HHS Proposes New Policy on Sex Discrimination

The New York Times got its hands on a memo suggesting the Department of Health and Human Services was considering a definition of sex for Title IX purposes to be determined by genetics. Per the Times:

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

This is problematic for a number of reasons: What of people who do not conform genetically to this binary conception of sex? What of people who have already undergone sexual reassignment surgery? Do people really face discrimination on the basis of what's on their original birth certificate?

If and when this new policy is put into effect, it will be at least the 3rd department to do so, following the Department of Defense and the Department of Education.

All That For This

Published an article over at Jewish Currents today about the first round of acquittals in the J20 trials. The process dragged out for almost a year, and somehow made it to a jury despite some rather unusual procedures. Here's a sample:

During the pretrial, hearing dates were rescheduled without notifying defendants who were required under penalty of arrest to attend. Law enforcement agents were demonstrated by the defense to be lying on the witness stand, and in closing arguments, lead prosecutor Jen Kerkhoff all but told the jury that their instructions were irrelevant and that reasonable doubt “doesn’t mean a whole lot.”
“We saw that the U.S. Attorney’s office has no problem with the fact that their interests overlap with [rightwing organizations] Project Veritas or the Oath Keepers,” explained Menefee-Libey. “We also saw that the DC Superior Court is willing to let all of these things proceed under their legitimizing purview. This was procedurally strange, but politically and morally terrifying and abhorrent.”

What the trials have helped bring to light above all else is the absolute disregard for procedure on the part of the police.

According to court documents, law enforcement had infiltrated the planning for all three events but zeroed in on the the anti-fascist, anti-capitalist bloc, which departed from Logan Circle at 10:00 that morning. Despite apparent concerns about their undercover infiltration methods, the DC police opted not to contact the protest organizers, as required by the department’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) regarding First Amendment activity. On the day of the protest, moreover, the police violated more of their SOP: In radio communications entered into evidence, the police commander and frontline officer discussed whether the protesters were anarchists, and made the call to mass arrest before the march even left the park, which violates their SOP requirement that protesters be arrested and charged individually. (Since the SOP was issued in 2004, mass arrests have been effectively prohibited in DC.)

Certainly going to be chilling to watch the prosecutor bring 188 more people to trial.

Why I Went on a Nazi's Podcast: Approaches and Goals

Plenty of far leftists have ended up in far right media in one way or another, mostly by accident. One of the hosts of a podcast I have been on twice (holiday episode coming soon!) called 2 Spicy actually got blindsided by Gavin McInnes in 2014 before he had made a name for himself beyond his status as persona non grata at Vice. (Apparently, McInnes only varied by degree from the rest of Vice's leadership.) Heather made the unfortunate mistake of taking an invite to do media without doing background research. Always do background research.

I've done a bit of background on the show I'm set to go on. (I'm writing this in advance of going on the show.) If you haven't heard of Millennial Woes, you're not missing much. His only noteworthy accomplishment seems to be speaking at the 2016 Maggiano's Seige NPI conference. Literally. Millennial Woes (who, despite having been doxxed as Colin Robertson still told me to call him 'Woes') is a 35 year old Scottish white nationalist with a mean antisemitic streak, anti-immigrant views, and a strange ambivalence towards bestiality. After he was doxxed (as a result of his only noteworthy accomplishment), his messaging suddenly became extremely conciliatory with regard to racial violence. You know how fash do.

Every year, Millennial Woes does a month long series of interviews he calls Millenniyule. This year he had designs to do 50 interviews in December. As a result of a fight on Twitter, I became one of them. What I hope to lay out here is how it came about that I got this "opportunity," my rationale for accepting it, my strategy for approaching it, and my goals.

Interview on "The Radical Imagination"

Last week, I sat down with Jim Vrettos for The Radical Imagination on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. We had an hour-long conversation about policing, pedagogy, and antifa. Watch it in full below.

What Is White Genocide?

Drexel University politics professor George Ciccariello-Maher has come under fire from right wing media outlets for tweeting an incendiary call for white genocide this Christmas.

To those uninitiated to the white nationalist underworld, any call for genocide would be reprehensible. However, the term "white genocide" has an insidious history as a propaganda tool.

Political Economy of Fascism Syllabus

In the wake of the election of an outright racist, sexist homophobe, now seems as good a time as any to debut my Political Economy of Fascism syllabus. This course is designed to take students through the complex of political theories that were grafted together in the early 20th century to become the doctrine of fascism. After familiarizing students with the historical developments leading to fascism, the basic principles of fascist thought are explored.

Given the compelling nature of fascist anti-rationalism, students are provided critical texts to disabuse them of the rabbit holes that fascism builds to pull people in. Instructors using this syllabus are strongly encouraged not to take this lightly. As per the syllabus, students should be instructed to do secondary source readings and debrief readings before reading the primary source (fascist) texts. Please instruct students that if they do not intend to do the secondary source and debrief readings, they should not dip into the primary source texts.

You can download the syllabus as a PDF using the Dropbox link here
Syllabus

The readings are separated by week in this Dropbox folder along with a text list of readings accessible online here
Readings

Instructors feel free to use this syllabus and reading list, but please let me know in the comments below. If you would like to modify the syllabus, I would be happy to provide the source LaTeX file the syllabus was written in.

Community Post on Feministing: Kinda Forget; Maybe Again

A little over a week ago, a piece of mine appeared on Feministing. In it, I review Donald Trump's habit of offending everyone...well, almost everyone. While he has no problem offending various ethnic groups and women, Trump is very hesitant to rebuke his more radical followers:

When pressed about his endorsement from David Duke, Trump gave only a lukewarm repudiation, doing so “if it would make you feel better.” When asked of his opinion on his name being invoked in a racist beating, he remarked, “the people who are following me are very passionate.” When asked when the US is going to get rid of Muslims, Trump responded, “We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”

Read the rest here

Shut Down Neo-Nazis at the National Press Club

Sign the petition

Workers, Women, and Revolution: From Inequality to Solidarity

Today, I published a recap of Julie Matthaei's excellent talk at the New School for Social Research last Tuesday. You can read the whole thing at the New School Economic Review. Here's a sample:

In 1973, the URPE women founded a Marxist-feminist reading group which due to growing interest over the years blossomed into multiple reading groups. Some of the early selections were Women and Revolution by Lydia Sargent and Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism edited by Zillah R. Eisenstein. The groups investigated complex questions such as "What is the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy?" since on the one hand capitalism appeared to break down certain "traditional" gender roles but on the other hand led to the increasing proletarianization of women without providing much accommodation for their needs as women. Additionally, these reading groups discussed whether women's liberation could be left until after the revolution and whether a concern for women's liberation could stand to divide the working class as so many male socialists at the time asserted. The answer was a resounding no.

Simmering below the surface was the question of "womanhood" itself. It soon became clear that an approach that considered only capitalism and patriarchy was insufficient to explain the experience of women of color and queer women (much less queer women of color). After some internal struggle, complemented by changes in the wider feminist movement, URPE embraced an approach that analyzed the intersections of all sorts of oppression and exploitation. As Matthaei said, they concluded, "There is no universal experience of womanhood."

Read the full article at the New School Economic Review

That's Dr. Nazi to You

The National Press Club is run by journalists from news outlets as prestigious as Bloomberg and Al-Jazeera. This October it will host a conference of neo-Nazis.

The National Policy Institute’s biennial conference serves as a meet and greet for an array of well-funded affiliates of this ideological bridge going from mass murderers like Dylann Roof and Rusty Houser to windbags like Donald Trump and Ann Coulter.

While the National Press Club defends its decision to host the conference by standing behind its “108 year history representing the values of freedom of speech, freedom of the press,” they seem to ignore that fascism as an ideological position has a 93 year history of opposing freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Read more at Medium.com

#WhiteChurchSex

For the past two days, the Twitter hashtag #BlackChurchSex has been the hub of a very deep and thoughtful conversation around sexual expectations within Black Christian communities. As a white Ashkenazi Jew, I have no place in this conversation, and do not intend to add to it. Rather, I believe that a similar conversation needs to happen about white Christian communities. Unlike the conversation among Black Christians, the white church has the political and financial capital to impose their regressive and oppressive sexual mores on the rest of us. Thus, this conversation must involve all of us.

So let's start: