Christian Fascist Groypers harassing LGBTQ pride month events
https://www.salon.com/2022/06/09/exclusive-self-described-christian-fascist-movement-is-trying-to-sabotage-lgbtq-pride-month/
Excerpt:
On Saturday morning in the Dallas "gayborhood" of Cedar Springs, an LGBTQ bar called Mr. Misster hosted a family-friendly "drag queen brunch" advertised with the tongue-in-cheek slogan, "Drag Your Kids to Pride." The event was intended to be light-hearted, featuring musical chairs, mocktails and a chance for kids to vogue alongside the performers.
But before the doors had even opened, the whole thing turned ugly, as dozens of right-wing protesters showed up on the sidewalk outside, recording attendees, calling them "disgusting" "groomers" or "faggots" who wanted "to cut the dicks off of little boys" and even following and heckling both performers and attending families as they walked back to their cars.
"It's going to be so kek when we take away all your rights," one protester associated with the white Christian nationalist America First/groyper movement told a counterprotester who was defending the event, using movement slang that roughly means "lol." In response, hard-right YouTuber and protest leader John Doyle, who was standing nearby, added with a smirk, "Every single one of them."
ARA Note: This is an outrage. We urge all our readers to turn out for the July 3 Los Angeles LGBTQIA+ Liberation March from Grand Park to Pershing Square to stand up for all queers and to provide community defense, rather than relying on a cop presence that is antithetical to the spirit of Stonewall, which was a rebellion against police abuse led by trans women of color.
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Excerpt:
A suburban Seattle city will pay more than $1.5 million to settle a dispute with a former assistant police chief who was disciplined for posting a Nazi rank insignia on his office door and joking about the Holocaust.
Former Kent Assistant Police Chief Derek Kammerzell, who had been with the department for nearly three decades, was initially given two weeks of unpaid leave after the 2020 incident. Outraged residents and members of the Jewish community prompted Mayor Dana Ralph to put Kammerzell on paid administrative leave and demand his resignation.
The city’s attempt to essentially discipline Kammerzell a second time led to a dispute between his lawyers and the city that appeared headed for litigation. But interim city Chief Administrative Officer Arthur “Pat” Fiztpatrick, who is also the city attorney, said Friday the city had resolved the matter through negotiation, The Seattle Times reported.
Ralph, in calling for Kammerzell’s resignation in January, acknowledged that the decision to revisit the discipline issue would likely “come at a high cost.” The city said Friday it would pay him $1,520,000 to resign.
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Video footage of Mexicana woman field worker who heard about Uvalde shootings, drove forty miles, went in and got her kids out while police stood around waiting as shooter continued killings. Then she was threatened with arrest by the police for talking to the media!
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Paladino's praise for Hitler didn't deter pro-Trump GOP leader rep. Elise Stefanik from endorsing him for Congress.
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NY GOP Congressional Candidate said “Hitler is the Kind of Leader We Need”
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Carl Paladino, a former Republican candidate for NYS governor, has the backing of #3 GOP Congressional leader Stefanik in the primary June 28.
Excerpt:
Carl P. Paladino, a Republican running for a House seat in Western New York, praised Adolf Hitler last year for inspiring his followers, describing the fascist dictator as “the kind of leader we need today.”
Mr. Paladino did not specifically condone Hitler’s actions in his remarks, which he made in a 2021 radio interview that was unearthed on Thursday. But he said he was impressed by how the German leader and head of the Nazi Party “aroused the crowd” in his speeches and suggested that Republicans in New York and Washington ought to emulate his approach.
“He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him,” he said in the interview, resurfaced by the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters. “I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.”
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Excerpt:
Fresh from rattling the saber against China with his Asian allies and lamenting the loss of life in Uvalde TX (surely there is no connection between the US military-industrial complex and war machine, and the unbelievable and intolerable incidence of mass shootings in the US), Joe Biden is coming to Los Angeles to address the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) “Summit of the Americas” during the first full week in June. Demonstrations are planned on Wednesday, June 8 by the “Anti-Imperialist Summit of Nuestra America”, initiated by Union del Barrio, and on Friday, June 10 after a three-day “Peoples Summit for Democracy”, held at Los Angeles Trade Technical College near the OAS venue at the LA Convention Center.
Not present for the OAS Summit will be Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela, banned from participation by the US State Department. Nor will the President of Mexico attend because of the ban on those others. And most of the Caribbean countries said they would not attend if the US invited its puppet, Juan Guaido, to “represent” Venezuela. The US also denied visas to a couple of dozen Cubans, doctors and other medical workers invited to address the People’s Summit for Democracy. The Anti-imperialist Summit of Nuestra America broke the ban by having a Cuban spokeswoman and a Venezuelan labor leader and legislative deputy address their gathering via zoom, along with local representatives of the Sandinistas from Nicaragua’s FSLN and of the FMLN in neighboring El Salvador, where the right-wing populist government of Bukkele has imposed a “state of emergency” over-riding all individual rights in the wake of the collapse of Bitcoin cryptocurrency, which Bukkele had made legal tender in the country.
The US bans and the response to them, along with the general refusal of governments across “Latin” America and the Caribbean to fall in line with the US/NATO sanctions on Russia over its war with Ukraine, underline the diminished power of the US, which can no longer expect its neighbors to respond, “How high?” when it commands, “Jump!” Even as the US invites its NATO allies like France, the UK and the Netherlands to participate in military “exercises” in South America along with its ‘Southern Command”, and the government of Colombia deepened its partnership with NATO, the people of Colombia voted for a former anti-capitalist guerrilla leader number one in their recent elections with over 40% compared to 28% for the second-place finisher, an anti-establishment right-wing populist.
But the question remains, here in the “belly of the beast”, what people in this country can do to further weaken the US imperial system, to strengthen the popular forces internationally, and to build relations of conscious solidarity among poor and working people through the Americas and the world. If US hegemony is weakening in the world at large, the domination of imperialism and monopoly capitalism, even in its most reactionary variants, seems undiminished in the US. The weakness of the US left has material consequences on liberatory class and anti-colonial struggle throughout the world.
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Excerpt:
KPFK itself is once again searching for a new General Manager. Paid staff opposition and a lack of board or upper management support forced the last one out, and there has been a revolving door of interims, and an atmosphere of fear and hostility that at least one of them generated in a thankfully brief tenure must be overcome. KPFK need to undertake a turn-around, which should be based on an increased commitment to the long-time Pacifica Mission of peace, conflict resolution, free speech, uncensored news and information, and community cultural expressions including drama and music. Previous GMs have repeatedly and wrongly tried to economize by firing the news staff and ending the local newscast in favor of carrying the (surprisingly-mainstream) "Pacifica Evening News" from KPFA in Berkeley.
Too much of the programming consists of cold-war liberals closely wedded to the Democratic Party and its support for the US war machine. This is in line with the so-called Peace & Security Funding Group, a group of foundations and well-heeled individuals who are trying to use the power of the purse to get peace groups to line up behind Biden's foreign policy and his State Department team and priorities. This would be the kiss of death for KPFK and Pacifica's ability to air dissenting and critical views from the left .
The station and the Foundation must bring their operations into the 21st century, both in the effective use of social media and podcasting to share and promote content, and in bringing a new generation of content-producing grassroots activists and artivists onto their airwaves, not just as guests for gatekeepers, but as producers and programmers in their own right. Hopefully this will begin to take shape and have an impact under a new GM. But that requires a commitment to greater diversity, more outreach and community engagement, especially with a new generation to whom Pacifica's past glories may mean little. It will require identifying and cultivating grassroots voices and the solutions that they are organizing and implementing to the climate crisis, the threat of war and fascism, the reality of a reckoning with racism, the new situation of labor and working people prepared to strike or quit for dignity and safety, etc. etc.
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Whole issue in PDF format here:
https://antiracist.org/pdf-of-ttt-volume-34-3-june-july-2022/
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