better era of the past, which as we know, the past was filled with even more racism and less progress. But then, we saw as many white people would wear red hats of their own such as “Make America Kind Again” or “Make America Sane Again” or “Make America Gay Again.” What they didn’t seem to get was they were now taking a symbol that struck concern into any disenfranchised person’s mind and trying to make it into some message of progress. The fact is that the red hat is already triggering and a form of white power and so you’re only really providing more power to that symbol. Think about it. Would you show your support for gay people by grabbing a Confederate flag and making the X rainbow colored? While it might be a hilarious image, what does that even do other than keep the Confederate flag more present in people’s minds?

This is the same for the #MeToo movement which first began in 2006 on Myspace by activist Tarana Burke. The movement was started to help survivors of sexual violence, particularly Black women and girls. By October 2017, the movement was now taken over by others in reaction to Harvey Weinstein when Alyssa Milano tweeted out “Me Too,” it went viral given Milano’s profile, and the rest is history. A movement and its focus has now entirely changed. Burke still modified the goals given the unexpected newfound interest in a phrase and movement she began, but this still was an example of a white person taking over without even realizing it.

My point here is that Black Lives Matter isn’t like running a 5K. This isn’t “Keep Calm and Carry On” or Livestrong bracelets which have been taken over from their original purpose but still have an underlying good and humor behind them. This is the taking over of a movement devoted to people’s lives and its continuing to cost people their lives and their everyday existence. “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” are suppressing Black people’s lives and engaging with them as opposed to promoting and contributing to Black Lives Matter only makes their white oppressive behavior stronger.

Well-meaning white people really need to step up and make some choices. I and other people of color can’t speak to “All Lives Matter” people about this. They already hate us and are unwilling to even understand us on the front that is race. But, also, if you are well-meaning, you have to understand how you’re communicating.

“All Lives Matter” is weak. It’s pathetic. It’s a slogan that got stolen for a movement with no other direction than racism. To engage them and to attempt to point out their stupidity is fruitless. Stop stooping to their level and instead focus on the goals of Black Lives Matter that can totally dismantle the “All Lives Matter” perspective for good.

if you live in America and are not on Twitter, you probably have a distorted view of what’s going on here right now

The situation is chaotic, so it’s hard to get an accurate picture. I’ve been sifting through... A LOT of different sources, checking who’s saying what, reviewing footage to see if it shows what I’m being told it shows.

Most protesters are peaceful. Most protesters are peaceful.

They turned out last week to protest racist violence and the fact that police engage in violence with impunity. The police are not out there for crowd control, public safety, or even protecting storefronts. They are counterprotesters demonstrating their perceived right to engage in violence with impunity.

Over the past days, I have watched so many videos from across the country showing over and over that the police are using unnecessary, indiscriminate violence to turn peaceful situations tense and tense situations violent. Their actions range from mild (shoving people with riot control shields) to concerning (spraying tear gas, an agent that causes coughing, in the midst of a pandemic that affects the respiratory system) to wanton (accelerating their SUVs into crowds) to gratuitously cruel (yanking down a teen’s face mask in order to pepper spray him right in the eyes even though he was simply standing there with his hands up).

Police have maced and tear gassed children at protests, like the nine year-old girl in Seattle. They’ve done the same to uninvolved bystanders who were just trying to walk home. In Salt Lake City, an old man at a bus stop couldn’t hobble away fast enough, so they knocked him down. In Minneapolis after curfew, troops fired rubber bullets / teargas at people who were on their own porches and balconies, because curfew. In another city, they stopped a civilian car, tased the people of color inside, and dragged them out for arrest on live news camera. Oh, also on live camera in Minneapolis they arrested a CNN correspondent and his crew, and many other journalists have been targeted with rubber bullets.

Rubber bullets sound kind of cute and cartoony, don’t they?

There’s no such thing as a non-lethal weapon, just less-lethal weapons. Rubber bullets are big hunks of metal jacketed in rubber. They’re supposed to be fired at the ground so that most of a bullet’s momentum can be harmlessly absorbed before it ricochets up and hits you in the legs. Used this way, they still bruise. They’re meant to hurt you enough to get you moving in the direction police want you to go. And you’d think that police are only supposed to use them when a crowd is already out of control or refusing to move, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Remember that CNN correspondent? His name is Omar Jimenez, and you can Google this: The police surrounded him and his crew. He very politely and deferentially asked them where they would like his crew to go. They didn’t respond despite Jimenez asking several times. Then they arrested them and led them away; all the while, Jimenez and the crew cooperated and calmly asked why they were being arrested, to which they initially received no answer. The police informed CNN that the arrest was made because Jimenez and his crew “refused to move.”

Surround. Give no directions, or make it impossible to follow directions. Arrest for failure to follow directions.

This is the same tactic that they’re using against crowds. They raise bridges or bring in barriers (”kettling”) to ensure protesters can’t leave. Then they arrest people for refusing to leave. Sometimes they fire teargas and/or rubber bullets at a crowd to drive them into a kettling situation. Sometimes they do it after the crowd is already kettled. The curfews? An excuse to arrest everybody on the street. Pay attention to when they’re announcing a curfew with little or no lead time. My city keeps claiming that essential workers are allowed to go to and from work even when a curfew is on, but would you bet cash money that no workers are getting swept up and arrested?

Journalists then report this as “protests turned violent” or “protesters clash with police.” Local authorities claim that the protesters are all or almost all outside agitators, from out of state, and journalists repeat this without (it seems) even asking themselves if that sounds plausible.

This is why Americans don’t know what’s going on.

(We should be skeptical of claims about outside agitators because it has a racist history. It is used to deny African-Americans of their agency in their own efforts to liberate themselves from white supremacy. On the other hand, to some unknown degree the protests are actually getting infiltrated by a) plainclothes LEOs possibly acting as agents provocateurs, b) white "allies” who mainly want to vandalize shit or start fights and don’t listen to the Black protesters who try to stop that crap, c) looters*, and d) white supremacists and other political opportunists**.)

All of the above is only a spoon-sized sample of what’s going on. You want more instances of police violence, you can find it. And all of these things have been happening for years, decades, generations. It’s not just Trump, though he certainly does bring out the worst in people, and his administration does like to loosen standards to enable the worst in people.

Yesterday morning (June 1, 2020), Trump called Putin. Then he called the governors of the states and basically told them to go to war against the American people. In the afternoon, he made a tough guy speech, calling himself the “law and order president,” promising he could fix it, promising to send the U.S. military into the states to establish order if the governors didn’t do it. While he was talking, you could hear people being teargassed and fired at with rubber bullets in the background. These were peaceful protesters in and near Lafayette Square. There was a water and medical station set up on the porch of St. John’s Episcopal church. The protesters and medics were driven away (again: with teargas, which causes coughing, in the middle of a pandemic) so that Trump could be seen posing in front of the church, holding up a Bible.

That church had no idea Trump was going to do that. Some of their clergy were at the medical station and got teargassed.

Please, please go read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s summary of yesterday, because there was more fuckery than I can summarize here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-1-2020

Law and order. “One law, one beautiful law.” I alone can fix it. We’ll use the military if the governors refuse to take action, “to protect the rights of law abiding Americans, including your second amendment rights.” Bible-waving. He fucking teargassed people for a photo-op.

In the middle of the night, the police herded hundreds of Washington, D.C. protesters into a residential neighborhood. The residents opened their doors for the protesters to take shelter. The police camped outside for hours, arresting anyone who came out. You may see accusations that protesters invaded people’s homes, but they didn’t -- they were invited. Some people are claiming police invaded people’s homes to get the protesters out, but I’m still looking for more information to substantiate that.

There are reliable reports that in addition to the National Guard and the regular military, ICE and CBP are being mobilized to “help.”

