Daily Archives: June 29, 2022

Nationwide protests against police brutality, spurred on by the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, took place throughout the summer of 2020 and served as the inspiration for Black Lives Matter Plaza.

Beginning in late-May, thousands of peaceful protesters took to the streets of DC to join in the outcry. On June 1, 2020, peaceful demonstrators many of whom were from DC were met with violence and tear gas by federal forces between Lafayette Park and St. Johns Church, near the current site of the plaza.

Four days later, the Black Lives Matter mural was unveiled across the plaza where protesters had gathered, commissioned by Mayor Bowser and completed by the DC Public Works Department with the assistance of the MuralsDC program.

Bowser also announced the official renaming of the segment of 16th Street NW, which was made permanent by the DC City Council in October 2020.Black Lives Matter Plaza is a permanent installation in Washington, DC.

Continued here:

Guide to Black Lives Matter Plaza | Washington DC

This blatantly racist question became a political hot button in 2015 after Sen. Bernie Sanders was booed and jeered by a crowd in Phoenix and shoved off a stage in Seattle for saying all lives matter.

By Howard Sierer

Do black lives matter or do all lives matter?

This blatantly racist question became a political hot button in 2015 after Sen. Bernie Sanders was booed and jeered by a crowd in Phoenix and shoved off a stage in Seattle for saying all lives matter. While Sanders answer should be obvious to anyone, five of six Democratic presidential contenders, including Sanders, subsequently answered the question in the politically correct manner of the times: black lives matter.

The then-recent killing of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, MO, sparked racial tension, riots and looting across the country. The previously obscure Black Lives Matter organization found its voice by encouraging and applauding the violence.

Democrats saw an opportunity to mobilize not only their black and liberal constituents but a large swath of voters in the middle who deplored what was portrayed in the liberal media as systemic police racism and by extension, the racist underpinning of American society in general.

The Michael Brown narrative that BLM and Democratic politicians touted turned out to be completely false. The police officer involved was investigated by the local prosecutor, by a St. Louis County grand jury, by the St. Louis district attorney and by Pres. Obamas Department of Justice. All found that the officer acted in self-defense when Brown charged him.

The wheels of justice turn slowly: months passed between the initial accusations and the officers eventual exoneration. The liberal media that had whipped up a frenzy against supposed police brutality relegated the exoneration story to back pages.

Despite flogging this false narrative, Black Lives Matter was vaulted into the national spotlight in what became an aggressively militant black denunciation of American society in general as inherently and irredeemably racist. Only a complete restructuring of our culture could cure the problem.

This new role was a far cry from BLMs founding purpose. As described by ABC News, BLM founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi self-identify as trained Marxist organizers and two of them as queer. They started the movement in obscurity in 2013, intending to highlight discrimination against black members of the LGBTQ community.

BLMs newly-expanded message of widespread systemic racism found fertile ground among liberals who saw themselves as standing on the moral high ground. As the late ethics professorJean Bethke Elshtainwrote, Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.

Pres. Trumps erratic and incessant messaging became a convenient target for BLM and the liberal establishment. But it took George Floyds killing in May 2020 to revitalize a faltering BLM and propel it back into the national spotlight. Once again, BLM militants applauded when peaceful marches and demonstrations turned into riots and orgies of looting and destruction, with one BLM organizer calling looting justified reparations.

Responding to BLM calls to defund the police and reform the countrys institutions, corporations anxious to be seen on the right side of racial justice donated over $90 million to BLM in 2020.

But since reaching that pinnacle of national attention and influence in the summer of 2020, its been all downhill with BLM falling from grace into scandal.

First, Democrats found that defunding the police and condoning riots were not winning messages. Many Democratic candidates backed away, a number of whom denied ever saying they supported defunding the police despite direct quotes from earlier in the summer.

Then following Bidens election, BLMs usefulness to the left as a romantic, revolutionary, anti-Trump force was lost. With Democrats in power, the movement became dispensable: renewed BLM societal criticism would by default be directed at them.

Awash with corporate funding and no longer as welcome in liberal circles, BLM has been exposed for grievously misusing its funds. It bought a $6 million mansion in Los Angeles for use by its leadership, using extensive legal maneuvers to hide its ownership.

One of BLMs founders, Patrisse Cullors, announced her retirement when news reports showed that she had spent over $3 million of BLM funds on four different houses including a $1.4 million home in Los Angeles upscale Topanga Canyon.

Social philosopher and former longshoreman Eric Hoffers observation that Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket certainly applies to BLM.

BLMs anti-police message is out of step with the thinking of most blacks today. Even shortly after the George Floyd killing, 81% of blacks wanted the same or more police presence in their communities.

Racist messaging has no place in American society. The liberal tendency to ignore racism when practiced by blacks is inherently flawed and in the longer term, is a stumbling block for future progress.

I agree with Thomas Sowell when he said, The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

Read the rest here:

Black Lives Matter Falls from Grace - The Independent | News Events Opinion More - The Independent | SUindependent.com

Nancy Pelosi's Democrats clearly hope the January 6 hearings will prevent them from drowning at the ballot box this November. But conservatives should view the panel as prologue for a different investigation into a series of disturbances that have had a dramatic and deleterious impact on our lives.

Congress needs to look into the 2020 riots, the Black Lives Matter organizations that coordinated them (not the concept that black lives matter, which is unimpeachable), and their founders. We can call the hearings the Joint Action for Congressional Knowledge hearings, or JACK, after Jack Del Rio, the NFL coach who was fined $100,000 simply for drawing the common-sense comparison between the 2020 riots and the events of January 6, 2021.

Americans live in a changed country today because of 2020. Since then, every institution, from school to the office, houses of worship, the military, sports leagues and the corporate world, has been tinted with a heavy dogmatic hue that was mostly absent before.

The hundreds of riots that took place in the second half of that year also left immense property damage, assessed at up to $2 billion, and at least 25 people dead. Moreover, the murder rate went up by a record 30 percent in 2020, leaving open the question of whether some kind of "Ferguson Effect"the phenomenon of police pulling back after BLM riots or after deadly force goes viralwas at fault.

>>>BLM Global Network Foundations Creators Are Not Interested in Black Lives

Since several prominent Black Lives Matter organizations that coordinated the 2020 disturbances were set up by individuals who have embraced violent action, and called for the "complete transformation" of America and the "dismantling of the organizing principle of this society," one can't be faulted for asking whether violence and the called-for dismantling are linked.

The BLM leaders want to break up the nuclear family, ditch capitalism, and adopt "participatory democracy." That is because BLM co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors were trained in both Marxist doctrine and praxis by theoreticians who want to destroy the United States.

All of this calls for a congressional investigation, one of our society's self-defense mechanisms. Congress has a responsibility to ask questions of those who organized and carried out the disturbances of 2020.

A committee looking into the 2020 riots must of course avoid the credibility shortcomings that have plagued the Jan. 6 panel. Both parties must be allowed to appoint members, because cross-examination is indispensable in eliciting the truth.

The architects of BLM are Americans with constitutional rights, even if they want to overthrow the constitutional order. They are free to try to peacefully persuade their countrymen to dismantle society, abandon capitalism, eliminate the police and courts systems, and embrace the central planning called for by LeftRoots, a revolutionary group for which Garza is a member of the coordinating committee.

But society also has the right to know what their goals are, and society has a right to be safe. The BLM groups cannot unconstitutionally use violence or intimidation to make their arguments.

The January 6, 2021, invasion of the Capitol was a stomach-turning event, a national embarrassment. Participants who broke the law must be prosecuted. But it would be fatuous to pretend that they have had anywhere near the social, cultural, financial, or political clout that the BLM organizers enjoy.

Our schools do not teach children material that originated with the Jan. 6 rioters. Americans are not forced into training sessions at work to instill the worldview of the Jan. 6 rioters. Our foreign policy is not crafted to comply with the tenets of the Jan. 6 rioters, whatever they might be.

BLM organizations, whether the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) or the more loosely organized umbrella Movement for Black Lives, have real power. BLMGNF says it sent out 127 million emails in the second half of 2020, out of which 1.2 million "actions" were taken.

>>>Black Lives Matter Leaders Arent Capitalist Converts, They Still Want To Dismantle the U.S.

Today, everywhere they turn, Americans hear that we live in an "oppressive society," that we have "systemic racism," that "white supremacy" reigns, that certain individuals are irredeemably "privileged," and that "capitalism is racist." These are absurd claims. Yet they have become holy writ. The organizing principles of society are being dismantled.

These are the messages that form Black Lives Matter's ideological platform. Our media have amplified them since BLM was first formed in 2013 with the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, and when it added political muscle after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Since 2020, these messages have entered every nook and cranny of American life.

All this has been based on the claim that police use lethal force more often against blacks than against whites. But studies of the issue, such as this one from Harvard, found no detectable racial differences.

It is time for the riots' leaders to be dragged into Congress and asked under oath what coordinating role they played, what their intent was, and what else they mean to do to American society.

