DeSantis, Migrants, and Gratuitous Cruelty

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Buffalo is the city of “Good Neighbors.” It’s a sort of marketing tagline. Is Buffalo friendlier than its New York peer cities? Who knows – I doubt such a thing could be quantified. Ultimately, it makes us all feel better about ourselves. We’re not like the other people. We’re not like New York City. We’re more midwestern. We’re nice.

There are plenty of examples of good neighborliness (see, for instance, the outpouring of support for the West Side Bazaar, hit recently by a major fire.)

But there are a slew of examples of ugliness. Consider if you will this letter to the editor of the Buffalo News, penned by one Joseph Fahey of Williamsville.

The hypocrisy of the Democrats is unending. Fifteen thousand illegal aliens showed up in the small community of Del Rio, Texas, in one day, and we barely heard about it. Fifty willing undocumented immigrants are sent to the super-wealthy Martha’s Vineyard, and the elites declare it a humanitarian crisis.

Del Rio Texas is on the US-Mexico border. The Mexican city of Ciudad Acuna lies on the other side of the fence. The 15,000 immigrants Mr. Fahey mentions came mostly from Haiti in September 2021. In order to reach that spot, those brave people had to make their way across the sea to Mexico and then to the US border on a perilous journey. They come to the United States seeking refuge from a failed state, gang violence, and crushing poverty. They come here seeking the same opportunity that your ancestors sought when they came here, no matter when or from where.

Humanitarian crises such as the ones Mr. Fahey mentions in Del Rio are more than just an opportunity for men in Williamsville with Irish surnames to revel in their misfortune and to own the libs. These are human beings and they deserve to be treated with respect.

But what, Mr. Fahey, does a 2021 crisis of Haitian migrants in Texas have to do with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis? Why would Florida’s governor pay six figures of taxpayer money to fly a handful of Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. While I am old enough to remember when Republicans supported immigrants fleeing failed communist states, Mr. Fahey misstates the facts.

DeSantis retained the services of an unknown vendor to select refugees to fly to Martha’s Vineyard. Plying them with McDonalds coupons and having them sign a waiver written only in English, a woman known only as “Perla” arranged for their transportation. The migrants could not legally work – an idiotic policy that only worsens these refugees’ plight. At a time when there is a supposed labor shortage, certainly work could be found for migrants ready and willing to do work.

Mr. Fahey says the Venezuelan refugees whom DeSantis tricked were “willing”, but the facts say otherwise:

“I don’t like the way they treated us,” said Jose, who made the journey to the border with two stuffed animals given to him as a gift by his 5-year old son, whom he left behind with relatives. “We’re human beings.”

Most of the migrants who seek asylum at the Southern border are released pending a court date. Most of them already have friends or family in the US. The asylum seekers intend to move along to other spots throughout the US. Barring a fundamental change in immigration law and policy, I have no doubt that other states would cooperate with Texas and other border states to facilitate this transportation. Resettlement agencies exist throughout the US to do help new immigrants start their new lives. In Buffalo we have several of them.

But DeSantis is instead kicking off his Presidential campaign by being deliberately cruel to refugees from a communist state and dropping them off on an island off the mainland – not anywhere near where their people are. None of this was done out of compassion or empathy or any sort of earnest desire to help. It was done out of hatred.

What Mr. Fahey is too inarticulate to say is that he supports Republican governors cruelly worsening the suffering of migrants from Venezuela because it’s a good meme.

Mr. Fahey gleefully continues,

NBC News published a statement by a Vineyard resident who said, “Florida Gov. DeSantis sending asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard is like ‘me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there.’” Other observers perversely compared sending these people to Martha’s Vineyard to the Holocaust.

Well, it is. DeSantis took people from Texas and spent Florida money to send them to a tony island off the coast of Massachusetts, under false pretenses. It was a form of human trafficking and accomplished no positive outcome.`

Because our system deems Martha’s Vineyard residents to be more important than regular Americans, the “crisis” was dealt with in one day. The Massachusetts National Guard was activated, and the migrants were removed to a nearby military base. I wonder what the Democrats’ reaction would be if Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott activated their National Guards and dumped these people off at a military base? I don’t really wonder.

Not sure how “our system” deems people on the Vineyard to be more important, but it is true that Martha’s Vineyard, an island of 15,000 residents, is ill-equipped to properly and adequately handle the resettlement of migrants flown from Texas as part of a meme. To their credit, the people on the Vineyard sprang to action and helped to feed, clothe, and house these migrants until such time as their onward travel could be arranged.

Mr. Fahey sees the quick action put in motion by Massachusetts’ Republican Governor, Charlie Baker to help and accommodate these refugees, whom DeSantis duped, as an indictment. Really, though, it reveals that treating immigrants as worthless cattle is a choice. Republican Governor DeSantis made that choice while Republican Governor Baker did not.

They were not “dumped … off at a military base.” They are not in custody and they have been offered shelter, food, clothing, and services as they plan their next steps with the help of resettlement agencies and immigration attorneys. They are getting the help they need and deserve, without any craven grandstanding Republican using them for a meme.

Unlike the Trump Administration’s behavior, the children were not separated from their parents.

I saw some people on Twitter allege that Martha’s Vineyard “deported” the refugees. One cannot “deport” someone from an island in Barnstable County, Massachusetts to mainland Barnstable County, Massachusetts.

I hope DeSantis and Abbott continue this practice. Perhaps the governors should send more undocumented immigrants to progressive communities in Western New York, such as the Elmwood Village, or tony East Aurora, where I’m sure the reaction would be the same.

Journey’s End, Catholic Charities, Jewish Family Services, and the International Institute are among the agencies in WNY tasked with helping immigrants start a new life in western New York. Erie County is especially welcoming of migrants, and large communities of people from places like Burma, Somalia, Ukraine, and Yemen have brightened our community.

Whether he realizes it or not, Mr. Fahey is, in effect, paraphrasing Heinrich von Treitschke and Der Sturmer. He sees immigrants as people to be foisted upon his political opponents. They are a scourge to be used primarily to wipe that shit-eating grin off those libs’ faces. The underlying attitude is that immigrants sind unser Unglück.

I wonder where Mr. Fahey lives, but I’m willing to bet that 14222 is more diverse than his zip code, and that the Elmwood Village doesn’t need lectures on inclusion or welcoming of immigrants from the likes of him.

To be fair, it was not very nice sending those people to a community inhabited by hypocritical, elitist snobs.

Perhaps Mr. Fahey should put himself in the shoes of these migrants fleeing poverty and violence and see them as fellow human beings rather than culture war ammunition.

They Plan the End of America

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The fake patriots. (Faketriots?) The phony law-and-order-for-thee-but-not-for-me types. The cretins who think America is about waving flags at overpasses and owning libs rather than representative democracy and the rule of law. We are witnesses to some unique things in the last 18 months.

We have witnessed an attempted coup. Coups d’etat are especially rare in the Anglophone world – countries created through British colonialism, which adhere to common law and rely on some form of parliamentary representative democracy to hold the reins of power.

Did you know there was a “stop the steal” astroturf group ready to accuse a victorious Hillary Clinton of stealing the election? Miracle of miracles, Trump won so that plan was tabled until 2020, when it was revived. The 2020 election was run in the midst of a global pandemic, which resulted in states making temporary changes to make ballot access easier and contact-free. As the in-person vote was tallied, it looked good for Trump. But the absentee and mail-in votes needed to be counted, and the Republicans have pretty uniformly decided that these votes were somehow unworthy and uncountable.

So, “stop the steal” was revived, Trump and his henchmen worked overtime to literally try to steal the election. The Roger Stonification and Steve Bannonization of America They had Republicans in swing states concoct fake, unchosen slates of “electors” in an effort illegally to change results in places like Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. They falsely claimed the machines were rigged by faraway Communists. They brought lawsuits – almost all of which were summarily dismissed – trying to change the results of various states’ elections. Trump himself used the power of the Presidential office to demonize and harass innocent civilian election workers. Trump pressured state officials to rig the election in his favor and to overthrow the will of the people – the ballot box.

