Remembrance: The 1917 Silent Protest Parade.

Photograph of the 1917 NAACP Silent Protest Parade by Underwood and Underwood (courtesy James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library).

The call to the march by the organizing committee of the 1917 NAACP Silent Protest Parade (courtesy James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library).

In a petition to the White House, the marchers called on President Woodrow Wilson to take action, stating that in the “last thirty-one years 2,867 colored men and women have been lynched by mobs without trial. … We believe that this spirit of lawlessness is doing untold injury to our country and we submit that the record proves that the States are either unwilling or unable to put down lynching and mob violence.”

The organizers ended their list of “why do we march” reasons with:

We march because the growing consciousness and solidarity of race coupled with sorrow and discrimination have made us one: a union that may never be dissolved in spite of shallow-brained agitators, scheming pundits and political tricksters who secure a fleeting popularity and uncertain financial support by promoting the disunion of a people who ought to consider themselves as one.

It’s not possible to read about this march, or look at the images without seeing all the terrible parallels from 1917 to 2017. Lynch mobs may not roam at will now, but murderous cops are allowed to roam, and they are not punished for the thousands, every single year, of killings of Indigenous, Black, and Hispanic people. People are still marching. People are still taking a stand. And it’s beyond sadness that in all this time, these things are still needed.

You can see and read much more at Hyperallergic.

Speaking of Neo-Nazi Assholes…

Tucker Viemeister.

In the previous post, Richard Spencer’s sugar daddy was revealed. Now, Spencer and his nazi buddies are busy talking themselves up again, and just loving the current regime in all its chaos and idiocy.

As Salon reports, Michael Peinovich, the creator of alt-right podcast network The Right Stuff, spoke with leader Richard Spencer and an anonymous former GOP staffer ‘Jazzhands McFeels’ on Sunday about the administration’s lack funding for domestic terrorist groups.

“He’s going to give us space to operate, and frankly, it is space to destroy,” Peinovich said of Trump.

“Now is the time that we have to make hay while the sun shines,” ‘Jazzhands McFeels’ argued, insisting the alt-right should take advantage “while these investigations of ‘domestic terrorist groups’ are not being funded by the government, they’re not being pushed by the Department of Homeland Security.”

Contrasting Trump’s administration with a hypothetical Hillary Clinton presidency, Peiovich added the alt-right would “probably be facing f*cking [racketeering] charges or some shit like that,” adding the movement has “to use these four years to grow into something that can’t be defeated by that kind of thing.”

[…]

“I hope the way that [Trump] is looked back on in history is that he was the vehicle that moved the alt-right movement, the white identity movement in the United States, back into the forefront of the political scene,” Peinovich said.

And that alone should be reason enough for impeachment. Via Raw Story.

“The velvet tyranny of political correctness.”

Richard Spencer and William H. Regnery II.

Lance Williams at Reveal has an absorbing article up about the person and money behind neo-nazi Richard Spencer. For many years, Regnery’s notions about race got him kicked out of one organization or another, but the rise of the Tiny Tyrant has made many of  his dreams come true.

Long before Donald Trump’s election ushered in an era of resurgent white nationalism, a disaffected Republican named William H. Regnery II was brooding about the demographic plight of white people and plotting their rescue.

Like Trump more than 20 years later, Regnery, the wealthy scion of a famous GOP family, had an increasingly dark view of a changing America: As he wrote, the U.S. had become a crime-ridden society with bad schools, high taxes, an intrusive government and a penchant for political correctness that was “morphing into an intellectual tyranny.”

Worse, “a flood of immigrants were changing the look of America from a palette of prime colors to a third-world monochrome,” he wrote in a rant that would be at home on the bookshelf of Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. “Instead of a lingua franca, the country clanged with many foreign tongues.”

By 1999, he had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States.

[…]

Through his family’s famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.   

Now, he’s back. Working behind the scenes, the retired Chicago business executive has played an important role in making his ultra-right views a part of America’s political conversation in the era of Trump.

In what he has described as his crowning political achievement, Regnery discovered Richard Spencer, the mediagenic agitator who invented the term “alt-right.” In 2011, Regnery made him the frontman for his white nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, providing Spencer the platform to launch the alt-right movement.

