Month: April 2019

“Three Mexican countries” is About Controlling the Narrative

By Teka Lark (April 3, 2019)

When I see things like, “Three Mexican countries…” often I hear people discuss how ignorant people are.

“How can you have power and be so ignorant to not know the name of countries?!”

I am not sure if the people saying these things are saying them because they too are playing the game. I hope that they are, I hope they know this is not just a game, but a war.

The war of grasping the narrative. The Internet has made most facts pretty easy to obtain, but they have always been easy for the privilege to obtain, but some facts the rich, don’t care about, because they feel they don’t need to.

Part of the US right’s playbook is controlling the narrative.

The narrative is you are not a human being. The country you are born in is not real. Your culture is not real. You are not human and you exist to serve. And not even serve like a dog, they like dogs, but you, they don’t like you. They view you as a broom, a hammer, a sex toy, a soda dispenser. You aren’t real. We aren’t real. We are things to them. We are when we get out of line broken toys or collateral damage.
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They are not ignorant when they call El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras –Mexico, they are calculated.

They are not even being funny, not funny the way we view funny. Their humor is part of how they swing their power. Like a bully tripping you in the hallway or calling you a racial slur and then saying, “I didn’t know or it was an accident or a mistake.”

They do it to show that they can disrespect you, to tell everyone else, to not respect you. They demonstrate to their base how they can call you out your name and how you will still accept their apology by accepting them in a position above you.

Every “joke,” every comment that is hidden under the guise of ignorance is them demonstrating their power over you to take it and to keep taking it.

It’s a signal to the people who admire them –of their power and a signal to their minions who to harass, discriminate against, and murder with few consequences.

The white, rich, and powerful, they are not ignorant, they know exactly what they are doing, they always have.

teka

Putting Our Hopes in Mueller was Lazy Politics

By Arun Gupta (April 2, 2019)

While I stayed away from the Russia controversy because I thought it was overblown, I did write an article in December 2016 pointing out of course Russia would want to destabilize the U.S. Putin is a brutal authoritarian and Islamophobe who persecutes journalists and the LGBT community. He carried out a program of such intense ethnic cleansing in Chechnya it rose to the level of genocide. Plus, the U.S. has been trying to destabilize Russia and the Soviet Union before that for the last century, so why the hell wouldn’t he want to return the favor?

One of the vilest aspects of this whole mess is how many Leftists are willing idiots for Putin and Russian state media. Every time I see a post about Russia, I see dimwitted leftists defending RT despite the fact it promotes and defends white nationalists, the alt right, the Milos, the Alex Jones. They are enemies of liberation, equality, and social justice in every way that FOX News is. But harebrained Leftists screech, “But they are no worse than FOX News!” As if that is the standard we should aspire to.

One final note. I like many other journalists thought pinning the hopes on Mueller was always a bad move. It’s lazy politics. You have to organize for change. The system is the problem, not the solution.
Instead, other journalists and I have focused our energies on reporting. For the last two years, when I haven’t been working on my food book, I’ve been writing about the rise of violent white nationalists, the attacks on immigrants, refugees, and Muslims, climate change, labor reporting, the Occupy ICE movement, among other stories. Compare that to the shady Left journalists who spent all their time obsessing over the Russia obsession. They are now taking glee in the Mueller report despite the fact it’s clear that Barr is engaged in a cover-up. No one could come to the conclusion in two days there was no obstruction of justice by Trump. In 1992 Barr sabotaged the Iran-Contra investigation that was gearing up to indict George H.W. Bush. That’s why Trump installed him as AG, to sabotage the Mueller report. But some Left journalists have so lost their way they are dancing with glee, trying to act as if Trump did nothing wrong. Just to own the Libs.

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