What they’ve done to D.C., they’re going to try to do in every city that has protests. What they’ve done to suspected undocumented immigrants, they’re going to try to do to all “rioters, looters, and antifa” -- which means anyone who opposes them.

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WHAT CAN WE DO?

1. Support #BlackLivesMatter. The bail funds have actually received a lot of money lately, which is great; if you can give, and if you know of a bail fund close to you that needs money for protesters, go ahead and give, but the next thing we need is money for mutual aid organizations, because in the next 5-21 days, a lot of people are going to get sick.

2. Look to experienced organizers for guidance. Follow African-American anti-racist activists, and if you’re white make sure you stay humble, don’t talk over them, listen to their ideas and directions, and do what they fucking say. If you’re white and you go out to protest, your job is to stay calm and be a human shield. Your whiteness can actually reduce police violence [note: it’s a risk -- you might be beaten or otherwise hurt and you could be arrested too]. If you start violence or vandalism, African-Americans are more likely to suffer for it.

3. There’s a lot to do if you can’t go out. Again, there’s a lot of organizing going on. For example, the Indivisibles are still organizing people to contact their elected representatives, and this is good and important work even though it may feel less direct than hitting the streets.

4. Make common cause with organizations that have beliefs different from yours. 

This takes a bit of discernment. Maybe you’re ready to swear you’ll never call the police again; maybe you want to end incarceration (we do have the largest imprisoned population in the world and the highest per-capita incarceration rate.) Or maybe you’re concerned about police brutality and racism in our justice system but you can’t imagine a world without policing and prisons. If you’re in the latter group, make sure that the policing reforms you support are in alignment with the general goal of reducing budgets for police departments and shrinking our prison system.

We need a big movement. That means you can’t refuse to work with other organizations just because they aren’t in complete lockstep with you.

3. Reblog posts like these with your own ideas / information / good sources of trustworthy information.

When you’re deciding which suggestions to follow and which posts to reblog, make sure the information is coming from someone who knows what they’re talking about. I’m not a veteran of many protests, so I can’t give you good advice about how to stay safe out there. I could probably (in an abundance of confidence) fake up something that sounds plausible based on what I’ve read. That kind of thing is dangerous. Don’t write shit that doesn’t either come from your experience or that you can’t back up with links to folks who really know.

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* "Looters.” Yeah, remember when Congress promised to help with the economic crisis and then decided all we need is a one-time $1200 check and mmmmaybe some extra unemployment insurance? And remember when the House passed some more bills to help, but Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said they weren’t going to be doing any more of that and the important thing for the Senate to do right now was confirm more of Trump’s nominees for federal judicial appointments? You say “looters,” I say, “desperate angry people.”

** We all need to learn how to recognize Boogaloos, Neo-Nazis, and other far-right extremists on sight, because journalists are not always aware of who they’re talking to.

Boogaloos: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/far-right-hawaiian-print-shirts-why-protesters-boogaloo-racist-a9539776.html

Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbols Database: https://www.adl.org/hate-symbols

Headlines

Anxiety and Covid-19 (CDC/Bloomberg) A special project by the Census Bureau has set out to map and measure all the anxieties that Covid-19 has brought in its wake. One finding: Almost a third of people in some states have little or no confidence they can pay August’s rent or mortgage. Some of the longest-lasting effects of the pandemic may stem from its adverse impact on mental health, and from enforced delays in medical treatment for other conditions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a study conducted in May and June, found that more than 10% of adults seriously considered suicide—a figure that rose to more than one-quarter among 18-24 year-olds. It also found a jump in substance abuse, and said mental health outcomes were worse among racial minorities, essential workers, and unpaid caregivers.

Making billions vs. making ends meet: how the pandemic has split the US economy in two (The Guardian) Stock markets are setting new highs driven by soaring prices for the tech companies that enable those lucky enough to work from home. Apple is close to being valued at $2tn. The total wealth of US billionaires has soared $685bn since the middle of March to a combined $3.65tn. Rock-bottom interest rates have triggered a home sales boom for some as those with the money reconsider their priorities in the work-from-home era. With nowhere to go, those Americans who can are saving at record rates. But only one in four Americans can work from home. Meanwhile roughly 30 million people are unemployed in the US, about 20% of the workforce. Almost 30 million Americans recently reported that they have not had enough to eat at some point in the previous seven days, according to the Census Bureau. The vast majority—about 26 million—had lower rates of educational attainment. “It’s white-collar professionals who are able to work from home. In some ways, this is a sign that the economy is just officially split in two,” Glenn Kelman, chief executive of property company Redfin, told NPR last week.

Protests, counterprotests, and violence (Washington Post) Far-right extremists and continued clashes between Black Lives Matter protesters and police this weekend renewed tensions in Portland, Minneapolis and other cities, pushing the country into its 80th day of consecutive demonstrations in some places. A group with ties to far-right organizations that have long targeted Portland gathered downtown Saturday afternoon to wave American flags and push back against Black Lives Matter protests challenging police brutality. The event ended with two gunshots. Protests in other cities also erupted into violence Saturday, as police grappled with small groups hijacking otherwise peaceful events. One clash ended in fistfights after Proud Boys marched in Kalamazoo, Mich. Police intervened as the Proud Boys retreated into a parking garage, about seven minutes after a large brawl broke out between members of the far-right group and their opponents. Officers arrested some counterprotesters who had come out to oppose the right-wing group. In Chicago, a protest also grew violent after people used umbrellas and skateboards to attack police officers, injuring 17. Twenty-four people were arrested. And just before midnight Saturday, a group of roughly 50 protesters, most dressed in black and wearing full-face masks, descended on the 5th District police precinct in South Minneapolis. The group lobbed rocks and fireworks at the building. The station’s front windows were sprayed with anti-police graffiti, and red paint was poured along the steps of the front entrance and the sidewalk.

Virus pandemic reshaping air travel as carriers struggle (AP) In a bid to survive, airlines are desperately trying to convince a wary public that measures like mandatory face masks and hospital-grade air filters make sitting in a plane safer than many other indoor settings during the coronavirus pandemic. It isn’t working. Surveys indicate that instead of growing comfortable with air travel, more people are becoming skeptical about it. In the United States, airline bookings have stalled in the past month after slowly rising—a reaction to a new surge of reported virus infections. Globally, air travel is down more than 85% from a year ago, according to industry figures. The implications for the airline industry are grave. Several leading carriers already have filed for bankruptcy protection, and if the hoped-for recovery is delayed much longer, the list will grow.

Staycations (Morning Consult) Fully 63 percent of U.S. adults said they had plans to take a staycation during the pandemic, with 26 percent having already taken one during the pandemic, compared to 17 percent who took a vacation. The staycationers—those realists who rejected false hope instantaneously, immediately wrote the summer off, and promptly made the best of a truly abysmal situation well beyond their control—were led by the Millennials, a generation forged in the fires of crushing societal disappointment, of whom 35 percent have already taken a staycation.

Death Valley hits 130 degrees, thought to be highest temperature on Earth in over a century (LA Times) Temperatures in Death Valley skyrocketed to a blistering 130 degrees on Sunday—possibly the highest mercury reading on Earth since 1913. If the National Weather Service’s recording is correct, it would also be among the top-three highest temperatures to have ever been measured in Death Valley, as well as the highest temperature ever seen there during the month of August. The reading comes amid an epic heat wave that continues to grip most of the southwestern U.S.

