Joe Manchin Protests Democratic Party Extremism by Changing Party Affiliation

 
Jim Hᴏft, "JUST IN:Joe Manchin has Left the Democratic Party in Wake of Trump Guilty Verdict"

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has officially left the Democratic Party, announcing his departure just one day after the controversial guilty verdict in former President Donald Trump’s trial

On Friday, Manchin, who is not seeking re-election, announced that he changed his party affiliation at the West Virginia State Capitol.

He explained that his decision was motivated by his criticism of both major parties for what he sees as “partisan extremism,” which he believes is harmful to American democracy.

“From my first day in public service in 1982, I have always focused on doing what’s best for my state and my country, without regard to party or politics. Throughout my days in elected office, I have always been proud of my commitment to common sense, bipartisanship and my desire to bring people together. It’s who I am. It’s who I will always be. I have never seen America through a partisan lens,” Manchin said in a statement.

“However, since becoming a United States Senator in 2010, I have seen both the Democrat and Republican parties leave West Virginia and our country behind for partisan extremism while jeopardizing our democracy. Today, our national politics are broken and neither party is willing to compromise to find common ground. To stay true to myself and remain committed to put country before party, I have decided to register as an independent with no party affiliation and continue to fight for America’s sensible majority,” he added.

Manchin then shared a post on X showing himself registering as an independent.

“My commitment to do everything I can to bring our country together has led me to register as an independent with no party affiliation,” the senator wrote on X.

My commitment to do everything I can to bring our country together has led me to register as an independent with no party affiliation. pic.twitter.com/tvMB2N87AW

— Senator Joe Manchin (@Sen_JoeManchin) May 31, 2024

In 2022, after Arizona Senator Sinema changed her registration from Democrat to Independent, people were asking West Virginia Senator Manchin if he’d do the same.

“I’m not a Washington Democrat. I don’t know what else to tell you. … And if a Washington independent is — we’ll see what happens there. We’ll have to look. People are registering more for independent than any other party affiliation, they are sick and tired of it,” Manchin said at the time.

Although Manchin announced his departure from the Democratic Party, he said he would neither seek re-election to the Senate nor pursue a presidential bid.

“After months of deliberation and long conversations with my family, I believe in my heart of hearts that I have accomplished what I set out to do for West Virginia. I have made one of the toughest decisions of my life and decided that I will not be running for re-election to the United States Senate,” Manchin said in a statement last year.

“But what I will be doing is traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.”

Desperate Democratic & UniParty Elites Stampede NATO into WWIII

2024-Biden's Wag the Dog election strategy becomes Plan A

Logical Next Step: Russia Escalates and Grants Donbass and Ukrainian Separatists permission to strike NATO supply lines to Ukraine outside of Ukrainian territory where needed.

A New Political Coalition has Coalesced

Victor Davis Hanson, "Our Revolutionary Times"

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies.

Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization.

Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so.

But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed difference.

Masked left-wing protesters were unashamedly and virulently antisemitic. Students on elite campuses especially showed contempt for both middle-class police officers tasked with preventing their violence and vandalism as well as the maintenance workers who had to clean up their garbage.

Mobs took over buildings, assaulted Jewish students, called for the destruction of Israel, and defaced American monuments and commentaries.

When pressed by journalists to explain their protests, most students knew nothing of the politics or geography of Palestine, for which they were protesting.

The public concluded that the more elite the campus, the more ignorant, arrogant, and hateful the students seemed

The Biden administration destroyed the southern border. Ten million illegal aliens swarmed into the U.S. without audit. Almost daily, news accounts detail violent acts committed by illegal aliens or their surreal demands for more free lodging and support.

Simultaneously, thousands of Middle Eastern students, invited by universities on student visas, block traffic, occupy bridges, disrupt graduations, and generally show contempt for the laws of their American hosts.

The net result is that Americans are reappraising their entire attitude toward immigration. Expect the border to be closed soon and immigration to become mostly meritocratic, smaller, and legal, with zero tolerance for immigrants and resident visitors who break the laws of their hosts.

Americans are also reappraising their attitudes toward time-honored bureaucracies, the courts, and government agencies.

The public still cannot digest the truth that the once respected FBI partnered with social media to suppress news stories, to surveil parents at school board meetings, and to conduct performance art swat raids on the homes of supposed political opponents.

After the attempts of the Department of Justice to go easy on the miscreant Hunter Biden but to hound ex-president Donald Trump for supposedly removing files illegally in the same fashion as current President Joe Biden, the public lost confidence not just in Attorney General Merrick Garland but in American jurisprudence itself.

The shenanigans of prosecutors like Fani Willis, Letitia James, and Alvin Bragg, along with overtly biased judges like Juan Merchant and Arthur Engoron, only reinforced the reality that the American legal system has descended into third-world-like tit-for-tat vendettas.

The same politicization has nearly discredited the Pentagon. Its investigations of "white" rage and white supremacy found no such organized cabals in the ranks. But these unicorn hunts likely helped cause a 45,000-recruitment shortfall among precisely the demographic that died at twice their numbers in the general population in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Add in the humiliating flight from Kabul, the abandonment of $50 billion in weapons to the Taliban terrorists, the recent embarrassment of the failed Gaza pier, and the litany of political invective from retired generals and admirals. The result is that the armed forces have an enormous task to restore public faith.

They will have to return to meritocracy and emphasize battle efficacy, enforce the uniform code of military justice, and start either winning wars or avoiding those that cannot be won.

Finally, we are witnessing a radical inversion in our two political parties. The old populist Democratic Party that championed lunch-bucket workers has turned into a shrill union of the very rich and subsidized poor. Its support of open borders, illegal immigration, the war on fossil fuels, transgenderism, critical legal and race theories, and the woke agenda are causing the party to lose support.

The Republican Party is likewise rebranding itself from a once-stereotyped brand of aristocratic and corporate grandees to one anchored in the middle class.

Even more radically, the new populist Republicans are beginning to appeal to voters on shared class and cultural concerns rather than on racial and tribal interests.

