Seattle police fatally shoot pregnant woman who they say confronted officers with a knife (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/19/seattle-police-fatally-shoot-black-mother-of-four-who-confronted-officers-with-a-knife/?utm_term=.dbdfe0000286)
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The Sheriff’s Office cited Florida statute 322.15(1) as to why Shipman was given a citation, but the statute only applies to drivers, not pedestrians. It states that every licensee must have his or her license on them “when operating a motor vehicle.”
Seattle police fatally shoot pregnant woman who they say confronted officers with a knife (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/19/seattle-police-fatally-shoot-black-mother-of-four-who-confronted-officers-with-a-knife/?utm_term=.dbdfe0000286)
#Resist
I wonder how this will play out...??
Woman with a knife shot by police....Okay sounds logical, "But"......
Unborn baby with absolutely no say in the matters that unfolded died also.
Two lives not one were taken that day.......
Love,
Liz
What the hell does that have to do with this thread??
Mr. Polombo, a hispanic New Yorker of unclear citizenship status, did not vote in 2016, and would have supported Hillary Clinton, had he bothered to vote at all.the boldest part. What relevance does that have?
FYI.
Mr. Polombo, a hispanic New Yorker of unclear citizenship status, did not vote in 2016, and would have supported Hillary Clinton, had he bothered to vote at all.the boldest part. What relevance does that have?
FYI.
Additionally, what point in context of the post you replied to were you addressing? You focused on irrelevant parts.
Joan, all you stated was supposition. Athos was commenting on the political atmospherethqt Trump has fostered. He didn't have to be a Trump supporter. Trump has all but said that racism is ok by him in his political statements and attitude.
The perp in question did not vote for anyone, and he is a Hillary Supporter.[/color]
KKK marchers say they will be armed Saturday at Charlottesville rally (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/kkk-marchers-say-they-will-be-armed-saturday-at-charlottesville-rally/2017/07/07/eba102b4-6270-11e7-8adc-fea80e32bf47_story.html?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.70e76a2e1b8a)
#Resist
It seems, then, that, if anything, anti-racism is alive and well...and growing...
KKK marchers say they will be armed Saturday at Charlottesville rally (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/kkk-marchers-say-they-will-be-armed-saturday-at-charlottesville-rally/2017/07/07/eba102b4-6270-11e7-8adc-fea80e32bf47_story.html?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.70e76a2e1b8a)
#Resist
It's worth noting that this article is about what will/might happen, and not what did happen.
What DID happen is about 50 Klansmen appeared to protest the removal of the statue, and about 2,000 counter-protestors showed up to protest the Klan.
It seems, then, that, if anything, anti-racism is alive and well...and growing...
This is conjecture, but I wonder if the response to the KKK march was a backlash to the perceived support that Trump has given to racists?
It seems, then, that, if anything, anti-racism is alive and well...and growing...
Except a racist was elected President of the United States.
This is conjecture, but I wonder if the response to the KKK march was a backlash to the perceived support that Trump has given to racists?
It seems, then, that, if anything, anti-racism is alive and well...and growing...
Except a racist was elected President of the United States.
Yes, he was.
And the reaction to his election, as evidenced here (and this is one of many examples), is both effective and inspiring -- and hopeful.
"...60 million people found racism an acceptable quality to be President of The United States..."
There was really NO pro-Hillary support of substance.
Donald Trump displaced 17 or whatever Republican Primary opponents, all with some claim to being qualified, only one or two will any real following, support for their personal positions, and even those came around to offer support to the man who was elected as our President, albeit grudgingly.
Hillary Clinton is not the subject of this thread. Trump, as president, his racism and his racist followers such as yourself are. Please try to stay on topic.
#Resist
Please don't nag. You have no control over Member comments here.Hillary Clinton is not the subject of this thread. Trump, as president, his racism and his racist followers such as yourself are. Please try to stay on topic.
#Resist
Trump nominee Sam Clovis blasted progressives as 'race traders' and 'race traitors' in old blog posts (http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/02/politics/kfile-sam-clovis-blog-posts/index.html)
#Resist
Trump adviser comments on mosque bombing by criticizing ‘the left’ (http://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2017/08/trump-adviser-comments-on-mosque-bombing-by-criticizing-the-left/)
#Resist
Gorka went on to say that “we’ve had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate-crimes, by right-wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left.” Gorka did not cite any specific instances to back up his claim. “When people fake hate crimes in the last six months with some regularity, it’s wise to find out what exactly is going on before you make statements, when they could turn out to be not who you are expecting.”
“Things were getting out of hand in the skirmishes between the alt-right and what I would describe as the outside agitators who wanted to encourage violence,” Toscano said, referring to the counterprotesters.
After police ordered everyone to vacate the park, columns of white nationalists marched out, carrying Confederate and Nazi flags as they headed down Market Street in an odd parade.
White nationalists ordered to leave Va. park before planned ‘Unite the Right’ rally (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/fights-in-advance-of-saturday-protest-in-charlottesville/2017/08/12/155fb636-7f13-11e7-83c7-5bd5460f0d7e_story.html?nid&utm_term=.f42e2e0328d6)Quote“Things were getting out of hand in the skirmishes between the alt-right and what I would describe as the outside agitators who wanted to encourage violence,” Toscano said, referring to the counterprotesters.QuoteAfter police ordered everyone to vacate the park, columns of white nationalists marched out, carrying Confederate and Nazi flags as they headed down Market Street in an odd parade.
#Resist
BREAKING NEWS, 2:33 p.m. At least six pedestrians were struck in a crash involving multiple vehicles in Charlottesville, according to the city government’s Twitter account. Matthew Korbon of Charlottesville said he was standing 10 feet from where the crash happened. He saw a car at high speed rear-end another car, then back up and plow through pedestrians. Charlottesville police said at least three vehicles were involved in the incident.
STATE OF EMERGENCY DECLARED (http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/local/car-plows-into-crowd-on-downtown-mall-near-unite-the/article_ef4ba358-7f6a-11e7-84cf-8f840f442510.html)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHDq66MXgAEej3Q.jpg:large)
#Resist
here’s a brief and certainly incomplete collection of some of the various people, things, and entities that the president has spoken out against by name since taking office:
- Opinion polls that are unflattering to him
- Nordstrom
- The “fake news” media
- Specifically “CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO”
- Meet the Press host Chuck Todd
- The New York Times
- The “fake” reporting on his campaign’s potential collusion with Russia
- The “witch hunt” that is the investigation into his campaign’s potential collusion with Russia
- #FraudNewsCNN
- Leakers
- Anonymous sources
- Senator Lisa Murkowski
- Senator John McCain
- Senator Lindsey Graham
- All Senate Republicans
- Congress
- Former attorney general Loretta Lynch
- His own attorney general, Jeff Sessions
- Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe
- Former FBI director James Comey
- The FBI
- “Fake tears” Cryin’ Chuck Schumer
- Nancy Pelosi
- Congressman Adam Schiff
- Senator Richard Blumenthal
- Barack Obama
- Hillary Clinton
- John Podesta
- Democratic congressional candidate Jon Ossoff
- Democrats in Congress
- Obamacare
- North Korea’s unsuccessful missiles
- North Korea
- Qatar
- China
- Mexico
- Canada
- London mayor Sadiq Khan
- “Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika”
- Morning Joe
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Snoop Dogg
- Mark Cuban
- “Celebs”
- Kathy Griffin
- The Ninth Circuit Court
- Transgender military service members
- Chelsea Manning
- M3-13 gang members
- The idea that his first 100 days in office were of symbolic significance
Friends and relatives have identified the victim of Saturday’s domestic terrorist attack in Charlottesville as 32–year–old paralegal Heather Heyer, a native of Virginia.
According to initial news reports and social media accounts, Heyer was crossing the street to join an anti–racist protest when she was struck, along with dozens of others, by a sports car driven by 20–year–old James Alex Fields Jr., a white, radical, homegrown terrorist and Trump supporter from Maumee, OH.
Nineteen others were injured in the attack, many of them seriously. Fields was arrested and charged with one count of second–degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding, and one count of hit–and–run, according to The Washington Post, citing local police.
As of Sunday morning, a GoFundMe campaign established to support Heyer’s family had already exceeded its goal of raising $50,000. “Heather Heyer was murdered while protesting against hate. We are raising money to give to her family for anything that they may need,” the campaign states.
“She died doing what was right. My heart is broken, but I am forever proud of her,” Heyer’s mother said, according to the GoFundMe page.
On Heyer’s Facebook page, a profile photo posted last November states, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
A separate GoFundMe campaign started by the co–chair of the Anchorage chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to help pay medical bills for those who were injured in the attack has so far raised over $100,000.
The attack occurred after the violent “Unite the Right” rally organized by neo–Nazi groups, members of the KKK, and other right–wing bigots was declared unlawful and broken up by police. The chaos and violence became so bad that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency before the rally had even officially started.
As counterdemonstrators, including members of Black Lives Matter, DSA, and Antifa, prepared for a peaceful early–afternoon march through the streets of downtown Charlottesville, Fields, who was identified in photos published on social media as having participated in the white supremacist protest earlier in the day, drove his gray Dodge Challenger at a high speed into the crowd, striking dozens of people and several cars. The attack was captured on several videos shared online, and Fields, who fled the scene, was later caught and arrested.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who had declared a state of emergency in the morning, said at an evening news conference that he had a message for “all the white supremacists and the Nazis who came into Charlottesville today: Go home. You are not wanted in this great commonwealth.”
Not only McAuliffe but also many other politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, deplored the white nationalists and the mayhem they created, many of them telling the president he needed to denounce the hate-mongers. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) and Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — who went a step further, calling for a Justice Department investigation of domestic terrorism — were among them. (Later Saturday evening, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the FBI and U.S. attorney would be investigating.) President Trump and Vice President Pence did not take their advice. Instead, they hid behind ambiguity and moral equivalence.
As news broke of a terrorist attack in Paris in November 2015, Trump immediately tweeted that he was praying for “the victims and hostages.” Very soon after a shooting at an Orlando nightclub in June 2016, Trump tweeted that he was “right on radical Islamic terrorism.”
But he kept quiet Saturday morning as a protest led by white nationalists, who arrived with torches and chants in Charlottesville, on Friday night, turned violent. The cable networks that he usually watches showed footage of increasingly violent clashes between the white nationalists, some of whom looked like soldiers because they were so heavily armed, and the counterprotesters who showed up to challenge them.
When he belatedly spoke up, all he could muster was a vague tweet (“We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Let’s come together as one!”) and then a despicable statement evincing the kind of moral equivalence Republicans used to denounce. (“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” In case you missed that, he repeated, “On many sides.”) In yet another tone-deaf tweet, he declared, “Condolences to the family of the young woman killed today, and best regards to all of those injured, in Charlottesville, Virginia. So sad!” Sad?? His stilted, off-key lines betray his lack of empathy and failure to comprehend the gravity of the moment.
This is not the first time Trump has played footsie with white nationalists. During the campaign, he initially pleaded ignorance of David Duke’s racism in an interview with Jake Tapper. He played to white nationalists’ fears of illegal immigrants, demonized Mexicans, made racist accusations against a federal judge, falsely accused illegal immigrants of causing a crime wave, and refused to apologize for anti-Semitic imagery. Once in office, he hired alt-right darlings including Stephen K. Bannon (who bragged that he had made Breitbart a “platform for the alt-right”) and Sebastian Gorka. As president, he has channeled the white racists’ “blood and soil” concept of nationalism in his speeches and encouraged white, Christian, working-class Americans to think of themselves as victims and to see their religion as under attack — while he championed a Muslim travel ban. Pence on Saturday was no better, sending out a mealy-mouthed tweet: “Karen & I saddened by the loss of lives in Charlottesville. Thoughts & prayers w/ families of officers & young woman. Also w/ injured victims.”
Trump did not tell the white nationalists to go to Charlottesville or to commit violence. But his campaign and presidency have given white nationalists cover, oxygen and the dream of respectability. And now, when the moment calls for some semblance of presidential leadership and denunciation of racists, he cannot bring himself to criticize a group that is unarguably part of his base (not a majority, but among his strongest fans).
This kind of stomach-turning display of moral obtuseness is precisely what opponents of Trump predicted when they warned that he was unfit for the presidency. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) on Saturday denounced white nationalism as a “scourge,” but he supported Trump even after Trump attacked a federal judge and Gold Star, Muslim parents. What did Ryan think America was getting?
Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, a Trump supporter who was in Charlottesville on Saturday, quickly replied. “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists,” he wrote.
Asked by a reporter in New Jersey whether he wanted the support of white nationalists, dozens of whom wore red Make America Great Again hats during the Charlottesville riots, Trump did not respond.
But Trump’s choice of words — and the silence that preceded them — are being cheered by at least a few groups of people: neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
On the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, updates about Saturday’s events unfolded quickly, as hundreds of mostly young, white men who had gathered in Charlottesville to stage a rally to “take America back” clashed with counterprotesters.
“WE HAVE AN ARMY!” the website posted to a live blog shortly after 11 a.m., along with photos of people carrying Confederate flags and neo-Nazi paraphernalia. “THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF A WAR!”
Less than half an hour after Trump’s live remarks, the Daily Stormer had declared the president’s words as a signal of tacit support for their side:
Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us.
He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate … on both sides!
So he implied the antifa are haters.
There was virtually no counter-signaling of us at all.
He said he loves us all.
The neo-Nazi live blog also noted that Trump had refused to respond when a reporter asked about white nationalists who supported him.
“No condemnation at all,” the Daily Stormer wrote. “When asked to condemn, (Trump) just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”
It was far from the first time white supremacists had signaled their support for Trump. Earlier Saturday, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke replied to Trump, suggesting the president was attacking “White Americans being targeted for discriminated (sic).”
“I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists,” Duke tweeted to Trump.
As The Post’s Jenna Johnson and John Wagner reported, Trump’s presidential campaign excited many white nationalists:
They rallied behind his promises to build a wall on the southern border, reduce the number of foreigners allowed into the country and pressure everyone in the country to speak English and say “Merry Christmas.” And they celebrated Trump selecting Stephen K. Bannon as his chief strategist, who formerly ran the right-wing Breitbart News and advocated for what he calls the “alt-right” movement.
When President Donald Trump is upset with you, he will let you know. This has been a hard rule about Trump — to the point it’s hard to believe any feud is too petty or too far for him. From Rosie O’Donnell to the family of a dead US military veteran, Trump has been ready to condemn just about everyone who gets in his way.
A couple weeks into his presidency, Trump even bashed the US retailer Nordstrom on Twitter: “My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!” There, he used the power of the White House to attempt to throw a job-creating US company under the bus just because it had let go of his daughter’s clothing line.
But when it comes to white supremacists, Trump’s statements are uncharacteristically tepid.
We can never truly say what’s in Trump’s heart and mind. But there’s a pattern here: Time and time again, when Trump has a chance to condemn white supremacists, he panders to them instead. And that pandering is unlike what he does with nearly any other people and groups he dislikes.
There have been many, many articles written about how no feud is too petty for Trump. The New York Times, for instance, keeps an ongoing count of all the people, places, and things that Trump has insulted on Twitter. As of late July, he had bashed more than 350 people, places, and things.
Of course, Trump doesn’t just randomly insult people on Twitter; he often does it with his mouth too.
It’s helpful to look at some of the people Trump has bashed over the past few years. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it gives you a pretty good indication of how vast Trump’s feuds spread:
The Khans, the family of a Muslim military veteran who was killed in action
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Alec Baldwin
The cast of Hamilton
Meryl Streep
Rosie O’Donnell
Samuel L. Jackson
Whoopi Goldberg
Mark Cuban
Paulina Vega, former Miss Universe
Anderson Cooper
Joe Scarborough
Megyn Kelly
Nordstrom
Bandon Dunes Golf Resort
Gonzalo Curiel, a US judge who oversaw a Trump University case
James Comey, former FBI director
Barack Obama
Hillary Clinton
John McCain, Republican senator of Arizona
Lindsey Graham, Republican senator of South Carolina
Lisa Murkowski, Republican senator of Alaska
Jeff Sessions, his own attorney general
Opinion polls
The Bias-Free Language Guide
The list really could go on and on.
In fact, this is a crucial part to Trump’s public persona. That he’s so willing to stand up to anyone he sees as a threat is one of the things that made some people like Trump in the first place.
Take, for instance, his position on terrorism. Trump consistently bashed Obama and Clinton for failing to call out, from his view, “radical Islamic terrorism” — never mind that there are important national security considerations for not using that phrase. To a lot of Trump supporters, this dog whistle about Muslims spoke to who the real enemy is, and they loved that he was willing to call it out even if it wasn’t “politically correct.”
So when there’s an attack that may have been caused by a Muslim perpetrator, Trump quickly jumps on Twitter to declare it as terrorism — even before the authorities have confirmed anything — and will use it to push his policies, such as his travel ban.
t’s not just Trump’s comments on Saturday that were tepid. On the campaign trail, Trump was just as vague when it came to condemning some of the white nationalists and other extremists who had come to endorse him.
When he appeared on CNN’s State of the Union in February last year, host Jake Tapper gave him what should be a pretty easy task: condemn the KKK. Trump dodged.
Here’s the exchange, which is really worth reading in full to see just how evasive Trump is when asked to, out of all things, condemn a KKK grand wizard:
TAPPER: I want to ask you about the Anti-Defamation League, which this week called on you to publicly condemn unequivocally the racism of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, who recently said that voting against you at this point would be treason to your heritage. Will you unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that you don’t want his vote or that of other white supremacists in this election?
TRUMP: Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, okay? I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. Did he endorse me? Or what’s going on? Because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists. So you’re asking me a question that I’m supposed to be talking about people that I know nothing about.
TAPPER: I guess the question from the Anti-Defamation League is even if you don’t know about their endorsement, there are these groups and individuals endorsing you. Would you just say unequivocally you condemn them and you don’t want their support?
TRUMP: Well, I have to look at the group. I mean, I don't know what group you’re talking about. You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about. I’d have to look. If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them and certainly I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong. You may have groups in there that are totally fine — and it would be very unfair. So give me a list of the groups and I’ll let you know.
TAPPER: Okay. I’m just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here, but—
TRUMP: Honestly, I don't know David Duke. I don't believe I've ever met him. I’m pretty sure I didn't meet him. And I just don’t know anything about him.
For the record, Trump had, in the past, known plenty about David Duke. When Trump declined to run for president in 2000 as a member of the Reform Party, he said that he didn’t want to be associated with Duke, who had supported Pat Buchanan’s nomination for the Reform Party. Trump at the time called Duke “a bigot, a racist, a problem.” This only seemed to change once he began running for president in 2015.
During the campaign trail, we saw similar messaging from white supremacists. As Sarah Posner and David Neiwert reported at Mother Jones, what the media largely treated as gaffes — Trump retweeting white nationalists, Trump describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals — were to white supremacists real signals approving of their racist causes. One white supremacist wrote, “Our Glorious Leader and ULTIMATE SAVIOR has gone full-wink-wink-wink to his most aggressive supporters.”
Some of them even argued that Trump has softened the greater public to their racist messaging. “The success of the Trump campaign just proves that our views resonate with millions,” said Rachel Pendergraft, a national organizer for the Knights Party, which succeeded David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will.”
That emboldening is what we saw in Charlottesville over the weekend. When asked to explain the Charlottesville protests, David Duke argued, “We are determined to take our country back,” he said at the protests, describing them as a “turning point.” “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.” (Although he did criticize some of Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville later on.)
More than anything, this is the clearest evidence of Trump’s pandering: White supremacists themselves interpret his statements favorably. They feel emboldened. And as long as Trump keeps refusing to clearly and unequivocally condemn their racist cause, that will continue.
Plainly, the New York education system, Fordham University and Wharton School of Business have failed Trump, promoting him without ensuring that he possessed basic reasoning skills and a grasp of American history. But in these institutions’ defense, he is unteachable, we have learned.
Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) re-upped their condemnation, but mere words fall on deaf ears. Unless and until Republicans are willing to censure the president, withhold endorsement for a second term and vigorously pursue avenues for impeachment, they are wasting their breath and our time.
How bad was his press conference? Well, when you lose Fox News you might as well throw in the towel. (Fox News’s Kat Timpf declared, “It’s honestly crazy for me to have to comment on this right now because I’m still in the phase where I’m wondering if it was actually real life what I just watched. It was one of the biggest messes that I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe it happened. . . . It shouldn’t be some kind of bold statement to say, ‘Yes, a gathering full of white supremacist Nazis doesn’t have good people in it. Those are all bad people, period.’”
We should be clear on several points. First, it is morally reprehensible to serve in this White House, supporting a president so utterly unfit to lead a great country. Second, John F. Kelly has utterly failed as chief of staff; the past two weeks have been the worst of Trump’s presidency, many would agree. He can at this point only serve his country by resigning and warning the country that Trump is a cancer on the presidency, to borrow a phrase. Third, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have no excuses and get no free passes. They are as responsible as anyone by continuing to enable the president. Finally, Trump apologists have run out of excuses and credibility. He was at the time plainly the more objectionable of the two main party candidates; in refusing to recognize that they did the country great harm. They can make amends by denouncing him and withdrawing all support. In short, Trump’s embrace and verbal defense of neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be disqualifying from public service. All true patriots must do their utmost to get him out of the Oval Office as fast as possible.
A reminder of what real conservatives stand for, as opposed to right-wing extremists:
Trump has also been invited to speak to the NAACP, but refused the offer.
Andrew Anglin, the editor of the Daily Stormer, wasted no time in defaming Heyer, writing an editorial shortly after her death in which he excoriated her appearance and called her “drain on society.” Anglin also noted Heyer’s marital and parental status, calling her a “fat, childless, 32-year-old slut,” claiming that her failure to marry and have children meant that she had “no value.”
.....
“Had she not died yesterday, hundreds of thousands of dollars would have been spent on propping-up this gross creature who had failed to do her most basic duty – her only real duty, in fact – and reproduce,” Anglin wrote. “Having no children at that age, it can be assumed that she had multiple abortions.”
“They tried to kill my child to shut her up, but guess what, you just magnified her,” said Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, sparking an ovation from a packed theater in downtown Charlottesville that lasted nearly a minute and a half.
“I have aged 10 years in the last week,” Bro said as she struggled up the stairs to the stage. But once from the podium, she delivered a fierce call to those who knew her daughter — and those around the world coming to know her now — to make her death worthwhile by fighting “as Heather would do.”
“I’d rather have my child, but by golly if I got to give her up, we’re going to make it count,” she said.
She implored those who wished to honor Heyer to pay attention to social events in the way that her daughter had taught her and others to do.
Citing a Facebook post of Heyer’s, Bro said: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
If we talked about what happened in Charlottesville the same way we talk about events in a foreign country, here’s how Western media would cover it. Those quoted in the “story” below are fictional.
The international community is yet again sounding the alarm on ethnic violence in the United States under the new regime of President Trump. The latest flash point occurred this past weekend when the former Confederate stronghold of Charlottesville descended into chaos following rallies of white supremacist groups protesting the removal of statues celebrating leaders of the defeated Confederate states. The chaos turned deadly when Heather Heyer, a member of the white ethnic majority who attended the rally as a counterprotester, was killed when a man with neo-Nazi sympathies allegedly drove his car into a crowd.
Trump, a former reality television host, beauty pageant organizer and businessman, rose to political prominence by publicly questioning the citizenship of the United States’ first black president, Barack Obama. Since his election, Trump has targeted Muslims, refugees, Mexicans and the media. He has also advocated for police brutality. These tactics have appealed to and emboldened white ethno-nationalist groups and domestic terrorist organizations.
After Charlottesville, Trump has largely refused to unequivocally condemn the actions of the white supremacist groups. In a shocking news conference Tuesday, Trump, fuming after consuming hours of cable television, doubled down on blaming “both sides” for the weekend’s violence. His remarks garnered praise from a former leader of a white terrorist group known as the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville,” Duke said on Twitter.
Beyond Trump’s coddling of white extremist groups, the emboldening of white supremacists and neo-Nazis raises questions about the state of the United States’ democracy 152 years after its brutal civil war over the rights of the white ethnic majority in its southern region to enslave members of the black ethnic minority. After the Charlottesville turmoil, more protests are expected around the country against the removal of Confederate monuments.
“Culturally, Americans are a curious lot,” said Andrew Darcy Morthington, an United Kingdom-based commentator who once embarked on a two-year mission trip to teach rural American children and therefore qualifies as an expert on U.S. affairs. “Donald Trump’s campaign message was that he would make America great again, and that there would be so much ‘winning.’ If America cares about being great, why has it fought so hard to keep monuments to the Confederate losers and enslavers?”
“The worst thing Britain ever did was letting go of our colony and thinking Americans were capable of governing themselves without eventually resorting back to tribal politics,” said Martin Rhodes, a shopkeeper in London. “I can’t believe a once-great empire would threaten everything it has built over generations just because a group of people give in to racism and xenoph…” Rhodes’s voice trailed off as he stared wistfully at a silent Big Ben.
Experts are also linking the weekend violence to the scourge of domestic terrorism carried out by white males, who have carried out almost twice as many mass attacks on American soil than Muslims have in recent years.
“This is the time for moderates across the white male world to come out and denounce violent racial terrorism, white supremacy and regressive tribal politics,” said James Charlotin, a Canadian national security expert. “Why haven’t they spoken out?”
European leaders have offered to convene the first-ever Countering Violent White Male Extremism (CVWME) summit somewhere in Europe, but critics have pointed out that Europe was the original exporter of many of the same colonial and white supremacist ideologies that have fueled misery all over the globe.
The Trump regime, which has failed to deliver on much of its legislation promises, is governing in a country awash in guns, where the maternal mortality rate, alcoholism and opioid drug use are on the rise.
“This is just a recipe for entrenched disaffection from the state and further isolation and radicalization of American white males,” Charlotin said.
“The Americans on both sides of the political spectrum like to talk about identity politics, or white identity,” said Mustapha Okango, a Kenyan anthropologist based in Nairobi. “The Americans like to lecture us and other Africans about keeping tribalism out of our politics and putting country ahead of our ethnic groups. America’s institutions are strong. But when I saw the images of those white men in polos carrying Party City tiki torches and weapons, it’s pretty clear American white tribal politics are alive and well, explicitly fueled by President Trump’s regime. White supremacy doesn’t just hurt blacks or other minority groups, it hurts the whole country. Take it from us Kenyans, it’s a dangerous recipe. We had hoped better for America.”
Last summer, when Donald Trump’s comments about Mexicans and Muslims led to widespread accusations that he harbored racist attitudes, the candidate pushed back. “I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” he said.
As evidence, Trump cited an endorsement he’d received from a weekly newspaper published in Ohio by Don King, the legendary African-American boxing promoter.
“Now, Don King knows racism probably better than anybody,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post. “He’s not endorsing a racist, okay?”
But how would Trump persuade those who believed he was a racist that wasn’t the case? “I’m not concerned,” he replied. “Actually, I’m not concerned because I don’t think people believe it.”
From his first public controversy in the 1970s, when the federal government sued Trump and his father over discriminatory rental practices in their New York real estate empire, to the opening salvo in his 2016 presidential campaign, when he said that Mexicans entering the United States were criminals and “rapists,” Trump has regularly fanned the flames of racial controversies.
After Trump’s defiant statement Tuesday that “both sides” bore responsibility for the street battles in Charlottesville last weekend, an unusually bipartisan collection of politicians and others have called on the president to back off from remarks portraying an overtly white-supremacist rally as something benign and reasonable.
What do such comments reveal about his personal attitude toward the nation’s wrenching history of racial discord? Are Trump’s racially divisive remarks just another example of his impulsivity and propensity to be provocative, or do they represent an abiding tolerance of racist views?
He’s like this on nearly every issue, said Armstrong Williams, a conservative, African-American TV and radio talk show host and longtime supporter of Trump. If ousted FBI director James Comey or former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus “had been black, people would have called what he did to them racist,” Williams said. “You cannot isolate this to race. It’s just who he is. He’s undisciplined and he causes unnecessary pain with what he says, and he’s done it all his life. The president treats everybody the same, unfortunately.”
Williams said Trump should have left his Monday statement condemning white supremacists as his last word, “but he just can’t stop himself, so he goes off without understanding the history of neo-Nazism and white supremacy. And those of us who had so much hope for him are just exhausted, because this is every day. People see it as a betrayal. Soon, he won’t have anybody, because when you start talking about Nazis and supremacy, who’s going to defend him on that?”
But others say Trump’s eagerness to speak up for at least some of the people who took part in the alt-right demonstrations in Charlottesville must be viewed as a reflection of his attitude on race.
“It could be both that he’s like this about all kinds of issues and that he’s particularly comfortable trafficking in racist language,” said Michael Fauntroy, a Howard University political scientist who has written on Republicans and the black vote. “I think he has something going on in his personality that leads him to say irrational things. But the most benign explanation of his behavior is that he’s very comfortable being around racists.”
Some Republicans have spoken out against Trump’s decision to equate left-wing protesters with the armed, avowed neo-Nazis who carried torches through the University of Virginia campus last weekend. But even those who strongly criticized the president stopped short of questioning his beliefs on race.
“There’s a whole lot of political calculus behind these comments,” Fauntroy said. “What are they going to say: ‘The leader of our party traffics in racism or is comfortable with racism, but we have to get things done, so we’re just going to ignore that?’”
Republican leaders have occasionally pushed back against Trump’s racial slurs. Last year, when Trump said that a federal judge of Mexican descent had ruled against him because he is “Mexican,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said the comment constituted “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” But Ryan did not back away from his endorsement of Trump’s candidacy.
Trump “is no racist,” said King, the boxing promoter, in an interview. “He’s a realist and a knight in God-sent shining armor. He promised to create a whole new system and that system includes the degradations of white supremacy, so when he takes down that old system, that doctrine goes with it. I still love Donald Trump.”
Trump’s four decades in the public eye began with a discrimination lawsuit against young Donald and his father, New York City developer Fred Trump.
For decades, the Trump real estate empire had been well known in Brooklyn and Queens as developments mainly for whites. In 1952, one of Trump’s tenants, the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, pushed back against the all-white nature of his 1,800-unit apartment complex by writing a song, “Old Man Trump,” that begins, “I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate he stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts when he drawed that color line here at his Beach Haven family project.”
“Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower / Where no black folks come to roam,” the song continues.
As Fred Trump brought his son into leadership of the family business, the two faced an investigation by the city Human Rights Commission in which testers tried to rent Trump apartments. The white applicant was offered housing right away, but the black applicant was told nothing was available.
The city shut down rentals at that Trump complex, and the Justice Department picked up the case, filing suit in 1973 against father and son, accusing them of “refusing to rent and negotiate rentals with blacks.” Trump employees stated that they had been instructed to mark rental applications from blacks with the letter C for “colored.”
Donald Trump, then 27, took the lead in defending the family. Under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, the New York attorney who had formerly worked for Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the communist hunts of the 1950s, Trump pushed back hard, countersuing the government and accusing the prosecutor, who was Jewish, of conducting a “Gestapo-like interrogation.” The judge summarily rejected Trump’s claims.
After years of court battles, Trump sought a settlement, agreeing to buy ads in local newspapers assuring the public that his company would not discriminate.
Despite the rough press he endured during that dispute, Trump did not hesitate to wade into racial controversies throughout his career.
In 1993, when he testified before a congressional committee looking into Indian gambling, Trump questioned whether tribe members who operated a casino competing with his Atlantic City operations were really native Americans. “They don’t look like Indians to me,” he said.
But a few years later, during a period when he was a registered Democrat who often expressed liberal views, Trump attacked Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan for how he talked about “Jews, blacks, gays and Mexicans.... He wants to divide our country.”
And in 1995, Trump opened his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida with a pointed welcome to Jews, blacks and gay couples, all of whom had long faced restrictions at other Palm Beach social clubs.
But those who’ve worked with Trump for many years say he also has a history of making rough, stereotyping comments about racial minorities. John O’Donnell, who was president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, said Trump blamed blacks for his financial problems.
“I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza — black guys counting my money!” Trump said, according to O’Donnell. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.... Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is; I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”
Trump has denied making that remark, but has also said that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
In 1989, after a 28-year-old white investment banker on a jog through Central Park was raped, beaten and left for dead, five teenaged boys, including four blacks and one Hispanic, were arrested.
Two weeks later, Trump bought full-page ads in the city’s four newspapers: “Bring back the death penalty,” he demanded, dismissing Mayor Ed Koch’s call for less hate in a frightened city. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed.”
When Rev. Al Sharpton, the black activist, denounced Trump for a “hatemongering ad,” Trump denied that race had anything to do with his call for retribution.
Soon after, Trump went on TV to talk about blacks in America: “A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market,” he said. “I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage.”
In 2014, the Central Park Five had their convictions overturned when a career criminal confessed and provided a DNA match that proved he was the rapist. The city paid the five men $41 million to settle their wrongful imprisonment suit, but Trump called the payment “the heist of the century” and “a disgrace,” said he wouldn’t give them a dime, and insisted he had nothing to apologize for.
A few months after the Central Park rape, Trump was asked about rumors that he planned to run for governor of New York. “Can you imagine me running for office?” he replied. “Wouldn’t you say I’m a little controversial for that?”
Several readers have noticed that the first letters of each paragraph spell out the word, “RESIST” — a common refrain among Trump’s critics.
No, at the heart of Trump’s campaign and the center of the Fox News operation, which incubated a Trump-ready electorate, has always been an appeal to white grievance, which Trump and Bannon were all too happy to gin up with fables about immigrants stealing whites’ jobs, African American killing fields in big cities, murderous illegal immigrants and, quite blatantly, an appeal to Southern infatuation with the Confederate myth of the “lost cause.” Trump’s vilifying all Muslims with a broad brush and his description of Mexicans as murderers were not incidental to his campaign; they were its distinguishing features.
Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.
How Trump Ruined My Relationship With My White Mother (http://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/how-trump-ruined-my-relationship-with-my-white-mother-1797935049)
#Resist
Organizer of Neo-Nazi Rally Tweets That Death of Heather Heyer Was 'Payback Time' [Updated] (http://gizmodo.com/organizer-of-neo-nazi-rally-tweets-that-death-of-heathe-1798041214)
(https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--4_lF1bxb--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/mnacrux1afu4pn6egsyr.jpg)
#Resist
Yeah, he deleted the tweet after claiming he was "hacked."
#Resist
Nearly 50 years ago, moments after learning that an avowed racist had gunned down Martin Luther King Jr., a young presidential candidate took the stage in Indianapolis to break the news to a largely African American crowd.
“What we need in the United States is not division,” Sen. Robert F. Kennedy implored. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.”
It was exactly what the grief-stricken crowd needed to hear. There were riots in many cities that night, but not in Indianapolis.
President Trump’s response to Charlottesville reminds us that the words and actions of our political leaders in the wake of tragic events matter.
America is hurting. And it is hurting largely because Trump has doused racial tensions with gasoline. With his planned visit to Phoenix on Tuesday, I fear the president may be looking to light a match.
That’s why I asked the president to delay his visit. It’s time to let cooler heads prevail and begin the healing process.
I’m not optimistic the White House will heed that call.
Just days after Trump confirmed that he was “seriously considering” issuing a pardon for former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio — who was convicted in July of criminal contempt of court for defying a federal judge’s orders to stop racial profiling — the president’s campaign announced that it will hold a rally at the Phoenix Convention Center. The timing doesn’t seem coincidental.
Let’s be clear: A pardon of Arpaio can be viewed only as a presidential endorsement of the lawlessness and discrimination that terrorized Phoenix’s Latino community. Choosing to announce it in Phoenix — especially in the wake of Charlottesville — would add insult to very serious injury and would reveal that the president’s true intent is to further divide our nation.
For years, Arpaio illegally targeted Latinos in our community because of the color of their skin. Mothers and fathers lived in fear as they dropped off their kids at school. Kids lived in fear of their parents being arrested and taken away.
A federal court ruled Arpaio’s tactics violated the law. After he defied a judge’s orders, he was convicted of criminal contempt. In convicting him, U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton noted that Arpaio “announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise.”
Even before his trial and conviction, voters grew tired of Arpaio’s brand of racism and blatant violation of the law. Last year, in an overwhelmingly Republican county, Arpaio lost by nearly 10 points. Although local Republicans helped defeat Arpaio, the white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other racists who shamed our country this month in Charlottesville would surely cheer a presidential pardon.
Our community is moving on and moving forward from Arpaio’s divisive legacy. A pardon won’t change the fact that Arpaio was convicted of a crime, nor will it shake our resolve to keep building a city that is welcoming, is inclusive and provides opportunities for anyone willing to work for them.
In Phoenix, we are working overtime to ensure that everyone will be safe on Tuesday — from the president to those attending his rally and those exercising their First Amendment right to protest. And, like Robert Kennedy, we will remind everyone that we need not division andhatred, but wisdom and compassion.
Most Confederate statues were erected in support of Jim Crowe laws in the 1920's. Another wave of them went up during the Civil Rights movement. They were made very cheaply and can hardly be considered works of art.
The reason these statues need to be removed is because they were erected in support of continued racism.
Here you go Joan:
https://www.facebook.com/MicMedia/videos/1620753744614076/?hc_ref=ARTJhqcxo_s73lL0rWIYfwLdNB-utP1eMr5vnLo8KCn7tDBLhQuliDRVlB1USq9mK6k&pnref=story
Today's Republican Party is NOT the party of Lincoln.
Today's Republican Party is NOT the party of Lincoln.
As explained by that fake news site Wikipedia.
The Southern Strategy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)
Here's the Daily Show Segment on Ferguson You've Been Waiting For (http://gawker.com/heres-the-daily-show-segment-on-ferguson-youve-been-wai-1627392644)Quote"Race is there, and it is a constant. You're tired of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it."
Democrats have found it so difficult to erase their past. Racists have always had a Democrat bent, with the KKK being a predecessor for today's Antifa, and like Black Lives Matter, like the Black Panthers, the militant arm of Democrats.Really? Then why is Trump supporting and apologizing for them? Why does the KKK, Neo-Nazis think he's supporting their views?
All those statues you want destroyed now, to help 'erase' your history, are of no matter. Nixon was not seeking racists, but seeking American voters, and Republicans were no haven for racist Dems from Southern States, who were so busy trying to vote down the Civil Right Act, including AlGore's dad, and lots of other racially challenged Democrats.
You all know your history, and trying to duck it, or smear others with your bile is not a pretty look for any of you.
White Nationals are not something Republicans endorse or seek out. You know that, but a compliant media writes your headlines, and you have comfort in the effort to slime your opponents, and lacking any plan other than Russia, Russia, Russia (10 days out of the headlines as of today), you are going back to the tried and true: Racist Racist Racist claims, and bottom feeding media will follow the Democrat playbook out the window for you, until you change it again, or actually find some useful approach.
We shall see in 2018, whether America still has some work to do, draining the swamp, and becoming responsive to it's Citizens and taxpayers, and when it is found that American is not yet Great Again, then you will suffer at the polls again, unless something drastic happens and Democrats get a grip.Today's Republican Party is NOT the party of Lincoln.
As explained by that fake news site Wikipedia.
The Southern Strategy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)
Democrats have found it so difficult to erase their past. Racists have always had a Democrat bent, with the KKK being a predecessor for today's Antifa, and like Black Lives Matter, like the Black Panthers, the militant arm of Democrats.
All those statues you want destroyed now, to help 'erase' your history, are of no matter. Nixon was not seeking racists, but seeking American voters, and Republicans were no haven for racist Dems from Southern States, who were so busy trying to vote down the Civil Right Act, including AlGore's dad, and lots of other racially challenged Democrats.
You all know your history, and trying to duck it, or smear others with your bile is not a pretty look for any of you.
White Nationals are not something Republicans endorse or seek out. You know that, but a compliant media writes your headlines, and you have comfort in the effort to slime your opponents, and lacking any plan other than Russia, Russia, Russia (10 days out of the headlines as of today), you are going back to the tried and true: Racist Racist Racist claims, and bottom feeding media will follow the Democrat playbook out the window for you, until you change it again, or actually find some useful approach.
We shall see in 2018, whether America still has some work to do, draining the swamp, and becoming responsive to it's Citizens and taxpayers, and when it is found that American is not yet Great Again, then you will suffer at the polls again, unless something drastic happens and Democrats get a grip.Today's Republican Party is NOT the party of Lincoln.
As explained by that fake news site Wikipedia.
The Southern Strategy (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)
Most Confederate statues were erected in support of Jim Crowe laws in the 1920's. Another wave of them went up during the Civil Rights movement. They were made very cheaply and can hardly be considered works of art.
The reason these statues need to be removed is because they were erected in support of continued racism.
Most Confederate statues were erected in support of Jim Crowe laws in the 1920's. Another wave of them went up during the Civil Rights movement. They were made very cheaply and can hardly be considered works of art.
The reason these statues need to be removed is because they were erected in support of continued racism.
Of all the tens of thousands of things written about the incidents in Charlottesville, this, in my opinion, is the most important point of all.
Lois is correct: The statues were not erected as memorials, nor were they erected as history. They were erected as a deliberate and planned campaign to keep Blacks "in their place."
Almost all of them were erected during two time periods:
First, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, coinciding with a renewed effort among Southerners to keep reverse any rights Blacks might have gained, including the enactment of Jim Crow Laws, a renewed lynching campaign, and the re-birth of the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, the most egregious of these false monuments is Stone Mountain, which features 75-foot high carvings of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. The figures were carved in the precise place where the second version of the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915.
A second wave of statues went up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, perfectly coinciding with the growth of the Civil Rights movement, and serving as planned resistance to Federal Laws and Supreme Court Decisions defending the rights of Blacks. And, of course, with the arising of the third iteration of the Ku Klux Klan.
These facts demolish most of the arguments offered by those who support the continued existence of statues and monuments to Confederate leaders standing on public property. It's not expunging or changing history, since the statues are not history. It's not changing history, since the statues absence will not change the way the Civil War, including its causes and its consequences, is taught and remembered. And it's certainly not censorship.
I don't have a problem with a person erecting a statue -- or flying the Confederate flag -- on his private property, and I would condemn any effort, legislation, or Court decision attempting to abridge that right. But the statues on public property should be removed. If they truly are "history," then place them in a museum where they can be viewed and understood in context. Otherwise, remove them, now.
And start with the removal of the Stone Mountain carvings. The plain and most basic fact is this: The U.S. Civil War was fought, by the Confederates' own assertions, to protect the right to keep slavery legal and extend it elsewhere in the country. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were the civilian and military leaders of an armed insurrection against the government that resulted in the deaths of over 700,000 of their fellow citizens, fought -- again -- to protect the institution of slavery. We should remember that as history, but we should obliterate any instance were this is celebrated. Starting with Stone Mountain.
I find it telling that those that protest the removal of these monuments based on "history" seem to know very little about it, and even claim ignorance of the Southern Strategy and the realignment of the political parties.
Good to have you back MissB.
By pardoning Arpaio, Trump made it clear that institutional racism is not just OK with him. It is a goal.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — As demonstrators clashed near a downtown park here two weeks ago, a white nationalist protester in a bulletproof vest turned, pointed a pistol toward the crowd and fired a single shot at the ground, in the direction of a black man wielding an improvised torch.
To make his escape, a video recording shows, the armed protester strolled past a line of about a dozen state police troopers who were safely positioned about 10 feet away behind two metal barricades. None of them budged.
“We all heard it and ran — I know damn well they heard it,” said Rosia Parker, a community activist in Charlottesville. “They never moved.”
Police had a suspect in the shooting in custody on Saturday morning, according to an official familiar with the investigation, who requested anonymity to provide information not yet public. But residents are still demanding to know why officers did not act in real time as heavily armed people fought and a car sped toward a crowd, killing a woman. So stark was the police failure to intervene, many participants in the protest and counterprotests believe it was by design.
Now, as white-power organizations declare their intentions to rally in cities around the country, police departments are looking to Charlottesville for hints on how to keep the peace — and what mistakes to avoid. Charlottesville, too, is seeking answers. The city announced on Friday that it had hired a former United States attorney to evaluate the planning and response to three white supremacist events in the city this year. The final rally, a show of power by white supremacist groups, was ostensibly held to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general.
Officials have insisted that no “stand down” order was issued, and a state police spokeswoman said troopers did not hear the shot. But many people suspect the inaction was deliberate, because just a month earlier, the police were heavily criticized for responding harshly at a Ku Klux Klan rally where anti-Klan protesters were sprayed with tear gas and arrested.
On the day of the “Unite the Right” rally, Aug. 12, only eight arrests were made, even with 125 local officers, hundreds of National Guard troops, the state police and neighboring police agencies present. Those arrested included James A. Fields, the driver who has been charged with murder in the death of Heather D. Heyer.
Investigators are also close to making arrests in the case of DeAndre Harris, 20, a local teacher’s aide and African-American who was beaten with a metal pipe and slabs of wood in a parking garage just a few yards from Police Headquarters, the city manager, Maurice Jones, said.
The police chief and mayor declined requests to be interviewed.
Mr. Jones said the police had developed two “tactical mobile force contingency plans” that were to be used as “quick responders” to skirmishes and fights that were popping up throughout downtown. The officers were instructed to “respond to fights directly” and to make arrests in teams and squads, he said.
“We saw plenty of video of officers stepping in to de-escalate situations,” Mr. Jones said.
He stressed that the city had tried to prevent the rally, but that a federal judge had ordered the city to grant the permit. But even a member of the City Council asked the city manager and the police chief why there was an “apparent unwillingness of officers to directly intervene during overt assaults.”
The city did not use a number of security measures recommended by the state police, said Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, including a ban on weapons and sticks of all kinds. The state also proposed designating parking areas, busing protesters and cutting off traffic for at least 10 blocks. None of that happened, he said. Mr. Jones said city laws had prevented officials from enacting some of the restrictions that the state suggested.
Mr. Moran said there may have been a 15-minute gap when skirmishes took place and troopers did not respond, because it took some time for them to suit up in riot gear.
Even so, he declined to criticize the response.
“If you stop the clock at 1:30, there were 13 minor injuries, no property damage and no one killed by a firearm,” Mr. Moran said, citing the time just before Ms. Heyer’s death.
But organizers, participants and counterprotesters said they had felt abandoned.
A 25-year-old woman named Kendall, who asked that her last name not be used because she did not want to be targeted, said she had been chanting at the white-power protesters when one of them punched her, bloodying her nose.
“I moved quickly to the police and said: ‘A man attacked me! Please help me! I need your help. He’s right there!’” she said. “They didn’t move a muscle. Only a few of them had the courage to make eye contact with me.”
Ézé Amos, a photographer from Nigeria who lives in Charlottesville, had a similar experience, he said, when he moved in for a close-up of a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Adolf Hitler’s face. The man punched the camera, hitting Mr. Amos’s face, he said.
“This happened right in front of the cops,” Mr. Amos said. “I said, ‘Hey, this man just assaulted me!’ The officer said, ‘Well I didn’t see it.’ I told him, ‘Everybody just saw it!’”
The officer took down Mr. Amos’s name.
“I am a black man photographing this. I kept telling myself, ‘If it gets out of hand, the cops will jump in and save me,’” he said. “I saw a white woman get hit, and they did not do anything. That’s when I actually got really scared of the whole thing.”
It was clear the police were acting with specific instructions, he said.
“Somebody is not telling us what happened,” Mr. Amos said. “Those cops did not just decide to fold their arms and watch this happen.”
The organizers of the rally said the police had unilaterally changed details that they spent weeks negotiating, such as how they would safely enter and exit the park.
“They didn’t follow through on any part of their plan,” said one of the coordinators, who goes by the name Eli Mosley. “They threw the whole thing away without telling us.” The changes involved every aspect of logistics, he said, including where counterprotesters would be, which streets would be blocked and how V.I.P.s would enter.
Mr. Mosely, an event coordinator for Identity Evropa, a white separatist group, said he believed that the city strategy was an attempt to stifle the rise of what has been called the “alt-right.”
“Looking back, we think it was nefarious,” he said. “The local government is very left wing, and they didn’t want anyone protesting the statue coming down.
“I believe this was somewhat of a trap in some ways,” he added. “We went there peacefully and were attacked, because we were forced to get past that gauntlet of counterprotesters.”
City officials have repeatedly said it was the protesters who did not honor the advance arrangements, which made it difficult to keep the two sides apart.
Richard B. Spencer, one of the headliners who was scheduled to speak at the event, went so far as to blame the city for Ms. Heyer’s death.
“The City of Charlottesville could have prevented that death if they had done their job, and that is to police the streets,” he said.
The city will not release a copy of the action plan devised to manage the demonstration because it contains “tactical and operational plans that could be used again,” said Miriam Dickler, the city spokeswoman.
The city has hired Timothy J. Heaphy, the former United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia, to conduct an independent review of three white supremacist events, including the “Unite the Right” rally and the Klan rally. Officials urged residents to come forward with firsthand accounts of crimes that went ignored.
At least one account — the video of the man firing the gunshot with troopers nearby — was shot by someone at the rally and submitted to law enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I.
Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the state police, said in an email that the troopers had not heard the shot because it had been “muffled by the loud volume of the crowd yelling and chanting, drums and music.” Another video shows that the gunshot was clearly audible even from inside the park, where dozens more state police troopers were posted.
“Had any one of our troopers witnessed that incident,” Ms. Geller said, “they would have immediately acted just as they did for the other four arrests made during the weekend.”
S. Lee Merritt, an attorney for Mr. Harris, the man who was beaten in the parking garage, said he was surprised to hear the city manager say arrests would be made soon. “I define soon as two weeks ago,” Mr. Merritt said.
On Wednesday, Chris Cantwell, a white supremacist who was featured in a Vice documentary about the “Unite the Right” rally, turned himself in for three felony charges resulting from a pepper-spray attack. Witnesses said it had taken place in front of police officers.
As White Nationalist in Charlottesville Fired, Police ‘Never Moved’ (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/us/charlottesville-protest-police.html)QuoteCHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — As demonstrators clashed near a downtown park here two weeks ago, a white nationalist protester in a bulletproof vest turned, pointed a pistol toward the crowd and fired a single shot at the ground, in the direction of a black man wielding an improvised torch.
To make his escape, a video recording shows, the armed protester strolled past a line of about a dozen state police troopers who were safely positioned about 10 feet away behind two metal barricades. None of them budged.
“We all heard it and ran — I know damn well they heard it,” said Rosia Parker, a community activist in Charlottesville. “They never moved.”
Police had a suspect in the shooting in custody on Saturday morning, according to an official familiar with the investigation, who requested anonymity to provide information not yet public. But residents are still demanding to know why officers did not act in real time as heavily armed people fought and a car sped toward a crowd, killing a woman. So stark was the police failure to intervene, many participants in the protest and counterprotests believe it was by design.
Now, as white-power organizations declare their intentions to rally in cities around the country, police departments are looking to Charlottesville for hints on how to keep the peace — and what mistakes to avoid. Charlottesville, too, is seeking answers. The city announced on Friday that it had hired a former United States attorney to evaluate the planning and response to three white supremacist events in the city this year. The final rally, a show of power by white supremacist groups, was ostensibly held to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general.
Officials have insisted that no “stand down” order was issued, and a state police spokeswoman said troopers did not hear the shot. But many people suspect the inaction was deliberate, because just a month earlier, the police were heavily criticized for responding harshly at a Ku Klux Klan rally where anti-Klan protesters were sprayed with tear gas and arrested.
On the day of the “Unite the Right” rally, Aug. 12, only eight arrests were made, even with 125 local officers, hundreds of National Guard troops, the state police and neighboring police agencies present. Those arrested included James A. Fields, the driver who has been charged with murder in the death of Heather D. Heyer.
Investigators are also close to making arrests in the case of DeAndre Harris, 20, a local teacher’s aide and African-American who was beaten with a metal pipe and slabs of wood in a parking garage just a few yards from Police Headquarters, the city manager, Maurice Jones, said.
The police chief and mayor declined requests to be interviewed.
Mr. Jones said the police had developed two “tactical mobile force contingency plans” that were to be used as “quick responders” to skirmishes and fights that were popping up throughout downtown. The officers were instructed to “respond to fights directly” and to make arrests in teams and squads, he said.
“We saw plenty of video of officers stepping in to de-escalate situations,” Mr. Jones said.
He stressed that the city had tried to prevent the rally, but that a federal judge had ordered the city to grant the permit. But even a member of the City Council asked the city manager and the police chief why there was an “apparent unwillingness of officers to directly intervene during overt assaults.”
The city did not use a number of security measures recommended by the state police, said Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, including a ban on weapons and sticks of all kinds. The state also proposed designating parking areas, busing protesters and cutting off traffic for at least 10 blocks. None of that happened, he said. Mr. Jones said city laws had prevented officials from enacting some of the restrictions that the state suggested.
Mr. Moran said there may have been a 15-minute gap when skirmishes took place and troopers did not respond, because it took some time for them to suit up in riot gear.
Even so, he declined to criticize the response.
“If you stop the clock at 1:30, there were 13 minor injuries, no property damage and no one killed by a firearm,” Mr. Moran said, citing the time just before Ms. Heyer’s death.
But organizers, participants and counterprotesters said they had felt abandoned.
A 25-year-old woman named Kendall, who asked that her last name not be used because she did not want to be targeted, said she had been chanting at the white-power protesters when one of them punched her, bloodying her nose.
“I moved quickly to the police and said: ‘A man attacked me! Please help me! I need your help. He’s right there!’” she said. “They didn’t move a muscle. Only a few of them had the courage to make eye contact with me.”
Ézé Amos, a photographer from Nigeria who lives in Charlottesville, had a similar experience, he said, when he moved in for a close-up of a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Adolf Hitler’s face. The man punched the camera, hitting Mr. Amos’s face, he said.
“This happened right in front of the cops,” Mr. Amos said. “I said, ‘Hey, this man just assaulted me!’ The officer said, ‘Well I didn’t see it.’ I told him, ‘Everybody just saw it!’”
The officer took down Mr. Amos’s name.
“I am a black man photographing this. I kept telling myself, ‘If it gets out of hand, the cops will jump in and save me,’” he said. “I saw a white woman get hit, and they did not do anything. That’s when I actually got really scared of the whole thing.”
It was clear the police were acting with specific instructions, he said.
“Somebody is not telling us what happened,” Mr. Amos said. “Those cops did not just decide to fold their arms and watch this happen.”
The organizers of the rally said the police had unilaterally changed details that they spent weeks negotiating, such as how they would safely enter and exit the park.
“They didn’t follow through on any part of their plan,” said one of the coordinators, who goes by the name Eli Mosley. “They threw the whole thing away without telling us.” The changes involved every aspect of logistics, he said, including where counterprotesters would be, which streets would be blocked and how V.I.P.s would enter.
Mr. Mosely, an event coordinator for Identity Evropa, a white separatist group, said he believed that the city strategy was an attempt to stifle the rise of what has been called the “alt-right.”
“Looking back, we think it was nefarious,” he said. “The local government is very left wing, and they didn’t want anyone protesting the statue coming down.
“I believe this was somewhat of a trap in some ways,” he added. “We went there peacefully and were attacked, because we were forced to get past that gauntlet of counterprotesters.”
City officials have repeatedly said it was the protesters who did not honor the advance arrangements, which made it difficult to keep the two sides apart.
Richard B. Spencer, one of the headliners who was scheduled to speak at the event, went so far as to blame the city for Ms. Heyer’s death.
“The City of Charlottesville could have prevented that death if they had done their job, and that is to police the streets,” he said.
The city will not release a copy of the action plan devised to manage the demonstration because it contains “tactical and operational plans that could be used again,” said Miriam Dickler, the city spokeswoman.
The city has hired Timothy J. Heaphy, the former United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia, to conduct an independent review of three white supremacist events, including the “Unite the Right” rally and the Klan rally. Officials urged residents to come forward with firsthand accounts of crimes that went ignored.
At least one account — the video of the man firing the gunshot with troopers nearby — was shot by someone at the rally and submitted to law enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I.
Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the state police, said in an email that the troopers had not heard the shot because it had been “muffled by the loud volume of the crowd yelling and chanting, drums and music.” Another video shows that the gunshot was clearly audible even from inside the park, where dozens more state police troopers were posted.
“Had any one of our troopers witnessed that incident,” Ms. Geller said, “they would have immediately acted just as they did for the other four arrests made during the weekend.”
S. Lee Merritt, an attorney for Mr. Harris, the man who was beaten in the parking garage, said he was surprised to hear the city manager say arrests would be made soon. “I define soon as two weeks ago,” Mr. Merritt said.
On Wednesday, Chris Cantwell, a white supremacist who was featured in a Vice documentary about the “Unite the Right” rally, turned himself in for three felony charges resulting from a pepper-spray attack. Witnesses said it had taken place in front of police officers.
#Resist
There are disturbing reports that people impersonating Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents are knocking on doors in the Houston area telling residents to evacuate -- presumably so these imposters can rob the empty homes. Real HSI officials wear badges that are labeled "special agent," which members of the public can ask to see and verify. ICE officers with Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) also wear badges labeled with ERO Officer. They also carry credentials with their name and organization.
Members of the public who receive such visitors should ask to see these properly labeled badges, and their credentials.
In addition, these officers and special agents would be conducting hurricane relief operations with other local law enforcement agencies.
Also note that during Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is not conducting immigration enforcement operations in the affected area.
A Charlotte mayoral candidate wants people to know that she’s Republican, smart – and white.
“VOTE FOR ME!” Kimberley Paige Barnette posted on Facebook. “REPUBLICAN & SMART, WHITE, TRADITIONAL.”
Barnette, who turned 53 on Friday, is a former Mecklenburg County magistrate making her first run for office.
She could not be immediately reached.
The post drew angry responses on Facebook.
“You are NOT doing conservatives or Republicans any favors,” one man wrote.
In a WTVI debate last month, Barnette criticized last September’s Charlotte protesters. She called the protests “an expression of Democratic behavior.”
Asked how the city could help its lower-income residents, Barnette said, “I don’t think we should encourage more lower-income people to (come to) Charlotte.”
“We should attract higher-income people.”
Barnette is a distant long-shot in a GOP primary featuring city council member Kenny Smith and businessman Gary Dunn.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJDHs0YVoAAr9E9.jpg)
#Resist
source, link please. ty
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DK5lVmrWAAEGeO8.jpg)
#Resist
NFL players who seek out interviews and media to 'make a statement' place themselves directly in the position of disrespecting citizens and Fans of the team who demand the NFL stick to its published and agreed policy, regarding how a team presents itself during the pre-came ceremony, including standing, in a dignified behavior and manner, during the playing of the U.S. National Anthem.
Disrespect is the only rational explanation for not following the NFL rules for every team, as regarding attendance and behavior during this ceremony, if they are to be considered as a compliant NFL franchise, and player(s).
When hinging some extraneous protest to such a revered and important item as the National Anthem of the United States, while in the United States, such behavior, and further public comment taunting the paying fan base, will draw a suitable and pointed response, is expected, and is to be avoided by the NFL and it's players.(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DK5lVmrWAAEGeO8.jpg)
#Resist
NFL players who seek out interviews and media to 'make a statement' place themselves directly in the position of disrespecting citizens and Fans of the team who demand the NFL stick to its published and agreed policy, regarding how a team presents itself during the pre-came ceremony, including standing, in a dignified behavior and manner, during the playing of the U.S. National Anthem.
Disrespect is the only rational explanation for not following the NFL rules for every team, as regarding attendance and behavior during this ceremony, if they are to be considered as a compliant NFL franchise, and player(s).
When hinging some extraneous protest to such a revered and important item as the National Anthem of the United States, while in the United States, such behavior, and further public comment taunting the paying fan base, will draw a suitable and pointed response, is expected, and is to be avoided by the NFL and it's players.
NFL players who seek out interviews and media to 'make a statement' place themselves directly in the position of disrespecting citizens and Fans of the team who demand the NFL stick to its published and agreed policy, regarding how a team presents itself during the pre-came ceremony, including standing, in a dignified behavior and manner, during the playing of the U.S. National Anthem.
Disrespect is the only rational explanation for not following the NFL rules for every team, as regarding attendance and behavior during this ceremony, if they are to be considered as a compliant NFL franchise, and player(s).
When hinging some extraneous protest to such a revered and important item as the National Anthem of the United States, while in the United States, such behavior, and further public comment taunting the paying fan base, will draw a suitable and pointed response, is expected, and is to be avoided by the NFL and it's players.
Here, and in other posts in this topic, Joan attacks Black people.
In another thread of hers I just read, she attacks Hispanic people.
If you're Asian, watch out, as Joan has you in her sights!
These folks use the antics of a hasbeen player, who wore 'pig socks' as he suggested police are racist pigs, and directly spoke to his disrespect for the United States, it's flag and anthem, during the Obama Administration, btw, as they try to find something to bitch about, and try to tie this tired belligerant activity somehow to President Trump.
Colin Kaepernick should be picked up as a backup QB, if not by the Baltimore Ravens, then by any one of a bunch of NFL teams, and I predict he will be, as the Season begins in September.
Would not mind the Washington Redskins having him on the roster, as he has a good arm, is capable, and presumably healthy. His issue with being dropped as Starting QB was his inability to make the necessary "reads" in time to get the ball out, keep moving down the field, and not get sacked, broken plays.
These folks use the antics of a hasbeen player, who wore 'pig socks' as he suggested police are racist pigs, and directly spoke to his disrespect for the United States, it's flag and anthem, during the Obama Administration, btw, as they try to find something to bitch about, and try to tie this tired belligerant activity somehow to President Trump.
Colin Kaepernick should be picked up as a backup QB, if not by the Baltimore Ravens, then by any one of a bunch of NFL teams, and I predict he will be, as the Season begins in September.
Would not mind the Washington Redskins having him on the roster, as he has a good arm, is capable, and presumably healthy. His issue with being dropped as Starting QB was his inability to make the necessary "reads" in time to get the ball out, keep moving down the field, and not get sacked, broken plays.
Hmm...
#Resist
Read your own post. Again, we all know Opinions are like Athos!
I see no conflict between my statement today, and my statement at the time Barbara noted the ex-QB from the left coast, some months ago.
These folks use the antics of a hasbeen player, who wore 'pig socks' as he suggested police are racist pigs, and directly spoke to his disrespect for the United States, it's flag and anthem, during the Obama Administration, btw, as they try to find something to bitch about, and try to tie this tired belligerant activity somehow to President Trump.
Colin Kaepernick should be picked up as a backup QB, if not by the Baltimore Ravens, then by any one of a bunch of NFL teams, and I predict he will be, as the Season begins in September.
Would not mind the Washington Redskins having him on the roster, as he has a good arm, is capable, and presumably healthy. His issue with being dropped as Starting QB was his inability to make the necessary "reads" in time to get the ball out, keep moving down the field, and not get sacked, broken plays.
Hmm...
#Resist
umhmm... absent full context to include Barb's original posting, whatever.
I don't have the post sorting time to dedicate to such a response.
I'm curious as to your opinion about the few teams who did not come out for the anthem.
I was on my way to Nissan Stadium in Nashville on Sunday morning when I got a phone call informing me that my performance of the national anthem before the Tennessee Titans game would be televised nationally later that day. President Trump had already spent the day before attacking the NFL players who’ve been kneeling during the anthem to protest police brutality against African Americans, so of course news outlets and all of America would be watching.
I started to get nervous, because I knew what I had to do.
I am a recording artist living in Nashville. I come from a country music background, but I grew up in and around New Orleans, where all kinds of music and cultures mix. When I was 10, we moved to a tiny Louisiana town called Ponchatoula. I remember hearing the “n-word” for the first time at school. It shocked and saddened me. It still does. I saw racism all around me growing up: I remember getting a homecoming ballot in high school and seeing the names divided on the page. One section read “black,” the other “white.” I remember thinking it couldn’t be real. That was in 2004.
Racism is still a huge stain on the heart of this country, and it is still very much alive. I see it often when I am touring with members of my band, who are primarily black men. We recently played a venue where I was told that the promoter did not want to pay me because my “drummer was threatening.” This was at a country club in the Deep South. I was with my drummer, who is like a brother to me, the entire day, and I never saw any type of aggression from him. The only threat she saw was the color of his skin.
So on Sunday, even though I had been looking forward to singing the national anthem at this game for about six months, I knew I had to find a way to stand in solidarity with my brothers, sisters, fans and friends who live with the effects of such toxic hatred all the time and are experiencing an even higher level of anxiety and fear because of the polarizing rhetoric Trump spews out.
I walked out to the middle of the field, sang the song and then peacefully locked arms with my boyfriend and took a knee. I took a knee for those who are mistreated, beaten down and disregarded in this country. I took a knee because every movement needs allies, and I knew that someone who looks like me and comes from my background needed to do it. When you’re white, it’s easy to disregard racism and not see your own privilege. Instead, I wanted to use my privilege — and my platform — to shed a light on systemic racism and social injustice.
A lot of people are calling my peaceful protest “un-American,” but that could not be farther from the truth. I love this country and the men and women who serve and die to protect our freedoms. Part of that freedom is being able to speak out when things are not right. I chose to stand during the anthem because I didn’t want my message to get misconstrued. I was not protesting the military or police or flag. I was protesting in solidarity with those whom the flag also represents: my fellow humans of color.
My decision may hurt my career, but it was the only choice for me. This cause is more important than my record sales.
I walked off the field to mixed reactions. Some people got my attention and shouted “thank you.” A lot of them booed. The booing didn’t bother me so much. What bothers me more is the silence: the silence of millions of white people every day, when they watch a video of a black woman’s son who is murdered simply for reaching for his driver’s license. We have to do better. We have to speak, and we have to be allies.
In the past few days, I have received death threats and had cancer wished upon me by the same people who claim to be great patriots. I’ve had people say that they should have executed me on the field. People are threatening my life because the idea that someone who looks like me would act against racism upsets them so much.
I can’t think of anything more un-American than threatening someone for an act of free speech. I am not afraid of these people, because I know that I am living on my mother’s prayers and God will protect me. It just hurts my heart to stand in the face of real unadulterated hate. But it’s the same hate that so many other people in this country face simply because of the color of their skin.
The only way we can move forward as a nation is if we bring it all back to love. We have to live it and demonstrate it every day in our own lives — and we have to point out injustices every time we see them. I am praying for our country. I know that there has to be more love out there, and I pray that we find it and fast.
Of course I 'attack' no one, just point out that the people who are breaking the rules, disrespecting the paying audience and team fans, by disrespecting our Nation's customs and anthem are wrong. Whether they are one color or another color is not material to anything at all.
These folks use the antics of a has been player, who wore 'pig socks' as he suggested police are racist pigs, and directly spoke to his disrespect for the United States, it's flag and anthem, during the Obama Administration, btw, as they try to find something to bitch about, and try to tie this tired belligerant activity somehow to President Trump.
The President, quoted as to exactly what he said, used a role play style story to relay what he may wish a responsible NFL owner to say, when confronted by players who break NFL rules and disrespect their sponsors, fans and audience, made clear his position. It is the majority opinion/position of the United States and is reflected in lack of attendance at NFL games following such rabid action.
Again, that those taking offense happen to be of one or another ethnicity or melanin level in their skin makes no difference, the offense is disrespect, the issue is National, and the lack of ratings year over year over Democrat politicization of yet another "social justice issue", no matter how badly misplaced, delivers a similar result.
I got a laugh out of Joan's assertion that NFL players taking the knee were breaking the rules. What rules? Who wrote them? Are these rules the same as laws?
Here's what the game operations manual says regarding the national anthem, according to an NFL spokesperson:
The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem.
During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking. The home team should ensure that the American flag is in good condition. It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country. Failure to be on the field by the start of the National Anthem may result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violations of the above, including first offenses.
It's important to note the use of the word "may" here. The NFL is not considering punishing fines on players or teams who choose to kneel or stay in the locker room during the national anthem, the spokesperson says.
I got a laugh out of Joan's assertion that NFL players taking the knee were breaking the rules. What rules? Who wrote them? Are these rules the same as laws?
Does the NFL Require Players to Stand for the National Anthem? (http://time.com/4955704/nfl-league-rulebook-a62-63-national-anthem-rule/)QuoteHere's what the game operations manual says regarding the national anthem, according to an NFL spokesperson:
The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem.
During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking. The home team should ensure that the American flag is in good condition. It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country. Failure to be on the field by the start of the National Anthem may result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violations of the above, including first offenses.
It's important to note the use of the word "may" here. The NFL is not considering punishing fines on players or teams who choose to kneel or stay in the locker room during the national anthem, the spokesperson says.
#Resist
Though a slight hijack, here's something I've been wondering since last Fall, and have yet to find a satisfying answer:
How good an NFL quarterback is Colin Kaepernick? Is he of a caliber that he should be starting for an NFL team right now, or at least serving as a back-up? I've tried googling to find more information about this specific topic, but the answers vary widely, from he's better than half the current starting quarterbacks, to he's a back-up every NFL team should want on its roster, to he's a washed-up has-been.
The answer to this question, to my mind, cuts right to the heart of this matter, i.e. is he being deliberately blackballed by NFL owners for his actions, or is he simply not good enough to play on an NFL team, and his lack of a current contract is simply a reflection of the latter.
Any insight here from people with knowledge of the NFL would be greatly appreciated!
South Carolina's decision to lower the Confederate flag on their statehouse has caused a wide range of reactions in the rock community. While many acts are cheering the decision of the South Carolina legislature, some acts are continuing to sell Confederate flag merchandise and rockers like Kid Rock remain defiant. "Isn't Kid Rock from the Midwest?" Tom Petty asks with a chuckle. "I think they were on the other side of the Civil War."
Petty, who featured the Confederate flag prominently onstage during his Southern Accents tour in 1985, spoke to Rolling Stone hours after the flag was taken down to express remorse for his actions.
The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida. I always knew it had to do with the Civil War, but the South had adopted it as its logo. I was pretty ignorant of what it actually meant. It was on a flagpole in front of the courthouse and I often saw it in Western movies. I just honestly didn't give it much thought, though I should have.
In 1985, I released an album called Southern Accents. It began as a concept record about the South, but the concept part slipped away probably 70 percent or so into the album. I just let it go, but the Confederate flag became part of the marketing for the tour. I wish I had given it more thought. It was a downright stupid thing to do.
It happened because I had one song on the album called "Rebels." It's spoken from the point of view of the character, who talks about the traditions that have been handed down from family to family for so long that he almost feels guilty about the war. He still blames the North for the discomfort of his life, so my thought was the best way to illustrate this character was to use the Confederate flag.
I used it onstage during that song, and I regretted it pretty quickly. When we toured two years later, I noticed people in the audience wearing Confederate flag bandanas and things like that. One night, someone threw one onstage. I stopped everything and gave a speech about it. I said, "Look, this was to illustrate a character. This is not who we are. Having gone through this, I would prefer it if no one would ever bring a Confederate flag to our shows again because this isn't who we are."
It got a mixed reaction. There were some boos and some cheers. But honestly, it's a little amazing to me because I never saw one again after that speech in that one town. Fortunately, that went away, but it left me feeling stupid. That's the word I can use. I felt stupid. If I had just been a little more observant about things going on around me, it wouldn't have happened. We did do a live record [Pack Up The Plantation: Live!] and there was a picture inside of us playing in front of one. I went back and had it removed from the record. It took a little time to get done, but it did get done. I still feel bad about it. I've just always regretted it. I would never do anything to hurt someone.
Lowering the flag from the statehouse grounds was the right decision. That flag shouldn't have any part in our government. It shouldn't represent us in any way. The war is over. You know, it's a bit ironic: It's the only time that I know of where we defeated a country in a war and then flew their flag. But Americans were on both sides of the issues. I'm sure some people still carry it to their graves.
That Southern pride gets transferred from generation to generation. I'm sure that a lot of people that applaud it don't mean it in a racial way. But again, I have to give them, as I do myself, a "stupid" mark. If you think a bit longer, there's bad connotations to this. They might have it at the football game or whatever, but they also have it at Klan rallies. If that's part of it in any way, it doesn't belong, in any way, representing the United States of America.
To this day, I have good feelings for the South in many ways. There's some wonderful people down there. There are people still affected by what their relatives taught them. It isn't necessarily racism. They just don't like Yankees. They don't like the North. But when they wave that flag, they aren't stopping to think how it looks to a black person. I blame myself for not doing that. I should have gone around the fence and taken a good look at it. But honestly, it all stemmed from my trying to illustrate a character. I then just let it get out of control as a marketing device for the record. It was dumb and it shouldn't have happened.
Again, people just need to think about how it looks to a black person. It's just awful. It's like how a swastika looks to a Jewish person. It just shouldn't be on flagpoles.
Beyond the flag issue, we're living in a time that I never thought we'd see. The way we're losing black men and citizens in general is horrific. What's going on in society is unforgivable. As a country, we should be more concerned with why the police are getting away with targeting black men and killing them for no reason. That's a bigger issue than the flag. Years from now, people will look back on today and say, "You mean we privatized the prisons so there's no profit unless the prison is full?" You'd think someone in kindergarten could figure out how stupid that is. We're creating so many of our own problems.
Antifa and BlackLivesMatter, and other extreme left groups are a far bigger issue and worry.
:-*
Eric Reid: Vice President’s visit was a P.R. Stunt (http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2017/10/08/eric-reid-vice-presidents-visit-was-a-p-r-stunt/)
#Resist
Jemele Hill Suspended by ESPN After Response to Jerry Jones (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/sports/football/jemele-hill-suspended-espn.html)
#Resist
Jemele Hill Suspended by ESPN After Response to Jerry Jones (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/sports/football/jemele-hill-suspended-espn.html)
#Resist
Athos, what's your personal opinion about this?
I'm really torn: I agree with what she said, both a couple of weeks ago, and today. But if she violated company policy, she violated company policy -- for the second time -- and she should be liable for the consequences.
The big factor, I assume, is that ESPN's been undergoing financial difficulties, and suffering from declining ratings. Given that, the last thing they want to do is have a well-known employee turning off viewers -- and advertisers.
So, a nonresponsive reply... typical...
So, a nonresponsive reply... typical...
So, a nonresponsive reply... typical...
He responded to Barb's post, not the imaginary one in your head.
I asked for his opinion, and he provided it. The fact that he is able to write more briefly and concisely than I is a virtue, and not a defect.
President Trump will become the first sitting president to address the Voters Value Summit on Friday in Washington. The comments wil come following an announcement that the Trump administration will authorize overt bigotry and discrimination by elected officials in the name of "religious freedom."
Critics have called the group anti-LGBT, including the Human Research Council. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated it as a hate group due to its statements and "false claims about the LGBT community."
Well he has nothing positive to say about individual liberties, he has trashed the First Amendment. And he is ignorant about national defense, he’s trying to start a war.
look to The Weimar Republic, 1933. That is our future under Trump.
Hopefully the electorate will appreciate the efforts and difficulty experienced within to get the items addressed that are necessary. It can be frustrating, and is very necessary to return our Nation and it's future to its proper status.
School district pulls 'To Kill A Mockingbird' from reading list; 'makes people uncomfortable' (http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/10/mississippi_school_district_pu.html)
#Resist
Sometimes good stuff happens too...
German Soccer Team Kneels During Game In Solidarity With NFL Players
“For a tolerant Berlin and an open-minded world, now and forevermore!”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/german-soccer-team-kneeling-protest_us_59e2a457e4b04d1d51822c63
Sometimes good stuff happens too...
German Soccer Team Kneels During Game In Solidarity With NFL Players
“For a tolerant Berlin and an open-minded world, now and forevermore!”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/german-soccer-team-kneeling-protest_us_59e2a457e4b04d1d51822c63
Thanks for posting this.
I love the line, "We are living in the 21st century, not the 18th century, but there are some people who haven’t developed their ideologies accordingly."
As I've often said, it sometimes takes a non-American to most accurately point out the faults and failings of Americans.
It's particularly poignant coming from the Germans who, having already gone the Fascist and nationalistic route once themselves, have absolutely no interest in heading down that road again.
Sometimes good stuff happens too...
German Soccer Team Kneels During Game In Solidarity With NFL Players
“For a tolerant Berlin and an open-minded world, now and forevermore!”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/german-soccer-team-kneeling-protest_us_59e2a457e4b04d1d51822c63
Thanks for posting this.
I love the line, "We are living in the 21st century, not the 18th century, but there are some people who haven’t developed their ideologies accordingly."
As I've often said, it sometimes takes a non-American to most accurately point out the faults and failings of Americans.
It's particularly poignant coming from the Germans who, having already gone the Fascist and nationalistic route once themselves, have absolutely no interest in heading down that road again.
I’ve been amazed and disappointed by so much of what this president had said, and his approach to running this country, which seems to be one of just a never ending divisiveness. But his comments today about those who have lost loved ones in times of war and his lies that previous presidents Obama and Bush never contacted their families are so beyond the pale, I almost don’t have the words.
…
This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others. This has of course been a common practice of his, but to do it in this manner — and to lie about how previous presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers — is as low as it gets. We have a pathological liar in the White House, unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically to hold this office, and the whole world knows it, especially those around him every day. The people who work with this president should be ashamed, because they know better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it. This is their shame most of all.
Standing during the National Anthem is the expected form of respect.
The issue Colin Kappernick and other players wish to address with their public display may well be within what their employer expects of players. Such display of not standing during the National Anthem, if one is physically able, is not what NFL Fans expect of the teams, and league, and players.
Fans will display their displeasure with their dollars, and game attendance it seems, from the look of the empty seats in many NFL stadiums in past weeks.
The 2018 NFL Season will tall the tale, as most teams sell out their available seats for every game, to Season Ticket Holders and to advanced sale to fans or ticket brokers. The 2017 empty seats are less burdensome financially to Teams then are the lost sales at the stadiums, and the lost tax revenue on such sales to the various towns whose citizens support the NFL stadium in their midst.
If season ticket sales go wanting for 2018, the NFL will have only itself to blame for how they handled this issue, for which there is a clear rule, and for which there is clear precedent, with a player fined a game check, threatened future game checks, who then decided to comply.
The fiction that some ex-Army guy counseled Colin Kappernick to kneel as a sign of respect for the Military is just that. Believe that, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn, NYC to sell you, a really great deal.
Did his ex-Army friend advise him to support Fidel Castro, and other dictators and urge him to wear Police Are Pigs socks as well?
Seems to me a valid cause is receiving lots of publicity, and getting little help from NFL viewers and fans, due to the venue in which this protest occurs. The National Anthem has nothing to do with such a protest.
Standing during the National Anthem is the expected form of respect.
The fiction that some ex-Army guy counseled Colin Kappernick to kneel as a sign of respect for the Military is just that. Believe that, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn, NYC to sell you, a really great deal.
In September 2017, as many criticized the “take a knee” protests by National Football League players as anti-military, readers wrote in to ask if a veteran had played a role in Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem in protest of police killings of African Americans.
Army Special Forces veteran Nate Boyer has said that his conversations with Kaepernick influenced the former NFL player to kneel, rather than sit, during the anthem.
Kaepernick began his protest by sitting on the bench during the anthem prior to a preseason game on 14 August 2016 when he was playing for the San Francisco 49ers. He was not in uniform at the time. The protest began garnering coverage when journalist Jennifer Lee Chan captured him sitting (this time in uniform) in a photograph prior to the team’s third preseason game on 26 August 2016.
Two days later, Kaepernick spoke to reporters about the protest. The encounter included this exchange:
Reporter: So many people see the flag as a symbol of the military. How do you view it and what do you say to those people?
Kaepernick: I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone. That’s not happening. People are dying in vain because this country isn’t holding their end of the bargain up, as far as giving freedom and justice, liberty to everybody. That’s something that’s not happening. I’ve seen videos, I’ve seen circumstances where men and women that have been in the military have come back and been treated unjustly by the country they have fought for, and have been murdered by the country they fought for, on our land. That’s not right.
When asked whether his protest could be construed as “a blanket indictment of law enforcement in general,” Kaepernick said:
There is police brutality. People of color have been targeted by police. So that’s a large part of it and they’re government officials. They are put in place by the government. So that’s something that this country has to change. There’s things we can do to hold them more accountable. Make those standards higher. You have people that practice law and are lawyers and go to school for eight years, but you can become a cop in six months and don’t have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist. That’s insane. Someone that’s holding a curling iron has more education and more training than people that have a gun and are going out on the street to protect us.
On 30 August 2016, the Army Times published an open letter to Kaepernick from former Seattle Seahawks player Nate Boyer, who served as a Green Beret in U.S. military actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq. In the piece, Boyer reflected on how he felt standing on the field as the anthem played during his only appearance for the Seahawks:
I thought about how far I’d come and the men I’d fought alongside who didn’t make it back. I thought about those overseas who were risking their lives at that very moment. I selfishly thought about what I had sacrificed to get to where I was, and while I knew I had little to no chance of making the Seahawks’ roster as a 34-year-old rookie, I was trying.
That moment meant so much more to me than even playing in the game did, and to be honest, if I had noticed my teammate sitting on the bench, it would have really hurt me.
I’m not judging you for standing up for what you believe in. It’s your inalienable right. What you are doing takes a lot of courage, and I’d be lying if I said I knew what it was like to walk around in your shoes. I’ve never had to deal with prejudice because of the color of my skin, and for me to say I can relate to what you’ve gone through is as ignorant as someone who’s never been in a combat zone telling me they understand what it’s like to go to war.
Boyer and Kaepernick met after the open letter was published, and before San Francisco’s final preseason game on 2 September 2016 in San Diego — the first time the quarterback knelt in front of the bench instead of sitting during the anthem. Boyer posted a photograph of himself with Kaepernick following the meeting, and later said:
We sorta came to a middle ground where he would take a knee alongside his teammate. Soldiers take a knee in front of a fallen brother’s grave, you know, to show respect. When we’re on a patrol, you know, and we go into a security halt, we take a knee, and we pull security.
Kaepernick’s then-teammate Eric Reid joined him in kneeling for the protest prior to that game. He recalled the experience in an op-ed published by The New York Times on 25 September 2017:
After hours of careful consideration, and even a visit from Nate Boyer, a retired Green Beret and former NFL player, we came to the conclusion that we should kneel, rather than sit, the next day during the anthem as a peaceful protest. We chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture. I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy.
Boyer also expanded on his discussion with both Reid and Kaepernick during a CNN town hall broadcast on 27 September 2017:
[Kaepernick] reached out and we were able to sit down together for a couple of hours before the last preseason game last year. It was really cool to hear him just listen, too, and be very open-minded, too, and [say] “Look, I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to hurt your brothers and sisters.” I showed him text messages of friends of mine and some of them were saying I was a disgrace to the Green Berets ’cause I was even meeting with him. And some of them were like, “I’m with you man but it really hurts me to see that.”
So when I talked to them, it was mutual. Me, him, and Eric Reid [said] “I think maybe taking a knee would be a little more respectful. It’s still a demonstration. You’re still saying something but, people take a knee to pray. So for me it was a common ground, at least, to start from.
Although Kaepernick is not currently signed to a team, various NFL players and team owners adopted the kneeling protest prior to games on 24 September 2017 after President Donald Trump told supporters during a rally that owners should fire any player who engaged in the demonstration, saying, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired. He’s fired.”
Actually, Katiebee, the First Amendment dictates that the government shall not interfere with a citizen's rights, and in this case, does not apply, as the government has nothing to do with what the NFL and it's employees may do.
This is between the NFL, it's employees, it's rules, and it's fans/sponsors. The President, as a fan, has an opinion and voiced it, as have many citizens who care about the issue, and it is his right to express his opinion, as we all agree.
Cheerleaders apparently thought screaming ‘f–k n–gers’ was the height of wit (http://nypost.com/2017/10/17/video-of-cheerleaders-chanting-n-word-prompts-school-probe/)
#Resist
Standing during the National Anthem is the expected form of respect.
The issue Colin Kappernick and other players wish to address with their public display may well be within what their employer expects of players. Such display of not standing during the National Anthem, if one is physically able, is not what NFL Fans expect of the teams, and league, and players.
Fans will display their displeasure with their dollars, and game attendance it seems, from the look of the empty seats in many NFL stadiums in past weeks.
The 2018 NFL Season will tall the tale, as most teams sell out their available seats for every game, to Season Ticket Holders and to advanced sale to fans or ticket brokers. The 2017 empty seats are less burdensome financially to Teams then are the lost sales at the stadiums, and the lost tax revenue on such sales to the various towns whose citizens support the NFL stadium in their midst.
If season ticket sales go wanting for 2018, the NFL will have only itself to blame for how they handled this issue, for which there is a clear rule, and for which there is clear precedent, with a player fined a game check, threatened future game checks, who then decided to comply.
The fiction that some ex-Army guy counseled Colin Kappernick to kneel as a sign of respect for the Military is just that. Believe that, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn, NYC to sell you, a really great deal.
Did his ex-Army friend advise him to support Fidel Castro, and other dictators and urge him to wear Police Are Pigs socks as well?
Seems to me a valid cause is receiving lots of publicity, and getting little help from NFL viewers and fans, due to the venue in which this protest occurs. The National Anthem has nothing to do with such a protest.
Unless and until you start backing up your endless assertions with evidence and sources, you're just a pair of lips flapping in the wind.
-----
Post edited to add the following:
Joan: "Such display of not standing during the National Anthem, if one is physically able, is not what NFL Fans expect of the teams, and league, and players."
You don't speak for the players, and you don't know their minds. Provide evidence of your claim, or retract it.
I agree, that there are things for which "rights" may exist, that are wrong.
When Obama interfered with his opinion, without gathering facts, then stayed with that opinion, such as the 'Skip Gates' incident, and the Ferguson tradgedy in which our President took positions opposite of the lawful action of Police, I was upset, damn right I was upset.
That made no difference to how some felt here, nor was it expected to make a difference. The fact is he was wrong, which was later shown, as his own DOJ investigated ad nauseum, in those and in many other cases.
Does not mean President Trump is a racist. He is not a racist, never has been and I don't expect he will be. Calling him racist is wrong. Ignoring the calling of racist when it is clearly wrong, the slandering of our President that way, is also wrong.
Time will tell how the NFL actions, and inactions, are accepted by football fans who pay to view, pay to attend games, pay a lot, only to face leftists prior to each game, essentially spitting on America. Feeling it in their wallet may be the only solution, to get this tax subsidized group to do the right thing.
" That made no difference to how some felt here, nor was it expected to make a difference."
And, more to the point, you don't speak for "NFL fans." You're right: There are some fans who object to the players' protests, most of whom object in general to Black Americans struggling for equal rights.
Then again, your post appears in a thread that demonstrates that "Racism Is Alive and Well, Thanks to Trump and His Supporters," so those fans objections -- and yours -- are, sadly, to be expected.
P.S. Props to Northwest for his wonderful line, "Unless and until you start backing up your endless assertions with evidence and sources, you're just a pair of lips flapping in the wind."
I agree, that there are things for which "rights" may exist, that are wrong.
When Obama interfered with his opinion, without gathering facts, then stayed with that opinion, such as the 'Skip Gates' incident, and the Ferguson tradgedy in which our President took positions opposite of the lawful action of Police, I was upset, damn right I was upset.
That made no difference to how some felt here, nor was it expected to make a difference. The fact is he was wrong, which was later shown, as his own DOJ investigated ad nauseum, in those and in many other cases.
Does not mean President Trump is a racist. He is not a racist, never has been and I don't expect he will be. Calling him racist is wrong. Ignoring the calling of racist when it is clearly wrong, the slandering of our President that way, is also wrong.
Time will tell how the NFL actions, and inactions, are accepted by football fans who pay to view, pay to attend games, pay a lot, only to face leftists prior to each game, essentially spitting on America. Feeling it in their wallet may be the only solution, to get this tax subsidized group to do the right thing.
Does not mean President Trump is a racist. He is not a racist, never has been and I don't expect he will be. Calling him racist is wrong. Ignoring the calling of racist when it is clearly wrong,
the slandering of our President that way, is also wrong.
Which, obviously, is NOT a contradiction of your point, MissBarbara. Simply me putting my cards on the table.
RACIST is a strong claim, a slanderous claim, usually not warranted.
The main reason I've never said Trump is a racist is because the word "racist" has been rendered completely meaningless.
RACIST is a strong claim, a slanderous claim, usually not warranted.
Not everything with a racial component is racist. Crying 'wolf' as is so often done with this claim, leaves people, your opponents in this case, and fair minded people overall, less willing to believe your next claim.
Speaking at a George W. Bush Institute event in New York, Bush didn't use Trump's name, but his target became clearer as the speech progressed. Here's a sampling:
“Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.”
“We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism.”
“We’ve seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. . . . Argument turns too easily into animosity.”
“It means that bigotry and white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed, and it means the very identity of our nation depends on passing along civic ideals.”
“Bullying and prejudice in our public life … provides permission for cruelty and bigotry.”
“The only way to pass along civic values is to live up to them.”
“The only way to pass along civic values is to live up to them.”
Which, obviously, is NOT a contradiction of your point, MissBarbara. Simply me putting my cards on the table.
I understand your point, and it's at least as valid as mine.
The main reason I've never said Trump is a racist is because the word "racist" has been rendered completely meaningless.
One point that seems inescapable to me is the fact that Trump's campaign slogan was "Make America Great Again." And one of his first acts as president was to ban people from a list of predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. Thus, banning Muslims is the way to "Make America Great Again."
I'm not saying Trump is racist, but...
Trump could have been smarter
White anger is the dark matter of the La David Johnson story. Ostensibly, that rage doesn’t appear to be why President Trump has spent a week disrespecting grieving black women, specifically Johnson’s widow, Myeshia Johnson, and Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.), the congresswoman whom she considers to be like family. But while we can’t see it in the daily news coverage, we see its effects: White rage’s gravity is warping not only what should be a solemn, yet perfunctory, duty for a president but also pulling whiteness back to the center of a story that should be about only a young black widow and her two children, with a third on the way.
We’ve been talking too much about white people and their anger since Trump started running for president, really. The white resentment that unmasked itself during the Obama era, sparked by the tea party and Trump’s birther crusade, had been pretty obvious even before the predominantly white media devoted legions of stories to it over the past couple of years in a fit of “Hillbilly Elegy” curiosity. It seemed apparent to people of color that this was the mysterious malady that caused people to support Trump; the press, in the manner of Christopher Columbus, would eventually discover it, too. Much less energy was devoted to, say, examining black anger about racial injustice and other issues. That’s partly why the president was able to get so many (mostly white) Americans to believe the fiction that kneeling athletes were Betsy Ross blasphemers. Those attitudes give Trump license to make targets of outspoken sports commentators and various members of Congress — especially if they’re women of color, his favorite opponents. The act of not believing black folks or performing confusion about our anger has social currency as well, since it makes it look as though we are all crying wolf. Even when we’re talking about a pregnant military widow, perhaps the most sympathetic character in the entire American story.
I don’t seek to invalidate the animus of Trump voters, much as it is often directed unfairly at people who look like me. What I want is to decenter white cultural rage. There are additional, and more justified, reasons to be angry in America — such as the president calling you a liar right after you’ve buried your soldier husband, killed in action for reasons yet to be determined.
Sgt. La David Johnson was one of four Army soldiers who died on Oct. 4 in Niger, reportedly the victims of an Islamic State ambush. I qualify that a bit only because the Pentagon doesn’t seem to know why these men died — especially Johnson, who was separated from the rest and not found for 48 hours after the initial attack. Myeshia Johnson was not allowed to see any part of her husband’s body, and Saturday’s funeral was closed-casket. There are very serious questions for the Trump administration to answer here. That’s even before we consider how badly Trump later treated her during his condolence call, apparently not remembering La David Johnson’s name and telling her callously that “he knew what he signed up for.”
On Monday morning, Myeshia Johnson went on the record. Recounting what the president said, the widow told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that “it made me cry cause I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said he couldn’t remember my husband’s name.” She also confirmed the damning account that both Wilson and La David Johnson’s custodial mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, had given of the phone conversation she had with the president. “Whatever Ms. Wilson said was not fabricated,” she said during an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “What she said was 100 percent correct. It was Master Sgt. Neil, me, my aunt, my uncle and the driver and Ms. Wilson in the car, the phone was on speakerphone. Why would we fabricate something like that?”
Trump, as if by instinct, retorted with a tweet indicating that she had lied: “I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!” It isn’t as if we couldn’t see this coming, what with candidate Trump’s vilification of another Gold Star family of color last summer, something that may have actually gained him fans.
It is also the latest chapter in America’s long history of mistreating African American military veterans, alive or dead. As Peter C. Baker noted in November in the New Yorker, the Equal Justice Institute in Alabama released a report about lynching shortly after the election that indicated that “no one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than black veterans” of America’s wars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Baker wrote that those veterans, returning home from fighting overseas, understandably felt more of an entitlement to equal treatment under the law, and the lynchings were intended to disabuse them of that notion.
Lynching was the most violent form of racial denigration in that era. But racial denigration, that act by which bigots strip any respectability or humanity away from black folks to reinforce their false racial hierarchy, has never gone away. And Trump has such a gift for it that he used it to win the White House. He was elected by a swell of bigotry, and so he serves his masters with aplomb. It may be the only consistent thing he does.
While he didn’t break out a noose for the Johnsons or Wilson, he did sic his dogs on them through his continued insistence that they are lying. Already, an Illinois man is being investigated for a Facebook post threatening to lynch Wilson. Knowing that his base either is racist or willing to vote in a man who would metastasize white supremacy, Trump felt secure putting a black Gold Star family in the crosshairs to escape accountability.
Asked toward the end of the interview Monday whether she had anything to say to the president, Myeshia Johnson said, “No,” then paused a bit before adding, “I don’t have nothing to say to him.” You should watch it in its entirety, if for no other reason than to see this moment. Her anger and hurt was palpable throughout the interview, but perhaps none more so than right then. You’ll see a woman who clearly can’t believe that she has to deal with this nonsense.
These are surely the worst days of her life. But rather than talking purely about her husband and any righteous rage she may have over the circumstances of his death, she has to talk about Trump and what he is doing to her. She may even be screaming inside over the fact that this maddening episode will always be a part of La David Johnson’s story. The president could’ve prevented that by trying to act like a human being for the five minutes it took to make that call, but alas.
While we don’t yet understand why La David Johnson was left behind to die, we understand why his family has been treated like trash. A fallen soldier’s family is being forced to make space for the president’s petty grievances in their time of bereavement, all because, even at an unconscious level, America accepts white anger. Even when viewed as wrong, it is at least tolerated more than the fury of black folks. This has been a long con by conservatives, dating back to before the birth of the Southern Strategy after Jim Crow, and it is paying out for them now.
The president knows that white resentment is a perfect fit for his pugnacious politics, so he can continue reflexively picking fights that wiser men ignore. He has cover from his acolytic base, who see the disrespect and hatred they have nurtured for so long exploding into presidential action. What appear to be confounding, unforced errors borne of his inherent cruelty are also chunks of red meat for his base. The satisfaction that Trump derives from feeding them clearly matters more to him than the outrage of a black war widow. If that’s disturbing, consider that it makes some political sense for him to behave like this. Whose fault is that?
The Military Has a Serious White Nationalist Problem (https://splinternews.com/the-military-has-a-serious-white-nationalist-problem-1819800897)This is a great concern. One fellow I know served in the Marines. He now preaches of the coming race war.
#Resist
This brings me a bit of hope:
Murfreesboro rally canceled as counterprotesters outnumber White Lives Matter activists
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/10/28/white-lives-matter-rally-murfreesboro-tn-live-updates-shelbyville-tn-stream-video/804380001/
Left unsaid, especially in the headlines, is VIOLENT counterprotesters, as the reason so many police are required, and whatever rally aspect that was paid for with permits and detailed arrangements, is left to go wanting, and somehow this is a good thing.
Not saying every 'rally' is a 'good thing' but using force with consent of the general public to disrupt is not a good thing... was not when Bull Connors did it with firehoses, and is not right today either. Thuggish behavior by anyone is not a good thing, not something to aspire to, nor to reward in any manner.This brings me a bit of hope:
Murfreesboro rally canceled as counterprotesters outnumber White Lives Matter activists
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/10/28/white-lives-matter-rally-murfreesboro-tn-live-updates-shelbyville-tn-stream-video/804380001/
This is my surprised face that joan1984 supports Nazis.
#Resist
Congresswoman Wilson’s Office Overwhelmed By Lynching Threats After Trump’s Repeated Attacks (https://theguardiansofdemocracy.com/congresswoman-wilsons-office-overwhelmed-lynching-threats-trumps-repeated-attacks/)
(https://static-eu-central-1.theguardiansofdemocracy.com/uploads/2017/10/lynching.jpg)
Almost Every Houston Texan Takes A Knee During Anthem Following Owner's "Inmates" Remark (https://deadspin.com/almost-every-houston-texan-takes-a-knee-following-owner-1819955226)
#Resist
Left unsaid, especially in the headlines, is VIOLENT counterprotesters, as the reason so many police are required, and whatever rally aspect that was paid for with permits and detailed arrangements, is left to go wanting, and somehow this is a good thing.
ALT-RIGHT WHITE SUPREMACISTS CLAIM PAPA JOHN'S AS OFFICIAL PIZZA (http://www.newsweek.com/papa-john-alt-right-nazis-white-supremacists-nfl-pizza-701648)
#Resist
Mocking someone for having native American ancestry sounds like white supremacy to me. It is most shameful that a President of the United States would engage in such offensive and petty name calling.
Mocking a person for claiming falsely Native American ancestry.
Trading on that lie to gain hiring advantage and status advantage among Educational peers is low life behavior, if not illegal, unfair to peers.
Being called on it is chump change compared to the shunning that should have happened, but is ignored by Democrats/Media.
Again, I am being redundant.
ALT-RIGHT WHITE SUPREMACISTS CLAIM PAPA JOHN'S AS OFFICIAL PIZZA (http://www.newsweek.com/papa-john-alt-right-nazis-white-supremacists-nfl-pizza-701648)
#Resist
In an email to the Huffington Post, Papa John’s also said it condemns racism in all forms. “We do not want these individuals or groups to buy our pizza,” the company said in a statement. This is every business owner's worst nightmare. The Stormer names you official [anything] of the Alt-Right." It's a publicly traded NASDQ company that's lost about 25% of its value since August. Unfair to punish shareholders for this. IMHO.
Mocking a person for claiming falsely Native American ancestry.
Trading on that lie to gain hiring advantage and status advantage among Educational peers is low life behavior, if not illegal, unfair to peers.
Being called on it is chump change compared to the shunning that should have happened, but is ignored by Democrats/Media.
Again, I am being redundant.Mocking someone for having native American ancestry sounds like white supremacy to me. It is most shameful that a President of the United States would engage in such offensive and petty name calling.
Does not mean President Trump is a racist. He is not a racist, never has been and I don't expect he will be. Calling him racist is wrong. Ignoring the calling of racist when it is clearly wrong, the slandering of our President that way, is also wrong.
Does not mean President Trump is a racist. He is not a racist, never has been and I don't expect he will be. Calling him racist is wrong. Ignoring the calling of racist when it is clearly wrong, the slandering of our President that way, is also wrong.
In 1927, Donald Trump’s father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/28/in-1927-donald-trumps-father-was-arrested-after-a-klan-riot-in-queens/?utm_term=.6a3811702d1e)
#Resist
Does not mean President Trump is a racist. He is not a racist, never has been and I don't expect he will be. Calling him racist is wrong. Ignoring the calling of racist when it is clearly wrong, the slandering of our President that way, is also wrong.
In 1927, Donald Trump’s father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/28/in-1927-donald-trumps-father-was-arrested-after-a-klan-riot-in-queens/?utm_term=.6a3811702d1e)
#Resist
https://www.snopes.com/donald-trump-father-kkk-1927/
Delisa Lynch, who goes by @MommaLynch24 on Twitter, quickly jumped into the fray with a retort of her own.
“What NFL team do Trump own?” she fired off, citing the president’s tweet. “Oh yeah they wouldn’t let him have one!”
Lynch appeared to be referring to Trump’s long and stormy relationship with the NFL. The president bought a United State Football League team in 1983 for a fraction of the price of an NFL franchise, but never purchased an NFL team, getting outbid in 2014.
The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.
He made a farce of his populist campaign by putting bankers in charge of the economy and industry insiders at the head of the federal agencies established to regulate their businesses. But other campaign promises have been more faithfully enacted: his ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries; the unleashing of immigration-enforcement agencies against anyone in the country illegally regardless of whether he poses a danger; an attempt to cut legal immigration in half; and an abdication of the Justice Department’s constitutional responsibility to protect black Americans from corrupt or abusive police, discriminatory financial practices, and voter suppression. In his own stumbling manner, Trump has pursued the race-based agenda promoted during his campaign. As the president continues to pursue a program that places the social and political hegemony of white Christians at its core, his supporters have shown few signs of abandoning him.
One hundred thirty-nine years since Reconstruction, and half a century since the tail end of the civil-rights movement, a majority of white voters backed a candidate who explicitly pledged to use the power of the state against people of color and religious minorities, and stood by him as that pledge has been among the few to survive the first year of his presidency. Their support was enough to win the White House, and has solidified a return to a politics of white identity that has been one of the most destructive forces in American history. This all occurred before the eyes of a disbelieving press and political class, who plunged into fierce denial about how and why this had happened. That is the story of the 2016 election.
One of the first mentions of Trump in The New York Times was in 1973, as a result of a federal discrimination lawsuit against his buildings over his company’s refusal to rent to black tenants. In 1989, he took out a full-page newspaper ad suggesting that the Central Park Five, black and Latino youths accused of the assault and rape of a white jogger, should be put to death. They were later exonerated. His rise to prominence in Republican politics was first fueled by his embrace of the conspiracy theory that the first black president of the United States was not an American citizen. “I have people that have been studying [Obama's birth certificate] and they cannot believe what they're finding,” he said in 2011. “If he wasn't born in this country, which is a real possibility ... then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.”
Trump began his candidacy with a speech announcing that undocumented immigrants from Mexico were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And “some,” he said, were “good people.” To keep them out, he proposed building a wall and humiliating Mexico for its citizens’ transgressions by forcing their government to pay for it. He vowed to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Amid heightened attention to fatal police shootings of unarmed black people and a subsequent cry for accountability, Trump decried a “war on police” while telling black Americans they lived in “war zones,” in communities that were in “the worst shape they’ve ever been in”—a remarkable claim to make in a country that once subjected black people to chattel slavery and Jim Crow. He promised to institute a national “stop and frisk” policy, a police tactic that turns black and Latino Americans into criminal suspects in their own neighborhoods, and which had recently been struck down in his native New York as unconstitutional.
Trump expanded on this vision in his 2016 Republican National Convention speech, which gestured toward the suffering of nonwhites and painted a dark portrait of an America under assault by people of color through crime, immigration, and competition for jobs. Trump promised, “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” citing “the president’s hometown of Chicago.” He warned that “180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens,” and said that Clinton was “calling for a radical 550-percent increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country under President Obama.
The plain meaning of Trumpism exists in tandem with denials of its implications; supporters and opponents alike understand that the president’s policies and rhetoric target religious and ethnic minorities, and behave accordingly. But both supporters and opponents usually stop short of calling these policies racist. It is as if there were a pothole in the middle of the street that every driver studiously avoided, but that most insisted did not exist even as they swerved around it.
One measure of the allure of Trump’s white identity politics is the extent to which it has overridden other concerns as his administration has faltered.The president’s supporters have stood by him even as he has evinced every quality they described as a deal breaker under Obama. Conservatives attacked Obama’s lack of faith; Trump is a thrice-married libertine who has never asked God for forgiveness. They accused Obama of being under malign foreign influence; Trump eagerly accepted the aid of a foreign adversary during the election. They accused Obama of genuflecting before Russian President Vladimir Putin; Trump has refused to even criticize Putin publicly. They attacked Obama for his ties to Tony Rezko, the crooked realtor; Trump’s ties to organized crime are too numerous to name. Conservatives said Obama was lazy; Trump “gets bored and likes to watch TV.” They said Obama’s golfing was excessive; as of August Trump had spent nearly a fifth of his presidency golfing. They attributed Obama’s intellectual prowess to his teleprompter; Trump seems unable to describe the basics of any of his own policies. They said Obama was a self-obsessed egomaniac; Trump is unable to broach topics of public concern without boasting. Conservatives said Obama quietly used the power of the state to attack his enemies; Trump has publicly attempted to use the power of the state to attack his enemies. Republicans said Obama was racially divisive; Trump has called Nazis “very fine people.” Conservatives portrayed Obama as a vapid celebrity; Trump is a vapid celebrity.
There is virtually no personality defect that conservatives accused Obama of possessing that Trump himself does not actually possess. This, not some uncanny oracular talent, is the reason that Trump’s years-old tweets channeling conservative anger at Obama apply so perfectly to his own present conduct.
Trump’s great political insight was that Obama’s time in office inflicted a profound psychological wound on many white Americans, one that he could remedy by adopting the false narrative that placed the first black president outside the bounds of American citizenship. He intuited that Obama’s presence in the White House decreased the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois described as the “psychological wage” of whiteness across all classes of white Americans, and that the path to their hearts lay in invoking a bygone past when this affront had not, and could not, take place.
When you look at Trump’s strength among white Americans of all income categories, but his weakness among Americans struggling with poverty, the story of Trump looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash. And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative—one that obscures the racist nature of that backlash, instead casting it as a rebellion against an unfeeling establishment that somehow includes working-class and poor people who happen not to be white.
The defenses of Trump voters against Clinton’s charge share in commo an aversion to acknowledging an unpleasant truth. They are not so much arguments against a proposition as arguments that the proposition is offensive—or, if you prefer, politically incorrect. The same is true of the rejoinder that Democrats cannot hope to win the votes of people they have condemned as racist. This is not a refutation of the point, but an argument against stating it so plainly.
From a different vantage point, what Trump’s supporters refer to as political correctness is largely the result of marginalized communities gaining sufficient political power to project their prerogatives onto society at large. What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth, but of power. It is why unpunished murders of black Americans by agents of the state draw less outrage than black football players’ kneeling for the National Anthem in protest against them. It is no coincidence that Trump himself frequently uses the term to belittle what he sees as unnecessary restrictions on state force.
But even as once-acceptable forms of bigotry have become unacceptable to express overtly, white Americans remain politically dominant enough to shape media coverage in a manner that minimizes obvious manifestations of prejudice, such as backing a racist candidate, as something else entirely. The most transgressive political statement of the 2016 election, the one that violated strict societal norms by stating an inconvenient fact that few wanted to acknowledge, the most politically incorrect, was made by the candidate who lost.
Even before trump, the Republican Party was moving toward an exclusivist nationalism that defined American identity in racial and religious terms, despite some efforts from its leadership to steer it in another direction. George W. Bush signed the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, attempted to bring Latino voters into the party, and spoke in defense of American Muslims’ place in the national fabric. These efforts led to caustic backlashes from the Republican rank and file, who defeated his 2006 immigration-reform legislation, which might have shifted the demographics of the Republican Party for a generation or more. In the aftermath of their 2012 loss, Republican leaders tried again, only to meet with the same anti-immigrant backlash—one that would find an avatar in the person of the next Republican president.
In 2015, the political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan L. Hajnal published White Backlash, a study of political trends, and found that “whites who hold more negative views of immigrants have a greater tendency to support Republican candidates at the presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial levels, even after controlling for party identification and other major factors purported to drive the vote.”
“Birtherism was the beginning, it was a way of tying together his foreignness and his name, in an effort to delegitimize him, from the get-go,” says James Zogby, a Democrat whose Arab American Institute has spent years tracking public opinion on Muslim and Arab Americans. By 2012, the very idea of Muslims in public service “had become an issue in presidential politics, with five of the Republican candidates saying they wouldn't hire a Muslim or appoint one, without special loyalty oaths.”
“I think you can draw a straight line between Obama and heightened racialization, and the emergence of Trump,” Tesler told me. “Birtherism, the idea that Obama's a Muslim, anti-Muslim sentiments—these are very strong components of Trump's rise, and really what makes him popular with this crew in the first place.”
Birtherism is rightly remembered as a racist conspiracy theory, born of an inability to accept the legitimacy of the first black president. But it is more than that, and the insistence that it was a fringe belief undersells the fact that it was one of the most important political developments of the past decade.
Birtherism is a synthesis of the prejudice toward blacks, immigrants, and Muslims that swelled on the right during the Obama era: Obama was not merely black but also a foreigner, not just black and foreign but also a secret Muslim. Birtherism was not simply racism, but nationalism—a statement of values and a definition of who belongs in America. By embracing the conspiracy theory of Obama’s faith and foreign birth, Trump was also endorsing a definition of being American that excluded the first black president. Birtherism, and then Trumpism, united all three rising strains of prejudice on the right in opposition to the man who had become the sum of their fears.
Trumpism emerged from a haze of delusion, denial, pride and cruelty—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profoundly American phenomenon. This explains both how tens of millions of white Americans could pull the lever for a candidate running on a racist platform and justify doing so, and why a predominantly white political class would search so desperately for an alternative explanation for what it had just seen. To acknowledge the centrality of racial inequality to American democracy is to question its legitimacy—so it must be denied.
Nevertheless, a majority of white voters backed a candidate who assured them that they will never have to share this country with people of color as equals. That is the reality that all Americans will have to deal with, and one that most of the country has yet to confront.
Yet at its core, white nationalism has and always will be a hustle, a con, a fraud that cannot deliver the broad-based prosperity it promises, not even to most white people. Perhaps the most persuasive argument against Trumpist nationalism is not one its opponents can make in a way that his supporters will believe. But the failure of Trump’s promises to white America may yet show that both the fruit and the tree are poison.
The United States of America by and large is racist.
While honoring Native American veterans, Trump lobs his favorite Native American insult (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/27/while-honoring-native-american-veterans-trump-lobs-his-favorite-native-american-insult/?utm_term=.09994d2643f9)
#Resist
Shortly after World War II, Donald Trump's father Fred falsely claimed their family was Swedish, hiding their German heritage to avoid any problems selling apartments to Jewish customers, the Boston Globe reported last year. Donald Trump was still claiming Swedish heritage as late as his 1987 book "Art of the Deal," in which he writes that his grandfather came to the U.S. from Sweden.
Why it matters: After President Trump called Sen. Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" at an event honoring Navajo Code Talkers, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended him saying, ""I think what most people find offensive is Elizabeth Warren lying about her heritage to advance her career."
WHITE HOUSE BARS ONE OF FEW BLACK JOURNALISTS FROM ATTENDING CHRISTMAS PARTY (http://www.newsweek.com/april-ryan-donald-trump-christmas-sarah-huckabee-sanders-white-house-726364?utm_campaign=NewsweekTwitter&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social)
#Resist
Actions have consequences, seems.
Actions have consequences, seems.
You mean like raping a child? Or supporting a child rapist?
#Resist
Keep beating that dead horse.
No one cares what you feel, or what you think, Assthos.
No one is waiting for your call.
That should be self evident to you, but you persist in posting near identical rants, and your vote did not count.
Let us hope it continues not to count in the future.
Get back on your Meds, puddin'.
If you support Roy Moore you are supporting a person who has engaged in the sexual assault of a minor. It is that simple.
If you support Donald Trump you are supporting a person who has engaged in sexual assault. It is that simple.
Says you? When the charges are brought and answered, and a jury finds these people guilty, we shall have the answers, correct?
Only when Republicans are smeared, is he unanimity so profound. When Senator Al Frankin, who does not deny the claims against him; even Rep. Weiner, all say they may miss him, and would vote for him again, lol, for Mayor of NYC even.
Need I bring up the rest of Democrats who to this day get a full pass? The list is a long one, including Presidents, Senators, and other politicians.If you support Roy Moore you are supporting a person who has engaged in the sexual assault of a minor. It is that simple.
If you support Donald Trump you are supporting a person who has engaged in sexual assault. It is that simple.
Take your meds... get to sleep... you know the routine.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQTge-rVAAAc-AO.jpg:large)
#Resist
Of course, Mr. Brown was not shot for having a nonworking taillight.
He gave a jumbled, sometimes conflicting story about the vehicle he was driving, had no paperwork, said he just bought it, then said he had not yet bought it but would do so "on Monday....", and could produce nothing written about the vehicle, registration or insurance.
He seemingly gave his drivers license to the Officer (some reports say he did not have a Drivers license), and the Officer was clearly in the process of checking Mr. Brown's history, and the Vehicle's owner status, or at least about to, when Mr. Brown bolted from the Mercedes and took off running.
The Officer ran after him, and attempted (not on video released to date, but audio from the Officer's microphone indicates) to stop Mr. Brown via use of a Taser. Mr. Brown continued running, with the Officer chasing him, and the Officer fired 8 shots, hitting him with a number of them before Mr. Brown stopped.
How ironic both this suspect and the man in Ferguson were named Brown...
Clearly the Officer used deadly force to stop and apprehend a fleeing suspect. The Officer has not made any statement since the incident, at least none that has been made public. His attorney quit, shortly prior to the Officer being charged and jailed, and his new attorney is reviewing the case prior to making any statement.
Did the Officer suspect the Mercedes was stolen, and the driver was in the midst of Grand Theft Auto... a felony? The suspect was warned to stay in the car, after an initial attempt to exit his vehicle, before he took flight. No alarm was expressed at what the Officer visually saw when he obtained the driver's license... No questions or comments were asked or made by the Passenger in the Mercedes.
Whether indeed Mr. Scott had permission to drive the Mercedes will come out, and likely is now known by Police and Authorities. What Warrants, if any, were on file for Mr. Brown (past due child support has been mentioned by one of his relatives as speculation about why he ran), will eventually be known by us all.
The charge of First Degree Murder seems a bit dramatic to me, and I expect that was the intent at the time the charge and arrest was made, and the Officer jailed. The right of a Police Officer to stop what he believes is a fleeing felon, and he knows is a fleeing suspect who is resisting arrest via flight on foot, who had disregarded direct orders at least twice, has limits, and I expect they were crossed here.
May this South Carolina town escape the circus that became Ferguson, MO. It is Friday afternoon...
In response to a question from one of the only African Americans in the audience — who asked when Moore thought America was last "great" -- Moore acknowledged the nation's history of racial divisions, but said: "I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another.... Our families were strong, our country had a direction."
At the same event, Moore referred to Native Americans and Asian Americans as "reds and yellows," and earlier this year he suggested the September 11 terrorist attacks were divine punishment.
The high school basketball squad from Eagle Grove, population 3,700, had traveled 60 miles up Highway 69 in Iowa to play the team from Forest City, population 4,100. It would be the Eagles against the Indians, a hardwood competition in the center of the country. For some people, this is as American as it gets.
At one point during the online streaming of the game last month, two white announcers for a Forest City radio station, KIOW, began riffing on the Hispanic names of some players from the mildly more diverse community of Eagle Grove. “They’re all foreigners,” said Orin Harris, a longtime announcer; his partner, Holly Jane Kusserow-Smidt, a board operator at the station who was also a third-grade teacher, answered: “Exactly.”
For some people, this is as American as it gets.
Mr. Harris then uttered a term occasionally used these days as a racially charged taunt, or as a braying assertion that the country is being taken back from forces that threaten it. That term is, simply, the surname of the sitting American president.
“As Trump would say, go back where they came from,” Mr. Harris said.
“Well, some would say that, yeah,” Ms. Kusserow-Smidt said. “Some days I feel like that, too.”
Last year’s contentious presidential election gave oxygen to hate. An analysis of F.B.I. crime data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found a 26 percent increase in bias incidents in the last quarter of 2016 — the heart of the election season — compared with the same period the previous year. The trend has continued into 2017, with the latest partial data for the nation’s five most populous cities showing a 12 percent increase.
In addition, anti-Muslim episodes have nearly doubled since 2014, according to Brian Levin, the director of the center, which he said has also counted more “mega rallies” by white nationalists in the last two years than in the previous 20. “I haven’t seen anything like this during my three decades in the field,” he said.
Peppered among these incidents is a phenomenon distinct from the routine racism so familiar in this country: the provocative use of “Trump,” after the man whose comments about Mexicans, Muslims and undocumented immigrants — coupled with his muted responses to white nationalist activity — have proved so inflammatory. His words have also become an accelerant on the playing field of sports, in his public criticism of black athletes he deems to be unpatriotic or ungrateful.
Officials at Salem State University in Massachusetts discovered hateful graffiti spray-painted on benches and a fence surrounding the baseball field, including “Trump #1 Whites Only USA.” An undocumented immigrant in Michigan reported to the police that two assailants had stapled a note bearing a slur to his stomach after telling him, “Trump doesn’t like you.” A white Massachusetts businessman at Kennedy International Airport in New York was charged with assaulting and menacing an airline worker in a hijab, saying, among other threats: “Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you.”
In an email, the White House on Friday denounced the use of the president’s name in cases like these. “The president condemns violence, bigotry and hatred in all its forms, and finds anyone who might invoke his or any other political figure’s name for such aims to be contemptible,” Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, said.
Still, it persists. Across the country, students have used the president’s name to mock or goad minority opponents at sporting events. In March, white fans at suburban Canton High School in Connecticut shouted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as players from Hartford’s Classical Magnet School, which is predominantly black and Latino, took foul shots during a basketball playoff game. They also chanted “He’s our president!”
The visiting players and their chaperones interpreted the chants not as a sudden burst of presidential fealty, but rather as a slyly racist mantra intended to rattle. As if Donald J. Trump was the president of here, in white suburbia, and not there, in the diverse inner city.
“I’m not sure what politics has to do with basketball,” Azaria Porter, then the Classical team’s 16-year-old manager, told The Hartford Courant. “It was just annoying. It was like, O.K., we get it.”
For the record, Classical beat Canton.
According to several scholars of American history, the invocation of a president’s name as a jaw-jutting declaration of exclusion, rather than inclusion, appears to be unprecedented. “If you’re hunting for historical analogies, I think you’re in virgin territory,” said Jon Meacham, the author of several books about presidents, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson.
Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, agrees. “If you’re looking at modern presidents, fill in the blank and see if it can be used in the same way,” he said. “You will see it has not. Hoover? Or Eisenhower? Can you imagine a situation like that?”
The jarring use of Mr. Trump’s name began to surface shortly after he declared his candidacy in June 2015. Within a year, educators were reporting incidents in which, as the Inside Higher Ed website put it, “Trump” had become “a kind of taunt, tossed by largely white students at minority opponents during, say, basketball games.”
But it was not confined to high schools like Dallas Center-Grimes in Iowa, where students mocked a basketball team from the more diverse community of Perry with chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump” in February 2016. Colleges and universities were experiencing similar moments.
Nor was it confined to places of learning. In March 2016, for example, video surveillance at a Kwik Shop in Wichita, Kan., showed a white motorcyclist arguing with two college students — one Hispanic, one Muslim — then assaulting one of them before driving off. The victims later said that the man interspersed his racist epithets with: “Trump, Trump, Trump.” (And yes, the name does tend to come in threes, as if the incantation of his name might summon the man himself.)
Shortly after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes, published a report called “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the 2016 Election on Our Nation’s Schools.” Based on a survey of more than 10,000 educators, it detailed an increase in incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags.
“Kids saying, ‘Trump won, you’re going back to Mexico,’” wrote a teacher from Kansas. “A black student was blocked from entering his classroom by two white students chanting, ‘Trump, Trump,’” wrote a teacher from Tennessee. “Seventh-grade white boys yelling, ‘Heil Trump!’” wrote a teacher from Colorado.
It is a far cry from wearing a button that says “I Like Ike.”
Mr. Beschloss recalled moments in recent American history when, say, the X in President Richard M. Nixon’s name appeared as a swastika, or a caricature of President Lyndon B. Johnson featured a Hitlerian mustache. But these were generally the acts of opponents to those presidents’ policies during the Vietnam War.
“The message here,” Mr. Beschloss said, “is ‘Trump is going to come and get you — and we support that.’”
There have also been cases in which anti-Trump protesters have harassed and assaulted supporters of the president for, say, wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap. In some instances, the name Trump is invoked in punctuation.
When asked how a president’s very name could become so coded, Mr. Beschloss cited Mr. Trump’s speeches and tweets, including two in particular: the announcement of his candidacy in 2015, during which he referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists; and his equivocating comments after a white supremacist rally and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Va., in June ended with one person killed and 19 wounded. (“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” the president had said. “On many sides.”)
“This broadened into a feeling by some people — right or wrong — that Trump is going to be a weapon to reduce the opportunities of those who are different,” Mr. Beschloss said. “This is a signal moment.”
Leah Wright Rigueur, an assistant professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, agreed, saying that Mr. Trump’s status as a racial wedge was of his own doing.
“When Trump says, ‘I hear you, I will represent you,’ he is speaking to a particular cross-section of the nation that does not include Muslims, that does not include people of color,” Ms. Wright Rigueur said.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of race, history and public policy also at the Kennedy School of Government, said that Mr. Trump had created his own breakaway brand, making him the personification of specific ideals.
“To use the name as a rallying cry for a kind of embodied white supremacy, white nationalism or sense of triumphalism, for taking back the country, as best as I can tell has never been crystallized in the name of a U.S. president,” Mr. Muhammad said.
“It’s authoritarian, the cult of personality,” Mr. Meacham said. “It’s saying that we’re American — and you’re not.”
The sporadic episodes — as chronicled by ProPublica’s “Documenting Hate” project, among others — continue. A “Heil Trump” here, the Trump name scrawled beside a swastika there. In late September, two high school football teams in the Salt Lake City suburbs were squaring off when cheers erupted. Someone was brandishing a cardboard cutout of Mr. Trump, and there began the chanting of three words that have electrified some and unnerved others: “Build the wall! Build the wall!”
Back in Iowa, there have been consequences and remorse in the wake of those two Forest City radio announcers musing on the Hispanic names of some of the players from Eagle Grove.
Ms. Kusserow-Smidt, 63, was fired as a board operator for the radio station; she has since resigned from the Forest City School District. Mr. Harris, 76, who had been with the station for more than 40 years, was also fired. The two have expressed deep regret for their comments, which they said did not reflect who they truly were.
“It didn’t sound right; it wasn’t right,” Mr. Harris told a local television station. “And I apologize.”
The xenophobic words of the two announcers stung some of the Eagle Grove players, including Nikolas Padilla, whose mother is from Iowa and whose father is from Mexico. Mr. Padilla, a 17-year-old senior, said that he briefly considered quitting because he did not want to be singled out for his Mexican heritage.
One particular comment by the broadcasters — “As Trump would say, go back where they came from” — puzzled Nikolas. His mother, Misty, recalled what her teenage son had said:
“Um, I came from Mason City, Iowa.”
Roy Moore Still Won’t Concede; Begs for Cash to Fund “Voter Integrity Program” (https://www.advocate.com/politics/2017/12/19/roy-moore-still-wont-concede-begs-cash-fund-election-integrity-program)
Here Are 16 Examples Of Donald Trump Being Racist (https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_584f2ccae4b0bd9c3dfe5566)
President Trump is not a Racist.
Here Are 16 Examples Of Donald Trump Being Racist (https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_584f2ccae4b0bd9c3dfe5566)President Trump is not a Racist.
#Resist
Here Are 16 Examples Of Donald Trump Being Racist (https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_584f2ccae4b0bd9c3dfe5566)President Trump is not a Racist.
#Resist
In the psychology of human behavior, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality, as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth. Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event, when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality. The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and the generation of political controversy with attempts to deny the existence of consensus.
More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.
Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.
Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.
In 2014, well before becoming a candidate, he tweeted: “Our government now imports illegal immigrants and deadly diseases. Our leaders are inept.”
“When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity,” Mr. Trump ad-libbed. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems,” he continued. “They’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists.”
During his campaign, he pushed a false story about Muslims celebrating in Jersey City as they watched the towers fall after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York. He said illegal immigrants were like “vomit” crossing the border. And he made pledges that he clearly could not fulfill.
“We will begin moving them out, Day 1,” he said at a rally in August 2016, adding, “My first hour in office, those people are gone.”
The announcement of the travel ban on a Friday night, seven days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, created chaotic scenes at the nation’s largest airports, as hundreds of people were stopped, and set off widespread confusion and loud protests. Lawyers for the government raced to defend the president’s actions against court challenges, while aides struggled to explain the policy to perplexed lawmakers the next night at a black-tie dinner.
White House aides resorted to Google searches and frenzied scans of the United States Code to figure out which countries were affected.
By early March, judges across the country had blocked his travel ban. Immigrant rights activists were crowing that they had thwarted the new president. Even Mr. Trump’s own lawyers told him he had to give up on defending the ban.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and lawyers at the White House and Justice Department had decided that waging an uphill legal battle to defend the directive in the Supreme Court would fail. Instead, they wanted to devise a narrower one that could pass legal muster.
The president, though, was furious about what he saw as backing down to politically correct adversaries. He did not want a watered-down version of the travel ban, he yelled at Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, as the issue came to a head on Friday, March 3, in the Oval Office.
It was a familiar moment for Mr. Trump’s advisers. The president did not mind being told “no” in private, and would sometimes relent. But he could not abide a public turnabout, a retreat. At those moments, he often exploded at whoever was nearby.
As Marine One waited on the South Lawn for Mr. Trump to begin his weekend trip to Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. McGahn insisted that administration lawyers had already promised the court that Mr. Trump would issue a new order. There was no alternative, he said.
“This is bullshit,” the president responded.
With nothing resolved, Mr. Trump, furious, left the White House. A senior aide emailed a blunt warning to a colleague waiting aboard Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland: “He’s coming in hot.”
Already mad at Mr. Sessions, who the day before had recused himself in the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump refused to take his calls. Aides told Mr. Sessions he would have to fly down to Mar-a-Lago to plead with the president in person to sign the new order.
Over dinner that night with Mr. Sessions and Mr. McGahn, Mr. Trump relented. When he was back in Washington, he signed the new order. It was an indication that he had begun to understand — or at least, begrudgingly accept — the need to follow a process.
Still, one senior adviser later recalled never having seen a president so angry signing anything.
When he got word that the Office of Refugee Resettlement had drafted a 55-page report showing that refugees were a net positive to the economy, Mr. Miller swiftly intervened, requesting a meeting to discuss it. The study never made it to the White House; it was shelved in favor of a three-page list of all the federal assistance programs that refugees used.
President Trump is not a Racist.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met yesterday.
President Trump is not a Racist.
President Trump is not a Racist.
“Yeah, I never liked the guy. I don’t think he knows what the fuck he’s doing. My accountants in New York are always complaining about him. He’s not responsive. And it isn’t funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. Nobody else.”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. But Donald went on, “Besides that, I’ve got to tell you something else. I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is. I believe that. It’s not anything they can control. . . . Don’t you agree?” He looked at me straight in the eye and waited for my reply.
“Donald, you really shouldn’t say things like that to me or anybody else,” I said. “That is not the kind of image you want to project. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation, even if it’s the way you feel.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “If anybody ever heard me say that . . . holy shit . . . I’d be in a lot of trouble. But I have to tell you, that’s the way I feel.”
President Trump is not a Racist.
A career intelligence analyst who is an expert in hostage policy stood before President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last fall to brief him on the impending release of a family long held in Pakistan under uncertain circumstances.
It was her first time meeting the president, and when she was done briefing, he had a question for her.
"Where are you from?" the president asked, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the exchange.
New York, she replied.
Trump was unsatisfied and asked again, the officials said. Referring to the president's hometown, she offered that she, too, was from Manhattan. But that's not what the president was after.
He wanted to know where "your people" are from, according to the officials, who spoke under condition of anonymity due to the nature of the internal discussions.
After the analyst revealed that her parents are Korean, Trump turned to an adviser in the room and seemed to suggest her ethnicity should determine her career path, asking why the "pretty Korean lady" isn't negotiating with North Korea on his administration's behalf, the officials said.
President Trump is not a Racist.
President Trump is not a Racist.
According to Durbin on Friday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was outlining a tentative bipartisan agreement on immigration they hoped Trump would support. That’s when Trump began interjecting, Durbin said.
“As Sen. Graham started to read the plan, the president started making comments and asking questions, and that’s when things deteriorated rapidly,” he said.
“When we talked about those in the United States on temporary protected status, there was a comment they were from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti,” Durbin said. “’Haitians?’ (Trump) said. ‘We don’t need more Haitians.’ ”
“Then we went on and the president started commenting on immigration from Africa,” Durbin said. “And that’s when he used those sickening, heartbreaking remarks, saying ‘Those shitholes send us the people they don’t want.’ He repeated that. He didn’t just say it one time.”
And Durbin said Trump in the meeting called for more Europeans to be admitted to the U.S. “He said, 'Put me down for one of the more Europeans to come to this country. Why don't we get more people from Norway?' "
President Trump is not a Racist.
This isn’t the first time the president has come under fire for comments about immigrants that critics have labeled as “racist.”
Donald Trump kicked off his 2016 presidential bid by disparaging Mexican immigrants.
“They are not our friend, believe me,” he said. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
According to The New York Times, Trump said during a meeting in June that Haitians “all have AIDS.” The White House vehemently denied the report.
Trump said that Nigerian immigrants wouldn’t ever “go back to their huts” in Africa.
In addition to immigrants, the president has also faced criticism for “racist” comments about people from other countries regardless of their immigration status.
Trump said that Afghanistan is a “terrorist haven.”
During the 2016 presidential election, Trump called out a Gold Star Muslim family and insinuated that the mother wasn’t talking because she was Muslim.
“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News in July.
In May 2016, Trump said that federal judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn’t hear the Trump University case fairly because he’s Mexican. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico. The answer is, He is giving us very unfair rulings—rulings that people can’t even believe,” he said.
Before his career as a politician, Trump allegedly wouldn’t rent to black people back in the 1970s. This led to his company being sued twice by the Justice Department for discrimination.
Trump retweeted an anti-Semitic meme.
He was called a racist in November after he said this to Navajo Code Talkers: “I just want to thank you because you’re very, very special people. You were here long before any of us were here, although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They call her ‘Pocahontas.’ But you know what, I like you because you are special. You are special people.”
Trump claimed that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
When Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition in December 2015, he called himself “a negotiator like you folks,” which many people said brought up Jewish stereotypes.
Trump once said, “Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that,” according to John R. O’Donnell, author of the 1991 book Trumped!
The president blamed “many sides” for neo-Nazi violence last year.
Trump retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda from a far-right British group last November.
During the 2016 presidential election, Trump pointed to a black man and said, “Look at my African-American over there.”
He retweeted false statistics about white homicide victims after a black activist was kicked and punched at one of Trump’s rallies in Alabama.
Trump asked African-American reporter April Ryan to set up a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus. Prior to this exchange, he said that many African-Americans were “living in hell,” in reference to conditions in inner cities, Politico reported.
President Trump is not a Racist.
White supremacists agreed. Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader, said on Friday that conservatives defending Mr. Trump on Fox News should stop saying it was about economics and legal systems, rather than race. “It’s obviously all about race, and to their credit, liberals point out the obvious,” he said.
The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, likewise welcomed Mr. Trump’s comments. “This is encouraging and refreshing, as it indicates Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration,” the site said.
I think it is finally coming into focus for the rest of the country. There are two kinds of people in America. Those who find this wholly unacceptable, and those who do. Those who do are racists. It will be sorted out in the next two election cycles.
President Trump is not a Racist.
TRUMP THINKS ONLY BLACK PEOPLE ARE ON WELFARE, BUT, REALLY, WHITE AMERICANS RECEIVE MOST BENEFITS
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-welfare-black-white-780252
President Trump is not a Racist.
TRUMP THINKS ONLY BLACK PEOPLE ARE ON WELFARE, BUT, REALLY, WHITE AMERICANS RECEIVE MOST BENEFITS
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-welfare-black-white-780252
In the spring of 2017, the newly elected president met with members of the Congressional Black Caucus. During that meeting, one of the members mentioned to Trump that welfare reform would be detrimental to her constituents— adding, “Not all of whom are black,” according to NBC News.
The president was incredulous. “Really? Then what are they?”
Dale Carnegie calls this technique "taking a bridge". Make a statement, or quote something, then change the topic and present a hypothetical, and agree with your own hypothetical, as if someone actually said it.
This headline is nothing but clickbait, by the original publication. The President asked about the constituents of a particular Congressperson, when she said they are not all black. And from that "Who are they?" remark in conversation, the Magazine/Writer surmises and tries to make it seem the President is not informed with the reality about who in America is on the dole.
It suits some here who will say or quote anything to further their agenda.
President Trump is not a Racist.
TRUMP THINKS ONLY BLACK PEOPLE ARE ON WELFARE, BUT, REALLY, WHITE AMERICANS RECEIVE MOST BENEFITS (http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-welfare-black-white-780252?utm_campaign=NewsweekTwitter&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social)
In fact, whites are the biggest beneficiaries when it comes to government safety-net programs like the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, commonly referred to as welfare.
White people without a college degree ages 18 to 64 are the largest class of adults lifted out of poverty by such programs, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The think tank’s 2017 report stated that 6.2 million working-age whites were lifted above the poverty line in 2014 compared to 2.8 million blacks and 2.4 million Hispanics.
When it comes the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP—the initiative formerly known as food stamps—the numbers look similar.
Just over 40 percent of SNAP recipients are white. Another 25.7 percent are black, 10.3 percent are Hispanic, 2.1 percent are Asian and 1.2 percent are Native American, according to a 2015 Department of Agriculture report.
Despite Trump’s newly gleaned information, welfare reform remains one of his top goals for 2018. His administration and Congressional Republicans are looking to overhaul federal safety-net programs like SNAP, Medicaid and housing benefits.
It suits some here who will say or quote anything to further their agenda.
Dale Carnegie calls this technique "taking a bridge". Make a statement, or quote something, then change the topic and present a hypothetical, and agree with your own hypothetical, as if someone actually said it.Actually it demosnstrates, not only Trumps ignorance, but your issues with parsing English.
This headline is nothing but clickbait, by the original publication. The President asked about the constituents of a particular Congressperson, when she said they are not all black. And from that "Who are they?" remark in conversation, the Magazine/Writer surmises and tries to make it seem the President is not informed with the reality about who in America is on the dole.
It suits some here who will say or quote anything to further their agenda.TRUMP THINKS ONLY BLACK PEOPLE ARE ON WELFARE, BUT, REALLY, WHITE AMERICANS RECEIVE MOST BENEFITS
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-welfare-black-white-780252
Clickbait!
Clickbait!
Do you have a credible, verifiable source that disputes the article?
Thanks in advance.
#Resist
No, Joan. He was ignorant enough to think that only blacks vote for blacks. He was signaling his ignorance of the same statistical population that you so generously quoted.
just wanted to call a spade a spade.
I think it’s terrible this recent affliction affecting many Republicans. I mean who knew about this sudden onset of deafness? And strange how it’s so specific to the word shithole?
Clickbait!
White Sorority Girl at University of Alabama Records Racist Rant for Instagram (https://www.theroot.com/white-sorority-girl-at-university-of-alabama-records-ra-1822135328)
Updated Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2018, 5:30 p.m. EST: The University of Alabama is now confirming that Harley Barber is no longer enrolled at the school.
UA President Stuart Bell issued the following statement, which was shared to the university’s Twitter account:
In light of the racist and disturbing videos posted by one of our students on social media, I want to express my personal disgust and disappointment.
Like many of you, I find the videos highly offensive and deeply hurtful, not only to our students and our entire University community, but to everyone who viewed them. The actions of this student do not represent the larger student body or the values of our University, and she is no longer enrolled here.
We hold our students to much higher standards, and we apologize to everyone who has seen the videos and been hurt by this hateful, ignorant and offensive behavior. This is not who we are; it is unacceptable and unwelcome here at UA. These types of incidents affect community members differently. If you have been impacted and would like additional support, please access resources here that are available to you on our campus.
Over the last year, I have had conversations with many of you who shared your UA experiences with me. You have voiced your pride in the progress we have made, but we still have much work to do. I want to thank all of the students, faculty and staff who met today to have conversations about this event and the steps we can take, individually and collectively, to create a more welcoming and inclusive campus. You have my commitment and the commitment of our leadership team to sustain progress and address directly any issues that arise.
I know you join me in taking a stand against this and all reprehensible behavior. As members of this community, we are a family and this is our home. Everyone has a right to feel safe and welcome here.
White Sorority Girl at University of Alabama Records Racist Rant for Instagram (https://www.theroot.com/white-sorority-girl-at-university-of-alabama-records-ra-1822135328)QuoteUpdated Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2018, 5:30 p.m. EST: The University of Alabama is now confirming that Harley Barber is no longer enrolled at the school.
UA President Stuart Bell issued the following statement, which was shared to the university’s Twitter account:
In light of the racist and disturbing videos posted by one of our students on social media, I want to express my personal disgust and disappointment.
Like many of you, I find the videos highly offensive and deeply hurtful, not only to our students and our entire University community, but to everyone who viewed them. The actions of this student do not represent the larger student body or the values of our University, and she is no longer enrolled here.
We hold our students to much higher standards, and we apologize to everyone who has seen the videos and been hurt by this hateful, ignorant and offensive behavior. This is not who we are; it is unacceptable and unwelcome here at UA. These types of incidents affect community members differently. If you have been impacted and would like additional support, please access resources here that are available to you on our campus.
Over the last year, I have had conversations with many of you who shared your UA experiences with me. You have voiced your pride in the progress we have made, but we still have much work to do. I want to thank all of the students, faculty and staff who met today to have conversations about this event and the steps we can take, individually and collectively, to create a more welcoming and inclusive campus. You have my commitment and the commitment of our leadership team to sustain progress and address directly any issues that arise.
I know you join me in taking a stand against this and all reprehensible behavior. As members of this community, we are a family and this is our home. Everyone has a right to feel safe and welcome here.
#Resist
‘Get out of the country!’: Navajo lawmaker harassed by Arizona Trump supporters accusing him of being here ‘illegally’
(https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/get-country-navajo-lawmaker-harassed-arizona-trump-supporters-accusing-illegally/)
#Resist
‘Get out of the country!’: Navajo lawmaker harassed by Arizona Trump supporters accusing him of being here ‘illegally’
(https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/get-country-navajo-lawmaker-harassed-arizona-trump-supporters-accusing-illegally/)
#Resist
Wow. Now THAT's ironic.
How White House advisor Stephen Miller went from pestering Hispanic students to designing Trump's immigration policy (https://www.univision.com/univision-news/politics/how-white-house-advisor-stephen-miller-went-from-pestering-hispanic-students-to-designing-trumps-immigration-policy)
#Resist
How White House advisor Stephen Miller went from pestering Hispanic students to designing Trump's immigration policy (https://www.univision.com/univision-news/politics/how-white-house-advisor-stephen-miller-went-from-pestering-hispanic-students-to-designing-trumps-immigration-policy)
#Resist
Stephen Miller is doing a great job, speaking truth and helping President Trump communicate clearly to Americans and non-Americans alike. Not surprised to hear he was in Honors classes in High School, and was outspoken there, openly, with his peers of all races, and with teachers, school board folks as well.
A man who is passionate when communicating, defends his views openly and effectively, is great to see, at the highest level in our Federal Government. His experience with Senator Sessions led to the recognition he receives now, and his experiences in California helped shape who he is today, in the belly of the beast so to speak, in California.
His enemies are our enemies, as Americans who love the country, and it's history, and Constitution, and want to preserve our Nation. MAGA.How White House advisor Stephen Miller went from pestering Hispanic students to designing Trump's immigration policy (https://www.univision.com/univision-news/politics/how-white-house-advisor-stephen-miller-went-from-pestering-hispanic-students-to-designing-trumps-immigration-policy)
#Resist
Joan, your America is not the America I was raised in. It is not the America my father fought for. It is not the America my Grandfather fought for.
If it comes down to it, I will meet you on the barricades to take back America from the likes of you.
It's not hard to imagine Joan at the Nuremberg Rally giving the Nazi salute and cheering Hitler on. Joan is a broken person, seemingly completely lacking in heart. When I encounter that in a person, I find it odd and sad and terrifying.
Speaking plainly is refreshing, from any political people, and it is most important that President Trump's message gets past the press censors, who tend to ignore his achievements, and rant against his policies, before most folks can digest the reality of a plain spoken statement themselves.
Most people certainly will not read uncensored Trump truths on the front page of their local newspapers, if they ever even find it there at all.
Stephen Miller is doing a great job, speaking truth and helping President Trump communicate clearly to Americans and non-Americans alike. Not surprised to hear he was in Honors classes in High School, and was outspoken there, openly, with his peers of all races, and with teachers, school board folks as well.
A man who is passionate when communicating, defends his views openly and effectively, is great to see, at the highest level in our Federal Government. His experience with Senator Sessions led to the recognition he receives now, and his experiences in California helped shape who he is today, in the belly of the beast so to speak, in California.
His enemies are our enemies, as Americans who love the country, and it's history, and Constitution, and want to preserve our Nation. MAGA.
If it comes down to it, I will meet you on the barricades to take back America from the likes of you.
Joan, your America is not the America I was raised in. It is not the America my father fought for. It is not the America my Grandfather fought for.
If it comes down to it, I will meet you on the barricades to take back America from the likes of you.
And if his classmates happened to have figured out “at their tender age” that they were gay? “We have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality,” Miller complained. “Do they notify parents if their teenagers have chosen an alternate lifestyle? Of course not.”
Miller bullied “the opposition with unverifiable statistics and figures, baseless claims launched with his articulate bravado. He would just bludgeon you with evidence he pulled from thin air, gun-death numbers or immigration statistics that were usually false or gross exaggerations.
"He just didn't buy it. He didn't believe the oppression existed.… This guy is 17 years old, and it's like listening to someone who's 70 years old — in the 1930s."
"I think he was one of the first examples we all had of someone who really felt threatened and left out by our celebration of multiculturalism and diversity,"
I am concerned for the mental state of anyone who describes their fellow Americans as "enemies" just because they don't believe as they do. This is another sign of being morally bankrupt.
Or maybe simply responding to a racist attack?
I am concerned for the mental state of anyone who describes their fellow Americans as "enemies" just because they don't believe as they do. This is another sign of being morally bankrupt.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/obama-to-latinos-punish-your-enemies-in-the-voting-booth/article/511932
Hmmm, how quickly they forget, or maybe just listen differently.
There’s an irony to this policy shift, though. A number of prominent members of the Trump administration have ancestors who are only in the country because they came to join members of their families who would be excluded from sponsoring them under the new proposal.
Donald Trump
Trump has benefited from what could be called “chain migration” on both sides of his family. (It’s important to note that it was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that established the existing standards regarding family relationships. Most of the migration described in this article preceded that law.)
His mother, Mary Anne Macleod migrated to the United States in 1930 from Scotland at the age of 18. She joined her sister Catherine Macleod (who had married a butler named George Reid) in Astoria, Queens, as reported by the Scottish paper the National.
“The National can reveal that Mary Anne had been issued with immigration visa no. 26698 at Glasgow on February 17, 1930,” reporter Martin Hannan writes. “On the passenger list for all aliens … Mary Anne states she will be living with her sister Mrs Catherine Reid, 3520 6th Avenue, Astoria, Long Island.” That document also indicated that Macleod intended to become an American citizen. (That’s the second yes on the image below. The “Perm” refers to the length of stay.)
In 1936, Mary Anne Macleod married Trump’s father, Fred.
Fred Trump’s father — the president’s grandfather — was named Friedrich and himself immigrated in 1885. He, too, appears to have arrived in New York City to be welcomed by his sister. The book “The Trumps” by Gwenda Blair describes Friedrich’s arrival at Ellis Island:
Friedrich Trump presented his papers, had them stamped, and found himself shoved into the grimy central rotunda. In the eerie half-light of gas lamps, officials shouted the names of those who had mail or, if they were fortunate, friends and relatives there in person. When “Friedrich Trump” rang out, the slim, light-haired youth jumped up and dashed over to the waiting room. His older sister, who had Americanized her name to Katherine, and her husband, Peter Schuster, stood there, smiling and teary eyed.
Friedrich Trump quickly found work as a barber, eventually moving west and making a fortune off the Yukon gold rush.
If Trump’s proposed rules applied, neither Trump’s paternal grandfather nor his mother would be allowed to enter the United States, since each came to meet a sibling already here.
Mike Pence
In a post at Medium, genealogy researcher Megan Smolenyak walked through Pence’s family background.
Pence’s maternal grandfather, Richard Cawley, came to the United States in 1923, according to Smolenyak’s research, joining his brother, James, who had arrived eight years earlier. James’s arrival at the age of 16 was predicated on joining his aunt, a woman identified in immigration documents only as “Mrs. Schnorr” of Illinois.
Neither of those relationships would qualify under the Trump administration’s proposed rules.
Richard Cawley’s eventual wife, Pence’s grandmother, was Mary Elizabeth Maloney, whose parents had themselves immigrated from Ireland. Our attempts to find their immigration records were unsuccessful.
Stephen Miller
The face of Trump’s immigration policy is Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president who’d previously worked in the office of Attorney General Jeff Sessions when Sessions served in the Senate. It was Miller who, last year, presented an initial immigration plan at a White House press briefing and who has repeatedly been described as the hard-liner behind much of Trump’s rhetoric.
Miller is the great-grandson of a man named Sam Glosser, as reported by Jewish Journal. Glosser was one of a family of retailers in Johnstown, Pa., son of a man named Wolf Lieb Glotzer.
The elder Glotzer came to the United States from Belarus in 1903. The documentation of his arrival in the United States includes the person who he joined here: his brother-in-law, Schmuel Levine.
The book “Long Live Glosser’s,” about the retail stores that the family founded, indicates that Wolf Glotzer’s son Nathan soon joined him in the United States. It was Nathan who ended up in Johnstown and started the store.
In 1906, Sam Glosser arrived in the United States on the Ryndam, along with his mother and two siblings. They listed Wolf Glotzer as their point of contact.
Glotzer’s arrival wouldn’t have met Trump’s standard for entry. But once here, he could have petitioned for Sam Glosser — under 21 and unmarried — to join him.
Dan Scavino
Trump relies on social media to promote his policy messages, and, save the tweets which Trump himself composes, that means relying on social media director Dan Scavino.
For Politico, genealogy researcher Jennifer Mendelsohn looked at the Scavino family’s history.
His great-grandfather, Gildo Scavino was born in Italy in 1884. Mendelsohn writes:
Gildo Scavino was part of a classic chain of immigrants that began with his older brother Vittorio (or Victor, as he would come to be known) who arrived at Ellis Island in 1904 with his wife Camilla. The records indicate that Vittorio had come on a business trip, but he apparently stayed on, because the following March, when brother Ettore (who would become Hector) arrived from Canelli, he listed brother Vittorio, at an address on E. 59th Street in New York City, as his point of contact.
Gildo Scavino arrived in 1913, accompanied by Vittorio (now going by Victor).
Under the existing rules, Victor Scavino could sponsor Gildo Scavino’s green card. Under the new rules Scavino’s great-grandson is responsible for promoting, he can’t.
Others
We looked at a few other White House staffers as well. Communications Director Hope Hicks is the descendant of families from Tennessee and South Carolina (by way of Connecticut). Legislative director Marc Short is the offspring of a long-standing Virginia family. Chief of Staff John F. Kelly’s family is from Massachusetts, but it was difficult to learn much beyond that. (Feel free to email us with insights.)
Perhaps the most interesting immigrant story is Jared Kushner’s. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States in 1949, after surviving the Holocaust. His grandmother, Rae Kushner, was instrumental in helping to orchestrate a mass escape from a Nazi-controlled ghetto. She helped construct a tunnel that allowed hundreds of Jews to escape with their lives.
In an interview with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. given in 1982, Kushner laments that the policies of the United States during the war made it hard for refugees from Nazi-controlled areas to immigrate.
“For the Jews, the doors were closed,” she said. “We never understood that. Even President Roosevelt kept the doors closed. Why? The boat, St. Louis, was turned back. What was the world afraid of? I don’t understand.”
I am concerned for the mental state of anyone who describes their fellow Americans as "enemies" just because they don't believe as they do. This is another sign of being morally bankrupt.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/obama-to-latinos-punish-your-enemies-in-the-voting-booth/article/511932
Hmmm, how quickly they forget, or maybe just listen differently.
President Trump's immigration proposal reveals what he has been after all along: an end to family-based immigration and the "lottery visa," which would mean fewer Latino, African and Muslim newcomers. And perhaps more Norwegians, if any want to come.
Yes, Trump is trying to Make America White Again. You're probably not surprised.
The broad amnesty that the White House offers to 1.8 million undocumented people brought here when they were children is just a diversion. The $25 billion Trump wants for his "border wall system" — really more of an intermittent fence — is mostly a sop to his base. Much more important in the long run is the fundamental shift Trump wants to make in the nation's system of legal immigration.
The administration seeks to drastically curtail the ability of immigrants to sponsor family members for entry into the country. This can only be seen as an attempt to halt the "browning" of America.
Under current law, U.S. citizens — including immigrants who are naturalized — can petition to obtain entry for their spouses, parents, siblings and sons and daughters of any age. Immigrants who are not citizens but hold green cards — meaning they are permanent residents — can sponsor spouses and minor or adult children for entry.
Trump proposes a sweeping change: Both citizens and green-card holders would be able to sponsor only spouses and minor children. As far as parents, siblings and adult children are concerned: Hasta la vista.
It is, of course, ironic that Republicans, who yammer so much about family values, would even entertain a proposal that is so deeply anti-family. But the party nominated and elected a thrice-married man who bragged about his habit of sexual harassment and allegedly paid hush money to a porn star for her silence about a tryst, so I guess that horse has long since left the barn.
The idea of limiting family-based sponsorship — championed by administration officials such as presidential adviser Stephen Miller and his former boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions — is broadly supported by GOP immigration hard-liners. Since it is difficult to argue against bringing close relatives together, proponents use the clinical-sounding term "chain migration," as if we were talking about links of metal rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.
Trump also wants to eliminate the diversity visa program, which allocates 50,000 visas each year to countries that otherwise send few immigrants to the United States. Applicants are selected by lottery but then are carefully vetted. White House claims that individuals are admitted "at random" in a program "riddled with fraud and abuse" are lies.
What is true is that the diversity lottery has primarily benefited migrants from African nations, which Trump has called "shithole countries."
The net result of Trump's plan — the whole purpose, apparently — would be to welcome fewer people of color into the United States. In an Oval Office meeting, Trump reportedly demanded to know why there couldn't be more immigrants from countries such as Norway. Surely it is not just a coincidence that Norway is one of the whitest countries in the world.
It should also be noted that while Trump's proposal would provide a 10- to-12-year path to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants who came into the country as children, it says nothing at all about the other 9 million or so here without documents. Presumably they would remain in the shadows.
There's a simple question here: Do you believe in America or not?
Throughout its history, the country has accepted waves of mostly low-skilled immigrants — German, Irish, Italian, Eastern European, now Latino. There are highly skilled immigrants, too; African newcomers, for example, are better-educated than the U.S. population as a whole, and an estimated 63 percent of people holding "computer and mathematical" jobs in Silicon Valley are foreign-born. But most immigrants over the years have arrived bearing not much more than grit, ambition and a dream.
Does an influx of workers with entry-level skills tend to depress wages? That's the wrong question. Instead, we should be asking why the federal minimum wage is so low as to be almost irrelevant.
And we should recognize that immigration gives the United States a tremendous competitive advantage. In other advanced countries, populations are aging rapidly. Immigration provides a steady stream of younger workers whose brain and brawn keep programs such as Medicare and Social Security viable.
The only coherent — if despicable — arguments for Trump's plan are racial and cultural. The way they used to put it in the Jim Crow days was succinct: White is right.
“Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children. This vital reform is necessary, not just for our economy, but for our security, and our future,” Trump said.
This is false. Legal immigrants can sponsor their spouses, children, parents, and siblings — but distant relatives, like cousins, cannot be sponsored for residency. The family reunification visa process takes years or even more than a decade, preventing "chains" from forming the way Trump suggests, as Politico reported in detail.
What's more, there are only so many family visas that can be granted. The numbers are capped by the U.S. government.
The Confederate flag resurged. The KKK burned a cross. Racial tensions flared in a Southern town.
The Alt-Right is Killing People (https://www.splcenter.org/20180205/alt-right-killing-people)
#Resist
J.B. Pritzker at center of new campaign firestorm for remarks during phone call with Blagojevich
http://abc7chicago.com/politics/jb-pritzker-at-center-of-new-campaign-firestorm-/3043149/
(http://abc7chicago.com/politics/jb-pritzker-at-center-of-new-campaign-firestorm-/3043149/)
In the videos that roiled the campus this week, biochemistry major Daniel Kleve of Norfolk professed to be the most active white nationalist in the state, disparaged Martin Luther King Jr., African-Americans and Mexicans and supported violence.
Ilhan Omar: No debate on 'whether Trump is a racist' (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/upfront/2018/02/ilhan-omar-debate-trump-racist-180209162142703.html)
President Trump is not a Racist.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DV3mANlVQAA_oZ6.jpg)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DV3mANhV4AA6ZPF.jpg)
Leading Conservative Thinker Ben Shapiro Loses His Shit Over Black Panther (https://splinternews.com/leading-conservative-thinker-ben-shapiro-loses-his-shit-1823003856)
#Resist
Black Panther Is Making Conservatives Feel Profoundly Threatened (https://splinternews.com/black-panther-is-making-conservatives-feel-profoundly-t-1823189335?utm_campaign=socialflow_splinter_twitter&utm_source=splinter_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow&__twitter_impression=true)
#Resist
And did anyone get the two Tolkien white guys? :emot_laughing:
Bad pun intended.
President Trump is not a Racist.
Federal authorities on Tuesday charged three men from rural central Illinois with the bombing of a Minnesota mosque last year and said one of the suspects told an investigator the goal of the attack was to "scare" Muslims out of the United States.
A statement from the U.S. attorney's office in Springfield, Illinois, says the men also are suspected in the attempted bombing of an abortion clinic. The Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, was bombed just before morning prayers on Aug. 5, causing a fire and extensive damage although no one was injured or killed. And there was an attempted bombing of the Champaign, Illinois, Women's Health Practice on Nov. 7.
One of the men, Michael B. Hari, 47, described in an April 2017 Chicago Tribune article how he drafted a $10 billion plan to build a wall along the border with Mexico, citing President Donald Trump's call for such a wall. Hari drew up the proposal after launching a security company, Crisis Resolution Security Services, the newspaper said.
Hari also filed a federal lawsuit just last month in central Illinois, naming the U.S. secretaries of agriculture and health and human services as defendants. It accuses their departments of violating his constitutional rights by doing the food-safety certification work that his firm, Equicert, does.
"The People of the United States have rejected the Marxist doctrine that the government shall own the means of production," he wrote, according to the court document. He requested a court order barring federal officials from interfering with his business.
The other two men charged in the mosque bombing with Hari were identified as Joe Morris, 22, and Michael McWhorter, 29. All three are from Clarence, a rural community of less than 100 residents some 35 miles north of Champaign-Urbana. A fourth man was charged with a gun offense, but he was not identified as a suspect in the bombing or attempted bombing.
A complaint said a tip in December led authorities to investigate the three men, after a person sent the local sheriff photos of guns and bomb-making material inside Hari's parents' home, where Hari often stayed. In January, a second informant told authorities that the three men had carried out the mosque bombing and the failed clinic bombing, according to the complaint.
McWhorter allegedly told an FBI agent during an interview that the three rented a pickup in Champaign and drove more than 500 miles to Minnesota with a plan to bomb the mosque, according to a criminal complaint. He said they wanted to let Muslims know they are not welcome in the United States and "scare them out of the country," according to notes taken by the FBI.
It wasn't clear from the complaint why the men may have targeted a mosque so far from Illinois.
Morris told one informant that Hari had promised to pay him and McWhorter $18,000 for participating in the mosque bombing, according to the complaint. An affidavit says the men broke a window to the imam's office and threw a pipe bomb containing black powder into the mosque. The pipe bomb exploded, causing a fire that was extinguished by sprinklers.
A witness outside the mosque heard the sound of breaking glass and saw a man get into a dark pickup truck. The truck then sped away, the affidavit said.
Minneapolis FBI Acting Special Agent in Charge Robert Bone said authorities no longer believe there is any further threat to the community in connection with this incident.
McWhorter also allegedly admitted that the three men tried to bomb the abortion clinic on Nov. 7, again renting a truck to carry out the attack. McWhorter described a PVC pipe bomb and said Morris broke a window and threw it in, where it failed to go off, according to the complaint.
The complaint also said nothing about a possible motivation for the clinic attack.
Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim advocacy and civil liberties group Council on American-Islamic Relations, welcomed news of the arrests.
"This is definitely a relief that this case is finally to conclusion and those assailants-slash-suspects are apprehended and no longer a threat to our community," Hussein said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
The Islamic Center primarily serves Somalis in the Minneapolis area and houses a mosque and religious school for children. Minnesota is home to the largest Somali community outside of east Africa, with an estimated 57,000 people, according to the most recent census estimates.
Mohamed Omar, the center's executive director, said at the time that the mosque didn't receive any threats beforehand or claims of responsibility afterward. The FBI had offered a $30,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the bombing. It's unclear if the reward money will be paid.
Officials said at the time that witnesses saw someone throw something from a truck or van before the blast and saw a vehicle speed away afterward. Mosque leaders later released security video from inside the mosque that caught the moments before the explosion, and some smoke and flying debris. The video didn't show the blast itself.
Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton called the bombing an act of terrorism when he and other officials visited the mosque the day after the explosion.
"That bombing that took place last summer was a tragedy for all Minnesotans," U.S. Attorney Gregory Brooker said, adding that it remains a top priority for law enforcement.
Starbucks Apologizes Following Outrage Over Controversial Arrest Inside Store (http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2018/04/14/starbucks-apology-philly-arrest/)
#Resist
Unfortunately we also have a unique dualism. African-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, Swedish-American, German-American.
It always has been alive, and. Well, wrong. It's just come out of the closet, along with sexual harassment, because the Twit in Chief brags about lusting after his own daughter, and grabbing women by the pussy.
It's America that's on it's deathbed. Any survivalists on the forums? If you have any preps to wrap up before the cascade failure of this clusterfuck, now's the time.
More to the point, the incidents in Charlottesville, VA, last summer were, and continue to be, perceived as indicative of the phenomenon under discussion:
(https://media3.giphy.com/media/l0Ex0h0heuV5fqFeU/giphy.gif)
More to the point, the incidents in Charlottesville, VA, last summer were, and continue to be, perceived as indicative of the phenomenon under discussion:
First of all, thank you for that entire argument.
Nazis marching the streets 117 miles from the Capital Building seems indicative of the the problem, but let me reword the problem.
That was Tolerated. "Tolerate intolerance" is the counter argument. No, that's not how it works. They weren't peacably assembled, they were Armed. So, it was less the pictures of the protest/counter protest here than the reaction to it. Specifically on the part of our Talking Head in Chief.
We do not tolerate intolerance here, because the Nazi theme song is Uber Alles. Over all, totalitarian white supremacy, the whiter, the better. They have the right to free speech, but what aren't Americans pointing out that the speech isn't just Hate, it's Anti-American. They march hand in hand, their flag with the Rebel Flag, the other greatest enemies of America.
That's why we don't tolerate intolerance, because intolerance is Zero Tolerance, and goes against the ideals we consider the core beliefs of America. Their goal their radical, outspoken goal, that they are working toward is to systematically destroy America. Sedition isn't illegal, but that's why I pointed out the distance to the capital building.
Because when they brought down the Reichtag in Berlin, it was too late. They have to be stopped now, before it's America Uber Alles, because we're already far too Over All (Of the rest of the world) for our own good.
It's not about ideology, when the ideology is ruling the world. Starting with US. Nobody, not even you can afford to wait until they come for you
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and only the dead have seen an end to war.
I'm not sure whether you did it on purpose or not, but your response precisely proves my point. So, thank you!
"Nazis marching the streets 117 miles from the Capital Building" seems indicative of only one thing... this is indicative of the fact that racism, at least organized public racism, is dying, and that these marchers were outliers.
You used the word "tolerated" in a different sense than I did.
What the president says or believes couldn't be more irrelevant.
Godwinning is one of the lowest -- and laziest -- forms of political discourse.
Rolling out that tired and commonly misunderstood Santyana quote is a cliche.
I prefer to focus on positive and demonstrable signs of hope and progress, and use that to build toward the future.
What the president says or believes couldn't be more irrelevant. The plain fact is that American society is moving forward, despite what the president says or believes. And yammering on social media is indicative of absolutely nothing.
You see the disparity there? Why does Ireland, an island off the coast of England, get as much representation as African?
It's because the only wave of immigration to the United States larger than the Irish immigration is the current immigration wave from Latin America.
Unfortunately we also have a unique dualism. African-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, Swedish-American, German-American.
It's because the only wave of immigration to the United States larger than the Irish immigration is the current immigration wave from Latin America.
Not counting the Spanish conquest, (Which caused the Latin population of the current emigration) English colonisation, German/Dutch colonisation, and Africa/Carribian/Southern triangular slave trade of the early (Pre-civil war) period.
You've heard this explanation from me before. This, counting Irish before Black is literally White Supremacy. Just like listing Irish, Italian, German, and other eastern European countries, in the same sentence as African American is a false equivalency.
By immigration waves, or current populations, African American> Irish, Italian, and German combined. There's a difference between preserving your cultural identity, and holding it over those who's identity has been stripped of them, for centuries.
1. No, mentioning Irish-American is NOT at all racist.
2. Mentioning African-American is NOT a "false equivalency" is the point is that ending the duality of identity and replacing it with just "American" is the point of the post.
3. The "Spanish Conquest" you are on about was in 1516...it's 2018...learn to count, it literally happened BEFORE there was even a United States proper.
4. German, Dutch, African...what are you on about? We are talking numbers, and the numbers say that the largest immigration waves to the United States are 1. Latinos and 2. Irish...
I not about to sit here and politely let you equate "Irish" to "racist."
1. No, mentioning Irish-American is NOT at all racist.
I didn't say it was.Quote2. Mentioning African-American is NOT a "false equivalency" is the point is that ending the duality of identity and replacing it with just "American" is the point of the post.
That's not duality of identity, that's Identity Politics, one of the core concepts of White Supremacy.Quote3. The "Spanish Conquest" you are on about was in 1516...it's 2018...learn to count, it literally happened BEFORE there was even a United States proper.
Yes, now learn to say United States when you mean United Tates, and America when you say America.Quote4. German, Dutch, African...what are you on about? We are talking numbers, and the numbers say that the largest immigration waves to the United States are 1. Latinos and 2. Irish...
A: Citation needed, and B: Heirarchy.QuoteI not about to sit here and politely let you equate "Irish" to "racist."
Once again twisting my words. I never said "Racist." You did. I said White Supremacy. As in the one we have here. The thread says Racist in the title, but I didn't write the title either.
When I want to call you a racist, I will call you a racist. I'm not going to give a special exception to Ireland when I'm talking about White Supremacy. Which is why I didn't single out Irish. You did.
Now, we've been discussing this, just fine before you Joined this forum. The only thing that's changed here is you. Not my words, not my point, not my belief. You're going to have to find someone else to call your Racist.
1. No, mentioning Irish-American is NOT at all racist.
I didn't say it was.Quote2. Mentioning African-American is NOT a "false equivalency" is the point is that ending the duality of identity and replacing it with just "American" is the point of the post.
That's not duality of identity, that's Identity Politics, one of the core concepts of White Supremacy.Quote3. The "Spanish Conquest" you are on about was in 1516...it's 2018...learn to count, it literally happened BEFORE there was even a United States proper.
Yes, now learn to say United States when you mean United Tates, and America when you say America.Quote4. German, Dutch, African...what are you on about? We are talking numbers, and the numbers say that the largest immigration waves to the United States are 1. Latinos and 2. Irish...
A: Citation needed, and B: Heirarchy.QuoteI not about to sit here and politely let you equate "Irish" to "racist."
Once again twisting my words. I never said "Racist." You did. I said White Supremacy. As in the one we have here. The thread says Racist in the title, but I didn't write the title either.
When I want to call you a racist, I will call you a racist. I'm not going to give a special exception to Ireland when I'm talking about White Supremacy. Which is why I didn't single out Irish. You did.
Now, we've been discussing this, just fine before you Joined this forum. The only thing that's changed here is you. Not my words, not my point, not my belief. You're going to have to find someone else to call your Racist.
I don't think you really know what that word means.Which is why I'm not using the word Racist. You are.
He's campaigning for governor of Georgia on a 'deportation bus' (https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/15/politics/georgia-governor-candidates-deportation-bus-trnd/index.html)
Roseanne Barr lashes out at co-stars; Trump wonders why he hasn’t gotten an apology from ABC, too (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2018/05/30/roseanne-barr-lashes-out-at-co-stars-blames-wanda-sykes-you-throw-me-under-the-bus/?utm_term=.9e7a2a70d2da)
Ambien is a hell of a drug.
#Resist
“We’re all staffers,” one of them said. Jenna Webster, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is interning at the Republican National Committee, said that she had received a mass email from the White House earlier in the day, inviting her to attend the event.
Trump intended those remarks as a refutation of the concerns and complaints of those most-outspoken members of the 2017 Eagles: Malcolm Jenkins, Chris Long, Torrey Smith, others. They’re pro athletes who make millions of dollars! Things are great! They should pipe down! They should be grateful! But the funny part is, it was the president of the United States who defined our country’s present condition purely in terms of money and wealth, and it has been the Eagles’ supposedly selfish and entitled pro athletes who have been raising money for autism research and a sports complex for Haitian children, lobbying lawmakers, and donating a year’s salary to various charities. If that’s selfishness, it’s a pretty odd form of it.
begin taking ESL languages at night school where you current reside.
begin taking ESL languages at night school where you current reside.
I am raising my daughter to speak three languages. A stranger demanded I 'speak English' to her (http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-speak-english-20180616-story.html)
#Resist
President Trump this week likened Hispanic immigrants to vermin. He warned that they would “pour into and infest our country.” And he defended his administration’s family separation policy by alleging that parents crossing the southern border with their children were poised to commit crime and murder.
For him, this language is not new.
Echoing the words and images of the white nationalist movement to dehumanize immigrants and inflame racial tensions has become a defining feature of Donald Trump’s presidency and of the Republican Party’s brand.
Trump has stirred supporters at rallies by reading “The Snake,” a parable about a tenderhearted woman who takes in an ailing snake but is later killed when the revived creature bites her. It should be heard as a metaphor for immigration, he says.
The president referred to some African nations as “shithole countries.” He posited that “both sides” were to blame for last summer’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And, again and again, he has accused black football players who took a knee during the playing of the national anthem to protest police discrimination of being un-American.
Among the many ways in which Trump stands out in the lineup of modern American presidents is his aversion to using his bully pulpit to unify the diverse nation he was elected to lead. Rather, he stokes cultural divisions and cultivates tribalism under the banner of his slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
“He takes a blowtorch to the tinder,” said Peter Wehner, a Trump critic who worked in the previous three Republican administrations and is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
“For Trump and for his presidency, the culture war is central and defining — and it’s a culture war of a particular kind,” Wehner added. “It’s not the traditional culture war of gay rights and abortion. It’s a culture war that manifests itself in race and ethnicity and nationality. That is his go-to theme.”
Throughout his public life, Trump has pitted one group of Americans against another and inserted himself in racial controversies. In 1989, as a celebrity real estate developer, he took out advertisements in New York’s newspapers calling for the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of raping a white female jogger in Central Park. More recently, Trump perpetuated for five years the lie that Barack Obama was born outside the United States to delegitimize his presidency.
As he leads his party into the potentially perilous midterm election five months from now, Trump is trying to make cultural identity a central theme of the Republican pitch to voters. His messages have been amplified by his surrogates as well as by friendly broadcasters on Fox News Channel and elsewhere in the conservative media.
Trump is calculating that by playing to people’s fears and anxieties he can maximize turnout among hard-core supporters to counterbalance evident enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Fueling Trump’s approach, advisers say, is an unremitting fear of his own: that his base could abandon him if he is deemed too weak on immigration, which was a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign.
Trump’s defenders flatly reject the suggestion that he is intentionally exacerbating the nation’s cultural differences.
“Those who focus on culture and race as the perceived center of POTUS policies are either ignoring or ignorant of the root causes of the problems,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said in a text message.
Pierson, one of the few African Americans who works for Trump, said the president’s policies are “centered around law and order and prioritizing American families.” To conclude otherwise, she said, would be exhibiting “bias.”
“I think people are conditioned to see what they want (or are being told) to see in everything that he does, not what he is actually doing,” Pierson said.
Trump has said he recoils from the images, sounds and stories beaming in this week from the border. “I don’t want children taken away from parents,” he said in a speech Tuesday. Yet he otherwise was initially defiant in the face of the growing public outcry, only capitulating Wednesday after the objections had reached a fever pitch. Even then, he suggested to reporters that it was a difficult call to retreat on his policy of separating immigrant children from their parents.
“If you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country’s going to be overrun with millions of people. And if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart. That’s a tough dilemma,” Trump said. “Perhaps I’d rather be strong. But that’s a tough dilemma.”
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), one of the party’s most hard-line voices on immigration, argued that Trump should be focusing more on culture in devising and articulating his policies.
“I don’t hear this president speaking much about race, [but] for me, there are cultural distinctions that matter,” King said. “Whenever you import large numbers of people from singular cultures, you import the culture, too. That’s why a movement towards assimilation in the broader American civilization is so important. That’s been pushed on the back burner and it should be on the front burner.”
GOP congressional leaders are plainly uncomfortable. Some of the most vulnerable House Republicans are running for reelection in swing districts where suburban voters who recoil from divisive rhetoric and policies could prove decisive.
By and large, however, they have not challenged Trump’s approach. Republicans who publicly object risk losing primary elections, being ostracized or mocked by the president. Or they find safe harbor elsewhere, as strategist Steve Schmidt, who helmed George W. Bush and John McCain’s presidential campaigns, did in announcing Wednesday that he was renouncing his membership in the Republican Party.
Before Trump’s retreat Wednesday, his advisers and allies said that the news media are covering the border situation hysterically and that there would not be long-term consequences for the president or the party.
“On a near-daily basis during the campaign, Republican operatives would spend their time freaking out about the controversy of the day,” said Andy Surabian, a former Trump campaign and White House official. “If you listened to them, you would have thought the sky was perpetually falling. The lesson of the campaign is that in Trump’s Washington, things move so fast that no single story will ever define the president, the administration or the party as a whole.”
New polls this week have shown a stark divide over the administration’s family separation policy. A Quinnipiac University poll found that American voters overall oppose the policy, 66 percent to 27 percent, mirroring other surveys.
Quinnipiac found that Republican voters support the separation policy, 55 percent to 35 percent, and that the demographic group with the deepest support is whites without college degrees.
Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster, said that in focus groups he conducted this week in Pittsburgh, many voters expressed “a sense of violation” and that women, in particular, feel empathy for the families being separated.
“This is a very unsettling time for the American voter,” Hart said. “People are unnerved, unsettled and unhappy.”
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who has long advocated that his party adopt a more inclusive posture to appeal to the nation’s diversifying electorate, warned that Trump’s strategy is risky.
“In a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” he said, “it helps to have a majority of the people behind what you’re trying to do.”
I’m unsure which closed minded response to my post is worse.
I’m unsure which closed minded response to my post is worse.
Really? Seriously? Well, that shows to me your 'open mind' is less reality than you may think it is. I suggested Democrats explain their positions, and goals, in detail. Take responsibility for what they want to actually accomplish, and how they propose to accomplish their goals.
The other is just hard boiled Antifa style, only worse, as it is fake 'antifa'.
Gutless agitation, resistance for the sake of resistance, Marxism at best.
I hope you get more replies to address your stated desire to persuade.
If Democrats continue to obstruct
Snowflake.
Please get a vocabulary. Snowflake.
An 8-year-old tried selling water for a trip to Disneyland. A white woman threatened to call police. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/06/24/an-8-year-old-tried-selling-water-for-a-trip-to-disneyland-a-white-woman-threatened-to-call-police/?utm_term=.f0f48440322f)
#Resist
my question is, why will anyone ever employ Erin Ashton (or whatever her name is), the Mom of the young person selling without a permit, after seeing the behavior and language of this 'Mom'.
No wonder she finds herself unemployed, and is out screeching for folks to buy her daughter's cold water. The kid can be understood, less so for the mom.
Since you are a snide punk, generally, I will skip your question for me.
Since you are a snide punk, generally, I will skip your question for me.
More ad hominem in lieu of a contribution? Yeah, that was rhetorical anyway. That means I wasn't expecting a meaningful answer.
Please get a vocabulary. Snowflake.
Oh, the irony here. Seriously, you're telling someone, on a story board, to get a vocabulary, and all you can come up with is "Snowflake?"
LOL! I got mistaken for Pathos? I really need to change my signature.
You guys really need to start thinking before you start lashing out at random.
Agreed, and please accept my sincere apology. We agree sometimes, sometimes not, and never wanted to associate you with him in any way.
Last year, the white nationalist Richard Spencer was kicked out of his Virginia gym after another member confronted him and called him a Nazi. This incident did not generate a national round of hand-wringing about the death of tolerance, perhaps because most people tacitly agree that it’s O.K. to shun professional racists.
It’s a little more complicated when the professional racist is the president of the United States. The norms of our political life require a degree of bipartisan forbearance. But treating members of Donald Trump’s administration as ordinary public officials rather than pariahs does more to normalize bigotry than exercising alongside a white separatist.
Over the last week, several Trump administration officials and supporters have been publicly shamed. On Friday night, the Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Va. That morning, protesters blasted a recording of sobbing migrant kids outside the home of Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of homeland security.
A few days before that, Nielsen left an upscale Mexican restaurant near the White House after protesters confronted her, chanting, “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace!” The Trump adviser Stephen Miller was also yelled at in a Mexican restaurant — someone called him a fascist, though he may not regard that as an insult. The same night that Sanders was denied service, Pam Bondi, Florida’s Trump-supporting attorney general, was heckled outside a movie theater where she’d gone to see a documentary about Mister Rogers. Adding to the furor, Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, urged people to keep jeering at members of Trump’s cabinet when they’re out and about, saying, “You tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Naturally, all this has led to lots of pained disapproval from self-appointed guardians of civility. A Washington Post editorial urged the protesters to think about the precedent they are setting. “How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?” it asked.
Of course, this is not hard to imagine at all, since abortion opponents have assassinated abortion providers in their homes and churches, firebombed their clinics and protested at their children’s schools. The Roman Catholic Church has shamed politicians who support abortion rights by denying them communion. The failure to acknowledge this history is a sign of the reflexive false balance that makes it hard for the mainstream media to grapple with the asymmetric extremism of the Republican Party.
