🔴STARTING NOW!!!

Join the #VIADUCT_EU Guest Lecture on the results of the December European Council, with @UniCologne's Wolfgang Wessels and @SenemAydnDzgit from
@sabanciu 💪

Join in on #Zoom now or otherwise follow along here for some highlights!

/THREAD

On Dec. 10-11, the European Council met, discussing among other topic, EU-Turkey relations in light of recent developments and the October conclusions.

/2

In October, the Council concluded that they would pursue better EU-Turkey relations

/3

Since then, the international community has been outraged by Turkish actions in Cyprus, France has withdrawn its diplomatic actors from Turkey, and #Erdogan has signalled opposition to "overt attacks on our nation"

/4

The scene has been set, now meet our speakers: @SenemAydnDzgit from @sabanciu and @ipc_ipm, and Wolfgang Wessels from @UniCologne, who is Project Coordinator of #VIADUCT_EU

/5

Good afternoon all!! ☕️☕️☕️

I got delayed this morning due to lack of access to 17 drops across all platforms. What a coincidence 😏

I N D I V I D U A L M A N D A T E N O T = 212

(thread ⬇️)

In the past few days some paid hacks operating under different spurious banners and using a few sloppy media platforms have been used to drum up a virulent campaign to smear and call for the head of Ahmad Salkida, Editor-in-Chief of @HumAngle_ Media.

On October 3, 2020, a platform, GCFR NG, seemingly a parody effort out to benefit from the time-honoured national honour rank, ran a misfit of a story, “Beware of Boko Haram agent, Ahmad Salkida-CAFA warns Nigerians.” The said report was derived from a random statement ...

by a group that goes by the name, Citizens Against Fake Activists, (CAFA). One Comrade Richard Adie reportedly signed the statement. The group’s name is, however, not registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission in Nigeria. It does not have any physical address ...

or functional website & has no tangible physical or digital footprints. The names associated with it are shadowy, bearing imaginary ghost emblems. The whole drama is so ghostly that it paid for a hotel hall for a press conference without leaving an address or phone number.

The same day, Blueprint, a local newspaper, ran an opinion, “Ahmed Salkida and his broken video on Nigerian military,” whose author is a subject of a self-embarrassing pointer to the hatchet job. At the end of the piece, the byline states that “Obi is a security expert ...

Some are understandably consumed with the court-packing issue right now. I'm much more interested in DC and Puerto Rican statehood. And specifically, the question of whether it is "rank politics" (and whether rank politics is bad).

So, let's talk about the Election of 1888! 1/24

You may remember that Grover Cleveland is the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms. The term he *didn't* serve is the one decided in 1888. Despite getting 90,000 more votes than his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland lost the Electoral College. 2/24

Harrison's Republican Party, who already controlled the Senate, also took back control of the House in that election, earning unified control for the first time since 1881.

But it was a fragile control. So they immediately got to work on admitting new Republican states. 3/24

In 1889, the Republican Congress admitted four new states: Washington, Montana and the Dakota Territory, which was split at the last minute into North Dakota and South Dakota. In 1890, they added Idaho and Wyoming.

Just as importantly is the territory they *didn't* add... 4/24

Republicans opted to leave Utah as a territory, because it was widely understood that Mormons were overwhelmingly Democrats. 

Thus, Republicans expanded both of their caucuses with all 8 House members from the new states and all 12 new members in the Senate. 5/24

It is clear that a consequential portion of Republican elected officials hold a particular view of America which only benefits “their kind of people.”

It is a vision so anti-democratic that secure it through exercise of raw, brutal power.

So what is to be done...

Unequivocally and boot these opponents of liberty out of the Republican party or start a new one.

Accept the repentant, but don’t waste time trying to persuade the obtuse, arrogant and violent.

Remember who caved and never, ever, ever vote a Trump lackey into office again.

Make repair for the damage the party has wrought.

Extend and protect voting rights for all. Act in true democratic fashion and listen to the will of the majority.

Aggressively enact policies to disrupt white supremacist extremist activity. Disassociate from racists.

Do a deep and thorough accounting of your authoritarian, patriarchal, white supremacist history and remove from pedestals those who, covered their dehumanizing tactics under the guise of “conservatism.”

Look to your religious institutions and divorce from them any notions that the Republican Party is God’s party and that the USA is God’s favored nation.

Glean wisdom from faith communities comprised of marginalized people groups. Smash the idol of Christian Nationalism.

Summary of Georgia Kraken Release...
Happy Thanksgiving, 🦃 🇺🇸!

COUNT I

DEFENDANTS VIOLATED THE ELECTIONS CLAUSE AND 42 U.S.C. § 1983

The hardest thing to overcome is the popular notion of "that can't happen in America", even while it's been happening all of your life.

Dear friends, nothing is as it's presented, what you have accepted as reality has been a mirage.

They LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING.

To understand not only what took place last week in DC, but the response of many Americans and the Republican party to it, it's absolutely essential to understand the role a certain kind of religion plays in US culture and politics. /1 #capitolsiegereligion

This kind of religion is most accentuated in its evangelical iteration, but is to be found in a lot of other sectors of religion in the US since, as Kristin Kobes du Mez shows in her book Jesus and John Wayne, evangelicalism has extended its influence all through US religion. /2

Some key reasons — rooted in a kind of religion that is deeply embedded in US culture and politics — many Americans and Republicans will keep lying boldly about what we can all see on the videos from last Wednesday: /3

a. The kind of religion on full display last week in the DC race riot lives in a world of alternative facts, and is proudly scornful of all information and news sources beyond that world. /4

b. The kind of religion we saw manifesting such malevolence in DC last week is ravenous for enemies. Its raison d'etre is the generation of an endless succession of enemies — the native peoples, "witches," "heretics," Jews, Commies, queers, women, liberals — to be overcome. /5

Comparing and Contrasting the 2000 contested election with the 2020 contested election.
According to @SenTedCruz book One Vote Away in 2000 Bush was able to assemble a Legal "Field of Dreams" team. All they had to do was make a call and people showed up to help.
1/

.@Tyler_t_moran and Esther Olavarria.