The results of all these revolutions will shake up the U.S. for decades to come.

Soon we may see a Georgia Tech or Purdue degree as far better proof of an educated and civic-minded citizen than a Harvard or Stanford brand.

We will likely jettison the failed salad bowl approach to immigration and return to the melting pot as immigration becomes exclusively legal, meritocratic, and manageable.

To avoid further loss of public confidence, institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the DOJ will have to re-earn rather than just assume the public's confidence.

And we may soon accept the reality that Democrats reflect the values of Silicon Valley plutocrats, university presidents, and blue-city mayors, while Republicans become the home of an ecumenical black, Hispanic, Asian, and white middle class.

The Rule OF Law has become a Rule BY Law

5/30/25 - The Day Politics Broke America...

...and the Banality which is Evil stepped OUT from the Shadows.  The "veil" of Justice has been lifted.

Burdening the Scapegoat with all the Social ills

...before releasing him into the wilderness (mid-November 2024)

The Biden-Putin Meeting that Resulted in the Ukraine War

from Wikipedia:

Jeffrey David Sachs (/sæks/ SAKS; born November 5, 1954)[4] is an American economist and public policy analyst, professor at Columbia University,[5][6] where he was former director of The Earth Institute. He is known for his work on sustainable development, economic development, and the fight to end poverty.[7]

Sachs is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.[8] He is an SDG Advocate for United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 global goals adopted at a UN summit meeting in September 2015.

From 2001 to 2018, Sachs was Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General, and held the same position under the previous UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and prior to 2016 a similar advisory position related to the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),[9] eight internationally sanctioned objectives to reduce extreme poverty, hunger and disease by 2015. In connection with the MDGs, he had first been appointed special adviser to the UN Secretary-General in 2002 during the term of Kofi Annan.[9][10]

Sachs is co-founder and chief strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger that has come under scrutiny from critics[11] and was the subject of a book by the journalist Nina Munk. From 2002 to 2006, he was director of the United Nations Millennium Project's work on the MDGs. He is co-editor of the World Happiness Report with John F. Helliwell and Richard Layard. In 2010, he became a commissioner for the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, whose stated aim is to boost the importance of broadband internet in international policy.[12] Sachs has written several books and received several awards. He has been criticized for his views on economics, on the origin of COVID-19, as well as on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[13][14]

Pushing American Idiocy Onto the entire Globe since 1945

Do Not See the Nazis!

Does Putin Own a Pizza Joint in Kyiv?

Desperation calls for Escalation...

The unwillingness to face reality is palpable.  Ukraine now needs NATO entry into WWIII to avoid the otherwise inevitable.  Blinken and BoJo are both aboard the train to Armageddon now departing Kyiv.

You're being Drawn in, NATO.  Don't kid yourselves.

A Chinese Reaction to Peter Zeihan

So, who do the Chinese People think is to Blame for the Ukraine War...???

Why Kharkiv Now?

Trivia for non-Ukrainians

Cutting the Gordian Knot

On Russia:

"A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma"

- Churchill

Will we have a multi-polar Rule OF Law, or a Unipolar Rule BY Law (aka - Rules-based Order)?

Systematizing...

Who will Win the Palme d'Or in '24?

Decision on Saturday!

Anora, a comic yet devastating film about a sex worker's marriage, wins Palme d'Or at Cannes. Sean Baker's Anora, a comic but devastating Brooklyn odyssey about a sex worker who marries the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, has won the Cannes Film Festival's top award, the Palme d'Or. 

...For nothing can possibly be more satisfying to a Progressive than demeaning the marriage tradition and sh*tting on Tradwives everywhere. Hurray for feminism!  A win for workers everywhere!

ooops.  I meant a win for capitalists everywhere.  Bring on the immigrants!

Desperation and Escalation in Ukraine

Why is No One in MY Square?

The Fix is in: Lawfare Justice Rising....

Alan Dershowitz, "I was inside the court when the judge closed the Trump trial, what I saw shocked me"

The trial's judge was 'an absolute tyrant'

I have observed and participated in trials throughout the world. I have seen justice and injustice in China, Russia, Ukraine, England, France, Italy, Israel, as well as in nearly 40 of our 50 states.

But in my 60 years as a lawyer and law professor, I have never seen a spectacle such as the one I observed sitting in the front row of the courthouse yesterday.

The judge in Donald Trump’s trial was an absolute tyrant, though he appeared to the jury to be a benevolent despot. He seemed automatically to be ruling against the defendant at every turn.

Many experienced lawyers raised their eyebrows when the judge excluded obviously relevant evidence when offered by the defense, while including irrelevant evidence offered by the prosecution.

But when the defense’s only substantive witness, the experienced attorney Robert Costello, raised his eyebrows at one of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s rulings, the court went berserk.

Losing his cool and showing his thin skin, the judge cleared the courtroom of everyone including the media.

For some reason, I was allowed to stay, and I observed one of the most remarkable wrong-headed biases I have ever seen. The judge actually threatened to strike all of Costello’s testimony if he raised his eyebrows again.

That of course would have been unconstitutional because it would have denied the defendant his Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses and to raise a defense.

It would have punished the defendant for something a witness was accused of doing.

Even if what Costello did was wrong, and it was not, it would be utterly improper and unlawful to strike his testimony — testimony that undercut and contradicted the government’s star witness.

The judge’s threat was absolutely outrageous, unethical, unlawful and petty.

Moreover, his affect while issuing that unconstitutional threat revealed his utter contempt for the defense and anyone who testified for the defendant.

The public should have been able to see the judge in action, but because the case is not being televised, the public has to rely on the biased reporting of partisan journalists.

But the public was even denied the opportunity to hear from journalists who saw the judge in action because he cleared the courtroom.

I am one of the few witnesses to his improper conduct who remained behind to observe his deep failings.

Even when journalists do report on courtroom proceedings, their accounts must be taken with a grain of salt. When you watch CNN or MSNBC, you generally see an account of a trial that never took place.

They spin the events so much that reality is totally distorted.

