• As the Baltimore Business Journal first reported, the reimagining of Lexington Market, which involves a massive redesign and the demolishing of the current beloved market building, has been approved by the Baltimore spending board for $250,000.
• Merritt Properties has gotten the first go ahead to build a 200,000 square-foot, 20-story, $70 million office building in Canton near its Boston Street gym that would include retail space and a conferencing center. Groundbreaking on the building, if all goes as planned, should happen in 2021.
• Improvements to the Howard Street tunnel are being reconsidered. The project, which would involve updating and adjusting the tunnel ideally to make the city’s port more active and lead to new jobs, has languished lately. But last week, James White, the executive director of the Port Administration, informed the House of Delegates budget committee that there is serious consideration again, with railroading company CSX Corporation and the deputy secretary of transportation (whose name is Jim Ports, just saying) in conversation. In the fall, CSX pulled their support, essentially saying they couldn’t justify the investment, and the city ended its request for $155 million dollars from the federal government.
• In related port news, the debate about whether or not the city should expand its two crude oil terminals and add new ones continues. City Council has offered legislation to prohibit oil being moved by train through Baltimore neighborhoods. There is a growing public outcry as well to prevent oil spills and other potentially disastrous impacts (as Clean Water Action, who supports the council’s bill, has observed, “165,000 Baltimoreans live in the crude oil train blast zone”). On Feb. 21, there will be a hearing at 1 p.m. held by City Council’s Land Use and Transportation Committee. Those who support the prohibition of oil terminals expansion will gather in front of City Hall at noon.
• Reed Cordish, son of developer David Cordish of Cordish Companies (and a former partner in Cordish Companies), has left his year-long role in the Trump administration as Trump’s head of the the Office of American Innovation. Mostly, Cordish had been involved in infrastructure changes, which are under consideration by congress and, despite the heavy price tag, remain some of the most (or maybe make the few?) promising changes from Trump since he came into office.

The post The Living and Real Estate Beat appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The “middle class” dominates political discussion, and the new Republican tax bill is no exception. This focus neglects those at the bottom, including the third of Baltimore’s households that earn less than $25,000 a year. While they pay little in income tax, we cannot ignore how the inequality perpetuated by this tax bill could exacerbate poverty in Baltimore’s vulnerable communities.

Maryland has the highest concentration of millionaires in the nation, even as 32.6 percent of Baltimore’s children live in poverty. The bill only widens the gap between low-income and privileged children. Baltimore’s millionaires will now be able to leave $11.2 million of their accumulated wealth tax-free to their children—up from $5.6 million in the status quo. This results in a wider wealth gap, reinforcing inequality. Wealth matters because it is a buffer against economic shocks, and enables long-term investments into education, new businesses, and retirement. Most egregious is the bill’s massive corporate tax cut. The cut will naturally increase corporate profits, but 91 percent of available corporate profits are currently directed to stock buybacks and dividends. Since the poor lack the financial resources to invest in stock, the tax cut only exacerbates the income gap.

Income inequality is more than an ideological issue, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. In a world of limited resources, it ensures the rich can buy privileges for their children that the poor cannot afford, impeding social mobility. Poverty becomes concentrated in particular neighborhoods when only the rich can buy their way out. The exodus in turn weakens community institutions like stores and schools that provide essential support to families. Take, for instance, McElderry Park, a once middle-class neighborhood that descended into poverty with population loss. Higher income inequality also means higher political inequality—it increases the ability of rich donors to crowd out the poor’s already diminutive voices in policymaking. Ultimately, the bill buttresses rich children at the expense of poor children’s social mobility.

Furthermore, the revenue lost from tax cuts for the wealthy may soon be used to justify major cuts to vital anti-poverty programs. Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, have suggested changing the federal Medicaid and food stamp programs to state-controlled block grants. When Bill Clinton made similar changes to the cash welfare system in 1996, states siphoned off grant money to fill budgetary gaps, while inflation eroded the grant’s value. The poor may similarly lose out in the case of food stamps and Medicaid. This would directly affect the nearly third of Baltimore’s residents on Medicaid or food stamps.

A weaker safety net could also mean more family instability, detrimental to child development. Research by Kathryn Edin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, shows that many impoverished single mothers see financial stability as a key prerequisite for marriage, a potential source of family stability. 64.8 percent of Baltimore’s children are in single-parent households, with the percentage at 93.5 percent in some neighborhoods. Cuts to anti-poverty programs as a result of the bill could severely affect these children’s futures.

It will be hard for states and localities like Maryland and Baltimore to compensate for any federal cuts with new or expanded initiatives. The bill’s cap on the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction makes it politically difficult to raise taxes. Moreover, a bias against poor minority communities might already exist in public spending. City planners recently uncovered that Baltimore spends more on public infrastructure in low-poverty than high-poverty areas. Should federal cuts occur, we fear low-income minority neighborhoods will take the brunt of federal cuts with little help from the state or city.

To be sure, individual aspects of the bill soften rather than worsen inequality. Though capping SALT is problematic, the deduction is disproportionately used by the rich. The Child Tax Credit has also become temporarily more refundable for the poor, though its expansion to the wealthy is troubling. By themselves, these reforms might have been signs of progress. Unfortunately, they have only been stomached to pay for massive tax cuts for the rich, dwarfing the benefits.

As the tax bill comes into effect, and as income inequality widens in the long run, Baltimore’s low-income residents are most at risk. Our city should monitor the effects of the tax bill as they play out and find ways to protect our most vulnerable from its consequences.

Serena Goldberg (sgoldb30@jhu.edu) and Teresa Ng (tng11@jhu.edu) are social policy students at Johns Hopkins University.  Submit your own op-ed to The Baltimore Beat by emailing it to opinions@baltimorebeat.com.

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On the day of President Trump’s inauguration, about 230 people were quartered off by the police and arrested for allegedly rioting. Others like Dylan Petrohilos weren’t arrested that day but charged later with conspiracy charges surrounding the allegations that they had planned the protest where a couple of windows were broken. This case has become known as the J20 case. A jury is currently deliberating on the first group of defendants. Baltimore resident and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World Isaac Dalto and graphic designer and activist Dylan Petrohilos, who prosecutors say were involved in planning the protest sat down with The Real News Network’s Eddie Conway last month to discuss the case.

The Real News: Okay, this is massive legal case involving over 200 defendants. Can you tell me who’s involved?

Isaac Dalto: There were about 230 people arrested initially, and about 13 medical personnel and journalist, and legal observers had their charges dropped pretty soon after we were indicted. About three months after the initial charges of felony riot were levied against 214 of us, the prosecutor amended the indictment and charged everyone with seven additional felony charges, including inciting a riot, conspiracy to riot and several counts of property destruction. Some people have since taken plea bargains but the vast majority of defendants have chosen to go ahead to trial and I think there are 191 of us still awaiting trial.

RNN: This group is a large group. It consists of people that have been allegedly charged with rioting, conspiring, etc., but Dylan, you weren’t arrested until several weeks later. Why are you included in this?

Dylan Petrohilos: I was indicted at the end of April when the superseding indictment came out, along with two other people who were also indicted that day. The reason why, people like me got indicted was because of alleged planning and the beliefs I was behind the protest that day. On Inauguration, that march was kettled off, police were incredibly violent that day. The Real News Network actually came out with much of the actual data that we have around how actually violent they were. And this was in response to some minor acts of vandalism and stuff like that.

RNN: I understand they invaded your house and took material? What materials did they take from your house?

DP: So, the first thing that they took was an anti-fascist flag that had been flying outside my front door since the election of Donald Trump. That flag represented, to me, it is a show of resistance to this idea that fascism could get normalized in the United States. Apparently having anti-fascist politics has become in 2017, a fairly controversial political stance to have. There have been as many articles condemning Antifa as there has been praising anti-fascism and the belief that fascism should be opposed. Along with that, there was numerous political magazines that were taken from my house, as well. These aren’t things that ended up in my actual discovery but cell phones were taken, a copy of In These Times was taken, a copy of Nation magazine was taken. A banner that says “Kiss Capitalism Goodbye” and stencils and different personal artwork also were taken.

RNN: Like you say, a month later they invade your house, they look at materials that you have a right to have. Political material. Do you think this is a political persecution?

