#He was one of the people who openly spoke up about Trumps hate speech

[ryutoro]

Isn’t there stereotypical Asian in Poughkeepsie Tapes

The “stereotypical asian”s name is keisuke hoashi. know his name

#He’s notable among asian-american actors in my opinion he isn’t very recognized #look him up. what you can find is interesting.ike the fact that he usually plays roles that weren’t specifically created to be asian #aka “white characters” #He also does theatre and voice acting(he’s in bobs burger I think?) commercials also an educator #He was one of the people who openly spoke up about Trumps hate speech #I can go on #but the accent? That’s literally such a minor thing #Also I never said I liked or approved of the movie I just find it interesting for a movie with such small budget #To make it this big

[creepingsharia]

Biden stacking hi-level positions in admin with Muslims & terrorist-apologists (updated)

Scroll to end for updates.

If you have more to add to the list please leave a comment here or on our Gab post. Maher Bitar - Sr. Director for Intelligence on the NSC

'Palestinian' Muslim deeply involved in Trump’s first impeachment

As Rep. Adam Schiff’s top legal adviser, he was deeply involved in the first impeachment of then-US President Donald Trump.

Maher Bitar, one of the executive board members of Students for Justice in Palestine, was one of the principal organizers of the 2006 conference which was being hosted by Georgetown University’s SJP hate group.

Reema Dodin - Deputy Director of White House Office of Legislative Affairs

'Palestinian' Muslim who justified suicide bombings

During the Second Intifada, in 2002, Dodin spoke about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with residents of Lodi, California, saying that “suicide bombers were the last resort of a desperate people,” according to the Lodi News-Sentinel.

...as one of two deputy directors of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, she will be in a position to keep track of proposed or impending or about-to-be-voted on legislation about Israel, Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the whole Middle Eastern works. She will know which Congressmen are “on our [Palestinian] side,” who can be persuaded to move toward the Palestinian position, who supports Israel and cannot be moved; she’s in the perfect place to inform or warn her allies in the pro-Palestinian camp of what’s to come, and how best to promote or stop it.

Sameera Fazili - Deputy Director at the US National Economic Council ('Kashmiri' Muslim) Source 1 + Bio

Update 1:

via: Biden’s Terror-Tied Appointee Sameera Fazili is a Threat to U.S.

via: Top Biden Economic Policy [Fazili] Adviser Linked to Kashmiri Extremists

Currently, Fazili is listed as Committee Chair of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network's (IMAN) Atlanta office, and she was previously listed as a director of IMAN's Chicago branch. Notably, two of IMAN's top 20 donors include the Barzinji Family Foundation and Mirza Family Foundation. These two organizations, in particular, are apparent successors to individuals and organizations associated with the SAAR Network, a web of businesses and charities accused of harboring numerous financial connections to entities involved with Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Aisha Shah - partnership Manager at the White House Office of Digital Strategy ('Kashmiri' Muslim) Source

Uzra Zeya - Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights (Zeya was a key Obama advisor during Arab Sprint/Muslim Brotherhood uprising) + Source

More on Zeya:

Biden Pick for Human Rights Undersecretary Worked for Group That Claimed Jews Were Behind 9/11

Sean Durns, a research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, called the Washington Report a "fringe organization" that has "published content with anti-Semitic themes," including claims that the Mossad was behind the JFK assassination and the Sept. 11 attacks...

And on Zeya’s previous work:

"Ms. Zeya, a Muslim, will seek out Islamic groups seeking to work effectively within the American political system, and non-Muslim groups looking for authoritative speakers on Islam," reported the outlet. She published several book reviews in the Washington Report and was listed as "program coordinator for the American Educational Trust specializing in Islamic affairs" in March 1990.

Ali Zaidi - Deputy National Climate Advisor (Pakistani) Source 1 + Source 2

Zayn Siddique - White House Deputy Chief of Staff (Bangladeshi) Source

Paul Abbate - Deputy Director of the FBI

9/11 mosque visiting, terror-imam praising FBI flack

…[as] the FBI’s #3 man, Associate Deputy Director Paul Abate, participated in a “love-fest” of sorts with Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood jihad Imam Johari Abdul-Malik at Hamas’ Dar al Hijra Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia.  See the UTT video HERE.

Denis McDonough - Secretary of Dept of Veterans Affairs (VA)

Islamic terror supporter

McDonough has a long history of openly supporting terrorists/jihadis while in public office.  

The counter-terrorism policies and strategies created under his watch as Deputy National Security Advisor and Chief of Staff under President Obama demonstrate his overt support for individuals and entities who openly call for the overthrow of the U.S. government and the destruction of liberty and innocent life.

McDonough’s seditious and unlawful actions are unprecedented in their brazenness and blatant violation of his oath and the law.

For instance, as the Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama, McDonough went to the Muslim Brotherhood’s mosque, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) in Sterling, Virginia with senior U.S. leaders including FBI, DHS, NSC, etc to PRAISE its Imam.

The ADAMS Center Imam is Mohamed Magid, a Muslim Brotherhood leader.

See the video of McDonough’s speech at ADAMS HERE.  (By the way, Denis McDonough lied when he said Thomas Jefferson held “the first Iftar dinner at the White House”)

McDonough with imam from terror-linked, Muslim Brotherhood mosque

Robert Malley - special envoy for Iran (Hamas supporter & Obama's Iran deal negotiator & failed ISIS czar)

... in 2008, when he was an informal foreign policy adviser for Obama's presidential campaign. He was forced to sever ties with the campaign when news outlets reported he had met with members of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that the State Department classifies as a terrorist organization.

President Bill Clinton, left, meets with, from left to right, Palestinian negotiator Nabi Abu Rudineh, Rob Malley and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat on July 17, 2000 at the Middle East peace summit at Camp David in Maryland.

Neera Tanden - Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

Clinton and Obama retread

Head of anti-American, Bloomberg-funded, pro-Sharia law think tank Center for American Progress that created an “Islamophobia” hit list and targeted those who warn about the dangers of sharia in the U.S. 

Update: Tanden has withdrawn

Hady Amr - Deputy Asst Secretary of State for Israel-Palestine

Biden’s New Asst Sec of State Worked for Islamic Terror State That Funds Hamas

One year after 9/11 Amr stated “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada” & called for engagement with Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood

... Over the past few years, Amr has repeatedly urged negotiations with Hamas. When the Trump administration unveiled its proposed peace deal, Amr co-wrote an article declaring that it should be scrapped in favor of focusing on a deal with Hamas. The article provides some insight into the policies that Amr may advance as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel-Palestine.

Matt Duss - State Dept

Associate of Linda Sarsour & Islamophobia conspiracist at left-wing think-tank Center for American Progress

Update 2:

Ilhan Omar - vice chairwoman Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations

The anti-American, 9/11 victim-mocking, brother-marrying, fraud-committing, ISIS terrorist-supporting Muslim said she is excited to:

“play a leadership role in overseeing our international aid and foreign policy on the continent."  Source

In other words, Americans can expect more taxation for Islamization...at least it will be outside the U.S.

Update 3:

Ramin Taheri, Chief of Staff, Office for Civil Rights - Source

Tariq Habash, Special Assistant, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development - Source

  Vanessa  Harmoush, Special Assistant, Office of Communications and Outreach - Source

She started her professional career as a journalist at the Washington, D.C., bureau for Al Jazeera America, where she worked primarily as a feature reporter.

For Harmoush, Al Jazeera America’s Qatar-based sister news organization, Al Jazeera, was always on when she was growing up in Lebanon. After her time at the D.C. bureau, she took an internship with then-Senator Mark Udall.

Today, she works as the communications director at Rocky Mountain Values, a progressive advocacy organization.

Al Jazeera is Qatar-funded jihadi propaganda outlet.

Many more far-left appointees at the source links above and via multiple U.S. Department of Education Announcements https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases.

Just the beginning & the Muslim Brotherhood, HAMAS, Hizbollah, ISIS, al-Qaeda, CAIR, MAS, MPAC, MSA, Emgage, et al know that America will one day be theirs

#Islam #Muslim #Sharia #Jihad #Legal #Law #News #Media #Politics #Religion #Immigration #Infiltration #Terror

[ciaran-nyc]

Beyond iCelebrity Week 3 Assignment

How can we heal as a nation from these twin viruses: COVID19 and The Big Lie/QAnon Conspiracy Contagion? What are some of your proposed antidotes?

Subjectivity and personal experience must be removed from the acknowledgment and understanding of objective facts. With politicians serving as interpreters of complex information for vast swaths of the nation, they must be held to a higher standard beyond personal political aspirations. Facts and real life events cannot be questioned and must simply be agreed upon as a base level in establishing common ground. Disagreement can exist in how to respond to reality but the first step is getting all to choose to exist in a world guided by the truth. There is no moving forward or healing as a nation, when some experience two contrasting realities when under the same circumstances. Alternative news sources and forums will always pop-up under stricter regulations, so if civilians can’t be trusted then the onus must be placed on politicians.

What are your thoughts on Eugene Goodman's actions the day on Jan 6th?

Officer Goodman’s actions on the day of January 6th exemplified extreme bravery in the face of insurmountable odds. He is a true patriot, for he put himself at risk for the safety of our country and the protection of democracy. Goodman’s identity as a black man cannot be overlooked in the context of the video and adds a great weight to his presence as a uniformed officer. Many of the same lawmakers Goodman sought to protect refuse to even acknowledge racism in America and further demonize efforts that seek equal rights for minorities. Watching Eugene Goodman be put in such a dangerous position for the sake of many who won’t truly appreciate his sacrifice is deeply troubling and difficult to reconcile. There is no question he is a hero, but it is a tragedy that his bravery won’t be recognized by the same people that claim to support the police.

Do you think AOC demonstrated bravery in telling her story? How does such a narrative redefine power? How do her relationships with other staff members provide solace and assist with collective healing?

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez demonstrated great strength and perseverance in her vulnerability and openness on such a public platform as Instagram live. Unlike a well crafted political speech, her live performance eliminated the middle man of a television broadcast as she directly spoke to her following. Her candor and honesty challenges much of the secrecy in politics that has sowed great mistrust for the government. By choosing to tell her own story she is taking the power back from the Capitol rioters and giving it to the people. This move certainly had political implications, as it is on brand for her to connect with fans and potential future voters in such a manner, but beyond that, she is refusing to be silenced by threats and violence, proving that American democracy was triumphant. Her symbolic survival of the siege and refusal to concede on her beliefs is meant to provide comfort and inspiration that despite the tough times America is experiencing, we will survive. By invoking her relationships with other staff members, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez creates a picture of a united government and demonstrates that despite the stark divisions in this country, progress can be made by coming together.

What is the difference between Fame and Infamy? What does the insurrection say about the shadow side of celebrityhood and false idolatry?

I think it is difficult to separate fame and infamy because rooted within fame and fandom is a desire to see behind the mask of celebrity into the messy and often traumatic lives of well known figures. A celebrity’s failures and shortcomings make for a far more compelling story than highlighting accomplishments. When a famous person makes a mistake and falls from grace, there is a feeling of reassurance for civilians because it proves that all people are flawed, allowing for normal people to feel more secure in their own failures. Celebrities that openly embrace their flaws can attain a different level of trust with fans, as it mimics an equal dynamic although the power distribution still remains greatly skewed. For many, a significant component of Donald Trump’s appeal was his public struggles in the spotlight, for his fallibility was misinterpreted as a relatable normalcy in rebuke of formality and political maneuvering. Although Donald Trump openly made mistakes, he refused to ever acknowledge them as such, and this resistance to facts was born out of an innate confidence that his supporters sought to mimic. Trump’s fame and infamy are one in the same, for his actions have propelled him to be both revered and reviled by millions. Perhaps Donald Trump’s most significant impact as president will be as a result of his influence as a celebrity and not from his power as president. Donald Trump was able to inspire an insurrection because he is famous; he didn’t have the power to command those civilians to act like he does with the army, he had to rely on his celebrity.

The social media, live-streamed insurrection: what does it mean that the perpetrators of the Capitol siege provided photographic and video evidence of their crimes? Was this more evidence of delusion? Of white privilege?

I believe privilege and delusion are indistinguishable. Privilege affords certain people a life that other’s are not privy to experience, thus creating intense delusions that simply become reality for the privileged. From an outside perspective, the rioters may have seemed delusional, but if in their lives the sum of their experiences has indicated a minimal expectation of resistance or repercussions to their actions, then it is simply a fact of their lives – why would they expect anything different when upping the stakes? The timid response from capitol officers and the delayed arrival of the national guard further maintain the privilege-born delusions that enabled the attempted insurrection in the first place, as it has been reinforced that white people can act with impunity. While the concept of a civilian-led government raid sounds outlandish and delusional, their boldness and total disregard for American customs indicated an inherent confidence that allowed these people to overlook the absurdity of their plots. Although many of the rioters have been arrested after the fact, they were still extremely successful in their motives. Although Joe Biden has been inaugurated, the impact of the siege will be long lasting. The rioters disrupted the world and made history, shaking the very foundation of the country. The widespread documentation of the insurrection led to the arrest and capture of many of the individuals, but also drastically impacted they way all who witnessed the events comprehend American politics and the culture at large. The visual evidence of the insurrection will be manipulated and used for a host of unimaginable reasons for years to come. Although many have ascribed negative attributes to the perpetrators of the Capitol siege, others have glorified them, transforming their image and likeness into a representation of resistance and strength. Without social media, the insurrection would have been far less effective and the long term affect would have been minimal.

Discuss the role of citizen sleuths and the anonymous creator of Faces of the Riot in this ongoing collaboration with the FBI. How does the hive mind serve as a corrective?

The work of “Faces of the Riot” in this situation is extremely important and well intentioned; however, working with the FBI and any government body is a slippery slope. There is no question the Capitol rioters need to be brought to justice, but with civilians aiding the investigation efforts, civilians in opposition will likely feel more emboldened to act. Many of those that stormed the Capital would likely self-describe as internet sleuths that are “fighting to uncover the truth.” Civilian cooperation is essential in solving any crime, but allowing civilians that are driven by no structure or regulations other than their own morals and partiality risks a wide margin of error rooted in personal bias/interest. The concept of a hive mind is potentially scary because of the lack of control once a large body of people are driven by a single directive in accomplishing a shared goal. Although the hive mind’s intentions may be pure, the means of accomplishing said goal will vary based on the individual. Further, those that appear most committed to a cause will likely become one of many leaders for their determination and intensity. Without a means of proper checks and balances of power, the direction of a a hive mind can switch swiftly and without thorough cause. Such switches can be inspired by a charismatic leader, or the desire of a well-connected government agency manipulating information in favor of those with the most social/political power at the time.

With the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950’s, hyperbole and gross over-exaggeration was utilized to manipulate United States civilians into equating communism with an attack on American values, which resulted in an intense national paranoia. Those that were accused of being communists were shunned, expelled from the country, and regarded as anti-American. The FBI’s director J. Edgar Hoover played a pivotal role in this campaign by sowing fear and division within the country as a means of maintaining political influence. The fervor of many Trump supporters and those that ultimately stormed the capital were rooted in misplaced trust in others, which created mob mentality singularly motivated by chaos. While those working to combat the hate witnessed at the Capitol siege can view their work as corrective, there are scores of Americans that fully supported the initial attack. Correction is entirely subjective and can be attempted, but it also entirely depends on access, privilege, and power.

[lovesjinkiblog]

I hope the “keep reading” link helps from flooding your dash with this. i’m just really angry about something and I need to rant but cannot do it on my main tumblr because i’m done fighting about it.

fighting with American pro gun conservatives last night was so exhausting. the gun culture in this country is so bad, like they’re not even willing to compromise. they legitimately told me liberal demo’s are less prone to violence when they’re shot in the face (yesterday a Sanders supporter shot ppl at the Republican baseball game.... which he condemned and spoke about right away... unlike 45 who has yet to condemn white supremacists that inflict violence and openly support him) and if you think about that, what a dumb and contradictory statement. they’ll call me a typical liberal for blocking these people but sometimes i feel like i honestly cannot exercise my right to freedom of speech. because who’s to tell who’s rational and not violent anymore? we can disagree on certain things but I have that lil fear that one of them will find me and literally shoot me in the face. it got very hostile when my fellow “opponent“ told me my mother missed with the coat hanger and badgered me for proof/evidence on how hate crimes have increased since trump took office or about white supremacists and their friendship with 45 when:

1. it’s sad they’re JUST hearing about this..... like this is not even remotely new

2. i’m not their fucking search browser. Google is free. shit is exhausting.

