May 9, 2022 – what a victory celebration it should have been! Just imagine: Vladimir Putin, Gatherer of the Russian Lands, greets the victorious returning troops on Red Square. Ukraine shattered as a country, its capital Kyiv taken in a surprise attack, its government exiled. Along with the battlefield triumph, Russia also celebrates its ruler, who boldly changed the course of history, triggering the biggest celebration since the 1945 parade held to celebrate the victory of Stalin's army over Nazism. Given the events of the past few months, that was likely what Putin had been hoping for. But the reality has turned out rather differently. On May 9, Russia will again celebrate Victory Day with a military parade, as it does every year, but the army that will parade through Red Square this time will be a humiliated one. Two and a half months after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia's armed forces are no longer the feared power they once were. Putin's troops have experienced a military and moral fiasco in Ukraine. Poorly led, poorly supplied, poorly motivated and poorly equipped, they have failed against an enemy thought to be much weaker. They had to retreat from their positions near the capital city of Kyiv. And what had been planned as a blitzkrieg has turned into a tough slog, a war of attrition. Russia's military pride has turned out to be something of a sham, like the village backdrops that Prince Grigory Potemkin once allegedly set up for his czarina to fool her into thinking he was settling empty territories. It is all just as surprising as it is devastating to the system Putin has built. The Kremlin leader has spent years preparing his country for a major confrontation with the West – in military, economic and political terms. His declared goals are maximum sovereignty and autonomy, for Russia to be an independent pole of power in the world. Now, it has turned out that the highly equipped army is unable to overrun its poorer neighbor. Russia's economy – dependent on imports. Most of its vast foreign reserves – blocked by Western sanctions. Its intelligence services – unable or unwilling to properly inform the ruler. Is Putin's system of power itself a Potemkin village, without the world, including Vladimir Putin himself, having noticed? What does it mean when this system's weaknesses are suddenly exposed? And does that make it more dangerous? A pet project of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is located an hour's drive west of Moscow: the army amusement park called "Patriot." At the park, you can ride in toy tanks, shoot with real AK-47s, watch re-enacted World War II battles and buy army souvenirs. Since 2020, it has also featured a church co-designed by Shoigu in olive green – the "Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces." House-sized mosaics depict Russia's armed victories through the centuries – all the way up to the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russia's intervention in Syria. A mosaic featuring Putin and Shoigu and the country's political elite had also initially been planned. In the lower church, a spacious baptismal font allows for the baptism of troops, and weapons looted from the Nazi Wehrmacht have been melted into the steps. The church's inauguration is symbolic of the new prestige the army has acquired during Putin's rule – in part attributable to the ambition of Defense Minister Shoigu. He brought glamour to the military, a new level of self-confidence and societal status. He gave the army not only its church, but also dashing new uniforms, a youth organization (Yunarmiya) and political officers for the kind of ideological indoctrination conducted in Soviet times. He kept the troops busy with large-scale, snap exercises. Russia's air force operation in Syria could even be seen as a patriotic film in theaters. With the invasion of Ukraine, though, that facade has collapsed and bizarre shortcomings have come to light. Just this week, a secretly recorded conversation emerged in which contract soldiers from the Caucasus detailed all that had gone wrong for them. The men returned home on their own in late March to South Ossetia, a de facto Russian-controlled area on Georgian territory. In a conversation with the region's president, they complained of armored personnel carriers that wouldn't start, tanks that refused to fire, officers who hide from their soldiers out of fear, artillery that missed targets by two kilometers and wounded soldiers who weren't provided with treatment. They also lamented a lack of information, maps and radios and of grenade launchers they said were bent. South Ossetia's president rebuked the men and asked if they thought Russia would lose the war. "Yes, we do," came the reply. Moscow prefers to keep silent about the number of Russians who have actually been killed in Ukraine. The latest official figures are about a month and a half old. In April, the British government said it estimated 15,000 soldiers had been killed, whereas the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces cites nearly 25,000 fallen. One military analyst in Brussels estimates that the Russians have lost close to 1,000 tanks. At least seven Russian generals have been killed. The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the guided missile cruiser Moskva sank, apparently after being fired upon by anti-ship missiles. The first days of the invasion, in particular, when the Russian army advanced on the Ukrainian capital, baffled Western analysts. "The strategic mistakes are completely crazy," John Spencer, an expert on urban warfare at the Madison Policy Forum think tank, told DER SPIEGEL at the time. Many observers now agree that the strength of the Russian military has been overestimated. One of the most visible weaknesses is logistics. Overstretched, poorly secured supply routes turned into easy targets for small, mobile Ukrainian units, especially in the early weeks of the war. Just a few days after the war began, a U.S. official said that 70 percent of Russian forces would soon run out of fuel and food, or had already. Glaring failures have also emerged in equipment maintenance – a result of sloppiness or corruption: Expensive air defense systems are getting stuck because their tires are defective, some missile launchers still have tires with "Made in the USSR" labels on them. "Their logistics have been disastrous throughout," says military historian Phillips O'Brien. "They just assumed they would steamroll the Ukrainians and they wouldn't have to worry about supply." Since Russia began concentrating its attacks on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, these massive logistics problems have been less frequent, in part due to the fact that supply routes are shorter and the advance has faltered...