DP: 100%. You can hear on the audio, for example, them talking, MPD [Metropolitan Police] specifically talking about, on the radio talking about the anarchist raid. And then setting up a trap. This is definitely them setting up political persecution in the era of Trump. And this prosecution comes down, the D.C. DOJ, the Department of Justice, the District Attorney’s office, specifically, is a branch of the Federal Government. So, Trump is actually overseeing this in some capacity. So, this is literally Trump turning, criminalizing activists and protesters.

RNN: So, with these cases what does it look like going forward into the future?

DP: The actual conspiracy it’s alleging, is that the conspiracy began when [two people] named Dee and Mads went on a podcast on It’s Going Down, which is an anarchist publication, right? And talked about the protests that were happening after, in the wave after Ferguson. That was the beginning of the conspiracy to riot in the United States capital, which there was no conspiracy to riot, right? People planned to protest that day. Specifically Trump, who came to power prophesizing more policing, more police militarization, promising to deport every undocumented immigrant so it came to an ethnic cleansing, and so on and so forth. The basis of the conspiracy is standard things that every protest has, like legal observers, like street medics, like a legal line was evidence of planning that people were going to do illegal things. And get arrested, right? That’s the reality that these are things that are standard in protests, every protest.

ID: And I think that’s really the real danger here. The danger is not just to ourselves or our freedom. The danger is to the future of civil resistance in this country. The government here is trying to set a precedent, a very literal, legal precedent, that would allow them to charge any protestor, or any dissident with a felony.

RNN: You’re saying right now they’re in the process of trying several people in the next week or so, they’re going to try several more. How long is this gonna stretch out and how long will they have people under the gun, so to speak?

ID: I was arrested on January 20th, and my trial is not scheduled until May. This entire ordeal will take more than 16 months for me, and more than 20 months for some of us. I think the last trial on the docket right now is in October 2018.

DP: The reality of the case is not about what a couple people did, it’s about turning resistance into felonies. It’s specifically trying to criminalize people for participating into protests. When what Trump was promising as he came into power, was a dystopic vision of the future and the people that were standing up to him, and resisting him were going to face the harshest consequences possible. The United States has a history of authoritarian crackdowns across the world, and this is us realizing that we need to, resist us.

ID: I’d just like to say as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, that this is not the first time in American history that our union has encountered this kind of oppression. During the Palmer Raids, World War I, there was a moment in time when every single member of our Executive Board was either murdered or in prison and we’re still here and we’ve weathered these kinds of storms before and we will again.

Visit therealnews.com for independent local, national, and international journalism that examines the underlying causes of chronic problems and searches for effective solutions.

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Project Veritas, the creepo undercover right-wing sting team run by James O’Keefe, spent months trying to fool the Washington Post into printing false accusations against theocrat and alleged pedophile Roy Moore in order to undermine the real allegations made by women that he was sexual inappripriate with them when they were minors. Moore, a twice-deposed former judge, is the only man alive who might make Luther Strange and Jeff Sessions, the two previous occupants of the Alabama Senate seat he is vying for, look almost normal.

Jaime Phillips, the woman trying to claim that Moore impregnated her when she was underage and then urged her to have an abortion, was spotted by Post reporters walking into the offices of Project Veritas. They confronted her on cameras of their own.

“The Washington Post seems to want a Nobel Prize for vetting a source correctly,” O’Keefe later said in response.

On the same day that the Post story broke, prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff introduced a Project Veritas video into the trial of the first six of the 193 to be charged under the federal Riot Act for protesting during the inauguration.

It came during the testimony of an undercover officer who infiltrated a Jan. 8 meeting in a church where various groups coordinated Inauguration Day activities. Kerkhoff asked the officer if he recorded the meeting and he said that his supervisors told him not to. But, he said, MPD later obtained a video of the same meeting.

It was filmed by a Project Veritas operative. And here’s where it gets really fucked up: We don’t know how much the Project Veritas video was edited.

“I’m not aware of any edits or anything,” Kerkhoff said in court. When the judge asked her who provided the video to the MPD, she replied: “A third party.”

Even worse, we don’t know how many Project Veritas operatives were in the room, saying things that may have colored undercover officer Bryan Adelmeyer’s perception of the events. So it taints his testimony as well. Despite the Veritas in its name, O’Keefe’s organization is built on deceit—and may in fact lose non-profit status in New York because he failed to disclose his criminal record for using false premises to enter a federal building in an attempted Watergate/ Bob the Builder cosplay self-sting.

