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

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How Trump’s biggest broken promise will make white supremacist terrorism even worse

In the wake of two horrific mass shootings over the weekend, particularly the one in El Paso where 20 people were allegedly murdered by a man who apparently left an online message echoing some of the themes of President Trump’s rhetoric, many have been putting blame at least partially at the president’s feet. We can debate how justified that is, but for the moment I want to shift focus just a little. There’s another vital question we need to ask: not whether Trump is inspiring murderers, but whether he is now, and will in the future, disappoint them in ways that could lead to more deadly violence.

In that screed, the author made reference to “the great replacement,” a right-wing theory about how white people are being replaced not only in numbers but in power and influence by minorities. You probably recall that the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 chanted “Jews will not replace us!,” but these ideas can be heard on the president’s favorite cable news network, where Laura Ingraham warns that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants.”

“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the author wrote, stressing the importance of forestalling future Democratic electoral victories. But what’s also striking is that he did not cite Trump as his inspiration or his savior. “My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president,” he wrote. Trump has been president for almost three years, talking in the same way this young man allegedly did and identifying the same thing as America’s most serious problem. Yet as far as the author was concerned, the Trump presidency didn’t solve that problem. Mass murder was still required.

In 2016, with his disturbingly sharp instinct for locating and stimulating the worst in people, Trump understood something other Republicans missed. The party’s base was angry and hungry, hungry for someone who would dispense with dog whistles and insinuations and give explicit voice to their rage and resentments. Trump gave it to them, and over and over again we still hear it from his supporters: “He says what I’m feeling.”

For many of them, that’s enough. To hear their sentiments echoed from the highest office in the land provides enormous satisfaction, even if the results don’t match the rhetoric.

But others, the less stable and the more heavily armed, will not be assuaged. They may well see in Trump’s presidency nothing but failure. After all, didn’t he promise a return to when people like them were on top? The Muslims would be banned, the minorities would be shown their place, a “big beautiful wall” would be built from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — and Mexico would pay for it.

It’s hard to overstate the symbolic importance that last part had for many Trump supporters, even if it was preposterous from the beginning. The idea of forcing Mexico to pay for the wall was about dominance, restoring our dignity by humiliating our neighbor to the south. This was the beating heart of what Trump promised, especially to white men who felt the world had shoved them aside: not just practical results but also a restoration of strength and stature.

And if you were one of those men, what do you see around you? You might love Trump for the things he says, but you might also come to believe he has failed you.

America has not been cleansed. The wall is not built, and Mexico has paid for nothing. There are no fewer immigrants in the United States than there were in 2016. Trump has not stopped the “invasion” or the “infestation”; instead, on an almost daily basis, he tells us it’s getting worse. Muslims are still here; a few of them are even in Congress. Women keep occupying more positions of prominence, and insisting that men be held to account for behavior that once was seen as their privilege. The clock Trump promised to wind back to a time when America was great has stubbornly continued to tick into the future.

If that’s what you think, you may or may not be angry at Trump, but you may conclude that it was foolish to expect a president to accomplish what you thought was needed. And you might, like the alleged El Paso or Tree of Life shooters or any of the white supremacist/nationalist terrorists we’ve seen in recent years, decide that you have no choice but to take matters into your own hands.

As historian Rick Perlstein noted just after the 2016 election, Trump made practical promises he couldn’t possibly keep, but “the biggest, only made implicitly, was the same one fascist strongmen always offer: transcendent national renewal, built upon the cleansing of dangerous untermenschen from the body politic.” Once that promise inevitably fails to be fulfilled, the results could be catastrophic. “The more Trumpism fails, the more, and more violently, scapegoats will be blamed.”

We are not heading toward that point, because we’re already there. And what happens if Trump loses in 2020? Then the most radical and murderous on the far right will know that the political project truly failed, and they may decide there is no option but violence until the America they want is born out of the carnage.

So yes, we can and must condemn Trump for being such an inspiration to the most depraved among us. But we should also know that defeating him will not make them disappear. It could make them even more dangerous.

#Resist

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#Resist

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Trump’s America unravels in one bloody nightmare weekend. Now it’s time to clean house.

Nobody made a super-big deal about it on March 15, 2019, when the president of the United States — in his fancy baggy suit, over-long tie hanging down behind the Resolute Desk, veto pen in hand — sat in the Oval Office and described the surge of desperate asylum seekers on America’s southern border as “an invasion.”

“People hate the word invasion, but that’s what it is,” Donald Trump told the White House press pool, as he vetoed the legislation from Congress aimed at blocking the president from his authoritarian maneuvers to divert at least $2.5 billion for a border wall — to keep these human beings out. Maybe no one made a big deal because we’d grown so numb to hate-inducements from inside our own White House. He’d already called the immigrant influx “an invasion” on more than a half-dozen occasions — tweeting just days earlier: “I am stopping an invasion as the Wall gets built. #MAGA.”

A month before that, Trump had chosen the border city of El Paso, Texas, as the place to dramatize the alleged threat from Latino migrants. He rented out a big arena (stiffing the owners, by the way) and rallied support for the xenophobic centerpiece of his re-election campaign, making sure to highlight any criminals among the thousands of migrants who’ve been arrested and detained. “Murders, murders, killing, murder,” the president rambled at one point, as his frenzied crowd chanted “Build that wall!” Trump went on: “We will. If we cut detention space, we are letting loose dangerous criminals into our country.”

Five and a half months after that rally, a white 21-year-old community-college student with a pro-Trump social media feed sat down in his family’s McMansion in a posh Dallas suburb and picked out El Paso — more than 600 miles away — on a map. When he got to the border city, the man-child posted a so-called manifesto on the hate-laden website called 8chan that stated: “This is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Hours later, in police custody, the gunman reportedly told investigators he entered a Walmart packed with back-to-school shoppers to kill as many Mexicans as possible.

Indeed, the 21-year-old did kill three Mexican nationals during the shooting spree that begin at 10 a.m. on a sun-soaked Saturday in El Paso. Most of those he mowed down with his AK-47-style long gun were the ones least able to escape a killer’s only-in-America rapid gunfire. The 20 corpses — some face down in a parking lot — included an 82-year-old woman and a 2-year-old. A 25-year-old woman was shot and killed while shielding her own 2-month-old baby (who lived), while witnesses described another infant with blood smeared across his belly. As always, the details of America’s 249th mass shooting of 2019 were both shocking and painfully familiar at the same time.

But this weekend came a grim plot twist.

If you’re like me and have the weird habit of falling asleep in front of the TV, you may have awakened, as I did at 5 a.m., to the gut-wrenching sight of police sirens flashing in the dead of a Dayton night. In America, the nightmares come when you wake up. It was the aftershock, the second spasm of deadly American violence in just 13 hours, and the 250th of the year.

Nine dead in Ohio. We don’t know why a man opened fire on the crowd outside the Ned Peppers nightclub, but we do know that just like in El Paso, he was a young white man dressed in black, with enough firepower to kill or main a few dozen humans in less than a minute’s time.

It was at that moment, in the predawn blackness of a hot August night, that you could see that the center of Donald Trump’s America is not holding. You had already watched the fear and loathing spiraling out of control — the immigrants afraid to leave their homes to take their kids out to a playground or an ice cream shop, the gulag of squalid concentration camps, the increasingly racist rants from a president desperate to cling to his job. And now these twin eruptions — body bags and hastily abandoned shoes stacked up on blood-stained American asphalt.

When things fall apart, they shatter into a million pieces. I can’t tell you yet exactly how the bloodshed in El Paso is related to a mass murder in Dayton, or to the social dysfunction right here in Philadelphia that caused someone to spray bullets into a crowd of people shooting a hip-hop video, or into a crowded block party in Brooklyn the night before that. I can’t explain why people tweeting about El Paso couldn’t use the hashtag #WalmartShooting because it was already in use for a man who’d just murdered two employees at an outlet in Mississippi.

All I know is that it’s all starting to feel like the same event — a Great Unraveling of America. The feeling only grew worse when I read that the authorities in El Paso believe some of the wounded may not go to local hospitals ... because they’re so afraid of our immigration cops. It seemed like one more sign that conditions in this country — the violence, the fear, the embrace of racism and xenophobia from the highest levels, and the long slide into neo-fascism — have become intolerable. And yet — with the blood of El Paso and Dayton not yet dry — far too many are still tolerating this.

