Category Archives: Alt-right

They call him Marshal Tweeto.

Janez Jansa, the right-wing prime minister of Slovenia, used Twitter to declare Donald J. Trump the winner of the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 4, saying, Its pretty clear that American people have elected @realDonaldTrump @Mike_Pence for #4moreyears.

Alas, this turned out to be, as Jansas hero likes to say, fake newsalthough Jansa has doubled down on it since. But the tweet was nothing new for the Slovenian prime minister. Jansa has moved from left to far-right over the years. He was once one of the founders of an independent Slovenia who had made his name in the 1980s as a journalist, writing for the left-leaning magazine Mladina. In 1988, he was arrested by the Yugoslavian authorities for publishing a stream of military leaks. After popular protests for his release, he joined the political movement that won the first democratic elections in Slovenia in 1990.

In 1993 he became the president of the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), and he still holds the title to this day. He is also a three-time prime ministerbut after a vote of no confidence in 2013, he was sentenced to two years in prison on corruption charges. The sentence was confirmed by the Higher Court in Ljubljana in April 2014, but subsequently unanimously overturned by the Constitutional Court of Slovenia a year later.

Jansa is a avid Twitter user, using social media to insult journalists, political opponents, the general public, and anybody who does not agree with him. Peddling misinformation on his Twitter profile is pretty usual for the prime minister. In July, he retweeted a video from the QAnon series The Fall of Cabal, which details an ugly conspiracy theory, and invited people to join him on the Parler social network, where he follows far-right figures such as Paul Joseph Watson, Katie Hopkins, Jack Posobiec, and Alex Jones conspiracy network Infowars.

He also likes to attack journalists and public figures, insulting them and spreading falsehoods about them. According to the SparkToro Fake Followers Audit, nearly 75 percent of his Twitter followers are fake, but his tweets are regularly picked up by mainstream media outlets in Slovenia, extending their reach.

Jansa has a two-prong approach to media relations, said Andraz Zorko, a public opinion expert, where he uses Twitter to form outrageous statements that agitate the general public and his opponents, and at the same time appears perfectly rational in traditional media outlets.

In the summer of 2015, Jansa and his colleagues from the SDS funded and launched a media outlet called Nova24TV. Its slogan is First in the service of truth, but the reality is anything but. The party-linked propaganda outlet spews regular falsehoods on the refugee crisis, Muslims, and the LGBTQ community, spinning and twisting the truth in order to fit the right-wing party agenda. Left-wing parties have labeled it a hate factory.

Like Trump, Jansa ended up with nothing but yes men around himself, effectively starting to drink his own Kool-Aid, dispensed by the very media apparatus he created in order to disrupt the liberal democratic consensus, explained Aljaz Bitenc Pengov, a political analyst.

I am not surprised that the prime minister running a fake-news government would publicly endorse the fake-news electoral victory of incumbent Donald Trump, said Anuska Delic, editor in chief at Ostro, a center for investigative journalism in the Adriatic region. In a year and a half since the launch of Ostros media fact-checking project, the media controlled by the SDS and majority-owned by members of the inner circle of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have been the main sources of fake news, disinformation, and misinformation in Slovenia.

Our findings indicate a symbiotic relationship between the party, its policies and goals, and the content that is being churned out by this media, Delic explained. At publication, the content is usually disseminated on social media by the partys members (many of them current public officials), its sympathizers, and possibly trolls to exert pressure on opponents and skew the public debate. The same methods are also used on unruly journalists who receive questions from one of these media which usually concern their professional or personal activities, or those of their family members. That content is further used to smear, harass, and attack reporters online.

In 2016, Hungarian investors joined the Nova24TV media venture with an investment of 800,000 euros that turned out to be connected to the Orban regime. They invested again in 2018, bringing a total sum of Hungarian investments into the SDS-related propaganda outlets to more than 3.5 million euros.

Nova24TVs other income is sourced from advertising contracts with partially state-owned companies such as Telekom Slovenije, insurance company Triglav, the Petrol Group, and others which, when publicly called out, could not explain the market reasoning behind them. Critics say they fund the channel to suck up to the party in power.

According to Primoz Cirman, editor of media outlet necenzurirano.si, The Orban-Jansa alliance formed after the so-called migrant crisis in 2015. Bothsaw the opportunity to establish themselves as defenders of Christian Europe. Jansas motives were logical. In 2014, the SDS lost a parliamentary election while he was in jail. As a result, the party needed a new platform, and Jansa found one in anti-globalism. There was only one problem: SDS needed channels for spreading its new ideas, so it started to establish its own media outlets. Since 2017, a huge influx of Hungarian capital has come into media companies, established by prominent SDS members or the party itself.

Nova24TVs website and TV station of the same name are just the central parts of Jansas propaganda empire in Slovenia. His party is also connected to more than 20 local online media outlets that are used to anneal the messages of party propaganda, which are further distributed by a network of Twitter and Facebook accounts.

By analyzing his Twitter behavior, we can note that the prime minister is spending more and more time on Twitter, said Maja Cimerman of Today Is a New Day, a Slovenian nongovernmental organization. During the U.S. elections, we calculate he spent at least three full hours a day on Twitter, with tweets appearing even at 4:30 in the morning. His behavior often indicates a form of escapism from the actual issues in the country, connected with the second pandemic wave where government policies are sorely lacking effectiveness, she adds.

Jansa owes more than just his media network to the neighboring Hungarian autocrat. He won the general election in the summer of 2018 but was unable to form a coalition, since other major parties denounced his hard-right stance. A New York Times article from June 2018 drew connections between Orban and Jansa, claiming that Jansa was following Orbans footsteps. Orban praised Jansa on Nova24TV during the election campaign in 2018, saying, Jansa is exactly the kind of leader Slovenia needs.

From 2018 until the spring of 2020, Jansas party was busy developing a relationship with Orban and other leaders of countries in the Visegrad Group. The COVID-19 pandemic offered a new window of opportunity.

In March, the countrys center-left coalition fell apart, and Jansa was able to form a center-right coalition with him at the helm and other right-wing and centrist parties playing second fiddle to his regime. He immediately went to work, proposing legislation to gut the public media outlet RTV Slovenija, shift more public money into funding his propaganda outlets, and repress NGOs.

At the same time, Orban and Jansa started forging long-term strategic cooperation, including efforts to tie the two countries power grids together and potentially build a new joint oil pipeline. Also in the talks were military contracts between the two countries, since the Slovenian government recently approved a military investment budget of a staggering 780 million euros over the next six years.

The alliance grew stronger and expanded to North Macedonia, where the same Hungarian proxies bought several media outlets that support right-wing party VMRO-DPMNE, Cirman explained. SDS and [Orbans party] Fidesz are virtually synchronized in European Parliament voting. Jansa was one of the few European leaders that opposed the rule of law as a condition for any EU member to be eligible for EU coronavirus funds. The alliance presents a new challenge for Slovenia, as Hungary has strong economic, cultural, and political interests in our country, especially in the field of infrastructure, energy, and banking.

Beyond Orban, Jansa favors the global alt-right. Jansa is no stranger to retweeting other outlets such as the Daily Caller, Project Veritas, Breitbart, PragerU, and other far-right Twitter accounts. Media outlets connected with Jansa and the SDS feature interviews with controversial guests from the global alt-right universe such as Kevin MacDonald, Daniel Friberg, Martin Sellner, and Renaud Camus, all of whom Jansa regularly retweets.

Jansas affection for the global neo-Nazi movement is simply an extension of his right-wing politics,explained Boris Vezjak, a philosopher and professor at the University of Maribor. These [shared] feelings are then reflected in the connections of the SDS party with the Generation Identity movement or in supporting local neo-Nazi groups to break up anti-government protests, he added.

As with Slovenian paramilitary units, Serbia has also seen the formation of anti-migration self-organized groups, said Katja Lihtenvalner, a researcher at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. In Bosnia we followed the formation of vigilantes and groups who were increasingly taking matters in their own hands, under the pretext of protecting the safety of others and public order. Generally, the impression is that authorities themselves are not able or willing to prevent the formation of such groups, the most radical of which are in Slovenia, where self-appointed ultranationalist groups were patrolling the border with fake guns and military uniforms.

Jansa has many political enemies, but his politics are a grim reminder of the turn things have taken in Slovenia.

Barbara Rajgelj, an assistant professor of law at the University of Ljubljana, explained: For the past 30 years, we were convinced Slovenian society was autocracy-resistant, but we are now seeing that isnt true. Part of this irresponsible public media tolerance was that Jansa was never confronted about his statements made on Twitter, even though his attacks towards the public media are well documented.

The future, however, looks bright for Jansa right now.

With a parliamentary majority in which Jansas party is calling the shots, while weaker coalition partners tremble in silence , the pandemic allows him to repress anti-government protests, a general culture of fear which makes people afraid to speak out because of fear of retribution, Slovenians are walking down the path of failed states. Despite Jansas having promoted far-right figures and built a propaganda network funded by a foreign regime, many Slovenians are still attracted to his maverick way of constructing his own reality, which is slowly sucking the air out of Sloveniaone tweet at a time.

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Slovenia's Prime Minister Is a Far-Right Conspiracy Theorist and Twitter Addict Who Won't Admit Trump Lost - Foreign Policy

Reading the pages ofThe Atlanticthis morning, David Frum opines that the Republican Party has two choices before it.

Simply put, Republicans caneither retrench into Trumpism or they can become more like Democrats or as Frum puts it, become more secular, more diverse, more accepting of female leadership which seems like odd advice from a party that just finished eviscerating Justice Amy Coney Barrett for the better part of a month.

With the death of Virginias mainstream media, the opinion columns have by and large moved online. Most of them have chimed in with varying degrees of value, but a quick summary will run as follows:

Lowell Feldover at the Democratic flagshipBlue Virginiaprognosticates thatDemocrats enjoy the latitude for infightingmoving into 2021 while Republicans continue to be in a three-way civil war (one of whose factions actually uses Civil War imagery).

Meanwhile over atBacons Rebellion,writerJames Sherlockstates facts pretty plainly:

Until there is a Republican Party of Virginia, not the current Republican Party of me, the party candidates will remain eclectic to the point of statewide incoherence. Not sure who has the juice to pull that together.

The inestimableJames A. Baconwhoshepherds what has to be one of the more informative bastions of intellectual policy thought in Virginiaobserves that the polarization of power in Virginia is much larger than Trump. With Democrats holding every statewide office, the question at large is whether Republicans (and specifically conservatives) can still muster a challenge?

Once the mainstay of conservative thought and opinion in Virginia, the old flagship ofBearing Driftseems to enjoy more left-of-center commentators than conservatives ones. Former Republican DelegateChris Saxmanbemoans the current state of affairson Grace Street;Steve Brodie Tuckerwrites on howthe Republican Party is irreparably damagedand calls for a third party;D.J. McGuire formerly a hard nosed anti-Communist until recently and now a hard nosed progressive Democrat points towards what moves behind the curtain an effort to build a third party.

This does not make their erstwhile rivals atThe Bull Elephantany more friendly, as their flirtation as the mouthpiece of the the alt-right in Virginia dithers from embarrassing to absolutely outrageous at any given moment.

Cathy McNicklewrites on howthe strategy of terror oscillating between COVID and BLM/Antifa workedto grind down Republicans who otherwise might have re-elected Trump in a landslide.Mark Jaworowskiwonders aloud onhow the alt-right can be coalesced into a wider coalition of smart right leadershipwith alt-right energy.

Yes, these voicesactuallyexistin the Republican Party of Virginia.

NewcomerKerry Dougherty(formerly of theVirginan Pilot) andBrian Kirwinrespectively have not chimed in with their prognostications, thoughDougherty sure does wag a finger towards the Biden campaignfor being sore winners.

Ouch.

Last but not least,Robert Zullowith the left-leaning (and dark money funded)Virginia Mercuryhas some basic and well-intended truths to lay on the table, namely the nature and feature of that all encompassing term: GRIFT.

For example, the Republican Party of Virginia launched an election integrity fund in attempt to siphon more money out of its voters ostensibly on behalf of the guy who has helped lose the Virginia GOP every statewide election, control of the General Assembly and three House of Representative seats since he took office.

Needless to say, I think we can distill the wisdom of the blogerati as such:

Virginia Republicans simply arent tacking into this headwind well, if at all.

Typically in any sort of After Action Report, you have four considerations: objectives, results, pathways, and goals.

The objective and the result should be self-evident at this rate. The pathways our processes, causes, what-happened, what worked, what broke apart, and most importantlywhy are where we have been stuck since the Jeff Frederick era.

Everyone knows what is broken; no one wants to fix it.

As it stands now, the Republican Party of Virginia is about to engage in a five-way civil war of its own and the winner take what few spoils remain.

This is not to say that anyone who hails from one of these camps is 100% on board in each. Some candidates will be able to unite the various camps.

Rare candidates will be able to unite them all (one thinks of Jim Gilmores campaign for governor in 1997 as an example of such quality).

