In Tech Platforms, White Supremacists Found Their Amplifier

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In the 1960s, reporters became attuned to the power they had over the public’s attention, and some tried to use it judiciously. While white supremacists, especially members of the Ku Klux Klan, offered privileged insider access to reporters who provided favorable coverage, the black press chose to ignore the Klan unless it was to highlight the group’s decreasing power. Jewish civil rights organizations suggested that journalists practice “quarantine” and actively choose not to cover the American Nazi Party. The Klan and the Nazis wanted attention. In each of these situations, media outlets acted as gatekeepers that could strategically silence those seeking to use the press as a megaphone.

Social media has fundamentally changed who controls the volume on certain social issues. Facebook, Google, and other platform companies want to believe they have created a circumvention technology that connects people directly to one another without any gates, walls, or barriers. Yet this connectivity has also allowed some of the worst people in this world to find one another, get organized, and use these same platforms to harass and silence others. The platform companies do not know how to fix, or perhaps do not understand, what they have built. In the meantime, previously localized phenomena spread around the globe, so much so that the culture of American-style white supremacy turned up in a terrorist attack on Muslims in New Zealand.

As a sociologist at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, I study how technology is used by social movements, including groups on the far left and the far right. Since the uprisings in the Middle East and elsewhere in 2011, we have witnessed thousands of protests and events inspired by and organized through social media. Progressive social movements routinely use networking technologies to grow their ranks and publicize their ideas. White supremacists have their own ways of deploying the same technology.

In the aftermath of outbursts of violence like the one in New Zealand, traditional news outlets draw heavily upon social-media postings for insights into the perpetrator’s motives and mine them for details that make stories sound more authoritative and vivid. Certain oddball phrases, Internet memes, and obscure message boards garner mainstream attention for the first time. Inevitably, people Google them.

The extra attention that these ideas gain in the aftermath of a violent attack isn’t just an unfortunate side effect of news coverage. It’s the sound system by which extremist movements transmit their ideas to a broader public, and they are using it with more and more skill.    

One variable remains consistent across all networked movements: The moderation policies of different platforms directly affect how groups amplify political ideologies online. For white supremacists and other extremists, they tend to use anonymous message boards to plan manipulation campaigns. These places traffic in racist, sexist, and transphobic content and link to obscure podcasts and blogs. Moderation is rare and tends to occur only when too much attention is drawn to a certain post. In some forums, posts self-delete and leave few traces behind.

Far more useful in reaching a new audience are places like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, which remove objectionable content—but may not do so before it spreads virally.

Taking advantage of that dynamic, the murderer in New Zealand posted a full press kit on an anonymous message board prior to live-streaming his terrifying acts on Facebook. Many have labelled it a manifesto, but it reads more like a collection of copy-and-pasted white supremacist conspiracy theories and memes. It would never have been notable on its own. This individual did not have the power or influence to boost these worn-out tropes. This manifesto could have probably existed in perpetuity on obscure document-hosting sites, and no one would have noticed. For platforms, this kind of content is simply white noise.

Explosive violence was the signal necessary to call attention to these posts. The New Zealand attacker used the live-streaming feature of Facebook to control the narrative, even to the point of saying “subscribe to PewDiePie”—a meme referencing a popular right-wing YouTube influencer—during his broadcast. He succeeded in linking his deeds to PewDiePie’s fame. As of today, Google search returns on “PewDiePie” include references to the Christchurch attack.

The New Zealand attacker also knew others would be recording and archiving the video for further amplification. When choosing to publish on an anonymous forum first, he also ensured that group of sympathetic trolls would re-upload content in the wake of takedowns by the major platforms. We’ve seen this tactic many times before. Sometimes it’s used in playful ways. When Scientology tried to get a leaked promotional video featuring Tom Cruise removed from the Internet, users made a point of reposting it in a variety of places—making it impossible to stamp out. Other instances are darker: Some users attempted to keep videos on YouTube of a misogynistic murderer from Santa Barbara, California. The scale of these efforts can be startling. In the first 24 hours after the Christchurch attack, Facebook alone removed 1.5 million postings of the video. In a statement late Saturday, the company said it was still working around the clock to “remove violating content using a combination of technology and people.”

Weeks before Friday’s attack, the New Zealand shooter littered other social media platforms with memes and articles about immigrants and Muslims to ensure that journalists would have plenty of material to scour. These sorts of cryptic trails are becoming an increasingly common tactic of media manipulators, who anticipate how journalists will cover them. The perpetrator of the New Zealand attacker clearly hoped that a new white supremacist would hear a siren song by directly connecting with his words and deeds.