I experienced that distortion firsthand yesterday, when I saw one of my former students and research assistants, a CNN legal analyst named Norman Eisen, during a break and went over to him and asked him about his family. We chatted for a few minutes in the most friendly way.

But NBC, the Daily Beast and other media decided to make up a story about the event. They claimed that I had a spat with my nemesis, rather than a friendly conversation with a former student. Their account was made up, yet it was circulated through the media.

To his credit, Eisen wrote to the media to correct the account, saying that the person sitting next to him would confirm the media’s false reporting. I doubt we will see a retraction.

This minor incident is simply the tip of a very large and deep iceberg of false reporting about the trial that can only occur because the proceedings are not being televised.

There are television cameras in the courtroom, and they record and transmit every word, but not to the public; only select reporters in the overflow room see what the cameras transmit.

There is absolutely no good reason why a trial of this importance, or any trial, should not be televised live and in real time. Allowing the public to see their courts in action is the best guarantee of fairness. As Justice Louis Brandeis wisely said a century ago, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, we used to listen to the colorful account of Dodger games rendered by Red Barber on the radio.

Occasionally when I went to a game and brought my portable radio, I could hear how the "old redhead," as we called him, colorfully elaborated and exaggerated what was occurring on the field.

Once television came along and everyone could watch the games live, the accounts became far more accurate, because we could see everything for ourselves.

A similar phenomenon would operate if trials were televised; it would force commentators to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

Today there is no check on partisan reporting of trials and exaggerations and personal opinions are rampant.

The American public is the loser.

The Cure for Leftism...

...and why our Society will ALWAYS be sick.

Why is "the right side of history" always so wrong?

Daniel Greenfield, "Obama Artist Accused of Sexually Assaulting Man"

On brand.

You probably don’t recognize the name Kehinde Wiley, but you might recognize his ridiculous official portrait of Obama in which one of the worst men to ever squat in the White House appears to be sitting in a chair inside a bush or some hedgerows.

Widely praised by the TED Talk people and mocked by everyone else (at least until King Charlie’s portrait came along), there didn’t seem to be much of a case to be made for it except that the Obamas were determined to make history by picking black artists and they couldn’t find any so they had to settle for these junior high school art projects that smell like paste when you look at them.

Anyway, to make a long story short, you might recognize Wiley’s name after this.

In an Instagram post shared Sunday, British-Ghanaian artist and curator Joseph Awuah-Darko alleged Wiley sexually assaulted him twice in 2021. Awuah-Darko said the first incident occurred on June 9, 2021, at a dinner held at the Noldor Artist Residency in Ghana, to celebrate Wiley’s work. Awuah-Darko is the founder and chairman of the Accra-based program.

In the post, he claimed he was “inappropriately groped” by Wiley, in front of another guest, and that the action was “unwelcome and unprovoked.” He then described a second incident that day as “much more severe and violent,” without elaborating further. (In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, he claimed that “a sexual encounter began consensually, but that it then moved to a bedroom, where… Mr. Wiley forced himself on him after Mr. Awuah-Darko had said he did not want to go further.”)

The assaults “almost destroyed me,” Awuah-Darko wrote in the post, adding he hoped that others would feel empowered to come forward.

Wiley is denying the accusations, and this is as much as I want to know about the whole thing except that having another Obama grandiose woke gesture boil down to this is perfectly on brand.

The right side of history is so wrong.

This is the End...

 ...my only Friend... the end.

Tradwives Should Burn in Hell!?

...starting @ 11:50

What Didn't You Learn in School Today?

I learned to stick funny things up my butt

that I was a messed up racist mutt

that killing babies is a woman's right

and I can be a girl and pee in their sight

THAT's what I learned in school...

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Slavoj Zizek: "The Need to Traverse the Fantasy" (12/28/15)

A call to mobilize Europe’s radical-emancipatory tradition, and why we need a solidarity of struggles, not a “dialogue of cultures”

Adam Kotsko, a professor of humanities at Shimer College in Chicago, in an email to me, provided the best characterization of the reactions to my latest text on the refugees and Paris attacks:

I notice that the responses always seem to be a referendum on you, almost a Rorschach test for what people think of you. If they think you’re a terrible quasi-fascist, pro-Western ideologue, they find stuff to support that. If they assume you’re in good faith, they can find a more positive reading. But the discussion never gets to the point of actually addressing the issue — it’s almost like ​“what we should do about the issue” is treated as self-evident to all concerned, and the question is whether and how you measure up to this implicit standard (which of course can’t be explicitly stated by anyone).

As for numerous attacks on what I have written, most of them don’t deserve an answer since they simply repeat the position I criticize. What should I say to the claim that I want to use the military to quarantine and throw out the refugees, apart from the fact that it’s a simple lie? Some of the criticism, however, is worthy of reply.

I often hear the reproach that I speak as a European, part of the European elite with whom I am in solidarity, and as such I am treating refugees as an external threat to be contained. To which I can only say: Of course I speak from an European position. To deny this would be a preposterous lie, an unmistakable sign of patronizing fake solidarity.

But which European position? In the same way that there is no one Islam, that Islam also can harbor emancipatory potentials (and I’ve written about this extensively ), European tradition is also marked by a series of deep antagonisms. The only way to effectively fight ​“Eurocentrism” is from within, mobilizing Europe’s radical-emancipatory tradition. In short, our solidarity with non-Europeans should be a solidarity of struggles, not a ​“dialogue of cultures” but a uniting of struggles within each culture.

Merkel’s invitation to accept the refugees — more refugees than any other European state — was a genuine ethical miracle, one that cannot be reduced to the capitalist strategy of importing cheap labor force. What I find more than a little bit weird is the eagerness to criticize Germany for not showing enough openness toward the refugees instead of focusing on those states that adopt the paraoniac anti-immigrant attitude: Poland, Hungary, etc. It’s the same old superego logic; the more we obey the commandment of the law, the more we are guilty. The more Germany acts in a (relatively) decent way, the more it will be criticized. On the top of that, it is deeply symptomatic of our hypocrisy how rarely the European Left insists that the way to defuse the racist fear of refugees is to include refugees in the public debate. Our TV stations and other public media should have been full of refugees describing their plea, talking about their expectations, etc. One should give them the space to speak in public, not just speak on their behalf.

