Morning Briefing: Ohio Chapter of White Lives Matter Target of Civil Rights Lawsuit
Morning Briefing: Ohio Chapter of White Lives Matter Target of Civil Rights Lawsuit
White Lives Matter, the White Nationalist group, is the target of a lawsuit 'over the firebombing of a Geauga County church that organized drag queen story hour events last year.'
Morning Briefing: The Ohio chapter of White Lives Matter, the White Nationalist group, is reportedly the target of a lawsuit “over the firebombing of a Geauga County church that organized drag queen story hour events last year.” The lawsuit alleges that members of White Lives Matter “conspired to violate and deprive the church of its civil and property rights by throwing a Molotov cocktail at the church building ‘with the intent to burn it to the ground.’”
Aimenn Penny, a member of White Lives Matter Ohio and the far right extremists neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, was recently sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for attempting to burn down the church, and the judge “ordered him to pay $10,507 in restitution to the church, to undergo mental health treatment and to serve three years supervised probation after his release.”
The defendants named in the lawsuit include Penny, as well as Chris Uthe, Brandon Perdue, Sherri Perdue, and other “unnamed members of White Lives Matter.”
Among the ten most challenged books in libraries across the country, seven deal with LGBTQ themes, according a new report by the American Library Association (ALA). Emily Drabinski, president of the ALA, said in a statement, “In looking at the titles of the most challenged books from last year, it’s obvious that the pressure groups are targeting books about LGBTQIA+ people and people of color.”
During 2023, there were “4,240 works in school and public libraries” targeted for challenges, which is a “substantial hike from the then-record 2,571 books in 2022 and the most the library association has tallied since it began keeping track more than 20 years ago.”
A teenager attending Hillcrest High School in Dallas, Texas was allegedly the target of antisemtic bully, according to a federal civil rights complaint filed with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights by StandWithUs. The complaint states that the student allegedly “heard other teens praise Hitler and was told to ‘Go bathe in Auschwitz where you belong.’”
On the campus of Rutgers University in New Jersey, the Center for Islamic Life reportedly “had its windows shattered, artwork smashed, TVs and printers broken as well as a Palestinian flag destroyed,” and the college police announced an investigation into the incident.
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Chris Lehmann writes that “as the 2024 election cycle lurches into gear, a torrent of allied spiritual appeals have reverberated through MAGA world. Like ‘God Made Trump,’ these messages traffic in what Matthew D. Taylor, senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, calls ‘prophetic memes’—nimble digital callouts to scriptural authority allegedly consecrating Trump’s reign that ricochet through evangelical media accounts and then gain viral authority in the sanctums of MAGA power. The Trump revolution in the Republican Party has shed many of the last remaining vestiges of traditional interest-group alignments—most strikingly, the business-evangelical accord at the heart of the powerful Reagan coalition that reshaped right-wing politics in the 1980s—and has begun to morph into something unprecedented in modern American politics: a nakedly Christian nationalist push for maximum worldly power, primed to usher in a post-democratic age of state-sanctioned Kulturkampf on the right. What began as a faux-populist appeal to rescue an imperiled, mythic ‘real America’ is now a full-fledged political revival movement, replete with personal redemption narratives, baptisms, and a new spiritual argot, steeped in the absolutist rhetoric and disposable memes of the Internet.” [The Nation]
Chauncey DeVega writes that “Trumpism and the American antidemocracy movement will continue long into the future, morphing and changing and adapting to fit a given social and political moment, but with the toxic core values intact. For now, his campaign rallies are a therapeutic space where Trump's biggest fans experience community, meaning, and pleasure in each other’s company, and from basking in their Dear Leader’s energy and dark charisma. Trump’s rallies are a space for his followers to worship him as a type of divinely chosen warrior, a force for vengeance on their behalf, who has been anointed by ‘god’ and ‘Jesus Christ’ to turn America into a type of plutocratic theocracy where people like them will be given special powers and ‘rights’ to rule over all others. Trump has harnessed the religious fervor and cult-like devotion of his followers to great effect. To that point, he is now selling his version of the Bible with the proceeds going to his war chest… As historians, political scientists and other experts have highlighted, the MAGA movement, like other authoritarian populist movements, is more of a force and experience than a coherent ideology.” [Salon]
Brian Klaas writes that “the notion that ‘everything happens for a reason’ isn’t just a false mantra of comfort to stitch on flowery pillows; it’s also a central delusion of the MAGA movement, a fun-house-mirror reflection of reality as a world of perfect, top-down control, in which random accidents never happen and everything has significant, hidden meaning if you only dare to look closely enough. Conspiratorial thought is an innate feature of human cognition, arguably an inadvertent by-product of evolution. Natural selection shaped the human brain to navigate the world by inferring cause and effect. The impulse is so ingrained that when patients have their corpus callosum severed, making communication between the two hemispheres of the brain impossible, the left hemisphere simply invents plausible explanations to account for inputs to the right side of the brain that the left side hasn’t seen. When no reasons are to be found, we automatically make them up… Conspiracy theories are difficult to debunk precisely because a thrilling story is more cognitively compelling than no story.” [The Atlantic]
What to expect from Radical Reports: Morning Briefing provides a daily round-up of reporting on the Radical Right; Extremist Links offers a weekly round-up of extremists activities including the white supremacist and militia movements; Narratives of the Right delivers weekly analysis of the current narratives in far right online spaces and promoted by right-wing media; and Research Desk provides monthly highlights research and analysis from academia on the Radical Right.
