TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Candace is attacked – even when she’s right (4:27) Ben Shapiro’s comments (12:50) The emotional response to news out of Israel (23:05) Nikki Haley vs. free speech (30:34) 2024 predictions pic.twitter.com/VOThqpQQ48
dailycaller | The Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing announced Friday that the outlet has severed ties with Candace Owens. Owens hosted a show on The Daily Wire after becoming a prominent name in the conservative movement. The outlet abruptly made the announcement of her departure for reasons currently unknown. “Daily Wire and Candace Owens have ended their relationship,” Boreing announced without an explanation.
NYPost | A Georgia district attorney accused of hiring her lover
to prosecute former President Trump broke her silence on the
controversy, saying she and the prosecutor were targeted because they
are black.
The comments were Willis’ first time addressing the allegations
publicly — but she neither confirmed nor denied the claims lobbed at her
and special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who helped secure an indictment
against the former Republican president in an election interference
case.
“They only attacked one,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis
Sunday at Big Bethel AME Church in Atlanta. “First thing they say, ‘Oh,
she’s gonna play the race card now.’
“But no God, isn’t it them that’s playing the race card when they only question one?”
She called Wade “a great friend and a great lawyer,” along with a
“superstar,” but failed to mention him by name once during her more than
30 minute speech, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The pair were accused by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman of having a
“clandestine” and “improper” affair when appointments were made for the
2020 election interference case.
Roman, a former official on the Trump 2020 campaign, argued in a
court filing last week that the integrity of the case had been
compromised by their alleged affair and asked that all charges against
him be dropped.
“The district attorney chose to appoint her romantic partner, who at
all times relevant to this prosecution has been a married man,” the
filing read.
Roman contended in the filing that Wade used some of the $654,000 in
legal fees he’d earned on the case to take Willis on vacations to “Napa
Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean.”
Willis pointed out during her speech that the other two prosecutors
assigned to the case, Anna Green Cross and John Floyd, both are white,
and noted that allegations have only emerged targeting the two prominent
black members of the prosecution — her and Wade.
“Isn’t it them playing the race card when they constantly think I
need someone from some other jurisdiction in some other state to tell me
how to do a job I’ve been doing almost 30 years?” she asked.
Roman was unmoved by Willis accusations of the charges being racially charged.
Harvard President Claudine Gay participated in the political assassination of a brilliant black scholar at Harvard named Roland Fryer. This is just one of the many problematic aspects of her career. @BillAckman
— Colonel Kurtz -Controversy, Depp/MeToo/Manson Etc. (@colonelkurtz99) December 12, 2023
yahoo | During the weekend that the corporation met to decide Gay’s future,
she participated in some of those discussions and had the opportunity to
review the corporation’s Dec. 12 statement in her defense before it
became public, two people involved in the process said.
According
to a person consulted by the corporation, the body discussed but opted
against releasing a detailed, public independent review in the style of
Stanford University, whose president resigned this summer.
Harvard’s
board is led by Pritzker, who was an early backer of Barack Obama’s
presidency and later served as secretary of commerce under his
administration. Despite her leadership role, Pritzker, a champion of
Gay’s, has not spoken publicly since the controversy began, leaving the
corporation to communicate through a single public statement.
The
other 10 members, in addition to Gay, include relatively unknown
financiers, donors, a former justice of the Supreme Court of California,
a former CEO of American Express and former presidents of Princeton
University and Amherst College.
The board meets several times a
year, and members serve six-year terms that can be renewed once. How it
identifies and chooses its members, who are known as fellows, is
something of a mystery. Outgoing members help select their own
replacements.
Pritzker has been the principal point of contact for major donors and others seeking to counsel Harvard on the path forward.
The
board seeks to build a well-rounded group of people who have
complementary expertise to help govern the university, said Richard
Chait, a professor emeritus at Harvard who studied governance in higher
education and was an adviser when the Harvard Corp. expanded in size
more than a decade ago.
Even after expanding, the panel is still
smaller than the boards of many other leading universities, according to
Chait, who said the average private university has about 30 or more
board members.
Board members are not paid for their role. “Not
only is it unpaid, but there is an expectation of a reverse cash flow —
all trustees have an expectation that the institution will be a
philanthropic priority consistent with their means,” Chait said.
The
corporation has weighed in on key questions — for example, in 2016, it
approved a change to the shield of Harvard’s law school, which was
modeled on the crest of an 18th-century enslaver.
In the past
several weeks, more faculty members, donors, alumni and outsiders have
raised questions about the corporation’s apparent failure to vet Gay’s
scholarship before promoting her to the presidency in July and for its
subsequent silence in recent weeks.
“The corporation should have
done their homework, and apparently they did not,” said Avi Loeb, a
Harvard science professor who has been publicly critical of the school’s
response after the Hamas attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people
were killed.
“They don’t engage in criticism the way they should,”
Loeb said of the corporation. “They don’t want the people who disagree
with them to speak with them.”
glennloury |Roland Fryer is the most gifted economist of his generation. Not the most gifted black economist of his generation, the most gifted economist of his generation. Period.
He
was tenured at Harvard at the age of 30, he was awarded the American
Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, he received a MacArthur
“Genius” grant, his publications appeared in some of the most
distinguished journals in the field, and his scholarship was regularly
covered in the mainstream media. His research upends many commonly held
assumptions about race, discrimination, education, and police violence.
It is tremendously creative, rigorous, and
consequential scholarship, and it cannot be simply written off because
it happens to challenge the status quo.
To do the kind of
work Roland does, you have to be more than brilliant. You have to be
fearless. And I cannot help suspect that now Roland is paying the price
for pursuing the truth wherever it leads. Several years ago, he was
accused of sexual harassment by a disgruntled ex-assistant. In my
opinion and that of many others, those accusations are baseless. But
Harvard has used them as a pretext to shut down Roland’s lab, to curtail
his teaching, and to marginalize him within the institution.
I’ll
not mince words. Those at Harvard responsible for this state of affairs
should be utterly ashamed of themselves. They have unnecessarily,
heedlessly tarnished the career of an historically great economist.
Again, I can't help but suspect that they have effectively buried vital
research not because it was poorly done but because they found the
results to be politically inconvenient. “Veritas” indeed.
Now,
I have been a friend and mentor to Roland for some time, and I’ve taken
great pleasure in watching him succeed. I can see how one might view my
criticisms of Harvard as biased. But this matter has been investigated
by others with no personal stake in Roland's career who have found
Harvard’s actions and reporting on them by the New York Times to be deeply flawed. I would point readers who want to know more to Stuart Taylor Jr.’s fine reporting for Real Clear Investigations.
Along
the same lines, the filmmaker Rob Montz has made a short documentary
about this subject. I’m interviewed in it alongside others who see this
fiasco for what it is, some of whom have much to lose by publicly coming
to Roland’s defense. People need to see this film. They need to know
the truth about Roland Fryer. So I ask you to watch and to judge for
yourself, and if you feel so moved, to share it as widely as possible.
epochtimes | An attorney for New York City Mayor Eric Adams confirmed on Friday
that the FBI seized the mayor's phones and an iPad as part of an
investigation into his campaign financing.
“After
learning of the federal investigation, it was discovered that an
individual had recently acted improperly. In the spirit of transparency
and cooperation, this behavior was immediately and proactively reported
to investigators. The Mayor has been and remains committed to
cooperating in this matter," his attorney Boyd Johnson said in a
statement.
"On Monday night, the FBI approached the mayor
after an event. The Mayor immediately complied with the FBI’s request
and provided them with electronic devices. The mayor has not been
accused of any wrongdoing and continues to cooperate with the
investigation."
Mr. Adams also denied any wrongdoing in a statement.
“As
a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to
follow the law and fully cooperate with any sort of investigation—and I
will continue to do exactly that. I have nothing to hide,” he stated.
Last week, the FBI raided the
home of Brianna Suggs, one of the mayor's chief political consultants,
after which the mayor also issued a statement that he was innocent of
any wrongdoing.
“I feel extremely comfortable about how I comply
with rules and procedures. I’ve stated this over and over again. I hold
myself to a high standard, I hold my campaign to a high standard, and I
hold my staffers at city hall to a high standard,” he said. He also said
that Ms. Suggs was a "real professional" and would remain on his team
for his 2025 reelection campaign.
“I am outraged and angry if anyone attempted to use the campaign to manipulate our democracy and defraud our campaign,” Mr. Adams said in the statement.
“I
want to be clear, I have no knowledge, direct or otherwise, of any
improper fundraising activity—and certainly not of any foreign money.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in Manhattan declined to comment.
Investigation
The FBI has not made public details of the investigation, but a search warrant was first reported by the New York Times, which reported that the federal investigation is related to alleged corruption in Mr. Adams's 2021 campaign and possible ties to the Turkish government.
The seized devices, which the FBI has likely made copies of, were returned days later.
The mayor's staff has confirmed that his office has met with the federal prosecutors, but did not disclose what they discussed.
After
the raid on Ms. Suggs's home, media reported that the relationship
between the mayor's 2021 campaign and Brooklyn-based KSK Construction
Group's ties to Turkey is the center of the probe.
The
KSK Construction Group owns apartment buildings and condominiums
throughout the city. It is owned by the KiSKA Construction Corp., a
company that possesses two branches of a Turkish hotel chain in the
United States.
Turkey
Mr. Adams has visited Turkey multiple times, including as part of official duties in different public offices.
“I’m
probably the only mayor in the history of this city that has not only
visited Turkey once, but I think I’m on my sixth or seventh visit to
Turkey,” Mr. Adams said at a Turkish flag-raising ceremony in New York recently.
Two of those trips were made while he was the Brooklyn Borough President.
Campaign records show that he received donations from three members of a foundation opened by the son of the Turkish president.
At an event this week, the mayor answered reporters' questions about the probe and his ties to Turkey.
“We
just thought it was a great opportunity to exchange ideas as we do with
all these…countries and we want to attract businesses here,” he said of the trips, according to The City.
“So
Turkey as well as any other country, I want to attract people to the
city. There’s nothing specific about that one particular country.”
He added that he frequently told his staff to "follow the law."
“I
just strongly believe you have to follow the law. It would really shock
me if someone that was hired by my campaign did something that was
inappropriate,” he said.
scalawag | Cop City is the Atlanta ruling class' chosen solution to a set of
interrelated crises produced by decades of organized abandonment in the
city. As Gilmore explains,
crisis means "instability that can be fixed only through radical
measures, which include developing new relationships and new or
renovated institutions out of what already exists." These crises
included the threat and reality of mass uprisings against police
violence, extreme and racialized income inequality and displacement,
corporate media narratives in the wake of the 2020 uprisings that
threatened the image of the city as a safe place for capital investment
and development, and a municipal secession movement that threatened to
rob the city of nearly half of its tax revenue following the uprisings.
