We Resist: Day 825

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Late yesterday and earlier today by me: An Observation and Financial Freedom for Everyone and Primarily Speaking.

Here are some more things in the news today...

Robert Costa, Tom Hamburger, Josh Dawsey, and Rosalind S. Helderman at the Washington Post: Trump Says He Is Opposed to White House Aides Testifying to Congress, Deepening Power Struggle with Hill. "[Donald] Trump on Tuesday said he is opposed to current and former White House aides providing testimony to congressional panels in the wake of the special counsel report, intensifying a power struggle between his administration and House Democrats. In an interview with The Washington Post, Trump said that complying with congressional requests was unnecessary after the White House cooperated with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's probe of Russian interference and the president's own conduct in office. 'There is no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress where it's very partisan — obviously very partisan,' Trump said."

That is absolutely incorrect. And it is infuriating that the Washington Post is framing this as a "power struggle" between Trump and Congressional Democrats, which is the absolute nadir of bothsideserism bullshit.

This isn't a "power struggle." The Democrats aren't trying to seize power; they are trying to protect our democracy, which is their job. They are tasked with holding the president accountable. Trump, on the other hand, is orchestrating a subversion of our democracy and a consolidation of power in the executive branch, with the assistance of Congressional Republicans.

Goddammit.

Alison Durkee at Vanity Fair: The White House Escalates Its Battle to Keep Don McGahn Silent. "[T]he White House is reportedly planning to use executive privilege to block [former White House counsel Don McGahn] from complying with a congressional subpoena, after McGahn's comments to special counsel Robert Mueller pointed toward potential instances of the president obstructing justice. ...[T]he move to block McGahn's testimony is part of a broader effort to thwart House Democrats from securing testimony from current and former White House aides, and comes after White House deputy counsel Michael M. Purpura instructed former personnel security director Carl Kline not to appear before Congress."

President Trump stopped to talk to reporters on the WH lawn. He said: The Democrats are trying to win 2020 and they aren’t going to win with the people I see...The only way they can luck out is by constantly going after me. pic.twitter.com/0FphDLtHXA

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) April 24, 2019

President Trump didnt stop long enough to answer the many questions reporters had today. My Qs: Should DHS be preparing for new & different Russian forms of interference in the 2020 election? Do you plan to exert executive privilege in response to congressional requests?

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) April 24, 2019

Staff at the Daily Beast: Trump: If Democrats Try to Impeach Me, I'll Take It to the Supreme Court. "In his latest tweet, strewn with misplaced capital letters, the president made clear he wouldn't go quietly. 'The Mueller Report, despite being written by Angry Democrats and Trump Haters, and with unlimited money behind it ($35,000,000), didn't lay a glove on me,' he wrote. 'I DID NOTHING WRONG. If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only ... are there no 'High Crimes and Misdemeanors,' there are no Crimes by me at all. All of the Crimes were committed by Crooked Hillary, the Dems, the DNC and Dirty Cops — and we caught them in the act! We waited for Mueller and WON, so now the Dems look to Congress as last hope!'" YIKES.

Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress: Trump Thinks the Supreme Court Is His Personal Goon Squad (and He May Be Right). "Trump is wrong that the Supreme Court may lawfully intervene if the House of Representatives chooses to impeach him. ...So a Supreme Court decision weighing in on whether the House properly impeached Mr. Trump would be utterly lawless. The House has the 'sole' power to decide which officials should be impeached, and the Senate has the 'sole' power to determine whether the charges brought by the House warrant removal from office. As the court held in Nixon, 'the Judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, were not chosen to have any role in impeachments.' The problem, however, is that this Supreme Court seems to think that that the law is optional when the Trump administration is involved."

Steve Vladeck at NBC News: Trump Tweet About Impeachment Confuses Political Conclusions with Legal Ones. "Whether Trump broke any criminal laws is therefore formally irrelevant to whether the House of Representatives has the constitutional authority to impeach him. The House certainly can impeach the president — or any other government officer — for non-criminal misconduct. The harder question is whether the House should do so. But the one point on which we all should be able to agree is that the Constitution commits resolution of that question entirely to our elected representatives in Congress — and not to the president's Twitter feed or the absence of criminal charges against him."