The great task of Rich Anderson as chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia is to get all these camps to work together against a wider opposition, one where all the voices get a seat at the table in any future majority/administrationandwhere all five camps (and various candidates) believe the nomination contest was adjudicated fairly, evenly, and without bias or pressure.

This will still require the discipline to weed out those who are poisonous to that essential unity. The alt-right cannot be part of this coalition; racial and ethnic sentiment cannot be part of this coalition; religious intolerance cannot be part of this equation.

The larger point is that unlike the emotional attachment Democrats gave to Obama and Clinton the left misses the fact that most Republicans viewed Trump as a vehicle for ideas, not as a cause unto himself.

That Republicans are not burning down our cities or behaving like BLM/Antifa shocks most observers on the left who were hoping for a similar temper tantrum.

Sorry. Not happening.

But we have to be considerate moving forward that we will require candidates and qualities that remain sensitive to the idea that we will only recapture majorities and statewide offices in Virginia by speaking the languages, hopes and fears of the broader Republican coalition in Virginia which means we go back into the suburbs, find our inner Jack Kemp, and start presenting an alternative to socialism that is uniquely American.

Above all else? Republicans need to start deeply considering whether our party infrastructure requires an update.If the RPV Advance actually comes off this year(and I think it will), the presentation of an After Action Report with recommendations to State Central on how it can effectively reform into a membership-driven party is critical.

We have great difficulties to surmount in 2021. The good news is that most difficulties are surmounted by leadership. The great news is that Virginia Republicans have never lacked for great leadership.

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So Now What, Virginia? - The Republican Standard

VIEW FROM HERE--People tend to believe what they want to believe and few people want to believe facts which upset them.

Also, the first information in organizes subsequent information even when the original data is totally wrong and the latter data is absolutely correct. That is how the human mind has evolved.

A very unfortunate corollary is the huge divide which can occur in a population when two significant segments passionately believe mutually exclusive Alt Facts. As the Trump made famous, Alt facts are considered valid if they support Trumps viewpoint, and it is equally true that the Dems accept Alt Facts which support their viewpoint.

There is a characteristic pattern how Trump embraces his Alt Facts. Trump boldly, loudly and incessantly proclaims falsity to be true. He began with the size of the inaugural crowd going so far as to present a doctored photo of the crowd on national TV. The Dems Alt Facts take a stealth approach of omission. The Dems simply ignore the horrible electoral defeat the nation just gave Nancy Pelosi in the House. Dems similarly ignore that there is no such group as Latinos even if you call them Hispanics or Latinx.

Alt Facts Combined with a Mission Are Deadly

When Alt Facts are combined with a sense of mission, people become zealots. We see this situation with cults. David Koreshs followers died because they believed the Alt Fact that he was a messiah. Heavens Gate followers committed suicide to hitch a ride on spaceship hidden behind the Hale-Bobb comet. The Rev Jim Jones followers not only murdered US House of Representative Leo Ryn and four others, while over 900 of his followers committed suicide. Hence the saying, Dont drink the Kool Aid. to warn people not to buy into the Alt Facts of charlatans.

The sense of being on a mission floods the brains neurology so that both mass murder and suicide become not only acceptable but are elevated to holy goals. Germanys Nazism showed how decent people infused with Alt Facts combined with a Mission can destroy civilization.

Alt Facts on a Mission Are Not New to Western Civilization

After Martin Luther began The Protestant Reformation on October 31, 1517 by posting his 95 Thesis to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, hundreds of years of religious wars ravaged Europe. As closer examination shows, a host of secular goals were advanced under the guise of the holy religious missions. The faithful seemed unconcerned with the death and destruction which their side inflicted but found the other sides minor transgressions to be the mark of Satan. Their sense of mission highjacked their minds not unlike how the Evangelicals are blind to Trumps decades of sinful behavior and the Dems cannot comprehend how Nancy Pelosi has ginned up the Alt Right with her prolonged attack on blue collar whites. When a populace is convinced it is on a holy crusade, it can do no wrong and the opponent can do no good.

Presently, the world is witnessing how difficult is it for Trump and many of his followers to accept what is obvious the majority of Americans are tired of Donald Trump, personally. At the same time, Pelosi Dems are similarly unable to accept the fact that their mission to Make America Socialist Again [MASA] has likewise been rejected.

Biden Stands Between Two Populations on Opposing Missions

Biden rejected both Trumpism and Pelosism when he said during the last debate, This is not about his family and it is not about my family, but about your family. There was no Black-White divide, no Gay-Straight divide, no Dem-GOP divide, there was no dividing of any type. E Pluribus Unum was in charge once again.

The Lurking Economic Disaster

A nation divided by opposing missions is not prepared to deal with real threats. The Pandemic Infection rate is like successive tsunamis inundating the shore while much of the GOP urges people to flock to the beaches. They are on a mission to prove that no masks and social crowding will bring us to herd immunity ASAP and the virus will thus magically vanish.

The Dems have their own folly, i.e. the lack of money cannot be solved by funneling cash to the bottom of the economic ladder. Trump is correct about one thing Pelosi has made certain no more funds reach Americans by proposing legislation which she knows GOP have to oppose.

Heres Whats Happening

Millions of Americans are trying to financially survive by doing a lot of things which endanger the entire economy. People are borrowing huge sums from the life insurance policies. If Pelosi had allowed biweekly or monthly payments to everyone as Munchin proposed, people would not be depleting cash reserves. People are beginning to live off credit cards. People who paid off their cards each month are paying off maybe 80% and then 70% and then they get down to paying the minimum. Credit card companies will have to reduce credit limits. People are slashing their coverage on auto insurance and increasing their deductibles to reduce premiums. The hurricanes will result in underlayment of claims and the raising of premiums in addition to carriers exiting certain markets. As Americans cut corners to protect themselves, they harm someone else. If Pelosi Dems had allowed cash to flow to the bottom, it would have flowed upwards and everyone would have benefited.

Both Pelosi Dems and GOP Business Practice Trickle Down Economics

We know about the GOP trickle down fallacy, but we never hear about the Pelosis form of trickle down. Pelosis demand that money go to cities is trickle down. The Dems want to save the Dem cities with corrupt mayors like LAs Eric Garcetti. For purposes of trickle down, there is no difference between GOP corporations and Dem cities

Trickle Up Works for All Americans

When a family gets cash, it pays rent and then the landlord pays his mortgage. With cash, people pay off their credit card each month and they need not borrow from the life insurance. It was Pelosi who reduced Munchins $1,000.00 twice a month to only $1,200.00 once and then the Dems, aping Trump, proclaimed that they had raised the amount by 20% while ignoring the fact that they had wiped out 100% of the second round. Also, Munchin favored more direct payments directly to people and not funneling all the money through hands of politicos where billions of dollars were stolen.