Another often-repeated reproach targets my mention of Western ​“values” and ​“way of life”: How dare I ignore the blatant fact that ​“Western values” are for the Third World people the very ideology that justifies their colonization and exploitation, the ruthless destruction of their ways of life? My answer is that I am far from ignoring it—I’ve written pages and pages on it. What I insist upon is that, in the same way that Islam does not designate one big homogeneous entity, European tradition also provides the resources for radical emancipation, i.e., for the radical self-critique of ​“Eurocentrism,” while calls for a return to some pre-colonial indigenous roots mostly fit perfectly global capitalism.

A more refined version of this reproach points out that egalitarianism, feminism, etc., are not simply part of Western core values but the result of a long struggle against the hegemonic ideology and politics of capitalism. It maintains that the freedom of press, of public speech, etc., is not an ingredient of liberal capitalist societies that arose spontaneously: it was hard won through popular struggles throughout 19th century. When the West boasts of its emancipatory values, one should always bear in mind that we are largely dealing with the logic of ​“if you can’t defeat them, join them.” I cannot but agree with this point, adding that the same struggle goes on today (Wikileaks, etc.).

The last point. In public debates on many campuses from London to Berlin, I am repeatedly told that now is not the time to raise the topic of the incompatibility of ways of life, of the status of women in some immigrant communities, etc. — that now we are dealing with a big humanitarian crisis, hundreds of thousands are fighting for their life, and to bring in cultural issues ultimately just detracts from the key issue. I totally disagree with this logic: It is precisely now, when hundreds of thousands are ariving into Europe, that we should talk about all this and elaborate a formula of how to deal with it.

The reason is not merely that only such a direct approach can help to defuse anti-immigrant paranoia, but a much more ominous fact: Sexuality has emerged as one of the central ingredients of today’s ideologico-political struggles.

Let’s take the Nigerian Boko Haram movement, the name which can be roughly and descriptively translated as ​“Western education is forbidden” — meaning, in particular, any education of women. How, then, to account for the weird fact of a massive sociopolitical movement whose main programmatic item is the hierarchic regulation of the relationship between the two sexes?

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made clear decades ago why an attack like the Paris bombings that focuses on the ​“dissolute” every day amusements can be considered appropriate. In February 1979, on his return to the Islamic Republic of Iran he said, ​“We’re not afraid of sanctions. We’re not afraid of military invasion. What frightens us is invasion by western immorality.” The fact that Khomeini talks about fear, about what a Muslim should fear most in the West, should be taken literally: Muslim fundamentalists, be they Shiite or Sunni, do not have any problems with the brutality of economic and military struggles, their true enemy is not the Western economic neocolonialism and military aggressiveness but its ​“immoral” culture.

The same holds for Putin’s Russia, where the conservative nationalists define their conflict with the West as cultural, in the last resort focused on sexual difference: apropos the victory of the Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst (a.k.a. Tom Neuwirth) at the 2014 Eurovision contest, Putin himself said at a dinner in St. Petersburg: ​“The Bible talks about the two genders, man and woman, and the main purpose of union between them is to produce children.” As usual, the rabid nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a member of parliament, was more outspoken. He called her victory ​“the end of Europe,” saying: ​“There is no limit to our outrage. … There are no more men or women in Europe, just it.” Vice prime minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted that the Eurovision result ​“showed supporters of European integration their European future — a bearded girl.”

There is a certain quasi-poetic uncanny beauty in this image of the bearded lady (for long time the standard feature of circus freakshows) as the symbol of united Europe — no wonder Russia refused to transmit the Eurovision contest to its TV public, with calls for a renewed cultural Cold War. Note the same logic as in Khomeini: not army or economy, the truly feared object is immoral depravity, the threat to sexual difference. Boko Haram just brought brings this logic to its endpoint.
What psychoanalysis tells us

One should not underestimate the complexity and persistence of different ​“ways of life,” and here psychoanalysis can be of some help. Which is the factor that renders different cultures (or, rather, ways of life in the rich texture of their daily practices) incompatible? What is the obstacle that prevents their fusion or, at least, their harmoniously indifferent co-existence?

The psychoanalytic answer is: jouissance. It is not only that different modes of jouissance are incongruous with each other without a common measure; the Other’s jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance.

The ultimate incompatibility is not between mine and other’s jouissance, but between myself and my own jouissance, which forever remains an ex-timate intruder. It is to resolve this deadlock that the subject projects the core of its jouissance onto an Other, attributing to this Other full access to a consistent jouissance. Such a constellation cannot but give rise to jealousy: In jealousy, the subject creates/​imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded.

The same definition applies to what one can call political jealousy, from the anti-Semitic fantasies about the mysterious practices and abilities of the Jews (which sometimes reach the level of madness, like the claim that Jewish men also menstruate) to the Christian fundamentalists’ fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians. As Klaus Theweleit, a scholar of fascist sociology, pointed out, it is all too easy to read such phenomena as mere ​“projections”: Jealousy can be quite real and well-founded; other people can and do have as much more intense sexual life than the jealous subject — a fact that, as Lacan remarked, doesn’t make jealousy any less pathological. Here is Lacan’s succinct description of the political dimension of this predicament:

With our jouissance going off track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only in so far as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies – unheard of before the melting pot. Leaving the Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own on him, by not thinking of him as underdeveloped.

To recapitulate the argument: Due to our impasse with our own jouissance, the only way for us to imagine a consistent jouissance is to conceive it as the Other’s jouissance; however, the Other’s jouissance is by definition experienced as a threat to our identity, as something to be rejected, destroyed even.

