Sunday, August 21, 2016 6:21:32 AM
So Much For Dog Whistles. Trump Has Now Fully Embraced White Nationalists.
Laurel Raymond
Aug 17, 2016
Donald Trump has built his campaign on the strength of his white-nationalist dog-whistle. He has a habit of retweeting racist and anti-Semitic memes from white-supremacists [ https://thinkprogress.org/3-white-supremacists-on-twitter-that-inspire-donald-trump-8e60a264848 ]. His campaign gives radio interviews to explicitly racist media outlets [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/07/24/trump-adviser-and-gop-congressmen-gave-pro-trump-interviews-white-nationalist-radio-host-rnc/211861 ].
Yet while Trump’s comments outraged many — like his claim [ https://thinkprogress.org/the-unthinkable-consequences-of-donald-trumps-racist-attack-on-a-judge-297f493938da ] that a Latino judge couldn’t be impartial — a virulent subculture heard his call and came out swinging. When Trump talks about “heritage” and the criminality of immigrants and people of color, white nationalists hear an endorsement of their core beliefs [ https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trumps-veiled-signals-to-white-supremacists-6a3d80bcc04e ]. Over the past year, they’ve come out in droves: making robocalls, organizing rallies, and raising money. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke cited Trump [ https://thinkprogress.org/riding-the-trump-tide-former-kkk-leader-announces-bid-for-u-s-senate-70ac5c9bf33c ] as his inspiration to run for Senate.
But until now, Trump has danced around openly embracing the white nationalist alt-right: He’ll retweet their adulation [ https://thinkprogress.org/3-white-supremacists-on-twitter-that-inspire-donald-trump-8e60a264848 ] of him and borrow their talking points [ https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trumps-new-attack-on-hillary-echoes-white-supremacist-websites-70579c9d7e50 ], but when asked, say the absolute minimum to defuse the controversy. To the white nationalists, Trump’s words are taken as a tacit signal of approval, but it’s one that still leaves Trump some wiggle room to claim ignorance [ https://thinkprogress.org/trump-plays-dumb-on-david-dukes-history-of-white-supremacy-here-s-proof-he-s-lying-dafb05f4cb31 ] in front of more mainstream audiences.
On Wednesday, Trump named Steven K. Bannon, the executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News (known for their drooling Trump coverage [ http://www.dailywire.com/news/8441/i-know-trumps-new-campaign-chairman-steve-bannon-ben-shapiro ]), as his new campaign CEO. In doing so, Trump signaled that he’s ready to formally embrace the alt-right and their white nationalist views.
“Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart openly embraced the white supremacist Alt-Right,” former Breitbart Editor-at-large and currently editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire Ben Shapiro [id.] wrote. Shapiro resigned from Breitbart after the site’s leadership ordered its reporters to stop defending former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields, who was allegedly assaulted by Trump’s then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
Under Brannon, Shapiro writes, “Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism [ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/ ] as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.”
Milo Yiannopoulos, whom Shapiro calls a “Trump-worshipping alt-right droog stooge,” is a prominent figure at Breitbart. He was recently banned from Twitter for orchestrating a racist and sexist troll-swarm of Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones that temporarily drove her from the platform. Yiannopoulos remains an editor at the site.
After Yiannopoulos wrote a piece [ http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/03/28/glenn-beck-breitbarts-milo-yiannopoulos-goebbels-his-evil-trump-twitter-defense-poison-to-the-republic/ ] defending Donald Trump’s retweet of a sexist meme comparing his and Ted Cruz’s wife, Glenn Beck compared Yiannopoulos to “Goebbels” — Hitler’s minister of propaganda — and called it “one of the more evil stories I have read” (as reported by Breitbart itself [id.], with insouciant commentary from Yiannopolous).
Yiannopoulos penned another Breitbart piece [ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/ ] in which he praised the alt-right for “a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.” He scoffs at claims made by “Establishment types” over its ties to anti-Semitism, white supremacism, and neo-Nazism.
A quick perusal of the #altright hashtag on Twitter reveals a rash of racist, sexist, and xenophobic memes. Outright anti-semitism and references to “Aryans [ https://twitter.com/Fash__McQueen/status/762667737885868032 ]” and Nazis are also common — as are tweets marked #MAGA (the abbreviation for Trump’ campaign slogan) and fawning over Trump himself.
Trump’s rise and the rise of the alt-ride go hand-in-hand. And under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart has enthusiastically gone along with both.
In choosing Bannon as his new campaign manager, Trump has signaled definitively that there will be no pivot to the mainstream — instead, he’s doubling down and formally embracing his alt-right support.
He’s done dancing around them — now he’s openly dancing with them.
Copyright 2016 Center for American Progress Action Fund
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-embraces-the-alt-right-cd91cc889154 [with comments]
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‘Racialists’ are cheered by Trump’s latest strategy
White nationalist writer Jared Taylor, in his home in Oakton, Va., says that Donald Trump should “concentrate on his natural constituency, which is white people.”
(Pete Marovich/For The Washington Post)
By David Weigel
August 20, 2016
OAKTON, Va. — Jared Taylor hits play, and the first Donald Trump ad of the general election unfolds across his breakfast table. Syrian refugees streaming across a border. Hordes of immigrants, crowded onto trains.
“Donald Trump’s America is secure,” rumbles a narrator. “Terrorists and dangerous criminals kept out. The border, secure; our families, safe.”
Taylor, one of America’s foremost “racialists,” is impressed and relieved. “That’s a powerful appeal,” he said. “If he can just stick to that, he is in very good shape.”
From his Fairfax County home, Taylor has edited the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance and organized racialist conferences under the “AmRen” banner. He said that Trump should “concentrate on his natural constituency, which is white people,” suggesting that winning 65 percent of the white vote would overwhelm any Democratic gains with minorities.
When Trump made Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon his campaign’s chief executive last week, Taylor found reasons to celebrate. It was the latest sign for white nationalists, once dismissed as fringe, that their worldview was gaining popularity and that the old Republican Party was coming to an end.
The rise of the alt-right — named for the Alternative Right website that the “identitarian” nationalist Richard Spencer set up in 2010 and adopted by those opposed to multiculturalism and mass immigration — has come to define how many of its adherents see Trump. There’s less talk now about a “pivot,” or a moment when Trump will adopt the ideas of people that he conquered. His strategy now resembles the alt-right dream of maximizing the white vote — even as polling shows his standing with white voters falls short of Mitt Romney’s in 2012.
Trump’s newest speeches, read from a teleprompter, hit all of their favorite notes. “I don’t think Trump had mentioned ‘sanctuary cities’ previously,” Spencer said in an interview. “There’s reason to believe that Bannon is returning him to his powerful, populist message — indeed, honing it. [Former campaign chairman Paul] Manafort was turning Trump into a standard Republican, with the [Mike] Pence [vice-presidential] choice, the economic policy, talk of how ‘Hillary is the real racist,’ if not quite in those words. Bannon is making me hope again, making Trump Trump again.”
Although there is no data gauging the size of the alt-right, its adherents point to Trump’s primary victories as proof that their ideas have been winning. They are so active on social media, from Twitter to Reddit, that critics are beginning to feel overwhelmed.
Breitbart, not founded as part of their movement, became a welcoming place for it. The site found millions of new readers clicking on stories about “black crime” and the threat of Syrian refugees. At Breitbart, undocumented immigrants are “illegals,” Black Lives Matter activists venerate “cop-killer heroes,” and Gold Star father Khizr Khan is a busy promoter of sharia law. Michael Brown, the man whose death kicked off the protests in Ferguson, Mo., was unfairly mythologized by the media.
Kurt Bardella, who handled Breitbart’s public relations until the spring, said that Bannon’s staff meetings were roiled by discussions of Islam and mass immigration.
“It was stuff like ‘these people don’t belong here, they’re overrunning our country,’ ” he said. “That kind of white nationalist sentiment.”
Trump, who has frequently linked or retweeted white nationalists and decried them only under pressure, gave frequent interviews to Breitbart. Already supportive of the Trump campaign, people like Taylor see Bannon’s move and the change in Trump’s tone as validation.
“Imagine a media that was more Breitbart than New York Times,” Taylor said. “Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown have been even more important than Trump, in one respect. They are the people who make whites realize that what the media have been telling them about race relations is simply wrong.”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has treated all of this as a gift. Hours after Bannon’s hire was official, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook held a conference call denouncing Breitbart — a taster for a series of email pitches and finger-wagging statements to come.
Breitbart News was dismissive. “They say that we are ‘anti-Semitic,’ though our company was founded by Jews, is largely staffed by Jews, and has an entire section dedicated to reporting on and defending the Jewish state of Israel,” site Chief Financial Officer Larry Solov and editor in chief Alex Marlow said in a statement. “They call us ‘racist,’ even though her husband’s law enforcement policies led to mass incarceration of blacks.”
That reaction, however, didn’t reflect Breitbart’s coverage of crime or of the alt-right. Last month, Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh referred to the criminal justice overhauls favored by some Republicans as “prison break legislation” that’s “un-compassionate to crime victims.”
Bannon, who directed conservative documentaries before he took over the site, kept Breitbart and its companion Sirius XM series entertaining. Sam Nunberg, a former Trump staffer, recalled that Breitbart interviewed Trump even when much of the media considered him a celebrity joke candidate.
“The problem in the conservative movement is it’s boring,” Bannon said in a May 19 exchange with the site’s technology editor and rising star Milo Yiannopoulos. “[If] you’re boring me, you’re losing my attention.”
The alt-right was decidedly not boring. Its arguments about what a winning, identity-based politics might look like were embraced by readers. Its writers embraced the torrent of jokes and memes from the alt-right, which portrayed Trump as a sort of trickster god and establishment Republicans as low-energy “cucks” — the derogatory name referencing cuckolding and given to anyone seen to be selling out to liberals.
“Had they been serious about defending humanism, liberalism and universalism, the rise of the alternative right might have been arrested,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a sympathetic March profile of the alt-right. “All they had to do was argue for common humanity in the face of black and feminist identity politics, for free speech in the face of the regressive Left’s censorship sprees, and for universal values in the face of left-wing moral relativism.”
Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter recently after leading a short harassment campaign against “Saturday Night Live” star Leslie Jones.
Breitbart’s coverage, and the alt-right in general, advance a theory that a left-behind wing of conservatives have screamed about for decades. In the 1980s, figures such as Pat Buchanan and the late Sam Francis warned that the left was transforming the country without much resistance from the Republican establishment. In an essay, Francis argued that “Middle American Radicals” hardly understood their potential influence.
“MARs form a class — not simply a middle class and not simply an economic category — that is in revolt against the dominant patterns and structures of American society,” Francis wrote. “Liberalism and cosmopolitanism were able, through their immense appeal to an intelligentsia, to portray localism and decentralized institutions as a mask for bigotry and selfishness.”
But Francis and other “paleoconservatives” lost a battle inside the Republican Party to people who thought it could grow its appeal to nonwhite voters. In an interview with The Washington Post this month, Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) used the term “alt-right crowd” to refer to the people that Jack Kemp, his mentor and former congressman from New York, had helped to purge. Ryan called the group out of the mainstream and, in other interviews ahead of his primary, which he won by 66 percentage points, he did not argue with radio hosts when they linked the alt-right to racist elements.
The National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, whose project to reform the mainstream conservative movement was waylaid by the Trump victory, said, “The alt-right just isn’t much of a movement, something that separates it from Goldwaterite conservatism after the 1964 election.
“Bannon isn’t willing to own his own site’s comment section, which is mainstream alt-right,” Ponnuru said. “I have grave concerns about the future of conservatism and the Republican Party, but the alt-right sweeping all before it isn’t one of them.”
In the meantime, the alt-right theory of politics is going through its first presidential campaign. Trump’s latest “pivot” has streamlined his arguments, not moderated them; it has promoted the people who agree with the alt-right, not a bid for the center.
“I’m honestly delighted that Trump is putting a team together that has such reasonable views on immigration,” said Jason Richwine, a policy analyst who left the Heritage Foundation after a backlash to his study of race and IQ and who has appeared on Breitbart’s XM show. “This was almost impossible to imagine even just a year ago. Whatever you might think of his campaign in general, it’s clear that Trump has opened up space to talk about immigration in a way we haven’t been able to before.”
At this year’s American Renaissance conference, Trump’s success was a popular and unifying subject. Peter Brimelow, the founder of VDare.com — named for Virginia Dare, the first white person born in America — used his speech to mock the failure of the Republican establishment and ask whether white voters were ready to become the dominant political bloc.
“What the GOP needs to do is Southernize the white vote,” Brimelow said. “You need to have everybody in the country voting the way that Southern whites vote.”
Trump’s new message — the combination of immigration restriction and the appeal to black voters — was no contradiction. Last year, in a November interview with Bannon, Trump regretted the loss of a worker who took his skills back to his native India.
“We’ve got to be able to keep great people in the country,” Trump said. “We have to be careful of that, Steve. I think you agree with that, Steve?”
Bannon did not. “A country is more than an economy,” he retorted. “We are a civic society.”
In his speeches this week, Trump has twinned his pitch to black voters with his warning about unchecked immigration. “Hillary Clinton would rather provide a job to a refugee from overseas than to give that job to unemployed African American youth,” he has said. That pitch, said Buchanan, could help Trump with the white voters who worry that by voting for him, they are endorsing racism.
“White folks are not monolithic,” Buchanan said. “You want middle America and moderates to know that you care about these folks, too. They’re the first ones who suffer when the shopping centers burn down.”
At Trump’s rally in Charlotte, one of the first of the Bannon era, the message was sinking in. Frances Johnson, 68, said that the polls were not reflecting Trump’s real level of support and that she sometimes emailed the campaign with ideas on how to change that. The pitch to black voters, she said, was smart.
“I really don’t think that African Americans want to be stuck where they are,” Johnson said. “They’re basically glorified slaves — they get free this, free that, free this, free that, and they can’t get a good job and depend on the government. What else do you call it?”
Ken Baswell, 55, was worried that Trump had not put enough TV ads on the air. If he did, he said, he would be trying to inject some truth into a media landscape that lacked it.
“I just want something other than what they’re pushing in mainstream America,” he said. “I want to know the real stuff going on behind the scenes, because I’m not stupid. I’m not a sheep.”
Robert Costa, Jenna Johnson and Frances Sellers contributed to this report.
© 2016 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/racial-realists-are-cheered-by-trumps-latest-strategy/2016/08/20/cd71e858-6636-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html [with
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It’s hard to imagine a much worse pitch Donald Trump could have made for the black vote
Donald Trump smiles during a roundtable discussion about national security on Aug. 17 at his Trump Tower office in New York City.
By Philip Bump
August 20, 2016
At a rally Friday night in Dimondale, Mich., Donald Trump repeated a version of a plea to black voters that he had offered 24 hours earlier in North Carolina.
"No group in America has been more harmed by Hillary Clinton's policies than African Americans," he said, apparently pointing to individuals in the crowd. "No group. No group. If Hillary Clinton's goal was to inflict pain to the African American community, she could not have done a better job. It is a disgrace."
"Detroit tops the list of most dangerous cities in terms of violent crime, number one," he said from a city 90 minutes away from Detroit with a population that is 93 percent white [ http://censusviewer.com/city/MI/Dimondale ]. "This is the legacy of the Democratic politicians who have run this city. This is the result of the policy agenda embraced by crooked Hillary Clinton."
He went on.
"The only way to change results is to change leadership. We can never fix our problems by relying on the same politicians who created our problems in the first place. A new future requires brand new leadership," he said.
"Look at how much African American communities are suffering from Democratic control. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose?" he asked. "You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?"
This was not the Teleprompter Trump that we saw in Charlotte, interlacing his prepared remarks with occasional asides. This was Traditional Trump, riffing a bit more on what he wanted to say in a manner that probably didn't do him much good.
Consider: Black Americans are not "living in poverty" as a general rule. A quarter of the black population is, according to data [ http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/ ] from the Kaiser Family Foundation, about the same as the percentage of Hispanics. In Michigan, the figure is slightly higher. Most black Americans don't live in poverty, just as most white Americans don't.
Consider: The unemployment rate in the black community is higher than that in the white community, as it has been since the Department of Labor started keeping track [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/09/06/black-unemployment-is-always-much-worse-than-white-unemployment-but-the-gap-depends-on-where-you-live/ ]. Among young blacks, though, the figure is not 59 percent — unless (as PolitiFact noted [ http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/jun/20/donald-trump/trump-misleadingly-puts-black-youth-unemployment-r/ ]) you consider not the labor force but every young black American, including high school students. Many young black high school students are unemployed. This isn't a metric that the Labor Department typically uses, for obvious reasons, but calculating the rates for young whites gives you about 50 percent, too.
Consider: Black voters are perfectly able to evaluate candidates on qualities other than their political parties. Black voters began supporting the Democratic Party heavily thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/07/when-did-black-americans-start-voting-so-heavily-democratic/ ]. Since then, they have consistently voted for the party — a party that is one-fifth black [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/08/is-political-polarization-making-racial-tensions-worse/ ] and which since 1964 has elected the vast majority of the black members of Congress. (This argument [ https://twitter.com/mikenizza/status/766751740565807105 ] from Al Sharpton in 2004 is worth a read.) Democrats win the support of black voters consistently because those voters like the work that they do and like the fights that they fight.
When President Obama won reelection in 2012, 93 percent of black Americans thought he was doing a good job. That's also the percentage of the vote he received, according to exit polls, beating Mitt Romney by 87 points.
And yet, somehow, Trump is doing worse.
In the battle between Trump and Clinton, he consistently lands in the low single digits of support from black Americans. In some polls, he has received 0 percent support [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/13/new-polls-in-pennsylvania-and-ohio-show-donald-trump-with-0-percent-of-the-black-vote/ ], a negligible amount. In our most recent survey, he got 2 percent support.
Why? Because nonwhite voters view Trump very unfavorably. We wrote about this [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06/20/three-in-four-voters-of-color-strongly-dislike-trump/ ] in June but can now update the numbers. Four-in-5 blacks have a very unfavorable view of Trump, with a slightly higher percentage, 83 percent, agreeing with the idea that he is biased against women and minorities. Eighty-seven percent of black voters we surveyed indicated that they would be anxious if he were elected president and only 6 percent "comfortable." The numbers for Clinton — who very quickly tweeted [ https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/766776538679443456 ] that Trump's Michigan comments were "so ignorant it's staggering" -- were nearly completely flipped.
There are any number of reasons that black Americans might view Trump unfavorably, starting with his 2011 effort to cast suspicion on Obama's place of birth. Or, probably, starting with his full-page ad calling for the death penalty against five black teenagers in New York City who were accused of rape — wrongly, as it turned out. Or perhaps thanks to the support his current candidacy is getting from people like former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
There's no reason to think that Trump's suggestion that black Americans had "nothing to lose" because they "are living in poverty" will do anything to reverse that trend. Nor was his insistence in North Carolina that he should get votes from black voters because "the inner cities are so bad." Some black people, research shows, live in places besides the "inner city [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/12/no-donald-trump-crime-is-not-out-of-control/ ]."
So why make the argument? It could be, simply enough, that Trump doesn't have anyone in his inner circle that can provide a sense of how to reach out to the black community. One adviser said on CNN [ https://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/19/watch-cnns-brianna-keilar-explain-trump-advisor-speaking-white-voters-not-black-outreach/212536 ] that Trump making his appeal in a mostly white town wasn't a big deal and that "maybe it would have been nice if he went and had a backdrop with a burning car." Or maybe Trump was listening to Ben Carson, who in May made a similar argument for Trump: He would only be president for four years [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/15/politics/ben-carson-donald-trump-only-four-years/ ], so what could go wrong?
It's likely that Trump's continuing lack of meaningful outreach [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/us/politics/donald-trump-black-voters.html ] to black voters keeps him from understanding effective ways of arguing his case. When he went to Baton Rouge to see flood damage, he stopped at a Baptist church with a mostly white congregation.
Or maybe black voters aren't his intended audience. Maybe, with his poll numbers low thanks to soft support from his own party, Trump is trying to convince Republicans that he wants or can earn the black vote. In our most recent poll, one-fifth of Republican men and a quarter of Republican women agreed with the statement that Trump is biased against women and minorities. He gets 90 and 80 percent of the vote from those groups, respectively. Maybe this is an attempt to get them to see him as doing real outreach, even if he isn't.
Of all of the claims Trump made Friday night, though, perhaps none is as laughable as his ultimate prediction.
"At the end of four years, I guarantee you, that I will get over 95 percent of the African American vote," he said. "I will produce for the inner cities, and I will produce for the African Americans. The Democrats will not produce, and all they've done is taken advantage of your vote. That's they've done. And once the election's over, they go back to their palaces in Washington, and you know what, they do nothing for you, just remember it."
Black voters will not give Trump 95 percent of the vote should he be up for reelection in 2020. If he got 25 percent of the vote from black Americans, it would be remarkable. And unless he persuades his own party to support his candidacy, the only one returning to a golden palace after Election Day will be Donald Trump.
© 2016 The Washington Post (emphasis in original)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/20/its-hard-to-imagine-a-much-worse-pitch-donald-trump-could-have-made-for-the-black-vote/ [with embedded video, and (approaching 9,000) comments]
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Poor Donald Runs For Black Cover
By Trey Ellis
08/19/2016 Updated August 20, 2016
Currently polling at one percent of the African-American vote and with so few days left before November 8th, why on earth is Trump looking for black support [ http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/292054-trump-says-hell-get-95-percent-support-of-black-voters ]? Even if he were to move the needle slightly, the numbers wouldn’t come close to digging himself out of the hole in which he currently finds himself.
Yes, I’m sure he’s hurt and a bit disappointed that he is on track to get the lowest percentage of the black vote since Robert E. Lee. Who can blame him? He’s a reality TV star and the first lesson in TV is get a cool black friend to show how cool you are. Trump’s only got Omarosa.
Obviously Trump doesn’t give a damn about the black vote. But he does care very much about the non-racist white working and middle class vote.
From the moment he politicized his entertainment persona by becoming the figurehead of the “First African-American-President-Is-Really-an-African-Born Muslim Movement,” he threw his lot in with what is called the “alt-right” (if by “alt” you mean white supremacist/Neo Nazi [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/trump-retweets-apparent-neo-nazi-the-second-time-year ]/truther/militia nutballs). He is proudly and explicitly anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant and the best predicator for identifying a Trump supporter is their fondness for the n-word [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/donald-trumps-strongest-supporters-a-certain-kind-of-democrat.html ]. So no, black folks, whether we have anything to lose [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-black-voters_us_57b77ac1e4b03d5136888aaf ] or not, are not going to throw our lot in with a man who’s biggest fan is David Duke.
Since no other explicitly white nationalist candidate has ever made it this far (sorry Pat Buchanan and George Wallace), Trump finds himself in uncharted, choppy waters. He had the hardcore white racist vote at hello, and for now he’s still hanging on to the “racist adjacent:” non-racist whites willing to rationalize or overlook his sexist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant dictates.
But it’s only dawning on him now that there aren’t enough of them to put him in the White House.
Trump desperately needs to win back white voters who were once understandably drawn to his projected strength and perceived focus on their issues, but who, increasingly, have been unsettled by his erratic behavior and intemperate ugliness. After all, who wants to vote for an asshole? Doesn’t that make you an asshole yourself?
So of course his recent lip service to African-Americans isn’t actually for African-Americans.
It’s whites that he needs to convince he’s not a racist. He just plays one on TV.
Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/trey-ellis/poor-donald-runs-for-blac_b_11620380.html [with comments]
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Why White Americans Fail To Reckon With The Truth Of Slavery
Opening line:
“The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.”
Notable passage:
“Ridgeway watched them stagger down the gangplanks, rheumy and bewildered, overcome by the city. The possibilities lay before these pilgrims like a banquet, and they’d been so hungry their whole lives. They’d never seen the likes of this, but they’d leave their mark on this new land, as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable racial logic. If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now.”
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Doubleday, $26.95
Published Aug. 2, 2016
The truth is more horrific to face than most modern Americans care to imagine.
08/19/2016 Updated August 20, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/colson-whitehead-underground-railroad_us_57b766d5e4b00d9c3a17ae4e [with comments]
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Obama’s Rising Approval Ratings Could Be Helping Hillary Clinton
President Barack Obama’s high approval numbers may help predict the outcome of the general election.
Battleground states are turning blue.
08/19/2016 Updated August 19, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obamas-approval-help-clinton_us_57b733c3e4b03d51368811b3 [with comments]
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Why Progressives Are Cautiously Optimistic About Hillary Clinton
The Bernie Sanders wing insists the momentum is on its side — and they will fight to keep it that way.
08/20/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-progressives-cautiously-optimistic-hillary-clinton_us_57b7951de4b0b51733a3a699 [with comments]
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Democrats fret over timing of Clintons’ charity fete
The 12th and final annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative will showcase both its philanthropic work and Hillary Clinton’s greatest potential vulnerability.
They fear the glitzy confab will provide fresh ammunition to Republicans, a week before the first debate between Clinton and Trump.
08/20/16
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/clinton-charity-event-presidential-debates-227223 [with comments]
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Inside the fall of Paul Manafort
Donald Trump’s campaign chairman thought he could weather the scrutiny of his lucrative foreign political consulting. He was wrong.
08/19/16
[...]
The week of personnel upheaval has left an aura of uncertainty looming over Trump’s White House bid, even at its upper levels, said multiple sources around the campaign.
As of noon Friday, Trump’s senior-level staff had not had a conference call, said the operative who has worked with the campaign.
“It’s complete chaos,” the operative said. “No one is in charge.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/paul-manafort-fall-trump-campaign-227212 [with embedded video, and comments]
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Corey Lewandowski Doesn’t Seem To Get That John Kerry Lost The 2004 Election
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager says the Trump campaign is fine — they’re just doing what a losing campaign did 12 years ago.
08/19/2016 Updated August 19, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/corey-lewandowski-john-kerry_us_57b738bae4b0b51733a3235c [with embedded video, and comments]
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The Forgotten Government Plan to Round Up Muslims
In the ’80s, terror led the government to consider something far more extreme than Donald Trump’s ban.
August 19, 2016
In the early morning hours of January 26, 1987, federal agents across Los Angeles charged into the homes of seven men and one woman and led them away in handcuffs. More than 100 law enforcement officers—city, state and federal—were involved. “War on Terrorism Hits LA,” read the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
The defendants were all pro-Palestinian activists, but it wasn’t clear what they’d been arrested for. Soon the government conceded it would not introduce criminal charges, instead seeking to deport the group by alleging material support to a communist organization—an ancient Red Scare statute that would soon be declared unconstitutional. The case quickly became a mess, and in the end, 20 years of legal wrangling would pass before a judge would call the case [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/us/01settle.html ] “an embarrassment to the rule of law.” But in the first days of the defense, the lawyers for the men who would become known as the LA Eight were turning over a greater puzzle: why their clients had been targeted in the first place.
And then the document arrived.
[...]
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/secret-plans-detention-internment-camps-1980s-deportation-arab-muslim-immigrants-214177 [with comments]
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Trump’s Sickening attacks on Clinton’s health
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington on Jan. 23, 2013.
(Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
By Ruth Marcus
August 19, 2016
Donald Trump — he who likes to fly home at night in the comfort of his own plane to sleep in the comfort of his own bed — is at it again on the question of Hillary Clinton’s stamina, or alleged lack thereof.
“To defeat crime and radical Islamic terrorism in our country, to win trade in our country, you need tremendous physical and mental strength and stamina,” he said in Wisconsin [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/18/trumps-claim-that-clinton-lacks-the-physical-stamina-to-be-president/ ]. “Hillary Clinton doesn’t have that strength and stamina.”
And a day earlier [ http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-terrorism-speech-227025 ], in case you missed it, “Importantly, she also lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face.”
It’s obvious what’s going on here. The strength-stamina combo is a gender-age twofer, a double whack at Clinton for the price of one. Strength, what men have and women lack; stamina, with its intimations of go-all-night virility. Clinton, in this depiction, is both a weak girl and a dried-up old crone.
No matter that Trump is a year and four months older — and, for that matter, endures a far less rigorous schedule. In Trump World, what counts is the attack, not the truth.
Trump began hitting Clinton on strength and stamina during the primaries, in a fascinating detour from his usual precision-bombing of opponents. Ordinarily, Trump homes in on an opponent’s actual deficit and proceeds to magnify it: low-energy Jeb, Liddle Marco or, more pertinent at present, Crooked Hillary.
But sometimes, under attack, Trump shifts to that trusty playground tactic — I know you are but what am I? — a move intended to jujitsu the conversation away from his own perceived vulnerabilities. Thus, Trump has trotted out “unstable Hillary Clinton [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-unhinged-lock-her-up/ ],” “a totally unhinged person [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/06/trump-in-series-of-scathing-personal-attacks-questions-clintons-mental-health/ ]” and “like an unbalanced person [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-unhinged-lock-her-up/ ].” I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.