Designed and propelled by a mix of state, corporate, and nonprofit
actors, Cop City would address the overlapping crises facing Atlanta in
three ways. First, it would provide a material investment in police
capacity on the heels of the uprisings, a project to prepare for and
prevent future rebellion. Second, it would represent an ideological
investment in the image of Atlanta, signaling to corporations and those
attracted by the influx of tech and other high-paying jobs that Atlanta
is a stable, securitized city that will protect their interests. And
third, Cop City would constitute a geographical investment—one that
refashions publicly-owned land in a disinvested area into something new
while opening up new opportunities for development. In other words, to
borrow from Gilmore, Cop City is a partially geographical solution to a
set of crises facing and generated by the city—a means through which a
coalition of state and corporate actors have chosen to address years of
organized abandonment and its outcomes.
When thousands of Atlantans took to the streets
during the nationwide uprisings of 2020, they were responding to more
than the recent police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and
Rayshard Brooks. They were responding to decades of social
disinvestment, displacement, and police expansion—and calling for a
reversal of these dynamics.
Twenty-first-century Atlanta has featured rapid, publicly-subsidized
development and gentrification, the further disintegration of the social
safety net, the expansion of surveillance and policing, and rising
inequality. Since 1990, the share of the city's Black population has decreased
from 67 percent to 48 percent, while the median family income and the
share of adults with a college degree in the city doubled. Investment
firms have gobbled up the housing stock, with bulk buyers accumulating
over 65,000 single-family homes throughout the Atlanta metro area in
the past decade. As the city has attracted major tech companies like
Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Honeywell—and along with them, more middle
and upper-class white people—the city has pushed its Black and working
class further out of the city. Choices by policymakers have made Atlanta
a lucrative place for big business, but a difficult place to live for
the rest of residents. In 2022, for example, Atlanta was named by Money as the best place to live and was identified by Realtor Magazine as the top real estate market in the country. The same year, Atlanta was proclaimed the most unequal city in the country; relatedly, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the U.S.
How did we get here? Atlanta has long been home to what is known as "the Atlanta Way"—the
strategic partnership between Black political leadership and white
economic elites that work in service of corporations and upper-class
white communities and to the detriment of lower-income Black and
working-class communities. While historians such as Maurice Hobson, Adira Drake Rodriguez, and Dan Immergluck
have documented the long history of the Atlanta Way throughout the
1900s, we can begin with the leadup to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta as a
key accelerant of the Atlanta Way. As Immergluck notes,
the decisions made in preparation for the Games "effectively set the
stage for long-term gentrification and exclusion in the city, focusing
primarily on making the city more attractive to a more affluent set of
prospective citizens."
nih | The gap between Whites and Blacks in levels of violence
has animated a prolonged and controversial debate in public health and
the social sciences. Our study reveals that over 60% of this gap is
explained by immigration status, marriage, length of residence,
verbal/reading ability, impulsivity, and neighborhood context. If we
focus on odds ratios rather than raw coefficients, 70% of the gap is
explained. Of all factors, neighborhood context was the most important
source of the gap reduction and constitutional differences the least
important.
We acknowledge the harsh and often justified
criticism that tests of intelligence have endured, but we would
emphasize 2 facts from our findings. First, measured verbal/reading
ability, along with impulsivity/hyperactivity, predicted violence, in
keeping with a long line of prior research. Second, however, neither factor accounted for much in the way of racial or ethnic disparities
in violence. Whatever the ultimate validity of the constitutional
difference argument, the main conclusion is that its efficacy as an
explainer of race and violence is weak.
Our findings
are consistent with the hypothesis that Blacks are segregated by
neighborhood and thus differentially exposed to key risk and protective
factors, an essential ingredient to understanding the Black–White
disparity in violence. The race-related neighborhood features predicting violence are
percentage professional/managerial workers, moral/legal cynicism, and
the concentration of immigration. We found no systematic evidence that
neighborhood- or individual-level predictors of violence interacted with
race/ ethnicity. The relationships we observed thus appeared to be
generally robust across racial/ ethnic groups. We also found no
significant racial or ethnic disparities in trajectories of change in
violence.
Similar to the arguments made by William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged,these results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood
conditions may reduce the racial gap in violence. Policies such as
housing vouchers to aid the poor in securing residence in middle-class
neighborhoods may achieve the most effective results in bringing down the
long-standing racial disparities in violence. Policies to increase home
ownership and hence stability of residence may also reduce disparities
(see model 3, Table 2).
Family
social conditions matter as well. Our data show that parents being
married, but not family configuration per se, is a salient factor
predicting both the lower probability of violence and a significant
reduction in the Black–White gap in violence. The tendency in past
debates on Black families has been either to pathologize female-headed
households as a singular risk factor or to emphasize the presence of
extended kin as a protective factor. Yet neither factor predicts
violence in our data. Rather, being reared in married-parent households
is the distinguishing factor for children, supporting recent work on the
social influence of marriage and calls for renewed attention to the labor-market contexts that support stable marriages among the poor.
Although
the original gap in violence between Whites and Latinos was smaller
than that between Whites and Blacks, our analysis nonetheless explained
the entire gap in violence between Whites and Latino ethnic groups. The
lower rate of violence among Mexican Americans compared with Whites was
explained by a combination of married parents, living in a neighborhood
with a high concentration of immigrants, and individual immigrant
status. The contextual effect of concentrated immigration was robust,
holding up even after a host of factors, including the immigrant status
of the person, were taken into account.
