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Music As A Weapon

Kate Seltzer | March 19, 2021

Topics: Capitol riot, Jeffrey Rettberg, JPEGMAFIA, White Beast

With the debut EP from his new mostly solo project, White Beast, musician and filmmaker Jeffrey Rettberg is hoping to inspire introspection in the minds of those “who have drifted into radical right wing ideology.”

Jeffery Rettberg produced a lot of music at the beginning of quarantine, but he had no immediate plans to release it. Then came the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Rettberg said he found himself wishing he’d released the music months earlier.

“I have a lot of different people in my life, including very close family members and friends who are older, who have sort of drifted into radical right wing ideology over the years,” he said. 

The self-titled debut EP for his project, White Beast, directly references that phenomenon, particularly on the track “Lost Champion of the Overdog.” 

“Drunk on myths of meritocratic supremacy,” Rettberg sings. “Committed to guns, god, and security. A numbing solace found in the maintenance of fantasies.”

“[The song] felt to me like a really concise explanation of where some people are coming from and why they’ve gotten to where they are,” Rettberg said. “Sort of taking on their perspective.”

The song delves into the psychology of how people fall into right wing nationalist thought, he explained.

“The first part is me from my perspective, then there’s this piece that’s pretty satirical and a little tongue in cheek,” he said. 

The best thing that could come of his family members listening to “Lost Champion” is that maybe it spurs a bit of introspection on why they hold the beliefs they do. But, he’s not necessarily optimistic anything will change.

“I learned a long time ago that it’s a shot in the dark,” he said. “So much of that ideology is based on intense aversion to introspection.”

The EP – done entirely with bass guitar, drums, and vocals – is Rettberg’s first solo release. Most of its songs were originally written in 2017, though Rettberg said he was able to devote more attention to it in the early months of COVID-19. The project has taken so long to release in part because it’s a collaboration with many people, with friends contributing everything from drums to album art.

“Approaching something as a recording project was an easier way of working with drummer friends of mine who are incredibly busy,” he said.

When he’s not playing music, Rettberg works as a filmmaker, directing music videos for artists like JPEGMAFIA and Butch Dawson. Both have been major influences on his musical career. 

“When I had met [JPEGMAFIA] and was working with him, he had a different approach to making music that was totally alien to me,” Rettberg said.”I have a single loop pedal that I’d been messing with for 13 years, and it suddenly clicked watching him make music: I don’t care about playing live, I can just write songs that were in my head and record them.”

Rettberg’s own music is tough to categorize, even for him.

“I feel like it has punk leanings,” he said. “I definitely like layering things intensely and including psychedelic elements and stuff. It’s maybe a heavy punk, psychedelic mixture of things, if I had to pinpoint it.”

Rettberg has been attending punk shows and playing punk music since he was 13, when he formed his first band.

“We were awful,” he said. “We just barely knew how to play our instruments.” 

It’s no surprise that Rettberg’s music now is so political: he says that bands like Crass, Icons of Filth, and DIRT were major influences on both his music and his worldview.

“Those were people who were talking about things I could barely comprehend at 13 or 14, but they had a really intense, and also a really educated, view of the world around them. That spoke to me. The Dead Kennedys were also huge to me growing up. I loved the mixture of a really smart political analysis with a mixture of really funny satire.”

Rettberg recently moved from Baltimore to Richmond, and was just beginning to enjoy RVA’s music scene when the world shut down. In addition to being a fan of local bands, he said he’s appreciative of the atmosphere and the energy of crowds.

“People seemed to really care about listening to the music, not just getting fucked up, though of course there was that aspect too,” he said. “I really liked that.”

When the world is a little safer, Rettberg says he hopes to eventually play live shows again. Until then, though, you can listen to White Beast’s EP on Bandcamp, and follow them on Instagram @whitebeastband.

‘Straight Pride’ Group Sent Hundreds to Capitol Hill Insurrection

New Civil Rights Movement | January 14, 2021

Topics: Capitol riot, Donald Trump, Straight Pride Parade, Sue Ianni, Super Happy Fun America

Just in case you didn’t already know what kind of people the “straight pride parade” organizers were, it’s now come out that they chartered multiple buses to bring hundreds of people to last week’s riot at the Capitol.

A Massachusetts woman who is a director of the anti-LGBTQ Super Happy Fun America, known for its “Straight Pride” march in Boston, says she helped the far right group organize busses to carry hundreds of Trump supporters to last Wednesday’s Capitol Hill insurrection that quickly turned violent and deadly.

“Sue Ianni said she doesn’t understand why those who attended Wednesday’s protest in Washington, D.C., that resulted in violent clashes inside the U.S. Capitol are being called ‘domestic terrorists,’” reports MetroWest Daily News. “Ianni organized 11 buses to ride down to D.C. for the protest. She is concerned she, and all Trump supporters, are targets of retribution.”

The number of busses seems very fluid, with AFP reporting Super Fun Happy America “chartered six buses carrying about 300 protesters for the demonstration in the US capital.”

The group has proudly been advertising their trip to D.C.

SHFA will be in DC once again on January 6th to get wild

— SuperHappyFunAmerica (@SuperHappyFunA) December 29, 2020

Bus 1 of 11 coming to Washington DC. See you there! pic.twitter.com/66ktWpwZKL

— SuperHappyFunAmerica (@SuperHappyFunA) January 6, 2021

Five people, including a police officer, died, countless others were injured, and President Donald Trump is expected to be impeached for inciting insurrection this week as a result of the domestic terror attack.

“Ianni said she is one of the organization’s directors, and falsely described Super Happy Fun America as ‘a civil-rights organization that peacefully protests the leftist cabal taking over this country.’”