Increasingly, though, the rap on Clinton combines gender, age and health in a smarmy package of unsupported insinuation. “She’s a mess, a total mess,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt [ http://www.hughhewitt.com/donald-trump-makes-return-visit/ ]. “She’ll do an event, she’ll make a short speech off a teleprompter, and then she goes home and goes to sleep.”
When Trump uses the teleprompter, it is a supposed token of maturity and professionalism; when Clinton does, she is failing — indeed, possibly brain-damaged. “She took a short-circuit in the brain,” Trump said in New Hampshire [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/06/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-short-circuit/ ] this month, seizing on Clinton’s explanation of how she flubbed an answer on her emails. “Honestly, I don’t think she’s all there.”
Trump is subtle only by comparison with his unhinged allies — and employees. Say-anything, know-nothing spokeswoman Katrina Pierson was on the job Thursday on MSNBC.
“What’s new are the other reports of the observations of Hillary Clinton’s behavior and mannerisms ... as well as her dysphasia, the fact that she’s fallen, she has had a concussion,” Pierson told Kristen Welker [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/18/trump-spokeswoman-diagnoses-hillary-clinton-with-dysphasia-despite-not-being-doctor/ ].
“It is extremely important to note that Hillary Clinton has taken a lot of time off the campaign trail,” Pierson added [ http://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12505078/hillary-clinton-health-stroke-conspiracy-fake ]. “It is something that needs to be addressed.”
What needs to be addressed [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/15/donald-trumps-top-spokeswoman-katrina-pierson-is-saying-some-very-strange-things-this-month/ ], actually, is Pierson’s own “behavior and mannerisms,” including her time-traveling assertions that President Obama and Clinton were responsible for the 2004 death of Army Capt. Humayun Khan (“It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagement that probably cost his life”) and alleging that Obama launched the 2001 war in Afghanistan (“Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem”).
On the topic of Clinton’s health, Pierson is backstopped by a cabal [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/08/armed-with-junk-science-and-old-photos-critics-question-hillaryshealth/ ] of conservative websites and commentators who have peddled out-of-context photos and video snippets to paint Clinton as a weakened, stumbling victim of brain damage.
Fox News’s Sean Hannity has been in the repulsive lead, citing video of Clinton’s shaking her head in pretend surprise at being accosted by reporters to suggest neurological injury. “It almost seems seizure-esque to me ... violent, out-of-control movements on her part,” Hannity said [ http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/10/watch-sean-hannity-fails-convince-doctors-hillary-clinton-suffers-seizures/212323 ].
Presidential candidates’ fitness for office, including their medical fitness, matters enormously, especially when Trump would be the oldest president ever elected [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/07/14/clinton-and-trump-are-the-oldest-candidates-ever-no-one-seems-to-care/ ], Clinton second only to Ronald Reagan. Both could reasonably be called on to disclose more health information; the Trumpian claim by the candidate’s physician, that he would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/14/donald-trumps-doctor-has-come-down-with-a-case-of-trumpitis/ ],” is particularly risible.
But the Trump & Co. attack on Clinton’s health, with its undertones of ageism and sexism, has no basis in reality, and no place in a presidential campaign. It would be tempting to say this is beneath even Trump, except that it isn’t.
© 2016 The Washington Post (emphasis in original)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-sickening-attacks-on-clintons-health/2016/08/19/258351be-662b-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html [with comments]
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Speculating About Candidate Health Is Mudslinging, Not Medicine
Dr. Drew’s comments about Hillary Clinton are all kinds of wrong.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dr-drew-hillary-clinton-health_us_57b5d369e4b095b2f542d88d [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtdA1w7AAQ [embedded; with comments]
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Media Claims Sexist To Investigate Hillary Clinton's Emergency Health Crisis
Published on Aug 20, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg / http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel , http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ]
Infowars reporter Joe Biggs talks about the recent health revelations of Hillary Clinton.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg7Q-h4e9o0 [with comments]
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Looks Like Ivanka Trump Doesn’t Pay Her Interns
Ivanka Trump
@IvankaTrump
How to make it work as an unpaid intern: http://bit.ly/2bga3xq [ http://www.ivankatrump.com/survive-unpaid-internship/ ] #nomoneynoproblems #interntips #internships
3:00 PM - 18 Aug 2016
[ https://twitter.com/IvankaTrump/status/766394275571441664 (with comments)]
This is rich.
08/19/2016 Updated August 19, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ivanka-trump-unpaid-interns_us_57b72ba3e4b0b51733a303fe [with comments]
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GOP Senator: Ken Burns Documentaries Are Better At Teaching History Than Actual Teachers
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) says there is a “cartel” of higher education.
08/19/2016 Updated August 19, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ron-johnson-ken-burns_us_57b76074e4b0b51733a379de [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNyEz6AKoZo [embedded; comments disabled]
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Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager Rose Quickly By Playing To His Ego
Donald Trump promoted Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager on August 17.
Kellyanne Conway is “telling Trump what he wants to hear,” a source said.
08/20/2016
[...]
Conway has experience working for male politicians who put their feet in their mouths - she previously worked for failed Senate candidate Todd Akin, a Republican who infamously said that women could not get pregnant from rape if it was a “legitimate rape.”
“She’s used to dealing with certifiable people ... as long as you follow the crazy rules you can get along perfectly,” the second source said.
She has also worked for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and ran a super PAC aligned with former Trump presidential opponent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). ...
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-campaign-manager-kellyanne-conway_us_57b75ad1e4b0b51733a372bc [with comments]
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‘I Survived Trump Magazine, Barely’ | MSNBC
Published on Aug 20, 2016 by MSNBC [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaXkIU1QidjPwiAYu6GcHjg / http://www.youtube.com/user/msnbcleanforward , http://www.youtube.com/user/msnbcleanforward/videos ]
A former employee of Trump Magazine, Carey Purcell, joins MSNBC’s Joy Reid to share her story about working at the publication that promoted an image of luxury while issuing her checks that bounced.
I Survived ‘Trump’ Magazine—Barely
Bills went unpaid. They turned off the electricity. Our paychecks started bouncing. I got cancer and they canceled my health coverage. Here’s what it was like to work for Donald Trump’s failed magazine.
August 14, 2016
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/donald-trump-magazine-employee-confessional-bankrupt-2016-214155 [with comments]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v04q51pDhM [with comments] [original at http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/i-survived-trump-magazine-barely-747811395567 ]
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Being Donald Trump Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry
Here’s a riddle: If you don’t say what you’re apologizing for, is it actually an apology?
08/20/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/being-donald-trump-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry_us_57b75ddae4b0b51733a376ef [with embedded video, and comments]
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37 Times Donald Trump Should Have Apologized
08/19/2016 Updated August 20, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-m-granholm/37-times-donald-trump-sho_b_11616220.html [with comments]
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Jerry Falwell Jr. Seriously Compared Trump To Winston Churchill
Jerry Falwell Jr. introduces Donald Trump at a rally in January at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
The scramble to boost Trump’s losing campaign is getting desperate.
08/20/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jerry-falwell-donald-trump-winston-churchill_us_57b8a976e4b0b51733a3cffe [with comments]
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Jerry Falwell Jr.: Trump is the Churchillian leader we need
August 19, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jerry-falwell-jr-trump-is-the-churchillian-leader-we-need/2016/08/19/b1ff79e0-64b1-11e6-be4e-23fc4d4d12b4_story.html [with embedded video, and (over 4,000) comments]
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Religious Freedom Law Protects Business Owner Who Fired Trans Woman, Judge Rules
The owner of the funeral home said that “we have a dress code that is very specific that men will dress as men,” according to a deposition.
The businessman says allowing one of his employees to express her gender identity “would be violating God’s commands.”
08/19/2016 Updated August 20, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/religious-freedom-lgbt-rights_us_57b747dee4b03d51368841e6 [with comments]
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A Rock Star And Two Ex-Politicians Hope To Save America From Trump
Donald Trump is “a false savior,” says former Rep. Bob Inglis.
Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic (right) wants Americans to stop being distracted by the horse race and the personalities.
“No candidate should get away with these really facile platitudes of ‘Oh, I’ll fix it, believe me, I’ll fix it.’ Tell me how,” says former Rep. Brian Baird.
They say people just need to ask three simple questions — and get their friends and neighbors to ask as well.
“What specific actions will you take, and what will you ask the American people to do to reverse global climate change and ocean acidification?”
“What specific actions will you take, and what will you ask the American people to do to fix the growing debt of the United States?”
“What specific actions will you take during your campaign and your time in office, and what will you ask the American people to do to help restore the respect and confidence of the American people in their elected government?”
08/20/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/three-questions-donald-trump_us_57b77fbce4b0b51733a39358 [with comments]
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Live Stream: Donald Trump Rally in Fredericksburg, Virginia FULL SPEECH HD STREAM 8/20/16
Streamed live on Aug 16, 2016 by Entertainment News Gaming [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy8Lq7my3GBcdg7W-_3u3MQ / http://www.youtube.com/user/LiquidMoves , http://www.youtube.com/user/LiquidMoves/videos ]
Saturday, August 20, 2016: Live stream coverage of the Donald J. Trump for President rally in Fredericksburg, VA at the Fredericksburg Expo Center. Coverage begins at 6:00 PM ET.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ZDrU6YOpU [with comments] [also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BSV1jOQFKs (with comments), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1cMTNgqkug (with comments), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAL3dbIiInQ (with comments), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_RKhJCVFyo (with comments), and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNI7iIPSdxs (with comments)]
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124659348 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124660342 and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124660893 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124663523 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124666221 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124666817 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124660613 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124665982 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124666114 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124666173 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=124666247 and preceding (and any future following)
Laurel Raymond
Aug 17, 2016
Donald Trump has built his campaign on the strength of his white-nationalist dog-whistle. He has a habit of retweeting racist and anti-Semitic memes from white-supremacists [ https://thinkprogress.org/3-white-supremacists-on-twitter-that-inspire-donald-trump-8e60a264848 ]. His campaign gives radio interviews to explicitly racist media outlets [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/07/24/trump-adviser-and-gop-congressmen-gave-pro-trump-interviews-white-nationalist-radio-host-rnc/211861 ].