The limitations
of our study raise issues for future research. Perhaps most important
is the need to replicate the results in cities other than Chicago. The
mechanisms explaining the apparent benefits to those living in areas of
concentrated immigration need to be further addressed, and we look to
future research to examine Black–White differences in rates of violence
that remain unexplained. As with any nonexperimental research, it is
also possible we left out key risk factors correlated with race or
ethnicity. Still, to overturn our results any such factors would have to
be correlated with neighborhood characteristics and uncorrelated with
the dozen-plus individual and family background measures, an unlikely
scenario. Even controlling for the criminality of parents did not
diminish the effects of neighborhood characteristics. Finally, it is
possible that family characteristics associated with violence, such as
marital status, were themselves affected by neighborhood residence. If
so, our analysis would mostly likely have underestimated the association
between neighborhood conditions and violence.
We
conclude that the large racial/ethnic disparities in violence found in
American cities are not immutable. Indeed, they are largely social in
nature and therefore amenable to change.
NYTimes | Ali-Rashid
Abdullah, 67 and broad-shouldered with a neatly trimmed gray beard, is
an ex-convict turned outreach worker for Cincinnati’s Human Relations
Commission. He or his co-workers were at the scenes of all five of
Cincinnati’s shootings with four or more casualties last year, working
the crowds outside the yellow police tape, trying to defuse the
potential for further gunfire.
They
see themselves as stop signs for young black men bound for
self-destruction. They also see themselves as truth-tellers about the
intersection of race and gun violence — a topic that neither the city’s
mayor, who is white, nor its police chief, who is black, publicly
addresses.
“White
folks don’t want to say it because it’s politically incorrect, and
black folks don’t know how to deal with it because it is their children
pulling the trigger as well as being shot,” said Mr. Abdullah, who is
black.
No
one worries more about black-on-black violence than African-Americans.
Surveys show that they are more fearful than whites that they will be
crime victims and that they feel less safe in their neighborhoods.
Most
parents Mr. Abdullah meets are desperate to protect their children but
are trapped in unsafe neighborhoods, he said, “just trying to survive.”
And some are in denial, refusing to believe that their sons are carrying
or using pistols, even in the face of clear evidence.
“
‘Not my child,’ ” he said, adopting the resentful tone of a defensive
mother. “ ‘It may be his friends, but not my child, because I know how I
raised my child.’ ”
His
reply, he said, is blunt: “These are our children killing our children,
slaughtering our children, robbing our children. It’s our
responsibility first.”
African-Americans
make up 44 percent of Cincinnati’s nearly 300,000 residents. But last
year they accounted for 91 percent of shooting victims, and very likely
the same share of suspects arrested in shootings, according to the
city’s assistant police chief, Lt. Col. Paul Neudigate.
Nationally,
reliable racial breakdowns exist only for victims and offenders in gun
homicides, not assaults, but those show a huge disparity.
The
gun homicide rate peaked in 1993, in tandem with a nationwide crack
epidemic, and then plummeted over the next seven years. But blacks still
die from gun attacks at six to 10 times the rate of whites, depending
on whether the data is drawn from medical sources or the police. F.B.I.
statistics show that African-Americans, who constitute about 13 percent
of the population, make up about half of both gun homicide victims and
their known or suspected attackers.
“Every
time we look at the numbers, we are pretty discouraged, I have to tell
you,” said Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology at the University of
Maryland.
Some
researchers say the single strongest predictor of gun homicide rates is
the proportion of an area’s population that is black. But race, they
say, is merely a proxy for poverty, joblessness and other socio-economic
disadvantages that help breed violence.
thenation | Last week, nine months after the raid, the Department of Justice
unsealed new grand jury indictments against Yeshitela, as well as Jesse
Nevel, Penny Hess, and Gazi Kodzo—national chair of the Uhuru Solidarity
Movement, chair of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, and
cofounder of the Black Hammer Party, respectively—naming them as
co-conspirators in an alleged plot to promote the political interests of
Russia within the United States.
The FBI surveilled these Black liberation activists and their
organizations for years before finally securing a search warrant for
their personal residences and other locations connected to the African
People’s Socialist Party and the International People’s Democratic Uhuru
Movement. The FBI’s search warrants were based on a federal grand jury
indictment, which charged an unrelated individual—Aleksandr Viktorovich
Ionov—with violations relating to a little-known statute called the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The superseding indictment charges Yeshitela, Nevel, and Hess
with conspiring to commit an offense against the United
States—specifically, “to act as an agent of a foreign government and
foreign officials…without prior notification to the Attorney General” as
required by law under FARA. The specific acts they are accused of
committing include attending an international conference in Russia, publishing
a “Petition to the United Nations on the Crime of Genocide Against
African People in the United States of America” after encouragement from
Ionov, accepting financial support from Ionov for a speaking tour in
the United States to discuss reparations, permitting Ionov to speak
during an African People’s Socialist Party event, and publishing and
speaking in support of the Russian government. It is worth remembering
that African American activists have charged the United States with
genocide since at least 1951, when the Civil Rights Congress submitted a
similar petition to the United Nations, titled “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.”
Despite the sensational nature of the charges and the Department
of Justice’s presentation of the case, we should be clear: The
indictments against the defendants do not allege any intent to commit
violent acts, nor espionage, fraud, nor even election interference.
Because of FARA’s extraordinary reach, the Department of Justice has
been able to selectively invoke foreign agent accusations as a way to
silence criticisms of the United States’ role in international politics.
A Dangerous Smokescreen for Political Repression
The Department of Justice is likely to invoke FARA and foreign agent
regulations more and more often in the next few years, especially to
target anti-war activists and movements critical of United States
foreign policy. Already in 2022, the DOJ signaled its intention to
broaden the scope of FARA to cover a wider range of activities and less
direct agent-principal relationships. It is now more imperative than
ever that progressive activists develop a nuanced understanding of the
cynical ways that FARA can been deployed to undermine international
solidarity and grassroots organizing.
The federal charges against Yeshitela, Hess, and Nevel also come
on the heels of a drastic increase in FBI attention to Black organizers.
Since 2017, the FBI has specifically targeted Black organizers against
police brutality—whom it has labeled “Black Identity Extremists” or,
more recently, “Racially Motivated Violent Extremists”—under Operation
“Iron Fist.”
Indeed, FBI Director Christopher Wray stated in August 2022 that
“the top domestic terrorism threat we face continues to be from
[domestic violent extremists] we characterize as racially or ethnically
motivated violent extremists.” As of 2020, this category of alleged
“extremists” included “actors who use retaliation and retribution for
wrongdoings against African Americans by those they view as oppressors,
including law enforcement of all races, whites, government personnel,
and others they view as participants in an unjust institutionalized
system,” according to the FBI’s threat guidance document.
Given this political context of increased attention to Black
liberation organizers, it is safe to predict that foreign agent
accusations will also be used more frequently in the coming years as a
tool for spying on, intimidating, and criminalizing Black social justice
organizations and Black internationalism, as well as other social
movements that critique the United States’ actions abroad.
In the face of this targeted political repression, progressive
forces should resist the cynical, politicized use of “foreign agent”
accusations as a dog whistle to chill and criminalize international
solidarity, and should directly oppose the attendant FBI raids and
prosecutions when and where they occur. The chilling effect caused by
foreign agent accusations is an incredibly powerful deterrent against
protected First Amendment activity, and such accusations could lead to
financial ruin, as was the case for Du Bois.
We must demand that the FBI immediately
cease targeting the Black liberation struggle and other struggles for
social justice before its intimidation tactics cause even further
damage.
mronline | How should dialectical materialists deal with the cultural question
to avoid falling into the Afrocentric trap? The work of Amilcar Cabral
and Sekou Toure provides a clue. First, what does the materialist mean
by culture? We can use Toure’s definition from his speech “A Dialectical
Approach to Culture.” He says:
By culture, we understand all the
material and immaterial works of art and science, plus knowledge,
manners, education, a mode of thought, behavior, and attitudes
accumulated by the people both through and by virtue of their struggle
for freedom from the hold and dominion of nature; we also include the
result of their efforts to destroy the deviationist politics, social
systems of domination and exploitation through the productive process of
social life. Thus culture stands revealed as both an exclusive creation
of the people and a source of creation, as an instrument of
socio-economic liberation and as one of domination.
This definition highlights that culture depends on the relationship
between people and their environment. It is not something merely spawned
from the head. Indeed, one of the primary ways we come to understand a
culture is through material artifacts such as pottery, tools, linguistic
codes (like Sumerian scripts), and the like. We even separate
historical periods through concepts like the “Iron or Bronze Age” or
notions like “Feudalism, Mercantilism, and Capitalism.” It goes to show
that the primary factor in cultural development is the
political-economic arrangement and the effects of its productive
relations.
In Cabral’s speech “National Liberation and Culture,” he states:
The value of culture as an element
of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is
the vigorous manifestation, on the ideological or idealist plane, of the
physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to
be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history
and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence
which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his
environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as
among different societies.
Again, pay special attention to the fact that Cabral highlights that culture is an ideological expression of
the material reality of society. Dialectical materialists do not ignore
the role of culture. Instead, We point out that the call for cultural
change is the ideological reflection of a need for the productive system
to change. When one complains about the consumerism of Afrikan people
or the high Black-on-Black violence, one should stop to consider the
structural elements that bring about those practices.
How exactly should We understand the notion of “ideological
reflection” in relation to base? Well, like the notion of simple and
expanded reproduction in Marx’s Capital (where the production process
cyclically reproduces itself), there is also the process of what is
termed social reproduction. Indeed, in Capital, Marx tells us that not
only are the productive forces reproduced in the average production
process, but there is a reproduction of the necessary relations of
capitalist production. In relation to culture as superstructure,
everyday of our lives, but especially during childhood development, we
encounter and internalize what that i term a “cultural logic.” This
“logic” functions similarly to paths that all lead, in one way or
another, to the same end.
During socialization, the child comes to acquire not only knowledge
of an external world, a mother, and the like, but she also comes to
acquire her culture. As the Soviet philosopher, Evald V. Ilyenkov
states, “The child that has just been born is confronted – outside
itself – not only by the external world, but also by a very complex
system of culture, which requires of him ‘modes of behavior’ for which
there is genetically (morphologically) “no code” in his body.” He says
further,
Consciousness and will become necessary forms of mental
activity only where the individual is compelled to control his own
organic body in answer not to the organic (natural) demands of this body
but to demands presented from outside, by the ‘rules’ accepted in the
society in which he was born. It is only in these conditions that the
individual is compelled to distinguish himself from his own organic
body. These rules are not passed on to him by birth, through his
‘genes’, but are imposed upon him from outside, dictated by culture, and
not by nature.
