The official story of the Trump administration's family separation policy is that it came about as a result of "zero tolerance" in which every person who could be charged with a crime would be, and that meant that parents were arrested too, and since the parents were going to jail, their kids had to be held somewhere. Read the rest

Polygon has an amazing piece on why gaming culture and young white male gamers are so toxic. They interviewed a number of folks doing actual academic research and professional journalism on the topic, and the answers are sadly exactly what you expect. Scared racist white guys have had a lot of time to fester in their little bubble, and are very resistant to any change that means they aren't always Übermenschen.

Excerpt via Polygon, but read the whole thing:

Why are gaming’s toxic men so enraged?

Women and people of color are beginning to appear in games as powerful characters with their own agency. Slowly, women and minorities are starting to hold senior positions in game development and game criticism. Why is representation — within and outside the art — so offensive to gaming’s toxic men?

Soraya Chemaly:

There’s a lot of sociological research about hierarchy and status in the gaming space, and the misogyny and aggression that comes out of that.

We know that the dynamics of women’s visibility online, particularly in what are perceived as competitive situations, can often result in lower-status men feeling threatened, and then dogpiling on women who have more prominence, status and visibility.

We see that in gaming, and we see it in the same way on Twitter where they have a two-tiered verification system that makes women extremely visible in prominent ways.

Jen Golbeck (Golbeck is an associate professor at the University of Maryland. Her books on internet and entertainment culture include Introduction to Social Media Investigation: A Hands-on Approach.):

The mythos of heroic, powerful men who are in charge — who are respected, successful and dominant — is a narrative that is really changing.

In an interview with CBS News' Jeff Glor on Sunday, President Donald Trump was asked which nations he considered to be foes of the United States. Read the rest

Remember when the words "shithole country" erupted from Trump's oozing, racist mouth-hole? Yeah, so does everyone else. Read the rest

Jason Kessler, organizer of last summer's violent, murderous "unite the right" rally in Charlottesville, has received preliminary National Parks Service approval to stage a "white civil rights rally" in Washington, DC, on Aug 11-12. He anticipates 400 attendees. Read the rest

Don't despair. Take action. Read the rest

“Toddlers are being detained.” Read the rest

She picks a Mexican restaurant. The irony is not lost on anyone.

Read the rest

Ambien manufacturer Sanofi issued a masterfully worded public statement on Wednesday in response to recently-fired ABC TV star Roseanne Barr's latest Twitter meltdown.

In a series of wackadoodle tweets she posted late last night, 'Roseanne' blamed Sanofi's prescription sleep medication for the racist tweets that got her eponymous show canceled. Read the rest

Dave writes, "Maxime Bernier, a far-right asshole who ran for leadership of Canada's Progressive Conservative party on a platform of 'fair gun policy' and 'standing up for rural Canadians,' decided that his colleague across the aisle (Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes) thought too much about her skin colour, and let it taint her point of view." Read the rest

Police in Rialto, California have released bodycam footage of an incident in which Bob Marley's granddaughter was detained when a white neighbor reported her for suspected burglary. Donisha Prendergast was merely staying at an Airbnb, on her vacation, with friends, while Black. Read the rest

Public records requests have shown that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- who have continued and intensified Obama's program of mass deportations and separation of families under Trump -- uses Facebook's logs, merged with logs from cellular carriers and analyzed by software from Palantir (Peter Thiel's police-state arms-dealer) to track immigrants people they're investigating. Read the rest

President Donald Trump makes good on his year-long threats to attack the state of California and its residents with harsh new immigration lawsuit. Read the rest

Huffington Post published this list of open neo-Nazi and white supremacists running for office.

HuffPo includes a number of assholes who are also white-supremacy-adjacent, as well. Some cowards simply use the dog-whistles and encourage the ideas of racism, while not posting photos of themselves in SS-esque outfits complaining about Jewish folk.

Via HuffPo:

There are at least three white supremacists currently running for Congress, and a fourth running for a state House seat. Two other candidates — one of whom can unambiguously be called a white supremacist, and one who has ties to white supremacist groups but denies being a white supremacist himself — announced runs for public office, but have since dropped out of their respective races.

Still more Republican candidates, many of whom are running for re-election, have used white supremacist slogans, invited white supremacists to official government events, or granted interviews to racist or anti-Semitic publications.

It’s important to identify these candidates, not only so people know who’s on their ballot, but because ― as we’ve seen ― someone who’s thought of as fringe one year can be in the White House the next.

Arthur Jones is standing uncontested to be the GOP's candidate in Illinois's 3rd Congressional District, representing suburban Chicago; he has run for office several times on a white-supremacist, Holocaust denial platform, calling the Holocaust "the biggest blackest lie in history." Read the rest

The Stranger's David Lewis snuck into the Northwest Forum, a s00per s33kr1t Nazi gathering in Seattle, and attended the speeches, including the keynote by reclusive white supremacist leader Dr Greg Johnson. Read the rest

Ta-Nehisi Coates (previously) is in characteristically amazing form with his new essay in the Atlantic, "The First White President," in which he posits that Donald Trump is "the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president" -- the first president elected by appealing to white supremacy to the exclusion of everything else. Read the rest