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Racism

January 15, 2022

Motivated Reasoning

Motivated reasoning is a common daily phenomenon for all of us, assuming we’re human and/or interact with other humans. It’s a cognitive science term that refers to a type of emotional bias in which we have a tendency to prefer decisions or justifications based on their personal desirability vs. an unbiased examination of the facts.

Thinking and feeling aren’t anywhere near as “separate” in the brain as is commonly believed — they are very intertwined, and it’s also incredibly difficult for us to understand or detect from moment to moment which parts of our stream of consciousness are “thinking” and which are “feeling.”

What’s worse, we have other biases that exacerbate the motivated reasoning bias — like the “Lake Wobegon Effect” wherein we tend to overestimate our own abilities vs. others. So, we’re overconfident — at the same that we are less rational than we think we are. That can be a volatile combination — especially when found in individuals who hold a lot of power, and make decisions that affect people’s lives.

For we know not what we do

It can be infuriating to deal with people who are using motivated reasoning to make decisions instead of critical thinking: they tend to work backwards from the conclusion they wish to reach, and ignore evidence that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs. The way they deal with the cognitive dissonance of conflicting information is simply to toss the new information out, instead of evaluating it. Generally, though, they are unaware that their brain is in the habit of making that easier choice, and tend to get angry when this is pointed out.

Examples of motivated reasoning:

Bigotry and prejudice
Belief that you can “reduce covid cases” by not testing
Belief that you can get Republicans elected by refusing to count Democratic votes either outright or via procedural means

Related concepts:

Emperor’s New Clothes
Potemkin Village
tautology
foregone conclusion
Catch-22
ouroborous
self-fulfilling prophecy
revealed wisdom
divine right of rule
teleological thinking
self-interest bias

January 5, 2022

Change the filibuster to save democracy

Majority Leader Schumer is right to come around to the idea that the filibuster must be changed in order to pass voting rights and save our democratic republic from the forces of authoritarianism.

The filibuster is an archaic rule that was at first only there by accident, then whittled into a sharp blade of minority rule by Southern plantation owner and virulent white supremacist John C. Calhoun — a man credited with laying the groundwork for the Civil War.

The South Carolina plutocrat strategized on behalf of wealthy aristocratic ambitions in the 1820s and 30s. Dubbed the “Marx of the master class” by historian Richard Hofstadter, Calhoun consumed himself with an obsession over how to establish permanent rule by his 1% brethren. He was an early proponent of property over people — the original “just business” kind of cold calculating supremacist that would come to typify the darker southern shadow culture of America.

Calhoun came to the conclusion that the Founders had made a grave mistake when creating the nation, and had put in too much democracy and too little property protection. He had a conviction that collective governance ought to be rolled back, because it “exploited” the wealthy planter class such as himself. During his time in the Senate he engineered a number of clever devices for the minority to rule over the collective will of the public — dubbed a “set of constitutional gadgets” for restricting the operations of a democratic government by a top political scientist at the time.

Public choice theory and Charles Koch

Slaveholding Senator John C. Calhoun inspired a series of men in the future to take up the torch of minority rule and its apparatus. James McGill Buchanan combined ideas from F. A. Hayek with fascist strains of Calhoun’s ministrations in the Senate to pack a conservative economic punch with public choice theory.

A young Charles Koch was exposed to Buchanan’s re-interpretation of Calhoun’s re-intepretation of the founders’ intentions, and embarked on a lifelong mission to indoctrinate the world in the religion of hyper-libertarian Ayn Randian fiscal austerity.

New lie, same as the old lie. The old lie is that America was never intended to be a democracy — which is doublespeak nonsense. The old lie is that the Declaration of Independence was wrong — that all men are not created equal; that the entire reason we founded a new nation was somehow misguided. But “conservatives” have been fighting fervently for this original Big Lie since time immemorial.

So: Charles Koch is the new John C. Calhoun. He and his vast navel-gazing empire of “think tanks” and other organs of self-regurgitation have managed to brainwash enough people and operate enough bots to make it almost a coin toss whether the average citizen believes the nation was founded as a democratic republic or an authoritarian theocracy.

The filibuster is one of the strongest minority rule tools in their toolbox.

We must bust the filibuster.

December 10, 2021

Was the Civil War about slavery? Yes.

But you don’t have to take our word for it — just ask the Vice President of the Confederacy what his reasons were in the infamous Cornerstone Speech of 1861, just a few weeks before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter:

“The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by . . . most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of . . . the equality of races. This was an error . . .