The full article is here, recommended.

Sunday Facepalm: The Destruction of All Media.

At yesterday’s Phyllis Schlafly Collegians D.C. Summit, an event for college students hosted by the late Schlafly’s group Eagle Forum, Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matt Boyle boasted that his publication’s goal is to completely destroy and eliminate the “mainstream media,” leaving Brietbart and other fringe organizations as the only available media outlets.

“The goal eventually is the full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media,” Boyle said. “We envision a day where CNN is no longer in business; we envision a day where The New York Times closes its doors. I think that day is possible, I think that we can get there.”

No subtlety there. Unfortunately, I think that day is all too possible too. Perhaps not probable, but still, I think we are far more weighted towards the fascism side these days. Certainly the Tiny Tyrant and the rethuglicans wouldn’t have much of a problem with this scenario.

“But when that happens,” he added, “the public still needs an information stream. And again, as much as we love Trump’s Twitter account, as much as we love the White House press releases and briefings and all that, there needs to be an independent and strong media in the United States, and that’s where we come in.”

Independent. Is that what toadying and the fostering of hate is called now? I think we can stick with propaganda, as that one is accurate.

Via Right Wing Watch.

The Wisdom of Rick Joyner, Fucking Idiot.

 

WISDOM IN THREE PARTS:

Part I:

A. Back off and let those men who want to marry men, marry men.
B. Allow those women who want to marry women, marry women.
C. Allow those folks who want to abort their babies, abort their babies.

In three generations, there will be no more Democrats.

Part II:
10 Poorest Cities in America (How did it happen?)
City, State, % of People Below the Poverty Level

1. Detroit, MI 32.5%
2. Buffalo, NY 29.9%
3. Cincinnati, OH 27.8%
4. Cleveland, OH 27.0%
5. Miami, FL 26.9%
5. St. Louis, MO 26.8%
7. El Paso, TX 26.4%
8. Milwaukee, WI 26.2%
9. Philadelphia, PA 25.1%
10. Newark, NJ 24.2%

What do these top ten cities (over 250,000 pop.) with the highest poverty rate all have in common?

Detroit, MI – (1st on poverty rate list) hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1961

Buffalo, NY – (2nd) hasn’t elected one since 1954

Cincinnati, OH – (3rd) not since 1984

Cleveland, OH – (4th) not since 1989

Miami, FL – (5th) has never had a Republican mayor

St. Louis, MO – (6th) not since 1949

El Paso, TX – (7th) has never had a Republican mayor

Milwaukee, WI – (8th) not since 1908

Philadelphia, PA – (9th) not since 1952

Newark, NJ – (10th) not since 1907

Einstein once said, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’
It is the poor who habitually elect Democrats… yet they are still POOR.

Part III:

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”
~Abraham Lincoln

“Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him had better take a much
closer look at the American Indian.”
~Henry Ford

Okay, all this idiocy can be distilled right down to: kill off all political parties except for conservative republican, always support the rich, and if you’re poor, go fuck yourself, because that’s your fault, natch. I’ll just briefly note that a good many white people on the poor side of life voted for the Tiny Tyrant, and many of them are now crying in their beer, because he hasn’t done one thing for them. At least the ones bright enough to figure out what a scam it all is. That last quote by Ford is pernicious, to say the least. After a partially successful genocide, and massive theft, no, the government didn’t do much for Indians, because they were busy stealing every fucking thing they could, and really didn’t want those inconvenient leftovers getting in the way. This would be Joyner’s way of expressing that ol’ white supremacy: white is might is right, yessir.

Let’s take a brief look at what some of those brilliant republicans have been saying about all us peons:

Paul Ryan says people just don’t want insurance, that’s all.  All those millions who would lose healthcare, ah, that’s their choice.

The Regime has threatened the insurance of low income people if Trumpcare isn’t passed, but hey, they care about you, they really do!

Sen. Ron Johnson explained how people with pre-existing conditions don’t deserve health coverage, because it’s like crashing a car.

