Motto: Death from Below, Keeps Safety from Above? Mors ab Inferis. Salues Desuper. Or… Bravery for a Free Space? Fortitudo Ad Liberum Spatium. Or… Death and Bravery for a Free Space? Mors et fortitudo, pro spatio libero. (Note, I used Google Translate, so this may not be proper Latin)
Beret: Carolina Blue
New Space Force uniform.
Photo credit: A U.S. Soldier participates in a night raid training mission during Emerald Warrior 2012, an exercise put together by U.S. Special Operations Command. Photo: USAFA U.S. soldier participates in a night-raid training mission during Emerald Warrior 2012, an exercise put together by U.S. Special Operations Command. Photo: USAF
This is just a fun post. I’m in no way Rambo, Soldier of Fortune, etc.
But, if the US Space Force had special forces, I would assume it would fall under a newly created US Space Force Special Operations Command (USSF-SOC) that falls under the Unified Combatant Command, with the new command either based out of the Colorado Springs area (able to cross train with local USAF, US Army and US Space Force facilities); Huntsville, AL area, or potentially somewhere in Florida such as Hulbert Field next to existing USAF Special Ops, or Patrick Air Force Base/Cape Canaveral Space Station or MacDill AFB.
But what would they do?
USSFSOC would be the shock force that protects terrestrial satellite stations for sustainment of the Defense Satellite Communication System (DSCS), performs Counter terrorism/CBRNE counter measures, retakes US or allied terrestrial satellite stations, while also incapacitating and taking over enemy ones with hand-to-hand combat, small arms, assault rifles, ordnance, calling in close air support strikes, etc.
A USSFSOC personnel would be like the Air Force Tactical Control Party (TAC-P) mixed with USAF Combat Control (Air Commando) , but this would be a Space Combat Control Party, i.e., Space CCP, i.e., Space Commando.
Similar to how CCTs are FAA certified Air Traffic Controllers, a Space CCP would be a NASA certified Flight Controller taught at the Christopher C. Kraft Jr., Mission Control Center Houston (MCC-H)
They go behind enemy lines, take out or take over enemy communication stations, extract USSF or allied personnel, repair satellites, conduct Flight Controller duties.
Teams would be led by an officer in person or remotely who has an Electrical Engineering background but supported by a cadre of enlisted personnel who are capable of hacking into or retrieving elements of an enemy’s servers located at satellite stations, or setting up /repairing remote satellite stations, etc.
Enlisted members will be designated as warrant officers so they can operate above enlisted but be subordinate to officers.
This will give the US and allies vital intelligence but also the ability to disrupt enemy satellite operations in space thus throwing off an enemy’s GPS targeting systems, etc. Also, USSF-SOC operators can establish/repair remote satellite stations.
Training would essentially be “capture the flag”, i.e., taking over enemy facilities and defending allied facilities.
HALO/HAHO (High Altitude, Low Opening/High Opening) parachuting. Using littoral waterway entrance methods (infiltration via beaches by sea or river) to enter into enemy territory. Using SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) tactics to successful bypass/neutralize enemy combatants. Surveil enemies using SALUTE reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, and Equipment). Direct close air support via Joint Terminal Attack Controller methodology to destroy enemy satellite stations. Defend and evacuate US Space Force or other DOD or Allied personnel at satellite stations in combat zones. Establish/repair remote satellite outposts. Physically take over enemy satellite stations either for destruction or for cooption.
Training may consist of (1) selection, (2) SERE school at Fairchild AFB, WA; (3) Ranger School; (4) US Army Airborne School (Parachute Badge) at Fort Benning, GA for Static Line qualification & Army Military Free Fall Parachutist School, Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona for HALO qualification; (5) Cold Weather orientation and Basic Military Mountaineering Course at the Northern Warfare Training Center at Ft. Wainwright Alaska, (6) Combat Diver/ Underwater Egress School at NAS Pensacola, FL, (7) Jungle Warfare at US Jungle Operations Training Center at Schofield Barracks, (8) Desert Warrior Course at Ft Bliss, also advanced training notably with satellite systems at the Jet Propulsion Lab Space Flight Operator Facility, .
Pararescuemen from the 38th Rescue Squadron and the 58th Rescue Squadron, Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., jump from a HC-130P/N for a High Altitude Low Opening free fall drop from 12,999 feet in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. PJs use a variety of jumps depending on the mission. / USAF Photograph by Staff Sgt. Jeremy T. Lock.
In this March 1, 2017, photo, soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team participate in jungle warfare training at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. The Army has set up a jungle training course amid a renewed focus on Asia and the Pacific after more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Daniel Lin)
In the future a person who qualifies for USSF SOC Space CCP could qualify for a NASA mission, meaning they’d be the first US Space Force Commando in space.
II. Gus, Ken Death, A Hate Crime, Portland, and Punk Rock
III. Gay Fascism. Horny for Nazis? And, Remembering Darby Crash of The Germs
IV. Early Punk and Fascism as Irony but later as Reality
V. Was Van Sant a little irresponsible about his relation to Ken Death? Did he know his view?
VI. What was happening in the Ken Death’s Portland of his youth and early adult years?
I. Opening Thoughts
Racism in the U.S. state of Oregon has been discussed ad nauseam. People can’t control the past, however, it doesn’t mean we can’t continue to learn from it and improve for its failings.
Overall, Oregon is a great state with great people, many who are accepting, which I know from my time in college having known many people form the state, yet, I would argue it is still a “Pass-over state” with not much economic opportunity outside the Portland area, meaning there is a lot of poverty and lack of diversity, and these can lead to racism.
The state of Oregon I would argue has done a lot to face up to its “sea to shining sea”, Oregon Trail, Manifest Destiny past of being established as an all-white Anglo-Saxon Protestant utopian state. However, some say the gestures of self-reflection and combating racism may simply be performative gestures of “wokeness”. However, Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) has done excellent documentaries discussing racism in the state’s past while also showcasing the contributions of people of color such as Portland’s historic black neighborhood of Albina. During the George Floyd Protests in the Summer of 2020, Portland was one of the main cities with Antifascist activists protesting police and exposing that some of the police force had connections with right-wing groups such as the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, etc. (See article: ‘Disturbing’ texts between Oregon police and far-right group prompt investigation by Erik Ortiz, published February 15, 2019, by NBC News).
However, in the wake of MAGA America, and staring at the potential of a DeSantis Fascist state come 2024 or beyond, where DeSantis and his Florida Republicans have espoused anti-LGBTQ rhetoric with his “Don’t Say Gay Bill” and other fascist moves such as bills limiting the press, removing books discussing BIPOC history, banning political parties, and taking over college boards for being too “woke” (with woke simply meaning not conforming to conservative, white, and male heteronormative standards at this point), this “Aryan” ideal of having the Northwest be an “all-white” area is still a lingering cause to many white supremacists. With the news flaming fears, many people not from the Northwest are buying up land in pristine areas in the Northwest jeopardizing the environment, encroaching on wildlife, etc.
Gavin McInnes, the annoying misogynist hipster founder of The Proud Boys – our modern day brownshirt thugs – talked about conservatives moving to Montana, which interestingly has a history of liberalism, progressivism, Democratic politics (e.g., John Tester), and a “to each their own” mentality in areas like Missoula and Bozeman. Yet, this might be changing as conservatives flood states like Montana, Oregon, Idaho, North and South Dakota, etc., because they see themselves as “refugees” from Democratic-ran cities that full of crime, minorities, communists, etc. Essentially, what every White Supremacist group wants, i.e., the Northwest Territorial Imperative (not to be confused with the progressive based Cascadia Movement).
Yet…the Pacific Northwest was home to many notable Right-Wing events, which I’ll get out the way. (1) William Luther Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries and The Hunter, which inspired terrorist Timothy McVeigh who killed 168 people with the Oklahoma City Bombing, and who inspired serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin who killed anywhere between 8 to 20 people, was a professor at Oregon State University and was inspired to support White Power as a response to the Civil Rights Movement – similar to how white racism is rising in response to the recent Black Lives Matter movement; (2) the White Power group, The Order, led by Robert Jay Mathews, died in a house fire caused by cops as he hid out on Whidbey Island in 1984; (3) In 2019, according to Chris Ingallis (2019) of King5 News, in Arlington, WA, north of Seattle, police seized weapons belonging to the Washington State Chapter of Attomwaffen, a group linked to multiple terrorist attack attempts in the United States including thwarted attacks on nuclear facilities; (4) The Aryan Brotherhood had a fortress in North Idaho near Lake Hayden; (5) Portland, Oregon was the birthplace of now defunct – allegedly -Volksfront; (6) In 2017, racist and convicted felon Jeremy Joseph Christian stabbed two men to death as they tried to defend a Muslim woman, etc.
A little-known fact about Oregon on top of its initial goal of being a WASP only state, according to Douglas Perry (2019) of Oregon Live, was that in 1936, before the US entered war with Germany, a Nazi warship cruised down the Willamette River, and Portlander’s cheered them on. Portland had a small German Bund or “social club” which passed out anti-Semitic flyers. Further, according to Silvie Adams (2019) of the Oregon Historical Society, stated that the German cruiser “Emden” chugged down the Willamette River with the Nazi naval flag, or ensign, at the stern. The ship moored in Portland at the foot of West Couch Street, just north of the Burnside Bridge (Adams, 2019). The photograph shows the flag at half-mast, likely honoring King George V of England, who died on January 20, 1936, the day the ship arrived in Portland (Adams, 2019).
We, or rather we should all know, that Oregon banned black people in its constitution, despite being an anti-slavery state loyal to the Union. The state also forcibly removed Native Americans from their ancestral lands and was also involved in “Yellow Peril” anti-Chinese sentiments of the mid to late 1800s. Further, we can add on anti-Japanese sentiments of the World War II era and anti-Mexican farmworker sentiments which is one of America’s more recent racist concepts (mid-twentieth century to present).
From personal experience, having lived all over the country, Oregon is sort of the boonies once you get outside Metro Portland, with little pockets of hippy areas like Eugene or Bend.
The many small towns dotting I-5 or elsewhere including the coastal areas remind you of towns stuck in the 1950s. They remind me of Castle Rock or Derry, Maine in Stephen King’s fictional universes. Rainy, dingy towns with Back to the Future-like Sunny Valley downtown areas, but with citizens straight from Raymond Carver’s alcoholic “kitchen soap opera” tragedies.
Yet, the state is still very white, which is not a bad thing at all, it is what it is, but just a reality, and with that reality comes lingering issues such racism and racial violence, even if now pushed to the fringes of acceptable societal norms.
As a black man who has lived all over the country, including having Southern American roots, I can attest I’ve had more isolated racial incidents in the progressive Northwest than the “racist South”, mostly from mentally ill hobos or freely released junkies lurking near bus or train stations. Don’t get me started about the West Coast Hobo situation. It’s notorious.
II. Gus, Ken Death, A Hate Crime, Portland, and Punk Rock
This paper however will go into details about famed director Gus Van Sant and his relationship with a Portland based Neo Nazi, Ken Murray Mieske, where with his accomplices, Kyle Brewster, and Steve Strasser – members of groups known as East Side White Pride and White Aryan Resistance (WAR) – murdered Ethiopian immigrant, Mulugeta Seraw on November 12, 1988, on Southeast 31st Avenue. Ken Mieske went under the alias, Ken Death, a punk rock persona in Portland’s punk and metal scene, which was known for hostility towards non-whites back in the 1980s. Mieske received life in prison, while Brewster served 13 years, and Strasser served about a decade behind bars.
It’s interesting to note that Kyle Brewster was later found at a Trump rally in Salem, Oregon and at Proud Boy events in Portland, Oregon, after his release from prison proving he wasn’t reformed, and should have received a longer sentence (or, at least a parole violation landing him back in jail). According to Oregon Live (2021) in its article, Kyle Brewster, convicted in notorious 1988 hate crime killing, seen at pro-Trump rallies in Salem, Portland, was stated has now living in Portland, Oregon. Per the same article, a 2012 essay by an unidentified man who claimed he had done time with Brewster in Oregon said Brewster helped radicalize him behind bars. The man stated that Brewster was a popular white prisoner and helped transform East Side White Pride from a racist street gang into a prison gang.
Further, David Holthouse (2017) of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), in his article titled: Rude & Crude, mentioned that Brewster was lurking around Portland gang, The Brood, at one of their flophouses in Southeast Portland.
Mieske died in 2011 of viral Hepatitis C.
Tom Metzger, the racist leader of WAR, previously based out of the rural areas north of San Diego (with SoCal having its own history of Neo Nazism), flooded 1980s Portland with racist material. Portland and the Willamette Valley during this era had one of the world’s largest Neo Nazi populations. Jim Redden of the Willamette Weekly in 1988 wrote articles analyzing the Neo Nazi scene of Oregon. Redden wrote, “The Faces of Death: Street kid, actor, musician, skinhead—who is the real Kenneth Murray Mieske?” on Dec. 1, 1988, which was published 18 days after Seraw’s murder. In the article, Van Sant mentioned that Mieske was a “great actor”, but also music promotor/venue owner associated with Monqui Presents production company, Chris Monlux, stated Mieske was a street kid later turned musician who introduced him to death metal. Jack Yost, a former peace studies coordinator at Portland State University, knew Miseke was a street kid who was a byproduct of Reaganomics, i.e., poverty, wealth disparity, etc.
Gus Vant Sant in 1988 directed a short film called Ken Death Gets out of Jail where Ken talks about his jail experiences. It is interesting to note that according to IMDB, the film is listed under “gay” and “gay interests”.
Portland based LGBTQ author, Mannie Murphy, wrote the graphic novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden where according to Google Books, “…brilliantly weaves 1990s alternative culture – from Kurt Cobain to William Burroughs to Keanu Reeves to the Red Hot Chili Peppers – with two centuries of the Pacific Northwest’s shameful history as a hotbed for white nationalism: from the Whitman massacre in 1847, to the Ku Klux Klan’s role in Portland’s city planning in the early 1900s; to the shameful treatment of black people displaced in the 1948 Vanport flood; and through the 2014 armed standoff with Cliven Bundy’s cattle ranch”.
Mieske allegedly was a “houseboy” for a “Mr. X”, where a houseboy is a sort of house servant serving and “servicing” a wealthier older gay male patron, which would make sense considering the gay hustler/houseboy culture was analyzed by Van Sant in his film My Own Private Idaho starring Keanu Reeves and the late, River Phoenix.
Did Gus Van Sant know about Mieske more than thought?
Its sems Gus was quick to distance himself…
If so, does Van Sant have a responsibility to use his art as a means of exploring Oregon’s racism to create a better world? Did he use a lost street kid being brainwashed by Neo Nazism, instead of intervening and turning him on a better path?
III. Gay Fascism. Horny for Nazis? And, Remembering Darby Crash of The Germs
Sometimes in contemporary politics because of concepts like intersectionality we seem to assume that various groups, such as people of color or the LGBTQ+ community are always allies. The truth is you have lots of homophobia in minority groups just as you have racism and white supremacy in gay or queer culture.
Simply because both are different from white male patriarchal heteronormativity (well, per as the theory of intersectionality goes or is understood in popular culture, I guess…), doesn’t mean they are allies necessarily. For example, Morrisey of The Smiths has been known to spout nativist rhetoric (which sucks because The Smiths are pretty dope, so, eh, separate the music from the artist?), Dave Rubin in the USA has shilled for the Republican Party as they actively try to de-legitimize his very existence, Michael Caignet (a French Neo Nazi convicted of pedophilia – I hate even typing that word…), Milo Yunniopolis (who argued for pedophilia – supposedly, he’s not “not gay”), Nicky Crane, Ernst Röhm (Chief of Staff of Hitler’s S.A.), Michael Kuhnen, Herbert Hoover (allegedly), Cecil Rhodes (allegedly), Richard Nixon (allegedly with Bebe Reboso), were all gay men who fought for white supremacy, almost as if they…lusted and pined for a preservation of what they consider a romanticized version of the Western “Greco Roman” male ranging from the “nymph nubile” form to that of the hyper-masculine (i.e., leather daddy).
I learned about a few of men above from an odd site called Conservapedia where in some of the articles the authors are trying to defend the compatibility of homosexuality with Nazism. Interesting… Weird…
Homosexual intersection with explicit fascism aside, legendary punk artists, Darby Crash, previously named Bobby Pyn, real name John Paul Beahm (born, September 26, 1958 – died, December 7, 1980), played and explored fascism, likely not as a real-world political ideology he wanted to come into a political reality, but rather as a social study though music, i.e., a punk rock headman as a type of cult leader. Darby Crash was interested in Hitler same as he was into Charles Manson, likely not because of he liked them necessarily, but he was curious about the dark side of human nature and what humans can do.
The Germs ran with this concept often wearing their iconic black sleeve armband with a blue circle, where the blue circle represented being loyal to the band, and to be loyal to the band one had to get a “germ burn”, i.e., have a cigarette put out on their wrist.
IV. Early Punk and Fascism as Irony but later as Reality
Punk, especially early punk, often played with Nazi imagery to show hypocrisy of the societies they lived in, mostly in the 1970s which were racked by austerity, de-industrialization, messed up war veterans, poverty, the fall out of the hippie movement, etc. Many kids of the early punk movement had parents who fought in World War II, so a way to scare parents was to wear poorly scribed Swastikas. Many punk youths saw themselves as rebelling against their hippie and/or way more conservative older WWII parents, so instead of peace and love, they adopted a postmodern cynicism with watered-down Nietzschean philosophy.