I’m somewhat agnostic on the question of whether publicly rebuking Trump collaborators is tactically smart. It stokes their own sense of victimization, which they feed on. It may alienate some persuadable voters, though this is just a guess. (As we saw in the indignant media reaction to Michelle Wolf’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner routine, some pundits project their own concern with Beltway decorum onto swing voters, who generally pay less attention to the news than partisans.)
On the other hand, there’s a moral and psychic cost to participating in the fiction that people who work for Trump are in any sense public servants. I don’t blame staff members at the Virginia restaurant, the Red Hen, for not wanting to help Sanders unwind after a hard week of lying to the public about mass child abuse. Particularly when Sanders’s own administration is fighting to let private businesses discriminate against gay people, who, unlike mendacious press secretaries, are a protected class under many civil rights laws.
Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.
All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes, given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.
But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.
Faced with the unceasing cruelty and degradation of the Trump presidency, liberals have not taken to marching around in public with assault weapons and threatening civil war. I know of no left-wing publication that has followed the example of the right-wing Federalist and run quasi-pornographic fantasies about murdering political enemies. (“Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands,” began a recent Federalist article.) Unlike Trump, no Democratic politician I’m aware of has urged his or her followers to beat up opposing demonstrators.
Instead, some progressive celebrities have said some bad words, and some people have treated administration officials with the sort of public opprobrium due members of any other white nationalist organization. Liberals are using their cultural power against the right because it’s the only power they have left, and people have a desperate need to say, and to hear others say, that what is happening in this country is intolerable.
Sometimes, their strategies may be poorly conceived. But there’s an abusive sort of victim-blaming in demanding that progressives single-handedly uphold civility, lest the right become even more uncivil in response. As long as our rulers wage war on cosmopolitan culture, they shouldn’t feel entitled to its fruits. If they don’t want to hear from the angry citizens they’re supposed to serve, let them eat at Trump Grill.
We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/trump-sarah-huckabee-sanders-restaurant-civility.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytopinion)
The words of Martin Luther King Jr. are usually poorly used, so much so that even invoking his wisdom onto a given situation can become a limp cliche. But it’s hard to witness the collective hand wringing from Democratic leadership and their allies and and their call for civility without considering King’s word on the white moderate in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
The modus operandi of King’s white moderate is the playbook of Democratic Party and centrist, Democrat friendly media establishments: Play nice; invoke the importance of civility to those who have none; don’t make too much noise, and distance yourself from those who do.
Who is this for?
A cursory glance at Twitter and anecdotal discussions with friends don’t represent the full spectrum of Americans who are depending on the Democratic Party (reluctantly or otherwise) to right some of the Trump administration’s wrongs. But it feels safe to deduce that if these calls for “civility” were meant for the Democrats’ base, they seem to be falling on frustrated ears. “Be nice to administrative collaborators and and conspirators of a sickening child separation domestic policy” is a demoralizing hill for Democrats to die on.
Constituents aren’t calling for powerful Democrats to support some kind of campaign of bloodlust, but they are tired of Democrats being spineless and more concerned with maintaining decorum than seeking justice. As a (good) Washington Post op-ed by former Gizmodo Media Group Special Projects Desk Deputy Editor Tom Scocca published Tuesday made plain, “fretting about ‘civility’ is a luxury for pundits.” It’s also the luxury of elected officials who can easily suggest that frustrated constituents just calm down and vote when their careers and schmoozy relationships with Republican counterparts on the hill depend on it. These are the “white moderates” MLK warned us about.
There’s something absurdly out of touch about party leaders, 2020 hopefuls, and pundits taking the time to dampen the harmless catharsis of seeing those who are paid to defend Trumps most shameful policy decisions being shamed in non-violent acts of direct action. It’s tone policing a constituency that is sick of the atrocities this administration gets away with, wagging the finger at those who don’t feel morally compromised by tales of powerful administration officials being mildly inconvenienced at restaurants.
The condescension and ahistorical comparisons won’t galvanize voters to the polls this fall. And if the Democrats continue to encourage their base to quell the peaceful, righteous anger of their base, they deserve to lose.
He started as a young aide to Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the five-term Senate firebrand who denounced Martin Luther King Jr. and once called gay people “weak, morally sick wretches.” He served as a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who lost his leadership post after defending a fellow senator’s segregationist campaign for president decades earlier. And he joined the inner circle of former defense secretary and Iraq War architect Donald H. Rumsfeld before returning to the Pentagon last year to run military personnel policy for the Trump administration.
Throughout, Wilkie showed a willingness to fight on the front lines of his bosses’ culture wars. Earlier this year he led efforts to justify Trump’s near wholesale ban on transgender troops. In 1997, he rebutted a Democratic proposal to ensure equal pay for working women. And in 1993, he publicly defended a failed push by Helms to support an organization whose logo included the Confederate flag.
Wilkie grew up visiting U.S. battlefields with his father and developed a lifelong fascination with military history, including that of his ancestors, who fought for the Confederacy. He was, as recently as 2005, a fixture at the annual memorial ceremonies in Washington held by descendants of Confederate veterans around the birthday of Jefferson Davis. Wilkie also was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that defends public displays of the Confederate symbols.
SEE IT: Trump supporter berates landscapers because they're 'Mexican,' calls them 'rapists and animals' (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-news-video-harassed-mexicans-20180625-story.html)
#Resist
If you think that Mexico is only sending drug dealers and rapists,
but also worry that Mexicans are going to take your job...
What the fuck do you do for a living?
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dg4IEfmW0AE_Id9.jpg)
#Resist
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dg4IEfmW0AE_Id9.jpg)
My new girlfriend is from Peru. Her beautiful face has features that are Native America/Asiatic in a way I recently heard described as Aztec-ie looking, except Inca-ie would be a geographically better term since the Aztecs were in Mexico. Regardless, her features unmistakably show an origin from south of the U.S. border.
It’s been sunny around here finally the last couple weeks. Yesterday with her partially bare legs in my lap and her hand in mine while we chatted with her family, I commented on how dark she had gotten just in the the last month. When we first met a couple months ago her skin tone already made me look like some pale creature from a cave, but now she is really brown.
We spent the day with some of her family. Spanish was being spoken very frequently especially to her mom. My girlfriend’s English is excellent, although she still doesn’t think so.
All of this had (and has) me wondering when I’m going to have to deal with some Trumper giving her grief. I feel like it’s inevitable she’ll be accosted in my presence about her legal status (she’s here legally 9 years now), or for speaking Spanish, or for looking like a ‘Mexican’, or for just plain being too brown.
Once again the racist is hijacking this thread by making her racism and Trump's about Hillary.
#Resist
President Trump is not a Racist.
President Trump is not a Racist.
President Trump is not a Racist.
No one said Hillary was racist. Jed_ did not say anyone is racist, only that he fears racism may come to his girlfriend, some day while he is with her, and IF that ever might happen, Jed_ thinks that person would be a "Trumpist".
So, no racism in Jed_'s story, and as usual, no racism in my reply. And no racism by President Trump having to do with this thread, and Jed_'s GF.
I understand why no one wants to defend their love of Hillary Rodham Clinton or her Democrat National Committee, or her Clinton Presidential Campaign. No one wants to associate with a loser, and a second time loser for this office at that. Hillary does not do well with thinking people, who pay attention, and want the best for America.
Thank God she will never be our President. After the Statutes of Limitation run their courses, which seems to be the current plan for all involved, and after the first Clinton Impeachment records are released by the National Archives about six years from now, maybe we can then find 'common ground' about the Clintons, and especially about Mrs. Clinton.
President Trump is not a Racist.
His narcissism transcends racism.
He's an equal opportunity bigot, but the kind of (Entitlement Malignant) Narcissist that has to make himself feel superior by stomping down inferiors. So, it's not a Narcissism<or>Racism/Sexism thing. He's a Racist Chauvenistic Narcissist. His self image is underpinned by the Ubermench mentality, which is why his hate speech, policies, and hiring/firing policies are so racist, sexist, and classist. He also makes fun of people with disabilities.
A man harasses a woman for wearing a Puerto Rico shirt, saying it's 'un-American' (https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/10/us/illinois-puerto-rico-park-officer/index.html)i guess wearing a shirt with a Texas flag on it is un-American too.
#Resist
Kentucky governor under fire after saying black kids playing chess 'not something you necessarily would have thought of' (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/396949-kentucky-governor-under-fire-after-saying-kids-playing-chess-at)
#Resist
President Trump is not a Racist.
You're well on record with this. You should probably keep those views to yourself.
#Resist
LMAO!! Don't Pay any attention to Athos Wayne. He and the other Democrats here (if you hadn't noticed by now, most here are are are members from the left , and Anarchists, still weeping over having no better candidate than Hillarious to run against Donald.) As for his threat to keeping your views to yourself, that can be ignored also. Regardless of the lefts attempt to to eliminate free speech in the US, we sill have the 1st amendment to say what we wish and state our opinions. Why would someone who wears stupid and silly hats want to pay attention to them anyway? :emot_rotf:
Wish we had someone like Thrump in Australia
Racism doesn't die. Sometimes it just tries to be subtle. "I don't want to sound racist, but;" is basically obsolete. They just came back out of the closet.
yet it was the POTUS who advocated the silencing of speech.You're well on record with this. You should probably keep those views to yourself.
#Resist
LMAO!! Don't Pay any attention to Athos Wayne. He and the other Democrats here (if you hadn't noticed by now, most here are are are members from the left , and Anarchists, still weeping over having no better candidate than Hillarious to run against Donald.) As for his threat to keeping your views to yourself, that can be ignored also. Regardless of the lefts attempt to to eliminate free speech in the US, we sill have the 1st amendment to say what we wish and state our opinions. Why would someone who wears stupid and silly hats want to pay attention to them anyway? :emot_rotf:
And?Just because I support Thrump doesn’t make me a Racist, or are you saying all Thrump supporters are Racists.
This thread is about Trump, his supporters, his enablers and his racism from all of them. You came out saying you like Trump.
#Resist
And?Just because I support Thrump doesn’t make me a Racist, or are you saying all Thrump supporters are Racists.
This thread is about Trump, his supporters, his enablers and his racism from all of them. You came out saying you like Trump.
#Resist
Uganda police arrest US citizen after viral video shows attack on hotel workers (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/402498-us-citizen-arrested-in-uganda-after-attacking-hotel-workers-in)
It's bad enough to be an asshole here, but now our State Department -whose Secretary was appointed by a racist- will waste tax money and resources to get this shirtbird out of jail.
This embarrassment of a human being should rot wherever they leave him.
#Resist
Uganda police arrest US citizen after viral video shows attack on hotel workers (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/402498-us-citizen-arrested-in-uganda-after-attacking-hotel-workers-in)
It's bad enough to be an asshole here, but now our State Department -whose Secretary was appointed by a racist- will waste tax money and resources to get this shirtbird out of jail.
This embarrassment of a human being should rot wherever they leave him.
#Resist
Uganda police arrest US citizen after viral video shows attack on hotel workers (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/402498-us-citizen-arrested-in-uganda-after-attacking-hotel-workers-in)
It's bad enough to be an asshole here, but now our State Department -whose Secretary was appointed by a racist- will waste tax money and resources to get this shirtbird out of jail.
This embarrassment of a human being should rot wherever they leave him.
#Resist
No one Appoints a Sec of State.
The Commander in Chief Nominates, and the Congress confirms for Cabinet.
The Secretary of State, appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, is the President’s chief foreign affairs adviser.
But he was also a segregationist who used his mastery of the chamber’s procedures to filibuster the 1964 Civil Rights Act and oppose bills banning lynching and abolishing the poll tax.
Isakson, Perdue seek to slow debate over renaming Russell Building (https://politics.myajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/isakson-perdue-seek-slow-debate-over-renaming-russell-building/dAu5tDOUffYDO6Nt6jRf6O/)QuoteBut he was also a segregationist who used his mastery of the chamber’s procedures to filibuster the 1964 Civil Rights Act and oppose bills banning lynching and abolishing the poll tax.
#Resist
DeSantis says Floridians can't 'monkey this up' by electing African-American Democrat as governor (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/desantis-floridians-monkey-electing-african-american-democrat-governor/story?id=57476957)
He wasn't even the GOP nominee 24 hours. Who advises these people?
#Resist
Definition of monkey with
informal
: to handle or play with (something) in a careless way : to monkey around with (something) I told you not to monkey with the lawn mower.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monkey%20with
Definition of monkey with
informal
: to handle or play with (something) in a careless way : to monkey around with (something) I told you not to monkey with the lawn mower.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monkey%20with
Bless your heart.
#Resist
People Are Destroying Their Nike Gear Because Of Colin Kaepernick (https://deadspin.com/people-are-destroying-their-nike-gear-because-of-colin-1828798521)
#Resist
The Cardinals’ Antoine Bethea decided to treat himself to a new car in 2010.
He and his father, Larry, drove to a dealership in Bethea’s hometown in Newport News, Virginia where he purchased an Audi R8 right off the truck. Bethea got in the car and his dad followed him in his own car to WalMart, where Bethea was going to purchase a couple of screws so he could affix the license plate to the back of the car.
But as Bethea drove into the parking lot, three unmarked cars suddenly surrounded his new Audi. One car parked in front of him, another to the side of him and a third behind him.
An undercover police officer got out of one of the cars and, according to Bethea, asked, “What do you do?”
“I’m like, ‘Why does it matter?’” said Bethea. “Why does it matter?”
The police officer told Bethea the car had been reported stolen, which mystified Bethea because he had just bought the car minutes earlier. That’s when it hit him: He was being racially profiled.
“This is the city I grew up in,” Bethea said. “Now when they approach you like that, you feel some kind of way. Now I got to check my emotions. I’m fuming inside. I’m fuming inside. Why does it matter what I do for a living? You just lied to me and said this car was reported stolen. No it’s not. It was just because guys like me were not driving that kind of car.”
Bethea said the situation was finally resolved when his father, then a deputy sheriff, pulled out his credentials to show the officers.
“It’s disheartening, man,” Bethea said.
Nike’s announcement Monday that former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick would be the face of its “Just Do It” ad campaign sparked a firestorm on social media. Some people, angered by Nike’s decision to associate itself with Kaepernick, who began kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 to protest perceived social injustices against black, burned their Nike gear in protest. Bethea, a teammate of Kaepernick’s in San Francisco from 2014-16, applauded Nike’s decision.
“I think it was huge man, what Nike did,” he said. “The reason I say that to you is we’re all human beings. We all want to be treated equally. That’s what this whole process was about. Equality. So for them to come out there and do this and have ‘Kaep’ as the face, I think it speaks volumes.”
It angers Bethea that Kaepernick’s cause has been hijacked for political motives. He said that after Kaepernick first kneeled during the anthem before a 2016 preseason game, several of the 49ers veterans asked him to stand up in front of the team and explain why he was kneeling.
“There were some people that felt a certain type of way, but after he got up and spoke intelligently and broke down the facts of why he was doing it, people might have disagreed but they understood. It was loud and clear why he was doing it.”
Those who say Kaepernick was protesting the flag or the anthem are either uninformed or being purposefully ignorant, Bethea said.
“You know sometimes how you’re arguing with somebody and all they want to do is pick out that small little topic you’re talking about but they’re not looking at the big picture?” Bethea said. “That’s the unfortunate thing.
“There’s been video out there (of injustices against African-Americans). Documentation is out there. It’s not right and people still want to make it against the flag. They still want to make it against the military. It’s not about that. It’s about the fact that as a black man, me having a young black son when he leaves the house, I have to have these types of conversations that I really shouldn’t have to have. That’s what it’s about. I have to have different conversations with my son than you (a white reporter) will have with your son.”
Bethea believes the criticism of Kaepernick has a racist element to it. Asked whether the reaction would have been different had Patriots quarterback Tom Brady taken a knee during the anthem, Bethea replied: “It would have been totally different. Totally different.”
Bethea is hopeful that the Nike campaign – which features a black-and-white picture of Kaepernick’s face with the message, “Believe in something. Even if means sacrificing everything.” – will change how some people view Kaepernick. In his mind, the former 49ers quarterback is a hero being blackballed by the NFL for standing up to injustice.
“I’ve been reading the comments, ‘What did he sacrifice?’ He sacrificed his livelihood,” Bethea said. “You can ask anyone, ‘If you spoke up for something and it meant you would lose your job, would do you it?’ Most people would be like, ‘I would not do it.’
“I’m hoping 10 years, 15 years down the line people will be talking about Kap differently.”
Unapproved O’Rourke text message asks for ‘undocumented immigrant’ vote (https://www.statesman.com/news/unapproved-rourke-text-message-asks-for-undocumented-immigrant-vote/ry1ohq1Am99nFqv78pcwtL/)
#Resist
Dallas Station Fox4 Blasted for Report on Marijuana Found in Apartment of Man Killed By Cop in His Own Home (https://www.mediaite.com/online/dallas-station-fox4-blasted-for-report-on-marijuana-found-in-apartment-of-man-killed-by-cop-in-his-own-home/)
And here we go. When 4th Amendment was clearly violated, they chose to attack the victim.
#Resist
Texas School Superintendent Gets Racist On Facebook About Deshaun Watson (https://deadspin.com/texas-school-superintendent-gets-racist-on-facebook-abo-1829171001)
#Resist
Texas attorney general opposing teen who refused to stand for Pledge of Allegiance
‘I thought it was very nice’: VA official showcased portrait of KKK’s first grand wizard (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/i-thought-it-was-very-nice-va-official-showcased-portrait-of-kkks-first-grand-wizard/2018/10/23/f49434ca-d6c0-11e8-aeb7-ddcad4a0a54e_story.html?utm_term=.16d7c8768d3c)
#Resist
One witness told WAVE 3 News that the shooter at one point said “whites don’t kill whites.”
After releasing a photo of the suspect, authorities received a tip from an employee of the city of Jeffersontown who said he thought he saw Gregory Bush outside the First Baptist church prior to Wednesday’s shooting, city police chief Sam Rogers said. The video confirmed Bush’s presence, Rogers said. The church is headed by a black pastor and has a large African-American membership.
Bush “appeared to try to gain access to the church,” Rogers said.
The information came as news media outlets reported that Bush made a racial comment after the deadly shooting at a Kroger in Jeffersontown, a city of about 26,600 people on the outskirts of Louisville.
Trump eyeing executive order to end birthright citizenship, a move most legal experts say runs afoul of the Constitution (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-eyeing-executive-order-to-end-citizenship-for-children-of-noncitizens-born-on-us-soil/2018/10/30/66892050-dc29-11e8-b3f0-62607289efee_story.html?utm_term=.bdf9faa5ea70)Isn’t it amazing that this idiot thinks he can alter a Constitutional Amendment?
This is why Rapist Kavanaugh was railroaded on to the bench.
#Resist
Isn’t it amazing that this idiot thinks he can alter a Constitutional Amendment?
Isn’t it amazing that this idiot thinks he can alter a Constitutional Amendment?
He can do it if Rapist Kavanaugh says he can.
He can do it if Rapist Kavanaugh says he can.
1: not until he's sworn in, and B: only if the other 8 Justices agree with them. Oh, and then they have to run it by Congress to have another Amendment passed, but that probably won't be the hard part.
Large Wall Of Racist Text.
Pence sets off firestorm with campaign prayer by 'Christian rabbi' (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/pence-sets-firestorm-campaign-prayer-christian-rabbi-n926016)
#Resist
Every American gets to pray, or not, in her/his own manner, to her own God(s) or not. It is what we do... Vice President Pence is no different in this regard as is shown, same for President Trump, and for their respective family members.
Every American gets to pray, or not, in her/his own manner, to her own God(s) or not. It is what we do... Vice President Pence is no different in this regard as is shown, same for President Trump, and for their respective family members.Pence sets off firestorm with campaign prayer by 'Christian rabbi' (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/pence-sets-firestorm-campaign-prayer-christian-rabbi-n926016)
#Resist
The headline the asshole cited should give a clue, 'campaign prayer' is clearly noted. A campaign event is not "governing", but "campaigning" and people will believe what they wish to believe, about how Vice President Pence will govern.
The Bible is not a bad place to begin, when discussing prayer. For a Christian.
Messianic Judaism "is not recognized as Jewish by any mainstream Jewish movement in the United States, or by the Chief Rabbinate, the supreme spiritual authority for Judaism in Israel." Per their own website, one of their goals is converting Jewish people to believe that Jesus is the messiah.
Militia offers to help stop caravan raise concern at border (https://www.apnews.com/6cb0dae384cd45ddb9efe49a6aab1789)
Militia offers to help stop caravan raise concern at border (https://www.apnews.com/6cb0dae384cd45ddb9efe49a6aab1789)
What could possibly go wrong? I say let them do it, can't be any worse than getting the Hell's Angels to run security at a hippy concert, and would save taxpayers a lot of money on deporting the women, keeping the children. I'm pretty sure that's the current Immigration policy isn't it?
Oh nothing could go wrong at all, except maybe random shooting of brown people that look like my girlfriend regardless of legal or citizenship status.
Oh nothing could go wrong at all, except maybe random shooting of brown people that look like my girlfriend regardless of legal or citizenship status.
Did I not clearly mark that as sarcasm?
Trump says he may send 15,000 troops to U.S.-Mexico border (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ahead-of-midterm-elections-trump-says-he-may-send-15000-troops-to-us-mexico-border/2018/10/31/9e7740ec-dd4a-11e8-aa33-53bad9a881e8_story.html?utm_term=.3f4ac16988fd)
What a waste of troops and funds.
#Resist
It's pretty clear that you didn't think the situation through to a conclusion.
President Trump is not a Racist.
“Trump said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city,’”
“He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’”
King has come under fire in recent days after The Washington Post reported that he met with a far-right party with historical Nazi ties in Austria while on a trip to Europe that had been financed by a Holocaust memorial group.
At the forum in Iowa on Thursday, King defended the Austrian political group, saying that the party had purged former Nazis more than 50 years ago, except one with “a little youthful affiliation.” The party is now led by Heinz-Christian Strache, who was active in neo-Nazi circles as a youth.
King spoke about touring Holocaust sites in Poland before he flew to Vienna, an experience he said was moving.
His past statements — King has assailed immigrants, retweeted a Nazi sympathizer and said, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” in what many interpreted as an echo of the language of white nationalists — have drawn more scrutiny since the shooting massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Last month, King’s decision to endorse Faith Goldy also drew uproar. Goldy is a white nationalist candidate for Toronto mayor who appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast around the Charlottesville rally and later publicly recited a white supremacist slogan.
White Nationalist Leader Posts Pictures From White House Grounds
#Resist
“The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she writes. “What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”
Man shouts 'Heil Hitler, Heil Trump' during intermission of Baltimore performance of 'Fiddler on the Roof' (https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bs-md-ci-hippodrome-20181114-story.html)
Photos that were temporarily posted to the district’s Facebook page showed some teachers and aides wearing caricatured outfits depicting Mexican people and others dressed up as a U.S. border wall.
Man shouts 'Heil Hitler, Heil Trump' during intermission of Baltimore performance of 'Fiddler on the Roof' (https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bs-md-ci-hippodrome-20181114-story.html)
how we were all intrepreting this incident.
Man shouts 'Heil Hitler, Heil Trump' during intermission of Baltimore performance of 'Fiddler on the Roof' (https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bs-md-ci-hippodrome-20181114-story.html)
It’s being reported the man did it because of his hatred for Trump, and that he was very drunk. Fox cites the Baltimore Sun as the source for that. Sorry for no link, and I did not confirm the Sun source, it’s the middle of the night for me. But I felt it was important, as that report contradicts how we were all intrepreting this incident.
how we were all intrepreting this incident.
I felt it was important, as that report contradicts how we were all intrepreting this incident.
Man shouts 'Heil Hitler, Heil Trump' during intermission of Baltimore performance of 'Fiddler on the Roof' (https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bs-md-ci-hippodrome-20181114-story.html)
I guess they didn't have a showing of Our American Cousin at that theater? That guy bought a ticket, specifically to a Jewish musical, about the Russian pogrums, just for the chance to say something, and that's all he could come up with?
Not even a very smart troll. Too bad he couldn't get a private Booth.
All right, so you seem to think that everyone or at least all of us interpreted it as the same thing.
Note, I said ‘some’, not all.
The point I was making, and you frequently fail to grasp the points people make, is way too many of us on the left seize on an incident like this and stay with their initial erroneous interpretation of what happened.
Maybe the enemy of my enemy isn’t necessarily my friend? Otherwise, it’s unlikely I would frequently be told to ‘Go fuck [myself]’ or ‘Eat a bag of dicks’.Unless you happen to like those activities. :)
Actually you’re now understanding my point, but possibly still not sure it was my point?
But there’s no reason to be uncivil, even if we’re in the process of chopping theirs heads off and burning them in a fire as a sacrifice to Lucifer. OK, did I just go too far?
Embattled Hyde-Smith posted photo of herself in Confederate hat (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/20/hyde-smith-confederate-hat-picture-1008010)
#Resist
Embattled Hyde-Smith posted photo of herself in Confederate hat (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/20/hyde-smith-confederate-hat-picture-1008010)
#Resist
There’s a point at which a historical hat is just a fucking historical hat. Thousands of people do historical re-enactments every year wearing such hats. Trying to take the wearing of a historical hat that likely many of her ancestors wore and extrapolating to outright racism is nonsense and just the type of misplaced outrage and over the top political correctness the right uses to stir up the base.
That said, the public hanging comment joke or not was is very poor taste in a region where lynchings occurred.
Those reporting about it don't differentiate between xenophobia and naked racism.
Xenophobia is not America.
I'm just going to assume that you quoted the wrong point, because you stopped there, and didn't keep reading...America is Immigration, it's where all Americans, regardless of Color came from, and every black mark of our history is ultimately smudged by our straying away from that foundation.
Racism in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States)
Three-Fifths Compromise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise)
Internment of Japanese Americans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans)
Civil rights movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement)
Islamophobia in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia_in_the_United_States)
Racism is more American than baseball.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-caravan-confirms-what-trump-has-been-saying-for-weeks/
Notice the article is from CBS, not FOX news.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-caravan-confirms-what-trump-has-been-saying-for-weeks/
Notice the article is from CBS, not FOX news.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-caravan-confirms-what-trump-has-been-saying-for-weeks/
Notice the article is from CBS, not FOX news.
Commentary is not news.
Should we give him partial credit for not using Facebook as a source this time?
I thought you just defamed people, didn't realize you actually gave out positive feedback, too. (Or at least threaten them with partial credit.) Learn something new every day!
Over the past decade, attackers motivated by right-wing political ideologies have committed dozens of shootings, bombings and other acts of violence, far more than any other category of domestic extremist, according to a Washington Post analysis of data on global terrorism. While the data show a decades-long drop-off in violence by left-wing groups, violence by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency — and has surged since President Trump took office.
This year has been especially deadly.Just last month, 13 people died in two incidents: A Kentucky gunman attempted to enter a historically black church, police say, then shot and killed two black patrons in a nearby grocery store. And an anti-Semitic loner who had expressed anger about a caravan of Central American refugees that Trump termed an “invasion” has been charged with gunning down 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history.
This month brought two more bodies: A military veteran who had railed online against women and blacks opened fire in a Tallahassee yoga studio, killing two women and wounding five. All told, researchers say at least 20 people have died this year in suspected right-wing attacks.
Terrorism researchers say right-wing violence sprouted alongside white anxiety about Obama’s presidency and has accelerated in the Trump era. Trump and his aides have continuously denied that he has contributed to the rise in violence. But experts say right-wing extremists perceive the president as offering them tacit support for their cause.
“If you have politicians saying things like our nation is under attack, that there are these marauding bands of immigrants coming into the country, that plays into this right-wing narrative. They begin to think it’s okay to use violence,” said Gary LaFree, criminology chairman at the University of Maryland and founding director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START.
Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, said political leaders, “from the White House down, used to serve as a check on conduct and speech that was abhorrent to most people. I see that eroding.”
“The current political rhetoric is at least enabling, and certainly not discouraging, violence,” Figliuzzi said.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-caravan-confirms-what-trump-has-been-saying-for-weeks/
Notice the article is from CBS, not FOX news.
Commentary is not news.
Should we give him partial credit for not using Facebook as a source this time?
#Resist
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-caravan-confirms-what-trump-has-been-saying-for-weeks/
Notice the article is from CBS, not FOX news.
Commentary is n
ot news.
Says the man who does more copying and pasting than any other member here.
Says the man who does more copying and pasting than any other member here.
Your point is what?
If you don't like my sources, you are welcome to challenge them using credible, verifable sources.
I suspect you won't.
#Resist
Says the man who does more copying and pasting than any other member here.
Your point is what?
If you don't like my sources, you are welcome to challenge them using credible, verifable sources.
I suspect you won't.
#Resist
What sources? Copy and pastes? Because they're from left wing sources? Not your thoughts certainly.I might if you informed me of a plausible reason, according to you, why ALL right wing sources are not believable and ALL left wing articles are gospel.
this post is shoe-in to win the funniest of the year - the title is a hoot
Republicans in control of the North Carolina General Assembly had hired Farr and others in his law firm to defend congressional boundaries approved in 2011. In 2016, a federal court struck down the map as racial gerrymandering.
Farr also helped defend a 2013 voter ID law that was considered one of the strictest in the nation. In addition to requiring residents to show identification before they could cast a ballot, the law also eliminated same-day voter registration, got rid of seven days of early voting and ended out-of-precinct voting.
A federal court ruled in 2016 that the primary purpose of North Carolina’s law wasn’t to stop voter fraud but to disenfranchise minority voters. The judges wrote that the law targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision,” in part because the only acceptable forms of voter identification were ones disproportionately used by white people.
Farr’s work on the 1990 campaign of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) also has been a source of controversy.
The campaign received scrutiny for distributing postcards that the Justice Department later said were meant to intimidate black voters from heading to the polls.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-caravan-confirms-what-trump-has-been-saying-for-weeks/
Notice the article is from CBS, not FOX news.
Commentary is not news.
If it were from Hillary,or Obama, you would consider it as gospel.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-caravan-confirms-what-trump-has-been-saying-for-weeks/
Notice the article is from CBS, not FOX news.
Commentary is n
ot news.
If it were from Hillary,or Obama, you would consider it as gospel.
DC clerk stalls Native American’s marriage over 'foreign' New Mexico ID card (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dc-clerk-stalls-marriage-over-foreign-new-mexico-id-card/ar-BBQj5os?ocid=sf&fbclid=IwAR2Aqgz7m8PO6lfTCkcSEMlK5CkUjVwsGPk2rUK4TbV4ZqkYTnHPLYoLFMk)
This is proof that some people are that stupid.DC clerk stalls Native American’s marriage over 'foreign' New Mexico ID card (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dc-clerk-stalls-marriage-over-foreign-new-mexico-id-card/ar-BBQj5os?ocid=sf&fbclid=IwAR2Aqgz7m8PO6lfTCkcSEMlK5CkUjVwsGPk2rUK4TbV4ZqkYTnHPLYoLFMk)
Saffron, get the hose. The goddamned Birthers are at it again! Seriously, America isn't white. Get that through your thick skulls, you cro-magnans, it never was. Not to mention the fact that you don't have to be an American to marry one (Just ask Ivana, and Melania)
His "self-defense" defense didn't work so well, I guess.
(https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--S6GzeFbP--/c_fit,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/nypyn9cuknlqbviotff5.png)
#Resist
(https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--S6GzeFbP--/c_fit,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/nypyn9cuknlqbviotff5.png)
#Resist
Native Americans came from Asia, so many will have Asian features. As for thier language, I had no idea that Native American languages were offensive to anyone, but I guess there are all kinds of idiots out there.
Sanders trotted out a typically absurd Trump administration claim: that “thousands” of potential terrorists are coming into the U.S. over the southern border.
Wallace played a clip of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielson repeating this lie at a press conference this week.
“CBP has stopped over 3,000 what we call special interest aliens trying to come into the country on the southern border. Those are aliens who the Intel community has identified are of concern,” Nielson said in the clip.
Wallace pointed out that this is, you know, not true.
“But special interest aliens are just people who have come from countries that have ever produced a terrorist, they’re not terrorists themselves,” Wallace said.
“The state department says, quote, ‘there was no credible evidence of any terrorist coming across the border from Mexico,” he added, citing a government report from September.
Sanders responded by flatly repeating the claim.
“We know that roughly nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is southern border,” she said, before Wallace cut her off.
“I know the statistic, I didn’t know if you were going to use it, but I studied up on this,” Wallace said. “Do you know what those 4,000 people come where they are captured? Airports.”
“Not always,” Sanders replied, clearly grasping. “It’s by air it’s by land it’s by sea, it’s all of the above, but one thing that you’re forgetting is at the most vulnerable point of entry that we have into this country is our southern border. You have to protect it, and the more and more that individuals know that....”
“But they’re not coming across the southern border, Sarah, they’re coming and they’re being stopped at airports,” Wallace said.
Sanders made one last attempt to stand her ground.
“They’re coming a number of ways, they’re certainly, I’m not disagreeing with you that they’re coming through airports,” she responded. “I’m saying that they come by air by land and by sea, and the more and more that our border becomes vulnerable and the less and less that we spend time and money protecting it the more that we’re going to have an influx, not just of terrorists, but of human traffickers and drug inflow.”
She did not note how many terrorists are coming by dirigible or submarine.
You want to rail at me because we don’t have partisan liberal needs?
Why is he pretending to shut down the country? He's threatening to keep it shut down, if he doesn't get funding for his racism memorial, but he has no control over the shutdown. Even if he did, he'd blame someone else for the failure in government.
Look everybody, see how the government doesn't work when I'm president? I mean, I'll shut it down until I get me wall!
He does control the shutdown by promising to veto any budget that doesn’t include an unnecessary wall.
Even thought the Great Wall of China failed to keep out invaders, the invaders were quickly and very successfully assimilated. Go figure.
The low number contradicts statements by Trump administration officials, including White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who said Friday that CBP stopped nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists from crossing the southern border in fiscal year 2018.
So don’t go blaming the 4th Estate. They are doing their job.
There is no reason for the major networks to put Trump on television tonight -especially after they wouldn't for Obama in 2014, claiming his address was partisan.
Well, you, you, you...[audible sigh]... I I know the president has said that that was his impression, uh, from previous administrations, previous presidents. I know, I know I’ve seen clips of previous presidents talking about the importance of border security, the importance of addressing the issue of illegal immigration.
Each and every living president, for the record, has denied telling the president that they’re on his side when it comes to walling off the U.S.’ southern border.
I loved it when folks in MAGA hats were asked if we should build a wall along the Atlantic coast to keep Muslims and Africans out and they said yes.
Programs such as Carlson’s and Laura Ingraham’s — to mention a prior target of ad boycotters — espouse a monochromatic viewpoint. Carlson isn’t reporting news, but slathering an ideological spin over it. It’s impossible not to identify an advertiser with his viewpoint, because his show is nothing but viewpoint.
As we observed earlier a propos of Ingraham, companies have been comfortable advertising on these shows for two reasons. One is they covet their viewership, which is among the strongest on Fox.
They other is that they’re confident that customers who are disturbed by the shows’ views won’t even know the companies are advertising on them, because they don’t watch the shows. How many moderates or progressives even knew that Bowflex advertised on Carlson’s show, before its association was threatened with being made public?
The goal of the boycott advocates is to let those customers in on the secret. The advertisers bail, because they know in their souls that Carlson’s and Ingraham’s audiences aren’t big enough to compensate for the loss of customers nauseated by the Fox talkers, once the association becomes broadly known.
On Saturday, after King’s lament in the New York Times that “white nationalist” had become a pejorative term, the Congressional Black Caucus said Republicans need to use more than words to denounce King.
The time he claimed “our civilization” can’t be restored with “somebody else’s babies”
In 2017, King tweeted that he agreed with far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders that “our civilization” cannot be restored “with somebody else’s babies.”
As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote after King made the statement, the idea that national identity and racial identity overlap is at the center of white nationalism.
“The formulation of ‘our’ civilization being at risk from ‘somebody else’s babies” is a deliberate suggestion that American civilization is threatened by unnamed ‘others.’” Bump wrote.
The time King retweeted a message by a Nazi sympathizer and defended it for weeks
In June, King retweeted a post by Mark Collett. King declined to delete the retweet and spent weeks defending it.
Collett is a British author who, as The Post’s Avi Selk wrote, “questions the Holocaust, wants to separate the continents by races, blames slavery on Jews, mocks interracial children, wrote a book embracing National Socialism, and once called himself a ‘Nazi sympathizer.’”
On neo-fascist message boards, users celebrated a U.S. congressman’s endorsement of an overt National Socialist, Selk wrote.
The time he met with a far-right group with Nazi ties on a trip sponsored by a Holocaust memorial group
In October, during a trip financed by a Holocaust memorial group, King spoke to the Unzensuriert website. As The Post’s Mike DeBonis wrote, Unzensuriert is associated with Austria’s Freedom Party, was founded by a former Nazi SS officer and is led by Heinz-Christian Strache, who was active in neo-Nazi circles in his youth. The Freedom Party has embraced a hard-line anti-immigration stance, one that was echoed by King when he was there.
“What does this diversity bring that we don’t already have?” King said in the interview with the site. “Mexican food, Chinese food, those things — well, that’s fine. But what does it bring that we don’t have that is worth the price? We have a lot of diversity within the U.S. already.”
The time he said blacks and Latinos will be 'fighting each other’ before the United States becomes a majority-minority nation
Shortly after King was criticized for his comments about rebuilding Western civilization, King responded to a conversation between Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Univision anchor Jorge Ramos about whites becoming a minority in the United States by 2044.
“Ramos’s stock in trade is identifying and trying to drive wedges between race,” King told Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson on 1040 WHO.
“When you start accentuating the differences, then you start ending up with people that are at each other’s throats. And he’s adding up Hispanics and blacks into what he predicts will be in greater number than whites in America. I will predict that Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other before that happens.”
The time he said black people could afford abortions if they stopped buying iPhones
In a September 2016 congressional hearing, King said that even if he succeeded in taking away Medicaid funding for abortion, blacks would find a way to end their pregnancies anyway.
According to Rewire, after saying that abortion was a “tragedy for any life, no matter what color,” King also responded that “they chose to have an abortion. I would give you even money that a vast majority of mothers who say they can’t afford an abortion have an iPhone, which costs more.”
https://www.facebook.com/699942941/posts/10158314912517942/Your idea of self defense seems to include reacting to a non-violent display by a child.
Full video, including the assault, and 'gun' gesture toward the adult, by the girl who misjudged, when she threatened the adult, if not his family members prior.
Clearly self defense, IMHO, and expect charges will be dropped, perhaps other juvenile charges filed before the dust settles fully in this case.
https://www.facebook.com/699942941/posts/10158314912517942/Your idea of self defense seems to include reacting to a non-violent display by a child.
Full video, including the assault, and 'gun' gesture toward the adult, by the girl who misjudged, when she threatened the adult, if not his family members prior.
Clearly self defense, IMHO, and expect charges will be dropped, perhaps other juvenile charges filed before the dust settles fully in this case.
There was NO self-defense on Bell’s part. It was an un-warranted physical assault on the girl. Pretty much like me taking a baseball bat to you if you yell at me.
Age of a person perpetuating an assault, on his family, then on him, is no matter when acting in self defense. A person being attacked may defend.
Last fall, Patenaude expressed concern over the Trump administration’s intervention in disaster-recovery money that Congress had appropriated for Puerto Rico and states hit by hurricanes.
President Trump in late September grew incensed after hearing, erroneously, that Puerto Rico was using the emergency money to pay off its debt, according to two people with direct knowledge of Trump’s thinking.
Trump told then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico, because he thought the island was misusing the money and taking advantage of the government, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal deliberations. Instead, he wanted more of the money to go to Texas and Florida, the person said.
“POTUS was not consolable about this,” the person said.
High School Students Bring Trump 2020 Flag To Basketball Game Against Predominantly Black School (https://deadspin.com/high-school-students-bring-trump-2020-flag-to-basketbal-1831844614)
#Resist
Cárdenas, a California Democrat of Mexican heritage, said in a statement Thursday night that he was "shocked" to hear Smith's words as he waited to speak on the floor and "often heard those kinds of comments" when he was a kid growing up outside Los Angeles.
The images in videos that went viral on social media Saturday showed a tense scene near the Lincoln Memorial.
In them, a Native American man steadily beats his drum at the tail end of Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March while singing a song of unity urging them to “be strong” in the face of the ravages of colonialism that now include police brutality, poor access to health care and the ill effects of climate change on reservations.
Surrounding him are a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing “Make America Great Again” caps, with one standing about a foot from the drummer’s face also wearing a relentless smirk.
Nathan Phillips, a veteran in the indigenous rights movement, was that man in the middle.
In an interview Saturday, Phillips, 64, said he felt threatened by the teens and that they suddenly swarmed around him as he and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave.
Phillips, who was singing the American Indian Movement song that serves as a ceremony to send the spirits home, said he noticed tensions beginning to escalate when the teens and other apparent participants from the nearby March for Life rally began taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd.
A few people in the March for Life crowd began to chant “Build that wall, build that wall,” he said.
“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ ” Phillips recalled. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”
So, he kept drumming and singing, thinking about his wife, Shoshana, who died of bone marrow cancer nearly four years ago, and the various threats that face indigenous communities around the world, he said.
“I felt like the spirit was talking through me,” Phillips said.
The encounter generated a wave of outrage on social media less than a week after President Trump made light of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians by the U.S. Cavalry in a tweet that was meant to mock Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who Trump derisively calls “Pocahontas.”
In a statement, the Indigenous Peoples Movement, which organized Friday’s march, called the incident “emblematic of our discourse in Trump’s America.”
“It clearly demonstrates the validity of our concerns about the marginalization and disrespect of Indigenous peoples, and it shows that traditional knowledge is being ignored by those who should listen most closely,” Darren Thompson, an organizer for the group, said in the statement.
Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), who with Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) became the first Native American women elected to Congress last fall, said the video was difficult to watch.
“To see a group of students from a Catholic school who are practicing such intolerance is a sad sight for me,” said Haaland, who is Catholic.
Some of the teens in the video wore sweatshirts from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Ky., which sent students to Washington to participate in Friday’s antiabortion March for Life event, according to an archived page of the school’s website that was taken down Saturday.
[A march takes on new meaning in the age of Trump]
School officials and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington released a joint statement Saturday.
“We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general,” the statement said.
“The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”
Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Lakota People Law Project, said the incident lasted about 10 minutes and ended when Phillips and other activists walked away.
“It was an aggressive display of physicality. They were rambunctious and trying to instigate a conflict,” he said. “We were wondering where their chaperones were. [Phillips] was really trying to defuse the situation.”
Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder who fought in the Vietnam War and now lives in Michigan, has long been active in the indigenous rights movement.
A co-founder of the Native Youth Alliance cultural and education group, he shows up to Arlington National Cemetery every Veterans Day with a peace pipe to pay tribute to Native Americans who served in the U.S. military.
“My job has always been taking care of the fire, to keep the prayers going,” Phillips said.
In that role, he has encountered anti-Native American sentiment before: In 2015, Phillips was verbally attacked by a group of Eastern Michigan University students who were dressed as Native Americans during a theme party near the town of Ypsilanti, according to news reports.
Phillips had approached the group, informing them that their celebration was racially offensive, a local Fox News station reported. One of the students threw a beer can at him, Phillips told the news outlet.
But the Friday incident, combined with the ensuing attention from media outlets scrambling to get his story, left him shaken.
“I’m still trying to process what happened,” Phillips said. “I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed.”
Still, he said, he hopes the teens will find a lesson in all of the negative attention generated by the videos.
“That energy could be turned into feeding the people, cleaning up our communities and figuring out what else we can do,” Phillips said. “We need the young people to be doing that instead of saying: ‘These guys are our enemies.’ ”
Right-wing trolls not only immediately proposed that the visibly aggressive teens, who were draped in the symbols of white nationalism and misogyny, were in fact the aggressed upon, but began a campaign of brutal online harassment against anyone—especially journalists and especially female journalists—who accurately described what they had seen, or reacted to it on the terms it deserved. In all it was an enactment of the culture-war tactics pioneered by Gamergate and used by Donald Trump to ascend to the pinnacle of global power: While random MAGA chuds and Pepes doxxed and threatened people online in an attempt to silence them and intimidate others, respectable types urged caution, proposing that if you were thoughtful enough you would perhaps realize that you hadn’t in fact seen what you had just seen, or that if you had, maybe it wasn’t that bad at all.
“I don’t know where she got her misleading and not factual information,” Herrod said.
According to the NAACP’s history of lynchings, nearly 73 percent of the 4,800 people lynched from 1882 until 1968 were black. It’s possible that some were also Republicans, but they were lynched because of the color of their skin and not their political party, Herod said.
Here’s how we should know that what this young man is asserting above is nothing more than a weak attempt at revisionist history at best, and classic gaslighting at worst:
I taught high school music for 10 years, and took more kids on more off-campus field trips, band and solo festivals, concerts, auditions, honor band weekends, football games, marching band competitions, jazz band festivals, musicals, all-counties, all-states, and other various and assorted events than I can remember.
Under no circumstances, if we had been confronted while on a school-sanctioned field trip by a group of protesters shouting derogatory comments at us, would I have allowed or encouraged my students to respond in kind by shouting “school spirit chants” back at the protesters. All that does is escalate a potentially dangerous situation. It’s basically “Field Trip 101”–when bad, strange, or potentially dangerous stuff starts happening, get out of there.
Any teacher or administrator worth their school lunch would have quickly hustled those kids out of that location, making sure that no knuckleheads in their group started doing exactly what this kid says he asked his “teacher chaperones for permission” to do. I’ve seen other groups of kids pull this kind of stunt while on trips, and it always backfires–raising tensions, inflaming emotions, and egging on individuals with little impulse control to indulge their worst instincts. And it always seems to come from groups of students from “privileged” schools–kids who were born on 3rd base but are convinced they’ve hit a triple.
I’m not saying the Covington Catholic teachers didn’t give the kids permission to start their chants, because there is clearly an appalling lack of good judgement at this school, and among the school’s teachers and administrators–as evidenced by the fact they were on this “field trip”–to protest women’s right to control their own bodies–in the first place. That’s bad enough–full stop.
What a sad scary time to be a young, upper-class, white male. Thoughts and prayers.
Let the Gaslighting Commence: Covington Catholic High School Edition (https://www.eclectablog.com/2019/01/let-the-gaslighting-commence-covington-catholic-high-school-edition.html)QuoteHere’s how we should know that what this young man is asserting above is nothing more than a weak attempt at revisionist history at best, and classic gaslighting at worst:
I taught high school music for 10 years, and took more kids on more off-campus field trips, band and solo festivals, concerts, auditions, honor band weekends, football games, marching band competitions, jazz band festivals, musicals, all-counties, all-states, and other various and assorted events than I can remember.
Under no circumstances, if we had been confronted while on a school-sanctioned field trip by a group of protesters shouting derogatory comments at us, would I have allowed or encouraged my students to respond in kind by shouting “school spirit chants” back at the protesters. All that does is escalate a potentially dangerous situation. It’s basically “Field Trip 101”–when bad, strange, or potentially dangerous stuff starts happening, get out of there.
Any teacher or administrator worth their school lunch would have quickly hustled those kids out of that location, making sure that no knuckleheads in their group started doing exactly what this kid says he asked his “teacher chaperones for permission” to do. I’ve seen other groups of kids pull this kind of stunt while on trips, and it always backfires–raising tensions, inflaming emotions, and egging on individuals with little impulse control to indulge their worst instincts. And it always seems to come from groups of students from “privileged” schools–kids who were born on 3rd base but are convinced they’ve hit a triple.
I’m not saying the Covington Catholic teachers didn’t give the kids permission to start their chants, because there is clearly an appalling lack of good judgement at this school, and among the school’s teachers and administrators–as evidenced by the fact they were on this “field trip”–to protest women’s right to control their own bodies–in the first place. That’s bad enough–full stop.
#Resist
‘It’s just showing school spirit’
King, who has a long history of making racist remarks — and who once claimed that some immigrants had “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert” — wasn’t expelled from Congress after his comments were published by the Times, but was removed from all his committee seats in the House of Representatives. Other representatives are calling for his resignation.
But if King has been punished for his remarks, should Trump, who has also made racist comments, be punished as well? Can a president be punished in the same way as a lawmaker?
In a recent episode of “60 Minutes,” Anderson Cooper asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman congresswoman from New York, if she thought Trump was a racist. Her answer was unequivocal: “Yeah, yeah. No question.”
Later, on Twitter, the 29-year-old representative — the youngest woman ever elected to the House — went into more detail: “The president defended neo-Nazis who murdered a woman in Charlottesville. The Department of Justice sued him for not renting to black tenants. He launched his campaign by calling Mexicans ‘rapists.’ He banned Muslims. The president is racist. And that should make you uncomfortable.”
Trump did indeed kick off his presidential campaign in June 2015 by focusing on Mexican immigrants. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
That is an openly racist remark.
But there’s more. In 2016, Trump suggested that Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge then presiding over a lawsuit against Trump University, could not be impartial due to his ethnicity. Trump said in a CNN interview then that the case represented a conflict of interest because Trump wanted to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and Curiel was “of Mexican heritage.”
Believing that someone cannot do their job well because of their racial or ethnic background is one of the worst manifestations of racism. And that’s the thinking Trump played into. (It should be clarified that Judge Curiel, whose parents are Mexican, was, in fact, born in the state of Indiana.)
The president doesn’t think he is racist. “I’m the least racist person that you’ve ever met,” he said in a TV interview with CNN’s Don Lemon in late 2015.
It’s impossible to get into Trump’s head. I don’t know what’s in there. But I am well aware of what has come out of his mouth. And what I’ve heard are racist remarks.
What kind of punishment does a president who has said such things deserve? The only thing worse than a politician who unashamedly voices his prejudices is a group that tolerates his views, cheers him on and emulates his behavior. We have known about Trump’s racism for a long time, yet some 62 million Americans still voted for him.
But King’s punishment indicates that a change may be coming. I hope it goes beyond that.
The bright red Make America Great Again baseball cap entered the popular culture as candidate Donald Trump’s political swag. It has transformed into an open wound, a firestorm of hate and a marker of societal atavism.
An aesthetically benign baseball cap is a 21st-century grotesquerie.
Has there been in recent memory any other item of clothing — so specific in design and color — that pits neighbors against each other, causes classroom altercations, sparks both rage and fear, and ultimately alludes to little more than a mirage?
Fashion has upset the populace before. Miniskirts were an affront to tradition and decorum. Baggy jeans and hoodies riled the establishment. “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts and pink pussy hats were created to send a message of political protest.
But the Make America Great Again hat is not a statement of policy. It’s a declaration of identity.
The MAGA hat. The acronym reads like a guttural cry. An angry roar. MAA-GAA! It calls out to a time — back in some sepia-tinged period — when America was greater than it is now, which for a lot of Americans means a time when this country still had a lot of work to do before it was even tolerant — let alone welcoming — of them and their kind. Some see an era of single-income families, picket fences and unlocked doors. Others see little more than the heartbreak of redlining, walkers and beards, and the “problem that has no name.”
The past was not greater; it is simply the past. It’s only the soft-focus, judicious edit that looks so perfect and sweet.
In the beginning, the MAGA hat had multiple meanings and nuance. It could reasonably be argued that it was about foreign policy or tax cuts, social conservatism, the working class or a celebration of small-town life. But the definition has evolved. The rosy nostalgia has turned specious and rank. There’s nothing banal or benign about the hat, no matter its wearer’s intent. It was weaponized by the punch-throwing Trump rallygoers, the Charlottesville white supremacists, Trump’s nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Kanye West and proponents of the wall, the wall, the wall.
The hat has become a symbol of us versus them, of exclusion and suspicion, of garrulous narcissism, of white male privilege, of violence and hate. For minorities and the disenfranchised, it can spark a kind of gut-level disgust that brings ancestral ghosts to the fore. And here, in 2019, their painful past is present.
The MAGA hat speaks to America’s greatness with lies of omission and contortion. To wear a MAGA hat is to wrap oneself in a Confederate flag. The look may be more modern and the fit more precise, but it’s just as woeful and ugly.
To wear the hat, is to take on history and divisiveness. Because whatever personal meaning might be attached to the hat, the new broader cultural meaning overrides. It is too late to save the hat from this fate. And it’s too soon to try to reclaim it and give it new life.
The hat figured prominently in the viral video of young Nick Sandmann’s eye-to-eye encounter with the elderly Native American drummer, Nathan Phillips, at the Lincoln Memorial. Sandmann stood his ground. He had every right to remain there, the high schooler said during an interview on “Today.” Sandmann did not seem to consider whether it was actually the right thing to do.
How drastically his appearance changed from the fateful moment on the Mall to his appearance on national television. The world met Sandmann when he was wearing a red MAGA hat and a quilted parka. His mouth was turned up in a thin, wide smile that occasionally expanded into a toothy one. When he appeared on television to defend himself against accusations of racism and disrespect, he wore a heather gray zip-front pullover and a button-down shirt. His short brown hair was shiny. His large eyes rarely blinked. His voice was flat. The MAGA hat was gone.
Journalist Savannah Guthrie asked him whether he thought the public outrage over his behavior might have been different were it not for the hat. “That’s possible,” Sandmann said, which was his most self-aware utterance of the interview.
Last year, Kanye West knew that he was tossing a hand grenade into the social media universe when he tweeted a photograph of himself wearing a MAGA hat. It was a contrarian moment, an attempt to get a rise out of people — and, of course, he did.
The hat is a provocation. Is its corrosiveness too much for high school students to understand? No. They have studied American history. They can sort through complex issues related to the Second Amendment, climate change and abortion to not only have an opinion but also organize to change the opinion of others. They are digital natives who understand the power of images. Armed with so much knowledge, it is, perhaps, a more jolting loss, a graver reality, when youth is wrecked by the acid hatred symbolized by a hat.
To deny the hat’s message is to be in denial — not about a misunderstanding or an unfortunate incident, but a familiar, festering truth.
I don't think there's any question at this point, except for racists who want to make excuses, so it's "Not racist." More specifically, he's a White Nationalist, which is a particularly dangerous form of Racism.
‘He wants people to like him.’ I’ll take it one step further, he wants people to idolize and adore him in every way possible. Only feeding his narcissism matters.
Sources directly connected to Jussie tell TMZ, the actor arrived in Chicago from New York late Monday, and at around 2 AM he was hungry and went to a Subway. We’re told when he walked out, someone yelled, “Aren’t you that f***ot ‘Empire’ n*****?”
The 2 men — both white and wearing ski masks — viciously attacked Jussie as he fought back, but they beat him badly and fractured a rib. They put a rope around his neck, poured bleach on him and as they left they yelled, “This is MAGA country.”
But The Root has learned that Clemson’s black players, some specifically citing racism and their disdain for Trump’s divisive politics, passed on the opportunity to hang out with the real-life Mayor McCheese.
The Root spoke with three black Clemson players who each separately confirmed that many players, both black and white, had no interest in making the trip. All three acknowledged that Donald Trump was the reason they chose not to attend. Even more telling, most of Clemson’s white players were in attendance while nearly three-fourths of the school’s black football players took a hard pass on the chance to eat cold fries with the president of people who eat salads from McDonald’s.
Police Investigating Attack on Jussie Smollett as Possible Hate Crime (https://jezebel.com/police-investigating-attack-on-jussie-smollett-as-possi-1832159767)QuoteSources directly connected to Jussie tell TMZ, the actor arrived in Chicago from New York late Monday, and at around 2 AM he was hungry and went to a Subway. We’re told when he walked out, someone yelled, “Aren’t you that f***ot ‘Empire’ n*****?”
The 2 men — both white and wearing ski masks — viciously attacked Jussie as he fought back, but they beat him badly and fractured a rib. They put a rope around his neck, poured bleach on him and as they left they yelled, “This is MAGA country.”
#Resist
UmmHmm... sounds very Chicago, I am sure, to everyone... yep..
UmmHmm... sounds very Chicago, I am sure, to everyone... yep..
Fuck off you racist shitbird.
#Resist
I'm not surprised you are defending a police department that covered up the murder of a civilian by an officer shooting him 16 times, 9 in the back.
The funny thing is if it was gun violence you'd go back to your bullet scarred racist thread.
Don't you have a white sheet to wash before you go have sex with Richard Spencer?
#Resist
You believe this stuff, and present it here along with your usual dozen cut and paste items you blame on President Trump,
You believe this stuff, and present it here along with your usual dozen cut and paste items you blame on President Trump,
Do you have a credible verifible source to refute things? No. you never do. All you have is your racist ranting, shitbird.
#Resist
Common sense.
But the decision that year of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick to kneel during the national anthem, to protest police brutality and racial injustice, proved too alluring for the president. Trump wrapped himself around an American flag pole at rallies, stoking white racial anxiety.
“Whenever the president finds himself in a political pickle — to put it crudely — he reaches for the culture wars,” said Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chairman of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.
The president ignored the racial message that the mostly African American players sought to convey. He learned quickly that he could elicit loud, appreciative boos whenever he disparaged Kaepernick or accused players of disrespecting the anthem and the flag.
A Conservative Nonprofit That Seeks to Transform College Campuses Faces Allegations of Racial Bias and Illegal Campaign Activity (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-conservative-nonprofit-that-seeks-to-transform-college-campuses-faces-allegations-of-racial-bias-and-illegal-campaign-activity)
#Resist
“I got to sacrifice a lot of money to perform. But there’s a man who sacrificed his job for us, so we got to stand behind him,” she told the AP.
Speaking about her husband, rapper Offset, Cardi B told the AP, “My husband, he loves football. His kids play football. It’s really hard for him...He really wants to go to the Super Bowl, but he can’t go to the Super Bowl, because he’s got to stand for something.”
A veteran Detroit police officer has been demoted and reassigned after posting a Snapchat video showing a black woman whose car he had just impounded walking home alone while he and another officer make derogatory remarks about her to each other in the background.
Meanwhile, pre-made captions that say “What black girl magic looks like” and “celebrating Black History Month” appear at the bottom.
The officer who created the video was identified as Gary Steele. He and his partner had pulled the woman over on Tuesday night because her registration had expired, police said. The officers were going to have her vehicle towed.
Detroit Police Chief James Craig told reporters at a news conference Thursday that body camera footage had shown that there was an offer — from either Steele or his partner — to escort her home. The woman refused, Craig said.
“She gets to do that, but we get to make sure she gets safely home,” Craig said. “But then to put up this insensitive post makes me angry.”
The Snapchat video, which was first published by ABC affiliate WXYZ, shows the woman walking away down a snow-covered street.
“Priceless,” one of the officers says.
“Walk of shame,” the other responds.
“In the cold,” the first one says again. Later one of the two says, “Bye, Felicia.”
The temperature low on Tuesday was 2 degrees in Detroit, according to AccuWeather.
Craig said that Steele, an 18-year veteran of the police department, had been demoted from corporal to officer.
“I’m not troubled, not disappointed; I am angry,” Craig said. “To make the reference to Black History Month is even more problematic.”
Craig said that the department was continuing to look into the incident and that Steele’s partner was also being investigated. Steele did not return a request for comment sent to his LinkedIn profile.
The woman whom the police had stopped was identified by local news outlets as Ariel Moore.
“What they put on there, that’s racist,” her mother, Monique Mobley, told WXYZ. “They demeaned my child for no reason.”
Moore told the outlet she was shocked.
Steele has had issues with the law himself. In 2008, he was charged with attacking an ex-girlfriend and firing a gun near her head, according to the Detroit News. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was able to keep his job at the police department, the newspaper reported.
“His history is troubling,” Craig said. “There’s a pattern, and I’m concerned about that pattern.”
He added: “He’s been a part of the force for 18½ years, who we expect to know better. This is a person who trains new officers.”
Craig said the officer could be suspended or fired. He said he called Moore’s mother to express his concerns about the way her daughter was treated. The department would pay the fee for towing her car, he said.
Another white Detroit police officer made a Snapchat post widely interpreted as racist last year. The video showed him in uniform with the text, “Another night to rangel [sic] up these zoo animals.” That officer, who was still on a probationary period at work, was fired.
There is no need to impound a car for expired tags. Wherever I've lived I've just gotten a fix-it-ticket. This must be white privilege.
A police officer who shot and killed a black man during a shootout inside an Alabama mall will not face criminal charges.
A report released by the state’s attorney general’s office says that the officer “reasonably exercised” his power when he shot Emantic “EJ” Fitzgerald Bradford Jr. three times. In the seconds-long chaos of that Thanksgiving night, the officer saw Bradford holding a gun, just feet away from a man who had just been shot. He saw the 21-year-old as “an immediate deadly threat to innocent civilians,” the report says, even though Bradford never fired his gun.
Bradford’s death last November reignited racial tensions in Alabama, where protesters marched through the Riverchase Galleria in the city of Hoover, demanding why police killed a black man who may not have had anything to do with the shooting.
Now, more than two months later, the decision to not charge the officer has renewed that outrage. On Tuesday evening, protesters outside Hoover City Hall burned American flags spray-painted with “BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER,” as police officers watched from a short distance. Frank Matthews, one of the organizers, told the Associated Press that demonstrators, including Bradford’s relatives, will travel to Montgomery, Ala., on Wednesday to protest outside the office of Attorney General Steve Marshall.
“Today took us by surprise. Some were expecting today’s outcome; some weren’t,” Iva Williams, of the Birmingham Justice League, told reporters Tuesday. “But nevertheless, we stay united in seeking social justice moving forward.”
The 26-page report released on the same day pieced together the rapid sequence of events that began with two gunshots just before 10 p.m. on Nov. 22, during early Black Friday shopping at the Galleria.
Erron Brown, the man who police later said was the actual shooter, allegedly shot 18-year-old Brian Wilson on the mall’s second-floor walkway and left him lying outside a JC Penney store. Brown ran toward the store as mall shoppers scurried away. Bradford, who was nearby, ran in the opposite direction. But he then turned around and headed toward the JC Penney and Wilson, with his gun drawn, the report says.
The officer and his partner, both of the Hoover Police Department, were behind him, just a few feet away. Believing that Bradford was about to kill Wilson, who was already bleeding with gunshot wounds, the officer fired four shots. He struck Bradford in the head, neck and lower back.
But what the officer didn’t see in the immediate chaos was Brown, who shot Wilson just seconds earlier, the report says.
Witnesses told investigators that they heard the officer tell Bradford to drop his weapon. But the officer told investigators that he was unable to give verbal commands because of the “quickness of the event” and the “immediate threat” he believed Bradford posed, according to the report.
The report says that the officer’s actions were consistent with nationally-accepted standards for active shooter scenarios. That he mistakenly believed Bradford shot the victim “does not render his actions unreasonable,” the report says.
“First, a reasonable person could have assumed that the only person with a gun who was running toward the victim of a shooting that occurred just three seconds earlier fired the shots,” the report says, adding that the other officer and two other witnesses all said that, at that moment, they also believed Bradford was the shooter.
Brown, 20, has been charged with attempted murder. His attorneys said he shot Wilson in self-defense, according to the report, which did not say how the two men knew each other. There has been no evidence that Bradford was involved in the shooting, and it remains unclear why he drew his gun.
The report also did not say whether he knew that the officers were behind him. Although the officer was wearing a body camera, he did not activate it before he shot Bradford. There was “no time” to do so, he told investigators.
Bradford’s parents and a family attorney said earlier that he had a concealed-handgun license. The officer, who was not named, was placed on administrative leave after the shooting, though it was not immediately clear if he has been reinstated. The Hoover Police Department have not responded to a request for comment Wednesday.
Outside Hoover City Hall on Tuesday evening, activists vowed to not stay silent. Bradford’s relatives, including his mother, held pictures of him in military uniform. (A spokesman for the Army told The Washington Post last year that Bradford began training but never completed it.)
“You shoot my firstborn son three times, three kill shots and you call this justice. How dare you. If this happened to your child, would you still call it justice? Because I don’t see any justice in this,” Bradford’s mother, April Pipkins, said in front of reporters, her eyes watery.
“He didn’t deserve what you did to him. . . . If you felt like he was a threat, you had to shoot him three times? And you say that the law justifies this? No verbal warning. Shame on you. Shame on you,” Pipkins continued.
Bradford lived just outside of Birmingham, a few miles from the mall. He was one of the nearly 1,000 people who were shot and killed by police in 2018, according to The Post’s database of police shootings, and is now among the many black men whose deaths have led to accusations of systemic racism in U.S. law enforcement.
“I came in from a trip I’d been on and I spotted — it looked odd — it was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had, and something didn’t click with me. … I went over to the police and told them what I saw and they went over and questioned her and, by God, she was trafficking that kid,” McCain said.
The nonprofit group, Coalition for Good Governance, discovered that approximately 127,000 Georgia voters simply did not have a recorded vote for lieutenant governor. Officials claimed that most of these voters simply left that part of their ballot blank. And for some reason, the “drop-off” (the difference between people who voted and people who skipped one race) was disproportionately Democrat.
They had never seen it before. The drop-off rate in Georgia was higher than almost any statewide office drop-off rate they had ever seen. So they gathered the best minds in the election data field from across country to try to figure out the mystery of Georgia’s disappearing votes. It seemed so random. Researchers researched, voting machine experts looked at the machines’ known vulnerabilities and professors ran analytics and statistical regressions. But no one could figure out the pattern.
And then, just for kicks, they decided to run a statistical analysis by race. And viola, they discovered that an incredibly disproportionate number of Georgia voters in majority black precincts didn’t record a vote for the second-highest office in the state. They found the anomaly was incredibly high in precincts where there were high percentages of black registered voters.
And here is the troubling part: According to the report from Coalition for Good Governance (CGG) and the experts who spoke with The Root, the undervote wasn’t concentrated in Democratic areas. It seemed to specifically happen in black neighborhoods. Even stranger, the black voters’ absentee mail ballots didn’t reflect the drop-off, only the people who voted on election day and people who voted on machines in early voting.
The CGG’s report notes:
The extreme undervote issue occurred at statistically significant levels in 101 of Georgia’s 159 counties. However, the undervotes on voting machines are concentrated in precincts where African American voters make up the majority of the precincts’ registered voters. The rates of touchscreen machine–reported undervotes in such precincts in the Lt. Governor contest are far greater than the undervote rates in non–African American neighborhoods regardless of whether those neighborhoods lean Democratic or Republican. The undervote problem did not happen at the same exaggerated levels in many primarily White neighborhoods that overwhelmingly voted for Stacey Abrams and other Democrats, rebutting the argument that the difference can be explained by party-driven voter behavior.
The Root was given exclusive access to the analyzed data from the 2018 Georgia elections as well as the analyses conducted by some of the top experts in the area. We spoke to the researchers and none of them has a logical explanation for the statistical anomaly.
The statistics professor from Berkeley can’t explain it. The voting-machine expert at the University of Michigan doesn’t know how it happened. The data analyst from one of the leading analytics firm in the world has no answers. The political expert who specializes in black voters can’t explain it.
Either all the black people in Georgia collectively decided to skip a vote on their ballot or something happened with the voting machines. But only the machines where black people voted.
All those Trump supporters in the black community
All those Trump supporters in the black community, did not like the Lieutenant Governor slate of Candidates. Is the only possible answer... yep... need better Candidates for Lt. Governor, seems. Want one? VA has more than they want.
Or are all southern states the same to you?
The topic was Georgia, and not Virginia. Or are all southern states the same to you?
Don't forget Kanye.
I was thinking more along the lines of Sherman’s visit.
And it was a very effective urban renewal project.
Wisconsin GOP Throws Successful Tantrum To Remove Colin Kaepernick From Black History Month Resolution (https://deadspin.com/wisconsin-gop-throws-successful-tantrum-to-remove-colin-1832591070)
#Resist
Police Investigating Attack on Jussie Smollett as Possible Hate Crime (https://jezebel.com/police-investigating-attack-on-jussie-smollett-as-possi-1832159767)QuoteSources directly connected to Jussie tell TMZ, the actor arrived in Chicago from New York late Monday, and at around 2 AM he was hungry and went to a Subway. We’re told when he walked out, someone yelled, “Aren’t you that f***ot ‘Empire’ n*****?”
The 2 men — both white and wearing ski masks — viciously attacked Jussie as he fought back, but they beat him badly and fractured a rib. They put a rope around his neck, poured bleach on him and as they left they yelled, “This is MAGA country.”
#Resist
What is the latest, from those who pay attention to Chicago crime, and anyone who cares about the alleged 'attack' in this case.
Stories change, seems
What is the latest, from those who pay attention to Chicago crime, and anyone who cares about the alleged 'attack' in this case.
Stories change, seems, and yet another tale with new quotes, and different time lines, etc. was presented on Good Morning America, trying to keep this particular story alive, seems.
Police said phone access they received was not helpful much. The pics taken of two unknown fuzzy subjects on a sidewalk were taken around the area of the reported attack, however the time stamp reads at least 30 minutes prior to the complaint about an attack.
There are before and after security cams, as to the reporting person having a white rope adorning his neck and shoulders, with a one minute gap between the pics. The times noted, and the location of the security cams, fits none of the report times or locations, close as Police can determine.
FBI and a dozen Chicago Police Detectives have been working the case since it was reported... with little known as to facts, so far.
I don't see a credible, verifible source linked to back any of this up.
#Resist
Prime Time Sports forced to close, after removing Nike apparel from store (https://koaa.com/news/2019/02/11/prime-time-sports-forced-to-close-after-removing-nike-apparel-from-store/)
Wrecking your own business to own the libs.
#Resist
Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi emphasized that the two “are not considered suspects at this time.”
He later characterized as “unconfirmed” a report by WLS-Ch. 7 that the two men had staged the attack with Smollett who, the station said, feared he was being written off “Empire.”
“Media reports (about) the Empire incident being a hoax are unconfirmed by case detectives,” Guglielmi tweeted Thursday evening. “Supt Eddie Johnson has contacted @ABC7Chicago to state on the record that we have no evidence to support their reporting and their supposed CPD sources are uninformed and inaccurate.”
Prime Time Sports forced to close, after removing Nike apparel from store (https://koaa.com/news/2019/02/11/prime-time-sports-forced-to-close-after-removing-nike-apparel-from-store/)
Wrecking your own business to own the libs.
#Resist
“As much as I hate to admit this, perhaps there are more Brandon Marshall and Colin Kaepernick supporters out there than I realized,” said [Prime Time owner] Martin.
Chicago police question actor Jussie Smollett and 2 'persons of interest,' including man who appeared on 'Empire' (https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-jussie-smollett-persons-of-interest-20190214-story.html)QuotePolice spokesman Anthony Guglielmi emphasized that the two “are not considered suspects at this time.”
He later characterized as “unconfirmed” a report by WLS-Ch. 7 that the two men had staged the attack with Smollett who, the station said, feared he was being written off “Empire.”
“Media reports (about) the Empire incident being a hoax are unconfirmed by case detectives,” Guglielmi tweeted Thursday evening. “Supt Eddie Johnson has contacted @ABC7Chicago to state on the record that we have no evidence to support their reporting and their supposed CPD sources are uninformed and inaccurate.”
For someone spouting MAGA constantly you should be celebrating the beating of a gay black man.
Unless you are willing to denounce that racist mantra, of course.
#Resist
Thanks for the update... seems much more to be learned about this Fake News Story.. more than Fake, created Hate Speech for Political reasons... or mental health call for help? A bit of both, seems... Am sure you will keep us up to date.
Thanks for the update... seems much more to be learned about this Fake News Story.. more than Fake, created Hate Speech for Political reasons... or mental health call for help? A bit of both, seems... Am sure you will keep us up to date.
So you're not willing to denounce that racist mantra. Got it.
#Resist
Make America Great Again, and Keep America Great are President Trump's election campaign slogans, and are not racist in any manner.
Make America Great Again, and Keep America Great are President Trump's election campaign slogans, and are not racist in any manner.
What you and your ilk attribute in your hatred of our President is beyond me.
Make America Great Again, and Keep America Great are President Trump's election campaign slogans, and are not racist in any manner.
And yet, you define "Great" by how white people are. You ignore the fact that what made America "Great" was accepting people, from all over the world, and making us citizens. (Not to mention fighting Nazis, instead of tolerating them)
Also, MAGA is, and always was an insult to America. It explicitely states that America wasn't great under a "Kenyan" president, and he can do better. He's not doing better. He's ruining it.
We were keeping America great, just fine, until you elected a racist swindler to Break it.
Make America Great Again, and Keep America Great are President Trump's election campaign slogans, and are not racist in any manner.
What you and your ilk attribute in your hatred of our President is beyond me.
Actually as his base interprets it, it is racist. It’s even beyond what Psi mentions that we’re somehow ‘great again’ because a black man is no longer president. The ‘again’ part implies there was this hypothetical time in the past the country was great, presumably perhaps the 1950s prior to civil rights and when women were only expected to be part of the workforce to find a husband, then quit to raise a family.
I will agree there was something about the 1950s that was great and requires serious reconsideration. The wealthy were taxed at a 90% rate.
Well at least "The Donald" will be only a one term president.
The only problem for the next president is that he / she will be spending the next four years repairing what "The "Donald" did to this country and to our allies in general.
The next president will have a huge job ahead of him / her.
Lets face it "The Donald" set this country back at least 60 years for minority people.
Love,
Liz
Excuse me, and as I recall, I have not characterized the President's Election Campaign Slogan(s) at all.
Excuse me, and as I recall, I have not characterized the President's Election Campaign Slogan(s) at all.
Trump AND his Supporters. That would be You. You take all his talking points, about those people not being people, but criminals. That's a Trump supporter being racist. Dehumanizing people based on where they come from, yearning to be free.
If you make America great (He hasn't) then everyone will want to be American, again.
You choose to expound, presume and ascribe motives and meanings, twisting what is, until it no longer resembles itself, then condemning the strawman you have created.
Well at least "The Donald" will be only a one term president.
Lets face it "The Donald" set this country back at least 60 years for minority people.
If anything, Trumps policies and proclamations have -- inadvertently and ironically -- proven a boon to "minority people." They have focused a spotlight on minorities, and the instances where their rights may have been violated or denied, and they have engendered a positive national discussion. And, perhaps most to the point, they have exposed the troglodytic [sic] deniers of rights as unacceptable outliers.
We are not moving ahead, we are moving backwards.
We are not moving ahead, we are moving backwards.
We were until the mid-terms. It looks like (Too early to tell) we've stopped it. We're not yet turning it around to Progress, but we've at least started to. IMNSHO.
Methinks this is part of how we talk past one another, often, that and a refusal to accept the result of the 2016 election.
If anything, Trumps policies and proclamations have -- inadvertently and ironically -- proven a boon to "minority people." They have focused a spotlight on minorities, and the instances where their rights may have been violated or denied, and they have engendered a positive national discussion. And, perhaps most to the point, they have exposed the troglodytic [sic] deniers of rights as unacceptable outliers.
Excellent point. Unintentional as it may be, he's not only shewn a spotlight on the plight of Americans, but he's also emboldened the Racists so they came out of the woodwork. We had no idea how bad our white supremacy problem was, until the cowards got brave enough to march down the streets, waving their conflicting flags together.
I'm dropping out of this conversation, simply because I don't think that we should speak for the minorities (Jews, Blacks, Mexicans and a host of others)
He does need to "sign anything".....his actions, his words inflame crowds against minorities. This country left the 60's behind and started down a road of equality for all, now with Donald we are seeing a resurgence of hate that has not been seen since the 60's (the only difference is now we have become more of an equal opportunity haters...). We are not moving ahead, we are moving backwards.
Love,
Liz
I'm dropping out of this conversation, simply because I don't think that we should speak for the minorities (Jews, Blacks, Mexicans and a host of others).....They would be the ones that would tell you what they are suffering.
Reality is, we have a Southern Border, and it must be defended, and it must be enforced against unwanted, unauthorized entry by anyone, and everyone.
Citizenship is what is desired for most residents in any Country, and authorized non-citizen residents is expected, in fact planned for and around by local government folks. Legal residents are the goal, hopefully good folks who obey the laws, and support the ideals of their neighbors as well, and who mind their own business, live their own lives, and support their own families, pay their bills, etc.
We need always to be working toward those goals in a serious way.
Making people Illegal, while allowing the wealthy to Buy immigrants from Europe (Ivanka, and Melania) is Racial Favoritism from White Supremacists.
Making people Illegal, while allowing the wealthy to Buy immigrants from Europe (Ivanka, and Melania) is Racial Favoritism from White Supremacists.
(http://www.jeankilbourne.com/jbp/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/boxed.jpg)
Woo. MOB from FSU.
I guess typing, "I denounce MAGA for being an inherently bigoted mantra," is harder than multiple long posts of verbal diarrhea.
Quote me, please:
peopleILLEGAL ALIENS, TRESPASSERS
I don't care what you think or see, know what I believe, and love MAGA slogan.
#Fuck Off
I don’t know why others insist on torturing themselves and responding to your drivel.
Quote me, please:
Okay:peopleILLEGAL ALIENS, TRESPASSERS
They're not people. The crime of "Tresspassing" makes them subhuman to you. In your own words. "It's just a slogan."
Yeah, where did you get the idea that Trespassing makes someone no longer a person, but all the crimes Trump&co commit doesn't?
What color is Illegal? What color is Criminal? Since you're so fond of colorcoding, but you don't want to sound racist...
I don't care what you think or see, know what I believe, and love MAGA slogan.
#Fuck OffI guess typing, "I denounce MAGA for being an inherently bigoted mantra," is harder than multiple long posts of verbal diarrhea.
Their color, race, height, mustache or not, gender, none of that makes any difference if they are breaking our law, they are subject to the law.
Don't break the law. Don't come here unauthorized, not at all.
I don’t know why others insist on torturing themselves and responding to your drivel.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally keep pointing out the flaws in this narrative, because I live here. I've lived in every state on the Mexican border, and I know the truth. The truth is, we can't afford to get rid of the undocumented immigrants. Their labor underpins the economy of too many states, and the cost of this is going to be more than the losses of having to replace them in the workforce.
I’m 190 miles closer to the border than you are. In the last year I’ve been in Brownsville, McAllen, Mission, Rio Grande City, Zapata, Laredo, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, and El Paso. And I agree with you.
I’m 190 miles closer to the border than you are. In the last year I’ve been in Brownsville, McAllen, Mission, Rio Grande City, Zapata, Laredo, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, and El Paso. And I agree with you.
So does pretty much everyone that actually lives around these "Criminals" and works with them. As opposed to the staged rally full of shills that they imported to El Paso to make it look like the people of El Paso agreed with him.
As if Texans can't tell when someone ain't from 'round 'ere.
That is actually what occurred in McAllen and in El Paso. Bleached blonde Republican country club bitches from Dallas, car pooling to the Valley to cheer on the Führer. Even Rep. Will Hurd, the Republican whose district includes over 600 miles of border, has said Trump is full of shit.
(It's safe to say that I'm using the term "White People" derogatorily).
There are six truck farms right around my horse farm.
They ALL hire immigrants to work the fields.
They hire them simply because "The White People" will not do the jobs that the immigrants are happy to do. Some of the bigger farms have housing for the workers
(that's right....housing). They simply want to keep them because THEY ARE such good workers. My small town (and this is NW New Jersey) is a mixture of Central and South Americans along with the rest of the "The White People".
(It's safe to say that I'm using the term "White People" derogatorily).
Because to be honest we need those workers (as was stated earlier). They are a large part of New Jersey's Economy.
Love,
Liz
(It's safe to say that I'm using the term "White People" derogatorily).
In which case, you're just as racist as the people you condemned further back in this thread...
And ultimately, Wisconsin agreed with the GOP on this call!
I forget, was it the white Baby Momma, or the Baby Daddy who ran off, who was from Wisconsin to begin the process?
Were the family, Mom and Dad, who adopted Colin, who rescued him from a failed situation, who raised Colin well, with California values, originally from Wisconsin, and thus worthy of note in the suggestion this activist out of work former football player be lauded for being not worthy to be part of a NFL locker room since he betrayed his team, the team owners, and the team's fans?
He opted out of his contract, bet on himself, and lost, seems... if he really wanted to play Football.
As a leftist Activist, he is doing well, nice NIKE money deal.
Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid ended their collusion grievance against the NFL on Friday, according to a joint statement between the NFL and Kaepernick's lawyers Mark Geragos and Ben Meiselas.
"For the past several months, counsel for Mr. Kaepernick and Mr. Reid have engaged in an ongoing dialogue with representatives of the NFL," said a statement released on Friday. "As a result of those discussions, the parties have decided to resolve the pending grievances. The resolution of this matter is subject to a confidentiality agreement so there will be no further comment by any party."
The NFL Players Association issued the following statement:
"Today, we were informed by the NFL of the settlement of the Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid collusion cases. we are not privy to the details of the settlement, but support the decision by the players and their counsel. We continuously supported Colin and Eric from the start of their protests, participated with their lawyers throughout their legal proceedings and were prepared to participate in the upcoming trial in pursuit of both truth and justice for what we believe the NFL and its clubs did to them. We are glad that Eric has earned a job and a new contract, we continue to hope that Colin gets his opportunity as well."
Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL in October 2017. The former 49ers quarterback has not played since the 2016 season, going unsigned in free agency in each of the past two seasons. Kaepernick drew attention throughout the nation in 2016 when he began to kneel during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racial injustice.
Reid signed with the Panthers in September 2018. He joined Kaepernick in protest during the anthem with the 49ers, and was also a member of the grievance against the NFL.
Kaepernick went 28–30 as San Francisco's starter from 2012-16. The 49ers won the NFC and lost Super Bowl XLVII in 2012.
In which case, you're just as racist as the people you condemned further back in this thread...
Both the Kaepernick and Reid grievances cited President Donald Trump’s role in pressuring NFL owners to bar any players who protested during the national anthem. The New York Times reported that NFL owners held a closed-door meeting in October 2017 in which a number of them appeared terrified of Trump. The Wall Street Journal further reported that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had been asked by Trump to deliver a message to the owners about the protest movement. “This is a very winning, strong issue for me,” Trump said, according to the Journal’s account of Jones’ deposition. “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”
Now it appears that listening to Trump on the issue may have cost owners—and won Kaepernick—many millions of dollars without doing anything to stop the years-long discussion around police brutality and systemic racism that Kaepernick, Reid, and other NFL protesters helped generate.
Meanwhile, Kaepernick has been honored by multiple human rights organizations for his stand for social justice, and in September was made the face of a new Nike campaign that used his status as a modern-day civil rights icon to sell sneakers.
You are of no matter at all, what you think, especially regarding this Candidate, now our President because he won the 2016 Election, as Americans decided we did not want even one day of what Democrats were pushing for our lives.
Chicago police question actor Jussie Smollett and 2 'persons of interest,' including man who appeared on 'Empire' (https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-jussie-smollett-persons-of-interest-20190214-story.html)[/quote]QuotePolice spokesman Anthony Guglielmi emphasized that the two “are not considered suspects at this time.”
He later characterized as “unconfirmed” a report by WLS-Ch. 7 that the two men had staged the attack with Smollett who, the station said, feared he was being written off “Empire.”
“Media reports (about) the Empire incident being a hoax are unconfirmed by case detectives,” Guglielmi tweeted Thursday evening. “Supt Eddie Johnson has contacted @ABC7Chicago to state on the record that we have no evidence to support their reporting and their supposed CPD sources are uninformed and inaccurate.”
For someone spouting MAGA constantly you should be celebrating the beating of a gay black man.
Unless you are willing to denounce that racist mantra, of course.
#Resist
‘This is America in 2019’
...
Am sure you will keep us up to date.
Am sure this will be addressed by the powers that be, in Illinois.
Make no mistake: Colin Kaepernick won.
Facing the most formidable foe of his career, Kaepernick stood his ground — and the NFL backed down. Although the terms of the league’s settlement with Kaepernick and Eric Reid — close friends and former San Francisco 49ers teammates who, in collusion grievances, alleged owners conspired to keep them unemployed because of their political activism — announced Friday are cloaked in a confidentially agreement, Kaepernick’s victory is as clear as his talent as a quarterback.
The NFL finally admitted as much, ending its lame arguments about why Kaepernick remains unsigned after last playing for San Francisco in 2016. That was the year Kaepernick sat and then kneeled to draw attention to police brutality and systemic oppression. Reid was the first player to kneel alongside him.
At the Super Bowl in Atlanta last week, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell continued to push the company line, essentially saying no teams believe that Kaepernick is capable of helping them win. It’s one thing to offer that tripe to the media. It’s quite another, however, to convince an arbitrator that none of the league’s 32 teams could use a passer who has made 58 career starts, helped a team reach a Super Bowl, is only 31 years old and has the fourth-best touchdown-to-interception ratio of all time.
Kaepernick’s grievance was expected to go to a full hearing sometime this year, and the NFL was facing the possibility of massive financial liability if it lost. Without a winning hand, the NFL decided to fold, said Stanford Law School professor William B. Gould IV.
An expert in labor law, Gould has closely monitored the developments surrounding the Kaepernick and Reid grievances. He wasn’t surprised by the league’s exit strategy.
“The NFL had to have some measure of concern about substantial liability,” said Gould, who served as chairman of the National Labor Relations Board from 1994-98. “The damages [awarded to Kaepernick] could have been considerable. For Kaepernick [to settle], it seems to me this has to be [financial] compensation. And I would think substantial compensation. Kaepernick certainly comes out of this a winner.”
The NFL is the most powerful sports league on the planet. It has virtually inexhaustible financial resources. It has top-notch lawyers. And it is fiercely protective of its image — the whole thing about not tarnishing the shield and all.
For the NFL to have settled with Kaepernick and Reid, who alleged that the owners attempted to ruin their careers because they chose to shine a light on racial injustice, well, that’s a horrible look for Goodell and the billionaires whom he serves. And the fact that the league found this option more palatable than continuing its fight reveals the level of its long-running palpable concern about the Kaepernick-Reid situation.
It wouldn’t be surprising if the league, on failing to have Kaepernick’s collusion grievance dismissed last August, began re-evaluating its position.
Gould believes that with so many smart people in the NFL’s New York headquarters, someone probably suggested it was time to find a back door.
“The league has taken so many hits, both in the area of race and in health and safety for the players, that they have to be gun-shy about future exposure,” he said. “Not simply in terms of compensation, because they can take a hit in terms of compensation. But in terms of public exposure and bad publicity, which they don’t want and can hurt them in the future.”
The fact is, except for fans who disagree with Kaepernick’s politics and the broadcasters and writers who carried the league’s water on the nonsensical Kaepernick-isn’t-good-enough-to-be-on-an-NFL-roster argument, it was clear that something was going on that had nothing do to with football.
The Washington Redskins helped prove that.
After starter Alex Smith suffered a potentially career-ending injury in November, the Redskins signed failed 32-year-old passer Mark Sanchez. After Sanchez did what Sanchez does, the Redskins dipped back into the free-agent quarterback market and signed Josh Johnson, who’s also 32 and who had not thrown a pass in a regular-season NFL game since 2011.
What’s more, since Kaepernick has been on the outside looking in, the list of ridiculously ineffective quarterbacks who have been signed is as long as it is laughable. It’s as if the league posted a sign in flashing red neon at every stadium that read, “Don’t believe what your eyes are seeing. All of these guys are actually better than Kaepernick.”
I mean, the Jedi mind trick doesn’t work on everyone.
The woeful performances of many players at Kaepernick’s position, the most important position in sports, undercut the league’s argument every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Even after Reid returned to work in late September last season and signed a multiyear contract extension this week, there wasn’t even a whisper in the game about doors potentially opening for Kaepernick. Because a full hearing on Kaepernick’s grievance was drawing closer, the league was under increasing pressure to come to the realization it finally did.
As I wrote a while ago, Kaepernick will never again play in the NFL. But labor lawyer Thomas A. Lenz said the NFL is most likely paying a whole lot for what it has done to Kaepernick. Perhaps even more than $10 million in the settlement.
“Over the Super Bowl period, with so much attention on Kaepernick, it [the pressure] seemed to mount,” said Lenz, a lecturer at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law. “And in terms of the settlement, it’s pure speculation at this point, but you could be looking at a couple of seasons of pay, whatever perks there might have come from a typical season under contract and endorsement opportunities he may have missed out on because he was not playing. There’s a whole range of things. I don’t think a settlement of [many millions of dollars] would be wild speculation at all.”
Of course, while Kaepernick’s fans will celebrate his victory, there’s also an inconvenient truth that must be addressed. Reid has publicly bashed Malcolm Jenkins and Anquan Boldin, the co-founders of the Players Coalition, for accepting money from the NFL to fund social justice work. Now, Reid and Kaepernick are likely taking the NFL’s cash as well.
On its face, that’s difficult to reconcile.
But the thing is, no matter where one stands on the NFL-Players Coalition partnership, Kaepernick and Reid should be applauded for fighting after they became convinced that their careers were illegally derailed. Especially Kaepernick. After absorbing a lot of hits throughout his toughest battle, he showed he’s a winner.
Jussie is unwell, some say...
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida issued a rebuke in the wake of the controversy. “This is outrageous. Students do not lose their First Amendment rights when they enter the schoolhouse gates,” the group said on Twitter. “This is a prime example of the over-policing of Black students in school.”
Jussie is unwell, some say...
(https://66.media.tumblr.com/372d60035f87ffcaca5df5e615d662f2/tumblr_inline_p0l7mi2xCi1sfm32i_540.gif)
No, my very stupid fellow American, the time for Resistance is when the Black Liberal had America by the balls, and his cock in a whore.
Who is Dave Wick?
An Indiana man was taken into custody on a preliminary murder charge after a road rage incident last weekend, during which witnesses said he yelled religious and ethnic insults at a Muslim-American man before shooting and killing him. However, there is no opportunity under current law for Passarelli to be charged with a hate crime despite witnesses alleging that he hurled xenophobic slurs at the victim and told him to “get out” of the country, because Indiana is one of the few states left without such laws.
A police report obtained by Fox 59 alleges that 33-year old Dustin Passarelli got into a road rage incident with 32-year-old Mustafa Ayoubi on the night of Saturday, February 16. Passarelli told police that a car he claimed to be Ayoubi’s “aggressively” drove behind him, and that he thought someone “threw something at his car or hit his car.” Passarelli then proceeded to follow Ayoubi to an apartment complex where Ayoubi was meeting his friends, and said he did so because he wanted to get Ayoubi’s insurance information in case there was damage to his car.
That’s when friends who witnessed the shooting say they watched Passarelli “cussing at Mr. Ayoubi and using religious and ethnic insults such as, “Go back to your country.” Witnesses claimed that Passarelli then appeared to shine a light or a laser at Ayoubi, then shot at him multiple times. Ayoubi was unarmed and tried to run away as Passarelli shot him in the back twice; he was later pronounced dead at the scene.
Passarelli told police that Ayoubi lobbed an anti-Semitic remark at him first, and that Ayoubi punched his driver’s side window and cracked it. But three of Ayoubi’s friends who witnessed the shooting say that Passarelli committed a hate crime against Ayoubi.
Usman Ashraf, a friend of Ayoubi’s, told news station 93.1 WIBC that Passarelli was shouting anti-Islamic slurs at them and telling them they should “get out of our country, you are foreigners.” Ayoubi, a U.S. citizen, moved to the country in 2001 and graduated from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, 13 WTHR reported.
“The guy that was in the car that was the shooter, he was screaming obscene words, saying Muhammad is a pedophile, Muhammad is, you all are, you follow worse kind of people...,” Ashraf told 13 WTHR. “Without giving any warning, he just started shooting...[Passarelli] emptied the whole clip on his back.”
A statement from Ayoubi’s family released to 13 WTHR says that Ayoubi died because “someone believed that he did not belong in the USA and he was a foreigner.”
Despite these accounts, Passarelli currently can’t be charged with a hate crime, as Indiana is one of five remaining states without a hate crime statute. A hate crime bill is currently making its way through the Indiana General Assembly; on Monday, the Indiana Senate’s Public Policy committee voted for hate crime bill SB 12, passing it to the Senate for a full vote. The version passed would apply to bias-motivated crimes regarding race, religion, “color,” disability, gender identity, and sexual orientation, amid other identity classifications. There’s no indication thus far that, if passed and signed into law, it would apply retroactively.
It appears that Indiana is having a hard enough time agreeing on just who this hate crime bill will protect. In January, the bill’s proponents feared that Indiana’s GOP would shut it down over a gender identity protection for transgender people. And while that protection made it through, a previous version of the bill protected political affiliation and law enforcement against would-be hate crimes against, say, Republicans and cops. However, an amendment removed those classes before Monday’s vote.
A dense fog hung over James Riley’s homestead in this apple-growing community as the platoon of buses, carrying 150 mostly Latino and black fifth-graders, pulled up.
Here in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, about 80 miles from downtown L.A., the 59-year-old Riley and his employees grow fruit and vegetables through most of the year. But their main crop is living history: musical theater, educational workshops and historical reenactments of everything from the Gold Rush era to the Civil War — all centered on a mock 1770s-era New England town that Riley designed.
College-age actors in three-cornered hats and bonnets, nattering away in faux-British accents, teach life lessons from the Revolutionary War: how to spool thread, roll a hoop with a stick and not run afoul of the Quartering Act of 1765, the Parliament diktat that forced Americans to house and feed British soldiers.
“Fifth-graders are sort of the magic age,” Riley said. “They’re not too cool yet, they still like to pretend.”
Even so, Riley said, his liberty to pursue this unique form of happiness is under attack.
Earlier in the day, officials with the Riverside Unified School District had been poking around the farm, wanting to see for themselves if the rumors were true: that Riley’s Farm was an unsafe environment for kids because of its owner’s alleged racism, misogyny and homophobia.
Last September, someone had uncovered tweets from Riley in which he stated that “black supremacy” was as problematic as white racism, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage was bogus and that his generation may be the last one “born with only two genders.”
"White supremacy?" he tweeted on Feb. 18 last year. “If there's a problem in America today, it's BLACK supremacy. Farrakhan, Obama, LeBron James, etc.”
Soon the backlash landed on Riley and his farm. Parents and activists called for a boycott, in Facebook and Twitter posts shared by thousands. His own brother and nephew, who run nearby apple farms, distanced themselves.
Deana Olson, a mother of five whose sons had visited Riley’s Farm as fifth-graders in the Menifee Union High School District, shared the tweets.
“You shouldn’t have to think about those things when sending your children on field trips,” she said. “He’s like a wannabe Trump, and that’s not OK. And if you think you can get away with it, then you’re not a good businessman.”
The Claremont Unified School District told Riley in a letter that they would no longer send students to his farm and were under “no obligation to expose children to an individual who engages in these crude and tasteless comments.”
In response, Riley has sued Claremont Unified, its superintendent, board trustees and two district principals, alleging they had violated his 1st (free speech) and 14th (equal protection under the law) Amendment rights. He is seeking more than $10 million in damages.
The controversy prompted Riverside Unified to dispatch the team of observers to Riley’s Farm.
“District officials, alongside legal counsel, are doing our due diligence to ensure that we’re doing what’s best for our students, our families and the staff,” a district spokesperson said in a statement.
As children outside practiced how to march in formation, Riley — a father of six — promised to put more “fear in public officials.”
“If there is any other district that pursues defamation of me,” Riley said, “that has been in a long-term relationship with us and has basically made a decision based on my political expression, then we will sue them.”
Tall and pensive, with gray hair pulled into a ponytail so he can better impersonate Patrick Henry, Riley arrived in town in 1994, following his older brother Dennis, who bought a three-acre orchard in 1978 and revolutionized the local industry.
Under Dennis’ “U-Pick” program, customers could wander among the trees and pick the fruit themselves instead of buying from roadside stands.
Soon Riley’s family — a sprawling clan originally from Arcadia — settled in Oak Glen, taking jobs as cooks and tour guides and teaching the public how to make apple cider and other treats; James estimates about 40 relatives remain in the industry. By the late 1980s, Dennis and his other siblings persuaded their parents to buy what’s now Riley’s Farm.
Around that time, a group of Civil War aficionados asked if they could reenact a battle in the farm’s upper meadows. James Riley said he was opposed at first, finding “shades of stolen valor in some of that stuff.”
But the Stanford history major and lifelong conservative quickly realized that “there are people who are good at defending their country, and there are other people who are good at talking about what [soldiers] had done.”
Riley wrote scripts that relied as much as possible on primary sources such as journals and letters to ensure no historical biases seeped into his productions. Actors came from his family as well as local high school and college drama departments. He trained everyone in era-appropriate diction and dress.
Teachers suggested Riley offer field trips. The idea proved wildly popular, with students coming from throughout Southern California.
In the early 2000s, Oak Glen residents complained that the smell of black powder from fired guns and the screams of schoolchildren were ruining their idyll — and their property values.
A petition presented to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors in 2006 asked that Riley be forced to muffle the shots and limit the field trips.
After some negotiations, Riley’s Farm agreed to have actors fire only six shots per day, between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.
Over the last decade, Oak Glen residents have grudgingly accepted that Riley’s vision has boosted tourism. He diversified Riley’s Farm to include overnight stays, group retreats, weddings and even quinceañeras.
“Jim is one of the consummate marketers up here,” said Nina Foster, a former vice president of the Oak Glen Apple Growers Assn. who worked for Riley for two years as a Revolutionary War reenactor. “He has a heart as big as all outdoors.”
But the school field trips are vital to Riley’s bottom line, making up $2.1 million out of total revenue of $4.2 million in a “typical recent year,” according to court filings.
While not busy tending to his business, Riley has attended tea party rallies dressed as Patrick Henry to stir up crowds, as well as launched a blog and Twitter account to express his political views.
He said he remembers only two significant clashes with customers before the tweet backlash: He dropped a depiction of the Great Awakening, the 18th century evangelical revival that swept the American colonies, because too many teachers complained about its religious overtones. And, he said, a Muslim group walked out during a speech that concludes every field trip because of this line: “There are places in the world right now where a woman can’t even drive a car, much less vote.”
“It’s been kind of a Hank Fonda-Jimmy Stewart type of relationship,” Riley said of serving people who don’t share his beliefs. “We may agree to disagree on contemporary politics, but the binding affection that binds our guests to the farm is a common love for history.”
But after the spread of his tweets, Riley said, he has been turned into a “conservative Christian strawman that has to be burned in public.”
Riley claims business has actually improved amid the controversy, as private schools and parents groups have organized trips in support. Nevertheless, he sued Claremont Unified.
“Government can’t chill the exercise of free speech indirectly or directly,” said his lawyer, Thomas Eastmond.
Claremont Unified declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
Barry P. McDonald, a Pepperdine University law professor who teaches a course on the 1st Amendment, thinks Riley’s case is “interesting” but probably a “loser.”
“The court would likely say the government’s job is to teach kids appropriate values,” he said. “In [Riley’s] instance, to force the school district into a business transaction where such offensive things are being tweeted, would be inimical to the school’s intent to teach respect and tolerance for others.”
But Riley argues that his conservative beliefs have not filtered into the farm’s programs.
“These are stories that are safely wrapped up in the events of the past,” he said. “If you want to come to a conclusion about them one way or another, that’s up to anybody.”
One concerned parent, Ridgecrest resident Becky Hilliker, accompanied her daughter to the farm after learning about the controversy. What she saw made her think Riley’s program should continue.
“It’s important for the kids to see this,” Hilliker said, adding that the tweets were “not something he said to the kids” and “it would be a shame to deny [them] the educational opportunities” with a boycott.
If he were to lose his lawsuit, Riley said, he was willing to sell the farm — or at least the part that belongs to him — to fund any appeal.
Around 2 in the afternoon, the field trip’s grand finale — the staging of the fictional Battle of St. George’s Tavern, where students split into teams of redcoats or colonists, armed with sticks bent to resemble muskets — was nearing its end.
One set of fifth-graders shouted “Free-dom! Free-dom!” as their classmates lay prone in a muddy field.
Soon, everyone gathered to hear the speech that has concluded the tour for more than a decade. Riley used to give it more often, but a young African American woman had the duties this day.
“They say that liberty is a chain,” she told her rapt audience, “and you are the next link in that chain. The freedom of this nation is very much in your hands.”
“I’m a crybaby every time,” Riley said, as his employees handed out caramel apples to students.
The script was done for the day. And the Riverside Unified School District officials who had come to make sure nothing went awry left Riley’s Farm. But not before walking away with a bag of goodies from its bakery.
Pro-Russian Coast Guard lieutenant arrested with hit list of liberal senators wanted to establish ‘a white homeland’ (https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/pro-russian-coast-guard-lieutenant-arrested-hit-list-liberal-senators-wanted-establish-white-homeland/)
Hmm... seems to readily conflate leftist elected, with leftist media folks, be the elected ones Senate, House, former, or current ones. Also missed a large number if using only left wing behavior and attitude as the measure.
Imagine Democrat and others who are wannabe Dem Primary types who are not listed... he must have additional lists, am thinking, and missed lots of RINOs as well from the elected or former elected categories...
Perhaps the story is still developing, and some will lobby to have their names released for publication as well... just sayin'...
“All men are created equal” is America’s founding creed, the reaffirmation that America is not defined by race or place of birth or any other outward characteristic, but rather by fidelity to the rule of law, democracy and the opportunity to pursue one’s dreams. Unfortunately, a high percentage of one major political party doesn’t buy that.
The recent Public Religion Research Institute poll finds:
Overall, nearly half of Americans generally support a racially and ethnically diverse vision of the United States, although there are moderate divisions by race. When asked to put themselves on a scale, where one end is the statement, “I would prefer the U.S. to be a nation made up of people from all over the world,” and the other end is the statement, “I would prefer the U.S. to be a nation primarily made up of people from Western European heritage,” 47% of Americans mostly agree with the first statement, while less than one in ten (9%) Americans mostly agree with the second statement, and 39% place themselves in the middle of the scale.
There are also stark political divisions on this issue. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Democrats, compared to only three in ten (29%) Republicans, mostly prefer a country with racial and ethnic diversity. Republicans are nearly twice as likely as Democrats to state a preference for a Western European majority in the country (13% vs. 7%). Additionally, over half (56%) of Republicans place themselves somewhere in the middle on this issue, compared to one-quarter (25%) of Democrats. Independents closely resemble Americans in general on this question.
But America is a racially and ethnically diverse country, you say. Yes, and that may explain the high degree of anger and sense of alienation many Republicans who supported Donald Trump feel. Less than a third of them believe America should be diverse.
One criticism of Trump supporters’ immigration stance has been that they are not merely opposed to illegal immigration but to immigration of black and brown people. The poll gives some support for that conclusion. For them, Trump’s criticism of “s---hole” countries is a sign he understands their beef with immigration.
This negative view of diversity permeates many Republicans’ thinking. For example, “Democrats are likeliest to say that the U.S.’s diversity makes the country stronger. More than three-quarters (77%) of Democrats say that the country’s diverse population makes it stronger, while only 55% of independents and 51% of Republicans agree. Notably, one in five (20%) Republicans say that the U.S.’s diverse population makes it weaker.”
On one hand, all political groups think our creed/beliefs in our Constitution are what most define us. “Overwhelming majorities of Republicans, independents, and Democrats agree that respecting American political institutions and laws (98%, 85%, 91%, respectively), believing in individual freedoms such as freedom of speech (96%, 88%, 93%, respectively), and accepting people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds (86%, 82%, 92%, respectively), are somewhat or very important for being truly American.” But PRRI also finds large majorities of Republicans think it is somewhat or very important to be born in America and believe in God if one wants to be “truly American.”
Republicans by and large don’t put too much stock in religious diversity (i.e., religious freedom). “Over half (54%) of Democrats, compared to only one in ten (12%) Republicans, mostly prefer religious diversity. By contrast, four in ten (40%) Republicans state a preference for a Christian majority, compared to only 14% of Democrats. A plurality (45%) of Republicans and nearly one in three (29%) Democrats place themselves in the middle of this scale. Independents closely resemble Americans in general on this question.”
The rejection of a pluralistic, multiracial democracy by so many Republicans should be deeply disturbing. It also explains the polarization on so many political issues. If one party doesn’t really think that those not from Western European heritage (i.e. ,nonwhite people) should be here, reaching consensus on immigration and even child separation seems nearly impossible. If one party thinks religious diversity is a threat to America’s identity, good luck reaching consensus on issues such as religious accommodation, the Muslim ban and more. (That said, one interesting part of the poll finds that there are supermajorities of Republicans and Democrats who favor a long list of policies, e.g. protection for those with preexisting conditions, treating rather than punishing drug users, getting rid of mandatory-minimum sentences and allowing those who’ve served prison sentences to regain the right to vote.)
We should seriously consider why so many Americans fundamentally reject our founding creed and where our institutions have failed to convey and propagate those fundamental beliefs. Ronald Reagan famously said, “America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, ‘You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.’ But then he added, ‘Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.’ ” Today, an alarming number of Republicans would say: Not so fast.
Former Maine Gov. Paul LePage, the Trump-loving Republican who left office last year after serving two terms, has said that he opposes plans to abolish the electoral college on the grounds that doing so would harm white people.
Law and Crime reports that LePage appeared on right-wing talk radio station WVOM this week to denounce a bill currently under consideration in which states would instruct their electors to support the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote, not just the candidate who wins the most votes in their individual state.
LePage started out by arguing that such a move would harm smaller states — but he then quickly pivoted to making an explicitly racist argument.
“What would happen if they do what they say they’re gonna do, white people will not have anything to say,” LePage complained. “It’s only going to be the minorities who would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida.”
LePage also said that having awarding the presidency to the winner of the popular vote would amount to setting up a “dictatorship” like “the constitution of Venezuela.”
In all the drama around Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, you may have missed a truly extraordinary incident, one that reveals a tremendous amount about how we talk about race in politics today, particularly how conservatives think about it.
Let me briefly summarize the series of events, and then we’ll consider what it means. The context is that in his prepared testimony Cohen called President Trump a racist and related a number of private comments Trump had made to support that claim. Republicans felt the need to respond, and here’s what happened:
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), head of the Freedom Caucus and a close ally of the president, brought in Lynne Patton to stand up behind him awkwardly for a few moments, thereby attesting by virtue of her presence that Trump cannot possibly be a racist. Because look, here’s a black person who worked for Trump at his company and was given a high position in the administration.
Multiple Democratic representatives made critical comments about Meadows bringing Patton to the hearing, noting that you can have a black friend or a black employee and still be a racist. That this needs to be said in 2019 is rather remarkable, but in any case, it culminated with Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who called out Meadows this way: "The fact that someone would use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber, in this committee is alone racist in itself."
Meadows then interrupted to ask that Tlaib’s words be “taken down,” a procedure by which a member can be rebuked for a personal insult to another member. “If anyone knows my record as it relates — it should be you, Mr. Chairman,” he said with rising emotion, referring to Rep. Elijah Cummings, who is black.
Tlaib reiterated that as her words had made clear, she was referring not to the contents of Meadows’s heart but to his decision to parade Patton in front of the committee. That’s the most appropriate and persuasive way to deal with something like this, by putting the focus on what he did, not who he is. “I am not calling the gentleman, Mr. Meadows, a racist for doing so,” she said. “I’m saying that in itself it is a racist act.”
With Meadows getting visibly angry and beginning to shout, Cummings asked Tlaib to repeat for a second time that she was not calling Meadows a racist. “You were not intending to call Mr. Meadows a racist, is that right?” he said. She responded, “No, Mr. Chairman, I did not call Mr. Meadows a racist.”
Meadows was not placated. “There’s nothing more personal to me than my relationship — my nieces and nephews are people of color,” he said, his face reddening and his voice rising. “Not many people know that. You know that, Mr. Chairman. And to indicate that I asked someone who is a personal friend of the Trump family, who has worked for him, who knows this particular individual, that she’s coming in to be a prop? It’s racist to suggest that I asked her to come in here for that reason!” He went on: “Mr. Chairman, you and I have a personal relationship that’s not based on color.”
Cummings then felt it necessary to offer his personal testimony attesting to his friendship with Meadows, acknowledge and validate his anger (“I could see and feel your pain”), and give Tlaib the opportunity to repeat for a third time that she had not called Meadows a racist.
Just to be clear, there’s no doubt that Patton was at that hearing to be a prop, no less than the giant poster with a picture of Cohen and the words “Liar liar pants on fire” that Republicans on the committee displayed at one point (yes, that actually happened). Patton wasn’t testifying; she was there to be photographed, her blackness a supposed rebuke to the idea that Trump is a racist.
I suppose we could have different opinions about whether that kind of tokenistic stunt is itself racist, but the mere suggestion sent Meadows into a rage. Despite the fact that he was obviously misinterpreting Tlaib's words, his anger conferred upon Tlaib and Cummings the responsibility to soothe him and assure him that he was a person of good heart and pure intent. It took Tlaib repeating three times that she wasn't calling Meadows a racist before he calmed down and the hearing could proceed.
For many watching, the incident evoked the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, but with both race and gender at play instead of just gender. You’ll recall that when Christine Blasey Ford testified, she was calm, controlled, deferential and polite, because she knew that if she displayed any anger she’d be called a lunatic and her allegations dismissed out of hand. Kavanaugh, on the other hand, was utterly unhinged — crying, shouting, sneering, interrupting senators — and his anger was taken not as evidence that he was unreliable but just the opposite. It was considered proof that he was the true aggrieved party and the victim of a terrible injustice that had to be remedied.
In a similar way, once Meadows got angry, everyone had to swing into action to deal with his emotions, which in the moment were treated as not only legitimate but requiring attention and redress. He could have been told, “You misunderstood. Now pipe down because we’re proceeding.” But that’s not how it worked.
Meadows’s rage at even the suggestion that he was capable of doing something racist happens in a context of a particular narrative about race and politics that has developed on the right in recent years. Conservatives have convinced themselves not only that racism is essentially a thing of the past but that someone being called racist is far worse than actual racism. Stories of white conservatives (whether politicians or ordinary people) being unfairly branded racist are a regular drumbeat on Fox News and in conservative talk radio, to the point where rank-and-file conservatives have become convinced that any argument with a liberal will inevitably end with them being called racist, a charge they will be unable to defend against no matter how many nonwhite nieces and nephews they have.
That’s not to say that there aren’t times when liberals do in fact unfairly brand particular conservatives as racist. It happens. But if the thought is so horrifying to Meadows, maybe he shouldn’t have spent 2012 going around saying that Republicans were going to “send Mr. Obama home to Kenya or wherever it is” (see here and here), spreading the racist smear that the former president was not, in fact, an American.
Oddest of all, this whole thing started over questions about whether Trump is a racist, which is utterly beyond debate at this point. It’s like we’re arguing about whether Harvey Weinstein really abused his power, or whether Kim Kardashian really wants to be famous. What else could Trump possibly do to convince of us of what he really thinks?
And we’re headed into a reelection campaign that will, like Trump’s 2016 campaign and much of his presidency, be built on a foundation of fear and hatred of foreigners and white racial resentment. Even as they cheer that campaign on, conservatives like Meadows will take great umbrage at any suggestion that they’re supporting a racist president fomenting racism for racist ends. This won’t be the last such temper tantrum that we’ll see.
As this country continues to spin more wildly out of control, I predict we will see overt racial appeals to white prejudice being made in 2020. Not just dog whistles, but overt indisputable appeals to race, religion, and orientation. “These people are not American. They don’t deserve a vote. Round them up and send them home.” This is part of Cohen’s warning about “no smooth transition” if Trump loses.
As this country continues to spin more wildly out of control, I predict we will see overt racial appeals to white prejudice being made in 2020. Not just dog whistles, but overt indisputable appeals to race, religion, and orientation. “These people are not American. They don’t deserve a vote. Round them up and send them home.” This is part of Cohen’s warning about “no smooth transition” if Trump loses.
Uhm, I noticed you're pretty silent on this big news day for your tangerine in chief. So, since this it the Trump Supporters thread, care to say something about the documented evidence against him, or just going to ignore it in favor of the oh so predictable appeals to reverse racism?
The only calls to "Round up" white people so far are coming from you. If this means a free trip to England (Assuming that's still Europe) then sign me up. It might not riing so hollow coming from the same people who supported rounding up Mexicans because they're not American, and sending them back where they belong.
We just want that to stop.
Again, you continue to confuse me with someone else.
Again, you continue to confuse me with someone else.
Then what was all that shit about White Prejudice? I'm sorry, you confused me. I thought you're making the absurd counter-claim that we'd start rounding up white people.
No, I’m saying we are hurdling towards our own Kristallnacht moment, when the politicians begin overtly inciting violence against minorities.
As this country continues to spin more wildly out of control, I predict we will see overt racial appeals to white prejudice being made in 2020. Not just dog whistles, but overt indisputable appeals to race, religion, and orientation. “These people are not American. They don’t deserve a vote. Round them up and send them home.” This is part of Cohen’s warning about “no smooth transition” if Trump loses.
Another Wall Of
Interesting how some take Mr. Cohen's statements to heart, now, who never prior listened, let alone believed Mr. Cohen, prior to his reading the script Lanny Davis prepared for the hearing, scheduled to counter Nuclear Weapons negotiations by our President while overseas.
Indeed, Lanny Davis served his primary client, Mr and Mrs Clinton, as he has faithfully always, and as he sought to complicate Inmate Cohen's future, while making for 'the script' to be followed by all the Democrat Players, now through next Fall.
The 'smooth transition' noted by Mr. Cohen, should President Trump fail in his 2020 efforts... is today an example of the smooth transition, and is the current transition to date, from the last Presidential Election, an example of what you worry about missing, should the President not be reelected next November?
Just checkin', as if this we see today is the example for how Americans should 'transition' in order to best serve the interests of all Americans, I think your priorities are a bit scrambled.
But, apparently, talking about the foreign aid makes her an anti-Semite, while IDFK, the foreign aid between a prominant Republican, and FUCKING RUSSIA doesn't make him a suspected pinko commie.
Am I hearing that right? Excuse me, I need to go out for a smoke.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Abdullahi Omar are perfect soft targets... young, liberal, minority, FEMALE. All the things angry white males love to hate.
And of course the real issue here is that there are those that are against any criticism of Israel, and that likely hate Arabs.
1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 King James Version (KJV)
Puerto Rico has started cutting benefits paid out by a food stamps program used by more than 1 million of its residents, as federal lawmakers have not provided the island with additional emergency disaster funding amid opposition from the Trump administration.
On Monday, Puerto Rico started reducing food stamp benefits by an average of 25 percent as part of an effort to sustain a program that has seen a dramatic increase in demand in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, said a spokesman for Puerto Rico’s Department of Family Affairs.
The food stamp benefit is distributed monthly to about 1.3 million of its residents, or 43 percent of those living on the island, the spokesman said. The reductions bring the benefit levels back to where they were before the hurricane.
The benefit cut, caused by an impasse among federal lawmakers over aid funding for the U.S. territory, has sparked new fears among Puerto Ricans about a critical lifeline for poorer residents amid an explosion of hunger since the hurricane hit.
“It is dangerous. People don’t have enough money to buy food already,” said Socorro Rivera, executive director of La Fondita de Jesús, a nonprofit group near San Juan that provides food for the homeless, who worries about being overwhelmed with new requests if the issue is not resolved soon.
“It’s obvious a lot of people will have severe problems,” Rivera said.
Several federal proposals have emerged that could quickly fund the program, though only temporarily. The Trump administration has now given its support for $600 million in additional food stamp benefits for Puerto Rico as part of a broader package spearheaded by Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), a spokeswoman for the senator said.
The Trump administration had previously dismissed House Democrats’ proposed $600 million plan to extend additional aid as “excessive and unnecessary,” amid a report in The Washington Post that President Trump told top White House officials he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico because he thought the island was not using the money properly and was exploiting the federal government.
The prospects of a deal are uncertain. Perdue included funding for the Puerto Rico food stamps program in a separate bill aiming to give financial aid for farmers in states such as Georgia to improve the legislation’s chances of passing, a spokeswoman for Perdue said.
There is no vote scheduled or timeline for passage. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) may bring up Perdue’s legislation this month, according to another source with knowledge of the issue who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the source was not authorized to comment publicly on the matter.
House Democrats in January approved funding for Puerto Rico that would go beyond Perdue’s legislation, including a measure that would reduce Puerto Rico’s requirement to share the costs of some reconstruction projects.
Some Senate Democrats are pushing to include similar measures in Perdue’s aid package. Four Democratic Senators, including presidential candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), sent a letter to House and Senate leadership earlier this month saying they were “deeply disappointed” the GOP bill neglects additional assistance for Puerto Rico beyond food stamp money.
Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in September 2017, leading to thousands of deaths, causing an estimated $90 billion in damage and devastating an economy that had already been in a recession for more than a decade.
Congress and the Trump administration have since approved more than $40 billion in emergency recovery money, as well as $1.27 billion in special food stamps funding, said Federico A. de Jesús, principal of FDJ Solutions, a consulting firm, and the former deputy director of the Puerto Rico governor’s office in Washington. At least $19 billion of that $40 billion has not yet been spent, de Jesús said.
Left in the funding lurch are Puerto Rico residents like Valeria Delgado Rivera, 28, who relies on the food stamps program to feed her daughter. Her hours at a Spanish restaurant in the Puerto Rican town of Carolina were cut in half after the hurricane, increasing her dependence on the food stamps program. She said the cuts to the program may force her to buy only breakfast and dinner, once she receives her reduced benefit package later this month.
“For me, it’s difficult because the only help I get for buying food is from this program,” Rivera said. “Of course I’m scared.”
Puerto Rico’s food stamps program is uniquely dependent on periodic help from Congress, though the island does not have a voting representative in either the House or Senate, or a say in presidential elections.
In mainland U.S. states, food stamp benefits expand or contract according to each state’s need. During the Great Recession, for instance, the size of the federal food stamps programs skyrocketed, as did the number of Americans who rely on it.
Puerto Rico’s program works differently. The island administers a separate program — called the Nutrition Assistance Program, rather than the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (or “SNAP”) received by mainland states — through an annual block grant provided by the federal government.
Because of emergency funding from Congress, food stamp benefits for Puerto Rico residents rose to $649 a month for a family of four after Hurricane Maria, matching the size of the benefit a family of four typically receives in the rest of the United States. But with cuts starting, Puerto Rico has returned to paying $410 a month for a family of four on food stamp benefits, or about 40 percent less than that received by U.S. families, a spokesman for Puerto Rico’s Department of Family Affairs said.
Even if approved by Congress, the additional $600 million allocation would fund the island’s food stamps program only until September 2019, de Jesús said.
More than 330,000 elderly people are among the Puerto Rican residents on the food stamps program, territory officials said. An additional 22,000 families asked for aid over the past year were denied assistance, a spokesman for the Department of Family Affairs said.
On average, Puerto Ricans are four times as likely to be considered “food insecure” than people living on the mainland, with about 40 percent of the island considered to lack basic access to sufficient nutritious food, said Bread for the World, a nonprofit organization that aims to end hunger. Puerto Rico’s median income is about $20,000, less than half the poorest U.S. state.
Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, said in an interview that the aid must be approved immediately and blasted the Trump administration’s January rejection of funding as “unrealistic and totally unhinged from the facts."
“This is not about politics — this is literally about people’s lives and their ability to feed their children and their elders in Puerto Rico,” Cruz said. “The need is still there.”
Documents obtained by NBC 7 Investigates show the U.S. government created a secret database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers tied to the migrant caravan and in some cases, placed alerts on their passports.
At the end of 2018, roughly 5,000 immigrants from Central America made their way north through Mexico to the United States southern border. The story made international headlines.
As the migrant caravan reached the San Ysidro Port of Entry in south San Diego County, so did journalists, attorneys, and advocates who were there to work and witness the events unfolding.
But in the months that followed, journalists who covered the caravan, as well as those who offered assistance to caravan members, said they felt they had become targets of intense inspections and scrutiny by border officials.
One photojournalist said she was pulled into secondary inspections three times and asked questions about who she saw and photographed in Tijuana shelters. Another photojournalist said she spent 13 hours detained by Mexican authorities when she tried to cross the border into Mexico City. Eventually, she was denied entry into Mexico and sent back to the U.S.
These American photojournalists and attorneys said they suspected the U.S. government was monitoring them closely but until now, they couldn’t prove it.
Now, documents leaked to NBC 7 Investigates show their fears weren’t baseless. In fact, their own government had listed their names in a secret database of targets, where agents collected information on them. Some had alerts placed on their passports, keeping at least two photojournalists and an attorney from entering Mexico to work.
The documents were provided to NBC 7 by a Homeland Security source on the condition of anonymity, given the sensitive nature of what they were divulging.
The source said the documents or screenshots show a SharePoint application that was used by agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations and some agents from the San Diego sector of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).
The intelligence gathering efforts were done under the umbrella of “Operation Secure Line,” the operation designated to monitor the migrant caravan, according to the source.
The documents list people who officials think should be targeted for screening at the border.
The individuals listed include ten journalists, seven of whom are U.S. citizens, a U.S. attorney, and 48 people from the U.S. and other countries, labeled as organizers, instigators or their roles “unknown.” The target list includes advocates from organizations like Border Angels and Pueblo Sin Fronteras.
NBC 7 Investigates is blurring the names and photos of individuals who haven’t given us permission to publish their information.
The documents are titled “San Diego Sector Foreign Operations Branch: Migrant Caravan FY-2019, Suspected Organizers, Coordinators, Instigators and Media” and are dated January 9, 2019.
Emblazoned on it are the American and Mexican flags, with a banner that reads: "ILU-OASSIS-OMEGA." An official at the Department of Homeland Security said the seal indicates that the documents are a product of the International Liaison Unit (ILU), which coordinates intelligence between Mexico and the United States.
For each person, the documents show their photo, often from their passport but in some cases from their social media accounts, along with their personal information. That information includes the person’s date of birth, their “country of commencement,” and their alleged role tied to the migrant caravan. The information also includes whether officials placed an alert on the person’s passport.
Some individuals have a colored “X” over their photo, indicating whether they were arrested, interviewed, or had their visa or SENTRI pass revoked by officials.
In addition to flagging the individuals for secondary screenings, the Homeland Security source told NBC 7 that the agents also created dossiers on each person listed.
“We are a criminal investigation agency, we’re not an intelligence agency,” the Homeland Security source told NBC 7 Investigates. “We can’t create dossiers on people and they’re creating dossiers. This is an abuse of the Border Search Authority.”
One dossier, shared with NBC 7, was on Nicole Ramos, the Refugee Director and attorney for Al Otro Lado, a law center for migrants and refugees in Tijuana, Mexico. The dossier included personal details on Ramos, including specific details about the car she drives, her mother’s name, and her work and travel history.
After sharing the documents with Ramos, she said Al Otro Lado is seeking more information on why she and other attorneys at the law center have been targeted by border officials.
“The document appears to prove what we have assumed for some time, which is that we are on a law enforcement list designed to retaliate against human rights defenders who work with asylum seekers and who are critical of CBP practices that violate the rights of asylum seekers,” Ramos told NBC 7 by email.
In addition to the dossier on Ramos, a list of other dossier files created was shared with NBC 7. Two of the dossier files were labeled with the names of journalists but no further details were available. Those journalists were also listed as targets for secondary screenings.
Customs and Border Protection has the authority to pull anyone into secondary screenings, but the documents show the agency is increasingly targeting journalists, attorneys, and immigration advocates. Former counterterrorism officials say the agency should not be targeting individuals based on their profession.
NBC 7 Investigates sent the information to all border and law enforcement agencies the source listed, asking whether the information was valid and if these tactics were legal.
A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson did not answer NBC 7’s list of questions or confirm the validity of the documents shared.
By email, the spokesperson said, “Criminal events, such as the breach of the border wall in San Diego, involving assaults on law enforcement and a risk to public safety, are routinely monitored and investigated by authorities.”
“It is protocol following these incidents to collect evidence that might be needed for future legal actions and to determine if the event was orchestrated,” the statement read. “CBP and our law enforcement partners evaluate these incidents, follow all leads garnered from information collected, conduct interviews and investigations, in preparation for, and often to prevent future incidents that could cause further harm to the public, our agents, and our economy.”
UPDATE - 4:20 p.m.
Minutes after our story published and five days after a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson gave us the agency's statement above, CBP told our colleagues at NBC News that the names in the database are all people who were present during violence that broke out at the border in November. The agency also said journalists are being tracked so that the agency can learn more about what started that violence. CBP never clarified that point directly to NBC 7 Investigates.
UPDATE - 8:20 p.m.
Staff attorney Esha Bhandari with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, called the government's targeting of journalists and migrants "outrageous."
“This is an outrageous violation of the First Amendment. The government cannot use the pretext of the border to target activists critical of its policies, lawyers providing legal representation, or journalists simply doing their jobs. We are exploring all options in response,” Bhandari said.
Senior staff attorney Mitra Ebadolahi with the ACLU of San Diego’s Border Litigation Project called NBC 7's report the latest example of abuse of power by the CBP.
“For years, the U.S. government has used the pretext of ‘border security' to trample on Americans’ constitutional rights. This most recent example is just the latest in a steady stream of CBP abuse of authority, and once again underscores the dire need for meaningful agency oversight and accountability," Ebadolahi said.
Journalists Targeted for Border Inspections
NBC 7 Investigates spoke with seven of the journalists listed on the database as targets for secondary screenings, including freelance photojournalist Ariana Drehsler.
“I'm interested in covering social and political issues,” Drehsler said, adding that she covered the migrant caravan in Tijuana for Buzzfeed News and United Press International.
“I think there's a lot of misconceptions, maybe from both sides, about who are these people that are trying to seek asylum,” Drehsler said. “So I think as a photojournalist, it is my responsibility to cover that to the best of my abilities.”
Drehsler estimated she had crossed the border from San Ysidro dozens of times covering the caravan.
“I was very transparent about what I was doing,” Drehsler said. “Sometimes you would see me carrying a camera and if I was asked by an agent what was I doing, I would tell them I was photographing the [migrant] shelters.”
But on December 30, 2018, when Drehsler was crossing back into the United States, she was pulled into secondary inspection and questioned by border agents.
“Two people in plainclothes came down and took me to another room,” Drehsler said. “They questioned me in a small room, asking me questions about the shelter, what was I seeing there, who was I working for.”
“They said that I was on the ground and they’re not, which I thought was really interesting.”
After about an hour, Drehsler said she was allowed to leave but agents warned her that an alert had been placed on her passport and that she would be pulled into a secondary screening again if she crossed the border. The agents told her to plan accordingly, given the screenings could last an hour or more. When she asked why this alert was placed on her passport, agents told her they had no idea.
Drehsler said she was pulled into secondary screenings two more times while crossing the border. Each time she said she was questioned by the same agents in plainclothes. The second time was on Jan. 2, 2019, and the third time was on Jan. 4, 2019.
On the third occasion, Drehsler said she was told to leave her gear, including her camera and cell phone, on a table outside of the interview room. When she returned, she said it didn’t appear to her that the gear had been looked through. Agents asked Drehsler if she could show them the photos she had taken but she said she declined.
Some of the questions agents asked Drehsler on the third screening struck her as odd.
“They asked about the new caravan and if word had gotten out about how difficult it is to seek asylum in the U.S.,” Drehsler said. “Then before I left, the female agent asked if I rented or owned my home.”
Drehsler told NBC 7 the personal details listed for her in the leaked screenshots are accurate. She confirmed the photo officials used came from her passport. The screenshots include a green “X” over Drehsler’s photograph, indicating she had been interviewed by agents.
Sharing the documents with Drehsler, she told NBC 7 she was “blown away.”
“I have so many questions; I have more questions than answers,” she said. “Personally, I don't understand what [agents] are hoping to find.”
Other journalists and attorneys have previously told news outlets like NPR and The Intercept that they too faced the same kind of increased scrutiny surrounding their work involving the migrant caravan.
Evidence of increased scrutiny of journalists at the border was detailed in an October 2018 report prepared by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ.)
The report identified 37 journalists who said they found the secondary screenings by border officials “invasive,” and said 20 cases involved border agents “conducting warrantless searches of [the journalists’] electronic devices.”
The journalists featured in the leaked documents said they were separated from their electronic devices and gear but had no evidence that agents had gone through their items.
Kitra Cahana is another freelance photojournalist and U.S. citizen listed as a target in the documents. By phone from Honduras, Cahana told NBC 7 she also faced increased scrutiny and was eventually denied entry into Mexico for no apparent reason.
Cahana's work has been featured in National Geographic magazine, The New York Times and the CBC out of Canada. One night in late December, she said Mexican authorities photographed her passport while she and other journalists were working near the border.
Then, on Jan. 17, 2019, while traveling from Canada to Mexico City, Cahana said she had a connecting flight in Detroit, Michigan. Cahana said in Montreal, her passport was flagged while going through U.S. Customs pre-clearance. Cahana said she was pulled into a secondary screening where border agents asked her a list of questions about her work.
“They were interested in whether I had an assignment when I was going down to cover the caravan,” Cahana said. “And they wanted to know how I was funding my work.”
Cahana said she was asked to explain how freelance photojournalism works, which she found strange. Afterward, her passport was flagged again in Detroit but eventually, she was allowed to board her flight and fly to Mexico City.
But when she arrived in Mexico, her passport was flagged again. Cahana said she brought this to a Mexican official and was taken into a back room with another group of detained individuals.
There, Cahana said her phone was taken away and she couldn’t leave the room. When she needed to use the restroom, an agent escorted her.
“I wasn't allowed to be in communication with anyone, I wasn’t allowed to contact my embassy,” Cahana said. “It was very confusing because my Spanish is quite limited and no one there really spoke English.”
Cahana said the whole ordeal lasted 13 hours and in the end, she was denied entry into Mexico. She had to wait until a plane arrived that could take her back to Detroit, where her flight originated.
Since then, Cahana said she tried one more time to cross the border into Mexico.
“I was trying to cross into Mexico through Guatemala to continue my work covering the caravan and then I was denied again,” Cahana said.
NBC 7 Investigates confirmed another journalist was denied entry into Mexico after covering the caravan in January. That journalist is also listed in the SharePoint files leaked to NBC 7.
In the documents shared with NBC 7, Cahana confirmed her personal details were accurate and that the photo used is from her passport. Cahana said she’s been in contact with the Committee to Protect Journalists and the ACLU as far as the alert placed on her passport, preventing her access to Mexico.
Cahana said the increased scrutiny by border officials could have a chilling effect on freelance journalists covering the border.
“In the current state of journalism, it's really freelancers who are bringing so much news to the public,” Cahana said. “And the uncertainty of having an alert placed on your passport and not knowing where and when that's going to prevent you from doing your work is really problematic.”
When we think about the attack on two mosques in New Zealand, which killed at least 49 people, it would serve us well to remember just how widespread and acceptable the hatred of Muslims is in Western society.
Islamophobia is everywhere. It cuts across party lines and political ideologies. It is a mainstream form of racism for which there are few consequences.
Studies have shown the preponderance of negative media coverage of Muslims cannot be explained away as merely news coverage of violent events. One study found that “Muslims are clearly distinctive as the only [religious] group associated with overwhelmingly negative coverage.”
Just this past week, a host on Fox News—the most popular and influential cable news network in America—implied that Rep. Ilhan Omar might not be loyal to America because she wears a hijab. The host was let off with a slap on the wrist and has suffered no other punishment. Why would she? Fox News has been a breeding ground for anti-Muslim hatred for years and years.
The second-longest-serving late night talk show host in America is Bill Maher. He is, for some reason, beloved by many liberals. He is also a committed Islamophobe. Here he is talking about the popularity of the name Mohammed in Britain:
“Am I a racist to feel that I’m alarmed by that? Because I am. And it’s not because of the race, it’s ’cause of the religion. I don’t have to apologize, do I, for not wanting the Western world to be taken over by Islam in three hundred years?”
Maher was not hounded off of television for any of these comments. Everything’s fine for him.
Speaking of Britain, things are perhaps even worse there. The British media routinely blares Islamophobic, false propaganda across its front pages. One of its most respectable conservative magazines has a regular columnist named Rod Liddle, who wrote a column last year which included the headline, “my own view is that there is not enough Islamophobia within the Tory party.” He suffered absolutely no consequences for this.
Liddle wrote this in defense of Boris Johnson, the former foreign minister for the British government, after Johnson compared Muslim women in burqas to “letterboxes” and bank robbers. Johnson, whose long history of Islamophobia and racism has not prevented him from reaching the height of British politics, also suffered absolutely no consequences for this. He is still a potential front-runner to become the next British prime minister.
Even if Johnson were to reach those heights, he would pale in prominence next to the most powerful Islamophobe in the world: the president of the United States, whose pledge to ban Muslims from America helped him get elected, and whose decision to carry out that pledge was upheld by the Supreme Court.
In Australia, where the suspect in the New Zealand attack is alleged to live, Islamophobia is a healthy and thriving part of political culture, where the two main parties vie to see who can crack down more on mostly Muslim immigrants who are trying to reach the country’s shores. These policies have been embraced by the far right around the world.
These are just a tiny number of examples. But the truth is obvious. You can hate Muslims and still make tons of money on television. You can hate Muslims and be a highly successful politician. You can hate Muslims and never lose your elite perch in the media. And if you violently target Muslims, it’s more likely than not that people will move on quickly. It’s long past time for that to change.
The number of hate groups in the United States rose for the fourth year in a row in 2018, pushed to a record high by a toxic combination of political polarization, anti-immigrant sentiment and technologies that help spread propaganda online, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Wednesday.
The law center said the number of hate groups rose by 7 percent last year to 1,020, a 30 percent jump from 2014. That broadly echoes other worrying developments, including a 30 percent increase in the number of hate crimes reported to the F.B.I. from 2015 through 2017 and a surge of right-wing violence that the Anti-Defamation League said had killed at least 50 people in 2018.
“We’re seeing a lot of bad trends,” Heidi Beirich, the director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in an interview on Wednesday. “There are more hate groups, more hate crimes and more domestic terrorism in that same vein. It is a troubling set of circumstances.”
Ms. Beirich said the increase in extremist activity tracked by her team began in earnest in the early days of the 2016 presidential election, when anxieties over immigration helped propel President Trump to the White House. Before that, she said, the number of hate groups had fallen for three straight years.
“Trump has made people in the white supremacist movement move back into politics and the public domain,” Ms. Beirich said. “He is a critical aspect of this dynamic, but he is not the only reason why the ranks of hate groups are growing. The ability to propagate hate in the online space is key.”
The center said in a statement that most hate groups in the United States espoused some form of white supremacist ideology, including neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederates and white nationalists. It said the number of white nationalist groups jumped by almost 50 percent, to 148 in 2018 from 100.
For the purposes of its study, the center said it considered any organization whose leaders, activities or statement of principles attacks an entire class of people to be a hate group. Violence is not a prerequisite.
The center’s findings run parallel to a report on extremist-related killings in the United States that was issued last month by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
That report said that right-wing extremism was linked to every extremist-related killing the group tracked in 2018, at least 50, and that jihadist groups were linked to none. It said that made 2018 the deadliest year for right-wing extremism since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
The law center and the Anti-Defamation League both pointed to the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in October as a symptom of the increasingly combustible mix of anti-immigrant sentiment, violence and online conspiracy-mongering.
“The white supremacist attack in Pittsburgh should serve as a wake-up call to everyone about the deadly consequences of hateful rhetoric,” Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the president of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement accompanying its report. “It’s time for our nation’s leaders to appropriately recognize the severity of the threat and to devote the necessary resources to address the scourge of right-wing extremism.”
But the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment had also created “an equal yet opposite reaction,” the Southern Poverty Law Center said. As the number of white supremacist groups rose, so did the number of radical black nationalist groups that espoused anti-white, anti-Semitic or anti-gay and anti-transgender views.
The center said the number of those groups had risen to 264 in 2018 from 233 in 2017, but it noted that the influence of black nationalism in mainstream politics was highly limited.
It did, however, point specifically to comments by the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who the center said echoed white supremacist myths of a looming white genocide in his rhetoric about President Trump, whom he has accused of “planning genocide” against African-Americans.
Mr. Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam have been connected to a continuing controversy surrounding the anti-Trump Women’s March organization, two of whose national leaders have been accused of sympathizing with Mr. Farrakhan and privately expressing anti-Semitic opinions.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which is based in Montgomery, Ala., has tracked domestic extremism since 1971, but in recent years conservatives have accused it of politicizing its findings and falsely labeling right-leaning organizations as hate groups.
The group paid $3.4 million to Maajid Nawaz, a British campaigner against Islamic extremism who sometimes works with conservative anti-Muslim politicians, after it included him on a list of anti-Muslim extremists in 2016. Richard Cohen, the center’s president, said in a public apology that the inclusion of Mr. Nawaz on the list had been “wrong.”
ALGONA, Iowa — It was the kind of question that a politician should have been able to handle with ease, but Representative Steve King is not any politician.
“Do you think a white society is superior to a nonwhite society?” Mary Lavelle, 63, asked, testing his reputation for white supremacist sympathies.
“I don’t have an answer for that. That’s so hypothetical,” Mr. King, Republican of Iowa, told her. “I’ll say this, America is not a white society — it has never been a completely white society. We came here and joined the Native Americans.”
He continued: “I’ve long said that a baby can be lifted out of a cradle anywhere in the world and brought into any home in America, whatever the color of the folks in that household, and they can be raised to be American as any other. And I believe that every one of us, every one of us, is created in God’s image.”
Ms. Lavelle said she asked the question in this northern Iowa town of 5,000 because she worried that anti-immigrant language used in a manifesto written by the suspect in the mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, resembled Mr. King’s own talking points. His fumbling answer to a relatively simple query may have done little to allay those concerns, two months after Mr. King, a nine-term Republican with a long history of racist comments, was publicly rebuked by members of his own party.
House Republican leaders removed Mr. King from his committee assignments in January, after comments he made to The New York Times questioned why the phrase “white supremacy” was considered offensive. A number of powerful party leaders, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, suggested he should resign, and the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution disapproving of Mr. King’s statements.
Mr. King remained defiant after losing his committee seats, and released a statement insisting that his comments had been misunderstood. He said he had been referring only to “Western civilization” when he asked “how did that language become offensive,” not “white nationalist” or “white supremacist.”
Mr. King again faced scrutiny on Monday after a post on his Facebook page speculated who would win a second civil war between red states and blue states.
“Folks keep talking about another civil war; one side has about 8 trillion bullets while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use,” read the post, which has since been deleted.
On Tuesday, pressed by a reporter from CNN, Mr. King told constituents that he “wasn’t aware” that the image had been published on his Facebook page the night before, and said he does not personally manage that page.
“I wish it had never gone up,” he said.
But he also sought to deflect the question, telling the reporter, “it’s interesting that nobody here asked that question,” while gesturing to his constituents.
“The only people who care about that is national news media. Nobody has raised the issue around here,” he said, prompting a handful of attendees to protest. The exchange was quickly picked up by American Bridge, a liberal political action committee.
But Ms. Lavelle clearly did care about Mr. King’s incendiary language. After being asked about the manifesto, Mr. King responded at length. He said the author of the manifesto had expressed as much sympathy for Communist China as white supremacy. “The further it went, the more inconsistent it became, and he seems to have mixed and matched ideologies,” he said.
Pressed about the overlap between the manifesto’s language and his own, Mr. King responded, “He also likely used the same words that Mao used.”
The thinking tends to be that racists raise racists. Therefore, if you see yourself as a good person, raising your kids with inclusive morals, you would have no reason to worry that they’d grow up to the be the sort of person who would march with white nationalists in Charlottesville. But it happens.
And in the wake of yet another mass shooting, this time at two New Zealand mosques, parents across the country—and the world—are asking themselves: “What more can we do?” Because not being racist yourself is not enough to stop the spread of white supremacy.
With social media and the internet readily available to most kids by the time they’re teenagers (and often much earlier), you can’t simply model good values. White supremacists spread their messages via YouTube and social media and recruit kids slowly and subtly through online multi-player video games.
It’s not realistic to think we can stay one step ahead of our kids with their access to technology. They can get around our parental controls, our trackers and monitors. They are subjected to online algorithms we can’t control. It’s almost a guarantee that they will be exposed to hate speech, hate symbols and extremist views, both online and in real life, by the time they’re in high school.
To combat it, Jinnie Spiegler, director of curriculum and training with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), says we need to teach them about it.
Start early with messages of diversity and inclusion
We’re not going to sit our kids down as teenagers and say, “So, listen; there’s this awful thing called ‘white supremacy’...” without ever having had a conversation with them about race, ethnicity or diversity. Those discussions need to start much earlier.
As early as 3 or 4 years old, you can use children’s books, TV shows and everyday experiences to talk about identity, race and the importance of including people of all colors and backgrounds into our lives.
Then, by the time your kids are 8 or 9 years old, you can dive deeper into the history of racism, religious bigotry and intimidation. Talk about examples of these not just from the distance past but from current events, as well, so they can become aware of its existence and able to identify it on their own.
Confront and interrupt bias and hate
Perhaps the worst thing we can do, Spiegler says, is to ignore bigotry when it happens. School or community leaders might be inclined to believe that one racist incident—such as a group of students making what appears to be a Nazi salute—is not representative of who they are as a whole.
“How schools deal with that and address it really sends a message,” Spiegler says. “Sometimes schools want to say it’s an isolated incident. They don’t really take it on and say, ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’”
Those incidents are opportunities for parents to talk with their kids about bias and hate. But the trick is to make it less of a lecture and more of a conversation to understand how your kids are interpreting these kinds of actions.
“It’s also important to hear how they’re thinking about it, otherwise it will shut down communication,” Spiegler says. “Hear what young people are thinking before we go into a rant. It’s important to convey your values, but also keep communication open.”
If you find they have views that contradict your own, you can question their line of thinking without immediately putting them on the defensive. Ask why do they feel that way, where did they learn that and why do they trust the source of their information? Then you can begin to learn more together.
Teach them about propaganda
In a world full of ‘fake news’, lying politicians and propaganda, kids need to learn how to spot when they’re being manipulated. With young kids, that can start by talking about advertising and the motivations behind an ad or commercial: They’re trying to sell you something.
Some social studies teacher give lessons on propaganda, but it’s a topic parents should be tackling at home, too, so kids can learn how to differentiate between unbiased fact and propaganda. The ADL created a guide called “Propaganda, Extremists and Online Recruitment Tactics” to help parents initiate a conversation with their teenagers. The guide offers some basic background on how extremists recruit, as well as questions and topics that parents can use as a starting point with their kids. Those questions include:
Have you seen any type of propaganda online? What did you notice about it?
How do you think propaganda is like advertising and how is it different?
What do you know about terrorism and extremism and what more do you want to know?
Why do you think members of extremist groups reach out to people online to recruit new members?
How do you feel about extremist groups trying to recruit young people online?
“Ultimately, part of how you want them to think about it is that they’re being lured into it,” Spiegler says.
Teach them about hate speech and hate symbols
If you think your child is not hearing hate speech and seeing hate symbols online, while they’re gaming and out in the community, you’re wrong. Spiegler says her own daughter often tells her about the swastikas written across students’ notebooks or on bathroom walls. If we don’t talk about it and explain the history behind such symbols, we are part of the problem.
“We’re seeing a huge increase of hate symbols in schools, and if we normalize it and don’t see it as an ongoing issue in the community, then it just becomes part of our culture,” Spiegler says. “I’m afraid that’s starting to happen.”
The ADL has a Hate Symbol Database that provides the pictures, descriptions and meanings of hundreds of hate symbols.
Most kids understand what bullying is, but you will probably have to help them differentiate bullying from hate speech. Caroline Knorr of Common Sense Media provides a clear explanation for kids in this HuffPost article:
If someone is trying to hurt someone, or knows that they’re hurting someone, and does it repeatedly, that’s cyberbullying. When someone expresses vicious views about a group or toward an attribute of a group, that’s hate speech.
Knorr offers parents and kids practical tips for handling hate speech online, such as by reporting it, blocking certain users and calling it out when they feel comfortable doing so.
Don’t let them become isolated
Kids crave feelings of acceptance. They need a sense belonging, to feel that they’re part of a group. Ask yourself: Is my child an outcast? Does he feel marginalized at school? Does she have friends?
If the answer is no, they are vulnerable to extremist groups who can fill that void. Help them identify places where they can build stronger connections, whether it’s through a club, activity, sport or church group.
“Young people feeling marginalized and having no sense of belonging with peers is a huge important thing that we all need to think about,” Spiegler says. “We always say we need to create inclusive, welcoming, diverse schools and communities so people don’t feel marginalized and isolated. Because then they are more susceptible because they’re looking for a sense of belonging, and these (extremist) groups offer that.”
Talk about current events
If you’re not talking to your kids about current events, chances are, they’re getting their information elsewhere. It’s important to use current events in an age-appropriate way to open up a dialogue with your kids about hate and bias.
Common Sense Media has a guide for Best News Sources for Kids that parents can use as a starting point for talking about the news, how it’s reported and how to become a critical consumer of media.
During an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” this past Sunday, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) lambasted President Trump for emboldening white nationalism after a young man killed at least 50 people at two New Zealand mosques. Kaine was referring to Trump’s answer after a reporter asked whether he sees "today that white nationalism is a rising threat around the world?” Trump responded, “I don’t really.”
This is not the first time Trump has been accused of catering to white nationalists after a terrorist attack. At an August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a young white man rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer. Afterward, Trump insisted that “there’s blame on both sides” for the violence.
Then in October 2018, a gunman killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. When Trump announced plans to visit the synagogue, many people in Squirrel Hill, the city’s predominantly Jewish neighborhood, took to the streets demanding first that Trump renounce white nationalism before paying his respects to the victims.
Trump has strongly rejected any charges that he’s to blame, tweeting Monday:
"The Fake News Media is working overtime to blame me for the horrible attack in New Zealand. They will have to work very hard to prove that one. So Ridiculous!"
Our research finds that Kaine could be correct, however: Trump’s rhetoric may encourage hate crimes, as we explain below.
Does Trump’s political rhetoric have a measurable link to reported hate crime and extremist activity?
We examined this question, given that so many politicians and pundits accuse Trump of emboldening white nationalists. White nationalist leaders seem to agree, as leaders including Richard Spencer and David Duke have publicly supported Trump’s candidacy and presidency, even if they still criticize him for not going far enough. The New Zealand shooter even referred to Trump as a “renewed symbol of white identity.”
So, do attitudes like these have real world consequences? Recent research on far-right groups suggests that they do, especially when these attitudes are embraced and encourage by peers. Specifically, the quantity of neo-Nazi and racist skinhead groups active in a state leads to increased reports of hate crimes within that state.
How we did our research
Using the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terrorism map data (HEAT map), we examined whether there was a correlation between the counties that hosted one of Trump’s 275 presidential campaign rallies in 2016 and increased incidents of hate crimes in subsequent months.
To test this, we aggregated hate-crime incident data and Trump rally data to the county level and then used statistical tools to estimate a rally’s impact. We included controls for factors such as the county’s crime rates, its number of active hate groups, its minority populations, its percentage with college educations, its location in the country and the month when the rallies occurred.
We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.
Of course, our analysis cannot be certain it was Trump’s campaign rally rhetoric that caused people to commit more hate crimes in the host county. However, suggestions that this effect can be explained through a plethora of faux hate crimes are at best unrealistic. In fact, this charge is frequently used as a political tool to dismiss concerns about hate crimes. Research shows it is far more likely that hate crime statistics are considerably lower because of underreporting.
Additionally, it is hard to discount a “Trump effect” when a considerable number of these reported hate crimes reference Trump. According to the ADL’s 2016 data, these incidents included vandalism, intimidation and assault.
What’s more, according to the FBI’s Universal Crime report in 2017, reported hate crimes increased 17 percent over 2016. Recent research also shows that reading or hearing Trump’s statements of bias against particular groups makes people more likely to write offensive things about the groups he targets.
Public school campuses in Charlottesville will be shuttered Friday for a second straight day — and more than 4,300 students will be kept out of classrooms — after a threat of racial violence surfaced online.
In a message to families, Rosa Atkins, superintendent of Charlottesville City Schools, said an investigation involving state and federal authorities remains active, necessitating the unusual step of keeping schools closed.
“We would like to acknowledge and condemn the fact that this threat was racially charged. We do not tolerate hate or racism,” Atkins said.
“The entire staff and School Board stand in solidarity with our students of color — and with people who have been singled out for reasons such as religion or ethnicity or sexual identity in other vile threats made across the country or around the world. We are in this together, and a threat against one is a threat against all.”
Police said in a statement that the online threat was directed at Charlottesville High School .
Authorities declined to further describe the threat, but images circulating on Reddit and other social media sites referred to a post on 4chan, an anonymous online messaging board. The post included a racist meme, used slurs for blacks and Latinos, and threatened to attack students of color at Charlottesville High.
[‘We lost our naivete’: A year later, Charlottesville remains a wounded city]
Charlottesville police spokesman Tyler Hawn said the decision to close an entire school system was done as a precaution.
Police told school board members about the threat Wednesday afternoon, said Jennifer McKeever, the board’s chairwoman. She said the school system decided to close the city’s nine schools out of an “abundance of caution” to allow law enforcement to investigate.
“We just didn’t have any additional information, and it was clear that we were not going to get any additional information,” she said. “As laypeople, we could not determine the credibility of the threat.”
The threat was another jolt to a community still strained by the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 that turned Charlottesville into the site of America’s largest white-supremacy gathering in decades.
This week’s online episode did not surprise members of Charlottesville High’s Black Student Union, who say it is symptomatic of persistent issues in Charlottesville City Schools, including excessive police presence in schools and a lack of black students in advanced classes.
“We’re still allowing this kind of racism in our school,” said Althea Laughon-Worrell, an 18 year-old who attends Charlottesville High School. “It’s making it seem like it’s okay for whoever posted that to say that, to feel that way. . . . It is because of racism, and because we haven’t dealt with this, that this person decided to post this.”
Zyahna Bryant, president of the Black Student Union, has called on the community to reckon with white supremacy in the aftermath of the 2017 rally and confront gentrification and the paucity of affordable housing in the city.
Bryant, 18, wants the latest episode to encourage community members to grapple with racial inequities in the school system.
“There needs to be a real conversation about how students of color are being supported,” Bryant said. “It is dangerous to continue to categorize racism as just person-to-person experiences without calling attention to the systems that work to uphold and enforce racist policies.”
The Charlottesville episode stoked further scrutiny of the way social media is used to perpetuate hateful rhetoric and violence, drawing parallels to the use of social media to broadcast a massacre at mosques in New Zealand last week.
Doron F. Ezickson, a regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement that the Charlottesville incident offered further evidence that social media is partly responsible for elevating extremist ideas.
It was, Ezickson said, another “frightening development for a city that is still healing from the traumatic and lingering experience” of the rally that brought hundreds of white supremacists into the town of 50,000 residents.
Margaret Matthews, a Charlottesville resident who has grandchildren in city schools, said the rally emboldened white supremacists and its fallout continues to disrupt the city.
After the school system announced it would close Thursday, Matthews said parents began asking themselves: “What do we tell our kids?”
Rep. Steve King, the Iowa Republican who has made a series of statements embracing white nationalism, on Thursday noted a contrast between the response of people in his state to spring flooding and the response of the residents of New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Speaking at a town hall in Charter Oak, Iowa, a city that is 99.4 percent white, according to census estimates, the nine-term congressman didn’t say what attributes explained the differing reactions. But racist tropes about African American dependence on the government echoed in the observations about New Orleans. The Crescent City maintains a black majority, though the community has shrunk since the disaster struck nearly 14 years ago.
"We go to a place like New Orleans, and everybody’s looking around saying, ‘Who’s going to help me? Who’s going to help me?’” King said, recounting what he said officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, had told him about the relief effort, in which he said he had participated. Yet, he was also one of 11 members of Congress to oppose a bill providing federal aid to Katrina victims in 2005.
In his home state, he said, residents looked after one another without government handouts. Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has declared a disaster in more than half of Iowa’s 99 counties because of severe flooding and is seeking a federal declaration that would free up funds from Washington.
“We go to a place like Iowa, and we go see, knock on the door at, say, I make up a name, John’s place, and say, ‘John, you got water in your basement, we can write you a check, we can help you,'" King said. “And John will say, ‘Well, wait a minute, let me get my boots. It’s Joe that needs help. Let’s go down to his place and help him.’”
King, who was stripped of his committee assignments in January over comments questioning whether the term “white supremacist” was offensive, said FEMA officials are “always gratified when they come and see how Iowans take care of each other.”
“We’re Iowans, and I’m always proud of our reaction to this,” he added, suggesting that his constituents displayed up-from-their-bootstraps grit in the face of environmental calamity, while the victims of Katrina — the deadliest storm to buffet the United States since the Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 — helplessly went in search of government assistance.
Katrina was responsible for an estimated 1,833 deaths, more than half of which were suffered by African Americans, according to data analysis by public health experts.
King then turned to discussing trade negotiations, which have major implications for his constituents. His district received more than $9 billion in federal farming subsidies between 1995 and 2017 — more than any other district in Iowa, which has received more subsidies than any other state in the nation.
An angry reaction met King’s remarks on Thursday.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, called the comments “disgusting and disheartening.”
Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), whose district includes most of New Orleans, said the comparison was further proof that King was a “white supremacist."
“When people show you who they are, believe them,” Richmond added.
The two men have clashed before over King’s use of New Orleans to draw unflattering comparisons. In 2017, while touting a measure that would have tracked offenses committed by immigrant children from “the most violent places in the world,” King said he was struck that the homicide rate in New Orleans was equivalent to that in certain Central American countries.
“It’s insensitive, and it’s nothing more than traditional white privilege of, ‘Let me criticize a minority city,’” Richmond said.
A spokesman for King, 69, didn’t return a request for comment.
Examples abound of King disparaging immigrants, minorities and women who undergo abortions, as well as taking up the cause of ethnic nationalism. Most recently, he shared a meme on Facebook suggesting that red states would win a civil war because they have “about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.” He has palled around with figures on Europe’s far-right fringes and retweeted a message from a self-described “Nazi sympathizer.”
King’s record of incendiary statements became so glaring in the weeks before the midterm elections last fall that a party often reluctant to police its own members virtually abandoned him.
The chairman of the House Republican campaign arm assailed his colleague for “white supremacy and hate,” saying the group would stay away from King’s reelection effort. He ended up narrowly beating back a challenge from a first-time Democratic candidate in his deep-red district.
In February, when he announced his intention to seek a 10th term next year, King appeared unbowed. “I have nothing to apologize for,” he said. Competition from Republican state Sen. Randy Feenstra is likely to present a more formidable challenge.
One prominent Republican who has not censured King is President Trump, who has also invoked Hurricane Katrina for his own political ends. Last year, the president pointed to the death toll in New Orleans to cast the relief effort in Puerto Rico in a more positive light. But vastly more people died as a result of Hurricane Maria’s devastation in the U.S. territory — nearly 3,000, according to a George Washington University report — than perished in New Orleans.
Critics of how the Trump administration dealt with that natural disaster argue that the response was tinged with racism. Those allegations recall the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, which exposed stark racial inequities.
Despite President George W. Bush’s statement in 2005 that “the storm didn’t discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort,” most of the people who languished in unbearable conditions in the city’s low-lying eastern areas were poor and black. An estimated 73 percent of those displaced by flooding or damage were black, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. Of those who survived, many fled New Orleans the year after the storm, including more than 175,000 black residents, according to FiveThirtyEight. More than 75,000 never returned.
“No one is going to tell me it wasn’t a race issue,” an evacuee said in congressional testimony in December 2005.
Another victim said she blamed every level of government. “I blame local. I blame state. I blame federal,” she said.
City residents as a whole were more likely to acknowledge the contribution made by charities and religious organizations than by the federal and state governments, though most still said public assistant was at least somewhat helpful, according to a 2015 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Race remains a fault line in opinions about the storm and its aftermath. In 2015, a Louisiana State University survey found that 80 percent of white residents of New Orleans believed the state had “mostly recovered” from the destruction. Nearly 60 percent of black respondents said the opposite, believing that the state had “mostly not recovered.”
Most white residents said the city was better off than it was before the hurricane struck, while most black people said the opposite.
The deluge inundating the Midwest has already been blamed for three deaths. While scientists have not yet completed models assessing the contribution of planetary warming to the most recent outbreak of heavy rainfall, they do believe that climate change is intensifying extreme precipitation.
King is an outspoken climate skeptic. In 2010, he said at a town hall that climate science was the “modern version of the rain dance.”
But Iowa residents won’t need the help of ancient rituals to induce rain. They’re going to have plenty of it this spring.
The Washington Post reports:
At an Oval Office meeting on Feb. 22, Trump asked top advisers for ways to limit federal support from going to Puerto Rico, believing it is taking money that should be going to the mainland, according to senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the presidents’ private remarks.
The meeting — an afternoon session focused on Department of Housing and Urban Development grants — ended abruptly, and Trump has continued to ask aides how much money the island will get. Then, Trump said he wanted the money to only fortify the electric grid there.
Trump has also privately signaled he will not approve any additional help for Puerto Rico beyond the food-stamp money, setting up a congressional showdown with Democrats who have pushed for more expansive help for the island.
According to the above-linked report, during staff meetings Trump has repeatedly claimed that large parts of Puerto Rico never had electricity to begin with. He has also complained that officials there have failed to sufficiently thank him for the aid already received.
State Rep. Stephanie Borowicz was on the ninth “Jesus” of her opening prayer in the Pennsylvania statehouse when other lawmakers started to look uncomfortable.
Speaker Mike Turzai, a fellow Republican, glanced up — but Borowicz carried on, delivering a 100-second ceremonial invocation that some of her colleagues decried as an offensive, divisive and Islamophobic display shortly before the legislature swore in its first Muslim woman.
“God forgive us — Jesus — we’ve lost sight of you, we’ve forgotten you, God, in our country, and we’re asking you to forgive us,” Borowicz said, followed by a quote from the Bible’s second book of Chronicles that implores God’s followers to “turn from their wicked ways.” Then she praised President Trump for his unequivocal support of Israel.
“I claim all these things in the powerful, mighty name of Jesus, the one who, at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess, Jesus, that you are Lord, in Jesus’ name,” Borowicz said.
By the time she said “Amen,” Borowicz had invoked Jesus 13 times, deploying the name between prayerful clauses as though it were a comma. She mentioned “Lord” and “God” another six times each and referenced “The Great I Am” and “the one who’s coming back again, the one who came, died and rose again on the third day.”
As the prayer reached a crescendo, at least one member shouted objections. Turzai, standing behind her, looked up again and nudged her elbow, prompting her to quickly conclude the address. Afterward, the protests only grew louder.
“It blatantly represented the Islamophobia that exists among some leaders — leaders that are supposed to represent the people,” Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell, the newly sworn-in Democrat who is Muslim, told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Monday. “I came to the Capitol to help build bipartisanship and collaborations regardless of race or religion to enhance the quality of life for everyone in the Commonwealth.”
Johnson-Harrell brought with her 55 guests, all there to see her historic moment at the statehouse. Thirty-two of them were Muslim, she told local news outlets. She later called for the General Assembly to censure Borowicz.
Johnson-Harrell’s new colleagues also came to her defense.
“Never have we started out with a prayer that divides us,” said the chamber’s top Democrat, Rep. Frank Dermody, speaking from the House floor. “Prayer should never divide us. It should bring us together.”
Rep. Jordan Harris, another high-ranking Democrat who called himself a devout Christian, criticized Borowicz for “weaponizing” her religion.
“I’m a Christian, and I believe in Christ,” Harris said in a statement. “What I believe is Christ’s teaching more than anything, and his teaching would not be about, and was not about, dividing us as a people, but uniting us as a people.”
Other state lawmakers called Borowicz’s prayer racist and said it was “fire and brimstone Evangelical prayer” that “epitomizes religious intolerance.”
Borowicz, responding to a local reporter’s question, refused to apologize.
“That’s how I pray every day. … I don’t apologize ever for praying,” she said.
Turzai later said that when the House invites religious leaders to lead the invocation, they’re instructed to respect all religious beliefs. However, the Patriot-News reported, lawmakers were not given the same instructions.
In recent years, the customary opening prayer — which kicks off every Pennsylvania legislative session day and was historically noncontroversial — has become another, minor front in an ongoing battle over religious representation and the separation of church and state. Last year, a federal court overturned statehouse rules that barred non-theists, who do not hold beliefs about any deity, from giving the opening invocation.
The judge ruled that the ban violated the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause, which protects the free exercise of religion. Republicans have appealed that verdict.
Them: A Fake Yet Relevant Film About the White Men Pissed at Jordan Peele for Saying He Won't Make a Film Starring a 'White Dude' (https://thegrapevine.theroot.com/them-a-fake-yet-relevant-film-about-the-white-men-piss-1833633666/amp)
President Trump is frustrated by two numbers that emerged after Hurricane Maria laid waste to Puerto Rico in 2017.
The first is 2,975, the number of people estimated to have died as a result of the storm, according to analysis conducted by George Washington University. This number, Trump has insisted, is far higher than reality. When he visited the island shortly after the storm struck, the death toll was only 16 — though that number had more than doubled by the time Air Force One began heading back to the mainland. As weeks passed and recovery efforts continued, the toll increased dramatically.
The other number is $91 billion, the amount of aid that Trump reportedly told Republican senators Tuesday that the island was receiving. This hefty figure was a source of frustration for Trump, who wondered why Puerto Rico was getting so much more than other affected states.
But unlike the estimated death toll, which is rooted in statistical analysis of the island’s mortality patterns, Trump’s $91 billion appears to be a steep inflation of what’s actually been appropriated.
It’s an awfully specific figure, $91 billion. It does bear some relation to the storm: Hurricane Maria was estimated to have done $91 billion in damage, most of it in Puerto Rico. The island’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló (PNP of Puerto Rico), asked for $94.4 billion a few months after the storm made landfall, an amount that increased to $139 billion last summer. But those are estimates of what would be needed for a full recovery, not what the island has actually received. By contrast, Texas and Florida asked for $61 billion and $27 billion in late 2017 for the storms that struck those states — doing far less damage than Puerto Rico experienced.
What’s been spent there so far? The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has spent $5 billion on debris removal, road repairs and power restoration. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has been approved to spend almost $10 billion in disaster relief funds, $1.5 billion last summer and $8.2 billion more approved last month. As The Post’s team notes, it’s murky — but those figures do not add up to anything close to $91 billion. Last October, the director of the federal control board that oversees Puerto Rico’s spending estimated an eventual investment of $82 billion, which is a bit closer to the mark but which hasn’t yet been received.
“It’s unclear where Trump got the figure for Puerto Rico aid,” The Washington Post’s Seung Min Kim, Josh Dawsey and Paul Kane reported. “One congressional official said it is difficult to quantify exactly how much aid the island has received to recover from Maria because of the way the money is disbursed.”
Trump’s antipathy to spending money on Puerto Rico has been evident since shortly after the storm hit.
Less than a week after Maria made landfall, Trump was quick to note that the island “was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt” before the storm hit and that it had “billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with.” That debt certainly existed, but Trump has repeatedly suggested relief aid sent to the island would be abused to pay it down.
“The people of Puerto Rico are wonderful,” Trump tweeted last October, “but the inept politicians are trying to use the massive and ridiculously high amounts of hurricane/disaster funding to pay off other obligations.” That tweet came shortly after the $82 billion estimate referenced above.
Tuesday’s report about Trump’s focus on Puerto Rico follows several similar reports. The tweet above followed a similar bout of irritation by the president last September, when he reportedly told top aides that he didn’t want the island to receive any additional relief funding. Last November, Axios reported that Trump wanted to rescind some already approved funding for the island out of concern over mismanagement. Late last month, Trump asked advisers how to limit federal spending on the island, according to Post reporting. That coincided with a fight over a lapse in food-stamp coverage when Congress failed to reauthorize funding. Some 1.3 million island residents are affected by the lapse, with a similar funding gap in Medicaid looming.
The Post reported Tuesday that HUD’s inspector general was reviewing whether the White House interfered in relief funding for Puerto Rico.
Again, it’s not clear how firmly Trump’s objections are rooted in actual spending figures. The island hasn’t received $91 billion, a number that doesn’t appear to overlap with any figure that’s actually under consideration. By citing that seemingly inflated figure, Trump’s hoping to bolster his political case against additional spending — which, ironically, is exactly what he criticizes his opponents of doing when they note the estimated death toll of nearly 3,000 people. That number, he claims, is inflated to make him look bad. Meanwhile, he seems to be inflating the spending number to make Puerto Rico look bad.
Trump’s administration of the executive branch often operates in a space adjacent to data and factual findings. Rarely, though, is that methodology as readily apparent.
After a man killed 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand this month, authorities discovered a document believed to have been written by him in which he appears to have articulated his violent, racist philosophy. Part of the document was in a question-and-answer format, including a question that asked whether the author was a supporter of President Trump.
“As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure,” the answer read. “As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.”
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office the next day, Trump was asked whether he saw white supremacism like that apparently embraced by the New Zealand shooter as a rising threat globally.
“I don’t really,” Trump said. “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
This was by no means the first time that Trump has downplayed the threat of white nationalism. After a white-nationalist demonstrator drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville in 2017, Trump gave a speech criticizing racism — but only after saying that blame for the violence rested on both sides, and also saying that the largely white-nationalist and neo-Nazi demonstrators included “some very fine people.”
A Washington Post-ABC poll conducted shortly afterward found that most respondents thought Trump was equating the neo-Nazis and their supporters with anti-Nazi demonstrators.
After the New Zealand shooting and Trump’s response, Pew Research Center asked a broader question: Did Americans think that Trump had done enough to distance himself from white-nationalist groups?
More than half said Trump had done too little — including a quarter of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
Those numbers were remarkably similar to what Quinnipiac University found in November. The pollsters asked Americans whether they believed that Trump’s decisions and behaviors broadly had encouraged white supremacist groups.
Again, 56 percent of respondents said that he had encouraged white supremacist groups, while only 3 percent said he had discouraged them. Nearly a fifth of Republicans (here excluding independents) agreed that he encouraged them.
Quinnipiac went further, asking those who said they believed Trump had encouraged white supremacists whether they thought he had done so deliberately or accidentally.
Thirty-five percent of respondents said that Trump encouraged white supremacists and did so deliberately. Only among Republicans who thought Trump encouraged the groups did more people think it was accidental than intentional.
There have been a slew of moments during Trump’s presidency when questions have been raised about his feelings about race. Last month, his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress and offered a number of examples of times that Trump had said racist things in his presence.
In February 2018, the Associated Press and NORC released a poll finding that most people thought Trump was himself a racist — including more than 8 in 10 black respondents.
There’s a consistency to White House comments after questions about Trump’s responses to violence and threats, including racist ones: How many times do we have to denounce these things?
If Pew’s poll is any guide, more than it is.
American journalists look to the Associated Press as the arbiter of language. Most newsrooms don’t have the resources to develop their own style manuals, so the influence of AP’s guidance stretches far beyond its own staff.
Friday’s updated entries on race-related issues are an acknowledgment of the topic’s growing prominence in American journalism. This new guidance offers journalists clarity and precision as they frame the news for their audiences.
Two things jumped out at me: AP finally agrees that “hyphenated Americans” are a relic. And, when an incident is racist, journalists should say so.
It’s seemingly small but significant that AP is eliminating the hyphenated American. The entry for dual heritage says to drop the hyphen in such terms as African American and Asian American. The hyphen dates to the 19th century as a way to distinguish immigrants as “other” and has been a common microaggression for more than a century.
When a subject’s heritage is relevant, it’s important to respect the source’s preference. Someone who is Asian American might be more accurately described as Chinese American. Someone who is black might want to be identified as Haitian Canadian.
Race is central to many recent headlines: Jussie Smollett’s case, immigration, the viral video of a teenager and a Native American elder.
However we are in an era of dog-whistle politics — if you know what to listen for, you get the message. Some newsrooms have soft-pedaled describing actions as racist. Instead, they have hedged with language such as “racially motivated.” Now AP has drawn a bright line in its entry on racism:
The terms racism and racist can be used in broad references or in quotations to describe the hatred of a race, or assertion of the superiority of one race over others.
The entry goes on to say that journalists should start by assessing the facts of the situation and discourages the euphemism “racially charged.”
A key portion of the entry on race-related coverage says:
Identifying people by race and reporting on actions that have to do with race often go beyond simple style questions, challenging journalists to think broadly about racial issues before having to make decisions on specific situations and stories.
AP has long given journalists latitude to use news judgment in determining how pertinent it is to include race in news coverage. But this year’s updates note that race is often “an irrelevant factor” and cautions journalists to be clear about the role of race before they include racial identifiers.
That’s a key component in mindful reporting: As journalists, we determine what is relevant to share with our audience. Everyone has their own innate set of assumptions, and race as a descriptor is one way in which we can add nuance or — perhaps unwittingly — reinforce stereotypes.
The stylebook also has a new entry cautioning against calling someone “a black” or “a white”; this is similar guidance to an entry updated in 2017 advising against referring to someone as “a gay.”
In full disclosure, I was asked to weigh in on AP’s race entries as a representative of the Asian American Journalists Association.
A few resources I recommend for people looking for more in-depth guidance on race issues:
Diversity Style Guide
Conscious Style Guide
Guide to Covering Asian America
National Association of Black Journalists Style Guide
Native American Journalists Association Style Guide
Global Press Style Guide
Journalism relies on the power of language. And the precision of that language is more critical than ever when it comes to how we cover race.
I was leaving a corporate office building after a full day of leading workshops on how to talk about race thoughtfully and deliberately. The audience for each session had been similar to the dozens I had faced before. There was an overrepresentation of employees of color, an underrepresentation of white employees. The participants of color tended to make eye contact with me and nod – I even heard a few “Amens” – but were never the first to raise their hands with questions or comments. Meanwhile, there was always a white man eager to share his thoughts on race. In these sessions I typically rely on silent feedback from participants of color to make sure I am on the right track, while trying to moderate the loud centering of whiteness.
In the hallway an Asian American woman locked eyes with me and mouthed: “Thank you.” A black man squeezed my shoulder and muttered: “Girl, if you only knew.” A black woman stopped me, looked around cautiously to make sure no one was within earshot, and then said: “You spoke the truth. I wish I could have shared my story so you’d know how true. But this was not the place.”
This was not the place. Despite the care I take in these sessions to center people of color, to keep them safe, this still was not the place. Once again, what might have been a discussion about the real, quantifiable harm being done to people of color had been subsumed by a discussion about the feelings of white people, the expectations of white people, the needs of white people.
As I stood there, gazing off into the memory of hundreds of stifled conversations about race, I was brought to attention by a white woman. She was not nervously looking around to see who might be listening. She didn’t ask if I had time to talk, though I was standing at the door.
“Your session was really nice,” she started. “You said a lot of good things that will be useful to a lot of people.”
She paused briefly: “But the thing is, nothing you talked about today is going to help me make more black friends.”
I was reminded of one of the very first panels on race I had participated in. A black man in Seattle had been pepper-sprayed by a security guard for doing nothing more than walking through a shopping center. It had been caught on camera. A group of black writers and activists, myself included, were onstage in front of a majority-white Seattle audience, talking about the incident. Fellow panelist Charles Mudede, a brilliant writer, film-maker and economic theorist, addressed the economic mechanisms at work: this security guard had been told that his job was to protect his employers’ ability to make a profit. He had been told that his job was to keep customers who had money to spend happy and safe. And every day he was fed cultural messages about who had money and who didn’t. Who was violent and who wasn’t. Charles argued that the security guard had been doing his job. In a white supremacist capitalist system, this is what doing your job looked like.
Well, at least he was trying to argue that point. Because halfway through, a white woman stood up and interrupted him.
“Look, I’m sure you know a lot about all this stuff,” she said, hands on hips. “But I didn’t come here for an economics lesson. I came here because I feel bad about what happened to this man and I want to know what to do.”
That room, apparently, wasn’t the place either. According to this woman, this talk was not, or should not have been, about the feelings of the man who was pepper-sprayed, or those of the broader black community, which had just been delivered even more evidence of how unsafe we are in our own city. She felt bad and wanted to stop feeling bad. And she expected us to provide that to her.
At a university last month, where I was discussing the whitewashing of publishing and the need for more unfiltered narratives by people of color, a white man insisted that there was no way we were going to be understood by white people if we couldn’t make ourselves more accessible. When I asked him if all of the elements of white culture that people of color have to familiarize themselves with just to get through the day are ever modified to suit us, he shrugged and looked down at his notebook. At a workshop I led last week a white woman wondered if perhaps people of color in America are too sensitive about race. How was she going to be able to learn if we were always getting so upset at her questions?
I’ve experienced similar interruptions and dismissals more times than I can count. Even when my name is on the poster, none of these places seem like the right places in which to talk about what I and so many people of color need to talk about. So often the white attendees have decided for themselves what will be discussed, what they will hear, what they will learn. And it is their space. All spaces are.
One day, in frustration, I posted this social media status:
“If your anti-racism work prioritizes the ‘growth’ and ‘enlightenment’ of white America over the safety, dignity and humanity of people of color – it’s not anti-racism work. It’s white supremacy.”
One of the very first responses I received from a white commenter was: “OK, but isn’t it better than nothing?”
Is it? Is a little erasure better than a lot of erasure? Is a little white supremacy leaked into our anti-racism work better than no anti-racism work at all? Every time I stand in front of an audience to address racial oppression in America, I know that I am facing a lot of white people who are in the room to feel less bad about racial discrimination and violence in the news, to score points, to let everyone know that they are not like the others, to make black friends. I know that I am speaking to a lot of white people who are certain they are not the problem because they are there.
Just once I want to speak to a room of white people who know they are there because they are the problem. Who know they are there to begin the work of seeing where they have been complicit and harmful so that they can start doing better. Because white supremacy is their construct, a construct they have benefited from, and deconstructing white supremacy is their duty.
Myself and many of the attendees of color often leave these talks feeling tired and disheartened, but I still show up and speak. I show up in the hopes that maybe, possibly, this talk will be the one that finally breaks through, or will bring me a step closer to the one that will. I show up and speak for people of color who can’t speak freely, so that they might feel seen and heard. I speak because there are people of color in the room who need to hear that they shouldn’t have to carry the burden of racial oppression, while those who benefit from that same oppression expect anti-racism efforts to meet their needs first. After my most recent talk, a black woman slipped me a note in which she had written that she would never be able to speak openly about the ways that racism was impacting her life, not without risking reprisals from white peers. “I will heal at home in silence,” she concluded.
Is it better than nothing? Or is the fact that in 2019 I still have to ask myself that question every day most harmful of all?
Fox News Apologizes... (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news-3-mexican-countries-graphic-815829/)
Fox News Apologizes For ‘Three Mexican Countries’ Graphic (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fox-news-3-mexican-countries-graphic-815829/)Ignorant is correct. A demonstration of why Fox is a poor news channel.
(https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/D2-LDsXQAErdCF.jpeg?crop=900:600&width=440)
Because if they speak “Mexican” they must be “Mexican countries” right? RIGHT???
