Judge Perlman, who was — no shit — Jewish, did not care for Nazis. This led him to reach out to one of the most powerful Jewish guys around: Meyer Lansky. Judge Perlman, as you might expect, hadn’t done Meyer any favors in the past. He had for example helped to end Prohibition, the repeal of which, while generally extremely popular, wasn’t great for the Meyer Lanskys of the world, who had been making bank off illegal booze. But when Perlman met with Meyer after the rise of the German American Bund, they ended up getting along pretty well. Perlman was like “I want you to disrupt meetings of Nazis” and Meyer was like “excellent, on it,” and Perlman was like “hang on I’m not finished” and Meyer was like “sorry” and Perlman was like “I will pay you and give you legal assistance, should anyone get arrested. The only condition is, don’t kill anyone.” With what I can only imagine to be the world’s greatest eye roll, Meyer said “Ugh fine, I won’t kill anyone. Also, I don’t want your money.”

And then he went to work.

In the meantime, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel also TRAINED other people to fight Nazis, which, come on, can you just imagine Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel training young antifa in the early 30s? I love it. I’m picturing a lot of newsboy caps and comments like “no no not like that, my bubbe (ofblessedmemory) punches better than that, you grip the brass knuckles like this.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29111557

The Haymarket Affair (1886)

Tue May 04, 1886

Image: *A Harper’s Weekly illustration of the Haymarket Riot from May 15, 1886.

A Harper’s Weekly illustration of the Haymarket Riot from May 15, 1886.

A Harper’s Weekly illustration of the Haymarket Riot from May 15, 1886.

A Harper's Weekly Illustration of the Haymarket Affair, May 15th, 1886

The Haymarket Affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre) was the bloody aftermath of a bombing that took place on this day in 1886 during a radical labor demonstration demanding an 8 hour day in Chicago, Illinois.

The strike began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day. After police began trying to disperse a May 4th rally associated with the strike, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers, four to eight civilians, and wounded approximately one hundred people on either side.

In the internationally publicized legal proceedings that followed, eight anarchists were convicted of conspiracy. Seven were sentenced to death and one to a term of 15 years in prison. Illinois Governor Richard J. Oglesby commuted two of the sentences to terms of life in prison; another committed suicide in jail rather than face the gallows. The other four were hanged on November 11th, 1887.

The trial, widely believed to be a farce, was condemned internationally. The Haymarket Affair, and working class struggle more broadly, is commemorated annually on May 1st as "May Day" or "International Workers' Day".

• Date: 1886-05-04
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, libcom.org, theanarchistlibrary.org.
• Tags: #Labor, #Anarchism, #Riots, #Protests.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Meet my Greek online pen pal, Johanis.

A long-time political organizer in the vibing anarchist scene of Athens, I met him in a long camping trip in Southern Greece, and I learned quite some stuff that are surprisingly obscure to the vast majority of other political people I have met anywhere else.

So I pulled up some old scrolls I have lying around from various trips, and tracked down our 2011-2018 correspondence, to find this grove of relevant information for the current German situation, I had long forgotten about.

Over the past weeks I tried to get ahold of Johanis, and get some more recent reflection on the aftermath of prosecuting the Greek Nazi Party, and the current situation of the Greek right-wing.

The insight come in spades.

This text took me significantly longer to compile, but it was extremely meaningful in understanding a country with a rich political history we now next to nothing about, except for Philosophers (500BC) -> Bankrupcy (2010AD).

Why I am writing this now? Political discourse on Lemmy turns to criticism of the classification of the German AfD right-wing party as right wing extremists, which will strengthen its surveillance. (Let's not forget that Nazism is outright banned in Germany already, in contrast with other countries).

This reminds me of a close parallel with the Greek situation especially before 2012, and the problems they faced there with the Greek neo-nazis "Golden Dawn".

This party was around since the 1990's, and was a deplorable minority, until the harsh austerity measures that followed the Greek bailout by the Eurozone and the IMF brought them to political prominence, with a modest win in Athens municipal elections, followed by an alarming 15% of the vote in national elections, and multiple seats in the parliament.

Its political power was accompanied by an increased street presence, to the effect that the fascists have overtaken the streets of a couple migrant and working class majority neighborhoods.

At this point, even people in the far left were making arguments against banning Golden Dawn, because that would make them supposedly look like the victim, and eventually strengthen them even more.

Furthermore, the faschists themselves were pushing the same narrative, threatening the left that "once they got there, there is nothing left to do" because they were confident they could absorb any censorship or attack into their victimization narrative ("The anti-racist laws are racist against Greeks", and similar.) The movement's response was to increase the antifascist action in the street, because this was where the fascist felt confident. But mind you, this approach has limits: The French have dealt with a different growing threat, that makes the street-fighting irrelevant. The trivialization of fascist talking points in the media, that gave rise to Lepen.