Rep. Pete Olsen was laughing over prenatal and maternity care, pointing out that since people with those nifty X chromosomes didn’t need that shit, why should they pay for it?

Now, the vote on Trumpcare has been canceled. (Yay!) Don’t get over excited though, because this is far from over, and McConnell will not give up easily, nor will Ryan, Trump, or all the other empty bags of flesh who are utterly devoid of empathy.

Yes, I’m sure we are all so darn impressed with how republicans care for people, especially those pesky poor people. Rick Joyner’s “wisdom” can be found here.

The Death of Medicaid.

Al Franken at The BookExpo2017 in New York City, 6/1/17. CREDIT: Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx.

Getting back to the Fuck You Care Plan, which gets worse at every small reveal. The denials over medicaid come in fast and furious, from evasive denials to outright lies, but the bottom line is quite simple: money will go into select filthy rich pockets; medicaid will be dead in few short years.

The bill would in fact massively cut Medicaid, threatening to completely phase out the program as we currently know it. The legislation would roll back Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, starting in four short years. It would also make deeper cuts to Medicaid by placing “per capita caps” on the program such that states will receive only a set amount of money for each recipient, no matter how much their care actually costs.

Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicaid in the Obama administration, said on Twitter that “the main event in the Senate bill is the destruction of Medicaid,” characterizing it as “far, far worse than even the House bill.” And the House bill, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, would leave 23 million more people without coverage.

But Trump administration officials presented alternative facts on Sunday.

Full story here.

Monday morning on MSNBC, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) countered Roy’s argument. He noted that the tax cuts that Trumpcare would deliver to the richest 400 taxpayers would pay for 750,000 people to be on Medicaid. Franken didn’t rely on a single study but cited the more comprehensive analysis of recent research on Medicaid published in NEJM. These researchers found that for every 750,000 people who lose Medicaid coverage, 1,000 to 2,000 people would die.

Franken actually understates the case. The NEJM cited a recent study estimating that Medicaid expansion has saved one life for every 239 to 319 people covered. That means enrolling 750,000 people in Medicaid could actually save 2,300 to 3,100 lives.

Full story here.

Sunday Facepalm.

Robert Oscar Lopez truly hates Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar. It’s symptomatic of every wrong thing in the world! Mr. Lopez has a rather stunningly long screed revolving around Plath, one which would take a very long time to fisk completely, so I’ll focus on some choice parts here and there, but the whole rancid rant is worth looking at, if you’re looking for a heap of rotten reasoning to start out your day, or round off your evening. One thing I’m not going to focus on, so I’ll give a quick mention here – Mr. Lopez just can’t resist bringing up Ms. Plath’s suicide, done while her children were in the house. “That evil slut, endangering babies!” Mr. Lopez brings that up every moment he can, a reminder that Ms. Plath’s life truly was worthless, but she’s gonna burn in hell for committing the sin of self murder. Naturally, while running down Ms. Plath’s book, Mr. Lopez not so slyly inserts an a plug, here, there, and everywhere, for his book, with the charming title of  “Wackos Thugs & Perverts: Clintonian Decadence in Academia”.  A bit of advice, Mr. Lopez – learn about commas. I’ll assume you didn’t have an editor who might have pointed out the benefit of such learning.

Okay, where to start? Hmmmm.

Next comes dysfunction, as people start basing their life decisions on their confused notions: for example, they decide to spend their twenties not on courtship but on working long hours and trying to publish bad novels, because their muddled judgment has told them life will be totally happy if they never get married or start a family (and if they change their mind in, say, their fifties, anybody can start a family with egg donors, surrogate wombs, and sperm donors.) Because of such poor judgment, they do self-defeating things like hang all their hopes for self-worth on getting a literary agent. They look for emotional closeness from co-workers and a shrink who charges $200 an hour to do what a husband would have done for free: nod, listen, and say, “yes, you’re so right.” (The difference is that a husband will also provide some good old-fashioned lovemaking—and babies!)

