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

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Offline Athos_131

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Reply #1320 on: July 19, 2019, 12:47:45 AM
The Explicit Embrace of Racism Is Next

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If you set aside boiling rage for a moment and look coldly at the progression of recent American politics, you can see where we are heading. Into the abyss.

To a large degree, the most lasting legacy of Martin Luther King, Junior’s leadership of the civil rights movement has not been the actual accomplishment of the movement’s broadest goals—America remains a racially segregated and unequal society—but rather a shift in the nation’s conventional wisdom about what falls within the bounds of acceptable, respectable thought. Within the span of a single generation, outright public racism went from respectable to disreputable.

Here I will pause to note that it should go without saying that the substance of racism and the pursuit of racist policy goals have remained firmly in place. To frame it in the harshest possible way, you could say that the civil rights movement achieved the ceremonial placing of a fig leaf atop the public discourse about race. But even in the harshest light, this sort of shift has had meaning: for several decades now, children have grown up in a country in which the official line, at least, has been one of pro-equality and disapproval of racism, rather than vice versa. This slide of racist thought into official disrepute has shaped the media, and pop culture, and education, and political rhetoric. I make no claim that this change has been as meaningful as it could be, or should be, or, indeed, that it has been pursued less than cynically by the majority of the political and economic establishment of white America. But it exists. It has persisted for longer than many of us have been alive. And it has had, at the very least, an effect on the perception of everyone who has grown up in post-civil rights era America. Racism is still pervasive, but it is not officially condoned.

This evolution in our national tone, I assumed, was a permanent one. The battle was no longer mostly against explicit, legal racism, but rather against implicit racism and racist structures and inequality rooted and racism—all of which would always be denied, because racism itself was no longer considered respectable. The most obvious manifestation of this is the fact that “racist” seems to the one of the last things that white people genuinely object to being called. Even a powerful person who constantly speaks and acts in ways that are racist, and who pursues policies that will inarguably achieve racist ends, will bristle and wail at being branded a racist. It carries the power of a word that was forged in a social justice struggle spanning centuries. Those who explicitly embraced racism were pushed to the fringes; the price of staying in the mainstream was raised by a token amount, to the disavowal of racist ideals even if you in fact operated in a way that furthered oppression.

I’m afraid that even the very thin layer of perceptual progress that seemed to be permanent may be eroding after all. The cycle of white grievance is now on the verge of springing forth in an ugly and shockingly retrograde way. The Republican party, in particular, has spent the decades since Nixon’s “Southern strategy” refining its racist dog whistles. Now it appears ready to toss them all aside. Welfare queens, Willie Horton, the use of MLK quotes about equality as a pretext for opposing affirmative action... all these things are too subtle for the Trump era. We now seem to be close—very close, closer than would have seemed possible just a few years ago—to the day when mainstream Republicans begin simply embracing the “racist” label. By this I mean that they stop denying it and instead argue that it is a justified position. It is not hard to imagine, is it? Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity grow tired of their pro forma evasions and decide to just bask publicly in the comfort of the cloak of white nationalism; Trump himself, neither savvy enough to concoct plausible denials nor with much incentive to care any more, grabs hold of the “racist” flag and waves it around, hugs it, treats it as red meat to toss to his base, just another transgression against political correctness; and the more right-wing portion of the Republican establishment, from Congress to think tanks to Southern statehouses, takes a long, satisfied breath, glances around to make sure they have the blessing of Fox News, and at last stops pretending they ever really cared about racism in the first place. If Trump’s political ascendance has proven anything, it is that a large portion of white America has just been waiting for cultural permission to lean into the racism that has always been there. They have eagerly walked the path from “Mexican rapists” to banning Muslims to “Build the Wall” to “Send her back!” And here we are: tiptoeing right on the far edge of just saying “fuck it.” If they do decide to say “fuck it,” things will get very dark. Darker, even, than they are now. Because millions of people will no longer feel obligated to even act as if they care.

We’re all racist. This is America. Did you grow up in America? You are racist. You grew up in a racist country, and we all spend our lives marinating in America’s legacy of racism, soaking it in by osmosis. It is not a moral judgment. It’s a fact. Some people accept this, and work to overcome and change it. Other people deny it, and let things carry on as they are. And still others wallow in it, drink it in, and allow it to poison their minds forever. Collectively, we in America have been fighting this battle with ourselves for 400 years. We make a little progress, and then we fall back. The sort of backsliding we are facing right now is the dangerous kind. When the “racist” label loses its sting—when it is picked up as a point of pride—we will move into a qualitatively different time. A more ominous time. It is easy to mock this all as hand-wringing over window dressing, given the fact that racism itself has been persisting just fine for all these years. But the public expectation that even racists would act as if they thought racism was bad had value: it was a sign that they thought that the weight of public opinion was on the other side. If that disappears, the poison that so many people have feeding on in private will become the main course. And there will be nothing else for anyone to eat.

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Reply #1321 on: July 19, 2019, 12:50:06 AM
Top Searches on Merriam-Webster Include 'Fascism' and 'Racism' After President Trump's Latest Rally

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Donald Trump held another neo-fascist rally yesterday in North Carolina, where the crowd chanted things like “treason,” “traitor,” and “send her back,” while the president talked about Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Online dictionary searches in the U.S. from last night show just how bad things have gotten.

Merriam-Webster reports that the most common searches last night included the terms: racism, socialism, fascism, concentration camp, xenophobia, and bigot. The searches are quite a snapshot of what it’s like to live in 2019, when toxic xenophobia and hatred are coming not just from the political fringes but from the most powerful man in the country.

The word “racism” received the highest number of searches last night, probably because there’s an ongoing debate in the U.S. over the president’s claims that Democratic women should “go back” to their countries. Three of the four women the president talked about were born in the U.S. and the fourth, Rep. Omar, became a naturalized citizen as a child.

“If they don’t love it, tell them to leave it,” Trump told the crowd on Wednesday in Greenville, North Carolina. “They don’t love our country. I think in some cases they hate our country.”

President Trump has escalated his rhetoric in recent months, not merely claiming that Democrats oppose his policies, but that they oppose America itself. Last month, Trump said that Democrats “want to destroy our country as we know it.” And when a reporter said in May that treason is punishable by death, Trump didn’t object to the suggestion.

The word “socialism” was the second most common word searched last night as Americans continue to debate what the political philosophy actually means. Some Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, have started to call Democrats “communists,” a more inflammatory word that invokes the Red Scare of the 1950s led by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. President Trump used the words socialist and socialism at least seven times last night, by our count.

“Fascism” was the third most popular word searched on Merriam-Webster, and it’s easy to see why. The definition at the online dictionary is on-point for what we’re witnessing in the U.S.:

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

The term “concentration camp” was the fourth most popular search last night, referring to the system of camps that the U.S. government is currently operating for asylum seekers at the southern border. Trump defended the camps and feigned outrage that anyone would dare call them concentration camps. The president pointed to a recent visit by Vice President Mike Pence to one of the camps in Texas, claiming that the experience proved migrants were being treated well.

“Mike Pence went down, just a few days ago, with members of Congress and the media and you looked at those so-called horrible concentration camps... they said, ‘wow, these places are clean, wow, they have air conditioning, they have water’...” Trump said.

This, of course, is a lie. Journalists on the ground at the McAllen, Texas concentration camp on July 12 reported that it was 99 degrees inside and that there was no air conditioning. And the government’s own watchdog has cited the facilities as dangerous and unsanitary.

“We are concerned that overcrowding and prolonged detention represent an immediate risk to the health and safety of DHS agents and officers, and to those detained,” the government report from last month reads, adding that some of the camps are a “ticking time bomb.”

Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham seemed to love Trump’s performance last night. One guest on Ingraham’s show even said that Rep. Omar is not an American.

Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley took to Twitter yesterday to confront the bigotry being stoked by Trump. And Rep. Omar responded with a poem from Maya Angelou:

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1151656827106541569

Bigot, the sixth most commonly searched word last night, wasn’t uttered at yesterday’s Trump rally, but it did pop up from an unlikely source just a few short years ago.

“You know how you can make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell,” Senator Lindsey Graham told CNN on December 8, 2015. “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

You’re not wrong, Senator Graham. But what happened to you since 2015?

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Reply #1322 on: July 19, 2019, 12:53:39 AM
Who really hates America here?

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Trump is now pretending that when the crowd at his latest bacchanal of hate chanted “Send her back," it caused him great distress. He’s doing what he often does when receiving criticism: Lie about it, but with a lie so obvious that his supporters know he’s not really serious and that he still wants them to go on doing what they’re doing.

Here’s what he said:

“I wasn’t happy with the message they gave last night,” Trump said of the crowd at his rally in Greenville, N.C., Wednesday night. “I was not happy when I heard that chant.”

Pressed by a reporter why he did not try to stop the chant directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Trump said he thought he had done so by starting to speak again “very quickly.”

“I started very quickly, and maybe you know that,” he said.

In fact, the president did not start speaking immediately but paused for about 13 seconds as the chants were heard.


Right now, Republicans are struggling to answer questions about all this in a way that doesn’t implicate them in the fact that the racist president they have slavishly supported is making it quite clear that racism will be the foundation of his reelection effort — and that the most ardent racists among his supporters couldn’t be happier about it.

Those Republicans can’t condemn Trump, let alone the voters on whom their own political survival depends. So they seem to be coalescing around the idea that, while a stray comment here or there might be regrettable, the real problem is the four congresswomen and their hatred for America. A brief roundup:

“Is it ‘racist’ to tell people who have contempt for the country — who abhor the common culture that makes us American — that they ought to go back to where they came from?” asks Andrew McCarthy in the National Review.

“This is about love for America. Certain people HATE our Country,” Trump tweets.

”We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists,” says Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “They hate America.”

“Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals,” says Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.).

“I’m sort of dumbfounded how unappreciative she is of our country,” says Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about Omar.


Let’s dig down into this idea of hatred for America. What exactly does it mean? If you disagree with the policies of the federal government, does that mean you hate America? How about if you find American culture contemptible? What if you think that core American values such as democracy and freedom of speech are unimportant or unworthy of being spread as widely as possible?

The truth is that, when we say someone “hates America,” we’re describing what we think is a feeling they have. But if you were to ask the conservatives who throw around this charge to articulate a general class of statement that, once uttered, indicates a hatred of America, then show how those four congresswomen’s statements fell into that category, I doubt they could do it.

For instance, many people responded to Omar’s criticism of American policy toward Israel by saying she was anti-American. But if I said, “So you mean that taking the position that current American foreign policy is counterproductive or morally problematic is always proof that one hates America?” they’d probably say, “Well no, that’s not really what I meant.”

Another example: At his rally, Trump referenced the fact that, earlier this year, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said, “We’re going to go in and impeach the motherf----r.” On Wednesday, Trump said, “That’s not somebody that loves our country.” So is it that proposing to impeach a sitting president means you hate America? Is it that using profanity means you hate America?

Trump also has a habit of saying we shouldn’t even espouse our traditional values because we aren’t worthy of them, as in the time he insisted that Russian President Vladimir Putin shouldn’t be criticized for having journalists and political opponents murdered because “What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

The president’s own hypocrisy is beyond argument. But I also want to draw attention to something else: Conservatives constantly criticize American culture, yet somehow no one suggests that means they “hate America.” Why is that?

In conservative evangelical circles especially, America is considered a fallen land that has gone into an irredeemable state of moral depravity. Gay people are allowed to marry, teenagers stubbornly continue to have sex, prayer has been banished from public schools. American culture has become a sewer.