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
— Alexander H. Stephens, March 21, 1861, reported in the Savannah Republican, emphasis in the original

More ways we know the Civil War was about slavery

The state secession declaration documents mention the words “slave”, “slavery“, and “slave-holding” over 150 times, along with a number of related words including abolition, abolitionist, race, African, white race, and negro among yet others.
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America is almost identical to the US Constitution; in most of the several places that had been modified, the subject of the change regarded slavery and the claimed rights of Southern white men to own black human beings as a captive labor force.
Contemporaneous speeches given by Southern leaders at the time leading up to the war and during the war uniformly named the question of slavery as the core animus for their fight.
The Confederates rejected the idea floated internally of enlisting Blacks to replace the much-drained manpower of the South even though the final year of the war — despite ample evidence of the capabilities of black fighting forces as evidenced by their use by the Union to rout Southern Armies in bloody battle after bloody battle.
The secessionists even hampered their own ability to get diplomatic recognition, by refusing to clarify any sort of end date for slavery or apologia for the moral failings of the peculiar institution to a Britain and France who saw the practice as barbaric by that time. In other words, they chose slavery over independence when push really literally came to shove.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were almost entirely about slavery and the question of whether it should be extended further into new US territories of the West, halted, or ended altogether. Lincoln was on the side of halting slavery, and when he was elected President in 1860 the Southern states began seceding from the Union.

December 5, 2021

Koup Klux Klan: The authoritarian movement trying to take over America

seditious conspiracy folks working to undermine the united states

It may have seemed like the election of 2016 came out nowhere, and the January 6, 2021 attempted coup event was another deep gash to the fabric of assumption — but in reality, the authoritarian movement to dismantle America has been working diligently for a long time. Depending on how you count, the current war against the government began in the 1970s after Roe v. Wade, or in the 1960s after the Civil Rights Act, or in the 1950s with the John Birch Society, or in the 1930s with the American fascists, or in the 1870s with the Redemption and Lost Cause Religion, or in the 1840s with the Southern Baptist split, or in the 1790s when we emerged from the Articles of Confederation.

We are facing an unprecedented crisis of democracy under attack by the most current roster of these extremists, hardliners, theocrats, plutocrats, and others of their ilk. The following mind map diagrams the suspects and perpetrators of the Jan 6 coup as we know so far — including the Council for National Policy, the Koch network, Trump and his merry band of organized criminals, the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and other right-wing groups — from militia convicted of seditious conspiracy, to rioters who have been arrested in the January 6th probe, to persons of interest who have been subpoena’d by the January 6 Committee in the House, to anyone and anything else connected to the ongoing plot to kill America whether near or far in relation. The map extends to include coverage of the basic factions at work in the confusing melodrama of American politics, and their historical precedents.

Mind map of the seditious conspiracy

I’ll be continuing to work on this as information comes out of the various investigations and inquiries into the attempted coup to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, from the January 6 Committee to Merrick’s DOJ, the GA district attorney, NY district attorney, various civil suits, and probably more we don’t even know about yet. You can navigate the full mind map as it grows here:

Head onward into “Continue Reading” to see the same mind map through a geographic perspective:

November 17, 2021

Property vs. People, all the way down

Or capital vs. labor, oligarchs vs. plebes, plutocrats vs. proles, rich vs. poor — however you want to narrate it, the property vs. people struggle continues on in new and old ways, each and ere day.

Here in America, the plutocrats have devised many clever methods of hiding the class struggle behind a race war smokescreen, that is both real and manufactured — instigated, exacerbated, agitated by the likes of schlubby wife abusers like Sloppy Steve Bannon, wrinkly old Palpatines like Rupert Murdoch, and shady kleptocrats like Trump and Putin.

The United States has nursed an underground Confederacy slow burning for centuries, for sociopathic demagogues to tap into and rekindle for cheap and dangerous political power. Like The Terminator, racist and supremacist troglodytes seem always to reconstitute themselves into strange and twisted new forms, from slavery to the Black Codes to sharecropping to convict leasing to Jim Crow to Jim Crow 2.0 — the psychopaths want their homeland.

Ds need to start framing this as an oligarch's game in which a global class war is repeatedly laundered and diverted into a provincial race war. https://t.co/9a0KikBuGo
— barb dybwad (@doctorparadox) November 16, 2021

The political left loves people, and our extremists for the most part destroy capital or property that insurance companies will pay to make shiny and new again — unlike the right wing extremists who bomb federal buildings, killing hundreds of people and costing taxpayers’ money to replace.

Meanwhile, the right wing claims to be the righteous party for its extreme fixation on life before birth, yet its regulation-allergic capitalists destroy people and the natural world more broadly, from factory farming to deforestation, the destruction of habitats, strip-mining and other toxic extraction practices, and on into climate change itself. Being in fact the chief architects of manmade atmospheric devastation, they have managed to make themselves invisible from the deed by simply (wink wink!) denying it exists.

WWJD?!

Certainly, not anything the Republican Party is up to. Jesus would be sad.

August 4, 2021

American Fascists & the Global Right 😈

It feels like the 1930s all over again — and with good reason. The rise of American fascists and right-wing extremism around the world has been a known trend for decades, and America’s past flirtations with fascism had been largely swept under the rug by the then anti-semites who tried to put a stop to FDR‘s New Deal and prevent the U.S. from getting into World War II.

