Jonathan Turley is a liar and a right-winger who has only
recently come out of the political closet. He's not been very honest
and still won't cop to his tight relationship with The Federalist
Society that's been ongoing for years. Today, he had the nerve to Tweet
this:
I
was raised in a politically active Democratic family in Chicago. Free
speech was one of the defining values of the party and championed across
campuses in the country. I no longer recognize the party as it
champions censorship and speech regulation.
I'm
sorry. When was he preaching free speech? He never called out "Don't
Say Gay" in Florida. He never called out attacks on Target or Bud Light
or CMT (instead, he promoted and encouraged those attacks). He only
believes in Free Speech for Conservatives and, no, that's not how The
First Amendment works.
He
has done real damage -- especially with his help on that Colorado hate
case that went before the Crooked Court and resulted in the right to
discriminate against gays and lesbians.
He
will be remembered as a hate merchant and as a disgusting piece of
garbage who promoted attacks on people and called for citizens to be
stripped of rights.
Thursday, July 27, 2023. Things heat up as crazy Ron DeSanits wants to
play doctor with Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nation continues to rebuke
Ronald for his efforts to recast slavery as a good thing and a glorified
jobs fair, and much more.
Ever been apart from a good friend or loved one for a few weeks? How about a few months? A year?
Remember
what it felt like to know that the end of the separation was coming
soon? That there'd be meals and movies and laughs and catching up, in
person, for the first time in ages?
And remember how agonizingly slow those last few days were before the reunion?
That's
life right now for the 1st Battalion, 163rd Field Artillery of the
Indiana Army National Guard, an Evansville-based unit that draws in some
300 soldiers from around the Hoosier State. They've been gone since
August 2022, sent 7,000 miles to Iraq to mind the details of a muted
conflict that the American public has generally moved past.
The soldiers will tell you otherwise. So will their relatives and
friends and nieghbors and co-workers. There have been a lot of holes in a
lot of lives for the past year. And at some point − achingly soon −
they'll be home.
We caught up with Capt. Ernie Griffin of the 163rd, who we also talked to in February
about the deployment. When he gets back to the United States and his
"other career," Griffin will start his tenure as principal at Plaza Park
Middle School. He was previously an assistant principal at Harrison
High School.
And the 163rd August return will see them replaced by other US troops. US troops remain on the ground in Iraq.
In 2008, Americans voted for all US troops to be removed from Iraq but that never happened -- not even during the drawdown.
Since Tucker Carlson was suddenly fired from FoxFOXA+0.2% News
last April and began posting videos on Twitter on June 6, his audience
has been in a freefall. Carlson’s inaugural video on Twitter, dubbed Tucker on Twitter,
had generated 26 million video views. (Twitter counts a video view as
any person that watches a video for two or more seconds with half the
screen viewable.) In the second episode, two days later, Carlson’s video
views dropped to 13.9 million. While the third episode, which coincided
with Trump’s indictment from the Justice Department, saw an increase to
18.7 million views, the general trend has been downward. For Carlson’s
more recent eighth episode, on June 30, the viewing was only 3.8
million, its lowest to date and a 86% decline since June 6.
Tucker
decided his future was in the gig economy and with TWITTER -- where
Matt Taibbi goes to play dungeon sub. And Glenneth had a lot to say on
TWITTER including this "This is pathetic of Fox. They fired Carlson, and now their position is: he's not allowed to speak. He didn't go to a competing network. He has no contract with Twitter. He's just speaking on social media."
He's not being silenced, he just can't host a program. Don't sign the
contract if you don't like what's in it. That's what negotiations are
all about. That's why you need to read them yourselves before you sign
them.
But more to the point, this: "CNN's collapse continues. Tucker returns with a Twitter show watched by millions" and "Meanwhile, the only part of media that is growing is independent. The public sees what corporate media has become." and "The sad, pathetic, decaying corporate media's reaction to Tucker's explosive Twitter debut was everything you'd expect and more."
So which is it? Tucker's triumphing in new media -- that's supposedly kicking "corporate media" in the butt -- or is he isn't?
Glenneth you're the one pretending to be his mouthpiece -- shouldn't you be able to make a coherent legal argument?
As
we've said for years now (nearly two decades) for an alleged lawyer
Glenneth has always struggled with the most basic legal concepts (such as breach of contract).
We should love stupid people. They give us so much to write about.
No advertising and no subscriptions? Tucker will be rolling in . . . no money.
Equally true, he did not get 17 million views.
The
Great Glenneth Greenwald has been lying about the numbers as well. But
can we pause that for a moment. Glenneth's jazz hands have been a
problem since he debuted his new talk show -- while his husband lay
dying in a hospital -- so very William Faulkner meets Grace Metalious.
But there's a new problem. Does he have lice or bed bugs? What's with
his inability to stop scratching his upper arms of late?
We'd warn people not to embrace him but, honestly, we can't imagine anyone ever wanting a hug from Glenneth.
