Replies to post #90937 on Your Economy (No Politics) (YE1)

[Ayock]

Not all agree with that assessment...

All-American smack down: Army, Marines, LeBron James reject Trump’s racism
By Eric Boehlert |
AUGUST 16, 2017

Trump stunned and angered (ED: most of...)the nation with bizarre embrace of white nationalism, and now the White House faces a massive backlash.


Denouncing Donald Trump as our “so-called president,” NBA star Lebron James added his voice to a rising, bipartisan choir of condemnations, as the stunned nation continues to grapple with Trump’s shocking embrace of white nationalism.

It’s a choir that now includes the Army and the Marines, as well as typically risk-averse business leaders (Wal-Mart, Intel, Under Armour), world-famous authors like J.K. Rowling, Republican politicians, and celebrities.

“Pathetic. Just pathetic, isn’t it?” That’s how Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich summed it up this morning on the “Today” show.
“What Trump did today was a moral disgrace,” Charles Krauthammer announced on Fox News Tuesday night.

The shock and awe all flows from Trump’s uncouth and un-presidential shouting match with reporters in the lobby of his Trump Tower in New York City. It’s the same lobby where two summers ago Trump began his presidential bid by attacking “rapists” who crossed the border from Mexico.

On Tuesday, Trump sprinted past common sense and decency by claiming that some “very fine people” had gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend as part of a white supremacists gathering.

That Nazi-fueled hate-fest — where marchers on Friday night chanted “Jews will not replace us!” — ended Saturday with the death of one American and three dozen protesters being sent to the hospital. After days of waffling on who was to blame, Trump on Tuesday emphatically announced both sides were to blame and that white supremacists were, at times, being unfairly maligned.

Former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke toasted Trump’s performance, but most people were sickened by it, and the White House now faces perhaps it’s most wide-ranging crisis of character.

“Sympathy For The Devil” reads Wednesday’s New York Daily News front page.

Leaders of the Army and the Marines were quick to publicly signal that they in no way endorsed Trump’s radical, racialist rhetoric:

Follow
GEN Mark A. Milley ? @ArmyChiefStaff
The Army doesn't tolerate racism, extremism, or hatred in our ranks. It's against our Values and everything we've stood for since 1775.
1:50 AM - Aug 16, 2017
1,437 1,437 Replies 13,514 13,514 Retweets 37,424 37,424 likes

Follow
Robert B. Neller ? @GenRobertNeller
No place for racial hatred or extremism in @USMC. Our core values of Honor, Courage, and Commitment frame the way Marines live and act.
3:51 PM - Aug 15, 2017
2,330 2,330 Replies 20,550 20,550 Retweets 56,323 56,323 likes

Inside the White House, one aide told Axios there was a fear of the administration imploding following yesterday’s debacle. “The danger for Trump now is that one senior resignation will start a run on the bank.”
The conservative National Review Online conceded Trump “gave the alt-right its greatest national media moment ever.”

Meanwhile, Republicans did their best to sprint away from the president and his abhorrent, toxic views:

Follow
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen ? @RosLehtinen
Blaming "both sides" for #Charlottesville?! No. Back to relativism when dealing with KKK, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists? Just no.
1:34 PM - Aug 15, 2017
741 741 Replies 3,482 3,482 Retweets 10,845 10,845 likes
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But the overriding feeling today seems to be one of profound anger and sadness. “This is bizarre and revolting,” tweeted director Ava DuVernay. Added author Michael Eric Dyson on CNN this morning, “We have a bigot-in-chief.

[Ayock]

What Trump Gets Wrong About Antifa

If the president is concerned about violence on the left, he can start by fighting the white supremacist movements whose growth has fueled its rise.

Joshua Roberts / Reuters
PETER BEINART 5:00 AM ET POLITICS



In his Tuesday press conference, Donald Trump talked at length about what he called “the alt left.” White supremacists, he claimed, weren’t the only people in Charlottesville last weekend that deserved condemnation. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he declared. “Nobody wants to say that.”

I can say with great confidence that Trump’s final sentence is untrue. I can do so because the September issue of The Atlantic contains an essay of mine entitled “The Rise of the Violent Left,” which discusses the very phenomenon that Trump claims “nobody wants” to discuss. Trump is right that, in Charlottesville and beyond, the violence of some leftist activists constitutes a real problem. Where he’s wrong is in suggesting that it’s a problem in any way comparable to white supremacism.