They fought against labor unions and labor organizers, often using private militia as henchmen to do their dirtywork with plausible deniability for themselves. The Ku Klux Klan — the principle paramilitary organization formed during Reconstruction to undo egalitarian gains from the Civil War — was just one of many instruments put to use in service of plutocratic aims to quell any “communist awakening” amongst their workers, lest they get any uppity ideas for themselves. They fell for the popular conspiracy theories of their time, which included Hitler’s bogus assertion that Jewish bankers controlled the world and had to be stopped before they destroyed the white race.

Fascist revanchism

Those fascists, butthurt over America’s overwhelmingly popular decision to enter the war and stop Hitler from exterminating the Jews, seethed with jealousy at the post-war “liberal consensus” that flourished alongside the booming US economy, propelled first by the war effort and later by the peacetime success of the New Deal‘s long shadow and the burgeoning of the American middle class.

The American fascists turned into the John Birch Society, and the McCarthyites, and the Libertarians, and the Moral Majority, and the Gingrich Revolution, and the Tea Party, and the MAGA / QAnon stew sloshing around mass media. The kooks on the far right — the kind of ilk so cray cray that even William F. Buckley excommunicates you from the Republican Party — have taken over the hen house now. Outrage sells, as Facebook well knows — and as two-bit dictators around the world have bribed Mark Zuckerberg to brainwash the masses using the most inanely illogical propaganda prolefeed, the world tilts dangerously towards authoritarianism and the end of our democracy as we know it. And with it, all hope for truth and light into the future for some time to come — the equivalent of a political meteor hitting the Earth.

The American fascists are still around, and now they have tools of propaganda that Goebbels could never have even wet dreamed of. They’re more powerful and more well-connected — to other sociopaths, malignant narcissists, and other pathological cult-leader types who might be of transactional service to each other from time to time. Many of them cling to ideas of Christian nationalism and Strict Father Morality. We’d be wise to keep an eye on these folks.