At
any rate, Glenneth was tossing around Tweets praising Mother Tucker for
his "explosive Twitter debut" -- yes, it was like diarrhea -- "CNN's collapse continues. Tucker returns with a Twitter show watched by millions."
Oh, Glenneth, if you couldn't lie you'd have to sit there silently.
60 million people did not watch Tucker. 10 million people did not watch Tucker despite Glenneth's claim:
Tucker
Carlson is the most successful host in the history of cable news. Even
in his "stripped-down" Twitter form, he attracted an audience almost no
corporate media employee could get close to. Is it possible this
partially motivates the universal disdain they have for him?
Tucker's got 60 million viewers!
That's what some are lying.
No,
he doesn't. Max Blumethal's wife is both ugly and hippy and that's
enough reason not to note her stupidity. But that transphobic Tweet she
pinned to her feed in February?
People
aren't watching it. The numbers increase but people aren't watching.
You click on her TWITTER feed and start scrolling and doing that will
start her video streaming. It doesn't mean you're watching it. In
fact, you have to make a point to stop if you want to turn on the
audio. Even if you don't turn on the audio, even if you scroll past it
quickly, it still counts as a stream. And it does that each time you
visit her Twitter feed.
John Stauber posted Mother Tucker's 'big' show four times last Tuesday to his TWITTER feed.
He
really is a car crash and so he attracts rubber neckers. Let's say
20,000 people visited his feed and scrolled. That means Tucker's video
streamed 80,00 times.
Megyn Kelly, Glenneth, all the usual trash, reposted Tucker's video.
He did not get 60 million viewers. It was -- automatically streamed -- many, many times.
People are not watching Tucker.
At
YOUTUBE, they've put in some measures to try to prevent that sort of
miscount. But if you have a YOUTUBE page and put a video on the home
page and it starts streaming when you go to the home page? That counts
as you streaming it. You might go to another page at that YOUTUBE
account in two seconds, say the "about" page, but the video started
streaming the minute you hit the home page and they're counting that
stream.
Twitter doesn't do that and doesn't care to.
Repeating,
Tucker is not a Twitter star. He was reposted on hundreds of
accounts. The number actually taking the time to watch the video is
very small. And you can argue it's probably around the number of users
leaving comments -- which Glenneth said was 29,000.
The
numbers were not an accurate count because this was not people going to
a video to stream it, this was a video that started streaming the
minutes you visited someone's Twitter feed and counted as a stream even
if you never stopped on it but just scrolled right past it.
The media
should have grasped that and, certainly, at this late date, a writer for
FORBES should know what's what.
Unlike
Twitter, YOUTUBE has measures in place to prevent this sort of false
inflation of streams. Why? A lot of people were trying to boost their
own
numbers by streaming, for example, a USEFUL IDIOTS -- sh, no rumors to
be Cass Elliot about it -- clip and they'd stream it for a minute or two
and then go away, search it and pull it back up and hit play and get 2
streams. Now they make you start where you stopped the video and you
don't get that second count (that was never a real count to begin
with). Musk won't implement anything like that because honesty and
truth are not core concepts in Musk Land.
A Ron DeSantis 2024
campaign worker who was reportedly fired for retweeting a fan-made
video about the governor which featured a symbol associated with Nazis
had previously praised the impact of white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Nate Hochman, a communications staffer, is said to have allegedly retweeted the controversial meme video from the Ron DeSantis Fancams Twitter account which ended with the 2024 hopeful's face imposed over what appeared to be a circular symbol known as the "sonnenrad."
Hochman,
as first reported by Semafor, was let go after allegedly retweeting the
since-deleted video featuring the ancient symbol which had been
appropriated by the Nazi Party and is still used today by white
supremacist groups.
Hochman,
Axios reported, not only retweeted the video from his own account but
had actually made the clip himself and posted it from the Ron DeSantis
Fancams profile. Joey Hannum, a former aide for Transportation
Secretary Pete Buttigieg, had also speculated that the Ron DeSantis Fancams Twitter account was being used by Hochman as a "sock-puppet operation."
And
there's no way they didn't know who Hochman was when they hired him. A
social media search is the most basic of 'reference' checks these
days. Jonathan Chait (INTELLIGENCER) agrees this was no accident:
It
would be easy to understand this development as simply more campaign
dysfunction, perhaps poor vetting, or even a symptom of the campaign
being “too online.” It is better understood as the result of a
fundamental strategic decision by DeSantis to actively court the far
right.
,
DeSantis’s campaign hired Hochman from National Reviewafter it
was reported he had participated in a Twitter Spaces with Nick Fuentes,
who is at least Nazi-adjacent. “We were just talking about your
influence and we were saying, like, you’ve gotten a lot of kids ‘based,’
and we respect that, for sure,” Hochman told him. “I literally said, ‘I
think Nick’s probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men
who might otherwise be conservative.’” (The comparison is instructive:
The nicest and perhaps only good thing that can be said about Shapiro is
that Nazis hate him.)
,
When I wrote a long feature about
DeSantis’s campaign last year, one factor I identified was its decision
to position DeSantis to Trump’s right. The most visible aspects of this
strategy have involved mocking Trump as a supporter of the COVID
vaccine and LGBTQ rights, both of which are themes in the video Hochman
created. But it has also led the campaign to woo the extreme right:
In
California, surveillance video shows a Los Angeles County sheriff’s
deputy brutally beating a 23-year-old transgender man outside a
convenience store in February. Emmett Brock was driving home from his
job as a teacher when he was followed by Deputy Joseph Benza to a
7-Eleven parking lot, where the officer tackled Brock to the pavement
and punched him repeatedly in the head, accusing him of resisting arrest
even as Brock cried out for help, struggled to breathe and made no move
against the officer. A police report said Brock was pulled over because
he had an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror; Brock says he
was assaulted because he held up his middle finger when driving past
Benza’s patrol car.
To the editor: Brock
never stood a chance. It is appalling to see him exit his car and never
get a chance to even ask why he was being followed by a deputy without
his patrol car's lights and siren on.
It is even more appalling to watch this deputy throw Brock to the ground and beat him.
This
has nothing to do with being transgender. That comes later with the
humiliation at the Norwalk sheriff's station. I hope to see justice
served and for Brock to be able to put the pieces of his life back
together.
Olivia Roberts, Hacienda Heights
To the editor: When
Emmett Brock told the staff at the Los Angeles County sheriff's station
in Norwalk that he is a transgender man, he said they asked to see his genitals. And he got a violent beating from a deputy for having an air freshener hanging from his car's rearview mirror.
It
is ironic that the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs said requiring
its members to reveal potential gang tattoos with skulls and Nazi
imagery would violate the 4th Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches
and the 5th Amendment's protections against self-incrimination.
Dennis Snyder, Long Beach
Let's update on two crazies who want to be president. Paul Rudnick has strong takes on both psychos.
Ronald's
floated a new plan for his faltering campaign. If Ron alone isn't
crazy enough to win your vote, well, he's ready to bring Junior on
board. That's twice as crazy as Ron alone! Tim Dickinson (ROLLING STONE) explains:
Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is talking up the prospect of Democrat and Joe Biden rival Robert Kennedy, Jr., serving in his administration.
In a new interview
with right-wing commentator Clay Travis, DeSantis was asked whether
he’d consider the anti-vax conspiracy theorist Kennedy as a running
mate. DeSantis, who has campaigned vigorously (and fecklessly)
to appeal to vaccine skeptics, downplayed that idea, arguing that the
Democrat was “averse to our base” on 70 percent of the issues.
But the Florida governor was warm to Kennedy serving in the Cabinet,
because Kennedy’s stance on “the medical stuff,” DeSantis said, “does
appeal to me.” DeSantis lofted the idea that Kennedy could serve as his
administration’s attack dog, battling the nation’s top health agencies.
“Sic him on the FDA, if he’d be willing to serve,” DeSantis said. “Or
sic him on CDC.”
Mike argues (rightly) "It's time for Ron DeSantis to be committed."
Ronald wants to 'rescue' medicine -- like he's done with education in
Florida where the horrors of slavery have been glossed over so that we
can now see the institution as just a really intense career day
workshop, right?
Florida’s new education guidelines garnered widespread rebuke last week over the requirement that schools teach that some enslaved people extracted a “personal benefit” from technical skills they learned in captivity.
It’s
an obviously absurd and ahistorical suggestion that fundamentally
relies on racism. It falsely suggests that enslaved people had the good
fortune — despite their bondage and all the horrifying abuse that came
from it — to learn specialized skills, such as blacksmithing, that many Black people had long been practicing outside of American chattel slavery.
As I wrote Friday,
Vice President Kamala Harris took Florida to task for the new
guidelines during an impromptu trip to Jacksonville. And DeSantis did
himself no favors in response.
“I didn’t do it, and I wasn’t involved in it,” he claimed before pivoting to defending it.
“I
think that they’re probably going to show some of the folks that
eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things
later in life. But the reality is, all of that is rooted in whatever is
factual. ... These were scholars who put that together. It was not
anything that was done politically.”
University of Buffalo researcher Ndubueze Mbah’s work on the concept of “abolition forgery”
shows us that oppressive (and occasionally violent) slave-like
conditions were imposed on Black laborers even after slavery had
officially been abolished in Europe and the United States.
“African bodies experienced abolition as beatings and starvation,” Mbah explained.
“As hanging on trees. As burning with fire. As prison confinement. As
penal labor. As forced labor. And that is not the story of abolition as
liberation.”
Slavery was actually beneficial to Black people, according to a set of new rules around how Black American history is going to be taught in Florida’s public schools.
The
new curriculum also includes assertions that Black people themselves
perpetrated violence during historical racial massacres like the 1906
Atlanta race riot and the 1921 Tulsa massacre.
