SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
heather heyer
Tennessee GOP Show That Revenge Is Fascism's First Instinct
The Republican Party has devolved into an organized mob bent on revenge, because the people of America are rejecting their version of leadership and their abandonment of the principles of democracy.
Apr 07, 2023
Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives are furious and out for revenge. Two Black Democratic members and a Democratic woman had confronted them — and embarrassed them — over their unwillingness to do anything about the slaughter of Tennessee’s children in that state’s schools.
To punish them and teach women and other young men Black men — who might think of being too troublesome in the legislature — a lesson, the GOP ran a pathetic Kangaroo Court for the world to see. And got their revenge.
Jim Jordan and his buddies in the GOP are furious and out for revenge. Donald Trump is being held to account by a Black district attorney in New York City for falsifying business records to affect the outcome of an election and to avoid paying taxes and Jordan is attempting to intimidate the prosecutor’s office.
Ron DeSantis is furious and out for revenge. After the CEO of Disney publicly disagreed with the governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, DeSantis thought he could hurt the company, but they outfoxed him. Now he’s demanding an investigation to harass and bully the company.
Brett “Beerbong” Kavanaugh is furious and out for revenge. Several women pointed out his drunken sexual assaults when he was a teenager and he told the Senate:
“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit … revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades … and as we all know, in the political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.”
Donald Trump is furious and out for revenge. For the first time in his 76 years on this Earth, he’s being held to account for a small slice of his lifetime of criminal behavior, and being held to account by a Black man. He’s apparently trying as hard as he can to trigger another of his stochastic terrorist followers to threaten or assassinate the DA, the judge, and their families.
The Republican Party has devolved into an organized mob bent on revenge, because the people of America are rejecting their version of leadership and their abandonment of the principles of democracy. Facing increasing rejection by voters, they have turned to gerrymandering, threats, blocking the right to vote, and inciting violence.
Having failed at holding power through the democratic process, Republicans have turned instead to revenge tactics.
Revenge is violence.
Revenge as a political philosophy is rooted in violence: the domination of the many by a few, whether the main instrument of that domination is personal physical violence, the violence of great wealth and political power being used to destroy one’s enemies, or unjustified violence inflicted by the state under color of law.
But at its core, revenge is rooted in physical violence, intimidation, and murder. It’s war brought into politics and governance.
Vengeance like this has its own power and its own attraction. The media is drawn to it, making it attractive to Republicans as a way of bringing together their followers.
Insecure, frightened men (and the occasional woman) participating in revenge-fueled violence find a sense of agency, of individual power and meaning, a sort of orgasmic release from a life of ordinariness and political impotence.
And make no mistake: the GOP has become the party of revenge and political violence.
Democrats watch revenge threats of violence against school board members; against nurses and hospitals treating Covid; against abortion providers; against racial minorities and queer people who Republican legislators declare — and try to put into law — are less than human or “aberrations” that must not be tolerated in a “free society.”
“It’s the exception,” the media notes, and moves on to the next story.
In fact, these displays of revenge-based violence and the willingness to use violence are Republican declarations. They are statements of purpose. They’re spoken and executed with pride.
They are assertions by Republicans and their followers that they are perfectly willing to exercise violence and its power up to and including the ultimate: the power to take human lives, as they did against three police officers (and tried to kill others) on January 6th.
Republicans and their media lionize Kyle Rittenhouse for showing up at a Black Lives Matter protest and killing two protestors. They celebrate police revenge against Black people with “thin blue line” flags, and wave the all-black US flag that signifies the willingness to kill one’s political opponents.
They show up at protests heavily armed and wearing tee-shirts evoking General Pinochet with the slogan, “Free helicopter rides for liberals.” Their leader said there are “very good people on both sides” after his followers — demanding revenge against Jews they say are trying to “replace” them with Black people — murdered a young woman named Heather Heyer.
Republicans running for office feature guns and imply threats to kill people for political revenge in their television and online advertising. Eric Greitens is just the latest in a long list of GOP shooters glorifying assault weapons and implying political violence. This is Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie’s Christmas Card, but he’s just one of many members of Congress to pose their white children with deadly assault weapons.
These are all expressions of a political philosophy that is based in revenge.
When men like Rusty Bowers, Adam Kinsinger, and Brad Raffensperger — Republicans who dared stop Trump’s criminal attempts to steal the 2020 election — describe how they were and continue to be threatened with violence, elected Republicans fall silent.
Arizona House Speaker Bowers endured violent threats outside his home through night after night as his daughter lay dying: this kind of revenge-driven violence is devoid of compassion. It is evil.
Not a word from Ronna Romney McDaniel about the embrace of revenge by the base of the Republican Party she leads, there was not a word from congressional Republicans about the violence their own fellow conservatives like Liz Cheney now face, nor a word from Republican media other than to cynically mouth phony excuses and justifications about why they must seek revenge.
Because revenge is now their brand. They revel in it.
They boast of it in ways they sometimes claim are just hyperbole or jokes, like when Sharron Angle (and others) warned of “Second Amendment solutions” to Democratic successes at the polls, or when Donald Trump sent his mob to hang Mike Pence in revenge for failing to flip the election to him.
Their followers know what they mean: these are proud statements of their willingness to use or endorse revenge-based violence, and carry explicit threats.
Revenge is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of revenge against an “other” they claim have stolen from them or persecuted them.
Rightwing media revel in the language of revenge. They dehumanize the victims of their violence with words like “invaders” and “vermin” and “illegals” and demand revenge for the lost jobs, integrated schools and neighborhoods, and other insults they imagine.
