Conservatives programed to trigger at words "Black Lives Matter" by Russian trolls.

[Herb & Suds]

Trump derangement syndrome is what Americans are left to deal with
We may need to cull the herd from Trumps cultist

 

[hanimmal]

Trump derangement syndrome is what Americans are left to deal with
We may need to cull the herd from Trumps cultist

I would rather start at fixing the problem with unchecked propaganda, and would love some legal accountability for politicians spreading lies.

 

[VILEPLUME]

 

[Fogdog]

Trump derangement syndrome is what Americans are left to deal with
We may need to cull the herd from Trumps cultist

It wasn't all that long ago, maybe a few as two weeks ago, that Trump's supporters used that term to belittle people who said Trump was dangerous to our democracy. The lens of time has flipped that phrase into its mirror image. They are the ones deranged for supporting Trump.

 

[Fogdog]

I would rather start at fixing the problem with unchecked propaganda, and would love some legal accountability for politicians spreading lies.

I would rather we have a long deliberation and debate about what to do regarding right wing and foreign propaganda across social media. Suggest top priority is that we identify and incarcerate the dangerous radicals who attacked our democracy on Jan 6.

 

[hanimmal]

 

[hanimmal]

-Havnt watched this yet, but didn't want to lose it.

 

[Sativied]

The lens of time has flipped that phrase into its mirror image.

Flipped back to its original meaning where it was used to ridicule Trump and his family. Trump used it preemptively, as usual to accuse others of what he is/does. I imagine a witty New Yorker in a bar came up with it after his buddy heard jr. talking and stated he’s talking just as crazy as his dad. “Yeah, they all suffer from TDS.” “TDS?” his buddy replied. “Trump Derangement Syndrome!” *burst out laughing* /end scene.

 

[hanimmal]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/01/hamilton-police-chief-resign/

A police chief and sergeant in a Georgia town were asked to resign last week after they unwittingly recorded their racist conversations on a body camera during the height of Black Lives Matter protests last summer.

The video of Hamilton Police Department Chief Gene Allmond and Sgt. John Brooks stirred emotions in a town of 2,000 with a long history of prejudice against its Black residents, amid a changing political landscape in Georgia. Just weeks ago, the state’s first Black senator was sworn in, the first time in two decades the state sent Democrats to the Senate. And it comes as police departments across the country are grappling with the reality that some of their own may have been among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6.

Mayor pro tem Ransom Farley, the first Black person to hold the job, said he could not even watch the video in its entirety, shocked that the men he worked with “day in and day out” spoke that way. Allmond was chief for about a decade, and Brooks worked in the department for about eight years, according to the city.

“To hear them use the n-word so easily, that was it,” Farley told The Washington Post. “I was so disgusted, and I was disgusted because I had no idea that this was the way that they talked.”

Allmond and Brooks did not respond to requests for comment.

The video was discovered when a city worker was checking to see whether the body cameras worked after Brooks had told the city council that they did not, said Buddy Walker, an assistant to the mayor. That employee reported the video to Walker, who informed city leaders after reviewing the first few minutes of the footage, he said.

The recording shows Allmond and Brooks on June 14 shortly before an anti-racism protest planned in Hamilton, about 80 miles south of Atlanta. Two days earlier, Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by Atlanta police responding to a call about him sleeping in a car at a Wendy’s.

Atlanta DA requests Rayshard Brooks case be reassigned, blames predecessor

Sgt. Brooks unknowingly began recording as he showed Allmond how to use the camera. He later told city officials he didn’t believe the device worked.

In the video, Brooks makes a lewd remark about Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms or former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

At one point, Allmond curses the anti-racism protests, saying slavery ended two centuries ago.

When Brooks mentions he has ancestral ties to enslavers, Allmond implies enslaved people were fortunate: “… for the most part, it seems to me like, they furnished them a house to live in, they furnished ’em clothes to put on their back, they furnished ’em food to put on their table, and all they had to do was f---ing work.”

“And now, we give them all those things, and they don’t have to work,” Brooks responded.

The camera continues recording as Brooks gets in his car and drives by himself. He pulls over, speaking to people on the street out of view from the camera, whom he later identifies in a phone call as White, armed counterprotesters. A group of men waving Confederate flags and yelling “all lives matter” tried to disrupt the peaceful protest, WTVM reported.

