BBC Reporter Lewis Goodall: “Are you here with your family?”
Ohla: “No. it’s only me. I left my family in Ukraine because they were like, ‘at least we have to save someone’.”
Goodall: “How old are you?”
Ohla: "I’m 19″
Goodall: “You must be so worried about them”
Ohla: “Yes, it’s actually tragic. I couldn’t sleep for 3 days… I was in constant panic because my friends from Kyiv are protecting Kyiv right now in the volunteer army.”
Goodall:”What do you think of Vladimir Putin, when you think of think?“
Ohla:"If I see him right now, I will kill him with my own hands. Because this person killed a lot of my friends, my family, my fellow citizens.”
Tennessee GOP State Senator Frank Niceley said this on the floor of the state house:
“I haven’t given you all a history lesson in awhile, and I wanted to give you a little history on homelessness. [In] 1910, Hitler decided to live on the streets for a while. So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory, and his body language, and how to connect with citizens and then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books.”
The new Nazi is not that different from the old Nazi. It’s just spelled GOP.
I’m kind of wondering if Amanda Marcotte has ever actually watched more than a brief clip of Triumph of the Will, though?
I feel like this article could have been stronger acknowledging additional layers of comparison. Because TotW is draped in insidious “wholesome” imagery too. No open antisemitism, even. Good local boys and family people all excited to stand tall for their Führer.
I’ve said this before, but watching uncensored Third Reich propaganda films with critical awareness is extremely instructive.
Fifteen years ago, around the same time I watched a bunch of Riefenstahl, I went to Germany, and went to the museum in the old half-finished Nazi stadium in Nuremberg. The museum uses its space hauntingly well, built on glass walkways through this cavernous monument to hubris. The paths take you through a chronicle of the rise and fall, including newsreels of Hitler - shaking hands and kissing babies like the doofy-looking, roguish politician he relied on everyone seeing him as.
In America, I observed, they only ever show you the same ten seconds of Hitler yelling, because they want you to think you can identify a monster when you see one.
They don’t show you that most of the footage is not like that at all. That fascism in progress mostly isn’t militaristic shouting, it’s an endearingly slovenly reality TV star taking office and holding “grassroots” rallies to stir up something that thinks it’s civic pride. They definitely don’t want you to recognize that a monster can look like the kind of regular dude that conservatives want to go drinking with.
I worried about it fifteen years ago and I wish I hadn’t been right.
Americans have now entered into one of the most sickening and dangerous periods of the 21st century. Trump is not only a twisted caricature of every register of economic, political, educational, and social extremism, he is the apogee of a warrior culture committed to rolling back civil rights, women’s reproductive rights, denying the threat of climate change, and mocking, if not threatening, all vestiges of economic justice and democracy. As David Remnick pointed out in The New Yorker, “he is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.”[1]Actually, it gets worse. Trump is the fascist shadow that has been lurking in the dark since Nixon’s Southern Strategy. A ghostly reminder of the price to be paid when historical consciousness and public values are lost in a culture of immediacy, ignorance, and a flight from social and political responsibility.
Authoritarianism has now become viral in America, spreading its toxic ideology into every facet of American life. The threat of totalitarianism with its legions of alt-right political zombies has now exposed itself, without apology, knowing full well that it no longer has to code or apologize for its hatred of all those who do not fit into its white-supremacist and ultra-nationalist script.