Some got the irony or joke of fascism (for example, Siouxsie Sioux wore a Swastika before but she learned her lesson being assaulted for doing so, yet, later went to perform songs like Israel in the actual state of Israel), while others used fascism to stare into the face of evil or ponder an amoral or at worst an indifferent universe (e.g., Joy Division’s first release features a Hitler Youth and a Joy Division was Holocaust brothel notable in post WWII “stalag” fiction, e.g., think Ilsa the She Wolf of the SS released in 1975). Others such as the later Oi punk of the late 1970s, referred to as boneheads by original non-racist Skinheads, took the fascist imagery seriously and became full Nazis associated with the UK National Front, and this type of punk was re-imported back into the USA by the 1980s, notably in areas like Orange County, which had a notable Skinhead population (i.e., Huntington Beach in John Birch Society Orange County). White street kids who found themselves in serious hot water, i.e., LA County Jail, or worst, the California State Prison System, teamed up in the racially segregated system of the prison system. The already racist culture of prison mixed with the once faux racism of certain punk scenes, and punk in many ways became a recruitment tool for white supremacist gangs. Angry kids from the suburbs found themselves in actual Nazi gangs, having to “put in work” to gain protection. Released inmates indoctrinated by racism and/or scarred by the violence of prison life, would return to the blue-collar white areas, and spread their messages, especially as crack cocaine in the early 80s, sold by lost and impoverished black or Hispanic youth exacerbated racial tension, white flight, etc.
For Darby Crash, a sensitive kid, playing with fascism was a persona rather than his real self, even though his persona got the best of him, as he later died of a heroin overdose, with this death largely overshadowed by the death of John Lennon. Darby Crash and his band The Germs, which featured Pat Smear (real name Georg Ruthenberg, who is a Jewish and black American), are noted as inventing or rather being pioneers of “hardcore punk” or at least West Coast Hardcore Punk (the title of East Coast could be given to the Bad Brains) which was different than the high-brow yet fashionable London scene of Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, but also different that the “too cool for school style” of The Ramones from the Tri-state area.
Hardcore Punk of the West Coast, in part pioneered by producers like Geza X, was sloppy, playful, ironic, kooky, but with an underlying mania and aggression, while East Coast Hardcore Punk was more political and one could even say more multicultural (for example, the D.C. punk scene), even though the Dead Kennedys from San Francisco – a bastion of left-wing ideology – inserted political awareness into West Coast punk.
West Coast was violent and jittery, kooky but serious, playing with anachronistic fashion often coopting greaser or Mystery Science Theater aesthetics, but it was also faster which is a notable West Coast influence on music in general going back as far as Surf Rock of the 1950s with its emphasis on “whipping out” such as in the sounds of Dick Dale with his song Misirlou, Jungle Fever, OohWhee Marie, etc.
This is all notable because this hardcore punk scene likely traveled up the interstate of Portland and Seattle, which had an already pre-existing garage rock culture dating back to the 1950s such with bands The Sonics from Tacoma and The Kingsmen from Portland.
Mieske’s stage name of Ken Death is like the naming convention style of Darby Crash.
What’s the difference between the two? Darby pulled off being an actual musician with a professionally produced record, whereas Ken Death…was a street kid who didn’t amount to much. His violent actions in Portland were likely stemmed from a sense of failure, on top of a closeted homosexuality, and his racism filled the void between who he really was (gay) while also what he couldn’t be (successful).
It is now largely accepted that Darby Crash was gay or bisexual (in the biopic film, What We Do Is Secret, Crash called his sexuality “relative”). Darby being featured in The Downfall of Western Civilization, with a girlfriend was largely believed to have been staged to his keep his sexuality hidden. It is also possible, just a theory, that Darby’s suicidal tendencies in his later life could been in part depression related to being closeted gay or bisexual young man in a hyper-masculine scene. Crash was inspired before his punk days by Davie Bowie, where Bowie is iconic for his gender bending persona’s notably Ziggy Stardust.
Ominously songs like Five Years and Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide by Bowie seems to emulate the timeline of Darby’s pre-planned “romanticized” suicide, where he died in the hands of a female friend, Casey, or Kasey Cola.
In one of Crash’s last performances at the Starwood in 1980, which he allegedly did just to buy enough heroin to kill himself, it can be heard in the crowd via footage of him being bullied about possibly being gay and Pat Smear seems to get into a physical altercation with hecklers.
This last section of Crash simply sheds light that many gay youths were likely attracted to the punk rock scene of its early years. A sort of “leather daddy” scene for young angry youths, but the scene overall emulated a hetero-normative patriarchal sensibility of aggression, violence, etc. Some were gay, but they were still men and the scene may have offered them outlet to mediate between both positions.
Ken Death may have been in a similar situation to Darby Crash, with Death maybe even ripping off Crash, but instead of suicide, he chose white supremacy and murder.
V. Was Van Sant a little irresponsible about his relation to Ken Death? Did he know his view?
Van Sant in his youth attended the Caitlin Gabel School in Portland but later returned and this city became the basis for many of his films from Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, and Elephant. Van Sant was also close to controversial director Larry Clark who is famous for his film Kids which was criticized for its visceral depictions of adolescents having sex, even though it brought needed attention to underage sex and health risks.
Van Sant like Clark, and a later Harmony Korine, are gonzo, auteur, experimental directors with an emphasis on exploring the idiosyncratic fringes of society, which is very similar to author Hunter S. Thompson, a Louisville native, which is where Van Sant was born.
It’s important to note that Washington native, Chuck Palahniuk, LGBTQ author, who wrote Fight Club, lived in Portland was inspired to write Fight Club based on a prank club he was associated with. In Palahniuk’s book of memoirs, Stanger Than Fiction (2004), he talks about how he worked in hospice care taking care of men dying of sexual related illnesses in Portland, but also, he discussed loosely the concept of white privilege, describing whiteness as being “wallpaper”, i.e., the ability to be innocuous.
Portland was and is just a “weird place”. It’s not uncommon to see “Keep Portland” weird stickers in the area.
Yet, is it possible that Van Sant was more “intimate” with Mieske than known.
It would have been embarrassing for his burgeoning film director career to have been associated with a Neo Nazi, especially in a sexual sense, and it would have been embarrassing for Mieske (Ken Death) who posing as a tough male archetype in the punk, metal, and white power scene. If anything, maybe Mieske’s previous life as a gay hustler street kid on the dangerous streets of Portland, confronted with a faltering music career, on top of pre-existing racism, led him to overcompensate for his tough guy role and he did the unthinkable…murder an innocent man.
There’s nothing much known publicly about Ken Mieske’s life in his childhood, but maybe he suffered abuse, possibly even sexual abuse, however, I am not saying that to insinuate that being gay is a result of abuse, i.e., I believe people are born that way.
VI. What was happening in the Ken Death’s Portland of his youth and early adult years?
The goal is to paint a scene.
The Portland Blazers won the NBA Championship in 1977 which must have united the city which has a history of racism yet having a small albeit iconic black community in Northeast Portland in the historic Albina neighborhood which is now gentrified. Yet, in 1985 you had the police choking death of Lloyd “Tony” Stevenson, a security guard who was trying to stop a crime but was killed by police anyways.
Ken Mieskie, if he went to high school and simply wasn’t a street kid his whole life, may have gone to Madison or Grant H.S. in the Eastern part of the city, and I speculate this only because Mieskie was a member of Eastside White Pride. He was born in 1966 meaning if he finished high school and on time, he would have graduated around 1984 at 18.
The Eastside of Portland seems to have a more diverse population hence racial tension. Also, by the mid to late 1980s, Portland was hit by crack, and the crack trade brought gangs from California. As you saw more Crypts, white people likely started siding with white power gangs. Also, we can’t forget about the Pacific Northwest’ history of…serial killers, such as the I-5 Killer, Randall Woodfield, who attended Portland State University and was caught in 1981. Portland’s infamy by the 1990s caught the eye of TV producers and the show, COPS, had many of its earliest episodes there.
It is important to remember, for the sake of unity, that a fair share of white people helped Black Americans get our freedom.
Wilberforce University, Bennett College, Clark Atlanta University, Fisk University, Xavier University of Louisiana, LeMoyne Owen College, Rust College, Shaw University, Alcorn State etc are all named after white benefactors and abolitionists
And it wasn’t about being a “white savior” who infantilizes black people but white allies in the cause of human liberation and progress
We today don’t admit that it was dangerous for white people to help black people especially with white supremacy terrorists in the Reconstruction South.
John Brown was hanged for example for trying to start a slave revolt at Harper’s Ferry. Many Kansas Jayhawkers (abolitionists) died fighting Missouri Pro slavery factions. White women might have faced physical violence for disobeying white male oriented patriarchy.
Let’s not forget the thousands of lives lost in the Civil War where many units were from abolitionists hotbed in Maine, Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania etc.
Even though the United States has kept perpetuating racism in various ways after the Civil War, we in modern times when analyzing the past should also look for stories of unity and positivity.
I have noticed in modern political discourse on both sides of the political spectrum a growing sense of segregation, with the left-wing pushing a de-colonial, Critical Theory (perpetual criticism), and a self-determinist framework, whereas the right-wing also plays the “identity politics” game but with a majority white, reactionary, and coded language mindset.
With each new generation we forget our past of unity or fleeting moments of unity.
It seems right wing racists, foreign intel agencies, the “woke” liberals, the media, political parties farming votes, capitalists monetizing race, etc., can’t help but divide things.
1) Participatory Budgeting where citizens vote on what percentage they want their taxes going, everyone’s submissions are averaged out, but then legislators do the same thing. Both are averaged and used as a baseline for Budgeting.
2) Merge the census with tax returns to cut costs if not by law, then by executive order
3) Review federal acquisition procedures to ensure procurement practices are optimal
4) Deleted
5) Better publicize what the federal government does in fun commercials such as what’s going on in science, agriculture, historic preservation, national parks, environmental efforts like the restoring animals on the Endagered Species List, Army Corps of Engineers, NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration)
6) Instill a spirit of customer service amongst public (civil) servants so the general public improves their perception of government
7) The possibility of using Enterprise Resource Planning system tools like SAP in government agencies to better coordinate finance (as to comply with rules such as the bona fide need rule, Misappropriation Act, colors-of-money), procurement offices, auditors, senior leadership, etc. One government, one language as far as ERP, SaaS (Software as a Service), Asset Management Tools, freight carrier guides with 3PLs (third party logistics).
8) Establish a Loving Day based on the Loving Supreme Court case to celebrate multiracial families where celebrities of biracial or multiracial heritage talk about their lives such as Derek Jeter, Pete Wentz, Patrick Mahomes, Mariah Carey, Halle Barry, Blake Griffin, Zach LaVine, The Rock, Meghan Markle, Cameron Champ, etc. See article: https://andscape.com/features/black-pga-golfer-cameron-champ-is-going-places-his-grandfather-wasnt-allowed
10) Encourage telework and refurbish commercial space into residential space
11) Deflate the College Cost Bubble by using the Department of Labor to challenge hiring criteria of businesses where many require expensive advanced degrees when jobs might require less costly education, i.e., increasing the value of a high school diploma again, etc.; requiring schools getting federal assistance or whom have had past substantial federal assistance on financial brink to consolidate to cut costs
12) Allow negotiation of Medicare drug costs
13) Establish a federal corporation that invests in prescription drug stocks because by doing so this agency can better negotiate by buying or selling shares
14) Medicare Now! Let people use thru Medicare earlier before retirement
15) Lay the ground work for single-payer Healthcare by flipping the FICA formula so out of the 7.65% where 6.20% goes to Social Security and the rest, 1.45%, towards Medicare/Medicaid (where your employes matches your contribution), you flip it but you do it slowly so those who paid into Social Security and are near retirement can get their full benefits (unless they opt for more Medicare). Raise the overall 7.65% to 8-10%.
16) E.U. style data protection for US consumers
17) Also require digital currencies be backed by some sort of convertible asset like gold or silver
18) Issue a Defense Production Act edict to gold miners to mine more gold and silver to continue increasing our vault reserves
19) Not to Exceed Age Limits for Justices such as 70 or 80 as opposed to term limits so we don’t get activist judges who constantly flip on laws as one judge takes over from the other, etc. Yet, we don’t get judges who are always in the hospital once very old
20) A Total Energy Policy that includes both green and fossil fuels including converting nuclear weapons into energy fuel for reactors, while handing over fuselages to the aerospace industry such as to send satellites into in orbit
21) Full Legalization of Cannabis and help with military recruitment by disallowing the asking about prior or post service (in the case of re-entry) Marijuana usage.
23) The possible establishment of a US Space Force Academy in a place like Cape Canaveral or Daytona Beach (near Embry Riddle Aeronautical University), Houston, Hunstville AL, Prescott AZ, or Santa Barbara CA near Vanderberg AFB (even if it has to still fall under the guidance of the USAFA and Air Education Training Command). Even if the school has to start off as a two-year school for junior and seniors who do their first two years at the USAFA. An academy size comparable to smaller academies such as US Coast Guard Academy or US Merchant Marine Academy. Sports will be in the small NAIA or NCAA III. Name facilities after famous astronauts or space pioneers.
24) (My personal favorite) Operation Gerbil or Gerbil Maze with NASA and companies like Blue Origin, SpaceX, Astra, etc. Replace nodes on the International Space Station with new sections but send the old ones to the Moon so we have materials to establish a small research facility. Scrap junk missions to land materials on the moon such as wiring, aluminum, etc.
26) Re-establish mental asylums with funds and grants to states via DHHS to help with the mentally ill homeless population.
27) Separate mental asylums, drug rehab, and jail where in many cases these are merge to cut costs especially as jails become more privatized
28) Fund clean needle exchanges and promote one-time use needles.
29) Urge cities that have lax policies on homeless peoples to encourage these people to clean their areas, aka, you can stay here if you clean the streets. This can be done by coordinating with nonprofit organizations, local police, etc.
30) Urge ISP service providers to require ALL adult sites have Two Factor Authentication to prevent minors from accessing pornography but protect pornography as free speech between consenting adults. Sites that don’t apply this such as those incorporate overseas can be blocked. I support the right to watch adult entertainment, but it is too accessible.
31) Reform federal sugar subsidies
32) Transition After Training (TAT) for Transgender service people where recruits after basic training, completing trade school and upon reaching a rank that permits off base living or single quarters will have the ability to transition.
33) Department of Justice mandate to protect Trans people if jailed be it local, state, or federal such as solitary confinement or protective custody to prevent them being abused or harassed
34) Artic Defense Pact as an extension of NATO, NORAD, and AFNORTH with Canada, US, Denmark, UK, Japan and Nordic countries to exercise and coordinate defense of the arctic especially as climate change opens waterways
36) Expand the early commissioning program at Junior Military Colleges but also schools like Embry Riddle Aeronautical University
37) Expand the payout for Enlisted College Loan Repayment Plans in the military
38) Expand the Segal Education Award for the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Teach America
39) House arrests for petty crimes as opposed to jailing
40) Policies to end racial segregation in jails such as isolating violent criminals from inmates capable of rehab. Segregate based on crimes committed and character (not race) instead of bunching all types of criminals together.
41) STD testing for all inmates before entry, while incarcerated, and before exit
42) Encourage the expansion of open stock market exchanges on Eastern Time to close on West Coast or Central (Chicago) Time so trading hours are extended a little bit
43) Include Mexico’s top universities into the Association of American Universities with the US and Canada to promote goodwill
44) Use Border Wall funding as leverage for increased gun control (not confiscation)
45) Return parts of federal land to Native Tribes and Native Hawaiians
46) Fly the flags of Native Tribes on federal property and deed back parts of federal lands to Native American tribes
47) Investigate Highway of Tears Native femicides with Canada
48) As Reparations Package: Free or very cheap HBCUs; free genetic testing to find African ancestry, and 0% federally insured fixed rate mortgages (Freedman Loans) as a reparations package for black Americans similar to the GI Bill and VA Home Loan
49) Require truck drivers submit DNA swabs since many unsolved crimes were submitted by truckers. Also, pilots such as those who use smaller off the radar air strips.
50) Authorize a “hacker hunter unit” with law enforcement and clandestine operation authority within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA)
51) Have (RPCs) remote processing centers where the US can have courts and processing centers for refugees in foreign nations similar to forward-operating bases (FOBs), thus reducing the need to migrate all the way to the United States when judges can do virtual court sessions, but you have onsite translators, law enforcement officials to run background checks, etc.
52) Cash Preservation Act to ensure that large businesses are still required to do a certain percentage of businesses with paper cash currency
53) Link all successful experiments at attempting to cure HIVAIDs to race for a cure, spanning stem cells, medications, nanotechnology, gene therapy, etc.
Terrence Howard, Kanye, B.o.B, Tyga, DeSean Jackson, Will Smith…something is going on.
I appreciate Umar standing up for black people but I disagree with him on things.
He’s another talker in a sea of people doing the same, chasing that easy money from the “algorithm”
I wonder how many women Dr. Umar Johnson sleeps with after his seminars while touring the country considering a lot of the applause in his crowds seems to come from black (maybe single, maybe not) women. Seriously. He’s selling a product that many want, and I figure many women might want the honor of saying they’re the muse to the “honorable” Dr. or “Chief” or “Emir” Umar Johnson.
