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

[Jed_]

Uh oh, copyright infringement?

[_priapism]

Uh oh, copyright infringement?

Perspective.  I don’t think the NYT knows we exist.

[Jed_]

Love that shirt.  It says it all.

[_priapism]

A lot of these articles are NYT pieces that require a paid subscription to read, so I do appreciate your “cutting and pasting” Athos.  Thank you.

I see all the noteworthy articles on Reddit a few hours before they appear here, usually complete with the entire text pasted in the comments there. I'm sure they are available to be read for free in many other places if you don't want to pay for the privilege. There are better news aggregator sources, basically.

Either way, copying and pasting other people's work to a backwater discussion board is about the definition of slacktivism and I still find the sentence I quoted above hilarious.

We stand in awe GB.  You are the gold standard.

[Jed_]

I read some here, scan many others.  I read far more of the ones I find on my own and tend to avoid any posted collections of news sources that seems to have a agenda (even if I agree with said agenda).  I saw the phrase ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ bandied about today, best to try and not embrace that.

I sort of like what I find on my iPhone and iPad along with msn.  The number of news sources found there is impressive and runs across the political spectrum.  Although I’m sure my news sourcing would be considered amateurish by many, it suits me.

[_priapism]

I read some here, scan many others.  I read far more of the ones I find on my own and tend to avoid any posted collections of news sources that seems to have a agenda (even if I agree with said agenda).  I saw the phrase ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ bandied about today, best to try and not embrace that.

I sort of like what I find on my iPhone and iPad along with msn.  The number of news sources found there is impressive and runs across the political spectrum.  Although I’m sure my news sourcing would be considered amateurish by many, it suits me.

Here’s mine.  I’ve stopped watching news, as the Cheeto tends to prompt GERD.

[Athos_131]

Trump calls rally crowd ‘incredible patriots,’ a day after trying to distance himself from ‘Send her back!’

President Trump stepped back Friday from a day-old claim that he was unhappy with a hostile chant by his supporters, lashing out at the media for its coverage of the episode and calling the crowd at the North Carolina rally “incredible patriots.”

“Those are incredible people. Those are incredible patriots,” Trump said during an event in the Oval Office at which he again attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the Somali-born lawmaker whom he was criticizing at his rally earlier this week when the chants of “Send her back!” rang out.

“She’s lucky to be where she is, let me tell you,” Trump said. “And the things that she has said are a disgrace to our country.”

Asked about his unhappiness with the rally chant, Trump said, “You know what I’m unhappy with — the fact that a congresswoman can hate our country. I’m unhappy with the fact that a congresswoman can say anti-Semitic things.”

Trump has provided no evidence that Omar ever said she hates the United States, and earlier this week she said, “I probably love this country more than anyone that is naturally born.”

In tweets earlier Friday, Trump characterized media coverage of his rally in Greenville, N.C., as “crazed” and complained that media was “totally calm & accepting” of what he said were “vile and disgusting statements” made by Omar and three other minority congresswomen that he has repeatedly criticized in recent days.

Trump also complained that the media covered the return of Omar to her home state on Thursday. She was greeted at the Minneapolis−St. Paul International Airport by a crowd chanting, “Welcome home, Ilhan!”

Trump has taken repeated aim at Omar and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) since Sunday, when he said in tweets that they should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

The other three lawmakers besides Omar were born in the United States. Omar was born in Somalia and became a U.S. citizen in 2000.

Trump’s shift Friday in his comments about the rally chant was reminiscent of how he responded to the deadly clash between white nationalists and protesters in Charlottesville in August 2017.

Speaking from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., he initially denounced an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” an assessment that was widely seen as not going far enough.

Two days later, at the urging of aides, Trump delivered a more forceful, scripted statement a news conference at the White House, calling the racism practiced by white supremacists and other hate groups “evil.”

The next day, however, during a news conference ostensibly about infrastructure in New York, Trump softened that assessment, saying “there’s blame on both sides . . . very fine people on both sides.”

Much of Trump’s criticism of Omar has focused on remarks she has made about Israel. Earlier this year, she tweeted that support for Israel among members of Congress was “all about the Benjamins,” a reference to hundred-dollar bills.

Omar later apologized for her remarks and said she did not realize “how my comments would be offensive to Jewish Americans.” She also clarified that, in general, her remarks were aimed at criticizing the Israeli government, not Jewish people.

Trump also has falsely accused Omar of praising the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

In his tweets Friday morning, Trump curiously referred to “three Radical Left Congresswomen.” For days he has targeted all four. At his rally, he criticized all four of them by name.

A White House spokesman did not respond to a question regarding the change.

Trump also referred in his morning tweets to “Foul Mouthed Omar.” However, it was Tlaib who generated headlines earlier this year when she used profane language to call for Trump’s impeachment.

Trump, himself, frequently uses profanities. At his rally, he used the word “goddamn” twice, drawing some complaints from Christian commentators.

During an event Thursday in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that he did not agree with the chant of “Send her back!” and “felt a little bit badly about it.” He also claimed he had moved to cut the chant off by starting to speak against it “very quickly,” even though he paused for 13 seconds until the chant died down.

Kayleigh McEnany, a spokeswoman for Trump’s reelection bid, told CBSN on Thursday that Trump “couldn’t really hear what was going on” when the crowd started to chant.

Trump’s decision to try to distance himself from the chant came after a flurry of GOP lawmakers publicly condemned it, even while being careful not to denounce Trump directly.

Earlier this week, the Democratic-led House voted largely along party lines to condemn Trump’s weekend tweets in which he said the lawmakers should “go back” where they came from.

In his tweets Friday, Trump predicted he would win Minnesota next year, saying voters there “can’t stand” Omar and “her hatred of our Country.”

In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton carried Minnesota by less than two percentage points.

Later Friday morning, Trump retweeted several of his tweets from earlier this week in which he was critical of Omar and the other minority lawmakers, including one in which he said it was “sad to see the Democrats sticking up for people who speak so badly of our Country and who, in addition, hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion.”

Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, on Friday tweeted footage of Omar’s greeting at the airport as she returned to Minnesota the night before.

“This land is your land, This land is my land, This land was made for you and me,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote, adding the hashtag, “#IStandWithIlhan.”

During her remarks at the airport, Omar pledged to continue to be Trump’s “nightmare.”

“When I said I was the president’s nightmare, well you’re watching it now,” she said. “Because his nightmare is seeing a Somali immigrant refugee rise to Congress.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The long, ugly history of insisting minority groups can’t criticize America

All week, President Trump has been suggesting that black, Latina and Muslim congresswomen critical of his policies should “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested” countries “from which they came,” even though all but one of the lawmakers he has been attacking were born in the United States.

That made Trump just the latest in a long line of American politicians who have demonized ethnic and religious minorities for political gain. The congresswomen may be citizens, Trump’s argument goes, but they are not real Americans, and therefore they have no right to be “viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.”

The racist and nativist themes Trump and some of his supporters have taken up since he tweeted about the four women on Sunday have a long history in American political discourse. The idea that immigrants and their offspring should either accept America as it is or “go home” echoes attacks made against other groups a century ago. Immigrants, especially those not seen as white, have long been subjected to claims that they’re not entitled to the same rights and freedoms as other Americans.

The first large-scale American anti-immigrant movement, popularly referred to as the Know Nothing Party, did not advocate that immigrants “go home.” The vast United States only had about 23 million inhabitants in 1854, the Know Nothings’ heyday. Even nativists could not imagine the United States succeeding without immigrants doing the backbreaking kinds of work — digging cellars, unloading ships, scrubbing floors, washing clothes — that native-born Americans disdained.

The political issue that most often caused clashes between immigrants and nativists then concerned public schools. Most public school systems, relatively new institutions, were run by committees of ministers who made Protestant Christianity an integral part of the curriculums. When Catholic immigrants began arriving in large numbers in the late 1840s during the Irish Potato Famine, they asked school leaders where they settled to remove Protestantism from the classroom or to publicly finance Catholic schools so their children would have an alternative to overtly Protestant public systems.

Some people saw these Catholic requests as reasonable. But most were furious that newcomers had the nerve to tell native-born Americans how to run their schools. The Know Nothing response was not to direct immigrants to “go home,” however, but to “stay in their lane.” Keep digging our ditches and mucking out our stables but, even after you become citizens, don’t “dictate” how the country should be run.

