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

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We are all ‘the Squad’ now

Trump has forced us all to take a position on what kind of America this is going to be — in essence, to define again what American “nationalism” means. Is it a white Christian nationalism (or if you’re Jewish and think you can wriggle yourself inside the Trumpian nationalist tent, you can call it Judeo-Christian), in which immigrants of color or other religions are not really Americans and can be told by the president to “go back” to their ancestral lands? Or is it the universalist nationalism of the Declaration of Independence, based on the liberal Enlightenment principles of equality before the law, the inviolable rights of the individual against the state and the conviction that all citizens — regardless of religion, ethnicity or ancestral roots and the timing of their arrival — are equally American?

This is hardly the first time that Americans have been presented with this question, needless to say, and they have often answered equivocally. The popular willingness to denounce and even persecute the “hyphenated” Americans of German and Irish descent during and after World War I, a frenzy spurred by leaders of both political parties; the imprisonment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II, upheld by the Supreme Court; and of course the unending horrific treatment of African Americans — these are more than sad episodes in our history. They are as much a part of who we are as the civil rights movement and other triumphs of individual liberties. White nationalism was never just a fringe phenomenon, and it isn’t today. The South was a bastion of the white-nationalist idea for almost two centuries and with support in the last half of the 20th century from conservative thinkers such as Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr. Today, the American conservative movement proudly nurtures a new nationalism, whose intellectual authors openly call on Americans to reject the universal liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence in favor of a nationhood grounded in religion and culture. It is a growth industry.

This nationalism in antithetical to the American experiment. The Founding Fathers, though white, Christian men, explicitly rejected establishing the new republic on a religious and ethnic foundation. They did not share a Burkean belief that the rights they enshrined in the Declaration derived from their Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, accreted over the centuries. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the “sacred rights of mankind” were not to be found among “parchments or musty records” but were “written, as with a sunbeam . . . by the hand of the divinity itself.” In the Declaration of Independence, which Abraham Lincoln recognized as the quintessential statement of American nationalism, there is not a word about culture, color or Christianity.

Yet the fight to define our nationalism has continued ever since. And that is what’s at stake in the current confrontation between the president and “the Squad.”

As always in such fights, the battle is not being fought on the clear and solid ground we’d all prefer. Trump himself deliberately picked this murky ground. He knows that a great number of Americans in both parties have little sympathy for the Squad, and for all kinds of reasons, ranging from simple racism, Islamophobia and misogyny, to genuine policy disagreements, to unhappiness with the bigotry and insensitivity that members of the Squad have themselves sometimes displayed. Almost everyone has a reason to temper their support. Professional Republicans are silent because they fear their voters; professional Democrats are still angry at the Squad for challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Many are inclined to declare a pox on both their houses — they deserve each other.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of equivocation. Trump has given us a binary choice: Either stand with American principles, which in this case means standing in defense of the Squad, or equivocate, which means standing with Trump and white nationalism. It doesn’t matter how you feel about Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The truth is, they have done nothing and said nothing about the United States or about an ally (in this case, Israel) that has not been done or said thousands of times. When politicians were denouncing “hyphenated” Americans during World War I, German and Irish Americans were not only denouncing their government. Some were actively working for the German government, engaging in sabotage and espionage, often supported by funds paid through the German Embassy in Washington. Yet even that did not justify a national assault on “hyphenated” Americans.

Our nation won’t be undermined by anything the Squad has said or done. It will be undermined if we don’t fight back against this assault on our universal principles. Disagree with the Squad, refute them, argue with them, vote against them. But also defend them, as the founders intended. The essence of our nation is at stake.

#Resist

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Kellyanne Conway asks reporter’s ethnicity as she defends Trump’s racist remarks

Kellyanne Conway, responding to a reporter’s question Tuesday about President Trump’s racist tweet directed to four Democratic congresswomen, asked the journalist: “What’s your ethnicity?”

Andrew Feinberg of Breakfast Media wanted to know what countries the president was referring to when he made the comment about Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). Each of the congresswomen are American citizens; three of whom were born in the United States. Omar was born in Somalia and became a U.S. citizen in 2000.

Conway, standing outside the White House, defended the president, saying he meant that the congresswomen should go back to where their families were “originally” from. In the exchange, she asked Feinberg of his lineage, seeming to argue that Trump’s point was that every American has an immigrant history, before offering that her family is from Ireland and Italy.

When reporters continued to push her for an answer, Conway said that the president had already explained himself in subsequent tweets.

“He’s tired,” she said. “A lot of us are sick and tired in this country of America coming last to people who swore an oath of office.”

Later, Conway tweeted that she’d meant “no disrespect” when asking about the reporter’s ethnicity.

While Trump and his allies have said his tweets about the four congresswomen were not racist but rather a commentary on their “socialist” ideology, Conway’s husband, a frequent Trump critic, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post with the headline, “Trump is a racist president.”

“Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president,” George Conway wrote. “Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear.”

Earlier, in a Fox News interview, Kellyanne Conway appeared displeased when asked whether she agreed with her husband’s take.

“No, I totally disagree,” she said. “But, I work with this president, I know him. I know his heart. I know his actions. I know how much he has helped people of color. And I go by what people do, not what other people say about them.”

Conway added that she objected to being asked to comment on her husband’s opinions, saying she’s “not going to run around pointing out everybody’s disagreements with the people in their lives. I sure could.”

She took a similar tack with the reporters on Tuesday, telling them that she could “cherry-pick what each of you have said and made fools of yourself, but I won’t. But I could.”

#Resist

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Kellyanne Conway inadvertently reminds America of our history of hostility to immigrants

For some reason — well, for an obvious reason — White House adviser Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday decided to ask a White House reporter about his ethnic background.

The reporter, Andrew Feinberg, had asked Conway to clarify what President Trump meant when he suggested that a group of Democratic women who have criticized him — all of whom are nonwhite — should “go back” to the countries from which they came. Three of the four are from the United States.

“What’s your ethnicity?” Conway responded, prompting Feinberg, clearly baffled, to ask why she wanted to know.

Because she did, Conway said, adding, “My ancestors are from Ireland and Italy.”

She later tweeted that she had asked the question of Feinberg because the majority of Americans are descended from people who immigrated from somewhere else. How that’s pertinent to Feinberg’s question — to what countries should the Democrats return? — still isn’t clear.

Unless, of course, Conway was tacitly admitting that Trump was telling, say, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to move out of Michigan and back to the West Bank, where her parents are from. Unless Conway was making clear that Trump’s description of these places of origin as “totally broken and crime infested” was a suggestion that Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a native of Somalia, have roots in places that he finds distasteful. (If he was telling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to return to her mother’s birthplace, Puerto Rico, his description of the place as “broken” and “a complete and total catastrophe” takes on a new meaning.)

But as Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center pointed out on Twitter, Conway’s personal revelation was more revealing than she probably intended.

Conway’s mother is of Italian descent and her father, Irish. We’ve written about her mother’s grandfather before, after the White House announced plans to mandate that immigrants speak English. When Conway’s great-grandfather Pasquale Lombardo arrived in the United States in 1909, he spoke only Italian.

That year is significant: It was the peak of migration from Italy to the United States.

It is also shortly after President Trump’s own grandfather — his father’s father — returned to the United States from Germany. (He had been in the U.S. previously, but his wife got homesick. The German government thought he had been trying to dodge the draft and slated him for deportation.) By the time he returned to the United States, German migration had waned somewhat. So had migration from Ireland, which peaked in the 19th century. (It’s not clear when Conway’s Irish ancestors arrived.)

What Wilkinson pointed out was that Italian and Irish immigrants were not exactly embraced.

The spike in Irish immigrants in the 19th century spurred a broad backlash. There were worries about Irish laborers taking American jobs and concerns about the influx of Catholics. Violence broke out, and discrimination was common.

Shortly after Lombardo arrived, concern had shifted to Eastern European migrants. The plunge in immigration on the graph above in the early 20th century reflects a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment that followed World War I. But there were specific moments at which that sentiment spiked, including after a bomb exploded on Wall Street in 1920.

That incident was blamed on anarchists linked to an Italian immigrant. An editorial in The Washington Post summarized one response: The bombing “emphasizes the extent to which the alien scum from the cesspools and sewers of the Old World has polluted the clear spring of American democracy.”

Warren G. Harding, the Republican presidential candidate in 1920, warned about a deluge of immigrants with loyalties to their home country. He called such immigrants “hyphenated” — as in, “Italian-American.”

“For Americans who love America, I sound a warning,” Harding said in one speech. “It is not beyond possibility that the day might come — and may God forbid it — when an organized hyphenated vote in American politics might have the balance of voting power to elect our government.”

Harding won and quickly embraced new immigration restrictions. By 1925, the Ku Klux Klan was marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Italians then and the Irish before them were seen as undesirable and unwelcome. They were blamed for ruining the fabric of the United States and, often, told to go back home to the places from which they had come.

Things change. There is now an adviser to the president of the United States who is the progeny of both Italian and Irish immigrants. That, of course, is Conway — and she figured that raising her own heritage was an effective way to defend Trump’s own nativist rhetoric.

It probably wasn’t.

#Resist

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It’s not just Trump. Many whites view people of color as less American.

President Trump is facing strong backlash for telling four progressive Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to where they “originally came from.” The presidential tweet sparked a storm of controversy for appearing to question the nationality and patriotism of these nonwhite members of Congress — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) — three of whom were born in the United States.

Trump’s comments were immediately criticized by Democrats (and some Republicans) for evoking long-standing racist tropes that treat racial and ethnic minorities as less authentically American than whites. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tweeted:

https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1150408691713265665

Of course, this isn’t the first time the president has questioned the Americanness of people of color. Trump first became popular among Republicans by publicly questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship. Since then, he has dismissed a federal judge born in Indiana as “a Mexican”; expressed a strong preference for white immigrants from Norway over those from “shithole” African countries; and said to African American athletes protesting racial injustice, “Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

But Trump isn’t alone in seeing people of color as less American. Indeed, for many whites, being American is often equated with being white.

Race and Americanness

As I noted in an earlier Monkey Cage post, within the social-science literature on intergroup relations, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto’s theory of social dominance argues that politically dominant groups, such as whites in the United States, effectively claim “ownership of the nation.” According to this influential theory, “Nationality and ethnicity are complementary because their power has enabled whites to successfully define the prototypical American in their own image.”

Consistent with that contention, social-psychology research shows that “to be American is implicitly synonymous with being white.” Those studies show that many whites subconsciously see both African and Asian Americans as less associated with the national category “American” than whites.

Moreover, whites who feel solidarity with other members of their racial group have stronger attachments to America and to such patriotic symbols as the national anthem and the American flag. They’re also more likely to hold views of Americanness that restrict membership, such as believing that being white and Christian are important to being “truly American.”

The figure below shows an even more direct link between whiteness and American patriotism.



The bars on the left show results from a June 1995 NBC Poll that asked respondents, “When you hear about someone being ‘patriotic,’ do you think of a white man, a white woman, a black man or a black woman?” The results again suggest that whites’ image of the prototypical American patriot is far more likely to be white than black.

Similarly, the bars on the right show that few whites thought African Americans were particularly patriotic in a February 2012 American National Election Study Survey. Only 28 percent of white respondents thought that the word “patriotic” described most blacks very or extremely well, compared with 51 percent who thought most whites are patriots.

Patriotism is often closely mixed with racial resentment

This view that African Americans are insufficiently patriotic fits well with classic conceptions of modern prejudice, which argue that contemporary racial resentment is characterized by “moral feelings that blacks violate … traditional American values.” In fact, one of the questions that Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher used to measure racial resentment for the Obama campaign in 2008 was: “I often feel that African Americans aren’t as proud and patriotic about this country as I am.”

The widespread belief that people of color are insufficiently American and patriotic also helps explain why some individuals — and not others — have their nationality and patriotism questioned if they criticize U.S. government policies. Trump said that those four members of Congress “hate our country” and should leave if they’re “not happy” with his administration.

But when Trump was writing about “Crippled America” and speaking of American carnage, no one called for him to go back to his ancestral homelands in Scotland or Germany.

#Resist

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The Daily 202: Eight takeaways from Trump’s racist tweets and what’s followed

THE BIG IDEA: The four-page resolution of disapproval that the House will take up this week to condemn President Trump’s racist tweetstorm quotes at length from Ronald Reagan’s final speech in the White House.

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness: We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people – our strength – from every country and every corner of the world,” Reagan said in January 1989. “And, by doing so, we continuously renew and enrich our nation. … Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Thirty years later, the man who now occupies the White House tweeted that four minority lawmakers – three of whom were born in the United States – should “go back” to “the crime infested places from which they came.” A reporter asked Trump on Monday, “Does it concern you that many people find that tweet racist?”

“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” the president replied, adding that the four women “hate our country.”

House Republican leadership aides expect few of their members to defect from Trump to support the resolution of disapproval, which could come up for a vote as soon as today. It also says that Trump’s tweets “have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”

Trump’s targets held a news conference at the Capitol last night to respond to the president’s comments. Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) each took turns speaking. Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Tlaib was born in Detroit, and Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York. Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia; her family fled the country amid civil war when she was a child, and she became a U.S. citizen as a teenager.

Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, remembered when she was a girl and her dad brought her to the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. He told her to look around. Then he told her that the monuments she saw, and the nation they represented, belonged to her just as much as anyone else. “I want to tell children across this country,” the congresswoman said last night, “no matter what the president says, this country belongs to you, and it belongs to everyone.”

Here are eight takeaways from this firestorm:

1) Trump’s rhetoric is creating a more dangerous climate and corroding the public discourse.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) asked the Capitol Police last night to provide extra protection for the four lawmakers, citing a growing threat profile, per Fox News.

There are also longer-term impacts to consider. For better or worse, the president is a role model. Modeling bad behavior sends signals to young people just as much as good behavior.

Conservative columnist George Will argues that this is why Trump is worse than Richard Nixon. “I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse, you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream,” the consistent Trump critic said on a New York Times Book Review podcast last week. “This will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon's surreptitious burglaries did."

2) Trump’s “go back” rhetoric is consistent not only with his own long history of attacks on people he perceives as the other but also the nation’s oscillating attitudes toward immigration throughout its history. Marc Fisher traces the etymology: “The Know-Nothings wanted German and Irish immigrants to get out because they were allegedly subversive and diseased people who were stealing American jobs. White preachers and politicians of the 1820s urged freed blacks to move to West Africa, supposedly for their own good. From that drive to encourage blacks to go back where they came from to waves of nativist attacks on Catholics, Jews, Asians and Hispanics in nearly every generation that followed, ‘go home’ rhetoric is as American as immigration itself. …

“There is hardly any ethnic or racial group in the country that hasn’t been told to go back where they came from. In collections of voices from the Japanese American internment camps of the World War II era, in diaries of the earliest Italian and Irish immigrants, in Jewish novels and memoirs from the turn of the 20th century, the slur is a mainstay. … From Calvin Coolidge’s warnings in the 1920s that the country was becoming ‘a dumping ground’ and that ‘America must remain American’ to the ‘America: Love it or leave it’ rhetoric that surrounded Richard Nixon’s presidency, the nation’s leaders have struggled for two centuries with a central ambivalence about its core identity as a magnet for immigrants.”

-- The news media is grappling with how to label Trump’s Sunday tweets, but The Washington Post decided Monday afternoon to use the word racist because of the well-documented history. “The ‘go back’ trope is deeply rooted in the history of racism in the United States. Therefore, we have concluded that ‘racist’ is the proper term to apply to the language he used Sunday,” Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said in a statement.

-- Conservative lawyer George Conway, the husband of counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, explains in an op-ed for The Post why this episode caused him to conclude that Trump is a racist – after years of giving him the benefit of the doubt.