3. what the fuck is the point anyway, they’re just going to call it fake news. They’re THAT brainwashed.... but it’s not like I don’t agree that our media can be heavily censored but COMMMMEEEE OOOOOONNNN “alternative facts” my ass

either way I caved and sent links and yet, none of them have properly responded to it other than the anonymous message I got about shooting liberals in the face. Thanks. Makes me feel SOOOO much better about ppl having more access to firearms than healthcare because you cannot be mentally stable if you’re saying shit like that, just like that Sanders supporter.... we all condemn his actions and agree with Sanders that we cannot resort to violence if we wish to fix how things are.

 I still don’t see why stricter gun laws would be a bad idea, i’m not an idiot and I know America will never be without guns and I’m not saying they should be banned entirely. I just don’t think it should be so easy to access firearms... why would back up checks/mental evaluations be a bad idea? if you want to own something that can literally kill someone in an instant, you should be mentally suitable to have such thing. I think certain TYPES of guns SHOULD be banned though, like guns that don’t have any purpose but to kill/blast people’s heads off.. such as guns made for war and combat. And out of everyone, I think Bernie Sanders is super rational about this issue, as he hunts and owns firearms. If you don’t know his position on gun control, you should look into it. A lot of Trump supporters just don’t know. I know there are other issues that bleed into it.... like mental health but like I said, until we can properly figure out how to HELP these people and NOT stigmatize them and be able to PROPERLY provide them with help and maybe not violence, like we have been doing thus far (obviously not working) I see don’t see why stricter gun laws wouldn’t help. Not to mention no one that fights me on this gives me any better solution, you say it’s mainly just a mental health issue? well then why are the majority of you supporting someone who wants to rip healthcare away from millions of Americans. What else can be done for people who are suffering from mental health issues? I’m sick of seeing gun violence happening every day. There were TWO separate incidents yesterday alone. You would think after Newtown, CT there would’ve been SOMETHING implemented (20 kids.... babies... plus teachers massacred by a psychopath... a literal psychopath) and yet people are too obsessed with their guns to do anything nor want to do anything because they don’t believe guns are an issue. Less now with the president we have. I’m just really sick of it. This is something I care about because if you really think of it, there’s nowhere you can be that’s safe anymore. Your life could be over anywhere, at any time. And I know it’s not always guns that inflict domestic terror, fear and violence, but it’s almost always the go-to weapon of choice. It’s just not the America I would want my children living in

i’m pro life in that sense and that sense alone.

#you don't agree with me? cool #but that's how I feel #if I post it on my gen blog I will get harassed #and i'm tired #not kpop

[seattlish]

UW Trump supporters are hosting a rally and encouraging people to bring bricks. Can the UW step in now?

Following the shooting of a longtime anti-facist activist at the protest* outside the, um, talk of that One “Provocateur,” the University’s statement was predictably underwhelming. 

Falling back on the need to be egalitarian and permissive of free speech, UW President Ana Marie Cauce wrote that “the UW must be a place where passionately expressed views can be aired, where we can argue about our differences in a manner that is respectful and informed, and where we also look for, and find, common ground.”

From her letter: 

In the weeks leading up to the event, I received calls and emails from many who wanted this event canceled, some of which cited the potential for disruption and conflict. My team and I consulted extensively with UWPD and Seattle Police beforehand, and while no credible threats were received, I gave serious consideration to the calls and emails and consulted with legal scholars and the UW division of the Attorney General's Office.

So why did I allow the event to go on? First, there is the legal right of our student groups to invite speakers, even a controversial one whose message is anathema to many, including me. We are bound by the law. But beyond that, canceling the event would have sent the message that a risk of disruption or conflict can be used to overwhelm our rights. That would empower those on the extremes willing to resort to such tactics. And while canceling this event would have meant canceling a speech by someone whose views I personally find repulsive, the next time it could be a speaker whose views are more in line with mine, but anathema to someone else. Then there would be silence, with all the real discussion happening underground where arguments could not be examined, or critiqued openly.

But of course, those who were concerned by the talk weren’t worried about “conflict” or “disruption,” but instead, were worried about what happens when the guy who basically started GamerGate (and allllllllll the very real threats to women that happened afterward) comes to campus on a day when the living embodiment of racism and xenophobia has just been installed into the highest office. 

The person who spoke at the UW last Friday—who considers himself the “second most dangerous man in America” after Donald Trump—has actively encouraged his fans to troll, threaten, and insult women. It’s literally the reason he was kicked off Twitter. The has dude also regularly engaged in what could easily be considered hate speech—about women, in particular, but also about people of color and trans folks—and tells women to kill themselves. The entire purpose of his talk was denying the existence of cyberbullying, an action which could result in real harm, especially to very young people. 

But sure. “Conflict.”

Anyway, the UW’s lackluster response seems to have emboldened some students, who are currently organizing an event and telling people to bring bricks. 

On a Facebook page called the UW Wall Building Association  (its original title appears to be Illegals GTFO so that’s tight), the event is listed as a rally to celebrate Trump’s inauguration. Attendees are encouraged to bring “high energy” and yes, bricks, to “help build the wall.”

But like. Come on. Can you even imagine if a Black Lives Matter protest encouraged people to bring bricks?

The group is full of treasures, like this poll: 

Which forces the question: What, exactly, does the UW consider too far? When do we stop pretending that both sides of a debate—wherein one side legitimately believes that the other side should be killed or injured—are valid and that we should all be breaking a sweat trying to find common ground?

The UW Republicans group has compared their event to an upcoming engagement with the “racially divisive” Shaun King—but again, I don’t recall King ever telling people to kill themselves?

Upholding free speech is great—except when it could actually have very real and hurtful consequences. These events at the UW aren’t intellectual debates, and they aren’t presenting differing opinions. They’re the equivalent of yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater. And hopefully, at some point, the administration will do something about it. 

*By the way, Seattlish has filed a public disclosure request for the incident reports and other information from that night. We’ll let you know when we hear back. 

#seattle #UW #racism #sexism #misogyny

[marymosley]

The “Nightmare” Of Authenticity: The Establishment Continues To Struggle With The Unknown

Heading into Super Tuesday, the media appears at its collective wit’s end. After the victory of Joe Biden in South Carolina, many attempted to portray a new day until the they faced polls in the morning showing Bernie Sanders again surging in states from California to Texas to even Massachusetts (where Elizabeth Warren is struggling to win her own state). Described as the “nightmare scenario,” the media and political establishment in Washington is back to clutching its pearls and speaking of a convention strategy to block Sanders, including Warren whose campaign calls such a move as the “final play.”

The continuing support win for Bernie Sanders has sent the D.C. political and media establishment into vapors. On the eve of Super Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke all lined up to endorse Joe Biden to try to stop the momentum for Sanders. Others are growing more and more shrill. Democratic strategist James Carville proclaimed the winner to be Valdimir Putin. His point was that both Sanders and Trump continue surging despite unrelenting attacks in the media. The fact is that many in Washington still cannot compute why so many voters will not listen to them about Sanders and Trump. The reason is that they are valued for the one thing that the establishment cannot offer: authenticity.

In 2016, I wrote a column on what I thought was a curious trend I was seeing in various states far outside of the echo-chamber of Washington some interesting anecdotes. On a trip to Alaska, I encountered support for the candidacy of Donald Trump in surprising numbers despite his portrayal in the media as a fringe candidate for what Hillary Clinton called a “basket of deplorables.”  More importantly, the appeal for Trump was not the racist dog whistles so often denounced in the media. Rather, voters viewed him as authentic in a way that is entirely unimaginable in D.C.  He was the outsider who would challenge the establishment and the collective opposition of the political and media elite only reaffirmed that appeal.

         I returned recently to Alaska and spoke to some of these same voters to see how they now view Trump. What I found was not just continuing support for Trump but also support for Bernie Sanders.  Both of these very different politicians shared the key element of authenticity for voters, who also resented the coordinated attacks by the political and media establishment.

         One of my stops was Mike Carpenter’s trading post on the way to Denali National Park, a shack covered in a mountain of detritus from pelts to animal traps to a human hand in a jar.  All prices are negotiable but advice comes free.  Four years later, Carpenter remains a Trump supporter, only more so.  With a MAGA hat now prominently hung over the counter, he said that Trump proved to be even better than he had hoped. He was sent to Washington to disrupt it and he did. 

         Sitting outside in front of the outpost was “Red” Cooney.  (Red said no one knows his real first name but his Mom).   Red, 75, is from Minnesota and has been in Alaska for 50 years.  He also supports Trump.  Like Carpenter, he recognized that Trump lies and engages in shady deals. However, he also viewed him as authentic in that he did not hide those traits.  He is, in a way, authentically inauthentic.  He does not ask for people to view him as a moral example, but he someone who delivers on the deal.  The other person who was the talk of the outpost was the political antithesis of Trump: Bernie Sanders.  People saw both men as not just honest, but brutally honest. Red estimated support in the rural area as “25 for Trump, 25 for Sanders, and the rest don’t care.”

         Authenticity is a word rarely applied to Trump, but it remains his greatest selling point outside Washington.  While rarely acknowledged, Trump has fulfilled many of his campaign promises with his push on immigration, the wall, taxes, Jerusalem, renegotiating NAFTA, dropping the Iran deal, rolling back regulations, opening areas like the artic to drilling, finishing the Keystone pipeline, gutting Obamacare and other promises.  More importantly, he does not try to pretend what he is not: honest or moral.  He openly talks about delivering wealth and having people vote their pocketbooks.  He is the ultimate car salesman who you don’t trust but still want to get a good deal from.

         Bernie Sanders is genuinely authentic.  Indeed, Sanders seems immune from changes from clothing or political styles.  There was never a popular time to be socialist but Sanders never budged. To the contrary, he praised Castro and spent his birthday in the Soviet Union during the cold war.  He changes his positions at the speed of tectonic plate shifts.  That is why you can hate socialism but love Sanders because you know (like Trump) exactly what you are getting.  Elizabeth Warren in comparison was known as a pro-corporate, anti-consumer academic for much of her career before being a champion of the downtrodden.  

         For the establishment, Sanders’ authenticity is precisely the problem.  He is the real deal who is unlikely to change as president any more than he did as a Senator. CNN and MSNBC have stood out in the level of open anti-Sanders bias.  Many were shocked by the hostile questions against Sanders by CNN’s Abby Phillips in the presidential debate.  Sanders may be surging across the country (and even pulling ahead of Biden in Texas), but NBC’s Chuck Todd objected to people even calling Sanders a “frontrunner.”  Others like Chris Matthews has denounced Sanders as leading the country to a socialist nightmare while James Carville has called him a “communist.” Hillary Clinton has been virtually campaigning against him, including declaring that “no one likes Bernie.”  Perhaps but many are voting for him, because, unlike Clinton, they know what they are getting with Sanders.

         While trumpeting the new “Red Scare,” the establishment is pushing Biden and Klobuchar who continue to change positions to court voting blocks.  For example, when she started to campaign in Nevada with one of the largest Hispanic populations, Klobuchar suddenly dropped her support for English being taught as a first language in public schools. She also previously supported building a wall along the Southern border until it became anathema to liberals.  Biden has notoriously changed or denied positions on the campaign trail, including denying his support for the Iraq War.

         The impression of these candidates is that what we see is merely the artificial product of image makers, pollsters, and speech writers.  It is all pre-fabricated until they are post-fabricated. Voters had the same reaction of the character Tony Stark when he dismissed Captain America in the movie Avengers by saying “Everything special about you came out of a bottle.” 

         This election is shaping up precisely in the same way. Screaming about sociopaths or socialists only convinces many that they are real threats to the hated status quo. The more that the media screams about the end-of-days with Trump and Sanders, the more people want to bring about that day.   

The “Nightmare” Of Authenticity: The Establishment Continues To Struggle With The Unknown published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

[political-fluffle]

Conservative institutions in the Donald Trump era have often sought to portray themselves as shocked and appalled by the so-called “alt-right.” White nationalists have also engaged in their own efforts to differentiate themselves from the neoconservatives who dominated the GOP for decades. But neither narrative is true. The reality is that a host of supposedly veritable right-wing institutions have become a safe haven for the far-right.

Indeed, there is a burgeoning underground network of group chats, message boards, and email chains serving as the breeding ground for incubating white nationalist ideas, and as a forum to strategize around how to launder those ideas through mainstream conservative publications. And, judging from a large series of messages from one of those email groups obtained by Splinter, it’s working.

These endeavors are often tactical in nature. As Paul Gottfried, a far-right political theorist, observed in the 2008 speech that is widely credited as birthing the term “alternative right,” “we must try to do what is possible rather than what lies beyond our limited material resources.” This new right, Gottfried said, could only win by conquering the institutions that neoconservatives then dominated. It needed the institutions it sought to annihilate to thrive. (Gottfried, who once told a journalist that he co-created the term “alt-right” with Richard Spencer, has since sought to distance himself from his former collaborator, though he has also mounted defenses of the overall movement on far-right websites.) (...)

Campus conservative groups like Turning Point USA have been a target both of external coups and their own racist representatives who used them as a means to legitimize their beliefs. Figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, the once-beloved conservative commentator and far-right troll, found refuge in havens such as Breitbart. Despite their prevailing view that much of the GOP constituted “cuckservatives,” numerous white nationalists have sought to use the party to propel them out of obscurity.

And then there’s the Daily Caller, the conservative publication co-founded by Tucker Carlson, who stepped down from his role as editor-in-chief in 2016. Even since the “alt-right” rose to prominence during the 2016 election, the site has been sucked into its own game of “Who goes Nazi?” Since Trump’s election, numerous Caller employees have come under fire for their semi-secret white nationalist affiliations. (...)

The emails were provided by a source who passed them along on condition of anonymity; multiple sources confirmed their authenticity. Many of the people Splinter spoke to for this story were granted anonymity to be able to openly discuss the inner workings of the far right. Splinter also reached out to Bennett, Elliott, the Daily Caller, and others for comment on this story. You can read their comments in a section near the end of this post.

In “Morning Hate,” Bennett, and others, were free to make their racist opinions known, while laying the groundwork for leading their double-lives, of sorts, in more mainstream conservative institutions. (...)

In August 2016, not long before the Caller’s founder, Tucker Carlson, began parroting white supremacist and white nationalist talking points on Fox News, Bennett explained to the “Morning Hate” group how he fit white nationalist themes into his work. He had managed to spin a Daily Caller article about Donald Trump Jr. retweeting anti-Semitic pseudo-intellectual and “alt-right” favorite Kevin MacDonald into positive coverage for the cause. MacDonald, a professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach, is widely known in white nationalist circles for providing an “intellectual” basis to anti-Semitic thought. He asserts that Jews have a “group evolutionary strategy” that allows them to outcompete non-Jews, which, in turn, accounts for their supposed financial dominance over Aryans. This, according to the SPLC, allows anti-Semites to spin their hatred of Jews into a rational fear. The white nationalists chanting “Jews will not replace us!” that descended on Charlottesville in 2017 for Unite the Right were, in other words, merely defending themselves. (...)

Any successful infiltration requires a cadre of supporters, which is precisely what “Morning Hate” and groups like it offered. Bennett’s work at the Daily Caller, which contributed further to the publication’s ongoing efforts to soft-peddle the “alt-right” and white nationalism, speaks for itself. Recent attempts—including an article written in early August 2019 that distanced the Callerfrom a former Google employee, whom the publication had once frequently boosted, for his pro-white supremacist posts on the Free Speech listserv—do little to make up for the damage the publication’s cozy relationship with white supremacists has done. (...)

[swingtheaux]

Is talking about mental health and suicide in Hip Hop becoming more prominent?

In today’s hip hop many artists have opened themselves to becoming more vulnerable and having songs that centre around mental health, addiction and suicide. To better understand what the effects of talking about such sensitive social topics we will delve into some prominent figures in hip hop who have championed the talk of mental health and how that has changed the scope of hip hop today.

Joe Budden

Joe Budden was one of the first to champion mental health conversations while actively rapping about his depression, talking openly about his suicidal thoughts and his addiction. Every week the topic of mental health comes up regularly on The Joe Budden Podcast. Joe highlights how as men in Hip Hop do not really open up or seek help from their peers when they are in need help and is actively trying to get people to start conversations, even a simple “How are you today?” or “Have you eaten today?” could really help someone take the first steps to seek help.

On his song Only Human (Feat. Emmanny)

“Tryin' to weather the storm I thought that black cloud was gone It's been beside me all along, not the song”

This song came out a day after he was released from jail and details almost attempting suicide due to the mother of his child who was keeping him from his son. He says it’s one of his Top 10 songs and that it was the most difficult to write creatively and emotionally.