Exactly how Catholics, who at this point made up no more than 10 percent of the population, could dictate anything to native-born Americans was never explained. Just having the temerity to question the status quo was seen as objectionable; to nativists, being Catholic rendered these immigrants incapable of being “true Americans.”

The language used by Trump supporters to excoriate Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Muslim born in Somalia, closely parallels that employed by the Know Nothings to attack the legitimacy of Irish Catholic politicians in the Civil War era.

To suppress political activism by “ungrateful” immigrants, Know Nothings tried to effectively strip the newcomers of their political rights altogether, proposing legislation that would have changed the waiting period until immigrants could became citizens and vote from five years to 21. But the Know Nothing movement was fleeting. In the North, where most immigrants and Know Nothings lived, voters came to see the growing political power of slaveholders as a more dire threat than the political threat posed by immigrants. So the naturalization laws remained unchanged.

Toward the end of the 19th century, Americans began to fear Catholic immigrants less and “godless” socialist immigrants more. Native-born Americans associated German immigrants (a group that, by then, included Donald Trump’s immigrant grandfather, Friedrich Trumpf, who arrived in America in 1885) with socialism and especially the radical brand of socialism known as “anarchism,” which espoused the use of violence to bring the movement’s goal to fruition.

A year after Trumpf’s arrival, a group of German-born anarchists in Chicago, angry about the violent suppression of a strike at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co., threw a homemade bomb into a squad of police breaking up a rally outside the factory. Seven policemen were killed, sparking nationwide outrage against immigrants in general and immigrant radicals in particular.

Most immigrants were not socialists. They came to America with dreams of getting rich, not fomenting revolution. And most immigrant socialists were not anarchists. They were democratic socialists who sought to achieve their goals at the ballot box. Some of their objectives were radical, such as government ownership of important industries. But most of their agenda — a ban on child labor in factories, guaranteed compensation for workers who are injured on the job, government financial assistance to those who lose their employment, limits on the rents landlords could charge, cut-rate “public housing” for the poor, and small government payments to the elderly “to take the edge off the fearful poverty and hopelessness of old age of members of the working class” — are today considered mainstream. Several socialists, including Russian Jewish immigrant Meyer London of New York, were elected to Congress in the 1910s and 1920s, where they endured vitriol from the right similar to that now directed at Omar and other members of “the Squad.”

The themes of that vitriol precisely mirror Trump’s line this week. By seeking to change the laws of the United States, nativists argued, immigrants (or even the children of immigrants) demonstrated a lack of gratitude to the country that took them in. If these immigrants, their American-born children and their elected representatives didn’t like the United States the way it was, they could keep quiet or go back to where they “came from” — even if they were not only citizens, but also duly elected representatives of their communities.

The most famous example of these sentiments being carried to their logical extreme was the case of Emma Goldman, another Russian Jewish immigrant. Drawn to radical politics by German immigrant anarchist Johann Most, Goldman became one of the American socialist movement’s most famous orators, sometimes advocating violence to punish rich industrialists who exploited their workers. She and Alexander Berkman plotted the assassination of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick after Frick brutally suppressed a strike at his factory in Homestead, Pa., in 1892. Berkman’s shot only grazed Frick, however, and while Berkman went to prison, Goldman escaped punishment. But she was jailed several times for disseminating information to women about birth control.

When Goldman became an outspoken critic of the draft during World War I, she was again arrested, this time for suppressing enlistment, and imprisoned for two years. Upon her release in 1919, “Red Emma” was deported back to Russia (by then, the Soviet Union) at the behest of a young J. Edgar Hoover. Goldman insisted that her deportation was unconstitutional because she was an American citizen. But a judge ruled that, because the citizenship of Goldman’s husband had been revoked in 1908, she was also no longer a citizen and thus could be deported for her anarchist beliefs.

Goldman was not the only immigrant deported for a political activism that native-born Americans decided showed ingratitude. Marcus Garvey was an immigrant from Jamaica who argued in the 1910s and ’20s that black Americans were so mistreated in the United States that they ought to go back to Africa of their own accord.

Whites did not like anyone fomenting discontent among African Americans, especially not an immigrant of color. Hoover tried to have Garvey deported around the same time as Goldman but was told by his superiors that he lacked sufficient grounds. Hoover then initiated an investigation of Garvey’s movement and eventually charged him with mail fraud. Meanwhile, the federal government declined to process Garvey’s application for citizenship, apparently due to his political beliefs. After he was convicted on the mail fraud charges and had served his sentence in federal prison, Garvey was deported in 1927 to Jamaica.

Since then, the “love it or leave it” idea has become a staple of right-wing demagoguery. The concept became especially prominent during the Red Scare in the early days of the Cold War and again during the presidency of Richard Nixon (when this cry was also used against white, native-born Vietnam War protesters). Now Trump is reviving it. His supporters, at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night, even started chanting, “Send her back!” when the president mentioned Omar, though Trump disavowed the chant on Thursday. It is ironic, and sad, that the president who has done so much to demonize immigrants was born in New York City, the world’s quintessential city of immigrants.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

A short history of President Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry

On Friday, 49 people were killed in a terrorist attack at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — the country’s worst mass killing since 1943. A suspect charged in the attack was reportedly an anti-Muslim zealot.

As news of the attack was unfolding, President Trump tweeted a link to Breitbart — a far-right “news” site. Breitbart has published vile anti-Muslim hatred, including calling Muslims “rapefugees,” mocking the notion of Islamophobia, and absurdly claiming that terrorist attacks are “an expression of mainstream Muslim values.” It’s a site where Muslim-hating white supremacists — like at least one of those who allegedly carried out the attack in Christchurch — would find writers who gave them rhetorical ammunition for their ideologies of hate. (Trump has since deleted the tweet.)

Trump is an Islamophobic bigot. As president, his words matter. He is using them to spread hatred. And deranged, unwell or evil people have allegedly been inspired by those words to target the very people that Trump targets in his speeches and his tweets. The charged suspect in New Zealand cited Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” (though he also said he rejected Trump as a policymaker and leader).

Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry has a long history. In 2011 and 2012, Trump insinuated that President Barack Obama was secretly Muslim. In September 2015, at a campaign rally, Trump nodded along as a supporter claimed “we have a problem in this country; it’s called Muslims.” Trump continued nodding, saying “right,” and “we need this question!” as the supporter then proceeded to ask Trump “when can we get rid of them [Muslims]?” In response, Trump said: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.”

In November 2015, on “Morning Joe,” Trump said that America needs to “watch and study the mosques.” Four days later, he indicated that he would “certainly implement” a database to track Muslims in the United States. Two days after that, he falsely claimed that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheered in New Jersey when the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Then came the most egregious statement — one that should haunt Trump’s legacy forever and taint everyone who supported him subsequently: On Dec. 7, 2015, he called to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. Three days later, Trump tweeted that the United Kingdom is “trying hard to disguise their massive Muslim problem.” On March 9, 2016, Trump falsely claimed that “Islam hates us.”

Upon taking office, Trump surrounded himself with anti-Muslim bigots. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump adviser, was fired by the FBI for his Islamophobia. Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national-security-adviser-turned-felon, said that Islam “is like a cancer.” And top officials such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton have also stoked hatred of Islam.

In late November 2017, Trump retweeted three videos by Jayda Fransen. She was one of the leaders of Britain First, a neo-fascist hate group. She has been convicted of multiple hate-crime offenses and was involved in organizing “Christian patrols,” which included what Britain First called “mosque invasions” aimed at intimidating British Muslims. While Fransen was out on bail, she appeared on Radio Aryan, a neo-Nazi radio station. Her interview began right after the station concluded its reading from “Mein Kampf.” That is who the president of the United States chose to amplify to his millions and millions of Twitter followers.

The list of Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry goes on and on. But just imagine replacing the word “Muslim” with “Jewish” or “black” in any of statements above. It immediately becomes clear that there is a grotesque double standard when it comes to the mainstream acceptance of anti-Muslim bigotry without consequence in the United States and the broader Western world. We must never reduce our vigilance toward the dangerous scourges of anti-Semitism and racism, but we must hold anti-Muslim bigots to the same standard that we would hold other bigots.