“Appreciate y’all being here,” he told the group in the video.

The local chapter of the Georgia Fraternal Order of Police told The Post that it did not condone the language in the video. Brooks, a member, will face a disciplinary process at the state office, lodge chapter president Christy Truitt said.

Within hours after the video was reviewed by city officials, both men were asked to resign. Both said they would, but Brooks did not return police equipment by a designated date and was terminated days later, Walker said. The vacant positions are open to applicants, and an interim chief has stepped in, City Attorney Ron Iddins said.

More than 70 percent of the town voted for President Donald Trump in 2020, and Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue led in their U.S. Senate races in the surrounding Harris County. But the state has trended Democratic amid a racial reckoning.

People who attended the June protest recalled the police seemingly allowing counterprotesters to disrupt the event, comparing their passive demeanor about agitations from that side to the reaction of U.S. Capitol Police on Jan. 6.

Maia Condon, the protest’s co-organizer, told The Post that the sight of police “standing with” counterprotesters was unsurprising, as was hearing their conversations when they thought no one was listening. Condon, who is Black, lives in neighboring Pine Mountain and knows similar prejudicial sentiments are shared by people in power throughout the county.

“It’s happening every day,” the 23-year-old said. “It’s just so happened that this time it got caught.”

Farley said the incident casts a shadow on Hamilton, which has grappled with its part in history, especially in recent years. A national reckoning inspired debate last summer over a Confederate statue in the town square, WTVM reported. Harris County saw eight lynchings in the late 1800s to early 1900s, according to the Lynching Project by the University of Georgia.

“This video definitely didn’t help Hamilton,” Farley said. “I think the city is slowly, but gradually, changing. This incident is more of a setback than anything.”

While the city officials say they acted promptly to remove Allmond and Brooks, a group of community members voiced concerns about allowing the men to resign, pointing out it will be easier for them to be rehired elsewhere. They note that leaders have allowed the problem to fester.

“Here — just like everywhere — racism is a very pervasive, silent disease,” said Pam Avery, a former reporter and community activist who grew up in the area.

Avery, a 70-year-old Pine Mountain resident, said that law enforcement in the county should undergo racial sensitivity training and Hamilton’s council should take steps to make amends for the town’s past.

Walker, who also attended the June event to support the peaceful protesters, said the city was aware of feedback from people who observed the “chummy” interactions between police and counterprotesters. When people at the demonstration almost came to blows, police seemed to side with the group of White men, he said.

“We were a little apprehensive at the chief and the officer were not being equal on both sides,” Walker said.

 

[MY OWN DANK]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/01/hamilton-police-chief-resign/View attachment 4813804

No one ever said intelligence was a prerequisite for a job in law enforcement

 

[hanimmal]

Trump's racist agenda. This is an example of modern day systemic racism.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/02/07/fafsa-verification-black-latino-college-aid/

For at least the last decade, the Education Department has disproportionately selected students from majority Black and Latino neighborhoods to provide further proof that the information on their financial aid application is accurate, according to an analysis of federal data by The Washington Post.

It is a seemingly innocuous request, one meant to reduce fraud and improper payments. But like any government audit, verification — as the process is known — can be a time-consuming, invasive experience primarily visited on the poor.

Nearly a quarter of the roughly 18 million students who filed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, were selected for verification in the 2019-2020 cycle. By comparison, the Internal Revenue Service audited less than half a percent of all returns last year.

The federal government is taking steps to lower the number of students subjected to verification, but it remains an added hurdle for students reliant on federal support to pursue higher education and vexing enough to derail some.

Brayneisha Edwards, 20, wondered whether she was cut out for college after verification left her scrambling to pay for school in the fall.

Edwards, a sophomore studying psychology and sociology at Maryville University in St. Louis, received a notice in the summer after filing her financial aid application requesting she complete a worksheet detailing the size of her family and their earnings. She turned in the form to the financial aid office, believing that was the end of it. Weeks later, after classes were underway, Edwards recalls being told the form was missing. Another submission. Another delay.

As the semester drew to a close, Edwards’s audit came to an end. But by then, she had lost out on scholarships provided on a first-come, first-serve basis for the fall. That left Edwards owing money and unable to register for spring classes.

