Link Bundle #3

Clearing out yet more old tabs on the browser.

Cop catches his supervisor on video demanding to know why he hasn't arrested enough black people. 

Different cops beat the hell out of a black man, then claim self-defense, not knowing surveillance cameras would prove their lie.

North Carolina Republicans were working to systematically make it difficult if not impossible for Democratic-leaning people to vote.

North Carolina isn't alone in working to disenfranchise voters. Republicans are using wild claims of illegal voters to justify voter purges- despite the fact that the people making the claims are known liars and con men.

A concise description of what the alt-right is. Short: cowardly fascists. 

Another reminder: the alt-right is not about free speech. It's not about tolerance. It's not about anything else except racism, bigotry, and evil. To say "alt-right" is the same thing as to say "KKK", "White Citizens Committee," and "Nazi." It's all the same thing, just wearing a fancy suit and waving a Kekistan flag.

And Trump, let it be always remembered, is their man. He's proven it by his words, his deeds, and the company he keeps. (Note: Ben Rodriguez, a former creative collaborator of mine, has become an ardent follower of Castalia House publisher and Rabid Puppies fascist troll Vox Day, the man quoted in the first linked article for saying, "There is no more Republican vs. Democrat. It is now whites vs. non-whites and white quislings.")

Speaking of Kekistan: How alt-right trolls took an obscure, poorly drawn cartoon and made it the face of hate, racism, and sadism on the Internet.

A common tactic of abusers is to tell their victim, "What's the matter with you? I'm just playing with you!" It's a common lie, and the alt-right uses the "I'm joking" defense for the exact same reasons. The idea is to get the victims to let them continue, to let them grow stronger, to get a tighter grip on them, until escape becomes impossible.

 Written a year ago, before Trump's election, this article is a lot more sympathetic than most would be today. What I take from it: the well-off despise those with less than they have, and the poor whites generally despise non-whites who appear to get government help they themselves are too proud to accept. Oh, and both sides are fervent believers in conspiracies.

Short version: when wealth concentrates, it ceases to circulate, choking the economy. The more concentrated the wealth, the more it tends to concentrate even more, squeezing everyone else.

Short version: self-control is a total myth. Any system that relies on it to function WILL fail.

I must remember to seek out and buy some Penzey's spices.

A thorough coverage of the history of Presidential disability in office, and how government coped- or failed to cope.

A reminder that the world has seen rich businessmen elected to executive office before. The trend is, the richer the businessman, the MORE corrupt his administration.

We are in a new cold war with Vladmir Putin's Russia, even if few in Washington want to admit it. Putin is deliberately spreading misinformation to influence elections around the world. His end goal: to discredit democracy, weaken Russia's enemies, and bring about a world order of totalitarian, white-supremacist regimes. And Putin's support of Trump's campaign, about which more facts come out every day, was part and parcel of that.

And I think I'll stop there for now.

It's always important to remember that the enemy is also us.

DISCLAIMER: I DON'T AGREE WITH A SINGLE WORD IN THIS LINK. NOT ONE FUCKING WORD.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2017/01/27/reclaiming-the-culture/?fb_action_ids=10208795432271356&fb_action_types=news.publishes

I share it with you for the following reasons:

(1) The person who posted the link on Facebook where I could see it is is a supporter of GamerGate, Rabid Puppies, Castalia Press, and the well-known white supremacist Vox Day. The author of the article at the link was the organizer of the last Sad Puppies slate and is a close ally of the previous Sad Puppies leaders Larry Correia and Brad Torgerson and a frequent correspondent with Vox Day.

(2) I call your particular attention to this excerpt:

"Look, this is the problem we’re up against. Back in the nineties, I found Rush Limbaugh’s habit of referring to America under Clinton as occupied America, annoying and thought of it as a schtick. (Even though I hated what Clinton did on most fronts, starting with Motor Voter.)

