Anger and fear have greeted the return to power of former US strongman Donald Trump, a corrupt far-white extremist coup plotter who is also a convicted felon and rapist, following this week’s shock presidential election result.

Ethnic tensions have been on the rise with members of the historically oppressed minority Black ethnic group reporting receiving threatening text messages, warning of a return to an era of enslavement.

In a startling editorial, the tension-wracked country’s paper of record, The New York Times, declared that the country had made “a perilous choice” and that its fragile democracy was now on “a precarious course”.

• READ MORE: Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza ‘betrayal of true feminism’
• ‘All-out catastrophe’: Famine fears as Israeli siege of north Gaza tightens
• Pacific nation leaders look forward to strengthened US relations with Trump
• All in all, Trump’s election is a calamity in he making — Paul Buchanan
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

President-elect Trump’s victory marks the second time in eight years the extremist leader, who is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of using campaign funds to pay off a porn star he had cheated on his wife with, has defeated a female opponent from the ruling Democratic Party.

Women continue to struggle to reach the highest office in the deeply conservative nation where their rights are increasingly under attack and child marriage is widespread.

This has prompted traumatised supporters of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had been handpicked to replace the unpopular, ageing incumbent, Joe Biden, to accuse American voters of racism to sexism.

“It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from Black . . . who do not want a woman leading them,” insisted one TV anchor, adding that there “might be race issues with Hispanics that don’t want a Black woman as president of the United States.”

Hateful tribal rhetoric
The hateful tribal rhetoric has also included social media posts calling for any people of mixed race who failed to vote for Harris to be deported and for intensification of the genocide in Gaza due to Arab-American rejection of Harris over her support for the continued provision of weapons to the brutal apartheid state committing it.

America Makes a Perilous Choice https://t.co/sKW5ZZa3Q3

— Xandre Rodríguez (@xandrerodriguez) November 6, 2024

“Victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan,” goes the saying popularised by former US President John F Kennedy, who was shot 61 years ago this month.

The reluctance to attribute the loss to the grave and gratuitous missteps made by the Harris campaign has mystified America-watchers around the world.

As an example, analysts point to her wholesale embrace of the Biden regime’s genocidal policy in the Middle East despite opinion polls showing that it was alienating voters.

Harris and her supporters had tried to counter that by claiming that Trump would also be genocidal and that she would ameliorate the pain of bereaved families in the US by lowering the price of groceries.

However, the election results showed that this was not a message voters appreciated. “Genocide is bad politics,” said one Arab-American activist.

Worried over democracy
As the scale of the extremists’ electoral win becomes increasingly clear, having taken control of not just the presidency but the upper house of Congress as well, many are worried about the prospects for democracy in the US which is still struggling to emerge from Trump’s first term.

Despite conceding defeat, Harris has pledged to continue to “wage this fight” even as pro-democracy protests have broken out in several cities, raising fears of violence and political uncertainty in the gun-strewn country.

This could imperil stability in North America and sub-Scandinavian Europe where a Caucasian Spring democratic revolution has failed to take hold, and a plethora of white-wing authoritarian populists have instead come to power across the region.

However, there is a silver lining. The elections themselves were a massive improvement over the chaotic and shambolic, disputed November 2020 presidential polls which paved the way for a failed putsch two months later.

This time, the voting was largely peaceful and there was relatively little delay in releasing results, a remarkable achievement for the numeracy-challenged nation where conspiracy theorists remain suspicious about the Islamic origins of mathematics, seeing it is as a ploy by the terror group “Al Jibra” to introduce Sharia Law to the US.

In the coming months and years, there will be a need for the international community to stay engaged with the US and assist the country to try and undertake much-needed reforms to its electoral and governance systems, including changes to its constitution.

During the campaigns, Harris loyalists warned that a win by Trump could lead to the complete gutting of its weak democratic systems, an outcome the world must work hard to avoid.

However, figuring out how to support reform in the US and engage with a Trump regime while not being seen to legitimise the election of a man convicted of serious crimes, will be a tricky challenge for the globe’s mature Third-World democracies.

Many may be forced to limit direct contact with him. “Choices have consequences,” as a US diplomat eloquently put it 11 years ago.

Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan journalist, cartoonist, blogger and author. He is also senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera and is republished under Creative Commons.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Anger and fear have greeted the return to power of former US strongman Donald Trump, a corrupt far-white extremist coup plotter who is also a convicted felon and rapist, following this week’s shock presidential election result.

Ethnic tensions have been on the rise with members of the historically oppressed minority Black ethnic group reporting receiving threatening text messages, warning of a return to an era of enslavement.

In a startling editorial, the tension-wracked country’s paper of record, The New York Times, declared that the country had made “a perilous choice” and that its fragile democracy was now on “a precarious course”.

• READ MORE: Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza ‘betrayal of true feminism’
• ‘All-out catastrophe’: Famine fears as Israeli siege of north Gaza tightens
• Pacific nation leaders look forward to strengthened US relations with Trump
• All in all, Trump’s election is a calamity in he making — Paul Buchanan
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

President-elect Trump’s victory marks the second time in eight years the extremist leader, who is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of using campaign funds to pay off a porn star he had cheated on his wife with, has defeated a female opponent from the ruling Democratic Party.

Women continue to struggle to reach the highest office in the deeply conservative nation where their rights are increasingly under attack and child marriage is widespread.

This has prompted traumatised supporters of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had been handpicked to replace the unpopular, ageing incumbent, Joe Biden, to accuse American voters of racism to sexism.

“It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from Black . . . who do not want a woman leading them,” insisted one TV anchor, adding that there “might be race issues with Hispanics that don’t want a Black woman as president of the United States.”

Hateful tribal rhetoric
The hateful tribal rhetoric has also included social media posts calling for any people of mixed race who failed to vote for Harris to be deported and for intensification of the genocide in Gaza due to Arab-American rejection of Harris over her support for the continued provision of weapons to the brutal apartheid state committing it.

America Makes a Perilous Choice https://t.co/sKW5ZZa3Q3

— Xandre Rodríguez (@xandrerodriguez) November 6, 2024

“Victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan,” goes the saying popularised by former US President John F Kennedy, who was shot 61 years ago this month.

The reluctance to attribute the loss to the grave and gratuitous missteps made by the Harris campaign has mystified America-watchers around the world.

As an example, analysts point to her wholesale embrace of the Biden regime’s genocidal policy in the Middle East despite opinion polls showing that it was alienating voters.

Harris and her supporters had tried to counter that by claiming that Trump would also be genocidal and that she would ameliorate the pain of bereaved families in the US by lowering the price of groceries.

However, the election results showed that this was not a message voters appreciated. “Genocide is bad politics,” said one Arab-American activist.

Worried over democracy
As the scale of the extremists’ electoral win becomes increasingly clear, having taken control of not just the presidency but the upper house of Congress as well, many are worried about the prospects for democracy in the US which is still struggling to emerge from Trump’s first term.

Despite conceding defeat, Harris has pledged to continue to “wage this fight” even as pro-democracy protests have broken out in several cities, raising fears of violence and political uncertainty in the gun-strewn country.

This could imperil stability in North America and sub-Scandinavian Europe where a Caucasian Spring democratic revolution has failed to take hold, and a plethora of white-wing authoritarian populists have instead come to power across the region.

However, there is a silver lining. The elections themselves were a massive improvement over the chaotic and shambolic, disputed November 2020 presidential polls which paved the way for a failed putsch two months later.

This time, the voting was largely peaceful and there was relatively little delay in releasing results, a remarkable achievement for the numeracy-challenged nation where conspiracy theorists remain suspicious about the Islamic origins of mathematics, seeing it is as a ploy by the terror group “Al Jibra” to introduce Sharia Law to the US.

In the coming months and years, there will be a need for the international community to stay engaged with the US and assist the country to try and undertake much-needed reforms to its electoral and governance systems, including changes to its constitution.

During the campaigns, Harris loyalists warned that a win by Trump could lead to the complete gutting of its weak democratic systems, an outcome the world must work hard to avoid.

However, figuring out how to support reform in the US and engage with a Trump regime while not being seen to legitimise the election of a man convicted of serious crimes, will be a tricky challenge for the globe’s mature Third-World democracies.

Many may be forced to limit direct contact with him. “Choices have consequences,” as a US diplomat eloquently put it 11 years ago.

Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan journalist, cartoonist, blogger and author. He is also senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera and is republished under Creative Commons.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

She made it clear in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, again at her televised debate with Donald Trump a few weeks later, and in all her interviews since.

Vice-President Kamala Harris, if or when elected the 47th United States president, will continue the centre-right policies of her recent predecessors, especially her current boss, President Joe Biden.

This likely means that efforts to address income equality and poverty, to abandon policies that beget violence overseas, and to confront the latticework of discrimination that affects Americans of colour and Black women especially, will be limited at best.

• READ MORE: Donald Trump ‘unfit to lead’ – vote for Harris, warns New York Times
• Other US presidential elections reports

If Harris wins today’s election, her being a Black and South Asian woman in the most powerful office in the world will not mean much to marginalised people anywhere, because she will wield that power in the same racist, sexist and Islamophobic ways as previous presidents.

“I’m not the president of Black America. I’m the president of the United States of America,” President Barack Obama had said on several occasions during his presidency when asked about doing more for Black Americans while in office. As a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is essentially doing the same.

And as it was the case with Obama’s presidency, this is not good news for Black Americans, or any other marginalised community.

Take the issue of housing.

Blanket housing grant
Harris’s proposed $25,000 grant to help Americans buy homes for the first time is a blanket grant, one that in a housing market historically tilted towards white Americans, will invariably discriminate against Black folks and other people of colour.

Harris’s campaign promise does not even discern between “first-time buyers” whose parents and siblings already own homes, and true “first-generation” buyers who are more likely not white, and do not have any generational wealth.

It seems Harris wants to appear committed to helping “all Americans”, even if it means her policies would primarily help (mostly white) Americans already living middle-class lives. Any real chance for those among the working class and the working poor to have access to the three million homes Harris has promised is between slim and none.

Harris’s pledges about reproductive rights are equally non-specific and thus less than reassuring to those who already face discrimination and erasure.

She says, if elected president, she would “codify Roe v Wade”. Every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter has made such a promise and yet failed to keep it.

Even if Congress were to pass such a law, the far right would challenge this law in court. Even if the federal courts decided to upload such a law, the Supreme Court decisions that followed between 1973 and 2022 gave states the right to restrict abortion based on fetus viability, meaning that most restrictions already in place in many states would remain.

And with half the states in the US either banning abortion entirely or severely restricting it, codification of Roe — if it ever actually materialises — would at best reset the US to the precarity around reproductive rights that has existed since 1973.

Less acccess to resources
Even if Harris miraculously manages to keep her promise, American women of colour, and women living in poverty, will still have less access to contraceptives, to abortions, and to prenatal and neonatal care, because all Roe ever did was to make such care “legal”.

The law never made it affordable, and certainly never made it so that all women had equal access to services in every state in the union.

Given that she is poised to become America’s first woman/woman of colour/Black woman president, Harris’s vague and wide-net promises on reproductive rights, which would do little to help any women, but especially marginalised women, are damning.

Sure, it is good that Harris talks about Black girls and women like the late Amber Nicole Thurman who have been denied reproductive rights in states like Georgia, with deadly results. But her words mean nothing without a clear action plan.

Where Harris failed the most of all, however, is tackling violence — overwhelmingly targeting marginalised, sidelined, silenced and criminalised folks — in the US and overseas.

During a live and televised interview with billionaire Oprah Winfrey in September, Harris expanded on the revelation she made during her earlier debate with Trump that she is a gun owner.

“If somebody breaks into my house they’re getting shot,” Harris said with a smile. “I probably should not have said that,” she swiftly added. “My staff will deal with that later.”

Grabbing attention of gun-owners
The vice-president seemed confident that her remark would eventually be seen by pro-gun control democrats as a necessary attempt at grabbing the attention of gun-owning, centre-right voters, who could still be dissuaded from voting for Trump.

Nonetheless, her casual statement about the use of lethal force revealed much more than her desire to secure the votes of “sensible”, old-school right wingers. It illuminated the blitheness with which Harris takes the issue of the US as a violent nation and culture.

It is hard to believe Harris as president would be an advocate for “common sense” measures seeking “assault weapons bans, universal background checks, red flag laws” when she talks so casually about shooting people.

Her decision to treat gun violence as yet another issue for calculated politicking is alarming, especially when Black folk — including Black women — face death by guns at disproportionate rates, particularly at the hands of police officers and white vigilantes.

Despite Trump’s disgusting claims, Harris is a Black woman. Many Americans assume she would do more to protect them than other presidents. However, her dismissive attitude towards gun violence shows that President Harris — regardless of her racial background — would not offer any more security and safety to marginalised communities, including Black women, than her predecessors.

The assumption that as a part-Black, part-South Asian president, Harris would curtail American violence that maims and kills Black, brown and Asian bodies all over the world also appears to be baseless.

In repeatedly saying that she “will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”, Harris has made clear that she has every intention to continue with the lethal, racist, imperialistic policies of her Democratic and Republican predecessors, without reflection, recalibration or an ounce of remorse.

Carnage in Gaza
Just look at the carnage in Gaza she has overseen as vice-president.

Despite saying multiple times that she and Biden “have been working around the clock” for a ceasefire in Gaza, the truth is that Biden and Harris have not secured a ceasefire simply because they do not want one.

Harris as president will be just as fine with Black, brown, and Asian lives not mattering in the calculations of her future administration’s foreign policy, as she has been as vice-president and US senator.

Anybody voting for Harris in this election — including yours truly — should be honest about why. Sure, there is excitement around having a woman — a biracial, Black and South Asian woman at that — as American president for the first time in history. This excitement, combined with her promise of “we’re not going back” in reference to Trump’s presidency, and many pledges to protect what’s left of US democracy,  provide many Americans with enough reason to support the Harris-Walz ticket.

Yet, some seem to be supporting Kamala Harris under the impression that as a Black and South Asian woman, she would value the lives of people who look like her, and once elected, support marginalised people much better than her predecessors.

This is a delusion.

Just like Obama once did, Harris wants to be president of the United States of America. She has no intention of being the President of “Black America” or the marginalised. She made this clear, over and again, throughout her campaign, and through her work as vice-president to Joe Biden.

There is a long list of reasons to vote for Harris in this election, but the assumption that her presidency would be supportive of the rights and struggles of the marginalised, simply because of her identity, should not be on that list.

Donald Earl Collins, professorial lecturer at the American University in Washington, DC, is the author of Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (2004). This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Case in point: Of all the ludicrous political ads this season, there is one I cannot stop thinking about. It is a video of Bernie Moreno, running to be Ohio’s senator. He is addressing an audience with women. He says that reproductive rights shouldn’t be an issue for women over 50—that it’s a bit crazy. Mr. Moreno is a 57 year-old man—so why is it an issue to him? There is laughing in the background at how crazy older women are.

He goes on to say that “you don’t get in pregnant in the checkout line at Krogers—you need to take personal responsibility.” I’d like to point out to Mr. Moreno that the only way a woman becomes pregnant is by a man. Yet, where are the laws requiring a man to take “personal responsibility” from the moment of conception? Where are the groups of women making laws for men and their rights?  Take the issue of reproductive rights out of this equation and think about how he disrespects women in his comments—how he, as a man, feels he can judge our feelings and decisions, and make it a joke.

Why are women still voting for misogynists? The VP nominee, J.D. Vance, has made it clear that women are only worthwhile if they have children. He has suggested tracking women’s menstrual cycles and that women should stay in violent relationships for the sake of children—in short, women have no value other than to please men.

The presidential nominee has called Kamala Harris retarded, even though she is far more qualified and experienced. He, of course, was elected after saying on tape that he could do anything he wanted to women because he was famous (and was found liable for sexual assault in a court of law). A elderly male senator recently said that hurricane survivors didn’t “give a function” about tampons, as if he’s an expert on women’s periods.

To be clear, this is certainly not all men. It’s a loud minority though, and it seems that it is acceptable to our society. Sexual harassment was brought to light during the #MeToo movement—so why are these men in position to run our country? Moreover, why are women voting for them?

When I was a young teen I developed large breasts. I did not want the type of attention it got me from boys and grown men. There were comments yelled as I walked home from school, and disgusting comments right to my face. Men unapologetically stared at my chest as if it was their right to do so. It deeply affected my self-esteem and body image for decades. I slouched and tried to cover myself when men were around. But men felt free to say whatever they wanted, letting me know that when they saw me all they really saw was my body. I did not have the self-assurance or temerity to fight back or express my discomfort. Like Dr. Conley, I thought that’s just the way it was then.

What happens when a society demeans the value of women? Look at Afghanistan. In the 70s women were wearing miniskirts and enjoying personal freedoms—now they are covered head to toe in burqas, banned from education, and not even allowed to look at men. That’s what happens.

Lilly Ledbetter just died, as well. She filed a suit against Goodyear after learning that she earned less than men doing the same job. The Supreme Court passed an act in her name in 2009—yes, only fifteen years ago. Until 1974 women could not have a credit card in their name without a husband signing off on it. Shall we go back to those good old days? In my mind, the constant disrespect from prominent men is heading in that direction.

Women, consider the lives of your daughters and granddaughters. This election is not just about reproductive rights, it is about respect and value for all of the female citizens of this country. I plead with you—it is up to us to vote discrimination and sexism out of office for good.

There are plenty of respectful men who could be leading this country, men who see women as equals and treat them as such. I know, I was raised by one, I am married to one, and I raised one myself

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Diane Vogel Ferri.

We speak with reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman about Ohio Senator JD Vance, whose history of sexist remarks has come under scrutiny since he was chosen to be Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Bracey Sherman says Vance’s attacks on women who do not have biological children and his promotion of a kind of “trad” lifestyle harkening back to 1950s norms show he is out of touch with modern families. “The short answer is he’s a weirdo. The longer answer is he’s a white supremacist and he’s a white nationalist,” Bracey Sherman says in explaining Vance’s ideology.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We speak with Dr. Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, who met this week with President Biden in a closed-door discussion with other artificial intelligence experts and critics about the need to explore the promise and risk of AI. The computer scientist and coding expert has long raised alarm about how AI and algorithms are enabling racist and sexist bias. We discuss examples, and she lays out what should be included in the White House’s “Vision for Protecting Our Civil Rights in the Algorithmic Age.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Things seemed hopeless for those wondering if Tucker Carlson ofFox News—who used his show to promote white supremacist hoaxes (Independent, 7/20/22) and degrading statements about immigrants (The Hill, 9/23/21)—would ever be held accountable for spewing hate on air. An advertiser exodus (New York Times, 6/18/20) and calls for his deplatforming from mainstream organizations (Anti-Defamation League, 5/25/22) seemed only to solidify the frozen-dinner heir's position as cable news' top-rated host. Last year, Carlson's show "averaged 3.32 million viewers, nabbing the biggest audience in cable news among viewers ages 25 to 54," according to the New York Post (4/24/23).

"He's the tent pole of the entire prime time line-up," said Reece Peck, author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class. "He helps the other shows, people stay to watch after Tucker and before Tucker."

And in a flash, he was gone (NBC, 4/24/23). After Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems for nearly $800 million over the network's repeated lies about the company fixing the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden, I noted (FAIR.org, 4/20/23) that the last-minute agreement was still a form of accountability for the network, even if the settlement sum was half of what Dominion sought. (Carlson's departure took $700 million from Fox's stock value in the 30 minutes after it was announced. The stock recovered somewhat, but was still down half a billion dollars at the closing bell.)

Done in by Dominion?

Indeed, the damaging discovery process preceding the trial date might have done Carlson in. The Washington Post (4/24/23) reported that "it was Carlson's comments about Fox management, as revealed in the Dominion case, that played a role in his departure from Fox, a person familiar with the company's thinking told the Post."

Dominion said Carlson's departure was not a condition of the settlement, according to the LA Times(4/24/23), but the paper did say that Carlson's comments "that turned up in the discovery process for the case may have also played a role in" his departure.

The LA Times also said that sources within Fox said that Carlson's departure is related to a separate, hostile work environment lawsuit brought by his former head of booking, Abby Grossberg, who alleges "that male producers regularly used vulgarities to describe women and frequently made antisemitic jokes" (New York Times, 4/24/23).

The texts exposed Carlson for who he is, a pompous, rich media elitist who gives not one single damn about MAGA voters and hates their king.

The discovery process of the Dominion case revealed numerous texts from Carlson—whose entire persona at Fox News rests on the wave of the Make America Great Again movement—showing his intense dislike of Donald Trump (New York Times, 3/8/23). "What [Trump is] good at is destroying things" was among one of the key texts, but everyone's favorite, of course, is Carlson saying of Trump, "I hate him passionately."