Last week, a prominent Fox News host and Trump ally, Judge Jeanine Pirro, suggested that wearing a Muslim hijab could be incompatible with believing in the U.S. Constitution. After her remarks sparked outrage, Pirro went on broadcasting as usual, only eliciting a toothless statement from Fox News. It’s clear that in media and in politics alike, vilifying Muslims is not unsavory enough to actually elicit consequences.

Some of the president’s supporters might accuse me of “politicizing tragedy,” but that is the only appropriate thing to do when tragedies are made more likely because of our politics. Hollow statements of condolence are meaningless if you are willing to turn around and support an Islamophobic bigot in the White House who makes those condolences more necessary.

The attack on New Zealand is an attack on religious freedom and an attack on that hallowed principle that worshiping the God of your choice should not make you a target of violence.

But if we want to stop such massacres, we need to work much harder to stamp out hate and bigotry in society — and part of that is to stop electing or supporting hateful bigots.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

In Another About-Face, Trump Refuses to Condemn ‘Send Her Back’ Chant

Trump on Friday demonstrated the limited influence of allies or advisers who try to steer him away from pre-election racial and cultural fights. He walked back his disavowal of a racially loaded chant at a campaign rally less than 24 hours after making it.

Acquiescing to behind-the-scenes pressure from nervous Republican lawmakers and from his elder daughter, Ivanka Trump, the president distanced himself on Thursday from the chant of “Send her back!” that the crowd at his rally on Wednesday in Greenville, N.C., directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who was born in Somalia. Mr. Trump said he was “not happy” with the chant’s language and claimed, falsely, that he had tried to cut it off.

But on Friday, the president appeared to disavow his disavowal — following the same three-stage crisis playbook he used after setting off a wave of criticism when he defended neo-Nazi protesters in 2017 Charlottesville, Va.

“No, you know what I’m unhappy with — the fact that a congresswoman can hate our country,” Mr. Trump said on Friday, referring to Ms. Omar, when he was asked about the chant condemned by Republicans as well as Democrats. “I’m unhappy with the fact that a congresswoman can say anti-Semitic things. I’m unhappy with the fact that a congresswoman, in this case a different congresswoman, can call our country and our people ‘garbage.’ That’s what I’m unhappy with.”

When asked about the chant again later in the day as he left Washington to spend the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Trump refused to condemn them. Instead, he seemed to be repeating his criticism of Ms. Omar and her allies in Congress without mentioning any names.

“You know what’s racist to me, when someone goes out and says the horrible things about our country,” he said. “The people of our country that are anti-Semitic, that hate everybody, that speak with scorn and hate — that to me is really a dangerous thing.”

The reversal followed the same pattern as the one after Charlottesville.

After Mr. Trump’s original response to the violence that took place there in August 2017, a low point of his presidency, aides urged him to take the high ground. Days later, he finally relented, reading a brief prepared statement from the Diplomatic Room in the White House in which he, for the first time, unequivocally condemned neo-Nazi groups and stated that “racism is evil.”

But the next day, he reverted to his original stance in a combative exchange with reporters in which he again blamed both sides for the violence that left one demonstrator dead and dozens injured. But while business leaders and Republican lawmakers briefly distanced themselves from the president at the time, Mr. Trump appears to have suffered little long-term political damage because of the episode — and that lesson appears to have made an impression.

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“It just destroys him to seem to be abandoning his base on any issue,” said Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian. “When he originally said he distanced himself from the chant at the rally, one could have guessed he would go back and embrace the people who cheered ‘Send her back!’ Contrite is not in his playbook.”

But even some critics of Mr. Trump said that the walkback of the walkback was not necessarily damaging to him. “I wish I could say it was foolish, but what have the actual consequences been in the real world or in Republican support of him sticking to his guns?” said William Kristol, the conservative columnist and prominent Trump opponent. “Being the tough, unapologetic guy, it keeps his brand stronger even if he takes a little bit of a hit.”

Mr. Trump continued his condemnation of Ms. Omar on Friday, claiming that she had “called our country and our people garbage.” It was not clear what remarks she made that he was referring to.

That attack continued his racially charged fight with Ms. Omar and three of her fellow Democratic congresswomen of color — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — into a sixth day.

Administration officials and campaign aides have rejected comparisons between Mr. Trump’s goading of elected women of color to “go back” to where they came from and what happened in Charlottesville. One was a deadly incident, they said, the other was a political fight.

But campaign aides have acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s tweets on Sunday — in which he used an age-old racist adage in telling the congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” — were unexpected, used loaded and unhelpful language, and any political strategy attached to them was reverse-engineered after the fact.

The president claimed his attacks were not politically motivated. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad politically; I don’t care,” he said. “I can tell you this, you can’t talk that way about our country. Not when I’m the president.”

While Republican lawmakers expressed outrage over what his supporters chanted in North Carolina, they kept their criticism of Mr. Trump to themselves.

Mr. Trump’s aides and allies did their advising in private, but his changing message made it hard for them to know whether they were on the same page as the man they work for.

One campaign aide, Mercedes Schlapp, retweeted criticism of the chant, promoting a commentator on Twitter to write that Ms. Omar was “an American citizen and chanting for her deportation based on her exercise of the First Amendment is disgusting.” On Friday, Ms. Schlapp said she stood by that tweet.

“I agree with the president on not going forward with the chant,” she said.

“When you look at her policies,” she said, referring to Ms. Omar, “that’s the problem. Her policies themselves are dangerous for America, and that’s what we’re concerned about.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Phoenix police union looks to 'scrub' officers from the internet after racist Facebook posts

The president of the Phoenix police union for rank-and-file officers said Thursday the group is researching a service that would "scrub" an officer's name from the internet.

The announcement comes in the wake of a Phoenix Police Department investigation into some officers who posted racist and inflammatory commentary on their personal Facebook accounts.

Michael "Britt" London, the president for the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, made the announcement in an uploaded video with updates for union members on the group's Facebook page.

"The Facebook investigation is still current, still going on," London said in the video, adding that someone associated with the union "has contacted a service that will scrub your name from the Internet. It's more of a security and privacy type thing."

He said in the video that the service could cost $3 a month but the union is still working on a deal. He directed members to call the union or visit a union members-only Facebook account to get more information.

Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a spokesman for Phoenix police, said in a Thursday email to The Arizona Republic the investigation into the Facebook posts is still under investigation by the department.

Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams said in a statement that a labor organization has the legal right to communicate with its members. She said this won’t affect the investigation.

"Questions about the actions of those organizations should be directed to them," she said in the statement. "The Professional Standards Bureau has confirmed that this action by one of our labor organizations will have no adverse impact on the current investigation into social-media posts, which is still ongoing."

London said in a statement the service is not to hide anything but to protect the privacy of officers and their loved ones from the public.

“The need for this service is to prevent the ongoing and frequent harassment of officers and their loved ones - harassment that is happening daily and that puts officers and their families at risk," the statement says. “This has nothing to do with hiding or ignoring anything. It has everything to do with keeping police officers and their families safe from those who continue to attack them online.”

97 Phoenix officers identified
In June, the Plain View Project, launched by Philadelphia lawyer Emily Baker-White, created a database of public Facebook posts and comments made by current and former police officers from several jurisdictions across the United States, including Phoenix.

The database shows hundreds of officers across the country posted racist or misogynistic statements or condoned violence on their Facebook accounts.

The project examined the accounts of about 2,900 officers. It reviewed the accounts of an additional 600 retired police officers.

It found 179 questionable posts from 97 current and former Phoenix officers. Many endorsed violence, in some cases against Mexicans, Muslims, women and criminal defendants.

BuzzFeed News and the nonprofit news organization Injustice Watch initially reported the story.

Union defends the officers
The Phoenix officer union, also known as PLEA, has previously defended the officers identified in the database.

"People — including cops — say things they regret or that are unfortunate," London has previously said. "But to judge an entire police department by a few social-media posts is doing a grave disservice to the nearly 3,000 sworn officers who work the front lines in Phoenix every day."

At the time, he also said police officers have used Facebook to raise money for officers who have died in the line of duty and support Phoenix residents, and the investigation didn't highlight those posts.