By contrast, Alexei Wood, a photojournalist who is one of the defendants in the current trial, is almost radically transparent about the live-stream video, which occupied much of the motion hearings over the past several months, that he filmed during the protest.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. I livestreamed myself from beginning to end, and the entire world can decide whether I incited a riot,” he said. “It’s out there for the whole world to decide, and I’m glad it is.”

The government, on the other hand, is not only using Project Veritas’ unauthenticated video, but they actually edited the videos in order to obscure the identity of the still-unknown Project Veritas operative, as if he were an officer.

This is further evidence of the deep connection between law enforcement, government officials, and right-wing movements. We know that an MPD communications officer provided a list of names of the defendants to far-right conspiracy site Got News. And video obtained by the Real News shows a U.S. Park Police officer in D.C. ordering a protester to follow the orders of a militia member because “he works for me.”

Two of the officers who testified in the trial were from D.C.’s 7th district. The officers who raided the home of a man based on his alleged presence in the Project Veritas video were also 7th district.

In July, an officer from the guns and drugs “powershift” unit of the 7th was photographed wearing—and may have designed—a T-shirt with a grim reaper, white-power symbols, and “Powershift,” “Seventh District,” “MPDC,” and “let me see that waistband jo”—this last a reference to searching inside the underwear of citizens in “jump out” corner-clearing drug busts.

These D.C. guys have the same view of policing as Trump, who urged officers to be violent with suspects—or at least not to shield their heads when putting them into a car or van. And Trump, of course, also tweeted false, O’Keefe-esque videos from Britain First in an attempt to stoke up anti-Muslim sentiment, or as Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it, “elevate the dialogue.”

So it is no surprise that federal prosecutors in D.C. are willing to stoop as low as O’Keefe to further their dissension of protest.

The last time O’Keefe tried so hard to sting the media, it involved dildos, hair grease, a boat, and a CNN reporter, Abbie Boudreau, who never got on the boat, causing the explosively bad idea to backfire.

He was later accused by one of his own operatives of drugging her when she refused his romantic overtures and then enlisting an army of right-wing trolls, including her former friend Andrew Breitbart, to harass her when she tried to expose him (listen to this week’s podcast with Chris Faraone, Dig Boston editor and author of “I Killed Breitbart” for more on this).

But, as Moore’s campaign shows, that’s the way the far right works now. If you’re on their side, they will defend almost anything. A couple weeks ago, I wrote a story for the New York Times arguing that Charles Manson was alt-right. “Charles Manson wasn’t the inevitable outgrowth of the Sixties. If anything, he was a harbinger of today’s far right,” the Times Op-ed page tweeted with a link.

Laura Ingraham, the far-right radio host who appeared to give a Seig Heil to Trump at the RNC last summer, tweeted a response. “‘Far right’? You mean ‘right so far,’ as in @realDonaldTrump has been right so far abt how to kick the economy into high gear.”

Ingraham’s tweet is the perfect emblem of the senseless mass prosecution of protesters. It is senseless.

And maybe that is why Trump retweeted it.

Baynard Woods is a reporter at The Real News. Email baynard@therealnews.com. Twitter @baynardwoods.

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Mary Finn, an editor with Democracy in Crisis, often makes extensive notes on my columns—in this case, we decided they were far more interesting than the column itself. So we left them, in dialogue with a half-formed column.

I have been trying to figure out a way, as a white man, to write about the mounting evidence that we are all horrible. Who needs to hear what I say about this?

Some guys are staying away from writing about this because they’ve behaved badly and they don’t want to be hypocrites or get caught. Can Glenn Thrush (NYT) write credibly about Trump’s assaults when his own aggression and follow-up apology emails are now on full display? This column’s women readers may feel dissatisfied with your reflections. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.—M.F.

I made a list of every man I’ve ever known who I’d put my 401K on the line that they’ve 1) Never harassed someone at work 2) Never coerced a woman for sex 3) Never could be perceived by a woman as doing any of the above. There are four men on my list and I’m 42. Maybe we’re now seeing men for who they are. Even the “good” men. The “good men” need to see themselves as they are, not how they want to be seen.—M.F.

