Recommended Reading: Free Helicopter Rides
www.radicalreports.org
Recommended Reading: Free Helicopter Rides
This Week's Recommended Reading on Substack: Zach Roberts, Hemant Mehta, Jill Filipovic, Oliver Willis, and Diana Butler Bass
The Week's Recommended Reading on Substack:
writes that “The horrors the [Augusto] Pinochet regime committed over three decades are something the American far right dreams of emulating… The modern love of Pinochet seems to have grown out of ‘chan culture,’ that vile part of the Internet where anonymous users create memes for the purpose of offending. Years before the Proud Boys were formed in 2016, users would ‘jokingly’ threaten to ‘take someone on a helicopter ride.’ And like most terrible things from the past decade, the 4chan meme started appearing in real life. I first came across the far right referencing ‘helicopter rides’ at a May Day rally in New York City in 2017.” writes that “Despite his years of promoting hate in line with AFA’s Jesus-driven mission, [Robert] Chambers is now suing the organization and many of their top leaders for ignoring his claims of sexual harassment, creating a “hostile work environment,” threatening to withhold his severance package unless he agreed to keep his mouth shut, and more.” writes that “there are many, many ways in which men are held to a much lower standard of parenting than women are, and many, many ways in which we would all be better off if the standards for women weren’t so impossibly high and so wildly conflicting. But also: A lot of men should be held to a higher standard of parenting. And simply reproducing a bunch of times, even if you provide your children plentiful resources, isn’t enough.” writes that “Beating up on Black people is sport for the right, it’s what makes them feel safe and secure and like everything is right with the world. It is their ultimate safe space, the area of escape that they love to taunt the left with so often. The particular spectre of Obama haunts them. They have told themselves lies about Black people for so many years, decades layered upon decades of delusional insults and myths, and along came Obama to not only debunk their mythology but he absolutely shattered them.” writes that you should “spend a few minutes today and consider how your own life was changed as a result of the terrible events of twenty-two years ago today. Remember where we’ve been and imagine the roads not taken. Instead of learning from the best of the human spirit, we learned to see enemies everywhere. Paranoia gripped us — we sunk into fear, scapegoating, propaganda, and revenge. And, eventually, we turned what we’d learned on our neighbors. There’s a direct connection between what happened then and our domestic politics now.”
1 Comment
No posts
A truly excellent round-up of vital articles that provide critical insight into our devolution as a society.