None more so than America’s so-called Republican leaders — the Mitch McConnells, Mitt Romneys, the Greg Abbotts — who seemed to share the same pathetic and cowardly playbook of quickly taking to Twitter, praying for the victims and their families, praising the first responders, and quickly logging off without one word about the scourge of white supremacy, their president who helps promote it, or the gun culture that makes it all so lethal.

The few GOP bigwigs who were pressed for more fell back on familiar tropes. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reached all the way to back to the 1990s to blame violent video games, while Abbott, the governor of Texas who once famously lamented the fact that Texans weren’t buying as many guns as Californians, said “the bottom line is that mental health is a large contributor.”

No doubt, mental health — and the lack of care — is a crisis in this country. But linking it to the El Paso murders seems like an evasion. From what we know so far, the killer embraced a sick ideology but knew exactly what he was doing — driving 600 miles to a carefully selected kill zone and writing a hate-filled but consistent manifesto. His mass murder seemed less a statement about his own mental health and more a statement about the moral health of a nation where so many are opening embracing racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Including the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Interestingly, the El Paso gunman was media-savvy enough to drop a line into his manifesto that his racist views are independent of his president, that journalists were certain to blame Trump but that would be, in his words, “fake news.” But are good-and-thinking people to make of the fact that Saturday’s killer — just like the Christchurch mass-murderer before him and the Pittsburgh synagogue gunman before him — echoed Trump’s “invasion” language on immigrants? What kind of America should citizens expect when the president attacks women of color in Congress by telling them to go back to where they came from and when his true believers chant, “Send her back!”?

Researchers went back and looked at the counties where Trump held his 2016 campaign rallies and found those jurisdictions posted a stunning 226 percent rise in hate crimes. That paper didn’t include El Paso, which was targeted in 2019 by both the Trump campaign and a mass killer. Or Southern Ohio, where the president held a rally on Thursday. Just last week, an FBI memo said fringe conspiracy theories are becoming a domestic terrorism threat — a warning that came to life with a series of pops on Saturday morning. Now, what are we going to do about it?

“Trump is a racist, and he stokes racism in this country,” said El Paso’s Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman and current 2020 presidential candidate. “It fundamentally changes the character of this country, and it leads to violence.” O’Rourke’s words were a moment of moral clarity that America so desperately needs right now. We just need a lot more.

Our intolerable state of affairs screams out for a crisis footing. We need Mitch McConnell to stop tweeting platitudinous baloney and call the Senate back from its summer recess and act on legislation that prevents gunmen from hunting human beings with weapons of warfare — a ban on military-style weapons that can kill or maim a person every second and the high-capacity magazines that feed them. If McConnell and the GOP leadership won’t hold that vote — and they won’t — then Democrats need to shut down Capitol Hill until it happens. There cannot be business as usual.

Last night, a meeting of the remarkable activists from Moms Demand Action —- the preeminent anti-gun-violence group right now — was taking place in Washington, D.C., and as news poured in from El Paso, they swarmed the White House for a candlelight (and iPhone-light) protest at White House that was powerful and profound. We should join them. All of us. People in Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, and elsewhere have taken greater risks to protest behavior that — while undeniable outrageous — arguably is nowhere near as bad as what the 45th president is perpetrating.

But the real moment of clarity as the sun rises over El Paso and Dayton is that President Trump urgently needs to resign or be impeached. Already, 120 House members have signed onto impeachment. But while the frequently cited Mueller report does lay out serious high crimes and misdemeanors, the real reason for impeachment should be Trump’s incitements to violence — which experts call stochastic terrorism — and his appeals to racism.

A president choosing to use the bully pulpit of his office to embrace racism — with the naked political goal of his own re-election — and now inspire mass murderers is the greatest abuse of American power in my lifetime, worse than the crimes of Richard Nixon’s Watergate. This is exactly why the Founders baked impeachment into the Constitution, and it’s why the 2020 election may be too long for us to wait. If things are intolerable now — and they are — take a moment to ponder how much worse things can get over the next 15 months if we continue to do nothing.

#Resist

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#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

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‘We were safe until he started talking’: El Paso residents respond to Trump

Watching President Trump step up to a White House podium Monday to assert that “hate has no place in America,” many people in this Texas border city were dumbfounded.
“We were safe until he started talking,” John Smith-Davis, 47, a retired Army veteran, said as he mourned with his friends at a memorial near the Walmart where a gunman opened fire Saturday. “He made us a target with his hateful rhetoric.”

Veronica Sanchez, a 23-year-old dental assistant, put it more succinctly: “He has said enough.”

El Paso, whose 680,000 people are mostly Latino and mostly Democrats, has long viewed Trump warily — and his most forceful statement since the massacre that has now claimed 22 lives there did little to change that.

“These barbaric slaughters are an assault upon our communities, an attack against our nation and a crime against all of humanity,” Trump said in a prepared speech Monday about the killings here and another mass shooting a day later in Dayton, Ohio. “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.”

That was little comfort to many El Paso residents, who focused instead on the ways that Trump has stoked the racism and xenophobia that appears to have motivated the killer and his decision to target Mexican immigrants.

El Paso Mayor Dee Margo said Monday that Trump was planning to visit the city on Wednesday, though by late in the day the White House had not officially confirmed that.

Many here said he would not be received warmly.

“From my perspective, he is not welcome here,” Democratic Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, whose district includes a wide swath of the city, said Monday in an interview on MSNBC. “Words have consequences. The president has made my community and my people the enemy. He has told the country that we are people to be feared, people to be hated.”

A string of officials in El Paso and across the nation have condemned Trump for his steady flow of racist rhetoric, including his repeated warnings about an immigrant “invasion”— the same term used in a manifesto posted to 8chan believed to be written by the shooter.

“We have a president right now who traffics in this hatred, who incites this violence, who calls Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, calls asylum seekers animals and an infestation,” Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic presidential candidate who represented El Paso in Congress, said Sunday at a vigil.

O’Rourke also took aim at a suggestion Trump tweeted early Monday that Republicans and Democrats might now work together to enact stronger background checks for gun buyers, “perhaps marrying this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform.”

“Only a racist, driven by fear, could witness what took place this weekend — and instead of standing up to hatred, side with a mass murderer’s call to make our country more white,” O’Rourke wrote on Twitter. “We are so much better than this president.”

El Paso is an island of Democrats in a West Texas sea of Republicans. Hillary Clinton carried El Paso County in 2016 with 69% of the vote and Beto O’Rourke won with 86% for his congressional seat.

Some Republicans here said they appreciated Trump’s remarks and said it was too soon for the inevitable political arguments.

“Right now, I want to make sure I can show support by going to vigils and my wife can go to someone’s rosary and support those who lost loved ones,” said 72-year-old Bob Pena. “We have people yet to be put into the ground and people are looking to make political points out of it. Arguments can — and will — be made on both sides.”

Home to a University of Texas campus and the Army’s Fort Bliss, El Paso sits just across the Mexican border from the far larger Ciudad Juarez, which has a population of 1.3 million.

As more Central American asylum seekers have arrived at the border in recent years, El Paso has become a major crossing point for immigrants entering the country illegally, second only to Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.

The Trump administration debuted its “zero tolerance” family separation policy in El Paso. More recently, the “Remain in Mexico” program, which requires asylum seekers to remain south of the border while their cases proceed in U.S. immigration court, was expanded from California to El Paso.

Claudia Ordaz Perez, an El Paso city councilwoman, said in a telephone interview she was trying not to politicize the tragedy. But it was difficult, she said, not to separate the massacre from the president’s escalating rhetoric on immigration and race.

“Of course, the rhetoric of hate from the shooter matches what we’re hearing on a national level and the president’s comments on this are just confusing,” she said.

Back at the Walmart on Monday, mourners delivered flowers, candles and signs to honor the dead.

Smith-Davis felt angry. Angry at the shooter. Angry at the gun lobby. Angry at Trump. He said Trump’s charge during his presidential campaign that Mexicans were drug dealers and rapists hurt the city, given hundreds of thousands cross the bridges every day from Juarez to El Paso to work.

“They’re just trying to make a living,” he said.

Sanchez, the dental assistant, who lives just across the border from El Paso in New Mexico, was especially upset by Trump’s talk of pairing gun and immigration legislation.

The killer, she pointed out, “wasn’t somebody who crossed the border. This is homegrown, somebody who came from the United States.”

The night before the massacre, Sanchez visited the Walmart for back-to-school shopping with her family. They had planned to return the next morning but saw reports of the attack and stayed home. She later read the shooter’s supposed manifesto railing against Latinos and immigrants like her parents, who crossed illegally from Mexico.

Back when Trump visited El Paso in February, Sanchez attended a competing rally for O’Rourke. She has Latino relatives in the area who voted for Trump but struggles now, after the mass shooting, to understand how they could remain committed to him.

Jaime Abeytia, who has lived in El Paso for 22 years, said that he did not imagine any Trump visit would be warmly received.

“His hypocrisy on hate is shockingly boundless,” he said.

“Unless he’s coming with some solid policy changes that directly address the available of high-capacity weapons — and not use the opportunity to propose more draconian immigration policy, I’m not interested in a Trump visit.”

#Resist

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For Latinos, El Paso is a devastating new low in a Trump era

Working with immigrants for 30 years, Pablo Alvarado has lived through decades of antagonism toward Latinos. It came in political waves that washed over California, Arizona and other states. There was Proposition 187 in the 1990s, the Minuteman protests, “America’s toughest sheriff” Joe Arpaio and his hard-line policing tactics.

Nothing compares to the reality Latinos are facing today, Alvarado said.

“It’s a destructive moment for this country,” said the executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “This is the first time when I feel as if our adversaries have declared war against our immigrant community.”

The massacre of 20 people Saturday by a man who traveled 650 miles to a Walmart in El Paso, reportedly with the intention of shooting “as many Mexicans as possible,” marks what appears to be one of the deadliest hate crimes ever against Latinos.

The killer gunned down an Army veteran who loved listening to oldies on Sunday mornings, a 15-year-old high school student and soccer player, a mother who apparently used her body to shield her 2-month-old child, and 17 others, whose stories are still emerging.

The mass violence — and the bigoted motive that echoed the worst racist rants of anti-immigrant hard-liners — marked for many Latinos a devastating new low in the Trump era.

Like Alvarado, many Latinos on Sunday said they felt that the anger toward their community is reaching a boiling point, fueled by the heated politics of immigration.

Many said they believe that hostility is encouraged by a president who attacked a federal judge’s impartiality for being “a Mexican,” who frequently refers to asylum seekers and migrants who cross the border without authorization as part of an “invasion,” and who, at a rally speaking about migrants, said: “How do you stop these people? You can’t,” and then chuckled and joked along when someone in the crowd shouted, “Shoot them.”

For those here without legal status, the Trump era has been marked by family separations, detention centers and the persistent threat of widespread raids touted by the president. Others struggle with larger questions about racism and how hostility against Latinos has moved from the margins to the nation’s center stage.

Moving forward, many fear that unless something major changes, there will be more violence, beyond that unleashed in El Paso.

Miguel Luna was cooking eggs and bacon for his family Sunday when his wife told him of the tragedy in El Paso. He read the manifesto calling the attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

“I felt physical pain throughout my body, like food poisoning,” said Luna, a community organizer from Westlake who focuses on environmental issues.

As details about the victims came out in the news, he felt a sense of threat, fear and rejection in a country his mother fought hard to reach after she left Colombia decades ago. Luna believed that the true weapon behind the violence in El Paso was President Trump.

“His words are the ammunition and people of color are his target,” he said. “And he’s not ceasing, and it’s all very methodical and directed.”

When Trump took office, Luna expected that political winds may shift against immigrants, and he launched a photo project online to celebrate their stories. He called it the Power of U and featured dozens of Latino immigrants — educators, political leaders, architects and activists.

“I wanted this to be an opportunity for us to highlight all the good things we bring to this country,“ he said.

On Sunday, the father of two took some comfort in the positive space he created for the community at a time of uncertainty. But real change will take much more, he said.

In Gilroy, Calif., the streets were quiet one week after another gunman shot and killed three people at the popular Gilroy Garlic Festival, shortly after posting online about “hordes of mestizos” and encouraging people to read a book associated with white supremacists. Authorities in that case have said that the gunman did not appear to target any particular group and that his motive may never be known. But the shooting, along with the massacre in El Paso, left people afraid.

Parks were empty, church parking lots were barren, and many businesses were deserted.

Gerardo Ortiz sat in a wheelchair, parked in his usual spot outside St. Mary Parish. Passersby greeted him in English and Spanish as Mass began, though there weren’t many people attending.

Ortiz, 73, said he has experienced racism all his life — back in Puebla, Mexico, where he lived more than 35 years ago, and here in the United States. But he too thinks that the recent escalation in gun violence can be attributed to the influence of Trump.

“This president provokes more violence, he shouldn’t have that vocabulary,” Ortiz said in Spanish. “If he sets that example, other people are going to follow what he says and does.”

Across the street, the owner of a party supplies store hung up three piñatas outside the storefront. Leon, who did not want to give his last name because of concerns about his legal status, has lived in the United States for about 40 years and has owned the store in Gilroy for seven.

He said the Latino community in Gilroy, particularly the Mexican community, is very close — and that he and his family were deeply saddened by reports that the shooter who opened fire in El Paso may have been fueled by hate toward Latinos.

“The Latino community is hurting,” Leon said.

Since Trump’s election, and especially since the announcement of the possibility of large-scale immigration raids several weeks ago, Leon’s children have also worried that both their parents may be deported, he said.

“They are scared that their mother isn’t going to come back home,” Leon said. And he feels that concern too.

“That’s the fear: that you are going to leave your house and never come back.”

In the parking lot at the Walmart Supercenter in Pico Rivera on Sunday morning, David Llamas maintained a wide-angle vigilance as he prepared to hit the road with a trunkful of Dodgers souvenirs to hawk.

He was on the lookout for furtive movements, backpacks and suspicious gazes.

“I’m watching everyone from the corner of my eye,” Llamas, 56, said. “It’s come to this — you’ve got to watch where you shop.

“Things have changed: We’ve got a president who is promoting racism,” he said. “How does he get away with all the crap he’s saying about la raza? I don’t know. But it’s not a good deal.”

Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant, said he always knew resentment and racism was just underneath the surface of American society.

Still, he’d spent 25 years trying to connect two major parts of his life — his conservative political philosophy and his race and identity.

He believed racism was just a fringe element in the Republican Party, percolating in its darkest corners but inevitably called out.

But something changed under Trump, he said.

“The president of the United States was elected in large part on an anti-Latino agenda,” Madrid said. “There is no other way you can feel about it other than offended and attacked.

“White nationalism is the purest form of identity politics,” he added. “It seeks to define ‘Americanness’ by one’s lineage and ancestry. It views the growing Latino population as an invasion, as illegal, as criminal — as less than human. The next obvious step is violence.”

Alvarado, the day laborer organizer, said that over the years he has seen the workers he organizes be subject to attacks — some have been cursed at, harassed and, in some cases, robbed, kidnapped or killed. Now, he said, he is more concerned than ever for the workers, spread across thousands of worksites.

But rather than cower, he said, they will find ways to push back.

“We have to fight against it, to be intelligent and find ways to defend ourselves — not with fear or hatred in our hearts,” he said.

On Wednesday, his group and other immigrant rights organizations plan to hold a vigil denouncing the hate that allegedly led to the massacre in El Paso.

#Resist

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#Resist

[psiberzerker]

He's one of those things that's like a symptom, cause, and the problem itself at any given time.  He's directly associated with so many problems, wealth, entitlement, ignorance, sexual harassment-to-rape, sexism, racism, xenophobia, embezzlement, enterprise corruption, and international espionage.  Sometimes it's hard to tell when he's the product of a social ill, the cause, or symbolically driving it.

