FBI: Text Messages Target LGBTQs For “Re-Education”

 

Via press release from the FBI:

The FBI is aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to African American and Black communities around the country and is in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter.

The reports are not identical and vary in their specific language, but many say the recipient has been selected to pick cotton on a plantation.

The text message recipients have now expanded to high school students, as well as both the Hispanic and LGBTQIA+ communities.

Some recipients reported being told they were selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp. The messages have also been reported as being received via email communication.

Although we have not received reports of violent acts stemming from these offensive messages, we are evaluating all reported incidents and engaging with the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.

We are also sharing information with our law enforcement partners and community, academia, and faith leaders.

Read the full press release. Re-education = ex-gay torture.

Peace & Justice History 11/16, 17:

November 16, 1928 
An obscenity trial began for Radclyffe Hall’s novel, “The Well of Loneliness.” Great Britain banned it for its treatment of lesbianism, though it contained no explicit sexual references.

A U.S. court in 1929 ruled similarly, for its sympathetic portrait of homosexuality, and because it “pleads for tolerance on the part of society.”

Radclyffe Hall
Read more 
November 16, 1989 
Six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained and -supported death squads in El Salvador.In 1995 the United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador linked the slayings to 19 members of the armed forces who were graduates of the School of the Americas (SOA, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), a facility run by the U.S. Army at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Over its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. The graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people.

Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor.
The Truth Commission’s report  
More on the School of the Americas 
November 16, 1990
President George H. W. Bush issued Executive Order 12735 which found the spread of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) to constitute an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” He declared a state of national emergency to deal with this threat. The order reiterated U.S. policy to lead and seek multilaterally coordinated efforts to control the spread of CW and BW and directed the secretaries of State and Commerce to adopt a variety of export controls.
November 16, 1994
After receiving assurances from the United States, Britain, and France, the Ukrainian Parliament approved Ukraine’s agreement to follow the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapons state.

November 17, 1973


President Nixon told an Associated Press managing editors meeting at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” 
Read more 
November 17, 1980

Hundreds were arrested at the Women’s Pentagon Action protest of patriarchy and its war-making.
Read more 
November 17, 1989
Riot police in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, arrested hundreds of people demanding the resignation of the leader of the Communist-led government. More than 15,000 people, mostly students, took part in the demonstration demanding democratic rights. [see November 18, 1989 below]
November 17, 2000
The Florida Supreme Court froze the tallying of the state’s presidential election returns, forbidding Secretary of State Katherine Harris to certify results of the vote count in the presidential race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november16

Peace & Justice History for 11/15:

November 15, 1917
About 20 women peacefully picketing for universal suffrage (right to vote), who had been arrested in front of the White House a few days earlier, were subjected to beatings and torture at Occoquan workhouse in Virginia.
The National Women’s Party and other organizations had been picketing the White House and President Woodrow
Wilson as he traveled around the country ever since the inauguration of his second term.

Mary Winsor
The incident became known as the “night of terror.”
Wilson had led the country into the European war (later called World War I), by characterizing the U.S. mission as “making the world safe for democracy.” The women demonstrating outside in Lafayette Square called attention to the need for complete democracy at home, where half of its citizens lacked complete voting rights.
Many women, including Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, had been arrested several times, usually for obstructing the sidewalk, and imprisoned before. When a judge learned of the abuse he freed the women. Public outrage over their treatment increased sympathy for the suffrage movement.

left: Lucy Burns in Occoquan Workhouse, Washington, DC. right: Alice Paul, New Jersey, National Chairman, Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage; Member, Ex-Officio, National Executive Committee, Woman’s Party, ca 1915.

Amazing resources from the Library of Congress on women’s suffrage 
November 15, 1940
75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under the first peacetime conscription.


Draft inductees leaving Wilmington, Delaware in November, 1941
November 15, 1943
Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler’s head of the SS (Schutzstaffel or protective rank), Gestapo, the Waffen SS and the Death’s Head units that ran the concentration camps, made public an order that Gypsies (more properly the Roma) and those of mixed Roma blood were to be put on “the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps.”