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Vladimir Potemkin: Putin's Disaster and What Could Happen Next
Laguna Woods Attack Highlights China-Taiwan Tensions (VIDEO)
This is a bizarre story, more so than usual with heinous events like this.
Here, "Why Laguna Woods? Mysteries still loom in Taiwanese church shooting."
And at the Los Angeles Times, "Laguna Woods shooting highlights growing tensions between Taiwan and China":
TAIPEI, Taiwan — The man accused of opening fire inside a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods on Sunday is believed to have been driven by hatred for Taiwanese people and the political belief that Taiwan is a part of China, highlighting the increasingly fraught geopolitical situation in the Taiwan Strait. David Wenwei Chou, a 68-year-old man from Las Vegas, is accused of shooting six people and killing one of them at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church. Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes said Monday that the attack appeared to be a “politically motivated hate incident,” and that Chou had left notes in his car stating he did not believe Taiwan should be independent from China. Cross-strait relations have grown strained in recent years, as Beijing has ramped up calls for unification, while more Taiwanese oppose the mainland’s aggression and influence. Officials from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles — Taiwan’s de facto consulate — said Chou was born in Taiwan and was a “second generation waishengren,” meaning his parents were from mainland China. Here’s a look at the issues bedeviling the two rivals across the Taiwan Strait. Is Taiwan a part of China? China’s claim on the island of 23 million people dates back to the Qing dynasty, though today’s Communist Party has never ruled over Taiwan. The Republic of China, founded in 1912, took the island from Japanese forces at the end of World War II, in 1945, and the Kuomintang, China’s Nationalist Party, fled there in 1949 after its defeat by Mao Zedong’s Communists. Taiwan became a democracy in the 1990s, though the Kuomintang, or KMT, is still one of the island’s dominant political parties. Members of the KMT in Taiwan favor closer ties with mainland China and potential unification, while the ruling Democratic Progressive Party leans toward independence. Increasingly, Taiwanese people, particularly younger generations, oppose unification and consider their culture and identity as separate from China. What is the threat from China? For Chinese President Xi Jinping, reuniting Taiwan with the mainland is a priority of his rule. While he has called for reunification through peaceful means, he hasn’t ruled out the use of force. Beijing sent record numbers of military jets into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone last year, and has used sand-dredging ships to wear down defenses on Taiwan’s islands off the coast of mainland China. Rising nationalism in China, encouraged by Xi and state propaganda, has spurred enthusiasm for reunification with Taiwan among Chinese citizens. China has embarked on a broad military buildup as part of Xi’s vision for China’s modernization and growing international might. Dwarfed by China’s People’s Liberation Army, Taiwan’s military has begun to bolster its defenses as well. Taiwan plans to spend another $8.6 billion in defense on top of a record $17-billion budget this year. Lawmakers are also considering increasing the duration of mandatory military service for Taiwanese men. Conscription used to be two years, but has since been pared down to four months. Where does the U.S. fit in? The U.S. maintains economic and political ties with Taiwan, but does not have formal diplomatic relations. The U.S. adheres to the “one China policy,” under which it acknowledges that China considers Taiwan a part of its territory, but doesn’t take its own explicit stance. The U.S. also sells arms to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act. The balancing of different policies is part of an attempt to maintain stability in the region. The “strategic ambiguity” means that the U.S. has remained deliberately vague on whether it would interfere if China were to attempt to take Taiwan by force. A declaration that it would not come to Taiwan’s aid could hearten Beijing, while an outright guarantee of support could provoke military action. In recent years, the relationship between the U.S. and Taiwan has strengthened as U.S.-China relations have deteriorated. While the U.S. still maintains strategic ambiguity, it has shown support for Taipei through diplomatic envoys at times of heightened tension, defense discussions and assistance with military training...
'Broad Decline' in Enrollment at Nation's Public Schools
As I was saying at my previous entry, man it's amazing what change the pandemic has wrought.
