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Posted
8 minutes ago, Ghost of NMAS said:

I hope she’s prepared to get shot in the head with a pepper ball 

I'm pretty sure her approach is "I wish a muthafucka would."  

Honestly, shit like that is how we win.  Go ahead, shoot pepper balls at pastors.  Women pastors especially.  Doing nothing more than exercising both her First Amendment rights and her Call.  DO IT.

But goddammit, I'd have to deal with one pissed off wife at home that night if it happens.  So, won't someone think of poor Brisket?

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Posted
16 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

We will be there.  My wife will be in her collar.  I'll be in this:

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It's but one little thing.  But it IS a thing.  At the very least, at least our kids will know we didn't collaborate (we're doing a lot more than this....but we're doing this too).

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Posted

I would recommend not bringing your mobile phone to a No Kings protest. If possible bring a new burner phone so you can take videos/photos and then toss the phone before getting home. I wouldn't give the feds the opportunity to identify that you're there and perhaps hack into your phone. At the very least they could id that your phone is there and then start tracking any and everything you do on that phone in the future. They already label anyone going to the rally as a potential terrorist so no reason to give them evidence that you might be one.

I would also wear non-descript clothing with a ballcap and shades to make it less likely to identify me. I'm sure that I will get at least one reply with f-off and that you're not afraid of the govt, but why make the fascists job easier?

Posted
21 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I would recommend not bringing your mobile phone to a No Kings protest. If possible bring a new burner phone so you can take videos/photos and then toss the phone before getting home. I wouldn't give the feds the opportunity to identify that you're there and perhaps hack into your phone. At the very least they could id that your phone is there and then start tracking any and everything you do on that phone in the future. They already label anyone going to the rally as a potential terrorist so no reason to give them evidence that you might be one.

I would also wear non-descript clothing with a ballcap and shades to make it less likely to identify me. I'm sure that I will get at least one reply with f-off and that you're not afraid of the govt, but why make the fascists job easier?

Yeah, we ditch our phones for these.  For real, you can live without it for a few hours.

But part of my wife's job and call is to be conspicuous and visibly bearing witness, so her face being known is something we've gotta live with.

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Posted
20 hours ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

hopefully her response was you're a grown ass man and you can wear whatever you want

Ha -- she told me to go for it.

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Posted

What is your higher authority, moral, spiritual, or otherwise?

A Lesson From the German Resistance That Applies Today
As authoritarian rules gain ground across the democratic world, making inroads not only in Hungary and Turkey, but even in the United States, a question from the 20th century has resurfaced in the 21st, one that presses on individuals as well as institutions. Put simply, who bends the knee to tyranny and who stands up to it?

A clue can be found in an extraordinary episode from inside the Third Reich that has lain, almost forgotten, for nearly 80 years. At the heart of it is a loose grouping of 10 or so friends and acquaintances drawn from German high society, both the aristocracy and professional elite. Their circle included not one but two countesses, an ambassador’s widow, a diplomat, high-ranking government officials (current and former), a doctor, a pioneering headmistress and a former model, among others. What they found in one another was a shared willingness to defy Hitler, in ways large and small.

Except their assumption of common purpose was fatally flawed. In September 1943, they met for a tea party — unaware that one of them was poised to betray all the rest to the Gestapo. That act would lead to arrest and jail and, for several of those present that day, death, whether by the guillotine or the hanging rope. Its ramifications would eventually reach the apex of the Nazi state.

The core mystery that runs through this story is not just the identity of the betrayer, but also why people of privilege and rank, who could so easily have kept their heads down, risked everything. Had they fallen in line, their fortunes, careers and country estates likely would have remained intact. They could have survived the war unscathed. But they chose another path.