Continue reading here:

We Need a Congressional Investigation Into the 2020 Riots - Heritage.org

Silent Objectors

In 2020, after George Floyd was killed by a policeman in Minneapolis, newspapers across the country, many of which traditionally used a lowercase b, changed their style guidelines to uppercase Black in reference to people.

The lowercase black is a color, not a person, wrote John Daniszewski, vice president for standards at the Associated Press, in a blog post about the decision. (The Chronicle of Higher Education made the change about a week before the AP did.) The following month, The New York Times followed suit, after a monthlong internal discussion.

The moves brought praise and relief from the greater Black community and Black academics alike, some of whom had already been capitalizing the B on their own for years. For those who had been asking for the change, it felt like a small win.

But some scholars say there is a silent group of Black writers and academics who prefer to take more liberty with the choice to capitalize, whether that means capitalizing both White and Black in their work, or choosing to lowercase the b.

In May, Rafael Walker, an assistant professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, pushed back on edits wed made in his essay for The Chronicle Review.

Walkers opinion piece,Who Gets to Write About Whom?, discusses whether its acceptable for people to talk or write about those outside of their demographic. Walker had left black lowercase on purpose, but when his story was sent back to him after an editors review, he wasnt surprised to find uppercase Black when referring to people.

Editors at The Chronicle had decided to capitalize Black, but not white, in June 2020. We decided not to uppercase white because we didnt want to echo what some white supremacists do. (The Times, whose style guide we use along with our own, chose not to capitalize white because white doesnt represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups.)

In the past when this happened to Walker, he took offense.

When that first started happening, it felt really insulting, he says. Often its white editors who dont study race, telling me how the word should be written.

Now, however, hes not shy about pushing back when an editor automatically makes that style change.

In capitalizing one, you end up marking it as something thats different from the other thing, he says. The implication there is that Black people are raced while white people are not.

That nuance made sense for Walkers piece, so we published it with his preferred lowercase black. Different contexts call for flexibility.

The fight to capitalize Black when referring to people dates back centuries. W.E.B Du Bois, the Black sociologist and civil-rights activist, always intentionally capitalized Negro. In the 1920s, he started a letter-writing campaign asking publications to capitalize the N.

The use of a small letter for the name of 12 million Americans and 200 million human beings, he once wrote, is a personal insult.

In 2015, Lori L. Tharps, then an assistant professor at Temple University and a free-lance writer, wrote a book review for The Washington Post on The Sisters Are Alright, by Tamara W. Harris. The story is about Black women in America, and Tharps, a Black woman who often wrote about the Black community, chose to capitalize the B in her draft. But her editor, who was white, said he agreed with her choice, but it wasnt the Posts policy to capitalize the b. Despite advocating for her in meetings with copy editors, they couldnt persuade them to keep the capital b.

It felt great to have this editor try, she says. But clearly it wasnt enough.

This was after she had written an opinion piece in The New York Times about the topic.

This is one of my greatest frustrations as a writer and Black woman living in the United States, she wrote. When speaking of a culture, ethnicity or group of people, the name should be capitalized. Black with a capital B refers to people of the African diaspora. Lowercase black is simply a color.

For her, capitalizing the letter is about recognition for the Black community and empowerment in her own identity. Shes never identified as African American because she doesnt have a direct connection to Africa.

But I have a connection to the people who are known as Black Americans, who have created their own unique culture, she says. Why would I be lowercase when no other ethnic group is lowercase?

Not every organization may follow the same rules, but at least a few have offered flexibility. The American Medical Association, for example, has chosen to capitalize Black and White when referring to people. But the AMA Manual of Style, typically used by authors of academic research in the medical and health fields, offers some exceptions to the rule.

We acknowledge that there may be instances in which a particular context may merit exception to this guidance, a blog post says, for example, in cases for which capitalization could be perceived as inflammatory or otherwise inappropriate.

The American Psychological Associations stylebook has a similar policy.

And when The Chicago Manual of Style, commonly used in humanities fields, announced it would capitalize the B, its editorial staff acknowledged that individual preferences will vary and usage may depend on context.

While many Black scholars choose to uppercase the B, there are plenty who dont, says Walker, the CUNY professor.

Walker pointed to La Marr J. Bruce, a Black writer and associate professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, who does not to capitalize the b.

I use lowercase b because I want to emphasize an improper blackness: a blackness that is ever-unfurling rather than rigidly fixed, Bruce wrote in his book, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind.

Over time, Walker has noticed a change in editorial attitudes around the choice to capitalize Black.

