Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will; her fight against this violation went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissed her rights with the remark that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Now you can see for yourself how imbecilic Carrie Buck was. Some of Buck’s letters have been published. Here’s one sample:

Dearest Mrs. Berry, Will write to you this A.M. This leaves me real well and getting along just fine. Mrs. Berry I have wrote to Dorris several times since I have been here and haven’t gotten any answer from it. I guess there are lots of girls going away now. I had a letter from mother here several days ago and said for me to send her some things. Will it be o.k. for me to do so or not. Will you please let me know. Give her my love and tell her I will write to her later as I haven’t got time to write now as I have got some work to do. Give Miss Vian (?) my love and all of the girls. Well I must close for now. With Love, Carrie B., Bland, Va.

That’s perfectly normal, an average human being with average human concerns having a conversation with another person. These are also scans of her letters, so you can also see that she had remarkably clear penmanship — not that penmanship is the mark of a worthy human, but it does show that she had normal skills and values.

What we did to this woman was a tragedy and a crime.

I was reading about this secret Nazi convention back in my hometown of Seattle. It is, as expected, a collection of unpleasant, ignorant people, who are also prosperous young professional men, so I suspect it’s the kind of crowd Mythicist Milwaukee would love to attract, so maybe they should read it for tips.

But there’s one bit that picqued my interest. Apparently there’s a famous Nazi author lurking back home.

When I’d asked Krafft back in 2015 how many white nationalists resided in Seattle, he responded “not many.” The only local voice for white separatism was the laughably uncharismatic Harold Covington of Northwest Front, who according to Krafft, asks people for money immediately upon meeting them. Surprisingly, some white nationalist circles now hold Harold Covington in high regard. That’s especially true among younger followers (including the church Shooter Dylann Roof). His “racially aware” Northwest sci-fi novels are required reading among convention attendees. Some have read all of them. To prep for the forum, I planned on reading Covington’s best-known works. I started with a young adult novel about a delinquent and his cheerleader girlfriend in the Seattle race war, but gave up after forty pages because the book is unreadable.

“Unreadable”? That sounds like a challenge. So I looked him up on Amazon to see if any were available for free, since no way in hell was I paying for them. None are free. But some had some had fairly extensive free previews, so I could get a taste. It was not a good flavor. These things are full of misogyny, racism, and violence by smug, oblivious white men with guns.

So I started on one, called The Brigade. The beginning was not auspicious. It’s about a guy who decides to murder two women because they got a friend of his arrested and thrown into jail. He was arrested because — of course he did nothing wrong — he called his girlfriend a “dyke”. That is enough of an excuse for ZOG to throw an innocent white man into prison!

The real problem is that she was a…wait for it…a feminist.

“Oh, she was always like that, ever since she came back from the university,” said King with a shrug. “I mean, what else do you expect from U of O? I just figured she rebelled against her religious upbringing when she went to college, trying to be chic and fit in, and then she just never sort of grew out of it. I actually used to think it was kind of cute, kind of her way of retaining her youth.”

“Yeah, well, baby tarantulas grow up into big fucking poisonous spiders,” Hatfield reminded him.

Yeah, I went to the U of O, too. No wonder I turned out this way. But I have to object: tarantulas are not poisonous. Neither are feminists.

But you might be wondering what terrible thing his girlfriend did to deserve having the criminal insult of “dyke” thrown at her. He caught her in flagrante with another woman!

Which leads to a hilarious revelation.

“Strike her?” laughed King bitterly. “My God, have you seen that creature? She’s built like a bulldozer! I lost my temper is all, when I walked into my living room and found them doing–dear Christ, what they were doing–I can’t even talk about it!”

“The Chocolate Ritual,” said Hatfield. “I know. It is supposed to be for bonding between female lovers. Most people have no idea of what homosexuals actually do. You were unlucky enough to get a crash course.”