"Every day, we use social media to better connect and better understand our city," he said. "Unfortunately, in the hunt for a negative spin, this anti-police group ignored all that in favor of absolute sensationalism. Their bias says far more about them than it does the police officers they’ve chosen to target."

'Congratulation George Zimmerman'
Many of the Phoenix officers' posts in the database endorsed violence, in some cases against Mexicans, Muslims, women and criminal defendants.

Phoenix Police Officer Joshua Ankert, who has been with the department since 2007, wrote, "CONGRATULATIONS GEORGE ZIMMERMAN!!! Thank you for cleaning up our community one thug at a time," in July 2013, the day after a jury in Florida acquitted Zimmerman of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager.

Phoenix Officer Ryan Nielsen, a 15-year veteran, wrote a Facebook post on March 2010 complaining about his "ghetto neighbors" having a party and making a lot of noise.

In the comment exchange with someone else, Nielsen wrote that he planned to buy a shotgun but that his AR — presumably referring to the AR-15 firearm — would help protect his house. He also said in the comment section that he may call the Sheriff's Office and report the residence may be a drop house, a term used by law enforcement to describe a property where smugglers house undocumented immigrants as they await payments.

Officer David Pallas, who has been with the department since 1987, uploaded a meme on June 2016 critical of the Obamas. The meme depicts Michelle Obama with a quote that says, "Every single day I wake up in a house that was built by slaves..." Underneath it, there's a picture of famed actor John Wayne with a caption that says, "THEN GET OUT! AND TAKE YOUR GAY MUSLIM HUSBAND WITH YOU."

That same month, Pallas posted another meme depicting the Quran with a caption that read, "HOW ABOUT BANNING THIS. IT OFFENDS ME!!"

Among the retired Phoenix police officers listed in the database was Stephen Wamsley, who teaches a police-science class at Moon Valley High School.

Posts from Wamsley's account celebrated instances of violence against criminals and suspects. One referred to a shootout between biker gangs as "thinning the herd" and called for more violent executions and less humane treatments of death row inmates.

"Let's go back to the firing squad," one post said. "Why don't we sell tickets and give the proceeds to the (victim's) family?" Other posts contain Islamophobic rhetoric, including two promoting "crusades." 

Reuben Carver III, who has been with the department since 2002, wrote a Facebook post on March 16, 2011, that said, "Its a good day for a choke hold."

'Nazi pigs'
Early this month, police released 911 calls in which callers made threatening comments to officers after a Phoenix police encounter went viral. Some of the callers vowed to kill the officers involved in the video and called them "Nazi pigs," among other epithets.

Police have said they are also investigating these calls.

The bystander video that spurred the calls shows Phoenix officers pointing guns and yelling threats at Dravon Ames, his pregnant fiancee, Iesha Harper, and their two young daughters after the couple said their 4-year-old daughter took a doll from a Family Dollar store.

'Shocked at the posts'
The Phoenix Police Department's social media policy tells employees to be cautious of their "speech and related activity on social media sites" because it "may be considered a reflection upon their position, and, in some instances, this Department."

It goes on to say that, "Employees are prohibited from using social media in a manner that would cause embarrassment to or discredit the department in any way."

Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams has pulled some officers off of their "enforcement assignments" because of the Facebook posts identified in the database.

"When I started looking more at the posts, I'll be honest with you, I was shocked," Williams said shortly after the database was made public. "Shocked at the posts and the comments that clearly promoted and created hate and dissension."

#Resist

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Racism Is an Impeachable Offense

Donald Trump has a rich, varied history of racism, bigotry, and discrimination going back to at least 1973, when the Justice Department filed a racial bias suit against him for mistreating Black applicants and tenants all over New York. At the time, it was one of the largest lawsuits of its kind. That was 46 years ago. Since then, the list of offenses has piled up. In a better time, his racist behavior would have prevented him from ever being elected, but here we are. He’s president and now he’s openly carrying that bigotry right into the Oval Office. Not only do I think he is violating his oath of office — I think his open, flagrant bigotry is an impeachable offense.

In the days when Trump was busy tempting the front pages of tabloids in between guest appearances on professional wrestling pay-per-view shows, his racism, misogyny, and even open accusations of sexual assault and harassment were frequently dismissed by the general public with a wink and a nod. An equal mix of wealth, white privilege, and the public’s obsession with celebrities that allowed him to ride above it all. But now he’s president of the United States, not just an NBC employee with a bad reality TV show where not a single “Apprentice” ever developed into an actual meaningful employee. And he is, in theory, subjected to the Constitution and all of the laws governing the presidency. But the thing is, somebody actually has to enforce them.

Do you know the difference between implicit bias and explicit bias? I need to explain it for what I’m about to say to really make sense. Across the country, corporations and government agencies, including police departments, are offering a wave of what’s called “implicit bias training.” The fundamental theory is that, in this country, otherwise well-meaning employees can be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or xenophobic in ways that they may not really even be aware of. It’s the notion that people unknowingly or unconsciously discriminate against others. Racial slurs might not be used, but the resulting bias and discrimination are real and painful. It’s about preferences and promotions, and who’s punished and who’s spared. I’m not saying I buy it; I’m telling you that’s what implicit bias is. Implicit bias training is designed to teach people how they may be advancing systemic oppression without being fully aware.

Why don’t corporations and agencies have training for explicit bias? The answer is simple: Explicit bias literally violates thousands of laws, codes, and policies across the country. When you are an open bigot on your job, the standard operating procedure is that you don’t need training, you need to be fired. That’s because bigotry is dangerous. It’s dangerous to have a racist doctor or nurse. It’s dangerous to have an openly bigoted police officer. That’s why responsible prosecutors are now ignoring cases from police officers found to have been openly bigoted on social media — because it’s impossible to trust a person’s judgment and credibility, especially about people different than them, when they publicly admit to hating those people. All over the country, people are routinely fired for explicit bias. As they should be.

If this past week has taught us anything at all, it has taught us that Trump is not implicitly biased. To tell four sitting congresswomen of color that they should “go back” to where they came from is so overtly bigoted that an almost identical phrase is listed on Trump’s own government website for the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

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

Can we pause there for a moment? The United States government literally specifies the very phrase that Trump just uttered as a prime example of unlawful workplace misconduct.

The paragraph also alludes to why explicit bias is so dangerous. After Trump first targeted the four congresswomen on social media, his followers then ran with it and gave his initial attack a life of its own: Thousands of attendees at a Trump rally in North Carolina began chanting “send her back, send her back” to Rep. Ilhan Omar. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think it was and is one of the single most bigoted moments in modern American politics. The next day, Trump, who has told over 10,000 lies in office, told one of the dumbest of them all – saying that he tried to stop his followers from making the bigoted chant. He said that like we don’t have eyes and ears. He basked in the chant. He stopped giving his speech and allowed the chant to grow. And did so for a full 13 seconds. And when he started speaking again, he said nothing of the moment. In fact, he restarted his attack on Omar as soon as the chant died down.

Let me share a quote with you. And then I’d love for you to guess who said it.

Donald Trump is not just allowing it to happen, but actively encouraging it to happen, is an indefensible disgrace.

The President keeps insisting he’s not a racist, and I’ve repeatedly said that in the 13 years I’ve known him, I’ve personally never witnessed him being a racist.

But since running for the White House, his inflammatory language has flirted ever closer to crossing the line into overt racism, and now he’s crossed that line. Big time.

Let’s be very unambiguously clear: what happened in North Carolina last night was not just racist-fueled demagoguery but bordered on fascism.

There was the President of the United States whipping his supporters into a hyper-animated state of rage about a political opponent because of her ethnicity.

That was from the blowhard Piers Morgan: a lifelong friend and defender of Trump. Before we applaud him, I should note that soon after Morgan made this bold, respectable statement on Trump, he went into his own indefensible attack on Congresswoman Omar. But the greater point is this: Piers fucking Morgan said it “was not just racist-fueled demagoguery but bordered on fascism.”

Presidents and prime ministers across the world are calling Trump out and openly saying that the bigotry demonstrated by Trump and his followers is depraved and unacceptable. On top of that, you couldn’t name a single serious employer in this nation that would allow an employee to say and do what Trump and his followers are saying and doing.