There is nothing more dangerous than people on a mission armed with Alt Facts -- except a nation divided by conflicting missions both of which are based on their own Alt Facts.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: Rickleeabrams@Gmail.com.Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.)

-cw

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People Believe What They Want to Believe - City Watch

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An anonymous New York architect has imagined how Donald Trumps presidential library might look like if it faithfully reflected his time in office. Immediately setting the stage are sculptures of COVID-19 proteins displayed right outside the entrancea monument to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who succumbed to the disease. In the Alt-Right Auditorium, films such as Birth of a Nation and Jud S, a 1940 Nazi propaganda film, are on a constant loop. Hypothetical permanent exhibitions include the Wall of Criminality, Tax Evasion 101, and the Twitter Gallery, while interactive elements include Lie to America, where visitors get to spin their own alternative facts. The Criminal Records Room, part of the Play the Prosecutor library archive, offers up the opportunity to do the research on how YOU would prosecute Trumps crimes against humanity!

Though the designer behind the concept remains unidentified, the renderings make their opinion of the outgoing president very clear. Even from behind the legendary Resolute Desk, Donald Trump set new bars for all future presidents, reads the curatorial statement. You can rest assured, no matter how low they go, no one in all eternity will ever be able to sink this once-great office any lower.

More than 700 works by the influential graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff have been donated to the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Made possible by the late designers children, the expansive gift contains works created as early as 1952 spanning all the way until his death, in 2017. The collection includes paintings, prints, book covers, and even his personal artworks and collages. Among his most recognizable designs include the NBC peacock, the Smithsonians yellow sun, and PBSs faces in profile. Bringing much of my fathers design and collage work to the permanent collection at the School of Visual Arts was enormously exciting for myself and my siblings, Maro Chermayeff, the chair of the universitys MFA Social Documentary Film program, tells The Art Newspaper. It was an obvious home for the works. He would be so pleased to know that students could continue to partake in his thinking and design ideas.

An overdue memorial dedicated to Native American veterans, now open in Washington, DC, marks a major step forward in recognizing their service. According to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), Native Americans serve in the U.S. armed forces more than any other ethnic group. As a collective, they have served in every major military tangle since the Revolutionary War, yet their efforts have gone largely unnoticeduntil now. Located a stones throw from the National Museum of the American Indian, the memorial overlooks a freshwater landscape adjacent to the National Mall. Harvey Pratt, a member of Oklahomas Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes and a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran, designed the 12-foot-tall stainless steel ring. Postured on a carved stone drum, the sculptures shape holds special significance to many Native American cultures, symbolizing traditions in dance, storytelling, and prayer. The monument is an emblem for reverence, as visitors are encouraged to leave prayer tiesa symbol of spiritualityon four vertical lances.

Each year, Vancevas World of Color Award (WOCA) goes to a design firm that best uses the brands color interlayers in laminated glass configurations. For the Museum of Fine Art, Houstons recently unveiled expansion, Steven Holl Architects encased its Kinder Building in white glass, including the canopied entrance, clerestory windows, and double-layered facade of laminated glass tubes over an opaque weather wall. Translucent interlayers filter sunlight into the galleries while protecting the artworks from harmful UV rays. As for the projects monochromatic nature, its difficult execution makes it worthy, explains WOCA juror Benjamin Wright. As an aesthetic maximalist, it seems somewhat contrary to give a color award to a white building, but in this case the architects and fabricators used the shape and nature of the glass to optimal effect. The challenge of lighting a museum with natural light cannot be understated.

Last week, a controversial sculpture of the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled in Richmond, London. The fleshy, naked depiction of the mother of feminism polarized critics, many noting that its representation was insulting to Wollenstonecrafts legacy. In response, a campaign to fund a statue of Virginia Woolf, created by the sculptor Laury Dizengremel, has received an influx of donations. The nonprofit Aurora Metro Arts and Media has been saving for three years to commission the sculpture, which will be situated by the river in Richmond, where the author lived and worked for a decade. Almost $21,000 of the $66,000 target has been raised to fund the monument, a life-size bronze statue of Woolf sitting on a bench and looking toward the river, with just enough space for visitors to sit next to her.

Todays attractive distractions:

What does a prenup smell like? Goops latest candle might have the answer.

This surrealism exhibition in Madrid is a welcome escape from the pandemic.

Patricia Carr Morgan captures the majestyand disappearanceof glaciers.

McDonalds will debut a plant-based hamburger, the McPlant, early next year.

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Imagining Donald Trumps Presidential Lie-Brary, and Other News - Surface Magazine

The million MAGA march that took place yesterday in Washington, D.C. was a staggering display of stupidity, racism, and the complete denial of reality. Of course that kind of behavior is expected from Trumps marauding death cult, but there was one moment that blew our collective minds. Among the protesters were two people in costume: one dressed as Joe Biden in a prisoner uniform, being held by the other, a man wearing a Trump mask while dressed as Homelander from The Boys.

Showrunner Eric Kripke tweeted an image of the duo, asking Um are they actually watching the show? Great question, Eric!

I mean, they know that Homelander is the villain of the series, right? After all, the Amazon series has repeatedly shown Homelander to be a frighteningly heartless sociopath who murders with impunity. In just two seasons, weve seen Homelander abandon a plane full of innocent passengers, murder his mommy figure, and threaten anyone who goes against him. Homelander is unequivocally a bad man.

Huh. Maybe Homelander IS a stand-in for Donald Trump. They both have dyed blonde hair, theyre both obsessed with their appearance, theyre both bottomless wells of insecurity and they both resent the very people who worship them. Theyre torn between a desperate need to be loved and an utter disdain for everyone in their orbit.

But the similarities dont stop there. Both Homelander and Trump f-ck with nazis (quite literally for Homelander and Stormfront), and they both love fascist military posturing and denigrating other countries. They wrap themselves in American flags and pretend to be heroic patriots, when theyre really just using the flag to conceal their various crimes. Oh, and they court conservative Christians with false piety while comparing themselves to Christ.

The similarities between these two megalomaniacal monsters are many, and most of us view these traits as deplorable. The deplorables themselves however, celebrate it. One wonders what the thought process was behind this Homelander Trump costume. Did the wearer get confused and think he was dressed as Superman? Or did he watch The Boys and just completely miss the point?

