A work of prophecy

They don’t realize it’s coming. The rich think that, because they’ve succeeded so well so far, they never need to worry that it can all come crashing down. They think we’re just talking a good game.

Rousseau’s most enduring contribution to the current revolutionary discourse, though, came via a 1789 speech. As writer Talia Lavin noted in a recent piece on the phrase’s origins, his pithy warning — “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich” — has become a rallying cry on social media and at contemporary political protests, where the people’s great and terrible anger at the economic predation of the 1% has helped propel a resurgent anti-capitalist movement. The phrase is all over Twitter, TikTok, and various other social media platforms. It has long been immortalized in song thanks to British heavy metal legends Motörhead (who provided the soundtrack for a bloody 1987 movie also named Eat the Rich about a restaurant that serves the meat of its former wealthy patrons), Swiss hard rockers Krokus, and, bizarrely, Aerosmith, whose vocalist Steven Tyler is currently estimated to be worth about $130 million. (Full disclosure: I have eat the rich tattooed on my stomach, which doubles as a tribute to Motörhead and my own political inclinations.)

I don’t think tattooing a phrase on your belly is a precursor to revolution, and I think that right now we have a complacent middle class (how else could Joe Biden be doing so well in the polls?). One real crisis is what it will take, and crises are on the way. Climate change is going to cause all kinds of disruption, the country is being managed so badly that new conflicts are going to arise, domestic unrest is going to be fomented by a militarized police and splintered right wing terrorist groups. Even minor things could be the tipping point — remember the gas shortages of the 1970s? Something like that could be the spark that wakes up a pissed-off majority.

I’m just saying the 1% need to recognize that they aren’t as well sheltered as they think they are. Buying off an election or hiring lobbyists isn’t going to turn them into good guys in the eyes of the people.

How Quillete packages itself for so-called liberals

Make no bones about it, Quillette is an outrageously racist site. Here’s an article that compiles numerous examples of its biases.

Lehmann has said she started Quillette to counter what she calls “blank slate fundamentalism,” or the proposition that educational outcomes, career success, capacity for ethics, and economic class are determined more by environmental factors than genetic ones. That is to say, she believes that social status, morality or immorality, and, yes, income itself are all genetically based.

Lehmann told Politico that Quillette’s goal is “to broaden the Overton window”—that is to say, expand the limits of acceptable discourse. She didn’t stipulate that she wants these limits broadened only to the right, but she didn’t have to. Writing in Quillette, Lehmann said the Overton window should be shifted so that people can more openly denounce “immigration,” for example by trumpeting the Muslim heritage of sex-crime suspects.

The real question, though, is why so-called liberals support the site, or even read it. The answer to that is that it exploits the same cracks that were exploited by the right wing to fracture the atheist movement: anti-feminism, anti-Islam, anti-trans bigotry. The people who are otherwise horrified by racism will cheerfully overlook the glaringly illiberal perspective of the site to join in #metoo-, Islam-, or trans-bashing.

Perhaps the most important weapon Quillette uses is applying pressure on a few specific fault lines that divide liberal audiences, such as the MeToo movement. Quillette has recruited liberal men accused of sexual harassment or assault, like Elliott, and empowered them as experts on feminism. In his first Quillette piece, Elliott blasted the desire to “believe women,” and blamed one accuser for his poor book sales and his television agent’s not returning his calls. Elliott has since written three more pieces for the magazine and become one of its strongest partisans on Twitter, joking about a “Quillette Hot American Summer” and frequently retweeting the magazine’s diatribes against feminism. “Wow, Quillette has been killing it recently,” he said in one tweet.

Despite his public defense of the magazine, Elliott told me, “People say, ‘Oh they published this or that,’ and I don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t read most of the articles in Quillette.” Asked about the magazine’s repeated promotion of racist pseudoscience, Elliott said, “I don’t agree with that, obviously. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.… The articles you’re talking about, I haven’t read. Maybe if I read one, it would be so offensive that I would say I can’t write for them anymore.”

You can’t be a “dyed-in-the-wool liberal” if you’re willing to smear women, Muslims, and trans persons. You’re just another bigot who only likes white Christian cis men.

The history lesson we all need

You should all take a little time to read David Neiwert’s century of lynching and rioting by white people in America, because we sure as hell didn’t get any of this in our public school history classes. This is the stuff that ought to be taught in fifth grade, except that a) a lot of white parents would scream at administrators about their kids being shown a picture of Grampaw smirking in a mob that’s dismembering and burning a black man, and b) I’d be afraid that there’d be some white parents smirking now and drilling the wrong lesson into their kids.

Even now I look at my fellow white people in that photo and wonder what the fuck is wrong with them. How do you participate in such horrors and ever again claim that you are on the side of what is right?

People would be concerned at teaching such graphic horrors in our classrooms now, but look at that — they were bringing their kids to a lynching, like it was a field trip to the local textile museum.

Mayor Pete gets a bad burn

Ow. Michael Harriot responds to Buttigieg’s claim that black folk just need more inspiration to succeed.

It proves men like him are more willing to perpetuate the fantastic narrative of negro neighborhoods needing more role models and briefcase-carriers than make the people in power stare into the sun and see the blinding light of racism. Get-along moderates would rather make shit up out of whole cloth than wade into the waters of reality. Pete Buttigieg doesn’t want to change anything. He just wants to be something.

Read the whole thing. Especially you, Mr Buttigieg, and after you finish you can just go off and quietly retire from the race.

Blackberries everywhere

Growing up south of Seattle, one of the omnipresent features were the blackberries — everywhere I walked, along the roads, in abandoned fields, along the railroad tracks, there were these impenetrable walls of blackberry brambles. They were a nuisance, but it was great in August because it was like all the paths were lined with candy, you could just pluck huge quantities of fat berries while hardly trying.

But today I read about the history of blackberries in that area, and it starts out disappointing — they’re non-native, introduced by Luther Burbank — but it just keeps getting more OH NO LUTHER YOU DIDN’T.

He started selling a new book that he’d written in his catalogs, The Training of the Human Plant.

Burbank wrote that the crossing, elimination and refining of human strains would result in “an ultimate product that should be the finest race ever known.”

He considered the U.S. the perfect place to practice eugenics, because, at the turn of the century, there were immigrants coming from all over the world. He wrote:

“Look at the material on which to draw. Here is the North, powerful, virile, aggressive, blended with the luxurious, ease-loving, more impetuous South.

“The union of great native mental strength, developed or undeveloped, with bodily vigor, but with inferior mind.”

We’re going to have to pay more attention to Nick Fuentes now

It’s painful, but he really is one of the worst of these right-wing monsters. Watch this smug, slimy scumbag execute standard old holocaust denial with a smile on his face.

Ick.

And now, a word from the Illinois Patriarchy Institute

These guys are always flooding my mailbox with their hand-wringing screeds about the gays and the trans and the non-god-fearing Americans, and lately they’ve been particularly wound up. Why? Because Chick-fil-A Betrays Principles and Faithful Customers. If you can’t trust a soulless giant capitalist chicken-killing and meat-processing restaurant to bash the gays, what are you going to do?

In a stunning act of betrayal, Chick-fil-A’s charitable foundation, the Chick-fil-A Foundation, has announced it will no longer donate to the Salvation Army, Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), or Paul Anderson Youth Home (PAYH). Though Chick-fil-A has not publicly acknowledged the reason for its betrayal, everyone knows what it is. Chick-fil-A is attempting to curry favor with the “LGBTQ+” community that is shredding our social fabric. This policy shift constitutes a cowardly betrayal of Chick-fil-A’s Christian ethos and its Christian customers who have stood by Chick-fil-A through all its trials at the hands of legions of supporters of sexual deviance. #LoveofMoney

Broods of vipers identifying as apostles of justice, equality, tolerance, diversity, inclusivity, and compassion have been protesting and maligning Chick-fil-A since 2012 when Dan Truett Cathy, chairman and chief executive officer, made some public statements in an interview with the Baptist Press supporting true marriage and opposing the legal recognition of homosexual unions as marriages. After homosexuals got wind of Cathy’s theologically orthodox and unremarkable statements, some part of hell broke loose and raged against Chick-fil-A. Fortunately for Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Christians turned out en masse all across the country to show their support with their time and money for Cathy’s stand for truth.