The
slavery-was-actually-a-good-thing and
there-were-bad-actors-on-all-sides bits are old, racist talking points
that I’m not surprised to see Ron DeSantis
shamelessly dredging up now that he’s on a national crusade to make
himself as appealing as possible to the worst of white America. Using
school curricula to delegitimize the horrors of slavery was an obvious
next step, but we still need to call it what it is – white supremacy in
government.
The historical revisionism being employed here has
a singular goal – to erase the horrors of America’s racist past,
legitimize far-right ideology and create easier pathways for racism to
thrive.
Just look at what’s happening in Italy.
For years, revisionists have redirected conversation about Italy’s role
in the second world war away from its fascist crimes, effectively
trivializing that past – and helping legitimize the county’s new far
right. The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and her ilk simply refuse to acknowledge
that Nazis and fascists were the bad guys in the war, and this
ridiculous glossing over of Italy’s past has been extremely helpful to
Italy’s contemporary far right.
That is what
DeSantis wants for America. A systematic destruction of human rights
followed by a reworking of our collective memory around race, so that
ultimately the country’s most vulnerable people don’t have a leg to
stand on in fighting for their most basic rights.
Long before Moms for Liberty, there were the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Their passion and influence kept generations of Southern children
ignorant of how slavery had caused the Civil War and how cruel it had
been. The “war between the states” was rather over “states’ rights” and
tariffs. Confederate soldiers were the heroes of a “Lost Cause.” Kindly
masters had been considerate to contented slaves.
Reconstruction was bad. The Ku Klux Klan was good.
The Daughters didn’t have to pull the truth from shelves. Its
influence with state boards kept offending books from ever being printed
or bought. When a University of Florida professor wrote that the South
had been more in the wrong in the Civil War, the Daughters of the
Confederacy got him fired.
Here’s one of them: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills
which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Another is worse: “Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C., Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre” (emphasis added).
And by?
In each of those massacres, Blacks were never the perpetrators. It is
a fraud on history and a libel on them to imply that they were. When
whites died, it was because Black men had taken up arms to defend their
homes, their families and themselves from armed mobs, seething with
racism, bent on arson and murder.
Not
everyone's noting the truth. No, there's always FOX "NEWS." THE
MAJORITY REPORT looks at how FOX "NEWS" is leaning-in to stand with
their fellow Klansman Ron DeSantis.
Let's wind down with this from The Green Party of Michigan.
Middle of the Mitten Greens Tag Sale
The
Middle of the Mitten Greens is inviting you to a street sale on July
29, 2023. Proceeds from the sale will be donated to the Green Party of
Michigan.
Corner of Michigan Ave. and Mifflin Ave. in Lansing. Free bags of groceries with each $10.00 purchase. (3 items).
Toys, clothing, household items, books, odds and ends. Free food!
Your
purchase will go to administrative costs of the Green Party of
Michigan. For more information please contact Robin Lea Laurain @
robinlaurainlpn@gmail.com.
Wednesday, Jly 26, 2023. Crazy runs the world. In Iraq, the prime
minister prepares to make nice with the leader of the nation who has
illegally set up military base camps in Iraq (no, not the US),
Australia's government rushes to say that the worst thing you can ever
do is impugn a holy book oh, and by the way, maybe not attack a
diplomatic institution, and in America -- where the crazy really roams
free -- we have Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Ron DeSantis who both think
they could be president.
The Australian embassy in Iraq issued a statement condemning the
desecration of the Quran in Copenhagen and the attack on the Swedish
embassy in Baghdad.
The statement mentioned that Australia unequivocally opposes the desecration of the Quran and other religious texts.
The statement elaborated that such acts are provocative and entirely
inconsistent with Australia’s firmly held belief in the freedom of
religion and the equality of all people.
Yes,
that's the violent act, the burning of book. Yes, that's what we lead
with. If we're insane and just want to coddle a bump of immature idiots
who need to grow the hell up. The burning of a book or a flag -- and
Iraq loves to burn other countries' flags -- is not an excuse for
violence now or ever.
But by all means, less
rush to go first and foremost with "OHHHHHHHH1" over a book being burned
as opposed to a fim "NO!" over three attacks on diplomatic missions.
The
people in those embassies and outposts had done nothing. Nor had their
governments. But they were the ones attacked and the chicken ass
Australian government -- that Caitlin Johnstone refuses to call out even
though she's Australian -- better hope no one gets injured or killed
the next time and better grasp that thanks to their cowardly stance,
there will be a next time.
They are normalizing such attacks with their very words.
And
shame on Caitlin and the other cowards who refuse to demand that
Australia fight to get Robert Pether and Julian Assange -- Australian
citizens -- freed and freed immediately.
As the
world knows, Julian's being persecuted for the 'crime' of journalism
and held in England. It's really past time for Caitlin to stop pissing
herself in public while moaning about Joe Biden. Julian's an Australian
citizens held in the United Kingdom, the Australian government has not
just the right but also the obligation to demand that the UK grant
Julian safe passage home.
