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

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Four of the ten worst shootings in America are while Trump is in office.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#WhiteSupremacistTerrorism: Hashtag Takes Over Twitter After Latest Pair of Mass Shootings

With the encouragement of our President, America has gone to great lengths to paint minorities as criminals, parasites and in some instances, terrorists. But after the latest pair of mass shootings this weekend, in which a total of 29 people were killed, the fears and frustrations of American citizens have taken over Twitter, with the hashtag #WhiteSupremacistTerrorism serving as their rallying cry.

CNN reports that on Saturday, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius gunned down 21 people and injured 29 others at a Wal-Mart swarming with cross-border shoppers in El Paso, TX. According to NBC News, it’s the deadliest shooting in 2019, as well as one of the worst in American history.

And it was also racially motivated, per CNN:

About 20 minutes earlier, a post on the online message board 8chan believed to be from the suspect laid out a dark vision of America overrun by Hispanic immigrants. The 2,300-word document, which police called a “manifesto,” was attached to a post that said, “I’m probably going to die today.”

The writing is filled with white nationalist language and racist hatred toward immigrants and Latinos, blaming immigrants and first-generation Americans for taking away jobs.

But while Americans struggled to process the lastest massacre on American soil, we woke up to the news of another mass shooting mere hours later in Dayton, Ohio.

From CNN:

Nine people were killed and at least 26 injured Sunday in a shooting in a popular nightclub district of downtown Dayton, Ohio, police say.

Officers killed the lone suspect after he fired for less than a minute from a “.223 high-capacity” gun, and he had additional magazines with him, Mayor Nan Whaley said. The .223 caliber is used in rifles like the AR-15 assault rifle used in previous mass shootings.

The suspect in the Dayton shooting has yet to be publicly identified, but as was the case in El Paso, it’s not exactly a secret that these catastrophic acts of domestic terrorism—which are far too often not recognized or treated as such—are carried out by white supremacists.

As such, the hashtag #WhiteSupremacistTerrorism is being used to demand gun reform, call out the portrayals of victims and perpetrators alike, highlight Donald Trump’s degree of complicity, and provide concerned citizens a public platform to mourn the countless lives we’ve lost to gun violence.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

Is his name Otto?  "Don't call me stupid!"  

YTF would anyone need 5 black pistols with muzzle cans?  (Also, 2 of the other guns are both M-4 Carbines.  There's no reason to have 2 of those, either.)  Even if you're going for the Guns Akimbo Perk, you only have 2 hands, and 2 hips.  The muffler makes concealment difficult enough, without 4 New York Reloads, so any covert sublty is pretty much ruined by having enough to spell out letters with handguns.

This is honestly how we can stop the spree shootings.  Not anyone who [Likes] an image like that on Social media, but anyone who has no concept, whatsoever of "Enough Guns" is just the kind of Pathology we need to be profiling.  By the time they decide where they want to use such an arsenal, it's too late, bodies are already dropping.

The FBI knows the profile, they literally wrote the book on them.  Honestly, all they have to do is print it up, it will fit in a fucking Pamphlet they can distribute to School Councilors, Military Recruiters, Police Academies, and Security Companies.

At the very top of the list, these guys ALWAYS seek to gain power, and authority Legally.  We don't even need to go on a Witch Hunt.  They will gladly come into the Police Station and ask for an application, because Law Enforcement/The Military is the best place for them to Assert Power.  (Unless they can get elected to Public Office, or are born the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company.)

The recruiters just have to know what to look for...

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Who Said It: The El Paso Shooter or Fox News?

When a white supremacist manifesto allegedly posted by the El Paso shooting suspect first began making the rounds on Saturday night, it was hard not to feel a sense of familiarity.

From a New York Times summary of the manifesto (emphasis mine):

It spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” It detailed a plan to separate America into territories by race. It warned that white people were being replaced by foreigners.

Hey, where have I heard that kind of violent extremist talk before? Oh, that’s right: on Fox News, constantly.

A tiny, tiny sample follows. See if you can spot the pattern (emphasis mine throughout):

Tucker Carlson, 7/9/19:

This cannot continue. It’s not sustainable. No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results.

Laura Ingraham, 6/18/19 podcast:

No longer can they claim to be for border enforcement, or “Oh yeah, we’re for enforcing the border, oh yeah, we’re for—we’re for keeping the country safe. And oh yeah, we’re not for illegal immigration, we’re for legal immigration”— that’s what they used to say That’s what the Obama folks and the Clinton folks used to say, but no longer. No, you’re for replacing the current American population, or swamping the current American population, with a new population of people who are perhaps more hospitable to socialist ideals.

Tucker Carlson, 5/21/19:

The American piñata has been getting pummeled for decades and now it has finally come apart. Our national wealth is up for grabs by whomever gets here first, and they are coming. Over just the past year, 1% of the entire population of the nation of Guatemala has moved to the United States. A Wall Street Journal piece last month described the plight of that country’s villages. Some of them are literally depopulating as people stream north to America’s generous welfare state. Meanwhile a new study from the Federation for Immigration Reform, FAIR, given exclusively to this show, shows the scale on which the United States is being plundered.