No, Carlson's on-air racism (Independent, 4/13/21; ADL, 4/22/21), transphobia (New York Post, 12/28/22), xenophobia (Washington Post, 12/15/18), admiration for authoritarians (FAIR.org, 8/3/21, 10/20/21), and flirtations with antisemitism (Daily Beast, 10/11/22, 12/23/22) were never the problem for Fox News. If The Washington Post's report that the Dominion texts were definitive is true, it's poetic justice: The texts exposed Carlson for who he is, a pompous, rich media elitist who gives not one single damn about MAGA voters and hates their king, only cynically using Trump's political popularity for his own media grift. That lifting of the veil, the end of the conceit for a corporation whose entire modus operandi is disguising its ruling-class politics to sell faux populism to its viewers, is a major outcome of the Dominion settlement.

Off to the gold mine

But what is to become of Carlson? Surely he won't drift quietly off into obscurity. The right-wing media machine, with its growing community of news sites, podcasts, and Substack newsletters, is a gold mine for anyone who can draft a sentence linking any conservative grievance to the word "wokeness." Carlson sold his stake in the Daily Caller (New York Times, 6/10/20), the news site he helped found, but the possibilities for rehabilitation are seemingly endless.

Bill O'Reilly once reigned as the star of Fox News until his ouster due to sexual harassment accusations (New York Times, 4/19/17), and today he is but a mere afterthought. But he was an aging relic before an explosion in Trump-fueled media. Today, a fresh-faced Carlson, still an emblem of MAGA rage, has the world as his oyster where he could perform untethered by corporate restraints, although without as much reach as cable news.

"His star will never shine as bright as it did at Fox."

"It's not beyond the realm of possibility that he could reinvent himself, but I think Fox is center stage, everything flows from its framing, from its agenda-setting, and it has the most influence over Republican politicians," Peck said. "Even with Newsmax and [One America News Network], it's really hard to match the respectability you get from being on a cable dial."

"His star will never shine as bright as it did at Fox," he said.

Fox is going to survive, valuing the audience that made the network what it is today, even if a little less hate is going to be pumped onto the mainstream American airwaves at primetime. "Fox has survived the loss of its biggest stars before," Peck said.

But Carlson's departure is a reminder that while the fight against Fox's worst hatemonger often seemed fruitless, the Goliaths are, in fact, vulnerable.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ari Paul.

The post Sexism in the Black Church appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Ware.

Tucker Carlson got fired!

Many liberals are celebrating, calling it a reckoning—a win for racial justice and decency. With this bombshell revelation, some might even believe that Fox News has finally gotten religion and seen the error of its ways. It's better late than never, they say. Salvation is always possible.

But if Fox did find religion, why did it take so long? Religion is not something that is found overnight. It is a conversion that moves us when it takes hold at the core of our being. It's hard to believe that Fox has suddenly seen the light and come to the conclusion that the blatant racism, hatred, and xenophobia that the network has trafficked in for so long is not something they want to continue. Does Fox News want us to believe that it has seen the light and knelt at the altar of repentance because it finally jettisoned the leading and most incendiary voice of racial hatred?

Why now?

True religion requires clear directional change. Repentance requires amends.

Why has the network at this moment felt a need to jettison Tucker Carlson from his throne? Fox had no problem previously with the racism, xenophobia, replacement theories, conspiracy theories, and the blatantly white supremacist tropes spewing from his mouth each evening. The network not only did not have a problem with Carlson's lies, half-truths, and propagandist rhetoric, it benefited enormously and from what was the cornerstone of ratings and advertising dollars. If Fox suddenly found religion, it was a different religion than the voice Paul heard on the road to Damascus that caused a radical change of heart. It was a different religion than the bright light of revelation from heaven that makes one turn away from one's complacency and complicity—from slavery, Jim Crow, unabashed and unchecked capitalism, and patriarchy.

At best, the kind of religion Fox found was the $787.5 million judgment agreement kind of spirit. It was not the fear of fire and brimstone and souls burning in hell. It was not the inability to live in one's own skin and sleep at night while doing nothing to stop the extrajudicial execution of Black and Brown in their own homes and neighborhoods or to stop refugee children from being separated from their parents and held in concentration camps at the U.S.-Mexico border. At best, the payout of nearly $1 billion to Dominion Voting Systems, and the other legal threats looming, is Fox's interpretation of dangling over the fires of hell.

If Fox has seen the light, even just the light of financial salvation, then it will purge itself not just of Carlson, but of all of the minions of hell that continue to pollute its airwaves with the filth of hatred, racism, and white supremacy. Why fire Carlson but continue to offer airtime to white supremacist ideologues like Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo, who have each engaged in the same distortions that Carlson is guilty of? Why exchange one divisive and hateful personality for another? True religion requires clear directional change. Repentance requires amends.

Can you imagine if it had been a Black or Brown person on the air spewing anti-white rhetoric, embracing hate-filled divisive ideologies, and fanning historical flames of the country's tendencies towards violence? How long will they be allowed on the air?

The very same day that Fox ousted Carson, CNN fired Don Lemon. Was the exact same day timing of the firings—weeks after Lemon said that Nikki Haley was "not in her prime" and CNN sent him to sensitivity training—a coincidence? Perhaps it was a joint sacrifice to the Gods of ratings, the almighty God of the dollar by networks who claim to be arch-enemies but are part of the same system.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ariel Gold.

It’s a great piece here, at Gray Zone — Amid rising reports of vaccine-related menstrual disruptions, the CDC and FDA are dismissing women’s concerns and denying them information while corporate media pathologizes them in sexist fashion.

The writer drills down into the vaccine loving industries (ipso facto, thoughtful and investigative critical thinking maligning industries), and how women were not a big part of the mRNA trials (sic), and that the disruption of the reproductive system of a female ain’t no big thing, according to the FDA and Saint Fauci and Company. Imagine, the adverse effects of these shots, on everyone, and no fetuses. This Gray Zone article focuses on women, and the writer, Marcie Smith Parenti, looks from a feminist point of view, albeit, one flawed since she equates feminism USA style with supporting the Democratic party, AKA, War-Banking-Poverty Pimping Party, as equal in its profane treatment of humanity as the Republican party. Here, a quote:

I have five female friends who, after receiving Covid-19 vaccines, experienced disruption to their menstrual cycles. Their symptoms have included hemorrhagic bleeding lasting more than a month; heavy intermittent bleeding for four months; passing golf-ball size clots of blood; and extreme cramping, serious enough to land one friend in the ER.

Most of these women are in their 20s and 30s, and at least one of them thinks she might want to have children. She now worries that her symptoms might be the harbinger of long-term fertility problems. At least two of my friends have symptoms that have not resolved. All are feminists and have throughout the years been consistent Democratic Party voters.

Other women of childbearing age have reported becoming temporarily “postmenopausal” after their second mRNA shot; conversely, women in menopause are reporting suddenly beginning to bleed again; trans men on hormone therapy have also reported sudden bleeding. Apparently, the number of vaccinated women around the world reporting alarmingly disrupted menstruation is, to be conservative, in the tens of thousands.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, does not warn women who get the shots that they may experience a disrupted menstrual cycle.

The big issue and concern with this piece is that Parenti does not go into detail around the OTHER jabs that do not use mRNA DARPA-Mengele wizardry as the undergirding of the treatment protocols–

The Mayo Clinic lies here about the mRNA vaccine, and even this site doesn’t give the information on the alternative “vaccines.” But here, on this flagging blog, more information in a short screed than all of Mainstream Mush and Murdering Media:

1) WHOLE VIRUS VACCINE

Vaccines include: Sinopharm, Sinovac

Number of doses required: 2 doses, intramuscular

Other licensed vaccines that use this type of technology: Hepatitis A, polio, rabies (all inactivated type)

What to know: The whole virus vaccine uses a weakened or deactivated form of the pathogen that causes COVID-19 to trigger protective immunity to it.

The two vaccines mentioned above – Sinopharm and Sinovac – both use inactivated pathogens, therefore they cannot infect cells and replicate, but can trigger an immune response.

3) NON-REPLICATING VIRAL VECTOR

Vaccines include: Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sputnik V (Gamaleya Research Institute)

Number of doses required: 2 doses, intramuscular

Other licensed vaccines that use this type of technology: Ebola

What to know: This type of vaccine introduces a safe, modified version of the virus – known as “the vector” – to deliver genetic code for the antigen. In a COVID-19 vaccine, the “vector” is the spike proteins found on the surface of the coronavirus.

Once the body’s cells are “infected”, the cells are instructed to produce a large amount of antigens, which in turn trigger an immune response.

Benefits: Viral vector-based vaccination is another well-established technology that can trigger a strong immune response as it also involves both B cells and T cells.

4) PROTEIN SUBUNIT

Vaccines include: Novavax

Number of doses required: 2 doses, intramuscular

Other licensed vaccines that use this type of technology: Hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, pneumococcal disease, shingles

What to know: The protein subunit vaccine contains purified “pieces” of a pathogen rather than the whole pathogen to trigger an immune response. It is thought that by restricting the immune system to the whole pathogen, the risk of side effects is minimised.

Benefits: The protein subunit vaccination is also a well-established technology that’s advantageous for those with compromised immune systems.

But reading Parenti’s piece, you can sense her socialism, her radical (root, fair, smart) belief that the wool has been pulled over the eyes of USA and Western societies Big Time by the war profiteers, and in this case, the war profiteers are those in this so-called war against a virus — Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Double Dealing. The planned pandemic that is, thanks to DARPA and the gain of function viral Mengele shit, is now an endemic — variants will come hell or highwater. What are we going to do about that? Boosters, straightjacket medicine — the resisters are the enemy. One Minute of Hate by Biden, that’s the ticket!

To many, this probably seems wrong-headed; and indeed, growing “scientific evidence” indicates it is a mistake. A recent University of Chicago and UC-Berkeley study found that women suffer higher rates of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical products than men, even when dosage is calibrated for differences in body weight. This is likely due to the more subtle dance of hormones that dictate women’s well-being, but the issue is very rarely studied.

It was not until 1993 that the federal government began requiring pharmaceutical companies to include women in their drug studies. And only in 2016 did the NIH begin to formally request that researcher grantees consider “sex as a biological variable” and specifically report on such findings.

Yet the fast-tracked Covid vaccine research skipped these provisions. Women were included in the initial Covid vaccine trials, however, none of these studies disaggregated research findings by sex.

Unfortunately, this is all tied to mind-stripping, and that Google guy, that celebrity in the movie, The Social Network, is being paraded around by lefties like Russel Brand. In that interview, Brand or the celebrity don’t look at what mind-stripping really does — not just scraping data and thoughts and emotions from people, the targets, but using that data to sway entire sectors of our lives, changing up to down, reality to fiction when it comes to regime change, the lies of Empire, the financial-AI-Wall Street thugs who want Cuba do go down, want Syria in flames, want Iran imploded by Israel’s nukes and alleged biological/viral/chemical bombs.