Yet while Trump’s comments outraged many — like his claim [ https://thinkprogress.org/the-unthinkable-consequences-of-donald-trumps-racist-attack-on-a-judge-297f493938da ] that a Latino judge couldn’t be impartial — a virulent subculture heard his call and came out swinging. When Trump talks about “heritage” and the criminality of immigrants and people of color, white nationalists hear an endorsement of their core beliefs [ https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trumps-veiled-signals-to-white-supremacists-6a3d80bcc04e ]. Over the past year, they’ve come out in droves: making robocalls, organizing rallies, and raising money. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke cited Trump [ https://thinkprogress.org/riding-the-trump-tide-former-kkk-leader-announces-bid-for-u-s-senate-70ac5c9bf33c ] as his inspiration to run for Senate.
But until now, Trump has danced around openly embracing the white nationalist alt-right: He’ll retweet their adulation [ https://thinkprogress.org/3-white-supremacists-on-twitter-that-inspire-donald-trump-8e60a264848 ] of him and borrow their talking points [ https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trumps-new-attack-on-hillary-echoes-white-supremacist-websites-70579c9d7e50 ], but when asked, say the absolute minimum to defuse the controversy. To the white nationalists, Trump’s words are taken as a tacit signal of approval, but it’s one that still leaves Trump some wiggle room to claim ignorance [ https://thinkprogress.org/trump-plays-dumb-on-david-dukes-history-of-white-supremacy-here-s-proof-he-s-lying-dafb05f4cb31 ] in front of more mainstream audiences.
On Wednesday, Trump named Steven K. Bannon, the executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News (known for their drooling Trump coverage [ http://www.dailywire.com/news/8441/i-know-trumps-new-campaign-chairman-steve-bannon-ben-shapiro ]), as his new campaign CEO. In doing so, Trump signaled that he’s ready to formally embrace the alt-right and their white nationalist views.
“Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart openly embraced the white supremacist Alt-Right,” former Breitbart Editor-at-large and currently editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire Ben Shapiro [id.] wrote. Shapiro resigned from Breitbart after the site’s leadership ordered its reporters to stop defending former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields, who was allegedly assaulted by Trump’s then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
Under Brannon, Shapiro writes, “Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism [ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/ ] as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.”
Milo Yiannopoulos, whom Shapiro calls a “Trump-worshipping alt-right droog stooge,” is a prominent figure at Breitbart. He was recently banned from Twitter for orchestrating a racist and sexist troll-swarm of Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones that temporarily drove her from the platform. Yiannopoulos remains an editor at the site.
After Yiannopoulos wrote a piece [ http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/03/28/glenn-beck-breitbarts-milo-yiannopoulos-goebbels-his-evil-trump-twitter-defense-poison-to-the-republic/ ] defending Donald Trump’s retweet of a sexist meme comparing his and Ted Cruz’s wife, Glenn Beck compared Yiannopoulos to “Goebbels” — Hitler’s minister of propaganda — and called it “one of the more evil stories I have read” (as reported by Breitbart itself [id.], with insouciant commentary from Yiannopolous).
Yiannopoulos penned another Breitbart piece [ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/ ] in which he praised the alt-right for “a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.” He scoffs at claims made by “Establishment types” over its ties to anti-Semitism, white supremacism, and neo-Nazism.
A quick perusal of the #altright hashtag on Twitter reveals a rash of racist, sexist, and xenophobic memes. Outright anti-semitism and references to “Aryans [ https://twitter.com/Fash__McQueen/status/762667737885868032 ]” and Nazis are also common — as are tweets marked #MAGA (the abbreviation for Trump’ campaign slogan) and fawning over Trump himself.
Trump’s rise and the rise of the alt-ride go hand-in-hand. And under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart has enthusiastically gone along with both.
In choosing Bannon as his new campaign manager, Trump has signaled definitively that there will be no pivot to the mainstream — instead, he’s doubling down and formally embracing his alt-right support.
He’s done dancing around them — now he’s openly dancing with them.
Copyright 2016 Center for American Progress Action Fund
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-embraces-the-alt-right-cd91cc889154 [with comments]
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‘Racialists’ are cheered by Trump’s latest strategy
White nationalist writer Jared Taylor, in his home in Oakton, Va., says that Donald Trump should “concentrate on his natural constituency, which is white people.”
(Pete Marovich/For The Washington Post)
By David Weigel
August 20, 2016
OAKTON, Va. — Jared Taylor hits play, and the first Donald Trump ad of the general election unfolds across his breakfast table. Syrian refugees streaming across a border. Hordes of immigrants, crowded onto trains.
“Donald Trump’s America is secure,” rumbles a narrator. “Terrorists and dangerous criminals kept out. The border, secure; our families, safe.”
Taylor, one of America’s foremost “racialists,” is impressed and relieved. “That’s a powerful appeal,” he said. “If he can just stick to that, he is in very good shape.”
From his Fairfax County home, Taylor has edited the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance and organized racialist conferences under the “AmRen” banner. He said that Trump should “concentrate on his natural constituency, which is white people,” suggesting that winning 65 percent of the white vote would overwhelm any Democratic gains with minorities.
When Trump made Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon his campaign’s chief executive last week, Taylor found reasons to celebrate. It was the latest sign for white nationalists, once dismissed as fringe, that their worldview was gaining popularity and that the old Republican Party was coming to an end.
The rise of the alt-right — named for the Alternative Right website that the “identitarian” nationalist Richard Spencer set up in 2010 and adopted by those opposed to multiculturalism and mass immigration — has come to define how many of its adherents see Trump. There’s less talk now about a “pivot,” or a moment when Trump will adopt the ideas of people that he conquered. His strategy now resembles the alt-right dream of maximizing the white vote — even as polling shows his standing with white voters falls short of Mitt Romney’s in 2012.
Trump’s newest speeches, read from a teleprompter, hit all of their favorite notes. “I don’t think Trump had mentioned ‘sanctuary cities’ previously,” Spencer said in an interview. “There’s reason to believe that Bannon is returning him to his powerful, populist message — indeed, honing it. [Former campaign chairman Paul] Manafort was turning Trump into a standard Republican, with the [Mike] Pence [vice-presidential] choice, the economic policy, talk of how ‘Hillary is the real racist,’ if not quite in those words. Bannon is making me hope again, making Trump Trump again.”
Although there is no data gauging the size of the alt-right, its adherents point to Trump’s primary victories as proof that their ideas have been winning. They are so active on social media, from Twitter to Reddit, that critics are beginning to feel overwhelmed.
Breitbart, not founded as part of their movement, became a welcoming place for it. The site found millions of new readers clicking on stories about “black crime” and the threat of Syrian refugees. At Breitbart, undocumented immigrants are “illegals,” Black Lives Matter activists venerate “cop-killer heroes,” and Gold Star father Khizr Khan is a busy promoter of sharia law. Michael Brown, the man whose death kicked off the protests in Ferguson, Mo., was unfairly mythologized by the media.
Kurt Bardella, who handled Breitbart’s public relations until the spring, said that Bannon’s staff meetings were roiled by discussions of Islam and mass immigration.
“It was stuff like ‘these people don’t belong here, they’re overrunning our country,’ ” he said. “That kind of white nationalist sentiment.”
Trump, who has frequently linked or retweeted white nationalists and decried them only under pressure, gave frequent interviews to Breitbart. Already supportive of the Trump campaign, people like Taylor see Bannon’s move and the change in Trump’s tone as validation.
“Imagine a media that was more Breitbart than New York Times,” Taylor said. “Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown have been even more important than Trump, in one respect. They are the people who make whites realize that what the media have been telling them about race relations is simply wrong.”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has treated all of this as a gift. Hours after Bannon’s hire was official, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook held a conference call denouncing Breitbart — a taster for a series of email pitches and finger-wagging statements to come.
Breitbart News was dismissive. “They say that we are ‘anti-Semitic,’ though our company was founded by Jews, is largely staffed by Jews, and has an entire section dedicated to reporting on and defending the Jewish state of Israel,” site Chief Financial Officer Larry Solov and editor in chief Alex Marlow said in a statement. “They call us ‘racist,’ even though her husband’s law enforcement policies led to mass incarceration of blacks.”
That reaction, however, didn’t reflect Breitbart’s coverage of crime or of the alt-right. Last month, Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh referred to the criminal justice overhauls favored by some Republicans as “prison break legislation” that’s “un-compassionate to crime victims.”
Bannon, who directed conservative documentaries before he took over the site, kept Breitbart and its companion Sirius XM series entertaining. Sam Nunberg, a former Trump staffer, recalled that Breitbart interviewed Trump even when much of the media considered him a celebrity joke candidate.
“The problem in the conservative movement is it’s boring,” Bannon said in a May 19 exchange with the site’s technology editor and rising star Milo Yiannopoulos. “[If] you’re boring me, you’re losing my attention.”
The alt-right was decidedly not boring. Its arguments about what a winning, identity-based politics might look like were embraced by readers. Its writers embraced the torrent of jokes and memes from the alt-right, which portrayed Trump as a sort of trickster god and establishment Republicans as low-energy “cucks” — the derogatory name referencing cuckolding and given to anyone seen to be selling out to liberals.