A similar concept is found in the Amerikan philosopher, George Herbert Mead’s, work Mind,Self, and Society with his notion of the generalized other. He says,
The organized community or social group which gives to
the individual his unity of self may be called ‘the generalized other.’
The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole
community. Thus, for example, in the case of such a social group as a
ball team, the team is the generalized other in so far as it enters—as
an organized process or social activity—into the experience of any one
of the individual members of it.
So, We understand that the person comes into a cultural matrix
already developed for him or her to which they are then enculturated. We
have to remember however, that the culture of any society is largely
going to be one that is most fit for the current mode of production and
its social relations. For example, during the feudal era, the common
sense of the time believed that the nature of reality reflected the
experiences of priests, lords, and serfs. The intellectuals of the era
erected a grand scheme called the great chain of being that places the
serfs at the lowest tier right above animals and had the church at the
top right underneath God. If one questioned this logic, they were more
often than not, treated as a social outcast or severely punished. There
is a similar trend in relation to the rise and maintenance of
capitalism.
From the last sentence, a word must be said about the role of law in
relation to the struggle. The Marxist legal theorist, Evgeny B.
Pashukanis, makes an astounding point in his article “Lenin and the
Problem of Law” when he points out that, “Under autocracy and under
capitalism it [is] impossible to struggle with the legal impotence and
juridic illiteracy of the masses, without conducting a revolutionary
struggle against autocracy and against capital. [T]his impotence is but a
partial phenomenon of the general subjugation for whose maintenance
Tsarist and bourgeois legality existed. But after the conquest of power
by the proletariat, this struggle has the highest priority as one of the
tasks of cultural re-education, as a precondition for the construction
of socialism.” Thus, We need to be wary of those who wish to ground our
struggle in the purely ideological realm. In other words, We must engage
in a war of position against the decadence of Capital viz. a seizure of
the instruments of production and the repressive apparatuses of the
state. Only with a structural victory can we hope to wage and win the
so-called “culture war”.
fox4kc | Eight days after five people were shot at a Kansas City, Missouri gas station, video of that shooting is circulating and community leaders are voicing their concern.
One of the victims was under five years old. A new video shows the chilling moments when that gunman starts shooting.
“Fear, anger, concern, it’s very terrifying and the fact that
residents and neighborhoods are plagued with this kind of violence. It’s
unacceptable and we have to do something about it,” Darren Faulkner,
the program manager with KC Common Good said.
The owner of the gas station told FOX4 he has seen a 50 percent decline in business since last Friday’s shooting.
“Historically in Kansas City, gun violence goes up during the summer
months June, July and August and we’ve seen such a spike—it seems
like—already,” Faulkner said.
Because of that shooting and the ones that followed near the area of
35th and Prospect, the Kansas City Missouri Police Department had to increase patrols in the area.
Darren Faulkner says the problem is getting worse and there needs to be action that addresses the root causes.
“These are issues that are deeply rooted in the lack of something;
the lack of knowledge, the lack of education, the lack of resources, the
lack of finances, the lack of whatever. This is deeply rooted in the
lack of.”
If you have any information that can help the police, you’re asked to reach out to the Kansas City Missouri Police Department.
caitlinjohnstone | The superseding indictment
containing these charges consists of a lot of verbal gymnastics to
obfuscate the fact that the DOJ is prosecuting US citizens for speech
and political activities in the United States which happen not to align
with the wishes of the US government. The grand jury alleges that the
aforementioned Ionov “directed” these Americans to “publish pro-Russian
propaganda” and “information designed to cause dissention in the United
States,” which is about as vague and amorphous an allegation as you
could possibly come up with.
For the record Omali Yeshitela, the
founder and chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and one of
the four Americans named in the indictment, has adamantly denied ever
having worked for Russia. Earlier this month before charges were brought
against him, the Tampa Bay Times quoted him
as saying, “I ain’t ever worked for a Russian. Never ever ever ever.
They know I have never worked for Russia. Their problem is, I’ve never
worked for them.”
But it’s important to note that this should not
matter. Under the First Amendment the government is forbidden to abridge
anyone’s freedom to speak however they want and associate with whomever
they please, which necessarily includes being as vocally pro-Russia as
they like and promoting whatever political agendas they see fit, whether
that happens to advance the interests of the Russian government or not.
The indictment alleges that the four Americans engaged in “agitprop” by
“writing articles that contained Russian propaganda and
disinformation,” but even if we pretend that’s both (A) a quantifiable
claim and (B) a proven fact, propaganda and disinformation are both
speech that the government is constitutionally forbidden from
repressing.
It’s not reasonable for the government to just dismiss
the First Amendment on the grounds that it is being “weaponized”. You
can’t have your government dictating what speech is valid and what
counts as “agitprop” and “disinformation”, because they’ll always define
those terms in ways which benefit the government, thus giving more
power to the powerful and taking power away from the people. You can’t
have your government dictating what political groups are legitimate and
which ones are tools of a foreign government, because you can always
count on the powerful set such designations in ways which benefit
themselves.
variety | However you might classify Cross’ tone, her particular brand of
outspokennnes had helped her win a bake-off for the weekend host slot
against two other hopefuls in 2020. She took the job that year — a seat
that had been vacated by anchor Reid, who moved to weeknights. In
announcing her eponymous show, Cross promised
to “touch on politics, culture, humanity, and the inhumanity of some
yet-to-be-addressed disparities.” She also pledged to place Black women
at “the center” of her program. What followed was a series of blunt and
headline-grabbing segments and appearances by Cross in a news cycle rife
with discourse over (and outward displays of) white supremacy. Notable
sound bites from Cross included an interview with radio personality
Charlamagne Tha God calling
the state of Florida the “dick of America,” one that should be
castrated. Comments like these led to extreme reactions from media
personalities on the right, including Megyn Kelly, who has called Cross a
“dumbass” and the “most racist person on TV.”
By far the most incendiary reaction to Cross was from Fox News’
Carlson. On Oct. 19, four days after Cross aired her Clarence Thomas
segment, Carlson accused Cross of inciting a “race war” with her
commentary. He even likened
her broadcast to the Rwandan radio station that played a significant
role in the country’s 1994 genocide. In the days following Cross’
firing, reports speculated that Jones had handed Carlson and Fox News “a win” by terminating her.
“No other cable news show regularly examined the many ways that white
supremacy is embedded structurally and historically throughout American
society,” wrote Salon in an analysis of her firing.
At the top of the year, “The Cross Connection” attracted around 4.6
million monthly viewers, according to an internal research document
issued by NBCUniversal and obtained by Variety. Cross’ audience skewed 55% female and 35% Black, an audience intersection that MSNBC has been chasing, Variety
reported earlier this month. All told, Cross’ program was MSNBC’s
most-watched by Black viewers, second only to “Politics Nation With Al
Sharpton.” The week before her termination, according to Nielsen media
research, she averaged 605,000 viewers in her time slot and rated third
behind competitors CNN and Fox News.
Jones’ defenders called her a fierce advocate for diversity, having
hired or elevated journalists of color including Katie Fang, Alex Wagner
and Symone Sanders to anchor roles. For many industry observers, the
situation has been heightened by the fact that two prominent Black women
journalists are at public odds.
“I don’t want to see someone like Tiffany move backwards, and I don’t
want there to be a double standard for Rashida,” Rev. Al Sharpton, the
host of MSNBC’s “Politics Nation,” told Variety.
Cross’ future is unclear. The question she has inspired — about the
question of different standards surrounding Black voices on cable news —
continues to inspire anxiety in the many sources Variety spoke with. Last Friday, the Washington Post ran an op-ed calling the “cancellation” of Cross a “chilling signal” to the wider industry.
“We feel the chill,” said one network anchor of color who, of course, spoke to Variety on the condition of anonymity.
BAR | The Black Liberation Movement in the United States has reached an
almost unprecedented level of ideological confusion. Unlike in the 20th
century, significant sections of the contemporary Black Left openly
embrace an understanding of ‘identity politics’[i] that is based in philosophical idealism.[ii]
A somewhat resurgent US Left has, correctly, begun to critique these
perceived political errors. Unfortunately, social democrats such as DSA,
Jacobin and Cedric Johnson in his award-winning article[iii]
add to the ideological confusion. This essay asserts that contrary to
the claims of advancing democracy and freedom, social democracy has
consistently undermined the struggle for national liberation and
socialism.
In 1896, Eduard Bernstein, the leading theoretician of social democracy,[iv] wrote that the 2nd or Socialist International[v]
should adopt a pro-colonial policy. Under the banner of social
democracy, Bernstein boldly proclaimed through colonialism the “savage
races” can be “compelled to conform with the rules of higher
civilization.”[vi]
Fortunately, other, more principled socialists won the debate and the
2nd international officially espoused an anti-colonial position.[vii] Although this isn’t the first time that Western ‘radicals’ have betrayed colonized people,[viii]
several leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian
Revolution, saw this as a complete betrayal of the ‘national question’
and international socialism.[ix]
Lenin theorized that in the late 19th century, capitalism entered a
new phase that he referred to as imperialism or monopoly capitalism.[x] Under imperialism, “capitalists can devote apart of these super profits to bribe their own workers to create something like an alliance between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other countries.”[xi]
In short, the capitalists use their extreme profits to create an
aristocracy of labor in North America and Europe who sellout and look
down upon workers in the global south. By the start of WWI, the process
was complete: the Social Democratic Party of Germany and others had
rejected their anti-colonial positions and voted to enter the war on the
side of their own national capitalist class.[xii]
In one of his most influential works, Lenin clearly demonstrated WWI
was fundamentally a war to determine which colonizer would control what
part of the world. He called these opportunistic social democrats,
“social imperialists, that is, socialists in word but imperialists in
deed.”[xiii]
A year before Lenin’s seminal work, WEB Du Bois in the “African Roots
of War” contends that the African continent was the ‘prime cause’ of
WWI. Similar to Lenin, Du Bois states:
“the white workingman has been asked to share the spoils of
exploiting ‘chinks and niggers.’ It is no longer simply merchant prince,
or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is
exploiting the world: it is the nation; a new democratic union composed
of capital and labor.”[xiv]
According to Du Bois, white workers condoning, if not outright,
support for lynching, legal segregation, poll taxes, and racist
politicians had a material basis in the imperialist system. Dubois
claimed that African America was a semi-colony[xv]
with, more in common with other Black and colonized people in the rest
of the world than US white workers. Preceding Kwame Ture and Charles
Hamilton’s call by thirty years,[xvi] Du Bois believed Black people must practice a form of voluntary segregation[xvii]
for at least a short period, then, unite with white workers. To be
clear, like all the theorists discussed in this essay, Du Bois believed
that the primary motivations for colonialism were economic.
MIT | Since 2014, viral images of Black people being
killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna
Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the
American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020,
nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of
George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest
social movement in the history of the United States.2 Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives.3 And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.4
Here is the article in which Harvard profs call for greatest expansion of militarized police surveillance bureaucracy in Western history. Below I discuss the flagrant ethical and intellectual problems and how elite academia can be so dangerous. https://t.co/Cq1fFCdWR2
It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious
crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too
heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor,
Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and
over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since
emancipation.5
The American criminal legal system is unjust and
inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the
problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by
an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on
long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this
country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer
employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically
opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing
roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of
people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it
backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between
policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed
world. We call this the “First World Balance.”
We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration.
This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the
book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay we err
deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative
rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher
and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and
especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are
correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the
empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the
American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we
hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral
and political philosophy we contribute can help illuminate what
alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be
sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book
project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong
about much of what we argue here.
In the first part of this essay, we outline five
comparative facts that contradict much of the prevailing way of thinking
about what is distinctive about the American criminal legal system. In
the second part, we draw out the normative implications of those facts
and make the case for the First World Balance.
Corporate America disproportionately targets Black and Hispanic
consumers with junk food, such as candy, sugary drinks, snacks, and fast
food, more than any other race.
The Rudd Center for Food and Policy Health at the University of Connecticut found
Black youth and adults were subjected to 21% more junk food ads than
their white counterparts. Researchers said corporate America boosted
their advertising budgets on Spanish-speaking television stations as a
total proportion of their ad budget.
As the advertising industry
drastically changes, companies are embracing celebrities and influencers
to promote their products on television and social media. Researchers
said advertisers hired celebrities from Black and Hispanic communities
to encourage young people of color to purchase junk food.
Many of these celebrities are idolized by consumers and will mimic their trends, even if that's unhealthy eating habits.
In
the midst of the worst obesity epidemic this nation has ever faced,
corporate America employs an army of influencers to bombard people of
color with ads for junk food. Data shows nearly 20% of all children are
obese, and rates are much higher among children of color: 26.2% of
Hispanic children and 24.8% of Black children. This is compared with
16.6% of white children.
dailymail | Highly-processed foods should be
reclassified as drugs because they are as addictive and harmful as
cigarettes, scientists argue.
Researchers
claim items like donuts, sugary cereals and pizza meet the meet
official criteria that established cigarettes as a drug in the 1990s.
These
include causing compulsive use and mood altering affects on the brain,
and having properties or ingredients that reinforce addiction or trigger
cravings.
Ultra processed foods - which also include
things like soda, chips, pastries and candies - contain high amounts
of unnatural flavorings, preservatives and sweeteners.
Researchers led by Dr Ashley Gearhardt, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, told DailyMail.com these foods are more like a drug because of how distant they are in taste and texture from natural foods.
'They
are industrial produced substances designed to deliver sugar and fat,'
Dr Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, a health behaviors research professor at
Virginia Tech University, said.
'They are not foods anymore. These are these products that have been really well designed to deliver addictive substances.'
consortiumnews |It
was — literally — a made-for-television moment. A former U.S. Navy
chief petty officer turned cable news pundit, dressed in a fresh
out-of-the-box camouflage uniform replete with body armor and magazine
pouches, wearing matching camouflage helmet and gloves, and cradling an
automatic rifle, stared into the camera and announced “I am here to help this country [Ukraine] fight what is essentially a war of extermination.”
With
a Ukrainian flag on his left shoulder, and a U.S. flag emblazoned on
his body armor, the man, Malcolm Nance, declared that “This is an
existential war, and Russia has brought it to these people and is mass
murdering civilians.”
A day before, Nance had tweeted a black-and-white photograph of himself, similarly clad, announcing “I’m DONE talking.”
Nance spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy as a cryptologic technician, interpretive (CTI),
specializing in the Arabic language, and has turned his career into a
thing of legend, so much so that when he speaks of his journey from news
desk to Ukraine, it almost sounds convincing.
“Ukraine announced that there was an international force on Feb. 27,” Nance told one reporter,
“and
I started looking into it on Feb. 28 … I called the Ukrainian embassy
in Washington, and I said: ‘Hey, I want an appointment.’ They were a
little slow, so I just went down there and put in my application. The
guy asked if I had combat experience and I said ‘Yep.’ Then he looked at
my application and said, ‘You’re on the team.’”
Just like that.
But
the hype doesn’t match the reality. Although he sports a combat action
ribbon on the lapel of his coat jacket (when not attired in full combat regalia), Nance has never actually participated in ground combat operations, according to a serviceman who served with him. His “combat” experience was limited to providing linguistic support onboard a U.S. Navy ship off the coast of Beirut in 1983. Important work, but not combat.
Despite
this resume enhancement, Nance was — according to Nance — a natural for
recruitment by Ukraine. In the days before the Russian invasion, Nance
was in Ukraine, reporting for MSNBC.
But being Malcolm Nance, he claimed to be doing so much more. “I spent a month in Ukraine,” Nance recalled,
“driving around, mapping out the Russian order of battle, driving up
and down the highways and analyzing where the invasion routes would come
and go. So I knew the country backward and forwards by the time of the
invasion.”
(It
might be time to remind the reader that Nance’s Navy specialism in
Arabic gave him neither the training nor the experience to conduct the
kind of battlefield intelligence preparation that he described.)
The
Ukrainians know this. So why would they take on a 61-year old Arabic
linguist whose physical presence on any battlefield would be seen as a
detriment?
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