You can't bash those away, and we are talking about an era when TV was still the mainstream media, and conspiracy theories were the realm of chain-mails and the blogo-sphere.

Back in the day the Greek far-right scene was dominated by the fascist Karatzaferis (which according to Johanis is a name of Turkish origin, ironically), who was following the Lepen playbook to the letter: he softened the edges, and offered a palatable version of petit-burgeoise conservativism, while secretly catering to a number of extreme far-right personalities in his party.

At least three of this breed are now prominent members of the center right governing party New Democracy, Johanis has written in an email last year. As for the governing party itself, it is a terrible nepotist government, with most figures being descedants of Greek politician families. The Prime Minister's sister is part of the government, and her driver run over someone during the pandemic and not a single soul was prosecuted. The Prime Minister (K.Mitsotakis the 2nd) himself is implicated in a scandal about using Cambridge Analytica and the infamous Israeli spyware "Predator", which he used together with the secret service in which he presides, to spy on his political opponents.

Mitsotakis pretends to be LGBT-friendly, for show, and to the disdain of his own party he legalized gay marriage last year, with votes from the left and the opposition. Johanis believes he did so to counterbalance the abysmal human right ratings from handling the immigrant situation, and the terrible freedom of the press ratings. In my opinion, this is why human rights cannot be an average: it is an all-or-nothing situation. Finally, Mitsotakis was quick to attest "there are only two sexes" following the Trump executive order, and some fringe anarchist group claims there is a TERF propaganda operation developing in Greece, but Johanis only half-heartedly believes this is the case. In fact, a Greek gender recognition act was passed by a coalition government led by center-left Syriza in 2017, with the vocal disagreement of Mitsotakis.

The appeal of the far-right to Greeks is rooted back to a turbulent post-WW2 history: As Nazi occupiers were leaving the land, a violent civil war broke out. For the Greek anarchist movement, the Varkiza Treaty is considered the hallmark of the second-half of 20th century class-aware social contract, marking the ceasefire between the (British-backed) conservative branch of the liberation warfare, and the territorialy prevalent communists (who were supported at wartime by a broader demographic of democrats and commoner guerilla soldiers). This was followed by a right-wing police state, with the majority of left-wing people excluded from public life, and exiled in terrible prison-camps in various islands around Athens and Piraeus. This "post-civil war" state culminated in a CIA-backed, brutally anticommunist, military junta during the late sixties and early seventies.

Following a student revolt that was violently suppressed, the junta attempted a coup in Cyprus, which failed, leading to a Turkish invasion and occupation of Northern Cyprus. At this point the junta collapsed and Greece entered its modern era of constitutional presidential democracy, with extreme right ideas (police state, anticommunism, restitute monarchy, etc) becoming unpopular, and propagated only in the confines of extreme political and religious fanatic circles (about 6-7%). Nonetheless this was the pool Karatzaferis initially catered to, and this reflected his (and later Golden Dawn's) voter base statistics.

The IMF and EU bailouts were interpreted as "the end of the post-junta era", with popular rejection of the extremely corrupted and nepotist bipartisan system that prevailed in the 1980-2010 period. Among other popular grievance movements, that were ridden with opportunist and/or conspiracist groups, that was the context in which Golden Dawn broke out of the confines of the far-right chambers, and started absorbing these feelings into a nationalist, xenophobic front.

Their street presence was extended beyond pogroms and stormtrooping to "mutual aid" acts, for instance helping poor granmas and holding soup kitchens for Greeks only, while "pretecting from immigrant hoodlums" and pulling their old rhetoric tricks: "We are no fascist for being patriots. We are simply not traitors, because we fought communists who wanted to give up Northen Greece to Stalin. I am not saying I am a national socialist, (implied that this is the purest form of what I am), but I am simply a nationalist, and this is nothing to be ashamed of", according to Johanis was a party line for chatting up people in the gym, cafeteria, the taxi trip, and the internet, and it was very effective.

It is my understanding that some of these areas, despite the sharp decline in Golden Dawn's number after the events I will soon explain, were never completely taken back by left-wing powers. (Only last year a fascist was prosecuted there for having a hideous Youtube were he ridiculed and harassed migrant women and people with mental disabilities, whom he tricked with some ridiculous payment, to cater to an audience of heinous fascist losers.)