More at the New York Times, "With Plunging Enrollment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools":
The pandemic has supercharged the decline in the nation’s public school system in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed. ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — In New York City, the nation’s largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years. In Michigan, enrollment remains more than 50,000 below prepandemic levels from big cities to the rural Upper Peninsula. In the suburbs of Orange County, Calif., where families have moved for generations to be part of the public school system, enrollment slid for the second consecutive year; statewide, more than a quarter-million public school students have dropped from California’s rolls since 2019. And since school funding is tied to enrollment, cities that have lost many students — including Denver, Albuquerque and Oakland — are now considering combining classrooms, laying off teachers or shutting down entire schools. All together, America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020, according to a recently published national survey. State enrollment figures show no sign of a rebound to the previous national levels any time soon. A broad decline was already underway in the nation’s public school system as rates of birth and immigration have fallen, particularly in cities. But the coronavirus crisis supercharged that drop in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed. No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out. A broad decline was already underway in the nation’s public school system as rates of birth and immigration have fallen, particularly in cities. But the coronavirus crisis supercharged that drop in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed. No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out. Now educators and school officials are confronting a potentially harsh future of lasting setbacks in learning, hardened inequities in education and smaller budgets accompanying smaller student populations. “This has been a seismic hit to public education,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “Student outcomes are low. Habits have been broken. School finances are really shaken. We shouldn’t think that this is going to be like a rubber band that bounces back to where it was before.” There are roughly 50 million students in the United States public school system. In large urban districts, the drop-off has been particularly acute. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s noncharter schools lost some 43,000 students over the past two school years. Enrollment in the Chicago schools has dropped by about 25,000 in that time frame. But suburban and rural schools have not been immune. In the suburbs of Kansas City, the school district of Olathe, Kan., lost more than 1,000 of its 33,000 or so students in 2020, as families relocated and shifted to private schools or home-schooling; only about half of them came back this school year. In rural Woodbury County, Iowa, south of Sioux City, enrollment in the Westwood Community School District fell by more than 5 percent during the last two years, to 522 students from 552, in spite of a small influx from cities during the pandemic, the superintendent, Jay Lutt, said. Now, in addition to demographic trends that have long eroded the size of rural Iowa’s school populations, diminishing funding, the district is grappling with inflation as the price of fuel for school buses has soared, Mr. Lutt said. In some states where schools eschewed remote instruction — Florida, for instance — enrollment has not only rebounded, but remains robust...
Ah, Florida. That oughta tell you something about what's going on. Public schools can work, but not so well in teachers' union-led blue states, like California.
Still more.
Los Angeles Unified School District Bleeding Students Badly
It's amazing what a coronavirus pandemic can do to shake up nearly unchangeable public institutions. It's a big deal.
At the Los Angeles Times, "LAUSD expects enrollment to plummet by ‘alarming’ 30% in the next decade":
Enrollment in Los Angeles public schools is expected to plunge by nearly 30% over the next decade, leading to tough choices ahead about academic programs, campus closures, jobs and employee benefits — and forcing, over that time, a dramatic remake of the nation’s second-largest school system. The predicted steep drop, which was outlined Tuesday in a presentation to the Board of Education, comes as school officials contemplate the future of Los Angeles Unified School District on several crucial fronts — including contract negotiations with the teachers union, which is seeking a 20% raise over the next two years. District leaders also are trying to plan for the best use of historically high education funding that some experts warn is likely to be short-lived. “There are a number of unsustainable trends,” said Supt. Alberto Carvalho, referring to declining enrollment and unstable funding. “The perfect storm is brewing. “Los Angeles Unified is facing an alarming convergence and acceleration of enrollment decline and the expiration of one-time state and federal dollars, as well as ongoing and increasing financial liabilities.” Carvalho warned the board that difficult conversations lie ahead and there is “not an easy path toward financial stability.” Enrollment has been incrementally dropping in L.A. Unified since peaking at about 737,000 students 21 years ago. That long-ago overcrowding detracted from the quality and even quantity of education — as campuses operated year-round with students on staggered schedules that provided 17 fewer days of instruction per year and limited access to advanced classes. The current enrollment is about 430,000 in kindergarten through 12th grade and is expected to fall about 3.6% a year to an estimated 309,000 nine years from now. The pace of the decline has accelerated since the pandemic, a phenomenon officials struggle to explain. At the start of the pandemic, many families kept preschoolers and kindergarteners out of remote learning — preferring not to plant their children in front of computers for schooling. Yet the pace of decline has persisted even with the resumption of in-person classes. Declines also are expected over the next nine years in L.A. County (19%) and the state (9%), according to data presented at Tuesday’s meeting. Experts have offered no conclusive explanation, but factors include families moving to more affordable areas, the decline in birth rates, a drop in immigration and, until recently, the rapid growth of charter schools. Problems related to the enrollment drop have already surfaced. A handful of campuses — despite their importance as community anchors — have closed or are projected to close. Or, the campuses have been offered to charter schools — which are not operated by the district and compete for students. Many charters are also facing enrollment challenges and some have shut down. Having fewer students creates financial strains because state and federal funding is based primarily on enrollment. It’s difficult to reduce fixed costs related to buildings and operations as the funding base shrinks. Moreover, decreased funding makes it more challenging to manage pension costs shared by all school systems as well as separate lifetime retiree health benefits that L.A. Unified has provided to long-term employees. In the coming years, under the current structure, there could be more L.A. Unified retirees and dependents receiving healthcare benefits than active employees, said Chief Financial Officer David Hart. “That was never contemplated,” Hart said. At the same time, the district has struggled this year with a shortage of qualified employees in teaching, nursing, counseling and other areas. To attract and retain such workers, it would help for the district to pay higher salaries — and to continue funding strong health benefits. Having sufficient money to spend, it would seem, ought to be the least of the district’s challenges, given Gov. Gavin Newsom‘s announcement last week of the largest budget surplus in state history. The surplus is expected to balloon to $97.5-billion by next summer, an estimate that vastly exceeds previous projections and which is folded into a $300.6-billion budget. About 40% of the budget goes by law to grade schools and community colleges. When including both state and federal sources, California would spend $22,850 per student in the upcoming academic year, an amount that seemed beyond any expectations not long ago...