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Trump just blamed the El Paso shooting victims for their own deaths

Over the weekend, a white man with a semiautomatic rifle went on a shooting rampage at an El Paso Walmart, killing 22 people.

President Trump, who averred that we cannot let the victims “die in vain,” offered an idea for how to prevent future shootings: “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 a shame about the deaths, in other words, but they never would have happened if immigrants didn’t keep trying to come here, and if Democrats would just let me stop them. “So, this atrocity,” as Nicole Hannah-Jones aptly summed up his view, “was caused by immigration.”

Having essentially blamed the victims for their own murders, the president was happily and enthusiastically acceding to what authorities think are the alleged killer’s specific demands.

“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” says an anti-immigrant online manifesto that authorities think the accused gunman posted. It echoes the “invasion” rhetoric commonly employed by the president at his rallies and on Twitter. In fact, much of the language overlaps with that of the president and his supporters, including repeated entreaties to “send them back.”

The idea here is that some sort of bipartisan immigration reform would stop the epidemic of white-supremacist violence in the United States. But of course that makes sense only if you believe that racist killers have a legitimate complaint — that we shouldn’t have Latino immigrants, and that, therefore, they do bear some of the blame. (Never mind that people of Hispanic descent existed in El Paso long before that region was part of the United States.) This was the idea, too, behind Trump’s common warning, reiterated last month, that if migrants didn’t like the detention centers along the border, they could simply not come.

What’s worse, the president in this case seems to be holding the prospect of modest gun reform hostage to his and the online screed’s common demands. You want background checks? Let me stem the “infestation” first and we can talk. Democrats will blanch at such a devil’s bargain — a fact that Trump and Republicans will surely use to blame them for not wanting to prevent further violence. It’s not hard to imagine an I-told-you-so from the president after the next shooter posts a manifesto about “Great Replacement” theory and murders a dozen people. (As it happens, a senator from the accused shooter’s home state not-so-subtly alluded to that theory a couple months ago.) Although perhaps even this modest proposal is off the table after this morning’s tweet about it, since the president didn’t mention it in his later comments today.

As Jessica Winter forcefully showed last year, Trump frequently falls back on the rhetoric and psychology of an abuser: Look what you made me do! This was his excuse for worsening conditions for migrants and seeking punitive measures to dissuade them from coming. It’s not his fault. It’s never his fault. Which is another way of saying there’s nothing he can do to allay the circumstances he introduced himself.

It’s hard to imagine the manifesto’s author being any happier with the results of his campaign. His message — that the country is in danger of being lost in a wave of immigration — has been heard loud and clear by the man who very likely influenced his thinking in the first place, or at least supercharged it. What happens to migrants next is up to them, the president and the manifesto’s author agree. Don’t want to die? Don’t come.

#Resist

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#Resist

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Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions

Objective
Racism is related to policies preferences and behaviors that adversely affect blacks and appear related to a fear of blacks (e.g., increased policing, death penalty). This study examined whether racism is also related to gun ownership and opposition to gun controls in US whites.

Method
The most recent data from the American National Election Study, a large representative US sample, was used to test relationships between racism, gun ownership, and opposition to gun control in US whites. Explanatory variables known to be related to gun ownership and gun control opposition (i.e., age, gender, education, income, conservatism, anti-government sentiment, southern vs. other states, political identification) were entered in logistic regression models, along with measures of racism, and the stereotype of blacks as violent. Outcome variables included; having a gun in the home, opposition to bans on handguns in the home, support for permits to carry concealed handguns.

Results
After accounting for all explanatory variables, logistic regressions found that for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism there was a 50% increase in the odds of having a gun at home. After also accounting for having a gun in the home, there was still a 28% increase in support for permits to carry concealed handguns, for each one point increase in symbolic racism. The relationship between symbolic racism and opposition to banning handguns in the home (OR1.27 CI 1.03,1.58) was reduced to non-significant after accounting for having a gun in the home (OR1.17 CI.94,1.46), which likely represents self-interest in retaining property (guns).

Conclusions
Symbolic racism was related to having a gun in the home and opposition to gun control policies in US whites. The findings help explain US whites’ paradoxical attitudes towards gun ownership and gun control. Such attitudes may adversely influence US gun control policy debates and decisions.

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Introduction
Several mass shootings in 2012 (e.g., Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut; Aurora, Colorado) reignited gun-control and firearm ownership debates in the United States (US). The public health importance of gun reform in the US is clear and should not need such tragedies for policy change. In 2011, there were 32,163 firearm-related deaths in the US, with 11,101 homicides (69.5% of all homicides), and 19,776 suicides (51.6% of all suicides) [1]. Rates of firearm homicides in the US (3.6 per 100,000) are over 7-fold of those in similar nations (e.g., Canada, 0.5; United Kingdom, 0.1; Australia, 0.1) [2]. Blacks are disproportionately represented in US firearm homicides (14.6 per 100,000), and would benefit most from improved gun controls [1]. Opposition to gun control is considerably stronger in whites than blacks [3], with whites also reporting twice the rate of personal gun ownership and having a gun in the home, than is reported by blacks [4]. Proponents of gun-ownership rights cite self-protection and safety as their primary argument for owning guns and resisting gun reform [4], [5]. This is paradoxical, as whites, and particularly white males, are considerably more likely to commit suicide with firearms (7.3 and 12.9 per 100,000, respectively), than die from a firearm homicide (1.9 per 100,000) [1]. Indeed, US research found that having one or more guns in the home is related to a 2.7 and 4.8 fold increase in the risk of a member of that household dying from homicide or suicide, respectively [6], [7]. Given that gun controls have been shown to reduce suicides and homicides [8]–[10] arguments against gun reform based on self-defense/protection/safety are counterintuitive, and are inhibiting the adoption of appropriate policy to improve public health. As such, it is important for public health advocates, researchers, and policy makers to consider all explanations for opposition to gun reform in US whites. However, research on the reasons for opposition to gun control is sparse, in part because of restrictions on funding for research on gun control in the US [11], [12].

Stronger opposition to gun control by US whites has not always been the case. During the civil rights movement of the late 60 s, black activists exercised their right to carry loaded firearms in order to provide protection from police and extreme white factions [13]. The response from US whites was to demand stricter gun control. The Mulford Act was signed into law by Californian governor Ronald Reagan in 1967, and prohibited the carrying of loaded firearms in public [13]. The social landscape has changed considerably, and most recent data indicates a quite different view on gun control by whites, with 53% of whites wanting to protect the right to own guns, whereas only 24% of blacks do [14].

People’s stated reasons for owning guns and opposing gun-control legislation are likely complex; however, it has been suggested that sociocultural factors such as fear of black violence may be associated with gun ownership, and with opposition to gun controls [15], [16]. Similarly, negative attitudes towards blacks (i.e., racism), along with conservative and political ideologies, appear to be related to fear of black violence and crime [17]–[20]. What is not known, and accordingly is the focus of this study, is whether racism is associated with gun ownership and opposition to gun control. It has been found that racial stereotypes (e.g., that blacks are violent) are related to US whites’ fears of violence from blacks, and to their support for crime-related policy measures, such as building prisons, and the death penalty [19], [20]. Support for such policies is particularly pronounced in US whites who hold higher levels of racism [19]. Strong evidence also supports the notion that negative racial stereotypes and attitudes are related to people’s perceptions of threat from black gun-related violence [20]. Additionally, US research using measures of implicit race attitudes (e.g., Implicit Association Test; IAT) have shown a preference for whites over blacks [21] and appear to influence people’s political decisions, and even choices of medical procedures for blacks [22]–[24]. For instance, measures of explicit and implicit racism measures predicted opposition to Obama’s health reforms [23].

Most prominently, symbolic racism (racial resentment), an explicit but subtle form and measure of racism, has been found to be consistently related to peoples decisions regarding policies that may affect non-white US citizens. It is argued that symbolic racism supplanted old-fashioned or overt/blatant racism which had seen blacks as amoral and inferior, and was associated with open support for race inequality and segregation under ‘Jim Crow Laws’ [25]. Research following the US civil-rights movement suggested that anti-black racism and stereotyping, as assessed by blatant measures, had declined [26]. However, subsequent research revealed that people may merely be reluctant to express racism and negative stereotyping on these blatant measures in order to avoid appearing racist [27], [28]. This observation led to the conceptualization and measurement of more subtle measures of racism, such as, symbolic racism [25].