I’d call that a problem. It basically means that the only reason Trump isn’t fired is because he’s president of the United States. He’d be fired from any other major corporation for this dangerous tomfoolery.

And only Congress has any real power to hold the president accountable. And while scores of progressive members of Congress have called for impeachment hearings to proceed, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for whatever reason, is against it.

Let’s examine what the presidential oath of office actually says. It’s one simple sentence. It says, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

I have questions.

Can we sincerely say that a man who has done what Trump did this week is honoring that oath? Can an explicitly biased person “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States?” Can an overtly racist person “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution?”

I emphatically say, hell no. An explicitly racist person cannot “preserve, protect, and defend” the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Both of those clauses were authored to protect groups of people who would otherwise be marginalized. They’ve been challenged and successfully defended for over 150 years because they were designed to ensure that all American citizens are treated equally. When Trump became president, he swore an oath that he, too, would play by these rules.

Can a person who is explicitly, overtly racist treat everyone equally under the law? I feel dumb even asking such a question. Now if you let them tell it, they’ll tell you “yes” a hundred times. But you can’t let a racist be the judge of whether or not their racism negatively fuels and shapes the way they think and make decisions. It’s the very reason why overtly racist people are fired from every single type of place of employment. If you are an overtly racist person, Walmart will fire you from bagging groceries. Uber will fire you from driving cars. Amazon will fire you from packing boxes. McDonalds will fire you from making burgers. Because you are a liability, and you can no longer be trusted.

The president of the United States should be held to a higher standard than an entry-level employee at any Fortune 5000 company in this country. Right now, he isn’t.

And only Congress has the power to change that.

#Resist

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3 sentenced for violence at Virginia white nationalist rally

Three members of a white supremacist group were sentenced Friday to between two and three years in prison for punching, kicking and choking anti-racism protesters at a white nationalist rally in Virginia and political rallies in California.

Members of the now-defunct Rise Above Movement were caught on camera assaulting counterprotesters before a planned “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.

Benjamin Daley, Michael Miselis and Thomas Gillen each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to riot. The men were sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville by Judge Norman Moon.

Daley, 26, of Torrance, California, was sentenced to 37 months in prison. Gillen, 25, of Redondo Beach, California, received a sentence of 33 months. Miselis, 30, of Lawndale, California, received 27 months.

U.S. Attorney Thomas Cullen said the men were motivated by “hateful ideology.”

“They were not interested in peaceful protest or lawful First Amendment expression; instead, they intended to provoke and engage in street battles with those that they perceived as their enemies,” Cullen said in a statement.

Members of the California-based Rise Above Movement frequently posted photographs and videos of themselves engaging in mixed martial arts street-fighting techniques along with messages related to the white supremacy movement.

In court documents, prosecutors said that from March 2017 to August 2017, RAM members — including Daley, Gillen and Miselis — engaged in acts of violence at rallies and organized demonstrations in Charlottesville and in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California.

As part of their guilty pleas, the men acknowledged that they did not commit the acts in self-defense.

Attorneys for Miselis and Gillen did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment.

Daley’s attorney, Lisa Lorish, said she and lawyers for Miselis and Gillen argued that prosecutors had not proved that a hate crime sentencing enhancement should apply in their cases. Lorish said Judge Moon denied the enhancement for all three men.

A fourth member of RAM, Cole Evan White, also pleaded guilty to a riot conspiracy charge and will be sentenced later.

#Resist

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Trump retweets far-right British commentator praising his attacks on Omar

President Trump retweeted a far-right British commentator Saturday morning who suggested “send her back!” is the 2020 version of “lock her up!”

The president, who spent Saturday morning retweeting people praising and defending him, promoted four tweets from Katie Hopkins, including one that showed a clip of Trump speaking about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at a political rally this week. Trump paused while the crowd chanted, “send her back!”

“New Campaign slogan for #2020? ‘Don’t love it? Leave it!’ Send her back is the new lock her up. Well done to #TeamTrump,” Hopkins tweeted with the video, referring to an anti-Hillary Clinton line commonly chanted at Trump rallies in 2016.

It’s been almost a week since Trump attacked Omar and her colleagues, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) with a racist tweet saying they should “go back” and fix the countries they’re originially from, rather than criticizing the United States.

All four women are U.S. citizens, and only Omar was born abroad, in Somalia.

Since then, Trump has continued to escalate the fight, refusing to back down from his contention that the Congresswomen “hate” America.

The day after the rally, he said he wasn’t happy with the crowd’s chant. But by Friday, he was defending his supporters.

In another tweet that Trump shared, Hopkins spoke into a camera for two minutes about how “brilliant” Trump was to go after four minority congresswomen and make the 2020 election a choice between them and him.

“Are you going to choose socialists, choose ISIS, choose the Palestinian flag, choose CAIR?” she wrote. “Or are you going to choose to Make America Great Again?”

In a separate tweet, she lamented, “How I wish we had such leadership in the U.K. Don’t like this country? Don’t like what it gives you? Then leave.”

Hopkins is known for her incendiary commentary. She wrote a column in 2015 comparing migrants to “cockroaches” and “feral humans.” After the 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Hopkins blamed the rabbi for supporting “mass migration.”

Trump has accused Omar of being anti-semitic because of comments she’s made criticizing the Israeli government and its supporters.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about whether Trump is aware of Hopkins’ past tweets. But it’s not the first time he’s shared her commentary.

A few weeks ago, he retweeted her celebrating the ascent of far-right leaders around the world.

#Resist

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In Trump’s vision of a white America, immigrants should be grateful and servile

When Donald Trump first proclaimed “Make America Great Again,” many white Americans focused on the slogan’s explicit appeal. Why wouldn’t we want America to be great again? But many of us who do not happen to be white understood the slogan’s subtext: Make America White Again. Immigrants, refugees and people of color have always recognized Trumpism for what it is — a politics of nostalgia for an era of unquestioned white superiority and power. Trump’s comments last weekend, that four congresswomen should “go back” to their ancestors’ countries if they don’t like this one, were also an argument that immigrants of color should simply be grateful to be here. Increasingly, post-white Americans are refusing to perform what many white Americans expect of them: docile compliance, with the implicit sequel of servitude. Instead, these proud Americans, who don’t hesitate to call Trump out, are both thankful and critical.

Call this mixture of gratitude and attitude a nuanced patriotism, a complicated love. Nuance like this is not a part of Trump’s rhetoric or his vision of America. Now, confronted by women of color who are not performing the gratitude and servitude he expects, he has made his own best case for even the most hesitant white people to recognize how white supremacy underlies his vision: “If they don’t like it here, they can leave.” This paraphrase of the classic insult “love it or leave it” implies that the four members of Congress do not belong to the United States, even though three of them — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — were born here. (The fourth, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, came here from Somalia as a girl and became a citizen.)

With these and other statements and silences, Trump is making whiteness, which has functioned as the politely invisible norm in American society, into the impolite, visible norm. Along the way, he is creating a situation where white people must choose: Be critical of their own whiteness or embrace it wholeheartedly. The fact that so many white people immediately recognized his racism is one good thing that has come out of this controversy, proof that they can identify and resist white supremacy.Exclusion Act, the first time it targeted a racial group for immigration exclusion.

Asian immigrants, and their American descendants, can testify to the pain of perpetually being suspected as foreigners. “Where are you from?” was the not-so-friendly question that many us have experienced. And if we tried to say that we’re from here, we braced ourselves for the follow-up: “No, where are you really from?” How often is a white person subject to this question? Do people ponder Robert Mueller’s ancestry? No.

Because whiteness is a paradoxical amalgamation of essence and transformation. On the one hand, white people’s whiteness is natural, inevitable, normal. Until recently, most white people never had their whiteness challenged or thought twice about it. Now their whiteness is more often questioned, thrown into relief against “terrifying hordes” of brown people at the southern border and increasingly vocal and visible populations of color within the United States. Now white people have to confront their whiteness. Some understand that it entails white privilege and that if we are to have a more just society, some of that privilege must be given up. Others deny that white privilege exists and retreat even further into a defensive whiteness, which results, in its extreme, in white supremacy.

