Havdalah #12: A's Emancipation, Ash Wednesday, and Trans Panic

Hello neighbors, and welcome to Adar!

This is the month of happiness, as well as the month of darkness. In a few weeks, we will lose an hour of the day but gain an hour of sunlight. Hypothetically. To be honest I don’t really know how Daylight Savings Time works. No one explain it to me.

We sit between Ash Wednesday and Purim — and fittingly, Katherine has written us a delightfully moody meditation on the former for this issue’s Sidebar. I hope our Catholic readers had a wonderful Shrove Tuesday and an appropriately reflective Ash Wednesday (enjoy the fish!).

We’ve got a less fun piece bringing up the rear in FashWatch, but we anticipate that the subject(s) will only become more relevant as 2024 hits its stride. Consider this our humble plea for you to resist the temptation of despair.

As the winter begins its noncommittal thaw and the days slowly begin to stretch out like cats rising again from slumber, I would like to issue a blanket reminder that we are still in a pandemic. The surge is receding, but has not disappeared. By all means, see loved ones, seek company, soak up the snatches of warmth when Fool’s Spring deems fit to provide them — and wear a mask.

Finally: tomorrow is February 18th — 81 years since the arrests of our namesake, The White Rose. These arrests led to the executions of all but one member. Please spare a thought for those who were killed for their refusal to compromise with Nazis, who opted instead to become the Germans’ “bad conscience”. For a refresher on these brave individuals, nearly all of whom were university students in their early to mid-twenties, please see the White Rose’s entry in the Global Nonviolent Action Database and our inaugural issue’s introduction.

Bella ciao.

James

Statehouse Assembly — RI Poor People’s Campaign

• When: Saturday, March 2

  • 10:00am — gather at Gloria Dei, 15 Hayes Street, Providence, RI 02908

  • 10:45am — march to the State House

  • 11:00am — State House, city side across from the Providence Place Mall, 94 Providence Place, Providence, RI 02903

• The Rhode Island Poor People’s Campaign will be joining over 31 states holding simultaneous days of action at statehouses across the country as part of the National Day of Mass Poor People's and Low-Wage Workers' Statehouse Assemblies. Take action together to address the systemic injustices that make the American dream a nightmare for close to half of the population of this country.

• This action is to demand: living wages, healthcare, voting rights and stopping voter suppression, equal rights for all, worker/labor rights, environmental justice, access to housing, fully-funded public education, abolishing poverty, and the unity of love, not the division of hate.

• Statehouse Assembly RSVP Link

Power Half-Hours for Gaza

• When: every day, Monday through Friday, 3:00pm EST

• Where: online

• Jewish Voice for Peace is holding Power Half-Hours for Gaza every day — join us as we channel our fury and sorrow into collective action to stop genocide.

• The same link will work every day.

  • Power Half-Hours for Gaza Registration

Jewish Voice for Peace Website

Continuing Actions for Palestine

The siege of Gaza has continued and intensified. Palestinians are in desperate need of water, fuel, medical supplies, and more; however, this aid has been locked up at the border and prevented from entering into Palestine. Please contact your representatives to call on them to work for a ceasefire and to get aid into Gaza.

This toolkit has a variety of links, including call scripts, groups accepting donations, phone banks, petitions, and more:

• Ceasefire Today Toolkit

Telecom services in Gaza are periodically being disrupted. This makes knowledge of what is happening there very difficult to get and to verify. Various social media websites — including and especially Twitter — while vitally necessary in getting ordinary voices heard, have also been full of dis- and misinformation of people deliberately trying to cause trouble. Especially now, be aware of who is sharing information and why they’re doing it.

• Al Jazeera reporting has continued to be the most accurate and reliable so far:

  • Al Jazeera News Coverage

Help A, an Incarcerated Activist

A is a Providence-based activist who is currently incarcerated, and will be getting out on parole next month. Before A was imprisoned, she participated in Never Again Action Rhode Island actions and is eager to re-engage upon release. A, who is a trans woman, is currently being held in a men's prison.

A was at the Wyatt Detention Center protests in Rhode Island, Facebooking live for Never Again. She has also protested for Climate Action Rhode Island and attended Black Lives Matter rallies protesting against systematic racism and police brutality. She has struggled through all this while suffering from childhood trauma, PTSD, suicidal thoughts, and housing inequality coming from her being a trans Latina.