Nonetheless, the fascists became too confident, and they killed a Greek left-wing rapper, Pavlos Fissas, in a traditionally communist area of merchant shipping workers (beatings of migrants and the killing of Pakistani worker Shehzad Luqman were up to this point brought up only by the antifascist left). The New Democracy has long being afraid that the reliable voting pool on their right, they could easily manipulate by poaching the talking heads from the extremist-right TV cesspool, would usurp the power for its own, and seized the opportunity to round up the Golden Dawn and jail them, not for being Nazis, but for being a criminal organization whose hierarchical structure made them directly responsible for the murder of Fissas. The fascist's networking with the mob, brothels, and other nefarious activites came to light, together with footage of Nazi paganism rituals with their leaders all over the place, and photographs of para-military training.

These had the effect of denigrating Golden Dawn forever in the eyes of the Greeks, who suffered terribly under Nazi Occupation. No need to mention the Greek authorities could have done this at any point if they didn't want the Golden Dawn in the streets, to help equalize the vocal anarchist and left-wing movements, especially in a time of bankrupcy, and only years apart from a devastating anarchist and football hooligan uprising in 2008, that tested the limits of the populous Greek riot police.

Many people worldwide, but especially in Germany keep victim blaming the Greeks for the situation, which is an easy way to not have to think about the Greek ruling class which is comprised mainly by filthy rich ship-owners, deeply entangled with illegal activities and the various ethnic mobs, as well as an extremely corrupted police, who bleed the Greek population: Greek salaries where the lowest in Europe even before they went bankrupt, and inflation is endemic due to established supply-chain cartels. Austerity, extreme privatization, and financial supervision by European neoliberals have made both worse, and recently the Greeks faced "German prices with Bulgarian salaries", as well as a brutal housing crisis.

The degree of police militarization and political activity on the left, scaled for the small population, is insane. Finally, the country is 88th (87th last year) in Freedom of the Press, with journalists sued, and at least in a couple of cases murdered. Following a deadly train accident in Tempi two years ago, the New Democracy faced a growing protest movement and and resorted to a cabinet reshuffle. For the careful amongst the readers, this brought the far-right extremist G. Vorides to the ministry of immigration, in a period that Greece faces scrutiny for its Frontex operations, illegal pushbacks, and hellish concentration camps for migrants, called hot-spots, which are ordered by the EU to keep Global North and East refugees and migrants out of Europe. At this time, a fascist once known for stormtrooping in the 1980s, is now in charge of a situation already ridden with human rights violations and international law crimes.

As a final note, in the last elections, a new party "Spartans" showed up and took a 7% of the vote. It was revealed that the Golden Dawn's Number 2 (I. Kasidiaris) had managed to spread the word from inside prison for his supporters to vote for "Spartans". After causing a number of incidents in the parliament that paralleled the unruly Golden Dawn days, the ruse came to light and the Spartans were prosecuted for voter fraud. This is no relief for Greek leftists though: after a bankrupcy, an austerity period, and a pandemic, with a huge proportion of the population still on Facebook, it is estimated that 30% of the vote goes to some kind of far-right nutjob, including the parties of P. Kamenos (antivax conspiracy theorist and nationalist) and A. Latinopoulou (a religious transphobe woman and ultra-nationalist). Of course this does not include the 40% New Democracy takes, with the far-right personalities it now incorporates.

Anarchists monitoring the far-right scene claim that there is no group yet to parallel the momentum of the Golden Dawn, but the far-right is still evolving and regrouping. For the time being they are once again countered by anarchist forces in the streets, but the effect of right-wing populist propaganda in voting behavior is far more prevalent, mirroring the French situation, and every other place really.

In my opinion the lessons learned here is that the alarmist response claiming that banning Nazis will invigorate them is misleading. Greece saw no surge in Nazi support after jailing the Golden Dawn. The fascists were disbanded and started blaming each other, and dissolved back to million immaterial grupuscula, with just the familiar 7% support they have been having post-junta. Street fights against stormtroopers are effective, and even pre-emptively attacking fascist haunts and ideological epicenters was proved to be succesful, as the British 1970s antifaschist movement has shown. (We should never forget that Hitler's SAs were 3 million strong in the 1930s - you will need to prevent this.)

The one thing that left-wing forces have not nailed yet is how to combat the insidious fascist mind control that creeps into the petit-burgeoisie through TV and social media, especially in countries with media controlled by the oligarchy, as in most countries. For these aspects, consult my previous essay about banning social media algorithms and hate-speech in Europe.

Last Christmas, I came over anarcho-syndicalism on Wikipedia, and since then, I’ve really gotten interested in anarchism, especially anarcho-syndicalism!

Today I own two copes of Rudolf Rocker’s Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice and recently bought a copy of Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread from AK Press.

Both books are also available for free on The Anarchist Library:

• Rudolf Rocker: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rudolf-rocker-anarchosyndicalism
• Peter Kropotkin: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread

I wanted to share a link to my thread and some of my thoughts about it here on #Lemmy enjoy!

Thread: https://social.linux.pizza/@midtsveen/113995517612454577

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62560258

Hello dear fellow human beings!