Belarus Protests (NYT) Minutes after President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus vowed to stand firm against protesters he reviled as “rats,” “trash” and “bandits,” antigovernment demonstrators staged their biggest protest yet on Sunday to oppose a fraud-tainted presidential election a week earlier. Tens of thousands of protesters—some estimates put their number at well over 200,000—turned out in the center of Minsk, the capital, dwarfing a rally of Mr. Lukashenko’s supporters earlier in the day. It appeared to be the largest protest in the history of Belarus, a former Soviet republic that Mr. Lukashenko has led since 1994. The protest had a festive air, in stark contrast to the tense moods of far smaller rallies last week that were violently suppressed by security forces, leaving at least two people dead, many injured and more than 6,000 under arrest.

Japan’s economy shrinks at record rate, slammed by pandemic (AP) Japan’s economy shrank at annual rate of 27.8% in April-June, the worst contraction on record, as the coronavirus pandemic slammed consumption and trade, according to government data released Monday. The Cabinet Office reported that Japan’s preliminary seasonally adjusted real gross domestic product, or GDP, the sum of a nation’s goods and services, fell 7.8% quarter on quarter. The annual rate shows what the number would have been if continued for a year. Japanese media reported the latest drop was the worst since World War II. But the Cabinet Office said comparable records began in 1980. The previous worst contraction, a 17.8% drop, was in the first quarter of 2009, during the global financial crisis.

New Zealand delays election because of coronavirus outbreak (Washington Post) Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday postponed the general election, scheduled for Sept. 19, for four weeks as authorities grapple with a new wave of cases that has set back the country’s pandemic recovery.

Normalizing ties with Israel (Foreign Policy) Israel’s historic agreement normalizing diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates seems to have opened the way for other Gulf states to do the same. On Sunday, Israeli Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen said that Israel is exploring similar agreements with several countries in the Middle East and North Africa, suggesting that Bahrain and Oman were at the top of the list. Both countries praised the accord shortly after it was publicized, but have not confirmed whether similar deals with Israel were in the works.

Death toll from attack on Mogadishu hotel rises to 16 (Reuters) At least 16 people were killed in an attack on Sunday by al Shabaab on a seaside hotel in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu, a government spokesman said, as the Islamist group launched a similar assault on a Somali military base. Sunday’s toll includes 11 victims and five assailants, Ismail Mukhtar Omar said in a tweet late on Sunday, adding: “Security forces lost one, 18 people were injured.” Militants stormed the high-end Elite Hotel in Lido beach, detonated a car bomb and then opened fire with assault rifles, the latest attack by al Shabaab, which has been battling the country’s central government since 2008.

Though media reports of the protests have dwindled, organized demonstrations for racial justice are still underway.

By Fabiola Cineas 

on July 16, 2020 8:30 am

In the weeks following the police killing of George Floyd, millions of Americans marched in the streets. Many had never attended a protest before, and some lived in historically conservative towns. At the peak of the protests — around June 6, according to publicly collected data from the Crowd Counting Consortium — people across all 50 states and dozens of cities around the world had participated in demonstrations that called for racial justice and an end to police violence.

But with the protests came a nonstop news cycle that seemed to fixate on burning cars and buildings, and clashes between police officers and protesters. As long as there were riots and looting, television news helicopters descended upon their respective cities, with organizers lamenting online that the media wasn’t interested in stories beyond those of broken windows, pepper spray, and vandalized storefronts.

And now, almost two months after the first protests erupted, national news cameras have fled, which makes it hard for the general public to recognize that protests are still going strong in cities and towns across America.

In Louisville, hundreds of protesters continue in their mission to bring to justice the police officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s death. Protesters have engaged in a number of large-scale public actions, from converging on the steps of the state’s capitol building to disrupting a mayoral press conference and hosting “blackout” marches.

On Tuesday, which marked day 48 of protests in the city, activists traveled to the home of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, where they sat on his lawn and demanded he bring criminal charges against the officers. More than 100 people were reportedly detained at the demonstration for trespassing, according to organizer Tamika D. Mallory, co-founder of the social justice organization Until Freedom. Even Wanda Cooper-Jones, the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, traveled to Louisville to advocate on Taylor’s behalf. (She also spoke to local reporter Senait Gebregiorgis while she was there.)

The momentum is similar in other cities across the country, such as Minneapolis and New York, where multiple demonstrations happen every day. However, mainstream news stories about the protests seem to only emerge now in the event of isolated violence (including multiple instances of suspected or avowed white nationalists running their vehicles into protesters) or protester clashes (like the recent spat between “Blue Lives Matter” protesters and counterprotesters in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn).

Local activists say the waning media attention is expected, but the work must continue. “We are in the biggest social movement this country has ever seen,” said activist Oluchi Omeoga, co-founder of the Black liberation nonprofit Black Visions Collective based in Minnesota. “When we say this is what will be written in the history books, it’s not an exaggeration. The folks calling for change in this moment are the folks who are going to be on the right side of history.”

The early news cycle’s focus on violence and destruction

Early news reports of the protests focused heavily on images of fires, overturned vehicles, and elevated scenes that distorted what was really taking place on the ground, with some pointing out that coverage seemed to exploit Black pain and violence.

On June 1, the front page of the New York Times read, “Twin crises and surging anger convulse U.S.” above a photo of protesters with their hands in the air and another showing police dressed in riot gear in a cloud of smoke. The same day, the Washington Post published an image of Minneapolis protesters crying and hugging one another after a truck ran through the crowd, with its own front-page headline reading, “U.S. at a precipice as demonstrations intensify.” (The bottom two images depict demonstrators at protests in Kansas City, Missouri, and Washington, DC.) And a San Francisco Chronicle headline on May 31 read “Riots, shooting rock Oakland” above an image of a protester standing with a fist raised in front of a dumpster fire.

The early coverage seemed “breathless,” Kanisha Bond, assistant professor of political science at Binghamton University, told Vox. “But that is not an unfamiliar tone when it comes to media coverage, specifically of urban uprisings involving both violent and nonviolent protest activity, and particularly when people who have been historically excluded from the traditional centers of American power are engaged in any sort of unrest.”

This was seen in the media coverage of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police shooting of Michael Brown. A Race Forward analysis found that news reports at the time largely lacked context explaining the “patterns of racially skewed police violence” that sparked the protests, with some not even mentioning the word “race” at all, Vox reported in 2015. Race Forward research director Dominique Apollon, who authored the study, told Vox that part of his advice to journalists was to “not take police accounts at face value.”

As Morgan State University politics and journalism professor Jason Johnson wrote for Vox in May, news coverage of uprisings often fails to show the full scale of protest activity — just because a few trash cans are on fire in one location doesn’t mean the entire city is on fire. Moreover, news reports of the Floyd protests didn’t always cover the cause of much of the violence: the police themselves. In many instances caught on camera, police used inordinate force against protesters who were silently marching or otherwise engaged in a peaceful group demonstration.

“Much of the damage attributed to protesters is often the result of police action or inaction in the face of lawful public behavior,” Johnson wrote. “Sometimes buried at the end of post-protest reports by local authorities is the fact that police munitions often start fires at protests, but this is seldom reported by the press, and there have been surprisingly few protesters arrested for arson relative to the fires that erupted during the unrest.”

Johnson also noted that news reports didn’t do much to highlight the presence of “run-of-the-mill opportunistic criminals” who seized on the moment to raid local businesses. For example, the media didn’t distinguish these actors from the protesters who, in a targeted effort, burned down the Third Police Precinct in Minneapolis, which was “a specific act of revolt.” The focus on damaged property over lost lives illustrated the media’s “misplaced priorities,” Johnson wrote.

Now, nearly two months after the first protests, a quick scan of the front pages of newspapers and digital media outlets would likely have one believe that the protests have altogether stopped. While they have surely shrunk in number and size, the social media accounts of activists and organizers continue to show compelling images of daily demonstrations.

