Author: Alan Buddug

Globalism

I’ve got a coworker who is driving me nuts with their Satanic panic, so I wanted to find a nice YouTube video about it, and I found Getting Sweaty About Globalism by Thought Slime. It’s pretty good, and it is down the page a bit, but first let me give you some definitions that really explain it a bit.

Real Globalism

Real, actual globalism is a reference to global capitalism. In general, it means that both resources and products are moved all over the world; so your phone might have been designed in California, but it was made from materials that came from Congo, other parts of the US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Bolivia, and those were shipped to China, where people built the phones under such horrible conditions that the factory has a suicide prevention net around it. When China steals your job, that was really globalism stealing it; it just took it to China after it stole it. (If a kid steals your car and drives it into a river, do you say that the river stole the car?)

Globalism doesn’t want to destroy your culture unless your culture has a problem with capitalism, and then you’re in big trouble. But let’s say your culture is fine with capitalism — globalism will happily take your culture, turn it into something marketable and sell it all over the world. The same globalized corporation will happily sell you some Christian wall art, a thin blue line flag, a BLM t-shirt, a gay pride button, and a 10-inch Baphomet statue. It will even sell you a leftist book — “There’s nothing you can say about capitalism that it won’t subsume and sell back to you.“

In order to make more money, global capitalism wants to get rid of regulation wherever it finds it, and it does that by existing outside the nation state (it can move any component of its operation to whichever nation favors that particular piece of the business) and buying off government officials or even whole governments. Global capital favors weak governments, and especially weak international government (e.g., the UN) because that allows it to maximize profit and externalize costs to you, the normal person who does not own capital. Globalism wants us all to exist under a kind of normalized international contract law — like (right-wing) libertarianism, it wants the government’s only role to be enforcing property rights and contracts with force or the threat of force.

Fake Globalism

The pretend globalism of right-wing fever dreams is something very different. Fascists like to pretend that capitalism is great, but that globalism is really a conspiracy by Jewish people, who are also Satanists, who are also pedophiles, to enslave white Christians and force them into doing sinful things like gay sex or making a cake for a gay wedding (which is apparently just as sinful as the sex). Did I mention that the righties think that these Jewish pedophile Satanists also control all the banks? So when right wingers say “bankers” they really mean Jewish people. The purpose, then, of this bullshit version of globalism is to take your very real and very valid rage against capitalism and nudge it in the direction of various marginalized groups who are easy targets for your hatred, and Jewish people are typically placed at the apex of this fictional conspiracy.

Fascists are fine with actual globalism as long as it can be built to serve the needs of their preferred hierarchy, which typically puts straight, white, Christian men at the top. They like how capitalism can be used as a tool of domination, but they hate one of the good things about it — the fact that it promotes all kinds of cultures (as a side effect of product design and marketing).

Fascists may claim that they are opposed to wars of choice, but if they manage to conquer their host nation, they inevitably turn their attention outward. They see everything good in the world as their rightful property, so they don’t have any reason not to try to grab Venezuelan oil, Bolivian lithium, or Chinese labor. They may claim that they are opposed to “internationalism” but they will gladly work with fascists from other nations, as they’ve done both in World War II and now, with fascists from different nations inspiring each other and even going to other countries to fight.

The Left’s Option

For the sake of completeness, I should mention that the left’s take on global capitalism (aka, globalism) is that it is bad. And if there were an evil ethnic group trying to take over the world, I’m positive that the left would oppose that — white supremacists are an evil ethnic group and the left opposes them, while still supporting white people because they are people. The left’s position is that all working people should try to have solidarity with each other all over the world, support each other’s differences, live in peace, and live in a way that is sustainable so we can maintain that peace. The left wants us all to have the opportunity to be citizens of the world. It’s the consistent goodness of the left that makes it so dangerous to capital and fascists alike, who will then claim that since goodness is not possible, the left must truly be evil.