On the other hand, whiteness is mutable, changing and becoming more inclusive. During the period of Chinese exclusion, for example, the Irish were not white like the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The Irish and other Europeans of questionable desirability — Greeks, Italians, Polish, Catholics, Jews and so on — only gradually became white, beginning at the turn of the 20th century. A new, pan-European whiteness solidified as the country kept out those clearly not white. White middle-class and working-class identity formed, attached to varying degrees of economic prosperity, culminating in the election of the Irish descendant John F. Kennedy Jr. This is the white privilege that results from getting into this country, getting jobs and other benefits that nonwhite people and women could not get, and claiming a forgetful Americanness, amnesiac about its origins.

A fusion of white supremacy and promised economic ascendancy is what Trump believes will repair the “American carnage” he identified in his inauguration speech. Here is another contradiction from a man of contradictions. He accuses these Democratic congresswomen of coming from places that are “a complete and total catastrophe . . . totally broken and crime infested,” but these are the same characteristics of a stricken America that he promised to fix. To think that they must “Make America Great Again,” he and his followers have to believe that America is like these other places, because it has been contaminated by the otherness brought in by nonwhite people. Against this terrifying mixing, he and his supporters want a comforting ideological, moral and racial purity.

That is what is most dangerous about Trump: the nostalgia for purity that supposes America is a white homeland and that motivates him and his followers to tell others to go back to faraway homes. This nostalgia is based on a fiction that the uncontaminated America is an immaculate place, despite the realities of an imperfect social fabric and the many tragedies taking place in actual American households: divorce, violence, homophobia, mental illness, unemployment and drug abuse — to name only some maladies. As for many immigrants, their new home in America is often as much a place of discomfort, even torment, as one of love and belonging. Immigrant stories are full of pain — the trauma of past wars and refugee experiences, the brutality of working constantly, the mundane destruction of affection that comes about when parents cannot spend time with increasingly distant children.

Not surprisingly, home has been a preoccupation for many American storytellers besides Trump. Against the Trumpian story of a Great White Nation, many of our storytellers have been telling more complex tales about America since at least the time of the runaway slave Frederick Douglass, whose home had been a plantation. It was no mistake that Toni Morrison, in “Beloved,” named the slave plantation in her novel Sweet Home. It was also no accident that Luis Alberto Urrea called his Great (Mexican) American Novel about a loving yet dysfunctional family — set on the border between California and Mexico — “The House of Broken Angels.” For many Native Americans, home was a reservation, a U.S. government euphemism for open-air ghettoization, and the setting of memorable novels by Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko. For Asian Americans, claustrophobic homes where immigrants hid are endless, as in Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior,” Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” and countless other books. Celeste Ng took this problematic home to its logical conclusion in “Little Fires Everywhere,” when the rebellious daughter of a white Ohio family runs away after burning down the family’s seemingly perfect suburban house. This is what whiteness has always been about in America: the great illusion that covers the enduring alienation, the spiritual loss that underlies the American Dream and gives it dramatic tension, as Jack Kerouac showed in “On the Road.” Even Trump, with his notion of “American carnage,” can be understood as an inheritor of Kerouac. What our storytellers have told us, over and over, is that home is often a complicated place that some want to stay in and some cannot wait to leave. Love it or leave it? If only life were so simple!

Nostalgia, which means homesickness, eradicates this complexity. Home often appears in our memory through a distorting longing so strong it borders on illness, where we forget all that might have been wrong and fetishize all that seemed good. “Make America Great Again” is an expression of this homesickness, threatening to hurt us all by defining home in only one way and turning it into propaganda, in the process expelling all those who do not fit home’s definition. Those fearful of change are homesick for an America that was, in fact, not so great for many people, including those white people who never benefited from America’s promise, from the poor to the working class to women of many backgrounds. To truly make America great requires the paradoxical ability to see that America as a home has always been imperfect. To make America a home for everyone means acknowledging that home is what we love and fear, what we remake and renovate.

This is not a hopeless project. In the late 19th century, almost no one helped Chinese immigrants. They had to defend themselves. Today, the spectacular cruelty of Trump’s rhetoric and his immigration policies is attacked constantly, both by people of color and by white people of conscience. We are a different America now (although that does not mean we cannot regress). To progress, we must redefine home and who belongs to it. While Trump wants to separate us into white Americans and everyone else, we must forge connections among people who do not look or think alike. We must say that this home is capacious enough for the white people to whom Trump appeals and for the rest of us, and that our destinies are tied together in a fateful kinship that no amount of border-closing or deportation will forestall. Economic prosperity does not have to be tied to nostalgic white supremacy. Instead, economic equality can emerge only by working through the agonies of our racial history, one that has exploited the poor of all colors and divided struggling white people from their nonwhite allies who also seek economic justice.

This is our American home. Passions are high, voices are loud, but this is the reality: Home is where we are, home is what we claim, and no one can tell us to go home if we are already at home.

#Resist

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The psychological phenomenon that blinds Trump supporters to his racism

President Trump’s tweet proposing that four Democratic congresswomen of color — three of them born in the United States, one a naturalized citizen — “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” was textbook racism. Yet while some Republicans condemned the statement — Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), who is black, lamented its “racially offensive language” — others flatly denied that there was a racial component to the salvo. A particularly contorted reaction came from Rep. Andy Harris (Md.), who said, “Clearly, it’s not a racist comment,” adding that the president “could have meant go back to the district they came from, to the neighborhood they came from.” But the president could hardly have made his meaning more clear: He said the four “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”

 “Well, I certainly do not think the president’s a racist,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who suggested that the tweet was justified by the representatives’ constant criticism “not only [of] the president but also Congress and our country.”

Fear of crossing a president who’s popular with the Republican base surely explains some of the convoluted rationalizations on offer. But a psychological phenomenon called cognitive dissonance may also shed light on some people’s unwillingness to acknowledge the self-evident racism in the tweets.

 Cognitive dissonance, first described by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the late 1950s, occurs when conflict emerges between what people want to believe and the reality that threatens those beliefs. The human mind does not like such inconsistencies: They set off alarms that spur the mind to alter some beliefs to make the perceived reality fit with one’s preferred views.

 In the case of Trump’s remarks — when absorbed by his supporters who do not consider themselves racist — those inconsistencies can be summarized in a sort of syllogism: (1) I do not support racists. (2) I do support President Trump. (3) President Trump has just made a racist remark. Those three facts simply don’t fit together comfortably in the mind.

 Just as a hungry person will seek food to alleviate hunger, Festinger argued, people who experience mental discrepancies of this sort will work to put them in accord, to reduce the dissonance. And they will often go to extraordinary lengths to do so: Resolving cognitive dissonance often takes considerable mental gymnastics.

 Supporters of Trump who experience cognitive dissonance over his remarks essentially have three psychological options to resolve it, altering in various ways the three beliefs that are in tension. One is to change the belief that they do not support racists. This response is unlikely, however, because it would require a massive overhaul of the view of the self, placing the person in a category he or she knows is morally dubious, not to mention socially vilified. Very rare is the person who will resolve psychological dissonance by saying, “Actually, I am a monster.”
Another option is to introduce new beliefs that bolster support for Trump. This does not address the conflicts among beliefs head-on but rather lessens the impact of the inflammatory statement by considering positive information about the president. One approach along these lines is to emphasize the awfulness of the policy positions and statements of the congresswomen Trump attacked, thereby casting the president as a defender of decency (and perhaps as a victim himself, not an aggressor). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), for instance, described Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) as “a bunch of communists” who “hate Israel” and “hate our own country.” Relatedly, Marc Short, Vice President Pence’s chief of staff, played up Trump’s lack of racism in other contexts, noting that his transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, was born in Taiwan. As reasons for supporting the president grow — either his sterling qualities or the negative characteristics of his opponents — it becomes easier to overlook a single misstep.

 A third route to resolving dissonance, in this specific case, is to flatly (and boldly) reject the consensus that telling someone to “go back” to their family’s country of origin is racist. Rep. Harris — with his revisionist argument that Trump wanted the women to go back to their districts — is probably the most striking example of this. But Fox News analyst Brit Hume may also belong in this category, with his hairsplitting statement that Trump’s comments were “nativist, xenophobic . . . and politically stupid” — but absolutely not racist, “a word so recklessly flung around these days that its actual meaning is being lost.” If Trump is just the latest in a long parade of people falsely accused of racism by liberals, that, too, makes it easier to take his side. (“Xenophobic” is not too far from “racist,” definitionally, but it does not carry nearly the same moral charge, so reframing the accusation that way may well ease psychological tension.)