“It’s very stressful,” Edwards said. “My grades are suffering. I have all of these doubts about am I even going to finish college. My parents didn’t go to college and they are trying to help, but this is new to all of us.”

Verification is intended to maintain the integrity of the $120 billion federal financial aid system, especially the billions of dollars in Pell grants provided to students with limited means like Edwards.

Students must comply with the Education Department or lose access to grants, scholarships and loans. Although the department selects students to audit, colleges must review and approve their documentation. The more complex their financial situation, the more documents they must submit and the longer the verification may take.

Some of America’s poorest college kids are in financial aid limbo, thanks to disruptions at the IRS

Each year, tens of thousands of students drop out of the process altogether, jeopardizing their ability to pay for and complete college. The department pegs this so-called “verification melt” at 11 percent of students selected for audit, but financial aid experts put it as high as 25 percent.

Too often, it’s the people who are least prepared to navigate the financial aid system and most at risk of falling through the cracks shouldering the burden of verification, advocates say.

“This is a really difficult time for many students to even consider college when they have loss of family income, death in the family,” said Kim Cook, executive director of the nonprofit National College Attainment Network. “If we get students to continue down the path to keep their options open for college, hurdles and barriers like verification can so easily knock them off that path.”

From 2017: Colleges puzzled by surge in FAFSA verification requests

The selection process for verification is opaque. The Education Department will not share the methodology but says these days it uses machine learning to target applicants with the highest statistical probability of errors.

Financial aid experts say students whose household income is low enough to qualify for Pell grants are audited at six times the rate of those who are ineligible. Students with an expected family contribution, or EFC, of $0, those who qualify for the most federal grant dollars, are most often selected.

Because of racial income and wealth disparities, those students tend to be Black and Latino, an observation of financial aid experts reflected in data compiled by The Post.

A decade’s worth of verification data by Zip code obtained through a freedom of information request shows that students in majority-Black and Latino neighborhoods are and continue to be targeted at a much higher rate than other communities per capita, despite the decrease in the number of students audited since 2010.

From 2010 through 2020, there have been more than 68,307,000 application checks, about a third of the total applications.

Though Black-majority communities make up 4 percent of that total, data obtained through an open records request reveal that the rate at which these communities are reviewed was on average 1.8 times higher than the rate in White-majority neighborhoods. The rate for Black majority Zip codes was 203 reviews for every 10,000 residents in 2020, compared to majority-White Zip codes with 116 reviews per the same rate.

Majority-Latino communities are reviewed on average 1.4 times higher than majority-White Zip codes — with a rate of 181 reviews per capita.

The Post analyzed the data by grouping Zip codes together based on the majority race and ethnicity.

The disparate impact of the policy raises questions about whether the Education Department is reinforcing systemic racism through an expensive process with limited benefits.

If the goal is to make certain the right amounts of taxpayer dollars land in the right hands, then researchers say verification has long missed the mark.

A National College Attainment Network analysis of federal data found that when the Education Department selected fewer students in the 2019-20 FAFSA cycle, it actually prevented more improper payments than the prior cycle. This suggests high audit rates were inefficient.

Researchers also examined how often Pell awards increased or decreased through the audit. In the two most recent award years, more than 70 percent of students who completed verification experienced no change in their award. Only 3 percent of all applicants became ineligible for the grant. Applicants with an expected family contribution of $0 overwhelmingly retained the full award after being audited.

Need help with financial aid forms? These groups are here to help.

University of Richmond senior Jesse Amankwaah, 21, has been selected for verification almost every year of his undergraduate education. And every year, his award amount remains exactly the same, he said.

At first, Amankwaah believed everyone had to provide more documents after submitting the FAFSA. But the more he spoke to classmates about the ordeal, the more it seemed it was reserved for people with the greatest financial need like him.

“Being selected once, okay. But three times? It started to feel like they didn’t trust me, like they thought I was lying,” Amankwaah, a political science major, said.

Collecting tax transcripts and attesting to the inner workings of his household is so baked into his college experience that Amankwaah doesn’t think much about it these days. But early on, detailing what his parents could and could not afford was “disheartening,” he said.