Funds raised will be used to help A with rent, clothes, technology, transportation, and an emotional support dog. A has experienced and resisted much systemic and interpersonal trauma, and these funds will help her build a more stable, peaceful life that she has never been afforded. Please contribute to help set her up for a smooth transition back into society and into her community to which she has dedicated so much care and love, and to show our thanks and to support her in her time of need.

A’s GoFundMe

Film Screening: Gather

• When: Wednesday, February 21, 7:00pm

• Where: Barrington Public Library, 281 County Road, Barrington, RI 02806

• Recommended for Adults

• Join the Barrington Land Conservation Trust for a screening of the documentary, Gather, followed by a moderated discussion of the movie.Gather follows the stories of Indigenous Peoples on the frontlines of a growing movement to reconnect with spiritual and cultural identities through a closer connection to their traditional foodways and native plants.

• Gather Registration

Film Screening: I Am Not Your Negro

• When: Sunday, February 25, 1:00pm and Wednesday, February 28, 6:30pm

• Where: Barrington Public Library, 281 County Road, Barrington, RI 02806

• Recommended for adults

• Join the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee for a showing of I Am Not Your Negro (2016), a film that explores the history of racism in the United States through author James Baldwin's recollections of civil rights leaders and personal observations of American history.

• I Am Not Your Negro Registration

Katherine (she / her)

It’s a strange thing to wear an image of the cross around our necks, to put it on our altars, to trace it in dust and ashes and oil on our foreheads. It is an image of execution, its obscenity obscured by sheer repetition — imagine wearing a little silver noose on a necklace, hanging a guillotine on the altar, putting an electric chair on a bumper sticker. Only more: for the cross was torture as well as a death sentence, an image of terror from an empire. So picture an iron maiden; the whip; drones overhead.

Waterboarding.

That is the strange center of Christianity; death. 

It is there in the happiest of feasts; even at Christmas a prophet speaks of His death to His mother. And Easter is triumph over the grave, but still, the grave is necessary. People — usually in the mood to insult — have called Christianity a death cult, a religion obsessed with martyrs and the afterlife and the grave, and they’re not wrong. We are told to hold all things lightly, even our own lives, because all things pass; compared to eternity the mountains themselves are as dust, much less empires and ideologies and the economy and that next promotion. Ash Wednesday, even more than Easter, even more than Good Friday, brings that home. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, memento mori, remember that one day, you too shall die. The palm branches we welcomed the Lord in with last year we have burned and now use to anoint ourselves with remembrances of our mortality. 

And we need that remembrance; here in America death is abstracted, medicalized, hidden away. We don’t like to talk about it, don’t want to admit it; but fuck it, everyone dies. Only thing we’ve all got in common; life’s a terminal disease, and you catch it when you’re born. Which means what matters is how you live. Tomorrow you might be gone, so what the fuck are you doing with today? If the only thing that lasts, is your soul, and mine, and hers, and his, then what matters isn’t how your sports team did, or your company’s stock price, or the Dow Jones — it’s dust, they’re all dust, they’re already gone — 

But that person you passed on the street, who asked you for change — the kids that could have gotten a free lunch if that bill had been passed — the civilians killed as acceptable losses in the latest war — the people displaced as the sea waters rise — they’re real — they’re real —  

In eternity, those are the actions we’ll be called to account for, the people we’ll be asked if we bothered to help in the time we were given. And we don’t know how much time that is, how much time we have to work before we’re dust in the ground ourselves and we have to give our accounting. 

So anoint ourselves in ashes and remember: life is short. Hold it lightly. 

Remember: this is what empires do to those that threaten them. Don’t give them your allegiance; don’t count on their protection if you threaten their power. 

Remember: you don’t know how much time you got; use it well. 

Mind how you go.

Needledrop: “Awake My Soul”, Mumford and Sons

“Parental Rights” movement coming to a school council near you; Alex Jones namedrops RI in conspiracist, anti-trans tirade

Content Warning: This section is dealing with a particular set of conspiracy theories that touch on school shootings, pedophilia, indoctrination, child abuse, sexual assault, conversion therapy, transphobia, and homophobia. Make the best decision for yourself about whether and how you read.

Note: bolded emphasis in all quotes is mine, to highlight right-wing propaganda; all quotes are transcribed directly from source material by myself, Steve Ahlquist, and I guess Youtube auto-caption helped too.

