Racism is alive and well, Thanks Trump and his supporters!

[Athos_131]

White People Want Trump

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online

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.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

'GO BACK TO MEXICO': VIRAL VIDEO SHOWS BURGER KING MANAGER ABUSED BY TWO WOMEN

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."

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Gov. Bill Lee signs Nathan Bedford Forrest Day proclamation, is not considering law change

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

BORDER PATROL CHIEF CARLA PROVOST WAS A MEMBER OF SECRET FACEBOOK GROUP

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.

#Resist

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AOC's Testimony About What She Saw At The Border Is Truly Harrowing

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.

https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1149699382427770882

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1149714706413817856

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.

https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1149701759243300865

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.

https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1149702196247834625

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.

#Resist

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Trump tells four liberal congresswomen to ‘go back’ to their countries, prompting Pelosi to defend them

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.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The unmistakable ugliness of Trump urging brown-skinned congresswomen to ‘go back’ to their countries

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Anyone defending that is a racist.

Preemptively, if you try:

Go Fuck Yourself.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Son, husband of immigrants tells U.S.-born political opponents to ‘go back’ to where they came from

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump Fans the Flames of a Racial Fire

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump’s Tweets Prove That He Is a Raging Racist

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump’s racist tweets are one of the lowest moments of his presidency

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

‘1950s racism straight from the White House’: Trump’s tweets revolt politicians around the world

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.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump is truly America’s Bigot-in-Chief

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The toxic power of Trump’s politics

“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?

#Resist

[Athos_131]

‘This is the agenda of white nationalists’: Four minority congresswomen condemn Trump’s racist remarks

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!”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Top Immigration Official Claims He Didn't See Trump's Racist Tweets But Also Says They Weren't Racist

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

This Is What Fascism Looks Like

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.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump and His Deplorables

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.

#Resist