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

[joan1984]

 Use of the charge, claim, brand "Racist", when the people in the story are not and have not been charged with breaking the law... and furthering the tale, with assthos posting such tripe here, further trying to tar President Trump with this non-story, is what upsets me, and what will hopefully sink voters who are so tired of such claims, to bother voting Democrat when next asked.

  Could one surmise, from the limited information given in the story, sure, and if one is seeking to have a chip knocked off one's shoulder, its as good a story as any to bitch about, meanwhile having NO EFFECT at all about true problems, and just spreading insane charges where there are no legal charges to be made.

  It is enough the Frat Kids have been shamed, and this incident has affected the education plans their parents paid for, for 'inference', rather than racism.

  You don't see it. I understand that. Assthos is truly hopeless, not worth worry or any saving grace. Hoping others realize the over use, crying wolf, does not help any cause you may wish to prosper.

[psiberzerker]

 Use of the charge, claim, brand "Racist", when the people in the story are not and have not been charged with breaking the law...

Nobody's charging them with the crime of being racist, but that picture is, racist.  (Also, Brandishing, and Menacing, by the legal definitions of both.)  Those frat boys are either intentionally posing as militiamen, to protect the sign from bullet holes, or proudly showing off the sight were a man was pulled out of the river.

That.

Is the crime.  

Here.

It's a crime scene, don't believe me?  Read the fucking sign.  A sign to tell anyone passing bye, what happened there, in 1955.

Either it was intentionally racist, or inadvertently racist, but until you can come up with a better theory than they're there to protect the sign from rednecks with guns.

The best you can come up with is "They're not racist."  When they sure look really very fucking racist, posing there, like that.

[psiberzerker]

You may try to argue which 1,000 words this is worth:



But anyone with 2 neurons to rub together can see that 1 of them is Racism.  No one, not even you, can seriously claim to not see it right there in front of you.

Unless you sympathize with White Supremacists.

[Athos_131]

 Use of the charge, claim, brand "Racist", when the people in the story are not and have not been charged with breaking the law... and furthering the tale, with assthos posting such tripe here, further trying to tar President Trump with this non-story, is what upsets me, and what will hopefully sink voters who are so tired of such claims, to bother voting Democrat when next asked.

  Could one surmise, from the limited information given in the story, sure, and if one is seeking to have a chip knocked off one's shoulder, its as good a story as any to bitch about, meanwhile having NO EFFECT at all about true problems, and just spreading insane charges where there are no legal charges to be made.

  It is enough the Frat Kids have been shamed, and this incident has affected the education plans their parents paid for, for 'inference', rather than racism.

  You don't see it. I understand that. Assthos is truly hopeless, not worth worry or any saving grace. Hoping others realize the over use, crying wolf, does not help any cause you may wish to prosper.

Don't like being called racist?

Stop posting racist things.

Or continue, and I'll continue treating you like the offensive shitbag you are.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Let the Gaslighting Commence: Covington Catholic High School Edition

Judge dismisses libel suit against Washington Post brought by Covington Catholic High School student

A federal judge in Kentucky on Friday dismissed a $250 million libel suit against The Washington Post brought by a high school student who claimed that the organization’s coverage of his and his fellow students’ encounter with an American Indian activist at the Lincoln Memorial in January was false and defamatory.

U.S. District Judge William O. Bertelsman ruled that seven Post articles and three of its tweets bearing on Nicholas Sandmann — who was part of a group of Catholic students from Kentucky who came to Washington to march against abortion — were protected by the First Amendment. In analyzing the 33 statements over which Sandmann sued, the judge found none of them defamatory; instead, the vast majority constituted opinion, he said.

“Few principles of law are as well-established as the rule that statements of opinion are not actionable in libel actions,” Bertelsman wrote, adding that the rule is based on First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech. “The statements that Sandmann challenges constitute protected opinions that may not form the basis for a defamation claim.”

Sandmann’s parents, who brought the suit on their son’s behalf, said they would appeal. “I believe fighting for justice for my son and family is of vital national importance,” Ted Sandmann said in a statement. “If what was done to Nicholas is not legally actionable, then no one is safe.”

The Post, in its motion to dismiss the suit, asserted that its stories were accurate and did not impugn the reputation of Sandmann, a Covington Catholic High School student who entered a social media maelstrom after video footage shot during a chaotic afternoon on the Mall showed him standing face-to-face with drumbeating Indian elder Nathan Phillips.

In his suit, Nicholas Sandmann claimed that the “gist” of The Post’s first article, on Jan. 19, was that he “assaulted” or “physically intimidated Phillips” and “engaged in racist conduct” and taunts.

“But,” the judge wrote, “this is not supported by the plain language in the article, which states no such thing.”

When the videos went viral, showing Sandmann and other students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, commentators saw an opportunity to criticize supporters of President Trump. Many claimed that Sandmann’s and other students’ behavior reflected a disrespect for the Native American elder, who is also a military veteran.

Phillips, who was part of an indigenous people’s march the same day, said in The Post’s first article about the incident that the teen blocked his way as he was trying to reach the top of the Lincoln Memorial’s steps.

Sandmann later said he was just remaining motionless and calm, in hopes of soothing emotions at the scene.

Sandmann’s suit called The Post’s coverage libelous on its face, but the judge’s opinion cited case law noting that statements must be “more than annoying, offensive or embarrassing.” They must expose the allegedly libeled party to public hatred, ridicule and contempt, among other damaging elements.