To justify the violence at the heart of their movement, they also squeal a phony claim to victimhood: wealthy Republicans claim Democrats are trying to take their tax dollars. They fear gays are trying to groom their children. They pretend teachers are indoctrinating their youth in socialism. Revenge, they say, is their only option.
Over the past four decades, as this revenge-fueled movement has arisen in America and taken over the GOP, more than three-quarters of all politically motivated murders have been committed by rightwing often-Republican-aligned terrorists who invariably claim they’re rightfully seeking revenge.
Republicans justify their violence as necessary to get revenge against those they say have assaulted their faith, their families, and the “identity” of their homeland. They will tell you it’s the unfortunate last-ditch “necessity” provoked by the Democrats and dark-skinned or queer “others” who “threaten our way of life.”
In reality, revenge is not the fascist’s final, last-gasp option: it’s their first.
— It’s their most powerful recruiting tool, showing, as it does, their dominance and control of society and society’s institutions.
— It’s how they cow dissent.
— It’s the weapon that provokes action, and fascists are all about action.
— It creates chaos, and revenge needs chaos to tear down the existing structures of governance and law that they intend to replace.
The final cause to which fascist revenge is directed is what Jefferson (and Hobbes) called bellum omnium in omnia: war of all against all. Every vengeful act is designed intentionally to bring society closer to breakdown, so the fascists can openly and vengefully kill their enemies — particularly people of color and “liberals” — in the streets of the nation.
It’s why Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring another 680: he told the world it was revenge for Waco and other “big government” violations of his rightwing world. It appears to be what motivated both the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58 people and left over 550 wounded, and the Boston Bomber. Revenge against Black people was claimed by the Buffalo killer of 20 people in a supermarket, and revenge against Hispanics motivated the 2019 El Paso shooter who murdered 23 people. Revenge against Jews enraged the Tree of Life synagogue shooter.
It’s the story line of the two best-selling books within this part of the modern Republican movement, Camp of the Saints and The Turner Diaries. Each ends with revenge-fueled mass slaughter leaving a nation of “pure” white Christian survivors, most holding well-used assault rifles as they stand atop piles of brown and Jewish bodies.
Most Americans are not driven by revenge. It’s not how they think politics should work.
They’d just like a country that works for all of us, instead of just white people, the billionaire class, and giant, monopolistic corporations. Most Americans are sick of Republicans saturating our airwaves with their revenge fantasies, their revenge investigations, their revenge against voters, their revenge programming on hate-driven TV and radio.
Revenge is a poison, and it’s deeply embedded now in the political bloodstream of our nation because Republicans who haven’t gotten their way have proclaimed the political and social equivalent of revenge-fueled holy wars.
They showed up with revenge in their hearts to make right Trump’s loss on January 6th; they sought revenge for having to wear masks during the pandemic; they seek revenge on women, racial, and gender minorities who merely want equal rights and freedoms as citizens of the United States.
A 2003 study by University of Oklahoma psychology researcher Ryan P. Brown found a strong association between revenge and narcissism, a personality disorder that has become a defining characteristic of many Republican politicians, from Donald Trump to, apparently, Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Jim Jordan.
“As expected,” Brown noted, “people low in dispositional forgiveness were more vengeful than were people high in dispositional forgiveness, but particularly so among those high in narcissism; among those low in narcissism, forgiveness was less strongly related to vengeance. Thus, the most vengeful people were those who were both low in forgiveness and high in narcissism, independent of gender differences and healthy self-esteem.”
Republicans in Tennessee, preening for the cameras and high on their own white privilege self-righteousness, got their revenge yesterday. They bullied and humiliated their Democratic colleagues who were acting on behalf of that state’s schoolchildren, and expelled two “uppity” Black members.
Now, hopefully, America sees how disgusting and pathetic revenge is when compared to governing on behalf of the people, instead of just the gun industry and the morbidly rich.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Not One Single Republican Votes for Probe of Neo-Nazis in US Military and Police
Zero House Republicans supported a measure requiring the Pentagon and federal law enforcement agencies to publish a report on countering white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in their ranks.
Jul 14, 2022
Zero House Republicans on Wednesday supported a measure requiring the Pentagon and federal law enforcement agencies to publish a report on countering white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in their ranks.
Rep. Brad Schneider's (D-Ill.) amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2023 directing the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Defense "to publish a report that analyzes and sets out strategies to combat white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in the uniformed services and federal law enforcement agencies" passed in a party-line 218-208 vote.
Among present lawmakers, Democrats were unified in support and Republicans in opposition. Reps. Theodore Deutch (D-Fla.), Kevin Brady (R-Texas), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) did not vote.
The House is expected to pass the full NDAA this week, after which it will conference with the Senate, where amendments to the annual military spending bill could be struck down.
Schneider's proposal requests "figures on the number of people who were discharged from uniformed services or law enforcement because of situations involving white supremacy and neo-Nazi activity," The Hill reported. It also calls for "information on how the agency leaders responded to 'planned or effectuated incidents' connected to white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology."
The report--to be published no more than 180 days after enactment of the NDAA and every six months thereafter--would be submitted to congressional committees, and unclassified sections would be made public.
In a House floor speech on Wednesday, Schneider said that the U.S. is experiencing a rise in domestic terrorism, pointing to the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by a right-wing, anti-Semitic gunman, and the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was killed when a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of progressive counter-protesters.
In a 2020 report titled Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement, the Brennan Center for Justice wrote that "the government's response to known connections of law enforcement officers to violent racist and militant groups has been strikingly insufficient."