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post: Trump Plausibly Committed Impeachable Offenses. A Leading Expert Explains How.

I spoke to [Philip Bobbitt, constitutional scholar at Columbia University and co-author of Impeachment: A Handbook] at length about the latest revelations. The upshot: Bobbitt now believes it's "plausible" that Trump committed impeachable offenses and that the House of Representatives is obligated to proceed from this premise.

...Coming from Bobbitt, this is notable, because he has long maintained that impeachment must be reserved only for the most extraordinary cases and (as his book argues) that we must approach the question of whether conduct is impeachable with extreme caution.

...In our interview, Bobbitt described the implications of all this for impeachment this way:

Mueller depicts an executive branch that is using the levers of his constitutional power in a corrupt way. It's not that a president can't determine whom to prosecute or investigate, or give advice to members of the executive to shape their testimony at legislative hearings. It's that he can't do so with the intent to frustrate the investigation of his own culpability. We certainly have ample evidence that suggests this what he was trying to do.

What's more, this obstructive conduct can be directly tied to the other element of the case against Trump: his response to Russian electoral sabotage. Importantly, Trump did not merely seek to derail an investigation into his campaign's conspiracy with that Russian sabotage — that is, into his own conduct.

Rather, Trump also sought to derail a full accounting of the Russian attack on our political system, separate and apart from whether his own campaign conspired with it. He did this because acknowledging the sabotage would detract from the greatness of his victory, which also led him to fail to marshal a serious response to the next round of interference.

Bobbitt explained the relevance of those facts to the impeachment question this way:

The real problem isn't just cooperating with the Russians, or just impeding an investigation into that cooperation. It's impeding an investigation to stop a determination of what Russia did, why, and how they did it. Because this is not over. It's going to happen again, not just in our country. In many countries.

The exposure of the country to very damaging political intelligence techniques, for the venal reason of not diminishing the status of your victory — would that be a high crime and misdemeanor? It certainly would.

In sum: Trump's obstruction to protect his own hide has also impeded investigation into Russia's subversion of the integrity of our elections — and that is an impeachable offense.

Cough:

Western diplomat says Putin decree easing procedure for people in areas of eastern Ukraine held by Russia-backed separatists to obtain Russian citizenship is "a highly provocative step that undermines efforts to de-escalate the situation."

— Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (@RFERL) April 24, 2019

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Maria Vasilyeva at Reuters: North Korea's Kim Arrives for Summit with Russia's Putin. "North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in the Russian city of Vladivostok on Wednesday for a summit he is likely to use to seek support from President Vladimir Putin while Pyongyang’s nuclear talks with Washington are in limbo. ...Kim will sit down for talks with Putin on Thursday at a university campus on an island just off Vladivostok. It will be the first summit between the two leaders, and the standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear program will top the agenda, according to a Kremlin foreign policy aide."

Julia Hollingsworth at CNN: Duterte Threatens 'War' Against Canada over Trash Shipped to Philippines. "Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to 'go to war' with Canada if the country doesn't take back tons of trash a Canada-based company had shipped to Manila several years ago. 'I'll give a warning to Canada maybe next week that they better pull that (trash) out,' he said Tuesday, according to CNN Philippines. 'We'll declare war against them, we can handle them anyway.'" Just as a reminder, Trump thinks Duterte is tops.

Patrick Wintour at the Guardian: Iran Will Continue to Defy U.S. Oil Sanctions, Says Tehran. "The Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, has said Tehran will continue to defy U.S. sanctions by finding buyers for its oil and warned that Washington should 'be prepared for the consequences' if it tries to stop it. ...Zarif, seen as the moderate face of Iran and speaking in New York, said Tehran would also keep the Strait of Hormuz open for oil exports. ...'It is in our interest, our vital national security interest, to keep the Persian Gulf open, to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.' He added that if the U.S. entered the Strait, they had to 'talk to those who are protecting the Strait of Hormuz, and that is (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).' The IRGC has been designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the Trump administration."