Tucker Carlson, 12/13/18:

Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this. We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement.

Fox & Friends, 11/2/18:

When you see a lot of young men carrying the flag of their country to your country to break your laws, it looks a lot more like an invasion than anything else.

Laura Ingraham, 8/7/18:

In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.

I could go on. This is not some fringe ideology confined to the dark corners of the web. It’s being peddled constantly by some of our highest-profile media figures—oh, and by the president of the United States.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

When Hate Came to El Paso

The older man next to me on the metal bench, dressed so dignified in his peach dress shirt, dark pants and dress shoes, touches me gently on the elbow.

It is Saturday late afternoon, and we are both in front of MacArthur Middle School, where the flags already droop in the desert heat, approaching 100 degrees, at half-mast. Police officers, Red Cross workers and firefighters of all kinds come and go. This little school is where the living come to look for the missing and the dead after a white male from the Dallas suburbs named Patrick Crusius, 21, allegedly came to my hometown to commit the largest massacre of Hispanics in American history. The handwritten sign over the schoolhouse door says it all: “Looking for Family and Friends.”

Behind his glasses, tears welled up in the eyes of my bench mate, Charles Almanzar, 70. Wordlessly, he shows me his phone: There is a picture of two small children, a girl of 2 and a boy of 5. The little boy is in the hospital. The little girl is still missing, the subject of a frantic search by Mr. Almanzar’s brother-in-law. Their mother, Jordan Kay Jamrowski Anchondo, at just 25, is dead, killed by Mr. Crusius, along with at least 19 others, at a Walmart not far from downtown El Paso.

If you want to know what a mass shooting is like in your hometown, it’s like this: text alerts on your phone, a frantic woman on local television begging people to bring water to waiting families, 200 people lining up to give blood in the blistering heat, helicopters thundering overhead, the dead left lying inside the crime scene called “horrific” by the police chief. Those waiting on word of dead and lost stand calm and dignified as strangers pull up with truckloads of that bottled water. It’s also like this: a stab in the heart not to your hometown, but to your people, in my case Latinos. Mr. Crusius specifically came here to my town, to kill my people.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God,” my little sister, Janet, also the child of an American father and a Mexican mother, says to me. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.”

I read the manifesto believed to be by Mr. Crusius, though not confirmed by the police, who traveled over 600 miles to kill and wound men, women, old people and children. Cell phone video posted online by victims betrays the dreaded elapse of time as they die: ten shots fired from an AK-47, not in rapid succession but in cunning staccato. First a shot. Then a long pause. Then one after another after another. And then there is the shout in Spanish: “Ay, no!”

“Oh, no!” the man screams.

“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the manifesto reads, before eerily and coolly describing the killer’s preferences of weapons and ammunition, politics, economics and racist philosophy. His idea is devastatingly simple: Killing Hispanics will stop immigrants from coming and drive citizens to leave. “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by invasion.”

Of course, Latinos arrived in Texas from Mexico in 1690, when it was all New Spain. My people settled the harsh brush country of south Texas, fought Comanches and Apaches and brought Christianity to America. My mother’s uncle, a Mexican citizen, fought in the Navy in World War II and perished. My Mexican grandfather came to Texas as an orphan, lived in Laredo and returned to Mexico. My Arkansan father, a soldier, met my mother in Monterrey and we settled way out here in the deserts of West Texas in 1970. We invaded nothing; we were already here long before Mr. Crusius was even conceived.

But he is just another passing figure in the moment of modern American violence that we all are living through: the predictable weakness of Republican politicians in the face of the gun lobby amid the ready availability of weapons of war. The other day, I perused a pawnshop, bought a fine fly rod but noticed that the only guns in vast supply were AR-15s, the kissing cousin of our favored weapon of war, the M-16.

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Most significantly though, the El Paso massacre — and that’s what it is, it is not a mass shooting but a premeditated massacre — was the inevitable byproduct of the Trump era’s anti-immigrant, and anti-Latino invective, which with its pervasive, vile racism has poisoned our nation.

El Paso-Juarez is a big, bustling desert city of over two million, straddling the United States and Mexico. My hometown has virtually zero modern history of ethnic strife; El Paso alone is over 80 percent Hispanic. We switch from English to Spanish without skipping a beat and we are fine with that. But the Trump era is not.

It has brought us walls, internment camps and children in cages. The massacre is the outcome I have feared for years now, and I can’t help but feel that its genesis lies with the president of the United States.

To put all of this into perspective, there have been other massacres of Latinos in American history. The worst was the notorious Porvenir massacre, 101 years ago, in what is now a vanished border town. Texas Rangers descended on the town in the early morning hours of Jan. 28, 1918, led off 15 Hispanic men and boys and executed them. The remaining inhabitants did exactly what Saturday’s shooter wanted: They fled to Chihuahua.

