収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

To get out of the way, here’s an update on schools: Pennsylvania school district requires social studies classes to incorporate right-wing propaganda. It’s mostly of interest because it’s not PragerU but another one of the factions. It’s not really the lead story in terms of importance or anything, but it doesn’t fit into the flow anywhere, so here y’go.

Now, to the actual Watch.

Let’s start with a couple of stories that went by for which I can provide some substantial missing context.

First one: The headline reads, DeSantis appoints Moms for Liberty co-founder to board overseeing state employee conduct. But let’s fill in the missing pieces.

If you read my Fascism Watch, you’ll know a lot about the moms4liberty cult, including: 1) The recent positive use of a Hitler quote on a chapter newsletter cover, and 2) The other co-founder coming out in support of the chapter head and her use of the Hitler quote.

That’s enough for me to say, “DeSantis appoints neo-nazi to board overseeing state employee conduct.”

Second one: Catholic clinic refuses to treat a 14-year-old trans girl… for her ADHD. Or anything else.

Right before losing power, the Trump administration, in this case under Pence’s leadership, had finally pushed through regulations _specifically declaring a right to withhold all medical care from all lgbt people_.

Remember that because it’s one of the things Republicans want. And they did the work. It missed happening by a few weeks and Biden’s win, and might’ve happened before end of term if they hadn’t been caught up in the coup attempt.

They’ll be back with this. After all, they do want all of us quite dead, and withholding medical care is one way to help make that happen.

Talking of people who explicitly want all queers dead, I’ve got a collection of items on the anti-LGBT campaign in California schools, mostly from VPS Reports:

• “Lynch them all!” Libs of TikTok incites death threats targeting Los Angeles Unified School District
• Sonja Shaw reshares threatening post against AG Rob Bonta: “you’re about to f- around and find out”
• Former Executive Director for Gays Against Groomers Frank Rodriguez and Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified school board member Leandra Blades (who attended Trump’s January 6th pre-insurrection rally) have been accused by OUSD Recall of influencing a minor to commit fraud for a social media stunt.

I don’t know how much legs any of these have, but one can always hope.

From this, let’s head to more hate against LGBT people:

The Atlantic isn’t really acknowledging the large internal refugee situation, but it is at least covering one family who fled Texas for California. These stories are important and we need more of them.

Anti-queer hate is not enough on its own, apparently: Author of Mississippi Trans Health Care Ban Lost His Primary Because He’s Not Racist Enough. They like his anti-queer bona-fides, but he isn’t onboard with supporting the Confederacy and its flag, so they replaced him with someone who was.

And from racism to anti-Semitism, specifically of Elon Musk, as well as more about Musk and Twitter:

The Daily Beast writes: Enough! Advertisers and Governments Must Dump Elon Musk. Fully agreed, of course. Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria write The truth about Elon Musk and anti-Semitism, which is a bit of the history that’s brought us here. TechDirt also has a bit of recap and commentary.

The problem with all of this is that every time I’ve seen Musk lurch another step to the fash in the past, I’ve seen a big upsurge in new accounts elsewhere. Sometimes directly (e.g., Mastodon), sometimes by strong reports (e.g., people looking for BlueSky invitation codes), sometimes via weak reports (e.g., anything about Threads).

I’m not seeing or hearing any of that this week. The people who are still on Twitter appear to have decided they are just fine helping fund the fascist project of an anti-Semite and anti-queer billionaire, and blaming everything that’s wrong on The Jews is not enough to move them.

Love to be wrong but I’m pretty sure I’m not. The numbers absolutely didn’t budge, and every other time, there’s been a landslide. If I’m not wrong, this means Elon Musk has normalised sitting at the table with nazis, and really, normalised nazis to a big degree – it appears that fascists who want to murder millions of us is Just Another Politics again amongst remaining Twitter users.

I even had someone on my own writing discord grumble quietly about my ban on Twitter links today. I am… extremely unhappy about that.

On the other hand, advocacy groups are rallying to the defense of the Anti-Defamation League and the Center for Countering Digital Hate in response to his lawsuits attempting to silence them and their criticism of his fascist propaganda and disinformation fountain. It’s a miniscule measure of consolation, but it’s a measure.

Finally, I’m confident that Musk has made a very severe mistake in admitting that he interfered in allied military operations on behalf of Putin and Russia. If you missed it: Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.

There’s been a bit of coverage of this since this under-weighted article was written, and people are starting to realise how important – and bad – this was.

Elon needs to understand there are games you do not fucking play, and this is one of them.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.