Cultural conservatives believe, and not without reason, that the country has left their values behind. They don’t react to this by saying, “All cultures evolve, even if it can be a little disorienting at times.” They react with anger and dismay, and a desire to change things back to the way they used to be. Does that mean they hate America?

We know the answer: As far as Republicans are concerned, their motives are always pure and their patriotism always beyond question. But when Democrats do exactly the same things as Republicans have done, it is proof only of their seething hatred of America.

When we criticize a Democratic president or his policies, it means we love America; when you criticize a Republican president or his policies, it means you hate America. When we criticize American culture for its licentiousness, it means we love America; when you say racism is still a powerful force in our national life, it means you hate America. When we say our economic system undermines the traditional family it means we love America; when you say our economic system exploits workers and creates inequality it means you hate America.

Speaking of the four Democratic congresswomen at his rally, Trump said, “They speak so badly of our country.” But few things have ever spoken worse of our country than the fact that we made Trump our president. Here’s hoping that what’s great about America will enable us to recover.

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Reply #1323 on: July 19, 2019, 12:56:11 AM
Trump chooses open racism. What does his party choose?

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In the American political system, parties have a certain “circuit breaker” role to play. Seven years ago, the Republican National Committee withdrew support from Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri after he tried to distinguish between “legitimate rape” and a different kind of rape. That stance probably cost the Republicans a seat in the U.S. Senate, but it put the party on record for being on the side of decency.

In 1991, David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, placed second in the Louisiana open primary for governor. President George H.W. Bush denounced Duke, saying that he “has a long record, an ugly record of racism and of bigotry. ... I believe he should be rejected for what he is and what he stands for." Former Louisiana Republican governor David Treen led an effort funded by the Republican Governors Association against Duke, who went on to lose to Democrat Edwin W. Edwards. That gave the seat to a Democrat, but it put the Republican Party on the right side of the fight against racism.

How different it is today. In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” It was a clear violation of the Constitution’s Article VI protections against religious tests, but the Republican Party did nothing. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who had previously led an extensive analysis of the need for the party to expand its appeal beyond white Christian voters, refused to commit the party to support the Constitution. Later, when Priebus served as White House chief of staff, Trump seemed to take particular delight in humiliating him, reportedly tasking him with killing flies. Trump had learned that Priebus, like the party he once led, was weak and worthy of his disgust.

In 2017, the RNC and Trump endorsed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who, in addition to being an accused child molester, had a troubled history on race.

Now, in the 2020 campaign season, President Trump has embraced open racism like no president since Andrew Johnson. In the heart of the old Confederacy, Trump stood before a rally of North Carolinians on Wednesday and denounced four women of color in Congress, inspiring a “send them back” chant that delighted the crowd. (He disavowed the chant on Thursday.) He keeps presenting the country with uncomfortable moral tests. The Republican Party keeps failing them.

Southerners like me know the game Trump is playing. We have seen it, sadly, time and again. Trump is the rightful heir to Lester Maddox’s ax handles and George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. What’s next for the RNC? Hang a Confederate battle flag in front of the national headquarters?

It is difficult to express how much this hurts my heart. To those of us who had believed and worked for the “compassionate conservative” vision of George W. Bush, watching the Republican Party embrace an open racist is like seeing an old friend drink himself to death. Lord knows we weren’t perfect, but at least we aspired to be something bigger and better than Trump’s bitter ugliness.

It’s a disgrace and a political disaster. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower won 39 percent of the African American vote. Eight years later, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and that figure plummeted to 7 percent; African American voters have never returned to the party. While every year the United States becomes less white, the Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of being the Big Tent Party. Perhaps Trump can win with this message in 2020, but this embrace of racism by a major American political party will rightly hang over the GOP in a shroud of shame. African American voters did not forget 1964, and there is little chance that nonwhite voters will forget 2020.

The Republican Party must decide if it is defined by Trump’s prejudices or the principles it has long claimed to believe. Is it too late to hope that it can summon courage and stand for more than Trump’s reelection? Probably. But if the party denounced Trump’s bigotry and hate, even at a short-term cost at the 2020 ballot box, it could be a turning point with long-term gains. A wise politician once told me: Be for the future. It’s going to happen anyway.

As Alabama governor, George Wallace actually did a lot of good things, such as passing the law for free school textbooks. But no one is remembered as the “free textbook” Wallace supporter. So it is with this moment. And none of the current Republicans will be remembered as a “tax reform” Trump supporter. None of the policies or judges will be remembered, but this open racism will never be forgotten. Trump long ago made his choices. The question for Republicans is simple: What choice will you make?

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Reply #1324 on: July 19, 2019, 12:58:19 AM
What the chorus of ‘Send her back!’ tells us about Trump and his supporters

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In rallying behind Trump’s belief that a great America deports, the president’s base reminded its leader of something he already knew: There’s no daylight between them.

As The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker and Colby Itkowitz reported, attendees at Trump’s campaign rally Wednesday in Greenville, N.C., responded to Trump’s tweets attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) with chants of “Send her back! Send her back!”

They wrote:

The event here made clear that Trump plans to use his criticism of the liberal lawmakers as a rallying cry during his 2020 campaign as he seeks to frame the election around the nationalistic message that has inflamed racial tensions across the country.

Omar is a naturalized citizen who moved to the United States as a child. She made several controversial statements early in her congressional career, and in a recent Washington Post Magazine article described why she has been so willing to criticize the United States. To Trump and his supporters, including ones in the media like Tucker Carlson, her willingness to criticize some things about the country rendered her unfit to be here. (Carlson called her “living proof” that U.S. immigration policy isn’t working.) Probably adding to their disdain for her is that a number of conspiracy theories have circulated about her, and Trump himself winked at one last night.

Trump’s tweets Sunday telling Omar and the three American-born members of Congress known as “the Squad” — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) — to “go back” to their countries if they don’t like America shocked many people in the political world, though it was pretty clear the president wouldn’t suffer repercussions from his most faithful supporters. As The Fix’s Aaron Blake pointed out yesterday, a new poll tested which Democrats were viewed least favorably by Republicans, and Omar and Ocasio-Cortez were at the top of that list.