3) White identity politics is driving Trump as 2020 approaches, and the Republican Party that he’s remaking in his image. Trump is making clear that his reelection campaign will feature the same explosive mix of white grievance and anti-immigrant nativism that helped elect him, Michael Scherer explains: “Trump’s combustible formula of white identity politics has already reshaped the Republican Party, sidelining, silencing or converting nearly anyone who dares to challenge the racial insensitivity of his utterances. It also has pushed Democratic presidential candidates sharply to the left on issues such as immigration and civil rights, as they respond to the liberal backlash against him. Left unknown is whether the president is now on the verge of more permanently reshaping the nation’s political balance — at least until long-term demographic changes take hold to make nonwhite residents a majority of the country around 2050. …

“Ashley Jardina, a professor at Duke University who recently wrote a book called ‘White Identity Politics,’ said that a majority of white Americans express some racial resentment in election-year surveys. Between 30 and 40 percent embrace a white racial identity. It is the latter group, with concerns about growing immigration threatening their racial status, who gravitated strongly to the president. The feeling of white identity is much stronger among non-college-educated whites than those who went to college, she said. ‘We do know that it is politically mobilizing,’ Jardina added. ‘Those who feel racial solidarity have more likelihood to participate in politics.’ …

“A December 2018 Pew Research Center poll found that 46 percent of white Americans said having a majority nonwhite nation in 2050 would ‘weaken American customs and values.’ … Asked whether having a majority nonwhite population would strengthen American customs and values, 42 percent of Democrats said it would, while only 13 percent of Republicans agreed.”

“Trump is proposing a giant swap: Republicans can no longer count on suburban women and we will continue to lose college-educated men and women, while we increasingly pick up working white Americans without college degrees,” said Ari Fleischer, who was a White House press secretary for President George W. Bush and who has spoken with Trump campaign advisers about their strategy for increasing turnout. “Nobody knows who will come out ahead in the swap,” he told Scherer. “That’s what the campaign will tell us.”

4) Trump’s increasingly incendiary rhetoric is being met with fading resistance from Republican and corporate leaders.

Making the case that the president’s behavior is being normalized, Toluse Olorunnipa compares the applause Trump got at the White House on Monday to what happened after Trump said Mexican immigrants are rapists, called for a Muslim ban and insisted there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville. “The president, who has grown more comfortable in Washington as he has surrounded himself with assenting voices, has learned over the past three years that there is little consequence within his party or from aligned corporate and religious leaders for embracing incendiary rhetoric and pugilistic attacks,” Toluse writes:

“The business world largely shrugged off Trump’s words, a shift from the kind of forceful response that industry leaders provided after Charlottesville. After Monday’s event at the White House — during which Trump accused members of Congress of hating Jews and loving al-Qaeda — business leaders gathered for the event circled around the president as he signed an executive order. Standing with Trump was Lockheed Martin chief executive Marillyn Hewson, one of the business leaders on Trump’s manufacturing council before it disbanded after the Charlottesville violence. Lockheed spokesman Bill Phelps did not answer questions about whether Hewson approved of Trump’s comments before or during the event.”

-- The New York Times looks at how senior staffers at the White House have grown emboldened as Trump blusters his way through scandals. After Trump defended the neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Gary Cohn, his top economic adviser at the time, told the Financial Times that “this administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups,”” Annie Karni notes. “On Monday, Mr. Cohn’s successor in the West Wing, Larry Kudlow, steered clear of the latest flare-up of Mr. Trump’s inflammatory language. ‘That’s way out of my lane,’ Mr. Kudlow said when asked about the president’s weekend tweets. ‘He’s tweeted what he’s tweeted,’ Mr. Kudlow said. ‘You’ll have to talk to him about that.’

“After Charlottesville, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a White House adviser, issued her own statement on Twitter, saying there was ‘no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.’ It was a notable corrective to her father. On Monday, Ms. Trump declined to comment on her father’s latest remarks. … Administration veterans said they had long ago become immune to thinking anything Mr. Trump said would stick to him for more than one news cycle. Indeed, even a year after Charlottesville, Republican lawmakers who distanced themselves from the president had come back to embrace his tax overhaul and his selection of Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.”

-- “Melania Trump is only the second first lady of the United States not born in America; the first, Louisa Adams was born in England. Yet she's remained silent as her husband tweets racist and xenophobic attacks,” CNN notes.

-- Speaking of Charlottesville: Two weeks after being sentenced to life in prison by a federal judge, the avowed neo-Nazi James A. Fields Jr. received a similar sentence in a Virginia court on Monday for ramming his car into counterprotesters during the white-supremacist rally. In ordering terms of life plus 419 years in state prison, Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore imposed the punishment recommended in December by a jury that convicted Fields of first-degree murder and nine other charges, per Laurel Demkovich and Paul Duggan.

5) Trump wants to make “the Squad,” as the four women he attacked call themselves, the face of the Democratic Party.

The president suggested that he’s attacking these women to elevate them. “The Dems were trying to distance themselves from the four ‘progressives,’ but now they are forced to embrace them,” he wrote after their presser last night. “That means they are endorsing Socialism, hate of Israel and the USA! Not good for the Democrats!”

A Trump campaign adviser told Jackie Alemany for her Power Up newsletter that Trump's tweets “yet again reinforced in the minds of many Americans that the Democratic Party is the party of AOC and Omar.”

-- But even if there’s some strategy, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one. Trump has united Democrats after they spent a week in disarray. “Inside the White House, there was some frustration that the president had inserted himself into what was an internal Democratic feud, offering Nancy Pelosi a convenient off-ramp from her disagreements — generational, philosophical and tactical — with the four liberal lawmakers,” Ashley Parker, Rachael Bade and John Wagner report.

Dana Milbank notes that Trump’s latest comments made Democratic bickering over Joe Biden’s relationship with James Eastland in 1973 look small in comparison, a dynamic that could help the former vice president.

-- Looking forward, this gives some momentum to liberals who want impeachment. There is lots of speculation that Trump welcomes impeachment proceedings because he knows Senate Republicans are not going to remove him from office, and he has said his base would rally behind him if Democrats impeach.

Despite the speaker’s opposition, 85 Democrats have publicly called for starting impeachment proceedings against Trump, more than one-third of her caucus. All four of the lawmakers in question have already called for Trump’s impeachment. Omar mentioned impeachment during the news conference. “It’s time for us to impeach this president,” Omar said. “It is time for us to stop allowing him to make a mockery out of this Constitution.”

Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) said he plans to force a vote on the House floor this month on impeaching Trump. The House voted 364 to 58 in December 2017, with Republicans in the majority, on a motion to table Green’s previous impeachment resolution. Green said Monday that “the American people are fed up” with his racism and bigotry and that the Sunday tweets brought everything “to a boiling point.”

-- Congressional Republicans were left largely to chart their own course Monday in the absence of any unified messaging effort by their party. “One Senate Republican chief of staff … said that there was only ‘commiserating’ at such moments, ‘no coordination,’” Felicia Sonmez, Mike DeBonis and Paul Kane report. “‘Every man for themselves,’ said a House Republican close to party leadership. … But common themes quickly emerged. In responding to Trump’s tweets Monday, several Republicans echoed the president’s claim that the four women ‘hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion,’ while others cast them as lax on border security.”

6) The world is watching. Trump’s comments hurt America’s standing in the world.

“British politician David Lammy branded Trump’s comments ‘1950s racism straight from the White House,’” Jennifer Hassan reports from London. “Prime Minister Theresa May, who has just days left in office, also condemned the tweets. ‘The prime minister’s view is that the language used to refer to these women was completely unacceptable,’ a Downing Street spokesman said. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt called the tweets ‘totally offensive.’ Former London mayor and former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said the president’s comments were ‘unacceptable.’ One of the two men will be selected prime minister next week. …

“Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, who was born and raised in the city and has frequently clashed with Trump, told a British radio station that this is the type of language he has heard for much of his life — though never from such a source. ‘I’ve heard it from racists and fascists. Never from a mainstream politician,’ he said. ‘Here you have the president of the U.S.A. using that same sort of language.’”

-- New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern criticized Trump on Radio New Zealand. “Usually I don’t get into other people’s politics, but it will be clear to most people that I completely and utterly disagree with him,” she said.

-- The Palestinian Authority, which has cut off ties with the White House over a succession of Trump policies that have favored Israel, called Trump’s statement an “insult” to the concept of American rule of law, according to the AP. “It’s an insult to the Statue of Liberty, America’s most famous symbol, an insult to the American values where migrants from all over the world are united as one nation under one law,” said Ibrahim Milhim, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority.

7) This will make it more difficult for Trump to advance his agenda on Capitol Hill. Moderate Democrats have a harder time explaining to their liberal base why they’re voting with the president each time he picks a fight like this.

