I posted 3 pieces yesterday, an Open Thread on 18/11/2016 and now another OT. There is so much going on now that needs addressing and not enough time for it all. Conway says Trump is disavowing the white supremacists and has been all through the campaign. BS!!! His advisors and cabinet choices say otherwise. And what is worse for me, his poison is spreading here too! I have known for years that we have our own racists too . . . I have lived in areas where they hide. But I refuse to be cowed by them. There is no place in a civil society for racism, bigotry or discrimination of any kind.
Short Takes
Montréal Gazette — Maxime Fiset was well on his way to becoming a neo-Nazi when he was arrested for inciting hatred.
Fellow skinheads had shaved his head for him, he had a Nazi flag in his room, draped over his copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and books on how to make a bomb, and he had founded the first organization and website in Quebec to bring all the right-wing extremists together — the Fédération des québécois de souche.
But it wasn’t until his arrest at school in Quebec City, with brass knuckles in his pocket, that he truly became radicalized, he says — and planned to inflict maximum damage.
In an interview with the Montreal Gazette the week after Donald Trump was elected, as swastikas appeared across the U.S. and in Canada, Fiset, looked back on how he joined the neo-Nazi movement — and how he got out.
Looking for Answers
At 17, Fiset was in a loving home, was good at school, and had everything he needed.
But he was looking for answers. He had a particularly influential, nationalist high school teacher, and learned about 20th century history, Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party.
He was also very much pro-independence and frustrated by what he perceived as the “weakening of Quebec culture” and the obstacles to independence — non-francophones and immigrants voting no.
“I was naive, and searching for answers to questions pretty much everyone asks themselves at some point in their lives — about politics and democracy,” said Fiset.
“I thought the Nazi party answered those questions. It was simple, black and white, and that was seductive … I stumbled into it and got stuck.”
At the end of the school year, Fiset, already an imposing young man, got a job working security for the city, guarding Roland-Beaudin Park in Quebec City. One night he approached a group of skinheads to tell them to leave, but instead began talking to them. They were friendly, he said — and they introduced him to Stormfront.
Self-described as “a community of racial realists and idealists,” the Stormfront website features a weekly radio show hosted by white supremacists Paul Fromm and David Duke, as well as discussion threads on everything from “which religions are acceptable” to the vandalism at a mosque in Sept-Îles. (There is a Quebec Stormfront forum, as well as one specifically targeted to youth).
Though many of the other skinheads were mostly interested in “booze, women and (skinhead music) shows,” Fiset was lured in by the politics.
It is important to understand the underpinnings of a belief system before trying to combat it, Fiset offers a glimpse into that understanding, a glimpse obtained from first hand experience. We would do well to listen. Click through for the rest of Fiset's story.
Daily Kos — According to news reports, and tweets from Kevin Allred, who is a lecturer at Rutgers University, in New Jersey where he teaches gender studies, he was taken to Bellevue Hospital in New York City for “psychiatric evaluation” by NYPD police, from his home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn NY.
The NYPD had been contacted by Rutgers Campus Police who received a report from a student that Mr. Allred was “threatening to kill white people.”
Allred is white.
Is this to be the new norm for daring to exercising the first amendment right to freedom of speech?
i said: would conservatives care as much abt the 2nd amendment if guns killed more white people? a question meant to expose double standard — Tweet of Kevin Allred 15 November 2016
Click through for the rest of this short piece. Can you conceive of the first amendment being in danger? I can and Trump vowed to curtail the freedom of the press, among other things, during his campaign. He will be a vengeful, small minded little dictator. On top of that, Washington State Senator Ericksen (R) has proposed a bill that would make protesting an act of economic terrorism. Another assault on the first amendment. The shit is going to hit the fan, and Trump has not even been sworn in yet.
Washington Post — President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress are drawing up plans to take on the government bureaucracy they have long railed against, by eroding job protections and grinding down benefits that federal workers have received for a generation.
Hiring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions — these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January.
These changes were once unthinkable to federal employees, their unions and their supporters in Congress. But Trump’s election as an outsider promising to shake up a system he told voters is awash in “waste, fraud and abuse” has conservatives optimistic that they could do now what Republicans have been unable to do in the 133 years since the civil service was created.
“You have the country moving to the right and being much more anti-Washington than it was,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a leading Trump adviser who serves on the president-elect’s transition team.
“We’re going to have to get the country to understand how big the problem is, the human costs of it and why it’s absolutely essential to reform,” said Gingrich, who urged Trump to shrink big government and overhaul the “job-for-life” guarantee of federal work.
Gingrich predicted that Stephen K. Bannon, a former Breitbart News chief who helped steer Trump’s campaign and is now one of his most influential advisers, would lead the effort. “It’s a big, big project,” he said.
Click through for the rest. I wonder if such can be applied to Representatives and Senators, most of whom would be Republicans, who did not do their jobs over the past 8 years. They were paid well, had gold plate benefits, but certainly did not represent the interests of the people. Waste and fraud could certainly be found in the Congress.
My Universe —