Gypsy prisoners arriving at a Concentration Camp


Himmler was determined to prosecute Nazi racial policies, which dictated the elimination from Germany and German-controlled territories of all races deemed “inferior,” as well as “asocial” types, such as hardcore criminals. Gypsies fell into both categories according to the thinking of Nazi ideologues and had been executed in droves both in Poland and the Soviet Union. The order of November 15 was merely a more comprehensive program, as it included the deportation to the Auschwitz death camp of Gypsies already in labor camps.
The Gypsies in Germany 
Gypsies: Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust  
November 15, 1957
U.S. Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) was founded. Thirty years later on November 20, SANE merged with the Nuclear Freeze organization (dedicated to freezing all nuclear weapons testing worldwide) at a joint convention in Cleveland to form SANE/FREEZE. Its successor is known as Peace Action, the largest U.S. peace organization.

Sane Nuclear Policy poster, 1960
SANE history  Peace Action
November 15, 1969
Following a symbolic three-day “March Against Death,” the second national “moratorium” against the Vietnam War opened with massive and peaceful demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Organized by the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“New Mobe”), an estimated 500,000 demonstrators participated as part of the largest such gathering to date. 
It began with a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House (while Pres. Nixon watched the Purdue-Ohio State football game on TV) to the Washington Monument, where a mass rally with speeches was held.

Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Peter, Paul and Mary, and four different touring casts of the musical “Hair” entertained the demonstrators. The rally concluded with nearly 40 hours of continuous reading of known U.S. deaths (to that date) in the Vietnam War.
November 15, 1986
A government tribunal in Nicaragua convicted American Eugene Hasenfus, a CIA operative, of delivering arms to Contra rebels and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. He had been arrested when his plane was shot down by Sandanista troops. He was pardoned a month after his conviction (his last name means “rabbit’s foot” in German).

 Hasenfus under arrest

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november15

Peace & Justice History 11/12

November 12, 1969
Seymour Hersh, an independent investigative journalist, in a cable filed through Dispatch News Service and picked up by more than 30 newspapers, revealed the extent of the U.S. Army’s charges against 1st Lieutenant William L. Calley at My Lai, a Vietnamese village.Hersh wrote: “The Army says he [Calley] deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians during a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968, in an alleged Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville.'”
The same Seymour Hersh first wrote about abuses of Iraqis held in Abu Ghraib prison by Americans in 2004.


Seymour Hersh

The My Lai massacre by Seymour Hersh
An interview with Hersh on Iraq
November 12, 1982
The Polish government freed the leader of the outlawed Solidarity union movement, Lech Walesa, after 11 months of internment. His release came only two days after riot police used tear gas, water cannon and phosphorous rockets to disperse large pro-Solidarity demonstrations in Warsaw and other cities.
Read more 
November 12, 1989
Tens of thousands of Americans joined “Mobilize for Women’s Lives” in more than 150 cities and towns nationwide. They sought protection of women’s rights to reproductive choice, including abortion. Their focus was on state legislatures in their own states where laws were being introduced to put limits of a woman’s right to choose when she should bear children.
More than 2500 defenders of legalized abortion gathered at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Kennebunkport, Maine, just a few miles from President George H. W. Bush’s summer home, to hold a candlelight vigil.

Watch Helen Reddy lead “I am Woman” at the D.C. rally 
National Abortion Rights Action League / Pro Choice America 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november12

sanewashing and wishcasting: how the press continues to fail us

by Jeff Tiedrich

if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay Read on Substack (Language NSFW, as always with Jeff Tiedrich’s writing)

the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media utterly failed us during the 2024 campaign season.

New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn came right out and said it: defending democracy is a ‘partisan act,’ and we won’t do it — and, fuck us all, the press kept their word, and didn’t do it. they enthusiastically put their fingers on the scale for Donny Convict.

arguably, the media’s worst transgression was the sanewashing — the cleaning-up of Donny’s incomprehensible blitherings, to hide his obvious cognitive disintegration and make him sound coherent.

a minutes-long disjointed word-salad about how tariffs on Chinese goods were going to lower the cost of childcare became “a major economic speech.”

Donny’s inability to keep his increasingly-demented mind on the topic at hand — his crazypants pinballing from they’re eating the dawgs to Hannibal Lecter wants to have you for dinner to would you rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted — was explained away by Donny as his brilliant “weave.”

that explanation, to The New York Times, “did all sort of seem to make sense.”


post-election, the media has mostly moved on from sanewashing, and has now jumped feet-first into wishcasting.

what’s wishcasting? over to you, Wiktionary.

[Wishcasting is] the act of interpreting information or a situation in a way that casts it as favorable or desired, despite the fact that there is no evidence for such a conclusion; a wishful forecast.

sure enough, the media has now gone into overdrive, churning out piece after piece in which they promise us that if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay.

not twelve hours after the election had been called for Donny, the Times wasted no time in assuring us that the election of a vindictive fascist is an amazing opportunity for vindictive fascism not to happen.

as I wrote three days ago,

the New York Times can fuck all the way off.

what kind of magical, everybody-gets-a-pony thinking is this? just fucking stop it.

did Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat both experience some kind of recent head trauma that has caused them to forget the years 2017 through 2020? Donny’s first presidency was a dumpster fire of corruption, mismanagement and mass death — but somehow now, given a second chance to fuck shit up worse, Donny’s going to bring us an “American renewal”?

anything’s possible, right? overnight, Donny Convict could magically become a wise and fair statesman — also, technicolor pigs could fly out of my ass.

oh my god, the media never stops imagining that Donny is going to somehow become presidential. during his first term — over and over — every time Donny stopped short of taking out his dick and pissing on the floor, the press would fall all the fuck over itself in a mad dash to proclaim him presidential.

spoiler alert: Donny never became presidential. not from the the first time he threw a ketchup-hurling tantrum in the White House, to the moment he absconded back to his Florida golf motel, taking with him boxes of stolen classified documents.

now, what the small-batch artisanal fuck is this?

the premise here is that if we’re respectful to Donny — if we fucking kowtow to him, and stop opposing him — he’ll be nice to us in return. he’ll become — dare I say it? — presidential.

Stop indulging the fantasy that outrage, social stigma, language policing, a special counsel, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or impeachment will disappear him. And stop talking as if normal political opposition is capitulation.

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery.

Mike Luckovich, explain to the nice people at the Atlantic why they’re living in a fever-swamp fantasy world.

news flash for Newsweek: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are not going to save us.

okay, I will grant that Newsweek may be half right. Lisa Murkowski seems to genuinely loathe Donny, and we can probably count on her to vote against the worst of his fuckery — but Susan Collins? the credulous naïf who assured us over and over again that Donny had learned his lesson, and would never transgress again?


now, let’s bask under some rays of hope from people who aren’t just blindly wishcasting, but are actually offering reasoned arguments.

in the middle of a fairly clear-eyed assessment of the Trumpian horrors to come, the Guardian gives us this:

Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “For him to expand presidential power, Congress has to give up power and they’re not in the mood to do that. They’ve never done that. There are plenty of institutionalists in Congress.”

Kamarck also expressed faith in the federal courts, noting that judges appointed by Trump only constitute 11% of the total placed on the bench by former presidents. A Trump dictatorship is “not going to happen,” she added. “Now, there might be things that the president wants to do that people don’t like that the Republican Congress goes along with him on but that’s politics. That’s not a dictatorship.”

here’s Tom Nichols, in a piece titled Democracy Is Not Over.

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

here’s Adam Serwer, from There Is No Constitutional Mandate for Fascism.

Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.

I sure hope to fuck they’re right.


This is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means disengaging with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

Peace & Justice History for 11/9

November 9-10, 1938
Nazis looted and burned synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and homes, and beat and murdered Jewish men, women, and children across Germany and Austria.

