Stephan: Lauren Boebert is a Republican Congresswoman, and I don't see any difference between her and a sniper spotter. I think she should be arrested as an accessory to the attempted murder of the Speaker of the House. I am sick and tired of the Republican anti-democratic insurrection enablers. There needs to be accountability and this party has to decide whether personal power or country is their first priority. So far it is pretty clear they choose power. Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, Mo Brooks, Mitch McConnell, the whole lot of them need to be thrown out of the Congress. They have no honor. They have no ethics except for their own personal advancement.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), a gun-toting supporter of the QAnon movement, is facing backlash after she was accused of live-tweeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) location during the attack on Capitol Hill last week.
Boebert shared the tweet soon after President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol with deadly results.
“The Speaker has been removed from the chambers,” Boebert wrote.
Twitter users responded by calling for the freshman representative to be jailed and removed from Congress.
“@FBIWFO please arrest @laurenboabert for aiding and abetting those who were hunting down @SpeakerPelosi on Jan, 6th by tweeting the Speaker’s whereabouts,” one person responded. “She’s 5ft tall, 100 pounds and carries a Glock (and won’t stop telling everyone).”
“@SpeakerPelosi you need to have her removed with every fight that you have. This is nothing short of an attempt […]
Stephan: I am amazed that this story is not getting greater coverage. Ginni Thomas, the wife of associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has long been known as a supporter of christofascist causes. But this is absolutely a bridge too far. Thomas should be immediately impeached and removed from the bench. It is preposterous that a supreme court justice's wife is cheering on an anti-democratic coup.
Insurrectionist admirer Ginni Thomas, wife of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
Hours before a violent mob of far-right extremists attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, President Donald Trump and his supporters spoke at an event in Washington D.C. — where they demanded that Congress overturn the electoral college results for the 2020 presidential election. And one of those supporters was conspiracy theorist Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Ginni Thomas tweeted her support of that event on January 6, saying, “LOVE MAGA people!” and “God bless each of you standing up or praying.” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes that after the attack on the Capitol Building, she added an addendum and posted, “Note: written before violence in US Capitol.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1347395084527017985&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alternet.org%2F2021%2F01%2Fginni-thomas-applauded-the-rally-that-preceded-the-capitol-building-attack%2F&partner=rebelmouse&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550pxTired of ads? Want to support our progressive journalism? Click to learn more.
Stern, in an article published by Slate on January 8, notes, “Thomas, a conservative lobbyist and zealous supporter of Donald Trump, has fervently defended the president over the last four years. On […]
Stephan: In the United States, as a culture, we have only one social priority: profit. As a result instead of a health care system, we have an illness profit system. And in our college education system, unique amongst the developed nations of the world, we have people in their sixties still with five-figure student debt. Did you know there are people near or after retirement with that kind of student debt? I didn't. When I went to the University of Virginia as part of an honors program called Echols scholars, my family paid $476 a year for my tuition.
In the 1970s when my daughter Katherine went to the University of California - Santa Cruz, in her own honors program, I paid about $4,600. Today, at a public four-year college (for in-state students) the average is $9,410, while for out-of-state students it is $23,890. For a private four-year college the average is $32,410, more than some families total income for a year, where the necessary living family income across the U.S. is $67,690.
There are all sorts of social outcome effects that arise from America's profit-based college system. First, of course, is the debilitating debt itself. Second, a profit-based college system means many who would like to go to college don't have the means to do so, because they can't handle the debt. As a result, only 36% of Americans over 25 have graduated from college while in Canada over 56% have a post-high school degree, and the U.S. ranks 6th in terms of college education.
But there are all kinds of other social effects. For instance, there is a strong correlation between being a Trumper and not having a college degree. Only 30.2% of the police in the U.S. have college degrees which helps to explain why American law enforcement is so violent. It also explains why so many scientists and physicians working today are immigrants.
Key Findings:
There are more people over the age of 50 with student loans (8.7 million) than people under the age of 24 with student loans (7.8 million), and they owe, on average, far more ($41,058 compared to $14,807).
There are more people over the age of 35 with student loans than under the age of 35 (22.7 million vs. 22.6 million), and they owe far more on average ($41,881 vs. $27,256).
A common popular belief about student loans is that they are a young person’s problem. We assume that, by and large, most borrowers are able to have their loans repaid by their mid-30’s. Sure, there may be a few stragglers who take until their 40’s or even beyond to repay their loans, but the conventional wisdom is that people 50 or older who haven’t yet been able to repay their loans are the outliers. The exception to the rule.
Well, it turns out that this is completely wrong.
This is Department of Education Data for the fourth quarter of 2020. For comparison purposes, we combined the source data to find statistics for […]
Stephan: For the past 40 years or more, I have been listening to people interested in UFOs talk about "the government's secret files." Well, we may finally get to see at least some of them.
UFO
When President Donald Trump signed the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law in December, so began the 180-day countdown for US intelligence agencies to tell Congress what they know about UFOs.No, really.The director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have a little less than six months now to provide the congressional intelligence and armed services committees with an unclassified report about “unidentified aerial phenomena.”It’s a stipulation that was tucked into the “committee comment” section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which was contained in the massive spending bill.
Pentagon to launch task force to investigate UFO sightingsThat report must contain detailed analyses of UFO data and intelligence collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI, according to the Senate intelligence committee’s directive.It should also describe in detail “an interagency process for ensuring timely data collection and centralized analysis of all unidentified aerial phenomena reporting for the Federal Government” and designate an official responsible for that process.Finally, […]
Theresa K. Vescio and Nathaniel E. C. Schermerhorn, - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Stephan: Based on research I have been tracking for years I have been telling my readers about the correlations between male dominance, "hegemonic masculinity" as it is called in this research report, White supremacy, and christofascism. Now we have new research published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that is quite definitive. The thing you want to note is that many women support hegemonic masculinity.
This is what makes gender equality so difficult to achieve in our culture. But, more than that, this is what fuels the biases of the Republican Party.
Trumpers at the insurrection
Significance
Donald J. Trump’s history-making ascension from nonpolitician to president of the United States has been attributed to the antiestablishment, antielitist, and nativist populism of Trump voters, as well as to sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Based on the findings of seven studies involving 2,007 people, men’s and women’s endorsement of hegemonic masculinity predicted support for Trump over and beyond the aforementioned factors, even when controlling for political party affiliation. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond social identity–based conceptualizations of masculinity to fully consider how men’s and women’s endorsement of cultural ideologies about masculinity legitimate patriarchal forms of dominance and reify gender-, race-, and class-based hierarchies.
Abstract
This work examined whether the endorsement of the culturally idealized form of masculinity—hegemonic masculinity (HM)—accounted for unique variance in men’s and women’s support for Donald Trump across seven studies (n = 2,007). Consistent with our theoretical backdrop, in the days (Studies 1 and 2) and months (Studies 3 through 6) following the 2016 American presidential election, women’s and men’s endorsement of HM predicted voting for and evaluations of Trump, […]