Let me clarify a few things.

We are one, all of us, all stardust, right from the belly of an exploding star, right to our shared evolution, history, & current technological & societal progress. All humanity and all life is one and connected, and so are all of our problems.

Poverty, hunger, homelessness, climate change, fascism, war, and even the global epidemic of loneliness & depression aren’t distinct disconnected problems. They are a singular globally connected problem. And it requires a singular globally connected solution.

All of these are problems of a skewed economy, aka wealth inequality. Those who don't have enough face poverty, hunger, homelessness, and a lifetime of financial insecurity. Those who have plenty, want even more, which leads to them dividing the masses by propaganda, eventually leading to fascism & war. Our collective mismanaged consumption is pushing us all towards climate catastrophe. All of these global issues are making us very lonely & depressed, and the overall society prone to crime & violence.

So how can we fix this skewed economy and our collective social issues? And is it even solvable?

Some might find the answer as obvious, some might consider it incorrect or impossible to achieve. Well, let me tell you folks, I've done the math, I've double checked my work, there is one and only one way out - Collectively!

Welcome to Collective Cake, a secular democratic global economic engine powered by all, and created for all. If we are the producers and if we are also the consumers, then we can manage our economy however we collectively want. It’s our Collective Cake, let’s take ownership and enjoy it best we can.

Is it a business? Or is it an cooperative? Is it a think tank? Or is it an economic union? Is it a democratically controlled, sustainability led unified global economy? It is anything & everything we want it to be. We get to collectively decide it!

Is it capitalism? Is it communism? Is it market socialism? All I will say about this is that capitalism is what exists right now, and market socialism is also capitalism, but the better kind. However, I want us all to refrain from using such labels while problem solving. Labels might help identify a sub-group, but it invariably causes division and we pick sides, we blindly love ours, and blindly hate theirs. An emotional response is not a well reasoned response. Lastly, if even one man cannot understand ambiguous or technical jargon, we have all collectively lost.

There's a lot for us talk about. Not a debate to be won, but a problem to be solved. Not using violence, but by strategy and collective action. Before we talk about the what or the how, we must talk more about the why. I have some thoughts that I'll share, but it doesn't matter for we can collectively decide and do anything we want. The matchstick has been lit.

Next week, I'll share my thoughts on our collective ethos or "our water".

Stay tuned!

Love, fakir

PS: enjoy this lovely animation that was released over 50 years ago!

Declaration of Educational Warfare — A Manifesto from the Classroom Frontlines

> This is not a reform. This is a rebellion.

I wrote this as a public declaration—because the education system is not broken.

It was built this way.

What we call “school” is often just a pipeline: from trauma, to obedience, to silence. This isn’t about fixing it. This is about burning it down and building something that actually nurtures minds.

Declaration of Educational Warfare

Subject Index: education reform, political indoctrination, propaganda in schools, American history, truth in education, anti-authoritarian, critical thinking, curriculum manipulation, modern revolution, cultural warfare, media literacy, civic responsibility, youth empowerment, educational resistance, information control, censorship in education, radical pedagogy

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4627900

Our reporter Rowan Glass went deep inside one of the world’s most enduring anti-capitalist movements, offering a rare and intimate glimpse into a community that has defied militarisation, marginalisation, and globalisation. Granted exclusive access to the 30th anniversary of the Zapatistas' 1994 uprising, our team captured the group’s commemorations, their political education programs, and their vision of self-governance – built from the ground up by Indigenous communities.

"¡Ya Basta! 30 Years of Zapatista Autonomy" explores the legacy and future of the EZLN, reflecting on how a masked, rural rebellion reshaped Mexico’s political landscape and inspired activists across the globe.

What does revolution look like when it refuses to seize state power? And what can the world learn from a community that continues to build its own system from the ground up?

Consider supporting our independent journalism at www.patreon.com/moderninsurgent.

Find the rest of our work at www.moderninsurgent.org

Youtube link

You know you love to see a picture of Kropotkin in the paper

cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/189533

I think this video is a great starter for this community, because then we can begin on the notion that we, as leftists, have to leave our comfort zones sometimes and do the work to realize the world that we dream about.

Anark hits us with some harsh truths in this video, but it should only serve as motivation for us to finally get going. For, it has definitely worked.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27372186

Rudolf Rocker (1873 - 1958)

Tue Mar 25, 1873

Image: **

Johann Rudolf Rocker, born on this day in 1873, was an anarchist theorist, historian, and activist, known for critical anarchist texts such as "Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice" (1938) and "Pioneers of American Freedom" (1949).

Though often described as an anarcho-syndicalist, Rocker was a self-professed anarchist without adjectives, believing that anarchist schools of thought represented "only different methods of economy" and that the first objective for anarchists was "to secure the personal and social freedom of men".