“The precarious circumstance of living in an immigrant family meant that some information felt sensitive,” said Amankwaah, the son of Ghanaian immigrants. “It’s really even the simple questions like, ‘Who do you live with?’ and ‘How much money do you all make?’ It’s not something we talk about until the school asks. And seeing it all laid out on paper can be rather disheartening.”

 

[hanimmal]

https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-philanthropy-racial-injustice-coronavirus-pandemic-8a80cad199f54c0c4b9e74283d27366f

NEW YORK (AP) — The foundation widely seen as a steward of the Black Lives Matter movement says it took in just over $90 million last year, according to a financial snapshot shared exclusively with The Associated Press.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation is now building infrastructure to catch up to the speed of its funding and plans to use its endowment to become known for more than protests after Black Americans die at the hands of police or vigilantes.

“We want to uplift Black joy and liberation, not just Black death. We want to see Black communities thriving, not just surviving,” reads an impact report the foundation shared with the AP before releasing it.

This marks the first time in the movement’s nearly eight-year history that BLM leaders have revealed a detailed look at their finances. The foundation’s coffers and influence grew immensely following the May 2020 death of George Floyd, a Black man whose last breaths under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer sparked protests across the U.S. and around the world.

That growth also caused longstanding tensions to boil over between some of the movement’s grassroots organizers and national leaders — the former went public last fall with grievances about financial transparency, decision-making and accountability.

The foundation said it committed $21.7 million in grant funding to official and unofficial BLM chapters, as well as 30 Black-led local organizations. It ended 2020 with a balance of more than $60 million, after spending nearly a quarter of its assets on the grant funds and other charitable giving.

In its report, the BLM foundation said individual donations via its main fundraising platform averaged $30.76. More than 10% of the donations were recurring. The report does not state who gave the money in 2020, and leaders declined to name prominent donors.

Last year, the foundation’s expenses were approximately $8.4 million — that includes staffing, operating and administrative costs, along with activities such as civic engagement, rapid response and crisis intervention.

One of its focuses for 2021 will be economic justice, particularly as it relates to the ongoing socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 on Black communities.

The racial justice movement had a broad impact on philanthropic giving last year. According to an upcoming report by Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, 35% of the $20.2 billion in U.S. funding dollars from corporations, foundations, public charities and high-net-worth individuals to address COVID-19 was explicitly designated for communities of color.

After the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, BLM’s founders pledged to build a decentralized movement governed by consensus of a members’ collective. In 2015, a network of chapters was formed, as support and donations poured in. But critics say the BLM Global Network Foundation has increasingly moved away from being a Black radical organizing hub and become a mainstream philanthropic and political organization run without democratic input from its earliest grassroots supporters.

BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors told the AP that the foundation is focused on a “need to reinvest into Black communities.”

“One of our biggest goals this year is taking the dollars we were able to raise in 2020 and building out the institution we’ve been trying to build for the last seven and a half years,” she said in an interview.

Cullors, who was already active in her native Los Angeles, where she created her own social justice organization, Power and Dignity Now, became the global foundation’s full-time executive director last year.

Fellow co-founders Alicia Garza, who is the principal at Black Futures Lab, and Opal Tometi, who created a Black new media and advocacy hub called Diaspora Rising, are not involved with the foundation. Garza and Tometi do continue to make appearances as movement co-founders.

In 2020, the foundation spun off its network of chapters as a sister collective called BLM Grassroots. The chapters, along with other Black-led local organizations, became eligible in July for financial resources through a $12 million grant fund. Although there are many groups that use “Black Lives Matter” or “BLM” in their names, less than a dozen are currently considered affiliates of the chapter network.

According to foundation records shared with the AP, several chapters, including in the cities of Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago, were notified last year of their eligibility to receive $500,000 each in funding under a multiyear agreement. Only one BLM group in Denver has signed the agreement and received its funds in September.

____

CHAPTERS CALL FOR MORE TRANSPARENCY

A group of 10 chapters, called the #BLM10, rejected the foundation’s funding offer last year and complained publicly about the lack of donor transparency. Foundation leaders say only a few of the 10 chapters are recognized as network affiliates.

In a letter released Nov. 30, the #BLM10 claimed most chapters have received little to no financial resources from the BLM movement since its launch in 2013. That has had adverse consequences for the scope of their organizing work, local chapter leaders told the AP.