But here’s that Thought Slime video I mentioned. It’s entertaining. (28 minutes)

And here is Philosophy Tube’s take on Antisemitism (56 minutes):

How to Clean a Handgun | Tacticool Girlfriend

One of the most common requests we get from the community is help learning the correct way to clean a handgun. Unfortunately, doing that demonstration is a little more tricky with the current pandemic protocols. So here is Tacticool Girlfriend showing you how to clean her CZ P10, which is very similar to most other striker-fired handguns that you can buy. The only thing that will really vary from gun to gun would be the initial disassembly.

Democracy, Conservatives & Pandemic Masks

By now, you’ve heard about the right-wing plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Unfortunately, this kind of foolishness is going to become the rule over the next year at least, and it’s probably a good idea for all of us to have a cursory understanding of what is going on in the minds of conservatives these days.

Regarding the plot, the main thrust of it wasn’t something about the incoherence of modern firearm law — in fact, Michigan is one of those states that uses a very light touch in regard to guns, which is why protesters armed with rifles were allowed inside the capitol building back in May of this year without any consequences. In both cases, the conservatives involved were not angry about anything that we might think of as a substantive attack on conservative values, but instead they were angry about being forced to wear a mask in public during a pandemic. Mask-wearing appears to be the thing that conservatives are ready to start a civil war over, outshining everything from abortion to the Second Amendment in importance (though, they might find those things to be sufficient as well). In fact, there was just another incident like this — a man was planning to kill the mayor of Wichita, Kansas over the mask ordinance there.

I don’t see any reason not to make fun of them about this. I mean, if they’re making us wear a mask in public during a pandemic, what will be next? They might make us wear seat belts, or require restaurants to pass a health inspection! They might even prohibit honest, God-fearing parents from murdering their own children! That it is asinine is no reason to ignore it, though. We need to understand their mindset, because it isn’t going away — and it has been this way for a very, very long time.

So these particular conservatives in Michigan planned to kidnap Governor Whitmer due to her tyrannical mask ordinance. To be clear, the ordinance isn’t squeaky clean — it was created by the state health department rather than going through the legislature, which would be the correct route — so they’re not entirely wrong about it being a problem. But they were going to try her for treason, which is fun for a couple of reasons: First, nothing she did can be defined as treason — insurrection, perhaps, but not treason. Treason requires that the crime was done to benefit an enemy of the United States (I’ll get back to that). Second, nobody outside of conservatives who have gone off the rails is going to respect the secret show trial that you had in your friend’s barn, and you’ve already decided that she is guilty, so the only point of having a trial is because you are somehow getting off on it. Basically, the whole thing was a childish fantasy by people who really don’t understand how the world works.

Regarding this being a childish fantasy: We’re likely to find out that this plot never really got beyond the “wouldn’t it be cool” stage, and so wasn’t really a plot after all. Federal law enforcement has a long history of jumping to conclusions or even inducing people to take the step that turns “wouldn’t it be cool” into an actual plot, and we already know that federal informants provided first-hand accounts that led to these arrests. It wouldn’t be surprising at all to find out that the plotters were induced to do or say things by that informant that ultimately resulted in their arrests — and that has somehow become legal.

Beyond the infantile nature of their plot against the governor, another clear reason why these plotters are jackasses is because they opposed wearing a mask in the first place. Wearing a mask and physically staying away from each other are reasonable things to do with a pandemic like this one, but they and their ilk simply would not do the right thing. That’s what induced Michigan’s health authorities to mandate that people wear masks.

You may know about T-Rex Arms, a small-arms-related company in Centerville, TN. Their founder is a relatively young man named Lucas Botkin, who is one of the most impressive shooters on YouTube right now. He and his brother Isaac are experts in small arms, but, like everyone, they have blind spots. Their biggest blind spot would be religion.

A post on “Gun People Who Hate Gun People” linked to a story about the father of Lucas and Isaac ( The Cold, Unforgiving World of Geoffrey Botkin ) and summarized Lucas thusly:

I’m still surprised that people don’t know that Lucas Botkin, head of T. Rex Arms is a gay-hating cult member. His dad, Geoffrey Botkin, is a leader of the quiverfull movement, and there’s this maelstrom of allegations of sexual abuse surrounding this cult that basically says that America needs to return to Biblical law to defeat satanism. The kicker? Lucas Botkin is listed as a staff member at the Botkin Conservatory, so it’s not like he’s keeping his distance.