In January 2016, Trump said at a campaign rally: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”

That’s not completely accurate. His support among some of the groups that helped send him to the White House isn’t what it used to be. Independent voters no longer back him at the rates they did in 2016. But Trump’s base — those voters who stand in line for hours to hear the president — is arguably more committed in their devotion than ever. And a Reuters/Ipsos poll out this week showed that the president’s net approval among members of his Republican Party rose by 5 percentage points.

Since the earliest days of the president’s campaign, surrogates have publicly defended Trump and his supporters, saying there is room for people of color, religious minorities and other marginalized groups in the president’s movement.

After Hillary Clinton said half of Trump supporters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it,” vice presidential candidate Mike Pence pushed back, strongly defending the diversity of his supporters.

“The truth of the matter is that the men and women who support Donald Trump’s campaign are hard-working Americans,” he said in 2016. “Farmers. Coal miners. Teachers. Veterans. Members of our law enforcement community. Members of every class of this country who know that we can make America great again.”

And headed into the midterm elections, Mark Burns, a South Carolina pastor who unsuccessfully ran for Congress, pointed to black Trump supporters like himself as proof that the Make America Great Again movement was diverse.

"This is foolish to STILL be asking if The President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump is a Racist. Trump have so many LOYAL Black Americans that Love this country & President,” he tweeted in 2018.

Noah Rothman, associate editor of Commentary Magazine, wrote that the idea that Trump supporters are racist speaks to a deep flaw in liberal political worldview.

“The notion that the president’s voters or even his supporters are inherently racist is logically flawed, and the comfort with which so many prominent liberals have embraced it suggests there’s something deeply wrong with the modern liberal political ethos,” he wrote in 2018.

But Wednesday’s response to Trump’s tweet suggests that the inclusivity of Trumpism is not a settled issue. With more than a year left in this campaign, one can surmise how the president will respond to those with whom he disagrees politically. And his most loyal adherents have made it clear that when it comes to promoting his vision, they will go along as far as Trump does.

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Reply #1325 on: July 19, 2019, 12:59:41 AM
Fury just beneath the surface: With a tiny push, Trump’s crowd chants ‘Send her back!’

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Speaking to reporters from the elegant, muted surroundings of the Cabinet Room this week, President Trump somberly informed America that he had extensive documentation of how four Democratic members of the House hated America.

“I have a list of things here said by the congresswomen that is so bad, so horrible that I almost don’t want to read it,” Trump said. “It’s my opinion they hate our country. And that’s not good. It’s not acceptable.”

A request to the White House for the contents of that list didn’t yield a response. A review of comments from the four — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) — fails to provide significant examples of anti-American sentiment (an experiment that’s more fruitful when applied to Trump). Certainly the four advocate policies with which many conservatives disagree, but disagreeing on a vision for the country isn’t the same as hating it.

The extent to which this assertion by Trump has gone unchallenged, though, is remarkable. Republicans, elected and not, have accepted his presentation that the four are anti-American, with a special focus paid to Omar, a naturalized refugee from Somalia who is Muslim.

She has been the focus of controversy, certainly. Past comments she has made about the influence of Israel in U.S. politics overlaid with offensive comments about those supporting Israel doing so in exchange for money have resulted in her being identified as anti-Semitic. (She apologized for the latter comments.)

Anti-American, though? At his rally Wednesday in North Carolina, Trump again claimed to have “pages and pages” of examples of anti-American sentiment, but decided instead to focus on a few examples. The anti-Semitism claim was included, but the riff centered on her alleged sympathy for terrorists or opponents of the United States. As with Trump’s claim earlier this week that Omar supported al-Qaeda — an obviously untrue assertion — the president’s arguments were one-sentence summaries of conservative-media-fueled controversies.

Like his reference to a 2013 interview Omar gave after a terrorist attack in Kenya. Responding to a question that suggested terrorist attacks were a “reaction to a situation,” she said that no one wanted to admit that “the actions of the other people that are involved in the world have contributed to the rise of the radicalization and the rise of terrorist acts.” As Fox News reported, Omar added that “nobody wants to take accountability of how these are byproducts of the actions of our involvement in other people’s affairs.”

Trump presented this as Omar “blaming the United States for the terrorist attacks on our country, saying that terrorism is a reaction to our involvement in other people’s affairs."

As he listed four or five similar examples, including ones that have been repeatedly debunked, people in the crowd shouted.

“Traitor!” one yelled. Then, one that caught fire: “Send her back!”

The entire point is that the evidence didn’t matter. Trump didn’t really need to offer any evidence at all. After all, his allies had circled the wagons around him in defense of his claims even before he presented those “pages and pages” of evidence. That Trump said it — and that the media pushed back — was reason enough to accept that Omar et al. were dangers to the republic.

This is one of the recurring effects of Trump’s style of politics. His determined effort to position the media as an enemy is an effort to pull his supporters closer to him. He is the man battling the powerful on behalf of his downtrodden base. He is the man bucking the “politically correct” tide. So when The Media declares that his words are racist, the natural reaction from many of his supporters is not only to defend Trump from attack but to take up and echo his claims as their own.

This has almost nothing to do with Omar. Just the tiniest of pretexts was enough to get people in the crowd energized for her forced deportation. Trump's base, after all, is eager for deportations of immigrants it thinks don't deserve to be in the United States. He won the Republican nomination in large part because of his willingness to adhere to the hardest line on immigration, including a declaration that migrants from Mexico were dangerous criminals as a default.

That Omar is Muslim is obviously a contributor here. Are we really meant to think that Trump declared that Omar should “go back” to Somalia in a tweet only after careful reflection on her history and a full consideration of the context of her comments? This is a man who, in December 2015, publicly stated that he didn’t think Muslims should be allowed in the country at all. Somalia is included in his administration’s ban on migration, the compromise ban that was meant to implement that campaign-trail pledge.

