Jakob Wasserhoevel

YouTube video by fantano The Bad Bunny Situation Is Stupid

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Herdecke: Merz verurteilt Messer-Angriff auf Bürgermeisterin von Herdecke Nach dem Angriff auf die SPD-Kommunalpolitikerin Iris Stalzer in NRW hat Bundeskanzler Merz mit Empörung auf die Tat reagiert.

Herdecke: Merz verurteilt Messer-Angriff auf Bürgermeisterin von Herdecke

Nearly 80 years after McCarthyism, Jane Fonda relaunches Committee for the First Amendment: ‘The stakes are too high’ | CNN Eight decades after Hollywood legends like Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland launched the Committee for the First Amendment to stand up to McCarthyism, Jane Fo...

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Nordrhein-Westfalen: Designierte Bürgermeisterin von Herdecke offenbar bei Messerangriff verletzt In Herdecke im Ruhrgebiet hat es vor dem Wohnhaus der designierten Bürgermeisterin Iris Stalzer einen Messerangriff gegeben – offenbar auf die SPD-Politikerin selbst. Über den oder die Täter ist bisla...

Ich bin schockiert über die Nachricht, dass Iris Stalzer vor ihrem Wohnhaus in Herdecke niedergestochen wurde. Ich hoffe, der oder die Täter werden schnell ausfindig gemacht und Iris Stalzer kann sich von diesem brutalen Angriff erholen. www.tagesschau.de/inland/regio...

Why is the surprised about the limited return on investment for a Safdie drama?

The more insane thing is spending 50 Million Dollars on an Indie Movie with a limited audience.

YouTube video by Secular Talk ‘F*CKING TRAITORS!’: US VETERAN EXPLODES AT ICE AS PORTLAND ERUPTS | The Kyle Kulinski Show

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YouTube video by Secular Talk Visibly Confused Trump STUNS Navy Crowd With Incoherence | The Kyle Kulinski Show

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Coalitions are a funny thing

Britain’s Tories Are Radicalizing — and Losing Hope Since becoming leader in 2024, Kemi Badenoch has taken Britain’s Tories onto hard-right territory — and dismal polling. Her call this week to abandon climate targets shows how Britain’s once dominant ...

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After a month of recovery, 12-year-old Lydia Kaiser—who was shot in the head at Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis—is back in class 🧡

Lydia was shot while shielding a younger student from the attack and suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Bari Weiss Named CBS News Editor-In-Chief, Solidifying Network's Rightward Shift The network will also acquire her publication, The Free Press, for a hefty sum.

Bari Weiss was named the editor-in-chief of CBS News, cementing the rightward shift of one of media's most storied newsrooms

You can’t get anti-institutionalists to trust an institution I will stipulate at the outset that I do not know how to reverse the long trend toward distrust in traditional American news sources. There's probably a solution out there, likely something involving ...

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Jane Fonda Revives Her Father’s McCarthy-Era Free Speech Group The actress joined Spike Lee, Billie Eilish, Pedro Pascal and others in reviving the Committee for the First Amendment, a group that her father, Henry Fonda, was a member of in the 1940s.

Jane Fonda and hundreds of members of the entertainment industry have revived the Committee for the First Amendment, a free-expression group that was originally formed by Hollywood stars including her father, Henry Fonda, during the McCarthy era.

Democracy depends on its citizens, especially those with a public platform, holding the line on what we consider beyond the pale, especially when extremism has broad support. It’s an obligation we must accept.

Who are we to draw the line? We are citizens who demand to live in a democratic Republic.

It’s true that those who think Trump is beyond the pale cannot claim to be representing “the country.” But neither can the Trumpists. America is deeply divided. There has never been a consensus that the nation should exist as a pluralistic democracy. And those who abhor that vision are now in power.

Too many prominent liberals and Democratic politicians are eager to sacrifice a substantive commitment to democratic values and principles on the altar of “unity”: No more drawing lines, too divisive!

They are not fostering understanding – just helping to normalize Trumpism.

As America falls apart, Ezra Klein aspires to be the voice of reason and demonstrate that he can still operate across the divide and do politics where everyone else has given up on it. But creating a sanitized fiction of the other side as the basis of your politics is not realism – it’s folly.

It is certainly worth grappling with the reasons why Trump still garners mass support beyond the circles that are ideologically committed to destroying modern pluralism. But that’s a very different endeavor from simply using Trump’s mass appeal as a justification to normalize MAGA.

White innocence is achieved not only by justifying and apologizing widespread support for political extremism – but in this case, by decreeing that whatever a significant portion of “regular folks” are supporting categorically cannot be extremism in the first place.

This tendency to latch onto any argument that helps to normalize Trump and his supporters is also indicative of how strong the incentives are within mainstream discourse to sanitize the political choices of white conservative Christians: As “regular folks,” they can do no wrong.

Remarkably, such arguments also ignore that America has had plenty of experience with broad popular support for state authoritarianism in its own history. There is nothing old, stable, or consolidated about *multiracial, pluralistic* democracy. It started less than 60 years ago.

This argument builds on a mythical tale of America’s past, a distorted perspective on U.S. history describing democracy as old, consolidated, and exceptionally stable, imagining the country and its people as basically immune to authoritarianism: It cannot happen here!

Since the mainstream discourse stipulates that extremism must be “fringe” in these United States, anything that has broad support is reflexively sanitized as *not* extremism. This apologist sleight of hand is often deployed to provide cover for extreme forces within the Republican Party.

This tendency to obscure the radicalization of the Right, to normalize Trump because of his continued mass appeal, to legitimize rightwing extremism, to accommodate and launder Trumpism, is a pervasive feature of the Trump era – it is one of its core pathologies.

Klein’s musings about redrawing the line are a manifestation of a pervasive tendency in elite circles to accommodate rather than fight back, to acquiesce rather than stand firm. It is exactly the wrong lesson to learn from a decade of Trumpism as the dominant force on the Right.

Something Ezra Klein hinted at in his conversation with TNC last week is still gnawing at me: That Liberals / Democrats may need to redraw the boundaries of what is acceptable so that Trump is no longer excluded. I think that is precisely the wrong answer to our current situation.

Where Is the Line? On Ezra Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the struggle to define the boundaries of what is acceptable in America

ICYMI yesterday:

I wrote about Ezra Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the struggle to define the boundaries of what is acceptable in America – and why democratic citizens have an obligation to hold the line on what we consider beyond the pale.

Some thoughts from my new piece:

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I think it is a mix of latent homophobia (of a weird "not queer enough" kind), cynicism against his youth appeal, & their perception of him as a "West Wing" politician of empty words. All of those criticisms are wrong & stupid, off course, but I find them a lot in left-wing anti-Buttigieg articles.

YouTube video by LastWeekTonight Presidential Libraries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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