For the third year in a row, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves is declaring the month of April as Confederate Heritage Month, keeping a tradition alive that his predecessors began 29 years ago. “April is the month when, in 1861, the American Civil War began between the Confederate and Union armies, reportedly the costliest and deadliest war ever fought on American soil,” the proclamation says. It notes that the last Monday of April is also Confederate Memorial Day in Mississippi.
Reeves appeared on Fox News on April 29, 2021, and claimed that “there is not systemic racism in America”
While only a few dozen Straight Pride participants actually showed up to the clandestine event, they were met by over 200 counter-protesters who shouted them down carrying signs, with phrases like “If being gay was a choice I’d be gayer” and “This was not on my gay agenda.”
Don Grundmann, the founder of the National Straight Pride Coalition, said he’s proud of his few supporters who showed up for standing up for their right to free speech and his group’s fundamental principals.
“Masculinity, femininity, the natural family of man, woman children, babies, born and unborn western civilization, Caucasians and all people, all of those are basic foundations that are under attack,” Grundmann ranted
Max Reed a member of the Modesto Non-Violent Collective, who helped organize the counter-protest that began at Enslen Park and then left to confront Straight Pride supporters in front of Planned Parenthood said “This community is standing together to reject this group and what they represent,” Reed said. This is not what Modesto is about. We’re about inclusion and diversity and unity.”
Other counter-protesters say they hope their strong turnout sends a message to Grundmann and his Straight Pride supporters across the country.
“When people want to come into your own backyard and spread a message that you don’t agree with then you have a right to stand up against that too,” Wendy Byrd, President of the NAACP Modesto Stanislaus Branch, said.
New York City’s Columbia University’s wrestling team, which bills itself as the nation’s oldest intercollegiate program, has had its season suspended by the university while officials investigate text messages sent by team members that included the frequent use of racist, misogynistic and homophobic terms.
On Monday, Columbia released a statement saying that the university’s athletic department “has decided that Columbia wrestlers will not compete until we have a full understanding of the facts on which to base the official response to this disturbing matter.”
Columbia withdrew from a meet on Sunday at Binghamton after the university announced it would have “zero tolerance in its athletics programs for the group messaging and texts sent by several members of the men’s varsity wrestling team,” messages that the university described as “appalling.”
Bwog, an independent, student-run Columbia news website was the first to reveal the scandal after publishing screenshots of the offending texts.
One of the texts refers to a student as a “gay fuck,” while another reads, “We got a missing faggot no Jews back at Claremont.”
Another text referred to black staffers at a UPS store and Black Lives Matter protestors as “nigs” or “niggers.”
Misogynistic texts included one that reads “Columbia bitches feel entitled to something when in reality they are all ugly socially awkward cunts.”
On Friday and Saturday, students protested outside the fraternity house of Kappa Delta Rho, which counts wrestlers among its membership. A Change.org petition calling for the expulsion of wrestlers had 875 supporters Monday evening.
Other students were planning to spread fliers throughout campus Monday to “protest the culture that permeates Columbia’s men’s athletics teams,” according to the description of a Facebook group. Almost 500 students were listed as interested in or planning to attend the event.
Columbia’s wrestling coach, Zach Tanelli, and Peter Pilling, the university’s athletic director, have not been available for comment.
A black church in Greenville, Mississippi, was set on fire on Tuesday night. Fire fighters arrived to find Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church “heavily engulfed in flames,” Mayor Errick Simmons said in an interview; the fire took nearly an hour to contain. No one was in the church at the time, and no one was injured. On the side of the church, beneath the blackened windows and roof, the words “Vote Trump” have been spray painted.
The fire is being investigated as a hate crime, Simmons said. Federal authorities, including the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives, are helping local authorities with the investigation, which is part of the standard procedure for church fires.
“We’re very cautious in this climate, in this day and time, to make sure we’re very deliberate in investigating matters like this,” Simmons said. This fire was “a direct assault on people’s right to free worship,” he said, and later added during a press conference, “I see this as an attack on the black church and the black community.”
Meanwhile in Washington FBI Director James Comey wasted no time ordering his investigators to sift through Hillary Clinton’s emails to search for the suspects.
Executive vice president Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (retired), of the conservative Family Research Council, was caught on a “hot mic” on Thursday saying that “the Jews are the problem” to an Israeli reporter and pitching his theory about President Barack Obama using “subliminal messages” to signal support for al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, in audio posted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on Friday.
Boykin is heard arguing that, as a result of the “messages,” Al-Qaeda and the Brotherhood saw that “that they have a president that identifies with them, that has been supportive of them inside the United States and is unwilling to go against them.”
“If you understand anything about Islam, there are subliminal messages,” Boykin can be heard saying. “His message, really, I believe was, ‘I understand you, and I support you.’”
“Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and everybody else” are taking advantage of this support and the “opportunity that they see that they have a president that identifies with them, that has been supportive of them inside the United States and is unwilling to go against them.”
Boykin could be heard recommending that the reporter contact FRC’s head of media relations, J.P. Duffy.
Boykin was then approached by someone about doing an interview with Henry Schwartz, a reporter for Israel National News, described as a “right-wing” publication.
“The Jews are the problem,” Boykin can be heard saying. “The Jews are the cause of all the problems in the world.” An unidentified person responds, “I know, I know, that’s why we’re trying to fix everything.”
Boykin’s remarks were captured after an online broadcast of a panel at the National Security Action Summit hosted by Brietbart News. The event is held as a counter to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and features speakers like Boykin who are even too crazy to be invited to speak at CPAC.
I wonder if Boykin and Tony Perkins shop for their white sheets together?
I’ve not written a lot about CPAC this year. Mostly because I’ve been busy and really lets face it. we all know that the GOP is a bunch of evil scumbags and that’s really not news to anybody.
But this week CPAC got even “scummier” at panel titled “Trumping The Race Card.”(I kid you not) on the GOP’s current outreach to minorities (ha!) when a card-carrying GOP white supremacist (no, NOT Tony Perkins) had enough of the GOP’s “new faux outreach strategy” and defended slavery claiming that white people “like him” are being “disenfranchised” by the federal government and now the GOP.
Think Progress reports:
The exchange occurred after an audience member from North Carolina, 30-year-old Scott Terry, asked whether Republicans could endorse races remaining separate but equal. After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?” Several people in the audience cheered and applauded Terry’s outburst. After the exchange, Terry muttered under his breath, “why can’t we just have segregation?” noting the Constitution’s protections for freedom of association.
Later when Terry was asked if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was. At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”
Of course right-wing blogs and websites are claiming that the Terry was planted by liberals in order to embarrass CPAC even though he is the author of an extremist right-wing blog himself named, Shotgun Barrel Straight. (Google it. I’m not linking to it here)
Scott Terry: Young, white, male, and angry GOP good “christian” who’s a gun owner. I’m sure we’ll be seeing him again in the news very soon.