On January 27th, the Barrington School Committee’s Policy Subcommittee convened to discuss the district’s “Gender Support and Inclusion Policy for Transgender, Gender-Diverse, and Transitioning Students”, (don’t choke on that mouthful), and hear comments before sending it up to the full committee, where it was again subject to discussion and public comment on February 1st. Both of these meetings were covered in full by Steve Ahlquist, and you can read his diligent reports on January 27th and February 1st at his Substack.

During his January 30th show, Alex Jones namedropped Rhode Island during one of his increasingly frequent anti-trans rants, opining that Barrington schools, run by a secret cadre of pedophiles, are plotting to force students to transition and use the might of the police to seize children from uncooperative parents. None of which is true. Fucking obviously.

Alex Jones, radio conspiracist and right-wing propagandist, has hosted The Alex Jones Show since 1999, and his name and fake-news website, InfoWars, are likely familiar even if you’re blanking on who he is. Jones is best known for two things: tirades intentionally engineered to go viral either through memetic silliness or the manufacturing of outrage, and his conspiracy theories surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre, a mass shooting that he has variably claimed never happened, or happened but was covered up, or happened but was intentionally engineered by the government — whichever version is most useful for him at any given time. Jones was sued for defamation by the families of Sandy Hook victims in Connecticut and his home state of Texas; in both cases he was subject to guilty verdicts handed down via default judgments due to his lawyers’ shockingly audacious non-compliance with the discovery processes. For more information on Alex Jones and his unfortunately significant impact on our culture, please read the Extremist File the Southern Poverty Law Center has compiled on him.

During one of his usual rambles shouted into his mic, Jones free-associated a new conspiracy theory:

This is likely unnecessarily redundant, but just in case: nothing that this bloviating, D-tier Bill Cooper impersonator claims here is true. A more involved analysis of this stream-of-consciousness rant can be found in episode #895 of Knowledge Fight, embedded below; the relevant discussion begins at 51:33 and ends around 58:50.

What I’m intrigued by is the School Committee meeting which occurred in Barrington on February 1st, after this invective was aired.

During the public comment section that evening, four mothers and one father took the podium to oppose the policy. Their approaches and deliveries varied, as did their levels of comprehension of the policy and their capacities to feign tolerance of trans people. These comments are all available in Steve Ahlquist’s video of the meeting. Several moments stood out to me.

Despite the first mother’s valiant attempts to ape neutrality on the idea of trans people, she did quite a pathetic job; I found her concern that the school committee was “trading off support for one group for another instead of finding solutions that are mutually fair and equal for everybody” to be rather bold in its insincerity when preceded by the belief that the policy was “modeling to children that lying and deception is [sic] the solution to their problem.”

You’ve heard of the Jewish Question! Now get ready for: the Trans Problem!

This talk of “fairness” and “equality” is disingenuous; the only solutions that people who use this rhetoric are going to accept are ones that are neither fair nor equal to trans students. 

This mother gave herself away when she bugled her opposition to “expecting compelled speech from the other adults … who are expected as employees to go along with this deception.” 

Leaving aside how revealing her repeated smearing of trans kids as deceptive is, the phrase “compelled speech” is a legal term you’ll frequently hear misapplied by the right wing, especially with regards to gendering trans people correctly. It’s a tell, and what it gives away is that Mom thinks bakers are oppressed when they have to stick two grooms on a wedding cake. Her stupidity would be humorously charming if the specter of compelled speech wasn’t being actively invoked to erode at the few gains LGBTQ people have made over the last decade.

Another mom was somehow more sly and more explicit in her objection: “I don’t think it’s a good practice to get [between] parental rights and minors.”

In the interest of being as unequivocally clear as fucking possible: “parental rights” is a right-wing dogwhistle.

Any time — especially now — you hear someone wringing their hands about the rights of parents being endangered, your first and swift response should be to ask, “Parents’ rights to what?”

The “parental rights” movement is reactionary politics cloaked in a duplicitous platform of concerns, and encompasses not just the contemporary anti-trans hysteria rolling through the nation, but also the opposition to sex education in public schools, the refusal to vaccinate children, and the pivot to homeschooling when a parent cannot exercise absolute control over their offspring. The foundation of this ideology is the belief that a child is the property of their parents, even if the parents would never articulate it in this fashion — although trust me, many do put it so bluntly.

This is not to say that parents don’t or shouldn’t have any rights. But in a society like ours, where dominion over kids is taken for granted, we should be rigorously interrogating what people assume those rights are.