“Had they been serious about defending humanism, liberalism and universalism, the rise of the alternative right might have been arrested,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a sympathetic March profile of the alt-right. “All they had to do was argue for common humanity in the face of black and feminist identity politics, for free speech in the face of the regressive Left’s censorship sprees, and for universal values in the face of left-wing moral relativism.”
Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter recently after leading a short harassment campaign against “Saturday Night Live” star Leslie Jones.
Breitbart’s coverage, and the alt-right in general, advance a theory that a left-behind wing of conservatives have screamed about for decades. In the 1980s, figures such as Pat Buchanan and the late Sam Francis warned that the left was transforming the country without much resistance from the Republican establishment. In an essay, Francis argued that “Middle American Radicals” hardly understood their potential influence.
“MARs form a class — not simply a middle class and not simply an economic category — that is in revolt against the dominant patterns and structures of American society,” Francis wrote. “Liberalism and cosmopolitanism were able, through their immense appeal to an intelligentsia, to portray localism and decentralized institutions as a mask for bigotry and selfishness.”
But Francis and other “paleoconservatives” lost a battle inside the Republican Party to people who thought it could grow its appeal to nonwhite voters. In an interview with The Washington Post this month, Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) used the term “alt-right crowd” to refer to the people that Jack Kemp, his mentor and former congressman from New York, had helped to purge. Ryan called the group out of the mainstream and, in other interviews ahead of his primary, which he won by 66 percentage points, he did not argue with radio hosts when they linked the alt-right to racist elements.
The National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, whose project to reform the mainstream conservative movement was waylaid by the Trump victory, said, “The alt-right just isn’t much of a movement, something that separates it from Goldwaterite conservatism after the 1964 election.
“Bannon isn’t willing to own his own site’s comment section, which is mainstream alt-right,” Ponnuru said. “I have grave concerns about the future of conservatism and the Republican Party, but the alt-right sweeping all before it isn’t one of them.”
In the meantime, the alt-right theory of politics is going through its first presidential campaign. Trump’s latest “pivot” has streamlined his arguments, not moderated them; it has promoted the people who agree with the alt-right, not a bid for the center.
“I’m honestly delighted that Trump is putting a team together that has such reasonable views on immigration,” said Jason Richwine, a policy analyst who left the Heritage Foundation after a backlash to his study of race and IQ and who has appeared on Breitbart’s XM show. “This was almost impossible to imagine even just a year ago. Whatever you might think of his campaign in general, it’s clear that Trump has opened up space to talk about immigration in a way we haven’t been able to before.”
At this year’s American Renaissance conference, Trump’s success was a popular and unifying subject. Peter Brimelow, the founder of VDare.com — named for Virginia Dare, the first white person born in America — used his speech to mock the failure of the Republican establishment and ask whether white voters were ready to become the dominant political bloc.
“What the GOP needs to do is Southernize the white vote,” Brimelow said. “You need to have everybody in the country voting the way that Southern whites vote.”
Trump’s new message — the combination of immigration restriction and the appeal to black voters — was no contradiction. Last year, in a November interview with Bannon, Trump regretted the loss of a worker who took his skills back to his native India.
“We’ve got to be able to keep great people in the country,” Trump said. “We have to be careful of that, Steve. I think you agree with that, Steve?”
Bannon did not. “A country is more than an economy,” he retorted. “We are a civic society.”
In his speeches this week, Trump has twinned his pitch to black voters with his warning about unchecked immigration. “Hillary Clinton would rather provide a job to a refugee from overseas than to give that job to unemployed African American youth,” he has said. That pitch, said Buchanan, could help Trump with the white voters who worry that by voting for him, they are endorsing racism.
“White folks are not monolithic,” Buchanan said. “You want middle America and moderates to know that you care about these folks, too. They’re the first ones who suffer when the shopping centers burn down.”
At Trump’s rally in Charlotte, one of the first of the Bannon era, the message was sinking in. Frances Johnson, 68, said that the polls were not reflecting Trump’s real level of support and that she sometimes emailed the campaign with ideas on how to change that. The pitch to black voters, she said, was smart.
“I really don’t think that African Americans want to be stuck where they are,” Johnson said. “They’re basically glorified slaves — they get free this, free that, free this, free that, and they can’t get a good job and depend on the government. What else do you call it?”
Ken Baswell, 55, was worried that Trump had not put enough TV ads on the air. If he did, he said, he would be trying to inject some truth into a media landscape that lacked it.
“I just want something other than what they’re pushing in mainstream America,” he said. “I want to know the real stuff going on behind the scenes, because I’m not stupid. I’m not a sheep.”
Robert Costa, Jenna Johnson and Frances Sellers contributed to this report.
© 2016 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/racial-realists-are-cheered-by-trumps-latest-strategy/2016/08/20/cd71e858-6636-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html [with
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It’s hard to imagine a much worse pitch Donald Trump could have made for the black vote
Donald Trump smiles during a roundtable discussion about national security on Aug. 17 at his Trump Tower office in New York City.
By Philip Bump
August 20, 2016
At a rally Friday night in Dimondale, Mich., Donald Trump repeated a version of a plea to black voters that he had offered 24 hours earlier in North Carolina.
"No group in America has been more harmed by Hillary Clinton's policies than African Americans," he said, apparently pointing to individuals in the crowd. "No group. No group. If Hillary Clinton's goal was to inflict pain to the African American community, she could not have done a better job. It is a disgrace."
"Detroit tops the list of most dangerous cities in terms of violent crime, number one," he said from a city 90 minutes away from Detroit with a population that is 93 percent white [ http://censusviewer.com/city/MI/Dimondale ]. "This is the legacy of the Democratic politicians who have run this city. This is the result of the policy agenda embraced by crooked Hillary Clinton."
He went on.
"The only way to change results is to change leadership. We can never fix our problems by relying on the same politicians who created our problems in the first place. A new future requires brand new leadership," he said.
"Look at how much African American communities are suffering from Democratic control. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose?" he asked. "You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?"
This was not the Teleprompter Trump that we saw in Charlotte, interlacing his prepared remarks with occasional asides. This was Traditional Trump, riffing a bit more on what he wanted to say in a manner that probably didn't do him much good.
Consider: Black Americans are not "living in poverty" as a general rule. A quarter of the black population is, according to data [ http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/ ] from the Kaiser Family Foundation, about the same as the percentage of Hispanics. In Michigan, the figure is slightly higher. Most black Americans don't live in poverty, just as most white Americans don't.
Consider: The unemployment rate in the black community is higher than that in the white community, as it has been since the Department of Labor started keeping track [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/09/06/black-unemployment-is-always-much-worse-than-white-unemployment-but-the-gap-depends-on-where-you-live/ ]. Among young blacks, though, the figure is not 59 percent — unless (as PolitiFact noted [ http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/jun/20/donald-trump/trump-misleadingly-puts-black-youth-unemployment-r/ ]) you consider not the labor force but every young black American, including high school students. Many young black high school students are unemployed. This isn't a metric that the Labor Department typically uses, for obvious reasons, but calculating the rates for young whites gives you about 50 percent, too.
Consider: Black voters are perfectly able to evaluate candidates on qualities other than their political parties. Black voters began supporting the Democratic Party heavily thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/07/when-did-black-americans-start-voting-so-heavily-democratic/ ]. Since then, they have consistently voted for the party — a party that is one-fifth black [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/08/is-political-polarization-making-racial-tensions-worse/ ] and which since 1964 has elected the vast majority of the black members of Congress. (This argument [ https://twitter.com/mikenizza/status/766751740565807105 ] from Al Sharpton in 2004 is worth a read.) Democrats win the support of black voters consistently because those voters like the work that they do and like the fights that they fight.
When President Obama won reelection in 2012, 93 percent of black Americans thought he was doing a good job. That's also the percentage of the vote he received, according to exit polls, beating Mitt Romney by 87 points.
And yet, somehow, Trump is doing worse.
In the battle between Trump and Clinton, he consistently lands in the low single digits of support from black Americans. In some polls, he has received 0 percent support [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/13/new-polls-in-pennsylvania-and-ohio-show-donald-trump-with-0-percent-of-the-black-vote/ ], a negligible amount. In our most recent survey, he got 2 percent support.
Why? Because nonwhite voters view Trump very unfavorably. We wrote about this [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06/20/three-in-four-voters-of-color-strongly-dislike-trump/ ] in June but can now update the numbers. Four-in-5 blacks have a very unfavorable view of Trump, with a slightly higher percentage, 83 percent, agreeing with the idea that he is biased against women and minorities. Eighty-seven percent of black voters we surveyed indicated that they would be anxious if he were elected president and only 6 percent "comfortable." The numbers for Clinton — who very quickly tweeted [ https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/766776538679443456 ] that Trump's Michigan comments were "so ignorant it's staggering" -- were nearly completely flipped.
There are any number of reasons that black Americans might view Trump unfavorably, starting with his 2011 effort to cast suspicion on Obama's place of birth. Or, probably, starting with his full-page ad calling for the death penalty against five black teenagers in New York City who were accused of rape — wrongly, as it turned out. Or perhaps thanks to the support his current candidacy is getting from people like former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
There's no reason to think that Trump's suggestion that black Americans had "nothing to lose" because they "are living in poverty" will do anything to reverse that trend. Nor was his insistence in North Carolina that he should get votes from black voters because "the inner cities are so bad." Some black people, research shows, live in places besides the "inner city [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/12/no-donald-trump-crime-is-not-out-of-control/ ]."