Rocker was involved in helping organize a number of labor strikes and represented the federation at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907. Rocker was well-read in his lifetime - his readers included figures Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Herbert Read, and Bertrand Russell.

"Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts."

- Rudolf Rocker

• Date: 1873-03-25
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, libcom.org, theanarchistlibrary.org.
• Tags: #Birthdays, #Anarchism.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

This is another thing that was lost in the torrent of executive orders, that I now think it might require some closer attention.

Like Greenland and Canada were initially treated as typical Trump dementia, but we see there is more and more to them, and news keep getting back at these topics.

We see that the anti-Christian bias thing pops up in places. And we can bet it stems from deep places within the Christian Nationalists in the Heritage Foundation Trump team sent questions to international researchers funded by the US, asking (among others), whether they work to combat Christian persecution

Previously, Trump issued an EO to "eradicate" anti-Christian bias. This is also in line with some fundamentalist Christian views that LGBT visibility and acceptance is a personal attack to them and their faith.

There is a plethora of ways this can go wrong, not only in the extreme forms of oppression these fundamentalists are after, but also in overt state sponsored violence against the LGBT and other groups who work within a religious tolerant framework, eg the Unitarians, and constitutional protections of freedom of religion - for non-Christians of course.

Why are the two worst crimes in the US: (a) vandalizing a Tesla and (b) protesting at a liberal arts college?

The left is getting killed on the trans sports issue [^1] [^2]

Do you have any data backing this? And what analysis goes with the data?

Don't let me be misunderstood: Rights are not defined by majorities, otherwise you could have a white majority voting on the humanity of black people, and wolves voting on the right of sheep not to be eaten.

On the other hand, the public's views are heavily conditioned by misanthropic, anti-democratic propaganda, that shifts the window of acceptable discourse, and excludes people from a set of fundamental freedoms that cisgender people take for granted. As a consequence, the ubiquitous genocidal discourse against trans lives, if left unchecked leads (and this is by now not a prediction but a historical fact) to erosion of rights of women, blacks, indigenous, disabled, and every other citizen. Because these freedoms are not "special" to trans people, but are mere extension of legal scholarship and the rule of law. The ongoing American fascism is not an overreach of "legitimate concerns" but it is profoundly, structurally embedded in challenging the legitimacy of trans people. This is why TERFism was initially deemed "unworthy of respect" by British courts: because it goes against TONS of legal precedent.

Long story short, in the times of "Der Stürmer" you could have said that the majority of German did not think Jews should be married to Germans. So what? So much for the argument that we should sacrifice human rights of ANY group because they are unpopular.

ALL protections exist so that UNPOPULAR groups enjoy the rights that the majorities take for granted. Outside that logic there is only fascism.

It is much like segregation (which, surprise, is coming back again) and apartheid: The Feelings of uneasy white people sharing bathrooms and sports with black people, are of no importance whatsoever, because, simply, segregation is dehumanizing and unjust.

By extension, what you suggest is morally corrupt and inhumane, and it is deeply fascist in its very conception.

Now, we are arriving at the data. Bear with me.

You people hand-wave a fucking lot when you suggest that trans rights are so unpopular that they have lost you elections, when there have been multiple arguments that Democrats barely touched on the topic, apart from being loosely against killing trans people in pogroms and LUKEWARM at that. So your argument amounts to little more than "Fascist discourse is more trendy so let's do that instead", which is not JUST the Ratchet effect: it is "being complicit to actual genocide".

So you HAND-WAVE about an IMAGINARY regular person (who is that fucking nazi?) to whom we must bow under all circumstances? Fuck that populist tactics, and fucking educate people.

But does this IMAGINARY nazi-enabling regular Joe even exist?

And what studies you cite for him not being able to revise being a shit person

Views differ even more widely along party lines. For example, eight-in-ten Democrats say they favor laws or policies that would protect trans individuals from discrimination, compared with 48% of Republicans. Conversely, by margins of about 40 percentage points or more, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to express support for laws or policies that would do each of the following: require trans athletes to compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth (85% of Republicans vs. 37% of Democrats favor); make it illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition (72% vs. 26%); make it illegal for public school districts to teach about gender identity in elementary schools (69% vs. 18%); require transgender individuals to use public bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth (67% vs. 20%); and investigate parents for child abuse if they help someone younger than 18 get medical care for a gender transition (59% vs. 17%).

Which is from Pew which others like you like to point to as a general "trans rights unpopular with our voter base", but if you actually read you will see that you can even find a small percentage of Republicans that are not vehemently against trans rights. And let's not forget that the percentage of Democrats against trans rights would be very much different if Democrat's media outlets weren't fucking complicit in amplifying genocidal "gender critical" misanthropy, and there weren't a score of fucking "leftist" intellectuals adopting their talk points, when there was ZERO voice given to the marginalized trans scholarship. So, this consent you talk to is manufactured by complicit Democrats to start with.