The taxonomy of the “minor” in this context is also important. This designation is frequently used to diminish the intellectual and emotional capacities of kids — painting them all as equally untrustworthy and incapable of decision-making whether they are toddlers or two months shy of 18 — in order to strip them of autonomy.

A legislative example of this can be found in Rep. Patricia Morgan’s sloppy boilerplate bills she attempted to get passed last year; Morgan consistently and stubbornly referred to students as “minors” to argue against their ability to have informed opinions and make informed decisions. When nearly 100 Rhode Island students appeared to voice their opposition to these bills, Morgan retreated to her Twitter to protest that she had been martyred and maligned by minors whose testimony had been coached by “activist school personnel.” Which is frankly hysterical, given that I still remember being a teenager, and from what I recall, I would have taken any opportunity to harass a public official, no coaching necessary. I highly recommend perusing Steve Ahlquist’s coverage on that hearing as well.

Digression aside, this is a rhetorical strategy of conservatives that has a long history and boasts a demonstrated track record of effectiveness, in no small part owing to the contempt with which we view and treat kids. As that second mother said, while questioning the school committee about how they plan on “determining whose home will be unsafe” for a trans student to come out:

“Kids do say a lot of different things.”

This conviction that parents are entitled to absolute authority and control over their children was most obvious during the lecture given by a third mother, whose comments were also some of the most insidiously (and deliberately) coded against transness. Her central thesis was that parents, as the entities with “the most investment” in the child, were owed the most deference because of that investment. 

I was almost shocked that the expectation of ownership over her children was so deeply entrenched in her psyche that she couldn’t help couching her argument in the same language as a tycoon discussing shares in a company. Almost.

Her speech was loaded with dogwhistles like a N.Y. System dog is loaded with onions; they were dripping out of there and it was disgusting to witness:

Ma’am, would any of those “variety of ways” happen to start with “c” and end in “therapy”?

She continued:

Again, the mask of neutrality falls away with the clumsiest of tells: what about being trans, besides dealing with you people, makes you think we must be in pain?

What, besides the very fact of our transness, tells you that there is a “problem”, if you don’t see transness as problematic?

On this final clause, I agree with White Barrington Mom #3: the issue that this hypothetical family is grappling with, which is certainly bigger than a kid’s gender identity, is her confidence that a parent’s authority should be weighed as so unquestionable, so unshakable, so unassailable, that, like a neutron star, reality warps to accommodate its mass.

In case it needs spelling out: yes, this attitude leads to abuse. Yes, this attitude makes a household unsafe for a trans youth. Yes, this attitude is indicative of a person absolutely ensconced in a right-wing milieu.

Do I think that all or even any of these moms are listeners of The Alex Jones Show? I mean, no, probably not. I obviously can’t rule it out; one lady really was concerned about overreach of power in labeling households as “unsafe,” and what would be done with that designation once determined (again, I cannot stress enough that no one’s kids are being taken). But I frankly think Alex Jones is a bit too gauche for Barrington. InfoWars stickers are much more common out in Warwick. Wherever Barrington parents are getting their right-wing propaganda fix, it's likely not The Alex Jones Show, but something that passes itself off as more sophisticated, more civil — dare I say, more nuanced?

These anti-trans arguments are endemic in conservative spaces, and they grease the pipelines; hatred and disgust are easy gateways from milquetoast Republicanism to the paranoiac vitriol of the Far Right. Which, frankly, aren’t too different when it comes to LGBTQ people. At the end of the day, conservative rhetoric hasn’t evolved all that much over the last several generations. White Mom #3’s performance of distress in defense of besieged “family values” is old hat, a song and dance that wouldn’t be out of place in 2004 even as we’re treated to it again 20 years later:

The rhetoric is not evolving, but it also isn’t going extinct. It isn’t even endangered. We’re going to hear a lot more of this as 2024 goes on. Many liberal Rhode Islanders are going to be gobsmacked by the prejudice that they didn’t know was fermenting and fomenting in their towns. Every inch gained by these movements is another foot lost for the trans population, especially trans youth, who are being squeezed between the forces of a mass moral panic about transness and a mass reaction against minute losses of control and domination over kids.