Its moved from an automatic change that the editors just make to a conversation with the author, Walker says. Oyin Adedoyin

Read more:

Race on Campus: Should the 'B' in 'Black' Be Capitalized? - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Listen to this article here

The media has attacked me from day one, and now its my turn to fight back, Kyle Rittenhouse, an 18-year-old murderer, told the Washington Examiner.

On June 23rd, Rittenhouse announced on Twitter to unveil a new video game, with earnings going towards funding defamation against the media for how they covered his trial.

The tweet stated, I am releasing a video game to fight back against the fake news! Its called Kyle Rittenhouses TURKEY SHOOT. Go to RittenhouseGame.com and pre-order the game now!

I am releasing a video game to fight back against the fake news!

Its called Kyle Rittenhouse's TURKEY SHOOT.

Go to https://t.co/0sMQGRY56t and pre-order the game now! pic.twitter.com/ugHLH5Unki

Kyle Rittenhouse (@ThisIsKyleR) June 23, 2022

On August 25, 2020, Rittenhouse, then a 17-year-old boy, shot and killed two people while injuring another at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The protest was honoring all the Black lives that were taken due to police brutality, especially days after the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man. Rusten Sheske, a white police officer, shot Blake seven times, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. After the police officer who shot Blake was not arrested on federal charges, Americans became enraged, sparking protests worldwide.

During the third night of protests, Rittenhouse came armed with a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle to protect Kenosha businesses from looters and burglars. But, Rittenhouse did more than just guard businesses; in fact, he went on to shoot three white men. Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber died from the shooting, while Gaige Grosskreutz survived his injuries.

Rittenhouse shot Joseph Rosenbaum, a 36-year-old unarmed white man, who was chasing Rittenhouse and grabbed his rifle, prompting Rittenhouse to shoot him four times and kill Rosenbaum. However, Rittenhouse proved that he was not done with killing people yet. After hitting Rittenhouse with his skateboard, he went on to shoot and kill Anthony Huber, a 26-year-old man. Then, ending his rampage of terror with one more shooting, Rittenhouse struck Gaige Grosskreutz, a 26-year-old man armed with a handgun, in his right arm. Grosskreutz ended up surviving the shooting.

In November 2021, Rittenhouse faced first-degree intentional homicide and four other felony charges but ultimately would be released, as his lawyers claimed he was using self-defense under the Second Amendment.

This trial sparked controversy among many Americans, believing that Rittenhouse should have been convicted for the shootings.

Many conservatives were upset with the Black Lives Matter protests, supporting Rittenhouse and raising $2 million to cover his bail. As a result, citizens viewed Rittenhouse as an individual who made everything worse by inflicting violence by bringing a gun to the protest.

After beating his case, Rittenhouse created a game so individuals could experience what shooting is like. The game is called Kyle Rittenhouses Turkey Shoot and is available on pre-order for $9.99.

To promote his game, Rittenhouse released a video where heshoots the air with a Nerf gun while rap music plays in the background. Rittenhouse continues, Its the fake news turkey st. Got a laser gun going pew pew pew. Follow my suits. We about to bankrupt the fake news.

In the video game, idiotic turkeys roam a grassy field, then cartoon Rittenhouse shoots the animals with slogans such as fake news and MSDNC painted on their bodies. The game has a timer to determine how many turkeys an individual can shoot in the destined time.

The profits will go towards Rittenhouses Media Accountability Project, an initiative that strives to file defamation lawsuits against the media who covered his trial back in 2021.

Collaborating with Mint Studios, one of the top publishers in mobile games, Mint Chip, CEO, told the Washington Examiner, We had to step in to help Kyle after we saw what was done to him. Before the trial, you couldnt even mention his name in a positive manner on social media without getting banned. The truth literally got you suspended. We fight for the truth.

For the game trailer, Rittenhouse declares, The media is nothing but a bunch of turkeys with nothing better to do than to push their lying agenda and destroy innocent peoples lives. He said the game is a response to the hateful perception depicted by the media, further telling the Washington Examiner, Thats why Ive decided to launch the Kyle Rittenhouse Turkey Shoot video game and partner with Mint Studios to create a fun and interactive way to get everyone involved in holding the media accountable.

With the upcoming release of the game, many people have mixed feelings about it. While some individuals believe that Rittenhouse should be in prison for murder, others are pleased that he got his charges dropped for self-defense. Regardless, Rittenhouse continues to make a name for himself in the same media outlets he claims to fight against.