The chapters are simply asking for an equal say in “this thing that our names are attached to, that they are doing in our names,” said Black Lives Matter DC organizer April Goggans, who is part of the #BLM10 along with groups in Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, San Diego, Hudson Valley, New York, and elsewhere.

“We are BLM. We built this, each one of us,” she said.

Records show some chapters have received multiple rounds of funding in amounts ranging between $800 and $69,000, going back as far as 2016. The #BLM10 said the amounts given have been far from equitable when compared to how much BLM has raised over the years. But Cullors disagreed.

“Because the BLM movement was larger than life — and it is larger than life — people made very huge assumptions about what our actual finances looked like,” Cullors said. “We were often scraping for money, and this year was the first year where we were resourced in the way we deserved to be.”

Still, the #BLM10 members said reality didn’t match the picture movement founders were projecting around the world. In its early years, BLM disclosed receiving donations from A-list celebrities such as Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Prince, prior to his death in 2016.

Leaders at the BLM foundation admit that they have not been clear about the movement’s finances and governance over the years. But now the foundation is more open about such matters. It says the fiscal sponsor currently managing its money requires spending be approved by a collective action fund, which is a board made up of representatives from official BLM chapters.

After Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, the surge of donations saw the foundation go from small, scrappy movement to maturing institution. Last summer, leaders sought nonprofit status with the IRS, which was granted in December, allowing the organization to receive tax-deductible donations directly. In the near future, that also will require the foundation to file public 990 forms, revealing details of its organizational structure, employee compensation, programming and expenses.

Brad Smith, president of Candid, an organization that provides information about philanthropic groups, said there are other ways for nonprofits to be transparent with the public besides federal disclosure forms. He said a philanthropic organization’s website is its best tool to show how willing it is to be held accountable.

“In exchange for getting tax exempt status, you as an organization committed to providing a greater level of transparency to confirm you are fulfilling your mission,” he said.

It’s because of Cullors, Garza and Tometi’s vision, along with the work of so many Black organizers in the ecosystem, that the BLM movement finds itself at a new phase of its development, said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of BLM’s first ever chapter in Los Angeles.

“We’re turning a corner, recognizing that we have to build institutions that endure beyond us,” Abdullah told the AP.

 

[hanimmal]

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-capitol-siege-race-and-ethnicity-wisconsin-2c0bc1149d9b6e057c31d56e92d0267b

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson is being called racist for an interview in which the white Republican said he wasn’t worried about the predominantly white supporters of President Donald Trump during the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, but that he might have been if they had been Black Lives Matter protesters.

In an interview Thursday with syndicated radio host Joe Pagliarulo, Johnson said of those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to try to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s electoral victory: “I knew those were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn’t concerned.”

“Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe — this is going to get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa, I might have been a little concerned,” Johnson said, referring to far-left-leaning protesters known as anti-fascists who resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations and other events.

Five people died during the assault on the Capitol, including a police officer, and 140 officers were injured. The insurrection also caused widespread damage and led to National Guard troops being called in to restore order. More than 300 Trump supporters have been charged in the storming of the building, including members of far-right extremist groups.

Johnson’s comments sparked outrage among Wisconsin Democrats, including state Sen. LaTonya Johnson, of Milwaukee.

“For him to say something as racist as that — it’s ridiculous,” said the state senator, who is Black. “It’s a totally racist comment and the insult to injury is he didn’t mind saying it in the position that he holds because for some reason that’s just deemed as acceptable behavior for people who live in and are elected officials in this state.”

Ron Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelthat he made the comment because many of the protests last summer over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis turned violent and caused widespread property damage. The unrest in the days after the handcuffed Black man’s May 25 death while in police custody caused extensive damage in cities across the country — an estimated $500 million in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area alone.

“That’s why I would have been more concerned,” Johnson said in a statement.

Democrats seeking the two-term senator’s seat next year were quick to call him out.

“Ron Johnson is a racist and is unfit to serve the people of Wisconsin. There is no missing context here. He knew what he was saying, he knew he shouldn’t say it, but this is who he is,” said Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry.

Tom Nelson, the Outagamie County executive who is also seeking the Democratic nomination, said Johnson has reached “a new despicable low” with his comments.

I was hoping to find the full clip, but here is the senator pushing propaganda in his 'whataboutism'.