We’re meant to think that his views on a Muslim from Somalia are nuanced? We’re surprised that a crowd of fervent supporters, the vast majority of whom almost certainly voted for him after hearing his campaign rhetoric, doesn’t demand further evidence of Omar’s malfeasance before calling for her to be removed from the country?

There’s a small lesson here for the Democrat who will face Trump in 2020: There’s no avoiding being smeared. Trump will lift up any and everything and frame it negatively against you. We learned that lesson in 2016, watching as long-debunked claims about Hillary Clinton were reiterated over and over — are still reiterated — to present Trump as a more rational actor. It doesn’t matter whose name appears on the ballot opposite Trump’s; the same thing will happen.

The big lesson, though, is specifically that it takes so little to generate so much anger. Trump’s rhetoric keeps his base just under a boil as a default position. Add a tiny bit of heat and it’s at full roil.

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Reply #1326 on: July 19, 2019, 01:00:53 AM
McConnell Is Fine With Trump's Unhinged Racism

Quote
Less that 24 hours after President Donald Trump smirked his way through his raucous crowd chanting “send her back” amid his ongoing racist attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared on Fox Business to insist that everything is good and fine and hey, Trump’s doing great!

Speaking with Maria Bartiromo on Thursday morning, McConnell said “the president’s onto something” after he was shown clips of Wednesday evening’s Trump event, including footage of the chant.

“He’s right about ‘the Squad’ wanting to turn us into a socialist country,” McConnell said, using the shorthand for the four progressive freshmen Democratic congresswomen the president has attacked over the past week.

“What he should have added, however, is it’s a lot broader than just the four of them,” McConnell continued.

McConnell’s approval of Trump’s racism notwithstanding, he did have some criticism for (you guessed it!) Democrats who have accused him of personally abetting the president’s latest bigoted screed.

“I think it’s time to lower the rhetoric related to that subject all across America,” McConnell said, when asked about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s charge that he is “complicit” in Trump’s xenophobia. “Everyone knows that’s nonsense.”

“I’ve got nothing to apologize on this front,” McConnell added, claiming he was in the crowd during Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, before pivoting into an attempt to once again paint the Democrats as socialists and repeating that “the president’s onto something here.”

Bartiromo continued the segment by attacking the media, noting that “A CNN reporter asked you if it would be ‘racist’ to ask your wife—your wife!—Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to go back to her home country of Taiwan.”

“What did you think of your wife being brought into this debate?” she asked.

“Well, I’m glad Elaine’s not willing to go back home,” a laughing McConnell answered. “As your viewers may not know, she came here at age eight not speaking a word of English, has been in two different Cabinets—both in President Bush 43, and President Trump. I’m really proud of her. She’s not interested in going home, and I’m glad she’s not.”

“What an incredible story,” Bartiromo agreed.

Folks, correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m starting to think Mitch McConnell might be kind of a hypocrite.

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Reply #1327 on: July 19, 2019, 01:03:45 AM
Bucky’s Convenience Store Employee Fired After Telling Customers ‘Go Back To Their Country’

Quote
A Bucky’s convenience store employee in Naperville has been fired, after he was caught on camera telling customers from Mexico to “go back to their country.”

The incident took place at a Bucky’s convenience store at 1576 Washington St. in Naperville. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, a member of the Buitron family indicated the unnamed employee refused service because they are from Mexico.

In the video, the employee at the counter tells the women he is “an American” and then asks, “are you a citizen?” After a woman responds asking “what is your problem?” the employee states in the video, “they need to go back to their county.”

As the Buitron family left the store, the employee states, “ICE will come.”

In a second video, other people in line can be seen getting involved in the verbal altercation. One man in line can be heard saying to the women “you have no right” and “leave.”

In an email, Bucky’s attorney Stephen Kalhorn said the “employee no longer works for us.”

Carolina Buitron told CBS 2, said she was cycling with six family members when a bike broke down near the store. While they waited for help, 15-year-old Indira Buitron went into the store to buy food.

Carolina said the clerk told the teen that the food she was buying was expensive and questioned the legal status of her two cousins waiting outside. The teen said they were her cousins visiting from Mexico.

Moments later, multiple family members went into the store to confront the employee.

Naperville police and city officials investigating this incident.

Buitron family members said activists had been planning a protest at the gas station Thursday, but it was unclear if that protest will go on after the employee was fired.

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Reply #1328 on: July 19, 2019, 01:06:43 AM
Trump falsely claims he tried to stop ‘Send her back!’ chants about Rep. Ilhan Omar

Quote
“I was not happy with it. I disagree with it. ... I think I did [try to stop the chant]. I started speaking very quickly.”

— Trump, in remarks at the White House, July 18

At a Trump campaign rally Wednesday, the crowd broke into an extended chant — “Send her back!” — about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

The president had been attacking Omar, a Somali American immigrant and practicing Muslim, with false claims for days. We just gave him Four Pinocchios for claiming she supports al-Qaeda.

Trump said he tried to stop the “Send her back!” chants by quickly resuming his speech. This will be a short fact check, because video of the rally totally debunks his claim.

The Facts
Trump got this ball rolling Sunday, with Twitter statements telling Omar and three U.S.-born lawmakers of color to “go back” to their countries. He doubled down on those claims over the following days.

Trump was attacking Omar by name at the North Carolina rally when the crowd began to chant “Send her back!” He let the chants linger for 13 seconds before resuming his speech. After the chants died down, Trump kept criticizing Omar.

Here’s a timeline:

July 14: Trump tweets: “So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly ... and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

July 15: Addressing reporters at the White House, Trump says: “As far as I’m concerned, if you hate our country, if you’re not happy here, you can leave. And that’s what I say all the time. That’s what I said in a tweet, which I guess some people think is controversial. A lot of people love it, by the way. A lot of people love it. But if you’re not happy in the U.S., if you’re complaining all the time, very simply, you can leave.”