It culminated with an armed insurrection on January 6th that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the Congress from carrying out the will of the American people, and to force – literally – that Donald Trump be re-elected as President for life. These people are not the principled heirs of our Enlightenment-guided Founding Fathers – they are instead the ignorant offspring of Confederate traitors. Local fool Carl Paladino is their pro-Hitler avatar.

To call the Trump MAGA cult un-American is an understatement. This was a coordinated coup attempt. It was a conspiracy to defraud the United States and to end our system of rules, laws, and elections as we know it. Our republic still hangs by a thread as an entire major political party remains in the thrall of a grifter charlatan who would destroy the country for the sake of vanity and power.

Maybe in addition to vanity and power, it is also a last gasp of good old-fashioned white Christian nationalism as a reaction to societal changes that they fear and reject. It all starts with abortion and it has morphed into equating anything having to do with LGBTQ+ rights as pedophilia and “grooming“. It has to do with terrorizing drag queen library readings and abolishing Pride Month displays at libraries.

I mean – drag queens. They say that this is somehow sexualizing kids. Kids who play dress-up all the time.

Florida banning the mere mention of anything having to do with gender identity, likely unintentionally banning kids playing house.

But it’s not just discriminatory legislation and terroristic action – it is the legitimization of this transformation of this country into a white Christian nationalist authoritarian country by a Supreme Court hand-picked by one trad Catholic man, Leonard Leo. By the time you read this, the Supreme Court will have likely overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1972 SCOTUS opinion, which held that states cannot restrict abortions in the first trimester of a pregnancy. Many Justices likely to vote to do this also told the country and its elected representatives that Roe is “settled law,” lying to convince people they would not do what they have done. To lie to the people to gain a lifetime appointment should be disqualifying in a functioning republic, but it isn’t. The libs will be owned, and this is the primary goal. Doctors, medical providers, and ultimately women will have a medical procedure rendered illegal overnight, and they will all of them face criminal sanctions or perhaps, if the Christian nationalists have their way, involuntary psychiatric committal. This is all an Orwellian nightmare of democratic backsliding – of reactionary authoritarianism, which one can only hope is short-lived.

As usual, Democrats as the sole political organization of sanity and western liberal democratic values are ill-equipped rhetorically to combat this right-wing eruption of sheer insanity.

Western New York, which was recently the target of a racist attack by a white nationalist terrorist from Binghamton, has a disproportionate number of homegrown Trump cult fascists in its midst. WBFO is doing a great job on this front right now, as has Investigative Post. A must-follow is Heidi Jones on Twitter. When you see indicted insurrectionist Pete Harding lead a group of people to wave flags on Walden or on an overpass by the blue water tower, this is not some grassroots outpouring of patriotic love for democracy and the rule of law, but an outspoken effort to end them in favor of right-wing authoritarian hegemony.

The battle isn’t about left-of-center pragmatism versus fiscal conservatism anymore. It is about American democracy versus authoritarianism. It is an existential battle of normalcy against nihilism, and now is the time for choosing.

Chaos in #NY23

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The first and solitary time that coup-plotting Trumper Chris Jacobs displayed some bravery and bucked his party’s diktats on guns, that party went into overdrive to drum him out of office.

The next thing that soon-to-be-former Congressman Chris Jacobs did was withdraw from the race for election to Congress in the newly drawn NY-23.

Almost literally within a week he went from a profile in courage moment to being the third rich guy named Chris to quit Congress over heat he couldn’t handle. Profile in cowardice.

Because New York isn’t a red state and NY-23, despite how rural it is, (but note it includes Jamestown, Elmira, Olean, Hornell, and second-ring Buffalo suburbs), might just be willing to elect a guy with an (R) after his name even if he says sane things about access to assault weapons. At the very least it was worth a shot. It was worth it for Jacobs to take a principled stand and answer for it.

It would be fundamentally irresponsible for any candidate for any office within the Buffalo media market to not – at a bare minimum – advocate for raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21. Jacobs expressed a willingness to do more than that and for that he earned my praise. Almost as quickly, he reveals how empty his “principles” were.