I’ve been talking to parent friends about raising boys to be good men. Is this even possible?-M.F.

But in the absence of an idea of what the good man may even be like, I worry that the more racist a man is the more likely he is to be believed and his victims vilified. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are only the most obvious examples.

I was talking to a nominally progressive guy in San Francisco and he said, “I mean, it just seems like we can’t win. It feels like no matter what we do, it’s never enough.” This guy despises Roy Moore but he feels misunderstood and attacked for being a man in the Me Too moment. There’s some solidarity between Mobile, AL and the Bay Area after all.—M.F.

Sixteen women have gone on record to say they were sexually assaulted or harassed by Donald Trump. He himself admitted to assaulting women in the Access Hollywood tape. There are further allegations that he raped a 13 year old. He was elected.

It’s not a coincidence that the Women’s March was the first mass movement under Trump. Trump will get away with his sexual assaults. Still, there’s something that’s happened to me since he got elected that has changed the way I see men. A friend told me she is sick of men. Me too. I’m having a hard time staying patient with men who pontificate. I think I’m holding regular guys (bosses, landlords, men on blind dates) accountable in a way I didn’t use to because I know Trump won’t be held accountable. Is that why so many women are participating in this national mass disclosure movement? If you can’t hold the president accountable, may as well make sure your boss isn’t a mini-Trump. —M.F.

More than 50% of white women voters checked the box for Donald Trump, even after all of this was known.

He also defeated the first woman nominee. I think that matters but I’m not entirely sure how. Why are the women feeling any level of confidence to tell their stories with THIS guy as president? I’d think it would have been safer to disclose when Obama, a self-declared feminist, was in charge. Why now?—M.F.

It’s weird that we’ve turned all of this horror into a partisan issue, but that is partially what it has become. And the Democrats are responding horribly.

It is unbelievable that the Clintons threw themselves an anniversary celebration of the 1992 win. I’ve always believed that Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick in the 1970s. It was disgusting to see the Democratic party luminaries celebrating Clinton. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump got away with sexual assault and got elected. Democrats need to reject Bill Clinton to have any credibility on Trump.—M.F.

Rather than seeing this as an opportunity to truly interrogate themselves and what they are as a party, they want Franken to stay because they see it as politically advantageous.

Is there any gradation in how we judge what all these men did? My women friends say things like, “If it’s a one-time ass grab and the guy got scolded, that’s different than a serial predator.” Should the consequences be applied bluntly or is there any room for nuance? I mean, I don’t want a boss who even grabbed one ass. But, would I be okay with a one-time ass-grab senator if he votes to keep Obamacare? I’m not sure how to judge.—M.F.

Some young men growing up in this moment may take the failures of Franken and C.K. and Charlie Rose as hypocrisy and embrace their inner Trump. They have an answer to these questions that they can use: Ignore it all. Be A Men’s Rights Douche or a Far-Right Western Chauvinist ™.

I got a text from a “good guy” friend of mine:”Jesus Christ, Charlie Rose??” The more “good guy” or “progressive” the accused, the harder the blow. It really may be ALL men. Yes, even Charlie Rose. Are there any “good” guys out there?—M.F

It’s the “good guys” who can be especially problematic because they hide behind their rhetoric (Franken): they can be sexual predators AND be seen as feminists/champions for the people. At least we know who Roy Moore really is.—M.F.

Others will hold their worst parts in check out of fear of social consequences. Is that the best we can hope for, something like a paraphrase of Flannery O’Connor? “He would have been a good man … if there had been someone there to shoot him every minute of her life”

Didn’t we already have this conversation during Anita Hill? I’m skeptical.—M.F.

The post A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Dude columnist struggles with what it means to be a man, woman editor has doubts appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

In a ridiculous and rightfully ridiculed New York Times piece from last week titled “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland,” journalist Richard Fausset hangs out with a Nazi doing regular things, not Nazi things, such as planning his wedding or shopping at the grocery store—in one of the photos accompanying the profile we see our neighborly Nazi with a shopping cart containing tortilla and black beans. The piece is the kind of unassuming support of fascism by way of Journalistic White Man “objectivity” that has become all too common since Donald Trump got elected because the Amerikkkan press is, no surprise, ill-equipped to ponder hatemongers while at the same time desperate to declare its own half-baked wokeness.