It certainly confused Antony Starr, the actor who plays Homelander, who tweeted his thoughts on the costume:

Homelander wouldnt be the first piece of popular culture the alt-right has misappropriated. There have been viral videos of MAGAts dancing to Rage Against the Machine while woefully misinterpreting their lyrics. Trump enters his rallies to Fortunate Son, which is a song that rails against men like Trump. And of course, there are plenty of internet vigilantes who worship Watchmen red pill anti-hero Rorschach.

At this point, Trump supporters have a preternatural ability to reshape popular culture into supporting their cause. They truly see what they want to see, regardless of logic or reality. Unfortunately for us, were stuck living with the consequences of their unhinged actions.

(featured image: Amazon Studios)

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Trumpers Fail To Realize That Homelander Is the Villain of The Boys - The Mary Sue

The 2020 U.S. presidential election brought into sharp relief the contrast between the American and Israeli Jewish communities, the two main centers of the Jewish world. According to post-election surveys, American Jewish support for the Democrats remains extremely high, at 77 percent (up from 70 percent in 2016). President Donald Trump was estimated to have received a mere 21 percent of the Jewish vote. In Israel, however, surveys have shown that Israeli Jews prefer Trump to Biden by 70 percent to 13 percent.

Much has been written on the growing gap between American Jews and Israel in terms of values and Jewish identity. In particular, the entrenchment of the occupation and the growing authoritarianism of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime has provoked growing disillusionment with Israel, especially among young Jewish progressives in North America. On the one hand is Israels unmistakable shift to the nationalist right; on the other, American Jews commitment to liberal, pluralistic, and progressive ideals, exemplified by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The liberal icon symbolized for many the role that Jewish Tikkun Olam can play in the struggle for universal social justice.

Now, the two communities find themselves not only drifting apart, but also increasingly at loggerheads. Most American Jews see Trump as a clear threat, while most Israeli Jews view him as an ally who offers security and hope. This divergence has to do not only with the two communities different values, but also their structural positions.

For a relatively prosperous and largely white minority, the extent of American Jewish backing for the Democrats is striking. A 2015 study found that Jewish support for Democrats was 40 percent higher than that of non-Jews in similar socio-economic positions. And while some of it can be explained in Jewish levels of education and concentration in metropolitan areas, this is clearly far from the whole story.

The Democratic Partys model of inclusive citizenship fits American Jewish aspirations to cultivate a cultural and religious minority identity alongside civic participation. In such a model, Jewish particularism and universal American citizenship reinforce each other as two sides of the same coin. The Republican Partys overwhelmingly white Christian character, on the other hand, is far less accommodating in this regard. The GOPs strong Evangelical base, and its Christian-infused social conservatism, have dissuaded most Jews from considering it a political home.

In the last four years, Trumps connections with the extreme right have added an explicit antisemitic dimension to this equation. Trump has repeatedly refused to denounce white supremacist groups and the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy. GOP politicians routinely invoke conspiracies regarding the Hungarian Jewish financier George Soros, while using their support for Israel to deflect charges of antisemitism.

The Womens March on New York, January 21, 2017. (Gili Getz)

The shift in the GOPs rhetoric under Trump has revealed that the general assimilation of white Jews into whiteness has clear limits. Trumps comments to American Jews, in which he referred to Israel as your country and Benjamin Netanyahu as your prime minister, betrayed his understanding of U.S. Jews as not fully American, in keeping with his overall exclusivist notion of citizenship.

The 2018 deadly attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue by a white nationalist who subscribed to GOP-amplified conspiracy theories involving Soros and immigration, meanwhile, showed in the starkest terms the dangers of Trumps normalization of white supremacy. The place of Jews in a nativist America is far from secure, and it is clear why they reject overwhelmingly this political vision.

Israeli support for Trump is similarly rooted in structural realities, and is tied to the transformation of Israels political system in the last 20 years. The slow but sure demise of the two-state solution, and the effective incorporation of the occupied West Bank into Israel, mark the emergence of a one-state political system in which Jewish dominance is secured through the erosion of Israels democratic features. If American Jews are a minority, Israeli Jews are in the opposite position. They constitute a hegemonic group of about 50 percent of the population in Israel-Palestine.

As Raef Zreik recently wrote on +972 Magazine, the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law spells out the new model of Jewish political dominance, with the downgrading of citizenship for Palestinians in Israel and commitment to Jewish settlement as a national value. As the permanence of the occupation becomes increasingly obvious, Israel can no longer maintain its democratic credentials and present itself as an island of liberalism in the Middle East.

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This explains why Israel has sought in the last decade to position itself as a strategic ally of the rising global authoritarian, revanchist, and Islamophobic right, headed by Jair Bolsanaro, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbn and, of course, Trump. For now, this alliance appears to be working in Israels interests, in an increasingly illiberal world. Israeli right-wing commentators supportive of Trump have adopted alt-right rhetoric, and have spoken in disparaging and even antisemitic terms about U.S. Jews support for liberal values. Key Netanyahu surrogates have described J Street as Jew boys, referred to American Jews as suburban rich people with private police, and routinely circulated Soros conspiracies.

Could this change under a Joe Biden presidency? It is almost certain that Bidens White House will try to revert, at least rhetorically, to previous patterns. No doubt the administration, very much like the EU, will try to revive the charade of the peace process and two-state solution. This will not change any of the existing dynamics, but it would enable international actors to continue ignoring the reality of effective Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Yet it is doubtful that this could work for much longer.

For Israel, the global hard right is now a natural and perhaps inevitable choice. Israels preference for a Trumpist GOP is therefore a logical conclusion, while for most American Jews, Trumpism is an anathema and a threat. Under these conditions, the rift between the communities could deepen and become about much more than values or disillusionment. It represents the clash of radically different alignments, rooted in the political trajectories and positions of both communities. This is no longer only about the future of Israel, but also about the future of Jews in the United States.

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The global right is threat to US Jews but a natural home for Israelis - +972 Magazine

Mothers talk to me of the fear they have for their kids going out into the community, worried about the violence they might face.

At a virtual meeting with advocates Tuesday, Singh endorsed an action plan by the National Council of Canadian Muslims calling for federal legislation that would allow authorities to shut down white supremacist organizations that do not meet the threshold for a militia or terrorist entity.

The plan also demands authorities move more proactively to dismantle hate groups under existing provisions of the Anti-terrorism Act and the Criminal Code.

Bernie Farber, chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, says national law enforcement agencies need to establish dedicated anti-hate crime divisions.

Right now it is in my view one of the most dangerous times in Canadian history when it comes to extreme right-wing violence, said Farber, former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, which disbanded in 2011.

Twenty-two people have been killed as a result of right-wing radicalization over the past four years, he said, including the 10 who died during the van attack in Toronto two years ago.