So why make the argument? It could be, simply enough, that Trump doesn't have anyone in his inner circle that can provide a sense of how to reach out to the black community. One adviser said on CNN [ https://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/19/watch-cnns-brianna-keilar-explain-trump-advisor-speaking-white-voters-not-black-outreach/212536 ] that Trump making his appeal in a mostly white town wasn't a big deal and that "maybe it would have been nice if he went and had a backdrop with a burning car." Or maybe Trump was listening to Ben Carson, who in May made a similar argument for Trump: He would only be president for four years [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/15/politics/ben-carson-donald-trump-only-four-years/ ], so what could go wrong?
It's likely that Trump's continuing lack of meaningful outreach [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/us/politics/donald-trump-black-voters.html ] to black voters keeps him from understanding effective ways of arguing his case. When he went to Baton Rouge to see flood damage, he stopped at a Baptist church with a mostly white congregation.
Or maybe black voters aren't his intended audience. Maybe, with his poll numbers low thanks to soft support from his own party, Trump is trying to convince Republicans that he wants or can earn the black vote. In our most recent poll, one-fifth of Republican men and a quarter of Republican women agreed with the statement that Trump is biased against women and minorities. He gets 90 and 80 percent of the vote from those groups, respectively. Maybe this is an attempt to get them to see him as doing real outreach, even if he isn't.
Of all of the claims Trump made Friday night, though, perhaps none is as laughable as his ultimate prediction.
"At the end of four years, I guarantee you, that I will get over 95 percent of the African American vote," he said. "I will produce for the inner cities, and I will produce for the African Americans. The Democrats will not produce, and all they've done is taken advantage of your vote. That's they've done. And once the election's over, they go back to their palaces in Washington, and you know what, they do nothing for you, just remember it."
Black voters will not give Trump 95 percent of the vote should he be up for reelection in 2020. If he got 25 percent of the vote from black Americans, it would be remarkable. And unless he persuades his own party to support his candidacy, the only one returning to a golden palace after Election Day will be Donald Trump.
© 2016 The Washington Post (emphasis in original)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/20/its-hard-to-imagine-a-much-worse-pitch-donald-trump-could-have-made-for-the-black-vote/ [with embedded video, and (approaching 9,000) comments]
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Poor Donald Runs For Black Cover
By Trey Ellis
08/19/2016 Updated August 20, 2016
Currently polling at one percent of the African-American vote and with so few days left before November 8th, why on earth is Trump looking for black support [ http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/292054-trump-says-hell-get-95-percent-support-of-black-voters ]? Even if he were to move the needle slightly, the numbers wouldn’t come close to digging himself out of the hole in which he currently finds himself.
Yes, I’m sure he’s hurt and a bit disappointed that he is on track to get the lowest percentage of the black vote since Robert E. Lee. Who can blame him? He’s a reality TV star and the first lesson in TV is get a cool black friend to show how cool you are. Trump’s only got Omarosa.
Obviously Trump doesn’t give a damn about the black vote. But he does care very much about the non-racist white working and middle class vote.
From the moment he politicized his entertainment persona by becoming the figurehead of the “First African-American-President-Is-Really-an-African-Born Muslim Movement,” he threw his lot in with what is called the “alt-right” (if by “alt” you mean white supremacist/Neo Nazi [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/trump-retweets-apparent-neo-nazi-the-second-time-year ]/truther/militia nutballs). He is proudly and explicitly anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant and the best predicator for identifying a Trump supporter is their fondness for the n-word [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/donald-trumps-strongest-supporters-a-certain-kind-of-democrat.html ]. So no, black folks, whether we have anything to lose [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-black-voters_us_57b77ac1e4b03d5136888aaf ] or not, are not going to throw our lot in with a man who’s biggest fan is David Duke.
Since no other explicitly white nationalist candidate has ever made it this far (sorry Pat Buchanan and George Wallace), Trump finds himself in uncharted, choppy waters. He had the hardcore white racist vote at hello, and for now he’s still hanging on to the “racist adjacent:” non-racist whites willing to rationalize or overlook his sexist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant dictates.
But it’s only dawning on him now that there aren’t enough of them to put him in the White House.
Trump desperately needs to win back white voters who were once understandably drawn to his projected strength and perceived focus on their issues, but who, increasingly, have been unsettled by his erratic behavior and intemperate ugliness. After all, who wants to vote for an asshole? Doesn’t that make you an asshole yourself?
So of course his recent lip service to African-Americans isn’t actually for African-Americans.
It’s whites that he needs to convince he’s not a racist. He just plays one on TV.
Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/trey-ellis/poor-donald-runs-for-blac_b_11620380.html [with comments]
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Why White Americans Fail To Reckon With The Truth Of Slavery
Opening line:
“The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.”
Notable passage:
“Ridgeway watched them stagger down the gangplanks, rheumy and bewildered, overcome by the city. The possibilities lay before these pilgrims like a banquet, and they’d been so hungry their whole lives. They’d never seen the likes of this, but they’d leave their mark on this new land, as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable racial logic. If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now.”
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Doubleday, $26.95
Published Aug. 2, 2016
The truth is more horrific to face than most modern Americans care to imagine.
08/19/2016 Updated August 20, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/colson-whitehead-underground-railroad_us_57b766d5e4b00d9c3a17ae4e [with comments]
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Obama’s Rising Approval Ratings Could Be Helping Hillary Clinton
President Barack Obama’s high approval numbers may help predict the outcome of the general election.
Battleground states are turning blue.
08/19/2016 Updated August 19, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obamas-approval-help-clinton_us_57b733c3e4b03d51368811b3 [with comments]
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Why Progressives Are Cautiously Optimistic About Hillary Clinton
The Bernie Sanders wing insists the momentum is on its side — and they will fight to keep it that way.
08/20/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-progressives-cautiously-optimistic-hillary-clinton_us_57b7951de4b0b51733a3a699 [with comments]
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Democrats fret over timing of Clintons’ charity fete
The 12th and final annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative will showcase both its philanthropic work and Hillary Clinton’s greatest potential vulnerability.
They fear the glitzy confab will provide fresh ammunition to Republicans, a week before the first debate between Clinton and Trump.
08/20/16
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/clinton-charity-event-presidential-debates-227223 [with comments]
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Inside the fall of Paul Manafort
Donald Trump’s campaign chairman thought he could weather the scrutiny of his lucrative foreign political consulting. He was wrong.
08/19/16
[...]
The week of personnel upheaval has left an aura of uncertainty looming over Trump’s White House bid, even at its upper levels, said multiple sources around the campaign.
As of noon Friday, Trump’s senior-level staff had not had a conference call, said the operative who has worked with the campaign.
“It’s complete chaos,” the operative said. “No one is in charge.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/paul-manafort-fall-trump-campaign-227212 [with embedded video, and comments]
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Corey Lewandowski Doesn’t Seem To Get That John Kerry Lost The 2004 Election
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager says the Trump campaign is fine — they’re just doing what a losing campaign did 12 years ago.
08/19/2016 Updated August 19, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/corey-lewandowski-john-kerry_us_57b738bae4b0b51733a3235c [with embedded video, and comments]
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The Forgotten Government Plan to Round Up Muslims
In the ’80s, terror led the government to consider something far more extreme than Donald Trump’s ban.
August 19, 2016
In the early morning hours of January 26, 1987, federal agents across Los Angeles charged into the homes of seven men and one woman and led them away in handcuffs. More than 100 law enforcement officers—city, state and federal—were involved. “War on Terrorism Hits LA,” read the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
The defendants were all pro-Palestinian activists, but it wasn’t clear what they’d been arrested for. Soon the government conceded it would not introduce criminal charges, instead seeking to deport the group by alleging material support to a communist organization—an ancient Red Scare statute that would soon be declared unconstitutional. The case quickly became a mess, and in the end, 20 years of legal wrangling would pass before a judge would call the case [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/us/01settle.html ] “an embarrassment to the rule of law.” But in the first days of the defense, the lawyers for the men who would become known as the LA Eight were turning over a greater puzzle: why their clients had been targeted in the first place.
And then the document arrived.
[...]
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/secret-plans-detention-internment-camps-1980s-deportation-arab-muslim-immigrants-214177 [with comments]
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Trump’s Sickening attacks on Clinton’s health
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington on Jan. 23, 2013.
(Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
By Ruth Marcus
August 19, 2016
Donald Trump — he who likes to fly home at night in the comfort of his own plane to sleep in the comfort of his own bed — is at it again on the question of Hillary Clinton’s stamina, or alleged lack thereof.
“To defeat crime and radical Islamic terrorism in our country, to win trade in our country, you need tremendous physical and mental strength and stamina,” he said in Wisconsin [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/18/trumps-claim-that-clinton-lacks-the-physical-stamina-to-be-president/ ]. “Hillary Clinton doesn’t have that strength and stamina.”
And a day earlier [ http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-terrorism-speech-227025 ], in case you missed it, “Importantly, she also lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face.”
It’s obvious what’s going on here. The strength-stamina combo is a gender-age twofer, a double whack at Clinton for the price of one. Strength, what men have and women lack; stamina, with its intimations of go-all-night virility. Clinton, in this depiction, is both a weak girl and a dried-up old crone.
No matter that Trump is a year and four months older — and, for that matter, endures a far less rigorous schedule. In Trump World, what counts is the attack, not the truth.
Trump began hitting Clinton on strength and stamina during the primaries, in a fascinating detour from his usual precision-bombing of opponents. Ordinarily, Trump homes in on an opponent’s actual deficit and proceeds to magnify it: low-energy Jeb, Liddle Marco or, more pertinent at present, Crooked Hillary.
But sometimes, under attack, Trump shifts to that trusty playground tactic — I know you are but what am I? — a move intended to jujitsu the conversation away from his own perceived vulnerabilities. Thus, Trump has trotted out “unstable Hillary Clinton [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-unhinged-lock-her-up/ ],” “a totally unhinged person [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/06/trump-in-series-of-scathing-personal-attacks-questions-clintons-mental-health/ ]” and “like an unbalanced person [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-unhinged-lock-her-up/ ].” I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.
