“Just because you have power doesn’t give you the right to abuse it.”--former Tennessee state Representative Justin Pearson, member of the Tennessee Three, expelled from the Tennessee legislature by a group of fascist old fat racist white Republican assholes for daring to care about slaughtered children (April 6, 2023)
"You cannot teach about an abomination in polite terms. Monstrous acts deprived of monstrous language will always, always fail to relay the depravity of these events. It has to be upsetting. Has to be unsavory. Has to be ghastly. Or it’s a lie."--Mark Sumner, author and journalist
The Tennessee school board voted unanimously, earlier this month, to remove the graphic novel "Maus" from the curriculum and school library. The Pulitzer Prize winning book, drawn from the author's own life, tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of a survivor and his son who is attempting to understand it all. Germans in the book are depicted as cats, while Jews are depicted as mice. The Tennessee school board says they banned the book based on profanity and nudity. The language they cited was the use of the phrase "God damn". Seriously, you will hear far worse than that on any TV show, today. And, even in my era, kids knew all the dirty words by the time they hit First Grade. As for the nudity... Remember, Jews in "Maus" are depicted as mice. We're talking about an image of a naked mouse, for Pete's sake. The Tennessee school board counters that they found the image of the naked mouse gratuitous. But both the "GD" and the naked mouse have to do with the suicide of the author's mother. I find nothing gratuitous there. In Texas, over 200 books have been removed from the shelves "pending review". And Texas teachers have been instructed that they must teach "both sides" of the Holocaust. There are NOT two sides to the Holocaust. In Indiana, a bill is pending that would forbid teachers from taking a side or giving any value judgements on the Holocaust. If we can't agree that the genocide of over 6 million people is a bad thing, then we're already lost as a society. Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with protecting children and will not stop at school libraries. The book banners are already attacking public libraries and the book stores will be next, then the Internets. We know what this is really all about, of course. The same thing book banning and burning has always been about. When knowledge and ideas are deemed by the powerful "too dangerous" for the public at large, what they really are saying is that it is too dangerous to THEM and THEIR hold on power. Ideas and information in the hands of the people are a far more powerful weapon against an authoritarian government than any gun or bomb. "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a Bible"--unknown, but often falsely attributed to Sinclair Lewis "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'"--Halford E. Luccock Fascism is here. It's home is the Republican Party. They are the party that is banning and burning books. They are the party that is trying (and succeeding) to take away rights Americans have enjoyed for a generation or more. They are the party that promotes the theory of the "Master Race". They are the party that preaches violence as an acceptable solution to any disagreement you may have with government. They are the party of The Big Lie, "alternative facts", and endless propaganda. They are the party that has given up any pretense of believing in democracy. And they persuade their audience through time-honored authoritarian methods of distraction and misdirection. Do you think it's just a coincidence that the right is seemingly flipping out over the sex appeal of cartoon candy at a time when the economy is going gangbusters and the Nazis are banning books? Find a phony grievance, make it much much bigger, and then blame it all on some group of "the other"--a disfavored minority. When someone--anyone--tells you, "I alone can fix it", you should run as fast as you can in the other direction. When someone tries to take away voting rights, you should throw them to the curb. When someone or some group starts banning books and any attempt to teach about racism and the Holocaust, you should understand that fascism is here, now, today. Be prepared to stand your ground and fight against it, lest we become what hundreds of thousands of our forefathers died to defeat. “I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting.”--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."--Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail “The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”--Martin Luther King, Jr. “It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can't make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important also.”--Martin Luther King, Jr. “This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.” (from "Madness On Capitol Hill" by Andrew McCormick in The Nation)
I've rarely seen a better articulation of "white privilege". That being said, though I'm sorry this woman and her fellow travelers were denied a proper education, she is NOT a patriot. No one who took part in the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Wednesday is a patriot. They are animals, monsters, criminals, terrorists. Anyone who took part and anyone who supports what took place is, by definition, ANTI-American. You can't be anything BUT Anti-American because you are supporting the violent overthrow of the American government. You are no better--in many ways, you are worse--than the Islamic militants who attacked the diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012. You have done more damage to the country you claim to love than Al Qaeda or Isil could ever have hoped to do. Above all else, you are losers. And you've attached your star to the biggest loser America has ever seen. By way of contrast, let me direct your attention to a winner. Stacey Abrams. As you're always so fond of telling us, Stacey Abrams never conceded in her race for Governor of Georgia. In that race, there was a legitimate case to be made that the votes of tens of thousands of African Americans were actually stolen from them. Hell, white people have been "stealing" the votes from black people for over 150 years, and you're just fine with that. You probably don't even know that the