Dustin Higgs is a Maryland based artist on Death Row for a crime he did not commit -

He was convicted and sentenced to the federal death penalty as an accomplice to the 1996 murders of Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn. It was the first federal death sentence handed down in Maryland in the modern era.

Dustin was not the person who actually shot the three women. Nor was he an accomplice. In fact, it was Willis Haynes who pulled the trigger, and he was sentenced to life in prison plus 45 years after a separate jury spared him the death penalty for the crime. With the resumption of federal executions in 2020, Dustin's life is at serious risk.

He is sentenced to be excecuted on Jan 15. 2021. 3 days before MLK Day and just 5 DAYS BEFORE THE NEW FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION IS PUT IN PLACE

Please if you have just one second or one spec of human decency, click these links.

Same country, one day apart

Not to make “wow cool robot” meme but nobody missed the mark of what the cyberpunk genre is about more than the company that actively subjected their workers to abusive working conditions for months, engages in transphobia, uses Maori face tattoos for aesthetics, silences Maori person pointing that out, has a scene that causes seizures by recreating procedure done by doctors for testing epilepsy and stays silent as their ravenous fanbase attack anyone who so much as points it out including sending them flashing gifs which may very well cause seizures.

Like words like “bitch” or phrases like “suck a fat one”. They have sexist/homophobic roots but most people do not use them in that way. They have become almost meaningless phrases. Lecturing people about them doesn’t do much to help.

It is very important to be aware of casual anti-semitism, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. But not everything that might have started that way stayed that way.

Flat Earth is a fundamentalist Christian conspiracy. But not even a decade after it really took off (thanks, Youtube), a lot of people who believe in it aren’t even aware of that. You have people of all faiths, and some without, following it.

Heck, the US started as an Atheist country, separation of state and church, and now most laws are in some way or another linked to religion, mostly Christianity.

The thing is, conspiracy theory - like every other belief - needs to be able to draw upon an intellectual history in order to explain itself. But since conspiracy theory is, by its nature, bullshit, the only intellectual history available to it is the conspiracy theory that came before it. It must be self-referential or can’t survive. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the single greatest conspiracy document of the 20th century and directly contributed to the Holocaust. There’s essentially no 20th century conspiracy theory that doesn’t draw upon the world of the Protocols to explain itself. This includes silly conspiracy theories like flat earth. “Well if the earth is flat, why isn’t that common knowledge?” “Because the elites are suppressing knowledge to keep you under their control.”

Of course I don’t actually believe that every single person who makes a lizard person joke is antisemitic. That’s the very point of this post. They aren’t, and when my non-Jewish friends make a lizard person joke I don’t chase after them with a big stick and beat them for it, as you seem to believe. 

A significant aspect of the way antisemitism has evolved is that dog whistles now make up much of its language.  What I’m referring to in this post is the overwhelming experience of Jewish users who combat coded antisemitism online - the fact that it’s coded makes it very easy for people to dismiss both our lived experience and expertise. Jews don’t just decide willy-nilly when something is harmful so we can bask in the pleasures of making other people feel guilty. We know the history of this hate, where it comes from and what it can do. 

So yeah, Zuckerberg is a weird guy. I, too, really dislike him. Do Nazis, in 2020, believe Zuckerberg is a literal lizard? No. Lizard people is a reference to a somewhat outdated antisemitic conspiracy theory popularized by David Icke. But Nazis are big into the idea that Zuckerberg isn’t a person. Jokes about Zuckerberg looking like a robot or lizard masquerading as a person can’t be isolated from his Jewishness and the white supremacist belief that Jews are an especially sinister force, capable of looking like ordinary (or white) people even though they really aren’t people, they’re a degenerate race in control of everything and bent on erasing white people entirely. 

Would you like to see how this plays out in Nazi chats? 

This is where I’m putting in a read more, or a warning to Jews reading this post that I’m about to add screencaps from Nazi social media. 

Discourse on Colonialism (Aimé Césaire) - this is more a focus on colonization, but I feel it's a necessary read in my opinion as in order to understand decolonization I believe it's important to first understand colonization.

Wretched of the Earth (Franz Fanon)

Decolonization is Not a Metaphor (Tuck, Yang)

The Wretched of the Earth (PDF, ebook)

Decolonization is Not a Metaphor (PDF)