As male Quiverfull children, Lucas and Isaac were literally born to kill; children are arrows in the quiver of God, and they’re not meant to just stay in the quiver. They’re meant to fly into whoever opposes their conception of Biblical law. The girls are supposed to grow up to make more arrows. I’ll stop with describing this metaphor because I think you get it.

Still, like I said, Lucas and Isaac know about guns, and even though their motivation is being prepared to murder everyone that doesn’t agree with them during the Apocalypse, I hate to see good knowledge go to waste, so I’ve watched some of their videos. The most recent one I saw was When and How to Resist Tyranny. This video starts out just fine, with Isaac talking about a relatively new pistol brace called the Honeybadger and the legal insanity surrounding it. This is a bizarre kink in US gun law that I’ll devote a whole post to some other time, but for now I’ll say that Isaac makes good points about the pistol brace controversy. The problem is that early in the video, Isaac jumps right off the side of the whole thing and starts talking about the Bible and says that the remainder of the video will be devoted to an interview with some conservatives who got arrested in Moscow, Idaho for blatantly refusing to comply with the local mask ordinance.

The Moscow, Idaho anti-maskers are an organization called CrossPolitics, whose logo features a US flag bowing before a Christian cross, indicating that their primary allegiance is to their interpretation of the Bible, and not their country. They went to the town hall without masks and sang hymns as a protest against the local mask ordinance. As you probably know, singing is the most effective way to spread a respiratory virus like covid — it’s even worse than coughing because it is sustained. The police showed up and arrested them for endangering public health. CrossPolitics is portraying it as two different violations of their First Amendment rights. The first violation would be to their practice of religion, even though they could have gone and practiced it somewhere else that didn’t endanger the public. The second violation would be to freedom of expression (and protest), even though the right to protest doesn’t give you the right to break the law while you’re doing it and conservatives are the first to point this out when centrist or leftist protests include violations of the law.

Obeying is obviously extremely important to conservatives, and yet here they are protesting having to obey a relatively simple and reasonable ordinance. And no discussion of a bodily-autonomy issue can happen without pointing out that conservatives deny the right of women to have bodily autonomy.

What are the factors that determine whether conservatives see a particular law as one that should be obeyed or rebelled against? In either condition, they are prone to getting homicidal. It all comes down to the social hierarchy that they believe is legitimate. Rules that emerge from what they believe to be a legitimate hierarchy must be obeyed, and rules that emerge from an illegitimate hierarchy must fought against. And the thing is — this is exactly what every reasonable person with a spine believes. The problem is the factors that make them believe a given hierarchy is legitimate or not.

For example, we would say that the elected governor of Michigan has some degree of authority by nature of having been elected through a fairly democratic process. But if that governor is a woman and a liberal/Democrat, they are not going to consider her to be a legitimate authority. This was the same situation with the Obama presidency — he was Black and a Democrat, therefore no matter how conservative his actions were, his authority was not legitimate and should not be obeyed. In terms of the pandemic, more conservatives would have gone along with the mask mandate if someone they considered to be a legitimate authority had clearly supported it from the outset. However, since part of that social hierarchy involved God, there are some conservatives that would never support doing anything about the pandemic other than praying that the Angel of Death pass over their house and kill the Muslims down the way instead.

Would they have been more likely to obey the ordinance if it had been enacted by the legislature? Yes, and really that’s how it should have been done. But many of them would have still refused because they see the authority of the entire government as illegitimate. In fact, many conservatives don’t even see liberals like Whitmer as American citizens, which is how the idea of “treason” starts to make sense in regard to the mask ordinance. Citizenship is the right-wing’s preferred way of manipulating human rights, and conservatives generally want to remove the protection of citizenship from everyone except straight, white, Christian, property-owning men. They literally do not think anyone else should be allowed to vote, and then they definitely want a republic where a group of elite men (who they might say were chosen by God) consider the votes of the rest of the men and then decide what to do.