The sophistication of these manipulators presents a challenge for the media. In describing these dynamics, I’m not mentioning the New Zealand killer’s name. Other than PewDiePie, I’m not citing any of the other personalities and tropes he tried to publicize. Withholding details runs counter to the usual rules of storytelling—show, don’t tell—but it also helps slow down the spread of white-supremacist keywords. Journalists and regular Internet users need to be cognizant of their role in spreading these ideas, especially because the platform companies haven’t recognized theirs.

Just as journalists of the past learned to cover white supremacists differently from other groups, platform companies must address the role their technology plays as the megaphone for white supremacists. In designing, deploying, and scaling up their broadcast technologies, Internet companies need to understand that white supremacists and other extremists will find and exploit the weak points. While Facebook, Google, Twitter and others have resisted calls for accountability, there is no longer any doubt about how these platforms—and the media environment now growing up around them—are used to amplify hate.

The Dying Howls of British Politics

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In the movies, shapeshifters such as werewolves, witches, and demons show their true form when fatally wounded. This week Brexit, 33 months since conception and only a fortnight before its due date, showed what it has always truly been: politicians haranguing each other over esoteric laws, in the name of unbridgeable differences. The sheen of Parliament has fallen away. It is, to copy the front page of at least two major British newspapers this morning, a “meltdown.”

Prime Minister Theresa May has now returned from the continent twice, cap in hand, with a deal for exiting the European Union. Each time the proposal has been destroyed in Parliament. Tonight in London, May will open a third “meaningful vote” on Britain’s departing terms—a phrase which, even by British comedic standards, plumbs new levels of irony.

On Tuesday the chaos peaked after Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, a man whose private-school baritone bellows like the blunderbuss of a 19th century redcoat, announced the U.K. could not leave the EU without remaining committed to the so-called “backstop,” a protocol ensuring no hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, should Britain crash out of the union without a deal. Cox’s ruling, couched in dense legalese, was itself a rebuke of the deal May brokered with Brussels that had boasted of legal “instruments,” reading a lot like last-minute flimflam. The verdict irked many members of Cox’s own Conservative Party, and for hours MPs from all parties confronted him, each frosty comment cloaked in the arcane language of Parliament, which included addressing Cox as “my honorable friend.” (Members of Parliament are not allowed to call each other by name.)

It was a volley of shit sandwiches, British-style. Most spoke only ostensibly to Cox, using him to dig their heels into respective trenches on either side of the Brexit debate.

Those repudiating Cox included members of the anti-EU European Research Group, chaired by Jacob Rees-Mogg, a millionaire hedge-funder who once canvassed for votes with his nanny. The ERG, which wants Brexit at almost any cost, has opposed May’s arguably necessary deal-making concessions at every turn. When Brexit supposedly kicks in, on March 29, they figure, the country will have no deal, and thus “crash out” of the European Union, going from a massive customs union into relative isolation, with all the economic disruption that entails. The ERG, along with a surprisingly large number of other Brexiteers, now believe that’s worth the risk, in order to avoid leaving any loopholes through which undesirable goods, services, or people could pass from Europe to the U.K.

These hardliners’ intransigence may prove their undoing. On Wednesday, a motion to take a no-deal Brexit off the table passed narrowly. (This doesn’t change the fact that a no-deal Brexit is still, legally, the default if the U.K. cannot come up with a plan.) Today May opens a vote on whether to ask the EU’s permission to delay Britain’s withdrawal. Within a week, she will attempt a third time to get her deal through Parliament, with an ultimatum that, should it fail, the exit date may be extended, and Brexit could even be quashed altogether. This should get May’s third deal vote passed, though any deal must ultimately be negotiated by the EU’s remaining 27 member states, and a head-spinning number of possible outcomes remain.

Regular Brits, meanwhile, have almost disappeared from the Brexit conversation. From workers set to lose jobs, to those on the much-debated Irish border and hundreds of thousands of expats across continental Europe whose visa fates are uncertain, the lives of millions have been reduced to percentage points on GDP, cannon fodder in the illusory crusade for sovereignty.

Many of the politicians who claimed to speak for the “person on the Clapham omnibus,” a popular British phrase for an everyman, have long retreated from Brexit’s frontline. Nigel Farage, who triumphantly declared in 2016 that the referendum was Britain’s “Independence Day,” has scaled back his day-to-day political activities and now makes a killing on Fox News and other media channels. If the people ever had a voice, it, like Theresa May’s on Tuesday, has vanished to a barely audible croak.

Entire magazines, podcasts and TV shows exist to service Brexit’s Sisyphean bureaucracy. It sucks the air out of any other story. Last week the debate on a sharp rise in knife crime across the U.K., on the BBC’s flagship political show Question Time, lasted just a few minutes between slanging matches over Brexit. Rarely does any political platform last more than five minutes before somebody mentions the B-word. Britain, a nation of 66 million people, is paralyzed beneath a political impasse that is increasingly confined to Westminster. So much for a popular referendum.

In June 2016, when Britain birthed this monster, I appeared on a German television special that ran until almost 7am the next morning. Towards the end, our host asked the three Brits “What happens next?” Our instant reply: “No idea.” Minutes later we emerged into a sun-soaked Berlin morning, braindead as the clubbers who poured from the entrances of nearby techno dungeons. Nobody spoke. Our little island had chosen to raise its drawbridge to Europe, and all we could see was the moat.

That moat only seems to have grown wider since then. Right-wingers have rallied in hardline, suicidal fervor around a no-deal position, claiming it won’t be as bad as economists predict, while some “Remainers” still cling to the hope of a second “People’s Vote” to cancel Brexit, an equally catastrophic reversal that would drag Britons’ faith in democracy to dangerous new depths. Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left Labour has admirably attempted to defend Britain’s welfare state amidst this three-ring circus. But on Brexit the Labour party is, like the Tories, hopelessly paralyzed. The “customs union” Labour recently proposed, to give the U.K. a say in European economic affairs, would require the EU to break precedent on trade policy. And May will almost certainly not countenance it as an alternative to her own negotiations.

We still have almost no idea what will happen next. The country’s sense of political reality is rapidly fading, like the protagonists lost inside the psychedelic layer cake of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi blockbuster Inception. As one British political commentator yesterday said, we are no longer at the point where MPs are experts conferring information to the media. They are as clueless as everybody else.

It is often too easy to poke fun at British representative democracy—the pageantry, the yelling, the leather seats and ancient, wood-lined halls—but Brexit has truly shown that beneath the pomp, Parliament really is a bunch of mostly wealthy Britons shouting angrily into a void. This week’s pandemonium has revealed that many of them don’t even really know what they’re doing. If the future of the nation weren’t at stake, that could be quite the cockle-warming thought.

Cockle farming, incidentally, may be terminally affected by Brexit.

In Salinas, Puerto Rico, Vulnerable Americans Are Still Trapped in the Ruins Left by Hurricane Maria

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Abandoned by their country, residents refuse to accept the idea that they will never recover.

Nearly a year and a half after Hurricane Maria, about three-fourths of the houses in the Sierra Brava neighborhood of Salinas, Puerto Rico stand battered and empty.

Some families left because their homes were rendered uninhabitable and they had no money to fix them. Others left because they lost their jobs. In responding to Maria, federal agencies had hired some local people, but just for a few months; meanwhile, many other jobs disappeared and have not come back.

Sierra Brava lies low along the south side of PR Route 3 in the shadow of Salinas City Hall. Go for a walk through its now largely silent streets, and one residence in particular will catch your eye. On a corner along Calle Abraham Peña, the neighborhood’s four-block-long main avenue, stands a small grey house trimmed in bright blue and topped by a blue plastic tarp. It is in even worse shape than some of the abandoned houses. But Wilma Miranda Ramos still calls it home.

The hurricane shifted Wilma’s ramshackle little box on its foundation, separating the front and rear halves and giving it a distinct sideways tilt. Thanks to waters that flooded down the nearby Río Nigua from the mountains on the day of the storm, the floors now undulate wildly and give underfoot. Large portions of the ceiling are gone, and blue light streams in through the tarp above. Water pours in with every rainfall.

Wilma explained that she’d been living there six years, but because the house was not hers, she could get no help with repairs. “Now I have a stitched-together roof,” she said, “but as I have nowhere to go I’m still here. Staying here in these conditions is not easy. But since I have my daughter and grandson of four years here with me, living here and not in the street is worth gold.”

Certain now that no federal help will be coming, Wilma said, “I hope my guardian angel arrives soon.”

In the summer of Maria, the region around Salinas had an unemployment rate that hovered between 15 and 20 percent and a poverty rate of 54%. The median household income in Salinas was a little over $16,000. The city was in economic decline, rendering it deeply vulnerable to devastation by any hurricane, and the monstrous Maria was not just any hurricane.

More than a century of U.S. colonial rule, culminating in a harsh federal plan to deal with the island’s debt to vulture capitalists, guaranteed that Maria’s destructive force would be multiplied by socioeconomic vulnerability. To make matters worse, federal disaster assistance to Puerto Ricans after Maria was much smaller and was doled out much more slowly than the assistance that went to Texas and Florida after hurricanes Harvey and Irma that same season.

Across Puerto Rico, according to the New York Times, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was responsible for awarding home-repair grants, rejected 58 percent of applications. When they did provide funds, the amount was often inadequate to restore a severely damaged house; the median grant was only $1,800, compared with about $9,127 in Texas after Harvey.