Back at MacArthur Middle School, Mr. Almanzar tucks away his phone. A Jehovah’s Witness, he had been out knocking on doors when the horror struck. Many asked him how God would allow this, and he gently responds by showing me Job 34:10, which in part reads: “Far be it from God, that he should do wickedness.” No, we both agreed, switching from English to Spanish. God did not do this.

We did. In allowing those weapons of war on our streets. In giving credence to sociopathic racists, only one of whom will be in jail tonight. In poisoning our body politic with the occupant of the White House. On the horizon, storm clouds build over the desert mesas to weep upon this desert city. And still the people keep coming, desperately bringing water to those here, quietly searching for the dead.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

#Resist

True, however the 2 aren't Mutually Exclusive.  This is one of the rare instances where both arguments are right.  We need to examine our society, if the systemic institutions of Racism get to the point where we can tolerate Internment Camps for people, based on their Nation of origin.  (Be it one of the First Nations, Japan, the "Middle East", or Latin America.)

Also, this is a second point:  We need to examine the availability of Weapons of Mass Destruction (High capacity military spec semi-automatics) when we get to the point that in we have more Terror Attacks using them than days have elapsed in the present year.

This is not the first time, this year, we have had more that one mass shooting, within the same 24 hours.  They aren't mutually exclusive, we have to address Both Issues.

[Lois]

I just saw this posted by a friend on Facebook:

Arright. I say that we ALL stop drinking Bourbon until Kentucky comes to their senses and stops sending Bitch McCommunist back to DC. If he makes t through the next election, we vow to stop drinking bourbon altogether.
I am available to consult about what kind of whisky can affordably replace whatever it is you presently drink.

All this because Mitch McConnell refuses to allow a vote on the senate floor on two bills designed to stop the Russains from interfering in our elections.  So does this really make McConnell a Russian Asset and un-American?  I think he's more of a stooge, or what the Russians would call a "useful idiot", but I guess that is an asset for the Russians.

But let's be fair.  McConnell is just trying to protect the South from Federal interference in their elections.  They finally got the Elections Rights Act to go away and now they have a chance to finally stop the darkies from voting again.

IMO, that is definately un-American.

[psiberzerker]

Okay, I can live without Evan Williams, but I'm going to finish this bottle.  It's already payed for...

I can always drink Bushmill's instead.  Ireland still isn't part of the UK.

[Athos_131]

Terror and Policy: 2 Sides of White Nationalism

Be warned: There is nothing soothing and uplifting in this column. I will not somberly mourn and point to our better angel and American resilience. This is not that kind of column.

I have a warning to deliver, a truth to tell, and it is as unsettling as it is obvious.

First, let’s start with the carnage that has unfolded over the last few days.

On July 28, a 19-year-old white man named Santino William Legan opened fire at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif., killing three people and injuring 13 others before taking his own life.

As the Daily Beast reported, just before the shooting Legan “posted a picture with a caption that told followers to read a 19th-century, proto-fascist book.” As the site explained:

“The book, which is repeatedly recommended alongside works by Hitler and other fascists on forums like 8chan, is full of anti-Semitic, sexist and white supremacist ideology. The book glorifies ‘Aryan’ men, condemns intermarriage between races, and defends violence based on bogus eugenicist tropes.”

Saturday, a 21-year-old white man identified by the police as Patrick Crusius walked into a crowded Walmart in El Paso and opened fire, killing 20 people and injuring more than two dozen others, some children. It was a massacre.

As The New York Times reported, “Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call” about the shooting at the Walmart, “a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online.” CNN reports that authorities are investigating the racist screed which “police believe” was posted by Crusius.

The manifesto is heavily anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic. It’s riddled with the fear of white “displacement” and fear that changing demographics will favor Democrats and turn America into “a one party-state.”

And then on Sunday, a 24-year-old man named Connor Betts opened fire in Dayton, Ohio, killing nine people and injuring at least 27 others. Most of those killed were black.

Are these shootings a gun control issue? Of course. We have too many guns, and too many high-capacity guns. We sell guns first designed for soldiers to civilians. We don’t do enough to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them and we do next to nothing to track guns once they are sold.

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Is this stochastic terrorism at play in which rhetoric by some incites action by others? Possibly. There is no doubt that Trump and Republicans are making poisonous anti-immigrant rhetoric part of their platforms.

But, I think laying all the blame at their feet is too convenient and simplistic.

I think a better way to look at it is to understand that white nationalist terrorists — young and rash — and white nationalist policymakers — older and more methodical — live on parallel planes, both aiming in the same direction, both with the same goal: To maintain and ensure white dominance and white supremacy.

The policymakers believe they can accomplish with legislation in the legal system what the terrorists are trying to underscore with lead. In the minds of the policymakers, border walls, anti-immigrant laws, voter suppression and packing the courts are more prudent and permanent than bodies in the streets. But, try telling that to a young white terrorist who distrusts everyone in Washington.

As the writer of the El Paso manifesto points out, “The Republican Party is also terrible.” The writer goes on to explain:

“Many factions within the Republican Party are pro-corporation. Pro-corporation = pro-immigration. But some factions within the Republican Party don’t prioritize corporations over our future. So the Democrats are nearly unanimous with their support of immigration while the Republicans are divided over it. At least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”

This is a reason these groups are often at odds. The white nationalist policymakers are annoyed and even incensed by the terrorists because they believe they besmirch the mission.

These terrorists want to do quickly what the policymakers insist must be done slowly, so the terrorists stew in their anger.

They are angry at immigrants because their numbers are ascendant — through both immigration and higher birthrates — and, those immigrants threaten an even more accelerated displacement of white people from a numerical majority.

They are angry at white liberals for courting the demise of white supremacy. They are angry at white liberal white women in particular for championing a woman’s right to choose and for not having more babies.

They are angry at black people for even existing.

It is not lost on me that this summer is the 100th anniversary of the “Red Summer,” when violent anti-black white supremacists rioted in cities across the country, killing many, just as the Great Migration — the mass migration of millions of black people mostly from the rural South to the urban North — was getting underway. Violence is the way the white terrorists respond to demographic shifts and demographic threat.

It’s not simply a matter of whether Trump’s rhetoric, or that of any other politician, led these shooters to do what they did. Maybe. It is also about recognizing that all of these people are on the same team and share the same mission and eat from the same philosophical trough. It’s just that their methods differ. The white supremacist terrorists and the white supremacist policymakers are bound at the hip.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump Blames the Media for White Supremacist Mass Shootings

Donald Trump’s response to the horrific mass shootings in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH had already been callous and utterly vapid, but on Monday morning, with a day of space to respond to the tragedies, he landed on an even worse message: actually, it’s the media’s fault.

Donald Trump’s response to the horrific mass shootings in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH had already been callous and utterly vapid, but on Monday morning, with a day of space to respond to the tragedies, he landed on an even worse message: actually, it’s the media’s fault.

As NBC News’ Benjy Sarlin pointed out, the president’s framing of the issue is exactly in line with the El Paso shooter’s manifesto:

https://twitter.com/BenjySarlin/status/1158352080509296646



On the actual policy side of things, Trump also responded this morning by sowing the seeds for poison-pill legislation in any future gun control bills.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1158330512341164032

“Perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform” is an outright attempt to sabotage gun bills in bad faith before they even approach Congress, which, would you believe it, has already happened to the one major gun bill the House has passed this year. House Republicans managed to slip a provision into HR8, the universal background checks bill, that requires gun sellers to notify ICE if a prospective buyer’s immigration status causes them to fail a background check.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

‘How do you stop these people?’: Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric looms over El Paso massacre

President Trump has relentlessly used his bully pulpit to decry Latino migration as “an invasion of our country.” He has demonized undocumented immigrants as “thugs” and “animals.” He has defended the detention of migrant children, hundreds of whom have been held in squalor. And he has warned that without a wall to prevent people from crossing the border from Mexico, America would no longer be America.

“How do you stop these people? You can’t,” Trump lamented at a May rally in Panama City Beach, Fla. Someone in the crowd yelled back one idea: “Shoot them.” The audience of thousands cheered and Trump smiled. Shrugging off the suggestion, he quipped, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.”

On Saturday, a 21-year-old white man entered a shopping center in El Paso, according to police, and allegedly decided to “shoot them.” Inside a crowded Walmart in a vibrant border city visited daily by thousands of Mexicans, a late-morning back-to-school shopping scene turned into a pool of blood. Twenty people died, and dozens were wounded.

After yet another mass slaying, the question surrounding the president is no longer whether he will respond as other presidents once did, but whether his words contributed to the carnage.

Since the moment Trump rode down his gold-plated escalator four years ago to start his renegade run for the White House, us-against-them language about immigrants has been a consistent and defining feature of his campaign and now of his presidency. Absent from his repertoire has been a forceful repudiation of the white nationalism taking rise on his watch.

Authorities in El Paso have not announced a motive in what they call an act of domestic terrorism, but at the center of their investigation is an anti-immigrant manifesto. Officials believe the shooter posted it shortly before he opened fire but continue to investigate.

Patrick Crusius has been named as the suspect.

Portions of the 2,300-word essay, titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” closely mirror Trump’s rhetoric, as well as the language of the white nationalist movement, including a warning about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

The author’s ideology is so aligned with the president’s that he decided to conclude the manifesto by clarifying that his views predate Trump’s 2016 campaign and arguing that blaming him would amount to “fake news,” another Trump phrase.

The extent to which the El Paso shooter was motivated by the president’s words will be fiercely debated in the days to come, and could be answered by the investigation. But some Democratic leaders on Sunday said Trump’s demagoguery makes him plainly culpable.

Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman from El Paso running for president, said it was appropriate to label Trump a white nationalist and said his rhetoric is reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

“He doesn’t just tolerate it; he encourages it, calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, warning of an invasion at our border, seeking to ban all people of one religion. Folks are responding to this,” O’Rourke said on CNN. He added, “He is saying that some people are inherently defective or dangerous, reminiscent of something that you might hear in the Third Reich, not something that you expect in the United States of America.”