In the past two weeks, there have been demonstrations in Sartell, Minnesota, and Keystone, South Dakota. Protests also carry on in Philadelphia, Houston, and Washington, DC. Meanwhile, in New York, the Instagram account JusticeforGeorgeNYC lists a collection of daily rallies, marches, protests, and vigils for Black people who have lost their lives to police brutality. On Wednesday, July 15, there are nearly a dozen events planned across Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan — from 8 in the morning to just before sunset.

News coverage can both help and hinder ongoing demonstrations

According to activists, the lack of coverage both hurts and helps protest movements as they continue through the summer.

On one hand, the absence of widespread protest coverage creates a false sense that the demonstrations have largely come to an end. “Some people do get their political cues from what makes its way into the general public discourse, which is largely shaped by what’s in the news, so media blackouts or withdrawals can give them the impression that either the ‘newsworthy part’ of the protests has expired or that there are simply no more events to be covered,” Bond told Vox.

The importance of protests as a tool for shifting public opinion is already evident in national polls. Monmouth University found at the end of May that 76 percent of Americans believe that racism is a big problem now, up from 51 percent in 2015. Other polls show that more people support the defunding of police than ever before. A June poll from the research firm PerryUndem found that 72 percent of respondents supported reallocating funds away from police and to other services like health care.

As political scientist Megan Ming Francis told Vox last month, systemic change begins with a shift in public opinion that’s brought about through protest. “The history of protest in this country is that when there’s more people, politicians pay attention,” she said. “If you want legal change, if you want political change, then it means you need to, at the same time or before, shift public opinion. That is crucial.”

On the other hand, some activists believe the constant presence of news cameras could hamper progress. If activists are constantly under the gaze and watch of the state, this could invite more violence on protesters and open up the opportunity for derailment.

“When the mainstream media steps away, we see even more clearly the vital function that independent media — including social media livestreamers — plays in providing a comprehensive and well-rounded accounting of protest and social mobilizations,” Bond told Vox. “The ubiquity of social media might attenuate any negative effects from a lack of media coverage — but how much is likely heavily determined by what sorts of information you allow across your online boundaries and within your social network.”

The most recent protest headlines at mainstream outlets — including the New York Times’s “Drivers Are Hitting Protesters as Memes of Car Attacks Spread” and USA Today’s “‘I would be very careful in the middle of the street’: Drivers have hit protesters 66 times since May 27” — focus on violence or arrests. Then there is CBS’s “87 people charged with felonies after Breonna Taylor protest at attorney general’s house” following Tuesday’s events, framed around protesters trespassing on an elected official’s property. When news outlets cherry-pick moments of violence to cover or criminalize protesters, they are choosing drama and sensationalism over the larger narrative — that the biggest anti-racism movement in a generation is still happening in the US.

“It comes down to what is considered newsworthy, which is often action, large numbers, and apparent mayhem,” Bond told Vox. “Burning buildings, smashing glass, and bleeding people are often visually riveting and can add a sense of vicarious danger and unpredictability, while direct actions like sit-ins, public education sessions, street parties, and/or meal distributions don’t offer people that sense of ‘ooh, what’s going to happen next’ the way that other actions might.”

The fight for justice lives on

Activists recognize how much has changed in public opinion since the first Floyd protests — and that’s why they haven’t stopped organizing. According to Omeoga, protests have taken place every day in Minneapolis since Floyd’s fatal arrest. Omeoga told Vox that part of what’s been missing in the coverage that has existed is expanding what we mean when we say “protest” or “public demonstration” to fully capture how people are mobilizing.

“The occupation of ‘George Floyd Ave,’ the place where he was murdered, is an act of resilience or a protest. We have been occupying that space every day since George Floyd was lynched. Folks are protesting for change in the simplest terms,” Omeoga said. “Folks are protesting for Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Riah Milton, and Dominique Fells. Folks are protesting against police brutality and state-sanctioned violence and for interpersonal violence against Black trans women. Folks are out protesting for Black lives.”

According to Omeoga, the media largely focused coverage on the peak of the protests because “that’s what they think people are interested in,” she said. “We have been conditioned under this capitalist society to only find value in things for very short, transactional periods of time. The media affirms that in the ways they show what is worthy of news and what isn’t.” For Omeoga, left-friendly platforms like Democracy Now and Unicorn Riot are alternative media outlets that can help people stay up to date.

Ashton P. Woods, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Houston, recognizes that while coverage may now only extend to protests that feature celebrities or to protests where politicians are present, he can’t get comfortable and rely on politicians to do the work. “We have a responsibility to protect what we have secured for ourselves and dismantle white supremacy,” Woods told Vox.

That work, he said, doesn’t mean having to show up in the streets. With the number of coronavirus cases surging across the country and its disproportionate impact on Black, Latinx, and Native American communities, Woods acknowledges that people have to mind their health and the health of friends and family and community members. The work can take place in online seminars and gatherings that educate people who are new to the movement. For Woods, in Houston, it also includes showing up to courts and to city hall to pressure Texas lawmakers to sign legislation that tackles systemic racism. And moving forward, he said, protests must continue to create safe spaces for all Black lives, including women and trans, queer, and nonbinary people.

“There’s been an erasure of what we are really protesting for, like the Black LGBTQ community or the Black immigrants — all Black lives matter,” Woods told Vox. “We’ve been doing this anti-racism work since before Trump got into office. We’ve been planning, coordinating, and doing the type of work that doesn’t get on the news for a long time.”

The lack of attention and accountability by lawmakers means protesters have to keep elevating their message, whether in the streets or online, he said.

@nitrosplicer you appear to have blocked me so I can’t actually click on your angry replies, but 

1: that’s the opposite of what a shit test is. a shit test is when you make an unreasonable demand of someone to see if they will give in or show some backbone, and you want them to show backbone and refuse you.

2: I didn’t say that I knew for a fact you were lying, I said your faction lies about this thing all the time but cops are also violent abusive authoritarian assholes so I wouldn’t believe you without proof. If you can provide proof (which I can’t click because your reply won’t show up for me outside my dash feed) that’s great. Believing you without proof is stupid. So I said I wouldn’t believe you without proof, and then you could provide it. That’s not proof I’m a bad person, that’s honestly something where both of us did the thing we were supposed to do.

3: “If people hadn’t protested, we would be showing that we believe Nazis in our town shouldn’t go unchallenged”.

No. Stop that. Stop that right now. That’s not how this works. That’s not how anything works.

Protests are entirely about optics. There are two primary means a protest can be effective, and they rely on being rare or shocking. Protests can be effective because it shows outsiders “Whoa, this issue I hadn’t put much thought into really is serious, look how much it motivates people!”, or because they show outsiders “Wow, these people aren’t doing anything wrong and the police are just losing their fucking shit all over them, the people in power are really afraid of what they have to say!” 

The Hong Kong protests are effective for these reasons. People in Hong Kong don’t protest all the time, so when lots of people start getting out and protesting, you know that the thing they are responding to is a rare, serious situation. And the police are brutally, violently cracking down on them, which lends credence to the protestors’ argument that this is about a brutal police state extending power over them. People look at the HK protests and take notice. Protests are also given credence by being underdog stories of standing up to overwhelming power, and Hong Kong is definitely that kind of event.

The left has burned up all of those things with their own protests. They protest all the time, constantly, about everything (What the fuck was the Women’s March actually about, as in actually?), and any protest about any one thing BECOMES about everything that professional-protestor lefties dislike (as with Occupy Wall Street, the point when everyone should have acknowledged American protests are dead). So when you come out to a protest, you convey no new information about “Whoa, this is so serious, people are coming out to protest”, because you do this all the time. And your protests so frequently turn violent, and you so frequently lie about that happening, and people do still remember how much you praise and exalt Antifa who absolutely love violence, so when you get brutalized by the police, people don’t really care because they think you had it coming. Is that fair? No, no it isn’t, but saying “people shouldn’t think that way” doesn’t change the fact that they do, and that changing that perception requires you to do things you aren’t doing.