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Staff at BBC News: Europe Wildfires: Norway Police Evacuate Hundreds in Sokndal. "Hundreds of people have had to leave their homes in Norway as emergency services try to extinguish forest fires raging in the south of the country. Some 148 homes were evacuated around the town of Sokndal, where fires have been burning since Tuesday. Police say the fires are still out of control and warn that heavy winds could help them to spread. April is very early for forest fires in Norway, and experts have warned of a dramatic increase across the continent."

Emily Holden at the Guardian: Millions More Americans Breathing Dirty Air as Planet Warms, Study Finds. "Air quality in the U.S. has been improving since the 1970s, but that progress may be backsliding and 43% of Americans are now living in places where they are breathing unsafe air, according to the American Lung Association report. As temperatures rise, wildfires are getting worse and spewing smoke across the west. And more smog, or ozone, is forming on warmer days. For the three hottest years on record, 2015 through 2017, about 141 million people lived in U.S. counties that saw unhealthy levels of particle pollution, either in a single 24-hour period or over a year, or unhealthy levels of smog."

The best part about this tweet is gonna be when Roberts pretends not to have seen it and insists the citizenship question is important to the voting rights act, a law he has bitterly hated since he was in his 20s. https://t.co/LKLoHhIlME

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) April 24, 2019

[CN: Environmental racism; classism; food insecurity] Marlene Cimons for Nexus Media at ThinkProgress: Flint's 'Food Apartheid' Is Impeding Recovery from Water Crisis. "Community activists like Bob Brown are trying to create new hope for residents. He is among those in the Flint community working with Laura Schmit Olabisi, an associate professor of community sustainability and environmental science and policy at Michigan State University, to help residents cope with the ongoing health effects of lead poisoning. Her focus is on nutrition, trying to find ways to improve their access to healthy food. When people don't eat enough fruits and vegetables — and fail to consume nutrients like calcium and iron — the impact of heavy metals like lead in the body is exacerbated."

[CN: Rape culture] Edward McKinley at the Kansas City Star: Lobbyist's Crusade to Change Title IX in Missouri Stems from His Son's Expulsion. "After his son was accused and subsequently expelled from Washington University in St. Louis last year through the school's Title IX process, a leading Jefferson City lobbyist launched a campaign to change the law for every campus in the state. Richard McIntosh has argued to legislators that Title IX, the federal law barring sexual discrimination in education and mandating that schools set up internal systems to police sexual violence, is tilted unfairly against the accused." Fucking of course.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?

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The Global Echo of Violent Misogyny

by David Futrelle

[Trigger warning for violence, terrorism, eliminationism, misogyny, racism, Islamophobia.]

We all know that Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed dozens of people in attacks last Friday, was motivated by a toxic mélange of far-right ideology largely revolving around his intense hatred of Islam. The 1500-page "manifesto" he posted to the internet – a grab-bag of his own writing and material cut and pasted from assorted right-wing sites and even the Unabomber's manifesto – crackles with denunciations of Muslims, "Marxists" and the assorted other bogeymen that haunt right-wing dreams.

But what has yet to be fully appreciated is the degree to which he was also motivated by a deep hatred of women.

I've spent much of the past year seeking out and exposing (and often simply mocking) online misogyny for my blog Man Boobz. I find much of it in what some have taken to calling the "manosphere" – a loose collection of interlinked sites devoted to Men's Rights Activism, pickup artistry, and a strange separatist movement of sorts called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW). The overwhelming majority of these sites – the most popular of which include The Spearhead, A Voice for Men, In Mala Fide and MGTOWforums.com (to which I won't be providing direct links, but they're easy enough to find, if you're so inclined)– are steeped in misogyny (and in some cases racism). I've become very familiar with their standard misogynist "arguments" and rhetorical tropes.