#ignorant #racist #fucks
“FBI & DOJ to review the outrageous Jussie Smollett case in Chicago. It is an embarrassment to our Nation!” With that tweet, Donald Trump took the absurdity of America’s obsession with a trivial crime and entertainment story and heightened it.
But it was just the kind of story that he and conservatives love, one that mixes race, criminality and culture. They need desperately to find emblems of minority pathology to justify their calloused, draconian approach to minority issues.
The Hate Crime Hoaxer, the Mexican Rapist, the America-Hating Muslim, the AIDS-Infected Haitian: each of these ideas has a particular serviceability. In their minds, I believe these archetypes work to invalidate criticism and to inoculate them from accountability.
For the record, if Smollett did what he is accused of having done, it was not only wrong, but also stupid.
But I also believe that the case is little more than tabloid fodder that the media, spurred by wails from conservatives and always so desperately insecure about being accused of liberal bias, has pumped up and stretched out. Everyone is trying to make this case bigger than it is and to mean more than it does.
At its core, it’s just a story about an alleged lie told by a cable television actor. It is a story about an alleged hate crime that didn’t happen, but that was staged by Smollett. The police diverted quite a few resources to investigate his claim, then came to the conclusion that the event was a hoax. Finally, the case was dropped before a trial and the records were sealed.
It is interesting Hollywood drama, but meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Smollett was charged with making false reports — lying. If the police are correct, there was no assault or death. There was no property damage. There was no theft.
The major damage was the damage Smollett did to his own career and reputation.
Diverting resources that could be used to investigate actual assaults and murders is a big deal, but if the police and prosecutors believed he did this, then they should have financial restitution as part of a plea deal.
It is an ugly truth that money and power make a mockery of our justice system. Some people sit in jails for weeks, months or even years waiting for a trial because they can’t afford bail. Others pay up and go home immediately. Some people must use overworked public defenders. Others can afford high-powered legal teams. Some people are not shown preferential treatment. Others are.
Often, the people most injured by the negative impacts of this corrupt system are the poor, black and brown.
But in this case, Smollett, a black man, was the one with the wealth and the power. Prosecutors cut him a break that I don’t think they would have cut for the poor and the powerless.
None of this is of any real consequence beyond the local authorities and Smollett himself. And yet, more than two whole months after the precipitating event, people are still trying to make Smollett the embodiment of race problems in America. The dimwits at “Fox & Friends”went so far as to say the case, if it had been true, had the potential to ignite “race riots in major cities across this country.”
Ridiculous.
Others bemoaned the horrible impact the case would have on other hate crime victims being believed.
As a theory, that certainly sounds plausible, but where are the data to support such a claim? Smollett didn’t invent incredulity about vulnerable people and crime, so neither is he likely to significantly alter it.
I believe a bigger problem than people not being believed is that they are believed, but no one cares what happened to them.
Even the media is far more interested in the hoax angle to this story than they ever were about the alleged hate crime.
As Phillip Bump wrote in The Washington Post in February, the debunking of Smollett’s claim had gotten far more coverage than the initial claim.
Folks, what you are seeing is a media being bullied into bending over backward to placate the people who endlessly accuse them of bias. I believe you are also seeing an expression of subconscious race bias in the media itself that truly registers sensation at the thought of this black man’s deception.
Smollett’s greatest offense in this regard was not lying, if indeed he did, but lying about white people who support a racist in the White House.
President Trump wants Midwestern farmers to believe that Puerto Rico, with the complicity of Democrats, is trying to take their disaster relief money from them — and that the island is undeserving of any further financial help.
As usual, these arguments are based on lies. But as Trump’s lies go, these are particularly instructive — and ugly.
Yet these new lies also raise a question: Why does Trump assume that Midwestern farmers will believe them?
A battle has erupted in the Senate over disaster relief, one that, if Trump has his way, will pit more recent disaster victims (Midwestern farmers dealing with flooding and Southerners dealing with tornado damage) against those on Puerto Rico who are still suffering under the aftereffects of the 2017 Hurricane Maria.
On Monday night, the Senate failed to pass a massive $13.45 billion emergency aid bill for victims of all these national disasters, amid an impasse over money for Puerto Rico. Democrats say the $600 million for food stamps for Puerto Rico in the bill is far short of what is needed, and support a bill the House passed a few months ago that contains hundreds of millions of dollars more for the island.
Trump opposes any of that additional funding. In an unusually disgusting and hateful series of tweets, he claimed that Puerto Rico has already gotten $91 billion in aid, which he said has been “wasted” by “grossly incompetent” leaders there.
Crucially, Trump also argued that Puerto Rico politicians “only take from USA” and that Democrats now “want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers.”
Trump’s claim that Puerto Rico has already gotten $91 billion in aid is a lie. As Glenn Kessler demonstrates, less than $20 billion has actually been laid out or identified, and Trump’s figure is based on an internal government estimate of what might be spent under current statutes over 20 years, an estimate that is itself very fuzzy and subject to change.
The claim that Democrats want to take money from Midwestern disaster relief and give it to Puerto Rico is also a lie.
As Erica Werner and Jeff Stein explain, what actually happened is that House Democrats passed a relief bill with money for Puerto Rico and other more recent disasters months ago — well before the Midwestern flooding occurred. So Senate Democrats on Monday tried to add an amendment to that bill that would make billions in disaster money accessible to the Midwest and Southeast. Thus, the Democratic approach was to fund Midwestern, Southern and Puerto Rican aid. But Republicans opposed that amendment.
At the same time, Democrats opposed the Republican version of the disaster relief bill. This one funded Midwestern disaster relief, but by their lights insufficiently funded Puerto Rico.
The idea here is that this is supposed to create a serious political predicament for Democrats. As the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls are campaigning in Iowa, this story goes, they just voted against a bill that funds help to the beleaguered Midwest.
Multiple Republicans have made versions of this argument. And Trump did, too, bashing Democrats for killing “great relief to Farmers.”
The core dispute
But the core dispute is not over whether Midwestern disaster relief should be funded, or by how much. It’s over whether more money should be added to help Puerto Rico. And even if more were added for Puerto Rico, as Democrats want, it would not come out of funding for Midwestern relief.
And so, the underlying premise of the Republican attack is that it should be a political liability for Democrats if they want to fully fund disaster relief for everybody.
In the real world, of course, if the true nature of this dispute were understood, it probably wouldn’t be a political problem for Democrats. That’s why they are embracing their demand for funding relief for all who are afflicted. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer put it, “we help our fellow Americans when there’s a disaster, wherever the disaster strikes. We do not abandon them. Period.”
It should be noted that Puerto Rico is still in desperate straits. Recently New York Times reporters visited more than 150 homes in Puerto Rico and came away with numerous wrenching stories.
This is why Trump needs to flagrantly distort the underlying dispute, by claiming both that Puerto Rico is undeserving of the aid money that Democrats want to give it, and that in so doing, Democrats would take money from Midwesterners, both of which are based on lies.
The underlying premise of this story is that the voters Trump plainly hopes to arouse with it will be inclined to believe those lies.
The things Trump will do to please his base
We already know that much of what Trump does is geared, to an extraordinary degree, toward his base. Trump embraced a lawsuit that would unleash enormous damage throughout the health-care system in part because it would please his base. Trump pardoned abusive racist Joe Arpaio after growing convinced that it was “a way of pleasing his political base.” Trump reportedly claimed of his horrific family separations that “my people love it.” Trump revived his attacks on football players protesting racism while believing it “revs up his political base.”
We don’t know for sure if Trump believes his latest attacks on Puerto Rico will please his base. But, given that he’s telling rural voters in a region he needs in 2020 that Puerto Rican disaster sufferers do not deserve any more help and that such help would take from them, it seems like a reasonable assumption.
It is unlikely that large numbers of those voters will believe this story. But what does the fact that Trump is telling it say about his view of those voters, and of what they want to hear?
It’s tempting to view President Trump’s many grievance-filled tweets as angry, indiscriminate lashing out at political opponents. It’s unhinged! It’s unpresidential! They’re “rage tweets!” Etc.
Often, though, if you look closely, you’ll see some design. Behind the invective and often-incorrect claims will be a controversial suggestion with built-in plausible deniability. He will be saying something without actually saying it. He’ll send the desired message to his supporters — a dog whistle — but when the media asks him and his aides, they’ll say he wasn’t really saying that. In the process, he’ll foment culture war and controversy.
Such appears to be the case with his tweets about Puerto Rico on Tuesday morning, along with an aide’s explanation of them.
In two Trump tweets about Puerto Rico and a cable news appearance from a top White House spokesman later that morning, both Trump and the spokesman talked about Puerto Rico as if it weren’t part of the United States. And they did so in a way that couldn’t help but make you think this might be deliberate.
In his tweets, Trump said the hurricane-ravaged island’s politicians “only take from USA” and said Puerto Rico will “continue to hurt our Farmers and States with these massive payments.”
Of course, as Philip Bump notes, Puerto Rico is indeed part of the United States. Like any state, it both contributes to and accepts help from the federal government. That may be in a way that people like Trump view as unbalanced, but it’s difficult to picture Trump talking about a state as “only tak[ing] from the USA.”
Puerto Rico also employs farmers, who are “our farmers,” but they don’t seem to factor in to Trump’s concept of “our Farmers.” Trump’s claim that Puerto Rico is taking resources from “our … States” is also a curious formulation.
The combination of those three things at the very least seems to betray Trump’s attitude that Puerto Rico is a lesser part of the United States.
Later, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley appeared on MSNBC. In an interview with Hallie Jackson, Gidley twice referred to Puerto Rico as a “country,” which it is not. It’s important to note that this came after he correctly labeled it a “territory” twice. Gidley was also asked about the “country” comments at the end of the interview, at which point he apologized and said it was a mistake. He said it was a “slip of the tongue.”
Jackson, to her credit, pressed the point. She had just grilled Gidley on Trump’s apparent otherizing of Puerto Rico, after all, and this seemed a conspicuous mix-up from someone who had been dispatched to talk about that. Gidley again assured her that it wasn’t intentional.
“No, that was — a slip of the tongue is not on purpose, Hallie,” Gidley said. “That would, by definition, be a slip of the tongue.”
That skepticism is not misplaced. Whatever you think of the reasons for Trump’s attitude toward Puerto Rico, there’s no question he’s trying to diminish it. The question is whether he’s doing that because that’s what he believes and he’s truly upset about its use of federal funds, or whether he sees some kind of political advantage in it (or both!). Even just the day before, he oddly referred to it as a “place” — in quotation marks — in a tweet. That’s four references in less than 24 hours that suggested Puerto Rico was less-than. At some point, we can’t dismiss all of these things as coincidences.
And a spokesman going on cable news and calling Puerto Rico a “country” would only seem to fan the flames of the fire Trump has lit on this issue.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley twice referred to Puerto Rico as “that country” during a television appearance Tuesday in which he defended a series of tweets by President Trump lashing out at leaders of the U.S. territory.
In two bursts of tweets — one late Monday night and another Tuesday morning — Trump complained about the amount of federal relief money going to the island and called its politicians “incompetent or corrupt.”
He also claimed that Puerto Rico “got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane,” a figure that actually reflects a high-end, long-term estimate for recovery costs. Only a fraction of that has so far been budgeted, and even less has been spent.
As he pressed to defend Trump’s contentions, Gidley sought to make the case that the leaders of the territory, whose residents are U.S. citizens, have mishandled the aid they’ve received thus far.
“With all they’ve done in that country, they’ve had a systematic mismanagement of the goods and services we’ve sent to them,” Gidley said. “You’ve seen food just rotting in the ports. Their governor has done a horrible job. He’s trying to make political hay in a political year, and he’s trying to find someone to take the blame off of his for not having a grid and not having a good system in that country at all.”
Gidley later attributed his misstatements to “a slip of the tongue.”
During the interview, Gidley was also asked about a tweet in which Trump said Puerto Rico’s leaders “only take from the USA.”
Asked to clarify how Trump views the status of Puerto Ricans, Gidley said Trump is supportive of its people, noting that he traveled there after Hurricane Maria hit in September 2017.
“He gave them a lot of money,” Gidley said. “They have mismanaged and misused that money. It hurts their people. That’s what he’s upset about.”
NEW MARKET, Tenn. — A racist symbol found spray-painted near a building destroyed by fire at the Highlander Education and Research Center has been displayed by notorious white supremacists here and abroad, including the man who livestreamed his massacre of worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
A fire of undetermined origin destroyed the main office Friday of the Highlander Center, an internationally known social justice organization that hosted prominent leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.
The building, about 25 miles northeast of Knoxville in New Market, housed archives documenting the Highlander Center's history. It's unclear what documents were destroyed; the Wisconsin Historical Society preserves the center's documents and said the majority of the center's archives are safe.
In a news release Tuesday, the Highlander Center announced that a "symbol connected to the white power movement" was found spray-painted in the parking lot by the main office. Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Coffey confirmed the symbol was found Friday and described it as "the hashtag symbol."
A photograph taken Tuesday by knoxnews.com shows the symbol, painted in black, not far from the rubble of the burned building. It consists of three vertical lines intersecting three horizontal lines, and looks like a hashtag with an extra line in each direction.
The symbol was used by the Iron Guard, also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a far-right, anti-Semitic movement active in Romania in the 1930s, said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism. He specializes in right-wing extremism and maintains the organization's Hate Symbols Database.
"Right-wing extremists in Europe and some in the United States have occasionally used that symbol, including in Tennessee," Pitcavage said. "The symbol was also one of the symbols that the Christchurch shooter painted on one of his firearms."
Coffey, the sheriff, said Tuesday his office is seeking assistance from another law enforcement agency to verify the context of the symbol found at the scene of the fire. He would not say which agency is assisting those efforts, and he could not be reached for comment Wednesday morning.
Before the center issued its news release, authorities had not mentioned the graffiti publicly, nor had they said whether they considered the fire to be suspicious. The sheriff's office is investigating with assistance from the state Fire Marshal's Office.
Members of the Traditionalist Worker Party also have used the Iron Guard symbol, Pitcavage said. The neo-Nazi outfit was active in Knoxville in late 2017 and early 2018 before the group reportedly collapsed when a bizarre love triangle saw its leader, Matthew Heimbach, arrested on battery charges in Kentucky.
Heimbach grew popular in far-right circles after he helped lead the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The demonstration turned deadly when avowed neo-Nazi James Alex Fields rammed his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Days later, when Heimbach spoke to reporters outside a court appearance for Fields, he wore a shirt bearing the Iron Guard symbol and a picture of the Romanian movement's fascist founder, Corneliu Codreanu.
While it was active in Knoxville, the Traditionalist Worker Party posted fliers that were removed from a university building, brought 20 people to protest a Women's March that drew a crowd of 14,000, and repeatedly painted swastikas and other imagery on the Rock, a massive boulder that serves as an ever-changing message board on UT's campus.
In January 2018, the Iron Guard symbol appeared on the Rock, spray-painted in black along with the letters "TWP," the words, "My borders my choice," and various other white supremacist symbols.
The following month, Heimbach held a gathering on UT's campus after the university said his group misrepresented itself to reserve a space. The talk drew 45 attendees, 250 protesters, 200 law enforcement officers — and condemnation from then-Chancellor Beverly Davenport, who noted, "I have repeatedly said they weren't invited."
Although the Traditionalist Worker Party reportedly disbanded after Heimbach's arrest in March 2018, some of its members continued to show up at events in Knoxville, including at a rally over the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Meanwhile, Heimbach signed on to be the "director of community outreach" for another neo-Nazi group, based in Detroit, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Swastikas have appeared on the Rock as recently as November.
During the livestream of last month's terror attack that killed 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand, the shooter could be seen using weapons with various names and symbols scrawled on them. One gun had the hashtag-looking Iron Guard symbol prominently displayed. He also posted photos of the guns to Twitter before his account was taken down; one image showed the symbol on the side of a firearm.
LAS VEGAS — President Trump on Saturday criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, one day after a New York man was arrested and charged with threatening to kill the Minnesota Democrat.
In remarks to a conservative Jewish group, Trump thanked several Republican lawmakers for their support before mocking Omar, an outspoken critic of U.S. policy toward Israel who has also made comments that some say invoke anti-Semitic stereotypes.
“Special thanks to Representative Omar of Minnesota,” Trump told members of the Republican Jewish Coalition in a ballroom of the Venetian Resort. “Oh, I forgot. She doesn’t like Israel. I forgot. I’m so sorry.”
Patrick W. Carlineo Jr., the man charged with threatening Omar, allegedly called the lawmaker a “terrorist” and vowed to put a “bullet in her [expletive] skull” in a phone call with a member of her Washington staff, according to a statement Friday by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of New York.
A spokesman for Omar did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s remarks.
Trump’s reference to Omar came during a wide-ranging speech in which he declared that the U.S.-Israel bond “has never been stronger” and argued that Democrats “aren’t fighting for Israel in Congress.”
“Republicans believe that we must never ignore the vile poison of anti-Semitism. We do. All of us,” Trump said. The president had previously sparked widespread condemnation after declaring that there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, at which neo-Nazis had shouted, “Jews will not replace us.”
Much of Trump’s speech Saturday was standard campaign-rally fare, with the president mocking asylum seekers, threatening to close the U.S. border with Mexico, attacking the Green New Deal plan to combat climate change and boasting about his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Several of the Trump administration’s actions toward Israel have been praised by that country’s leaders, including the moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and a recent decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights. That disputed region was seized from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war, and most of the international community considers the annexation an illegal occupation.
Trump’s decision has particularly resonated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has sought to ally himself with the president ahead of his bid for reelection on Tuesday.
“Over the years, Israel has been blessed to have many friends who sat in the Oval Office,” Netanyahu told Trump during a visit to the White House last month. “But Israel has never had a better friend than you. You show this time and again.”
On Saturday, Trump received a standing ovation when he spoke about the embassy move. “Unlike other presidents, I keep my promises,” he said.
He made note of his relationship with Netanyahu and made a reference to the Israeli prime minister’s reelection battle, asking the crowd, “How is the race going, by the way? . . . I think it’s gonna be close.”
He touted his decision to withdraw the United States from the “disastrous” Iran nuclear deal, telling the crowd, “They wanted to kill Israel. They wanted to destroy Israel.”
And he hailed the work of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, peace envoy Jason D. Greenblatt and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. “I would like to see peace in the Middle East,” Trump said. “If those three can’t do it, you’ll never have it done.”
Two protesters were escorted from the venue after briefly interrupting Trump as he began his remarks, chanting, “Jews are here to say, ‘Occupation is a plague.’ ”
But overall, Trump received an enthusiastic reception from the crowd.
Las Vegas casino magnate and major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, who is on the RJC’s board of directors, was seated in the front row for Trump’s speech. A handful of attendees were holding signs reading, “We Are Jews For Trump” and “Thank You President Trump.” Others were wearing red yarmulkes with “TRUMP” in white lettering.
The audience also gave a standing ovation to Timothy Matson, a police officer who rushed to the scene of last year’s shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and suffered gunshot wounds while saving lives. Trump had invited Matson to attend his State of the Union address in February.
Trump has seized on recent infighting in the Democratic Party over comments from Omar that were widely perceived as using anti-Semitic tropes and called on the freshman lawmaker to resign over those remarks. Late last month, Trump claimed that Democrats are an “anti-Israel” and “anti-Jewish” party, even though Jews have historically voted more Democratic than Republican.
While Trump has condemned Omar for evoking stereotypes about Jews and money, Trump himself had expressed similar sentiments to the RJC in 2015, when he was running for the GOP presidential nomination.
“You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” Trump said then. “But that’s okay. You want to control your own politician.”
Trump on Saturday was speaking to an audience comprising primarily American Jews. But at one point, he told the crowd that he “stood with your prime minister at the White House.” At another point, Trump warned that Democrats’ “radical agenda” in Congress “very well could leave Israel out there all by yourselves.”
Does Rep. Omar "like" Israel?
Does she say that publicly, has she ever? She need not "like" anyone or anything, and if one accuses President Trump of telling a untruth, in regard to whether Rep. Omar, or any other politician 'likes' Israel, please give some statement she has made to show Trump's comment is not valid.
Thank you.
Have not heard him speak about causes of cancer at all.
#Persist
Not racist, at all..
(https://66.media.tumblr.com/00b12e78cd5e2d9705c749b6a9854ff0/tumblr_ppm8t4QUG31rclr47o1_1280.png)
Never forget.
#Resist
WE do not have a family separation policy.
WE do not have a family separation policy.
Outgoing chief of staff John Kelly blamed Jeff Sessions for family separation policy in new interview (https://www.businessinsider.com/john-kelly-says-jeff-sessions-is-responsible-for-family-separation-policy-2018-12)
So Kelly and Sessions both were lying?
Or you?
#Resist
The Trump administration family separation policy is an aspect of U.S. President Donald Trump's immigration policy. The policy was presented to the public as a "zero tolerance" approach intended to deter illegal immigration and to encourage tougher legislation.[1][2][3][4] It was adopted across the whole U.S.–Mexico border from April 2018 until June 2018,[5][6][7] however later investigations found that the practice of family separations had begun a year previous to the public announcement.[8] Under the policy, federal authorities separated children from parents or guardians with whom they had entered the US.[6][9][10] The adults were prosecuted and held in federal jails, and the children placed under the supervision of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.[6]
By early June 2018, it emerged that the policy did not include measures to reunite the families that it had separated.[11][12] Following national and international criticism,[13][14][15][16][17][18] on June 20, 2018, President Trump signed an executive order ending family separations at the border.[7] However in March 2019, a government report showed that since that time 245 children had been removed from their families, in some cases without clear documentation undertaken to track them in order to reunite them with their parents.[19]
On July 26, 2018, the Trump administration said that 1,442 children had been reunited with their parents while 711 remained in government shelters.[20] However, in January 2019 the administration acknowledged that thousands of children affected by the policy remained separated from their families, with officials uncertain of the exact number.[21][22]
History
Bush administration
President George W. Bush began the trend of a "zero tolerance" approach in 2005 with Operation Streamline, but during his administration, exceptions were generally made for adults traveling with minors.[1]
Obama administration
U.S. President Barack Obama made changes to immigration policy, releasing parents and focusing on deportation of immigrants who committed crimes in the U.S.[23] Attempting to cope with the 2014 American immigration crisis, a surge of refugees fleeing violence in Central America, while complying with the 1997 Flores v. Reno Settlement Agreement consent decree by keeping families together, under Obama the Department of Homeland Security built family detention centers in Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and Texas.[24][25][26]
In 2015 Obama introduced the Family Case Management Program which, according to the fact sheet about the program, specifically prioritized "families with certain vulnerabilities, including pregnant or nursing family member; those with very young children; family members with medical/mental health concerns; families who speak only indigenous languages; and other special needs" to offer an alternative to being held in detention centers while awaiting the court to process their asylum claims, which often takes years.[27]
In 2016, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Flores v. Lynch[28][29] that detained immigrant children should be released as quickly as possible, but that parents were not required to be freed. The Obama administration complied by releasing women and children after detaining them together for 21 days.[30][29]
Trump administration
Presidential candidate Donald Trump said ending "catch and release" was the second of his two priorities for immigration reform, after walling off Mexico.[31][32] When the administration began separating families, pro-Trump pundits argued that the administration was implementing the same policy as the Obama administration.[25] According to PolitiFact, the assertion that Trump was implementing the same policy as Obama is "false", noting "Obama's immigration policy specifically sought to avoid breaking up families. While some children were separated from their parents under Obama, this was relatively rare and families were quickly reunited even if that meant the release of a parent from detention."[25] The Obama Administration did consider separating families, but decided against it.[33]
Refusal to accept asylum seekers at border crossings
In January 2017, the American Immigration Council and five other advocacy organizations filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties protesting the "systemic denial of entry to asylum seekers". It is not legal for the US to deny anyone the right to seek asylum. Nonetheless, according to advocacy lawyers, asylum seekers presenting at border crossings were denied for a variety of reasons, including "the daily quota has been reached," that they needed to present a visa, or that they needed to schedule an appointment through Mexican authorities, none of which are accurate. One nonprofit organization spokesperson commented, "We've basically arrived at a place where applying for asylum is not available to most people."[34][35]
The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General concluded that this practice, which it calls "metering" legal entry "leads some aliens who would otherwise seek legal entry into the United States to cross the border illegally."[36]
The administration also cancelled the Central American Minors Program (CAM) which had given the hope to parents that they would be able to bring their child into the U.S. legally – ending the parole portion of the program in August 2017 and no longer accepting new applications for the refugee portion of the program as of November 9, 2017.[37] The CAM program had allowed some parents to bring their children legally to the U.S. since 2015, with the children gaining the right to apply for citizenship if they were granted special refugee status. Due to the processing delays, the program had not offered relief for those who faced the a threat of immediate danger, yet at the level of the individual families it had made it less attractive to bring children illegally, as there was the prospect of legal entry.[38]
DHS "pilot program" in 2017
From July to October 2017, the Trump administration ran what the DHS called a "pilot program" for zero tolerance in El Paso. Families were separated, including families that were seeking asylum, and children were then reclassified as "unaccompanied" and sent into a network of shelters with no system created to reunite them with their parents.[5] The existence of this early "pilot program" first became widely known in June 2018, with reporting by NBC News from information provided by DHS.[12]
In May 2018, NPR spoke with a director at The Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights, an agency that advocates for the children's best interests. Asked if staff had noticed an increase in children coming in with parents and then separated from them at the border, the director told NPR, "We noticed as early as late spring of 2017, and through the winter and now the spring of this year, we have seen a significant number of children referred to us for the appointment of a child advocate for kids taken from their parents at the border."[39]
According to an April 2018 memo obtained by The Washington Post, the government viewed the El Paso experiment as successful in that it showed a 64% drop in apprehensions while apprehensions began to rise in October when it was paused. According to a Border Patrol report on the initiative, the El Paso sector processed approximately 1,800 individuals in families and 281 individuals in families were separated under this initiative.[40] This "experiment" was eventually used by ICE, CBP, and CIS to launch the zero-tolerance program across the entire Southwest border in April.[5]
Proposals of family separation as a means to deter immigration
Two weeks after President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, the administration reviewed the idea of separating immigrant children from their mothers as a way to deter asylum-seekers.[30][41] In March 2017, it was first reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was considering a proposal to separate parents from their children if they were caught attempting to cross the border into the United States.[30][29] John Kelly, then Secretary of Homeland Security, confirmed that the policy was under consideration,[39][42] but later denied it.[43][44] Speaking on Democracy Now! the director of the National Immigration Law Center said that the policy, if implemented, would amount "to state-sanctioned violence against children, against families that are coming to the United States to seek safety" and that the administration did not act with transparency in explaining what was being proposed.[45]
The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement to address media reports of the plan, "... We urge policymakers to always be mindful that these are vulnerable, scared children," and they offered to assist Homeland Security in "crafting immigration procedures that protect children".[46] In March, more than a month prior to the official "zero tolerance" decision, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration charging that the administration was illegally separating hundreds of children from their parents while the parents awaited asylum proceedings.[47]
On April 5, the DHS said they were no longer considering the policy partly due to the steep decline in mothers attempting to travel to the U.S. with their children,[48] however Attorney General Jeff Sessions then ordered an escalation of federal prosecutions. Parents were being charged with misdemeanors and jailed while their children were classed as unaccompanied and placed under DHS care. Within five months, hundreds of children were reported to have been separated from their parents.[49] In late April 2018, the media reported that a review of government data found that about 700 migrant children, more than 100 of them under the age of 4, had been taken from their parents since October 2017. At that time Department of Homeland Security officials said they did not split families to deter immigration but rather to "protect the best interests of minor children crossing our borders".[50] Saying it would save $12 million a year, in June the Trump administration ended the Family Case Management Program, which kept asylum-seeking mothers and their children out of detention.[27]
By December, after a new surge in families crossing the southern border, the DHS was again considering the policy to separate children from parents.[51] In January 2018, following testimony from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in which she refused to rule out implementing the proposed policy of the separation of parents from their children, more than 200 child welfare organizations released a letter calling for the Trump Administration to abandon plans to forcibly separate children from their parents at the U.S. border. The letter said, in part: "We know that this policy would have significant and long-lasting consequences for the safety, health, development, and well-being of children. Children need to be cared for by their parents to be safe and healthy, to grow and develop. Forced separation disrupts the parent-child relationship and puts children at increased risk for both physical and mental illness. The Administration's plan would eviscerate the principle of family unity and put children in harm's way."[52]
Administration issues "zero-tolerance" policy
On April 6, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed federal prosecutors "to adopt immediately a zero-tolerance policy for all offenses" related to the misdemeanor of improper entry into the United States, and that this "zero-tolerance policy shall supersede any existing policies". This would aim to criminally convict first-time offenders when historically they would face civil and administrative removal, while criminal convictions were usually reserved for those who committed the felony of illegal re-entry after removal.[53][54] On May 7, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced:
If you cross the border unlawfully ... then we will prosecute you. If you smuggle an illegal alien across the border, then we'll prosecute you. ... If you're smuggling a child, then we're going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law.[6][55]
Multiple media accounts, as well as direct testimony from detained migrants to members of Congress, reported that immigrant families lawfully presenting themselves at ports of entry seeking asylum were also being separated.[56][57][10][10] Speaking on Face the Nation on June 17, Senator Susan Collins said that the Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen had testified before the Senate that asylum seekers with families would not be separated if they presented themselves at a legal port of entry, "Yet, there are numerous credible media accounts showing that exactly that is happening, and the administration needs to put an end to that right off."[9] Later in the day Nielsen tweeted: "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period."[58]
The departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security did not take steps in advance of the April 2018 announcement to plan for family separations or a potential increase in the number of children who would be referred to Office of Refugee Resettlement because they did not have advance notice of the announcement, according to agency officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office. Though they did not receive advance notice of the April 2018 announcement, Office of Refugee Resettlement officials said they were aware that increased separations of parents and children were occurring prior to the April announcement, saying the percentage of children referred to the agency who were known to have been separated from their parents rose by more than tenfold from November 2016 to August 2017.[59]
The policy is notably unpopular, more so than any other major bill or executive action in recent memory.[60] Poll aggregates show that approximately 25% of Americans supported the policy, although a majority of Republicans supported it.[60][61] Following the May announcement, dozens of protest demonstrations were held, attracting thousands. In Washington, D.C., Democratic members of Congress marched in protest.[62] The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called for the Trump administration to "immediately halt" its policy of separating children from their parents,[63][64] and human rights activists have criticized that the policy, insofar as it is also applied to asylum seekers, defies Article 31 of the Refugee Convention.[65]
Zero-tolerance policy reversed
Despite previously asserting that "You can't [reverse the policy] through an executive order,"[66] on June 20, 2018, Trump bowed to intense political pressure and signed an executive order to reverse the policy[67] while still maintaining "zero tolerance" border control by detaining entire families together.[68][69][70] Asked by a reporter why he had taken so long to sign the order, Trump asserted, "It's been going on for 60 years. Sixty years. Nobody has taken care of it. Nobody has had the political courage to take care of it. But we're going to take care of it."[71][72]
When it became clear that "zero tolerance" could not be sustained while keeping families together within the scope of court rulings, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAlee announced on June 25 that the agency would cease referring every person caught crossing the border illegally for prosecution, effectively ending the "zero tolerance" policy.[73] Implementing "zero tolerance" was a "huge challenge operationally for our agents", McAlee said: Border Patrol stations were being overwhelmed by the number of children being held in crowded conditions in holding cells while their parents were processed in court and held in immigration detention, and agents were spending more time processing detained immigrants than guarding the border.[73]
On June 26, a Federal Court ordered the government to reunify separated families with minor children under 5 years of age within 14 days of the order, and families with minor children age 5 and over within 30 days of the order. [70] On September 20, 2018, the government reported to the court that it had reunified or otherwise released 2,167 of the 2,551 children over 5 years of age who were separated from a parent and deemed eligible for reunification by the Government.[74]
In March 2019, The Boston Globe reported that the Trump administration had continued the family separation policy even after a court had ordered an end to routine family separations in June 2018. A recent government report showed that 245 children were removed from their families, in some cases without clear documentation undertaken to track them in order to reunite them with their parents.[75]
Motivation
In February 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) asylum chief John Lafferty told DHS employees that the Trump administration was "in the process of reviewing" several policies aimed at lowering the number of asylum seekers to the United States, which included the idea of separating migrant mothers and children.[41]
Speaking on NPR in May 2018, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly described the policy as "a tough deterrent [and] a much faster turnaround on asylum seekers". When questioned if it might be considered "cruel and heartless" to remove children from their mothers, Kelly replied, "I wouldn't put it quite that way. The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever."[76]
In June 2018, Attorney General Sessions said, "If people don't want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them. We've got to get this message out. You're not given immunity."[77] White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said: "It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law."[1]
The Washington Post quoted a White House official as saying that Trump's decision was intended to "force people to the table" to negotiate on laws in Congress.[78] Meanwhile, Trump tweeted: "Any Immigration Bill MUST HAVE full funding for the Wall, end Catch & Release, Visa Lottery and Chain, and go to Merit Based Immigration." [sic][79]
Process
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) detains families suspected of illegally crossing the border, or in some cases families applying for asylum.[80] Prior to 2018, most suspected illegal border-crossers were dealt with through civil proceedings in immigration courts, where deportation proceedings and asylum hearings take place; most who were criminally prosecuted in federal court "either had been apprehended at least twice before, or had committed a serious crime".[81] Under the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy, the Department of Justice began to criminally prosecute all suspected illegal border-crossers for illegal entry, even those who crossed for the first time.[82][81] Families undergo separations when parents or adult relatives were charged with unlawful entry.[6]
Parents are held in Federal jails prior to trial. The government conducts expedited, mass trials of alleged border crossers under Operation Streamline. According to The New York Times, "Lawyers receive the roster of clients assigned to them on the morning of the hearing and meet with each one for about 20 minutes to explain the charges and the process in Spanish."[81] People who plead guilty are typically sentenced to time served in jail, while repeat offenders may be sentenced to 30 to 75 days in jail.[81] Once convicted, they are eligible for deportation. Due to the Trump executive order, DHS no longer prioritized deporting those convicted of more dangerous crimes. They are then transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.[80]
According to several defense lawyers working with the immigrants, in many cases the Border Patrol agents lie to the parents in order to get them to let go of their kids, telling them that the children are being taken for questioning or "to be given a bath". In other cases the children may be removed to another location while the parent is in jail being processed, which generally takes a few hours.[83] Children are held temporarily by the DHS before being transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). ORR contracts the operation of around 100 facilities for child migrants to companies and nonprofit organizations. The Flores settlement requires that ORR hold children no longer than 20 days before releasing them.
Children are being transferred into foster care placements across the country. The fifty children placed in western Michigan include infants of 8 and 11 months, and have an average age of 8. Children are flown to Michigan during the overnight hours, and foster care officials report they have not been told where they are going. Officials also report that children have been waiting as long as 30 days to speak to their parents, due to difficulties locating them.[84]
According to the legal support organization KIND, in at least six cases including that of a two-year-old girl, parents being deported have not been reunited with their children, who remain in the United States.[85]
According to a June 2018 analysis by USA Today, in most cases migrants are bused from the immigration holding facility to federal court where they plead guilty to having entered the country illegally, a misdemeanor, and are sentenced to whatever time they have already spent in the government's custody and a $10 fine. They are then bused back to the holding facility to be processed for deportation. If they have children, upon their return they may find that their children are gone.[86][87]
According to a report of June 27 by Texas Tribune, immigrant children as young as 3 years old have been ordered into court for their own deportation proceedings. Children in immigration court are not entitled to free, court-appointed attorneys to represent them. Instead, they are given a list of legal services organizations that might help them.[88][89]
Impact
In the past, most migrants illegally crossing the border came almost entirely from Mexico; however, the current influx now includes greater numbers of women and children fleeing violence, gang recruitment, and sexual trafficking in the Northern Triangle of Central America countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Rather than illegally crossing into the US, they are presenting themselves at the border hoping to claim asylum, which they are legally entitled to do.[50]
In June 2018, U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal spoke with recently arrived detainees at the Federal Detention Center, SeaTac facility located near Seattle. The facility housed 206 immigrants, 174 of them were women. Many of the women spoke of "fleeing threats of rape, gang violence and political persecution".[14] She said more than half of the women were mothers who had forcibly been separated from their children, some as young as 12 months old, and said that many did not know where their children were being detained. Commenting on her visit of the facility, Jayapal called the women's stories "heartbreaking", saying, "I've been doing immigration-rights work for almost two decades. I am not new to these stories. I will tell you there was not a dry eye in the house. ... Some of them heard their children screaming for them in the next room. Not a single one of them had been allowed to say goodbye or explain to them what was happening."[14]
Number of children
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed on June 15, 2018, that 1,995 immigrant children were separated from their parents during the six weeks from April 19 and May 31.[90] This figure did not include children of families that asked for asylum at an official border crossing and were then separated.[91][92] Speaking on Face the Nation on June 17, Senator Susan Collins suggested that the number may well be higher.[9]
Steven Wagner, the Acting Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families under HHS, was unable to say in June 2018 how many separated children had been placed with sponsors or reunited with their parents, but that the department is "under a legal obligation" to place children quickly with a sponsor, however, "we actually don't have a time limit in terms of days" that the children are allowed to stay in HHS care.[93]
Zero tolerance and the separation of children was suspended for an indefinite period of time on June 20, 2018, through an executive order. On June 26, U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against the family-separation policy and required the government to reunite separated families within 30 days and to reunite children under five years of age with parents within 14 days. On that date DHS stated that 522 migrant children, all of them in the custody of Customs and Border Protection, had been reunited with their families.[94] After a site visit to DHS facilities, Senator Elizabeth Warren reported that, "Mothers and children may be considered 'together' if they're held in the same gigantic facility, even if they're locked in separate cages with no access to one another."[95] The Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar testified that 2,047 children—out of a total of around 2,300 ever in HHS custody—continued to be held in HHS-contracted facilities.[96]
On July 5, Azar declared that the total number of children that had been separated was under 3,000 and that, of these, the number of children under five years was fewer than 100.[97] On July 6, government lawyers informed Judge Sabraw that HHS would be able to meet the deadline of July 19 for only about half of the concerned children.[98] The government had connected 46 of the toddlers with parents still in custody.[99] Concerning the other half, the lawyers stated that the parents of 19 of the children had been released and now had unknown whereabouts, and the parents of further 19 children had been deported. Two children had been connected to parents criminally ineligible to re-take custody of their children.[99] Judge Sabraw said the time limit for reunifying the youngest children could be extended under the condition that the government would provide a master list of all children and the status of their parents. A list of 101 children was to be shared with the ACLU within the following day.[98] A status conference was scheduled for the morning of July 9 concerning which cases would merit a delay.[100][98] On July 6, a government lawyer provided the status of 102 children under 5 in custody to Federal Judge Dana Sabraw, and stated that numbers are approximate and "in flux".[99]
In September 2018 it was reported that 12,800 children were being held in federal custody, and that federal shelters housing migrant children were filled to around 90% since May 2018.[101]
A report by Amnesty International, published in 2018, found that the statistics on the separated children did not include children who had been separated from non-parental relationships, for example from grandparents, or those who were separated due to their documentation being insufficient.[102][103] In January 2019, auditors from the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services stated that the practice of separating migrant children from their families started earlier and involved thousands more children than previously known, and that in the summer of 2017 a "steep increase in the number of children who had been separated from a parent or guardian" occurred.[104][105]
A followup government report released in January 2019, revealed that while HHS had previously said that the total number of children separated from their parents was 2,737, a new investigation revealed that the actual number of separated children was several thousand higher, with the exact number unknown due to poor record keeping.[22][21] HHS is not able to identify or count children who were released from the government’s custody before officials started identifying separated families.[106] Following a court ruling in 2019, government officials stated that identifying all children would require a joint effort of 12 to 24 months duration led by a team of officials representing HSS, ICE and CBP.[107]
Fiscal costs and diversion of resources
The costs of separating migrant children from their parents and keeping them in "tent cities" are higher than keeping them with their parents in detention centers.[108] It costs $775 per person per night to house the children when they are separated but $256 per person per night when they are held in permanent HHS facilities and $298 per person per night to keep the children with their parents in ICE detention centers.[108]
To handle the large amount of immigration charges brought by the Trump administration, federal prosecutors had to divert resources from other crime cases.[109] The head of the Justice Department's major crimes unit in San Diego diverted staff from drug smuggling cases.[109] Drug smuggling cases were also increasingly pursued in state courts rather than federal courts, as federal prosecutor were increasingly preoccupied with pursuing charges against illegal border crossings.[109] In October 2018, USA Today reported that federal drug-trafficking prosecutions on the Southern border plummeted, as prosecutorial resources were diverted to the family separation policy.[110]
It was reported in June 2018, that the Trump administration plans to pay a Texas Non-Profit Southwest Key Programs Inc, more than $458 million in the fiscal year of 2018 to care for immigrant children detained crossing the US border illegally.[111]
In July 2018, it was reported that HHS had diverted at least $40 million from its health programs to care for and reunify migrant children, and that the HHS was preparing to shift more than $200 million from other HHS accounts.[112] In September 2018, it was reported that the Trump administration planned to shift more than $260 million from HHS programs, including those on cancer research and HIV/AIDS research, to cover the costs associated with detaining children and delaying releasing them to adults.[113]
ProPublica audio tape
On June 18, 2018, as reporters waited for a briefing by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, ProPublica posted a recording of crying children begging for their parents just after being separated from them, which the reporters listened to as they waited for her to speak. Nielsen arrived and spoke, blaming Congress for the administration's policy of separating parents from their children and saying that there would be no change in policy until Congress rewrote the nation's immigration laws. At one point during the briefing, New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi played the tape. Nielsen refused to answer any questions about the material in the tape, such as "How is this not child abuse?"[114]
Most of the tape consists of children crying and wailing for their parents, but a six-year-old girl is heard to repeatedly beg that her aunt be called, who she is certain will come and pick her up. ProPublica was able to contact the aunt, however the aunt was unable to assist for fear that her own petition of asylum would be put in jeopardy due to the recent Trump Administration decision to discontinue asylum protections for victims of gang and domestic violence. The aunt said that she was able to keep in touch with her niece by phone and that she had talked to her sister; however, her sister had not yet been allowed to speak with her child. The aunt said that the authorities had told the child that her mother may be deported without her.[115]
Commenting on President Trump's executive order and how it was related to the tape of the children crying, Republican commentator Leslie Sanchez commented on Face the Nation, "And a lot of Republicans I talked to, even bundlers, people that put big amounts of money together, said, when they heard the cries of the children, without visual, being separated, that was the moment where America knew this was too far. And that's when the president retreated."[116]
Allegations of forced medication and mistreatment
There are concerns that the facilities that children were held in may have in the past been associated with the forcible drugging of children. The Texas Tribune reported that detained children who had previously been held at the Shiloh Treatment Center said they had been forcibly treated with antipsychotic drugs by the facility personnel, based on legal filings from a class action lawsuit. According to the filings, the drugs made the children listless, dizzy and incapacitated, and in some cases unable to walk. According to a mother, after receiving the drug, her child repeatedly fell, hitting her head and eventually ending up in a wheel chair. Another child stated that she tried to open a window, at which point one of the supervisors hurled her against a door, choked her until she fainted and had a doctor forcibly administer an injection while she was being held down by two guards. A forensic psychiatrist consulted by the Tribune compared the practice to what "the old Soviet Union used to do".[117][118][119][120][121]
The treatment center is one of the companies that have been investigated on charges of mistreating children, although the federal government continues to employ the private agency which runs it as a federal contractor.[117][118][119][120][121]
On July 30, 2018, a federal judge ruled that government officials have been in violation of state child welfare laws when giving psychotropic drugs to migrant children without first seeking the consent of their parents or guardians. According to the ruling given by Judge Dolly Gee, staff members have admitted to signing off on medications in lieu of a parent, relative, or guardian. The judge also ordered that the government must move all children from the facility except for those deemed by a licensed professional to pose a “risk of harm” to themselves or others.[122]
Deterrence
Government data from 2018 suggests that the family separation policy did little to deter migrants from crossing the US border illegally.[123]
Legal proceedings
ACLU challenge and nationwide injunction
In June 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an class-action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of two mothers (one from Brazil, one from Democratic Republic of the Congo) who had been separated from their children, seeking a halt to the policy. On June 25, the ACLU requested an injunction halting the policy.[124][125] On June 26, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against the family-separation policy.[126][127]
In his opinion, Sabraw wrote: "The facts set forth before the court portray reactive governance — responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government's own making. They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution. This is particularly so in the treatment of migrants, many of whom are asylum seekers and small children."[126][127] Judge Sabraw wrote that the federal government "readily keeps track of personal property of detainees in criminal and immigration proceedings", yet "has no system in place to keep track of, provide effective communication with, and promptly produce alien children".[128] The injunction barred the U.S. government from separating parents and children at the border unless the adults presented a danger to children, and required the government to reunite separated families within 30 days, to reunite children under five years of age with parents within 14 days, and to permit all separated minors to speak with their parents within ten days.[126][127]
In March 2019, Judge Sabraw issued a preliminary ruling which would potentially expand the number of migrants included in the American Civil Liberties lawsuit after newly released government documents identified thousands more families that had been separated as early as July 1, 2017. In his ruling Sabraw called the documents "undisputed" and commented, “The hallmark of a civilized society is measured by how it treats its people and those within its borders."[129]
Status hearing
Judge Sabraw set a status hearing for July 6, 2018.[130] On July 6, the Trump administration asked for more time to reunite migrant families separated, highlighting the challenge of confirming familial relationship between parents and children, with parents of 19 of 101 detained children under the age of 5 already deported according to a Department of Justice lawyer.[131] The Judge set another deadline of Tuesday (July 10) for reunification, and gave the government until Saturday evening to create a list of all 101 youngest children along with an explanation of proposed difficulties. With the list the Judge believed that the two sides would be able to have "... an intelligent conversation Monday (July 9) morning about which child can be reunited July 10, which can not - and then the court can determine whether it makes sense to relax the deadline".[131]
Second ACLU lawsuit
Charging the Trump Administration with initiating new government screening policies designed to bar immigrants from entering the country by preventing them from getting a fair hearing, on August 7, 2018, the ACLU filed a lawsuit which focuses on migrants who have been placed in fast-track deportation proceedings known as “expedited removal.” The lawsuit was filed on behalf of 12 migrants who failed their “credible fear” interviews, one of the first steps for asylum seekers in the fast-track removal process.[132]
Challenge by 17 states
On June 26, 2018, a separate legal challenge to the family separation was brought by 17 states (California, Delaware, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington) against the Trump administration.[126] The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Seattle. The plaintiff states, all of whom have Democratic state attorneys general, challenge the forcible separation of families as a "cruel and unlawful" violation of the constitution's Due Process and Equal Protection Clause.[133][126] Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is leading the suit. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who represents California, called Trump's executive order putting a halt to the policy as an "empty and meaningless order that claims to take back policies that he [Trump] put in place himself as a political stunt".[134]
In a new motion filed on July 2, the group asked for immediate information and access to those that are being detained. The motion included more than 900 pages of declarations from family members as well as others that have been involved in the separation of the families. On July 5, PBS Newshour reported on 12 of the 99 declarations that they believe "offer a window into what's has been happening under the family separation policy". PBS included information from the declaration of one mother who wrote that her 1-year-old son was taken from her at a legal point of entry in November. She said that when they were reunited after three months he cried continually and when she removed his clothing she found him to be dirty and infected with lice. Others spoke of multiple detainees, including young children, held in very small rooms or cages, sometimes "freezing" cold, and without adequate bathroom facilities. Several others wrote of a lack of food, including food for children. One woman wrote that she was kept in a cell with nearly 50 other mothers and they were told "that they could not eat because they were asking about their children."[135]
Flores filings
On June 21, 2018, the Department of Justice (DoJ) asked U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee to alter her 2015 ruling in Reno v. Flores on the conditions of family detention by the Department of Homeland Security. The government seeks to end a 20-day limit on family detention and to end the requirement that children be held in day care centers that are state-licensed.[128] The DoJ filing claims that limits on detention must be ended due to "a destabilizing migratory crisis".[128] Attorney Peter Schey, who represents the child plaintiffs in Flores, vowed to oppose the filing[136] He filed an opposition on the grounds of there having been no significant change in circumstances warranting such a revision of the ruling.[137] On June 29, the DoJ filed a statement that in future the Government will ″detain families together during the pendency of immigration proceedings when they are apprehended at or between ports of entry″ in place of separating them.[138]
On July 9, Judge Gee denied the government's request to hold families together indefinitely in ICE facilities, and its request to exempt detention facilities from state licensing requirements for that purpose.[139][140] Gee wrote that, "Absolutely nothing prevents Defendants from reconsidering their current blanket policy of family detention and reinstating prosecutorial discretion."[140][141]
August DHS complaint
On August 23, 2018, the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the American Immigration Council filed a complaint with DHS alleging the “pervasive, and illegal, practice of coercing separated mothers and fathers into signing documents they may not have understood.” According to the complaint, “the trauma of separation and detention creates an environment that is by its very nature coercive and makes it extremely difficult for parents to participate in legal proceedings affecting their rights.” It also describes the use of "physical and verbal threats, the denial of food and water, the use of solitary confinement, the use of starvation, restrictions on feminine-hygiene products, and the use of pre-filled forms."[142]
Other challenges on behalf of individuals
Separately, a Guatemalan woman filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington challenging the Trump administration's practice on June 19, before the Executive Order. It is one of a small number of similar court challenges, with demands such as the immediate release of the child, an order prohibiting US authorities from separating the family, and money for damages of pain and suffering.[143][144]
Another lawsuit is that of a 9-year-old boy from Honduras who, according to the family, had fled with his father after his grandfather was murdered, was detained at the border and was separated from his father while sleeping. Another case is that of a 14-year-old girl who, so the lawsuit, had fled persecution in El Salvador and was lured away from her mother at a detention facility in Texas under the pretext of taking her to bathe. In both cases, the child was brought thousands of miles away.[145]
Federal class action lawsuit
On September 5, 2018, a federal lawsuit was filed to seek monetary damages on the basis of the inflicted psychological harm and the creation of a fund to support the mental health treatment of the children.[146]
Facilities involved
During separation
The Ursula detention facility, operated by Customs and Border Protection, in McAllen, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley—On June 17, 2018, the facility housed 1,129 people, including 528 families and nearly 200 unaccompanied minor children. The facility has been called, "the dog kennel" because chain link fencing is being used to create areas for those waiting to be processed, including children who have been separated from their parents. The caged areas are bare without toys or books for the children. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley toured the facility in June and said that the parents were being told that they would only be separated from their children for "just a very short period—they go to a judge and then they're reunified [but] the reality is it's very hard for the parents to know where their kids are and to be able to connect with them".[147]
Detention of parents
Port Isabel Detention Center, operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in Los Fresnos, Texas—This facility is surrounded by swampland and houses detained parents. Several members of Congress toured the facility in June and met with 10 women who had been separated from their children. Some of them did not know where their children had been transferred to and none had been able to speak with a lawyer. One women said that she was told that her child would be put up for adoption. Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline said the women were uncontrollably sobbing.[147]
South Texas Detention Facility, operated by the GEO Group, in Pearsall, Texas[148]
Eloy Detention Center, owned and operated by CoreCivic, in Eloy, Arizona—This privately run immigration jail is ringed by barbed wire and an electrified fence. In late May, detained parents had counted at least 40 people who had been separated from their children among the 1,500 people detained in the facility; Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not release its own figures.[149][150]
Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington—Adults separated from their child relatives were transferred to this facility, which suffered a chicken pox outbreak in late June, preventing a visit by Congressman Derek Kilmer.[151]
Detention of children
Casa Padre, a private facility owned and operated by Southwest Key Programs, in Brownsville, Texas—A housing facility for children built in a former Walmart and operated under contract for the Department of Health and Human Services. On June 13, it housed 1,469 children, a plurality of whom arrived as unaccompanied minors crossing the border. Southwest Key estimated that 5% of children held there had been separated from their parents.[152]
Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Homestead, Florida—A housing facility for around 1,100 children. Approximately 70 children separated from their families are housed at the facility.[153] The facility had been opened and closed during the Obama administration and was recently reopened.[153]
Estrella del Norte, a private facility owned and operated by Southwest Key Programs, in Tucson, Arizona—A 300-bed housing facility for children, that housed 287 children in mid-June 2018. A former staff member described conditions in the facility as increasingly "prison-like", and recounts being told to forbid siblings without their parent from hugging one another.[154]
Tornillo tent city, operated by the Federal government in Tornillo, Texas—Erected in the desert at the Marcelino Serna Port of Entry in western Texas. The site was chosen for a tent camp slated to house thousands of migrant children, including both unaccompanied minors and children separated from their parents.[155] Representative Beto O'Rourke, who led a protest on Father's Day, June 17, 2018, was told that 200 children were being detained in the camp, 20% of whom were separated from their parents.[156]
Three facilities in Combes, Raymondville and Brownsville (Casa El President, operated by Southwest Key), in southern Texas, have been set up to hold children under five and have been referred to as "tender age shelters". Medical professionals and lawyers who visited the facilities described "play rooms" filled with preschool children crying and in crisis.[157] Colleen Kraft, the president of American Academy of Pediatrics, visited the Coombs facility and said she was "shaken" by what she saw, calling it "a heartbreaking scene" and unlike anything she'd seen in her decades as a pediatrician. She termed the practice of removing the children from their parents "government-sanctioned child abuse".[13]
Upbring New Hope Children’s Shelter in McAllen, Texas. As of June 21, about 60 children were housed in this facility, including six who had been separated from their parents while the remaining children had arrived alone. According to American Academy of Pediatrics President Colleen Draft, this center, like other centers, confiscates any possessions the child may arrive with and care givers are not allowed to comfort or touch the children. Following President Trump's June 20 executive order to stop separating undocumented immigrant parents and their children, on June 21 First Lady Melania Trump visited this facility saying, "I'm here to learn about your facility, in which I know you house children on a long-term basis and I'd also like to ask you how I can help these children to reunite with their families as quickly as possible." Critics have argued that this visit did not give the First Lady an accurate look at what many have called an unfolding crisis. She was also widely criticized for wearing a jacket that on the back stated "I Really Don't Care, Do U" when she boarded the plane for her trip to the facility.[158][159]
An East Harlem, New York shelter run by Cayuga Centers, Children's Village in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and additional shelters in Long Island, in Westchester and the Bronx are among nine facilities in New York state housing separated children.[160] In a June 22 interview New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that he believes that HHS sent about 700 children to his state but he is not certain because HHS has refused to release any information about the children. The Governor said that he also contacted the foster care agencies in his state in an attempt to assess the number of children and to make sure that their needs were being met, but HHS had put a gag order on the agencies and they were not able to disclose any information either. He was allowed to visit one facility and the staff there told him that the children in their care "have a high level of psychological trauma [and] anxiety disorders".[161]
Proposed facilities
Houston facility for young children, pregnant girls, and teenage mothers—Southwest Key has leased a 53,600-square-foot building—419 Emancipation Avenue—formerly occupied by the non-profit Star of Hope in Houston, Texas, and applied to use it as a detention center for up to 200 migrant youth "from age 0 to 17".[162] Advocates report that the facility would house "children younger than 12 as well as pregnant and nursing teenagers"; the Department of Health and Human Services refers to this younger age group as "tender-age children"[163] Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner opposes the facility and has urged the Texas state government not to license it. At a press conference, Turner said, "I do not want to be an enabler in this process. I do not want the city to participate in this process. The health department has yet to provide a food permit or shelter permit.... If we don't speak, if we don't say no, then these types of policies will continue."[163]
Military detention camp for migrant families at Fort Bliss
Military detention camp for migrant children on Goodfellow Air Force Base
Reunification
Following the suspension of the policy in June 2018, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar testified that the Department would only reunite children with their detained parents if Congress passed legislation lifting the 20-day limit on family detention required under the Flores settlement.[96]
On July 9, the government stated that the number of parents deported alone and the number of parents released to the United States alone were each nine, rather than 19. As of that date, two parents of children younger than five had been reunited. The government said that more than fifty parents would be reunited with their small children on July 10, and that they would be released from ICE custody into the United States after being reunited.[164] DoJ lawyer Sarah Fabian stated that of the 102 children, 75 were eligible for release and 27 could not be immediately be reunited for various reasons.[165]
An HHS official reported that of the 102 children, 38 had been returned to their families by Tuesday evening, and that more reunions were to continue "throughout the night".[166] The administration gave reasons why the remaining 64 children were not united by the deadline. According to the administration, in one case, parent and child may both be U.S. citizens.[167]
On July 23, the administration stated that 879 parents had been reunited with their children, another 538 have been cleared for reunification, further 463 parents had cases that were still under review, and further 454 were either considered not eligible or were not yet known to be eligible for reunification with their children. More than 450 parents may have already been deported without their children.[168] On July 26, 1,637 children were deemed eligible for reunification and 711 were deemed not eligible. So far, 1,442 had been reunited. Those deemed not eligible included 431 whose parents may have been deported and 120 with parents who waived reunification.[169]
On June 26, 2018, responding to an ACLU class action lawsuit, a federal judge ordered all separated children, except where not appropriate, be reunited with their parent within 30 days.[126][127]
Procedures to reunite families
Authorities made the decision to take children from their parents without a plan to reunite families,[12] resulting in numerous cases of parents and children having no contact since being forcefully separated. One investigation reported that "The policy is being applied in such an opaque and ad hoc manner that government case workers, public defenders, federal prosecutors, judges, and the Border Patrol do not have clear answers about if, when, or where children will be reunited with their parents, or even whether separated parents are able to communicate with their kids by phone." When asked if separated parents will "just fall into a black hole" and be unable to reunite with their children unless they hire a lawyer, a Justice Department official replied that once the parent is in ICE custody, the child is taken into the Health and Human Services system, and the government does not try to reunite them.[11]
It was reported that if or when an attempt was made to reconnect children to their parents it would be difficult because children and parents entered two separate systems: parents entered the US Department of Homeland Security to face criminal prosecution while children were classified as an "unaccompanied alien child" and transferred to the US Department of Health and Human Services. At that point the government no longer tracked them as a family unit and there was no system in place to reunite families. In May, parents in the McAllen facility were given a number to call to locate their children, but it was the wrong number, and no phones were available for their use. A federal public defender working at the facility spoke to a judge asking that the families be reunited saying, "This is a tragedy that's happening right before this court. There's a very real possibility the parent will be deported without their children".[11] John Sandweg, the former head of ICE, agreed saying, "You could easily end up in a situation where the gap between a parent's deportation and a child's deportation is years," and that many children might never see their parents again.[170]
Representative Pramila Jayapal met with dozens of mothers whose children had been taken from them, and reported that in some cases, Border Patrol agents told the mothers that "their families don't exist anymore."[83] The Boston Globe interviewed foster parents in Michigan who were caring for four children that had been taken from their parents; a six-year-old boy, two eight-year-old girls, and a nine-year-old boy. Only one of the children, the six-year-old, knew where his parent was. The boy and his father, from Honduras, had crossed the border six months previously in an attempt to claim asylum, and he had not seen him since he had been led away in handcuffs.[11] In May 2018, another Honduran man, Marco Antonio Muñoz, 39, committed suicide after his 3-year-old son was forcibly taken and separated from him by Border Patrol Agents. The man had crossed the Rio Grande with his son and his wife and turned himself and his family in to authorities to ask for asylum.[171]
A journalist working for The New Yorker spoke with several women incarcerated at the Otero County Prison, a privately run facility in New Mexico, and an attorney who is representing them. One mother tearfully said that she had no idea where her child might be and was concerned that his medical conditions were not being attended to. Another mother said that of the fifty mothers in her wing at Otero few knew where their children were. The public defender representing these mothers said, "The family-separation policy is changing the lawyer-client relationship. My clients don't even care about beating the charge they're facing. It makes it harder to represent them, because all they want is to be with their children. There can't really be due process for a parent in a situation like this."[172]
Despite numerous reports of separations in which parents were not given information about their children,[173] Senator James Lankford, speaking on Meet the Press blamed "media that's not been responsible with this" for reports of difficulties locating parents or children. Calling the government personal working for the various agencies that have been handling the separations "professionals", he stated, "They know where every child is to be able to connect them to their parent or their relative that came."[174]
Following a court order by District Judge Dana Sabraw to reunite all parents with their children by July 26, it was revealed that about 500 children's parents had already been deported. Judge Sabraw commented, "What was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know either.”[175] On August 2, the Justice Department filed in court that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) should take responsibility for reuniting families, rather than the federal government.[176] The ACLU responded by stating that while they are ready to help, the burden of responsibility for finding parents of minors separated at the border was the government's responsibility.[177]
In February 2019, Trump officials said that they would not focus any efforts on reuniting parents with children who had already been sent to foster homes.[178]
Reactions
Opposition and condemnation
The policy attracted significant condemnation from a wide array of sources including medical, scientific, religious and human rights groups. It is extremely unpopular with the public, with approximately 25% of Americans supporting the policy, less than any recent major piece of legislation.[60] The detainment of children by the U.S. government has been compared to the Nazi concentration camps by some observers and politicians.[179][180]
Medical and scientific community
The policy has been condemned by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association, with the American Academy of Pediatrics saying that the policy has caused "irreparable harm" to the children.[13][2][181] Together, they represent more than 250,000 doctors in the United States.[13] Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris described the family separation policy as "a recipe for toxic stress".[182] Dr. Irwin Redlener, who co-founded Children's Health Fund, called the policy "dehumanizing" and described it as a form of child abuse.[183] A number of concerned researchers and clinicians signed an open letter to Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen calling on her to end the migrant child separations, writing, "Decades of psychological and brain research have demonstrated that forced parental separation and placement in incarceration-like facilities can have profound immediate, long-term, and irreparable harm on infant and child development."[184]
Religious groups
Many religious groups also oppose the policy including many Christian organizations such as:
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
The National Association of Evangelicals[185]
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America[186]
Episcopal Church
United Methodist Church
African Methodist Episcopal Church
Presbyterian Church
Evangelical Lutheran Church
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints[187]
In response to a criticism of the policy by a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the policy, citing the Bible.[188][189]
On June 18, a group of more than 600 United Methodist Church clergy and laity announced that they were bringing church law charges against Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The members of the group accused Sessions of "child abuse, immorality, racial discrimination and dissemination of doctrines contrary to the standards of the doctrine of the United Methodist Church".[190] The last charge refers to Sessions' "misuse" of Romans 13, which he quoted to argue that secular law must always be obeyed.[191]
All four major denominations of American Judaism oppose the policy:
Reform
Conservative
Orthodox
Reconstructionist[192]
Islamic organizations also oppose the policy.[193]
Pope Francis supports statements by US Catholic Bishops who had called the policy "contrary to our Catholic values" and "immoral", adding "It's not easy, but populism is not the solution."[194]
Evangelist Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, called the practice "disgraceful" and said that "it's terrible to see families ripped apart and I don't support that one bit." Graham did not, however, attach blame to President Trump or his administration, but rather blamed "... the politicians for the last 20, 30 years that have allowed this to escalate to where it is today".[195]
Academia
Many professors and administrators in colleges and universities have likened the policy to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.[196] Open letters signed by various scholars denounced the policy and called for its halt.[196][197]
Criminals are incarcerated
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S defenders professed outrage on Friday at comments from Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic presidential candidate, who accurately observed that the president’s rhetoric on immigrants would not have been out of place in Nazi Germany.
Speaking at two campaign events in Iowa, O’Rourke said that Trump’s policy of separating the children of asylum-seekers from their parents as they cross the border, “follows the rhetoric of a president who not only describes immigrants as rapists and criminals, but as animals and an infestation.”
“Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as an infestation in the Third Reich,” O’Rourke told students at Morningside College in Sioux City. “I would not expect it in the United States of America.”
Last year, Trump told reporters that the deportation of undocumented immigrants was necessary because “you wouldn’t believe how bad these people are — these aren’t people, these are animals.” A month later, the president tweeted that Democrats “want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13.” Last week, Trump mocked the claims of asylum-seekers who claimed their lives were at risk as “a big, fat con job.”
On Thursday night, O’Rourke stood by his observation about the rhetorical echoes from history when asked by Alexandra Jaffe of the Associated Press if he was comparing the Trump administration to Nazi Germany.
“Well, I compared the rhetoric that the president has employed to rhetoric that you might have heard during the Third Reich,” O’Rourke replied.
“Calling human beings an infestation is something that we might’ve expected to hear in Nazi Germany,” he continued. “Describing immigrants — who have a track record of committing violent crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans — as rapists and criminals. Seeking to ban all Muslims — all people of one religion — what other country on the face of the planet does that kind of thing? Or in our human history or in the history of the Western world?”
“Putting kids in cages?” O’Rorke added. “Saying that neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists are very fine people? You draw your own conclusions, but this is not something that I expected to hear a president of the United States of America ever say.”
Pressed on whether he was lowering the tone by invoking the Nazis, O’Rourke called it necessary. “If we don’t call out racism,” he replied, “in this position of trust the president enjoys, then we’re going to continue to get its consequences: hate crimes in this country up every single one of the last three years; the mosque in Victoria, Texas, burned to the ground on the very day that he signed the executive order attempting to ban Muslim travel to the United States of America; kids in cages at the US-Mexico border, at their most desperate, vulnerable moment; their moms, from whom these kids had been taken by force, deported back to the very countries from which they fled, in some cases to certain death.”
“These are the consequences of our silence,” O’Rourke concluded. “Silence is complicity in what this administration is doing.”
The former Texas representative denounced that rhetoric at another event earlier on Thursday, after relating an exchange with a Mexican-American third grader, who asked him, “Why does the president not like me?”
Video of O’Rourke’s comments at the first event was quickly posted on Twitter by a reporter for the far-right website Daily Wire, prompting a condemnation from the Zionist Organization of America, which accused him of “hateful and ignorant rhetoric” for decrying Trump’s hateful and ignorant rhetoric.
The ZOA, which is supported by archconservative donor Sheldon Adelson, is closely aligned with the Trump administration. The group’s politics can be gleaned from a quick look at its homepage, which is often dominated by articles from Breitbart. Having drawn criticism from Israeli liberals for featuring former White House aides Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka at its 2017 gala dinner, the ZOA responded by inviting Trump’s hard-right national security adviser, John Bolton, and his provocative ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, last year.
Patrick Svitek, a Texas Tribune reporter who covered O’Rourke’s Senate race against Ted Cruz last year, noted that the former member of Congress had characterized Trump’s rhetoric the same way then, telling supporters that the president’s use of the word “infestation” to describe undocumented immigrants was “how they talked in the Third Reich. That’s not how I want us talking here in the United States of America.”
(https://66.media.tumblr.com/00b12e78cd5e2d9705c749b6a9854ff0/tumblr_ppm8t4QUG31rclr47o1_1280.png)
Never forget.
#Resist
The practice was the result of an informal arrangement: Seven Motel 6 locations in Washington state shared the personal information of their guests with federal immigration officials on a daily basis between 2015 and 2017, authorities said. Of the 80,000 guests whose information was shared, at least nine were detained, officials said.
On Friday, the practice, which Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said constituted an illegal invasion of privacy in a lawsuit he filed against the hotel chain, reached a conclusion after it agreed to a $12 million settlement with guests who had been affected.
Every guest who had their information shared with ICE is eligible for restitution. The attorney general’s office said it would not require claimants to disclose their immigration status.
Ferguson’s lawsuit, which was filed in January 2018, was prompted by a news report in the Phoenix New Times that uncovered the practice at some Motel 6 locations in Arizona in September 2017.
The New Times found that ICE agents made at least 20 arrests at two Motel 6 locations in the seven months prior. After the outcry sparked by the report, the company apologized and issued the directive to its more than 1,400 locations that they were “prohibited from voluntarily providing daily guest lists to ICE.”
Ferguson said the practice was not limited to Arizona. He found Motel 6 locations in Washington state that were providing guest lists to federal immigration agents without reasonable suspicion, probable cause or search warrants, his office said. The information that was given to ICE included guests’ names, driver’s license numbers, passport, green card and other ID numbers, room numbers, dates of birth and license plate numbers, it said.
The practice violated the Consumer Protection Act and Washington state laws against discrimination, according to the lawsuit. Ferguson’s office said guests with Latino-sounding names were singled out at least some of the time.
“In anticipation of ICE’s daily visits, some Motel 6 locations routinely printed their guest lists and a form, referred to as a ‘law enforcement acknowledgement form,’ which the ICE agents signed upon receiving the day’s guest list,” Ferguson’s office said Friday in a news release. “At the two Everett locations, for example, ICE agents routinely visited the motels early in the morning, sometimes twice a day, from February 2015 through September 2017. ICE agents requested the day’s guest list, circled guests with Latino-sounding names and returned to their vehicles.”
Ferguson’s office said that at least nine people were detained as a result of the practice, although it is unknown how many were deported.
One man from Seattle, who stayed at a Motel 6 near the Seattle-Tacoma airport for one night to wrap Christmas presents for his four children, was detained and deported after being approached by ICE agents in the hotel’s parking lot, according to Ferguson’s office. It did not release his name but said that he was the sole provider for his wife and their four children.
Another father, the primary breadwinner for his wife and six children, who had lived in the United States for more than 20 years, was detained after staying at a Motel 6 to pick up supplies for his grocery business, the office said.
And a Washington man who lived in the United States since he was 1 was detained as he was going to get milk for his baby from a car in a Motel 6 parking lot, the office said. That man was released after being detained for six days, but lost his job.
A resolution that was part of the settlement stipulates that Motel 6 will not provide guest information to law enforcement authorities without “a judicially enforceable search warrant or a credible reason to believe that someone is in imminent danger,” the office said in the news release.
“The company has also implemented a system of additional controls to ensure corporate oversight and compliance in cases where law enforcement requests are made,” said a statement from Motel 6 spokeswoman Maggie Giddens. “The safety and security of our guests, which includes protecting guest information, is our top priority, and we are pleased to be able to reach resolution in this matter."
ICE declined to comment through spokesman Richard A. Rocha.
“Motel 6’s actions tore families apart and violated the privacy rights of tens of thousands of Washingtonians,” Ferguson said in a statement. “Our resolution holds Motel 6 accountable for illegally handing over guests’ private information without a warrant.”
When the police break your teammate’s leg, you’d think it would wake you up a little.
When they arrest him on a New York street, throw him in jail for the night, and leave him with a season-ending injury, you’d think it would sink in. You’d think you’d know there was more to the story.
You’d think.
But nope.
I still remember my reaction when I first heard what happened to Thabo. It was 2015, late in the season. Thabo and I were teammates on the Hawks, and we’d flown into New York late after a game in Atlanta. When I woke up the next morning, our team group text was going nuts. Details were still hazy, but guys were saying, Thabo hurt his leg? During an arrest? Wait — he spent the night in jail?! Everyone was pretty upset and confused.
Well, almost everyone. My response was….. different. I’m embarrassed to admit it.
Which is why I want to share it today.
Before I tell the rest of this story, let me just say real quick — Thabo wasn’t some random teammate of mine, or some guy in the league who I knew a little bit. We’d become legitimate friends that year in our downtime. He was my go-to teammate to talk with about stuff beyond the basketball world. Politics, religion, culture, you name it — Thabo brought a perspective that wasn’t typical of an NBA player. And it’s easy to see why: Before we were teammates in Atlanta, the guy had played professional ball in France, Turkey and Italy. He spoke three languages! Thabo’s mother was from Switzerland, and his father was from South Africa. They lived together in South Africa before Thabo was born, then left because of apartheid.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that Thabo was one of the most interesting people I’d ever been around. We respected each other. We were cool, you know? We had each other’s backs.
Anyway — on the morning I found out that Thabo had been arrested, want to know what my first thought was? About my friend and teammate? My first thought was: What was Thabo doing out at a club on a back-to-back??
Yeah. Not, How’s he doing? Not, What happened during the arrest?? Not, Something seems off with this story. Nothing like that. Before I knew the full story, and before I’d even had the chance to talk to Thabo….. I sort of blamed Thabo.
I thought, Well, if I’d been in Thabo’s shoes, out at a club late at night, the police wouldn’t have arrested me. Not unless I was doing something wrong.
Cringe.
It’s not like it was a conscious thought. It was pure reflex — the first thing to pop into my head.
And I was worried about him, no doubt.
But still. Cringe.
A few months later, a jury found Thabo not guilty on all charges. He settled with the city over the NYPD’s use of force against him. And then the story just sort of….. disappeared. It fell away from the news. Thabo had surgery and went through rehab. Pretty soon, another NBA season began — and we were back on the court again.
Life went on.
But I still couldn’t shake my discomfort.
I mean, I hadn’t been involved in the incident. I hadn’t even been there. So why did I feel like I’d let my friend down?
Why did I feel like I’d let myself down?
A few weeks ago, something happened at a Jazz home game that brought back many of those old questions.
Maybe you saw it: We were playing against the Thunder, and Russell Westbrook and a fan in the crowd exchanged words during the game. I didn’t actually see or hear what happened, and if you were following on TV or on Twitter, maybe you had a similar initial viewing of it. Then, after the game, one of our reporters asked me for my response to what had gone down between Russ and the fan. I told him I hadn’t seen it — and added something like, But you know Russ. He gets into it with the crowd a lot.
Of course, the full story came out later that night. What actually happened was that a fan had said some really ugly things at close range to Russ. Russ had then responded. After the game, he’d said he felt the comments were racially charged.
The incident struck a nerve with our team.
In a closed-door meeting with the president of the Jazz the next day, my teammates shared stories of similar experiences they’d had — of feeling degraded in ways that went beyond acceptable heckling. One teammate talked about how his mom had called him right after the game, concerned for his safety in SLC. One teammate said the night felt like being “in a zoo.” One of the guys in the meeting was Thabo — he’s my teammate in Utah now. I looked over at him, and remembered his night in NYC.
Everyone was upset. I was upset — and embarrassed, too. But there was another emotion in the room that day, one that was harder to put a finger on. It was almost like….. disappointment, mixed with exhaustion. Guys were just sick and tired of it all.
This wasn’t the first time they’d taken part in conversations about race in their NBA careers, and it wasn’t the first time they’d had to address the hateful actions of others. And one big thing that got brought up a lot in the meeting was how incidents like this — they weren’t only about the people directly involved. This wasn’t only about Russ and some heckler. It was about more than that.
It was about what it means just to exist right now — as a person of color in a mostly white space.
It was about racism in America.
Before the meeting ended, I joined the team’s demand for a swift response and a promise from the Jazz organization that it would address the concerns we had. I think my teammates and I all felt it was a step in the right direction.
But I don’t think anyone felt satisfied.
There’s an elephant in the room that I’ve been thinking about a lot over these last few weeks. It’s the fact that, demographically, if we’re being honest: I have more in common with the fans in the crowd at your average NBA game than I have with the players on the court.
And after the events in Salt Lake City last month, and as we’ve been discussing them since, I’ve really started to recognize the role those demographics play in my privilege. It’s like — I may be Thabo’s friend, or Ekpe’s teammate, or Russ’s colleague; I may work with those guys. And I absolutely 100% stand with them.
But I look like the other guy.
And whether I like it or not? I’m beginning to understand how that means something.
What I’m realizing is, no matter how passionately I commit to being an ally, and no matter how unwavering my support is for NBA and WNBA players of color….. I’m still in this conversation from the privileged perspective of opting in to it. Which of course means that on the flip side, I could just as easily opt out of it. Every day, I’m given that choice — I’m granted that privilege — based on the color of my skin.
In other words, I can say every right thing in the world: I can voice my solidarity with Russ after what happened in Utah. I can evolve my position on what happened to Thabo in New York. I can be that weird dude in Get Out bragging about how he’d have voted for Obama a third term. I can condemn every racist heckler I’ve ever known.
But I can also fade into the crowd, and my face can blend in with the faces of those hecklers, any time I want.
I realize that now. And maybe in years past, just realizing something would’ve felt like progress. But it’s NOT years past — it’s today. And I know I have to do better. So I’m trying to push myself further.
I’m trying to ask myself what I should actually do.
How can I — as a white man, part of this systemic problem — become part of the solution when it comes to racism in my workplace? In my community? In this country?
These are the questions that I’ve been asking myself lately.
And I don’t think I have all the answers yet — but here are the ones that are starting to ring the most true:
I have to continue to educate myself on the history of racism in America.
I have to listen. I’ll say it again, because it’s that important. I have to listen.
I have to support leaders who see racial justice as fundamental — as something that’s at the heart of nearly every major issue in our country today. And I have to support policies that do the same.
I have to do my best to recognize when to get out of the way — in order to amplify the voices of marginalized groups that so often get lost.
But maybe more than anything?
I know that, as a white man, I have to hold my fellow white men accountable.
We all have to hold each other accountable.
And we all have to be accountable — period. Not just for our own actions, but also for the ways that our inaction can create a “safe” space for toxic behavior.
And I think the standard that we have to hold ourselves to, in this crucial moment….. it’s higher than it’s ever been. We have to be active. We have to be actively supporting the causes of those who’ve been marginalized — precisely because they’ve been marginalized.
Two concepts that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately are guilt and responsibility.
When it comes to racism in America, I think that guilt and responsibility tend to be seen as more or less the same thing. But I’m beginning to understand how there’s a real difference.
As white people, are we guilty of the sins of our forefathers? No, I don’t think so.
But are we responsible for them? Yes, I believe we are.
And I guess I’ve come to realize that when we talk about solutions to systemic racism — police reform, workplace diversity, affirmative action, better access to healthcare, even reparations? It’s not about guilt. It’s not about pointing fingers, or passing blame.
It’s about responsibility. It’s about understanding that when we’ve said the word “equality,” for generations, what we’ve really meant is equality for a certain group of people. It’s about understanding that when we’ve said the word “inequality,” for generations, what we’ve really meant is slavery, and its aftermath — which is still being felt to this day. It’s about understanding on a fundamental level that black people and white people, they still have it different in America. And that those differences come from an ugly history….. not some random divide.
And it’s about understanding that Black Lives Matter, and movements like it, matter, because — well, let’s face it: I probably would’ve been safe on the street that one night in New York. And Thabo wasn’t. And I was safe on the court that one night in Utah. And Russell wasn’t.
But as disgraceful as it is that we have to deal with racist hecklers in NBA arenas in 2019? The truth is, you could argue that that kind of racism is “easier” to deal with.
Because at least in those cases, the racism is loud and clear. There’s no ambiguity — not in the act itself, and thankfully not in the response: we throw the guy out of the building, and then we ban him for life.
But in many ways the more dangerous form of racism isn’t that loud and stupid kind. It isn’t the kind that announces itself when it walks into the arena. It’s the quiet and subtle kind. The kind that almost hides itself in plain view. It’s the person who does and says all the “right” things in public: They’re perfectly friendly when they meet a person of color. They’re very polite. But in private? Well….. they sort of wish that everyone would stop making everything “about race” all the time.
It’s the kind of racism that can seem almost invisible — which is one of the main reasons why it’s allowed to persist.
And so, again, banning a guy like Russ’s heckler? To me, that’s the “easy” part. But if we’re really going to make a difference as a league, as a community, and as a country on this issue….. it’s like I said — I just think we need to push ourselves another step further.
First, by identifying that less visible, less obvious behavior as what it is: racism.
And then second, by denouncing that racism — actively, and at every level.
That’s the bare minimum of where we have to get to, I think, if we’re going to consider the NBA — or any workplace — as anything close to part of the solution in 2019.
I’ll wrap this up in a minute — but first I have one last thought.
The NBA is over 75% players of color.
Seventy-five percent.
People of color, they built this league. They’ve grown this league. People of color have made this league into what it is today. And I guess I just wanted to say that if you can’t find it in your heart to support them — now? And I mean actively support them?
If the best that you can do for their cause is to passively “tolerate” it? If that’s the standard we’re going to hold ourselves to — to blend in, and opt out?
Well, that’s not good enough. It’s not even close.
I know I’m in a strange position, as one of the more recognized white players in the NBA. It’s a position that comes with a lot of….. interesting undertones. And it’s a position that makes me a symbol for a lot of things, for a lot of people — often people who don’t know anything about me. Usually, I just ignore them. But this doesn’t feel like a “usually” moment.
This feels like a moment to draw a line in the sand.
I believe that what’s happening to people of color in this country — right now, in 2019 — is wrong.
The fact that black Americans are more than five times as likely to be incarcerated as white Americans is wrong. The fact that black Americans are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as white Americans is wrong. The fact that black unemployment rates nationally are double that of overall unemployment rates is wrong. The fact that black imprisonment rates for drug charges are almost six times higher nationally than white imprisonment rates for drug charges is wrong. The fact that black Americans own approximately one-tenth of the wealth that white Americans own is wrong.
The fact that inequality is built so deeply into so many of our most trusted institutions is wrong.
And I believe it’s the responsibility of anyone on the privileged end of those inequalities to help make things right.
So if you don’t want to know anything about me, outside of basketball, then listen — I get it. But if you do want to know something? Know I believe that.
Know that about me.
If you’re wearing my jersey at a game? Know that about me. If you’re planning to buy my jersey for someone else…… know that about me. If you’re following me on social media….. know that about me. If you’re coming to Jazz games and rooting for me….. know that about me.
And if you’re claiming my name, or likeness, for your own cause, in any way….. know that about me. Know that I believe this matters.
Thanks for reading.
Time for me to shut up and listen.
Please 'splain to me, what this last post has to do with President Trump?
Maybe it belongs in the Basketball thread.
Please 'splain to me, what this last post has to do with President Trump?
Maybe it belongs in the Basketball thread.
Go Fuck Yourself.
#Resist
Athos confirms the post has nothing to do with the President, and his supporters and should not be lumped into this or any other Trump focused thread, due to the OP being too lazy to begin a new thread, or draw clearly how what some player 'feels' or does not feel has to do with President Trump.
Please move this past three posts to an appropriate thread/Section.
Athos confirms the post has nothing to do with the President, and his supporters and should not be lumped into this or any other Trump focused thread, due to the OP being too lazy to begin a new thread, or draw clearly how what some player 'feels' or does not feel has to do with President Trump.
Please move this past three posts to an appropriate thread/Section.
Go Fuck Yourself.
#Resist
Confirmation, again. Move the posts, please. Thank you.
During a visit to the border on Friday, President Trump declared, “Our country is full.”
“Can’t take you anymore,” he said, as if he were addressing migrants from Mexico and Central America directly, though none were in the room for the roundtable in Calexico, Calif.
Yet people in other countries did take note of his words. In Germany, a local division of the nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD, celebrated the American president’s pronouncement. The party’s branch in Bad Dürkheim, a spa town of about 19,000 in western Germany’s pastoral Rhineland region, hailed Trump on Facebook as a “realistic man who has the courage to speak the truth."
A user commented, “Germany is also full.”
Trump’s language — repeated on Saturday and affirmed again in a Sunday evening tweet stressing, “Our country is FULL!” — was rebuked in the United States as an aberration. But it fits a pattern of far-right rhetoric reemerging globally. Fear of an immigrant takeover motivates fascist activity in Europe, where, historically, the specter of overcrowding has been used to justify ethnic cleansing.
Adolf Hitler promised “living space” for Germans as the basis of an expansionist project, which historians said distinguishes the Third Reich from today’s xenophobic governments. Still, experts found parallels.
“The echoes do indeed remind one of the Nazi period, unfortunately,” John Connelly, a historian of modern Europe at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “The exact phrasing may be different, but the spirit is very similar. The concern about an ethnic, national people not having proper space — this is something you could definitely describe as parallel to the 1930s.”
The president’s words became even more freighted when he repeated them on Saturday before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, saying, “Our country is full, can’t come. I’m sorry.”
The remarks drew outrage, with critics pointing to the lesson of the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying Jewish refugees who were turned away by the United States in 1939. About a quarter of the passengers later perished in Nazi death camps.
The words chosen by Trump have come to be associated with 20th-century moral catastrophe. An account of Switzerland’s xenophobic reaction to Jewish refugees from the Third Reich is titled, “The Lifeboat is Full: Switzerland and the Refugees, 1933-1945.”
Hermann Peiter, a former professor of theology at the University of Kiel, has documented how ideas about the master race gained currency after Germany’s defeat in World War I based on the complaint, “No room for foreigners! Germany is full!”
Already on Thursday, before Trump had declared the country “full,” Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman and Democratic presidential candidate, was comparing the president’s language to the rhetoric used by Nazi leaders.
“Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as ‘an infestation’ in the Third Reich,” O’Rourke said. “I would not expect it in the United States of America.”
Trump last year described immigrants as “animals,” later saying that he was referring to the MS-13 gang, most of whose members are from Central America. He has used the epithet going at least as far back as 2015, during the first month of his presidential campaign.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley, in a statement to the Associated Press, responded to O’Rourke’s comments by portraying the Democrats as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.
But it is Trump whose language echoes the warnings of white nationalists in Europe — a connection on which the White House didn’t have an immediate comment.
Signs declaring that Germany is already “occupied” announce the perspective of the anti-Muslim, nationalist movement “Pegida,” a German acronym for a name that translates as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. “The country is full,” the movement’s supporters tell European media, calling Germany the “stupidest country in Europe” for accepting Muslim refugees.
In 2014, Nick Griffin, a former member of the European Parliament and chairman of the far-right British National Party who referred to the Holocaust as the “Holohoax,” said on the BBC, “The country’s full. We’ll shut the door.”
In the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn, a far-right maverick who was slain as he campaigned for prime minister in 2002, popularized an anti-immigrant message in part with the catchphrase, “Our country is full.” Supporters of Geert Wilders, the far-right icon who assumed Fortuyn’s mantle, still use the slogan.
None of these nations are among the most densely populated in the world. The United States in particular, where the fertility rate is at a historical low, is not full.
The notion that Germany required more space in the early 20th century was similarly not born out by reality. Parts of eastern Germany were actually underpopulated, Connelly said. But it was a powerful myth, which drove the agenda of “Lebensraum,” he said — “the idea that this great nation had to expand, otherwise it would wither and die.”
Fear of overcrowding has always been a “phantom,” the historian added, “connected also to the idea of there being a pure nation having its own protected territory.” The central obstacle to purity were the Jews, he said; Hitler was less concerned about other ethnic groups.
A former member of Trump’s own party said the president’s warning about population density was similarly specific. David Jolly, a former Florida congressman who was unseated in 2016, noted on Sunday that Trump was only concerned about the entry of certain ethnic groups.
As far-right parties in Europe aim to normalize themselves, they have dispensed with some of the incendiary rhetoric linking them to their 20th-century progenitors. Last year, the National Front in France rebranded as the National Rally to distance itself from memories of Nazi ties. (The new name, however, was reminiscent of a World War II-era bloc that collaborated with the pro-Nazi Vichy government.)
The undertaking has left some of Europe’s most committed far-right activists to look elsewhere for inspiration, including to the U.S. Local party chapters across the continent, fed up with the incremental approach of their national leaders, prize Trump’s flame-throwing. Two years ago, they agreed with the American president that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
In Germany, a regional branch of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party posted a photo of the car attack that left 32-year-old Heather Heyer dead, including a caption that read, “The Americans aren’t as patient as German nationalists.”
President Trump says he wants to get tougher on illegal immigration. Republican lawmakers are worried he did the opposite with his Department of Homeland Security shake-up.
The Washington Post reports that Trump is furious about the record level of migrants coming to the border, a visual reminder that his campaign promise to severely slash immigration is unfulfilled.
On Sunday, Trump forced out Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the person who helped implement some of his most extreme border policies. Since then, he has continued to boot officials at the Department of Homeland Security — most recently the head of the Secret Service. There are reports that the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could be next. One official told The Post that this feels like “they are decapitating the entire department.”
It’s a strange strategy for Trump, who seems to be casting out allies. As secretary, Nielsen vigorously defended her department, even as it separated families at the border and fired tear gas at crowds. If Trump doesn’t think any of that is tough enough, what is?
That’s the question that has Republicans in Congress worried. So worried that they’re going on the record with their concerns.
“They are the intellectual basis for what the president wants to accomplish in immigration,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the most senior Senate Republican, said in an interview with The Post’s Seung Min Kim about the immigration officials Trump is ousting.
"Strikes me as just a frustration of not being able to solve a problem,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) told Politico, adding: " … I don’t know if there’s anybody who’s going to be able to do more.”
Before the firings, this was already a precarious issue for Republicans. Polling suggests that Republican base voters take immigration seriously: A December GW Politics poll found that immigration is the top issue Republican voters want Congress to deal with this year. But Congress hasn’t tackled any major immigration issues yet, and Trump may have just made it harder for lawmakers to do so by throwing a key agency into chaos.
Also not helpful from Republicans’ perspective is that Trump now seems committed to veer as far to the right on immigration as politically possible. That may have helped him win the presidency, but it’s not where the battle for control of Congress in 2020 is going to play out. It will be fought in swing districts such as Rep. Will Hurd’s (R-Tex.) along the border, where the electorate is much wider than the small slice of immigration hard-liners Trump is catering to. (Surprise: Hurd does not seem like a fan of Trump’s DHS shake-up.)
How hard-line to be on immigration isn’t a new tension between Republicans in Congress and Trump. A number of them opposed his national emergency declaration at the border to build a wall, a move Trump made only after Congress refused to fund construction of the wall.
But the party’s relationship over immigration has perhaps never been as fraught as it is now. Kim reports that Grassley had plans to go on Fox News and broadcast directly to the president why he’s making a mistake by gutting his main immigration-enforcement agency.
Republicans in Congress have worked with Trump enough to understand that the president mostly looks out for his own political career, even when it’s at the expense of the rest of his party. But even when viewed through the lens of Trump’s own political health, a number of Republicans think he just made a big mistake.
Please 'splain to me, what this last post has to do with President Trump?Read the thread title. It seems there are those that belive that President Trump is giving the green light for racism to re-emerge.
Maybe it belongs in the Basketball thread. Thank you.
Please 'splain to me, what this last post has to do with President Trump?Read the thread title. It seems there are those that belive that President Trump is giving the green light for racism to re-emerge.
Maybe it belongs in the Basketball thread. Thank you.
FUrthermore, the post is more about racism than about basketball.
YouTube shut down numerous chat rooms being flooded for over an hour by racist comments when thousands of people tuned into YouTube on Tuesday to watch a House Judiciary Committee congressional hearing on the rise of white nationalism.
The hearings featured officials from Facebook and YouTube, two platforms that have been under fire for their use by white supremacists.
When viewers opened up YouTube livestreams during the first hour of the hearings, they were greeted with fast-moving chat rooms filled with racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim rhetoric. As Alexandria Walden, Google’s public policy counsel, explained to lawmakers the company’s actions against bigotry on YouTube, almost half of the screen on the YouTube-hosted stream was filled up with that bigotry.
“We know the very platforms that have enabled these societal benefits can be abused,” Walden said.
Several YouTube channels livestreaming the hearing, including the congressional committee’s own channel, shut down their live chats as they became flooded with hate speech. Fox Business channel kept their chat open the longest of those viewed by Gizmodo, even as it was flooded with racist comments.
Meanwhile, the popular and overtly racist conspiracy theory YouTube channel Red Ice was fundraising while livestreaming the hearing as their own band of bigots filled up their channel’s chat room. For the first hour of the hearings, YouTube’s search delivered people right to the channel. Eventually, that chat room was shut down as well.
Google, which owns YouTube, eventually took action to shut down the chats entirely.
“Hate speech has no place on YouTube,” a YouTube spokesperson told Gizmodo. “We’ve invested heavily in teams and technology dedicated to removing hateful comments and videos and we take action on them when flagged by our users. Due to the presence of hateful comments, we disabled comments on the livestream of today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing.”
The full process across multiple large channels appeared to take over 90 minutes.
One common comment was to compare Eileen Hershenov, a senior vice president at the Anti-Defamation League who testified on Tuesday, to Jewish stereotypes as waves of comments accused Jews of trying to destroy “whites.” Dr. Mohammed Abu Salha, who had two family members murdered “execution style” and appeared before the committee, was mocked and criticized for being Muslim as he recounted the day he saw their bodies.
The hearing was linked from 8chan, a den of bigots and racists with outsized influence in the world of white supremacy, whose users helped hasten the toxic flood of hate speech. Conspiracy theorists and right-wingers kept it up from there.
The new Democratic House majority held a hearing Tuesday on the rise of white nationalism, following the mosques massacre in New Zealand, the Pittsburgh synagogue killings and the deadly neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville.
Republicans invited Candace Owens to testify.
That would be the Candace Owens whom the alleged perpetrator of the New Zealand atrocity called “the person who has influenced me above all.” It’s not clear whether he was sincere in saying that, but perfectly clear was Owens’s glib dismissal of the notion that her words could have encouraged such evil: “LOL!” and “HAHA.” She said the American left tied her to the carnage because it feared her “Blexit” plan to have black people quit the Democratic Party.
That’s also the same Candace Owens who in December said “if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted — he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize.” She later clarified that it was not “fine” that Adolf Hitler was “a homicidal, psychotic maniac.”
Owens, a 29-year-old African American provocateur, first ran an anti-Trump website that made fun of Donald Trump’s genitals, then became a conservative favorite on the Infowars conspiracy website. In recent months, she erroneously claimed that bombs sent to prominent Democrats by a Trump supporter had actually come from leftists; told France to “defend your culture” against Muslims; said “Europe will fall” to Islam and sharia law by 2050; and mused whether “something biochemically happens” to women who do not marry or have children.
President Trump praised Owens in a tweet last year, and the white nationalist Richard Spencer called her “the last stand of implicit white identity, a creation of conservative white people who want to socially signal just how not racist they are.”
If Republicans were hoping to sabotage the Judiciary Committee’s hearing, they got what they wanted. Owens’s presence turned a serious inquiry — there were representatives from civil rights groups, social media and a Muslim man whose daughters were killed in a hate crime — into farce.
Owens said the Republicans’ Southern strategy “never happened.” She said the rise in hate crimes was fake, from “manipulating statistics.” She called the Ku Klux Klan a “Democrat terrorist organization.” She mocked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.); proclaimed that “the Russian collusion hoax has fallen apart”; declared that Trump is “bringing everybody together”; and said the real “family separation” crisis is “black babies separated from the wombs of black mothers.”
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) played the clip of Owens’s remarks about Hitler.
Owens responded: “I think it’s pretty apparent that Mr. Lieu believes that black people are stupid” because he didn’t play “the full clip in its entirety.”
The chairman, Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), told her not to “refer disparagingly to a member of the committee.”
“Sure, even though I was called ‘despicable,’ ” retorted Owens, who also said Nadler had an “anti-black bias.”
The “despicable” remark that offended Owens came from Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.): “I regret that there are some on this panel that have tried to hijack this hearing and desecrate the lives lost to the hate crimes and violence of white supremacists . . . I think that is despicable.”
Attempted hijacking was a fair description of what Republicans did Tuesday. They also invited to testify Morton Klein of the far-right Zionist Organization of America, who used the pulpit to denounce the “vicious anti-Semitic remarks” of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). He said verses from the Koran inspire “constant murder of Jews in Israel.” Klein was invited to testify even though he recently wrote of “evil murders by your filthy Arab Islamist despicable brethren.”
Owens was more flamboyant. She declared that “I’m adamantly against victimhood,” then repeatedly portrayed herself as a victim. (Antifa “threw water at me” and “threw eggs at me.”) She decried “name calling”— while calling Democrats “disgusting,” “cowardly” and “unbelievably dishonest.”
Even if Republicans wanted a provocateur, couldn’t they have found somebody else? Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said “I do have to wonder” about the choice, given that “we have a mass murderer . . . who did call out one of the witnesses on this panel as being his inspiration, whether or not she was.”
Whatever their motives, Republicans frequently sought validation Tuesday from Owens, who has spoken about the need to overcome “white guilt.”
Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), for example, asked Owens to describe the “hate you experienced” for being a conservative. She obliged.
And Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) asked whether her pro-life views “trigger people” (answer: yes). He coaxed: “Tell me a little about how the president has helped the black community.” Answer: “He’s getting us off our feet,” and conservatives are “so supportive.”
“Thank God we have you,” Buck remarked.
I like Stephen Miller a lot,
A Republican congressman has spread false allegations that the US representative Ilhan Omar denied the September 11 hijackers were terrorists, as part of a new wave of abuse directed at her by some conservatives.
Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas shared a tweet falsely reporting that Omar had said she “does not consider [September 11] a terrorist attack on the USA by terrorists”, while accusing the Minnesota congresswoman of playing down the attack.
Crenshaw was responding to a short video clip of a speech given by Omar in California last month, when she complained that all Muslims suffered the consequences of the actions by a small group of them on 11 September 2001, when al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four passenger jets and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon building outside Washington, while one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
Crenshaw was joined by Ronna McDaniel, the Republican party chairwoman, who claimed Omar had shown she was “anti-American”, and the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, who questioned Omar’s loyalty to the US during a broadcast on Wednesday morning.
Omar described the attacks against her as “dangerous incitement” and urged colleagues to condemn them. She said: “My love and commitment to our country and that of my colleagues should never be in question. We are ALL Americans!”
Last week, a supporter of Donald Trump in upstate New York was charged with threatening to kill Omar, one of the first Muslim women to serve in the US Congress. Patrick Carlineo was arrested after telephoning Omar’s office and stating that he would shoot her. Carlineo told the FBI “that he was a patriot, that he loves the President, and that he hates radical Muslims in our government”, according to a criminal complaint.
The latest round of attacks on Omar by Republicans was prompted by the publication on Tuesday of a snippet from a speech she gave last month to an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), in which she referred to the September 11 attacks.
“Cair was founded after 9/11 because they recognised that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” Omar said. The remark was criticised by Crenshaw and others, who said Omar’s description minimised September 11 and its perpetrators.
But a video of Omar’s full speech shows that the disputed remark followed from comments only a minute earlier in which Omar did mention terrorism. She complained that Islam was discussed in schools only in relation to Muslim terrorists.
“It doesn’t matter how good you are if you, one day, find yourself in a school where other religions are talked about, but when Islam is mentioned, we are only talking about terrorists, and if you say something, you are sent to the principal’s office,” she said.
A spokeswoman for Crenshaw, a retired navy Seal, did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite the allegations from McDaniel and Fox News, Omar also used the speech to praise the US as “a country that was founded on religious liberty”. Omar arrived in the US during the 1990s as a child with her family, who were refugees from Somalia.
“I know as an American, as an American member of Congress, I have to make sure that I am living up to the ideals of fighting for liberty and justice. Those are very much rooted in the reason why my family came here,” she said in the speech.
I like Stephen Miller a lot,
I like Stephen Miller a lot,
Are you both ring-wraiths?
President Trump on Friday tweeted a video attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for the way she phrased a reference to 9/11, adding fuel to a controversy that has swelled in Republican political circles this week.
The video showed snippets of comments Omar made last month at a banquet for a Muslim civil rights organization interspersed with footage of the twin towers burning.
“WE WILL NEVER FORGET!” Trump tweeted, along with the video.
On Thursday, the New York Post had helped set the tone by publishing a front page that showed her comments over a similar image.
The remarks in question came in March, as Omar, one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, spoke about Islamophobia at an event held by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil-liberties group. The white-supremacist shooting that left 50 Muslim worshipers dead at two mosques in New Zealand had occurred the week before.
“For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it,” she said, in the middle of a roughly 20-minute long speech. “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. So you can’t just say that today someone is looking at me strange and that I am trying to make myself look pleasant. You have to say that this person is looking at me strange, I am not comfortable with it, and I am going to talk to them and ask them why. Because that is the right you have.”
The speech had drawn a protest outside at the time and even news coverage from conservative-leaning outlets such as the Washington Times, which noted that she told fellow Muslims to “raise hell,” and “make people uncomfortable,” as they sought to defend their rights.
But this week conservatives began to fixate on a different portion of the speech, after CAIR posted a video on Tuesday: the four words she used to refer to 9/11, as “some people did something.”
The comments were the focus of harsh broadsides from people like Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.), Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronda McDaniel, Donald Trump Jr., and “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade, who questioned whether Omar, a Somali refuge, was “an American first.”
And after the New York Post put it on such an incendiary cover, some liberals began to speak up against it, saying they felt it was an incitement to violence against Omar, who has been the target of threats and overt Islamophobia.
“Such an ungenerous interpretation of her remarks is only possible if one is inclined to believe that Omar sympathizes more with terrorists than her murdered countrymen,” Zak Cheney-Rice at New York magazine wrote. “That she spoke them in the course of decrying Islamophobia makes it especially disconcerting that her political opponents would decontextualize them to fan the flames — she receives regular death threats on the basis of her faith, including from one New York man who threatened recently to ‘put a bullet in her . . . skull.’”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) called for more Democrats to speak out to defend her this week.
“Members of Congress have a duty to respond to the President’s explicit attack today,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “@IlhanMN’s life is in danger.”
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tweeted that Omar is “a leader with strength and courage.”
“She won’t back down to Trump’s racism and hate, and neither will we,” he wrote. “The disgusting and dangerous attacks against her must end.”
Trump has long wielded 9/11 as a political weapon. In the early part of his presidential campaign, he spread a falsehood that “thousands,” of people in New Jersey — where there is a “heavy Arab population,” he said — he celebrated as the twin towers came crashing down.
During a primary debate in 2016, he went after rivals like Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over George W. Bush’s failure to prevent 9/11.
“The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign. Remember that,” Trump told Bush.
In 2010, Trump made a highly publicized offer to purchase a contentious site that an Egyptian business planned to build an Islamic community center on near Ground Zero.
As long as President Trump has focused on what he said was the danger lurking at the southwestern border, he has also talked about the supposed threat from one specific group already in the country: Muslims.
During the 2016 campaign, he would not rule out creating a registry of Muslims in the United States. He claimed to have seen “thousands” of Muslims cheering on rooftops in New Jersey after Sept. 11, a statement that was widely debunked. After deadly attacks in Paris and California, Mr. Trump called for a moratorium on Muslims traveling to the United States.
“I think Islam hates us,” Mr. Trump told Anderson Cooper, the CNN host, in March 2016.
Now, with 19 months until the 2020 election, Mr. Trump is seeking to rally his base by sounding that theme once again. And this time, he has a specific target: Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.
Mr. Trump and his team are trying to make Ms. Omar, one of a group of progressive women Democratic House members who is relatively unknown in national politics, a household name, to be seen as the most prominent voice of the Democratic Party, regardless of her actual position. And they are gambling that there will be limited downside in doing so.
On Monday, Mr. Trump will visit Minnesota — a state that some of the president’s aides speak of as a place to expand his electoral map — and will hold an economic round table. The event is outside Ms. Omar’s congressional district, but the president’s decision to appear there is a calculated choice.
His Minnesota appearance comes after his tweet of a video interspersed with Ms. Omar speaking and the burning World Trade Center towers. Ms. Omar’s critics have claimed a portion of the remarks, in which she highlighted Islamophobia faced by Muslims after Sept. 11, were dismissive of the terrorist attacks.
Mr. Trump is banking on painting the entire Democratic Party as extreme. And Ms. Omar has become a point of contention for some members of her own party, after remarks she made about the Israel lobby were condemned as anti-Semitic by some long-serving Democrats, as well as by Republicans and Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Trump’s electoral success in 2016 was based partly on culture wars and fears among an older, white voting base that the country it knew was slipping away. Like his hard line on immigration, his plays on fears of Muslims — including inaccurately conflating them with terrorists — proved polarizing among the wider electorate, but helped him keep a tight grip on his most enthusiastic voters. In the South Carolina Republican primary in February 2016, for instance, exit polls showed that 75 percent of voters favored his proposed Muslim ban.
Now, as he looks toward 2020, he is betting that electoral play can deliver for him again. It is a strategy that risks summoning dark forces in American society, a point Ms. Omar made in a statement Sunday evening.
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“Since the president’s tweet Friday evening, I have experienced an increase in direct threats on my life — many directly referencing or replying to the president’s video,” Ms. Omar said. “This is endangering lives. It has to stop.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday that she had requested a review of Ms. Omar’s security, while Trump aides insisted that the president meant no harm.
“Certainly the president is wishing no ill will and certainly not violence towards anyone,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said on Sunday’s broadcast of ABC News’ “This Week.”
Privately, Mr. Trump’s advisers describe Ms. Omar as his ideal foil. Her remarks about the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, combined with her role in a progressive contingent of freshman House Democrats who have sparked intraparty battles, have been treated as a gift by Republicans.
Trump aides and allies say they are pleased that some of the Democratic hopefuls for the 2020 presidential nomination are defending her against the president’s attacks, claiming they think it will be damaging for them in the general election.
Ms. Omar “is the perfect embodiment of the sharp contrast President Trump wants to paint for 2020,” said Sam Nunberg, a 2016 campaign aide to Mr. Trump. He added that Mr. Trump is tethering Ms. Omar to more visible Democrats, like her closest ally in Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, whom Republicans have sought to make a boogeyman.
“This contrast gives the president a chance to expand his support closer to 50 percent,” Mr. Nunberg insisted.
But on Sunday, Democrats said Mr. Trump was diving into an issue on which he has a shaky standing.
“He has no moral authority to be talking about 9/11 at all,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Mr. Nadler noted that Mr. Trump’s real estate company applied for and received grants after the attacks that were intended for small businesses affected by the devastation.
Mr. Nadler said he thought Ms. Omar’s comments about the Sept. 11 attacks were being taken out of context.
“I have had some problems with some of her other remarks, but not with that one,” Mr. Nadler said.
The controversy arose from Ms. Omar’s remarks at an event last month sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization, where she focused on attacks against Muslims after Sept. 11. She said she had “lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.”
“CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” she said. (The organization was actually founded in 1994.)
Critics of Ms. Omar contended that the words “some people did something” were dismissive of the terrorist attacks, but her defenders said her words were taken out of context.
The attack was not Mr. Trump’s first on Ms. Omar. Despite repeatedly being denounced for not making forceful condemnations of white nationalists who traffic in anti-Semitism, the president pounced when Ms. Omar unleashed a firestorm in February with her comments on Israel, rejecting her subsequent apology and calling for her to resign.
“Congressman Omar is terrible, what she said,” Mr. Trump told reporters.
Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic strategist, said the Democratic presidential candidates who had responded to Mr. Trump’s latest attacks on Ms. Omar were keeping the focus on his tactics. And he predicted that the use of such graphic images from one of the nation’s darkest days would backfire for the president.
“Voters are turned off by the use of 9/11 for political purposes, and my guess is that moderate voters are going to see Trump’s use of that as both ugly and extreme,” Mr. Garin said. “I think his over-the-top exploitation of 9/11 is going to turn more voters off than he wins over by attacking the Democrats on this.”
Ilhan Omar has courted controversy ever since she transformed, in the public’s conception, from a telegenic symbol of American pluralism to an actual person with actual opinions. In the months after her swearing-in to Congress, the Minnesota representative has been strident in her criticism of Saudi Arabia and Israel. Both are American allies, but it’s her position on the latter country that has prompted members of her own party to turn against her. The past two months have seen her accused varyingly of anti-Semitism, disloyalty to the United States, and, most recently, of downplaying the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The first criticism can be attributed to her suggestion that American support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins” — a seeming nod to the bigoted trope that rich Jews control the world. The second and third are more flagrantly Islamophobic in origin.
The backlash came to a head this week after footage surfaced of Omar speaking about Islamophobia at a Council on American-Islamic Relations event last month. “Far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and frankly, I’m tired of it and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it,” Omar said to an audience gathered in Los Angeles. “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something,” she said, gesturing as if to separate herself from “some people,” “and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
Conservatives seized on Omar’s characterization of 9/11 as “some people did something” to cast it as an effort to trivialize the attack. President Trump on Friday tweeted a video that intercut her repeatedly saying “some people did something” and footage of the 9/11 attacks, with the caption, “We will never forget!” Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, tweeted that her comments were “unbelievable.” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel added that Omar is “anti-American,” while the New York Post on Thursday published a cover photo of airplanes colliding with the Twin Towers. “Rep. Ilhan Omar: 9/11 was ‘some people did something,’” the headline read. “Here’s your something: 2,977 dead by terrorism.” The photo echoed imagery from an Islamophobic poster displayed at the West Virginia statehouse last month, which pictured Omar in front of the collapsing World Trade Center. “‘Never forget,’ you said,” the caption reads. “I am the proof — you have forgotten.” Such an ungenerous interpretation of her remarks is only possible if one is inclined to believe that Omar sympathizes more with terrorists than her murdered countrymen. That she spoke them in the course of decrying Islamophobia makes it especially disconcerting that her political opponents would decontextualize them to fan the flames — she receives regular death threats on the basis of her faith, including from one New York man who threatened recently to “put a bullet in her fucking skull.”
Omar’s imprecision regarding Israel can be frustrating for her supporters. Even those who engage with her geopolitical critiques in good faith might find her deployment — intentional or inadvertent — of anti-Semitic tropes unforgivable, were she not so apologetic about her self-proclaimed ignorance and backed by a vocal cohort of Jewish-American progressives who insist that her comments were directed at a government — not a people — whose supporters routinely accuse its critics of anti-Semitism to stifle debate. But it grows increasingly apparent that efforts to discredit her are rooted in a larger project for which her comments are mere pretext. One of the first two Muslim women ever in Congress was always likely to face smears equating her with terrorism and questioning her loyalty and fitness to serve. Such are the wages of embodying an existential threat to a politics that has spent decades profiting from fear of Muslims, immigrants, and — more recently — refugees and asylum seekers, and vowing ruthlessness toward them in response.
Omar is a Congressional “first,” and her opponents smell blood in the water. Even her less-spotlit Muslim woman counterpart, Michigan representative Rashida Tlaib, has faced dubious allegations of anti-Semitism and having terrorist sympathies. (Tlaib is Palestinian-American.) The political value of attacking both is apparent. For Republicans, it enables them to deflect from their own bigotry, personified most recently by a president who has attempted to ban Muslim immigration, dissolve the American asylum system, and cast Muslims as latent or active terrorists while demonizing brown-skinned immigrants more broadly. For centrist Democrats, entertaining the suggestion that Omar is anti-Semitic is an opportunity to signal their commitment to pluralism while shoring up their ties to Israel and its supporters. Both rely on a willful misreading of her intentions that is more compatible with anti-Muslim stereotypes than with her actual, documented opposition to human- and civil-rights violators of all stripes.
Such reductionism is not a recent trend. Congressional “firsts” have long been targeted by political opportunists and bigoted peers, dating back to Reconstruction. Following the Civil War, lies underpinned by stereotypes were how anxieties regarding free black people holding elected office in the South were articulated. “One cannot study Reconstruction without first frankly facing the facts of universal lying,” wrote W.E.B. DuBois in his history of the period, Black Reconstruction. “There was not a single great black leader [of that era] against whom almost unprintable allegations were not repeatedly and definitely made.” Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first black U.S. congressman ever elected, in 1870 faced legal challenges from white Democratic congressmen who claimed he was ineligible because he had not been a citizen long enough, having only been granted said status a few years prior with the 14th Amendment and 1866 Civil Rights Act. (These challenges were later overruled.) Parroting the prejudices of the era, historians and artists attempted to cast Reconstruction as a time when black vice, sloth, and stupidity transformed government into a corrupt and chaotic free-for-all. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, famously portrayed black congressmen voting on bills with their boots off, feet on their desks, gorging on fried chicken.
This is how power and orthodoxy respond to threats. Neither has encountered a black Muslim congresswoman before, or such a vocal critic of Israeli policy and the lobbying that supports it. Political discourse has reached the point, with Omar, where good-faith debate over her deployment of anti-Semitic tropes has been largely displaced by pure Islamophobic id. Opponents regularly equate her with terrorists, riling up voters, politicians, and pundits who already believe that the proper response to Islam is violence. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has already inspired successful and attempted terror attacks — including by Cesar Sayoc, who sent mail bombs to prominent critics of the president, and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue after being inspired about a Trump-peddled conspiracy theory about criminal immigrants.
But Omar’s treatment is a logical extension of decades of Islamophobic rhetoric and policy — much as the Reconstruction-era response to black congressmen was an extension of centuries of anti-black sentiment and violence. Perhaps it should have been expected in a scenario where Republicans — whose platform and standard-bearer, Trump, call for the exclusion and maltreatment of Muslims, refugees, and asylum seekers — came face-to-face with a Muslim refugee and former asylum seeker from Somalia who is now one of their peers. Political disagreement was bound to define the encounter. But anti-Muslim bigotry is not innate — it is a choice that Omar’s detractors continue to make, and the dangers of doing are only becoming more apparent. Now that Trump has fanned the flames, the backlash only stands to intensify further. The costs are already steep, and they will only get higher.
The Monday fire that devastated France’s iconic Notre Dame Cathedral drew expressions of sorrow and sympathy from around the world, including from U.S. lawmakers. The edifice has stood, in some capacity, for eight centuries and is one of the most-visited houses of worship in the world.
President Trump tweeted about the fire twice:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1117844987293487104
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1117910111236681728
Vice President Pence also shared his thoughts and prayers. He tweeted that "it is heartbreaking to see a house of God in flames.”
But neither man had responded to the recent fires that destroyed three predominantly African American churches in Louisiana.
After the publication of this piece, Alyssa Farah, a spokeswoman for Pence, reached out to the Fix with a statement from the vice president.
“When tragedy strikes in places of worship, people of all faiths unite. Our hearts go out to the members of the congregations of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, St. Mary’s Baptist Church, and Greater Union Baptist Church who were victims of arson. No one should be in fear in a house of worship. Justice must be carried out on the perpetrator,” the statement said.
On Tuesday, state authorities charged Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old white man and the son of the local police deputy, with hate crimes in the Louisiana church attacks. He was earlier charged with arson.
Of course, the churches in Louisiana are significantly younger than Notre Dame. But they also have a rich history and played a significant role in St. Landry Parish’s black community. At least one hosts a cemetery containing graves of black people enslaved in Louisiana.
“My church has a lot of history,” the Rev. Gerald Toussaint of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, which is more than 140 years old, told the Daily Advertiser. “I don’t understand it. What could make a person do that to a church?”
Greater Union Baptist Church is also more than 100 years old, according to Pastor Harry Richard, whose grandfather was one of the congregation’s founders.
“He left a legacy for me, and I was trying to fulfill that to the best of my ability,” he told CBS News.
St. Mary Baptist Church also was targeted by the arsonist.
The burning of black churches was a common intimidation tactic during the Jim Crow era. “For decades, African-American churches have served as the epicenter of survival and a symbol of hope for many in the African-American community,” Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said last week in a statement condemning the fires. “As a consequence, these houses of faith have historically been the targets of violence.”
The church fires have, of course, drawn wide coverage and attention. The Louisiana governor mentioned it in his recent state of the state. But top Trump administration officials have not spoken out on or condemned the violence.
Fundraising has also been slow.
In the wake of the Notre Dame fire, veteran journalist Soledad O’Brien tweeted about this. “So far no zillionaires have stepped forward to offer to bail them out,” she wrote, a reference to French billionaires pledging hundreds of millions of euros toward Notre Dame’s restoration.
On Tuesday, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton made an appeal on behalf of the Louisiana churches.
https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1118210864652390402
So far, a GoFundMe account has raised $180,000 to support the restoration of the churches.
Some argue the responses to the Louisiana churches and Notre Dame are not comparable because of the French cathedral’s outsize historic and architectural significance.
“It’s a tragedy when black churches + mosques are bombed, burned or vandalized, but of course the world pays more attention to an 800-year-old architectural masterpiece in the heart of a city everyone visits! That’s not white supremacy, and nonwhites who love Paris aren’t dupes.” journalist Thomas Chatteron Williams wrote on Twitter. “How are we going to build the multiethnic/multicultural/pluralistic societies we need on the basis of such petty divisiveness? We really all need to do better.”
But the overwhelming response to the Notre Dame fire, compared with the muted response to the attacks on the black congregations, suggests the destruction of some houses of worship is more heartbreaking than others.
Five years have gone by, some 1,825 days, since the people of Flint, Mich., were doomed to a life with no clean water, with no clear end in sight. (Nestle just pledged to continue providing bottled water for the town at least through August of this year.)
And it’s been more than 18 months since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, killing nearly 3,000 people, destroying much of the infrastructure and leaving much of the island U.S. territory still without adequate power.
It remains a struggle for both the people of Flint and Puerto Rico to get the federal funds needed to make full recoveries, and so it was on Tuesday, the day after flames ravaged France’s historic Notre Dame cathedral, some found irony in the speed with which the U.S. pledged to come through with cash to support efforts to rebuild the almost-1,000-year-old edifice.
https://twitter.com/clairewillett/status/1118262912651411457
https://twitter.com/erinbiba/status/1118311883759550464
They and many others (#Flint was trending much of the day on Twitter) were reacting to news announced by Donald Trump’s administration that the U.S. would be sending aid to France to assist in the rebuilding of Notre Dame.
According to the Hill, as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it, the U.S. will offer “assistance in the rehabilitation of this irreplaceable symbol of Western civilization.”
On the same day, word came in that Flint was receiving a remaining $77.7 million in federal funding to assist in that community now almost five-year-long battle to again have clean water flowing through its taps.
But as MLive pointed out, rather than being new monies to help speed progress along:
The funds are from a $120 million federal and state loan granted to Flint in March 2017 by the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act of 2016. The funds support several Flint water infrastructure projects.
https://twitter.com/JamilSmith/status/1118287254756007936
And as NPR reports, funding for Puerto Rico is at standstill due to infighting among federal lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
So, it would seem that critics aren’t so much questioning whether the U.S. should put dollars into remaking Notre Dame as much as voicing that old saying: Charity, or, in this case, taxpayer-funded legislative aid, should perhaps begin at home.
"...On the same day, word came in that Flint was receiving a remaining $77.7 million in federal funding to assist in that community now almost five-year-long battle to again have clean water flowing through its taps..."
So the leftist folks at TheRoot, and our KB Resistance just presume that 'free' drinking water for Flint for the past FIVE years, and continuing, and the 'same day' $77,700,000.00 in US Federal funding assistance payments, so far, is "nuttin'", "chump change"..., "...racists"...
Residents in many Democrat controlled for decades cities, e.g. Washington, DC have purchased their own drinking water since Mayor Marion Barry's decade in Office, very long ago, with no end in sight. Are we compensated? NOT! Why?
Because municipal utilities are a State and Local matter, and our State/Local folks suck. Great at handing out Parking Tickets, Towing cars, not so good when it comes to day to day civil life here, and lots of places.
One day 5 years ago, "some people did something", and moved from one water supply to a different water supply, and failed to add a solution so the new fresh, cleaner water supply did not begin to strip their filthy corroded old pipes of the filth and unspeakable items with which the old pipes were coated.
Irony is the City of Flint made all the decisions, including to switch Rivers, and including to not add the protective solution to the 'new' water supply, as "Cost Savings Measures"... who's Fraternity brother was behind the pitch to the City to SAVE all that money? What does it matter, after all this time...
Flint, MI residents need to increase their own Taxes, and fix their own water supply. What have they done with the $120,000,000.00 they 'borrowed', so far, that they are still without hope these 5 years later?
Well, now they have at least $120 Million in borrowed Fed money, who knows how much of borrowed or granted State money, little to no Flint MI city money and no solution in view... have these folks been reelected in the past 5 years?
Oh, wait, they already spent all the Federal money and State money they got their hands on, and still nothing to be proud about? Hmmm.
No Presidential Medal of Freedom for YOU, Flint, MI Politicians.
When Flint MI residents raise their own matching $120 Million, please get back to us about how they will just drink bottled water (they have not made plastic bottles illegal yet, have they? one never knows, with Dem Politicians, just asking) forever, paying out of each persons pocket, except for the usual suspects who 'know who they are' already, who get things 'free'...
And stop bitching about life happening there. Paris will survive and fix Notre Dame at least. No worries about Paris. Flint will still be bitching about life TEN years from now over something. Pay your debts on time, should you expect to have to borrow more one day... please.
Life happens.
So the leftist folks at TheRoot, and our KB Resistance just presume that 'free' drinking water for Flint for the past FIVE years, and continuing, and the 'same day' $77,700,000.00 in US Federal funding assistance payments, so far, is "nuttin'", "chump change"..., "...racists"...
Residents in many Democrat controlled for decades cities, e.g. Washington, DC have purchased their own drinking water since Mayor Marion Barry's decade in Office, very long ago, with no end in sight. Are we compensated? NOT! Why?
Irony is the City of Flint made all the decisions, including to switch Rivers, and including to not add the protective solution to the 'new' water supply, as "Cost Savings Measures"...
And stop bitching about life happening there. Paris will survive and fix Notre Dame at least.
including to switch Rivers
Please educate me, maybe more than me, as to exactly who this supposed White Racist is, the name please, and what elected position did he hold in Flint?[color]
including to switch Rivers
Stop lying.
#Resist
Ok, if not 'rivers' then 'sources' is the word I could have used. Thank you.
Ok, if not 'rivers' then 'sources' is the word I could have used.
Open a Flint MI thread that had nothing to do with Trump, please, or drop it.
Facts and not finger pointing would be refreshing.
Obama also signed the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation (WIIN) Act in December 2016. The act provided $170 million for communities grappling with drinking water emergencies and Flint was specifically mentioned as an intended recipient. The Environmental Protection Agency officially awarded Flint $100 million of the WIIN-authorized funding in March 2017, then under the Trump administration, to help fund water infrastructure replacements and upgrades.https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/posts-distort-facts-on-obama-flint/
Trump is not responsible for the water issues in Flint.
Paris, tweet or not, comes under "walk and chew gum " as to the need to address more than one issue at a time, as issues arise; not a racism issue, Paris and the French Government owned Cathedral at Notre Dame.
A Florida man was arrested Friday and accused of making threatening phone calls to Democratic officials in which he allegedly ranted in racist terms about Muslims, black people and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)
John Kless, 49, of the Fort Lauderdale area, was charged with making an interstate threat, a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.
Marlene Fernandez-Karavetsos, a spokeswoman for Fajardo Orshan, the U.S. attorney for Southern Florida, said Kless was expected to be released on a $25,000 bond on Friday afternoon. She said some weapons he owned had been seized, but declined to give specifics.
Officials said that Kless made a series of disturbing phone calls on Tuesday, beginning at 7 a.m. with a call to the office of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California who recently announced a 2020 presidential campaign.
“The day you come after our guns,” Kless said in a voice mail, “is the day you’ll be dead,” according to the federal court complaint filed against him. He ranted about 9/11 and “illegals coming in," and used the n-word to describe people on welfare, prosecutors said.
“You’re gonna die,” Kless continued, according to the complaint. “You’ll be your death bed ... along with all the rest of you Democrats.”
About 10 minutes later, he left a message for Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), officials said. She and Omar are the first Muslim women to be elected to Congress.
Prosecutors said he ranted at length about Omar, focusing in particular on the way she had referred to the 9/11 terrorist attacks at a recent event, and using multiple racial epithets to describe both her and Tlaib. He called Tlaib “Taliban” and Omar a “towel head."
“You know what, she’s lucky she’s just getting death threats,” he said, according to the complaint. “So are you. All right? ... 'Cuz the day when the bell tolls ... and this country comes to a war, there will be no more threats.”
Prosecutors said he added that there were “millions of us who hate you ... for what you done on 9/11,” and used Muslim and racial epithets against former president Barack Obama as well.
The arrest comes amid complaints from Omar’s supporters that a fixation on her statements about 9/11 could amount to an incitement of violence.
During a speech in March about Islamophobia, Omar referred to 9/11 in a way that some felt was dismissive. She said that just because “some people did something,” it didn’t mean that all Muslims should lose their civil liberties.
But that phrasing became an opening for conservatives — such as Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.), Donald Trump Jr. and, eventually, President Trump — to attack Omar. In a comment that was widely denounced, “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade questioned whether she had dual loyalties, though he later said he didn’t mean it as a personal attack. Trump tweeted a video of the burning twin towers spliced with Omar’s remarks.
Prosecutors said Kless’s last threatening phone call on Tuesday was made to Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who is running for president. He called Booker the n-word and other racial epithets, continued to rant about Omar’s 9/11 remark and made several violent threats, according to a transcript included in the indictment.
“We need to kill all you,” he said, according to the transcript.
Kless had previously made a harassing phone call to the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in which he ranted about abortion, illegal immigration, Muslims in Congress and people taking away his guns, the court complaint said.
Kless did not respond to a request for comment left on his voice mail.
Omar has said the number of threats against her spiked after Trump tweeted the video about her, including many that directly referred to the video.
Rep. Matt Gaetz — one of President Donald Trump’s most avid supporters in Congress — has hired a former White House speechwriter who was forced out last year amid scrutiny over his ties to white nationalists.
The Florida Republican announced Friday that former Trump administration aide, Darren Beattie, will join his Capitol Hill office.
“Very proud to have the talented Dr. Darren Beattie helping our team as a Special Advisor for Speechwriting. Welcome on board!” Gaetz tweeted Friday.
Beattie was fired from the White House in August 2018 after reports that he had delivered remarks at a 2016 conference, dubbed an “active hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, alongside a well-known white nationalist, Richard Spencer.
Organizers of the event, the H.L. Mencken Club, described it as a gathering for the “independent-minded intellectuals and academics of the Right.” But the SPLC has described its attendees as “a band of white nationalists, pseudoacademic and academic racists.”
The former Duke University instructor, who rose to prominence for his early prediction that Trump would win the presidency, later released what he said was a transcript of his speech. No video of his speech has been found.
Gaetz has been one of Trump’s most vocal defenders on Capitol Hill and on television, and is known for his bombastic rhetoric.
The attorney-turned-lawmaker has drawn scrutiny himself for inviting a Holocaust denier to one of Trump’s State of the Union addresses. Gaetz has also appeared on the conspiracy-peddling website “Infowars,” run by Alex Jones, though he later said he regretted having done so.
Gaetz’s office did not return a request for comment on the staffing decision.
U.S. Rep. Steve King said that after facing months of criticism for comments in the New York Times about white supremacy and nationalism, he better understands the persecution Jesus Christ felt.
The 4th District representative made the comments in response to a question from the Rev. Pinky Person of the Faith In Christ Fellowship, who told King during a town hall Tuesday in Cherokee that she was concerned that "Christianity is really being persecuted."
“When I have to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives, and look up at those 400-and-some accusers — you know we just passed through Easter and Christ's passion — and I have better insight into what He went through for us, partly because of that experience," King told about 30 attendees the town hall at Western Iowa Tech Community College.
King's "accusers" were fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives, who took action condemning King after the New York Times published an article quoting him saying, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
House Republicans also stripped King of committee assignments after the article.
The Kiron Republican has repeatedly said the New York Times misquoted him or mischaracterized his words.
King said he is proud of the "strong Christian ethic" in the 4th District. He said the United States is a Christian nation because Americans have strong morals and are willing to confess to wrongdoings and ask for forgiveness.
"It's in our culture, it's who we are," he said. "If it were any other way we wouldn't be the America we are, and probably wouldn't be an America at all."
King is a member of the Roman Catholic Church. He said he counts on his faith to get through difficulties in his role.
"In our staff, we've made sure we have solid, faithful people, in Washington and here in the district," he said. "For all that I've been through, and it seems even strange for me to say it, but I am at a certain peace, and it is been because of a lot of prayers for me."
Now, the representative faces multiple primary challenges for the 4th District seat. State Sen. Randy Feenstra, a high-profile challenger, has raised $260,442 since his campaign launched on Jan. 9, while King raised $61,666 between Jan. 1 and March 31, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
King plans to hold his next town hall Thursday at 3 p.m. at the Jefferson Community Golf Course in Jefferson.
The Trump administration and Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices Tuesday held a legal seminar on how to preserve white hegemony in four easy steps.
Step 1: Devise a discriminatory policy.
In this case, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, after consulting with Stephen Bannon, who was then President Trump’s nationalist “alt-right” adviser, resolved to put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census for the first time in 70 years. This would have the well-documented effect of reducing responses to the census by Latinos (from citizens and noncitizens alike), resulting in the undercounting of that population for purposes of congressional apportionment and $900 billion in federal funding.
Step 2: Create a pretext.
In this case, Ross lied to Congress, saying the Justice Department wanted the citizenship question added to help enforce the Voting Rights Act — a claim three lower courts dismissed as pretextual. In fact, emails showed that Ross (with White House encouragement) was the one who pushed for the citizenship question and quietly dragooned the Justice Department into asking for the question to be added.
Step 3: Muddy the waters.
In this case, Solicitor General Noel Francisco and conservative justices raised doubts about the statistical capabilities of the Census Bureau, claiming it couldn’t accurately “quantify” the damage that would be done by adding a citizenship question because the alternative way to get such information was an “untested statistical model.” Why “untested”? Because the administration denied its experts’ requests to run tests before leaping to a decision.
Step 4: Blame the victim.
Francisco, the top Trump administration lawyer, saved this nastiness for the final minute of the 80-minute argument. If the court disallows the citizenship question, he said, “you are effectively empowering any group in the country to knock off any question on the census if they simply get together and boycott it,” he said, raising the possibility of a boycott by gender-nonbinary people.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only Hispanic on the high court, interrupted angrily. “Are you suggesting that Hispanics are boycotting the census? Are you suggesting . . . that they don’t have a legitimate fear?”
“Not in the slightest, Your Honor,” replied Francisco, who had done exactly that.
For decades, the decennial census sent to each household hasn’t included a citizenship question (it’s instead asked on surveys), and for good reason. Latino residents — legal or illegal — tend to resist such questions out of an (unfounded) fear the government might use the information against them or their relatives. Census Bureau research has projected a drop of at least 5.1 percent from noncitizen households if the question is added, part of an estimated undercount of 6.5 million people. This contradicts the Constitution’s requirement for an “actual enumeration of the people” — not just citizens.
A lower-court judge ruled that the administration committed a “veritable smorgasbord” of violations in adding the question. But the conservative justices seemed willing to overlook Ross’s lie and the administration’s dubious justifications.
Francisco began with a deception, saying the citizenship question “has been asked as part of the census in one form or another for nearly 200 years.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked Francisco the same question three times before he acknowledged that the citizenship question had been abandoned in 1960, in part, because it would depress the count of noncitizens.
“Well, sure, Your Honor,” Francisco granted, then quickly explained why “we don’t think this is really subject to judicial review.”
So the administration is free to disregard millions of Latinos in the census — and the courts have no say.
This seemed to be fine with Republican-appointed justices. Justice Samuel Alito said he was satisfied that the accuracy would be 98 percent if the citizenship question were asked (never mind those 6 million or so left out).
Trump’s two appointees developed a newfound fondness for foreign law: Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed out that the United Nations recommends a citizenship question, and Justice Neil Gorsuch said “virtually every English-speaking country” asks one.
More disturbing were their counterfactual theories claiming some other, unknown variable might cause Latinos not to answer the census. (No such notions appeared in the case record, and census experts had already controlled for other variables.)
Alito challenged “the legitimacy of concluding that there is going to be a 5.1 percent lower response rate because of this one factor,” adding, “maybe there is something more there.”
“There could be multiple reasons,” Gorsuch concurred.
Justice Stephen Breyer derisively suggested the real cause might be the presence of pet dogs or cats.
The justifications all sounded a bit “contrived,” as Justice Elena Kagan put it, like so much “post-hoc rationalization” of a decision made for another reason.
When you consider that the indisputable effect of adding the citizenship question will be to suppress Latinos’ census participation — and by extension to suppress their political clout — it is difficult not to be cynical about what that reason is.
A 15-year-old boy was taken into police custody after allegedly threatening to blow up a mosque and bringing "several pounds" of potassium nitrate to his Phoenix school, officials said Tuesday.
A classmate of the Pinnacle High School student told his parents Monday that the suspect had said he "wanted to 'blow up a Muslim church,'" police said. The parents of the witness called Phoenix police, who said the boy told them "he did not observe any weapons or devices that would allow the suspect to act upon his statement."
But the next day, the classmate noticed the suspect had brought "a plastic bag containing several pounds of a white powdery substance" to school, police said.
The boy reported what he saw to school officials, and when officers arrived at the scene, they discovered the suspect had "several pounds of potassium nitrate," according to police.
Phoenix police Sgt. Tommy Thompson said potassium nitrate isn't dangerous on its own but can be mixed with other substances to create a potential explosive.
The teen, who has not been identified, was taken into custody to be interviewed, police said. Pinnacle High School was not locked down because he hadn't threatened the school.
A statement from Paradise Valley Unified School District, which Pinnacle is a part of, said the school and the district are cooperating with the police investigation.
The statement said students and staff were never in danger, and it was safe for them to attend school Wednesday.
"It’s always advisable that parents check their teen’s phones and/or tablets to see what they are texting, posting on social media, and passing on to others," the district's statement said. "Teens should be reminded that making alleged threats, even when they intend it as a joke, can have severe consequences and is considered a felony."
President Trump on Friday defended his comments after the 2017 “Unite the Right” protests in which an avowed neo-Nazi killed a woman and injured dozens of others in Charlottesville, arguing that his focus was on the protesters defending the monument of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Trump, pressed on whether he stood by his comments that there were “very fine people on both sides,” told reporters, “If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly. And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”
Former vice president Joe Biden resurrected Trump’s response to the deadly rally by self-professed white supremacists in a video to launch his presidential campaign on Thursday. In it, Biden said Trump’s remarks “shocked the conscience of this nation.”
“With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden says in the video. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”
Trump, who spoke to reporters en route to a speech to the National Rifle Association in Indiana, said, “People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.”
Trump and others have tried to distinguish between the self-proclaimed white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and the other supporters of Confederate monuments, who were all marching in Charlottesville that weekend.
But the events that weekend were organized by a self-proclaimed white nationalist, Richard Spencer, and those in attendance wore swastikas and chanted anti-Semitic slogans.
James Alex Fields Jr., who killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 other people when he plowed his car into a group of counterprotesters at the rally by self-proclaimed white supremacists, pleaded guilty to hate crimes in federal court earlier this month.
Fields, 21, of Ohio admitted guilt to 29 of 30 counts in a federal indictment as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed they would not seek the death penalty in the case. Fields is set to be sentenced July 3.
Some Trump supporters have become Charlottesville truthers, arguing that Trump’s comments were taken out of context. They maintain, as Trump does, that he was not calling self-proclaimed neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people,” and in fact, he said they should be condemned.
Post writer Aaron Blake more thoroughly examined the fallacies of this argument, noting that it’s hard to make the case that there were “very fine people” marching alongside people chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
Joe Biden’s presidential launch has again cast a spotlight on President Trump’s comments about the 2017 tragedy in Charlottesville. And in doing so, it has unearthed a surprising amount of revisionist history from Trump’s supporters.
And now from Trump himself, too.
In his announcement video, Biden prominently featured scenes from the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally that resulted in an avowed neo-Nazi killing a woman and injuring dozens of other by driving into a crowd of counterprotesters. Trump would soon condemn what happened “on many sides” and later argue there were “very fine people on both sides” of the scenes that weekend.
That led to an instant backlash, including by some in the White House, who felt Trump was downplaying the racism on display on that tragic day.
But some Trump supporters — and now Trump himself — have argued that he was taken out of context. They say he wasn’t referring to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and white nationalists when he referred to “very fine people” on both sides, but rather some other people who shared their cause of saving a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
“If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly,” Trump said Friday. “I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee — a great general, whether you like it or not."
The argument makes little sense when you consider the facts on the ground, and it ignores Trump’s regular use of dog whistles.
Let’s recap what happened.
After the death of Heather Heyer, Trump on Aug. 12 condemned “in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence — on many sides.” He then repeated “on many sides,” apparently emphasizing that the counterprotesters (which included many who were peaceful and some who weren’t) needed to be condemned, as well.
After an outcry, Trump on Aug. 13 offered a more forceful denunciation of the white supremacists, neo-Nazis and white nationalists who had rallied in Charlottesville. But then, on Aug. 15, he again returned to the “both sides” commentary, saying there was both “blame” and “very fine people” on each side that day.
Contained in that third set of comments is a quote that Trump supporters, including Trump surrogate Steve Cortes and Breitbart News, have argued is exculpatory, They note that Trump, at one point, explicitly excluded neo-Nazis and white nationalists from his “very fine people” formulation.
Here’s a brief transcript:
REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides —
TRUMP: Well, I do think there’s blame, yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it. And you don’t have any doubt about it either. And, and if you reported it accurately, you would say it.
[CROSSTALK]
TRUMP: Excuse me. You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group, excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park, from Robert E. Lee to another name.
George Washington was a slave-owner. Was George Washington a slave-owner? So will George Washington now lose his status — are we going to take down — excuse me. Are we going to take down statues of George Washington? How 'bout Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Ok, good. Are we going to take down the statue because he was a major slave-owner? Now we’re going to take down his statue. So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history, you’re changing culture. And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis or the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, ok? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
As you can see, Trump does say those groups should be “condemned totally.” This is the basis for what some call the “Charlottesville hoax.”
But it leads to the question: Which “very fine people” was he talking about? The “Unite the Right” rally was partly organized by a well-known white nationalist, Richard Spencer, and included both neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups. Former Ku Klux Klan head David Duke was a scheduled speaker. The cause they were protesting — the removal of Lee’s statue — is one supported by many nonwhite supremacists and nonwhite nationalists, but this rally was clearly not one for your average supporter of Confederate monuments.
And indeed, if you look at what Trump says next, it seems that he totally misconstrues who was actually protesting in Charlottesville. Here’s the next part:
REPORTER: You said the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?
TRUMP: No. There were people in that rally, and I looked the night before, if you look, they were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people — neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest. Because I don’t know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit. So I only tell you this, there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country. A horrible moment. But there are two sides.
There was indeed another protest the night before the deadly rally, but it could hardly be described as “very quiet” or “fine people.” Here’s how The Post described the scene:
At their Friday night rally at the University of Virginia, the white nationalists brandished torches and chanted anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans, including “blood and soil” (an English rendering of the Nazi “blut und boden”) and “Jews will not replace us” — all crafted to cast Jews as foreign interlopers who need to be expunged. The attendees proudly displayed giant swastikas and wore shirts emblazoned with quotes from Adolf Hitler. One banner read, “Jews are Satan’s children.”
Vice News has footage of these Friday-night protesters chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil”:
For the Trump defense to make any sense, there would have had to be some other group of people who didn’t subscribe to these awful ideals but for some reason decided to march in common cause with neo-Nazis, white supremacists and white nationalists. It’s theoretically possible there might have been some such people there, but you would think they’d quickly become pretty uncomfortable marching next to people chanting “Jews will not replace us” — and people who appeared prepared for violence, even donning helmets.
And even if such people were somehow there, the overwhelming thrust of the rally was clearly not so innocuous. It was organized by well-known figures in those movements, and the turnout seemed to follow accordingly.
Trump does this a lot. He will say something suggestive — in this case, suggestive that the violence in Charlottesville wasn’t really such a clear-cut result of resurgent racism — and then he will later say something else to give himself plausible deniability. But the plausibility here is basically nil. Trump seemed to find something redeeming in a group of protesters that was clearly full of racists. And even though a person in this group actually killed someone, he decided the blame needed to be shared with another group that wasn’t nearly so monolithic or hateful — and didn’t kill anyone.
Oh, and even if you think the media has oversold these comments in some way, Biden’s summary was careful. Here’s how he portrayed it:
Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. It was there on August of 2017 we saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging and bearing the fangs of racism. Chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ‘30s. And they were met by a courageous group of Americans, and a violent clash ensued and a brave young woman lost her life.
And that’s when we heard the words from the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation. He said there were some very fine people on both sides. Very fine people on both sides?
With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.
Biden correctly described who was marching that day, and then he correctly characterized Trump’s comments. The idea that he’s launching his campaign on the “Charlottesville hoax” or the “Charlottesville lie” is a rather amazing contention.[/size][/b]
"Trump and others have tried to distinguish between the self-proclaimed white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and the other supporters of Confederate monuments, who were all marching in Charlottesville that weekend."
A gunman opened fire at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, Calif., on Saturday morning, leaving one dead and three injured, according to authorities.
In a news conference Saturday afternoon, Poway Mayor Steve Vaus and San Diego County Sheriff William D. Gore confirmed four people were taken by first responders to Palomar Medical Center with gunshot injuries at around 12 p.m., Pacific time.
One of the victims, an adult female, “succumbed to their wounds,” Vaus said. Three others remain in the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries — one female child and two adult males. All three were in stable condition.
“I can only tell you that we have a fatality,” Vaus told MSNBC, “and I can also tell you that it was a hate crime, and that will not stand.”
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department responded to reports of an active shooter at the synagogue just before 11:30 a.m.; at the time, two prayer services were on going. The Poway Sheriff’s Station confirmed the shooting via Twitter, after deputies were called to the scene by “reports of a man with a gun.” Police say a male suspect has been detained for questioning after turning himself in shortly after the shooting. Officials say the suspect used an assault rifle.
Among the injured was Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, whose hand was wounded. Minoo Anvari, a member of the congregation, told CNN that “he did not leave his congregation until he was finished speaking to them -- calming their fears and pledging resilience.”
Anvari’s whose husband was inside when the gunfire began, said, “Everybody was crying and screaming.”
Saturday marked the six month anniversary of the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.
The Chabad hosts a weekly Kiddush luncheon that followed the Shabbat morning services. On Saturday, the synagogue was also holding a Passover celebration, according to 10News, which was scheduled to end at 7 p.m. with a final holiday meal.
Trump expressed his “deepest sympathies” for the victims of the shooting, which he said “looks like a hate crime," prior to departing for a rally in Wisconsin.
“My deep condolences to all of those affected,” the president added.
Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter, condemning the act of violence: “Tragic news that a gunman has attacked Chabad of Poway synagogue, on this, the last day of Passover, a day that is supposed to be a celebration of faith and freedom. I am thinking of, and praying for, those hurt and affected.”
When a gunman opened fire in a synagogue in California, killing one and injuring three others, Lori Kaye jumped between the shooter and the rabbi.
Kaye, 60, was shot at the synagogue and died at a nearby hospital.
In addition to Kaye, at least three others were wounded in the shooting Saturday at Congregation Chabad in Poway, north of San Diego. By late Sunday morning, all three injured victims had been discharged from a hospital.
Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, 57, had been shot in the hand when Kaye stepped between him and the gunman. The rabbi suffered what looked like defensive wounds to both his index fingers, a doctor at the Palomar Medical Center said.
Roneet Lev, a member of the congregation and Kaye's friend of 25 years, was not at the synagogue but told CNN she rushed to the hospital when she heard about the shooting. As Goldstein was being wheeled into surgery, he told her how her friend saved his life, she said.
Kaye had attended services Saturday to say a Kaddish prayer for her mother, who died in November, Lev said.
Kaye's husband is a physician and rushed to the scene to perform CPR after he heard about the shooting. When he realized his wife was a victim, he fainted, Lev said.
"She didn't die a senseless death," Lev said. "She died advertising the problem we have with anti-Semitism and to bring good to this world. ... If God put an angel on this planet, it would have been Lori."
Kaye, a native of San Diego, leaves behind her husband and a 22-year-old daughter, Lev said.
Hatred, resentment, white supremacy and victimhood are deadly political tools. President Trump wields them with no thought to the consequences — and people die.
The latest is Lori Gilbert Kaye, 60, fatally shot Saturday at the Chabad of Poway synagogue near San Diego. The suspected shooter, a 19-year-old gunman armed with a military-style assault rifle, wounded three others. The assailant, who reportedly yelled anti-Semitic slurs during the attack, left behind an Internet screed full of the same kind of paranoid vitriol about Jews that was used to motivate the Holocaust.
The alleged killer’s “open letter” voiced hearty approval of the massacre of 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October. He was apparently an equal-opportunity hater, however, because in the letter he confesses to an arson attack at a nearby mosque and claims to have been inspired by the anti-Muslim rampage in New Zealand last month that left 50 dead.
I should note that both the Pittsburgh and Poway shooters expressed criticism of Trump because they thought him too supportive of Israel. But Trump’s Middle East policy does not get him off the hook. At this point, no one can deny the obvious: The president, primarily through his unconstrained rhetoric, has fostered an atmosphere in which hate-filled white supremacists feel motivated, vindicated and emboldened to act.
In my lifetime, at least, we have never before had a president who deliberately exacerbates racial and religious tensions for political gain. We have had a few who winked at racists to get elected, a few who blew dog whistles about such issues as school desegregation and “inner-city crime.” But I can’t think of one of Trump’s predecessors who might have been capable of looking at a crowd of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members on one side, a diverse crowd of counterprotesters on the other, and saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Of course, that does not mean that all of Trump’s supporters are racist. Nor does it mean that Trump somehow generates racism out of thin air. What he does is allow it to surface into the light, where its putrid flowers can bloom.
No one who has any familiarity with U.S. history could be under the illusion that racism and anti-Semitism are things of the past. But yes, much has changed over the years and decades. The country has become more diverse — there will be no white, non-Hispanic majority by 2045 — and its promise of equality has been expanded to groups that were previously excluded. Ours is a better, fairer nation now, though we still have far to go.
But social change is unsettling, especially when it comes along with economic change. Americans once were certain that their children’s lives would be wealthier and more fulfilled than their own; now, they’re not sure. White men used to run everything in this country; now they merely run almost everything.
The job of a leader is to try to calm anxieties and bring people together. Trump, however, deliberately makes everything worse.
He launched his campaign in 2015 by demonizing Latino immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He encouraged his supporters not simply to question existing immigration policy or seek to change it, but to hate the immigrants themselves — to see them as “animals” and “bad hombres.” He modeled that hatred with his cruel policy of deliberately separating thousands of children from their asylum-seeking parents. It is not possible to treat people that way if you acknowledge and respect their humanity. Trump has given every indication that he does not.
One of the vile notions found in the cesspools of the Internet is that there is an organized attempt underway to “replace” white Americans with Latinos, and that this plot is somehow inspired or abetted by Jews. This ridiculous fantasy was on the mind of the suspected Pittsburgh shooter, and perhaps the Poway shooter as well.
Trump could use his Twitter feed or his political rallies to lower the temperature. He could acknowledge that the asylum seekers are just men and women trying to do what’s best for their families. He could denounce all the conspiracy theories about “globalists,” a term anti-Semites use to refer to Jews. He could engage with African Americans on issues such as police shootings and voter suppression.
But he does not.
Trump’s theory of politics is based on division, not unity. He constantly stokes anger, never apologizes, always seeks another crack where he can drive another wedge. Hate crimes, meanwhile, have reached a new high. That is no coincidence.
When several members of groups with ties to white nationalists showed up at a rally criticizing Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, it represented the latest attempt by the groups to raise their profile in Chicago.
What happened at the rally outside the Daley Center earlier this month, experts say, is part of an intensifying movement by the groups to recruit new members in recent years. While the organizations still do not have a large following in the Chicago area, their actions — which include flyering city streets and college campuses — are part of a disturbing trend that can’t be ignored, Foxx and other public officials say.
Members of three groups — the Proud Boys, the American Guard and the American Identity Movement — attended the April 1 rally organized by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, according to witnesses and photos the men posed for that were posted on social media.
The Proud Boys has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — a designation the right-wing group denies. The Anti-Defamation League calls the group “overtly Islamophobic and misogynistic,” noting that some members are “anti-Semitic and racist.”
The American Identity Movement, known as AIM, is considered by some experts to be a rebranded version of Identity Evropa, which the SPLC dubs a white nationalist group and the ADL considers white supremacist. Current leaders of AIM deny that and have distanced themselves from Identity Evropa.
The SPLC has also designated the American Guard as a hate group, while the ADL calls the group “hard-core white supremacists.”
While the police union denied any knowledge the groups would be at the rally, Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, said the event offered group members a chance to be seen at a more “mainstream” event.
The rally came after Foxx’s office’s controversial decision to drop charges against actor Jussie Smollett for allegedly faking a hate crime.
“It represents a significant recruiting opportunity,” said Levin, who two decades ago helped write the hate crime manual used by Cook County prosecutors. “They can ensconce themselves into rallies that are already highly charged and actually get coverage as opposed to doing it themselves.”
White nationalist leader
Some of the men at the rally have been implicated in violence while others involved in recruiting efforts in the city have pushed nationalist tropes.
One man who attended the rally — identified as Brien James — is “a longtime Indiana white supremacist” who previously helped found “a hardcore racist skinhead gang” whose members have been responsible for at least nine murders, the ADL said.
James now leads the American Guard, which the ADL says has “connections to anti-immigrant extremism, hatred, and violence.” James, who joined the Ku Klux Klan in his teens, has bragged about being tried for attempted murder, multiple batteries and hate crimes, the SPLC said.
In a video posted to Facebook, James said he was marching alongside members of the Chicago chapter of Proud Boys. A former member of that group, Jason Kessler, was an organizer of the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. In addition, four Proud Boys members have pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a fight with anti-fascist protesters in New York.
Nevertheless, the FBI has not designated the Proud Boys as an extremist group. The group’s founder has sued SPLC for defamation, and the group’s website says members are men who are “western chauvinists.”
In a YouTube video, James admits he “spent over 20 years in the white nationalist movement, most of the time in some sort of leadership position or another. I founded and ran some of the most extreme white nationalist gangs in America.” But James — who previously described himself as an “Indiana state representative for the Proud Boys” — says his views have changed, and he is now a “civic nationalist” who supports President Trump and wants to put American constitutional principles first. A spokesperson for the Indiana Proud Boys says James is not currently affiliated with the group.
James did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Northerly Island fight
Another man seen at the rally in Proud Boys clothing, Thomas Christensen, is facing aggravated battery charges in connection with a 2017 stabbing that wounded two people at a Dropkick Murphys concert at Northerly Island. Christensen has pleaded not guilty.
Tom Rainey, a self-described anti-fascist activist, said he confronted Christensen at the rally. Rainey claims Christensen swatted him with a picket sign, but Rainey wasn’t hurt.
Christensen declined to comment saying via Facebook, “I do not wish to be featured in your story. Please respect my wishes and leave me alone.”
Identity Evropa rebranded
The anti-Foxx protest also served as the latest venue for the American Identity Movement’s propaganda efforts. Posters advertising the group were put up near downtown landmarks that day, and pictures of them were tweeted by AIM.
The group previously hung posters from city-owned traffic control boxes and light poles during last month’s South Side Irish Parade. Posters for the organization and Identity Evropa have also popped up in the West Loop and at college campuses across the city.
Members of Identity Evropa, including founder Nathan Damigo, also took part in the Charlottesville rally, according to SPLC, and along with other participants, have been targeted in state and federal lawsuits by victims of a car attack that left a counter-protester dead and 28 others injured.
Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th) said he was outraged by the flyers posted along the South Side Irish Parade route and said he would push police to investigate. No charges have been announced.
An Indiana paramedic and Navy veteran, identified as Peter Diezel, has been involved in flyering efforts in the past — including at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois last fall, according to witnesses and pictures posted to a Twitter account associated with Identity Evropa. Diezel’s personal Twitter account featured tweets denying there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and others defending Adolf Hitler. In another tweet, however, he claimed to hate neo-Nazis.
Some of those tweets have been removed from Twitter, but they were archived by Panic! in the Discord, a group whose members have researched leaked chat logs from a server associated with Identity Evropa and which seeks to out members of nationalist groups. The chat logs were originally released by Unicorn Riot, an alternative media collective covering social and environmental issues.
Last August, Diezel was seen handing out information about Identity Evropa at a farmer’s market in Logan Square, said an anti-fascist activist who lives in Chicago who asked not to be identified. In an interview, the activist told the Sun-Times that he saw Diezel posting flyers that said, “IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE.”
The same day, the activist said a friend snapped a photo of Diezel that was later used for posters activists hung around Logan Square “to warn the community.” Diezel later posed for pictures taken in front of the anti-fascist posters bearing his face — and those photos were tweeted by another Twitter account, @chidentitarian.
Diezel did not respond to multiple phone calls and messages, and the ambulance company he works for declined to forward messages or make him available for an interview.
The @chidentitarian also tweeted pictures of the posters found along the route of the South Side Irish Parade. Earlier this month, the account tweeted a poll asking where AIM members should flyer next, listing Logan Square, Englewood and Austin, among other options.
The account, in response to questions from the Sun-Times, sent a message saying its members came out to the FOP rally because they “were outraged to learn that Jussie Smollett would face no consequences for smearing American nationalists as vicious hate criminals.”
A spokesman for AIM said in an email the group “does not permit the advocacy of extremism, hatred, supremacy or violence.”
Foxx ‘afraid,’ FOP denies ties to the groups
Foxx said it was disheartening that groups were at the rally and even taking part in discussions about criminal justice.
“The injection of white nationalists in this conversation, for me, I will tell you personally, I was afraid,” she said.
FOP President Kevin Graham said the groups attended the rally on their own and said he did not know whom they represented.
“I had never heard of ‘Proud Boys’ before, and I have no idea who they are,” Graham wrote in an email.
Studies have found that groups linked to white nationalism and racist extremism have become increasingly emboldened in recent years, although how active they are in the Chicago area is subject to debate.
Data compiled by the ADL pointed to a rise in public events and propaganda efforts by groups that espouse nationalist beliefs. Identity Evropa was responsible for the bulk of the propaganda efforts on college campuses last year, as well as over 300 incidents elsewhere, the ADL said.
Despite these groups having a limited footprint locally, they can have outsized influence, the ADL’s Jessica Gall said.
“This is by and large a small group of people, but I don’t think we can disregard the impact their ideas can have,” she said. “With social media … these ideologies have been perpetuated.”
Levin said he tallied 22 hate killings in the United States in 2018 that were “ideologically motivated.”
Locally, Levin said there were 77 hate crimes reported in Chicago in 2018, marking a 26 percent increase from the previous year and a single-year high for the past decade, citing data collected from police. Levin believes authorities aren’t doing enough to track and monitor groups aligned with white nationalism.
FBI, CPD: We track violence, not speech
Despite the figures, federal and local officials said they can’t investigate individuals based on their membership in a certain group or any exercise of free speech.
“Our focus is not on membership in particular groups, but on individuals who commit violence and other criminal acts,” FBI Special Agent Siobhan Johnson said.
Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said his department doesn’t monitor white supremacist or nationalist groups “unless there is an allegation of criminal wrongdoing.”
President Trump regularly criticizes his critics. He has called Joe Biden “sleepy” and Sen. Bernie Sanders “crazy.” But he seems to save some of his most personal attacks for women and, specifically, women of color, such as Sen. Kamala D. Harris.
Harris (D-Calif.), who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, attracted attention Wednesday during Attorney General William P. Barr’s testimony. The Washington Post’s Jacqueline Alemany wrote that Harris, a former California attorney general, offered up “sharp, concise and repeated” questions that generated some news. She got Barr to acknowledge, for example, that he had not reviewed the underlying evidence in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation before deciding not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.
More than 2 million people watched a clip of Harris’s questioning on Twitter, and her team used it in a fundraising push Wednesday night.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that Trump soon weighed in on the senator’s performance. In an appearance on Fox Business Network, he told host Trish Regan that Harris had been “probably very nasty” to Barr.
Trump then expanded his comment to include the other Democratic presidential contenders on the panel, Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.). “You have three of them running against me, and they were up there ranting and raving like lunatics, frankly,” Trump said. “How is that fair?”
But Harris was the only person he attacked by name.
It’s not the first time he has referred to the candidate, who is polling at 4 percent among Democrats in the most recent Post-ABC survey, as “nasty.” While speaking to Fox News’s Sean Hannity last week, Trump said Harris has “a little bit of a nasty wit, but that might be it.”
By calling Harris “nasty,” Trump seems to be drawing on troubling and pernicious stereotypes that paint black women as “angry.”
“Black women are not supposed to push back, and when they do, they’re deemed to be domineering, aggressive, threatening, loud,” Trina Jones, who has studied racial stereotyping and how it plays into the lives of African American women, told the BBC.
And as I wrote previously, Trump has a long history of directing his harshest attacks toward black women, a group that has been critical of him since the earliest days of his administration. He has targeted Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), White House correspondent April Ryan, media maven Oprah Winfrey, former ESPN anchor Jemele Hill, former national security adviser Susan E. Rice and former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile.
He called Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) “wacky” and dishonest, and he tweeted that Omarosa Manigault Newman, once the highest-ranking black woman in his administration, was a “crazed, crying lowlife” and a “dog.”
Harris is the only black woman running for president, and her supporters say she faces unique challenges that make it harder to get media attention and raise funds. With his “nasty” descriptor, Trump is mining some of the same stereotypes that make it hard for black women to succeed in politics. It’s a classic Trump tactic.
First, the Syracuse man repeatedly called a senator’s office in Washington and said he planned to kill former President Barack Obama, using a racial slur in his threat, the authorities said.
A year later, the same man, Stephen J. Taubert, called the California office of Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat, and vowed to kill her and her staff members. Once again, he spouted violent rhetoric over the phone, using racist epithets.
On Tuesday, Mr. Taubert, 61, was sentenced to 46 months in prison for the phone calls.
His sentence was handed down in the Federal District Court in Syracuse. It came six weeks after a jury found Mr. Taubert guilty of threatening to kill a former United States president, transmitting a threat in interstate commerce and making a threat to influence, impede or retaliate against a federal official.
The jury also found that Mr. Taubert chose to make threats against Mr. Obama and Ms. Waters, two black Democratic Party leaders, because of their race, a distinction that allowed prosecutors to seek an enhanced sentence.
“Racist threats to kill present and former public officials are not protected free speech, but serious crimes,” Grant C. Jaquith, the United States attorney for the Northern District of New York, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Mr. Taubert’s lawyer, Courtenay K. McKeon, declined to comment. But in court on Tuesday, she and Mr. Taubert both said that he was mentally ill and deserved a more lenient sentence, according to The Syracuse Post-Standard.
Mr. Taubert blamed social media and his conservative politics in part for his behavior, the newspaper’s website reported. Mr. Taubert, who said in court that he once served in the United States Air Force, worked as a janitor at a variety of offices, including some government employers, until 2011, when he had a stroke and had to stop working, according to court papers.
“Probably the worst thing for me is social media,” Mr. Taubert said during the sentencing hearing, the Post-Standard reported. “I should stay off of it. When I hear all these people knocking the president, it upsets me.”
Mr. Taubert threatened Ms. Waters and her staff members last July, when the congresswoman was in a high-profile verbal feud with the Trump administration.
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The previous month, White House officials had been heckled at restaurants by protesters opposed to the administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that separated children from their families.
At a rally, Ms. Waters, a frequent critic of the White House, commended the protesters and encouraged her supporters to take similar actions. She specifically told them to “show up” wherever they had to, “create a crowd” and “push back.”
Some conservatives took issue with her comments, arguing that “push back” had a physical connotation that was tantamount to inciting assault.
Two days after Ms. Waters’s remarks, President Trump joined in the criticism, writing on Twitter that the California congresswoman had called for “harm” to his supporters. Then he warned her to “be careful what you wish for.”
Roughly a month after Mr. Trump’s tweet, Mr. Taubert called Ms. Waters’s office in Los Angeles. Using pejorative slurs for women and African-Americans, he said that he planned to attend all of Ms. Waters’s public events and vowed to kill her and her staff, prosecutors said.
When asked about that call by police officers, Mr. Taubert repeated his racial slur against her, according to court papers. He also called Ms. Waters “low I.Q.”, a comment that mirrored the language of Mr. Trump’s tweet.
The call to Ms. Waters’s office came 13 months after Mr. Taubert made multiple calls to the Washington office of Al Franken, then a Democratic senator from Minnesota. In two of those calls, Mr. Taubert said he was planning to go to Washington the next day to “hang” Mr. Obama at his home.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Taubert had a history of threatening phone calls dating back to 2013, when he said he was going to burn down the N.A.A.C.P.’s building in Baltimore.
In letters of support filed with the court and provided to The New York Times, Mr. Taubert’s family and friends said he had apologized several times for the calls. They portrayed him as a man who exercised poor judgment but who had no intention of following through on his threats.
But Judge Glenn T. Suddaby cited Mr. Taubert’s history of menacing phone calls as he handed down the sentence.
“They claim he’d never hurt anybody,” Mr. Suddaby said in court, The Post-Standard reported. “Mr. Taubert, you’ve repeatedly hurt people with your words.”
Mr. Taubert was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine, and will face three years of supervised release after completing his prison term.
A representative for Mr. Obama declined to comment. Representatives for Ms. Waters did not immediately respond to requests for comment, though in March, after Mr. Taubert was found guilty, Ms. Waters said in a statement that she was pleased by the conviction.
President Donald Trump despises “fake news.” The Washington Post, The New York Times—these are “enemies of the people.” He has urged the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission to force Saturday Night Live off the air to punish the comedy show for making jokes about him.
What he likes are independent and honest voices who say things such as: Vaccines cause autism. President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a “carefully crafted fake.” Democratic Party insiders organized the murder of a staffer to cover up their nefarious plan to blame Russia for the hack of their emails. Sharia police are enforcing sharia law in Minneapolis. The Sandy Hook massacre never happened; the dead children were paid actors. (These are all false claims.)
After Facebook on Friday banned far-right figures and organizations from their platform, including the site Infowars, the president threatened to “monitor” social-media sites in retaliation. Through much of the late evening of May 3 and early morning of May 4, the president used his Twitter feed to champion the people who earn a large living spreading false reports. He hailed them as conservative thinkers whose free-speech rights have been abridged by social-media platforms.
MORE IN THIS SERIES
The Speech Wars
The fight over free expression
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CONOR FRIEDERSDORF
Why Sri Lanka Silenced Social Media
GRAEME WOOD
An Internet for Kids
CONOR FRIEDERSDORF
One thing at least will follow from the president’s Twitter campaign: It will become even more difficult than before for the shamefaced remains of what used to be mainstream conservatism to separate themselves from these grifters, racists, and liars. According to the president, they are now martyrs, saying things that deserve to be heard. There have been times in the past few years—especially during the hoax to shift blame from the Russians for hacking the Democratic National Committee—that Fox News and Infowars blurred into each other. Those days will now return.
Yet even as the president engrafts conspiracists and racists onto mainstream conservatism, it’s worth wondering: Why is he starting this fight? What does he hope to accomplish? In the past, when presidents publicly criticized major corporations by name, they got results.
In April 1962, President John F. Kennedy criticized, at a White House press conference, “a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility.” Kennedy was angry about steel-price increases that he regarded as inflationary. He spoke even more harshly in private, calling the executives “bastards” and “sons of bitches.” Within 48 hours, the price increases had been rescinded.
In June 2010, a ruptured deepwater rig spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama described the spill as the “worst environmental disaster the United States has ever faced.” He vowed that the owner of the rig, BP, would pay for whatever damage had been done; $20 billion was ultimately collected from the oil company.
But what happens if Facebook … just ignores the president? Facebook—long the premier channel for distributing hoaxes, scams, and Russian propaganda—seems to have made a business decision to clean up its act. Or at least begin to clean up its act. Perhaps presidential pressure will change Facebook’s mind. Or perhaps Facebook will calculate: Trump’s agitation will be forgotten by tomorrow. He’ll move on to the next thing. He’s just venting. He never follows up.
One observer of social media speculates that Trump hopes to deter Facebook from enforcing its rules against him and his 2020 campaign. In that case, wouldn’t Trump fight on the strongest ground, not the weakest? Identifying “my team” with some of the worst characters on the internet seems a prelude not to a hard fight, but to an embarrassing retreat.
Instead of preparing for a trial of strength against a corporation that a president should easily win, he has joined his personal brand to a gaggle of shady characters in an outburst likely to be forgotten in a day or two. Or, at least, forgotten by him.
But other and more determined actors are “monitoring”—and monitoring more attentively and persistently than the president himself. Trump’s Twitter rampage coincided with a North Korean missile test. For months, Trump has been touting the suspension of North Korean missile testing as proof that his concessions to that dictatorship delivered results. By resuming the testing, the North Koreans were administering a calculated humiliation to Trump, gambling that they can extract more from a president who talks tough in international relations, but acts weak. Now Facebook has set him a test of strength at home.
Trump has staked the prestige of the presidency on a gang of bad actors with shady histories who use social media to profit from deceit and the inflaming of racial and religious hatred. They are his supporters, after all, and he does not have so many to lose. But now Trump needs a win. North Korea is watching, and so are even more serious world actors.
The Washington Post reported that foreign governments have learned to shrug off Trump’s bluster and tough-guy talk. “He has shown us that what’s black at 9 a.m. can be gray at 3 p.m. and white at 7 p.m.,” said a Mexican diplomat of the president’s revolving pronouncements.
Past presidents spoke. Trump just … talks. Trump’s racist, conspiracist con-artist friends may be about to learn that sad difference firsthand too.
Recently, a man allegedly burned down three black churches in Louisiana. Another wrote a white-nationalist screed and then allegedly shot up a synagogue, killing one and injuring three. On two occasions, a noose was found hanging in a Maryland middle school. A band of white nationalists marched into a D.C. bookstore to harass an author they didn’t like. Hate crimes small and large seem to be on the rise everywhere.
But here’s something else that has been happening: Some 400,000 people have visited a memorial to the victims of racial-terror lynchings since it opened in Montgomery, Ala., about one year ago. People in 300 counties where lynchings took place have started conversations about erecting markers or monuments in their hometowns. Maryland’s General Assembly last month created the nation’s first truth and reconciliation commission on lynching.
The vision of the memorial — that “it would be born in Montgomery but live all over the country,” as founder Bryan Stevenson said — is becoming real.
It’s a big, complicated country. The hopeful doesn’t negate the baleful. But the hopeful is a part of our story.
Stevenson, a lawyer, has been representing people convicted, in some cases wrongly, of capital crimes in Alabama for three decades through the Equal Justice Initiative.
He believes that the opposite of poverty is not wealth but justice; that all human beings are more than the worst thing they’ve ever done; and that racial healing cannot take place until the country faces the truth about its history.
To that end, the Equal Justice Initiative created and last year inaugurated in Montgomery the Legacy Museum, which traces the United States’ history of racial oppression from slavery through Jim Crow to mass incarceration, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
The memorial offers a haunting, distressing passage through 800 hanging steel columns, each representing a county where lynchings took place, and each engraved with the names of the victims. Originally, the idea was to have a monument at every lynching site, but EJI documented more than 4,400 that took place between 1877 and 1950, so that was impractical.
A duplicate of each of the 800 pillars lies on the grass outside, waiting for its county to claim it and place it in a suitably public location. None has been claimed yet, but Stevenson told me he’s fine with that.
“We don’t want to just see a monument go up,” he said. “We want there to be multiple discussions. The monument placement isn’t meaningful unless it’s surrounded by increased consciousness.”
Even now, Stevenson said, “people have so little awareness of what happened on their courthouse square, or in the park behind their church.” He encourages communities to start with a marker that can tell a story: Here a black man asked for an increase in his wages, and so was taken away by a crowd and burned to death.
And no one was punished for the crime. “That’s what made this so terrifying,” Stevenson said. “The banker could do this, and then make you come into his bank the next day and pretend that you didn’t know he had just tortured someone to death.”
That is why Stevenson supported Maryland’s initiative — sponsored by Del. Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk (D-Prince George’s), passed unanimously and signed by Gov. Larry Hogan (R) — to create a commission. It will hold hearings around the state for three years, seek testimony from relatives of victims and others, and publish documents.
“You have to tell the truth before you get to reconciliation,” Stevenson said, though he cautioned, “We can’t leave it to any small body to do the heavy lifting.”’
Peña-Melnyk agreed, saying she hopes the commission will help everyone confront an ugly history — at least 40 lynchings took place in Maryland. She says it’s especially important now, given the “divisiveness and racism” of President Trump.
Stevenson said he believes the increase in hate crimes reflects not a growth in racism, which has never gone away, but a more tolerant attitude toward it.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been in a good place,” he said. “But now we’ve made it a little less shameful to give voice to expressions of hatred. . . . This is what happens when you waver, when you equivocate, when you look the other way.”
The justice initiative recently opened a third site in Montgomery memorializing 24 victims of lynchings that took place during the 1950s. A fourth will open at the end of the year to document 1,600 lynchings that took place from 1865 through 1876.
Meanwhile, four new hotels are going up near EJI’s facilities, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.
Is there something off-putting about a tourism economy rising atop this ugly history?
No, says Stevenson. What is off-putting is that for decades tourists have been coming to Alabama to fish or hunt or go to football games, to visit plantations and “ogle and ooh and aah over the slave owners’ homes,” and have not given a thought to who built those homes and under what conditions.
Maybe that is beginning to change. That would be a little bit of progress in a scary time.
If you want to know what the gravestone of American democracy might say, consider this recent Vice headline:
Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too.
Possibly in response to this embarrassing admission and the obvious failure to successfully delouse one of the platforms most responsible for the spread of Measles and Donald Trump, Facebook actually banned a few of the worst and most bigoted misinformers on the planet this week.
This upset the big baby birther. He vowed — with the full weight of the executive branch — to watch the situation.
This may just seem like random ranting and distraction. But this intimidation is actually key to Trump’s 2020 campaign, as Judd Legum points out in this important thread.
Because of Judd’s work for his Popular.info newsletter, many of the Trump campaign’s recent ads have been taken down. Trump is already spending $500,000 a week on Facebook, which GOTMFV show guest Laura Olin called “the new Fox News.”
Judd explained, “He needs to be a VICTIM of Facebook censorship so that it’s IMPOSSIBLE for Facebook to enforce their own rules.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this Stephanie Mencimer piece: “The Left Can’t Meme”: How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors.
It let me to this piece about “Memetic Warfare” by Jeff Giesea, which was extremely important to the Trump 2020 campaign’s social media strategy. It advised beating ISIS with trolling, using denigration ridicule along with direct harassment. He was created for help creating Trump’s troll army and his tactics were either mirrored or embraced by the large-scale Russian-back effort to to the same thing.
Giesea is now furious at Trump campaign for not taking Facebook’s attempt to take control of its platform more seriously. He’s been ahead of the curve again in recognizing that so-called “de-platforming” is the biggest risk to the right and Trump. He believes Trump should be using executive power even more to intimidate or possibly even take action against platforms that put up guardrails that limit the right.
Giesea even has a plan that would handcuff large social media platforms that you should expect Trump fans and then Trump to embrace.
We know Trump that this week essentially invited Putin to replicate the “help” Russia offered to him in 2016. A large chunk of that help involved not just promoting Trump but aggravating racial animus over social media.
The boundaries between casual racism and neo-Nazism are being intentionally blurred on social media and when Trump again defends his Charlottesville comments. The goal is to stake out maximalist demands that would prevent these platforms from enforcing any content restrictions.
By defending the most extremes Trump isn’t making any stand for free speech, which we know he’d crush the moment he can get away with it. He’s trying to make sure the extremism and lies he needs to run on 2020 cannot be checked.
Hours after Joe Biden launched his 2020 campaign by attacking President Trump for his response to a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the president began to spin a yarn.
The August 2017 demonstration was actually just a group of “neighborhood” folks from the local University of Virginia community who simply “wanted to protest the fact that they want to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said in an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin in late April.
Trump himself had merely been supporting those same purportedly peaceful protesters when he said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he continued.
In fact, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — which left one woman dead and 19 injured — was explicitly organized by a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis as a celebration of white nationalism. The official event was presaged by a nighttime parade in which rallygoers held tiki torches aloft while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil,” a reference to a nationalist slogan used in Nazi Germany.
“It is a misrepresentation of what was happening in Charlottesville to say it was a statue protest that went wrong,” said Nicole Hemmer, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center who lives in Charlottesville and attended the rally as an observer. “Anyone who was there that day would have walked into a park of people waving Nazi flags and people who were Klansmen. It was not a secret who put that rally on that day.”
For Trump, his recasting of Charlottesville is just the latest version of a story he has been altering and embellishing over the past 21 months in defense of one of the lowest points of his presidency, when he attracted bipartisan opprobrium for his seeming reluctance to forcefully condemn white supremacy. Even in his revisionist retelling, the president’s decision to lavish praise on Lee — a slave owner who led Confederate troops in defense of human bondage — leaves in place a level of ambiguity for those in his political base sympathetic to alt-right causes.
His approach to Charlottesville highlights a number of recurring themes in Trump’s responses to controversy: his refusal to apologize or admit error; his defiance in the face of critics; his willingness to view facts as malleable in the service of self-preservation; and his ability to speak abstrusely in a way that provides fodder for defenders and detractors alike.
White House officials reject any suggestion that Trump has been equivocal on white supremacists.
“President Trump and the entire Administration have and will continue to condemn racism, bigotry, and violence in all forms — and any claim to the contrary is false, disgusting, and a slanderous attempt to sow division in America,” spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement, citing the administration’s relationship with Israel and historically low unemployment rates for blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans.
But Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, said Trump’s continued reticence to confront white supremacists “is not a dog whistle picked up by the alt-right — it’s a bullhorn the whole country can hear.”
According to the ADL’s most recent annual report, white supremacists were responsible for 39 of the 50 extremist-related murders the group counted in 2018, an increase from the previous year, when 18 of 34 such crimes were committed by white supremacists.
A report in February by the Southern Poverty Law Center identified a record 1,020 hate groups operating across the country in 2018. It also found that the number of deaths linked to the radical right had increased: In the United States and Canada, at least 40 people have been killed by white supremacists.
“It has emboldened extremists,” Greenblatt said of Trump’s ambivalent posturing. “How do we know this? Because they say so. It’s spurred this new, nativistic nationalism that’s playing out on college campuses and social media and now cities across the country.”
'Very fine people on both sides'
The president’s response to the Charlottesville rally — three whiplash statements over four days — seemed to encapsulate his uncertainty over how strongly to condemn the white-supremacist groups behind the event.
On Aug. 12, 2017, after an avowed neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Trump offered a brief initial statement from his private golf resort in Bedminster, N.J. He denounced “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” — repeating “on many sides” a second time for emphasis.
The statement was widely condemned as creating a false equivalency between the two groups and for not going far enough. Back at the White House two days later — urged on by worried aides — the president delivered a more forceful, scripted statement in a hastily arranged news conference.
“Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups,” he said.
Those remarks, however, left Trump frustrated. The president told aides in the stately Diplomatic Reception Room that his mea culpa was the “worst speech I’ve ever given” and “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made,” according to accounts the journalist Bob Woodward provided in his book “Fear,” about the Trump presidency.
The next day, during a news conference ostensibly about infrastructure at Trump Tower in New York, the president unleashed a freewheeling riff on the violence at the rally.
In one breath, he said, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis or the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally” — a statement his allies have latched on to in defense of his handling of the issue to claim the president was always clear in his denunciations of bigotry and hate-fueled violence.
Yet, in the next breath, Trump asserted, “there’s blame on both sides . . . very fine people on both sides.”
