Articles by admin

Initially I was glad Twitter closed Trump’s account and glad that Parler and other platforms were shutdown,  as a precaution against incitements to violence.  However let’s […]

Some of the people at a Trumpist gathering in LA pulled the whig off of Berlinda Nibo and pepper sprayed her, but a white man in the same Trump-supporting crowd, Roy Ball, lifted her up and carried her away from the hostile members of that crowd. White supremacy certainly is an element of Trump’s base, but it’s simplistic, divide-and-conquer polarization to call them all fascists and white supremacists. To build grassroots power, we have to a have a sustained presence in our streets and in our communities and in halls of political and economic power. We don’t want a polarized country in which millions of conservatives view Black Lives Matter and other forms of progressive activism as terrorism, which is what they are told by their version of the corporate media. And we don’t want a polarized country whereby millions of liberals or mainstream progressives view rightwing protests as terrorism. If that happens, there a combo punch body blow to our right to protest. Twitter shutdown Trump’s account and other tech giants did other forms of deplatforming due to concerns about rightwing incitements to violence. In the immediate context, that makes sense to many of us, especially progressives. But building grassroots power requires masses of people to be able to take to the streets to protest and to have counter protests, and ideally, it’s the job the police to make sure that occurs without people getting hurt. That’s key to the functioning of a free and open society. That’s why I’m cautious to not make sweeping generalizations about the Stop the Steal protesters and rioters. If you interpret that as me being a white supremacist apologist or sympathizer, you are making a huge leap of bad faith. Regarding the role of media outlets in the polarization of our country, it’d probably be useful to inquire into the extent to which liberal, progressive, and leftist outlets actually interviewed participants in the Stop the Steal protests and interviewed other segments of Trump’s base vs writing stories based on academics and other researchers studying rightwing movements and making comments about them. A parallel inquiry would be to look at how conservative and righwing media outlets reported on Black Lives Matter protests, in terms of conducting fair and in-depth interviews with the movement’s leaders and participants and allies. So far in looking at this, our polarized media landscape involves a lot of name-calling and terminology, as if we were studying creatures from  another planet or animals in a zooybecause all the protesters and rioters were white, most of them male and some of them had Neo-Nazi and Confederate flags, therefore all of them are white supremacists who would kill your family if given a chance?

Issues of racism and ideology go together, inextricably.  The ruling class has used racism not only to amass vast wealth via enslaved labor, but it […]

How would you describe what the protesters and rioters are for and what they are against? A CNN reporter was debating with protesters about the election […]

s I see it, if I support freedom (true liberation, not the fraudulent  ‘freedom’ to oppress others or to enjoy one’s privileges that others are […]

Despite Trump’s compulsive lying, I think he’s right when he says the seige on the Capitol was just the beginning, in that more skillful fascists […]

The following quote from Waldron Bello’s Nov 10 article in Foreign Policy in Focus calls to mind how important it is for white people to […]

I feel or try to feel sadness instead of hatred toward the misguided people who protested and rioted at the Capitol because I’ve often hated […]

Fadhel Kaboub:“What we have right now is a Green New Deal resolution, which is essentially an invitation for the country to come together and think […]

A lack of self-awareness seems to correlate with focusing only on finding flaws in others. Taken to the extreme, that mentality involves seeking to rid the […]