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This morning the Christchurch shooter changed tack and entered a guilty plea to 51 counts of murder, 40 of attempted murder and one under the Terrorism Suppression Act. We can now call him what he is: a terrorist. But there are questions that still need to be addressed, writes Anjum Rahman.

Ive just received the news that the accused in the Christchurch mosque attacks has pleaded guilty to all charges, and my heart is so full of emotions right now. Mostly relief for all the victims of this attack, who will now not be put through a court trial. Relief that the attacker will not be able to spread his hateful message through the use of the courts in this country.

Relief that, to some extent, this will provide partial closure for the victims. Full closure will not happen until sentencing, but there is no doubt that this is a huge step.

Relief also for the people who would have had to be on the jury. For them to have to go through all the evidence would have also been traumatic.

Relief that the court case will now no longer be a rallying point for white supremacists the world over. Those who have been emboldened by his atrocious act of violence, and who have stepped up there harassment of Muslims and other people of colour. Those who have been inspired by this act to conduct other mass killings around the world.

Along with the relief, some anger that it took this long. That a guilty plea could have been forthcoming much earlier and reduced a huge area of stress for those affected. Still, at least its done now.

For me, the guilty plea on the charge of terrorism is one of the biggest aspects. This firmly places the act as one that was designed to cause terror and to remove any feelings of safety for the target community. It sends a huge signal that white supremacy and the alt-right are engaged in terrorist activity, and this acknowledgement has been very slow in coming, particularly in other places across the world.

There are some questions, though, that still need to be addressed. The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch Mosque Attacks has been tasked to answer some of these, but that report may or may not be released to the public. And the public deserves answers to the issues raised in the Terms of Reference. A trial, had it been fully public, would have given us the full details.

It is not good enough that our intelligence agencies hide behind the veil of national security in this. We need to know how the attacker was able to come and go from this country with impunity, why his social media activities didnt raise any intelligence flags, why he was able to get a license and who were his referees.

Most importantly, we need to know who his associates were, both online and offline. An attack of this sophistication, though carried out by an individual, is highly unlikely to have been carried out in complete isolation. He would have been talking to people about some of the logistics, even if he didnt specify exactly what he was going to do.

Also, we need to know about his path to radicalisation. I personally have seen some information about that, but now that there is no court trial, this information must be put into the public sphere. Who was he talking to, what was he influenced by. This guilty plea removes any excuse for secrecy, and we as a country must ask for full transparency.

I understand that our public service is tied up with the Covid-19 pandemic, another threat to our public safety. We appreciate their work and willingness to go above and beyond to keep the New Zealand public safe.

Once this current crisis is over, public safety requires that the full circumstances leading up to this attack are fully disclosed. We need to know about any failings in the system, what has been done to rectify these and what is yet to be done.

I wish that this was over, but it is not over and will not be over for a long time. We can not afford to forget or put it behind us. Because those who hate and commit violence are still out there and causing harm, and we need to know they will be stopped before they can do so.

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There is relief. There is anger. And there is still a demand for answers - The Spinoff

The alternative right is undeniably damaging and toxic to American politics. Anytime intolerance presents itself in a culture it creates a fear and disturbs the constructive political conversation that is otherwise likely held. Unfortunately, because the alt-right makes use of the word right, many people group this small sect of people with actual Republicans and conservatives. That is not the case. The definition of the alt-right doesnt fall close to what a Republican is or stands for.

The term alternative-right, or alt-right, was coined by Richard Spencer by his webzine in 2010. Spencer is a well known white supremacist who used his platform to advocate for an America free of minorities.

The Southern Poverty Law Center defined the alt-right as:

"A set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that 'white identity' is under attack by multicultural forces using 'political correctness' and 'social justice' to undermine white people and 'their' civilization."

Alternative right stands to give hateful and racist people a means to organize. They believe in small government and limiting taxes, but that is where the similarities with the actual right end. Thats why they use the word alternative; they cant be a part of the real right.

In his farewell address to America, Senator John McCain discussed the issues that the alt-right and racist extremist groups pose to our country:

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been, he wrote.

The majority of Republicans despise and denounce the alt-right. They dont have real political ideologies or opinions. Theyre just racist populists who pretend that they care about political issues other than race to try and legitimize themselves.

Aligning the alt-right with the actual right not only hurts the right, but it legitimizes white supremacy. It is up to not only Republicans, but every ideology of the political spectrum to denounce the alt-right as not a part of the Republican party.

Mikayla Rochelle is a junior studying strategic communication at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those ofThe Post. What are your thoughts? Tell Mikayla by tweeting her at @mikayla_roch.

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So Listen: The alt-right is not the right - The Post

This wobbly but well-intentioned broadside against racism has been sitting on the shelf since it won the Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance 2018. What gives? Could it be that this true tale of 1990s KKK resurgence has nothing to say to the here and now? Not if you live in the real world, where incidents like the white-supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, have sparked a resurgence of racist attacks from Parkland to El Paso. Just as Spike Lees BlackKklansman used an incident from the 1970s to show that the alt-right cry of America first! is sadly alive and festering in the Trump era, Burden uses a true story from 1996 to point up a hate movement that is tragically not showing down.