With regard to the identity of an ethnic group, this means that ​“there is always, in any human community, a rejection of an inassimilable jouissance, which forms the mainspring of a possible barbarism.” Here, Lacan underpins Freud, for whom the social bond (group identification) is mediated by the identification of each of its members with the figure of a Leader shared by all: Lacan conceives this symbolic identification with a Master-Signifier as secondary to some preceding rejection of jouissance, which is why, for him, ​“the founding crime is not the murder of the father, but the will to murder he who embodies the jouissance that I reject.” (And, one might add, even the murder of the primordial father is grounded in the hatred of his excessive jouissance, his possessing of all women.)

The starting point, what I ​“immediately see,” is that I don’t know who or what I am since my innermost core of jouissance eludes me. I then identify myself with others who are caught in the same deadlock, and we ground our collective identity not directly in some Master-Signifier but, more fundamentally, in our shared rejection of the Other’s jouissance.

The status of Other’s jouissance is thus deeply ambiguous: It is a threat to my identity, but at the same time my reference to it founds my identity — in short, my identity emerges as a defensive reaction to what threatens it, or, as we may say apropos anti-Semitism, what is a Nazi without a Jew?

Hitler allegedly said: ​“We have to kill the Jew within us.” A.B. Yehoshua’s provided an adequate comment to this statement:

This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit.

In this sense, Jews are effectively the objet petit a of the Gentiles: what is ​“in Gentiles more than Gentiles themselves,” not another subject that I encounter in front of me but an alien, a foreign intruder, within me, what Lacan called lamella, the amorphous intruder of infinite plasticity, an undead ​“alien” monster who cannot ever be pinned down to a determinate form.

In this sense, Hitler’s statement tells more than it wants to say: Against its intention, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the ​“Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that ​“the Jew is within us” — what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, his identity, is also in the Jew. (And the same holds even for a certain kind of anti-racism. The Politically Correct anti-racism depends on what it fights (or pretends to) — on the first-level racism itself, thus parasitizing its opponent: The PC anti-racism is sustained by the surplus-enjoyment which emerges when the PC-subject triumphantly reveals the hidden racist bias of an apparently neutral statement or gesture.)

Another conclusion to be drawn from this intermingling of jouissances is that racism is always a historical phenomenon: Even if anti-Semitism seems to remain the same through millenia, its inner form changes with every historical rupture. French philosopher Étienne Balibar perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, in which we are all neighbors to each other even if we live far away, the structure of anti-Semitism is in a way globalized: Every other ethnic group perceived as posing a threat to our identities functions as a ​“Jew” did for the anti-Semite. The paradox is that, in our specific historical situation, anti-Semitism is universalized. This universalization reaches its apogee in the unique exceptional fact that even the fervent Zionist themselves construct the figure of the ​“self-hating Jew” along the lines of anti-Semitism.

Why Sam Kriss is wrong

I read with interest Sam Kriss’s reply to me. First off, it was dishonest of him to write:

As Zizek himself frequently argues, the primary pathology of the racist is to refuse to see the Jew or the Muslim or the Roma as a person …

So what, then, are we to make of his statement that ​“Muslims find it impossible to bear our blasphemous images and reckless humor, which we consider a part of our freedoms”?

I said no such thing. This is what I wrote:

[F]undamentalist Muslims find it impossible to bear our blasphemous images and reckless humor, which we consider a part of our freedoms.

Do you notice the word that he omitted?

Despite such intellectual sleights of hand, Kriss seemed to engage also with the Lacanian concepts I use, accusing me of misusing them. But then I stumbled upon sentences like the following one: ​“Fantasy is that which structures reality, and even if it’s a symptom, the symptom is always a sign to be interpreted, rather than a cloud that obfuscates.”

Such sentences are strict nonsense, implying a series of false identifications: objet a as the cause of desire is reduced to its role in fantasy (while Lacan elaborated in detail the status of objet a outside fantasy, as well as modes of desiring which remain after we ​“traverse” the fantasy), fantasy is equated with symptom (while Lacan spent long chapters elaborating their opposition), etc.

Since there is no space here to engage in this explanation (every good introduction to Lacan will do the job), I will limit myself to a passage from Kriss’s reply which condenses his double confusion, theoretical as well as political, culminating in his ridiculous notion of fidelity to a fantasy:

In Lacanian terminology, what Zizek identifies as a fundamental disparity between ​‘our’ civilized European way of life and the irreducible foreignness of the migrants would be called an asymmetry in the Symbolic order. (It’s not just Lacanianism that he abandons here — what happened to the Hegelian identity of non-identity and identity?) If this asymmetry does exist, then fantasy is precisely the means by which it can be resolved. If we lack the appropriate signifiers for each other, then the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication. If migrants are to live peacefully and happily in Europe, the demand should not be that they give up their fantasy of a better life, but that they cling to it for all its worth.

First, the basic premise of Lacan’s theory is that what my critic rather clumsily calls the ​“asymmetry in the symbolic order” does not primarily occur between different ways of life (cultures) but within each particular culture: each culture is structured around its particular ​“points of impossibility,” immanent blockades, antagonisms, around its Real.

Second, far from ​“resolving” it, a fantasy obfuscates it, it covers up the antagonism – a classic case: the fantasmatic figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism obfuscates the class antagonism by way of projecting it onto the ​“Jew,” the external cause that disturbs an otherwise harmonious social edifice. The statement ​“If we lack the appropriate signifiers for each other, then the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication.” is thus totally misleading: it implies that each culture somehow manages to be in touch with itself, it just lacks appropriate signifiers for other cultures. Lacan’s thesis is, on the contrary, that each culture lacks ​“appropriate signifiers” for itself, for its own representation, which is why fantasies are needed to fill in this gap.

And it is here that things get really interesting: these fantasies as a rule concern other cultures. Back to the Nazis: the fantasy of the Jew is a key ingredient of the Nazi identity. The Jew as the enemy allows the anti-Semitic subject to avoid the choice between working class and capital: by blaming the Jew whose plotting foments class warfare, he can advocate the vision of a harmonious society in which work and capital collaborate.

This is also why Julia Kristeva is right in linking the phobic object (the Jew whose plots anti-Semites fear) to the avoidance of a choice: ​“The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from a decision.”