Robert Pether remains less well known.
Robert
returned to Iraq for a business meeting only to be arrested and held
for over a year now in an attempt by the corrupt Iraq government to
force Pether's company to renegotiate the terms of the contract.
Let's stay with cowardly governments for a moment. Iraqi is currently initiating Operation Tail Between The Legs. KURDISTAN 24 reports:
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia'
al-Sudani on Tuesday received Turkish Ambassador to Baghdad Ali Reza
Gunay, according to the PM’s Media Office.
Both sides discussed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's expected visit to Baghdad next week.
The Turkish President is scheduled to
meet with the Iraqi Presidency, parliament, council of ministers and
various political leaders.
Oh, goody. An opportunity for Mohammed Shia al-Sudani to drop to his knees before Erdogan and beg. Beg like the dog he is.
There
are two main reasons this visit shouldn't be happening. The first is
the water issues. The second is equally important. With little
attention or outcry from the world community, Turkey has not only been
bombing northern Iraq -- the Kurdistan -- for years. It has not only
burned down forests in the Kurdistan. It has also set up military
outposts there. That is a violation of the country's sovereignty and,
yes, it is an act of war.
A
hundred years ago, the Turkish government carried out an Armenian
genocide and the world was okay with that. Now, the Turkish government
carries out a Kurdish genocide and the world looks the other way again.
They say they're going after the PKK -- the PKK being a group that's
active because the Turkish government has been killing Kurds for years
now. But the PKK has been the Turkish government's excuse for killing
innocents as they bomb Iraqi villages and farms from their Turkish
warplanes. Aaron Hess (INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW) described the PKK in 2008,
"The PKK emerged in 1984 as a major force in response to Turkey's
oppression of its Kurdish population. Since the late 1970s, Turkey has
waged a relentless war of attrition that has killed tens of thousands
of Kurds and driven millions from their homes. The Kurds are the world's
largest stateless population -- whose main population concentration
straddles Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria -- and have been the victims of
imperialist wars and manipulation since the colonial period. While
Turkey has granted limited rights to the Kurds in recent years in order
to accommodate the European Union, which it seeks to join, even these
are now at risk."
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We end today’s show with peace activist Kani Xulam, who’s the
director of the American Kurdish Information Network. He has just
arrived in New York City after his solo 300-mile, 24-day walk from the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to United Nations headquarters
here.
Monday marked the 100th anniversary of the partitioning of Kurdistan
into four parts: British Iraq and French Syria, Turkey and Iran. All of
this was done without the consent of the Kurdish people. They were left
without a recognized sovereign state. What’s happened since has been
called a cultural genocide.
This comes as the Kurds of Syria face threats from all sides after
devastating earthquakes and relentless attacks by the Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad and the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Kani Xulam is joining us here in New York for more.
Kani, welcome back to Democracy Now! The latest news of, globally, around Kurds was Sweden, in order to get into NATO,
making a deal with the Turkish president, Erdoğan, around what should
happen to the Kurds there, who he so often calls terrorists, those who
fled Turkey and now live in Sweden. Your response?
KANIXULAM: When NATO
was conceived, it was supposed to be an alliance for freedom. And Kurds
don’t have freedom. On top of it, their language is banned. They’re
subjected to cultural genocide. If NATO wants
to reassess its aims, its future aspirations, it needs to address this
issue. It cannot cave in to Erdoğan and his racist policies that are
trying to eradicate the name of the Kurds from the geography of the
Middle East.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could
you talk a little about the history, especially of this treaty a hundred
years ago that partitioned the Kurdish people into four different
states?
KANIXULAM:
You know, when the war started, an imperialist war, when America
entered it, at least President Wilson said he wants to make the world
safe for democracy. What happened afterwards was anything but to make
the world safe for democracy. British, French, France, they joined
Turkey and Iran in basically partitioning the land of the Kurds through
fraud, through force, without the consent of any of the Kurds on the
ground. It was a deal done in Lausanne, in the heart of Europe.
And we have been living with its effects. In Iraq, we have been
gassed. In Syria, we have had three different laws applying to our
citizenship rights. In Turkey, our very name has been eradicated from
the land, if you will. Our mountains have acquired Turkish names. Our
rivers have acquired Turkish names. Our villages have acquired Turkish
names. And we have been struggling ever since to have a say.
And I walked from Washington, D.C., to the United Nations to say that
we exist, we have a voice, we have a history, we have a culture, we are
no different than our neighbors, and we need to solve this issue
through peaceful means, through civil discourse. In the heart of the
Middle East, we have the presence of the Kurds. It’s like, you know, the
presence of Alps in Europe or the presence of Zagros Mountains in the
Middle East, and it’s an objective fact. And yet our neighbors are
saying that there are no Kurds, and they’re trying to pretend that the
Kurds don’t exist, and they’re trying to assimilate every single Kurd on
the ground as we speak.
