Link Bundle: Republicans and Bigotry

The tabs in my browser have been building up since 2019, and this is the only way I can seem to curb my tab-hoarding, so...

Republicans in Indiana decided there needed to be a hate crimes law... but not one that covers racism or homophobia.

Elected GOP official backs white supremacy, part 1.  (This guy has since been promoted from Raleigh to Washington.)

Elected GOP official backs white supremacy, part 2. (Josh Hawley is notorious for this.)

Elected GOP official backs white supremacy, part 3. (Why did you THINK so many people loved Reagan?)

Elected GOP official backs white supremacy, part 4. (Fifty-one of them, to be more accurate.)

Elected GOP official backs white supremacy, part 5. (What? You thought I was going to skip Trump? The dude tried to incorporate Nazi insignia into his 2020 campaign. And Tom Cotton is even worse than Hawley, believe it or not.)

Elected GOP official backs white supremacy, part 6.

Elected GOP official backs white supremacy, part 7. This article was written by my neo-Confederate US Representative at the time. My current one is just as bad.

Elected GOP official backs white supremacy, part 8.  (He didn't resign. He did, however, lose his re-election campaign, although getting prosecuted for embezzlement might have had something to do with that.)

Elected GOP official backs white supremacy, part 9. (This one is still there.)

Cops are bigots, part 1. 

Cops are bigots, part 2.

Cops are bigots, part 3.

Cops are bigots, part 4. (And for the record, I bought into the Acevedo hype at the time. More fool I.)

Cops are bigots, part 5. (What kind of people did you THINK the ICE would attract?)

Cops are bigots, part 6. Continued.

Cops are bigots, part 7. Yes, even cops of color. The training, the culture, and the weeding out of good cops guarantees it.

To be fair, cop-killers are ALSO bigots.

Just because the Kochs are fundraising against Trump now doesn't mean they don't still back white supremacy.

And by now it should be no surprise that "libertarian" tech-bros are RABIDLY racist.

Right-wingers lie to promote hate, part 1. (This is basically Ben Shapiro's whole thing.)

Right-wingers lie, part 2 (although the article writer gives Milton Friedman far more benefit of the doubt than I do).

Right-wingers lie, part 3.

But don't blame Republican officials: bigotry is the very core of American conservatism. It may be getting worse right now, but this is the way it has always been. And you can't say you were not warned.

Even though the Republican voting base will deny it.

 I'm only halfway through my tabs, but I have things I need to do today, so this is where I have to stop.

Link Bundle: Prejudice

Well, I have too many tabs on my laptop web browser, so let's clean them up. I think I can get a bunch of them off just by picking those involving racism and bigotry...

A reminder that modern day conservatives use religious liberty as an excuse to defend bigotry and discrimination... if they bother to require any excuse at all.

Reminders that conservatives only believe in free speech if it's speech that upholds white supremacy. Otherwise, if you speak out against injustice and for equality, they want you dead.

Reminders that our judicial system itself is built on racial bias.

Reminder that Eisenhower, yes, was quite thoroughly racist.

Reminder that, for Trump and his cronies, even legal immigrants must be purged. And, eventually, native born citizens that the conservatives don't like.

Reminder that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is an organization out of control, violating our most basic freedoms at will.

Reminder that conservatives still believe women are property.

Reminder that the party of Lincoln now believes the South should have won the Civil War.

Reminder that there will always be members of a persecuted group who pretend that their persecutors actually like them.

Reminder that, when a system is biased, a computer programmed to follow that system will also be biased.

Reminder that conservatives are working to prevent non-whites from voting at all costs.

Reminder that Trump and his followers are willing to waste money and make America less safe in order to advance nakedly racist goals.

Reminder that "Go back where you came from" has always been racist.

Reminder that, in America, "normal" is defined as "straight white man".

Reminder that racism is alive and well in our schools.

And, finally, reminders that our current administration has no interest whatever in serving any American who isn't white.

Mass Link Bundle

I really need to use this blog more often.