For such a judgemental person he’s out of shape and should cut back on the deep fried lemon pepper wings.
Considering his misogyny and bigotry, like the “reject modernity, embrace traditionalism” “black people were better under segregation” of thinkers like Kevin Samuels, with the late Mr. Samuels having been associated with podcasts like the Fresh and Fit Podcasts (which leads to Rollo Tomassi, Andrew Tate, Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern, The Young Americans, etc.), I wouldn’t be surprised if Johnson, with his version of Pan-Africanism, is a proponent of polygamy, considering many men are doing whatever they can these days to “get their balls” back, even though I’d argue they were never taken/they’re embarrassing themselves/saying things they might not be able to take back one day. But, who knows? That’s just speculation my part…
I guess according to Umar… people who love each other and have children across “racial lines” have to get…divorced? Split time with their kids? Feel shame?
Fuck you.
Umar chirps about staying in your race and that black men should only date black women but this puts all the blame on men as if black women don’t set the criteria. Marrying someone simply for their race and no other characteristic is stupid to me but it works for some.
There’s plenty of black men for black women and if a woman can’t find a partner that’s more of a sign of her than men. There’s always a willing man more than a willing woman in my opinion. Black women are also allowed to date outside their race and this doesn’t offend me. I remember growing up and there was no love thrown my way and I can admit that. I also grew up traveling as a military brat where environments are very diverse and non-segregated.
Honestly all the anti-whitey talk is a turn off. It’s a turn off to air this supposed dirty laundry. Hate is a turn off. Ignorance is a turn off.
I admit, I’m dating a white woman but black women are beautful but my lady isn’t black. Cool. She makes me feel supported, free, and she doesn’t think she knows better when I speak about race. I can be a nerd. I don’t have to worry about appearances. I can listen to whatever music I want. She simply listens. She shows me affection and there’s no real power struggles. I support her.
No one supported me so why turn my hand away from someone I care for just because of a fat and fat mouthed bigot rapping off black stats and woke talking points I already know about?
I use to live in “Hotlanta” and went to high school there but it wasn’t my style 100%. Bougie. Fast. Heartless. Fake it to you make it. Avarice. Leased cars. Shootings. Strip clubs. Hook up culture. Some of the most spoiled black children I’ve ever seen living in mansions but making fun of poor kids or bullying white kids. Granted there was plenty of old Dixie hate around. I know the S.W.A.T, Ben Hill, Greenbrier, Fort Mac, Old National, Riverdale, the West End near Morehouse and Spelman, just as much as I know the burbs where I grew up where my school was 50% black. Church on Sunday, wings for lunch with extra bleu cheese or Publix chicken with “fixins” on the side. To be honest I miss old days of black culture before rap, before “woke”, but I’m not hating. I grew up with two parents, one from the hood of Miami near Liberty City by way of kinfolk from Alabama near Selma (my grandmother grew up near Coretta Scott King), and my other parent is from the backwoods country of Georgia.
Yet, Umar Johnson has no right to tell a black person who lives the black experience, which is an experience of many experiences, from poor to bourgeoisie, rural to urban, Northern to southern, East to West, native born American or new African immigrant, part black, extrovert, or introvert, straight or gay, tall, or short, “proper sounding” or ebonics, that they aren’t black because they don’t meet his criteria.
When will black people ever stop this? Time and time again…This purity testing? Blackness could be this all-encompassing and loving movement, happy to spread sacred wisdom of the Motherland to influence all mankind, but instead it comes off as hate against hate.
And, who care’s if he’s “eloquent” or “funny”. Hitler was eloquent. Idi Amin was eloquent. Mao was eloquent. Grand Wizard’s can be eloquent or funny.
Dr. Umar who is essentially in the Intellectual Dark Web, like quacks such as Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux, Eric Weinstein, etc. He’s not building anything. He’s not engineering anything. He’s not coding for anything. He’s just another…talker. A paid, viral, algorithm chasing talker with some papermill doctorate, in our postmodern hellscape of self-help gurus with fascist underpinnings hidden under Joseph Campbell Jungian analysis or whatever.
I find it offensive that Umar as one American guy thinks he can single handedly define what Pan-Africanism is. His Pan-Africanism seems like a black man’s wet dream of Hitler grandeur with his Pan-Aryan ideas or some George Orwell 1984 dystopia. Pan-Africanism, Umar aside, despite the noble intentions and the many contributions of self-ascribed Pan-Africanist is inserting a black framework into larger discussion, seems like a form of reverse colonialism where predominately American voices are dictating the narrative, despite America, compared to black countries abroad, is privileged. Yes, systems do oppress black people, but one black American has more opportunity than many black Africans abroad.
I understand the need for we as black people to regain a sense of our roots, but often Pan-Africanism seems like erasure, oddly. It attempts to merge all black aesthetics into one on the grounds of unity, but incidentally might erase the unique nuances that makes the black experience so unique. Further it might not even include things which some might not consider “black enough”. It also might insert toxic elements from the America’s into the family oriented, rural, and pastoral cultures of many African groups. It’s not that Pan Africanism is bad, but how it has come to be, seems slightly problematic but questioning it in certain circles is grounds for something akin to “excommunication”.
And, by the way if you’re some white liberal reading this. Respectfully, all love to you, thank you for being allies to black people in time of need, but on this matter… white liberals have a tendency of listening to the loudest black voice in the room because they’re constantly searching for the blackest “diamond” in the rough.
Pan-Africanism in one way could be considered a bridgehead for the United State’s growing interests in Africa to hedge countries like China, and the US State Department (and intel community) could use “Pan-Africanists” to insert US ideas into Africa.
Adding insult to injury as Umar goes around threatening the existences of interracial couples who are already receive hatred from certain parties, he also DID NOT go to a Historically (emphasis on historically) Black College and University (as if it matters or makes you less black if you don’t go to one). Sorry, is Obama not black enough for going to an Ivy League college, a place where black people were denied for most of American history? Why are we shaming black dance teams at “white colleges” when this could be a showcase of black culture, etc.? Black people act like white folk don’t have (or, didn’t invent) remote controls. It’s not hard for others to watch Grambling vs Southern or the Celebration Bowl.
Umar went to Millersville University and got an advanced degree from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, where osteopathic medicine is heavily criticized by traditional medicine, but it’s not that Umar cares, or many of his follower’s care, considering we live in a world of Zodiac followers and hand-readers, because he simply needed a Dr. in front of his name to give himself more credence. Good on him for achieving it, but simply because you’re a “doctor” doesn’t mean your prescription to the world’s problems are entirely accurate.
He’s even been caught lying talking about his ancestry to Frederick Douglass according to The Root (2017) article by Michael Harriot, titled: We Fact-Checked Umar Johnson’s Hotep Tantrum with Roland Martin Because Someone Had To. That should have cancelled him, but his hotep followers don’t care, his black female followers obsessed with black men with white women don’t care, no different than Trump supporters not caring for his multiple lies.
The further irony of Umar is that he’s some type of Muslim, but for whatever odd reason, black Americans never question the fact that Islam played a huge role and still does play on in the enslavement of black people. Muslims, whom I have no problem with, but relating to the history of slavery in Africa, weren’t permitted to enslave fellow Muslims, so being in Northern Africa and the Sahel, Muslims made raids into Sub-Saharan Africa or traded for slaves for goods with black African tribes or kingdoms. Tribes who didn’t want to be enslaved and wanted to make money from the gold trade routes converted to Islam as a business decision. These gold trade routes helped Timbuktu flourish, but the wealth of gold trading Muslim African Kingdoms likely tipped off the Europeans who had contact with Islam (for better or worsts).
After the Reconquista of Spain and Portugal over the Moors, the Portuguese simply sailed to areas that Muslims were familiar with, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade began in the Age of Discovery, especially after Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand sent Christopher Columbus to what would be the new world.
If certain black people are so committed to “de-colonization”, then why not go further, and return to nature-worship which is more indigenous than any Abrahamic religion? However, our ancestors in the USA fought with Christianity inspiring us, so why throw away what our ancestors fought with simply because we want “consciousness”? Why can’t you be a Christian or a cultural one at least (identifies as one, but not a hardcore follower) like most Americans and be equally as intrigued with African culture? Are we better than our ancestors because they were more oppressed than us, but they didn’t “fight hard enough” according to or modern standards? I dunno…
I would argue the existence of black people is miserable because not only are you oppressed by systems out of your control that inherently criminalized or stereotype you, but you’re also policed, haggled, and harassed by your own black people where everyone walks around purity testing the authenticity of the other instead of owning their own lives. You’re a target of white supremacists and get the ire of black nationalists.
Yet, maybe I can’t be mad at Umar because black people are human and most humans care about what other’s think and try to fit in as to not bring negative attention to themselves.
II. Want to Hear a Conspiracy?
Anyways,
Want to hear a “conspiracy theory”?
Ok. Here we go…
White supremacists love black separatism.
Oh, wait, that’s not a conspiracy.
It’s as if the Founding Fathers who supported slavery but knew that the freedom of black people was inevitable, knew that one day, particularly with black people being treated so poorly, would segregate themselves, because they would hate white people, which was their plan all along.
There’s something odd going on to me, but it seems we as a people have accepted the contemporary discourse of self-determination and tribalism as a needed tenant for a more just world, yet, to me, I suspect that this tribalism, particularly in the United States, where white and black are more similar than we given credit for, is and has been pre-planned or is the expression of past segregated/nationalistic ideas still echoing into the present (for example, even the hippies of days past were still racially regressive compared today’s standards but their views or analyses on race, gender, etc., largely remains unchanged to this day).
The Great Replacement Theory” or “Kalegri Plan” is something spouted by conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and Nazis (and, Fox News) alike, but I would argue that the future is the “Great Re-Segregation”.
The Great Re-Segregation is the innocuous herding of groups into defined spaces (maybe, even “smart cities” with “themes” and within meta-verse spaces, i.e., no different than racially segregated neighborhoods) in a globalized world where groups are essentially herded like animals (without thinking of it as such), where our data is collected (genetic information included), surveillance is everywhere, and the mass media is used to stir up unrest in the public, yet, since levers of power will be largely influenced by Westernized European inspired ideas, policy, etc., but also the growing influence of the homogeneous Chinese.
A society ruled by a technocratic elite (i.e., like things already are), indifferent to progressivism or conservatism, who operate with a pragmatic and “syncretic” viewpoint and manages the species, like a Darwinist exhibition. Sure, we will still have overlap between the groups, because we as a species have always had overlap, because sharing genetics helps “keep gene pools” humble (not inner-bred), which helps the overall longevity of the species (i.e., genetic vigor), but most people will be herded (socially groomed) to segregate and the political right and political left are both responsible.
Countries are essentially “centers” overseeing commodified groups where all nations answer upward to institutions and systems effectively ran by a small group of people, i.e., a pyramid scheme. When consumer bases start to slow down in how fast they replicate while also demanding more rights as they climb the economic ladder, economic down-turns are manufactured, new bodies from around the globe are shifted into industrial ones, and process of segregation in one hand and assimilation in another takes course.
However, I don’t want you to lose faith in all institutions, and institutions in many ways are highly effective at mitigating risks and subsidizing costs to help the public; however, there’s players within these systems that seem to have an agenda, or maybe these leaders are simply operating subconsciously the way the system was designed to, i.e., an empiricist, scientific, sterile mindset of mitigating groups, creating grand narratives, managing the scarcity of resources, etc.
III. Trauma, Conspiracy Theory, etc., etc.
But on black people.
Terrance Howard is flying around the world telling people that he has disproved gravity. Kanye “Ye” West is having a psychotic episode for our sick entertainment as he is handled by white nationalists and antisemites using him as a “pet to prove that they aren’t has “unstable” as Ye. Rapper, B.o.B., attempted crowdfunding to raise money to help prove the Earth is flat. NFL Wide receiver, DeSean Jackson was called out for saying antisemitic things. Rappers such as Tyga often talks about “Jewish money”, etc., the irony is that there’s likely Jewish management working on his albums (with rappers also somehow allowed to say terms like “white bitches”). Will Smith, likely feeling emasculated by social media and his wife (or, life partner, what have you, whom had a relationship with Tupac – who holds a messianic status amongst certain black people), calling his manhood and even blackness into question, assaulted another black man on stage, in front of the whole world, at the world’s most prestigious acting award (even if the event has fallen off in popularity in recent years as far as ratings). Kyrie Irving did share a post of a “Black Hebrew Israelite” adjacent documentary (not to be confused with black people who practice Orthodox or Reformed Judaism) that has antisemitic tropes.
The comedian, Godfrey, and even the radio personality, Charlemagne the God, whom I would say have their heads on right for the most part, sometimes praise the Farrakhan’s of the Nation of Islam, which as a group espouses…Black Nazi rhetoric, even if they make certain good points analyzing power, how things work, etc. I found it interesting that everyone called out Ye for his obvious hatred, yet, there this veneration for figures like the Farrakhan’s which is often a way of proving “how down you are” in a culture were purity testing, i.e., sizing each other up seems prominent.
Black people have been taught that we cannot be racist, but only prejudiced, since we lack institutional power, yet, the irony of this idea is that A) it allows black people to not challenge our potentially bigoted ideas and to feel empowered within those beliefs because traditionally we lack power, and B) this notion seems like a form of infantilizing black people by saying our actions aren’t as comparable to that of our supposed “superiors”, and this can be problematic on multiple fronts such as empowering sociopaths who already lack the ability to take self-accountability, and yes, black people can be sociopaths as well.
Bullet point (B) in my opinion tends to be promoted more by non-black liberals or non-black Leftists, who struggle with how to help or listen for fear of offending. Building empowerment solely on the idea that we as black people don’t have power or haven’t had an impact on power systems, seems defeatists to me, i.e., a victim-based mentality, which sure has plenty of merit – considering black people were and are victims in many ways – but, this tendency also has elements of “erasure”, i.e., it erases the impacts black people have been able to insert on power systems.
We as black people always focus on depression as black people. Our movies are either hilarious comedies or the most depressing family or slavery stories. It’s one extreme to the next. It reminds me of the Greek mask where one half is smiling and the other is sad.
Many self-ascribed black nationalists don’t know every single black person who contributed something of prominence, and we often talk about social leaders and celebrities, as opposed to our engineers, scientists, doctors, etc., which interestingly is something that all groups do, further showing we’re no better or worse than anyone else.
Before I go on, I want to state that I want all humans to be inspired by blackness. I do not want black exclusivity, black segregation, black hierarchies, black gatekeeping, purity testing, etc. We are all humans and should find inspiration and commonality amongst each other because we all have different ways of seeing things, so it’s intelligent to learn and adapt to each other. The same way how when I was kid found a moral is tales like Robin Hood who fought the rich and the state for the benefit of the common man, I want a white kid feeling lonely in the boonies to be inspired by Shaka Zulu.
I’ll get to the point of my beliefs. I don’t like segregation. I was raised with a Christian inspired Abolitionism that seeks a future where are people judged by their actions solely and not for their race.
Even though I am by no way a good Christian, and many Christians would reject me as being a Christian because I’m not an extremist, I still place merit on the teachings on mercy, love, humility, etc., that Christianity teaches.
Interestingly, my political left leanings are in part inspired by Christian mercy.
I believe that racial segregation is social engineering derived from our colonial roots and is a way of dividing the public by manufacturing dialectical (diametrically opposed) tension, cultures., etc.
I find it “funny” that white nationalists support the rhetoric of black separatists, so…if logic is to persist, and black people or the political left say that the US is white supremacists (i.e., Amerikkka), then maybe black separatism was intended to be another force that keeps the races separate, so they can be “farmed” “herded” etc. I find it interesting that certain elements of Left-Wing thought, with its anti-colonial, post-colonial, and de-colonial framework calls for self-determinism, yet, white nationalists or other Right-Wing forces call for self-determination too.
I believe that those in power use both left-wing and right-wing because they have a pragmatic view of power, to maintain racial segregation, hierarchies, etc., but these people, seeing themselves as entitled to “evolve the species”, use tension to merge elements of bipolar opposites, so from the explosion of these opposite agents, you create a new paradigm, but the later repeat the cycle as new diametrically opposed binaries reveal themselves.
There’s a Darwinists and Enlightenment Period based mindset (which includes liberalism, Communism, fascism, and capitalism) that sees chaos and flux as essential in the process of evolution and these concepts are embedded into Western thought, didactic, etc. The common man, burdened by the grind of existence, where the system knows and manipulates our Maslow Hierarchy of Needs by creating scarcity (competition, unemployment, etc.), is more likely to find solace in their identity (the cheapest form of currency in my opinion), and not question how those identities are constructed to be binaries in a system of control for the benefit of a few.
For example, the Nation of Islam, which is listed as a hate group by the US State Department, Southern Poverty Law Center (who helped take down the KKK in the 1960s), and Anti-Defamation League, believes that black scientist named Yakub (insinuating Jacob from the Jewish tradition) created white people and other races with an unspecified birth-control method to be “diametrically opposed” to blackness, and to conquer black people.
Nation of Islam by the way was allegedly created by a man impersonating a black man, and he mysteriously disappeared, potentially stealing money from membership fees of poor blacks. Many poor black people fled up north, and the creator of the Nation of Islam, using the then popular trend of secret groups, like B’nai B’rith, the Klu Klux Klan, etc., focused on these new black migrants who became jaded by racism up north. Before the twentieth century, after the Civil War, the United States saw an increase in spiritualism, mesmerism (hypnosis), seances, etc., because there was a lot of death from the war and a changing of America as new immigrants came in. The N.O.I., is simply a byproduct of these events. Today, the Nation of Islam has ties to Scientology, which is further proof of the mind-control elements the N.O.I. seeks out.