In Sierra Brava, only a lucky few managed to wrangle any home-restoration money out of FEMA. Roofs and the spaces where roofs used to be remain covered in blue tarp. The tap water is foul and undrinkable. Electricity was restored about four months after Maria, but with rates two to three times the cost of power on the mainland, people are falling farther and farther behind on their bills; as a result they now risk seeing their lights go out again, this time shut off by the power company.

Many houses in the neighborhood have been handed down within the same family for several generations, some going all the way back to Spanish rule. And that became many residents’ biggest problem. For almost a year after the storm, FEMA was approving repair funds only for those who could show proof of ownership, and many did not have sufficient documentation.

FEMA finally started accepting affidavits as proof of ownership last August but did not ensure that previously rejected homeowners were informed of the policy change. Anyway, by then, many had abandoned their ruined houses and moved away for good.

“It has just stayed the same way”

On a dead-end side street near Wilma’s home, another woman called us over to have a look at her house, a more substantial concrete structure with a vivid orange paint job and no roof. Throughout, jagged pieces of blue fabric hung from strands of rope above, as if in some ill-conceived art installation. The house was empty except for a stove and a refrigerator, and a couple of ruined mattresses.

The woman, Socorro Rolon, pointed to the shredded tarp. “This was given to me by the church, and I had to go look for some poles to hold it up, and me and a guy from the church put everything like this.” The tarp didn’t last long. “Everything got wet. My husband and I slept there on those old mattresses over there, and everything was wet, nothing could be saved.”

Socorro and her husband had taken refuge in Salinas’ emergency shelter during the hurricane. “When we returned from the shelter,” she said, “we found total destruction. So we went back to the shelter, but since my husband has had a stroke, we had to return to the house even though it was destroyed. We did what we could. The hurricane destroyed half the world over here. It took the street, and didn’t spare anyone.”

Maria survivors who received home-restoration money from FEMA could apply to a program called Tu Hogar Renace (Your Home Reborn), which sent crews to do repairs. Socorro and her husband received some FEMA money; she didn’t say how much. “So,” she said, “we signed up with Renace, and they came four times to check the house. I have a letter they sent, and it said the house couldn’t be fixed,” at least not for the amount of money they had. “It stayed like this, and we lived in it.” When life in a roofless house finally became unbearable, they rented a room in a neighbor’s house.

Tu Hogar Renace has received almost four thousand complaints about the quality or incompleteness of their work, and the Puerto Rican government has launched an investigation. But that won’t get Socorro out of her predicament. “So,” she said, “we have the house and a check that FEMA gave us, but they didn’t help anymore afterwards, and what we get from Social Security isn’t much. I get about $200 and he gets about $300 or so.”

Where they once lived for free in their own house, now, she said, “we are paying to live where we are because we cannot live on the street.”

In seeking help for home restoration, residents faced several obstacles. The closest FEMA office taking applications was in the city of Guayama, a half-hour drive east of Salinas. For car-less residents whose friends and neighbors had fled—and given the lack of a good public transportation system—that office might as well have been in Washington, DC. Those who could get themselves to Guayama found that application forms were in English, but at least the people in the office spoke Spanish.

Those calling the FEMA help line found non-Spanish-speaking employees on the other end. Residents could also apply online, but for four months after the hurricane, Sierra Brava had no electricity. Even if they got access to the Internet, senior citizens who had no family members nearby to help them were often stymied by the FEMA website. And for those who did get their applications submitted, the inspectors who came to check out their houses spoke only English; the documents they had to sign to receive compensation were also in English.

Waiting for FEMA . . .

Madeleine Flores Tenazoa, 30, had volunteered to be our guide and translator in Salinas. She is a kind of unofficial community organizer, deeply rooted in Sierra Brava. She showed us her grandmother’s house, which had been in her family for many decades. FEMA provided a paltry $400 to repair the home’s severely damaged roof and nothing to replace the contents of its flooded-out rooms.

Madeleine told us, “When they came, they asked, ‘Where is the furniture you lost? My grandma said it was all ruined, so it got hauled away. They said, ‘Well then we aren’t going to give you nothing, since we can’t see what you lost.’”

Her grandmother wasn’t the only one to have this problem, and word got around. In and around Salinas, we saw big curbside piles of ruined furniture and appliances, one bearing a hand-painted sign reading “No toque” (“Don’t touch”). Madeleine said that if city workers come now to remove the debris, “Those people say, ‘No, no, no! We are waiting for FEMA. They need to see what we lost!’ But come on, it’s been a year and a half. FEMA’s not coming.”

About a mile south of Sierra Brava is Playa de Salinas, the seafront area that Maria hit even harder than the central city. Riding through the area with Madeleine, we noticed an elderly woman sitting on a stack of concrete blocks in the dirt outside a small half-built house. She had a push broom with her and was shelling gandules—beans she’d plucked from the large bushes that grew nearby.