Johnny Nash sums up my feelings at this, because words don’t suffice.

https://t.co/r3apSHRBuc

I know it’s so hard for folks to understand how important this is, even for me. I don’t have words. My mind is all garbling with how incredible Esther and @tyler_t_moran are.

Both of them are incredibly humble. Both likely annoyed right now at the fuss. “Let’s get to work!”

.@Tyler_t_moran serving the office of @SenatorReid would come to Nevada and meet with families to see what the problems were in our communities. She used to go to their homes (not typical) eat with them and in that beautiful language that can only be shared around food -

would ask them what was wrong. People would look at me asking for cues “just dígale” and they would unleash what ICE had done to them, how a notario had explained something to them, as they pulled out all the receipts from a plastic bag and handed them to @tyler_t_moran -

.@Tyler_t_moran would patiently sit there with them and ask “por que!?” She would turn to us and say “is this common?” *nods* her calm demeanor would turn slightly pink as anger flowed but she’d keep asking, pulling out her little notebook and pen. A week later she’d contact -

Today the Electoral College will confirm what we learned in November: @JoeBiden is the legitimate President-Elect of the United States. @realDonaldTrump lost. I lost (ie, voted for the loser).

This is worth pointing out because learning how to react when God doesn’t give you what you want is a major element of Christian discipleship. It’s the element of discipleship most avoided by the Prosperity Gospel heresy that has taken the lead in claiming Trump won.

Paula White has been at the forefront of this movement. @ericmetaxas has said that he knows President Trump won because somebody he trusts “prophesied” it (prophecy is real, but this hogwash deserves scare quotes).

Yes. Hogwash.

We are tempted to buy the hogwash when we didn’t get what we wanted. Just like the cancer patient at a Benny Hinn crusade. Just like the person contemplating bankruptcy at a Creflo Dollar meeting.

THREAD 📌Those of us whose lives have been made a living hell by Trump's presidency have a right to ask those of you who voted Trump/Trump proxy (yes, your Stein votes threw the election to Trump in PA, WI & MI), to have the decency to just STFU. Not everything is about you.
1/

And FGS everyone stop applauding GOP who put us here for their belated mea culpas or one tweet you agree with. If you want to applaud, applaud folks who were doing the work of the past 4yrs, not coming in at the end to say they wouldn't make the same awful mistake again.
2/

And if you want "healing," don't demand it of people who have been hurt. Let the folks who skimmed through the past 4yrs painlessly do that work. Some of you don't even know that Betsy DeVos was one of the most effective Cabinet members--destroying thousands of young lives.
3/

This is a tenuous time. People are wounded--and I do not mean Trump folks because I honestly could not conceivably care less about them. I mean people I have been interviewing over 4yrs: BIPOC, women, immigrants, LGBTQ, poor and disabled people, Muslims. SO MUCH SUFFERING.
4/

22k people died this week and that is because 77k people out of 130M just couldn't bring themselves to vote for a brilliant life-long public servant because something something vagina emails speeches and whateverthefck you lied to yourself about in 2016 to "show" Hillary.
5/

Posted on 8kun platform 12/20.
This is huge!

Dear Patriots,
Some of you may recognize my name. I have daily briefings with POTUS & have posted here before a handful of times as a "helper".
What I'm about to disclose is the most important post you'll read before the inauguration.

The Anabaptist Option:

Neo-Calvinist Cornelius Van Til was a lifelong Republican voter, but couldn't crack the application of Reformed theology to politics. How does the Christian worldview manifest in the political realm with regard to particular parties and politicians?

Van Til's student, Francis Schaeffer, motivated by his postmillennialism in the Cold War context, promoted Christianity as antithetical to communism. Fundamentalist friends like Jerry Falwell found political motivation in the moralist message of Schaeffer's A Christian Manifesto.

The aforementioned mindset put the Moral Majority (1979) into motion right around the time of the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention (1979) and the presidential run of Ronald Reagan (1981). Similar rhetoric and results followed in the years to come.

Politicians, knowing they had to secure the votes of the Moral Majority, or 'Values Voters,' or 'evangelicals' as a voting bloc, pandered to them by citing their 'Christian faith' and 'pro-life' positions which ran counter to Roe v. Wade (1973), another Schaefferian target.

Those left unpersuaded by the aforementioned project were no longer merely political opponents, but morally inferior people, most likely owing to a lack of true Christian faith and practice. Clearly, the moral failings of Bill Clinton weren't consistent with his Christian faith.

As a woman of color & immigrant in higher education & career services - I have some pressing thoughts. Here goes:

A daughter of immigrants as Vice President. The first woman Vice President. The first Black woman Vice President. The first South Asian woman Vice President. 1/X

Of course, we must acknowledge that no candidate is perfect – President-Elect Biden is not perfect. Vice President-Elect Harris is not perfect. There is much work to be done to continue to move forward towards a more progressive and truly inclusive America. 2/X

We cannot back to a version of “normal” that actively excludes certain individuals based on their race, country of origin, immigration status, size, ability, experience with addiction, religion, sexual orientation, gender expression, and more. 3/X

However, it is critical that we, as members of the workforce, take note of a specific aspect of this election that cannot be ignored: the power of sponsorship. 4/X

I long for the day when women of color need not wait for a door of opportunity to open. However, our reality is that sponsorship is currently a critical element of workplace success – and I say this as a woman of color myself. 5/X