One of the problems with Facebook is that it makes it easy to just "share link", say a little bit about a thing, and then forget about it... and Facebook's magic makes it impossibe to find that link ever, ever again.

Another problem I have, not connected to Facebook, is that I will often read a link, think, "I want to say something about this, but I need to think about it," and then... just... let it sit there... in the tabs on my browser...

... which, at the moment, are up to something like a hundred tabs.

So, this is me, clearing out some (not all) of those tabs, and at the same time archiving the links in a place where they can be found. Some of these go back quite some time- they've been building up.

Starting with the most recent and moving backwards through my tabs row:

On how direct cash aid to individuals is the most effective means of ending poverty and boosting the economy, but envy and hatred of the poor sabotages it.

I like parts of this proposal, but I agree more explanation needs to happen.

Democratic leadership is still pro-business, anti-worker, and deaf as a post to what people are actually asking for- specifically, that corporations be reined in and that people get a decent wage and conditions at their jobs.

Of course, mechanization is on course to eliminate most human jobs, leaving the majority of mankind unemployable unless we do something about it.

White people forget that the Detroit Riots were a reaction to decades of police brutality and public segregation against black people.

This guy was the first: as of this week, three or four other top cybersecurity people have bailed out of executive-branch departments. Wonder why?

Brian Babin, my Congressman, wants to make it illegal to extend civil rights protection over transsexual people.

If you were wondering how Donald Trump won (despite the ten kazillion opinions on that subject expressed since the election), here's one clue: Hillary Clinton is even more disliked than he is.

Re: Trump-Russia collusion: How much more smoke does there have to be until we can safely assume there's a fire?


... and, well, I've run out of room in the tags. Guess I'll do more of this tomorrow.

Free speech needs limits if other freedoms are to be respected.

I do not believe freedom of speech is, or ought to be, absolute. I believe words matter, that words have consequences, and that words can be used and are being used to harm others and to tear down our society.

I have a couple simple rules that guide what I consider speech not worthy of protection by our society.

If you tell a deliberate lie which can be objectively proven to be a lie, with any reasonable expectation that it will be taken as the truth by a normal listener, that speech should not be protected.
If you advocate for the physical harm, dispossession, separation, or expulsion, either directly or as a proposal for public policy, of a group of people as a group, without regard to justice for any individual within that group, with any reasonable expectation that other people might be persuaded to act upon your advocacy, that speech should not be protected.

I'm sure, with enough careful parsing, I could come up with one or two more, but these two are the big ones. Deception should never be free speech; and bigotry should never be free speech.

This is why, for example, I regard Colin Kapernick's protest as free speech, but I do NOT regard InfoWars and Breitbart's lies as free speech. The former told no lies and did not advocate for anyone else's harm. Alex Jones and Steve Bannon do both on a daily basis.

Likewise, I don't regard the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville as free speech. I regard it as a terrorist rally advocating the destruction of democracy and equality in the United States- in short, as an act of war against the rest of us.

I take seriously how important freedom of speech is, both as a creator of fiction and as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about political matters. For example, if you tell a lie not knowing it was a lie, that is defensible up to the point you are informed otherwise. As much as I would like to say, for example, that spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy claims, not objectively disprovable but designed to make people more likely to accept violence towards Jews, shouldn't be protected... I don't see any way of doing it without also taking away the right of voters to hold elected officials under suspicion without obvious evidence of wrongdoing.

But although there may not be a clear line to show where a speaker's good faith ends, lying and demonizing others by race, religion, gender, or sexuality are so far beyond that line that there ought not be any doubt.

And I believe it's high time that we, as a society, quit holding the viper to our breasts. Totalitarians will always use a society's freedoms as a tool to bring that society down... but it is possible to maintain most of those freedoms without letting the totalitarians win.

No deception. No advocating pogroms. Not even as jokes (or, as Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh continually claim in court, "non-factual entertainment programming").