Mac Miller

Mac Miller’s career has been coloured with talk or lyrics about drug abuse, depression and death. Mac recently passed away due to an accidental overdose of a combination of drugs and alcohol. Mac found an outlet for emotional expression through his music, he explicitly called it great therapy for depression in his Billboard interview of 2015.

Mac also pointed out that fame and success doesn’t solve problems

 “I think it started [with success],” Miller said during the interview. "It's funny, because you talk to people, and they say, 'What do you have to be depressed about? You have money.'... Fame is tricky because you read what's said about you, and you know what you know to be true, and the lines start to blur.”

 On his most streamed track Weekend feat. Miguel he raps

“Never will I walk in line I cross the T's and dot the I's Wondering, well, wonderin' how I got this high Fell asleep and forgot to die, God damn”

 XXXtentacion

XXXtentacion was part of a new wave of artists, sometimes referred to as “soundcloud rap”, whose music embodied a disconnect with societal norms, and embraced internet culture and heavy Xanax use. The role of Xanax, an addictive and potent pharmaceutical used to treat anxiety, to help soothe or numb pain, and created a floating disconnection from reality.

On his first two albums (17 and ?), which debuted at number 2 and number 1 respectively on the Billboard 200, XXXtentacion explicitly talked about loneliness, depression, and the urge to end his own life.

On the song Jocelyn Flores X raps about a tragic suicide of his close friend

“Picture this, in bed, get a phone call Girl that you fucked with killed herself That was this summer when nobody helped And ever since then, man, I hate myself Wanna fuckin' end it”

His music spoke to young people who shared similar struggles with mental health. That, coupled with his almost sermon-like posts to Instagram Live in which he directed reassuring messages to people suffering, placed him at the forefront of a movement of young rappers who became musical extensions of a national opioid and suicide crisis, one that transcends genre as well as racial and social lines.

I believe with prominent figures in hip hop bringing awareness to mental health and other struggles has opened hip hop up to becoming more about yourself. Frank Ocean’s beautifully and elegantly written letter about loving a man was released in 2013, it was a talking point of that year and was a very powerful moment when he performed Forrest Gump at the Grammy’s. Hip hop isn’t as accepting towards LGBTQ+ community as other genres of music but it slowly becoming more welcoming in the same light as mental health becoming an increasing conversation in hip hop. Frank has been seen wearing “drag queen” like make up on his artist headshots, we’ve had artist like Lil Peep, who also passed this year, and his boyfriend Ilovemakkonen being openly gay couple in Hip Hop. We’ve had artist like Young Thug who’s defying gender stereotypes by wearing a dress on his album cover and openly stating “Ninety percent of my clothes are women’s.

 “? (XXXTentacion Album).” Wikipedia, December 10, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%3F_(XXXTentacion_album)&oldid=872914645.    “17 (XXXTentacion Album).” Wikipedia, December 10, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=17_(XXXTentacion_album)&oldid=872953131.    1035 TheBeat. XXXTentacion Calls Out Drake In His First Interview After Jail! Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZkEdPAqOEM&t=73s.    “Acura Integurl - Frank Ocean.” Vimeo. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://vimeo.com/32936729.    “BlocBoy JB & Drake ‘Look Alive’ Prod By: Tay Keith (Official Music Video) Shot By: @Fredrivk_Ali - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV-3s2wwC8c.    Complex. Joe Budden Responds to Migos Diss | Everyday Struggle. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kQaNePHkiI&t=298s.    DISCOANONYMOUS. Blue Magic  Chasing Rainbows. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93wd7ff9lXA&t=65s.    Dreamville. J. Cole - False Prophets. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5e6ftNpGsU&t=16s.    EminemVEVO. Vevo Presents: Shady CXVPHER. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygzRDayKxTk.    EnvelopeUniverse. Rick & Morty - Therapist Speech to Pickle Rick. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvB8h5LNpwA&t=15s.    “Frank Ocean.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://open.spotify.com/artist/2h93pZq0e7k5yf4dywlkpM.    Frank Ocean - Topic. Forrest Gump. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnZ9q1eXvYA.    HAYASEZA0602. The Stylistics - Betcha By Golly Wow 1975. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxeq1iYFY_w.    J. Frank Ocean - Forrest Gump (Grammys). Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJi4z63Yoew&t=19s.    “J. Cole - False Prophets - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvFDXV0VBg4.    “Jeffery (Mixtape).” Wikipedia, November 21, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeffery_(mixtape)&oldid=870028359.    Joe Budden TV. The Joe Budden Podcast Episode 194 | Mathematics. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7O3IrPLAfM.    ———. The Joe Budden Podcast Tour Documentary. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xPSDKmWY9g.    “Kanye West & Lil Pump Ft. Adele Givens - ‘I Love It’ (Official Music Video) - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwQgjq0mCdE.    “Kendrick Lamar - HUMBLE. - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvTRZJ-4EyI.    Lima, Kevin. Tarzan. Animated. Buena Vista Pictures, 1999.    Mac Miller. Mac Miller - Inertia. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKh8FiKzfvQ.    ———. Mac Miller - My Favorite Part (Feat. Ariana Grande) (Live). Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndf-eMyEVG8.    “Mac Miller - Weekend (Feat. Miguel) - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N29-54dhVHg.    “Mac Miller On New Album ‘GO:OD A.M.,’ Battling Depression and Donald Trump - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdO3SqZXDCg.    “Mac Miller on Sobering Up, His Nemesis Donald Trump and the Drake-Meek Mill Beef.” Billboard. Accessed December 10, 2018. /articles/columns/the-juice/6663072/mac-miller-interview-donald-trump-drugs-drake-meek-mill-good-am-album.    Nickelodeon UK. SpongeBob SquarePants | Naughty Nautical Neighbours | Nickelodeon UK. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K1pcOfrTXc.    “No Love Lost: The Public (and Private) Life of Joe Budden.” Complex. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.complex.com/music/2014/12/joe-budden-interview-no-love-lost.    NPR Music. Mac Miller: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrR_gm6RqCo.    “N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMZi25Pq3T8.    “Only Human (Feat. Emanny) - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdHbslVNeV8.    Paranoia. Al Green - Call Me. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTpIHph07Mo.    PostMaloneVEVO. Post Malone - Psycho Ft. Ty Dolla $ign. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au2n7VVGv_c.    Reactions. How Does Xanax Work? Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq6oNcd3d-U.    “Sesame Street: Cookie Monster: It’s Important - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5e6ftNpGsU.    “Some Love Lost.” Wikipedia, October 28, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Some_Love_Lost&oldid=866072055.    The FADER. Mac Miller - Stopped Making Excuses (Documentary). Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ3w99trVUk.    “The Joe Budden Podcast with Rory & Mal.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://open.spotify.com/show/43srgsyieFX5zjq3XqiQmT.    TravisScottVEVO. Travis Scott - SICKO MODE Ft. Drake. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ONRf7h3Mdk.    Triston Ortiz. XXXTENTACION Last Live Stream Before He Died! R.I.P. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8-9zxqzVPI.    truthtalkin1. Enchantment - Trying To Get Over (With You). Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMIShaQbddI.    WAV Media. XXXTentacion and Ski Mask The Slump God Mix Drinks | Re-Mixology. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4J2pVp8Bus.    XXXTENTACION. XXXTENTACION - Look At Me! (Official Video). Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qku2WZ7aRYw.    ———. XXXTENTACION - MOONLIGHT (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO). Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX8Hg6kWQYI.    ———. XXXTENTACION - SAD! (Official Music Video). Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAeYPfrXwk4.    “XXXTENTACION - Jocelyn Flores (Audio) - YouTube.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAucVNRx_mU.    “XXXTENTACION Chart History.” Billboard. Accessed December 10, 2018. /music/xxxtentacion.    Young Thug. Young Thug “Best Friend.” Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz6OUIjtM6E.    “Young Thug Says 90 Percent of His Closet Is Women’s Clothing.” Complex. Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.complex.com/style/2015/09/young-thug-closet-womens-clothing.    zilentzap. Lil Peep x Makonnen - London Snippet (Album Trailer). Accessed December 10, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdVLjYLxCKs.  

[theconservativebrief]

In at least five state and national races across the country, the Republican Party is dealing with an uncomfortable problem. Their party’s candidates are either a card-carrying Nazi, a Holocaust denier, a proud white supremacist, or all of the above.

In North Carolina, for example, GOP officials are stuck with Russell Walker, a white supremacist running for the state House of Representatives. According to his personal website (littered with the n-word), he believes that “the jews are NOT semitic they are satanic as they all descend from Satan.”

Republicans in the state have regrets. “This is a very Democratic district, one that we failed to keep our eye on,” Dallas Woodhouse, executive chair of the North Carolina GOP, told me in an email. “However, we can’t stop him from running.”

In Illinois, meanwhile, the Republican Party shrugged off Arthur Jones, a primary candidate who boasted of his membership in the American Nazi Party. But Jones won, and now party officials, including ones who called Jones “morally reprehensible” and “a complete nutcase,” are scrambling to launch a write-in campaign. Jones’s campaign website features a section called “Holocaust?” in which he argues that the “idea that six million Jews, were killed by the National Socialist government of Germany, in World War II, is the biggest, blackest lie in history.”

In Virginia, the chair of the state GOP resigned earlier this month, reportedly because of alt-right leaning, pro-Confederate candidate Corey Stewart’s win in the Republican primary. But even Stewart had to disavow Wisconsin’s Paul Nehlen, who is running to replace Speaker Paul Ryan. Nehlen’s too racist for Twitter and even for Gab, the preferred social media platform of the alt-right. Meanwhile, a California Republican running for Congress has been making appearances on neo-Nazi podcasts and argues on his campaign website that “diversity” is a Jewish plot. (The California GOP has disavowed him.)

Racial animus helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump. Since the end of the civil rights movement and under Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s “Southern strategy” that used racism as an unstated cudgel against Democrats, the Republican Party itself has played a welcoming host to racial tensions and fears. Simultaneously, it has depicted itself, as conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby put it in 2012, as “the party of color-blind equality and “a party that doesn’t think with its skin.”

But in a year when the left is energized in opposition to Trump, particularly by his policies toward minority groups and immigrants, and as the GOP tries to hang on to their majorities in Congress and state houses around the country, state party officials say they do not need racist fringe candidates running for office. None of these candidates is expected to win in the general election this fall, but they are going to give liberals on the hunt for examples of simmering neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate rhetoric at least five places to point.

Arthur Jones, an independent insurance salesperson known as “Art,” regrets voting for Donald Trump. But he’s got a different reason than most who’ve thought twice about their vote. In a speech in April 2017, Jones said:

The Jewish lobby has Donald Trump locked up. I don’t think the man realizes how naive he appears to the rest of the world. He’s nothing but a puppet in their hands. And we were foolish enough to send this naive, Jew-loving fool into the White House. I’m embarrassed that I voted for him. I’m sorry I voted for him. If I could take the vote back, I would in a minute.

Art is a card-carrying Nazi. Jones reportedly once led the American Nazi Party, and he was a member of a later version of the ANP, the National Socialist White People’s Party.

His website says he’s “concerned about the future of our country,” which, for a normal politician, might sound like a generic call for more spending on their generic priorities. But it takes on a very different connotation when you click over to the section called “Holocaust?,” a page that features a variety of conspiracy theories and racist ideas shared by the Holocaust-denier world.

Arthur Jones openly denies the Holocaust. artjonesforcongress.com

Arthur Jones perpetuates racist conspiracy theories about Jewish people.

Jones also brags about protesting against Elie Wiesel, who wrote one of the most renowned memoirs of surviving the Holocaust, Night. (To be clear: This is not an oppo-research photo. It is posted proudly on Jones’s own site.)

From Arthur Jones’s campaign website.

Jones’s ideas aren’t resonating widely with suburban Chicago voters. He is expected to lose. In 2016, the district went to the Democratic incumbent Dan Lipinski, who won 100 percent of the vote because no Republican bothered to run against him. Jones only got on the ballot because, as the Atlantic detailed earlier this year, he went door to door gathering signatures (and not mentioning his views on race or Jewish people). By December, he was the only Republican to file to run.

State Assembly member David McSweeney, a Republican, spoke with me about what Jones’s run could mean for his party. “The guy is a complete jerk and a nutcase,” he said, adding, “it’s politically harmful to have a jerk and a nutcase like this associated with the party.”

McSweeney is mad at Republicans in Illinois for failing to take Jones seriously at every turn: They said nothing as he gathered signatures to run, they didn’t challenge the signatures when he submitted them, and they didn’t try to run an alternative write-in candidate in the primary. Then, just two weeks ago, they missed an important filing deadline to get a third-party candidate on the ballot.

Sen. Ted Cruz heard the news about the missed deadline and said voters should support a write-in candidate or support the Democrat. “This bigoted fool should receive ZERO votes.”

This is horrific. An avowed Nazi running for Congress. To the good people of Illinois, you have two reasonable choices: write in another candidate, or vote for the Democrat. This bigoted fool should receive ZERO votes. https://t.co/9WYlvCMKaF

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 29, 2018

The GOP has since scrambled into action. McSweeney is pleased that it appears the Illinois GOP will finally work to support a write-in candidate to challenge Jones. But the damage, some in the party argue, has been done.

“Morally reprehensible, that is the most important part,” Mcsweeney told me. “It’s just a disaster. This guy is a complete jackass, a complete nutcase, and doesn’t represent anything from the party that we’re all part of. It’s just absolutely necessary to make sure the people know that this guy is a fraud, a nutcase, a loser, and should be shunned, and hopefully gets zero votes except for his own pitiful vote.”

(When Jones was told by Politico there would be no third-party challenger from the GOP on his race, he said, “I snookered them. … I played by the rules, what can I say?”)

About 800 miles southeast of Chicago, Russell Walker, a retired chemical engineer, is running to represent District 48 in the North Carolina state House of Representatives. On his website he explains that he believes white people are superior and that there is “no such thing as equality.”

The latest and the most demonized expression in the English language, surpassing hate and racist is –”White Supremacy”. Well someone or group has to be supreme and that group is the whites of the world. As explained in detail in another section of this website, there is no such thing as equality. Someone or something has to be superior and someone or something has to be inferior. That is just such a simple fact that it needs no explanation.

He has picketed a local newspaper while holding a sign stating, “GOD IS A RACIST.” He refers to Barack Obama as “genetically inferior” and says “woman are [sic] the weaker sex.” He refers to white women who have interracial relationships as “race traitors.” And according to his appearance this week on the neo-Nazi Stormfront Action podcast, he’s advising Arthur Jones, saying: “Jones is for real. He has strong ideas about Nazism.”

Walker gained some national notoriety in 2017 when, during a television interview following a lawsuit he filed to keep the Confederate flag in South Carolina courtrooms was dismissed, he referred to Martin Luther King Jr. using a racial slur.

The North Carolina Republican Party has repeatedly disavowed Walker’s campaign, as has the Hoke County Republican Party. (Hoke is one of the counties included within Walker’s district.)

In a June 26 post on a county party website, SaveHoke.com, Hal Nunn, county party chair, stated: “The Hoke County Republican Party agrees with NCGOP Chairman Robin Hayes comments on the Republican candidate for NC House 48 race and adds that this person’s actions and comments, past/present, are completely disturbing, and we will not support a candidate with such racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and anti-military views.”

Mark Schenck, chair of the Scotland County Republican Party (also included within Walker’s district), went further, blasting Walker in an email sent to a North Carolina journalist: “Russell Walker does not represent Republican Values. Republicans are said to be the Party of Lincoln, Walker hates Lincoln.”

Walker responded by threatening both Schenck and Nunn. He and Schenck had a confrontation on June 25. A day later, after Nunn posted on SaveHoke.com that the Hoke County GOP wouldn’t be supporting Walker, Walker wrote Nunn an email “telling, not politely asking” him that the post must be taken down.

Walker also left a voicemail for Nunn (you can listen to it here), threatening to force foreclosure on Nunn’s home and cars (“I’ll put liens on your house, every goddamn car I can find and everything else”). He also said, “You don’t know where Jews come from.”

On July 2, Walker was sent a “no trespassing” notice by the North Carolina GOP, which stated in part: “The North Carolina Republican Party did not make this decision lightly; however, due to your recent behavior and threatening messages we feel it to be necessary. The Party has determined that your presence at the events and on Party offices or property impair the functioning of the Party.”

Walker — and Jones, Corey Stewart, a neo-Nazi running for office as a Republican in California, and others — are a problem for Republicans and the GOP at large.