You would not make this argument unless you wanted to appeal to the Republican voter base, but doing so only shows that it is voter trends that guide your politics and not principles, and in fact, you are willing to enable crimes against humanity to appeal to a fascist voter base. This is unscrupulous and misanthropic.

Instead of succumbing to extremely well-funded racist and nazi propaganda, a principled political advocate with such means and resources as the Democrats could help alleviate what is a systematic attack to decent society and inclusive democracy. Therefore, your advocacy ultimately paints the Democrats as a manufactured opposition, and essentially a fascist party, once it does not stand for human rights, as it never were.

Centrists should be actively considered agitator agents for fascism at this point. Like, have you clowns even considered that your voter base might want you to grow a fucking spine and stand up for human rights, with trans rights front and center? Because I only see your democratic voter base being alienated by your flirt with fascism.

[^1]: In the original response, this "Trigger Warning" was prepended Trigger Warning: Get a pack of Kleenex and load your favorite Daily Wire playlists to have handy, because this is not going to be a light read for a self-proclaimed intelligent centrist.

[^2]: The discussion in question: https://lemmy.ml/post/27381625 , and the comment in question: https://lemmy.ml/post/27381625/17379633

The authors hit out at a “growing portrayal of protesters as alleged threats to democracy rather than a vital part of public participation.”

Two major Acts of Parliament – the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 – have “changed the legal landscape” for protest drastically over the past few years.

Site with Google Translate https://inicijativa-org.translate.goog/clanci/398/novi-sajt-anarhosindikalisticke-inicijative/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

This thoughts were inspired by https://lemmy.ml/post/26866136 (Warning: go straight to the human curated translation in the comments.)

TL;DR Think-tanks with unlimited resources use different techniques to game social media algorithms. They are consistently pushing towards racist pseudoscience and Nazism. EU has the legal frameworks to stop targeted advertisement and hate speech, and the time to do is now. The consequences if it doesn't are dire.

1

There are just to many think-tanks. It was only recently that the Heritage Foundation made news, but it was too late, wasn't it? Heritage has been around for many years, playing the field of fringe religious communities, and field-testing its policies overseas.

What most people fail to realize is that Heritage is a drop of an ocean of think-tanks, which are a mostly invisible power of political influence. And this raises the question, how the fuck are these foundations so well-funded, seemingly having unlimited resources. Well, who the fuck can even have this type of unlimited resources?

Many think-tanks have been active for decades in climate skepticism, and this provides perhaps the more familiar mind map to understand their operation. They are funding intellectuals, politicians, journalists. They organize seminars, publish books, make podcasts, all from behind the curtains. They have huge lists with public relation contacts.

Keywords and talking points from think-tanks find their way to every medium of mass communication in the Western world. This is not even a modern problem. This used to be a problem twenty years ago. Think-tanks have more tools and more powers today.

Let's not forget christian fundamentalists. This is a momentary interjection, to remind you that those were fringe creeps that stalked women outside abortion centers, held their own little cultish events. The fundamentalist modus operandi influenced to a degree the TERF movements, with impromptu entryist demos about bathroom bans. And then there were the Nazis, always lurking around, and waiting to usurp spaces and communities, such as video games and anonymous networks.

All three of them were fringe, marginalized weirdoes, until recently. What the fuck changed?

2

We stand on a time point where we realize that the grim reality of our global politics has been influenced by an invisible, powerful player with zero oversight: Think tanks.

We can't understand how the deceptively grassroots facade of fringe movements came to the mainstream. We are witnessing a power takeover by Gamergater 4-chan flavor Nazi incels, nutjob christian nationalists, and oil companies.

Some knew that think tanks were shifting the goalposts of public discourse. Aaron Schwartz had realized and wrote a couple articles about it: By scraping and analyzing climate change journal articles he came about to the conclusion that think tanks also manufacture consent about affirmative action and racial determinism.

People who say that Aaron would be a free-speech absolutist if alive are not only utterly oblivious about his progressive politics (he worked with Elizabeth Warren), but also with regard to “free-speech” being a modern Nazi dogwhistle for “race realism”, ie racism. The same race science promoted by such figures as Chris Rufo and Peter Bogoshian, who turned out to be funded by Danish white supremacist Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.

In case you don't remember, Chris Rufo's first successful propaganda project for the Republicans was a “critical race theory” outrage. This campaign revolved around motivating angry mobs of white people against the idea that “all whites are racist”.