The last of his three statements was classic Trump — raw, visceral, unfiltered — and, in the eyes of many, his most honest response. The tableau of Trump blaming both sides as John F. Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, stood by grim-faced, was a reflection of “a president who is very frustrated at being told what to say, and who reverts back to his genuine reaction, that there were very fine people on both sides,” Hemmer said.
In his initial remarks about Charlottesville, and his recent ones praising Lee, Trump was relying on the rhetorical tools he frequently deploys during controversy — making contradictory or murky statements that allow him and his defenders to claim whatever benefits them in the moment.
Despite his brief condemnation of neo-Nazis and white nationalists, for example, members of those same groups heard in Trump’s comments support for their ideology when he blamed both sides.
“What he’s signaling to his base — including those that are explicitly racist or with implicit racial bias — is: ‘I’m your guy,’ ” said C. Shawn McGuffey, a sociology professor and the director of African diaspora studies at Boston College. “He can say all he wants that, ‘I’m not a racist, I’m not a white nationalist,’ but when white nationalists call you a white nationalist, you’re clearly signaling something.”
David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, illustrates the president’s Rorschach messaging. The day of the rally, Duke praised Trump, enthusing that the march represented “a turning point for the people of this country.”
“We are determined to take our country back,” he said. “We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.”
But after Trump disavowed hatred and violence in a tweet, Duke responded angrily on social media, writing, “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”
An unsuccessful presidential candidate who endorsed Trump in 2016, Duke’s feelings toward the president now are mixed. “He’s still giving some decent rhetoric, but he’s not keeping his promises,” Duke said in an interview last week , citing Trump’s tough talk on immigration and his vow to enact middle-class tax relief.
At the same time, Duke expressed an appreciation for some of Trump’s language on Charlottesville.
“He was the only person in the entirety of the U.S. government who pointed out that all the fault was not with the people who came there to defend the Robert E. Lee statue, and those who came to defend the right and heritage of white people,” Duke said.
'Concocting a phony story'
The launch of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign on April 25 brought the white-supremacist rally back into the national discussion and immediately put Trump on the defensive. The president had largely avoided commentary on Charlottesville over the past year, save for an anniversary statement in August condemning the “riots,” which made no mention of white supremacists.
Biden’s announcement video featured footage of the rallygoers, dressed in makeshift riot gear, as he described “their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging and bearing the fangs of racism.”
Calling Charlottesville “a defining moment for this nation in the last few years,” Biden criticized Trump for praising the “very fine people on both sides” and portrayed his candidacy as part of a moral battle for the soul of the nation.
Leon Panetta, a former secretary of defense, CIA director and White House chief of staff, said delving back into Charlottesville is perilous territory for the president. “It brings attention to probably one of his worst failings, which is his inability to acknowledge when he says something stupid,” Panetta said. “It’s probably one of the worst things he has said during his presidency.”
But Trump couldn’t help but respond, and he did so by distorting his initial reaction. He repeatedly praised Lee — a line of defense largely absent from his rhetoric in the aftermath of the 2017 event. He said he was never condoning white supremacy but simply defending the rights of peaceful protesters who did not want the Lee statue taken down.
The defense left many unconvinced. Biden accused Trump of “concocting a phony story.”
“The very rally was advertised — advertised — as a white-supremacist rally,” Biden told a crowd April 30, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Anti-Semitic chants were clear. Hatred was on the march, and he knew it.”
McGuffey said in an era of news micro-cycles, Trump is “trying to rewrite history, he’s trying to clean it up.”
“He’s had almost two years now to do that, and this is his latest version,” he said.
Trump’s defenders, however, argue the president has been consistent in his outspokenness about hatred since the beginning. Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union” on April 28, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Trump’s response to Charlottesville “was twisted for many years” and was “darn near perfection.”
“I think anytime a president is willing to condemn people who hate other people based on their race of their religion it’s a great day for America, and that’s what he did,” Conway said.
Another White House official also argued it is unfair to suggest Trump is sympathetic toward neo-Nazis or other extremists given his record on condemning anti-Semitism, including after the recent shooting at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California.
In focusing on Lee, Trump also managed to plunge the nation into a semi-academic debate about the legacy of the Confederate general while obscuring his original response. On ABC’s “This Week,” House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), a veteran civil rights activist, called Lee “a great tactician” before excoriating him as “a brutal slave master” and a “loser.”
Greenblatt said the discussion about Lee allows Trump to defend himself while signaling to the alt-right members of his base that he tacitly agrees with them.
“When you say you’re against white supremacy but then you praise Robert E. Lee, the general who led us in the war in favor of white supremacy, I think it’s safe to say these are contradictory messages,” he said.
Trump’s latest remarks, Greenblatt added, should be viewed as part of a troubling broader arc, from Charlottesville to the white-supremacist shootings at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and at the Poway, Calif., synagogue.
“These aren’t outliers on a scatter plot,” Greenblatt said. “These are data points on a trend line.”
On Monday night, Dallas news station WFAA released new cellphone footage from the 2015 arrest of Sandra Bland that confirms what we all already knew: that the life of Texas state trooper Brian Encinia was never in danger and that Texas officials have withheld evidence of not only her controversial arrest, but very likely her death.
In the 39-second video—a collaborative effort between WFAA and the Investigative Network—Encinia aggressively demands Bland, 28, get out of her car while she calmly questions the justification for doing so.
“Why am I being apprehended?” she asks, recording their interaction for her own safety.
“Get out of the car now!” Encinia yells before pointing a taser at her. “I will light you up!”
She is eventually removed from her car and arrested.
Three days later she would be found dead in her Waller County jail cell near Houston, where her death would be ruled a suicide.
The Washington Post reports that until the release of this video, the Encinia’s dashcam footage was believed to be the only existing recording of the infamous July 2015 traffic stop in which Bland was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change. During the investigation, Encinia maintained that he feared for his safety during the stop.
“My safety was in jeopardy at more than one time,” Encinia told investigators.
But as you can see for yourself, clearly that wasn’t the case.
Bland’s family and attorney never saw this footage until now and believe it was intentionally withheld. As such, they’re demanding that Texas officials re-examine the criminal case against Encinia.
“Open up the case, period,” Shante Needham, Bland’s sister, said after watching the video.
She added, “We also know they have an extremely, extremely good cover-up system.”
After declining an on-camera interview with WFAA, the Texas Department of Public Safety released the following statement maintaining that the footage wasn’t withheld:
“The premise that the video was not produced as a part of the discovery process is wrong. A hard drive containing copies of 820 Gigabytes of data compiled by DPS from its investigation, including the dashcam videos, jail video footage and data from Sandra Bland’s cell phone, was part of discovery.”
But Cannon Lambert, the attorney who represented the Bland family, calls bullshit.
“I’ve not seen it,” said Lambert, when shown the video by Brian Collister, chief reporter with the Investigative Network. “If they had turned it over, I would have seen it, Brian. I’ve not seen that.”
“He sees exactly what’s in her hand,” Lambert added, referencing the footage. “How can you tell me you don’t know what’s in her hand when you’re looking right dead at it? What did she do to make him feel his safety was in jeopardy? Nothing.”
Of particular note, grand jury proceedings are secret, so whether Waller County grand jurors were shown the video remains unconfirmed.
“[The video] not only shows that [Encinia] lied, but that he really had no business even stopping her, period,” Needham said. “And at the end of the day, he needs to go to jail.”
State Rep. Garnet Coleman released the following statement upon the release of this new information:
“It is troubling that a crucial piece of evidence was withheld from Sandra Bland’s family and legal team in their pursuit of justice. The illegal withholding of evidence by one side from the other destroys our legal system’s ability to produce fair and just outcomes. As Chair of the House Committee on County Affairs that looked into the death of Sandra Bland, I will make sure that the Committee will also look into how this happened.
I am glad to see that the Sandra Bland Act is already making a difference in terms of better training for jailers and new officers. Additionally, through new data reporting requirements regarding traffic stops, the Act has already helped push local reforms and key legislative policies forward such as House Bill 2754 by Representative White, of which I am a Joint-Author of, that prevents arrests for nonjailable offenses. HB 2754's policy was part of the original Sandra Bland Act as filed last session. I am proud that the Act has had a positive impact and will continue to make a difference in the future.”
Despite officials being elusive in providing Bland’s family with answers, the family settled a wrongful death suit against Waller County and Texas DPS in 2016 for $1.9 million.
Additionally, there were no indictments handed down to Waller County lawmen in connection with Bland’s death.[/size][/b]
Family of Sandra Bland Demands Answers After New Footage of Her Arrest Surfaces (https://www.theroot.com/family-of-sandra-bland-demands-answers-after-new-footag-1834580813)
Donald Trump appeared before a raucous crowd of supporters for another one of his MAGA rallies in Panama City Beach, FL, on Wednesday. There, he joined the audience in laughing at an impromptu suggestion from the crowd: What if the U.S. just murdered undocumented immigrants?
“When you have 15,000 people marching up, and you have hundreds and hundreds of people, and you have two or three border security people that are brave and great,” Trump said. “And don’t forget, we don’t let them and we can’t let them use weapons. We can’t. Other countries do. We can’t. I would never do that. But how do you stop these people?”
At that point an as-of-yet unidentified member of the audience shouted “Shoot them!” Trump simply chuckled along with the crowd, noting, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.
It was an iconic baseball celebration: Boston Red Sox catcher Christian Vázquez leaping into the arms of pitcher Chris Sale after the final out of the World Series last fall, teammates in perfect unison.
But on Thursday, the star players were far apart. Sale was at the White House where the 2018 champions were honored by President Trump. Vázquez was home in Boston, one of at least 10 players, all Latino or African American, who elected not to attend.
“It’s personal, bro,” Vázquez, who is from Bayamón, Puerto Rico, said in a brief interview before a game against the Orioles here Wednesday. Of the more than a dozen players who attended, only one — outfielder J.D. Martinez, who is of Cuban descent — is a minority. Manager Alex Cora, who is from Puerto Rico, also was absent.
“Everybody has personal opinions,” Vázquez said. “I don’t like to talk about those thoughts.”
The Red Sox have sought to play down the split, but the cleaving of the team along racial lines has symbolized an era in which Trump — who has sowed, and exploited, deep divisions in American society — has forced the nation to confront fundamental questions of identity, transforming what had once been feel-good ceremonies at the White House into pitched moments of cultural reckoning.
From famous sports heroes to lesser known Olympians to the stars of the performing arts, the toxicity of the Trump era has led once apolitical entertainers to pick a side, and, in doing so, render a judgment on the president himself.
“It really shows the divide and the place we’re in in our country,” said the retired figure skater Adam Rippon, who won bronze at the Winter Olympics last year but did not participate in Team USA’s visit to the White House. On Twitter, Rippon, who is gay, declared he would “not stand with” an administration he said is willing to “discriminate against those that they perceive as different.”
In an interview this week, Rippon said the racial split among the Red Sox is more evidence that minorities are “excluded” from Trump’s governing agenda and feel compelled to take a stand.
“It’s amazing to win the World Series and go the White House, and it’s incredible,” he said. “But the flip side of that is I feel as an athlete you have this incredible platform and you have a choice to be that role model for your younger self.”
A White House spokeswoman declined to comment and instead referred to Trump’s public comments. At the South Lawn ceremony, Trump regaled the players and coaches and promised to give them a tour of the Lincoln Bedroom. He recounted Sale’s clutch performance in the clinching World Series game, but made no mention of Vázquez or Cora.
In brief remarks, Sale called the visit a “very high honor,” and Martinez said it was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, thanking Trump for his hospitality.
On rare occasions, athletes boycotted White House visits under previous presidents for political reasons. But Trump has directly and eagerly engaged the dissenters, aggravating the disputes and fanning racial and social tensions.
Entire teams, such as the University of Virginia men’s basketball squad this month, have declined invitations, while the White House has not extended offers to some women’s teams, including two WNBA champions, which have typically been on the list.
Trump angrily rescinded invitations to the Golden State Warriors in 2017 and the Philadelphia Eagles last year after black players announced publicly they would not come.
“I have never, ever, ever voiced my opinions that way before, because I’m not a political person,” said Carmen de Lavallade, 88, a black Creole actress, dancer and choreographer, who was among the first to spurn Trump.
In August 2017, she announced she would not attend a traditional White House reception for performers honored annually by the Kennedy Center. That prompted Trump and the first lady to respond by skipping the awards event.
“It’s like he opened Pandora’s box,” said de Lavallade, who had performed for President Lyndon B. Johnson. She cited Trump’s equivocations in denouncing the marchers in a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville for prompting her decision.
Some black athletes have visited the Trump White House, most prominently golfer Tiger Woods, a business partner of Trump’s whom the president awarded the Medal of Freedom this week.
But the highly publicized snubs have raised the stakes for others. In January, Trump treated the Clemson University football team to a spread of fast food in the East Room during the partial government shutdown.
More than 70 players showed up, but 42 of the team’s 57 African American players did not, according to a report in The Root, which quoted three players, speaking anonymously, as citing Trump’s “divisive politics” and “racism.”
In an interview Wednesday, Red Sox President Sam Kennedy said the organization decided after winning the 2004 World Series that it would adopt an “apolitical” position and accept invitations to the White House based on respect for the institution. Most players showed up in 2005 and 2008 to meet President George W. Bush and in 2014 to meet President Barack Obama.
Amid the controversy this year, the players have said they respect each other’s decisions and called it a private matter.
But Cora has been outspoken that it would be inappropriate for him to visit the White House when his native Puerto Rico is still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Maria, which led to more than 3,000 deaths on the island two years ago.
The sentiment has been interpreted as an implicit rebuke of Trump, who has angrily rejected criticism of his administration’s response. The president has blamed local officials for poor management and vastly inflated the amount of federal aid money that has been dispensed to the island. A broader disaster relief package has been stalled in Congress, with Trump opposing a Democratic push for more money for Puerto Rico.
Cora has been dogged by questions, and he said before the game Wednesday that he was done addressing the matter. The players “know how I feel,” he told reporters. “We just put it to rest.”
While current Red Sox players have played down or tried to avoid discussing any tensions over the White House visit, former star player David Ortiz this week said he supported those skipping the event and condemned Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants.
“You don’t want to go and shake hands with a guy who is treating immigrants like [expletive] because I’m an immigrant,” Ortiz, who was born in the Dominican Republic, told radio station WEEI earlier this week.
The discomfort in the clubhouse was apparent after the team’s 2-1 victory Wednesday when a Red Sox staffer blocked a Washington Post reporter from reentering the clubhouse with other journalists, saying no more questions about the White House would be permitted.
In Boston, the racial division has threatened to erode some of the good feeling from last year and serve as a reminder of the team’s troubled history with segregation. The Red Sox were the last Major League franchise to desegregate, in 1959, under their longtime owner Tom Yawkey.
Kennedy noted that the organization has taken a stand on some sensitive cultural issues, including successfully petitioning a city commission to rename a roadway near Fenway Park from Yawkey Way to Jersey Street.
“I’ve talked to a lot of players,” said Kennedy, who attended along with Red Sox owner John Henry. “It’s important to let the guys know that we respect and support their individual decisions.”
Still, it is hard to miss the symbolism that the team split apart after Wednesday night’s game and players took different flights home to Boston, said Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of political science and Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame, who focuses on race, gender and politics.
“It’s an unintended consequence in the way in which the team is dividing,” she said. “It leads to sensitive outcomes.”
In the clubhouse Wednesday, some players sat at their lockers absorbed on their cellphones and others huddled around a television to watch another game.
At times, players drifted into small groups. Four white players began a card game, while Vázquez and Eduardo Rodriguez, a Venezuelan native who also will not visit the White House, conversed in Spanish.
Though he declined to discuss his decision, Vázquez, like Cora, expressed pain over the slow recovery of Puerto Rico, where he said some of his relatives lost power and had the roofs blown of their homes. Members of the team, including white and Latino players, visited the U.S. territory last year, once on a relief mission to deliver supplies and again after the World Series for a parade in Cora’s honor.
Asked whether his decision would affect how he is viewed by the public, Vázquez responded: “It’s tough . . . The kids see us every day on the TV no mater what happens, if I go or not. It’s nothing personal. I’m ‘bueno’ in my home, with Puerto Rico.”
“We need help to get back to the beautiful Puerto Rico we had before,” he said. “That’s all we ask.”
Across the room, Mitch Moreland, a first baseman from Amory, Miss., arrived at his locker sporting American flag shorts — a gift, he said, from teammate Andrew Benintendi, of Cincinnati. Moreland called the White House visit “very special.”
“Everybody’s got their choice. We respect each other,” Moreland said. Of his own decision, he offered a patriotic response: “I was born in America, and I’m probably going to be buried here, so I’m excited about the opportunity.”
Pitcher David Price of Murfreesboro, Tenn., was digging into a newspaper crossword puzzle in front of his locker. Price, who is black, had caused an uproar last week when he retweeted to his 1.8 million followers a Boston sportswriter’s observation that the racial divide on the team means only the “white Sox” were visiting the White House. Price later clarified that he found the tweet insensitive and was seeking to admonish the writer.
Of the fraught politics, Price said: “That’s just the moment we’re in.” But he said he respected those teammates who are going: “Absolutely. That’s America — right? Right?”
Price declined to explain his decision and said he was not monitoring public reaction. But he appeared acutely aware of the nuances of the debate. Overhearing a reporter tell another player the Golden State Warriors had turned down a visit with Trump, Price felt compelled to interject.
“The invitation got rescinded,” he said with emphasis. “Make sure you say that.”
resident Trump has not shied away from proposing harsh strategies to keep migrants out. He was willing to support a shutdown of the government to have U.S. taxpayers pay for a wall between the United States and Mexico. Trump has complained that the troops at the border aren’t allowed to be as “rough” as he would like. And he has vowed to close the border altogether, thus threatening multiple economies, to curtail both illegal and legal immigration.
At a rally Wednesday, he seemed to condone straight-up violence to deal with “the border crisis.”
The Washington Post’s Antonia Noori Farzan wrote:
A roar rose from the crowd of thousands of Trump supporters in Panama City Beach on Wednesday night, as President Trump noted yet again that Border Patrol agents can’t use weapons to deter migrants. “How do you stop these people?” he asked.
“Shoot them!” someone yelled from the crowd, according to reporters on the scene and attendees.
The audience cheered. Supporters seated behind Trump and clad in white baseball caps bearing the letters “USA” laughed and applauded.
“That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement,” Trump replied, smiling and shaking his head. “Only in the Panhandle.”
Trump’s support for violence against those hoping to immigrate to the United States isn’t an isolated incident.
Last year, Trump defended U.S. agents using tear gas against Central American migrants, including children, at the border crossing in San Ysidro, a neighborhood in San Diego. And while discussing gang violence believed to be tied to illegal immigration, Trump encouraged police officers to be violent with those they suspect of committing a crime.
He said:
“When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over? Like, don’t hit their head, and they just killed somebody — don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?”
Many found the remark alarming, given that some of the migrants arriving at the U.S. border were fleeing the type of violence Trump and his supporters joked about.
Trump’s language echoes the violence called for by some of his supporters. According to an April police report, a former member of a New Mexico militia group told police that fellow members had made “terroristic threats.” While reflecting on some migrants the group had been monitoring, a militia member said, according to the Young Turks:
“Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them? We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber.”
And after Trump’s election where he often painted immigrants as threats to American life, researchers found that bullying in middle schools was up 18 percent in Republican districts, compared with Democratic districts, according to the Hechinger Report, and was especially directed to immigrants. And nearly 1 in 5 middle school students in Republican regions reported being bullied.
A Defense Department report released documents to Newsweek claiming that:
“Estimated 200 unregulated armed militia members currently operating along the southwest border. Reported incidents of unregulated militias stealing National Guard equipment during deployments. They operate under the guise of citizen patrols supporting CBP [Customs and Border Protection] primarily between POEs [Points of Entry]."
While not all Trump supporters have taken this approach, the president has done nothing to discourage those who back him from entertaining these ideas. At worst, his jovial remarks could lead some to conclude that he thinks these responses are socially acceptable.
Taking a hard line to immigration has been a central component of Trump’s politics since he launched his presidential campaign and was attractive to those who were unsatisfied with existing approaches to immigration. It is one of the main issues that led voters to support him over other conservatives who also had tough approaches.
The boundaries of acceptable treatment have not always been clear and, some would argue, are now nonexistent. And that appears to be the way that Trump and some of his most loyal supporters like it when it comes to immigration.
#Resist
With Ramadan underway, the Diyanet Mosque of New Haven was a daily gathering place for Muslims to be among friends and family as they broke their fast.
But on Sunday, worshipers received devastating news: A fire had broken out just before 4 p.m., rendering the mosque uninhabitable.
And on Monday, New Haven officials delivered another blow: They announced that they believed that the fire had been set intentionally.
“We’re just kind of shocked,” said Haydar Elevli, the president of the Connecticut branch of the Turkish-American Religious Foundation, which owns the mosque. “Everybody’s sad right now.”
The specific motive for the arson was unclear. There have been no arrests and the investigation is continuing, the authorities said.
Nobody was hurt in the blaze, and Mr. Elevli said in an interview on Monday night that the damage was “not too bad.” The New Haven Fire Department did not respond to further requests for comment.
At a news conference earlier Monday, while standing in front of the charred three-story building, Chief John Alston of the Fire Department said federal law enforcement officials were helping with the investigation into the arson.
“I found an attack like this is especially hurtful and hateful when you attack an institution for what people believe,” Gov. Ned Lamont said at the news conference.
The arson came at a time when places of worship have been frequent targets.
In March, 51 people were killed in attacks at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the suspect published a hate-filled manifesto, the authorities said. A week later, someone set a fire outside an Islamic Center mosque in Escondido, Calif., and anti-Muslim graffiti referring to the New Zealand attacks was found, officials said.
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Also that month, the Muhammad Islamic Center of Greater Hartford received a phone call from someone who threatened to burn it down, the authorities said. The person used racial slurs in the call, according to an imam at the center.
In April, three predominantly black churches were set on fire in Louisiana, and a gunman opened fire at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., during a service on the last day of Passover. The authorities were investigating whether the suspect in the shooting was the author of an anti-Semitic manifesto, in which the writer also claimed responsibility for the mosque fire in Escondido.
“Given recent attacks on houses of worship in this country and around the world, it is incumbent on law enforcement authorities to investigate the possibility of a bias motive for this arson,” Tark Aouadi, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Connecticut said in a statement about the New Haven fire.
Mr. Elevli said he had not heard of any threats targeting the mosque or its members before the fire. He said it had not crossed his mind that the mosque could have been targeted.
“This comes from nowhere,” he said. “It’s terrible for everybody.”
The mosque, at 531 Middletown Avenue, near Foxon Boulevard, has classrooms and apartments and opened in 2010, Mr. Elevli said. The mosque was under construction, and the building was largely empty when the fire occurred.
The mosque’s parent organization, the Diyanet Center of America, is a Maryland-based nonprofit that provides “religious, social and educational services to Turkish immigrants and Muslims,” according to the organization’s website.
Over the years, the New Haven mosque had become a place for families to gather, with educational programs for children on the weekends.
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Mr. Elevli said he got a call Sunday afternoon from an imam saying that the mosque was on fire. He said a visiting imam from Turkey was inside reading a book when he walked outside and noticed the building was on fire.
“I dropped everything and ran there,” Mr. Elevli said.
The roads close to the building were blocked, but he parked his car and walked closer to the building in heavy rain. He said many bystanders were crying.
Mr. Elevli said he was not sure when people will be able to re-enter the building. It will depend in part on the criminal investigation and a review of the damage for insurance purposes, he said. He is considering whether to erect a tent for people to gather under during Ramadan, the holiest month of the Muslim calendar.
Mr. Elevli said he had received numerous calls from nearby religious groups offering to help.
“Thank God all the churches and synagogues are calling us, willing to help, willing to share their space,” he said.
For months, a Democratic senator has been asking Trump judicial nominees what appears to be a straightforward question: Was Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that ended legalized school segregation, properly decided?
Legal scholars across the ideological spectrum say the answer is clearly yes. Still, more than two dozen nominees have declined to answer the question at a time when many schools remain segregated by race.
The standoff has come to resemble a serious game of chicken. If the nominees say Brown was correctly decided, are they obligated to opine on more controversial precedents, in particular Roe v. Wade, which established a woman’s right to abortion? Some nominees say the Democratic senators are not content with statements calling segregation immoral.
The other side says the refusal to engage undermines the national consensus around equal protection under the law that underlies Brown.
That decision, announced 65 years ago Friday, is widely seen as one of the Supreme Court’s greatest moments, with the court’s unanimity sending a powerful message to a segregated nation.
The matter was especially pronounced in the nomination of Wendy Vitter, who was confirmed Thursday as a federal district judge in Louisiana without the vote of a single Democratic senator.
“I don’t mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult, difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions — which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with,” Vitter said during her confirmation hearing. “If I start commenting on, ‘I agree with this case,’ or ‘don’t agree with this case,’ I think we get into a slippery slope.”
“I was stunned by her answer,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who posed the question, said this week on the Senate floor. “Brown is woven into the fabric of our nation. How could anyone suggest disagreeing with Brown, as she did?”
Blumenthal, who regularly asks Trump district and circuit court nominees about Brown, said he assumes they are acting on orders from the White House not to give an opinion about any case on the books.
A Justice Department spokesman replied: “Nominees are not instructed on how to answer any question.”
Some conservatives say judicial nominees are right to avoid the question, suspecting that Democrats are trying to force nominees down a politically dangerous path.
“If they say yes, the next question is, what do you think of Roe v. Wade?” said John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern University’s law school. Indeed, Blumenthal typically asks about a variety of controversial cases along with Brown.
“Brown is widely regarded as a landmark decision implementing the equal protection guarantee. I think the left is playing games with it precisely because it does have this stature,” said Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank.
Civil rights activists are appalled by the nominees’ refusal to answer the question, saying their reluctance to engage on bedrock civil rights law undermines national consensus that has developed against school segregation.
The NAACP opposed Vitter and other nominees who refuse to affirm Brown. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights sent a letter to senators urging them to vote no on the 27 nominees it counts who have declined to answer the question. The group identified four nominees who endorsed the decision.
“The Brown decision ended legalized apartheid in America’s school system, and it set the stage for African-American integration into all facets of American life,” wrote Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference.
Brown v. Board of Education had a sweeping effect on U.S. schools, as the system of school segregation was dismantled and black and white students in some cities were bused to schools under court orders to achieve integration. The decision ushered in significantly more racial integration in other aspects of American life, too.
Now, some of that progress has been reversed. The busing that resulted from the decision was widely unpopular in some cities and triggered significant white flight to the suburbs. A study by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles finds that progress made in educating black children with white children eroded after courts released school systems from desegregation orders.
The Supreme Court has been torn over the proper interpretation of Brown: whether it is a mandate for colorblind decision-making or a tool for integrating schools.
In considering cases from Seattle and Louisville in 2007, the court voted 5 to 4 to invalidate programs that used race as a factor in assigning students to schools. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that classifying children by race for desegregation was constitutionally no different from classification by race for segregation.
“Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” Roberts wrote. “The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again — even for very different reasons.”
He then delivered one of his most memorable lines in his tenure as chief justice: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
If well-known, it was not universally well-received. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joined the majority to invalidate the specific plans, but said he could not go along with Roberts’s broader pronouncements. “Fifty years of experience since Brown v. Board of Education should teach us that the problem before us defies so easy a solution,” Kennedy wrote.
The court’s liberals said that Roberts’s reading stood the intent of Brown on its head and that its work was not done.
“The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in his dissent. “To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown.”
Justice John Paul Stevens declared: “The chief justice rewrites the history of one of this court’s most important decisions.”
In a recent interview, Stevens repeated what he wrote in his dissent: that no member of the Supreme Court he joined in 1975 would have agreed with Roberts.
But during his own confirmation hearing in 2005, Roberts did not hesitate to endorse Brown. And he has repeatedly praised the “genius” of the spare decision that could be embraced unanimously by the court.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, at his confirmation hearing, called the decision “inspirational” and the “single greatest moment in Supreme Court history,” although Justice Neil M. Gorsuch resisted efforts during his confirmation hearing to pin him down on any Supreme Court precedents.
Beyond confirmation questioning, Brown has proven to be a tricky question in the past for conservative jurists. That’s especially so for “originalists” such as the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who argue that the Constitution should be interpreted based on how its words and amendments were understood at the time they were enacted.
It is difficult to argue under an originalist approach that the promise of equal protection in the 14th Amendment required desegregation because it was adopted during a time of strict, state-sponsored segregation.
Scalia said he would have voted in dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that upheld racial segregation and the policy of “separate but equal,” but he hated the question.
“Waving the bloody shirt of Brown again!” was Scalia’s common response when asked about it.
LONDON — Russians who were linked to interference in the 2016 U.S. election discussed ambitious plans to stoke unrest and even violence inside the U.S. as recently as 2018, according to documents reviewed by NBC News.
The documents — communications between associates of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked oligarch indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for previous influence operations against the U.S. — laid out a new plot to manipulate and radicalize African Americans. The plans show that Prigozhin’s circle has sought to exploit racial tensions well beyond Russia’s social media and misinformation efforts tied to the 2016 election.
The documents were obtained through the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative project funded by Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky. NBC News has not independently verified the materials, but forensic analysis by the Dossier Center appeared to substantiate the communications.
One document said that President Donald Trump’s election had “deepened conflicts in American society” and suggested that, if successful, the influence project would “undermine the country’s territorial integrity and military and economic potential.”
The revelations come as U.S. intelligence agencies have warned of probable Russian meddling in the 2020 election.
The documents contained proposals for several ways to further exacerbate racial discord in the future, including a suggestion to recruit African Americans and transport them to camps in Africa “for combat prep and training in sabotage.” Those recruits would then be sent back to America to foment violence and work to establish a pan-African state in the South, particularly in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
There is no indication that the plan — which is light on details — was ever put into action, but it offers a fresh example of the mindset around Russian efforts to sow discord in the U.S.
The blueprint, entitled “Development Strategy of a Pan-African State on U.S. Territory,” floated the idea of enlisting poor, formerly incarcerated African Americans “who have experience in organized crime groups” as well as members of “radical black movements for participation in civil disobedience actions.”
The goal was to “destabilize the internal situation in the U.S.”
Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of counterintelligence at the FBI and an NBC News contributor, who reviewed the documents, said that they offer a warning to the U.S.
“Regardless of whether or not these plans are an amateurish thought experiment, the fact that these people are talking about doing this should disturb Americans of all stripes,” Figliuzzi said.
“The unfortunate reality is that we’re seeing an adversary that will consider virtually anything to get what it wants, and if it means violence or splitting America along racial lines or eroding our trust in institutions, they’ll do it.”
Some of the documents appear to have been sent by Dzheykhun “Jay” Aslanov, an employee of the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based troll farm that played a key role in the 2016 Russian meddling campaign. Aslanov was one of 13 Russians indicted by Mueller in February 2018 for his role with the IRA.
The plan was shared with Mikhail Potepkin, a Russian businessman, who then circulated it more widely, according to communications reviewed by NBC News.
Both Aslanov and Potepkin have been linked to Prigozhin, a Russian catering magnate often described as “Putin’s chef.” Prigozhin was also indicted by Mueller for funding the IRA. Widely perceived as a Kremlin operative, he has been connected to a shadowy mercenary outfit known as the Wagner Group, whose guns-for-hire are reported to have been involved in Russian military operations in Syria and Eastern Ukraine, according to U.S. military officials.
The Mueller report exposed how Russian trolls, employed by associates of Prigozhin, deliberately inflamed racial tensions by spreading false and incendiary stories to African Americans via social media. Among the objectives was to suppress black turnout in the 2016 U.S. election.
Another of the newly obtained documents is a map of the U.S. overlaid with information about African American population size in seven southern states. Also included are the number of subscribers to websites and social media accounts that were set up by Russian trolls at the IRA to spread race-baiting rhetoric, the latter of which were later removed by the social media companies.
Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., who was briefed on the documents, said they highlight how ongoing racial issues in the U.S. can be used in misinformation efforts.
“Russia understands how critical the African American vote is to determining the outcome of elections,” said Demings, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. “And because we have not effectively dealt with racism as a country ourselves, I believe we've made ourselves vulnerable to foreign powers like Russia to continue to try to undermine.”
The documents also discuss how to expand Russia’s clout on the African continent and win business there, from arms sales to mining contracts. They outline propaganda efforts to target Africans and stir up negative opinions about Europe and the U.S.
Cooking up elaborate interference schemes is standard practice within Prigozhin’s circle, according to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russian intelligence and author of “The Red Web,” a book on Russian information warfare.
“This is typical of the way Prigozhin and his team operate,” Soldatov said. “They come up with pitches, some of them very ambitious. They discuss many possible ideas and then send the pitches to the Kremlin to be authorized or rejected. It’s their modus operandi.”
The idea of African American statehood has an intellectual precedent in Russia. During the early 20th century, communists in America proposed forming a “black-belt nation” in the South. Some party members traveled to the Soviet Union for training.
“Even though these kinds of initiatives from the Russians aren’t new to us, what is new is the rapidity with which they can get this message out on social media and saturate the American consumer with these kinds of thoughts,” said Figliuzzi, the former FBI official. “That puts the Russian initiative on steroids and should scare all of us.”
Florida state Sen. Dennis Baxley — a man who answers the question "What if a soft-boiled egg could feel hate?" — is at it again. The Ocala lawmaker is famous for two things: writing Florida's Stand Your Ground law and defending the Confederate States of America from critics. And, wouldn't you know it, during an appearance Sunday on Miami's NPR station, WLRN, Baxley said some more gobsmackingly racist nonsense.
Baxley went on WLRN to talk about abortion, since Georgia, Alabama, and other states recently passed nightmarish anti-abortion restrictions and Baxley himself had sponsored a similar anti-choice bill this year that died before becoming law. But Baxley, for some bizarre and entirely in-character reason, justified his anti-abortion stance by echoing straight-up white-supremacist talking points about Western European birthrates.
WLRN's recap states:
“When you get a birth rate less than 2 percent, that society is disappearing,” he said of Western Europe. “And it’s being replaced by folks that come behind them and immigrate, don’t wish to assimilate into that society and they do believe in having children. So you see that there are long range impacts to your society when the answer is to exterminate.”
As Orlando Weekly's Colin Wolf noted yesterday, this is factual nonsense in addition to being racist nonsense. Abortion rates don't have any correlation with birth rates — birth rates in the United States are dropping, sure, but they are dropping while rates of abortion are also falling.
But the bigger issue here is the racism. A key component of white-supremacist ideology is the notion that the white, Western European "race" will ultimately be "replaced" by immigrants of color who will take over and essentially exterminate white people. White nationalists refer to this as "replacement theory" or "white genocide."
This is basically the defining creed linking most white supremacists — everyone from Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to the 2017 neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, to this year's mass murderer in New Zealand echoed a version of it. But the idea is outright nonsense — it's a paranoid theory popularized by a racist French philosopher who is demonstrably terrified of immigrants. And, moreover, the basic precepts of "Western culture" or "Judeo-Christian values" are recent historical inventions that promote the false idea that white Christian Europeans solely created things such as democracy, rational inquiry, and modern science. Iowa Rep. Steve King, who is essentially an outright white nationalist, has been lambasted for repeating many of the same points.
It's all hogwash, which is why a rube like Baxley seems to have fallen for it. Baxley simply does not like facts or history — he's the descendant of Confederate soldiers and infamously continues defending the Confederacy as something that should be honored rather than the racist, traitorous slave society it was. Mere days after a white supremacist killed a woman at the 2017 Charlottesville rally, Baxley refused to cancel a speech he was scheduled to give to a local pro-Confederate group.
In addition to being racist, Baxley also got pretty misogynistic in his interview. He told WLRN he believes fetuses “are independent lives separate from the mother who’s carrying the child," an idea as sexist as it is scientifically stupid.
Harriet Tubman — former slave, abolitionist, “conductor” on the Underground Railroad — will not become the face of the $20 bill until after President Trump leaves office, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday.
Plans to unveil the Tubman bill in 2020, an Obama administration initiative, would be postponed until at least 2026, Mr. Mnuchin said, and the bill itself would not likely be in circulation until 2028.
Until then, bills with former President Andrew Jackson’s face will continue to pour out of A.T.M.s and fill Americans’ wallets.
Mr. Mnuchin, concerned that the president might create an uproar by canceling the new bill altogether, was eager to delay its redesign until Mr. Trump was out of office, some senior Treasury Department officials have said. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump criticized the Obama administration’s plans for the bill.
That April, Mr. Trump called the change “pure political correctness” and suggested that Tubman, whom he praised, could be added to a far less common denomination, like the $2 bill. “Andrew Jackson had a great history, and I think it’s very rough when you take somebody off the bill,” Mr. Trump said at the time.
Mr. Trump has frequently described Jackson, whose portrait hangs in the Oval Office, as a populist hero who reminds him of himself. Two months into his presidency, Mr. Trump stopped to lay a wreath at Jackson’s tomb at the Hermitage, his plantation in Nashville. “It was during the Revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite,” Mr. Trump told a crowd gathered there. “Does that sound familiar?”
The delay comes three years after Mr. Mnuchin’s predecessor, Jacob J. Lew, announced plans for a sweeping and symbolic redrawing of the currency that would see Tubman replace the slaveholding Jackson on the face of the note.
Treasury Department officials did not say whether Mr. Trump had a hand in the decision, and Mr. Mnuchin would not say whether he himself believes that Tubman should be on the bill’s face. “I’ve made no decision as it relates to that,” Mr. Mnuchin said Wednesday at a congressional hearing in response to a question from Representative Ayanna S. Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts.
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During the hearing, Mr. Mnuchin said that he was now focused on enhancing the anti-counterfeiting security features of the currency, focusing first on the $10 and $50 bills. Designing new imagery is on the back burner.
“It is my responsibility now to focus on what is the issue of counterfeiting and the security features,” Mr. Mnuchin said. “The ultimate decision on the redesign will most likely be another secretary down the road.”
Replacing Jackson with Tubman was both filled with symbolism and marred by controversy.
Tubman was born into slavery, escaped and then returned to the South, where she led other slaves to freedom. She was a Union scout during the Civil War and later advocated women’s voting rights. Jackson orchestrated the removal of Native Americans from lands to the east of the Mississippi River and sent them marching west on the so-called Trail of Tears.
In 2017, speculation began that Mr. Trump might scrap Mr. Lew’s plan for the $20 bill when mentions of it were scrubbed from the Treasury Department’s website during a redesign.
Then, that August, Mr. Mnuchin made clear that Tubman’s future on the bill was in doubt.
“People have been on the bills for a long period of time,” he told CNBC. “This is something we’ll consider. Right now, we’ve got a lot more important issues to focus on.”
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, recently introduced the Harriet Tubman Tribute Act and called on the Treasury Department to offer clarity on the status of the $20 bill. The legislation, if passed, would direct the department to place the likeness of Tubman on $20 Federal Reserve notes printed after Dec. 31, 2020.
“There is no excuse for the administration’s failure to make this redesign a priority,” Ms. Shaheen said. “Sadly, this delay sends an unmistakable message to women and girls, and communities of color, who were promised they’d see Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.”
Supporters of the tribute act in the House — including Representatives Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, and John Katko, Republican of New York — also expressed frustration with the Trump administration over the delay.
“The administration’s decision to drag their feet and delay the redesign of the $20 until 2028 is unacceptable,” Mr. Cummings said in a statement. “Our currency must reflect the important role women, and especially women of color, have played in our nation’s history.”
Former Obama administration officials have been quiet about Tubman during the past two years, hopeful that Mr. Trump would forget about the plan and allow it to proceed.
Mr. Lew, through a spokeswoman, had no comment on Wednesday. But Gene Sperling, the former director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, assailed Mr. Mnuchin on Twitter for embracing Mr. Trump’s divisiveness.
“Today Mnuchin pathetically announces that Tubman on $20 will be delayed till 2028 — meaning their goal is never,” he tweeted.
Women have appeared on United States currency a handful of times, often on seldom-used $1 coins. In the 19th century, Pocahontas and Martha Washington were the first women to make it onto American currency — and the last to make it onto paper.
Pocahontas appeared among a group of men on the $10 bill and the $20 bill in the late 19th century. Washington was on $1 silver certificates in 1886, 1891 and 1896.
The suffragist Susan B. Anthony was the first woman to appear on an American coin: a dollar produced from 1979-81 and again, briefly, in 1999. But originally, the Treasury Department planned to depict the allegorical Lady Liberty. It was not until legislators and activists objected that the department agreed to honor a real-life woman.
In 2015, Mr. Lew started a 10-month process to develop a plan that was initially intended to honor a female historical figure on the $10 bill, replacing Alexander Hamilton. After much controversy, consternation and public debate — in part because of the popularity of the musical “Hamilton,” which is based on the secretary’s life — Mr. Lew changed course and instead made plans for a vignette of suffragists to be put on the back of the $10 and for Tubman to become the face of the $20 bill.
On Wednesday, activists from the group Women on 20s, which helped push Tubman to the prominence of the $20 bill, were disappointed but hopeful that the delay would avoid meddling from Mr. Trump.
“At Women On 20s, we’re not surprised that Secretary Mnuchin may be kicking the design reveal of the $20 bill to sometime beyond the potential interference of a Trump presidency,” the group said in a statement calling on Congress to pass legislation to add Tubman to the currency. “As we’ve been saying for years, symbols do matter.”
https://tubmanstamp.com/
I think it would be difficult to make payment with, the cashier might reject it. But it works in machines that accept money. I go through self check out at my grocery stores all the time. But I normally use my c.c.
Franklin and Jessica Richardson had planned for a relaxing Memorial Day weekend. They would spend Sunday picnicking on the sandy shores of Oktibbeha County Lake, a popular fishing destination on the outskirts of Starkville, Miss., and maybe even rent a cabin for the night.
Instead, within minutes of their arrival, the young black couple were facing down a white campground manager who pulled out a gun and told them to leave.
A spokesman for Kampgrounds of America, a chain that oversees hundreds of commercial campgrounds nationwide, told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the property manager for the Starkville location had been fired. But for the Richardsons, the experience was made all the more harrowing — and somewhat ironic — by the fact that Franklin, a sergeant in the Army National Guard, had recently returned from a nine-month deployment in the Middle East, according to WCBI.
“It’s kind of crazy,” he told the station. “You go over there and don’t have a gun pointed at you, and you come back home and the first thing that happens is you have a gun pointed at you.”
The incident appears to have stemmed from confusion over whether the picnic spots by the lakefront were public or private property. To Jessica Richardson, who documented a snippet of the confrontation in a 39-second video that had been viewed more than 500,000 times on Facebook as of early Wednesday, the manager’s response proved that racism was “alive and well.”
“You can feel the intent behind it,” she told WCBI. “I felt it. I felt the heat from it. I felt it in her eyes. I knew exactly what it was.”
After waking up to beautiful weather on Sunday, the couple researched lakes where they could have a picnic with their 2-year-old dog, she wrote on Facebook. They settled on Oktibbeha County Lake, which is located roughly 10 miles from Starkville, the home of Mississippi State University.
Less than five minutes after they arrived, Richardson wrote, “a truck pulls up and a white lady screams at us.”
The woman, who identified herself as the property manager, jumped out of the black Dodge Ram and kept one finger on the trigger as she pointed a gun at them, Richardson told WCBI.
“She was just like, ‘Get, get, you don’t belong here, you don’t belong here, you don’t belong here,'” Richardson said.
Richardson pulled out her cellphone and began filming. In the video that she posted to Facebook on Sunday afternoon, a woman with short white hair and a yellow Kampgrounds of America T-shirt can be seen approaching the couple with her gun drawn and pointed at the ground.
“This lady literally just pulled a gun because we’re out here and didn’t have reservations, for a lake that we didn’t even know we had to have reservations for,” Richardson narrates as the woman walks closer, a stern expression pressed on her face. “The only thing you had to do was tell us.”
The woman can be heard telling the couple that they should have checked in with the campground’s office.
“We didn’t know,” Richardson said in the video. “The only thing you had to tell us was to leave, we would have left. You did not have to pull a gun.”
The woman tucked the gun back into the pocket of her denim shorts.
“Well, I’m just telling you, you need to leave because it’s under private ownership,” the property manager replied. “Y’all just can’t be out here. KOA won’t let you.”
The couple left, Richardson wrote. On their way out, they stopped by the campground’s office. There, they met another property manager, who happened to be the woman’s husband. Confusingly, he contradicted what his wife had told them.
“I get out and start talking to him,” Franklin Richardson told WCBI. “The first thing he says is, ‘Oh, you don’t need a reservation for the lake.’ Then, she pulls up flying, hops out of the car, then proceeded to yell at my wife, ‘Get in the car, you need to get back in the car,’ just cussing her out and she’s not even saying anything.”
In a statement shared with The Post, Kampgrounds of America spokesman Mike Gast said that the company “does not condone the use of a firearm in any manner on our properties or those owned and operated by our franchisees.”
“The employee involved in the incident has been relieved of her duties at the Starkville KOA,” he added.
It’s unclear whether the Richardsons were inadvertently trespassing when the incident took place. Gast said that the couple had been “seeking to access a lake via the campground’s private property.” But Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors President Orlando Trainer told the Commercial Dispatch that he wasn’t sure if the area where they were picnicking would actually be considered private property, because the KOA in Starkville is located on land that belongs to the local school district.
The lake itself is public, and online reviews suggest the Richardsons aren’t the first to be confused: Fishermen and photographers have previously reported that the campground’s manager screamed at them for trespassing on private property when they showed up without a reservation.
The incident is the latest to call attention to the way that black people engaging in everyday activities are treated with suspicion, resulting in aggressive questioning or phone calls to the police. Parks and outdoor recreation areas, in particular, have a long history of racial discrimination: In the early 20th century, the administrators of national parks discouraged African Americans from visiting, and camping facilities were strictly segregated. Visitors to those parks remain predominantly white, despite the efforts of groups that aim to encourage more people of color to explore the outdoors.
Researchers have found that parks are still widely perceived as places where African Americans will face unwelcoming, or downright hostile, treatment. The experience that the Richardsons described would seem to confirm that. To Jessica, the most shocking part of Sunday’s confrontation was hearing the campground manager say, “Get, get” to her and her husband, making her feel that they were being treated like animals.
“You say ‘Get, get’ to a stray dog that’s on your porch,” she told WCBI. “That ‘Get, get’ got to me more than ‘You don’t belong here.’ ”
Some who noticed his turban and unshorn beard called him a terrorist. Others taunted that he was Osama bin Laden. From nearly his first day as a school bus driver in suburban Maryland, Sawinder Singh, an observant Sikh, said he was targeted for the way he looked.
The harassment came from co-workers, supervisors and students, he said. One day while driving the roads of Montgomery County, he missed a turn, only to have a large group of middle-schoolers aboard shout that he was kidnapping them.
“The driver is going to blow up the bus!” he recalls them yelling.
But 13 years into his career with the county school system, Singh, 45, is turning a page on those experiences, as his lawyers and school officials settle issues raised in a complaint filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2016.
The agreement, expected to be announced Tuesday, includes efforts to improve cultural education and training on recognizing bias, which Singh said he hopes will lead to a greater understanding among employees and students of Sikhs and other religious minorities in the diverse school system.
His attorneys assert the case could have a broad reach nationally, given Montgomery’s stature as one of the country’s largest and most well-regarded school systems.
“If a school district of its caliber is doing this, then other districts will take notice,” said Amrith Kaur, legal director for the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights organization representing Singh. “I hope that it’s a wake-up call for other districts and for other employers.”
Kaur’s organization, which has represented hundreds of hate-crime clients over the past 18 years, says that Sikhs in America are hundreds of times more likely than the average American to experience bias. Many are targeted because of their skin color, turbans, uncut hair and religious faith; some, including Singh, also are immigrants.
“This is an issue that continues to grow, and it’s not going away,” Kaur said.
School system officials said in a statement they investigated each allegation Singh made and took “swift corrective action” with staff members and students who engaged in offensive behavior.
They said they are committed to providing a safe and welcoming environment, citing training efforts on cultural proficiency and implicit bias, along with broader efforts to address hate-based incidents in schools.
In response to incidents cited by Singh, school officials said they conducted face-to-face training on workplace bullying among transportation department workers in 2016, published a staff newsletter story in 2016 about Singh to highlight his background and experiences, and listed him as a resource for teachers on Sikh or South Asian cultural programs.
“We do not and will not tolerate behavior that is hateful, bigoted, racist or discriminatory,” the statement said.
Singh, a father of three who lives in Clarksburg and has two children in the school system, started his job in 2006. He was a musician and music teacher in India — and a devotional singer at Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in the Sikh religion, he said.
He moved to the United States in 1999, following several trips to the country to perform music, and later landed a job with the school system’s transportation operations.
“Working with the school system, to me, it was a kind of honor, and especially working with students and children,” he said. “I felt that I am going to start their day and end their day. I was very happy about it.”
But harassment soon followed, he said. As an observant Sikh, he said, his unshorn hair and beard are integral to his religion and considered among his “articles of faith” — showing thankfulness and humility and that “whatever you are given by God, you keep it, you do not touch it.”
In the beginning, Singh did not want to make waves and did not report incidents, his lawyers say.
“He didn’t do it the first time or the second time or even the fifth time something unfair happened to him,” said Karla Gilbride, a senior attorney with Public Justice, a public interest legal organization that joined the Sikh Coalition on the case in January 2018.
According to the EEOC complaint, co-workers in the transportation department called Singh “Osama bin Laden,” “al-Qaeda” and “Taliban.” When bin Laden was killed in 2011, it said, fellow employees expressed condolences to him as if they were related.
One supervisor threatened to put duct tape on Singh’s beard and pull it off, the document said, and when he said he did not appreciate the joke — and that his hair was an expression of his religion — he was told he lacked a sense of humor.
Many offensive comments came from students, too: The complaint lists 21 incidents he said he reported to school officials from 2011 to 2016, each listed with a date.
One student reached out to shake his hand in August 2013, then asked if he had a bomb. A group of students at first refused to board his bus in November 2015, saying he was a terrorist.
In February 2016, a student began to board, then stepped back, saying, “Look at the driver! We are all going to die today!”
Singh said he struggled with how he was treated. His attorneys said that while the school system responded to many incidents reported by Singh, the response was inadequate.
“These things were troubling me all the time when I came home, affecting my sleep,” he said. “My background is in serving, not harming anybody.”
Starting in 2011, Singh tried to report major incidents of harassment by students in writing, according to the EEOC complaint. A copy of the EEOC complaint shared with The Washington Post was redacted, with names of employees and schools removed.
In 2012, it said, a supervisor told him that his efforts to inform students’ schools of their behavior “would ruin students’ education.” The supervisor tried to dissuade him from completing paperwork and said he was too easily offended, according to the document.
In response to the EEOC complaint, school officials said they deny being liable for discrimination but believe “we can and must work together with the community to ensure all students and staff are treated with respect.”
In other allegations, Singh’s EEOC complaint said he was denied opportunities for training and advancement and “required to do less complex work when compared to my non-Sikh, non-South Asian, non-Indian origin colleagues.”
Singh was promoted to bus route supervisor but asserts he was assigned menial tasks. And after the Sikh Coalition advocated on his behalf, the complaint alleged he was retaliated against — written up harshly for dropping two students off at home, rather than at a caregiver’s, after believing their account that a parent’s note had been lost.
He was suspended without pay for 10 days and cited for a “critical offense” that bars promotion for at least three years, the complaint said.
As part of the settlement, the school system will establish a project team to consider changes to training initiatives that would make them more interactive and based in real-life scenarios, and include awareness of the Sikh religion. The two organizations involved in Singh’s case will propose changes that school officials will consider; the first formal proposal should be offered within 60 days.
The goal is a more systemic approach that includes assessing the climate for students and staff of all ethnicities and religions, and going beyond individual discipline, Singh’s lawyers said.
The agreement also includes expanded career opportunities for Singh, including the chance to work under a mentor and transfer to another bus depot. Singh’s attorneys declined to discuss any potential financial compensation in the settlement.
Singh said he is happy the school system was willing to work on the agreement — and hopes that processes and procedures improve for others facing harassment.
“I’m hoping there will be more enforcement,” he said, adding that he does not want to see anyone else have to bear up to similar disparagement. “If any employees are being discriminated against, there should be proper investigations.”
“I want everyone to feel a sense of belonging,” he said.
A photo-printing company has pulled its advertisements from Laura Ingraham’s show after the Fox News program aired a graphic featuring white supremacist and anti-Semite Paul Nehlen.
The controversy stems from a Thursday night episode of "The Ingraham Angle,” in which the host lamented recent comments made by Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), criticizing Facebook’s refusal to take down an altered video of Pelosi.
Speaking with conservative activist Candace Owens, Ingraham likened the altered video to a work of satire. Clinton’s and Pelosi’s complaints, she said, were simply a coordinated effort from the left to “silence conservative voices” ahead of next year’s election, a common accusation by conservatives, including President Trump.
“Facebook now, what do they monitor, hate?” Ingraham asked. “That sounds good until you realize hate — and these are some of the people that they’ve shunned.”
Fox then displayed a graphic featuring Owens and seven other “prominent voices censored on social media.” Among those silenced, Ingraham said, were “people who believe in border enforcement, people who believe in national sovereignty.”
But for many, the inclusion of Nehlen — who was banned from Twitter in February 2018 for a racist tweet about Meghan Markle, actress and wife of Britain’s Prince Harry, and is known for espousing anti-Semitic rhetoric — was indefensible. Once a fringe candidate in the Republican congressional primaries in Wisconsin, Nehlen has described himself as “pro-White” and has a documented affiliation with the alt-right movement. He once tweeted a list of his critics on Twitter, writing that of those 81 people, “74 are Jews while only 7 are non-Jews.”
Nehlen was denounced by Breitbart, and soon afterward, his own party.
CNN news anchor Jake Tapper also criticized Ingraham on Friday, tweeting: “Just a reminder that Paul Nehlen is a racist and if you’re defending him that’s what you’re defending.”
Included in the backlash were numerous calls to Ingraham’s advertisers to boycott her show. By Friday evening, at least one had taken notice: photo-printing company Fracture.
“Last night one of our ads aired during an episode of The Ingraham Angle during which Laura Ingraham expressed alarming views that run entirely counter to the values that we hold as a company,” Fracture wrote in a statement. “Effective immediately, we are no longer advertising on The Ingraham Angle.”
In a statement, Fox News vehemently denied assertions that Ingraham was defending Nehlen.
“It is obscene to suggest that Laura Ingraham was defending Paul Nehlen’s despicable actions, especially when some of the names in our graphic were pulled from an Associated Press report on best known political extremists banned from Facebook,” the statement read. “Anyone who watches Laura’s show knows that she is a fierce protector of freedom of speech and the intent of the segment was to highlight the growing trend of unilateral censorship in America.”
Ingraham appeared to respond to those who had condemned her show in a Friday morning tweet, writing, “Retweeting screenshots of despicable old tweets by racists and/or anti-Semites must make those racist & anti-Semites very happy.”
Fracture, which promised to update its media-buying criteria following Thursday’s episode, is one of several companies that have pulled out of "The Ingraham Angle” in recent years. In March 2018, she lost more than a dozen advertisers after accusing Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg of whining when he was rejected from four California colleges.
Among those to pull out: Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Hulu, Jenny Craig, Ruby Tuesday and Miracle-Ear. Ingraham later apologized. However, Hogg — who was eventually accepted into Harvard — alleged the mea culpa was a front to “save your advertisers.”
The Washington Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi wrote in December these advertiser decisions tend not to affect Fox’s bottom line. That month, at least 18 companies had pulled their ads from Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show after he claimed immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier and more divided.”
But these upset advertisers can be moved to other programs throughout the day, Farhi noted, leaving Fox with no loss of revenue.
YouTube has chosen not to take action against right-wing video personality Steven Crowder after Vox host Carlos Maza posted clips of Crowder repeatedly harassing him with derogatory, anti-gay, and racist statements, which Maza says resulted in hordes of Crowder’s fans doxxing him and subjecting him to abuse on social media.
Last week, Maza posted a cut of Crowder’s show to Twitter, including sections where Crowder called him a “lispy queer,” a “token Vox gay atheist sprite,” and a “gay Mexican.” Other attacks included an offensive pantomime of Maza’s voice in which Crowder pretended to eat chips and exclaimed “just can’t eat one, like dicks.” (According to Maza, Crowder has also referred to him by the derogatory slur “anchor baby”). Maza said in followup tweets that Crowder’s videos, many of which had received millions of views, continually led to him experiencing a “wall of homophobic/racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter,” as well as waves of taunting texts to his cell phone number and on one occasion, a phone call.
“This has been going on for years,” Maza tweeted.
YouTube’s hate speech policy page specifically bars “content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups” based on a number of attributes including ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation. In a subsection, YouTube specifically writes creators cannot:
Use racial, ethnic, religious, or other slurs where the primary purpose is to promote hatred.
Use stereotypes that incite or promote hatred based on any of the attributes noted above. This can take the form of speech, text, or imagery promoting these stereotypes or treating them as factual.
Invoking hurtful stereotypes of gay men as effeminate to target a specific gay person, as well as disparaging references to that person’s ethnic background, seems about as straightforward a violation of this policy as can be. YouTube writes on that page that content in violation of these rules will be removed and can result in a creator having strikes applied to their account.
Perhaps that’s why in an obviously insincere apology video uploaded this weekend, Crowder tried his best to come off as indifferent but nonetheless felt the need to insist off the bat he was “not in violation of policy guidelines.”
Turns out YouTube agrees! The platform responded on Tuesday by saying it would not take any action on the videos involved. After claiming YouTube takes “allegations of harassment very seriously” and that they had spent days “conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged to us,” the Team YouTube Twitter wrote that while Crowder’s language was “clearly hurtful,” “the videos as posted don’t violate our policies” and will “remain on our site.”
Gizmodo asked YouTube and its parent company, Google, via email why the specific language used by Crowder and highlighted in Maza’s videos did not constitute a violation of the previously aforementioned rules. In response, the Google Press Team directed Gizmodo to the prior thread on Twitter, but included “Further info on Background (okay to paraphrase, according to YouTube)”.
Gizmodo did not agree to any kind of “on background” stipulation with YouTube beforehand, so here it is.
Amid relaying some boilerplate data points on its anti-harassment policies and insisting that Crowder did not personally spread Maza’s personal information online—which neither Gizmodo nor Maza have alleged—the Google Press Team said that it takes into account whether “criticism is focused primarily on debating the opinions expressed or is solely malicious.” It also argued that “the main point of these videos was not to harass or threaten, but rather respond to the opinion” expressed by Maza in prior videos:
We have strict policies that prohibit harassment on YouTube.
In the first quarter of 2019 we removed 47,443 videos and 10,623 accounts for violation of our policies on cyberbullying and harassment.
We take into consideration whether criticism is focused primarily on debating the opinions expressed or is solely malicious. We apply these policies consistently, regardless of how many views a video has.
In videos flagged to YouTube, Crowder has not instructed his viewers to harass Maza on YouTube or any other platform and the main point of these videos was not to harass or threaten, but rather to respond to the opinion.
There is certain behavior that is never ok: that includes encouraging viewers to harass others online and offline, or revealing nonpublic personal information (doxxing).
None of Maza’s personal information was ever revealed in content uploaded by Crowder and flagged to our teams for review.
(The press team did not respond to multiple follow-up requests for comment from Gizmodo on the specifics of how it determined Crowder’s language was not in violation of its hate speech policy.)
So in other words, YouTube’s stance is apparently that it is okay for a host with millions of subscribers (3,846,360 as of early Wednesday a.m.) to repeatedly engage in racist, homophobic bullying so long as it’s couched as part of some kind of ambiguously defined ‘debate.’ This is not only a fundamental misunderstanding of the intent of hate speech, which is not to “debate” or “respond” but to dehumanize, but is almost indistinguishable from bad-faith rhetorical arguments offered up by people spreading hate speech. In fact, Maza said that in 2018 he received hundreds of anonymous texts saying “debate steven crowder.”
YouTube is refusing to take action on this not so long after it denied allegations its proprietary algorithms for juicing audience numbers are contributing to the spread and normalization of hate speech online—what’s been colloquially referred to as the “extremist rabbit hole.” (Coincidentally, one data-driven report by Data & Society last year listed Crowder as one of a network of 65 YouTube personalities, ranging from more mainstream conservative figures like psychologist Jordan Peterson to white supremacists like Richard Spencer, that promote reactionary positions through “an interlocking series of videos, references, and guest appearances.”)
“It’s bullshit and they know it. Literally every form of hate speech qualifies as a ‘hurtful opinion,’” Maza told Gizmodo via Twitter DM. “YouTube is trying to make excuses to avoid enforcing its own policies, because it knows that enforcing them would require them to punish some of their most ‘engaging’ creators. YouTube doesn’t give a shit about actually stopping harassment, it’s doing damage control so it can keep tricking advertisers into believing that it has the courage to regulate its own platform.”
“... Audiences don’t need to be explicitly asked to harass a target to become abusive,” Maza added. “If they see a major YouTuber doing it, they get the message that that kind of abuse is acceptable. Give me a break... My issue isn’t that Crowder is asking his followers to harass me. It’s that he’s harassing me, with homophobic and racist language, in front of millions of loyal listeners, thanks to an audience that YouTube helped him find and build.”
Maza posed a question to LGBTQ+ employees at YouTube: “YouTube has decided to side with the people who made our lives miserable in high school. It’s decided to use the platform you’ve helped create in order to arm bigots and bullies with massive megaphones. Why do you stick around? What are you going to do about it?”
By the way, YouTube’s account on the site is currently decorated to celebrate LGBT Pride Month.
n a separate statement posted to its subsidiary the Verge, Vox Media wrote that YouTube “now appears to be broken in some ways that we can’t tolerate. By refusing to take a stand on hate speech, they allow the worst of their communities to hide behind cries of “free speech” and “fake news” all while increasingly targeting people with the most offensive and odious harassment... YouTube is not enforcing the policies and are not removing known and identified users who employ hate speech tactics. By tacitly looking the other way, it encourages this behavior and contributes to a society more divided and more radicalized.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib choked up during a congressional hearing on Tuesday while reading one of the torrent of death threats she said she has received for the crime of being one of the first Muslim women ever to serve in Congress.
Tlaib, who has been the consistent target of racist and Islamophobic attacks since taking office, was asking FBI officials about the “tools” they have to fight domestic extremism when she read from a letter she and fellow Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar had been sent. She had to pause to compose herself while reading the letter and was visibly emotional as she finished it.
The letter writer referred to Tlaib and Omar as “ragheads,” said they were pleased to hear about the Christchurch massacre, and added, “This is a great start. Let’s hope and pray that it continues here in the good old USA. The only good Muslim is a dead one.”
https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1136013078510874624
“We get so many of them,” she added, “and I keep asking, what happens? What happens to these individuals...I’m a mother. I want to go home to my two boys.”
Last week, as Donald Trump curtsied before the Queen; as Congressional Democrats continued to cower from their constitutional obligations; while we took our horses down to Old Town Road, mounted Megan Thee Stallion’s bandwagon and watched what happens When They See Us, the Federal Bureau of Investigation admitted that prejudiced assumptions against the Black Lives Matter movement, Muslim Americans and black identity extremists was all a lie. Intelligence officials sat in front of lawmakers and openly admitted that white supremacists and right-wing violence are the biggest domestic terror threat but also admitted that federal agencies aren’t really doing anything about it.
On Tuesday, June 4, the House Oversight subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties held the second session in a series of hearings titled: “Confronting White Supremacy.” Among those testifying before the subcommittee was Michael C. McGarrity, the director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. McGarrity explained that right-wing extremists like the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh were charged with hate crimes instead of domestic terrorism simply because “there’s no domestic terrorism charge.”
To be clear, there is a law that defines domestic terrorism but not one that charges people who commit acts of terrorism in America. People who conspire with international terrorists—even if they aren’t materially involved in an act of violence—are charged with “acts of terrorism transcending international boundaries.” But someone who sends pipe bombs to Democrats; plows through a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville, Va.; or shoots up a church in Charleston, S.C., will not face domestic terrorism charges.
The subcommittee noted that there was a 17 percent increase in reported hate crimes in 2017 from the previous year and a 31 percent increase since 2014. And in spite of the ADL’s report that white supremacists were responsible for 78 percent of extremist murders in 2018, the FBI still dedicates most of its time, money and manpower to investigating and stopping international terrorism. According to the Daily Beast, the Trump administration even disbanded a unit in the Department of Homeland Security dedicated to domestic terrorism and right-wing extremists, upsetting many intelligence and law enforcement officials.
“The FBI has testified the bureau allocates its resources almost exactly backwards than the problem would suggest,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said. “Devoting 80 percent of field agents to stopping international terrorism including Islamic extremism and only 20 percent to stopping domestic terrorism including far right and white supremacist extremism.”
Not only did McGarrity concede that people labeled as “black identity extremists” had nothing in common except their skin color, but Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s (D-Mass.) question about the FBI’s “black Identity extremist” designation prompted a startling revelation from McGarrity.
When Pressley pressed McGarrity on the secret “race paper” and the black identity extremist designation first uncovered in the 12-page FBI document called “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers,” the counterterrorism director revealed that the FBI no longer uses the term.
“The designation no longer exists?” Pressley asked.
“It hasn’t existed since I’ve been here for 17 months,” McGarrity replied. “We are not using ‘black identity extremists’ as a term or for a group.”
And despite the insistence of the president, Steve King and every guest on Fox News that there are bad people on “both sides,” including Black Lives Matter terrorists, McGarrity disclosed the astonishing number of people who have been killed by Black Lives Matter terrorists:
Pressley: How many extremist murders has the FBI linked to Black Lives Matter or similar black activist groups?
McGarrity: We don’t work Black Lives Matter it’s a movement. It’s an ideology. We don’t work that.
Pressley: So the answer is none. Can you just say that for the record? There has been no killing that the FBI can link to black Lives Matter or similar black activist groups, to your knowledge.
McGarrity: To my knowledge—I’d have to go back—but to my knowledge, right now, no.
When it comes to any form of resistance or fight for equality, America will always paint black people as terrorists. Law enforcement officers always knew this was bullshit. The FBI was fully aware that Black Lives Matter posed no threat, but COINTELPRO is constantly updated to monitor every movement for freedom and equality, including “defiant” anti-lynching advocates, the “Un-American, communist-inspired” civil rights protests and the Black Power movement that FBI officials called “the greatest threat to internal security of the country.”
“To recap: The FBI created a new category of threat,” NPR’s Hannah Allam noted. “And two years later quietly abandoned it without explanation.”
But when it comes to white people’s stance on black protest, as the great poet and philosopher Montero Lamar Hill once said: “Can’t nobody tell me nothing.”
They can’t tell me nothing.
ederal hate crime charges have been filed against the son of a sheriff's deputy who was arrested in connection with a string of fires at three historically black churches in Louisiana, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday.
Holden Matthews, 21, faces three counts of intentional damage to religious property, which constitute hate crimes under the Church Arson Prevention Act. He was also charged with three counts of using fire to commit a felony, the Justice Department said in a news release after the federal indictment was unsealed.
The indictment says the fires were set "because of the religious character" of the properties.
The fires at the three churches, which were all started by gasoline and set from late March to early April, unnerved churchgoers in the St. Landry Parish region — conjuring up images of attacks on black churches in the South during the civil rights movement, and more recently, during the 1990s.
"Churches are vital places of worship and fellowship for our citizens and bind us together as a community," David Joseph, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, said in a statement. "Our freedom to safely congregate in these churches and exercise our religious beliefs must be jealously guarded. Today we are one step closer to justice for the parishioners of these churches and the St. Landry Parish communities affected by these acts."
Matthews already faced state charges in the church fires, including violating Louisiana's hate crime law. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.
During a news conference in April after Matthews' arrest, St. Landry Parish Sheriff Bobby Guidroz revealed that he is the son of one of his deputies. He added that Matthews' father, Roy Matthews, was unaware of his son's alleged involvement.
Investigators at the time also described Matthews' possible connection with "black metal" music, and said they were determining whether he was influenced by a subgenre that has been linked to white nationalist ideology and church arsons in Norway.
Matthews, who has no previous criminal record, was denied bail in his state case and his trial is scheduled to begin in September.
If convicted in the federal case, he faces up to 20 years per count of intentional damage to religious property, as well as a $250,000 fine and restitution for each of the counts, among other potential punishments.
The churches were empty at the time of the fires, officials have said, although each suffered considerable damage and forced worshippers to hold services at other locations.
Extensive work was well underway on a new $20 bill bearing the image of Harriet Tubman when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced last month that the design of the note would be delayed for technical reasons by six years and might not include the former slave and abolitionist.
Many Americans were deeply disappointed with the delay of the bill, which was to be the first to bear the face of an African-American. The change would push completion of the imagery past President Trump’s time in office, even if he wins a second term, stirring speculation that Mr. Trump had intervened to keep his favorite president, Andrew Jackson, a fellow populist, on the front of the note.
But Mr. Mnuchin, testifying before Congress, said new security features under development made the 2020 design deadline set by the Obama administration impossible to meet, so he punted Tubman’s fate to a future Treasury secretary.
In fact, work on the new $20 note began before Mr. Trump took office, and the basic design already on paper most likely could have satisfied the goal of unveiling a note bearing Tubman’s likeness on next year’s centennial of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. An image of a new $20 bill, produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and obtained by The New York Times from a former Treasury Department official, depicts Tubman in a dark coat with a wide collar and a white scarf.
That preliminary design was completed in late 2016.
A spokeswoman for the bureau, Lydia Washington, confirmed that preliminary designs of the new note were created as part of research that was done after Jacob J. Lew, President Barack Obama’s final Treasury secretary, proposed the idea of a Tubman bill.
The development of the note did not stop there. A current employee of the bureau, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, personally viewed a metal engraving plate and a digital image of a Tubman $20 bill while it was being reviewed by engravers and Secret Service officials as recently as May 2018. This person said that the design appeared to be far along in the process.
Within the bureau, this person said, there was a sense of excitement and pride about the new $20 note.
But the Treasury Department, which oversees the engraving bureau, decided that a new $20 bill would not be made public next year. Current and former department officials say Mr. Mnuchin chose the delay to avoid the possibility that Mr. Trump would cancel the plan outright and create even more controversy.
In an interview last week, Mr. Mnuchin denied that the reasons for the delay were anything but technical.
“Let me assure you, this speculation that we’ve slowed down the process is just not the case,” Mr. Mnuchin said, speaking on the sidelines of the G-20 finance ministers meeting in Japan.
The Treasury secretary reiterated that security features drive the change of the currency and rejected the notion that political interference was at play. He declined to say if he believed his predecessor had tried to politicize the currency.
“There is a group of experts that’s interagency, including the Secret Service and others and B.E.P., that are all career officials that are focused on this,” he said, referring to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. “They’re working as fast as they can.”
Monica Crowley, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mnuchin, added that the release into circulation of the new $20 note remained on schedule with the bureau’s original timeline of 2030. She did not, however, say that the bill would feature Tubman.
“The scheduled release (printing) of the $20 bill is on a timetable consistent with the previous administration,” she said in a statement.
In a separate statement released on Friday afternoon, Len Olijar, the director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, said the bureau “was never going to unveil a note design in 2020,” adding that doing so this far in advance of going into circulation would aid counterfeiters. He described the image obtained by The Times as a “facsimile” that contained no security features, and he echoed Mr. Mnuchin’s argument that it was too early to develop an integrated concept or design until security features are finalized.
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“No bureau or department official has ‘scrapped anything,’” said Mr. Olijar, in what appeared to be a reference to Tubman. “Everything remains on the table.”
But building the security features of a new note before designing its images struck some as curious. Larry E. Rolufs, a former director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, said that because the security features of a new note are embedded in the imagery, they normally would be created simultaneously.
“It can be done at the same time,” said Mr. Rolufs, who led the bureau from 1995 to 1997. “You want to work them together.”
The process of developing American currency is painstaking, done by engravers who spend a decade training as apprentices. People familiar with the process say that engravers spend months working literally upside down and backward carving the portraits of historical figures into the steel plates that eventually help create cash. Often, multiple engravers will attempt different versions of the portraits, usually based on paintings or photographs, and ultimately, the Treasury secretary chooses which one will appear on a note.
Mr. Rolufs said that because of the complexity of creating new currency, circulating a new note design by next year was ambitious. He also acknowledged that making major changes to the money is an invitation for backlash.
“For the secretary to change the design of the notes takes political courage,” he said. “The American people don’t like their currency messed with.”
As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump called the decision to replace Jackson, who was a slave owner, with Tubman “pure political correctness.” An overhaul of the Treasury Department’s website after Mr. Trump took office removed any trace of the Obama administration’s plans to change the currency, signaling that the plan might be halted.
Within Mr. Trump’s Treasury Department, some officials complained that Mr. Lew had politicized the currency with the plan and that the process of selecting Tubman, which included an online poll among other forms of feedback, was not rigorous or reflective of the country’s desires.
The uncertainty has renewed interest in the matter. This week, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, where Tubman was born, wrote a letter to Mr. Mnuchin urging him to find a way to speed up the process.
“I hope that you’ll reconsider your decision and instead join our efforts to promptly memorialize Tubman’s life and many achievements,” wrote Mr. Hogan, a Republican.
On Friday, Democrats called on Mr. Mnuchin to provide more answers about plans for the $20 note and suggested that the Treasury secretary had misled Congress.
“The Trump administration’s indefinite postponement of this redesign is offensive to women and girls, and communities of color, who have been excitedly waiting to see this woman and civil rights icon honored in this special way,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire.
Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, who raised the issue with Mr. Mnuchin at a hearing in May, accused him of doing Mr. Trump’s bidding.
“Secretary Mnuchin has allowed Trump’s racism and misogyny to prevent him from carrying out the will of the people,” she said.
At the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which offers tours and an exhibit on the history of the currency, some visitors said they preferred tradition, while others were seeking change.
“For me, it’s not important enough to spend the money to change it,” said Jeff Dunyon, who was visiting Washington from Utah this week. “There are other ways to honor her.”
Others believed that adding Tubman to the front of the $20 bill and moving Jackson to the back was an important symbolic move, and, for them, the possibility that it might never happen has been painful.
Charnay Gima, a tourist from Hawaii, had just finished a tour when she pulled aside a guide to ask what became of the plan to make Tubman the face of the $20 bill. The plan was scrapped, she was told, for political reasons.
“It’s kind of sad,” said Ms. Gima, who is black. “I was really looking forward to it because it was finally someone of color on the bill who paved the way for other people.”
President Pence
President Donald Trump on Friday declined to give Vice President Mike Pence an early endorsement for president in 2024.
When asked in an interview with “Fox & Friends” whether Pence would have his “automatic endorsement,” Trump tried to sidestep the question.
“Well, it's — I love Mike, we are running again, you're talking about a long time, so you can't put me in that position,” Trump said. “But I certainly would give it very strong consideration. He's a very, very outstanding person.”
Pence, the former governor of Indiana, has long played a deferential role in regard to Trump, serving as loyal booster while not expressing further political ambitions of his own.
Pence regularly travels around the country to sell the administration’s agenda and has served as a primary fundraiser for the Trump team.
Trump refused Tuesday to apologize for the full-page ad he ran in 1989 calling for the execution of the Central Park Five and suggested the men might still be guilty, even though they were exonerated years ago.
Ten days after the brutal rape and beating of a female jogger in Central Park, Trump, then a real estate developer in Manhattan, took out a full-page ad in four New York City newspapers demanding the death penalty be reinstated for the five teenage boys of color arrested for the crime.
“The ad’s basically very strong and vocal, they are saying bring back law and order. And I’m not just referring to New York, I’m referring to everything,” Trump told Larry King at the time, using the kind of rhetoric he still employs.
Years later, the men were exonerated by DNA evidence and another man’s confession. The story is back in the news with a new Netflix miniseries, “When They See Us,” focused on the boys who were wrongfully convicted and served between six and 16 years of their young adulthood in jail.
April Ryan, a White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, tweeted at the president early Tuesday asking if he’d apologize to the five men. Then, as the president left the White House for his reelection kickoff rally in Orlando, Ryan asked him in person.
“Why do you bring that up now? It’s an interesting time to bring that up,” Trump responded. “You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt . . . some of the prosecutors think the city should never have settled that case and we’ll leave it at that.”
Trump has never apologized for his role in exacerbating the heightened emotions of the case. Several weeks before the 2016 election, Trump gave a similar answer to CNN, noting that the boys, who at the time of their convictions were 14 through 16 years old, had admitted guilt.
The boys have said they were coerced by police to do so.
Yusef Salaam, one of the five, wrote a Washington Post essay in 2016 shortly after Trump doubled down on his contention that they were guilty of the crime.
“Trump has never apologized for calling for our deaths,” Salaam wrote. “It’s further proof of Trump’s bias, racism and inability to admit that he’s wrong.”
Kyle Kashuv deserves some sympathy. But that’s about all.
Some context: Harvard University has rescinded its offer of admission to Kashuv, an 18-year-old Parkland, Fla., school shooting survivor and conservative activist, after screenshots of slurs and racist language from 2017 or early 2018 made their way online.
In one message, a then-16-year-old Kashuv complained about how a female classmate at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School preferred “N-----jocks” (sexually, the limited context suggests), and in another wrote “Kill all the f---ing Jews.” In a shared Google document being used as a class study guide, he repeated the N-word 11 times, writing that “practice uhhhhhh makes perfect.”
Perhaps this is just a kind of youthful folly that Kashuv has now outgrown. But it is certainly a kind that stands out.
When his comments surfaced in May, Kashuv wrote a statement acknowledging that he had used “callous and inflammatory language,” and, while not actually apologizing, suggested that he had matured and grown. Later, when the Harvard admissions committee wrote to say that it had been made aware of his offensive statements, Kashuv responded in a much more robust manner, with a full apology and even an additional email to the school’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
It wasn’t enough. The school rescinded his admission.
So on Monday, Kashuv made the saga public via a Twitter thread that included screenshots of Harvard’s communications, his own replies and his reflections on it all. The thread ended with the eyebrow-raising statement that, “In the end, this isn’t about me, it’s about whether we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistakes brand you as irredeemable, as Harvard has decided for me.”
Has it, though?
I feel bad for Kyle Kashuv. He is still young, after all, and having his college admission rescinded is surely disappointing, embarrassing and stressful. But do I think that it justifies so much Internet hue and cry, or that Harvard should reinstate his place in the class of 2023? Not at all.
The decision to rescind was not a plot to “crush [Kashuv’s] public reputation,” as David French wrote in National Review. After all, Harvard did not publicly advertise its deliberations; Kashuv shared the story all on his own. Nor does the decision illustrate forgiveness “withheld,” as Ben Shapiro huffed in the Daily Wire. Forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending nothing happened. We don’t get to choose what accountability looks like.
“Wisdom comes through a renovation of the heart,” David Brooks mused in the New York Times, chastising Harvard for not taking a “truth-and-reconciliation approach.” But sometimes, feeling the consequences for your actions — even if you didn’t think said actions would be so consequential — is part of that internal renovation.
This is not a question of whether our society has outlawed forgiveness, whether educational institutions misunderstand childish mistakes or whether the academic establishment has it out for conservatives. The issue is that Harvard has standards for admission that include not making wildly offensive comments, and Kyle Kashuv’s behavior in high school failed to meet them.
We’ve all been teenagers; most of us managed to pass through high school without being known for our egregious racial slurs. And there are, frankly, many deserving students who would like to go to Harvard — other Parkland survivors, other reformed makers of racist jokes, a wide range of other outstanding scholars who are neither. Perhaps the university simply thought that its limited resources would be better spent educating someone else.
When it comes down to it, it’s not a death sentence to be turned away from the elite university of your choice; it happens to tens of thousands of teenagers every year. Even having one’s admission revoked is nothing new; in 2017, Harvard rescinded the admission of 10 students over similarly obscene Facebook messages. A college education is not closed off to Kyle Kashuv, neither is future success. The only person who has deemed him irredeemable is … him.
If anything, Kashuv’s setback may be the latest illustration of the hazards of growing up in a digital age: Things you have said or written in the past might have bearing on your future, and these complications may arise without warning. Certainly, I’m sympathetic to the fact that Harvard’s decision might have come as a surprise and as a disappointment. But I’m not so sympathetic as to suggest that the consequences don’t make sense.
After being convicted of the murder of activist Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others when he plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters during the infamous Charlottesville rally, James Alex Fields Jr. is begging the judge responsible for his sentencing to show him mercy.
WJLA reports that Fields’ legal team believes that the 22-year-old should not spend the rest of his life in prison due to his age, his traumatic childhood and his history of mental illness.
“No amount of punishment imposed on James can repair the damage he caused to dozens of innocent people. But this Court should find that retribution has limits,” his attorneys wrote in a sentencing memo submitted on Friday.
Additionally, his attorney’s pointed out that “no individual is wholly defined by their worst moments” and leniency in his sentencing would be appreciated as an “expression of mercy.”
Prosecutors countered that the Adolf Hitler admirer and devout anti-Semite has yet to demonstrate any remorse for his actions and should be punished accordingly. They also pointed to years of documented racist behavior exhibited by Field prior to taking Heyer’s life and that he was recorded on a jail phone call last month making inflammatory remarks about Heyer’s mother.
Prosecutors also refused to accept Fields’ history of mental illness as an excuse for his behavior.
“Any mental health concerns raised by the defendant do not overcome the defendant’s demonstrated lack of remorse and his prior history of substantial racial animus,” prosecutors wrote.
Fields struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors to take the death penalty off of the table, but under federal sentencing guidelines, he’s expected to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Fields sentencing is scheduled for June 28.
The Treasury Department’s internal watchdog has agreed to look into why designs of a new $20 bill featuring Harriet Tubman will not be unveiled next year.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, last week asked the Treasury Department’s inspector general to open an investigation following Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s announcement at a May Congressional hearing that designs of the new $20 would be unveiled in 2026 instead of 2020 — the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote.
Mr. Mnuchin, at the hearing, would not commit to Tubman being featured on the note, diverging from the plan and timeline set by the Obama administration and leaving the decision to a future Treasury secretary.
Treasury’s inspector general, in a letter to Mr. Schumer dated June 21, said that the review of the $20 would be included in an already-planned audit of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s process for designing new notes and security features. That audit will include interviews with senior officials from Treasury, the B.E.P., the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and the Secret Service. A formal investigation will be opened if any indication of misconduct surrounding the delay emerge during the inquiry.
“I believe this approach will efficiently address the concerns expressed in your request,” Rich Delmar, the acting inspector general at Treasury, wrote in a letter to Mr. Schumer.
Mr. Delmar said that the review would specifically include the process with respect to the $20 bill.
“If, in the course of our audit work, we discover indications of employee misconduct or other matters that warrant a referral to our Office of Investigations, we will do so expeditiously,” Mr. Delmar added.
The audit is expected to take 10 months. Mr. Delmar said that work would begin before the end of June.
Mr. Mnuchin has said that it was his responsibility to focus on anti-counterfeiting measures with the note and that the $20 bill would still come into circulation by 2030. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that extensive work on a note featuring Tubman began before President Trump took office and continued until at least 2018.
As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump said that replacing the $20 bill’s current occupant, Andrew Jackson, with Tubman, a former slave and abolitionist, was “pure political correctness.”
A Treasury spokesman said that the timeline for issuing the new $20 note is not a political process and that security and preventing counterfeiting is the department’s priority.
Mr. Schumer said in a statement that he was happy that the matter is being reviewed.
“I’m pleased the inspector general will review this matter and hope it is conducted in an expeditious fashion,” Mr. Schumer said. “There are no women, there are no people of color on our paper currency today, even though they make up a significant majority of our population, and the previous administration’s plan to put New Yorker Harriet Tubman on the $20 note was a long overdue way to recognize that disparity, and rectify it.”
He added, “The motivation for the Trump administration’s decision to delay the release of the new note has not been credibly explained, and the inspector general’s review must get to the bottom of this.”
A House panel is releasing information that it says “points to a partisan and discriminatory effort” behind the Trump administration’s move to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 Census, just days before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the matter.
In a memo to members of the House Oversight Committee, the panel’s Democratic staff said that James Uthmeier, a former senior adviser and counsel to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, had refused to answer “dozens of questions” but that he had nonetheless “confirmed key information” about the effort to add the citizenship question.
“Mr. Uthmeier disclosed that Secretary Ross directed him to begin examining the citizenship question within weeks of being sworn in as Secretary and that they had multiple conversations about it well before any request came from DOJ — erasing any doubt about the inaccuracy of Secretary Ross’ claim that he added the citizenship question ‘solely’ at DOJ’s request,” the memo reads.
Ross originally told Congress that his decision to add the question came solely in response to a December 2017 Justice Department request, but lawsuits later produced emails showing that Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, had been pushing for the question for months before that.
The Justice Department earlier this month dismissed the allegations that it hid the government’s true motives, calling them “frivolous.”
The Oversight Committee voted earlier this month to hold two Cabinet officials — Ross and Attorney General William P. Barr — in contempt of Congress in connection with the administration’s efforts to shield documents related to its decision to add the citizenship question.
The panel is recommending a full House vote on contempt, although the timing of such a vote remains unclear.
In a statement issued Tuesday morning, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), said the Trump administration “claimed that the only reason it wanted to add the citizenship question was to help the Department of Justice enforce the Voting Rights Act, but that claim has now been exposed as a pretext.”
“Official after official appearing before the Committee have refused to answer questions about the real reasons behind their effort, but the mounting evidence points to a partisan and discriminatory effort to harm the interests of Democrats and non-Whites,” he said.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in April and is scheduled to issue a ruling by the end of June. The issue was rushed to the Supreme Court because the Commerce Department said it needs an answer this summer to print census forms.
Last week, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to deny a request to send the census question case back to a lower court. Lawyers for civil rights organizations, meanwhile, had asked the high court to put off a ruling on the issue in the wake of new allegations that the question was added with the input of a Republican strategist, Thomas Hofeller.
Hofeller wrote a 2015 study showing that adding the question would give an electoral advantage to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites. Documents suggest that Hofeller was communicating with the Trump administration about the question in 2017 and earlier with a census official.
The oversight panel released transcripts Tuesday of interviews with four people on the matter. They include Uthmeier; John Gore, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division; Gene Hamilton, a former DOJ and Department of Homeland Security official; and Kris Kobach, a former Kansas secretary of state who once headed Trump’s voter integrity commission.
When things seem darkest in our political world, it is useful to think about the longer-term future of America’s political parties: one an increasingly diverse demographic coalition, and the other an ever-greater concentration of fearful white racists.
That is just the demographic reality. Absent any drastic, 70s-style realignment of the U.S. political party landscape, the fact is that the Republican party will continue sinking farther into the cloistered white reactionary end of the pool, as the Democrats take everyone else. Consider the findings of a new CAP report on the demographic futures of the parties: first, that in the 2016 election, the “parties’ coalitions were more dissimilar in terms of their racial, educational, and age composition” than at any time since 1980, the beginning of the Reagan era and the modern Republican party. And second, the fact that diversity is coming into the electorate whether anyone likes it or not:
Nonwhites will continue to grow as a share of both parties’ coalitions, especially Hispanics. We find that, by 2032, Hispanic voters will surpass black voters as the largest overall nonwhite voting group. And, by 2036, black voters will make up a larger share of the Democratic coalition than white noncollege voters.
On the other hand, we find that white voters will continue to decline through 2036 as a share of both the Republican and Democratic party coalitions, though this decline with be considerably quicker in fast-growing states such as Arizona and Texas that are already less white. White noncollege voters, in particular, are projected to decline rapidly as a share of both parties’ coalitions across all states through 2036, although the sharpest declines will, again, be in fast-growing states.
The broad trends going forward: The Democratic party coalition will be college-educated whites plus black and Latino voters, and the Republican coalition will be white, non-college-educated voters plus rich people. But, concurrent with these trends is the fact that white, non-college-educated voters are sharply declining as an overall percentage of the electorate. The share of white, college-educated voters and black voters will hold more or less steady, and the share of Latino voters will increase. This means that the Republicans will have to make up the votes of their declining core demographic from within those groups. Picking up substantial numbers of black voters seems unlikely; there may perhaps be more votes to be found for Republicans among Latinos, but even there, they will have trouble, because of all the, you know, xenophobia-bordering-on-genocidal-ideation. So they will seek to attract more educated white voters.
The Republican party’s only real path in the future is to more tightly cling to its identity as The White People Party. That means more racism, more anti-immigrant sentiment, more Trumpian pseudo-populism, though probably in a more refined package. The future is more divisive, not less. We can expect the Republican party to move farther to the right—even though it is today, by one measure, already farther to the right than European parties that are considered racist and far right. Though moderating itself in search of centrist votes may seem “rational,” it will not be so easy for the Republican party to make inroads with all of the groups that Trump is currently oppressing as hard as he possibly can. The familiar fantasy of a “big tent” Republican party with a friendly face and an open door for all fiscal moderates will remain a fantasy. The pendulum has swung too far into extremism to be snatched back. The only real options for the Republicans to maintain power in coming decades will be:
More white voters. And, in a nation that is growing less white,
Voter suppression.
The demographic realities actually give me hope, because they are moving inexorably away from the Republican party. But the party of corporate dominance and racists will not give up power without a fight. White identity politics will, if you can believe it, grow even more intense. And we will see how much racism the business community is willing to support in order to maintain its low tax rate.
An Alabama woman who was shot in the stomach, resulting in the death of her five-month-old fetus, was indicted on a manslaughter charge by a grand jury. The reason? She started the dispute that led to her getting shot.
Initially, police charged 23-year-old Ebony Jamison for shooting 27-year-old Marshae Jones in December of 2018 outside a Dollar General in Birmingham. But according to AL.com, a police investigation determined that it wasn’t Jamison who was to blame for the shooting—it was Jones, for starting it:
“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”
Reid added that the fight began over the unborn baby’s father, and that the investigation found that Jamison was defending herself.
Reid’s latest statement reiterates what he said at the time of the shooting, which was:
“When a 5-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child,’’ Reid said. “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”
Alabama recently passed a near-total ban on abortion, and it’s not unheard of for a woman to face jail time for miscarrying. While shocking, this case clearly delineates in the most gruesome terms what we already know: That women’s lives are not valued.
The Supreme Court on Thursday froze the Trump administration’s plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form sent to every U.S. household, saying the government had provided a “contrived” reason for wanting the information.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the splintered opinion, and it seemingly will be up to him — if the Commerce Department offers new justification — whether it passes muster and the question appears on the census form.
Agencies must offer “genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” Roberts wrote in a section of his opinion joined only by the court’s four liberals.
“Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”
Roberts was the only member of the Supreme Court on the term’s closing day to be on the prevailing side in both the census case and the court’s ruling on partisan gerrymandering. It was emblematic of the chief justice’s new role at the center of the court, now that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has retired.
But the ruling caused considerable confusion. It was unclear whether there would be time for the administration to come up with an acceptable justification for the question and obtain judicial approval.
The administration had said a decision was needed by the end of June to add such a question; other officials have said there is a fall deadline.
Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco called the decision a disappointment but said in a statement after the ruling that the government “will continue to defend this administration’s lawful exercises of executive power.”
After Thursday’s ruling was announced, President Trump seemed annoyed by the court’s demand for more explanation and frustrated by the time limitation.
He tweeted that he has inquired with “the lawyers” whether the census may be delayed until the Supreme Court receives the necessary information to make a “final and decisive decision” on the matter.
“Can anyone really believe that as a great Country, we are not able the ask whether or not someone is a Citizen,” Trump’s tweet says. “Only in America!”
Those who challenged the citizenship question were pleased by the ruling but said they were cautious given the uncertainty about whether the administration might still prevail. Opponents have said the citizenship question would result in an undercount of millions of people who fear acknowledging that a noncitizen is part of their household.
While the Supreme Court’s deliberations centered on whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had authority to add the question and had followed legal procedures, challengers also want to reopen in lower courts whether he had discriminatory intent.
The court’s decision in Department of Commerce v. New York came in the most debated Trump administration initiative to reach the high court since last year’s 5-to-4 decision upholding the president’s ban on certain travelers from a group of mostly Muslim countries.
There was even more at stake here, and the debate was filled with partisan politics: An undercount estimated by census officials of more than 8 million people would most affect states and urban areas with large Hispanic and immigrant populations, places that tend to vote for Democrats.
The decennial count of the nation’s population determines the size of each state’s congressional delegation, the number of votes it receives in the electoral college and how the federal government allocates hundreds of billions of dollars.
Challengers included Democratic-led states and civil rights and immigrant rights organizations.
Roberts’s bottom line — that a lower court was right to say Ross had not provided an adequate explanation for adding the citizenship question — was joined by liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
They agreed that Ross’s stated reason for adding the question — that it was requested by the Justice Department to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act — fell apart upon examination.
“That evidence showed that the Secretary was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office; instructed his staff to make it happen; waited while Commerce officials explored whether another agency would request census-based citizenship data; subsequently contacted the Attorney General himself to ask if DOJ would make the request; and adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process,” Roberts wrote, reflecting what U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman and other judges have found.
In Furman’s view, Roberts wrote, “this evidence established that the Secretary had made up his mind to reinstate a citizenship question ‘well before’ receiving DOJ’s request, and did so for reasons unknown but unrelated to the VRA.”
Ross had also met with some of the White House’s hard-line immigration foes about the issue.
Roberts said that Ross deserved great deference in deciding how to run the census, but that “reasoned decisionmaking under the Administrative Procedure Act calls for an explanation for agency action. What was provided here was more of a distraction.”
In his January opinion, Furman said the question could not be added without resolving its “legal defects.”
He had a long list of requirements — gathering adequate information and statistics, submitting a report to relevant congressional committees, and considering relevant evidence — as well as providing Ross’s “real rationale.”
Some found the decision puzzling about what comes next.
“I don’t understand what the court decided,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) “I think it’s kind of confusing,” and “my general rule of thumb is if I’m confused about something I don’t comment.”
The court’s conservatives concurred with Roberts in the first part of his opinion, in which he said Ross had the right to ask a citizenship question and that he has wide discretion over conducting the census.
Justice Clarence Thomas said Roberts should have stopped there.
“For the first time ever, the Court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale,” Thomas wrote. “Echoing the din of suspicion and distrust that seems to typify modern discourse, the court declares the secretary’s memorandum ‘pretextual.’ ”
He criticized Furman’s opinion that said Ross and his aides “acted like people with something to hide.”
“I do not deny that a judge predisposed to distrust the secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and — with a jar of pins and a spool of string — create an eye-catching conspiracy web,” Thomas wrote.
He was joined by Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court should have stayed out of Ross’s decision-making.
“To put the point bluntly, the Federal Judiciary has no authority to stick its nose into the question [of] whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons,” Alito wrote.
The court’s liberals, on the other hand, thought Roberts did not go far enough. Ross’s decision should simply have been set aside, they said.
Evidence presented to Ross by his in-house experts on the census “indicated that asking the question would produce citizenship data that is less accurate, not more,” wrote Breyer.
Groups who had opposed adding the question expressed cautious optimism that decision against adding the question will stick.
“On the census, the Trump administration’s lies went so far that even this Supreme Court had to say no,” said Michael Waldman, president of the liberal Brennan Center for Justice. “If this leads to a result with no citizenship question, that would be a very welcome outcome, and it would also preserve the status quo. This should have been an easy case, and in the end, it was.”
Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s Voting Rights Project, said there is not enough time for the administration to try to come up with a new legal rationale for adding the citizenship question.
“If they try to do this over the weekend, it’s a sign of cutting corners and not reasoned decision-making,” Ho said. “There really is not time. If the administration tries to rush it, that’s clearly a red flag.”
Lower-court judges have said Ross violated administrative law and the Constitution’s enumeration clause by proposing to ask the citizenship question of each household. Those issues were at stake before the Supreme Court.
But discoveries in the case after the court heard oral arguments raised new and different issues — principally, whether the administration’s motivation was, at its core, discriminatory.
Judges in Maryland and New York have said they would consider new allegations regarding the claim that Ross’s actions violated equal-protection guarantees and was part of a conspiracy to drive down the count of minorities.
The information came from the files of a deceased Republican political operative. Thomas Hofeller, who had been in touch with some census officials at the start of the Trump administration, wrote a memo that said adding the question might help Republicans and white voters in subsequent redistricting decisions based on the census data.
Pregnant Woman Indicted For Baby's Death After Being Shot (https://jezebel.com/alabama-woman-indicted-after-someone-else-shoots-her-in-1835892341)QuoteAn Alabama woman who was shot in the stomach, resulting in the death of her five-month-old fetus, was indicted on a manslaughter charge by a grand jury. The reason? She started the dispute that led to her getting shot.
Initially, police charged 23-year-old Ebony Jamison for shooting 27-year-old Marshae Jones in December of 2018 outside a Dollar General in Birmingham. But according to AL.com, a police investigation determined that it wasn’t Jamison who was to blame for the shooting—it was Jones, for starting it:
“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”
Reid added that the fight began over the unborn baby’s father, and that the investigation found that Jamison was defending herself.
Reid’s latest statement reiterates what he said at the time of the shooting, which was:
“When a 5-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child,’’ Reid said. “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”
Alabama recently passed a near-total ban on abortion, and it’s not unheard of for a woman to face jail time for miscarrying. While shocking, this case clearly delineates in the most gruesome terms what we already know: That women’s lives are not valued.
#Resist
Pregnant Woman Indicted For Baby's Death After Being Shot (https://jezebel.com/alabama-woman-indicted-after-someone-else-shoots-her-in-1835892341)QuoteAn Alabama woman who was shot in the stomach, resulting in the death of her five-month-old fetus, was indicted on a manslaughter charge by a grand jury. The reason? She started the dispute that led to her getting shot.
Initially, police charged 23-year-old Ebony Jamison for shooting 27-year-old Marshae Jones in December of 2018 outside a Dollar General in Birmingham. But according to AL.com, a police investigation determined that it wasn’t Jamison who was to blame for the shooting—it was Jones, for starting it:
“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”
Reid added that the fight began over the unborn baby’s father, and that the investigation found that Jamison was defending herself.
Reid’s latest statement reiterates what he said at the time of the shooting, which was:
“When a 5-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child,’’ Reid said. “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”
Alabama recently passed a near-total ban on abortion, and it’s not unheard of for a woman to face jail time for miscarrying. While shocking, this case clearly delineates in the most gruesome terms what we already know: That women’s lives are not valued.
#Resist
FUCKING SERIOUSLY? Is this because men can not be expected to keep control of themselves or just walk away?
When Beronica Ruiz went to pick up her 12-year-old son from school in Passaic, N.J., last week, it wasn’t the first time that day she needed to be there. Hours earlier, Ruiz and her husband had met with the school’s vice principal over concerns that their son was threatened by other students who allegedly chanted “All Mexicans should go back behind the wall,” the family’s attorney told The Washington Post.
The New Jersey couple were upset the school didn’t inform them about the taunts but left the June 19 meeting feeling “somewhat reassured” after the vice principal said he would contact the students and their parents, said Daniel Santiago, the lawyer.
But as Ruiz, who was pushing her 1-year-old daughter in a stroller, walked home from Passaic Gifted and Talented Academy School No. 20 with her son that afternoon, the boy noticed they weren’t alone. Three boys trailed behind — and he recognized them.
“He turned to his mother and said, ‘Mom, those are the children that were threatening me, and they’re following us,’ ” Santiago said.
Moments later, a 13-year-old boy allegedly attacked. Santiago said the boy first punched Ruiz’s son in the face. When the 35-year-old mother tried to step in, the teen hit her and “threw her to the ground,” causing her to lose consciousness, Santiago said.
“This was a brutal hate crime, and it was committed by a 13-year-old,” Santiago said. “I don’t know what circumstances could give rise to a 13-year-old boy having such hate in his heart that he would commit this brutal attack and leave a woman essentially to die in front of her children without any remorse or any twinge of conscience.”
Ruiz was hospitalized for two days after the alleged beating, which left her with facial fractures and a concussion, Santiago said.
On Tuesday, the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office announced that the 13-year-old, who fled the scene, had been arrested and charged following the June 19 incident. He faces one count each of aggravated assault and simple assault, and has been released to his parents pending an appearance in family court, according to the news release. The attack was condemned by Passaic City Mayor Hector C. Lora, who said in a statement to The Post he was “outraged” and added that “what happened to the mother is unacceptable.”
“This incident is being taken extremely seriously. I have met with and spoken personally with the family,” Lora said. “I have met with my chief of police, local officials and school administration as well as board members to make sure there is accountability and that this family receives justice as well as any help and resources we can provide so they can heal and feel safe.”
However, Santiago maintains that the violent attack could have been avoided if the school had responded differently to the initial bullying complaint, noting that he is planning to file a lawsuit on behalf of the family. School officials did not respond to requests for comment late Tuesday.
“Just practically speaking, if the boy wasn’t in school, if he had been disciplined for actually using racially charged slurs, this attack would not have happened,” the attorney said.
The 13-year-old suspect is African American, Santiago said. Ruiz and her husband are Mexican and are in the United States on work permits while they await green cards, but their children are American citizens, he said.
The day before the alleged assault, Santiago said Ruiz’s son was in the school cafeteria when a group of students started mocking him about his ethnicity, telling him, “Go back behind the wall.”
In response to the bullies, Santiago said the boy “quite astutely” pointed out, “We’re all immigrants, so what are you talking about?” But instead of defusing the situation, “the other boys became violent” and started threatening Ruiz’s son, Santiago said.
“He pulled one of the teachers aside and said, ‘I’m scared for my safety,’ ” the lawyer said. “The teacher grabbed the attention of a security guard, and they essentially sequestered my client’s son in a room for his own safety.”
Though the school appeared to see “the threat as very real,” Santiago said Ruiz and her husband were not made aware of what happened until their son told them.
During the meeting with the school’s vice principal, the administrator admitted fault, telling the parents that “it slipped his mind” and “he should have contacted them,” Santiago claimed.
“That in itself is a woefully inadequate response,” he said, later adding, “If my son’s health and his well-being and indeed his life was in danger and the school knew about it and they failed to report it to me, someone dropped the ball. That is a failure on the school district’s part.”
It is not exactly clear what motivated the 13-year-old to allegedly go after Ruiz and her son, but the mother told NBC New York that the teen was swearing loudly when he approached the family on the street. Ruiz said when she tried to get the 13-year-old to stop, he told her to “shut up” and punched her.
By the time she regained consciousness and called the police, her attacker was gone, Santiago said. But it wasn’t long before Ruiz saw him again.
When Ruiz was released from the hospital, she and her husband took their son back to school only to discover that the teen was still attending classes “as if nothing had happened,” Santiago said.
“They spoke to the vice principal again, and the response they received was, ‘Well, he has the right to an education just as much as your son does,’ ” Santiago said.
The boy was suspended only after Ruiz’s husband called Lora, the mayor, Santiago said. (Lora has not commented on his involvement.) It is unclear whether the other two boys present that afternoon have faced disciplinary action, though Santiago said they “tried to stop the 13-year-old.”
The school has also now offered to pay for the family’s medical bills, Santiago said.
“We do appreciate the gesture,” he said, “but at this point, it’s too little too late.”
Santiago said that while Ruiz’s physical injuries have started to heal, “her emotional wounds are slower to recover.”
“My son, he can’t sleep, and I don’t sleep because I am very worried,” Ruiz told ABC7 News.
In Tuesday’s statement, prosecutors made no mention of hate crime charges, although that’s how Santiago categorizes what happened.
“This began by boys chanting that Mexicans should go back behind the wall,” he said. “What spurred them to threaten violence was Ruiz’s son advising that we all come from immigrants. . . . That anger triggered in this young boy enough hate and enough fury to attack a woman, an adult, with no fear.”
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, shared another person’s tweet with his millions of followers during the Democratic debate on Thursday that falsely claimed Senator Kamala Harris was not black enough to be discussing the plight of black Americans.
“Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves,” Ali Alexander, a member of a right-wing constellation of media personalities, wrote on Twitter. “She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”
Mr. Trump, a valuable Republican surrogate as his father faces a bruising 2020 race, posted the tweet of unverified information, then asked his more than three million followers: “Is this true? Wow.” By the end of the night, Mr. Trump had deleted his message, and by Friday, a spokesman said it had all been a misunderstanding.
“Don’s tweet was simply him asking if it was true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it’s not something he had ever heard before,” said the spokesman, Andy Surabian, “and once he saw that folks were misconstruing the intent of his tweet, he quickly deleted it.”
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But by then, the original message, questioning the background of a presidential candidate who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, had already spread far and wide. For people like Mr. Alexander — an alt-right fringe figure who has also gone by the name Ali Akbar — the entire point of commenting was to go viral and counteract any progress made by a Democrat like Ms. Harris. She caught Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumed front-runner, off guard on Thursday night by questioning his track record on race.
Because his tweet was elevated by valuable surrogates like the president’s son, Mr. Alexander has become part of a loose network of accounts weaponized by the Trump campaign as part of its effort to discredit candidates.
The facts are these: Ms. Harris, a first-term senator from California and a former prosecutor, is the biracial daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother. She has faced repeated questions about her race throughout her career, but has at times resisted being put into one category or another. In an interview with The Washington Post this year, Ms. Harris called herself “an American,” defying calls at various points for her to choose.
“My point was: I am who I am,” Ms. Harris said at the time. “I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.”
On Thursday evening, Ms. Harris was more forceful in relaying her experiences with racism. “Growing up, my sister and I had to deal with the neighbor who told us her parents couldn’t play with us because she — because we were black,” Ms. Harris said.
She was also forceful in her criticism of Mr. Biden, who served as vice president to the nation’s first black president but who drew intense scrutiny a week ago for expressing a willingness to work with lawmakers who have different views — a group that at one point included segregationist senators.
Ms. Harris told Mr. Biden during the debate that it was “hurtful” that he’d worked with segregationists. She also accused him of working with them to oppose busing students to schools to better integrate them, a claim Mr. Biden denied.
“And, you know,” Ms. Harris said, “there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
Her impassioned embrace of her personal history was what Mr. Alexander and then Mr. Trump pounced on. By the end of the evening, even though Mr. Trump had deleted his tweet, a round of accounts began sharing the contents of Mr. Alexander’s tweet questioning Ms. Harris’s background.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-HXAP8W4AAnupI.jpg)
This activity caught the attention of Caroline Orr, a Virginia-based researcher who studies disinformation and elections. Mr. Alexander is a real person, but Ms. Orr hinted that the activity may have been the work of Twitter bots meant to spread his misinformation.
“A lot of suspect accounts are pushing the ‘Kamala Harris is not Black’ narrative tonight,” Ms. Orr wrote on Twitter. “It’s everywhere and it has all the signs of being a coordinated/artificial operation.”
On Friday, Mr. Alexander denied that his tweet had been part of an organized effort to spread that message at all, and he has characterized as racist inquiries into what he meant by his original tweet.
Lily Adams, an aide to Ms. Harris, on Friday criticized Mr. Trump’s tweet. “This is the same type of racist attack his father used to attack Barack Obama,” she said. “It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.”
Mr. Trump, for his part, had moved on: He sent a fund-raising text message to followers of the Trump campaign.
On the first day of Star Wars Celebration Chicago this past April, it was suddenly announced that Riz Ahmed—who played Imperial courier-turned Rebel hero Bodhi Rook in Rogue One—had to cancel his appearance at the convention. Now, the actor’s revealed why, and it’s another reflection of being a minority attempting to travel in the U.S.
As THR reports, speaking recently at CAA’s Amplify leadership summit—which examines issues pertaining to diversity, treatment of minorities, and multicultural issues in both politics and the sports, entertainment, and tech industries—Ahmed brought up his appearance (or rather lack thereof) at Celebration Chicago.
He revealed that the reason he couldn’t attend as planned is that the Department of Homeland Security stopped him from getting on his flight—far from the first time the actor has been impeded in travel efforts in his career:
Hassan Minhaj can win a Peabody, I can win an Emmy, Ibtihaj Muhammad can go to the Olympics, but some of these obstacles are systemic and we can’t really face them alone, we need your help. I’m basically here to ask for your help, because it’s really scary to be a Muslim right now, super scary. I’ve often wondered, is this going to be the year when they round us up, if this is going to be the year they put Trump’s registry into action. If this is going to be the year they ship us all off.
Muslim travelers have long faced prejudice during air travel, the spectre of the war on terror (and prejudices stoked long before it) still being felt in the years since the 9/11 terror attacks, but Federal scrutiny has spiked under the Trump administration as the President has spent much of his tenure seeking to instate travel bans on people from Muslim-majority countries.
Ahmed’s case is not the first time an artist traveling to meet fans at a convention has found themselves turned away by Federal agents because of scrutiny and discrimination like this, and sadly, it’s unlikely to be the last while President Trump is in office (and, even sadder, likely beyond even that). And if someone as recognizable as Ahmed—literally a main character in a Star Wars movie—is being stopped for the simple reason of being a minority, how many untold stories of this prejudice are out there?
Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.
In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, “Oh well.” Another responded with an image and the words “If he dies, he dies.”
Created in August 2016, the Facebook group is called “I’m 10-15” and boasts roughly 9,500 members from across the country. (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”) The group described itself, in an online introduction, as a forum for “funny” and “serious” discussion about work with the patrol. “Remember you are never alone in this family,” the introduction said.
Responsible for policing the nation’s southern and northern boundaries, the Border Patrol has come under intense scrutiny as the Trump administration takes new, more aggressive measures to halt the influx of undocumented migrants across the United States-Mexico border. The patrol’s approximately 20,000 agents serve under the broader U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which has been faulted for allegedly mistreating children and adults in its custody. The agency’s leadership has been in turmoil, with its most recent acting chief, John Sanders, resigning last week.
ProPublica received images of several recent discussions in the 10-15 Facebook group and was able to link the participants in those online conversations to apparently legitimate Facebook profiles belonging to Border Patrol agents, including a supervisor based in El Paso, Texas, and an agent in Eagle Pass, Texas. ProPublica has so far been unable to reach the group members who made the postings.
ProPublica contacted three spokespeople for CBP in regard to the Facebook group and provided the names of three agents who appear to have participated in the online chats. CBP hasn’t yet responded.
“These comments and memes are extremely troubling,” said Daniel Martinez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who studies the border. “They’re clearly xenophobic and sexist.”
The postings, in his view, reflect what “seems to be a pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants within CBP. This isn’t just a few rogue agents or ‘bad apples.’”
The Border Patrol Facebook group is the most recent example of some law enforcement personnel behaving badly in public and private digital spaces. An investigation by Reveal uncovered hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers who moved in extremist Facebook circles, including white supremacist and anti-government groups. A team of researchers calling themselves the Plain View Project recently released a hefty database of offensive Facebook posts made by current and ex-law enforcement officers.
And in early 2018, federal investigators found a raft of disturbing and racist text messages sent by Border Patrol agents in southern Arizona after searching the phone of Matthew Bowen, an agent charged with running down a Guatemalan migrant with a Ford F-150 pickup truck. The texts, which were revealed in a court filing in federal court in Tucson, described migrants as “guats,” “wild ass shitbags,” “beaners” and “subhuman.” The messages included repeated discussions about burning the migrants up.
Several of the postings reviewed by ProPublica refer to the planned visit by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, including Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Veronica Escobar, to a troubled Border Patrol facility outside of El Paso. Agents at the compound in Clint, Texas, have been accused of holding children in neglectful, inhumane conditions.
Members of the Border Patrol Facebook group were not enthused about the tour, noting that Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from Queens, had compared Border Patrol facilities to Nazi concentration camps. Escobar is a freshman Democrat representing El Paso.
One member encouraged Border Patrol agents to hurl a “burrito at these bitches.” Another, apparently a patrol supervisor, wrote, “Fuck the hoes.” “There should be no photo ops for these scum buckets,” posted a third member.
Perhaps the most disturbing posts target Ocasio-Cortez. One includes a photo illustration of her engaged in oral sex at an immigrant detention center. Text accompanying the image reads, “Lucky Illegal Immigrant Glory Hole Special Starring AOC.”
Another is a photo illustration of a smiling President Donald Trump forcing Ocasio-Cortez’s head toward his crotch. The agent who posted the image commented: “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won.”
The posts about Escobar and Ocasio-Cortez are “vile and sexist,” said a staffer for Escobar. “Furthermore, the comments made by Border Patrol agents towards immigrants, especially those that have lost their lives, are disgusting and show a complete disregard for human life and dignity.”
The head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Joaquin Castro, reviewed the Facebook discussions and was incensed. “It confirms some of the worst criticisms of Customs and Border Protection,” said Castro, a Democrat who represents San Antonio. “These are clearly agents who are desensitized to the point of being dangerous to migrants and their co-workers.” He added that the agents who made the vulgar comments “don’t deserve to wear any uniform representing the United States of America.”
Vicki Gaubeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, said the postings are more evidence of the sexism and misogyny that has long plagued the Border Patrol. “That’s why they’re the worst at recruiting women,” said Gaubeca, whose group works to reform the agency. “They have the lowest percentage of female agents or officers of any federal law enforcement agency.”
In another thread, a group member posted a photo of father and his 23-month-old daughter lying face down in the Rio Grande. The pair drowned while trying to ford the river and cross into the U.S.; pictures of the two have circulated widely online in recent days, generating an outcry.
The member asked if the photo could have been faked because the bodies were so “clean.” (The picture was taken by an Associated Press photographer, and there is no indication that it was staged or manipulated.) “I HAVE NEVER SEEN FLOATERS LIKE THIS,” the person wrote, adding, “could this be another edited photo. We’ve all seen the dems and liberal parties do some pretty sick things…”
After allegedly sending a death threat to a Muslim lawyer on Twitter last year, a North Carolina man is facing federal felony charges of issuing a threat via interstate commerce that could land him in prison for up to five years, the New York Times reported on Monday.
According to the Times, the charges stem from a March 2018 incident in which Virginia lawyer, author, and now-Democratic nominee for State Senate Qasim Rashid received a slur-filled message from a pseudonymous account containing the phrase “view your destiny” alongside a photo that appeared to be of the infamous 1915 lynching of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank in Georgia. Rashid had no idea who sent the tweet but flagged it in a screenshot to Twitter, which later suspended the account. He also reported it to the FBI, according to the Associated Press.
He first learned that FBI agents had identified the man behind the tweet as 52-year-old Joseph Cecil Vandevere last week, the Times wrote.
Per the Times, as of Monday evening the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina said a warrant has been obtained for Vandevere’s arrest, though he was not yet in custody:
In an indictment filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina on June 20, Joseph Cecil Vandevere of Black Mountain, N.C., was charged with issuing a threat via interstate commerce, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.
A warrant has been issued for Mr. Vandevere, 52, who had not been arrested as of Monday night, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the district. He could not be reached on Monday evening, and it was unclear whether he had a lawyer.
The Daily Beast reported archived snapshots of Vandevere’s alleged account, @DaDutchman5, showed the threat directed at Rashid followed “at least a year of unhinged attacks against other politicians and public figures” as well as posts in favor of the crazed Pizzagate conspiracy theory, among others.
That Vandevere is facing charges is notable because Twitter is essentially overrun with these kind of threats, despite the site and its founder Jack Dorsey having repeatedly promised to do something about it for years. In May 2019, Twitter’s head of legal, policy, and trust and safety Vijaya Gadde told Vice that the site was still examining whether to ban literal Nazis—a policy so blindingly obvious that even scandal-ridden Facebook, a company that civil rights organizations have relentlessly criticized for its inaction on hate speech, has at least officially implemented.
Gadde told Vice that the company believes “counter-speech and conversation are a force for good, and they can act as a basis for de-radicalization, and we’ve seen that happen on other platforms, anecdotally.”
It’s also noteworthy because law enforcement often does not take social media threats seriously, Rashid told the Daily Beast.
“It’s not very common that they actively pursue these kinds of death threats,” Rashid said. “It’s going to make social media safer, and it’s actually going to protect speech for those who engage in constructive dialogue as opposed to violent extremism.”
Earlier this week, Nike pulled the release of what the Wall Street Journal described as “a U.S.A.-themed sneaker” that had been slated to be released on July 4. The sneakers, which featured the circa-1770 “Betsy Ross flag” on the heel of the shoe, were shipped to retailers and then recalled. “Nike has chosen not to release the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July,” Nike said in a statement, “as it featured the old version of the American flag.”
The Journal revealed that this was not quite the embarrassing quality-assurance blooper that the company’s statement suggested, reporting that blackballed quarterback and Nike spokesperson Colin Kaepernick had objected to the use of a flag that flew while slavery was still practiced in the United States, and that Nike had withdrawn the sneakers in part at Kaepernick’s behest. Nike still hasn’t addressed that, although its initial statement was later upgraded to, “Nike made the decision to halt distribution of the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July based on concerns that it could unintentionally offend and detract from the nation’s patriotic holiday.”
What happened next was more or less what happened the last time Nike and Kaepernick appeared in the same sentence. The people you’d expect to lose their shit—the people whose entire politics resolve to always losing their shit over trivial Mad Libs mini-outrages like this—vigorously and seemingly quite gladly went on to lose it again. This bottomless capacity and eagerness to take this kind of theatrical offense over things like this, and to just absolutely go to town on whatever superheated slop is dished out by the partisan media ecosystem that exists to serve it up, is by now both a sort of political identity and identity politics unto itself. This performance of being upset, which is both consciously performed and seemingly also in total lizard-brain earnest, fills the vacuum of the broader moment—specifically with the smell of burning sneakers and the sound of offended people wailing about how offended other people are.
The spectacle of all that is still strange, because the specifics of it are, just on their basic merits, so goofy. The shit-losing community yowls about how offensive and ridiculous they find the offense that they presume other people to have taken; they do this into the front-facing camera on their phones, or into a webcam they’ve set up on the dashboard of their car, or into the cursor blinking on some social media site’s little text box. They direct these complaints at a multinational corporation that manufactures athletic equipment, over literal or figurative piles of smoldering athletic socks and desecrated basketball shoes that they have just immolated/defaced. These people are not themselves upset—they are never upset, which is easily ascertained because of how reliably they insist upon that—but they are disappointed and embarrassed on Nike’s behalf, or just kind of laughing in a not-mad way at how upset other people get, and also how easily offended people are these days.
It doesn’t really matter that there is nothing really to this, and that it fundamentally resolves to people 1) insisting that it is unpatriotic to deny the American flag the right to appear on a tacky sneaker, and 2) saying “fuck Colin Kaepernick” for the umpteenth time. It’s not about Kaepernick’s reading of the flag, which can be both correct—“under the guise of ‘heritage,’ symbols of early US history have long been adopted by hate groups set on returning to a time when all non-white people were viewed as subhuman and un-American,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Keegan Hankes said, identifying the flag’s use in recent recruiting material from racist reactionary organizations—and maybe also a bit much. None of that really matters to anyone, because none of the people getting upset about this withering insult to Betsy Ross herself, or the bedrock constitutional right to put a flag on a sneaker so people will buy it or whatever really had an opinion on any of this before Colin Kaepernick had his.
The whole story has had an almost algorithmic feel about it from the jump, like one of those text-jammed procedurally generated t-shirts you see on Facebook except that this one says You’re Damn Right I Will Defend Betsy Ross From Sneaker Companies And Free Agent Quarterbacks. It is hot outside and a lot of people are off work today, and yet this story continues to run smoothly even on autopilot. Various grouches and weirdos rise in turn to deliver themselves of speeches and sermons that consist of the same 50 words arranged in slightly different order. It is useless, or useful only in demonstrating which members of Congress are willing to tweet feet pics and which prefer to rely on ominous line breaks to make their point. All of them make the same point, which is not really a point at all so much as it is pretending to be oppressed by what some other person thinks or some sneaker company does.
It is reasonable to wonder what a flag would even be doing on a shoe, where it could get dog shit mushed onto it or be dunked in a mud puddle or otherwise suffer the sort of indignities from which flags are generally protected. The short answer is that it was there because someone at Nike thought it might help the shoes sell, although that’s not a thing flags are supposed to be used for, either. But the way these symbols get used necessarily change over time, and to fit the interests of those using them. “In Betsy Ross’s time, the flag was strictly utilitarian,” Betsy Ross House director Lisa Moulder said. “It was a military tool. It wasn’t commercialized until much later. In the 18th century, flags helped troops on land or at sea identify each other, so you’d know if you were firing on military troops or an ally.” There’s always some war to find.
A Nicaraguan man who died Friday at an Arizona hospital is the 12th person to die in the custody of US immigration authorities since September.
Three dozen people from Central America, including the 52-year-old man, had turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents west of Sasabe, US Customs and Border Protection said in a statement. They were being processed at a Border Patrol facility in Tucson when he fell into medical distress.
CBP expressed its condolences to the man's family.
Eleven others have died in US custody, including a 30-year-old Honduran man who died in ICE custody last Sunday at a hospital in Humble, Texas, the agency said.
Yimi Alexis Balderramos-Torres entered ICE custody on June 6 and less than two weeks later was transferred to the Houston Contract Detention Facility in Houston, Texas.
On June 30, he was found unresponsive in his dormitory and attempts to revive him were unsuccessful, ICE said.
Other detainees to die in ICE custody since November include a 58-year-old Cuban man; two Russian nationals, a 40-year-old man and a 56-year-old man; a 54-year-old Mexican man; and a 21-year-old Indian national. A 25-year-old Salvadoran transgender woman, Jonathan Alberto "Johana" Medina Leon, died in the agency's custody in early June.
Besides the 12 migrants who have died in US custody, a 2-year-old boy from Guatemala died in May at an El Paso hospital. The boy had suffered from complications of pneumonia and was not identified and not in US custody at the time of his death, Tekandi Paniagua, the Guatemalan consul general in Del Rio, Texas, told CNN. He had previously been in US custody.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, the guy who went on a Twitter rampage last Tuesday over Nike’s decision to pull its Betsy Ross Fourth of July sneakers, and the guy who vowed to quash $1 million in incentives for the company to bring a manufacturing facility to the state, apparently can’t live without his Nikes.
Or maybe he’s just another Republican politician claiming the mantle of patriotism by latching onto the latest racist campaign targeting private businesses over decisions they make out of respect for people of color.
At 2 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Ducey posted a thread of nine tweets saying he was “embarrassed for Nike.”
“Instead of celebrating American history the week of our nation’s independence, Nike has apparently decided that Betsy Ross is unworthy, and has bowed to the current onslaught of political correctness and historical revisionism,” he wrote.
“Nike has made its decision, and now we’re making ours. I’ve ordered the Arizona Commerce Authority to withdraw all financial incentive dollars under their discretion that the State was providing for the company to locate here,” he added.
Here’s the thread:
https://twitter.com/dougducey/status/1145980544909340672
Two days later, Ducey was photographed at a Fourth of July barbecue wearing Nike shoes. The photo was shared on Twitter by the Coconino County Democrats.
https://twitter.com/CoconinoDems/status/1146957975317147648
In case you didn’t click on it, here’s a closer look at his feet:
(https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--BpJzoIgE--/gagrnyaxteprdxfmhc06.jpg)
To be clear, the criticism here isn’t that Ducey is wearing Nikes—he can wear any fucking type of shoes he wants to. What’s laughable is that a) he’s a hypocrite and b) he’s willing to risk hundreds of local jobs over a political stunt that makes him look patriotic to racist voters, but then does it half-ass. MAGA!
That probably shouldn’t surprise anyone, though, since Ducey’s Twitter account is plastered with GOP patriotism porn. But at least make some kind of effort, dude. Maybe keep one shoe and burn the other? Stick your feet on the grill? I don’t know.
A spokesman for Ducey offered a sarcastic response to a request for comment by Business Insider: “Really? Yes, the governor owns Nikes. Stop the presses.”
They’re stopped.
Peoria police say a man stabbed and killed a 17-year-old at a Circle K on the 4th of July.
According to the department’s Facebook post, 27-year-old Michael Adams walked into the store and stabbed the victim in the neck. The victim was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. Adams was arrested not far from the scene.
FOX 10 reports that Adams told officers that the victim was listening to rap music and “that type of music makes him feel unsafe because he’s been attacked in the past by people who listen to rap music.”
He claimed he was trying to prevent a future attack involving the victim and admits the two never spoke.
Adams attorney told the TV outlet that he suffers from mental illness and had been previously released from jail without medication. He said his client should be admitted to the hospital for treatment.
The suspect is currently back in jail with a bond set at $1 million.
Since the Border Patrol opened its station in Clint, Tex., in 2013, it was a fixture in this West Texas farm town. Separated from the surrounding cotton fields and cattle pastures by a razor-wire fence, the station stood on the town’s main road, near a feed store, the Good News Apostolic Church and La Indita Tortillería. Most people around Clint had little idea of what went on inside. Agents came and went in pickup trucks; buses pulled into the gates with the occasional load of children apprehended at the border, four miles south.
But inside the secretive site that is now on the front lines of the southwest border crisis, the men and women who work there were grappling with the stuff of nightmares.
Outbreaks of scabies, shingles and chickenpox were spreading among the hundreds of children who were being held in cramped cells, agents said. The stench of the children’s dirty clothing was so strong it spread to the agents’ own clothing — people in town would scrunch their noses when they left work. The children cried constantly. One girl seemed likely enough to try to kill herself that the agents made her sleep on a cot in front of them, so they could watch her as they were processing new arrivals.
“It gets to a point where you start to become a robot,” said a veteran Border Patrol agent who has worked at the Clint station since it was built. He described following orders to take beds away from children to make more space in holding cells, part of a daily routine that he said had become “heartbreaking.”
The little-known Border Patrol facility at Clint has suddenly become the public face of the chaos on America’s southern border, after immigration lawyers began reporting on the children they saw — some of them as young as 5 months old — and the filthy, overcrowded conditions in which they were being held.
Border Patrol leaders, including Aaron Hull, the outspoken chief patrol agent of the agency’s El Paso Sector, have disputed descriptions of degrading conditions inside Clint and other migrant detention sites around El Paso, claiming that their facilities were rigorously and humanely managed even after a spate of deaths of migrant children in federal custody.
But a review of the operations of the Clint station, near El Paso’s eastern edge, shows that the agency’s leadership knew for months that some children had no beds to sleep on, no way to clean themselves and sometimes went hungry. Its own agents had raised the alarm, and found themselves having to accommodate even more new arrivals.
The accounts of what happened at Clint and at nearby border facilities are based on dozens of interviews by The New York Times and The El Paso Times of current and former Border Patrol agents and supervisors; lawyers, lawmakers and aides who visited the facility; and an immigrant father whose children were held there. The review also included sworn statements from those who spent time at El Paso border facilities, inspection reports and accounts from neighbors in Clint.
The conditions at Clint represent a conundrum not just for local officials, but for Congress, where lawmakers spent weeks battling over the terms of a $4.6 billion humanitarian aid package for facilities at the border. The lack of federal investment, some argue, is why the sites have been so strained. But the reports of squalor prompted several Democratic lawmakers to vote against the final bill, which did not have oversight and enforcement provisions.
By all accounts, the Border Patrol’s attempt to continue making room for new children at Clint even as it was unable to find space to send them to better-equipped facilities was a source of concern for many people who worked there.
“I can’t tell you the number of times I would talk to agents and they would get teary-eyed,” said one agent, a veteran of 13 years with Border Patrol who worked at Clint.
Mary E. González, a Democratic state lawmaker who toured the Clint station last week, said that Border Patrol agents told her they had repeatedly warned their superiors about the overcrowded facility, but that federal officials had taken no action.
“They said, ‘We were ringing the alarms, we were ringing the alarms, and nobody was listening to us’ — agents told me that,” Ms. González said. “I genuinely believe that the higher-ups made the Clint situation happen.”
A Forward Operating Base
Architects designed the Clint station as a type of forward base — replete with fueling stations, garages for all-terrain vehicles and horse stables — from which agents could go on forays along the border.
The station was never intended to hold more than about a hundred adult men, and it was designed with the idea that migrants would be detained for only a few hours of processing before being transferred to other locations.
Officials have allowed reporters and members of Congress on controlled tours of Clint, but prohibited them from bringing phones or cameras inside, and from entering certain areas. But through interviews with dozens of people with knowledge of the station — including lawyers, former detainees and staff members — The Times was able to model the main areas where children were held: the station’s central processing area, with its cinder-block cells; a converted loading area and yard; and a warehouse on the property.
Parts of the site resemble what might be seen at many government buildings. Photographs in the hallway celebrate the work of the Border Patrol, showing agents on horseback and in all-terrain vehicles. A conference room features high-backed chairs upholstered with faux leather.
But the sense of normalcy fades away the deeper one goes into the station. A detachment of Coast Guard personnel, sent to assist overworked agents, stock an ad hoc pantry with items like oatmeal and instant noodles. Monitors in blue shirts roam the station, hired through an outside contractor to supervise the detained children.
Beyond the pantry, a door leads to the site’s processing center, equipped with about 10 cells. One day this month, about 20 girls were crowded into one cell, so packed that some were sprawled on the floor. Toddlers could be seen in some cells, cared for by older children.
One of the cells functioned as a quarantine unit or “flu cell” for children with contagious diseases; employees have at times worn medical masks and gloves to protect themselves.
A part of the processing area was set aside for detained children to make phone calls to family members. Many broke into tears upon hearing the voices of loved ones, episodes so common that some agents merely shrugged in response.
Clint is known for holding what agents call U.A.C.s, or unaccompanied alien children — children who cross the border alone or with relatives who are not their parents.
Three agents who work at Clint said they had seen unaccompanied children as young as 3 enter the facility, and lawyers who recently inspected the site as part of a lawsuit on migrant children’s rights said they saw children as young as 5 months old. An agent who has worked for Border Patrol for 13 years — and who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the situation — confirmed reports by immigration lawyers that agents have asked migrants who are teenagers to help care for the younger children.
“We have nine agents processing, two agents in charge of U.A.C. care and we have little ones that need their diapers changed, and we can’t do that,” the agent said. “We can’t carry them or change diapers. We do ask the older juveniles, the 16-year-olds or 17-year-olds, to help us out with that.”
As immigration flows change, the scene inside Clint has shifted as well. The number of children in the site is thought to have peaked at more than 700 around April and May, and stood at nearly 250 two weeks ago. In an attempt to relieve overcrowding, agents took all the children out of Clint but then moved more than 100 back into the station just days later.
Unaccompanied boys are kept in a converted loading area that holds about 50 people. Until a few weeks ago, older boys were kept in a tent encampment outside.
Families, including adult parents, were also sent to Clint earlier this year, and Representative Will Hurd, a Republican whose Texas district includes Clint, said that 11 adult males “apprehended that morning” were also being held at the site when he visited on June 29.
Before the influx of migrants began to wane in recent weeks, the agents said they had kept the families in a warehouse normally used to house A.T.V.s. It was converted into two holding areas initially intended to house 50 people each.
A Chief Agent Under Fire
At least two Border Patrol agents at Clint said they had expressed concern about the conditions in the station to their superiors months ago. Even before that, senior Homeland Security officials in Washington had significant concerns about the El Paso Sector’s brash chief patrol agent and his oversight of the facility over the past year, when tighter security along other sections of the border prompted a steep rise in migrant crossings along the section that runs from New Mexico through West Texas.
The situation became so severe that in January, officials at Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, took the unusual move of ordering the sector chief, Mr. Hull, to come to headquarters in Washington for a face-to-face meeting. The officials were concerned that Mr. Hull, an agency veteran who speaks with a pronounced Texas twang, had moved too slowly to put safety measures in place after the deaths of migrant children, according to a Homeland Security official. After the meeting, Mr. Hull moved forward with the new procedures.
But tension has persisted between Mr. Hull and officials in Washington, particularly in recent months, as the number of migrants continued to increase at his facilities. The officials believe that Mr. Hull and Matthew Harris, the chief of the Clint station, have been slow to follow directives and communicate developments at the facilities in their sector, according to two Homeland Security officials.
Mr. Hull is seen as a hard-liner on immigration issues. He has often been heard saying that migrants exaggerate the problems they face in their home countries.
Officials at the border agency declined multiple interview requests.
Last month, the acting head of C.B.P., John Sanders, ordered an internal investigation into the Clint facility. The investigation — which is being conducted by the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the department’s inspector general — has examined allegations of misconduct.
As part of the review, investigators have conducted interviews and watched hours of video footage to see how agents treated detainees. So far, investigators have found little evidence to substantiate allegations of misconduct. But they have found that the facility is several times over capacity and has horrendous conditions.
The uproar over the site is drawing scrutiny on Border Patrol facilities that are some of the least-regulated migrant detention centers in the United States.
That is in part because they are intended in most cases to hold migrants for no more than 72 hours, before they are turned over to better-equipped facilities operated by other government agencies with stricter regulations on, say, the number of toilets and showers required. But the 72-hour limit has been frequently breached during the current migrant surge; some children have been housed at Clint for weeks on end.
Lawyers who visited the Clint station described children in filthy clothes, often lacking diapers and with no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap, prompting people around the country to donate supplies that the Border Patrol turned away.
But Mr. Hull painted a far different picture of his need for supplies in April, when the numbers of children held in Clint were soaring. Mr. Hull told commissioners in Doña Ana County in Las Cruces, N.M., in April that his stations had more than enough supplies.
“Twenty years ago, we were lucky if we had juice and crackers for those in custody,” Mr. Hull said, as quoted in The Las Cruces Sun-News. “Now, our stations are looking more like Walmarts — with diapers and baby formula and all kinds of things, like food and snacks, that we aren’t resourced or staffed for and don’t have the space to hold.”
An Inspector Arrives
One day in April, a man from Washington arrived unannounced around midday at the Clint station. He introduced himself as Henry Moak, and told the agents inside that he was there to inspect the site in his role as Customs and Border Protection’s chief accountability officer.
The Clint station was far over capacity on the day of Mr. Moak’s visit, bulging with 291 children. Mr. Moak found evidence of a lice infestation; children also told him about going hungry and being forced to sleep on the floors.
One girl, a 14-year-old from El Salvador, had been in custody for 14 days in Clint, including a nine-day stretch in a nearby hospital during which Border Patrol agents accompanied her and kept her under surveillance. Mr. Moak did not specify in his report why the girl had been rushed to the hospital. When the girl returned to Clint, another child had taken her bed so she had to sleep on the floor.
Two sisters from Honduras, one 11 and the other 7, told Mr. Moak that they had to sleep on benches in the facility’s hold room, getting their own cot only when other children were transferred out. “The sisters told me they had not showered or brushed their teeth since arriving at Clint station,” Mr. Moak said in his report. Showers had been offered twice during the girls’ time in custody, but the girls were asleep each time, his review showed.
Mr. Moak in the end stated that Clint was in compliance with standards.
One of a team of lawyers who inspected the station in June, Warren Binford, director of the clinical law program at Willamette University in Oregon, said that in all her years of visiting detention and shelter facilities, she had never encountered conditions so bad — 351 children crammed into what she described as a prisonlike environment.
She looked at the roster, and was shocked to see more than 100 very young children listed. “My God, these are babies, I realized. They are keeping babies here,” she recalled.
One teenage mother from El Salvador said Border Patrol agents at the border had taken her medicine for her infant son, who had a fever.
“Did they throw away anything else?” Ms. Binford said she had asked her.
“Everything,” she replied. “They threw away my baby’s diapers, formula, bottle, baby food and clothes. They threw away everything.”
Once at Clint, she told Ms. Binford, the baby’s fever came back and she begged the agents for more medicine. “Who told you to come to America with your baby, anyway?” one of the agents told her, according to the young woman’s account to Ms. Binford.
Border Patrol agents have said they have adequate supplies at Clint for most of the migrants’ needs. The facility lacks a kitchen, they said, so the ramen, granola bars, instant oatmeal and burritos that serve as most of the sustenance for migrants has been the best they could do.
Children sometimes could be seen crying, said one Border Patrol agent, who has worked for seven years at the Clint facility, but it most often seemed to be because they missed their parents. “It’s never because they’re mistreated; it’s because they’re homesick,” she said.
A Father Finds His Sons
Not long after Mr. Moak signed off on the conditions inside Clint, a man named Ruben was desperately trying to find his sons, 11-year-old twins who both have epilepsy.
The boys had crossed the border together in early June with their adult sister. They were hoping to reunite with their parents who had come to the United States earlier from El Salvador in order to earn enough money to pay for the boys’ epilepsy medications. They require daily injections and a strict regimen of care to prevent the seizures they began having at age 5.
But the twins were separated at the border from their sister and sent to Clint.
The first time they spoke to Ruben on the phone, the two boys sobbed intensely and asked when they would be able to see their parents again.
“We don’t want to be here,” they told him.
Ruben asked that his last name and the names of his sons be withheld for fear of retaliation by the American government.
Only later did Ruben learn that the boys had been given at least some of their epilepsy medication, and neither one had had a seizure. But one boy reported breaking out in a skin rash, his face and arms turning red and flaky. Both had come down with fevers and said they had been sent temporarily to the “flu cell.”
“There is no one to take care of you there,” one told his father.
It took 13 days after the boys were detained to speak to their father over the phone. A lawyer who had entered the facility, Clara Long of Human Rights Watch, met the boys, tracked down their parents, and helped them make a call. The boys were stoic and quiet, she said, and shook her hand as if “trying to act like little adults” — until they spoke to their father. Then, they could answer only with one- or two-word answers, Ms. Long said, and were wiping tears from their faces.
Much of the overcrowding appears to have been relieved at Clint, and overall arrivals at the border are slowing, as new policies make migrants, mainly from Central America, return to Mexico after they request asylum, as the summer heat deters travelers and as Mexico’s crackdown on its southern border prevents many from entering.
A Border Patrol agent who has long worked in the El Paso area said agents had tried to make things as easy as possible for the children; some bought toys and sports equipment on their own to bring in. “Agents play board games and sports with them,” he said.
But the Border Patrol long “took great pride” in quickly processing migrant families, and making sure children did not remain in their rudimentary stations for longer than 72 hours, the agent said. Clint, he said, “is not a place for kids.”
In the surrounding town, many residents were puzzled and sad at the news of what was happening to children in the station on Alameda Avenue.
“I don’t know what the hell happened, but they’ve diverted from their original mission,” said Julián Molinar, 66, a retired postal deliveryman who lives in a house facing the station. He served in the Army in Europe as the Berlin Wall came down, he said, and was dismayed that there was now talk of building a border wall near his home. As for the Clint facility, he said, “children should not be held here.”
Dora H. Aguirre, Clint’s mayor, expressed sympathy for the agents, who are part of the community in Clint and neighboring El Paso. “They’re just trying to do their job as a federal agency,” she said. “They are trying to do the best they can.”
President Donald Trump’s fight to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census is one he seems likely to lose.
Eleven days after an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling, a new team of Justice Department attorneys must persuade three district court judges that a June 30 printing deadline a previous DOJ legal team insisted had to be met no longer applies — even though, the Commerce Department said last week, the questionnaires are being printed already.
To pass muster with the Supreme Court, the new DOJ team must find a rationale that the high court will rule consistent with regulatory law and also believable — a tough assignment given that the court said in its ruling that the previous rationale was not.
“I think over the next day or two you’ll see what approach we’re taking, and I think it does provide a pathway for getting the question on the Census,” Attorney General William Barr told reporters Monday.
But that effort has been undermined repeatedly by Trump, who last week appeared to concede that his purpose was political. “Number one, you need it for Congress, you need it for Congress, for districting,” he said last week. “You need it for appropriations — where are the funds going? How many people are there? Are they citizens or are they not citizens?” (Districting and appropriations decisions are in fact based on the census's raw population numbers, not on any citizen count.)
“It just feels like a farce,” said Vanita Gupta, a former head of DOJ’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama and current president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which opposes adding the citizenship question. “There are people who view this as the president asking the Justice Department to do unlawful things and to violate and undermine the rule of law.”
The idea that judges will agree to ignore existing evidence in the case, Gupta said, “seems absurd.”
Trump’s continued insistence on adding the citizenship question increases the risk of additional disclosures about the White House’s role in the effort.
On Friday one of the three district court judges, Maryland-based U.S. District Judge George Hazel, ordered the start of discovery, a chance for both parties to seek out related evidence in the case.
Civil rights groups say they plan to use that opportunity to pry into communications between the White House and the Commerce Department and Justice Department officials involved in ordering the new query. They may also seek more details on Trump’s own involvement. That will likely trigger renewed legal battles over executive privilege and the confidentiality of White House interactions.
The district court judges will need to be convinced that whatever new rationale the DOJ lawyers produce for adding the census question isn’t undermined by earlier evidence that, among other things, suggested a deceased Republican redistricting strategist, Thomas Hofeller, sought to ask about citizenship to create an electoral advantage for Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
Hazel previously ruled that only Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s intent was relevant to the legal issues in the case. But with the litigation now focused on issues of intentional discrimination and a conspiracy to deprive Latinos of their civil rights, the plaintiffs are planning a broader effort to turn up evidence that could be problematic for the administration.
“A civil conspiracy claim is what makes the intent of a larger number of people relevant,“ said Denise Hulett of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which represents plaintiffs in the two related cases before Hazel. “We think that’s going to come into play even more than it did before because it’s clear a large group of people were involved in the decision.”
Another lawyer for the plaintiffs said some document demands and deposition subpoenas that were taken off the table during the last rounds of litigation may now be in play again. “We know we didn’t get certain things before and they may now be subject to being revisited,” said Niyati Shah of Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
One of the plaintiffs’ new targets in discovery will be Trump aides who may have been involved in the decision to add a citizenship question.
“It’s been our contention throughout that the White House was directly involved,” Hulett said, “facilitating connections between Ross and whoever they needed to connect him with.”
Hulett noted that just after Ross announced his decision to add the question, Trump’s reelection campaign sent out an email saying the move was the president’s idea.
“The president wants the 2020 United States Census to ask people whether or not they are citizens,” the March 19, 2018, email said.
The civil rights groups’ efforts to obtain more behind-the-scenes details seem certain to trigger further legal battles. “We anticipate resistance,” Hulett said. “Executive privilege is always difficult to overcome, but it’s not sacrosanct.”
Any attempt to add a citizenship question at this point also could run into trouble with logistics and cost.
Trump said Friday the administration had considered “four or five ways” to ask about citizenship on the census, including printing an addendum to the standard questionnaire. But an addendum could cause its own problems, according to John Thompson, a former Census director who spent more than three decades with the bureau and resigned in May 2017.
“I think that's probably a recipe for disaster,” he said. “It hasn't been tested, and it will most likely cause confusion and errors.”
The bureau would likely need to send an addendum in a separate mailing — a significant undertaking considering that the Census Bureau seeks to reach 330 million people in more than 140 million households.
The 2020 census will be the first to feature a digital questionnaire, and the Census Bureau has said it will encourage the majority of households to complete the survey that way. Any change to the digital questionnaire would be easier technologically than adding a printed form, but it would still require approval from the Office of Management and Budget and could run afoul of existing court orders.
Another stumbling block could be the sudden move to assign new attorneys to the census case, according to Andrew Reamer, a research professor with George Washington University’s Institute for Public Policy, who’s been tracking the census legal battle.
DOJ announced the new group of lawyers Sunday, but did not offer a reason for the change.
“They just lost their legal staff on this, the guys who have been dealing with this for a year,” he said. “Now they’re stuck with a whole bunch of lawyers from the consumer protection branch.”
Still, he said the change of personnel reflects a broader difficulty in arguing the Trump administration’s position in court.
“I think the staff would have been in personal jeopardy if they had to go forward and argue that June 30 didn’t matter anymore,” he said. “It would have been a professional stain on their careers.”
Last year, 1-year-old Mariee Juárez, a child from Guatemala, died of a respiratory infection that she contracted while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody with her mother. In this past year, at least six more children have died while in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody, after almost a decade of no child deaths.
On Wednesday, her mother, Yazmin Juárez, shared her powerful, blunt, and tearful testimony before a House subcommittee. Juárez alleged that ICE falsified her daughter’s medical records, and said she wanted to appear before Congress to make sure no more children die from the treatment they receive in ICE and CBP custody.
“I’m here today because I want to tell all people of all the world, in all countries, especially in the United States, that we need to make a change and make a difference to actually care and protect kids more,” Juárez said, her testimony translated into English. “ICE detention centers are terrible, inadequate places to lock children up—I’m sorry to say—as if they were animals.”
Speaking before the committee, Juárez told its members that Mariee was healthy when she was checked out by a nurse when they were first detained in March 2018, fleeing fear-inducing conditions in their home country. She said they were packed in a room with 12 people, with at least one child clearly sick.
As Mariee became ill, first with a weeks-long cough, then a persistent fever, Juárez alleged that doctors refused to examine Mariee’s lungs more closely. She said she would wait in a line morning after morning for an appointment, only to be given Tylenol, Pedialyte and Vicks VapoRub, the latter which Juárez later found out isn’t safe to give to children younger than 2 years old.
She recalled how hot her daughter’s little body and head felt. One night, she said, the toddler wouldn’t wake up when her mother roused her for dinner. Still, Juárez wasn’t given an appointment for Mariee; she told New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that at one point, her toddler was given a popsicle, with her mother told that it would help with the fever.
When Juárez finally gotten an appointment, the family was cleared for release from ICE. Mariee’s medical records, which Juárez provided to the committee, showed she was medically cleared for travel, but Juárez said that was false, and that she was never seen by a doctor. “How many more fraudulent medical records might be out there?” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz asked during her questioning.
Reached for comment via email, ICE responded that it couldn’t comment on Juárez’s testimony or ongoing legal cases, but said it was “committed to ensuring the welfare of all those in the agency’s custody, including providing access to necessary and appropriate medical care,” and cited a 2017 DHS inspector general report which said that family residential centers are “clean, well-organized, and efficiently run.”
Tearfully, Juárez recalled how her daughter was in the hospital for weeks, poked and prodded with tubes. Weeks later—on Guatemala’s Mother’s Day—Mariee died.
“It is very hard to see so many children and for none of them to be my daughter, and to think that I will never see her again, or hug her, or enjoy being with her, or tell her how much I love her,” Juárez said. “You have no idea how hard it is to move on without my little girl. It’s like they tore out a piece of my heart, like they tore out my soul.”
Responding to a question from Ocasio-Cortez about mistreatment she saw or experienced herself, Juárez alleged that she was told by an immigration agent that the U.S. is a country for Americans only, that Trump was their president, and that they could take Mariee away from her and put her in jail.
Juárez sued the U.S. government for $60 million last year. Earlier this year, Juárez filed another lawsuit against the city of Eloy, AZ, which had a contract with ICE to oversee the South Texas Family Residential Center hundreds of miles away in Dilley, TX, where she and Mariee were detained. She’s suing Eloy, which operated as a middleman between ICE and CoreCivic, for $40 million for Mariee’s “wrongful and preventable death,” claiming that the city neglected to ensure that children at Dilley received adequate medical care and sanitary living conditions.
In September, Eloy pulled out of the contract with CoreCivic and ICE, which garnered the city roughly $430,000 in fees annually.
“My daughter is gone. The people who are in charge of running these facilities and caring for these little angels are not supposed to let these things happen to them,” Juárez said. “It can’t be so hard for a country like the United States to protect kids who are locked up.”
THE CRUSH of migrants that overwhelmed U.S. border facilities in the spring, producing appalling conditions for migrant children at Customs and Border Protection stations, has eased with summer’s arrival as scorching temperatures and deterrent measures adopted by Mexican authorities drove down border-crossing arrests by nearly a third between May and June. Together with the $4.6 billion in supplemental funding enacted by Congress and signed by President Trump, that is taking pressure off the government’s capacity to manage the flow of migrants, especially the families and minors that have transformed the immigration landscape.
What will remain, however, are urgent questions about the Border Patrol, and the degree to which the agency’s failings of culture exacerbated a shocking humanitarian crisis on the southwest frontier. If crisis exposes character, then the agency manning the front lines of America’s border with Mexico needs to take a hard look at its own shortcomings — not only of resources but also of professionalism.
Without doubt, thousands of Border Patrol agents have struggled to contend with the biggest spike in migrant border-crossing in more than a decade, and many went the extra mile — playing with children in their care and displaying a hundred other kindnesses. Much of the apparently inhumane treatment of some migrants was reported by Border Patrol agents themselves to watchdog groups and higher-ups in the agency. Homeland Security officials have added additional medical personnel and opened new facilities to accommodate minors.
Still, the accounts of visitors to the Border Patrol’s station at Clint, in far west Texas, and reporting on the same facility by the New York Times, strongly suggest that Border Patrol officials failed to respond to warnings of filthy, unhygienic and dangerous conditions for unaccompanied minors there. True, it was a shortage of bed space that produced a bottleneck in which hundreds of migrant children were stuck in facilities such as the one in Clint, originally built to hold adults. But the fact that those children, some of them infested with lice, were forced to endure weeks at the station without clean clothing, soap, toothpaste and other basic necessities — even as the Border Patrol sector chief for that region, Aaron Hull, insisted that the agency had maintained humane conditions — is a sign of institutional indifference and callousness.
That impression is reinforced by reports of private Facebook group pages linked to current and former CBP agents that feature obnoxious, sneering and obscene references to undocumented migrants and Hispanic members of Congress. Border Patrol and Homeland Security officials insist the pages and commentary are unacceptable and unrepresentative; they have ordered investigations and taken disciplinary action against some personnel.
It’s anyone’s guess how deeply infected the Border Patrol has become by the toxic attitudes reflected in those Facebook groups. What’s worrying is that the intolerance and contempt for migrants afoot within the agency have only been encouraged by Mr. Trump, whose constant disparagement of migrants is a hallmark of his rhetoric. Little wonder it has found echoes in the far bureaucratic reaches of his administration.
The principal saw a swastika first. It was inky black, spray painted on a trash can just beside the entrance to the high school. David Burton switched off the engine of his SUV, unaware, even then, of the magnitude of what he was about to see.
This was the last day of the year for the class of 2018 at Glenelg High School. There was going to be an awards ceremony, a picnic, that end-of-a-journey feeling that always made Burton so proud of his job. But as he was on his way to work at 6:25 a.m., the assistant principal had called, agitated and yelling about graffiti. “It’s everywhere,” he kept saying, so Burton had leaned on the gas and rushed the last few miles.
Soon, everyone would be telling him how shocked they were. This was Howard County, after all: a Maryland suburb between Washington and Baltimore that is extremely diverse, extremely well-educated and home to Columbia, a planned community founded on the principles of integration and inclusion. People moved their families here for that reputation just as much as for the good schools.
“Pleasantville,” Burton liked to call it, but as a black man, and as the principal of the county’s only majority-white school, he knew this place was more complicated. When he stepped out into the bright spring day, he confronted the reality of just how much more.
Beneath his dress shoes, there were more swastikas. Spray painted around them were crude drawings of penises.
Then Burton saw the letters “KKK.” He saw the word “Fuck” again and again next to the words “Jews,” “Fags,” “Nigs” and “Burton.”
were more than 100 markings in total, though he didn’t bother to count.
He turned a corner and saw something written in large capital letters on the sidewalk: “BURTON IS A NIGGER.”
He paused only for a moment, looking at the words, trying to comprehend that all of this was real.
Later, school district officials, county administrators and prosecutors would have a name for what happened here. They would repeat it, condemn it and vow to prevent it from occurring again. Hate crime.
The phrase has become inescapable as hate-fueled incidents have spiked across the country. A quarter of all hate crimes reported to the FBI, more than any other category, are similar to the attack discovered at Glenelg on May 24, 2018. Vandalism and destruction of property, a physical marking of an age-old threat: You don’t belong here.
The majority are repaired, washed away or painted over without anyone arrested. When the perpetrators are caught, they are rarely charged with a hate crime. Here, there would be consequences, and with them, a division between those who wanted to confront the racism in their midst and those determined to explain it away.
But first, Burton, 50 years old and dressed in one of his best black suits, would walk back over the graffiti, retreat into his office, close the door and pray.
His staff scrambled to cover the spray paint with tarps, carpet pads, anything they could find. The maintenance team searched for a sandblaster. But there was too much to cover and too little time before the students and parents began arriving. The seniors were wearing red caps and gowns, ready for their awards ceremony. Everyone was directed to alternative entrances, away from the worst of the damage. But photos of the graffiti were already being texted, emailed and Snapchatted.
In the auditorium, Imani Nokuri looked for her family, who had come to see her perform the national anthem. She was one of fewer than 20 black students in the class of more than 260 seniors. She and her younger sister, a freshman at Glenelg, had been rapid-fire texting all morning, comforting each other. But when Imani saw the look of deep concern her grandmother gave her, she forced a smile onto her face. “It’s okay,” she promised. “I’m fine.”
In the central office, teachers who had led diversity and empathy training for students were crying. Police were arriving, asking to see security footage. Phones were ringing with calls from reporters. Photos of the damage were about to be broadcast on TV, making their way into homes across the region.
In one of those homes, 72-year-old Susan Sands-Joseph was watching. She knew Glenelg well. She was one of the first black students to attend the school after desegregation. Suddenly, all the memories that she tried not to dwell on were dredged up again: the words she was called, the tomatoes thrown at her head, the looks her parents gave her when she came home saying scalding hot soup had been pushed into her lap again. “It’s okay,” she had promised them. “I’m fine.”
By the time the awards ceremony was about to begin, Principal Burton had rewritten the speech he had been planning to give. “We are not going to let this ruin your celebration,” he would now tell students.
He emerged from his office with notes clutched in his hand and stopped to check in with the police. The security footage, they told Burton, confirmed what he had suspected.
The principal entered the auditorium to a burst of applause. He stepped up to the podium. He stood before his students, looked out into their faces and felt certain: The people who did this were looking back at him.
Seth Taylor tipped his head down so his graduation cap would block his view of the podium. It felt, he said later, like the principal was staring right at him. But he and the others had hidden their faces behind masks the night before, Seth reminded himself. How could anyone know they were the ones who had done it?
All morning, he had been replaying the vandalism in his mind. He’d been at his buddy Matt Lipp’s house, where the parents of all their friends had gathered the evening of May 23 to sort out the details of Senior Week. The teens’ parents had rented them a house in Ocean City, the annual destination for thousands of local students celebrating graduation, and were divvying up tasks: who would drive the group to the beach, who would stock their fridge, who would cook them dinners before leaving them for a week of beer pong, sunburns and meetups with houses full of girls.
Afterward, Seth stayed to watch a Washington Capitals playoff game. He loved these kinds of nights and, really, everything about high school. Cheering crowds at his football and baseball games, late-night Xbox sessions, fishing trips, parties in their parents’ basements. He could do without the academic part — he was a B student, at best — but he was planning to join the Army Reserve and maybe go to community college.
With him at Matt’s was Josh Shaffer, a hockey player he’d been friends with since seventh grade, and Tyler Curtiss, the baseball team captain who had been homecoming king and prom king.
Matt and Josh declined interview requests, but Seth and Tyler agreed to talk to The Washington Post about the vandalism. When they tell the story of that evening, they start with the end of the Caps game, when everyone but Seth was deep into a supply of Bud Light, and the conversation turned, once again, to their senior prank.
Tyler wanted to superglue locks. Seth suggested they grease up three pigs and release them into the school.
Or, somebody said, they could go spray paint the words “Class of 2018.”
Within minutes, they were driving to the school with spray paint from Matt’s parents’ garage. They parked at the church next door, tied T-shirts into masks over their faces and sprinted through the woods.
A shake of the can, the smell of fumes. The words went down easily, just as they had planned: “Class of 2018,” they wrote across the sidewalk.
And then Seth watched as Josh wrote something else: “BURTON IS A” it began.
Later, this was the moment he agonized over — the point at which he could have turned back. “I wish I said something, like, ‘This is stupid, guys. It’s not worth it. We could actually get in trouble for this.’”
Why he didn’t, he would always struggle to explain: “I don’t know. Everyone was doing it. We didn’t realize the consequences.”
“It was just spray paint. It just happened. It is all a blur.”
The blur went on for about seven minutes, during which all of them sprayed something hateful. Josh targeted the principal. Matt attacked Jewish, gay and black people. Tyler drew two swastikas. Seth drew swastikas, “fags” and “KKK.”
When a car drove by, they leaped behind the brick columns near the front entrance, hiding. A moment later, they started spraying again.
Finally, they ran back to their cars. They chucked their paint cans in the woods. They swore to each other that they would never admit what they did.
Seth came home to a quiet house. His sister was away at college, his father was on a business trip, and his mother was asleep. He went to the fridge and found the breakfast she had made for him to eat the next morning. Seth popped the eggs into the microwave. When he went to grab them, the plate slipped. The hot eggs tumbled onto his arms and legs. The shock somehow made it hit him. What had he just done?
Panicked, he started Googling:
“How long do you go to jail for vandalism?”
And then: “Can you get a hate crime for painting swastikas?”
Now he was sitting in the Glenelg auditorium, thinking about what he’d told his mom. Early that morning, she’d received an email from the school informing parents about the graffiti. Horrified, she texted Seth, warning him what he would find when he arrived at the awards ceremony.
“Who would do that?” he had texted back.
And in a sense, he meant it. He had already begun to separate what he’d done from who he believed himself to be. He hadn’t intended to hurt anyone, he said. He would always maintain he wasn’t an anti-Semite, a homophobe or a racist.
From the podium a voice said: “Tyler Curtiss.”
Seth looked up. His friend was walking toward the stage. But Tyler wasn’t getting in trouble. He was accepting an athletic leadership award. He was walking across the stage and shaking the principal’s hand.
Seth felt a tap on his shoulder. The athletic director was standing over him. “Seth,” he said quietly. “You need to come with me.”
Seth followed him out, trying not to look at his classmates. On the other side of the auditorium doors, two police officers were waiting to take him to the office of the school resource officer, Steve Willingham.
On the TV screen inside was security footage from the night before. Seth could see his own stout frame, paint can in hand, frozen in high definition.
“I bet you don’t want to see that, do you?” he remembers Willingham saying.
“No,” Seth answered.
“Do you know why you’re in here?”
“Yes,” Seth said. He didn’t know then that the officers had been strategic in pulling him out first. Willingham had coached Seth’s sister in soccer. He was friends with Seth’s dad. He suspected that of all the boys, Seth was the most likely to confess.
It took only one question: “What happened?”
“Things got out of hand,” Seth recalls telling him. “I was under the impression we were going to do a prank, and it got bad.”
He started to cry. He would be the only one who immediately admitted what they did. The others, court records show, would deny it. Tyler wished Willingham good luck in finding out who did it.
Eventually they were told: The school’s WiFi system requires students to use individual IDs to get online. After they log in once, their phones automatically connect whenever they are on campus.
At 11:35 p.m. on May 23, the students’ IDs began auto-connecting to the WiFi. It took only a few clicks to find out exactly who was beneath those T-shirt masks.
“You have the right to remain silent,” an officer said to Seth before long. “Anything you say or do . . . ”
They told him to remove his graduation cap and gown. They cuffed his arms behind his back.
Seth realized they were about to march him outside, past the windows of the cafeteria. By now it would be filled with students eating lunch.
“Can you cover my face so that the kids don’t videotape me?” he asked.
“No,” an officer replied. “You deserve this.”
By the end of the day, charges had been filed. Not just vandalism and destruction of property, but a hate crime. Prosecutors believed the young men had committed their acts with animosity toward protected groups — and that they could prove it. In Maryland, that meant that the punishment could be intensified. It meant they were looking at up to six years of incarceration.
Before they were released from jail that night, the four students watched on a small TV screen outside their holding cell while their crime was broadcast on the local news — as it would be over and over in the coming days. Viewers saw four white teens, scowling at the camera, and the school system’s superintendent vowing at a news conference to hold them accountable.
“Howard County stands out as a place where diversity and acceptance are cherished,” Michael Martirano said. It sounded like something any superintendent would say. But here, many knew, it came with a story: one taught to children in school, bragged about to visitors and proclaimed on signs.
In the early 1960s, before the Fair Housing Act and the legalization of interracial marriage in Maryland, a white developer named James Rouse began purchasing huge swaths of Howard County farmland to build a planned community named Columbia.
He envisioned it as a mixed-race, mixed-income utopia. “The next America,” he called it, and although racial tensions could never be completely erased, to many people, that is what it became. Today, the suburb — home to a third of the county’s 300,000 residents — is renowned for its ethnic diversity, interracial marriages, interfaith centers and high-achieving schools. It appears frequently on national “Best Places to Live” lists.
Most are unaware of the history that came before Columbia. The farmland Rouse purchased included former slave-holding plantations. An estimated 2,800 people were enslaved in the county at the beginning of the Civil War. A century later, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that schools must be desegregated, Howard County was so resistant that it took more than a decade for the black-only school, Harriet Tubman, to close its doors. The opposition to black students learning alongside white ones was so fierce, a cross was burned. It happened outside a school dance at Glenelg High School.
Glenelg is in western Howard, the most rural part of the county, then and now. While the rest of Howard’s high schools have no racial majority, 76 percent of Glenelg students are white.
On the news that night, though, only students of color were interviewed.
“It’s just a small number of students who decide to make these decisions that negatively impact the image of our school,” one said.
“This is not representative of what Glenelg stands for,” said another.
That week, after Seth, Tyler, Matt and Josh were released from jail without having to pay bail, their classmates began to argue over whether those statements were true.
Tyler Hebron, a senior who was president of the school’s black student union, typed her feelings into an Instagram post. “It shouldn’t have taken this event to occur for us to observe the hateful actions of our peers,” she remembers writing. “We shouldn’t say we are surprised. We are not.”
During her freshman year, a student flew a Confederate flag at a football game. Swastikas were scratched into the bathroom stalls. In 2017, someone had written the n-word and Principal Burton’s name on a baseball dugout. She had heard boys play a game to see who could yell the n-word the loudest. To her, this crime was just high-profile proof of the hostility she had always felt.
Soon, comments started appearing beneath her Instagram post.
“You’re racist,” one said. “All you do is blame straight white males.”
The night before graduation, she found herself thinking about whether she should pack pepper spray in her purse. She wasn’t sure, she told her parents, that she felt safe.
Among black families like hers, there were doubts that the white teens would face the kind of punishment black teens receive for similar crimes. Two years earlier, a group of students had painted swastikas on a historic black schoolhouse in Northern Virginia. A Loudoun County judge sentenced them not to jail time or community service, but to reading: along with visiting the Holocaust museum, each had to choose a single book about Nazi Germany or the Jim Crow era and write a report on it.
Two black families came to Burton and told him they were pulling their kids out of Glenelg before the next school year. The principal tried to persuade them not to go.
But in his own house, his wife, Katrina, was wondering if he should leave, too.
They had two daughters to think about, an eighth-grader and a senior at another Howard County high school, who on the day of the hate crime had come home and collapsed in her mother’s arms, sobbing. Katrina knew about the parents who warned Burton not to talk about the incident in his speech at the graduation ceremony, and watched as some of them refused to stand and clap for him that day.
“Are you safe?” she kept asking her husband.
There had been so many incidents in his life that had made Burton question just that. When he was 16, and the parents of a white friend in his Michigan hometown called him the n-word. In college, when he and his fraternity brothers were pulled over and questioned by a group of white cops seemingly for no reason. At a convenience store in South Carolina just a few years ago, when a hostile clerk refused to serve him and his family.
But inside a school, he was an authority figure, the man in charge. For most of his career, he’d led schools in Prince George’s and Howard counties filled with students of color.
And then to his surprise, he was asked in 2016 to leave Howard County’s Long Reach High School, where a third of the students are black, and take over at Glenelg, where less than 5 percent are black. Here, he suspected, it would take time to win over the community.
He started standing in the halls every morning and every class break, looking students in the eye as he said hello. He attended as many games and plays and art shows as he could. He made sure the swastikas scratched in the bathroom were documented and investigated, but quietly, to avoid giving those who drew them the attention they were seeking.
After two years, he felt that he had earned the respect of this place, and these people. They welcomed him when he arrived at the annual end-of-the-year celebration for the senior class at an Ellicott City resort. Parents gave him hugs and thanked him for what he had done for their kids.
That night, he learned that one senior had been caught trying to order alcohol at the bar. The student was kicked out of the event, but the next day, Burton decided he didn’t want to be overly harsh in his punishment.
“Even though you did this, I am going to allow you to go to the school picnic,” he told the teen.
Less than a week later, it was the same student, Josh Shaffer, who would scrawl Burton’s name and the n-word onto the sidewalk.
“The person you married is not about to cower,” the principal told his wife. He wouldn’t be leaving Glenelg.
He could use the summer, he thought, to plan what he was going to do the following school year, the message he needed to send.
And if the prosecutors sought his help in holding his students accountable, he knew what his answer would be.
Every time Seth walked from the parking lot of the Howard County Circuit Court to its entrance, he passed a small, decaying building with barred windows and a slanted roof. He rushed by with his head down, passing a plaque that explained the structure's history. Here, slaves who'd tried to run to freedom were held before being returned to the people who owned them.
In late March, Seth entered the courthouse dressed in one of his father’s suits, accompanied by his parents. It was his final appearance in front of the judge overseeing all four Glenelg cases: William V. Tucker, a black man with a reputation for his interest in the way the criminal justice system handles young people.
One by one, they had come before him and pleaded guilty, or been found guilty after agreeing to a statement of facts.
Two of them had tried to have the hate-crime charges dismissed. Their attorneys claimed that their First Amendment rights were being violated. They could be punished for the vandalism, the argument went, but not for what they wrote.
It didn’t work.
Now, it was Tucker’s job to answer a question the community had been debating for nearly a year: What consequences did these young men, now 19, deserve?
They hadn’t been allowed to walk at graduation. Their post-high-school plans had been derailed, and they were working in landscaping, asbestos removal and, in Seth’s case, office furniture construction. Their names and mug shots were seared into Howard County’s memory and the Internet’s search results. It was up to Tucker to decide whether, on top of that, they should spend time in jail.
His view became clear when Joshua Shaffer was the first to be sentenced on March 8, 2019. Seth stayed home and kept refreshing his Internet browser, waiting for news. Finally, the local TV station published a video: Josh was being walked out of the courthouse in cuffs. He had been sentenced to three years of probation, 250 hours of community service and 18 consecutive weekends in Howard County Jail.
Seth’s parents called his attorney, Debra Saltz, in a panic. His case was different, she reminded them. He was different. They just had to persuade the judge to see that.
Saltz stood in court that March morning and pointed to her client.
“Your honor, I truly believe justice and mercy call on us to consider who he is,” she said. “And I believe it requires the court to consider what has happened in his life, what he has done since May 24.”
Seth, she explained, had been working to make amends. He’d completed 181 hours of community service. He’d written an apology letter to Principal Burton. He’d visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and volunteered at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. He’d spent time with an African American pastor and attended regular diversity training with an African American counselor.
He did it all with the support of his parents, who had spent the year agonizing over how their son could have done something so heinous. Seth’s father, Scott Taylor, stood to tell the judge he blamed himself.
“The letters ‘KKK’ were painted on the school. Seth didn’t understand the pain, suffering and terror associated with those letters, because I never told him,” the father said. “I never told him how the Klan used to collect money after church in my neighborhood when I was growing up in the South, and how they would stand in the road like the fire department.”
“I’ve come to realize I did fail,” he continued. “It’s not what I said in my home; it’s what I didn’t say.”
When it was Seth’s turn to speak, he assured his parents that it was not their fault.
“You taught me better,” he said. “This isn’t who you raised.”
He apologized to the principal and to the communities he hurt.
“It was the worst decision I have ever made in my entire life. What I did there keeps me up at night. I deserve whatever punishment I get,” he said. “I have worked hard since that day to show my family, my school, my community and Principal Burton how sorry I am.”
Seth said he just wanted all of them to understand: He is not a racist.
Later, he would explain himself this way: “I never really understood the symbol of the swastika. I knew it was wrong to plaster it somewhere. I didn’t learn exactly what the Nazis were doing to the Jews until I went to the Holocaust Museum. I never learned that they were mutilated. I knew that they were, like, burned. But I never learned that they had experiments done on them, were injected with diseases. The school didn’t include that. They just included the burning and the train cars.”
His understanding of the KKK was limited, too, he said. “Some people think it’s just a word, or a symbol or three letters put together. . . . But they were lynching people, hurting people for no good reason.”
Now, he said, he knows. But he still doesn’t believe his actions that night make him a bigot.
“I spray paint one racist thing and, suddenly, I become a racist? Just because I did it doesn’t mean I hate Jews, gay people or black people.”
He was standing before the judge, pleading guilty to a hate crime, but he would not admit that he harbored any hate.
All around him, the adults agreed.
“He will forever be known as the racist kid at Glenelg, but that’s not who Seth is,” his father said in court that day.
“I told him that his act was racist, but don’t let it define him as a racist. He can and I pray that he will go on and do better,” Maxwell Ware, the African American pastor he met with, wrote in a letter supporting him.
“He is not a racist . . . he has a good heart,” his attorney told the judge.
Behind her, Principal Burton was listening. He’d heard Joshua Shaffer’s attorney give a similar speech. When Matthew Lipp was sentenced, he would hear it then too. Tyler Curtiss had written it in a Facebook apology the day after the crime. Tyler, Burton knew, had turned to Jesus, joining a church where he talked openly about the swastikas he painted that night. He had spent months telling his story to Jewish congregations, interfaith groups and the county’s board of rabbis. Come the day of his sentencing, Tyler would say: “I hold no hatred toward any human being, especially those in the communities that were affected.”
They all believed it was possible to do what they did without really meaning it.
Burton wanted to look them in the eye and say: “You did something very racist. How you don’t think you’re a racist, I don’t know.”
What he did know was what they’d been taught in school: Glenelg covered the Holocaust and the Klan in detail, in U.S. history and American government and world history and in the books they read for language arts.
He believed what possessed them to draw those words and symbols that night wasn’t a lack of knowledge, but something deeper, something ugly, something taught to them, consciously or unconsciously, along the way. If they couldn’t admit that now, maybe they never would. But it wasn’t his responsibility to educate them any more.
When it was Burton’s turn to speak at Seth’s sentencing, he didn’t say the word “racism.” He talked about all the people the crime had affected — the teachers crying in his office, the parents who pulled their kids out of his school, his daughter in tears, and for just a few moments, himself: “I know I give up my time, my effort, I give up my life for my students,” he said. “I think the only thing I am asking in return is just a little bit of respect.”
The courtroom waited in silence for Judge Tucker to reach his decision. Seth kept his gaze on the table. His father rubbed his mother’s back.
“I appreciate the fact that you are now trying to show that you are not a racist, that you committed a racist act,” Tucker finally told Seth. “But part of what I need to do is punish you. So the sentence is going to be as follows.”
Three years probation. Two hundred fifty hours in community service. And nine consecutive weekends in jail.
“A normal weekend incarceration is Friday 6 p.m. to Sunday 6 p.m.,” Tucker said. It was a Thursday. “For this weekend, it begins today.”
A black sheriff’s deputy stepped behind Seth and pulled out her handcuffs. His mother began to cry.
“Alright, Mr. Taylor, good luck to you,” the judge said, and the metal closed around Seth’s wrists.
Six weeks later, Seth backed his car out of his parents' driveway, headed to his final weekend in jail.
Good behavior during his weekends locked up meant he had to serve only two-thirds of them.
The following weekend, Tyler Curtiss, who had painted two swastikas, would finish his weekends, five in all.
Matt Lipp, whose graffiti attacked Jewish, black and gay people, would serve 11 of the 16 he was sentenced to. He has filed an appeal, still arguing that his First Amendment rights had been violated.
Josh Shaffer, who targeted the principal, was sentenced to the most jail time: 18 weekends. He would serve 12.
All four will be eligible to get the hate crimes expunged from their record when their probation is finished.
Together they had figured out how to navigate their 48-hour stints locked up: how to make the time pass, how to hide their toilet paper so it wouldn’t be stolen, what to do when the other inmates threw dominoes at their heads.
Seth didn’t know the names of the people who gave them trouble, but he had nicknames he made up for them. “String Bean,” for the tall, lanky one. “Pistachio” for the one with the mustache.
“Two black kids who just do not like us,” he called them.
Now he drove past the high school, yawning as he turned toward the highway. He’d been up late the night before, playing Mortal Kombat with strangers on his Xbox. He felt comfortable there, behind the anonymity of his username. He didn’t feel that way anywhere in Howard County. He grew nervous anytime he saw a person of color, wondering if they recognized him and knew what he had done.
He didn’t think anyone would recognize him come Monday, when he was going to start a new job in a heating and cooling apprenticeship program an hour away. It was going to pay $14 an hour. If he liked it, he might get his HVAC license. And then in three years when his probation was over, he thought he might move to Florida. Do some fishing. Start over.
He pulled into the jail parking lot 20 minutes early, switched off his engine and pulled out his phone. He turned on Kodak Black, who started rapping about “nigga s---.”
A truck pulled up beside him and Seth rolled down his passenger window.
“Hey,” he called to Josh. The two were the only ones in the group who had stayed close friends. During the week, they went to the gym together late at night, when they wouldn’t see other people.
“You ready to play three hours of checkers?” Josh asked.
“I’m finding a book, man,” Seth said. “I can’t play Uno again. I’m never playing Uno again in my life as soon as I leave this jail.”
Josh pulled out a can of tobacco dip. Seth took a hit from his strawberry-flavored Juul. They sat there until Josh said, “You ready?” and then Seth followed him inside.
The principal steered into the high school lot a month later and parked in the same spot he had a year before. He stepped out of his SUV in one of his best black suits. It was the last day of school for the class of 2019.
Once again, there was going to be an awards ceremony and a picnic, but this year, there was no graffiti waiting for him.
In the weeks since his former students were sent to jail, he and his wife had been asked again and again what they thought of the punishment. People were outraged — either that the young men had received a “slap on the wrist” or that they had been so persecuted. Burton wouldn’t take a side. “To me, it felt like a crime,” he said. “But what happens because of that crime is not up to me to figure out.”
He had to focus on his 1,200 current students: the LGBTQ kids who still felt isolated. The Jewish girl who told the local paper she still wishes she could transfer. Whoever was still scrawling swastikas on the bathroom stalls.
In the past year, he’d created a task force of diverse students to work on the school’s climate. Soon every freshman would go through an empathy workshop. And nearly 40 of his employees had spent the year meeting to discuss the book “Waking Up White,” a memoir of a white woman who comes to understand that racism is a system that she had been shaped by and contributed to her entire life without even realizing it. Maybe, he thought, that lesson would get passed on to Glenelg’s students.
But on this morning, his job was to celebrate his seniors. He stood outside as they arrived in their red caps and gowns. Their parents and grandparents followed behind, cameras in hand.