Official's are "struggling" to explain what's happened. They know. They just can't say so publicly, as obviously more and more parents will see the light and hightail it out of there.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Lindsey's Latest
She's so sweet, on Twitter.
Also, flashback to Keeley Hazell.
And TaraJayne British MILF.
Plus, Dua Lipa.
Karine Jean-Pierre Gets Off to Rough Start (VIDEO)
Cringeworthy.
DOOCY TIME: Biden's "Twitter posted the other day, 'You want to bring down inflation? Let’s make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.' How does raising taxes on corporations reduce inflation?"
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 16, 2022
Karine Jean-Pierre: "So, are you talking about a specific tweet?" pic.twitter.com/8z1F5puDAR
The Age of Rationing
From David Dayen, at the American Prospect, "From pandemic supply chain snarls to baby formula shortages, we forgot that physical production isn't magic, and we need to engineer it for stability."
Payton Gendron's Descent Into Racial Extremism (VIDEO)
I did not read the guy's manifesto.
When Norway's Anders Breivik murdered 77 people back in 2011, I read his manifesto, which was easily available online. Lots of anti-jihad bloggers were cited at the document, although Breivik wasn't easily pinned down as a white supremacist. Frankly, he could have been the William Foster of Oslo, murdering scores of people while having a bad day in an urban multicultural dystopia.
I looked for Gendron's statement, to no avail. Folks on the left think they've got this guy nailed down like he's James Earl Ray or something. Who know? He's a kid who knew he'd be throwing his life away if he went through with his plans. What a fucking waste.
At WSJ, "Buffalo Shooter’s 673-Page Diary Reveals Descent Into Racist Extremism":
A lone actor, socially isolated and mentally troubled, found inspiration online: ‘I just don’t have the time to wait any longer’." CONKLIN, N.Y.—Days before carrying out one of the deadliest racially motivated attacks in recent U.S. history, Payton Gendron wrote that he’d finally made up his mind. “I just don’t have the time to wait any longer,” he posted online. “I was supposed to do this 2 months ago. But now I finally feel actually ready.” The entry was from a nearly 700-page online diary that Mr. Gendron, an 18-year-old white man, kept for the past several months. Writing under the online pseudonym “Jimboboiii,” he detailed his preparations for the massacre and his embrace of racist conspiracy theories that he said drove him to kill. A link to the diary was posted on a public web forum shortly before Mr. Gendron opened fire at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo last Saturday. The attack left 10 people dead and three more wounded. All but two of his 13 victims were Black. They included an 86-year-old grandmother, a retired Buffalo police lieutenant and a church deacon. Mr. Gendron, who is being held without bail after surrendering to police, pleaded not guilty to a single charge of first degree murder. Federal prosecutors said they are contemplating charging him with hate crimes. Mr. Gendron’s diary entries, which appear to date from November 2021 to the night before the shooting, along with an accompanying 180-page document, chronicle his descent into a shadowy, isolated world of swirling conspiracies, paranoia and violence. Investigators are working to fill in missing pieces of Mr. Gendron’s background. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and police continue to pore over evidence from Conklin to Buffalo. But Mr. Gendron’s extensive posts—a dark and paranoid monologue—present a portrait of a mass shooter that has become familiar in recent years: a lone actor, socially isolated and mentally troubled, who finds inspiration to commit mass violence in the recesses of the Internet. Mr. Gendron seemed to live an unremarkable childhood. He played soccer as a youth, was a Boy Scout and made his high school’s honor roll. He planned on going to college to become an engineer. In the months leading up to the massacre, Mr. Gendron spent hours glued to a computer in his family’s home in this quiet, predominantly white town in upstate New York. He posted dozens of hateful memes about Black people and Jews, discussed past racially motivated mass shootings and planned his own attack in painstaking detail. In March, he drove hundreds of miles to scout the Buffalo supermarket he later attacked. He disdained mainstream political parties and the media, writing that he believed they were controlled by Jews. He described himself as a fascist. Though there were harbingers of trouble—including a 2021 incident in which he was hospitalized after threatening violence at school—Mr. Gendron by his own account had seemed to keep his plotting and extreme views largely hidden. His tone flippant in some entries and rageful in others, Mr. Gendron posted his plans to a private channel on the messaging platform Discord. A few people had access to view the content, according to a person familiar with the matter. “We took action against the server as soon as we became aware of it and removed all related content and the server in accordance with our policies against violent extremism,” said a spokeswoman for Discord. Mr. Gendron found his way to extreme online forums on the anonymous social platform 4chan when he felt bored during the pandemic, he wrote. He started on pages devoted to the outdoors, migrated to ones focused on guns and ultimately landed on a page that allows nearly unfettered discussion of white supremacy. 