As usual, Democrats – who have nominated someone you’ve never heard of from a place you may vaguely be able to place on a map – have a huge problem with messaging. It’s so easy for Republicans to take literally any effort to prevent mass shootings and scream about how it’s violative of the 2nd Amendment (regardless of whether that’s true). Democrats have to stress that legislation to prevent teenaged psychopaths from easily obtaining weapons of war is consistent with 2nd Amendment protections. Few freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution are absolute – even speech. So, if the government has the power to ban obscene speech, it has a similar power to declare that an 18 year-old cannot possess an AR-15 to shoot up a school, and a 30 year-old cannot open-carry a rocket-launcher at Wendy’s.

Despite all his prior bad acts and omissions, when it came time for Jacobs to choose between the victims and the killers, he chose the victims. This was, for his party, haram.

But Jacobs will be out at the end of the year, so he becomes a premature lame duck. If only he had staked out a brave and correct position and stuck to it, maybe he could have earned himself some kudos for, e.g., being a party maverick who has met the moment and come out on the right side of an issue that deeply wounded his city.

Yet the Republican Party, even in indigo-blue New York State, has become so extreme, nihilistic, and bloodthirsty that it would rather enable the next mass shooting than piss off its base, the people whom talk radio, Fox News, Trump, and Christian nationalism have brainwashed into thinking that mass killings are an acceptable price to pay for whatever they think “freedom” is.

They’ll tell you it’s everything but guns. It’s doors. It’s security. It’s a need to have armed soldiers in every classroom. It’s mental health. It’s video games. It’s rap music. But schools in other countries have more than one door, they have kids with mental health issues, they have the same video games and music that we do, but what they don’t have is a proliferation of guns. This means that other countries have a different calculus of what “freedom” means, and frankly it means that people are reasonably secure in the knowledge that their kids will go to school and come home alive; that the absence of guns obviates the need for TSA-style school security. Of course, most of these countries have stronger, uniform safety nets so that kids with mental health issues get free or affordable access to the care they need. They also restrict firearms in such a way that 18 year-olds have practically no ability to waltz into a local shop, buy a gun made for waging war, and shoot dozens of random, innocent people.

When the time comes for Republicans to stand up and be counted on things like expanding access to free or affordable care in this country, they refuse. The only thing they’re good for nowadays is backsliding our democracy and the culture wars. Just ask Pizza Hut and the Secret Service. That and enabling more maniacs to buy more guns to do more mass shootings.

Freedom to shop at the grocery store or attend school secure in the knowledge that you won’t get shot dead would seem to be worth advocating for, even if you’re a Republican.

With Jacobs’ departure, the Republicans now have a choice between Nick Langworthy, Carl Paladino, and Marc Cenedella. With idiot vote fraud convict Rus Thompson and his execrable wife running things, Paladino’s campaign is certain to make headlines for the dumbest things possible. Things like Carl posting some conspiracy bullshit on his Facebook page calling the Buffalo and Uvalde massacres a false flag, and when exposed does his best Sergeant Schultz impression. Paladino’s presence in the race is quite literally an insult to everyone’s intelligence. The laundry list of reasons not to consider him is long and wildly uncomplicated.

I wish Democratic candidate Max Della Pia best of luck in getting his message out there. Hopefully he’s known in the Southern Tier, but he has a lot of work to do to get some name recognition in Buffalo. Also one has to hope that no former Democratic candidates for Congress pop out of the woodwork to make a big mess of things like they have, say, on multiple previous occasions.

Just when things start looking a little less bleak, we are showered with bleakness galore.

How Many More Martyrs Do We Need

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Gun rally

How many more innocent people have to die before this country takes its gun addiction seriously?

How many more little kids in elementary school need to be slaughtered before we ban sales of guns to deranged teenagers?

How many more black supermarket shoppers need to be assassinated by yet another well-armed deranged teenager?

How many more innocent Americans – of any age race, in blue or red state – have to die before we ban sales of body armor? Before we have a federal law forbidding sales of firearms to people under 21 years of age? How many more innocent Americans have to have their insides cut into pieces by military ammunition by an over-armed, armored teenager, martyred to benefit the gun manufacturers’ lobby?

You can blame video games if you want. Every industrialized country has video games; none of them have this mass shooting epidemic.