Russel Brand sometimes appears to be milquetoast, maybe, I don’t know, part of his UK roots, really, and this dude, Tristan Harris. You may recognize him from the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.

Here Tristan explains how our attention is being mined and that we have now become the product.”

I watched the The Social Network. Bad all around, geared to a 6th grade reading level, really, and this Harris guy is quite the multimillionaire charlatan. He’s in the film, about 1/3 of the total running time. Now, big tech is a million times worse than this shit-show demonstrates, and then when you see take-downs on Harris, on the film, we get those other misanthrope elite thinking Ayn Rands piling on their own libertarianism, and some equate questioning the main thrust of The Social Network — that big tech kills — to those who pushed the movie, Reefer Madness — trying to emote fear into citizens against pot smoking fellow citizens. Wrong comparison — apples to pig skins.

Techies are more than just smart arbiters of tech-surveillance capitalism; there is something highly broken in many of them, and they should never be in a position of power, legal or otherwise, that is, many of us believe. They are their own demigods, and they believe that Digital Tech is no different than the technology that brought us the bicycle. Look at this mind numbing stuff here criticizing the documentary for all the wrong reasons, I believe — “The Social Dilemma Manipulates You With Misinformation As It Tries To Warn You Of Manipulation By Misinformation.”

Note: Netflix, the company which produced, distributed and widely promoted the documentary, is also arguably the first big internet company to spend time, money, and resources on trying to perfect the “recommendation algorithm”! That’s capitalism, folks!

Taking this to the next stage, Ollie, the violent video games.

Yeah, so violent, murder-seeped, war-mongering, racist interactive X-box games, come on, they have zero effect on the brains of punks and not-so-punky kids and adults who play them, and live them, and spend countless human life hours joy sticking with them (Not). Look at this spin, “We present you our “TOP 10 Brutal FPS Games of 2021 & 2022” for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, STADIA & PC” ranking list. Hope you enjoy it!”

That is the big smoke and mirrors, propaganda, lie of capitalism. This is not a lie:

The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression had a mediation effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while family environment moderated the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with a good family environment, exposure to violent video games had only a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, it had both direct and indirect effects mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. This moderated mediation model includes some notions of General Aggression Model (GAM) and Catalyst Model (CM), which helps shed light on the complex mechanism of violent video games influencing adolescent aggression. (“The Relation of Violent Video Games to Adolescent Aggression: An Examination of Moderated Mediation Effect”)

Yeah, so 4 G, cell phones to the ear, all the EMF’s, now Internet of Things, Internet of Nano-Things, Internet of Biological Things, none of that create negative effects on humans, plants, animals. This is how these charlatans of the Mengele Brand work. However, let’s see where this takes us, RFK Jr.:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit published its decision Aug.13. The court ruled that the FCC failed to consider the non-cancer evidence regarding adverse health effects of wireless technology when it decided that its1996 radiofrequency emission guidelines protect the public’s health.

The court’s judgment states:

“The case be remanded to the commission to provide a reasoned explanation for its determination that its guidelines adequately protect against harmful effects of exposure to radiofrequency radiation…”

CHD Chairman and attorney on the case Robert F Kennedy, Jr. said:

“The court’s decision exposes the FCC and FDA as captive agencies that have abandoned their duty to protect public health in favor of a single-minded crusade to increase telecom industry profits.” (Source)

So, now, break out the masks, in my state, Oregon. Absurdity, and I have volunteer jobs, and the mandate is to have the masks on at interpretive centers, everywhere the public may walk into. I know for a fact after thousands of hours of research on the topic of mask efficacy and tertiary topics that these masks do not stop a virus. Truly. Alas, though, I can chuck everything by sticking to my guns and my knowledge base, or put up with a mask that I pull over (off of my nose) to breathe. Now, just applying for work, the vaccine passport will be mandatory. No passport, no job, no food, nothing. And these  Democrats didn’t see this coming (bs), and now that it is here, Bring on the Stasi. No different than the white supremacist Republicans and their stupidity about racism, structural racism, structural violence, and the mis-history of their pathetic souls believing Young George Shall Not Tell a Cherry-Tree Chopping Lie. This country is diseased with infantilized thinkers, and putridity on both sides of the Apple Pie Red-White-Blue manure pile of political parties wafts in my air.

Danny does it well here, in the article at Black Agenda Report, “Critical Race Theory Debacle Signals the Collapse of the American Empire.” Old Stan and Ollie would be proud:

The GOP’s entire identity is shaped by white supremacy.

The question that must inevitably be answered is: where do correct ideas come from? It is clear they do not come from General Mark Milley. The U.S. military will not become less racist if it studies “white rage” because white supremacy is baked into the fabric of its very purpose as an institution. Correct ideas also do not come from the GOP, as its opposition to Critical Race Theory is based on the equally faulty and racist premise that “culture wars” are destroying what makes the United States “special.” Correct ideas are inevitably lost on dueling sections of a ruling class seeking to stabilize an illegitimate empire.

The people’s struggle to liberate themselves from systems of exploitation is the primary generator of correct ideas. Critical Race Theory’s growing influence correlates with the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests dating back to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2011. The growth in the popularity of “socialism” can be traced back to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the struggle against union busting and austerity in Wisconsin, Chicago, and elsewhere. The history of class struggle, whether in the case of Black America or liberation movements abroad, is characterized in part by masses of people being propelled into a lifelong search for the correct alignment of ideas and actions that will bring qualitative changes in their conditions of life.

“Critical Race Theory’s growing influence correlates with the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests.”

The debate over Critical Race Theory will not resolve the contradictions that ensure Black Americans make less than sixty cents for every white American dollar , the U.S. military receives trillions to bomb Black and brown people abroad, and racist New Cold War tropes continue to be recycled to justify policies such as the extremely counterproductive sanctions on China’s solar energy sector . Super exploitation and war are all the American Empire has left to offer. A huge challenge for the class struggle in the United States is the fact that there are more corporate consultants and Democratic Party operatives posing as “anti-racist” than grassroots leaders and organizations prepared to take on the urgency of the political moment. Liberal elites, even when they tolerate criticisms of capitalism and racism, ultimately suppress or smear the revolutionary leaders and movements that inform revolutionary struggle. This is why establishment adherents to Critical Race Theory can offer anti-capitalist critique while scantly supporting organizations fighting to free U.S. political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal whose activities remain criminalized by the state.

The collapse of the condominium in Florida serves as an apt metaphor for the system of imperialism as a whole. Our search for correct ideas exists within the confines of the crumbling edifice of the American Empire. Conditions continue to worsen for the majority, which will inevitably lead to graver and more acute crises as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Empire offers no answers, just platitudes and lies. Social transformation rests upon the ability of the oppressed to look beyond the narratives of their oppressor, seek truth from facts, and build a mass movement that can sustain radical and revolutionary debate and organization.

Of course, the word “critical” comes from a bedrock of critical thinking, looking beyond the looking glass, tossing all those the rose tinted shit Capitalism glasses to the crusher, and stopping the feeding tube filled with lies and historical fictions into our babies on through the K12 system. The amount of stupidity coming from many K12 teachers and administrators and curriculum dictators is reflected in the amount of deficits in thinking and knowledge and compassion and ethics and vital questioning of authority many of these 18 year old’s are plagued with once they graduate (sic). Yep, you are what you do not know, what you do not think, what you do not speak, what you do not hope for, what you are not exposed to, what you do not eat, drink, breathe, consumer, buy, do, believe, hope for, imagine, create, grow, what you do not read or discuss or debate.

Here it is, black and white, what you do or do not ask, what you do or do not investigate, what you do or do not study scientifically, what you do or do not engage in, that’s the Kurtz horror in our Heart of Darkness. These elite MDs, et al. are Mengele on a very sophisticated level.

When it comes to the Covid-19 vaccine and “fertility,” the official talking points have been dizzyingly contradictory. On the one hand, one regularly encounters passionate and categorical insistence that there is no evidence of any negative impact on fertility, short or long term, attending any Covid-19 vaccine. As of yesterday, the CDC now states, “There is currently no evidence that any vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, cause fertility problems in women or men.”

In the Guardian article from April, Dr. Gunter sneeringly invokes the age-old, disingenuous, sexist, and murderous conflict between male “scientists” and female “witches,” saying, “No, the Covid-19 vaccine is not capable of exerting reproductive control via proxy. Nothing is. This is because it is a vaccine, not a spell.” Brumfiel of NPR asks, “Can vaccines cause infertility, miscarriages? The answer to all this is no.” Concerns to the contrary, he says, are nothing more than “a persistent set of lies.” The New York Times states, “Scientists have said there is no evidence that the vaccines affect fertility or pregnancy.” Dr. Brian Levine, founding partner of a reproductive health clinic, says, “No one has been able to say that there are any untoward outcomes on anyone’s reproductive potential or reproductive future as a result of receiving the Covid-19 vaccine or the sequence of vaccines.”

A widely quoted male gynecologist told the BBC that there was “no evidence to suggest that COVID-19 vaccines will affect fertility.” Alan Copperman, MD, of the Mt. Sinai Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Science, claims “the evidence shows that the vaccines will not affect anyone’s fertility.”  Just yesterday, from the Boston Globe, we are told there is “conclusive evidence that the vaccine has no negative impacts on reproduction.”

Such statements give the unmistakable impression that the matter of Covid-19 vaccination and fertility is resoundingly decided.

But, here’s what is confusing. The menstrual cycle – and please, someone do correct me if I’m wrong – is a fertility cycle, consisting of a follicular phase, the ovulation phase, the luteal phase, and then the passing of the menses itself. If a woman accepts a Covid-19 vaccine and begins to suddenly and hemorrhagically bleed, for weeks or months or end,  this by no means necessarily suggests she is permanently sterilized, but nevertheless indicates her cycle has been thrown off track, which is a fertility-related side effect – one which is particularly salient to a woman trying to conceive.

Indeed, when one reads the medical literature and official corporate and government statements with the uncharitable eye of a lawyer (which I am), the medical establishment’s position on Covid-19 vaccination and fertility is strikingly more circumspect than that which appears in the press.

It turns out that the lack of “scientific evidence” that Covid-19 vaccines affect fertility has at least something to do with the lack of actual scientific research on the question.

Again, Capitalism runs on chaos, confusion, patriotisms, false gods, scientism, divide and conquer technique, and much much more, but also relies on the head in the sand proposition; on overload, general anxiety disorder on steroids; and through the super-charged world of Social (sic) Media. To the point of most humanity in these United States of America having no conversations about masks, the mRNA, vaccinations forced while you are held down by the thugs of capitalism: banks, mortgage holders, landlords, employers, the cops/pigs, authorities, state, local and county boards. Mandates are marching orders. Mandates are, well, this: “If you don’t see, hear or speak the evil, then, we are dead, the living dead, when the evil is in the corporations, in the courtrooms, in the cop shops, in the various branches of government, in the military, in the Social Network brain zapping, mind stripping systems of oppression.”