Last year, a House Committee on Veterans' Affairs hearing on "Violent Domestic Extremist Groups and the Recruitment of Veterans" highlighted the dangers of far-right extremism among veterans and active-duty military personnel.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the percentage of all domestic terrorist incidents linked to active-duty military personnel and reservists increased in 2020 to 6.4%, up from 1.5% in 2019 and 0% in 2018.
Schneider cited a May presentation from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, titled "The Insider Threat and Extremist Activity Within the DOD," which detailed cases of domestic terrorism connected to members of the U.S. military.
"Such behavior, such extremism is a threat to us in all segments of society," Schneider said during debate. "There is no reason to believe that our military is any different."
"These are exceptions, they are rare," he added, "but we must do everything we can to identify them and to thwart them before risks become a reality."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Rise of Fascism Feeding Off a Meaner, More Violent United States
Violence is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of violence.
Jun 24, 2022
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
-Benito Mussolini
"Have you noticed that people are getting meaner?" the villain asks in a Paramount+ promo for their new show Evil.
"What does it mean?" asks the "nice" character.
"It means," says the evil character with a note of triumph in her voice, "that your side is losing."
And here we are. The lede of an above-the-fold story in yesterday's Washington Post lays it out:
"In the past 24 hours, there has been an uptick in the number of violent threats against lawmakers on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and all lawmakers on the committee are likely to receive a security detail..."
We need to discuss the violence and threats of violence now endemic to the GOP, because they signal a hopefully reversible--but possibly terminal--slide into fascism.
Fascism is violence.
Its philosophy is rooted in violence: the domination of the many by a few, whether the main instrument of that domination is personal physical violence, the violence of great wealth or political power being used to destroy one's enemies, or unjustified violence inflicted by the state under color of law.
But at its core, fascism is rooted in physical violence, intimidation, and murder. It's war brought into politics and governance.
Violence like this has its own power and its own attraction.
The media is drawn to it, making it the most powerful recruiting tool a fascist movement has.
Insecure, frightened men (and the occasional woman) participating in fascist violence find a sense of agency, of individual power and meaning, a sort of orgasmic release from a life of ordinariness and political impotence.
And make no mistake: the GOP has become the party of political violence.
Democrats treat the violence associated with today's Republican Party as if it were coming from outliers, as if it's "a few bad apples," as if it's simply a troublesome weirdness on the extreme periphery of the conservative movement.
We see this in their response to the violence of January 6th, to the threats of violence directed at members of the January 6th Committee who are now getting security details, and to the frequent but scattershot violence that erupts across the country almost daily.
Democrats watch threats of violence against school board members; against nurses and hospitals treating Covid; against abortion providers; against racial minorities and queer people who Republican legislators declare--and try to put into law--are less than human or "aberrations" that must not be tolerated in a "free society."
The media continues to largely ignore those frequent moments when fascist-infiltrated police--the only group within our society who are legally authorized to use violence without consequence--overlook or overtly encourage the violence that breaks out when Americans dare stand up to fascist militias.
"It's the exception," the media notes, and moves on to the next story.
In fact, these displays of violence and the willingness to use violence are declarations. They are statements of purpose. They're spoken and executed with pride.
They are assertions by fascists that they intend to exercise violence and its power up to and including the ultimate: the power to take human life.
Republicans and their media lionize Kyle Rittenhouse for showing up at a Black Lives Matter protest and killing two protestors. They celebrate police violence with "thin blue line" flags, and wave the all-black US flag that signifies the willingness to kill one's political opponents.
They show up at protests heavily armed and wearing tee-shirts evoking General Pinochet with the slogan, "Free helicopter rides for liberals." Their leader said there are "very good people on both sides" after his fascists murdered a young woman named Heather Heyer.
Republicans running for office feature guns or imply threats to kill people in their television and online advertising. Eric Greitens is just the latest in a long list of GOP shooters glorifying assault weapons and implying political violence. This is Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie's Christmas Card:
These are all expressions of fascism.
When men like Rusty Bowers and Brad Raffensperger--who dared stop Trump's criminal attempts to steal the 2020 election--describe how they were and continue to be threatened with violence, elected Republicans fall silent.
Arizona House Speaker Bowers endured violent threats outside his home through night after night as his daughter lay dying: this kind of violence is devoid of compassion. It is evil.
Not a word from Ronna Romney McDaniel about the embrace of violence by the base of the Republican Party she leads, not a word from congressional Republicans about the violence their own fellow conservatives now face, not a word from Republican media other than to cynically mouth phony excuses and justifications.
Because violence is now their brand. They revel in it.
They boast of it in ways that are often misinterpreted as either hyperbole or jokes, like when Sharron Angle (and others) warned of "Second Amendment solutions" to Democratic efforts, or when Donald Trump said he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and still get elected.
Their fascist followers know better: these are proud statements of their willingness to use or endorse violence, and carry explicit threats.
Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
"[T]he propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.
"The Nazis 'were convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,' ... and experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.
"The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It has always been true that the mob will greet 'deeds of violence with the admiring remark: it may be mean, but it is very clever.'"
When a nation goes fascist, it happens quickly. It takes people by surprise.
In 1919, Benito Mussolini started out with 300 armed volunteers, his Blackshirts. They began by terrorizing gay men, striking union members, and socialists; newspaper reports of their violence, beatings, and the occasional murder swept across Italy.
Over the next three years Mussolini's Blackshirt militia burgeoned to over 20,000 men, so when, on the last day of October 1922, he directly confronted King Victor Emmanuel III with the threat of violence, the king gave in, dissolved the government, and appointed Mussolini Prime Minister of Italy.
No campaign, no election, just three years of unrelenting violence and the threat of more violence.