 Since the uproar, Trump has proclaimed that many people agree with his controversial statement and that indeed, “a lot of people love it.” But decades of behavioral research suggests that not all the people refraining from condemning the president support his attacks. Instead, they’re doing mental contortions to explain away the ugliness, to justify their continued support of him — and to maintain their positive views of themselves.

#Resist

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‘He always doubles down’: Inside the political crisis caused by Trump’s racist tweets

President Trump’s own top aides didn’t think he fully understood what he had done last Sunday, when he fired off a trio of racist tweets before a trip to his golf course.

After he returned to the White House, senior adviser Kellyanne Conway felt compelled to tell him why the missives were leading newscasts around the country, upsetting allies and enraging opponents. Calling on four minority congresswomen — all citizens, three born in the United States ­­— to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” had hit a painful historical nerve.

Trump defended himself. He had been watching “Fox & Friends” after waking up. He wanted to elevate the congresswomen, as he had previously discussed with aides. The Democratic lawmakers — Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — were good foils, he had told his advisers, including campaign manager Brad Parscale. The president said he thought he was interjecting himself into Democratic Party politics in a good way.

As is often the case, Trump acted alone — impulsively following his gut to the dark side of American politics, and now the country would have to pick up the pieces. The day before, on the golf course, he hadn’t brought it up. Over the coming days, dozens of friends, advisers and political allies would work behind the scenes to try to fix the mess without any public admission of error because that was not the Trump way.

“He realized that part of it was not playing well,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump confidant, who golfed Saturday with the president and spoke to him about it on Monday. “Well, he always doubles down. Then he adjusts.”

Like others, Graham urged Trump to reframe away from the racist notion at the core of the tweets — that only European immigrants or their descendants are entitled to criticize the country. Advisers wrote new talking points and handed him reams of opposition research on the four congresswomen. Pivot to patriotism. Focus on their ideas and behavior, not identity. Some would still see a racist agenda, the argument went, but at least it would not be so explicit.

“The goal is to push back against them and make it not about you,” Graham said.

The damage control did not save elected Republicans from their chronic struggle to navigate Trump’s excesses. Democrats were demanding a reckoning, a vote on the floor of the House condemning his racist remarks that would showcase their own unity and moral vision. The White House would mobilize an intense whip operation, putting Trump repeatedly on the phone, to keep his members in line.

Then, just as many felt the firestorm was coming under control, Trump’s own supporters would set it ablaze again, with a “Send her back!” chant at a Wednesday night rally in Greenville, N.C., inspired by the president’s own words.

This account of Trump’s tweets and their aftermath is based on interviews with 26 White House aides, advisers, lawmakers and others involved in the response — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share behind-the-scenes details.

On Sunday morning, Trump tweeted that the “Washington Post story, about my speech in North Carolina and tweet, with its phony sources who do not exist, is Fake News.”

The political crisis was both familiar and extraordinary — engulfing every aspect of American politics, from the presidential campaign to the White House to Capitol Hill. Many in both parties, well acquainted with Trump’s history of racially charged rhetoric, were stunned at how far he had gone this time. Republicans were fearful of the potential damage but reluctant to confront or contradict Trump. The White House and the Trump campaign sought to contain the furor without alienating key supporters. Democrats finally unified after a week of squabbling to roundly condemn the president.

And at key moments, there were attempts to pretend it hadn’t happened at all. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) talked to Trump early in the week about ongoing budget negotiations, the tweets never even came up, according to two people familiar with the communication.

In the end, Trump succeeded in at least one respect. Just a few days earlier, he had publicly pined for the days when he could put out a tweet that took off “like a rocket.” Now he had done it again. Americans had to choose sides, and he had drawn the dividing line.

'Making America white again'
When Trump woke up to tweet on July 14, the nation’s leadership was scattered, its attention focused elsewhere.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was out of state. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had flown back home to San Francisco. The leaders of the House Republican Caucus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Steve Scalise (La.), were at a fundraising retreat at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Pennsylvania.

Of the group, only Pelosi, who sleeps just a handful of hours most nights, acted quickly. Trump’s tweets landed about 4:30 a.m. on the West Coast. Within three hours, just as Trump was arriving at his Virginia golf club, she had condemned his words on Twitter, calling out the racial tone directly, saying Trump’s “plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.” 

Trump’s eruption gave her a chance to move beyond an irritating, and increasingly personal, split with the four congresswomen. They had been furious when Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic Caucus declined to follow their guidance on a recent immigration funding vote. Now they were united.

At a joint news conference by the four lawmakers late Monday, Omar said Trump’s tweets represented “the agenda of white nationalists.”

Democratic candidates for president reacted quickly with outrage and offered support for the embattled House lawmakers.

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), the child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, told her campaign staff that she had been targeted by the same “go home” attack. In an emotional response at an Iowa event Tuesday, Harris said Trump had “defiled” his office and “it has to stop.”

“I am going to tell you what my mother told me: ‘Don’t you ever let anyone tell you who you are. You tell them who you are. Period,’ ” Harris said, growing visibly angry as she spoke. “We are Americans, and we will speak with the authority of that voice.”

Trump’s own campaign, by contrast, was caught off guard by the tweets and didn’t know initially how to respond. Top aides had been bragging about their ability to fundraise and capitalize on social media advertising when the president blew up the news cycle. But they placed no Facebook ads to ride this wave. The Republican National Committee was silent for more than a day. No one wanted to touch it, advisers said.

“People have been through so many of these with him,” said one Republican involved in the fight.

Cliff Sims, a former West Wing aide to Trump, explained the mentality that still governs the building. “The people who thrive and survive over the long term are the ones who are okay with going where the president leads,” he said.

But as the workweek began, it became clear that the uproar could not be ignored. A person involved in the president’s fundraising effort said many donors were dismayed by the comments — but that there was scant desire to back away from the president publicly.

“You put your head up, and you get it cut off,” this person said. “And then everyone remembers you weren’t loyal when this blows over.”

Many Republican lawmakers demurred or tried to find a middle ground, avoiding direct criticism of Trump while nonetheless expressing face-saving dissatisfaction. “We should focus on ways to bring people together,” said Sen. Cory Gardner, who faces a tough reelection race next year in Colorado.

Inside the weekly Republican lunch on Tuesday, GOP leaders tried to avoid direct references to Trump’s racist comments. McConnell repeated a phrase famously uttered by the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, a figure he reveres: “I attack ideas. I don’t attack people.”

One effusive Trump ally, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), spoke up in defense of Trump inside the lunch, ticking off a litany of conservative grievances against the left, such as their attacks against immigration enforcement and comments perceived as anti-Semitic.

“Let’s not lose sight of, frankly, the radical views that are coming out of the House,” Daines said in an interview, describing his message to the other Republican senators.

Still, other GOP senators were uneasy. At a minimum, it was “dumb politics,” said one senior GOP senator, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid about the president’s tweet.

Two of the harshest Republican pushbacks came, tellingly, from the only two elected black Republicans serving in Congress. Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) called the tweets “racially offensive.”

“There is no room in America for racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and hate,” said Rep. Will Hurd (Tex.).

'Stay there and fight'
By midday Monday, the Republican battle to minimize the damage was unfolding on two fronts. The first was an effort to get Trump to shift his message, without admitting a mistake. The goal, said one senior White House aide, was to “get the message back to a place where we could defend the president.”

The idea was to argue that the four congresswomen hated America and were welcome to leave for that reason. There were other lines of attack as well. Omar had been condemned earlier in the year for comments criticizing support for Israel that many Democrats considered anti-Semitic. Pressley had seemed to suggest a racial litmus test for politics, saying Democrats don’t need “any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

Privately, allies of the president said there was advantage in elevating “the Squad,” a term the lawmakers had adopted for themselves that Republicans have derided. They hoped to use the feud to portray reelecting the president as the patriotic thing to do.

“We’re talking about four congresswomen that have pretty extreme views,” Graham said. “If that’s the face of the Democratic Party, we’re in pretty good shape.”