Then he saw it: this year’s version of a senior prank. A tractor was pulling into the parking lot. On the front was an old couch bolted to the forklift, a sign that read “2019,” and a few students sprawled on the cushions. On the back was a blue flag. “TRUMP,” it read, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
The assistant principal set off after them, and Burton decided to let him handle it. Instead he made his way to the auditorium. He stepped up to the podium, looking out at his students’ faces. Then their names were called, and they came on stage to shake his hand.
The poor treatment of migrant children at the hands of U.S. border agents in recent months extends beyond Texas to include allegations of sexual assault and retaliation for protests, according to dozens of accounts by children held in Arizona collected by government case managers and obtained by NBC News.
A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy held in Yuma, Arizona, said he and others in his cell complained about the taste of the water and the food they were given. The Customs and Border Protection agents took the mats out of their cell in retaliation, forcing them to sleep on hard concrete.
A 15-year-old girl from Honduras described a large, bearded officer putting his hands inside her bra, pulling down her underwear and groping her as part of what was meant to be a routine pat-down in front of other immigrants and officers.
The girl said "she felt embarrassed as the officer was speaking in English to other officers and laughing" during the entire process, according to a report of her account.
A 17-year-old boy from Honduras said officers would scold detained children when they would get close to a window, and would sometimes call them "puto," an offensive term in Spanish, while they were giving orders.
Earlier reports from investigators for the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General from the El Paso and Rio Grande Valley sectors in Texas detailed horrific conditions for children and other migrants held in overcrowded border stations where they were not given showers, a clean change of clothes or the space to sleep. The reports from the Yuma CBP sector describe similar unsanitary and crowded conditions but go further by alleging abuse and other misconduct by CBP officers.
President Donald Trump has pushed back against reports of poor conditions for children, and Kevin McAleenan, acting secretary of the DHS, which oversees CBP, has said the reports are "unsubstantiated."
In a statement about the Yuma allegations, a CBP spokesperson said, "U.S. Customs and Border Protection treats those in our custody with dignity and respect and provides multiple avenues to report any allegations of misconduct. ... The allegations do not align with common practice at our facilities and will be fully investigated. It’s important to note that the allegation of sexual assault is already under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General."
Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Wednesday that the allegations are under investigation and will face multiple reviews.
"Anyone involved in sexual assault or physical harassment like that I would, of course, expect to be fired, not merely disciplined," he said on MSNBC.
The DHS had been sounding the alarm on overcrowding in border facilities for months, resulting in a $4.5 billion emergency funding bill recently passed by Congress. In Yuma, a soft-sided tent facility was opened at the end of June to accommodate overcrowding at the border station.
But in almost 30 accounts obtained from "significant incident reports" prepared between April 10 and June 12 by case managers for the Department of Health and Human Services, the department responsible for migrant children after they leave CBP custody, kids who spent time in the Yuma border station repeatedly described poor conditions that are not pure byproducts of overcrowding. They reported being denied a phone call, not being offered a shower, sleeping on concrete or outside with only a Mylar blanket, and feeling hungry before their 9 p.m. dinnertime.
One child reported "sometimes going to bed hungry because dinner was usually served sometime after 9 p.m. and by that time she was already asleep," according to the documents.
All children who gave accounts to case managers had been held at the border station longer than the 72 hours permitted by law.
Laura Belous, an advocacy attorney for an organization that provides legal services to migrant children, the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, said her group was "horrified and sickened by the allegations of abuse ... But unfortunately, we are not surprised."
"The children that we represent have reported being held in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions for days," Belous said.
"Our clients tell us that they have seen CBP agents kick other children awake, that children do not know whether it’s day or night because lights are left on all the time, and that they have had food thrown at them like they were wild animals."
"Our clients and all migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and respect," she said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said Wednesday that he had visited the Yuma border station in April "and the human condition that I observed in Yuma was the worst state of the human condition I have ever seen in my life." But Gaetz also said, "I could tell you that the Border Patrol agents and the Homeland Security agents that were there were dealing with conditions that they had not trained for, they were not equipped to handle, and they were doing the very best they could under terrible circumstances."
Nearly every child interviewed by the HHS case workers after leaving the Yuma border station reported poor sleeping conditions. A 17-year-old boy from Guatemala reported having to sleep outside even though his clothes were wet from having recently crossed a river, likely the Colorado River.
Once he was transferred inside, the conditions were not much better. "He shared that there was not always space on the floor as there were too many people in the room. He further shared that there would be room available when someone would stand up," his report stated.
Many migrant children said they were either not given a mattress, a pillow or a blanket, or were just given a Mylar blanket instead.
Other children described being scared of the officers and said the officers would get angry if they asked for anything. One child wore soiled underwear for the 10 days he was in the border station because he was afraid to ask the officers for a clean pair, according to one of the reports. Another, a 15-year-old girl from Guatemala, described the food as "gross and cold most of the time."
Health and Human Services referred NBC News to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
In a statement, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said, "These allegations are very concerning and need to be fully investigated. The president has denied any problems with these detention centers — despite multiple confirmed reports to the contrary — but it is the Trump administration’s own policies that have contributed to this humanitarian crisis and this lack of accountability."
Cummings has called on McAleenan to testify about the poor conditions for immigrants at the border.
Seven years ago, as the Supreme Court considered a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, Justice Antonin Scalia said the quiet part loud.
The 2006 near-unanimous renewal of the landmark civil-rights bill was “attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement,” Scalia lectured then–Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli. “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”
Scalia’s logic was clear: The 1965 law, which guaranteed black Americans’ right to the franchise in the South for the first time in 100 years, was a “racial entitlement” that Congress itself would never remove, and so the high court was duty-bound to remove it. When Chief Justice John Roberts issued his ruling invalidating the law’s provisions determining which jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination must submit to oversight by the federal government, however, Scalia’s rationale was absent from the decision. Also absent was any mention of what part of the Constitution the invalidated provision violated.
Roberts didn’t call the Voting Rights Act a “racial entitlement.” Rather, he insisted that while he agreed with the law’s intentions—“any discrimination in voting is too much,” he wrote—close federal oversight of local election laws to prevent discrimination was no longer warranted. “Things have changed dramatically,” Roberts concluded. Shortly thereafter, Republican-controlled states moved as quickly as possible to impose restrictions on voting targeted at minority communities, as if determined to make Roberts look a fool or a liar.
The disparate approaches taken by two of the Court’s conservatives to the Voting Rights Act reflect the right’s dueling impulses toward civil-rights laws. Where Scalia rejected the very effort to guarantee black people the same right to cast a ballot as white people as a “racial entitlement,” Roberts insisted that he agreed with the law’s underlying premises, but that the statute now did more harm than good.
Lingering beneath the surface was a defining question for the American right: Does it agree with Roberts that “any discrimination in voting is too much”? Or with Scalia, who saw ensuring equal participation in the polity as a black “racial entitlement”?
The Supreme Court’s looming decision over the addition of the citizenship question on the U.S. census will hinge on the answer to that question. The census provides the basis for congressional apportionment and the distribution of federal resources. Empirical studies of the impact of adding the question have determined that it would result in a dramatic undercount of Latinos and immigrants—exactly contrary to one of the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationales, that it would provide a more accurate count.
Since the rise of Trump, the American right has been offered a stark choice between the democratic ideals it has long claimed to believe in, and the sectarian ethno-nationalism of the president, which privileges white identity and right-wing Christianity over all. Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.
The Roberts Court has already taken steps in this direction. Last year it endorsed Trump’s travel ban, despite the president’s public statements identifying Muslims as the ban’s target, on the basis that the order itself did not mention religion, a blueprint for allowing further discriminatory efforts to pass constitutional muster as long as the high court’s conservatives retain control. Later that year, the conservative justices, self-styled champions of the freedom of religion, denied a request by a Muslim death-row inmate to have an imam present for his execution, forcing the condemned man to make do with the prison’s Christian chaplain. In both cases, the Court’s conservatives could hide behind the letter of the law in dismissing the government’s official disapproval of Islam. But recent revelations in the census case will force the Roberts Court to decide whether America is a nation for all of its citizens, or a white man’s republic.
On the surface, State of New York v. United States Department of Commerce appears to be a dry question of administrative and constitutional law. In January 2017, the news leaked that the Trump administration wanted to add a question asking census respondents whether they were American citizens. The Trump administration enlisted the acting head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, John Gore, to state that the question should be included to improve enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Wilbur Ross, the head of the Department of Commerce, which administers the census, insisted to Congress that this was the reason for the addition of the question. In fact, Ross had sought the addition of the question long before this rationale was provided.
A recent Court filing by groups challenging the addition of the citizenship question shows what the administration really had in mind. The filing shows that Thomas Hofeller, the late Republican redistricting expert, concluded that adding the citizenship question would, in his words, “be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” That analysis was offered in a 2015 memo, as Hofeller was helping Republicans draw redistricting lines that they believed would cement a majority in Congress. That memo, along with a 2017 document written by Hofeller on the subject, which contains some language identical to a later Justice Department memo on the matter, was turned over to the liberal group Common Cause by Hofeller’s daughter after his death.
Voting districts are typically drawn using total population. A switch to using the voting-age citizen population would, Hofeller concluded in his 2015 memo, expand white political power at the expense of people of color, and thereby increase Republican advantage. But, Hofeller wrote, that shift could only occur with the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which would provide the federal government with data necessary for that switch. This argument, which reappears in Hofeller’s 2017 memo, was adopted by the Justice Department in its justification for adding the citizenship question to the census, along with the legal pretext of wanting to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
In other words, long before Trump was even elected, Republican Party insiders were plotting to increase white political power at the expense of people of color. After Trump was elected, they implemented this plan by insisting that their actual goal was the protection of minority voting rights. As with the Voting Rights Act, there was the real reason and the stated reason, the truth and the pretext. The nationalism, and the delusion.
“It just seemed like a new level of mendacity, and putting their goals out there in black and white in a way we hadn’t seen before,” says Dale Ho, one of the American Civil Liberties Union attorneys who submitted the filing on behalf of the challengers in the census case. “No one believes that anyone in this administration has any intention of enforcing the Voting Rights Act.”
The use of the Civil Rights Division, which was established to protect Americans’ fundamental rights, to undermine those very rights is a perversion of justice. But it also illustrates that Trumpism merely traveled a few stops down the road from where the Republican Party leadership had been. The risk with Trump was not that the GOP would become a vehicle for the preservation of white political and cultural hegemony; it was that he would discredit that project by making its agenda explicit, by saying, as Scalia did, the quiet part loud.
That the Republican effort to increase white political power might be motivated by partisanship rather than racism is little solace. Segregationist Democrats might not have insisted on disenfranchising black voters after Reconstruction had those voters not been staunch Republicans. Whether motivated by partisanship or racism, though, the result is the same. If the Roberts Court does not draw a line here, this will not be the last step toward reestablishing a white man’s government it will be asked to take.
The census case does not hinge on whether the citizenship question is discriminatory. Rather, as a matter of administrative law, the executive branch must follow certain procedures before making decisions. The Trump administration’s blatant dishonesty settles the question of whether it followed procedure definitively: It did not.
“This kind of smoking-gun evidence of what the real illicit reason is behind a government action is incredibly rare. Court decisions don’t require it, and it’s really quite shocking to read it so explicitly,” Wendy Weiser, a voting-rights expert at the Brennan Center, told me. “Every procedural constraint on agency decisions was violated in this case, and the reason that was provided, every lower court found, was not the real reason that the secretary of commerce added the citizenship question.”
The Trump administration has fiercely denied that Hofeller’s reasoning influenced the administration. But like most Trump-administration denials, this appears suspect. Not only did a Trump transition official, Mark Neuman, testify in a deposition that he spoke with Hofeller, who urged him to add such a question to the census, but Neuman later became an adviser to Ross. (Neuman testified that Hofeller told him that the change would increase Latino political participation.) As The New York Times reported, Neuman provided Gore with the draft of a memo endorsing the citizenship question that echoes Hofeller’s language in a 2017 document found on his hard drive word for word, and a later, more detailed memo to Ross from the Justice Department further adopts Hofeller’s reasoning and uses some of his language. The Trump administration’s reply to the filing dismisses this evidence of Hofeller’s influence on the process as “pure speculation.”
Ironically, because conservatives on the Roberts Court appear to believe that government remedies for racial discrimination are worse than racial discrimination itself, there is considerable apprehension among left-leaning attorneys about providing the high court with concrete proof of racist intent in this case or any other. They fear that such proof is liable to make the Court’s conservatives more likely to rule against them. In this case, however, the evidence that adding the question was intended to bolster white political power is also further proof that the administration did not follow the law in adding the question.
The census case is not ultimately about administrative procedure; it is, more fundamentally, about whether the Trump administration can use the federal government for the explicit purpose of increasing white political power. The Trump administration, and by extension, the conservative masses, are already on board, convinced by years of right-wing propaganda that all the opposition’s victories at the ballot box are suspect. Those elements of the Republican establishment that funded and conceived of the census scheme are all in, as well. The only remaining question is whether, and to what extent, the high court is willing to ratify this step toward white man’s government. It is not the first time it has been asked to do so.
Even before William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically,” the modern conservative movement has struggled to reconcile the ethno-nationalism that moves masses of its voters with the pluralism embodied in the notion that all persons are created equal.
Trump’s victory settled the question of whether the GOP would seek to expand its base by diversifying it, or rely on the imposition of white political hegemony over a changing electorate. This is a counter-majoritarian strategy that, in the long run, relies on abandoning the pretense of liberal democracy in favor of something else: A white man’s republic, if they can keep it.
Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu (Calif.) on Thursday called on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to “fire those who were responsible” for a GOP ad featuring activist and former NFL player Colin Kaepernick.
Lieu retweeted a post from the veterans advocacy group VoteVets that included a link to a Yahoo News story alleging Kaepernick's skin had been darkened in the ad.
“Dear @GOPLeader Kevin McCarthy: I served with you in the California legislature and now in Congress. I do not believe you are a racist,” Lieu tweeted Thursday. “If the below is true, then I hope you will fire those who were responsible.”
The ad, reportedly sent on Wednesday by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) — which serves to get Republicans elected to the House of Representatives — shows a photo of Kaepernick and includes a mug with the “Betsy Ross” flag, which has recently been the subject of controversy after Nike scrapped plans for its “Betsy Ross” flag-themed sneakers.
“WHO DO YOU STAND WITH? DONALD TRUMP AND THE BETSY ROSS FLAG OR ANTI-AMERICAN FLAG COLIN KAEPERNICK?” the ad said, according to Yahoo News.
NRCC communications director Chris Pack told Yahoo News that “the photo was not darkened.”
Other groups, including VoteVets, have continued to rip the NRCC for the ad, tweeting Thursday that if the group intentionally darkened Kaepernick’s skin, “then forget apologies — they ought to be forced to explain to America why they believe darker skin makes someone look worse, in their eyes.”
“Any answer they could give would be un-American,” the group said.
Nothing matters.
The 10,796 false or misleading statements don’t matter. The Muslim travel ban doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that his administration literally locked children in cages. That the most powerful man in the country sat in an official meeting and insisted that some black immigrants come from shithole countries doesn’t matter. Excusing white supremacist violence doesn’t matter. His ignorance of how tariffs work doesn’t matter. His lies about immigration statistics, crime, and drugs crossing the border don’t matter.
Neither does his suspiciously opaque relationship with Vladimir Putin. Or his praise for strongarm dictators. Or his buffoonish actions on the world stage. Or his insults. Or his porn-star payoffs. Or seating a foreign agent on the national security council. Or hiring neo-Nazis as advisors. Or hiring alt-right propagandists as advisors. None of it matters
White people don’t care.
Not all white people.
Just white people. More specifically, white voters.
Writing about white people, white voters or the white vote shouldn’t upset white people or impugn my journalistic integrity any more than it does when Politico, the Washington Post or the New York Times talks about “black voters” or “the black vote.”
See? We’re fine with it.
Yes, Virginia. There is a white vote.
In a June 12 national survey of registered voters, Quinnipiac University pollsters matched Donald Trump against the top Democratic presidential candidates: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker. News outlets across the country including CNN, Newsweek and the Washington Post have reported on the results—namely, that Donald Trump loses against every single one of the candidates by a relatively large margin. But relatively few have mentioned that regardless of the presidential final round matchup, one thing remains true:
White people are going to vote for Trump.
Among white registered voters, Trump beat Biden by one percentage point (46 to 47) which is within the margin of error. But Trump won the white vote by six to ten points when matched up every other Democratic presidential candidate. The Quinnipiac poll is not an outlier. In a Politico/Morning Consult poll, Trump again landed within the margin of error when white voters were asked to choose between him and Joe Biden. But he won the white vote with every other Democratic contender even though the majority of them disapprove of the job he is doing as president. A poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov from June 9-11 shows that white voters would vote for Donald Trump versus a generic Democratic candidate by a margin of 10 points.
The stunning part about this revelation is that voters in every poll—even white voters—generally agree that the country is headed in the wrong direction. According to the data, most of Trump’s support comes from white voters without a college degree and white men in general. Every other category, including people who identify as black, Asian and Hispanic, all say they would support any candidate other than Trump.
It is easy to spin this as a conservative problem or an indication of the political divide in America. But that line of reasoning sidesteps one incontrovertible truth that no one seems to want to say out loud:
White people don’t care.
They don’t care about deficits. They aren’t concerned with national security. The hand-wringing over immigration is a ruse. Their “economic anxiety” is baloney. They aren’t really worried about “the right to life.” They could care less about jobs, infrastructure, healthcare or education. They don’t care about black people.
Especially black people.
Because electing and reelecting an irrefutable racist is an act of racism in and of itself, regardless of one’s priorities or intent. In fact, Donald Trump’s unapologetic level of bigotry and prejudice might be the only arena in which he excels. He has shown no particular acumen in foreign policy, domestic policy, economics, diplomacy, compassion, problem-solving, reading, writing, arithmetic, talking, spelling or speaking for more than 10 seconds without insulting someone or telling a blatant lie.
His tax breaks to the wealthy have accelerated the deficit and grown the national debt to an all-time high. He has insulted and alienated America’s allies including England, Germany, Australia, France, Japan, Canada, and Mexico. His meaningless tariffs have crippled farming and manufacturing. He has torpedoed health care. He put buffoons in charge of the Departments of Education, Treasury, the Interior, and Justice. His handling of natural disasters is a disgrace. He can’t write in complete sentences or speak coherently. He doesn’t know history, the Constitution or how the branches of government works. He is a terrible liar and he can’t even play golf without cheating.
Yet, he is probably going to win the white vote.
And it’s not because he’s white. Pete Buttigieg is white and trails Trump by seven p0ints with the white vote. According to 23andMe, Elizabeth Warren is 99 percent white (and one percent from the Dolezal tribe) but Trump outpaces her with white voters by 10 points. Bernie Sanders trails Trump by six percentage points in the Quinnipiac poll. The only thing one can logically conclude is that white people’s lone reason for voting for Donald Trump is that he is a racist.
Aside from racism, what else is Donald Trump good at?
That was a rhetorical question because I’m sure there is an answer. Maybe he makes a mean pot pie. Perhaps he is a championship-level Connect Four player. I’ve heard that he can eat a family-size bucket of KFC in record time, which is kind of impressive. But despite his infinite number of faults, his numerous lies, and his plentiful deficiencies, white people will still want Donald J. Trump as their president.
Not all white people, just a statistically significant amount.
In that Quinnipiac poll, 33 percent of black voters said they’d vote for Biden in the Democratic primaries and most outlets, including this one, eagerly referred to Joe Biden’s support among one-third of African American registered, likely voters simply as “blacks.” Again, I didn’t mind at all. But according to that journalistic precedent, there is only one accurate term that correctly describes the demographic willing to elevate a dimwitted, vitriolic, morally defective racist to the most powerful position in the world:
White people.
Nothing else matters.
This is what they want.
Sometime in the three years before he murdered nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Dylan Roof sat down at his computer and typed “black on White crime” into Google. According to Roof’s online manifesto, something about the death of Trayvon Martin sparked his curiosity. Roof knew Geroge Zimmerman, who killed Martin, was the real victim, but he wanted statistics to prove what he felt in his gut.
“The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens,” Roof wrote. “There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.”
Roof pointed to his discovery of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens website as the beginning of his journey into radicalization. Its end was a massacre he hoped would spark a race war with millions of white Americans following in his bloody footsteps.
In the weeks leading up to the church attack, the site that inspired Roof featured story after story portraying blacks as uniquely dangerous threats—a “racial spree shooting in Texas,” dozens killed in a single weekend in Chicago, and Jay-Z allegedly “funding violent protests in Baltimore and Ferguson.”
Four years later, the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website is still online, pumping out stories about “black serial murderers.” Those pieces are now slotted between odes to nationalist politicians like Nigel Farage, advertisements for a white supremacist conference at a Tennessee state park, and a widget tracking the progress of a crowdfunding campaign to help build Donald Trump’s border wall.
All of that content is still out there, waiting to be found by the next Dylan Roof. But the people behind the site aren’t able to spread their message without some help: The group’s website is hosted by a Michigan-based company called Liquid Web and registered by web infrastructure giant GoDaddy, a publicly traded company currently valued at over $12 billion.
America is a country without hate speech laws, one built on the premise that it’s not the government’s job to decide what types of speech should be prohibited. In the internet era, that sort of governance is largely left up to the private companies responsible for the technology powering all our digital communications. As spectacular incidents of hate-based violence draw headlines and the web is flooded with extremist content, there’s been an increasing public pressure for companies to take that responsibility more seriously.
While social media giants have received the brunt of the attention for providing a platform to hate groups, firms that enable more basic kinds of services to these deeply controversial groups appear to have largely abdicated that responsibility—or rejected the notion that refusing to do business with certain groups is the right thing to do.
The Council of Conservative Citizens site is just one of the 391 websites we ran through web-based tools to determine which tech companies are providing services to groups like it. We reached out to a handful of non-profit organizations that work to monitor and counter hate—the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, Hope Not Hate, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, and the Counter Extremism Project. They each provided us a list of groups they see as being involved in the propagation of hate. To this list we added some other sites operated by groups connected to by the sites provided by these nonprofits, which we then verified with the groups that provided the initial list.
The organizations we looked at run the gamut from white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and chapters of the Ku Klux Klan to groups dedicated to stripping the rights of immigrants and LGBT people. There are also some neo-Confederates, black nationalists and racist Odinists in the mix as well. The list includes one website for a white nationalist beer company and a whites-only dating site.
Using this list, we found 151 tech companies currently offering hosting, DNS registration, or content delivery network services to the websites on this list. While the overwhelming majority of companies only worked with one or two sites, some names came up again and again.
GoDaddy and its subsidiary Wild West Domains provided services to the largest number of sites on our list, 130. Cloudflare, which provides protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks, works with the second largest number of sites, 56. They are followed by Tucows (and its subsidiary eNom) with 46 and the companies comprising Endurance International Group with 42.
While the aforementioned companies play major roles in the online ecosystem, most are relatively obscure to the general public. However, there were some big names we found working with sites on our list. Google provided services to 27 sites, Amazon works with nine, and Microsoft works with five.
We reached out to all of the technology companies mentioned by name in this story. Most either did not respond or gave brief statements that they were looking at the sites we highlighted but declined to go into depth about their policies or their relationships with specific sites.
Of all the sites we inquired about, only 29 were either taken down by their hosts, became inaccessible, or deleted all of their content since we reached out to the technology providers in early June.
The only company to take systematic action was Automattic, which runs the Wordpress platform. Automattic terminated the pages of 17 of the 24 pages Gizmodo inquired about, including eight pages operated by chapters of the neo-Confederate group League of the South. Two League of the South pages we asked about were allowed to continue operating on Wordpress, as of July 11.
Aside from a few individual exceptions, it does not appear any other company we contacted took significant action.
Some companies gave broad, formulaic responses about how they work to comply with local laws, but insist, like French hosting company OVH, which works with nine sites, that “cloud infrastructure providers cannot be arbiters of morality,” as the company wrote in an email to Gizmodo.
OVH hosts the websites of a chapter of the KKK that features a picture of the incineration of the Jewish star on its homepage as well as a racist far right German political party whose members shouted “Heil Hitler” and threw bottles at police during a protest in 2015.
GoDaddy did not sever its relationship with any of the 130 sites we inquired about.
“GoDaddy does not condone content that advocates expressions of hate, racism, bigotry,” a GoDaddy representative wrote in an emailed statement. “We generally do not take action on complaints that would constitute censorship of content and limit the exercise of freedom of speech and expression on the Internet. While we detest the sentiment of such sites, we support a free and open Internet and, similar to the principles of free speech, that sometimes means allowing such tasteless, ignorant content.”
GoDaddy is the registrar for two websites serving as fronts for the neo-Nazi music network Blood & Honour. Blood & Honour was founded by lead singer of the British white supremacist metal band Skrewdriver, whose members reportedly advocated for the same sort of violent race war Roof’s massacre was intended to ignite. The group’s penchant for violence goes beyond simply racial animus. In 2011, two Blood & Honour members were sentenced to life in prison for murdering a pair of homeless people in Florida because they, according to law enforcement officials, “considered the homeless to be an inferior class, regardless of race.”
A spokesperson for DreamHost, which worked with 23 sites on our list, broadly defended the company’s decision to stay relatively hands-off when it comes to the content it hosts, stating, “when private companies that control internet traffic begin to weigh in on questions of content, then the very fabric of what we know the internet to be, and how it can be expected to function, is placed at risk.”
However, in the weeks since we reached out to DreamHost about its relationship with the website of the National Alliance for Reform and Restoration Group, the hate group’s page has been taken offline. The National Alliance for Reform and Restoration Group, among the most extreme and dangerous groups we encountered, has explicitly advocated for genocide against all non-whites in the United States since its founding in 1970. In the years since, several group members have been responsible for over a dozen acts of violence—including failed bombing attempts at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Washington, and along the highway leading to Walt Disney World.
The Turner Diaries, a book written by the group’s founder, may have inspired over 200 murders since its publication, author and International Centre for Counter-Terrorism associate fellow J.M. Berger estimates, including those carried out by Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh. When three white men in Jasper, Texas, murdered a disabled African American man by dragging him from the bumper of their car, one of them told police after the attack that they were “starting The Turner Diaries early.”
Google hosts three sites for the neo-Nazi terrorist organization Combat 18, famous for a series of nail bomb attacks targeting predominantly non-white neighborhoods of the UK..
Google also hosts the website for the white nationalist podcast network Radio Aryan. One of the hosts on the network goes by the handle Grandpa Lampshade, a reference to likely apocryphal stories about how Nazi made lampshades from the skin of Jews who died in concentration camps. Shortly before murdering 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, according to police, Robert Bowers shared an anti-Semetic post by Grandpa Lampshade on the alt-right social network Gab. As HuffPost noted in an article that revealed his true identity, Lampshade said in a podcast in the weeks before the shooting that the “answer” to demographic change in America may “involve a whole lotta killin’.”
Representatives from Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Network Solutions, which is the registrar for 38 sites on our list, provides services to the website of the National Socialist Movement, which the SPLC calls “one of the largest and most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the United States.” While a statement of principles on the group’s website currently tries to project a kinder, gentler face of national socialism (with calls for universal healthcare and self-rule for Native American territories), an earlier version of the document from 2007 tilted more toward advocating genocide. “All non-White immigration must be prevented,” it read. “We demand that all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force.”
Taylor Michael Wilson had a Nationalist Socialist Movement business card in his possession when he attempted to hijack an Amtrak train traveling through Nebraska last year. Following the attack, Wilson said he has committed the hijacking “to save the train from black people.”
Court documents from Wilson’s trial show that Wilson’s cousin told investigators that Wilson had “joined an ‘alt right’ Neo-Nazi group that he … had found researching white supreamcy forums online.”
HostGator, part of the Endurance International Group, hosts the website of the neo-Nazi Vanguard Streaming Network, which has daily podcasts featuring content like interviews with white supremacist politician Paul Nehlen, an online store where visitors can support the operation by buying neo-Nazi merch (like a shirt with a stylied picture of American Nazi Party founder Geroge Lincoln Rockwell or one featuring an alt-right clown meme), and an article entitled “3 Firearms Every White Man Should Own.”
Sometimes these companies work with organizations that, while dramatically more mainstream than unrepentant neo-Nazis, still advocate viewpoints diametrically opposed to their professed corporate values.
Microsoft hosts the website for Alliance Defending Freedom, likely the most influential anti-LGBT legal advocacy group in the country. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys represented the Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple and pushed rules to deliberately expose LGBT people to intentional discrimination in dozens of other states. It fought against the decriminalization of gay sex in Texas and has supported efforts to make gay sex punishable with prison time in Jamaica and Belize.
The group published a memo supporting Russia’s “gay propaganda” law, which prohibited providing access to information about LGBT issues to young people. The law has had the effect of shutting down websites that provide information to LGBT youth and, according to a Human Rights Watch report, stopped mental health professionals in the country from directly addressing LGBT issues with their patients.
At the same time, Microsoft positions itself as a corporate leader in pushing for LGBT rights. A 2018 company blog post reads, “Microsoft has a history of supporting and advocating for LGBTQ+ rights: In 1993, it became the first Fortune 500 company to provide same-sex domestic partnership benefits, and it was also one of the first companies to include sexual orientation in its corporate non-discrimination policy.”
Microsoft is even pushing international efforts to promote marriage equality around the globe, like in Taiwan, yet the company is providing hosting services to an organization that is a primary institutional force fighting against those very efforts.
Technical relationships between these companies can complicate questions about responsibility. For example, MarkMonitor was technically the registrar for 24 sites on the list. However, all of those sites were hosted on either Google’s Blogspot platform or Automattic’s Wordpress platform. A MarkMonitor spokesperson insisted that because its relationships are with those platforms directly, the company’s only option would be cutting off registration service to the entire Wordpress or Blogspot network, thereby taking millions of sites effectively offline—at least until those platforms found a new registrar.
Most of the companies we reached out to declined to seriously engage with our inquiries, or ignored them completely. A rare exception, Cloudflare’s leadership was excited to engage in the conversation. Cloudflare General Counsel Doug Kramer made the argument that his company, which provides technical protection against denial-of-service attacks, deliberately makes an effort to avoid having to be in the business of judging the moral worth of its clients.
“It’s not that we think doing business with these groups is important for the health of the internet as part of some free expression principle,” Kramer said. “Instead, we think that us taking on the role becoming one of the censors of the internet is bad because we don’t think we would do it well. It would distract us from the virtuous things we are able to do, like keeping the internet secure.”
“It’s easy to point at sites you don’t like and make a single decision,” Kramer added. “But to come up with a consistent policy you can apply to the 16 million websites that use us for various services in a predictable and consistent way is very difficult.”
Cloudflare has put itself in that situation in the past. Amid a flurry of public pressure following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Cloudflare cut off service to the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer, temporarily reversing its previous policy of content neutrality.
In an email to employees, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince expressed ambivalence about giving the Daily Stormer the boot. “Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous,” he noted. “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.”
One complication, Cloudflare found, was that after kicking off the Daily Stormer, the company got a flood of complaints about the services it was providing to Black Lives Matter sites and the pages of small religious organizations caught in factional disputes. Having made that decision once, the company was being asked to make it over and over again.
Instead of being deliberate about whose business they take, Cloudflare pivoted to providing free services to organizations fighting hate—like Bedayaa, which advocates for LGBTQI rights in Egypt and Sudan. Good speech, the company hopes, will win the day over bad speech without the need for corporate censorship.
Cloudflare insists it is not up to the task of deciding whether it’s acceptable to take the money of Stormfont, a white supremacist bulletin board whose users have been responsible for nearly 100 murders, according to SPLC, or Vanguard News Network forum, a site where the man who killed three people during a 2014 shooting spree at a pair of Kansas Jewish community centers posted over 12,000 times. Vanguard’s motto: “No Jews. Just Right.”
“There are a lot of people who care about freedom of speech and don’t want these companies themselves to be making all the decisions [about what websites are online],” said Oren Segal, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “They’re erring on the side of allowing any extremists to recruit and radicalize because somehow that’s safer than taking some corporate responsibility and curating what’s on their platforms. I think that’s a problem.”
Segal agreed tech companies often do a bad job of determining what is truly extremist content and what isn’t. When social media companies like Facebook and YouTube, for example, are faced with deplatforming campaigns aimed at vulnerable minority groups, they end up making mistakes over and over again, further marginalizing already marginalized voices in the process.
However, Segal insists, that difficulty doesn’t let these companies off the hook for the business direct relationship they have with extremists, a relationship that just so happens to benefit their bottom line—both in terms of earning revenue from these sites’ business in the form of advertising and from not having to expend resources to proactively go out and look for hate groups propagandizing on their platforms.
“There are plenty of organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, that can provide information and definitions and perspective on these groups and their activities so they can make more informed decisions,” he said. “They don’t have to be naturally good at these things, but there is a not unreasonable expectation, that they learn what they need to know to create safer products and to have some corporate responsibility. Ignorance only goes so far in this argument.”
In Segal’s experience, payment processors, like PayPal and Patreon, and social networking companies, like Facebook and Twitter, have been significantly more willing to engage with organizations like the ADL for help in going after organized hate groups on their platforms than hosting and registration infrastructure companies have been. But that’s largely because social networks have become the center of the action.
This online ecosystem is currently in the period of flux. In a previous era of the internet, organized hate groups, and their stand-alone web properties, were the key players. Social media platforms gobbling up much of the rest of the internet has triggered a fundamental shift. “The far right is post-organizational now,” explained Nick Ryan of the UK-based anti-racism advocacy group Hope Not Hate. “Most people engaging with extreme right ideologies, memes, views are doing so online and often not part of a formal network, organization or political movement.”
Stand-alone hate group websites have declined in prominence as unaffiliated social media users sharing racist memes have drawn the public’s attention. That shift, according to Segal, allowed companies providing services to those sites to slip under the radar, while those sites still play an important role in spreading hate.
Some of these sites also distribute extremist and white supremacist podcasts, which experts believe have become increasingly influential. “It seems like there is a new one every day,” Segal said. “Many of these are housed on websites, since they’ve mostly been kicked off of mainstream podcast platforms.”
The Anti-Defamation League provided a list of six of the most influential white nationalist podcasts on the internet and the websites from which they are distributed or otherwise do business with Google, GoDaddy, Endurance International Group, Corporate Colocation Inc., Veesp, Public Domain Registry, Cloudflare, Justhost.ru, DNC Holdings, OVH, Internet Domain Service BS Corp, Squarespace, and Epik.
These podcasts, while playing a significant role in the white nationalist ecosystem, generally escape wider public notice. Before being contacted by Gizmodo, a spokesperson for Veesp, a company with servers located in St. Petersburg, Russia, said they had never received any communications from the public about its relationship with The Right Stuff, a white supremacist podcasting network. In an email, a Veesp representative said the company follows the hate speech laws set under the Russian Federation but scoffed at the idea that a company should take any moral responsibility for the business relationships it has with extremist groups.
In a 2016 episode of a podcast on the network, the hosts insisted that an ethnic cleansing to remove non-whites from the United States was their ultimate goal.
Brad Galloway is a former white nationalist who left the movement, which he now combats from the outside through his work with the Organization for the Prevention of Violence. Having spent years using the internet to recruit people into his hate group, Galloway knows full well how deplatforming can be a double-edged sword.
“I believe they’ll try to operationalize any kind of content and websites still play a huge role in how they’re doing things,” Galloway said. “But it’s a bit like whack-a-mole. When you look at a site like the Daily Stormer, how many times did it get whacked, go away, and just reemerge somewhere else?”
If one web hosting company decides to kick a website off its platform, the group behind the site can easily find another company that doesn’t know, or care, what they’re up to. Switching to a different registrar is even easier. Unless a site is actively undergoing a DDoS attack, most of Cloudflare’s services are immaterial to whether a site’s content is accessible.
From the perspective of a company providing web infrastructure services to an organization on this list, not proactively policing their platform makes a lot of sense. Doing the necessary work requires resources and the overall societal benefit is small if a hate group could get back online within a relatively short period of time. As an added benefit, they also get to continue taking neo-Nazis’ money, which is, at the end of the day, still money.
“When we look at it on a one-off basis, [deplatforming a single site] seems useless and not that practical. But what’s the other option, to just do nothing? There’s a collective effort that needs to be done here,” said Segal.
Segal urges the entire industry to start actively making the moral decision of whether they’re going to take the money of a hate group in exchange for giving that group a platform or they’re not.
Those decisions, made one at a time, by hundreds of different companies, can slowly shift the boundaries of what’s generally acceptable online. Should every tech company on the planet immediately decide to cut off every single group put on some list by an extremism-monitoring nonprofit? No, of course not.
But one step in a positive direction would be working with some of these organizations to police their platforms proactively and, on a case-by-case basis, make the concrete and public decision about if they want to take the money of a neo-Nazi group or not. If they want to take the money of an anti-LGBT group or not. If they want to take the money of a white nationalist dating site exclusively for white people or not.
Right now, as hundreds of sites on our list show, that conversation only seems to be triggered when the media spotlight shines on a particular company’s relationship with a particular site. Even then, it’s usually only after an act of senseless violence.
“To just sort of throw your hands in the air because of the volume, I just don’t think that’s an acceptable answer anymore,” said Segal. “The people who run these platforms have to make decisions about the greater good—whether they want to or not.”
A video has emerged showing the general manager of a Burger King confronting two elderly women after they berated him for speaking Spanish inside the restaurant.
The clip, posted onto Facebook by Neyzha Borrero on July 6, shows Ricardo Castillo, who is Puerto Rican, repeatedly condemn the two women for being prejudiced before asking them to leave after they told him to "go back to Mexico" because he was speaking to an employee in Spanish.
The incident was recorded at a Burger King in Eustis, Florida, while Borrero was having a meal with her boyfriend Oni Martinez.
"When you're in America, you should speak American English," one of the women can be heard telling Castillo.
"No ma'am, I don't," Castillo replies. The woman adds: "Yeah, yeah, go back to Mexico if you want to keep speaking Spanish, go back to your Mexican country, your state, your country."
Raising his voice, Castillo adds: "Guess what ma'am, I'm not Mexican, I'm not Mexican but you're being very prejudice and I want you out of my restaurant, right now."
One of the women then says they'll leave after they have finished their meal. The general manager retorts: "You know what, I'll do it for you ma'am, I'll call the cops."
The confrontation then continues on for a short while longer before both women leave the restaurant while informing Castillo that they'll never return.
"Bye ma'am, have a great day. Don't come back," Castillo says as they leave.
Earlier on during the clip, Martinez can be heard saying while the argument takes place: "This is America. It's an everyday thing."
Speaking to the Palm Beach Post, Borrero praised Castillo for how he dealt with the two customers.
"I was very surprised [at] his reaction," Borrero said. "I think even though he was being verbally attacked and discriminated, he handled [it] very, very well. He never used profanity to them. He never insulted them, he just asked them to leave and never come back to his restaurant."
Castillo added he was also happy with how he dealt with the situation.
"I was not disrespectful at any time, but I did tell them they had to leave the restaurant," he said. "The only couple that was sitting down in the lobby was a Puerto Rican female and a Mexican guy. They told me after, 'We felt offended.' The best thing to do was to get the people out of the restaurant."
In a statement to Fox 35 Orlando, Burger King said: "There is no place for discrimination in our restaurants. We expect employees and guests to treat each other with respect. This incident took place at a franchised restaurant and the owner is looking into the matter."
Gov. Bill Lee has proclaimed Saturday as Nathan Bedford Forrest Day in Tennessee, a day of observation to honor the former Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader whose bust is on display in the state Capitol.
Per state law, the Tennessee governor is tasked with issuing proclamations for six separate days of special observation, three of which, including the July 13 Forrest Day, pertain to the Confederacy.
Lee — and governors who have come before him — are also required by state law to proclaim Jan. 19 as Robert E. Lee Day, honoring the commander of the Confederate Army, as well as June 3 Confederate Decoration Day, otherwise known as Confederate Memorial Day and the birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
"I signed the bill because the law requires that I do that and I haven’t looked at changing that law," Lee said Thursday.
He declined to say whether he believed state law should be changed to no longer require the governor to issue such proclamations or whether he had reservations about doing so.
A previous effort by Democrats to do so was unsuccessful.
"I haven’t even looked at that law, other than knowing I needed to comply with it, so that’s what I did," Lee said. "When we look at the law, then we’ll see."
Lee signed the proclamation Wednesday.
The statute instructs the governor to proclaim those three days of special observation, along with Abraham Lincoln Day on Feb. 12, Andrew Jackson Day on March 15 and Veterans Day on Nov. 11, and to "invite the people of this state to observe the days in schools, churches, and other suitable places with appropriate ceremonies expressive of the public sentiment befitting the anniversary of such dates."
In the Forrest proclamation, identical to the one issued each year by former Gov. Bill Haslam, Forrest is described only as a "recognized military figure in American history and a native Tennessean."
The text reads that the governor encourages "all citizens to join (him) in this worthy observance."
Robert E. Lee Day, Confederate Decoration Day and Nathan Bedford Forrest Day have been special days of observation in the state since 1969.
Before that, they were legal holidays, legislative librarian Eddie Weeks said.
Forrest Day first became a holiday in 1921, the 100th anniversary of his birth; Robert E. Lee Day began in 1917, though it was initially referred to only as "the nineteenth day of January," and Confederate Decoration Day was first observed as a legal holiday in the state in 1903, according to Weeks.
During his campaign for governor and in his first weeks in office, Lee maintained that he was opposed to removing the Forrest bust from its current location outside the Senate and House chambers in the Capitol, explaining he believes it would be "a mistake to whitewash history."
Lee previously dismissed questions about whether the state should provide additional context around the bust, saying he would instead focus on diminishing racial conflict in other ways.
Weeks later, Lee told reporters he was now open to adding historical context to the bust, though no action has been taken to do so.
Lee earlier this year said he regretted participating in "Old South" parties at Auburn University nearly four decades ago as part of Kappa Alpha Order, a fraternity that lists Robert E. Lee as its "spiritual founder."
The governor, a college student at the time, was also pictured in an Auburn yearbook dressed in a Confederate Army uniform, a common practice for members of the fraternity at the time.
"I never intentionally acted in an insensitive way, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that participating in that was insensitive and I’ve come to regret it," Lee said in February.
WHEN NEWS BROKE that thousands of current and former Border Patrol agents were members of a secret Facebook group filled with racist, vulgar, and sexist content, Carla Provost, chief of the agency, was quick to respond. “These posts are completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see — and expect — from our agents day in and day out,” Provost said in a statement. “Any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.”
For Provost, a veteran of the Border Patrol who was named head of the agency in August 2018, the group’s existence and content should have come as no surprise. Three months after her appointment to chief, Provost herself had posted in the group, then known as “I’m 10-15,” now archived as “America First X 2.” Provost’s comment was innocuous — a friendly clapback against a group member who questioned her rise to the top of the Border Patrol — but her participation in the group, which she has since left, raises serious questions.
Provost is one of several Border Patrol supervisors The Intercept has identified as current or former participants in the secret Facebook group, including chief patrol agents overseeing whole Border Patrol sectors; multiple patrol agents in charge of individual stations; and ranking officials in the Border Patrol’s union, who have enjoyed direct access to President Donald Trump. (It is technically possible that someone else posted in the group using the individuals’ accounts.) The group’s existence has already generated at least two investigations from lawmakers and internal Department of Homeland Security oversight bodies.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to the DHS Inspector General’s office last week specifically requesting that investigators examine whether Provost and Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan knew about or had previously addressed the problem of government personnel posting “violent, racist, misogynistic comments and pictures” in the “I’m 10-15” group.
“This is why I have requested a full investigation into this matter,” Thompson said in a statement to The Intercept, after being informed of Provost’s participation in the group. “We need to know who in CBP leadership knew about these deplorable groups, when did they find out, and what action they took, if anything.”
Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, did not dispute that Provost and other senior agents had commented in the group. Provost did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, CBP said its Office of Professional Responsibility “is investigating the material provided to CBP this week from multiple sources.”
“CBP does not tolerate misconduct on or off duty and will hold those who violate our code of conduct accountable,” the statement said. “Several CBP employees have received cease and desist letters and several of those have been placed on administrative duties pending the results of the investigation. These posts do not reflect the core values of the Agency and do not reflect the vast majority of employees who conduct themselves professionally and honorably every day, on and off duty.”
ProPublica was first to report the existence of the secret Border Patrol group on July 1, revealing that members used the page to joke about migrant deaths and share sexually violent and threatening posts about several Democratic lawmakers, including, in particular, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y. Politico followed up by reporting that senior officials in the Border Patrol, as well as CBP public affairs officials, had known about the group for years and used it as an “intelligence” stream to monitor the sentiment of the workforce. The Intercept then reported that the public revelations sparked an internal purging of the Facebook group’s content, but not before we archived hundreds of posts shared over multiple weeks.
CBP’s press office disputed reporting that it had monitored the group. “While the Agency has taken appropriate action to review, investigate, and caution employees about inappropriate posts brought to our attention, the Agency does not restrict employees from affiliating through social media groups,” a spokesperson told The Intercept in an email. “Further, contrary to previous media reports, CBP’s Office of Public Affairs does not continuously monitor the personal use of social media by CBP employees.”
Evidence of Provost’s participation in the secret Border Patrol group comes as Ocasio-Cortez, along with Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas;, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., head into a hearing with the Committee on Oversight and Reform and the inspectors general of DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services on Friday to discuss their recent visit to detention centers along the border.
As both ProPublica and The Intercept have reported, the lawmakers visit was a hot topic among “I’m 10-15” members, who discussed throwing burritos at the members of Congress or, in the case of one El Paso-based agent, staging a “bang in” to relieve stress from their presence. In a statement to the press Wednesday, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, chair of the oversight committee, said the Facebook group would be a topic of discussion at the hearing. The Maryland Democrat has opened an investigation into the group and, in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, requested that the Facebook executive see to it that his company “preserve all documents, communications, and other data related to the ‘I’m 10-15’ group” including “log files and metadata.”
Shortly after the Facebook group was revealed, CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility issued a public statement, citing Provost, saying that it had alerted the DHS inspector general’s office and that an investigation had been launched. McAleenan later said that an unspecified number of individuals had been placed on “administrative duties” following the disclosures over the last week, while ABC News obtained an internal memo showing that CBP “was aware, as early as February 2018, of at least one private Facebook group that included ‘inappropriate and offensive posts’ by its personnel.”
Whether the group in question was “I’m 10-15” is unclear. As CNN reported last week, CBP employees have also participated in a group known as “The Real CBP Nation” that shared similar content to the Border Patrol group.
A CBP spokesperson told The Intercept that it “investigated and took action regarding specific inappropriate social media posts and associated individuals that the Agency was made aware of in 2016” and that OPR “distributed guidance to the workforce that warned CBP employees can be disciplined for inappropriate social media posts, including posts in private groups” in February 2018. As for current investigations, the spokesperson said, “Several employees have been placed on administrative duty (also known as restricted duty).”
“The cases are still being investigated. When the facts are ascertained in the investigative process, the report is reviewed to determine whether the case should be heard by the Agency’s Disciplinary Review Board or referred to local management for review under management’s disciplinary authority. We cannot comment on individual cases.”
CATERING TO CURRENT and former Border Patrol agents and other CBP employees, the “I’m 10-15” group had more than 9,500 members before being exposed. As of Friday morning, the number was a little over 4,000. Though efforts were made to remove recent disturbing content, much of the group’s past posts and comments sections remain intact, with the names of members who have left the group appearing in gray.
The names of three current chief patrol agents appeared in The Intercept’s search of the Border Patrol Facebook group, including Matthew Hudak, of the Big Bend sector, whose last post was on August 10, 2016; Rodney S. Scott, of the San Diego sector, who remains in the group and whose last post was on November 17, 2018; and Jason D. Owens, former deputy chief patrol agent for the Laredo, Texas, sector, who now oversees operations the Border Patrol’s Houlton sector in Maine. The Intercept additionally identified nine current or former group members whose names match current patrol agents in charge, or PAICs, of individual Border Patrol stations.
The names of Border Patrol union figures also appear in the group, including Hector Garza, who was among the first active-duty agency members to establish a relationship to then-candidate Trump in 2015, and Tucson chapter union head Art del Cueto, host of the Breitbart-sponsored Border Patrol union podcast “The Green Line” and frequent Fox News guest.
While posts shared by Border Patrol supervisors viewed by The Intercept were generally benign, that was not true in all cases.
By all indications, group member Thomas Hendricks was something of an edgy memelord in “I’m 10-15,” never cowering before the politically correct demands of so-called snowflakes. When Hendricks appeared to disappear from the group last summer, his stature and mystique grew, prompting “who is Tom Hendricks” and “we are all Tom Hendricks” style posts.
The truth, as ProPublica reported this week and as comments reviewed by The Intercept indicate, is that Hendricks appears to be a supervisor in the Border Patrol Calexico station with more than two decades on the job. He returned to “I’m 10-15” on June 21, posting “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won. I have returned. To everyone who knows the real me and had my back I say thank you. To everyone else? This is what I have to say…”
Hendricks then included an image of a smirking Trump forcing Ocasio-Cortez’s face into his crotch by the back of her neck.
The post, which garnered more than 250 likes, was on the ProPublica website less than two weeks later.
Earlier this month, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters that migrants detained at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility she and other representatives visited said they were being told to drink out of the toilet by CBP officers. Conservatives laughed at her, and called her a liar.
Since then, AOC, along with Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, have become the target of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ire. Pelosi has attempted to diminish their power, insisting that they have no actual following within Congress, and are only popular on social media.
But on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez showed just how wrong Pelosi is to question what these House freshmen can accomplish, testifying before the House Oversight Committee regarding family separation and detention centers. She spoke about her experiences visiting that detention center and others, along with Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar, Pressley, and Tlaib (and Republicans Wisconsin Rep. Debbie Lasko, Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, and Texas Reps. Michael Cloud and Chip Roy).
Ocasio-Cortez insisted she be sworn in before testifying, saying later that she wanted to prove to conservative attackers that she and the other Democratic representatives weren’t exaggerating the accounts of poor conditions and mistreatment from detained migrants.
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During her testimony, Ocasio-Cortez entered a document into the record showing written statements from detained migrants themselves, emphasizing that these families are not being centered nearly enough within the narrative of the crisis at the border.
“When these women tell me that they were put into a cell and that their sink was not working—and we tested the sink ourselves and the sink was not working—and they were told to drink out of a toilet bowl I believe them,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I believe these women.”
Tlaib began tearing up during her testimony while speaking about Jakelin Caal Maquin, the 7-year-old Guatemalan girl who died from sepsis while in CBP custody with her father. She recalled the children she saw during her detention center visits, such as a boy who asked her in Spanish where his father was, and entered into the record a photo of a drawing made by another child, of a group of people sleeping on the floor behind the wall of a cage.
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Tlaib said that while at one of the facilities, she asked CBP officers what they thought should be done. She said one told her that the government needed to stop sending money, because it wasn’t working. Another told her that they hadn’t been trained to be a social worker or medical professional, and that they wanted to be at the border.
A third reportedly said they knew that the family separation policy, which the Trump administration called off last summer but still enacts for families that aren’t biological children of parents, wasn’t working.
Pressley recalled the light or nonexistent answers she and her colleagues were given by some CBP agents when she attempted to inquire about things such as air conditioning.
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She recalled one woman whose hand she held as the woman cried, concerned that she, an epileptic who had her medication taken from her by CBP, could fall to the floor in a seizure at any moment. Pressley went on to detail that, despite knowing America so far only as their captor, these migrant women still believe so strongly in the promise of America.
“These families need trauma support, case workers, clean water, adequate and nutritious food,” she said. “Instead they have received a level of degradation we should be ashamed is occurring on American soil.”
These are the House Democrats—the up-and-coming women of color—whom Pelosi has spent the past six months attempting to silence and corral. If their testimonies before the House committee do anything beyond sharing the stories of detained migrants who deserve more empathy and attention, they illustrate just how much of a disservice she does to try to curb their power merely in order to maintain her own.
President Trump said Sunday that four minority, liberal congresswomen who have been critical of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” prompting other Democrats — including Pelosi — to leap to their defense.
Pelosi denounced Trump’s tweets as “xenophobic comments meant to divide our nation,” while the four congresswomen promised to continue fighting Trump’s agenda and accused him of seeking to appeal to white nationalists.
Trump’s remark swiftly united a House Democratic caucus that had been torn apart in recent days by infighting between Pelosi and the four freshman women of color — Democratic Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.). It also comes as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are preparing to round up migrant families that have received deportation orders across the country.
Trump kicked off the furor with a string of tweets before heading to his golf club in Sterling, Va., on Sunday morning.
“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” Trump tweeted.
Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Tlaib was born in Detroit and Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York — about 20 miles from where Trump was born. Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia; her family fled the country amid civil war when she was a child, and she became a U.S. citizen as a teenager.
All four women won election to Congress in 2018.
In a follow-up tweet, Trump suggested that the four Democrats should leave Washington.
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he said. “Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
Trump’s tweets prompted a sharp response from Pelosi, who described them as racist and divisive.
“When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again,” she said in a tweet. “Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power.”
The four Democratic lawmakers also fired back at Trump on Twitter. Omar wrote that “As Members of Congress, the only country we swear an oath to is the United States.”
Trump was “stoking white nationalism,” she argued, out of anger that she and other women of color are fighting in Congress against his “hate-filled agenda.”
Pressley shared a screenshot of Trump’s tweets and stated, “THIS is what racism looks like. WE are what democracy looks like. And we’re not going anywhere. Except back to DC to fight for the families you marginalize and vilify everyday.”
Tlaib warned Trump, “I am fighting corruption in OUR country. . . . Keep talking, you’ll be out of the WH soon.”
And Ocasio-Cortez sent a string of tweets defiantly addressing the president. “You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us,” she said. “You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.”
Trump’s tweet came after House Democrats spent the prior week locked in internal tumult over whether Pelosi and House leaders have unfairly marginalized the four liberal freshmen. The firestorm reignited late Friday when the official House Democratic Caucus Twitter account attacked Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff for suggesting that Democrats had voted to “enable a racist system.” And on Saturday, Pressley made comments at the annual Netroots Nation conference that seemed to add to the conflagration.
But within a few hours on Sunday, Democratic lawmakers were united in defending their colleagues against Trump’s attack.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to bring everybody together — I think the president just did that for us,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said. “Nobody in our caucus is going to tolerate that kind of hatred. They’re not going to tolerate xenophobia, and they’re not going to tolerate racism. . . . This puts it all in perspective.”
Dingell, whose suburban Detroit constituency includes one of the largest Muslim American populations of any House district, said she was “furious” at Trump’s tweet and said it represented a direct attack on her community.
“It’s just stark hatred,” she said. “It’s absolute total hatred. He doesn’t know what he does to a community like the one that I live in when he does something like that. . . . It reinforces the fear of so many people in this country.”
Even lawmakers who have butted heads with the quartet of freshmen stood up for them on Sunday. Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), co-chair of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus and a frequent critic of the four, said in a tweet that Trump’s comments about them were “totally unacceptable and wrong.”
Some lawmakers pointed out Trump’s history of “birtherism” as well as the fact that the president’s wife, Melania, had immigrated to the United States. Melania Trump emigrated from Slovenia in 1996 for her modeling career.
“3 of 4 are American born and other is a citizen,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said of the four Democratic lawmakers in a tweet. “They are all ‘more’ American than 2 of Trumps wives (he seems partial to foreign women) and his grandparents.” Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump, was born in what was then Czechoslovakia, and Trump’s grandparents and mother were born in Europe.
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) responded to Trump by recounting how, despite being born in the United States, he was repeatedly told to “go back to Mexico” from childhood through adulthood, regardless of his service in the Marine Corps or how well he did in school.
“To people like Trump I will never be American enough,” Gallego said in a tweet. “So if you wonder why I give no inch to these racists, now you know. Nothing will ever satisfy them, all we can do is stop them.”
Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said on “Fox News Sunday” that Trump’s tweet was “racist” and “wrong.”
“Telling people to go back where they came from? These are American citizens elected by voters in the United States of America to serve in one of the most distinguished bodies in the U.S. House of Representatives,” said Luján, who is assistant House speaker.
For years, Trump repeatedly raised doubts about former president Barack Obama’s birth certificate, making the issue part of his 2016 presidential run. He finally acknowledged in September 2016 that Obama was born in the United States — but falsely accused the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton of being the source of the rumor.
“Trump is now turning the same birtherism he directed at President Obama against women of color serving in Congress,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said. “Everyone should call this what it is: racism.”
Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), a vocal Trump critic who recently left the Republican Party, also defended the four Democratic lawmakers.
“To tell these American citizens (most of whom were born here) to ‘go back’ to the ‘crime infested places from which they came’ is racist and disgusting,” Amash said in a tweet.
By late Sunday afternoon, at least 27 congressional Democrats, plus Amash, had used the words “racist” or “racism” on their Twitter accounts to describe Trump’s tweets.
Some Democrats went even further. “This is white nationalism,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who is running for president.
Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, were largely silent Sunday. In television appearances, several Trump administration officials declined to defend the president’s tweets.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” host Jake Tapper asked Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, whether he knew whom the president was talking about in his tweets.
“I don’t. I don’t,” Cuccinelli said.
Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, also declined to weigh in. “I think that you need to talk to the president about his specific tweets,” Morgan said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
Jeh Johnson, who was homeland security secretary during the Obama administration, said Morgan had “ducked” the question. Johnson argued that by sending the inflammatory tweets, Trump was undermining his own administration’s efforts on a bipartisan immigration reform deal.
“I cannot believe a president of the United States would make a statement about foreign-born members of Congress, suggesting they go back from where they came from. ... Americans should not become numb to this kind of language and offensive statements,” Johnson said on “Face the Nation.”
The president of the United States on Sunday urged some women in Congress to go back to the countries from which they came. The problem — beyond the nasty historical overtones of such a sentiment, of course — is that three of the four women about whom he appeared to be talking were born in the United States.
Trump’s tweets on these kinds of things are often somewhat carefully crafted — enough to give him some plausible deniability. But it’s pretty clear this one was directed at three American-born congresswomen, as well as one refugee-turned-lawmaker, otherizing them and urging them to return to countries in which they weren’t born.
“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly . . . and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” Trump said.
He added: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how . . . it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough."
Then comes the key part: “I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
There’s one person these tweets are obviously about, and that’s Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Trump’s sentiment closely echoes a controversial segment that Fox News host Tucker Carlson did last week in which he urged the Somali-born congresswoman to return to her birth country, citing her alleged “undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people.” Trump appears to have seen this segment and regurgitated it, as he often does with Fox’s programming.But Trump’s tweets didn’t refer to just one female member of Congress; they referred to “'Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen.” So who else might he be urging to return to their country?
In addition to Omar, here are the other foreign-born Democratic members of Congress, according to a list compiled by the Pew Research Center, along with their birth countries.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), India
Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.), Ecuador
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Vietnam
Rep. Norma J. Torres (D-Calif.), Guatemala
Remember how Trump ended his tweets: He said Pelosi would be glad to arrange these members’ travel back to the countries from which they originally came. It’s a reference to the recent infighting between her and some of the party’s more liberal members — a suggestion that Pelosi would be glad to see them gone.
Torres and Mucarsel-Powell, though, haven’t gotten themselves involved in this, and Murphy is a moderate who has taken Pelosi’s side. That leaves Jayapal as the only plausible member of the foreign-born “'Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen” group that he could be talking about, along with Omar. Jayapal has said Pelosi’s dismissive comments about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and others were “not helpful,” amid other comments.
But was Trump talking about a member who was born in India? He described the governments of these members’ birth countries as being a “complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.” A fair number of people might apply such labels to countries like Somalia, Ecuador and Guatemala. But India?
Not according to Trump himself. Just two weeks ago, Trump said this of India while meeting with its prime minister, Narendra Modi: “India is doing very well as a country.” Trump said in late 2017 that Modi was “a great gentleman doing a fantastic job in bringing around lots of factions in India — bringing them all together. That’s what I hear, and that’s good news. And it really is. It’s a lot of good reports coming out of India.”
He tweeted this in May, after Modi’s electoral victory:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1131609042227482625
So it’s clear Trump wasn’t talking about Jayapal going back to India. He was talking about Omar and someone else. The most logical interpretation is that he meant the other members of “the squad,” — the members who have clashed most directly with Pelosi in recent days: Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).
Ocasio-Cortez’s family is from Puerto Rico (which is a U.S. territory), and she was born in New York. Tlaib is Palestinian American and was born in Detroit. Pressley is black and was born in Cincinnati.
So not only is Trump rekindling a nasty historical talking point about immigrants, he’s apparently otherizing brown-skinned members of Congress by implying they are foreigners who, as Carlson suggested, may not love this country.
That’s an incredible sentiment from the president of the United States, and it’s pretty unmistakable.
Shortly before heading to a golf club that his company owns on Sunday morning, President Trump lashed out at a group of Democratic lawmakers on Twitter.
Injecting himself into a feud between liberal Democrats new to Congress and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Trump said it was “so interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.”
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he wrote. “Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.”
“I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!” he added, referring to the tension with Pelosi, a dispute partly rooted in the party’s response to Trump. As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote, that line suggests strongly to whom Trump is referring in the tweets. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).
The only problem is that Omar’s the only one of the four who has anywhere besides the United States to which she can “go back.”
Omar came here as a child, a refugee of civil war in Somalia, the country where both of her parents and her husband are from. She moved with her family to Minnesota and became a citizen, eventually marrying a British citizen from whom she later separated.
Trump has frequently targeted Omar, calling her unpatriotic and suggesting that she should be ousted from Congress. His rhetoric mirrors that of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who last week called Omar a “living fire alarm,” on the purported dangers of immigration.
Trump and his allies claim that Omar’s criticisms of racial tensions in the United States are tantamount to disloyalty to her adopted home. Telling immigrants to go back where they came from itself has a historical toxicity that’s rooted in race more than origin, a toxicity reflected in the fact that the other three people included in Trump’s disparagement — liberals, feuding with Pelosi, critics of Trump — aren’t even immigrants.
For example, Ocasio-Cortez, the most famous of the four, is from the Bronx. Her mother is from Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory.
In fact, Ocasio-Cortez’s family history is much more American than Trump’s own. His mother was born in Scotland, and two of his three wives are from Southern or Eastern Europe.
As The Post reported earlier this year, Trump’s father, like Ocasio-Cortez, was born in the Bronx. In fact, he was born not far from her district — to immigrant parents.
But Trump has repeatedly insisted that his father wasn’t born in the United States, instead having come from Germany. Fred Trump was apparently conceived in Germany, yes, but his place of birth, according to his birth certificate, was on what was then called 177th Street.
Perhaps Trump finds a German origin story more appealing than one that centers on the heavily black and Hispanic borough of New York City. After all, his disparagement of immigrants early last year as coming from “shithole” countries focused on Haiti (awfully close to Puerto Rico!) and Africa but included a lament that more immigrants didn’t come from places like Norway.
Which brings us to Tlaib. Her family and spouse are from the West Bank, but she herself is from Detroit.
Perhaps Trump means that she should go back to Detroit and fix it before telling him how he is failing as a president? If so, he’s embarking on a slippery slope because he’s recently complained about the dirtiness of New York and repeatedly disparaged the city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio. If one can’t criticize political opponents until their home turf is running perfectly, Trump might have to resign and seek de Blasio’s position (instead of the opposite, which is de Blasio’s goal).
Then there’s Pressley, whose family is entirely domestic. Unlike Trump, both her parents are from Ohio — a red state, even. Her husband is from Boston.
Where, exactly, should Pressley go back to?
Oh, but we apologize. According to a spokesman for the campaign, Trump didn’t tell the Democrats to “go back” anywhere because he also then said that they should later return to the United States, an obviously sincere addition on the president’s part.
So there you have it! All a big misunderstanding, not at all raising questions about Trump’s views on political opponents who are immigrants or people of color.
Trump woke up on Sunday morning, gazed out at the nation he leads, saw the dry kindling of race relations and decided to throw a match on it. It was not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last. He has a pretty large carton of matches and a ready supply of kerosene.
His Twitter harangue goading Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to the country they came from, even though most of them were actually born in the United States, shocked many. But it should have surprised few who have watched the way he has governed a multicultural, multiracial country the last two and a half years.
When it comes to race, Mr. Trump plays with fire like no other president in a century. While others who occupied the White House at times skirted close to or even over the line, finding ways to appeal to the resentments of white Americans with subtle and not-so-subtle appeals, none of them in modern times fanned the flames as overtly, relentlessly and even eagerly as Mr. Trump.
His attack on the Democratic congresswomen came on the same day his administration was threatening mass roundups of immigrants living in the country illegally. And it came just days after he hosted some of the most incendiary right-wing voices on the internet at the White House and vowed to find another way to count citizens separately from noncitizens despite a Supreme Court ruling that blocked him from adding a question to the once-a-decade census.
His assumption that the House Democrats must have been born in another country — or that they did not belong here if they were — fits an us-against-them political strategy that has been at the heart of Mr. Trump’s presidency from the start. Heading into next year’s election, he appears to be drawing a deep line between the white, native-born America of his memory and the ethnically diverse, increasingly foreign-born country he is presiding over, challenging voters in 2020 to declare which side of that line they are on.
“In many ways, this is the most insidious kind of racial demagoguery,” said Douglas A. Blackmon, the author of “Slavery by Another Name,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of racial servitude in America between the Civil War and World War II. “The president has moved beyond invoking the obvious racial slanders of 50 years ago — clichés like black neighborhoods ‘on fire’ — and is now invoking the white supremacist mentality of the early 1900s, when anyone who looked ‘not white’ could be labeled as unwelcome in America.”
Mr. Trump ritually denies any racial animus or motivations. His fight against illegal immigration, he says, is only about securing the border and protecting the country. He regularly boasts that unemployment among Hispanics and African-Americans has hit record lows. Last week he thanked Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, for crediting his stewardship of the economy.
“I am the least racist person you have ever met,” he has said more than once.
But he does not go out of his way to avoid looking like he is, and his string of Twitter posts on Sunday left his own advisers unable or unwilling to defend him. None of six spokespeople for the White House or his campaign initially responded to requests for comment.
One of the only administration officials who was already booked for the Sunday talk shows, Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, made clear he wanted no part of it. “You’re going to have to ask the president what he means by those specific tweets,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.
Republican lawmakers, by and large, did not rush to the president’s side on Sunday either, but neither did they jump forward to denounce him. Deeply uncomfortable as many Republicans are with Mr. Trump’s racially infused politics, they worry about offending the base voters who cheer on the president as a truth-teller taking on the tyranny of political correctness.
Only in the evening did Mr. Trump respond to the furor, saying that Democrats were standing up for colleagues who “speak so badly of our Country” and “whenever confronted” call adversaries “RACIST.”
At that point, Tim Murtaugh, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Trump, responded to a request for comment, saying, “The president pointed out that many Democrats say terrible things about this country, which in reality is the greatest nation on Earth.” He did not explain why Mr. Trump told American-born lawmakers to “go back” to countries they were not from.
Other presidents have played racial politics or indulged in stereotypes. Secret tapes of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon show them routinely making virulently racist statements behind closed doors. Mr. Nixon’s Southern strategy was said to be aimed at disenchanted whites. Ronald Reagan was accused of coded racial appeals for talking so much about “welfare queens.” George Bush and his supporters highlighted the case of a furloughed African-American murderer named Willie Horton. Bill Clinton was accused of a racial play for criticizing a black hip-hop star.
But there were limits, even a generation ago, and most modern presidents preached racial unity over division. Mr. Johnson, of course, pushed through the most sweeping civil rights legislation in American history. Mr. Bush signed a civil-rights bill and denounced David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan leader, when he ran for governor of Louisiana as a Republican. His son, George W. Bush, made a point of visiting a mosque just days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to emphasize that America was not at war with Muslims. Barack Obama invited an African-American Harvard professor and the white police officer who mistakenly arrested him for a “beer summit.”
Mr. Trump’s history on race has been well documented, from his days as a developer settling a Justice Department lawsuit over discrimination in renting apartments to his public agitation during the Central Park Five case in New York. Jack O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, later wrote that Mr. Trump openly disparaged others based on race, complaining, for example, that he did not want black men managing his money.
“Trump has not only always been a racist, but anyone around him who denies it, is lying,” Mr. O’Donnell said on Sunday. “Donald Trump makes racist comments all the time. Once you know him, he speaks his mind about race very openly.”
Mr. Trump, he said, regularly trafficked in racial stereotypes — Jews were good with money, blacks were lazy, Puerto Ricans dressed badly. “White people are Americans to Trump; everyone else is from somewhere else,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “He simply denies the reality of how we all immigrated to the United States.”
Mr. Trump propelled his way to the White House in part by promoting the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Mr. Obama was actually born in Africa, not Hawaii. He opened his presidential bid in 2015 with an attack on Mexican “rapists” coming across the border (although “some, I assume, are good people”) and later called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. He said an American-born judge of Mexican heritage could not be fair to him because of his ethnic background.
As president, he complained during meetings that became public that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and said African visitors would never “go back to their huts.” He disparaged Haiti and some African nations with a vulgarity and said instead of immigrants from there, the United States should accept more from Norway. He said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a rally to save a Confederate monument that turned deadly in Charlottesville, Va., although he also condemned the neo-Nazis there.
He is only saying what others believe but are too afraid to say, he insists. And each time the flames roar and Mr. Trump tosses a little more accelerant on top. The fire may be hot, but that’s the way he likes it.
Donald Trump keeps trying to convince any disbelieving holdouts that he is a raging racist. At least, that’s how I imagine his motives. In truth, it is more likely that his truest nature is simply being revealed, again and again, and he is using his own racism to appeal to the racism in the people who support him.
On Sunday morning, the same day that the Trump administration earlier announced it would conduct raids to round up undocumented immigrants, Trump weighed in again on the conflict between four female freshmen congresswomen and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, tweeting a series of three of the most racist tweets he could produce:
So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly ...
... and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how. ...
... it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!
Those progressive congresswomen are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts.
First, the facts: The country Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley “originally came from” is this one. They were born in America. Omar was a refugee from Somalia.
But, this is the most important fact: They aren’t white, and they are women. They are “other” in the framing of the white nationalists. They are descendants of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
The central framing of this kind of thinking is that this is a white country, founded and built by white men, and destined to be maintained as a white country. For anyone to be accepted as truly American they must assimilate and acquiesce to that narrative, to bow to that heritage and bend to those customs.
It sees a country from which black and brown people come as deficient — “a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world” — because, at its base, it sees black and brown people as deficient.
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It is a form of white identitarianism, which opposes multiculturalism, but refuses to deem that opposition racist.
And so, it chafes when these black and brown women from exotic-sounding places with exotic-sounding names would dare to challenge the white patriarchy in this country. Why do they not know their place? Why do they not genuflect to the gentry? Why do they not recognize — and honor — the white man’s superiority?
Start here: because the entire white supremacist ideology and ethos is a lie. America expanded much of its territory through the shedding of blood and breaking of treaties with Native Americans. It established much of its wealth through 250 years of exploiting black bodies for free labor.
And, for the entire history of this country, some degree of anti-blackness has existed. Now, there is an intensifying anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant xenophobia.
America was born with a congenital illness and it has been in need of active rehabilitation ever since, although it has often rejected the curative treatments and regressed.
Challenging America to own its sins and live up to its ideals isn’t a vicious attack, it’s an act of patriotism. As James Baldwin once put it, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
And, who better to lead the charge than four women who represent the future face of America.
But, Trump — and many of his supporters and defenders — spew their racism and tell themselves that it is perfectly acceptable when it is read back to them, in much the same way that a dog will eat its own vomit.
This is the second time Trump has weighed in on the dispute between Pelosi and the congresswomen. Friday he seemed to be coming to Pelosi’s defense, telling reporters: “She is not a racist. O.K.? She is not a racist. For them to call her a racist is a disgrace.”
But, he wasn’t really standing by Pelosi but hiding behind her. It was his way of saying that people who are not racist can be falsely assumed to be, like him. He established a parallel in Pelosi, two victims in kind.
But, there is no parallel. There can be no more discussion or debate about whether or not Trump is a racist. He is. There can be no more rhetorical juggling about not knowing what’s in his heart. We see what flows out of it.
White people and whiteness are the center of the Trump presidency. His primary concern is to defend, protect and promote it. All that threatens it must be attacked and assaulted. Trump is bringing the force of the American presidency to the rescue of white supremacy. And, self-identified Republicans absolutely love him for it.
We are watching a very dark chapter in this nation’s history unfold in real time. We are watching as a president returns naked racism to the White House. And we are watching as fellow citizens — possibly a third of them — reveal to us their open animus for us through their continued support of him.
Perhaps Trump was trying to distract his base from the fact that his promised immigration raids did not occur over the weekend. Maybe he failed to understand that he would only help the Democrats unite around the four congresswomen he attacked, until then a source of party division. Whatever his motivation, Mr. Trump hit one of the lowest moments of his presidency on Sunday, which is saying something, when he tweeted that “ ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
This reference to four left-wing members of Congress — widely understood to mean Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — required an explanation and an apology. Instead, Mr. Trump doubled down on Monday, insisting, essentially, that his critics are the real racists.
If the president had a real press secretary who offered daily briefings, as was the long-established custom, now would be a time for clarification. A few of the questions that might be asked: Which governments was Mr. Trump criticizing? Is it the president’s view that foreign-born Americans should be judged based on their place of origin, rather than their actions? And does he believe that people of color, even if born in the United States, are not true Americans?
Because, in fact, three of the four members of Congress he targeted were not born abroad. The president’s impression that they were seems to stem from some combination of their skin color and foreign-sounding (to him) names, reflecting his casual, shallow, ignorant, toxic racism.
But even if they were all foreign-born — so what? Just as many, if not most, Americans would be horrified to be blamed for their current president and his actions — his family separations, admiration for dictators and so on — individuals hailing from other countries are individuals who deserve to be judged on the content of their character. Once they are citizens, they are citizens, indistinguishable from those born into citizenship. In its dehumanizing essence, this episode recalls Mr. Trump’s insistence that the United States should attract more immigrants from Norway than “shithole” countries in Latin America and Africa.
Monday was sentencing day on state charges for the neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a group of protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer, a reminder of another low moment in Mr. Trump’s presidency. But his Sunday tweets are among the most despicable comments from any president in recent memory — with the only competition coming from other comments by Mr. Trump. Sadly, the poison by now is no more surprising than the cowardly complicity of the Republican Party.
Lawmakers and commentators abroad expressed shock and disgust Monday after President Trump targeted Democratic minority congresswomen in tweets over the weekend and told them to “go back” to their countries.
On U.S. soil, the tweets prompted outrage, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) branding Trump’s string of remarks as “xenophobic comments meant to divide our nation,” and Democrats defending those believed to be at the center of Trump’s fury: Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.).
While Republicans largely avoided commenting on the president’s statements, lawmakers around the world did not.
British politician David Lammy branded Trump’s comments “1950s racism straight from the White House” and called for Boris Johnson, who is in the running to replace Theresa May as prime minister, to condemn the remarks.
On Monday, May, who has just days left in office, condemned the tweets.
“The prime minister’s view is that the language used to refer to these women was completely unacceptable,” a Downing Street spokesman said.
May’s sharp rebuke of the president has put pressure on other lawmakers, especially Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, who is also vying for her job, to condemn the tweets. Both men have been silent so far.
May’s condemnation comes after a tense week between Britain and the United States with the special (or not-so-special) relationship at a new low.
“The President of the United States telling elected politicians — or any other Americans for that matter — to ‘go back’ to other countries is not OK, and diplomatic politeness should not stop us saying so, loudly and clearly,” tweeted First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon.
Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, who was born and raised in the city and has frequently clashed with Trump, told a British radio station that this is the type of language he has heard for much of his life — though never from such a source.
“I’ve heard it from racists and fascists. Never from a mainstream politician,” he said. “Here you have the president of the U.S.A. using that same sort of language.”
The outrage came from outside Britain as well.
“Trump’s racism is sickening. Any European politician who fails to condemn this has questions to answer & should be ashamed of themselves,” wrote Belgian politician Guy Verhofstadt.
In Germany, commentators condemned Trump’s remarks on Monday. To rely on “ugly sentiments,” wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily newspaper, has “long become part of his strategy.”
Trump’s tweets, the paper wrote, were so “clearly racist, that a debate over their content is a waste of time.”
German news outlet Der Spiegel echoed those comments. In a commentary on its website, the publication said Trump is now relying on an “even more overt and blunt racism” than ahead of the 2016 U.S. elections.
In the West Bank, where Tlaib has relatives and is considered a hometown hero despite having never lived there, many saw Trump’s tweets as a confirmation of what they view as a pro-Israel bias — and an insult to values America purports to uphold.
Bassam Tlaib, one of the congresswoman’s uncles in the West Bank, told the Associated Press Trump’s tweets were “a racist statement meant to target Rashida because she has Palestinian roots.”
“This statement proves that Trump is anti-Palestinian, anti-Islam and completely biased toward Israel,” he continued.
The Palestinian Authority, which has cutoff ties with the White House over a succession of Trump policies that have favored Israel, called Trump’s statement an “insult” to the concept of American rule of law, according to the AP.
“It’s an insult to the Statue of Liberty, America’s most famous symbol, an insult to the American values where migrants from all over the world are united as one nation under one law,” said Ibrahim Milhim, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority.
In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced the tweets when asked whether he considered them racist during a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Monday.
“That is not how we do things in Canada,” he said at a military base in Petawawa, Ontario. “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, and the diversity of our country is actually one of our greatest strengths and a source of tremendous resilience and pride for Canadians. We will continue to defend that.”
President Trump’s Twitter feed is a repugnant place, and no one would want the thankless task of having to weed through all his bitter, bigoted ramblings to determine which are the most offensive. But a three-tweet thread early Sunday morning — in which he wrote that the four progressive House Democrats who call themselves “The Squad” should “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came” — certainly has to rank among the most disgusting.
By now everyone in America should realize the threshold problem with what Trump is saying about the lawmakers, all of whom are women of color: Three out of the four — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts — can’t “go back” to the countries he has in mind because they are, in fact, from here. They were born in the United States, just like Trump himself, making them every bit as American as he is. Only the fourth, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, was born elsewhere; she emigrated from Somalia. And as a naturalized citizen of the United States, she too is as American as he is.
But Trump doesn’t care about such niceties. Nuance has never been his thing. And in any case, he is not really trying to inform us or to make a reasoned point about anything or to express a fully formed thought of any sort. He is simply spewing as usual, and in the process fanning the flames of disunity, chaos, prejudice and polarization — all cleverly hidden behind a veneer of rote and thuggish patriotism. He is playing to the lowest, most degraded emotions of his supporters while reveling in the fury of his opponents. This is the definition of demagoguery.
Sadly, it has found a receptive audience.
In Trump’s telling, these women who came from such “corrupt” and “crime-infested” countries (although they didn’t) are now lecturing “the people of the United States” about how “our” country is supposed to be run.
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His unmistakable point is that because some of the lawmakers’ families once lived elsewhere — in countries he would no doubt dismiss as “shitholes” — they are not really Americans like those of us to whom his tweet is directed. It is reminiscent, of course, of his long, cynical campaign to convince people that President Obama was born outside the country.
But Trump’s family too came from elsewhere. His mother and grandparents were born in Europe. So is he one of “us” or one of “them”?
In any case, to tell people in this country of immigrants that they should “go back” (in this case to places they are not, in fact, from) is a particularly familiar, childish and bigoted taunt that has been used by know-nothings throughout American history.
Trump’s burst of tweets hit all the notes: It is xenophobic, it is “othering” in the most obvious sense of the word, it is mean-spirited, it is divisive, and it is factually wrong. He reflexively moves the American civic conversation backward rather than forward. And he revels in the blowback, as evidenced by his tweets Sunday night chastising Democrats for defending their colleagues.
He is just trolling, as usual. He is just trying to get a rise out of us. He is baiting us. He wants headlines, he spoils for a fight, he is hoping to exacerbate the tensions that have bubbled up between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and these four congresswomen. We shouldn’t rise to his bait, but how can we not? If we ignore him, we normalize his reckless behavior, and that’s even worse.
“Our country is in serious trouble,” Donald Trump said. China was beating us on trade, as was Japan. But that was nothing compared with another country: Mexico. Mexico is “laughing at us, at our stupidity,” he said. “They are not our friend, believe me.”
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” he continued. Then he hit his stride, making a claim that has since become part of the Trump canon: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Some were good people, he said — but!
“I speak to border guards,” Trump claimed, “and they tell us what we’re getting.”
Is it possible Trump spoke with a border guard? It’s possible, though it’s not clear when he would have. This was in June 2015, as you’re no doubt aware, in the speech Trump gave announcing his candidacy for the presidency. Trump was not then in the habit of visiting the border with Mexico, though he was in the habit of watching Fox News, where he could hear from Border Patrol agents on occasion. He was attuned to what the conservative base of the Republican Party was hearing in conservative media and reflecting those sentiments back to them.
It took a bit to set in. Trump’s launch didn’t make too much of a splash at the time, covered largely as a fluke or a sideshow. But then, a few days later, Univision broke with the Trump Organization’s Miss Universe pageant because of those comments about Mexico. Others who had partnered with Trump did the same, including Macy’s, which had been carrying Trump’s line of ties. Suddenly, Trump’s comments about Mexico became part of the national conversation.
Trump, true to form, leaned into it, holding a massive rally in Arizona featuring family members of people killed by immigrants who were in the country illegally. In short order, Trump vaulted into the lead in the Republican field, securing a core base of support that helped propel him past the early primaries in a crowded field. His value proposition to Republican voters had multiple facets: outsider, business savvy, etc. But it was unquestionably his defense of his comments about Mexican immigrants that pushed him into the spotlight and to the nomination.
His extreme views on immigration and race weren’t limited to what he said in June 2015, of course. He continued to inaccurately link immigration from Mexico to crime over the course of the campaign (and into his presidency). In December, he called for Muslims to be banned from entering the United States, a response to a mass shooting in San Bernardino committed by an American and his Pakistan-born wife. A few weeks before that, Trump had tweeted out an image incorrectly suggesting that most white American murder victims were killed by black people. Shortly before the 2016 election, Trump decided to again suggest that the teenagers accused of raping a woman in Central Park in the 1980s — a group later exonerated — were indeed guilty of the crime. At the time, Trump had paid for ads in New York tabloids calling for a reinstatement of the death penalty.
This campaign strategy of saying whatever he felt, we were told, was Trump being Trump. His advisers told any member of the media who would listen that this was the key to his appeal: Trump wasn’t “politically correct” or beholden to the in-vogue ways of tailoring his words.
It worked. Trump won the presidency thanks to a margin of about 78,000 votes in three states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Part of that victory was a function of voters who’d backed Barack Obama in 2012 staying home. Part of it was that Trump mobilized less-frequent white voters to come out to the polls. At the time, this was attributed to Trump’s economic message: more power to working people, a harder line on trade deals. But that “economic anxiety” argument was quickly undercut by polling looking at the views voters actually expressed.
In exit polls, those concerned about the economy preferred Hillary Clinton; those worried about immigration and terrorism — the twin specters powering Trump’s dark vision about the state of the country — backed him. Research suggested that Trump’s strength among working-class whites was correlated to differences in racial attitudes by education level. Other research showed that race was a more powerful motivator for Trump voters in 2016 than it was for Mitt Romney voters in 2012.
We’ve seen lots of evidence that it’s racial, not economic, anxiety that motivates Trump supporters. A March 2016 Post-ABC News poll showed that there was a stronger link between Trump support and feeling that white Americans were “losing” than between Trump support and struggling economically. In a 2016 poll, Trump voters were more likely to say that whites face a lot of discrimination compared with any other group.
Given the close outcome of the 2016 election, a lot of factors might have swung the vote one way or the other. That holds for Trump’s positions on race and immigration, too: Without throwing fuel on an existent anti-immigrant and xenophobic narrative fostered by Breitbart News and other conservative outlets, it’s likely that enthusiasm for Trump wouldn’t have been enough to edge out Clinton in the necessary states.
The lesson for Trump was a little different, though. He'd been told time and again by advisers and external pundits that he needed to tamp down his rhetoric and move to the middle to win the general election. Trump wouldn't or couldn't do that — and he won anyway. He'd long claimed that he knew better than the experts; now, it seemed, he'd proved it. Letting Trump be Trump, as the phrasing had it, paid off.
As president, Trump has focused on delivering for his 2016 base of support, in part because it's the sort of transactionalism with which he's familiar and in part because he is eager to keep them close in 2020. His loyalty to his base has been reciprocated. Trump's various toxic comments and actions as president — referring to various countries as shitholes, drawing moral equivalence between both sides during the Charlottesville protests and, over the weekend, telling nonwhite Democratic legislators to “go back” where they came from — haven't done anything to drive his base away.
In fact, those actions have forced the Republican Party into a sort of purification. Bucking Trump hasn't paid off for members of his party. Republicans who stood by Trump won their primaries in 2018, though not always their general elections. Trump's popularity with Republicans remains high. The only Republican to vocally, consistently and fervently criticize Trump was Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan — whose opposition to Trump led him to leave the party.
There's a self-fulfilling component to this: The lack of criticism has given Trump cover within his party and no doubt helped keep his approval ratings high. No one wants to be the first one over the side of the trench.
Trump clearly sees value in casting his opponents as outsiders and un-American, declaring repeatedly that Democrats want to see full socialism in the United States — or even, as he hinted earlier this month, communism. (Enjoy your communes, folks.) He has suggested that Democrats want “open borders,” a flood of migrants from and through Mexico who will become Democratic voters. He has claimed that Democrats are soft on terrorism and on crime, both of which he links to nonwhites (the latter by referring to Chicago, among other things).
It’s a whirlwind of racial fears, xenophobia meant in part to bolster Trump’s standing with his base. But it’s also clearly Trump saying what he believes. Trump ran a campaign based on these fears and based on racist rhetoric. The draft of his announcement speech released to the press before he spoke in June 2015 didn’t include any comments about Mexico sending us racists. He added that as he was riffing. His advisers write him speeches, and he embellishes them. He’s being himself.
If questionable and overtly racist comments are Trump being Trump, what does that tell us about Trump?
The four Democratic congresswomen who President Trump told to “go back” to their countries rejected the president’s racist remarks on Monday, calling his tweets a distraction from the issues facing the country, in particular the detention of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Democratic Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) told reporters at the Capitol that they were not surprised by the president’s attacks and vowed not to be silenced by them.
“This is the agenda of white nationalists. ... This is his plan to pit us against one another,” Omar said.
Trump said earlier Monday that he is not concerned by criticism that his tweets were racist, asserting that the congresswomen hate the United States and are free to leave. Three of the four were born in the United States; the fourth, Omar, came to the U.S. from Somalia and became a citizen as a teenager.
Pressley began by voicing gratitude for the support the four have received in light of the “most recent xenophobic, bigoted remarks from the occupant of our White House.”
“I encourage the American people and all of us — in this room and beyond — to not take the bait,” Pressley said. “This is a disruptive distraction from the issues of care, concern and consequence to the American people that we were sent here with a decisive mandate from our constituents to work on.”
Addressing the children of the United States, Ocasio-Cortez rejected Trump’s words and said that they were the opposite of what America stands for.
“No matter what the president says, this country belongs to you. And it belongs to everyone. … This weekend, that very notion was challenged,” she said.
She said Trump was launching personal attacks on the congresswomen — including accusing them of hating the United States — because he wasn’t able to debate them on policy grounds.
“Weak minds and leaders challenge loyalty to our country in order to avoid challenging and debating the policy,” she said.
And Omar defended the comments that she and her colleagues have made as coming “from a place of extreme love for every single person in this country.”
Asked about Trump’s suggestion earlier Monday that she supports al Qaeda, Omar replied: “I will not dignify it with an answer.”
Trump tweeted another broadside against the Democratic congresswomen while the press conference was underway.
“The Dems were trying to distance themselves from the four ‘progressives,’ but now they are forced to embrace them,” he said. “That means they are endorsing Socialism, hate of Israel and the USA! Not good for the Democrats!”
Trump can’t stop himself from lobbing racist attacks on House Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley. But for Trump’s top immigration official, telling female congresswoman of color to “go back...from [where] they came” is no big deal.
Speaking on CNN’s New Day this morning, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said he hadn’t seen Trump’s tweets because he’s too busy doing his job (read: defending the president’s racism). However, he insisted Trump’s comments were merely political hand grenades, and not the racist attacks they clearly are.
“I didn’t see the tweet that you’re reading, actually. I can hear what you’re reading, but, I spent the weekend reading litigation and regulatory materials related to asylum, so,” Cuccinelli began, chuckling. “You know, I don’t—I can see the president is commenting on some of the splits in the Democratic caucus, in the House presumably, but beyond that I’m staying focused on trying to fix our asylum system.”
Cuccinelli said some more things about how these Democrats “complain” too much, as if there’s nothing to complain about. CNN’s Alisyn Camerota pressed Cuccinelli further, asking him that as the head of immigration processes, if he thought the president should be telling U.S. citizens of color to go “back” to their country of origin. The two then got into a heated exchange about who has been on Twitter last, LOL!
The most remarkable part of Cuccinelli’s segment is at the end, when Camerota asked him if it was correct that he had gone on anchor Jake Tapper’s program the day before, where Tapper had read Trump’s tweets aloud to him. Here was the exchange:
Camerota: “Director Cuccinelli, did my colleague Jake Tapper read you that tweet yesterday, on air?”
Cuccinelli: “Yes, he did.”
Camerota: “So you have heard this tweet before, and you have had 24 hours to process it?”
Cuccinelli: “So what? So what?”
Camerota: “I’m asking you your opinion about it.”
Cuccinelli: “I told you I haven’t been on Twitter in 24 hours. I’m not in there doing the Twitter war. I’m working on fixing an asylum system and trying to make our immigration system legal and vetting illegals work correctly. That’s what I’ve spent my time—including this weekend—doing. Not tweeting.”
A man who has said racist things about how the National Guard should use riot gear to turn asylum-seekers around at the border and make them “swim for it” suddenly has no comment on a very similar sentiment. Got it.
There is no shortage of horrors currently happening at this country’s southern border and at concentration camps around the United States right now. According to the claims of one family, we might have to add “forcing a toddler to choose which parent she wants to not be separated from” to the list.
A Honduran couple identified as Tania and Joseph told NPR that last week, Border Patrol agents at a facility in El Paso, TX, told the asylum-seeking couple and their three young children (who are nine, six, and three) that one parent would be allowed to stay in the country with the children while the other would be forced to leave. In order to determine which parent was more expendable, the agent allegedly turned to the couple’s three-year-old daughter, named Sofi, and asked her which parent she would rather choose to be with.
Per NPR, this happened next:
“The agent asked her who she wanted to go with, mom or dad,” her mother, Tania, told NPR through an interpreter. “And the girl, because she is more attached to me, she said mom. But when they started to take my husband away, the girl started to cry. The officer said, ‘You said you want to go with mom.’”
Think about the cruelty involved in this—not only forcing a toddler to choose between her mother and father, but also responding like this when she becomes upset.
Making matters worse is that, according to lawyers for the family, Sofi has a serious heart condition, and has already previously suffered a heart attack which required surgery. According to the couple’s account, a doctor “pleaded” with CBP agents to not separate the family due to Sofi’s condition. Tania told NPR that the doctor told her not to let Sofi answer as to which parent she wanted to stay with, because “they don’t have the right to ask a minor.”
Per NPR, again:
When the three children realized the family faced separation, they latched on to Joseph — the son around his neck and a daughter around each leg, the parents said. Joseph was taken to another cell.
“I was going to be separated from my children and my wife, and I would have to go back to Juárez on my own,” Joseph said through an interpreter. “I felt devastated.”
Although the Department of Homeland Security guidelines exempts those with “known physical/mental health issues” from the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy, NPR reports that the family has been sent back to Juarez, Mexico, twice already this year, even after the bishop of the Archdiocese of El Paso stepped in on the family’s behalf.
Following another intervention from the unnamed doctor, the family was finally released together on Friday. According to NPR, they’ve since flown to the Midwest to be relatives. DHS didn’t respond to NPR’s requests for comment. (I have also contacted DHS and will update if I hear back.)
What’s missing from the ongoing debate about what exactly to call these atrocities (and yes, “concentration camp” is an accurate descriptor) isn’t just what’s happening now in front of our eyes, but what kind of lasting impact this is going to have on these families the government is hellbent on ripping apart. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, studies have shown emotional symptoms resulting from detention include “anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
We are doing this to children before they even have fully-formed memories. It is cruel, disgusting, and abhorrent. And all of the handwringing in the world won’t change the fact that America has been and is still carrying out child abuse as both unofficial and official policy, and our cryptofascist government is all too happy to enforce it.
Hillary Clinton had a point. In September 2016, the Democratic presidential candidate, criticized some of her rival’s supporters for backing him. “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” she said at a fundraiser in New York. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Clinton distinguished these people from some of Trump’s other supporters, whom she described as “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them [...] and they’re just desperate for change.” She told her supporters that this latter basket included “people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” That nuance escaped the Trump campaign, which rallied around the “deplorable” label and said it showed how Clinton was out of touch. Mainstream news organizations tsk-tsked her for breaking a cardinal rule of political campaigning by criticizing the electorate.
Two years into Trump’s presidency, “deplorable” seems almost kind. It’s clear by now that racism is an animating force of Trump’s presidency, yet many of Trump’s supporters and most of the Republican Party still back him after every bigoted slight and discriminatory policy he makes. They may not be willing to admit that they agree outright with everything he says or does, but their continued political support makes the distinction meaningless. Even those Republicans who do voice objections to Trump tend to treat each outburst as a discrete incident, thereby denying the obvious deeper problem. At this stage, to not object to the president outright is to be complicit in his racist presidency.
The latest evidence comes from where it often does: the president’s personal Twitter account. Speaker Nancy Pelosi sparred last week with “the squad,” a group of four progressive freshman House Democrats, leading its most prominent member, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to claim Pelosi was singling out women of color in the Democratic caucus. Trump, for whatever reason, decided to publicly defend Pelosi by saying she wasn’t a racist. When those lawmakers then criticized Trump, he responded with an extraordinary series of tweets attacking their citizenship.
So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!
His hostility is unsurprising. The squad—which also includes congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—represent everything that Trump is not. These young women are unsparing in their criticism of him and his presidency; Tlaib famously said they would “impeach the motherfucker” shortly after she was sworn into office in January. One can hardly blame them for their zeal, since voters first elected them to Congress in the 2018 midterms as part of the electorate’s broader rebuke of Trump.
Even by Trump’s standards, it was an extraordinary diatribe. “Go back where you came from” is a popular taunt among white nationalists, one that’s used to instill feelings of otherness and alienation in the target. It’s also become a staple of schoolyard bullying against children of color after Trump took office. It did not matter to the president that all four of the lawmakers are American citizens, or that three out of the four were born in the United States. His underlying assertion is that they—and other non-white Americans—can never be full members of the American nation by virtue of their race.
If this were the first indication that Trump harbored racist views, his remarks would have been a tremendous shock. But it was not. He announced his presidential bid by claiming Mexico was sending murderers and rapists across the border, and campaigned on banning Muslims from entering the United States. He said an Indiana-born federal judge couldn’t be fair to him because he was “Mexican.” He told lawmakers he didn’t want immigrants from “shithole countries.” He constantly taunts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry by calling her “Pocahontas.” He described the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville as “very fine people.” And that’s just since 2015.
Trump, who knows these views helped elect him, doubled down on his remarks in a press conference on Monday, rebuffing criticism that they echoed white nationalists. “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” he replied. “All I’m saying is if they want to leave, they can leave. It doesn’t say leave forever. It says leave.” Trump didn’t bother denying that his comments were racist, just that they weren’t as racist as everyone believed. His assumption that his racist views hold quiet but widespread currency is a familiar trope among racists, too. In their eyes, they are bold truth-tellers amid a silent majority that keeps quiet out of political correctness.
Denialism abounds. Marc Short, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, argued that Trump couldn’t be a racist because Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao is Asian American. “So when people write the president has racist motives here, look at the reality of who is actually serving in Donald Trump’s cabinet,” he told reporters. (Chao is married to Trump’s most powerful ally in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.) Others tried to define racism down into oblivion. “Trump’s ‘go back’ comments were nativist, xenophobic, counterfactual and politically stupid,” Fox News anchor Brit Hume opined. “But they simply do not meet the standard definition of racist, a word so recklessly flung around these days that its actual meaning is being lost.” Hume did not explain how one could be a nativist xenophobe without also being racist.
At the same time, by Monday afternoon, a number of elected Republicans chimed in to critique Trump, but not without caveats; some made sure to also criticize of the four women lawmakers in question, as if to insulate themselves from potential backlash from the Republican base. “POTUS was wrong to say any American citizen, whether in Congress or not, has any ‘home’ besides the U.S.,” Texas Representative Chip Roy wrote on Twitter. “But I just as strongly believe non-citizens who abuse our immigration laws should be sent home immediately, & Reps who refuse to defend America should be sent home 11/2020.”
Even moderate Republicans had to make clear that they were offering a qualified defense of their fellow lawmakers. Maine Senator Susan Collins alluded to the squad’s “views on socialism, their anti-Semitic rhetoric, and their negative comments about law enforcement” before admonishing Trump to “take that [tweet] down.” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott noted that the Democratic Party was “embroiled in racial controversy” before Trump’s “unacceptable personal attacks” stole the spotlight. “I couldn’t disagree more with these congresswomen’s views on immigration, socialism, national security, and virtually every policy issue,” Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey said in a statement. “But they are entitled to their opinions, however misguided they may be.”
What could be driving such tepid responses? Maybe they really disagree with the squad’s views so strongly that they have to mention them whenever given the chance. Maybe they’re so intimidated by the Republican base’s embrace of racist politics that they don’t want to distance themselves too much from it. Maybe they’re simply worried that Trump will turn that base against them. Whatever the reason, their hesitation gives the appearance that they don’t really oppose Trump’s racism. They just want him to be quieter about it.
Trump has forced us all to take a position on what kind of America this is going to be — in essence, to define again what American “nationalism” means. Is it a white Christian nationalism (or if you’re Jewish and think you can wriggle yourself inside the Trumpian nationalist tent, you can call it Judeo-Christian), in which immigrants of color or other religions are not really Americans and can be told by the president to “go back” to their ancestral lands? Or is it the universalist nationalism of the Declaration of Independence, based on the liberal Enlightenment principles of equality before the law, the inviolable rights of the individual against the state and the conviction that all citizens — regardless of religion, ethnicity or ancestral roots and the timing of their arrival — are equally American?
This is hardly the first time that Americans have been presented with this question, needless to say, and they have often answered equivocally. The popular willingness to denounce and even persecute the “hyphenated” Americans of German and Irish descent during and after World War I, a frenzy spurred by leaders of both political parties; the imprisonment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II, upheld by the Supreme Court; and of course the unending horrific treatment of African Americans — these are more than sad episodes in our history. They are as much a part of who we are as the civil rights movement and other triumphs of individual liberties. White nationalism was never just a fringe phenomenon, and it isn’t today. The South was a bastion of the white-nationalist idea for almost two centuries and with support in the last half of the 20th century from conservative thinkers such as Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr. Today, the American conservative movement proudly nurtures a new nationalism, whose intellectual authors openly call on Americans to reject the universal liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence in favor of a nationhood grounded in religion and culture. It is a growth industry.
This nationalism in antithetical to the American experiment. The Founding Fathers, though white, Christian men, explicitly rejected establishing the new republic on a religious and ethnic foundation. They did not share a Burkean belief that the rights they enshrined in the Declaration derived from their Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, accreted over the centuries. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the “sacred rights of mankind” were not to be found among “parchments or musty records” but were “written, as with a sunbeam . . . by the hand of the divinity itself.” In the Declaration of Independence, which Abraham Lincoln recognized as the quintessential statement of American nationalism, there is not a word about culture, color or Christianity.
Yet the fight to define our nationalism has continued ever since. And that is what’s at stake in the current confrontation between the president and “the Squad.”
As always in such fights, the battle is not being fought on the clear and solid ground we’d all prefer. Trump himself deliberately picked this murky ground. He knows that a great number of Americans in both parties have little sympathy for the Squad, and for all kinds of reasons, ranging from simple racism, Islamophobia and misogyny, to genuine policy disagreements, to unhappiness with the bigotry and insensitivity that members of the Squad have themselves sometimes displayed. Almost everyone has a reason to temper their support. Professional Republicans are silent because they fear their voters; professional Democrats are still angry at the Squad for challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Many are inclined to declare a pox on both their houses — they deserve each other.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of equivocation. Trump has given us a binary choice: Either stand with American principles, which in this case means standing in defense of the Squad, or equivocate, which means standing with Trump and white nationalism. It doesn’t matter how you feel about Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The truth is, they have done nothing and said nothing about the United States or about an ally (in this case, Israel) that has not been done or said thousands of times. When politicians were denouncing “hyphenated” Americans during World War I, German and Irish Americans were not only denouncing their government. Some were actively working for the German government, engaging in sabotage and espionage, often supported by funds paid through the German Embassy in Washington. Yet even that did not justify a national assault on “hyphenated” Americans.
Our nation won’t be undermined by anything the Squad has said or done. It will be undermined if we don’t fight back against this assault on our universal principles. Disagree with the Squad, refute them, argue with them, vote against them. But also defend them, as the founders intended. The essence of our nation is at stake.
Kellyanne Conway, responding to a reporter’s question Tuesday about President Trump’s racist tweet directed to four Democratic congresswomen, asked the journalist: “What’s your ethnicity?”
Andrew Feinberg of Breakfast Media wanted to know what countries the president was referring to when he made the comment about Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). Each of the congresswomen are American citizens; three of whom were born in the United States. Omar was born in Somalia and became a U.S. citizen in 2000.
Conway, standing outside the White House, defended the president, saying he meant that the congresswomen should go back to where their families were “originally” from. In the exchange, she asked Feinberg of his lineage, seeming to argue that Trump’s point was that every American has an immigrant history, before offering that her family is from Ireland and Italy.
When reporters continued to push her for an answer, Conway said that the president had already explained himself in subsequent tweets.
“He’s tired,” she said. “A lot of us are sick and tired in this country of America coming last to people who swore an oath of office.”
Later, Conway tweeted that she’d meant “no disrespect” when asking about the reporter’s ethnicity.
While Trump and his allies have said his tweets about the four congresswomen were not racist but rather a commentary on their “socialist” ideology, Conway’s husband, a frequent Trump critic, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post with the headline, “Trump is a racist president.”
“Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president,” George Conway wrote. “Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear.”
Earlier, in a Fox News interview, Kellyanne Conway appeared displeased when asked whether she agreed with her husband’s take.
“No, I totally disagree,” she said. “But, I work with this president, I know him. I know his heart. I know his actions. I know how much he has helped people of color. And I go by what people do, not what other people say about them.”
Conway added that she objected to being asked to comment on her husband’s opinions, saying she’s “not going to run around pointing out everybody’s disagreements with the people in their lives. I sure could.”
She took a similar tack with the reporters on Tuesday, telling them that she could “cherry-pick what each of you have said and made fools of yourself, but I won’t. But I could.”
For some reason — well, for an obvious reason — White House adviser Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday decided to ask a White House reporter about his ethnic background.
The reporter, Andrew Feinberg, had asked Conway to clarify what President Trump meant when he suggested that a group of Democratic women who have criticized him — all of whom are nonwhite — should “go back” to the countries from which they came. Three of the four are from the United States.
“What’s your ethnicity?” Conway responded, prompting Feinberg, clearly baffled, to ask why she wanted to know.
Because she did, Conway said, adding, “My ancestors are from Ireland and Italy.”
She later tweeted that she had asked the question of Feinberg because the majority of Americans are descended from people who immigrated from somewhere else. How that’s pertinent to Feinberg’s question — to what countries should the Democrats return? — still isn’t clear.
Unless, of course, Conway was tacitly admitting that Trump was telling, say, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to move out of Michigan and back to the West Bank, where her parents are from. Unless Conway was making clear that Trump’s description of these places of origin as “totally broken and crime infested” was a suggestion that Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a native of Somalia, have roots in places that he finds distasteful. (If he was telling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to return to her mother’s birthplace, Puerto Rico, his description of the place as “broken” and “a complete and total catastrophe” takes on a new meaning.)
But as Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center pointed out on Twitter, Conway’s personal revelation was more revealing than she probably intended.
Conway’s mother is of Italian descent and her father, Irish. We’ve written about her mother’s grandfather before, after the White House announced plans to mandate that immigrants speak English. When Conway’s great-grandfather Pasquale Lombardo arrived in the United States in 1909, he spoke only Italian.
That year is significant: It was the peak of migration from Italy to the United States.
It is also shortly after President Trump’s own grandfather — his father’s father — returned to the United States from Germany. (He had been in the U.S. previously, but his wife got homesick. The German government thought he had been trying to dodge the draft and slated him for deportation.) By the time he returned to the United States, German migration had waned somewhat. So had migration from Ireland, which peaked in the 19th century. (It’s not clear when Conway’s Irish ancestors arrived.)
What Wilkinson pointed out was that Italian and Irish immigrants were not exactly embraced.
The spike in Irish immigrants in the 19th century spurred a broad backlash. There were worries about Irish laborers taking American jobs and concerns about the influx of Catholics. Violence broke out, and discrimination was common.
Shortly after Lombardo arrived, concern had shifted to Eastern European migrants. The plunge in immigration on the graph above in the early 20th century reflects a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment that followed World War I. But there were specific moments at which that sentiment spiked, including after a bomb exploded on Wall Street in 1920.
That incident was blamed on anarchists linked to an Italian immigrant. An editorial in The Washington Post summarized one response: The bombing “emphasizes the extent to which the alien scum from the cesspools and sewers of the Old World has polluted the clear spring of American democracy.”
Warren G. Harding, the Republican presidential candidate in 1920, warned about a deluge of immigrants with loyalties to their home country. He called such immigrants “hyphenated” — as in, “Italian-American.”
“For Americans who love America, I sound a warning,” Harding said in one speech. “It is not beyond possibility that the day might come — and may God forbid it — when an organized hyphenated vote in American politics might have the balance of voting power to elect our government.”
Harding won and quickly embraced new immigration restrictions. By 1925, the Ku Klux Klan was marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Italians then and the Irish before them were seen as undesirable and unwelcome. They were blamed for ruining the fabric of the United States and, often, told to go back home to the places from which they had come.
Things change. There is now an adviser to the president of the United States who is the progeny of both Italian and Irish immigrants. That, of course, is Conway — and she figured that raising her own heritage was an effective way to defend Trump’s own nativist rhetoric.
It probably wasn’t.
President Trump is facing strong backlash for telling four progressive Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to where they “originally came from.” The presidential tweet sparked a storm of controversy for appearing to question the nationality and patriotism of these nonwhite members of Congress — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) — three of whom were born in the United States.
Trump’s comments were immediately criticized by Democrats (and some Republicans) for evoking long-standing racist tropes that treat racial and ethnic minorities as less authentically American than whites. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tweeted:
https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1150408691713265665
Of course, this isn’t the first time the president has questioned the Americanness of people of color. Trump first became popular among Republicans by publicly questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship. Since then, he has dismissed a federal judge born in Indiana as “a Mexican”; expressed a strong preference for white immigrants from Norway over those from “shithole” African countries; and said to African American athletes protesting racial injustice, “Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”
But Trump isn’t alone in seeing people of color as less American. Indeed, for many whites, being American is often equated with being white.
Race and Americanness
As I noted in an earlier Monkey Cage post, within the social-science literature on intergroup relations, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto’s theory of social dominance argues that politically dominant groups, such as whites in the United States, effectively claim “ownership of the nation.” According to this influential theory, “Nationality and ethnicity are complementary because their power has enabled whites to successfully define the prototypical American in their own image.”
Consistent with that contention, social-psychology research shows that “to be American is implicitly synonymous with being white.” Those studies show that many whites subconsciously see both African and Asian Americans as less associated with the national category “American” than whites.
Moreover, whites who feel solidarity with other members of their racial group have stronger attachments to America and to such patriotic symbols as the national anthem and the American flag. They’re also more likely to hold views of Americanness that restrict membership, such as believing that being white and Christian are important to being “truly American.”
The figure below shows an even more direct link between whiteness and American patriotism.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/2swEg_mBFylPo9C6zo3PQN0UGm8=/975x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WJIETRQ5ENGCPJLXZVTZGIUBDY.png)
The bars on the left show results from a June 1995 NBC Poll that asked respondents, “When you hear about someone being ‘patriotic,’ do you think of a white man, a white woman, a black man or a black woman?” The results again suggest that whites’ image of the prototypical American patriot is far more likely to be white than black.
Similarly, the bars on the right show that few whites thought African Americans were particularly patriotic in a February 2012 American National Election Study Survey. Only 28 percent of white respondents thought that the word “patriotic” described most blacks very or extremely well, compared with 51 percent who thought most whites are patriots.
Patriotism is often closely mixed with racial resentment
This view that African Americans are insufficiently patriotic fits well with classic conceptions of modern prejudice, which argue that contemporary racial resentment is characterized by “moral feelings that blacks violate … traditional American values.” In fact, one of the questions that Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher used to measure racial resentment for the Obama campaign in 2008 was: “I often feel that African Americans aren’t as proud and patriotic about this country as I am.”
The widespread belief that people of color are insufficiently American and patriotic also helps explain why some individuals — and not others — have their nationality and patriotism questioned if they criticize U.S. government policies. Trump said that those four members of Congress “hate our country” and should leave if they’re “not happy” with his administration.
But when Trump was writing about “Crippled America” and speaking of American carnage, no one called for him to go back to his ancestral homelands in Scotland or Germany.
THE BIG IDEA: The four-page resolution of disapproval that the House will take up this week to condemn President Trump’s racist tweetstorm quotes at length from Ronald Reagan’s final speech in the White House.
“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness: We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people – our strength – from every country and every corner of the world,” Reagan said in January 1989. “And, by doing so, we continuously renew and enrich our nation. … Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Thirty years later, the man who now occupies the White House tweeted that four minority lawmakers – three of whom were born in the United States – should “go back” to “the crime infested places from which they came.” A reporter asked Trump on Monday, “Does it concern you that many people find that tweet racist?”
“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” the president replied, adding that the four women “hate our country.”
House Republican leadership aides expect few of their members to defect from Trump to support the resolution of disapproval, which could come up for a vote as soon as today. It also says that Trump’s tweets “have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
Trump’s targets held a news conference at the Capitol last night to respond to the president’s comments. Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) each took turns speaking. Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Tlaib was born in Detroit, and Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York. Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia; her family fled the country amid civil war when she was a child, and she became a U.S. citizen as a teenager.
Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, remembered when she was a girl and her dad brought her to the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. He told her to look around. Then he told her that the monuments she saw, and the nation they represented, belonged to her just as much as anyone else. “I want to tell children across this country,” the congresswoman said last night, “no matter what the president says, this country belongs to you, and it belongs to everyone.”
Here are eight takeaways from this firestorm:
1) Trump’s rhetoric is creating a more dangerous climate and corroding the public discourse.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) asked the Capitol Police last night to provide extra protection for the four lawmakers, citing a growing threat profile, per Fox News.
There are also longer-term impacts to consider. For better or worse, the president is a role model. Modeling bad behavior sends signals to young people just as much as good behavior.
Conservative columnist George Will argues that this is why Trump is worse than Richard Nixon. “I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse, you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream,” the consistent Trump critic said on a New York Times Book Review podcast last week. “This will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon's surreptitious burglaries did."
2) Trump’s “go back” rhetoric is consistent not only with his own long history of attacks on people he perceives as the other but also the nation’s oscillating attitudes toward immigration throughout its history. Marc Fisher traces the etymology: “The Know-Nothings wanted German and Irish immigrants to get out because they were allegedly subversive and diseased people who were stealing American jobs. White preachers and politicians of the 1820s urged freed blacks to move to West Africa, supposedly for their own good. From that drive to encourage blacks to go back where they came from to waves of nativist attacks on Catholics, Jews, Asians and Hispanics in nearly every generation that followed, ‘go home’ rhetoric is as American as immigration itself. …
“There is hardly any ethnic or racial group in the country that hasn’t been told to go back where they came from. In collections of voices from the Japanese American internment camps of the World War II era, in diaries of the earliest Italian and Irish immigrants, in Jewish novels and memoirs from the turn of the 20th century, the slur is a mainstay. … From Calvin Coolidge’s warnings in the 1920s that the country was becoming ‘a dumping ground’ and that ‘America must remain American’ to the ‘America: Love it or leave it’ rhetoric that surrounded Richard Nixon’s presidency, the nation’s leaders have struggled for two centuries with a central ambivalence about its core identity as a magnet for immigrants.”
-- The news media is grappling with how to label Trump’s Sunday tweets, but The Washington Post decided Monday afternoon to use the word racist because of the well-documented history. “The ‘go back’ trope is deeply rooted in the history of racism in the United States. Therefore, we have concluded that ‘racist’ is the proper term to apply to the language he used Sunday,” Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said in a statement.
-- Conservative lawyer George Conway, the husband of counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, explains in an op-ed for The Post why this episode caused him to conclude that Trump is a racist – after years of giving him the benefit of the doubt.
3) White identity politics is driving Trump as 2020 approaches, and the Republican Party that he’s remaking in his image. Trump is making clear that his reelection campaign will feature the same explosive mix of white grievance and anti-immigrant nativism that helped elect him, Michael Scherer explains: “Trump’s combustible formula of white identity politics has already reshaped the Republican Party, sidelining, silencing or converting nearly anyone who dares to challenge the racial insensitivity of his utterances. It also has pushed Democratic presidential candidates sharply to the left on issues such as immigration and civil rights, as they respond to the liberal backlash against him. Left unknown is whether the president is now on the verge of more permanently reshaping the nation’s political balance — at least until long-term demographic changes take hold to make nonwhite residents a majority of the country around 2050. …
“Ashley Jardina, a professor at Duke University who recently wrote a book called ‘White Identity Politics,’ said that a majority of white Americans express some racial resentment in election-year surveys. Between 30 and 40 percent embrace a white racial identity. It is the latter group, with concerns about growing immigration threatening their racial status, who gravitated strongly to the president. The feeling of white identity is much stronger among non-college-educated whites than those who went to college, she said. ‘We do know that it is politically mobilizing,’ Jardina added. ‘Those who feel racial solidarity have more likelihood to participate in politics.’ …
“A December 2018 Pew Research Center poll found that 46 percent of white Americans said having a majority nonwhite nation in 2050 would ‘weaken American customs and values.’ … Asked whether having a majority nonwhite population would strengthen American customs and values, 42 percent of Democrats said it would, while only 13 percent of Republicans agreed.”
“Trump is proposing a giant swap: Republicans can no longer count on suburban women and we will continue to lose college-educated men and women, while we increasingly pick up working white Americans without college degrees,” said Ari Fleischer, who was a White House press secretary for President George W. Bush and who has spoken with Trump campaign advisers about their strategy for increasing turnout. “Nobody knows who will come out ahead in the swap,” he told Scherer. “That’s what the campaign will tell us.”
4) Trump’s increasingly incendiary rhetoric is being met with fading resistance from Republican and corporate leaders.
Making the case that the president’s behavior is being normalized, Toluse Olorunnipa compares the applause Trump got at the White House on Monday to what happened after Trump said Mexican immigrants are rapists, called for a Muslim ban and insisted there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville. “The president, who has grown more comfortable in Washington as he has surrounded himself with assenting voices, has learned over the past three years that there is little consequence within his party or from aligned corporate and religious leaders for embracing incendiary rhetoric and pugilistic attacks,” Toluse writes:
“The business world largely shrugged off Trump’s words, a shift from the kind of forceful response that industry leaders provided after Charlottesville. After Monday’s event at the White House — during which Trump accused members of Congress of hating Jews and loving al-Qaeda — business leaders gathered for the event circled around the president as he signed an executive order. Standing with Trump was Lockheed Martin chief executive Marillyn Hewson, one of the business leaders on Trump’s manufacturing council before it disbanded after the Charlottesville violence. Lockheed spokesman Bill Phelps did not answer questions about whether Hewson approved of Trump’s comments before or during the event.”
-- The New York Times looks at how senior staffers at the White House have grown emboldened as Trump blusters his way through scandals. After Trump defended the neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Gary Cohn, his top economic adviser at the time, told the Financial Times that “this administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups,”” Annie Karni notes. “On Monday, Mr. Cohn’s successor in the West Wing, Larry Kudlow, steered clear of the latest flare-up of Mr. Trump’s inflammatory language. ‘That’s way out of my lane,’ Mr. Kudlow said when asked about the president’s weekend tweets. ‘He’s tweeted what he’s tweeted,’ Mr. Kudlow said. ‘You’ll have to talk to him about that.’
“After Charlottesville, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a White House adviser, issued her own statement on Twitter, saying there was ‘no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.’ It was a notable corrective to her father. On Monday, Ms. Trump declined to comment on her father’s latest remarks. … Administration veterans said they had long ago become immune to thinking anything Mr. Trump said would stick to him for more than one news cycle. Indeed, even a year after Charlottesville, Republican lawmakers who distanced themselves from the president had come back to embrace his tax overhaul and his selection of Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.”
-- “Melania Trump is only the second first lady of the United States not born in America; the first, Louisa Adams was born in England. Yet she's remained silent as her husband tweets racist and xenophobic attacks,” CNN notes.
-- Speaking of Charlottesville: Two weeks after being sentenced to life in prison by a federal judge, the avowed neo-Nazi James A. Fields Jr. received a similar sentence in a Virginia court on Monday for ramming his car into counterprotesters during the white-supremacist rally. In ordering terms of life plus 419 years in state prison, Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore imposed the punishment recommended in December by a jury that convicted Fields of first-degree murder and nine other charges, per Laurel Demkovich and Paul Duggan.
5) Trump wants to make “the Squad,” as the four women he attacked call themselves, the face of the Democratic Party.
The president suggested that he’s attacking these women to elevate them. “The Dems were trying to distance themselves from the four ‘progressives,’ but now they are forced to embrace them,” he wrote after their presser last night. “That means they are endorsing Socialism, hate of Israel and the USA! Not good for the Democrats!”
A Trump campaign adviser told Jackie Alemany for her Power Up newsletter that Trump's tweets “yet again reinforced in the minds of many Americans that the Democratic Party is the party of AOC and Omar.”
-- But even if there’s some strategy, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one. Trump has united Democrats after they spent a week in disarray. “Inside the White House, there was some frustration that the president had inserted himself into what was an internal Democratic feud, offering Nancy Pelosi a convenient off-ramp from her disagreements — generational, philosophical and tactical — with the four liberal lawmakers,” Ashley Parker, Rachael Bade and John Wagner report.
Dana Milbank notes that Trump’s latest comments made Democratic bickering over Joe Biden’s relationship with James Eastland in 1973 look small in comparison, a dynamic that could help the former vice president.
-- Looking forward, this gives some momentum to liberals who want impeachment. There is lots of speculation that Trump welcomes impeachment proceedings because he knows Senate Republicans are not going to remove him from office, and he has said his base would rally behind him if Democrats impeach.
Despite the speaker’s opposition, 85 Democrats have publicly called for starting impeachment proceedings against Trump, more than one-third of her caucus. All four of the lawmakers in question have already called for Trump’s impeachment. Omar mentioned impeachment during the news conference. “It’s time for us to impeach this president,” Omar said. “It is time for us to stop allowing him to make a mockery out of this Constitution.”
Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) said he plans to force a vote on the House floor this month on impeaching Trump. The House voted 364 to 58 in December 2017, with Republicans in the majority, on a motion to table Green’s previous impeachment resolution. Green said Monday that “the American people are fed up” with his racism and bigotry and that the Sunday tweets brought everything “to a boiling point.”
-- Congressional Republicans were left largely to chart their own course Monday in the absence of any unified messaging effort by their party. “One Senate Republican chief of staff … said that there was only ‘commiserating’ at such moments, ‘no coordination,’” Felicia Sonmez, Mike DeBonis and Paul Kane report. “‘Every man for themselves,’ said a House Republican close to party leadership. … But common themes quickly emerged. In responding to Trump’s tweets Monday, several Republicans echoed the president’s claim that the four women ‘hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion,’ while others cast them as lax on border security.”
6) The world is watching. Trump’s comments hurt America’s standing in the world.
“British politician David Lammy branded Trump’s comments ‘1950s racism straight from the White House,’” Jennifer Hassan reports from London. “Prime Minister Theresa May, who has just days left in office, also condemned the tweets. ‘The prime minister’s view is that the language used to refer to these women was completely unacceptable,’ a Downing Street spokesman said. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt called the tweets ‘totally offensive.’ Former London mayor and former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said the president’s comments were ‘unacceptable.’ One of the two men will be selected prime minister next week. …
“Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, who was born and raised in the city and has frequently clashed with Trump, told a British radio station that this is the type of language he has heard for much of his life — though never from such a source. ‘I’ve heard it from racists and fascists. Never from a mainstream politician,’ he said. ‘Here you have the president of the U.S.A. using that same sort of language.’”
-- New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern criticized Trump on Radio New Zealand. “Usually I don’t get into other people’s politics, but it will be clear to most people that I completely and utterly disagree with him,” she said.
-- The Palestinian Authority, which has cut off ties with the White House over a succession of Trump policies that have favored Israel, called Trump’s statement an “insult” to the concept of American rule of law, according to the AP. “It’s an insult to the Statue of Liberty, America’s most famous symbol, an insult to the American values where migrants from all over the world are united as one nation under one law,” said Ibrahim Milhim, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority.
7) This will make it more difficult for Trump to advance his agenda on Capitol Hill. Moderate Democrats have a harder time explaining to their liberal base why they’re voting with the president each time he picks a fight like this.
Pelosi spoke late last night with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as they tried to broker a debt ceiling and budget deal with just days left before Congress leaves until after Labor Day. “The talks took on new urgency after Pelosi shot down a White House fallback plan that would have Congress raise the debt ceiling — potentially for just a short period of time — by late next week if they failed to reach a budget agreement,” Damian Paletta and Erica Werner report. “Pelosi said the idea of raising the debt ceiling on its own and not in conjunction with a budget agreement was not ‘acceptable to our caucus’ and therefore did not stand a chance of passage in the House. …
“People involved in the negotiations said they were not panicking and that there were still multiple options to avoid a full-blown crisis, and they also said that all sides were working hard to reach a resolution. One option would be for lawmakers and the White House to reach an agreement in principle on the budget before the August recess, temporarily raise the debt ceiling, and then agree on specifics in the intervening months. White House officials also remain unsure whether Pelosi will be able to whip up enough Democratic votes to pass a budget compromise, and some congressional aides remain wary of whether Trump will ultimately agree to whatever budget deal Mnuchin brings to him."
8) Irony is dead: Attorney General Bill Barr spoke yesterday at a Justice Department summit on combating anti-Semitism. He was not talking about Trump, of course, but his warnings about divisiveness seem applicable to this situation. “My concern today is that under the banner of identity politics, some political factions are seeking to obtain power by dividing Americans,” Barr said. “They undermine the values that draw us together, such as shared commitment to our country’s success. This is the breeding ground for hatred, and we must reject it.”
“We are a pluralistic nation composed of very distinct groups, each bound together by ethnicity, race, or religion – each group proud of its identity and committed to its faith and traditions,” he continued. “Yet despite these differences, we can be bound together into a broader community. Not one that seeks to grind away our distinctive identity. … But one that respects, indeed delights in, the freedom of each of us that give meaning to our lives – that help us understand our place and our purpose in this Creation. This real sense of community cannot be politically mandated. It arises from the genuine affinity, affection, and solidarity that grows out of a shared patriotism and that spontaneous feeling of fellowship that arises from a shared sense of place, shared experience, and common local attachments. These bonds are the surest safeguard against racial hatred.”
Trump is a racist, in his words and his actions.
Before you go clutching your pearls and extolling the virtues of “civility,” let me say this: put a sock in it.
This is not a new revelation, nor is it something that we can continue to ignore as though it were coming from a drunk uncle at the family barbeque. Bigotry is dangerous and, in the hands of our nation’s commander-in-chief, it can mean an inability to recognize individual humanity and a failure to act with moral authority in times of crisis. Every person talking about his clothes as he cheerfully bares his ass is part of the problem.
Sunday, he claimed that newly elected progressive Democrats “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” and “the worst, more corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.” And he told freshmen Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—outspoken Democratic women of color who have challenged the administration’s inhumane immigration policies— to leavethe country.
Three of the four were born here in the United States. All are American citizens, and duly elected members of Congress.
Trump’s repugnant rebuke of American values did not come out of thin air. It unfolded days after “The Squad” travelled with a delegation of congressional democrats to tour detention facilities in border states. What they found was deplorable. Reports of rampant abuse and neglect filled the airwaves, leading Trump to again dismiss accurate coverage as “fake news.” Rather than focus on improving basic conditions and getting to work on bi-partisan, comprehensive reforms, the president basically said if immigants didn’t like how they were being treated, they should stay in their own country.
This morning, he turned his ire on some of his most vocal critics in Congress—all of whom have previously called for his impeachment.
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump tweeted about the four congresswomen today. “Then come back and show us how it is done.”
“These places need your help badly,” he went on, “you can’t leave fast enough.”
While Republicans predictably remained tight-lipped and oblivious, Democrats reacted swiftly.
“Mr. President, the country I ‘come from,’ and the country we all swear to, is the United States,” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez responded. “You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us. You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.”
“When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a tweet. “Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power.”
This isn’t simply disgusting and divisive rhetoric. Whether it is the abhorrent, inhumane treatment of immigrants detained in government-sponsored concentration camps or the slow, piecemeal aid sent to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, for some, his policies have been deadly.
Certainly, this is not the first time Trump has shamelessly revealed himself in public. His “Make America Great Again” campaign was always about catering to our lowest common denominator-- a hateful sector of the electorate that believes themselves culturally superior by skin color and religion.
For years, even before mounting a formal bid for the presidency, Trump regaled television news audiences with racist conspiracy theories about former president Barack Obama. He pledged to send investigators out to prove the nation’s 44thpresident was not born in the United States. He later derided immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries, calling those foreign nations “shit hole countries.” He once said immigrants from Haiti all “have AIDS” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts.”
In Trump’s mind, a judge’s Mexican heritage made him incapable of ruling fairly in a civil fraud case against one of his companies and he believes “laziness is a trait in blacks.” Trump, whose real estate company was sued for housing discrimination in the 1970s, went on the place a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five innocent black teenagers. Even after the Central Park 5 was exonerated, he refused to take it back. After Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlotteville, Virginia amid a white supremacist protest, he lamented the there were “some very fine people” on “both sides.”
Trump is not a fine person. His words Sunday were not racially “charged,” “fueled,” or “tinged.” They were unapologetically racist.
And, if you support him, so are you.
Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, perhaps in a telling of things to come, said on his show that Omar “has an awful lot to be grateful for” but “hates this country more than ever.” He doubled down on his comments the following night, arguing that arriving in this country as a refugee should prevent her from criticizing the United States.
Then President Donald Trump started in, tweeting over the weekend about how “interesting” it was to see members of Congress “from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” try to criticize and lead the U.S. themselves and telling them to “go back” to where they were from. Most of the women he referred to—Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—are U.S.-born citizens, whereas Omar’s family, from Somalia, sought asylum here when she was 12. She became a naturalized citizen at 17.
Since then, Republicans have either remained silent on Trump’s racist remarks about Omar and the other women or defended the remarks as fair criticism.
The former have tried to cover their asses, but the latter has molded Trump’s racism and xenophobia into an argument that might seem on its face a bit less vitriolic than Trump’s bald racism—that Omar must hate America, since she’s bucking the unwritten “model minority” rule by daring to criticize a country that so selflessly accepted her and her family in their time of need. (Another route they’ve taken to justify the dog-piling: resurrecting Omar’s previous comments criticizing Israel, once again smearing her as anti-Semitic, a line of attack they’ve also tried on Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib.)
These conservatives, grasping at straws to justify the president’s racist comments, have backed themselves into a corner, scraping together weak defenses for Trump’s indefensible attacks on these elected women of color. Because if they can paint Omar as the aggressor—if she is the one with hate in her heart—Republicans can get away with being hateful themselves.
But the idea that Omar is ungrateful or that she hates this country could not be more laughable and completely, offensively wrong. As an immigrant, she’s had to prove her allegiance and love for America more than any American-born citizen, even a first-generation child of immigrants, can ever know. And as a Muslim woman from an African country, she’s had to prove her patriotism and worth to this country time and time again.
This arbitrary rule that immigrants, particularly refugees or asylum seekers, are not allowed to criticize and demand better from their government rings completely hollow, but it’s one that many immigrants are made to feel like they have no choice but to follow. America, falsely lauded as a country founded on accepting all immigrants, makes immigrants the other, then demands they meet the expectation to be no different than any other citizen. Assimilate—and shut up—or fail.
And so, they can’t complain. Not when they find that the American dream comes with terms and conditions—isolation, racism, xenophobia. Not when school bullies stick gum on their hijabs, as Omar experienced as a child. Not when they’re asked where they’re really from, or are made fun of for speaking with an accent that doesn’t sound “American,” or dubbed “you people,” an insult my mom hears every day at her customer service job in a call center. They must uphold the stereotypes of the model immigrant and minority or be deemed an outsider who isn’t worthy of being an American. Coupled with the knowledge of the advantages they have living in the U.S. that they might never have been afforded in their home country, they can’t complain, and so they rarely do.
And still, immigrants are forced to learn, firsthand, exactly how this country fails its most vulnerable residents. Omar’s experience as a Muslim and a Somali American is exactly what has allowed her to learn where America falls short—where it fails its citizens, natural-born and naturalized. Yet, despite it all, Omar loves this country. Speaking on a panel at Netroots Nation over the weekend, Omar said that despite being criticized as anti-American for daring to criticize how our country conducts itself, “I believe, as an immigrant, I probably love this country more than anyone that is naturally born.”
She’s pledged her allegiance, once again. But unsurprisingly, her comment only fueled more intense scrutiny—with her speaking the absolute goddamn truth read as some kind of affront to natural-born Americans. When she’s critical of the U.S., she’s un-American. And yet, when she reaffirms her love for the U.S., she’s still un-American. In that catch-22 lies the truth behind the Republicans’ rush to reframe Trump’s remarks from racism to patriotism—in the eyes of her worst critics, Omar will never measure up to their racist ideals of how an immigrant should be, no matter what she says or does.
Andrew Anglin, who publishes the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, has been ordered to pay $14 million to a woman whom he asked his followers to harass, according to BuzzFeed News.
Federal judge Jeremiah Lynch found in Missoula, MT that Anglin “acted with actual malice” by telling his followers, “Let’s Hit Em Up. Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm? Because AYO - it’s time, fam.”
The target of these attacks was Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh and her family. Anglin and his followers also targeted Gersh’s workplace.
The judge levied $10 million, the maximum state punitive damages, for what he called “particularly egregious and reprehensible” behavior by Anglin to “punish Anglin and deter him from engaging in such conduct in the future.” The judgement also included $200,000 for lost earnings and medical expenses, $821,000 for future lost earnings, and $3 million for pain and suffering.
The origins of the harassment against Gersh are convoluted.
From BuzzFeed:
The targeted harassment against Gersh began in late 2016, when the Montana woman reached out to Sherry Spencer, the mother of white supremacist Richard Spencer, about a protest planned at a building she owned.
According to court records, Gersh offered to help Spencer sell the building but, on Dec. 15, 2016, Spencer published a post on Medium claiming Gersh was trying to extort her.
The following day, Anglin posted the first post about Gersh on The Daily Stormer, titled, “Jews Targeting Richard Spencer’s Mother for Harassment and Extortion - TAKE ACTION!”
“If you’re in the area, maybe you should stop by and tell her in person what you think of her actions,” he wrote, adding that those who do should not do anything violent.
All in all, Anglin posted two dozen times about Gersh, including publishing her and her family’s contact information.
“This is the goylash,” one message sent to Gersh read. “You remember the last goylash, don’t you Tanya? Merry Christmas, you Christ killing Jew.”
Gersh was devastated by the attacks, as the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday:
Gersh, her husband and their 12-year-old son were flooded with vile phone calls, text messages, emails, and social media posts, many of which contained death threats and anti-Semitic slurs. Gersh, who is Jewish, was told that she should have perished in the Holocaust, and received chilling voice mails with the sound of a gun firing again and again. She began experiencing panic attacks that left her vomiting and short of breath.
“I was frightened to the point that we couldn’t think straight,” Gersh told reporters after a court hearing last week. “We talked about waking our children in the middle of the night — to run from Nazis.”
The judge ordered Anglin to remove all posts and photos related to Gersh’s family from the Daily Stormer. They are apparently still receiving harassment. “The atrocious conduct directed at Gersh and her family has not entirely abated,” the judge wrote.
This is not the only fine that’s been recently levied against Anglin. Last month, he was hit with a $4.1 million fine in a defamation lawsuit for accusing a radio producer of being a terrorist.
But none of this means Anglin will actually pay these fines. He fled the country to an unknown location in 2017 and doesn’t seem to plan to return. For this reason, Anglin was largely absent during the case. For weeks, lawyers couldn’t even get in touch with him. His lawyers eventually fired him for leaving the country.
“My client made the decision years ago he was going to expatriate himself and never return,” Anglin’s lawyer, Marc Randazza, told The Missoulian. “When a federal judge tells you to do something and you refuse, you put your lawyer in a difficult position.”
A divided House voted Tuesday to condemn President Trump’s racist remarks telling four minority congresswomen to “go back” to their ancestral countries, with all but a handful of Republicans dismissing the rebuke as harassment while many Democrats pressed their leaders for harsher punishment of the president.
The imagery of the 240-to-187 vote was stark: A diverse Democratic caucus cast the president’s words as an affront to millions of Americans and descendants of immigrants, while Republican lawmakers — the vast majority white men — stood with Trump against a resolution that rejected his “racist comments that have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
Trump insisted in a string of tweets Tuesday morning that he’s not a racist — “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” he wrote — and the top two Republicans in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) made identical statements when pressed on Trump’s remarks: “The president is not a racist.”
Trump also lashed out at the four Democratic women — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — for the third day in a row, accusing them of “spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician in the House or Senate.” The Republican National Committee provided a list of comments to bolster Trump’s contention, but in none did the four women say they hate America, as the president has asserted.
Three of the lawmakers were born in the United States, and Omar is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Somalia.
“I know racism when I see it. I know racism when I feel it. And at the highest levels of government, there is no room for racism,” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who fought for civil rights in the 1960s, said in the final minutes of the House debate.
The debate played out on a raucous House floor as lawmakers attacked one another’s motives and repeatedly questioned whether their opponents had violated long-standing rules of decorum — rules that ultimately were changed after Republicans challenged Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s use of the word “racist.”
Pelosi said the words “are disgraceful and disgusting, and those comments are racist,” careful not to label Trump himself a racist. “How shameful to hear him continue to defend those offensive words — words that we have all heard him repeat, not only about our members, but about countless others.”
Moments later, Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.) moved to have Pelosi’s words taken down, a rarely invoked procedure that halted debate for more than an hour while the House parliamentarian examined whether they violated the chamber’s standards of decorum.
A visibly frustrated Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), who was presiding over the House, reprimanded his colleagues, saying that despite his efforts to be fair, they “don’t ever want to pass up an opportunity to escalate.”
“We just want to fight,” he said.
The words had indeed violated the rules, according to House precedent, and Democrats proceeded to vote on party lines to overrule it in this instance and allow Pelosi’s remarks to be printed in the Congressional Record, the official legislative annals.
McCarthy rose to attack Democrats afterward, calling it “a sad day” for the House. “Our rules of order and decency were broken today,” he said.
But Democrats said the day, in fact, was a long time coming — a rare occasion on which members of the Republican caucus have been forced to go on the record regarding Trump’s rhetoric. Since Trump has tightened his grip on the GOP, many lawmakers in his party have gone to great lengths to avoid criticizing him, fearful of the president’s wrath sinking their electoral chances.
“This resolution is harassing the president of the United States,” said freshman Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.)
Democrats insisted that the vote was a test for the Congress and the nation.
“We know who he is,” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) said of Trump. “The question is, only question is, who are we. Are we still the country of immigrants?”
Earlier in the debate, there was another tense moment when Rep. Sean P. Duffy (R-Wis.), his voice raised, drew a reproach from Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) over his comments that the four congresswomen at the center of Trump’s tweets are “anti-American.”
“I’ve looked closely at the chain of three tweets, I see nothing that references anybody’s race, I don’t see anybody’s names,” Duffy said, “but the president is referring to people, congresswomen, who are anti-American. And lo and behold everyone in this chamber knows who he is talking about.”
Jayapal called the comments “defamatory” and asked that Duffy’s words be taken down. After some back and forth, she relinquished her request but said “it was completely inappropriate to tell any of us we are anti-American.”
Trump’s series of tweets and comments began Sunday when the president said the four Democrats should “go back” to “the crime infested places from which they came.”
With his tweets Tuesday, Trump made clear that he didn’t want Republicans to support the resolution. Doing so, he said, would “show ‘weakness.’ ”
McCarthy said during a morning news conference he would vote against the resolution and encourage other Republicans to do the same. McCarthy said he did not consider Trump’s tweets to be racist, but about “socialism versus freedom.”
Only four Republicans broke ranks — Reps. Will Hurd (Tex.), the lone black Republican in the House; Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Susan Brooks (Ind.) and Fred Upton (Mich.) — and joined Democrats in backing the resolution. Independent Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), who quit the GOP earlier this month, also voted for it. Six Republicans did not vote.
In his latest tweets, Trump accused the four lawmakers of being “Horrible anti-Israel, anti-USA, pro-terrorist” and took issue with the “public shouting of the F . . . word, among many other terrible things.”
Speaking to reporters at the end of a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, he held up papers and claimed to have “a list of things here said by the congresswomen that is so bad, so horrible that I almost don’t want to read it.”
Asked where the four House Democratic congresswomen should go if they did leave the United States, Trump said “wherever they want, or they can stay.”
“But they should love our country. They shouldn’t hate our country,” he said.
All four lawmakers have called for Trump’s impeachment, and Tlaib has done so using profane language.
Trump frequently used profanity at his campaign rallies, including one in Portsmouth, N.H., in February 2016 when he said that companies that have relocated overseas for more favorable tax rates can “go f--- themselves.”
In a tweet Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez, who represents a district that includes part of the borough where Trump was born, Queens, took issue with the president’s contention that he is not a racist.
“You’re right, Mr. President — you don’t have a racist bone in your body,” she wrote. “You have a racist mind in your head, and a racist heart in your chest.”
McConnell declined to directly answer repeated questions about whether the tweets were racist, responding to reporters’ questions on the matter by saying everyone involved should “lower this incendiary rhetoric.”
Pressed repeatedly about how he would react if his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, was told to go back to her native Taiwan, McConnell didn’t answer, instead calling legal immigration “good for America.”
Most Republicans, however, simply sought to turn the tables, accusing Democrats of ignoring inflammatory statements made by the women Trump targeted. Many, for instance, cited comments by Omar that evoked anti-Semitic tropes — comments for which she apologized and to which the House responded by passing a resolution condemning hatred generally.
“I wish Democrats would condemn anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism with same furor that they attack the president,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).
While Democrats united behind the resolution passed Tuesday, with Pelosi casting it as backing “our sisters,” many rank-and-file members said they wanted to do more. Dozens signed on to a censure resolution filed by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who called Trump’s comments “opprobrious” and deserving of serious rebuke. Censure, he said, would put Trump alongside President Andrew Jackson, who was censured by the Senate in 1834.
“We should put him where he wants to be — with a president who was racist, who had slaves, and led to the Trail of Tears against Native American Indians,” he said.
A thornier possibility for Democrats came from Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.), who filed articles of impeachment against Trump on Tuesday under special procedures that could bring them up for a vote by the end of the week.
That poses a dilemma for Pelosi, who has resisted calls to impeach Trump while he has support in the GOP-controlled Senate.
“To tolerate bigotry — racism in this case — is to perpetuate it,” Green said in an interview. “We should not perpetuate this kind of behavior coming from the president, and if we don’t check him, he will continue.”
Senior Democratic aides expect Pelosi will move to either kill the resolution or refer it to committee, effectively sidelining the matter. But either option would pose a difficult vote for her caucus, of which more than 80 members have supported launching an impeachment inquiry.
A former top Texas judge says she has left the Republican Party over President Trump, after his racist tweet telling four congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from.
Elsa Alcala joins a small group of conservatives alienated by Trump’s remarks as most of the Republican Party sticks with the president — including through his latest attacks on Democratic representatives of color, three of whom were born in the United States.
“Even accepting that Trump has had some successes (and I believe these are few), at his core, his ideology is racism,” the 55-year-old retired judge wrote Monday in a Facebook post. “To me, nothing positive about him could absolve him of his rotten core.”
Alcala, who served for 20 years as a judge and was appointed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry to Texas’s criminal appeals court, left her longtime party, in part, because of Trump’s latest tweets, which have been decried by U.S. lawmakers and world leaders, she told the Austin American-Statesman. Continued support from other Republicans for the president turned her away as well.
But her discomfort with her old party had been building for a while, she said. She delayed saying so publicly to avoid wading into a “hot button” issue.
“Every day with the Republican Party seemed worse than the day before,” Alcala told the Statesman. “Trump speaks about brown people like me as lesser beings. It’s cliche to say, but the Republican Party left me.”
The chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, James Dickey, thanked Alcala for her service in a statement, saying his organization is “sorry that [Alcala] has chosen to no longer support the party that supported her, her colleagues and her successors.”
Alcala declined to comment to The Washington Post.
She was one of two Latinas recently serving on Texas’s highest courts, according to the Statesman. Alcala left the state appeals court last year after deciding not to run for reelection. She used her prominent voice to question the use of the death penalty, and her retirement left the court “without its most outspoken judge and biggest critic of the current criminal justice system,” the Texas Tribune wrote.
Before his Sunday tweets tapping into a long history of immigrants and minorities being told to “go back” to where they came from, Trump had been rebuked for — among other statements — questioning President Barack Obama’s birth in the United States without evidence and saying a federal judge could not deal impartially with a case involving Trump because of his ethnicity.
Trump’s behavior has tested some Republicans’ allegiance. Announcing earlier this month that he was leaving the GOP to become an independent, Rep. Justin Amash did not mention the president while explaining that he has “become disenchanted with party politics,” but the Michigan congressman had been one of Trump’s most vocal GOP critics. Amash was the first Republican in Congress to say that the president had committed “impeachable conduct.”
Amash, too, was dismayed by Trump’s “go back” comments, calling them “racist and disgusting” on Twitter.
But other members of the president’s party have become less critical of his most questionable statements. The overwhelming majority of House Republicans voted Tuesday against a resolution to condemn Trump’s remarks toward the Democratic congresswomen. Only four GOP representatives supported the measure, while six others did not vote.
By The Post’s last count, 89 Republican members of Congress had spoken on the tweets. Eighteen condemned Trump’s words, while 42 criticized both Democrats and Trump. Another 161 dodged the topic or haven’t given an opinion, and 29 focused their criticism on the other party or defended Trump, saying he is not racist.
Alcala told the Statesman that she had hoped state Republican politics would be better than her party’s dynamics at the national level but that she found Texas to be “more of the same.” The former judge will be voting in a Democratic primary for the first time in more than 20 years, she wrote in her Facebook post, which she has not made public.
"Any of the viable Democratic presidential candidates” would be an improvement over Trump, she wrote.
When Donald Trump began running for president more than four years ago, most Republicans, or at least most Republican leaders, clearly saw him for what he was: in Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s (R-S.C.) words, “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.” Criticism became attenuated as Trump secured the nomination, but then-Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) was willing to call out Trump’s attack on a “Mexican” judge as the “textbook definition of a racist comment,” and dozens of prominent Republicans withdrew their endorsements, at least temporarily, when the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape emerged.
Those scruples have eroded faster than the polar ice cap. In March, after Trump declared a national emergency to spend money on a border wall that Congress had refused to fund, only 13 Republicans in the House and 12 in the Senate voted to defend the Constitution. I described this as a “declaration of moral bankruptcy.” Four months later, that looks like the good ol’ days. On Tuesday, just four House Republicans — plus Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), now an independent — voted to condemn Trump for telling four congresswomen of color, three of them born in the United States, to “go back” to where they came from.
In addition to the four House Republicans who voted to denounce Trump — Reps. Will Hurd (Tex.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Susan Brooks (Ind.) and Fred Upton (Mich.) — only a few others have passed what should be an easy moral test. They include Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, presidential candidate Bill Weld and, surprisingly, former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci, who called the president’s comments “racist and unacceptable.”
That is the GOP roll of honor — you can count them on two hands. There were, to be sure, a larger number of Republicans lawmakers who criticized Trump’s comments but refused to call them racist or tried to balance out their criticism with attacks on Democrats. By The Post’s tally, of 250 elected Republicans in Congress, only 60 — about 1 in 4 — were willing to rebuke Trump in any form, however mild.
A far larger number — 161 — are too cowardly to say anything at all. “I have a long-standing policy that I don’t comment on tweets,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.). How convenient. But Cruz is an intellectual and moral giant compared to Rep. Mike Kelly (Pa.) who responded: “You know, they talked about people of color. I’m a person of color. I’m white.” Or Rep. Andy Harris (Md.), who suggested that Trump’s tweets were “clearly not racist” because “he could have meant go back to the district they came from — to the neighborhood they came from.” Their reasoning skills make me wonder whether Kelly and Harris are graduates of Trump University.
Some of the “no comments” are downright puzzling. Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) is retiring; what does he have to lose? Former congressman Mark Sanford is thinking of challenging Trump in the primaries. So why does he have no opinion about whether the president is a racist?
And then there is former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who apparently imagines herself as Trump’s successor. On Sunday, she tweeted about protesters taking down a U.S. flag and raising a Mexican flag at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Colorado. “There are no words for why the Democrats are staying silent on this,” Haley huffed. “If this is your way to winning an election, fire your strategist. This is disgusting. Love your country.” You know what there are truly no words for? Haley’s response to Trump’s tweets. There hasn’t been one.
But at least Haley is not one of the many Republicans — 57 percent of those surveyed by USA Today/Ipsos — who actually supported Trump’s remarks. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) had the gall to not only absolve Trump of racism but to also accuse the members of “the Squad” of being the real racists. Cheney’s chutzpah is matched by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) who complained that “our rules of order and decency were broken,” because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) labeled Trump’s comments — though not the president himself — “racist.” So McCarthy and his fellow Republicans are outraged that anyone would dare to call out the president’s racism. (“This resolution is harassing the president of the United States,” said Rep. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania.) With the actual racism itself, they have no problem.
The booby prize for moral imbecility is a close contest. I’m tempted to give it to Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) who tweeted like a “love it or leave it” bar-stool blowhard: “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals. This is America. We’re the greatest country in the world. I stand with @realdonaldtrump.”
But, as usual, it’s hard to beat out Graham, who has gone from abhorring Trump’s despicable tirades to amplifying them. Doing his best imitation of Joe McCarthy, Graham said, “Well, we all know that [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and this crowd are a bunch of communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country.” There is, in fact, no evidence that Trump’s targets are communists or that they hate America or even Israel. But there is ample evidence that the GOP has suffered a complete moral and intellectual collapse. Here’s all you need to know: These days, “The Mooch” displays more moral clarity than the leaders of the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Reagan.
What you should know about National Origin Discrimination under Title VII
The law protects people against employment discrimination on the basis of their national origin. Following are some examples of employment discrimination based on national origin.
Harassment Based on National Origin
Ethnic slurs and other verbal or physical conduct because of nationality are illegal if they are severe or pervasive and create an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment, interfere with work performance, or negatively affect job opportunities. Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person's foreign accent or comments like, "Go back to where you came from, " whether made by supervisors or by co-workers.
The truly sad thing is the deplorables don’t care. I guess that’s why they’re deplorable. Trump’s approval rating hasn’t budged much since he’s been in office, including since that horrifically racist tweet. Their twisted view of reality spews from Fox into what passes as their brains. Fox tells them Trump isn’t racist, it’s those four congresswomen, and by default all of the Democrats, that are real real racists, against white people. And they believe it? Or, they don’t care. They gleefully chanted ‘Send her back’ at the latest rally.
A reality.
It’s truly mind boggling.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent allegedly sought out an undocumented Guatemalan woman living in California, sent her Facebook messages and asked her to watch a live video of him masturbating — all while her 12-year-old son was in custody at the Border Patrol station in Clint, Tex., where he worked, according to an April complaint filed with CBP and interviews with the mother.
The complaint, obtained by The Washington Post, outlines conversations between the agent and the woman that she viewed as coercive, beginning with his asking for her Facebook handle after she was allowed to speak by phone with her son, who had been taken into custody at the border. She said in interviews that she had hoped the communication would yield information about her son but that instead she endured sexual advances from a CBP agent at the facility where her son was detained.
“I felt like the world was falling on top of me,” said the 48-year-old woman, an undocumented immigrant who came to the country from Guatemala and now lives in California. She spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from the agent and other immigration authorities. “I felt my son is in the hands of a bad man.”
A CBP spokesman said Tuesday that the agency was aware of the woman’s allegations and that an investigation was underway, but he said CBP could not comment on the ongoing probe.
“The vast majority of CBP employees are dedicated, honest, compassionate and fair professionals,” spokesman Matthew F. Leas said. “This alleged conduct is not in line with our code of conduct and will not be tolerated.”
CBP declined to say whether the agent was still reporting for duty at the Clint Border Patrol station. Because the investigation is ongoing and he has not been charged, The Post is not identifying the agent; attempts to reach him have been unsuccessful.
The accusations have come to light as the agency battles an onslaught of criticism and allegations of abuse at its facilities. The Border Patrol has faced scrutiny for its employees’ use of a private Facebook group, with dozens of current and former agents under investigation for allegedly making racist, sexist or otherwise derogatory posts about migrants and members of Congress.
An influx of Central American families and unaccompanied children across the southern U.S. border has strained CBP operations, crowded Border Patrol stations with thousands of detainees and forced some agents to abandon their typical duties to look after unaccompanied children.
The treatment of child detainees and the conditions in Clint, in particular, have garnered widespread attention in recent weeks after a group of lawyers visited the Border Patrol station outside El Paso and reported seeing children living in squalor, with older children left to care for younger children.
The outcry that followed helped spur congressional approval of a $4.6 billion emergency spending package that the Trump administration said was needed to improve detention conditions and facilitate transfers of children out of Border Patrol custody.
One of the children caught up in the backlog was the 12-year-old boy from Guatemala. His mother told The Post that he crossed the border on April 18 in an attempt to reunite with her in California, where she has lived for nearly all of his life while working as a housecleaner to earn money for her family in Central America. She said she sent for her son in Guatemala because he had reached an age when boys are targeted for gang membership or are persecuted for not joining.
After the boy crossed the border, the Border Patrol took him into custody and contacted his mother to tell her that he was being held at Clint. Two days after that, she said, she received a call from her son. The conversation was brief: She asked him how he was doing, and he told her he was fine.
“I asked him where he was calling me from, and he didn’t know,” she said. “Then I heard the voice of this officer, and the officer took the phone.”
“You see, Señora, your son is okay,” the new voice said in Spanish.
“You do a great job, helping so many children,” she answered, hoping for another chance to speak to her son.
The agent seemed friendly, “educated and respectful,” she remembered, noting that he said he wanted to be her friend and wanted to keep her informed about her son’s situation while he was at the facility.
“It felt like a relief to have someone on the inside who could tell me what was going on day and night,” she said in a recent interview.
She said the agent suggested that they speak by video chat on Facebook Messenger and said that he would send her a friend request using an alias.
Looking back on the conversation, the woman said that was the moment she “fell into his trap.”
That afternoon, her phone buzzed. It was a video request from the alias he had described, depicting an avatar of a sports team’s logo.
When she answered, the live video popped up on her screen and she could see the agent for the first time. The man appeared to be lying on a bed, with the camera aimed at the lower half of his body. She could see his dark brown shorts, legs and bare feet.
She thought it strange and asked to see his face. He flashed the camera upward for a moment before settling it again on his shorts.
For 25 minutes — 24 minutes and 50 seconds, according to the chat logs — the two talked, she said.
He told her about his family life, a failed relationship, how he attended church. Then he asked whether she was single.
She demurred, telling him that she had fled domestic violence in Guatemala in 2007 to come to the United States. But it would be nice to meet in person, she offered. She said it was a shame he was too far away.
She said he responded that the distance would not be a problem, that the two could still get to know each other. He asked her whether there were people nearby.
When she said there were not, he slipped his hand inside his shorts and appeared to start masturbating, she said.
“ ‘Look at me. Look at me,’ ” she remembered him pleading when she looked away. “ ‘Do you like it?’ ”
She froze.
“I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know how to act,” she said. “I thought: ‘My God, what is going to happen with my child? Did this guy do anything to him?” The woman said she escaped the Facebook call when her phone battery suddenly died.
When her phone came back on, she saw that the agent had sent her a flurry of Facebook messages with sad-face emoji.
“I need you :(” he wrote in Spanish, in messages viewed by The Post. “You didn’t answer anymore :(”
“I don’t know what you thought of me,” she replied.
She was afraid, alone in her room, and she began to cry. That night she couldn’t sleep. And the next day, feeling increasingly panicked, she texted the agent to ask whether her son was still at Clint. The agent said he was, so she pleaded with him to help her, to let her speak with him. “Please don’t be bad. . . . Don’t forget that I am alone here,” she wrote.
“I’m busy now,” the agent responded.
Fearful of retribution against her son, the woman found an immigrant legal-aid hotline through her church and called it. The hotline connected her to a legal-aid group, which promptly detailed her complaint in an email to senior CBP officials.
“She is obviously frightened and does not want her son in the hands of this agent,” read the complaint, which was submitted on April 24 and contained the dates of the allegations and the name of the accused agent. “These are very serious allegations and we wanted to make sure that first and foremost the child is safe and that these allegations are investigated.”
Within days, the woman received word that her son had been transferred out of the Clint Border Patrol station and into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages the long-term care of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” and coordinates family reunifications.
In mid-May, her son still in government custody, the woman said she met with two investigators from CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility, one of the offices tasked with internal personnel investigations. They interviewed her about her complaint, went over copies of her Facebook Messenger exchange with the agent and asked her to put the messages in order.
On June 12, she was reunited with her son, whom she had not seen since she left him in the care of relatives when he was 8 months old.
He told her that conditions at Clint were difficult. He had been unable to brush his teeth for eight days there. He said some border agents were kind to him: One told him that he should grow up to become a doctor, and another offered him extra burritos and juice to look after another child with special needs. But the agent who had taken the phone from him that day as he spoke to his mother — that was the man he and the other children feared, he told The Post.
The boy described the agent in detail, saying that he stood out to the migrants there. He said the agent cursed at the children, ridiculed some of them as “ugly” and told them that they would “regret coming to this country.”
When the agent saw some of the boys looking at his gun, “he said we didn’t have permission to look at his gun, and he said if we touched the gun, he’d shoot us,” the boy said. “He also said that if we whistled at the girls or touched them, they could shoot us.”
The woman said she was never notified of the outcome of the investigation, which authorities said is ongoing.
But since that Facebook video call, the woman said she has been unable to quell her fear that the CBP agent could seek to come after her or her son in retaliation for her complaint. The government knows her address, her name, her telephone number — everything, she said.
“He could come, or he could send someone else,” she said. “He’s the law, right?”
After instructing four women of color in the House of Representatives to “go back” where they came from, President Trump now claims, “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!”
That appears incorrect. I have identified the following racist bones in Trump’s body:
Phalanges and metacarpals: These are bones of the fingers and hands that Trump has used to tweet tirades against black and brown people and to retweet Nazi sympathizers, including, twice, an account called @WhiteGenocideTM with a photo of the founder of the American Nazi Party.
Mandible and maxilla: These are the jawbones that Trump has used to denounce Mexican immigrants as “criminals, drug dealers, rapists,” not to mention to refuse to criticize the Ku Klux Klan.
Femurs, fibulas, tibias, metatarsals: These foot and leg bones carried Trump into his casinos, where black staff members would be rushed off the floor so he couldn’t see them, according to a former employee, Kip Brown.
Virtually every remaining bone was implicated in Trump’s early refusal to rent apartments in his buildings to blacks, leading the Nixon administration Justice Department (not exactly a pillar of liberalism) to sue him for housing discrimination in the 1970s. A former building superintendent working for Trump explained that any rent application from a black person was coded “C,” for “colored,” apparently so that the office would know to reject it.
“Racist” is an explosive term that should never be lightly flung as an epithet, and it is more likely to end a conversation than clarify it. For a single tweet or action there is a possibility of misunderstanding or ambiguity.
Yet for more than 45 years, since that housing discrimination, Trump has engaged in a consistent pattern of racist behavior and speech. His latest controversial tweets are not an aberration but a culmination. This isn’t a matter of a single tweet; it’s a lifetime with a narrative arc of bigotry.
America’s history is a tapestry of innumerable threads, many of them triumphant and inspiring that we should be deeply proud of, but Trump goes out of his way to weave together two of the most shameful strands.
One is the racism and nativism that go back to the 18th century, to the Philadelphia speaker who in 1844 denounced Irish immigrants as “scum unloaded on American wharves” and helped provoke anti-Catholic riots, to the waves of hysteria against African-Americans, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and other immigrants. There is another strain of American hospitality highlighted by the Statue of Liberty and the admission of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees beginning in the 1970s, but the nativism is real — it’s why Trump’s family, alarmed by anti-German bigotry, pretended to be Swedish.
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The other thread that Trump pulls is more political: what we now call McCarthyism, although it, too, goes back to our nation’s earliest days. It vilifies opponents as enemies of the state.
More than two centuries ago, opponents of Thomas Jefferson warned that he was a Jacobin who if elected would unleash a French-style reign of terror upon America. As one commentator put it, “The Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored.” Senator Joseph McCarthy updated that in the 20th century with reckless accusations that leftists were Communists — and now Trump picks up that mantle by suggesting that his four progressive targets in Congress “might be” Communists, not to mention that they “hate our Country” and are “pro Al-Qaeda.”
I’m not sure whether this new McCarthyism is instinctive and unthinking, or these bilious rants represent a shrewd effort to manipulate voters into seeing the 2020 presidential campaign through the prism not of issues but of racial identity, in hopes of winning Trump an edge with white voters.
I do know that Trump has taken two of the most ignominious threads in American history — nativism and McCarthyism — and woven them together in an outburst that is an affront to democratic norms.
If anyone doubts that Trump’s statements were despicable, note that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission specifically bars employers from using “ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person’s foreign accent or comments like, ‘Go back to where you came from.’”
Frankly, I’m even more troubled by Trump’s policies than by his tweets, and I wish the reaction to Trump focused more on practical initiatives to reduce child poverty, treat drug addiction or end mass incarceration. But the question put to Congress this week was a resolution properly condemning the presidential tirade. It was grotesque to see Republicans who had been mute at presidential bigotry suddenly protest that the backers of the resolution violated rules of decorum.
Really? We’re left again with the question: How can members of the party of Lincoln today protest the label of racism, but not the racism itself — in a man who for 45 years has shown himself to be a racist from his mandible to his metatarsals?
At a rally in Greenville, NC tonight, President Trump spent minutes attacking freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
“She looks down with contempt on the hard-working Americans [by] saying that ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country,” Trump said.
“Omar has a history of launching vicious anti-Semitic screeds,” he added.
The crowd then broke into a terrifying, full throated chant: “SEND HER BACK!”
The chant was in reference to the now-notorious racist tweets Trump posted last week in which he told Omar and several of her colleagues of color to “go back” to where they came from.
On Twitter, Omar responded to the terrifying video with incredible grace.
https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1151656827106541569
Omar, unlike the other three members of Congress targeted by Trump, is actually an immigrant. She was born in Somalia and spent her childhood in a refugee camp in Kenya before migrating to the U.S., where she is a fully naturalized citizen.
It hardly needs to be said how dangerous this incitement by Trump could be. His followers have repeatedly committed acts of violence against marginalized groups and the press. Several have already threatened the lives of the very woman he is attacking. One death threat against Omar earlier this year was so severe that a man was arrested and charged. “I’ll put a bullet in her (expletive) skull,” the man said, according to a U.S. Attorney’s press release.
But Trump doesn’t care. If the last week’s saga has shown anything, it’s that there is no length he’s unwilling to go to in order to rile up his fascist fans. By targeting her publicly, the president is putting Omar in very real danger. But to him, it’s just more positive attention from his supporters.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress have done nothing but give Trump what even they characterize as a “slap on the wrist” for his rhetoric. By the time they figure out how truly serious these threats are, it may be too late.
If you set aside boiling rage for a moment and look coldly at the progression of recent American politics, you can see where we are heading. Into the abyss.
To a large degree, the most lasting legacy of Martin Luther King, Junior’s leadership of the civil rights movement has not been the actual accomplishment of the movement’s broadest goals—America remains a racially segregated and unequal society—but rather a shift in the nation’s conventional wisdom about what falls within the bounds of acceptable, respectable thought. Within the span of a single generation, outright public racism went from respectable to disreputable.
Here I will pause to note that it should go without saying that the substance of racism and the pursuit of racist policy goals have remained firmly in place. To frame it in the harshest possible way, you could say that the civil rights movement achieved the ceremonial placing of a fig leaf atop the public discourse about race. But even in the harshest light, this sort of shift has had meaning: for several decades now, children have grown up in a country in which the official line, at least, has been one of pro-equality and disapproval of racism, rather than vice versa. This slide of racist thought into official disrepute has shaped the media, and pop culture, and education, and political rhetoric. I make no claim that this change has been as meaningful as it could be, or should be, or, indeed, that it has been pursued less than cynically by the majority of the political and economic establishment of white America. But it exists. It has persisted for longer than many of us have been alive. And it has had, at the very least, an effect on the perception of everyone who has grown up in post-civil rights era America. Racism is still pervasive, but it is not officially condoned.
This evolution in our national tone, I assumed, was a permanent one. The battle was no longer mostly against explicit, legal racism, but rather against implicit racism and racist structures and inequality rooted and racism—all of which would always be denied, because racism itself was no longer considered respectable. The most obvious manifestation of this is the fact that “racist” seems to the one of the last things that white people genuinely object to being called. Even a powerful person who constantly speaks and acts in ways that are racist, and who pursues policies that will inarguably achieve racist ends, will bristle and wail at being branded a racist. It carries the power of a word that was forged in a social justice struggle spanning centuries. Those who explicitly embraced racism were pushed to the fringes; the price of staying in the mainstream was raised by a token amount, to the disavowal of racist ideals even if you in fact operated in a way that furthered oppression.
I’m afraid that even the very thin layer of perceptual progress that seemed to be permanent may be eroding after all. The cycle of white grievance is now on the verge of springing forth in an ugly and shockingly retrograde way. The Republican party, in particular, has spent the decades since Nixon’s “Southern strategy” refining its racist dog whistles. Now it appears ready to toss them all aside. Welfare queens, Willie Horton, the use of MLK quotes about equality as a pretext for opposing affirmative action... all these things are too subtle for the Trump era. We now seem to be close—very close, closer than would have seemed possible just a few years ago—to the day when mainstream Republicans begin simply embracing the “racist” label. By this I mean that they stop denying it and instead argue that it is a justified position. It is not hard to imagine, is it? Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity grow tired of their pro forma evasions and decide to just bask publicly in the comfort of the cloak of white nationalism; Trump himself, neither savvy enough to concoct plausible denials nor with much incentive to care any more, grabs hold of the “racist” flag and waves it around, hugs it, treats it as red meat to toss to his base, just another transgression against political correctness; and the more right-wing portion of the Republican establishment, from Congress to think tanks to Southern statehouses, takes a long, satisfied breath, glances around to make sure they have the blessing of Fox News, and at last stops pretending they ever really cared about racism in the first place. If Trump’s political ascendance has proven anything, it is that a large portion of white America has just been waiting for cultural permission to lean into the racism that has always been there. They have eagerly walked the path from “Mexican rapists” to banning Muslims to “Build the Wall” to “Send her back!” And here we are: tiptoeing right on the far edge of just saying “fuck it.” If they do decide to say “fuck it,” things will get very dark. Darker, even, than they are now. Because millions of people will no longer feel obligated to even act as if they care.
We’re all racist. This is America. Did you grow up in America? You are racist. You grew up in a racist country, and we all spend our lives marinating in America’s legacy of racism, soaking it in by osmosis. It is not a moral judgment. It’s a fact. Some people accept this, and work to overcome and change it. Other people deny it, and let things carry on as they are. And still others wallow in it, drink it in, and allow it to poison their minds forever. Collectively, we in America have been fighting this battle with ourselves for 400 years. We make a little progress, and then we fall back. The sort of backsliding we are facing right now is the dangerous kind. When the “racist” label loses its sting—when it is picked up as a point of pride—we will move into a qualitatively different time. A more ominous time. It is easy to mock this all as hand-wringing over window dressing, given the fact that racism itself has been persisting just fine for all these years. But the public expectation that even racists would act as if they thought racism was bad had value: it was a sign that they thought that the weight of public opinion was on the other side. If that disappears, the poison that so many people have feeding on in private will become the main course. And there will be nothing else for anyone to eat.
Donald Trump held another neo-fascist rally yesterday in North Carolina, where the crowd chanted things like “treason,” “traitor,” and “send her back,” while the president talked about Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Online dictionary searches in the U.S. from last night show just how bad things have gotten.
Merriam-Webster reports that the most common searches last night included the terms: racism, socialism, fascism, concentration camp, xenophobia, and bigot. The searches are quite a snapshot of what it’s like to live in 2019, when toxic xenophobia and hatred are coming not just from the political fringes but from the most powerful man in the country.
The word “racism” received the highest number of searches last night, probably because there’s an ongoing debate in the U.S. over the president’s claims that Democratic women should “go back” to their countries. Three of the four women the president talked about were born in the U.S. and the fourth, Rep. Omar, became a naturalized citizen as a child.
“If they don’t love it, tell them to leave it,” Trump told the crowd on Wednesday in Greenville, North Carolina. “They don’t love our country. I think in some cases they hate our country.”
President Trump has escalated his rhetoric in recent months, not merely claiming that Democrats oppose his policies, but that they oppose America itself. Last month, Trump said that Democrats “want to destroy our country as we know it.” And when a reporter said in May that treason is punishable by death, Trump didn’t object to the suggestion.
The word “socialism” was the second most common word searched last night as Americans continue to debate what the political philosophy actually means. Some Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, have started to call Democrats “communists,” a more inflammatory word that invokes the Red Scare of the 1950s led by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. President Trump used the words socialist and socialism at least seven times last night, by our count.
“Fascism” was the third most popular word searched on Merriam-Webster, and it’s easy to see why. The definition at the online dictionary is on-point for what we’re witnessing in the U.S.:
a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
The term “concentration camp” was the fourth most popular search last night, referring to the system of camps that the U.S. government is currently operating for asylum seekers at the southern border. Trump defended the camps and feigned outrage that anyone would dare call them concentration camps. The president pointed to a recent visit by Vice President Mike Pence to one of the camps in Texas, claiming that the experience proved migrants were being treated well.
“Mike Pence went down, just a few days ago, with members of Congress and the media and you looked at those so-called horrible concentration camps... they said, ‘wow, these places are clean, wow, they have air conditioning, they have water’...” Trump said.
This, of course, is a lie. Journalists on the ground at the McAllen, Texas concentration camp on July 12 reported that it was 99 degrees inside and that there was no air conditioning. And the government’s own watchdog has cited the facilities as dangerous and unsanitary.
“We are concerned that overcrowding and prolonged detention represent an immediate risk to the health and safety of DHS agents and officers, and to those detained,” the government report from last month reads, adding that some of the camps are a “ticking time bomb.”
Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham seemed to love Trump’s performance last night. One guest on Ingraham’s show even said that Rep. Omar is not an American.
Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley took to Twitter yesterday to confront the bigotry being stoked by Trump. And Rep. Omar responded with a poem from Maya Angelou:
https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1151656827106541569
Bigot, the sixth most commonly searched word last night, wasn’t uttered at yesterday’s Trump rally, but it did pop up from an unlikely source just a few short years ago.
“You know how you can make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell,” Senator Lindsey Graham told CNN on December 8, 2015. “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”
You’re not wrong, Senator Graham. But what happened to you since 2015?
Trump is now pretending that when the crowd at his latest bacchanal of hate chanted “Send her back," it caused him great distress. He’s doing what he often does when receiving criticism: Lie about it, but with a lie so obvious that his supporters know he’s not really serious and that he still wants them to go on doing what they’re doing.
Here’s what he said:
“I wasn’t happy with the message they gave last night,” Trump said of the crowd at his rally in Greenville, N.C., Wednesday night. “I was not happy when I heard that chant.”
Pressed by a reporter why he did not try to stop the chant directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Trump said he thought he had done so by starting to speak again “very quickly.”
“I started very quickly, and maybe you know that,” he said.
In fact, the president did not start speaking immediately but paused for about 13 seconds as the chants were heard.
Right now, Republicans are struggling to answer questions about all this in a way that doesn’t implicate them in the fact that the racist president they have slavishly supported is making it quite clear that racism will be the foundation of his reelection effort — and that the most ardent racists among his supporters couldn’t be happier about it.
Those Republicans can’t condemn Trump, let alone the voters on whom their own political survival depends. So they seem to be coalescing around the idea that, while a stray comment here or there might be regrettable, the real problem is the four congresswomen and their hatred for America. A brief roundup:
“Is it ‘racist’ to tell people who have contempt for the country — who abhor the common culture that makes us American — that they ought to go back to where they came from?” asks Andrew McCarthy in the National Review.
“This is about love for America. Certain people HATE our Country,” Trump tweets.
”We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists,” says Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “They hate America.”
“Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals,” says Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.).
“I’m sort of dumbfounded how unappreciative she is of our country,” says Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about Omar.
Let’s dig down into this idea of hatred for America. What exactly does it mean? If you disagree with the policies of the federal government, does that mean you hate America? How about if you find American culture contemptible? What if you think that core American values such as democracy and freedom of speech are unimportant or unworthy of being spread as widely as possible?
The truth is that, when we say someone “hates America,” we’re describing what we think is a feeling they have. But if you were to ask the conservatives who throw around this charge to articulate a general class of statement that, once uttered, indicates a hatred of America, then show how those four congresswomen’s statements fell into that category, I doubt they could do it.
For instance, many people responded to Omar’s criticism of American policy toward Israel by saying she was anti-American. But if I said, “So you mean that taking the position that current American foreign policy is counterproductive or morally problematic is always proof that one hates America?” they’d probably say, “Well no, that’s not really what I meant.”
Another example: At his rally, Trump referenced the fact that, earlier this year, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said, “We’re going to go in and impeach the motherf----r.” On Wednesday, Trump said, “That’s not somebody that loves our country.” So is it that proposing to impeach a sitting president means you hate America? Is it that using profanity means you hate America?
Trump also has a habit of saying we shouldn’t even espouse our traditional values because we aren’t worthy of them, as in the time he insisted that Russian President Vladimir Putin shouldn’t be criticized for having journalists and political opponents murdered because “What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”
The president’s own hypocrisy is beyond argument. But I also want to draw attention to something else: Conservatives constantly criticize American culture, yet somehow no one suggests that means they “hate America.” Why is that?
In conservative evangelical circles especially, America is considered a fallen land that has gone into an irredeemable state of moral depravity. Gay people are allowed to marry, teenagers stubbornly continue to have sex, prayer has been banished from public schools. American culture has become a sewer.
Cultural conservatives believe, and not without reason, that the country has left their values behind. They don’t react to this by saying, “All cultures evolve, even if it can be a little disorienting at times.” They react with anger and dismay, and a desire to change things back to the way they used to be. Does that mean they hate America?
We know the answer: As far as Republicans are concerned, their motives are always pure and their patriotism always beyond question. But when Democrats do exactly the same things as Republicans have done, it is proof only of their seething hatred of America.
When we criticize a Democratic president or his policies, it means we love America; when you criticize a Republican president or his policies, it means you hate America. When we criticize American culture for its licentiousness, it means we love America; when you say racism is still a powerful force in our national life, it means you hate America. When we say our economic system undermines the traditional family it means we love America; when you say our economic system exploits workers and creates inequality it means you hate America.
Speaking of the four Democratic congresswomen at his rally, Trump said, “They speak so badly of our country.” But few things have ever spoken worse of our country than the fact that we made Trump our president. Here’s hoping that what’s great about America will enable us to recover.
In the American political system, parties have a certain “circuit breaker” role to play. Seven years ago, the Republican National Committee withdrew support from Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri after he tried to distinguish between “legitimate rape” and a different kind of rape. That stance probably cost the Republicans a seat in the U.S. Senate, but it put the party on record for being on the side of decency.
In 1991, David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, placed second in the Louisiana open primary for governor. President George H.W. Bush denounced Duke, saying that he “has a long record, an ugly record of racism and of bigotry. ... I believe he should be rejected for what he is and what he stands for." Former Louisiana Republican governor David Treen led an effort funded by the Republican Governors Association against Duke, who went on to lose to Democrat Edwin W. Edwards. That gave the seat to a Democrat, but it put the Republican Party on the right side of the fight against racism.
How different it is today. In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” It was a clear violation of the Constitution’s Article VI protections against religious tests, but the Republican Party did nothing. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who had previously led an extensive analysis of the need for the party to expand its appeal beyond white Christian voters, refused to commit the party to support the Constitution. Later, when Priebus served as White House chief of staff, Trump seemed to take particular delight in humiliating him, reportedly tasking him with killing flies. Trump had learned that Priebus, like the party he once led, was weak and worthy of his disgust.
In 2017, the RNC and Trump endorsed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who, in addition to being an accused child molester, had a troubled history on race.
Now, in the 2020 campaign season, President Trump has embraced open racism like no president since Andrew Johnson. In the heart of the old Confederacy, Trump stood before a rally of North Carolinians on Wednesday and denounced four women of color in Congress, inspiring a “send them back” chant that delighted the crowd. (He disavowed the chant on Thursday.) He keeps presenting the country with uncomfortable moral tests. The Republican Party keeps failing them.
Southerners like me know the game Trump is playing. We have seen it, sadly, time and again. Trump is the rightful heir to Lester Maddox’s ax handles and George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. What’s next for the RNC? Hang a Confederate battle flag in front of the national headquarters?
It is difficult to express how much this hurts my heart. To those of us who had believed and worked for the “compassionate conservative” vision of George W. Bush, watching the Republican Party embrace an open racist is like seeing an old friend drink himself to death. Lord knows we weren’t perfect, but at least we aspired to be something bigger and better than Trump’s bitter ugliness.