Does this proposition not hold especially for political phobia? Does the phobic object/​abject, on the fear of which the rightist-populist ideology mobilizes its partisans (the Jew, the immigrant, today in Europe the refugee), not embody a refusal to choose? Choose what? A position in class struggle. The anti-Semitic fetish-figure of the Jew is the last thing a subject sees just before he confronts social antagonism as constitutive of the social body (I paraphrase here Freud’s definition of fetish as the last thing a subject sees before discovering that a woman doesn’t have a penis).

So the first conclusion is that some fantasies at least are ​“bad”: we should definitely not advise the Nazis ​“not to give up their fantasy of a better life (without Jews) but to cling to it for all its worth”… Should we then distinguish between ​“good” and ​“bad” fantasies — say, should we replace racist fantasies with humanist all-inclusive fantasies of global brotherhood and collaboration?

This seems to be the direction of my critic when he writes that ​“the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication” — in short, even if a fantasy is not true, this is all we have to maintain at least a semblance of communication.

But is this really the (political) lesson of Lacan’s psychoanalysis? Is fantasy really the last resort of politics? Is Communism ultimately just a fantasy we should cling to whatever the cost? The least one can say is that Lacan’s theory opens up another way, what one may call a politics of traversing the fantasy: a politics which does not obfuscate social antagonisms but confronts them, a politics which aims not just to ​“realize an impossible dream” but to practice a ​“discourse (social link) which would not be that of a semblance” (Lacan), a discourse which touches/​disturbs the Real. Whatever Lacan is, he is not a post-modernist who claims that all communication is, as Kriss puts it, a ​“semblance.”

Exposing the cultural/ acultural anti-racist  hypocrisy - "Who is he to say that he's a nobody..."

Polish Life AFTER the fall...

It's good to be the king... until it's not.

 On Hunter's Fairweather Friends...

Daniel Greenfield, "As Biden’s Polls Drop, Hunter’s Patron Stops Paying His Bills"

When your dad's on top, everyone is your friend. When your dad is sinking, no one will take your calls.

The Hunter Biden story has lots of strange twists and turns, but one of the strangest may be Kevin Morris.

Morris is a Hollywood lawyer who met Hunter at a Biden fundraiser, took over his investments, paid his bills and bought his artwork. Morris provided Hunter with $6.5 million in loans, which including paying his back taxes, covering rent, payments on a Porsche, lawyer fees, child support and whatever else might been on the tab.

This presumably does not count the paintings that sold for a total of over $1 million and of which Morris supposedly bought about half.

Why did Morris do all this? Maybe Hunter got off the streetcar to Santa Monica and declared, “I have always been dependent on the kindness of stranger.” Apparently, Kevin felt sorry for him and there were no homeless in the area so he lavished millions on Hunter.

So much for that.

Hunter Biden’s so-called “sugar brother” Kevin Morris has told associates that he can’t afford to cover the mounting legal bills incurred by the first son, who’s set to face two trials starting next month.

“The reason Kevin got involved financially in the first place was that he could see that no one was going to help Hunter,” a person close to the Hollywood entertainment lawyer told Politico.

“Now, four and a half years later, there’s still no help — and now Kevin is completely tapped out,” the person added. “So just when Hunter is facing two criminal trials starting in a few weeks, he has no resources. It’s pretty dire.”

Federal trials are really expensive. Just ask any of the former Trump administration figures who got dragged through them for wholly partisan reasons. Plan A was to just toss Hunter’s case away and that fell apart when the judge wouldn’t go for it. Plan B is going to be more expensive.

But I can’t help but wonder if Kevin is now “tapped out” because he’s been looking at Joe’s poll numbers.

If you can drop $6 million plus on the president’s crackhead son, is that because you love all crackheads, or because it’s the ‘president’ part of it that matters.

With polls raising the possibility that the investment in a Biden presidency may be strictly short-term, a smart investor would indeed opt out rising legal costs with limited returns.

Now maybe Kevin really just loves crackheads and wants to be kind to them to the tune of $6 million. Life is strange and anything is possible. But I wonder if the fate of Hunter’s legal bills may be tied to daddy’s poll numbers. When your dad’s on top, everyone is your friend. When your dad is sinking, no one will take your calls.

It’s hard out there for the failed son of a failed president.

When English Moralism Majors Take Over Your Economy...

“Contemporary society is characterized by constant and relentless moralizing. But at the same time society is becoming more and more brutal. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity. Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer. In this respect, too, we are becoming hostile towards form. Apparently, the ascendency of morality is compatible with the barbarization of society. Morality is formless. Moral inwardness dispenses with form. One might even say: the more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is. Against this formless morality, we must defend an ethics of beautiful forms.”

-Byung-Chul Han 

Don't Fall for it, Georgia!

Chinese Sanctions, spelled "B-l-a-c-k_R-o-c-k"...

Sundance, "Joe Biden Announces Tariffs on Non-Existent Products from Non-Existent Origination Country – Here’s Why"

It was predictable [SEE HERE], and it happened exactly as predicted.

BlackRock investment firm writes the regulatory and economic policy for Joe Biden’s administration. That’s the quid-pro-quo that maintains the Biden political financial operation. All of DC know it. No one does not know. The ones who claim they do not know about it are all pretending. Republicans take the background BlackRock bribes and pretend.

BlackRock positioned massive investment assets inside Chinese auto manufacturers, MG, BYD, and Chery. The three Chinese companies are in the process of moving North American auto manufacturing to Mexico, specifically to make EVs. The Chinese EVs made in Mexico will come into the U.S market tariff free under the USMCA trade agreement. China and BlackRock will make billions.

Today, Joe Biden announced a series of tariffs against China in the EV industry. [SEE HERE] The Chinese EVs are not being made in China. The tariff regime is a farce – a total joke.

Biden might as well be announcing tariffs on Chinese swimming pools flown into the USA via hot air balloon. There will be more Chinese swimming pools delivered from China than Chinese EVs. The Chinese EVs come from Mexico. The tariff is fake.

WHITE HOUSE […] To further encourage China to eliminate the acts, policies, and practices at issue – and to counteract the burden or restriction of these acts, policies, and practices – the Trade Representative shall modify the two actions to increase section 301 ad valorem rates of duty for the following products from China:

Battery parts (non-lithium-ion batteries): Increase rate to 25 percent in 2024
Electric vehicles: Increase rate to 100 percent in 2024
Lithium-ion electrical vehicle batteries: Increase rate to 25 percent in 2024
Lithium-ion non-electrical vehicle batteries: Increase rate to 25 percent in 2026
Natural graphite: Increase rate to 25 percent in 2026
Other critical minerals: Increase rate to 25 percent in 2024 (read more)

None of this stuff is coming from China. It is all coming from Mexico via transnational shipping and Chinese manufacturing in Mexico. [Check Date]

On the EV issue, this tariff approach is politically duplicitous by Biden against the backdrop of massive investment in Mexico by the three largest Chinese EV automakers. Last December, the three Chinese auto manufacturers, MG, BYD, and Chery, announced they were going to spend billions building new EV manufacturing plants in Mexico. Each Chinese auto manufacturer was going to spend between $1.5 to $2.0 billion.

Those Mexican built Chinese EVs would pass into the USA market under current USMCA trade rules and regulations, as long as they technically meet the material origination rules. This can make tariffs against the Chinese imported EVs a moot point, because China will be making them in Mexico (North American trade agreement).

One of the reasons President Trump said the U.S. auto industry would suffer a “bloodbath,” is specifically because the current Chinese auto companies are targeting these EVs in the $10,000 or less range. If you want to see what it looks like when cheap Chinese EVs start to flood a consumer market, visit Russia – the Western sanctions have only increased this flow. I can see it clear as day.

China plans to pump out thousands of cheap, what I would consider semi-disposable, electric cars into the USA market. That’s why they have invested so heavily in Mexico. Keep in mind, BlackRock (a Biden benefactor investment firm) is enmeshed with this Chinese move.

This tariff claim, by the Biden administration on “import Chinese EVs”, is optics only for political benefit. Whereas, the 100% tariffs proposed by Donald Trump specifically target Chinese EVs made in Mexico.

Stand back and elevate your thinking on this Chinese EV issue; the substance of it is a consequence of a much larger dynamic. It is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is a cleaving underway, a dedollarization that continues in global trade. Nations are no longer relying (dependent) on dollars as the baseline for trade parity; they are determining their own nation to nation trade valuations outside the use of the dollar as a benchmark.

The result of this dedollarization taking place is massive inflation inside the USA that continues as the dollar (yellow zone) is weakened against the increasingly non-dollar-aligned world (grey zone). The frequency of dollar use is lessening as alternatives are being used.

Trade into the yellow zone still requires a benchmark of dollars, but bilateral trade within the grey zone increasingly does not. This is the root of the global financial and economic cleaving. Mexico is not stupid.

China is trying to position their transportation sector (auto, planes, trains and mass transit manufacturing) as Apple manufacturing is to cell phone use. Some of these disposable Chinese electric vehicles are actually impressive, which makes sense when you consider that China steals the engineering and design elements from knuckleheaded Western corporations who use China for industrial manufacturing (see Tesla etc).

@@

Never-Biden's Step Front & Center

Eli Lake, "The Rise of the ‘Never Biden's"

Donors who once worried more about Donald Trump now see the president’s bid for a second term as the greater threat to America.

Joe Biden’s threat last week to freeze arms shipments to Israel along with reports that his administration is withholding intelligence about Hamas leaders’ whereabouts has reverberated throughout U.S. politics. Now, some Never Trump donors say the Biden administration’s policy toward the Jewish state is such a betrayal they’re considering jumping on board the Trump train.

Call it the rise of the Never Bidens, donors who once were more worried about Trump but now see Joe Biden’s bid for a second term the greater threat to America. The Free Press spoke with four donors who contributed tens of millions of dollars in the last election cycle. They say they are reconsidering their political giving in light of the president’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war. All of them expressed their frustration with Biden’s CNN interview last Wednesday, in which he said of Israel, “if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah.”

Cliff Asness, a Republican donor who says he “spent well over seven figures” to support Trump’s primary opponent Nikki Haley, told The Free Press that “My ‘Never Again’ is trumping my ‘Never Trump’ these days.”

“Biden is a huge disappointment, really a moral outrage with this arms embargo being only the latest and greatest outrage,” continued Asness, the co-founder of AQR Capital Management. “Despite my long opposition to him, this makes me more likely, though I haven’t quite gotten there yet, to see Trump as the better of two bad alternatives.”

Asness is not the only Never Trumper to move to the Never Biden camp.

Billionaire entertainment mogul and major Democratic donor Haim Saban wrote of Biden’s policy switch in an email to two senior White House advisers last week: “Let’s not forget that there are more Jewish voters who care about Israel than Muslim voters that care about Hamas.”

And after CNN aired Biden’s comments on Wednesday, hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, a registered Democrat, took to X to call the move “one of the worst acts against an ally of a sitting president ever. Hopefully, this means he won’t be sitting for longer.”

David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel and has been in touch with many Trump-skeptic Jewish donors though he has no official role on the campaign, told The Free Press that he has seen “more Jewish money coming in” for Trump in the election.

“I think the announcement on Wednesday,” he said referring to Biden’s arms decision, “was the last straw for people who were already leaning very close to going for Trump. He continued, “There is clearly a change going on, people who are active in politics with big money, people who were never Trumpers or reluctant ‘hold your nose Trumpers’ are telling me that Trump has to win.”

Michael Granoff, a managing partner of Maniv, a venture fund dedicated to clean transportation technology, told The Free Press that he voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but has lost confidence in the president: “I am not voting for Biden. I’m not saying I’m voting for Trump, but it’s a nonzero chance now.” Granoff was a staffer on the Clinton-Gore campaign and was a close friend of the late senator Joe Lieberman. These days he calls himself a political independent. He has given to campaigns for Rep. Ritchie Torres, the Bronx Democrat who has emerged as one of the most pro-Israel voices in Congress, as well as former Rep. Liz Cheney, who broke with Trump after January 6.

