There was a post which made the rounds, an article on Substack from a man who discusses his white nationalist beliefs and his disillusionment after moving to the Midwest. I can't bear to even link to the post. It's pure drivel.
He starts out discussing how he left white nationalism, but what the author means is that he stopped feeling it was necessary that he made it the defining feature of his personality, nor to go to the rallies, etc. He goes on and on about it, making it clear that he is still firmly rooted in it and just isn't driven to be politically active about it.
The segment which was getting traction was about him moving to the Midwest. But even then, people are laughing and I just shake my head. The guy was disillusioned because he felt superior to all the contented midwesterners, living simple lives without motivation to chase greater success or money. He even talked about them in racial terms, comparing them to Asians, and other "inferior" groups.
The article was repugnant and I feel sad that feelings like the author's are so common.
|
"Why the Idea of Western Civilization is More Myth Than History"
So I asked him—casually, I thought—why he was so interested in the ancient Greeks. He beamed up at me with an angelic smile and answered, "Because that's what you study, Mama."
At this point, my heart nearly burst with parental pride. I am a Professor of Classical Archaeology and the ancient Greeks are, quite literally, my bread and butter. But my heart sank when my son added as an afterthought, "and because the Greeks gave us Western Civilization." Buckle up, kid, I thought, you're in for a lecture.
I wanted to tell him that the ancient Greeks did not give us Western Civilization. That there is no golden thread, unfurling unbroken through time from Plato to NATO. That we in the modern West are not the heirs of a unique and elevated cultural tradition, stretching back through Atlantic modernity to Enlightenment and Renaissance Europe, and from there through the darkness of the medieval period and ultimately back to the glories of classical Greece and Rome.
[...]
But if the West and its history was invented in the imperial capitals of seventeenth century Europe, the notion of Western Civilization was born in the eighteenth century on the battlefields of revolutionary North America.
From Adams to Washington, the founding fathers found inspiration in the classical world not only for their revolutionary fervor, but also for how to justify the inconsistencies at the heart of the revolutionary movement—the cry for a freedom that permitted Black slavery, and the rejection of imperial shackles whilst continuing to impose them on others. It was the privileged inheritance of Western Civilization, the cultural and intellectual correlate of race, that justified the differential treatment of different groups of Americans.
Western Civilization is therefore not just a myth in the sense that it is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false. It is a myth that was invented to justify slavery, imperialism, and oppression. As such, it served the ideological needs of the time of its invention, reflecting the core values of the society that produced it.
|
"Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members"
Earlier this month, while the rest of the country was celebrating the achievements of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., parents and children in the "Dissident Homeschool" network opened a lesson plan and were greeted with the words: "As Adolf Hitler wrote…"
The contents of the MLK lesson plan would be shocking for almost anyone, but for members of the 2,400-member "Dissident Homeschool" Telegram channel, this was a regular Monday at school.
"It is up to us to ensure our children know him for the deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro he actually was," the administrator of the network's Telegram channel wrote, alongside a downloadable lesson plan for elementary school children. "He is the face of a movement which ethnically cleansed whites out of urban areas and precipitated the anti-white regime that we are now fighting to free ourselves from."
Since the group began in October 2021 it has openly embraced Nazi ideology and promoted white supremacy, while proudly discouraging parents from letting their white children play with or have any contact with people of any other race. Admins and members use racist, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs without shame, and quote Hitler and other Nazi leaders daily in a channel open to the public.
The "Dissident Homeschool" network is run by a husband and wife team who use the aliases "Mr. and Mrs. Saxon." This week the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective published a detailed report that unmasked the Saxons as Logan and Katja Lawrence, who live in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, with their four young children.
The researchers were able to identify the Lawrences through biographical details they shared in the Telegram channel's group chat and on podcast appearances. One of the key clues to identifying them came when they revealed that they owned a German Shepherd called Blondi—the same name as Hitler's dog.
|
What the Capitol insurgency reveals about white supremacy and law enforcement
America should be honest about the fact that while many people are attracted to law enforcement because they truly want to protect and serve, there are others who seek out these jobs because they want to enforce white supremacist ideologies. Enforcing these ideologies means relegating pursuits of racial equity and criminalizing Blackness. For white supremacists, Blackness is viewed as an antithesis to white supremacy and anyone who actively and overtly embraces racial equity is a potential target of violence, even when the people doing the violence wear a badge.
|
Biden orders assessment of domestic extremism risk
In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue. Seriously, it's one of the most expected actions after recent events. Thank god it's actually happening.
Psaki said that, in addition to the threat assessment, the White House would build out capability within its National Security Council to counter domestic violent extremism, including a policy review on how the federal government can share information about the threat better.
|
Among the Insurrectionists at the Capitol
I am about 1/10th of the way through this article and it is single-handedly going to get me to subscribe to the New Yorker. It's some of the most well written prose I've read in a long time.
I know the white privilege portion of the Capitol riot has been well covered but this particular passage hammers it home:
A moment later, the door at the back of the chamber's center aisle swung open, and a man strode through it wearing a fur headdress with horns, carrying a spear attached to an American flag. He was shirtless, his chest covered with Viking and pagan tattoos, his face painted red, white, and blue. It was Jacob Chansley, a vocal QAnon proponent from Arizona, popularly known by his pseudonym, the Q Shaman. Both on the Mall and inside the Capitol, I'd seen countless signs and banners promoting QAnon, whose acolytes believe that Trump is working to dismantle an occult society of cannibalistic pedophiles. At the base of the Washington Monument, I'd watched Chansley assure people, "We got 'em right where we want 'em! We got 'em by the balls, baby, and we're not lettin' go!"
"Fuckin' A, man," he said now, looking around with an impish grin. A young policeman had followed closely behind him. Pudgy and bespectacled, with a medical mask over red facial hair, he approached Black, and asked, with concern, "You good, sir? You need medical attention?"
"I'm good, thank you," Black responded. Then, returning to his phone call, he said, "I got shot in the face with some kind of plastic bullet."
"Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?" the officer inquired. It was the tone of someone trying to lure a suicidal person into climbing down from a ledge.
"We will," Black assured him. "I been making sure they ain't disrespectin' the place."
"O.K., I just want to let you guys know—this is, like, the sacredest place."
It is hard to imagine that same tone of voice if the people he had been speaking to were Black Lives Matters protesters behaving exactly the same way. There's no way it would be the same calm tone in his voice.
|
The Parler videos from the Capitol
Before Parler was temporarily taken down, some folks discovered they could scrape the Parler API and so they set about archiving and making available every video (public or private apparently.) These videos were not hacked and stolen, it was the result of the API simple incrementing a variable rather than randomly generating IDs.
ProPublica has taken every video from that day and put them into chronological order for ease of viewing.
|