The party has responded largely by either condemning and attempting to disavow far-right candidates while arguing that somewhere, a Democrat is doing something even more dastardly (praising anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, for example). Or they maintain complete radio silence about candidates who claim the party’s mantle despite openly embracing the worst of the alt-right.

As Democrats try to hold onto a polling lead in advance of this fall’s midterm elections, they have and will tie racist and far-right leaning Republican candidates to other Republicans running for office or already serving, forcing Republicans to either disavow them or risk appearing soft on anti-Semitic racism.

Racist rhetoric, after all, doesn’t typically serve Republicans well electorally. In Virginia’s 2017 governor’s race, for example, Republican Ed Gillespie rode hard on NFL protests and keeping Confederate statues in place — and lost, as Democratic and independent voters were motivated to turn out in part by Gillespie’s strategy.

Not to mention that racism is inherently anathema to minority votes. A critical rise in black turnout in Alabama’s Senate special election helped push Democrat Doug Jones over controversial Republican Roy Moore. One activist told the Atlantic that black voters were responding to “the resurgence of this white conservative overtly racist rhetoric.” Bad Republican candidates also depress Republican voting. In that Alabama election, thousands of voters — including many who supported Donald Trump in 2016 — simply didn’t show up.

More important, candidates like Walker and Jones threaten to further inculcate the idea that the Republican Party is inherently susceptible to candidates who espouse racist and anti-Semitic ideas. The Republican Party is, after all, both the party of Lincoln, and the party of Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater’s Southern strategy aimed at getting racists on board without, in Atwater’s own words, “saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’” And it’s also the party of the nation’s most prominent birther, who rode to the White House on a wave of what researchers in December 2017 called “racial resentment.”

In the wake of Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comments after Charlottesville, and with his outward support of Corey Stewart and silence on other extremist candidates, and with what feels like more and more Republican candidates with connections to racist and anti-Semitic ideas and figures emerging by the day, that idea isn’t likely to go away.

Original Source -> Nazis and white supremacists are running as Republicans across the country. The GOP is terrified.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

[trendingnewsb]

Trump Condemned Racism As ‘Evil.’ Here Are 19 Times He Embraced It.

It’s been over a year since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and he’s spent much of that time reaffirming the legacy of racism upon which he built both his campaign and his real estate business. 

From taco bowls and travel bans to “birtherism” and scorn about Black Lives Matter, HuffPost has kept running lists during and after the election detailing examples of Trump’s racism dating as far back as the 1970s. We’ll continue to document those incidents here as they happen. 

JIM WATSON via Getty Images

Trump speaks to the press about protests in Charlottesville at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Aug. 12, 2017.

He said immigrants from Africa and Haiti come from “shithole countries”

In a meeting with lawmakers in the Oval Office in January 2018, Trump argued against restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti and African nations, describing them as “shithole countries,” sources told The Washington Post and NBC News.

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” the president reportedly said. “We should have more people from places like Norway.”

“Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people,” White House principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah told CBS News in a statement later that day. 

He took more than 48 hours to denounce the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia

Trump came under fire in August for his response to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one counter-protester dead. 

The day of the rally, Trump said he condemned the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” without specifically mentioning the white supremacists who organized the rally and the one who ran over a woman with his car. 

“The president’s remarks were morally frustrating and disappointing,” former NAACP president Cornell Brooks said at the time. “While it is good that he says he wants to be a president for all the people and he wants to make America great for all of the people, let us know this: Throughout his remarks he refused to” call out white supremacists by name.

Then, more than 48 hours after the rally, after dozens of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and even the maker of the torches used at the rally firmly denounced the white supremacists by name, Trump finally issued a firmer condemnation.

“Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” he said following the immense public pressure.  

Some of his top advisers and Cabinet picks have histories of prejudice

Since winning the election, Trump has picked top advisers and cabinet officials whose careers are checkered by accusations of racially biased behavior.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor, was executive chairman of Breitbart, a news site that Bannon dubbed the “home of the alt-right” ― a euphemism that describes a loose coalition of white supremacists and aligned groups. Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart increased its accommodation of openly racist and anti-Semitic writing, capitalizing on the rise of white nationalism prompted by Trump’s campaign.

Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn ― who worked as Trump’s national security adviser until resigning in February amid revelations that he discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador ― has drawn scrutiny for anti-Muslim comments he has made over the years. In February, Flynn tweeted that “fear of Muslims is rational.” Over the summer, he said that there is a “diseased component inside the Islamic world” that is like a “cancer.” Flynn has defended Trump’s past proposal of banning Muslim immigration and suggested he would be open to reviving torture techniques like waterboarding.

In addition, Trump has nominated Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to be attorney general of the United States. The Senate refused to confirm Sessions as a federal judge in 1986 amid accusations that he’d made racially insensitive comments, including that the only reason he hadn’t joined the Ku Klux Klan was because members of the extremist group smoked marijuana. Civil rights groups condemned Trump’s nomination of Sessions, while leading white nationalists celebrated it.

And Steve Mnuchin, who Trump tapped to serve as Treasury secretary, faces allegations of profiting from racial discrimination. As a hedge fund manager, Mnuchin purchased a troubled mortgage bank, sped up its foreclosure rate and sold it for a killing several years later. Along the way, Mnuchin’s bank came under fire from housing rights groups for racist practices like lending to very few people of color and maintaining foreclosed-upon properties in neighborhoods that were predominantly black and brown less than in white neighborhoods.

He denied responsibility for the racist incidents that followed his election

While the hate speech and racist violence emboldened by his campaign only escalated after his win, Trump downplayed the incidents and half-heartedly denounced them.

There were nearly 900 hate incidents across the U.S. in the 10 days following the election, a report released last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center found. Those attacks include vandals drawing swastikas on a synagogue, schools, cars and driveways; an assailant beating a gay man while saying the “president says we can kill all you faggots now”; and children telling their black classmates to sit in the back of the school bus.

In nearly 40 percent of those incidents, the SPLC found, people explicitly invoked the president-elect’s name or his campaign slogans.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Anti-Defamation League have also tracked significant growth in racist and bigoted attacks.

“We’ve seen a great deal of really troubling stuff in the last week, a spike in harassment, a spike in vandalism, physical assaults. Something is happening that was not happening before,” ADL national director Jonathan Greenblatt told The New Yorker.

Despite those findings, Trump insisted on CBS’ “60 Minutes” the Sunday after his election that there had only been “a very small amount” of racist incidents.

“I am so saddened to hear that,” Trump said when asked about the racist incidents. “And I say, ‘Stop it.’ If it helps, I will say this, and I will say right to the camera: ‘Stop it.’”

He also accused the media of overstating the attacks.

“I think it’s built up by the press because, frankly, they’ll take every single little incident that they can find in this country, which could’ve been there before ― if I weren’t even around doing this ― and they’ll make it into an event, because that’s the way the press is,” he said.

Trump’s denouncement of hate-fueled violence was relatively mild, especially compared to the zeal with which he routinely attacks other targets ― like, say, “Saturday Night Live,” or the cast of “Hamilton,” who addressed Vice President-elect Mike Pence at a recent performance in New York that Pence attended.

“[Trump] hits the news media when he thinks there’s a story that’s unfair, he tweets when he is outraged about something in the media,” CNN host Wolf Blitzer said in November 2016, after Trump criticized the cast of “Hamilton” for singling out Pence, whom the audience also booed. “But he doesn’t seem to go out of the way to express his outrage over people hailing him with Nazi salutes.”

He launched a travel ban targeting Muslims

In an executive order since blocked by the courts, Trump restricted Syrian refugees and travel by immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.

While White House press secretary Sean Spicer later insisted that it was “not a Muslim ban,” Trump said the day he signed it that he would prioritize helping Syrian Christians and made an exception for admitting refugees who are religious minorities in those countries. 

Trump has characterized people from that region of the world as being “terror-prone,” despite there having been zero fatal terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 1975 by immigrants from the seven targeted countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

A blanket ban on travel from those countries and anti-Muslim bigotry in general is “essentially an extension of the fear and vilification of not only Muslims but everyone perceived to be Muslim that’s been taking place for centuries,” Khaled Beydoun, a law professor at the University of Detroit who also works with the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, explained to Vox.  

He attacked Muslim Gold Star parents

Trump’s retaliation against the parents of a Muslim U.S. Army officer who died while serving in the Iraq War was a low point in a campaign full of hateful rhetoric.

Khizr Khan, the father of the late Army Captain Humayun Khan, spoke out against Trump’s bigoted rhetoric and disregard for civil liberties at the Democratic National Convention on July 28. It became the most memorable moment of the convention.

SAUL LOEB via Getty Images

Khizr Khan, a Goldstar father, speaks on Feb. 2 about Trump issuing an executive order to ban travelers from seven countries.

“Let me ask you, have you even read the U.S. Constitution?” Khan asked Trump before pulling a copy of the document from his jacket pocket and holding it up. “I will gladly lend you my copy.”

Khan’s wife, Ghazala, who wears a head scarf, stood at his side during the speech but did not speak.

In response to the devastating speech, Trump seized on Ghazala Khan’s silence to imply that she was forbidden from speaking due to the couple’s Islamic faith.

“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News that first appeared on July 30.

Ghazala Khan explained in an op-ed in The Washington Post the following day that she could not speak because of her grief.

“Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could?” she wrote. “Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?”

He claimed a judge was biased because “he’s a Mexican”

In May 2016, Trump implied that Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over a class action suit against the for-profit Trump University, could not fairly hear the case because of his Mexican heritage.

“He’s a Mexican,” Trump told CNN. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico. The answer is, he is giving us very unfair rulings — rulings that people can’t even believe.”

Curiel, it should be noted, is an American citizen who was born in Indiana. As a prosecutor in the late 1990s, he went after Mexican drug cartels, making him a target for assassination by a Tijuana drug lord.

Even members of Trump’s own party slammed the racist remarks.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

Trump delivers a statement in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 14, 2017.

“Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said, though he clarified that he still endorsed Trump

The comments against Curiel didn’t sit well with the American public either. According to a YouGov poll released in June 2016, 51 percent of those surveyed agreed that Trump’s comments were not only wrong, but also racist. Fifty-seven percent of Americans said Trump was wrong to complain against the judge, while just 20 percent said he was right to do so.

When asked whether he would trust a Muslim judge in light of his proposed restrictions on Muslim immigration, Trump suggested that such a judge might not be fair to him either.

The Justice Department sued his company ― twice ― for not renting to black people

When Trump was serving as the president of his family’s real estate company, the Trump Management Corporation, in 1973, the Justice Department sued the company for alleged racial discrimination against black people looking to rent apartments in the Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island boroughs of New York City.

The lawsuit charged that the company quoted different rental terms and conditions to black rental candidates than it did to white candidates, and that the company lied to black applicants about apartments not being available. Trump called those accusations “absolutely ridiculous” and sued the Justice Department for $100 million in damages for defamation.

Without admitting wrongdoing, the Trump Management Corporation settled the original lawsuit two years later and promised not to discriminate against black people, Puerto Ricans or other minorities. Trump also agreed to send weekly vacancy lists for his 15,000 apartments to the New York Urban League, a civil rights group, and to allow the NYUL to present qualified applicants for vacancies in certain Trump properties.

Just three years after that, the Justice Department sued the Trump Management Corporation again for allegedly discriminating against black applicants by telling them apartments weren’t available.

The Washington Post via Getty Images

Black Lives Matter protestors stand in a fog of tear gas during clashes at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, 2017.

In fact, discrimination against black people has been a pattern throughout Trump’s career

Workers at Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, have accused him of racism over the years. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $200,000 in 1992 because managers would remove African-American card dealers at the request of a certain big-spending gambler. A state appeals court upheld the fine.

The first-person account of at least one black Trump casino employee in Atlantic City suggests the racist practices were consistent with Trump’s personal behavior toward black workers.

“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, told The New Yorker for a 2015 article. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”

Trump allegedly disparaged his black casino employees as “lazy” in vividly bigoted terms, according to a 1991 book by John O’Donnell, a former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.

“And isn’t it funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” O’Donnell recalled Trump saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

“I think the guy is lazy,” Trump said of a black employee, according to O’Donnell. “And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”

Trump told an interviewer in 1997 that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true,” but in 1999 accused O’Donnell of having fabricated the quotes.

Trump has also faced charges of reneging on commitments to hire black people. In 1996, 20 African-Americans in Indiana sued Trump for failing to honor a promise to hire mostly minority workers for a riverboat casino on Lake Michigan.

He refused to immediately condemn the white supremacists who advocated for him

Trump’s response to the Charlottesville chaos wasn’t the first time he appeared hesitant to condemn white supremacists. 

Three times in a row on Feb. 28, 2016, Trump sidestepped opportunities to renounce white nationalist and former KKK leader David Duke, who’d recently told his radio audience that voting for any candidate other than Trump would be “treason to your heritage.”

When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he would condemn Duke and say he didn’t want a vote from him or any other white supremacists, Trump claimed that he didn’t know anything about white supremacists or about Duke himself. When Tapper pressed him twice more, Trump said he couldn’t condemn a group he hadn’t yet researched.

By Feb. 29, Trump was saying that in fact he did disavow Duke, and that the only reason he didn’t do so on CNN was because of a “lousy earpiece.” Video of the exchange, however, shows Trump responding quickly to Tapper’s questions with no apparent difficulty in hearing. 

It’s preposterous to think that Trump didn’t know about white supremacist groups or their sometimes violent support of him. Reports of neo-Nazi groups rallying around Trump go back as far as August 2015.

His white supremacist fan club includes The Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi news site; Richard Spencer, director of the National Policy Institute, which aims to promote the “heritage, identity, and future of European people”; Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a Virginia-based white nationalist magazine; Michael Hill, head of the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist secessionist group; and Brad Griffin, a member of Hill’s League of the South and author of the popular white supremacist blog Hunter Wallace.

A leader of the Virginia KKK who backed Trump told a local TV reporter in May, “The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in.”

Later that month, the Trump campaign announced that one of its California primary delegates was William Johnson, chair of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The Trump campaign subsequently said his inclusion was a mistake, and Johnson withdrew his name at their request.

After the election, Spencer’s National Policy Institute held a celebratory gathering in Washington, D.C. A video shows many of the white nationalists assembled there doing the Nazi salute after Spencer declared, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”

He questioned whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States

Long before calling Mexican immigrants “criminals” and “rapists,” Trump was a leading proponent of “birtherism,” the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is thus an illegitimate president. Trump claimed in 2011 to have sent people to Hawaii to investigate whether Obama was really born there. He insisted at the time that the researchers “cannot believe what they are finding.”

Obama ultimately got the better of Trump, releasing his long-form birth certificate and relentlessly mocking the real estate mogul about it at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that year.

But Trump continued to insinuate that the president was not born in the country.

“I don’t know where he was born,” Trump said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2015. (Again, for the record: Obama was born in Hawaii.)

In September, under pressure to clarify his position, Trump finally acknowledged that Obama was indeed born in the United States. But he falsely tried to blame Hillary Clinton for starting the rumors ― and tried to take credit for settling them himself with his racist pressure campaign.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Trump said. “I finished it.”

He treats racial groups as monoliths

Like many racial instigators, Trump often answers accusations of bigotry by loudly protesting that he actually loves the group in question. But that’s just as uncomfortable to hear, because he’s still treating all the members of the group ― all the individual human beings ― as essentially the same and interchangeable. Language is telling, here: Virtually every time Trump mentions a minority group, he uses the definite article the, as in “the Hispanics,” “the Muslims” and “the blacks.”

The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump. Donald Trump, July 2015

In that sense, Trump’s defensive explanations are of a piece with his slander of minorities. Both rely on essentializing racial and ethnic groups, blurring them into simple, monolithic entities, instead of acknowledging that there’s as much variety among Muslims and Latinos and black people as there is among white people.

How did Trump respond to the outrage last year that followed his characterization of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists?

“I’ll take jobs back from China, I’ll take jobs back from Japan,” Trump said during his visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in July 2015. “The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.”

How did Trump respond to critics of his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.?

“I’m doing good for the Muslims,” Trump told CNN last December. “Many Muslim friends of mine are in agreement with me. They say, ‘Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant and so fantastic.’”

Not long before he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the country, Trump was proclaiming his affection for “the Muslims,” disagreeing with rival candidate Ben Carson’s claim in September 2015 that being a Muslim should disqualify someone from running for president.

“I love the Muslims. I think they’re great people,” Trump said then, insisting that he would be willing to name a Muslim to his presidential cabinet.

How did Trump respond to the people who called him out for funding an investigation into whether Obama was born in the United States?