Hitler rose to power on the wings of violence as well, first in the Beer Hall Putsch and later, when he became Chancellor, through his volunteer militia the Brownshirts terrorizing gays, Jews, and union members. Paul von Hindenburg thought Hitler would set aside the violence, as promised, if he was given the power he demanded. Hindenburg didn't understand fascism.
Violence is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of violence. And then continues to rule with violence.
Fascist media revel in the language of violence. They dehumanize the victims of their violence with words like "invaders" and "vermin" and "illegals."
To justify the violence at the heart of their movement, they squeal a phony claim to victimhood: They think Democrats are trying to take their tax dollars. They fear gays are trying to groom their children. They believe teachers are indoctrinating their youth in socialism. Violence, they say, is their only option.
Over the past two decades, as this fascist movement has arisen in America and taken over the GOP, more than three-quarters of all politically motivated murders have been committed by rightwing often-Republican-aligned terrorists.
Terrorism is fascism. Isis and Al-Qaeda are fascist organizations, just like the various militias that attacked our Capitol on January 6th and today stalk our streets from the backs of pickup trucks while brandishing assault weapons.
For the Republicans in Congress, this is not a problem until violence is threatened against one of their own; when a lone mentally ill man calls police to confess he's hallucinating voices telling him to kill Brett Kavanaugh, legislation is passed within days to protect the Court's justices.
Two years earlier, when "men's rights" advocate Roy Den Hollander murdered the 20-year-old son of Judge Esther Salas and was carrying detailed plans to kill Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor next, Republican Senator Rand Paul blocked legislation in the Senate to provide federal judges with that protection.
Not even one Republican objected to Paul's obstruction, and Mitch McConnell let it stand. Violence is their brand.
When violence is threatened against the few remaining non-fascist Republicans, theoretically members of their own tribe, that's just fine with the "base voter" fascists who now control the levers of power in the party. Just ask any of the Republicans who have testified before the January 6th Committee or who voted to impeach Trump.
Fascists justify their violence as necessary to protect their faith, their families, and the "identity" of their homeland. They will tell you it's the unfortunate last-ditch "necessity" provoked by the "others" who "threaten our way of life."
In reality, violence is not the fascist's final, last-gasp option: it's their first.
- It's their most powerful recruiting tool, showing, as it does, their dominance of society and society's institutions.
- It's how they cow dissent.
- It's the weapon that provokes action, and fascists are all about action.
- It creates chaos, and fascism needs chaos to tear down the existing structures of governance and law that they intend to replace.
The final cause to which fascist violence is directed is what Jefferson (and Hobbes) called bellum omnium in omnia: war of all against all. Every murderous act is designed intentionally to bring society closer to breakdown, so the fascists can openly kill their enemies--particularly people of color and "liberals"--in the streets of the nation.
It's why Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring another 680. It appears to be what motivated both the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58 people and the Boston Bomber. It was claimed by the Buffalo killer of 20 people in a supermarket, and the 2019 El Paso shooter who murdered 23 people.
It's the story line of the two best-selling books within the militia movement, Camp of the Saints and The Turner Diaries. Each ends with mass slaughter leaving a nation of "pure" white Christian survivors, most holding well-used assault rifles as they stand atop piles of bodies.
Hannah Arendt noted in her 1969 essay "Reflections on Violence":
"[T]he danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end.
"If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely.
"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently demanded that Republicans "take back their party." So far, they're not listening.
Every day that Republicans refuse to seize and root out the fascist violence now associated with their party is another day closer to a dystopia like the one through which Hannah Arendt lived.
It can happen here.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Rights Groups Fight Back Against 'Punitive and Unjust' Anti-Protest Law in Florida
"H.B. 1 is undemocratic legislation that has stifled our constitutional rights by obstructing the activity of Black community organizers. H.B.1 must be repealed, abolished, or simply outlawed."
Jul 14, 2021
A coalition of civil rights groups on Wednesday filed a motion in a Florida federal court seeking to block the state's recently enacted anti-protest law--which critics say targets racial justice demonstrators while letting right-wing protesters off the hook.
"We use protest as a vehicle for change and not only does this law silence our voices, but it puts our lives in danger."
--Nailah Summers, Dream Defenders
The ACLU of Florida, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), and Community Justice Project (CJP), with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP serving as counsel, filed a motion for preliminary injunction (pdf) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida in a bid to block parts of H.B. 1, the so-called "anti-riot" bill introduced in the wake of last year's Black Lives Matter protests and signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in April.
The injunction was filed on behalf of Dream Defenders, the Black Collective, Chainless Change, Black Lives Matter Alliance of Broward, the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, and the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville.
"Among other things, the law risks criminalizing peaceful protest, shields those who injure or kill protestors (for example by ramming their vehicles into protestors) from civil penalties, discourages people from protesting, and otherwise infringes on First Amendment rights," the organizations filing the motion said in a statement. "The law was passed as a direct response to racial justice protests in 2020, and appears designed to target those who protest against police violence."
Critics argued that H.B. 1's civil legal immunity provision endangers lives and would have protected the neo-Nazi who murdered anti-racism protester Heather Heyer with his car in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.
H.B. 1 is but one of scores of Republican-sponsored anti-protest bills introduced in dozens of states over the past year. As of late June, eight states have passed such laws.
The same groups that filed Wednesday's motion also sued DeSantis and other state officials in May over H.B. 1.
"This law has changed the landscape for what it means to organize and create safer conditions for our communities in Florida," said Nailah Summers, co-executive director of Dream Defenders, in a statement. "Protest has always been a vital tool for accountability for our public officials. We use protest as a vehicle for change and not only does this law silence our voices, but it puts our lives in danger."