Known as Kristallnacht, it was a night of organized violence against Jews marking the beginning of the Holocaust with the killing of 91 and the deportation of 30,000 to concentration camps. The German word translates to “the Night of Broken Glass,” so called because of the vast number of broken windows in Jewish shops, 5 million marks worth ($1,250,000).
Read more 
November 9, 1965
At the first draft-card burning [see November 6, 1965], a heckler shouted that they should burn themselves, not their draft cards. Three days later Roger LaPorte, a student of religion and a Catholic Worker volunteer, poured gasoline on himself and struck a match to it in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York. Police managed to douse the flames.

Roger LaPorte
On his way to the hospital he said, “I’m a Catholic Worker. I’m against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.” He died 33 hours later. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement and a speaker on the 15th, wrote that she believed that LaPorte knew it was wrong to take his own life. But she explained his desire to end the Vietnam War; in the previous few days, six massive air strikes had made it the deadliest week since the war began.
Read more 
November 9, 1984
U.S. peace activists sailed a shrimp boat into the Port of Corinto to confront U.S. warships threatening Nicaragua. The U.S. had mined the harbor in violation of international law, and had invaded Nicaragua through this port in 1896 and 1910.
November 9, 1989
For the first time since World War II, free travel between East and West Germany was allowed. The Berlin Wall, built to stop the exodus from the Communist-controlled East in 1961, was opened in response to nonviolent popular action.
   
November 9, 2002
Somewhere between 450,000 and a million Europeans in Florence, Italy, peacefully protested the threatened U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Florence, Italy 11.9.2002
The inaugural meeting of the European Social Forum had just concluded there.It was a regional part of the framework established at the World Social Forum which had met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, first in 2001.

Read more about this protest 
The Forum is a citizens’ movement exploring alternatives to globalization and the inhumane consequences of the changing world order. They focus on sustainable development, social and economic justice. Those who were part of the Forum come from a broad range of civil society, including: pacifists; environmentalists; those in nonprofit, volunteer and non-governmental organizations; representatives of religious and lay groups; those in the anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movements; and, for the first time in Florence (Firenze), significant involvement of the labor movement, notably the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), and trade unions or national confederations from nine European countries, including Russia.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november9

(Oops. I’m sorry about the title. Fixed it, though.)

Fears grow that woman arrested for undressing in Iran could be tortured in psychiatric unit

Protesters and political prisoners are being drugged, tortured and beaten in state-run institutions, say rights groups

Human rights organisations say they are gravely concerned that a young Iranian woman arrested for stripping down to her underwear could be subjected to torture after she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital by the authorities.

Amnesty International said it had found evidence that the Iranian regime used electric shocks, torture, beatings and chemical substances on protesters and political prisoners taken to state-run psychiatric institutions after being called mentally unstable. It said the situation facing the young woman was “alarming”.

Video of the young woman, who has not been formally identified, walking around a university campus in Tehran in her underwear was widely circulated on social media last week before she was seen being arrested by police officers. She is believed to have been protesting at being physically assaulted by campus security guards at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran for failing to comply with the strict dress code imposed on all Iranian women.

The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) called the student’s transfer to an undisclosed psychiatric facility a “kidnapping”, saying the use of forced transfer of anti-regime protesters to mental health facilities was being increasingly used to silence dissent.

A woman in her underwear sits on a wall while others, including veiled women, walk past
The woman is believed to have been protesting at being physically assaulted by campus security guards. Photograph: X/Amnesty

“Iranian authorities systematically use involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation as a tool to suppress dissent, branding protesters as mentally unstable to undermine their credibility,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of CHRI.

“Transferring individuals who participate in peaceful protests to psychiatric hospitals represents not only an act of arbitrary detention but also constitutes a form of kidnapping. This practice is a blatantly unlawful move to discredit activists by labelling them mentally unstable.”

There have been a number of other high-profile cases of protesters arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations who were also committed to psychiatric hospitals after their arrest.

Saman Yasin, a well-known Kurdish rapper, was taken by the authorities to Tehran’s Aminabad psychiatric hospital after his arrest at a protest in 2022, where he was allegedly tortured and coerced into a confession. He spent two years in prison before being released on medical furlough last month.

A source close to Yasin told the Guardian: “Saman was tied to the bed in the psychiatric centre in a cruciform position for a long time. They administered high-dose sedatives and despite his unconscious state, the restraints on his hands and feet were not removed.”

In October 2023, Roya Zakeri, a young Iranian woman who was filmed chanting anti-regime slogans, was called mentally unwell by state media and taken to the women’s ward of Razi psychiatric hospital. The Guardian has been told by people close to her family that she was injected with sleeping agents, physically assaulted and had her arms and feet chained.

A woman with her head uncovered stands on a bin or postbox with passersby at her feet, holdinga hijab inthe air.
Rights activist Azam Jangravi protesting in Tehran in 2018. Photograph: supplied

Azam Jangravi, a human rights activist, said she was pressed by Iranian authorities to sign a statement saying she had mental health issues after photographs of her waving her hijab over her head on a Tehran street were widely circulated in 2018.

“When they interrogated me, they accused me of being a spy,” she said. “They wanted me to write a confession stating that I regretted my protest and that I did it because I was mentally unwell. I didn’t sign it … They keep taunting us during interrogations by citing the examples of former political prisoners who were sent to these psychiatric hospitals, [telling us] ‘If you don’t regret your act of protest, you’ll face the same fate.’ I fear the university student is under horrific conditions right now and we must demand her release,” she said.

The Guardian spoke to young women in Iran who said they been inspired by the video of the university student, who was rapidly hailed as a new icon of Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement after the video was posted online.

“Nobody I know who protested and has called for freedom from the Islamic Republic does not support her act of protest,” said Farah*, a university student in Tehran. “This is what we are fighting for, to have the freedom to choose. We are in awe of her bravery. If it were up to the regime, all of us who protested would be branded as mentally unwell.”

Images of the young woman have also been posted by pro-regime social media accounts, which have circulated messages about her mental health and personal life.

*Name has been changed

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/nov/08/woman-arrested-iran-undressing-protesters-psychiatric-institutions-rights-groups

Peace & Justice History for 11/4:

November 4, 1811
A group of men in Bulwell, near Nottingham, England, armed with hammers, axes and pistols in the dark of night, broke into the workshop of a master weaver named Hollingsworth and smashed six weaving machines the men thought threatened their jobs. They and their supporters opposed the industrialization that had turned home-based sustainable textile work into factory work with significant loss of jobs through mechanization (and those at much lower wages), as well as the attendant air and water pollution.
Luddites smashing loom.
They called themselves followers of the probably fictional General Ludd and continued their attacks for months, with over a thousand knitting machines destroyed. In response, thousands of troops were sent to stop the rebellion, and Parliament passed a law making destruction of weaving machines a hanging offense.
Luddites has since become a term used for those who oppose technology.
November 4, 1956
Two hundred thousand Russian troops with 1000 tanks stopped an
anti-Stalinist uprising in Hungary and installed a new pro-Soviet government. Although civilians had set up barricades along all the major roads leading to Budapest, the Soviet air force bombed the capital and troops poured into the city in a massive dawn offensive.
Hungarian Army and National Guard troops participated in the resistance; only Communist Party functionaries and security police fought alongside the Warsaw Pact troops. The help promised from the U.S. to protect and aid the anti-Stalinists never came.
20,000 Hungarians ultimately died as a result (as well as 4000 troops), and ten times that many left the country permanently.

Hungarian ‘freedom fighters’ temporarily forced back Soviet tanks and troops.