But perhaps most importantly, you are not the underdogs. You have had unquestioned control of American cultural discourse for fifty years, and when there is the slightest threat to it, you flipped your shit and started calling everyone Nazis. You outnumbered the parade three to one. There were barricades to keep YOU from charging them, not the other way around. And they weren’t waving swastika flags or chanting about White Pride Worldwide, they were saying “Hey, we’re just being straight, like most people are, and look how much the Left is losing its shit over that!” You’re the overdogs. You’re in charge. You decide what is acceptable to say and think. You have allowed them to easily paint a picture where they are the heroic underdogs standing up to your tyranny.

Their strategy is to say things that are not and should not be offensive (it’s okay to be white, straight people can be proud of who they are), wait for the left to predictably flip its shit, and then say “Wow, the people in charge of our culture really don’t think that it’s okay to be white / straight people can be proud of who they are! Maybe you should look into joining some kind of movement where white/straight people all look out for each other and oppose the interests of minorities, because those people are opposed to us!” 

Your side says “We have to overreact, because this innocuous sounding thing is actually a Nazi code phrase to recruit you!” One, taht relies on people trusting your judgment about who evil Nazis are, and they do not trust you any more. Two, again, their recruiting code phrases have no power unless you give them power. If someone on 4chan decided “Hey, the OK hand sign should be a white power symbol!” and that was the end of it, the OK hand sign would not be a white power symbol. They don’t have the power or numbers to do that. They would have no ability to signal each other by flashing the OK sign, because everyone would still be using the OK sign anyway, so they wouldn’t know “okay this guy is on my team so I can talk about white genocide to him.” But you flipped out and screamed at anyone using the OK hand sign, and now anyone using that hand sign innocuously gets yelled at by you and comes away correctly thinking you are assholes, and anyone who keeps using it now effectively signals “I don’t care what the screaming leftist control freaks say is racist.” You did their plan for them. You made it a white power signal when nobody else had the power to do that.

Their strategy is to lay a garden rake on the floor and you step on it like fucking Sideshow Bob every single time. 

They recruit by pointing to your compulsive overreactions and saying “You should join us, because you need to prrotect yourselves from these assholes!” You keep compulsively overreacting and making it worse. There is no interpretation of anything that justifies “I have to do what the Nazis want me to do and I have to play into the Nazis’ plan, because otherwise, I am tacitly supporting Nazis!” They know you are going to do that. They count on you doing that, and they make plans so you doing that helps them. Stop helping them.

What would have happened if you didn’t show up to counterprotest? If you hadn’t tried to suppress the march in the first place, it probably wouldn’t have even happened, because nobody would care about it. If it did, it would need no assistance from the alt-right, and the alt-right wouldn’t care because it wouldn’t be Sticking It To The Libs. It would be a lame event nobody cared about that fizzled out like the XFL. But if everything was the same up until the day of the march, and nobody showed up to protest? It would be a lame event nobody cared about. It would not be in the news. It would not be shocking. It would not help the alt-right push its narrative. There would be nothing memorable about it. You would show you didn’t care. They are beneath your notice, because they don’t matter, and nobody should give a shit about what they say. Nobody would think “Oh, wow, the left thinks Nazis are okay!” because the entire strategy of the Nazis here is to not let on to normies that they are secretly Nazis, and because normies already know you are Maximally Upset about everything all the time. A straight pride parade is just called “traffic”, so it would have no more power to intimidate or terrorize anyone than fucking traffic does. 

I need you to understand this. Okay? I need you to understand. Your side has been in control so long, that you are facing political opponents who know how you will behave. They have predicted how you will behave and their strategy is to use your behavior against you. They KNOW that you will say  “If people hadn’t protested, we would be showing that we believe Nazis in our town shouldn’t go unchallenged”, they are COUNTING on you saying that, because they have created a situation where that behavior harms you and helps them. 

You are doing what they want. You are not helping anyone but them. If you continue to do the things they have predicted you will do and that they rely on you doing, then you will keep helping them and harming yourselves. No amount of “I can’t show that Nazis shouldn’t go unchallenged!” will change the fact that your compulsion to behave this way and demonstrate your moral purity only harms your interests. 

Protests are entirely about optics. They do not have mythic power beyond their ability to convince other people through their optics. The only people leftist protestors ever try to convince are the people who already agree with them.

Leftist (social) media and its effectiveness

Call to action: if you know of any attempts to do any of the things in this post (specific or achieving the same aims) and think it appropriate, please reply to this post and describe/link to them! More ideas are also welcome, as is active investigation of what has worked well or poorly in the past.

This is going to be a personal post of little interest or relevance to anyone else, but I wanted to get some thoughts down. I'm coming from a background of almost no organising work outside of anti-racist protests and Food not Bombs work, so this post contains almost no investigation and no trial in the crucible of actual activity. With that health warning in place, in summary: there are things that leftist content consumers (including myself - this is primarily a personal post), leftist discoursers, content creators and online leftism in general can do differently, to encourage more active participation and growth beyond Communism 101 type consciousness.

It feels like there has been an explosion of leftist ~content~ over the past few years: Breadtube (despite its obvious and infuriating flaws), podcasts (RevLeft Radio is my current favourite), and the gradual, partial normalisation of radical leftist talking points on some social media platforms. Whether this is actually true, or whether it merely reflects my own developing interest, I don't honestly know. (I think the question demands investigation, actually - perhaps even an online survey, measuring perception of growth alongside how many years the respondee has engaged with online leftism, could help begin answer this question.) This is a good thing, of course. But it feels important to examine the limitations of this form of political education and how they might be overcome.

Clearly, at the level of propaganda, any useful contribution to the ongoing battle for consciousness must be welcomed. But there is a danger that such work can only ever lead to a helpless, shallow understanding of our condition and our enemies, with neither theoretical depth nor a convincing path (or action schema) towards collective liberation. The danger is that this actually contributes to what Mark Fisher called Capitalist Realism: essentially, defeatism, impotent undirected rage and an inability to theorize a way forward. Even work aimed at more advanced content consumers, such as RevLeft, while laying out one possible way forward, can never impart the sort of deep understanding and agency necessary to turn passive listeners into effective wielders of the theory that is being discussed: such dexterity can only come from active engagement. Such active engagement, whether practical or theoretical, is essential not only in combating passivity, but in preventing book worship (Mao's term) and a failure to perform concrete analysis of concrete conditions.

The question, then, is how to bridge the chasm in the road from primitive, immediate, reactive class consciousness, to passive consumer, to active participant. This is of course dependent on the stage of development of the movement(s).

Engagement with the masses has been well-covered from Maoism's Mass Line to some genuinely insightful Anarchist works on the interdependent development of means and ends in the progression of revolutionary consciousness (well-summarized in some of YouTube's Anarchopac's videos and during her RevLeft appearance). Careful work is needed, however, to strengthen the early stages of the pipeline and overcome the disparateness and inherent isolation of online communication.

With regards to the more theoretically inclined, what is absolutely obvious is that passive consumption of theory is useless. It breeds complacency, anti-experimental/"scientific" dogmatism (Engels: Socialism Utopian and Scientific, expanded into useful philosophy and praxis by Mao) and theoretical helplessness. The medium of online leftism greatly expands our reach, but that medium demands passive engagement - it does not even facilitate active reading, just hours of listening, often without even a pause of a few seconds for thought. Demanding that listeners do background reading and join IRL orgs where possible is essential. This post is partly a call to action for less engaged leftists (including myself) to actively read and participate more. To help transform geographically isolated listeners into users of theory (and perhaps cadres for proactive online activism), however, creating communities focussed on active theoretical engagement that goes beyond sectarian mud slinging seems essential.