Women’s suffrage was a mistake, they say. The civil rights act — including voting protections — was also a mistake, they say. Only people with “skin in the game” (property owners) really ought to be able to vote, they say. Only Christians have the moral authority to be trusted with voting, they say. LGBTQ people are criminals at best or perhaps not even human, they say. These are all aspects of the hierarchy that they believe to be legitimate, and when power is wielded by an illegitimate hierarchy it is no different from a puppet government installed by a foreign nation. Therefore, the actions of the Whitmer government are “treason”.

When an illegitimate hierarchy, run by women, black people, and “perverts”, doesn’t even bother to get permission before enacting an ordinance related to disease — something that is the will of God — this is pretty much the worst thing a government can do. We’ve seen this with problems other than the pandemic, including vaccinations and helmet laws. Just this year, Missouri revoked the law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets because the Missouri state government is currently controlled by conservatives. I’m betting that if you went back and looked at the implementation of nationwide seat belt laws, that the same arguments were used against it. (No need to take that bet, I just took a minute to look it up, and yes, we had the same kind of resistance to seat belt laws.)

We have these people who don’t think most Americans are citizens, and who don’t respect the religious or metaphysical beliefs of other people. Should they be determining how we all live? Aren’t these exactly the people who are apt to create a “tyranny of democracy”? I’m too much of a fan of democracy to say that they should be excluded from it, but we certainly can’t negotiate with them. If your position is that women have the same rights as men, and their position is that women are non-citizens who should be required to obey their husbands (or fathers), what is the middle ground? If your position is that LGBTQ people can live and love as they choose, but their position is that they should be executed for violating the will of God, what is the middle ground?

The biggest factor in the rise of fascism in the US today is that the hierarchy conservatives see as legitimate is threatened by various demographic trends including the increase in non-religious people (threatening the rule of Christianity), the increase in Latinx and Hispanic people (threatening the rule of white people), and the ongoing gap between the the educational achievement of boys versus girls, which is leading to women having dramatically more power at every level of society. And, of course, there are political changes that have been anathema to the conservative hierarchy, like the dramatic increase in women and non-Christians in elected positions, and marriage equality. Fascism represents a desperate attempt by the group that holds power to maintain that power in the face of what seems like an insurmountable challenge. It is inherently genocidal because it acknowledges that mass murder is likely the only way to stop the power shift from happening. Again, what is the middle ground?

The most important thing to remember, however, is that though concerns of executive or judicial branch overreach are completely legitimate, conservatives are not sincere when they bring them up. As we’ve seen, they will happily use any position of power to usurp the law or accepted operating procedures if it benefits their preferred hierarchy. These are arguments made disingenuously, meant to convince an audience that genuinely believes in, for example, the rule of law or the separation of powers. Conservatives themselves are really only interested in maintaining power. Though we should demand better behavior from government, we should not believe that conservatives would ever hold themselves to the same standard that they demand from Democrats.

Christianity is completely compatible with democracy, but only if Christians respect the right of other people to reject Christianity, and only if government policy reflects the country’s diversity of religious belief. Thankfully, many Christians do believe in religious liberty. (Here’s an argument for why Christians should support religious freedom.) Conservatives have made themselves crystal clear: They do not support democracy.

Pinkerton

On October 10, a Pinkerton hired as a guard by 9News (NBC affiliate) in Denver shot and killed an anti-Black-lives protester. The mainstream media hasn’t been covering it very well because it doesn’t really reflect the preferred narrative of either of the two separate groups of billionaires that control US media. No leftists were involved in this incident.