A reporter asks Trump, “Does it concern you that many people saw that tweet as racist and that white nationalist groups are finding common cause with you on that point?” The president responds: “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me. And all I’m saying: They want to leave, they can leave. Now, it doesn’t say leave forever. It says leave if you want.”

July 16: Trump tweets, “IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY HERE, YOU CAN LEAVE!”

July 17: Nearly 16 minutes into his remarks at the rally in Greenville, N.C., Trump mentions Omar by name. “Representative Ilhan Omar, of a really great state I almost won — first time in decades and decades — Minnesota, great state ...”

The crowd at that point begins loudly booing and chanting. Video of the rally shows Trump standing passively onstage, watching the crowd. The chants die down on their own.

After a minute or so, Trump resumes the attack: “Omar minimized the September 11th attacks on our homeland, saying ‘some people did something.’ I don’t think so. Some people did something. Yeah, some people did something, all right. ... Omar laughed that Americans speak of al-Qaeda in a menacing tone and remarked that, ‘You don’t say America with this intensity. You say al-Qaeda. It makes you proud. Al-Qaeda makes you proud.’” (The claim about al-Qaeda is a Four Pinocchio distortion of what Omar actually said in a 2013 interview.)

The crowd stops him again, chanting “send her back!” for 13 seconds. The president stands onstage, waits for the chant to die down, then keeps talking about Omar.

A few minutes later, Trump again suggests Omar and the other congresswomen leave the United States: “They never have anything good to say. That’s why I say, ‘Hey, if they don’t like it, let them leave, let them leave.’ Right? Let them leave. They’re always telling us how to run and how to do this. How do — you know what, if they don’t love it, tell them to leave it.”

July 18: At the White House, a reporter asks Trump about the chant. The president says, “I was not happy with it. I disagree with it. ... I think I did [try to stop it]. I started speaking very quickly.”

The Pinocchio Test
Trump got this ball rolling with his tweets and remarks telling Omar and other lawmakers to “go back” to their countries. Video of the rally shows Trump did not try to stop the “Send her back!” chants about Omar. He stood passively onstage and waited for the chants to die down on their own before resuming his speech. Within seconds, he was back to criticizing Omar. Minutes later, he suggested again that Omar and other critics leave the United States.

Another Four Pinocchios.

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Reply #1329 on: July 19, 2019, 01:08:05 AM
Omar Responds to Trump's Racist Rally Chants: 'He Is a Fascist'

Quote
Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar called it like it is on Monday amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing racist attacks against her and other members of the so-called Squad of progressive Democratic freshman congresswomen.

“I believe he is a fascist,” Omar told a crowd of reporters as she walked down a DC street, less than 24 hours after a smug Trump sat back to enjoy an arena-full of supporters chanting “send her back” at the mention of her name during a MAGA rally Wednesday night in North Carolina.

“I want to remind people that this is what this president and his supporters have turned our country—that is supposed to be a country where we allow democratic debate and dissent to take place,” Omar continued. “So this is not about me, this is about us fighting for what this country truly should be and what it deserves to be.”

Omar had responded to the president’s continued racist attacks with a series of positive messages, including quoting Maya Angelou. But her comments on Thursday—made shortly after she met briefly with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and reminded reporters that “racism kills”—show just how seriously the congresswoman is taking Trump’s attacks.

House Democrats, meanwhile, have begun to speak out about the possible danger for Omar and the other lawmakers Trump has targeted.

“It’s crystal clear to me that her life is in imminent danger,” Rep. Bobby Rush told Politico on Thursday. “Trump has threatened the safety of a member of Congress.”

“We have communicated, even before last night, with the Sergeant-at-Arms office about making sure that our members have what they need for their protection,” Speaker Pelosi told reporters after meeting with Omar earlier in the day.

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Reply #1330 on: July 19, 2019, 01:11:41 AM
We Were Never Going to Escape This Week Without a Sitting Politician Defending Slavery

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The New Hampshire Union Leader reported on Wednesday on a local dimension of Racist Week, which, of course, happened on Facebook.

Things started off with former state Senate candidate Dan Hynes, who asked on Facebook: “If Trump is the most racist President in American history, what does that say about all of the other Presidents who owned slaves?”

Hynes seemed to be posing the question to obnoxiously riff on remarks from politicians like Joe Biden. But the fireworks started when state Rep. Werner Horn barged through the door, commenting on the post, according to the Union Leader: “Wait, owning slaves doesn’t make you racist.”

Hynes followed up: “I guess not. Which is surprising since everything else makes someone a racist,” to which Horn concluded that “owning slaves wasn’t a decision predicated on race but on economics. It’s a business decision.”

The newspaper called up the sitting state politician and got his thoughts on the cause of slavery in full, and well, this trainwreck happened:

"Slavery later on in the American South was not about the color of the skin of the slaves but their value as workers on the plantations,” Horn said.

“The U.S. had abolitionists since the start, people who felt slavery wasn’t moral but they weren’t enslaving black people because they were black. They were bringing in these folks because they were available.”

“What they were looking at was whether they were fit enough to do the demanding work that needed to be done. It was an economic reality.”


Glad to see the Lost Causers found a home in the North, too.

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Reply #1331 on: July 19, 2019, 01:16:58 AM
You Must Be New Here

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I was standing in a bar in downtown Greenville—Grumpy’s, I’m pretty sure it was—off East 5th Street. This was about two months ago, when I was in town for my brother’s graduation from East Carolina University. The two of us were meeting up with some of his friends for drinks while our parents relaxed back at his apartment. The joint was a pretty standard dive bar with a porch out back, where one incredibly cute golden retriever puppy was laying as six people stood around it, all puffing on cigs.

Back inside, we were waiting to grab a couple cheap beers. I had already taken note of the translucent pigmentation that dominated the crowd the moment I walked in. I didn’t count, but it felt pretty clear that, save for the people that could spot us as a couple Sappony men, there were nothing but extremely drunk and extremely white college kids filling the place. One kid, standing three people over from us, with his hat turned backward, his sky blue polo unbuttoned to show a hairless pale chest, threw back a shot and slammed the glass onto the bar. He was speaking excitedly with another white kid sitting on a barstool. He leaned in close and grinned.

“YOU’RE A FUCKING N*****"

He screamed it again.

Nobody paused. The trashy music blasting over the shitty speakers didn’t scratch to a halt. Hardly anyone so much as turned their head. The bartender, another white guy, nodded to his friends standing to his side. They laughed and patted his shoulder. His beer sloshed in his hand. He smiled wide. You know the smile. I certainly did. He was happy. He was content. He was with his people.

This week has been fucking terrible. Or fucking great. It depends on who you are, I suppose.

Last night’s rally, in which President Donald Trump doubled down on his racist remarks about Rep. Ilhan Omar and the Squad and brought the house down at ECU, was either yet another putrid blemish on the face of an executive office befouled with centuries of them or a joyous event that sparked hope in your soul that We might actually take this country back. It’s all a matter of perspective, which is exactly why it was ingenious timing for Trump to have Greenville lined up as his soft landing spot.

Not unlike the boisterous, racist bro who found himself at home shouting epithets in Grumpy’s, Trump was in his element, and locked firmly into a destructive groove for an hour-and-a-half. He flailed his arms and opened his mouth and read from the prompter and had the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand, as the campaign had planned, just for showing up.

In the wake of the chants, a great many on the left and a handful on the right have decried the president’s racist words, the xenophobic chant, and the entire un-American sentiment underpinning both. It’s been nice to see, sure, but it doesn’t seem to matter to the people on the inside, the ones hooting and hollering and lining up to pass out from heat exhaustion just so they can get a chance to be castigated on the news the following morning.

See, there is always a They. It doesn’t much matter where you’re from.

The feeling you derive when you hear talk about Them varies greatly depending on where you are. In my current home, in the bubble of Brooklyn, They are wonderful; They are great; They are accepted. Not in the fancy neighborhoods with douche-tower apartment buildings ruining the sky for the sake of the rich, but certainly, in theory, They are generally welcome here, in this country and this city. But in Greenville and towns like it, or at least the ones I know, They are about the most dangerous force on earth. There, They take many shapes and forms, but rest assured, They are coming. For your jobs, for your schools, for your money, for your family. They they they.

But, as I’ve been told, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. That is, accomplishing the goal of muddying the waters so much that up is down and racist is right can take several forms, some more outright and some more veiled. Lucky for Trump and Greenville’s (and North Carolina’s and America’s) racists, they almost always get a choice.

For the folks seeking a more jagged, unpolished version of American racial conservatism—none of that “socially liberal” bullshit to be found here—I give you state Rep. Michael Speciale.

Speciale doesn’t represent Greenville. His district is located about an hour’s drive southeast. But this past spring, he ran for the the Third Congressional District seat vacated by the passing of Walter Jones, which includes portions of Greenville and the surrounding communities.

I’ve written about Speciale at length before; it’s not a pleasant rabbit hole to fall down. The short of it is that Speciale is a nut at best and a xenophobic racist dickhead at worst. He is a staunch Roy Moore defender. He called the Women’s March “a joke.” He has filed legislation allowing North Carolina to secede from the union. He’s called for completely deregulating handgun sales. And, naturally, he is a connoisseur of the deranged right-ring memes we know and love.

What’s most frightening about Speciale isn’t the fact that he holds a vote in the state legislature, though that is terrifying; it’s how familiar he is, at least to those of us who grew up knowing dozens of middle-aged white men just like him.

The last in-person conversation I had with one of my childhood friends ended in an argument that started with him pontificating about the possibility—no, inevitability, he stated so surely—of a race war in America. This was the summer of the Ferguson race riots, following Michael Brown’s murder at the hands of the racist police force. My friend’s reasoning for the forthcoming war was that They were growing too unruly, too wild, and, of course, too lazy to pull themselves out of the mess They got themselves into. The reasoning he was employing was nothing I hadn’t heard a million times growing up in North Carolina, but the hop, skip, and a jump he took to land from the notoriously casual racism to the concept of a violent nationwide battle for racial supremacy still caught me off-guard.

My surprise at hearing this diatribe, started out of thin air in between our third and fourth beers, was a result of my being close with him; had I been paying attention, I could have seen this coming and avoided or maybe even subverted the situation, either by undermining him or by severing ties. Instead, I found myself on my heels, and then leaning into a full-scale fight that effectively concluded our relationship. There was likely not much I could’ve done at that point, save for shouting and leaving, which I did.

But I kept thinking about that conversation as I went through the arduous process of detailing the last fifty years of my state’s political and social history. What I found was that, present within the dominating, boisterous strain of Southern conservatism made famous by Jesse Helms that my friend had latched onto so quickly, there is also another, almost more dangerous version of politician that allows people to make the same arguments—that of the genteel far-righter.

Enter state Rep. Greg Murphy.

Murphy beat out Speciale and a dozen others in the race for the third—last week, he claimed victory in the GOP primary over Joan Perry—and will, barring an upset from Democrat Allen Thomas, secure the seat. Murphy was more than pleased to be present at Wednesday’s rally and even happier to talk up the speech with Fox Business beforehand.

Murphy is decidedly not Speciale. While he is a gun lover, Murphy is also a doctor who purportedly supports at least some version of Medicaid expansion in the state, at a time when the GOP-led state legislature is willing to drag out the budget approval process just to keep that from happening. Mostly, though, he is white bread. He is the safe choice, as far as Republicans go—his edges are sanded and his rhetoric is plain. Yet as a candidate backed by the Freedom Caucus, NCGunowners.com, and Trump, he is happy to side with Rep. Mark Meadows and the far right in Congress in order to secure votes and political longevity. He does not need to shout his beliefs about where Rep. Omar should go, because that is what Trump and the crowd—his supporters—are there for. He is there to smile and shake hands and look like a normal human being by comparison, while still casting all the same votes as the crazies.