The Guillotine podcast, before its downfall, had begun to build such engagement, and podcasts could provide one focus for more active, constructive engagement. Some other ideas:

* An actually-existing example: the Rebel Steps podcast, which describes various ways of getting involved with the cause in real life.

* Discord-based quasi-"reading groups", with one room per book, so that there is less pressure to keep up and so that ideas and interpretations may spread beyond a single group of individuals. Room ground rules/ethos could be inspired by those of Mao's Combat Liberalism and similar works. Technologically, both Discord (the mainstream) and open-source alternatives (resilient) should be used, preferably wired together or at least linked to each other channel by channel - one technology would predominate but the other would sit in reserve, and open source capabilities and know-how would be spread.

* Promotion of the use of WiFi mesh networks where there is a sufficient density of people, and the hosting of community message boards on them.

* An app(s) containing study questions and literature. "Solutions" in the form of secondary literature, and answers to "right/wrong" type questions.

* a 4chan style message board. Could be the basis of campaigns, discussion etc.. We can never out-lie the alt right or achieve the same effectiveness in self delusion, so do not try to blindly copy /pol/ - but we have to counter the takeover of neutral subreddits by right wing trolls, for example. Must not be hosted in fascist-infested boards such as 8chan.

* ways of publicising events to which we want to attract new potential activists, at the risk of fash knowing about them. E.g. counterprotests in my area, info evenings, etc.

* self help resources, practices, tools.

* collective help groups (for addictions, loneliness etc.) with an explicitly leftist character.

* platforms or use of existing tools for collaborative content creation.

We must then deliberately connect these with mainstream spaces, in a two-way fashion: build selective channels from the mainstream to these more advanced spaces, and use the spaces to muster engagement with the mainstream.

Recreation is also important, and our down-time must be channelled effectively. Just as IRL, community gardens can provide not only relaxation, healing and a social space, but community engagement and visible power, so our online spaces and online recreation must be neither dissolved into the mainstream nor isolated from it.

A final random thought: if you're a Breadtuber and you want to make a video about a mainstream subject, think about what sort of audience you want and title your video accordingly. If you want Youtube to flag it as extremist content and only show it to committed leftists, then by all means start the title with "Capitalism and". (And maybe there's a legitimate reason why you'd only want leftists to see it.) But often I see deeply moving and highly effective videos, that often contain a fantastic, non-explicit anticapitalist message, pushed from the mainstream into the subcultural sphere by lousy titles.

Known resources:

* MutualSupport subreddit

* Rebel Steps podcast

* RevLeft discord channel (patrons only)

* BadEmpandana discord channel (patrons only)

I warned of right-wing violence in 2009. Republicans objected. I was right.

White nationalists have only gotten more dangerous since then.

Eight years ago, I warned of a singular threat — the resurgence of right-wing extremist activity and associated violence in the United States as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the financial crisis and the stock market crash. My intelligence report, meant only for law enforcement, was leaked by conservative media.

A political backlash ensued because of an objection to the label “right-wing extremism.” The report also rightly pointed out that returning military veterans may be targeted for recruitment by extremists. Republican lawmakers demanded then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano rescind my report. The American Legion formally requested an apology to veterans. Some in Congress called for me to be fired. Amid the turmoil, my warning went unheeded by Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security caved to the political pressure: Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.

Since 2008, though, the body count from numerous acts of violent right-wing terrorism continued to rise steadily with very little media interest, political discussion or concern from our national leaders. As this threat grew, government resources were scaled back, law enforcement counterterrorism training was defunded and policies to counter violent extremism narrowed to focus solely on Muslim extremism. Heated political campaigning by Donald Trump in 2016 pandered to these extremists. Now, right-wing terrorism has become the national security threat which many government leaders have yet to acknowledge.

[The Trump administration is showing white nationalists it won’t fight them at all]

The mere existence of so many heavily armed citizens filled with hate and anger toward various elements of American society is troubling enough in its own right. They number in the hundreds of thousands. More troubling is the violent convergence now underway within right-wing extremist movements — sanitized with the label “alt-right.” Largely under the media radar, disaffected extremist groups with long histories of squabbling have been independently pooling resources, some even infiltrating our government through the outreach efforts of right-wing extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriff’s and Peace Officers Association. Over the past year, we’ve witnessed political violence erupt between right-wing extremist protesters and counterprotesters at pro-Trump rallies in Minnesota, Washington, California and now Virginia. This rebranded alt-right extremist movement has the ultimate goal to disruptcivil society, undermine government institutions and pick which laws — if any — they will abide by, and what supposed “justice” they will administer on their own authority.

But the story, in a very real sense, didn’t begin in 2017. As with the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges during the 1990s, the 2014 Bundy standoff in Nevada and the 2016 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge siege in Oregon have served not only as recruitment opportunities for anti-government and hate groups, but they also serve as a radicalization facilitator. Why? Because extremists in the 2014 and 2016 standoffs were allowed to take up arms against the federal government and threaten law enforcement officers without suffering any legal consequences.

[Not punishing the Bundys for the Nevada standoff led to the occupation in Oregon]

More recently, the renewed debates over Confederate monuments, same-sex marriage and Black Lives Matter has reinvigorated alt-right extremists to mobilize toward a more radical fringe element capable of violent action at any moment. Of further concern, a new generation of “charismatic leaders” within the white supremacist movement has emerged after Trump’s election, creating an opportunity for disparate groups to unite under one banner.

Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, militia extremists, and other radical right-wing zealots march side-by-side at pro-Trump rallies across the country. Trump’s endorsement of the border wall, the travel ban, mass deportations of illegal immigrants — these ideas were touted on white supremacist message boards merely 10 years ago. Now they’re being put forth as official U.S. policy. Such controversial plans have placated white supremacists and anti-government extremists and will draw still more sympathetic individuals toward these extremist causes along with the sort of violent acts that too often follow, like Charlottesville.

Rhetoric from the president has further emboldened the alt-right. After the violence in Charlottesville, former KKK leader David Duke welcomed President Trump’s remarks: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa.” Similarly, other white nationalists praised the president for not attacking them.

[When white supremacists strike, police don’t always strike back]

America finds itself overwhelmed with domestic terrorist attacks, increased terrorist plotting and the emergence of new polarizing political issues. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has not only failed to implement an effective strategy to combat right-wing terrorism; it is afraid to even raise the subject in public for fear of political backlash or contradicting its narrow-minded terrorism narrative (e.g., terrorism only comes from Muslims).

Extremists no longer hide anymore. They number in the hundreds of thousands and are extremely well-armed. The political apparatus and the news media appears confused in their reporting of the scope of the domestic terrorist threat — some ignoring it completely. When 9/11 happened, the government made an effort to connect the dots beforehand, but failed because of a lack of communication among agencies. In this case, the government isn’t even trying — and worse, it appears to be enabling the threat to flourish.

The Islamist militants who brought down the World Trade Center’s twin towers 16 years ago (or the ones who rammed their vehicles into pedestrians in London, Paris and Barcelona recently) had no domestic constituency. Their acts weren’t enshrined instantly on social media or obliquely heralded by the president, duly elected representatives or rationalized by media ideologues dead set on preventing a political backlash. The terrorists I have dedicated my life to stopping have had all that going in their favor. This is more than a formula for disaster. It virtually invites the disaster upon us.

Read more:

This is how you become a white supremacist

Attacks like Portland’s will keep happening unless we all fight white supremacy

White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.

By Daryl Johnson : Daryl Johnson is the former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He now owns DT Analytics, a private consulting company for state and local law enforcement. August 21, 2017

So Toronto, there is going to be a rally for the WCAI (Worldwide Coalition Against Islam), an islamophobic and generally white supremacist group. That rally is scheduled for August 11th, 2018.

There is a counter protest planned.

Info:

4Coordination info for day-of is at the bottom! 8pm Tuesday: 107 Going, 412 Interested 9pm Wednesday: 120 Going, 483 Interested Event endorsements: Toronto IWW General Defence Committee Local 28 Toronto Against Fascism Grand River IWW General Defense Committee Ottawa IWW General Defence Committee Local 6 Montréal Antifasciste / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / Mid-August marks the anniversary of what we've come to call Charlottesville, a horrifying weekend of violence at the hands of the far-right. August 11th bore a warning we'd never forget -- hundreds of white supremacists with lit torches marched through the University of Virginia campus, chanting anti-semitic and racist slogans while moving to encircle a small group of counterprotesters. The bigots didn't just use their "free speech", but also pepper spray to hurt their captive audience of anti-racists. It wasn’t over. The next day, these same white supremacists unleashed horrors many had not seen in their lifetime. Charges aside, the video evidence is unrelenting; white men attacking Deandre Harris with a lead pipe, police supervising gratuitous violence against counterprotesters, the brutal domestic terrorism that killed Heather Heyer. But all wasn’t lost. August 12th saw the masses coming out to defend against what they had witnessed. Seemingly non-political community members turned anti-fascist overnight -- no more, never again, not on our streets. Enough is enough. These overt white supremacists unleashed a kind of solidarity against fascism that unshackled communities across the globe. / / / / / One year later and it has only intensified. Mass violence is being committed more often than ever, if not to attack the marginalized then as the product of long-term austerity imposed on the working class. This ongoing conflict between the far-right and everyone else is taking lives from our communities, even when they’re not openly rallying -- Jordan Peterson’s lackeys spreading transphobia like gospel, Doug Ford’s attacks on healthcare disguising his misogyny and ableism, Justin Trudeau’s deference and collaboration in ignoring the needs of Indigenous communities reeling from repression on all sides. And these victims -- many like us -- are exploited by right-wing media as fodder for anti-human ideologies like Islamophobia. Following the wrong religion, having the wrong skin, being born in the wrong country can all paint a target on your back for The Toronto Sun’s next hit. And in the case of the Danforth shooter, a history of mental illness is disregarded to fuel their pre-existing narrative of outsiders coming to get them. / / / / / The anti-Islam hate group WCAI has called for a regional gathering of racists and white supremacists to come together against our city to espouse their hatred of Islam. Their members are flying in from their base in Calgary and far-right reinforcements are to join them in Toronto. When given the chance, these bigots will commit acts of violence against both marginalized people and anyone who stands in their way -- we cannot let them have that chance! If Charlottesville taught us anything, it’s that the power of working-class solidarity through struggle serves as an unending beacon of justice. It’s that if we all come together, we can empower entire generations of resistance to organize and mobilize against white supremacy. So we ask you, friends and comrades, to come out and fight with us on August 11th 2018 to show WCAI that their racism and Islamophobia will not be tolerated! / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / Our counter-demonstration officially begins at 1pm in Nathan Phillips Square. Please come in pairs for safety! Street medics, legal liaisons and support crew (armed with food, water and love) will be on site and marked for visibility. While at the event, it is important that we stay close together. The safest place at the rally is in the middle of a tight crowd of antifascists. More people coming out = everyone is safer. Wandering off or hanging out loose around the outside is not advised to do alone. We advise all participants to cover anything personally identifying while on site, and to take care about when and where you are removing your masks. Please consider that the far-right loves to take photos and videos of counterprotesters, even when we are not near them. If you participate or even just get close to their protest, you run the risk of having your photo taken.

Join the facebook event page here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/651818438529429/

Opinion | Free Speech Will Not Save Us - The New York Times

By

Ross Douthat,

May 26, 2018

Image

San Francisco 49ers, from left, Eli Harold, Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid, taking a knee during the national anthem before an N.F.L. game in 2016.CreditKirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

Across the culture wars of the Trump era, from the controversies over diversity and dissent in academia and Silicon Valley to the president’s personal war against protesting pro football players, there is a principled argument that the best cure for polarization everywhere is a stronger respect for freedom of speech.

This argument asks conservatives to recognize that their defense of intellectual diversity on campus is hollow unless they also defend the rights of black athletes to publicly protest. It asks left-wingers to recognize that shouting down right-wing speakers or getting Google engineers fired for “wrongthink” involves the same tactics that they deplore when they’re used against progressives. It asks everyone to commit not just to the letter of the First Amendment but to a broader culture of free speech.

I admire the principle of this position, and to some extent I share it: There is no doubt that tolerance and magnanimity are virtues that our society’s warring factions need to cultivate. But it’s also important to recognize that these virtues depend on deeper forms of wisdom and consensus, and they can’t always sustain themselves in cultures and institutions that are simply going bad. Like everything associated with “classical liberalism” — to borrow a label claimed by some of the shouted-down academic dissidents — the idea of free speech is part of a superstructure that can easily be pulled apart from below by contending factions, or crumble when its cultural foundation disappears.

Consider the N.F.L. protests first. Yes, it would be good if there were a stronger commitment to free speech from team owners, and if they weren’t so willing to collude against their players’ activism.

But the problems run much deeper. The owners aren’t interested in standing up for their employees’ right to protest because their bottom line is threatened by Americans exercising their rights and turning off their televisions or ditching season tickets.

The reasons for that counterprotest include an admirable patriotism and an understandable weariness with the politicization of sports and entertainment. But they also include a typical conservative cluelessness about black grievances, a performative and commercialized Americanism that parodies healthy civic life, and the toxic identity politics that Donald Trump is constantly encouraging. And then, of course, the N.F.L. is particularly vulnerable to Trump’s demagogy because its business model depends on gladiatorial combat whose medical risks it has been desperate to hush up.

So the N.F.L. owners have a multilayered problem, cultural and financial and political and medical, to which a simple why-don’t-they-respect-free-speech solution seems woefully insufficient. Everything about the intersection of sports and race relations and the Trump presidency is simply toxic, and expecting free speech to flourish where those rivers meet is like suggesting that a Superfund site cleanup begin by planting daffodils in the most polluted stretch.

There’s a similar problem with debates about free speech on liberal college campuses. Yes, it’s obviously bad when speakers are denied a platform, threatened and shouted down. But if every protester suddenly fell silent, the atmosphere in elite academia would still be kind of awful — and not only from a conservative perspective.

Meritocracy, materialism and smartphones would still induce mental breakdowns among bright young climbers. The humanities would still be in existential crisis and possibly terminal decline. A “hedge fund with a library attached” model of administration would still prevail. An incoherent mix of ambitious scientism and post-Protestant moralism and simple greed would still be the ruling spirit.

Much of recent left-wing campus activism has to be understood in this depressing context — as a response to a pre-existing crisis, an attempt to infuse morality and purpose into institutions that employ many brilliant minds but mostly promote incurious ambition and secular conformity.

Which suggests that the dissident, “dark web” intellectuals who have gained a following by warring with those activists ultimately need (as some of them seem to intuit) a competing moral and metaphysical vision of their own, not just the procedural freedom to say some stuff that is politically incorrect.

A cycle of conservative speakers triggering left-wing activists may vindicate the First Amendment, but it won’t help the university escape its current incoherence and despondency. A classical liberalism that only wants to defend its own right to argue — because that’s what John Stuart Mill would want or something — will end up talking only to itself. If you want a healthy culture of debate, it’s not enough to complain that Marxists and postmodernists are out to silence you; you need your own idea of what education and human life itself are for.