Name	Type	Location	Known for
Greg Abbott	Politician	Texas	The 48th governor of Texas since 2015 who has presided over multiple energy grid disasters, a self-induced economic fiasco at the border, and ghoulish vigilante legislation designed to terrorize women seeking abortion services, and a perversion of the child sex trafficking apparatus to instead target and tyrannize trans youth
Roman Abramovich	Foreign agent		Russian oligarch close to both Putin and Trump
ACU Strategic Partners	Foreign agent		A company seeking to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East in partnership with a sanctioned Russia company; Mike Flynn was working for them without having disclosed it to the US government as required.
Sheldon Adelson	Businessperson	Las Vegas, NV	CEO billionaire of the Sands Corp casino empire (died, 2021)
AggregateIQ	Corporation		Canadian data firm connected to Cambridge Analytica parent company SCL Group that played a role in spreading Brexit propaganda
Roger Ailes	Media personality	Deceased	Primogenitor of Fox News whose downfall came over dozens of women testified to his decades of sexual assault and blackmail behaviors
Todd Akin	Politician	Missouri	Politician who lost his Senate race to Clairse McCaskill in 2012 when he made the comment on TV about women having a way to "shut the whole thing down" to avoid becoming pregnant if raped.
Nelson W. Aldrich
Ali Alexander	Extremist		One of the primary organizers of the Stop the Steal rally on January 6 that turned into and/or attempted to mask a coup attempt
Samuel Alito	Judge	Washington, DC	Supreme Court Justice who penned a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, riddled with Christian nationalist tropes and arbitrary Originalist interpretations
American Energy Alliance	Non-profit		A tax-exempt nonprofit that advocated for corporate-friendly energy policies. Koch's Freedom Partners donated $1.5 million in 2012.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)	Non-profit		Corporate-funded nonprofit that writes legislation for Republican legislatures, including spearheading the efforts to wrest partisan control over election results in 49 states.
Americans for Prosperity	PAC		The Koch Brothers' Libertarian political advocacy arm
Philip Anschutz	Businessperson	Colorado	CO oil and entertainment billionaire and founder of Qwest Communications
Michael Anton
Lee Atwater	Political Operative		Infamously brutal Republican strategist for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush who promoted the "abstraction" of racism via Southern Strategy and ran the infamous Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Michele Bachman	Politician	MN	Minnosota Republican politician who was the first woman in her state to be elected to the House of Representatives, she is known for her extremist Dominionist views
Steve Bannon	Media personality	Houseboats	Former Breitbart provocateur who joined the Trump administration as a key advisor and dark propagandist for Trump intent on sowing chaos
Ross Barnett
William Barr	Public Sector		Donald Trump's Attorney General who shielded him from public awareness of his crimes, corruptions, and compromises during the 45th presidency.
Maurice Barres	Author	France	French nationalist author in the early 20th century who introduced Great Replacement theory
Louis Beam	White Supremacist
Roy Beck	White Supremacist		Executive Director of NumbersUSA, member of the white supremacist Tanton Network
Andy Biggs	Politician	AZ	House Republican subpoena'd by the January 6 Commission for his role in the attempted coup
Black Legion	Extremist	Michigan	Secret society of black-hooded terrorists working in MI against labor unions and labor organizers in the 1930s. Legionnaires talked of staging a coup to oust FDR and imposing a fascist regime in the United States
David Bogatin	Oligarch	NYC	A top figure in the Russian mafia who bought 5 luxury condos in Trump Tower to launder money, he admitted in 1987.
Jacob Bogatin	Oligarch		David Bogatin's brother, and a partner of notorious Russian mob moss Semion Mogilevich
John Wilkes Booth	Criminal	Deceased	Stage actor and Confederate sympathizer who shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head in April 1865, a few months after his re-election in 1864.
L. Brent Bozell	Extremist		BFF of William F. Buckley and author of Conscience of a Conservative to support Barry Goldwater's candidacy in 1960.
Harry and Lynde Bradley	Kochtopus		Midwesterners who built their wealth on defense contracts
Andrew Breitbart	Media personality		Founded both Brietbart and the Huffington Post
Anders Breivik	Extremist	Oslo, Norway	Mass murderer who killed 77 people in Oslo, Norway as inspired by the white supremacist ideology of Great Replacement theory
Mo Brooks	Politician	Huntsville, AL	House Republican from Alabama subpoena'd by the January 6 Committee for his role in the attempted coup
Brother's Circle	Criminal		Organized crime gang pursued by then-FBI head Robert Mueller circa 2011
Michael Brown		Ferguson, MO	Unarmed black man killed by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking a series of riots in the city.
Pat Buchanan	Politician	Washington, DC	Politician and paleoconservative who worked for presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan before running against incumbent George H.W. Bush in 1992; widely considered a bigot, racist, and antisemite.
William F. Buckley Jr	Media personality
Doug Burley	Political Operative		Founding and leading both The Family and the National Prayer Breakfast of right-wing power brokers
Cambridge Analytica	Corporation	London, UK	Data firm implicated in the propaganda campaigns of both Brexit in 2015 and Donald Trump in 2016 that stole hundreds of millions of Facebook profiles and mined the treasure trove of information for weaknesses to manipulate in attempts to persuade
Renaud Camus	Author	France	French writer and critic who created the recent 2011 formulation of the Great Replacement Theory
Tucker Carlson	Media personality	NYC	Fox News evening opinion anchor and fish stick heir who promotes the Great Replacement conspiracy theory to his primetime audience of older white men.
Doug Casey	Businessperson		Ayn Rand devotee and "anarcho-capitalist" who specializes in how to profit from turmoil
Michael Catanzaro	Lobbyist		Partner at the CGCN Group lobbying firm who headed "energy independence" for the Trump transition team.
Cato Institute	Think Tank
Madison Cawthorn	Politician	NC
Center to Protect Patient Rights	Kochtopus		Dark money group funded by the Kochs to attack the ACA with fearmongering and vitriol
Mike Cernovich	Media personality
CGCN Group	Lobbyist		Lobbyist for the Koch brothers
James Chaney	Activist	Neshoba County, MS	One of 3 civil rights activists murdered by local white supremacists when engaging in non-violent civil disobedience, along with Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
Jeremy Joseph Christian	Extremist	Portland, OR	stabbed 3 people who tried to intervene while he was hurling anti-Muslim slurs at 2 young women in Portland, OR
Chris Christie	Politician		Former governor of NJ and former Trump supporter and transition team lead who became a Trump critic
Michael Cohen	Businessperson	NYC	Donald Trump's personal lawyer, sentenced to 3 years in federal prison for felony crimes, including campaign finance crimes
Steven A. Cohen	Businessperson		Finance (SAC Capital Advisors)
Roy Cohn	Political Operative	Deceased	Lawyer who represented Senator Joseph McCarthy in the infamous televised 1954 hearings, and later went on to become a mafia-connected fixer in NYC and mentor to budding real estate developer Donald Trump
Competitive Enterprise Institute	Think Tank	Washington, DC	A Washington think tank that had been bankrolled by fossil fuel industries, particularly the Kochs.
Continental Resources	Corporation	Oklahoma	OK-based shale oil company with a large and profitable fracking operation
Coors brewing family	Koch Investor	Colorado	The Coors gave money to Oliver North to fund the Iran-Contra operation
Council of Conservative Citizens (CoC)
Ted Cruz	Politician	Texas
Jefferson Davis
Kim Davis	Public Sector	Kentucky	Former county clerk of Rowan County, KY who defied a US federal court order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in 2015
Devos family	Koch Investor		Founders of the Amway marketing empire; Betsy DuVos was the Secretary of Education under Trump
Amadou Diallo		New York	a West African immigrant mowed down by 41 shots from police when leaving his apartment on February 4, 1999.
James Dobson	Media personality		conservative talk-show host and fundamentalist Christian who strongly advocated spanking and corporal punishment be applied liberally to children
Chester Doles			Former KKK leader who runs the white supremacist American Patriots USA. Nearly beat a Black man to death in 1993. Marched in 2017 in Charlottesville.
Rod Dreher	Extremist		Benedict Option author and traditionalist
Dinesh D'Souza	Media personality		Conservative gadly who alleged that Obama was "African" in outlook rather than American, absorbing his "radical" views from his Kenyan father
Doug Ducey	Politician	AZ	Governor of Arizona
Aleksandr Dugin	Extremist	Russia	Russia's primary fascist political philosopher and originator of Eurasianism conspiracy theory
David Duke	White Supremacist
John Eastman	Political Operative		Ran against Kamala Harris in 2010 for California AG, then showed back up in 2020 to write an outrageous op-ed that Newsweek for some reason actually published, that claimed that she was "secretly" not a US resident and therefore not eligible to be the VP! Now the Kamala Harris birther
Myron Ebell	Political Operative		Outspoken climate change skeptic, who headed the Trump transition team for the EPA
Election Integrity Project California	Extremist		Election fraud group working with Leonard Leo
Larry Ellison	Businessperson		Gave $5 million to Marco Rubio
Cassandra Fairbanks
Jerry Falwell, Jr	Televangelist
The Family	Lobbyist		Shadowy DC group with tremendous sway in Congress and around the world, following a distorted "strongman Jesus" version of Christianity.
The Federalist Society	Extremist
Scott Fitzgerald	Politician	WI	House Republican
Michael Flynn	Cult Leader
For America	PAC
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Fox News	Corporation
Free Congress Foundation
Freedom Caucus	Politician
Freedom Partners	Kochtopus		The Koch Brothers' secretive donor club.
FreedomWorks	Extremist
Matt Gaetz	Politician
Kevin Gentry	Kochtopus		VP of Special Projects and VP of the Koch Foundation
Greg Gianforte	Politician		body-slamming Guardian reported Ben Jacobs while running for a GOP House seat in Montana
Newt Gingrich	Media personality
Tim "Baked Alaska" Gionet	White Supremacist
Rudy Giuliani	Politician	NYC
GiveSendGo			"Christian" donation platform
Barry Goldwater	Politician	AZ
Seb Gorka	Political Operative
Billy Graham
Madison Grant	Political Operative		Close personal friend of Herbert Hoover who helped draft the exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924 -- the Stephen Miller of his day. His "Passing of the Great Race" was beloved by Hitler as "his bible."
Chuck Grassley	Politician		Senator
The Great Awakening
Marjorie Taylor Greene	QAnon	GA
Eric Greitens	Politician	MO
Harold Hamm	Kochtopus		Billionaire founder of Continental Resources, an OK-based shale company with large fracking business & one of the charter members of the Kochs' donor circle.
James Henry Hammond	Extremist
Warren G. Harding	Politician		Enthusiastically supported the white-supremacist work of Lothrop Stoddard et al
Billy James Hargis	Extremist
Orrin Hatch	Politician		Sen. Orrin Hatch raised concerns about funding certain entitlement programs. “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything,” he said.
Josh Hawley	Politician	MO	Missouri Senator funded by Peter Thiel who gave the January 6 mob a fist bump on his way in to object to certifying the electoral count
Matthew Heimbach	Extremist		White nationalist and one of the founders of the Traditionalist Workers Party
Jesse Helms	Politician
Leona Helmsley
Diane Hendricks		WI	The wealthiest woman in Wisconsin at $3.6 billion
Heritage Foundation	Think Tank	Washington, DC
Honest Elections Project	Extremist		A conservative legal organization connected to Leonard Leo that files legal briefs to SCOTUS opposing mail-in ballots and other voting reforms that help more people to vote,
Herbert Hoover	Politician	Washington, DC	White supremacist and wealth supremacist, he was adamant about doing nothing to help people during the Great Depression.
Mike Huckabee	Politician
Laura Ingraham	Media personality		Fox News host
Andrew Jackson	Politician	Deceased	US President
John Birch Society	Extremist
Andrew Johnson	Politician	Deceased	US President
Chuck Johnson	Media personality		Alt-right super troll
Ron Johnson	Politician		Wisconsin Republican Senator who supported Donald Trump, promoted ivermectin for covid, and said he wasn't afraid of the January 6 mob because they were white people
Alex Jones	Media personality		Host of InfoWars, the 9/11 conspiracy show that put the genre on the map
Jim Jordan	Politician	OH	A long-time Tea Party hyena, the Congressman known as Gym once helped his buddy cover up decades of sexual abuse of young wrestlers in their care.
Judicial Education Project	Extremist		A legal group tied to Leonard Leo, working to advance conservative takeover of the judiciary.
Islam Karimov	Oligarch	Uzbekistan	Former Communist official who became the first president of Uzbekistan in 1991, and remained the country's dictator until his death in 2016.
Alex Kaschuta	Media personality		Right-wing podcaster
Brett Kavanaugh	Judge	DC
Dr. D. James Kennedy			creating a Dominionist "conversion" playbook
John F. Kennedy	Politician	Deceased
Robert F. Kennedy	Politician	Deceased
Anna Khachiyan
Martin Luther King	Activist	Deceased	Civil Rights leader in the 1960s, and enemy of Southern politicians
Charlie Kirk	Media personality
Walter Kirn	Author	MT	Up in the Air author and disaffected former member of the American intellectual class
KKK	White Supremacist
Bill Koch	Businessperson
Charles Koch	Kochtopus	Kansas	industries: pipelines, oil refineries, lumber and paper, coal, chemicals, commodity futures, etc.
David Koch	Kochtopus	Deceased	industries: pipelines, oil refineries, lumber and paper, coal, chemicals, commodity futures, etc. (now deceased)
Fred Koch	Kochtopus	Kansas	Father of Charles and David, Fred Koch was an early and fervent acolyte in the ultra-conservative John Birch Society
Frederick Koch	Businessperson	New York
David Koresh	Cult Leader	Waco, TX
Ku Klux Klan (see KKK)	White Supremacist
Kylie Jane Kremer
David Lane	White Supremacist		Member of the white supremacist group The Order who coined the 14-word slogan popular with Great Replacement adherents: "We must secure the exisatence of our people and a future for white children"
Ken Langone	Businessperson		Founder of Home Depot
Lyndon LaRouche	Cult Leader
Robert LeFevre	Kochtopus		Charles Koch's mentor, a quasi-anarchist, who said, "government is a disease masquerading as its own cure"
Leonard Leo	Extremist		Chairman of the Federalist Society, a legal organization working to pack the courts with conservative judges.
Marine Le Pen	Politician	France
Honor Levy
Liberty Counsel			Christian special rights group
The Liminal Order
William S. Lind	Political Operative
Kelly Loeffler	Politician	Georgia	Insider trading immediately upon arriving at her unelected Senate seat when her husband, President of the NYSE, found a way to have some money arrive at Brian Kemp, the Governor, who appointed her.
Dana Loesch	Media personality		NRA spokeswoman
Sen. Huey Long	Politician	Deceased
Thomas Mair	Extremist		Assassin of British MP Jo Cox, who was outspoken against the UK's Brexit campaign
Paul Manafort	Lobbyist
Clarence Manion
Blake Masters	Politician	AZ
John McAfee	Businessperson	Deceased
Sen. Joseph McCarthy	Politician	Deceased	Senator best known for his demagoguery against alleged Communist agents in the US government during the Cold War in the early 1950s
Kevin McCarthy	Politician	CA
Michael McKenna	Kochtopus		Lobbyist and President of MWR Strategies lobbying firm, who have the Koch brothers as clients
Timothy McVeigh	Extremist	Oklahoma City, OK	White supremacist McVeigh was a disgruntled former military guy who took up with the white power movement and executed the Oklahoma City bombing -- as inspired, he said, by enacting "revenge" for Waco.
Andrew Mellon	Businessperson
Rebekah Mercer	Oligarch		Daughter of NY hedge fund manager Robert Mercer; she helped guide the Trump transition team following the 2016 election, and funded right-wing social network Parler
Robert Mercer	Oligarch		Father of Rebekah Mercer and longtime right-wing donor
MicroChip			Pro-Trump bot-king
Stephen Miller	Extremist
Michael Milken
Cleta Mitchell	Extremist	OK	Lawyer who represented various right-wing entities including the NRA, and was considered the "fringe of the fringe" -- at age 70 she "represented" Trump during his telephone call to Brad Raffensperger asking him to find ~11,000 votes
Semion Mogilevich	Criminal		Notorious Russian mob boss
Stefan Molyneux	Media personality		Alt-right troll
Sun Myung Moon	Cult Leader		Leader of the Moonie cult and self-proclaimed deity, Mr Moon served time in federal prison for tax fraud, among other charges.
Roy Moore	Politician	AL	Trump-backed politician and pedophile who narrowly lost the Alabama Senate race to Doug Jones in 2018.
JP Morgan	Businessperson
Rupert Murdoch	Oligarch		Fox News owner famous for his amoral media
Jack Murphy
Benito Mussolini
MWR Strategies	Kochtopus		Lobbying firm for the Koch brothers
Dasha Nekrasova
neo-Nazis	Extremist
Terry Nichols	Extremist		Blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building with Timothy McVeigh
Richard Nixon	Politician
Ralph Norman	Politician		House Republican who skirted the metal detectors to enter the House floor after the January 6 insurrection
NRA	Extremist		National Rifle Association
NYPD	Public Sector		New York Police Department
Barack Obama	Politician	Chicago, DC, Los Angeles	The 44th President of the United States, and the first black person to hold the job. He was widely loathed by the Right despite his positive record.
John M. Olin	Kochtopus		Chemical and munitions company titan
Viktor Orban	Politician		Radical right president of Hungary and Putin supporter
The Order			White supremacist group
Candace Owens	Extremist
Matt Parrott	Extremist		Co-founder with Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Workers Party
Laszlo Pasztor
Norman Vincent Peale	Businessperson		Christianity as a business man's religion
Mike Pence	Media personality		Donald Trump's VP
Rick Perry	Politician
Scott Perry	Politician		House Republican who skirted the metal detectors to enter the House floor after the January 6 insurrection
Jordan B Peterson	Academic		A sort of hero figure to the incel crowd
William Pierce
Pioneer Fund			A white supremacist group set up for "race betterment" in 1997 at a private club.
Jeanine Pirro	Media personality		Fox News host known for having a bit of a drinking problem and a brash on-air personality
Mike Pompeo	Public Sector		Sec of State after the firing of Rex Tillerson; former CIA Director; former Republican congressman from KS and largest recipient of Koch campaign funds in all of Congress
Jack Posobiec	Media personality
Lewis Powell	Businessperson		Wrote a 1971 memo that rallied the largely white and male business community around a plan to dismantle the New Deal and the liberal consensus
Sydney Powell	Political Operative		Also Associates with UFO believers and anti-vaxxers
Proud Boys	Extremist		Militia group involved in the January 6 coup attempt
Thomas Pyle	Businessperson		president of the American Energy Alliance, funded by Exxon and the Kochs
QAnon	QAnon		Conspiracy theory about Democratic pedophiles that recycles Nazi ideology
Jean Raspail	Author	France	French author of the 1973 Camp of the Saints novel about migrants organizing to take over France; the racist fiction inspired the white power movement of the 1980s, Steve Bannon, and a host of other fascist movements in Europe, America, and around the world
Nancy Reagan	Media personality	Deceased
Ronald Reagan	Politician	Deceased	Actor and Republican who became the 40th President from 1981 through 1989
Kyle Rittenhouse
Pat Robertson	Televangelist
Dylann Roof
George Romney
Mitt Romney	Politician	UT
Murray Rothbard	Extremist
Dave Rubin
Richard Mellon Scaife	Koch Investor		Heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes, and Koch donor
David Schnare	Political Operative		"Free-market environmentalist" who accused the EPA of having blood on its hands, who joined climate change denier Myron Ebell on the Trump transition team for the EPA
Stephen Schwarzman			Finance
Rick Scott	Politician
Jeff Sessions	Politician	AL
Marc Short	Political Operative		Ran the Koch Brothers' secretive donor club, Freedom Partners, before becoming Mike Pence's senior advisor during the 2016 presidential transition
Sinclair Broadcasting Group	Corporation
Paul Singer	Koch Investor		Finance (Elliott Management hedge fund). Supported Rudy Giuliani.
SNCC	Non-profit
Social Contract Press	White Supremacist		A racist publishing company, part of the Tanton Network, that published the white nationalist novel Camp of the Saints
Richard Spencer	White Supremacist
Balaji Srinivasan	Businessperson
State Policy Network	Kochtopus		Funded in part by the Kochs
Dan Stein	White Supremacist		President of Tanton Network organization FAIR
Lothrop Stoddard	White Supremacist		Author of the 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
Roger Stone	Lobbyist
Richard Strong	Businessperson		Strong Capital Management Mutual Fund
Sen. Robert Taft	Politician
John H. Tanton	White Supremacist	Michigan	White nationalist who organized The Tanton Network of 13 anti-immigrant organizations
Tea Party	PAC		Intensely antitax group
Peter Thiel	Businessperson	Los Angeles, CA	Eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire and pocketbook for the New Right project
Clarence Thomas	Judge	Washington, DC
Ginni Thomas	Political Operative	Washington, DC
Three Percenters	Extremist		Militia group who had a heavy presence at the January 6 attempted coup
Traditionalist Workers Party	Extremist
Turning Point USA	Extremist		Charlie Kirk's right-wing PR organization
Unabomber	Criminal
Unification Church	Cult Leader
Unite the Right	Activist	Charlottesville, NC	Charlottesville, NC event in 2018 where white supremecist groups marched with tiki torches, and activist Heather Hyer was killed by a right-wing extremist who drove his car through the crowd.
University of Texas at Austin	Academic	Austin, TX
JD Vance	Politician	OH	Venture capitalist and Peter Thiel acolyte running for Senate in Ohio
Ricky Vaughn
Ruben Verastigui	Criminal	DC	Former RNC and other GOP offices staffer who made social media ads for the Trump campaign and was later arrested with child porn on his phone after a DHS sting.
John Vinson	Extremist		Head of the Tanton Network-backed anti-immigrant hate group American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF)
George Wallace	Politician	Alabama
Joe Walsh	Media personality
Kelli Ward	Politician	AZ	GOP Chair
Ron Watkins	Extremist		Identified as the most likely suspect to be Q of QAnon
Randy Weaver	White Supremacist	Naples, ID
Vicki Weaver	White Supremacist	Naples, ID
Weev	White Supremacist		Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer
Paul Weyrich	White Supremacist		Arch-deacon of the New Right ultraconservative movement and hugely influential figure who founded the Heritage Foundation, Council for National Policy, and ALEC.
White Citizens Councils	White Supremacist
Geert Wilders
Darren Wilson	Public Sector		Police officer who brutally killed a Black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, MO in 2014.
WikiLeaks	Foreign agent
Milo Yiannopoulos	Media personality