There are evil forces out there, Mister Ostrich, and I ain’t talking lions and leopards. The evil is the banality of it, the Eichmanns, the folks wearing lab coats, the uniformed military, civilians and such in DARPA who are just regular people working on the next and the next evil virus that can’t be taken down by normal methods.

Now this is evil  suppression of a theraputic — SaNoTize, it should have been approved March 2020! Imagine that, nasal spray, to cut down on viral load. Guaranteed to work better than social distancing, masks and endless antimicrobial spays and foams that are not creating AMR — antimicrobial resistance on steroids.

The self-administered nitric oxide spray, developed by Vancouver biotech firm SaNOtize, is said to have yielded promising results in its UK and Canada clinical trials, including against the UK variant. The company is preparing submissions to worldwide regulators for emergency approval.

“We are currently working to find the right partner in India and hoping it will be approved as a medical device in India to prevent Covid-19,” said CEO and co-founder of SaNOtize Dr Gilly Regev.”What I would have loved right now is to go and give this to a whole town in India and show that everyone using it is not getting infected,” she said. “We would have saved millions of lives if we could have brought it to market last year.”

Again, you are what you are not allowed to see, not allowed to read, not allowed to hear, not allowed to watch, not allowed to speak:

Mere discussion of the drug has resulted in big-tech censoring or deplatforming thought leaders in collaboration with the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, Merck Co. – which manufactured the drug in the 1980s, has come out big against the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19. In February, the company’s website read: “Company scientists continue to carefully examine the findings of all available and emerging studies of Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 for evidence of efficacy and safety. It is important to note that, to date, our analysis has identified no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies; no meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.”

As the Post points out – Merck has not launched a single study of its own on ivermectin.

“You would think Merck would be happy to hear that ivermectin might be helpful to corona patients and try to study it, but they are most loudly declaring the drug should not be used,” said Schwartz.

“A billion people took it. They gave it to them. It’s a real shame.”

In closing, the research team writes that “Developing new medications can take years; therefore, identifying existing drugs that can be re-purposed against COVID-19 [and] that already have an established safety profile through decades of use could play a critical role in suppressing or even ending the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.”

“Using re-purposed medications may be especially important because it could take months, possibly years, for much of the world’s population to get vaccinated, particularly among low- to middle-income populations.“

‘Oh say can you say, by the dawn’s early propaganda/censoring/book-internet burning’: You can’t view this on YouTube or Facebook. Now that’s a crime against humanity.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Missouri state lawmakers can bear arms in the legislative chamber but if they're women, they can no longer show their bare arms under new dress code rules passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Friday.

State Rep. Ann Kelley (R-127) is behind the new regulation, which passed by a 105-51 vote as part of a rules package. Rule 98 states that "at all times when the House is seated, proper attire for gentlemen shall be business attire, including coat, tie, dress trousers, and dress shoes or boots. Proper attire for women shall be business attire, including jackets worn with dresses, skirts, or slacks, and dress shoes or boots."

"Do you know what it feels like to have a bunch of men in this room looking at your top trying to determine if it's appropriate or not?"

Defending the policy during floor debate on Wednesday, Kelley said: "Men are required to wear a jacket, a shirt, and a tie, correct? And if they walked in here without a tie, they would get gaveled down in a heartbeat. If they walked in without a jacket, they would get gaveled down in a heartbeat. So, we are so interested in being equal."

However, Democratic state lawmakers pushed back against the policy, with Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern (D-15) tweeting that "it is mind-boggling that members of the Missouri House have the right to bear arms on the floor of the chamber, but women legislators are forbidden from showing bare arms."

Rep. Peter Merideth (D-80) refused to vote on the measure, telling colleagues, "I don't think I'm qualified to say what's appropriate or not appropriate for women and I think that is a really dangerous road for us all to go down."

"Y'all had a conniption fit the last two years when we talked about maybe, maybe wearing masks in a pandemic to keep each other safer," he added. "How dare the government tell you what you have to wear over your face?"

Also speaking on the House floor, Rep. Ashley Aune (D-14) asked, "Do you know what it feels like to have a bunch of men in this room looking at your top trying to determine if it's appropriate or not?"

Reacting to the new rule, human rights attorney Qasim Rashid tweeted that "the Missouri GOP banning women from showing their bare arms isn't a sign of Shariah or Taliban—it's a sign of right-wing 'Christian' extremism."

"Stop deflecting extremism in America as something foreign," Rashid added. "It's 100% American. Admit it. Own it. Work to stop it."

Speaking to CNN Friday, Aune noted that "in 2019 House Republicans passed the abortion ban that went into effect this summer after the Dobbs decision came down, fully restricting a women's right to choose in this state, and on day one in our Legislature they're doubling down on controlling women."

Under the state's abortion ban, pregnant Missourians are forced to travel to other states for the medical procedure. Last year, Republican state lawmakers unsuccessfully tried to punish them for doing so via a measure that would have allowed private citizens to sue anyone who "aids or abets" abortions violating Missouri's ban—no matter where they are performed.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Politics has always been cruel. Political candidates can be brutal in trying to discredit, or even destroy, their political opponents. Congressional leaders will at times act harshly when trying to whip party members into line. And as is true in any profession, there will always be politicians who mistreat subordinates simply because they are jerks.

But the cruelty of the far right is something different. This is cruelty as the defining characteristic of a movement. To the far right, cruelty is more than a means to achieving a policy goal—it is often the goal itself. Cruelty for cruelty's sake—directed against "the other," a variable collection of liberals, immigrants, and minority groups. It has become the substance, even the soul, of today's far right. And it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate the far right from the rest of the political right on this score.

It would be wrong to suggest that everyone in the far right should be diagnosed as a sociopath. It is striking, however, how closely these characteristics describe far-right groups and politicians.

Just look at how much pure cruelty by GOP leaders has been in evidence lately. Ron DeSantis spends public money to transport a handful of undocumented immigrants to politically liberal northern areas of the country. Substantively this accomplishes nothing. The tiny number of people involved doesn't amount to a scratch on a Boeing 747-8, when compared to the number of undocumented immigrants in Florida. But even that understates the absurdity of the stunt. The coup de grâce is the fact the immigrants in question were taken from Texas, not Florida.

This wasn't about seeking a policy success. It was a calculated demonstration of raw cruelty. By all accounts, many of theseimmigrants were mislead. No effort was made to be sure they would have a place to stay, or something to eat, once they arrived at their destination.

It would be naïve to believe these transfers happened in the cruel way they did by accident. This wasn't sloppiness. The cruelty was the point.

For DeSantis this was, of course, a political stunt. But he carried it out in a particularly cruel fashion because that is what his right-wing base would respond to. Political gain was the motive, but cruelty was, nevertheless, the point of the exercise. And then, far from recoiling from this in disgust, Texas Governor Greg Abbott starteddoing the same thing himself.

If you think this assessment of the right wing is unfair, spend a little time in right-wing cyberspace. The level of abject cruelty on display is shocking. You don't even have to visit a right-wing website, just jump onto Twitter and look forthe army of right-wing trolls. And don't worry if you don't find them right away because they will find you.

But cruel political stunts are just one example of right-wing cruelty. There is also the cruel way the right attacks transgender students. Unwilling to offer any accommodation, right-wing leaders work tobar them from participating in sports in their affirmed gender and require them to use bathrooms designated for the sex they don't identify with. They go so far as toban books that touch on transgender issues from school libraries, andprohibit any mention of the subject in class. The view from the right is clearly that no compassion is required. Who cares if theyare 7.6 times more likely than other young people to commit suicide?

Then there is the troubling tendency of the political right in general to respond to political violence against liberals with cruel humor. This was recently on view in theright-wing response to the brutal attack against Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul.

There is no shortage of examples of right-wing cruelty. There is the perennialRepublican effort to cut funding for Medicaid, a program providing healthcare for millions of Americans who otherwise would be unable to afford it. Then there was the successful effort toend the expanded Child Tax Credit, despite it having reduced childhood povertyby almost 50 percent.

And it's too bad, the right would likely agree, about that12-year-old girl becoming pregnant after being raped, but they still oppose making rape an exception to abortion bans. And for that matter, they would no doubt agree that it is unfortunate some women are being forced to continue a pregnancy even though the fetus has no chance of surviving, and even when this puts the mother's life in jeopardy. But none of this seems sufficient to cause them to jump to fix the situation.

We might as well say it aloud. There's something almost pathological about this. To try to use the DSM to diagnose a group, as opposed to an individual, would be ridiculous. That's not what it's designed for. Still, looking at what traits are indicative of sociopathy is enlightening. An article onHealthline characterizes a sociopath as follows:

Per Healthline, sociopaths often:

Break rules or laws

Behave aggressively or impulsively

Feel little guilt for harm they cause others

Use manipulation, deceit, and controlling behavior

Remind you of anyone? More to the point, does it remind you of any political movement?

Obviously, it would be wrong to suggest that everyone in the far right should be diagnosed as a sociopath. It is striking, however, how closely these characteristics describe far-right groups and politicians.

• Breaking rules or laws: The most obvious example, of course, is the January 6 insurrection. But there's also the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer of Michigan, attacks against liberal protestors, andnumerous other acts of violence.
• Behaving aggressively or impulsively: Again, January 6 anyone? But even leaving the insurrection aside, far-right organizations are awash with the toxic masculinity that celebrates aggression and violence.
• Feeling little guilt for harm they cause others: Far-right groups often relish violence and cruelty, especially when directed against immigrants, liberals, and others they dislike. It is often a source of pride, not guilt. Just look at theright-wing's celebratory response to Kyle Rittenhouse shooting three people, two of whom died.
• Manipulation, deceit, and controlling behavior: Looking again at the January 9 insurrection, Donald trump and militia leaders, whether they were working together or separately, were able tomanipulate hundreds of people, with previously clean records, into committing felonies by attacking the capital. Militia leaders and other extreme-right wing actors are often charismatic.

There is no reason to think any of this will change. On an individual basis, some members of far-right organizations will likely be able to evolve over time—to back away from the darkness. But the far-right movement itself won't. Cruelty, hatred for "the other," and a love of violence are all now central to the movement's essence, burned into its DNA.

It won't change. It can only be defeated.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Steven Day.

One press conference question at a Prime Ministerial summit in Aotearoa New Zealand kicked off a wave of social media scorn this week — and even criticism and international headlines about sexism. But media made a better fist of the awkward questions thrown up by parents withholding consent for the treatment of their sick baby and their supporters.

At a press conference involving Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her Finnish counterpart Sanna Marin on Wednesday, November 30, a Newstalk ZB journalist unloaded a question which generated an immediate tsunami of criticism.

“A lot of people will be wondering are you two meeting because you’re similar in age and you’ve got a lot of common stuff there, when you got into politics and stuff. Or can Kiwis actually expect to see more deals between our two countries down the line?”

“I wonder whether or not anyone ever asked Barack Obama and John Key whether they met because they’re of similar age. We of course have a higher proportion of men in politics, it’s reality. Because two women meet it’s not simply because of their gender,” she said.

Marin was even more succinct.

“We are meeting because we are both prime ministers,” she said.

After that the criticism started flooding in on social media.

Then it came from those in the wider New Zealand media.

Question’s premise
On Today FM, Lloyd Burr took aim at the question’s premise.

“Just because they’re both young women Prime Ministers? You think that’s why they’re meeting?

“Do you think she’s come all the way to New Zealand to talk fashion and beauty tips, childbearing, menstruation, maybe anti-aging tips,” he asked, sarcastically.

The criticism continued in the international media.

CBS News in the US took aim at the reporter’s “sexist question” in a headline, while videos of the exchange posted by organisations like SBS News and The Washington Post garnered millions of views.

There are questions on why Marin is here, given our two countries are not huge trading partners.

Thankfully she kindly pointed some of those reasons out, saying she was worried about countries becoming dependent on trading with authoritarian regimes and wanted to establish closer ties with democratic allies.

Angle covered
Other reporters, including TVNZ’s Katie Bradford on 1News, covered that angle.

A simple “What are you here to achieve?” would have got a similar response without generating any international headlines about sexism.

Newstalk ZB may have produced a near-global consensus on that poor question to Marin and Ardern, but it did a lot better covering the bulletin-leading case of two parents who had refused to consent to their sick child getting a desperately-needed operation.

They were afraid the baby might receive a transfusion of blood from a donor who hd been vaccinated against covid-19.

Lawyer and Outdoors Party leader Sue Grey is representing the family in court — and in the media.

That was awkward for media wary of giving their platforms to her anti-vax views and it resulted in some on-air flare-ups.

Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan cut Grey off when she started airing anti-vax talking points.

“I don’t want to go into your beliefs on this,” du Plessis-Allan told Grey.

“I’ve got to be honest with you, I just can’t go there. I just cannot be bothered with this.”

Similar scenario
A similar scenario played out the following day on RNZ’s Morning Report when Corin Dann interviewed Grey.

That devolved into a lengthy oscillation between Grey’s attempts to recite anti-vax talking points and Dann’s increasingly exasperated interruptions.

Predictably, Grey’s supporters have taken this treatment as evidence of a vast media cover-up.

Meanwhile, the out-of-context or inaccurate claims about vaccines she did get to broadcast might have worried some listeners.

But having told listeners to trust experts, and not laypeople, Morning Report and other media also allowed experts airtime.

Dann talked to haematologist Jim Faed later on Morning Report the same day and immunology professor Nikki Turner appeared on Heather du Plessis-Allan’s ZB show and on Three’s The Project. Experts like her provided a useful corrective, but another way to avoid broadcasting misinformation is to just not book people who spread it.

Dann sounded a little agonised over interviewing Grey while previewing Morning Report on RNZ’s First Up with Nathan Rarere.

“We’ll talk to the lawyer of the mother about this,” he said. “This is obviously a very tricky story, a very sensitive story, but nonetheless one that is in the court.”

Led news bulletins
Not only was it a matter before the court — it was a story that led news bulletins and filled front pages, including that of the New Zealand Herald on Thursday.

Sue Grey and conspiracy theorist Liz Gunn featured in the front page photo along with the child in question — all under the headline “We’re not prisoners”.

It was probably not realistic to ban Grey from media appearances under those circumstances.

In The Spinoff, Stewart Sowman-Lund recognised those factors compelling the media coverage, before suggesting an approach for reporters interviewing Grey.

“Those interviewing her should either be fully prepared to counter — in detail — her anti-vaccination rhetoric or — given the likelihood it will quickly descend into conspiracy territory — cut it off early.”

Maybe Dann and Du Plessis-Allan could have been better served committing to one of those two roads.

But at least their questions were incisive and on-topic, even if they weren’t met with useful responses.

If this week’s prime ministerial press conference showed us anything, it is that it is less embarrassing for our journalists to have it that way round than the opposite.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The post Racism and Sexism in the Housing Industry appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robin Bartram.

We speak with Dahlia Lithwick, who covers the courts and the law for Slate, about women who fought the racism, sexism and xenophobia of Trump’s presidency. She profiles many of them in her new book, “Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America.” “Law is slow and takes a long time, but at its best, it really can make us all freer and safer and restore dignity to those that have been harmed,” says Lithwick.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is a shattering blow to women, as well as to anyone who believes that women should have the same rights and same autonomy over their bodies as men. It is an enormous victory for the forces of authoritarianism and misogyny. States will now punish women for having non-reproductive sex by forcing them, if they get pregnant, into involuntary servitude. It is an augur of minority rule.

I don’t consider any of those conclusions controversial. To the contrary, they are essential to understanding what the court’s decision really signifies.

But they are almost entirely missing from mainstream-media news coverage, which has instead presented the erasure of reproductive rights primarily as just another political issue with two sides and some complexity.

“There’s been a lot of good opinion writing,” Nancy MacLean, a scholar of the radical right at Duke University, told me in an interview. “But in the mainstream media coverage, there’s a lot of both-sidesism: an attempt to be fair in a way that doesn’t alert readers to what the real stakes of the situation are.”

“The mainstream media has bought into misogyny and sexism,” Carrie Baker, a professor at Smith College, told me. “I don’t even think it’s intentional misogyny and sexism,” she said. “It’s like unconscious bias. They’re so used to prioritizing the worldviews of white people and men that to do other than that feels biased. It infects the entire media.”

Mona Eltahawy, who writes the Feminist Giant newsletter, put it even more bluntly. “What the US media is incapable of doing is saying clearly that this is a white supremacist Christian movement driven by white supremacist, Christian zealots who are patriarchal to the core,” she said:

They’re tiptoeing around it, they don’t want to call them zealots, they don’t want to call it a theocracy, they don’t want to say they’re patriarchal, they don’t want to say they’re anti-feminist. They just tiptoe around all of this, mostly, because these are white Christian people, including white Christian women.

So let’s take a look at what the feminists I interviewed, and whose work I read, believe  is missing from the mainstream news coverage.

It’s about women

Guardian (6/24/22)

“We’re looking at women facing involuntary servitude to the state,” said Nancy MacLean. “It’s a war on women—in the context of a war on democracy.“

“What’s missing from the press coverage is any real discussion of the agenda of having power over women’s lives and destiny,” said Jodi Jacobson, a journalist and longtime advocate of reproductive justice. The hostility towards women is on full display on social media, Jacobson said. “Basically, if you look at what these guys are saying online, they’re saying: ‘Your bodies are ours now.’”

Moira Donegan wrote in a stand-out Guardian column (6/24/22) about the many, many things the story was not about (but which the press is nevertheless obsessing over). Among them: “who was right and who was wrong,” “the US judiciary’s crumbling legitimacy” and the “vulgar” question of ”what this withdrawal of human rights might mean for [the Democratic] party’s midterm election prospects.”

She added: “The real story is not about the media who will churn out the think pieces, and the crass, enabling both-sidesism, and the insulting false equivalences and calls for unity.” Then came this powerful conclusion:

The real story is the women…whose lives will be made smaller and less dignified by unplanned and unchosen pregnancies, the women whose health will be endangered by the long and grueling physical process of pregnancy; the women, and others, who will have to forgo dreams, end educations, curtail careers, stretch their finances beyond the breaking point, and subvert their own wills to someone else’s.…

The real story is the millions of women, and others, who now know that they are less free than men are—less free in the functioning of their own bodies, less free in the paths of their own lives, less free in the formation of their own families.

The fury of negation

Atlantic (6/27/22)

The news on TV was so disconnected from her own reality that journalist Molly Jong-Fast (Atlantic, 6/27/22) wrote:

The idea that Roe was about anything other than power was so profoundly delusional that I felt like throwing my cellphone in Central Park’s Turtle Pond…. After a weekend of seeing media outlets treat the loss of Roe like everything else, I wanted to write something about how it really feels to watch the rights of my sisters being taken away. I wanted to write something about how it feels to watch the conservative Supreme Court spit on us. I am just one voice, but I want to tell you that I hear you. I understand your rage, and I feel it too.

“The media misses the punitive impulse of the entire right-wing coalition,” MacLean told me. Abortion wasn’t a major political issue until the early 1970s. It wasn’t until “it became associated with the woman’s movement and women’s freedom and autonomy” that the right wingers turned so ferociously against it.

Their core credo, MacLean said: “Women should not be able to engage in non-reproductive sex, and if they do, they should face the consequences.”

The road to Gilead

“I have not heard one media outlet talk about the fact that this is part of a Christian nationalist agenda,” Jodi Jacobson said. “What I have heard is media outlet after media outlet putting on the same people who have lied us to this place.”

Civia Tamarkin, a filmmaker whose 2017 documentary Birthright: A War Story was about the right-wing war on women, told me the old abortion imagery of danger and coat hangers is “missing the point, especially when they say ‘keep abortion safe.’”

“It needs to be jail bars now,” she said. “Abortion is safe, but people are going to self-induce with medication and they’re going to be charged criminally. They’re going to end up in jail.”

Tamarkin described her documentary as “a real-life Handmaid’s Tale.” Now we’re one big step closer to Gilead. “The similarity is government-forced child-bearing to populate a country. That’s what it’s all about,” she said. “’Handmaid’s Tale’ is about a theocratic autocracy, and that’s exactly what we are living now.”

In the book, all-white Gilead is suffering from depopulation. In the US, Tamarkin said, the equivalent is “the white nationalist fear of ‘replacement.’” Replacement theory has recently made a huge public resurgence in the right-wing media. It stipulates that Western elites, manipulated by Jews, are bringing nonwhites into the United States to replace white voters in order to achieve their social and political goals, which ultimately include the extinction of the white race.

The anti-abortion movement—at least in part—“is very much about maintaining white supremacy in a time of a dwindling white population,” said Carrie Baker. But, I asked, won’t an abortion ban also lead to more nonwhite babies? “They can disenfranchise people of color,” Baker said. “But they need more white bodies.”