On Capitol Hill, Republican leaders settled on a similar way to frame the disaster.

“I want to make absolutely clear that our opposition to our socialist colleagues has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion or with their race,” said Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), chair of the House Republican Conference.

Democrats, by now, were focused on making sure the nation did not forget Trump’s original message. Pelosi had begun working on a resolution of disapproval Sunday night in conversations with Reps. Jamie B. Raskin (Md.) and Tom Malinowski (N.J.). They had already introduced a resolution in April condemning white-supremacist terrorism, which was now repurposed.

But first they had to manage an unruly caucus, which began to jockey over the resolution’s language. At least one member pushed for a more aggressive resolution that would censure Trump. Another proposed inserting language commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The White House vote-counters initially feared as many as 50 Republicans might defect to support the resolution, and Trump ordered an all-hands White House effort to keep the GOP caucus together. White House aides told allies on the Hill that it was okay to criticize Trump, as long as they didn’t vote with Democrats.

Trump was obsessed with the vote tally and received regular briefings. Aides fed him a constant stream of lawmaker reactions and put him on the phone with several lawmakers. He told his team to tell any wafflers that he loves America and that they needed to pick sides. Trump called McCarthy to cancel an immigration meeting planned at the White House on Tuesday.

“Stay there and fight,” he told McCarthy.

Vice President Pence also worked the phones, telling Republican members not to fall for a Democratic trap.

In the end, only four Republicans broke ranks, including Hurd. Key members from districts where Trump’s “go back” message would play terribly stuck with the president. They included two members from New York, John Katko and Elise Stefanik, and Mario Diaz-Balart, the son of Cuban immigrants, whose Florida district is 76 percent Hispanic.

“A statement does not make one racist,” he told reporters.

'I'm sick of this mess'
While they lobbied in private, Republican leaders also began looking for a way to regain the narrative in public, at least in a way that could play with the conservative base.

When Pelosi came to the floor to read the words of the resolution, calling Trump’s comments racist — not Trump himself, despite what Diaz-Balart argued — Republicans saw an opening.

Their vehicle was an obscure text, Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice, a rule book that had governed the House floor since 1837. Based on old British traditions of respecting the king, an updated version of the manual specifically said the president could not be accused of making a racist statement, regardless of the accuracy of the allegation.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) — a United Methodist pastor and respected figure in the caucus — was up on the dais, tasked specifically by Pelosi to manage the debate. The chamber seemed close to finishing without incident when Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.) stood up to ask that Pelosi’s words be struck from the record by the parliamentarian.

Flashing through the Missouri congressman’s mind as he grew frustrated with Republican maneuvers were times he had been subjected to the same racist trope the president had tweeted, he said in an interview.

“I’m sick of this mess,” Cleaver recalled thinking. “In theology, we say the devil has two favorite tools: disunity and division. . . . I see people running around, the devil running around here, having fun. . . . I’m just thinking he’s just having a ball and using people to get delight.”

So, Cleaver announced, “I abandon the chair,” dropped the gavel and abruptly left the dais.

It didn’t matter that the president himself had said Pelosi’s response to him was “racist” just a day earlier, or that House rules still allowed the sentiment to be passed into law. Republicans finally had a way to cast themselves as the victims of an out-of-control Democratic leadership.

“Democrats are just so blinded by their hatred of the president that they use every single tool at their disposal to harass him,” said Chris Pack, communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “And it’s getting really pathetic.”

'We find a way'

By the time Trump landed in Greenville, N.C., on Wednesday evening, the mood had lifted in the White House, and Republicans believed the worst was behind them. A White House aide urged the traveling press pool to be sure to “tune in” to the rally, implying it was not something they would want to miss.

“You can take issue with his tactics,” said Josh Holmes, a close adviser to McConnell. “But the reality is that there is no political figure in memory who consistently saddles his opponents with unwinnable arguments quite like President Trump.”

But the nuance of Trump’s shifts all week had been lost on many in the crowd of thousands at the East Carolina University auditorium. Midway through his speech, as he recounted his denunciation of Omar’s record, the crowd began to chant “Send her back!” — a paraphrase of his own tweeted “go back.”

He paused for about 13 seconds to let the chants wash over him.

Back in Washington, and even for some Republicans in the room, it was a nightmare scenario suggesting that the nativism at the heart of Trump’s Sunday tweet — that nonwhite citizens had less claim on the country — would soon become a fixture of the campaign.

The following morning, Republican leaders, including McCarthy and Cheney, huddled at the vice president’s residence to figure out how to deal with the danger of the chant catching on. Pence agreed to take the matter to the president. 

Matthew Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group that had hosted Trump at its convention in April, also spoke out. The chants, he wrote on Twitter, were “vile” and “have no place in our society.”

Others in the White House began to reconsider the emerging strategy of using Omar’s record as a rallying cry for the base.

Trump agreed to say the chants were wrong — but few thought that would be the end of it.

Indeed, by Friday, he was attacking the four lawmakers again, suggesting that no criticism of the country should be tolerated and praising the rally chanters he had distanced himself from just a day earlier. “Those are incredible people. Those are incredible patriots,” he said.

There was little sign, in other words, that Trump had been cowed by the week’s experience.

At one point during the North Carolina rally, the president mused about Pressley’s remarks on race, which he characterized as thinking “that people with the same skin color all need to think the same.”

“And just this week — can you imagine if I said that? It would be over, right?” Trump continued. “. . . But we would find a way to survive, right? We always do. Here we are. Here we are. We find a way. Got to always find a way.”

#Resist

[horny guy]

REPORT: US is Less Racist Under Trump Than Obama

https://trendingpolitics.com/report-us-is-less-racist-under-trump-than-obama/?utm_source=fanclub&utm_medium=manychat

According to a recent study conducted by researchers Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington at the University of Pennsylvania, racism during the Trump presidency has gone down compared to racism during the Obama presidency.


This is a major narrative destroyer for the far-left media. Check out what the Spectator had to say:

Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington set out to measure the effect of Trump’s election on anti-black and anti-Hispanic prejudice, using a randomly-selected panel of 2,500 Americans whose changing opinions have been under study since 2008. The academics report that they had been expecting to measure a rise in racist opinions, writing: ‘The normalization of prejudice or opinion leadership both lead us to expect that expressed prejudice may have increased in this period, especially among Republicans or Trump supporters’. They had been led to expect this, they say, through an extensive reading of recent literature in social sciences which, they say, supports the notion that racist attitudes lie dormant inside many people, waiting to be triggered by certain events – of which the election of Donald Trump might be one. There could, after all, hardly be anything more calculated to awaken an incipient racist than the president calling Mexicans a bunch of rapists.
Yet the study found exactly the opposite. Americans, claim Hopkins and Washington, have actually become less inclined to express racist opinions since Donald Trump was elected. Anti-black prejudice, they found, declined by a statistically-insignificant degree between 2012 and 2016, when Trump was elected. But then after 2016 it took a sharp dive that was statistically significant. Moreover, contrary to their expectations, the fall was as evident among Republican voters as it was among Democrats. There was also a general fall in anti-Hispanic prejudice, too, although this was more evident among Democrat voters.

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In their abstract to the report, Hopkins and Washington state that President Trump used "explicit, negative rhetoric" to target racial minorities. They also ask "did this rhetoric lead white Americans to express more prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through the normalization of prejudice or other mechanisms?"

Check out the full abstract below:

In his campaign and first few years in office, Donald Trump consistently defied contemporary norms by using explicit, negative rhetoric targeting ethnic/racial minorities. Did this rhetoric lead white Americans to express more prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through the normalization of prejudice or other mechanisms? We assess that question using a 13-wave panel conducted with a population-based sample of Americans between 2008 and 2018. We find that via most measures, white Americans' expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after the 2016 campaign and election, and we can rule out even small increases in the expression of prejudice. These results suggest the limits of racially charged rhetoric's capacity to heighten prejudice among white Americans overall. They also indicate that prejudice can behave like an issue attitude: rather than being a fixed predisposition, prejudice can respond thermostatically to changing presidential rhetoric and policy positions.

[_priapism]

REPORT: US is Less Racist Under Trump Than Obama

Trump’s horrific racism spurs backlash among those polled.