“I have a great relationship with the blacks,” Trump said in April 2011. “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

Even when Trump has dropped the definite article “the,” his attempts at praising minority groups he has previously slandered have been offensive.

Look no further than the infamous Cinco de Mayo taco bowl tweet:

Former Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) offered a good summary of everything that was wrong with Trump’s comment.

“It’s like eating a watermelon and saying ‘I love African-Americans,’” Bush quipped.

In an apparent attempt to win favor with black and Latino voters in the final months of the campaign, Trump fell back on his penchant for stereotyping. At the first presidential debate in September, Trump claimed African-Americans and Latinos in cities were “living in hell” due to the violence and poverty in their neighborhoods. The previous month, speaking to an audience of white people, Trump asked “what the hell do [black voters] have to lose” by voting for him.

Trump’s treatment of longtime White House correspondent April Ryan during a February press conference left many wondering if Trump assumes all black people are friends with one another. 

When Ryan, a black reporter for the American Urban Radio Networks, asked Trump if he would hold meetings with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to help craft his urban development policy, he asked her to handle the introduction.

“Well, I would. I’ll tell you what, do you want to set up the meeting?” Trump asked. “Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?”

“No, I’m just a reporter,” Ryan replied. 

He trashed Native Americans, too

In 1993, Trump wanted to open a casino in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that would compete with one owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Nation, a local Native American tribe. He told the House subcommittee on Native American Affairs that the Pequots “don’t look like Indians to me… They don’t look like Indians to Indians.”

Joe McNally/Getty Images

In the 1980s, Donald Trump was much younger, but just as racist as he is now.

Trump then elaborated on those remarks, which were unearthed last year in the Hartford Courant, by claiming ― with no evidence ― that the mafia had infiltrated Native American casinos. 

He also had no problem using a Native American slur to attack his political rivals.

Just days after proclaiming November as Native American Heritage Month, Trump went after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has identified as part Native American, with a nickname he’s used against her before: “Pocahontas.” 

Invoking Pocahontas, an Algonquin woman associated with an English colony in Virginia, to lodge an attack is unacceptable, Indian Country columnist Ruth Hopkins tweeted.

“Pocahontas was prepubescent girl held hostage & raped by European invaders,” she tweeted after Trump’s remarks earlier this month. “Stop mocking her & Native women.”

Later in November, Trump came under fire for using the slur at an event honoring Native Americans.

“You were here long before any of us were here,” Trump told the honored Native American code talkers who served during World War II. “Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.”

Several Democrat lawmakers denounced Trump’s language, and Jefferson Keel, president of The National Congress of American Indians, said Trump’s use of the name as an insult was a distraction from the honorees. 

“We regret that the President’s use of the name Pocahontas as a slur to insult a political adversary is overshadowing the true purpose of today’s White House ceremony,” he said in a statement that day. 

He encouraged the mob anger that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five

In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City-area newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in New York and the expansion of police authority in response to the infamous case of a woman who was beaten and raped while jogging in Manhattan’s Central Park.

“They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump wrote, referring to the Central Park attackers and other violent criminals. “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.”

The public outrage over the Central Park jogger rape, at a time when the city was struggling with high crime, led to the wrongful conviction of five teenagers of color known as the Central Park Five.

The men’s convictions were overturned in 2002, after they’d already spent years in prison, when DNA evidence showed they did not commit the crime. Today, their case is considered a cautionary tale about a politicized criminal justice process.

Trump, however, still thinks the men are guilty.

He condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester

At a November 2015 campaign rally in Alabama, Trump supporters physically attacked an African-American protester after the man began chanting “Black lives matter.” Video of the incident shows the assailants kicking the man after he has already fallen to the ground.

The following day, Trump implied that the attackers were justified.

“Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”

Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the protester is part of a larger, troubling pattern of instigating violence toward protesters at campaign events, where people of color have attracted especially vicious hostility.

Trump has also indicated he believes the entire Black Lives Matter movement lacks legitimate policy grievances. He alluded to these views in an interview with The New York Times Magazine where he described Ferguson, Missouri, as one of the most dangerous places in America. The small St. Louis suburb is not even in the top 20 highest-crime municipalities in the country.

He called supporters who beat up a homeless Latino man “passionate”

Trump’s racial incitement has already inspired hate crimes. Two brothers arrested in Boston in August 2015 for beating up a homeless Latino man cited Trump’s anti-immigrant message when explaining why they did it.  

“Donald Trump was right ― all these illegals need to be deported,” one of the men reportedly told police officers.

Trump did not even bother to distance himself from them. Instead, he suggested that the men were well-intentioned and had simply gotten carried away.

“I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

He stereotyped Jews and shared an anti-Semitic image created by white supremacists

When Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition last December, he tried to relate to the crowd by invoking the stereotype of Jews as talented and cunning businesspeople.

“I’m a negotiator, like you folks,” Trump told the crowd, touting his 1987 book Trump: The Art of the Deal.

“Is there anyone who doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room?” Trump said. “Perhaps more than any room I’ve spoken to.”

Nor was that the most offensive thing Trump told his Jewish audience. He implied that he had little chance of earning the Jewish Republican group’s support, because his fealty could not be bought with campaign donations.

“You’re not going to support me, because I don’t want your money,” he said. “You want to control your own politician.”

Ironically, Trump has many close Jewish family members. His elder daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism in 2009 before marrying the real estate mogul Jared Kushner. Trump and Kushner raise their three children in an observant Jewish home.

In July 2016, Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic image that featured a photo of Hillary Clinton over a backdrop of $100 bills with a six-pointed star next to her face and the label “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”

“Crooked Hillary – – Makes History!” Trump wrote in the tweet.

HUFFPOST

The religious symbol was co-opted by the Nazis during World War II when they forced Jews to sew it onto their clothing. Using the symbol over a pile of money is blatantly anti-Semitic and re-enforces hateful stereotypes of Jewish greed.

But Trump insisted the image was harmless.

“The sheriff’s badge ― which is available under Microsoft’s ‘shapes’ ― fit with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it,” he said in a statement.

Mic, however, discovered that the image was actually created by white supremacists and had appeared on a neo-Nazi forum more than a week before Trump shared it. Additionally, a watermark on the image led to a Twitter account that regularly tweeted racist and sexist political memes.

He treats African-American supporters as tokens to dispel the idea he is racist

At a campaign appearance in California in June 2016, Trump boasted that he had a black supporter in the crowd, saying, “Look at my African-American over here.”

“Look at him,” Trump continued. “Are you the greatest?”

http://ift.tt/2w8hkug from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2D900dj via Viral News HQ

#IFTTT #Viral News HQ

[mystlnewsonline]

New Post has been published on https://www.stl.news/opportunity-in-utah-mitt-romney-eyes-political-resurgence/60464/

Opportunity in Utah: Mitt Romney eyes political resurgence

SALT LAKE CITY/January 03, 2018(AP)(STL.News)—He has already made a fortune in business, managed an Olympics, served as governor and secured a presidential nomination. Now, Mitt Romney, at 70 years old, is considering a new career in Congress.

Those who know Romney best expect him to announce plans in the coming weeks to seek a suddenly vacant Utah Senate seat. Such a decision would mark an extraordinary resurgence for a Republican leader who had faded from the national spotlight after two failed White House bids and an unsuccessful push to block President Donald Trump’s rise to power.

While Romney has softened his anti-Trump rhetoric over the last year, longtime associates suggest the former Massachusetts governor is eager to bring a new moral conscience to the Republican Party in Washington.

“Obviously, he’s ambitious. But he’s ambitious for the right reason: to serve,” said former New Hampshire Attorney General Tom Rath, a longtime Romney friend. “Mitt Romney is a grown-up voice that America needs. He will add dignity and common sense.”

Romney’s closest political allies were not given advance notice of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch‘s announcement Tuesday that he would not seek re-election this fall, but the decision was not a surprise.

Romney, who moved to Utah after losing the 2012 presidential contest, met privately with Hatch last year to discuss Hatch’s possible retirement. In the subsequent months, and with Hatch’s apparent blessing, he quietly expressed interest in running for the seat in Hatch’s absence. In recent weeks, however, Hatch seemed to be changing his mind — at Trump’s urging.

Facing the prospect of Romney’s resurgence, Trump openly pressured Hatch to stay in the Senate. His private lobbying campaign was bolstered by a public love fest in December, with Trump inviting Hatch with him on Air Force One in December when he shrunk the boundaries of two Utah monuments.

“Congratulations to Senator Orrin Hatch on an absolutely incredible career. He has been a tremendous supporter, and I will never forget the (beyond kind) statements he has made about me as President,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “He is my friend and he will be greatly missed in the U.S. Senate!”

Few in Romney’s small inner circle were willing to speak publicly about his intentions Tuesday, preferring instead to keep the day’s focus on Hatch’s decades of public service. Several spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private discussions. None tamped down speculation about Romney’s Senate ambitions.

Should he run, Romney is not expected to face significant resistance in Utah’s GOP primary contest or in the November general election. Romney, who has five sons and 24 grandchildren, is perhaps the highest-profile Mormon in America and is hugely popular in Utah, where about 60 percent of residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Beyond his religious connections, many remember Romney for turning around Salt Lake City’s 2002 Winter Olympics after a bribery scandal. In the same city, he delivered a scathing speech in the spring of 2016 attacking Trump as “a fraud” who “has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.”

The takedown resonated in Utah, a state steeped in a culture of courtesy, where people struggled to embrace Trump’s brash demeanour and comment about women, minorities and Muslims. He finished third in the state’s Republican presidential caucus and earned a smaller percentage of the vote than any Republican presidential candidate in the last two decades.

Just last October, GOP Utah Gov. Gary Herbert called Trump’s tenure up to that point “erratic” and noted that governing is different than running a business and is not a “dictatorship.”

But beyond Utah, Romney remains hated by many Trump loyalists. The hashtag NeverRomney quickly sprung up on Twitter in the hours after Hatch’s announcement. There also emerged a sense of resignation that little could be done to block his path to the Senate.

“The Republican base views Mitt Romney with the same disdain that they view Mitch McConnell,” said Andy Surabian, senior adviser to a pro-Trump super PAC allied with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon. “I think the conservative movement will look to weaken him at every turn to ensure he never becomes anything more than a junior senator from Utah.”

That’s just fine for some Utah Republicans, who are concerned with the fate of the GOP under Trump’s leadership.

Derek Miller, the president and CEO of the World Trade Center Utah, who had been considering a run for Hatch’s seat, said Romney would be a stabilizing voice of the Republican Party.

“The Republican Party is going through turmoil right now, unfortunately,” Miller said. “I think Gov. Romney’s voice is an important voice right now in that debate of what the Republican Party stands for.”

By Associated Press, published on STL.NEWS by St. Louis Media, LLC (JS)

#anti-Trump rhetoric #Mitt Romney #Orrin Hatch #PAC allied #Utah

[deniscollins]

A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland

If you owned a welding company, what would you do if informed that one of the welders was a committed organizer for the Traditionalist Worker Party, a Nazi-group, who did podcasts for Radio Aryan, and posted Nazi support material on his Facebook page: (1) do nothing and respect his freedom of speech, (2) speak with him about restricting his political viewpoints, (3) fire him, or (4) something else (if so, what)? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.

Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.

But Mr. Hovater, in the days leading up to the wedding, was somewhat less anxious. There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”

It was a weeknight at Applebee’s in Huber Heights, a suburb of Dayton, a few weeks before the wedding. The couple, who live in nearby New Carlisle, were shoulder to shoulder at a table, young and in love. He was in a plain T-shirt, she in a sleeveless jean jacket. She ordered the boneless wings. Her parents had met him, she said, and approved of the match. The wedding would be small. Some of her best friends were going to be there. “A lot of girls are not really into politics,” she said.

In Ohio, amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes, Mr. Hovater’s presence can make hardly a ripple. He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux. Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, a homage to the TV show “Twin Peaks.” He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. He is a big “Seinfeld” fan.

“I guess it seems weird when talking about these type of things,” he says. “You know, I’m coming at it in a mid-90s, Jewish, New York, observational-humor way.”

Mr. Hovater, 29, is a welder by trade. He is not a star among the resurgent radical American right so much as a committed foot soldier — an organizer, an occasional podcast guest on a website called Radio Aryan, and a self-described “social media villain,” although, in person, his Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother. In 2015, he helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and again at a “White Lives Matter” rally last month in Tennessee. The group’s stated mission is to “fight for the interests of White Americans.’’

Its leaders claim to oppose racism, though the Anti-Defamation League says the group “has participated in white supremacist events all over the country.” On its website, a swastika armband goes for $20.

If the Charlottesville rally came as a shock, with hundreds of white Americans marching in support of ideologies many have long considered too vile, dangerous or stupid to enter the political mainstream, it obscured the fact that some in the small, loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make those ideas seem less than shocking for the “normies,” or normal people, that its sympathizers have tended to mock online.

And to go from mocking to wooing, the movement will be looking to make use of people like the Hovaters and their trappings of normie life — their fondness for National Public Radio, their four cats, their bridal registry.

“We need to have more families. We need to be able to just be normal,” said Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, in a podcast conversation with Mr. Hovater. Why, he asked self-mockingly, were so many followers “abnormal”?

Mr. Hovater replied: “I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”

He added: “The fact that we’re seeing more and more normal people come is because things have gotten so bad. And if they keep getting worse, we’ll keep getting more, just, normal people.”

Flattening the Edges

Mr. Hovater’s face is narrow and punctuated with sharply peaked eyebrows, like a pair of air quotes, and he tends to deliver his favorite adjective, “edgy,” with a flat affect and maximum sarcastic intent. It is a sort of implicit running assertion that the edges of acceptable American political discourse — edges set by previous generations, like the one that fought the Nazis — are laughable.

“I don’t want you to think I’m some ‘edgy’ Republican,” he says, while flatly denouncing the concept of democracy.

“I don’t even think those things should be ‘edgy,’” he says, while defending his assertion that Jews run the worlds of finance and the media, and “appear to be working more in line with their own interests than everybody else’s.”

His political evolution — from vaguely leftist rock musician to ardent libertarian to fascist activist — was largely fueled by the kinds of frustrations that would not seem exotic to most American conservatives. He believes the federal government is too big, the news media is biased, and that affirmative action programs for minorities are fundamentally unfair.

Ask him how he moved so far right, and he declares that public discourse has become “so toxic that there’s no way to effectively lobby for interests that involve white people.” He name-drops Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, architects of “anarcho-capitalism,” with its idea that free markets serve as better societal regulators than the state. And he refers to the 2013 science-fiction movie “Pacific Rim,” in which society is attacked by massive monsters that emerge from beneath the Pacific Ocean.

“So the people, they don’t ask the monsters to stop,” he says. “They build a giant robot to try to stop them. And that’s essentially what fascism is. It’s like our version of centrally coming together to try to stop another already centralized force.”

Mr. Hovater grew up on integrated Army bases and attended a mostly white Ohio high school. He did not want for anything. He experienced no scarring racial episodes. His parents, he says, were the kinds of people who “always assume things aren’t going well. But they don’t necessarily know why.”

He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist. There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.

“That’s their thing, man,” he said.

Online it is uglier. On Facebook, Mr. Hovater posted a picture purporting to show what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II: a streetscape full of happy white people, a bustling American-style diner and swastikas everywhere.

“What part is supposed to look unappealing?” he wrote.

In an essay lamenting libertarianism’s leftward drift, he wrote: “At this rate I’m sure the presidential candidate they’ll put up in a few cycles will be an overweight, black, crippled dyke with dyslexia.”

After he attended the Charlottesville rally, in which a white nationalist plowed his car into a group of left-wing protesters, killing one of them, Mr. Hovater wrote that he was proud of the comrades who joined him there: “We made history. Hail victory.”

In German, “Hail victory” is “Sieg heil.”

A Growing Movement

Before white nationalism, his world was heavy metal. He played drums in two bands, and his embrace of fascism, on the surface, shares some traits with the hipster’s cooler-than-thou quest for the most extreme of musical subgenres. Online, he and his allies can also give the impression that their movement is one big laugh — an enormous trolling event put on by self-mocking, politically incorrect kids playing around on the ash heap of history.

On the party’s website, the swastika armband is formally listed as a “NSDAP LARP Armband.” NSDAP was the abbreviation for Hitler’s Nazi Party. LARP stands for “Live-Action Role Playing,” a term originally meant to describe fantasy fans who dress up as wizards and warlocks.

But the movement is no joke. The party, Mr. Hovater said, is now approaching 1,000 people. He said that it has held food and school-supply drives in Appalachia. “These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about,” he said.

Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, estimated that the Traditionalist Worker Party had a few hundred members at most, while Americans who identify as “alt-right” could number in the tens of thousands.

“It is small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s one of the segments of the white supremacist movement that’s grown over the last two years,” she said.

It was midday at a Panera Bread, and Mr. Hovater was describing his political awakening over a turkey sandwich. He mentioned books by Charles Murray and Pat Buchanan. He talked about his presence on 4chan, the online message board and alt-right breeding ground (“That’s where the scary memes come from,” he deadpanned). He spoke dispassionately about the injustice of affirmative action, about the “malice directed toward white people” in popular media, about how the cartoon comedy “King of the Hill” was the last TV show to portray “a straight white male patriarch” in a positive light.

He declared the widely accepted estimate that six million Jews died in the Holocaust “overblown.” He said that while the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler wanted to exterminate groups like Slavs and homosexuals, Hitler “was a lot more kind of chill on those subjects.”

“I think he was a guy who really believed in his cause,” he said of Hitler. “He really believed he was fighting for his people and doing what he thought was right.”

He said he wanted to see the United States become “an actually fair, meritocratic society.” Absent that, he would settle for a white ethno-state “where things are fair, because there’s no competing demographics for government power or for resources.”

His fascist ideal, he said, would resemble the early days in the United States, when power was reserved for landowners “and, you know, normies didn’t really have a whole hell of a lot to say.”

His faith in mainstream solutions slipped as he toured the country with one of the metal bands. “I got to see people who were genuinely hurting,” he said. “We played coast to coast, but specifically places in Appalachia, and a lot of the Eastern Seaboard had really been hurt.”

Friendships Made and Lost

In 2012, Mr. Hovater was incensed by the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, believing the story had been distorted to make a villain of George Zimmerman, the white man who shot the black teenager. By that time, he and Ms. Hovater had been dating for a year or two. She was a small-town girl who had fallen away from the Catholic Church (“It was just really boring”), and once considered herself liberal.

But in the aftermath of the shooting, Ms. Hovater found herself on social media “questioning the official story,” taking Mr. Zimmerman’s side and finding herself blocked by some of her friends. Today, she says, she and Mr. Hovater are “pretty lined up” politically.

As they let their views be known, friends left and friends stayed.

“His views are horrible and repugnant and hate-filled,” said Ethan Reynolds, a Republican and city councilman in New Carlisle, Ohio, who said he had befriended Mr. Hovater without knowing his extremism. “He was an acquaintance I regret knowing.”

Jake Nolan, a guitarist in one of the bands Mr. Hovater played in, stuck with him. “There are people who literally go around Sieg Heiling,” he said. “Then you have the people who just want the right to be proud of their heritage” — people, he said, who are standing up against “what appears to be an increasingly anti-white America.”

Mr. Hovater befriended Mr. Heimbach in February 2015 at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Mr. Heimbach, who two years earlier had founded a White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland, was holding a protest outside the proceedings and praising Vladimir Putin. The pair founded the Traditionalist Worker Party in the spring.

Soon Mr. Hovater was telling people that he would be running for a council seat in his hometown, New Carlisle, population 5,600. The announcement caught the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the heavy metal press. But he never filed papers.

On a recent weekday evening, Mr. Hovater was at home, sautéing minced garlic with chili flakes and waiting for his pasta to boil. The cats were wandering in and out of their tidy little rental house. Books about Mussolini and Hitler shared shelf space with a stack of Nintendo Wii games. A day earlier, a next-door neighbor, whom Mr. Hovater doesn’t know very well, had hung a Confederate flag in front of his house.

“This is kind of brackish territory here,” Mr. Hovater said. “A lot of people consider Cincinnati the most northern Southern city.”

The pasta was ready. Ms. Hovater talked about how frightening it was this summer to watch from home as the Charlottesville rally spun out of control. Mr. Hovater said he was glad the movement had grown.

They spoke about their future — about moving to a bigger place, about their honeymoon, about having kids.

#Freedom of Speech

[bejaermi]

Two Mondays ago Jemele Hill from ESPN was suspended for asking fans to boycott the advertisers of the Dallas Cowboys. Her tweet was in response to a new rule made by the Cowboys and Jerry Jones, who two weeks before kneeled with his team in solidarity and then did a reversal and announced he’d fire/suspend any player who kneeled during the National Anthem. Jones’s actions have now spurred a debate between owners who are conflicted over what rules to place on a league that is almost 80 percent black. [1] Like many others Jemele was upset the owner of the richest franchise in the NFL would respond so harshly to his players exercising their first amendment rights. So she went to Twitter and told people to stop buying Dallas Cowboys merchandise.

Then in response to another tweet she said fans should go further and boycott the advertisers and sponsors of the Cowboys.

For this ESPN suspended her citing that she had violated their social media policy. Seeing that they were fine with (mostly) men attacking her on her Twitter feed and saying nothing, so it seems suspect to many that now ESPN is concerned about Hill’s social media account. Unless you remember that ESPN is an actual company, and Jemele Hill is only an employee. Oh and she’s a black woman.

Hill did not start this war, she’s merely a casualty, along with Colin Kaepernick. The title of shitstarter belongs to our 45th president who, has not passed any major legislation in the last 9 months, and decided to stir up an imaginary controversy to accost the NFL and its players. The outward reasons for this war are unclear, and are only a blip in the line of idiotic things this president has done in the last year. #45 loves conflict. Whether it’s John McCain, a Gold Star Family, or little Marco Rubio, Donald J. Trump likes to stir the pot. And now that he’s commander-in-chief he owns the big spoon. As for definitive reasons on why Trump talked about Kaepernick and called him a son-of-a-bitch is anyone’s guess. Only #45 really knows why he did it. Critics have speculated that as president he’s getting back at his enemies in a way he never could before. (Trump’s hatred and/or jealously of the NFL goes all the way back to the 1980s when he was the owner of the USFL New Jersey Generals and sued the NFL for anti-trust violations.)[2] Maybe he said what he said because he needed a diversion when he spoke to the great people of Alabama, (where he was campaigning for Luther Strange, but instead campaigned for himself and possibly the 2020 election),would love to hear. Or he was just his usual Queens, NY self [3] and used a person of color as a shield so his constituency wouldn’t see that he’s clueless when it comes to how to run the country.

  Again, no one knows for sure, but the fact is that on September 23rd, Trump declared war on the players of the NFL, especially Colin Kaepernick, whom though he didn’t mention directly, the implication was crystal clear. Trump then went further and distorted what Kaepernick and other players were doing. Telling the audience that they were disrespecting the flag and shitting on America.

  “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage. That’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for…Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, you’d say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now Out! He’s fired!’ “[4]

  The roar of the crowd is deafening, then the chants of “USA! USA! USA!”,  start. Trump, in his candy cane colored tie and his dark untailored suit smiles like a triumphant svengali. He walks back and forth, throwing his hands in the air, as though telling imaginary political aides, “See, I told you, they’re like putty in my hands.”  Trump then walks back to the podium ready to sort of help Luther Strange. Whom everyone knows has taken a huge backseat to the omnibus that is Donald Trump and a Trump rally. [5] He was never there to help Luther anyway, he barely knew who Luther was. He just wanted the roaring cheers from the crowd and the soundbites that he knew would make the Evening News. Trump took a small issue that was really only discussed by sports journalists, black folks, and stalwart football fans and made it a national story filled with angst and hate against players who are just demonstrating their first amendment rights.

  President Trump may understand that there is a constitution, but he doesn’t like the parts that give citizens rights, except for the 2nd amendment. Protests are and will always be part of the American fabric. But protests are meant to be confrontational, they are meant to disturb and disrupt. See the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, and the Black Lives Matter Movements. As a citizen, Trump, like Jemele Hill and Colin Kaepernick, has the right to speak his mind on the NFL. But why would a president insert himself into what is simply a labor matter. No one asked him a question like they did President Obama when Skip Gates was arrested outside his home and what eventually lead to the “Beer Summit”,[6] Trump decided to get his constituents riled up against some black boys, albeit rich black boys, but black boys none the less. While we can all agree that Trump should be more worried about North Korea, we also have to concede, that he’s not the first person to suggest that Kaepernick be ostracized, nor is he even the first to suggest that kneeling should be prohibited. [7] But unlike Hue Jackson (coach of the Cleveland Browns) who has some skin in the game, Trump’s has no skin that is remotely near the game. What he does have is a mind  filled with bile and vitriol, and his words tend to infect anyone who believes them.

After the president spoke and the Dallas Cowboys knelt during the anthem, while their fans booed, and the Pittsburgh Steelers (except for Alejandro Villenueva) stayed in their tunnel instead of standing up for the anthem and Ray Lewis did his “half protest prayer.” Fans took to their social media sites and burned Kaepernick jerseys, Steelers paraphernalia and any item that had anything to with any player that dared to exert their first amendment rights.  Yells of , “Protest on your on time!” or “I will never support anyone who doesn’t support our troops or our flag!” were pasted on websites, Twitter and broadcast on the Evening News. These same “patriots”, also went online and added Mike Tomlin to an imaginary lists of  “no-good niggers”.[8] This is what a few moments of our president’s speech moves citizens to do, not only deny their fellow citizens their constitutional rights but creates hate tsunamis.

  Which brings us back to Jemele Hill.  Jemele[9] is no stranger to bringing her experiences and speaking her mind on issues that intersect social and sports issues. A lot of her writing and reporting is similar to that of Robin Givhan of the Washington Post, who interposes fashion with social issues and the feminist gaze, giving the reader a more nuanced and fuller look at what the fashion world really is. Jemele does the same thing. In 2005 she was the only black woman sports journalist working for a major newspaper. She’s paid her dues, she spent six years at the Detroit Free Press covering Michigan State sports, where she is also an alumni. Her opinion on Sheryl Swoopes coming out as lesbian was clearly based in a feminist gaze that analyzed sports while making room for a critique about rampant over masculinity,

“Sorry, but Swoopes’s coming-out doesn’t have enough shock value to make us learn anything. Lesbians don’t pose a threat and have a certain appreciation in a male-dominated culture. And sadly, the prevailing stereotypes of female athletes as lesbians will probably reduce Swoopes’s emotional admission to a raunchy, tasteless joke by the end of the week. The only way we’re going to address homophobia in sports is if Peyton Manning, the NFL’s MVP last season, makes a similar disclosure. Or Brett Favre. Or Michael Jordan.”[10]

She also compared the Barry Bonds drugging scandal with the invisible case against Lance Armstrong in 2006. She claimed that race was instrumental in the investigation, when it was clear there was as much circumstantial evidence against Armstrong as there was against Bonds.[11] (In an Oprah Winfrey 2013 interview, Lance Armstrong admitted to doping and had his tour de France championships taken from him. )[12] You only have to look at her Twitter feed every day especially the hour before she anchors ESPNs main Sportscenter at 6p every weeknight (with her co-host Michael Smith.) Many of the tweets are vulgar, misogynistic, and openly racist in nature, and most have almost nothing to do with her on-air performance.

  Many of the purveyors of “ill will” to Jemele are white men of all ages and from all across the country.  Jemele answers almost of all of the “well wishers” individually in order to let them know their ignorance and their vileness will not and has not deterred her from spreading her what she knows is right.[13] And like many women of color, Jemele learned what was right by learning from other women in her family. In Jemele’s case her grandmother.[14]

The vein of doing what was right and continuing to speak truth to power, last month Jemele called the president, “A White Supremacist.”

  She pissed off a lot of people. She also energized a lot of folks, especially black women.

But is Jemele’s statement true?  The President and his Press Secretary don’t agree. And as a result they were the first to call for Jemele’s dismissal from ESPN.

…but I think that’s one of the more outrageous comments anyone could make and certainly something that I think is a fireable offense by ESPN.

-Sarah Huckabee Sanders  9/15/17[15]

Why is the President worried about a sports journalist? The easy answer, because she dared to say anything negative against the President. This president has the thinnest skin of any president in modern history. Which is especially astounding since president #44 was the first black president, and #43 was the president who was in office when 9/11 happened. If those presidents took the criticism that was doled out to them, why can’t Trump. The only obvious reason is that Jemele is a black woman in a very white male profession. Like racism, misogyny is a problem that America doesn’t want to acknowledge exists. Yet if the Harvey Weinstein story is any indication, we’ll have to address it sooner than later. The critics, the media, even Trump’s aides are afraid to dig further into what Trump’s racial ideology is. They can’t stomach that their fellow citizens, maybe even family members, elected a bigot. Even his own aides don’t know. In Charlottesville when he waited until his third press conference to condemn white supremacists, no one was sure whether he was just ignorant, a white supremacist or white supremacist adjacent.

In the meantime Jemele kept being Jemele.  She continued to tweet about Insecure, defend herself against trolls, and comment on social issues that intersected with her job, covering sports. Her comments regarding the president only reiterated what much of the President’s own cabinet is saying about him. (Rex Tillerson thinks his boss is a fucking moron like many of us do. A statement that Tillerson later refused to dignify with an answer, which means of course that he said it.)[16] After she called the president a white supremacist and she went to the president of ESPN and cried in his office explaining that she never meant to bring shame to the company or to her colleagues. She wasn’t admitting she existed wrong (because she’s entitled to her opinion, especially when it’s right), but she was doing what so many women of color do, recognizing an error in her delivery, but not in the substance. The way you know that your ex-husband is an asshole, you will continue to treat him like one, but you probably shouldn’t call him an asshole in front of your children.

But as her tweeting continued, NFL players had started kneeling in larger

numbers. Where her  first tweets had been born in response to Trump’s actions regarding Charlottesville, Trump’s tweets were now targeted at Jemele and how she had single handedly brought down ESPN rating. The ball was now in Jemele’s court, repsonding was never a question. The question was would her bosses have her back this time? Trump  was making statements about sports and how sports management should be carried out.  How could she resist taking him on? She’s a journalist, who has written for ESPN.com, was a sports journalist with “His and Hers,” has battled with many of the best sports writers and reporters and has held her own. She’s not merely eye candy,  the way some women sportcasters are displayed though she is incredibly attractive, has a fabulous hair/makeup team and dresses fiercely when she’s on the screen, she is the real deal. A Michigan State alumni who is a fierce Spartan fan, she can hang with the “boys” on predictions, fantasy football rankings, what an injury report can mean, and what a football formation looks like. (Yes, Cam Newton, there are actually women who know football, can wear a knee high boot, and win the sports pool.) [17] Jemele is the culmination of what happens when a young black woman decides to combine the social realities of the US with sports. She sees and understand the juncture of both and as a result she takes the mantle from male journalists like Mike Lupica, Jimmy Breslin, and William Rhoden and puts a spin on sports stories that show that the political is always personal. Trump had just made his quips and nonsense political statements personal.

  After his infamous Alabama speech,  the NFL showed a rare and swift sense of brotherhood and solidarity; by protesting against a micromanaging president who had no business trying to control them. The shows of owners and their teams kneeling, linking arms, and some not showing up at all were remarkable, if not exactly authentic. It wasn’t as if any of the owners were going to hire Kaerpernick while giving the president the proverbial middle finger. In fact, CK was almost forgotten in the two weeks after the president’s comment. Instead message became, “either honor the flag the right way or take your privileged ass somewhere else.” The term that was on many of my threads were “Oppressed Millionaires.” As though black millionaires were immune to the brutalism and microagressions that occur in America. Ask the Seattle Seahawks, at least four of their players have been stopped, detained or arrested by police for no reason.[18]

While Charlottesville was the impetus for Jemele’s first tweet, her second tweet to boycott the Cowboy’s sponsors was tied to  the backpedaling of the NFL. As of a week ago rumors were flying that the NFL was going to suspend or fine those who didn’t stand for the Star Spangled Banner. Then Jerry Jones not only backpedaled he did a somersault and said he would fire anyone who did not honor the flag or the fans. Is anyone really surprised that Jerry Jones did that? (I was more surprised he was kneeling.) Dallas Cowboys merchandise is the number one merchandise sold in the NFL shop. The Steelers, Patriots, Raiders, and 49ers are some of the other the other teams that bring millions of dollars to the owners who receive amlost all of the proceeds from those sales. Jones also backslided because the viewership and the attendance for NFL games have slipped significantly. And the lukewarm response from owners, Roger Goddell and the NFL towards scandals like the CTE coverup, deflated footballs and explicit cheating, domestic abuse, and Colin Kaepernick have made the public leary of the NFL. The public is choosing to watch repeats of Everyone Loves Raymond and the Golden Girls over the boring games that come on every Sunday night with Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth. Jones and his fellow owners are worried. They have huge stadiums paid by taxpayers, they are their own economic tsunamis and if they lose public approval they are dead. What to do? Well take the side of the president of course.