[Image Description: Screenshots of a series of tweets by a user named @valeriehalla that read
ok: i’m scared to exist online right now, even in what we should be able to consider safe spaces for queer folks
i’m scared because we are all watching continually as more and more of us are violently picked off and destroyed
by other queer folks, and by people who claim to be sympathetic to us, utilizing the same rhetoric that should be helping and empowering us
the word “discourse”, at this point, is only ever used sarcastically and with a kind of quiet dread by my friends
we joke about being problematic, but me, my peers and maybe you too, live in a state of constant low anxiety
over the fact that we don’t get second chances to make mistakes. if you’re a queer person of any kind of visibility, it’s one and done
the well of patience and compassion runs deep for our cis/straight allies, and we reserve NOTHING for ourselves
this is assuming you even make a mistake. we target each other for complete bullshit just as often
weeks ago i was chased off twitter for using the word “queer”, before that i was getting death threats over fabricated purity politics
friends of mine have been targeted with callout posts over things they didn’t do or for weird fandom drama with zero material impact
i’m not trying to absolve any of us of guilt. we’ve all done and will do wrong things, we’ll hurt each other, again and again
it’s easy, because we’re all a little bit fucked up over here. we’re carrying wounds we’re weird, we’re not always presentable
but that’s exactly why we need patience and compassion for each other more than anything else
because those wounds make it so easy for us to destroy eachother, and some of y'all may be tempted
it’s easier. when it’s some 20-something queer artist struggling to meet half the poverty line, it’s easy to run them off for hurting you
i GET why it’s tempting for some folks, because this is power that you can exert, a situation you can change
when we’re all so tired and so used to being powerless
but please understand that the folks you’re targeting may not come back from it. they may not ever come back. it’s happened, it will happen
when you mark someone as unsaveable and irredeemable in the only space they have to exist in, they can’t exist anymore
End of tweets.]
Just to make something about this crystal clear, and this is something that I think many people will recognize about these tweets, the situations that valeriehalla is describing aren’t just the result of people punishing honest mistakes. Some of these things are straight up authoritarian bullshit perpetrated by people who are trying to create power structures in the LGBTQ+ community.
This is what it means to be a TERF, a transmedicalist/truscum, or an ace exclusionist. This is the environment they’re trying to build, one where other people in the LGBTQ+ community have to live with fear and anxiety of the kind of authoritarian bullying that these people try to create.
It’s really important to push back on this stuff anytime we see it, because authoritarians actively work to spread their malfeasant ideology. They lie and manipulate in order to spread their message because they honestly believe that anything, no matter how immoral, is justified in pursuit of their core goals. And their core goals always involve hurting us, all of us. They only see three types of people; those that agree with them and are allies, those that don’t agree with them and are enemies, and those people who they hate and will only ever attack.
We fight them by not letting them get away with it. We fight them by educating people about their tactics and their evil. We fight them by protecting those of us who are young enough or immature enough to still be vulnerable to their recruitment tactics. And we win by never giving them an inch, ever.
In a fight where one side believes only in the oppression and eventual destruction of the other, there’s no middle ground to be found, they are wholly wrong in their beliefs and they’re willing to hurt people in service to them.
This post might sound alarmist because I don’t know the respectable, non-alarmist way to put this. He’s going full final-days-in-the-Fuhrerbunker. I want to be alarmist. We need to be alarmed.
But it’s really hard to stay at the appropriate level of alarm for even three hours – and we need to stay there for the next three months. It’s exhausting no matter what, and nearly all of our current information environment makes it even more difficult than it needs to be.
Most of what the mainstream media has to say about the election isn’t reporting so much as it is fanfiction. Characters with familiar names and recognizable faces feature in an alternative universe where “normal” political forces (which were defunct ten years ago) apply. Sniping about “messaging,” pathologically boring lectures about “enthusiasm” – it would be annoying anti-Democratic concern-trolling in a world where a free and fair election could be taken for granted. In the real world of powerful and accelerating anti-democratic threats, it is both dangerous and bizarre, like dumping a fifth of vodka into a Super Soaker and trying to use it to put out a brush fire.
The mainstream conversation is so disorienting that it’s understandable why there are also a fair amount of influential progressive commentators who have burrowed themselves into the reverse narrative. It doesn’t matter what we do, Trump is just going to steal the election anyway; it doesn’t matter if he loses, he’s going to refuse to leave anyway. A subset of these fatalists swing all the way around to conventional Pundit Brain: Trump has already blown up all the rules of democratic politics because Democrats aren’t using the One Weird Trick that would make them good at democratic politics!*
Before jumping down the rabbit hole of whether these narratives are true, it’s important to emphasize that they are not constructive. We are in a crisis. In a crisis, you need to help people understand that something abnormal is happening AND that there is something they can do to make things better. Communicating to people that things are fine, as the mainstream horserace normal politics model does, isn’t helpful, because it helps people rationalize the false but comforting belief that everything is fine. Communicating to people that things are hopeless, as the doom-mongering counternarrative does, is even less helpful. If you’re acting normal about something abnormal, there’s at least the off-chance you’ll get lucky and unwittingly bluff your way through the short- and medium-term. But if you’re constantly getting the message that you’re screwed no matter what, it’s human nature to either a) go into denial and double down on an unproductive response, which is irrational but understandable or b) get cynical and give up, which is an entirely rational response to a situation that actually is hopeless.
Trump is already trying to steal the 2020 election. He has help from the henchmen he has put in charge of important federal agencies and from the white-shoe lifers in the Republican legal establishment. Anything you can imagine he might do, you should assume he has at least considered it. He will consider things that would never even occur to you.
He hasn’t succeeded yet. He can be stopped with overwhelming turnout. We know this because of the 2018 midterms. Autocrats who are successfully smothering a democracy do not allow the opposition party to win partialorfull control in regional governments, take over half the federal legislature, and gain a foothold in the presidential line of succession. That’s not how autocracy works. If you come across a commentator who is under the impression that a burgeoning dictatorship just gives away that kind of power for the lulz, consider taking that person’s opinions on the subject with a grain of salt.
Thanks to the 2018 midterms, House Democrats have been able to foil some of Trump’s schemesandwarn the public about others. Even with Individual 1’s desperate thrashing at the intelligence agencies, we’re getting a lot more specific information about Russian attacks on the election than we were this time in 2016 from the Obama administration.
At least Trump “didn’t declare the election illegal,” Pelosi said. “We had a plan for that” — though really, she acknowledged, the only workable plan was “to win big. Had it been four or five seats, he would’ve tried to dismantle it.” In his news conference the day after the midterms, Trump spoke respectfully of Pelosi….
More importantly, we didn’t know about the plan until afterward because they didn’t need it. Trump has blinked before, so there’s no reason to assume he won’t blink again. We shouldn’t assume he will do the same thing in 2020 that he did in 2018, because it’s a different situation! Just that people who have assumed Donald Trump will act in a completely different way than he has in the past usually end up with egg on their faces.
My two cents – AND THIS IS JUST MY OPINION SO YOU CAN SKIP IT – is that any kind of post-election autocratic power grab would probably need decisive action from Trump within days, maybe even hours, of polls closing. That, in turn, would require Trump to absorb the narcissistic injury of a loss immediately, which he has been psychologically incapable of doing for the first 74 years of his life. Remember, he didn’t have to come to terms with the curb-stomping he received in the midterms right away. At first he could tell himself that Republicans holding onto the Senate (by the skin of their teeth when they should by all rights have swamped it, but whatever) represented a “split decision” and even a moral victory for him, so he could afford to go into, like, con man autopilot mode and try to charm “Nancy.” Everyone else adjusted to the Democratic victory the next day, and the next night, peoplegot into the streets warning him not to try any bullshit. It was only after bigger districts finished counting and mail-in ballots were counted that it sunk in for him how badly he had lost and what the consequences would be. Then he soothed himself by shutting down the government indefinitely, which he seemed to feel was a display of his power – until “Nancy” pantsed and dog-walked him so he had to slink off and pretend it never happened.
If an election which was more or less as legitimate as the 2016 election (questionable but not Belarus) were held today, I think the most likely result would be a scenario a lot like the midterms: East Coast states make it clear which way the wind is blowing to most people, but Trump goes to bed at 3 AM thinking he’s close enough to fight it out in court. Over the next couple of weeks the mail-in ballots get opened, Miami and Philadelphia finish counting, and the real numbers start penetrating even his toxic bubble. Eventually someone reminds him that his armed Secret Service detail can escort him off the premises no matter what he does, so he loses what little nerve he has and skips Biden’s inauguration to go golfing at Mar a Lago. Or maybe Sochi.
But again, that is not a guarantee or even a prediction. The FACT is that anything can happen in the next three months, and Trump and his goons are putting a lot of effort into ensuring that everyone does happen. I spelled out my opinion of what seems most likely at the moment because it can get really easy to dwell on the worst-case scenario, which leads to fatalism and inaction. The least-bad scenario is actually more plausible than it’s been for the last few years, if we motivate ourselves to get it done. We can’t waste all our time and energy thinking about what he’s going to do, because we need to think about what we’re going to do. Voting is the core issue as always, but it helps to be more concrete.
If your state has early in-person voting, and if you can do so safely, vote in-person as soon as you can. Every state’s vote by mail infrastructure was going to be strained this year before these dirtbags decided to sabotage the postal service. If you can cast your vote early, you can help make the lines a little shorter on Election Day while leaving vote by mail resources for people who need them.
If you and the people you live with are relatively low risk, or if you’ve survived COVID and your health care provider thinks you have immunity for the next few months, consider volunteering as a poll worker. Usually a lot of poll workers are retirees, who are by definition in a high-risk group. If enough of them decide to sit this year out – and that’s the smart, responsible choice – then polling places end up closing, which helps Republican voter suppression by making the lines longer. The more volunteers your area has, the more polls they’ll have open, which makes it that much easier to let people vote quickly and at a safe distance from each other.
*Avoiding sources because this stuff is toxic. If you think I’m making this up because you haven’t seen it anywhere, good.
**Look, nobody*** is more sympathetic to The Men and their psychological frailties than me, but seriously, guys, some of you need to log the hell off for a few days.
***For certain non-traditional values of “nobody.”
John Bolton, the mustacioed Dr. Strangelove who served as Trump’s third national security advisor, has started leaking copies of his book, out this week. Unsurprisingly, the book contains a lot of damning evidence of Trump’s attempts to extort foreign countries into helping him steal the 2020 election, which Bolton pompously refused to provide during Trump’s impeachment. This included the shakedown of the Ukrainian president which got Trump impeached. It turns out Trump was also desperately trying to get Chinese President Xi to help him, either by announcing bullshit investigations into former Vice President Biden’s family (we knew about this) or by dramatically increasing American imports to kind of goose the economy in a way that might help Trump in the election.
We shouldn’t get numb to the existential small-d democratic nightmare of Trump’s sabotaging American foreign policy interests for his own political benefit. Yes, we’ve been living with it all along, and you’re probably tired of hearing or saying how bad it is. It’s still really bad! But the China piece of it is, you know, relevant to current events. Bolton left the administration in the fall of 2019, so he wouldn’t have any information on the COVID crisis, but there’s no reason to believe that Trump stopped trying to get on Xi’s good side. All those spectacular failures to get the pandemic under control when we had a chance six months ago, and even some of the more bizarre decisions since then, have to be reconsidered in light of this:
Again, this is and always has been the opposite of complicated. HE DID IT AT A PRESS CONFERENCE. HE ASKED RUSSIA FOR MORE EMAILS AND MORE EMAILS APPEARED.
We don’t necessarily know why this sloppy, panicked attempt to decapitate the SDNY went down when it did. But OH MY GOD, we know why the fuck it happened.
These three headlines from the past few days are all part of the same story. Trump is actively trying to get foreign autocrats to help him cheat his way through the 2020 election, because he does not believe he can win a free and fair election. This is, unusually for him, a completely reasonable belief based on empirical evidence: he knows how much cheating he had to do last time. Whether it’s because of that cheating specifically or the general mobster bullshit he’s been into for his entire adult life, he’s desperate to gut legal oversight of his crimes and cheating, which is why he’s hired an attorney general who will help him cheatandcover up crimes.
All of this can only work if we agree to get distracted by nonsense. They are going to try absolutely everything they can think of to delegitimize their opponents and hide their own malevolence. You do not have to help them.
ThemurderofGeorge Floyd is exactly what it looks like. I cannot tell you if you should watch the whole excruciating video. I can tell you that you have seen enough to know exactly what it is.
This is the wolf-watcher-who-cried-wolf problem that we keep having with Trump. A lot of people sounded the alarm years ago that Trump would take us to this point. A lot more people with a lot more power heard the warnings, mocked everyone who was worried about things that hadn’t happened yet, and got used to the idea that those things could happen. And so when Trump does exactly what he what he has always said he would do, they’re surprised but not shocked – when what they need to be is shocked but not surprised. Pooh-pooh, you’re just hysterical, the humvees on the streets of the capitol aren’t tanks yet.
That’s one of the most encouraging responses to Trump’s dictatorial cosplay earlier this week. The other is the fact that, you know, it didn’t work. The next day, even more demonstrators turned out. The crowd was just as peaceful, just as resilient, even larger and more diverse. If Trump felt like his actions the day before had helped him, he would have doubled down. Instead, he spent the night having his usual Twitter tantrum.
