Before everyone raises glasses to make their “the system worked” toasts, let’s remember…./1

Nearly a year ago, the Tablighi Jamaat controversy took over India’s media. Around 3,500 foreign nationals had visited India to attend the Tablighi Jamaat event at the Nizamuddin Markaz Mosque in Delhi.

With the lockdown being announced on March 24, 2020, several attendees had moved to different parts of the country to attend smaller gatherings in local mosques.

Around 960 foreign nationals were held at quarantine and in states like UP, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka, etc. were sent straight to prison.

There was an outpour of Anti-Muslim bigotry in much of Indian news media with this event where it ramped up its demonisation of the community.

For weeks, the attendees of the Tablighi Jamaat event were named the “super-spreaders” of COVID and in several cases, Maulana Mohammad Saad was called a terrorist and “the maulana of death”.

It's funny how so many people who claim to worship "democracy" also dismiss nationalism as selfish xenophobia. Democracy is absolutely meaningless without strong national sovereignty. Under globalism, citizens of any given state have little influence over how they are governed.

Nationalism isn't just mindless tribalism. People are correct to insist their government has a responsibility TO THEM that vastly outweighs any imagined responsibility to foreign governments they have absolutely no influence over, or foreign populations.

We've seen that point taken to absurd extremes by the Left during the Trump administration, with whack-job judges ruling that foreigners have rights that EXCEED those of American citizens, including absolute rights to enter the U.S. and influence its government.

And we're frequently told that some international elite "consensus" completely overrides our ability to make individual decisions - or even to petition our own government, or vote for representatives who disagree with whatever "the world" has supposedly decided.

All of that is the absolute negation of "democracy" in any form, including the dangerous mob rule and majoritarianism that the Left selectively advocates. (Notice they always have a list of things nobody gets to vote on anymore, no matter how strong the majority vote would be.)

1. I was walking in the woods yesterday and I had an epiphany. It wasn’t one I wanted to have. I was thinking about today’s class, where we are reading Kimmerer’s ‘Gathering Moss’. I’ve taught Braiding Sweetgrass in multiple classes every year since 2016. It’s eminently teachable

2. Both books are beautifully written. Students uniformly enjoy them as assigned reading. They do a great job communicating to non-Indigenous folks the contours of basic Indigenous relationships to more-than-human beings. They’re wildly popular with white readers.

3. I’ve found Braiding Sweetgrass to be a great entry point for non-Indigenous folks to Indigenous scholarship. But this is where yesterday’s epiphany comes in. Neither Braiding Sweetgrass or Gathering Moss tends to the deep deep lineages of Indigenous scholarship in Canada or US

4. As the popularity of ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ has soared, I’ve seen more and more white folks wax on about ‘braiding knowledge’. But they often don’t know any of the lineages of these concepts beyond what is presented in this one book. They confidently run with this.

5. Kimmerer does a commendable job of weaving in her own experiences, her family stories+nods to some very important knowledge keepers who deserve to be celebrated for their work. But Braiding Sweetgrass does not tend to the citational politics Sara Ahmed & others teach us about

So much #FactCheckBait being put out by IT Cell today and so many people biting.

What is #FactCheckBait? Fascists putting out tweets or messages with very obvious rebuttal properties. So non-fascists are distracted by rebutting or fact checking them. And the fascists get more name recognition. What have the top sanghi twitter accounts done other than provoke?

Why are so many sanghi bigot handles famous & well followed on Twitter despite having no notable quality other than getting called out by liberals? Cos that's all it takes. If they can fool liberals into QTing or even screenshot-ing them, they become heroes and then are like

Another example of #FactCheckBait. This sanghi wants you to identify them while pointing out the very obvious flaws in their logic. This sanghi is counting on it to improve their visibility. Don't give them that oxygen. Call them out like this, without IDs, if you must.

As pointed out by @bongopondit, peak #FactCheckBait was Ted Cruz saying rejoining the Paris climate agreement was about appeasing Paris not Pittsburgh. He knows it's BS. He's an evil psychopath but not dumb. He wants you to QT him and distract from his insurrection efforts.

It's been a whole day since we tweeted Part 2 of this chapter, so let us remind you: #AdamSmith just said that the colonies got nothing that helped them succeed from the mother country. (IV.vii.c) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

So these two opening sentences are pretty heckin’ sarcastic:
Now we've seen the great advantages the colonies got (they got nothing!) (IV.vii.c.1)
So what have been the great advantages to Europe! (IV.vii.c.2)

Seems like there’s a...tone there. #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Europeans buy goods from America, and Americans buy European goods as well. Even countries that don’t trade directly with America have benefited. (IV.vii.c.3–8) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

The mother countries restrict colonial trade (esp the exclusive right to buy from or sell to their colonies). That's a dead weight on the increase of the wealth of nations. Everything is more expensive, everyone enjoys less of it. (IV.vii.c.9) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Maybe European countries get added security? In ancient times, empires expected military support and revenue from their colonies, and they got it.
18thC colonies? Not so much. (IV.vii.c.11–13) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets