Tag: we will rise

REPORT: Trump Will Enter White House With His Own Team Of Private Security Enforcers

vaspider:

suricattus:

karadin:

beingliberal:

This will end well. 

they had a name in Hitler’s Germany – ‘brownshirts’ 

So, the man just dissed the Secret Service.  People who are highly trained, and literally spend their days stepping in front of a bullet for their charges. 

I doubt it’s because he thinks they wouldn’t take a bullet for him (he’s far too much of an egomaniac for that).  No, it’s  probably because he doesn’t think they’ll keep secrets for him, despite a long history of keeping (potentially scandalous) secrets for every single sitting president ever.

Which make me wonder what exactly Rump thinks he will need to hide?

A very good point

There’s nothing to hide. We know.  They are entirely transparent.  

We can’t be complacent about it.  His (un)presidency cannot be validated.  

REPORT: Trump Will Enter White House With His Own Team Of Private Security Enforcers

Eugene Robinson: “Where I wish President Trump failure”

liberalsarecool:

“The people chose Hillary Clinton. But it’s the electoral vote that counts, not the popular vote, so Donald Trump will be president. And no, I’m not over it.

No one should be over it. No one should pretend that Trump will be a normal president. No one should forget the bigotry and racism of his campaign, the naked appeals to white grievance, the stigmatizing of Mexicans and Muslims. No one should forget the jaw-dropping ignorance he showed about government policy both foreign and domestic. No one should forget the vile misogyny. No one should forget the mendacity, the vulgarity, the ugliness, the insanity. None of this should ever be normalized in our politics.

The big protests that have followed Trump’s election should be no surprise. You can’t spend all those months trashing our nation’s values and then expect everyone to join you in a group hug. Trump made the bed in which he now must lie.

If a normal Republican had been elected, I could say the polite and socially acceptable thing, something like “I didn’t support So-and-So, but he will be my president, too, and I wish him success.” But I cannot wish Trump success in rounding up and deporting millions of people or banning Muslims from entering the country or re-instituting torture as an instrument of U.S. policy. In these and other divisive, cruel, unwise initiatives, I wish him failure.

I do hope he succeeds in avoiding some kind of amateurish foreign policy blunder that puts American lives or vital national interests at risk. And let me be clear that I am not questioning his legitimacy as president. When the results are certified and the electoral college casts its votes, Trump will be the nation’s duly chosen leader, ridiculous though that may be.

But he has not earned our trust or hope. Rather, he has earned the demonstrations that have erupted in cities across the country. He has earned relentless scrutiny by journalists, whom he shamelessly made into scapegoats during the campaign, and he has earned the constant vigilance of the public he now must serve.

We must watch Trump, and judge him, every single inch of the way.”

Trump spent 18 fact-free months trashing America. His voters agreed, and now Trump has millions of ignorant people ready to dismantle the country.

He hired Steve Bannon as a strategist. This is all you need to know.

He was never ‘elected’ the election was tampered with.  We may never know to what extent.  Without a legitimate election, he can never be truly accepted – accept by those who simply don’t care (and there seems to be a lot).  

We need to be vigilant about ourselves, as well.  We let it happen.

How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler

karadin:

kmnml:

annetdonahue:

youngblackfeminist:

valeria2067:

glorious-spoon:

giandujakiss:

So the Smithsonian posted this an hour ago.  Just because.

The Smithsonian is pulling no punches.

“But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed The Washington Post.

Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.”

We are literally. Repeating history.

WE ARE ACTUALLY REPEATING HISTORY. The parallels are terrifying and they are very, very real. 

Read “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson. It’s a good 101-course in this complete and total clusterfuck.

Sigh.

TRump – continuing his rallies after election to feed his most ardent supporters, surrounding himself with a private security force as well as secret service agents (much like Hitler’s brownshirts) creating a non profit political org with his children, a few loyal supporters and the billionaire Mercers who funded his campaign to ‘bully’ congress members who don’t vote his way, Dems and Republicans, his demonizing of the media, and bullying individual citizens and companies via his Twitter account (well, Hitler would have had a Twitter too)

We have one advantage: we know.  

Stay loud, stay vigilant, stick together. Make the media move in the right direction.  To diminish this monstrosity, we’ve got to be bigger.  We’ve got to be.

How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler

One of the most inspiring events from 2016: loud, angry, heartbroken queer kids (and adults) forcing an entire industry to re-think its attitude toward minority characters.  You made a difference.  

In 2017, please stay loud, angry – don’t lose your voice. Keep standing up to patriarchal complacency, to bullying bigots, the freeloading fascists who want to turn our world inside out.  Don’t let them.  Make every kind of noise. Make it at your MPs, your representatives, your senators, your community leaders, at industry, at advertisers, at anyone of influence.  

Don’t let the corrupt and the fanatical make policy.  Don’t let them undo us and all our good.  

Remember your voice and speak out, speak for those who cannot.  Speak for yourself and all you love, all you hope for.  This is our time to stand up for what we believe, for what will be. Remember your beautiful, powerful voice. 

“Write novels.”

jenroses:

dduane:

sophiamcdougall:

I have a friend who’s a journalist. She’s ridiculously awesome and I really want to name her because everyone should know just how awesome she is, but this isn’t a time where it feels wise to reveal the political thoughts expressed by a journalist in private, at least not without her permission.

The day before I saw her last week, I’d locked myself out of Facebook and Twitter. I’d been forced to realise the psychological harm they were doing me outweighed any political good my frantic clicktivism could possibly be accomplishing. My brother had called, on my sister-in-law’s instructions. “R. says you’re tweeting and facebooking constantly about politics,” he said. “She said ‘call your sister, I don’t think she’s doing well.’”  

“I’m okay, probably,” I’d told him.

“I don’t think you are,” he said. 

I felt a little better, though not by much, by the time I met my friend for lunch. She was shaken, she said. Democracy was falling apart. I muttered weakly that perhaps it wasn’t quite that bad. She said she’d rather act now than hope for the best.

I agreed. But act how?

She said she was getting onto the board of various charities. She was writing about the best way to report on extremism, avoiding the terrible false equivalencies of the “he said/she said” approach which has blighted our discourse with such ghastly effect.

I said I was supporting the Stop Funding Hate campaign. Giving to Planned Parenthood and ACLU over there, refugee charities over here. Writing letters. Trying to think of useful ways to get involved in local politics.

“You know what you should do,” she said.

No, I really didn’t.

“Write novels,” she said.

I told her that in the days after the election I felt as if art had been revealed as an empty joke. An indulgence we could no longer afford. As if I would never be able to justify doing it again. What we were even going to write now? Flimsy, tinselly distractions from ghastly reality? Or sharp-eyed, unflinching commentary that no one except the already-convinced would ever read? What was the point of art?

“No, no!” she said. “Art is what will save us.”

“But it hasn’t,” I wanted to scream. We tried and tried. We’ve filled the world with our stories, our songs – we’ve tried so hard to make our stories better – with diverse casts and empathy and hope – and it’s not enough; no one’s saying it was perfect, or that the attempt was anywhere close to  finished. But we were trying. And now look. 

It is so important, she told me, that there is art already made and due to come out in the coming year that embodies the opposite of this. Diverse, progressive stories, that are not going to go untold whatever happens.

I’d had in my mind two quotes. Peter Cook, on Germany’s satirical clubs of the thirties “that did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler.” 

And Kurt Vonnegut:

“During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we’ve ever been in – and which we lost – every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.“

But if they hadn’t been there? I thought, looking at my friend. Who was fierce and bright-eyed and smiling. Those useless satirists and artists and musicians pouring their spirits into their art and watching it land on the floor of history like that dropped custard pie?  What if there was nothing to look back on in those times but a culture in militaristic  lockstep, or perhaps worse, slumped in dead-eyed indifference?  After those years-long nightmares, what would there have been to wake up to? Maybe it was absurd to find the thought more chilling than the reality of what had happened, to feel that it would have been an international death of the soul,  but .. still …

If artists couldn’t prevent disaster, could they at least preserve something precious from being lost while it endured? If they hadn’t stopped a single war, had they at least kept the rot from penetrating the human culture unchallenged? 

It’s not enough. It’s not enough.

“Write novels,” said my friend stubbornly. “Write novels.”

And for those of us who’re doing it anyway: there is no more important time to be found at our posts, doing our jobs: spitting in Entropy’s eye and making more goddamn art.

I am 100% convinced that storytelling will save us. In many ways, it already has. 

Read, sometime, about the role of the Shell Scenarios in the overthrow of Apartheid in South Africa. 

A silly comic about two hockey boys in love changed my entire understanding of storytelling this year. 

Religion is basically organized storytelling. 

NEVER underestimate the power of words. 

Words MADE this country. If anything can save us, it will be words and art and creative resistance.

Read it, believe it and live it.

Especially you fan fiction writers – you’re the punk rock, the anti-establishment, the ones who make it gayer, more coherent, funnier, the ones who take the piss and you inspire more than you realise.  Keep writing.  Keep doing what you do.

In the 1977 film, Julia, there’s a scene that frightened me when I was younger.  It takes place at a medical school in Vienna; the title character is there to study, sometime in the 1930s.  A seemingly random event happens: a group of Nazi youth (not in uniform) storm the school and wreck havoc. They attack students and teachers and, at one point, gleefully grab a doctor and swing him up in their arms, throwing him out of the building, to his death.  

Students, including Julia, fight back, but the reality is, most likely were killed. Julia herself is so badly injured she is difficult to identify by her friend, Lilly.  She loses a leg in the attack.  

The mindless mob, worked into a frenzy of fanaticism, indoctrinated into hate, out to destroy all the intellectuals, the educated, the minds of reason.  

Never say it can’t happen ‘here.’  If Dump is inaugurated and his ‘dream team’ comes to be, the trickle down effect won’t be economic, it could very well be something far worse.  Those who feel entitled to destroy.  

iaiamothrafhtagn:

shark-kiss:

defenestratrix:

birdrhetorics:

my great-grandfather had to leave italy in the 20′s because he hit a fascist with a tuba, so if you think I am going to take this sitting down you are going to have to catch these hands and also this tuba

When my grandmother got married in the Philippines during WWII, she had to do so under her sister’s name. She couldn’t use her own because she was wanted by the occupying Japanese forces for slapping a soldier off a dock when he assaulted her friend. So if you think I’m not going to backhand some pussy-grabbing fascist then meet me on the fucking dock.

My family no longer has a crest because records of my great grandfather’s existence was burned because he knee’d one of Franco’s guards in the dick repeatedly after the bombing of Guernica, where his wife’s family was from. I will knee every fascist I meet in the respective genitalia. 

the holy trinity.