The woman, Fela Suren, called us over. She said she was “eighty something” years old. The house was being built for her by a local church, but the work was on pause until she or they could get more money together. Next to the unfinished house stood her longtime home, minus its roof and a couple of walls. It was clear that before Maria, it had been a larger, more attractive house than her new concrete-block one was going to be.

Most of Fela’s furniture and appliances sat exposed to the Caribbean sun and rain. A small, new section of roof covered only the kitchen area, which was now serving as Fela’s bedroom. The room was now open to the outdoors on one side. Her bed had big hardwood head- and foot-boards and was draped with  mosquito netting. Out back, her well’s hand pump still produced water, but it was a milky yellow color.

Fela said she has no family in Salinas, but she has good neighbors. One of them cooks meals for her and brings her water to drink. She spends her days tidying up in and around her ruined house and the construction site. As Fela spoke, she was all smiles. At eighty-something, she seemed to be leaving the past in the past and looking to the future. But in that future, she declared, “I never want to see anything like that hurricane again.”

The story of recovery from a devastating hurricane like Maria will always be a long and painful one—but it has to begin somewhere. For many residents of Puerto Rico, that story still hasn’t started. Until something changes, their story is one of survival, not recovery. It isn’t a nice one, but they want every one of us to hear it.

As Madeleine urged in a parting comment, “People need to come here and see how we are trying to live.”

Climate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Every year, the world’s elite gather like the Illuminati in the Swiss chalet town of Davos for the World Economic Forum, where they discuss how to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. Often that results in comically out-of-touch conversations, such as the idea, put forth at this year’s summit, that digital “upskilling” can solve economic inequality. But sometimes it provides a platform for someone like the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who appeared before these elites like the prophet Cassandra.

“Either we prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming or we don’t,” she said at the summit in January. “Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t. Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.”

Thunberg’s bluntness is warranted: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last October that humanity has roughly twelve years left to prevent a rise in world temperatures that would make civilization unsustainable in its current form by the century’s end. Virtually all of the Davos attendees will be dead by the time that happens. Thunberg and the rest of her generation are now desperately trying to get them and other world leaders to act before climate change becomes irreversible.

Widespread student protests are largely unheard of in the United States, but there are notable exceptions. The marches and sit-ins against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s come to mind, as do last year’s walkouts against gun violence. In each case, young people were angry about a mortal threat to their lives: dying in a futile overseas conflict, or being murdered in one’s classroom by a heavily armed gunman. This year, another student movement is taking shape, this time to stop an existential threat to humanity itself. In February, thousands of students walked out of schools across Europe to call for stronger international action. Another student strike is planned for Friday in the United States and more than 70 other countries.

The anti-war left ultimately succeeded in pressuring Washington to abandon the conflict in Vietnam, but it took around a decade for small campus protests to grow into a mass movement, and their tactics sparked a conservative backlash that helped elect (and reelect) a Republican president. Millennials hoping to force leaders to act on climate change can learn something from their success—and even more from their failures.

The ruling gerontocracy won’t make it easy for younger Americans to translate their political energy into policy. HuffPost’s Michael Hobbs argued earlier this month that age may be the defining split in our democracy. Older Americans, he noted, are more likely to vote in elections and three times as likely to donate to political campaigns. They also tend to live in smaller rural states, giving them disproportionate influence in the Electoral College and the Senate. “Without a dramatic increase in immigration or a sudden doubling of the birth rate, this is likely to be a permanent shift,” Hobbs wrote.

These forces helped elevate Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. His campaign was built around a weaponized nostalgia of sorts—the “again” in “Make America Great Again”—that appealed to older white voters who resisted cultural changes that shaped the Obama era. He also broke with GOP orthodoxy on the campaign trail by refusing to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. His strategy worked. According to exit polls, the majority of Americans over 40 sided with Trump, including 62 percent of white Americans between 40 and 64 years old and 58 percent of those older than 65.

Trump loves to appropriate old political slogans. “Let’s make America great again” was Reagan’s theme during the 1980 election. “America first” was the rallying cry of isolationists before World War II. Most apt of all was his occasional reference to his base as the “silent majority,” a phrase first popularized by Richard Nixon in 1969. Nixon used it to describe what he saw as a clear division in those turbulent years. It implied that civil rights and anti-war activists—and the urban intellectuals who favored them—were a noisy minority, and that most Americans were working-class people who opposed social change.

Nixon’s theory was somewhat vindicated after he won re-election in 1972 in a 49-state landslide (though of course an electoral majority is far from an actual majority of the population). While Trump appeals to a similar demographic, they are neither silent nor a majority, electoral or otherwise. He lost the popular vote in 2016 by roughly three million votes and only won thanks to the flawed Electoral College. A similar bias toward smaller states kept the Senate in Republican hands. Thanks to a decade of partisan gerrymandering, Democrats had to win a wave election in the 2018 midterms just to secure a workable majority in the House of Representatives.

Trump regularly denies that climate change is real, once tweeting that it was “created by and for the Chinese” to make America less economically competitive. Since taking office, he’s withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate agreement, championed the U.S. coal mining industry over renewable energy, and placed dogmatic deregulators in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump once reportedly told aides that he wasn’t worried about the national debt because “I won’t be here.” That attitude also sums up his, and most Republicans’, approach to climate change.

But their nonchalance is at odds with public opinion on the issue. A Yale/George Mason University poll in February found that fewer than 60 percent of Americans worried about climate change before Trump’s election; that number is now approaching 70 percent. The Obama administration had signed international climate accords and pushed the Clean Power Plan to rein in carbon emissions, giving the appearance of progress on the issue. By shattering those relatively modest efforts, Trump and his allies may inadvertently have convinced more Americans to support climate action.

Americans, like other animals, occasionally devour their young. The last two decades of policy have not been kind to millennials. Thanks to the Great Recession, they earn less money than boomers and Generation X did at their age. They’re buying fewer homes, paying off their student debts more slowly, and putting less money into their savings. Millennials enjoy far less economic and social stability than their parents did, and it’s taking a psychic toll. Oh, and the world is ending.

There’s a cottage industry, especially within conservative circles, that tries to blame young Americans for their own problems. Millennials are cast as lazy, coddled, and censorious, thus the supposed proliferation of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” on college campuses and the push for better labor conditions in the workplace. Fox News, whose average viewer is 65 years old, is particularly fond of describing young Americans as naive and out of touch. This backlash is nothing new: A Gallup poll after the Kent State shootings in 1970 found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students after National Guard fired into a crowd of protesters, killing four students.

Americans’ views on climate change vary significantly by age. A January survey by Data for Progress found that a majority of millennials and Generation X support the Green New Deal, while a majority of boomers and the Silent Generation oppose it. The generational divide is even apparent among conservatives. In a May 2018 Pew survey, only 44 percent of Republican millennials said they wanted to expand offshore oil and gas drilling compared to 71 percent of Republican boomers. A similar gap—43 percent of young Republicans versus 73 percent of older ones—emerged on support for expanded coal mining. What explains this stark age gap? Older Americans tend to be more conservative in general, and they would bear the highest costs for combating climate change while seeing the least benefit from them.

Like the Vietnam protesters of the ’60s and ’70s, millennials have shown a knack for mass organizing. Students at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, led nationwide protests against gun violence after 17 of their classmates were massacred last year. The March for Our Lives last year became one of the largest national demonstrations in U.S. history, drawing almost 200,000 people in Washington, D.C., alone. Thunberg, the 16-year-old activist who spoke at Davos, cited their work as an inspiration for the student strikes.

What’s more, young also seem to have avoided some of the pitfalls that anti-war protesters fell into almost 50 years ago. Young people also seem to understand that they need to wield political power through the governing process, not just outside of it. Trump’s presidency prompted hundreds of Democratic millennials to run for elected office, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and the Green New Deal’s highest-profile champion.

Millennials also seem to have rejected violence as a political tactic. Though the anti-war movement as a whole wasn’t violent, parts of, notably the Weather Underground, committed domestic terrorism. It was also a remarkably violent era in general: The FBI tabulated more than 2,700 bombings in the U.S. in an 18-month span between 1971 and 1972. That helped fuel an electoral backlash from moderates and conservatives, aiding Nixon’s election bids in 1968 and 1972. The anti-war movement ultimately succeeded in shifting public opinion against the war, and Nixon—fresh off his reelection rout of George McGovern, who had advocated for immediate withdrawal—wound down America’s involvement in Vietnam. But the cost was a generational shift toward conservatism.

The Vietnam War was a clear mortal threat to young people, tens of millions of whom were eligible to be drafted; nearly 60,000 Americans were killed in the conflict. Climate change presents a different sort of threat to millennials. It’s less immediate than an ongoing war, less visceral than being shot at. But ultimately it will prove more catastrophic. Even if drastic action is taken over the next decade, the impact of rising global temperatures on civilization will dwarf the Vietnam War’s bloodshed. The World Health Organization has projected that come 2030, climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year.

Combatting climate change will take much more effort than ending the Vietnam War, and much longer. It will require a mass movement unlike any America, or even the world, has ever seen. It will also require millennials to succeed where the anti-war left failed a half-century ago: at the ballot box. There can’t be meaningful action as long as climate deniers and slow-walkers are in charge in Washington. The challenge will be to convince enough older voters that global warming is every bit as frightening to millennials as the Vietnam War was to boomers.