ESPN is a company that has chosen not to examine Trump’s ideology beliefs, but instead to take the middle ground. Instead they decided to take the pussy way out and stand by their money.  Specifically they supported their advertisers and sponsors more than they did the anchor of their flagship show. a sponsor stance. There was no way that they could lose their major sponsors on their main sportscast of the day. Men came home from work to just sit in front of Sportscenter, possibly with their hands down the front of the their pants, but we can’t know for sure. The last thing that these Bud drinking, Stihl having, John Deere mowing, and Ford F-150 driving would tolerate seeing is a black woman talking about politics with their sports.  They still haven’t accepted that Jemele Hill has the job she has, now she wants them to think too? And the sponsors jumped at the chance to not take a side and instead threatened to pull their ads unless action was taken.  But one of the tipping points were the ESPN employees themselves.

If there were many ESPN employees in agreement with Jemele, it was hard to find one in the tweets and emails that were “leaked” to the press. Many of Jemele’s colleagues  were upset about what Jemele said and wanted some kind of discipline put on her. Many referred to other journalists who had been fired or “phased out” after they used words and references that were out of bounds and none of them were to the president. But ESPN has never been consistent when disciplining their journalists, Bill Simmons was disciplined when he spoke out against Roger Goddell, but Colin Cowherd wasn’t disciplined when he spoke out against Sean Taylor.[19] I’m not sure how ESPN can continue to keep up the façade of neutrality when they pay their journalist to also be commentators and opinion makers. What do you think the NFL Insiders on NFL countdown are? They may know the game, but they (Chris Mortensen, Louis Riddick, and Adam Schefter) get their information from the various NFL Deep Throats and reporting that “news” as fact. They are like the Hot Topics bunch on Wendy Williams.

And while ESPN has suspended Jemele, the NBA has not suspended Greg Popovitch, LeBron James, and Stephen Curry for their free speech about the President. Nor has the NFL (and now according to Roger Goddell they won’t) fine/suspend any of the players (current or former) who have kneeled in the past or will kneel in the future. (That’s good news for Ray Lewis, he won’t have to pretend kneel this time.) Other men have also come out for Jemele, black male sportcasters of the NABJ have come out in support of Jemele.  Mike Lupica wrote that Jemele has the right to speak her truth at ESPN. Dave Zirin has been a staunch supporter of Jemele’s writing pieces and arguing on Twitter about Jemele’s right to free speech.

Jemele felt that was inexcusable and said so. ESPN had already changed face and suspended her, for what they felt was insubordination. Yet other white male sportscasters had also called for a boycott and decried the stomping of players rights.[20]In fact many journalists had called for a boycott of the entire season, citing all the problems the NFL had including Kaepernick. But none of those writers were fired, suspended or disciplined. Again, what does Jemele have that many of the sports journalists don’t?

Let me say it loud so those in the cheap seats can hear it.

She’s a black woman.

Jemele is a persecuted woman of color, more specifically she is a black woman speaking truth to power. US history is clear about what happens to black women when they choose to speak truth to power, they are continually tormented and abused until they bend, and sometimes then break. Look up Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer. Shirley Chisolm. Look at the women who started and continue to maintain the Black Lives Matter movement. And of course they tried to make our former first lady bend as well.

Michelle[21] was supposed to sit behind Barack and say nothing. The last first lady who had an agenda and didn’t know how to bake cookies was Hilary Clinton, and that ended very badly. Go Google, “Michelle Obama insults,” and the results are horrifying. Make sure your children aren’t in the room, because it won’t be pretty. The mild insults are about her wearing shorts, going on long trips, or wearing fancy clothes. The worse ones are when the white men of the senate told her to put her arms in some sleeves for the formal portrait.  Or when governors, city directors and other “government officials” around the country sent pictures of an ape and in one instance called it “A ape in heels.” Or when a washed up television star posted a picture that said, “He (President Obama) wakes up to this?[22] This rage and hate was aimed at a first lady whose national agenda was for children to eat well, and the Republicans said, “Bring back the French fries and chicken nuggets!”

Michelle, Serena, Viola, and Jemele also have to navigate gender. What I haven’t seen is feminist groups come out in support of Jemele and her right to free speech. Where are the white women, besides Samantha Bee? Why aren’t prominent white women standing up for Jemele? In recent years white women have done some dumb things and have advernnatly or inadvertently scrubbed women of color (in this case black women) from spaces  because they feel ignored and devalued. With Sophia Vergara being the highest paid television actress at the moement, white women may be feeling very vulnerable. Remember Patricia Arquette’s speech (that Jennifer Lopez inexpicably stood up for) that spoke of how ungrateful other folks were for the work white women did for them  and how now white women have to look out for themselves?[23] Or the dismissal of Viola’s speech at the 2015 Emmys about inequality and lack of roles for women that a soap opera actress with no accolades even close to Viola’s felt was silly and hallucinatory. Or Maria Sharapova’s recent story of Serena Williams calling her a bitch and how terrible Serena was (during the time the story had been about Serena’s new baby), when she conveniently for the terrible drag impression she did of Serena with padding that gave her a huge butt and enormous breasts. Or the idea that Ellen would create a Halloween costume of Nicki Minaj and her cotume consisted of a large ass and a bad wig. Is this solidarity? Or the silence from groups like NOW during the 2008 presidential campaign when right-wingers were calling Michelle Obama a radical black panther because of a fist bump with her husband and her Princeton senior thesis that was pro-black in nature. Or the criticism that came when Michelle said she was going to be “Mom-in-Chief” for a while in order to get her children acclimated to the white house and their new school. White women excoriated her for choosing to be a mother first, forgetting that the whole purpose of feminism is to give women choices, whether those choices are popular or not are inconsequential. And forgetting or ignoring the intersectionality that shows that for black women, staying home and not going into bankruptcy while doing it,was a radical event.

So why shouldn’t the Michelle Obamas, Serena Williamses, Viola Davises and Jemele Hills shout out loud about the inequality they see in their nation? And again why would the President of the United States care?

ESPN’s slow response to suspend Jemele was not because they were feeling benevolent or because they see Jemele Hill as irreplaceable. They were slow to make a decision because they were in a quandary. How to discipline Jemele without looking like racists and a misogynists. Could they do what they had done to Sage Steele the year before[24] and make her disappear into a vortex? No, she had spoken about the  president. ESPN hoped all of it would just disappear. It didn’t. This is Donald Trump, the most thin skinned President in modern history the White House couldn’t let it go. So they had to wait and see what happened. And Jemele kept being Jemele and ESPN finally had their opening to suspend her and if all reports are correct her contract won’t be renewed.

So who will talk about what’s right in the sportworld? Jason Whitlock, Stephen A Smith, Bomani Jones? Their columns and on air responses have run from super conservative and misogynist (Whitlock) to non committal and dismissive (Smith). What will we as sports fan lose if we lose Jemele? What will black women lose? But the person who has truly been lost in all of this is Colin Kaepernick. Remember him? How will any of this get him his job back? Can he afford to wait on others to help him or does he have to take the owners and the NFL on and fight for himself.  We’ll find out, on October 16, 2017, Kaepernick filed a lawsuit against the NFL and its owners. Claiming that the owners colluded to keep him out of the NFL and without a job because he used his 1st amendment right.

It seems Kaepernick has decided to use his 7th amendment right, the right to have a jury of your peers in a civil case over 20.00.

It’s about time.

  *************************************************************************************

  [1] https://theundefeated.com/features/the-nfls-racial-divide/

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/donald-trumps-long-stormy-and-unrequited-romance-with-the-nfl/2017/09/23/979264a4-a093-11e7-8ea1-ed975285475e_story.html?utm_term=.d7a4b6cd0b0e  Trump won the case against the NFL, but the court determined that the USFL was imploded on it’s own. Trump won $1.00. But since you earn triple earnings in anti-trust proceedings, he received, $3.00.

[3] No offense to Queens, NY

[4] https://youtu.be/vrW-GI_9IL8

[5] Luther Strange loses his bid to be re-elected despite Trump coming to save him.  Trump later tells the media, “I guess I backed the wrong guy.”

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy

[7] Hue Jackson, the coach of the Cleveland Browns isn’t a fan of NFL players protesting, http://www.sportingnews.com/nfl/news/browns-coach-hue-jackson-against-national-anthem-protest-patriotism/1lrihp1r2yv7710y7olb8equrs

[8] http://www.theroot.com/fire-chief-says-pittsburgh-nfl-coach-mike-tomlin-added-1818808004

[9] From this point, I’m just going to refer to Jemele Hill as Jemele. That’s how us black folks do. She’s in distress and I don’t have time to be formal.

[10] http://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/jemele_hill_on_being_black_fem.php

[11] http://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/jemele_hill_on_being_black_fem.php

[12] http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/15/health/armstrong-ped-explainer/index.html

[13] https://theundefeated.com/features/jemele-hill-on-doing-the-right-thing/

[14] I too learned from the women in my family and have heard this same refrain from may of the women of color who are successful and speak truth to power.

[15] https://ww.si.com/tech-media/2017/09/13/sarah-huckabee-sanders-tells-press-jemele-hill-should-lose-job-over

[16] http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/15/tillerson-trump-moron-castration-243785

[17] http://time.com/4970126/cam-newton-jourdan-rodrigue-routes/

[18] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/seahawks-michael-bennett-says-police-officer-held-gun-to-his-head/

[19] In 2011 Colin Cowherd made a statement about the recently deceased Washington Redskins player that not on besmirsched his character, but insinuated that because he was black and was in trouble with the law it’s no surprise that he’s dead. Cowherd made a small non-apology but was not disciplined.

In 2014, Bill Simmons one of ESPNs biggest sports journalists was suspended because of his remarks against Roger Goddell during the Ray Rice tape incident. Simmons called Goddell a liar and was suspended for 3 weeks.

[20] https://www.thenation.com/article/nfl-owners-and-espn-bosses-are-showing-which-side-they-are-on/

[21] I was going to say Shelly, but she was the FLOTUS. So I’ll just keep it to first names. Just like Jemele. They’re all my besties in my head.

[22] http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37985967

[23] http://variety.com/2015/film/news/patricia-arquette-comments-oscars-2015-controversy-1201439814/

[24] Steele lost her coveted post for ESPN’s NBA Countdown when she made derogatory statements about the protesters fighting the president’s travel and how it was forcing her to be late for her flights. She has since been moved to Sportscenter on the Road one of ESPN level B shows. )

Sistahs, Brothas, and Presidents Two Mondays ago Jemele Hill from ESPN was suspended for asking fans to boycott the advertisers of the Dallas Cowboys.

[takebackthedream]

Trump Won’t Say It, But We Will: White Terror in Charlottesville by Richard Eskow

Her name was Heather Heyer. She was marching for justice in Charlottesville when she was killed by a white racist. Say her name.

His name was Timothy Caughman. He was walking down the street in New York City when he was killed by a white racist. Say his name.

Their names were Ricky John Best and Taliesen Myrddin Namkai-Meche. They were riding a train in Portland when they saw a Muslim woman and her friend being threatened. They stepped forward to protect them and were killed by a white racist.

Their names were Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Wharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson. They were studying the Bible in a Charleston church when they were killed by a white racist. Say their names.

And say the name of the real murderer, the one who sent agents out to kill: white nationalist terror.

It took real bravery for Heather Heyer to march that day. And it takes bravery just to be black or Muslim or Jewish or gay or trans in the United States, where the threat of violence hangs over every walk down the street, every ride on a train, even a Bible class in a great and historic church.

The Words Donald Trump Won’t Say

Last year, Donald Trump insisted that it was important to name your adversary. “Now, to solve a problem,” Trump said in an October 9, 2016 debate, “you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name. (Hillary Clinton) won’t say the name and President Obama won’t say the name. But the name is there. It’s radical Islamic terror.”

It’s your turn, Mr. President. Say the name: White nationalist terror.

There were nearly twice as many incidents of white nationalist terrorism as Islam-related terror in the United States between 2008 and the end of 2016, according to one analysis. But instead of standing up to the terrorists, Trump has refused to even name the threat. He refused again when he was asked about the violence in Charlottesville and the death of Heather Heyer, making this now-infamous comment instead:

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”

Leaving aside the bizarre “many sides” construction – Trump somehow turned a two-sided confrontation into an ethical hypercube – the meaning of this comment was not lost on most observers: The President of the United States deliberately refused to make a distinction between actual Nazis and other self-proclaimed racists and the people who were opposing them because … well, because they were actual Nazis and self-proclaimed racists.

The Nazis were happy with Trump’s statement. The “Daily Stormer,” an amateurish neo-Nazi website – imagine a student newspaper published by the feral kids from William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies – wrote, “Trump’s comments were good… Nothing specific about us.”

Trump refused to acknowledge the violent death, at the hands of a white supremcist, of the 32-year-old woman who was peacefully exercising her rights of free speech and assembly. He has remained silent as we have learned more about the killer’s openly pro-Nazi statements and his attendance at a fascist rally in Charlottesville before he killed Heather Heyer.

The Nameless Ones

There is one name we will not say today: the killer’s. When you face a pack of wild dogs and one of them goes for your throat, does it really need a name?

The rally the killer attended was organized by a group called Vanguard America. The name, which is undoubtedly meant to be bold and intimidating, sounds more like a midsized insurance brokerage. Its members look like they work in one, too, except for the canine rage on their faces.

Vanguard America is openly fascist in nature and has been actively involved in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim efforts. Their putative complaint in Charlottesville was the renaming of a park that had been dedicated to Robert E. Lee, the military leader of an armed rebellion that was waged against the United States of America in order to protect and preserve the enslavement of human beings.

Lee’s statue is scheduled to be removed as part of that process. That’s as it should be. Robert E. Lee had no historical connection to Charlottesville, and his statue was not even built until nearly 60 years after the Civil War had ended.

“Historical value”? 35 new Confederate monuments have been built in North Carolina since 2000. That’s not history. It’s hate. These parks and statues aren’t relics of the past. They’re racist declarations in the present.

Names like Robert E. Lee should not be honored in the streets and parks of a free and democratic nation. They represent the violent suppression of an entire people.

They represent white terror.

Will the Real Donald Trump Please Stand Up?

The killer, like his fellow pups, wore a white shirt and carried a shield at the rally. Although they’re clearly trying to look fierce, this sorry-ass group of scrofulous child-men looks more like a gaggle of extras waiting to go onstage in an elementary school production about pirates.

But don’t let their nerdy, self-evident inadequacy fool you. It is that very inadequacy that makes them dangerous, as it has made generations of fascists before them dangerous. They have something to prove, which means they need someone to prove it on.

If their doughy, pasty bullying forms remind you of someone, that’s no surprise. They share those traits with the man who now sits in the Oval Office. Did Trump equivocate because he’s too cowardly to confront them? Did it seem like filial disloyalty to condemn the men who walk in his father’s KKK-friendly footsteps? Is he a secret sympathizer?

Trump wouldn’t say the words “white nationalist terror,” even after some of his fellow Republicans spoke out. “Nothing patriotic about #Nazis,the #KKK or #WhiteSupremacists,” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio. “It’s the direct opposite of what #America seeks to be.”

“We should call evil by its name,” tweeted Sen. Orrin Hatch. “My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.” Sen. Ted Cruz described the racists as “repulsive and evil” and called on the Justice Department to investigate a “this grotesque act of domestic terrorism.”

When you’ve been owned on social justice by Ted Cruz, you’ve really been owned. But then, Donald Trump has been flirting with white nationalism for a long time. He said this in Poland, for example:

Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture, and memory … Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail. Our people will thrive. And our civilization will triumph.

Those “bonds of history, culture, and memory” are the ones that bind white Europeans to each other against the rest of the world. “The West” is white Europe. Everything he describes as “ours” is white and European, including the “civilization” that white supremacists is under attack from black, brown, and non-Christian hordes. It’s no surprise, then, that Trump’s election has caused elation among white racists.

If Not Us, Who?

The fascist Richard Spencer understands what the president is saying, and can say it a little more directly. “We will not be replaced from this park,” Spencer said last May. “We will not be replaced from this world. Whites have a future. We have a future of power, of beauty, of expression.”

Sorry, Dick. We’ve heard the “Horst Wessel Song” and it’s not that beautiful or expressive.

As for that “future of power,” it’s clear that the president has a rhetorical addiction to the language of violence. His apocalyptic words about North Korea came straight from the “Triumph of the Will” playbook. “Fire and Fury” – it sounds like a Leni Riefenstahl movie.  Violent language sets the stage for violent action.