Here is a good discussion about this too.

 

[hanimmal]

https://apnews.com/article/us-news-race-and-ethnicity-coronavirus-pandemic-1489c946446c36b0afe4e9fdb4f030c7

NEW YORK (AP) — White supremacist propaganda reached alarming levels across the U.S. in 2020, according to a new report that the Anti-Defamation League provided to The Associated Press.

There were 5,125 cases of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and other hateful messages spread through physical flyers, stickers, banners and posters, according to Wednesday’s report. That’s nearly double the 2,724 instances reported in 2019. Online propaganda is much harder to quantify, and it’s likely those cases reached into the millions, the anti-hate organization said.

The ADL, which was founded more than a century ago, said that last year marked the highest level of white supremacist propaganda seen in at least a decade. Its report comes as federal authorities investigate and prosecute those who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January, some of whom are accused of having ties to or expressing support for hate groups and antigovernment militias.

“As we try to understand and put in perspective the past four years, we will always have these bookends of Charlottesville and Capitol Hill,” group CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.

“The reality is there’s a lot of things that happened in between those moments that set the stage,” he said.

Christian Picciolini, a former far-right extremist who founded the deradicalization group Free Radicals Project, said the surge in propaganda tracks with white supremacist and extremist recruiters seeing crises as periods of opportunity.

“They use the uncertainty and fear caused by crisis to win over new recruits to their ‘us vs. them’ narrative, painting the ‘other’ as the cause of their pain, grievances or loss,” Picciolini told the AP. “The current uncertainty caused by the pandemic, job loss, a heated election, protest over extrajudicial police killings of Black Americans, and a national reckoning sparked by our country’s long tradition of racism has created a perfect storm in which to recruit Americans who are fearful of change and progress.”

Propaganda, often distributed with the intention of garnering media and online attention, helps white supremacists normalize their messaging and bolster recruitment efforts, the ADL said in its report. Language used in the propaganda is frequently veiled with a patriotic slant, making it seem benign to an untrained eye.

But some flyers, stickers and posters are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic. One piece of propaganda disseminated by the New Jersey European Heritage Association included the words “Black Crimes Matter,” a derisive reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, along with cherry-picked crime statistics about attacks on white victims by Black assailants.

A neo-Nazi group known as Folks Front distributed stickers that include the words “White Lives Matter.”

According to the report, at least 30 known white supremacist groups were behind hate propaganda. But three groups — NJEHA, Patriot Front and Nationalist Social Club — were responsible for 92% of the activity.

The propaganda appeared in every state except Hawaii. The highest levels were seen in Texas, Washington, California, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania, according to the report.

Despite the overall increase, the ADL reported a steep decline in distribution of white supremacist propaganda at colleges and universities, due in large part to the coronavirus pandemic and the lack of students living and studying on campus. There were 303 reports of propaganda on college campuses in 2020, down from 630 in 2019.

Greenblatt acknowledged that free speech rights allow for rhetoric that “we don’t like and we detest.” But when that speech spurs violence or creates conditions for normalizing extremism, it must be opposed, he said.

“There’s no pixie dust that you can sprinkle on this, like it’s all going to go away,” Greenblatt said. “We need to recognize that the roots of this problem run deep.”

 

[Offmymeds]

Unfortunately & obviously the Russians have been wildly successful & continue operations even further, on the ground, by recruiting the likes of Guiliani, Ron Johnson, et al. No matter how one falls on the issues, you are delusional if you think you haven't been affected (affected, not effected) by the Russian campaign. If your tensions have risen, you have been affected and deceived.

The Russians also began preparing for counterattacks by utilizing a state-controlled internet system physically separated from the rest of the world. That is a step farther than China because the Russian IRA & Putin's mafia are attacking any and every country to achieve any advantage, It's a nuclear cyber war, a wasteland approach and it's working. Authoritarian regimes are taking over democracies and states such as Iran, NK, China, Israel, even Mexico are stepping up their own chaos agents, their own cyber armies as counterattacks. It's risen to a dark industry. The costs are low enough for the wealthy and unscrupulous private companies or even public ones to engage their own through contract services that also give them plausible deniability.

This is a very dangerous time for democracy. The entire GOP party has chosen to abandon democracy in favor of authoritarianism. The events unfolding recently are the very same events that lead to authoritarian regimes around the world.