If you would like a preview of what a response to such behavior looks like once you’re elected, look to Rep. Mark Walker, representing the sixth, another eastern North Carolina district.

https://twitter.com/RepMarkWalker/status/1151688382428393472

Walker, like Murphy, also feels familiar. They are the men you knew at church, the supposedly upstanding member of the congregation, who, from time to time, would also speak in hushed tones about “Them” and “Those People,” but in a tone of caution, of worry, not outright violence. It wasn’t the same instigation offered by Speciale or Trump. It was something worse. You couldn’t call them racist outright, because they didn’t screamed the n-word or call for mass deportation of your neighbors and friends. They’re just trying to protect their community, you see. And if that means quietly supporting the same policies offered by the authoritative ideologues shouting down from on high, then so be it.

My family on both sides hails from eastern North Carolina. I grew up in the Piedmont, in the middle of the state, in a mill town hollowed out by corporate greed that ultimately voted for Trump by a 4:1 margin. It’s all home to me, and even after being gone for three years, it still is, more than New York could ever hope to be.

Loving it as much as I do, I still recognize that there is a sickness there. It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Yesterday, about four hours before the rally, I saw it online.

That meme, shared by a family member, is one of about a dozen I could pull from my Facebook feed from the past 24 hours about Omar. To cut you off: I know, picking memes from social media, in a space I’ve created and curated, is not a representative way to report the news or the political leanings of Real People. But as I’ve previously reported, the growing influence of social media in terms of being North Carolinians’ main source of political news has led to some truly heinous shit. (The infamous, botched Pizzagate attack on a DC pizza joint was carried out by a man from the next town over from where I grew up.)

The second comment beneath the above meme read as follows—keep in mind that this was posted roughly five hours before Trump uttered the same smear:

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--5ft4nTXW--/c_scale,dpr_2.0,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/zeby9ytbjp8jo79twki4.png

Now, fast forward to this morning, after the speech and the chant, to check in on how Fox News chose to contextualize last night’s events.

I can’t help but hear the echoes, from Facebook to Speciale to my family to Fox News to Trump. It refuses to die down, to quiet itself. It is there, always, after every major political event. I used to believe it was a straight line—from Fox to Trump to the memes posted by my online relatives. Now I’m not so sure anymore. It’s hard to grasp where this mess starts and where it ends. It’s constantly growing outwards, sometimes rapidly and loud, sometimes stealthily, but always expanding its reach. It’s not so much a line of dominos as it is an ever-churning stew of shitty values and vast misinformation, tumbling and blending together until it’s difficult to delineate what’s coming from the Oval Office from the right-wing fever swamp.

There’s no immediate antidote for this sickness, because in order for that to exist, there needs to be common ground, or at least a shared version of reality. But that is not the case—and it’s exceedingly difficult to image how these poles realign themselves again.

I’d like to end on a happier note, to say that I see a way forward in which the economic pressures snap the chanters from their foggy reality, free from the racist and xenophobic tendencies that moor them to the Speciales and Trumps and Walkers and Murphys of the political system, and join arms with a candidate who offers solutions beyond the shallow “We’re going to bring [insert your long-dead local industry] back!” they fell for three years ago. But every time I start to feel hopeful, someone starts chanting, and I recede back into the acceptance of the fact that I was always going to lose that friend, that the shithead at Grumpy’s was always going to go without getting his ass kicked, and that Trump was always going to be the beloved president of my hometown.

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Reply #1332 on: July 19, 2019, 01:30:20 AM
I'd like to say I'm tired, but I'm a white guy and have to keep fighting this shit.

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Reply #1333 on: July 19, 2019, 01:35:42 AM
I'd like to say I'm tired, but I'm a white guy and have to keep fighting this shit.

#Resist


You have been busy.



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Reply #1334 on: July 19, 2019, 01:39:29 AM
Trump falsely claims he tried to stop ‘Send her back!’ chants about Rep. Ilhan Omar
Quote
“I was not happy with it. I disagree with it. ... I think I did [try to stop the chant]. I started speaking very quickly.”
..........
Trump was attacking Omar by name at the North Carolina rally when the crowd began to chant “Send her back!” He let the chants linger for 13 seconds before resuming his speech. After the chants died down, Trump kept criticizing Omar.



Just watched the NBC Nightly News.    This was disgusting.  "I did try to speak very quickly"   Bullsh*t.   He sat and absorbed it.  YES, for 13 seconds.    I hate him.

"I think I did try to stop it."   WRONG, F*CKFACE!
"I started speaking very quickly."   13 SECONDS LATER, ASSWIPE!

UGH!!!
« Last Edit: July 19, 2019, 02:45:11 AM by MintJulie »

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Reply #1335 on: July 19, 2019, 01:50:21 AM

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Reply #1336 on: July 19, 2019, 04:37:53 AM
You must be exhausted from copying and pasting. A true hero.

And what are you doing to combat it?  Besides sarcasm, that is.

#Resist

In before some racist Yellow Wall gives you a completely antagonistic applaud.

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Reply #1337 on: July 19, 2019, 05:32:56 AM
« Last Edit: July 19, 2019, 05:43:13 AM by Athos_131 »

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Reply #1338 on: July 19, 2019, 01:17:07 PM

1:36:10





Different subject, but also a good listen from the author of the book Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly at 56:03

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Reply #1339 on: July 19, 2019, 04:42:43 PM
And what are you doing to combat it?  Besides sarcasm, that is.

The same as you: nothing of quantifiable value.

A lot of these articles are NYT pieces that require a paid subscription to read, so I do appreciate your “cutting and pasting” Athos.  Thank you.