Heather Cox Richardson:
“May 15, 2022 (Sunday)
Yesterday, an 18-year-old white man murdered 10 people and wounded three others with an AR-15. The shooter traveled more than 200 miles to get to a predominantly Black neighborhood, where he put on heavy body armor and live streamed his attack as he gunned down people grocery shopping. Eleven of those he shot were Black.
The Buffalo Police Commissioner, Joseph Gramaglia, said, “The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake that this is an absolute racist hate crime. It will be prosecuted as a hate crime. This is someone who has hate in their heart, soul and mind."
Before his attack, the shooter published a 180-page screed on Google Drive. It is mostly a list of his weaponry, but in it he also explained his belief in what is known as the “great replacement theory,” embraced by white nationalists. This is the idea that white people are losing economic, cultural, and political power to Black people and other people of color. The name is usually associated with a French agitator who argued in a 2011 book that immigrants were destroying European culture, but the theory that an “other” is destroying traditional society has roots stretching far back in European history. In the twenty-first century, that theory has launched right-wing political parties and shootings around the world.
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But the Buffalo shooter’s ramblings drew not only from the European theory—although there is plenty of that in his 180 pages of racism and anti-Semitism. They also drew from America’s own version of a theory of replacement.
That theory comes out of the 1870s and was explicitly connected to voting.
In 1867, Congress began the process of recognizing the right of Black people to have a say in their government. In the Military Reconstruction Act, it called for conventions in former Confederate states to write new state constitutions and permitted Black southerners to register to vote to choose delegates to those conventions. White supremacists scoffed at the idea that formerly enslaved people and those white men willing to work with them could produce coherent constitutions.
When their constitutions not only were coherent, but made adjustments to give more representation to poorer white men than the prewar constitutions had provided, white supremacists set out to make sure voters did not ratify the new constitutions. Needing to avoid the U.S. Army, still stationed in the South to protect Black people and their white allies, the white supremacists dressed up in white sheets to look like dead Confederate soldiers (no one was fooled) and tried to terrorize voters to keep them from the polls.
It didn’t work. Voters ratified the new constitutions, which guaranteed Black voting. Congress readmitted the southern states to the Union, but not until they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That crucially important amendment dissolved the state laws discriminating against Black Americans. It established that Black people were U.S. citizens and guaranteed that the U.S. government would see to it that no state could take away the rights of any citizen without the due process of law.
In 1870, white politicians in Georgia tried to undermine their new state constitution. The American people then ratified the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote. Congress also created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, which it promptly did. Attorney General Amos Akerman, a former Confederate who had become a Republican, oversaw more than 1000 cases against the Ku Klux Klan.
With the federal government holding them to account for their racist attacks on Black Americans, southern white supremacists began to argue that their objections to Black equality were actually about voting. By 1871, they argued that Black men voted for leaders who promised roads and hospitals and schools. Those social investments would require tax levies, and since the Black population was poor almost by definition after enslavement, those taxes would fall almost entirely on the white men who owned property. In this telling, Black voting was essentially a redistribution of wealth from those with money to those without, from white men to Black men. It was socialism.
White supremacists began to say that they objected to Black voting and to the governments Black people elected not on racial grounds, but on economic ones. They promised to “redeem” the South from the profligate state governments that they said were bleeding tax dollars out of white landowners to provide services for the poor, generally characterized as Black, although there was no racial monopoly on poverty in the post–Civil War South.
In 1876, the “Redeemers” took over the southern states, thanks partly to the rhetoric that made them sound reasonable to northern observers and largely to the violence that enabled them to keep Black men from the polls. The “Solid South” would stay Democratic until Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, running for president on a platform that called for the federal government to leave states’ racial discrimination alone, won five deep southern states in 1964.
The violence of the 1876 election, along with fears of what their lives would look like in its wake, led Black Americans to leave the South in a movement known as the Exodus. In 1879 and 1880, about 20,000 Black southerners went west to Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. “[T]he whole South…had got into the hands of the very men that held us slaves,” one recalled, “and we thought that the men that held us slaves was holding the reins of government over our heads…. [and] there was hope for us and we had better go.”
About two thousand of those migrants went to Indiana.
Indiana was a contested state in which the Republican and Democratic parties traded power. In 1876, it had gone to the Democrats by a few thousand votes.
When Black Americans began to come to their state, Indiana Democrats immediately howled that the Republicans were importing Black migrants to shift the state back toward the Republicans in the 1880 election. Their clamor was loud enough to cause a Senate investigation. The Democratic majority on the select committee concluded that the Republicans must have induced the Black southerners to leave their region because there was well-paid work and no violence in the South; Republicans retorted that if they were really trying to flood the electoral system, they would have left Black Americans where they were.
But the conspiracy theory took root. White Hoosier Democrats met Black migrants with showers of rocks and vowed to “clean out all the g–d d– –n n***ers in the county before the [1880] election.” After a political rally in Rockport, Indiana, Democrats attacked local Black inhabitants, shouting: “Kill them, kill them.” After they shot Uriah Webb, one rioter stood over his body and said, “One vote less,” while the others cheered Democratic presidential candidate Winfield Scott Hancock.
Racial hostility kept the Black population of Indiana small, but it also fed the cultural and social discrimination that made Indiana the beating heart of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Under violent con man David Curtis Stephenson, who raped, mutilated, and murdered a female state employee, the Indiana Ku Klux Klan developed the idea of “100% Americanism,” which argued for a hierarchy of races in which the white race was uppermost. Immigrants and Black Americans, that theory said, were destroying traditional America.
That argument has poisoned American politics since the 1870s. Yesterday, the Buffalo shooter echoed the modern European great replacement theory, but he also echoed the racial “socialist” argument of the U.S. He railed against Black Americans, whom he wildly insisted take, on average, $700,000 apiece from white Americans. He urged those who thought like him not to pay taxes, which he said would be wasted on such people. Then he warned white Americans not to become a political minority because minorities are never treated well.
Today’s Republican politicians, including Elise Stefanik of New York, the third ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, have pushed the great replacement theory for years and even after yesterday’s massacre have refused to denounce it. That theory is based in racial hate, but it is not only about racial hate. It is also about politics, and today Republicans are using it to create a one-party state.
“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement,' if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World," Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, who is one of the country’s leading proponents of the great replacement theory, said on his show. "But they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it: That's true."
It was not true in 1879, it is not true now, and people making this argument have blood on their hands.”
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What good is it to unfreeze and bring back to life an extinct species when the world no can longer sustain it? And who is going to pay to bring them back?:
“Extinction: Why scientists are freezing threatened species in 'biobanks'”
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“Understand that airplanes directly and irreversibly heat up the planet. Those who already understand this fly less or not at all, but more importantly they call for an end to the aviation system. Everyone will understand at some point”
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….doomed to repeat it:
John-Alex Pilling:
“Sparta was an oligarchic war machine supported by a permanent underclass of slaves, the helots. While the helots worked the land, Spartan men prepared for war. Infants with imperfections were not permitted to live. Boys were taken from their families at a young age to be trained as warriors and to live in barracks and eat in communal mess halls. While luxury was flaunted in other parts of the ancient world, it was shunned in Sparta, where citizens lived, to coin a phrase, a “Spartan existence.” Sparta was strictly closed to immigration, and foreigners were not permitted to stay.
The political system was an oligarchy, in which dual kings, from two separate royal families, served simultaneously as a check on one another. Sparta also had an assembly of twenty-eight men, the Gerousia, made up mostly of members from the royal families. Spartan citizens were also permitted to elect five Ephors, who served in an executive role alongside the kings.
Matthew Kroenig,
The Return of Great Power Rivalry”
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John Russell:
Bert Wolfe writes
A recent RAND Corporation study of wealth and income inequality in America makes it very clear that there has been a quiet, sub rosa class war in the United States waged by the American oligarchy against the average working people of America since the early 1970s. This “reverse distribution” of income and wealth upwards, really a massive $2.5 TRILLION annual theft — and THEFT is not too strong a word for it — by the American oligarchy from the average working people of America explains why so many Americans are struggling financially, flat broke, working multiple low wage, often part time jobs, are mired deeply in debt, and it explains much of the social unrest and discontent in America over the last 50 years.
In the early 1970s, the far right wing backlash and counterrevolution to the reforms of the New Deal, the post-WWII era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Great Society began. It started with the infamous Powell Memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce of 1971 that served as a blueprint of how the American oligarchy could undermine the power that the American middle class had gained for itself and restore the primacy the oligarchy had prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The American oligarchy has followed the instructions of the Powell Memorandum closely for nearly 50 years now, regained the power and influence it had lost, and shifted the political discourse and struggle in America dramatically to the right.
In 1973, began the Great Uncoupling of increases in American wages and salaries from increases in corporate productivity and profitability. Except for measly, grudging pay increases to cover inflation, and to be told that they were lucky they still had jobs, the average working people of America ceased to share in the tremendous wealth that their labor created for the bosses and the shareholders. Forty-nine years is a LONG time to go without a REAL pay increase, and it explains much of the social discontent in America in the years since.
Much of this reactionary counterrevolution occurred quietly and secretly, through profound, but stealthy economic moves that occurred in corporate executive suites and boardrooms, and in right wing scholarly studies and propaganda coming out of the work of a small, but dedicated cadre of right wing academics, and most effectively and tellingly, in the huge sums of money that the American oligarchy used to first undermine moderate center-right conservative politicians in the Republican Party, then to buy off business oriented politicians in the Democratic Party and push the “party of the people” hard to the right. There is today no real, effective leftist political party in America, other than the small, vocal, but outnumbered and largely neutralized “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party.
Sad to say, but most average working people in America have been kept in the dark about what was happening, like frogs in a pot of water that was being heated slowly, but surely, until it was too late to respond effectively. Also, caught up in the day-to-day struggle to make a living, which became increasingly more difficult as the years went by, the average working people of America were simply too distracted and exhausted to pay much attention to politics and its effects on their socioeconomic standing.
Today, the American oligarchy has pretty much succeeded in defanging and neutralizing the American political process as any sort of realistic threat to their power and wealth. The pathetic and limited choice at the election polls is, sadly, between two right wing bourgeois political parties: the neoliberal corporatist Democrats and the reactionary, increasingly fascist and bat shit crazy Republicans. Any “reforms” offered to the beleaguered working people of America are generally tepid, underfunded, incremental half measures at best. More often than not, the bourgeois blowhards of Washington, DC expend a great deal of energy creating political heat, without necessarily generating much political light or real action. Political gridlock and inaction isn’t just the result — it’s pretty much the intention.
Any REAL reform here in the United States will only occur when millions of Americans take to the streets participating in mass demonstrations and general strikes that paralyze America, bring the American oligarchy to its knees, and their bourgeois politicians to the bargaining table offering the REAL reforms and meaningful government policy changes that the American people so desperately need and want.”
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“George W. Bush Mixes Up Ukraine With Iraq In Big Freudian Slip”
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There is absolutely no excuse for America not offering free college except fascism & Dems having logged -1.4% growth to abolish ALL student debt is so beyond asinine that it qualifies as gross stupidity
When you consider that Democrats have the numbers in Washington to eliminate Gerrymandering you begin to realize Democrats’ complicity in forfeiting our democracy to authoritarian fascism
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“Saharan dust cloud over the Atlantic may reach Gulf Coast by weekend”
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