Pinkerton started out as the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1850, and first became famous while working for the Union during the US Civil War. But don’t let that fool you into thinking they were the good guys; they were getting paid, and after the war, the people who could afford to pay were capitalists. Pinkertons became a paramilitary force for big business, and at one time outnumbered the US military. They acted as a private military that was used against unions. They pioneered the use of data collection and infiltration as tools against working people. Though most of their functions were absorbed by government agencies, like the FBI and Secret Service, the company still exists as Pinkerton today, and they’ve been courting wealthy people hoping to make a huge profit by helping them survive the extreme chaos that is coming with climate change.

Given their history and reputation, it was really surprising to see a Pinkerton failing as completely as Matthew Dolloff did on Saturday. Pundits are guessing he will spend a year in prison for the severe escalation of that altercation with the right wing extremist (though I think I might see a way he can lawyer his way out of it; see below).

US law is clear on when you may use deadly force against another person: You must legitimately fear for your life. It’s partially subjective, but a jury is going to have to determine whether you really should have feared for your life if you shoot someone. If you freak out and shoot someone, you may have believed in the moment that you had to shoot, but you also were not being reasonable, and that defense isn’t going to work. And it shouldn’t work — as the person with the gun, you do not have the luxury of irrational panic. It’s hard to say whether the capitalist lackey believed in that moment that the fascist jackass was a threat to his life, but it is clear to everyone else that a punch or a generous dose of pepper spray is rarely a threat to your life.

If you are at a protest and you are armed, you really just have one job. Consider yourself a hammer that will only respond to nails. If you are getting in a fistfight — or even just having a verbal argument with someone — you are making a grave mistake. If someone is behaving aggressively toward you, you need to walk away, and hopefully, you went into the situation with an unarmed person who knows how to deescalate. Any concealed carry trainer worth their salt will tell you this very same thing.

Legal Analysis

I’m not a lawyer and this doesn’t reflect the opinion of the club as a whole.

I do not think deadly force was justified; it’s a mess, though, and I would hate to be on that jury. There is an animation of the still photos that shows most of the event (warning: death) but not the moments preceding it.

Since Dolloff and Pinkerton (edit: also 9News) are likely to both be the subject of a wrongful death suit from the biker’s family, Pinkerton will put its support behind Dolloff. A dismissal or lesser conviction would greatly reduce the amount of the award of the wrongful death suit. Pinkerton also wants to minimize damage to its reputation.

Pinkerton’s lawyers will claim that Dolloff was present near the biker as part of his job guarding a 9News producer; it seems as if Dolloff was trying to get between the biker and the 9News producer when the biker assaulted him (looks like a smack) but I don’t have confirmation on that detail. Pinkerton’s lawyers will portray this as Dolloff defending the producer from a physical attack initiated by the biker. They will claim that as Dolloff was retreating after the smack, he believed that the biker was drawing a firearm, and responded by shooting the biker. (That the biker was also retreating is somewhat irrelevant if Dolloff believed the biker was drawing a gun.) They will attempt to shift responsibility to the biker by claiming that the Pinkerton was disoriented and somewhat blinded (due to his sunglasses having been knocked askew) because the biker assaulted him.

It’s unclear whether that will work. The outcome will probably come down to what happened before the Pinkerton touched the biker (i.e., whether the initial physical attack came from the Pinkerton or the biker), but the above defense coupled with Dolloff’s status as a legitimate agent of capital will likely allow him to get away with only a minor conviction regardless. Pinkerton will push for a plea deal to get out of a public trial and the prosecuting attorney will be happy to oblige; the two sides might agree to a hefty fine.

Finally, Dolloff was not licensed as an armed security guard, which is required in Denver, but this is a relatively small matter.

Gun Safety Tips

If you are a gun owner, you are surely already familiar with the 4 rules of guns safety. But here they are again, just in case:

  1. All guns are always loaded.
  2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.
  3. Keep your finger off the trigger till your sights are on the target.
  4. Identify your target, and what is behind it.

Since 60% of gun-related deaths in the US are suicides, and because guns are dangerous machines just like a car (1.35 million US deaths per year), chainsaw (28,000 injuries per year), or lawnmower (80,000 injuries per year, 70 deaths), we add a fifth rule:

Be aware of your mental state, and don’t handle guns if you are impaired.