Rufo boasted that he had "changed the meaning of the term" completely, and projected on CRT "everything Americans hate". He set out to repeat the successful experiment with "gender ideology", shifting the meaning of "transgender" to sexualizing children or exposing children to "pornography". Only willful ignorance or outright nazism can prevent seeing the Nazi undertones of this blatant propaganda at this point.

3

It is an old Nazi trick to claim to be the victim of racism against whites. But the issue here is quantity, not quality. The critical race theory became huge, and it was one of the major pillars of Ron DeSantis early politics in Florida. It was also a test-case for the outbreak of “template legislation” we now witness with anti-trans bills.

It is easy to put the blame on public figures like Elon Musk, but it is also a premise to let him be the fall guy, the “excessive tormentor”, a scapegoat that will justify the system.

I tend to believe, no matter how much I despise Musk and deplore everything he stands for, that he is a fine example of the orchestrated Nazi radicalization process that happens online, with the funding of think-tanks, and the power of social media algorithms.

Musk probably fell into the rabbit hole by some anti-trans entry point, while obsessively scrolling during COVID, or even while possibly plausibly “researching” about his trans daughter. Can't we assume the same happened with Rowling? Katherine Cross makes an argument that Rowling's radicalization happened entirely within Twitter.

What we see with Musk, we see with thousands of white males online. It is the algorithms-gamed-by-think-tanks that have this effect. They might also have targeted billionaires to endorse their “cause”, in the first place. For obvious reasons, made now more obvious by chain-saw brandishing racists.

Starting out with being politically incorrect edgelords only to move on to adopting “national socialism” as a legitimate political ideology. Or starting out as Jordan Peterson fanboy incels, and by way of “evolutionary psychology” pseudoscience, delve deeper into “masculinist” criticism of “matriarchy”.

4

Virtually every asshole you hate in the present day has big think-tanks bucks backing them, their tours, their books, their podcasts, their interviews. And a huge network of media outlets that provide visibility and legitimacy. It was not long ago when a right-wing commentator explained how this works: a nazi will tweet something, Elon Musk will quote, Carlson Tucker will report, Fox will amplify it, and Joe Rogan will bring in some one to provide a “reasonable”, if not “unorthodox”, or “politically incorrect” account of it.

In a matter of hours, millions of people will have adopted, well, Nazi takes, as absolute facts of nature.

Don't forget what politically incorrect originally, and inherently means: Racist. Don't let slip that Nazism was primarily a racist movement, as it construed Jews as a “race”. Don't forget that Nazi-funded Peter Bogoshian was among the earliest contemporary commentators to accuse “liberal universities” of imposing a “religious-like orthodoxy” against “minority conservative opinions”. Well, it ...kinda was about race?

It was about fucking racism. As Aaron Schwartz had pointed out, right wing think tanks move the goal posts. Two decades ago the anthropologist concensus that there is only one human race went down without any objections. “Race realism” was hand-down considered debunked pseudoscience. Now we have these people in government who want to breakdown on universities with figurative chain-saws, in order to “save civilization”. (They mean white supremacy, duh.)

5

You may have noticed that these people are also seething climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, anti-vegan, and huge transphobic bigots? These are all orchestrated campaigns, gaming the social media algorithms with solid funding and coordination. You know how it is constantly reported that social media push right wing bias?

Well, we can't know if it is the algorithms themselves, or think tanks are paying huge numbers of agents to feint engagement, or they use bots, or make sponsorship deals with social media companies. They might as well employ all those tactics together. We know that the think tank talking points were there in 2016, and 2018, and 2021, and they were never properly moderated. Especially the targeting and vilification of queer people was stunning, reflecting genuine Christian Nationalist doublespeak, eg conflating homosexuality with “pornography”.

Think tanks embraced gamers-cum-incels-cum-nazis, christian nationalists, TERFs, and gamed the algorithms, pushing the most backward, unscientific, and hateful vitriol, and leading to the ongoing, racist-theocratic “cultural revolution”, that if not strangled in its cradle right now, will set the West back not 50 but two- or -three hundred years back, and lead humanity to atrocities and barbarism we were raised to believe was only a disturbing chapter of history books.

They are already pushing for making being trans illegal, by way of "identity fraud" or "sex offense". We all know that if they say they make it a capital offense nobody will even be surprised. The US Bible Belt might be a lost cause for human rights. But for Europe there is still time.

6

Europe is at a critical crossroads, to enforce and extend its Digital Markets and AI-Acts. Behavioral advertising technology applied to political propaganda is a terror, and leads to terror. It leaves voters and consumers, heck, it leaves whole societies helpless in an asymmetrical war of consent manufacturing, which leads to real violence, as Charlottevile has shown, as the rise in anti-trans hate-crime has shown, as the Southport riots in England have shown. Don't be fooled by the coverage: these riots were orchestrated by the far right very deliberately, and were influenced by racist think-tanks like New Culture Forum.