"But in the last ten years, I’ve come to realize he was right. America was and largely still is an occupied country. Foreign agents (natural born, but recruited early by Soviet Agit Prop) control our media, our education, our entertainment. And most of what the occupiers have done is try to destroy that which is uniquely American: our individualism, and our system of government. They also try to inoculate against people finding about our system on their own and thinking it’s brilliant, by tainting the character of the founding fathers and the idea of America as a nation AT LEAST as good as any other, if not better."

Note: Sarah Hoyt thinks that no true American could ever believe that things like Social Security, a universal health care system, etc. were good things without being brainwashed by some foreign power.

But more important: this belief is not new to her. It's not even new to the past century. Yes, you could replace "Soviet Agit Prop" with "the International Jew", but it's even older than that.

Before the Civil War, Southerners, slave owners or not, almost unanimously insisted that slavery was not only the ideal state for blacks, but that blacks loved being enslaved... unless "Yankee agitators" came and corrupted them into wanting to run away or rebel.

Meanwhile, Northerners attacked Catholics and abolitionists on similar grounds- "Papist conspiracy," "radical foreign revolutionaries," etc. The American Party, better known to history as the Know-Nothings for their unwillingness to openly admit their true beliefs in public, elected large delegations to Congress, at one point holding the balance of power between Democrats and the emerging Republicans- on the strength of fear of "non-Americans".

At the height of the Gilded Age, after America had experienced twenty years of an economy where working people got poorer and the rich got extremely rich, the Populist movement arose. As part of their movement, poor whites allied politically with blacks in the name of economic equality. The conservative backlash was immediate- "N-----r loving socialists!" The alliance was broken, and ever since the movement for civil rights was portrayed by conservatives as a communist conspiracy imposed from abroad.

The Red Scare pushed by Woodrow Wilson after the October Revolution? It included special crackdowns on all organizations advocating racial equality.

One of the agents involved in that crackdown, J. Edgar Hoover, went on to become head of the FBI, creating COINTELPRO- an organization within the FBI dedicated to infiltrating, discrediting, and breaking up civil rights organizations on the grounds that they were Communist fronts.

Throughout American history, conservatives have claimed that they, and only they, are true Americans. They have proclaimed all efforts by minority or disadvantaged groups to seek a better deal to be conspiracies from outside, and thus un-American. In fact, they go so far as to say that the very concept of equality itself is un-American- that there is a racial, religious and cultural hierarchy which must be maintained to preserve American freedom.

And, all too often, that conspiracy is a Jewish conspiracy. It's important to note that both Hitler and Goebbels got a lot of their ideas from American publications- most notably the Dearborn newspapers and magazines published by infamous anti-Semite Henry Ford. Pre-World War II, "Soviet" and "Jewish" were synonyms not just in Nazi Germany, but right here in the United States as well... and in the John Birch and Tea Party circles, they've never ceased to be synonyms.

And here is Sarah Hoyt, a self-proclaimed libertarian, spreading the lovely Goebbels fertilizer for a new generation. Doesn't it smell like flowers?

Well... the stuff you shovel onto flowers, maybe.

She will protest that there's not a racist bone in her body, to which I reply: bullshit. Go to the first paragraph in my excerpt. The one Clinton innovation she points out as opposing is "Moter Voter," i. e. registering people to vote at the same time they get their driver's license. This wildly successful program was intended to make it easier for people- especially non-whites- to vote. And Mrs. Hoyt opposes it.

Which, in my view, is a telling clue to what Hoyt really means when she says the last ten years persuaded her that America was "under occupation." She means, it was under occupation by non-whites- only, like her spiritual ancestors in the Know-Nothings, she doesn't want to admit it openly.

I share this link because I want you all to see what American fascism looks like at the grassroots level... and to remind you that it's NOT all a Putin plot. Putin couldn't do a damn thing to us if we didn't grow this bullshit at home ourselves- and if some many of us didn't take a nice big sniff of it and pronounce it sweeter than roses.

Note the name: Sarah Hoyt. And then avoid anything attached to that name. This is what white supremacy looks like when it's trying to look respectable.