what the psychotic fuck

I see New York City elected the biggest clowncar of a mayor they’ve had in two decades. Guess this one will get a bunch of people killed too. Christ, what a nightmare.

NYC Wants Shoppers to Take Off Masks in Crime-Fighting Measure
Laura Nahmias – March 6, 2023

New York City Mayor Eric Adams called on shop owners to require customers to remove their face masks when entering stores to help cut down on retail crime that has surged since the pandemic.

“We are putting out a clear call to all of our shops: Do not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask.”

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Today’s Cultural Warfare Update for May 8, 2023

Rightists in general and fundamentalists in particular hate girl’s sports. They’ve spent decades railing against Title IX, describing it as un-feminine, gender-confusion, and all the sorts of things they used to like to leverage against lesbianism and now against trans people. So of course they tried to expel a girl’s team from the practice facility by making them compete against boys – and then when they won the league championship, disqualified them.

How the fash/GOP war against historical reality is going in schools: “‘Slavery was wrong’ and 5 other things some educators won’t teach anymore,” courtesy the Washington Post.

George Takai isn’t fucking around with his new venture, and he and Todd Beeton actually go into some of the history of Christian Nationalism, the rebranding of reconstructionism. It’s a high-overview piece, but if you’re new to the subject, probably not bad.

BuzzFeed is trying to step a bit and educate at least its own readers with an article, “Trans People Have Existed For Thousands Of Years And Other Things You Should Know About Trans People.” We need more mainstream sources acknowledging the actual reality, and now.

Daily Beast reports on how The Times’ recent staff mutiny was not the first time employees raised the alarm internally over the paper’s trans coverage—or the first time management shut them down. But frankly, fuck the New York Times and the horse they rode in on, they’ve blown it every time it mattered. To hell with ’em.

Assigned‘s coverage and breakdown of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling gets to Episode 4, where the transphobia really gets rolling.

This American Life’s latest episode – When to Leave – spends its first act on an OBGYN trying to figure out when she’s going to have to leave Idaho, and its second half on Russians fleeing Putin’s regime. I very much do not think the comparison is accidental – or inappropriate. Particularly given that Idaho is busily legalising armed marches by militias.

Study after study have said the same thing, but it’s always good to have more: kids raised by LGBT parents do as well or better than kids raised by heterosexual couples, no matter what the fash like to say. They’ll never admit it and they’ll always make up some new damn lie.

Anti-LGBT campaigners showed up at the York (Ontario, Canada) Catholic District School District board meeting demanding that “safe spaces” for LGBT children be removed and condemned and/or should be labelled “danger zones” instead. It got worse from there, and eventually the board called the police, who removed the anti-LGBT campaigners.

The Texas Observer has a good write-up on the fundamentalist activists spending big money on the “He Gets Us” Jesus propaganda campaign, and how they don’t believe in the very Jesus they’re selling. It is, as always, another lie – another funnel to lead people slowly towards authoritarian dominionism.

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Fascism Watch for 8 May 2023

Beau wants everyone to understand that we’re re-running 2016 again and everybody seems to have forgot what to do when they promise shocking degrees of evil. Here’s the video where he goes through the steps on how to react if someone close to you starts going in on these obscenities. Give it a watch if you have any friends or family anywhere on the right.

Fascist and fascism apologist Tucker Carlson is lying about January 6th again, describing it as a “peaceful gathering” and using deceptively edited/massively excised footage to portray it that way. It’s obscene, of course. I was watching it live not via major media, but via the livestreams of people involved, actually there, actually doing it. Thankfully, some of those videos have survived, and ProPublica have them.

NBC News has it basically right and uses reasonable language, for once. Not great; “lie” should be in the headline. Raw Story does have “lie” in the headline, thank you very much. Mediaite uses the word “disgusted,” which isn’t strong enough, NBC steps up the game a little in a later article, but only because police are impugned.

Assigned Media’s Evan Urquhart says “you’ve got to stop picturing camps” – that it’ll be hospitals and jails used against trans people, more than camps. This was the model in the Soviet Union for LGBT people as well – expanding existing incarceration systems is much less noticeable and much less disturbing to people who don’t want to see things than entirely new facilities. I’m not sure he’s right about that, but it certainly fits the model of using the drug war apparatus for a new target.

Meanwhile, other neofascists are echoing the calls for genocide, using the same “eradication” phrasing as Michael Knowles used at CPAC. For example, Donald Trump-embraced fascist Nick Fuentes calling for the eradication of feminists, liberals, and jews.

Fuentes knows what Knowles meant. Everyone does. Except maybe Salon, who still thinks it’s kind of a pose, even if it’s a pose that will lead to violence and death. But it’s not a pose, and I wish people would fucking learn that.

HuffPo has more on GOP Congressman Matt Rosendale’s photo-op with neo-nazi white supremacists Ryan Sanchez and Greyson Arnold at the Capitol building, expanding on Vishal Singh’s coverage linked here before. Rosendale denies knowing who they were and says he was just going between meetings, but The Guardian says that doesn’t hold up.

On a related note, Idaho Republicans are busily legalising armed marches by militias. Very specifically and with intent. People wondering when to leave Idaho should maybe think “now. Now is good.”

The Texas Tribune has a rundown on all the GOP’s anti-LGBT bills currently active or already passed in Texas this year. It’s a long list. They’re particularly going after queer children, of course, as fascists and bullies most like to hurt those who can least fight back.

Elon Musk really, really wants to move more firmly into the Putinist camp and support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s hard to know whether that’s why the tor/onion service Twitter were running as an anti-censorship tool before Musk took over has been shut down, but it’s either that or sheer, overweening incompetence.

Atlanta cops have been hitting protesters against a new massive police training facility (“Cop City”) with terrorism charges. Sunday night, they also got a legal observer, so it’s making wider headlines. Charging protesters with terrorism is also a classic fascist move.

I’m not saying the old system was fair, but it was at least balanced – emphasis on was, as Florida, West Virginia and Missouri withdraw from bipartisan effort aimed at maintaining accurate voter rolls.

There’s a fair bit of alarm about legislation in Georgia which would allow legislators to remove prosecutors, particularly since some of the stated reasons for it are political. Sounds bad man. The last version of it I saw wouldn’t take effect until 2024, but I don’t know whether that’s been changed.

Your occasional reminder that Ron DeSantis was a torturer, and revelled in it, at Gitmo. Meanwhile, documentarian Ken Burns describes DeSantis’s new educational censorship regime as downright Soviet in a new interview.

American evangelical fundamentalists have been using other countries as testing grounds for their anti-LGBT campaigns for decades. See the UK, for anti-trans activism, where they’ve been wildly successful; see Poland for anti-abortion activity; and see, again, Uganda for exterminating LGBT people. Another attempt at passing a blanket ban is going right now. Unlike previous versions, this one doesn’t have a death penalty – but it does have years and years in prison, and many other penalties as well.

It’s the kind of thing they’ll do here if they can.

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