When you have to worry about state violence against peaceful protesters, every day that demonstrators aren’t terrorized by the government is at least a short-term win. But more than that, it’s proof of concept. Some combination of top-down pressure from military top brass and bottom-up pressure from demonstrators can make him back down. That’s good to know.
It can be complicated to trust your eyes and ears when the real work is long term, slow, and therefore invisible. Sometimes you have to witness a symbolic gesture and be encouraged to turn it into something more. Despite the violence perpetrated by local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, there were a lot of police who took a knee with the protesters, or even marched with them arm in arm. That is not a substitute for systematic reform, but if it were only a meaningless gesture to deflect criticism, they wouldn’t have resisted doing it before. That helps to validate the protests for people who aren’t paying attention, which makes the necessary changes more doable politically.
Peoplesinginganddancing in the streets of American cities are exactly what you want them to be: giant crowds of people from all walks of life refusing to let the bastards grind them down.
May 7th, 2000: Vladimir Putin is inaugurated as president of Russia. He had been acting President since December 31, 1999, and except for a four year break from 2008-2012 where he was Prime Minister instead, he has stayed there ever since.
the thing that strikes me about this latest wave of anti-trans hate and legislation in the U.S. is that it feels like it’s *kind of* about trans people but really about a fear fundamental to all conservatives that a day will one day come when they will no longer be able to completely control their children
american conservatism is a death cult. trump made this incredibly obvious but it’s been trending that way for a while. it is spiteful, bigoted, cruel, morally bankrupt, and all evidence in support of it has either been fabricated, forged, deceptively edited, or disproven. being conservative goes against a fundamental human desire to be kind to those around you and I think on some level conservatives know this, and thus, they know that the only reason children would subscribe to these values is if they are indoctrinated into them with cult-like single-mindedness
Conservatives have been pushing for homeschooling for decades, they’ve been raising concerns about teaching evolution in schools since the early 20th century, they’ve made wedge issues out of sex ed, history textbooks, and now gay and trans teachers. They want a world in which children are taught to be conservative from birth and any attempt to teach them anything else is a literal crime. They want this because they know, deep down inside, that most children would not agree with them unless they were literally brainwashed into it.
also worth pointing out that most child abuse (sexual or otherwise) takes place within a “traditional” family structure or a “traditional” religious institution and I have to wonder if people who want to abuse kids have a fundamental investment in preserving strict hierarchies in which adult men have unquestioned authority over children
Like I’m not saying *every* conservative is like this but perhpas their emphasis on “groomers” is a wee bit of projection
Anyway abolish the family trans rights are human rights institute fully automated luxury gay space communism now
This tweet sums it up pretty well:
This is another big reason why most conservatives bitch about higher education; a lot of younger people (myself included) undo their conservative upbringing brainwashing after being exposed to new ideas, meeting new and diverse people, and getting a higher-quality education when they attend college.
This is also, of course, why conservative lawmakers constantly seek to undermine public education and make it shittier so the kids who go through it are more ignorant. An educated and well-informed populace is the GOP’s worst nightmare.
like, agreed in general but also the roots of this movement are white supremacy. that’s the beginning and end of this shit.
when and why did the homeschooling and private school push begin? after brown versus board and public schools were desegregated.
why did the conservative backlash (which we’ve been riding for forty plus years) begin? because of the civil rights act, which threatened to end the white supremacy status quo and “unfairly take from whites” to give to poc.
why are conservatives trying to cripple the federal government? because the federal government is committed (however poorly implemented and imperfectly) to protect minorities and is seen as blocking white men from taking/stealing what they want when they want to.
you cannot fight them without naming what they actually are committed to at the end of the day, which is, again WHITE SUPREMACY.
After reading George Orwell’s book Animal Farm and his life-changing dystopian 1984, I happened to be struck with a very powerful and triumphant point; why it is important to read.
In general, the books reflect events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was remarkably known to be a critic of Stalinism.
Anyways, why is it so important to read?
In the Animal Farm, Old Major – who symbolizes Marxism – was the oldest pig, he had assembled all the farm’s animals before he died. “Comrades, you have heard already about the strange dream that I had last night.” He had a dream of a world in which animals would live without the tyranny of the farm’s owner, Mr. Jones. – Who symbolizes Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II.