We're walking a very thin line but we are at last beginning a recovery of democracy, even as the GOP unleashes their full aresenal of voting rights suppression tactics and economic obstruction. It is a fight every day but it is a fight that America can win.

 

[Fogdog]

Unfortunately & obviously the Russians have been wildly successful & continue operations even further, on the ground, by recruiting the likes of Guiliani, Ron Johnson, et al. No matter how one falls on the issues, you are delusional if you think you haven't been affected (affected, not effected) by the Russian campaign. If your tensions have risen, you have been affected and deceived.

The Russians also began preparing for counterattacks by utilizing a state-controlled internet system physically separated from the rest of the world. That is a step farther than China because the Russian IRA & Putin's mafia are attacking any and every country to achieve any advantage, It's a nuclear cyber war, a wasteland approach and it's working. Authoritarian regimes are taking over democracies and states such as Iran, NK, China, Israel, even Mexico are stepping up their own chaos agents, their own cyber armies as counterattacks. It's risen to a dark industry. The costs are low enough for the wealthy and unscrupulous private companies or even public ones to engage their own through contract services that also give them plausible deniability.

This is a very dangerous time for democracy. The entire GOP party has chosen to abandon democracy in favor of authoritarianism. The events unfolding recently are the very same events that lead to authoritarian regimes around the world.

We're walking a very thin line but we are at last beginning a recovery of democracy, even as the GOP unleashes their full aresenal of voting rights suppression tactics and economic obstruction. It is a fight every day but it is a fight that America can win.

Mark me down as delusional, then. I don't buy that everybody is affected by Putin's propaganda. A lot are but Trump did lose in November. An awful lot of women showed up at the women's march in 2017. Most people in the US are not affected by propaganda put out by the anti-abortion movement. The list goes on. A lot of people are. But not everybody and in Trump's case, not even a majority bought his and Putin's crap.

 

[Offmymeds]

Mark me down as delusional, then. I don't buy that everybody is affected by Putin's propaganda. A lot are but Trump did lose in November. An awful lot of women showed up at the women's march in 2017. Most people in the US are not affected by propaganda put out by the anti-abortion movement. The list goes on. A lot of people are. But not everybody and in Trump's case, not even a majority bought his and Putin's crap.

My point is Putin's goal is chaos & conflict. How do you feel about the insurrectionists or BLM or antifa or 'the gov't or Senate Republicans defending Putin? There is a reason we vent on these posts. My blood pressure is up just because it has worked on those select personality types. That's a win for Putin.

 

[hanimmal]

Mark me down as delusional, then. I don't buy that everybody is affected by Putin's propaganda. A lot are but Trump did lose in November. An awful lot of women showed up at the women's march in 2017. Most people in the US are not affected by propaganda put out by the anti-abortion movement. The list goes on. A lot of people are. But not everybody and in Trump's case, not even a majority bought his and Putin's crap.

I disagree with you about this. I do think that the majority of us in the US (especially those who go online or follow politics) has been impacted by this attack from Putin. Of course not all brainwashed into believing the big lies, but defiantly affected. Because it is damn near impossible not to have had to deal with the propaganda.

Masks, Coronavirus, elections, antivaxxers, religion (abortion/gay rights), xenophobia, on and on. The internet and current social media to television is too easily exploited by the militarized trolling.

 

[hanimmal]

Ron Johnson (Sen R-Wisc) is getting a lot of milage out of his BLM trolling.

The thing I find annoying is that the pundits are falling right into the trap of calling out (correctly) his blatant racism, but not his propaganda trolling of attaching the social justice protests as Liberals/Leftists/Democrats/etc which is the big lie in this troll by Johnson.


I went to his twitter to see what his propaganda video of violence he showed, and he is clearly using examples of the white domestic terrorist mayhem that Trump used for his own re-eelction campaign.

https://www.rollitup.org/t/the-people-behind-the-violence-in-the-american-protests-of-george-floyd.1018871/post-15696726


I love the first reply to it. Why was Johnson in Moscow on July 4th 2018?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eight-republicans-spent-july-4-in-russia-where-are-the-fireworks/2018/07/06/beae30be-812e-11e8-b658-4f4d2a1aeef1_story.html

“What does July 4th mean to me? Freedom,” Sen. Ron Johnson chirruped on Twitter on Independence Day.
For the Wisconsin Republican, it meant, specifically, the freedom to spend July 4 in Moscow with seven other Republican lawmakers posing for propaganda photos with Russian officials. On the same day it was reported in Britain that two more people had been poisoned by a Russian nerve agent British officials say came from Vladimir Putin’s regime. On the day after the Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump.