Wow. I haven’t been called a brood of vipers in days, and usually it’s by angry atheists on an anti-SJW crusade. It’s good to see a Christian organization returning to its roots and its heritage of hatred, and the True Meaning of the words of the Bible.

They should have waited, though. Don’t you worry, Chick-fil-A still hates those non-Christian sexual deviants!

Chick-fil-A says it will now focus its charitable efforts in three areas: education, homelessness, and hunger. But when asked more specifically, it did not go so far as to say that it will no longer donate to organizations that oppose LGBTQ rights.

“No organization will be excluded from future consideration–faith-based or non-faith-based,” Chick-fil-A President and COO Tim Tassopoulos said in a statement to VICE.

See? The door is still open for a policy of bigotry. You just have to cater to their desire for dollars, as Jesus would expect you to do. This change is only motivated by money, as they see all those potential customers walking by their doors on the way to Popeye’s Chicken. That’s really all this is, a cautious ploy to expand their customer base in the face of competition.

Despite attempts to move away from politics, the company has been unable to shake its homophobic reputation. Just last month, Chick-fil-A was forced to close its very first location in the U.K. after only eight days following protests and pressure from groups promoting LGBTQ rights.

Disclosure: I can’t claim to have boycotted Chick-fil-A, because I’ve never eaten there, never been tempted even before they revealed their bigotry. And now I don’t eat there because of the vegetarian thing.

I have eaten at Popeye’s, decades ago, and it was really good. I guess if I had to break down and eat a dead bird, I’d prefer to go there anyway, no matter what openly Christian Chick-fil-A said to make amends. Although I really doubt that Popeye’s management is full of secularists and atheists.

HIS EMAILS THO

The latest totally unsurprising scandal: emails from Stephen Miller to Breitbart reveal that he is a flaming racist. He loves confederate flags, Calvin Coolidge, eugenics, and racist novels. He was trying to shape the coverage at Breitbart, which was just fine with the editors there, who are just as racist as Miller.

McHugh told Hatewatch that Breitbart editors introduced her to Miller in 2015 with an understanding he would influence the direction of her reporting. For that reason, and because Miller would have regarded her as a fellow traveler of the anti-immigrant movement, McHugh sometimes starts conversations with Miller in the emails, seeking his opinion on news stories. Other times, Miller directly suggests story ideas to McHugh, or tells her how to shape Breitbart’s coverage. Periodically, Miller asks McHugh if he can speak to her by phone, taking conversations offline.

“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh told Hatewatch.

Miller still has his job and the support of our president.

Oh, and did you know that Facebook still regards Breitbart as a high quality news source?

Facebook’s launch of a new section on its flagship app dedicated to “deeply-reported and well-sourced” journalism sparked immediate controversy on Friday over the inclusion of Breitbart News, a publication whose former executive chairman explicitly embraced the “alt-right”.

Basically, the KKK is now running the country and major media outlets. Are you OK with this?

Who the heck is Josh Dietz?

Dietz is one of those well-groomed young white men with a brain full of slithery slimy worms. He’s a white nationalist with a podcast and a YouTube channel who’s been palsy-walsy with some of the nastiest Nazis in town.

…Dietz hosts the McSpencer Group alongside Spencer, perhaps the best known American neo-Nazi and a founding member of the so-called alt-right. For hours at a time, Dietz and a rotating selection of guests help plot the future of the white identity movement, touching on subjects from eugenics to Kurt Cobain (“a symbol of white displacement”) to the “negrofication” of American culture.

[Following publication of this article, videos posted to Spencer’s YouTube account featuring Dietz were pulled down. Several of Dietz’s podcast episodes can still be found on the streaming site BitChute.]

“They can’t speak eloquently. They can’t dress a particular way. They can’t show enthusiasm for education or career advancement or, I don’t know, monogamous healthy relationships without out of wedlock children,” said Dietz, during an episode with the author Colin Flaherty recorded earlier this year. (Flaherty, incidentally, was the voice behind the explicitly racist video that NYPD union boss Ed Mullins apologized for sharing this past summer).

Dietz frequently appears on other similar podcasts, and his own show, No Apologies, has featured guests such as Patrick Little, who believes Jews should be raised as livestock, and notorious neo-Nazi David Duke. In a conversation with Duke earlier this year, Dietz asks about the “issue” of right-wing figures maintaining relationships with Jewish people, and whether it “makes them emotionally blind to criticism.”

“You really can’t trust them,” says Duke. “The only Jews that I really have any respect for are those Jews that expose Jewish power and expose Jewish racism and expose Jewish efforts to destroy us.”

Following the lengthy monologue, Dietz replies: “That’s so well said.”

In addition, though, he has a Masters degree in clinical psychology and has been teaching at various small colleges in the New York area.

According to a since-deleted LinkedIn page, Dietz has also lectured at Brooklyn College, York College, Queensborough Community College, Medgar Evers College and New York City College of Technology. Inquires to those schools were not immediately returned.

A spokesperson for St. Francis College—where Dietz was listed in an employee directory until Friday morning—said that he last taught there in Fall 2018, and “will not return as an instructor in the future.” Further questions about Dietz’s time at St. Francis were not answered.

Wow. An openly racist man was teaching at Medgar Evers College…how did the poor fellow cope? Every day he walked through those doors he was rebuked by the name of a black civil rights activist, and in all of his classes he had to teach young black students. It must have been so hard for him. At least he could go home at night and vent his feelings on the internet, vomiting up all his hate and inadequacy for an adoring audience of fascists.

He’s losing that now. His allies are tearing down his videos, his website, TheDietzMethod, where he promoted his hypnosis and life-coaching business, is gone, and you can bet that no university is going to hire him, even for those awful little adjuncting positions, ever again. It turns out you can’t be trusted to teach if you think a lot of your students are inferior subhumans because of the color of their skin. Before you start bewailing the loss of free speech at modern universities, keep in mind that my dream of being a professor at Liberty University has also been crushed. Oh, woe.

One might wonder how he came to be this way, and sadly, he followed a common and predictable trajectory.

In conversations on his shows, Dietz occasionally refers to his own path toward white nationalism. He started as a traditional conservative, then became involved in Men’s Rights circles, writing for Return of the Kings, a pick-up artist website, and self-publishing a book billed as the “politically incorrect guide to dating.” He was once a fan of Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys founder, but over time has come to regard that strand of the “alt-lite” as too moderate.

Once again, men’s rights misogyny was the gateway to a rat’s nest of toxic ideas.

Also, I’m curious: they mention that Dietz’s videos are being taken down (by who, it doesn’t say), yet I discover that Richard Spencer, the McSpencer Group, and the National Policy Institute still have active YouTube channels. Were the Nazis just overlooked?

Needs more Nazi-punching

A group of cowardly jerk-offs gathered at the Emmett Till memorial, which they can’t shoot up anymore because it’s been made bullet-proof, to whimper a bit.

We are here at the Emmett Till monument that represents the Civil Rights Movement for blacks. What we want to know is, where are all of the white people?

Huh. Strange question. I can at least say they aren’t lying in a coffin, battered into unrecognizability, because they were the ones doing the battering. Did they expect a complementary monument to the racists who beat Till to death, shot him, mutilated his body, and threw him into a river? I don’t see any heroics or sacrifices made by those white people, because they got acquitted by an all-white jury.

Nothing has changed. Want to hear Richard Spencer rage about Jews and black people, saying My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit? We have been blessed with a recording.

I guess that partly answers where all the white people were.

You know, Richard B. Spencer still has a Twitter account, still gets invited to pontificate on CNN, is still favorably regarded by the alt-right.

Are people still arguing about whether it’s good or bad to punch Nazis? Because think that debate is now settled.