Europe still has time to take action. The Nazis made a fatal mistake: Concealing their true colors got them so far, they got the US government. But they were so wildly enthusiastic about it they dropped the act. Now Europe knows that it is, once again, fighting Nazis. And, in sharp contrast with the US, where Nazism is an abstract idea, Europeans know that humanity and civilization is at stake because of this repelling, murderous, sick-to-the-bone racist ideology.

Appendix 1

We have talked about this recently. Here is why Big Social platforms can't be protected by free speech laws.

• Hosting a platform with millions or billions of users.
• Exploiting algorithms that mine sensitive data to an invasive degree.
• Control the flow of information, to a very granular degree of precision.
• Experimentally collecting behavioral data in response to said control of information.
• Modeling user’s life expectancy, sexual orientation, political beliefs, consumer patterns, terminal illnesses.
• Selling said data and model outputs to private insurance companies as well as police states.
• Addicting users to withdraw from real life, and get hooked to their screen where they can happily serve the company for data mining.

I hardly think that any of the above should be gauged by the standards of individual rights to free speech. Even corporate entities viewed as individuals with a right to free speech. This is something else entirely, and whoever owns it, out of whichever country must have their ass regulated off. Even harder than the EU did. Operations of this type and size should be eventually dismantled. They are inherently antisocial, corporatist, and totalitarian in their conception and daily function. Sometime ago I started a discussion about the “Role of Attrition” in the effort to dismantle Big Social enterprises

Appendix 2

I don't think hate-speech is free-speech. I think that hate-speech is slander against whole groups of people on the basis of protected, immutable traits. By protecting hate-speech, democracies provide its worst enemies the tools they need to dismantle democracy (Joseph fucking Goebbels said that).

As for moderation in Meta/X, here are the thoughts from a recent discussion:

Nazism is explicitly deemed unworthy of respect in some legal systems, like Germany or the UK. MAGAs, white supremacists, and alt-righters are objectively too close to nazism, therefore their opinions are unworthy of respect to start with. There is also the paradox of intolerance. If you let these people in, to respect their opinion, they will take over and deprive people of the right to live. They don’t play by tolerant society’s rules, so they they don’t get tolerated.

The value is having a society that is tolerant of diversity of opinion. Here is the opinion of the scientific consensus on transgender people, which is have been so for years, if not decades. We have been harassed, bullied, doxxed, and banned for bringing those up in all major social media platforms. TERFs, white supremacists, misogynists, racists, have always gotten away in these platforms with punching down on leftists, African and Caribbean reparations activists, feminists, and queer people. They were protected by equally bigoted moderators under the guise of entitlement to their opinion, at the same time that all these other opinions are bashed and framed as “overstepping”. This is in line with what the EFF and Techdirt, which are both vocal First Amendment absolutists, have already said that what X and Facebook do now is in fact amplifying hate speech and effectively suppressing the free speech of gender and sexual minorities. And this has been the situation for years, take for example the online harassment of feminists . It is a deeply systemic bias, due to centrist indoctrination in broader society, that it is the leftist and inclusive spaces that are called out for lack of diversity for responding to harassment and bigotry, when the voices and lives of people are simply dominated and evacuated in major platforms without an iota of moderation and responsiveness to punch-down harassment. Let alone that in the light of the most recent developments, which consolidates the above tendencies, makes the timing of the tolerance argument even more ironic and dishonest.

The New Culture Forum (NCF) is a think tank founded by nationalist UKIP politician Peter Whittle.

The video in question is an interview with KCL war and "fortifications" specialist David Betz, who forecasts civil war outbreaks in the Western world, and praises Hungary as an island of sanity.

The amount of racist violent rhetoric in the comments is disturbing, and the chosen topic of a civil war, is not a good look for the supporters of these ideas. Long story short, there are numerous people in the comments seething to shed blood because they don't like seeing brown people in their midst.

The comments echo the aftermath of the widespread far-right anti-immigrant riots last August in England and Northern Ireland. The comment section reeks of the white supremacist Great Replacement theory.

Whittle's NCF seems to be embedded in an ecosystem of consent manufacturing right-wing, fossil fuel lobbying think tanks, active in the UK, and linked to conservative politicians.

For context, it was recently reported that Musk showed an interest to interfere in British far-right politics.

We can at least conclude that there are some powerful consent manufacturing apparatuses at play in England, and an invigorated far-right dynamic and anti-immigrant sentiment.

This is some scary stuff.

Shady actors like these do not pour their money in a Western democracy for no good reason, and it is only plausible that some shit is going down in a country where the political weaponization of trans people by the conservative party, has led to an early implementation of the anti-transgender health policy legislation now considered central in the US fascist takeover.