It’s a disgrace and a political disaster. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower won 39 percent of the African American vote. Eight years later, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and that figure plummeted to 7 percent; African American voters have never returned to the party. While every year the United States becomes less white, the Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of being the Big Tent Party. Perhaps Trump can win with this message in 2020, but this embrace of racism by a major American political party will rightly hang over the GOP in a shroud of shame. African American voters did not forget 1964, and there is little chance that nonwhite voters will forget 2020.
The Republican Party must decide if it is defined by Trump’s prejudices or the principles it has long claimed to believe. Is it too late to hope that it can summon courage and stand for more than Trump’s reelection? Probably. But if the party denounced Trump’s bigotry and hate, even at a short-term cost at the 2020 ballot box, it could be a turning point with long-term gains. A wise politician once told me: Be for the future. It’s going to happen anyway.
As Alabama governor, George Wallace actually did a lot of good things, such as passing the law for free school textbooks. But no one is remembered as the “free textbook” Wallace supporter. So it is with this moment. And none of the current Republicans will be remembered as a “tax reform” Trump supporter. None of the policies or judges will be remembered, but this open racism will never be forgotten. Trump long ago made his choices. The question for Republicans is simple: What choice will you make?
In rallying behind Trump’s belief that a great America deports, the president’s base reminded its leader of something he already knew: There’s no daylight between them.
As The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker and Colby Itkowitz reported, attendees at Trump’s campaign rally Wednesday in Greenville, N.C., responded to Trump’s tweets attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) with chants of “Send her back! Send her back!”
They wrote:
The event here made clear that Trump plans to use his criticism of the liberal lawmakers as a rallying cry during his 2020 campaign as he seeks to frame the election around the nationalistic message that has inflamed racial tensions across the country.
Omar is a naturalized citizen who moved to the United States as a child. She made several controversial statements early in her congressional career, and in a recent Washington Post Magazine article described why she has been so willing to criticize the United States. To Trump and his supporters, including ones in the media like Tucker Carlson, her willingness to criticize some things about the country rendered her unfit to be here. (Carlson called her “living proof” that U.S. immigration policy isn’t working.) Probably adding to their disdain for her is that a number of conspiracy theories have circulated about her, and Trump himself winked at one last night.
Trump’s tweets Sunday telling Omar and the three American-born members of Congress known as “the Squad” — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) — to “go back” to their countries if they don’t like America shocked many people in the political world, though it was pretty clear the president wouldn’t suffer repercussions from his most faithful supporters. As The Fix’s Aaron Blake pointed out yesterday, a new poll tested which Democrats were viewed least favorably by Republicans, and Omar and Ocasio-Cortez were at the top of that list.
In January 2016, Trump said at a campaign rally: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”
That’s not completely accurate. His support among some of the groups that helped send him to the White House isn’t what it used to be. Independent voters no longer back him at the rates they did in 2016. But Trump’s base — those voters who stand in line for hours to hear the president — is arguably more committed in their devotion than ever. And a Reuters/Ipsos poll out this week showed that the president’s net approval among members of his Republican Party rose by 5 percentage points.
Since the earliest days of the president’s campaign, surrogates have publicly defended Trump and his supporters, saying there is room for people of color, religious minorities and other marginalized groups in the president’s movement.
After Hillary Clinton said half of Trump supporters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it,” vice presidential candidate Mike Pence pushed back, strongly defending the diversity of his supporters.
“The truth of the matter is that the men and women who support Donald Trump’s campaign are hard-working Americans,” he said in 2016. “Farmers. Coal miners. Teachers. Veterans. Members of our law enforcement community. Members of every class of this country who know that we can make America great again.”
And headed into the midterm elections, Mark Burns, a South Carolina pastor who unsuccessfully ran for Congress, pointed to black Trump supporters like himself as proof that the Make America Great Again movement was diverse.
"This is foolish to STILL be asking if The President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump is a Racist. Trump have so many LOYAL Black Americans that Love this country & President,” he tweeted in 2018.
Noah Rothman, associate editor of Commentary Magazine, wrote that the idea that Trump supporters are racist speaks to a deep flaw in liberal political worldview.
“The notion that the president’s voters or even his supporters are inherently racist is logically flawed, and the comfort with which so many prominent liberals have embraced it suggests there’s something deeply wrong with the modern liberal political ethos,” he wrote in 2018.
But Wednesday’s response to Trump’s tweet suggests that the inclusivity of Trumpism is not a settled issue. With more than a year left in this campaign, one can surmise how the president will respond to those with whom he disagrees politically. And his most loyal adherents have made it clear that when it comes to promoting his vision, they will go along as far as Trump does.
Speaking to reporters from the elegant, muted surroundings of the Cabinet Room this week, President Trump somberly informed America that he had extensive documentation of how four Democratic members of the House hated America.
“I have a list of things here said by the congresswomen that is so bad, so horrible that I almost don’t want to read it,” Trump said. “It’s my opinion they hate our country. And that’s not good. It’s not acceptable.”
A request to the White House for the contents of that list didn’t yield a response. A review of comments from the four — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) — fails to provide significant examples of anti-American sentiment (an experiment that’s more fruitful when applied to Trump). Certainly the four advocate policies with which many conservatives disagree, but disagreeing on a vision for the country isn’t the same as hating it.
The extent to which this assertion by Trump has gone unchallenged, though, is remarkable. Republicans, elected and not, have accepted his presentation that the four are anti-American, with a special focus paid to Omar, a naturalized refugee from Somalia who is Muslim.
She has been the focus of controversy, certainly. Past comments she has made about the influence of Israel in U.S. politics overlaid with offensive comments about those supporting Israel doing so in exchange for money have resulted in her being identified as anti-Semitic. (She apologized for the latter comments.)
Anti-American, though? At his rally Wednesday in North Carolina, Trump again claimed to have “pages and pages” of examples of anti-American sentiment, but decided instead to focus on a few examples. The anti-Semitism claim was included, but the riff centered on her alleged sympathy for terrorists or opponents of the United States. As with Trump’s claim earlier this week that Omar supported al-Qaeda — an obviously untrue assertion — the president’s arguments were one-sentence summaries of conservative-media-fueled controversies.
Like his reference to a 2013 interview Omar gave after a terrorist attack in Kenya. Responding to a question that suggested terrorist attacks were a “reaction to a situation,” she said that no one wanted to admit that “the actions of the other people that are involved in the world have contributed to the rise of the radicalization and the rise of terrorist acts.” As Fox News reported, Omar added that “nobody wants to take accountability of how these are byproducts of the actions of our involvement in other people’s affairs.”
Trump presented this as Omar “blaming the United States for the terrorist attacks on our country, saying that terrorism is a reaction to our involvement in other people’s affairs."
As he listed four or five similar examples, including ones that have been repeatedly debunked, people in the crowd shouted.
“Traitor!” one yelled. Then, one that caught fire: “Send her back!”
The entire point is that the evidence didn’t matter. Trump didn’t really need to offer any evidence at all. After all, his allies had circled the wagons around him in defense of his claims even before he presented those “pages and pages” of evidence. That Trump said it — and that the media pushed back — was reason enough to accept that Omar et al. were dangers to the republic.
This is one of the recurring effects of Trump’s style of politics. His determined effort to position the media as an enemy is an effort to pull his supporters closer to him. He is the man battling the powerful on behalf of his downtrodden base. He is the man bucking the “politically correct” tide. So when The Media declares that his words are racist, the natural reaction from many of his supporters is not only to defend Trump from attack but to take up and echo his claims as their own.
This has almost nothing to do with Omar. Just the tiniest of pretexts was enough to get people in the crowd energized for her forced deportation. Trump's base, after all, is eager for deportations of immigrants it thinks don't deserve to be in the United States. He won the Republican nomination in large part because of his willingness to adhere to the hardest line on immigration, including a declaration that migrants from Mexico were dangerous criminals as a default.
That Omar is Muslim is obviously a contributor here. Are we really meant to think that Trump declared that Omar should “go back” to Somalia in a tweet only after careful reflection on her history and a full consideration of the context of her comments? This is a man who, in December 2015, publicly stated that he didn’t think Muslims should be allowed in the country at all. Somalia is included in his administration’s ban on migration, the compromise ban that was meant to implement that campaign-trail pledge.
We’re meant to think that his views on a Muslim from Somalia are nuanced? We’re surprised that a crowd of fervent supporters, the vast majority of whom almost certainly voted for him after hearing his campaign rhetoric, doesn’t demand further evidence of Omar’s malfeasance before calling for her to be removed from the country?
There’s a small lesson here for the Democrat who will face Trump in 2020: There’s no avoiding being smeared. Trump will lift up any and everything and frame it negatively against you. We learned that lesson in 2016, watching as long-debunked claims about Hillary Clinton were reiterated over and over — are still reiterated — to present Trump as a more rational actor. It doesn’t matter whose name appears on the ballot opposite Trump’s; the same thing will happen.
The big lesson, though, is specifically that it takes so little to generate so much anger. Trump’s rhetoric keeps his base just under a boil as a default position. Add a tiny bit of heat and it’s at full roil.
Less that 24 hours after President Donald Trump smirked his way through his raucous crowd chanting “send her back” amid his ongoing racist attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared on Fox Business to insist that everything is good and fine and hey, Trump’s doing great!
Speaking with Maria Bartiromo on Thursday morning, McConnell said “the president’s onto something” after he was shown clips of Wednesday evening’s Trump event, including footage of the chant.
“He’s right about ‘the Squad’ wanting to turn us into a socialist country,” McConnell said, using the shorthand for the four progressive freshmen Democratic congresswomen the president has attacked over the past week.
“What he should have added, however, is it’s a lot broader than just the four of them,” McConnell continued.
McConnell’s approval of Trump’s racism notwithstanding, he did have some criticism for (you guessed it!) Democrats who have accused him of personally abetting the president’s latest bigoted screed.
“I think it’s time to lower the rhetoric related to that subject all across America,” McConnell said, when asked about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s charge that he is “complicit” in Trump’s xenophobia. “Everyone knows that’s nonsense.”
“I’ve got nothing to apologize on this front,” McConnell added, claiming he was in the crowd during Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, before pivoting into an attempt to once again paint the Democrats as socialists and repeating that “the president’s onto something here.”
Bartiromo continued the segment by attacking the media, noting that “A CNN reporter asked you if it would be ‘racist’ to ask your wife—your wife!—Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to go back to her home country of Taiwan.”
“What did you think of your wife being brought into this debate?” she asked.
“Well, I’m glad Elaine’s not willing to go back home,” a laughing McConnell answered. “As your viewers may not know, she came here at age eight not speaking a word of English, has been in two different Cabinets—both in President Bush 43, and President Trump. I’m really proud of her. She’s not interested in going home, and I’m glad she’s not.”
“What an incredible story,” Bartiromo agreed.
Folks, correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m starting to think Mitch McConnell might be kind of a hypocrite.
A Bucky’s convenience store employee in Naperville has been fired, after he was caught on camera telling customers from Mexico to “go back to their country.”
The incident took place at a Bucky’s convenience store at 1576 Washington St. in Naperville. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, a member of the Buitron family indicated the unnamed employee refused service because they are from Mexico.
In the video, the employee at the counter tells the women he is “an American” and then asks, “are you a citizen?” After a woman responds asking “what is your problem?” the employee states in the video, “they need to go back to their county.”
As the Buitron family left the store, the employee states, “ICE will come.”
In a second video, other people in line can be seen getting involved in the verbal altercation. One man in line can be heard saying to the women “you have no right” and “leave.”
In an email, Bucky’s attorney Stephen Kalhorn said the “employee no longer works for us.”
Carolina Buitron told CBS 2, said she was cycling with six family members when a bike broke down near the store. While they waited for help, 15-year-old Indira Buitron went into the store to buy food.
Carolina said the clerk told the teen that the food she was buying was expensive and questioned the legal status of her two cousins waiting outside. The teen said they were her cousins visiting from Mexico.
Moments later, multiple family members went into the store to confront the employee.
Naperville police and city officials investigating this incident.
Buitron family members said activists had been planning a protest at the gas station Thursday, but it was unclear if that protest will go on after the employee was fired.
“I was not happy with it. I disagree with it. ... I think I did [try to stop the chant]. I started speaking very quickly.”
— Trump, in remarks at the White House, July 18
At a Trump campaign rally Wednesday, the crowd broke into an extended chant — “Send her back!” — about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).
The president had been attacking Omar, a Somali American immigrant and practicing Muslim, with false claims for days. We just gave him Four Pinocchios for claiming she supports al-Qaeda.
Trump said he tried to stop the “Send her back!” chants by quickly resuming his speech. This will be a short fact check, because video of the rally totally debunks his claim.
The Facts
Trump got this ball rolling Sunday, with Twitter statements telling Omar and three U.S.-born lawmakers of color to “go back” to their countries. He doubled down on those claims over the following days.
Trump was attacking Omar by name at the North Carolina rally when the crowd began to chant “Send her back!” He let the chants linger for 13 seconds before resuming his speech. After the chants died down, Trump kept criticizing Omar.
Here’s a timeline:
July 14: Trump tweets: “So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly ... and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
July 15: Addressing reporters at the White House, Trump says: “As far as I’m concerned, if you hate our country, if you’re not happy here, you can leave. And that’s what I say all the time. That’s what I said in a tweet, which I guess some people think is controversial. A lot of people love it, by the way. A lot of people love it. But if you’re not happy in the U.S., if you’re complaining all the time, very simply, you can leave.”
A reporter asks Trump, “Does it concern you that many people saw that tweet as racist and that white nationalist groups are finding common cause with you on that point?” The president responds: “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me. And all I’m saying: They want to leave, they can leave. Now, it doesn’t say leave forever. It says leave if you want.”
July 16: Trump tweets, “IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY HERE, YOU CAN LEAVE!”
July 17: Nearly 16 minutes into his remarks at the rally in Greenville, N.C., Trump mentions Omar by name. “Representative Ilhan Omar, of a really great state I almost won — first time in decades and decades — Minnesota, great state ...”
The crowd at that point begins loudly booing and chanting. Video of the rally shows Trump standing passively onstage, watching the crowd. The chants die down on their own.
After a minute or so, Trump resumes the attack: “Omar minimized the September 11th attacks on our homeland, saying ‘some people did something.’ I don’t think so. Some people did something. Yeah, some people did something, all right. ... Omar laughed that Americans speak of al-Qaeda in a menacing tone and remarked that, ‘You don’t say America with this intensity. You say al-Qaeda. It makes you proud. Al-Qaeda makes you proud.’” (The claim about al-Qaeda is a Four Pinocchio distortion of what Omar actually said in a 2013 interview.)
The crowd stops him again, chanting “send her back!” for 13 seconds. The president stands onstage, waits for the chant to die down, then keeps talking about Omar.
A few minutes later, Trump again suggests Omar and the other congresswomen leave the United States: “They never have anything good to say. That’s why I say, ‘Hey, if they don’t like it, let them leave, let them leave.’ Right? Let them leave. They’re always telling us how to run and how to do this. How do — you know what, if they don’t love it, tell them to leave it.”
July 18: At the White House, a reporter asks Trump about the chant. The president says, “I was not happy with it. I disagree with it. ... I think I did [try to stop it]. I started speaking very quickly.”
The Pinocchio Test
Trump got this ball rolling with his tweets and remarks telling Omar and other lawmakers to “go back” to their countries. Video of the rally shows Trump did not try to stop the “Send her back!” chants about Omar. He stood passively onstage and waited for the chants to die down on their own before resuming his speech. Within seconds, he was back to criticizing Omar. Minutes later, he suggested again that Omar and other critics leave the United States.
Another Four Pinocchios.
Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar called it like it is on Monday amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing racist attacks against her and other members of the so-called Squad of progressive Democratic freshman congresswomen.
“I believe he is a fascist,” Omar told a crowd of reporters as she walked down a DC street, less than 24 hours after a smug Trump sat back to enjoy an arena-full of supporters chanting “send her back” at the mention of her name during a MAGA rally Wednesday night in North Carolina.
“I want to remind people that this is what this president and his supporters have turned our country—that is supposed to be a country where we allow democratic debate and dissent to take place,” Omar continued. “So this is not about me, this is about us fighting for what this country truly should be and what it deserves to be.”
Omar had responded to the president’s continued racist attacks with a series of positive messages, including quoting Maya Angelou. But her comments on Thursday—made shortly after she met briefly with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and reminded reporters that “racism kills”—show just how seriously the congresswoman is taking Trump’s attacks.
House Democrats, meanwhile, have begun to speak out about the possible danger for Omar and the other lawmakers Trump has targeted.
“It’s crystal clear to me that her life is in imminent danger,” Rep. Bobby Rush told Politico on Thursday. “Trump has threatened the safety of a member of Congress.”
“We have communicated, even before last night, with the Sergeant-at-Arms office about making sure that our members have what they need for their protection,” Speaker Pelosi told reporters after meeting with Omar earlier in the day.
The New Hampshire Union Leader reported on Wednesday on a local dimension of Racist Week, which, of course, happened on Facebook.
Things started off with former state Senate candidate Dan Hynes, who asked on Facebook: “If Trump is the most racist President in American history, what does that say about all of the other Presidents who owned slaves?”
Hynes seemed to be posing the question to obnoxiously riff on remarks from politicians like Joe Biden. But the fireworks started when state Rep. Werner Horn barged through the door, commenting on the post, according to the Union Leader: “Wait, owning slaves doesn’t make you racist.”
Hynes followed up: “I guess not. Which is surprising since everything else makes someone a racist,” to which Horn concluded that “owning slaves wasn’t a decision predicated on race but on economics. It’s a business decision.”
The newspaper called up the sitting state politician and got his thoughts on the cause of slavery in full, and well, this trainwreck happened:
"Slavery later on in the American South was not about the color of the skin of the slaves but their value as workers on the plantations,” Horn said.
“The U.S. had abolitionists since the start, people who felt slavery wasn’t moral but they weren’t enslaving black people because they were black. They were bringing in these folks because they were available.”
“What they were looking at was whether they were fit enough to do the demanding work that needed to be done. It was an economic reality.”
Glad to see the Lost Causers found a home in the North, too.
I was standing in a bar in downtown Greenville—Grumpy’s, I’m pretty sure it was—off East 5th Street. This was about two months ago, when I was in town for my brother’s graduation from East Carolina University. The two of us were meeting up with some of his friends for drinks while our parents relaxed back at his apartment. The joint was a pretty standard dive bar with a porch out back, where one incredibly cute golden retriever puppy was laying as six people stood around it, all puffing on cigs.
Back inside, we were waiting to grab a couple cheap beers. I had already taken note of the translucent pigmentation that dominated the crowd the moment I walked in. I didn’t count, but it felt pretty clear that, save for the people that could spot us as a couple Sappony men, there were nothing but extremely drunk and extremely white college kids filling the place. One kid, standing three people over from us, with his hat turned backward, his sky blue polo unbuttoned to show a hairless pale chest, threw back a shot and slammed the glass onto the bar. He was speaking excitedly with another white kid sitting on a barstool. He leaned in close and grinned.
“YOU’RE A FUCKING N*****"
He screamed it again.
Nobody paused. The trashy music blasting over the shitty speakers didn’t scratch to a halt. Hardly anyone so much as turned their head. The bartender, another white guy, nodded to his friends standing to his side. They laughed and patted his shoulder. His beer sloshed in his hand. He smiled wide. You know the smile. I certainly did. He was happy. He was content. He was with his people.
This week has been fucking terrible. Or fucking great. It depends on who you are, I suppose.
Last night’s rally, in which President Donald Trump doubled down on his racist remarks about Rep. Ilhan Omar and the Squad and brought the house down at ECU, was either yet another putrid blemish on the face of an executive office befouled with centuries of them or a joyous event that sparked hope in your soul that We might actually take this country back. It’s all a matter of perspective, which is exactly why it was ingenious timing for Trump to have Greenville lined up as his soft landing spot.
Not unlike the boisterous, racist bro who found himself at home shouting epithets in Grumpy’s, Trump was in his element, and locked firmly into a destructive groove for an hour-and-a-half. He flailed his arms and opened his mouth and read from the prompter and had the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand, as the campaign had planned, just for showing up.
In the wake of the chants, a great many on the left and a handful on the right have decried the president’s racist words, the xenophobic chant, and the entire un-American sentiment underpinning both. It’s been nice to see, sure, but it doesn’t seem to matter to the people on the inside, the ones hooting and hollering and lining up to pass out from heat exhaustion just so they can get a chance to be castigated on the news the following morning.
See, there is always a They. It doesn’t much matter where you’re from.
The feeling you derive when you hear talk about Them varies greatly depending on where you are. In my current home, in the bubble of Brooklyn, They are wonderful; They are great; They are accepted. Not in the fancy neighborhoods with douche-tower apartment buildings ruining the sky for the sake of the rich, but certainly, in theory, They are generally welcome here, in this country and this city. But in Greenville and towns like it, or at least the ones I know, They are about the most dangerous force on earth. There, They take many shapes and forms, but rest assured, They are coming. For your jobs, for your schools, for your money, for your family. They they they.
But, as I’ve been told, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. That is, accomplishing the goal of muddying the waters so much that up is down and racist is right can take several forms, some more outright and some more veiled. Lucky for Trump and Greenville’s (and North Carolina’s and America’s) racists, they almost always get a choice.
For the folks seeking a more jagged, unpolished version of American racial conservatism—none of that “socially liberal” bullshit to be found here—I give you state Rep. Michael Speciale.
Speciale doesn’t represent Greenville. His district is located about an hour’s drive southeast. But this past spring, he ran for the the Third Congressional District seat vacated by the passing of Walter Jones, which includes portions of Greenville and the surrounding communities.
I’ve written about Speciale at length before; it’s not a pleasant rabbit hole to fall down. The short of it is that Speciale is a nut at best and a xenophobic racist dickhead at worst. He is a staunch Roy Moore defender. He called the Women’s March “a joke.” He has filed legislation allowing North Carolina to secede from the union. He’s called for completely deregulating handgun sales. And, naturally, he is a connoisseur of the deranged right-ring memes we know and love.
What’s most frightening about Speciale isn’t the fact that he holds a vote in the state legislature, though that is terrifying; it’s how familiar he is, at least to those of us who grew up knowing dozens of middle-aged white men just like him.
The last in-person conversation I had with one of my childhood friends ended in an argument that started with him pontificating about the possibility—no, inevitability, he stated so surely—of a race war in America. This was the summer of the Ferguson race riots, following Michael Brown’s murder at the hands of the racist police force. My friend’s reasoning for the forthcoming war was that They were growing too unruly, too wild, and, of course, too lazy to pull themselves out of the mess They got themselves into. The reasoning he was employing was nothing I hadn’t heard a million times growing up in North Carolina, but the hop, skip, and a jump he took to land from the notoriously casual racism to the concept of a violent nationwide battle for racial supremacy still caught me off-guard.
My surprise at hearing this diatribe, started out of thin air in between our third and fourth beers, was a result of my being close with him; had I been paying attention, I could have seen this coming and avoided or maybe even subverted the situation, either by undermining him or by severing ties. Instead, I found myself on my heels, and then leaning into a full-scale fight that effectively concluded our relationship. There was likely not much I could’ve done at that point, save for shouting and leaving, which I did.
But I kept thinking about that conversation as I went through the arduous process of detailing the last fifty years of my state’s political and social history. What I found was that, present within the dominating, boisterous strain of Southern conservatism made famous by Jesse Helms that my friend had latched onto so quickly, there is also another, almost more dangerous version of politician that allows people to make the same arguments—that of the genteel far-righter.
Enter state Rep. Greg Murphy.
Murphy beat out Speciale and a dozen others in the race for the third—last week, he claimed victory in the GOP primary over Joan Perry—and will, barring an upset from Democrat Allen Thomas, secure the seat. Murphy was more than pleased to be present at Wednesday’s rally and even happier to talk up the speech with Fox Business beforehand.
Murphy is decidedly not Speciale. While he is a gun lover, Murphy is also a doctor who purportedly supports at least some version of Medicaid expansion in the state, at a time when the GOP-led state legislature is willing to drag out the budget approval process just to keep that from happening. Mostly, though, he is white bread. He is the safe choice, as far as Republicans go—his edges are sanded and his rhetoric is plain. Yet as a candidate backed by the Freedom Caucus, NCGunowners.com, and Trump, he is happy to side with Rep. Mark Meadows and the far right in Congress in order to secure votes and political longevity. He does not need to shout his beliefs about where Rep. Omar should go, because that is what Trump and the crowd—his supporters—are there for. He is there to smile and shake hands and look like a normal human being by comparison, while still casting all the same votes as the crazies.
If you would like a preview of what a response to such behavior looks like once you’re elected, look to Rep. Mark Walker, representing the sixth, another eastern North Carolina district.
https://twitter.com/RepMarkWalker/status/1151688382428393472
Walker, like Murphy, also feels familiar. They are the men you knew at church, the supposedly upstanding member of the congregation, who, from time to time, would also speak in hushed tones about “Them” and “Those People,” but in a tone of caution, of worry, not outright violence. It wasn’t the same instigation offered by Speciale or Trump. It was something worse. You couldn’t call them racist outright, because they didn’t screamed the n-word or call for mass deportation of your neighbors and friends. They’re just trying to protect their community, you see. And if that means quietly supporting the same policies offered by the authoritative ideologues shouting down from on high, then so be it.
My family on both sides hails from eastern North Carolina. I grew up in the Piedmont, in the middle of the state, in a mill town hollowed out by corporate greed that ultimately voted for Trump by a 4:1 margin. It’s all home to me, and even after being gone for three years, it still is, more than New York could ever hope to be.
Loving it as much as I do, I still recognize that there is a sickness there. It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Yesterday, about four hours before the rally, I saw it online.
That meme, shared by a family member, is one of about a dozen I could pull from my Facebook feed from the past 24 hours about Omar. To cut you off: I know, picking memes from social media, in a space I’ve created and curated, is not a representative way to report the news or the political leanings of Real People. But as I’ve previously reported, the growing influence of social media in terms of being North Carolinians’ main source of political news has led to some truly heinous shit. (The infamous, botched Pizzagate attack on a DC pizza joint was carried out by a man from the next town over from where I grew up.)
The second comment beneath the above meme read as follows—keep in mind that this was posted roughly five hours before Trump uttered the same smear:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--5ft4nTXW--/c_scale,dpr_2.0,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/zeby9ytbjp8jo79twki4.png (https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--5ft4nTXW--/c_scale,dpr_2.0,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/zeby9ytbjp8jo79twki4.png)
Now, fast forward to this morning, after the speech and the chant, to check in on how Fox News chose to contextualize last night’s events.
I can’t help but hear the echoes, from Facebook to Speciale to my family to Fox News to Trump. It refuses to die down, to quiet itself. It is there, always, after every major political event. I used to believe it was a straight line—from Fox to Trump to the memes posted by my online relatives. Now I’m not so sure anymore. It’s hard to grasp where this mess starts and where it ends. It’s constantly growing outwards, sometimes rapidly and loud, sometimes stealthily, but always expanding its reach. It’s not so much a line of dominos as it is an ever-churning stew of shitty values and vast misinformation, tumbling and blending together until it’s difficult to delineate what’s coming from the Oval Office from the right-wing fever swamp.
There’s no immediate antidote for this sickness, because in order for that to exist, there needs to be common ground, or at least a shared version of reality. But that is not the case—and it’s exceedingly difficult to image how these poles realign themselves again.
I’d like to end on a happier note, to say that I see a way forward in which the economic pressures snap the chanters from their foggy reality, free from the racist and xenophobic tendencies that moor them to the Speciales and Trumps and Walkers and Murphys of the political system, and join arms with a candidate who offers solutions beyond the shallow “We’re going to bring [insert your long-dead local industry] back!” they fell for three years ago. But every time I start to feel hopeful, someone starts chanting, and I recede back into the acceptance of the fact that I was always going to lose that friend, that the shithead at Grumpy’s was always going to go without getting his ass kicked, and that Trump was always going to be the beloved president of my hometown.
I'd like to say I'm tired, but I'm a white guy and have to keep fighting this shit.
#Resist
Trump falsely claims he tried to stop ‘Send her back!’ chants about Rep. Ilhan Omar (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/18/trump-falsely-claims-he-tried-stop-send-her-back-chants-about-rep-ilhan-omar/?utm_term=.cd146076619f)Quote“I was not happy with it. I disagree with it. ... I think I did [try to stop the chant]. I started speaking very quickly.”
..........
Trump was attacking Omar by name at the North Carolina rally when the crowd began to chant “Send her back!” He let the chants linger for 13 seconds before resuming his speech. After the chants died down, Trump kept criticizing Omar.
You must be exhausted from copying and pasting. A true hero.
1:36:10
And what are you doing to combat it? Besides sarcasm, that is.
The same as you: nothing of quantifiable value.
Uh oh, copyright infringement?
A lot of these articles are NYT pieces that require a paid subscription to read, so I do appreciate your “cutting and pasting” Athos. Thank you.
I see all the noteworthy articles on Reddit a few hours before they appear here, usually complete with the entire text pasted in the comments there. I'm sure they are available to be read for free in many other places if you don't want to pay for the privilege. There are better news aggregator sources, basically.
Either way, copying and pasting other people's work to a backwater discussion board is about the definition of slacktivism and I still find the sentence I quoted above hilarious.
I read some here, scan many others. I read far more of the ones I find on my own and tend to avoid any posted collections of news sources that seems to have a agenda (even if I agree with said agenda). I saw the phrase ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ bandied about today, best to try and not embrace that.
I sort of like what I find on my iPhone and iPad along with msn. The number of news sources found there is impressive and runs across the political spectrum. Although I’m sure my news sourcing would be considered amateurish by many, it suits me.
President Trump stepped back Friday from a day-old claim that he was unhappy with a hostile chant by his supporters, lashing out at the media for its coverage of the episode and calling the crowd at the North Carolina rally “incredible patriots.”
“Those are incredible people. Those are incredible patriots,” Trump said during an event in the Oval Office at which he again attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the Somali-born lawmaker whom he was criticizing at his rally earlier this week when the chants of “Send her back!” rang out.
“She’s lucky to be where she is, let me tell you,” Trump said. “And the things that she has said are a disgrace to our country.”
Asked about his unhappiness with the rally chant, Trump said, “You know what I’m unhappy with — the fact that a congresswoman can hate our country. I’m unhappy with the fact that a congresswoman can say anti-Semitic things.”
Trump has provided no evidence that Omar ever said she hates the United States, and earlier this week she said, “I probably love this country more than anyone that is naturally born.”
In tweets earlier Friday, Trump characterized media coverage of his rally in Greenville, N.C., as “crazed” and complained that media was “totally calm & accepting” of what he said were “vile and disgusting statements” made by Omar and three other minority congresswomen that he has repeatedly criticized in recent days.
Trump also complained that the media covered the return of Omar to her home state on Thursday. She was greeted at the Minneapolis−St. Paul International Airport by a crowd chanting, “Welcome home, Ilhan!”
Trump has taken repeated aim at Omar and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) since Sunday, when he said in tweets that they should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
The other three lawmakers besides Omar were born in the United States. Omar was born in Somalia and became a U.S. citizen in 2000.
Trump’s shift Friday in his comments about the rally chant was reminiscent of how he responded to the deadly clash between white nationalists and protesters in Charlottesville in August 2017.
Speaking from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., he initially denounced an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” an assessment that was widely seen as not going far enough.
Two days later, at the urging of aides, Trump delivered a more forceful, scripted statement a news conference at the White House, calling the racism practiced by white supremacists and other hate groups “evil.”
The next day, however, during a news conference ostensibly about infrastructure in New York, Trump softened that assessment, saying “there’s blame on both sides . . . very fine people on both sides.”
Much of Trump’s criticism of Omar has focused on remarks she has made about Israel. Earlier this year, she tweeted that support for Israel among members of Congress was “all about the Benjamins,” a reference to hundred-dollar bills.
Omar later apologized for her remarks and said she did not realize “how my comments would be offensive to Jewish Americans.” She also clarified that, in general, her remarks were aimed at criticizing the Israeli government, not Jewish people.
Trump also has falsely accused Omar of praising the terrorist group al-Qaeda.
In his tweets Friday morning, Trump curiously referred to “three Radical Left Congresswomen.” For days he has targeted all four. At his rally, he criticized all four of them by name.
A White House spokesman did not respond to a question regarding the change.
Trump also referred in his morning tweets to “Foul Mouthed Omar.” However, it was Tlaib who generated headlines earlier this year when she used profane language to call for Trump’s impeachment.
Trump, himself, frequently uses profanities. At his rally, he used the word “goddamn” twice, drawing some complaints from Christian commentators.
During an event Thursday in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that he did not agree with the chant of “Send her back!” and “felt a little bit badly about it.” He also claimed he had moved to cut the chant off by starting to speak against it “very quickly,” even though he paused for 13 seconds until the chant died down.
Kayleigh McEnany, a spokeswoman for Trump’s reelection bid, told CBSN on Thursday that Trump “couldn’t really hear what was going on” when the crowd started to chant.
Trump’s decision to try to distance himself from the chant came after a flurry of GOP lawmakers publicly condemned it, even while being careful not to denounce Trump directly.
Earlier this week, the Democratic-led House voted largely along party lines to condemn Trump’s weekend tweets in which he said the lawmakers should “go back” where they came from.
In his tweets Friday, Trump predicted he would win Minnesota next year, saying voters there “can’t stand” Omar and “her hatred of our Country.”
In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton carried Minnesota by less than two percentage points.
Later Friday morning, Trump retweeted several of his tweets from earlier this week in which he was critical of Omar and the other minority lawmakers, including one in which he said it was “sad to see the Democrats sticking up for people who speak so badly of our Country and who, in addition, hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion.”
Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, on Friday tweeted footage of Omar’s greeting at the airport as she returned to Minnesota the night before.
“This land is your land, This land is my land, This land was made for you and me,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote, adding the hashtag, “#IStandWithIlhan.”
During her remarks at the airport, Omar pledged to continue to be Trump’s “nightmare.”
“When I said I was the president’s nightmare, well you’re watching it now,” she said. “Because his nightmare is seeing a Somali immigrant refugee rise to Congress.”
All week, President Trump has been suggesting that black, Latina and Muslim congresswomen critical of his policies should “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested” countries “from which they came,” even though all but one of the lawmakers he has been attacking were born in the United States.
That made Trump just the latest in a long line of American politicians who have demonized ethnic and religious minorities for political gain. The congresswomen may be citizens, Trump’s argument goes, but they are not real Americans, and therefore they have no right to be “viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.”
The racist and nativist themes Trump and some of his supporters have taken up since he tweeted about the four women on Sunday have a long history in American political discourse. The idea that immigrants and their offspring should either accept America as it is or “go home” echoes attacks made against other groups a century ago. Immigrants, especially those not seen as white, have long been subjected to claims that they’re not entitled to the same rights and freedoms as other Americans.
The first large-scale American anti-immigrant movement, popularly referred to as the Know Nothing Party, did not advocate that immigrants “go home.” The vast United States only had about 23 million inhabitants in 1854, the Know Nothings’ heyday. Even nativists could not imagine the United States succeeding without immigrants doing the backbreaking kinds of work — digging cellars, unloading ships, scrubbing floors, washing clothes — that native-born Americans disdained.
The political issue that most often caused clashes between immigrants and nativists then concerned public schools. Most public school systems, relatively new institutions, were run by committees of ministers who made Protestant Christianity an integral part of the curriculums. When Catholic immigrants began arriving in large numbers in the late 1840s during the Irish Potato Famine, they asked school leaders where they settled to remove Protestantism from the classroom or to publicly finance Catholic schools so their children would have an alternative to overtly Protestant public systems.
Some people saw these Catholic requests as reasonable. But most were furious that newcomers had the nerve to tell native-born Americans how to run their schools. The Know Nothing response was not to direct immigrants to “go home,” however, but to “stay in their lane.” Keep digging our ditches and mucking out our stables but, even after you become citizens, don’t “dictate” how the country should be run.
Exactly how Catholics, who at this point made up no more than 10 percent of the population, could dictate anything to native-born Americans was never explained. Just having the temerity to question the status quo was seen as objectionable; to nativists, being Catholic rendered these immigrants incapable of being “true Americans.”
The language used by Trump supporters to excoriate Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Muslim born in Somalia, closely parallels that employed by the Know Nothings to attack the legitimacy of Irish Catholic politicians in the Civil War era.
To suppress political activism by “ungrateful” immigrants, Know Nothings tried to effectively strip the newcomers of their political rights altogether, proposing legislation that would have changed the waiting period until immigrants could became citizens and vote from five years to 21. But the Know Nothing movement was fleeting. In the North, where most immigrants and Know Nothings lived, voters came to see the growing political power of slaveholders as a more dire threat than the political threat posed by immigrants. So the naturalization laws remained unchanged.
Toward the end of the 19th century, Americans began to fear Catholic immigrants less and “godless” socialist immigrants more. Native-born Americans associated German immigrants (a group that, by then, included Donald Trump’s immigrant grandfather, Friedrich Trumpf, who arrived in America in 1885) with socialism and especially the radical brand of socialism known as “anarchism,” which espoused the use of violence to bring the movement’s goal to fruition.
A year after Trumpf’s arrival, a group of German-born anarchists in Chicago, angry about the violent suppression of a strike at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co., threw a homemade bomb into a squad of police breaking up a rally outside the factory. Seven policemen were killed, sparking nationwide outrage against immigrants in general and immigrant radicals in particular.
Most immigrants were not socialists. They came to America with dreams of getting rich, not fomenting revolution. And most immigrant socialists were not anarchists. They were democratic socialists who sought to achieve their goals at the ballot box. Some of their objectives were radical, such as government ownership of important industries. But most of their agenda — a ban on child labor in factories, guaranteed compensation for workers who are injured on the job, government financial assistance to those who lose their employment, limits on the rents landlords could charge, cut-rate “public housing” for the poor, and small government payments to the elderly “to take the edge off the fearful poverty and hopelessness of old age of members of the working class” — are today considered mainstream. Several socialists, including Russian Jewish immigrant Meyer London of New York, were elected to Congress in the 1910s and 1920s, where they endured vitriol from the right similar to that now directed at Omar and other members of “the Squad.”
The themes of that vitriol precisely mirror Trump’s line this week. By seeking to change the laws of the United States, nativists argued, immigrants (or even the children of immigrants) demonstrated a lack of gratitude to the country that took them in. If these immigrants, their American-born children and their elected representatives didn’t like the United States the way it was, they could keep quiet or go back to where they “came from” — even if they were not only citizens, but also duly elected representatives of their communities.
The most famous example of these sentiments being carried to their logical extreme was the case of Emma Goldman, another Russian Jewish immigrant. Drawn to radical politics by German immigrant anarchist Johann Most, Goldman became one of the American socialist movement’s most famous orators, sometimes advocating violence to punish rich industrialists who exploited their workers. She and Alexander Berkman plotted the assassination of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick after Frick brutally suppressed a strike at his factory in Homestead, Pa., in 1892. Berkman’s shot only grazed Frick, however, and while Berkman went to prison, Goldman escaped punishment. But she was jailed several times for disseminating information to women about birth control.
When Goldman became an outspoken critic of the draft during World War I, she was again arrested, this time for suppressing enlistment, and imprisoned for two years. Upon her release in 1919, “Red Emma” was deported back to Russia (by then, the Soviet Union) at the behest of a young J. Edgar Hoover. Goldman insisted that her deportation was unconstitutional because she was an American citizen. But a judge ruled that, because the citizenship of Goldman’s husband had been revoked in 1908, she was also no longer a citizen and thus could be deported for her anarchist beliefs.
Goldman was not the only immigrant deported for a political activism that native-born Americans decided showed ingratitude. Marcus Garvey was an immigrant from Jamaica who argued in the 1910s and ’20s that black Americans were so mistreated in the United States that they ought to go back to Africa of their own accord.
Whites did not like anyone fomenting discontent among African Americans, especially not an immigrant of color. Hoover tried to have Garvey deported around the same time as Goldman but was told by his superiors that he lacked sufficient grounds. Hoover then initiated an investigation of Garvey’s movement and eventually charged him with mail fraud. Meanwhile, the federal government declined to process Garvey’s application for citizenship, apparently due to his political beliefs. After he was convicted on the mail fraud charges and had served his sentence in federal prison, Garvey was deported in 1927 to Jamaica.
Since then, the “love it or leave it” idea has become a staple of right-wing demagoguery. The concept became especially prominent during the Red Scare in the early days of the Cold War and again during the presidency of Richard Nixon (when this cry was also used against white, native-born Vietnam War protesters). Now Trump is reviving it. His supporters, at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night, even started chanting, “Send her back!” when the president mentioned Omar, though Trump disavowed the chant on Thursday. It is ironic, and sad, that the president who has done so much to demonize immigrants was born in New York City, the world’s quintessential city of immigrants.
On Friday, 49 people were killed in a terrorist attack at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — the country’s worst mass killing since 1943. A suspect charged in the attack was reportedly an anti-Muslim zealot.
As news of the attack was unfolding, President Trump tweeted a link to Breitbart — a far-right “news” site. Breitbart has published vile anti-Muslim hatred, including calling Muslims “rapefugees,” mocking the notion of Islamophobia, and absurdly claiming that terrorist attacks are “an expression of mainstream Muslim values.” It’s a site where Muslim-hating white supremacists — like at least one of those who allegedly carried out the attack in Christchurch — would find writers who gave them rhetorical ammunition for their ideologies of hate. (Trump has since deleted the tweet.)
Trump is an Islamophobic bigot. As president, his words matter. He is using them to spread hatred. And deranged, unwell or evil people have allegedly been inspired by those words to target the very people that Trump targets in his speeches and his tweets. The charged suspect in New Zealand cited Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” (though he also said he rejected Trump as a policymaker and leader).
Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry has a long history. In 2011 and 2012, Trump insinuated that President Barack Obama was secretly Muslim. In September 2015, at a campaign rally, Trump nodded along as a supporter claimed “we have a problem in this country; it’s called Muslims.” Trump continued nodding, saying “right,” and “we need this question!” as the supporter then proceeded to ask Trump “when can we get rid of them [Muslims]?” In response, Trump said: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.”
In November 2015, on “Morning Joe,” Trump said that America needs to “watch and study the mosques.” Four days later, he indicated that he would “certainly implement” a database to track Muslims in the United States. Two days after that, he falsely claimed that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheered in New Jersey when the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.
Then came the most egregious statement — one that should haunt Trump’s legacy forever and taint everyone who supported him subsequently: On Dec. 7, 2015, he called to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. Three days later, Trump tweeted that the United Kingdom is “trying hard to disguise their massive Muslim problem.” On March 9, 2016, Trump falsely claimed that “Islam hates us.”
Upon taking office, Trump surrounded himself with anti-Muslim bigots. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump adviser, was fired by the FBI for his Islamophobia. Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national-security-adviser-turned-felon, said that Islam “is like a cancer.” And top officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton have also stoked hatred of Islam.
In late November 2017, Trump retweeted three videos by Jayda Fransen. She was one of the leaders of Britain First, a neo-fascist hate group. She has been convicted of multiple hate-crime offenses and was involved in organizing “Christian patrols,” which included what Britain First called “mosque invasions” aimed at intimidating British Muslims. While Fransen was out on bail, she appeared on Radio Aryan, a neo-Nazi radio station. Her interview began right after the station concluded its reading from “Mein Kampf.” That is who the president of the United States chose to amplify to his millions and millions of Twitter followers.
The list of Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry goes on and on. But just imagine replacing the word “Muslim” with “Jewish” or “black” in any of statements above. It immediately becomes clear that there is a grotesque double standard when it comes to the mainstream acceptance of anti-Muslim bigotry without consequence in the United States and the broader Western world. We must never reduce our vigilance toward the dangerous scourges of anti-Semitism and racism, but we must hold anti-Muslim bigots to the same standard that we would hold other bigots.
Last week, a prominent Fox News host and Trump ally, Judge Jeanine Pirro, suggested that wearing a Muslim hijab could be incompatible with believing in the U.S. Constitution. After her remarks sparked outrage, Pirro went on broadcasting as usual, only eliciting a toothless statement from Fox News. It’s clear that in media and in politics alike, vilifying Muslims is not unsavory enough to actually elicit consequences.
Some of the president’s supporters might accuse me of “politicizing tragedy,” but that is the only appropriate thing to do when tragedies are made more likely because of our politics. Hollow statements of condolence are meaningless if you are willing to turn around and support an Islamophobic bigot in the White House who makes those condolences more necessary.
The attack on New Zealand is an attack on religious freedom and an attack on that hallowed principle that worshiping the God of your choice should not make you a target of violence.
But if we want to stop such massacres, we need to work much harder to stamp out hate and bigotry in society — and part of that is to stop electing or supporting hateful bigots.
Trump on Friday demonstrated the limited influence of allies or advisers who try to steer him away from pre-election racial and cultural fights. He walked back his disavowal of a racially loaded chant at a campaign rally less than 24 hours after making it.
Acquiescing to behind-the-scenes pressure from nervous Republican lawmakers and from his elder daughter, Ivanka Trump, the president distanced himself on Thursday from the chant of “Send her back!” that the crowd at his rally on Wednesday in Greenville, N.C., directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who was born in Somalia. Mr. Trump said he was “not happy” with the chant’s language and claimed, falsely, that he had tried to cut it off.
But on Friday, the president appeared to disavow his disavowal — following the same three-stage crisis playbook he used after setting off a wave of criticism when he defended neo-Nazi protesters in 2017 Charlottesville, Va.
“No, you know what I’m unhappy with — the fact that a congresswoman can hate our country,” Mr. Trump said on Friday, referring to Ms. Omar, when he was asked about the chant condemned by Republicans as well as Democrats. “I’m unhappy with the fact that a congresswoman can say anti-Semitic things. I’m unhappy with the fact that a congresswoman, in this case a different congresswoman, can call our country and our people ‘garbage.’ That’s what I’m unhappy with.”
When asked about the chant again later in the day as he left Washington to spend the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Trump refused to condemn them. Instead, he seemed to be repeating his criticism of Ms. Omar and her allies in Congress without mentioning any names.
“You know what’s racist to me, when someone goes out and says the horrible things about our country,” he said. “The people of our country that are anti-Semitic, that hate everybody, that speak with scorn and hate — that to me is really a dangerous thing.”
The reversal followed the same pattern as the one after Charlottesville.
After Mr. Trump’s original response to the violence that took place there in August 2017, a low point of his presidency, aides urged him to take the high ground. Days later, he finally relented, reading a brief prepared statement from the Diplomatic Room in the White House in which he, for the first time, unequivocally condemned neo-Nazi groups and stated that “racism is evil.”
But the next day, he reverted to his original stance in a combative exchange with reporters in which he again blamed both sides for the violence that left one demonstrator dead and dozens injured. But while business leaders and Republican lawmakers briefly distanced themselves from the president at the time, Mr. Trump appears to have suffered little long-term political damage because of the episode — and that lesson appears to have made an impression.
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“It just destroys him to seem to be abandoning his base on any issue,” said Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian. “When he originally said he distanced himself from the chant at the rally, one could have guessed he would go back and embrace the people who cheered ‘Send her back!’ Contrite is not in his playbook.”
But even some critics of Mr. Trump said that the walkback of the walkback was not necessarily damaging to him. “I wish I could say it was foolish, but what have the actual consequences been in the real world or in Republican support of him sticking to his guns?” said William Kristol, the conservative columnist and prominent Trump opponent. “Being the tough, unapologetic guy, it keeps his brand stronger even if he takes a little bit of a hit.”
Mr. Trump continued his condemnation of Ms. Omar on Friday, claiming that she had “called our country and our people garbage.” It was not clear what remarks she made that he was referring to.
That attack continued his racially charged fight with Ms. Omar and three of her fellow Democratic congresswomen of color — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — into a sixth day.
Administration officials and campaign aides have rejected comparisons between Mr. Trump’s goading of elected women of color to “go back” to where they came from and what happened in Charlottesville. One was a deadly incident, they said, the other was a political fight.
But campaign aides have acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s tweets on Sunday — in which he used an age-old racist adage in telling the congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” — were unexpected, used loaded and unhelpful language, and any political strategy attached to them was reverse-engineered after the fact.
The president claimed his attacks were not politically motivated. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad politically; I don’t care,” he said. “I can tell you this, you can’t talk that way about our country. Not when I’m the president.”
While Republican lawmakers expressed outrage over what his supporters chanted in North Carolina, they kept their criticism of Mr. Trump to themselves.
Mr. Trump’s aides and allies did their advising in private, but his changing message made it hard for them to know whether they were on the same page as the man they work for.
One campaign aide, Mercedes Schlapp, retweeted criticism of the chant, promoting a commentator on Twitter to write that Ms. Omar was “an American citizen and chanting for her deportation based on her exercise of the First Amendment is disgusting.” On Friday, Ms. Schlapp said she stood by that tweet.
“I agree with the president on not going forward with the chant,” she said.
“When you look at her policies,” she said, referring to Ms. Omar, “that’s the problem. Her policies themselves are dangerous for America, and that’s what we’re concerned about.”
The president of the Phoenix police union for rank-and-file officers said Thursday the group is researching a service that would "scrub" an officer's name from the internet.
The announcement comes in the wake of a Phoenix Police Department investigation into some officers who posted racist and inflammatory commentary on their personal Facebook accounts.
Michael "Britt" London, the president for the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, made the announcement in an uploaded video with updates for union members on the group's Facebook page.
"The Facebook investigation is still current, still going on," London said in the video, adding that someone associated with the union "has contacted a service that will scrub your name from the Internet. It's more of a security and privacy type thing."
He said in the video that the service could cost $3 a month but the union is still working on a deal. He directed members to call the union or visit a union members-only Facebook account to get more information.
Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a spokesman for Phoenix police, said in a Thursday email to The Arizona Republic the investigation into the Facebook posts is still under investigation by the department.
Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams said in a statement that a labor organization has the legal right to communicate with its members. She said this won’t affect the investigation.
"Questions about the actions of those organizations should be directed to them," she said in the statement. "The Professional Standards Bureau has confirmed that this action by one of our labor organizations will have no adverse impact on the current investigation into social-media posts, which is still ongoing."
London said in a statement the service is not to hide anything but to protect the privacy of officers and their loved ones from the public.
“The need for this service is to prevent the ongoing and frequent harassment of officers and their loved ones - harassment that is happening daily and that puts officers and their families at risk," the statement says. “This has nothing to do with hiding or ignoring anything. It has everything to do with keeping police officers and their families safe from those who continue to attack them online.”
97 Phoenix officers identified
In June, the Plain View Project, launched by Philadelphia lawyer Emily Baker-White, created a database of public Facebook posts and comments made by current and former police officers from several jurisdictions across the United States, including Phoenix.
The database shows hundreds of officers across the country posted racist or misogynistic statements or condoned violence on their Facebook accounts.
The project examined the accounts of about 2,900 officers. It reviewed the accounts of an additional 600 retired police officers.
It found 179 questionable posts from 97 current and former Phoenix officers. Many endorsed violence, in some cases against Mexicans, Muslims, women and criminal defendants.
BuzzFeed News and the nonprofit news organization Injustice Watch initially reported the story.
Union defends the officers
The Phoenix officer union, also known as PLEA, has previously defended the officers identified in the database.
"People — including cops — say things they regret or that are unfortunate," London has previously said. "But to judge an entire police department by a few social-media posts is doing a grave disservice to the nearly 3,000 sworn officers who work the front lines in Phoenix every day."
At the time, he also said police officers have used Facebook to raise money for officers who have died in the line of duty and support Phoenix residents, and the investigation didn't highlight those posts.
"Every day, we use social media to better connect and better understand our city," he said. "Unfortunately, in the hunt for a negative spin, this anti-police group ignored all that in favor of absolute sensationalism. Their bias says far more about them than it does the police officers they’ve chosen to target."
'Congratulation George Zimmerman'
Many of the Phoenix officers' posts in the database endorsed violence, in some cases against Mexicans, Muslims, women and criminal defendants.
Phoenix Police Officer Joshua Ankert, who has been with the department since 2007, wrote, "CONGRATULATIONS GEORGE ZIMMERMAN!!! Thank you for cleaning up our community one thug at a time," in July 2013, the day after a jury in Florida acquitted Zimmerman of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager.
Phoenix Officer Ryan Nielsen, a 15-year veteran, wrote a Facebook post on March 2010 complaining about his "ghetto neighbors" having a party and making a lot of noise.
In the comment exchange with someone else, Nielsen wrote that he planned to buy a shotgun but that his AR — presumably referring to the AR-15 firearm — would help protect his house. He also said in the comment section that he may call the Sheriff's Office and report the residence may be a drop house, a term used by law enforcement to describe a property where smugglers house undocumented immigrants as they await payments.
Officer David Pallas, who has been with the department since 1987, uploaded a meme on June 2016 critical of the Obamas. The meme depicts Michelle Obama with a quote that says, "Every single day I wake up in a house that was built by slaves..." Underneath it, there's a picture of famed actor John Wayne with a caption that says, "THEN GET OUT! AND TAKE YOUR GAY MUSLIM HUSBAND WITH YOU."
That same month, Pallas posted another meme depicting the Quran with a caption that read, "HOW ABOUT BANNING THIS. IT OFFENDS ME!!"
Among the retired Phoenix police officers listed in the database was Stephen Wamsley, who teaches a police-science class at Moon Valley High School.
Posts from Wamsley's account celebrated instances of violence against criminals and suspects. One referred to a shootout between biker gangs as "thinning the herd" and called for more violent executions and less humane treatments of death row inmates.
"Let's go back to the firing squad," one post said. "Why don't we sell tickets and give the proceeds to the (victim's) family?" Other posts contain Islamophobic rhetoric, including two promoting "crusades."
Reuben Carver III, who has been with the department since 2002, wrote a Facebook post on March 16, 2011, that said, "Its a good day for a choke hold."
'Nazi pigs'
Early this month, police released 911 calls in which callers made threatening comments to officers after a Phoenix police encounter went viral. Some of the callers vowed to kill the officers involved in the video and called them "Nazi pigs," among other epithets.
Police have said they are also investigating these calls.
The bystander video that spurred the calls shows Phoenix officers pointing guns and yelling threats at Dravon Ames, his pregnant fiancee, Iesha Harper, and their two young daughters after the couple said their 4-year-old daughter took a doll from a Family Dollar store.
'Shocked at the posts'
The Phoenix Police Department's social media policy tells employees to be cautious of their "speech and related activity on social media sites" because it "may be considered a reflection upon their position, and, in some instances, this Department."
It goes on to say that, "Employees are prohibited from using social media in a manner that would cause embarrassment to or discredit the department in any way."
Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams has pulled some officers off of their "enforcement assignments" because of the Facebook posts identified in the database.
"When I started looking more at the posts, I'll be honest with you, I was shocked," Williams said shortly after the database was made public. "Shocked at the posts and the comments that clearly promoted and created hate and dissension."
Donald Trump has a rich, varied history of racism, bigotry, and discrimination going back to at least 1973, when the Justice Department filed a racial bias suit against him for mistreating Black applicants and tenants all over New York. At the time, it was one of the largest lawsuits of its kind. That was 46 years ago. Since then, the list of offenses has piled up. In a better time, his racist behavior would have prevented him from ever being elected, but here we are. He’s president and now he’s openly carrying that bigotry right into the Oval Office. Not only do I think he is violating his oath of office — I think his open, flagrant bigotry is an impeachable offense.
In the days when Trump was busy tempting the front pages of tabloids in between guest appearances on professional wrestling pay-per-view shows, his racism, misogyny, and even open accusations of sexual assault and harassment were frequently dismissed by the general public with a wink and a nod. An equal mix of wealth, white privilege, and the public’s obsession with celebrities that allowed him to ride above it all. But now he’s president of the United States, not just an NBC employee with a bad reality TV show where not a single “Apprentice” ever developed into an actual meaningful employee. And he is, in theory, subjected to the Constitution and all of the laws governing the presidency. But the thing is, somebody actually has to enforce them.
Do you know the difference between implicit bias and explicit bias? I need to explain it for what I’m about to say to really make sense. Across the country, corporations and government agencies, including police departments, are offering a wave of what’s called “implicit bias training.” The fundamental theory is that, in this country, otherwise well-meaning employees can be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or xenophobic in ways that they may not really even be aware of. It’s the notion that people unknowingly or unconsciously discriminate against others. Racial slurs might not be used, but the resulting bias and discrimination are real and painful. It’s about preferences and promotions, and who’s punished and who’s spared. I’m not saying I buy it; I’m telling you that’s what implicit bias is. Implicit bias training is designed to teach people how they may be advancing systemic oppression without being fully aware.
Why don’t corporations and agencies have training for explicit bias? The answer is simple: Explicit bias literally violates thousands of laws, codes, and policies across the country. When you are an open bigot on your job, the standard operating procedure is that you don’t need training, you need to be fired. That’s because bigotry is dangerous. It’s dangerous to have a racist doctor or nurse. It’s dangerous to have an openly bigoted police officer. That’s why responsible prosecutors are now ignoring cases from police officers found to have been openly bigoted on social media — because it’s impossible to trust a person’s judgment and credibility, especially about people different than them, when they publicly admit to hating those people. All over the country, people are routinely fired for explicit bias. As they should be.
If this past week has taught us anything at all, it has taught us that Trump is not implicitly biased. To tell four sitting congresswomen of color that they should “go back” to where they came from is so overtly bigoted that an almost identical phrase is listed on Trump’s own government website for the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
Ethnic slurs and other verbal or physical conduct because of nationality are illegal if they are severe or pervasive and create an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment, interfere with work performance, or negatively affect job opportunities. Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person’s foreign accent or comments like, ‘Go back to where you came from,’ whether made by supervisors or by co-workers.
Can we pause there for a moment? The United States government literally specifies the very phrase that Trump just uttered as a prime example of unlawful workplace misconduct.
The paragraph also alludes to why explicit bias is so dangerous. After Trump first targeted the four congresswomen on social media, his followers then ran with it and gave his initial attack a life of its own: Thousands of attendees at a Trump rally in North Carolina began chanting “send her back, send her back” to Rep. Ilhan Omar. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think it was and is one of the single most bigoted moments in modern American politics. The next day, Trump, who has told over 10,000 lies in office, told one of the dumbest of them all – saying that he tried to stop his followers from making the bigoted chant. He said that like we don’t have eyes and ears. He basked in the chant. He stopped giving his speech and allowed the chant to grow. And did so for a full 13 seconds. And when he started speaking again, he said nothing of the moment. In fact, he restarted his attack on Omar as soon as the chant died down.
Let me share a quote with you. And then I’d love for you to guess who said it.
Donald Trump is not just allowing it to happen, but actively encouraging it to happen, is an indefensible disgrace.
The President keeps insisting he’s not a racist, and I’ve repeatedly said that in the 13 years I’ve known him, I’ve personally never witnessed him being a racist.
But since running for the White House, his inflammatory language has flirted ever closer to crossing the line into overt racism, and now he’s crossed that line. Big time.
Let’s be very unambiguously clear: what happened in North Carolina last night was not just racist-fueled demagoguery but bordered on fascism.
There was the President of the United States whipping his supporters into a hyper-animated state of rage about a political opponent because of her ethnicity.
That was from the blowhard Piers Morgan: a lifelong friend and defender of Trump. Before we applaud him, I should note that soon after Morgan made this bold, respectable statement on Trump, he went into his own indefensible attack on Congresswoman Omar. But the greater point is this: Piers fucking Morgan said it “was not just racist-fueled demagoguery but bordered on fascism.”
Presidents and prime ministers across the world are calling Trump out and openly saying that the bigotry demonstrated by Trump and his followers is depraved and unacceptable. On top of that, you couldn’t name a single serious employer in this nation that would allow an employee to say and do what Trump and his followers are saying and doing.
I’d call that a problem. It basically means that the only reason Trump isn’t fired is because he’s president of the United States. He’d be fired from any other major corporation for this dangerous tomfoolery.
And only Congress has any real power to hold the president accountable. And while scores of progressive members of Congress have called for impeachment hearings to proceed, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for whatever reason, is against it.
Let’s examine what the presidential oath of office actually says. It’s one simple sentence. It says, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
I have questions.
Can we sincerely say that a man who has done what Trump did this week is honoring that oath? Can an explicitly biased person “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States?” Can an overtly racist person “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution?”
I emphatically say, hell no. An explicitly racist person cannot “preserve, protect, and defend” the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Both of those clauses were authored to protect groups of people who would otherwise be marginalized. They’ve been challenged and successfully defended for over 150 years because they were designed to ensure that all American citizens are treated equally. When Trump became president, he swore an oath that he, too, would play by these rules.
Can a person who is explicitly, overtly racist treat everyone equally under the law? I feel dumb even asking such a question. Now if you let them tell it, they’ll tell you “yes” a hundred times. But you can’t let a racist be the judge of whether or not their racism negatively fuels and shapes the way they think and make decisions. It’s the very reason why overtly racist people are fired from every single type of place of employment. If you are an overtly racist person, Walmart will fire you from bagging groceries. Uber will fire you from driving cars. Amazon will fire you from packing boxes. McDonalds will fire you from making burgers. Because you are a liability, and you can no longer be trusted.
The president of the United States should be held to a higher standard than an entry-level employee at any Fortune 5000 company in this country. Right now, he isn’t.
And only Congress has the power to change that.
Three members of a white supremacist group were sentenced Friday to between two and three years in prison for punching, kicking and choking anti-racism protesters at a white nationalist rally in Virginia and political rallies in California.
Members of the now-defunct Rise Above Movement were caught on camera assaulting counterprotesters before a planned “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.
Benjamin Daley, Michael Miselis and Thomas Gillen each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to riot. The men were sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville by Judge Norman Moon.
Daley, 26, of Torrance, California, was sentenced to 37 months in prison. Gillen, 25, of Redondo Beach, California, received a sentence of 33 months. Miselis, 30, of Lawndale, California, received 27 months.
U.S. Attorney Thomas Cullen said the men were motivated by “hateful ideology.”
“They were not interested in peaceful protest or lawful First Amendment expression; instead, they intended to provoke and engage in street battles with those that they perceived as their enemies,” Cullen said in a statement.
Members of the California-based Rise Above Movement frequently posted photographs and videos of themselves engaging in mixed martial arts street-fighting techniques along with messages related to the white supremacy movement.
In court documents, prosecutors said that from March 2017 to August 2017, RAM members — including Daley, Gillen and Miselis — engaged in acts of violence at rallies and organized demonstrations in Charlottesville and in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California.
As part of their guilty pleas, the men acknowledged that they did not commit the acts in self-defense.
Attorneys for Miselis and Gillen did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment.
Daley’s attorney, Lisa Lorish, said she and lawyers for Miselis and Gillen argued that prosecutors had not proved that a hate crime sentencing enhancement should apply in their cases. Lorish said Judge Moon denied the enhancement for all three men.
A fourth member of RAM, Cole Evan White, also pleaded guilty to a riot conspiracy charge and will be sentenced later.
President Trump retweeted a far-right British commentator Saturday morning who suggested “send her back!” is the 2020 version of “lock her up!”
The president, who spent Saturday morning retweeting people praising and defending him, promoted four tweets from Katie Hopkins, including one that showed a clip of Trump speaking about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at a political rally this week. Trump paused while the crowd chanted, “send her back!”
“New Campaign slogan for #2020? ‘Don’t love it? Leave it!’ Send her back is the new lock her up. Well done to #TeamTrump,” Hopkins tweeted with the video, referring to an anti-Hillary Clinton line commonly chanted at Trump rallies in 2016.
It’s been almost a week since Trump attacked Omar and her colleagues, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) with a racist tweet saying they should “go back” and fix the countries they’re originially from, rather than criticizing the United States.
All four women are U.S. citizens, and only Omar was born abroad, in Somalia.
Since then, Trump has continued to escalate the fight, refusing to back down from his contention that the Congresswomen “hate” America.
The day after the rally, he said he wasn’t happy with the crowd’s chant. But by Friday, he was defending his supporters.
In another tweet that Trump shared, Hopkins spoke into a camera for two minutes about how “brilliant” Trump was to go after four minority congresswomen and make the 2020 election a choice between them and him.
“Are you going to choose socialists, choose ISIS, choose the Palestinian flag, choose CAIR?” she wrote. “Or are you going to choose to Make America Great Again?”
In a separate tweet, she lamented, “How I wish we had such leadership in the U.K. Don’t like this country? Don’t like what it gives you? Then leave.”
Hopkins is known for her incendiary commentary. She wrote a column in 2015 comparing migrants to “cockroaches” and “feral humans.” After the 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Hopkins blamed the rabbi for supporting “mass migration.”
Trump has accused Omar of being anti-semitic because of comments she’s made criticizing the Israeli government and its supporters.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about whether Trump is aware of Hopkins’ past tweets. But it’s not the first time he’s shared her commentary.
A few weeks ago, he retweeted her celebrating the ascent of far-right leaders around the world.
When Donald Trump first proclaimed “Make America Great Again,” many white Americans focused on the slogan’s explicit appeal. Why wouldn’t we want America to be great again? But many of us who do not happen to be white understood the slogan’s subtext: Make America White Again. Immigrants, refugees and people of color have always recognized Trumpism for what it is — a politics of nostalgia for an era of unquestioned white superiority and power. Trump’s comments last weekend, that four congresswomen should “go back” to their ancestors’ countries if they don’t like this one, were also an argument that immigrants of color should simply be grateful to be here. Increasingly, post-white Americans are refusing to perform what many white Americans expect of them: docile compliance, with the implicit sequel of servitude. Instead, these proud Americans, who don’t hesitate to call Trump out, are both thankful and critical.
Call this mixture of gratitude and attitude a nuanced patriotism, a complicated love. Nuance like this is not a part of Trump’s rhetoric or his vision of America. Now, confronted by women of color who are not performing the gratitude and servitude he expects, he has made his own best case for even the most hesitant white people to recognize how white supremacy underlies his vision: “If they don’t like it here, they can leave.” This paraphrase of the classic insult “love it or leave it” implies that the four members of Congress do not belong to the United States, even though three of them — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — were born here. (The fourth, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, came here from Somalia as a girl and became a citizen.)
With these and other statements and silences, Trump is making whiteness, which has functioned as the politely invisible norm in American society, into the impolite, visible norm. Along the way, he is creating a situation where white people must choose: Be critical of their own whiteness or embrace it wholeheartedly. The fact that so many white people immediately recognized his racism is one good thing that has come out of this controversy, proof that they can identify and resist white supremacy.Exclusion Act, the first time it targeted a racial group for immigration exclusion.
Asian immigrants, and their American descendants, can testify to the pain of perpetually being suspected as foreigners. “Where are you from?” was the not-so-friendly question that many us have experienced. And if we tried to say that we’re from here, we braced ourselves for the follow-up: “No, where are you really from?” How often is a white person subject to this question? Do people ponder Robert Mueller’s ancestry? No.
Because whiteness is a paradoxical amalgamation of essence and transformation. On the one hand, white people’s whiteness is natural, inevitable, normal. Until recently, most white people never had their whiteness challenged or thought twice about it. Now their whiteness is more often questioned, thrown into relief against “terrifying hordes” of brown people at the southern border and increasingly vocal and visible populations of color within the United States. Now white people have to confront their whiteness. Some understand that it entails white privilege and that if we are to have a more just society, some of that privilege must be given up. Others deny that white privilege exists and retreat even further into a defensive whiteness, which results, in its extreme, in white supremacy.
On the other hand, whiteness is mutable, changing and becoming more inclusive. During the period of Chinese exclusion, for example, the Irish were not white like the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The Irish and other Europeans of questionable desirability — Greeks, Italians, Polish, Catholics, Jews and so on — only gradually became white, beginning at the turn of the 20th century. A new, pan-European whiteness solidified as the country kept out those clearly not white. White middle-class and working-class identity formed, attached to varying degrees of economic prosperity, culminating in the election of the Irish descendant John F. Kennedy Jr. This is the white privilege that results from getting into this country, getting jobs and other benefits that nonwhite people and women could not get, and claiming a forgetful Americanness, amnesiac about its origins.
A fusion of white supremacy and promised economic ascendancy is what Trump believes will repair the “American carnage” he identified in his inauguration speech. Here is another contradiction from a man of contradictions. He accuses these Democratic congresswomen of coming from places that are “a complete and total catastrophe . . . totally broken and crime infested,” but these are the same characteristics of a stricken America that he promised to fix. To think that they must “Make America Great Again,” he and his followers have to believe that America is like these other places, because it has been contaminated by the otherness brought in by nonwhite people. Against this terrifying mixing, he and his supporters want a comforting ideological, moral and racial purity.
That is what is most dangerous about Trump: the nostalgia for purity that supposes America is a white homeland and that motivates him and his followers to tell others to go back to faraway homes. This nostalgia is based on a fiction that the uncontaminated America is an immaculate place, despite the realities of an imperfect social fabric and the many tragedies taking place in actual American households: divorce, violence, homophobia, mental illness, unemployment and drug abuse — to name only some maladies. As for many immigrants, their new home in America is often as much a place of discomfort, even torment, as one of love and belonging. Immigrant stories are full of pain — the trauma of past wars and refugee experiences, the brutality of working constantly, the mundane destruction of affection that comes about when parents cannot spend time with increasingly distant children.
Not surprisingly, home has been a preoccupation for many American storytellers besides Trump. Against the Trumpian story of a Great White Nation, many of our storytellers have been telling more complex tales about America since at least the time of the runaway slave Frederick Douglass, whose home had been a plantation. It was no mistake that Toni Morrison, in “Beloved,” named the slave plantation in her novel Sweet Home. It was also no accident that Luis Alberto Urrea called his Great (Mexican) American Novel about a loving yet dysfunctional family — set on the border between California and Mexico — “The House of Broken Angels.” For many Native Americans, home was a reservation, a U.S. government euphemism for open-air ghettoization, and the setting of memorable novels by Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko. For Asian Americans, claustrophobic homes where immigrants hid are endless, as in Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior,” Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” and countless other books. Celeste Ng took this problematic home to its logical conclusion in “Little Fires Everywhere,” when the rebellious daughter of a white Ohio family runs away after burning down the family’s seemingly perfect suburban house. This is what whiteness has always been about in America: the great illusion that covers the enduring alienation, the spiritual loss that underlies the American Dream and gives it dramatic tension, as Jack Kerouac showed in “On the Road.” Even Trump, with his notion of “American carnage,” can be understood as an inheritor of Kerouac. What our storytellers have told us, over and over, is that home is often a complicated place that some want to stay in and some cannot wait to leave. Love it or leave it? If only life were so simple!
Nostalgia, which means homesickness, eradicates this complexity. Home often appears in our memory through a distorting longing so strong it borders on illness, where we forget all that might have been wrong and fetishize all that seemed good. “Make America Great Again” is an expression of this homesickness, threatening to hurt us all by defining home in only one way and turning it into propaganda, in the process expelling all those who do not fit home’s definition. Those fearful of change are homesick for an America that was, in fact, not so great for many people, including those white people who never benefited from America’s promise, from the poor to the working class to women of many backgrounds. To truly make America great requires the paradoxical ability to see that America as a home has always been imperfect. To make America a home for everyone means acknowledging that home is what we love and fear, what we remake and renovate.
This is not a hopeless project. In the late 19th century, almost no one helped Chinese immigrants. They had to defend themselves. Today, the spectacular cruelty of Trump’s rhetoric and his immigration policies is attacked constantly, both by people of color and by white people of conscience. We are a different America now (although that does not mean we cannot regress). To progress, we must redefine home and who belongs to it. While Trump wants to separate us into white Americans and everyone else, we must forge connections among people who do not look or think alike. We must say that this home is capacious enough for the white people to whom Trump appeals and for the rest of us, and that our destinies are tied together in a fateful kinship that no amount of border-closing or deportation will forestall. Economic prosperity does not have to be tied to nostalgic white supremacy. Instead, economic equality can emerge only by working through the agonies of our racial history, one that has exploited the poor of all colors and divided struggling white people from their nonwhite allies who also seek economic justice.
This is our American home. Passions are high, voices are loud, but this is the reality: Home is where we are, home is what we claim, and no one can tell us to go home if we are already at home.
President Trump’s tweet proposing that four Democratic congresswomen of color — three of them born in the United States, one a naturalized citizen — “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” was textbook racism. Yet while some Republicans condemned the statement — Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), who is black, lamented its “racially offensive language” — others flatly denied that there was a racial component to the salvo. A particularly contorted reaction came from Rep. Andy Harris (Md.), who said, “Clearly, it’s not a racist comment,” adding that the president “could have meant go back to the district they came from, to the neighborhood they came from.” But the president could hardly have made his meaning more clear: He said the four “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”
“Well, I certainly do not think the president’s a racist,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who suggested that the tweet was justified by the representatives’ constant criticism “not only [of] the president but also Congress and our country.”
Fear of crossing a president who’s popular with the Republican base surely explains some of the convoluted rationalizations on offer. But a psychological phenomenon called cognitive dissonance may also shed light on some people’s unwillingness to acknowledge the self-evident racism in the tweets.
Cognitive dissonance, first described by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the late 1950s, occurs when conflict emerges between what people want to believe and the reality that threatens those beliefs. The human mind does not like such inconsistencies: They set off alarms that spur the mind to alter some beliefs to make the perceived reality fit with one’s preferred views.
In the case of Trump’s remarks — when absorbed by his supporters who do not consider themselves racist — those inconsistencies can be summarized in a sort of syllogism: (1) I do not support racists. (2) I do support President Trump. (3) President Trump has just made a racist remark. Those three facts simply don’t fit together comfortably in the mind.
Just as a hungry person will seek food to alleviate hunger, Festinger argued, people who experience mental discrepancies of this sort will work to put them in accord, to reduce the dissonance. And they will often go to extraordinary lengths to do so: Resolving cognitive dissonance often takes considerable mental gymnastics.
Supporters of Trump who experience cognitive dissonance over his remarks essentially have three psychological options to resolve it, altering in various ways the three beliefs that are in tension. One is to change the belief that they do not support racists. This response is unlikely, however, because it would require a massive overhaul of the view of the self, placing the person in a category he or she knows is morally dubious, not to mention socially vilified. Very rare is the person who will resolve psychological dissonance by saying, “Actually, I am a monster.”
Another option is to introduce new beliefs that bolster support for Trump. This does not address the conflicts among beliefs head-on but rather lessens the impact of the inflammatory statement by considering positive information about the president. One approach along these lines is to emphasize the awfulness of the policy positions and statements of the congresswomen Trump attacked, thereby casting the president as a defender of decency (and perhaps as a victim himself, not an aggressor). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), for instance, described Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) as “a bunch of communists” who “hate Israel” and “hate our own country.” Relatedly, Marc Short, Vice President Pence’s chief of staff, played up Trump’s lack of racism in other contexts, noting that his transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, was born in Taiwan. As reasons for supporting the president grow — either his sterling qualities or the negative characteristics of his opponents — it becomes easier to overlook a single misstep.
A third route to resolving dissonance, in this specific case, is to flatly (and boldly) reject the consensus that telling someone to “go back” to their family’s country of origin is racist. Rep. Harris — with his revisionist argument that Trump wanted the women to go back to their districts — is probably the most striking example of this. But Fox News analyst Brit Hume may also belong in this category, with his hairsplitting statement that Trump’s comments were “nativist, xenophobic . . . and politically stupid” — but absolutely not racist, “a word so recklessly flung around these days that its actual meaning is being lost.” If Trump is just the latest in a long parade of people falsely accused of racism by liberals, that, too, makes it easier to take his side. (“Xenophobic” is not too far from “racist,” definitionally, but it does not carry nearly the same moral charge, so reframing the accusation that way may well ease psychological tension.)
Since the uproar, Trump has proclaimed that many people agree with his controversial statement and that indeed, “a lot of people love it.” But decades of behavioral research suggests that not all the people refraining from condemning the president support his attacks. Instead, they’re doing mental contortions to explain away the ugliness, to justify their continued support of him — and to maintain their positive views of themselves.
President Trump’s own top aides didn’t think he fully understood what he had done last Sunday, when he fired off a trio of racist tweets before a trip to his golf course.
After he returned to the White House, senior adviser Kellyanne Conway felt compelled to tell him why the missives were leading newscasts around the country, upsetting allies and enraging opponents. Calling on four minority congresswomen — all citizens, three born in the United States — to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” had hit a painful historical nerve.
Trump defended himself. He had been watching “Fox & Friends” after waking up. He wanted to elevate the congresswomen, as he had previously discussed with aides. The Democratic lawmakers — Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — were good foils, he had told his advisers, including campaign manager Brad Parscale. The president said he thought he was interjecting himself into Democratic Party politics in a good way.
As is often the case, Trump acted alone — impulsively following his gut to the dark side of American politics, and now the country would have to pick up the pieces. The day before, on the golf course, he hadn’t brought it up. Over the coming days, dozens of friends, advisers and political allies would work behind the scenes to try to fix the mess without any public admission of error because that was not the Trump way.
“He realized that part of it was not playing well,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump confidant, who golfed Saturday with the president and spoke to him about it on Monday. “Well, he always doubles down. Then he adjusts.”
Like others, Graham urged Trump to reframe away from the racist notion at the core of the tweets — that only European immigrants or their descendants are entitled to criticize the country. Advisers wrote new talking points and handed him reams of opposition research on the four congresswomen. Pivot to patriotism. Focus on their ideas and behavior, not identity. Some would still see a racist agenda, the argument went, but at least it would not be so explicit.
“The goal is to push back against them and make it not about you,” Graham said.
The damage control did not save elected Republicans from their chronic struggle to navigate Trump’s excesses. Democrats were demanding a reckoning, a vote on the floor of the House condemning his racist remarks that would showcase their own unity and moral vision. The White House would mobilize an intense whip operation, putting Trump repeatedly on the phone, to keep his members in line.
Then, just as many felt the firestorm was coming under control, Trump’s own supporters would set it ablaze again, with a “Send her back!” chant at a Wednesday night rally in Greenville, N.C., inspired by the president’s own words.
This account of Trump’s tweets and their aftermath is based on interviews with 26 White House aides, advisers, lawmakers and others involved in the response — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share behind-the-scenes details.
On Sunday morning, Trump tweeted that the “Washington Post story, about my speech in North Carolina and tweet, with its phony sources who do not exist, is Fake News.”
The political crisis was both familiar and extraordinary — engulfing every aspect of American politics, from the presidential campaign to the White House to Capitol Hill. Many in both parties, well acquainted with Trump’s history of racially charged rhetoric, were stunned at how far he had gone this time. Republicans were fearful of the potential damage but reluctant to confront or contradict Trump. The White House and the Trump campaign sought to contain the furor without alienating key supporters. Democrats finally unified after a week of squabbling to roundly condemn the president.
And at key moments, there were attempts to pretend it hadn’t happened at all. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) talked to Trump early in the week about ongoing budget negotiations, the tweets never even came up, according to two people familiar with the communication.
In the end, Trump succeeded in at least one respect. Just a few days earlier, he had publicly pined for the days when he could put out a tweet that took off “like a rocket.” Now he had done it again. Americans had to choose sides, and he had drawn the dividing line.
'Making America white again'
When Trump woke up to tweet on July 14, the nation’s leadership was scattered, its attention focused elsewhere.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was out of state. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had flown back home to San Francisco. The leaders of the House Republican Caucus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Steve Scalise (La.), were at a fundraising retreat at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Pennsylvania.
Of the group, only Pelosi, who sleeps just a handful of hours most nights, acted quickly. Trump’s tweets landed about 4:30 a.m. on the West Coast. Within three hours, just as Trump was arriving at his Virginia golf club, she had condemned his words on Twitter, calling out the racial tone directly, saying Trump’s “plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.”
Trump’s eruption gave her a chance to move beyond an irritating, and increasingly personal, split with the four congresswomen. They had been furious when Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic Caucus declined to follow their guidance on a recent immigration funding vote. Now they were united.
At a joint news conference by the four lawmakers late Monday, Omar said Trump’s tweets represented “the agenda of white nationalists.”
Democratic candidates for president reacted quickly with outrage and offered support for the embattled House lawmakers.
Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), the child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, told her campaign staff that she had been targeted by the same “go home” attack. In an emotional response at an Iowa event Tuesday, Harris said Trump had “defiled” his office and “it has to stop.”
“I am going to tell you what my mother told me: ‘Don’t you ever let anyone tell you who you are. You tell them who you are. Period,’ ” Harris said, growing visibly angry as she spoke. “We are Americans, and we will speak with the authority of that voice.”
Trump’s own campaign, by contrast, was caught off guard by the tweets and didn’t know initially how to respond. Top aides had been bragging about their ability to fundraise and capitalize on social media advertising when the president blew up the news cycle. But they placed no Facebook ads to ride this wave. The Republican National Committee was silent for more than a day. No one wanted to touch it, advisers said.
“People have been through so many of these with him,” said one Republican involved in the fight.
Cliff Sims, a former West Wing aide to Trump, explained the mentality that still governs the building. “The people who thrive and survive over the long term are the ones who are okay with going where the president leads,” he said.
But as the workweek began, it became clear that the uproar could not be ignored. A person involved in the president’s fundraising effort said many donors were dismayed by the comments — but that there was scant desire to back away from the president publicly.
“You put your head up, and you get it cut off,” this person said. “And then everyone remembers you weren’t loyal when this blows over.”
Many Republican lawmakers demurred or tried to find a middle ground, avoiding direct criticism of Trump while nonetheless expressing face-saving dissatisfaction. “We should focus on ways to bring people together,” said Sen. Cory Gardner, who faces a tough reelection race next year in Colorado.
Inside the weekly Republican lunch on Tuesday, GOP leaders tried to avoid direct references to Trump’s racist comments. McConnell repeated a phrase famously uttered by the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, a figure he reveres: “I attack ideas. I don’t attack people.”
One effusive Trump ally, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), spoke up in defense of Trump inside the lunch, ticking off a litany of conservative grievances against the left, such as their attacks against immigration enforcement and comments perceived as anti-Semitic.
“Let’s not lose sight of, frankly, the radical views that are coming out of the House,” Daines said in an interview, describing his message to the other Republican senators.
Still, other GOP senators were uneasy. At a minimum, it was “dumb politics,” said one senior GOP senator, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid about the president’s tweet.
Two of the harshest Republican pushbacks came, tellingly, from the only two elected black Republicans serving in Congress. Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) called the tweets “racially offensive.”
“There is no room in America for racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and hate,” said Rep. Will Hurd (Tex.).
'Stay there and fight'
By midday Monday, the Republican battle to minimize the damage was unfolding on two fronts. The first was an effort to get Trump to shift his message, without admitting a mistake. The goal, said one senior White House aide, was to “get the message back to a place where we could defend the president.”
The idea was to argue that the four congresswomen hated America and were welcome to leave for that reason. There were other lines of attack as well. Omar had been condemned earlier in the year for comments criticizing support for Israel that many Democrats considered anti-Semitic. Pressley had seemed to suggest a racial litmus test for politics, saying Democrats don’t need “any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”
Privately, allies of the president said there was advantage in elevating “the Squad,” a term the lawmakers had adopted for themselves that Republicans have derided. They hoped to use the feud to portray reelecting the president as the patriotic thing to do.
“We’re talking about four congresswomen that have pretty extreme views,” Graham said. “If that’s the face of the Democratic Party, we’re in pretty good shape.”
On Capitol Hill, Republican leaders settled on a similar way to frame the disaster.
“I want to make absolutely clear that our opposition to our socialist colleagues has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion or with their race,” said Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), chair of the House Republican Conference.
Democrats, by now, were focused on making sure the nation did not forget Trump’s original message. Pelosi had begun working on a resolution of disapproval Sunday night in conversations with Reps. Jamie B. Raskin (Md.) and Tom Malinowski (N.J.). They had already introduced a resolution in April condemning white-supremacist terrorism, which was now repurposed.
But first they had to manage an unruly caucus, which began to jockey over the resolution’s language. At least one member pushed for a more aggressive resolution that would censure Trump. Another proposed inserting language commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The White House vote-counters initially feared as many as 50 Republicans might defect to support the resolution, and Trump ordered an all-hands White House effort to keep the GOP caucus together. White House aides told allies on the Hill that it was okay to criticize Trump, as long as they didn’t vote with Democrats.
Trump was obsessed with the vote tally and received regular briefings. Aides fed him a constant stream of lawmaker reactions and put him on the phone with several lawmakers. He told his team to tell any wafflers that he loves America and that they needed to pick sides. Trump called McCarthy to cancel an immigration meeting planned at the White House on Tuesday.
“Stay there and fight,” he told McCarthy.
Vice President Pence also worked the phones, telling Republican members not to fall for a Democratic trap.
In the end, only four Republicans broke ranks, including Hurd. Key members from districts where Trump’s “go back” message would play terribly stuck with the president. They included two members from New York, John Katko and Elise Stefanik, and Mario Diaz-Balart, the son of Cuban immigrants, whose Florida district is 76 percent Hispanic.
“A statement does not make one racist,” he told reporters.
'I'm sick of this mess'
While they lobbied in private, Republican leaders also began looking for a way to regain the narrative in public, at least in a way that could play with the conservative base.
When Pelosi came to the floor to read the words of the resolution, calling Trump’s comments racist — not Trump himself, despite what Diaz-Balart argued — Republicans saw an opening.
Their vehicle was an obscure text, Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice, a rule book that had governed the House floor since 1837. Based on old British traditions of respecting the king, an updated version of the manual specifically said the president could not be accused of making a racist statement, regardless of the accuracy of the allegation.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) — a United Methodist pastor and respected figure in the caucus — was up on the dais, tasked specifically by Pelosi to manage the debate. The chamber seemed close to finishing without incident when Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.) stood up to ask that Pelosi’s words be struck from the record by the parliamentarian.
Flashing through the Missouri congressman’s mind as he grew frustrated with Republican maneuvers were times he had been subjected to the same racist trope the president had tweeted, he said in an interview.
“I’m sick of this mess,” Cleaver recalled thinking. “In theology, we say the devil has two favorite tools: disunity and division. . . . I see people running around, the devil running around here, having fun. . . . I’m just thinking he’s just having a ball and using people to get delight.”
So, Cleaver announced, “I abandon the chair,” dropped the gavel and abruptly left the dais.
It didn’t matter that the president himself had said Pelosi’s response to him was “racist” just a day earlier, or that House rules still allowed the sentiment to be passed into law. Republicans finally had a way to cast themselves as the victims of an out-of-control Democratic leadership.
“Democrats are just so blinded by their hatred of the president that they use every single tool at their disposal to harass him,” said Chris Pack, communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “And it’s getting really pathetic.”
'We find a way'
By the time Trump landed in Greenville, N.C., on Wednesday evening, the mood had lifted in the White House, and Republicans believed the worst was behind them. A White House aide urged the traveling press pool to be sure to “tune in” to the rally, implying it was not something they would want to miss.
“You can take issue with his tactics,” said Josh Holmes, a close adviser to McConnell. “But the reality is that there is no political figure in memory who consistently saddles his opponents with unwinnable arguments quite like President Trump.”
But the nuance of Trump’s shifts all week had been lost on many in the crowd of thousands at the East Carolina University auditorium. Midway through his speech, as he recounted his denunciation of Omar’s record, the crowd began to chant “Send her back!” — a paraphrase of his own tweeted “go back.”
He paused for about 13 seconds to let the chants wash over him.
Back in Washington, and even for some Republicans in the room, it was a nightmare scenario suggesting that the nativism at the heart of Trump’s Sunday tweet — that nonwhite citizens had less claim on the country — would soon become a fixture of the campaign.
The following morning, Republican leaders, including McCarthy and Cheney, huddled at the vice president’s residence to figure out how to deal with the danger of the chant catching on. Pence agreed to take the matter to the president.
Matthew Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group that had hosted Trump at its convention in April, also spoke out. The chants, he wrote on Twitter, were “vile” and “have no place in our society.”
Others in the White House began to reconsider the emerging strategy of using Omar’s record as a rallying cry for the base.
Trump agreed to say the chants were wrong — but few thought that would be the end of it.
Indeed, by Friday, he was attacking the four lawmakers again, suggesting that no criticism of the country should be tolerated and praising the rally chanters he had distanced himself from just a day earlier. “Those are incredible people. Those are incredible patriots,” he said.
There was little sign, in other words, that Trump had been cowed by the week’s experience.
At one point during the North Carolina rally, the president mused about Pressley’s remarks on race, which he characterized as thinking “that people with the same skin color all need to think the same.”
“And just this week — can you imagine if I said that? It would be over, right?” Trump continued. “. . . But we would find a way to survive, right? We always do. Here we are. Here we are. We find a way. Got to always find a way.”
REPORT: US is Less Racist Under Trump Than Obama
Trump’s horrific racism spurs backlash among those polled. :facepalm:
REPORT: US is Less Racist Under Trump Than Obama
After President Trump’s crowd chanted “Send her back!” about an immigrant congresswoman last week, Vice President Pence led the charge to get Trump to publicly “disagree” with it.
But even Pence isn’t so sure what that’s worth, as his squirmy interview this weekend betrayed.
CBS News’s Major Garrett tried to pin down Pence on just how firm Trump’s opposition to the sentiment is. Given Trump’s soft, fact-challenged disavowal and then his refusal to repeat it — not to mention his long history of toying with and egging on his crowds’ provocations — Pence was at pains to say Trump would do anything to actually stop a recurrence.
The video is above, and below is the transcript, in which Garrett does yeoman’s work guiding Pence off his talking points:
PENCE: ... No, Major, the president wasn’t pleased about it. Neither was I. The president’s been very clear about that. But what we’re also not pleased about is the fact that there are four members of Congress --
MAJOR GARRETT: Yes, but you know that this president’s --
VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: -- who are engaging in the most outrageous statements --
MAJOR GARRETT: -- relationship with his supporters is as close as anyone has ever had in American politics. This could all go away with one simple word or a phrase or something. You have a chance to say it right now --
VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: Well --
MAJOR GARRETT: -- don’t do it again.
VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: Major --
MAJOR GARRETT: Is that your message?
VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: Major, the president was very clear --
MAJOR GARRETT: Was he?
VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: -- that he wasn’t happy about it. And that if it happened again he -- he might -- he might make an effort to speak out about it.
MAJOR GARRETT: He will make an effort to speak out about it?
VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: That’s what he’s already said.
“. . . If it happened again he — he might — he might make an effort to speak out about it.”
“Might.” “Might.”
The interview highlighted something I pointed out Friday when writing about Ivanka Trump’s reported role in all of this. It’s great to find out exactly who was urging Trump to condemn his crowd’s behavior, but what happens when the crowd chants it again?
Trump claimed when he said he “disagreed” with the chant that he started speaking quickly to put a halt to it. Except he didn’t. He seemed to revel in it, in fact, and he actually waited a full 13 seconds until the chant was finished.
There’s also the “Lock her up!” history. When those chants started, Trump also disavowed them, saying that “I didn’t like it” and that “I think it’s a shame that they said it, but a lot of people would say that should happen.” Eventually, he embraced “Lock her up!” and told Hillary Clinton in a debate that, if he were president, she would be “in jail.”
What’s happening today bears stark similarities to both that situation and when Trump vacillated on his response to the murder of a counterprotester by a white supremacist in Charlottesville in 2017. In both cases, Trump was apparently persuaded to condemn the actions, but then reversed himself. Regarding Charlottesville, Trump blamed the violence “on many sides” before offering a more forceful condemnation of the racists in the crowd. But then he returned to his equivocation, citing “very fine people on both sides” of the protests.
According to The Post’s Bob Woodward, Trump regards that middle response — the one in which he did what those around him wanted — as the “worst speech I’ve ever given” and “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made."
Given all of that, it seems the most likely response from Trump is a muted one. Even if you accept the argument that Trump wasn’t necessarily aiming for this kind of provocation when he first urged Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), an immigrant, and three U.S.-born congresswomen to “go back” to their countries — which is difficult to swallow — his inclination to toy with racial provocations and let his base play its part is just too strong. He also has had Stephen K. Bannon put the fear of God into him when it comes to alienating his base. The most likely outcome would seem to be a somewhat jokey “you guys shouldn’t do that, you’ll get me in trouble” — something that provides him some plausible deniability that he actually tried to shut down the chants, even if he didn’t really.
We’ll see what happens, but Pence clearly doesn’t want to wager his credibility on Trump actually following through on his advice. And if Trump doesn’t, it will make everyone around him who counseled him against this kind of incitement — including Pence and Trump’s own daughter — look pretty inept.
And to be clear, this is Trump’s own vice president not being certain Trump has the desire to repudiate a racist chant. That’s a remarkable lack of faith.
One of President Trump’s political gifts is his ability to cobble together parachutes after pushing his allies out of airplanes. A campaign-trail attack on Arizona Sen. John McCain for not being a hero was retrofitted into disparagement of McCain’s purported weakness on veterans’ issues. Any number of personal comments about other opponents get reworked into more palatable critiques as the ground rushes ever closer.
The most recent and perhaps most significant example? Trump’s effort to cast last weekend’s racist attacks on four Democratic congresswoman: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.).
On Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) appeared on CNN, where that attack — and the ensuing week of fallout — came up. Shortly before the interview aired, Trump tweeted that he didn’t believe that the congresswomen “are capable of loving our country.” Johnson was asked whether he agreed with that sentiment.
"You know, I would say, in general, the whole America love-it-or-leave it is not — not a new sentiment. Back in the '60s, that wasn't considered racist,” he replied. “I just find it very unfortunate that so many parts of our public debate right now are getting immediately stuck inside a racial framework, when what I would like to see is us moving toward that colorblind society.”
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was mentioned in the next sentence.
Johnson’s response didn’t really answer the question but, instead, the question he came prepared to answer: How did he feel about Trump’s racist tweets? And he deployed the parachute the president had generously provided: Actually, this is just an update to the “love it or leave it” argument from the 1960s.
It wasn’t, no matter how often Trump has tried to make that case over the past seven days. What Trump wrote, specifically, was:
“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
Nothing here about not loving the United States. The objection is to congresswomen from places with “the worst, most corrupt and inept” governments “viciously telling the people of the United States ... how our government is to be run.” Those congresswomen — three of whom, as you’ve no doubt heard, were born in the United States — should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places” of their births.
Trump wasn't saying “love it or leave it.” He was saying “you're not welcome here.”
The “go back where you came from” line is one with a long, fraught, racist history. The connotations of “love it or leave it” are somewhat less problematic, given the veneer of patriotism it includes. The effect is similar, though: Conform or leave.
In this case, the thing to which one must conform isn’t a love of country but, instead, an embrace of Trump’s politics.
Trump spent much of last week trying to argue that the Democrats at issue were hostile to the United States, a necessary precondition for his claim that he was saying “love it or leave it” (which, again, was itself the parachute he was building to save people from plummeting in defense of his racist tweets). His sweeping claim that the women were hostile to America is heavily based on out-of-context quotes, guilt by association or just making things up.
He claims, for example that they, collectively, “call the people of our country and our country ‘garbage.’ ” This is an apparent reference to Ocasio-Cortez at one point saying that the American people shouldn’t settle for compromise public policy that is “10 percent better from garbage” — a claim that is awfully hard to position as a disparagement of the country as a whole.
But some tried. White House adviser Stephen Miller was asked about that claim and others in an interview on Fox News on Sunday.
"She's talking about — she's talking about policies,” host Chris Wallace said. “She's not talking about the country and the people. Is garbage such a horrible word?”
"She's saying that America in her view right now is garbage,” Miller replied, which is obviously not true.
Wallace was ready. He showed Miller this tweet from Trump.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/524707073649827840
Miller expressed frustration that Wallace was conflating Trump’s criticism of Obama with the congresswomen’s purported criticism of America.
“Let me just cut to the heart of the issue,” Miller replied. “These four congresswomen detest America as it exists, as it is currently constructed. They want to tear down the structure of our country.”
Why? In short, because they advocate socialist policies and oppose Trump’s rhetoric on the border. Though Miller framed this as their collectively backing “open borders,” which is obviously not the case.
Trump, Miller said at another point, had a philosophy of “America First.”
"Saying that America needs to improve to get closer to an America First ideal, as the president did as a candidate, criticizing Obama, criticizing our trade deals, our foreign policies, our immigration policies, is out of love for America,” Miller claimed. “Saying, as Representative Ocasio-Cortez did, that illegal immigrants are in effect more American than Americans is fundamentally an anti-American statement.”
It’s not clear how Ocasio-Cortez made that alleged claim, but the throughline here is clear. Miller’s objections to Ocasio-Cortez are ones rooted in policy, in his belief that she advocates for legislative changes that would “tear down the structure” of the country. Miller exaggerates policies with which he disagrees in order to present them and their supporters as hostile to the country itself.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) spoke with CBS on Sunday, where she was presented with the similar challenge of responding to Trump’s claims. She took the Miller approach a step further.
“These members of the House of Representatives — more, it’s not just these four, it’s also some of the candidates who are running for president on the Democratic side — fundamentally believe in policies that are dangerous for this nation,” Cheney said. “And as Republicans we are going to fight against those even if the mainstream media accuses us of racism when we do that.”
So Trump’s tweets were about a policy dispute — as his “love it or leave it” retcon has it — and, in response to that policy dispute, Trump was being labeled as racist! It’s gone full circle: The racism allegation wasn’t about Trump’s racist tweets, but, instead, was a bad-faith response to the thing Trump claimed his tweets were actually about. Which they weren’t.
The Trump era of politics is complicated. Sometimes the parachutes he offers get tangled. Sometimes, like Cheney, you end up back on the plane.
For a week, President Trump and his supporters have been scrambling to distance his attacks against four Democratic congresswomen earlier this month from the obvious racist subtext they included. Trump decided that he’d present the attacks as being not about his views of the national origins of the women, none of whom are white, and instead on unsupported claims that they hate America. But as often happens when Trump is struggling to toe a line of argument, he couldn’t help but say what he actually thinks.
So, en route to the Supreme Court to pay his respects to the late justice John Paul Stevens, Trump tweeted a less-nuanced critique of the four, who refer to themselves as “the squad.”
“The 'Squad’ is a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart,” Trump wrote. “They are pulling the once great Democrat Party far left, and were against humanitarian aid at the Border . . . And are now against ICE and Homeland Security. So bad for our Country!”
The opposition to “humanitarian aid” is a reference to a vote in which the four — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — opposed a funding deal last month because of concerns about increasing funding for Homeland Security agencies of which they’re critical. But that, of course, is the less interesting part of the tweet.
Trump has suggested before that the four are racist. As the controversy over his tweets telling them to “go back” to the places they came from was boiling last Monday, Trump tweeted that Democrats should be wary of uniting “around the foul language & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular & unrepresentative Congresswomen.”
Asked later in the week about the “send her back” chant targeting Omar at his rally in North Carolina, Trump denied that the chant was racist, instead offering a counterexample of racism.
“No, you know what’s racist to me? When somebody goes out and says the horrible things about our country — the people of our country — that are anti-Semitic, that hate everybody, that speak with scorn and hate,” Trump said. “That, to me, is really a very dangerous thing. I think these four congressmen — and I could say some worse than others. But if you look at the statements they’ve made, when they call the people of our country ‘garbage,’ when they hit Israel the way they’ve hit Israel so hard, so horrible — I think, to me, that’s a disgrace.”
We’ll note, again, that this is not an accurate representation of what the four congresswomen have said. Trump and his allies have given multiple examples purporting to show anti-American activity on the part of the Democrats, the examples of which are centered on policy disputes with the administration.
In other words, Trump is claiming that allegations of racism directed at himself and his policies — and the supporters who embrace them — are themselves examples of racism. Analysis by The Washington Post found that Trump is three times as likely to accuse nonwhite people of racism as he is white people.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. When segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace was asked if he considered himself to be a racist during a 1968 interview, he offered a similar deflection.
“No sir, I don’t regard myself as a racist,” Wallace said, “and I think the biggest racists in the world are those who call other folks racist. I think the biggest bigots in the world are those who call other folks bigots.”
Last year, as the anniversary of the violent 2017 protests in Charlottesville arrived, Trump tweeted a condemnation of “all types” of racism. This was an obvious reference to the sort of reverse racism embedded in his and Wallace’s rhetoric: Purported racism against white people.
As we pointed out then, nearly two-thirds of Trump voters say they’re at least somewhat concerned about “reverse racism” impacting their lives — that is, the idea that whites are the focus of discrimination. That includes a quarter of that group who say they’re very concerned about it. Research from the Pew Research Center released in March shows that white Republicans and Republican-leaning independents see whites, blacks and Hispanics as about equally the target of discrimination.
About a tenth of respondents told Pew that whites face more discrimination than blacks; 80 percent of that group identified as Republican or Republican-leaning.
Trump’s response to the women criticizing him and his policies is to suggest that they are themselves racist. Ironically, it’s an example of what White House adviser Stephen Miller said in an interview Sunday that Democrats did all too often.
“I think the term ‘racist’ has become a label that is too often deployed by the left,” Miller said. “Democrats in this country simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear.”
That raises an important subtext to this. Trump ran for office leveraging opposition to “political correctness,” the idea that traditional American conversation and interactions were being criticized out of existence. In the first Republican primary debate in 2015, the first question directed at him addressed his offensive criticisms of prominent women.
“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he said, to applause. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness.”
Changing mores have meant more skepticism about and condemnation of racist or sexist comments. Those who make those sorts of traditionally racist and sexist comments or who reinforce traditional race and gender roles are generally members of the more powerful racial and gender groups: whites and men. Being told that it’s unacceptable to say or do things that others see as racist or which reinforce racial hierarchies is seen as a race-based criticism. Is seen, apparently, as racist.
Shortly after the 2018 midterm elections, journalist Yamiche Alcindor asked Trump if he wasn’t worried that his rhetoric was emboldening white nationalists. That, Trump declared, was a racist question.
What’s really remarkable about Trump’s tweet Monday is how it overlaps with his efforts over the past week to claim that he was just taking issue with purported anti-Americanism on the part of the Democrats. That’s his (bad) defense of his tweets telling the women to “go back” where they came from: He was simply telling them to leave because they hate America as manifested in their approach to Israel and immigration policy.
So then, what makes them racist? They are racist because they “want to tear down the structure of our country” (as Miller claimed on Fox News), largely because they oppose Trump’s policies on immigration?
If so, what does that say about whom Trump’s immigration policies are meant to support?
Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi revised Trump’s campaign slogan into “Make America white again.” It was the latest effort on her part to tweak the president, linked to his push for a question on the census centered on citizenship.
Asked about it last week, Trump described Pelosi’s comment as “racist.”
A big question in the days following President Trump’s controversial tweets about four minority congresswomen has been: Why aren’t more Republicans unequivocally denouncing them as racist?
One big reason GOP lawmakers haven’t all labeled Trump’s telling the four representatives — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — to “go back” to the countries they came from as racist is because they know how loyal Trump’s base is. Given this, if they publicly offend him, the president could encourage his supporters to back a more Trump-loyal candidate in the next Republican primary. He did so to several in 2018.
Some Republicans clearly agreed with the sentiments Trump expressed and embraced them. Others did verbal gymnastics to not address the question — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) pivoted to frame the debate as about “socialism vs. freedom” rather than race. Some, like Rep. Mike Kelly (Pa.) contorted themselves to the point of redefining other phrases to avoid having to place any blame on Trump.
"You know, they talk about people of color. I’m a person of color. I’m white. I’m an Anglo Saxon. People say things all the time, but I don’t get offended,” Kelly told VICE News. “‘With a name like Mike Kelly you can’t be from any place else but Ireland.’”
But this week also showed how many Republicans vary in how they define or are willing to apply the word “racism.” That’s something Trump’s candidacy and presidency have forced to Republicans explore, publicly. They haven’t always been shy about using the R-word, even when criticizing Trump.
In December 2015, after hearing Trump’s support for banning Muslims from traveling to the United States, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who was running against Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, told Americans: “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot."
Months later, Trump accused a judge presiding over a lawsuit involving his business of having a bias against him because of the judge’s Mexican heritage. Many Republicans remained silent, but then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) criticized the remarks claiming that the judge would be unfair to Trump because he is white as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
Now, as president, Trump has had nearly solid Republican support, no matter what he has said, even from some of his most harsh former critics in the GOP.
“A Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back,” said Graham this week, apparently referencing Omar, who fled civil war in Somalia as a child before immigrating to the U.S. “If you’re a racist, you want everybody from Somalia to go back cause they’re black or they’re Muslim.”
And when the House voted this past week to condemn the president’s statements as racist, some Republicans challenged whether the House could even use that label. In the end, only four GOP House members voted to support the resolution.
Before the vote, Rep. Will Hurd (R.-Tex.), the only black Republican in the House, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that Trump’s tweets were “racist.”
“I think those tweets are racist, and xenophobic,” he said. “They’re also inaccurate.”
He was joined by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Susan Brooks (Ind.) and Fred Upton (Mich.) in backing the resolution. Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), who quit the GOP this month and became an independent, also voted in favor.
Part of the issue is that what constitutes racist language has changed over time. But to many academics who study the issue, the purpose of racism has been consistent.
Ibram Kendi, director of American University’s Antiracist Center, writes in his forthcoming book “How to Be an Antiracist” that racism is “a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas.”
And scholars Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields wrote about racism in “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life" that “Racism refers to the theory and the practice of applying a social civic or legal double standard based on ancestry and to the ideology surrounding such a double standard,” they said. “Racism is not an emotion or state of mind, such as intolerance, bigotry, hatred or malevolence.”
“Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once,” they added.
There is of course, a strict dictionary definition of racism (“hatred or intolerance of another race or other races”). Most people in a position of power know that; it’s a matter of where they draw the line on what qualifies as racist, and whether they adjust that line when it’s politically convenient to do so.
While the president did not use any directly derogatory terms in his tweets, he tapped into tropes used in the past to raise anger against minorities. Leaving room for plausible deniability is a good way to give yourself, and your political allies, room to maneuver when you make statements that are racist. As The Fix’s Aaron Blake has written, Trump recognizes the benefit of plausible deniability, and frequently utilizes it.
Republicans seem to be on completely different pages about what constitutes racism. Some even blame the left, saying it is liberals who are increasingly invoking racism and showing intolerance. That argument on its face is not illegitimate. Liberals, especially those of color, would argue that they are more vocal in calling out racism because racism is indeed far-reaching in our society.
Either way, hearing that racism is so prevalent has allowed some Republicans to use claims of its omnipresence as an excuse to neither address it nor even acknowledge it at all.
But even more important than how Republican lawmakers define racism is Trump’s view that whether his tweets are racist or not may be irrelevant.
The day after the president’s original tweets, he was asked his thoughts about the fact that his comments had widely been interpreted as racist. And he replied:
“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me. A lot of people love it, by the way.”
He’s right. A lot of people in his base did love it, so much so that at his campaign rally a few days later, Trump supporters began to chant “Send her back!” to display just how much they agreed with his original sentiments.
While the president eventually disavowed the chant that his original comments inspired, he has not apologized for his initial tweets and continues to question the patriotism and loyalty of the congresswomen, vowing Friday to punish them for their language.
President Trump escalated his attacks Monday on a group of four minority congresswomen known as “the Squad,” calling them “very Racist” and “not very smart.”
Trump’s assessment came in a tweet as his motorcade traveled from the White House to the Supreme Court to pay his respects to the late Justice John Paul Stevens, who died last week at age 99 and was lying in repose.
It was the latest in a string of attacks directed at the four freshman lawmakers since a week ago Sunday, when Trump said in a tweet that they should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Only one of the four, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), was born outside the United States, and she became a U.S. citizen in 2000.
Trump has often tried to turn the tables on his political opponents, accusing them of the very shortcomings for which they criticize him.
“The ‘Squad’ is a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart,” Trump wrote. “They are pulling the once great Democrat Party far left, and were against humanitarian aid at the Border . . . And are now against ICE and Homeland Security. So bad for our Country!”
Over the past week, Trump has repeatedly defended his words directed at the four women — Reps. Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — despite widespread criticism that his remarks were racist and divisive.
During a heated exchange on “Fox News Sunday,” Stephen Miller, a White House senior adviser, sought to defend Trump, saying that the term “racist” is being misused.
“I think the term ‘racist’ has become a label that is too often deployed by the left, Democrats, in this country simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear,” Miller said.
Asked Monday about Trump’s tweet calling the four lawmakers “racist,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters at the White House: “Well, they certainly are young and inexperienced. That doesn’t stop all of you from elevating them into the stratosphere and superstardom.”
Trump has attacked the women on multiple issues in the past week, including over their views on Israel.
His mention of “humanitarian aid” on Monday referenced a $4.6 billion border bill passed by the House late last month. The measure would pump billions of dollars into the budgets of agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, that have been overwhelmed by the influx of Central American migrants at the United States’ southern border.
Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib voted against the legislation, saying it did not include enough restrictions on how the Trump administration could spend the money and did not include adequate protections for migrant children at detention facilities.
The lawmakers have also been highly critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a range of issues.
During an appearance Monday morning at an NAACP convention in Detroit, Tlaib was introduced as “one of the four women who was told to go back home.”
“Yeah, I’m not going nowhere, not until I impeach this president,” she said upon taking the stage.
Last week, Trump directed most of his ire at Omar, a Somali-born refugee. As he criticized her during remarks at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, the crowd broke out into chants of “Send her back!”
Trump later said he was not happy with the chant but has since characterized the crowd as “incredible patriots.”
Earlier last week, the Democratic-led House passed a resolution condemning his tweets directed at the four lawmakers.
MAGA Twitter is enraged at officials of the oldest international beauty pageant for dethroning a beauty queen after racist and Islamophobic tweets surfaced on the Twitter account of a Trump supporter and reigning Miss Michigan.
Organizers of the Miss World America pageant dismissed Michigan winner Kathy Zhu for what they called “offensive, insensitive and inappropriate”social media content, according to a letter and texts from the organization posted to Twitter by Zhu, whom the Detroit Free Press called “a well-known political commentator and online figure.”
Think Progress reports that the 20-year-old serves as the vice president of the University of Michigan chapter of the College Republicans and communications director for the Chinese Americans for Trump Movement, while Zhu’s Twitter account reports that the Zhu is kinda racist.
“Did you know the majority of black deaths are caused by other blacks?” Zhu wrote, in one of the now-deleted Tweets, according to the Detroit Press. “Fix problems within your own community before blaming others.”
“This applies for every community,” Zhu explained to the Free Press after the tweets surfaced. “If there is a problem, fix things in your own community before lashing out at others and trying to find an issue there. That is all I wanted to say. It is not a problem against black people. Obviously, I am not racist or stuff like that.”
I agree with MAGA Miss Michigan. I honestly don’t see why those comments should be considered racist, although Zhu conveniently left out the fact that the vast majority of white murders are committed by white people, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. But I’m sure Zhu has tweeted a lot about white-on-white crime. Let me go check.
Well, someone must have obviously deleted those tweets...
“Or stuff like that.”
But Zhu didn’t just tweet out a few anti-black talking points used by every white supremacist with an internet connection. Zhu extended her bold bigotry to Muslims, too, as Think Progress explained:
One of the now-deleted tweets in question stems from an incident in February 2018, when Zhu was a freshman at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando. Zhu reportedly sprinted away from a Muslim Student Associate table on campus after a fellow student offered her a chance to try on a hijab, a head covering many Muslim women wear, as part of a World Hijab Day celebration.
“There is a ‘try a hijab on’ booth at my college campus,” Zhu, who is Chinese-American, wrote in a now-deleted tweet. “So you’re telling me that it’s now just a fashion accessory and not a religious thing? Or are you just trying to get women used to being oppressed under Islam?”
In a separate tweet, Zhu criticized a sign at the Muslim Student Association table that said “My hijab empowers me.”
“The hypocrisy of this is kind of disgusting,” Zhu reportedly tweeted at the time.
(https://pics.me.me/kathy-zhu-opoliticalkathy-kathy-zhu-following-fallo-politicalkathy-replying-to-61009226.png)
After she handed in her cubic zirconia crown, the hashtag #standwithkathyzhu took over Twitter. OK, only six people used the hashtag, but you know how Twitter suppresses conservative voices. Plus, when you consider the Disney Mermaid atrocity of 2019, the danger of Democrats instituting socialism, how hard it is to find a good pair of flag-emblazoned running shoes and the invasion Mexican toddlers crossing the border to take all the jobs, conservatives have their hands full trying to making America great again. But they were still angry enough to somehow twist the narrative into believing that Zhu lost her title because of her political beliefs while the pageant forced her to wear a hajib and banned from performing math on Twitter.
And of course, there were those who insisted that Zhu can’t be racist because she’s Chinese-American, which is like saying Hitler wasn’t a racist because he had Jewish and black ancestors.
However, I don’t understand why Zhu’s supporters are upset. I believe the pageant organizers handled the situation by using the principles of Trump and his conservative supporters. Zhu made public statements that some people thought were un-American. Therefore the people in charge did the only thing they could do in this situation:
They sent her back.
Now that is a thing of beauty.
Top leaders of the Illinois Republican Party launched an effort at damage control Sunday after a social media post echoed President Donald Trump’s criticism of four Democratic congresswoman and went further, referring to them in a movie-type poster of being a “jihad squad” and contending they believe any criticism is racist.
The post was made to the Illinois Republican County Chairmen’s Association Facebook page on Friday night but gained publicity over the weekend. It displayed images of Democratic U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and topped by a hijab-wearing Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. The four, all women of color, have been dubbed “the squad.”
“Political jihad is their game,” the Facebook post said. “If you don’t agree with their socialist ideology, you’re racist.”
The post also displayed the logo of the association.
The four members of Congress have been at the center of Trump’s social media posts for a week, after he initially told members of the group in a tweet “to go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
All four are citizens, and three of them were born in the United States.
Trump initially defended his tweet, then said it was not meant to be racist. He then traveled to a North Carolina rally, during which he criticized Omar as a crowd chanted, “send her back.” A day later he disavowed those saying the chant, but the next day defended those who chanted as “patriots.”
The Democratic-controlled U.S. House passed a resolution last week rebuking Trump’s tweets, calling them “racist comments."
The Illinois’ state Republican chairmen group’s Facebook post was roundly criticized in comments, and as news of the posting spread, state GOP Chairman Tim Schneider, the handpicked chairman of former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, acknowledged it represented “bigoted rhetoric.”
“The recent social media post coming from the IRCCA does not reflect my values or the Illinois Republican Party’s values,” Schneider said in a statement. “My intense disagreement with the socialist policies and anti-Semitic language of these four congresswoman has absolutely nothing to do with their race or religion. I urge everyone who opposes them to keep the rhetoric focused on policy and ideology.”
Mark Shaw, the Lake County GOP chairman who heads the state county chairmen’s group, said the posting was “not authorized by me” and said he was “sorry if anyone who saw the image was offended by the contents.”
Shaw said the post had been deleted, and he called it an “unfortunate distraction” from the ideological issues involving the four progressive congresswoman.
On Facebook, Shaw called the posting “unauthorized.” Then he explained how the group has a “multistage, approval process for all social media posts on any of its social media properties.” That process, he said, is being “reevaluated.”
Shaw was named to head the county GOP chairmen’s group and given the title of state Republican co-chairman in an attempt to heal the party and forestall a challenge to Schneider following Rauner’s near defeat in his bid for renomination in the 2018 March primary against former state Rep. Jeanne Ives of Wheaton. Ives contended Rauner failed social conservatives by expanding abortion, transgender and immigrant rights.
Rauner went on to lose the general election to Democrat J.B. Pritzker, removing the biggest source of cash and loyalty to the state GOP. Neither Schneider nor Shaw addressed Trump’s original tweets in their statements.
Democratic state Sen. Cristina Castro of Elgin said Sunday she was speaking with the American Muslim Council when she received word of the Facebook posting.
“We were talking about Islamophobia and creating a welcoming community in Illinois and there’s this posting,” Castro said. “What is the Illinois Republican County Chairmen’s Association thinking?” she said. “They have become the party of Trump. They fan the flames. It’s actually really racist rhetoric. You can disagree with people on their viewpoints, but with this, you are continuing to divide and fan the flames.”
A Dallas-born U.S. citizen has been detained in federal custody for more than three weeks, his lawyer told The Dallas Morning News.
Francisco Erwin Galicia, 18, was traveling with his 17-year-old brother, Marlon Galicia, and a group of friends to a soccer scouting event when they were stopped at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint in Falfurrias in late June, the Morning News reported. Francisco Galicia had a Texas ID, which can only be obtained with a Social Security number, but his brother, who was born in Mexico and lacked legal status, only had a school ID.
Both brothers were detained and put into CBP custody, according to the newspaper report. After two days in detention, Marlon Galicia signed a voluntary deportation form and is now residing in Reynosa with his grandmother. Francisco Galicia spent three weeks in CBP custody, where he wasn't allowed to use the phone, his mother told the Morning News. He was moved Saturday into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles the intake of single adults, and has been able to call his mother, the newspaper reported.
"He’s going on a full month of being wrongfully detained," his mother, Sanjuana Galicia, told The Dallas Morning News. "He’s a U.S. citizen and he needs to be released now."
Claudia Galan, Francisco Galicia's lawyer, told The Washington Post she presented CBP officers with the 18-year-old's birth certificate and other documents proving his citizenship but was unable to get him released. The Post reported that the delay could be in part because Francisco's mother, who is not a citizen, took out a U.S. tourist visa in his name while he was still a minor, falsely saying he was born in Mexico. Galan told the newspaper that the paperwork confusion only furthered the agency’s suspicion that Galicia’s U.S. documents were fake.
The lawyer told the Morning News she plans to present the same documents, which include a congratulatory certificate his mother was given by hospital staff when he was born and a high school ID, to ICE officers.
After he was caught on tape for the second time telling supporters how worried he is about black people exercising their right to vote, Brian Kemp might need to change his name from “The Wizard of Voter Suppression,” to the “Self-Snitching King of the South.”
As Georgia’s Republican Candidate for Governor, Kemp would tell anyone willing to listen that he is not in favor of voter suppression. As Secretary of State and the man responsible for elections in Georgia, he would downplay the Associated Press analysis that shows 70 percent of the 53,000 voters he purged with his flawed “exact match” system were black. He would dispute the APM report that a disproportionate number of black voters were among the 107,000 voters purged from rolls using the “use it or lose it” law. Kemp would even dispute the ACLU lawsuit that alleges that Kemp’s office threw out at least 600 absentee ballots, including 1 in every 10 in the state’s most diverse county.
Yet, despite Kemp’s assertions that he is simply trying to prevent voter fraud (which coincidentally, happens about as often as Kanye saying something smart or Donald Trump telling the truth—almost never) audio doesn’t lie.
Rolling Stone has obtained audio of Kemp at a “Georgia Professionals For Kemp,” dinner where Republican supporters donate the extra money they saved on chicken seasoning to Kemp’s gubernatorial campaign. The fundraiser was held at the Blind Pig Parlour Bar, the winner for the most subconsciously racist restaurant name of the year, 1982- 2018, narrowly beating out Cracker Barrel each year.
In the leaked audio, Kemp confesses his concerns about the get-out-the-vote for Stacey Abrams campaign.
And as worried as we were going into the start of early voting was the literally tens of millions of dollars that [the Abrams camp] are putting behind the get-out-the-vote effort to their base. A lot of that was absentee ballot requests. They have just an unprecedented number of that,” he said, “which is something that continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote—which they absolutely can—and mail those ballots in, we gotta have heavy turnout to offset that.
Let’s dissect this for a second.
Here we have the man whose primary job is protecting and promoting the citizens’ right to vote telling people that his political success as a candidate for governor is diametrically opposed to the job he now holds. The man charged with upholding the integrity of Georgia’s ballots saying he is “concerned” about people exercising their right to vote should be an impeachable offense.
And just in case you don’t speak the Georgia dialect of Caucasoid, that “base” to which Kemp repeatedly refers is black people. White voters in Georgia overwhelmingly vote Republican while nearly 90 percent of the state’s black voters are unwavering Democrats.
This is not Kemp’s first time being caught on tape making these kinds of remarks. In 2014, Kemp warned his Republican supporters that Democrats “registering all these minority voters” could cause the GOP to lose the election.
Again, for Republicans like Brian Kemp, cheating is not a last resort.
It’s their entire strategy.
ICE has detained this U.S. citizen for more than three weeks (https://www.texastribune.org/2019/07/23/texas-ice-us-citizen-detained/?utm_campaign=trib-social&utm_content=1563892302&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter)
He’s a US Citizen. File a writ of Habeus Corpus for immediate release in Federal Court. His lawyer is either stupid or working pro bono.
He’s a US Citizen. File a writ of Habeus Corpus for immediate release in Federal Court. His lawyer is either stupid or working pro bono.
Assuming he was granted the privilege of a Lawyer. You're right, that's the law, but the law is being suspended under the auspices of "Homeland Security." They don't even have to read you your Miranda Rights (Which includes the right to an attorney) if they can prove that you're black, a Muslim, or hispanic.
They can execute you, unarmed, on the street, with cameraphones running. "I feared for my life!" They can lock up children, without Charges, en mass.
Great legal advice, assuming the law is being applied here.
Not so for US Citizens, and habeus can only be denied in state of national emergency, which had not been declared (yet).
He has a lawyer. And apparently he was released.
So why is this question suddenly active?
So why is this question suddenly active?
A New Hampshire state legislator is under fire for insisting that “owning slaves doesn’t make you racist.” In a private interaction with a former New Hampshire resident and during an interview with The Root, the Republican lawmaker doubled and tripled down on his assertion by altering the definition of the word “racist,” rewriting history and explaining that chattel slavery wasn’t necessarily racist because slaveowners really liked money.
Werner Horn serves in New Hampshire’s House of Representatives for a district that includes the 99.5 percent white town of Hill, N.H., and his 95.9 percent white hometown of Franklin, N.H. His voting record shows that he has voted against repealing the death penalty, allowing undocumented immigrants the opportunity to obtain drivers licenses, raising the minimum wage, increasing access to absentee voting, repealing voter ID laws and prohibiting discrimination based on gender identification. Horn is rated 79 percent by the American Conservative Union and is endorsed by the NRA. But just because he’s a member of the Republican Party who doesn’t live around black people doesn’t necessarily mean one should assume Horn is a racist.
No, there are plenty of other reasons.
Last week, Horn shared his public views on American history, slavery and racism in a now-deleted Facebook post. USA Today writes:
Horn initially drew attention for his comments in a Facebook post by former state House member Dan Hynes, who posed the question: “If Trump is the most racist president in American history, what does that say about all of the other presidents who owned slaves?”
Horn responded, “Wait, owning slaves doesn’t make you racist...”
“I guess not,” Hynes answered Tuesday. “Which is surprising since everything else makes someone a racist.”
Horn then added, “It shouldn’t be surprising since owning slaves wasn’t a decision predicated on race but on economics. It’s a business decision.”
After media outlets questioned Horn’s choice of words, Eboni Sears, who is a black woman and a past resident of the comparatively more diverse town, Dover, N.H., (89 percent white, 1.3 percent black), decided to contact the state representative to challenge his views after seeing the story in the Boston Globe.
“They don’t really get to interact with a whole lot of black people on a regular basis, so I was really just trying to show him a different viewpoint,” Sears told The Root. “I didn’t realize that he didn’t care. So that’s how it started.”
Sears contacted Horn on Facebook, thinking that he wouldn’t respond. However, Horn engaged Sears in an hourlong exchange obtained by The Root that both Horn and Sears confirmed is accurate. The conversation included accusations that Sears was actually the one who was being prejudiced, that Horn couldn’t be racist because of his military background and, of course, the infamous “racist bone” diagnosis where Horn absolved himself of racism. (It should be noted that Sears served in the Navy for five years, which, by Horn’s logic, makes her nearly two times less racist than he is.)
To be fair, Facebook messages can be misinterpreted, so I contacted Horn to clear up any misinterpretations. What followed was a baffling display of what is either a misunderstanding or a complete fabrication of America’s past.
When asked if his initial comment that “owning slaves doesn’t make you racist” may have misconstrued, Horn emphatically replied: “No. When your actions are motivated by your feelings on the race of an individual, that is racism.”
For context, Merriam-Webster defines “racism” as:
1: belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2a: a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles
b: a political or social system founded on racism
3: racial prejudice or discrimination
To be clear, buying, selling or owning a human being requires inherent superiority because it is impossible to own an equal. But when I asked Horn if the literal concept of owning another human being fits the definitions of racism, Horn replied: “No.”
“You have to ask and then answer the question: ‘Why is that person owning another person?’” Horn added. “That’s how you figure out if something is racist, sexist, homophobic. You have to figure out what’s the motivation behind the action. If there was a purely financial motivation to owning a slave, then it is not racist.”
OK, well fuck definitions, then.
Anticipating that he would eventually trot out the overused, vapid argument that “black people sold slaves” and “slavery has been around since ancient times,” I restricted our discussion to slavery as it existed in America. Still, the lawmaker went on to recount a revised version of history where slavery wasn’t racist until 1800. He reeled off a contorted, ahistorical view that contradicts every objective account of America’s past:
“Parsing out slavery in America, as opposed to slavery in general, is significant only because of how people behaved themselves after around 1800,” Horn said. “After around 1800, the northern abolitionists tried to destabilize the institution of slavery in the South. So to justify and continue the practice, they [Southerners] came up with a bunch of racist garbage where the blacks, specifically, were a subhuman race. It’s racist garbage.”
But Horn’s “alternative facts” contradict the research of almost every legitimate scholar and historian including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research (and co-founder of The Root), who notes that the Mid-Atlantic slave trade coincided with the enlightenment in Europe, whose “theorists posited that the key dividing line between a free man or woman and a slave wasn’t religion but race.
“I have no idea where [Horn’s] line of logic comes from,” Gates told The Root. “You can simply look at the 18th century philosophers from David Hume to Immanuel Kant—starting in 1754 with Hume’s racist footnote to his essay Of National Characters in which he claimed that in all of Africa, there were no arts, no sciences, an idea upon which Kant elaborated 10 years later in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime—also expounded on the racial differences between white and black people.”
Undeterred by logic or facts, Horn argued that slavery was an economic decision because, he explained: “When you look at the ledgers, the prices brought for men were the highest. Women and children brought lesser prices. That’s an economic driver because if it was racist, they would just be buying everybody at the same price.”
I know, I know. It makes absolutely no sense. Using this explanation, many of the well-paid ISIS soldiers aren’t terrorists because their “motivating factor” is money. Apparently, in Horn’s world, actions can’t be racists, only intent.
Bringing up the regurgitated argument that racism has less to do with the actions of the enslavers and more to do with their intent, what’s in white people’s hearts or what Horn repeatedly referred to as “motivating factors,” the elected official segued into the claim used by every white supremacist ever: “In the 1600s, Africans were enslaving other Africans so that would seem to take the race aspect out of it,” he explained, conveniently leaving out the fact that European and American traders also raided villages and kidnapped Africans, and the untold number of whites who kidnapped free blacks in America and forced them in to slavery.
“The Europeans...transported them to the New World and the Caribbean not because they were racist, but because they were making money and did not care that they were making money off the suffering of human beings. That’s the key part of it. That’s the key part of it. They’re making money off it.”
And there you have it from the horse’s mouth.
They did not care because they were making money off the suffering of human beings.
Not only were all of those “human beings” black, but the very act of placing an “economic decision” above the suffering of the enslaved indisputably means that the financial needs of white enslavers were considered to be superior to the humanity of the black slaves. But, of course, Horn doesn’t see it that way.
“Calling Thomas Jefferson and George Washington racist puts a stain of hatred on the Founding Fathers,” Horn told The Root. “And since Washington and Jefferson aren’t here to defend themselves, I’ve got no problems pointing out the differences between how slavery was perceived prior to 1800 and how slavery was perceived after 1800. That was the whole thrust of the comment.”
That version of history is not true. Contrary to Horn’s opinion, both men thought that slavery was an immoral institution. Both men advocated for the abolition of slavery. In their writings, both Washington and Jefferson distinctly referenced the racial aspect of the peculiar institution while continuing to own slaves.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson placed wealth and power above the humanity of black people.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were racists.
I informed Horn of all of this. But when I asked Horn how he reconciles his definition of racism with these facts, Horne admitted that Thomas Jefferson was a racist, but for totally different reasons…kinda.
“Jefferson for sure was a racist. For sure,” said Horn. “Not because he owned slaves but because he recanted his position that he was going to free his slaves and he didn’t...But let me be clear: When you look at the motivation factor behind the decision, the response is very important. But that’s the difference. If the motivating factor was race, then it is racist. But I don’t buy into the narrative that slavery is automatically racist.”
If that doesn’t make sense to you, you should know that you’re not alone. Gates notes that the Enlightenment-era belief in racial inferiority was, in part, fueled by Jefferson, explaining that Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, which was written the same year as the Constitution, fit the definition of racism.
“In it, Jefferson, in a scientific pose, theorized about the racial differences between the white and black races,” Gates explained. “Jefferson opined that, ‘the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.’”
If that’s not “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race,” then maybe racism doesn’t exist.
Washington, on the other hand, remained a slaveowner despite repeatedly saying that the institution was racist. He knew it but did it anyway. At the end of his life, Washington called slavery his “only unavoidable subject of regret,” writing:
Ages to come will read with Astonishment that the man who was foremost to wrench the rights of America from the tyrannical grasp of Britain was among the last to relinquish his own oppressive hold of poor unoffending negroes. In the name of justice what can induce you thus to tarnish your own well earned celebrity and to impair the fair features of American liberty with so foul and indelible a blot.
George Washington, meet the fulfillment of your prophecy—Werner Horn.
Asked whether Horn’s defense of his beloved Founding Father George Washington was correct, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair of Howard University’s Department of Afro-American Studies, Dr. Greg Carr dispelled the notion with a simple command:
“Show me the white slaves.”
“If [Horn] redefines racism as caring about black people, then yes, Washington loved slaves like Hercules and Ona Judge in the same way that white people love LeBron James,” said Carr. “And all those negroes ran away as fast as they could as soon as they saw a crack of daylight.
“Ask [Horn] to explain why those Founding Fathers came to the conclusion that a slave was worth three-fifths of a white person and enshrined it in the Constitution...in 1787,” Carr continued. “Ask him to explain John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton debating the very nature of black life in the Federalist Papers in 1788.”
Indeed, Federalist Paper No. 54, which became the basis for the three-fifths compromise, reads:
But we must deny the fact, that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever as persons. The true state of the case is, that they partake of both these qualities: being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property...The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixed character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character.
But Carr completely destroys Horn’s fiction by pointing to scholars like Gerald Horne, whose Counterrevolution of 1776 explained that racism was one of the underlying factors of the American Revolution.
“England was debating ending the trading of enslaved Africans in the late 18th century and offering them extended rights,” Carr explained. “This scared the hell out of the British North American colonies, led by Virginia, which had 40 percent of the enslaved Africans in the colonies. Even though they provided the most eloquent defenses of freedom and liberty and all that crap, they were imprisoning four out of every 10 enslaved persons in the British colonies.
“What people call the American Revolution involved George Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and the Founders getting the hell away from the British precisely because the British were considering creating a legal form of humanity for the Africans,” Dr. Carr said. “There is absolutely no historical evidence to back up what [Horn] said.”
Gates, concurring with Carr, added: “While arguments that slavery was a ‘positive good’ exploded in the Antebellum era, as advocates for emancipation put Southern slaveholders on the defense, there is no doubt that earlier generations had already made a link between race and slavery in order to justify it.”
Ultimately, one New Hampshire legislator’s Facebook comments and fictional history lesson will not affect most people’s lives in any meaningful way. Sears even indicated that she wasn’t offended by his comments as much as she was surprised at Horn’s lack of understanding and thought that people should know what he thinks about race.
“That’s the disturbing part,” explained Sears.
“He really believes it.”
A Tuesday night dinner at a North Hills restaurant ended in accusations and a racial slur, and the Raleigh woman who uttered it says she would say it again.
Chanda Stewart and Lakesha Shaw said they were at Bonefish Grill with a friend when Nancy Goodman called them rude and complained that they were being too loud.
"We’ve had people come to our table and say, 'Hey, you girls look like you’re having fun. We want to join you,' but never to come to my table and tell me I’m rude," Shaw said Wednesday.
Goodman's remarks irritated the women, and Stewart pulled out her cellphone to record Goodman in the restaurant as they expressed their displeasure with her.
"We're paying for our food just like everyone else, and she told us that we are the rudest people," Stewart says in the cellphone video.
Goodman is then seen pulling out her own phone and walking around some tables to confront the women.
"I've got real good friends who are black, and I love them," Goodman tells the women.
"We never said anything about color," Stewart responds.
"You're too loud," Goodman says.
"In your opinion," Shaw replies. "Let me show you my money. It's just as green as yours."
"Why are you so stupid (racial slur)?" Goodman tells Shaw as she walks off.
"Do you call your black friends [that]?" the women ask her.
Goodman shakes her head, and as she picks up her purse to leave, says, "They're not like you."
On Wednesday evening, in a post on her Facebook page, Goodman apologized "to my family, friends and other patrons in the bar at North Hills Bonefish."Shaw and Stewart were still stinging from the slur.
"I'm still trying to wrap my head around it all," Stewart said. "It’s disheartening, it is. But this is the society that we’re living in right now."
"I don’t care how you feel like we should have been acting," Shaw said. "If I was standing on the table with three heads in a purple jumpsuit, nothing justifies you to come to my table and call me a stupid (racial slur)."
Goodman said Wednesday that she should have handled the situation differently.
"Looking back on it now, I wish I would have asked the waiter to ask management if they would just quiet down," she said. "Instead, I went off on them, which I shouldn’t have done. But I had had it. It was out of my control to calm down my anxiety."
Still, she said she knew the slur was offensive and wasn't sorry she used it.
"I’m not going to say I’m sorry to them because they kept pushing at it," she said. "I would say it again to them. They are the rudest individuals I have ever seen."
Shaw was stunned when she learned Goodman was ready to use the slur again.
"The fact that you’re willing to say you will repeat that again shows me the hate that you harbor in your heart for the black African-American race," she said. "I don’t care what color I am. Give me the respect of being a human being, just like everyone else deserves."
Goodman said she's not racist.
"I have many black friends, and I have never encountered three people that ugly in a bar," she said. "I wish those women well, and maybe there’s a lesson learned for them, too, that you don’t disrespect an elderly person."
Shaw and Stewart said they have no plans to return to Bonefish Grill, saying a manager should have stepped in after Goodman first went to their table to complain. Instead, they said, a waiter told them that everyone could have handled themselves differently.
Bonefish Grill officials are reviewing the incident, according to Elizabeth Watts, a spokeswoman for the restaurant chain's parent company, Bloomin' Brands Inc.
"We are a place for all people to gather for good food in a comfortable atmosphere, including positive interactions among guests. We do not tolerate hate speech or disrespect in our restaurants," Watts said in a statement. "We are reviewing the incident to see how we can do better at de-escalating something like this in the future."
Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen — speaking at a Republican event this month — expressed concern that the United States is "going to look like South American countries very quickly," warning that new immigrants will not be able to "assimilate" at the rate that they are arriving.
Allen made her remarks during a July 15 event commemorating "Mormon Political Pioneers" at the Arizona Republican Party headquarters in Phoenix.
Phoenix New Times obtained audio of Allen's comments on Thursday, the full version of which is posted at the bottom of this page. In a text message, Allen told New Times that her comments on assimilation were inspired by a study from a University of North Carolina professor.
"I said we needed to be able to control our immigration process so that we have time to assimilate people into our society and economic system. Jobs, housing, education, and health care," she said. "Plus to be able to teach them about the American form of government. That's all there was to it."
Allen cited the same professor again in response to follow-up questions regarding her comments about South American countries, a reference she made to declining white birthrates, and a criticism of Democratic State Senator Martín Quezada.
During a rambling, 25-minute speech peppered with religious and autobiographical references, Allen expressed a worldview that the founding principles of the United States are under attack by feminists, secularists, and immigrants.
Allen's discussion of assimilation occurred near the end of her speech, following a reference to Dr. James Johnson, a business professor at the University of North Carolina who studies demographics.
"Another thing that Dr. Johnson talked about is the 'Browning of America,'" Allen said. "That America is fast becoming ... we're going to look like South American countries very quickly."
Allen, a Snowflake resident who represents a legislative district comprising parts of Coconino, Gila, Yavapai, and Navajo counties, raised alarm over the declining birth rates of whites in the United States.
"The median age of a white woman is 43. The median age of a Hispanic woman is 27," Allen said. "We are not reproducing ourselves, the birthrates. But here's what I see is the issue. It's because of immigration."
Johnson has been widely cited for his work identifying six ongoing demographic changes in the U.S, including population growth in the South, increasing interracial marriage, longer life expectancy, declining economic prospects for men, a rise in children living with grandparents, and immigration-driven population change that he calls "the Browning of America."
Allen expressed fears that the United States does not have the resource capacity for new immigrants. She also cautioned that immigrants are arriving at a rate that does not allow them to learn "the principles of our country."
"We have a right as a country to have people coming in an organized manner, so we know who are coming. So we can have jobs for them. So we can provide education for them, and health care, and all these things that people need," Allen said. "We can't provide that when people are just flooding us and flooding us and flooding us and overwhelming us so we don't have time to teach them the principles of our country any more than we're teaching our children today."
Allen's interpretation of Johnson's research does not align with how he presents it in public lectures. In frequent talks to business groups, Dr. Johnson describes the trend of increasing immigration from Hispanic countries as a reality that the U.S. will need to adapt to if it wants to maintain its "competitiveness in the global marketplace."
In a 2013 lecture to the National Entrepreneur Center in Florida, Johnson disputed the notion that immigrants place a burden on society. He distinguished between the "fiscal impact" of immigrants, such as healthcare and education costs, with the "economic impact," which factors in the spending power of immigrants and other benefits.
"There are these spin-off jobs that wouldn't be there if you didn't have the immigrant. They are pay taxes. They spend money goods and services," Johnson said. "If you shut down the borders and run everybody home, what happens to the immigration attorney? They ain't got no money. They're out of a job. And everything he spends on goes down the tube."
In her speech, Allen also made a reference to her colleague Quezada.
"When Senator Quezada says we don't want to assimilate, then what do you want? What do you plan for America to look like in 10 years? What kind of form of government are we going to live under in 10 years?"
After listening to a copy of the July 15 audio, Quezada told New Times he could not say for certain what remarks of his Allen was referring to. But Quezada pointed to tweets he sent two weeks prior in which he advocated for "acculturation" of immigrants over "assimilation."
Quezada was referring to comments by a Democratic presidential candidate, who explained in an interview that he did not grow up speaking Spanish due to a legacy in which the language was "looked down upon."
"Some of us have been victimized by this nation's culture of forced assimilation rather than acculturation," Quezada wrote on Twitter on July 1. "Some of our families were able to pass on aspects of our culture like language. Others were beaten in school for speaking native or indigenous languages."
Quezada compared Allen's remarks to those of former Republican State Representative David Stringer, who famously called immigration an "existential threat" and decried that there "aren't enough white kids to go around" in Arizona public schools.
"This is David Stringer all over again. It was very much Stringer-esque, in the tone and perspective she has on immigrants," Quezada said. "It’s insulting, to say the least."
Stringer's comments on immigration — which were widely publicized in June 2018 — led top Republican officials to call for his resignation. He eventually vacated his seat in March over revelations that he was arrested in Baltimore in the '80s for allegedly molesting underage teenage boys.
Prior to her comments on immigration, Allen used her speech to rehash her opposition to an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee equal rights regardless of sex. During the most recent legislative session, the Arizona Legislature rejected the ERA for the third time in three years.
Allen repeated her earlier criticism that the ERA refers to "sex," rather than "gender," before launching into a broader criticism of feminism. What's really hurting society, Allen said, is the decline of the patriarchy.
She cited research by Johnson showing that women are enrolling in college at greater rates than men, and that men accounted for most of the job loss during the 2008 recession.
"We have been taught in our society that the patriarchal order is horrible and awful for children, going after our families and destroying our families. That is the basis of our foundation of society. You destroy the family, you destroy the society. And we are working overtime to destroy our society," Allen said. "Our boys are struggling to know how to be men. This feminist movement is not doing favors for us, at all."
A charter school owner, Allen was first elected to the Arizona State Senate about a decade ago, representing District 5 from 2008 to 2012. She joined the Legislature again in 2014 as a District 6 senator in 2014 and has twice won re-election.
Allen previously drew headlines in 2015 for saying that Arizona should consider adopting a law that would require mandatory church service. "Probably we should be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth," Allen said.
In 2009, speaking in support of uranium mining, Allen falsely claimed the Earth was 6,000 years old.
The head of Border Patrol told lawmakers this week that she didn’t know the secret Facebook group she joined was bad. Carla Provost, who’s been leading the Border Patrol since April of 2017, said that the Facebook group’s racist and violent posts were “not indicative of the Border Patrol that I know.”
Provost testified in front of the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, where she was asked about a secret Facebook group called “I’m 10-15,” a reference to Border Patrol lingo for “an alien in custody.” The private Facebook group was first revealed by ProPublica on July 1 and the Border Patrol initially issued a statement denouncing it. But the Intercept later uncovered on July 12 that Provost herself was a member of the group and had even posted a comment.
Provost testified that a “colleague” invited her to the group and that she is “on Facebook very, very rarely.” Provost suggested that she was unaware of the violent imagery posted there, but no member of Congress at the hearing asked questions about the most horrifying graphics, including a photoshopped image of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being raped by President Donald Trump. Gizmodo has chosen not to reproduce the image but a censored version is available at ProPublica.
The Facebook group included news stories about detainees who have died while in U.S. custody and encouraged throwing burritos at Congresswomen of color who were visiting an American concentration camp.
“There should be no photo ops for these scum buckets,” one member of the Facebook group said, following another post that read, “fuck the hoes.” Others joked about the deaths of asylum seekers and some suggested that an Associated Press photo showing a father and daughter who had recently died had been staged by Democrats.
Provost testified that the people who posted in the group, which, again, included multiple racist comments and violent rape memes, were “a few bad apples,” within the organization. The Facebook group had roughly 9,500 current and former Border Patrol members from across the country. The Border Patrol staff is currently comprised of roughly 20,000 people.
“I am as outraged as everyone else when it comes to the statements that were made on that page,” Provost said. Strangely, Provost went on to compare her “bad apples” to those of other professions, and promised to hold her people accountable.
“There are bad doctors, there are bad nurses, there are bad teachers, but we don’t vilify the entire group of those individuals,” Provost said. “We need to take action on those who have violated our standards of conduct, and we need to hold them accountable, and we will do that.”
Provost failed to mention that nurses and teachers aren’t currently running a vast system of concentration camps on U.S. soil as the Department of Homeland Security currently does.
“Let me be clear, on July 1 was the first time I saw those highly offensive and absolutely unacceptable posts, when I saw them in the ProPublica report,” Provost claimed.
Provost says that she gave an auditor access to her Facebook account to look at her activity and verify that she was an infrequent user. And while that’s all well and good, the problem is that members of Border Patrol sometimes lie to Congress and all we have is her word on this issue. For example, Border Patrol’s Chief of Law Enforcement, Brian Hastings, testified this week that the 18-year-old that it detained for nearly a month in inhumane conditions never told them that he was an American. That appears to be a lie, based on documents obtained by the Dallas Morning News.
The teen who was detained, named Francisco Galicia, lost 26 pounds while he was in Border Patrol custody and was denied access to a lawyer. Galicia’s mother even presented his birth certificate, which officials said must be fake. He was later served with paperwork from the Department of Homeland Security that said he falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen, despite the fact that he was born in Dallas, Texas.
From the document, obtained by the Dallas Morning News:
On or about June 27, 2019, you were found at the Falfurrias, Texas, Border Patrol Checkpoint, a distance of more than 25 miles from the United States border with Mexico ... You did not receive the permission of an immigration officer to proceed beyond that 25 mile limit ... At that time, you falsely represented yourself to be a citizen of the United States for the purpose of furthering your entry into the United States.
Border Patrol and its broader parent organization, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, are perpetrating unimaginable cruelty at the border on a daily basis. Recently a 3-year-old Honduran girl was forced to choose between her parents as one of them was deported.
“The agent asked her who she wanted to go with, mom or dad,” the girl’s mother Tania told NPR recently. “And the girl, because she is more attached to me, she said mom. But when they started to take my husband away, the girl started to cry. The officer said, ‘You said you want to go with mom.’”
When Provost was asked on Wednesday about the separation of children from other family members, she said that it was the law. Historically, “I’m just following the law” has not been a valid defense of gross human rights abuses committed around the world.
“We do have many children that are either coming with other siblings, some are coming with other siblings that are minors, aunts, uncles,” Provost told the committee. “By law, I cannot keep those individuals together.”
There’s a misconception among the American public that family separation at the border has stopped after an outcry about parents and children who were forcefully pulled apart by the Trump regime. But families are still being broken up, as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings are regularly separated from kids. The media often refer to the kids who have been separated as “unaccompanied minors” despite the fact that they were not, in the strictest sense, actually unaccompanied at all. Toddlers don’t travel hundreds of miles by themself. They’re classified as “unaccompanied” because they traveled with someone who isn’t an immediate, blood-related parent.
The full 2-hour hearing with Provost about the crimes against humanity that she continues to perpetrate on American soil is available on YouTube.
Three University of Mississippi students have been suspended from their fraternity house and face possible investigation by the Department of Justice after posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till.
One of the students posted a photo to his private Instagram account in March showing the trio in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and murdered in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men accused of the slaying.
The photo, which was obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, shows an Ole Miss student named Ben LeClere holding a shotgun while standing in front of the bullet-pocked sign. His Kappa Alpha fraternity brother, John Lowe, squats below the sign. A third fraternity member stands on the other side with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle..
LeClere posted the picture on Lowe’s birthday on March 1 with the message “one of Memphis’s finest and the worst influence I’ve ever met.”
Neither LeClere nor Lowe responded to repeated attempts to contact them.
It is not clear whether the fraternity students shot the sign or are simply posing before it. The sign is part of a memorial effort by a Mississippi civil rights group and has been repeatedly vandalized, most recently in August 2018. Till’s death helped propelled the modern civil rights movement in America.
Five days after LeClere posted the photo, a person who saw it filed a bias report to the university’s Office of Student Conduct. The complaint pointed out there may have been a fourth person present, who took the picture.
“The photo is on Instagram with hundreds of ‘likes,’ and no one said a thing,” said the complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica. “I cannot tell Ole Miss what to do, I just thought it should be brought to your attention.”
The photo was removed from LeClere’s Instagram account after the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica began contacting fraternity members and friends. It had received 274 likes.
Kappa Alpha suspended the trio on Wednesday, after the news organizations provided a copy of the photo to fraternity officials at Ole Miss. The fraternity, which honors Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder” on its website, has a history of racial controversy, including an incident in which students wore blackface at a Kappa Alpha sponsored Halloween party at the University of Virginia in 2002.
“The photo is inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable. It does not represent our chapter,” Taylor Anderson, president of Ole Miss’ Kappa Alpha Order, wrote in an email. “We have and will continue to be in communication with our national organization and the University.”
After viewing the photo, U.S. Attorney Chad Lamar of the Northern District of Mississippi in Oxford said the information has been referred to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for further investigation.
“We will be working with them closely,” he said Thursday.
University officials called the photo “offensive and hurtful.”
University spokesman Rod Guajardo acknowledged that an Ole Miss official had received a copy of the Instagram picture in March. The university referred the matter to the university police department, which in turn gave it to the FBI.
Guajardo said the FBI told police it would not further investigate the incident because the photo did not pose a specific threat.
Guajardo said that while the university considered the picture “offensive,” the image did not present a violation of the university’s code of conduct. He noted the incident depicted in the photo occurred off campus and was not part of a university-affiliated event.
“We stand ready to assist the fraternity with educational opportunities for those members and the chapter,” Guajardo said.
He said the university will continue to build programs to engage students in “deliberate, honest and candid conversations while making clear that we unequivocally reject attitudes that do not respect the dignity of each individual in our community.”
Since the first sign was erected in 2008, it has been the object of repeated animosity.
Vandals threw the first sign in the river. The second sign was blasted with 317 bullets or shotgun pellets before the Emmett Till Memorial Commission officials removed it. The third sign, featured in the Instagram photo, was damaged by 10 bullet holes before officials took it down last week. A fourth sign, designed to better withstand attacks, is expected to be installed soon.
News of the suspensions and referral to the Justice Department came as Till’s cousin, Deborah Watts, co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, was already planning a moment of silence Thursday to honor her cousin with a gathering of supporters and friends dressed in black and white in “a silent yet powerful protest against racism, hatred and violence.” Thursday is Till’s birthday. Had he lived, he would have been 78 years old.
This is not the first time Ole Miss fraternity students have been caught up in an incident involving an icon from the civil rights movement.
In 2014, three students from the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house placed a noose around the neck of a statue on campus of James Meredith, the first known black student to attend Ole Miss. They also placed a Georgia flag of the past that contains the Confederate battle emblem.
According to federal prosecutors, the freshmen students hatched the plan during a drinking fest at the house, where one student disparaged African Americans, saying this act would create a sensation: “It’s James Meredith. People will go crazy.”
One pleaded guilty and received six months in prison for using a threat of force to intimidate African American students and employees because of their race or color. Another student also pleaded guilty. He received probation and community service after he cooperated with the FBI. A third man wasn’t charged.
All three students withdrew from Ole Miss, and the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity’s national headquarters shuttered its chapter on the Ole Miss campus after its own investigation, blaming the closing on behavior that included “hazing, underage drinking, alcohol abuse and failure to comply with the university and fraternity’s codes of conduct.”
Kind of sums it up. Not illegal to take pics, no action needed.
WALL OF RACIST REACTION
We’ve heard this before. Go back where you came from. Go back to Africa. And now, “send her back.” Black and brown people in America don’t hear these chants in a vacuum; for many of us, we’ve felt their full force being shouted in our faces, whispered behind our backs, scrawled across lockers, or hurled at us online. They are part of a pattern in our country designed to denigrate us as well as keep us separate and afraid.
As 148 African Americans who served in the last administration, we witnessed firsthand the relentless attacks on the legitimacy of President Barack Obama and his family from our front-row seats to America’s first black presidency. Witnessing racism surge in our country, both during and after Obama’s service and ours, has been a shattering reality, to say the least. But it has also provided jet-fuel for our activism, especially in moments such as these.
We stand with congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, as well as all those currently under attack by President Trump, along with his supporters and his enablers, who feel deputized to decide who belongs here — and who does not. There is truly nothing more un-American than calling on fellow citizens to leave our country — by citing their immigrant roots, or ancestry, or their unwillingness to sit in quiet obedience while democracy is being undermined.
We are proud descendants of immigrants, refugees and the enslaved Africans who built this country while enduring the horrors of its original sin. We stand on the soil they tilled, and march in the streets they helped to pave. We are red-blooded Americans, we are patriots, and we have plenty to say about the direction this country is headed. We decry voter suppression. We demand equitable access to health care, housing, quality schools and employment. We welcome new Americans with dignity and open arms. And we will never stop fighting for the overhaul of a criminal-justice system with racist foundations.
We come from Minnesota and Michigan. The Bronx and Baton Rouge. Florida and Philadelphia. Cleveland and the Carolinas. Atlanta and Nevada. Oak-town and the Chi. We understand our role in this democracy, and respect the promise of a nation built by, for and of immigrants. We are part of that tradition, and have the strength to both respect our ancestors from faraway lands and the country we all call home.
Our love of country lives in these demands, and our commitment to use our voices and our energy to build a more perfect union. We refuse to sit idly by as racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are wielded by the president and any elected official complicit in the poisoning of our democracy. We call on local, state and congressional officials, as well as presidential candidates to articulate their policies and strategies for moving us forward as a strong democracy, through a racial-equity lens that prioritizes people over profit. We will continue to support candidates for local, state and federal office who add more diverse representation to the dialogue and those who understand the importance of such diversity when policymaking here in our country and around the world. We ask all Americans to be a good neighbor by demonstrating anti-racist, environmentally friendly, and inclusive behavior toward everyone in your everyday interactions.
The statesman Frederick Douglass warned, “The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous.” This nation has neither grappled with nor healed from the horrors of its origins. It is time to advance that healing process now through our justice, economic, health and political systems.
Expect to hear more from us. We plan to leave this country better than we found it. This is our home.
Saba Abebe, former special assistant, Office of Economic Impact and Diversity, Energy Department
Tsehaynesh Abebe, former adviser, U.S. Agency for International Development
David Adeleye, former policy specialist, White House
Bunmi Akinnusotu, former special assistant, Office of Land and Emergency Management, Environmental Protection Agency
Trista Allen, former senior adviser to the regional administrator, General Services Administration
Maria Anderson, former operations assistant, White House
Karen Andre, former White House liaison, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Caya Lewis Atkins, former counselor for science and public health, Department of Health and Human Services
Roy L. Austin Jr., former deputy assistant to the president, White House Domestic Policy Council
Kevin Bailey, former special assistant, White House; senior policy adviser, Treasury Department
Jumoke Balogun, former adviser to the secretary, Labor Department
Diana Banks, former deputy assistant secretary, Defense Department
Desiree N. Barnes, former adviser to the press secretary, White House
Kevin F. Beckford, former special adviser, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Alaina Beverly, former associate director, Office of Urban Affairs, White House
Saba Bireda, former senior counsel, Office for Civil Rights, Education Department
Vincent H. Bish Jr., former special assistant to the assistant secretary of strategic program management, Department of Health and Human Services
Michael Blake, former director for African American, minority and women business enterprises and county and statewide elected officials, White House
Tenicka Boyd, former special assistant, Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Education Department
Tanya Bradsher, former assistant secretary for public affairs, Department of Homeland Security
Stacey Brayboy, former chief of staff, Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Agriculture Department
Allyn Brooks-LaSure, former deputy associate administrator for external affairs, Environmental Protection Agency
Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, former director of coverage policy, Office of Health Reform, Department of Health and Human Services
Quincy K. Brown, former senior policy adviser, Office of Science and Technology Policy, White House
Taylor Campbell, former director of correspondence systems innovation, White House
Crystal Carson, former chief of staff to the director of communications, White House
Genger Charles, former general deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Housing, Federal Housing Administration, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Glorie Chiza, former associate director, Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, White House
Sarah Haile Coombs, special assistant, Department of Health and Human Services
Michael Cox, former special assistant to the assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs, Commerce Department
Adria Crutchfield, former director of external affairs, Federal Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Joiselle Cunningham, former special adviser, Office of the Secretary, Education Department
Charlotte Flemmings Curtis, former special adviser for White House initiatives, Corporation for National and Community Service
Kareem Dale, former special assistant to the president for disability policy, White House
Marco A. Davis, former deputy director, White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics
Russella L. Davis-Rogers, former chief of staff, Office of Strategic Partnerships, Department of Education
Tequia Hicks Delgado, former senior adviser for congressional engagement and legislative relations, Office of Legislative Affairs, White House
Kalisha Dessources Figures, former policy adviser, White House Council on Women and Girls
Leek Deng, former special assistant, Bureau for Global Health, U.S. Agency for International Development
Tene Dolphin, former chief of staff, Economic Development Administration, Commerce Department
Monique Dorsainvil, former deputy chief of staff, Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, White House
Joshua DuBois, former executive director, Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships; former special assistant to the president, White House
Dru Ealons, former director, Office of Public Engagement, Environmental Protection Agency
Rosemary Enobakhare, former deputy associate administrator for public engagement and environmental education, Environmental Protection Agency
Karen Evans, former assistant director and policy adviser, Office of Cabinet Affairs, White House
Clarence J. Fluker, former deputy associate director for national parks and youth engagement, White House Council on Environmental Quality
Heather Foster, former public engagement adviser and director of African American affairs, White House
Kalina Francis, former special adviser, Office of Public Affairs, Treasury Department
Matthew “Van” Buren Freeman, former senior adviser, Minority Business Development Agency, Commerce Department
Cameron French, former deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Jocelyn Frye, former deputy assistant to the president and director of policy and special projects for the first lady, White House
Bernard Fulton, former deputy assistant secretary for congressional relations, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Stephanie Gaither, former confidential assistant to the deputy director, Office of Management and Budget, White House
Demetria A. Gallagher, former senior adviser for policy and inclusive innovation, Commerce Department
Lateisha Garrett, former White House liaison, National Endowment for the Humanities
W. Cyrus Garrett, former special adviser to the director of counternarcotics enforcement, Department of Homeland Security
Bishop M. Garrison, former science and technology directorate adviser, Department of Homeland Security
Lisa Gelobter, former chief digital service officer, Education Department
A’shanti F. Gholar, former special assistant to the secretary, Labor Department
Jay R. Gilliam, former special assistant, U.S. Agency for International Development
Artealia Gilliard, former deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy, Transportation Department
Brenda Girton-Mitchell, former director, Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Education Department
Jason Green, former associate counsel and special assistant to the president, White House
Corey Arnez Griffin, former associate director, Peace Corps
Kyla F. Griffith, former special adviser to the secretary, Commerce Department
Simone L. Hardeman-Jones, former deputy assistant secretary, Office of Legislative and Congressional Affairs, Education Department
Thamar Harrigan, former senior intergovernmental relations adviser, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Dalen Harris, former director, Office of Intergovernmental and Public Liaison, Office of National Drug Control Policy, White House
Khalilah M. Harris, former deputy director, White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans; former senior adviser, Office of Personnel Management
Adam Hodge, former deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, Treasury Department
Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser, White House
Will Yemi Jawando, former associate director, Office of Public Engagement, White House
Karine Jean-Pierre, former northeast political director, Office of Political Affairs, White House
A. Jenkins, former director, Center for Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Commerce Department
Adora Jenkins, former press secretary, Justice Department; former deputy associate administrator for external affairs, Environmental Protection Agency
W. Nate Jenkins, former chief of staff and senior adviser to the budget director, Office of Management and Budget, White House
David J. Johns, former executive director, White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans
Brent Johnson, former special adviser to the secretary, Commerce Department
Broderick Johnson, former White House assistant to the president and Cabinet secretary for My Brother’s Keeper Task Force
Carmen Daniels Jones, former director, Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, Agriculture Department
Gregory K. Joseph II, former special assistant, Office of the Executive Secretariat, Energy Department
Jamia Jowers, former special assistant, National Security Council
Charmion N. Kinder, former associate, Press Office of the First Lady, White House; former assistant press secretary, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Elise Nelson Leary, former international affairs adviser, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Kimberlyn Leary, former adviser, White House Council on Women and Girls
Daniella Gibbs Léger, former special assistant to the president and director of message events, White House
Georgette Lewis, former policy adviser, Department of Health and Human Services
Kevin Lewis, former director of African American media, White House; former principal deputy director of public affairs, Justice Department
Catherine E. Lhamon, former assistant secretary for civil rights, Education Department
Tiffani Long, former special adviser, Economic Development Administration
Latifa Lyles, former director, Women’s Bureau, Labor Department
Brenda Mallory, former general counsel, White House Council on Environmental Quality
Dominique Mann, former media affairs manager, White House
Shelly Marc, former policy adviser, Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, White House
Tyra A. Mariani, former chief of staff to the deputy secretary, Education Department
Lawrence Mason III, former domestic policy analyst, Office of Presidential Correspondence, White House
Dexter L. McCoy, former special assistant, Office of the Secretary, Education Department
Matthew McGuire, former U.S. executive director, The World Bank Group
Tyrik McKeiver, former senior adviser, State Department
Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, former assistant to the administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Solianna Meaza, former special assistant to associate administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Mahlet Mesfin, former assistant director for international science and technology, Office of Science and Technology Policy, White House
Ricardo Michel, former director, Center for Transformational Partnerships, U.S. Agency for International Development Global Development Lab
Paul Monteiro, former associate director, Office of Public Engagement, White House
Jesse Moore, former associate director, Office of Public Engagement, White House
Shannon Myricks, former specialist, Office of Management and Administration Information Services, White House
Melanie Newman, former director of public affairs, Justice Department
Fatima Noor, former policy assistant, Domestic Policy Council
Bianca Oden, former deputy chief of staff, Agriculture Department
Funmi Olorunnipa, former ethics counsel, White House Counsel’s Office
Elizabeth Ogunwo, former White House liaison, Peace Corps
Stephanie Sprow Owens, former deputy director, Reach Higher, Education Department
Denise L. Pease, former regional administrator of the northeast and Caribbean region, General Services Administration
Danielle Perry, former special adviser to the assistant secretary, Agriculture Department
Allison C. Pulliam, former special assistant, Office of Presidential Personnel, White House
Colby Redmond, former advance specialist, Office of the Secretary, Commerce Department
Derrick Robinson, former researcher, Office of Communications, White House
Lynn M. Ross, former deputy assistant secretary for policy development, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Sarah Rutherford, former press and media operations assistant, White House
Alexander Sewell, former special assistant, Export-Import Bank
Michael Smith, former special assistant to the president and senior director of Cabinet affairs for My Brother’s Keeper, White House
Russell F. Smith, former deputy assistant secretary for international fisheries, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Commerce Department
Jackeline Stewart, former press secretary, General Services Administration
Angela Tennison, former leadership development director, Education Department
Kenny Thompson Jr., former special assistant to the president and director of message events to the vice president, White House
Ivory A. Toldson, former executive director, White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Fred Tombar, former senior adviser to the secretary for disaster recovery, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Christopher R. Upperman, former assistant administrator for public engagement, Small Business Administration
Malik Walker, former senior adviser for congressional and legislative affairs, Office of Personnel Management
Jason R.L. Wallace, former director of scheduling and advance, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Myesha Ward, former assistant U.S. trade representative for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement
Clarence Wardell III, former presidential innovation fellow
Benjamin E. Webb, former executive director of policy and planning, Customs and Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security
C’Reda J. Weeden, former executive secretary, Department of Health and Human Services
Tonia Wellons, former associate director, Office of Strategic Partnerships, Peace Corps
Antonio White, former senior adviser, Treasury Department
Monae White, former special projects manager, Education Department
Aketa Marie Williams, former director of strategic communications, Office of the Undersecretary, Education Department
Jonta Williams, former adviser to the assistant administrator for Africa, U.S. Agency for International Development
Jessica Wilson, former special assistant, Office of Policy, Department of Homeland Security
Taj Wilson, former deputy associate counsel, White House
Candace Wint, former director of advance, Department of Housing and Urban Development
Brent C. Woolfork, former managing director, Overseas Private Investment Corporation
Tarrah Cooper Wright, former special assistant to the secretary, Department of Homeland Security
Ursula Wright, former associate assistant deputy secretary, Education Department
Carl Young, former adviser and assistant, Office of Management and Budget, White House
Stephanie Young, former senior adviser, Office of Public Engagement, White House
David N. Zikusoka, former senior adviser for weapons of mass destruction and nonproliferation, Office of the Vice President, White House
President Trump ranted Saturday morning on Twitter about an African American lawmaker by disparaging the Baltimore district that Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.) represents as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
As chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Cummings has initiated most of the investigations into the Trump administration’s operations and policies, including recently the reports of inhumane treatment at migrant detention centers.
Trump, seemingly borrowing from a Fox & Friends segment on the same topic, tweeted that Cummings’s district is “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than conditions at the border. He suggested Cummings focus his attention instead on cleaning up “this very dangerous & filthy place.”
Trump’s attack on Cummings is reminiscent of his recent racist attacks on four minority congresswomen who he said should “go back” to the “crime infested” places they were originally from and fix them before trying to improve America. All four women are U.S. citizens, and only one was born abroad.
In a series of three tweets, Trump wrote:
“Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA......
....As proven last week during a congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.
Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this corrupt mess immediately!”
Cummings responded a few hours later, defending his dedication to his constituents and pivoting to Trump’s failure to work with him on lowering drug prices.
“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors,” Cummings tweeted. “It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”
An hour before Trump went off on Cummings, Fox & Friends ran a piece called, “How do living conditions in Rep. Cummings’ Baltimore district compare to those at the border?” It showed footage of Baltimore streets overrun with garbage and claimed that Cummings was ignoring the problems of his own constituents.
Baltimore is the third most dangerous city in the country behind Detroit and St. Louis, according to the FBI’s 2017 crime report. But Maryland’s 7th district, which Cummings has represented since 1996, includes about half of Baltimore city and has a median household income of around $60,000 and a higher percentage of college graduates than the country as a whole.
Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. Young released a statement defending both Cummings and his city, calling the president a “disappointment to the people of Baltimore, our country and to the world.”
“It’s completely unacceptable for the political leader of our country to denigrate a vibrant American City like Baltimore, and to viciously attack U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings a patriot and a hero,” he said. “Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is hurtful and dangerous to the people he’s sworn to represent.”
Trump isn’t the first politician to comment on Baltimore’s struggles, but others have done so from a position of wanting to help.
In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), then fighting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president, took a walking tour of an impoverished Baltimore neighborhood. He said it looked like a “Third World country,” as he decried America’s vast economic inequality.
Notably, Ben Carson, the only black member of Trump’s Cabinet, made his career as a neurosurgeon in Baltimore. A spokesman at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which Carson now leads, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), whose 2020 presidential campaign headquarters is in Baltimore, tweeted that she’s “proud” to have it based there.
“Baltimore has become home to my team and it’s disgraceful the president has chosen to start his morning disparaging this great American city,” she wrote.
Many other Democrats rushed to Cummings’s defense. Former vice president Joe Biden, also a presidential candidate, said the Maryland congressman “is one of the finest people I’ve served with.”
“It is despicable for you to attack him and the people of Baltimore this way,” Biden tweeted. “Once again you have proved yourself unfit to hold the office. A President is supposed to lift this nation up. Not tear it down.”
Trump’s tweets and the Fox News report seem to be in response to a July 18 hearing, at which Cummings became furious when acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan said his department was doing its best with a difficult situation.
“When a child is sitting in their own feces, can’t take a shower?. . . I want to concentrate on these children, and I want to make sure that they’re okay. . . . We are the greatest country in the world,” Cummings bellowed. “Come on. We’re better than that.”
But the president’s ire with Cummings may also have to do with the chairman securing permission from his committee this week to subpoena all emails and texts dealing with official government business sent to or from administration officials on their personal accounts, which would include communications to and from the president’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who reportedly have used private emails to carry out White House work.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. was a U.S. congressman representing parts of Baltimore and then the mayor of the city, forcefully defended Cummings, calling him “a champion in the Congress and the country for civil rights and economic justice, a beloved leader in Baltimore, and deeply valued colleague.”
“We all reject racist attacks against him and support his steadfast leadership. #ElijahCummingsIsAPatriot,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) tweeted.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who served in the House alongside Cummings for many years, also tweeted praise for his colleague and condemned the president.
“Elijah Cummings grew up facing racist bullies like Trump and learned to confront them with qualities unknown to Trump: courage and integrity,” Van Hollen wrote. “The great people of Baltimore have something Trump craves but will never have as he degrades the Office of the President: dignity.”
In an emotional monologue about Trump’s latest comments, CNN’s Victor Blackwell pointed out that Trump has often used the word “infested” to refer to places where black and brown people live. To Trump’s contention that “no human being” would want to live in Baltimore, Blackwell said, his eyes filled with tears, that he did.
“I don’t want to sound self-righteous, but people get up and go to work there,” he said. “They care for their families there. They love their children who pledge allegiance to the flag just like people who live in districts of congressmen who support you, sir. They are Americans, too.”
In case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words to describe Maryland’s 7th congressional district on Saturday morning. Here are the key phrases: “no human being would want to live there,” it is a “very dangerous & filthy place,” “Worst in the USA” and, our personal favorite: It is a “rat and rodent infested mess.” He wasn’t really speaking of the 7th as a whole. He failed to mention Ellicott City, for example, or Baldwin or Monkton or Prettyboy, all of which are contained in the sprawling yet oddly-shaped district that runs from western Howard County to southern Harford County. No, Donald Trump’s wrath was directed at Baltimore and specifically at Rep. Elijah Cummings, the 68-year-old son of a former South Carolina sharecropper who has represented the district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1996.
It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream. President Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are “clean, efficient & well run," which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector-general recently called “a ticking time bomb."
In pointing to the 7th, the president wasn’t hoping his supporters would recognize landmarks like Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps the nation’s leading medical center. He wasn’t conjuring images of the U.S. Social Security Administration, where they write the checks that so many retired and disabled Americans depend upon. It wasn’t about the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry. And it surely wasn’t about the economic standing of a district where the median income is actually above the national average. No, he was returning to an old standby of attacking an African American lawmaker from a majority black district on the most emotional and bigoted of arguments. It was only surprising that there wasn’t room for a few classic phrases like “you people” or “welfare queens” or “crime-ridden ghettos” or a suggestion that the congressman “go back” to where he came from.
David Zurawik: Trump’s Twitter attack on Cummings and Baltimore: undiluted racism and hate »
This is a president who will happily debase himself at the slightest provocation. And given Mr. Cummings’ criticisms of U.S. border policy, the various investigations he has launched as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, his willingness to call Mr. Trump a racist for his recent attacks on the freshmen congresswomen, and the fact that “Fox & Friends” had recently aired a segment critical of the city, slamming Baltimore must have been irresistible in a Pavlovian way. Fox News rang the bell, the president salivated and his thumbs moved across his cell phone into action.
As heartening as it has been to witness public figures rise to Charm City’s defense on Saturday, from native daughter House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, we would above all remind Mr. Trump that the 7th District, Baltimore included, is part of the United States that he is supposedly governing. The White House has far more power to affect change in this city, for good or ill, than any single member of Congress including Mr. Cummings. If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone’s, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land.
Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.
Kind of sums it up. Not illegal to take pics, no action needed.
Yes, it is illegal to take certain pictures, even in Mississippi. It didn't pose a Specific threat? They're brandishing weapons in front of a plaque commemorating a LYNCHING. Of a black man for talking to a white woman, in a grocery store.
The threat is specific to Black People.
What did Santayana say about history? I forget.
So, was it illegal to take this particular pic?
Only school, SJW Facebook shaming.
perhaps if they are concerned about the physical sign itself, could place it higher, or somehow out of range, if that is their major concern. Of course, placing it higher or otherwise out of range, no one could see the bullet holes, so no repairs may be necessary.
You, others, presume to know the people's intentions who are in the pic.
Yellow Wall is just upset the sign was memorializing Emmett Till's murder instead of celebrating his killers.
Next he'll be upset the three racists in the photo weren't awarded the Nathan Bedford Forrest Scholarship.
Use of the charge, claim, brand "Racist", when the people in the story are not and have not been charged with breaking the law...
Use of the charge, claim, brand "Racist", when the people in the story are not and have not been charged with breaking the law... and furthering the tale, with assthos posting such tripe here, further trying to tar President Trump with this non-story, is what upsets me, and what will hopefully sink voters who are so tired of such claims, to bother voting Democrat when next asked.
Could one surmise, from the limited information given in the story, sure, and if one is seeking to have a chip knocked off one's shoulder, its as good a story as any to bitch about, meanwhile having NO EFFECT at all about true problems, and just spreading insane charges where there are no legal charges to be made.
It is enough the Frat Kids have been shamed, and this incident has affected the education plans their parents paid for, for 'inference', rather than racism.
You don't see it. I understand that. Assthos is truly hopeless, not worth worry or any saving grace. Hoping others realize the over use, crying wolf, does not help any cause you may wish to prosper.
Let the Gaslighting Commence: Covington Catholic High School Edition (https://www.eclectablog.com/2019/01/let-the-gaslighting-commence-covington-catholic-high-school-edition.html)
A federal judge in Kentucky on Friday dismissed a $250 million libel suit against The Washington Post brought by a high school student who claimed that the organization’s coverage of his and his fellow students’ encounter with an American Indian activist at the Lincoln Memorial in January was false and defamatory.
U.S. District Judge William O. Bertelsman ruled that seven Post articles and three of its tweets bearing on Nicholas Sandmann — who was part of a group of Catholic students from Kentucky who came to Washington to march against abortion — were protected by the First Amendment. In analyzing the 33 statements over which Sandmann sued, the judge found none of them defamatory; instead, the vast majority constituted opinion, he said.
“Few principles of law are as well-established as the rule that statements of opinion are not actionable in libel actions,” Bertelsman wrote, adding that the rule is based on First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech. “The statements that Sandmann challenges constitute protected opinions that may not form the basis for a defamation claim.”
Sandmann’s parents, who brought the suit on their son’s behalf, said they would appeal. “I believe fighting for justice for my son and family is of vital national importance,” Ted Sandmann said in a statement. “If what was done to Nicholas is not legally actionable, then no one is safe.”
The Post, in its motion to dismiss the suit, asserted that its stories were accurate and did not impugn the reputation of Sandmann, a Covington Catholic High School student who entered a social media maelstrom after video footage shot during a chaotic afternoon on the Mall showed him standing face-to-face with drumbeating Indian elder Nathan Phillips.
In his suit, Nicholas Sandmann claimed that the “gist” of The Post’s first article, on Jan. 19, was that he “assaulted” or “physically intimidated Phillips” and “engaged in racist conduct” and taunts.
“But,” the judge wrote, “this is not supported by the plain language in the article, which states no such thing.”
When the videos went viral, showing Sandmann and other students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, commentators saw an opportunity to criticize supporters of President Trump. Many claimed that Sandmann’s and other students’ behavior reflected a disrespect for the Native American elder, who is also a military veteran.
Phillips, who was part of an indigenous people’s march the same day, said in The Post’s first article about the incident that the teen blocked his way as he was trying to reach the top of the Lincoln Memorial’s steps.
Sandmann later said he was just remaining motionless and calm, in hopes of soothing emotions at the scene.
Sandmann’s suit called The Post’s coverage libelous on its face, but the judge’s opinion cited case law noting that statements must be “more than annoying, offensive or embarrassing.” They must expose the allegedly libeled party to public hatred, ridicule and contempt, among other damaging elements.
In seeking dismissal, The Post’s lawyers also noted that several of Sandmann’s complaints stemmed from the articles’ descriptions of the crowd’s behavior in general, not his. The judge, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, agreed in many cases. “And while unfortunate, it is further irrelevant that Sandmann was scorned on social media,” the judge wrote.
The judge also found no fault with The Post quoting Phillips.
“The court accepts Sandmann’s statement that, when he was standing motionless in the confrontation with Phillips, his intent was to calm the situation and not impede or block anyone,” the judge wrote.
“However, Phillips did not see it that way. He concluded that he was being ‘blocked’ and not allowed to ‘retreat.’ He passed these conclusions on to The Post. They may have been erroneous, but . . . they are opinion protected by the First Amendment. And The Post is not liable for publishing these opinions.”