Consider Otto Kiep, 57 years old at the time of the tea party, a diplomat who had secured the glamorous post of German consul general in New York City in the last years of the Weimar Republic. In 1933, an invitation had come to attend a dinner in honor of an eminent fellow countryman, Albert Einstein, who also happened to be the world’s most famous Jew. To accept would be to incur the wrath of his new Nazi masters, installed in power just a few weeks earlier. To refuse would be to side with their campaign of antisemitic persecution. Kiep accepted the invitation and delivered a toast in Einstein’s honor. That brought a summons back to Berlin where he would be hauled before the Führer himself.

Or take Maria von Maltzan, the young countess who turned her Berlin apartment into an unofficial refuge for “submarines” — Jews forced to live in hiding, whose safety depended on staying silent and unseen. (Among them was Ms. von Maltzan’s own forbidden Jewish lover.) Or her fellow countess, Lagi Solf, who broke the rules banning contact with Jews, in order to fetch groceries for the submarines. Carrying full shopping bags, one in each hand, had long been her habit. That way, if she ran into someone on the street she would be unable to give the requisite Heil Hitler salute.

In scouring the archives, including letters, diaries and court testimonies left behind by the group, and by speaking with their surviving relatives, I’ve begun to form an answer to why some were capable of saying no to a mighty and terrifying regime while the vast majority of their neighbors were bowing their heads and saying yes.

Several were committed Christians, adamant that they would ultimately have to answer not to Adolf Hitler but to Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most devout was the hostess of the fateful tea party: the innovative educator, Elisabeth von Thadden, whose school, the Evangelical Rural Education Home for Girls, founded six years before the Third Reich, discreetly took in Jewish pupils while their families scrambled to secure the papers that would enable them to flee the country. Her belief that she was accountable to God alone helped Ms. von Thadden face down the Gestapo inspector who came to examine her school for “deficiencies of conviction,” after the authorities learned that she had recited an Old Testament psalm, which, to them, bore the unforgivable taint of Hebrew scripture. (A 13-year- old pupil was the informant.)

Others among the rebels were children of the nobility, convinced their highest loyalty was not to national socialism but to their own ancestors. Hitler might have dreamed of a 1000-year Reich, but these families had already ruled Germany for centuries. They believed that those of their class represented the deep and true Germany, defined in part by its patrician ideal of compassion for the weak. Nazism would be a passing fad; it was they, and the aristocratic inheritance they embodied, that would last.

So it was that Maria von Maltzan could speak to the Gestapo men who raided her apartment with imperious impatience. When they demanded she open up the wooden compartment under a sofa-bed — inside which her lover was hiding, holding his breath — she explained that it could not be opened, and that if the secret police were so certain someone was hiding inside, they should aim their guns at it and shoot. She all but dared them to do it. But, she insisted, if they did, they would have to compensate her for the damage, and promise to do so in advance and in writing. Her gambit, deployed with all the hauteur of her caste, worked. Her lover survived.

Several key players in the drama were women whose upbringing shared another striking aspect: a close relationship with a strong father. That was true of Ms. von Thadden and both countesses, Maria and Lagi. In all three cases, the women were not just loved by their fathers; they were trusted by them. In a way that was unusual in the era before modern feminism, they were deemed by their fathers to be the equal of any man, capable of taking on any task. Long after their fathers were dead, the women carried that confidence with them. By the time the Nazis ruled Germany, it had blossomed into courage.

The strength of those women was buttressed by that deeper conviction that is perhaps the key determinant of who defies an oppressive regime and who buckles before it: belief in an authority higher than the government of the day. Most rebels at the tea party also came to understand that such a belief demanded action as well as thought.

For some, that translated into small gestures of defiance, like Lagi Solf and her shopping bags. For others, such as Otto Kiep, it meant acts of audacious resistance, coming within touching distance of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Through deeds large and small, they demonstrated — to themselves and one another — that obedience was not the only option.

To be clear, most aristocratic Germans did not rebel against Hitler. On the contrary, the German nobility largely fell in line behind the Nazis, drawn in part by the Führer’s pledge to restore titles abolished in the Weimar era. And of course, we cannot neatly read across from that place and that time to our own age.