Excerpt from:

Kyle Rittenhouse Announces Shooting Video Game Targeted at the Media - The Black Wall Street Times

People gathered downtown at the Monroe County Courthouse Monday.

Bloomington protestors are calling on government officials to demand abortion as a right.

The crowd met Monday at the county courthouse and marched to Planned Parenthood and a pregnancy crisis center.

The protest was in response to the Supreme Courts ruling, striking down Roe v. Wade.

Ashley Culbertson is an IU junior and organizer with the party for socialism and liberation out of Indianapolis.

READ MORE: Two sides of abortion battle face off at Indiana Statehouse

We really wanted to bring people all together in one space who really care about this issue and lay out things they can do, help get them the sources that they can give to others.

Culbertson listed ways people can support local pro-choice efforts.

Black Lives Matter Bloomington is doing a fund drive right now to raise funds to buy Plan B specifically for women of color in Bloomington because they know that they will be disproportionately affected by this decision.

She said voters should tell their representatives to protect their rights and to take action before the November election.

Read more:

Bloomington protesters: Democratic reps need to take action to protect abortion access - WFYI

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Just a day after the Supreme Court issued a radical decision on gun rights, it officially declared Roe v. Wade a dead letter. In all of the tumult surrounding the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, even eagle-eyed Court watchers would have been forgiven for overlooking one curious detail. After all, it was overlooked when it appeared in the draft opinion that was leaked in May. Nestled among Justice Samuel Alitos arguments laying waste to nearly 50 years of abortion precedent lurked an unassuming footnote documenting a narrative advanced in amicus briefs submitted to the high court. These friend of the court briefs, Justice Alito explained, present[ed] arguments about the motives of those favoring liberal access to abortion, namely that some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.

According to Alito, claiming abortion is a tool of racial genocide is not beyond the pale. [I]t is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect. After all, he noted [a] highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black. As further support for the view that abortion has functioned as a tool of eugenics, Alito cited Justice Clarence Thomass separate opinion in 2019s Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, a challenge to an Indiana law that prohibited abortion where undertaken for reasons of race or sex selection or because of the diagnosis of a fetal anomaly. The Court declined to review the law, deferring the question of the constitutionality of such reason bans to another day. While Justice Thomas agreed with the decision to decline review, he nonetheless wrote separately to emphasize that the day was coming when the Court would have to confront the constitutionality of laws like Indianas, which, in his view, merely reflected a compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.

As evidence of the eugenic potential of abortion and reproductive rights, Justice Thomas noted that [t]he foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement, which developed alongside the American eugenics movement. Indeed, reproductive rights advocates like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the modern birth control movement, and Alan Guttmacher, who served as the President of Planned Parenthood in the 1960s, worked hand in glove with the eugenics movement, endorsing contraception and abortion as effective methods for controlling the population and improving its quality. But if the eugenics movement was principally concerned with optimizing the genetic profile of the white race, Sanger and Guttmachers commitment to population control through reproductive freedom reflected a shared concern for high maternal mortality rates and a commitment to allowing women to make decisions about childbearingand the size of their familiesfor themselves.

Uninterested in this nuance, Justice Thomas maintains that the work of these birth control pioneers was shot through with racial animus. Margaret Sanger, he notes, campaigned for birth control in black communitiescreating a birth-control clinic in Harlem as well as the Negro Project, which worked with Black leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and Black clergy to promote birth control in poor, Southern Black communities. Thomass implication is clear: contraception and abortionthe twin pillars of reproductive rightsare not merely rife with eugenic potential, they are, put simply, tools of racial injustice.

Justice Alitos decision to include this footnote, and its not-so-subtle association of abortion with eugenics and racial genocide, in the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs is puzzling, if only because, as a matter of law, it is entirely gratuitous. Having laid out his case that Roe is egregiously wrong because the abortion right is unmoored from constitutional text and lacks deep roots in the countrys history and traditions, there was no need to invoke racial eugenics. So, why did Justice Alito, a shrewd tactician when it comes to advancing the conservative legal project, insist on this unusual aside?

Perhaps it was merely an anodyne gesture of collegiality toward Justice Thomas, who, as the most senior justice in the majority, could have kept this plum opinion assignment for himself, but instead allowed Justice Alito the opportunity to spear Roes great white whale. After all, Justice Thomas has diligently husbanded the notion of eugenic abortion to great effect, helping it to flourish in the lower federal courts, particularly among conservative jurists. When the Sixth Circuit, for example, recently upheld an Ohio law that barred doctors from performing abortions on women who choose to end their pregnancies because the fetus has Down syndrome, the majority opinion and all but one of the concurrences referenced Thomas Box concurrence and its condemnation of eugenic abortion. Judge Richard Allen Griffin explicitly noted Nazi Germanys horrific implementation of eugenics, musing that the tragic practice of eugenics continues today with modern-day abortions.

Colleagueship aside, Alitos footnote seems like a strategic choicean effort to till new ground in an opinion that will be dissected and scrutinized for generations to come. With this in mind, the footnote seems less like an inadvertent aside or a gesture of collegiality, and more like a poison pill, laying the foundation for extending the assault on reproductive rights to contraception, with which Margaret Sanger is most closely associated. This prospect is not far-fetched, especially considering that the Court has previously justified revisiting and overturning earlier decisions in order to remedy racial injusticeBrown v. Board of Educations overruling of Plessy v. Fergusons separate but equal doctrine is perhaps the most famous example. Indeed, in his own concurrence to the Dobbs majority opinion, Justice Thomas made the case for revisitingand eventually overrulingprecedents securing the right to contraception, same-sex marriage, and same-sex sexuality.

The conservative impulse to use race as a means of toppling reproductive rights has unexpected roots. Over the last 20 years, reproductive justice advocates have made the case that restrictions on abortion and contraception are disproportionately borne by women of color and poor women, and that it is essential to consider reproductive rights in concert with economic and environmental justice, immigration status, disability, and race, class, and sexual orientation. This critique has proved incredibly effective, prompting mainstream reproductive rights groups, like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, to expand their agendas beyond abortion to include things like access to affordable contraception, sex education, pre- and post-natal care, family leave, and childcare.

Conservatives also noted the reproductive justice movements success in reframing the debate. In time, the pro-life movement too began to recast antipathy to abortion as a matter of social justice. Responding to claims that abortion was a reasonable choice for women of limited means and resources, the pro-life movement invested heavily in the expansion of crisis pregnancy centerswhich sought to dissuade pregnant individuals from abortion, in part by providing free or low-cost access to prenatal testing, prenatal care, diapers, and other newborn essentials.

Simultaneously, the pro-life movement began emphasizing the supposed harms that abortion posed to minority children and their communities. The Radiance Foundation, an antiabortion group, placed billboards in predominately Black neighborhoods staunchly asserting that Black children are an endangered species. Life Always, another prominent pro-life group, orchestrated a billboard campaign in minority neighborhoods that proclaimed The Most Dangerous Place for an African American is in the Womb. More recently, the tagline Black Lives Matter has been met with retorts from antiabortion groups thatunborn Black lives matter.

The rights embrace of racial justice may seem curiousparticularly given the conservative assault on identity politics, anti-discrimination laws, and voting rights protections. But in some respects, this pivot is entirely predictable. Its not the first time the conservative movement has repackaged some of its core agenda items in the wrappings of racial equity.

Ten years ago, for example, the defense of Second Amendment rights was framed primarily in terms of public safety. But more recently, advocates have recast their support of more robust gun rights as an appeal to racial justice. And once again, Justice Thomas has led the charge. In a separate concurrence in 2010s McDonald v. City of Chicago, Justice Thomas linked the right to bear arms to thwarted Black citizenship. As he explained, the federal governments failure to protect Second Amendment rights during Reconstruction enabled private forces, often with the assistance of local governments, to subjugate the newly freed slaves and their descendants through a wave of private violence designed to drive blacks from the voting booth and force them into peonage, an effective return to slavery. In conjuring up images of lynchings and other forms of racial violence, Justice Thomas effectively insisted that more expansive gun rights are antidotes to racism.

Justice Thomas reprised these arguments in his majority opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Courts recent decision striking down New Yorks concealed carry permitting regime and holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms in public spaces. He noted the systematic efforts to disarm newly freed Blacks and recounted how blacks used publicly carried weapons to defend themselves and their communities in the postbellum period. Indeed, in a truly stunning aside, Justice Thomas cited Dred Scott v. Sanford, the 1857 case that precipitated the Civil War, for the view that the right to bear arms was so clearly understood as a marker of citizenship that Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of Dred Scott, fretted that recognizing Blacks as full citizens would permit them to keep and carry arms wherever they went. Not to be outdone on racial wokeness, Justice Alito concurred separately to detail circumstances in which [o]rdinary citizens frequently use firearms to protect themselves from criminal attack. In particular, he noted that the Court had fielded amicus briefs from groups, including the Asian Pacific American Gun Owners Association, whose members feel that they have special reasons to fear attacks.