Pelosi spoke late last night with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as they tried to broker a debt ceiling and budget deal with just days left before Congress leaves until after Labor Day. “The talks took on new urgency after Pelosi shot down a White House fallback plan that would have Congress raise the debt ceiling — potentially for just a short period of time — by late next week if they failed to reach a budget agreement,” Damian Paletta and Erica Werner report. “Pelosi said the idea of raising the debt ceiling on its own and not in conjunction with a budget agreement was not ‘acceptable to our caucus’ and therefore did not stand a chance of passage in the House. …

“People involved in the negotiations said they were not panicking and that there were still multiple options to avoid a full-blown crisis, and they also said that all sides were working hard to reach a resolution. One option would be for lawmakers and the White House to reach an agreement in principle on the budget before the August recess, temporarily raise the debt ceiling, and then agree on specifics in the intervening months. White House officials also remain unsure whether Pelosi will be able to whip up enough Democratic votes to pass a budget compromise, and some congressional aides remain wary of whether Trump will ultimately agree to whatever budget deal Mnuchin brings to him."

Irony is dead: Attorney General Bill Barr spoke yesterday at a Justice Department summit on combating anti-Semitism. He was not talking about Trump, of course, but his warnings about divisiveness seem applicable to this situation. “My concern today is that under the banner of identity politics, some political factions are seeking to obtain power by dividing Americans,” Barr said. “They undermine the values that draw us together, such as shared commitment to our country’s success. This is the breeding ground for hatred, and we must reject it.”

“We are a pluralistic nation composed of very distinct groups, each bound together by ethnicity, race, or religion – each group proud of its identity and committed to its faith and traditions,” he continued. “Yet despite these differences, we can be bound together into a broader community. Not one that seeks to grind away our distinctive identity. … But one that respects, indeed delights in, the freedom of each of us that give meaning to our lives – that help us understand our place and our purpose in this Creation. This real sense of community cannot be politically mandated. It arises from the genuine affinity, affection, and solidarity that grows out of a shared patriotism and that spontaneous feeling of fellowship that arises from a shared sense of place, shared experience, and common local attachments. These bonds are the surest safeguard against racial hatred.”

#Resist

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Trump Is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You.

Trump is a racist, in his words and his actions.

Before you go clutching your pearls and extolling the virtues of “civility,” let me say this: put a sock in it.

This is not a new revelation, nor is it something that we can continue to ignore as though it were coming from a drunk uncle at the family barbeque. Bigotry is dangerous and, in the hands of our nation’s commander-in-chief, it can mean an inability to recognize individual humanity and a failure to act with moral authority in times of crisis. Every person talking about his clothes as he cheerfully bares his ass  is part of the problem.

Sunday, he claimed that newly elected progressive Democrats “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” and “the worst, more corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.” And he told freshmen Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—outspoken Democratic women of color who have challenged the administration’s inhumane immigration policies— to leavethe country.

Three of the four were born here in the United States. All are American citizens, and duly elected members of Congress.

Trump’s repugnant rebuke of American values did not come out of thin air.  It unfolded days after “The Squad” travelled with a delegation of congressional democrats to tour detention facilities in border states. What they found was deplorable. Reports of rampant abuse and neglect filled the airwaves, leading Trump to again dismiss accurate coverage as “fake news.” Rather than focus on improving basic conditions and getting to work on bi-partisan, comprehensive reforms, the president basically said if immigants didn’t like how they were being treated, they should stay in their own country.

This morning, he turned his ire on some of his most vocal critics in Congress—all of whom have previously called for his impeachment.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump tweeted about the four congresswomen today. “Then come back and show us how it is done.”

“These places need your help badly,” he went on, “you can’t leave fast enough.”

While Republicans predictably remained tight-lipped and oblivious, Democrats reacted swiftly.

“Mr. President, the country I ‘come from,’ and the country we all swear to, is the United States,” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez responded. “You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us. You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.”

“When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a tweet. “Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power.”

This isn’t simply disgusting and divisive rhetoric. Whether it is the abhorrent, inhumane treatment of immigrants detained in government-sponsored concentration camps or the slow, piecemeal aid sent to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, for some, his policies have been deadly.

Certainly, this is not  the first time Trump has shamelessly revealed himself in public. His “Make America Great Again” campaign was always about catering to our lowest common denominator-- a hateful sector of the electorate that believes themselves culturally superior by skin color and religion.

For years, even before mounting a formal bid for the presidency, Trump regaled television news audiences with racist conspiracy theories about former president Barack Obama. He pledged to send investigators out to prove the nation’s 44thpresident was not born in the United States. He later derided immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries, calling those foreign nations “shit hole countries.” He once said immigrants from Haiti all “have AIDS” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts.”

In Trump’s mind, a judge’s Mexican heritage made him incapable of ruling fairly in a civil fraud case against one of his companies and he believes “laziness is a trait in blacks.” Trump, whose real estate company was sued for housing discrimination in the 1970s, went on the place a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five innocent black teenagers. Even after the Central Park 5 was exonerated, he refused to take it back. After Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlotteville, Virginia amid a white supremacist protest, he lamented the there were “some very fine people” on “both sides.”

Trump is not a fine person.  His words Sunday were not racially “charged,” “fueled,” or “tinged.” They were unapologetically racist.

And, if you support him, so are you.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The America Ilhan Omar Knows

Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, perhaps in a telling of things to come, said on his show that Omar “has an awful lot to be grateful for” but “hates this country more than ever.” He doubled down on his comments the following night, arguing that arriving in this country as a refugee should prevent her from criticizing the United States.

Then President Donald Trump started in, tweeting over the weekend about how “interesting” it was to see members of Congress “from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” try to criticize and lead the U.S. themselves and telling them to “go back” to where they were from. Most of the women he referred to—Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—are U.S.-born citizens, whereas Omar’s family, from Somalia, sought asylum here when she was 12. She became a naturalized citizen at 17.

Since then, Republicans have either remained silent on Trump’s racist remarks about Omar and the other women or defended the remarks as fair criticism.

The former have tried to cover their asses, but the latter has molded Trump’s racism and xenophobia into an argument that might seem on its face a bit less vitriolic than Trump’s bald racism—that Omar must hate America, since she’s bucking the unwritten “model minority” rule by daring to criticize a country that so selflessly accepted her and her family in their time of need. (Another route they’ve taken to justify the dog-piling: resurrecting Omar’s previous comments criticizing Israel, once again smearing her as anti-Semitic, a line of attack they’ve also tried on Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib.)

These conservatives, grasping at straws to justify the president’s racist comments, have backed themselves into a corner, scraping together weak defenses for Trump’s indefensible attacks on these elected women of color. Because if they can paint Omar as the aggressor—if she is the one with hate in her heart—Republicans can get away with being hateful themselves.

But the idea that Omar is ungrateful or that she hates this country could not be more laughable and completely, offensively wrong. As an immigrant, she’s had to prove her allegiance and love for America more than any American-born citizen, even a first-generation child of immigrants, can ever know. And as a Muslim woman from an African country, she’s had to prove her patriotism and worth to this country time and time again.

This arbitrary rule that immigrants, particularly refugees or asylum seekers, are not allowed to criticize and demand better from their government rings completely hollow, but it’s one that many immigrants are made to feel like they have no choice but to follow. America, falsely lauded as a country founded on accepting all immigrants, makes immigrants the other, then demands they meet the expectation to be no different than any other citizen. Assimilate—and shut up—or fail.

And so, they can’t complain. Not when they find that the American dream comes with terms and conditions—isolation, racism, xenophobia. Not when school bullies stick gum on their hijabs, as Omar experienced as a child. Not when they’re asked where they’re really from, or are made fun of for speaking with an accent that doesn’t sound “American,” or dubbed “you people,” an insult my mom hears every day at her customer service job in a call center. They must uphold the stereotypes of the model immigrant and minority or be deemed an outsider who isn’t worthy of being an American. Coupled with the knowledge of the advantages they have living in the U.S. that they might never have been afforded in their home country, they can’t complain, and so they rarely do.

And still, immigrants are forced to learn, firsthand, exactly how this country fails its most vulnerable residents. Omar’s experience as a Muslim and a Somali American is exactly what has allowed her to learn where America falls short—where it fails its citizens, natural-born and naturalized. Yet, despite it all, Omar loves this country. Speaking on a panel at Netroots Nation over the weekend, Omar said that despite being criticized as anti-American for daring to criticize how our country conducts itself, “I believe, as an immigrant, I probably love this country more than anyone that is naturally born.”

She’s pledged her allegiance, once again. But unsurprisingly, her comment only fueled more intense scrutiny—with her speaking the absolute goddamn truth read as some kind of affront to natural-born Americans. When she’s critical of the U.S., she’s un-American. And yet, when she reaffirms her love for the U.S., she’s still un-American. In that catch-22 lies the truth behind the Republicans’ rush to reframe Trump’s remarks from racism to patriotism—in the eyes of her worst critics, Omar will never measure up to their racist ideals of how an immigrant should be, no matter what she says or does.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Neo-Nazi Blogger Hit With $14 Million Fine for Vicious Harassment

Andrew Anglin, who publishes the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, has been ordered to pay $14 million to a woman whom he asked his followers to harass, according to BuzzFeed News.

Federal judge Jeremiah Lynch found in Missoula, MT that Anglin “acted with actual malice” by telling his followers, “Let’s Hit Em Up. Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm? Because AYO - it’s time, fam.”

The target of these attacks was Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh and her family. Anglin and his followers also targeted Gersh’s workplace.

The judge levied $10 million, the maximum state punitive damages, for what he called “particularly egregious and reprehensible” behavior by Anglin to “punish Anglin and deter him from engaging in such conduct in the future.” The judgement also included $200,000 for lost earnings and medical expenses, $821,000 for future lost earnings, and $3 million for pain and suffering.

The origins of the harassment against Gersh are convoluted.

From BuzzFeed:

The targeted harassment against Gersh began in late 2016, when the Montana woman reached out to Sherry Spencer, the mother of white supremacist Richard Spencer, about a protest planned at a building she owned.

According to court records, Gersh offered to help Spencer sell the building but, on Dec. 15, 2016, Spencer published a post on Medium claiming Gersh was trying to extort her.

The following day, Anglin posted the first post about Gersh on The Daily Stormer, titled, “Jews Targeting Richard Spencer’s Mother for Harassment and Extortion - TAKE ACTION!”

“If you’re in the area, maybe you should stop by and tell her in person what you think of her actions,” he wrote, adding that those who do should not do anything violent.

All in all, Anglin posted two dozen times about Gersh, including publishing her and her family’s contact information.

“This is the goylash,” one message sent to Gersh read. “You remember the last goylash, don’t you Tanya? Merry Christmas, you Christ killing Jew.”

Gersh was devastated by the attacks, as the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday:

Gersh, her husband and their 12-year-old son were flooded with vile phone calls, text messages, emails, and social media posts, many of which contained death threats and anti-Semitic slurs. Gersh, who is Jewish, was told that she should have perished in the Holocaust, and received chilling voice mails with the sound of a gun firing again and again. She began experiencing panic attacks that left her vomiting and short of breath.

“I was frightened to the point that we couldn’t think straight,” Gersh told reporters after a court hearing last week. “We talked about waking our children in the middle of the night — to run from Nazis.”

The judge ordered Anglin to remove all posts and photos related to Gersh’s family from the Daily Stormer. They are apparently still receiving harassment. “The atrocious conduct directed at Gersh and her family has not entirely abated,” the judge wrote.

This is not the only fine that’s been recently levied against Anglin. Last month, he was hit with a $4.1 million fine in a defamation lawsuit for accusing a radio producer of being a terrorist.

But none of this means Anglin will actually pay these fines. He fled the country to an unknown location in 2017 and doesn’t seem to plan to return. For this reason, Anglin was largely absent during the case. For weeks, lawyers couldn’t even get in touch with him. His lawyers eventually fired him for leaving the country.

“My client made the decision years ago he was going to expatriate himself and never return,” Anglin’s lawyer, Marc Randazza, told The Missoulian. “When a federal judge tells you to do something and you refuse, you put your lawyer in a difficult position.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

A divided House votes for resolution condemning Trump’s racist remarks

A divided House voted Tuesday to condemn President Trump’s racist remarks telling four minority congresswomen to “go back” to their ancestral countries, with all but a handful of Republicans dismissing the rebuke as harassment while many Democrats pressed their leaders for harsher punishment of the president.

The imagery of the 240-to-187 vote was stark: A diverse Democratic caucus cast the president’s words as an affront to millions of Americans and descendants of immigrants, while Republican lawmakers — the vast majority white men — stood with Trump against a resolution that rejected his “racist comments that have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”

Trump insisted in a string of tweets Tuesday morning that he’s not a racist — “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” he wrote — and the top two Republicans in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) made identical statements when pressed on Trump’s remarks: “The president is not a racist.”

Trump also lashed out at the four Democratic women — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — for the third day in a row, accusing them of “spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician in the House or Senate.” The Republican National Committee provided a list of comments to bolster Trump’s contention, but in none did the four women say they hate America, as the president has asserted.

Three of the lawmakers were born in the United States, and Omar is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Somalia.

“I know racism when I see it. I know racism when I feel it. And at the highest levels of government, there is no room for racism,” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who fought for civil rights in the 1960s, said in the final minutes of the House debate.

The debate played out on a raucous House floor as lawmakers attacked one another’s motives and repeatedly questioned whether their opponents had violated long-standing rules of decorum — rules that ultimately were changed after Republicans challenged Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s use of the word “racist.”

Pelosi said the words “are disgraceful and disgusting, and those comments are racist,” careful not to label Trump himself a racist. “How shameful to hear him continue to defend those offensive words — words that we have all heard him repeat, not only about our members, but about countless others.”

Moments later, Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.) moved to have Pelosi’s words taken down, a rarely invoked procedure that halted debate for more than an hour while the House parliamentarian examined whether they violated the chamber’s standards of decorum.

A visibly frustrated Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), who was presiding over the House, reprimanded his colleagues, saying that despite his efforts to be fair, they “don’t ever want to pass up an opportunity to escalate.”

“We just want to fight,” he said.

The words had indeed violated the rules, according to House precedent, and Democrats proceeded to vote on party lines to overrule it in this instance and allow Pelosi’s remarks to be printed in the Congressional Record, the official legislative annals.

McCarthy rose to attack Democrats afterward, calling it “a sad day” for the House. “Our rules of order and decency were broken today,” he said.

But Democrats said the day, in fact, was a long time coming — a rare occasion on which members of the Republican caucus have been forced to go on the record regarding Trump’s rhetoric. Since Trump has tightened his grip on the GOP, many lawmakers in his party have gone to great lengths to avoid criticizing him, fearful of the president’s wrath sinking their electoral chances.

“This resolution is harassing the president of the United States,” said freshman Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.)

Democrats insisted that the vote was a test for the Congress and the nation.

“We know who he is,” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) said of Trump. “The question is, only question is, who are we. Are we still the country of immigrants?”

Earlier in the debate, there was another tense moment when Rep. Sean P. Duffy (R-Wis.), his voice raised, drew a reproach from Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) over his comments that the four congresswomen at the center of Trump’s tweets are “anti-American.”

“I’ve looked closely at the chain of three tweets, I see nothing that references anybody’s race, I don’t see anybody’s names,” Duffy said, “but the president is referring to people, congresswomen, who are anti-American. And lo and behold everyone in this chamber knows who he is talking about.”

Jayapal called the comments “defamatory” and asked that Duffy’s words be taken down. After some back and forth, she relinquished her request but said “it was completely inappropriate to tell any of us we are anti-American.”

Trump’s series of tweets and comments began Sunday when the president said the four Democrats should “go back” to “the crime infested places from which they came.”

With his tweets Tuesday, Trump made clear that he didn’t want Republicans to support the resolution. Doing so, he said, would “show ‘weakness.’ ”

McCarthy said during a morning news conference he would vote against the resolution and encourage other Republicans to do the same. McCarthy said he did not consider Trump’s tweets to be racist, but about “socialism versus freedom.”

Only four Republicans broke ranks — Reps. Will Hurd (Tex.), the lone black Republican in the House; Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Susan Brooks (Ind.) and Fred Upton (Mich.) — and joined Democrats in backing the resolution. Independent Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), who quit the GOP earlier this month, also voted for it. Six Republicans did not vote.

In his latest tweets, Trump accused the four lawmakers of being “Horrible anti-Israel, anti-USA, pro-terrorist” and took issue with the “public shouting of the F . . . word, among many other terrible things.”

Speaking to reporters at the end of a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, he held up papers and claimed to have “a list of things here said by the congresswomen that is so bad, so horrible that I almost don’t want to read it.”

Asked where the four House Democratic congresswomen should go if they did leave the United States, Trump said “wherever they want, or they can stay.”

“But they should love our country. They shouldn’t hate our country,” he said.

All four lawmakers have called for Trump’s impeachment, and Tlaib has done so using profane language.

Trump frequently used profanity at his campaign rallies, including one in Portsmouth, N.H., in February 2016 when he said that companies that have relocated overseas for more favorable tax rates can “go f--- themselves.”

In a tweet Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez, who represents a district that includes part of the borough where Trump was born, Queens, took issue with the president’s contention that he is not a racist.

“You’re right, Mr. President — you don’t have a racist bone in your body,” she wrote. “You have a racist mind in your head, and a racist heart in your chest.”

McConnell declined to directly answer repeated questions about whether the tweets were racist, responding to reporters’ questions on the matter by saying everyone involved should “lower this incendiary rhetoric.”

Pressed repeatedly about how he would react if his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, was told to go back to her native Taiwan, McConnell didn’t answer, instead calling legal immigration “good for America.”

Most Republicans, however, simply sought to turn the tables, accusing Democrats of ignoring inflammatory statements made by the women Trump targeted. Many, for instance, cited comments by Omar that evoked anti-Semitic tropes — comments for which she apologized and to which the House responded by passing a resolution condemning hatred generally.

“I wish Democrats would condemn anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism with same furor that they attack the president,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).

While Democrats united behind the resolution passed Tuesday, with Pelosi casting it as backing “our sisters,” many rank-and-file members said they wanted to do more. Dozens signed on to a censure resolution filed by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who called Trump’s comments “opprobrious” and deserving of serious rebuke. Censure, he said, would put Trump alongside President Andrew Jackson, who was censured by the Senate in 1834.

“We should put him where he wants to be — with a president who was racist, who had slaves, and led to the Trail of Tears against Native American Indians,” he said.

A thornier possibility for Democrats came from Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.), who filed articles of impeachment against Trump on Tuesday under special procedures that could bring them up for a vote by the end of the week.

That poses a dilemma for Pelosi, who has resisted calls to impeach Trump while he has support in the GOP-controlled Senate.

“To tolerate bigotry — racism in this case — is to perpetuate it,” Green said in an interview. “We should not perpetuate this kind of behavior coming from the president, and if we don’t check him, he will continue.”

Senior Democratic aides expect Pelosi will move to either kill the resolution or refer it to committee, effectively sidelining the matter. But either option would pose a difficult vote for her caucus, of which more than 80 members have supported launching an impeachment inquiry.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

‘His ideology is racism’: Former top Texas judge says she’s leaving GOP over Trump

A former top Texas judge says she has left the Republican Party over President Trump, after his racist tweet telling four congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from.

Elsa Alcala joins a small group of conservatives alienated by Trump’s remarks as most of the Republican Party sticks with the president — including through his latest attacks on Democratic representatives of color, three of whom were born in the United States.

“Even accepting that Trump has had some successes (and I believe these are few), at his core, his ideology is racism,” the 55-year-old retired judge wrote Monday in a Facebook post. “To me, nothing positive about him could absolve him of his rotten core.”

Alcala, who served for 20 years as a judge and was appointed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry to Texas’s criminal appeals court, left her longtime party, in part, because of Trump’s latest tweets, which have been decried by U.S. lawmakers and world leaders, she told the Austin American-Statesman. Continued support from other Republicans for the president turned her away as well.

But her discomfort with her old party had been building for a while, she said. She delayed saying so publicly to avoid wading into a “hot button” issue.

“Every day with the Republican Party seemed worse than the day before,” Alcala told the Statesman. “Trump speaks about brown people like me as lesser beings. It’s cliche to say, but the Republican Party left me.”

The chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, James Dickey, thanked Alcala for her service in a statement, saying his organization is “sorry that [Alcala] has chosen to no longer support the party that supported her, her colleagues and her successors.”

Alcala declined to comment to The Washington Post.

She was one of two Latinas recently serving on Texas’s highest courts, according to the Statesman. Alcala left the state appeals court last year after deciding not to run for reelection. She used her prominent voice to question the use of the death penalty, and her retirement left the court “without its most outspoken judge and biggest critic of the current criminal justice system,” the Texas Tribune wrote.

Before his Sunday tweets tapping into a long history of immigrants and minorities being told to “go back” to where they came from, Trump had been rebuked for — among other statements — questioning President Barack Obama’s birth in the United States without evidence and saying a federal judge could not deal impartially with a case involving Trump because of his ethnicity.

Trump’s behavior has tested some Republicans’ allegiance. Announcing earlier this month that he was leaving the GOP to become an independent, Rep. Justin Amash did not mention the president while explaining that he has “become disenchanted with party politics,” but the Michigan congressman had been one of Trump’s most vocal GOP critics. Amash was the first Republican in Congress to say that the president had committed “impeachable conduct.”

Amash, too, was dismayed by Trump’s “go back” comments, calling them “racist and disgusting” on Twitter.

But other members of the president’s party have become less critical of his most questionable statements. The overwhelming majority of House Republicans voted Tuesday against a resolution to condemn Trump’s remarks toward the Democratic congresswomen. Only four GOP representatives supported the measure, while six others did not vote.

By The Post’s last count, 89 Republican members of Congress had spoken on the tweets. Eighteen condemned Trump’s words, while 42 criticized both Democrats and Trump. Another 161 dodged the topic or haven’t given an opinion, and 29 focused their criticism on the other party or defended Trump, saying he is not racist.

Alcala told the Statesman that she had hoped state Republican politics would be better than her party’s dynamics at the national level but that she found Texas to be “more of the same.” The former judge will be voting in a Democratic primary for the first time in more than 20 years, she wrote in her Facebook post, which she has not made public.

"Any of the viable Democratic presidential candidates” would be an improvement over Trump, she wrote.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Surprise, surprise. This GOP lawmaker gets the booby prize for moral imbecility.

When Donald Trump began running for president more than four years ago, most Republicans, or at least most Republican leaders, clearly saw him for what he was: in Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s (R-S.C.) words, “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.” Criticism became attenuated as Trump secured the nomination, but then-Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) was willing to call out Trump’s attack on a “Mexican” judge as the “textbook definition of a racist comment,” and dozens of prominent Republicans withdrew their endorsements, at least temporarily, when the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape emerged.

Those scruples have eroded faster than the polar ice cap. In March, after Trump declared a national emergency to spend money on a border wall that Congress had refused to fund, only 13 Republicans in the House and 12 in the Senate voted to defend the Constitution. I described this as a “declaration of moral bankruptcy.” Four months later, that looks like the good ol’ days. On Tuesday, just four House Republicans — plus Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), now an independent — voted to condemn Trump for telling four congresswomen of color, three of them born in the United States, to “go back” to where they came from.

In addition to the four House Republicans who voted to denounce Trump — Reps. Will Hurd (Tex.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Susan Brooks (Ind.) and Fred Upton (Mich.) — only a few others have passed what should be an easy moral test. They include Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, presidential candidate Bill Weld and, surprisingly, former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci, who called the president’s comments “racist and unacceptable.”

That is the GOP roll of honor — you can count them on two hands. There were, to be sure, a larger number of Republicans lawmakers who criticized Trump’s comments but refused to call them racist or tried to balance out their criticism with attacks on Democrats. By The Post’s tally, of 250 elected Republicans in Congress, only 60 — about 1 in 4 — were willing to rebuke Trump in any form, however mild.

A far larger number — 161 — are too cowardly to say anything at all. “I have a long-standing policy that I don’t comment on tweets,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.). How convenient. But Cruz is an intellectual and moral giant compared to Rep. Mike Kelly (Pa.) who responded: “You know, they talked about people of color. I’m a person of color. I’m white.” Or Rep. Andy Harris (Md.), who suggested that Trump’s tweets were “clearly not racist” because “he could have meant go back to the district they came from — to the neighborhood they came from.” Their reasoning skills make me wonder whether Kelly and Harris are graduates of Trump University.

Some of the “no comments” are downright puzzling. Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) is retiring; what does he have to lose? Former congressman Mark Sanford is thinking of challenging Trump in the primaries. So why does he have no opinion about whether the president is a racist?