After a blog reader alerted me to the misogyny in Breivik's manifesto, I read through those sections of the sprawling work that dealt specifically with feminism. I was struck again and again by how utterly familiar it all sounded. Much of it could have been taken word-for-word from the manosphere blogs I read every day. (Not to mention from some of the misogynist trolls who regularly comment on my site.) The ideology is the same, the language is the same, even the specific obsessions are the same – from no-fault divorce to the evils of "Sex and the City."

Here's one typical passage, which appears to have been written by Breivik himself:

It's the destructive and suicidal "Sex and the City" lifestyle (modern feminism, sexual revolution) which we are taught to revere as the truth. In that setting, men are not men anymore, but metro sexual and emotional beings that are there to serve the purpose as a never-criticising soul mate to the new age feminist woman goddess. The perfect matriarchy has now been fulfilled …

Isolated, "sex and the city lifestyle" is relatively harmless, but if you glorify it and ram it down the throat of mainstream society like we see today it becomes a lethal and destructive societal force as we are witnessing which eventually leads to a complete breakdown of moral/ethics, the nuclear family model and a sustainable fertility rate which again is leading us to the extinction of Europeans.

Breivik goes on to rant about STDs and no-fault divorce, before moving on to another favorite obsession of manosphere misogynists, the supposed sexual "capital" of manipulative women:

Females have a significantly higher proportion of erotic capital than males due to biological differences (men have significantly more prevalent sexual urges than females and are thus easily manipulated). The female manipulation of males has been institutionalised during the last decades and is a partial cause of the feminisation of men in Europe. This highly underestimated factor has contributed to the creation and rise of the matriarchal systems which are now dominating Western European countries.

Obsessed with the purported danger that Islam will outbreed the West, Breivik offers an assortment of creepy solutions to increase the fertility of Western whites. (It's not altogether clear to me if these are all his own views, but they certainly are consistent with what he says elsewhere in the manifesto.) After suggesting limiting contraception and banning abortion, Breivik offers this idea:

Discourage women in general to strive for full time careers. This will involve certain sexist and discriminating policies but should increase the fertility rate by up to 0,1-0,2 points.

Women should not be encouraged by society/media to take anything above a bachelor's degree but should not be prevented from taking a master or PhD. Males on the other hand should obviously continue to be encouraged to take higher education – bachelor, master and PhD. …

Womens "new role" should be actively illustrated and glorified through series, movies and commercials. …

The end result for implementing the above reforms would be an increase in the fertility rate up from 1,5 to approximately 2,1-2,4 which would be sustainable.

However, this will also involve significant restrictions in women's rights and media rights.

That last "side effect" does not seem to be much of a problem for Breivik.

Large chunks of the manifesto consist of cut-and-pasted blog posts from an anonymous far-right Norwegian blogger known as Fjordman. (See my post here for an extensive number of quotes from Fjordman that Breivik included in his manifesto.) Like Breivik's own writings, many of Fjordman's writings could be lifted virtually word for word from "manosphere" blogs.

One internet prankster conducted a little experiment that proved pretty clearly just how unexceptional this sort of rhetoric is in the manosphere, posting an assortment of misogynist quotes from Breivik's manifesto (all of them taken originally from Fjordman) to Reddit's Men's Rights forum – without identifying them as being from Breivik.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the blatant misogyny, the post initially received numerous upvotes and some positive comments ("Nice post man") from the regulars. Once it was revealed that the quotes had come from Breivik's manifesto, the downvotes and critical comments began to stack up. (I wrote about the incident here.)

But Reddit's Men's Rights subreddit is actually one of the most moderate and least misogynistic Men's Rights hangout online. Others in the manosphere have stepped up to defend Breivik's manifesto (if not his actions) plainly and explicitly, in full knowledge of just whose ideas they are endorsing.