You can blame mental health, but we are the only industrialized country to not guarantee health care to every citizen, nor do we hold some sort of global monopoly on mental health issues. No other similarly situated country has this mass shooting epidemic.

You can blame the fact that the Texas shooter has a Hispanic name but that doesn’t explain Mr. Conklin, New York.

You can point to whatever you want, but the simple fact remains that this country has too many people with too many guns, and too many innocent people are being shot (not to mention suicides) as a result. Here is the truth:

How many times have I had to come onto this dumb, 20 year-old blog and write something about a mass shooting? Too many. Here’s some:

Fuck Your Gun. (2013)

The Difference is Guns (2018)

The US Senate Decides that Guns are More Important than People (2013)

That’s just a few. I don’t have the heart or the patience to go through them all. There are too many. One was too many. Every other country like ours – even the ones with a cowboy/wild west/gun culture like Australia – have figured this out.

One thing is for certain – there needs to be federal action. No loopholes. No state opt-outs. The Ku Conklin Klan should be unable to cross state lines to bypass New York restrictions. Enough.

But when people like Chris “Milquetoast Trump” Jacobs offer up their cheap, meaningless thoughts & prayers, remember that he cares more about his NRA rating than about the lives of supermarket shoppers in the next district over who were gunned down while shopping for groceries.

And that’s really the issue, free from bullshit or dilution:

What do freedom and liberty mean – what do they really mean – if black folks in Masten are not free to go to the grocery store in peace? If children cannot go to elementary school in peace? If we need to turn average places of public accommodation into fortresses, what the hell kind of “freedom” is that?

Williamsville’s Holocaust Hucksters

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This is being written directly to the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Williamsville – Deb Rogers and Dave Sherman.

Shame on you both. You two are nothing more than hucksters who, like many hucksters before you, are using the Holocaust cheaply and disproportionately to advance some sort of contemporary political agenda – in this case, quarantining of people with infectious diseases. Even if a legitimate objection exists, there are literally a million better ways to go about raising them than jumping right to a blatant and stupid violation of Godwin’s Law.

Honestly, the substance of the proposed rule is beside the point. Whether Deb Rogers and Dave Sherman are happy to encounter at Wegmans, say, an “individual health choice” advocate with Ebola who won’t self-isolate is not important here. This is about dumb people using dumb rhetoric to make a dumb point. Literally no one asked the Village of Williamsville what it thought about anything, and all of this was designed specifically to get Deb Rogers in the paper or on Bauerle’s show to whine about the culture war thing du jour.

It goes without saying that in the year of our Lord 2022, two grown adults in a position of governmental authority should not have to be lectured about the facts and nature of the Holocaust from a centenarian survivor of it.

Literally, add that to your resumes – “said something so stupid once that a local Jewish group had to send a 100 year-old Holocaust survivor to explain why what I said was stupid.”

When you compare the quarantining of an Ebola patient with Nazi Germany’s systematic genocide of 11 million innocent European civilians, including 6 million Jews, you are, Deb and Dave, an idiot. A cretin. I’m shocked that you didn’t equate mask mandates with Kristallnacht. I’m even more shocked you have the mental wherewithal to pull your socks up in the morning.

And then after all of this sturm und drang, they did not really apologize.

“So again, for any pain, or embarrassment, I caused anyone – and this gentleman, God bless you, I could never have done what you did – I apologize for creating the wrong impression, or stirring up the wrong emotions,” Sherman said, nodding toward Leibovic.

No, it’s not about the “pain” or “embarrassment” you caused anyone else, Dave Sherman. It’s about the embarrassment you foisted upon yourself with your pathetic rhetoric. It’s about how fundamentally crass and ignorant it is for some corduroyed schmuck to equate a health rule with the slaughter of 11 million people.

As for Mayor Deb,

Mayor Deb Rogers, who at one point left the board room to collect herself, insisted that her own comments from the earlier meeting had been misrepresented, and that she’s received threats as a result.

Rogers said following the discussion that she hoped to work with members of the Jewish organizations on a joint statement, or news conference, to make a show of unity.

“We can all acknowledge that maybe we said some things that we shouldn’t have said. We have learned from those experiences, learned from those mistakes, and we can step forward and be a beacon in the community of getting together,” she said.

Who’s “we”? Why is this being bothsidesed? Why are these people so fundamentally unable or mentally unwilling to simply say that their words were completely inappropriate, that it was the height of stupidity and ignorance to equate any state health regulation with the slaughter of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, and that they are profoundly sorry for their stupidity, ignorance, and inappropriateness, and that they will take time to re-assess their entire lives in the wake of this colossal self-own?

Rogers said it was like Communist China, which is stupid in a whole other way.

Of course, Sherman and Rogers instead see this as a key moment to do the right thing for the community and for healing at this time – cast themselves as victims of “threats.” No one condones threats, obviously, but you’re not the victims here.

They got their phony bloviation, and Williamsville continues its descent into laughingstock territory.

Mychutzpah

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Look who’s calling people “racist.” Could it be the same guy who said that immigrants or minorities or people of color would “infest” the town of Hamburg if he lost his race for town supervisor?

And what “troubling warning signs” does this right-wing culture warrior deem worthy of investigation?

From the article he himself posted:

The state police responded. They investigated. They interviewed the subject. And they felt at the time it was appropriate to have that individual brought in for a mental health evaluation

Buffalo police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia

The article goes on to explain that the shooter made a generalized threat against his school last June. The threat was identified and reported. The police responded and investigated. The suspect was interviewed and then sent to the hospital for a mental health evaluation. So, on what planet does Mychajliw get the idea that “NO ONE acted”? Did he not read the article he linked to? And why did he bring up supposed investigations of “moms at school board meetings”? Obviously, we know why – he is still clinging to the Covid fights of yore, but I did not see anything in the NPR piece about moms at Conklin, NY school board meetings being investigated? Did you?

So, while Mychajliw – who is gratifyingly out of public office and is now a full-time right-wing professional propagandist – accuses the “left” of focusing on “feelings + ignor[ing] facts” he offers up feelings and ignores facts. Mychajliw says that the shooter was on police and school radar, and then says the school and police failed to “act”. Yet, according to the article he links to, the system involuntarily hospitalized him in the psych ward. The same guy who says facemasks are tyranny is telling you an involuntary psych hold is a lack of action.

The Republicans in this region have literally the most to answer for, yet they are completely absent from this situation, except for Nick Langworthy dropping some flowers off on Jefferson. Not so much as an effort to get their people to donate food or money to the people most directly victimized by a violence that is at least in part fueled by their rhetoric.

But let’s give Mychajliw the benefit of the doubt – that he is truly concerned about liberals substituting feelings for facts. This kid was investigated and held involuntarily for a mental health evaluation due to threats against his school. Yet he was able to purchase and possess the military hardware that enabled him to commit mass murder in a grocery store, and avoid injury from retired Buffalo cop Aaron Salter, Jr.’s gun. Want to eschew “feelings” and talk about facts? Talk about that.

It’s the Naziism

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The moment I heard the terrorist was white and wearing fatigues and a vest, I had a thought and I looked at my watch.

It was the 14th.

I immediately knew there’d be a videostream and an idiot’s manifesto of death. The Christchurch template.

14 is a significant symbolic number among American Nazis. It is the shorthand version of the racist great replacement white grievance propaganda that fascist radio and politicians relentlessly feed their audiences, for profit.

An 18 year-old near Binghamton had easy access to military equipment that enabled him to slaughter almost a dozen innocent people. His Naziistic worldview was fueled by a racist hatred that Rupert Murdoch and his media clones have pushed for years.

When The NY Times exposed Tucker Carlson’s malign role in that, he laughed. They all laugh. They laugh as their audience commits slaughter. Then they condemn any pushback as “woke” and “critical race theory”.

If believing that the right to shop at Tops without fear of being mowed down by a racist assassin trumps the right of an 18 year-old kid to own military hardware is “woke”, then I’m woke.

The 2nd Amendment extremists need this information: that Tops has an armed retired cop working security. He engaged the gunman, who is lucky enough to live in a country that offers over-the-counter bullet-proof vests – and was killed by the terrorist’s modified AR-15, a military weapon sold relatively freely here to homicidal children. So, don’t ever let the “good guy with a gun” pseudo-argument pass your lips again.