Symbolic racism is a belief structure underpinned by both anti-black affect and traditional values [29]. The anti-black affect (racism) component of symbolic racism is said to be established in pre-adult years through exposure to negative black stereotypes (e.g. blacks as dangerous, blacks are lazy), to the point that phenomena such as crime and physical violence have become typified as black phenomena [30]. The anti-black affect is not necessarily conscious or deliberative, but may be felt as fear, anger, unease, and hostility towards blacks [29], [31], [32]. The symbolic component reflects the abstract view of blacks as a collective rather than as individuals, as well as its basis in abstract white moralistic reasoning and traditions. Because symbolic racism represents an ingrained schema, individuals high in symbolic racism will react in a negative manner, often unconsciously, to issues perceived to involve a racial (i.e. black) component. Psychometric work shows that while symbolic racism has a small relationship with old-fashioned or blatant racism and stereotypes, only symbolic racism is associated with policy preferences related to race after controlling for conservative and political ideology and demographic characteristics (e.g., education, gender, age) [33].

Policies of which blacks or whites are the intended or obvious beneficiaries (e.g. affirmative action, school busing) should easily be perceived as involving a racial component. But other policies may also involve a perceived racial component merely because they concern an issue that is already understood by whites in racial (black) terms. Thus, symbolic racism has been linked to opposition to and support for a range of policies that whites consistently associate with blacks (e.g., welfare), even if it is not in the self-interest of whites to do so [22]–[25], [32]. This is also likely to explain the frequently observed correlations between symbolic racism and public opinion regarding a range of criminal justice policies (e.g. death penalty, mandatory sentences). There is substantial evidence that whites associate blacks with crime, and especially violent crime [19], [30]. The result of this conflation of race and crime is that whites high on symbolic racism will support policies that are perceived as being tough on crime and oppose policies that are considered lenient. Green and colleagues [34] have found a positive relationship between symbolic racism and punitive crime policies (i.e., death penalty, three strikes imprisonment), and negative correlation with policies that are intended to assist criminals (i.e., education of inmates, poverty reduction). And although conservative ideologies and racism are inherently related, symbolic racism makes a unique contribution to crime policy attitudes after accounting for other race-neutral factors (e.g., conservatism, crime victimization, crime news exposure, and socio-demographics) [34]. More generally, symbolic racism should also correlate with fear of crime and black violence, along with attitudes to policies that may reduce, or increase, perceived threat (e.g., gun ownership, gun control). Self-protection and physical safety (e.g., fear) are the most commonly cited reason for owning a gun and opposing gun control and blacks are overrepresented in the crime statistics and media portrayals of violent crime. Accordingly, people with higher symbolic racism may be more likely to own a gun and oppose gun control as a means of dealing (consciously or unconsciously) with abstract fears regarding blacks [19].

Given the importance of guns and gun-control to US public health, and the urgent need for appropriate policy to reduce gun-related harms, it is vital to examine the psychological and sociocultural reasons for the paradoxical attitudes of many US citizens and politicians to gun-control. US whites have twice the rate of gun ownership of blacks, oppose gun control to much greater extent than blacks, but are considerably more likely to kill themselves with those guns, than be killed by others or blacks. While the literature suggests that racism in whites shapes fear of black violence and support for policies that disadvantage blacks, no research has examined whether racism is related to gun ownership and attitudes to gun-control in US whites. This study investigated whether racism is related to gun ownership and opposition to gun control in US whites. We hypothesized that, after accounting for known confounders (i.e., age, gender, education, income, location, conservatism, political identification, anti-government sentiment), anti-black racism would be associated with having a gun in the home, and opposition to gun controls.

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Methods
The most recent data from the American National Election Study (ANES) [35] was used to test the hypothesis. The ANES panel study is the leading large-scale psychological and socio-political attitudes survey in the US, measuring various constructs and attitudes in monthly waves from a representative probability sample of US voters. Explanatory variables, including demographic details (i.e., age, gender, education, income, location: southern vs. other), anti-government sentiment, measures of conservatism (e.g., liberal versus conservative ideology), party identification (e.g., Republican versus Democrat leanings), symbolic racism, belief in a black violent stereotype, and implicit racism (i.e., race IAT), were accessed for US whites. Outcome measures were: having a gun in the home, opposition to policies banning handguns in the home, and support for permits to carry concealed handguns.

Potential participants for the ANES were contacted via telephone using random-digit-dialling and requested to complete an online survey each month from January 2008 to September 2009. Respondents were paid $10 a month for participation and those without internet access were provided with internet service for the duration of the study. The current study drew on data from several waves of the ANES survey. To counter the impact of participant drop-out and non-response on the representativeness of the sample examined in the current study we applied ANES generated weights as recommended (i.e. wave 20 post-election weight) [35]. The comprehensive ANES panel study demographics, data, materials and methods are freely available online at (http://www.electionstudies.org/).

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Measures
As part of the ANES, participants provided comprehensive information about the demographic composition of their household alongside their own background characteristics. Participants’ highest level of educational attainment was grouped into five categories: less than high school diploma, high school diploma, some college but no bachelor’s degree, bachelor’s degree, and graduate degree. This variable was scored from 1 = less than high school diploma, to 5 = graduate degree. Household income in the last year was reported by all participants. Participants were instructed to include their own pre-tax income and the income of all other household members from all sources (e.g. wages, tips, interest on savings, child support, Social Security). Nineteen income bands were used ranging from 1 = <$5,000 per annum to 19 = ≥$175,000 or more per annum. Consistent with previous research [36], education and income where dummy coded into five and four categories for analysis, respectively, rather than being treated as linear variables.

Racism
Measures of two key types of racism against blacks were taken from the ANES for analyses: symbolic racism and implicit racial attitudes. Additionally, a single item from wave 20 of ANES was used to assess whether participants held the stereotype that blacks are violent. Participants responded to the item “How well does the word ‘violent’ describe most blacks?” using five response categories ranging from 1 = “extremely well”, to 5 = “not at all well” (i.e. extremely well, very well, moderately well, slightly well, or not at all well). The item was coded so that a response of extremely well or very well, indicated endorsement of the black violent stereotype (coded 1), with other responses coded as 0, did not endorse stereotype blacks are violent.

In wave 20 of the ANES, participants were asked to respond to a four-item scale drawn from the Symbolic Racism Scale [37]. Specifically, participants indicated the extent to which they agree (1 = agree strongly to 5 = disagree strongly) with statements such as “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” (reverse scored). Scores on the four items were coded so that high scores are indicative of elevated levels of symbolic racism. A test of the reliability of the scale showed the four items corresponded closely with each other as indicated by a Cronbach’s alpha level of 0.8 and the emergence of a single factor from exploratory factor analysis of the scale. We utilized the average score across the four items to produce a scale ranging 1 = lowest symbolic racism score, to 5 = highest symbolic racism score.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is commonly used in experimental psychology to gauge implicit bias. A brief race (anti-black) IAT was included in wave 19 of the ANES to assess the extent to which participants demonstrated black-white racial bias. The theoretical background, instructions, and methodology for the race IAT have been well described elsewhere [21], [22]. Briefly, the race IAT was administered online, requiring participants to rapidly associate pictures of white and black faces with positively- and negatively-valenced words. Participants were asked to press the key “P” for white faces and for positive words and “Q” for any other stimulus. Alternatively, they were asked to press “P” for black faces or positive words and “Q” for other stimuli. The test consisted of 84 stimuli, two practice runs (14 sets of stimuli each) and two data collection blocks (28 sets of stimuli each). Response latencies across blocks were analysed to produce an effect size coefficient or D score. This score is coded so that positive scores indicate an unconscious preference for whites over blacks.