“From our first story on this incident to our last, we sought to report fairly and accurately the facts that could be established from available evidence, the perspectives of all of the participants, and the comments of the responsible church and school officials,” said Shani George, The Post’s director of communications. “We are pleased that the case has been dismissed.”
This is your periodic reminder Yellow Wall does anything possible to derail this thread.
You're the one whining about trying to be my friend.
#Resist
It doesn’t take much evidence for President Trump to decide he’s right. Dead people still on voter rolls? Then he clearly lost the popular vote in 2016 because of voter fraud. A warrant was obtained against a former campaign staffer a few weeks before the election? Then the entire investigation into Russia’s role in the election was obviously invalid.
The most recent example came Saturday, when Trump began his day by watching a Fox News segment looking at run-down areas in Baltimore. The report featured video filmed by a Republican activist from the city and was used to draw a specific contrast: This is what Rep. Elijah E. Cummings’s district looks like. Yet, the Maryland Democrat has the gall to criticize Trump?
Never mind that what was shown were individual units in one part of Cummings’s district. Never mind that his district also reportedly includes rental units owned by Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner. Those discrete bits of televised evidence, those several rowhouses — on Fox News, no less! — were more than enough for Trump to offer a sweeping assessment of Cummings’s tenure.
“Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border,” Trump tweeted, “when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA. As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
It takes an enormous amount of chutzpah for Trump to level this charge. This was, after all, the president who pledged at his party convention three years ago this month that he alone could fix the government’s problems. Since he’s been president, Trump has traveled to Maryland several times in an official capacity, but never to Baltimore.
His invocations of the city since he has been president include a mention of East Baltimore as he established “opportunity zones” in several regions — designations that could end up benefiting Kushner.
Most of the times he has mentioned Baltimore, though, have been to lump it together with other heavily black places such as Detroit and Chicago as a stand-in for “dangerous, run-down areas.” We’re spending money on wars overseas, he said, while “neglecting the fate of American children in cities like Baltimore and Chicago and Detroit.” Speaking to police officers, he lamented that we had “seen the unbearable horror of the shortcomings in Baltimore and Chicago that have cut short so many lives and so many beautiful, beautiful dreams.”
He uses “Baltimore” as an invocation of something bad. It is something from which people must be lifted up or against, something from which the rest of the country should be compared. It overlaps with how he uses “infest,” a term that been used by Trump on Twitter to describe only places that are mostly nonwhite or heavily Democratic.
To contrast himself with Cummings, Trump insisted on Sunday that he has done more for black Americans than have Democrats simply because the black unemployment rate has fallen.
When Trump took office, 57.5 percent of the country’s working-age black population was employed; now, 58.2 percent are. Over the prior three years, the percentage had climbed 4.2 points. The unemployment rate in the Baltimore area has dropped under Trump, from 4.5 percent to 3.8 percent. Three years before his inauguration, it was at 6.3 percent. Employment growth there has trailed the rest of the country.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly conflated the concerns of black Americans with problems in the “inner city,” as though what was happening in places such as West Baltimore defined the black experience.
Trump’s main pitch to black voters in 2016 was: “What do you have to lose?” To be fair, that pitch included no promise of black voters actually gaining much in voting for him.
Trump’s disparagement of Baltimore and his insistence that its problems are Cummings’s problems and not his own reflects where Trump thinks government resources should be expended. Just as he championed a $16 billion bailout for farmers at the same time his administration was mulling a $15 billion cut to food stamps, Trump sees some parts of America as deserving of concern and others as hopelessly broken.
Struggling places such as West Virginia are victims from outside forces that must be combated, like environmentalists and drug-smuggling immigrants. Baltimore? Baltimore’s problems aren’t a function of decades of structural racism or neglect but, instead, the fault of the people who live there and represent it.
There’s a paradox that’s worth reiterating: If it’s an indictment of Cummings that Baltimore has problems, it is necessarily also an indictment of Trump. Both are in positions of political authority over it, but at least Cummings has spent time in the district.
To compare Baltimore to the border, as Trump did, exposes what the president is actually doing. Trump has direct control over facilities at the border housing migrants, facilities that have been repeatedly criticized as dirty, under-resourced and unhealthy for those interned in them. Baltimore, while part of the United States, is at enough of a remove that he can pass the buck wherever he wants. He doesn’t even need to pretend that it’s his responsibility — and his defenders quickly stepped up to bolster that belief.
A few rowhouses prove that Cummings is a hypocrite. A few news stories raising alarms about conditions at the border? Fake news.
Early last year, I was in Baltimore to see how residents felt about the president one year into his term. I spoke with a man named Oliver Spriggs, 78, who lived in Cummings’s district. He was walking with his 8-year-old grandson, Keishawn.
I asked how he thought Trump was doing.
“You really don’t want to know,” Spriggs replied.
Keishawn chimed in: “Horrible!"
"Lousy!” Spriggs said. He said that he felt Trump was a liar.
“And as far as I’m concerned,” Spriggs added, “he’s a racist in his words and his actions.”
His grandson, surprised, looked at his grandfather.
“He’s a racist?” Keishawn asked.
It seems maddeningly repetitive to have to return time and again to the fact that Donald Trump is a racist, but it must be done. It must be done because it is a foundational character issue, one that supersedes and informs many others, in much the same way that his sexism and xenophobia does.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Representative Elijah Cummings’s district “is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” a “very dangerous & filthy place” and “No human being would want to live there.” Cummings is black, as are most people in his district.
This talk of infestation is telling, because he only seems to apply it to issues concerning black and brown people. He has sniped about the “Ebola infested areas of Africa.” He has called Congressman John Lewis’s Atlanta district “crime infested” as well as telling him to focus on “the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S.” He has called sanctuary cities a “crime infested & breeding concept.” He has talked about how “illegal immigrants” will “pour into and infest our Country.” He has called the presence of the MS-13 gang members “in certain parts of our country” an “infestation.”
None of this is about crime as a discrete phenomenon, but rather about inextricably linking criminality to blackness. White supremacy isn’t necessarily about rendering white people as superhuman; it is just as often about rendering nonwhite people as subhuman. Either way the hierarchy is established, with whiteness assuming the superior position.
A survey of Trump’s tweets reveals that his attachment of criminality to populations is almost exclusively to black and brown people and to “inner cities,” an urban euphemism for black and brown neighborhoods.
Trump has repeatedly made clear his view, from the Central Park Five case to a series of tweets he published in 2013, writing: “Sadly, the overwhelming amount of violent crime in our major cities is committed by blacks and hispanics — a tough subject — must be discussed.”
But, blackness doesn’t make one more apt to abuse others, any more than whiteness makes one apt to abuse opioids. Human beings respond to their environments, to their needs and desires, to their hopelessness and despair.
For instance, crime raged in New York City in the 1800s when there were almost no black people in the city. Indeed, in 1985, the writer and prodigious chronicler of New York City, Edward Robb Ellis, wrote in The New York Times about a citizen complaining in 1852 that “the increase of crime, the ferocity and frequency of assaults on private citizens at night in this city, and the … imbecility and inefficiency of the police is creating great alarm in the decent and orderly portion of our inhabitants.”
According to Ross, Walt Whitman himself said, “New York is one of the most crime-haunted and dangerous cities in Christendom.”
Were the white people living in New York at the time racially, pathologically predisposed to criminality? Of course not. And black and brown people now aren’t. That historical and sociological context is lost on the racists.
Furthermore, there is nothing benign in Trump’s language. Infestations justify exterminations. There is a reason that Martin Luther King Jr. said, “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.” The mouth that demeans may not always be attached to the hand that destroys, but they are most assuredly connected in spirit and in spite.
It would be easy to prosecute a case against Trump on policy, but policies are not at the center of the creature. White supremacy, white nationalism and white patriarchy are.
The core of this man is racist in a way that is so fused to his sense of the world that he is incapable of seeing it as racist. It is instinctual for him to attack people of color. It is instinctual for him to denigrate the places they live and the countries to which they trace their heritage.
He has so bought into the white supremacist narrative that his ideology no longer requires, in his own thinking, a label. For him, this lie of it is just the truth of it, and what is “right” can’t be racist.
This is a means by which racists have operated throughout history, to rescue themselves from association with those who flayed the flesh of the enslaved, who raped the women and sold the children, who released the dogs and aimed the water cannons, who noosed the necks and set ablaze the crosses.
Those demonstrative few, those consumed by hatred and sadism, those were the racists. Not the exponentially larger groups who swallowed and regurgitated a warped view of the world, a doctored view of history, and supposedly damning “facts” without contextualization.
Trump is a racist. Say that out loud. Say it with the profundity that it deserves. That to me is the beginning and the ending of the rationale I need to stand steadfast in my resistance.
President Trump’s sweeping disparagement of Maryland’s 7th Congressional District over the weekend was obviously not informed by the district’s actual dynamics. Trump apparently saw a segment on Fox News in which a Republican activist shared videos of run-down houses in a district represented by a fierce critic of the president, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.). With a flick of his magic Twitter wand, Trump declared the district to be so toxic as to be uninhabitable.
“No human being would want to live there,” he wrote on Twitter, a wholesale denigration of the people who do live there — people who, in Trump’s eyes, either don’t want to live there or aren’t human. Trump was focused on the portion of Baltimore that Cummings represents (the dark-blue cluster in the district), almost certainly without recognizing that the district also stretches out into the suburbs and includes no fewer than 64,926 people who voted for Trump in 2016.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/g69turk1SSw9AmhQCyhhVJ-JKS8=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TH4BGFBDARCTVD3PNLGMRB6NVI.jpg)
Cummings’s district is “considered the Worst in the USA,” according to the president’s random attack, and is “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.” It’s a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” Trump went on, and “very dangerous & filthy."
Again, Trump was responding to a few videos shared by a Republican who lives in Baltimore, but it took very little for him to extrapolate: It’s Baltimore, so it’s poor, dangerous and dirty — which is precisely the context in which Trump has always referred to the city.
The thing is, though: Cummings’s district isn’t that poor. Compared with the other 434 congressional districts, the 7th District is in the 61st percentile on median household income. White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s old district, South Carolina’s 5th District, is in the 22nd percentile for income, despite Mulvaney disparaging Cummings’s district on Sunday.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/q1LsFdA1fs9KM9WJr49CI6qxRe8=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WMS5TUR5ZND7LJVUBSQKOJQWMQ.jpg)
(Here, we’ve compared incomes to the Cook Political Report partisan voting index, a look at how districts have voted in the past two presidential elections. On these charts, districts that backed Trump in 2016 are in red.)
Mulvaney specifically referred to poverty, a metric on which his old district and Cummings’s are about equal, according to Census Bureau data. Maryland’s 7th District is in the 70th percentile for poverty. Poverty there is significantly lower than in, say, the heavily Republican 5th District of Kentucky, which Trump has not targeted for disparagement on Twitter.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/Lb0mnN7N4izBsn_rVaHj5hU7dhY=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/M7G4QMOVXJFB5HQSNOI2VUOOEE.jpg)
In both of those graphs, we’ve overlaid another dimension: the density of the white population in the districts. The smaller the circle on the graph, the more heavily nonwhite it is.
Let’s compare income and race directly. Many of the most heavily black districts in the United States are also on the lower end of the income spectrum. Maryland’s 7th District has the second-highest median income among districts that are at least half black. (The highest is found in Maryland’s 4th District.)
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/ZkY4kKSOSi8Qb71kXAZtUUBtIB8=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/REYEW6UBFREO3PX7653CAMSMZE.jpg)
Part of Trump’s focus on Baltimore concerns the rate of violent crime in the city. The Gun Violence Archive tracks shooting incidents by congressional district. From 2014 to now, there were 4,335 such incidents in Cummings’s district, the third-highest of any district.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/bMBOn855VDi1Dtsb3aFEelDPpiw=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/2QSZNGM7P5F7HGCKLXNDMWBSRE.jpg)
This doesn’t correlate precisely to poverty at the district level. The district with the highest poverty rate in the country, according to the Census Bureau, is New York’s 15th District, represented by Rep. José E. Serrano (D-N.Y.). The district with the most shootings is Illinois’s 7th, in Chicago — a district that does have higher poverty than the median.
On average, the 15 congressional districts with the highest number of shooting incidents are in the 88th percentile nationally for poverty.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/68ZelWP9RpHL_hqpUNg_a4OVhPE=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/JTFL4JBB2RBURNYHQ4WM2WI3HI.jpg)
The lowest poverty rate of those 15? Maryland’s 7th District.
There’s a complicated overlap among race, crime and income. There are long-standing systemic reasons for Baltimore’s poverty, explored by The Post during unrest in the city in 2015. As Emily Badger wrote then:
“Just a few years ago, Wells Fargo agreed to pay millions of dollars to Baltimore and its residents to settle a landmark lawsuit brought by the city claiming the bank unfairly steered minorities who wanted to own homes into subprime mortgages. Before that, there was the crack epidemic of the 1990s and the rise of mass incarceration and the decline of good industrial jobs in the 1980s.”
“And before that? From 1951 to 1971, 80 to 90 percent of the 25,000 families displaced in Baltimore to build new highways, schools and housing projects were black. Their neighborhoods, already disinvested and deemed dispensable, were sliced into pieces, the parks where their children played bulldozed.”
“And before that — now if we go way back — there was redlining, the earlier corollary to subprime lending in which banks refused to lend at all in neighborhoods that federally backed officials had identified as having ‘undesirable racial concentrations.’”
But again: As that first map shows, the district isn’t all Baltimore. There’s another gap that’s worth highlighting, in fact. The median household income for white households in Cummings’s district is 2.25 times the income for black households. That’s a higher discrepancy than in all but 13 other districts — including Illinois’s 7th District.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/_2nbUMZcaBnbIxd9Ot7MPxemzpc=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/JCEDKZCYCRBE7PKAFX2JDPDLBE.jpg)
Despite that gulf, black household incomes in Cummings’s district are in the 61st percentile among congressional districts — the same position white households hold. Why the above gap, then? White households in his district have incomes that are in the 91st percentile. About a third of the district is white, according to the Census Bureau. Voter data from the data firm L2 suggests that those white voters are more heavily Democratic than Republican.
It’s a complicated picture, one that Trump obviously isn’t interested in. He often presents blue districts — particularly urban, heavily nonwhite blue districts — as representations of the worst of America. That fails to capture the complexity of the situation. Here, the goal is obvious: Bash Cummings. Picking out one part of a district to impugn an elected leader, though, means that Trump might be held more accountable for Baltimore than Cummings himself.
In the 2016 election, the Republican running against Cummings pulled in 21.8 percent of the vote. Trump did a bit worse, getting 20.2 percent and about 4,000 fewer votes.
Given the weekend’s tweets, it seems quite possible that Trump might do worse in 2020.
On Sunday afternoon, a gunman opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, an annual summer festival in the quiet city of Gilroy, California, located about 30 miles south of San Jose. The gunman killed three people, including a six-year-old boy, and injured at least 12 others. Police said the gunman had been shot and killed and that authorities suspected he may have had an accomplice, who was still at large.
Although authorities initially did not reveal the identity of the shooter, local news station KPIX 5 reported he was a 19-year-old man named Santino Legan. Police recovered a backpack filled with ammunition at the scene, and they later searched his home and a second location.
Little is currently known about Legan: Though witnesses claim to have heard him say he was “really angry” while he was opening fire on the crowd, there’s not much indication as to his potential motive for the shooting. While his social media platforms appear to have been deleted as of Monday morning, one post on his alleged Instagram read: “Ayyy garlic festival time. Come get wasted on overpriced shit.” Another post on the now-deleted Instagram included a picture of a Smokey the Bear sign advocating for forest fire prevention, with Legan writing in the caption: “Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to cater to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?” then plugging the text Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.
A 19th-century text of unknown authorship (its origins have been attributed to everyone from British author Arthur Desmond to Call of the Wild novelist Jack London), Might Is Right has long been considered a key text in the white supremacist movement, says Keegan Hankes, a senior analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s intelligence project. “It’s widely popular and present among ethnocentric white nationalists of all levels, from suit-and-tie white supremacists to neo-Nazis,” Hankes tells Rolling Stone.
The text, which has been banned in multiple countries, essentially advocates for social Darwinism, or the idea that members of certain races or ethnicities are inherently better equipped for survival than others. The author argues that true egalitarianism does not and cannot exist, and that the “white race” is inherently biologically superior to other races.
Although the social Darwinist arguments in the text were not considered all that radical in the 19th century, when the eugenics movement was at its height, it has since been embraced by everyone from noted satanist Anton LaVey to Katja Lane, the wife of white-nationalist-organization The Order founder David Lane, who wrote the preface for its 1999 reprinting. It is also available on the white supremacist website Counter-Currents, and the PDF version has become a staple of white supremacist digital libraries and forums.
“The most important thing [about the text] is this belief in ethnocentricity and biological determinism that is getting pulled from the late 19th century to this current day,” says Hankes. “The ideas are ubiquitous today in white supremacist circles.”
While it’s still unclear whether the shooting was racially motivated, or if Legan had any other concrete ties to extremist circles, this would not be the first time that a mass shooter had been influenced by old-school white supremacist writings. The manifesto of the Christchurch shooter, for instance — while primarily designed to incite division and troll its readers — also contained allusions to Oswald Mosley, a 1930s British fascist known for his Nazi sympathies and xenophobic ideology, and to the writings of David Lane.
“Unfortunately, this is starting to feel all too common,” says Hankes. “There’s a tragedy and we look for a connection to white supremacy, and these are exactly the types of breadcrumbs you might expect.”
President Trump attacked the Rev. Al Sharpton on Monday as “a con man” and someone who “Hates Whites & Cops,” just hours before Sharpton held a news conference in Baltimore to decry Trump’s derogatory weekend tweets directed at the city and an African American congressman.
Sharpton, a former Democratic presidential candidate and MSNBC talk-show host, appeared in Baltimore alongside Michael Steele, who formerly chaired the Republican National Committee and served as Maryland’s lieutenant governor.
At the event, held at a Baltimore church, Sharpton said Trump had attacked the city and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) in “the most bigoted and racist way.”
“He has a particular venom for blacks and people of color,” Sharpton said of Trump.
Steele, the first African American elected statewide in Maryland, criticized Trump for “reprehensive comments” and invited him to come to Baltimore.
“Put the tweet down brother, and show up,” Steele said.
In tweets beforehand, Trump said he had known Sharpton for 25 years. He said the two “always got along well” and attended boxing matches together.
“He would ask me for favors often,” Trump said. “Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score. Just doing his thing. Must have intimidated Comcast/NBC. Hates Whites & Cops!”
Sharpton’s news conference came two days after Trump criticized Baltimore as a “rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live” and attacked Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who represents part of the city. Cummings chairs the House Oversight Committee, which has been holding an array of hearings critical of Trump administration practices.
Sharpton responded Monday morning on Twitter by sharing a photograph of Trump attending a 2006 conference hosted by Sharpton’s organization, the National Action Network. The photo also included singer James Brown and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
“Trump at NAN Convention 2006 telling James Brown and Jesse Jackson why he respects my work. Different tune now,” Sharpton wrote.
Trump soon responded on Twitter, saying that Sharpton would “always ask me to go to his events” as “a personal favor.”
“Seldom, but sometimes, I would go. It was fine,” Trump said.
Sharpton later continued the back-and-forth on Twitter, writing: “Trump says I’m a troublemaker & con man. I do make trouble for bigots. If he really thought I was a con man he would want me in his cabinet.”
Trump also renewed his attacks on Baltimore and Cummings on Monday, asserting in a tweet that the city of more than 600,000 people “has the worst Crimes Statistics in the Nation.”
“25 years of all talk, no action!” Trump wrote. “So tired of listening to the same old Bull...Next, Reverend Al will show up to complain & protest. Nothing will get done for the people in need. Sad!”
Steele also spoke out about Trump over the weekend, raising a question in a tweet about “how much more of Trump’s incessant whining, tweeting, bullying, & racism are we willing to put up with.”
Trump launched his attacks on Cummings two weeks after he started taking aim at a group of four liberal minority congresswomen known on Capitol Hill as “the Squad.”
In the first of his tweets attacking the freshman lawmakers, he said they should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” — remarks that drew a rebuke from the House.
Only one of the four women — Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali refugee who became a U.S. citizen in 2000 — was born outside the United States. The others — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — were born in the United States.
In another tweet Monday, Trump referenced the four lawmakers again.
“If the Democrats are going to defend the Radical Left ‘Squad’ and King Elijah’s Baltimore Fail, it will be a long road to 2020,” he said.
Trump’s advisers have concluded that the overall message sent by such attacks is good for the president among his political base — resonating strongly with the white working-class voters he needs to win reelection in 2020.
Sharpton also saw a political motive in Trump’s attacks. During a call Monday morning into MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he said, “I think this is Trump getting ready for reelection.”
Later Monday morning, Trump struck a more hopeful note about Baltimore and suggested that the city’s leaders call him.
“The fact is, Baltimore can be brought back, maybe even to new heights of success and glory, but not with King Elijah and that crew,” he said. “When the leaders of Baltimore want to see the City rise again, I am in a very beautiful oval shaped office waiting for your call!”
“I know you are, but what am I?” is not only a time-honored playground rejoinder, it’s also one of Donald Trump’s favorite arguments. Hillary Clinton started the racist birther conspiracy, said America’s most prominent birther. She’s “crooked,” said the most corrupt president in U.S. history. I didn’t conspire with the Russians, the Democrats conspired with the Russians. I’m not a racist, Rep. Elijah Cummings is a racist.
When Trump made that last charge against Cummings in the midst of a days-long attack on the congressman’s city of Baltimore and everyone who lives there, some people found it puzzling. What the hell was Trump talking about? He didn’t even bother to explain.
But he didn’t have to, because if you didn’t immediately understand, he wasn’t talking to you.
Trump was talking directly to his base, for whom discussions about race have a particular resonance and a particular dynamic. As someone who spends hours every day watching Fox News, Trump is tuned directly into the discussion of race that occurs on that platform and elsewhere in conservative media; he knows it well. As much as liberals are concerned with racism and the operation of racist systems, exposure to that media would convince you that, in American politics today it is actually conservatives who spend the most time thinking about race.
For the uninitiated, here are the some of the main features of the racial narrative Fox and other conservative outlets weave:
Actual racial discrimination against African Americans and other minorities is largely a thing of the past.
The most common victims of racial discrimination today are white people, who are regularly elbowed aside by minorities given government benefits they don’t deserve.
Liberals constantly accuse conservatives of being racist with zero justification, an accusation that can be impossible to refute.
When minorities criticize government policy, it shows they are unpatriotic and “ungrateful.”
People of color are held back by their own pathologies.
Democrats are The Real Racists, which is proven by the fact that their party was pro-slavery during the Civil War and many 20th-century segregationists were Democrats.
Let’s not forget what the trigger was for Trump’s Twitter rant about Baltimore being “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” It was, of course, a Fox News segment meant to invoke precisely that disgust. When Trump called Cummings (D-Md.) a racist, he was activating this entire narrative in the minds of his most ardent supporters, saying to them: You’re the victims here, and those people don’t have any right to criticize us.
Of course, racial revanchism was always at the core of Trump’s political project. For years conservatives had been told to feel angry by immigration, by social change and by “political correctness,” i.e., annoying liberals telling you to treat others with politeness and respect even if you don’t like them. Trump took all that anger and unleashed it by saying that you no longer have to feel constrained. You can let out all the feelings people have been telling you to tamp down and revel in your liberation. Put on that MAGA hat, chant “Lock her up!” and “Send them back!” and bathe yourself in liberal tears.
We should say here that on occasion some liberals are indeed too quick to charge conservatives with saying racist things. However often you think those excesses actually occur, what cannot be disputed is that conservatives have come to believe they are absolutely constant and fear that any expression of conservative ideas will be met with the accusation of racism.
Within the tightest circle of Fox obsessives, there is no ambivalence about any of this. But as you move outward from there, people’s feelings get more complicated. And Trump, by being so obviously racist, makes it difficult to keep insisting that all accusations of racism are unfair.
Yet he did other Republicans a temporary favor by calling Cummings a racist, because they could find safe harbor in asserting that neither Trump nor Cummings is in fact a racist, something one after another of them is now saying with evident relief at the ability to sound magnanimous while continuing to support the president their own constituents love.
They’re worried, though, because the possibility for backlash is real. Not only is Trump getting his opponents as activated as his supporters (if not more), evidence is growing that he’s alienating some of the very people he thinks he’s appealing to, not to mention other groups such as suburban women whose votes could be up for grabs in 2020. You can tell how desperately many Republicans wish he’d change the subject.
But he won’t. Trump believes he is winning, because he’s getting attention and giving his core supporters what they want. He turns on Fox News and sees good friends Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro amplify his arguments and tell him that he’s a genius executing a masterful strategy.
Which is why it’s likely that we’ll be repeating this cycle over and over between now and November 2020: Trump gets mad at a Democrat, he sees something on Fox that makes his blood boil, he tweets something racist, Democrats express their outrage, some Republicans try to explain it away while others back him up, the whole ugly mess dominates the news for a few days before finally fading — and then a couple of weeks later we do it all again.
The president believes that the endless repetition of that cycle will guarantee his victory. He believes that white people are motivated by racial animus, by resentment and fear, by anger and hate, and only by bringing those emotions to the fore will he be reelected. He accuses others of hating America, but this is his odious vision of who Americans are, at least the only Americans who matter to him. If only we could be confident that he’s wrong.
Trump lashed out anew Tuesday at Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and the “corrupt” city he represents, saying residents of Baltimore are “living in hell” and claiming that thousands of African Americans have thanked him for highlighting the city’s problems.
Speaking to reporters as he left the White House, Trump also said that he would visit Baltimore “at the right time” and claimed that he has helped himself politically with his relentless attacks that began with tweets over the weekend in which he called the city a “rodent infested mess.”
“The African American community is so thankful,” Trump said as he prepared to head to a commemoration in Jamestown, Va., the birthplace of representative government in the United States. “They’ve called me and said finally someone is telling the truth.”
“Those people are living in hell in Baltimore,” Trump added. “They really appreciate what I’m doing, and they’ve let me know it.” He offered no specifics about who had reached out to him.
Trump blamed Cummings, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, for problems in the city, saying, “he’s had a very iron hand on it.”
Trump had a 6 percent job approval rating among African American voters in a Quinnipiac poll released this week. That figure has ranged as high as 18 percent approval in recent Washington Post-ABC News polling.
Quinnipiac also released a finding Tuesday that 51 percent of voters think Trump is racist while 45 percent do not.
During his remarks to reporters, Trump said, “I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world.”
Later Tuesday, as he returned to the White House, Trump was pressed by a reporter for specifics about who in the African American community had been thanking him for his comments on Cummings and Baltimore. He didn’t offer any.
“A lot of people. Many, many people,” Trump said.
Following a visit Monday afternoon with students attending summer programs at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, Cummings referenced the controversy with Trump in a tweet.
“I am fueled by these smart and energized young people and I will continue to do every day what I am duty-bounded to do — help my constituents to live their best lives and serve as a check on the Executive Branch,” he wrote.
Trump’s comments Tuesday echoed tweets sent late Monday night about Cummings and his majority-black congressional district, which includes part of Baltimore, as well as parts of two neighboring counties.
After misleadingly calling Baltimore’s statistics “the worst in the United States on Crime and the Economy,” Trump suggested that the city had wasted aid.
“Billions of dollars have been pumped in over the years, but to no avail,” Trump tweeted. “The money was stolen or wasted. Ask Elijah E. Cummings where it went. He should investigate himself with his Oversight Committee!”
As with Trump’s first attack on Cummings, the president’s Monday-night insults weren’t fired off in a vacuum. Rather, they came amid hours of programming on Fox News blasting Cummings and Democrats, and backing Trump’s complaints about Baltimore.
Kimberly Klacik, a Baltimore Republican whose Saturday morning appearance on Fox inspired Trump’s initial attacks, was back Monday night on “The Ingraham Angle,” and the president tuned in to watch. After quoting from Klacik’s interview on Twitter, Trump echoed a controversial 2016 campaign slogan aimed at black voters, writing: “What the h.... do you have to lose?”
Trump’s latest missives made clear that days of withering criticism from Democrats and some Republicans have done little to temper his drive for stoking racial tensions as an electoral strategy. They also starkly highlighted how Fox News and its array of Trump-backing hosts continue to drive the president’s daily agenda.
When Trump tuned in to Fox on Saturday, he was already enraged at Cummings over the Democrat’s role in investigating his businesses and relatives as chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and for his criticisms of Trump’s border strategy.
That anger was ignited by Klacik’s segment on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” featuring footage of dilapidated buildings and garbage in Cummings’s district. (The piece didn’t note that the district includes above-average median incomes, famed institutions such as the Johns Hopkins Hospital and even rental units owned by Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.)
Within an hour of the piece airing, Trump opined on Twitter that “no human being would want to live” in “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” Baltimore and called Cummings “a brutal bully.”
Thus began a familiar cycle, exemplified earlier this month when Trump sent a racist tweet aimed at four minority Democratic congresswomen and demanding that they “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came,” despite the fact that all four are U.S. citizens. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) likewise deemed Trump’s broadside against Cummings a “racist attack,” echoing many other prominent Democrats.
Two days of brutal verbal sparring followed. Trump first insisted that “Democrats always play the Race Card,” before then accusing Cummings — who is African American and whose district is nearly 53 percent black — of himself being “racist.” When the Rev. Al Sharpton joined the fray and slammed Trump for criticizing Cummings in “the most bigoted and racist way,” Trump claimed in a tweet that the former Democratic presidential candidate “Hates Whites & Cops.”
At the White House this week, The Washington Post reported, some advisers worried that Trump’s attacks on Cummings would distract from larger issues and declined to defend his more personal insults lobbed at the congressman. A Monday afternoon White House meeting with black pastors, many of whom supported Trump, hinted at a potential easing of hostilities.
But by Monday night, a trio of Fox News hosts went on air to enthusiastically back the president. As CNN’s Brian Stelter reported, Tucker Carlson’s show touted how “DEMS HAVE FAILED BALTIMORE,” while Sean Hannity cued up a segment on the “CRISIS IN BALTIMORE.” Laura Ingraham, meanwhile, invited Klacik back on the show under the chyron, “DEMOCRATS WRECK CITIES, BLAME TRUMP.”
Amid that cable news support, Trump returned to Twitter and his familiar grievances against Cummings and Baltimore. Trump has taken particular umbrage at Cummings for criticizing his Department of Homeland Security chief during a congressional hearing earlier this month over reports of unsanitary conditions for children at border facilities.
“None of us would have our children in that position,” Cummings said during the hearing. “They are human beings.”
On Monday night, Trump again hit out at the congressman over that critique.
During Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, there has been an ongoing debate about whether Trump’s words and even the president himself should be called “racist.”
This debate has intensified in the past weeks. First, Trump tweeted that four nonwhite congresswomen should “go back” to where they “originally came from,” even though three of them were born in the United States.
And then, on Saturday, Trump, who has often used infestation imagery to describe places where minorities live, tweeted that Democratic Rep. Elijah Cumming’s Baltimore district was a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and a “very dangerous & filthy place.” Cumming’s district is actually relatively affluent and well-educated, but it is majority black, and Cummings himself is also black.
Although many politicians, political commentators, news outlets and even a few longtime defenders of the president have called Trump’s words “racist,” Republican leaders have generally closed ranks and rejected this characterization.
To understand this debate about Trump and racism, it’s important to put it in historical perspective. First, it is but one episode in a long history of American denials of the extent and consequences of prejudice, racial discrimination, segregation, disenfranchisement and persecution. Whites have done so even when the racism was virtually undeniable.
Second, this debate illustrates the more recent and growing partisan polarization on the question of what constitutes racism. That polarization makes it unsurprising that so many Republican leaders would not condemn Trump in these terms.
Most Americans denied racism even under Jim Crow
The Jim Crow era, from the 1870s through the 1950s, was a period of explicit, legally sanctioned racism. Racial segregation was enforced by law for decades. Black people were subjected to systematic discrimination, property deprivation, disenfranchisement and even violent death at the hands of Southern racists.
But remarkably, when pollsters asked white Americans about the situation of blacks, most still thought that African Americans were being treated fairly. In 1944, 1946 and 1956, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) asked Americans, “Do you think most [N]egroes in the United States are being treated fairly or unfairly?” The graph below shows that at least 60 percent of whites said that most blacks were treated fairly.
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By contrast, only 11 percent of African Americans said that blacks were treated fairly in 1956.
How could so many white people think this? One simple reason is that most whites at that time had racist attitudes themselves, such as opposing interracial marriage. The most prejudiced whites have always been the least likely to acknowledge the harmful effects of racism and discrimination against African Americans. This is exemplified in a figure like former Alabama governor George Wallace, who once infamously proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” — and didn’t even consider himself racist in the 1960s. (He would later reject this view and apologize.)
The denial of racism today still fits the Jim Crow pattern
The pattern of prejudiced whites denying racism is still true today. In a 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) survey, 53 percent of whites said that blacks didn’t face a lot of discrimination. Once again, this attitude is especially prevalent among those with more prejudiced attitudes toward black people.
In this survey, whites who said they would prefer to see their close relatives marry other whites, as well as whites who rated whites more favorably than blacks, were much less likely to say that there is a lot of discrimination against African Americans.
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What’s changed: The extraordinary partisan polarization on race
Of course, many things have changed since Jim Crow. One especially important difference is that hostility toward African Americans and the denial of racial discrimination was distributed across both parties in the 1950s. In the South, most whites were Democrats, after all.
Over time, however, and particularly in the past several years, Democrats and Republicans have moved further apart on questions of race. This gap is visible in how Democrats and Republicans think about racism as well.
Take one other seemingly clear-cut example of racism: the use of the n-word to describe African Americans. Polls show that Democrats and Republicans increasingly disagree on whether the n-word is offensive. Indeed, the percentage of Republicans who consider the word offensive or unacceptable has actually declined in recent years.
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As of 2018, only 33 percent of self-reported Trump voters said that it was racist for whites to use the n-word, compared to 86 percent of Clinton voters.
We find this same partisan divide about other racial issues, including interracial marriage. In the 2018 CCES survey, only 23 percent of Trump voters disagreed with the statement, “I prefer my close relatives marry spouses of their same race,” compared to 63 percent of Clinton voters.
These gaps help explain why, overall, Trump voters think that discrimination against whites is more pervasive in the U.S. than discrimination against blacks.
To be sure, thinking that African Americans don’t face a lot of discrimination today, or saying that Trump’s racist tweets have nothing to do with race, is not the same as believing blacks were treated fairly in the Jim Crow era. But prejudiced whites have always denied the effects of racism and discrimination to justify and legitimize pervasive racial inequality — and this pattern holds today.
Don’t expect Trump’s tweets to change anything
Given this context, it’s hardly surprising that many Americans would not call Trump’s recent statements racist. Polling from Fox News and YouGov/Economist found that bare majorities — 56 percent and 54 percent, respectively — of Americans thought that the “go back” language used in Trump’s tweets was racist. But only one-fifth of Republicans agreed.
Absent more widespread and sustained criticism of Trump from other Republicans, this is unlikely to change. If it doesn’t, then American politics will continue to be divided not simply on how to address racism, but what constitutes racism — and whether it even exists — in the first place.
It wasn’t the best timing — but, then, there probably isn’t a great moment for President Trump to declare that he is the “least racist person there is anywhere in the world.”
Trump made that claim while standing outside the White House on Tuesday, responding to a reporter’s question about the still-bubbling controversy spurred by the president’s repeated attacks on black, Hispanic and Muslim members of Congress. Over the weekend, Trump turned his attention to Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), bashing the congressman by disparaging the city of Baltimore, part of which Cummings represents.
As he often does, Trump claimed that the media was misrepresenting reality. There was that claim about how he isn’t racist, an extension of his long-standing claims that he’s the “least racist person” people have met or that, like so many white Americans, he is free of any racist bones.
“What I’ve done for African Americans in two and a half years,” he said — immediately after disparaging the Rev. Al Sharpton as racist — “no president has been able to do anything like it.”
Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson were not available for comment.
To prove that his disparagement of Baltimore was warranted, Trump claimed that “the African American community” had called him to thank him for “telling the truth.”
“The African American people have been calling the White House,” Trump claimed. “They have never been so happy about what a president has done.”
Trump will often claim that he’s received calls from people offering their support; generally those claims are unprovable.
It is the case, though, that Trump met with black leaders at the White House on Monday. He announced a meeting with religious leaders on Twitter, a meeting that hadn’t appeared on his schedule before Monday morning. (In his tweet announcing the discussion, Trump said he was looking forward to his meeting with “wonderful Inner City Pastors” — deploying a descriptor that he has consistently used interchangeably with “black” or “black community.”) Those pastors included several who are long-standing allies of the president’s.
If Trump did hear from many other black Americans, the odds are good that the commentary was not as positive as Trump presents it. As Trump was talking to reporters on Tuesday, Quinnipiac University released new polling data showing that three-quarters of black Americans — and more than half of Americans overall — think Trump is not only not the least racist person in the world but is actually explicitly racist.
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It’s not just black Americans. Most independents think Trump is racist. Most white women think Trump is racist. Most whites with a college degree think Trump is racist. The groups that don’t think that tend to be white, male, Republican and lacking a college degree.
A Fox News poll released last week asked respondents specifically about Trump’s tweets targeting four Democratic women, telling them to “go back” where they came from, despite three of them having been born in the United States. More than half the respondents said those attacks were racist.
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Trump would certainly not be the first racist president. What’s interesting in Quinnipiac’s polling, though, is that many Americans see racism as a motivator behind at least one Trump policy.
The pollsters asked whether respondents thought Trump’s position on border security — a position explained by Trump at his campaign launch in June 2015 as being necessary to halt an influx of criminals from Mexico — was motivated by sincere concern about securing the border or by racist beliefs.
A plurality of respondents said it was the former. But 4 in 10 respondents said they thought Trump’s policies on the border were primarily motivated by racism. That includes most black Americans. White women and whites with college degrees are basically split on the question.
If there’s a bright spot here for Trump, opinions on his border policies and his views of race are basically unchanged since July 2018. Then, about the same percentage of respondents said Trump was racist and that his border policies are motivated by racism. In other words, all the recent debate over Trump’s disparagement of House Democrats doesn’t seem to have budged public opinion very much.
One side effect of that stagnation is that Trump may come to believe there’s no immediate political downside to continuing this line of attack against his critics. It wasn’t prohibitive in 2016: A poll taken shortly before that contest found that 7 percent of Trump’s supporters believed he was racist — but that they’d vote for him anyway.
I often learn about President Trump doing or saying something bigoted before I’ve had a chance shake the cobwebs loose, as my father’s expression goes. Thanks to my phone alerts and my cursed curiosity about the news, I have to swallow some newly reported cruelty before I have brushed my teeth or have had a glass of water. What is old is often still old, often a regurgitated version of some former divisive strategy Trump has employed as far back as his old housing discrimination and Central Park Five ad days. He rarely changes what has worked since the 1970s, since it seems to resonate both with Republican Party sycophants and his entranced supporters. Racism doesn’t really have seasons.
It may be easy for some to digest, but not for me. There is no getting used to this when you are in the crosshairs of this policy, when people who look like you sit patronized by a president who tells them all the time about how he got a few more of us some jobs and few more of us out of jail, then acts as though we should be satisfied with that. “What do we have to lose?” he asks, while we sit in this systematically racist America. “Why do we hate America?” he wonders aloud, as we criticize his administration for working consciously to exacerbate inequities in everything from health care to education to housing. “Why don’t we want safety and security?” Trump proclaims, as we see his government treat migrants (the ones who survive) like literal vermin while comparing our communities to “infestations.” Again, there is no getting used to this.
A white-nationalist presidency is untenable. Having to endure one while the man in the office has committed obvious crimes, such as obstruction of justice, is even worse. Add on the ever-increasing threat of white-supremacist domestic terrorism — which the FBI director warned about just last week and the administration’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric fuels like gasoline — and it is impossible not to conclude that the presidency is too powerful for someone as racist as Donald Trump.
Saturday’s attack on Elijah Cummings may seem like a small example, just another episode in his reality show, but it was actually a demonstration of how grossly his power can be misused. The president reminded us that we are governed in part by a cable channel. He tweeted what Media Matters researcher Matthew Gertz called a “straight recitation” of a Fox segment comparing the supposed lack of cleanliness of Cummings’ 7th Congressional District — which covers West Baltimore, has a mix of mostly urban and suburban areas, and is 53 percent black — to the inhumane conditions ongoing at Border Patrol detention facilities, conditions about which the House Oversight chairman berated acting Homeland Security head Kevin McAleenan at a July 18 hearing.
Being a propaganda operation for the president, Fox naturally depicted the city as a decrepit, rodent-ridden ghetto, all caused by the neglect of Democrats. Both Trump and disciples like Kimberly Klacik, a Baltimore-based black Republican, continued through the weekend, posting selectively edited videos of filthy areas of the city and accusing Cummings of neglecting his district in favor of overzealous oversight of the White House.
Prideful Baltimore residents rebutted with hashtags, statistics, and beautiful imagery of their city that belied the president’s slander. Reminders of Jared Kushner’s history as a slumlord in the city flooded social media. CNN anchor Victor Blackwell, who is African American, nearly broke down in tears live on the air defending his hometown. Bristling in particular at Trump’s insistence that “no human being would want to live there,” Blackwell said, “People get up and go to work there. They care for their families there. They love their children who pledge allegiance to the flag just like people who live in districts of congressmen who support you, sir.” He concluded, “They are Americans, too.”
I admired Blackwell’s strength in that moment, even if I thought his effort and that of his fellow Baltimoreans may have been somewhat quixotic. He would never prove his point to Trump, but his tears did not signify weakness. It was a humanity confronting the lack thereof. We have laughed to keep from crying during this entire Trump administration, and sometimes we just cannot do it anymore.
Since taking over the House, the Democrats have not sat idly, passing several bills that have signified where they stand as a party. However, the semantic Twister the House Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler is playing right now in order to avoid simply launching an impeachment inquiry when the number of House members in favor of one is now in triple digits is an insult to African American voters in particular, the Democrats’ most faithful and consistent constituency.
It is a slap in the face to see a president this criminal and this racist treated called as much by Democrats who won’t do anything about it, all to ensure that they save their own majority.
Yes, it matters that the Republicans not hold both chambers should Trump be re-appointed president by voters (and whatever foreign actors assist him in his election effort). But if not to take action at a time like this, what are we electing Democrats for?
The president’s attack on Cummings should light a fire, at the very least, every African American voter ahead of the August recess. They should be flooding town halls to not only press for the president’s impeachment, but to impress upon each House member whom they visit the urgency of the true emergency at hand. Not their power, but our communities. Not their pragmatism, but our reality.
Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans will never allow a conviction, I know. However, the other main Democratic arguments against impeachment are bunk: the effort against Richard Nixon united the country, they currently enjoy sufficient public support, and they can do all the business that the people require in Congress while putting Trump on trial for the crimes that they crow on Twitter all day that he committed. Again, what was the point of bringing Robert Mueller to testify before the American people if you weren’t going to do a single thing with his report other than tell us to go vote our conscience once we read it? What if we live in a state where Republicans take that vote away? What if Trump does something else even more disastrous before the election that makes all of this moot? And don’t tell me that it isn’t possible, because, please.
One of the high crimes and misdemeanors listed in the Constitution is “dereliction of duty.” In his attack on Cummings, the president made it clear that, in violation of his oath of office, he doesn’t want to be the president of Baltimore. Nor, one can presume, would he be the president of any urban area that was populated by people who didn’t vote primarily for him. He said much the same of Ferguson, Missouri, in a state he won by nearly 20 percentage points, before he won the 2016 election — calling it one of the most dangerous cities in the world, which would include war-torn parts of Syria and Afghanistan. This is what Trump thought of our America then. Any reason to believe, after these Baltimore remarks, that he has changed his mind?
When Blackwell spoke of “Americans,” it was difficult not to consider the fluidity of that word with regards to black and brown people over the history of this republic — or even since Trump has taken office. Our citizenship has always been subject to debate, and that is why Jim Crow horrors echo through today’s Trump migration policy as much as the history of concentration camps. And we should understand, going forward, that when Trump refers to America, the aspiring authoritarian is talking about himself. When he recently attacked the “Squad,” four first-year progressive Congresswomen of color, with racist barbs about their supposed lack of patriotism, he just meant that they weren’t pledging allegiance to him. Trump’s remarks about Baltimore showed that he hates the true America more than any of those four ever did.
Racism serves the purpose, for many black people and other marginalized populations he targets, that author Toni Morrison referenced in her noted 1975 speech at Portland State. “It’s important to know who the real enemy is and to know the very serious function of racism, which is distraction,” she said then. “It keeps you from doing YOUR WORK. It keeps you explaining over and over your reason for being.” Much like Blackwell’s message on CNN, we are constantly having to justify our existence in the country that is our home.
Keep in mind, that isn’t a message to white people. That isn’t a message to white reporters, white news producers, white editors, white anchors, white politicians, white policy directors, white columnists, white radio hosts, white business owners, white donors, nor even to white allies. None of them have much of a reason to be sidetracked by the racism that Trump or anyone else spits out, whether at Cummings last Saturday in a series or tweets or anyone else. The president’s racism is not some story that fades from the news as quickly as a tweet disappears from a timeline. It is a national emergency that has resonates through municipal water systems and online chat rooms, through hospital emergency rooms and classrooms that have no heat in the wintertime. We have enough problems with presidents who are merely unwilling to do anything about racism, let alone those pursuing an active platform of white supremacy.
Look at Baltimore alone. By virtue of Trump’s political disagreement with one person, he is effectively blocking an entire city from federal representation and — if you note what he wrote in his tweet — possibly federal aid. Trump has, in effect, blackballed an American city. How is that not the only thing Democrats are talking about?
It isn’t like impeachment wouldn’t be to Democrats’ benefit. The president is clearly losing it over this, tweeting at Al Sharpton on Monday morning that he “Hates Whites and Cops!” merely for announcing that he is going to Baltimore. But Trump has always hated the idea of an uppity Negro, and for that reason may even still be angry with Cummings for daring to give him the business two years ago during a private meeting — and it might be why he was so eager to hit him the way that he did now. “Most black people are doing pretty good. We have people struggling to make ends meet, but that’s insulting,” Cummings told Trump in March of 2017, per reporter Peter Nicholas. “Probably nobody has ever told you that.” “You’re right,” the president reportedly responded, “nobody has ever told me that.” Cummings correctly assessed in January of 2018, post-Charlottesville, that “I don’t think it made any difference.”
The truly sad thing is that Baltimore could use the help. It suffers from an underinvestment in city resources across the board, had a heating crisis in its schools last winter, and has a police department under federal oversight. For all these “infrastructure weeks” Trump keeps staging and false promises he keeps making, local leaders like Baltimore city council president Brandon Scott continue to reach and fight for their city to get federal resources, even from a president that now appears bent on using Baltimore as electoral cannon fodder. After all, it was Trump who just four years ago, retweeted one of his followers who’d asked during the Freddie Gray unrest, “Can we drop @realDonaldTrump off in the middle of #Baltimore so he can show Obama how it’s done?” The then-reality star and bankruptcy veteran responded “I would fix it fast!”
I don’t bring that up as a “gotcha,” because as Cummings would say, it doesn’t make any difference. The point is that Trump has had his chance to be the president of Baltimore, and of the United States. He said he wanted the job, and now he says it is someone else’s responsibility. We should take him at his word.
The House Oversight Committee is seeking documents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection as it investigates secret Facebook groups in which dozens of current and former employees allegedly shared racist and sexist memes and joked about migrant deaths.
The move suggests that the panel’s chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, is not backing down from his investigations into the Trump administration, despite the president’s recent attacks on the Maryland Democrat and his district.
In a letter Wednesday to acting customs and border protection commissioner Mark Morgan, Cummings voiced alarm that some of the agents involved in the Facebook groups may still be on the job.
“The Committee is concerned that Border Patrol agents and other CBP employees who wrote posts disparaging immigrants may still be working with immigrants and children,” Cummings wrote in the letter.
Cummings said members of the Facebook groups had made “racist, sexist and xenophobic comments relating to immigrants and Members of Congress” and requested that CBP provide all documents related to the matter by Aug. 14, including the postings themselves, the names and titles of every CBP employee investigated, and records of any employment action taken against them.
Cummings also reiterated his request for a briefing on the matter, setting a deadline of Aug. 7.
Earlier this month, CBP announced that it is investigating 62 current employees and eight former employees for possible misconduct over their alleged participation in the Facebook groups. The groups include “Real CBP Nation” and “I’m 10-15,” which is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”
The announcement came after ProPublica published a report about content posted to one of the private online forums. According to Politico, CBP officials were already aware of the groups before they were reported by news outlets, prompting outrage from lawmakers and advocates for immigrant rights.
Some of the most recent offensive Facebook postings concerned a visit by members of Congress to a Border Patrol station in Clint, Tex. One post carried an illustration of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) performing a sex act at a Border Patrol facility; another portrayed a smiling President Trump pushing the congresswoman’s face toward his lap.
In testimony before Cummings’s committee this month, acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan called the postings “unacceptable” and said CBP is “moving very quickly to hold people accountable for conduct that doesn’t meet our standards.” He added that some of the agents who participated in the groups had been placed on administrative duties, although he did not provide details.
Trump’s political rallies are certainly a spectacle, but a spectacle we’ve seen before. In both style and substance, the president’s campaign appearances bear strong resemblances to the rallies held a half-century ago by Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama.
There are a number of similarities between the two politicians’ rallies. But there is one significant difference — and it shows how Mr. Trump remains a greater danger and poses a graver threat to peaceful political discourse, especially as we enter a presidential election campaign.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Wallace presented himself as the political champion of aggrieved working-class and middle-class whites. As governor, he embodied the cause of segregationist resistance, literally standing in the schoolhouse door to block the first black students at the University of Alabama and figuratively standing against what he called the “civil wrongs bill.”
Yet in his repeated campaigns for the presidency between 1968 and 1976, despite today’s consensus to the contrary, Mr. Wallace didn’t make open appeals to racism. Instead, he couched opposition to the civil rights movement — both his own opposition and that of whites in the North and South alike — in new terms. Taking aim at liberals in government and leftist protesters in the streets, Mr. Wallace presented himself as the champion of ordinary Americans besieged by both. He promised then, as Mr. Trump has now, to restore “law and order” to a troubled nation.
A former bantamweight boxer, Mr. Wallace thrived on the combative nature of politics. In the political ring, he lashed out at hippies, beatniks, civil rights “agitators,” “pointy-headed intellectuals,” both “briefcase-toting bureaucrats” and “bearded bureaucrats,” “lazy” welfare recipients, “anarchists and communists,” atheists, antiwar “radicals and rabble rousers,” and street thugs whom liberals, he said, believed had “turned to rape and murder because they didn’t get enough broccoli when they were little boys.”
While he lacks Mr. Wallace’s background in boxing, Mr. Trump has adopted a similar stance in his own rallies. He’s claimed some of Mr. Wallace’s specific phrases as his own — most notably the call for “law and order” — and more generally has stoked the same fires of resentment and racism.
Mr. Wallace’s words electrified crowds of working- and middle-class whites. “Cabdrivers and cattle ranchers, secretaries and steelworkers, they hung on every word, memorized the lines, treasured them, savored them, waited to hear them again,” noted an Esquire profile. “George Wallace was their avenging angel. George Wallace said out loud what they nervously kept to themselves. George Wallace articulated their deepest fears, their darkest hates. George Wallace promised revenge.”
Mr. Trump has tapped into that sentiment, winning over white voters with a willingness to buck “political correctness” and voice their anger and anxieties directly. “He says what we’re thinking and what we want to say,” noted a white woman at a Trump rally in Montana. “We wish we could speak our mind without worrying about the consequences,” explained a white man at a Phoenix event. “He can speak his mind without worrying.”
By articulating their audiences’ hatred, both men effectively encouraged them to act on it.
Mr. Wallace’s rallies regularly erupted in violence, as his fans often took his words not just seriously but also literally. Mr. Wallace often talked about dragging hippies “by the hair of their head.” At a Detroit rally in 1968, his supporters did just that, dragging leftist protesters out of their seats and through a thicket of metal chairs. As they were roughed up, the candidate signaled his approval from the stage: “You came here for trouble and you got it.”
Mr. Trump’s rallies have likewise been marked by violence unseen in other modern campaigns. At a 2015 rally in Birmingham, Ala., for example, an African-American protester was punched, kicked and choked. Rather than seeking to reduce the violence from his supporters, Mr. Trump rationalized it, saying “maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
This leads us to the significant difference between Mr. Wallace and Mr. Trump. Mr. Wallace’s targets were, for the most part, presented in the abstract. Though he denounced broad categories of generic enemies — “agitators,” “anarchists” and “communists” — he rarely went after an individual by name.
Mr. Trump, in pointed contrast, has used his rallies to single out specific enemies. During the 2016 campaign, he demonized his political opponents in the primaries and the general election, and also denounced private individuals, from Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor, to the former Miss Universe Alicia Machado and the federal judge Gonzalo Curiel.
At recent rallies, he has targeted four Democratic House members who have criticized him and his administration — Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley.
Participants at Mr. Trump’s rallies have been moved to attack individuals he’s singled out. For most rally participants, the attacks have been confined to ominous but nevertheless nonviolent chants — from the 2016 cries of “Lock her up!” to the recent refrain of “Send her back!” But a handful have gone further, targeting the individuals named by the president with death threats and even attempts at violence.
In late 2018, a Trump supporter, Cesar Sayoc Jr., mailed pipe bombs to high-profile Democrats and media figures who had criticized the president and whom the president had denounced in return. After his arrest, Mr. Sayoc explained that Mr. Trump’s rallies had become “a newfound drug” for him and warped his thinking. “In the lead up to the 2018 midterm elections,” Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers added last week, “President Trump warned his supporters that they were in danger from Democrats, and at times condoned violence against his critics and ‘enemies.’”
Since the midterms, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and the threats from his supporters have only intensified. In March, a Trump backer in New York was arrested on charges of threatening to “put a bullet” in Ms. Omar’s “skull.” In April, a Trump supporter in Florida was arrested on charges of making death threats to Ms. Tlaib and two other Democrats. This month, two police officers in Louisiana were fired over a Facebook post suggesting that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez should be shot.
As the 2020 campaign heats up, the president’s rhetoric will as well. It’s long past time that he started worrying about the consequences of his words.
President Donald Trump is right when he says Baltimore’s got problems. Like all big cities, it has crime, drugs, corruption, pockets of poverty and yes, rodents. But it also has wonderful neighborhoods, beautiful parks, a world class university, rich history and a lively, vibrant culture.
Obviously, Trump hasn’t singled out Charm City because he's concerned about it. It's only 40 miles away, but he has never visited as president and hasn't offered to lift a finger to help. Shouldn't presidents want to make things better for all Americans? Not Trump, whose only concern is that Rep. Elijah Cummings, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, believes in the Constitution and its time-honored system of checks and balances — and is using his authority to probe the president and his administration. And half of Cummings' district is in Baltimore.
Or perhaps I’m wrong and Trump really does care. But if that’s the case, why stop at Baltimore? His loud criticism of it can be contrasted with his silence on other places that also have serious problems.
Least educated, most dangerous
The least educated states are, from 46th to 50th: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia and Mississippi.
Highest poverty rates (46th to 50th): Kentucky, West Virginia, New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi.
Most dangerous (46th to 50th): Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico.
Highest share of people on food stamps in 2017 (46th to 50th): Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, New Mexico.
Most dependent on federal aid — i.e., “socialism” (46th to 50th): Kentucky, Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi.
Most polluted (46th to 50th): Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana.
Most people lacking health insurance (46th to 50th): Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Oklahoma, Texas.
What’s interesting is that of the 16 states mentioned in these seven categories, 15 are red states that voted for Trump in 2016. Trump can't mention their problems, because he fears offending people who voted for him.
Deep red hellholes in the South
Trump thinks Baltimore’s a hellhole? The data shows Mississippi, a deep red state, is poorly educated and mired in poverty and crime and heavily dependent on federal aid. Of course, because Mississippi’s governor, two senators and three out of four Congressmen are Republicans who are all in the tank for him, Trump won’t say a word. The good people of Mississippi deserve — and should demand — better.
The good people of Kentucky also deserve better. Another state that can’t support itself and is heavily dependent on Washington (it gets $2.61 for every dollar it sends to Washington), the Bluegrass State also ranks poorly on the poverty and pollution scale.
Trump criticizes Cummings, who has been in Washington since 1996. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has been in the Senate since 1984 — what’s he done? Besides watering down and flat-out blocking efforts to safeguard our electoral process, I mean. Turning a blind eye to Russian attacks on our democracy — which has kept him busy since the Obama era — is nothing less than dereliction of duty, and although he bristles at his new nickname, “Moscow Mitch,” I say if the boot fits, comrade, wear it.
You get the idea. When Trump, who wants those critical of America to leave, criticized it himself in his dark, creepy “American carnage” inaugural address (no inspirational “shining city on a hill” or “malice towards none” for him), he could have been talking about these ravaged, failing, mostly red states just as much as Baltimore’s 7th congressional district. But he’ll never do that, of course.
Jared Kushner could help Baltimore
One way Trump could help Baltimore clear up its rodent infestation without spending a dime of taxpayer money is to summon his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, down the hall to the Oval Office and tell him to be a better landlord in that city. The Kushner family — which owns nearly 9,000 rental units in 17 locations, most of them in Baltimore County — racked up 200-plus housing violations there in 2017 alone.
More Baltimore commentary: The president is right about Baltimore. Are Democrats really prepared to defend failure?
ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis, who found substandard conditions were par for the course in Kushner properties, tells the story of one resident, Marquita Parmely: “She had a mouse infestation that was severe enough that her 12-year-old daughter recently found one in her bed. Parmely also has a 2-year-old with asthma, which is aggravated by allergens in mice droppings. She moved her own bed and other furniture away from the walls to dissuade mice, kept the family’s laundry in tote bags after mice started appearing in the hamper and vacuumed twice a day.” The greedy Kushner clan fixes things only when threatened with fines, and even then, “violations on nine properties were not addressed, resulting in monetary sanctions."
How ironic that Trump complains of problems that a greedy, uncaring member of his own White House staff has been complicit in creating. It seems that the great city of Baltimore isn’t the only place that needs to be cleaned up.
Racists love Trump, because he employs the Presidency to legitimize their own racism, and gives them permission by example to express their racism in ever more public and provocative displays.
You want to know why I'll never be your friend?
But you look for something to be upset about.
He was born in Queens and lives on Fifth Avenue. His skyscrapers dot city skylines on several continents. But President Trump is increasingly intent on disparaging urban areas, depicting them as blighted and overrun by criminals and homelessness — all part of a divisive reelection strategy heading into 2020.
Trump’s denigration of cities is part of an effort to animate a base of rural, mostly white supporters while depressing minority turnout in places like Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia — a repeat of the two-pronged strategy that helped him to a surprising electoral college victory in 2016 and could be determinative again four years later.
“No one has paid a higher price for the far-left destructive agenda than Americans living in our nation’s inner cities,” Trump said Thursday night at a rally in Cincinnati, drawing cheers from the mostly white crowd. “We send billions and billions and billions for years and years, and it’s stolen money, and it’s wasted money.”
“For 100 years it’s been one party control, and look at them,” he continued. “We can name one after another, but I won’t do that because I don’t want to be controversial.”
In reality, the country’s largest urban areas are major engines of the national economy and generate more tax money than they receive from the federal government. By contrast, most rural areas receive more from Washington than they generate.
The president singled out California and two of its largest cities, commenting on a homelessness problem that he laid at the feet of the state’s leaders.
“Nearly half of all the homeless people living in the streets in America happen to live in the state of California. What they are doing to our beautiful California is a disgrace to our country. It’s a shame,” he said.
“Look at Los Angeles with the tents, and the horrible, horrible disgusting conditions. Look at San Francisco, look at some of your other cities,” Trump added.
Trump’s administration has not made homelessness a priority and has offered no new policy ideas for dealing with the problem.
After a skirmish in the crowd, as Trump supporters swarmed around a small group of protesters who had unfurled a sign that read “Immigrants Built America,” the president took the opportunity to punctuate his chosen message.
“Cincinnati, do you have a Democrat mayor?” Trump asked the crowd. “Well, that’s what happens.”
Last weekend, Trump tweeted more than 30 times about Baltimore, the nation’s 30th largest city, calling it a “very dangerous & filthy place” where “no human being would want to live.”
He blamed Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight Committee that is investigating the administration on multiple fronts, and described his district, which includes parts of Baltimore as well as its suburbs, as a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess.”
A Trump campaign aide defended the president against critics who called those statements racist.
“It’s notable that no one has challenged the President’s descriptions of the problems in Baltimore and other cities. Critics would rather focus on the word ‘infested,’ which is the very same word Congressman Cummings used to describe his own city’s drug problems in a congressional hearing 20 years ago,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s reelection campaign.
“After all this time, why hasn’t it gotten better? It’s completely legitimate to call out the leadership in cities where conditions haven’t improved decade after decade.”
“When the nation and our economy are clearly on the right track, why would we turn the country over to the same political party whose ideas have failed so many of our city residents?” Murtaugh added, noting, as the president often does, that African-American unemployment is dropping.
While Trump avoided mentioning Cummings by name at the rally Thursday night, he did assert that Baltimore’s homicide rate was higher than several Central American countries.
“I believe it’s higher than — gimme a place that you think is pretty bad,” Trump said, bringing his supporters in on the bit. “Gimme a place.” People shouted the names of American cities and foreign countries. Trump picked up on a shout of “Afghanistan.”
“I believe it’s higher than Afghanistan,” the president said.
Then on Friday morning, Trump tweeted about a recent burglary at Cummings’ home, presenting a news story that seemed to prove his point under a thin veil of “you hate to see it” empathy.
“Really bad news! The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too bad!”
Trump’s ambiguous tweet drew a bipartisan wave of rebukes.
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who left the administration late last year on good terms with the president, replied to the tweet Friday. “This is so unnecessary,” she wrote, adding an emoji of a perplexed face.
In running against urban centers, Trump, whose family originally became wealthy building tax-supported housing in Brooklyn and Queens, is picking up an American political tradition of appealing to rural voters by depicting cities as centers of crime and disease. In the current context, in which America’s urban population is more racially diverse than most of its rural areas, the slogans have taken on an added dimension.
“He’s talking about cities and urban areas and using it as a proxy for minorities,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster in Washington. “He’s pretending to be benevolent, but he’s locking in the stereotype that ‘these people need us to take care of them — those people can’t govern themselves.’ It’s this white savior idea — that is as fundamentally and historically racist as it comes in this country, the idea that people of color need to be saved by the white man.”
Trump’s expressions of concern for urban communities also offer him something to point at to rebut charges of racism sparked by his comments about Cummings and his tweet telling four female Democratic members of Congress who call themselves “The Squad” to “go back” to other countries.
“It just further demonstrates how disconnected he is from reality,” said Denver Mayor Michael Hancock. “It’s really at the city level where the issues of bread-basket America are being addressed: housing, homelessness, mobility, the opioid epidemic. Cities are doing the things the federal government has failed to do.”
Even in attacking Democratic presidential hopefuls who have suggested decriminalizing the border, Trump has geared his argument toward African Americans in inner cities, suggesting that they will be the ones most hurt by more undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S.
Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and the husband of Trump 2020 campaign senior advisor Mercedes Schlapp, suggested that Democrats might be “cavalier” about their support from African American voters.
“The party is moving to open borders and that’s a disastrous policy for urban blacks,” Schlapp said. “It makes perfect sense that Trump would point that out.”
But Michael Nutter, a former two-term mayor of Philadelphia who is African American, said that all of Trump’s rhetoric is meant to obscure racism and his actual indifference to urban America, where he is unlikely to garner much support.
“He has no plan for America’s cities at all,” Nutter said. “This is just more red meat for his base. The whole presidency and the reelection will be focused on dividing the country,” he said. “That is the only way he believes he can win.”
Nutter said Trump’s “psychological warfare” aimed at depressing African-American turnout next year will have the opposite effect.
“In 2016, people just couldn’t believe that this kind of bizarro character had any possible chance,” Nutter said. “Now, I think that folks’ eyes are wide open. People are fully woke.”
On Saturday Morning, a gunman at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, shot and killed at least 20 people before surrendering to the police. By all accounts, Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old alleged shooter, is a fan of President Donald Trump and his policies. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “a Twitter account bearing the suspect’s name contains liked tweets that include a ‘BuildTheWall’ hashtag” and “a photo using guns to spell out ‘Trump.’”
Incredibly, the nation woke up to more grim news on Sunday, with reports that a man suited up in body armor and bearing a rifle with high-capacity magazines had carried out a rampage in Dayton, Ohio, killing at least nine people and injuring 26.
Little is known yet about the Dayton shooter, but a four-page manifesto authorities believe was written by Crusius and posted shortly before the El Paso attack is full of the kind of hateful rhetoric and ideas that have flourished under Trump.
The manifesto declares the imminent attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion,” accuses Democrats of “pandering to the Hispanic voting bloc,” rails against “traitors,” and condemns “race mixing” and “interracial unions.” “Yet another reason to send them back,” it says.
Sound familiar? The president of the United States — who condemned the El Paso attack on Twitter — has repeatedly referred to an “invasion” at the southern border; condemned Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and Syrian refugees as “snakes;” accused his critics of treason on at least two dozen occasions; and told four elected women of color to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” (It is worth noting that Crusius, in his alleged manifesto, claims his views “predate” and are unrelated to Trump, but then goes on to attack “fake news.”)
That there could be a link between the attacker and the president should come as no surprise. But it might. Over the past four years, both mainstream media organizations and leading Democrats have failed to draw a clear line between Trump’s racist rhetoric and the steadily multiplying acts of domestic terror across the United States. Some of us tried to sound the alarm — but to no avail.
“Cesar Sayoc was not the first Trump supporter who allegedly tried to kill and maim those on the receiving end of Trump’s demonizing rhetoric,” I wrote last October, in the concluding lines of my column on the arrest of the so-called #MAGAbomber. “And, sadly, he won’t be the last.”
HOW I WISH I could have been proven wrong. Yet since the publication of that piece almost a year ago, which listed the names of more than a dozen Trump supporters accused of horrific violence, from the neo-Nazi murderer of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville to the Quebec City mosque shooter, there have been more and more MAGA-inspired attacks. In January, four men were arrested for a plot to attack a small Muslim community in upstate New York — one of them, according to the Daily Beast, “was an avid Trump supporter online, frequently calling for ‘Crooked Hillary’ Clinton to be arrested and urging his followers to watch out for Democratic voter fraud schemes when they cast their ballots for Trump in 2016.”
In March, a far right gunman murdered 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — and left behind a document describing Muslim immigrants as “invaders” and Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”
And now, this latest massacre in El Paso. Let’s be clear: in an age of rising domestic terrorism cases — the majority of which are motivated by “white supremacist violence,” according to FBI Director Christopher Wray — Trump is nothing less than a threat to our collective security. More and more commentators now refer, for example, to the phenomenon of “stochastic terrorism” — originally defined by an anonymous blogger back in 2011 as “the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”
Sounds pretty Trumpian, right? As I wrote in October: “The president may not be pulling the trigger or planting the bomb, but he is enabling much of the hatred behind those acts. He is giving aid and comfort to angry white men by offering them clear targets — and then failing to fully denounce their violence.”
And as I pointed out on CNN earlier this year, there is a simple way for Trump to distance himself from all this. Give a speech denouncing white nationalism and the violence it has produced. Declare it a threat to national security. Loudly disown those who act in his name. Tone down the incendiary rhetoric on race, immigration, and Islam.
Trump, however, has done the exact opposite. In March, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, the president said he did not consider white nationalism to be a rising threat, dismissing it as a “small group of people.” A month earlier, in February, Trump was asked whether he would moderate his language after a white nationalist Coast Guard officer was arrested over a plot to assassinate leading journalists and Democrats. “I think my language is very nice,” he replied.
In recent weeks, the president has again launched nakedly racist and demagogic attacks on a number of black and brown members of Congress, not to mention the black-majority city of Baltimore. When his cultish supporters responded to his attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with chants of “send her back,” Trump stood and watched and later referred to them as “patriots.”
So we’re supposed to be surprised or shocked that white nationalist violence is rising on his watch? That hate crimes against almost every minority group have increased since his election to the White House in 2016?
On Tuesday, just days before this latest act of terror in El Paso, the leaders of the Washington National Cathedral issued a scathing, and startlingly prescient, rebuke of Trump:
Make no mistake about it, words matter. And, Mr. Trump’s words are dangerous.
These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.
Thanks to his hate-filled rhetoric, his relentless incitement of violence, and his refusal to acknowledge the surge in white nationalist terrorism, the president poses a clear and present danger to the people, and especially the minorities, of the United States.
With the encouragement of our President, America has gone to great lengths to paint minorities as criminals, parasites and in some instances, terrorists. But after the latest pair of mass shootings this weekend, in which a total of 29 people were killed, the fears and frustrations of American citizens have taken over Twitter, with the hashtag #WhiteSupremacistTerrorism serving as their rallying cry.
CNN reports that on Saturday, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius gunned down 21 people and injured 29 others at a Wal-Mart swarming with cross-border shoppers in El Paso, TX. According to NBC News, it’s the deadliest shooting in 2019, as well as one of the worst in American history.
And it was also racially motivated, per CNN:
About 20 minutes earlier, a post on the online message board 8chan believed to be from the suspect laid out a dark vision of America overrun by Hispanic immigrants. The 2,300-word document, which police called a “manifesto,” was attached to a post that said, “I’m probably going to die today.”
The writing is filled with white nationalist language and racist hatred toward immigrants and Latinos, blaming immigrants and first-generation Americans for taking away jobs.
But while Americans struggled to process the lastest massacre on American soil, we woke up to the news of another mass shooting mere hours later in Dayton, Ohio.
From CNN:
Nine people were killed and at least 26 injured Sunday in a shooting in a popular nightclub district of downtown Dayton, Ohio, police say.
Officers killed the lone suspect after he fired for less than a minute from a “.223 high-capacity” gun, and he had additional magazines with him, Mayor Nan Whaley said. The .223 caliber is used in rifles like the AR-15 assault rifle used in previous mass shootings.
The suspect in the Dayton shooting has yet to be publicly identified, but as was the case in El Paso, it’s not exactly a secret that these catastrophic acts of domestic terrorism—which are far too often not recognized or treated as such—are carried out by white supremacists.
As such, the hashtag #WhiteSupremacistTerrorism is being used to demand gun reform, call out the portrayals of victims and perpetrators alike, highlight Donald Trump’s degree of complicity, and provide concerned citizens a public platform to mourn the countless lives we’ve lost to gun violence.
(https://66.media.tumblr.com/fab6c91811f60edcc36b6f74bfa89f9a/tumblr_pvpwhh11rK1s94fnwo1_1280.png)
When a white supremacist manifesto allegedly posted by the El Paso shooting suspect first began making the rounds on Saturday night, it was hard not to feel a sense of familiarity.
From a New York Times summary of the manifesto (emphasis mine):
It spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” It detailed a plan to separate America into territories by race. It warned that white people were being replaced by foreigners.
Hey, where have I heard that kind of violent extremist talk before? Oh, that’s right: on Fox News, constantly.
A tiny, tiny sample follows. See if you can spot the pattern (emphasis mine throughout):
Tucker Carlson, 7/9/19:
This cannot continue. It’s not sustainable. No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results.
Laura Ingraham, 6/18/19 podcast:
No longer can they claim to be for border enforcement, or “Oh yeah, we’re for enforcing the border, oh yeah, we’re for—we’re for keeping the country safe. And oh yeah, we’re not for illegal immigration, we’re for legal immigration”— that’s what they used to say That’s what the Obama folks and the Clinton folks used to say, but no longer. No, you’re for replacing the current American population, or swamping the current American population, with a new population of people who are perhaps more hospitable to socialist ideals.
Tucker Carlson, 5/21/19:
The American piñata has been getting pummeled for decades and now it has finally come apart. Our national wealth is up for grabs by whomever gets here first, and they are coming. Over just the past year, 1% of the entire population of the nation of Guatemala has moved to the United States. A Wall Street Journal piece last month described the plight of that country’s villages. Some of them are literally depopulating as people stream north to America’s generous welfare state. Meanwhile a new study from the Federation for Immigration Reform, FAIR, given exclusively to this show, shows the scale on which the United States is being plundered.
Tucker Carlson, 12/13/18:
Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this. We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement.
Fox & Friends, 11/2/18:
When you see a lot of young men carrying the flag of their country to your country to break your laws, it looks a lot more like an invasion than anything else.
Laura Ingraham, 8/7/18:
In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.
I could go on. This is not some fringe ideology confined to the dark corners of the web. It’s being peddled constantly by some of our highest-profile media figures—oh, and by the president of the United States.
The older man next to me on the metal bench, dressed so dignified in his peach dress shirt, dark pants and dress shoes, touches me gently on the elbow.
It is Saturday late afternoon, and we are both in front of MacArthur Middle School, where the flags already droop in the desert heat, approaching 100 degrees, at half-mast. Police officers, Red Cross workers and firefighters of all kinds come and go. This little school is where the living come to look for the missing and the dead after a white male from the Dallas suburbs named Patrick Crusius, 21, allegedly came to my hometown to commit the largest massacre of Hispanics in American history. The handwritten sign over the schoolhouse door says it all: “Looking for Family and Friends.”
Behind his glasses, tears welled up in the eyes of my bench mate, Charles Almanzar, 70. Wordlessly, he shows me his phone: There is a picture of two small children, a girl of 2 and a boy of 5. The little boy is in the hospital. The little girl is still missing, the subject of a frantic search by Mr. Almanzar’s brother-in-law. Their mother, Jordan Kay Jamrowski Anchondo, at just 25, is dead, killed by Mr. Crusius, along with at least 19 others, at a Walmart not far from downtown El Paso.
If you want to know what a mass shooting is like in your hometown, it’s like this: text alerts on your phone, a frantic woman on local television begging people to bring water to waiting families, 200 people lining up to give blood in the blistering heat, helicopters thundering overhead, the dead left lying inside the crime scene called “horrific” by the police chief. Those waiting on word of dead and lost stand calm and dignified as strangers pull up with truckloads of that bottled water. It’s also like this: a stab in the heart not to your hometown, but to your people, in my case Latinos. Mr. Crusius specifically came here to my town, to kill my people.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God,” my little sister, Janet, also the child of an American father and a Mexican mother, says to me. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.”
I read the manifesto believed to be by Mr. Crusius, though not confirmed by the police, who traveled over 600 miles to kill and wound men, women, old people and children. Cell phone video posted online by victims betrays the dreaded elapse of time as they die: ten shots fired from an AK-47, not in rapid succession but in cunning staccato. First a shot. Then a long pause. Then one after another after another. And then there is the shout in Spanish: “Ay, no!”
“Oh, no!” the man screams.
“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the manifesto reads, before eerily and coolly describing the killer’s preferences of weapons and ammunition, politics, economics and racist philosophy. His idea is devastatingly simple: Killing Hispanics will stop immigrants from coming and drive citizens to leave. “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by invasion.”
Of course, Latinos arrived in Texas from Mexico in 1690, when it was all New Spain. My people settled the harsh brush country of south Texas, fought Comanches and Apaches and brought Christianity to America. My mother’s uncle, a Mexican citizen, fought in the Navy in World War II and perished. My Mexican grandfather came to Texas as an orphan, lived in Laredo and returned to Mexico. My Arkansan father, a soldier, met my mother in Monterrey and we settled way out here in the deserts of West Texas in 1970. We invaded nothing; we were already here long before Mr. Crusius was even conceived.
But he is just another passing figure in the moment of modern American violence that we all are living through: the predictable weakness of Republican politicians in the face of the gun lobby amid the ready availability of weapons of war. The other day, I perused a pawnshop, bought a fine fly rod but noticed that the only guns in vast supply were AR-15s, the kissing cousin of our favored weapon of war, the M-16.
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Most significantly though, the El Paso massacre — and that’s what it is, it is not a mass shooting but a premeditated massacre — was the inevitable byproduct of the Trump era’s anti-immigrant, and anti-Latino invective, which with its pervasive, vile racism has poisoned our nation.
El Paso-Juarez is a big, bustling desert city of over two million, straddling the United States and Mexico. My hometown has virtually zero modern history of ethnic strife; El Paso alone is over 80 percent Hispanic. We switch from English to Spanish without skipping a beat and we are fine with that. But the Trump era is not.
It has brought us walls, internment camps and children in cages. The massacre is the outcome I have feared for years now, and I can’t help but feel that its genesis lies with the president of the United States.
To put all of this into perspective, there have been other massacres of Latinos in American history. The worst was the notorious Porvenir massacre, 101 years ago, in what is now a vanished border town. Texas Rangers descended on the town in the early morning hours of Jan. 28, 1918, led off 15 Hispanic men and boys and executed them. The remaining inhabitants did exactly what Saturday’s shooter wanted: They fled to Chihuahua.
Back at MacArthur Middle School, Mr. Almanzar tucks away his phone. A Jehovah’s Witness, he had been out knocking on doors when the horror struck. Many asked him how God would allow this, and he gently responds by showing me Job 34:10, which in part reads: “Far be it from God, that he should do wickedness.” No, we both agreed, switching from English to Spanish. God did not do this.
We did. In allowing those weapons of war on our streets. In giving credence to sociopathic racists, only one of whom will be in jail tonight. In poisoning our body politic with the occupant of the White House. On the horizon, storm clouds build over the desert mesas to weep upon this desert city. And still the people keep coming, desperately bringing water to those here, quietly searching for the dead.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D1tPTFvXQAAJamc.jpg)
#Resist
Be warned: There is nothing soothing and uplifting in this column. I will not somberly mourn and point to our better angel and American resilience. This is not that kind of column.
I have a warning to deliver, a truth to tell, and it is as unsettling as it is obvious.
First, let’s start with the carnage that has unfolded over the last few days.
On July 28, a 19-year-old white man named Santino William Legan opened fire at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif., killing three people and injuring 13 others before taking his own life.
As the Daily Beast reported, just before the shooting Legan “posted a picture with a caption that told followers to read a 19th-century, proto-fascist book.” As the site explained:
“The book, which is repeatedly recommended alongside works by Hitler and other fascists on forums like 8chan, is full of anti-Semitic, sexist and white supremacist ideology. The book glorifies ‘Aryan’ men, condemns intermarriage between races, and defends violence based on bogus eugenicist tropes.”
Saturday, a 21-year-old white man identified by the police as Patrick Crusius walked into a crowded Walmart in El Paso and opened fire, killing 20 people and injuring more than two dozen others, some children. It was a massacre.
As The New York Times reported, “Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call” about the shooting at the Walmart, “a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online.” CNN reports that authorities are investigating the racist screed which “police believe” was posted by Crusius.
The manifesto is heavily anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic. It’s riddled with the fear of white “displacement” and fear that changing demographics will favor Democrats and turn America into “a one party-state.”
And then on Sunday, a 24-year-old man named Connor Betts opened fire in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine people and injuring at least 27 others. Most of those killed were black.
Are these shootings a gun control issue? Of course. We have too many guns, and too many high-capacity guns. We sell guns first designed for soldiers to civilians. We don’t do enough to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them and we do next to nothing to track guns once they are sold.
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Is this stochastic terrorism at play in which rhetoric by some incites action by others? Possibly. There is no doubt that Trump and Republicans are making poisonous anti-immigrant rhetoric part of their platforms.
But, I think laying all the blame at their feet is too convenient and simplistic.
I think a better way to look at it is to understand that white nationalist terrorists — young and rash — and white nationalist policymakers — older and more methodical — live on parallel planes, both aiming in the same direction, both with the same goal: To maintain and ensure white dominance and white supremacy.
The policymakers believe they can accomplish with legislation in the legal system what the terrorists are trying to underscore with lead. In the minds of the policymakers, border walls, anti-immigrant laws, voter suppression and packing the courts are more prudent and permanent than bodies in the streets. But, try telling that to a young white terrorist who distrusts everyone in Washington.
As the writer of the El Paso manifesto points out, “The Republican Party is also terrible.” The writer goes on to explain:
“Many factions within the Republican Party are pro-corporation. Pro-corporation = pro-immigration. But some factions within the Republican Party don’t prioritize corporations over our future. So the Democrats are nearly unanimous with their support of immigration while the Republicans are divided over it. At least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”
This is a reason these groups are often at odds. The white nationalist policymakers are annoyed and even incensed by the terrorists because they believe they besmirch the mission.
These terrorists want to do quickly what the policymakers insist must be done slowly, so the terrorists stew in their anger.
They are angry at immigrants because their numbers are ascendant — through both immigration and higher birthrates — and, those immigrants threaten an even more accelerated displacement of white people from a numerical majority.
They are angry at white liberals for courting the demise of white supremacy. They are angry at white liberal white women in particular for championing a woman’s right to choose and for not having more babies.
They are angry at black people for even existing.
It is not lost on me that this summer is the 100th anniversary of the “Red Summer,” when violent anti-black white supremacists rioted in cities across the country, killing many, just as the Great Migration — the mass migration of millions of black people mostly from the rural South to the urban North — was getting underway. Violence is the way the white terrorists respond to demographic shifts and demographic threat.
It’s not simply a matter of whether Trump’s rhetoric, or that of any other politician, led these shooters to do what they did. Maybe. It is also about recognizing that all of these people are on the same team and share the same mission and eat from the same philosophical trough. It’s just that their methods differ. The white supremacist terrorists and the white supremacist policymakers are bound at the hip.
Donald Trump’s response to the horrific mass shootings in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH had already been callous and utterly vapid, but on Monday morning, with a day of space to respond to the tragedies, he landed on an even worse message: actually, it’s the media’s fault.
Donald Trump’s response to the horrific mass shootings in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH had already been callous and utterly vapid, but on Monday morning, with a day of space to respond to the tragedies, he landed on an even worse message: actually, it’s the media’s fault.
As NBC News’ Benjy Sarlin pointed out, the president’s framing of the issue is exactly in line with the El Paso shooter’s manifesto:
https://twitter.com/BenjySarlin/status/1158352080509296646
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBNLE2ZX4AAEe-F?format=jpg&name=small)(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBNLE2aWkAAxKtu?format=jpg&name=small)
On the actual policy side of things, Trump also responded this morning by sowing the seeds for poison-pill legislation in any future gun control bills.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1158330512341164032
“Perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform” is an outright attempt to sabotage gun bills in bad faith before they even approach Congress, which, would you believe it, has already happened to the one major gun bill the House has passed this year. House Republicans managed to slip a provision into HR8, the universal background checks bill, that requires gun sellers to notify ICE if a prospective buyer’s immigration status causes them to fail a background check.
President Trump has relentlessly used his bully pulpit to decry Latino migration as “an invasion of our country.” He has demonized undocumented immigrants as “thugs” and “animals.” He has defended the detention of migrant children, hundreds of whom have been held in squalor. And he has warned that without a wall to prevent people from crossing the border from Mexico, America would no longer be America.
“How do you stop these people? You can’t,” Trump lamented at a May rally in Panama City Beach, Fla. Someone in the crowd yelled back one idea: “Shoot them.” The audience of thousands cheered and Trump smiled. Shrugging off the suggestion, he quipped, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.”
On Saturday, a 21-year-old white man entered a shopping center in El Paso, according to police, and allegedly decided to “shoot them.” Inside a crowded Walmart in a vibrant border city visited daily by thousands of Mexicans, a late-morning back-to-school shopping scene turned into a pool of blood. Twenty people died, and dozens were wounded.
After yet another mass slaying, the question surrounding the president is no longer whether he will respond as other presidents once did, but whether his words contributed to the carnage.
Since the moment Trump rode down his gold-plated escalator four years ago to start his renegade run for the White House, us-against-them language about immigrants has been a consistent and defining feature of his campaign and now of his presidency. Absent from his repertoire has been a forceful repudiation of the white nationalism taking rise on his watch.
Authorities in El Paso have not announced a motive in what they call an act of domestic terrorism, but at the center of their investigation is an anti-immigrant manifesto. Officials believe the shooter posted it shortly before he opened fire but continue to investigate.
Patrick Crusius has been named as the suspect.
Portions of the 2,300-word essay, titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” closely mirror Trump’s rhetoric, as well as the language of the white nationalist movement, including a warning about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
The author’s ideology is so aligned with the president’s that he decided to conclude the manifesto by clarifying that his views predate Trump’s 2016 campaign and arguing that blaming him would amount to “fake news,” another Trump phrase.
The extent to which the El Paso shooter was motivated by the president’s words will be fiercely debated in the days to come, and could be answered by the investigation. But some Democratic leaders on Sunday said Trump’s demagoguery makes him plainly culpable.
Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman from El Paso running for president, said it was appropriate to label Trump a white nationalist and said his rhetoric is reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
“He doesn’t just tolerate it; he encourages it, calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, warning of an invasion at our border, seeking to ban all people of one religion. Folks are responding to this,” O’Rourke said on CNN. He added, “He is saying that some people are inherently defective or dangerous, reminiscent of something that you might hear in the Third Reich, not something that you expect in the United States of America.”
Ensconced over the weekend at his New Jersey golf club, Trump was silent about the El Paso massacre other than a few tweets. In one sent Saturday night, he called the shooting “an act of cowardice” and said, “I stand with everyone in this Country to condemn today’s hateful act. There are no reasons or excuses that will ever justify killing innocent people.”
Although a press pool traveled with Trump to New Jersey, the president opted not to address the nation Saturday. He did, however, find time to stop by a wedding reception being held at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster and pose for photos with the bride, according to images circulating on social media.
On Sunday afternoon, Trump announced that he had ordered federal government flags flown at half-staff in honor of the El Paso attack and a mass slaying early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, and that he would address the shootings Monday at 10 a.m.
“Hate has no place in our country, and we’re going to take care of it,” Trump said in Morristown, N.J., just before flying home to Washington. He did not respond to questions from reporters about the El Paso shooter’s manifesto but said generally that “this has been going on for years” and acknowledged that “perhaps more has to be done.”
Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, flatly dismissed the suggestion that Trump was to blame.
“Goodness gracious, is someone really blaming the president? People are sick,” Mulvaney said on NBC. He pointed to the manifesto, adding, “If you do read that, you can see him say that he’s felt this way for a long time, from even before President Trump got elected.”
Mulvaney acknowledged that “some people don’t approve of the verbiage that the president uses,” but he argued: “People are going to hear what they want to hear. My guess is this guy’s in that parking lot out in El Paso, Texas, in that Walmart doing this even if Hillary Clinton is president.”
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tweeted that O’Rourke’s comments on CNN were “disgusting and wrong.” She added, “A tragedy like this is not an opportunity to reboot your failing presidential campaign.”
Regardless of the El Paso shooter’s motivations, Trump throughout his presidency has stoked fear and hatred of the other, whether Latino immigrants or black people living in cities or Muslims.
Although he has not directly espoused the “great replacement” theory of white supremacists, Trump has openly questioned America’s identity as a multiethnic nation, such as by encouraging migration from Nordic states as opposed to Latin America.
In speeches and on social media, the president has capitalized on divisions of race, religion and identity as a political strategy to galvanize support among his white followers. Last month he attacked four congresswomen of color and said they should “go back” to the countries they came from, even though three were born in the United States and all four are U.S. citizens. Most recently, Trump lashed out at Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), one of the highest-ranking black lawmakers, by calling his Baltimore district “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and claiming that “no human being would want to live there.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University and expert on authoritarianism, said Trump has been strategic.
“This is a concerted attempt to construct and legitimize an ideology of hatred against nonwhite people and the idea that whites will be replaced by others,” she said. “When you have a racist in power who incites violence through his speeches, his tweets, and you add in this volatile situation of very laxly regulated arms, this is uncharted territory.”
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified in the Senate last month that the bureau has seen a recent uptick in the number of domestic terrorism arrests and that most involved some form of white supremacy.
But Trump has done little to vigorously confront this crisis that his own government is trying to combat. In the wake of the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Trump at first claimed there were good people on both sides before later backtracking, and only under pressure from his advisers.
And after a white supremacist was accused of killing 51 Muslims in New Zealand, Trump dismissed the idea that white nationalism was a rising threat, saying it was only “a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
Leonard Zeskind, author of “Blood and Politics,” a history of the white nationalist movement, said the ugliest phenomena often develop in countries when there is a vacuum of moral leadership. Zeskind explained that white nationalism is autonomous from any political formation, but that Trump energizes its followers.
“He gives it voice. He’s their megaphone,” Zeskind said. He added, “Donald Trump, dumping on immigrants all the time, creates an atmosphere where some people interpret that to be an okay sign for violence against immigrants.”
On the campaign trail Sunday, many of the Democrats hoping to defeat Trump drew parallels between his rhetoric and the El Paso shooting and denounced his handling of white supremacy.
“I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said on CNN. “He is responsible because he is stoking fears and hatred and bigotry. He is responsible because he is failing to condemn white supremacy, and seeing it as it is, which is responsible for such a significant amount of the terrorist attacks.”
Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) told reporters outside a church in Las Vegas: “The words of the president of the United States have consequences.” Trump, she added, has “the responsibility of elevating public discourse, of challenging us to rise to our best selves, to speak to our better angels — not to talk about people on both sides being equal. Not to appeal to hate and division.”
And Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on CNN: “What he has got to understand is that when you have language that is racist, that is virulently anti-immigrant, there are mentally unstable people in this country, who see that as a sign to do terrible, terrible things.”
To experts in the field, the El Paso rampage was predictable. Frank Figliuzzi, a former head of counterintelligence at the FBI, wrote in a column published just four days earlier in the New York Times that Trump’s words eventually could incite bloodshed.
“The president has fallen short of calling for overt violence against minorities and immigrants, but unbalanced minds among us may fail to note the distinction,” Figliuzzi wrote. “If a president paints people of color as the enemy, encourages them to be sent back to where they came from and implies that no humans want to live in certain American cities, he gives license to those who feel compelled to eradicate what Mr. Trump calls an infestation.”
When one side proposes ways that human beings might begin to solve a deadly problem while the other side leaves it up to God, you know which side is right.
When one side proposes solution after solution to contain gun violence — and offers compromise after compromise to get something done — while the other side blocks action every time, you know which side is right.
When the president of the United States and his most incendiary media allies fuel hatred of those who are not white while his opponents say we should stand in solidarity with one another, you know which side is right.
When one side brushes aside the dangers of racist and white nationalist terrorism while the other side says we need to be vigilant against all forms of terrorism, you know which side is right.
And when Americans are gunned down in incident after incident, when we are numbed by repeating the same sorrowful words every time, when we move within a news cycle from “something must be done” to “the Senate will block action” or “the politics are too complicated,” you know America’s democracy is failing and its moral compass is broken.
Our rancid political culture is, quite literally, killing our nation. And the problem is not caused by some abstraction called “polarization” or by “the failure of both sides to understand each other.” Those are the alibis of timid souls so intent on sounding “balanced” that they turn their eyes from the truth.
What is that truth? When it comes to gun violence and the need to confront white nationalism, one side is right and one side is wrong.
Until we face this, even two mass shootings within 24 hours will do nothing to galvanize action. In El Paso, 20 people were killed at a shopping center on Saturday and 26 were wounded by a gunman who, according to police, appears to have posted an anti-immigrant screed online before the shooting. Then at 1 a.m. on Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, another mass shooter left nine dead and 27 injured in area known for its lively nightlife that is heavily patrolled by police. The shooter was killed in less than a minute.
“Think about that minute,” said Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley. “The shooter was able to kill nine people and injure 26 in less than a minute.” The gun-permissiveness crowd wants us not to think about that minute. It puts the lie to the gun lobby’s claim that having armed people nearby when a mass killer strikes is all we need to keep us safe.
The wrong side in this debate does not want us to come together. On the contrary, its goal after every mass shooting is to deflect and divide. Here’s what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said when asked by reporters what we should do about gun violence. “Listen, there are bodies that have not yet been recovered,” Abbott replied. “I think we need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics.”
No, Abbott, reading from the NRA’s script, started “the politics” right at that moment, and it is an insidious form of politics. Simultaneously, he deflected by pretending it’s impolite to answer substantive questions and divided by saying that those who raise them disrespect the dead.
Nothing disrespects those who are slaughtered more than the political paralysis Abbott and those like him are encouraging.
Invoking God and calling for prayer should never seem obscene. But it is always obscene to use the Almighty to escape our own responsibility.
“God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio,” President Trump said in a Sunday morning tweet from his New Jersey golf club.
Yes, may God bless them. But may God also judge Trump for a political strategy whose success depends on sowing racism, reaction and division. May God judge him for stoking false and incendiary fears about an immigrant “invasion,” the very word echoed by the manifesto that police suspect was the El Paso shooter’s. May God judge the president for cutting programs to fight white extremism at the very moment when the FBI is telling us that we are more at risk from white-nationalist terrorists than Islamist terrorists.
In pursuit of a mythical middle ground, the faint-hearted will counsel against calling out the moral culpability of those who divide, deflect and evade. Meanwhile, the rationalizers of violence will continue to claim that only troubled individuals, not our genuinely insane gun policies, are responsible for waves of domestic terrorism that bring shame on our country before the world.
But sane gun laws are the middle ground, and most gun owners support them. Opposing the political exploitation of racism is a moral imperative. And refusing to acknowledge that only one side in this debate seeks intentionally to paralyze us is the path of cowardice.
In a laundry list of reasons why the United States is grappling with mass killings, an Ohio state lawmaker has settled on immigrants, same-sex marriage, transgender rights, disrespect toward veterans and “drag queen advocates.”
Candice Keller, a Republican state representative from Middletown, near Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were killed early Sunday, offered her diagnosis on her personal Facebook page, the Dayton Daily News reported. Her post came only hours after the Dayton shooting, as the nation still reeled from the Saturday mass killing of 20 people in El Paso and the discovery of an anti-immigrant, white nationalist manifesto believed to have been written by that alleged gunman.
Keller’s post sent shock waves through the state and local Republican Party, where there is a groundswell of calls from fellow conservatives urging her to resign, said Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones, who oversees law enforcement across Keller’s district.
“It’s an embarrassment. It’s shameful. It does not reflect our party, our community, or the people who are hurting right now,” Jones told The Washington Post on Monday. “She only left out people who look like her.”
The comments stunned the mustachioed, cigar-chomping, pro-Trump lawman who himself has taunted immigrants with billboards but has called for civility amid toxic partisan politics. Jones said he was worried Keller’s posting would have a chilling effect on future victims in the county who may believe police officers have similar notions. “She made our job that much more difficult in law enforcement,” he said.
Jones declined to say who else in the county opposed Keller’s views but said there would soon be clearer signs of opposition within GOP ranks. He urged he national and state Republican Party to join the call for her resignation.
Other Republicans distanced themselves from Keller.
“Some want to politicize these events, and I cannot condone such comment and behavior,” Butler County GOP chairman Todd Hall told the Cincinnati Enquirer. The group did not return a request for comment.
Keller did not return a request for comment.
Her list also included fatherless upbringing, violent video games and two arguments that conservatives have leveled at former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick — that kneeling protests over police brutality are insults to both law enforcement and veterans.
Amid an apparent rise of domestic terror arrests, Keller did not include anything about white nationalism, an ideology President Trump condemned Monday; the availability of semiautomatic assault rifles and 100-round ammunition drums like the one used in the Dayton killings; or how the alleged killer legally obtained a firearm after he was kicked out of a high school for writing a list of girls he wanted to kill.
Keller also blamed President Barack Obama for “disrespect to law enforcement,” along with Democratic lawmakers, public schools and “snowflakes, who can’t accept a duly-elected President.” Her post was later either removed from view or deleted.
She has courted controversy before. At a 2018 gun rights rally a month after the Parkland high school killings, Keller said that a 15-year old survivor “would just as soon be eating Doritos and playing video games.”
Butler County Democratic Party chairman Brian Hester said that Keller “loves to fan the flames and play the role of victim here, not the nine people who were killed” and called her unfit for office, the Daily News reported.
Jones, who wrote “Shame shame shame” in reference to Keller on Twitter, noted that Keller represents a diverse group of constituents across western Ohio.
“Some of the people she talked about in her rant, those people work for me. They’re family members,” he said. “She assaulted all of them.”
Shortly before a gunman opened fire outside a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more, a manifesto believed to be linked to him was posted online. It railed against a “Hispanic invasion” and laid out a plan to divide the United States into territories based on race.
Authorities believe 21-year-old Patrick Crusius wrote the document, though they are still gathering evidence.
It begins by praising the manifesto of the gunman who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand earlier this year. That document cited a white supremacist theory known as “The Great Replacement,” which postulates that a secret group of elites is working to destroy the white race by replacing them with immigrants and refugees.
“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the manifesto says.
After a brief introduction, the 2,300-word manifesto is divided into five sections: political reasons for the attack, economic reasons, equipment that will be used to carry out the shooting, the expected reaction to the attack, and “personal reasons and thoughts.” Titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” the document is a jumble of positions and ideologies. In it, the writer warns of the dangers of environmental degradation, rails against corporate influence in the government and cautions against interracial marriage.
Under “political reasons,” the manifesto lambastes both Democrats and Republicans, suggesting the United States will soon become a one-party state run by Democrats because of the growing Hispanic population, the death of the baby-boom generation and the “anti-immigrant rhetoric of the right.” The author postulates that the growing Hispanic population in Texas will soon make it a solidly Democratic state, which he argues would all but assure repeated Democratic presidential victories.
“The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate,” the manifesto says.
The document repeatedly rails against corporations, which the author says have taken over the government. The author criticizes Republicans for favoring corporations, but argues that “at least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”
The author also expresses fear over the impact automation will have on job opportunities and argues that immigrants should not be allowed to continue coming into the country as long as job opportunities are scarce. He argues that while immigrants often take menial jobs that Americans are unwilling to perform, their children seek better opportunities and often receive college degrees that allow them to obtain high-skill positions. The document again blames corporations for advocating for work visas for skilled workers and says they rely on immigrants to fill low-skilled positions.
In a jumbled rant, the document rails against corporations for destroying the environment by over-harvesting resources. The manifesto chastises the government for being unwilling to confront environmental issues and most Americans for being unwilling to change their lifestyles to be more environmentally friendly. It argues that the United States therefore needs fewer people consuming resources.
The author wrote that he planned to mainly rely on an AK-47 as his weapon for the shooting, noting that it overheats after about 100 rounds and that he would need a heat-resistant glove.
The manifesto notes that many migrants return to their home countries to reunite with family, arguing that “the Hispanic population is willing to return to their home countries if given the right incentive. An incentive that myself and many other patriotic Americans will provide.” The author writes that such terrorist attacks will “remove the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc.”
In the “personal reasons and thoughts” section, the author writes that he has spent his life preparing for a future that does not exist, though does not specify what that future would be. He ends on an anti-immigrant screed, worrying that Hispanics will take over the Texas government and says the Founding Fathers have given him the rights — presumably referring to the right to bear arms — to save the country from destruction.
“Our European comrades don’t have the gun rights needed to repel the millions of invaders that plaque [sic] their country. They have no choice but to sit by and watch their countries burn,” the manifesto says.
Finally, the manifesto ends by decrying interracial couples and proposes separating the United States into territories based on race. The author points to white supremacist theories that “stronger and/or more appealing cultures overtake weaker and/or undesirable ones.”
The author expresses fear that he will be captured, rather than die during the shooting, because that would mean he would receive the death penalty and his family would despise him. And he stresses that he has maintained his white supremacist ideology for many years, predating President Trump and his 2016 campaign, which he says did not influence his reasons for carrying out the attack.
“This is just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe,” the author writes.
President Trump clearly just wants all of this to go away.
We all do, of course; no one wants to see more incidents in which mostly white, mostly male gunmen massacre people at random in public places. Most of us, though, aren’t in a position to make whatever changes might be needed to prevent similar events in the future. Our wanting it to go away is tangibly different than Trump’s: We want it to go away because it’s a horror; he seems to want it to go away because it’s a nuisance.
The weekend’s mass shooting in El Paso is particularly troublesome for Trump because it appears to explicitly overlap with two of his political priorities: curtailing immigration from Mexico and defending the ability of Americans to own a broad range of firearms. A short screed posted online before the attack that appears to have been written by the alleged shooter includes language mirroring Trump’s own rhetoric on an “invasion” of migrants. In many places, the document makes overt the subtext of a lot of Trump’s political rhetoric, like Trump’s past claims that Democrats want immigrants to enter the country so that they eventually vote Democratic. The post makes the same questionable claims that Trump’s White House has made about immigrants taking jobs.
Trump’s initial reaction to the El Paso shooting and a subsequent one in Dayton, Ohio, was what we would expect: a tweet of commiseration and some commentary about doing . . . something.
“A lot of things are being done right now,” Trump said when speaking to reporters while on his way back to Washington from his private club in New Jersey. Congress is on recess until next month.
On Monday morning, Trump had a more specific proposal.
“We cannot let those killed in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, die in vain,” he wrote on Twitter. “Likewise for those so seriously wounded. We can never forget them, and those many who came before them. Republicans and Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform. We must have something good, if not GREAT, come out of these two tragic events!”
It’s incredibly telling that Trump sees these mass shootings as something that Democrats want to end. He sees new legislation that would expand background checks — something that consistently has the near-universal support of the American public in polling — as a bargaining chip for him to use to get something he wants. In this case it’s new immigration restrictions. But he might as well have said anything: new corporate tax cuts, voter ID rules, you name it. Trump thinks that preventing gun violence is a Democratic priority, not an American one. He offers the thinnest olive branch possible and considers it something that he can use to extract concessions from the opposition.
That he chose immigration restrictions as the Republican bargaining position in this case, though, is staggering. This is, after all, exactly what that screed linked to the El Paso shooter called for. While criticizing both parties for the current state of immigration, the author of the document also wrote that “at least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”
Two mornings later, the Republican president whose rhetoric is peppered throughout that document proposes that an effort to limit the number of guns available for mass shootings like the one in Texas should be paired with a policy to greatly reduce immigration.
Trump is obviously sympathetic to the arguments articulated in the document. He has kept explicit white nationalism at a distance partly out of political necessity, but it occasionally cracks through to the surface. His campaign was predicated on the rhetoric included in that document. A former FBI supervisor who spoke with The Washington Post claimed that the bureau is wary of engaging fully with white supremacists in a way that “targets what the president perceives as his base.”
Shortly after Trump’s tweet offering to trade fewer gun deaths for the sort of immigration reform the author of the manifesto hoped to see, the president identified one addressable cause of mass shootings.
“The Media has a big responsibility to life and safety in our Country,” he tweeted. “Fake News has contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up over many years. News coverage has got to start being fair, balanced and unbiased, or these terrible problems will only get worse!”
The train of thought here is easy to follow. Trump is hearing that those who oppose immigration and those embracing loose gun laws are to blame for the shooting in Texas, but since those groups are also central to his base, he can’t similarly blame them. So he scans his perceived enemies for someone to blame — “Immigrants? Probably won’t work this time,” etc. — and lands on his preferred target.
The media were a focus of that document linked to the El Paso shooting, too. “The media is infamous for fake news,” it reads, itself a direct echo of Trump. “Their reaction to this attack will likely just confirm that.”
Stunningly, Trump's excoriation of the media was, in part, a defense of himself. In this moment, he decided to complain about the media coverage of twin events in which nearly 30 people were killed because the media understandably linked his rhetoric and his failures to address gun violence to those killings. His tweet was a reminder to his base: The media is unfair to me.
If you think that's reading more into Trump's tweet than is warranted, consider his next tweet, a retweet of a message sent in December 2018.
https://twitter.com/ChatByCC/status/1070841804122193920
A subtle reminder from the president: Trump is standing up for Americans, not instead fostering anti-immigrant rhetoric and turning his back on a flood of high-powered weapons that blankets the country.
In his comments to reporters on Sunday, Trump claimed, as he has in the past, that he inherited this problem, a way of pushing the blame elsewhere. He’s not wrong, of course, but the responsibility is now his to address. He doesn’t seem to be embracing that role, to put it mildly.
His comments on Monday morning may not be his final proposals. But they were his first reactions, and that by itself tells us a lot.
In the wake of two horrific mass shootings over the weekend, particularly the one in El Paso where 20 people were allegedly murdered by a man who apparently left an online message echoing some of the themes of President Trump’s rhetoric, many have been putting blame at least partially at the president’s feet. We can debate how justified that is, but for the moment I want to shift focus just a little. There’s another vital question we need to ask: not whether Trump is inspiring murderers, but whether he is now, and will in the future, disappoint them in ways that could lead to more deadly violence.
In that screed, the author made reference to “the great replacement,” a right-wing theory about how white people are being replaced not only in numbers but in power and influence by minorities. You probably recall that the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 chanted “Jews will not replace us!,” but these ideas can be heard on the president’s favorite cable news network, where Laura Ingraham warns that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants.”
“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the author wrote, stressing the importance of forestalling future Democratic electoral victories. But what’s also striking is that he did not cite Trump as his inspiration or his savior. “My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president,” he wrote. Trump has been president for almost three years, talking in the same way this young man allegedly did and identifying the same thing as America’s most serious problem. Yet as far as the author was concerned, the Trump presidency didn’t solve that problem. Mass murder was still required.
In 2016, with his disturbingly sharp instinct for locating and stimulating the worst in people, Trump understood something other Republicans missed. The party’s base was angry and hungry, hungry for someone who would dispense with dog whistles and insinuations and give explicit voice to their rage and resentments. Trump gave it to them, and over and over again we still hear it from his supporters: “He says what I’m feeling.”
For many of them, that’s enough. To hear their sentiments echoed from the highest office in the land provides enormous satisfaction, even if the results don’t match the rhetoric.
But others, the less stable and the more heavily armed, will not be assuaged. They may well see in Trump’s presidency nothing but failure. After all, didn’t he promise a return to when people like them were on top? The Muslims would be banned, the minorities would be shown their place, a “big beautiful wall” would be built from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — and Mexico would pay for it.
It’s hard to overstate the symbolic importance that last part had for many Trump supporters, even if it was preposterous from the beginning. The idea of forcing Mexico to pay for the wall was about dominance, restoring our dignity by humiliating our neighbor to the south. This was the beating heart of what Trump promised, especially to white men who felt the world had shoved them aside: not just practical results but also a restoration of strength and stature.
And if you were one of those men, what do you see around you? You might love Trump for the things he says, but you might also come to believe he has failed you.
America has not been cleansed. The wall is not built, and Mexico has paid for nothing. There are no fewer immigrants in the United States than there were in 2016. Trump has not stopped the “invasion” or the “infestation”; instead, on an almost daily basis, he tells us it’s getting worse. Muslims are still here; a few of them are even in Congress. Women keep occupying more positions of prominence, and insisting that men be held to account for behavior that once was seen as their privilege. The clock Trump promised to wind back to a time when America was great has stubbornly continued to tick into the future.
If that’s what you think, you may or may not be angry at Trump, but you may conclude that it was foolish to expect a president to accomplish what you thought was needed. And you might, like the alleged El Paso or Tree of Life shooters or any of the white supremacist/nationalist terrorists we’ve seen in recent years, decide that you have no choice but to take matters into your own hands.
As historian Rick Perlstein noted just after the 2016 election, Trump made practical promises he couldn’t possibly keep, but “the biggest, only made implicitly, was the same one fascist strongmen always offer: transcendent national renewal, built upon the cleansing of dangerous untermenschen from the body politic.” Once that promise inevitably fails to be fulfilled, the results could be catastrophic. “The more Trumpism fails, the more, and more violently, scapegoats will be blamed.”
We are not heading toward that point, because we’re already there. And what happens if Trump loses in 2020? Then the most radical and murderous on the far right will know that the political project truly failed, and they may decide there is no option but violence until the America they want is born out of the carnage.
So yes, we can and must condemn Trump for being such an inspiration to the most depraved among us. But we should also know that defeating him will not make them disappear. It could make them even more dangerous.
Nobody made a super-big deal about it on March 15, 2019, when the president of the United States — in his fancy baggy suit, over-long tie hanging down behind the Resolute Desk, veto pen in hand — sat in the Oval Office and described the surge of desperate asylum seekers on America’s southern border as “an invasion.”
“People hate the word invasion, but that’s what it is,” Donald Trump told the White House press pool, as he vetoed the legislation from Congress aimed at blocking the president from his authoritarian maneuvers to divert at least $2.5 billion for a border wall — to keep these human beings out. Maybe no one made a big deal because we’d grown so numb to hate-inducements from inside our own White House. He’d already called the immigrant influx “an invasion” on more than a half-dozen occasions — tweeting just days earlier: “I am stopping an invasion as the Wall gets built. #MAGA.”
A month before that, Trump had chosen the border city of El Paso, Texas, as the place to dramatize the alleged threat from Latino migrants. He rented out a big arena (stiffing the owners, by the way) and rallied support for the xenophobic centerpiece of his re-election campaign, making sure to highlight any criminals among the thousands of migrants who’ve been arrested and detained. “Murders, murders, killing, murder,” the president rambled at one point, as his frenzied crowd chanted “Build that wall!” Trump went on: “We will. If we cut detention space, we are letting loose dangerous criminals into our country.”
Five and a half months after that rally, a white 21-year-old community-college student with a pro-Trump social media feed sat down in his family’s McMansion in a posh Dallas suburb and picked out El Paso — more than 600 miles away — on a map. When he got to the border city, the man-child posted a so-called manifesto on the hate-laden website called 8chan that stated: “This is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Hours later, in police custody, the gunman reportedly told investigators he entered a Walmart packed with back-to-school shoppers to kill as many Mexicans as possible.
Indeed, the 21-year-old did kill three Mexican nationals during the shooting spree that begin at 10 a.m. on a sun-soaked Saturday in El Paso. Most of those he mowed down with his AK-47-style long gun were the ones least able to escape a killer’s only-in-America rapid gunfire. The 20 corpses — some face down in a parking lot — included an 82-year-old woman and a 2-year-old. A 25-year-old woman was shot and killed while shielding her own 2-month-old baby (who lived), while witnesses described another infant with blood smeared across his belly. As always, the details of America’s 249th mass shooting of 2019 were both shocking and painfully familiar at the same time.
But this weekend came a grim plot twist.
If you’re like me and have the weird habit of falling asleep in front of the TV, you may have awakened, as I did at 5 a.m., to the gut-wrenching sight of police sirens flashing in the dead of a Dayton night. In America, the nightmares come when you wake up. It was the aftershock, the second spasm of deadly American violence in just 13 hours, and the 250th of the year.
Nine dead in Ohio. We don’t know why a man opened fire on the crowd outside the Ned Peppers nightclub, but we do know that just like in El Paso, he was a young white man dressed in black, with enough firepower to kill or main a few dozen humans in less than a minute’s time.
It was at that moment, in the predawn blackness of a hot August night, that you could see that the center of Donald Trump’s America is not holding. You had already watched the fear and loathing spiraling out of control — the immigrants afraid to leave their homes to take their kids out to a playground or an ice cream shop, the gulag of squalid concentration camps, the increasingly racist rants from a president desperate to cling to his job. And now these twin eruptions — body bags and hastily abandoned shoes stacked up on blood-stained American asphalt.
When things fall apart, they shatter into a million pieces. I can’t tell you yet exactly how the bloodshed in El Paso is related to a mass murder in Dayton, or to the social dysfunction right here in Philadelphia that caused someone to spray bullets into a crowd of people shooting a hip-hop video, or into a crowded block party in Brooklyn the night before that. I can’t explain why people tweeting about El Paso couldn’t use the hashtag #WalmartShooting because it was already in use for a man who’d just murdered two employees at an outlet in Mississippi.
All I know is that it’s all starting to feel like the same event — a Great Unraveling of America. The feeling only grew worse when I read that the authorities in El Paso believe some of the wounded may not go to local hospitals ... because they’re so afraid of our immigration cops. It seemed like one more sign that conditions in this country — the violence, the fear, the embrace of racism and xenophobia from the highest levels, and the long slide into neo-fascism — have become intolerable. And yet — with the blood of El Paso and Dayton not yet dry — far too many are still tolerating this.
None more so than America’s so-called Republican leaders — the Mitch McConnells, Mitt Romneys, the Greg Abbotts — who seemed to share the same pathetic and cowardly playbook of quickly taking to Twitter, praying for the victims and their families, praising the first responders, and quickly logging off without one word about the scourge of white supremacy, their president who helps promote it, or the gun culture that makes it all so lethal.
The few GOP bigwigs who were pressed for more fell back on familiar tropes. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reached all the way to back to the 1990s to blame violent video games, while Abbott, the governor of Texas who once famously lamented the fact that Texans weren’t buying as many guns as Californians, said “the bottom line is that mental health is a large contributor.”
No doubt, mental health — and the lack of care — is a crisis in this country. But linking it to the El Paso murders seems like an evasion. From what we know so far, the killer embraced a sick ideology but knew exactly what he was doing — driving 600 miles to a carefully selected kill zone and writing a hate-filled but consistent manifesto. His mass murder seemed less a statement about his own mental health and more a statement about the moral health of a nation where so many are opening embracing racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Including the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Interestingly, the El Paso gunman was media-savvy enough to drop a line into his manifesto that his racist views are independent of his president, that journalists were certain to blame Trump but that would be, in his words, “fake news.” But are good-and-thinking people to make of the fact that Saturday’s killer — just like the Christchurch mass-murderer before him and the Pittsburgh synagogue gunman before him — echoed Trump’s “invasion” language on immigrants? What kind of America should citizens expect when the president attacks women of color in Congress by telling them to go back to where they came from and when his true believers chant, “Send her back!”?
Researchers went back and looked at the counties where Trump held his 2016 campaign rallies and found those jurisdictions posted a stunning 226 percent rise in hate crimes. That paper didn’t include El Paso, which was targeted in 2019 by both the Trump campaign and a mass killer. Or Southern Ohio, where the president held a rally on Thursday. Just last week, an FBI memo said fringe conspiracy theories are becoming a domestic terrorism threat — a warning that came to life with a series of pops on Saturday morning. Now, what are we going to do about it?
“Trump is a racist, and he stokes racism in this country,” said El Paso’s Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman and current 2020 presidential candidate. “It fundamentally changes the character of this country, and it leads to violence.” O’Rourke’s words were a moment of moral clarity that America so desperately needs right now. We just need a lot more.
Our intolerable state of affairs screams out for a crisis footing. We need Mitch McConnell to stop tweeting platitudinous baloney and call the Senate back from its summer recess and act on legislation that prevents gunmen from hunting human beings with weapons of warfare — a ban on military-style weapons that can kill or maim a person every second and the high-capacity magazines that feed them. If McConnell and the GOP leadership won’t hold that vote — and they won’t — then Democrats need to shut down Capitol Hill until it happens. There cannot be business as usual.
Last night, a meeting of the remarkable activists from Moms Demand Action —- the preeminent anti-gun-violence group right now — was taking place in Washington, D.C., and as news poured in from El Paso, they swarmed the White House for a candlelight (and iPhone-light) protest at White House that was powerful and profound. We should join them. All of us. People in Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, and elsewhere have taken greater risks to protest behavior that — while undeniable outrageous — arguably is nowhere near as bad as what the 45th president is perpetrating.
But the real moment of clarity as the sun rises over El Paso and Dayton is that President Trump urgently needs to resign or be impeached. Already, 120 House members have signed onto impeachment. But while the frequently cited Mueller report does lay out serious high crimes and misdemeanors, the real reason for impeachment should be Trump’s incitements to violence — which experts call stochastic terrorism — and his appeals to racism.
A president choosing to use the bully pulpit of his office to embrace racism — with the naked political goal of his own re-election — and now inspire mass murderers is the greatest abuse of American power in my lifetime, worse than the crimes of Richard Nixon’s Watergate. This is exactly why the Founders baked impeachment into the Constitution, and it’s why the 2020 election may be too long for us to wait. If things are intolerable now — and they are — take a moment to ponder how much worse things can get over the next 15 months if we continue to do nothing.
Watching President Trump step up to a White House podium Monday to assert that “hate has no place in America,” many people in this Texas border city were dumbfounded.
“We were safe until he started talking,” John Smith-Davis, 47, a retired Army veteran, said as he mourned with his friends at a memorial near the Walmart where a gunman opened fire Saturday. “He made us a target with his hateful rhetoric.”
Veronica Sanchez, a 23-year-old dental assistant, put it more succinctly: “He has said enough.”
El Paso, whose 680,000 people are mostly Latino and mostly Democrats, has long viewed Trump warily — and his most forceful statement since the massacre that has now claimed 22 lives there did little to change that.
“These barbaric slaughters are an assault upon our communities, an attack against our nation and a crime against all of humanity,” Trump said in a prepared speech Monday about the killings here and another mass shooting a day later in Dayton, Ohio. “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.”
That was little comfort to many El Paso residents, who focused instead on the ways that Trump has stoked the racism and xenophobia that appears to have motivated the killer and his decision to target Mexican immigrants.
El Paso Mayor Dee Margo said Monday that Trump was planning to visit the city on Wednesday, though by late in the day the White House had not officially confirmed that.
Many here said he would not be received warmly.
“From my perspective, he is not welcome here,” Democratic Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, whose district includes a wide swath of the city, said Monday in an interview on MSNBC. “Words have consequences. The president has made my community and my people the enemy. He has told the country that we are people to be feared, people to be hated.”
A string of officials in El Paso and across the nation have condemned Trump for his steady flow of racist rhetoric, including his repeated warnings about an immigrant “invasion”— the same term used in a manifesto posted to 8chan believed to be written by the shooter.
“We have a president right now who traffics in this hatred, who incites this violence, who calls Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, calls asylum seekers animals and an infestation,” Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic presidential candidate who represented El Paso in Congress, said Sunday at a vigil.
O’Rourke also took aim at a suggestion Trump tweeted early Monday that Republicans and Democrats might now work together to enact stronger background checks for gun buyers, “perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform.”
“Only a racist, driven by fear, could witness what took place this weekend — and instead of standing up to hatred, side with a mass murderer’s call to make our country more white,” O’Rourke wrote on Twitter. “We are so much better than this president.”
El Paso is an island of Democrats in a West Texas sea of Republicans. Hillary Clinton carried El Paso County in 2016 with 69% of the vote and Beto O’Rourke won with 86% for his congressional seat.
Some Republicans here said they appreciated Trump’s remarks and said it was too soon for the inevitable political arguments.
“Right now, I want to make sure I can show support by going to vigils and my wife can go to someone’s rosary and support those who lost loved ones,” said 72-year-old Bob Pena. “We have people yet to be put into the ground and people are looking to make political points out of it. Arguments can — and will — be made on both sides.”
Home to a University of Texas campus and the Army’s Fort Bliss, El Paso sits just across the Mexican border from the far larger Ciudad Juarez, which has a population of 1.3 million.
As more Central American asylum seekers have arrived at the border in recent years, El Paso has become a major crossing point for immigrants entering the country illegally, second only to Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.
The Trump administration debuted its “zero tolerance” family separation policy in El Paso. More recently, the “Remain in Mexico” program, which requires asylum seekers to remain south of the border while their cases proceed in U.S. immigration court, was expanded from California to El Paso.
Claudia Ordaz Perez, an El Paso city councilwoman, said in a telephone interview she was trying not to politicize the tragedy. But it was difficult, she said, not to separate the massacre from the president’s escalating rhetoric on immigration and race.
“Of course, the rhetoric of hate from the shooter matches what we’re hearing on a national level and the president’s comments on this are just confusing,” she said.
Back at the Walmart on Monday, mourners delivered flowers, candles and signs to honor the dead.
Smith-Davis felt angry. Angry at the shooter. Angry at the gun lobby. Angry at Trump. He said Trump’s charge during his presidential campaign that Mexicans were drug dealers and rapists hurt the city, given hundreds of thousands cross the bridges every day from Juarez to El Paso to work.
“They’re just trying to make a living,” he said.
Sanchez, the dental assistant, who lives just across the border from El Paso in New Mexico, was especially upset by Trump’s talk of pairing gun and immigration legislation.
The killer, she pointed out, “wasn’t somebody who crossed the border. This is homegrown, somebody who came from the United States.”
The night before the massacre, Sanchez visited the Walmart for back-to-school shopping with her family. They had planned to return the next morning but saw reports of the attack and stayed home. She later read the shooter’s supposed manifesto railing against Latinos and immigrants like her parents, who crossed illegally from Mexico.
Back when Trump visited El Paso in February, Sanchez attended a competing rally for O’Rourke. She has Latino relatives in the area who voted for Trump but struggles now, after the mass shooting, to understand how they could remain committed to him.
Jaime Abeytia, who has lived in El Paso for 22 years, said that he did not imagine any Trump visit would be warmly received.
“His hypocrisy on hate is shockingly boundless,” he said.
“Unless he’s coming with some solid policy changes that directly address the available of high-capacity weapons — and not use the opportunity to propose more draconian immigration policy, I’m not interested in a Trump visit.”
Working with immigrants for 30 years, Pablo Alvarado has lived through decades of antagonism toward Latinos. It came in political waves that washed over California, Arizona and other states. There was Proposition 187 in the 1990s, the Minuteman protests, “America’s toughest sheriff” Joe Arpaio and his hard-line policing tactics.
Nothing compares to the reality Latinos are facing today, Alvarado said.
“It’s a destructive moment for this country,” said the executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “This is the first time when I feel as if our adversaries have declared war against our immigrant community.”
The massacre of 20 people Saturday by a man who traveled 650 miles to a Walmart in El Paso, reportedly with the intention of shooting “as many Mexicans as possible,” marks what appears to be one of the deadliest hate crimes ever against Latinos.
The killer gunned down an Army veteran who loved listening to oldies on Sunday mornings, a 15-year-old high school student and soccer player, a mother who apparently used her body to shield her 2-month-old child, and 17 others, whose stories are still emerging.
The mass violence — and the bigoted motive that echoed the worst racist rants of anti-immigrant hard-liners — marked for many Latinos a devastating new low in the Trump era.
Like Alvarado, many Latinos on Sunday said they felt that the anger toward their community is reaching a boiling point, fueled by the heated politics of immigration.
Many said they believe that hostility is encouraged by a president who attacked a federal judge’s impartiality for being “a Mexican,” who frequently refers to asylum seekers and migrants who cross the border without authorization as part of an “invasion,” and who, at a rally speaking about migrants, said: “How do you stop these people? You can’t,” and then chuckled and joked along when someone in the crowd shouted, “Shoot them.”
For those here without legal status, the Trump era has been marked by family separations, detention centers and the persistent threat of widespread raids touted by the president. Others struggle with larger questions about racism and how hostility against Latinos has moved from the margins to the nation’s center stage.
Moving forward, many fear that unless something major changes, there will be more violence, beyond that unleashed in El Paso.
Miguel Luna was cooking eggs and bacon for his family Sunday when his wife told him of the tragedy in El Paso. He read the manifesto calling the attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
“I felt physical pain throughout my body, like food poisoning,” said Luna, a community organizer from Westlake who focuses on environmental issues.
As details about the victims came out in the news, he felt a sense of threat, fear and rejection in a country his mother fought hard to reach after she left Colombia decades ago. Luna believed that the true weapon behind the violence in El Paso was President Trump.
“His words are the ammunition and people of color are his target,” he said. “And he’s not ceasing, and it’s all very methodical and directed.”
When Trump took office, Luna expected that political winds may shift against immigrants, and he launched a photo project online to celebrate their stories. He called it the Power of U and featured dozens of Latino immigrants — educators, political leaders, architects and activists.
“I wanted this to be an opportunity for us to highlight all the good things we bring to this country,“ he said.
On Sunday, the father of two took some comfort in the positive space he created for the community at a time of uncertainty. But real change will take much more, he said.
In Gilroy, Calif., the streets were quiet one week after another gunman shot and killed three people at the popular Gilroy Garlic Festival, shortly after posting online about “hordes of mestizos” and encouraging people to read a book associated with white supremacists. Authorities in that case have said that the gunman did not appear to target any particular group and that his motive may never be known. But the shooting, along with the massacre in El Paso, left people afraid.
Parks were empty, church parking lots were barren, and many businesses were deserted.
Gerardo Ortiz sat in a wheelchair, parked in his usual spot outside St. Mary Parish. Passersby greeted him in English and Spanish as Mass began, though there weren’t many people attending.
Ortiz, 73, said he has experienced racism all his life — back in Puebla, Mexico, where he lived more than 35 years ago, and here in the United States. But he too thinks that the recent escalation in gun violence can be attributed to the influence of Trump.
“This president provokes more violence, he shouldn’t have that vocabulary,” Ortiz said in Spanish. “If he sets that example, other people are going to follow what he says and does.”
Across the street, the owner of a party supplies store hung up three piñatas outside the storefront. Leon, who did not want to give his last name because of concerns about his legal status, has lived in the United States for about 40 years and has owned the store in Gilroy for seven.
He said the Latino community in Gilroy, particularly the Mexican community, is very close — and that he and his family were deeply saddened by reports that the shooter who opened fire in El Paso may have been fueled by hate toward Latinos.
“The Latino community is hurting,” Leon said.
Since Trump’s election, and especially since the announcement of the possibility of large-scale immigration raids several weeks ago, Leon’s children have also worried that both their parents may be deported, he said.
“They are scared that their mother isn’t going to come back home,” Leon said. And he feels that concern too.
“That’s the fear: that you are going to leave your house and never come back.”
In the parking lot at the Walmart Supercenter in Pico Rivera on Sunday morning, David Llamas maintained a wide-angle vigilance as he prepared to hit the road with a trunkful of Dodgers souvenirs to hawk.
He was on the lookout for furtive movements, backpacks and suspicious gazes.
“I’m watching everyone from the corner of my eye,” Llamas, 56, said. “It’s come to this — you’ve got to watch where you shop.
“Things have changed: We’ve got a president who is promoting racism,” he said. “How does he get away with all the crap he’s saying about la raza? I don’t know. But it’s not a good deal.”
Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant, said he always knew resentment and racism was just underneath the surface of American society.
Still, he’d spent 25 years trying to connect two major parts of his life — his conservative political philosophy and his race and identity.
He believed racism was just a fringe element in the Republican Party, percolating in its darkest corners but inevitably called out.
But something changed under Trump, he said.
“The president of the United States was elected in large part on an anti-Latino agenda,” Madrid said. “There is no other way you can feel about it other than offended and attacked.
“White nationalism is the purest form of identity politics,” he added. “It seeks to define ‘Americanness’ by one’s lineage and ancestry. It views the growing Latino population as an invasion, as illegal, as criminal — as less than human. The next obvious step is violence.”
Alvarado, the day laborer organizer, said that over the years he has seen the workers he organizes be subject to attacks — some have been cursed at, harassed and, in some cases, robbed, kidnapped or killed. Now, he said, he is more concerned than ever for the workers, spread across thousands of worksites.
But rather than cower, he said, they will find ways to push back.
“We have to fight against it, to be intelligent and find ways to defend ourselves — not with fear or hatred in our hearts,” he said.
On Wednesday, his group and other immigrant rights organizations plan to hold a vigil denouncing the hate that allegedly led to the massacre in El Paso.
Over the weekend, a white man with a semiautomatic rifle went on a shooting rampage at an El Paso Walmart, killing 22 people.
President Trump, who averred that we cannot let the victims “die in vain,” offered an idea for how to prevent future shootings: “Republicans and Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform. We must have something good, if not GREAT, come out of these two tragic events!”
It’s a shame about the deaths, in other words, but they never would have happened if immigrants didn’t keep trying to come here, and if Democrats would just let me stop them. “So, this atrocity,” as Nicole Hannah-Jones aptly summed up his view, “was caused by immigration.”
Having essentially blamed the victims for their own murders, the president was happily and enthusiastically acceding to what authorities think are the alleged killer’s specific demands.
“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” says an anti-immigrant online manifesto that authorities think the accused gunman posted. It echoes the “invasion” rhetoric commonly employed by the president at his rallies and on Twitter. In fact, much of the language overlaps with that of the president and his supporters, including repeated entreaties to “send them back.”
The idea here is that some sort of bipartisan immigration reform would stop the epidemic of white-supremacist violence in the United States. But of course that makes sense only if you believe that racist killers have a legitimate complaint — that we shouldn’t have Latino immigrants, and that, therefore, they do bear some of the blame. (Never mind that people of Hispanic descent existed in El Paso long before that region was part of the United States.) This was the idea, too, behind Trump’s common warning, reiterated last month, that if migrants didn’t like the detention centers along the border, they could simply not come.
What’s worse, the president in this case seems to be holding the prospect of modest gun reform hostage to his and the online screed’s common demands. You want background checks? Let me stem the “infestation” first and we can talk. Democrats will blanch at such a devil’s bargain — a fact that Trump and Republicans will surely use to blame them for not wanting to prevent further violence. It’s not hard to imagine an I-told-you-so from the president after the next shooter posts a manifesto about “Great Replacement” theory and murders a dozen people. (As it happens, a senator from the accused shooter’s home state not-so-subtly alluded to that theory a couple months ago.) Although perhaps even this modest proposal is off the table after this morning’s tweet about it, since the president didn’t mention it in his later comments today.
As Jessica Winter forcefully showed last year, Trump frequently falls back on the rhetoric and psychology of an abuser: Look what you made me do! This was his excuse for worsening conditions for migrants and seeking punitive measures to dissuade them from coming. It’s not his fault. It’s never his fault. Which is another way of saying there’s nothing he can do to allay the circumstances he introduced himself.
It’s hard to imagine the manifesto’s author being any happier with the results of his campaign. His message — that the country is in danger of being lost in a wave of immigration — has been heard loud and clear by the man who very likely influenced his thinking in the first place, or at least supercharged it. What happens to migrants next is up to them, the president and the manifesto’s author agree. Don’t want to die? Don’t come.
Objective
Racism is related to policies preferences and behaviors that adversely affect blacks and appear related to a fear of blacks (e.g., increased policing, death penalty). This study examined whether racism is also related to gun ownership and opposition to gun controls in US whites.
Method
The most recent data from the American National Election Study, a large representative US sample, was used to test relationships between racism, gun ownership, and opposition to gun control in US whites. Explanatory variables known to be related to gun ownership and gun control opposition (i.e., age, gender, education, income, conservatism, anti-government sentiment, southern vs. other states, political identification) were entered in logistic regression models, along with measures of racism, and the stereotype of blacks as violent. Outcome variables included; having a gun in the home, opposition to bans on handguns in the home, support for permits to carry concealed handguns.
Results
After accounting for all explanatory variables, logistic regressions found that for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism there was a 50% increase in the odds of having a gun at home. After also accounting for having a gun in the home, there was still a 28% increase in support for permits to carry concealed handguns, for each one point increase in symbolic racism. The relationship between symbolic racism and opposition to banning handguns in the home (OR1.27 CI 1.03,1.58) was reduced to non-significant after accounting for having a gun in the home (OR1.17 CI.94,1.46), which likely represents self-interest in retaining property (guns).
Conclusions
Symbolic racism was related to having a gun in the home and opposition to gun control policies in US whites. The findings help explain US whites’ paradoxical attitudes towards gun ownership and gun control. Such attitudes may adversely influence US gun control policy debates and decisions.
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Introduction
Several mass shootings in 2012 (e.g., Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut; Aurora, Colorado) reignited gun-control and firearm ownership debates in the United States (US). The public health importance of gun reform in the US is clear and should not need such tragedies for policy change. In 2011, there were 32,163 firearm-related deaths in the US, with 11,101 homicides (69.5% of all homicides), and 19,776 suicides (51.6% of all suicides) [1]. Rates of firearm homicides in the US (3.6 per 100,000) are over 7-fold of those in similar nations (e.g., Canada, 0.5; United Kingdom, 0.1; Australia, 0.1) [2]. Blacks are disproportionately represented in US firearm homicides (14.6 per 100,000), and would benefit most from improved gun controls [1]. Opposition to gun control is considerably stronger in whites than blacks [3], with whites also reporting twice the rate of personal gun ownership and having a gun in the home, than is reported by blacks [4]. Proponents of gun-ownership rights cite self-protection and safety as their primary argument for owning guns and resisting gun reform [4], [5]. This is paradoxical, as whites, and particularly white males, are considerably more likely to commit suicide with firearms (7.3 and 12.9 per 100,000, respectively), than die from a firearm homicide (1.9 per 100,000) [1]. Indeed, US research found that having one or more guns in the home is related to a 2.7 and 4.8 fold increase in the risk of a member of that household dying from homicide or suicide, respectively [6], [7]. Given that gun controls have been shown to reduce suicides and homicides [8]–[10] arguments against gun reform based on self-defense/protection/safety are counterintuitive, and are inhibiting the adoption of appropriate policy to improve public health. As such, it is important for public health advocates, researchers, and policy makers to consider all explanations for opposition to gun reform in US whites. However, research on the reasons for opposition to gun control is sparse, in part because of restrictions on funding for research on gun control in the US [11], [12].
Stronger opposition to gun control by US whites has not always been the case. During the civil rights movement of the late 60 s, black activists exercised their right to carry loaded firearms in order to provide protection from police and extreme white factions [13]. The response from US whites was to demand stricter gun control. The Mulford Act was signed into law by Californian governor Ronald Reagan in 1967, and prohibited the carrying of loaded firearms in public [13]. The social landscape has changed considerably, and most recent data indicates a quite different view on gun control by whites, with 53% of whites wanting to protect the right to own guns, whereas only 24% of blacks do [14].
People’s stated reasons for owning guns and opposing gun-control legislation are likely complex; however, it has been suggested that sociocultural factors such as fear of black violence may be associated with gun ownership, and with opposition to gun controls [15], [16]. Similarly, negative attitudes towards blacks (i.e., racism), along with conservative and political ideologies, appear to be related to fear of black violence and crime [17]–[20]. What is not known, and accordingly is the focus of this study, is whether racism is associated with gun ownership and opposition to gun control. It has been found that racial stereotypes (e.g., that blacks are violent) are related to US whites’ fears of violence from blacks, and to their support for crime-related policy measures, such as building prisons, and the death penalty [19], [20]. Support for such policies is particularly pronounced in US whites who hold higher levels of racism [19]. Strong evidence also supports the notion that negative racial stereotypes and attitudes are related to people’s perceptions of threat from black gun-related violence [20]. Additionally, US research using measures of implicit race attitudes (e.g., Implicit Association Test; IAT) have shown a preference for whites over blacks [21] and appear to influence people’s political decisions, and even choices of medical procedures for blacks [22]–[24]. For instance, measures of explicit and implicit racism measures predicted opposition to Obama’s health reforms [23].
Most prominently, symbolic racism (racial resentment), an explicit but subtle form and measure of racism, has been found to be consistently related to peoples decisions regarding policies that may affect non-white US citizens. It is argued that symbolic racism supplanted old-fashioned or overt/blatant racism which had seen blacks as amoral and inferior, and was associated with open support for race inequality and segregation under ‘Jim Crow Laws’ [25]. Research following the US civil-rights movement suggested that anti-black racism and stereotyping, as assessed by blatant measures, had declined [26]. However, subsequent research revealed that people may merely be reluctant to express racism and negative stereotyping on these blatant measures in order to avoid appearing racist [27], [28]. This observation led to the conceptualization and measurement of more subtle measures of racism, such as, symbolic racism [25].
Symbolic racism is a belief structure underpinned by both anti-black affect and traditional values [29]. The anti-black affect (racism) component of symbolic racism is said to be established in pre-adult years through exposure to negative black stereotypes (e.g. blacks as dangerous, blacks are lazy), to the point that phenomena such as crime and physical violence have become typified as black phenomena [30]. The anti-black affect is not necessarily conscious or deliberative, but may be felt as fear, anger, unease, and hostility towards blacks [29], [31], [32]. The symbolic component reflects the abstract view of blacks as a collective rather than as individuals, as well as its basis in abstract white moralistic reasoning and traditions. Because symbolic racism represents an ingrained schema, individuals high in symbolic racism will react in a negative manner, often unconsciously, to issues perceived to involve a racial (i.e. black) component. Psychometric work shows that while symbolic racism has a small relationship with old-fashioned or blatant racism and stereotypes, only symbolic racism is associated with policy preferences related to race after controlling for conservative and political ideology and demographic characteristics (e.g., education, gender, age) [33].
Policies of which blacks or whites are the intended or obvious beneficiaries (e.g. affirmative action, school busing) should easily be perceived as involving a racial component. But other policies may also involve a perceived racial component merely because they concern an issue that is already understood by whites in racial (black) terms. Thus, symbolic racism has been linked to opposition to and support for a range of policies that whites consistently associate with blacks (e.g., welfare), even if it is not in the self-interest of whites to do so [22]–[25], [32]. This is also likely to explain the frequently observed correlations between symbolic racism and public opinion regarding a range of criminal justice policies (e.g. death penalty, mandatory sentences). There is substantial evidence that whites associate blacks with crime, and especially violent crime [19], [30]. The result of this conflation of race and crime is that whites high on symbolic racism will support policies that are perceived as being tough on crime and oppose policies that are considered lenient. Green and colleagues [34] have found a positive relationship between symbolic racism and punitive crime policies (i.e., death penalty, three strikes imprisonment), and negative correlation with policies that are intended to assist criminals (i.e., education of inmates, poverty reduction). And although conservative ideologies and racism are inherently related, symbolic racism makes a unique contribution to crime policy attitudes after accounting for other race-neutral factors (e.g., conservatism, crime victimization, crime news exposure, and socio-demographics) [34]. More generally, symbolic racism should also correlate with fear of crime and black violence, along with attitudes to policies that may reduce, or increase, perceived threat (e.g., gun ownership, gun control). Self-protection and physical safety (e.g., fear) are the most commonly cited reason for owning a gun and opposing gun control and blacks are overrepresented in the crime statistics and media portrayals of violent crime. Accordingly, people with higher symbolic racism may be more likely to own a gun and oppose gun control as a means of dealing (consciously or unconsciously) with abstract fears regarding blacks [19].
Given the importance of guns and gun-control to US public health, and the urgent need for appropriate policy to reduce gun-related harms, it is vital to examine the psychological and sociocultural reasons for the paradoxical attitudes of many US citizens and politicians to gun-control. US whites have twice the rate of gun ownership of blacks, oppose gun control to much greater extent than blacks, but are considerably more likely to kill themselves with those guns, than be killed by others or blacks. While the literature suggests that racism in whites shapes fear of black violence and support for policies that disadvantage blacks, no research has examined whether racism is related to gun ownership and attitudes to gun-control in US whites. This study investigated whether racism is related to gun ownership and opposition to gun control in US whites. We hypothesized that, after accounting for known confounders (i.e., age, gender, education, income, location, conservatism, political identification, anti-government sentiment), anti-black racism would be associated with having a gun in the home, and opposition to gun controls.
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Methods
The most recent data from the American National Election Study (ANES) [35] was used to test the hypothesis. The ANES panel study is the leading large-scale psychological and socio-political attitudes survey in the US, measuring various constructs and attitudes in monthly waves from a representative probability sample of US voters. Explanatory variables, including demographic details (i.e., age, gender, education, income, location: southern vs. other), anti-government sentiment, measures of conservatism (e.g., liberal versus conservative ideology), party identification (e.g., Republican versus Democrat leanings), symbolic racism, belief in a black violent stereotype, and implicit racism (i.e., race IAT), were accessed for US whites. Outcome measures were: having a gun in the home, opposition to policies banning handguns in the home, and support for permits to carry concealed handguns.
Potential participants for the ANES were contacted via telephone using random-digit-dialling and requested to complete an online survey each month from January 2008 to September 2009. Respondents were paid $10 a month for participation and those without internet access were provided with internet service for the duration of the study. The current study drew on data from several waves of the ANES survey. To counter the impact of participant drop-out and non-response on the representativeness of the sample examined in the current study we applied ANES generated weights as recommended (i.e. wave 20 post-election weight) [35]. The comprehensive ANES panel study demographics, data, materials and methods are freely available online at (http://www.electionstudies.org/).
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Measures
As part of the ANES, participants provided comprehensive information about the demographic composition of their household alongside their own background characteristics. Participants’ highest level of educational attainment was grouped into five categories: less than high school diploma, high school diploma, some college but no bachelor’s degree, bachelor’s degree, and graduate degree. This variable was scored from 1 = less than high school diploma, to 5 = graduate degree. Household income in the last year was reported by all participants. Participants were instructed to include their own pre-tax income and the income of all other household members from all sources (e.g. wages, tips, interest on savings, child support, Social Security). Nineteen income bands were used ranging from 1 = <$5,000 per annum to 19 = ≥$175,000 or more per annum. Consistent with previous research [36], education and income where dummy coded into five and four categories for analysis, respectively, rather than being treated as linear variables.
Racism
Measures of two key types of racism against blacks were taken from the ANES for analyses: symbolic racism and implicit racial attitudes. Additionally, a single item from wave 20 of ANES was used to assess whether participants held the stereotype that blacks are violent. Participants responded to the item “How well does the word ‘violent’ describe most blacks?” using five response categories ranging from 1 = “extremely well”, to 5 = “not at all well” (i.e. extremely well, very well, moderately well, slightly well, or not at all well). The item was coded so that a response of extremely well or very well, indicated endorsement of the black violent stereotype (coded 1), with other responses coded as 0, did not endorse stereotype blacks are violent.
In wave 20 of the ANES, participants were asked to respond to a four-item scale drawn from the Symbolic Racism Scale [37]. Specifically, participants indicated the extent to which they agree (1 = agree strongly to 5 = disagree strongly) with statements such as “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” (reverse scored). Scores on the four items were coded so that high scores are indicative of elevated levels of symbolic racism. A test of the reliability of the scale showed the four items corresponded closely with each other as indicated by a Cronbach’s alpha level of 0.8 and the emergence of a single factor from exploratory factor analysis of the scale. We utilized the average score across the four items to produce a scale ranging 1 = lowest symbolic racism score, to 5 = highest symbolic racism score.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is commonly used in experimental psychology to gauge implicit bias. A brief race (anti-black) IAT was included in wave 19 of the ANES to assess the extent to which participants demonstrated black-white racial bias. The theoretical background, instructions, and methodology for the race IAT have been well described elsewhere [21], [22]. Briefly, the race IAT was administered online, requiring participants to rapidly associate pictures of white and black faces with positively- and negatively-valenced words. Participants were asked to press the key “P” for white faces and for positive words and “Q” for any other stimulus. Alternatively, they were asked to press “P” for black faces or positive words and “Q” for other stimuli. The test consisted of 84 stimuli, two practice runs (14 sets of stimuli each) and two data collection blocks (28 sets of stimuli each). Response latencies across blocks were analysed to produce an effect size coefficient or D score. This score is coded so that positive scores indicate an unconscious preference for whites over blacks.
Conservatism, Anti-Government Sentiment, and Political Party Identification
Conservatism (ideological self-placement) was derived from four items assessing self-descriptions of liberal versus conservative leanings, and strength thereof. The four items were asked in wave 11 of the ANES. Participants were firstly asked “When it comes to politics, would you describe yourself as liberal, conservative, or neither liberal nor conservative?”. The extent to which participants considered themselves to be liberal or conservative was then gauged with a further question: “Would you call yourself very liberal or somewhat liberal? Would you call yourself very conservative or somewhat conservative?”. Those who rated themselves as “neither liberal nor conservative” were requested to indicate: “Do you think of yourself as closer to liberals, or conservatives, or neither of these?”. We combined all ratings on these four items to produce a score ranging from 1 to 7 (1 = extremely liberal, 4 = moderate, 7 = extremely conservative).
To better capture conservative values and associated views regarding government infringement on personal rights, we included a measure of anti-government sentiment. Participants responded with either a yes, immediate threat; or no, does not (yes responses coded as 1, no as 0) to the item ‘Do you think the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens, or not?’.
Party identification, and the strength of this identification, was derived (wave 19) from the same process using four component questions assessing whether participants identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents. This process yielded a score ranging from 1 to 7 (1 = strong Democrat, 4 = independent, 7 = strong Republican).
Gun Ownership
Questions relating to household gun ownership were included in wave 19 of ANES. Participants were firstly asked if any person in the household owned any type of gun. Specifically, participants were asked: “Do you or does any other member of your household own a handgun, rifle, shotgun, or any other kind of firearm, or does no one in your household own a firearm?”. Subsequently, participants were asked: “Do you happen to have in your home or garage any guns or revolvers?”. This second question functioned largely to corroborate responses to the initial question, but also established the participant’s personal ownership of the reported gun in the home. For analyses, a yes response to either item was coded as a 1, no responses were coded as 0.
Opinions on Gun Control
Participants were asked two questions regarding their views on two potential gun control policies in wave 13 of the ANES panel study. Participants were firstly asked: “Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose making it illegal for anyone to keep a handgun at home?”. Next they were asked: “Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose giving permits to allow any adult to carry a concealed handgun if they have never been convicted of committing a crime and they have passed a test showing that they know how to use the gun safely?”. To produce a clear index of whether the participant is opposed to gun control, we coded responses to the first question so that 1 = definite opposition to making it illegal to keep a handgun at home, and 0 = other responses. The item assessing support for a permit to carry a concealed handgun was reverse coded, so that “favor” for permits to have concealed handguns was coded as 1, which in effect represents opposition to gun control. Other responses were coded as 0, indicating non-support for concealed handguns.
Statistical Analysis
Multivariate logistic regression was used to examine relationships between explanatory variables, and gun-related outcomes. Odds ratios (OR) are reported with 95% confidence intervals (CI) for univariate and multivariate relationships with the outcome variables (see Tables 1–3) based on Taylor linearized standard errors. Explanatory variables were entered simultaneously in models, with the exception of having a gun in the home. Because participants reporting gun ownership will quite logically be against measures that involve giving up their guns, and ownership is hypothesised to be related to racism, we entered the variable ‘have a gun in the home’ in a second step for models examining opposition to gun control (Tables 2 and and3).3). Spearman’s correlation coefficients between all variables were calculated along with descriptives (see Tables 4 and and5,5, respectively).
Whenever there is a mass shooting, far too many people (cough, Republicans) ignore the proliferation of weapons of war on American streets that slaughter innocents and shred communities in a matter of seconds. Instead, they amble over to their bookshelf, pull out the Book of Talking Points, and mutter on and on about other things they think drove someone to commit mass murder. They mewl about violent video games or the mental health of the murderer. Not to diminish the absolute necessity to take mental health seriously or to address it, but the way Republicans and the National Rifle Association talk about it is as predictable as it is tiresome.
But here’s the question I keep asking myself: Can’t someone just be plain evil? Can’t someone hear the words from those they admire and act on the implicit or explicit messages delivered?
I’m asking these questions because the mental health rationale is selectively employed. Let me highlight just one example: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall anyone wondering aloud about the mental state of the husband-and-wife killers of 14 people at a San Bernardino, Calif., holiday party in 2015. Both were Muslim and killed by law enforcement. In fact, five days later, then-candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
But Republicans from President Trump on down the line are talking about mental health (and, yes, violent video games) in the wake of the mass murder of 22 people (as of this writing) at a Walmart in El Paso on Saturday. As The Post reported, authorities believe Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old white male alleged shooter, posted a 2,300-word manifesto rooted in the ideology of white supremacy and white nationalism moments before he unleashed hell. Crusius found common cause with the murderer of 51 Muslims in New Zealand.
And he found common cause with Trump. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the suspected killer wrote. Brandon Friedman, a former Obama administration official and co-founder of the McPherson Square Group, took to Twitter to do an old-fashioned sentence diagram of the alleged killer’s manifesto and the anti-immigrant rhetoric from Trump and his media and congressional enablers.
The New York Times reports: “Since January, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word ‘invasion’ — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election messaging.” And Trump regularly employed the word “invasion” in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
That the alleged killer said he held his bigoted beliefs before Trump became president is of little comfort. For racists, white supremacists and white nationalists, having your views bullhorned from the bully pulpit of the Oval Office is a stamp of approval.
Evil is what festers in weak souls who find power in deeply rooted conspiracy theories about their own superiority and the inferiority of others. Evil perpetuates itself on message boards and chat rooms. And evil comes alive in four-page manifestos that parrot well-worn hateful arguments that are then posted online before the person poisoned by them acts out. Dylann Roof posted his five-page tirade hours before he martyred nine African Americans at Mother Emanuel church in 2015 in Charleston, S.C., in the hopes of starting a race war.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said it exactly right on Twitter. “White supremacy is not a mental illness,” she wrote. “We need to call it what it is: Domestic terrorism.” And we need to also call it evil.
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison won global acclaim for her ability to tell the story of the black American experience — and specifically the damaging effects of racism — when few authors with national platforms were addressing the issue.
Her death on Monday at 88 coincided with national conversations about the role President Trump has played in stoking white nationalism. Many fans of Morrison are reflecting on her words criticizing the consuming nature of dismantling racism.
Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Morrison wrote “Making America White Again,” an essay for the New Yorker about the cultural anxiety that she said motivated most of the white Americans who voted for Trump. She wrote:
"So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.
On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.
The “terror” that Morrison mentioned when describing some Trump supporters has revealed itself in recent days following a mass shooting in El Paso where police believe the suspect probably posted an online rant using language that mirrors rhetoric used by President Trump. The posting is still under investigation.
Fear led many voters to choose a president whose vision of America resembled the days of decades past — a period that Morrison often featured in her work.
While largely known for her fiction, Morrison was not afraid to wade into the very real world of national politics. She made headlines for referring to President Bill Clinton as “the first black president” because of how his political enemies treated him during his impeachment.
She told Time magazine in 2008: “People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-a-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.”
That year, she endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who four years later presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Morrison, who often wrote about how cruel America had been to its black citizens, spoke of a newfound affection for the United States with the election of Obama, the country’s first black president.
“I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama,” she told the Guardian. “I felt like a kid. The Marines and the flag, which I never look at — all of a sudden it looked … nice. Worthy. It only lasted a couple of hours. But I was amazed, that music that I really don’t like — ‘God Bless America’ is a dumb song; I mean it’s not beautiful. But I really felt that, for that little moment.”
One of Morrison’s most quoted statements comes from a 1975 speech at Portland State University.
“The real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction,” she said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.”
“None of that is necessary,” she added. “There will always be one more thing.”
Less than a week before Donald Trump’s election, we wrote a piece provocatively entitled “CVE for White People: The Trumpist Movement and the Radicalization Process.” The article, whose title referenced the approach of “countering violent extremism” or CVE, argued that the Trump movement should be understood in a fashion roughly similar to the way scholars of extremism understand the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—that is, as an illiberal movement embedded in a country’s electoral system that has an ambiguous relationship to violence and an overtly violent fringe. “Trumpism, like the Brotherhood, is a political movement built on the mass mobilization of faith—in the one case religious faith and in the other case faith in a single charismatic individual,” we wrote. “Like the Brotherhood, it is a movement that exists within an electoral system but which has a deeply ambivalent relationship with the democratic norms of that system, a movement which both formally rejects violence yet manages also to tolerate or encourage it.” On “the fringes of both movements are radicals, some of whom are violent,” we argued. “The line between the Brotherhood and certain ultra-conservative Salafist and even violent Islamist groups in Egypt is a somewhat fuzzy one. This is more similar to than different from the Trump campaign which has, and often cheerfully accepts, the overt support of domestic white supremacists and members of the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement.” And, of course, “Both movements have also spawned terrorists.”
The piece goes on to propose understanding the process the more violent Trump supporters go through as akin to the process of radicalization described in a detail in the literature about jihadist terrorism. And at the end of the piece, we offered a simple test of our theory:
There’s a simple measure for whether our basic theory here is, in a general sense, right: If it is, we will see a significant spike in white supremacist violence over the next few years. The Trump campaign has provided a baseline undemocratic ideation to hundreds of millions of people and also provided a platform through which extremists, both violent and non-violent, can recruit and cultivate. If our collective understanding of the process of violent radicalization is correct, the result will be blood.
The past few years have unfortunately provided a dramatic test of this theory; more unfortunately still, the theory has held up well. By nearly any metric, white supremacist violence is up significantly, the lethality of attacks has risen dramatically, and the link between the ideation and action has become particularly clear. President Trump plays a key role in this ideational cauldron—though pinning down the precise role of his rhetoric in any one incident is a mug’s game.
Consider first the raw data. According to FBI data, 2017—the most recent year for which data are available—saw a sharp jump in hate crimes over 2016. Crimes motivated by race, ethnicity or national origin leapt from 3,489 in 2016 to 4,131 in 2017. Crimes based on religion jumped from 1,273 in 2016 to 1,564 in 2017. Data for 2015 are roughly consistent with the data for 2016 and follow a gentler rise from 2012, 2013 and 2014, when levels fluctuated. While these numbers don’t specify the particular political valence of the attack, around 70 percent of crimes motivated by religion are consistently directed against Jews and Muslims, and around 60 percent of crimes motivated by race, ethnicity or national origin are consistently directed against Black and Latino victims.
Hate crimes are a crude measure. They include lots of offenses well short of violence against people. Thirty-seven percent of all 2017 offenses, for example, involved what the FBI terms “crimes against property”—which includes vandalism and the like.
That said, what the FBI terms “crimes against persons” rose in 2017 as well. In 2016, the FBI reported 3,765 incidents, affecting 4,720 victims, and committed by 4,353 offenders. By contrast, in 2017, there were 4,090 incidents of crimes against persons, affecting 5,084 victims, and committed by 4,442 offenders. (These numbers include all hate crimes, not just those motivated by race and religion.)
Then there are the most violent attacks—the ones that blur the lines between hate crimes and terrorism.
An April 2019 analysis by the New York Times, relying on data from the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, reported a “surge” in “white extremist” attacks in the U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand dating back to a spurt of anti-immigrant violence in Europe in 2015 and possibly sparked by the 2011 attack in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik. While the raw numbers for 2017 and 2018 remain below that of 2015, the numbers of white extremist attacks are still high. Most of this surge is the result of anti-immigrant violence in Europe and has little to do with conditions in the United States. But it’s also clear that an international ecosystem of far-right racism has emerged that has contributed as well.
In the United States alone, “attacks jumped” in 2017, the Times writes, with nine deadly acts of violence that year; preliminary data for 2018 show five deadly attacks. The data presented by the Times suggest that the deadliness of white extremist attacks may be rising, too, particularly in North America. Until 2018, the deadliest white extremist attacks in the U.S. included a 2012 shooting at a Wisconsin Sikh temple that killed six people and the 2015 shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina, church that killed nine. Compare this to the El Paso shooting this past weekend, which killed 22 people.
Certainly, there is no body of attacks in the recent pre-Trump era like the current period—in which we have multiple mass shootings in a compressed period of time conducted on the express basis of hatred of foreigners, immigrants, or religious minorities. According to the database cited by the Times, far-right extremists perpetrated three deadly attacks in 2015 (in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; in Charleston, South Carolina; and at Umpqua Community College in Oregon). No deadly attacks took place in 2016.
The list of attacks in the years since Trump’s election is quite striking. Before El Paso was the March 2019 shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 50 people. Then there was the April 2019 shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, in which one person died; in that case, the letter posted by the shooter blamed Jews for “white genocide.” Before that was the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, before which the shooter posted about Central American immigrants as “invaders” assisted in entering the country by Jews. Eleven people died in that attack.
The FBI is aware of the problem. According to the office of FBI Director Christopher Wray, the bureau has recorded about 90 domestic terrorism arrests in 2019 so far; a majority of those cases motivated by racial hatred “are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence,” Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the wake of the attack, the FBI released a statement announcing that the bureau “remains concerned that U.S.-based domestic violent extremists could become inspired by these and previous high-profile attacks to engage in similar acts of violence.”
Relatedly, the FBI has also gotten concerned about conspiracy theorizing, warning in an intelligence bulletin from the Phoenix field office that “anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity.” Among the violent incidents identified by the bulletin as motivated by conspiracy theories was the Tree of Life shooting—and the bulletin also pointed to synagogues and mosques as “popular conspiracy theory targets.” Not all the conspiracies listed in the bulletin fall under the rubric of white supremacy, but there is certainly an overlap.
“This report is a call to action—and we will heed that call,” said then-Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker when the FBI’s 2017 hate crimes report was released in November 2018. Well, the president has certainly heeded the call, and taken action: He has serially stoked the fire.
The question of how best to read a document posted by a killer in the time before a violent attack is a difficult one, but it’s impossible to ignore that the Christchurch shooter described Muslims as “invaders” and wrote of Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Before the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, the attacker wrote on the far-right social network Gab that the Jewish organization HIAS was “bring[ing] invaders that kill our people”—a reference to a conspiracy theory that HIAS was coordinating the entrance of Central American immigrants into the United States. The El Paso shooter also wrote of the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” though he added that his views on the matter “predate Trump.” Throughout this whole period, the president was referring to immigrants as “invaders” and warning of an “invasion of Illegals” from the southern border.
This on top of his having inaugurated his campaign for president with claims that Mexico was sending its rapists to the United States and conducted his campaign with near-daily attacks on Muslims and Islam. He has continued his occasional flirtation with violence in his speeches and rallies, most recently in response to a rally attendee in Florida who yelled out, “Shoot them,” when Trump asked rhetorically, “How do you stop these people?”—meaning Central American immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump smiled and commented that “only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement,” as the crowd cheered.
To what extent does Trump’s rhetoric have any impact?
“I blame the people who pulled the trigger.... Goodness gracious, is someone really blaming the president?” declared White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend. “Was Bernie Sanders responsible for, for when my friends got shot playing baseball? I don’t think that he was. Was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responsible when someone drove up to a DHS facility with a homemade bomb and an AR15 and tried to blow the place up calling it a concentration camp, the same rhetoric that she used, was she responsible? I don’t think that she was.”
Kellyanne Conway made a point of tweeting that the Dayton shooter had a “leftist Twitter feed.” And later declared herself “hopping mad” that the press wasn’t covering his apparently left-leaning views while devoting substantial attention to the relationship between Trump and the violence in El Paso.
They do protest too much. Yes, as a general matter, it’s a bad idea to attribute the actions of disturbed people to the ideas they imbibe. Violence often looks for a text to justify itself. And people who want to kill will find a reason, sometimes political. So one should generally refrain from attributing a particular incident to a particular leader’s rhetoric.
That said, it’s also a bad idea to attribute any specific extreme weather event to climate change. Yet when a pattern of extreme weather events emerges that fits precisely within the pattern one would expect from rising global temperatures and is not accompanied by countervailing patterns that climate change would not produce, it is reasonable to observe the shift and the aggregate trends.
Something similar is happening here. No one incident can be laid at President Trump’s feet. Yet when a president talks the way Trump talks over a long period of time, when he deploys rhetoric routinely that can be expected to stir the pot of violent extremism, when one can predict—as we did—prospectively the manner in which such rhetoric will interact with a political community and yield violence, and when violence then materializes in precisely the hypothesized fashion, it would be unreasonable to deny that there is a connection.
We certainly don’t let the Muslim Brotherhood off so easily.
The ‘collapse of white privilege’
President Trump visits El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, but cannot make a big speech in an open venue for fear of being booed. (In Dayton, he made himself invisible, meeting behind closed doors with family and medical staff, making no public appearance or comment.) He creates division and anger at a time when the country would normally look to the president. The contrast between the bitter, little man who occupies the White House, attacking Beto O’Rourke on Twitter and insisting before taking off Wednesday morning against all evidence that his rhetoric brings us together, and former vice president Joe Biden, who chose to deliver a big, important speech Wednesday in Iowa could not have been more stark.
Biden began by stating what too many Republicans, embarrassed by this president but shamefully still backing him, refuse to admit: “The words of a president matter,” Biden said. “They can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace. They can calm a nation in turmoil. They can console and confront and comfort in times of tragedy ... They can appeal to the better angels of our nature. But they can also unleash the deepest, darkest forces in this nation.” His tone varied from defiant to sorrowful, he emphatically blasted out each phrase. The language was plain and direct, but the call to recall our founding principles was profound and stirring.
The notion that Trump is “fine” except for all those tweets and comments is a dangerous fiction used by squeamish Republicans to avoid confronting him. Biden recounted the parade of Trump horribles — from Charlottesville (“very fine people on both sides”) to raising fear of a refugee “invasion” to calling Baltimore a “disgusting, rat-infected and rodent mess” that “no human being” would choose to live in.
Biden reminded us that at a rally in Florida, after Trump asked the crowd how to stop immigrants, someone in the audience said “shoot them.” Trump smiled and took it as a joke. Biden argued that it “is not far at all” from Trumpian comments to the alleged El Paso murderer’s diatribe that “this attack is in response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” just as his praise to “very fine” neo-Nazis chanting “you will not replace us” is not far at all from the words of the mass murderer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, who said Jews “were committing genocide to his people.”
Biden flat out accused Trump of fanning white nationalism and mocked his “low-energy, vacant-eyed mouthing of the words written for him condemning white supremacists this week.” Biden noted that white supremacists themselves praise Trump during a time the number of hate groups and white nationalist shooters surges.
Biden did not say Trump was responsible for white nationalist terrorism, but he did accuse Trump of pouring fuel on the fire, retweeting white nationalist messages and cutting funding to fight domestic, white nationalist terrorism. He said Trump’s invoking of mental health as the issue was “a dodge” — as he reminded everyone of his authorship of the assault-weapons ban in the 1990s. “We will do it again,” he said to cheers. He also insisted that we make “the same commitment as a nation to root out domestic terrorism as we have to stopping international terrorism.”
Biden also contrasted Trump to presidents who stood up at key moments in history (e.g., George H.W. Bush turning in his NRA membership, Bill Clinton’s speech after the Oklahoma City bombing, George W. Bush’s mosque visit after 9/11, Barack Obama’s sermon after the Charleston, S.C., massacre). Now, Biden argued, “Our president who has aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation. And it makes winning the battle for the soul of this nation that much tougher, harder.”
Biden made the case that Trump fundamentally doesn’t understand the job. “Trump offers no moral leadership; seems to have no interest in unifying this nation, no evidence the presidency has awakened his conscience in the least,” he said. “Indeed we have a president with a toxic tongue who has publicly and unapologetically embraced a political strategy of hate, racism and division.”
Biden then called on the country to take up the challenge and do what Trump can’t. “Stand together. Stand against hate. ... Treating everyone with respect. Giving everyone a fair shot. Leaving nobody behind. Giving hate no safe harbor.”
Biden closed by reminding us that greatness stems from the conviction “America is an idea” — not great because we have the biggest economy or military or because we “win.” The essence of America is its creed. Ironically (or tragically), this is how conservatives used to talk, before they became yes-men for Trump or argued that his defacing democracy was tolerable because of judges or tax cuts.
Biden told voters: “Everyone knows who Donald Trump is. We need to show them who we are. We choose hope over fear. Science over fiction. Unity over division. And, yes — truth over lies.”
We’re in a time when someone such as Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who fancies himself an intellectual and used to write about America as a creedal nation, does not the nerve to denounce Trump nor the self-respect to come up with a better framing of the election than a choice between civics and socialism. (Actually civics and democracy are under attack by Trump and his quisling party.)
Biden explained that the real choice is between Trump and American democracy, between Trump and objective truth and between Trump and someone with a basic understanding of what makes America “great.” The speech was intended to and succeeded in making the case that Biden could be that better alternative, but in another sense it should serve as a provocation to Republicans.
What and who are Republicans supporting? How can one love America’s founding principles and vote for Trump? Do tax breaks justify keeping a president that inspires white terrorism?
Anyone who fails to comprehend the decision we face and the obvious answers to these queries, unfortunately, is unreachable at this point. The rest of us will simply have to outvote those lost souls.
Nauseatingly racist Fox News host Tucker Carlson dismissed concerns about white supremacists as a “conspiracy theory” on Tuesday. This is a cruel lie: a white supremacist murdered 22 people over the weekend in El Paso, TX, after he had apparently written about a “Hispanic invasion.”
“The whole thing is a lie,” Carlson said. “If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns of problems this country faces, where would white supremacy be on the list? Right up there with Russia probably. It’s actually not a real problem in America. The combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside a college football stadium.”
He added, “I mean, seriously, this is a country where the average person is getting poorer, where the suicide rate is spiking—‘white supremacy, that’s the problem’—this is a hoax. Just like the Russia hoax, it’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power. That’s exactly what’s going on.”
Clearly, the problem of white supremacy is not a conspiracy. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks approximately 1,020 extremist groups in America and estimates that there are 5,000 and 8,000 people who are members of the Ku Klux Klan alone. Plus, it’s impossible to know the number of people who have become radicalized online. Racism is a poison throughout the country—and throughout its history.
On Fox, Carlson continued: “White supremacy—you know, I’ve lived here 50 years, I’ve never met anybody—not one person—who ascribes to white supremacy. I don’t know a single person who thinks that’s a good idea. I don’t—I mean, they are making this up, and it’s a talking point which they are using to help them in this election cycle, obviously, because Russia died.”
It’s another absolutely grotesque performance by Carlson, who only has to look in a mirror if he wants to meet a white supremacist. The deflection is understandable, though, given the clear parallels between Carlson’s rhetoric and that of the El Paso shooter. He, like other racists trying to turn bigotry into a lucrative grift, has jumped to deny white supremacy’s existence as if it could insulate him from any accusations of his most definable trait, hatred.
White supremacy is why there are children in concentration camps at the border and why a gunman murdered 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. It’s why there are so many black people in prisons. It’s why three black Louisiana churches were set on fire in April. It’s why Heather Heyer was killed.
Carlson has a huge platform on Fox News, and it lets him normalize hate. White supremacists are not just having an intellectual debate; they talk about violence and they act out on their violent ideas. The more toxic racism Carlson spouts, the more blood he will have on his hands.
A U.S. State Department official oversaw the Washington, D.C.-area chapter of a white nationalist organization, hosted white nationalists at his home and published white nationalist propaganda online, Hatewatch has determined.
The official, Matthew Q. Gebert, works as a foreign affairs officer assigned to the Bureau of Energy Resources, a State Department spokesperson told Hatewatch. Online, and in private correspondences with other white nationalists, Gebert uses “Coach Finstock” as a pseudonym. Through that alias, he expressed a desire to build a country for whites only.
“Whites need a country of our own with nukes, and we will retake this thing lickety split,” “Coach Finstock” said on a May 2018 episode of “The Fatherland,” a white nationalist podcast. “That’s all that we need. We need a country founded for white people with a nuclear deterrent. And you watch how the world trembles.”
Gebert joined the State Department in 2013 as a presidential management fellow, according to an alumni update published about him in George Washington University’s GW Magazine that summer. Presidential management fellowships are considered prestigious. The program has a "narrow focus – developing a cadre of potential government leaders," according to a website devoted to the program.
A post Gebert made as “Finstock” on a white nationalism-focused forum called The Right Stuff suggests his radicalization started in 2015, two years after he started his job with the State Department. “I got into this movement and off the conservative reservation in 2015,” he wrote in a January 2018 thread called “Ricky Vaughn is a N*****faggot who has no place in The Right Stuff,” which referred to the pseudonymous identity used by an internet personality in the white nationalist “alt-right” movement.
Using a pseudonym, Gebert expressed an understanding that his connections to white nationalism could end his career.
“There are bigger things than a career and a paycheck, and I don’t want to lose mine,” Gebert said as “Coach Finstock” on an episode of “The Fatherland” recorded in August 2017, referring to his commitment to white nationalism. “I am prepared to lose mine. Because this is the most important thing to me in my life … in tandem with my family, of course.”
Hatewatch left a voice message for Gebert at the State Department on June 25, 2019, asking him about “Coach Finstock.” Gebert never returned the call.
Gebert’s links to white nationalism
Two separate sources told Hatewatch they spent time at Gebert’s home in Leesburg, Virginia, in 2017 at gatherings that included such known members of the white nationalist movement as podcaster Michael Peinovich and “Marcus Halberstram,” the pseudonymous co-host of a podcast called “Fash the Nation.”
One of the sources told Hatewatch they spent the night at Gebert’s home following a party on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2017. The other source, who is close to Peinovich’s inner circle, told Hatewatch that parties centered around holidays were commonly held at Gebert’s home, and typically included people associated with the white nationalist movement.
Hatewatch ascertained the location of Gebert’s home using Loudoun County, Virginia, property records. Gebert and his wife, Anna Vuckovic, purchased their home June 1, 2012, for $531,000 and still own it today, the records show.
While standing outside the house listed in the property records, Hatewatch contacted the source who is close to Peinovich’s inner circle to solicit a description of the home. “It’s at the end of a cul-de-sac,” the source said without hesitating, accurately describing the location.
Both sources who claimed to have spent time at Gebert’s home provided detailed descriptions of its exterior to Hatewatch. The descriptions included the couple’s backyard, which features an expansive deck and a six-sided, above-ground veranda. The backyard was visible to Hatewatch from a shaded public walking path next to the property.
The source who spent the night at Gebert’s home provided emails and screenshots of text messages to Hatewatch that corroborate their story.
The same source said they also attended a clandestine dinner at a hotel with Gebert, his wife and Holocaust-denying author David Irving on June 17, 2017. The source provided emails and text messages to corroborate the story of the dinner. The source also sent a picture of Irving, which they said was taken at the dinner.
A third source told Hatewatch they also attended the event with Irving and the Geberts. Both sources who said they attended the Irving dinner recalled it being held in a private room in a hotel in downtown Washington, D.C. An email provided by one of the sources shows it was held at the Nage Bistro at the Courtyard Marriott, and started at 7 p.m. Saturday, June 17, 2017. Gebert introduced himself as a state department official at that dinner, according to both sources who attended it.
State Department employees are restricted from engaging in some outside political activities while working for the federal government, according to the Hatch Act. Some of those restrictions include engaging “in political activity in an official capacity” and engaging in “political activity while on duty or in the workplace.” Hatewatch was unable to determine if Gebert was on duty during the Irving dinner or if the gathering involved political activity.
Four separate sources named Gebert’s wife, Anna Vuckovic, as “Wolfie James,” a blogger and Twitter personality who also is connected to the white nationalist movement. In addition to the three aforementioned sources, a fourth source told Hatewatch they knew Vuckovic by her name and identified her in the movement as “Wolfie James.” The fourth source said they had heard Vuckovic’s husband had “a serious job,” and that the couple lived in the Washington, D.C. area.
Digital footprint leads to Gebert and Vuckovic
Gebert, as “Coach Finstock,” and Vuckovic, as “Wolfie James,” left behind a substantial trail of archived Twitter posts under their pseudonyms, Hatewatch determined. These archives revealed clues about their identities.
Gebert, for example, operated multiple Twitter handles as “Coach Finstock” from 2015 until the spring of 2019, according to two of the sources who spoke to Hatewatch.
At least one of these “Coach Finstock” accounts, @TotalWarCoach, led Hatewatch to expired handles that use elements of Gebert’s real name.
Twitter preserves old handles in conversations on that platform even after users change them. An open-source intelligence technique involves combing through conversations until older handles appear.
A review of conversations by @TotalWarCoach indicates that the same account previously employed handles like @MQGeb, which uses Gebert’s initials and part of his last name, and also @MQGebert, which includes his first two initials and his full last name.
Gebert left other breadcrumbs as “Coach Finstock” on Twitter. For example, the “Coach Finstock”-linked handle @WeWonFam posted what appears to be a personal photograph of the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial facing the Washington Monument on Nov. 17, 2016, a week after President Trump’s election into office. That post suggests the author’s location is in Washington, D.C. @WeWonFam listed Washington, D.C., as its location in the account’s Twitter bio.
“It’s much more beautiful now,” @WeWonFam commented.
@WeWonFam also posted about attending an event that weekend linked to Richard Spencer’s group National Policy Institute, referring to it as the “Shitlord hajj.” Richard Spencer is arguably America’s most infamous white nationalist, and National Policy Institute is a think tank he oversees. The event to which @WeWonFam referred appears to be one staged in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 19, two days later. Attendees at that gathering gave Hitler-salutes and shouted “Hail Trump!” according to video footage published by The Atlantic.
The “Wolfie James”-linked handle @WolffieJames (with two F’s) named her general location once, too. @WolffieJames posted to Twitter on May 13, 2017, “Still justifying that you live in a neighborhood bc it’s ‘safe’ or there are ‘good schools’? Admit it: you want to live near #WhitePeople.”
@WolffieJames then engaged in a conversation in the replies of that tweet with a user going by the handle @Basedmishmosh, who asked “Wolfie James” where she lived.
“Proximal to DC,” @WolffieJames replied. “It’s a cesspool.”
Gebert and Vuckovic’s home in Leesburg is roughly 40 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.
Gebert, as “Coach Finstock,” also periodically appeared on white nationalist podcasts, such as “The Fatherland” and an untitled production hosted by internet personality “Ricky Vaughn.” Hatewatch played those podcast appearances to two of Gebert’s neighbors. Both neighbors told Hatewatch that “Coach Finstock” sounded like Gebert.
“I wanted to tell you really badly that it wasn’t him, but I can’t tell you it’s not him. Because, boy, that sure sounds like him,” one of the neighbors said of the voice.
“Coach Finstock” identifies the ages of his children at different points on at least two episodes of “The Fatherland.” The second of the two neighbors told Hatewatch that the ages mentioned by “Coach Finstock” matched the approximate ages of Gebert’s children, relative to the time the podcasts were recorded.
“I consider myself a white nationalist,” Gebert says as “Coach Finstock” on the “Ricky Vaughn” podcast, which was published in February 2018.
'Finstock,' 'Wolfie' and 'D.C. Helicopter Pilots'
Gebert, as “Coach Finstock,” helped lead a Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia-based organizing chapter of Michael Peinovich’s The Right Stuff network called “D.C. Helicopter Pilots,” according to three sources who spent time with those two men and their associates between 2016 and 2018.
Peinovich is among the most influential and significant figures of the contemporary racist right. He has produced thousands of hours of podcasts that helped shape the white nationalist “alt-right” movement and buoy the candidacy of President Donald Trump. Peinovich has used his popularity as a podcaster to build an on-the-ground movement of white nationalists that stretches across North America.
The “helicopter” in “D.C. Helicopter Pilots” likely refers a meme on the far right inspired by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Under Pinochet’s orders, loyalists to his regime threw political opponents out of helicopters as a form of extrajudicial killing.
Southern Poverty Law Center lists Peinovich's network The Right Stuff, of which "D.C. Helicopter Pilots" is a chapter, under the white nationalist category on our Hate Map.
Gebert appeared on a forum devoted to The Right Stuff network as “Finstock,” based on a review of his posts. TRS took its forum down in May 2018, following users voicing concerns that their private information could be exposed. But Hatewatch preserved elements of the website.
A March 25, 2018, post appears to show Gebert, as “Finstock,” recruiting people to his local chapter, or “pool party.” “Pool parties” is a euphemism for recruiting chapters connected to Peinovich and his podcast network.