But I’ve followed what goes on around here enough to tell you this: ‘he’s not from here” and “he’s from Binghamton” is irrelevant. WNY is a hotbed of fascist and Nazi extremism itself and I was fully expecting to be familiar with the name of this terrorist.

We have bad actors and irresponsible media like WBEN right here that get clout and make bank by spreading the same lazy Naziism this shooter espouses. It’s just a coincidence that this murdering Nazi was from Conklin and not Clarence. Of the many problems, Naziism seems to be the biggest one.

Do they care? Look at Tucker here after the Times exposed him (part 1 and part 2). As long as the checks clear, and black people are slaughtered, Tucker and his ilk think it’s all a big LOL.

Via Twitter

People’s Republic of Williamsville

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Dear Comrades! The proletariat of Williamsville have seized power and, through their vanguard party implemented an appropriate dictatorship to bring the bourgeois liberal order to its knees, defenestrate the nobility, and to implement a true worker’s democratic order. Raise the red banner! Cue the Internationale! Long Live the Glorious Revolution!

Or that’s just what the *checks notes* Village Mayor wants you to think.

“I’m just saying I’m embarrassed to be sitting up here with two trustees who, I will say, are nothing short of communists in their ability to vote ‘no’ on this opposition,” Rogers said. “Because this is exactly what we saw happening in communist China, where people were being taken from their homes against their will and placed into quarantine camps.”

Williamsville Mayor Deb Rogers

I’ve spent some time in communist countries and I can think of a few differences right off the top of my head that would disprove Deb Rogers’ theory about the Trotskyite scum people on her village board who oppose her:

  1. Williamsville has a multi-party democratic board of freely elected trustees. This does not happen under communism, where all political power is held by the ruling party, which sets up sham elections with slates of pre-approved party candidates and the electorate is forced to “vote” by checking a “yes” or “no” box. To my knowledge, this has not yet happened in Williamsville.
  2. Williamsville enjoys free enterprise whereby people are able to start and own businesses, exploit the working class hire people, and compete in the marketplace in an effort to make a profit. Under most communist regimes, private enterprise, if allowed at all, is limited to only the smallest mom & pop stores such as barber shops, small restaurants, jewelry, and art. If permitted, these businesses are forced to pay confiscatory taxes, their ability to hire people is severely limited, and direct competition with state-owned enterprises is strictly regulated if permitted.
  3. Williamsville has a free press and, to my knowledge, the editors and writers of the Amherst Bee are not members of the communist party for which the paper is the official organ.
  4. Williamsville has freedom of speech and all of the other freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of New York and the United States. This is made evident by the way in which Comrade Rogers is free to utter the most obnoxious idiocy without fear of official government sanction therefor.

So we are clear, what Comrade Mayor Rogers is upset about is the idea that people who are suffering from a communicable, transmissible disease, might be ordered by the state to isolate to prevent transmission and epidemic at a place not their home. This is almost exactly like the outcome of the DDR’s Tenth Party Congress in 1981.

Presumably, based on this reported temper tantrum, Comrade Mayor Rogers might consider it to be “communism” for a school to send home a child with lice or strep; that it would be analogous to the Khmer Rouge emptying Phnom Penh of bespectacled citizens and sending them to die in camps for the state Department of Health to ask that people consider other people and take reasonable measures to avoid the preventable spread of infectious diseases, and that the state step in if they refuse.

The proper way for an aggrieved party to seek recourse against what it thinks is a governmental overreach is to file a lawsuit. Oh, look, there’s already one filed. Maybe the nominally “pro-life” bourgeois so-called “Republicans” are happy to have, e.g., an Ebola nurse running around town willy-nilly but that is unlikely to be in the best interests of public health. Then again, public health is a joke anyway, as we don’t have health coverage for every American, and no one gives a crap that we have a Covid positivity rate of 20% locally, or the effect that this has on immunocompromised people and on the economy generally. Glory to the People’s Martyrs who died so you could shop maskless at Target!