This racial pivot is a potent form of whataboutism that can be incredibly hard to refutewhat about the unarmed Blacks, like Ahmaud Arbery, who are left vulnerable to white supremacist violence? Do they not deserve the Second Amendments protection to defend themselves and their families against racial violence? In another amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in Bruen, the National African American Gun Association, a group of Black gun owners, doubled down on this point, observing that, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Southern states relied on gun control laws to enforce Jim Crow. Their brief even recounts Martin Luther King, Jr.s unsuccessful efforts to secure a gun license in the face of credible threats against himself and his family.

This kind of racialized logic is not only hard to refuteit is hard to resist, wooing some strange bedfellows to the gun rights cause. Because the scourge of gun violence has disproportionately impacted minority communities, Black voters have mostly sided with gun control measures. But a racialized reframing of gun rights has prompted a reappraisal by some. A group of Black Legal Aid Lawyers filed an amicus brief in support of striking down New Yorks concealed carry permitting law. The brief raised eyebrowslegal aid lawyers do not tend to be conservative, after all. But they argued that because gun restrictions are often selectively enforced, such laws provide a potent vehicle for increased state surveillanceand criminalizationof minorities. It was the kind of argument that liberals would typically make. And perhaps that was the point. When the decision in Bruen was announced, the group applauded it as an affirmative step toward ending arbitrary licensing standards that have inhibited lawful Black and Brown gun ownership in New York.

Abortion and gun rights are the twin pillars of the modern conservative legal movement. And while this Court, with its 6-3 conservative super-majority, has just overruled Roe and expanded gun rights, they surely recognize that broad swaths of the country object to their vision of the Constitution. Which is why this pivot to race is so attractive. And it is hard, perhaps even impossible, for any other Justice to refute Justice Thomass account of racial harm. He is, after all, the only member of the Court that can speak from personal experience about the issues facing the Black community. Ketanji Brown Jackson will surely alter the Courts racial dynamics, providing a useful foil to Justice Thomass account of race, but her voice was not yet available in these two consequential decisions.

The appeal to race also usefully complicates the traditional ideological alignments, fracturing the coalition of social justice groups, while uniting the conservative legal movement and some unexpected allies under the banner of racial uplift. And perhaps most importantly, pivoting to race provides the Court with the veneer of racial justice that helps to insulate their most egregious decisions from the inevitable public blowback. After all, when progressives decry the dismantling of Roe and the expansion of the Second Amendment, conservatives need only parrot back these new racial talking points to insist that they are the ones who are centering the needs of minority communities.

The rights newfound interest in race speaks to the lefts success in centering questions of racial justice in contemporary political discourse. When millions of protesters lined the streets to mourn George Floyd and challenge the status quo, they made clear that our political and legal discourses would have to grapple with questions of race and racialized violence. The rights recent embrace of raceeven as it decries identity politics and critical race theorywould be amusing if it werent so obviously cynical. The Court has cloaked its radically conservative legal agenda in a mantle of wokeness that conservatives would be quick to denounceif it werent so useful for achieving their most deeply cherished goals.

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Thomas and Alito Are Appropriating Racial Justice to Push a Radical Agenda Mother Jones - Mother Jones

When the Internet-culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany first encountered One Direction, the British-Irish boy band, she was home for the summer after her freshman year at college. She was sad and sick of herself; shed struggled to fit into her schools hard-partying social scene. Most Saturday nights, she writes, I would put on something ugly, drink two beers in a fraternity annex and wait for someone to say something I could throw a fit about, then leave. Tiffany was moping around the house when her younger sisters cajoled her into watching This Is Us, a One Direction documentary. Her first impressionsbland songs, too much shiny brown hairwere soon overtaken by a weird sense of enchantment. The boys were goofy; they were sweet. One of them touchingly imagined a fan, now grown, telling her daughter about the bands terrible dance moves. Finding 1D, Tiffany writes, was like connecting to something pure and reassuring and somehow outside of timelike being yanked out of the crosswalk a second before the bus plows through.

But Everything I Need I Get From You, Tiffanys new work of narrative nonfiction, is not about One Direction. As much as I love them, she writes, the boys are not so interesting. Instead, the bookwhich is wistful, winning, and unexpectedly funnysets out to explain why Tiffany and millions of others needed something like One Direction as badly as we did, and how the things we did in response to that need changed the online world for just about everybody. The books initial lure may lie in the second proposition. For me, at least, fandom has started to feel like a phenomenon akin to cryptocurrency or economic populisma history-shaping force that wed be foolish to ignore. After all, fans dont just drive the entertainment industry, with its endless conveyor belt of franchise offerings and ever more finely spliced marketing categories. They also affect politics (as when K-pop groupies flood police tip lines during Black Lives Matter protests) and influence the news (as when Johnny Depp stans attack the credibility of his alleged abuse victims). One of Tiffanys most provocative arguments is that fans have drafted the Internets operating manual. Their slang has become the Webs vernacular, she writes, and their engagement strategiesriffing, amplifying, dog-pilingsustain both its creativity and its wrath.