Granoff said Biden’s current policy toward Israel’s war betrays the commitments he made after Hamas invaded the Jewish state on October 7. “The speech he gave on October 11 was one of the finest speeches a president has ever made,” he said. “Had he stuck to that policy, he would be leading in the race right now. I would be raising money for him.”

A new set of polls shows Biden trailing Trump in five of the six swing states that will likely decide the election.

One politically connected New York bundler told The Free Press that the anti-Biden sentiment among pro-Israel donors has been rising steadily since March. “I trace it back to the State of the Union,” the source said. In that March 7 speech, Biden adopted the casualty figures of the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, which do not separate dead civilians from dead combatants. What’s more, in April the ministry acknowledged its data was incomplete for 11,371 of the 33,091 deaths it had recorded, suggesting the totals Biden cited were exaggerated. As Peter Savodnik reported this week, even the UN now admits those numbers cannot be trusted.

Last Thursday, Ackman reposted a statement from Trump, blasting Biden’s decision on his social media platform, Truth Social:

Crooked Joe Biden, whether he knows it or not, just said he will withhold weapons from Israel as they fight to eradicate Hamas Terrorists in Gaza. Hamas murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including babies, and are still holding Americans hostage, if the hostages are still alive.

Though Ackman contributed to both the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Al Gore and gave $1 million to Rep. Dean Phillips’ primary run against Biden this year, he has more recently declared himself a “centrist” who “will vote for and support whoever is best for our country regardless of their party affiliation.”

And now, he seems to be leaning toward Trump.

In a comment under Trump’s statement, Ackman wrote simply: “@realDonaldTrump speaks the truth.”

The 2 State Non-Solution...

Palestinian solution: "...from the river to the sea, Palestine must be "Jew Free"!"

Georgia Fails to Swallow the Neoliberal Globalist Bait...

Have they learned the Ukrainian lesson?

The Forgotten Exodus...

What became of the Jewish "Right to Return"?

The Apple Small-Business Crush...

Corporate GIANT-ism Uber Alles!!!!

Local Angles

Mike McDaniel, "Marilyn Mosby: finally, justice comes to Baltimore"

Freddie Gray was a small-time petty criminal and drug dealer, who back in April of 2015 was arrested for possession of a knife illegal under Baltimore law.

Richly ironic was Gray was hanging out, likely making drug connections, in a Baltimore neighborhood notorious for that. Officers were there that day at DA Marilyn Mosby’s direction in response to community outrage at the lawlessness in the area. Officers made a lawful Terry stop on Gray who ran, was caught and searched, and the knife was found. On the way to jail, Gray was seated in the back of a transport van and was seen and heard to be bashing himself against the interior of the vehicle. Before he arrived at the jail, he managed to break his neck and died, but not immediately.
Rushing to judgment long before a competent investigation could be completed, Mosby charged six officers—three white, three black—with a ridiculous number of felonies. It was an egregious case of charge stacking. Some of them never so much as touched Gray. Mosby, also black, clearly saw political advantage in the charges, and quickly became the social justice hero of the moment. Gray never reached the holy social justice martyr status of George Floyd, whose martyrdom was years into the future.

Mosby, in the meantime, was enjoying her new-found celebrity. Photos of her and her husband Nick abounded, and magazines did tongue-bathing profiles of the newest young, black, female hero, a woman checking DEI boxes before checking DEI boxes became mandatory.

It quickly became obvious there was no criminal there there. The cases, before a black judge who had previously handled police misconduct cases for the federal DOJ, all ended badly for Mosby. The judge turned out to be an honest, non-racist jurist and his carefully considered decisions made clear there was never probable cause to arrest any of the officers, let alone proof beyond a reasonable doubt of any crime. Three of the officers were found not guilty of all charges, and because the remaining three would be tried on the same faulty and/or non-existent evidence, their charges were dismissed. An internal Baltimore Police investigation also eventually exonerated the officers of policy violations.

Throughout the debacle, Baltimore burned and then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake, also black, destroyed her political career by bizarrely proclaiming she gave the almost entirely black rioters “space to destroy,” by preventing the police from stopping riot, looting and arson. As is all too common for such people, Mosby, apparently thinking herself invulnerable, burned down her own career:

Disgraced former Baltimore District Attorney Marilyn Mosby sobbed in court Tuesday as she was convicted of mortgage fraud — a verdict that could carry decades in prison.

The Democrat served in office from 2015 until she lost her 2022 reelection bid after being indicted on perjury and mortgage fraud charges related to the withdrawal of funds from the city’s Deferred Compensation Plan. [skip]

Mosby, 44, was indicted on both the perjury and mortgage fraud charges in January 2022, and was found guilty of the perjury in November 2023.

Mosby is facing up to 40 years in prison, though as one might expect, Joe Biden is being pressured to pardon her.

Will Biden pardon Mosby? For the moment, that will depend on entirely political calculations. If his handlers think a pardon will help solidify his base, it’s likely. Unfortunately for her, Mosby isn’t Muslim, the identity group Biden’s handlers currently most want to appease. Thus far in the campaign, they’re taking the black vote for granted. If Biden loses the election, expect his handlers, through Biden’s shaky signature, to pardon all manner of miscreants, not the least his family and himself.

In the meantime, Baltimore’s crime rate continues to skyrocket. Its police force, laboring under a federal consent decree, is badly undermanned and recruiting has proved virtually impossible. The DOJ is doing all it can to prosecute the officers that remain, most of whom keep their heads down and do as little as possible.

And of course, the primary victims of this woke largess are the very poor, inner city black residents of Baltimore who would much prefer the police were allowed to do their jobs.

That’s the legacy of social justice martyr Freddie Gray, and Marilyn Mosby, the woman once lauded as the fresh face of young, female, black political success.

A Message to Palestine

Populism Ascendant!

The "Haves" DESERVE their "havings", the "Have Nots" just need to Shut-Up & Enjoy! their censorship and Tech Silencings!!

-Paraphrasing Nancy Pelosi