Super Happy Fun America’s leaders have described straight Americans as “an oppressed majority.” The Daily Beast last year reported one of the “straight pride” group’s leaders has been linked to a white-nationalist hate group, has been called a front for the far-right group Resist Marxism, and “has endorsed the far-right ‘helicopter’ meme, which calls for liberals to be thrown from helicopters as in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.”

Meanwhile, Ianni is claiming Super Happy Fun America was merely “expressing our First Amendment rights to protest an illegal election,” and the thousands of pro-Trump extremists, many of whom illegally breached the walls of the Capitol, were “very moving, very inspiring,” and “what America is all about.”

Getty Images published this photo purportedly of Ianni at the Capitol on Wednesday.

Embed from Getty Images

Ianni refused to tell MetroWest if she was one of those who illegally breached the Capitol building.

Massachusetts based Trump supporters and insurrectionists Mark Sahady, Brandon Navom and Suzanne Ianni on their way to the Capitol and then inside the capitol. Pretty easy one here.

You might know Mark Sahady from organizing the bigoted Straight Pride Parade last year in Boston pic.twitter.com/zmkV6zBzeF

— Gregg Housh (@GreggHoush) January 9, 2021

Ianni says they will never stop fighting.

“We will fight tooth and nail,” she told AFP. “This isn’t over just if Biden gets inaugurated, if that happens. We’ll never stop fighting. And Trump will be our president for the next four years, no matter who they inaugurate.”

“The media is portraying us as a bunch of domestic terrorists,” Ianni told MetroWest, and “showing the same video clips over and over. What you’re not seeing is a bunch of people walking around. It’s our right to this government, and the Capitol police waved them in.”

Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image: Straight pride flag, via NCRM

The Amazon Trail: All Along the Watchtower

Lee Lynch | January 12, 2021

Topics: American Civil Liberties Union, Capitol riot, Coup, Donald Trump, Republican Party, Southern Poverty Law Center, The Amazon Trail, Unite the Right

In this month’s Amazon Trail, Lee Lynch explains that the right-wing insurrection we’re dealing with now in the United States is nothing new.

Oh, hell, what can I say at a time like this? Did we think they’d simply go away?

When angry white criminals occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon back on January 2, 2016 and the seven miscreants were charged with federal conspiracy and weapons violations only to go scot free;

When, in the 1980s and 1990s, angry white Christians organized to legalize discrimination against their scapegoats-of-the-day, gays, in order to build a vast political machine;

When a woman was killed by a white supremacist at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia;

When people of color are daily, hourly, victims of “officers of the law”;

With Southern Poverty Law Conference workers putting their lives in jeopardy to identify and expose hate groups;

With the American Civil Liberties Union and its sister social justice organizations unendingly trying to bring equality to a country that can’t or won’t provide it for its citizens;

When sixty-four million voters choose a money-grubbing, power-grabbing, morally empty, strangely uneducated cheater to rule them, and make an American idol of him;

When you’re Jewish, or your skin isn’t white, or you’re female, or your affectional preference scares people enough to make you a threat and a target;

When Americans bomb their neighbors;

When it’s dangerous to represent the citizens who elected you — we need to pay attention. We need to acknowledge that anti-democratic power is quietly accruing and will lash out; will harm rather than protect this too-trusting nation.

These rightist protestors are angry that gays can marry; they’re angry about a woman, especially a woman of color, becoming our vice president. They’re angry because they can’t get ahead, can’t pay their medical bills, can’t put anything away for retirement. This anger is passed from generation to generation, and as we become a more just and equal nation some of these Americans blame the newly enfranchised for taking away their jobs, or their right to be better than whoever is lowest on their totem poles. They’re striking back, but at the wrong people.

Right wing demonstrators apparently think wealthy Republicans represent them. Socially, they may. But it’s not affirmative action taking bread off their tables, it’s not gay marriage siphoning off the middle class. It’s not “satanic” Democrats lowering taxes on big business or cutting food stamps, gutting Medicaid, and threatening to weaken Medicare and Social Security. Democrats are not the ones passing laws to weaken unions nor are they making it easier to give U.S. jobs to countries guilty of child labor, sweatshops, and pitiful wages.

Republicans are for big business. There’s a mutually beneficial relationship there: corporations fund their political campaigns and elected officials do corporations’ bidding. Like voting to consider corporations equal to humans. The campaign donations are used, in part, to target voters who are told that Democrats, progressives, socialists, liberals — whatever trigger word works — are harming Americans. The demonization is passed through certain churches, through organizations like the N.R.A., through some charter schools, through media designed for the purpose of telling lies.

They spread lies that smeared intelligent and capable Hillary Clinton so thoroughly that an insecure, bankruptcy-prone idiot who knows nothing about government, foreign affairs, economics — about anything necessary to the office of President of the United States — was elected. Now, because he pandered to the anger and frustration of a populace frightened of change, opposed to inclusiveness, looking for a miracle, they seem to believe an economic evangelist con man will lead the way to riches untold.

We should have expected it and done more to stop it. This is a capitalist nation. Nothing wrong with that. Except, when Republicans eased the restrictions on corporations, they unleashed a money-grubbing free-for-all.

Unfettered capitalism is greed, pure and simple. Greed for profit and greed for power. And that’s what we have today, universal greed. Instead of taking care of its citizens, our government feeds that greed, starving those it was supposed to serve and protect, telling them all the while who to blame. While destroying the economy for the average American, these shameless elected corporate automatons duped laid-off factory workers, ex-service people, unstable wanna-be rebel leaders. Duped them not into a revolution, but into murderous, cock-a-hoop self-sabotage.

The Republicans aren’t sitting in jails, the corporations aren’t sharing their riches. These dissenters, tools of a corporate, big brother world, aren’t going away. We, the people, cannot look away any more.  

Copyright Lee Lynch 2021. Top Photo via The Hill/Twitter

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