But if there is a lesson to be gleaned from the deadly fate of those men and women, it might just be that the best safeguard against tyranny is a legion of people who believe in an authority higher than any political program, prince — or president.

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Posted
45 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I would also wear non-descript clothing with a ballcap and shades to make it less likely to identify me. I'm sure that I will get at least one reply with f-off and that you're not afraid of the govt, but why make the fascists job easier?

Costumed protesters in Portland defy description of the city as a 'war zone'

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Posted

These lies and incendiary language are endangering regular Americans that will peacefully protest. If any protestors are killed or injured this weekend, the blood is on their hands. 

Mike Johnson is a traitor to the United States. Unfuckingbelievable. I will cheer when this twerp faces justice. 

 

 

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Posted
47 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

These lies and incendiary language are endangering regular Americans that will peacefully protest. If any protestors are killed or injured this weekend, the blood is on their hands. 

Mike Johnson is a traitor to the United States. Unfuckingbelievable. I will cheer when this twerp faces justice. 

 

 

We do not hate America, Speaker Johnson.  We just hate you.

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Posted

I just posted this in the Daily Texan to hopefully get some views from folks who don't visit the Cloak Room, but this article about how Chicagoans are starting to organize should be seen here, too.

 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Hank Kingsley said:

These lies and incendiary language are endangering regular Americans that will peacefully protest. If any protestors are killed or injured this weekend, the blood is on their hands. 

Mike Johnson is a traitor to the United States. Unfuckingbelievable. I will cheer when this twerp faces justice. 

 

 

Countering this message plainly and obviously is important.  For example, my signage and such is bedecked in multiple American flags.

Because I am a patriot.

Mike Johnson is a traitor.  He doesn't get to claim a country that he betrays and sells out on bended knee.  My family fought and bled for this country.  We'll do so again, while Mike Johnson hides in his den of cowardice, groveling at the feet of an authoritarian who stands against every American value.

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Posted
22 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Mike Johnson is a traitor.  He doesn't get to claim a country that he betrays and sells out on bended knee.  My family fought and bled for this country.  We'll do so again, while Mike Johnson hides in his den of cowardice, groveling at the feet of an authoritarian who stands against every American value.

Just remember that Mike Johnson is the Speaker and second in line for the Presidency because Matt Gaetz was upset that Kevin McCarthy was not stopping the underage sex investigation of Gaetz.

Posted

I'll put this here since it's the general resistance thread. Maybe this will become a trend for more kids publicly shaming their shitty politician parents.

When Children of Public Figures Go Public With Their Dissent
The conversation heats up on social media.

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Maddie Block was scrolling on social media last month when she saw a post from a New Mexico state senator about his recent trip to Israel, where he heard remarks from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ms. Block, 28, who lives in New York and is a vocal defender of Palestinian rights, was stopped in her tracks. The post dismissed the idea that Israel was committing genocide in its war in Gaza, saying that “Israel does everything possible to avoid killing Gazan civilians.” To Ms. Block, the post amounted to misinformation, and sought to excuse Israel for killing tens of thousands of people in Gaza, she said in an interview.

So she decided to post a TikTok video disagreeing with its author — who also happens to be her father.

“It looks like my dad and a bunch of other, just like, loser politicians from New Mexico went to meet with Netanyahu,” Ms. Block said in a video that has been viewed more than 1.8 million times and gained national media attention.

In the video and a series of follow-up posts, she speculated that her father, State Senator Jay Block, a Republican representing parts of northwestern Albuquerque, was being paid to repeat pro-Israel talking points. (He denies this.) She questioned why a state senator needed to get involved in the Middle East, anyway: “How does meeting with Netanyahu help the local people of New Mexico?” she asked.

The political rifts that exist in families across the country often play out behind closed doors. But in an era of intense polarization, some young family members of political figures have taken to social media to condemn the positions of their elders.