Conservatism, Anti-Government Sentiment, and Political Party Identification
Conservatism (ideological self-placement) was derived from four items assessing self-descriptions of liberal versus conservative leanings, and strength thereof. The four items were asked in wave 11 of the ANES. Participants were firstly asked “When it comes to politics, would you describe yourself as liberal, conservative, or neither liberal nor conservative?”. The extent to which participants considered themselves to be liberal or conservative was then gauged with a further question: “Would you call yourself very liberal or somewhat liberal? Would you call yourself very conservative or somewhat conservative?”. Those who rated themselves as “neither liberal nor conservative” were requested to indicate: “Do you think of yourself as closer to liberals, or conservatives, or neither of these?”. We combined all ratings on these four items to produce a score ranging from 1 to 7 (1 = extremely liberal, 4 = moderate, 7 = extremely conservative).

To better capture conservative values and associated views regarding government infringement on personal rights, we included a measure of anti-government sentiment. Participants responded with either a yes, immediate threat; or no, does not (yes responses coded as 1, no as 0) to the item ‘Do you think the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens, or not?’.

Party identification, and the strength of this identification, was derived (wave 19) from the same process using four component questions assessing whether participants identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents. This process yielded a score ranging from 1 to 7 (1 = strong Democrat, 4 = independent, 7 = strong Republican).

Gun Ownership
Questions relating to household gun ownership were included in wave 19 of ANES. Participants were firstly asked if any person in the household owned any type of gun. Specifically, participants were asked: “Do you or does any other member of your household own a handgun, rifle, shotgun, or any other kind of firearm, or does no one in your household own a firearm?”. Subsequently, participants were asked: “Do you happen to have in your home or garage any guns or revolvers?”. This second question functioned largely to corroborate responses to the initial question, but also established the participant’s personal ownership of the reported gun in the home. For analyses, a yes response to either item was coded as a 1, no responses were coded as 0.

Opinions on Gun Control
Participants were asked two questions regarding their views on two potential gun control policies in wave 13 of the ANES panel study. Participants were firstly asked: “Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose making it illegal for anyone to keep a handgun at home?”. Next they were asked: “Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose giving permits to allow any adult to carry a concealed handgun if they have never been convicted of committing a crime and they have passed a test showing that they know how to use the gun safely?”. To produce a clear index of whether the participant is opposed to gun control, we coded responses to the first question so that 1 = definite opposition to making it illegal to keep a handgun at home, and 0 = other responses. The item assessing support for a permit to carry a concealed handgun was reverse coded, so that “favor” for permits to have concealed handguns was coded as 1, which in effect represents opposition to gun control. Other responses were coded as 0, indicating non-support for concealed handguns.

Statistical Analysis
Multivariate logistic regression was used to examine relationships between explanatory variables, and gun-related outcomes. Odds ratios (OR) are reported with 95% confidence intervals (CI) for univariate and multivariate relationships with the outcome variables (see Tables 1–3) based on Taylor linearized standard errors. Explanatory variables were entered simultaneously in models, with the exception of having a gun in the home. Because participants reporting gun ownership will quite logically be against measures that involve giving up their guns, and ownership is hypothesised to be related to racism, we entered the variable ‘have a gun in the home’ in a second step for models examining opposition to gun control (Tables 2 and ​and3).3). Spearman’s correlation coefficients between all variables were calculated along with descriptives (see Tables 4 and ​and5,5, respectively).

I did not embed the tables at the end of this article.  I encourge people to peruse them.

#Resist

[_priapism]

So redneck racists own more guns?  Who would have thought?

[Athos_131]

I was told in another thread that it's about school funding and/or mental illness and not about racism.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

What happened in El Paso is not about mental health. It’s about evil.

Whenever there is a mass shooting, far too many people (cough, Republicans) ignore the proliferation of weapons of war on American streets that slaughter innocents and shred communities in a matter of seconds. Instead, they amble over to their bookshelf, pull out the Book of Talking Points, and mutter on and on about other things they think drove someone to commit mass murder. They mewl about violent video games or the mental health of the murderer. Not to diminish the absolute necessity to take mental health seriously or to address it, but the way Republicans and the National Rifle Association talk about it is as predictable as it is tiresome.

But here’s the question I keep asking myself: Can’t someone just be plain evil? Can’t someone hear the words from those they admire and act on the implicit or explicit messages delivered?

I’m asking these questions because the mental health rationale is selectively employed. Let me highlight just one example: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall anyone wondering aloud about the mental state of the husband-and-wife killers of 14 people at a San Bernardino, Calif., holiday party in 2015. Both were Muslim and killed by law enforcement. In fact, five days later, then-candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

But Republicans from President Trump on down the line are talking about mental health (and, yes, violent video games) in the wake of the mass murder of 22 people (as of this writing) at a Walmart in El Paso on Saturday. As The Post reported, authorities believe Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old white male alleged shooter, posted a 2,300-word manifesto rooted in the ideology of white supremacy and white nationalism moments before he unleashed hell. Crusius found common cause with the murderer of 51 Muslims in New Zealand.

And he found common cause with Trump. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the suspected killer wrote. Brandon Friedman, a former Obama administration official and co-founder of the McPherson Square Group, took to Twitter to do an old-fashioned sentence diagram of the alleged killer’s manifesto and the anti-immigrant rhetoric from Trump and his media and congressional enablers.

The New York Times reports: “Since January, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word ‘invasion’ — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election messaging.” And Trump regularly employed the word “invasion” in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.

That the alleged killer said he held his bigoted beliefs before Trump became president is of little comfort. For racists, white supremacists and white nationalists, having your views bullhorned from the bully pulpit of the Oval Office is a stamp of approval.

Evil is what festers in weak souls who find power in deeply rooted conspiracy theories about their own superiority and the inferiority of others. Evil perpetuates itself on message boards and chat rooms. And evil comes alive in four-page manifestos that parrot well-worn hateful arguments that are then posted online before the person poisoned by them acts out. Dylann Roof posted his five-page tirade hours before he martyred nine African Americans at Mother Emanuel church in 2015 in Charleston, S.C., in the hopes of starting a race war.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said it exactly right on Twitter. “White supremacy is not a mental illness,” she wrote. “We need to call it what it is: Domestic terrorism.” And we need to also call it evil.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

What Toni Morrison said about Trump supporters and fears of the ‘collapse of white privilege’

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison won global acclaim for her ability to tell the story of the black American experience — and specifically the damaging effects of racism — when few authors with national platforms were addressing the issue.

Her death on Monday at 88 coincided with national conversations about the role President Trump has played in stoking white nationalism. Many fans of Morrison are reflecting on her words criticizing the consuming nature of dismantling racism.

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Morrison wrote “Making America White Again,” an essay for the New Yorker about the cultural anxiety that she said motivated most of the white Americans who voted for Trump. She wrote:

"So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

The “terror” that Morrison mentioned when describing some Trump supporters has revealed itself in recent days following a mass shooting in El Paso where police believe the suspect probably posted an online rant using language that mirrors rhetoric used by President Trump. The posting is still under investigation.

Fear led many voters to choose a president whose vision of America resembled the days of decades past — a period that Morrison often featured in her work.

While largely known for her fiction, Morrison was not afraid to wade into the very real world of national politics. She made headlines for referring to President Bill Clinton as “the first black president” because of how his political enemies treated him during his impeachment.

She told Time magazine in 2008: “People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-a-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.”

That year, she endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who four years later presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Morrison, who often wrote about how cruel America had been to its black citizens, spoke of a newfound affection for the United States with the election of Obama, the country’s first black president.

“I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama,” she told the Guardian. “I felt like a kid. The Marines and the flag, which I never look at — all of a sudden it looked … nice. Worthy. It only lasted a couple of hours. But I was amazed, that music that I really don’t like — ‘God Bless America’ is a dumb song; I mean it’s not beautiful. But I really felt that, for that little moment.”

One of Morrison’s most quoted statements comes from a 1975 speech at Portland State University.

“The real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction,” she said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.”

“None of that is necessary,” she added. “There will always be one more thing.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

More CVE for White People: The Radicalization Process Revisited

Less than a week before Donald Trump’s election, we wrote a piece provocatively entitled “CVE for White People: The Trumpist Movement and the Radicalization Process.” The article, whose title referenced the approach of “countering violent extremism” or CVE, argued that the Trump movement should be understood in a fashion roughly similar to the way scholars of extremism understand the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—that is, as an illiberal movement embedded in a country’s electoral system that has an ambiguous relationship to violence and an overtly violent fringe. “Trumpism, like the Brotherhood, is a political movement built on the mass mobilization of faith—in the one case religious faith and in the other case faith in a single charismatic individual,” we wrote. “Like the Brotherhood, it is a movement that exists within an electoral system but which has a deeply ambivalent relationship with the democratic norms of that system, a movement which both formally rejects violence yet manages also to tolerate or encourage it.” On “the fringes of both movements are radicals, some of whom are violent,” we argued. “The line between the Brotherhood and certain ultra-conservative Salafist and even violent Islamist groups in Egypt is a somewhat fuzzy one. This is more similar to than different from the Trump campaign which has, and often cheerfully accepts, the overt support of domestic white supremacists and members of the so-called ‘alt-right’ movement.” And, of course, “Both movements have also spawned terrorists.”

The piece goes on to propose understanding the process the more violent Trump supporters go through as akin to the process of radicalization described in a detail in the literature about jihadist terrorism. And at the end of the piece, we offered a simple test of our theory:

There’s a simple measure for whether our basic theory here is, in a general sense, right: If it is, we will see a significant spike in white supremacist violence over the next few years. The Trump campaign has provided a baseline undemocratic ideation to hundreds of millions of people and also provided a platform through which extremists, both violent and non-violent, can recruit and cultivate. If our collective understanding of the process of violent radicalization is correct, the result will be blood.

The past few years have unfortunately provided a dramatic test of this theory; more unfortunately still, the theory has held up well. By nearly any metric, white supremacist violence is up significantly, the lethality of attacks has risen dramatically, and the link between the ideation and action has become particularly clear. President Trump plays a key role in this ideational cauldron—though pinning down the precise role of his rhetoric in any one incident is a mug’s game.

Consider first the raw data. According to FBI data, 2017—the most recent year for which data are available—saw a sharp jump in hate crimes over 2016. Crimes motivated by race, ethnicity or national origin leapt from 3,489 in 2016 to 4,131 in 2017. Crimes based on religion jumped from 1,273 in 2016 to 1,564 in 2017. Data for 2015 are roughly consistent with the data for 2016 and follow a gentler rise from 2012, 2013 and 2014, when levels fluctuated. While these numbers don’t specify the particular political valence of the attack, around 70 percent of crimes motivated by religion are consistently directed against Jews and Muslims, and around 60 percent of crimes motivated by race, ethnicity or national origin are consistently directed against Black and Latino victims.

Hate crimes are a crude measure. They include lots of offenses well short of violence against people. Thirty-seven percent of all 2017 offenses, for example, involved what the FBI terms “crimes against property”—which includes vandalism and the like.

That said, what the FBI terms “crimes against persons” rose in 2017 as well. In 2016, the FBI reported 3,765 incidents, affecting 4,720 victims, and committed by 4,353 offenders. By contrast, in 2017, there were 4,090 incidents of crimes against persons, affecting 5,084 victims, and committed by 4,442 offenders. (These numbers include all hate crimes, not just those motivated by race and religion.)

Then there are the most violent attacks—the ones that blur the lines between hate crimes and terrorism.

An April 2019 analysis by the New York Times, relying on data from the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, reported a “surge” in “white extremist” attacks in the U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand dating back to a spurt of anti-immigrant violence in Europe in 2015 and possibly sparked by the 2011 attack in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik. While the raw numbers for 2017 and 2018 remain below that of 2015, the numbers of white extremist attacks are still high. Most of this surge is the result of anti-immigrant violence in Europe and has little to do with conditions in the United States. But it’s also clear that an international ecosystem of far-right racism has emerged that has contributed as well.

In the United States alone, “attacks jumped” in 2017, the Times writes, with nine deadly acts of violence that year; preliminary data for 2018 show five deadly attacks. The data presented by the Times suggest that the deadliness of white extremist attacks may be rising, too, particularly in North America. Until 2018, the deadliest white extremist attacks in the U.S. included a 2012 shooting at a Wisconsin Sikh temple that killed six people and the 2015 shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina, church that killed nine. Compare this to the El Paso shooting this past weekend, which killed 22 people.

Certainly, there is no body of attacks in the recent pre-Trump era like the current period—in which we have multiple mass shootings in a compressed period of time conducted on the express basis of hatred of foreigners, immigrants, or religious minorities. According to the database cited by the Times, far-right extremists perpetrated three deadly attacks in 2015 (in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; in Charleston, South Carolina; and at Umpqua Community College in Oregon). No deadly attacks took place in 2016.

The list of attacks in the years since Trump’s election is quite striking. Before El Paso was the March 2019 shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 50 people. Then there was the April 2019 shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, in which one person died; in that case, the letter posted by the shooter blamed Jews for “white genocide.” Before that was the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, before which the shooter posted about Central American immigrants as “invaders” assisted in entering the country by Jews. Eleven people died in that attack.

The FBI is aware of the problem. According to the office of FBI Director Christopher Wray, the bureau has recorded about 90 domestic terrorism arrests in 2019 so far; a majority of those cases motivated by racial hatred “are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence,” Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the wake of the attack, the FBI released a statement announcing that the bureau “remains concerned that U.S.-based domestic violent extremists could become inspired by these and previous high-profile attacks to engage in similar acts of violence.”

Relatedly, the FBI has also gotten concerned about conspiracy theorizing, warning in an intelligence bulletin from the Phoenix field office that “anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity.” Among the violent incidents identified by the bulletin as motivated by conspiracy theories was the Tree of Life shooting—and the bulletin also pointed to synagogues and mosques as “popular conspiracy theory targets.” Not all the conspiracies listed in the bulletin fall under the rubric of white supremacy, but there is certainly an overlap.

“This report is a call to action—and we will heed that call,” said then-Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker when the FBI’s 2017 hate crimes report was released in November 2018. Well, the president has certainly heeded the call, and taken action: He has serially stoked the fire.

The question of how best to read a document posted by a killer in the time before a violent attack is a difficult one, but it’s impossible to ignore that the Christchurch shooter described Muslims as “invaders” and wrote of Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Before the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, the attacker wrote on the far-right social network Gab that the Jewish organization HIAS was “bring[ing] invaders that kill our people”—a reference to a conspiracy theory that HIAS was coordinating the entrance of Central American immigrants into the United States. The El Paso shooter also wrote of the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” though he added that his views on the matter “predate Trump.” Throughout this whole period, the president was referring to immigrants as “invaders” and warning of an “invasion of Illegals” from the southern border.

This on top of his having inaugurated his campaign for president with claims that Mexico was sending its rapists to the United States and conducted his campaign with near-daily attacks on Muslims and Islam. He has continued his occasional flirtation with violence in his speeches and rallies, most recently in response to a rally attendee in Florida who yelled out, “Shoot them,” when Trump asked rhetorically, “How do you stop these people?”—meaning Central American immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump smiled and commented that “only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement,” as the crowd cheered.

To what extent does Trump’s rhetoric have any impact?

“I blame the people who pulled the trigger.... Goodness gracious, is someone really blaming the president?” declared White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend. “Was Bernie Sanders responsible for, for when my friends got shot playing baseball? I don’t think that he was. Was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responsible when someone drove up to a DHS facility with a homemade bomb and an AR15 and tried to blow the place up calling it a concentration camp, the same rhetoric that she used, was she responsible? I don’t think that she was.”

Kellyanne Conway made a point of tweeting that the Dayton shooter had a “leftist Twitter feed.” And later declared herself “hopping mad” that the press wasn’t covering his apparently left-leaning views while devoting substantial attention to the relationship between Trump and the violence in El Paso.

They do protest too much. Yes, as a general matter, it’s a bad idea to attribute the actions of disturbed people to the ideas they imbibe. Violence often looks for a text to justify itself. And people who want to kill will find a reason, sometimes political. So one should generally refrain from attributing a particular incident to a particular leader’s rhetoric.

That said, it’s also a bad idea to attribute any specific extreme weather event to climate change. Yet when a pattern of extreme weather events emerges that fits precisely within the pattern one would expect from rising global temperatures and is not accompanied by countervailing patterns that climate change would not produce, it is reasonable to observe the shift and the aggregate trends.

Something similar is happening here. No one incident can be laid at President Trump’s feet. Yet when a president talks the way Trump talks over a long period of time, when he deploys rhetoric routinely that can be expected to stir the pot of violent extremism, when one can predict—as we did—prospectively the manner in which such rhetoric will interact with a political community and yield violence, and when violence then materializes in precisely the hypothesized fashion, it would be unreasonable to deny that there is a connection.

We certainly don’t let the Muslim Brotherhood off so easily.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

The ‘collapse of white privilege’

 

Rich/white/straight/male privilege, yeah.  That's basically the X/Y/Z axes of Entitlement.  As long as teh wimminz, darkies, sexual deviants, and poor have their own special interests, the people in power aren't a Minority.  Everyone else are "Minorities."  (Even women, who statistically hold a slight Majority, due to manly dangerous pursuits like sports, and war coupled with "Protect teh wimminz" white knighting.)

Again, it's a little more complex than that.  It always is.

[Athos_131]

Joe Biden’s speech in Iowa puts Trump to shame

President Trump visits El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, but cannot make a big speech in an open venue for fear of being booed. (In Dayton, he made himself invisible, meeting behind closed doors with family and medical staff, making no public appearance or comment.) He creates division and anger at a time when the country would normally look to the president. The contrast between the bitter, little man who occupies the White House, attacking Beto O’Rourke on Twitter and insisting before taking off Wednesday morning against all evidence that his rhetoric brings us together, and former vice president Joe Biden, who chose to deliver a big, important speech Wednesday in Iowa could not have been more stark.

Biden began by stating what too many Republicans, embarrassed by this president but shamefully still backing him, refuse to admit: “The words of a president matter,” Biden said. “They can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace. They can calm a nation in turmoil. They can console and confront and comfort in times of tragedy ... They can appeal to the better angels of our nature. But they can also unleash the deepest, darkest forces in this nation.” His tone varied from defiant to sorrowful, he emphatically blasted out each phrase. The language was plain and direct, but the call to recall our founding principles was profound and stirring.

The notion that Trump is “fine” except for all those tweets and comments is a dangerous fiction used by squeamish Republicans to avoid confronting him. Biden recounted the parade of Trump horribles — from Charlottesville (“very fine people on both sides”) to raising fear of a refugee “invasion” to calling Baltimore a “disgusting, rat-infected and rodent mess” that “no human being” would choose to live in.

Biden reminded us that at a rally in Florida, after Trump asked the crowd how to stop immigrants, someone in the audience said “shoot them.” Trump smiled and took it as a joke. Biden argued that it “is not far at all” from Trumpian comments to the alleged El Paso murderer’s diatribe that “this attack is in response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” just as his praise to “very fine” neo-Nazis chanting “you will not replace us” is not far at all from the words of the mass murderer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, who said Jews “were committing genocide to his people.”

Biden flat out accused Trump of fanning white nationalism and mocked his “low-energy, vacant-eyed mouthing of the words written for him condemning white supremacists this week.” Biden noted that white supremacists themselves praise Trump during a time the number of hate groups and white nationalist shooters surges.

Biden did not say Trump was responsible for white nationalist terrorism, but he did accuse Trump of pouring fuel on the fire, retweeting white nationalist messages and cutting funding to fight domestic, white nationalist terrorism. He said Trump’s invoking of mental health as the issue was “a dodge” — as he reminded everyone of his authorship of the assault-weapons ban in the 1990s. “We will do it again,” he said to cheers. He also insisted that we make “the same commitment as a nation to root out domestic terrorism as we have to stopping international terrorism.”

Biden also contrasted Trump to presidents who stood up at key moments in history (e.g., George H.W. Bush turning in his NRA membership, Bill Clinton’s speech after the Oklahoma City bombing, George W. Bush’s mosque visit after 9/11, Barack Obama’s sermon after the Charleston, S.C., massacre). Now, Biden argued, “Our president who has aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation. And it makes winning the battle for the soul of this nation that much tougher, harder.”

Biden made the case that Trump fundamentally doesn’t understand the job. “Trump offers no moral leadership; seems to have no interest in unifying this nation, no evidence the presidency has awakened his conscience in the least,” he said. “Indeed we have a president with a toxic tongue who has publicly and unapologetically embraced a political strategy of hate, racism and division.”

Biden then called on the country to take up the challenge and do what Trump can’t. “Stand together. Stand against hate. ... Treating everyone with respect. Giving everyone a fair shot. Leaving nobody behind. Giving hate no safe harbor.”

Biden closed by reminding us that greatness stems from the conviction “America is an idea” — not great because we have the biggest economy or military or because we “win.” The essence of America is its creed. Ironically (or tragically), this is how conservatives used to talk, before they became yes-men for Trump or argued that his defacing democracy was tolerable because of judges or tax cuts.

Biden told voters: “Everyone knows who Donald Trump is. We need to show them who we are. We choose hope over fear. Science over fiction. Unity over division. And, yes — truth over lies.”

We’re in a time when someone such as Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who fancies himself an intellectual and used to write about America as a creedal nation, does not the nerve to denounce Trump nor the self-respect to come up with a better framing of the election than a choice between civics and socialism. (Actually civics and democracy are under attack by Trump and his quisling party.)

Biden explained that the real choice is between Trump and American democracy, between Trump and objective truth and between Trump and someone with a basic understanding of what makes America “great.” The speech was intended to and succeeded in making the case that Biden could be that better alternative, but in another sense it should serve as a provocation to Republicans.

What and who are Republicans supporting? How can one love America’s founding principles and vote for Trump? Do tax breaks justify keeping a president that inspires white terrorism?

Anyone who fails to comprehend the decision we face and the obvious answers to these queries, unfortunately, is unreachable at this point. The rest of us will simply have to outvote those lost souls.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Tucker Carlson Calls White Supremacy a 'Hoax' In Astonishing Diatribe

Nauseatingly racist Fox News host Tucker Carlson dismissed concerns about white supremacists as a “conspiracy theory” on Tuesday. This is a cruel lie: a white supremacist murdered 22 people over the weekend in El Paso, TX, after he had apparently written about a “Hispanic invasion.”

“The whole thing is a lie,” Carlson said. “If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns of problems this country faces, where would white supremacy be on the list? Right up there with Russia probably. It’s actually not a real problem in America. The combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside a college football stadium.”

He added, “I mean, seriously, this is a country where the average person is getting poorer, where the suicide rate is spiking—‘white supremacy, that’s the problem’—this is a hoax. Just like the Russia hoax, it’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power. That’s exactly what’s going on.”

Clearly, the problem of white supremacy is not a conspiracy. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks approximately 1,020 extremist groups in America and estimates that there are 5,000 and 8,000 people who are members of the Ku Klux Klan alone. Plus, it’s impossible to know the number of people who have become radicalized online. Racism is a poison throughout the country—and throughout its history.

On Fox, Carlson continued: “White supremacy—you know, I’ve lived here 50 years, I’ve never met anybody—not one person—who ascribes to white supremacy. I don’t know a single person who thinks that’s a good idea. I don’t—I mean, they are making this up, and it’s a talking point which they are using to help them in this election cycle, obviously, because Russia died.”

It’s another absolutely grotesque performance by Carlson, who only has to look in a mirror if he wants to meet a white supremacist. The deflection is understandable, though, given the clear parallels between Carlson’s rhetoric and that of the El Paso shooter. He, like other racists trying to turn bigotry into a lucrative grift, has jumped to deny white supremacy’s existence as if it could insulate him from any accusations of his most definable trait, hatred.

White supremacy is why there are children in concentration camps at the border and why a gunman murdered 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. It’s why there are so many black people in prisons. It’s why three black Louisiana churches were set on fire in April. It’s why Heather Heyer was killed.

Carlson has a huge platform on Fox News, and it lets him normalize hate. White supremacists are not just having an intellectual debate; they talk about violence and they act out on their violent ideas. The more toxic racism Carlson spouts, the more blood he will have on his hands.

#Resist