Johnson and his colleagues apparently exercised their freedom not to meet with opposition or civil society figures (those whom the Putin regime has not imprisoned or killed), avoiding the risk of offending their hosts.
They also exercised their freedom to soft-pedal their criticism of the Russian government, leading Russian politicians and state media to mock them as supplicants.

Yet despite this lavish display of the freedom to kowtow, they didn’t get the meeting they hoped for with Putin himself. He was busy, the Kremlin said.

There was a time, in the pre-Trump era, when Republicans would have erupted in fireworks over an Independence Day visit by submissive American lawmakers to the country the 2012 Republican presidential nominee called “our number one geopolitical foe.” (Relations have worsened considerably since then.) They called Jane Fonda “Hanoi Jane” and a traitor when she went to North Vietnam in 1972. After Democrats visited Iraq in 2002, Republicans ridiculed them as “Baghdad boys.”

So, what do we call these Red Square Republicans? My interlocutors on Twitter suggest “Moscow Mules.” Or, given the position they put themselves in before our masters in Moscow, perhaps they should be called the Prostrate Eight: Sens. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), Steve Daines (Mont.), John Hoeven (N.D.), John Neely Kennedy (La.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), John Thune (S.D.) and Johnson, plus Rep. Kay Granger (Tex.).

Their excellent adventure included a ballet performance of “Sleeping Beauty,” and fairy-tale notions pervaded their official meetings, too. “I’m not here today to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth,” Shelby told Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. “I’m saying that we should all strive for a better relationship.”

Yes, let us strive for camaraderie with a government that attacks us with cyberwarfare, meddles in our elections, denies entry to American officials who are critical of Moscow, destabilizes Europe and the Middle East, kills critics at home and abroad, occupies its neighbors’ land and shoots down the occasional passenger jet. Or, as Shelby put it, “this, that or so forth.”

One can hardly wait to see the lawmakers’ next codel: meeting with wounded Taliban fighters on Veterans Day? A Memorial Day wreath-laying for fallen members of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard? Flag Day at a street protest in Tehran?

Soon they’ll be meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and praising him as talented, honest and trustworthy. Oh, wait.

“I asked our friends in Russia not to interfere in our elections this year,” one of the Moscow Mules, Kennedy, said after their meetings. “I asked them to exit Ukraine and allow Ukraine to self-determine. I asked for the same thing in Crimea. I asked for their help in bringing peace to Syria. And I asked them not to allow Iran to gain a foothold in Syria.”

Apparently he didn’t say “pretty please with a cherry on top,” because the Russians were dismissive of the Americans’ pleading.

Duma member Vyacheslav Nikonov said that of the many meetings he has had with American lawmakers, this “was one of the easiest ones in my life,” The Post’s Anton Troianovski reports.

The Post’s Karoun Demirjian reports that state television in Russia mocked the meek Americans. One Russian military expert said, “We need to look down at them and say: You came because you needed to, not because we did.”

Sergey Kislyak, Russian legislator and former ambassador to Washington, dismissed the Prostrate Eight’s message as “things we’d heard before,” and said “our guests heard rather clearly and distinctly” Russia’s denial that it interfered in U.S. elections.

They hardly needed to go to Moscow for that, though, because Trump himself tweeted last week: “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!”

This came after Trump pushed for Russia to be readmitted to the Group of Seven, and in advance of the July 16 Putin-Trump meeting in Helsinki that an Esquire writer called Trump’s “annual performance review.”

“Happy 4th of July!” Shelby, leader of the Moscow Mules, tweeted from Russia. “We are the land of the free because of the brave.”

And what is more courageous than visiting your foe on the Fourth of July and shrinking from accusations of this or that or so forth?

 

[schuylaar]

the fact we had a full on pandemic with Teump and not only did he do nothing, he worked against those who were doing something.