Animalism – which symbolizes Communism – was a system of ideals that Old Major established, which were put into words and hung on the barn wall for all animals to see.
After the rebellion of the animals against Mr. Jones, pigs were the ruling class, and as time passed by, they had started taking excessive advantage of all of it.
Clover was a female horse – who symbolizes the working class people – and when the pigs begin sleeping in beds, she thought that she remembered a rule against animals sleeping in beds.
Like in the Animal Farm, countless people are currently living under tyranny and opression. They are being, on ongoing basis, disdainfully patronized, fooled, with their rights being abducted away from them with all complacency and indifference.
In fact, the female horse, Clover, was right. One of the ideals was “4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.” But how could she prove the pigs’ deviation from the authentic laws if she could not read?
Clover represents those people who are able to distinguish deviation, but are helpless to change anything.
Another important moment was that of Clover watching other animals being executed by the ruling pig, Napoleon. – who symbolizes Stalin. – “As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago…”
The key phrase is, “If she could have spoken her thoughts.” But could she? Clover was not so good in using her words. She could not read.
Like the Animal Farm,1984 also speaks of betrayed revolution. The ruling party, which led to the revolution (in a very particular way), started to change and to take advantage of the people’s hard work. People were living under a totalitarian tyrant system. There was no such thing as freedom. “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” For, “Big Brother [Oceania’s autocrat] is watching you.”
Until now, you may think just ‘knowing words’ might be useless. Well, that isn’t as futile and as simple as it might sound. In Orwell’s 1984novel, the totalitarian state Oceania had created a controlled language, the Newspeak, as a tool to actually limit thought. Yes, to limit thought! By reducing the vocabulary of the actual language.
The Newspeak had barely something new. It was English, but a more limited one. It attempted to eliminate personal thought by restricting one’s expressiveness.
By creating the Newspeak, Big Brother sought to tighten the range of thought through “the Destruction of words.” “It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words.” Says Syme who works with Winston, the main character, at the Ministry of Truth.
Big Brother, who was all the time watching them through the Telescreen, managed to narrow the range of thoughts and concepts that would pose a threat to the regime, such as self-expression, individuality and freedom generally, in order for Thoughtcrime – the crime of simply thinking – to be “literally impossible.”
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” For the less you express yourself, the less you’re likely to make change.
In conculsion, and in Orwell’s view, the deluded dominated people must seek for knowledge. They need to wake up, to be aware, to become “concious”. For it is by conciousness that Truth would result, and it is within Truth that lies freedom.
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel…”
redid this from 4 years ago & it’s crazy to think things are just about as horrible as expected, yet in many ways just the same.
I hope all my USAmericans out there are staying safe tonight & not letting these fascist cowards intimidate you into accepting inaccurate election results, not voting or anything else for that matter!
Keep in mind we will not know the true outcome until mail-in ballots are in. This could take anywhere from days to weeks.
We may not live in a democracy, but we can sure as fuck demand one. Chile just rewrote their constitution. Polish women have brought the country to a standstill demanding restoration of reproductive rights. Have hope. The power is in the people. Keep in touch with your loved ones and have a plan!
Now, Schmidt wants tech companies to make it harder to express those traits: “We should make it easier to see the news from another country’s point of view, and understand the global consciousness free from filter or bias. We should build tools to de-escalate tensions on social media — sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment.”
(…)
It’s also unclear what Schmidt means by “hate and harassment.” The former CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, once expressed surprise at the number of people who came to him with complaints of “harassment” on the platform that were in fact mere political disagreements.
But others, especially feminists, have been doggedly attempting to expand the definition of “online harassment” for some time. Notable examples include the arrest and trial of Toronto artist Gregory Alan Elliott for disagreeing with feminists on the internet, and the push by feminists at the U.N. to make “cyberviolence” a major political issue.
This is the problem. Conservatives assume everyone is like them but with different priorities. They think the opposite of authoritarianism is queer authoritarianism, and the opposite of colonialism is the colonial oppression of white people. It doesn’t occur to them that people who aren’t on top of an oppressive regime could want anything other than to be on top of an oppressive regime.
