The Second Amendment And Slavery: Perfect Together? Worthy of a REV podcast…here’s the gist of this historian’s argument:
In her new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, Anderson traces racial distinctions in Americans’ treatment of gun ownership back to the founding of the country and the Second Amendment, which states:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The language of the amendment, Anderson says, was crafted to ensure that slave owners could quickly crush any rebellion or resistance from those whom they’d enslaved. And she says the right to bear arms, presumably guaranteed to all citizens, has been repeatedly denied to Black people.It was in response to the concerns coming out of the Virginia ratification convention for the Constitution, led by Patrick Henry and George Mason, that a militia that was controlled solely by the federal government would not be there to protect the slave owners from an enslaved uprising. And … James Madison crafted that language in order to mollify the concerns coming out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full control over their state militias — and those militias were used in order to quell slave revolts. … The Second Amendment really provided the cover, the assurances that Patrick Henry and George Mason needed, that the militias would not be controlled by the federal government, but that they would be controlled by the states and at the beck and call of the states to be able to put down these uprisings.
Facebook plans to announce Friday that it will no longer automatically give politicians a pass when they break the company’s hate speech rules, a major reversal after years of criticism that it was too deferential to powerful figures during the Trump presidency.
Since the 2016 election, the company has applied a test to political speech that weighs the newsworthiness of the content against its propensity to cause harm. Now the company will throw out the first part of the test and will no longer consider newsworthiness as a factor…
Blatantly-Racist Allegheny County DA Orders No Plea Bargains With Black Attorney Who Criticized Him.
Five days after well-known Black attorney Milton Raiford spoke out against racism in the criminal justice system, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. emailed all of his deputy prosecutors forbidding them from offering any plea deals to Raiford or his clients.
Zappala’s email, obtained by the Tribune-Review, went on to say that effective immediately, “no plea offers are to be made.”
Zappala, who’s served for more than two decades as Allegheny County’s top prosecutor, has been criticized as a racist long before he sent an email all but cementing his planned discrimination. Under his leadership, the district attorney’s office charged Black juveniles as adults 20 times more frequently than their white peers, the Pittsburgh City Paper reported. He also backed a decision to refile “failure to disperse” charges against 16 Black Lives Matter demonstrators even after the Associated Press unearthed a Facebook group of current and former cops calling the protesters “terrorists” or “thugs.”
Dog Bites Man: Trump’s Grasp On Reality ‘Startling’. He’ll be back in office by August, with the MyPillow guy as his new Veep.
How NC Cops Trapped And Tear-Gassed Peaceful Protestors. Literally no way out. No dispersal order. Just aimed and fired into trapped crowd.
Japan ‘Cornered’ Into Holding Olympics? Nobody thinks it’s a good idea. The vast majority of the Japanese people oppose it. However:
The Switzerland-based IOC derives almost 75% of its income from selling broadcast rights. Its income has been stalled since the one-year postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, and estimates suggest it could lose $3 billion-$4 billion in broadcast income if the games were canceled…
…The IOC’s plan is to get 15,000 Olympic and Paralympic athletes from more than 200 countries and territories into Tokyo, sequester them in a bubble at the Olympic Village, let them compete and then get them out of Japan within two days of their finish.
What could possibly go wrong?
What do you want to talk about?