For the Village Board of the People’s Republic of Williamsville to pass (or reject) a resolution in opposition to (or support of) a state regulation is an utter and irrelevant waste of time that exists only to let someone grandstand. Comrade Mayor Deb Rogers got her grandstanding moment, and even hurled completely outlandish insults at a couple of trustees who were basically saying that, contrary to the opinions of Titoist bourgeois reactionaries, this was a colossal waste of time and effort. Just like Trotsky and Guevara would have wanted.

How To Talk Radio

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Joe Beamer is a young man who wields a degree of political power in Buffalo that is disproportionate to his knowledge and ability. Last Thursday, he allowed our public airwaves to be polluted by disgusting and abhorrent pro-Putinist propaganda, and he let it on without contemporaneous challenge or cross-examination. It was a monologue of disinformation.

Beamer did critique it some minutes later, but that is why the phrase “too little, too late” exists in that syntax.

Let’s be honest: WBEN ceased to be “news” radio a long time ago. It is now an empty shell that barely competes with your Spotify playlist or favorite podcast. WBEN used to be the local home of Rush Limbaugh. Remember him? He was the biggest thing on right-wing talk radio from 1988 until his death, yet he is remembered for nothing. All that hate and bile brought him riches and an empty void of a legacy.

Now, talk radio is made up of Limbaugh clones, none of whom have the smarts or talent to do what he did. It’s all the same dumb tropes and talking points that you now get on Facebook. Calling women “femi-nazis” only gets you so far, especially when you have real-life contemporary nazis threatening the western liberal small-d democratic order.

I don’t listen to WBEN. I don’t need some stranger telling me what to think about things. I don’t need “Charlene from Lancaster” giving her deranged opinion about Vladimir Putin any more than I need “Rambo Jim’s” take on anything. I can make up my own mind by consuming the news from various sources. I don’t watch cable news talk for the same reasons. It is boring.

Last week, however, “Charlene” called up WBEN during Beamer’s time hosting and spewed a vicious, untrue stream of pro-Putin propaganda, which she likely picked up on local Q-Anon bulletin boards or Facebook. To call it unhinged would be a gross understatement. It was sheer insanity, delivered with a self-assured ignorance that is the hallmark of contemporary talk radio and Facebook political discourse. Putin is getting the job done in Ukraine, she said.

Why is it that so many people in western New York in particular are so deeply and shamelessly radicalized on the right? The common denominator is WBEN. Caputo, DiPietro, Mychajliw, Paladino, Aldinger, Dinero, Thompson, the risible “Financial Guys” – just to name a few – all of them share a nexus with WBEN. It is where right-wing ideology goes to grow an audience, to spread propaganda, and to seek legitimacy. I mean, the radio wouldn’t let lies on the air, would it?!

It starts with Grand Island tolls, morphs during the Obama years into the “tea party”, Bauerle declares that Obama is worse than al Qaeda. They go through the Koch-funded “Americans for Prosperity,” then Trumpism, the alt-right, “Groypers“, and anti-mask/anti-vaxxers. It is a straight line that has done so much and worked so lazily to poison our society and political discourse. It has helped to transform the conservative movement writ-large, and the Republican Party, into a local branch of United Russia.

They want to be ruled by an anti-woke dictator. They like Putin because Putin is anti-woke. Putin does not think “black lives matter.” Putin doesn’t “say gay”. Putin hates trans people and gays and lesbians and queer people, too. Like they, Putin has no real use for (((George Soros))) or the (((globalists))). Putin only cancels the libs who dissent from his party line. They like that Putin literally eliminates opponents when he doesn’t put on a show trial and sends them to Siberia. Trump and Putin got along. Trump wishes he could do to critics what Putin does.

This is why Q-addled right-wing talk radio callers praise war crimes and call their victims Nazis – because Putin is right, in two senses of that word. But if you’re a young talk radio host bringing up Ukraine as a topic, you should have enough of a grasp of the subject to cross-examine callers. It’s supposed to be a dialogue, not a soliloquy.

Non-sports talk radio is the gateway to right-wing authoritarianism, and this has been a gradual process over the course of the last 50 years. “Charlene” is a symptom. WBEN is the opiate.

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