On In Mala Fide, blogger Ferdinand Bardamu praises Breivik's "lucidity," and blames his murderous actions on the evils of a too-liberal society:

[A]nother madman with a sensible manifesto. Another completely rational, intelligent man driven to murderous insanity. And once again, society has zero introspection in regards to its profound ability to turn thoughtful men into lunatic butchers.

He's not being sarcastic here. He continues:

That makes HOW many rage killers in the past five years alone? And not just transparent headcases like Jared Loughner or George Sodini, but ordinary men like Pekka-Eric Auvinen or Joe Stack who simply weren't going to take it anymore. No one bothers to ask WHY all these men suddenly decide to pick up a gun and start shooting people – they're all written off as crazies. Or the rage killings are blamed on overly permissive gun laws …

Here's an idea – sick societies produce sick individuals who do sick things. Anders Breivin [sic] murdered nearly a hundred teens (not children, TEENS – they were at a summer camp for young adults) and must pay the price, but the blood of those teens is ultimately on the hands of the society that spat him forth. He is the bastard son of a masochistic, degenerate, rootless world that pisses on its traditions and heritage to elevate perversity, mindless consumerism and ethnic self-hatred to the highest of virtues.

That final reference to "ethnic self-hatred" seems to be Bardamu's euphemistic way of complaining that not enough white people are white supremacists.

Meanwhile, Chuck of Gucci Little Piggy offers what appears to be a somewhat more restrained, if ultimately more puzzling, defense of Breivik's manifesto – or at least that portion of the manifesto that Breivik borrowed from the writings of far-right blogger Fjordman.

After first complaining, incorrectly, that feminists are "try[ing] to blame Breivik on MRAs" (he cites me and Hugo Schwyzer as examples), Chuck goes on to endorse Breivik's (and Fjordman's) notion that feminism "grease[s]the wheels to allow Islam into his country," as Chuck summarizes the argument. The rest of Chuck's post elaborates on, and endorses, Breivik's/Fjordman's theories, arguing that feminism's "emasculation of Western men has taken the organic policing mechanism out of the hands of men in society" and thus rendered Western society helpless before the Islamic cultural invaders. (More on Bardamu and Gucci Little Piggy's arguments here.)

But the strangest response I've seen so far to the massacre in Norway comes from Sofiastry, an antifeminist blog that seems to be broadly sympathetic to the "alt" (that is, the "intellectually" racist) right. Apparently taking her cue from Bardamu, Sofia offers an appreciation of sorts for Breivik's repellant manifesto:

[A]lthough his actions were cruel beyond belief, and committed by a delusional, psychopath driven by his delusions of political grandeur, there is lucidity and sense in much of what he writes. He never seemed to explicitly advocated [sic] for a genocide of Muslims within Europe, but superficially claimed that he just wanted to sustain European culture.

So, let's weigh Breivik's pros and cons here. CON: He murdered dozens of people in cold blood, motivated by a hateful ideology. PRO: He didn't explicitly call for actual genocide?

And then it just gets, well, weird:

I feel that Breivik is being tried for more than his cruelty within the feminist community. The fact that he belongs to the privileged group of the white male makes him hate-worthy along with every other privileged white male who might sympathize with his ideology, even if they don't happen to be psychotic. Breivik exemplifies White Men, even though Osama Bin Laden to the very same liberal ideologues did not represent Every Muslim.

It's another symptom of our culture that feels it is OK to hold white men to higher standards of political correctness, self-flagellation and martyrdom whilst simultaneously relentlessly berating and mocking them on a cultural level.

Yep, that's right. She thinks we hate Breivik … because he's a white dude.

I can't speak for every feminist, but for me, it's more the murdering, and the misogyny, and the racism. But mostly the murdering. (For more on Sofia, see here.)

Despite the many undeniable similarities between Breivik's repellent misogyny and misogynist beliefs that are widespread in the "manosphere," some MRAs profess to be shocked –shocked! – that anyone would connect the dots. MRA bloviator Bernard Chapin, for example, responded to my first piece on Breivik with an angry, incoherent ten minute YouTube diatribe expressing his outrage that I would possibly suggest any connection between MRA thought and a "psychopath" like Breivik. It's a classic case of someone protesting too much. The connections are clear to anyone willing to see them.