Mike Burden, played by an all-stops-out Garrett Hedlund as a fuse ready to ignite, has been raised on hatred. After a stint in the Army, Burden signs up as a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon. He also works as a repo man for South Carolina Klan leader Tom Griffin (a snarling Tom Wilkinson). To this former orphan, Griffin is a father figure who teaches the effectiveness of violence at getting a message across. Propaganda is another method. To that end, Griffin, Burden, and the Klansmen have taken over a movie theater in the small town of Laurens and run it as the Redneck Shop, a KKK museum. The move horrifies the Rev. David Kennedy (Forest Whitaker), a preacher who organizes a protest against this monument to white hoods and photos of black lynchings. When the protest starts to gain heat in real life, Jesse Jackson joined in Griffin sends Burden out with a rifle to silence Rev. Kennedy. That the anointed assassin cant follow through is an epiphany for the young man, whose change-of-heart is sparked by a spiritual awakening and his love for Judy Harbeson (Andrea Riseborough), a dirt-poor, single mother who points to a better way.

The hatemongers impossible-but-true redemption is the crux of the film that actor-turned-filmmaker Andrew Heckler instills with a passion that carries him over rough spots as a first-time writer and director. Hedlund does wonders showing us Burdens hidden resources and the scars hes still carrying. But there are character transitions missing in Burdens transformation that might have taken us deeper into his life, as happened in last years more forceful Skin, in which Jamie Bell tore into the fact-based role of Bryon Widner, a tattoo artist who inked his skin as a message of hate until a good woman helped him see the light.

Still, Heckler deserves props for not smoothing the edges of this incendiary tale. Indeed, Griffin took violent vengeance against Burden and poisoned the community against him. Even the reverend suffered blowback for offering the reformed racist and his lady love shelter in his own home. Dr. Kings message Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that is reprised here. The still pertinent question, however simplistically rendered by the film, is: How long will it take to sink in?

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Burden Review: Real-Life Story of Love and Racism Is Well-Intentioned, Wobbly - Rolling Stone

When the history of this political era is written, major themes will include the unexpected rise of populism and Trumpian nationalism on the right and the rejuvenated fondness for socialism on the left.

The story of how we got to this point will be a rich and complicated one, involving widespread institutional decline, the unhealthy influence of social media, and so many other trends that made it possible for some of the worst of the worst to manipulate American politicsoften while lining their own pockets. All of which was made possible by the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Act of 2002, better known as McCain-Feingold. While much has been written and debated about the late Arizona and former Wisconsin senators legacy legislation in the decade since the Citizens United Supreme Court case struck down parts of the law, far less has been said about how the parts not overturned by the Courtparticularly its ban on soft money contributions to political partieshave done immense damage to American politics.

This shift of power away from the political parties resulting from this ban has led to the rise of outside groups and activists with narrow agendas, little incentive to compromise their views, and an eagerness to make themselves players in primaries. While some observers might cheer on this weakening of the elites, it has had the effect of turning the national political parties into glorified public relations shops for the White House when their party has the presidency. At the same time, the party out of power looks not just directionless but held hostage by fear of its own voters to appease small but vocal segments of their baseas seen in the rise of the alt-right in 2016 and the socialist hardcore Bernie supporters of 2020.

All of this was warned of years ago, as in this 2014 Washington Post op-ed by two election lawyers. After detailing the drop in fundraising by the two partiesa drop that meant a significant decline in the parties spending powerthe authors explain that it was the shortfall in fundraising relative to outside groups that most profoundly undercut the parties traditional role in our political system:

Reliable figures on the total amount outside groups raised for election activity are nearly impossible to obtain because much of that activity is carried out through tax-exempt social welfare organizations and trade associations that are not required to disclose what they spend. Nevertheless, one way to gauge the growing spending advantage that outside groups enjoy over political parties is to look at broadcast advertisements, whose sponsors are required to identify themselves.

According to political scientist Michael Franz, since McCain-Feingold, the number of advertisements that political parties sponsor relative to other groups has fallen precipitously. In pre-reform 2000, the Republican and Democratic parties aired two-thirds of all advertisements in the presidential general election. In post- / reform 2004, that figure dropped to one-third; in 2008, it was less than one-fourth. By 2012, just 6 percent of all advertisements were sponsored by the political parties.

As a consequence, both the Republican and Democratic national committees have atrophied to the point that they are no longer able to exercise some core functions. Both national parties used soft money to support an extensive grass-roots network through their state party committees. As those funds dried up, the state parties shriveled. This hollowing-out has left the parties barely able to engage aggressively with outside groups on the left or right.