July 27, 2021

Dunning-Kruger Effect

A strong and prevalent cognitive bias that causes a large majority of people to rate themselves more highly and more skilled than statistically possible. Lack of self-awareness can cause us to overestimate our knowledge or ability in a given area, and this phenomenon is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Posited in 1999 by two Cornell psychologists, Professors Dunning and Kruger also found that low-skilled people often have a double bind: they think of themselves as very skilled, but the lack even the basic level of skill that would allow them to detect and learn from their mistakes to get better. It’s very difficult for them to get out of the “trap” of perceiving themselves as superior, thus obviating any need to continue effort at improvements.

They also found that individuals of high skill levels also suffer from a sort of “lensing effect” (now dubbed the Dunning-Kruger Effect accordingly) in terms of their own self-assessment, but in the other direction — they are not generally aware of the rarity of their gifts. They assume most other people have the same kinds of knowledge and critical thinking skills that they do. In other words, careful study of our images of ourselves found us all to be living in a bubble of inaccurate self-perception, on both ends.

How to counteract the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

Ask for feedback from other people, and listen to it honestly.
Keep learning and gather knowledge and improving your skills.

July 20, 2021

Trump is driving Evangelicals from the flock

It’s been said that the devilish ways of pedophiliac liberal Democrats are killing Christianity in America, but the numbers tell a different story. Following the 2016 Armistice in the War on Christmas, Donald Trump yet managed to drive 1 in 7 Evangelicals from the fold, according to data from Pew and PRRI.

Far from the surge in True Believers prophesied by the right wing, the religious right’s deal with the proverbial and/or literal devil seems to have driven members away. Trump is losing Evangelicals, and really — should we be so shocked? If it doesn’t matter (to some) whether our leaders are serial philanderers and lifelong business cheats, or earnestly striving public servants spreading compassion — what use is their moral code, then? None. It is bankrupt.

Shrödinger’s Moral Leadership

The religious right can’t have it both ways — either moral leadership is important, or it isn’t. It can’t selectively be important *only* when a Democrat is in power. Evangelicals also need to make a choice between God and Caesar. Prosperity gospel is the latter and not the former, but many pretend otherwise or are fooled — after all, fool’s gold can still fool.

Cognitive dissonance upon dissonance continues to fall in the totally unraked forest of right-wing values. I’m aiming to continue pulling on a few threads connecting the religious right, and Evangelicals in particular, to the rise of political extremism in the Republican Party:

The pitch that winning the culture war is more important than God’s law is thin at best
Donald Trump is not a Christian
The “imperfect vessel” fails as moral justification
Jesus didn’t care about tax cuts
Christian leaders’ claims that politics is amoral ground beyond the reach of God’s teachings is self-evident nonsense
Christians are leaving their own moral house unguarded. No one is showing the living proof of Jesus’ teachings anymore — and it’s not the fault of the people on the left who weren’t doing it before.

June 2, 2021

Tulsa Race Massacre

On May 31, 1921, a mob of murderous whites descended on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma dubbed Black Wall Street, and razed it to the ground. They dropped homemade bombs in the first ever domestic aerial attack on American soil, during the Tulsa Race Massacre following the end of World War I.

Over three hundred Blacks were murdered and hastily buried or burned. Police and other state officials were complicit; no one was ever charged for the crimes and insurance companies refused to honor Black business owner’s claims from the destruction of their livelihood and senseless slaughter of their friends, families, and community. A generation of wealth was wiped out overnight, with deep economic repercussions passing down to ensuing descendants.

Whitewashing, literally

The Confederates managed to memory hole the Tulsa Race Massacre event clean out of history for the most part, until the 100-year anniversary of the event — arriving at a time of perhaps maximum racial polarization and most extreme partisanship in this country since the civil rights era. Nor is it the only example of mass murder and destruction of Black property and assets — there are plenty others we’ve never heard about in school. That’s why it’s so important to bear witness, and to remember, and to tell and retell the stories of our past — even the painful ones. Especially the painful ones.

This image refutes any and all sneering references to bootstraps, in perpetuity throughout the universe. This image is, among many other things, economic terrorism. pic.twitter.com/lE6FIQlVJA
— barb dybwad (@doctorparadox) June 2, 2021

January 9, 2021

Ghost skins

Ghost skin is short for ghost skinhead. It refers to a white supremacist who hides his racist beliefs in order to blend into wider society, with the goal of remaining undetected and covertly continuing his Nazi agenda.

Over at least the past 2 decades, white supremacists have been specifically infiltrating law enforcement. Going into the police is an attractive career option to begin with, for someone with controlling tendencies, an interest in power, and often an incentive to use the badge as a shield for one’s own crime schemes.

Ghost skins are rebranded Nazis

White supremacy has a long and brutal history in America. This original stain not only hasn’t been washed clean, but is seeping outwards once again. It’s expanding outward through QAnon and conspiracist fear-mongering on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, the -chans, etc. It’s what resulted in the January 6 deadly siege on the Capitol building where Congress was counting the electoral college votes and certifying Joe Biden’s presidency.

Part of the larger swell of fascism in this country, ghost skins have allowed neo-Nazis and a motley assortment of thugs, violent criminals, and authoritarian personalities to hide out in the fabric of society, waiting to strike when the time is right. When The Storm comes. When it is time, the President tells them, to take their country back.