You give yourself away, Mr. Lopez. This isn’t about young people being twisted about by academia; it’s about women. Women who don’t do the right thing by eschewing education, allowing themselves to be married off at a young age, and burying themselves under the weight of their uterus. So, all the young men automatically get a pass in your twisted view? How about all the young men who aspire to be authors, and work on writing rather than courting? How about all the young men who decide babies aren’t for them? I guess everything is okay if you have a penis, right? After all, in your black and white world, the only thing required to fix up a wayward penis is a good woman, yeah?

As for a husband being as good or better than a therapist, I get the idea you have rose coloured telescopes glued to your eyes. Many marriages are good, but many more or not. Marriage is not a panacea, nor is it for everyone.

Next comes anxiety, as people immersed in this blurry world of nonsensical values find their waking hours plagued with stress, doubt, uneasiness, worry, fear, and of course blind rage. Having mismanaged and sabotaged the most important relationships around them, they cling foolishly to people who hate them. They spurn people who would love them. As they realize that they’ve made bad decisions, they start racking themselves and doubling down, excoriating themselves for not doing enough of the confused decision-making that got them there in the first place. “Maybe I shouldn’t have broken down and put up a profile on OKCupid! Maybe I just need to sign up for more writing workshops run by arrogant lechers who tell long-winded stories about how they got their novel published in 1982! Maybe I should try harder to be like Diane Chambers in Cheers.”

Umm, quick question, Mr. Lopez – what decade is this? I ask because I’m not so sure you’ve made it into the current century with the rest of us. As much as it would suit your purpose, relationships do not fit neatly into a little box, same size for everyone. It’s not up to you to say that all these relationships are automagically good, and all those are automagically bad. For all your bloviating over what you seem to think comprises academia, you could have done with a bit more of it in your life, Mr. Lopez, your writing leaves much to be desired. Your writing skills are on par with mine, which is in no way a compliment.

Finally arrives ignorance, the all-encompassing state in which this tragic process culminates and to which, like the Via Appia pointing to Rome, all of the bad thinking leads. Confusion has made knowledge unattainable, while dysfunction has made it impossible for the victim of this rhythm to discipline their lives for true study and actual learning. In a crippling state of anxiety, the mind is unable to focus. The ultimate result is the lack of any perspective and inability to gain it. Life becomes nothing but outbursts, reactions to provocations, obsessions, and increasingly violent ideations. Ignorance is not bliss. It is deadly.

Oh gods, your writing, painful it is. A lack of perspective is a common trait of being young. When you’re young, you live very much in the present. Generally speaking, we naked apes aren’t great at the whole long-term thinking/planning business. Experiences eventually pile up, allowing for perspective and introspection, you just have to give people a bit of time. It all works out. As for ignorance, well, ignorance is often innocent and correctable. Smug, willful ignorance, yes, that’s dangerous, and ugly, like the shined up shit you’re peddling, Mr. Lopez.

Never forget that Sylvia Plath, after writing about the tragically disoriented and suicidal Esther Greenwood, stuck her head in a gas oven and endangered the lives of her small children.

Yes, yes. Your obsession with Ms. Plath is bit off, y’know. What about all the generations of young people since Ms. Plath? Nothing to say about them? All the kids who got their education and made their way through life, many of them authors, many of them raising kids of their own? The silence is deafening.

To liberals, despite all their trucks with ideologically driven Black Panthers and ACTUP and pink pussy hats, Sylvia Plath epitomizes what they stand for: embittered observations about how annoying the world is, total inability to suggest anything better, sarcasm, whining, mental illness, self-absorbed neurosis, and suicidal politics with zero regard for what they do to children. The proliferation of talk therapy options, psychotropic drugs, and self-help books (including a boom in Christian sects structured around “healing” and “pastoral care for the whole person”) seems to have had no impact on the main problem facing the American left: They are profoundly spoiled, unhappy, and destructive.

I don’t have any problems suggesting better, Mr. Lopez, and neither do most of the people I know. America does not comprise the world, and there are many fine examples in the world of people getting it right. We often point out these real world examples, only to have people like yourself scream “commie socialists!” and run away. I’ll take a guess on the ‘suicidal politics’ business – that’s about women having bodily autonomy, right? A very simple phrase takes care of that one, Mr. Lopez: what I do in regard to my health is none of your fucking business, full stop.

There are countless reasons to express alarm about the left of today. My book’s title was intentionally provocative: Wackos Thugs & Perverts, to encapsulate the trivium of nihilistic tendencies that predominate in academia. You have wackos peddling wildly implausible theories about the world as if they are unquestionably smart. You have thugs on all levels, from the party racketeers who move trillions of dollars in tax-free holdings and student loans for worthless degrees, to the angry youths shattering windows and tweeting vile insults at people in the name of causes they barely understand. And at last you have the perverts who have declared war on every form of bodily dignity, striving to force their pornographic imagination into every nook and cranny of society.

Oh yes, there are whackos peddling wildly implausible theories, like Alex Jones, Lance Wallnau, Dave Daubenmire, all of Fox News, and so on. You’ve gotten your directions a bit mixed up there. Oh yes, there are thugs, monied criminals fucking everyone over for the sake of their pockets. There’s one sitting in the white house right now. At the moment, Mr. Lopez, hate crimes are spiking, and they aren’t being committed by those on the left side of life. Tweeting “vile insults” is bad? Perhaps you can manage to shut Trump the fuck up. It’s not those interested in social justice and human rights who constantly have their noses stuck in everyone else’s crotches, Mr. Lopez. That would be christians and conservatives. Perhaps if you managed to come up for air now and then, you’d see that those crotches are attached to actual human beings who deserve all human rights.

But there is room for compassion if we understand that the left is defined not by its politics but rather by its mental illness. They live in bell jars that they cannot understand or trace back to any clear person to blame. Thus they find wild monsters hidden behind everything that provokes them. They think Donald Trump wants to rape them and Mike Pence want to electrocute them to make them heterosexual. They think Vladimir Putin caused Hillary Clinton to lose an election. They think the Koch Brothers plot to sell them into slavery and Steve Scalise is a white supremacist.

Oh for fuck’s sake. You’re going to float away on that cloud of smug arrogance, Mr. Lopez. I don’t think Trump wants to rape me. Trump has a clear history of sexual assault, and has been accused of rape. Trump has admitted to committing sexual assault, and you think that should be ignored. Nice. Pence is a believer is corrective ‘therapy’ when it comes to gay people. That’s some very nasty shit right there. Perhaps you should learn about it. Maybe you’d be happy living in a theocracy, Mr. Lopez, I wouldn’t. It’s more than obvious by now that yes, there was interference in the election, there’s evidence to that effect. Of course, idiots such as yourself don’t care for evidence, do they? I think everyone would be better off if the Koch brothers simply went off and played with their money and left politics alone. A good many politicians are white supremacists, and quite open about it, look at Steve King, defender of all white supremacy.

This just goes on and on, and I’m stopping here. If you want to read the whole mess, here you go.

Nurturing Hate.

Christian Picciolini, founder of the group Life After Hate, is pictured. | AP Photo.

If there is one thing the Regime is good at, it’s nurturing hate, encouraging bigotry, and fomenting unreasonable fear. Life After Hate is a small organization dedicated to de-radicalizing those in violent, extremist groups. They have lost their funding, because the Tiny Tyrant & Co. don’t believe in domestic terrorism.

The Trump administration has dropped federal support of an organization dedicated to countering white nationalist and neo-Nazi extremism, a Politico report revealed on Friday.

The organization, Life After Hate, was founded in 2009 and is run by a small staff of men and women who were once part of racist activist and extremist movements, and who now work to de-radicalize others involved in violent extremist groups.

In its final days, the Obama administration awarded the group a $400,000 grant as part of its Counter Violent Extremism (CVE) program. Life After Hate was the only group dedicated to fighting white nationalist extremism to receive a grant under the program.

It’s also in increasing demand: Picciolini told Politico that since President Trump’s election, Life After Hate has seen a 20-fold increase in requests for help, coming “from people looking to disengage or bystanders/family members looking for help from someone they know.”

But Life After Hate Founder Christian Picciolini told ThinkProgress in February the group never received its check from the federal government. And now, the organization has been dropped altogether from the list of grants associated with the CVE program, which the Department of Homeland Security announced on Friday.