whole purpose behind the "Jungle Primaries" and Run-Off elections in the South is to keep black candidates from winning elections. That's how it should be, you believe. They're supposed to shoot the black people, not the white people, the MAGAt said. This is not true of your votes in the 2020 presidential race, where Republicans and Democrats alike have concluded that this was one of the fairest and freest elections in US history and no evidence of widespread fraud has yet been presented. Stacey Abrams did not whip up African American voters in Georgia to "storm" and "occupy" the Georgia State Capitol. There were no mobs of rioters chanting "Hang Kemp, Hang Kemp!" Stacey Abrams did what you do, if you are a true patriot. She went to work. She knocked on doors. She registered voters. She organized. She did not tell them to "fight"; she told them to VOTE. That's how we do it in America. And, in 2020, she won...not for herself--she gained no title or office--but for the people of Georgia. Stacey Abrams is a winner. Stacey Abrams is an American Patriot. Those who sought (and still seek) to overthrow the freely elected government of the United States of America, and those who support and enable them, are the lowest form of human scum...not patriots. By the very words of the Constitution they claim to love, they are traitors. The prescribed penalty for treason is death. Just sayin'. You are the whiniest bunch of entitled babies I've ever seen. It's always bothered me--and this goes back beyond Trump--that there is a contingent of people in this country who think and act as though anything that befalls someone else (poverty, homelessness, disease, drugs, violence) is their own damn fault, but anything that befalls them is someone else's fault. There was an article in a prominent right-wing magazine, recently, decrying the meanness and insensitivity of left-wing media. FWIW, the examples they cited were all of commenters to media stories, not the media stories themselves. And they concluded that the right would NEVER be like that. And I'm like, do these people hear themselves? Are they completely lacking in self-awareness? Shall we talk inner city drug use vs. the opioid crisis. They were all like, those "N"-words are doing it to themselves; put them in jail to rot, let them die. But opioids, oh, help us, help us, we are but poor victims. Shall we talk AIDS? When it was just Gay people, it was "God's retribution". But when it started affecting heterosexual society, suddenly it was something that required immediate and concerted attention. On and on and on. My favorite remains the national television quote of the star of "Coach" who, arguing against taxes, obliviously stated, "I've been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No." Perhaps the worst of the treasonous characters in this tale are those who actually sit in our government and know better, but who, for the purely craven pursuit of personal power, have lied to those who might not know better. These include, but are not limited to, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham, Mo Brooks, and Matt Gaetz. These individuals--and over 100 other Republican legislators in Congress--know damn well that there was no widespread voter fraud in 2020...that the election was NOT stolen. Yet they continue to feed you the lies. Because it is so much easier to incite a mob than it is to do the hard work that Stacey Abrams did. Its so much easier to start an insurrection to overthrow a government than it is to actually come up with policies that the majority of Americans want to vote for. Oh yeah, you should know, if you don't already, that YOU are the minority. On the battlefield of ideas, conservatives lost years ago. Trickle down never did. Pappy Bush was right when he called it "Voodoo Economics". That's just one example. But the Republican Party, as a whole, is intellectually bankrupt. For four years, pundits and politicians alike have been wondering "Where is the bottom? Just how low does Trump have to go before Republicans break from him?" It's nice to see that armed insurrection--an all out terrorist attack on the Capitol--was that bottom for some. I'd say you set that bottom really low, but at least you found it. But for some--for Hawley and Gaetz and Brooks and Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson--they STILL haven't gone as low as they are willing to go. And that is why I have no patience, now, for their "Can't we all get along" speeches. Sounds familiar. Its like Susan Collins saying she thinks Donald Trump has learned a pretty big lesson from impeachment and would NEVER do anything bad again. So why punish him? He's been punished enough. How'd that work out for us, Sue? There has to be accountability. There HAS TO BE. For Trump, for Hawley, for the Sedition Caucus in Congress, for the violent terrorists who invaded the Capitol on Wednesday. It needs to be swift and it needs to be certain. As the FBI agent in "National Treasure" says, "Someone's got to go to jail, Ben." In this case, a lot of "someones". We can't "look forward", we can't "wait it out", we can't "just let the embers die". Because, if we let this pass, it is an open invitation to terrorists--on the right, on the left, and from other countries--that this is all A-OK. And its not. Its just not. And it is not enough just to say that its not. The most disingenuous of arguments is that doing anything now would just deepen the already existing divide among Americans. The time for that thinking passed long ago...at least as far back as Charlottesville. We no longer have a divide among Americans. We now have a divide between Americans and ANTI-Americans, between American Patriots and Trumplican Traitors. Its like law enforcement saying, "We don't want to prosecute Charles Manson because it might upset the other members of the Manson Family." Haven't we learned OUR lesson, yet? If armed insurrection at the US Capitol isn't enough to command immediate removal from office, then America is well and truly fucked. "Right-wing white men love to tell minorities they should be be less violent, as they bomb countries that didn't attack us and wantonly kill thousands and thousands of people."--comment by anon004 in response to racist tirade from Joe Scarborough about the Michael Brown case on MSNBC
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