Violence

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I know I have said here more than once that I believe the right-wing patriarchy, the white supremacist movement in this country wants me and everyone like me to be dead so long as we refuse to conform to their ideas of how human culture should be structured.

They don’t want feminists to exist, or queers of any variety. They are uncomfortable with creative artists and free-thinkers. They don’t like science because they can’t control it. They definitely hate people of color and immigrants who come from non-Western countries. Even a whiff of social democracy as it exists in European countries, which threatens the supremacy of rich white men, drives them into frothing rage.

They want a society where those white men rule, where women and children are property (which was legally the case when I was born in 1953), and the rest of us fall into the slots they have decreed we live in. And when we refuse to do so, when we push them out of power and insist on power of our own, they often respond with violent anger.

While this struggle is not unique to the United States, there are strong roots to patriarchy and white supremacy in the US. It’s a strand of American culture that has existed since the founding of our nation. It does not hesitate to strike out when threatened, and it perceives threats almost everywhere. Thus we have seen the continuing rise of right-wing militias in the modern era, which culminated in the assault on Congress on January 6, 2021.

This week the threat came in the form of the Department of Justice, which conducted a search of the Trump property in Florida, ostensibly to seek some range of classified papers that were in Trump’s possession. This threat is apparently so severe that the almost-instant response was a wide range of conservatives calling for violence and revenge.

Over at The Atlantic, Peter Wehner reports on their reaction.

Now They’re Calling for Violence

Trump loyalists have reacted to the search of the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago residence with unhinged fury.

…MAGA-world denizens have called for violence and civil war, so much so that the phrase civil war was trending on Twitter Monday night. One user on Trump’s social-media platform, Truth Social, said, “Fuck a civil war, give them a REVOLUTION. We out number all of the [sic] 10 to 1.”…

Ben Collins, who covers disinformation, extremism, and the internet for NBC News, wrote on Monday evening, “The posts on these pro-Trump forums tonight are as violent as I’ve seen them since before January 6th. Maybe even moreso.”

Commentators in right-wing media, meanwhile, have been using extraordinarily reckless and inflammatory language.

The Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump outlet, wrote “This. Means. War”—which was “quickly amplified by a Telegram account connected to Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime political adviser,” according to The New York Times. Bannon called the FBI “the Gestapo” and said, “We need to choke down the FBI and choke down the Justice Department.”…

Wehner continues with many other examples, so see it all at the link. He believes there may well be worse to come, and I have to agree.

I certainly hope we aren’t going to descend into ever more violence. My own training is in mediation and cooperative decision-making, and my impulse when confronted with anger is to respond with a very light touch. But an awful lot of my lefty friends have guns—more than you probably imagine—and in fact think that guns are essential for their own safety at this time.

We already know the incredible level of individual violence which exists in the United States. I can certainly imagine we will see individuals and small groups lashing out even more often, with bursts of violence like the attack on an FBI office yesterday. How this will play out over time is completely unclear to me.

For now, I continue to live a peaceful life, and I wish the same for all of you. Please don’t take that peace for granted. It could change in an instant.

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Workers of the World, Unite!

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Starbucks workers are unionizing all over, but Starbucks is fighting the trend by firing union organizers.

As we see in the video below, the ultimate power belongs to the workers. Without us, they have nothing but an empty store.

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A reminder

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Colorado isn’t the only state where abortion providers are stressed right now.

From Public Notice:

“Travel patterns have shifted”: the Chicago Abortion Fund on being a Midwest oasis of reproductive care

“People are just afraid, they’re faced with a lot of misinformation.”

…The current crisis is new in its intensity and danger. But abortion rights have been under assault for a long time. Advocates and activists have put in place extensive networks and institutions designed to help those who need care and to protect abortion rights.

One such institution is the Chicago Abortion Fund. Founded in 1985, the fund’s mission is to provide “financial, logistical, and emotional support to people seeking abortion services.” It fields more than 500 calls a month from people seeking reproductive health care throughout the Midwest. Recently it has been working with people as far away as Texas and Arizona.

…I spoke to Alicia Hurtado, communications and advocacy manager at the Chicago Abortion Fund, about how the organization’s work has been affected by the Supreme Court decision, and how they plan to continue to fight for reproductive justice.