“Adults keep saying, ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope,’” Thunberg, who was nominated Wednesday for the Nobel Peace Prize, said in January. “But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

Bed-Stuy Vs. Felicia The Degenerate

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Laurie Miller, 58, a black woman from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, was just minding her business, living alone in the same row house she moved into as a child in 1974, when she got a new next-door neighbor: Charlotte Taillor, a white queer feminist who works as a dominatrix and BDSM instructor. When she saw all the weird men coming and going from the house, Miller raised hell. Taillor doesn’t live there, but runs her dominatrix training academy out of it. The New York Times went to a recent community meeting about the controversy. Excerpt:

One of Ms. Taillor’s supporters said critics just objected to the nature of her work and wouldn’t care if she were teaching knitting.

Ms. Miller said afterward that neighbors were able to hear “things like whips and chains and moans and stuff like that.”

“These brownstones are old and hollow,” she said.

Another block neighbor, Mary Patrick, said at one point about Ms. Taillor: “She should leave. She should take that to 42nd Street.”

Ms. Taillor told her critics in the room: “You don’t have to kink-shame or say that people are creepy because of what they enjoy doing.”

She added that her hope when she moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant was “to have a nice relationship with a nice community of woke people.”

“Oh, ‘woke’!” Ms. Miller fired back. “Bye, Felicia!”

Ha! (If you don’t get the joke, look here for the explanation.)

Read the whole thing. Even though Taillor finally agreed to clear out, you’ve got to read the story to find out what Laurie Miller is doing now. She is not letting up! I’m guessing that’s her yelling on the street in this recent local TV news report about the controversy, in which the dominatrix complains that her angry neighbors are hurting her feelings. Shouldn’t she be thanking them for that? I’m so confused.

Here’s what I’m not confused about: Laurie Miller is the hero America needs! It might be Weimar America elsewhere, but not on her block of Bed-Stuy.

JOE A GO!

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Exclusive: Biden to run for White House, says Dem lawmaker

Former Vice President Joe BidenJoseph (Joe) Robinette BidenFeehery: Dems’ embrace of socialism makes a Trump reelection look inevitable Press: Which way do Dems go in 2020? GOP pollster says Biden, Sanders are polling low for how well-known they are MORE will run for president in 2020, a senior Democratic lawmaker told The Hill on Tuesday, a move that will shake up the crowded Democratic primary field and make him the clear front-runner for his party’s nomination against President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Stone’s defense denies using court to generate publicity for his book release Ocasio-Cortez: Trump sets tone of ‘misogyny, racism, conspiracy theory-ism’ MORE.

“I’m giving it a shot,” Biden said matter-of-factly during a phone call with a House Democratic lawmaker within the past week — a conversation the congressman recounted to The Hill and interpreted as a sure sign that Biden will run in 2020.

In the brief phone call, the former vice president asked if he could bounce some campaign strategy ideas off the lawmaker and invited the lawmaker to sit down with him in person in the near future. Biden also said he hoped to have the lawmaker’s support, something the lawmaker did not commit to.

Biden responded that there was no harm if they keep talking, according to the lawmaker who spoke to The Hill on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the phone conversation.

Biden did not share any details about when or where he planned to make his formal presidential announcement, the lawmaker said. Biden and his wife, Jill, just returned from vacation in St. Croix in the Caribbean, where they reportedly discussed potential pitfalls and began finalizing their plans, The Associated Press reported.

Biden spokesman Bill Russo refuted the idea that the former vice president is absolutely running: “He has not made a final decision. No change.”

But at an event with firefighters Tuesday morning, Biden teased a 2020 presidential run as the crowd chanted, “Run, Joe, run!”

“I appreciate the energy you all showed when I got up here,” Biden told an energetic crowd at the International Association of Fire Fighters’ annual conference in Washington, D.C. “Save it a little longer, I may need it in a few weeks. Be careful what you wish for.”

His entry into the race has been largely expected. In recent weeks, the 76-year-old Biden has been laying the groundwork for what would be his third and final presidential bid, seeking support from Democratic donors, lawmakers and others in his political circle.

Biden, who served as President Obama’s vice president for two terms, also has a team of campaign aides already assembled for the moment he decides to launch a White House bid, which is expected in early April.

Senate and House sources said Biden has been reaching out to allies on Capitol Hill with increasing frequency in recent weeks, having conversations about what his potential candidacy would look like. Biden, Democrats said, has talked about how he could win in the primary, making the case that a growing Democratic field would work in his favor and that, because of things like his blue-collar appeal, he would be the strongest candidate to beat Trump in a general election.

Rep. Cedric RichmondCedric Levon RichmondCPAC attendees say Biden poses greatest threat to Trump The Hill’s Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill’s Morning Report – What to watch for as Mueller’s probe winds down MORE (D-La.), the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, has been speaking to Biden regularly and urging him to jump in the race. Richmond said he believes that Biden is “95 percent” committed to running and has been coordinating calls between Biden and other members of Congress. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie ThompsonBennie Gordon ThompsonNielsen testifies: Five things you need to know Dem to Trump official: ‘White babies would not be treated the way these babies of color are being treated’ Pence uses NY Times, Washington Post headlines to defend Trump’s claim of border crisis MORE (D-Miss.) said he has been informed that he’s on a “call list” and Biden should be reaching out soon.

One source familiar with Biden’s thinking says it’s all part of the former vice president’s mission “to check all boxes” before he officially announces he’s running.

“He’s basically in. He’s just running the traps, as he says,” the source said.

In a Monday interview with CBS, Democratic Sen. Christopher CoonsChristopher (Chris) Andrew CoonsSixteen years later, let’s finally heed the call of the 9/11 Commission  Senate Dems introduce bill demanding report on Khashoggi killing Trump got in Dem’s face over abortion at private meeting: report MORE, who now holds the Delaware Senate seat Biden held for 36 years, said he was “confident” that Biden would run.

“If he gets in, he’s the front-runner,” conceded a second House Democratic lawmaker, who has already endorsed another candidate for president. “He’s the standard that others will have to measure up to in terms of policy knowledge, in terms of his ability to run a presidential campaign, and folks who are close to him in the polls will have to compare themselves to Biden’s strengths.”

Rep. Gerry ConnollyGerald (Gerry) Edward ConnollyDems struggle to turn page on Omar controversy Questions mount over Cohen pardon claims Progressives come to Omar’s defense MORE (D-Va.), a former Biden staffer during the 1980s, hasn’t spoken to Biden recently but said there is nothing stopping his former boss from running again.

“At this stage in life, he doesn’t have a lot to lose and has a lot to gain. And he has a lot to offer the country,” Connolly told The Hill outside of the Capitol. “He offers the prospect of some desperately needed healing in this country after this scourge.”

A new Monmouth University poll had Biden leading the pack, with 28 percent of likely Democratic voters saying they support him in the primary. Sen. Bernie SandersBernard (Bernie) SandersTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Trump tries to win votes in Senate fight Hillicon Valley: US threatens to hold intel from Germany over Huawei | GOP senator targets FTC over privacy | Bipartisan bill would beef up ‘internet of things’ security | Privacy groups seize on suspended NSA program | Tesla makes U-turn MORE (I-Vt.) was a close second, with 25 percent, followed by Sens. Kamala HarrisKamala Devi HarrisTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Feehery: Dems’ embrace of socialism makes a Trump reelection look inevitable Press: Which way do Dems go in 2020? MORE (D-Calif.), with 10 percent, and Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth Ann WarrenTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Facebook restores Warren ads removed for criticizing the platform Feehery: Dems’ embrace of socialism makes a Trump reelection look inevitable MORE (D-Mass.), with 8 percent.

But it won’t be smooth sailing for Biden. There is a concern among Democrats that while he would make a strong general election candidate, he would have a tough time in a primary because the party and many of his potential presidential rivals have tacked increasingly to the left.

The former vice president will also face decades-worth of opposition research — including his comments on the crime bill and his vote on the Iraq War — which portrays Biden as out of touch with the Democratic Party. And in the era of “Me Too,” he will face criticism for his treatment of Anita Hill when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee during Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings.

One Democratic lawmaker who spoke with Biden last week and has been encouraging him to run said the former vice president is very close to announcing his White House bid, barring some unforeseen complication.

“He’s 95 percent there, but he’s not 100 percent,” the Democratic lawmaker said. “He wants to make sure the due diligence is done, but it’s no secret he wants to go.”

Despite the swarm of senators already in the race — Sanders, Harris and Warren, as well as Cory BookerCory Anthony BookerPress: Which way do Dems go in 2020? GOP pollster says Biden, Sanders are polling low for how well-known they are O’Rourke weighing possible Iowa trip ahead of 2020 announcement: report MORE (D-N.J.), Kirsten GillibrandKirsten Elizabeth GillibrandPress: Which way do Dems go in 2020? The Hill’s 12:30 Report: Trump unveils budget wish list with domestic cuts, defense hikes Tax Foundation: Bill to restore full SALT deduction would benefit high earners MORE (D-N.Y.) and Amy KlobucharAmy Jean KlobucharTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Press: Which way do Dems go in 2020? Americans’ complaints over big tech haven’t hurt business, says GOP pollster MORE (D-Minn.) — one Democratic senator is hoping Biden joins the group.

“I love him,” the senator told The Hill, “and think he’s got a unique ability to connect with Americans in the Rust Belt who feel left behind by government.”