[…]

“It sends a message that white extremism does not exist, or is not a priority in our country, when in fact it is a statistically larger and more present terror threat than any by foreign or other domestic actors,” Picciolini said at the time.

[…]

“We can simply look at recent history, from Dylann Roof to Wade Michael Page to countless others who killed innocent victims in the name of white supremacist ideologies,” Picciolini added. “We have hundreds of thousands of homegrown sovereign citizens and militia members with ties to white nationalism training in paramilitary camps across the U.S. and standing armed in front of mosques to intimidate marginalized Americans. The terror threat is already within our borders, yet we refuse to even call it terrorism when it happens.”

Picciolini told ThinkProgress that the Trump administration’s decision to shift away from efforts to combat far-right hate could actually make future terrorist attacks more likely. And, the shift comes at the very moment that reports indicate far-right hate is on the rise.

Think Progress has the full story. Life After Hate.

If You’re Black, Being A Cop Won’t Stop Cops Shooting You.

Image from the scene where an off-duty officer was shot by a fellow cop in St. Louis (image via Twitter).

Y’know, if this doesn’t drive home the endemic bigotry in this fuckin’ country, and the problem of bigoted cops shooting and murdering people on the basis of skin, I just don’t know what will drive it home. All I have here is sputter and head shaking. This truly should be unbelievable, because something like this should never, ever happen.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and local news outlet Fox2Now, a white St. Louis police officer shot a black off-duty officer from his own force after a car chase ended in a crash outside the off-duty officer’s home.

The African American officer, who has not yet been identified, came outside of his home while off-duty after hearing the commotion from a car chase that ended nearby. Despite identifying himself as a cop, the man was ordered to the ground by two officers. He complied, and soon after, they recognized him and told him to get up.

That was when a third officer entered the scene, and because he did not recognize the black off-duty cop and claimed to “fear for his safety,” shot the off-duty cop in the arm.

The Post-Dispatch reported that police are calling the incident an example of “friendly fire” due to the suspects from the car chase firing at police. The paper also reported that police initially claimed that the 38-year-old African American officer, who has been on the force for 11 years, was “caught in the crossfire.”

Obviously, this ‘incident’ is going to come with many different stories, as cops try to spin it this way and that, in an attempt to make it look like anything except what it is. When in the fuckety fuck are people going to wake the fuck up, and stop accepting this bullshit? Cops are out of control, and free to run around murdering people at will, as long as the victims have the right skin colour, then they were just askin’ for killin’, you betcha. Fucking disgusting, and even more disgusting are all the people on juries, freeing murderers. That has to stop.

This is a real problem,” Rufus J. Tate Jr., the attorney for the injured off-duty officer, told the local Fox affiliate.

“In the police report, you have so far, there is no description of threat he received. So we have a real problem with that. But this has been a national discussion for the past two years. There is this perception that a black man is automatically feared,” the attorney concluded.

I do believe that belongs in the understatement of the century category.

Via Raw Story.

Standing With Russia, Against …

The Obscene Kiss, an illustration of witches kissing the Devil’s anus from Francesco Maria Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum (1608).

Satanists! Who else? Rick Wiles is on a tear over it all:

“I believe the deep state, at it’s core, is satanic,” Wiles said. “It is Luciferian. They, that synagogue of Satan dark state, in 1917, overthrew the Russian government … The Russian people were trapped in communism, atheistic God-hating communism for 70 plus years; the Russians finally cast it off and came out from under this communist oppression. I believe the deep state is furious with them that they dared to overthrow their God-hating atheism, their Satanism.”

Sigh. I get very tired of repeating this, but atheism and satanism, not the same thing. Atheists don’t believe in any gods. Satanists are Christians as far as their mythology goes, Lucifer/Satan/Devil/Whatever is part and parcel of the christian mythos. Jehovah and Jesus and the rest of the cast don’t matter much without the foil of Lucifer. As for the deep state stuff, some evidence please.

“The people in control of America today are Satanists,” he continued. “What do they defend? Baby killing. Selling baby parts. Homosexuality. Pedophilia. They celebrate it.”

