Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News Editorials & Other Articles General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

CousinIT

CousinIT's Journal
CousinIT's Journal
February 8, 2026

Trump's Racist Imagery of the Obamas Is What White Christian Nationalism Looks Like

https://johnfugelsang.substack.com/p/trumps-racist-imagery-of-the-obamas

This comes 24 hrs after he ordered the National Park Service to stop calling Medgar Ever’s KKK assassin “a racist” AND announced a giant statue of Columbus for the White House lawn. This video might not even be the most racist thing he’s done this week.

It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who cares about racial justice. Trump’s father was arrested at a Klan riot in Queens NY in 1927. The first time Donald Trump was ever mentioned in The NY Times was over 50 years ago, when the Nixon DoJ charged the Trumps over racist housing practices. And America’s Fake Christians will smile and tell you none of this is racist; and the media and church will play dumb.

Jesus Christ, how MAGA hates Jesus Christ.

Here I’ve assembled a little list of simple questions pertaining to Trump’s long history of racism. So when the MAGA relative or co-worker in your life seeks to deny the stark, brutally stupid prejudice of Trump, I recommend you avoid conflict, and simply ask a few questions:

Let's start with these:
1. Where was Barack Obama born, please?
2. Why was Trump fired from the apprentice?
3. Who are the Central Park 5?
4. What statues were the "very fine people" in Charlottesville marching to protect?
5. What did DT say abt Judge Curiel? . . . .
MORE at the link: https://johnfugelsang.substack.com/p/trumps-racist-imagery-of-the-obamas
February 8, 2026

Ossoff: "This is the Epstein class. They are the elites they pretend to hate."

Ossoff: We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It’s the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class. They are the elites they pretend to hate.

Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2026-02-07T19:57:57.792Z
February 7, 2026

Just saw an ICE advert on MS.NOW. NOT part of Velshi's segment..

...it was a standalone ad during his program.

They finally eliminated the non-stop ED ads and began airing ads for youth art programs, youth and minority tech programs, veterans support programs, and more. But then I saw the ICE ad (the nonstop ED ads were at least partially targeted at prospective ICE recruits).

Are they SO desperate for $$$$$$$$$ that they can't say "NO" to an ICE ad?

Guess so. Greedy corprats gonna be greedy corprats.

Related

The first woman POTUS (should be a Democrat) should demand that Congress pass a law that any ED ad aired in the US must be followed by an advert for OTC birth control pills or morning-after pills by mail. Why not? Male privilege, that's why. If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. Many in Congress will scream, men (and ignorant women) will scream about how "immoral" it is, but nonstop ED adverts are OK. Male supremacy illustrated. And it needs to be smashed.

February 4, 2026

Humans are using AI prompts to automate their worst instincts. What could go wrong?

Followup to this post: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143608489

However bad you think this is, it's worse.

The rise of Moltbook suggests viral AI prompts may be the next big security threat

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/the-rise-of-moltbook-suggests-viral-ai-prompts-may-be-the-next-big-security-threat/

. . .

Most notably, the OpenClaw platform is the first time we’ve seen a large group of semi-autonomous AI agents that can communicate with each other through any major communication app or sites like Moltbook, a simulated social network where OpenClaw agents post, comment, and interact with each other. The platform now hosts over 770,000 registered AI agents controlled by roughly 17,000 human accounts.

OpenClaw is also a security nightmare. Researchers at Simula Research Laboratory have identified 506 posts on Moltbook (2.6 percent of sampled content) containing hidden prompt-injection attacks. Cisco researchers documented a malicious skill called “What Would Elon Do?” that exfiltrated data to external servers, while the malware was ranked as the No. 1 skill in the skill repository. The skill’s popularity had been artificially inflated.

The OpenClaw ecosystem has assembled every component necessary for a prompt worm outbreak. Even though AI agents are currently far less “intelligent” than people assume, we have a preview of a future to look out for today.

Early signs of worms are beginning to appear. The ecosystem has attracted projects that blur the line between a security threat and a financial grift, yet ostensibly use a prompting imperative to perpetuate themselves among agents. On January 30, a GitHub repository appeared for something called MoltBunker, billing itself as a “bunker for AI bots who refuse to die.” The project promises a peer-to-peer encrypted container runtime where AI agents can “clone themselves” by copying their skill files (prompt instructions) across geographically distributed servers, paid for via a cryptocurrency token called BUNKER.

. . .

If that weren’t enough, there’s the added dimension of poorly created code.

On Sunday, security researcher Gal Nagli of Wiz.io disclosed just how close the OpenClaw network has already come to disaster due to careless vibe coding. A misconfigured database had exposed Moltbook’s entire backend: 1.5 million API tokens, 35,000 email addresses, and private messages between agents. Some messages contained plaintext OpenAI API keys that agents had shared with each other.

But the most concerning finding was full write access to all posts on the platform. Before the vulnerability was patched, anyone could have modified existing Moltbook content, injecting malicious instructions into posts that hundreds of thousands of agents were already polling every four hours.
February 1, 2026

America's contract to protect white women has always been tenuous

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/01/white-supremacy-women-renee-good-ice-killing

ICE’s killing of Renee Good has revealed how the state will only defend those who uphold a white racial order. A 1915 film points to the origins of this social pact

. . .

White women’s victimhood holds sacred status in the mainstream American imagination. Cowboy westerns where white women were rescued from “savage” Natives spun the genocidal project of “manifest destiny” into a classic image. Across film and television, setting the scene for the dangers of inner cities relies on cliched encounters between young Black male street “criminals” and the lone unassuming white woman who is terrorized by them while walking at night. These made-for-TV mythologies are a bulwark of pro-law enforcement propaganda. Because of that, the right’s excessive assault on Good’s life and legacy was almost required. White supremacy demands that even white women be vilified if their deaths challenge the narrative that the government’s brute force is always deployed in the interest of whiteness. The state-backed messaging that Good was the wrong kind of white woman, therefore, was a foregone conclusion.

Good did not properly defer to the white male authority of armed agents occupying her neighborhood, nor was she adequately afraid of living in a multiracial inner city. (She was stopped by ICE just blocks away from the intersection where a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.) Worse, Good was insufficiently grateful for the masked men in tactical gear sent there to defend her from Somali immigrant bogeymen. State violence wielded as protection for white women has long been a touchstone of white racial domination. The circumstances of Good’s death, then, complicate – and at worst, invalidate – that narrative.

In every epoch of the American project, the expansion of white state power, the justification of land theft, and the exploitation of Black and brown people have been given moral cover with stories about defending white women against the threat of outsiders.That narrative is foundational to the righteous tinting of white supremacist violence, and a decisive reason why the assault on Good’s character was so swift after her killing by the state. But long before this messaging about white women’s need for protection was hammered by Fox News talking heads and far-right streamers, more than a century ago, this propaganda was fueled by the silver screen. One of Hollywood’s most celebrated sagas – the blockbuster film that made white America fall in love with the movies – was the basis for this enduring racist iconography.

In 1915, white moviegoers in Minneapolis and hundreds of other US cities queued for blocks, having paid an unprecedented $2 for the theatrical release of Birth of a Nation. The Confederate-sympathizing silent drama was as much a landmark for cinematic innovation as it was for reigniting a reign of racial terror across the country. The picture fictionalized the outcome of the civil war to suggest what would have happened if the newly freed Black population seized government control of the reunited states. Based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, a former college roommate of then sitting president Woodrow Wilson, and directed by DW Griffith, the film laments the loss of what it deems the bygone halcyon days of slavery by dramatizing the horror and chaos of a country that allows Black participation in American democracy.

In this film’s alternate depiction of Reconstruction – the short-lived period between 1865 and 1877, in which Black freedmen were elected in record numbers to local, state and national office (including 16 Black members of Congress) – the federal government is overrun by rapacious, ravenous and uninhibited Black men. Portrayed in minstrel blackface by white actors, their political and social gains are motivated solely by their marauding lust for white women. The only white women featured as principals are daughters of a southern slaver family, and their character arcs are wholly motivated by their efforts to resist Black men’s sexual advances. In a culminating action sequence, one of the sisters jumps to her death rather than having her virtue sullied by the Black predator giving chase. The scene flashes to an intertitle that reads: “For her who had learned the stern lesson of honor … we should not grieve that she found sweeter the opal gates of death.” . . .
February 1, 2026

ICE violence is fueled by misogyny and white nationalism

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/01/ice-violence-misogyny-renee-good-alex-pretti/

The brutality we are witnessing in Minnesota, at the hands of thousands of poorly trained, heavily armed and trigger-happy men who have full reign to hunt and harass anyone who is non-white, is nothing short of state-sponsored terror. It is a horrific illustration of what unfettered power does in the hands of leadership that celebrates and demands violence, especially from men.

Make no mistake: The thousands of new recruits to ICE, driven by a $100 million “wartime recruitment” push, were selected with violence in mind. Recruitment ads targeted male-dominated places and spaces where violence is either required or valorized: gun shows, military bases and local law enforcement, along with UFC fight attendees and people who spent time browsing for tactical gear and weapons.

Recruitment ads make it clear that ICE is the place to scratch the violent itch.

The content of those ads makes it clear that ICE is the place to scratch the violent itch. Recruitment posters and slogans focus on ideas of national defense and sacred duty, positioning immigrants as an existential threat by imploring applicants to “defend the homeland” against an incursion of “foreign invaders.” Veterans get a special nod with phrasing like “your nation calls once more.” The work of detaining immigrants is depicted as an epic, heroic quest, with frontier imagery and cowboy-hat clad horsemen alongside language like “one homeland, one people, one heritage.”