Ensconced over the weekend at his New Jersey golf club, Trump was silent about the El Paso massacre other than a few tweets. In one sent Saturday night, he called the shooting “an act of cowardice” and said, “I stand with everyone in this Country to condemn today’s hateful act. There are no reasons or excuses that will ever justify killing innocent people.”

Although a press pool traveled with Trump to New Jersey, the president opted not to address the nation Saturday. He did, however, find time to stop by a wedding reception being held at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster and pose for photos with the bride, according to images circulating on social media.

On Sunday afternoon, Trump announced that he had ordered federal government flags flown at half-staff in honor of the El Paso attack and a mass slaying early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, and that he would address the shootings Monday at 10 a.m.

“Hate has no place in our country, and we’re going to take care of it,” Trump said in Morristown, N.J., just before flying home to Washington. He did not respond to questions from reporters about the El Paso shooter’s manifesto but said generally that “this has been going on for years” and acknowledged that “perhaps more has to be done.”

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, flatly dismissed the suggestion that Trump was to blame.

“Goodness gracious, is someone really blaming the president? People are sick,” Mulvaney said on NBC. He pointed to the manifesto, adding, “If you do read that, you can see him say that he’s felt this way for a long time, from even before President Trump got elected.”

Mulvaney acknowledged that “some people don’t approve of the verbiage that the president uses,” but he argued: “People are going to hear what they want to hear. My guess is this guy’s in that parking lot out in El Paso, Texas, in that Walmart doing this even if Hillary Clinton is president.”

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tweeted that O’Rourke’s comments on CNN were “disgusting and wrong.” She added, “A tragedy like this is not an opportunity to reboot your failing presidential campaign.”

Regardless of the El Paso shooter’s motivations, Trump throughout his presidency has stoked fear and hatred of the other, whether Latino immigrants or black people living in cities or Muslims.

Although he has not directly espoused the “great replacement” theory of white supremacists, Trump has openly questioned America’s identity as a multiethnic nation, such as by encouraging migration from Nordic states as opposed to Latin America.

In speeches and on social media, the president has capitalized on divisions of race, religion and identity as a political strategy to galvanize support among his white followers. Last month he attacked four congresswomen of color and said they should “go back” to the countries they came from, even though three were born in the United States and all four are U.S. citizens. Most recently, Trump lashed out at Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), one of the highest-ranking black lawmakers, by calling his Baltimore district “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and claiming that “no human being would want to live there.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University and expert on authoritarianism, said Trump has been strategic.

“This is a concerted attempt to construct and legitimize an ideology of hatred against nonwhite people and the idea that whites will be replaced by others,” she said. “When you have a racist in power who incites violence through his speeches, his tweets, and you add in this volatile situation of very laxly regulated arms, this is uncharted territory.”

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified in the Senate last month that the bureau has seen a recent uptick in the number of domestic terrorism arrests and that most involved some form of white supremacy.

But Trump has done little to vigorously confront this crisis that his own government is trying to combat. In the wake of the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Trump at first claimed there were good people on both sides before later backtracking, and only under pressure from his advisers.

And after a white supremacist was accused of killing 51 Muslims in New Zealand, Trump dismissed the idea that white nationalism was a rising threat, saying it was only “a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”

Leonard Zeskind, author of “Blood and Politics,” a history of the white nationalist movement, said the ugliest phenomena often develop in countries when there is a vacuum of moral leadership. Zeskind explained that white nationalism is autonomous from any political formation, but that Trump energizes its followers.

“He gives it voice. He’s their megaphone,” Zeskind said. He added, “Donald Trump, dumping on immigrants all the time, creates an atmosphere where some people interpret that to be an okay sign for violence against immigrants.”

On the campaign trail Sunday, many of the Democrats hoping to defeat Trump drew parallels between his rhetoric and the El Paso shooting and denounced his handling of white supremacy.

“I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said on CNN. “He is responsible because he is stoking fears and hatred and bigotry. He is responsible because he is failing to condemn white supremacy, and seeing it as it is, which is responsible for such a significant amount of the terrorist attacks.”

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) told reporters outside a church in Las Vegas: “The words of the president of the United States have consequences.” Trump, she added, has “the responsibility of elevating public discourse, of challenging us to rise to our best selves, to speak to our better angels — not to talk about people on both sides being equal. Not to appeal to hate and division.”

And Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on CNN: “What he has got to understand is that when you have language that is racist, that is virulently anti-immigrant, there are mentally unstable people in this country, who see that as a sign to do terrible, terrible things.”

To experts in the field, the El Paso rampage was predictable. Frank Figliuzzi, a former head of counterintelligence at the FBI, wrote in a column published just four days earlier in the New York Times that Trump’s words eventually could incite bloodshed.

“The president has fallen short of calling for overt violence against minorities and immigrants, but unbalanced minds among us may fail to note the distinction,” Figliuzzi wrote. “If a president paints people of color as the enemy, encourages them to be sent back to where they came from and implies that no humans want to live in certain American cities, he gives license to those who feel compelled to eradicate what Mr. Trump calls an infestation.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

On guns and white nationalism, one side is right and one is wrong

When one side proposes ways that human beings might begin to solve a deadly problem while the other side leaves it up to God, you know which side is right.

When one side proposes solution after solution to contain gun violence — and offers compromise after compromise to get something done — while the other side blocks action every time, you know which side is right.

When the president of the United States and his most incendiary media allies fuel hatred of those who are not white while his opponents say we should stand in solidarity with one another, you know which side is right.

When one side brushes aside the dangers of racist and white nationalist terrorism while the other side says we need to be vigilant against all forms of terrorism, you know which side is right.

And when Americans are gunned down in incident after incident, when we are numbed by repeating the same sorrowful words every time, when we move within a news cycle from “something must be done” to “the Senate will block action” or “the politics are too complicated,” you know America’s democracy is failing and its moral compass is broken.

Our rancid political culture is, quite literally, killing our nation. And the problem is not caused by some abstraction called “polarization” or by “the failure of both sides to understand each other.” Those are the alibis of timid souls so intent on sounding “balanced” that they turn their eyes from the truth.

What is that truth? When it comes to gun violence and the need to confront white nationalism, one side is right and one side is wrong.

Until we face this, even two mass shootings within 24 hours will do nothing to galvanize action. In El Paso, 20 people were killed at a shopping center on Saturday and 26 were wounded by a gunman who, according to police, appears to have posted an anti-immigrant screed online before the shooting. Then at 1 a.m. on Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, another mass shooter left nine dead and 27 injured in area known for its lively nightlife that is heavily patrolled by police. The shooter was killed in less than a minute.

“Think about that minute,” said Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley. “The shooter was able to kill nine people and injure 26 in less than a minute.” The gun-permissiveness crowd wants us not to think about that minute. It puts the lie to the gun lobby’s claim that having armed people nearby when a mass killer strikes is all we need to keep us safe.

The wrong side in this debate does not want us to come together. On the contrary, its goal after every mass shooting is to deflect and divide. Here’s what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said when asked by reporters what we should do about gun violence. “Listen, there are bodies that have not yet been recovered,” Abbott replied. “I think we need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics.”

No, Abbott, reading from the NRA’s script, started “the politics” right at that moment, and it is an insidious form of politics. Simultaneously, he deflected by pretending it’s impolite to answer substantive questions and divided by saying that those who raise them disrespect the dead.

Nothing disrespects those who are slaughtered more than the political paralysis Abbott and those like him are encouraging.

Invoking God and calling for prayer should never seem obscene. But it is always obscene to use the Almighty to escape our own responsibility.

“God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio,” President Trump said in a Sunday morning tweet from his New Jersey golf club.

Yes, may God bless them. But may God also judge Trump for a political strategy whose success depends on sowing racism, reaction and division. May God judge him for stoking false and incendiary fears about an immigrant “invasion,” the very word echoed by the manifesto that police suspect was the El Paso shooter’s. May God judge the president for cutting programs to fight white extremism at the very moment when the FBI is telling us that we are more at risk from white-nationalist terrorists than Islamist terrorists.

In pursuit of a mythical middle ground, the faint-hearted will counsel against calling out the moral culpability of those who divide, deflect and evade. Meanwhile, the rationalizers of violence will continue to claim that only troubled individuals, not our genuinely insane gun policies, are responsible for waves of domestic terrorism that bring shame on our country before the world.

But sane gun laws are the middle ground, and most gun owners support them. Opposing the political exploitation of racism is a moral imperative. And refusing to acknowledge that only one side in this debate seeks intentionally to paralyze us is the path of cowardice.

#Resist

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Ohio Republican blames mass shootings on ‘drag queen advocates,’ Colin Kaepernick and Obama

In a laundry list of reasons why the United States is grappling with mass killings, an Ohio state lawmaker has settled on immigrants, same-sex marriage, transgender rights, disrespect toward veterans and “drag queen advocates.”

Candice Keller, a Republican state representative from Middletown, near Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were killed early Sunday, offered her diagnosis on her personal Facebook page, the Dayton Daily News reported. Her post came only hours after the Dayton shooting, as the nation still reeled from the Saturday mass killing of 20 people in El Paso and the discovery of an anti-immigrant, white nationalist manifesto believed to have been written by that alleged gunman.

Keller’s post sent shock waves through the state and local Republican Party, where there is a groundswell of calls from fellow conservatives urging her to resign, said Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones, who oversees law enforcement across Keller’s district.

“It’s an embarrassment. It’s shameful. It does not reflect our party, our community, or the people who are hurting right now,” Jones told The Washington Post on Monday. “She only left out people who look like her.”

The comments stunned the mustachioed, cigar-chomping, pro-Trump lawman who himself has taunted immigrants with billboards but has called for civility amid toxic partisan politics. Jones said he was worried Keller’s posting would have a chilling effect on future victims in the county who may believe police officers have similar notions. “She made our job that much more difficult in law enforcement,” he said.

Jones declined to say who else in the county opposed Keller’s views but said there would soon be clearer signs of opposition within GOP ranks. He urged he national and state Republican Party to join the call for her resignation.

Other Republicans distanced themselves from Keller.

“Some want to politicize these events, and I cannot condone such comment and behavior,” Butler County GOP chairman Todd Hall told the Cincinnati Enquirer. The group did not return a request for comment.

Keller did not return a request for comment.

Her list also included fatherless upbringing, violent video games and two arguments that conservatives have leveled at former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick — that kneeling protests over police brutality are insults to both law enforcement and veterans.

Amid an apparent rise of domestic terror arrests, Keller did not include anything about white nationalism, an ideology President Trump condemned Monday; the availability of semiautomatic assault rifles and 100-round ammunition drums like the one used in the Dayton killings; or how the alleged killer legally obtained a firearm after he was kicked out of a high school for writing a list of girls he wanted to kill.

Keller also blamed President Barack Obama for “disrespect to law enforcement,” along with Democratic lawmakers, public schools and “snowflakes, who can’t accept a duly-elected President.” Her post was later either removed from view or deleted.

She has courted controversy before. At a 2018 gun rights rally a month after the Parkland high school killings, Keller said that a 15-year old survivor “would just as soon be eating Doritos and playing video games.”

Butler County Democratic Party chairman Brian Hester said that Keller “loves to fan the flames and play the role of victim here, not the nine people who were killed” and called her unfit for office, the Daily News reported.

Jones, who wrote “Shame shame shame” in reference to Keller on Twitter, noted that Keller represents a diverse group of constituents across western Ohio.

“Some of the people she talked about in her rant, those people work for me. They’re family members,” he said. “She assaulted all of them.”

#Resist

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What’s inside the hate-filled manifesto linked to the alleged El Paso shooter

Shortly before a gunman opened fire outside a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more, a manifesto believed to be linked to him was posted online. It railed against a “Hispanic invasion” and laid out a plan to divide the United States into territories based on race.

Authorities believe 21-year-old Patrick Crusius wrote the document, though they are still gathering evidence.

It begins by praising the manifesto of the gunman who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand earlier this year. That document cited a white supremacist theory known as “The Great Replacement,” which postulates that a secret group of elites is working to destroy the white race by replacing them with immigrants and refugees.

“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the manifesto says.

After a brief introduction, the 2,300-word manifesto is divided into five sections: political reasons for the attack, economic reasons, equipment that will be used to carry out the shooting, the expected reaction to the attack, and “personal reasons and thoughts.” Titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” the document is a jumble of positions and ideologies. In it, the writer warns of the dangers of environmental degradation, rails against corporate influence in the government and cautions against interracial marriage.

Under “political reasons,” the manifesto lambastes both Democrats and Republicans, suggesting the United States will soon become a one-party state run by Democrats because of the growing Hispanic population, the death of the baby-boom generation and the “anti-immigrant rhetoric of the right.” The author postulates that the growing Hispanic population in Texas will soon make it a solidly Democratic state, which he argues would all but assure repeated Democratic presidential victories.

“The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate,” the manifesto says.

The document repeatedly rails against corporations, which the author says have taken over the government. The author criticizes Republicans for favoring corporations, but argues that “at least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”

The author also expresses fear over the impact automation will have on job opportunities and argues that immigrants should not be allowed to continue coming into the country as long as job opportunities are scarce. He argues that while immigrants often take menial jobs that Americans are unwilling to perform, their children seek better opportunities and often receive college degrees that allow them to obtain high-skill positions. The document again blames corporations for advocating for work visas for skilled workers and says they rely on immigrants to fill low-skilled positions.

In a jumbled rant, the document rails against corporations for destroying the environment by over-harvesting resources. The manifesto chastises the government for being unwilling to confront environmental issues and most Americans for being unwilling to change their lifestyles to be more environmentally friendly. It argues that the United States therefore needs fewer people consuming resources.

The author wrote that he planned to mainly rely on an AK-47 as his weapon for the shooting, noting that it overheats after about 100 rounds and that he would need a heat-resistant glove.

The manifesto notes that many migrants return to their home countries to reunite with family, arguing that “the Hispanic population is willing to return to their home countries if given the right incentive. An incentive that myself and many other patriotic Americans will provide.” The author writes that such terrorist attacks will “remove the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc.”

In the “personal reasons and thoughts” section, the author writes that he has spent his life preparing for a future that does not exist, though does not specify what that future would be. He ends on an anti-immigrant screed, worrying that Hispanics will take over the Texas government and says the Founding Fathers have given him the rights — presumably referring to the right to bear arms — to save the country from destruction.

“Our European comrades don’t have the gun rights needed to repel the millions of invaders that plaque [sic] their country. They have no choice but to sit by and watch their countries burn,” the manifesto says.

Finally, the manifesto ends by decrying interracial couples and proposes separating the United States into territories based on race. The author points to white supremacist theories that “stronger and/or more appealing cultures overtake weaker and/or undesirable ones.”

The author expresses fear that he will be captured, rather than die during the shooting, because that would mean he would receive the death penalty and his family would despise him. And he stresses that he has maintained his white supremacist ideology for many years, predating President Trump and his 2016 campaign, which he says did not influence his reasons for carrying out the attack.

“This is just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe,” the author writes.

#Resist

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Trump’s initial responses to the El Paso shooting track with the screed linked to the shooter

President Trump clearly just wants all of this to go away.

We all do, of course; no one wants to see more incidents in which mostly white, mostly male gunmen massacre people at random in public places. Most of us, though, aren’t in a position to make whatever changes might be needed to prevent similar events in the future. Our wanting it to go away is tangibly different than Trump’s: We want it to go away because it’s a horror; he seems to want it to go away because it’s a nuisance.

The weekend’s mass shooting in El Paso is particularly troublesome for Trump because it appears to explicitly overlap with two of his political priorities: curtailing immigration from Mexico and defending the ability of Americans to own a broad range of firearms. A short screed posted online before the attack that appears to have been written by the alleged shooter includes language mirroring Trump’s own rhetoric on an “invasion” of migrants. In many places, the document makes overt the subtext of a lot of Trump’s political rhetoric, like Trump’s past claims that Democrats want immigrants to enter the country so that they eventually vote Democratic. The post makes the same questionable claims that Trump’s White House has made about immigrants taking jobs.

Trump’s initial reaction to the El Paso shooting and a subsequent one in Dayton, Ohio, was what we would expect: a tweet of commiseration and some commentary about doing . . . something.

“A lot of things are being done right now,” Trump said when speaking to reporters while on his way back to Washington from his private club in New Jersey. Congress is on recess until next month.

On Monday morning, Trump had a more specific proposal.

“We cannot let those killed in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, die in vain,” he wrote on Twitter. “Likewise for those so seriously wounded. We can never forget them, and those many who came before them. Republicans and Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform. We must have something good, if not GREAT, come out of these two tragic events!”

It’s incredibly telling that Trump sees these mass shootings as something that Democrats want to end. He sees new legislation that would expand background checks — something that consistently has the near-universal support of the American public in polling — as a bargaining chip for him to use to get something he wants. In this case it’s new immigration restrictions. But he might as well have said anything: new corporate tax cuts, voter ID rules, you name it. Trump thinks that preventing gun violence is a Democratic priority, not an American one. He offers the thinnest olive branch possible and considers it something that he can use to extract concessions from the opposition.

That he chose immigration restrictions as the Republican bargaining position in this case, though, is staggering. This is, after all, exactly what that screed linked to the El Paso shooter called for. While criticizing both parties for the current state of immigration, the author of the document also wrote that “at least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”

Two mornings later, the Republican president whose rhetoric is peppered throughout that document proposes that an effort to limit the number of guns available for mass shootings like the one in Texas should be paired with a policy to greatly reduce immigration.

Trump is obviously sympathetic to the arguments articulated in the document. He has kept explicit white nationalism at a distance partly out of political necessity, but it occasionally cracks through to the surface. His campaign was predicated on the rhetoric included in that document. A former FBI supervisor who spoke with The Washington Post claimed that the bureau is wary of engaging fully with white supremacists in a way that “targets what the president perceives as his base.”

Shortly after Trump’s tweet offering to trade fewer gun deaths for the sort of immigration reform the author of the manifesto hoped to see, the president identified one addressable cause of mass shootings.

“The Media has a big responsibility to life and safety in our Country,” he tweeted. “Fake News has contributed greatly to the anger and rage that has built up over many years. News coverage has got to start being fair, balanced and unbiased, or these terrible problems will only get worse!”

The train of thought here is easy to follow. Trump is hearing that those who oppose immigration and those embracing loose gun laws are to blame for the shooting in Texas, but since those groups are also central to his base, he can’t similarly blame them. So he scans his perceived enemies for someone to blame — “Immigrants? Probably won’t work this time,” etc. — and lands on his preferred target.

The media were a focus of that document linked to the El Paso shooting, too. “The media is infamous for fake news,” it reads, itself a direct echo of Trump. “Their reaction to this attack will likely just confirm that.”

Stunningly, Trump's excoriation of the media was, in part, a defense of himself. In this moment, he decided to complain about the media coverage of twin events in which nearly 30 people were killed because the media understandably linked his rhetoric and his failures to address gun violence to those killings. His tweet was a reminder to his base: The media is unfair to me.

If you think that's reading more into Trump's tweet than is warranted, consider his next tweet, a retweet of a message sent in December 2018.

https://twitter.com/ChatByCC/status/1070841804122193920

A subtle reminder from the president: Trump is standing up for Americans, not instead fostering anti-immigrant rhetoric and turning his back on a flood of high-powered weapons that blankets the country.

In his comments to reporters on Sunday, Trump claimed, as he has in the past, that he inherited this problem, a way of pushing the blame elsewhere. He’s not wrong, of course, but the responsibility is now his to address. He doesn’t seem to be embracing that role, to put it mildly.

His comments on Monday morning may not be his final proposals. But they were his first reactions, and that by itself tells us a lot.

#Resist