With the parties hollowed out, proper candidate vetting fell apart. Republicans were first to be affected by this after George W. Bush left office. Free from any reprisal from the increasingly toothless Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, or the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or the ideologically friendly White House, outside organizations like the Club for Growth and former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMints Senate Conservatives Fund wreaked havoc in primaries across the nation. Instead of helping Republicans in winnable Senate seats, they often ensured Democratic successes by securing primary victories for heavily flawed candidates. Or theyd challenge an incumbent, who would still defeat their preferred candidate but be left beaten, blooded, and bankrupt.

All of which seems like a test run for 2016, when these and similar groups stuck to the sidelines as the RNC was helpless (or too scared of a third party run) to stop Donald Trumps hijacking of the party and the conservative movementa hijacking fueled by the very discontent with conservative elites these groups created.

As for the Democrats, their fracturing looks to have only been postponed by the Obama presidency. Like Republicans under Bush, the coalitions cohesion was maintained when their party held the White House. But underneath the Hope and Change was a simmering discontent, a worry about losing everything to Republicans in the 2010 midterms. This fear birthed the lefts own purity groupslike Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party, whose muscle wasnt truly flexed until the 2018 primary victory of New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). The far left, too, showed that it was capable of knocking off its own congressional leadership.

Much has been said recently about how 2020 is a repeat of 2016, particularly about how an outsider with no true ties to a political party has essentially taken it over. With Bernie Sanderss early victories this presidential primary season, it looks as if there is little chance that Democrats will be able to stop him from being their nominee.

So with both parties shells of their former selves, the McCain-Feingold law will have helped pave the way for a nationalist and (possibly) a socialist to win the White House. Not exactly a legacy to be proud of.

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McCain-Feingold Gave Us Trump. Its Giving Us Bernie, Too. - The Bulwark

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Stock photo of laughing woman wearing headphones and standing in front of two popular online memes

Each day, the chaos of the internet is filled with wretched news stories and terrible opinions. It would be an unrewarding slog if it werent for the beacon of hope that brings us all together: memes. There is no political event or pop culture moment that cant be turned into a meme, and no meme that cant be remixed into oblivion. But for some, accessing these memes is no easy task. Around 8 million Americans have some type of visual impairment, according to 2012 data from the Census Bureau. While much of the internet is accessible to people with visual impairments through screen readers, which transfer text into audio or Braille, translating images, including memes, for the visually impaired is more difficult.

A group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have been working to make memes more accessible, combining audio text and music cues to mirror the effect of a visual meme. Twitter, for example, was founded as a text-based social media platform, at first making it easily accessible through screen readers. But now, millions of images and gifs are uploaded every day, and only 11% of them are paired with a caption that describes the image.

The real question was, can you really just write out what's in the meme, or will that kill the joke? says Cole Gleason, a Ph.D. student at CMU and one of the authors of the paper Making Memes Accessible.

Memes, like any good joke, can lose some of their spark when trying to translate, as any young person whos ever tried to explain a meme to an old person would know.

We recognize that, for all images on the internet, this is a very hard problem, but focusing in on some of these subsets like memes isn't actually as difficult because they had certain constraints, he says.

Memes are hard to define, and best identified with a you know it when you see it mentality, but most often feature a viral image or gif accompanied by a joke format. The memes Gleason and his colleagues have worked with are what you might call vintage memes from an earlier era of the internet, back when people werent even sure how to pronounce meme. (Its meem, like dream.) The memes feature common images overlaid with a repeated joke format. Think of old friends like Success Kid or Philosoraptor or the Socially Awkward Penguin.

Gleason says the benefit of working with this type of meme is its simplicity. If we know that the format of the joke is this and we can extract the text, we can probably figure out a way to put those together, he says.

Instead of having an audio description that describes toddler clenching his fist followed by the joke, the researchers accessible memes create an audio version of the joke text, set to mood-appropriate background music. The idea is to create a sound that mimics the feeling. Think of a victorious sound for Success Kid bragging Put candy bar in the shopping cart without mom noticing, or a pensive, dream-like tune for Philosophizing Raptor asking, Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?

As part of the research, Gleason and his colleagues talked to blind Twitter users about their experiences on the platform, and whether or not they had a desire to better understand memes. Some said yes, some didnt care, and some were already well-versed in them. Many of the users they spoke to didnt necessarily like the soundtracked version of the memes because they were used to alt-text that worked with screen readers.

But Gleason still thinks theres hope for making it work. His goal is to set up a crowd-sourcing site where people could submit memes and other people could create sounds for them.

To some, making memes better accessible to people with visual impairments or other disabilities might not seem like groundbreaking, or even necessary work. But memes are an essential part of the internet. At their best, they bring people together to laugh at and riff off a joke (at worst, its a medium for alt-right trolls to express their demonic tendencies).

You see this in accessibility where people are like, Why are you working on memes when you could be helping blind people get to work or do their jobs? says Gleason. People forget to prioritize recreation or fun.

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Even memes should be accessible, and researchers at CMU are trying to figure out how - PGH City Paper