So, how do we resist the fascist impulse? Lady Gaga started a hashtag, #ThisIsNotUS. That’s a nice thought and a way to start a conversation, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Yes, Heather Heyer is “us.” But so is Vanguard America, and so is Donald Trump. So are the Republicans who occupy all three branches of the federal government, along with most of our state houses and governorships. The same Republicans who have used openly racist imagery for more than fifty years, and have actively suppressed black and brown votes to preserve their power.

Mass incarceration is “us,” because most of us have stayed home when it’s protested. Wall Street is “us,” too. It has enjoyed the protection of both parties as it once again engages in racially-biased banking practices. District attorneys from both parties have looked the other way at systematic patterns of police violence against community of color. They’re “us,” because we elected them.

If racism is not “us,” then wet haven’t done enough to bring it down.

Racism is the curse of the majority, and only the majority can end it. It lives in our homes, our houses of worship, and our neighborhoods. The killer’s racism was invisible to his mother, who told a reporter that her son couldn’t be racist because he had a black friend. We need to ask ourselves: What is still invisible to us? What are we blind to: as white people, if we’re white; as straight people, if we’re straight; in all the many ways we are members of the dominant tribe and not the ‘other’?

That blindness creates the dark spaces where hatred grows.

But awareness is only the first step. We must resist it, too — by marching in the streets, by demanding change, by rejecting violent speech whenever we hear it, and by stepping in to defending people when they are under attack.

‘Many sides’? There are only two sides here: Right and wrong. Murderer and victim. Hatred and love. In the clutch, when it really mattered, the president of the United States refused to pick a side. But we can. We can lay down our lives, one by one if necessary, until we have won.

And the next time someone is murdered by white terror, we can say her name.

[libertariantaoist]

They said the election of Donald Trump would usher in an era of political repression  in which the First Amendment would come under attack – and they  were right, although not in the way they meant it:

“Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played  any role last year in a  Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories   –  some fictional  –  that favored Donald Trump’s presidential bid, two people  familiar with the inquiry say.

“Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands,  known as ‘bots,’ to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at  times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against  Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.”

Aside from sites run by the Russian government, like Russia Today and Sputnik,  the targets of the investigation are Breitbart.com, the pro-Trump web site formerly  managed by Steve Bannon – now an advisor to the President – and Infowars.com,  the “conspiracy” site made famous by entertainer Alex Jones, although the purview  of the witch hunt “investigation” is bound to broaden.

Those “bots” – automated programs that broadcast links, tweets, Facebook posts,  etc. – were supposedly launched at key times during the presidential campaign,  and were disproportionately anti-Clinton — are supposedly the key link in a  Vast Russian Conspiracy. The FBI leakers tell McClatchy News that “investigators  examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations  took any actions to assist Russia’s operatives. Their participation, however,  wasn’t necessary for the bots to amplify their news through Twitter and  Facebook.”

So this is how the smear campaign scores points: you don’t have to be on the  Russian payroll – you can be a “useful idiot” just because of your political  views, which condemn you as an “unwitting” agent, as former CIA director  Mike Morell described  Trump. This is how the parameters of “respectable” opinion are policed: this  is how the War Party criminalizes those who think that the cold war is over  and shouldn’t be revived.

“’This may be one of the most highly impactful information operations in  the history of intelligence,’ said one former U.S. intelligence official, who  spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.”

Ah yes, there’s yet another one of those “former intelligence officials” leaking  the details of an ongoing FBI inquiry – but, hey, there’s no Deep State campaign  to undermine the Trump administration! And he’s right, if “impactful” means  that what we’re witnessing is a wave of anti-Russian hysteria backed by government  coercion the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country since the 1950s.

Because you can bet that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), the chief ringmaster  of the House hearings on “Russian influence” in the election, is going to jump  on this. And so we’re going to be treated to the spectacle of web site editors  hauled up before his committee and harangued about their “Russian connections”  – just like accused “Communists” were dragged before the House Un-American Activities  Committee and interrogated, smeared, and threatened with prison time if they  refused to answer questions.

That’s the practice – here’s the theory:

“As for the bots, they carried links not only to news stories but  also to Democratic emails posted on WikiLeaks, especially those hacked from  Podesta and made public in October, said Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford  University Internet Institute who has researched the bot attacks.”

Prof. Howard’s research tells us that “misinformation” (i.e. opinions Howard  doesn’t agree with) is being spread via “computational  propaganda,” and that this is a Bad Thing since it creates “distrust among  voters.” And it isn’t just Trump-bots the Professor is “concerned” about: in  the run up to the Brexit referendum (and guess which side he was on!)  he  warned that Brexit-bots were spreading similar “misinformation.” Howard  and other concern-trolls from academia moan that these automated bots could  “sway” elections – but, then again, so could other “automated” means of persuasion,  say, Internet ads that pop up on your computer, or, indeed, any other  form of “computational propaganda” that utilizes advanced technology (television  ads) to make the case for a candidate or cause. What these people are edging  toward, but don’t dare say openly, is that they advocate censorship of opinions  they don’t like.

Yet they come very close to saying it. Here’s  an approving article on the Oxford University web site that hardly masks Howard’s  agenda:

“A form of mass propaganda more insidious than anything used in the 20th  century is being used to manipulate global politics, according to the latest  research. The culprit is social media and the lax regulation that allows voters  to be bombarded with politically slanted misinformation – fake news.”

Insidious! Manipulative! “The culprit”! And what’s the solution? Regulation.  The piece goes on to cite Howard:

“Ruling elites have often used propaganda  to sustain their power, but this latest wave is different,’ says Professor Philip  Howard, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Fellow of  Balliol College. ‘Targeted messaging over social media is deeply personalized  compared to the messaging that ‘all communists are evil’ that used to be distributed  by mass films. It’s much more difficult to source who’s generating the content.  Users think the messaging may be coming from their family and friends; it’s  about particular issues the programmer knows you care about. And it appears  to be pretty effective.’”

So it’s okay for “ruling elites” to use propaganda,  “but this latest wave is different.” Well, yes, its goal is apparently to oppose  the current ruling elites, which is what Howard objects to.

Despite the fact that “it’s more difficult to  source who’s generating the content,” however, Howard has a pretty good idea  of who are the “culprits”:

“‘We know that the Russians have spent money on propaganda  efforts to improve Trump’s profile over Twitter,’ says Howard, ‘and that seems  to have included creating bots that follow Trump and re-tweet a lot of what  he says, as well as news from Russia. They often tweet stories about Democrats,  western elites and corruption.’ There are links between propagandists for Brexit  and for Trump, he adds. ‘My speculation would be that Russia would like to see  the EU smaller and further from consensus. There’s a handful of accounts that  were passionate about getting the UK to leave Europe and then they suddenly  became interested in American politics.’”

“Links between propagandists for Brexit and  for Trump” – somebody please call the FBI! And apparently somebody has.

Howard hails from Canada, where they don’t have  a First Amendment, and where “hate speech” – another alleged “problem” with  social media, according to the Professor – is illegal. Here in the United States,  people like Howard, who want to regulate speech, have to hide their real agenda.  Thus we have the Adam Schiffs of this world, and their media camarilla, pushing  an “investigation” into pro-Trump web sites on the pretext that they’re part  of a Vast Russian Conspiracy to take over America. If “hate speech” doesn’t  work, then try invoking “national security” – that’s a sure bet.

Howard goes on to target those he sneeringly dubs “patriotic programmers” –  Americans – who are guilty of spreading pro-Trump “misinformation,” slyly implying  that they, too, are part of the Vast Russian Conspiracy. Which conjures visions  of ordinary American citizens being hauled up before Schiff’s Inquisition and  being asked “Are you or have you ever been …?”

It would be comical if it didn’t represent such  a serious threat to our liberties.

McCarthyism started out as a partisan campaign  to tar the Democrats as the Kremlin’s party But at least there  was some evidence that the reds had indeed infiltrated the highest reaches  of FDR’s administration. In the case of the neo-McCarthyites, their “evidence”  consists of sheer  assertions by anonymous spooks, cries of “its classified, we can’t give  you the evidence,” and a case made by profit-making cyber-“security” companies  like CrowdStrike that is fast coming unglued.  

In an effort to explain away their stunning  election loss, the Democrats – in league with their Deep State and media allies  – are embarked on a campaign of vilification that will end the way these things  always end: the use of State power to discredit, smear, and ultimately outlaw  dissenting opinions.

What this latest outbreak of politically-motivated  moral panic reminds me of is the “Satanic sex ritual” craze  of some years ago, where children were brought in to be interviewed by psychiatrists  and social workers and asked: “Show me on this doll where the evil Satanists  touched you.”

Yes, they told us that if Trump took the White  House the First Amendment would be crushed underfoot and the dark shadow of  authoritarianism would be cast across the crumbling remnants of our republic  – and they were right!

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com #first amendment

[lizzy-parker]

Women's March on Washington: What's Next?

Now that the excitement has died down a bit and the emotional high from the Women's March has been dampened by the onslaught of depressing and alarming developments in the Trump presidency, I think that some reflection is in order. I would like to address a few of the criticisms I have encountered about the march, point out a few things about the march that I found to be especially encouraging and exciting, and talk about what I hope to see moving forward from the march.

Criticisms

In the week since the march, dozens of the particularly clever and stirring handmade signs have gone viral, as have countless news articles and opinion pieces. The majority of what I have seen published about the march has been positive, but there have also been several criticisms.

1. The march was too white.

One criticism that I think is very relevant and worth paying attention to is the fact that the marches were very white. Of course, there is nothing wrong with white women marching, but there needs to be recognition that historically, women of color have been excluded from white feminism, and the fact remains that of the white women who voted, more than half voted for Trump (compared to less than 6% of black women). Feminism is great, but white feminism is white supremacy, which is unacceptable. However, the organizers of the Women’s March did a great job embracing intersectional feminism by choosing such a diverse group of remarkable women (and a few men) to speak at the march, and many of the speakers addressed the importance of intersectionality and inclusivity. We have come a long way in addressing racism in the feminist movement, but we still have a long way to go.

2. "The march was offensive."

Another prevalent criticism was that the march was offensive. Here’s the thing: being loud and challenging the status quo is kind of the point of marching and protesting. I totally get it if carrying a sign with a swear word or a cartoon depiction of a uterus is not your style or makes you uncomfortable. It used to make me a lot more uncomfortable than it does now, but that’s a separate issue; the point is, I get it. However, what I don’t get is being more offended by a sign than you are by the systems of oppression, injustice, and inequality that the people at the march spoke out against. (Here’s a video that perfectly illustrates this point.) One specific point that was very clear at the march but has not been as clear on the internet is the purpose and meaning of the pink hats.

I’m just going to spell it out. Some critics have incorrectly given the impression that people who wore the ‘pussy hats’ were doing it just to be crude. That is actually really ironic because, in addition to being a play on words (pussy cats, the hats had cat ears, thus, pussy hats), one of the goals of the PussyHatProject is to reclaim the word “pussy” for empowerment rather than the degradation for which it has previously been used. In addition to reclaiming the word, the hats were a response to Trump’s horrifying assertion that he can “grab [women] by the pussy”. Sexual assault is a very serious issue. At least one in five women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime, and for Trump to openly admit to sexually assaulting women and still be elected president is totally unacceptable.

3. "The march was unnecessary."

The final criticism, which seemed to come mostly from women who did not attend the march, was that the message of the march was unnecessary. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not about to say that every woman should have gone to the march, that every woman felt welcome at the march, or that every woman needs to agree with all of the platforms of the march. However, if you think that all of the issues that people were marching for are irrelevant, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and guess that you feel that way because you don’t feel oppressed or notice oppression in your daily life. Don’t get me wrong, I wish that no one felt oppressed, including you, whoever you are, but the fact remains that people are oppressed and suffer injustices at the hands of fellow human beings.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” - Desmond Tutu

It’s really uncomfortable to deal with the fact that we have inadvertently contributed to systems of oppression; it’s really uncomfortable to confront our own privilege and learn how to stand up to injustice and oppression. Marching is certainly not the only way to stand up against oppression, nor can it be the only thing we do to stand up against oppression, but it has been part of very effective movements in the past that have made progress for justice and humanity. Therefore, the Women’s March is very relevant and very necessary. So is continuing to act.

Successes

Despite the criticisms it has received, the march was overwhelmingly positive. The empowerment and positive message of the march extended for several days as it reverberated throughout the internet and the news. It was especially encouraging when the attendance estimates rolled in, showing that the scale of the march was, in many ways, unprecedented and confirming that the march was several times size of the inauguration crowd. Here are some specific ways in which the Women’s March was great.

1. Solidarity

The Women’s March on Washington and the 650 sister marches that took place around the United States and the world were a stunning demonstration of strength and solidarity. Estimates published in The Atlantic show that between 3.3 and 4.6 million people marched, at least 500,000 of whom were in Washington, D.C. The sheer scale of the march has demanded the attention of national headlines and social media all week. In the days following the march, my Facebook feed was flooded with selfies, pictures, and posts on my family, friends, and distant acquaintances at the marches around the country. For me, the march was an amazing and unforgettable experience. I was blown away by the solidarity and camaraderie that formed so naturally within the pink sea of random strangers. Together, we made a statement: we are here, we care, and we will not be silent. In addition, being at the march and knowing that so many other people were there as well was a mental and emotional boost. In the midst of several months of feeling pretty upset and powerless, the Women’s March was a day of energy, empowerment, and hope.

2. Diversity and intersectionality

The marchers in Washington, D.C. heard speeches given by an impressive, diverse group of remarkable activists and celebrities. The organizers did an excellent job laying intersectionality as the foundation of the March, and this was made most apparent by the fact that the speakers represented such a range of identities, communities, and issues.The most powerful aspect of the march was the diversity of the issues represented there. Even though the march was officially centered on women, marchers spoke out about practically every social issue facing our nation today. People made signs talking about addressing women’s rights, civil rights, environment, Black Lives Matter, immigration, islamophobia, free speech, police brutality, poverty, mass incarceration, the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Flint water crisis, pussies, racism, sexism, LGBTQ+, education, people with disabilities, abortion, the wage gap, mental health, the rights of Native Americans and indigenous peoples, the refugee crisis, Betsy DeVos, fake news, hate crimes, the KKK, Trump, Pence, fascism, the preservation of the republic as we know it, and more.

3. New activists

Like many people I know, Women’s March was my first personal experience with protesting, marching, and being in that large of a crowd. Many people I have talked to since the election have expressed feeling as though there is now a large weight or a dark cloud hanging over their outlook on the future and that part of the reason they went to the march is that they needed to do something about all of the depressing and concerning developments that have unfolded since the election. You are not alone; I have felt that way too. It is worth mentioning, however, that the new feelings of “I feel betrayed by my country” and “there is no way that this is going to end well” are not new feelings for a lot of marginalized people. Up to this point, my white privilege and class privilege have protected me from feeling truly vulnerable and targeted, and to be honest, the ways in which I am privileged will probably continue to protect me from feeling the full force of the Trump administration. Several women of color, speakers and attendees, at the Women’s March also brought this up. They were not saying that more privileged women who are feeling this way shouldn’t be, but they were saying, “Welcome to the club. We’ve been here for centuries and it sucks.” If there is any silver lining to the Trump presidency, it is that it woke a lot of people up to the reality we live in and has spurred many to action. It is unfortunate that something so awful had to happen to make so many people, myself included, realize the extent to which prejudice and injustice are still powerful, ugly forces stepped into almost every institution in our society. But now that we are here, it is even more imperative that none of us grows complacent. Now that there are so many new activists out there, it is time for us to use our privilege to educate ourselves and fight for what’s right.

Moving Forward

History books will certainly mention this march. The question that remains is what the next sentence will be. I sincerely hope that it is not 'Unfortunately, the movement quickly lost momentum, and the Trump administration met little resistance as it cut apart and unraveled the fabric of the country,' but rather, 'It was a spark that ignited a movement of millions of Americans and people around the world who organized and united to fight for the rights of women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, Muslims, the poor, the disenfranchised, and all people. They refused to be ignored and as a result, won several significant battles.' The Women’s March was great, but it is just the beginning. Now is the time for reflection, education, organization, and action to combat inequality and injustice on both personal and systemic levels.

Note: If you are wondering why I did not address the pro-life/pro-choice controversies surrounding the march, the reason is that I did not want to cover such a complicated and misunderstood issue as a tangent inside an article that is really not about that. Stay tuned for a future article on that issue!