Because your right to free speech ends where your fellow man's right to not be attacked in the streets begins- even if you're not the one doing the attacking.

What kind of administration are we dealing with?

DONALD TRUMP - President of the United States

Investigated and prosecuted for refusing to rent or sell housing to non-whites from the 1970s clear up to the 1990s. Repeatedly reported as ordering black employees off the floors of his hotels and casinos when he came to visit so he wouldn't have to look at them. Father was a known member of the Ku Klux Klan.

STEVE BANNON - Chief political advisor to the President

Until recently publisher of Breitbart, and thus oversaw the publication of biased or outright false "news" stories presenting blacks, Jews, gays, feminists, Hispanics, and immigrants in general as violent criminals seeking to destroy white civilization. On record as saying his goal is to destroy the American government as we know it and to replace with the raw exercise of power. Records from his divorce proceedings show a history of anti-Semitic statements and domestic abuse.

STEPHEN MILLER - Senior policy advisor to the President

College classmate and close ally of alt-right neo-Nazi activist Richard Spenser, and co-organizer of white supremacist rallies and events with Spenser at Duke University. Overt white nationalist.

JEFF SESSIONS - U. S. Senator, nominee to become Attorney General of the United States, senior legal advisor to the President

Was rejected for a place on the federal judicial bench in the 1980s after statements of support for white supremacy and overt hostility to blacks were revealed in Congressional testimony. Fought (mostly successfully) to oppose desegregation and equal funding for public schools in his home state of Alabama. As state attorney general, only supported civil rights cases brought by white plaintiffs. A leading voice against racial, gender, and sexual equality throughout his political career. Advised other countries on efforts to enact white nationalism into law.

BETSY DeVOS - AmWay heiress, school privatization and desecularization advocate, nominee to become US Secretary of Education 

Young earth Creationist and fundamentalist Christian. Sister of Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater, a private mercenary force sent to Iraq by the Bush administration's Department of State ostensibly as bodyguards. Blackwater made no secret of their desire to be "crusaders" and to kill Muslims regardless of other considerations, leading to a scandal after secret reports of Blackwater massacring unarmed civilians became public knowledge. Blackwater relabeled itself as Xe after losing its federal contracts and shifted its focus to providing security for certain dictators.

There's probably- almost certainly- more names that could be listed here that I don't know about.

But this ought to be enough to make it crystal clear that the Trump administration is centered around the belief of white nationalism and white supremacy, and that persecution of non-whites, non-straights, non-males, and non-Christians will be official government policy throughout his term of office.

And if the Republican Party does not openly and strongly resist this policy, then it must also be regarded as a white supremacist organization- and treated accordingly.

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.

Conservatism and cowardice go hand in hand.

Wow, it's been a very long time since I used this blog, hasn't it?

So, today I saw a friend of mine repost on Facebook a status which began by saying it was time for liberals to begin some "real talk" about Islam, lest we "give up the issue to conservatives."

I did not respond well to this, as you might guess. "Real talk about X" is a long-time dog-whistle for, "I want to say something bigoted about X group, but I don't want to look like a bigot, so I'm going to present my prejudices as common sense." And I responded to the status, saying, more or less, "What you're saying is, liberals need to agree with conservatives in hating and fearing Muslims." This triggered an exchange with the original status poster until my friend yanked his repost and stopped the exchange.

That said, there were several points that merit response.

First, on the original poster's claim that his "real talk" was not about hating and fearing Muslims; bullshit. The whole point of his original post is that liberals are silent about Islam and terrorism and that "real talk" is necessary, but has been censored by the left. Well, since the general liberal position on Islamic terrorism is that we need to dismantle the terrorist organizations that carry out attacks without blaming an entire religion for the crimes of fewer than one percent of its adherents, the "real talk" that is being censored is almost certainly the conservative view: "Islam is evil, Muslims are evil, and we need to punish Muslims regardless of their individual roles in anything at all."

Second: do you know how this person said this alternative view was being censored? "People are afraid to speak the truth because they'll be called racists."