Yes, this makes the problem sound insanely big; the advantage of free speech as common ground is that you don’t have to solve the “what’s wrong with academia” problem or the equally daunting “what’s wrong with big-time sports and race relations.”

But sometimes the problems are bad enough that the procedural approach isn’t a solution. And with due respect to the First Amendment, I think this is one of those times.

(via Opinion | Free Speech Will Not Save Us - The New York Times)

Welcome to the Capitol Hill Green Zone

There was a fire near the Capitol on Monday. The smoke came from inside Washington’s “Green Zone,” or the especially secure area patrolled by the National Guard, put in place to ensure that Wednesday’s inauguration does not face the same violence as Congress saw with vote certification on January 6.

With the fire in the Green Zone came a brief panic. Did the dark clouds herald a second assault on the Capitol in as many weeks? To the relief of breathless news anchors, in a panic about fears of bombs and gunmen, the fire had a far more mundane explanation. A homeless woman, trying to keep warm in winter, was using a portable heater. Its fires spread, consuming her possessions and burning her, but she declined a trip to the hospital.

That small news, of a national failing so durable and familiar it feels like background, comes 12 paragraphs deep into this WTOP story. Before that, we are treated to the theater and security of spectacle, of the great lengths to which the national security state, having largely failed on January 6, promises to make sure that the ceremony of democracy continues smoothly on January 20th. 

What makes a fire at an encampment different on January 18, 2021 than it would have been on, say, January 18, 2020 is that a large chunk of the District is now surrounded and fortified in a kind of Green Zone. With the influx of 20,000 National Guards to the Capitol, the city is now more than ready to repel the last assault, if only its forces could be deployed back in time to do so. 

“Green Zone” is Pentagon jargon made real. It’s a euphemism for safety and security within a tightly patrolled perimeter, a term whose very use masks the violence that calls it into being. There are no Green Zones in peacetime.

“Green Zone” entered the popular vocabulary of Americans following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Thanks largely to the destabilizing nature of invasion, a galaxy-brained overestimation of how smooth things would be, and especially an ill-conceived political purge in a formerly one-party state that barred its entire government and military workforce from holding jobs, the US summoned an insurgency into being.

To govern in insurgency, the U.S. carved a little fortified retreat into the center of the nation it had sent into chaos. Surrounded by tall concrete walls, Iraq’s Green Zone was full of amenities for its highly transitional residents, almost all of them from the United States or allied nations. These residents worked in the offices of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the government imposed upon post-Saddam Iraq. The relative calm enjoyed inside the Iraq Green Zone was only possible because of the violence done by the U.S. outside of it.

And even then, that calm came up short. While there are only 1/8th as many American troops in Iraq as DC right now, rocket attacks persist, 17 years after the Green Zone’s creation. The U.S. Embassy, still inside the Green Zone in Baghdad, was hit with rockets on December 20, 2020.

U.S. Embassy building, Green Zone, Baghdad, damaged during the Dec 20, 2020 rocket attack. (Jack Holt / CENTCOM)

While the U.S. is awash in small arms, rocket attacks remain an extremely distant possibility. And, before I continue with this, I should say explicitly that the Green Zone imposed in Iraq meant not just Americans with guns and lethal authority, but it also meant checkpoints Iraqis had to navigate without the occupiers speaking their language. At a minimum, internal security forces almost always have the benefit of language and deescalation, should they choose to pursue it.

What we gain from thinking about 2021 Inauguration DC as a Green Zone is a sense of solidarity across occupations, even as the degrees of violence and imposition through force vary. President Trump, more explicitly than virtually every one of his predecessors, saw little distinction between enemies foreign or domestic, and sought to do what violence he could to his enemies where he found them.

“Trump’s domestic politics are the same as his foreign policy, turned inward: the failure of the state was that it was insufficiently violent against its enemies,” I wrote in Hell World the week of the Capitol assault. “Make America Great Again was a call for a new baptism in blood, and specifically the blood of people in the United States who did not subscribe to the same specific strain of nationalism that Trump ingested on Fox News and then found throughout the entire voting base of the Republican Party.”

I think that this war nationalism, pointed inwards as well as out, is essential to understanding the present. That war nationalism persists, even as the wars that animated it barely capture public imagination.

As I was drafting this, I received a press release from the symbolic heart of the forever war.

"Explosions reported earlier today about 40 miles outside of Baghdad, Iraq, in the town of Jurf Sakhar were not the result of U.S. military action," said captain Bill Urban, the spokesperson for U.S. Central Command. (Central Command is the part of the Pentagon that oversees all wars in the Middle East, its slice of the globe.)

Like the fire at the encampment, the existence of tragedy in the presence of the military suggests an immediate causal explanation to all observers, regardless of what actually happened. In the absence of other sources, those in the profession of violence craft their own narratives, and share them where they can.

The indefinite continuation of the Forever War creates a perverse praetorianism, one that sees the wars as not yet won because of constraints on violence. This praetorianism comes home and joins police forces, whose officers then underestimate publicly posted threats to assassinate members of Congress, while simultaneously sharing memes about how weird-tasting milkshakes are the work of dedicated antifascists.

National Guard troops guard a street leading to the White House two days before president elect is to be inaugurated. Washington D.C. is on lockdown after rioters stormed the United States Capitol building because Donald J. Trump falsely insists he won the election despite evidence to the contrary. Image: Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Relying on police to solve the problem of violence like January 6 places a tremendous amount of faith in police, hardly apolitical actors, taking the threat seriously. Giving police new powers to pursue domestic terrorism overlooks the vastly expanded set of police powers since 9/11, and it misses how police are already leaning on surveillance platforms, like war-surplus drones and helicopters, to record and track events like Black Lives Matter protests.

With tools like this on call, how did the security of DC fail so utterly that the Capitol was breached?

“D.C. officials mismanaged two far-right street mobilizations by allowing Proud Boys and other street militants to assault local counterprotesters and bystanders in November and December, disproportionately focusing police resources on separating 'mutual combatants,' while discouraging residents from counterprotesting,” writes Daniel Trombly in Foreign Policy.

“Fears that street clashes might provoke Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act or federalize the MPD further encouraged an attitude of waiting out far-right street politics,” Trombly continues. “Neither D.C. officials nor USCP expected or prepared for the Capitol to be stormed, and encouragement and assistance within the Hill may have exacerbated this problem. The solution for the inauguration, an influx of tens of thousands of National Guard and federal law enforcement personnel and stifling security measures, are unsustainable, and the creation of a new domestic War on Terror is dangerous.”

The United States has spent the last 19+ years living inside the paranoid logic of a forever war, convinced enemies are everywhere, building Green Zones where it can, and doing violence to secure them.

What matters most for the people of Washington in the aftermath of the inauguration is that the fortress comes down. 

More should happen, too. The people of DC deserve statehood, like that of all people residing in U.S. territories, and while it's unlikely that an expansion of democracy within the country will dissuade violence from the kind of people who take private jets to try and overthrow an election, a U.S. that is more democratic will effectively bar from office the kinds of leaders who insist on winning by restricting the franchise.

Dismantling the Capitol Hill Green Zone is a first step to dismantling the antidemocratic strains within the United States that it was a reaction against. But it cannot be fully dismantled without a move away from the Forever War.

The inauguration will take place in a Washington fortified against violence, where the fortunate huddle indoors against disease and those let down by society lose all their possessions to fire while struggling to keep warm outdoors, their personal tragedy only news when it is mistaken for violence. 

Inside that hollowed fortress Washington, Joe Biden will become the third president to inherit the Forever War. May he be the last to do so.

This essay originally appeared as a newsletter at Wars of Future Past, a newsletter by defense technology journalist Kelsey D. Atherton.

Welcome to the Capitol Hill Green Zone syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/