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Tag: Fascism

Gonzo Notes: What’s Up, Kit? March 2025

Posted in Gonzo Notes, Journalism, and LGBTQIA

As we slide into Spring, I find myself at a bit of a turning point. I’ve been out of work and freelancing for just over a year now, without luck at finding a permanent position to replace the Texas Observer. Unemployment just ran out. So it’s time for me to take stock of myself, and the industry.

Over the past year, I’ve found success as a freelance reporter, and grown my readership on sites like Bluesky. At the same time, my job search has been fruitless; the closest I got to being hired over the past year was at an environmental nonprofit, not at a press publication. Despite all my accomplishments, I’ve averaged less than one job interview a month. Unemployment helped me make ends meet between assignments, but it also forced me to spend time applying for jobs I didn’t actually want.

I still hope that someday I’ll find a home at another publication that values queer, opinionated voices like mine. However, I’m starting to feel like that role might not exist right now. In the meantime, there are still stories I need to tell.

Don’t be a platform for fascist propaganda

Posted in Activism, and Journalism

You’ve probably heard someone say ‘Don’t platform nazis.’ It means don’t publish fascist garbage uncritically on your platform. It’s usually directed at journalists, influencers and others with a big audience.

But here, I’m highlighting smaller ways well-meaning people accidentally spread fascist propaganda. These are some ways I see people inadvertently giving a platform to the worst among us:

Austin Free Press: Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation Leads to Hate

Posted in Austin, and Journalism

Murder, assault, bomb threats, and verbal threats were some of the worst anti-LGBTQ+ hate incidents occurring in the greater Austin area over the last three years, according to data that the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD documented as the basis for a recent report on such incidents nationwide. Austin Free Press used GLAAD’s Texas data to analyze incidents in the Austin area.

Even as violent crime falls nationwide, threats against the LGBTQ+ community are on the rise nationally, in Texas, and in Austin. In explaining that contradiction, experts say anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is helping to drive those trends.

“We’re seeing this really massive rise in anti-LGBTQ incidents all across the U.S.,” said Sarah Moore, GLAAD’s senior manager of news and research. Moore’s research shows that between Pride Month in June of 2023 and that same time this year incidents increased by 112% nationwide. In Texas, the increase was 44% during that period.

LGBTQ Nation: Frisco, Texas Is Erasing Diversity & Pride

Posted in Journalism

When the municipal government of Frisco, Texas, made its only Pride declaration in June of 2022, the event made headlines for a different reason than that historic first: it drew out the Proud Boys. 

The extremist right-wing group has made opposition to LGBTQ+ expression – especially drag and Pride – a cornerstone of its violent movement. In Frisco, the Proud Boys harassed a key organizer and followed him and other supporters to a celebration at a restaurant after the proclamation. 

Justin Culpepper, 36, one-half of the married couple who founded the nonprofit Pride Frisco, said the extremist group threatened to assault him. “I went into the restaurant, and the people who worked at the restaurant protected me,” he recalled.

FAIR: Alex Jones and the Post-Truth Landscape

Posted in Austin, FAIR, and Journalism

To lose a child to violence is already one of the most traumatic things a human being can experience. To compound that by seeing those deaths made the center of a seemingly limitless conspiracy theory pushes that suffering to a level that is almost inconceivable.

The Truth vs. Alex Jones, a documentary released last month from HBO/MAX, immerses us in the immense pain—and equally momentous bravery—of the parents and other surviving relatives of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, as they take on perhaps the most notorious conspiracy theorist of our age. Through exclusive courtroom footage and numerous emotionally vulnerable interviews, director Dan Reed (Leaving Neverland, Four Hours at the Capitol) brings the viewer inside the survivors’ legal efforts to force Alex Jones to face the consequences of his actions.

On the morning of December 14, 2012, a 20-year old man entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. Over the course of about five minutes, he systematically slaughtered 26 people, mostly young children, then killed himself. He had murdered his mother earlier that day.

The internet is ephemeral

Posted in Gonzo Notes, and Ministry of Hemp

I grew up invested in the technocratic fantasy that the internet would turn into a  perfect archive of all knowledge, always at our fingertips. Our mantra is often “the internet is forever,” and it’s easy to buy into this myth.

In  the process, we sometimes forget the ephemeral nature of the digital  world. If you’re online long enough, you’ve seen whole communities rise and fall. Places where we’d go to “hang out” for hours are now  meaningless husks. Yes, it’s true you can technically find my LiveJournal if you look, but it’s no longer a place where minds gather to share ideas, stories, and silly memes.

When we say “the  internet is forever,” we mean it in a forensic or archaeological sense. As online communities collapse, they leave little traces behind the way we leave behind fingerprints, and shed hair or skin cells as we move through the physical world. Researchers, such as antifascists on the  trail, can sift through the rubble but the vitality departed long ago.