Increasingly, though, the rap on Clinton combines gender, age and health in a smarmy package of unsupported insinuation. “She’s a mess, a total mess,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt [ http://www.hughhewitt.com/donald-trump-makes-return-visit/ ]. “She’ll do an event, she’ll make a short speech off a teleprompter, and then she goes home and goes to sleep.”
When Trump uses the teleprompter, it is a supposed token of maturity and professionalism; when Clinton does, she is failing — indeed, possibly brain-damaged. “She took a short-circuit in the brain,” Trump said in New Hampshire [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/06/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-short-circuit/ ] this month, seizing on Clinton’s explanation of how she flubbed an answer on her emails. “Honestly, I don’t think she’s all there.”
Trump is subtle only by comparison with his unhinged allies — and employees. Say-anything, know-nothing spokeswoman Katrina Pierson was on the job Thursday on MSNBC.
“What’s new are the other reports of the observations of Hillary Clinton’s behavior and mannerisms ... as well as her dysphasia, the fact that she’s fallen, she has had a concussion,” Pierson told Kristen Welker [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/18/trump-spokeswoman-diagnoses-hillary-clinton-with-dysphasia-despite-not-being-doctor/ ].
“It is extremely important to note that Hillary Clinton has taken a lot of time off the campaign trail,” Pierson added [ http://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12505078/hillary-clinton-health-stroke-conspiracy-fake ]. “It is something that needs to be addressed.”
What needs to be addressed [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/15/donald-trumps-top-spokeswoman-katrina-pierson-is-saying-some-very-strange-things-this-month/ ], actually, is Pierson’s own “behavior and mannerisms,” including her time-traveling assertions that President Obama and Clinton were responsible for the 2004 death of Army Capt. Humayun Khan (“It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagement that probably cost his life”) and alleging that Obama launched the 2001 war in Afghanistan (“Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem”).
On the topic of Clinton’s health, Pierson is backstopped by a cabal [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/08/armed-with-junk-science-and-old-photos-critics-question-hillaryshealth/ ] of conservative websites and commentators who have peddled out-of-context photos and video snippets to paint Clinton as a weakened, stumbling victim of brain damage.
Fox News’s Sean Hannity has been in the repulsive lead, citing video of Clinton’s shaking her head in pretend surprise at being accosted by reporters to suggest neurological injury. “It almost seems seizure-esque to me ... violent, out-of-control movements on her part,” Hannity said [ http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/10/watch-sean-hannity-fails-convince-doctors-hillary-clinton-suffers-seizures/212323 ].
Presidential candidates’ fitness for office, including their medical fitness, matters enormously, especially when Trump would be the oldest president ever elected [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/07/14/clinton-and-trump-are-the-oldest-candidates-ever-no-one-seems-to-care/ ], Clinton second only to Ronald Reagan. Both could reasonably be called on to disclose more health information; the Trumpian claim by the candidate’s physician, that he would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/14/donald-trumps-doctor-has-come-down-with-a-case-of-trumpitis/ ],” is particularly risible.
But the Trump & Co. attack on Clinton’s health, with its undertones of ageism and sexism, has no basis in reality, and no place in a presidential campaign. It would be tempting to say this is beneath even Trump, except that it isn’t.
© 2016 The Washington Post (emphasis in original)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-sickening-attacks-on-clintons-health/2016/08/19/258351be-662b-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html [with comments]
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Speculating About Candidate Health Is Mudslinging, Not Medicine
Dr. Drew’s comments about Hillary Clinton are all kinds of wrong.
08/19/2016 Updated August 20, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dr-drew-hillary-clinton-health_us_57b5d369e4b095b2f542d88d [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRtdA1w7AAQ [embedded; with comments]
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Media Claims Sexist To Investigate Hillary Clinton's Emergency Health Crisis
Published on Aug 20, 2016 by The Alex Jones Channel [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg / http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel , http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ]
Infowars reporter Joe Biggs talks about the recent health revelations of Hillary Clinton.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg7Q-h4e9o0 [with comments]
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Looks Like Ivanka Trump Doesn’t Pay Her Interns
Ivanka Trump
@IvankaTrump
How to make it work as an unpaid intern: http://bit.ly/2bga3xq [ http://www.ivankatrump.com/survive-unpaid-internship/ ] #nomoneynoproblems #interntips #internships
3:00 PM - 18 Aug 2016
[ https://twitter.com/IvankaTrump/status/766394275571441664 (with comments)]
This is rich.
08/19/2016 Updated August 19, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ivanka-trump-unpaid-interns_us_57b72ba3e4b0b51733a303fe [with comments]
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GOP Senator: Ken Burns Documentaries Are Better At Teaching History Than Actual Teachers
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) says there is a “cartel” of higher education.
“Let’s get rid of the higher education cartel.”
08/19/2016 Updated August 19, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ron-johnson-ken-burns_us_57b76074e4b0b51733a379de [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNyEz6AKoZo [embedded; comments disabled]
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Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager Rose Quickly By Playing To His Ego
Donald Trump promoted Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager on August 17.
Kellyanne Conway is “telling Trump what he wants to hear,” a source said.
08/20/2016
[...]
Conway has experience working for male politicians who put their feet in their mouths - she previously worked for failed Senate candidate Todd Akin, a Republican who infamously said that women could not get pregnant from rape if it was a “legitimate rape.”
“She’s used to dealing with certifiable people ... as long as you follow the crazy rules you can get along perfectly,” the second source said.
She has also worked for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and ran a super PAC aligned with former Trump presidential opponent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). ...
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-campaign-manager-kellyanne-conway_us_57b75ad1e4b0b51733a372bc [with comments]
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‘I Survived Trump Magazine, Barely’ | MSNBC
Published on Aug 20, 2016 by MSNBC [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaXkIU1QidjPwiAYu6GcHjg / http://www.youtube.com/user/msnbcleanforward , http://www.youtube.com/user/msnbcleanforward/videos ]
A former employee of Trump Magazine, Carey Purcell, joins MSNBC’s Joy Reid to share her story about working at the publication that promoted an image of luxury while issuing her checks that bounced.
I Survived ‘Trump’ Magazine—Barely
Bills went unpaid. They turned off the electricity. Our paychecks started bouncing. I got cancer and they canceled my health coverage. Here’s what it was like to work for Donald Trump’s failed magazine.
August 14, 2016
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/donald-trump-magazine-employee-confessional-bankrupt-2016-214155 [with comments]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v04q51pDhM [with comments] [original at http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/i-survived-trump-magazine-barely-747811395567 ]
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Being Donald Trump Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry
Here’s a riddle: If you don’t say what you’re apologizing for, is it actually an apology?
08/20/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/being-donald-trump-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry_us_57b75ddae4b0b51733a376ef [with embedded video, and comments]
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37 Times Donald Trump Should Have Apologized
08/19/2016 Updated August 20, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-m-granholm/37-times-donald-trump-sho_b_11616220.html [with comments]
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Jerry Falwell Jr. Seriously Compared Trump To Winston Churchill
Jerry Falwell Jr. introduces Donald Trump at a rally in January at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
The scramble to boost Trump’s losing campaign is getting desperate.
08/20/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jerry-falwell-donald-trump-winston-churchill_us_57b8a976e4b0b51733a3cffe [with comments]
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Jerry Falwell Jr.: Trump is the Churchillian leader we need
August 19, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jerry-falwell-jr-trump-is-the-churchillian-leader-we-need/2016/08/19/b1ff79e0-64b1-11e6-be4e-23fc4d4d12b4_story.html [with embedded video, and (over 4,000) comments]
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Religious Freedom Law Protects Business Owner Who Fired Trans Woman, Judge Rules
The owner of the funeral home said that “we have a dress code that is very specific that men will dress as men,” according to a deposition.
The businessman says allowing one of his employees to express her gender identity “would be violating God’s commands.”
08/19/2016 Updated August 20, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/religious-freedom-lgbt-rights_us_57b747dee4b03d51368841e6 [with comments]
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A Rock Star And Two Ex-Politicians Hope To Save America From Trump
Donald Trump is “a false savior,” says former Rep. Bob Inglis.
Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic (right) wants Americans to stop being distracted by the horse race and the personalities.
“No candidate should get away with these really facile platitudes of ‘Oh, I’ll fix it, believe me, I’ll fix it.’ Tell me how,” says former Rep. Brian Baird.
They say people just need to ask three simple questions — and get their friends and neighbors to ask as well.
“What specific actions will you take, and what will you ask the American people to do to reverse global climate change and ocean acidification?”
“What specific actions will you take, and what will you ask the American people to do to fix the growing debt of the United States?”
“What specific actions will you take during your campaign and your time in office, and what will you ask the American people to do to help restore the respect and confidence of the American people in their elected government?”
08/20/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/three-questions-donald-trump_us_57b77fbce4b0b51733a39358 [with comments]
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Live Stream: Donald Trump Rally in Fredericksburg, Virginia FULL SPEECH HD STREAM 8/20/16
Streamed live on Aug 16, 2016 by Entertainment News Gaming [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy8Lq7my3GBcdg7W-_3u3MQ / http://www.youtube.com/user/LiquidMoves , http://www.youtube.com/user/LiquidMoves/videos ]
Saturday, August 20, 2016: Live stream coverage of the Donald J. Trump for President rally in Fredericksburg, VA at the Fredericksburg Expo Center. Coverage begins at 6:00 PM ET.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ZDrU6YOpU [with comments] [also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BSV1jOQFKs (with comments), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1cMTNgqkug (with comments), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAL3dbIiInQ (with comments), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_RKhJCVFyo (with comments), and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNI7iIPSdxs (with comments)]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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