And then there is former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who apparently imagines herself as Trump’s successor. On Sunday, she tweeted about protesters taking down a U.S. flag and raising a Mexican flag at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Colorado. “There are no words for why the Democrats are staying silent on this,” Haley huffed. “If this is your way to winning an election, fire your strategist. This is disgusting. Love your country.” You know what there are truly no words for? Haley’s response to Trump’s tweets. There hasn’t been one.

But at least Haley is not one of the many Republicans — 57 percent of those surveyed by USA Today/Ipsos — who actually supported Trump’s remarks. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) had the gall to not only absolve Trump of racism but to also accuse the members of “the Squad” of being the real racists. Cheney’s chutzpah is matched by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) who complained that “our rules of order and decency were broken,” because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) labeled Trump’s comments — though not the president himself — “racist.” So McCarthy and his fellow Republicans are outraged that anyone would dare to call out the president’s racism. (“This resolution is harassing the president of the United States,” said Rep. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania.) With the actual racism itself, they have no problem.

The booby prize for moral imbecility is a close contest. I’m tempted to give it to Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) who tweeted like a “love it or leave it” bar-stool blowhard: “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals. This is America. We’re the greatest country in the world. I stand with @realdonaldtrump.”

But, as usual, it’s hard to beat out Graham, who has gone from abhorring Trump’s despicable tirades to amplifying them. Doing his best imitation of Joe McCarthy, Graham said, “Well, we all know that [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and this crowd are a bunch of communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country.” There is, in fact, no evidence that Trump’s targets are communists or that they hate America or even Israel. But there is ample evidence that the GOP has suffered a complete moral and intellectual collapse. Here’s all you need to know: These days, “The Mooch” displays more moral clarity than the leaders of the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Reagan.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

What you should know about National Origin Discrimination under Title VII

The law protects people against employment discrimination on the basis of their national origin. Following are some examples of employment discrimination based on national origin.

Harassment Based on National Origin

Ethnic slurs and other verbal or physical conduct because of nationality are illegal if they are severe or pervasive and create an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment, interfere with work performance, or negatively affect job opportunities. Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person's foreign accent or comments like, "Go back to where you came from, " whether made by supervisors or by co-workers.

#Resist

[Lois]

Sounds like impeachable conduct to me. 

[Jed_]

The truly sad thing is the deplorables don’t care.  I guess that’s why they’re deplorable.  Trump’s approval rating hasn’t budged much since he’s been in office, including since that horrifically racist tweet.  Their twisted view of reality spews from Fox into what passes as their brains.  Fox tells them Trump isn’t racist, it’s those four congresswomen, and by default all of the Democrats, that are real real racists, against white people.  And they believe it?  Or, they don’t care.  They gleefully chanted ‘Send her back’ at the latest rally.

It’s truly mind boggling.

[_priapism]

The truly sad thing is the deplorables don’t care.  I guess that’s why they’re deplorable.  Trump’s approval rating hasn’t budged much since he’s been in office, including since that horrifically racist tweet.  Their twisted view of reality spews from Fox into what passes as their brains.  Fox tells them Trump isn’t racist, it’s those four congresswomen, and by default all of the Democrats, that are real real racists, against white people.  And they believe it?  Or, they don’t care.  They gleefully chanted ‘Send her back’ at the latest rally.
A reality.
It’s truly mind boggling.

I’ve come to accept that 40% of our country is racist and they support Trump because he gives voice to their racist viewpoints.  This isn’t a subtle dog whistle any longer.  The former leader of the free world is standing in crowded auditoriums and spouting racist, sexist, homophobic comments, and the crowds are shouting their approval.  Our worst nightmares are a reality.

[Lois]

Slip-sliding-away towards fascism?

[Athos_131]

Don't worry y'all, Yellow Wall will be posting shortly to say Trump isn't a racist and rationalize all of this.

And completely avoid the thread on the Mueller report.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Border agent in Clint accused of harassing mother of 12-year-old migrant who was in custody

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent allegedly sought out an undocumented Guatemalan woman living in California, sent her Facebook messages and asked her to watch a live video of him masturbating — all while her 12-year-old son was in custody at the Border Patrol station in Clint, Tex., where he worked, according to an April complaint filed with CBP and interviews with the mother.

The complaint, obtained by The Washington Post, outlines conversations between the agent and the woman that she viewed as coercive, beginning with his asking for her Facebook handle after she was allowed to speak by phone with her son, who had been taken into custody at the border. She said in interviews that she had hoped the communication would yield information about her son but that instead she endured sexual advances from a CBP agent at the facility where her son was detained.

“I felt like the world was falling on top of me,” said the 48-year-old woman, an undocumented immigrant who came to the country from Guatemala and now lives in California. She spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from the agent and other immigration authorities. “I felt my son is in the hands of a bad man.”

A CBP spokesman said Tuesday that the agency was aware of the woman’s allegations and that an investigation was underway, but he said CBP could not comment on the ongoing probe.

“The vast majority of CBP employees are dedicated, honest, compassionate and fair professionals,” spokesman Matthew F. Leas said. “This alleged conduct is not in line with our code of conduct and will not be tolerated.”

CBP declined to say whether the agent was still reporting for duty at the Clint Border Patrol station. Because the investigation is ongoing and he has not been charged, The Post is not identifying the agent; attempts to reach him have been unsuccessful.

The accusations have come to light as the agency battles an onslaught of criticism and allegations of abuse at its facilities. The Border Patrol has faced scrutiny for its employees’ use of a private Facebook group, with dozens of current and former agents under investigation for allegedly making racist, sexist or otherwise derogatory posts about migrants and members of Congress.

An influx of Central American families and unaccompanied children across the southern U.S. border has strained CBP operations, crowded Border Patrol stations with thousands of detainees and forced some agents to abandon their typical duties to look after unaccompanied children.

The treatment of child detainees and the conditions in Clint, in particular, have garnered widespread attention in recent weeks after a group of lawyers visited the Border Patrol station outside El Paso and reported seeing children living in squalor, with older children left to care for younger children.

The outcry that followed helped spur congressional approval of a $4.6 billion emergency spending package that the Trump administration said was needed to improve detention conditions and facilitate transfers of children out of Border Patrol custody.

One of the children caught up in the backlog was the 12-year-old boy from Guatemala. His mother told The Post that he crossed the border on April 18 in an attempt to reunite with her in California, where she has lived for nearly all of his life while working as a housecleaner to earn money for her family in Central America. She said she sent for her son in Guatemala because he had reached an age when boys are targeted for gang membership or are persecuted for not joining.

After the boy crossed the border, the Border Patrol took him into custody and contacted his mother to tell her that he was being held at Clint. Two days after that, she said, she received a call from her son. The conversation was brief: She asked him how he was doing, and he told her he was fine.

“I asked him where he was calling me from, and he didn’t know,” she said. “Then I heard the voice of this officer, and the officer took the phone.”

“You see, Señora, your son is okay,” the new voice said in Spanish.

“You do a great job, helping so many children,” she answered, hoping for another chance to speak to her son.

The agent seemed friendly, “educated and respectful,” she remembered, noting that he said he wanted to be her friend and wanted to keep her informed about her son’s situation while he was at the facility.

“It felt like a relief to have someone on the inside who could tell me what was going on day and night,” she said in a recent interview.

She said the agent suggested that they speak by video chat on Facebook Messenger and said that he would send her a friend request using an alias.

Looking back on the conversation, the woman said that was the moment she “fell into his trap.”

That afternoon, her phone buzzed. It was a video request from the alias he had described, depicting an avatar of a sports team’s logo.

When she answered, the live video popped up on her screen and she could see the agent for the first time. The man appeared to be lying on a bed, with the camera aimed at the lower half of his body. She could see his dark brown shorts, legs and bare feet.

She thought it strange and asked to see his face. He flashed the camera upward for a moment before settling it again on his shorts.

For 25 minutes — 24 minutes and 50 seconds, according to the chat logs — the two talked, she said.

He told her about his family life, a failed relationship, how he attended church. Then he asked whether she was single.

She demurred, telling him that she had fled domestic violence in Guatemala in 2007 to come to the United States. But it would be nice to meet in person, she offered. She said it was a shame he was too far away.

She said he responded that the distance would not be a problem, that the two could still get to know each other. He asked her whether there were people nearby.

When she said there were not, he slipped his hand inside his shorts and appeared to start masturbating, she said.