Social media has had a “profound impact in terms of taking these disagreements public,” said Ioana Literat, an associate professor of communication at Teachers College, Columbia University, and an author of “Not Your Parents’ Politics.” Whether or not they are from high-profile families, members of Gen Z “don’t have to rely on traditional media gatekeepers or family approval to be heard.”

The phenomenon has left some lawmakers in the awkward position of having to field phone calls from reporters about their child’s TikTok account. Reached by phone last week, Senator Block said he was proud of his daughter, and that he supported her right to say whatever she wanted about his political positions. The two are not currently in contact, he said.

“I love my daughter very much,” he said. “Anything she has said to hurt me, whether politically or financially or relationship-wise, I forgive her.”

In the interview, Mr. Block reiterated his support for Israel, which he thinks has been justified in how it has conducted its strikes in Gaza. He said he had visited as part of a bipartisan cultural exchange program paid for by the Israeli government, motivated in part by his concerns about rising antisemitism in the United States after the Oct. 7 attack.

He said that after his daughter posted her video, he and a member of his staff had received death threats. “Reckless comments can really push people toward violence, and unfortunately we’ve seen that a lot today, quite frankly, with the left,” he said.

The Block family is not alone in navigating their political disagreements in public. Political scions have long applied public pressure to their parents. Patti Davis, for instance, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, was a thorn in her father’s side throughout his presidency, loudly denouncing his policies on nuclear weapons. In recent years, the dynamic more often results in political sparring and family drama that tends to draw an audience online.

Take Jack Schlossberg, who called his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign “an embarrassment” and has continued to oppose his efforts as President Trump’s health secretary. Or Christian Walker, a conservative social media figure who publicly criticized his father, the Senate candidate Herschel Walker, in 2022 after reports that he paid a girlfriend to have an abortion.

And then there is Vivian Wilson, a daughter of Elon Musk, who wrote on Threads last year that her father had misrepresented her experience as a transgender woman “in a last-ditch attempt to garner sympathy points.” She called the Trump administration, which her father helped into office, “cartoonishly evil” in an interview this year with Teen Vogue.

Some of the young, digitally savvy family members speaking up are estranged from the relatives whose politics they oppose. But not all of them. Claudia Conway, daughter of the former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, made news as a 15-year-old for a series of posts disapproving of her mother’s political views. (In one, she begged Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to “adopt” her.)

In an interview with The New York Times last year, Ms. Conway said she regretted the way she had worded some of her posts in 2020. In the years since, she said that she and her mother had worked to repair their relationship.

Ms. Block, who has not spoken to her father in more than two years, does not expect that kind of reconciliation. In a recent interview, she said she grew up mostly sharing the Republican viewpoints of her father, a former lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. When he retired from the military and ran for a seat on the Sandoval County Commission in 2016, Ms. Block helped with his campaign. “I couldn’t have won my first election without her,” he said in the interview.

The two began to have private arguments about abortion rights and immigration as the Trump administration got underway, Ms. Block said. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 strained their relationship further. “He was so anti-vax and not wanting to wear masks and saying this was some form of government tyranny,” Ms. Block said.

Children of politicians are already exposed to the public’s approval or disapproval of their parents’ politics, said Christopher Ojeda, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. In many cases, those young people end up choosing between conflict with their families and conflict with their peers. “They’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he said.

Ms. Block, who now works for a nonprofit and is pursuing a master’s degree, said she would have been more willing to overlook their disagreements if her father were not in office. However, he was influencing policies that she believed were hurting people, she said, and he had not been receptive to her private confrontations. “That was when I was like, I think I kind of need to start speaking out about this,” she said.

Ms. Block said she did not want her posts to result in threats for either her or her father. She said she hoped her videos on TikTok, where she has more than 50,000 followers, would encourage people to pay attention to politics at the local and state level.

She is quickly learning that even criticism can become fodder for more content.

When she saw that her father had spoken to The Daily Mail about their relationship, describing her actions as “horrible,” she posted on TikTok again.

“I had a good laugh,” she wrote [Nice use of Glover's "This is America"].



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