But for people who already have a good handle on those rules, here are some additional tips that will help you stay safe with your firearms. We are aware that several of these recommendations are controversial among American gun owners; we are also aware that we’re right. 😉

Use the “safety finger” no matter what you are doing.

The third rule of gun safety is to keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target. Practically speaking, this means using the “safety finger” — keeping your trigger finger straight, pointed toward the direction that the gun is pointed, resting on the frame of the gun. We often point out that your finger is by far the most important safety device. However, a huge part of competent operation of a firearm involves muscle memory, and a gun isn’t the only thing in your life that has a trigger. If you own guns, or even if you’re planning to get one, you should be using the safety finger with everything — I mean your drill, bottles of glass cleaner, spray paint that has a trigger, and even your infrared thermometer (if you have one of those). That way, you are developing and maintaining safe muscle memory. When people accidentally pull a trigger, they typically don’t even realize that their finger was on the trigger — that’s muscle memory.

Use a holster.

While the gun itself is the most expensive part of purchasing a firearm, there’s a lot of other stuff that you need. We encourage you to include a holster in your initial gun purchase even if you only plan to use the gun for home defense. It’s an extra layer of safety between your finger (or some other object) and that trigger. If your gun isn’t in your hand, and it isn’t in a secured container, it should be in a holster. Carrying in a bag or pocket without a holster creates the opportunity for something to get into the trigger guard; fortunately, there are holsters that fit inside a bag or pocket.

Secure the gun.

Another gun-related expense that people overlook is a way to secure the gun when you don’t have it with you. Since most first-time gun owners purchase a handgun (we suggest that you start with a long gun), that can mean a very inexpensive locking box. This keeps it out of the hands of both children and criminals. It might make sense to buy a gun safe before you have the gun — a gun safe can be a great place to keep other items that need to be secure. If you have a gun that you don’t want to have on you, but you also want to be able to get to quickly, there are storage devices for quick access.

Choose the right kind of holster for your application.

The correct holster holds the gun in a rigid covering (usually kydex) that completely protects the trigger from fingers and foreign objects. While part of the holster can be leather, the part that actually covers the gun should not be leather — even rigid leather can change shape and end up in your trigger guard, causing a negligent discharge. A concealed-carry holster should have passive (friction) retention only. An open carry holster should have some kind of mechanical release mechanism. Read up on the safety of any mechanical release mechanism before you buy — some of them are associated with negligent discharges. In terms of how to carry your gun concealed, that depends a lot on you; be prepared to buy a lot of holsters before you find the right solution for you.

Draw fast, re-holster slow.

Re-holstering errors are one of the most common types of negligent discharges, and are always a severe danger to the shooter (and a lesser danger to bystanders). A re-holstering error can result in a bullet in your leg, your ass, or your genitals depending on how you carry. Therefore, when you re-holster, stop, look at the holster to make sure it is clear, make sure your finger is safe, and slowly re-insert the gun into the holster. If you have a gun with a manual mechanical safety (we recommend that you do not), make sure you’re getting that safety to the correct position before re-holstering — not as part of the re-holstering itself. If you have a gun with a hammer (we recommend striker-fired), ride that hammer with your thumb to make sure it doesn’t move as you holster the gun. If conditions are dangerous enough that you do not feel safe eyeballing the holster thoroughly while you re-holster, then it is not safe to re-holster at all.

Do not stage guns.

In the way, way back, in the long ago, people used to “stage” guns around the place where they lived or worked instead of carrying a gun on their person. The idea was that this would be faster than trying to draw and would free you from the uncomfortable feeling of carrying a gun. And let’s be honest — it can make people there with you uncomfortable, too. However, we now understand that staging guns prevents you from having total control of all those guns, creating the opportunity for unauthorized people to access them — that includes keeping a gun in your car or truck. The new way is to keep the gun (or guns) on your person whenever possible. Yes, this means wearing a gun around the house or workplace. It may seem awkward at first, but it’s the more responsible option, and people will get used to it pretty quickly — especially if you explain the hazards of the alternative. I’m guessing that this recommendation is going to cause some people to get particularly bent out of shape, but the only real problem with it is the existence of gun-free zones, which essentially force you to store a gun in your car or go without it.