The economic toll

“What’s really missing is what this means for women’s basic equality,” Caroline Fredrickson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “Controlling reproduction is what has enabled women any facsimile of equal status.”

Fredrickson said that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s comment in May should have gotten more press coverage. Yellen told a congressional committee: “I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.”

Fredrickson said the economy “depends on women’s liberty, and women’s liberty depends on bodily autonomy, as well as significant investments in family supports.

“Only if we see how women are hampered in having a truly fair playing field in the economic sphere will we recognize the true burden of forced parenting—and parenting without social and financial supports,” Fredrickson said.

The threat to democracy

Salon (6/24/22)

Amanda Marcotte wrote a powerful piece in Salon (6/24/22) casting the decision as “a malignant minority imposing an authoritarian will on the majority.”

“The end of Roe isn’t just a tragedy for human rights,” she wrote. “It’s the surest sign yet that American democracy is collapsing, and Republicans are securing the ability to force the majority of Americans that keep voting against them to live under minority rule.”

Similarly, Duke’s Nancy MacLean mocked the view that “Oh we’re not taking away this fundamental right, we’re just giving it back to the states.” With the Supreme Court’s blessing, Republicans who control state governments have rewritten district lines and passed laws that make it almost impossible for Democrats to win even with a majority of the votes.

“It’s a fiction to say that somehow democracy is operating at the state level,” MacLean said. “We’re not going to be able to fix this, because we no longer have operative democracies.”

The science is clear

“I think that what is bad about the media coverage right now is that it is acting as if there are both sides to science and to medicine,” Pamela Merritt, executive director of Medical Students for Choice, said in an interview.

“They don’t do that with any other area of medicine,” she said. “I would like to see the press cover some of the outrageous claims about abortion the same way they covered the use of dog de-wormer to treat Covid,” she said. “They don’t take that kind of aggressive stance” when it comes to anti-abortion conspiracy theories, she said.

Abortion is safe. It is significantly safer than carrying a child to term. It’s also common (as well as popular). Journalists shouldn’t attribute those facts as if they were opinions. (It’s like climate change that way.)

“It is more common than major dental surgery in this country,” Merritt said. “One out of three or four people capable of pregnancy get an abortion,” she said. “Just look at the numbers.”

The anti-abortion movement is a huge, well-funded machine, underwritten by billionaires like Charles Koch and a network of dark-money donors.

“It’s not grandmas out in front of a clinic,” Merritt said. “I don’t appreciate reading articles that make it sound like the pro-abortion and reproductive rights movement lost to a bunch of grandmas in front of clinics. We lost to a well-funded, coordinated national campaign that doesn’t have to address any dissent in their ranks.”

The role of the Catholic Church

There’s been little if anything in the news about the role of the American Catholic Church in getting Roe overturned. But Smith’s Carrie Baker says its role is central, and sinister.

“The architect of the anti-abortion movement in the US is the US Conference of Catholic Bishops,” she said. “The Catholic Church has bankrolled this movement. They bankrolled the packing of the court.” All six justices who concurred in the Dobbs opinion were raised Catholic.

And Baker said it is not a coincidence that the church also has a long and sordid history of condoning pedophilia and sexual abuse of parishioners by priests. “Sexual abuse and forced pregnancy are two sides of one coin,” she said. “And that coin is misogyny.”

Women are notoriously excluded from the Catholic hierarchy. “They want to keep women subordinate,” Baker said. “I think they want to continue the sexual abuses of women and children,” she said. “How else do we make sense of this confluence of events? I think it’s a fundamentally corrupt institution that wants to maintain its power, to be able to take sexual advantage of children and women.”

Usual suspects in denial

One reason the news stories you’re reading and hearing are insufficiently cataclysmic about the extent to which this is an attack on women and a move toward authoritarian theocracy is that the people reporters normally call for comment aren’t talking like that either.

“None of the major pro-choice groups, of which I am no longer a fan, are framing it that way,” said Jacobson.

Medium (6/28/22)

And while news reporters reflexively turned to Democratic leaders to find out what’s next, opinion writers have correctly pointed out that those Democratic leaders just don’t get it.

“Aside from a very vocal progressive segment, Democrats from President Biden on down have uttered their disdain but frankly, they are devoid of the anger and passion that this perilous moment demands,” independent journalist Nida Khan wrote on Medium (6/28/22).

Indeed, the White House appears to be trying hard to make the overturning of Roe into an “everyone” issue, with President Biden, for instance, stressing “the broader right to privacy for everyone.”

But it’s about women. The top issue for Democratic leaders right now is the midterm elections, not women. So leadership on this issue will have to be found elsewhere.

Sample nut graphs

What are some of the essential paragraphs of context missing from new stories about the overturning of Roe?

Tamarkin answered:

I would put in there that this is not about abortion, this is about control and power and the intersectionality of racism, sexism and classism by a fearful white nationalist portion of the country that is determined to obliterate the line between church and state and create an autocratic theocracy. It’s not about controlling pregnancy, it’s about controlling the population demographics here. It’s about suppressing people of color and a return to the enslavement that comes with economic subjugation.

Merritt said articles should stipulate

that abortion is incredibly safe. It is the most regulated medical procedure in any state in the US. That abortion is common, and that bodily autonomy is fundamentally a human right. I would also add that we cannot stop abortion. You cannot put the pill  back in the bottle. What we’re really talking about is sending people who are capable of pregnancy to jail.

Write more like this

New York Times (6/29/22)

I’ll end by expressing appreciation and quoting for one excellent piece in the New York Times on Wednesday by Julie Bosman (6/29/22), who wrote:

In dozens of interviews this week, American women who support abortion rights recalled the moment when they heard that Roe had been overturned, and the waves of shock and fury that followed. They reflected on how access to legal abortion had quietly undergirded their personal decisions, even if they had never sought one themselves. They worried that the progress many women have made since abortion was legalized — in education, the workplace and in the culture—would be halted.

And they reconsidered their own plans and those of their children: whether they should live, work or attend colleges in states where abortion has been banned, how they could help other women with unwanted pregnancies, and whether they would ever recover the constitutional right to receive a safe abortion, a guarantee that tens of millions of women have known their entire lives.

“It’s been quite disorienting, in terms of our humanity,” said Jennifer Solheim, 47, who teaches literature at the University of Illinois Chicago.

One article like this isn’t nearly enough, though. That every woman has had her citizenship degraded and that the forces of autocratic theocracy have triumphed is essential context for every story about the death of Roe.

This post originally appeared on Dan Froomkin’s website Press Watch (6/30/22).

The post Misogyny, Theocracy and Other Missing Issues in Post-Roe Coverage appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Dan Froomkin.

These Op-Ed’s I pen in Newport News Times are my reckoning with loads of travel, plethora of spiritual work, and in-the-trenches journalistic forays dredging unimaginable but potent “land.”

I muck around with smalltown newspapers, even when the gig pays zero shekels, because I have a thing for smalltown newspapers staying in business. REALLY. So here you go:

I ended up in Spokane, years ago, near or around Father’s Day, 2001. Lo and behold, the story of the celebration is rooted there. A Spokane woman, Sonora Smart Dodd (man, I spent a lot of time in the Sonora – as diver, hiker, journalist), wanted to honor her Civil War vet father, who ended up raising her and five siblings after their mother died in childbirth.

June 19, 1910 was the “first” father’s day (Spokane, WA). The official national holiday designation came from a very odd father indeed, Richard Nixon, as the third Sunday in June (1972).

Much philosophical, political, sociological, and psychological territory has been traversed covering what it means to be a father, a son, an uncle, and a man. Oh, the dissertations that have been festooned dissecting intersections of American life with “the father.” We even have a bifurcation in politics around the father figure.–

I had my college students look at narrative framing around Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the strict father ideology (conservatives) and the nurturing father (progressives).

Two worldviews clash, as the strict father assumes that the world is inherently dangerous and difficult so children, who are born bad, must be made good. Whereas, the progressives see children born good, and parents can make them better.

Lessons in right versus wrong and a moral authority – George H W Bush and Ronald Reagan – define the conservative father. Contrastingly,  nurturing empathy and responsibility for oneself and taking care of others – Jimmy Carter or Barak Obama – are characteristics of the liberal father. George Lakoff looked at this, as well as how conservatives use language to dominate politics.

Here I was teaching at a university and community college in El Paso and adult professionals in Juarez, guiding them to consider the many sides of the male coin: Texas, a macho state governed by George W. Bush, and then for one term, Ann White. The town was more than 85 percent Latino, and my students (parents or grandparents from Mexico) were navigating what it means to be not just a college-educated person, but a high school graduate.

I also had many artist friends, and others, like masons and auto body guys, on both sides of the border, who were products of gangs. Many an out-of-town intellectual or journalist has ventured to this bi-national area to study gangs.

Many of my homies in and out of gang-life inked giant images of the Virgin de Guadalupe tattoos on their skin.

Many of the gangs in LA were rooted first in El Paso. I worked in Segundo Barrio, with youth who were in gangs like Los Aztecas and Los Fatherless.  I worked in prisons as a college teacher where gangs influenced each writing session.

I worked on military compounds – Fort Bliss, White Sands, even at the United Sergeants Major Academy.  Back then, very few women came through the Academy to get their last stripe, E-9. Many units were men’s clubs. Gangs, or sort.

Even in that setting, I pushed combat-toughened students to think about the role of fathers now (1986 to 2000) and back in their grandfathers’ days.

What is it to be a man in America? What is it to be a son or daughter in America? We went into the how’s and why’s of deadly violence in gang life, and we talked about the deadlier violence perpetrated by US military.

Men are from Mars (Roman god of war, Ares) and women are from Venus (beauty, love and relationships, as it represents the sentimental, affective and sensitive side of the heart).  Right? Hard versus soft, right?  Should we allow females in combat? And, then shelves of books on rape culture and toxic masculinity.

The landscape was mined with explosive topics from the get-go for me, as I got my classes rolling on debates and research projects around those controversial topics.

What does it mean to be father? Definitions have morphed foundationally since I started journalism and teaching at age 21.

I taught poet Robert Bly’s Iron John, and I had to defend that action since teaching “men to be men” in English departments seemed anathema to the “woke world.”

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building an emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

I taught the Fight Club, too, and had to defend that book choice as well. However, my reading list included Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Sapphire (Black Wings & Blind Angels), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) and so many others.

I worked into syllabi Charles Bowden’s Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future and Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family to some consternation from female faculty in El Paso and Spokane.

As a case manager for the houseless, just-out-of-prison, struggling with addiction, I found many a male figure, for sure, was either absent from the men and women’s lives, or that father was someone who’d easily occupy Dante’s Seventh circle of hell.