The post continues with a transcript of the interview, where Ms. Hurtado describes their work and how it has changed since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Read the whole thing!

And remember too, that all abortion funds are still stressed as well. You can help through the National Network of Abortion Funds.

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Useful legislation

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No, it doesn’t go far enough. And yes, we still have more work to do—we must keep pushing. But this is a real victory, especially on climate change.

For details on the likely effects of the bill, listen to this podcast at Dave Roberts’ Volts, where he discusses the impact of this bill with experts.

And I’ll re-up this post from Bill McKibben, which outlines what our next steps must be if the bill does pass: Making Momentum Matter! – Post-Manchin, the climate fight morphs in many ways.

I’ll post more analysis as I can.

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This energy is what we need…

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…to win in the mid-terms.

These organizers in Kansas walked door-to-door, day after day, getting out the vote to defeat Kansas’s abominable abortion law. They raised tons of money to support the effort. They coordinated with Indivisible and never gave up. Every one of us has to match their heart and their efforts to win this fall.

This is an interview with community organizer Yazmin Bruno-Valdez, and with Olivia Julianna of Gen-Z for Change. You may have heard of Olivia. She was attacked by Matt Gaetz, body-shamed publicly, and she used that attention to raise more than two million dollars for the effort.

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Victor Orban, Leader of CPAC

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An authoritarian white nationalist, just the sort of politician Republicans love. Listen to his words below, and hear the cheers. Orban’s type of patriarchal government—anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-multiculturalism—is the government they wish to impose on the rest of us. Don’t look away.


 

ETA: Laura Jedeed has more.

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Kansas!

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The first vote in the post-Dobbs era has ended, and Kansas, considered a very red state these days, has voted to keep abortion legal in the state. (gift link, no paywall) This is an enormous victory for women, and for freedom everywhere. That the vote was not even close should be somewhat reassuring, but there is still a very long road ahead to the mid-terms. Let’s not get complacent.

Remember:

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The Manchin Act

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The deeply imperfect “Inflation Reduction Act” is so important to pass. I won’t truly believe in the passage until I see it, of course, because our dysfunctional Congress does tend to kill every potential step forward.

But this bill contains many policies that can help us make real progress against the most important emergency we face: climate change and the resulting disruption to current ecological systems on earth, systems that humans and other living things rely on for survival.

From Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams:

Humanity can’t equivocate any longer. This is a climate emergency

…The climate emergency has been declared over and over by Nature and by human suffering and upheaval in response to its catastrophes. The 2,000 individuals who recently died of heat in Portugal and Spain are not here to bear witness, but many of the residents of Jacobabad in Pakistan, where Amnesty International declared the temperatures “unlivable for humans”, are. The heat-warped rails of the British train system, the buckled roads, cry out that this is unprecedented. The estimated billion sea creatures who died on the Pacific north-west’s coast from last summer’s heatwave…all bear witness that this is a climate emergency. So do we. Yet the anxiety we feel, the grief that is ours, pales in comparison to the ferocity of our resolve.

We can choose to live differently and build wiser and more just ways to produce, consume and travel. Our hope lies in our collective actions….

What Democrats’ big new bill would actually do – Vox has a review of the bill’s provisions.

Bill McKibben outlines what our next steps must be if the bill does pass: Making Momentum Matter! – Post-Manchin, the climate fight morphs in many ways.

But I wanted to point out, once again, that throughout the entire lengthy saga of the bill first known as “Build Back Better” it has always been the “moderates” of the Democratic Party who have held up progress, who have been the sticking point.

The Progressive Caucus and Pramila Jayapal, head of the caucus, have consistently been pragmatic and willing to compromise, to do all it takes to accomplish something, anything that helps us move towards our goal. Personally I want whatever fragments of harm reduction our broken system can produce.

The media in general like to scold leftists any time things don’t go well for the Dems, but in truth we are not the stumbling block here. And the media doesn’t understand much about the topography of the left anyway, so they probably shouldn’t be commenting on us at all.

Biden’s Presidency Is Sinking Because of Conservative Democrats—Not the Left

Call your Senators, write some letters, find a local protest, whatever you can do to see this bill over the finish line. We are in a moment where every day counts, every step matters, and every tenth of a degree that we can lower the earth’s temperature makes it more likely that we will survive this time.

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