"H.B. 1 is a punitive and unjust law created to silence communities, but protect vigilantes."
--Krystina Francois, The Black Collective
Krystina Francois, co-founder and board member of the Black Collective, said that "H.B. 1 is a punitive and unjust law created to silence communities, but protect vigilantes."
"Black Floridians deserve more than a law that continues to suppress their voices," asserted Francois. "Our constitutional right to assemble peacefully and demand justice from a society that would rather criminalize us than uplift our quality of life is necessary."
Ben Frazier, president of the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, said that "H.B. 1 targets Black organizers, and their allies who stood up courageously to say 'Black Lives Matter!'"
"We protested against police brutality and against social, racial, and economic injustice," Frazier continued. "The enactment of H.B. 1 has frightened peaceful protesters from exercising their constitutional right to assemble and protest. Many of our supporters have declined to participate while expressing a fear of unfair arrests by law enforcement officers and the fear of potential bodily harm by vigilantes."
"The First Amendment, which guarantees our rights to voice our demands, is being muffled, strangled, and suffocated," he added. "H.B. 1 is undemocratic legislation that has stifled our constitutional rights by obstructing the activity of Black community organizers. H.B. 1 must be repealed, abolished, or simply outlawed."
Underscoring what critics of H.B. 1 say is the law's discriminatory intent, the editors of the Miami Herald on Tuesday published an editorial decrying the hypocritical leniency shown to Cuban-American demonstrators and their supporters who blocked a Miami expressway on Tuesday in a show of solidarity with anti-government protesters in Cuba.
According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "Police encouraged people to disperse--to no avail." People at "SOS Cuba" demonstrations in Tampa and Orlando also blocked major thoroughfares and ignored police orders to disperse.
There were no arrests reported at the Miami protest. Three men were reportedly arrested in Tampa for assaulting or resisting officers, while one man was reportedly arrested in Orlando for disorderly conduct. There were no reported arrests for violations of H.B. 1.
Addressing DeSantis' dodging of reporters' questions about the uneven application of H.B. 1, the Herald editors wrote: "Honestly, we would have been more impressed if he had just responded: 'Nah, the Miami-Dade demonstrators seeking human rights in Cuba have nothing to fear from my anti-riot law. We created it to subdue Black folks seeking human rights in the United States.'"
Writing for Latino Rebels, Thomas Kennedy said: "Let's be clear here, the only thing that changed in terms of the protests are the demands and who is organizing them. When it was Black Lives Matter protests, DeSantis vowed to throw the book at them and condemned them profusely but when it was Cuban protestors, it became politically inconvenient to enforce the very same law he advocated for months ago."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Republican Party Must Be Purged Like the Nazis and Fascists
It must not be allowed, like the Confederacy was, to live on with its own "lost cause" BS mythology.
Apr 13, 2021
President Joe Biden has largely given up on trying to negotiate anything with Republicans. There's a good reason for this: the GOP is no longer a legitimate political party.
One of the most comprehensive and well respected surveys of political parties worldwide is called the Global Party Survey and came out of work done at Harvard in the US and Sydney University in Australia. The researchers note: "Drawing on survey data gathered from 1,861 party and election experts, the study uses 21 core items to estimate key ideological values, issue positions, and populist rhetoric for 1,127 parties in 170 countries."
What they found was that the Democratic Party in the US is fairly solidly within the norms for political parties in fully developed countries around the world. It resembles normal and legitimate parties in Canada and most of Western Europe.
Today the libertarian--and petro-billionaires that Ronald Reagan welcomed to the party so completely own it that no Republican is willing to admit that climate change is real, that the American people actually like Social Security and Medicare, or that people working full-time shouldn't live in poverty.
The Republican party, however, both behaves and is ideologically most similar to Hungary's Fidesz party, Turkey's AKP party and Poland's PiS party.
All three are, essentially, fascist parties. As Zach Beauchamp of Vox notes, Turkey is one of the world's leading jailers of journalists, Poland's party has threatened judgeswho don't rule the way they like with criminal punishment, and Hungary scapegoats immigrants as a strategy to gain and grow political power.
Victor Orban's Fidesz Party is particularly worth examining, because it sometimes appears that Donald Trump was using it as a model for his own rise to power.
For twenty years Hungary was a functioning democracy; today it's a corrupt oligarchy.
In ten short years since he was first elected in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, now fabulously wealthy by Hungarian standards and an oligarch himself, succeeded in transforming his nation's government from a functioning European democracy into an autocratic regime of single-party-rule.
Orban took over the Fidesz Party, once a conventional "conservative" political party like our GOP pre-Reagan, with the theme of restoring "Christian" purity and "making Hungary great again." His rallies regularly draw tens of thousands.
He campaigned on building a wall across the entirety of Hungary's southern border, a promise he has largely kept.
He altered the nation's constitution to do what we'd call gerrymandering and voter suppression, ensuring that his Party, Fidesz, would win more than 2/3rds of the votes in pretty much every federal election well into the future.
He's now packed the courts so thoroughly that legal challenges against him and his Party go nowhere.
His Party has rewritten elementary school textbooks to say that refugees entering the country are a threat because "it can be problematic for different cultures to coexist." Using this logic, he has locked up refugee children in cages.
When the Hungarian Helsinki Committee said "the indefinite detention of many vulnerable migrants, including families with small children, is cruel and inhuman," Orban said the Syrian refugees seeking asylum "pose a security risk and endanger the continent's Christian culture and identity." He added, "Immigration brings increased crime, especially crimes against women, and lets in the virus of terrorism."