An embryo is not a baby. No one is selling baby parts. Or adult parts. Nothing at all wrong with homosexuality. And then, the big ol’ chestnut of christian fanatics – pedophilia! I’d like to know why, as much as they love to bring it up, they never address the mass amounts of rape and sexual assault committed against children by christians. Work on that one, Mr. Wiles.

Wiles went on to praise and defend Russia’s strict anti-LGBTQ laws, declaring that “as a Christian, I stand with the Russian people in their defense of morality and I condemn the dark state that is in control of the United States and Europe and Canada and Australia and New Zealand; it is a Luciferian, demonic Satanic empire that is against God, hates God.”

As it would seem the Luciferian Demonic Satanic Empire is firmly on the social justice side, it doesn’t appear to be terribly powerful, looking at what’s happening in the world at the current time. Interesting how Wiles carefully picks out all those places dominated by white people as being under attack, which is not at all subtle in its appeal to bigotry.

After asserting that he feels “more threatened and afraid of the CIA” than of the Russians, Wiles again insisted that “Luciferian, devil worshiping” forces within the “deep state” are working to foment a war in order to punish Russia “for breaking free of that communist tyranny that that satanic group had put on Russia.”

Some days, I just can’t get over how very much some things have changed. I can’t imagine anyone having the spine to say this sort of thing in the 1960s or  1970s.

Wiles was also outraged that some Christians are “condemning Russia for being an anti-Christian nation that persecuted Christians” simply because it had banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses and seized the group’s churches.

“You know what the Russians did?” Wiles asked. “They banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Kicked them out of the country. Well, congratulations! I’m glad you did it. I wish we could do it. I wish we could get rid of all the cults in this country. We’d be better off for it.”

Yes, I have no doubt many christians would just love that sort of power, and it would be damned scary if they had it, to say the least. They are working towards that, and Trump is working at giving them what they want. As for cults, it would be really nice to stick a muzzle on christianity.

Via RWW, one and two.

On the other side of the aisle, Sam Rohrer is all about the antichrist:

“Lawlessness is what the devil, Satan, is attempting to create,” Rohrer said, explaining that the “enemies of Christ”—by which he meant globalists, Islam, and the cultural “establishment”—are “all working together” because “they hate God, they hate the Constitution, they despise Jesus Christ, they want to destroy Israel and the United States and they are using chaos and division as their way of creating the circumstances … out of which will come the Antichrist.”

“These things that we’re seeing are preparatory for the emerging of the Antichrist,” he said. “We have to understand that what we are seeing has been foretold, it is exactly what the Bible is talking about will happen, is happening and we need to, as God’s people, be taking advantage of this time and pointing people to Jesus Christ, understanding the Battle of the Ages is unfolding before our very eyes.”

Hate crimes have spiked under Trump, and they keep escalating. Crimes committed by people who describe themselves as god lovin’, constitution lovin’, Jesus lovin’ christian patriots. I think Rohrer and company have this whole antichrist thing backwards, to say the least.

Via RWW.

It’s Not About Sex. It’s Not About Sex. It’s Not About Sex.

Pride Leadership Award
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Damita Zweiback presents a Department of Defense Pride Military Leadership Award to Army Maj. Gen. Tammy S. Smith, deputy commanding general for sustainment of the Eighth Army, during an award ceremony marking LGBT Pride Month at the Pentagon, June 12, 2017. Army photo by Zane Ecklund.

Christians, some of the most willfully obtuse assholes on the planet, dedicated to obscurantism. One Jerry Boykin, executive vice-president of the Family Research Council, is terribly upset over the cowardice of the Regime, characterised by the Pentagon’s annual LGBT Pride Event.

“This is a social experimentation, and it has so demoralized our military,” Boykin said. “And it’s not just gay pride day, it’s women in the infantry, it’s a variety of things that were part of the Obama administration’s agenda.”

Boykin said that he had “great expectations” that the new administration would be “stopping this kind of stuff,” but was disappointed.

No, it’s not a social experiment. It’s acknowledging and accepting people for who they are, recognizing that they are indeed full humans, who have all those nifty human rights. As for “stopping this kind of stuff”, at least the people in the Pentagon had the integrity to continue inclusiveness and recognition.