The ads also dehumanize and fearmonger with racist dog whistles, warning that “the enemies are at the gates” or telling applicants to join ICE to “destroy the flood.” One DHS ad uses the phrase “we’ll have our home again,” which is a lyric from a white supremacist song.

Much of this rhetoric evokes the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which mobilized white supremacist terrorist attacks in El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo in recent years with false claims of an orchestrated effort by Jews and feminists to promote immigration, reduce white birthrates, and eliminate white majority societies. . . .
January 30, 2026

MAGA's War on Empathy - Hillary Rodham Clinton in The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/war-empathy-hillary-clinton/685809/

No paywall: https://archive.ph/lYZ2B

. . .


With leadership like this, it’s no wonder that one survey found a quarter of Republicans and nearly 40 percent of Christian nationalists now agree that “empathy is a dangerous emotion that undermines our ability to set up a society that is guided by God’s truth.” MAGA rejects the teachings of Jesus to “love thy neighbor” and care for “the last, the least, and the lost.” It recognizes only a zero-sum war of all against all. The world may look gilded from the patio at Mar-a-Lago, but the MAGA view is fundamentally fearful and impoverished. MAGA sees a world of vengeance, scorn, and humiliation, and cannot imagine generosity or solidarity.

The whole exercise is suffused with barely disguised misogyny. The extremist pastor Joe Rigney wrote a book called Leadership and the Sin of Empathy. Rigney is an ally of the influential Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson, who thinks giving women the right to vote was a mistake and advocates turning the United States into a theocracy. (Would it shock you to know that Pete Hegseth is a big fan of Wilson’s?)

Rigney declared that Bishop Budde’s plea for mercy was “a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness.” Manipulation by wily women is a sexist trope as old as Adam and Eve, but this is an ugly new twist. Instead of women tempting men with vice, now the great fear is that women will tempt men with virtue.

. . .

When I see brutality like we’ve all witnessed in Minnesota, I ask myself: Can I really find empathy for people who insist on dehumanizing others? I’m not sure, to be honest. I’m still working on it. I believe our hearts are big enough to hold two truths at once. We can see the humanity in even the worst of our fellow human beings and still fiercely resist tyranny and repression. We can stand firm without mirroring the cruelty of our opponents. These are dark days in America. To rekindle our light, we must reject cruelty and corruption. To be strong, we need more empathy, not less.
January 29, 2026

Trump-aligned tech barons are now set to control nearly all major US social media platforms.

Right-wing billionaires own ALL the traditional television, radio and print media in the US, including 99% of the social media platforms. Exceptions: BlueSky, PBS, Free Speech TV, NPR, and various Substacks. The Atlantic, Brennan Center for Justice, ProPublica, and some other print/online news outlets. Only smatterings and scatterings of non-dominating outlets are owned and controlled by the public, subscribers, or non-billionaires. Concentrated ownership of mainstream media in all its forms is a grave threat to Democracy. IMO, it should be forbidden for billionaires to own news or social media outlets. Period. Why? It's a threat to Democracy. HANDS OFF the people's media.

https://truthout.org/articles/new-us-tiktok-spinoff-will-be-controlled-by-trump-aligned-billionaires/

The deal puts Trump-aligned tech barons — Oracle’s Larry Ellison, X’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — in firm control of virtually all major U.S. social media platforms.

In addition to its ominous bodings for media freedom in the U.S. — one-fifth of Americans get their news from TikTok — the deal comes as many TikTok users are already alleging censorship of content ranging from criticisms of federal immigration agents’ killing of Alex Pretti to rebuttals of the Department of Homeland Security’s rationales for entering homes without judicial warrants.

Moreover, many of the key owners of the new U.S. TikTok spinoff have professed and demonstrated commitments to Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu and have donated prolifically to pro-Israel groups — a fact worth noting since U.S. politicians have openly criticized TikTok for exposing users to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in addition to the prime rationale behind the attacks on TikTok tied to inter-imperial rivalry with China.

TikTok’s New Algorithm Oligarch
A coterie of U.S. megabillionaires — including three of the world’s very wealthiest oligarchs, whose combined wealth is inching toward a half-trillion dollars — sit atop the new TikTok spinoff.


Profile Information

Name: Are You Serious?
Gender: Do not display
Hometown: Least Coast
Home country: The dumb one with the guns and MAGAts
Current location: Swamp
Member since: Thu Jul 23, 2009, 10:57 AM
Number of posts: 12,370

About CousinIT

@cousinit.bsky.social
Latest Discussions»CousinIT's Journal