4chan didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment. In Mr. Gendron’s Discord entries, which started last November, he recounted his childhood in this town of 5,000, saying he didn’t have many friends, wasn’t close to his family and felt isolated. “I would like to say I had quite a normal childhood ([less-than] 8) but that is not the case,” he wrote, signifying his life up to 18. Mr. Gendron is the oldest of three boys, according to neighbors. His parents, Paul and Pamela, are civil engineers who work for the New York State Department of Transportation, an agency spokesman said. The boys played basketball in their driveway, and had a trampoline in the backyard, neighbors said. Mrs. Gendron would walk around the neighborhood for exercise, and Mr. Gendron would wave while tending to his property. By the front door there is a round cement tile bearing a boy’s hand print, a heart, the year 2008 and the name Payton. The parents didn’t answer phone calls seeking comment and weren’t at their home when a reporter visited Monday. One of Mr. Gendron’s lawyers, Daniel Dubois, declined to comment on Tuesday. In one diary entry, dated May 5 of this year, Mr. Gendron wrote that he competed on school swimming and soccer teams and, until Covid-19, volunteered as a firefighter. But he said over and over that he never fit in. In a separate entry, dated May 9, he wrote that serving as a youth leader in his Boy Scout troop was “the peak of my life,” but “everything went bad after.” “It’s not that I actually dislike other people, it’s just that they make me feel so uncomfortable I’ve probably spent actual years of my life just being online,” he wrote in the May 5 entry. “And to be honest I regret it. I didn’t go to friend’s houses often or go to any parties or whatever. Every day after school I would just go home and play games and watch youtube, mostly by my self [sic].” While neighbors and those who interacted with him said Mr. Gendron seemed quiet and responsible, his behavior grew erratic in recent years. On the first day of his senior year at Susquehanna Valley High School in 2020, he came to school wearing what appeared to be a full-body medical protective suit complete with gloves and gas mask. In his online journal, Mr. Gendron posted a photo of himself in class wearing the outfit. Later, he posted memes calling Covid a Jewish conspiracy. He credited 4chan, where extremist views are expressed with few restrictions, with influencing him. In particular, he spent time on the platform’s “politically incorrect” page that is known among analysts as a hub for spreading far-right ideology, including white supremacy. “I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts that they were intellectually and emotionally inferior,” he wrote on May 5, referring to Black people. Last spring, a teacher reported to school administrators that Mr. Gendron had written about wanting to carry out a shooting, a law-enforcement official said. The state police were called, and he was taken to a hospital for a mental-health evaluation before being released a day and a half later, according to Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Mr. Gramaglia said state and federal law enforcement didn’t detect any further warning signs involving Mr. Gendron until Saturday’s shooting. “I spent 20 hours in a hospital’s emergency room on 5/28/2021,” Mr. Gendron wrote, in a post dated Dec. 9. “This was because I answered murder/suicide to the question ‘what do you want to do when you retire?’ on an online assignment in my Economics class.” Mr. Gendron wrote in his Discord logs that his time in the hospital was “one of my worst nights of my life” and called it a turning point. “I got out of it because I stuck with the story that I was getting out of class and I just stupidly wrote that down,” he wrote. “That is the reason I believe I am still able to purchase guns. It was not a joke, I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.” In a public letter, Superintendent Roland Doig said the local school district was “shocked and unspeakably saddened by the tragic, racially motivated hate crime that took place in Buffalo, New York on Saturday.” Mr. Doig said the district is cooperating with law enforcement and wouldn’t comment further. By the time he was hospitalized, Mr. Gendron had already discovered racist theories online, and his hospital stay pushed him further toward action, he wrote. He exhaustively discussed in his diary the “Great Replacement Theory,” a white racist belief espoused by previous mass shooters and promoted on extremist online forums. It claims Jewish conspirators use Black people, immigrants and others to undermine whites. He also cited as a key motivation the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which left 51 dead. That lone gunman, who promoted the replacement theory, had live-streamed his attack on Facebook. The Gendrons didn’t show outward signs of trouble at home, erecting a tent and inviting neighbors and friends to a party last June when Payton Gendron graduated from school. Neighbors recalled Mr. Gendron saying he would follow in his parents’ footsteps to become a civil engineer. A photo posted on his high school’s Flickr account shows Mr. Gendron and another individual driving in a black Toyota convertible festooned with balloons and a banner adorned with his name in a senior class parade. After graduating, he briefly attended SUNY Broome community college during the fall semester of 2021 and spring semester this year, according to the school. Mr. Gendron also worked for about four months this winter at the Conklin Reliable Market along the town’s main road, but left around three months ago, according to store owner John Gage. “He was a real quiet kid,” Mr. Gage said. “Gave me two weeks’ notice when he left. Never had any problems with him.” During this period, Mr. Gendron ruminated on Discord over his evolving plans for the coming attack. He wrote about browsing extreme corners of 4chan and Reddit every day. By early February, he wrote that he was skipping his college physics class to work on documents he planned to publish about his beliefs...
Monday, May 16, 2022
Renaud Camus' 'Le Grand Replacement'
Following-up from yesterday, "Great Replacement Theory."
The New York Times is very interested in this, as noted last night on Twitter.
Here's the newspaper's story from 2019, which bears a lot of similarity with its reporting yesterday on the Buffalo shooter, Payton Gendron (perhaps for political purposes). See, "The Man Behind a Toxic Slogan Promoting White Supremacy":
Here it is: 🫤 #Buffalo #BuffaloNY #BuffaloNewYork #BuffaloStrong #PaytonGendron https://t.co/7qs6KKH5f2
— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) May 16, 2022
PLIEUX, France — Though the writer had already lived in his castle for a quarter of a century, it was only three years ago that he finally restored it to its original purpose as a fortress. The writer, Renaud Camus, rebuilt the top 10 feet of the 14th-century tower, giving him an even more commanding view of his surroundings: the village of 40 souls below; the Pyrenees, faintly visible some 100 miles south despite the midsummer haze; and, in every direction, the peaceful, rolling hills of the “eternal France” that he describes as under assault from what he calls hordes of immigrants. Up in his castle, the France that Mr. Camus imagines has made him one of the most influential thinkers on the far right in his own country and elsewhere. In his writings, he describes an ongoing “invasion” of France by immigrants bent on “conquest” of its white, European population. To him, the immigrants are “colonizing” France by giving birth to more children and making its cities, towns — and even villages — unlivable. Others have espoused similar ideas. But Mr. Camus’s portrayal of demographic change — le “grand remplacement,” or the supposed “great replacement” of France’s original population by newer arrivals, mostly from Africa — has become an extremist talking point, cited by mass killers in distant parts of the world. “It’s a slogan that dramatizes the situation, talking of great replacement the same way we speak of the great barbarian invasions,” said Rudy Reichstadt, an expert on political extremism at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès research institute in Paris. “Now, if you go to a horse race betting bar and talk politics, and you mention the great replacement, people will understand what you mean.” The idea of the great replacement has directly influenced French politicians and thinkers. Interpreted and repackaged across the internet, it has resonated widely beyond France, including in white supremacist circles. The men held in two recent mass shootings — at a Walmart in El Paso and at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand — both referred to the “great replacement” and the need to defend white populations against invading outsiders. While decrying the killings, Mr. Camus said he had no regrets about coming up with the term. “The great replacement has become a household word,” he said. “I take responsibility for it. I believe in its relevance.” Stroking his white beard, Mr. Camus, who is not related to the 20th-century writer Albert Camus, sat in his expansive study — half the top floor of his castle filled with books and a handful of African masks. In contrast to the harsh words he chooses to describe France’s immigrants, he spoke softly, and sometimes with the mannerisms of another era. He and his partner of two decades, Pierre, addressed each other as “vous,” though they said they sometimes slipped into the informal “tu.” Ensconced in his castle in southern France, in a village an hour’s drive across country roads from the nearest train station, Mr. Camus, 73, is perhaps an unlikely source of inspiration for the world’s far right and white supremacists. Until a few years ago, Mr. Camus was known, mainly by other French writers, as a novelist and a pioneering writer of gay literature. An early book about his sexual experiences, called “Tricks,” remains his most translated work. Growing up in a conservative rural town in central France, Mr. Camus went to Paris in the 1960s and found a niche in the capital’s literary and artistic scene. He befriended Roland Barthes, who wrote the preface for “Tricks.” As a member of the Socialist Party, he became active in politics on the left. Still, Mr. Camus longed to return to the countryside. He sold his Paris apartment and, in 1992, used the money to buy and restore the castle in Plieux, fulfilling a lifelong fantasy. A few years after moving to Plieux, he had what he calls an epiphan that would shape his political views. While visiting a 1,000-year-old village in southern France, he said he saw a group of veiled women milling around a fountain. “And in the ancient windows — beautiful, paired gothic windows — veiled women would appear all of a sudden,” he said. “It was really the population of eternal France that was changing.” That led to the formation in 2002 of his own political party, l’In-nocence, which calls for an end to all immigration and promotes sending immigrants and their children back to their countries of origin. But it was a decade later, when he publicly began using the term “great replacement” and wrote a book with the same title, that his influence in France began to be felt. The great replacement, he wrote, indicates the “replacement of a people, the indigenous French people, by one or others; of its culture by the loss of its cultural identity through multiculturalism.” He says he sees no contradiction between his earlier life as a gay writer on the left and his current role as an ideological beacon for the right, including violent extremists. He contends he has always told “the hard truths.” Previous generations of European immigrants had been drawn by “love” for France, he wrote. But the newer arrivals since the 1970s — mostly from France’s former colonies in the Maghreb and in sub-Saharan Africa — didn’t come “as friends.” Instead, he declared, they came as conquerors and colonizers, filled with hatred and a desire to punish France. He singled out Muslims for “not wanting to integrate” into French society...
Buffalo Suspect Peyton Gundron, White Supremacist Spouting 'Great Replacement Theory', Is 'Mainstream Republican'
Rolling Stone's headline, at Memeorandum "The Buffalo Shooter Isn't a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He's a Mainstream Republican."
Talking to my wife yesterday, the first thing I said is "Democrat will use this to tar all conservatives as white supremacists."
Sure, there's going to be a political angle to these things, but it was barely a few minutes after the news breaking that Democrats began viciously smearing conservatives and Republicans is literally accomplices to murder, as mentioned Saturday. I've been out here 15 years blogging, and grave-dancing as soon as a conservative or Republican dies is the most consistently heinous fact about Democrat leftists. It's evil.
I tweeted yesterday:
This isn’t journalism. It’s a smear, hateful #Democrat Party propaganda. #Democrats #Buffalo #BuffaloNY #PeytonGenfron #RepEliseStefanik #Election2022 https://t.co/b9FdvOwXen
— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) May 16, 2022
And at the New York Times, also piling on Rep. Stefanik, "A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P." (via Memorandum)":
Replacement theory, espoused by the suspect in the Buffalo massacre, has been embraced by some right-wing politicians and commentators. Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States. The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans. And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.” Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence. But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations. By his own account, the Buffalo suspect, Payton S. Gendron, followed a lonelier path to radicalization, immersing himself in replacement theory and other kinds of racist and antisemitic content easily found on internet forums, and casting Black Americans, like Hispanic immigrants, as “replacers” of white Americans. Yet in recent months, versions of the same ideas, sanded down and shorn of explicitly anti-Black and antisemitic themes, have become commonplace in the Republican Party — spoken aloud at congressional hearings, echoed in Republican campaign advertisements and embraced by a growing array of right-wing candidates and media personalities. No public figure has promoted replacement theory more loudly or relentlessly than the Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has made elite-led demographic change a central theme of his show since joining Fox’s prime-time lineup in 2016. A Times investigation published this month showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Mr. Carlson has amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration, and his producers sometimes scoured his show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did. “It’s not a pipeline. It’s an open sewer,” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor who was fired in 2020 after defending the network’s decision to call Arizona for then-candidate Joseph R. Biden, and who wrote a forthcoming book on how media outlets stoke anger to build audiences. “Cable hosts looking for ratings and politicians in search of small-dollar donations can see which stories and narratives are drawing the most intense reactions among addicted users online,” Mr. Stirewalt said. Social media sites and internet forums, he added, are “like a focus group for pure outrage.” In just the past year, Republican luminaries like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Georgia congressman, and Elise Stefanik, the center-right New York congresswoman turned Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement theory. Appearing on Fox, Mr. Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting to “drown” out “classic Americans.” In September, Ms. Stefanik released a campaign ad on Facebook claiming that Democrats were plotting “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting “amnesty” to illegal immigrants, which her ad said would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” That same month, after the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group, called on Fox to fire Mr. Carlson, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, stood up both for the TV host and for replacement theory itself. “@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on Twitter. In a statement after the Buffalo shooting, Mr. Gaetz said that he had “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.” One in three American adults now believe that an effort is underway “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to an Associated Press poll released this month. The poll also found that people who mostly watched right-wing media outlets like Fox News, One American News Network and Newsmax were more likely to believe in replacement theory than those who watched CNN or MSNBC. Underlying all variations of replacement rhetoric is the growing diversity of the United States over the past decade, as the populations of people who identify as Hispanic and Asian surged and the number of people who said they were more than one race more than doubled, according to the Census Bureau. Democratic politicians have generally been more supportive of immigration than Republicans, especially in the post-Trump era, and have pushed for more humane treatment of migrants and refugees. But the number of immigrants living in the United States illegally, which rose throughout the 1990s and 2000s, first began to decline under President Obama, a Democrat whom critics nicknamed the “deporter-in-chief.” There is no evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens and others who are ineligible. And while Mr. Biden has laid out plans to expand legal immigration, federal agencies have expelled more than 1.3 million migrants at the southwest border on his watch, while continuing some of the more restrictive immigration policies begun by former President Trump. Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump filled his public speeches and Twitter feed with often inflammatory, sometimes false rhetoric about immigrants, and he employed the term “invaders” in arguing for a border wall. Such language has been more broadly adopted by his most ardent supporters, such as Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator, who last summer said on Twitter, “We are being replaced and invaded” by illegal immigrants...
Sunday, May 15, 2022
Great Replacement Theory
You'll be hearing more of this "great replacement theory" in the days ahead. It's not a conspiracy as much as a real theory that can be tested against evidence. Cathy Young, for example, debunks it, here: "The Replacement Theory -- And Terrorist Practice" (Via Memeorandum).
The American Mind, the popular "national conservatism" website, defends the theory here: "Replace the Ruling Class," and "Shaping the Perfect Subjects: The managerial class wants to replace America’s core demographic with one it can more easily control."
Fox News --- and Trucker Carlson in particular --- have come under heavy fire since the killings. I quit watching his show, but obviously the Democrat Party's open borders policies are predicated on the supply a steady stream of illegal alien public welfare supplicants to build a permanent leftist-socialist-immigrant voting coalition.
I did catch this segment at the time, last year, featuring Mark Styen (with video snippets of Tucker). Good times, heh:
Payton Gendron, 18-Year-Old White Supremacist, Massacres 10 in Buffalo Supermarket Racist Attack (VIDEO)
Most everyone has heard about Buffalo race murders by now.
Payton Gendron has pleaded not guilty in the attack. I've searched for the racist "Great Replacement" manifesto the shooter posted online, but it's been scrubbed. Posted in Google docs, the Google information overlords removed it within minutes of posting. The shooter fitted a Go Pro camera to his helmet and live streamed it on Twitch, which was also immediately taken down.
The left's diabolical partisan political exploitation of the murders was instantaneous. No surprise there, but more disgusting than ever. I scolded Joe Lockhart and Soledad O'Brien here and here.
Gendron killed a black security guard --- recently retired as a police officer of 30 years --- in a brief shootout.
The latest is at Buffalo News, "Community holds vigil, protests in wake of racially motivated mass shooting."
The main story's at morning newsletter from the New York Times, "Good morning. A massacre at a Buffalo supermarket was the deadliest in the U.S. this year":
A gunman embracing a white supremacist ideology opened fire yesterday afternoon at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three more. The mass shooting was the deadliest in the United States this year and among a spate of racist attacks in recent years. The suspect, Payton S. Gendron, 18, had driven more than 200 miles to stage the attack, and he livestreamed it as he fired at shoppers and store employees. He was arrested at the store and pleaded not guilty in a brief court appearance. Around the same time, a manifesto attributed to him appeared online, repeatedly invoking the racist idea that white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color. The view is known as “replacement theory” and was once linked to the far-right fringe, but it has become increasingly mainstream. Among the victims were a security guard and an 86-year-old mother of four who had stopped at the store on her way home from visiting her husband at the nursing home where he lives. How the shooting unfolded Around 2:30 p.m., as shoppers filled the Tops supermarket, the suspect arrived wearing body armor, tactical gear and a helmet with a video camera attached. He carried an assault rifle with an anti-Black slur written on the barrel and began firing in the parking lot. Three victims were killed outside, and one was wounded. Then the suspect went inside the store to continue his attack, briefly exchanging fire with the security guard before killing him. He went on to stalk victims throughout the store; “bodies were everywhere,” one witness said. Shonnell Harris, a store manager, told The Buffalo News that she heard an estimated 70 shots and ran through the Tops, repeatedly falling down before escaping out back. The gunman eventually returned to the front of the store. By then, the police had arrived, and he briefly put a gun to his neck before he began removing tactical gear as a form of surrender and the police tackled him. The victims Of the 13 people who were shot, 11 were Black and two were white. Four worked at the Tops grocery. Few have been publicly identified. The security guard who was killed was a former police officer — “a hero in our eyes,” said Joseph A. Gramaglia, the Buffalo police commissioner. Ruth Whitfield, 86, was a mother of four and “a mother to the motherless,” her son told The News. Her husband had moved into a nursing home years ago and she still visited every day. She had just visited him when she stopped at Tops to get something to eat, WGRZ reported. The suspect The attack appeared to be inspired by earlier mass shootings motivated by racial hatred, including a 2019 mosque shooting in New Zealand and a massacre at a Texas Walmart that same year, according to the manifesto. In chilling detail, the document outlined a plan to kill as many Black people as possible, including the type of gun to use, a timeline, a specific parking spot and where to eat ahead of time. Gendron wrote that he chose the area of the supermarket because it was home to the largest percentage of Black residents near his home in New York’s largely white Southern Tier. The police had surrounded his home outside Binghamton, N.Y., overnight. “It was a straight up racially motivated hate crime,” said John Garcia, the local sheriff. Federal law enforcement officials said they were investigating the shooting as a hate crime. The next court proceeding was set for Thursday.
More at Memorandum.
Friday, May 13, 2022
Andrew L. Urban and Chris McLeod, Zelensky
At Amazon, Andrew L. Urban and Chris McLeod, Zelensky: The Unlikely Ukrainian Hero Who Defied Putin and United the World.
Democrats' Electability Argument Falling Flat in 2022
From Amy Walter, at the Cook Report:
For the last six years, the one thing that has kept the Democratic Party unified and motivated is Donald Trump. Fear and loathing got Democrats to turn out in the 2018 midterms, and kept those voters engaged in 2020. Sure, the party was divided ideologically and generationally, with liberals and younger voters flocking to the Bernie Sanders wing and older, Black and more moderate Democrats sticking with Joe Biden. But, at the end of the day, both sides understood that the most important and existential issue was defeating Trump. This strategy for the 2018 midterms was summarized best by then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's slogan of "Just win, baby." Primaries were for picking the candidates who could win these swing CDs, not for intra-party ideological warfare. In 2020, Democrats rallied behind the more centrist Biden simply because they believed he provided Democrats the best chance to beat Trump that fall. But, with Trump no longer in the White House and Biden's approval ratings underwater, the electability message is falling flat in Democratic primaries. In 2018, Democratic candidates prevailed in GOP-leaning CDs by leaning into a message of bipartisanship. Today, however, a restive Democratic base, discouraged by a lack of action on many of their key issues (like climate and student loan debt), and frustrated by GOP attacks on issues like abortion and election integrity, want fighters, not unifiers as their candidates...
RTWT.
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