Know the status of your weapon.

The first rule of gun safety is that all guns are always loaded, but there might be a situation where you need the gun to be loaded, but it is not. That could really ruin your day. Make sure you know that your gun really is loaded. The best way to do that is to learn how to do a “press check” which is where you slightly pull back the slide to reveal the brass of the cartridge case without ejecting the cartridge out of the gun. This is something you should practice with a dummy round (snap cap) before trying it with live rounds.

Pass guns between people safely.

Before you hand a gun to someone, you should check it to make sure it is not loaded. We don’t recommend handing another person a loaded gun — not even in a holster — but regardless, you should report the status of the gun to the other person and make sure they understood what you said. If you are receiving a gun from someone, check that gun again so that you know the status of the gun.

Let your kids touch your guns.

Children are naturally curious, and if they’re curious about your guns, they’ll eventually manage to touch them. Making something forbidden makes it more appealing not just to kids, but to adults as well. If you are there to make the gun safe, supervise while the kid is touching it, and then enforce good hand washing after, you are increasing the chances that a child will have safer interactions with guns in the future. Children should never have unsupervised access to firearms, and you must consult with a child’s legal guardian before you let them touch a gun (if you’re not that person).

Preparing for Electoral Unrest and a Right-Wing Power Grab

Crimethinc has a very nice analysis of unrest that is likely to occur in the US after the 2020 election, and you should check it out.

Every possible outcome of the struggle over the 2020 election involves considerable risks. No matter how it occurs, a Trump victory would further polarize the country, radicalizing many liberals and leftists, but it would also likely lead to a tremendous amount of bloodshed and repression. If Biden wins the election in a landslide without significant resistance from Trump’s supporters, he will surely crack down on radicals and introduce policies that are oppressive to poor, Black, brown, indigenous, and undocumented people in order to placate the right-wing forces with whom he hopes to re-establish a truce. If Biden ends up in office thanks chiefly to the efforts of social movements in the street, it could discourage him from immediately cracking down on them, but this path involves passing through a very dangerous period of open conflict in which victory is by no means guaranteed.

Republican, Democrats, the KKK, and Richard Nixon

If you’ve spent much time online, you’ve probably seen a Republican claim that the KKK were Democrats. It’s a clever oversimplification that furthers the Republican party’s most popular defense: “I know you are but what am I?” — aka, the Peewee Herman Defense.

This deception works because it is technically true: At the time of the KKK’s founding (1865), and up until around 1968, KKK members were Democrats — over 100 years. Then, Richard Nixon and his advisors decided that to beat the Democrats, they would make a sharp right turn into white supremacy and authoritarianism. First, they devised the Southern Strategy. The plan was to dog-whistle white supremacy, without saying anything overt. That is still the policy of the Republican party today, though Donald Trump tends to say the quiet part out loud. By 1980, there were no KKK members who were Democrats — they had all switched to the Republican party.

One easy way to defuse this insincere argument is to simply ask, “And what party do the KKK belong to now?”

The other thing the Nixon adminstration did was to start the War on Drugs in 1970 — which was intended as a war against Black people and the left.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman asked, referring to the war on drugs.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” he concluded, according to Baum. 

Top Nixon adviser reveals the racist reason he started the ‘war on drugs’ decades ago by Alex Lockie, Business Insider

It’s not that Black people and leftists were using more drugs. Rather, the government could use selective enforcement to turn the law into a weapon. Selective enforcement is when you create a law that applies to everyone, but then you almost exclusively enforce it against a group of people you don’t like. Conservatives are big fans of selective enforcement, and that is why they are terrified that selective enforcement might be used against them — for example, with the creation of new gun laws. It’s the inverse of the Peewee Herman Defense — accusing their opponents of what they themselves are doing, or have explicitly expressed that they plan to do.