Five years to the week before American Nazis rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing "patriots" held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary's largest minority group, chanting "We will set your houses on fire!" Orban's police watched without intervening. Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orban's party, provoked the demonstration when he called the Roma "animals...unfit to live among people." Orban refused to condemn him or the anti-Roma violence.
He's handed government contracts to his favored few, elevating an entire new class of pro-Orban businesspeople who are in the process of cementing control of the nation's economy, as those who opposed him have lost their businesses, been forced to sell, and often fled the country.
Virtually the entire nation's press is now in the hands of oligarchs and corporations loyal to him, with talk radio and television across the country singing his praises daily. Billboards and social media proclaim his patriotism. His media allies are now reaching out to purchase media across the rest of Europe to spread his rightwing message.
Last year he began dismantling the Hungarian Science Academy, replacing or simply firing scientists who acknowledge climate change, which he has called "left wing trickery made up by Obama."
The world, and particularly the EU, have watched this 10-year juggernaut with increasing alarm, and even the EU's 2015 and 2018 attempts to essentially impeach Orban have backfired, increasing his two reelection margins as his handmaids in the media proclaim him a victim of the "European deep state" and "meddling foreigners," particularly George Soros (who, ironically, once paid for a young Orban to study in Britain).
While he blasts Soros and his own country's Jewish leaders with anti-Semitic tropes, he was feted by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who called him "a true friend of Israel." Orban replied, "A Hungarian patriot and a Jewish Israeli patriot will always find something in common."
Last summer, the same month Rudy Giuliani said he had a former Ukrainian prosecutor willing to testify that Joe Biden was corrupt, Donald Trump invited Orban to the White House for a state visit; Orban has been one of Trump's two primary sources of information about how Ukraine opposed or tried to "sabotage" him.
In a rally three months before his White House meeting, Orban said that countries that accept refugees are producing "mixed-race nations."
Orban is now ruthlessly using his own nation's diplomatic and criminal justice systems to aid foreign criminal oligarchs, having hired his own local versions of Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo.
The American Republican Party in many ways followed Orban's example as it moved from being a legitimate political party to a fascist outlier on the world stage. This happened in four steps.
The first step was when a Republican majority on the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 and 1978 that if politicians or a political party wanted to take vast sums of money from individual billionaires or large corporations, that was no longer to be considered bribery or political corruption. Instead, the Court said, and doubled down on in 2010 with Citizens United, money is not money but is, in fact, "First Amendment protected free speech."
Back in the 1970s the Democratic party was so awash in cash from labor unions that they largely ignored the ruling, but the GOP jumped in with both feet and the ocean of money that flowed from that effort floated Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1981. It also led him to make common cause with a number of rightwing billionaires, who today essentially own the Republican Party.
In some ways, the network these billionaires have created is actually larger than the GOP. As Ken Vogel noted for Politico in 2016:
[Charles] Koch and his brother David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That's about 3 1/2 times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month, according to POLITICO's analysis of tax and campaign documents and interviews with sources familiar with the network. And the staggering sum the network plans to spend in the 2016 election run-up--$889 million--is more than double what the RNC spent in the previous presidential cycle.
Reagan put into his cabinet and as his heads of regulatory agencies former lobbyists and other corrupt officials, beginning the internal destruction of a US government that was once responsive to its average citizens.
We've now reached the point where the Republican Party can no longer be reformed; it must be either torn down and rebuilt or eliminated from American political life at the ballot box if our government is to regain anything resembling the ability to govern on behalf of the majority of its citizens.
The second step was in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich arrived in Washington DC and essentially proclaimed that power was the only thing that mattered in politics. He shut down and threatened to shut down the government repeatedly, impeached Bill Clinton for private, consensual extramarital sex, and established as a political principle for the Republican party that reality didn't matter as long as you could sell what you were doing to voters.
The best example of this was his so-called "Contract With America," which mostly boiled down to tax cuts for the very rich, destruction of labor unions and cutting benefits for low-income and working people, and deregulation of American corporations.
The third step toward fascism for the Republican Party came with Donald Trump. Trump said out loud what Nixon, Reagan and both Bush's said with dog whistles like the Willie Horton ads: the GOP was now officially the party of white supremacy. Everything else was subordinate to that.
And the fourth step that we see playing out today is based on the classic fascist strategy of the Big Lie.
Mussolini's Big Lie had to do with Italy's "mutilated victory" that helped end World War I. He said for Italy to return to its glory days, it would have to establish an empire and he was the man to do it.
Hitler's Big Lie was that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by Jewish and socialist negotiators at the end of World War I, and that they were actually on the verge of winning the war when these people sold Germany out.
Trumps Big Lie, beyond "American carnage," was that he won the 2020 election but was denied his victory because of "voter fraud" perpetrated by Black people in majority-Black cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. He continues to sell this lie, and has been joined by most of the institutional Republican Party in it.
Today the libertarian--and petro-billionaires that Ronald Reagan welcomed to the party so completely own it that no Republican is willing to admit that climate change is real, that the American people actually like Social Security and Medicare, or that people working full-time shouldn't live in poverty.
Political positions that are fabulously popular--from Covid relief to rebuilding our nation's crumbling infrastructure--are now routinelly opposed by the GOP not because they're bad policy but because their billionaire patrons don't want their taxes raised to pay for them.
We've now reached the point where the Republican Party can no longer be reformed; it must be either torn down and rebuilt or eliminated from American political life at the ballot box if our government is to regain anything resembling the ability to govern on behalf of the majority of its citizens.
It's a job some of the "never Trump" Republicans are trying to undertake at this moment, and most Americans wish them well.