“They may be otherwise very courageous people, but when it comes to this issue they have shown no ounce of courage whatsoever, and they’re better people than that,” he said of Trump-appointed Pentagon officials. “It is time to take this on and say, ‘We are not going to celebrate how people have sex.’”

It’s not about sex. It’s not about sex. It’s not about sex. It’s not about sex. It’s not about sex. It’s not about sex. It’s not about sex. It’s not about sex. It’s not about sex. It’s not about sex. What in the Fuck is wrong with christians, that they simply cannot stop obsessing about and over sex? No one wants your disgusting, judgmental noses all up in their sex lives, and no one is interested in regaling you with sex stories. Maybe that’s the problem, I don’t know. Christians of all stripes are one the leading consumers of porn, when in the hell are you all going to get enough, and leave the rest of us alone?

Boykin went on to say that he is “saddened” that Defense Secretary James Mattis “doesn’t see” that “the biggest thing that has happened to our military” is not sequestration budget cuts but instead is “these social experiments where our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, coastguardsmen have essentially been told by the actions of the administration that your primary mission really isn’t as important as a social agenda, and therefore I will put you into combat, I will put you in harm’s way, but what I’m really concerned about is whether we allow women to serve in the infantry, whether we celebrate how people have sex. That is insane as far as I am concerned.”

Your obsession with sex and toxic misogyny are right on the border of questionable sanity as far as I’m concerned. How about you get that looked at? And shut the fuck up while you’re at it.

Via RWW.

Media, Oh Media, Wherefore Art Thou?

CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

The Senate secrecy over the Fuck You Care Plan is working, and like a dream. It’s not being covered, anywhere, by anyone. Granted, there’s not a whole lot of story there, but media has no business ignoring it to the point that it seems it’s not a reality. If anything, media should be pounding on this, hard. If there’s a case of the death of democracy, it’s right there.

The informal July 4 deadline Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has set for Senate Republicans to pass a health care bill that could strip coverage from 23 million Americans is rapidly approaching — but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the front page of major newspapers across the country on Monday.

National outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post featured no front-page coverage of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), also known as Trumpcare, which is being secretly written by an all-male group of senators. The lack of attention being paid to the bill indicates McConnell’s strategy of avoiding publicity by drafting the bill behind closed doors, holding no hearings, and unveiling the bill’s text at the last possible minute is paying dividends.

[…]

People who consume their news online also didn’t see any coverage on major outlets’ homepages Monday morning.

Trumpcare has also been a blip on the TV news radar. According to an analysis by Media Matters looking at coverage from June 1 through June 14, the bill has received scant mention on broadcast and cable news, with Republican secrecy surrounding the bill barely even being mentioned.

There’s a reason Republicans want to Trumpcare on the down low — even Fox News is unable to spin the unpopularity of the bill, which is essentially a tax cut for the rich masquerading as health care reform.

[…]

Progressive senators are trying to make the media take notice. On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent a letter to Republican committee chairs with jurisdiction over Trumpcare requesting that they “schedule hearings to discuss, debate and hear testimony about the health care bill you are currently drafting in secret.”

The letter, which goes on to list each of the 31 rooms where a hearing could be held, says the millions of American who would be negatively impacted by Trumpcare “deserve an open and public debate over the bill.”

“The American Health Care Act would fundamentally redefine health care in our country,” it concludes. “To draft it behind closed doors and pass it without even one hearing is nothing short of legislative malpractice and a repudiation of all the Senate stands for.”

So…how about it, media? Can we get a little bit of outrage over this travesty? A little bit of attention? Think Progress has the full story, along with many images showing the complete lack of coverage.

Oh Goody, Another War.

Tucker Viemeister.

Chris Murphy: Four direct engagements w Syria/Iran/Russia in 45 days. Trump is quietly starting a new war that Congress has not declared. Red alert.

News that no one needs to hear. Trump must be stopped. Now. I can’t help wondering if this is just the Tiny Tyrant wanting to play with his toys, or his attempt at a Reichstag fire.

Via Raw Story.