“Hello future comrades. Drop me a direct message if you are interested in getting involved. Not playing too cool for school, but getting added to the D.C. Helicopter Pilots group here ‘comes later,’” Gebert wrote as “Finstock” in the forum in a post titled “Washington D.C. + Northern Virginia (D.C. Pilots).”
The sources who spent time in Gebert and Vuckovic’s home told Hatewatch the person doing that recruitment work as “Finstock” was Gebert. The source who was only able to name Vuckovic as “Wolfie James” also noted that Vuckovic’s husband ran “D.C. Helicopter Pilots.” The same source described “D.C. Helicopter Pilots” as a local chapter of Peinovich’s The Right Stuff network.
Hatewatch spoke to Vuckovic at the front door of their home on June 24, 2019, at approximately 8:30 p.m. EST. Vuckovic denied the allegations made by four sources to Hatewatch about her role in the white nationalist movement as “Wolfie James.”
Hatewatch gave a business card to Vuckovic for Gebert and requested that he contact the reporter and respond to queries for this story. He did not do so.
Despite Vuckovic’s denial, the source who spent the night at Gebert’s home forwarded email conversations they had with Peinovich in 2017, which support the couple’s involvement in The Right Stuff.
Timestamps on the emails shared with Hatewatch show the exchanges occurred between March 11 and March 16, 2017. The correspondence involves an account Peinovich uses as his personal email address. Hatewatch’s previous interactions with Peinovich confirm the authenticity of his email address.
Peinovich also shared his cell phone number in one of the emails. The phone number he shared in the emails matches a phone number the white nationalist podcaster used to correspond with Hatewatch before sending a cease-and-desist letter to Southern Poverty Law Center’s Montgomery, Alabama, office on Feb. 24, 2019.
Peinovich, March 11, 2017, 9:08 a.m. EST: “I’m gonna get in touch with Coach and see if I can work out a place to stay. If I come it will probably be Friday. We have two shows to do Monday and Thursday and I have a part time wagecuck gig that I need to do. Hopefully you don’t have to leave too early in the morning Saturday.”
Source, March 11, 2017, 10:47 a.m. EST: “Ok, fantastic. There are a bunch of cheap rooms (less than $39 a night) on AirBnB if you have some cash and don’t mind the pozzed company. Hope you can come down on Friday!”
Peinovich, March 11, 2017, 12:48 p.m. EST: “Cool. I am gonna try to get Coach to put me up with one of the DC pool party goys so hopefully won’t have to pay for a room. I’ll let [you] know when my plans are firmed up.”
“Wagecuck” is a slang word which implies doing something unrelated to the white nationalist cause for money. “Pozzed” is a homophobic “alt-right” slang word that stems from someone being HIV positive. “Pozzed” generally connotes the influence of cultural diversity in a broader sense and has nothing to do with the virus.
Peinovich approached the source later that afternoon with a more solidified plan to attend a house party for The Right Stuff in Leesburg, Virginia, where Gebert and Vuckovic live, the emails show. A person named as “Coach” is described in the emails as arranging travel to and from the location of the party in Leesburg.
Peinovich, March 11, 2017, 4:53 p.m. EST: “Would you be interested in coming to a house party with [The Right Stuff] people in Leesburg Friday night? It will be St. Patty’s so hanging out in the district will be a shitshow. This would be both less money and less hassle and better conversation.”
Source, March 11, 2017, 6:10 p.m. EST: “Yes but I would need a ride there and back. My flight on Saturday leaves at 3 pm.”
Peinovich, March 11, 2017, 6:14 p.m. EST: “That can be arranged. I’m gonna need a ride out there too, so you can come with. I’ll talk to Coach, he's happy to pick us up. If you need to stay over to avoid anyone drunk driving that can be arranged as well. This should be a lot of fun.”
Source, March 11, 2017, 6:18 p.m. EST: “Ok great. If someone could be a designated driver that evening so I can get back to my airbnb before flying out the next day, that would be great. I would drive myself but I don’t have a license yet.”
Peinovich, March 11, 2017, 6:19 p.m. EST: “Ok, I will talk to Coach about it. He can get a volunteer.”
The email conversation resumed March 16, 2017, the day before the gathering took place at Gebert’s home, according to the source.
Peinovich, March 16, 2017, 11:21 a.m. EST: “What time do you get off work? We'll be arriving at Union Station at 6:05. Coach will pick us up to take us to his house for the party. Can you be there around then?”
Source, March 16, 2017, 11:22 a.m. EST: “Great. I’ll get to Union Station a little early and meet you guys there.”
Peinovich, March 16, 2017, 11:24 a.m. EST: “Awesome. Looking forward to it. I have your number. Mine is redacted. See you then.”
The source also forwarded the screenshot of a text message from a person marked on the phone as “Coach Finstock.”
“Coach Finstock,” March 17, 2017, 6:19 p.m. EST: “Hi [Redacted] – I’m here and I assume you’re hanging in Union Station. Black CRV with Illinois plates or see you shortly when Mike arrives.”
Source, March 17, 2017, 6:19 p.m. EST: “Great.”
White nationalist propaganda and 'Unite the Right'
In addition to hosting meet-ups and publishing calls for recruitment, Gebert contributed to a podcast hosted on Peinovich’s network called “The Fatherland,” speaking under the name “Coach Finstock.”
“Coach Finstock” talked on “The Fatherland” about attending the deadly “Unite the Right” rally Aug. 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia. He described himself as wearing a hat and sunglasses that day to avoid being identified.
“I came back in one piece. Un-doxxed. Knock on wood,” Gebert said as “Coach Finstock,” referring to the fact that he managed to avoid being identified in the crowd. “Un-arrested. Just with some mild war wounds that frankly I’m kind of proud of.”
James Alex Fields, a man who marched with the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America that day, drove his car into a crowd of antiracist demonstrators, killing a woman named Heather Heyer. Fields was sentenced to life in prison in June for his role in murdering Heyer. Gebert, speaking as “Coach Finstock,” blamed the violence and chaos at the doomed event on the city of Charlottesville and expressed no apparent regret about what transpired.
“Dude, we smacked the hornet’s nest with a big fucking stick,” Gebert said as “Coach Finstock,” sounding as if he chuckled. “And the only question is whether this is valuable accelerationism or whether we just provoked the red guards, like, a year before we had enough time to spare.”
The word “accelerationism” refers to a phrase used by white nationalists and neo-Nazis which implies that Western civilization must collapse before they can achieve their goal of building an all-white country for non-Jews. Gebert also blamed the police and the city for not providing enough support to white nationalists.
“We gotta red pill police and military,” Gebert said on the same podcast, referring to a slang term connoting radicalization, particularly along lines of convincing people to embrace fascism as their political ideology. “I think those are our two biggest priorities.”
Gebert appeared on another episode of “The Fatherland” as “Coach Finstock” in May 2018 and espoused racist views about black people.
“Well, think about it, we’re suckers for … court jesters – are in our DNA,” Gebert said as “Finstock,” referring to black people. “We like to have a charismatic joker, at least, around us sometimes.”
He continued on the same subject roughly a minute later into the episode, explaining why he believed white people were generally kind to black people.
“I think it reflects the better angels of our white nature that we – despite all of the evidence we have from the criminality to whatnot that we still have a soft spot in our heart for Red Foxx and ‘Sandford and Son,’” he said, referring to a black comedian and his television show. “Or Chris Rock. Against our better judgment, we still give them the benefit of the doubt.”
He added that he wanted black people in the U.S. separated from white people permanently.
“Do not misinterpret me. I am not cucking. They do not belong around us for an ocean at least,” he said.
Gebert, as “Coach Finstock,” also talked about having his third child at least in part to aid in a fight against declining white birth rates.
“What else can you do but spit into the face of the madhouse that we are forced to live in and say, ‘no, we will carry on, we will have more kids and we are going to fight and not go quiet into the night,’” he said of his third child.
Hatewatch also obtained a copy of a since-deleted podcast hosted by “Ricky Vaughn,” a personality from the alt-right movement whose real name is Douglass Mackey, according to a report by Huffpost. The short-lived podcast produced by “Ricky Vaughn” was not published on Peinovich’s website, but the host did appear on podcasts alongside Peinovich, before appearing to quit the movement.
Gebert, as “Coach Finstock,” debated the state of far-right politics with “Ricky Vaughn” on that episode, which archives show was recorded in February 2018. He debates “Ricky Vaughn,” taking the more radical far-right political viewpoint of the two speakers.
On that podcast, “Coach Finstock” endorses “naming the Jew.” “Naming the Jew” is an expression that suggests singling out the names of Jewish people who white antisemites believe have done harm to the white race. He also endorses the so-called “14 Words.” The “14 Words” is a popular saying with neo-Nazis and white nationalists and goes, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Wolfie James’ blog posts focused on white nationalist women
For her part, Vuckovic, as “Wolfie James,” wrote blog posts focused on dating tips for white nationalist women and parenting advice for white nationalist moms. She wrote these for Peinovich’s The Right Stuff and at least one other white nationalist website. Someone appears to have deleted some of the “Wolfie James” posts, but Hatewatch was able to unearth them through internet archives.
or example, while operating as “Wolfie James,” Vuckovic published a post called “7 Reasons Why Alt-Right Men Are the Hottest” for AltRight.com and “How to Red Pill Your Woman” for The Right Stuff.
“In an open-borders America she should fear the spics, too – they love their people-smuggling, gang-banging, and drunk driving more than most,” she wrote in “How to Red Pill Your Woman.” “Be cautious not to get overly heated when you fear monger, however; the truth will speak for itself.”
Vuckovic, while writing as “Wolfie James,” also ranked PBS Kids shows on a “hate score” for Peinovich’s website in a post published Dec. 30, 2016. “Wolfie James” sought to limit “Jewish influence” on readers’ children in her writing, according to the post.
“George’s owner, the man in the yellow hat, is the typical klutzy, retarded white man always being peddled on the Jewtube,” “Wolfie James” wrote of the show “Curious George.”
Vuckovic, writing as “Wolfie James,” also referred to the “Sesame Street” characters “Bert and Ernie” as “homos.”
A swastika and a 'bowl cut' meme posted to Twitter
Gebert’s production of white nationalist propaganda was not limited to his podcast appearances. He also operated at least 10 Twitter handles from 2015 to 2019, which interacted with known white nationalists on that platform including Peinovich, Richard Spencer and “Spectre,” a man who has engaged in the harassment campaigns of women, reporters and minorities on that site, and whose real name is Trey Garrison.
Hatewatch could not determine whether Gebert, as “Coach Finstock,” operated his menagerie of Twitter accounts during his workday at the Department of State because we could not determine his schedule. The accounts appeared to post content multiple times per day, based on a review of archives.
Some of the handles that posted content using a display name or other indicators linked to Gebert’s “Coach Finstock” persona include @TotalWarCoach, @Cue1933, @WeWonFam, @Q1776, @DissentCoach, @NeverCuck, @RisenCoach, @RevengeCoach, @TerminalAmerica and @UnbowedCoach, Hatewatch determined.
The multiple Twitter accounts linked to Gebert’s “Coach Finstock” persona contain certain similarities. Some of the accounts, for example, but not all, use the bio description “Radicalized by reality.” The accounts also sometimes listed Peinovich’s website in their bios.
Some of the accounts used variations on the same avatar: For example, both @NeverCuck and the handle @DissentCoach used the same avatar image of Viggo Mortensen’s character from the 2007 film “Eastern Promises,” which focuses on the Russian mafia in England. Accounts such as @RevengeCoach and @RisenCoach used an avatar of Tom Hardy’s character from the 2015 action film “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
The D.C. Helicopter Pilots chapter of The Right Stuff also used at least one Twitter account, @DC_Pilots. It’s unclear who operated that account. The @DC_Pilots account also used the phrase “Radicalized by reality” in its bio.
Some of the handles linked to Gebert and his chapter of The Right Stuff appear to have been abandoned by the person operating them, while others have been suspended by Twitter for violating the site’s terms of service.
Hatewatch reached out twice to a Twitter spokesperson for additional information regarding the “Coach Finstock” Twitter accounts but did not receive a response.
The “Coach Finstock” accounts sometimes posted content that appears to condone violence or genocide. For example, the “Coach Finstock”-linked handle @RisenCoach, which was active in autumn 2017, once employed a profile picture of a skull-and-crossbones overlaid with what appears to be Dylann Roof’s bowl-shaped haircut.
So-called “bowl culture” refers to the veneration of Roof, who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. White nationalists who admire this convicted killer sometimes superimpose images of his hairstyle onto other pictures in the form of memes.
The “Coach Finstock”-linked handle @NeverCuck, which was active from at least autumn 2018 to January 2019, once posted an image of a Nazi-era swastika.
“It’s that time … again,” @NeverCuck wrote, referring to a historical image of German Nazi SS officers forming a human swastika with torches.
“Coach Finstock” handles posted antisemitic political commentary. The account @DissentCoach wrote Jan. 18, 2019, in reply to a doctored picture of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg being greeted by the hooded specter of death, “When the decrepit old witch finally bites the dust, please one of you make a vid with our crabbies saying ‘The Supreme Court is now officially 11% less Jewish’ as a caption.”
“Crabbies” appears to refer to a meme of animated dancing crabs, which was employed by some white nationalists on social media to mock the death of Arizona Sen. John McCain in August 2018.
The account @Cue1933 also posted an antisemitic meme about New York Senator Charles Schumer on Oct. 4, 2016, and a meme in support of then-candidate Donald Trump. The handle @Cue1933 likely refers to the year 1933, which is when German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor.
Hitler’s Nazi party expanded its powers throughout that year. The Nazis opened their first concentration camp in Dachau, Germany, in March 1933.
Evidence to support dinner with David Irving
Debunked historian David Irving is among the most notorious and influential Holocaust deniers in the world, and Gebert’s willingness to attend a private dinner party with him suggests the foreign affairs officer possesses a level of comfort with antisemitic conspiracies.
Irving’s work has repeatedly been discredited by historians for its inaccuracies, and he was labeled “antisemitic and racist” by the British high court when he attempted, and failed, to sue for libel.
Irving, nevertheless, built a cult following for himself, particularly among neo-Nazis, and white nationalists, including Gebert, according to two sources who also attended the dinner in June 2017.
“I’m going to form an association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other Liars — or the ASSHOLs,” Irving said to a Canadian audience in 1991, falsely suggesting that Germans did not commit genocide against European Jews during World War II.
The two sources who attended the dinner with Irving recalled that approximately 12 guests, including Gebert and Vuckovic, sat along a rectangular table with Irving in a private room at a hotel in the Washington, D.C., area. The sources recalled conversation topics that were overtly antisemitic, including the “Jewish question,” which loosely refers to the false belief that Jews secretly control the world through acts of nefarious manipulation.
One of the two sources who attended the dinner with Irving forwarded an email invitation for it to Hatewatch, indicating that it was held at a restaurant called Nage Bistro at the Courtyard Marriott on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington, D.C. Nage Bistro is permanently closed, but Yelp reviews indicate that it was open when the Irving dinner took place on June 17, 2017. “Please keep the above strictly confidential,” Irving writes in the invitation after relaying the date, time and location. The invitation is signed by Irving.
Irving, in an email to Hatewatch, said, “There was one gentleman, whom I will not name, that could have been from State.”
A screenshot of a text message forwarded by one of the two sources to Hatewatch supports the claim that Gebert, as “Coach Finstock,” accepted an invitation to the dinner with Irving.
Source, June 3, 2017, 2:28 p.m. EST: “Hey, Coach. I’m organizing a private dinner with David Irving, who’s back in the U.S. Would you, Ana and the pilots be interested? Trying to get a preliminary headcount – thinking everyone’s kids could be there as well.”
Coach Finstock,” June 3, 2017, 2:28 p.m. EST: “Absolutely. Rough date/time/location?”
The source also forwarded emails from a Protonmail account operated by a user going by the name “Wolfie James.” The emails were sent in response to one sent by the source with the subject “Re: June 17 event in D.C.,” which contained a link to an event page hosted on a website promoting Irving’s work . The Protonmail address of someone going by “Finstock” is copied.
Wolfie James, June 9, 2017, 3:49 p.m. EST: “Redacted, thanks for this! To be clear, I may give this link to like minded friends? We will certainly attend.”
Three days later, the conversation between “Wolfie James” and the source continued:
Wolfie James, June 12, 2017, 12:53 p.m. EST: “Hey, Not to get all autistic, but this event is advertised as Friday, June 17 but June 17 is on a Saturday. Is it on Friday or Saturday? Buying two tickets now. Thanks friend, WJ”
Source, June 12, 2017, 12:59 p.m. EST: “I mentioned this to Irving and all I got was ‘aaaaargh’ (?). So, we’ll just have to see when they announce the location. Maybe it’s advanced psyops instead of a typo…”
Wolfie James, June 12, 2017, 12:59 p.m. EST: “88 dimensional chess, for sure. Was hoping to arrange a babysitter in time, but if I have to bring them, I will. Thanks!”
The number 88 holds a special place in the language of white nationalists and neo-Nazis and is often used in inside jokes. “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so pictured side-by-side, the number 88 translates to “HH” or “Heil Hitler.”
Gebert and Vuckovic found a babysitter and attended the dinner without their children, the source recalled.
Donation to 'Uncle Paul'
Gebert, under his real name, donated $200 to white supremacist and former Republican candidate for Congress Paul Nehlen on Jan. 15, 2018.
Sludge, an online publication focused on money in politics, first discovered the donation in July 2018. The Department of State mentioned the Hatch Act in its comment to Sludge, but it is unclear if the agency took any disciplinary action against Gebert.
Gebert owned a home in Leesburg, Virginia, when he made the donation, according to Loudoun County property records. Gebert’s Virginia home is a 750-mile drive from the district in Wisconsin where Nehlen ran for Congress.
Nehlen appeared on a podcast hosted by The Right Stuff called “Fash the Nation” in December 2017. He was receiving widespread public criticism for voicing antisemitic views on Twitter when Gebert gave $200 to his campaign.
Nehlen today goes by the nickname “Uncle Paul” and praises acts of terrorism done in the name of white nationalism, Hatewatch reported in June.
'The Right Stuff' exposed
Peinovich and those connected to “The Right Stuff” are known for operating in secret, and often go to great lengths to protect their identities from public exposure.
Gebert’s “Coach Finstock” moniker, for example, appears to be taken from the 1985 film “Teen Wolf.” It’s unclear where Vuckovic found her pseudonym, “Wolfie James,” unless “wolf” also refers to the same film.
Both Gebert and Vuckovic appear also to have gone to great lengths to keep their faces off the internet. Hatewatch was able to find one photograph of Vuckovic but found none of Gebert. He did not appear in yearbook photographs published by American University, where he graduated in 2003, according to the school. He did not appear in photographs published by George Washington University, where he graduated with a master’s degree from the Elliott School of International Affairs, according to a directory published by that school.
One of the sources who attended a gathering with other white nationalists at Gebert’s Leesburg home recalled the host putting in place a rule limiting photography there. The source said Gebert pushed this rule among other white nationalists to keep from having his identity exposed.
Ultimately, “Coach Finstock” and “Wolfie James” are the third and fourth pseudonymous characters connected to The Right Stuff named by Hatewatch in 2019. In January, Hatewatch published an investigation naming “Spectre” as Trey Garrison of Dallas, Texas. In May, Hatewatch published an investigation naming “Eric Striker” as Joseph Jordan of Queens, New York.
“It would be good to have higher status white people coming on board to this movement,” Peinovich said on a podcast called “The Public Square” in February 2019, referring to his desire to recruit educated people of means to white nationalism. “It represents a sort of loss of status in the so-called normal world to be associated with this [movement]. … My thing is at some point, people have to be willing to do that.”
Peinovich continued, calling people who find success outside of the white nationalist movement “suspect.”
“What does status [outside the movement] mean anyway?” he asked. “I would not want to have status in that world. … If you have status in that world, you’re suspect actually.”
Two of the sources who spoke to Hatewatch about Gebert and Vuckovic’s involvement with Peinovich compared The Right Stuff network to a cult.
Due to the cease-and-desist letter, Hatewatch reached out to Peinovich’s lawyer for a comment on this story. Peinovich’s lawyer replied to our inquiry by leaving a voicemail on his client’s behalf.
“You had called me regarding Mike Peinovich and wanted his comments on the forthcoming so-called article,” the lawyer said on the voice message. “Mr. Peinovich stands by his prior statements and indicates he wants no contact with the SPLC. Thank you very much.”
State Department response and requests for comment
Hatewatch presented a brief summary of the information contained in this investigation to the State Department by email.
A State Department spokesperson replied to Hatewatch saying the department is “committed to providing a workplace that is free from discriminatory harassment and investigates alleged violations of laws, regulations, or Department policies, taking disciplinary action when appropriate.”
The unoccupied home of an interracial couple in Sterling, Ohio, exploded early Wednesday morning, and officials found a misshapen swastika and a misspelled anti-black slur painted on their garage.
The incident was being investigated as a possible hate crime by the local police, the F.B.I. and other agencies, according to Capt. Doug Hunter of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office.
The explosion was reported by a neighbor around 12:40 a.m. on Wednesday. The couple had been staying at a hotel nearby as they renovated their home after an electrical fire on July 3.
“The entire house was engulfed,” Captain Hunter said.
The couple’s home in rural Sterling, about 25 miles southwest of Akron, Ohio, was the last house on a dead-end street, Captain Hunter said. A neighbor’s garage and vehicles had also been spray-painted, but there were no discernible words on them, he said, adding that the authorities were not aware of any security cameras that might have caught the vandalism.
One of the homeowners, Angela Frase, told reporters that she had lived there with her husband for 23 years without any major problems. When a reporter asked what was going through her head, she answered, “Disbelief, that there’s still this much hatred in America.”
“We decided that whatever happens, we’re not rebuilding here,” she said. “We’re not coming back. We’re done.”
Captain Hunter said that on Tuesday morning, workers who were renovating the home called the Fire Department to report that the stove had been left on, filling the house with gas. In response, the local utility had shut off the gas. The electricity had already been shut off.
Ms. Frase said that investigators had told her it was possible that an intruder sparked the explosion with a cigarette — and that whoever was responsible died in the fire.
The Frases could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday.
There were no suspects as of Wednesday afternoon, Captain Hunter said. The Blue Ribbon Arson Committee was offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case.
Jimmy Aldaoud, a man the Trump administration deported to Baghdad, Iraq in June, died Tuesday, Politico reported Wednesday. The 41-year-old had been likely unable to access insulin to treat his diabetes in Iraq, according to people who knew him.
Immigration attorney Edward Bajoka posted on Facebook about Aldaoud’s death. He wrote:“He was forcefully deported to Iraq a couple of months ago. He was born in Greece and had never been to Iraq. He knew no one there. He did not speak Arabic.”
Aldaoud was an Iraqi national and a member of the Chaldean Catholic group. He was born in Greece and had lived in the U.S. for most of his life.
In a Facebook video, Aldaoud described his deportation: “Immigration agents pulled me over and said I’m going to Iraq,” he said. “I refused, I said, ‘I’ve never been there. I’ve been in this country my whole life, since pretty much birth.’… They refused to listen to me.”
“I begged them,” he said. “I said, ‘Please, I’ve never seen that country, I’ve never been there. However, they forced me. I’m here now. And I don’t understand the language... I’ve been sleeping in the street.’”
Aldaoud had serious health concerns including diabetes and schizophrenia, meaning that his deportation is a particularly stunning example of the Trump administration’s calculated cruelty toward vulnerable people.
Bajoka wrote: “He was a paranoid schizophrenic. His mental health was the primary reason for his legal issues that led to his deportation.”
“The likely cause of death was not being able to get his insulin,” he wrote.
A vulnerable person like Aldaoud would benefit from a policy allowing people in the U.S. to access healthcare regardless of citizenship status, an idea that has been floated by several Democratic candidates for president. When he was in clear need of help from a medical professional, though, government officials and law enforcement intervened to make his troubles exponentially worse.
Miriam Aukerman, an attorney with the ACLU of Michigan, said in a written statement: “Jimmy’s death has devastated his family and us. We knew he would not survive if deported. What we don’t know is how many more people ICE will send to their deaths.”
Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) tweeted that Aldaoud should “never” have been deported to Iraq.
Martin Manna of the Chaldean Community Foundation in Michigan said that many people are concerned about whether they will be deported next.
“There’s a tremendous amount of anxiety in the community,” he said. “Iraq’s not a safe place for many of the people who are being sent back.”
“Rest In Peace Jimmy,” Bajoka, the attorney, wrote. “Your blood is on the hands of ICE and this administration.”
The recent mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, has ushered in a new wave of scrutiny into how Donald Trump's presidency has seemingly emboldened white supremacists to commit acts of domestic terrorism, as the alleged Texas shooter's manifesto echoed the president's own rhetoric. “In both clear language and in code, this president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation,” former vice president and 2020 frontrunner Joe Biden said Wednesday, while fellow candidate and former congressman Beto O'Rourke went one step further, labeling the president a white supremacist himself. “He is [a white supremacist],” O'Rourke said Wednesday. “He's also made that very clear, he's dehumanized or sought to dehumanize those who do not look like, or pray like the majority here in this country.” So it doesn't exactly come as a surprise to learn that when it comes to the federal government's own efforts to combat domestic terrorism, the White House has reportedly been pretty reluctant to give the matter the attention it deserves.
CNN reports that the Trump-led White House “rebuffed” the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to highlight domestic terrorism in the government's National Counterterrorism Strategy, which would have “specifically spelled out” the domestic terror threat as being a major counterterrorism priority. Sources told CNN that the White House “wanted to focus only on the jihadist threat” while ignoring the rising threat of domestic terrorism—including by white supremacists—in the report, which was released last fall. “They had major ideological blinders on,” said one senior source close to the Trump administration. After a year-long battle between the White House and DHS, the report ultimately included one paragraph on domestic terrorism, which briefly acknowledges its rise and mentions “other forms of violent extremism, such as racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism”—but, crucially, not white supremacy. DHS sources told CNN that the White House also refused to let the report include a statement acknowledging “that there would be a subsequent domestic terrorism strategy.” (A senior administration official told CNN in defense of the report: “This Administration's National Strategy for Counterterrorism was the first to ever include domestic terrorism. This issue continues to be a priority for this Administration, and the National Security Council has launched an interagency process focused on combating domestic terrorism in support of the President's counterterrorism strategy.”)
The reasoning behind the White House's reluctance to emphasize domestic terrorism—despite it now accounting for nearly as many arrests as international terrorism—is “a matter of some debate,” CNN reports. One official, for instance, suggested the administration's bullishness on emphasizing jihadist terrorism instead was a response to how the Obama White House was “too politically cautious in calling out the threat of Islamist terrorism.” But multiple sources believe the president's seeming allegiance with white supremacists is likely to blame. “You know it will trigger the boss,” the senior source said about the possibility of denouncing white supremacists. “Instinctively you know he's going to be averse to mentioning that.” A former senior administration official told CNN that Trump has a problem with criticizing white supremacists, saying that the source “didn't have expectation” that the administration would support the mention of domestic terrorism “because the preponderance of it involves white supremacy and that's not something this administration is comfortable speaking out against, until the other day by the President and even that was pretty hedged.” Trump said in a speech Monday that the U.S. “must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” though his subsequent statements have undercut the sentiment of his remarks. The president then said on Wednesday that his concern “about the rise of any group of hate” includes “white supremacy, or any other kind of supremacy.”
The recent spate of mass shootings has shined a light on the lack of domestic terrorism resources at Homeland Security, whose reaction to the weekend's tragedies, one DHS official told NBC News, was “uh-oh, we have a problem.” DHS has faced widespread cuts to its domestic terrorism program since Trump took office in 2017, as the Office of Terrorism and Prevention Partnerships' one-time $21 million budget and staff of 16 full-time employees and 25 contractors has dwindled down to just $2.6 million and eight employees. The Trump administration has also cut grants to extremism prevention programs, as well as reassigned intelligence analysts formerly dedicated to domestic terrorism. While Wray has emphasized the FBI's commitment to combating domestic terrorism, that agency has also been affected by an imbalance in resources—as well as the president's own views, former officials suggested to the Washington Post. “I believe Christopher A. Wray is an honorable man, but I think in many ways the FBI is hamstrung in trying to investigate the white supremacist movement like the old FBI would,” former FBI supervisor David Gomez told the Post. “There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base. It’s a no-win situation for the FBI agent or supervisor.”
Whether the White House's willingness to confront the problem—and dedicate resources to it—will improve in the wake of the recent shootings still remains a question. In his speech Monday, Trump called for more action to be taken, announcing he was directing the Department of Justice to partner “with local, state, and federal agencies, as well as social media companies, to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.” But DHS officials told NBC News there have been no discussions of increased funding, and current and former law enforcement officials cited by the Daily Beast say they aren't satisfied with the president's “demoralizing” remarks. “It is a good step to recognize the threat of white supremacy, but words alone cannot solve the problem,” Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism, told the Daily Beast. “Action speaks louder than words. What kind of policy, legislations, designation, and funding is the administration willing to propose, support, and authorize in order to counter this emerging threat? This is where the rubber meets the road.”
Donald Trump vowed on Monday to give federal law enforcement "whatever they need" to fight domestic terrorism, in the wake of two mass shootings over the weekend in Texas and Ohio that left at least 31 dead.
But, following this weekend's bloodshed, some are skeptical about what is actually being done by the federal government to counter violent threats from white supremacists. Based on statements from prominent lawmakers, recent congressional testimony, and a slate of staff and funding cuts within the Department of Homeland Security, it appears that the government is falling woefully short when it comes to fighting domestic terrorism.
On Monday, in response to the shootings, the two top members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr questioning how the Department of Justice intends to protect citizens from domestic terrorism. It's a question reverberating across the government, particularly as the threat of right-wing extremism continues to grow: according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, attacks by far-right perpetrators more than quadrupled between 2016 and 2017.
Seth G. Jones, a senior adviser at the Center and author of the report, previously told Business Insider that the rise of far-right extremism is "almost unprecedented." Other groups have found similar data points, with the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism noting that every single extremist killing in 2018 was linked to right-wing extremism. A senior FBI counterterrorism official told CNN in June that the agency has seen a major increase in the number of white supremacist domestic terrorism cases in the last few months.
But, despite a growing threat, resources under the Trump administration appear to be dwindling. During recent congressional testimony, senior FBI officials said they were overseeing around 850 domestic terrorism investigations, compared to about 1,000 investigations the year prior. When Brette Steele, the former regional director of strategic engagement in the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Terrorism and Prevention Partnerships, testified before Congress, she noted major cuts within the agency since 2017.
For instance, while the DHS office handling domestic terrorism "managed $10 million in grant funding, 16 full-time employees, 25 contractors, and a total budget of approximately $21 million," two years ago, today, resources within the office comprise of "no contractors, and no other means of supporting existing programs beyond a team of eight dedicated, full-time employees and an operating budget of $2.6 million."
That office, dubbed the Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Protection, was announced in April by Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan. But, when NBC News questioned the administration on funding and staffing within the office, the DHS declined to comment, raising concerns among former DHS officials about whether the office will actually be effective.
"You have some very dedicated government employees still at the office dealing with terrorism prevention and just trying to keep the lights on," Nate Snyder, an Obama administration counterterrorism official, told the Los Angeles Times.
'The FBI is hamstrung'
In a Sunday night statement, following this weekend's shootings, FBI Director Christopher Wray said "we will bring the full resources of the FBI to bear in the pursuit of justice for the victims of these crimes."
But, where are those resources coming from? As Dave Gomez, a former FBI supervisor who oversaw terrorism cases, noted in an interview with the Washington Post, "I believe Christopher A. Wray is an honorable man, but I think in many ways the FBI is hamstrung in trying to investigate the white supremacist movement like the old FBI would."
"There's some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base. It's a no-win situation for the FBI agent or supervisor," Gomez added.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has made clear its intentions to focus specifically on Islamic extremism, versus all violent ideologies, with DHS quietly shifting resources away from programs aimed at combatting far-right and white supremacist groups. According to data from the Brennan Center for Justice, within the New York University School of Law, at least 85% of "Countering Violent Extremism" grants explicitly target minority groups, including Muslims, LGBTQ Americans, Black Lives Matter Activists, immigrants, and refugees.
At the same time, organizations that had received grants under Obama to combat extremist ideology in their communities lost funding, and the Trump administration decided earlier this year that it would not be renewing programs to fight domestic terror.
For instance, the White House revoked a federal grant that had been awarded by the previous administration to the nonprofit Life After Hate, which was founded by former extremists to counter violent ideologies and help people leave hate groups. Christian Picciolini, who helped found the group, previously told Business Insider that, at the time, they were the only organization that had received a federal grant specifically focused on white supremacism. He added that they were never given an official answer as to why the $400,000 grant was rescinded.
"Government interaction has been limited since the administration changed," Picciolini said. "We used to have very good connections with people at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI and those connections have become very, very limited."
Daryl Johnson, a former DHS analyst, told the Washington Post that the government has pulled back grant programs for combating this type of violence at a time when they should be, instead, expanding such efforts.
"We're in this heightened state of activity where we have mass shootings and bomb plots, and yet there's no political willpower and everybody seems to be burying their head in the sand rather than try to tackle the issue," he said.
Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, emphasized that point in a Monday statement following Trump's address on the weekend's mass shootings.
"Dozens are dead and white supremacist terrorism, for years, is on the rise and is now our top domestic terrorism threat," Thompson said. "Repugnant anti-immigrant rhetoric and white nationalism simply do not belong here. Those that looked the other way for years — or enabled right-wing extremism for political advantage — are on notice. We must address this very real and present threat. The safety and security of our communities is at stake."
The suspect accused of killing 22 people at an El Paso Walmart told authorities that he was targeting “Mexicans” and confessed to carrying out the shooting rampage when he surrendered to authorities, according to police.
Law enforcement officials responding to the scene on Saturday spotted a car stopped at an intersection not far from the Walmart, an El Paso police detective wrote in an arrest warrant affidavit obtained by The Washington Post. They then saw a man — identified as Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old charged with capital murder in the case — get out of the car with his hands in the air, the affidavit said.
He told them, “I’m the shooter,” Detective Adrian Garcia said in the affidavit, which was filed to a judge on Sunday, the day after the shooting.
Authorities believe Crusius was the author of a statement posted online shortly before the attack that decried what it called a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Federal officials have called the attack — which also injured dozens of people — domestic terrorism and said they are weighing federal hate crimes charges in the case.
The El Paso rampage was one of two mass shootings to occur within a day. Just hours later, a gunman in Dayton, Ohio, killed nine people before police officers shot and killed him.
Crusius has been in jail since surrendering. Authorities say he has been cooperative and has answered their questions. Greg Allen, the El Paso police chief, said the suspected attacker seemed to be “in a state of shock and confusion” and has not shown any remorse to the investigators.
According to Garcia’s affidavit, Crusius waived his right to an attorney and agreed to speak, telling police he traveled from Allen, Tex., a suburb of Dallas, with an assault rifle and multiple magazines.
“The defendant stated once inside the store he opened fire using his AK-47 shooting multiple innocent victims,” Garcia wrote. The detective added that Crusius said his targets were “Mexicans.”
The car he emerged from on Saturday was about a half mile from the Walmart, stopped on a street that essentially divides shopping areas from residential areas.
Garcia wrote that Texas Rangers heading to the shooting saw the vehicle stopped in a left-turn lane. It was unclear where Crusius was heading, though Allen has suggested that he did not know the area well and got lost in a neighborhood upon arriving.
An attorney for Crusius did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the affidavit.
Crusius’s relatives have decried “the destruction Patrick did” and condemned the ideas described in the online statement.
“Patrick’s actions were apparently influenced and informed by people we do not know, and from ideas and beliefs that we do not accept or condone, in any way,” his family said in a statement released through an attorney. “He was raised in a family that taught love, kindness, respect, and tolerance — rejecting all forms of racism, prejudice, hatred, and violence.”
The FBI has dispatched officials from a domestic terrorism-hate crimes fusion cell to investigate the El Paso shooting. The bureau also said this week it is investigating the Dayton shooter after learning he was interested in “violent ideologies” and, separately, announced that it had opened a domestic terrorism investigation into a July 28 mass shooting at a food festival in Gilroy, Calif.
During the Gilroy shooting, six days before the El Paso attack, a gunman killed three people before fatally shooting himself. The FBI said it opened the domestic terrorism probe in that case after learning the gunman had also explored “violent ideologies” and assembled a list of possible targets across the country.
A man who authorities say worked as a security guard has been arrested and accused of plotting to firebomb a Las Vegas synagogue or a bar catering to LGTBQ customers, officials said Friday.
An FBI-led anti-terrorism task force on Wednesday netted the 23-year-old suspect and identified him as Conor Climo of Las Vegas, U.S. Attorney Nicholas Trutanich said in a statement.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Nancy Koppe on Friday ordered the suspect to remain in federal custody pending an Aug. 23 court appearance on a federal firearms charge.
Climo's court-appointed federal public defender didn't immediately respond to messages.
Court documents say Climo communicated by encrypted internet chat with people identified as white supremacists, and told an FBI informant in recent weeks that he was scouting places to attack.
"Threats of violence motivated by hate and intended to intimidate or coerce our faith-based and LGBTQ communities have no place in this country," Trutanich said.
Documents point to a 2016 news report by KTNV-TV in Las Vegas about Climo patrolling his neighborhood wearing battle gear and carrying an assault rifle and survival knife. He shows and describes to a reporter the four, 30-bullet ammunition magazines he is carrying.
Neighbors expressed concern, but Climo was not arrested at that time.
Las Vegas police Officer Aden OcampoGomez noted Friday that Nevada is an open-carry weapon state and Climo broke no laws.
Trutanich said Climo was arrested Thursday after a probe involving at least one undercover online contact and an FBI confidential informant who reported that Climo "discussed, in detail, how to build a "self-contained Molotov" incendiary device.
Investigators serving a warrant at his home found hand-drawn schematics and component parts of a destructive device, according to the criminal complaint, including flammable liquids, oxidizing agents and circuit boards. They also confiscated an AR-15 assault-style weapon and a bolt-action rifle.
The charge against Climo accuses him of possessing an unregistered firearm in the form of the component parts of a destructive device.
"Climo would regularly use derogatory racial, anti-Semitic and homosexual slurs," the U.S. attorney's office statement said. "He discussed attacking a Las Vegas synagogue and making Molotov Cocktails and improvised explosive devices, and he also discussed conducting surveillance on a bar he believed catered to the LGBTQ community."
Biden Says Trump 'Fueling a Literal Carnage'
Climo could face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if he is convicted
A man who authorities say worked as a security guard has been arrested and accused of plotting to firebomb a Las Vegas synagogue or a bar catering to LGTBQ customers, officials said Friday.
An FBI-led anti-terrorism task force on Wednesday netted the 23-year-old suspect and identified him as Conor Climo of Las Vegas, U.S. Attorney Nicholas Trutanich said in a statement.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Nancy Koppe on Friday ordered the suspect to remain in federal custody pending an Aug. 23 court appearance on a federal firearms charge.
Climo's court-appointed federal public defender didn't immediately respond to messages.
Court documents say Climo communicated by encrypted internet chat with people identified as white supremacists, and told an FBI informant in recent weeks that he was scouting places to attack.
"Threats of violence motivated by hate and intended to intimidate or coerce our faith-based and LGBTQ communities have no place in this country," Trutanich said.
Documents point to a 2016 news report by KTNV-TV in Las Vegas about Climo patrolling his neighborhood wearing battle gear and carrying an assault rifle and survival knife. He shows and describes to a reporter the four, 30-bullet ammunition magazines he is carrying.
Neighbors expressed concern, but Climo was not arrested at that time.
Las Vegas police Officer Aden OcampoGomez noted Friday that Nevada is an open-carry weapon state and Climo broke no laws.
Trutanich said Climo was arrested Thursday after a probe involving at least one undercover online contact and an FBI confidential informant who reported that Climo "discussed, in detail, how to build a "self-contained Molotov" incendiary device.
Investigators serving a warrant at his home found hand-drawn schematics and component parts of a destructive device, according to the criminal complaint, including flammable liquids, oxidizing agents and circuit boards. They also confiscated an AR-15 assault-style weapon and a bolt-action rifle.
The charge against Climo accuses him of possessing an unregistered firearm in the form of the component parts of a destructive device.
"Climo would regularly use derogatory racial, anti-Semitic and homosexual slurs," the U.S. attorney's office statement said. "He discussed attacking a Las Vegas synagogue and making Molotov Cocktails and improvised explosive devices, and he also discussed conducting surveillance on a bar he believed catered to the LGBTQ community."
Biden Says Trump 'Fueling a Literal Carnage'
Climo could face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if he is convicted
For a crowd of 500 at a fundraiser in the Hamptons, President Donald Trump made fun of the leaders of the European Union, South Korea, and Japan, including by imitating the accents of the Asian countries’ leaders. The fundraiser was at the home of real estate developer Joe Farrell in Bridgehampton on Friday, according to the New York Post.
First, Trump beat his ol’ drum that the EU member nations don’t pay their share of NATO costs. Then, he moved onto South Korean President Moon Jae-in. According to the Post, Trump praised South Korea’s TV manufacturing and general economy before saying, “So why are we paying for their defense? They’ve got to pay.”
Then, Trump imitated the president’s accent while, as the Post put it, “describing how he caved in to Trump’s tough negotiations.”
But it didn’t end there! Trump also imitated a Japanese accent to talk about his recent conversations with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe! (An aside: Is the Post trying to be.... generous? by saying he imitated two separate accents as if the president understands the nuances between the two languages?) Trump recounted a conversation he had with his Japanese counterpart about Abe’s father, a kamikaze pilot.
Via the Post:
Trump asked Abe if the kamikaze pilots were drunk or on drugs. Abe said no, they just loved their country. Trump remarked, “Imagine they get in a plane with a half a tank of gas and fly into steel ships just for the love of their country!”
These are allegedly U.S. allies.
Since he started talking about Asian leaders, Trump had to discuss his friendship with Kim Jong Un. “I just got a beautiful letter from him this week. We are friends,” Trump said, according to the tabloid. “People say he only smiles when he sees me.”
The president of the U.S. then said the grossest sentence I have read in at least three days: “If I hadn’t been elected president we would be in a big fat juicy war with North Korea.”
I realize Trump had a different childhood than most of us — i.e. parents who explained basic codes of conduct — but it’s never too late to learn. Don’t imitate people’s accent. It doesn’t come off as funny; it’s just racist. Don’t do it.
Tucker Carlson went on his prime-time Fox News show in April last year and told his viewers not to be fooled. The thousands of Central Americans on their way to the United States were “border jumpers,” not refugees, he said. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time,” he asked, “or will leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?”
When another group approached the border six months later, Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, offered a dispassionately violent suggestion about what could be done to stem the flow of migrants: “You can shoot invaders.”
A few days after, Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: If the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, the United States would lose its identity. “The objective is to dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture,” Mr. Limbaugh said, adding: “This is why people call this an invasion.”
There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month. In a 2,300-word screed posted on the website 8chan, the killer wrote that he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
It remains unclear what, or who, ultimately shaped the views of the white, 21-year-old gunman, or whether he was aware of the media commentary. But his post contains numerous references to “invasion” and cultural “replacement” — ideas that, until recently, were relegated to the fringes of the nationalist right.
An extensive New York Times review of popular right-wing media platforms found hundreds of examples of language, ideas and ideologies that overlapped with the mass killer’s written statement — a shared vocabulary of intolerance that stokes fears centered on immigrants of color. The programs, on television and radio, reach an audience of millions.
In the four years since Mr. Trump electrified Republican voters with slashing comments about Muslims and Mexicans, demonizing references to immigrants have become more widespread in the news media, the Times review found.
Sometimes the hosts are repeating the president’s signature phrases. Sometimes the president appears to take his cues from television pundits. The cumulative effect is a public dialogue in which denigrating sentiments about immigrants are common.
Before the first groups of Central American migrants received heavy news media coverage in 2018, words like “invaders” or “invasion” were rarely used by American outlets. In the last year, the use of such terms has surged, with references to an immigrant “invasion” appearing on more than 300 Fox News broadcasts. The vast majority of those were spoken by Fox News hosts and guests, but some included clips of Mr. Trump using that language at rallies and other public appearances.
The Times analysis examined the last five years of show transcripts from Fox News, CNN and MSNBC to measure the frequency of terms like “invasion” and “replacement.” Segments that included this language were verified by watching clips of the shows to determine whether hosts and guests were speaking in their own words or reporting on the language of others.
“It’s a bit of a vicious cycle,” said the conservative writer William Kristol, a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s who has worked at Fox News and other networks. “Something is said on Fox News, and Trump repeats it, and that legitimizes it — and then someone else goes a little further.”
He added, “The use of what once would have been viewed as really extreme and inappropriate and sometimes conspiratorial, sometimes dehumanizing language is really striking.”
While the notion of immigrants as a national threat was a feature of the conservative Patrick Buchanan’s unsuccessful bids to win the Republican presidential nominations in 1992 and 1996 (he used the phrase “illegal invasion” then), they ran counter to the Republican Party’s efforts to make itself more appealing to Hispanics and other minorities in the two decades before Mr. Trump became its front-runner.
The portrayal of immigration as a menace has returned with force, a shift brought on not just by radio and TV hosts, but by Republican leaders in Congress and the president himself. This year Mr. Trump has used the terms “invasion” or “invaded” seven times on Twitter to describe the situation at the border, at one point referring to the approach of the migrants as “the attempted Invasion of Illegals.” At rallies, he has injected terms like “predator,” “killer,” and “animal” in his descriptions of immigrants.
The Trump-friendly media world — from outlets like Sinclair Broadcast Group and The Drudge Report to platforms like Breitbart News and Gateway Pundit — has used similar incendiary rhetoric. “The fact of the matter is that this is an attempted invasion of our country — period,” Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump campaign adviser, said last year in a commentary on migrants that aired on nearly 200 Sinclair television stations.
At the start of the El Paso suspect’s screed, he refers to the “great replacement,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory based on a French book that claims the migration of minority groups can lead to a “genocide” of white culture.
The El Paso suspect, who confessed to the mass shooting last week, claimed in the document he posted to be defending against a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The words “invasion” and “invaders” appear six times in the text, a stark parallel to the language heard on conservative television and talk radio today.
Before the El Paso shootings, others with deadly or hateful motives used the same language.
The replacement theory was prominent in a document posted on 8chan by the suspect in the massacre that killed 51 people in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.
The man who is alleged to have killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue last October had expressed his contempt for “invaders” before he opened fire on the congregation with an AR-15-style assault rifle, the authorities say. During the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that left one woman dead, marchers shouted, “You will not replace us.”
Lawrence Rosenthal, a professor at the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said that the shared vocabulary of white nationalists and many prominent conservatives was chilling. “Where that intersects with the Republican Party today,” he added, “is the Republican argument that the Democrats are in favor of immigration because that will give them a permanent majority.”
Mr. Limbaugh, whose syndicated radio show has a weekly audience of 15 million, has trafficked in similar themes.
On Wednesday, responding to the El Paso shootings, Mr. Limbaugh said, “What is it about the word ‘invasion’ that so bothers these people? Is it because that’s what it is? Have we ever seen anything like this?”
On Fox News, Mr. Carlson has proffered a version of this idea, albeit in less extreme language than that of the 8chan message boards where the El Paso killer lurked.
Mr. Carlson, whose show averages about three million viewers a night, has featured guests who subscribe to the replacement theory, like Peter Szijjarto, the foreign minister to Hungary’s nationalistic president, Viktor Orban. In February, Mr. Carlson and Mr. Szijjarto discussed the need to increase birthrates in their respective countries. Otherwise, Mr. Carlson said, “our plan here in the West is to just let the depressed people die off and replace them with people from other countries.”
Another prime-time Fox News host, Laura Ingraham, who was considered for a communications job in the Trump administration, has used similar language. Last October, she warned viewers that their opinions “will have zero impact and zero influence on a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.”
Fox News had no comment.
The overlap between fringe ideology and the words of conservative talk show hosts is not accidental, critics say. “They’re putting that into the zeitgeist,” said Carl Cameron, the former chief political correspondent for Fox News, who is now working for a news aggregator aimed at a progressive audience, Front Page Live.
“Fox goes out and looks for stuff that is inherently on fire and foments fear and anger,” Mr. Cameron added.
The use of “invasion” and “invaders” has also surfaced on outlets away from right-wing media. The Times review of demonizing terms for immigrants found a spike in such terms in 2018 on CNN and MSNBC, but almost exclusively in the context of reporting how leading conservatives had been using such language.
Fox News, it should be noted, is not monolithic. While its prime-time lineup of Mr. Carlson, Sean Hannity and Ms. Ingraham is devoted to right-wing commentary, some of the network’s news reporters, like the anchor Shepard Smith, have taken pains to refute misleading language about migrants. Chris Wallace, the “Fox News Sunday” host, recently grilled the White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, about the racism inherent in Mr. Trump’s critical remarks about Baltimore.
Days after the El Paso massacre, Mr. Carlson said on-air that white supremacy was “actually not a real problem in America” and likened it to a “hoax.” His words ignited widespread criticism, including from fellow conservative commentators like Erick Erickson and a Fox News weekend anchor, Arthel Neville.
The next night, Mr. Carlson returned to his show and urged his critics to “calm down,” warning about the roiling divisions in the country, before announcing that he was leaving on a vacation that he and Fox News said had been previously planned.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent charged with running over a Guatemalan migrant along the Arizona-Mexico border and then lying about it has pleaded guilty and can face up to a year in prison, according to a deal with prosecutors.
Matthew Bowen, 39, a 10-year veteran agent stationed in Nogales, was scheduled to appear in Tucson federal court on Monday for the first day of his trial. But late last week, his attorney filed a motion saying they would accept a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The plea agreement is dated Aug. 8. but the court on Monday released details about the agreement with prosecutors.
Bowen agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for violating the rights of Antonin Lopez Aguilar, a 23-year-old migrant from Guatemala.
He acknowledged that he had intentionally ran over Lopez Aguilar on Dec. 3, 2017, as the agent tried to detain him after entering the U.S. illegally near Nogales.
"During my apprehension of (Antonin Lopez Aguilar), I intentionally struck him with an unreasonable amount of force. My actions when I struck A.L.-A. were not justified and violated his rights protected by the Constitution of the United States," Bowen admitted, according to the document detailing the deal with prosecutors.
As part of the plea deal, Bowen also agreed to resign immediately from the Border Patrol. They had placed him on indefinite suspension without pay since his indictment in June 2018, according to the Tucson-based Arizona Daily Star.
Prosecutors also agreed to dismiss a charge against him for having lied about striking Lopez Aguilar in a report.
The sentencing hearing is scheduled for Oct. 15. Bowen faces up to $100,000 in fines, could spend up to a year in prison, and up to five years of probation.
Bowen's attorney, Sean Chapman, successfully defended another Arizona border agent facing charges in Tucson federal court. Both agents worked together and were stationed in Nogales.
Agent Lonnie Swartz was accused of shooting and killing 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez through the border fence in Nogales in 2012, after a botched smuggling attempt and a rock-throwing incident.
The first jury cleared Swartz of second-degree murder in an April 2018 trial. A second jury acquitted him of manslaughter charges in a retrial in November. A civil case is still making its way through court.
Court records show that Bowen texted Swartz in 2017 following a rock-throwing incident. He called the people throwing rocks "mindless murdering savages."
The plea deal allowed Bowen to avoid a jury trial. He acknowledged that U.S. prosecutors had enough evidence against him to secure a guilty verdict, including testimony from other agents who expressed their dismay over the December 2017 incident.
A Florida white supremacist has been arrested for threatening a shooting at a Walmart just days after 22 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in one of the worst mass shootings in the country's modern history.
Richard Clayton, 26, was arrested by Florida Department of Law Enforcement authorities on Friday in Winter Park after making an online threat last week, according to police.
(MORE: Las Vegas neo-Nazi charged with plot to bomb gay club, synagogue)
On Aug. 6, Clayton allegedly posted on Facebook, "3 more days of probation left then I get my AR-15 back. Don’t go to Walmart next week."
The threat echoes the shooting allegedly carried out by Patrick Crusius in El Paso on Aug. 3. The suspect entered the Walmart and opened fire with an AR-15 assault rifle. Nearly 50 people were hit by the gunfire before the suspect exited the store and was later arrested a short distance away.
Police said Crusius, a native of Allen, Texas, some 10 hours away, admitted to the crime and said he was trying to kill as many Mexicans as he could. He also posted a "manifesto" online espousing white supremacist and anti-immigrant sentiments.
Florida authorities said Clayton holds some of the same beliefs.
"Clayton appears to believe in the white supremacist ideology and has a history of posting threats on Facebook using fictitious accounts," Florida Department of Law Enforcement officials said.
He was not on probation, despite his threat, Florida officials told The Associated Press.
Clayton was charged with intimidation through a written threat and is being held at Orange County Jail on $15,000 bond.
The arrest was among a number of recent cases of police departments nationwide targeting white supremacist threats.
Conor Climo, a 23-year-old from Las Vegas, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly possessing bomb-making materials and espousing neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology with an undercover FBI agent online. He was allegedly planning on fire-bombing a synagogue in Las Vegas and hoped to stage a mass shooting at a gay nightclub as well.
A "significant portion," about one-third, of all domestic terrorism cases involve white supremacist ideology, according to the FBI. Director Christopher Wray testified about the issue in a lengthy hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 23, but said the bureau's "focus is on the violence."
"We don't investigate ideology, no matter how repugnant," Wray said.
This weekend, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) drew big crowds in Iowa, spoke in bold terms and showed greater ease in discussing policy (with fewer rote answers) in media interviews. Among the best of the latter was her sit-down with NBC News’s Chuck Todd, in which she said this about Russia:
HARRIS: ... But here’s the thing, we also have to, on this election issue, understand that this longstanding adversary decided they wanted to attack us where we are strong. And one of the almost intangible strengths of America is that we can hold ourselves out as a democracy, imperfect though we may be, flawed though we may be. And it’s an intangible strength. It gives us the authority to walk in rooms and actually talk about human rights, talk about civil rights, talk about concepts of freedom, right?
So they decide, let's get at them. Let's attack that. So they decide to attack what is the strongest pillar of a democracy, which is free and open elections. So let's get Americans going at each other. What's going to get heat?
TODD: The easiest way to do it.
HARRIS: And they tried out a bunch of different things. and you know what caught heat? The issue of race. So Russia exposed America’s Achilles heel. And all of a sudden, then guess what, for those who want to marginalize the conversation about race and racial inequities and say, oh, well, that’s identity politics or that’s this or that, guess what, now it is also a national security issue, and we need to deal with it.
It’s worth underscoring how authoritatively Harris speaks about national security, refusing to get sidetracked about whether Russia is a state sponsor of terrorism. (Sponsorship is less an issue than its direct violence and human rights abuses in Syria and Ukraine.) Her analysis of what is and is not a security threat is intriguing and timely.
The administration, determined to stir fear and hate against Muslims and migrants and simultaneously loath to take on white nationalists who share President Trump’s rhetoric, has focused resources against external terrorist threats while minimizing the threat from white nationalist terrorism. It is in that vein that we need to discuss not only Trump’s lies, which sow discord and paranoia about the government, but also his conspiracy theorizing (highlighting the “deep state,” another gambit to drive alienation and paranoia) and his blatant racism.
Trump is said to be bothered that he is being called out as a racist. The Post reports:
The president views the characterization largely through the lens of politics, said one close adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations, explaining that Trump feels the charges of racism are just another attempt to discredit him — not unlike, he believes, the more than a dozen women who have accused him of sexual misconduct or the investigation into Russian election interference.
The mounds of evidence that Trump is a racist, not to mention the complaints of numerous women and his own statements on the “Access Hollywood” video that support the charge that he is a sexual predator, are conveniently ignored by Trump’s enablers, including virtually the entire Republican Party. The president, a master of unfounded accusations, attributes bad faith to adversaries who refuse to soft-pedal his racism as he continues to spew a toxic mix of lies, conspiracies and racism — all of which play into the mind-set of those who think that the government and dark forces are conspiring against them.
Trump insists, for example, that a caravan of men, women and children desperately fleeing violence at home is an “invasion,” populated by criminals and terrorists. He thereby echoes and reinforces the “replacement” theory spouted by the suspects in the Christchurch, Pittsburgh and El Paso killings. Americans should not shy from discussing Trump’s conspiracy-mongering or his racism. If he were echoing and reinforcing radical Islamist terrorists’ ideology (e.g. America is the Devil!), everyone would properly view him as emboldening our enemies; it should be no different when it comes to white nationalism.
Trump apologists accuse his critics of “blaming” him for El Paso. That’s false. No one to my knowledge has claimed that without Trump’s encouragement the killer would not have slaughtered 22 people. Trump isn’t guilty of conspiracy or incitement. He is, however, throwing gasoline on the fire. The white nationalists think Trump is on their side, which strongly suggests that he is providing some of the publicity and normalization they crave.
How can an entire party and acolytes in right-wing media continue to back someone who gives aid and comfort to white nationalists? Well, they have backed someone who has given deniability and encouragement to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to attack our democracy. Putin, white nationalists, North Korea — Trump seems to have an affinity for those who threaten our national security and our democracy. And the GOP and right wing lamely respond, “But taxes …” or “But Gorsuch …”
The irony of his slogan “America First” is that Trump puts America far behind his need for ego-stroking by dictators and behind his fixation to bond with his base over white grievance.
So, yes, supporting Trump is enabling him to fill the well of racist hate from which terrorists drink and to provide cover to the United States’ aggressive foes. The Republican Party is responsible for keeping him there, just as Fox News hosts and other sycophants are responsible for boosting him and attacking defenders of decency, democracy and the American creed (“all men are created equal …”). We’re not talking about criminal liability; we’re talking about moral responsibility for enabling a major threat to our democracy and a megaphone for white nationalists — the president of the United States.
People are taking time Monday to honor those hurt and killed in connection with a controversial rally two years ago in downtown Charlottesville.
Activist Heather Heyer was killed and dozens were injured when James Alex Fields junior rammed his car into a crowd marching in protest of the Unite the Right rally.
Folks continue to remember Heyer by stopping by a memorial along Fourth Street in Charlottesville.
“I'm paying my respect back to her and giving her wishes, best wishes, to know that we still hold a piece of her in our hearts," said Kenny Winston.
A camp with Charlottesville Parks and Recreation came out Monday, August 12, to look at the memorial and to teach children about what happened. The kids wrote a camp pledge, which was read aloud to remind them to make a change in the world. One line of the pledge says, "I will see people for who they are and not for who I want them to be, race nor gender will determine my actions towards others."
Two Virginia State Police Troopers were also killed on August 12, 2017, when their helicopter crashed following the violent rally.
Lieutenant Jay Cullen and Trooper-pilot Berke Bates died when their Bell helicopter went down in a wooded area of Albemarle County.
Cullen and Bates were monitoring the Unite the Right rally from above, then provided support to a motorcade for then-Governor Terry McAuliffe.
Federal investigators have not released a cause of the crash, and say a final report will likely not be released until next year.
Families who were enjoying a warm Sunday gathered along the Rio Grande in Juarez are accusing U.S. Border Patrol agents of opening fire on them with rubber bullets.
The incident happened near Paisano and Executive, near the newly built Border Barrier in Sunland Park, and just downstream from the American Dam operated by the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission.
According to witnesses, a Juarez man who was swimming in the river near the U.S. side was warned by a guard to move away from the dam gates. Shortly after, approximately 20 to 30 Border Patrol Agents responded to the scene.
Mexican residents who had been swimming in the river at the time of the incident allegedly got upset at the Border Patrol response, prompting agents to fire rubber bullets, described as ball-shaped, hitting two men.
Dozens of families with small children were enjoying the river at the time of the incident and many said it was irresponsible of the agents, claiming they fired at least 12 shots.
Juarez Police responded to the scene, but no one was taken into custody in Mexico as a result of the incident.
Now, there's talks of defacing a national monument. By an immigration official. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/08/13/trump-immigration-official-cuccinelli-offers-own-take-new-colossus/1995205001/)
“Give me your tired, your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”
You can't just re-write a classic poem, and a gift to America because it doesn't agree with your politics.
Might as well just write on "Unless you don't speak English, or are Brown" in crayon.
Emma Lazarus wrote a poem, which then was posted at the Statue of Liberty.
Yes, and it is a classic, you can't just rewrite for your politics. Any more than you can re-write "America the Beautiful" to say anything other than as it was written, without shitting on the original artist.
The two are unrelated events, and Emma Lazarus spoke for herself, not law.
And yet, the Statue is a symbol of Liberty, and a beacon for Immigrants, yearning to breathe free. Not a watch-tower to light the way for sharp-shooters to pick people off trying to get in, and not a Lighthouse to warn people to stay the fuck out. We welcome immigrants, we're America, that's what we do, it's what we have always done.
Nobody's calling it "Law," it is a symbol of our American identity, the spirit of the USA, that is under attack by your white nationalists.
Open borders and the Welfare State are incompatible, obviously.
No, obviously you can't just state that as fact, when "Welfare" saved America from the Great Depression, but we still have an open Northern Border, as we always have, and it's not considered a threat to our Nation, because Canadians are white.
Emma Lazarus wrote a poem, which then was posted at the Statue of Liberty.
Yes, and it is a classic, you can't just rewrite for your politics. any more than you can re-write "God Bless America" so say anything other than what it was written to say, without shitting on the original artist.
The two are unrelated events, and Emma Lazarus spoke for herself, not law.
And yet, the Statue is a symbol of Liberty, and a beacon for Immigrants, yearning to breathe free. Not a watch-tower to light the way for sharp-shooters to pick people off trying to get in, and not a Lighthouse to warn people to stay the fuck out. We welcome immigrants, we're America, that's what we do, it's what we have always done.
Nobody's calling it "Law," it is a symbol of our American identity, the spirit of the USA, that is under attack by your white nationalists.
Open borders and the Welfare State are incompatible, obviously.
No, obviously you can't just state that as fact, when "Welfare" saved America from the Great Depression, and we still have an open Northern Border, as we always have, and it's not considered a threat to our Nation, because Canadians are white.
Canadians are not eligible for Welfare in the U.S.
I mentioned the OPEN BORDER with Canada, not the Lend-Lease program, for example.
Undocumented, and not legal immigrant persons, have limits on what they may and certainly what they should be able to 'get' as to Free Stuff.
2 different things: You want to talk about "Welfare?" We can talk about that, but I was talking about IMMIGRATION, and the Statue of Liberty. Nobody's suggesting "Free stuff" for Mexican Immigrants. Try to focus.
Color is not the factor at all. Those who comply with immigration law should be treated differently than those who do not comply with immigration law.
Then why aren't there children separated from their families, and detained in North Dakota? That's an open border, what we have on the southern border is not, by any stretch of the imagination "Open."
If "Color is not a factor," then explain to me why people are being shot in the Rio Grande, and people can buy cigarettes in America, transport them to Canada, buy Whiskey in Canada, and sell it in America, making a profit every time? That's an OPEN BORDER. If we can't afford an open border, then why aren't you upset about the one that is wide fucking open, and yet you are so concerned about the one that is locked the fuck down?
I am so glad we are able to clear all that up for all.
For someone who claims racism doesn't exist, Yellow Wall spends a lot of time defending it.
I am so glad we are able to clear all that up for all.
Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back there, toots.
Still haven't said a damned thing about our open border, and all the undocumented immigrants we have her that aren't "Mexican."
You're willing to defend those who stand against all things are American. You're not even creative enough to be a white nationalist yourself, you just blindly follow them.
Write to Nancy Pelosi and ask for a 'new' keyword, or three, please.
Please. I have more than enough words of my own, as a writer. Nice try at condesention, though.
Are some more likely to encounter it, depends a lot on how they live, where they live, and how they carry themselves, I suppose.
It also depends on how Vulnerable they are. Poor citizens have less to fight with, so your Urbane hipster black, latin, and asian Americans that live in developed liberal neighborhoods are more resistant to it than migrant farmers working in rural areas for land-owners who speak English. Or ghetto denizens who can't call the police, for fear of matching the description they gave to the 9-11 operator, if it happens to be black-on-black crime.
Wipepo don't have to worry about taking off their hooded sweatshirts, if they call the cops on another white guy, in a hooded sweatshirt, because the police are BOLOed to look for a suspect in blue jeans, and a grey sweatshirt. We're talking about Institutional Racism, here. At least, that's the point I'm trying to get across, white racism deniers have the privilege of overlooking these things, because you don;t have to worry about looking like a criminal, being stopped and frisked, or anyone demanding your green card. It's easy to deny racism in the highest levels of government, when you've never experienced it in your own home.
Is it a good 'catchall' boogeyman to blame for all that is wrong? NO.
You're the only one that's even suggesting that. The title of this thread starts with the word RACISM. So, what would you have us talk about, cooking with edible flowers?
The handful of Nazi or other outcasts who dress like a 'wannabe' badguy, is just that, a handful, relative to the civil population.
You denied even something as blatant, and proudly racist as marching down the streets of Charlottesville with schwasticas, and called Anti-fa "Fascists."
When they break laws, we need to arrest and prosecute, and get the scum off the street of civil society.
You want direct quotes, in yellow of you outright, explicitly stating that? Because it wouldn't be any trouble at all for me or Athos_131 to provide, in spite of the fact that you refuse to ever back up any of your accusations with a shred of evidence.
Do racists vote? Who cares?
We care about the ones IN OFFICE. So yeah, they vote. they voted a president into office, as political backlash for having half a black president.
Same with the left wing Democrat army of activists like Antifa.
Thanks for saving Athos and I the trouble. The left wing hasn't committed a single mass shooting, nor burned a single ethnic place of worship down, with the congregations inside it. Nobody has assassinated doctors, nor blown up clinics for the right to Chose, either. False equivalency, until you can provide 1 instance of anyone being murdered by a left wind extremist, the burden of proof is on you to substantiate that false equivalency. There is no Liberal KKK. There are no Democratic Nazis. You'll have to show 1 time that "Leftists" have ever opened fire on federal agents, and innocent bystanders, including journalists (Who recorded it) barricaded either in their pedophile compounds, or from behind jersey barriers. We're not the ones hosing down first nations on their own tribal lands in winter, either.
If you're sick and tired of us peaceably protesting racial violence, then do something about the white supremacists, instead of denying that it's that bad. It's literally all ^that^ bad.
When they break the law, they need to be captured, charged, and jailed, and removed from the civil community.
We'll never know until they actually start committing mass murders, jailing children, and marching armed down our streets.
Same with criminals of all stripes, including especially those using firearms, brandishing illegally or actually shooting people with the firearms.
Those are all conservatives. Prove me wrong.
Do the criminals vote? Who cares?
This repetition belies your affected apathy.
When politicians "care" about the votes of miscreants and criminals,
You want the tweets? We can get those too. the videos from Fox News, the Breitbart articles on illegals skewing the California elections, these are all your talking points, not our's. The liberals are not using these talking points, you are.
Abuse of the language, for lack of a 'worse' pejorative to gain some traction, should be criminal in itself.
The first amendment. Read it. Also, the 4th, 5th and 9th, while you're at it.
I'm just not going to bother reading the rest of this gobbledygook. The record is already starting to skip...
Choosing, then restating what I did not say, or picking out of context what I did say, while typical for you and others here, who trained you well, seems, does not make your slander true.
Libel. In print, it's libel, and nobody here "Trained" me.
Charlottesville was about, ostensibly, local citizens who wanted to retain the Lee and other statues perhaps, in their current places, and scheduled the demonstration to protest planned removal of Civil War Memorial Statues.
Charlottesville was about, ostensibly, local citizens who wanted to retain the Lee and other statues perhaps, in their current places, and scheduled the demonstration to protest planned removal of Civil War Memorial Statues.
James Alex Fields Jr was from Ohio.
Jacob Scott Goodwin was from Arkansas.
Alex Michael Ramos was from Georgia.
Daniel Patrick Borden was from Ohio.
Tyler Watkins Davis was from Florida.
#Resist
Be so selective, it seems your concern is not addressed?
You fucking troll.
President Trump’s explosive feud with two Democratic congresswomen moved to the international stage on Thursday as Israel denied the lawmakers entry into the country just hours after Trump publicly urged Israel to block them.
U.S. officials said the extraordinary intervention by the president was part of his strategy to sow divisions within the Democratic Party by shining a spotlight on its most liberal members.
Trump blasted the two lawmakers, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), tweeting that “they hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.”
But the actions by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his close ally, appeared to unite Democratic Party leaders.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the move “deeply disappointing,” and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who lobbied Israeli officials on Wednesday to allow the lawmakers to make a trip, called it “outrageous.”
A senior White House official said that Trump never directly told Netanyahu to prohibit the visit but that advisers conveyed the president’s views to the Israeli government after it initially said the women would be allowed in.
Netanyahu “was certainly aware of the president’s position,” the official said.
Like others, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.
The president’s advisers have given him mixed views on how to deal with “the Squad” — Omar, Tlaib and Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Some Trump aides have told the president to particularly focus on Omar and Tlaib because they are the most polarizing — and poll the worst — in the eyes of his campaign advisers.
Other U.S. officials worried that Trump’s opposition to their travel would backfire, one official said. Trump dismissed those arguments, saying that Omar and Tlaib’s criticisms of Israel make them worthy targets.
But even some Republican critics of the congresswomen broke with Trump and Netanyahu, saying the decision was wrong.
“Denying them entry into #Israel is a mistake,” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “Being blocked is what they really hoped for all along in order to bolster their attacks against the Jewish state.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying organization that rarely criticizes the Israeli government, said the congresswomen should be allowed to visit. AIPAC said in a tweet that it disagreed with Omar and Tlaib’s support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, better known as BDS, which calls for boycotting Israeli goods and services to protest Israeli treatment of Palestinians. But the group added, “We also believe every member of Congress should be able to visit and experience our democratic ally Israel firsthand.”
Tlaib and Omar have repeatedly denied harboring any animus toward Jews or Israelis and have said their criticisms of the Israeli government are based on serious policy differences.
In a statement, Omar said the Israeli decision was not a surprise coming from Netanyahu, “who has consistently resisted peace efforts, restricted the freedom of movement of Palestinians, limited public knowledge of the brutal realities of the occupation and aligned himself with Islamophobes like Donald Trump.”
The Democratic Party’s leading liberal presidential primary candidates swiftly condemned the decision, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) calling it a “sign of enormous disrespect to these elected leaders” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warning that it would be a “shameful, unprecedented move.”
Netanyahu insisted that his government continues to respect the U.S. Congress but said there are limits to whom it will allow entry. “As a vibrant and free democracy, Israel is open to all its critics and criticism, with one exception: Israeli law prohibits the entry of people who call and operate to boycott Israel,” he said in a statement.
Senior Democrats in Congress said they felt particularly misled by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, who said last month that the two congresswomen would be allowed to visit Israel “out of respect for the U.S. Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America.” On Wednesday, Israeli officials notified Democrats that Netanyahu had changed his mind, sparking a last-minute lobbying campaign by Democrats to reverse the decision.
Several Jewish Democrats who have long been critical of Tlaib and Omar’s positions on Israel pleaded with Dermer on their colleagues’ behalf. Reps. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) — all strong supporters of Israel — phoned the envoy to lobby against barring the congresswomen. Hoyer took the lead on negotiating for the Democrats, but a Wednesday phone call with Netanyahu proved unsuccessful.
While some Democrats said privately that the move exposes Netanyahu’s true nature as a pawn of Trump, Jewish House Democrats in particular worry that the move will empower critics of Israel, fueling the BDS movement. In phone calls with lawmakers, Dermer tried to justify the decision, saying Omar and Tlaib had no real intention of visiting Israel. Hoyer rejected that view in his statement, saying the decision is “outrageous, regardless of their itinerary or their views.”
Now Democrats fret privately that the ban will trigger new tensions between their party and Israel that Trump could exploit. According to one top lawmaker involved in the talks, the party plans to try to use public pressure in the coming days to change Israel’s mind about barring the congresswomen.
“I am saddened by the Israeli government’s decision to bar two sitting Members of Congress from entering Israel, especially following Ambassador Dermer’s public announcement that both women would be allowed to enter just a short time ago,” Lowey said in a statement. By blocking them, the Israeli government is “empowering those who seek to create a wedge between our two countries,” she added.
With three weeks to go before a repeat election on Sept. 17, Netanyahu is fighting a bitter battle to stay in office and wants to appear strong to his fractured right-wing base.
Omar and Tlaib’s trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank was planned by Miftah, a nonprofit organization headed by Palestinian lawmaker and longtime peace negotiator Hanan Ashrawi.
On Thursday, the group called Israel’s decision “an affront to the American people and their representatives.”
“MIFTAH worked hard to organize a well-rounded visit . . . in order to facilitate their engagement with Palestinian civil society and to provide them with an opportunity to see the reality of occupation for themselves,” the group said in a statement. “This is their right and duty as members of Congress, who oversee US policies and actions that affect Palestine, Israel, and countries worldwide.”
The question about their entry status arose because of a recently passed Israeli law that denies entry visas to foreign nationals who publicly back or call for any kind of boycott — economic, cultural or academic — against Israel or its West Bank settlements.
Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, publicly confirming the decision to ban the two lawmakers, said Thursday that the move was coordinated among Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Israel Katz and Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan in accordance with the law preventing those who advocate a boycott from entering Israel.
“The State of Israel respects the U.S. Congress, as part of the close alliance, but it is inconceivable that anyone who wishes to harm the State of Israel will be allowed,” Deri said in a statement.
Deri made clear that if Tlaib’s request to visit included a humanitarian reason — such as a private meeting with her family — then he would consider it.
Trump, who maintains a close relationship with Netanyahu, said last month the lawmakers should “go back” to the countries they came from, in remarks widely condemned as racist. Tlaib was born in Michigan, and Omar was born in Somalia. Both have criticized Israel’s human rights record and treatment of Palestinians.
No official meetings were scheduled for the U.S. lawmakers, but they were planning to travel to the West Bank cities of Bethlehem, Hebron and Ramallah and spend time in Jerusalem.
They were scheduled to meet with Israeli and Palestinian civil society groups, humanitarian workers and young people and see one of the East Jerusalem hospitals affected by recent cuts in U.S. aid to the Palestinians.
The protesters were sitting on the pavement to block staff from parking at a Rhode Island prison that works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement when a black pickup truck swerved toward them. The protesters shouted as the driver laid on the horn, and the truck briefly stopped.
And then, the driver hit the gas.
In a viral video captured by bystanders, the protesters screamed and jumped out of the way. Several were struck, according to organizers of the Wednesday night demonstration at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I. Some were treated at a hospital, though none were severely injured.
“It was terrifying because we didn’t know what exactly his intention was,” Amy Anthony, a spokesperson for Never Again Action, a Jewish activist group that planned the protest, told The Washington Post. “It certainly appeared he was trying to hit us.”
The driver, protesters say, was a correctional officer employed by the privately run facility who was wearing a badge and a uniform — an assertion backed up by video of the incident. Police officers working at the protest did not intervene, Anthony said, and the driver eventually walked into the prison after other guards pepper-sprayed the protesters.
“It’s obvious that there was an assault that took place,” Anthony said. “We’re not sure what we can do now.”
The Rhode Island attorney general’s office and the Rhode Island State Police are investigating the incident, the attorney general’s office said in a statement. Maj. Craig Horton of the Central Falls Police Department told The Post his agency was assisting.
“Once we have a full understanding of the relevant facts, we will determine how to proceed,” the attorney general’s office said in the statement. “Peaceful protest is a fundamental right of all Americans; it is unfortunate last night’s situation unfolded as it did. We urge all to exercise restraint as our investigation proceeds.”
An employee reached by phone at the Wyatt Detention Facility declined to comment early on Thursday. Messages left for the Central Falls Police Department and ICE weren’t immediately returned.
The confrontation took place during a wave of protests around the country by Jewish groups against ICE, including a demonstration that shut down part of Manhattan’s West Side Highway on Saturday, leading police to arrest nearly 100 protesters.
Anthony’s group, which ties its activism to preventing future atrocities like the Holocaust, arrived at the prison around 7 p.m. on Wednesday. The Wyatt Detention Facility, which describes itself as a “quasi-public corporation,” the Providence Journal reported, has contracts with ICE to house immigration detainees. The facility is operated by the Central Falls Detention Facility Corp. and is overseen by a board appointed by the mayor of Central Falls, located about seven miles north of Providence.
About 30 protesters first shut down the main entrance to the prison by linking arms and sitting on the ground, Anthony said. Around 9 p.m., they moved to block the driveways into the staff parking lot. About 45 minutes later, the black pickup showed up.
“The truck kind of swerved to sort of pick up speed,” Anthony said. “It felt unreal to see this happening and to see that someone was actively driving into a group of people who, as I say, were peacefully sitting.”
The group included children and one protester in a wheelchair, Anthony said.
Before the truck could get through to the parking lot, though, protesters gathered on the other side of the gate, shouting “Shame!” Moments later, other guards from the prison rushed across the street to surround the protesters and then fired pepper spray.
After the demonstrators fled the pepper spray, the driver parked in the lot and then walked into the prison, Anthony said.
Although Central Falls police were on the scene, they did not get involved, Anthony said, and officers later refused to take statements from protesters. Organizers are discussing what legal recourse they might have now.
Anthony said the incident hardened her group’s resolve to continue protesting ICE and prisons that work with the federal agency.
“If this is the way this correctional officer is behaving in public when people are recording, it’s not hard to imagine the behavior is much worse behind the walls in the facility where no one can see what is happening,” she said.]The protesters were sitting on the pavement to block staff from parking at a Rhode Island prison that works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement when a black pickup truck swerved toward them. The protesters shouted as the driver laid on the horn, and the truck briefly stopped.
And then, the driver hit the gas.
In a viral video captured by bystanders, the protesters screamed and jumped out of the way. Several were struck, according to organizers of the Wednesday night demonstration at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I. Some were treated at a hospital, though none were severely injured.
“It was terrifying because we didn’t know what exactly his intention was,” Amy Anthony, a spokesperson for Never Again Action, a Jewish activist group that planned the protest, told The Washington Post. “It certainly appeared he was trying to hit us.”
The driver, protesters say, was a correctional officer employed by the privately run facility who was wearing a badge and a uniform — an assertion backed up by video of the incident. Police officers working at the protest did not intervene, Anthony said, and the driver eventually walked into the prison after other guards pepper-sprayed the protesters.
“It’s obvious that there was an assault that took place,” Anthony said. “We’re not sure what we can do now.”
The Rhode Island attorney general’s office and the Rhode Island State Police are investigating the incident, the attorney general’s office said in a statement. Maj. Craig Horton of the Central Falls Police Department told The Post his agency was assisting.
“Once we have a full understanding of the relevant facts, we will determine how to proceed,” the attorney general’s office said in the statement. “Peaceful protest is a fundamental right of all Americans; it is unfortunate last night’s situation unfolded as it did. We urge all to exercise restraint as our investigation proceeds.”
An employee reached by phone at the Wyatt Detention Facility declined to comment early on Thursday. Messages left for the Central Falls Police Department and ICE weren’t immediately returned.
The confrontation took place during a wave of protests around the country by Jewish groups against ICE, including a demonstration that shut down part of Manhattan’s West Side Highway on Saturday, leading police to arrest nearly 100 protesters.
Anthony’s group, which ties its activism to preventing future atrocities like the Holocaust, arrived at the prison around 7 p.m. on Wednesday. The Wyatt Detention Facility, which describes itself as a “quasi-public corporation,” the Providence Journal reported, has contracts with ICE to house immigration detainees. The facility is operated by the Central Falls Detention Facility Corp. and is overseen by a board appointed by the mayor of Central Falls, located about seven miles north of Providence.
About 30 protesters first shut down the main entrance to the prison by linking arms and sitting on the ground, Anthony said. Around 9 p.m., they moved to block the driveways into the staff parking lot. About 45 minutes later, the black pickup showed up.
“The truck kind of swerved to sort of pick up speed,” Anthony said. “It felt unreal to see this happening and to see that someone was actively driving into a group of people who, as I say, were peacefully sitting.”
The group included children and one protester in a wheelchair, Anthony said.
Before the truck could get through to the parking lot, though, protesters gathered on the other side of the gate, shouting “Shame!” Moments later, other guards from the prison rushed across the street to surround the protesters and then fired pepper spray.
After the demonstrators fled the pepper spray, the driver parked in the lot and then walked into the prison, Anthony said.
Although Central Falls police were on the scene, they did not get involved, Anthony said, and officers later refused to take statements from protesters. Organizers are discussing what legal recourse they might have now.
Anthony said the incident hardened her group’s resolve to continue protesting ICE and prisons that work with the federal agency.
“If this is the way this correctional officer is behaving in public when people are recording, it’s not hard to imagine the behavior is much worse behind the walls in the facility where no one can see what is happening,” she said.
A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld a previous court order mandating the Trump administration provide basic personal hygiene items to children in detention at facilities in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
The ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Fransisco hands a loss to the Trump administration, which had challenged a lower court decision two years ago ordering U.S. officials to provide basic personal hygiene items as well as adequate sleeping conditions, temperatures and food and water to children in detention at facilities in the Rio Grande Valley.
The appeals court's ruling essentially backs the two-decade old Flores agreement, which mandates key aspects of how immigrant children can be held by authorities, including that they be kept under the “least restrictive conditions” possible.
“Assuring that children eat enough edible food, drink clean water, are housed in hygienic facilities with sanitary bathrooms, have soap and toothpaste, and are not sleep-deprived are without doubt essential to the children’s safety,” the appeals court panel ruled.
“The district court properly construed the agreement as requiring such conditions rather than allowing the government to decide whether to provide them,” they added.
The Justice Department declined to comment to The Hill.
Justice Department attorney Sarah Fabian made headlines in June when she argued before the panel that the Flores agreement did not specify that the government was required to provide soap or oral hygiene products.
Did the court specify that the soap and oral care products be explained to the detainees, maybe in writing, or in mime, if the detainee cannot read any known language, perhaps with pictures of what a toothbrush is used for, and floss of course, just in case such things are ALIEN to the detainee?
You're just not going to acknowledge the racism of assuming they're illiterate, don't know what a toothbrush is, or how to use soap. Regardless of age, they're not animals, and yet they're being kept in dog kennels.
What do you know about their life?
"Go back to the crime infested shitholes where they came from."
I wonder where you got that prejudice from.
the gangs and cartels who brought them here...
How bad could it be, compared to their life from whence they came? Perhaps the solution is to return home, and plan better for how to get a better life than what they have there.
Fake racism and white supremacy being a myth are topics for joan right now because they’re hot topics in conservative media right now. Just ask Tucker Carlson.
It’s what their Russian handlers have told them to push. Now that I think about it, don’t the word salad bafflegab posts of a certain someone often come across as bad computer generated translations from the Russia?
Detain the adults, the children, pets if they have not already eaten them along the 2000 mile walk ...
Detain the adults, the children, pets if they have not already eaten them along the 2000 mile walk ...
Just because you would eat your pets does not mean other people do.
The wife of an Arkansas jail administrator was arrested and charged with assault several days after police say she pulled a gun on four black teenagers who were going door to door to raise money for their high school football team.
Police in the eastern Arkansas city of Wynne, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) northeast of Little Rock, said the incident happened Aug. 7. Police responding to reports of "suspicious persons" found the four children on the ground, with Jerri Kelly, who is white, standing over them holding a gun, Memphis TV station WMC reported.
The officer let the children stand up, and they told him they had been selling discount cards to raise money for a school athletic program. The Wynne School District said two of the four children were wearing football jerseys.
Kelly, 46, was charged Monday with aggravated assault, false imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a minor.
Cross County Sheriff's Department Captain Jeff Nichols said a warrant was put out for Kelly's arrest, and she turned herself in Monday evening. She was released that night on $10,000 bond.
Kelly, who is the wife of Cross County Jail Administrator Joseph Kelly, couldn't immediately be reached for comment Thursday and it wasn't clear whether she had an attorney who could comment.
Nichols said a mugshot of Kelly wasn't taken on Monday because she had a "medical emergency" as she was being booked. He said he could not release more information, citing medical privacy laws. He said she came to the jail to have a mugshot taken after her initial court appearance on Thursday morning, in part because of community backlash.
"She was afforded the same booking process and procedures as anyone that's brought into our facility," Nichols said. "She received no preferential treatment."
Bill Winkler, who said he has lived in the neighborhood where the incident took place for four decades, said children are typically out this time of year selling discount cards for the football team.
"Usually it's right before football season, late summer or early fall," Winkler said.
Wynne School District Superintendent Carl Easley said the district is considering stopping door-to-door fundraisers.
BEIT UR AL-FAUQA, West Bank (Reuters) - Sitting under an olive tree in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Muftia Tlaib scoffs at the attention she has recently received from the president of the United States.
“May God ruin him,” she says.
Tlaib is the grandmother of U.S. congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, at the center of an affair that has drawn Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu together against U.S. Democrats.
On Thursday, bowing to pressure from Trump, Israel barred a visit by Rashida Tlaib and fellow Democrat Ilhan Omar that it had initially said it would allow.
The next day, Israel said it would let Tlaib visit her family in the West Bank on humanitarian grounds - but Tlaib rejected the offer, saying that Israel had imposed restrictions meant to humiliate her..
On Friday night, Trump tweeted:
“Rep. Tlaib wrote a letter to Israeli officials desperately wanting to visit her grandmother. Permission was quickly granted, whereupon Tlaib obnoxiously turned the approval down, a complete setup. The only real winner here is Tlaib’s grandmother. She doesn’t have to see her now!”
Ninety-year-old Muftia Tlaib, sitting in her garden in the village of Beit Ur Al-Fauqa, was not impressed. “Trump tells me I should be happy Rashida is not coming,” she said. “May God ruin him.”
Her son, Rashida’s uncle Bassam Tlaib, said the women had not seen each other since 2006:
“She was going to slaughter a sheep when Rashida arrived and prepare her favorite food, stuffed vine leave.
“SECOND MOTHER”
“Rashida sees her granny as a second mother, she has always supported her. Rashida says she owes her success to her grandmother.”
Tlaib did not outline what the conditions imposed on her visit were. Israeli media reported that she had agreed not to promote boycotts against Israel as part of her request to Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
Tlaib, like Omar, has voiced support for the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which opposes the occupation and Israel’s policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. BDS backers can be denied entry to Israel by law.
The pair are the first two Muslim women to be elected to Congress, and Detroit-born Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American congresswoman. Both are members of the Democratic party’s progressive wing and sharp critics of Trump and Israel.
The Palestinians want to establish a state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, territories Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Israel has annexed East Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally; maintains a blockade of Gaza, run by the Islamist Hamas movement; and controls most of the West Bank, where Palestinians have limited self-rule.
The prospects of resolving the conflict under the “two-state solution” that had guided peacemaking efforts for years have dimmed significantly since Trump took office, while Israeli settlements on land Palestinians seek for a state have expanded.
The Trump administration, which is particularly close to the Netanyahu government, has touted its own peace plan but details remain vague. It fueled Palestinian anger by recognizing disputed Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017.
Trump has for weeks been attacking Tlaib and Omar, along with lawmakers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts - all women of color known as the “Squad” - accusing them of hostility to Israel in a barrage condemned by critics as racist.
“Trump has told Rashida and Ilhan to go back to their home countries. What a contradiction, yesterday he asked them to leave and today he asks that they aren’t let in,” said Bassam Tlaib.
Still, the grandmother is hopeful: “My heart tells me that she will come.”
A Texas Rangers investigation into the arrest of a handcuffed black man led by mounted officers with a rope down a Galveston street concluded that the officers’ actions did not warrant a criminal investigation.
Galveston city officials had requested a third-party investigation into the Aug. 3 arrest of Donald Neely, 43, on a misdemeanor criminal trespassing charge. The arresting mounted Galveston police officers, Patrick Brosch and Amanda Smith, clipped a rope line to Neely’s handcuffs and led him several blocks.
The Texas Rangers were tasked with conducting a criminal inquiry of the arrest, while the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office will perform a full administrative review of the Galveston Police Department’s policies and practices.
A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety said in a statement that the Rangers had completed its investigation into the arrest and conferred with the Galveston County District Attorney’s office. The district attorney determined that “there was nothing that warranted a criminal investigation.”
Photos of the arrest drew national attention and prompted accusations of racism and comparisons to slavery. Galveston Police Chief Vernon Hale apologized after the photo surfaced, saying the officers used poor judgment.
Melissa Morris, Neely’s attorney, said she was not surprised at the district attorney’s conclusion, though still believes the officers behaved unethically.
“I can understand them deciding there’s no criminal action with these officers,” Morris said. “I still think it’s poor judgment even if it’s within the confines of policy.”
On Monday, Morris and Ben Crump, Neely’s civil attorney, demanded the Galveston Police Department release body camera footage of the arrest within 30 days, threatening legal action if the request is not honored. Crump has already begun organizing a civil rights march that will start at the Eugenia and George Sealy Pavilion in Galveston at 4 p.m. on Sept. 15.
A spokeswoman for the city of Galveston said it would release the body camera footage at the conclusion of the investigations by the Texas Rangers and county sheriff.
Neely’s family says he has been diagnosed with bipolar disease and paranoid schizophrenia and was living on Galveston streets for several years. His mental health condition has led to discussions between Morris and the Galveston County district attorney’s office about possibly helping him avoid jail time and getting him the treatment he needs.
Neely has a record of misdemeanor and felony infractions dating to 1994, including 19 arrests for trespassing, according to Galveston County court records. Kevin Petroff, an assistant district attorney for Galveston County, said prosecutors are more interested in getting Neely the help he needs rather than adding more jail time to his record.
“We have discussed all possible mental health treatment options and ways in which that we might work towards that goal,” Petroff said.
Morris was hopeful that Neely might be the flagship case for a possible mental health diversion court that Galveston County is in the early stages of developing. County commissioners in June voted to authorize Wayne Mallia, a former state district judge, to gather information from similar diversion courts across the country and report back on his findings.
“Mr. Neely has dozens of criminal trespassing convictions just because he’s homeless and in poverty and mentally ill,” Morris said. “The fact that they’re trying to divert that and give him some help instead of convicting him is definitely a step in the right direction.”
Washington state resident Eric Lin was not shy about his love for Adolf Hitler. According to a criminal complaint filed Friday, Lin enjoyed referencing the Third Reich in writing: He apparently sent a litany of Hitler-referencing death threats to a Hispanic woman in Miami and got himself arrested last week after he planned to wire a man $10,000 to beat her up, hatched a plot to kidnap her and stuff her in a plastic bin, and repeatedly vowed to kill every Hispanic person in the Magic City.
"The time will come when Miami will burn to the ground — and every Latin Man will be lined up against a Wall and Shot and every Latin Woman Raped or Cut to Pieces," Lin allegedly wrote August 8.
Lin, age 35, is originally from Clarksburg, Maryland, but was arrested Friday in Seattle and charged with making threatening communications online. Lin appeared in Seattle federal court for this first time this morning. He has not yet entered a plea.
According to an affidavit from a Miami FBI agent filed in federal court, Lin was not shy about putting his violent threats in writing. Between May and August of this year, Lin allegedly fired off a litany of hateful, pro-Trump, pro-Hitler, and violent Facebook messages directed toward Hispanics living in Miami. Those messages wound up in the hands of the FBI.
Per the FBI agent's affidavit, an alleged victim — an immigrant from Spain identified only as "C.I." — contacted the Miami Police Department to alert law enforcement that Lin had been sending her threatening messages from two Facebook accounts since May 30. Miami PD alerted the FBI July 24. Then the feds interviewed C.I., who provided 150 printed pages of insanely racist, violent messages Lin had allegedly sent. She said Lin had at one point frequented the Miami restaurant where she worked.
Among the many terrifying messages Lin sent was an image of Hitler superimposed over a photo of Lin's face, C.I. said.
"Composite of my face with the Führer and Reichskanzler Deutschland," he allegedly wrote May 30. The informant also told the FBI that Lin had whipped out the same photo in the restaurant where C.I. worked.
From there, the messages grew far more hateful and violent. Lin repeatedly said he wanted to "kill" and "exterminate" Hispanics, whom he repeatedly referred to as "Spics." In one case, he called Hispanic people "rabid dogs." In another, he said he would let C.I. "live so you can slowly watch me destroy your entire race."
"In 3 short years your entire Race your entire culture will Perish only then after I kill your Spic family I will permit you to die by hanging on Metal Wire [sic]," Lin allegedly wrote June 7. The next day, he told C.I. he planned to "enslave, rape, and use you like a baby-making machine. Once I'm finished with you I might just get rid of you like a piece of trash." The same day, he allegedly also said he would kill C.I. with a rifle while carrying a neo-Nazi dagger used by the SS.
The messages only continued. He allegedly said he wanted to "exterminate" the "worthless Latin race." July 9, he sent more Nazi-referencing threats. "By the authority of ADOLF HITLER AND GOD I HEREBY DECLARE SPANISH AND ALL SPANISH-SPEAKING PEOPLE ILLEGAL," Lin allegedly wrote. "[T]hat's ALL I NEED AUTHORITY FROM ADOLF HITLER TO ACT. I FOLLOW ONLY ADOLF HITLER AND THEN GOD. THEY ARE ONE AND THE SAME." He again threatened to kill every Hispanic person in Miami and at one point told C.I. he would "drink your blood until you die."
The messages then trod pro-Trump territory. July 19, Lin allegedly wrote:
I thank god every day Donald John Trump is President and that he will launch a Racial War and Crusade to keep the Niggers, Spics, and Muslims and any dangerous non-White or Ethnically or Culturally foreign group "In Line." By "in Line" it is meant that they will either be sent to "Concentration Camps" or dealt with Ruthlessly and Vigorously by the United States Military.
The FBI obtained a warrant to search Lin's private accounts. The feds found even more terrifying details: Lin had apparently been hatching plans to pay someone to hurt or kidnap C.I. while he'd also been messaging her.
"Hey Chris, I was wondering if you could do me a favor?" Lin allegedly wrote July 10. "I was wondering if you can go to Miami and beat up this Spic who insulted me. I can pay you $10,000."
"Sure, pay me first Paypal or Zelle," the alleged accomplice responded.
Days later, Lin seemingly changed his tune. Instead of simply beating up C.I., "Chris" should kidnap her, stuff her in a plastic bin, and transport her all the way to Seattle. Lin wrote:
The Plan is you and Mara convince her that you are Rich White Americans people she looks up to. And then get her into a rented house or mansion and chain her up and put her in a Rubber maid Plastic Bin. Then you got to drive her to Seattle, Washington, upon which I will pay you $25,000 cash. You don't need to kill her her hurt her at most you will be charged with Kidnapping. Nothing will happen to you if you get the Right lawyers She's a Spic who Hates White Americans... I doubt the FBI would care much about her.
The same day, he added, "I don't care if I have to Pay you a Million Dollars or More I want this Done!"
Thankfully, Lin never got the chance.
In the summer of 1619, two warships manned by English privateers raided a Portuguese vessel the pirates hoped was brimming with gold. Instead, they found and divided up an altogether different cargo: some 350 African slaves, taken in bondage possibly from what is now Angola. What happened to all those poor souls may never be known — they were among the early wave of the more than 12 million Africans sent across the Atlantic to live and die in slavery in the New World.
But we do know that, in August of that year, the English privateers appeared not far from the colony of Jamestown, in modern-day Virginia, and bartered 20 to 30 of these Africans for food from the English settlers there. That transaction 400 years ago marked the first landfall of black people on the shores of what would become the United States.
In recent weeks, it has been the subject of a spate of coverage in mainstream media, including an ambitious series of reported essays published in a special issue of the New York Times magazine this past weekend. The “1619 Project” takes this arrival as a seminal event with which to reframe the history of the United States. It charts how — from prison systems to land laws, the origins of capitalism to the evolution of the American diet — there’s little that defines the United States that doesn’t somehow have the legacy of slavery at its foundation.
For the project’s lead reporter, Nikole Hannah-Jones, it underscores the black condition in America. “We are the constant reminder of … the lie at our origins that, while Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, his enslaved brother-in-law was there to serve him and make sure that he’s comfortable,” she said in an interview with PBS. “If you believe that 1776 matters,” she added, “if you believe that our Constitution still matters, then you also have to understand that the legacy of slavery still matters and you can’t pick and choose what parts of history we think are important and which ones aren’t.”
The project was deeply researched and fact-checked with the assistance of a panel of historians. Elements of it were conducted in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, a venerable pillar of American learning. It’s a serious work of popular history that starts America’s clock four centuries ago. (The Washington Post published its own reckoning with 1619.)
What followed was 250 years of brutal slavery the United States, then a century of de facto apartheid rule. Hannah-Jones, 43, stresses that she is part of only the first generation of black Americans born in a country where it was not legal to discriminate against them.
But this reframing proved all too much for an assorted cast of American conservatives. Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House, blasted the Times for printing “propaganda.” President Trump echoed the talking points of right-wing media, decrying the “zero credibility” paper’s “Racism Witch Hunt.” And conservative pundit Erick Erickson lamented the “racial lenses” that the project deployed to look at a history of black subjugation.
For right-wing nationalists, there’s little room for the recognition of fundamental evil, of an original sin, in the founding myth of the nation. A commentator for the far-right Federalist website complained that the project’s goal was to “delegitimize America and further divide and demoralize its citizenry."
The project’s proponents swatted away such claims, arguing that there’s nothing divisive about a more thorough and just accounting of the past — and that these criticisms only justified the urgent need for it now. Trump and his ilk may scoff at efforts to think more deeply about America’s racial sins, but he has defended those who marched in favor of monuments to white supremacy.
“Coinciding with the Trump presidency and resurgent white nationalism, the 400th anniversary of slavery in what would become the United States has inspired renewed scrutiny of the curse of color caste on our collective consciousness,” wrote academic Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey in The Washington Post last month. “The widening wealth and health gaps between African Americans and whites, hyper-criminalization and mass incarceration of African Americans, the meaning and future of affirmative action, and efforts to save Confederate flags and memorials are but a few contentious issues that will trigger further conflict.”
These battles over historical memory are hardly unique to the United States. In countries like Turkey and India, nationalist ruling parties have launched a steady assault on the legacies of their republics’ secularist founders. Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin, an epochal dictator with the blood of millions on his hands.
In Europe, far-right politicians routinely gripe about shouldering the stigma of their nations’ fascist pasts. A leader of Germany’s ultranationalist AfD party in 2017 bemoaned how the country’s focus on atoning for the horrors of the Holocaust rendered Germans “a totally defeated people.” That same year, France’s Marine Le Pen denied that the French should feel guilty in the present for the deportations of French Jews to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.
“If someone was responsible, it was those who were in power at the time, which is not France,” Le Pen said. “France has been abused in the minds of people for years. We taught our children that they had every reason to criticize, to see only the darkest historic aspects. I want them to be proud of being French again.”
Those who engage with history more seriously than politicians understand that recognition of a national darkness need not be an impediment to national pride. “This America is a community of belonging and commitment, held together by the strength of our ideas and by the force of our disagreements,” wrote Harvard historian Jill Lepore in her latest book, “This America: The Case for the Nation.” “A nation founded on universal ideas will never stop fighting over the meaning of its past and the direction of the future…. The nation, as ever, is the fight.”
It’s not clear how many Jewish people there are in the United States in part because it’s not clear how one should properly define “Jewish.” The Post’s Emily Guskin explored the complexity of the issue last year, estimating that the number of Jewish people in America likely ranged from 5.7 million to 7.2 million — or, under a more expansive definition, up to 12 million.
And on Tuesday, President Trump told reporters that any members of that group who vote for Democrats, which is most of them, either “lack knowledge” or are “disloyal.”
The context for Trump’s comment was a reporter’s question about Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who were barred from entering Israel earlier this month following comments critical of the nation — and following advocacy for the ban from Trump. Tlaib was eventually granted entry to see her elderly grandmother, but she declined to go because of restrictions Israel placed on a visit.
Trump has repeatedly and expansively described both Omar and Tlaib as anti-Semitic, leveraging controversial comments Omar made about American politicians who support Israel (for which she apologized) and, more broadly, the pair’s criticisms of the country. Trump’s habit, though, is not to present a case for why an opponent is bad but, instead, to paint with a massively broad brush.
“You should see the horrible things that Tlaib has said about Israel,” Trump said, without identifying any such things. “You should see the things that the four of them have said about Israel over the last couple of years,” he continued, referring also to Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). It would indeed be interesting to see what the four had said, since if they’ve all made repeated anti-Semitic comments, they have not risen to public attention. (Trump’s claimed to have a list of horrible things the four have done in the past but has never presented anything substantive.)
Specifically, Trump was asked about reducing aid to Israel as a result of Omar and Tlaib being barred from entry. Trump feigned shock.
“I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. Where has the Democratic Party gone?” Trump said. “Where have they gone where they’re defending these two people over the state of Israel? And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
There’s a remarkable irony here. Omar was criticized for a tweet which was interpreted as suggesting that American politicians had conflicting loyalties to the U.S. and Israel. “I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress,” she wrote in a tweet following criticism for a similar comment she’d made in a speech. This was the brunt of the anti-Semitism charge against her earlier this year.
Trump’s comments are an explicit invocation of the primacy of Israel over other domestic politics. How could any Jewish American be so “disloyal” as to vote Democratic, he says, prompting the obvious question: Disloyal to whom?
Where has the Democratic Party gone, he asks, that it defends elected members of its party over Israel? The answer, of course, is that the party exists to defend its members, even in cases that are more obviously problematic than the scenario that Trump’s referring to with his expansive, overheated rhetoric. Trump expects the Democratic Party to put Israel’s concerns over its own in criticizing Omar’s positions? There’s the aforementioned irony, in case you hadn’t spotted it.
Disparaging Jewish American Democrats as lacking knowledge — as ignorant — means disparaging millions of people. In 2016, exit polling suggested that Jewish voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump by a nearly 50-point margin. Last year, the margin was closer to 60 points. But those are small sample sizes and therefore less precise than they might seem.
Instead, we can look at polling conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2015. At that point, Pew found that nearly two-thirds of Jewish Americans identified as Democrats or as independents who generally vote Democratic. If we assume, say, 5 million adult citizens in that population, more than 3 million American Jews fall into Trump’s lacking knowledge/disloyal group.
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Over time, that affiliation has been consistent, as Pew data show — even in the Trump era.
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That group of Jewish Americans who vote Democratic may include his own daughter. Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism when marrying her husband Jared Kushner. She’s a registered Republican but hasn’t always been; she was ineligible to vote in the 2016 Republican primary because she was a political independent. A political independent, we’ll note, who donated to numerous Democrats. A political independent whose father has referred to as a Democrat in the White House, however jokingly.
The Republican Jewish Coalition quickly jumped in to support Trump’s comment.
“President Trump is right,” it wrote in a tweet, “it shows a great deal of disloyalty to oneself to defend a party that protects/emboldens people that hate you for your religion."
The Coalition’s tweet gets at Trump’s goal: Conflating Omar’s comments with Tlaib’s and Ocasio-Cortez’s criticism of Israel’s policies with anti-Semitism and those representatives with the Democratic Party broadly. We go quickly from the views of two freshman members of Congress to a sweeping indictment of the party that is presented as necessarily disqualifying for anyone Jewish.
When Omar suggested earlier this year that political support of Israel was predicated on campaign contributions, she apologized. In 2015, Trump, then a candidate, spoke to the RJC and made a similar comment.
“You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” he said then. “You want to control your politicians, that’s fine.”
The RJC tweeted after Trump’s speech, too.
To hear President Trump tell it, the group of four Democratic representatives who have been an ongoing focus of his criticism for the past month are anti-Semites.
Asked about the four last month — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) — Trump insisted that they collectively harbored anti-Jewish sentiments.
“I think they’ve said horrible things, and they’re anti-Semitic,” Trump said. “And if you look at the kind of statements they’ve made about Israel, it’s a disgrace.”
Calling their purported rhetoric “a very dangerous thing,” Trump later reiterated his claim.
“I think these four congressmen — and I could say some worse than others — but if you look at the statements they’ve made … when they hit Israel the way they’ve hit Israel so hard, so horrible,” he said, “I think, to me, that’s a disgrace.”
On Tuesday, he referred to the four as “AOC” — Ocasio-Cortez — “plus three."
“You should see the things that the four of them have said about Israel over the last couple of years,” he reiterated. He went on to criticize Jewish Americans who voted for Democrats as displaying either “a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
Given how long Trump has made these claims about the group’s anti-Semitism, we reached out to the White House to do exactly what Trump wanted: to see the things that the four of them have said about Israel. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham sent the following, reordered for clarity but without other edits.
The White House’s list
Rep. Rashida Tlaib attacked those in Congress that stood up against the anti-Israel BDS movement, claiming “they forgot what country they represent.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar questioned the patriotism of Americans who support pro-Israel policies, asking why “it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Omar revived this horrible anti-Semitic thinking when confronted over her comments.
Omar has claimed that support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins.”
Omar once tweeted that “Israel has hypnotized the world” and prayed that people would see the “evil doings of Israel.”
Omar and Tlaib have both declared support for the BDS movement that demonizes Israel.
Analysis
You’ll notice first that Omar is the primary focus of the list. Tlaib is mentioned twice; Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley not at all.
Let’s start with Tlaib. This is her tweet:
https://twitter.com/RashidaTlaib/status/1082095303325609984
Tlaib says that her point was that American elected officials represent the United States, where boycotts and protests are constitutionally protected. In its response cited by the White House, the Anti-Defamation League even gave her the benefit of the doubt.
The tweet “has been interpreted by some as suggesting that Jews or Members of Congress, such as the sponsors of the bill, are more loyal to Israel than to their own country,” it reads. “Whether or not this was her intent, this type of language is deeply problematic.”
Tlaib is also criticized for supporting BDS, the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” movement aimed at putting economic pressure on Israel to change that country’s policies for dealing with Palestinians. The movement has been criticized as threatening the state of Israel and as being inherently anti-Semitic. It’s worth noting, though, that there’s a line between criticism of Israel and hostility toward Jews that is often blurred in this discussion.
The criticisms of Omar — who, like Tlaib, is Muslim — include BDS but go further, focusing on three particular incidents.
The first is Omar’s comment at an event this year which is quoted, her comment about there being “political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country"; namely, Israel. Coincidentally, the context for the comment was Omar’s concern that the arguments being made by herself and Tlaib (who was sitting next to her) were seen as anti-Semitic in part because of their religion.
Omar went on to tie pro-Israel lobbying to other prominent lobbying efforts.
“I want to ask why is it okay for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, of fossil fuel industries or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobbying group that is influencing policies?” she said.
The “push for allegiance” comment led to an exchange with Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) over the same “dual loyalty” issue for which Tlaib was criticized. The isolated “have allegiance/pledge support” line comes from that exchange.
In her exchange with Lowey, Omar said she was focusing on criticism of the country, not the people.
“Being opposed to Netanyahu and the occupation,” she wrote, “is not the same as being anti-Semitic.”
The other examples used against Omar are a tweet suggesting that legislators support Israel because of “Benjamins” — money. She apologized for using the line, while continuing to argue that she was concerned about the influence of lobbying money. The White House also points to that 2012 tweet by Omar in which she stated that Israel had “hypnotized the world.” Omar apologized for that this year, as well.
What’s not included in the White House’s list, we’ll note, are some of the charges that Trump made during a campaign rally in North Carolina last month. At that point, Trump claimed that Omar had offered sympathies to al-Qaeda and had downplayed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These are both claims that went viral in conservative media that stem from interpretations — or misinterpretations — of comments Omar made during an interview and in a speech. The White House didn’t include them.
Instead, we learn that Trump’s designation of the four Democrats as anti-Semites officially stems from:
Two of them supporting a heavily criticized political effort focused on Israel’s policies.
A nebulous tweet by one of the two.
Two problematic tweets from the other for which she has apologized.
Comments about lawmakers having an allegiance to Israel.
On Wednesday, Trump clarified his “disloyalty” assertion about Jews who vote Democratic by saying that they were “being disloyal to Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel.” That, of course, is an explicit assertion that American Jews have some sort of dual loyalty.
The ADL’s response to Tlaib, shared by the White House, notes that this is a charge that “has been leveled as a smear against many kinds of Americans — including against Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.” The group wrote that it would reach out to Tlaib to “discuss concerns about the history and context of the allegations of dual loyalty that have been leveled at Jewish Americans at various times in our history.”
As of writing, it has not offered a statement about Trump’s comments.
Trump decided long ago that it would be smart politics for him to yoke his administration to Israel and to try to brand the Democratic Party as anti-Semitic.
He set about executing a pro-Israel checklist: moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the Golan Heights as part of sovereign Israel, and taking a hard line against Iran. And he promoted himself as the greatest president — a deity even — for Jewish people.
Yet Trump has become flummoxed that Jewish Americans are not in turn lining up to support his reelection, according to people familiar with his thinking, and he has lashed out in predictable fashion.
“If you vote for a Democrat, you’re very, very disloyal to Israel and to the Jewish people,” Trump said Wednesday on the South Lawn of the White House. He was amplifying a statement he made in the Oval Office a day earlier: “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
Trump’s use of the word “disloyalty” drew immediate criticism from Jewish groups, whose leaders said it echoed anti-Semitic tropes about where American Jews’ loyalty lies. The president insisted his comments were not anti-Semitic.
Regardless, this turn in the president’s rhetoric about Jews magnifies his transactional approach to politics and his miscalculation that his hawkish interpretation of support for Israel should automatically translate into electoral support from Jewish Americans.
It also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the motivations of many Jews, who are not a monolithic voting bloc but rather prioritize a wide range of issues — not only Israel, but also education, the economy and the environment, as well as civility and morality.
“He is reflecting a concept of Jewish Americans as single-issue voters around Israel, which we’re not; that we’re uniformly hawkish on these issues, which we’re not,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy group. “In reality, what matters most to us are the exact values that the president is spending his term trashing. We care about equality and justice, and we embrace the notion that this is a nation of immigrants and opportunity for all.”
Looking to his 2020 reelection bid, Trump is thrusting Israel into the culture wars he has waged as president. He is trying to make support for Israel a litmus test — along with immigration and guns — and calling Democrats anti-Semitic to fire up his base.
Daniel Shapiro, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Barack Obama, said Trump’s expectation that Jewish people vote for him because of his record on Israel is “breathtakingly cynical.”
“In his typical buffoonish way, he thinks that by [pushing] out these instructions, essentially, to American Jews to get in line and become his supporters he’s going to be successful,” Shapiro said. “It’s all shaped by his narcissism. It’s all shaped by his transactional nature. It’s all shaped by his insatiable need for praise and confirmation of his greatness and appreciation for the gifts he’s bestowed on whoever it is he’s courting. And it’s not going to fly with this community.”
Trump’s transactional expectations for Jewish voting patterns reflect how he views other voting blocs. He routinely defends himself against charges that he is racist by citing the relatively low unemployment rate for African Americans on his watch, as well as the criminal justice legislation he signed last year, as if those are the only issues of concern to black voters.
Trump has claimed a “Jexodus” movement of Jews from historically backing Democrats to supporting Republicans. But polling shows this may be more fantasy than reality.
In the 2016 election, 71 percent of Jewish voters cast ballots for Hillary Clinton and 23 percent for Trump, according to exit polling. Gallup tracking poll data in 2018 showed that just 26 percent of Jewish Americans approved of Trump’s performance as president while 71 percent disapproved, making Jews the least likely of any of the religious groups studied to support Trump.
Trump has been told over and over again that he is “the most pro-Israel president ever,” according to a former senior administration official, delivering on a wish list that includes recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — but the official said Trump is angry that he has not received more plaudits from Jewish Americans. Trump contrasts his unpopularity with Jews to the overwhelming support he enjoys from evangelical Christians.
This official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the president’s mind-set, argued that Trump’s rhetoric of late is “a manifestation of frustration of not getting the recognition and the praise and the support that he feels like he deserves as a result of what he’s done.”
Trump placed an early bet on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and they forged a close alliance, but Netanyahu faces a difficult reelection bid next month, and a loss would be devastating to Trump. Furthermore, Trump’s push for a Middle East peace deal has stalled, and the Palestinians have rejected the U.S. proposal.
Still, Trump tweeted a quote early Wednesday from Wayne Allyn Root, a noted conspiracy theorist and conservative radio host in Nevada, who praised Trump on Newsmax and lamented that a majority of Jews vote for Democrats.
“President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America . . . The Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God,” Trump quoted Root as saying.
Jews do not believe in a second coming.
Trump has used statements from Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) criticizing Israel and its treatment of Palestinians to label them “anti-Semites.” And he has called them “the face of the Democratic Party.”
The Trump campaign’s chief operating officer, Michael Glassner, issued a strongly worded statement Wednesday accusing Democrats of supporting those who want “to wipe Israel from the map.”
“As a Jew myself, I strongly believe that President Trump is right to highlight that there is only one party — the Democrats — excusing and permitting such anti-Jewish venom to be spewed so freely,” Glassner said. “In stark contrast, there is no bigger ally to the Jewish community at home and around the world than President Trump.”
At Trump’s urging, the Israeli government last week blocked the two congresswomen from visiting the country, citing their support for a boycott movement against Israel. The Israelis then relented in response to a request from Tlaib to visit her grandmother, who lives in the occupied West Bank, but the congresswoman ultimately decided not to make the trip because she would have been required by Israel to pledge not to promote boycotts.
Democratic leaders have publicly supported the congresswomen, even as they have sought to distance the party from some of their sentiments. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at this spring’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference that his party supported Israel and that it was “absolutely vital” to continue doing so.
“Those who seek to use Israel as a means of scoring political points do a disservice to both Israel and the United States,” Schumer said, in a veiled reference to Trump. “Our politics may be more polarized than ever, but it is incumbent upon all of us who care about the U.S.-Israel relationship to keep it bipartisan.”
After Trump’s “disloyalty” comments this week, Schumer said in a statement Wednesday: “When President Trump uses a trope that has been used against the Jewish people for centuries with dire consequences, he is encouraging — wittingly or unwittingly — anti-Semites throughout the country and the world.”
On the campaign trail, Democratic candidates also denounced Trump’s comments.
“Come on, man. That’s like a dog whistle. ‘Loyalty.’ Come on,” former vice president Joe Biden told a crowd in Newton, Iowa.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey shared his understanding of Jewish values. “There’s an idea in Judaism about kindness and decency and mercy,” he told reporters in Altoona, Iowa. He added, “One of the greatest Jewish ideals is to welcome the stranger. One of the great Jewish writings comes from Micah. That is, you know, ‘Do justice. And love mercy.’ These ideals are not being evidenced by the president of the United States.”
A city council candidate in Michigan shocked a public forum when she said she wants to keep her community white "as much as possible."
Jean Cramer made the comment Thursday in response to a question about diversity in Marysville, a city in St. Clair County, 55 miles (88 kilometers) northeast of Detroit. The Times Herald in Port Huron said she's one of five candidates running for three council seats in November.
More than 90% of Marysville's 9,700-person population is white.
Cramer responded when the moderator asked candidates if Marysville should do more to attract foreign-born residents, who are boosting populations in some Great Lakes states.
"Keep Marysville a white community as much as possible," she replied. "White. Seriously. In other words, no foreign-born, no foreign people."
The newspaper later asked Cramer if she wanted to clarify her remarks.
"Husband and wife need to be the same race. Same thing with kids," she said. "That's how it's been from the beginning of, how can I say, when God created the heaven and the earth. He created Adam and Eve at the same time. But as far as me being against blacks, no I'm not."
Other candidates at the forum were deeply troubled. Mike Deising said: "Just checking the calendar here and making sure it's still 2019."
Council member Paul Wessel said anyone who makes it to Marysville should be allowed to live there. The council meeting room is named for the late Joseph Johns, who was Syrian, owned a local business and was an elected official for decades. He was the father of Mayor Pro Tem Kathy Hayman.
"I don't even know that I can talk yet, I'm so upset and shocked. ... So basically, what you've said is that my father and his family had no business to be in this community," Hayman told Cramer.
Mayor Dan Damman said Cramer's comments were "vile" and "jaw-dropping."
Candidate: Michigan City Should Be as White 'as Possible' (https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/08/23/us/ap-us-candidate-racist-comment.html)
Ramon Torres had been a U.S. citizen for nearly ten years when he was detained for four days on an immigration hold – despite having a U.S. passport, a Louisiana driver’s license, and a Social Security card, and despite that fact that a court ordered his release.
Torres’ ordeal began in August 2018, when he was pulled over and arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Torres, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2009, was carrying multiple forms of identification, including his driver’s license and other security credentials. Torres was booked at the Ascension Parish Jail, and the next day the Parish Court ordered his release.
But Torres wasn’t released. Instead, the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office placed an “immigration hold” on Torres on the suspicion that he was unlawfully present in the United States.
The basis for this suspicion? He had a Latinx name and brown skin. Staff at the sheriff’s office explained that they had a policy of detaining all Latinx people for immigration review.
When his friends and family tried to intervene and provide additional documentation proving that Torres is a U.S. citizen, officials in the sheriff’s office still didn’t budge.
Torres spent four days in jail before a lawyer’s involvement finally secured his release.
This was a flagrant violation of Torres’ constitutional rights, and this week the ACLU of Louisiana sued on his behalf.
Racial profiling is illegal, unconstitutional, and deeply harmful to families and communities – diverting scarce resources away from pressing public safety priorities.
What happened to Torres is inexcusable and antithetical to our most cherished American values.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when local law enforcement authorities get in the business of federal immigration enforcement. From Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reign of terror in Arizona to the Trump administration’s mass deportation and detention agenda, immigrant communities are being unfairly targeted, harassed, and terrorized by the very law enforcement agencies that should be protecting them.
It’s also a reminder of the thinly-veiled racism that underlies these policies. Ramon Torres is a U.S. citizen. He owns a home. He has a driver’s license and other forms of proof of his identity. But he was held in jail because of his Latinx name and the color of his skin.
Our lawsuit asks the court to declare these actions unconstitutional and to award damages to Torres for what he endured. But more broadly, we must also continue the fight against all forms of anti-immigrant bias and discrimination. The safety and wellbeing of our communities depend on it.
A Louisiana Parish Jailed a U.S. Citizen for Being Latinx. We’re Suing. (https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/race-and-criminal-justice/louisiana-parish-jailed-us-citizen-being-latinx-were)QuoteRamon Torres had been a U.S. citizen for nearly ten years when he was detained for four days on an immigration hold – despite having a U.S. passport, a Louisiana driver’s license, and a Social Security card, and despite that fact that a court ordered his release.
Torres’ ordeal began in August 2018, when he was pulled over and arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Torres, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2009, was carrying multiple forms of identification, including his driver’s license and other security credentials. Torres was booked at the Ascension Parish Jail, and the next day the Parish Court ordered his release.
But Torres wasn’t released. Instead, the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office placed an “immigration hold” on Torres on the suspicion that he was unlawfully present in the United States.
The basis for this suspicion? He had a Latinx name and brown skin. Staff at the sheriff’s office explained that they had a policy of detaining all Latinx people for immigration review.
When his friends and family tried to intervene and provide additional documentation proving that Torres is a U.S. citizen, officials in the sheriff’s office still didn’t budge.
Torres spent four days in jail before a lawyer’s involvement finally secured his release.
This was a flagrant violation of Torres’ constitutional rights, and this week the ACLU of Louisiana sued on his behalf.
Racial profiling is illegal, unconstitutional, and deeply harmful to families and communities – diverting scarce resources away from pressing public safety priorities.
What happened to Torres is inexcusable and antithetical to our most cherished American values.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when local law enforcement authorities get in the business of federal immigration enforcement. From Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reign of terror in Arizona to the Trump administration’s mass deportation and detention agenda, immigrant communities are being unfairly targeted, harassed, and terrorized by the very law enforcement agencies that should be protecting them.
It’s also a reminder of the thinly-veiled racism that underlies these policies. Ramon Torres is a U.S. citizen. He owns a home. He has a driver’s license and other forms of proof of his identity. But he was held in jail because of his Latinx name and the color of his skin.
Our lawsuit asks the court to declare these actions unconstitutional and to award damages to Torres for what he endured. But more broadly, we must also continue the fight against all forms of anti-immigrant bias and discrimination. The safety and wellbeing of our communities depend on it.
#Resist
A simple call to ICE and a look into their available database could have been done to answer the question about status.
A simple call to ICE and a look into their available database could have been done to answer the question about status.
Literally Gestappo tactics. Do you know any Jews, passing as patriotic Germans? Report them, so we can round them up, and deport them!
So, rather than throwing acid on them with intent to maim, just call the Government, and have the round them all up. For 'merka!
I'm not calling you a Nazi. They're organized. At best, you're just a sympathizer, and apologist.
The issue at question was presumption of criminal behavior, IE, alien status of the person who was detained after the Court released that person, pending a hearing for the Motor Vehicle infraction for which the person was arrested.
The issue at question was presumption of criminal behavior, IE, alien status of the person who was detained after the Court released that person, pending a hearing for the Motor Vehicle infraction for which the person was arrested.
The same is true of the President, and the House of Representatives. The difference is one is a specific person, who stands accused of specific crimes, against America, and Democracy.
The other is presumed Guilty of vague crimes, without a trial, nor due process, based soley on the of the color of their skins, and their first language. The presumption that America, and Americans are white, and speak English. That anything else is unAmerican.
White Supremacy, hence the Gestappo Tactics. A crime is only a crime if you're not the President, and therefore above the law. If you're poor, then you deserve to be rounded up, your children taken away, and stripped of all rights, without any charges.
If they're "Criminals," charge them with a crime. Just like you claim to support for the President.
A simple call to ICE and a look into their available database could have been done to answer the question about status. No need to hold 'everyone' or 'anyone' unless there is a existing 'Detainer' on file for that person.
Charge him, or stop harassing via media.
The ones that are still locked up in dog kennels in this very state. Did you forget about those, because of your hyperfocus on Impeachment? They're still illegally held against their will, without charges. So, add Crimes Against Humanity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_apartheid) to the docket. We're talking about Racism in America, thanks to Trump. In this thread, read the fucking title, if you forget again.
I thought we shipped them back. Oh well, hard to keep track, or maybe their hearings were delayed.
By now you know that NBA players went on strike Wednesday night in protest of both the Jacob Blake shooting and the violent white people industrial complex that helped make it happen. That strike quickly grew contagious. Six MLB teams refused to take the field. Six WNBA teams, including the Atlanta Dream — co-owned by Georgia Senator and rising star in corrupt racist s--tbaggery Kelly Loeffler — also refused to play. Only one Major League Soccer game went on Wednesday night, and that was because word had gotten to the two teams involved too late. Kenny Smith walked off the NBA on TNT set in solidarity. Wednesday night was one of those HOLY S--T THIS IS HAPPENING moments that make you feel alive and strangely hopeful in otherwise miserable times.
And I couldn’t see the purpose of it, at least initially.
I do now, obviously. But a few days ago, I got into an argument with some friends, who, after the Jacob Blake shooting, posed a prescient question: What if NBA players just walked out and went on strike in protest? Wouldn’t that be awesome? To which I was like, well, what would that accomplish? What would it change? What leverage do NBA teams have over, like, the mayor of Kenosha? And my friend Albert Burneko said to me, what if they just don’t wanna play, Drew? Why isn’t that a good enough reason? Why does there have to be a goal past that?
Burneko was irritatingly correct. You could see and hear the exhaustion from players and coaches BEFORE these strikes. You could listen to Chris Paul. Or to Doc Rivers. Or to LeBron. I’m a white guy, so I do not and cannot know the daily burden that all of these men, and that every black person in America, must carry. Hence, I was thinking about this strike from a strategic standpoint and not a human one.
This is a particularly American problem, where people like me leave their empathy behind and turn into results-oriented brand-bots. I was thinking through all this like I was f---ing Mayor Pete. Meanwhile, the second the final whistle blows, Chris Paul is right back to being haunted. That’s why he said what he said about the police shooting of Jacob Blake on Tuesday night, and it’s why the Milwaukee Bucks refused to come out of the locker room the day after.
There doesn’t have to BE a strategy to this. In fact, the NBA playoffs are going to resume, and cynicism has already begun to set back in that this strike will ultimately result in nothing but more empty sloganeering. But people close to the NBA walkout already saw this endgame coming. Chris Webber saw it coming in a speech he gave that, justifiably, went viral within minutes. So did Shaq, who spoke after Kenny Smith dropped his mic. Both Webber and Shaq expressed the kind of raw eloquence that you hear only from people who have seen some hard s--t. Here’s the full text of Shaq’s remarks (bold emphasis mine):
“African Americans are fed up. People that care are fed up. And something has to change. But I’m with Charles… what is the next step? Do you say okay, I’m gonna boycott the season? Because right now the games are just postponed. Something’s gonna happen next week. Something’s gonna happen next year. Something’s gonna happen next month. And I’m with you on whatever stand you take, but are we cancelling? Are we postponing? What’s the next plan? And how does this eliminate bad people’s thought process?
“I’m not sure cancelling a game is gonna make a racist person say, Oh! They cancelled the game! We’re not gonna be racist anymore! We have to identify certain areas. Certain problems. Root out the evil. Root out the problems. And we have to start systematically taking things down. Because again, we’re all businessmen here. We have the plan. And in order to take the plan to the next level, you have to take next steps. So again, November is coming up. Make sure you get a new DA. Make sure you get a new chief of police. Make sure you get a new mayor. Make sure you get a new president. Make sure you get a new sheriff. It’s in our hands. It’s always been in our hands. We need to put people in place that understand our language, understand our frustrations, and that’ll be where we start.”
That’s the key. This is the start. I am certain that Black people throughout America are VERY tired of starts. Of baby steps. Of small signs of progress toward a better tomorrow that never seems to arrive. Webber said as much in his speech last night, but then added this:
“That does not mean, young men, that you don’t do anything. Don’t listen to these people telling you don’t do anything because it’s not gonna end right away. You are starting something for the next generation and the next generation to take over.”
Those next generations seem awfully far away at the moment, but they’re not worth sacrificing at the altar of fatalism. As the Bucks’ strike unfolded, I instantly came around. Of course the players were doing the right thing. Of course it was time for them to collectively make both viewers AND owners uncomfortable, the way many individual players have been their whole lives. Of course it was time for them to tell the NBA front office that it needed to have a strategy of its own to deal with this uprising. Of course it was time for them to stop the machine, to let Americans know that what happened to Jacob Blake mattered to basketball players more than basketball did. The endgame wasn’t as vital to these players as the moment itself.
And holy s--t, the moment mattered. It proved indelible as it was unfolding. I sat there watching an empty court and I was like, well I was a f---ing idiot for questioning the idea of this strike.
I shouldn’t have needed the Bucks protesting to be enlightened — all of the horrifying violence I’ve already witnessed should have done the trick — but I and plenty of others did need enlightening. I and plenty of others do need to be forced to LISTEN.
A lot of people, predictably, refuse to do so, either because they’ve made a living profiting off of ignorance, or because they’re just f---ing morons themselves. Their reasoning hardly matters. What matters is that, thanks to these athletes — who were already risking their lives playing games in the middle of a plague — you know that there is a right side and a wrong side to this now. How the right side wins remains frustratingly elusive, but drawing the line is vital on its own.
#BanTheNaziFromKB
Do you encourage, and want such behavior, crowd taunting, threatening, obscene name calling, for any reason, by any group of residents/citizens, on any sidewalk?
All you posted seem to be lawfully protesting, without violence, looting, or mob intimidation of citizens walking the city streets.
My question to you was about the "racist" claim you introduced, as you watched, then commented on last nights BLM/Biden Demonstrators with Senator and Mrs. Rand Paul in Washington, who were simply walking on the street, a block from the White House, following the Republican National Convention.
Quite a different look, between what we all respect, a demonstration, and the mob depicted last night, and you decided to attack the victims, call them racist, and find your way to support such uncivil behavior by your Candidate's supporters.
KENOSHA, Wis. —
A U-Haul truck loaded with supplies for protesters in Kenosha was seized by police or federal agents Wednesday, and the two people inside were arrested.
The Milwaukee church that sent the supplies said it hasn’t been given an explanation, so WISN 12 News asked the Kenosha police chief Friday why their $1,000 worth of food, snacks and drinks destined for protesters was intercepted.
"We happily loaded it up with what we had," said the Rev. Jonah Overton, of Zao MKE Church.
Overton took WISN 12 News inside what they call their supply depot for protests at their church near UW-Milwaukee.
“Those were the types of things in the U-Haul: snacks, water, Gatorade, Band-Aids, fire extinguishers," Overton said.
"And you don't have that stuff back yet,” WISN 12 News reporter Nick Bohr asked.
"No, we don't have it back, and we have no word that we might ever get it back," Overton said.
The church has been collecting supplies for protesters for months. Pastors said this is the first time they've ever been confiscated.
When WISN 12 News questioned the Kenosha police chief Friday afternoon, he said he didn't know about it.
"I'm not aware of that incident," Chief Daniel G. Miskinis said.
The church wants answers.
"I have no idea how the police could interpret water, Gatorade, bags of chips and fire extinguishers as a threat. And the fact that even after seeing all of that they confiscated it and continued to proceed to arrest the driver and passenger is absolutely beyond me," Overton said.
Overton said they only know the driver and passenger by their first names. They just came to the church for the supplies, so they haven't been able to track them down.
Andy Kno, who reports on such things, credited the raided/seized persons and vehicles to "Riot Kitchen", a West Coast group that is known to supply rioters for left wing causes, "demonstrators" would be the leftist description of such persons.
Andy Kno, who reports on such things, credited the raided/seized persons and vehicles to "Riot Kitchen", a West Coast group that is known to supply rioters for left wing causes, "demonstrators" would be the leftist description of such persons.
Who?
Where's the piece of that reporting?
Show your work.
#BlackLivesMatter
#BanTheNaziFromKB
Andy Kno is a well known reporter, often Tweets.
Google him, if you are not up to date on West Coast violent leftist mob reports.
Andy Kno is a well known reporter, often Tweets.
Google him, if you are not up to date on West Coast violent leftist mob reports.
I repeat,
Who?
Where's the piece of that reporting?
Show your work.
#BlackLivesMatter
#BanTheNaziFromKB
Twitter is stupid. Anyone who reports via twitter is not really a reporter, just a takling head spouting nonsense.
If there’s one thing Colin Kaepernick has shown us this week, it’s that when a black athlete steps out of line in the eyes of white America, it is clear who is going to overreact, and who’s going to understand.
To those outside the black community, people who are largely unaware of the nuances of black life in America, professional athletes speaking out on social issues appears to be breaking news. To black people, however, they have seen this hustle. They know it when they see it. They have seen the likes of Jack Johnson (beats white men in the ring, dates white women), Muhammad Ali (his Muslim faith), Allen Iverson (tattoos and cornrows), Cam Newton (touchdown celebrations, being black in a space usually reserved for white men), Serena Williams (her body and hair) and now San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick all written and talked about by white sportswriters who take a paternal tone and an air of understanding what goes on in their lives and communities. Yet those who pride themselves on scooping their colleagues on the next big story or writing the hottest of takes can’t figure out what ails many of the people they cover.
This is a tale of two views, and it is black and white.
Many of those views assume that Kaepernick, who decided not the stand for the national anthem before a game last week, can’t be oppressed because he’s rich and that he was adopted by white parents, and wonder why he hasn’t focused on “black-on-black” violence and issues. Curt Schilling, the Alt-Right’s next great white hope after Donald Trump, chimed in with his thoughts, Trump himself said the quarterback should consider looking for another country “that works better for him.” Telling black people and other minorities to go to find another country to live in is one of the oldest racist tropes out there, but this is Trump we’re talking about, of course. Yet it goes beyond politicians. Hub Arkush, executive editor of Pro Football Weekly, tweeted that Kaepernick should be grateful for making the money his does. A big change from last season, Arkush thought that the Chicago Bears should trade for the quarterback. Clay Travis of Fox Sports called Kaepernick “a fucking idiot” and wondered “what does the United States do to oppress black people?” and peppered it all with a handful of backhanded compliments.
No one is calling the writers racist. However, the tone that some sportswriters use in these instances is racially insensitive at best, and it’s something black people are all too familiar with. We openly talk about these topics in church, at the barbershop and in Facebook groups. We see it in the critiques of President Obama, with All/Police/Blue Lives Matter, and in every comment section of an article on Chicago’s heartbreaking violence. We often take on that weight. It is an added layer to what goes with black life in America.
The idea that racism doesn’t affect athletes is a myth, an urban legend propped up by the system that perpetuates many of the problems black people in America face to this day. It’s the people that don’t face these problems that don’t understand that. Just earlier this year, Seattle Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor was looking to buy a gym and the employees called the police on him. This happened after he signed a contract extension worth $28 million last season. Before that, it was the racial slurs hurled at Richard Sherman over social media for his rant after the NFC Championship game a few years back. Remember when Atlanta Hawks guard Thabo Sefolosha got his leg broken by NYPD officers? He’s a one percenter as well, but he’s not immune.
“When I go home, I get pulled over just because,” Tennessee Titans linebacker David Bass said about going back to his hometown of St. Louis, “and they’ll say, ‘We’re doing random checks,’ which is against the law. Or they say, there was a theft and the getaway car was like my black Durango. When they don’t know who you are, all you are is black. They don’t know that I graduated from college, or that I’m in the NFL. But when they find that out, they want to stop and have a conversation.”
Since Kaepernick’s public stance, he’s turned into Public Enemy Number One, but he’s also exposing this vicious cycle. His stance has made more people stand up and ask, exactly, why he’s having his feet held to the fire for exercising his American right to protest and free speech. Black athletes and black sports analyst are often told to “stick to sports” when they venture out of the comfort zone of white male Americana. Bradley Zimanek, a Montgomery Advertiser columnist once suggested that ESPN football analyst Andre Ware favored Blake Sims as the Alabama quarterback over Jake Coker, who’s white, because both are black.
“This is not something that I am going to run by anybody,” Kaepernick told NFL Network. “I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed. … If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right.”
This is what black athletes have to deal with and always have dealt with.
Since Kaepernick didn’t stand for the national anthem, everyone has offered an opinion on him. John Isner, the highest-ranking American player in men’s tennis, “I thought it was pathetic from him,” Isner told reporters. “The cause he was going for, fine by me. He could have found some other ways to present his voice there. A lot of NBA players have done it, and good on ’em.” It was one of the most willfully ignorant reactions to Kaepernick outside of Rodney Harrison who said of Kaepernick, “He’s not black.”
On the other side, there’s NFL Hall of Famer Jim Brown, a legend in the realm of activist athletes and arguably the greatest football player ever. He was happy to see players like Kaepernick speak out on society’s ills, saying, “And for a couple of generations it was about making money, not messing with your image. And the agents became the pivotal figure for a lot of these guys,” Brown told NFL Total Access. “And the agents kept reminding them that you have to be this all-American boy to make these kind of dollars and these dollars are astronomical dollars. So the money came into the culture and created a couple of generations of individuals who did not want to speak up.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar also weighed in, writing for the Washington Post: “What should horrify Americans is not Kaepernick’s choice to remain seated during the national anthem, but that nearly 50 years after Ali was banned from boxing for his stance and Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ raised fists caused public ostracization and numerous death threats, we still need to call attention to the same racial inequities.” He went on to write: “Failure to fix this problem is what’s really un-American here.”
And then there’s the #VeteransForKaepernick hashtag that’s been trending on Twitter over the last 24 hours. Black veterans who fought for this country voicing their support for a man’s right to do something they’re put in harm’s way to protect: speak up. The very people politicians are trying to say Kaepernick is disrespecting with his protest are the offering up some of the clearest and smartest takes on the matter. Not sportswriters or pundits. It was interesting to see that the people they were trying to prop up as “Negro Firewall,” joined Kaepernick in calling them out.
Racism is much more complex than we like to imagine. It’s more than a word; it’s a system that is backed up money, politics and the criminal justice system. We live in a country where when media pundits called U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte, a 32-year-old man, a “kid,” for lying about his brotastic experience at the Rio Olympics, but a Cleveland police officer can kill Tamir Rice for doing just that – being a kid. A country where Kaepernick is deemed as being unpatriotic, for exercising his constitutional right to freedom of speech, but Dylann Roof can burn the American flag and walk into an A.M.E. church and murder people. A country where a presidential candidate whose slogan is “Make America Great Again,” wants to criticize a black man who just wants justice is the epitome of not just hypocrisy, but it’s also downright fucking absurd. Black lives seem to matter on game day when America needs to be entertained. The rest of the week, not so much.
Kaepernick used his platform, for all intents and purposes, to call America on its shit. There’s nothing wrong with loving our country, while having an honest conversation on how we can make things better. No laws were broken and nobody was hurt. He was just exercising his right to get some peace of mind.
I fail to see where Mr. Ngo claims this group was doing more than providing food to those exercising their constitutionally granted right to assemble.
Perhaps you can cite the post?
It appears you are wrong, or trying to obfuscate for nefarious purpose.
#BlackLivesMatter
#BanTheNaziFromKB
Hmmm, I expect U-Haul knows where their van is, within a Meter of two.
The 'church' did not expect the edible supplies to be returned to them, when they happily loaded the van, with two 'unknown' to them drivers, with hopes their 'donation' would keep the Kenosha BLM/Biden Mob going for a while, in violation of the orders of the Governor, and the presence of many National Guard members there to enforce 'peace'...
Likely/perhaps, the van is at the same location as the Black School Bus, the Black Laundry Truck, and the SUV that were captured at a remote location on the way to Kenosha, WI, where there were 9 or more arrests of the occupants yesterday.
During the arrest, LE had to pry open the SUV... The vehicles were carrying, in addition to the persons arrested, a cache of illegal fireworks, gas masks, protective vests, weapons, and suspected controlled substances.
Andy Kno, who reports on such things, credited the raided/seized persons and vehicles to "Riot Kitchen", a West Coast group that is known to supply rioters for left wing causes, "demonstrators" would be the leftist description of such persons.
If not a part of the same outfit as your missing van of 'church supplies', likely the same law enforcement outfit that got one, got them all.
I hope the Law Enforcement folks put the snacks and fire extinguishers to good use.
#Blue Lives Matter
Milwaukee Bucks assistant coach Vin Baker said Tuesday that White House senior adviser Jared Kushner showed a “level of ignorance” with his remarks about NBA players’ refusal to take the court after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis.
“There’s no sensitivity there,” Baker told POLITICO Playbook authors Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman. “I don’t obviously agree with the comment. There’s a level of ignorance there.”
The Bucks, whose home arena in downtown Milwaukee is 40 miles north of Kenosha, sparked a wave of protests across the sports world after the team declined to participate in a playoff game last Wednesday against the Orlando Magic.
The NBA subsequently postponed its three playoff games scheduled to take place that day as players around the league also refused to take the court in protest against racial injustice and police brutality.
Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was dismissive of the players’ actions in an interview last Thursday with CNBC.
“Look, I think that the NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially,” Kushner said. “So they have that luxury, which is great.”
Kushner said that “there’s a lot of activism” within the NBA and that the league had “put a lot of slogans out,” but argued that “what we need to do is turn that from slogans and signals to actual action that’s going to solve the problem.”
Trump has also been intensely critical of the NBA, calling the league “highly political” in a tweet Tuesday morning.
“Basketball ratings are WAY down, and they won’t be coming back,” he wrote. “I hope football and baseball are watching and learning because the same thing will be happening to them. Stand tall for our Country and our Flag!!!”
Bucks senior vice president Alex Lasry told POLITICO on Tuesday that the White House had not reached out to the team, and he described Kushner’s comments as a “little ironic, coming from him.”
“This wasn’t anyone taking a night off and then just going back to their hotel room being like, ‘Eh … I just didn’t want to play today,” Lasry said.
“This was a statement. And this was an act to say, ‘Hey, enough is enough, and if you guys aren’t going to take this seriously, then we’re going to have to do something to bring this to the forefront again and hopefully force people to act.”
I think you are mistakenly insulting half of the entire country with your not too well thought out statement.. i am not racist and i support our president, i was not a racist when i supported obama either. i doubt there are really too many racists still alive in america. maybe your anger is caused by a bad experience in your past or the media is making things seem worse than they really are in your perspective.
My Beloved died in January. He was a foot taller than me and had large, beautiful dark eyes and dexterous, kind hands. He fixed me breakfast and pots of loose-leaf tea every morning. He cried at both of our children’s births, silently, tears glazing his face. Before I drove our children to school in the pale dawn light, he would put both hands on the top of his head and dance in the driveway to make the kids laugh. He was funny, quick-witted, and could inspire the kind of laughter that cramped my whole torso. Last fall, he decided it would be best for him and our family if he went back to school. His primary job in our household was to shore us up, to take care of the children, to be a househusband. He traveled with me often on business trips, carried our children in the back of lecture halls, watchful and quietly proud as I spoke to audiences, as I met readers and shook hands and signed books. He indulged my penchant for Christmas movies, for meandering trips through museums, even though he would have much preferred to be in a stadium somewhere, watching football. One of my favorite places in the world was beside him, under his warm arm, the color of deep, dark river water.
In early January, we became ill with what we thought was flu. Five days into our illness, we went to a local urgent care center, where the doctor swabbed us and listened to our chests. The kids and I were diagnosed with flu; my Beloved’s test was inconclusive. At home, I doled out medicine to all of us: Tamiflu and Promethazine. My children and I immediately began to feel better, but my Beloved did not. He burned with fever. He slept and woke to complain that he thought the medicine wasn’t working, that he was in pain. And then he took more medicine and slept again.
Two days after our family doctor visit, I walked into my son’s room where my Beloved lay, and he panted: Can’t. Breathe. I brought him to the emergency room, where after an hour in the waiting room, he was sedated and put on a ventilator. His organs failed: first his kidneys, then his liver. He had a massive infection in his lungs, developed sepsis, and in the end, his great strong heart could no longer support a body that had turned on him. He coded eight times. I witnessed the doctors perform CPR and bring him back four. Within 15 hours of walking into the emergency room of that hospital, he was dead. The official reason: acute respiratory distress syndrome. He was 33 years old.
Without his hold to drape around my shoulders, to shore me up, I sank into hot, wordless grief.
Two months later, I squinted at a video of a gleeful Cardi B chanting in a singsong voice: Coronavirus, she cackled. Coronavirus. I stayed silent while people around me made jokes about COVID, rolled their eyes at the threat of pandemic. Weeks later, my kids’ school was closed. Universities were telling students to vacate the dorms while professors were scrambling to move classes online. There was no bleach, no toilet paper, no paper towels for purchase anywhere. I snagged the last of the disinfectant spray off a pharmacy shelf; the clerk ringing up my purchases asking me wistfully: Where did you find that at, and for one moment, I thought she would challenge me for it, tell me there was some policy in place to prevent my buying it.
Days became weeks, and the weather was strange for south Mississippi, for the swampy, water-ridden part of the state I call home: low humidity, cool temperatures, clear, sun-lanced skies. My children and I awoke at noon to complete homeschooling lessons. As the spring days lengthened into summer, my children ran wild, exploring the forest around my house, picking blackberries, riding bikes and four-wheelers in their underwear. They clung to me, rubbed their faces into my stomach, and cried hysterically: I miss Daddy, they said. Their hair grew tangled and dense. I didn’t eat, except when I did, and then it was tortillas, queso, and tequila.
The absence of my Beloved echoed in every room of our house. Him folding me and the children in his arms on our monstrous fake-suede sofa. Him shredding chicken for enchiladas in the kitchen. Him holding our daughter by the hands and pulling her upwards, higher and higher, so she floated at the top of her leap in a long bed-jumping marathon. Him shaving the walls of the children’s playroom with a sander after an internet recipe for homemade chalkboard paint went wrong: green dust everywhere.
During the pandemic, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house, terrified I would find myself standing in the doorway of an ICU room, watching the doctors press their whole weight on the chest of my mother, my sisters, my children, terrified of the lurch of their feet, the lurch that accompanies each press that restarts the heart, the jerk of their pale, tender soles, terrified of the frantic prayer without intention that keens through the mind, the prayer for life that one says in the doorway, the prayer I never want to say again, the prayer that dissolves midair when the hush-click-hush-click of the ventilator drowns it, terrified of the terrible commitment at the heart of me that reasons that if the person I love has to endure this, then the least I can do is stand there, the least I can do is witness, the least I can do is tell them over and over again, aloud, I love you. We love you. We ain’t going nowhere.
As the pandemic settled in and stretched, I set my alarms to wake early, and on mornings after nights where I actually slept, I woke and worked on my novel in progress. The novel is about a woman who is even more intimately acquainted with grief than I am, an enslaved woman whose mother is stolen from her and sold south to New Orleans, whose lover is stolen from her and sold south, who herself is sold south and descends into the hell of chattel slavery in the mid-1800s. My loss was a tender second skin. I shrugged against it as I wrote, haltingly, about this woman who speaks to spirits and fights her way across rivers.
My commitment surprised me. Even in a pandemic, even in grief, I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead that sing to me, from their boat to my boat, on the sea of time. On most days, I wrote one sentence. On some days, I wrote 1,000 words. Many days, it and I seemed useless. All of it, misguided endeavor. My grief bloomed as depression, just as it had after my brother died at 19, and I saw little sense, little purpose in this work, this solitary vocation. Me, sightless, wandering the wild, head thrown back, mouth wide open, singing to a star-drenched sky. Like all the speaking, singing women of old, a maligned figure in the wilderness. Few listened in the night.
What resonated back to me: the emptiness between the stars. Dark matter. Cold.
Did you see it? My cousin asked me.
No. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it, I said. Her words began to flicker, to fade in and out. Grief sometimes makes it hard for me to hear. Sound came in snatches.
His knee, she said.
On his neck, she said.
Couldn’t breathe, she said.
He cried for his mama, she said.
I read about Ahmaud, I said. I read about Breonna.
I don’t say, but I thought it: I know their beloveds’ wail. I know their beloveds’ wail. I know their beloveds wander their pandemic rooms, pass through their sudden ghosts. I know their loss burns their beloveds’ throats like acid. Their families will speak, I thought. Ask for justice. And no one will answer, I thought. I know this story: Trayvon, Tamir, Sandra.
Cuz, I said, I think you told me this story before.
I think I wrote it.
I swallowed sour.
In the days after my conversation with my cousin, I woke to people in the streets. I woke to Minneapolis burning. I woke to protests in America’s heartland, Black people blocking the highways. I woke to people doing the haka in New Zealand. I woke to hoodie-wearing teens, to John Boyega raising a fist in the air in London, even as he was afraid he would sink his career, but still, he raised his fist. I woke to droves of people, masses of people in Paris, sidewalk to sidewalk, moving like a river down the boulevards. I knew the Mississippi. I knew the plantations on its shores, the movement of enslaved and cotton up and down its eddies. The people marched, and I had never known that there could be rivers such as this, and as protesters chanted and stomped, as they grimaced and shouted and groaned, tears burned my eyes. They glazed my face.
I sat in my stuffy pandemic bedroom and thought I might never stop crying. The revelation that Black Americans were not alone in this, that others around the world believed that Black Lives Matter broke something in me, some immutable belief I’d carried with me my whole life. This belief beat like another heart—thump—in my chest from the moment I took my first breath as an underweight, two-pound infant after my mother, ravaged by stress, delivered me at 24 weeks. It beat from the moment the doctor told my Black mother her Black baby would die. Thump.
That belief was infused with fresh blood during the girlhood I’d spent in underfunded public school classrooms, cavities eating away at my teeth from government-issued block cheese, powdered milk, and corn flakes. Thump. Fresh blood in the moment I heard the story of how a group of white men, revenue agents, had shot and killed my great-great-grandfather, left him to bleed to death in the woods like an animal, from the second I learned no one was ever held accountable for his death. Thump. Fresh blood in the moment I found out the white drunk driver who killed my brother wouldn’t be charged for my brother’s death, only for leaving the scene of the car accident, the scene of the crime. Thump.
This is the belief that America fed fresh blood into for centuries, this belief that Black lives have the same value as a plow horse or a grizzled donkey. I knew this. My family knew this. My people knew this, and we fought it, but we were convinced we would fight this reality alone, fight until we could no more, until we were in the ground, bones moldering, headstones overgrown above in the world where our children and children’s children still fought, still yanked against the noose, the forearm, the starvation and redlining and rape and enslavement and murder and choked out: I can’t breathe. They would say: I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
I cried in wonder each time I saw protest around the world because I recognized the people. I recognized the way they zip their hoodies, the way they raised their fists, the way they walked, the way they shouted. I recognized their action for what it was: witness. Even now, each day, they witness.
They witness injustice.
They witness this America, this country that gaslit us for 400 fucking years.
Witness that my state, Mississippi, waited until 2013 to ratify the 13th Amendment.
Witness that Mississippi didn’t remove the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag until 2020.
Witness Black people, Indigenous people, so many poor brown people, lying on beds in frigid hospitals, gasping our last breaths with COVID-riddled lungs, rendered flat by undiagnosed underlying conditions, triggered by years of food deserts, stress, and poverty, lives spent snatching sweets so we could eat one delicious morsel, savor some sugar on the tongue, oh Lord, because the flavor of our lives is so often bitter.
They witness our fight too, the quick jerk of our feet, see our hearts lurch to beat again in our art and music and work and joy. How revelatory that others witness our battles and stand up. They go out in the middle of a pandemic, and they march.
I sob, and the rivers of people run in the streets.
When my Beloved died, a doctor told me: The last sense to go is hearing. When someone is dying, they lose sight and smell and taste and touch. They even forget who they are. But in the end, they hear you.
I hear you.
I hear you.
You say:
I love you.
We love you.
We ain’t going nowhere.
I hear you say:
We here.
Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ antiracism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.
The OMB director, Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other material that teaches or suggests that the United States or any race or ethnicity is “inherently racist or evil”.
The memo comes as the nation has faced a reckoning this summer over racial injustice in policing and other spheres of American life. Trump has spent much of the summer defending the display of the Confederate battle flag and monuments of civil war rebels from protesters seeking their removal, in what he has called a “culture war” ahead of the 3 November election.
Meanwhile, he has rejected comments from the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, and others that there is “systemic racism” in policing and American culture that must be addressed.
How did the US's mainstream right end up openly supporting vigilante terror?
Richard Seymour
Read more
Vought’s memo cites “press reports” as contributing to Trump’s decision, apparently referring to segments on Fox News and other outlets that have stoked conservative outrage about the federal training.
Vought’s memo says additional federal guidance on training sessions is forthcoming, maintaining that “the President, and his Administration, are fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States”.
“The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed,” he added. “The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government.”
When rioters attack police, tear down statues, or demand submission from patrons in restaurants, they are motivated, in part, by Critical Race Theory. Andrew Breitbart saw it coming; President Trump is the first leader to do anything to fight it.
If the NFL owners and front office thought that adding Lift Every Voice and Sing to the pre-game program would mollify more players than it put off fans, they were likely wrong on both counts.
Given the powerful video put together by Dolphins players and their head coach to explain their reluctance to be on field for the cameras for yet more reverence theater, and the Texans’ decision to stay in the locker room before the game, this NFL-opening Sunday arrives with less settled than ever.
Whether players choose to stand or kneel, each gesture will be captured by the cameras, scrutinized and critiqued.
Or, as the Dolphins put it: “Decals and patches, fireworks and trumpets, we’re not puppets.”
This moment is decades in the making. This starts with the inclusion of the national anthem into many sporting events starting in World War I, continues to John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists at the 1968 Olympics, to the original 9/11, when the seventh-inning stretch began to accommodate America the Beautiful.
Then came San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem in order to draw attention to police violence in communities of color, and President Donald Trump’s rallying cry to NFL owners on players who did likewise to “get that sonofabitch off the field.”
Over the years the NFL cornered the market on military displays with all the subtlety of Team America: World Police. They included the pageantry of troops reunited with their families, fireworks and fighter jet flyovers and a side dish of wholesome T&A high-stepping into the stadium on fringed white cowboy boots, where giant American flags were stretched over an entire football field.
No wonder fans in Kansas City booed the Moment of Unity when the Texans and Chiefs came together at midfield on Thursday night. Nothing even exploded!
It’s impossible to imagine fans booing if players had come together after a hurricane or tornado had just ripped through any part of the country. Or for those left homeless after wildfires. But when it comes to Black lives, it seems fans care less about those suffering and more about how it forces them to see the casualties of their privilege.
And now teams are left to debate internally what to do, how to challenge the league, the fans, and each other, and come to some plan that honors the platonic ideal of team unity they’ve been spoon fed — but only when it meets the needs of their employers.
The Dolphins: “Ask the pundits and we shouldn’t have a say. If you speak up for change, then I’ll shut up and play. If we remain silent, that would just be selfish. Since they don’t have a voice, we’re speaking up for the helpless. It’s not enough to act like you care for the troops. Millions get paid for patriotism. You get paid to salute.”
The players were referencing the 2015 revelation that the NFL was paid millions by the Department of Defense to include these displays on gameday. It was a recruiting tool for the military, and the NFL is a business.
Is it patriotic to allow yourself to be part of the financial arrangement set up between the military and the league? Why isn’t it just as patriotic to want the same benefits for Black communities that NFL money affords many of the individuals who play?
Who gets to decide how we define what patriotism is, whether it includes the idea of community building or protecting our elders by wearing masks in a pandemic? These questions are being publicly asked now by the players who have been told for years to stand and be silent.
The most powerful commentary in sports right now continues to come from athletes who have been instructed to shut up and dribble, or catch, or run.
Between the Dolphins’ video and the one released by a number of players, including Super Bowl MVP Pat Mahomes, in the wake of the George Floyd killing imploring commissioner Roger Goodell to listen to them, it’s impressive how effectively these young men are using their collective voices and social media.
It was actually a notable voice in academia, sports and social justice, Dr. Harry Edwards, who suggested Lift Every Voice and Sing should be added to the NFL’s pregame lineup.
It was a suggestion made when the NFL’s solution to Kaepernick was to effectively freeze him out of the league. Kaepernick and teammate Eric Reid eventually settled a lawsuit with the NFL contending just that, but despite starting this conversation the NFL appears willing to have now, it should be noted that neither man has a job in the league this opening weekend.
This moment isn’t without risk. Kaepernick hasn’t taken a snap since 2016, and Black coaches and quarterbacks have historically had fewer opportunities. If those voices lead, they could find temporary support but be similarly frozen out if the mood of these owners shifts.
And so here we are, a pandemic in full flower and the NFL season underway. Who stands, who sits, who jeers, who boycotts — these are as much a question as the winners and losers in the game. It comes from decades of lauding the idea of team, without caring for the communities many players came from.
The Dolphins get the last word. “If we could just right our wrongs we wouldn’t need two songs. We don’t need another publicity parade. So we’ll just stay inside until it’s time to play the game.”
I don’t know what we expected.
Despite the best efforts of a good chunk of America, everything continues to be a flaming dumpster fire. Why should the NFL’s first Moment of Unity be any different?
In case you missed it, those were fans at the NFL opener in Kansas City booing the Moment of Unity.
While the Chiefs remained on the field, arms linked, for the playing of Lift Every Voice and Sing (also known as the “Black National Anthem”) and the Star-Spangled Banner, the Texans returned to the locker room for the playing of both anthems. Afterwards, both teams met at mid-field for a moment of silence to honor the fight for racial justice. And that’s when the booing started.
Because this is where we are as a country. We can’t even acknowledge that racial equality is a laudable goal without it being somehow controversial. A significant portion of America has swung so far to the right, that people are booing the idea of judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Of course, they’re happy to cheer for Black players on the field, just not off it.
The portion of the NFL fan base that was appalled by the boos were immediately white-splained by the kind of people who take part in Trump boat rallies that “it’s not about race, it’s about keeping the politics out of sports,” and that “sports have always been an escape from reality.”
So let’s be clear: Sports are not now, and have never been, free of politics. Before it there was Colin Kaepernick, there was Billie Jean King, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali, Althea Gibson, and Jackie Robinson. We have worked through injustices as a nation as much on the field as off. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, disingenuous, or both.
Moreover, the only people who have ever had the luxury of viewing sports as an escape are cisgender, heterosexual, white men. The rest of us have always seen the same inequalities in sports we see in society on a daily basis. Be it racial discrimination in hiring coaches and managers, violence against women, or athletes who spout homophobic or bigoted views, the ugliness of the inequities of American life are there in sports for anyone who wants to look.
I’m so sorry, fans at Arrowhead, that players dared to bring up issues that actually affect their lives and the lives of the people they care about. I’m sure you’d much rather have them perform for your pleasure at your command. How dare they remind you that not everyone has the same privileges you do. How unthinkable of them to sully your evening with reality. How absolutely tawdry of them to inject race into a sport played predominantly by Black men. How upsetting that there’s almost nowhere for you to go to escape the fact of racial injustice in America. Maybe try a maskless Trump rally at the bottom of a lake next time.
As for the players, you’re lucky they stayed on the field. I, for one, would have loved it if they had heard the boos, turned around, and marched back to the locker room, refusing to risk their health for fans who can’t even acknowledge their basic humanity.
As for the fans at Arrowhead, somewhere a whole bunch of white villages are missing their (racist) idiots.
Axel “ZexsOG” Torres, a member of the Army National Guard Twitch stream repeated an antisemitic phrase about the Holocaust while streaming on Twitch on August 27. “Yo, six million wasn’t enough,” Torres said. “Thank you so much for the follow, I appreciate you.”
“Six million wasn’t Enough” is a popular phrase among white supremacists and Neo Nazis. It’s a reference to the number of Jewish people who were killed in the Holcaust. It’s not clear Torres was aware he was spouting an antisemitic phrase. On Twitch, it’s typical for a streamer to say the username of a person who follows them or gives them a big enough donation during the stream.
A Twitch viewer with the username “6millionwasnt_nough” clipped the moment and saved it on Twitch under the title “Army Agreed.” During the stream, Torres was watching teammates play Call of Duty: Warzone and interacting with fans. Just before he shared a antisemitic phrase, he shouted out someone else named Hyper Eagle.
“This was an unfortunate situation and goes against the Army values of fostering inclusiveness and diversity. We are working with our volunteers on the [Army National Guard] Twitch Page to educate them on screen names that may have racial or negative sentiment behind them,” Lieutenant colonel Jamie Alan Davis of the Army National Guard told Motherboard in an email.
“The COVID19 pandemic has forced recruiters to find creative ways to connect with their target audience, which isn't always perfect, and new approaches come with new challenges. We have since deleted the clip and we will no longer announce those types of screen names during live streams.”
On his public Facebook page, which went private yesterday afternoon after Motherboard reached out to the National Guard for comment, Torres shared posts that portrayed Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero and said "welfare destroyed black families." In another Facebook post, Torres expressed support for a bill under which "rioters" would lose welfare checks.
Torres did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.
This incident is just the latest in a series that shows the U.S. Military had no idea what it was getting into on Twitch. On Saturday night, a member of the U.S. Navy esports team played a game with “close friends” on an official Navy stream. The Sailors' friends used the usernames “Japan 1945,” “Nagasaki,” and “Gamer Word,” which is a known stand in for the n-word.
After the incident was covered on Motherboard and other publications, the Navy removed the Sailor from the U.S. Navy esports team.
"After the events surrounding the stream of Among Us on Saturday night, where three non-Navy affiliated users decided to use extremely inappropriate in-game usernames, we have paused streaming and are re-evaluating how we vet users who are allowed to play with us on stream in an effort to ensure that this does not happen again,” Command Lara Bollinger of the U.S. Navy Public Affairs Office told Motherboard in an email. “We do not condone those usernames and the Navy Goats and Glory team member’s immediate response that night was neither quick nor correct. His reaction to the situation was unbecoming of a member of our team and he will no longer be streaming with us."
The Navy says it doesn't condone this behavior, but it's increasingly obvious that the Pentagon was not prepared for what it meant to be on Twitch. Streaming live video for hours at a time, without a script, improvising and reacting to an onslaught of feedback, is a hard task for anyone. Judging by the performance we've seen across the military's various Twitch channels so far, it's not clear that the people it's choosing to represent it are ready for the job, which many, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, think shouldn't exist in the first place.
It was insidiously easy to get a member of the Army National Guard to repeat antisemitic speech without realizing it. It was also easy for a Guardsman like Torres—who has posted on his Facebook page about how welfare is destroying black families and shares misinformation about LGBTQ people—to become the face of the military. The fact that it was so easy means the military is not prepared for the extremist ideologies that have infiltrated so much of online life, including the gaming community.
Goats & Glory, the U.S. Navy Esports team, played Among Us on Twitch this Saturday night and hosted other players who used the names “Japan 1945,” “Nagasaki,” and “Gamer Word.” Nagasaki and Japan 1945 are references to the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of World War II. “Gamer Word” is a reference to the n-word. During the one hour and 17minute long stream, Pepe the Frog Twitch chat emojis covered portions of the screen.
A video of the stream is still up and has been viewed more than 1,000 times, hundreds of more views than a typical U.S. Navy Twitch stream. Personnel Specialist Brandon Chandler was running the stream.
“We’re going to play Among Us with some of my close friends,” Chandler said.
Among Us is a multiplayer game where players take on rolls on a space station. Most of the crew is trying to fix the station but one person is an imposter tasked with killing as many people as possible. Between rounds, the players vote to see who they think is the imposter.
After the first round, the user in the game named Gamer Word hadn’t voted and everyone was waiting on them. “Just waiting on you, uh, individual,” Chandler said, hiding his face from the camera. He laughs.
“Don’t say it,” one of the other players said in a taunting voice while Chandler laughs.
“Don’t say his name, don’t say it,” a second player said.
These weren’t random people playing with Chandler, but people he described as his “close friends.” To join a game of Among Us, players have to input a code that’s on the host’s screen. Chandler gave the code to his friends and hid the image of the code on the public Twitch stream by using a Pepe the Frog emoji to block it out. The legacy of Pepe the Frog is complicated, and he’s a popular character on Twitch. He’s also listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.
An hour into the stream, Chandler paused and switched out the map. When the stream returned, the player’s names had been changed. Gone was “Gamer Word” and the references to Nagasaki and Japan 1945.
“Almost 200 people in here now,” a member of the U.S. Navy esports team who was off camera said after the stream restarted. Viewers flooded into the stream after news of the player names hit Twitter.
“Nice,” Chandler said. “Poggers.”
Chandler played Among Us for a few more minutes before switching to League of Legends. But he abandoned a match during champion selection and got locked out of starting another round for five minutes. “It looks like we’re going to have to end the stream a little early,” Thessa L Reed, another member of Goats & Glory, said, citing technical difficulties and a personal issue.
"After the events surrounding the stream of Among Us on Saturday night, where three non-Navy affiliated users decided to use extremely inappropriate in-game usernames, we have paused streaming and are re-evaluating how we vet users who are allowed to play with us on stream in an effort to ensure that this does not happen again,” Command Lara Bollinger of the U.S. Navy Public Affairs Office told Motherboard in an email. “We do not condone those usernames and the Navy Goats and Glory team member’s immediate response that night was neither quick nor correct. His reaction to the situation was unbecoming of a member of our team and he will no longer be streaming with us."
Twitch did not return our request for comment.
The U.S. Navy, Army, Air Force, and National Guard all maintain a presence on Twitch and other online gaming spaces now. It’s not going well. The Pentagon’s rush into gaming is both a recruitment drive and a branding opportunity. It’s gotten into trouble for possibly violating the first amendment by banning viewers, and drawn the legislative ire of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who attempted to pass legislation that would prevent the Pentagon from using its resources to stream on Twitch.
The Dallas Independent School district apologized for an assignment that asked high school students to write an essay about a modern "hero" and suggested Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with killing two people during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse was suggested as "hero for the modern age" along with the possible subjects of Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, George Floyd and Joseph Rosenbaum — one of the Rittenhouse's alleged victims.
Rittenhouse, of Antioch, Illinois, was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree intentional homicide in connection with the Aug. 25 shooting deaths of Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber during protests over the shooting by police of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in Kenosha.
Kristian Hernandez said that her younger brother, a student at W.T. White High School in Dallas, shared details of the assignment with his family.
"My brother was really in disbelief that this was actually an assignment," Hernandez told NBC affiliate KXAS.
"The juxtaposition of George Floyd's name with Kyle's name was just astounding," she said. “The value of Black lives are not up for debate, and that’s what it felt like this was sort of getting at — by way of the names that were included."
The Dallas Independent School District apologized for the "unapproved assignment" and removed it from its online portal, according to NBC affiliate KXAS. Students do not have to complete the assignment.
In a statement provided to KXAS, the school district said the post is under investigation and that it would not provide further comment.
"Racial equity is a top priority in Dallas ISD, and we remain committed to providing a robust teaching environment where all students can learn. It is important that we continue to be culturally sensitive to our diverse populations and provide a space of respect and value," the district said.
Can't wait for the Nazi to racistly explain away this one.
No idea why a Policeman would fire wantonly into another apartment.
The Officer involved was fired. The Grand Jury brought charges. Court will get to decide, based upon evidence, etc.
Firing into the wrong apartment, hitting no people, little to relate to the tragic death of the EMS Worker, in a different apartment. Officers had a Warrant for the apartment where Briana Taylor lived, seeking to find a 'ex-boyfriend' at that address, along with drug related, weapon related items.
Seems the 'ex-boyfriend' no longer lived at that address. The warrant was for the apartment, entry and search. Police knocked, according to testimony given to the Grand Jury, by the 'then current boyfriend' who was there, and who FIRED THROUGH THE DOOR and SHOT A COP, upon hearing the KNOCK... Police, with a wounded officer among them, returned the gunfire.
Democrat Biden Voters so far TODAY have shot two Police Officers, and set fires, and caused general mayhem and chaos, for no valid reason at all, with the full support of elected Democrats, and JoE Biden despite having a huge Police presence, and 500 National Guard troops so as to save the law abiding population from the Democrat Marxist Anarchist Biden Voter rioters.
So, your question had to do with the cop who broke laws, got fired, and will face a Trial for his actions... and this was racist how?
If you’re surprised, you haven’t been paying attention.
This afternoon, a Louisville grand jury indicted one of the three officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s murder, Brett Hankison, on charges that had nothing to do with Taylor’s death. Hankison was indicted on three counts of wanton endangerment, a Class D felony with a maximum penalty of five years in prison. If found guilty on all charges and given the max, Hankison would spend, at most, 15 years in prison. The other two officers involved in Taylor’s killing will face no charges.
The charge of “wanton endangerment” is typically used in a case where a person acts recklessly, but rarely used in cases that end in death. Wanton endangerment in the first degree is defined as “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life, he wantonly engages in conduct which creates a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person.”
What’s more, assuming the indictment was read out correctly, Hankison was not charged with firing his gun into Breonna Taylor’s apartment, thus killing her. Instead, Hankison is charged with firing a gun “wantonly” into the apartments surrounding the one Taylor was sleeping in, but not the apartment she was in. Meaning the grand jury found that Hankison and his fellow officers have basically been legally absolved by a grand jury of any wrongdoing. In fact, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a fast-rising star in the Republic party, stated at a press conference this afternoon that there was “no evidence” that Hankison fired the bullet that killed Breonna Taylor.
Let’s be clear: No officers were charged with any crimes related to the death of Breonna Taylor — not even the officer who fatally shot her.
So, what would it take for a grand jury to find a police officer guilty of killing a Black person in America? If sleeping in your home when police burst in and shoot you won’t do it, what will? We already know cops can kill a Black person for checking to see who is creeping around the windows outside their home. Or while detaining them for potentially minor crimes. Or when pulling them over for a traffic stop when they do everything right. Taylor’s case, in which the police kicked the door to her apartment and shot her as she jumped out of bed, was literally the best-case scenario, in terms of holding a police officer responsible for the killing of a Black person. And yet here we are again.
For the past several months, athletes, most notably those in the NBA and WNBA, have been vocal about Taylor’s murder – frequently making sure her her name was front and center before, during, and after games. The WNBA players, who dedicated their season to Taylor back in July, linked arms and wore identical shirts saying “Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor” during their day of reflection in August.
LeBron James and the Lakers wore hats meant to keep the focus on getting justice for Taylor. Actresses Regina King and Uzo Aduba both wore Breonna Taylor shirts while appearing at the Emmys just this week. It was hard to go an hour, much less a day on social media without seeing the hashtag #ArrestTheCopsWhoKilledBreonnaTaylor.
While we wait for the reaction of the sports world, it’s worth asking white America, “Under what circumstances would you consider the killing of a Black person by a cop to be murder?” Because the way it stands right now, I don’t know that most white people have an answer.
And let’s not put all the blame on the grand jury. Attorney General Cameron could have handled this case much differently, arresting and charging the officers involved with crimes relating to homicide, held a preliminary hearing before a judge, and then proceeded to go to the grand jury for an indictment. That’s how most felonies are prosecuted in Kentucky, and it lets the grand jury know that the prosecution is backed by the approval of the State. But putting the entire thing in the hands of a grand jury has become the modus operandi for prosecutors too afraid to hold police accountable for their actions. Easier to just wash your hands of it.
If Cameron et al wanted the officers who killed Taylor charged with murder, they would have been. But Cameron, who appeared at the Republican National Convention with President Trump, is on the shortlist to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. With a prosecuting attorney beholden to the most blatantly white supremecist president since Andrew Jackson, Breonna Taylor never had a chance.
The outrage from athletes, many of whom championed justice for Taylor, have started to roll in, including former Louisville star Donovan Mitchell:
https://twitter.com/spidadmitchell/status/1308833999536689155
There will be protests tonight. Maybe riots. Hopefully, there will be discussion and growth for our country. But for Breonna Taylor, there will be no justice.
Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.[/color]
#BlackLivesMatter
#BanTheNaziFromKB
Rukmini Callimachi
Did you hear them call out and say, “I’m police?” Anything like that?
Rukmini Callimachi
Of the roughly one dozen people that I spoke to, I found only one neighbor, and it was the man who happened to be immediately on the staircase above Breonna Taylor’s apartment, who said that he heard the police announce themselves.
Rukmini Callimachi
And you’re sure you only heard police once? Police!
Neighbor 1
Yeah, I heard “police.”
Rukmini Callimachi
And he claims that he heard them say it only once.
Neighbor 1
One time.
Rukmini Callimachi
Police.
Neighbor 2
I never once heard them that night announce themselves.
Neighbor 3
There was no identification that, oh, we’re police.
Neighbor 2
I didn’t hear that at all.
Rukmini Callimachi
Everybody else said that the first thing they heard —
Neighbor 3
No. They’re just — pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
Sorry ESPN, Jalen Rose ain’t sticking to hoops.
The ESPN NBA analyst used halftime of the network’s broadcast of Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals to call out the city of Louisville for failing to issue indictments in the death of Breonna Taylor.
“It would be a great day to arrest the cops that murdered Breonna Taylor!” yelled Rose as the show headed to commercial break.
Have a listen:
https://twitter.com/colbydroscher/status/1308951028134539267
Hours earlier in Louisville, a grand jury decided not to hand down an indictment on any charges related to homicide against any of the officers responsible for the death of Taylor, who was asleep in her apartment when cops conducted a ‘no-knock’ raid of her home. Only one of the officers was indicted, hit with three counts of wanton endangerment, a Class D felony with a maximum penalty of five years in prison, for firing bullets into neighboring apartments. Taylor’s shooting? Nothing.
Yeah.
And so, Toe the Mod can change a thread title at will, and that is ok?Yeah.
And so, Toe the Mod can change a thread title at will, and that is ok?Yeah.
No. It is not allowed. I corrected them all.
The level of violence of the police entry was calibrated up based on the race of those known/suspected to be inside. If white people were known to be inside it would have gone differently up to and including a decreased level of police violence and an occupant firing back bringing any charges.
Oh, and joan is a racist piece of shit.
You've got that right Jed.
Racist!
"...That consent decree has now expired, allowing Republicans to organize poll watching and other "ballot-security" efforts..."
Now Republicans have the identical rights as do Democrats, eh?
i am almost positive you are fat have a nose ring and purple hair..
"...That consent decree has now expired, allowing Republicans to organize poll watching and other "ballot-security" efforts..."attempting to intimidate people at the polls again, like tRump is encouraging them to do.
Now Republicans have the identical rights as do Democrats, eh?
Just google ‘Trump poll watchers’ numbnuts, it’s on every news site except Fox. Don Jr was promoting a website to recruit these people.
Voter intimidation is illegal, so I hope a lot of Trump supporters are jailed for this.
The more indignantly people claim they’re not racist, the less I believe them.
We’re all racists, or more broadly, bigots. We all make assumptions about other people based on their appearance, their skin color, their race, their nationality. . . ancestral, previous or current, their gender, their various religions or lack of, their orientations and affiliations, and other superficial perceptions we have about them.
The question really becomes, to what degree to you make those prejudicial assumptions, and to what degree do recognize yourself doing it, and to what degree do you do anything positive about it?
At 59 years old, I’m still a work in progress on these matters and really everything else in my life. We all should be striving to be better people, to be more knowledgeable, to be more compassionate, to be more forgiving, and to be more accepting of people as they are.
Every human should look upon themselves and self-reflect on these matters. But so many do not, and revel and wallow in their prejudices, racism and bigotry, like that’s an end in and of itself, something to be proud of and not to correct?
I’m a work in progress. Fuck you if you’re not.
(https://i.imgur.com/FkoBNhB.jpg)CRT is not history of racism it is theory. not fact. Ask Black people how many of them fault Africa for selling them into slavery and see what the answer is. The fact is the true history of slavery goes a lot deeper and the true history of slavery is how people just don't let it go. Watch this guy's video's he tells you point blank that the real racists are those claiming racism. https://www.youtube.com/c/ModernRenaissanceMan1176/videos
Look! FOX found a black guy with an “Uncle Tom” coffee mug who spouts off there is no racism! Jeezus.
Look! FOX found a black guy with an “Uncle Tom” coffee mug who spouts off there is no racism! Jeezus.
The Republican Party used to cum every time they found a black person in their midst. And as long as they acted deferentially to white Republicans (like Clarence Thomas did to Scalia), all was good. But the moment they asserted themselves, they were drummed out of the party like Colin Powell and Michael Steele.
The Republican Party as it is today needs to be destroyed. I’m an actual believer in the two party system, but both parties need to adhere to two maxims:
1. Racism still exists and is wrong.
2. The truth matters.
The current Republican Party is racist and living in an alternative fictional world.
I like the new “ignore user” feature on the platform update.
Why won’t Donald Trump rush to tweet criticism of attacks against Muslims? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/06/19/why-wont-donald-trump-rush-to-tweet-criticism-of-attacks-against-muslims/?utm_term=.8c311655fb7d)Nobody should defend musloids. All they want to do is kill everybody and spread. Just like they've done since it was invented. Read the koran, it is a battle plan.
#Resist