A white nationalist is going to be the US president. Several countries have such rats as leaders & are sustaining the growth of extremist & nationalist forces. We need social media to communicate & collaborate with each other.

Freedom of speech is fundamental to social transformation. Those arrested, disappeared, tortured, murdered for exercising it testify to that. None of us cares if nationalists have a platform for their hate speech but if we allow them to be censored, it is just a matter of time before they come for us.

A white nationalist is going to be the US president. Several countries have such rats as leaders & are sustaining the growth of extremist & nationalist forces. We need social media to communicate & collaborate with each other.

Freedom of speech is fundamental to social transformation. Those arrested, disappeared, tortured, murdered for exercising it testify to that. None of us cares if nationalists have a platform for their hate speech but if we allow them to be censored, it is just a matter of time before they come for us.

The job of that apparatus is to garner the vote & manage opposition from the left. The apparatchiks are all suitable people to target in denunciations. Go for it.

But those who vote for the DP should not be denounced & excoriated for exercising their right to vote for who they pleased. The truth of the matter is that many who vote Democrat are involved in the social movements, including antiwar, women’s rights, civil rights, & all the rest–& they always have been. Many who vote Democrat are progressive, humanitarian, marvelous people & these sweeping denunciations are not deserved.

Today the Russian defense minister announced their air force has launched a major operation off the carrier in the Syrian provinces of Idlib & Homs targeting ammunition depots, training camps, & armaments factories.

The defense minister didn’t mention the resumption of Russian airstrikes over rebel-held east Aleppo where 250,000 civilians live & which were reported by Syrian activists.

Some antiwar activists object (fewer of them protest) when US warplanes claim they’re emancipating civilians by bombing them to smithereens–like in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya. But they consider Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians to be the real deal of freedom fighting. How have politics degenerated so badly on fundamental principles?

Principled antiwar activists are opposed to bombing civilians to death & accept no compromise on that. The only principled antiwar demands to rebuild the international antiwar movement around are: the immediate cessation of Syrian & Russian bombing; the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces in Syria, overt & covert, paramilitary, mercenaries, on land, air, & by sea. Out now!

(Photo by Bassam Khabieh/Reuters)

So it must seem deranged to many international observers of US politics that so many people here are posting scurrilous denunciations of the protesters. At first the critics sniffed at the young people because they didn’t protest Obama’s wars. That’s because they couldn’t get their babysitters to take them to the protests or because their grade school teachers were bigger than them & wouldn’t let them out of school.

When that nonsense bottomed out, the crazy-pants element took up the charge against the protesters, denouncing them as ‘Soros-funded anti-democracy mobs & rioters pushing for a coup.” They claim the left & those damned liberals have ‘abandoned the working class who voted Trump into office when we should be supporting his pro-worker & antiwar positions’ & stop substituting identity politics for class. By identity politics, of course, they mean Black, Latino, immigrant, women, Muslims who feel most threatened by Trump’s fascistic threats & are marching to say hell no to that crap.

Then the accusers throw in the kicker: the protests are a regime-change operation by Clinton forces. It should come as no surprise that those making these surreal accusations are Trump supporters who probably don’t so much pretend as actually believe they are progressives. They complain they don’t want to be marginalized as crackpots & we can go along with that, & even acknowledge their sanity if they will face up to their stinking rotten reactionary politics. Either they’re crackpots or they’re right-wing. Or are they part of that alt-right thing?

Do you think it might be relevant that those slinging this nonsense around to discredit protesters also support Assad’s dictatorship; don’t just support but enthusiastically cheer Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians; see US intervention as a regime-change operation in Syria; ignore Rodrigo Duterte’s human rights crimes & support him because he talks trash to the US; think the Arab uprisings & most mass protests are CIA & Mossad operations?

Do you think it possible that right-wing people actually believe they are progressive? Hopefully they’re just nuts.

(Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)