The things you will learn in this book. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read much further, because the original article is correct: this book is unreadable, and stops being funny fast. Yes, Our Hero sneaks into a house, and callously murders the two lesbians with a big gun. It kind of makes all the protestations about innocent, harmless men being unjustly accused by conniving women ring false. Not funny at all.

There’s also lots of crap about organizing paramilitary brigades, and boring details about military weapons. Not recommended, except for burning or wiping your ass.

Any lesbians reading this should chime in with an explanation of what the Chocolate Ritual might be, though, since I clearly don’t know as much about what homosexuals do as Harold Covington.

He was thoughtful, and admitted when he was wrong.

The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida. I always knew it had to do with the Civil War, but the South had adopted it as its logo. I was pretty ignorant of what it actually meant. It was on a flagpole in front of the courthouse and I often saw it in Western movies. I just honestly didn’t give it much thought, though I should have.

In 1985, I released an album called Southern Accents. It began as a concept record about the South, but the concept part slipped away probably 70 percent or so into the album. I just let it go, but the Confederate flag became part of the marketing for the tour. I wish I had given it more thought. It was a downright stupid thing to do.

He gives a great answer, and he doesn’t hesitate to reject all the awful things done under that flag.

Beyond the flag issue, we’re living in a time that I never thought we’d see. The way we’re losing black men and citizens in general is horrific. What’s going on in society is unforgivable. As a country, we should be more concerned with why the police are getting away with targeting black men and killing them for no reason. That’s a bigger issue than the flag. Years from now, people will look back on today and say, “You mean we privatized the prisons so there’s no profit unless the prison is full?” You’d think someone in kindergarten could figure out how stupid that is. We’re creating so many of our own problems.

He’s also a reminder that Southerners can be great and good people.

For years, the most unpleasant characters on the internet have been using the cry of “free speech!” as an unrestricted, unquestioned privilege that must be respected over all others. It’s magic. No compromise is allowed; all you have to do is invoke “free speech”, and you can bulldoze all over other people’s expectations of privacy, or safety, or even of their right of free speech. I think free speech is a good thing, and we shouldn’t tolerate government dictating what we’re allowed to say, and people should be able to freely discuss their opinions and ideas in a participatory democracy, but that needs to be balanced with other rights as well (“what other rights?”, I can imagine the basement-dwelling trolls of the internet asking, “there are no other rights but my right to spew the sewage floating in my brain everywhere.”)

So we should appreciate the free speech that allows someone to say, “I believe I have the right to own an M16,” even though I personally disagree with that and I think there ought to be a heck of a lot more gun control, but that right to free speech ends when they add, “and I think I have the right to track down your address and blow your brains out if you disagree.” That changes everything from a good if annoying discussion to a threat and a danger. Likewise if they try a lesser threat, “and I think I have the right to force you to argue with me and I’m going to harass you until you agree.”

There is an argument going on right now between fascist white nationalists and universities in which administrators and centrists are caving in before the magical mantra of “free speech!” This is what happens when you lose perspective and decide that one right trumps all the others. In the name of Free Speech, people who believe millions of other people should lose all of their rights and be deported, deprived of recourse to legal redress, be kicked out of school, or even imprisoned or murdered, get to further incite these gross violations of liberty on college campuses.

In a grotesque parody of the Berkeley students who stood up for civil rights on Sproul Plaza in 1964, the far right has made free speech on campus a shield for hate groups as it recruits and organizes. College administrators’ knee-jerk defenses for free speech avoid addressing legitimate concerns regarding safety and academic freedom for faculty and students.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ quoted John Stuart Mill in defense of free speech, but conspicuously left out the context. Mill firmly believed speech that advocated harm to others is an abuse of the right to speak. In 1969 the Supreme Court agreed, ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio that there is no free speech right to advocate violence when violence is likely to occur. There are, in fact, solid legal reasons, particularly after Charlottesville, why campuses can and should deny a platform to far-right speakers, precisely because they encourage violence against specific groups and enable situations of imminent danger.

“Free speech” is an all-purpose slogan disingenuously used to mask violent threats and an outright take-over of, ironically enough, the right of free speech. You don’t really believe that Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, and Milo Yiannopoulos are making a principled defense of socialists, communists, academics, artists, and progressives to discuss their ideas, do you? They hate those guys! They want to intimidate and suppress liberals, and have found that mouthing the words “free speech” are a great way to do it, since moderates tend to cave before it.

The threat of white-supremacist violence is real. Leaked threads from an alt-right message board reveal the sadistic aspirations of self-identified Freikorps who gathered online in hopes that their “Day of the Rope”—referring to a Kristallnacht-inspired mass lynching and genocide depicted in the white-nationalist novel The Turner Diaries—would kick off at Berkeley on April 27 when Ann Coulter had been scheduled to speak.

No altercations materialized that day, but determination to provoke violence and justify a state crackdown on antifascist resistance motivates far-right groups to keep coming back to Berkeley. Breaking this iconic “commie” stronghold, in their eyes, would achieve a major milestone on their path to power.

Right-wing speaking events—including the “Free Speech Week” scheduled for late September at Berkeley, featuring the odious trifecta of Yiannopoulos, Coulter, and Steve Bannon—are part of an increasingly coordinated nationwide effort among far-right groups to recruit on college campuses. Using free speech as a wedge to silence dissent and discredit opposition, they intend to radicalize white youth by waging psychological warfare on academic leftists, social-justice organizations, and minorities. It should be no surprise that Jeremy Christian, white-supremacist murderer of two men in Portland, cried out “Free speech or die!” during his day in court. For white supremacists, the push for free speech is directly connected to their campaigns of terror.

We also mustn’t forget that these “free speech” advocates are using it as a tool to do harm to minorities and women — and behind their strategy is an appeal to the comfortably privileged to sit back and let them do the dirty work of securing their sheltered nice ideals at the expense of the life and liberty of the underclasses.

Tone-deaf campus administrators continue to ignore the warnings of students and faculty, and prioritize making campuses “safe for free speech” by militarizing university spaces with a heavy police presence—unsurprisingly, with disproportionately detrimental effects on students of color. Violent confrontations can be avoided entirely if responsible decision-makers acknowledge that fascist gatherings by their very presence pose a threat to our spaces of work and learning. Trump’s repeal of DACA this week makes this imperative even more urgent; we must not forget that what is being contested at Berkeley is not just “free speech” for racists but the enforcement of sanctuary-campus policies against ICE.

It cannot be the sole responsibility of communities facing white-supremacist violence to be suitably respectable victims for public consumption. Commentators, politicians, and campus administrators must reject the alt-right’s framing of this as a battle over free speech. Regardless of the far right’s strategies to divide us, we must prioritize the safety of students and amplify the voices of the vulnerable—not promote narratives that serve racist ideologies.

Laurie Penny has some vigorous words for the Nazis — and that’s free speech, too. When all you’re fighting for is the right to be a shitlord, you don’t get to claim the mantle of Hero of Free Speech. There is a whole interlinked network of sometimes conflicting rights, and picking the easiest one to defend because it doesn’t compromise your lifestyle of blaming the less privileged for your failings isn’t heroic.

So let’s be clear: getting fired because you hate women is not an equivalent hardship to getting fired because you happen to be one. People who have been disowned by their parents for being gay or transgender aren’t going to have sympathy when your mum and dad find your stash of homophobic murder fantasies and change the locks. Getting attacked for being a racist is not the same as getting attacked because you are black. The definition of oppression is not “failure to see your disgusting opinions about the relative human value of other living breathing people reflected in society at large.” Being shamed, including in public, for holding intolerant, bigoted opinions is not an infringement of your free speech. You are not fighting oppression. You are, at best, fighting criticism. If that’s the hill you really want to die on, fine, but don’t kid yourself it’s the moral high ground. I repeat: You cannot be a rebel for the status quo. It would be physically easier to go and fuck yourself, and I suggest you try.

The fact that some people—the women, people of color, immigrants and queer people you want put back in their proper place—disapprove of you does not make you edgy. A bag of cotton wool is edgier than you lot. Fighting for things to go back to the way they were twenty or thirty or fifty years ago does not constitute a bold resistance movement. It constitutes the militant arm of the Daily Mail comments section. Fighting real oppression involves risk, and before you start, I’m talking about real risk, not some girl on the internet calling you a cowardly subliterate waste of human skin, like I just did.

I’ll support your call for free speech when you stop using it to marginalize the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone else, and when it stops being a proxy for defending the status quo and your privileged status rather than the right that allows the oppressed to have a voice.

Once again, shallow YouTube Personality PewDiePie has blurted out a racist slur in a video. Hey, it was just a heated gaming moment, says notoriously dimwitted Breitbart apologist Ian Miles Cheong. He has 57 million subscribers. He made $1.4 million a month for squealing in gaming videos. He is the very definition of the superficial, lightweight, know-nothing and contribute-nothing pinnacle of internet vapidity. And he’s very good at it.

So he puked out hate in a heated gaming moment. That apparently excuses everything. I guess my gaming moments have never been sufficiently heated to prompt me to shout out bigotry against other people…or maybe I don’t feel that degree of bias. I think I might say the usual swears — damn, shit, fuck — in those heated moments, but I’m not sure why you’d suddenly spit against a whole people. Filthy Norwegians! Gosh, I lost my game, I suddenly hate Saxons. Whoops, blame that one on the Luxembourgians.

But despite being appalled at this talentless ass, you have to recognize that there’s not much to be done. How many of his subscribers will drop his account because he’s prone to racist outbursts? None. I predict he’ll gain some. Contrarians, alt-righters, channers, Nazis, members of the KKK will sign up just to show solidarity. YouTube will do nothing, because that’s their core constituency.

Stupid triumphs.

Still, he hasn’t been entirely silent: His most recent video, which argues that this year’s hurricane season is nothing out of the ordinary and shouldn’t be politicized, was posted earlier Sunday. It already has more than two million views.

Here come the climate change deniers, the anti-science brigade, the Republicans, all ready to sign up and swell his legion of assholes.

This video is profane and loud, so don’t play it at work. Wait, it’s Sunday morning — it’s perfectly OK to play it in church, if you find yourself wasting time there.

Anyway, a cop pulls someone over for failure to use his turn signal, and walks up to the driver with his gun drawn…because you know that someone who forgets to signal when driving on an empty street is one badass renegade wild thing who is likely to be on his way to a bank robbery or a murder or, I don’t know, a shoplifting spree. Only this guy turns out to be worse: he’s a man with a cell phone camera and a righteous rant.

Cop pulls over a black man for failure to signal, walks to his car with his gun drawn… Black dude is my fucking hero💯💯💯💯💯🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆😂😂😂😂👍👍👍👍👍👍👍 pic.twitter.com/S8ef8Mx4Kk

— SIX_FOOT_5 (@Choco_Optimus) September 10, 2017

I wish I could say I’d do the same, except the cops look at the color of my skin and see me as an agent of the status quo, so they would never come up to my door with their gun in hand. I’d probably be terrified into silence if they did.

Kudos to this man standing up to The Man.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed this: white nationalism is commonly characterized by the media as a primarily economic issue. This is the party line from the New York Times; they’re constantly banging on about how Trump voters are just desperately poor (not true), and reporting on interviews and focus groups with disaffected moderates where they hear them complaining about employment and regulations and immigrants competing for their jobs (because, apparently, young Republicans dream of someday working in a poultry slaughterhouse).

Another victim of this desperate aversion to actually pointing out endemic racism is the New Statesman. Writing about some new right wing scheme called The Anglosphere Project in 2000, you might get the impression that this movement is defined by its stance on free trade, entrepreneuralism, and market policy — it’s all very wonky.

For the moment, it remains semi-subterranean, new, a little shocking – like the ideas of rolling back the power of trade unions which the Tories were rehearsing in the mid-1970s; or the attack on comprehensive welfare systems which the US policy-thinker Charles Murray was testing out around the same time; or the foretelling of the collapse of the Soviet Union which analysts such as Zbigniew Brzezinski were putting into public debate, to general disbelief, a little later.

This idea, or rather cluster of ideas, has similar origins – in the Anglo-American intellectual right, a milieu at once self- confident, vengeful, well funded and very sharp. It is based on the belief that the transatlantic right needs some kind of coherent internationalist vision to set against the corporatist European Union. The answer is what the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson has called the Anglosphere. The US, Canada, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and much of the West Indies, it is pointed out, enjoy a common language, a common culture, common legal traditions and, above all, common entrepreneurial instincts. Can these countries create a loose association of some kind? Mexico, though it does not meet all the criteria, would have to fit in, since it is already part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) – which is central to the Anglosphere project, both economically and politically. Norway might fit in, given that it is negotiating with Nafta. Japan, backward-looking and over-regulated, would not.

You should be suspicious, though. The Anglosphere Project was founded by John O’Sullivan, a Thatcherite, Conrad Black, the Canadian version of Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Conquest, a right-wing historian, now deceased.

I don’t know whether it has evolved in the last 17 years, or whether the real motivation was lurking beneath the capitalist veneer all along, but if you check out Project Anglosphere right now, it’s a hotbed of seething racist buzzwords. They are all about our “heritage”. We must defeat “diversity” and “multiethnicity”. Repeal “multiculturalism” now.

In this turbulent era an amoral, ruthless Globalism and it’s resulting pathologies threaten the very existence of the Anglosphere. In response nationalists are on the march. Our principles guarantee social stability, cultural coherence and genuine unity – unlike globalist ideologies such as Multiculturalism which guarantee intractable social conflict. It is becoming increasingly apparent that ethnic, religious, political and sexual violence are the toxic fruits of ‘Diversity’ extremism. Only Nationalism has the necessary antidotes and political will to heal the deliberately induced polarisation and fragmentation of the Western world.

It’s an anti-immigrant white nationalist organization. I suspect that that’s what it was all along. But gosh, whining about the North American Free Trade Agreement is a nice distraction from the underlying motivation of the group.

It also has something in common with other far right groups: it’s primary business seems to be churning out propaganda, especially internet-digestible memes. Oh, look, they have black friends!

It’s even more blatant on the @ProjectAnglo twitter feed. Nothing but memes. They follow Ann Coulter, VDARE, Paul Joseph Watson, Katie Hopkins, James Delingpole, and a few cartoon frogs. You want to see the ugly underbelly of the internet, though, all you have to do is look at who is following them. Here’s a sampling of the profiles of typical pro Anglo Project supporters.

ᚹᚺᛁᛏᛖ᛫ᛈᚱᛁᛞᛖ, Nationalist,ProLife,Protector of Western Civilization’s EuroCentric Heritage, Identity & Traditions, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ,ᛟPutinᛟLePenᛟCharles Martel

Right Wing Meme Squad. Supporter of ethnic cleansing- pls no bully meh.

🐸 Alt-Right. American Nationalist. Pro-White. Reactionary. #HailVictory

Rising sea levels can be attributed to Libtard tears, not global warming! I follow back to any Trump supporting patriots. I fully support Obama for prison!

Trigger the tards!! Wish my dad’s were Joe Rogan, Lawrence Krauss, and uncle Jordan b Peterson, aunt Camille Paglia, Princess Kenny. Kekistani Sith Lord

I really hope Krauss is embarrassed by the company he’s keeping there.

But the main point is that the economic jibber-jabber is just a mask over the real reason these people are pro-Trump and pro-America and pro-Britain — the truth is that they’re really just xenophobic, hate-mongering bigots who’ve found that complaining about free trade (not that there aren’t good arguments on that matter) is a sneaky way to virtue-signal to their fellow jingoists and start a racist asshat club. That’s what they are.