No, Breivik is not an MRA. No, he didn't take his marching orders from The Spearhead or In Mala Fide. But he is steeped in the same kind of hatred that is prevalent on those sites, and many of his repugnant beliefs about feminism and women in general are virtually identical to beliefs widespread in the misogynistic manosphere – a fact that a few in the manosphere are already willing to acknowledge out loud, as we saw above.

No, not every misogynist is going to pick up a gun. But ideas do have consequences. Vile, hateful ideas have vile, hateful consequences.

PS: For more on Breivik's misogyny, see Michelle Goldberg's Norway Killer's Hatred of Women in TheDailyBeast.

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Open Thread & News Round-Up: Norway Attack

[Trigger warning for terrorism and violence.]

Here is some of the news emerging about Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian man accused of killing at least 93 people in a bomb attack and shooting rampage in Oslo and on the island of Utøya last week:

Breivik, who has admitted to being the bomber/shooter, was in court today for a custody hearing. The Guardian's live blog is here: The court "decided to remand Breivik in custody for eight weeks, as it believes there is a risk he would tamper with evidence were he released. Breivik has also provided statements that require further investigation—especially his assertion that there may be two more cells in his organisation. Judge has also agreed to the prosecution's petition for complete isolation for four weeks and a ban on letters and visitors."

CNN: Who is the suspect in the Norway attacks?

Reuters—Norway's mass killer pursuing anti-Islam crusade: "Multi-culturalism is one of the dirtiest words in Anders Behring Breivik's political vocabulary."

New York Times—Breivik Wrote of Fear of Islam and Plan for War:

As stunned Norwegians grappled with the deadliest attack in the country since World War II, a portrait began to emerge of the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, 32. The police identified him as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, while acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.

"We are not sure whether he was alone or had help," a police official, Roger Andresen, said at a televised news conference. "What we know is that he is right wing and a Christian fundamentalist."

In the 1,500-page manifesto, posted on the Web hours before the attacks, Mr. Breivik recorded a day-by-day diary of months of planning for the attacks, and claimed to be part of a small group that intended to "seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda."

He predicted a conflagration that would kill or injure more than a million people, adding, "The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come."

I wish I had wise or comforting words for our Norwegian Shakers. All I've got is this: We are with you.

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Explosion in Oslo

There has been a big explosion at the Prime Minister's office in Oslo today. Prime Minister Per Stoltenberg is fine, but there are reports that other people have been injured.

At the moment, the explosion appears to have been caused by a car bomb, but that has not been confirmed by officials.

UPDATE: Reuters is reporting at least one person has died.

UPDATE 2: A police officer on-scene has told Bloomberg that a bomb caused the blast.

UPDATE 3: Reuters confirms two deaths in the blast.

UPDATE 4: Contact information: Relatives can call 81502800. Witnesses can call +47 22669966.

UPDATE 5: There are reports, which have been confirmed by police, of a man dressed as a police officer opening fire at Utøya in Buskerud. Police are now on-site and have sealed off the area, but there are people hiding from the gunman in the sealed zone, and it is not known how many have been injured, if any.

UPDATE 6: The Guardian's live blog of events is here.

UPDATE 7: It is now being reported that five have been injured in the shooting. BBC coverage is here.

UPDATE 8: Oslo authorities are urging people to stay at home.

UPDATE 9: Per Reuters, seven people have died. Two more severely injured.

UPDATE 10: Reuters:

A gunman detained after shootings at a youth meeting on a Norwegian island and a bombing in central Oslo on Friday is Norwegian, Justice Minister Knut Storberget said.

"Our information is that he is Norwegian," he told a news conference. "I don't know so much about him."

He said that seven people were killed in a bombing in central Oslo and 10 injured. Several people were killed and others wounded in a shooting at a youth camp northwest of Oslo of the ruling Labour Party, he added.

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