Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/23/proud-boys-jailed-obviously.html
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Judge Mark Dwyer called them McInnes’ “soldiers” and compared them to Nazi Brownshirts: “I know enough about history to know what happened in Europe in the '30s when political street brawls were allowed to go ahead without any type of check from the criminal justice system.”
It was nice to see the judge making this comparison plain. That the cops wouldn’t is par for the course, and that the corporate media won’t is yet another example of their shameful bothsidesism.
There’s no shame in calling a fascist thug a fascist thug when he behaves like a fascist thug.
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I am glad somebody does. This knowledge seems in short supply these days. I am going to tread on @anon61221983 's territory (with great fear and trembling) and suggest that we need to start considering history teachers front line troops in the battle for a return to sanity. Far too many kids get out of school and never learn what happened in the Holocaust, what lynchings were, what the Nazis actually were, and what they actually did. If we do not know how this happened in previous generations, we will not be able to recognize it when it happens again. And it will. And it is. And too many do not see, or actively refuse to see, the train coming down the tracks at them. I do understand that college courses teach tis stuff, and do so (pretty) well, but many kids don’t go to college and even those that do, history classes are often optional electives (I had none in my undergrad curriculum.) HS history is about as far as it goes, and those classes are often neutered of any meaningful content. This has to change.
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32 year old dudes who are proud to call themselves boys are kinda sad. Will he still be a boy when he’s released at 37?
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They are proud to use the boys will be boys defense. Just a little rough housing because boys will be boys, and boys can’t be responsible for their actions since someone else made them do it*. (as long as they are in the ethnic majority of course) 
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Plant a Proud Boy in the clink and four years later harvest a full-grown Aryan Brotherhood soldier.
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I already do consider them that. The moment that the 1930s and 1940s began dying out of living memory to a critical degree, history teachers were handed a new duty to keep that memory alive.
They’re severely hobbled, though, saddled with Texas textbooks, low budgets, large class sizes, and time from teaching stolen by standardised test prep and other distractions.
On a promising non-academic note about history education, the writers of the new “Watchmen” series have introduced a large audience to the Tulsa race riot, a topic which rarely is discussed in American HS history courses. Viewers of the premiere have expressed genuine surprise that it was a real event, as this CNN headline indicates.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/21/us/tulsa-race-riot-black-wall-street-watchmen-trnd/index.html
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The Tulsa massacre was largely suppressed in all media. I was shocked to learn about it ca. 10 years ago, but even more appalled that I’d never encountered it.
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It’s good that these guys are locked up, but it would be bad if we took this as an indication that the justice system is capable of protecting us from white supremacists. By default, it does the opposite: exonerating white supremacist violence - whether from the police or fascist civilians - and punishing those who resist it.
The courts won’t protect us and the cops definitely won’t. We need to be able to protect each other.
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As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In addition to the Texas textbooks, there are books that are mostly fiction with a little bit of history thrown in, usually from a right-wing perspective and with a fair amount of testosterone thrown in. Pretty much every guy I’ve met who considers himself a history buff has read these.
I’m not even exempting myself really. I have read about historical events, but I know nothing of the study of history.
Think about how little the scientific method is taught in schools. The study of history is taught with far less rigor.
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Add to those: critical thinking, media literacy, financial literacy. It’s almost as if a population that graduates from high school with a basic education in all these things as the standard would threaten the interests of certain American institutions and political movements.
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This should be required high-school reading. If it isn’t on my kiddos list freshman year, I will make her read it so that she’s going into the “Rah, Rah! USA” version of history classes with the right filter.
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We had a unit in middle school on how to read a newspaper. By now it is obsolete. Instead of teaching what content is in each section of a newspaper, how an article is structured, etc, they should have made the unit on how to spot bullshit.
There was a financial literacy course in high school, but it wasn’t good at all. I had no formal education in critical thinking at all.
It was required reading for me, but I had already read it on my own by the time it was assigned.
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In earlier years, home economics used to incorporate this in terms of household budgeting and basic consumer awareness for the future wives of America – nothing about banking, investing, and credit, but it was something. That’s long gone as a standard. Sometimes financial literacy topics are folded into math classes, but that’s about it.
A school usually makes a conscious choice to incorporate teaching those skills across all of its course offerings. Unless you’re talking about an elite secular public or private high school, though, that’s not going to happen in the U.S.
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“Today, children, we are going to do a module entitled, “How to read Twitter”.”
“But, miss, all is says is “Don’t!”?”
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Like Twitter, only with more female nudity
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I just noticed my missing “w” and corrected it 
“Titter” was the Franky Howard moderated social media site*.
*This is a very Latter Half of the 20th Century UK centric comment.
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Centurions, why do they Twitter so?
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But why isn’t Gavin McInnes in jail?
In front of the Press Club were several dozen police officers and several hundred protesters. One of the protesters, wearing a black mask, crossed McInnes’s path; McInnes grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him around, and punched him in the face. “What the fuck?” the protester shouted. “Fuck you, fascist!” A few police officers rushed to arrest the protester, while other officers escorted the Proud Boys inside.
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