To those familiar with the punk and metal scenes, however, Nazism has been a persistent scourge, not a novelty to be pondered, almost always barely under the surface of any extreme scene or subgenre. We’ve got a great example of that in Norwegian black metal paladins of indignation Mayhem, who perform their 1994 album “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas,” this Friday at Baltimore Soundstage, and whose drummer is, well, pretty much a Nazi.

If you care to hear the seedy, traumatic details of Mayhem’s mythography, you’ve no doubt heard them already so let’s just rush through them briefly. In 1989 or so, five years into the band’s career (and two year’s after the gamechanging EP “Deathcrush”), Swedish vocalist Dead joined Mayhem and solidified their reputation thanks to his pained vocals, self-injurious performance style, and eventual, infamous suicide in 1991. When Mayhem guitarist Euronymous discovered Dead—who slashed his wrists and then shot himself in the head—he took a photo (which later ended up on a bootleg album cover) of his corpse, brain hanging out, and made bits of his skull into jewelry. Two years later, Euronymous was stabbed to death by Mayhem bassist Count Grishnackh (he recorded solo as Burzum), who around that same time also burned some churches in a rejection of Christianity and a reclamation of Norwegian heritage.

Out from under all of that, “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” (an auto didact’s translation of “about the mystery of the lord Satan,” by the way), the moment when black metal got big; the songs sprawl, the riffs spiral and sting, and it stops having much of anything to do with punk rock or hard rock. It’s a kind of unassailable constellate of young white men howling and screaming and hating their way through it all. There is no other record like it. And it is black metal as exquisite musical corpse—Dead’s lyrics fleshed out by guitarist Blackthorn (who also provided some riffs to the record and would serve time as an accomplice in Euronymous’ death) then sung by Dead’s replacement Attila, who sorta sounds like he’s chewing on the side of a couch when he sings and at times hits a kind of terrifying mania as if he doesn’t even hear the music at all—imagine Scott Walker crooning while on fire.

Mayhem’s ability to get “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” together is mostly thanks to drummer Hellhammer, ostensibly Mayhem’s only member by the time the record was released (others were dead or in jail or, in Attila’s case, back in Hungary studying to be an electrical engineer and out of touch because well, snail mail), and kept the group going to this day. Hellhammer has also been known to wear Nazi uniforms and signs his name on Mayhem records in such a way that turns the L’s of his name into lightning strike-looking Nazi SS’s. The bad faith provocation goes deep: In 1998’s tabloid-ish black metal history book “Lords Of Chaos,” he declared “black metal is for white people”; in the 2008 documentary “Until The Light Takes Us,” he praised Emperor drummer Faust for killing a gay man named Magne Andreassen in 1993 and called Andreassen a “fucking faggot.”

With Mayhem, there is nothing to really “unpack.” A whole lot of art out there is made by terrible people often espousing terrible ideas. Rejecting it full-stop is not a cop-out, and embracing it is not a sign of sophistication or one’s ability to be “above” politics. Handwringing is useless and justifying it is bullshit.

Fighting it, flipping it upside down, however, is an option. In Baltimore, the origin of Deathfest (which has welcomed Mayhem to its stage before) and a metal town for better and worse, there are also two of the best culture jammers when it comes to confounding and confronting black metal’s hateful history.

In 2014, Drew Daniel, a Johns Hopkins professor and one half of the duo Matmos, put out “Why Do The Heathen Rage?” as The Soft Pink Truth, offering up queer avant-disco covers of black metal songs in order to celebrate and parody the music and in effect kill fashy black metal bullshit dead.

“My record involves queer and trans and female people (and some straight, white male allies) working together to “cover” (in the sense of ‘occupy?’) a territory that isn’t (often) marked as such,” Daniel told me in 2014. The Soft Pink Truth’s cover of Mayhem’s ‘Buried By Time And Dust’ from “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” is creaking electro that quotes Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express’ and Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’ (while we’re on the topic of musicians doing heinous shit, Bambaataa has been accused by of molesting young men over the past few decades). Daniel described “Why Do The Heathen Rage?” as “a silly record about a serious question: Where does pleasure stop and responsibility begin?”

In Baltimore there’s also Terence Hannum, whose corporeal metal band Locrian mixes and matches styles in a way that maybe wouldn’t have happened if not for Mayhem’s kitchen sink black metal, though Locrian’s music is instead humanist, empathetic, and existential. Tracks on 2015’s “Infinite Dissolution” explore the seemingly imminent end of the planet with interludes named after the Keystone Pipeline.

And following the election of Donald Trump, Hannum (who is in the band Holy Circle as well) put together an overtly anti-fascist noise project titled Axebreaker. Recent release “Live Assault II,” is as “brutal” as anything by Mayhem, and so it provides a fairly easy alternative to Nazi-adjacent noise. Axebreaker’s music suggests there are actually things worth getting geeked up over and hating, by the way—just not the honky paranoia of so-called “white genocide” but, you know, the genuine oppression that comes from corporate control, abuse, and fascism. The record’s rage is plainspoken like a black bloc breaking a Starbucks window, and its buried electronic beats hit hard like a fist in Richard Spencer’s face.

Daniel and Hannum aren’t just making #Resist-style musical sick burns. They’re contorting a style and a whole heinous political philosophy in favor of death and pain and occasionally all-out hate, stripping the aesthetic for parts and assembling something new and restorative. There is lots of music out there, and perhaps one way to operate is to stop listening to music made by shitheads, especially when there’s music that goes just as hard that isn’t made by shitheads.

Full disclosure: It is this critic’s perspective that by far, like not even a question, the most expressive piece of black metal of the past 20 years is “Strength and Vision,” a 2007 record from National Socialist Black Metal (in other words, fucking Nazi) group Slavia. It mixes hiss and static punk rock-tinged black metal—echoes of Mayhem’s “Deathcrush”—with extended samples of classical music, middle eastern music, Hitler speaking, and Nazis chanting (it samples the way Kanye West’s “The Life Of Pablo” samples).

But I really bring up Slavia, a fairly obscure band no longer around, because they offer up a windy way back to Baltimore and tacit Nazi support. When Jonas Raskolnikov Christiansen, the sole voice behind Slavia died in 2011 at age 31 of colon cancer, a tribute concert featured, among others, Hoest of the group Taake. In 2007, Hoest smeared as swastika on his chest at a show in Germany and claimed it was to provoke rather than advocate and consistently claims he is apolitical, though occasionally his lyrics have been anti-Islam in a way that would make Sebastian Gorka say “slow up.”

Taake played Maryland Deathfest in 2014, seven years after the swastika shtick. Here’s a quote from Deathfest’s website: “Taake has met with some criticism because of some live performances and controversial song lyrics. Despite the bad press, front man Hoest maintains an apolitical stance, and says that they will continue to express themselves through their music.”

Deathfest for what it’s worth has kicked some National Socialist bands off their lineups over the years, but Nazis, racists, purists of all kinds are well, banal and lame, and their supporters, sympathizers, advocates are weasels—which brings us back to the New York Times, especially that photo of a Nazi shopping at the grocery store, tortilla and black beans piling up in his cart.

Everything is political, and that Times photo makes clear that nothing is “objective” though, like the article, it was meant to declare the opposite. The tortillas in one’s shopping cart are political, especially if you happen to be a Nazi shitbag (or even just a regular old “build that wall”-style Trump voter, by the way) and the tickets one buys to a show at Baltimore Soundstage celebrating a brilliant, terrifying album with death and abuse in the forefront and hey, some Nazi views as well—that’s political too.

Mayhem plays Baltimore Soundstage on Dec. 1. Matmos plays E.M.P. Collective on Dec. 2 as part of a fundraiser for True Vine record shop. Holy Circle plays Metro Gallery on Dec. 14.

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A year ago, after the election of Donald Trump, Dylan Petrohilos hung an Antifa flag out in front of his house.

“I had [the flag] flying outside my home because Trump was elected and there was a belief he was a fascist, and so we had this idea that we needed to bring back the moniker of anti-fascism,” Petrohilos told me at a bar where he was discussing the Washington D.C. Riot Act case with other defendants arrested in connection with the protests of Trump’s inauguration.