Soviet tanks in Budapest.
Pictorial history of the Hungarian Uprising 
November 4, 1984
The first free elections in Nicaraguan history were held. Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista Front claimed a decisive victory (70%), defeating six other parties, in the country’s first elections since the revolution the Sandanistas had led five years previous. The high-turnout election (83%) was monitored by 400 independent election observers who said the election had been fair.

Read more 
November 4, 1995
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was fatally shot minutes after speaking at a peace rally held in Tel Aviv’s Kings Square in Israel.

The rally in Kings of Israel Square
  Yitzhak Rabin
Read more 
November 4, 2008
The first African American ever nominated by a major political party as candidate for president went before the electorate. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and his Democratic vice-presidential running mate, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, faced Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin; independent candidates Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez; Green Party candidates former Representative Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente; and former Repepresentatives Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november4

Return the SCOTUS to law and order-

(I don’t know if this is gonna work; I’m not on Instagram, but I went there, and could see, hear, read, and got the embed link. MomsRising is asking for shares, so if anyone cares to share, thank you!)

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Only The Decent People Can Save Us (Again) by Oliver Willis

Decency Is On The Ballot Read on Substack

(Plus Kal El bonus at the bottom.-A)

In the last few decades, we have been witness to systematic failures in American life. Time and time again the guardrails we believed existed turned out to be illusions, or at best, guardrails without any teeth. The courts, the financial institutions, the legislators, and especially the media – entrusted as the watchdogs of democracy – have absolutely failed.

There is only one group that, more often than not, has been up to the task: The people. The people keep showing up and at the very least, voting to put people in charge to clean up the messes. Of course, once those people are in office they too often respond with timidity and reluctance and don’t go as far as necessary to exercise the mandate they have been given, but the people did their jobs.

In every presidential election since 1988, with the exception of 2004, a plurality or majority of the public voted for the Democratic candidate. That is a data point you rarely see repeated and I am quite certain that if it was Republicans with such a popular vote winning streak both the party and the media would never shut up about it. That is a triumph of decency. It would be easy for voters to be snowed under by the right’s avalanche of lies and hate, ably amplified by their buck-chasing friends in the press, but the voters keep seeing through it.

To be certain, there are structural barriers. Neither Al Gore nor Hillary Clinton became president even though the will of the American people said they should have been. And the presidencies of Bill Clinton, Obama, and Biden have had too many missed opportunities to push the ball forward, even though all three of these men had mandates to go quite far.

But what matters is that enough voters saw through the haze of absolute bullshit to send a message to do the right thing.

Here we are again. The Republican Party has always glowed bright with a hateful intensity, but Trump has allowed them to move that hate from Mitt Romney’s “quiet rooms” to spotlights like Madison Square Garden. The press and the oligarchs that own it at institutions like The New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN and others, are quite happy to make billions of dollars from GOP fueled hate, as long as they can make a buck. They just don’t care about the consequences.

Voters still care. It may be naïve or cringe, or corny, but they believe. Voters have shown us that a majority of them are opposed to hate, opposed to racism, opposed to misogyny, opposed to treating people as second class based on their orientation. And a majority of them are pro-decency.

Yes, most of the pro-decency vote has a liberal ideology but it is more than that. There are people who just don’t like being crude bigots that spend all of their time shoving the faces of the vulnerable into the dirt. There are more of us than there are of them, and they have to effectively cheat or rig the rules to overcome our numbers.

Decency is on the march, but we are at a breaking point, again. Election day or week is not a “fever break” moment. No matter the outcome, but especially if decency is victorious again, we cannot go to sleep. The bad boss at the end of the game has not been defeated. 2004 showed us that. 2008 showed us that. 2012. 2016. 2020. The forces of darkness and depravity do not respect the will of the people and if you retreat, expecting that everyone will finally accept the supremacy of decency – the other side will see that as an opening.

The decent people need to stand up for what they believe in and then keep standing, keep pushing back, until the other people are broken – and then decency most continue to advance and remain forever vigilant.

I voted for decency, and I always will. I know I’m not alone.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

Exclusive Kal-El Photo

Kal once again shows how excited he is to work by my side.