These forces work in tandem, which is why when White Mom #2 From Central Casting claims, “I don’t have any problems — you have an 18-year-old, they’re a legal adult, they can do whatever they want, I don’t have a problem,” you cannot afford to believe her. We have already seen in St. Louis how these age minimums can be argued higher and higher. We have already seen how reversible and logistically simple accommodations like autonomy over dress and name are still threatening to a custodian’s control. We have already seen that non-conformity is considered not just evidence of a problem, but itself problematic.

A fourth mother, late for the meeting and with a clear misunderstanding of the policy’s text, expressed deep anxiety about locker rooms in middle schools. She made one statement, possibly off the cuff, which was the most honest admission out of any of the parents who spoke in opposition that evening:

“I’m not saying they’re at risk — it’s just uncomfortable.”

NSC-131 harassing Massachusetts Governor at her house again

On the night of February 10th, Nationalist Social Club made their second appearance at Governor Maura Healey’s home in Arlington. 

Armed with a shitty banner and, as reported by Rolling Stone, “uniformed in khakis, black jackets, face masks, and baseball caps,” (dress code was “casual Friday” I guess), NSC-131 again haunted the Governor’s residence in an attempt to… intimidate her, I suppose? They were predictably dispersed by the fuzz, and considering Healey didn’t seem moved by their Hitler salutes the first time, I doubt they were very scary this go-around either. Maybe next time they should rattle some chains or bring some grim portents. Some moaning and bone-chilling cries of the damned wouldn't go amiss, and though I’m also tempted to suggest white sheets, that might be a copyright infringement.

You can read up on the incident in the item published by Rolling Stone, and on the first demonstration in the initial article published by The Boston Globe back in October. The journalist of the former write-up states that NSC-131 is an “off-shoot” of Patriot Front, which is actually incorrect; while the founder of NSC, Chris Hood, was formerly a PF member, he got booted for some financial shadiness and other drama, and NSC and PF actually have some bad blood. Otherwise, however, it’s a very good piece, and I especially commend Dickinson for mentioning PINE, NSC’s astroturfed little attempt to propagandize conservative New Englanders who are still lukewarm on the idea of a white ethnostate. For a refresher on PINE, see the “FashWatch” in Havdalah #3.

Podcast Recs: Teddy Wilson covers Moms for Liberty on IDSG, Molly Conger covers Patriot Front on ICHH, KF’s “Formulaic Objections” series

We also have some other relevant podcast recommendations for this issue!

Back in August, Teddy Wilson was a guest on I Don’t Speak German, where he covered Moms for Liberty, a Far Right organization which has just recently established a chapter in Rhode Island (as mentioned in Havdalah #5’s “FashWatch”). Moms for Liberty, which also has its own entry in the SPLC’s Extremist Files, is one of the groups leading the current charge on “parental rights” and “anti-indoctrination”. 

Teddy Wilson can be found covering the Far Right ecosystem at his Substack, Radical Reports, and I Don’t Speak German is the podcast of researchers Daniel Harper and Jack Graham, who follow the machinations of prominent groups and individuals on the Far Right and expose the tangled connections within their networks.

Next up: Molly Conger guest-hosted an amazing episode of It Could Happen Here on February 8th! She covered the history of Patriot Front and the litany of lawsuits it has left in its wake. This is an especially exciting full circle moment for Havdalah, as the “FashWatch” of our very first issue covered one of the lawsuits that Conger brings up — we even cited her coverage of Sines v Kessler when speculating on the strategy of plaintiffs’ counsel. This writer is a big fan. 

You can find Molly Conger’s antifascist research and writing at The Devil’s Advocates, as well as at her Patreon, and you can follow her on Twitter @socialistdogmom for her diligent independent stenography of local politics in Charlottesville, VA. She also has very sweet dogs. It Could Happen Here, from CoolZoneMedia, is a daily podcast about things falling apart and, (sometimes), how to put them back together.

Finally, if you’re a legal dweeb like me, the mention of those defamation suits above may have perked your ears like a pooch hearing the word “walk”. If so, this complete playlist of “Formulaic Objections”, Knowledge Fight’s series on the depositions from both cases, is for you! Depos might not be the usual idea of a fun time, but trust me on this one: these are just as interesting as they are baffling. This playlist also includes general trial coverage and post-mortems — and multiple episodes have guest appearances from lawyers and journalists working the cases.

Knowledge Fight, hosted by Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes, is a prolific podcast (begun in 2017 with 900 episodes and counting) dissecting Alex Jones and InfoWars and providing valuable analysis of his impact on the rest of us.