Simply reading this I can pull so much. A) black people descended from slaves often make similarities to that of the ancient Jews in captivity since that was the only book that slaves were allowed to read (or, be read too), granted it was redacted by slave owners to justify slavery, B) because of Christianity being forced upon us – my people, as it was for most groups, including tribal Europeans in the Dark Ages, newly freed black people after slavery, notably those exposed to other ideas in Northern Cities, were searching for identity and some chose a religion that was perceived as polar opposite to Christian, rural, and Southern, yet still beholden to the credibility of Abrahamic faiths, and chose unorthodox Islam, and C) the figure of Yakub – a rip off of Jacob – is essentially the concept that not only chirps to anti-Jewish thought, but also the notion of the “Uncle Tom”, “sell-out”, “race traitor”, etc., meaning that the Nation of Islam inserted this character, as a “purity testing” trip-wire figure, as a means of taking the high ground to call any detractors or critics “enemies of the race”, which is a pretty low and lazy way of winning arguments.
There was also an aversion to the COVID-19 vaccines, despite black Americans in certain categories being at increased risk for contracting it due to high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, etc., but also black and Latin workers often work in businesses that were prone to outbreaks such as warehouses, meat packing facilities, restaurants, etc.
Sure, my last point about COVID-19 is more understandable, because to be frank, the virus was new, people had limited information, the virus did fundamentally change how we operate (such as tele-work, social distancing, etc.), and there is a general mistrust of institutions; however, for all the other previous points stated, there is a trend of black men, notably popular black celebrities, descending into what I consider to be postmodern solipsism, relativity, and conspiracy theory.
Further, as this phenomenon of black celebrities going mad is happening, which is not necessarily new, there are public figures willingly to use this distortion or confusion of what is real or what is not real to mix it with Pan-Africanism so these public leaders to ascend to prominent positions.
Umar Johnson, for example, is a Men’s Rights Activist, likely inspired by the late yet controversial Kevin Samuels (whom like Jesse Lee Peterson, tells the story that black people were better off segregated).
IV. Fascism hiding under Postmodernism
Misinformation affects all people regardless of demographic because as a society we are now living in a hyper-reality of late-stage, globalized capitalism – full of parody, pastiche, bad actors, i.e., trolls or agents of misinformation, and recycled pop culture – where the distinction between real and fake, or simulation and simulacra is hard to discern.
We live in a world where corporate power for example is so strong, innocuous, and entrenched and it pervades all aspects of life, including the commodification of race, culture, sexuality, orientation, ideology, religion, education, healthcare, and just about…everything. Even misinformation is commodified.
I say that postmodernism is the chameleon skin that shrouds the predatory animus of capitalism.
The disorienting “skin”, i.e., postmodern culture, is simply a way of capitalism to sustain itself by a) creating relativity so we don’t know what is real or fake, and b) recycling culture, often in anachronistic fashion, because most growth or markets have already been exhausted, and most production isn’t from labor value but is from financialization, i.e., using fiat money to speculate on assets to create artificial demand where those at the top benefit the most, and manipulate business cycles to their own benefit (knowing government’s, already being privatized, will insure their loses at taxpayer expense).
As a result, we live in a world where “Continental Philosophy” encompassing fields such as metaphysics and existentialism merges with “Analytical Philosophy” encompassing fields like linguistics, game theory, logic, etc. In other words, we have a lot of intensive research and data alongside endless subjective interpretations of said data thus leading to a “collective flux”, i.e., mass solipsism, resulting in statements such as “my truth”.
Even though this democratization of information can be inspiring and helpful (e.g., checking institutional power), it does lead to a “triumph of the will” of ideas, i.e., the strongest survives, hence we may be subject to constant and ever-growing ideological conflict as ideas battle each other with no sense of moderation or consensus in sight.
But as a fellow black man, I can understand why there’s this need for truth among black people, yet, it seems to be leading black men (not saying more so than anyone else) down conspiracy rabbit holes.
The truth is, of course, black people had our diverse and often differing indigenous identities stripped and were forcibly yet partially assimilated into Western Civilization, to be labor power, but also to serve as an aesthetic binary to whiteness, where blackness became the magnet for the vileness of white supremacy.
Black Americans were designed to arouse a sense of supremacy in white settlers, many who had nothing but the value of being white.
Black people historically were denied education, reading, the ability to speak up, and our own destinies. Yet, this doesn’t mean that black people lacked aptitude, but rather we were disbarred from understanding the civilization which fell upon us, and which also devalued us. There’s a tendency to think that we’re not getting the entire story, or, there’s a paranoia of some higher deeper and nefarious truth – which is true but can be untrue depending upon on how we seek those truths.
But, how far black people have come is a true miracle.
We must be willing to check our own theses.
Simply because we feel something doesn’t mean that it is true, and the also the simplest path towards a solution is often not the truth but its tempting to take the less arduous path. For example, antisemitism is often a gross simplification of the truth, because Jews don’t run the world, even though, of course, there are powerful players that are Jewish pulling the levers of power, but to time and time again blaming Jews is intellectually lazy and ironic. If Jews really ran the world, why would they not just bulldoze anyone in their way?
White nationalist for example, preach that they are superior one second, while claiming to be victims at the same time, and most of the bad ideas that are affecting everyone – white people included – were created by white people. Karl Marx, a Jew, or a BIPOC person didn’t steal your job, but Mitt Romney working in Leveraged Buyouts did.
The temptation to jump to antisemitism, is disingenuous, and an easy scapegoat, but black people do this too, i.e., we try to find a simple explanation without understanding all the nuances, conflicts, inner diversity of various groups, etc.
When you add all of this with the fact that black men are often the most criminalized, black people in general – traditionally speaking – are often seen as having “less quality” or “less refined tastes”, etc., there is an insatiable thirst for truth to rebuild or regain our “consciousness” “regalia” “honor”, but the trauma on black people, both present and past, both anecdotal and institutional, seems to corrupt the path towards truth. This corruption, which objectively is from a good place I would argue, seems to have some black people questioning everything, even basic principles such as Terrance Howard arguing against basic arithmetic (something all humans developed and understood on their own).
History is already a confusing and rigorous endeavor, but most people fall for conspiracy theories, where I defined conspiracy theories as theories where the conclusion is already predetermined, but the researcher with a specific or ideological bias uses facts that simply serve their point, instead of actively challenging their own thesis or idea. Conspiracy theories as opposed to let’s say investigative journalism often lacks rigorous peer review, panel presentations, debates, etc.
She’s not a horrible person, but I don’t get much from her opinions and they seem highly biased, reactionary, and not reasearched that well. I think she has learning to do on issues, but she has a platform to spread her “contrarian” ideas to the masses and add to the paranoia that’s already out there. You hear the word shill a lot online, and in many ways despite her seeming “against the man”, I think she’s only libertarian as a rebuttal to progressive politics so conservatism can be sustained without verbally admitting it, yet, her Fruedian slips in her Tweets reveals a lot of where she is coming from.
Idaho, where Kim is from, is a lovely state with its own unique albeit small progressive elements, but hearing Kim Iversen talk it reminds me of a conservative person from Idaho who really didn’t grow up around a lot of diversity despite her having family who are Asian. Yet, she was indoctrinated within a largely white environment – which isn’t bad – yet, that can shape a person’s biases similarly to if it were the opposite. Put it this way, I’m sure many Right Wingers love her, despite her coming off as “progressive”. I feel she is closeted cheerleader for white supremacy without even realizing it because she equates the talks around white supremacy as being hostile towards white people but fails to get its a conversation about a system.
This take by Kim Iversen and Joe Rogan…is stupid. I’m sorry, it’s stupid. White Supremacists can’t be threats because they…wear khakis? Kim is so paranoid that white people will be “criminalized” that she’ll actually downplay people in a movement that has done violence in the USA such as terrorism.
Another goofball take by Kim. So liberals are leaving supposedly. OK. But Ryan Grim rebuts her claim by saying liberals are moving to liberal areas and her best comeback is “well, they’re not the same sort of Demcrats”. Oh really, can you elaborate more? She also doesn’t address the larger reasons behind the housing crisis such as the Federal Reserve’s easy money policy making home prices soar, innovations in online homebuying making home buying faster, etc.
I’m glad that Kim Iversen runs her mouth. Seriously. She could easily slip away as another innocuous ambiguous newscaster, yet, by her talking and her Tweeting, her true biases, thought process, and beliefs become more apparent.
See exhibits below….
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She can’t understand why people are mad that a vigilante went to a protests which resulted in two deaths? She doesn’t get the symbolic nature of the case considering it was a BLM protests but Kyle being acquitted is a form of the state scaring people to not protests etc.
Forward: Before I get into the article, I want to write a quick list of white supremacists hate crimes, since it seems Kim Iverson is skeptical that white supremacy is a threat, largely since she feels doing anything about it would violate some sort of libertarian principle. But I’m not sure if she’s a libertarian necessarily, and could simply be a free thinker, yet her segments on Rising by The Hill to me have been helping to stoke a sense of mistrust, conspiracy, and even apologetics for right wing ideology.
After I wrote this, it struck me that Kim Iversen is following in the tradition of former MTV VJ, Kennedy, and MTV contributor, Kurt Loder, who are both libertarians. Yet, Kim’s style on her show, Rising by The Hill, seems to be picking up notes from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, i.e., opining in real time, firmly anchored by a bias, rather than giving in-depth analysis of the issues she’s talking about and with nuance. Kim Iversen seems like a decent person. She’s continuously worked and built a career for herself, and that is commendable. However, I notice that she seems flat-footed when it comes to having a good pulse of what’s going on, and in many ways, I think her upbringing has left her a bit ignorant or unable to understand nuance on many issues, such as those relating to race. Her politics are all over the place, which isn’t problematic in and of itself, but discerning what Iversen believes is task. To me, she’s ultimately a “progressive Republican” with a tendency of spreading paranoid energy, and seems strongly influenced by her upbringing in Idaho, but she takes the “hip position” of being a libertarian (without stating it publicly), meaning she’s really nothing more than a Republican. As she decries the tyranny of the state, her political position ends up being nothing more than apologetics for Republican politics. She can be the most progressive conservative pundit on YouTube if she wants, but in reality, the Republican Party doesn’t care about any of her “progressive ideas”, yet she continuously muckrakes the Democratic Party – a party, which of course, can be embarrassing and counter-productive, but still the Democratic Party gives more people across the country, regardless of background, a sense of belonging (as opposed to the monolithic politics of the GOP).
White Supremacist Violence and/or Mass Shootings by White Suspect Crimes:
Payton S. Gendron (10 kills in Buffalo NY). Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (168 Kills and 680 wounded). Dylan Roof (9 Kills at a church in Charleston, SC). Stephen Paddock (60 Kills and 411 wounded). Robert Crimo III (killed 7 and injured over a dozen in Highland Park, IL). Phoenix Ilkner, a College Republican called exteme by classmates (2 killed and injured others) at Florida State University. Scott Decry (8 dead, Seal Beach CA). John T. Ernest (Poway Synagogue Shooter. 1 dead. 3 injured). Ethan Nieneker, charged with two counts of capital murder and one count of first-degree felony murder (Austin TX). Vance Boetler, shot two Democrat politicians in Minnesota, with no National Mourning from the Trump Vance Administration. Eric Rudolph (1 Killed and 111 injured at the Atlanta Olympics). James Huberty (21 Kills and 19 wounded at McDonalds during San Ysidro Massacre in 1984). Devin Kelley (26 Kills and 22 wounded at the Southerland Church Shootings in TX). Robert Long (8 Kills and 1 Wounded in Atlanta). Dimitrios Pagourtzis (10 Kills and 14 wounded at Santa Fe HS in Texas who was found with Nazi and Soviet regalia). Brenton Tarrant (51 Kills and 40 injured at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand). Buford Furrow Jr. (1 Kill and 5 wounded at a LA Jewish Day Care). John King, Lawrence Brewer, Shawn Berry (1 Kill of James Byrd Jr who was decapitated by being dragged by a truck in Jasper, TX). Frazier Glenn Miller (3 Kills at a Jewish Synagogue in Kansas). Robert Bowers (11 Kills and 7 wounded at a Jewish Synagogue in Pittsburgh). Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (15 Kills and 17 wounded at Columbine HS, where the sole black victim was called the N-word before being shot while calling for his mother). James Harris Jackson (1 Kill with a sword of a black homeless man collecting cans in New York City, NY). Jeremy Joseph Christian (2 Killed and 1 Wounded in Portland OR). James Alex Fields (1 Killed by car and 35 wounded in Charlottesville. Trump supporter). John Earnest (1 Killed and 3 Wounded at Poway Synagogue). Gregory Bush (2 Killed in Jefferson Town KY). Kenneth Murray “Death” Mieske, Kyle Brewster, and Steve Strasser (1 Killed by baseball bat beating. Mulugeta Seraw was beated by Neo Nazis of W.A.R. in 1988 in Portland, Oregon. Brewster was found fighting alongside Proud Boys in Oregon in 2021). Jonathan Russell Kennedy (1 Murder and two attempted murders in Huntington Beach, CA, 1994). Erik R. Anderson (1 Fatal Stabbing of Native American, George Mondragon in 1996 in Huntington Beach, CA). Samuel Woodward (1 Kill of Ben Bernstein in Lake Forest, CA).
Intro in Kim Iversen’s Questionable Analysis on Ethan Crumbley and the Patriot Front March
There’s some controversy around Kim Iversen. I don’t hate her, and I will try to put her into context. Yet, she is quite a mystery. For a public figure she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, not even a locked account that prevents public edits. Basic Google searches pulls up some information but not much about her background.
I don’t think she’s an evil person and I feel she’s fairly interested in the topics she speaks on. Yet, the controversy around Kim has been going on for a while but it really came to fruition with her “interesting” take of Oxford High School mass shooter, Ethan Crumbley. According to Kim, the reason the Sun publication showed an angelic photo of the mass shooter was because the media was trying to make it seem like all innocent white Christian males appear to be terrorists. She didn’t really miss the point as to why people were disappointed at the photo of Crumbley, in that she acknowledged that when people of color are shown in the media they are often depicted with the worst imagery, yet, Kim decided to be a contrarian for the sake of being one, by spinning as if showing an innocent photo of Crumbley was another attempt to “demonize” white males.
Honestly, it caught everyone off guard and left people scratching their heads. It is as if when progress about fair coverage relating race is happening, she felt she had to insert a contrarian opinion for the simple sake of doing so, which could be authentic, or could be for money reasons, i.e., it’s her job, but when you see her Twitter account response to criticism she doubled down on her defense of white Christian males (which makes sense considering she was raised in white society and has a white father and family members).
Traditionally, black people for example were always stigmatized via the media (something that Kim Iversen has acknowledged), e.g., just peek at George H.W. Bush’s campaign ad referring to Willie Horton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUxAMG8UqIw
Yet, even if we can all agree that racialized news coverage is bad, the fact that white supremacy is being analyzed seriously seems to have many people feeling uncomfortable, either out of fear of being unfairly associated with the movement, some who are angry that they feel black crime rates are displayed (despite has already stated there’s historical use of stats when referring to black people), or some people are living with a sense of false consciousness, in that America is largely based on white supremacy and people are naturally wired to act as if it doesn’t exists because that defies a certain set of morals mythologized within American culture such as “we are all individuals” or “all people are equal”, when in fact, many groups are not treated equally. Talking about and combating white supremacy isn’t anti-white, where certainly in the past talking about black crime was anti-black considering the U.S has an explicit anti-black history.
The backlash to speaking about white supremacy comes from fear, in which there’s an inherent fear centering around reprisal, which is ironic because if people are terrified for reprisal (which isn’t or won’t happen), what they’re admitting is that in the past they used similar tactics to make minorities live in fear. Basically, their unfounded fear of reprisal is based on them understanding the horrible past of this nation. If logic were to persist, if white supremacy is not a thing, then why are there so many people eager to point out black crime statistics? If America wasn’t built on racism, then why do so many white people fear “reverse racism”?
If we were to isolate this take by Kim on Ethan Crumbley, sure, OK, we can leave it as an “agree to disagree, but really disagree” moment. Yet, just a few days later Kim Iversen on her Rising program by The Hill released a segment titled, “Kim Iversen: Joe Rogan Calls BS on Patriot Front March, Is the Group Backed by Feds?”, published on 9 December 2021, which when accessed by me on 13 December 2021, amounted a total of 512,000+ views. In this segment it is important to notice that Kim is strategically positioned in the segment in the middle of her two co-hosts, meaning she is the focal point of the video and steering the conversation. In the video, she referenced a Joe Rogan segment, featuring Matt Taibbi (Episode 1745), in which Joe calls into question a recent march of white supremacists called Patriot March that occurred in late November 2021 in Washington, D.C. Joe claims that because they’re “in shape”, and wearing the same clothes, etc., that they look like the Feds. Joe does state jokingly that he’s an unreliable source because he’s a comedian (which is interesting because if that’s the case they why take you seriously anytime?), but still double downs on the fact that they can’t be white supremacist because…they have drums, and they have Khakis?
Kim event got the leader of Patriot Front’s age wrong by claiming he’s eighteen years old (I’m assuming she read an article from 2017) but is about 23 or 24 years older having been born in 1998 according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (2021). Further, Kim if she just read a little more into this or at least provided more context for her audience, she would have discovered that Patriot Front has ties to the Daily Stormer, being one of the most popular white supremacist websites. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (2021), “On November 3, 2017, roughly 30 members of Patriot Front marched through the University of Texas at Austin to the campus’s George Washington statue where Rousseau delivered a torchlit speech. The following day, Patriot Front members convened at Austin’s Monkeywrench Books with members of Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff meet-up groups for a flash demonstration.”
The fact that Patriot Front employs Flash Demonstrations seems to more evidence to detract from the idea that the November 2021 march was a Federal Law operation.
“The origins of Patriot Front lie in neo-Nazi organizing that began in 2015 at the message board IronMarch.org, itself an outgrowth of the community of dedicated fascists who commented at online forums such as 4chan and Stormfront, and allegedly founded by Russian nationalist Alexander Slavros. IronMarch in turn spun off the activist group AtomWaffen (German for “Atomic Bomb”) Division, whose members engaged in various far-right actions earlier this year.” (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2021). Lastly, Southern Poverty Law Center (2021) stated, “After an AtomWaffen member in Florida shot and killed two other members in May 2017, telling authorities the group was planning to blow up a nuclear plant, a number of AtomWaffen participants joined ranks with Vanguard America.”
Relating to Alexandr Slavros stated within the Southern Poverty Law Center (2021) article about Patriot Front, I find it interesting that Matt Taibbi being Russian (which is not a crime, and I don’t want to promote Russophobia) spoke against the Russia-Gate situation during the Trump Administration. I can understand and accept that the case was likely fraudulent, yet, it wasn’t entirely fraudulent in my opinion. My opinion, is that Russia-Gate took facts, omitted some facts, and conflated others in order to check the balance of power of Trump who did display a sense of being imbalanced himself, and also threatening to unravel US foreign policy especially with Russia whom he and others in his administration such as Rex Tillerson of Exxon Mobil and Michael Flynn had relations with. It was a flex of power not only to the Trump Administration who were creating their own unauthorized foreign policy, but it was a sign to leaders abroad, like Vladimir Putin, that the US State will go to about any means to protect our democracy from foreign influence.
Taibbi and other commentors such as Michael Blumenthal and Andrew Mate of The Grey Zone, rallied against Russia-Gate, but nowhere to my knowledge did they or have they admitted that Russia was providing online Far Right propaganda which influenced the Alt-Right which therefore fell under the tent camp strategy of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. The only sort of Far-Right ideology spoken about by members of the Grey Zone often revolves around the Azimov Battalion in Ukraine, who were revealed to have received US military financing against Russia. In essence, Taibbi and others will call out Eastern European fascism and Nazism when it comes from a US ally to discredit US foreign policy, yet they remain silent on Russian Far Right ideology such as the popularity of thinkers like Aleksandr Dugin who provided essential literature for many in the Alt Right (alongside the writings of thinkers like Julius Evola). Taibbi and others effectively “threw out the baby with the bathwater” as an analogy. Yet, the US government has endangered the US public with Russia-Gate because they didn’t focus hard enough on the far-right ideology actually coming into the USA and West, but rather appropriate facts for their own Machiavellian politics.
Yet, back to Iverson, after showing the Joe Rogan segment laughs before going into the history of plausible or proven examples of state-sanction terror cells. Kim also shows screenshots from Twitter by people like Mr. Reagan, an obvious right-wing pundit, who did have a YouTube channel for a long time and went so far as alleging that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a fake politician and actress. Kim goes into the background of Patriot Front in which she explains the group was a splinter group that broke away from a group called Vanguard who were the group that set up the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, VA. Yet, Kim inserts some interesting commentary by stating they are “non-violent”, which might be true in theory, or at least that what’s they say to not bring poor press to their movement, yet, it seems Kim is saying they are non-violent as a way of dissuading any sort of threat by Patriot Front or influence they may have on other groups.
It’s as if Kim is undermining the potentiality of the movement because she’s coming from a libertarian mindset, e.g., she states, “the big question is, how big of a threat are these things though? Yes, do these things exists, yes. Do terrorists exist in all forms, yes. But how large of a threat? What are the American people willing to give up to root out this threat?”.
Before I criticize what Kim just said there, to be fair, the group, where leader Thomas Ryan Rousseau spoke, was relatively small (numbering around 100), and this is according to Ellie Silverman (2021) of The Washington Post, who further stated that the event was pushed by fake Twitter account. “It shows how a small troupe of fascists in uniform can … exploit the loopholes around a social media company like Twitter and absolutely make themselves look much more fearsome, look much more scary,” said Michael Edison Hayden, senior investigative reporter and spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, “and give themselves a much better shot at getting the mainstream coverage they so desperately crave.” (Silverstein, 2021).
The likelihood of what happened at the march is either A) the anonymous Twitter account as owned by a person associated with Patriot Front who sent the message to rally, employing their “flash mob tactics”, but then quickly erased their account, or to give more credence to the idea that the Federal Authorities were involved, is B) the account was set up by law enforcement, with them knowing their “flash mob tactics”, to snuff out Patriot Front to get evidence of its members and gain intelligence on the group. Even if masked, the members had to get to the Capitol somehow, so traffic cameras or other means such as triangulating cellphones can easily build a possible registry of suspects.
But, saying the group was a false flag set up by the federal government seems unlikely, if not disingenuous (my favorite Joe Rogan word he uses a lot), since the authorities would have to recruit about 100 people to march and with 100 people you get the chance that at least one person would spill the beans, or a person that any of those 100 people knew could become suspicious and possibly spill the beans, thus jeopardizing the operation. The possibility of a leak would jeopardize any sort of integrity the government has and be disastrous, culminating in Congressional hearings, firings, even possible cause for actual white supremacists to appeal their cases or convictions, etc.
Joe and Kim’s take on the event possibly being a false flag event has an underlying element of conspiracy, and what one could extrapolate from that claim is that other hate marches or even the Capitol Insurrection itself was a false flag. This therefore takes away from the severity of these situations in an attempt to sweep them under the rug as quickly as possible since they are ammunition for government or activist to continue seeking reform against topics such as white supremacy.
Kim also offers some very thin and weak arguments about the group. She claims that because they have a “polished website” and that they seem well-organized, and that the leader is allegedly only an eighteen-year-old person, somehow means this group can’t be real or be a threat. What Kim and Joe seem to be missing is that white nationalist groups aren’t unsophisticated and have adapted to not looking like traditional Skinheads with red-laced jackboots, being out of shape Good Ole Boys reading Soldier of Fortune with a cache of weapons, or Klansmen. It’s not that hard to get a professional website made if you have a lot of people and tap into someone’s talents or even pay someone do set up your site for you. Also, even if the supposed founder of the movement is young, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have funding from powerful people who have fascist sentiments, similarly to how Richard Spencer came from money, set up the National Policy Institute (ran from his mother’s $3 Million dollar home), and had powerful connections such as with Stephen Miller from the Trump Administration whom he attended Duke University with (Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, 2017).
White Nationalists are not all junkies or meth-heads, or disenfranchised angry white youths, or men who have spent time in the prison system who are tatted up with Swastikas, but as Charlottesville proved, they can be a computer programmer, a cop, a military servicemember, a real estate agent, a college student, a bailiff, or even an adult actor, etc.
Note: The adult actor is Paul Kryscuk, whom according to Joseph Wilkenson (2020) of The New York Daily News, is a 35-year-old reported porn star, who sold multiple manufactured weapons to 21-year-old then-Marine Liam Collins, the feds said. Kryscuk allegedly mailed the illegal DIY weapons from his homes in New York and Idaho to Collins in North Carolina. Kryscuk and Collins were regulars on the online neo-Nazi forum Iron March back in 2017 before the site was shut down, according to the feds. During that time, they recruited Jordan Duncan, a 26-year-old ex-Marine and military contractor, and Justin Hermanson, a 21-year-old current U.S. Marine. According to the feds, the crew filmed a “training montage” of themselves shooting guns near Kryscuk’s home in Boise, Idaho. The video ends with all four giving the “Heil Hitler” salute under a black sun flag, a Nazi symbol. The phrase “Come home white man” then appears on screen to conclude the video. Kryscuk’s vehicle was also spotted at two different Black Lives Matter rallies in Boise, Idaho, over the summer, according to the indictment. Kryscuk and Duncan later discussed shooting the protesters, with Kryscuk calling their group a “death squad,” the feds said. Collins, who was enlisted until September, and Duncan had moved to Boise to work closer to Kryscuk before they were all arrested in late October, according to the Justice Department. (Wilkerson, 2020).
As we can see with Mr. Kryscuk, who lived in Idaho where Kim Iverson calls home, he was attached to IronMarch, similarly to Mr. Rosseasu of Patriot Front, where these groups interface with the Daily Stormer, Atomwaffen SS, and possibly even foreign Neon Nazi sources in Russia.
The analysis of Joe and Kim are both weak and lazy at best. The burden of proof to prove if this is a false flag is on them, but Kim especially didn’t do any sort of investigative research to prove if they aren’t real. Her skepticism is based on a libertarian position, mixed with historical precedent that the government has been involved with groups like this before (for example, Red Squads that infiltrated Leftist groups in the 1960s), but no actual investigative muscle to back up her opinion, despite being an employee of a multi-billion-dollar media corporations that owns hundreds of new stations across the USA.
It’s my suspicion that Joe had his take because he’s tired of Left-Wing politics particularly that centering around the topics of white privilege, wokeness, gender inclusion, gender assignment, etc.
Joe seems agitated by the Left because he’s a comedian and many in the comedian community are revolting against cancel culture. In the segment with Matt Taibbi, Rogan when talking about the Rittenhouse Case, insinuated that black people were so passionate about racial issues that they didn’t even know the victims were white, alleging he has black friends – who remain unknown – who told him they didn’t know the victims were black (I am assuming this is Charlamagne da God who was on the JRE with comedian Andrew Schulz on episode 1314).
Joe then shares a meme, showing the gas station owners of the Car Source that Rittenhouse was allegedly defending who are possibly from the Indian subcontinent, and the victims who were white. This is important because when showing the meme, Joe smugly says “I have a bunch of memes. I have a folder of my phone”, and this seems to be in reference to the backlash Rogan has received on his Instagram in which he’s posted questionable memes, such as one insinuating that the authoritarian right makes strong men and the libertarian right makes good times (silly, because conservatives don’t really care about personal freedoms including the marijuana Joe likes to smoke), but the left spectrum makes weak men and hard times. It’s easy for him to tap into the already existing mistrust of the mainstream media, take out his annoyance with the way things are, and use his platform/popularity to convince people that it’s all a hoax.
Lastly, Kim in this segment states that she was raised in Idaho which in the past was the headquarters of the Aryan Brotherhood near cities like Coeur d’Alene and Lake Hayden (now located in West Virginia) in the upper panhandle of the state. She states that people never really saw them as a threat, which is partially true, considering I grew up in the Pacific Northwest as child and later as a young adult, and remember counter-protestors at these events when showed on the local news. People would show up to protest the Aryan Brotherhood and other groups when they marched, yet, what Kim fails to admit is that this isn’t the 1980s or 1990s anymore. Back then, the United States and specifically Idaho still operated with a sense of white racial majority politics. White America could afford to not take them seriously since society then was still largely controlled by white people, e.g., most TV sitcoms featured white families (and, to even show an interracial relationship for example even in the 1990s was still taboo as to not anger the “Middle America” demographic), every President up to that point had been a white Christian male, etc.
Yet, fast forward, come after the election of the first black/bi-racial President in Barak Obama, the election of the first black and Indian American Vice President with Kamala Harris, and an evolution in society as far as acceptance of gay marriage, the inclusion of immigrants such as those from Latin America, the growing popularity of socialist or progressive politics, and the fight to include Trans people into everyday life, one could argue that white nationalists are gaining steam from this progress. The time Kim grew up in Idaho, gay marriage wasn’t even legal anywhere in the United States, the word Socialism was a political campaign killer, and BIPOC liberation politics had been largely anesthetized by the corporate white-wash appropriation of the MLK “can we all get along” iconography (despite MLK having socialist sentiments merged with Christian ideology). The change in the overall culture of America from when Kim grew up in Idaho to now is further amplified by advancements in technology where at the time Kim is referring to the fastest internet speed as dial-up, whereas now is lightspeed broadband communication across the globe, as well newer notions such as the dark web, using crypto currency, having aliases, etc. For example, the company Gab, located in Clarks Summit, PA., BitChute based out o of the United Kingdom, and Epik, located in Sammamish, WA, host white supremacists and Neo-Nazi websites, blogs, videos, torrents, etc., where Gab was associated with the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting. The world Kim is nostalgically looking back on didn’t have 8chan, BitChute, Gab, Parlor, Epik, etc.
When you add the differences between the past to the present with clear examples of white terrorism, then it’s unwise at best for Kim Iversen to simply be downplaying the threat movement of white supremacy. Hell, Fox News itself with commentators like Tucker Carlson openly panders to fascists rhetoric bordering upon “blood and soil” politics, and let’s not forget, Emperor Nero in exile himself, Trump and all the toxicity he and his administration platformed (including Steve Bannon going on a tour of Europe to inspire nationalists, influence EU elections, and set up a training center in Italy to train Right Wing activists).
According to Silverman (2021), “There were more than 5,000 cases of white supremacist propaganda in 2020, a near doubling from the prior year, the ADL found. The Patriot Front accounted for more than 80 percent.”
Is Kim Iversen really “Anti-Establishment”?
Kim Iversen despite appearing as if she’s anti-establishment, is establishment in that she is employed by The Hill and represented by N.S. Bienstock, which is a major TV talent agency representing the likes of establishment news figures such as Dan Rather, Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper, Bill O’Reilly. United Talent Agency acquired N.S. Bienstock on 22nd Jan 2014. Grace N.S. Bienstock is owned by the private company United Talent Agency which is one of the top 7 talent agencies in Hollywood.
When it comes to the Rising segment, The Hill is owned by Nexstar Media Group, NASDAQ symbol NXST, which had Fiscal Year 2020 revenue streams of $4.5 billion with a Fiscal Year 2016 total equity position of $284.35 billion. Nexstar, owns TV stations across the United States who are affiliates with the major TV networks (e.g., CBS, ABC, NBC, etc.), and owns shares of Food Network.
According to OpenSource.com (2021), Nexstar Media Group has donated to both Democrats and Republican politicians such as in 2014 with $2,600.00 to Mitch McConnell; $1,000 to Adam Kinzinger in 2014; $5,000 to both Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Donald Trump in 2016; $2,500 to Joe Manchin in 2016, $5,000 to Jim Jordan, and $10,000 to Team Graham in 2020 which I assume is Lindsay Graham who went up for re-election in South Carolina, etc. So, Nexstar does lobby and donate to politicians like most corporations do.
What happened to Krystal Ball and Seegar Enjeti?
Before the current cast of Rising with Kim Iversen, Ryan Grim, etc., it features Krystal Ball and Seegar Enjeti. Krystal representing more of leftist viewpoint and Seegar representing more a conservative view, were quite popular, but were oddly fired from the segment. It is my belief that The Hill, being an extension of Nexstar (a major corporation most know nothing about, yet, that’s the nature of many corporations), were trying to overstep the traditional monopoly of the big TV corporations so they focused on YouTube in a way that touched into alternative media market yet still trying to keep the traditional news segment feel.
Yet, it seems that Krystal and Seegar were too good at their jobs, where in many cases Krystal’s left leaning commentary that rallied against corporatism likely sealed her fate. She worked for a corporation arguable with conservative politics, spoke against capitalism, became a relatively popular figure, and then she was canned. Yet, Kim Iversen was brought on with an enhanced model of focusing on click-bait and to covertly anchor the show with libertarian, i.e., right wing, i.e., capitalist, sentiments. Whether, Kim thinks she’s simply defending libertine ideals, or our notion of individualism based on classical liberal ideals like David Hume, the truth is that ideology has largely manifested itself obviously as Republican, and therefore as corporatist by nature. Essentially, sure we have our individual rights, but this notion of individual rights is also the basis for corporate personhood, which is no surprise that libertarian billionaires like the Koch Family funding right-wing grassroots movements.
Kim Iversen seems progressive enough, but underlying her psychology is what could be considered “red pilling”, i.e., opening the window to turn listeners into right wing viewers suspicious of authority and slowing attempting to chip away at the progressive gains the left has made. Her left leaning counterpart in Ryan Grim, though often inserting his counter opinion to Kim is often overshadowed, which to me insinuates that Ryan Grim is coming for a centrist position. What we’re left with is what we have if we were to look at Congress, i.e., a centrist’s democratic party lethargically talking about progressive talking points stolen from the few progressives in that party (as seen through Ryan Grim) but accompanied by an ever-growing fascist Republican party.
She’s hungry for clicks, she’s not doing this for free (she’s in it for a pay check and career), she comes from the radio world so she knows the power of sensationalism, it’s a matter of time before she’s on the Joe Rogan Podcast, she’s fairly stubborn when dealing with criticism instead of seeing it as an opportunity to grow her worldview, and likely will get crowned by the Right Wing as a darling sooner than later. A part of me feels she’s just being controversial for the sake of controversy because he’s aware that it’s about the algorithm and clicks, and this likely comes from experience in radio, where such shock tactics are needed, but this is amplified by the medium of social media like YouTube.
Another contrarian in a landscape of contrarians competing for attention.
Unpacking Kim’s politics
Kim Iversen has an ambiguous politics, similarly to that of Joe Rogan (note: if interested read by article titled, Is Joe Rogan a Neoplatonist? The syncretic politics of Starship Troopers, zany ESP, magick, the Human Potential Movement, Howard Hughes, Disney and the RAND Corporation by Quinton Mitchell).
But, that’s her right. Not everyone has to fit into a proper definition, necessarily, but I don’t really like Kim’s political analysis. I think she comes off as “progressive” but her underlying worldview is libertarian, where libertarianism despite having representation on the left, e.g., socio-anarchism in the tradition of thinkers like Noam Chomsky (author, of Manufacturing Consent (1988) with Edward S. Herman). However, the truth is that libertarianism within US political history has always been an extension of conservative and Far Right politics – the prevailing ideology for most of the United States history – and in many ways libertarianism has been a politically correct way for the Far Right to appeal to mainstream audience. For example, the libertarian positions of individualism and property rights often translates to segregation (such as with State Rights used the desegregation debates), not supporting social services which might go the poor/minorities/or immigrants, and maintaining an economic ideology – capitalism, i.e., a variant of colonialism – which exploits labor so owners who traditionally are predominately white keep ownership over the means of production. The very basis of property rights in the United States were originally written for white male landowners who were originally intended as being the only ones allowed to vote considering many had a Republican model idea to government, before Democratic ideas came about to expand the franchise to common people.
Whether she admits it or not, she’s a libertarian, but I define her as a Gen X 3rd Position syncretic libertarian and contrarian wavering in postmodern fashion between New Age, Far Right, the Left, etc., while using click-bait and suspiciously stupid opinions (considering, she’s represented by one of the top talent agencies in Hollywood, even though I thought Hollywood was now called “Hollyweird” by the Qanon crowd). How can she ever allege a conspiracy or shadowy “deep state” when in fact she’s an extension of institutions of power? The conspiracy is she’s a populist libertarian talking on a corporate media network. She’s really a libertarian, leaning in the vein of libertarianism one would find in the ideology that Joe Rogan displays. With her coming from a radio background and now getting more notoriety via the internet, Kim is picking up on hot button issues like COVID-19, China vs. the United States, buzzwords like the Deep State, or any other hot topic floating in the collective consciousness, i.e., the zeitgeist.
She like Russell Brand really dug into COVID-19 skepticism. She is a supporter of Palestine which might give her points with elements of the political Left coming from a de-colonialist tradition but also, she might get points from the racist elements of the Right Wing where supporting Palestine or even radical Jihadism is because they are antisemites (for example, the case of Devon Arthurs, who is Neo Nazi associated with Atomwaffen SS, converted to Islam and his roommates were planning on blowing up a nuclear facility in Florida, per the source A.C. Thompson, 2018, ProPublica. Also, Ethan Melzer, a former private in the US Army, was charged with treasons for divulging information about his Army unit to a Satanic Neo Nazi group called Order of Nine Angels, per Kyle Rempfer, 2020, Army Times).
She has spoken against US interventionism in Latin American nations, which is good. Yet, she doesn’t believe that white supremacy isn’t as big of threat as what the media is saying, even though the media never talked about it in the past at least as being indicative of a growing social trend, so the fact the media is finally acknowledging white supremacy doesn’t mean it’s a false story but, more so we’re finally pointing the light at white supremacy. Sure, we can debate the scope of white supremacy, for example, there’s not hundreds of thousands of hate crimes occurring, yet, white supremacy can’t be measured with a scope of simply being large or small, because all it takes is a few individuals to conduct terrorist attacks, and white supremacy isn’t always with terrorism but cast with ballots at the voting booth. Whether she wants to admit it or not, Donald Trump’s MAGA is an expression of white supremacy, or what I like to call “white settler politics”.
Deconstructing the aesthetics of Kim’s political ideology
Before I go on, I must state that I don’t think everyone in list below is bad or entirely problematic, yet, some are, yet, all of the people listed below represent the “alternative space”, and this space seems influential on Kim Iversen’s ideas.
Kim could be best associated with the alternative media sphere that has Jimmy Dore (who spends a lot of his time attacking progressives for not being aggressive enough despite not realizing that a person such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is just one person in the House of Representatives who has to send legislation through a burdensome progress of drafting, committee, vote, Senate review/approval/or kick-back, and Presidential signature); Russell Brand; Graham Elwood, Joe Rogan (who has platformed and joked around with figures like Gavin McInnes – founder of the Proud Boys -, Alex Jones who shilled for Donald Trump and has ties to Roger Stone, Jordan B. Peterson [multiple times], figures of the Intellectual Dark Web, and any array of thinkers bordering upon being kooks); the Useful Idiots with Katie Halper (who really isn’t problematic at all – whom, interestingly hasn’t been invited to the Joe Rogan Experience. Kim Iversen has participated on Katie Halper’s podcast), and Matt Taibbi (a critic of Russia-Gate, yet, being Russian he seems to have bias and can’t seem to acknowledge the fact that even if Russia-Gate was fraudulent it doesn’t mean it entirely was, but even if it was entirely false, Far Right ideology from East Europe such as Russia and Ukraine, e.g., the concept of a Nazbol or monarchism, did influence the American Right Wing which therefore falls into the spectrum of MAGA politics. For example, Richard Spencer and his follower sang at Charlottesville, “You will not replace us” but also “Russia is our friend”), Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, possibly The Grey Zone with Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté (critics of NATO, Russia Gate, Israel, the CIA, etc.), maybe a little Peter Schiff (an proponent of Austrian Economics spanning Fredrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard – a father of anarcho-capitalism, the Mont Perelin Society, and Ludwig Von Mises), sprinkle in some Ron Paul (an influential figure in anti-Federal Reserve politics, the Tea Party, etc. But, we can’t forget about Libertarian Presidential nominee, Gary Johnson, whom Joe Rogan admitted to voting for in 2016), and Tulsi Gabbard (who is pretty much the presidential choice for everyone listed before, yet Tulsi is an active duty military officer, who seems to be playing the same game that Kim Iversen is playing, i.e., being appealing to the Leftism developed by Bernie Sanders, the state via her ties to the Pentagon via her committee assignment to the Armed Services Committee, but also appealing to post-Tea Party libertarianism one finds on the political right).
Loose cultural markers or aesthetics that float around the world that Kim’s ideology wavers around are the following: A distrust of mainstream media (MSM) especially those associated with liberal politics such as CNN or MSNBC (where the MSM have issue of ethics and integrity, yet, to assume that mainstream media doesn’t do any good job at all is false, and for some reason conservatives don’t consider Fox News to be MSM), Naturalism, holistic medicine, anti-vaccinations (an easy way to gain followers in a heated debate on vaccines, but anti-vax culture often revolves around conspiracy theorists in the traditional of the New World Order, fears of racial replacement or de-population, the Christian Right, etc.), con-spirituality (i.e., conspiracy spirituality, the nexus between conspiracy theory culture and New Age spirituality such as zodiac, charms, UFOs, parapsychology, etc., where New Age spiritualism is a successor of older Occultic and Neoplatonic ideologies mainly from the late 19th to early 20th century such as of Alastair Crowley, Austen Osman Spare, or Madame Blavatsky, where some these older ideas did have intersection with right-wing ideologies, i.e., Nazi Occultism. For example, take the curious case of the MAGA Shaman arrested for the January 6th Insurrection. Think of it as when the Right Wing trips too much acid at Burning Man or when hippies and paleo-conservatism merge), Boomerism, Generation X MTV generation cynicism (a spoiled generation, despite being the product of the divorce generation of their Boomer Parents, from America’s Goldie Lock’s era of the 1990s after the Cold War but whom where anti-establishment largely because corporations appropriated anti-establishment fashion, e.g., punk, rap, grunge, etc.), comedians revolting against cancel culture (despite comedy often being a cover for actual oppression or further stigmatizing historically marginalized groups), a cynicism towards wokeness (e.g., insinuating that corporate America is only being inclusive now for profits as opposed to being humanist, when this argument fails because capitalism catered to white supremacy but I guess people didn’t have a problem with them?), the Manosphere (appealing to men’s rights in the face of what some consider to be the radical feminist takeover of institutions and culture, particularly at the detriment of white heteronormative males, which has spawned a subculture of dating gurus, Incels, but also women who can profit by simply saying what these men want to hear, i.e., “I’m not like other women”), T.E.R.Fs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), skepticism towards government or central authority (despite displaying a sense of disassociation because the right wing is anti-government in many ways, often because they feel they can’t benefit from government as they use to, but in other ways many support police and militarism, but they seem to fix this my favoring “paramilitary” culture, i.e., militia culture), liberalism based around the rights of the individual which naturally leads more so towards a favoring or apologetic of capitalism (despite having some socialist sympathies, but we have to remember Gen X was born and indoctrinated during the Cold War, so the recent Millennial and Zoomer generation acceptance of Leftism isn’t as strong necessarily within Gen X, i.e., it’s still a taboo ideology that defies their materialist needs, career ambitions, etc., considering many are in managerial positions now), decentralization, etc.
Her politics could be understood as a synchronistic 3rd position that merges elements of left and right. An overlap between the anti-establishment left of old mixed with elements or right-wing libertarianism, yet she seems firmly based on conservatism (her default position), which could be from the fact she was born and raised in a very conservative state, with one of the largest white populations, during the Cold War, etc. Then we must consider her personality, which could be naturally contrarian for the sake of being so (which is just one possible element of her personality, i.e., I am not saying she’s an overall bad person, i.e., we all have our quirks), and when you compound this by the fact that she is a career-woman (I’m assuming she identities with feminism) she likely has a chip on her shoulder. I am not saying that being a strong empowered career driven woman is bad at all (I support it), but when factoring in her own personality, it could translate that she essentially double-down hard on her beliefs to not relent since relenting even if she has a bad take on a subject is a form of losing. Appearing wrong or giving credit when due might be possibly hard for Kim in that she’s possibly self-conscious about what people think of her (getting into Twitter beefs), yet she doesn’t see it this way and double downing on bad takes.
It’s anti-establishment and seemingly progressive so it can appeal to actual progressive people, yet the issue with 3rd Position politics is that even though it seems natural, and many are prone to moderate politics, when you’re platforming 3rd position politics to a mass audience, typically through an opinion piece format such as what Kim Iversen does, then you do pose the risk of legitimatizing actual Far Right ideology and end up seeming likely a disingenuous centrists who cherry picks elements from whatever side of the spectrum they feel comfortable with.
Generation X
All these people, expect for Jimmy Dore, could be grouped into the Generation X demographic, i.e., millennials before millennials, but unlike millennials, they’re more influenced by the precursor Baby Boomer generation, and weren’t as emersed with technology as Millennials. For Generation X, technology was there but it was still speculative, such as William Gibson Cyberpunk, Johnny Mnemonic, The Matrix, etc., but the physical world wasn’t as technologically integrated as it was with Millennials and Zoomers. In other words, Gen X being older now, isn’t as nuanced around technology despite using technology, and their worldview whether they admit it or not is influenced by a nostalgia of how things were. In other words, sometimes Gen X misses the mark because they’re not as technologically emersed as what they think they are. For example, understanding certain memes might go over the heads of some Gen Xers because they’re older and not as culturally engulfed in the levels and sublevels of contemporary pop culture.
What I notice with people like Joe Rogan for example, is that he sounds old or lacks a sense of gravitas where the world is now. His podcast ends up simply being “Joe talking to Joe”, where it’s a platform for him sharing his opinions more so than really challenging his own opinions or even that of others. As a Millennial myself who is about to be 35 years old, I’m getting “up there”, yet Generation X is already “up there” yet Generation X was one the most prolific “youth generations”, probably on par with teenagers right after World War II, i.e., they were the MTV Reality TV (Real World, Road Rules) generation meaning that they defy age in a traditional sense. They’re older but are frozen in youth. Kim Iversen’s news coverage could be defined as when Tool listeners, with all of its Jungian psychology and appeals to the hippie moniker of “It’s all a lie man!” from the 1990’s enter institutions of power but end up not being as progressive as what they think they actually are.
Generation X was defined by postmodernism. Postmodernism being a philosophical worldview that was a reactionary movement to the objective truth claims (grand narratives or meta-truths) proposed by modernism or structuralism, e.g., the postmodernist rejecting the claim that science will save us all. To the postmodernist there is no grand truth but various truths meaning reality is ultimately subjective since most alleged truths are often biased by those who state such truths, or there are limitations in what humans can understand. The goal of presenting this subjective worldview was to undermine oppression that postmodernist blamed on the objective truth claims of objective truths. Postmodernism resulted in a merging of high-art with low-art (pop culture), a general sense of nihilism considering no truth could be objectively determined, but overall postmodernism, outside of being a philosophical worldview, is also a condition resulting from when capitalism reaches its zenith, i.e., late-stage capitalism.
If postmodernism could be easily defined, I refer to it as modern people existentially living as individuals within late-stage capitalism, in which the landscape is dominated by corporations who recycle culture but also use clever ways of shrouding power, conspiracy theories are endemic since people can’t discern between factual information or misinformation, people communicate through pop culture references, and no one really knows who is running the show system systems are highly complex and interwoven often creating problems by proxy of being so complicated.
Generation X was defined by this. They were the byproducts of Reaganomic consumerism, consumption, TV, the declining crime rate from the 80s into the 90s, and the general sense of global peace and American exceptionalism after the Cold War ended. The United States was the sole hegemonic force in the world, exploiting global supply chains built off cheap labor from America’s now competitor in China, and corporatism dictated culture. Yet, Gen Xers despite living in this relatively peaceful time, have a tendency for punk rebelliousness, where punk itself emerging in the 1970s, could be considered a form of postmodern music in that it revolts against order and plays with nihilism, yet, it became just another commodified movement of capitalism considering there is no real escaping capitalism.
I know all this because I was born in 1987, so I am an older Millennials, i.e., I’m Gen X’s baby brother who grew up with same tropes and cultural influences despite not being old enough to adequately partake, yet my childhood was still dictated by a sense of corporate culture (Beavis and Butthead, Daria, Liquid TV, The Simpsons), aggressive campaign marketing to children, etc. If you ever read the book White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo, my generation of Millennials are the baby charter of Wildmer, i.e., a baby born into a nineteen-eighties household absorbing CNN doomsday footage.
Idaho and Bio.
Boise is like a smaller Denver, yet development has grown rapidly largely since people form California migrated to the state for affordability reasons, similarly to how Californians flocked to states like Arizona. What do you notice about both states? They are traditionally very conservative such as Arizona being known not only for suntans, retirement communities, a love of John Wayne aesthetics, strict watering laws, and memories of late 1990s commercials featuring Arizona State University Girls Gone Wild footage, but also Barry Goldwater and John McCain neoconservatism. Not only do you have a local conservatism, but you have a conservative influx by newcomers mainly from places like California who fear taxes, dislike big cities, support the police, but want the convenience of nice homes, shopping centers with everyone favorite Cheesecake Factory or P.F. Chang’s, perfect suburban high schools, etc. It’s as if Orange County in the heyday of its John Birch Society paleoconservative phase landed in Arizona and Idaho. Cities and towns centering around Boise (located in the region called the Treasure Valley) include Nampa, Eagle, Meridian, Star, Emmett, Caldwell, etc.
I am familiar with Idaho. I lived in the Pacific Northwest in Washington State, and with my father being military, I stayed at Mountain Home Air Force Base for a short period of time since my family moved all over the place, but later in life, my first serious relationship in college was with a woman from a small town just outside Boise. When I traveled to Idaho to meet my girlfriend’s family and attend her cousin’s wedding (as the only black person there which wasn’t a problem), Boise was growing, but it was still relevantly new as far as being a “happening city”. In other words, Zillow or Realtor.com hadn’t gotten its hands on Boise quite yet. This was right around the time of Boise State’s iconic win versus Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl with the famous Statue of Liberty play.
She was born and raised in Idaho on March 28, 1980 (Alchetron.com, 2021). She attended Capital High School in Boise, ID (Metrobiography.com, 2021), and is a trained jazz drummer (Alchetron.com, 2021). It probably wasn’t until she got to college at The University of California – Davis (majoring in philosophy), where she first got her true sense of diversity and be able to break free, with UC-Davis being accessible to both metropolitan Sacramento and San Francisco. Yet, even California itself isn’t the most diverse state overall. Sure, in metropolitan regions, yes, but the State of California itself – same as everywhere else in the United States – does have a history or racism and segregation which culminated in segregated and often poorer/people-of-color communities. We often hail the West Coast as progressive but in many ways the West Coast is symbolic of the Dream of Manifest Destiny, i.e., white Zionism, where Western states did purposely segregate people of color, e.g., Portland, Oregon with Sunshine Laws (curfews), The Oregon Territory barring African Americans from settling after the Civil War in which Confederate settlers moved into the territory, the eradication of Native Tribes, discrimination against Hispanics even if they were native to California before the American take-over, etc.
In other words, whatever diversity Kim was exposed to when was attending college in late-1990s, it likely wasn’t the best depiction of diversity and even if there was diversity this was in a time when people didn’t analyze structural racism or oppression as much. This was the time of the MTV era 1990s where it seemed the “world was perfect” under corporatism and corporate America.
Kim being from Idaho which for most of its existence has been a predominately white state, expect for pockets of Tribal Lands such as those of the Nez Perce tribe, a significant Hispanic population due to the state’s reliance on agriculture, and others such as small demographic of Asian Americans, yet, very few African Americans traditional (outside of college towns like Boise, i.e., Boise State University). There’s also a very large Mormon population, arguably with the second largest Mormon population outside of Utah. There is also a significant Basque community in Idaho who hail from Basque Country in Northern Spain and Southern France.
According to Alchetron.com (2021), Kim worked for radio stations such as in California such as KDVS, KDND, and KWOD, but also co-hosted a show in Indiana called WAZY Wake-Up Crew with Big Jake and Kim Iversen on WAZY-FM. Yet, she received her own show in Austin, TX, Your Time with Kim Iversen on KAMX, and she has co-hosted the radio show Loveline. She has done stints as news reporter for News 12 Networks and as a VJ for Concert TV. Kim as a diverse portfolio of experiences which is good for her and her career.
Kim’s Ethnicity, Biracialism in White Spaces, and understanding orientalism (the sexualization and mystification of Asian Women) in relation to white supremacy
Kim is of Vietnamese and Danish-American descent. Her Vietnamese lineage likely comes from the Vietnam War Era where many Vietnamese refugees were resettled throughout the United States such as California, Louisiana, etc. So, likely she has anti-Communist beliefs because her family fled Communist Vietnam. I am not sure if her father is a war veteran but many veterans (just like Earl Wood’s, i.e., Tiger Woods dad) took Vietnamese wives. She was also raised in the Cold War in a conservative state meaning she likely grew up in a home that favored Ronald Reagan. Being in a home led by a white father, which isn’t bad, it’s easy to see that Kim grew up “white”. Sure, she was a minority in many ways and likely had connections to her Asian roots, but the environment around her was overwhelmingly white conservative, so she was indoctrinated with that belief structure of Republicanism.
Being partially Asian likely wasn’t a problem since Asian Americans were often treated as “model minorities” and it’s not uncommon for white men to marry Asian women. There’s nothing wrong with interracial marriage or love, yet, in relation to white supremacy, Asian woman are often victims of orientalism, i.e., Asian women are casted or lusted over as being mysterious exotics with submissive and consoling characteristics, and often not burdened by white supremacy as other groups of color traditionally.
Since Asian Americans are often seen to be treated with model minority status (which is a controversial term as stated by Audrea Lin (2018) in which she stated the model-minority myth obscures the vast differences among Asian-Americans), the truth is that Asian woman are often sexualized through orientalism. One could assume that the Far Right does tolerate Asian Americans despite when they need to activate white supremacy against Asian Americans to remind who is “on top of the totem pole”. It might sound off record, but for example with the Alt-Right online communities there is a love of anime for example, where women are often depicted with hyper-sexualized and white-washed features.
Audrea Lin (2018) of The New York Times wrote about white supremacy’s fetish for Asian women in an article titled, The Alt Right’s Asian Fetish. The article discusses how Andrew Anglin (founder of the Daily Stormer), Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich, John Derbyshire, and Kyle Chapman all dated, had sexual relations, and/or married Asian women. Lin (2018) even references Charleston AME Church shooter, Dylan Roof, who stated that Asians “could be great allies of the white race,”. Lin (2018) also references Adolf Hitler, who stated, ““I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves,” Adolf Hitler said in 1945. “They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own.””. Lastly, Lin (2018) interestingly points out that the Alt-Right fetish for Asian woman could be in part due to white women more so adopting feminism.
We must remember that Japan as an Axis power and to this day is a homogenous nation that has visible nationalist parties, paramilitary groups, etc., and this fact of course resonates with the Alt Right. For example, when it comes to showcasing history in the West, history is often dominated by Greco-Roman or Dark Ages European culture, yet, there is a soft spot for the aesthetics of Asian cultures such as that of the Japanese (for example, Samurai), yet, the cultures of let’s say Africa before slavery is pretty much non-existent within mainstream historical documentaries, etc.
Like many minority children living in predominately white spaces or multi-racial children, especially before society started talking about Critical Race Theory, often have a sense of identity crisis. Children of color are often the sole representatives of what other’s think their group is or how they see them on TV. For example, being a black child in suburbia but people assume that child to be like black people they see on TV, i.e., hip, tough, athletic, not academic, etc. Kim likely experienced this to a varying degree. For example, particularly as a female in a white environment and in a nation where beauty standards for the longest were catered to a European aesthetic of beauty, she likely had some issues with identity. Assuming she is cisgender heteronormative, most of the boys she likely liked growing up where obviously white. In other words, she was fitting into a culture that was predominantly white and emulated that culture’s view on the world (remembering this was the 1980s and 1990s – nowhere near as progressive as what we have now), becoming an apologist or defender of that culture, despite always being slightly on “the outside” of it.
If she adopted the worldview, politics, beauty standards, gender roles, and possibly even racial biases or racial lack of awareness (cultural sensitivity) of the predominate group, she was able to fit in and be just like any other kid, yet, I’m sure she’s experienced at least a little racism or ignorance while growing up as a kid.
The American Revolution was a worker’s strike and the modern Left needs to embrace this tradition to alleviate the accusation that it’s not “patriotic”. The colonists were subjects (contracted workers, i.e., contractors), within chartered colonies (corporations) – thirteen departments to be exact (the Thirteen Colonies)-, whose labor was being exploited for the benefit of shareholders back in the United Kingdom. Our understanding of the Revolution was crafted by the business class who used the proletariat class, for their “hostile takeover of the corporation”, to emphasis a radical worship of individual liberty and anti-taxation, which translates to power for the most powerful private interests.
Part 1. 1776 as a Worker’s Socialist Movement
Part 2. The Left Has a Patriotism Problem, in theory.
I. 1776 as a Worker’s Socialist Movement
Imagine it’s 1776 and somehow, we have TV and the modern mainstream news. Imagine the news talking about a guerilla army in a place called America revolting against the business interests of the British Empire. The news, imaging Tucker Carlson in a powered wig, would likely call the American Revolutionaries, terrorists, and Communist agitators for propaganda purposes.
When we’re taught about American Independence stories of Paul Revere, The Boston Tea Party, the crossing of the Delaware River, etc., come to mind, yet, what we’re not taught is that the energy of the American Revolution wasn’t purely about freedom in the way we understand it now, i.e., individual rights, personal property rights, etc., – which, in and of itself were used by the business class to advance their own interests at the expense of the people – but, also within the American Revolution there was a very Socialist energy. By Socialist it doesn’t necessarily mean Marxist, considering Marxism is just one of the many theories of Socialism, but since Marxism had the most indelible impact on the Socialist movement by providing a scientific framework for analysis, then what I’m saying is partially influenced by Marx such as his notion of class struggle, dialectical materialism, etc.
The colonists were subjects (contracted workers, i.e., contractors), within chartered colonies (corporations), thirteen departments to be exact (the Thirteen Colonies) whose labor was being exploited for the benefit of shareholders back in the United Kingdom.
The colony is the basis for the concept of the corporation where the first corporation, The Dutch East India Company, later inspired other companies such as The British East India Company. Colonies were business enterprises, often risky, which required private military contractors, inmate labor, human trafficked labor (slaves), and volunteers.
So, when the American Revolutionaries revolted, they as workers/slaves were revolting against a corporation, i.e., a capitalist enterprise.
We are often told one side of the coin when it comes the energy of the American revolution. It was not only libertarian in nature, but also socialist in nature. I suppose a merger of these traditions would be what we consider socio-anarchist.
For example, we often hear revolts against taxes as being American, yet even though the colonists (workers) were being taxed unfairly, there’s not much difference between taxes and wages. The workers were basically not being paid well enough, i.e., they weren’t fairly compensated for their labor to begin with, even before on the back end when they had to pay taxes, stamp duties, tariffs, etc. Colonists were getting the “double whammy” of being underpaid (slaves not paid at all) and then taxed (which likely caused harsher exploitation of workers/slaves by managers to make up for losses).
The energy of the revolution could only have happened if the worker classes revolted. In a way you could say the energy of the Revolution was a union movement, or, we could say the American Revolution is the birth of the American workers’ rights movement.
So, how did our conception of the American Revolution come to be? Those with power dictated the narrative, divided the public naturally with a capitalist system that created class struggle, but also layered it all with a racial caste system, so the white poor would identify, i.e., vicariously live through, the white elites.
I do feel that the Founders, some well-read into Enlightenment philosophers, might have speculated of the possibility of what would later become socialism as being a possibility, yet, since “mob rule of the people” would negate their own plans, but by not taking caring of the people would lead to disaster, they left an ambiguous statement within the Preamble, i.e., providing for the good will. Therefore, this one of the reasons why I believe in the Living Document interpretation of the constitution as opposed to the Originalist interpretation such as that of Supreme Court Justices such as Amy Coney Barrett, where the Originalist believe you must view the Constitution based on the time it was written, which is ridiculous, because that method denies the realities of the time at hand, its nuances, etc. (people were also slaves in this time, women had no right to vote in those times, etc.). The Founders were smart enough to know that the Enlightenment Tradition, such as what they were seeing in France, i.e., America’s fraternal brother, had utopian scope that not only emphasized the individual but also the collective.
We often hail the Founding Fathers as sage-life wisemen of virtuous character, but in essence they were of the gentry class, i.e., the middle-management classes, i.e., the managers of trading houses, labor agencies (slave depots), estates, warehouses, and law firms that served British investor interests. They were of the class had Anglophile sensibilities particularly in their education, and we can see this in the schism of the Loyalist gentry class versus the Revolutionary gentry class where Loyalists of the same class migrated to what is now Canada.
The American Revolution was two things, (1) A revolt of the proletariat, i.e., working classes subconsciously channeling what we could consider a Socialist energy, and (2) a “Hostile Takeover” by the middle-management of the colonies who wanted to cut out their foreign investors and become the de facto board of chairmen themselves.
Essentially, middle managers used the working classes, exploiting their unrealized concept of Socialism and worker’s rights, and then applied a concept of unfettered economic liberty which would always serve the ruling classes which the Founders after their victory now owned. It’s no different than workers revolting against a firm, but the leader of that firm simply uses them and turns around and does the same thing.
The very fact that the signers and framers from the upper classes didn’t trust democracy which they called “mob rule” is proof that the conscious and subconscious construction of the USA was based on classism. We can even add to the rebellions which came after the Revolution which weren’t simply about taxes, but about people fearing their wages would be eaten into since they likely didn’t make that much to begin with, such as in Shay’s Rebellion. Shay’s Rebellion on the surface seems like American’s simply protesting taxes, but really, they were protesting the merchant class passing down costs on to them for them to pay their own creditors. It’s no different than a bank steadily increasing your withdrawal fees, as a means of covering their own overhead. The people who revolted at what is now called Shay’s Rebellion were suppressed by a private army funded by the merchant class and commanded by General Benjamin Lincoln, which foreshadows how today private military contractors are used to suppress workers across the globe.
However, the framers and signers of the constitution all had their own personalities and reasons, and their occupations spanned from doctors, lawyers, military, and land holders, etc. We can’t lump all Framers and Signers together since they all had their own philosophy, yet the one thing they did have in common, is they were, even if they had moral reservations about it, were a part of a class system, where many of the signers by the time of Independence had their own special interests in mind, and not necessarily the good will of the American people as claimed.
To add to the claim that the American revolution had a Socialist element to it is that the Enlightenment philosophy of the revolution encompasses Leftist thought, i.e., individualism versus collectivism, both have roots in an Enlightenment thought through the centuries of European history.
Yes, what we consider to be notions of radical freedom, democracy, capitalism, and socialism all have a common ancestry dating back to the Renaissance (thinkers such as Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola), yet over time as history carried on and democratic experiments were burgeoning there was a splintering of ideas, yet, what we consider to be libertarian and socialists both have the same ends but through different strategy, e.g., one posits that individual rights and private property rights somehow ensures liberty, whereas the other posits that collective control over the means of production or an empowerment of the larger collective working class ensures that individual rights are respected, i.e., equality. The issue with the capitalist argument is that you can’t have equality even if equality or liberty exists on paper because the accumulation of capital, often created by robbing one’s labor, i.e., underpaying, creates too much of a vast spread within a hierarchy, i.e., there’s a larger difference between the haves and have nots. Socialism, particularly the specific, I repeat specific framework (since other types of socialism exist) of Fredrich Engels and Karl Marx, i.e., Scientific Socialism or Marxism, is more based within reality, whereas notions of capitalism, despite what we’ve been told, are more based on romantic idealism, i.e., ideas over real-world conditions.
The notion freedom by way of a capitalist system is based more in ideas (romanticism, religion, non-empiricism), rather than realism (understanding negative effects of systems, i.e., externalities, using a scientific framework to study human interactions, the interconnection of things, the inherent social nature of humans and the social nature of transaction, etc.), thus the American notion as we know it of liberty is more in aligned with Hegelian idealism, which is something that Marx disagreed with. Instead of living under “grand ideas”, Marx rather called capitalism what it is, which is a system based on the exploitation of labor for the benefit of a few or an individual. It exists to have people work for you, but you underpay them and collect the surplus yourself.
We can put Karl Marx in the same umbrella of Western philosophy as the thinkers who inspired the Revolutionaries, even though Marx came later, and many thinkers went in their own directions. For example, both Marx and Jefferson were influenced by J.J. Rousseau. Hegel, Kant, Spinoza, Smith, etc.
Both Marx and Jefferson had a materialist view to reality, though unique and modified to themselves, which could be translated as a scientific (observation of nature) or a realist view to nature, i.e., science, such as the science influenced by Newtonian thought. Yet, to not get too much into religion, it could be argued that Jefferson would be agnostic in a modern-day sense with Christian apologetics, whereas Marx would have been an atheist on the deeper end of scientific realism.
Jefferson stated, “Nature has, in truth, produced units only through all her works. Classes, orders, genera, species, are not of her works. Her creation is of individuals.” If Jefferson had survived to read Charles Darwin, he may be interested in the works Darwin such as the interconnectivity of all life.
Marx stated, ““Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle”.
“Like many other contemporaries he read—e.g., Hutcheson, Kames, Bolingbroke, Tracy, and Hume—Jefferson was an empiricist, and in keeping with Isaac Newton, a dyed-in-the-wool materialist.”
The Left as a Patriotism problem. It’s not that those on the Left, Progressive, or Left Liberal side of the house don’t like the United States. Their efforts to improve conditions is proof they do care about America. Yet, the Left as largely lost the “Patriotism optics” war, despite winning the Culture War as far as mainstream media as mainstream media has become more inclusive over time. Many on the Left might think that not being a radical patriot, waving the Stars and Stripes, posting things about supporting the troops, etc., is all that necessary, and some might even think it’s cringe or nonsensical to do such things because they could be seen as mere figurative gestures that don’t improve material conditions of the American people.
Yet, by not owning more of the Patriotic aesthetic this gives easy ammunition to the political right who can simply rebut any progressive idea as being “un-American”, etc. The Political Right as far as culture, i.e., fashion, optics, aesthetics, attempts to own the soul of the military, police, and even the Revolutionary War. Why do Leftist let this happen? It’s ok to be critical of the American system while still honoring the aesthetics of it. It’s ok to have a post-colonial framework, or even a Critical Theory viewpoint, or to apply intersectionality, and still have the appearance, but also the innate belief of loving your country.
Basically, we need to see more marketing campaigns to stitch the Leftist Framework with Patriotic imagery. Having American Flags at a rally for Bernie or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is something simple to do. Unifying progressive veteran organizations and focusing on veteran care for troops while still honoring their service, even though the Left might lean towards pacifism, is fine. But the major point is to present the truth that the American Revolution was a worker’s strike (more to come on this below).
Republicans can easily have no policy besides enriching the rich even more, but they capture people with the allure of belonging to a Patriotic Tradition. Yet, the issue with how we understand this tradition is that the Revolutionary War for example wasn’t merely a war to free ourselves from taxes, but was also a worker’s strike, meaning the energy of the Revolutionary had a Leftist framework.
I’m frustrated as an everyday “heteronormative” guy wanting to see the Left succeed.
I surf the internet and on Instagram I constantly see beautiful models with Bible quotes above their LinkTree link (leading to OnlyFans) covering themselves with the US flag (something you wouldn’t see on the political left – which is fine, but it is a powerful tool), I see gun enthusiast pages, Don’t Tread on Me flags, people selling T-Shirts such as “Liberty or Death” or “1776”, truck or off-road vehicle pages, Blue Lives Matter pages, etc. The appeal of the political right is that it makes itself seem like a fun place for the normal person. “We got beautiful woman, we love our country, we admire our heroes, we eat meat, watch sports, we use our hands, we’re manly men and the women who love these men”, etc., etc.
Yet, on the Left things aren’t as monolithic and homogenous, which is fine, but due to ideologies such as Identity politics the Left is left in state where it can’t even agree internally on what can be done without people feeling they’re offending someone of another intersectional component. There’s a lot of “you aren’t down” enough shaming tactics on the Left which further divides things so the unified right can easily pick it apart or obstruct. How can the Left unite if the ideology of feminism (which isn’t bad) does posit itself against men and don’t really care what men think (not necessarily in theory as what a person criticizing this would say, but just look to social media where you see pages after pages essentially not…liking men), and I would say the same thing in reverse, when men on the Left might feel stunned or unable to feel they can articulate their thoughts without fear of being lectured? As crazy as it wounds, sexual politics are a big part of the appeal of the political-right because it coddles the heteronormative ego, whereas the left questions it, yet women on the right are willing to “stand by their men” because it’s beneficial for them to do so, i.e., they get adoring love and admiration.
You can apply this feeling of awkwardness across race, gender, orientation, assignment, etc. Yet, it’s not bad what the left has achieved as far as advancing the conversation. I almost feel a sense of “existential” growth at pondering intersectionality and I would say the Left has made me into a better person, but what I feel in my head even if it on the right track, and how the world outside of my head are two different things. The Left might feel enlightened but it’s a flimsy reality on the streets, where people like see it as “weak”, “intellectual”, etc.
I always had the idea of trying to reconcile heteronormative masculinity with Leftist thought. And, sure, I bet a critic with the typical “eye roll” response as if attempting such as thing is just proof of “male insecurity”, but I would argue it’s essential since this identity does exists in the material world, and the Right Wing is able to exploit masculinity and make it seem “explicitly” Right Wing. As a man, to be honest, this erks me. Maybe the American Left needs a “Men of Steel” tradition, where the notion of steel goes back to old Socialist imagery of the hammer, and this could help in hedging the culture war of the political right.
Regardless, the Right Wing is a unified force that markets itself with the high horse position of patriotic imagery and it also appeals to a “safe space” of non-intellectual, Football watching, beer drinking, firework shooting, Redneck rigging, “chicks” in daisy duke loving Americana. As a Leftist who grew up an old school Democrat before the passage of NAFTA, in many ways the culture of the right wing, is my culture (I’m watching Sunday Night Football with a beer right now), despite me coming from a tradition that always sympathized with the worker, had disdain for Wall Street, etc.
In many ways, the American Left lost its style of the “Roseanne America” or Axel Foley’s Detroit in Beverly Hills Cop. And, sure, these might not be “representative” of America as is, but ask yourself this question, “How do you help a Southern guy with a truck actually embrace Leftist ideology?”. Beau the Fifth Column for example is a refreshing attempt at inserting culturally conservative chic with the Leftist framework.
The last attempt at making the Left an actual fun place was decried at being “Bernie Bros”. Remember that? When men who supported Bernie were lumped into this category of a “Bernie Bro” because Bernie Sanders posed an ideological threat to Hillary Clinton, yet Bernie’s message even after the loss of Hillary in 2016 helped to re-energize the Democratic Party, going so far as helping first-time female candidates such as Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez, Rhasida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, even though the powerbase of the Democrats are neoliberal capitalist. Were Bernie Bros toxic, or even a thing, or where they simply believers in Leftist ideology, simply using their masculine energy to rebut the appropriate masculine energy of the right-wing, who posed a risk to neoliberal female candidate whose decisions over her long (and impressive) career lead up to the issues we face today?
Seeing how radical Trump supporters are, the Left needs some All American “Bernie Bros” in the mix right alongside strong females, BIPOC communities, service workers, the LGBTQ community, veterans, etc.
It comes off as too erudite now, walking on eggshells, brainy, etc., yet ironically also living off a neoliberal “hipster” culture. It lacks the older aesthetics of the beer drinking truck driving union card holder, or the striking union organizers fighting the Rockefellers at coal mines in Colorado or Appalachia. It lacks the aesthetic of the “anti-war yet still patriotic veteran” such as how things were during the Vietnam War era, i.e., the men who might ride motorcycles with a POW/MIA flag.
The Left to survive needs to figure out its Patriotic and Americana problem, even though I know many intellectuals, content creators, podcasters, etc., on the Left will see this all as a silly attempt that doesn’t improve material conditions. But, why let your opposition have free ammunition, especially when that ammunition is easy the Left’s as well?
It has to also figure out a way of reconciling certain positions such as gun rights, which is a culture war aspect that the right holds onto firmly. There are actual liberal and left leaning gun clubs who could be used to advocate for gun ownership but also with progressive policies for safer gun controls. For example, the Socialist Rifle Association (https://socialistra.org/) and The Liberal Gun Club (https://theliberalgunclub.com/)
Using violence is what a child does when it doesn’t get its way. White Supremacy actually let White people down. Supremacy is a construct, like a drug, so when that drug is taken away, there’s negative reactions.
Showing positive examples, new stories, etc., of racial harmony which exists already in the natural world
Celebrating European nationalities over Pan-Whiteness, for example Italian American, Irish American, etc. For example, back in the eighteen-hundreds to early-to-mid nineteen hundreds, whiteness was not the concept we see today. Rather, European groups delineated themselves based on nationalistic cultures, such as Irish, Polish, Italian, English, Scottish, etc., yet as time went on there was a merging of all the groups into a Pan White sentiment, largely since the United States was based on racial segregation, so white groups despite having different customs saw themselves as the same. This merging into Pan-Whiteness occurred after WW2 with the establishment of government segregated suburbs, where upward mobility in a capitalist system took precedent over once hard ethnic lines. Hence, whenever there is a black liberation movement, there is mass reaction from Pan Whiteness regardless of the white person’s ethnic heritage. The way how America was designed was to make it that when black people call for liberation it is seen as an attack on whiteness, i.e., whites feel they are being unfairly treated or “punished” for any sort of reconciliation process.
Showing white ethnic participation within progressive or Leftist movements from history but also how certain European communities were attacked by the pre-existing Anglo Saxon Protestant establishment. For example, Irish Catholics were oppressed by the English. Italian Americans were hanged in New Orleans. Teach black people about these as well, so black Civil Rights action groups can build alliances with white people who are willing to help without white people feeling they are overstepping boundaries.
Educating people of all races about white contributions to Abolitionism, the Underground Railroad, participating in Freedom Marches and Anti-Apartheid movements. This helps educate all people regardless of race the important contributions of white people in helping achieve equality, rather than the current sentiment which seems to assume that white people are inherently problematic. White people feel rejected or scorned, so they regress or find opportunists who are willing to turn them into racists, etc., and this was most prominent in the modern United States with the election and reaction to President Barack Obama and the election of Donald Trump.
Including white leftist movements within the USA within the iconography of the contemporary Progressive Movement such as labor strike movements, Midwest socialist movements of the early twentieth centuries, the Catholic communitarian tradition, etc.
Separating European political philosophy from American political philosophy, since America, despite its many flaws, helped to create the diversity and inclusion we see today. Many within the Alt Right have been radicalized by European philosophers such as Julius Evola, Aleksandr Dugin, etc., and this is a violation of the American progressive tradition that has basis in Anglo Saxon Protestantism typically from Northern American transcendental thought of the Abolitionists. American notions of individualism and Enlightenment thought created the basis for abolitionism and equality, so being American is being anti-racists though it took us a long time to fulfill that dream. Hence, whenever we display imagery of the American Revolutionary, we must remember that within that sentiment was the sentiment of racial equality, even though conservative politics typically appropriates patriotic regalia.
Dealing with what I call the YouTube Nazi Pop problem and creating more diverse content in subjects that males gravitate towards including militarism, history, etc. Individual history podcasts or content creators are not bad, but when you take the aggregate sum of videos relating to WW2 such analysis of Nazism, Indo European studies, ancient European tribalism (many Viking symbols are used by the Far Right, despite not all people into European history are racists), and the separate Far Right videos, YouTube becomes of sort of grooming tool in awakening White Power. YouTube is predominately male dominated and watched, so when you have young white men, who play videos games, watch Anime (which as elements of Aryan ideals within it), are not confident around women, and the fact that men are interested in things of “utility” and history, they become recruits to the “Red Pill movement”. I do blame the cultural Left for this in part because they have not typically created a way for cisgender masculinity to express itself and feel empowered under Progressive principles.
Force BLM and other movements to show solidarity with white people killed by police so BLM does not look like a racist organization, even though it is not, but as a movement people of various opinions have ascribed the BLM movement with an array of values. For example, the Reverend Al Sharpton spoke at the eulogy for a white teenager killed in Arkansas by police. This is a great example of solidarity, and that police reform is not anti-white.
Operations against white supremacy including doxing, arrests, etc.
Understanding masculinity and how it can lead to fascism. Masculinity, particularly white masculinity as a construct, has been on the chopping board for most of our understanding of progressive liberation. Yet, white supremacy and entitlement and ego-grooming do and did exists. Think of the concept of the 1980s Action Star. Male power fantasies produced during a time of capitalistic avarice where capitalism itself was built on exploitation while covering up the exploitation to expand markets and profits. Or think about sports. Think about Connor vs Floyd in a boxing batch. Connor represented in part the “victim” Cinderella Man in one hand while also being a symbol for “white boys got it to”, yet Floyd was depicted as the “bully, black, mouthy” boxer. For example, as a black male when I grew up all my heroes on TV were largely white because that is all there were, but I never thought about it, yet, when black men started to take more leadership roles such as the Football QB, many suffered backlash. Is this insecurity? If was OK for me to be inspired by William Wallace in Braveheart, then why do some white people have issues seeing honor within non-whites? If non-whites have accepted white heroes, then why do many in white America have a problem with it the other way around. Granted, I am talking in generalities, but the general sense is just that. White America is constantly seeking avatars of superiority but with a mythos of honor, humility, natural prowl, etc. “The Good Ole Boy”. Yet, the rise of right-wing is largely sexual, i.e., psychosexual. The fast-paced progress of sexual liberation amongst females and economic empowerment of women has left younger generations of males without a traditional sense of purpose, yet, this is not the fault of females, but a reality to change. Many Instagram models have used this for money, for example, you will see Pro-Trump models with hyper sexuality making money off men who feel their pride has been hurt and women have options. Change is harsh and people get left behind, or do they? White men aren’t suffering anymore than anyone else but their egos were elevated through social conditioning where challenges to their aesthetic value can create an extreme drop. For example, many supremacists who have not created anything often say that non-whites didn’t create anything, so certain white people are appropriating the achievements of individuals who so happened to have been white and their achievements weren’t produced because they wanted them to be “white inventions”. The need to feel superior is at times a signs of being inferior.
I was a huge Highlander fan as a kid. I have mixed emotions about a remake of the classic film. The magic of Highlander was that it was a film of open ideas. It was a B movie. There was freedom in the story line and direction. It channeled a street level energy, but also touched into something romantic about our human condition. The main character was cast as an effective no-name actor, which was great because it wasn’t a Hollywood decision. The magic of Highlander was that it was a student project effectively. It was an example of well-done DIY movie. We also have to realize the film was made in a time when a deadly diseases was sweeping the planet, there was a sense of lawlessness, etc., so it really touched people in many ways. So, what will a Highlander remake tap into? But, I do think a Highlander film could be great, if done correctly and if it retains an aura of indie film rather than explicitly going the route of Big budget Hollywood film, though it will need the best special effects. There’s plenty of studios who could a good job such as Annapurna Studios or A24, etc.
Highlander is Neoplatonism in that immortals are “pieces of essence” from a larger source, i.e., the ominous higher being or source known as The One or a Demiurge. By fighting in combat this insinuates a Darwinist “strongest survives” mentality, and the last one standing thus touches transcendence or “the next level”. The fact that combat is the underlying basis insinuates a Darwinist struggle of fitness and natural selection, yet the fact that only one immortal can truly stand in the end for The Game to be over, insinuates that Immortals are possessing an essence of larger otherworldly source of power. A larger force from another dimension “broke itself” apart or was “destroyed” and inhabits a few select humans over the course of time, and by consolidating itself without our dimension the last immortal who stands is effectively The One. The fact that humans on Earth are chosen, insinuates that Humans are a special species, having evolved through the game of evolution, through time, various struggles, pain, violence, near extinctions, admixtures, refinements, etc. Humans are the worthy in that they not only are the dominant species able to make free-willed decisions, but have the aptitude and consciousness of awareness, where conscious awareness is needed to understand the stakes of The Game. The Game would be useless if any other animal were involved. Humans are the chosen animals who can comprehend metaphysical possibilities, existentialism, asking their purpose within the universe, creators who make things within their own image, etc.
In The Game there are rules. 1) Only one on one combat. I think this is because it permits for a clean transfer of power from person to person, 2) Only use bladed weapons. I think this is because when an Immortal takes the head of their opponent, the power transfer, known as The Quickening, comes with the presence of electricity, meaning bladed weapons help conduct and transfer the power from The Source, 3) No fighting on Holy Ground which I’ll give theory to below, 4) Immortals can’t have children, which I think is because there’s no point, in that mortals spread their genes to live “forever” whereas immortals simply live forever carrying their own genes through time, 5) There can be only one remaining in the end, 6) There’s only so many immortals that will ever exists, in theory, and immortals can come in all ages, races, genders, etc., and 7) Mortals must die before being resurrected as an Immortal.
If we were to apply natural sciences to immortals in the Highlander series, then immortals are the a sort of biological necessity, possibly for an array of reasons, e.g., immortals must exists for the survival of the species in that they can A) have a volume of knowledge from their lived experiences to quickly help the species continue on its path of evolution without going all the way back to square zero in the case of catastrophe, and B) the fact that an assumed benefit of winning The Prize is having the ability to have children, meaning that the surviving immortal will not only have a plethora of information gained from their lifetime but also be the most genetically fit individual to help benefit the species in that their genetics span various epochs of human existence, struggle, fitness, adaptation, and development.
The fact that Immortals cannot fight on Holy Ground insinuates an otherworldly source in that the essence is “fractured” amongst immortals, meaning that religions, regardless of their diversity, all have a common source, with that source likely being humankind’s understanding of natural law (physical) but also the possibility of the metaphysical, i.e., things that humans cannot comprehend but can possibly exists. What we consider to be belief, religions, etc., is all just an interpretation of our purpose in the world, yet that interpretation is based off the fact that a higher level of existence does exists, thus Holy Ground is sacred in that these sites are the closest sort of “communication centers” or “portals” to a higher reality. Fighting on Holy Ground is like itching a rash on The One. It is too close to home. Holy Ground sites are where dimensions crisscross and create “portals” between each other. Therefore, violent events occur when Immortals fight on Holy Ground in that it creates an anomaly in physics or space-time. For example, Mount Vesuvius is recorded in Highlander cannon has erupting when two immortals fought on an ancient Holy site. To reconcile religion with biology or evolutionary biology, when humans have faith, they connect to a higher source. For example, when humans observe electrons, they notice that electrons mysteriously disappear. Belief might possibly have the ability to shape realities in ways we cannot understand based on science, yet quantum mechanics and quantum computers might pose insight.
When immortals beat another immortal in combat, they gain their essence and power, but this transfer of power called The Quickening, is typically defined by the presence of electricity, lightning, etc. Electricity is a form of energy resulting from the existence of charged particles (such as electrons or protons), either statically as an accumulation of charge or dynamically as a current.
So, if the source of Immortals comes from The One, when immortals kill each other, they consolidate power. In other words, The One, is a source of power, manifesting itself as a being, likely from another dimension, i.e., the Fourth or Fifth dimension, but within the human dimension, i.e., the third dimension, its presence is felt through electricity and consolidates as immortals consolidate power through combat. Immortals are like organic transceivers of otherworldly information which in our universe manifests itself a phenomenon from subatomic particles, i.e., such electricity from electrons.
The One has some sort of nature that it can only manifest itself in shards or pieces but to consolidate it must consolidate through what we deem as combat or fitness or struggle or tension. The One had to breakdown to communicate or relate to our dimension, but since the lower dimension, i.e., us in the 3rd will eventually strive to reach a higher one, similarly to a higher dimension will try to understand a lower one. Thus, the struggle of Immortals is a necessity.
Immortals are transceivers of information from a higher dimension manifesting within our dimension, hence, therefore immortals can sense one another, i.e., there is a natural magnetism between them all.
The importance of the head to an immortal is that it is what we consider to be the highest charka, i.e., it is where all the energy is conducted from, or rather where power plant of the human body is operated from. By taking the head it thus severs the operation of the human’s biochemistry and physiology, and the essence of The One inhabiting an immortal is transferred to the Immortal that is nearest.
Immortals as I have read elsewhere are effectively biological batteries and avatars holding a power from another dimension that is on the quests to consolidate itself within our dimension. This higher power seems to be morally ambiguous in that Immortals come in all forms of morals, i.e., some are good, some are evil, etc. The One is playing a game even if it does not realize that from its own dimension, but it plays itself out as such within our dimension. Its only goal is crossing dimensions and Immortals are the “building blocks” helping it manifest itself within our reality.
Think about us within the 3rd dimension and drawing a picture, i.e., a two-dimensional figure. Imagine if we had the ability to go into that picture and let us say that picture or pictures had an existence of their own. Our 3rd dimensional existence would be omnipotent and overpowering to the 2nd dimension, so in Highlander, it is the same thing, but we are in the 3rd and The One comes from a higher dimension. Yet, even if we could go into a second dimension, the same rules of physics we are used to within the third, i.e., up, down, left, right, space, volume, etc., would not work for us, so we must operate based on the physics of the dimension we are in.
The fact that Immortals cannot have children is because they do live forever, thus there is no point in having children if you cannot die thus there is no reason to spread ones’ genetics. The game of mortals and that of immortals are different. Immortality to a mortal is procreation, whereas immortality for an immortal is surviving in its most distilled form natural selection without the excess of needing to breed. Immortals are consequences of evolution, yet there is manipulation from this higher source. Immortals must exist. #highlander #higherlandermovie #highlanderfan #sciencefiction #fantheory #theory #fantasy
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