AMYGOODMAN:
Kani Xulam, in 1997, you were one of two Americans and four Kurds who
fasted for peace in Kurdistan and for the freedom of Kurdish
parliamentarians who had been arrested by Turkey and imprisoned. This is
you speaking while fasting on the steps of Capitol Hill. Again, this is
Washington, D.C., 1997.
KANIXULAM:
Today, with some guarded optimism, we can report to you that our fast
did have its intended effect on the policymakers in Washington. We also
wanted to reach out to the mainstream media. Although The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune
did pay some homage to our fast, much of the rest of the mainstream
media kept their distance from us. They failed to validate our
nonviolent message for peace and freedom. They did a disservice to our
people’s longing for peace and to their people’s longing for the truth.
It is unfortunate that Saddam and war sell better than Ferda and peace.
Frankly, we are not disappointed. We are committed to our cause more
than ever before.
AMYGOODMAN: So, that was Kani Xulam in 1997. Kani, has there been progress made? And what do you think needs to happen now?
KANIXULAM:
The progress has been slow. We are trying to make America
Kurdish-friendly, D.C. Kurdish-fairly. I’m reminded of a quote by Dr.
King, who said the whites need the Blacks to come clean, to get rid of
their guilt; the Blacks need the whites to heal, to lose their fear. The
British, the French, the Turks, the Persians partitioned our homeland.
They need to come clean, and they need to — they need to reach out to
us, so that they could live in conscience, in good faith with their
children. And we need them to help us lose our fear and lose our hurt,
the pain and the suffering that has been inflicted on us for the last
100 years since the treaty.
And the future is really, we have to respect the Kurds and accept the
Kurds. They deserve a seat at the United Nations, too. To pretend that
the Kurds don’t exist is to pretend that the world is flat.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Kani
Xulam, could you talk about the role of the United States, for instance,
during the invasion of Iraq and the Iraq War? The U.S. backed autonomy
for the Kurds as a means of achieving its own — the White House’s own
goals in the Middle East, but, of course, has said nothing about the
Kurds in Turkey or in the other Middle East states.
KANIXULAM:
You know, in the course of my walk, long walk for freedom across the
founding heartland of America, I came across a sign saying “Americans
who had died for the cause of Iraqi freedom.” Many died, that’s true,
but the Kurds really didn’t want to have anything to do with the Arab
majority in Iraq. They desperately wanted to be on their own. In 2017,
they voted to be on their own, and yet neither the United Nations nor
the U.S. honored them, in spite of their support of the allied effort to
topple Saddam.
In Syria, 11,000 Kurds have died, together with their Arab comrades, to get rid of ISIS
threat, not just in the Middle East but also from Europe and the world.
The relationship between the United States and the Kurds in Syria is
still a military one. The Kurds desperately want that relationship to be
a political one. We need political status. We cannot depend on our
neighbors, who are bent on our destruction. This is a crime against
humanity, and it needs to be stated. And I appreciate Democracy Now! for allowing me to say this on the air.
AMYGOODMAN:
Kani Xulam, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the
American Kurdish Information Network, has just completed a solo walk
from Washington, D.C., to the United Nations.
That does it for our show. Democracy Now! is currently accepting applications for paid internships in our archive and development departments. Learn more and apply at democracynow.org.
In the US, we've got another crop of crazies who want to be president.
On July 20, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
testified before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee’s
Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The hearing
took place two days after former president Donald Trump announced that
he had received a “target letter” from special counsel Jack Smith. Trump
said he expected to be indicted on criminal charges related to the
attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election, which culminated
in the attack on Congress by a fascist mob summoned by Trump on January
6, 2021.
In the face of an unprecedented and rapidly escalating
political crisis of the entire US political system in the run-up to the
2024 presidential election, the bulk of the Republican Party and the
entire leadership of the House Republican conference have lined up
behind Trump, portraying the fascist would-be dictator as the victim of a
Democratic-led government witch-hunt.
Two days before Trump revealed the special counsel’s target letter, the New York Post
published on its website a two-minute video showing RFK Jr. telling
associates at an upscale Manhattan restaurant that Jews and Chinese
people are less susceptible to the virus that is the cause of the global
COVID-19 pandemic, and that this may be the result of deliberate
genetic engineering. This version of the infamous “blood libel” against
the Jews was the latest iteration of RFK Jr.’s combination of
anti-vaccination propaganda, anti-China anti-communism and anti-Semitism
that has characterized his campaign for the Democratic presidential
nomination from the outset.
Following the exposure of this
fascistic outburst, which was roundly condemned by other members of the
Kennedy family and led to a further drop in RFK Jr.’s poll numbers, the
House Republican leadership openly embraced him. In return, he eagerly
and no less openly placed himself at their disposal in seeking to
deflect attention from Trump’s crimes and portray both the ex-president
and himself as victims of a “deep state” conspiracy.
The Judiciary Committee is headed by top Trump attack dog Jim Jordan of
Ohio, who was one of 147 House Republicans who voted to overturn the
2020 election. Under the leadership of Jordan, the Select Subcommittee
on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which he set up, has
held hearings advancing the false narrative that conservatives and Trump
supporters are being unfairly targeted by the various federal police
and intelligence agencies.
At the outset of the last week’s
hearing, Jordan took time to introduce “a good friend of mine,” former
Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat, who is currently
serving as Kennedy’s campaign manager. Over the last year, Kucinich has worked with right-wing elements, including the increasingly fascistic Libertarian Party,
to forge “left-right” unity against the “corporate duopoly.” Speaking
to a smiling Kucinich, Jordan said, “We appreciate your service to the
1st Amendment.”
In his nearly three hours of testimony, Kennedy Jr. never refuted claims
by Republican politicians that Trump or his allies were unfairly
“censored” or “targeted” by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS), or social media companies, including after Trump’s failed coup.
Instead, Kennedy claimed that he, more so than Trump, was the target of a
censorship campaign, aimed at destroying his credibility and hampering
his bid to become president.
That Kennedy Jr. was even allowed to
testify on Capitol Hill to a worldwide audience less than a week after
being exposed for advancing a fascistic and anti-Semitic conspiracy
theory about COVID-19 demonstrates the absurdity of the claim that he
is being censored. The fact that the Republicans courted him and used
the hearing to provide him with a platform expresses the degree to which
anti-Semitism and anti-Asian racism are increasingly accepted and
promoted within the ruling class.
From one crazy to another, from Junior to Ron DeSantis. Ronald just gets worse each day. As Tavis Smiley noted,
"Ron DeSantis has doubled down on his view that slavery benefitted
Black folk. Did it? I mean, of course, that's a rhetorical question.
Saying slavery was good for Black folk because it gave us jobs is like
saying that the Nazi holocaust was good because it gave us Anne Frank's
diary, like saying apartheid was good because it gave us President
Nelson Mandela. It is absurd. It takes Orwell to a new level."
In
the abstract, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) defense of changes to
discussion of slavery in his state’s schools is baffling. The state’s
new educational standards suggest that enslaved people “developed skills
which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,”
as though being considered property was simply a step on the career
ladder.
Asked about it, DeSantis offered that
the curriculum — which he insisted wasn’t something he produced — would
probably “show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you
know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Needless to
say, this is not generally how historians view the institution of
slavery.
But
DeSantis’s argument isn’t offered solely as a governor of a large
state. It is also offered as a guy who is running for the Republican
presidential nomination in 2024 and, in that context, his efforts to
downplay the extent to which Black Americans suffered from slavery make
much more sense.
He's lying for
votes. He's lying to get votes and
he's so disgusting that he will insult African-Americans who were put
into slavery and those who lived to see the end of it by lying about
what was historically done to this group of people. He's a liar. It's
that simple.
We want a liar to be in charge of our children's education?
This is not acceptable. Either, in the 21st century, we're okay with that or we're not.
Bump continues:
Last week, YouGov published polling data
showing a divide in how Americans view the effects of racism. Poll
respondents were asked whether racism against various racial groups was a
problem now and the extent to which it had been in the past.
Republican
respondents were more likely to say that racism against Black people
was lower in the past than were White respondents or respondents
overall. (Perceptions of racism in the past are shown with triangles on
the graph below.) They were also less likely to say that racism against
Black Americans is currently a problem (shown with a dot) — and were
about half as likely as respondents overall to say that racism is
currently a big problem (indicated with a dashed line) for Black
Americans.
So you
coddle a lot of ignorant people? Is that what Ronald wants to do? We
can't afford to coddle. We need to be adults and speak honestly.
Honesty does not render the institution of slavery as the equivalent of a
trade school. There is no excuse for that. It's a lie and you call
out lies.
More to the point, you
call out the people who promote those lies. Ron DeSantis is not fit to
be president of the United States for many, many reasons. But the one
we're addressing right now, the lying about history and lying about pain
inflicted on a people? That's outrageous. Gregory Korte (BLOOMBERG NEWS) reports:
Will
Hurd said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his rival for the Republican
presidential nomination, should take responsibility for a new state
curriculum that calls for teaching that slavery gave enslaved people
valuable skills.
“Implying
that there is an upside to slavery is absolutely wrong,” said Hurd, a
former US representative running a long-shot bid for the GOP nomination,
in an interview Monday with Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power.”
DeSantis
criticized Vice President Kamala Harris last week for going to Florida
to condemn the recently adopted social studies curriculum. The Florida
governor said he wasn’t involved in drafting the document but defended
the standards.
“They’re
probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed,
you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis
said Friday.
“He
shouldn’t have doubled down on this,” said Hurd, who has a Black father
and White mother, and for a time was the only Black Republican in the
US House.