Uh huh. So you believe something strongly, but won't say anything because you're afraid someone will call you a name? You think that, when someone holds an opinion and says it openly, that act by itself is censorship against anyone who differs?

Horseshit. 

I can't count how many names I've been called in online discussions about this and that: communist, socialist, statist, traitor, idiot, asshole, sheep, shithead, and worse and worse. I won't pretend I don't care about some of those labels, but I've certainly never let them even slow me down from expressing my opinion and arguing my position on anything and everything. I've certainly never felt censored because of namecalling. No epithet posted on the Internet has yet resulted in my loss of access to the Internet, my arrest or imprisonment, or my being sued or fined for my beliefs.

Your opinion, whatever it is, cannot force my silence; and my opinion cannot force your silence.

Third, and finally: if you're afraid that speaking your opinion on X might make you seem like a bigot, it might just be because you ARE being a bigot. If you're self-censoring yourself on that grounds, then you need to stop and carefully re-examine your beliefs and why you hold them. Hint: if you are classifying a group of 1.5 billion people as if they are all identical and interchangable, that's bigotry. If you believe that membership in any arbitrary group is sufficient cause to consider a person evil or criminal, with no further evidence, that's bigotry. And if your opinions sound anything like, "All X are dangerous," or, "We can't allow X into our country because they'll destroy us all," then guess what? That opinion is based on hate, fear, and prejudice- in other words, bigotry.

And guess what? That puts you side by side with the likes of ISIL, whose entire belief system is built on bigotry and anti-liberalism. It is the nature of liberals to disagree, but to accept the presence and equal rights of those who disagree with them. It is the nature of conservatives, and especially religious fundamentalist conservatives, to attack all who disagree with them and seek to drive them out or destroy them outright.

Because liberals are brave enough to accept that not everyone is alike, and that it is possible to be different or strange and not be hostile. Conservatives, on the other hand, are scared livid of anything different or strange, and hate, fear and hold in contempt all that is different from themselves.

And yet, while liberals defend their positions even when attacked and beaten, conservatives are such shrinking violets that they apparently silence themselves for fear that they might be called by the nasty, horrible name of "racist."

I suspect that's why Trump is doing so well among conservatives: with every bigoted and ignorant thing he spews from his mouth on the campaign trail, he's saying the things conservatives are too cowardly to admit they still believe. And he gets away with it.

Trump is "real talk."

And, ironically, Trump has pledged that the first thing he'll do when he becomes president is to make it illegal for anybody to criticize him. He's already put it into the contracts he makes his volunteers sign; anyone who works for him is never again allowed to say anything bad at all about Donald Trump, ever, for the rest of his or her life, on pain of lawsuit.

Because even Donald Trump is too cowardly to live in a society where other people don't agree with him on absolutely everything. Instead, while Bernie Sanders and even Hillary Clinton listen to their protesters and sit down with them and discuss their views, Trump silences them, then encourages his followers to beat them into submission and promises to pay the legal costs. 

Just as ISIL is too cowardly to live in a world where any religion other than their unique and ultra-fundamentalist sect of Islam exists. Instead they kill everyone who doesn't follow their faith in their exact way.

What happened in Brussels today is the act of an organization of cowards. And it is their devout hope that their acts of murder will empower our cowards here to respond in kind, to trigger the war of religious extermination they desperately desire.

I refuse to be a coward, and I refuse to be silent while cowards call for "real talk" as a way to veil their prejudices and fears in a haze of respectability.

The religion of Islam has many different sects and subdivisions, just as Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism do. The crimes of one particular group of Muslims lie on the head of members of that group and no one else. Any policy which treats all members of a group as culpable for the crimes of a small group of individuals, without regard to any facts on an individual basis, is injustice to those affected. And no matter how much you hate or fear a group, for whatever reasons, such policy remains now and forever unjust.

That's not "real talk." That's just truth.

And if you disagree, have the courage of your convictions and say so- and don't fear whatever names I or anyone else might call you.