One Direction makes for a good case study. The five heartthrobs came together on a reality show, in 2010the height of Tumblrs popularity, and a time when teen-agers were beginning to sign up for Twitter en masse. The girls who worshipped the band, called Directioners, were fluent in the tropes of the social Internet: irony, surrealism, in-group humor. Interviewing and describing these girls, Tiffany revisits the teenybopper stereotype, a punching bag for critics since Adorno. Nobody is primed to see self-critique or sarcasm in fans, she writes. But her subjects, far from frantic or mindless, are productive, even disruptive, obscuring the objects of their affection with a mannered strangeness. The book distinguishes between mimetic fandomthe passive variety, which celebrates the canon exactly as isand transformational fandom, which often looks like playful disrespect, and can deface or overwrite its source material. Directioners, Tiffany argues, are projection artists, and she highlights their outr handiwork: deep-fried memes, crackling with yellow-white noise and blurred like the edges of a CGI ghost; a physical shrine where Harry Styles, the groups breakout star, once vomited on the side of the road. In an affecting chapter, Tiffany makes a pilgrimage to Los Angeles to find the shrine herself. But its creator, confused by how many people construed her marker as crazy or maliciousshed wanted only to send up the lust and boredom that would lead someone to memorialize pukehad taken it down. The sign, she tells Tiffany, was more a joke about my life than about Harrys.

Indeed, the deeper the book plunges, the more incidental the singers end up feeling. Theyre raw material, trellises for the fantasies of self being woven around them. (The bands relentless blankness comes to seem a feature, not a bug.) Tiffany acknowledges that fannish enthusiasms arent random, that they have a lot to do with marketing. The word fan, she writes, is now synonymous with consumer loyalty. But she also cites the media scholar Henry Jenkins, who asserts that fans are always trying to push beyond the basic exchange of money. At times stubbornly unprofitabletweeting hes so sexy break my back like a glowstick daddy about Harry Styles isnt likely to boost his bottom linethey can serve as allies to artists hoping to transcend the commercial. Tiffany quotes Bruce Springsteen, who reportedly insisted that he wanted his music to deliver something you cant buy.

This same chaotic energy can make fans annoying, even dangerous. Tiffany runs through the Larry Stylinson conspiracy theory, which hijacks a time-honored technique of fan fictionshippingto posit a secret relationship between Harry Styles and his bandmate Louis Tomlinson. Emboldened by lyrical, photographic, and numerical clues, Larries rained vitriol on the singers girlfriends, closing ranks and terrorizing dissenters. (Some also determined that Tomlinsons newborn son was a doll.) Such harassment campaigns may not approach the level of Gamergate, Tiffany writes. But any kind of harassment at scale relies on some of the same mechanismsa tightly connected group identifying an enemy and agreeing on an amplification strategy, providing social rewards to members of the group who display the most dedication or creativity, backchanneling to maintain the cohesion of the in-group, which is always outsmarting and out-cooling its hapless victims, all while maintaining a conviction of moral superiority.

Its scary stuff. Yet the social event of fandom may finally be less compelling than its individual dimension. Being a fan, for Tiffany, is achingly personal. I loved her musings on why and how people pledge themselves to a piece of culture, and whether that commitment changes them. At one point, she describes the historian Daniel Cavicchis work with Springsteen buffs. Cavicchi was interested in conversion narratives: some of his subjects arrived at their passion gradually, but others were suddenly, irrevocably transformed. Tiffany talks to her own mother, a Springsteen obsessive, who recounts what ethnographers might call a self-surrender story, in which indifference or negativity is radically altered. (I fell in love and I just never left him, her mom sighs, recalling a Springsteen performance from the eighties.) The chapter draws intriguing parallels between fandom and religious experience, teasing out the mystical quality of fans devotion, how oddly close we can feel to icons weve never met. It also explores the link between affinity and biography. For Tiffanys mother, Springsteen concerts punctuated the blur of raising young children; one show even marked the end of her chemotherapy treatments.

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How Fans Created the Voice of the Internet - The New Yorker