What Trump calls “the alt left” (I’ll explain why that’s a bad term later) is actually antifa, which is short for anti-fascist. The movement traces its roots to the militant leftists who in the 1920s and 1930s brawled with fascists on the streets of Germany, Italy, and Spain. It revived in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when anti-racist punks in Britain and Germany mobilized to defeat Neo-Nazi skinheads who were infiltrating the music scene. Via punk, groups calling themselves anti-racist action—and later, anti-fascist action or antifa—sprung up in the United States. They have seen explosive growth in the Trump era for an obvious reason: There’s more open white supremacism to mobilize against.

As members of a largely anarchist movement, antifa activists generally combat white supremacism not by trying to change government policy but through direct action. They try to publicly identify white supremacists and get them fired from their jobs and evicted from their apartments. And they disrupt white-supremacist rallies, including by force.

As I argued in my essay, some of their tactics are genuinely troubling. They’re troubling tactically because conservatives use antifa’s violence to justify—or at least distract from—the violence of white supremacists, as Trump did in his press conference. They’re troubling strategically because they allow white supremacists to depict themselves as victims being denied the right to freely assemble. And they’re troubling morally because antifa activists really do infringe upon that right. By using violence, they reject the moral legacy of the civil-rights movement’s fight against white supremacy. And by seeking to deny racists the ability to assemble, they reject the moral legacy of the ACLU, which in 1977 went to the Supreme Court to defend the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois.

Antifa activists are sincere. They genuinely believe that their actions protect vulnerable people from harm. Cornel West claims they did so in Charlottesville. But for all of antifa’s supposed anti-authoritarianism, there’s something fundamentally authoritarian about its claim that its activists—who no one elected—can decide whose views are too odious to be publicly expressed. That kind of undemocratic, illegitimate power corrupts. It leads to what happened this April in Portland, Oregon, where antifa activists threatened to disrupt the city’s Rose Festival parade if people wearing “red maga hats” marched alongside the local Republican Party. Because of antifa, Republican officials in Portland claim they can’t even conduct voter registration in the city without being physically threatened or harassed.

So, yes, antifa is not a figment of the conservative imagination. It’s a moral problem that liberals need to confront.

But saying it’s a problem is vastly different than implying, as Trump did, that it’s a problem equal to white supremacism. Using the phrase “alt-left” suggests a moral equivalence that simply doesn’t exist.

For starters, while antifa perpetrates violence, it doesn’t perpetrate it on anything like the scale that white nationalists do. It’s no coincidence that it was a Nazi sympathizer—and not an antifa activist—who committed murder in Charlottesville. According to the Anti-Defamation League, right-wing extremists committed 74 percent of the 372 politically motivated murders recorded in the United States between 2007 and 2016. Left-wing extremists committed less than 2 percent.

Second, antifa activists don’t wield anything like the alt-right’s power. White, Christian supremacy has been government policy in the United States for much of American history. Anarchism has not. That’s why there are no statues of Mikhail Bakunin in America’s parks and government buildings. Antifa boasts no equivalent to Steve Bannon, who called his old publication, Breitbart, “the platform for the alt-right,” and now works in the White House. It boasts no equivalent to Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who bears the middle name of a Confederate general and the first name of the Confederacy’s president, and who allegedly called the NAACP “un-American.” It boasts no equivalent to Alex Jones, who Donald Trump praised as “amazing.” Even if antifa’s vision of society were as noxious as the “alt-right’s,” it has vastly less power to make that vision a reality.

And antifa’s vision is not as noxious. Antifa activists do not celebrate regimes that committed genocide and enforced slavery. They’re mostly anarchists. Anarchism may not be a particularly practical ideology. But it’s not an ideology that depicts the members of a particular race or religion as subhuman.

If Donald Trump really wants to undermine antifa, he should do his best to stamp out the bigotry that antifa—counterproductively—mobilizes against. Taking down Confederate statues in places like Charlottesville would be a good start.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/what-trump-gets-wrong-about-antifa/537048/

[al44]

Hey basserdan-

I read that yesterday. It aligns with my way of thinking. One can disagree with anything but only a fascist would challenge the right to speak it. And they call themselves anti fascists. I would give it a big LOL, but there is no humor in their brand of violence. Mussolini would have been proud.

......al