The trial for Alek Minassian, who told police he planned and carried out the attack in April 2018 but has pleaded not criminally responsible, began via video conference Tuesday.

Minassian told interrogators he corresponded before the attack with two mass murderers motivated by the misogynist incel culture propagated by males claiming to be involuntary celibate.

Hate groups and white supremacist ideas are wildly enabled by mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and message boards like 8chan, but also fringe platforms including Gab, Telegram and Parler, says Barbara Perry of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism.

Were also seeing a lot more of what Ive been calling floaters people who dont necessarily affiliate with any particular group but, given the availability of online venues, sort of move in and out of social media platforms, cherry-picking narratives that seem to fit their own grievances or their own lot in life, Perry said in a phone interview.

Advocates including Perry and the national Muslim council met virtually with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Public Safety Minister Bill Blair and Diversity Minister Bardish Chagger on Monday evening to discuss possible steps.

Anti-Semitic incidents have been on the rise since 2016, exceeding 2,200 last year, according to advocacy group Bnai Brith Canada.

Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said most of them begin online.

He and Conservative MP Marty Morantz are part of a task force launched this fall that includes politicians from Australia, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States who aim to push their legislatures to pass similar laws and collectively pressure web companies to act.

Ayatollah (Ali) Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has tweeted vile anti-Semitic content multiple times in the past month, and Twitter has not flagged it, Housefather said in a phone interview.

He said companies should work harder to contextualize or remove hateful posts.

The Inter-Parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism was scheduled to host its first virtual briefing with community organizations Tuesday evening.

Monday and Tuesday marked the anniversary of Kristallnacht also known as the Night of Broken Glass a 1938 pogrom against Jews in Nazi Germany that saw scores of civilians killed, stores and synagogues smashed and thousands rounded up for concentration camps.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 10, 2020.

Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press

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Singh says government must move to counter hate groups, which have tripled since 2015 - Lethbridge News Now

Donald Trump is not much of a note-taker, and he does not like his staff to take notes. He has a habit of tearing up documents at the close of meetings. (Records analysts, armed with Scotch Tape, have tried to put the pieces back together.) No real record exists for five meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin during the first two years of his Presidency. Members of his staff have routinely used apps that automatically erase text messages, and Trump often deletes his own tweets, notwithstanding a warning from the National Archives and Records Administration that doing so contravenes the Presidential Records Act.

Trump cannot abide documentation for fear of disclosure, and cannot abide disclosure for fear of disparagement. For decades, in private life, he required people who worked with him, and with the Trump Organization, to sign nondisclosure agreements, pledging never to say a bad word about him, his family, or his businesses. He also extracted nondisclosure agreements from women with whom he had or is alleged to have had sex, including both of his ex-wives. In 2015 and 2016, he required these contracts from people involved in his campaign, including a distributor of his Make America Great Again hats. (Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign required N.D.A.s from some employees, too. In 2020, Joe Biden called on Michael Bloomberg to release his former employees from such agreements.) In 2017, Trump, unable to distinguish between private life and public service, carried his practice of requiring nondisclosure agreements into the Presidency, demanding that senior White House staff sign N.D.A.s. According to the Washington Post, at least one of them, in draft form, included this language: I understand that the United States Government or, upon completion of the term(s) of Mr. DonaldJ.Trump, an authorized representative of Mr. Trump, may seek any remedy available to enforce this Agreement including, but not limited to, application for a court order prohibiting disclosure of information in breach of this Agreement. Aides warned him that, for White House employees, such agreements are likely not legally enforceable. The White House counsel, Don McGahn, refused to distribute them; eventually, he relented, and the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, pressured employees to sign them.

Those N.D.A.s havent stopped a small villages worth of ex-Trump Cabinet members and staffers from blabbing about him, much to the Presidents dismay. When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I dont like that, he told the Washington Post. In 2019, he tweeted, I am currently suing various people for violating their confidentiality agreements. Last year, a former campaign worker filed a class-action lawsuit that, if successful, would render void all campaign N.D.A.s. Trump has only stepped up the fight. Earlier suits were filed by Trump personally, or by his campaign, but, last month, the Department of Justice filed suit against Stephanie Winston Wolkoff for publishing a book, Melania and Me, about her time volunteering for the First Lady, arguing, astonishingly, that Wolkoffs N.D.A. is a contract with the United States and therefore enforceable by the United States. (Unlike the suit against Trumps former national-security adviser John Bolton, relating to the publication of his book, The Room Where It Happened, there is no claim that anything in Wolkoffs book is or was ever classified.) And Trump hasnt stopped: last year, he required doctors and staff who treated him at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to sign N.D.A.s.

Hardly a day passes that Trump does not attempt to suppress evidence, as if all the world were in violation of an N.D.A. never to speak ill of him. He has sought to discredit publications and broadcasts that question him, investigations that expose him, crowds that protest him, polls that fail to favor him, and, down to the bitter end, ballots cast against him. None of this bodes well for the historical record and for the scheduled transfer of materials from the White House to the National Archives, on January 20, 2021. That morning, even as President-elect JosephR.Biden, Jr., is ascending the steps of the Capitol, staffers from the archives will presumably be in the White House, unlocking doors, opening desks, packing boxes, and removing hard drives. What might be missing, that day, from file drawers and computer servers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is difficult to say. But records that were never kept, were later destroyed, or are being destroyed right now chronicle the day-to-day doings of one of the most consequential Presidencies in American history and might well include evidence of crimes, violations of the Constitution, and human-rights abuses. It took a very long time to establish rules governing the fate of Presidential records. Trump does not mind breaking rules and, in the course of a long life, has regularly done so with impunity. The Presidential Records Act isnt easily enforceable. The Trump Presidency nearly destroyed the United States. Will what went on in the darker corners of his White House ever be known?

The truth behind a Presidents actions can be found only in his official papers, HarryS.Truman said in 1949, and every Presidential paper is official. Truman became an advocate of archival preservation after learning about the fate of his predecessors papers. When George Washington left office, in 1797, he brought his papers back to Mount Vernon, but, loaned out, they were extensively mutilated by rats and otherwise injured by damp; eventually, they were carried by the historian Jared Sparks to Massachusetts, where Sparks threw out anything he didnt like, scrapped what he found worthless, gave away much of the rest, and, beginning in 1837, published what he liked best as The Writings of George Washington.

For many years, there was no alternative for a departing President but to take his papers home with him; there wasnt really any place to put them. Thomas Jefferson, having no confidence that the office of the private secretary of the President of the U.S. will ever be a regular and safe deposit for public papers, took pains to deposit many of his papers with his Cabinet departments. In 1810, Congress established a Committee on Ancient Public Records and Archives of the United States. It reported that the records of the federal government were in a state of great disorder and exposure; and in a situation neither safe nor convenient nor honorable to the nation. Congress took little action. In 1814, the congressional library burned to the ground.

Most of the papers of William Henry Harrison, the log-cabin candidate, succumbed to flames when that log cabin burned down. Those of both John Tyler and Zachary Taylor were largely destroyed during the Civil War. In 1853, when Millard Fillmore left the White House, he had his papers shipped to a mansion in Buffalo. He died in 1874, having made no provisions for the papers. When Fillmores only son died, in 1889, his will ordered his executors to burn or otherwise effectively destroy all correspondence or letters to or from my father. Only by the merest miracle were forty-four volumes of Fillmores Presidential-letter books found in an attic of a house, in 1908, and only because it was on the verge of being demolished.

Chester Arthurs son had most of his fathers Presidential papers burned in three garbage cans. The only place I ever found in my life to put a paper so as to find it again was either a side coat-pocket or the hands of a clerk, UlyssesS.Grant once said. For years after Grants Administration, scholars were able to locate hardly any of his Presidential papers. In 1888, Congress urged the Library of Congress to collect the papers of the Presidents. In the eighteen-nineties, the library established a Manuscript Division, and a historian who later became its chief began lobbying for the establishment of a National Archives; meanwhile, the American Historical Association formed a Public Archives Commission. In 1910, after the commission reported that many of the records of the Government have in the past been lost or destroyed, the A.H.A. petitioned Congress to build a depository. Congress authorized the funds, but no plan was undertaken until after the close of the First World War.

Grover Cleveland, during his two terms, preferred to communicate in person, leaving no paper trail. He insisted that the records of his Presidency were his personal property and, in 1886, refused to turn over papers that the Senate had demanded: if I saw fit to destroy them no one could complain. (That is what, during the Presidency of DwightD.Eisenhower, came to be called executive privilege.) Clevelands contention became a convention: the Presidents papers belong to the President, who can deny requests for disclosure not only from the public but from other branches of the federal government. William McKinley was assassinated in 1901; his secretary held on to his papers until 1935, when he donated them to the Library of Congress, where they remained under his, and later his sons, tight control until 1954. In 1924, a raft of papers from the Taft, Wilson, and Harding Administrations were found in the attic of the White House. Warren Hardings Presidency was riven by scandal; after his death, his wife told the chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress that she had destroyed all his papers, although she had burned only those she thought would harm his memory. Most of the rest she left to the Harding Memorial Association. The Library of Congress acquired a cache of those and other papers in 1972, on the condition that they be closed to the public until 2014. (They turned out to include a thousand pages of love letters between Harding and his mistress. Wont you please destroy? he wrote her in one letter. She did not destroy.) Calvin Coolidge instructed his private secretary to destroy all his personal files; on Coolidges death, the secretary said, There would have been nothing preserved if I had not taken some things out on my own responsibility.

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Will Trump Burn the Evidence? - The New Yorker

The controversy over the People of Colour exhibition at Mercy Pictures shows how alt-right ideas can thrive in irony-steeped artistic environments, writes Amal Samaha.

On Saturday, a gallery show in Auckland ended. The exhibition featured rows upon rows of flags, each on a relatively uniform rectangular frame, set in neat rows.

All apparently normal, except for something that became increasingly obvious.

All photos: Tash van Schaardenburg

There seemed to be a lot of swastikas.

Really, a lot of swastikas. Of 150 or so flags, 20 were Nazi symbols, and others represented more obscure hateful ideologies. Each wall had at least a few swastikas, many positioned provocatively as if to ask are these not the same as the flags beside them?

In each case, I hope the audiences answer was no, one of these is a fucking swastika.

The People of Colour show created by artists Jerome Ngan-Kee, Jonny Prasad and Teghan Burt, also the co-directors of Mercy Pictures, the gallery where it was shown was clearly out to court controversy. And they got it: on the first night the show was vandalised, and the Mercy Pictures Instagram was quickly inundated with criticism.

Ngan-Kee issued an apology soon after the exhibition ended, only for the other gallery staff to turn on him and ridicule the apology in a now-deleted post.

On Tuesday, Mercy Pictures other directors issued a statement which stopped short of an apology. It noted that Mercy Pictures wider family contains many people of marginalised identities, and called allegations of fascism offensive and untrue.

So what caused such outrage? Lets go back to the exhibition itself, where among the many, many swastikas were other far right symbols: some obvious, such as a sign saying its okay to be white, and others more obscure, such as the Sonnenkreuz, Sonnenrad, Vichy French and Spanish Falangist flags. In fact, it was hard to think of a fascist flag that wasnt there. Worse, these were displayed alongside the tino rangatiratanga flag, the United Tribes flag and Thoes mana motuhake, all apparently without permission from tangata whenua.

But such easy shocks are a dime a dozen for gallery shows. A swastika is a guarantee of controversy, though usually audience fears are allayed by an artist statement or write-up making some banal point about how nationalism is bad.

This, however, wasnt the case, with People of Colour. The shows artistic statement was anything but banal, since it was supplied by one Nina Power.

Power is a UK philosopher and former academic, and a bizarre figure to be linked to the wider ecology of the alt-right, being something of a convert from the post-modern, leftist intellectualism that the alt-right often derides. Once a committed feminist activist and scholar of philosophers like Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, it seems that by gradually becoming involved in anti-transgender feminist activism, she found herself associating with progressively more right-wing figures.

Former friend and fellow academic Linda Stupart says that these days, Nina Power is openly aligning herself with violent edgelord alt-right men [and] transphobes, and has definitively divested herself of contemporary feminist thought.

Power strongly rejects suggestions that she has any relationship with the alt-right or that she holds anti-transgender views.

Many took Powers exhibition text to mean she was directly involved in the project, but this isnt necessarily the case. Ngan-Kee, Prasad and Burt are graduates of the University of Aucklands Elam Art School and have no apparent relationship with Power; its unclear exactly how much she knew about the content of the show.

But Power is only a small part of this story. Perhaps the more interesting aspect is what the show revealed about the contemporary art world.

With their obsession with shock value, censorship and political correctness, some of the cool kids of art can be surprisingly reactionary. Before knowing the back story, it would have been easy to assume the whole People of Colour drama was a case of a clueless gallery accidentally giving space to the alt-right. In fact it was actually a case of edgy gallery kids flirting with fascistic concepts from the start, with little help needed from their associates in the UK.