When Petrohilos’ home was raided by D.C. police in April, the flag was the first thing they took. They also took seven small black flags, copies of The Nation and In These Times magazines, and a banner, made during the financial crisis, that read “Kiss Capitalism Goodbye.”

These items are evidence in the J20 case, the first mass trial of which begins this week. Most of the defendants were arrested on inauguration day, after a protest (which the government has deemed a riot) resulted in several broken windows. Police officers threw more than 70 “non-lethal” grenades, sprayed dozens of canisters of pepper spray, and cordoned off around 200 people in a “kettle” flanked by riot police and walls on all sides.

And though the Department of Justice claims that Petrohilos conspired to plan the riot, he was not arrested that day. He says he was not even there.

But the fact that the government says he spoke about J20 on a podcast and was recorded by undercover police and the far-right sting video site Project Veritas at protest-planning meetings has put Petrohilos at the center of what could be the most important political conspiracy trial of a generation—one that could change the way we think about our data and other records of our actions.

Almost any statement made by Petrohilos about the day’s protest evidence was at play in what was to be the final hearing before this week’s trials. The Nov. 9 hearing was intended to establish the fact of the conspiracy, a move that would make co-conspirators’ statements admissible in court, despite hearsay rules.

Prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff cited statements made on the It’s Going Down podcast as evidence of conspiracy. At one point, the judge, Lynn Leibovitz, surmised that appearing on a podcast required planning, so if Petrohilos was going on the podcast to talk about the protests perhaps the existence of the podcast could be evidence of conspiring.

“Saying that coming on a podcast recorded for public consumption to talk about a public demonstration is evidence of conspiracy, is like saying that someone writing a column in High Times is proof that they are in a drug cartel,” Paul Hernandez, a member of the It’s Going Down editorial collective wrote me. “The State is trying to make the case that anyone that attends a demonstration or protest is thus involved in a conspiracy.”

All the prosecution needed to establish was a conspiracy to commit any crime, including “conspiracy to disrupt public congress.” This could refer to any protest at any time.

“This is a fundamental attack on the right to organize,” Petrohilos said.

Petrohilos is not among those to stand trial this week. The prosecution classed all of the defendants into four categories based on their alleged involvement in planning or participating in the riot. He is in category two, which Kerkhoff has referred to in court as the “planners.”

“Dylan Petrohilos said, ‘Come with me if you want to talk about black bloc. I am black bloc,’” Kerkhoff said in court, citing the planning meeting that was infiltrated.

“Black bloc” is the essence of a large part of the J20 charges. It is a political strategy in which wearing identical clothing and face masks allows a group to move collectively through the city in protest, mimicking the black flag of anarchism and making it harder for police to identify individuals, which is why the government is using clothing as evidence of conspiracy.

Isaac Dalto, Petrohilos’ friend who is also included in Category 2 as a planner, says the government is using affiliation with the Industrial Workers of the World union, for whom he organizes, as evidence of conspiracy.

“Because they went to legitimate, above-ground union meetings about forming a union in their workplace, their Google calendars say IWW, and that’s being used against them to prove membership in this criminal conspiracy that we’re alleged to be part of,” says Dalto.

“Conspiring to commit lawful acts is not a crime. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s called organizing,” he said. “That’s the real danger of this case to democracy and dissent in this country—that any form of organizing or civil resistance stands to become a crime.”

The threshold for conspiracy is so low that two journalists, Aaron Cantú and Alexei Wood, are still facing charges for following a group that they were covering. Wood is part of the group who demanded a speedy trial and goes to court this week.

With long hair, black clothes, and a leather wide-brimmed hat, Wood may have looked a bit like an outlaw at the hearing, but he was arrested and charged with conspiring because he was livestreaming the political actions.

“The chilling effect is obvious,” he said. “It took me months to go document another protest. Even the most like, Grannies Against Trump thing, I didn’t want to go to. I was traumatized. Absolutely traumatized.”

Finally, he says, on May Day, he was fed up.

“I was like, ‘Fuck it, this is what I do. This is my beat. This is what I’ve done for years,’” Wood said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I live-streamed myself from beginning to end, and the entire world can decide whether I incited a riot. . . . It’s out there for the whole world to decide, and I’m glad it is.”

Baynard Woods is a reporter at the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis. Email baynard@democracyincrisis.com; Twitter @baynardwoods

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