And today's Trump-twisted, corrupt GOP must not be allowed, like the Confederacy was, to carry forward its own "lost cause" bullshit mythology about the 2020 election or "hugs and kisses" to the Capitol Police on January 6th. We now have the benefit of hindsight to know how that worked out.
This post originally appeared at hartmannreport.com, but is published here with permission of the author.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Citing Threat From Armed Groups, Virginia Gov. Declares Emergency and Bans Guns at State Capitol
"This isn't about the Second Amendment," said activist Molly Conger, "this is about threats of terrorism."
Jan 14, 2020
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam on Wednesday declared a temporary state of emergency in the capitol of Richmond and banned the carrying of weapons at a gun rights rally scheduled for next week, citing threats of armed demonstrators storming government buildings.
"We have received credible intelligence from our law enforcement agencies that there are groups with malicious plans for the rally that is planned for Monday," Northam said in a press conference announcing the state of emergency.
The order (pdf) ends on Tuesday, January 21 at 5:00pm.
The declaration was triggered by credible threats of violence discovered by law enforcement from potential attendees of the rally. Northam said some of the "out-of-state militia groups and hate groups planning to travel from across the country to disrupt our democratic process with acts of violence" cited the white supremacist violence in the nearby city of Charlottesville in 2017, where a young woman named Heather Heyer was murdered, as inspiration.
"Please know that we have been preparing extensively to protect public safety at Monday's rally," said Northam. "But no one wants another incident like the one we saw in Charlottesville."
According to VICE reporter Tess Owen, the violence that occurred in Charlottesville looms large over the order and the expected enforcement:
In addition to banning weapons on Capitol grounds, Northam also said he'd established a unified command between state police, Capitol police, the Richmond police department, and the city's first responder teams. This is a critical move--one that's likely borne out of the lessons learned from the massive law enforcement failures during Unite the Right, which left one dead and dozens injured. Months after that rally, an independent review team released a searing 220-page report analyzing how law enforcement's disorganization and failure to coordinate across agencies allowed the violent, ugly scenes that unfolded that day.
The rally, "Lobby Day," is being organized by the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
On a Facebook page organizing the gun rights demonstration hosted by the Virginia Citizens Defense League, several commenters expressed frustration at Northam's move to restrict guns from the capitol grounds. One wrote, "This is simply a move to infringe on not only our 2nd Amendment rights but our 1st Amendment rights as well."
"This isn't about the Second Amendment," said activist Molly Conger, "this is about threats of terrorism."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Israel Denounced for Plans to Name Train Station After Trump Following Jerusalem Decision
Critics say the move is "yet another indicator of the broad collusion between the U.S. and Israel," and illustrates "the inability of the U.S. to be a broker of any kind of just peace between Israel and Palestinians."
Dec 27, 2017
Critics are denouncing Israel for its decision to name a future train station located near to the holiest site where Jews can pray after U.S. President Donald Trump, following his recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocate the American Embassy.
Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, called the government's decision "yet another indicator of the broad collusion between the U.S. and Israel," and told Common Dreams it illustrates "the inability of the U.S. to be a broker of any kind of just peace between Israel and Palestinians."
Other critics turned to Twitter, with several highlighting Trump's comments following a violent white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this year, at which a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed. Trump was widely condemned for blaming the violence on "many sides" and saying that some of those who rallied in support of white supremacy were "very fine people."
Disgusting! #Netanyahu will name #Jerusalem train station to the #kotel after a despised serial sexual predator, pussy grabbing Russian puppet who mocks the handicapped and called the #Charlottesville #WhiteSupremacist #Nazis that killed #HeatherHeyer very fine people. #Israel
-- Julie Silver (@JulieAnnSilver) December 27, 2017
Yisrael Katz, Israel's transportation minister--as well as a senior Cabinet official, Israel's intelligence minister, and, as the Associated Press notes, "a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [who] is seen by many as his likely eventual successor as head of the Likud party"--announced plans for the "Donald John Trump" station on Tuesday.
Katz called the extension of the high-speed rail from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem Israel's most important national project, and said, "The Kotel [Western Wall] is the holiest place to the Jewish people, and I have decided to name the train station leading to it after U.S. President Donald Trump, in recognition of his brave and historic decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital."
Trump's move to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital has provoked international outrage, including a United Nations General Assembly resolution declaring the decision "null and void." Last week, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, said the United States had "disqualified" itself as "an honest mediator" in efforts to resolve the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, stating, "we will not accept any plan from the United States of America because of its bias and violation of the international law."
The Western Wall--also called the Wailing Wall, Al-Buraq Wall, and Kotel--is located in the Old City of Jerusalem and is the western support wall for a holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
"Israel captured East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City, in 1967, and annexed it in a move not recognized internationally," the AP notes. "The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, and a longstanding international consensus holds that the fate of the city should be decided through direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations."
During a Middle East trip in May, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Western Wall, though he declined to comment on whether he recognized the wall as Israeli territory. However, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have both recognized the Western Wall as part of Israel.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Christopher Columbus: No Monuments for Murderers
The world is still sliced in two between the worthy — the owning classes, the corporate masters, the generals — and the nobodies. The invaded, the owned, the bombed, the poisoned, the silenced.
Oct 06, 2017
A New York Times article, following the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the murder of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer, described the growing calls to remove monuments that celebrate the Confederacy. The article went on to cite some who balk, however, when "the symbolism is far murkier, like Christopher Columbus."
But there is nothing murky about Columbus' legacy of slavery and terrorism in the Americas. The record is clear and overwhelming. The fact that The New York Times could report this with such confidence -- adding that "most Americans learn rather innocently, in 1492 [Columbus] sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World" -- means that educators and activists still have much work to do.