There are many good men. Last month, I met a fellow who lives and works in Waldport. Eight years in the Marine Corps. He’s forty-five, and has 9 “kids” living with him: His own biological children, and those he has taken in from family members who have run away from their duties, to include mothers and fathers.

He’s a living lesson for any man – he teaches respect for all people, including those living in vans or tents. He gives back to Waldport community with free clothes and furniture. He is navigating all the attention needed from those 9 youth, ranging from toddlers to 18 years old.

Happy Father’s Day!

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural,” going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy. Ecstasy amounts to living within reach of the high voltage of the golden gifts. The ecstasy comes after thought, after discipline imposed on ourselves, after grief.

― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

These Op-Ed’s I pen in Newport News Times are my reckoning with loads of travel, plethora of spiritual work, and in-the-trenches journalistic forays dredging unimaginable but potent “land.”

I muck around with smalltown newspapers, even when the gig pays zero shekels, because I have a thing for smalltown newspapers staying in business. REALLY. So here you go:

I ended up in Spokane, years ago, near or around Father’s Day, 2001. Lo and behold, the story of the celebration is rooted there. A Spokane woman, Sonora Smart Dodd (man, I spent a lot of time in the Sonora – as diver, hiker, journalist), wanted to honor her Civil War vet father, who ended up raising her and five siblings after their mother died in childbirth.

June 19, 1910 was the “first” father’s day (Spokane, WA). The official national holiday designation came from a very odd father indeed, Richard Nixon, as the third Sunday in June (1972).

Much philosophical, political, sociological, and psychological territory has been traversed covering what it means to be a father, a son, an uncle, and a man. Oh, the dissertations that have been festooned dissecting intersections of American life with “the father.” We even have a bifurcation in politics around the father figure.–

I had my college students look at narrative framing around Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the strict father ideology (conservatives) and the nurturing father (progressives).

Two worldviews clash, as the strict father assumes that the world is inherently dangerous and difficult so children, who are born bad, must be made good. Whereas, the progressives see children born good, and parents can make them better.

Lessons in right versus wrong and a moral authority – George H W Bush and Ronald Reagan – define the conservative father. Contrastingly,  nurturing empathy and responsibility for oneself and taking care of others – Jimmy Carter or Barak Obama – are characteristics of the liberal father. George Lakoff looked at this, as well as how conservatives use language to dominate politics.

Here I was teaching at a university and community college in El Paso and adult professionals in Juarez, guiding them to consider the many sides of the male coin: Texas, a macho state governed by George W. Bush, and then for one term, Ann White. The town was more than 85 percent Latino, and my students (parents or grandparents from Mexico) were navigating what it means to be not just a college-educated person, but a high school graduate.

I also had many artist friends, and others, like masons and auto body guys, on both sides of the border, who were products of gangs. Many an out-of-town intellectual or journalist has ventured to this bi-national area to study gangs.

Many of my homies in and out of gang-life inked giant images of the Virgin de Guadalupe tattoos on their skin.

Many of the gangs in LA were rooted first in El Paso. I worked in Segundo Barrio, with youth who were in gangs like Los Aztecas and Los Fatherless.  I worked in prisons as a college teacher where gangs influenced each writing session.

I worked on military compounds – Fort Bliss, White Sands, even at the United Sergeants Major Academy.  Back then, very few women came through the Academy to get their last stripe, E-9. Many units were men’s clubs. Gangs, or sort.

Even in that setting, I pushed combat-toughened students to think about the role of fathers now (1986 to 2000) and back in their grandfathers’ days.

What is it to be a man in America? What is it to be a son or daughter in America? We went into the how’s and why’s of deadly violence in gang life, and we talked about the deadlier violence perpetrated by US military.

Men are from Mars (Roman god of war, Ares) and women are from Venus (beauty, love and relationships, as it represents the sentimental, affective and sensitive side of the heart).  Right? Hard versus soft, right?  Should we allow females in combat? And, then shelves of books on rape culture and toxic masculinity.

The landscape was mined with explosive topics from the get-go for me, as I got my classes rolling on debates and research projects around those controversial topics.

What does it mean to be father? Definitions have morphed foundationally since I started journalism and teaching at age 21.

I taught poet Robert Bly’s Iron John, and I had to defend that action since teaching “men to be men” in English departments seemed anathema to the “woke world.”

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building an emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

I taught the Fight Club, too, and had to defend that book choice as well. However, my reading list included Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Sapphire (Black Wings & Blind Angels), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) and so many others.

I worked into syllabi Charles Bowden’s Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future and Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family to some consternation from female faculty in El Paso and Spokane.

As a case manager for the houseless, just-out-of-prison, struggling with addiction, I found many a male figure, for sure, was either absent from the men and women’s lives, or that father was someone who’d easily occupy Dante’s Seventh circle of hell.

There are many good men. Last month, I met a fellow who lives and works in Waldport. Eight years in the Marine Corps. He’s forty-five, and has 9 “kids” living with him: His own biological children, and those he has taken in from family members who have run away from their duties, to include mothers and fathers.

He’s a living lesson for any man – he teaches respect for all people, including those living in vans or tents. He gives back to Waldport community with free clothes and furniture. He is navigating all the attention needed from those 9 youth, ranging from toddlers to 18 years old.

Happy Father’s Day!

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural,” going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy. Ecstasy amounts to living within reach of the high voltage of the golden gifts. The ecstasy comes after thought, after discipline imposed on ourselves, after grief.

― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

The post #10. Activists Call Out Legacy of Racism and Sexism in Forced Sterilization appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

The post Activists Call Out Legacy of Racism and Sexism in Forced Sterilization appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

She is flying to Dallas and plans to join Biden at his rally Monday night, according to her campaign.

Klobuchar was the third presidential candidate to drop out of the race in less than 49 hours, following Pete Buttigieg’s departure late Sunday and Tom Steyer’s exit late Saturday. Their decisions reflect an urgent push among moderates to consolidate behind Biden as a counter to progressive rival Bernie Sanders.

Klobuchar outlasted several better-known and better-funded Democrats, thanks to a better-than-expected third-place finish in in New Hampshire. But she couldn’t turn that into success elsewhere, as she struggled to build out a campaign that could compete across the country and had poor showings in the next contests.

The three-term senator had one of this cycle’s more memorable campaign launches, standing outside in a Minnesota snowstorm last February to tout her “grit” and Midwestern sensibilities. Klobuchar argued that her record of getting things done in Washington and winning even in Republican parts of her state would help her win traditionally Democratic heartland states like Wisconsin and Michigan that flipped in 2016 to give Donald Trump the presidency.

She was hoping to own the moderate lane of a Democratic field that grew to some two dozen candidates. But that got much tougher when Biden joined the race in April, starting as a front-runner and remaining there. Klobuchar also was quickly overshadowed by Buttigieg, a fellow Midwesterner who shot from being the largely unknown mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to a top contender on a mix of intelligence, strong oratory and youthful optimism. Buttigieg dropped out on Sunday, saying he no longer had a viable path to the nomination. He has not endorsed anyone.

Klobuchar entered the race with low name recognition compared with many of her rivals, a disadvantage she was still citing a year into her campaign. Outside Minnesota, the lawyer and former prosecutor was best known for her questioning of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during a 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Klobuchar asked Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexually assaulting a fellow teenager when both were in high school, if he ever had so much to drink that he didn’t remember what happened. Kavanaugh retorted, “Have you?” Klobuchar continued, unruffled, and Kavanaugh later apologized to the senator, whose father is recovering from alcoholism.

Even before she got into the race, Klobuchar was hit with news stories claiming she mistreated her Senate staff, and she had a higher-than-usual turnover rate in her office. Klobuchar said she is a “tough boss” but countered that she has several longtime employees, including the manager of her presidential campaign.

She also face questions over her prosecutor past. In January, The Associated Press published a story about Klobuchar’s office in Minneapolis having prosecuted the case of a black teenager accused of the 2002 shooting death of an 11-year-old girl. Klobuchar has cited the story to show her toughness on crime. But an AP/APM Reports investigation uncovered new evidence and myriad inconsistencies, raising questions about whether Myon Burrell was railroaded by police. The issue followed Klobuchar on the campaign trail, with protesters forcing her to cancel a rally in suburban Minneapolis days before Super Tuesday.

Klobuchar campaigned on her productivity in Washington, where she led more than 100 bills that were signed into law. And she criticized the more liberal candidates in the field, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders, for running on promises she said they couldn’t keep.

Rather than advocate for “Medicare for All,” for example, Klobuchar favored expanding the Affordable Care Act and working to reduce prescription drug costs — changes she said had a chance of passing and would make a significant impact. She supported making community colleges free but said she wouldn’t promise to do the same for four-year colleges and universities because the U.S. cannot afford it.

“I’ve got to tell the truth,” she said during a CNN town hall at a college campus, where she acknowledged her position may be unpopular with younger voters.

Klobuchar was one of the first candidates to outline a plan for addressing addiction and mental health, an issue she described as personal because of her father’s longtime struggle. Her accounts of growing up with a father suffering from alcoholism and watching him be forced to choose between prison or treatment were some of the most compelling moments of speeches, interviews and discussions with voters. Klobuchar said that her father described getting help as being “pursued by grace” and that it’s an opportunity all people fighting addiction deserve.

But Klobuchar couldn’t match her top competitors in fundraising. She raised about $11 million in the last quarter of 2019 — roughly half of what Sanders and Buttigieg received. The lack of finances early on in the campaign meant Klobuchar wasn’t able to expand her operation on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire until months after her rivals. She then scrambled to put an operation in place in Nevada, South Carolina and the 14 states that will vote on Super Tuesday.

Still, there were bright spots, including strong debate performances that helped bring in new donors. Her campaign credited Klobuchar’s showing in a debate days before the New Hampshire primary with helping her clinch a better-than-expected third place in the state’s primary, topping Warren and Biden. Klobuchar said she raised $12 million in the next week.

During one debate she addressed sexism in the campaign, questioning whether a woman with Buttigieg’s experience would qualify for the stage. She also pushed back at fears of a female candidacy, saying, “If you think a woman can’t beat Donald Trump, (House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi does it every day.”

In January, she earned endorsements from The New York Times, which also endorsed Warren, and the Quad-City Times, one of Iowa’s largest newspapers. But Klobuchar was sidelined for much of the last few weeks before the Iowa caucuses when she — along with fellow candidates Warren, Sanders and Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado — was stuck in Washington for the Senate impeachment trial.

She continued to rack up endorsements even as her campaign struggled, getting the backing of newspapers including the Houston Chronicle, The Seattle Times and the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Catch up on the 2020 election campaign with AP experts on our weekly politics podcast, “Ground Game.”