“ ‘Look at me. Look at me,’ ” she remembered him pleading when she looked away. “ ‘Do you like it?’ ”

She froze.

“I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know how to act,” she said. “I thought: ‘My God, what is going to happen with my child? Did this guy do anything to him?” The woman said she escaped the Facebook call when her phone battery suddenly died.

When her phone came back on, she saw that the agent had sent her a flurry of Facebook messages with sad-face emoji.

“I need you ” he wrote in Spanish, in messages viewed by The Post. “You didn’t answer anymore ”

“I don’t know what you thought of me,” she replied.

She was afraid, alone in her room, and she began to cry. That night she couldn’t sleep. And the next day, feeling increasingly panicked, she texted the agent to ask whether her son was still at Clint. The agent said he was, so she pleaded with him to help her, to let her speak with him. “Please don’t be bad. . . . Don’t forget that I am alone here,” she wrote.

“I’m busy now,” the agent responded.

Fearful of retribution against her son, the woman found an immigrant legal-aid hotline through her church and called it. The hotline connected her to a legal-aid group, which promptly detailed her complaint in an email to senior CBP officials.

“She is obviously frightened and does not want her son in the hands of this agent,” read the complaint, which was submitted on April 24 and contained the dates of the allegations and the name of the accused agent. “These are very serious allegations and we wanted to make sure that first and foremost the child is safe and that these allegations are investigated.”

Within days, the woman received word that her son had been transferred out of the Clint Border Patrol station and into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages the long-term care of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” and coordinates family reunifications.

In mid-May, her son still in government custody, the woman said she met with two investigators from CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility, one of the offices tasked with internal personnel investigations. They interviewed her about her complaint, went over copies of her Facebook Messenger exchange with the agent and asked her to put the messages in order.

On June 12, she was reunited with her son, whom she had not seen since she left him in the care of relatives when he was 8 months old.

He told her that conditions at Clint were difficult. He had been unable to brush his teeth for eight days there. He said some border agents were kind to him: One told him that he should grow up to become a doctor, and another offered him extra burritos and juice to look after another child with special needs. But the agent who had taken the phone from him that day as he spoke to his mother — that was the man he and the other children feared, he told The Post.

The boy described the agent in detail, saying that he stood out to the migrants there. He said the agent cursed at the children, ridiculed some of them as “ugly” and told them that they would “regret coming to this country.”

When the agent saw some of the boys looking at his gun, “he said we didn’t have permission to look at his gun, and he said if we touched the gun, he’d shoot us,” the boy said. “He also said that if we whistled at the girls or touched them, they could shoot us.”

The woman said she was never notified of the outcome of the investigation, which authorities said is ongoing.

But since that Facebook video call, the woman said she has been unable to quell her fear that the CBP agent could seek to come after her or her son in retaliation for her complaint. The government knows her address, her name, her telephone number — everything, she said.

“He could come, or he could send someone else,” she said. “He’s the law, right?”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Racist to the Bone

After instructing four women of color in the House of Representatives to “go back” where they came from, President Trump now claims, “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!”

That appears incorrect. I have identified the following racist bones in Trump’s body:

Phalanges and metacarpals: These are bones of the fingers and hands that Trump has used to tweet tirades against black and brown people and to retweet Nazi sympathizers, including, twice, an account called @WhiteGenocideTM with a photo of the founder of the American Nazi Party.

Mandible and maxilla: These are the jawbones that Trump has used to denounce Mexican immigrants as “criminals, drug dealers, rapists,” not to mention to refuse to criticize the Ku Klux Klan.

Femurs, fibulas, tibias, metatarsals: These foot and leg bones carried Trump into his casinos, where black staff members would be rushed off the floor so he couldn’t see them, according to a former employee, Kip Brown.

Virtually every remaining bone was implicated in Trump’s early refusal to rent apartments in his buildings to blacks, leading the Nixon administration Justice Department (not exactly a pillar of liberalism) to sue him for housing discrimination in the 1970s. A former building superintendent working for Trump explained that any rent application from a black person was coded “C,” for “colored,” apparently so that the office would know to reject it.

“Racist” is an explosive term that should never be lightly flung as an epithet, and it is more likely to end a conversation than clarify it. For a single tweet or action there is a possibility of misunderstanding or ambiguity.

Yet for more than 45 years, since that housing discrimination, Trump has engaged in a consistent pattern of racist behavior and speech. His latest controversial tweets are not an aberration but a culmination. This isn’t a matter of a single tweet; it’s a lifetime with a narrative arc of bigotry.

America’s history is a tapestry of innumerable threads, many of them triumphant and inspiring that we should be deeply proud of, but Trump goes out of his way to weave together two of the most shameful strands.

One is the racism and nativism that go back to the 18th century, to the Philadelphia speaker who in 1844 denounced Irish immigrants as “scum unloaded on American wharves” and helped provoke anti-Catholic riots, to the waves of hysteria against African-Americans, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and other immigrants. There is another strain of American hospitality highlighted by the Statue of Liberty and the admission of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees beginning in the 1970s, but the nativism is real — it’s why Trump’s family, alarmed by anti-German bigotry, pretended to be Swedish.

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The other thread that Trump pulls is more political: what we now call McCarthyism, although it, too, goes back to our nation’s earliest days. It vilifies opponents as enemies of the state.

More than two centuries ago, opponents of Thomas Jefferson warned that he was a Jacobin who if elected would unleash a French-style reign of terror upon America. As one commentator put it, “The Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored.” Senator Joseph McCarthy updated that in the 20th century with reckless accusations that leftists were Communists — and now Trump picks up that mantle by suggesting that his four progressive targets in Congress “might be” Communists, not to mention that they “hate our Country” and are “pro Al-Qaeda.”

I’m not sure whether this new McCarthyism is instinctive and unthinking, or these bilious rants represent a shrewd effort to manipulate voters into seeing the 2020 presidential campaign through the prism not of issues but of racial identity, in hopes of winning Trump an edge with white voters.

I do know that Trump has taken two of the most ignominious threads in American history — nativism and McCarthyism — and woven them together in an outburst that is an affront to democratic norms.

If anyone doubts that Trump’s statements were despicable, note that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission specifically bars employers from using “ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person’s foreign accent or comments like, ‘Go back to where you came from.’”

Frankly, I’m even more troubled by Trump’s policies than by his tweets, and I wish the reaction to Trump focused more on practical initiatives to reduce child poverty, treat drug addiction or end mass incarceration. But the question put to Congress this week was a resolution properly condemning the presidential tirade. It was grotesque to see Republicans who had been mute at presidential bigotry suddenly protest that the backers of the resolution violated rules of decorum.

Really? We’re left again with the question: How can members of the party of Lincoln today protest the label of racism, but not the racism itself — in a man who for 45 years has shown himself to be a racist from his mandible to his metatarsals?

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump Is Playing With Fire, and Someone Is Going to Get Burned

At a rally in Greenville, NC tonight, President Trump spent minutes attacking freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

“She looks down with contempt on the hard-working Americans [by] saying that ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country,” Trump said.

“Omar has a history of launching vicious anti-Semitic screeds,” he added.

The crowd then broke into a terrifying, full throated chant: “SEND HER BACK!”

The chant was in reference to the now-notorious racist tweets Trump posted last week in which he told Omar and several of her colleagues of color to “go back” to where they came from.

On Twitter, Omar responded to the terrifying video with incredible grace.

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

Omar, unlike the other three members of Congress targeted by Trump, is actually an immigrant. She was born in Somalia and spent her childhood in a refugee camp in Kenya before migrating to the U.S., where she is a fully naturalized citizen.

It hardly needs to be said how dangerous this incitement by Trump could be. His followers have repeatedly committed acts of violence against marginalized groups and the press. Several have already threatened the lives of the very woman he is attacking. One death threat against Omar earlier this year was so severe that a man was arrested and charged. “I’ll put a bullet in her (expletive) skull,” the man said, according to a U.S. Attorney’s press release.

But Trump doesn’t care. If the last week’s saga has shown anything, it’s that there is no length he’s unwilling to go to in order to rile up his fascist fans. By targeting her publicly, the president is putting Omar in very real danger. But to him, it’s just more positive attention from his supporters.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress have done nothing but give Trump what even they characterize as a “slap on the wrist” for his rhetoric. By the time they figure out how truly serious these threats are, it may be too late.

#Resist