“This
could have been handled very, very easily by saying we’re going to
tweak that language to make clear that slavery was a bad thing for our
society, it was our original sin,” he said. “That’s what Ron DeSantis
should do, and not pass the buck and say it wasn’t his responsibility.”
Exactly.
It's a dodge move a kid makes, not a grown up. And a kid would be
immediately corrected. But let's stop a moment for a paragraph in the
section above:
DeSantis
criticized Vice President Kamala Harris last week for going to Florida
to condemn the recently adopted social studies curriculum. The Florida
governor said he wasn’t involved in drafting the document but defended
the standards.
Kamala Harris was elected vice president of the United States. Florida is in the US. She has every right to go to Florida.
But
Ron was not elected to national office. Ron's supposed to be the
governor of Florida. He changed the law so that he could campaign and
be governor. But he's not governing as he flits across the country like
a giant gypsy moth. Kamala? She did her job. Ron's doing everything
but his job. Is that why Florida's having the insurance problems --
where they're paying three times as much now as people in other states?
Because they don't have a governor reporting to work each day?
Last week, the Florida State Board of Education approved new academic standards that
will require middle schools to teach students that enslaved people
"developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their
personal benefit."
Vice President Kamala Harris was the first to speak out about the guidelines in a speech at Delta
Sigma Theta Sorority Inc.'s 56th national convention in Indianapolis
Thursday, stating that they pushed "revisionist history."
"Just
yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students
will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery," Harris, 58,
said. "They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not
stand for it."
Watters, 45, criticized Harris' remarks on The Five and argued.
"This is well documented among historians," Watters claimed. "This is
historical fact that slaves did develop skills while they were enslaved
and used those skills as blacksmiths, in agriculture, tailoring, in the
shipping business, to then use to benefit themselves and their families
once they were freed."
The
controversy swirling around Florida's new slavery curriculum expanded
Tuesday, as the White House condemned Fox News host Greg Gutfeld for
defending the state’s education standards by claiming Holocaust
survivors also needed “useful” skills in order to survive the Nazis.
On
an episode of "The Five" talk show Monday, Gutfeld referenced a book
written by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl and said "you had to survive
in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful… Utility
kept you alive.”
The
comments were part of a segment on Florida's new history standards that
imply slaves benefited from their servitude by learning skills that
could "be applied for their personal benefit."
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement to The Hill Tuesday that Gutfield's comments were "an obscenity" and criticized Fox News for failing to condemn the host.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland has also criticized the
comments for failing to add the context that "the Holocaust was a
systematic genocide with the ultimate aim of exterminating the entire
Jewish population... We should avoid such oversimplifications in talking
about this complex tragic story."
What's
worse is how there are so many liars at FOX "NEWS."
A Florida law that
took effect on July 1, 2023, restricts how educators in the state’s
public colleges and universities can teach about the racial oppression
that African Americans have faced in the United States.
Specifically, SB 266 forbids
professors to teach that systemic racism is “inherent in the
institutions of the United States.” Similarly, they cannot teach that it
was designed “to maintain social, political and economic inequities.”
We are professors who teach the modern history of the Middle East and Eastern Europe,
and we know that even democratically elected governments suppress
histories of their own nations that don’t fit their ideology. The goal
is often to smother a shameful past by casting those who speak of it as
unpatriotic. Another goal is to stoke so much fear and anger that
citizens welcome state censorship.
We see this playing out in Florida, with SB 266 being the most extreme example in a series of recent U.S. state bills that critics call “educational gag orders.”
The tactics that Gov. Ron DeSantis is using to censor the teaching of
American history in Florida look a lot like those seen in the illiberal
democracies of Israel, Turkey, Russia and Poland.
Amy
Dru Stanley, an expert in slavery and emancipation who teaches at the
University of Chicago, condemned the Florida Board of Education's new
guidelines.
"The guidelines do violence to American history. Misleading is too kind a term," she told Newsweek.
"The
guidelines update for 21st-century political purposes the myths of
slaveholders: the specious notion of Black uplift through relations of
personal domination and ownership under chattel slavery. The falsehoods
that slaves learned valuable skills from dehumanizing, brutal labor for
their masters; that outdoor work was healthful.
"The
guidelines resurrect the pro-slavery defense that slavery was 'a good--a
positive good,' as argued by Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina in Congress, in 1837.
"The
adoption of the guidelines has made a damaging travesty of education in
Florida --damaging in distorting the past, damaging in teaching children
to find something good in owning human beings as property, forcing their
labor through whippings, and buying and selling them as commodities,
damaging in seeking to win votes through whitewashing the most extreme
forms of racial injustice."
Sophie White, a professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, was also fiercely critical.
"I
certainly think it also worth turning the question around, which is why
Florida's state Board of Education (presumably under the direction of
the governor) is so eager to erase the history of slavery," she told Newsweek.
"What
are they so afraid of? That students in Florida get to confront the
past, or that they understand the continuing legacies of hereditary,
race-based chattel slavery?"