In fact, Christopher Columbus launched the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1494, when he sent back at least two dozen enslaved Tainos, including children, to Spain. In February of that year, Columbus dispatched 12 of his 17 ships from the Caribbean back to Spain with a letter to be delivered to the king and queen by Antonio de Torres, captain of the returning fleet. Columbus wrote:
There are being sent in these ships some Cannibals, men and women, boys and girls, which Your Highnesses can order placed in charge of persons from whom they may be able better to learn the language while being employed in forms of service, gradually ordering that greater care be given them than to other slaves.
Here, as in so much of world history, violence and exploitation is sprinkled with a perfume of benevolence. Later in the letter, Columbus explains to the king and queen that his plans for colonizing the lands he has "discovered" could be financed by slavery:
These things could be paid for in slaves taken from among these cannibals, who are so wild and well built and with a good understanding of things that we think they will be finer than any other slaves once they are freed from their inhumanity, which they will lose as soon as they leave their own lands.
A year later, in February 1495, Columbus initiated massive slave raids, ordering his men to round up 1,600 Tainos and to bring the captives to La Isabela, on the island of Hispaniola (today's Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where the "best" 500 (some accounts say 550) men and women could be shipped to Spain. One of the colonists, Michele de Cuneo, was an eyewitness to these crimes. "Of the rest who were left," wrote Cuneo, "the announcement went around that whoever wanted them could take as many as he pleased; and this was done."
It's worth pausing to reflect on the terror the Tainos must have experienced being torn from home and families, and packed on ships bound for an uncertain destination -- that is, those who survived Columbus' slavery free-for-all. Where are the monuments to these first victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade?
Gold. That was the essence of Columbus' "enterprise" -- la empresa -- as he called it. Wrote Columbus: "Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever owns it is lord of all he wants. With gold it is even possible to open for souls the way to paradise." Later in 1495, to effect this gold lust, Columbus initiated the policy of forcing Tainos throughout Hispaniola to deliver tributes of gold every three months.
The Tainos resisted, of course, but were brutally suppressed by the Columbus regime. The Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas wrote that to quell the resistance, Columbus ordered his men to "spread terror among the Indians to show them how strong and powerful the Christians were." In sickening detail, Las Casas described some of what it meant for the Spaniards to "spread terror" among the Tainos:
Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons and pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians as daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying, "Go now, spread the news to your chiefs." They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow. They burned or hanged captured chiefs.
No, there is nothing murky about Columbus' record of cruelty in the Caribbean. One can read the horrific details even in the biography of Columbus written by his own son Ferdinand. What's murky are any remaining rationales for failing to topple monuments to this brutal exploitation of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, for keeping the Columbus Day holiday, or for failing to address a curriculum that, as The New York Times describes, allows children to learn that Columbus "sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World."
Twenty-five years ago, I wrote an article, "Once Upon a Genocide," reviewing the major children's literature about Columbus. My conclusion was that these books teach young readers that colonialism and racism are normal. Consistently, the books presented Columbus coming ashore on the lands he "discovered," planting a flag, claiming it in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and naming the island San Salvador -- erasing the rights and humanity of the original inhabitants. No book I reviewed at that time asked children to reflect on who or what gave Columbus the authority to take over other people's land. These picture books were literary monuments to white European domination, and to the subordination of non-white Others.
Through my work as curriculum editor with Rethinking Schools magazine, I have been in a number of elementary and middle schools over the past couple of years. Sadly, many of the same books I reviewed in the early 1990s still populate school libraries. The good news is that, these days, many more teachers approach the Columbus invasion from the standpoint of the Tainos. One needn't tell young children about people's hands being chopped off for them to realize that it is wrong for people to arrive at your home from far away, claim it as theirs, and demand you work for them.
In classrooms throughout the country, students are putting Columbus on trial -- along with the system of empire that animated his voyages. Instead of reading children's books and textbooks uncritically, teachers are asking students to read for the silences: What important information is missing, whose stories are not being told, whose lives are absent? In some schools, students are writing new children's books that tell a fuller, more accurate history of Columbus' arrival and the people who were here first. (Many of these activities are described at the Zinn Education Project, and in the book I co-edited, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years.)
And throughout the country, schools, school districts, and cities -- including Berkeley, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Albuquerque, and, most recently, Los Angeles -- have abandoned Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day.
Donald Trump may still -- for the moment -- be president, but he is not president of how we remember the past. Everywhere people of conscience are challenging the iconography of hate, exploitation, racism, and colonial domination. Slowly, we are toppling Confederate monuments -- and others celebrating more contemporary scoundrels like Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo.
When I lead workshops for educators critiquing how the traditional children's literature on Columbus celebrates white lives at the expense of people of color, how this literature endorses the bullying of little nations by big nations, how it teaches that there are two kinds of people in the world, the worthy and the unworthy, I end by asking participants: Why? Why is it that for such a long period of time these books have told a consistent story -- is there some publisher conspiracy to lie to children?
No doubt there are many possible explanations. But the one I find most compelling is that in fundamental ways, Columbus' world is not so different from the world we live in today. Big countries continue to dominate "lesser" nations. The quest for profit is still paramount. The world is still sliced in two between the worthy -- the owning classes, the corporate masters, the generals -- and those the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano called los nadies -- the nobodies. The invaded, the owned, the bombed, the poisoned, the silenced.
So yes, let's pull down the monuments, let's make the holidays more inclusive, let's rewrite the textbooks and children's literature. But let's also challenge the fundamental structures of ownership, power, and privilege that have given us such a skewed constellation of heroes and holidays.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More Stories
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy