The Morris NorthStar can f*ck off and die

How fitting. That wretched, badly-written, psychopathically ‘conservative’ alternative campus newspaper for racist homophobes, the Morris NorthStar, was hand-delivered to my office today. They do this all the time: pile up a bunch of copies on the racks around campus, and then come by my office and personally slide one under my door or give it to me at my desk. They don’t do this for any other faculty in my building. I’m just special, I guess.

I’ve had enough. I’ve posted this sign outside my door now.

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Zero tolerance for Nazi fuckwits. No more.

I demand to be put on the Professor Watch List

They’ve been coming for women, minorities, and immigrants, so you just knew they get around to college professors as enemies of the state. A group called “Turning Point USA” has created the Professor Watch List, which includes a list to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom (doesn’t that sound lovely and vaguely familiar?), and also includes a form to turn in suspected leftists. It’s like a McCarthyite wet dream.

One problem: I’m not on the list. In fact, nobody at Morris is on the list. I fear our problem is that we’re such a little sanctuary of progressive thought that we’ve got a shortage of far right wing rats. I must make my case for being included on the list.

Look at that. I didn’t even have to get into the Cracker Incident.

I hope this omission can be corrected rapidly. If I am listed, I can also rat out virtually all of my colleagues, too, who are all raging liberals (OK, with a few exceptions). I’d like to see my university more prominently acknowledged on a right-wing enemies list.

Nazis. Nazis, nazis, nazis.

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Watch the video of alt-right — excuse me, fucking goddamn nazis praising Führer Trump and making Nazi salutes and questioning the humanity of Jews and liberals, and then try to tell me that racism isn’t what got that orange asshole elected. My wife’s father, my uncles, my grandfather fought in a brutal war to end that fascism, and now the Republican party has brought them to power here.

Hail Trump? Christ.

I know the answer to this one!

All you Christians complaining that moderate Muslims do nothing about ISIS…what have you done about the KKK?

All you Christians complaining that moderate Muslims do nothing about ISIS…what have you done about the KKK?

That’s easy. They’ve encouraged them to get rid of the sheets, stop burning crosses, put on nice clothes, get elected to high office, and perpetuate the same hate and discrimination and oppression under a different name: “alt right”, “white nationalism”, “conservativism”. The KKK, a Christian racist organization, has shriveled away as it took over the Republican party, a Christian racist organization.

The Church Lady now says, “Don’t you dare call their policies racist! That’s offensive!”

The #NODAPL protests are still going on

It’s definitely winter up here in the upper Midwest. The temperature is right around freezing, there’s at least 15cm of snow on the ground, and the roads and sidewalks are slick with hard-packed ice. And they’re using water cannons on protesters at Standing Rock.

This is not just cruel — it’s dangerous. I’m sure residents of the Dakotas are just as conscious of the risks of getting wet outside in frigid weather as we are here in the slightly more urban state of Minnesota. You just don’t do that. You can kill people in this weather.

And of course they’re using rubber bullets and tear gas, and roughing up protesters and throwing them in dog kennels.

She told me that they were arrested at a prayer ceremony lead by camp elders, and that she had been slammed to the ground by uniformed officers with shields and helmets that kept her from distinguishing whether they were law enforcement or national guard.

“It was three against one, that’s their strategy,” she said, “there’s tear gas in the air everywhere. They didn’t fire it directly at me, but it’s everywhere.”

I was told that when they were arrested, they weren’t read their rights until after they spent a day in jail.

Her description of the arrest matched my student’s description. She told me they were bussed to a facility where they were kept in dog cages with urine stains on the floor, pictures of dogs hung on the walls. Women were separated from men with chain link fencing and a tarp.

They said their phones and money were confiscated, the money seized and turned into procurement cards and calling cards, allegedly without consent. The balance was not returned upon release, she said.

The state of the jail uniforms made the women feel vulnerable, she said, and the tarp separating the women from the view of the camp’s men exacerbated that feeling. She went on to tell me they were strip-searched.

“It was just turn your head and cough, just spread your cheeks and cough, but they didn’t tell us what they were going to, so when the woman approached me with rubber gloves on, I braced for a body cavity search. It’s worse not knowing, you know?”

America! This is what we’re like before the orange fascist takes power. What’s it going to be like next year?

You can still donate to the Standing Rock Sioux, and they’re going to need it. It takes courage and dedication to confront this kind of oppression.

Normalizing racism

A guy named Richard Spencer organized a conference this past weekend for his organization, the inocuously named National Policy Institute. This is how NPI describes themselves.

NPI is an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world. It was founded in 2005 by William Regnery and Samuel T. Francis, in conjunction with Louis R. Andrews.

Can we knock off the bullshit? All this is is the rebranding of white supremacy movements and the whitewashing of unabashed racism. None of this is about protecting the “heritage, identity, and future” of white people; we white people are doing just fine and can luxuriate in our privileged status. I don’t have to get off my butt to defend my good fortune, I can sit back and take it for granted.

This is about putting down other human beings who would like — and deserve — to share equally in all of the rights and privileges we already have. It’s about denying to others what we regard as our due.

They’re succeeding. The chilling thing is how easily the media are manipulated, and how willingly they bend to their efforts to recast themselves as something new and completely different from the KKK and skinheads. This article in the LA Times is a perfect example.

This was the white nationalist lobby — the alt-right — coming to town for a victory lap after Donald Trump’s election, assuming what they see as their rightful place influencing the new administration.

“An awakening among everyone has occurred with this Trump election,” Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist think tank, said during opening remarks. “We’re not quite the establishment now, but I think we should start acting like it.”

Several hundred pro-white nationalists showed up for the day-long confab, buoyed by Trump’s popularity and the role they now intend to play in bringing white identity politics to Washington.

Sitting around conference tables, the formally dressed men more resembled Washington lobbyists than the robed Ku Klux Klansmen or skinhead toughs that often represent white supremacists, though they share many familiar views.

I don’t assume the reporter is at all sympathetic to their cause, but she willingly accepts their rebranding and their movement into the mainstream, as if it is just the new fact of life that must be objectively reported rather than opposed. Nowhere in the piece are the words “race” or “racism” or “racist” used. You won’t find the words “black” or “Latin” used, either — isn’t it odd how an article about the rise of racist fascists that takes the angle of journalistic abstraction doesn’t, in this case, even bother to get the perspective of anyone who is the target of this focused hatred? The opinions of the white people attending this conference about white people are simply assumed to be all that needs to be brought up. “He said/she said” journalism so readily becomes “We said/they’re ignored” journalism when race becomes an issue.

Also chilling: this remark by one of the attendees.

“We are the epicenter of the right now in terms of intellect,” said 30-year-old Nathan Damigo of California. “We are the culture creators of the right.”

“Intellect”? Jesus. These “scientific” racists are always so ignorant of basic biology and no one in these articles ever bothers to question their claim to “intellectualism”. There’s not one bit of it anywhere in their rationalizations — it’s all pseudoscience and aggressive posturing. “Sporting the same haircut of short sides and back with a familiar flop on top” like a uniform does not make you clever.

But I’ll agree that they are the new “culture creators of the right”. The right is building a new culture that is openly comfortable with racists. They are proudly making American conservatism synonymous with racism, while at the same time sniffing indignantly if you dare to point out that fact. And we’ve got lots of liberals going along with this rebranding, protesting that we’re going to offend a lot of voters if we are so brazen as to recognize that the views they are espousing are in fact racist.

It also reminds me of this infamous passage from 2004 about the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Do not let them get away with using a blasé media to normalize their delusions. Remember how disastrous that reshaping of perceived reality was in the Bush administration, and realize that their new efforts are going to be just as destructive.

They’re racists. They’re fascists. Their goal is to undermine civil liberties and loot the country to benefit themselves and their ugly, hateful kin. You can’t honestly report on Richard Spencer or Steve Bannon or Donald Trump without stating this fact.

Scientology sucks

The actress Shelley Duvall was recently interviewed by the odious Dr Phil, who worked her current mental illness for ratings. One unfortunate consequence of that interview, though, is that Vivian Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick’s daughter, has started fundraising to supposedly benefit Duvall. Unfortunate because Kubrick is a Scientologist, which calls her motives and actual intent into question.

Vivian Kubrick became a Scientologist in 1999 at which point she became estranged from the rest of her family. She did not attend the funeral of her own sister, Anya Kubrick, in 2009, nor did she visit her sister when she was battling cancer.

Scientology has a long history of hostility towards psychiatry. For details please read the article Scientology’s war on psychiatry at Salon.com, HERE. Another good one is Scientologists Really, Really Hate Psychiatrists on Vice.com, HERE.

The location listed on Vivian Kubrick’s Go Fund Me page for Duvall is Clearwater, FL. Neither Kubrick nor Duvall lives in Clearwater; it is, however, the location of The Church of Scientology’s business operations.

Kubrick has not had any contact with Duvall since filming wrapped on The Shining in 1979; they have not kept in touch over the years and were never close. Kubrick is not doing this at Duvall’s request, nor is she working with Duvall’s family.

Kubrick is requesting $100K without knowing the details of Duvall’s condition, or how much treatment will cost.

Methods used within the Scientology community to treat mental illness are questionable and potentially dangerous. Again, read the articles above.

Should Kubrick’s affiliation with Scientology, an organization that “maintains the very notion of mental illness is a fraud”, disqualify her from intervening in the life of a woman who clearly needs intensive, professional, psychiatric help?

So she has no real connection with Duvall, Duvall has not asked for this, and the request is maddeningly vague — just “Give me money, and somehow I might use it to help someone with psychiatric issues, despite not believing in psychiatry at all”.

Kubrick has so far raised over $22,000 just by appealing to people’s sympathy for a celebrity. Stop. You don’t know where the money you’re giving is going to go at all.