Its in this environment of plausible deniability that alt-right ideas and flirtations with fascism can thrive. The People of Colour story shows how fascism can creep into academia and the art world alike, simply because both allow for extreme detachment between an author and their body of work, and convoluted, wordy justifications are par for the course.

Its normal practice in academia to quote the works of people who were Nazis (for example, philosopher Martin Heidegger or jurist Carl Schmitt) despite their Nazism. Its considered perfectly fine to appreciate their ideas, so long as that appreciation of their ideas doesnt stray into admiration for their Nazism.

Similarly, in the art world it is normal to be fascinated by fascist iconography, to find its visual language useful, to use it to shock or provoke dialogue (for example, see the art of NZ-Tongan artist Benjamin Work). Too easily, though, this interest in the visual signifiers of fascism can stray into admiration often without opposition, so long as the artist can provide a sufficiently long-winded justification. Had Mercy Pictures just done this and not made the mistake of drawing attention to themselves further by involving Power, they might well have gotten away with the whole thing.

Because fascist ideas creep into public life under a veil of plausible deniability, and because they often preempt and provoke controversy, it is very easy to characterise the outrage over events like the People of Colour show as overblown, conspiratorial or out of touch. After all, it is just art. Theyre just flags. Theyre just colours and shapes.

The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin once suggested that fascism is partly about making politics into an artform: rendering politics as simply a game of colours and symbols. Modern internet fascists do this extremely well, from turning Pepe the frog into a Nazi meme, to flooding the internet with StoneToss comics, to making ironic use of alt-right hand gestures.

It seems Mercy Pictures did this by taking the most intensely political images on earth and putting them all together, as if to say theyre just colours and symbols, do you cucks really care about this?

Perhaps the best way to counteract situations in which fascist ideas hide behind art world bullshit is to put the politics back into art.

By challenging artworks like these we take what is held to be apolitical and re-politicise it. In doing so, we remove the plausible deniability that allows fascists to find a footing.

In 2020, it might not be good enough for edgy art to explore concepts: your art might actually have to say something worthwhile about them. It might not be enough to provoke dialogue you might have to contribute to it.

The Bulletin is The Spinoffs acclaimed daily digest of New Zealands most important stories, delivered directly to your inbox each morning.

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Swastikas off K Road: How the worst art show in New Zealand came to be - The Spinoff

Question: Why did God make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?

Answer: The color of Jesus skin is of little or no consequence. The whiteness or blackness of ones skin is a biological quality which has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the personality. The significance of Jesus lay, not in His color, but in His unique God-consciousness and His willingness to surrender His will to Gods will. He was the Son of God, not because of His external biological make up, but because of His internal spiritual commitment. He would have been no more significant if His skin had been black. He is no less significant because His skin was white.

This is the quote the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave when asked about the race of Jesus in October of 1957.

What made this quote off putting to me was not the existence of a conceptualization of Jesus as white, so much as the idea that one of the most prominent figures in the American history of Black Civil Rightswho was himself Blackthought the Son of God was white.

While Kings statement that Jesuss skin color is of little consequence should perhaps be true, as Howard Blum says, a Jewish Prophet from the Roman era ran so explosively into the American obsession with race that his image has been used to justify the worst atrocities of white supremacy as well as inspire the most heroic of civil rights crusades. That is to say that, while empirically the race of Christ shouldnt matter, it does.

Even though race is a social construct, and one that is much different today than it would have been in Jesuss time, it is a construct with very real implications. For Christianity to ascribe Jesus' race as white distorts the historical fact that, geographically speaking, he would have been of Mediterranean or African descent. More than that, to assert that Jesus was white is to imbue him with a sense of privilege and power contrary to the story of what Christ experienced.

This matters because Christ is the essence of Christianity, and Christianity is essentially distinguished from other faiths by the fact that everything in it is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.

So how, then, if Jesus is so central to the faith, did Christianity get this one imperative construction wrong?

The process of white washing Jesus was not unique in any real sense. It was done through art, through writing and of course through sermon. Art like Leonardo da Vincis Last Supper, Michelangelos Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and Warner Sallmans light-eyed, light-haired Head of Christ made Jesus palpably white to common people. This art worked in conjunction with the already dominant theology built on centuries of white European thought that deemed Jesus to be a white man.

This white washing set the stage for the justification that Jesus stood with the powerful rather than the disenfranchised. For example, when hate groups such as the Klu Klux Klan called themselves Christian groups, they did so under the guise of protecting the purity of a race pre-ordained.

Yet briefly in the 1930s and again in the 1960s and 1970smore sustainably the second time aroundJesus was not only analyzed as standing with the oppressed and dismantling the status quo, but he was constructed as a Black Man. This construction of Jesus arose from the assertion by Black theologians that a Jesus who stood and empathized with the marginalized and was crucified at the hands of an unjust government could not be white.

In recent years, academia and some parts of the church have begun the process of recognizing the actuality of what Jesus looked like, to more closely agree with the constructs of Black theologians of the 1930s and 1960s. More simply put: people finally realize that Jesus wasnt white.

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That leads one to ask: how have we simultaneously made Jesus so racially malleable and static? And how do we properly speak truth to power about the nature of Jesuss race and appearance, while acknowledging that the church and Christians at large have not always gotten this right?

This brings us back to Kings quote. I will never agree with him on the fact that Jesus was white. Nor will I agree that race is completely inconsequential. Race has been used as a construct to subvert and deny the rights of generations of peoples and that matters. Race is still usedwhether explicitly or notto justify the murder of Black and Brown people, and that matters.

So yes, understanding that Christ was NOT a white man who stood for status and abuses of power matters. Actually, it does more than matter; it is imperative.

Jesus Christ came to liberate humanitys minds, bodies and souls. He came to teach us to do unto others as we would have done unto us. He came to show us that we should stand with the oppressed and never allow injustices to go unnoticed. Understanding what he looked like while he did it is not an inconsequential thing in a world where skin color has literally meant the difference between life and death. Yes, the message he brought and the lessons he taught are also of major importance, but for us to get the race of Christ right is essential.

If we can understand that the man who Christians consider to be their savior not only usurped ideas of power and status, but that he did it in the body of a man of color, then perhaps the messages that come out of pulpits on Sunday will change. Perhaps we will no longer allow alt-right Christian hate groups to use Jesus as a reasoning for their unfounded hatred.

Perhaps we will be one step closer to understanding who Jesus was, what he stood for and just how revolutionary he truly was.

Tatayana Richardson is a Trinity senior who thinks everyone should read "The Black Messiah" at least twice in their lifetimes. Her column, "Searching for Canaan," runs on alternate Mondays.

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News flash... Jesus wasn't white - The Chronicle - Duke Chronicle