In seeking dismissal, The Post’s lawyers also noted that several of Sandmann’s complaints stemmed from the articles’ descriptions of the crowd’s behavior in general, not his. The judge, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, agreed in many cases. “And while unfortunate, it is further irrelevant that Sandmann was scorned on social media,” the judge wrote.

The judge also found no fault with The Post quoting Phillips.

“The court accepts Sandmann’s statement that, when he was standing motionless in the confrontation with Phillips, his intent was to calm the situation and not impede or block anyone,” the judge wrote.

“However, Phillips did not see it that way. He concluded that he was being ‘blocked’ and not allowed to ‘retreat.’ He passed these conclusions on to The Post. They may have been erroneous, but . . . they are opinion protected by the First Amendment. And The Post is not liable for publishing these opinions.”

“From our first story on this incident to our last, we sought to report fairly and accurately the facts that could be established from available evidence, the perspectives of all of the participants, and the comments of the responsible church and school officials,” said Shani George, The Post’s director of communications. “We are pleased that the case has been dismissed.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Frankly, if Yellow Wall was concerned about racism, that poster would be defending Trump's racist tweets toward Rep. Cummings.  Maybe that poster is too cowardly because it's close to home.

Instead Yellow Wall decided to defend some assholes who found it hilarious to celebrate Emmett Till's murder.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

This is your periodic reminder Yellow Wall does anything possible to derail this thread.

The first post they made here was some nonsense about Hillary Clinton losing the election.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

This is your periodic reminder Yellow Wall does anything possible to derail this thread.

Coming from you.  

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

 

Yeah, but you brag about fighting against "Hypocrites" anywhere on the boards, and your favorite MO is derailing the thread with post-spam.

You're the one that's notorious for it, here in this thread.  You want examples?

[Athos_131]

You're the one whining about trying to be my friend.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

You're the one whining about trying to be my friend.

   Is that what you think it is?  No, I said I was disappointed, because you had a chance to #Resist and didn't.  We don't have to be friends to work together on our common goals.

Allies, not Friends.  Now, I believe you're strawmanning "Yellow Wall."  Please, do go on...

[Athos_131]

K.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

#Resist

I am.  You're welcome to start, any time...

[Athos_131]

K.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The ‘I alone can fix it’ president wants black areas to fix themselves

It doesn’t take much evidence for President Trump to decide he’s right. Dead people still on voter rolls? Then he clearly lost the popular vote in 2016 because of voter fraud. A warrant was obtained against a former campaign staffer a few weeks before the election? Then the entire investigation into Russia’s role in the election was obviously invalid.

The most recent example came Saturday, when Trump began his day by watching a Fox News segment looking at run-down areas in Baltimore. The report featured video filmed by a Republican activist from the city and was used to draw a specific contrast: This is what Rep. Elijah E. Cummings’s district looks like. Yet, the Maryland Democrat has the gall to criticize Trump?

Never mind that what was shown were individual units in one part of Cummings’s district. Never mind that his district also reportedly includes rental units owned by Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner. Those discrete bits of televised evidence, those several rowhouses — on Fox News, no less! — were more than enough for Trump to offer a sweeping assessment of Cummings’s tenure.

“Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border,” Trump tweeted, “when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA. As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

It takes an enormous amount of chutzpah for Trump to level this charge. This was, after all, the president who pledged at his party convention three years ago this month that he alone could fix the government’s problems. Since he’s been president, Trump has traveled to Maryland several times in an official capacity, but never to Baltimore.

His invocations of the city since he has been president include a mention of East Baltimore as he established “opportunity zones” in several regions — designations that could end up benefiting Kushner.

Most of the times he has mentioned Baltimore, though, have been to lump it together with other heavily black places such as Detroit and Chicago as a stand-in for “dangerous, run-down areas.” We’re spending money on wars overseas, he said, while “neglecting the fate of American children in cities like Baltimore and Chicago and Detroit.” Speaking to police officers, he lamented that we had “seen the unbearable horror of the shortcomings in Baltimore and Chicago that have cut short so many lives and so many beautiful, beautiful dreams.”

He uses “Baltimore” as an invocation of something bad. It is something from which people must be lifted up or against, something from which the rest of the country should be compared. It overlaps with how he uses “infest,” a term that been used by Trump on Twitter to describe only places that are mostly nonwhite or heavily Democratic.

To contrast himself with Cummings, Trump insisted on Sunday that he has done more for black Americans than have Democrats simply because the black unemployment rate has fallen.

When Trump took office, 57.5 percent of the country’s working-age black population was employed; now, 58.2 percent are. Over the prior three years, the percentage had climbed 4.2 points. The unemployment rate in the Baltimore area has dropped under Trump, from 4.5 percent to 3.8 percent. Three years before his inauguration, it was at 6.3 percent. Employment growth there has trailed the rest of the country.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly conflated the concerns of black Americans with problems in the “inner city,” as though what was happening in places such as West Baltimore defined the black experience.

Trump’s main pitch to black voters in 2016 was: “What do you have to lose?” To be fair, that pitch included no promise of black voters actually gaining much in voting for him.

Trump’s disparagement of Baltimore and his insistence that its problems are Cummings’s problems and not his own reflects where Trump thinks government resources should be expended. Just as he championed a $16 billion bailout for farmers at the same time his administration was mulling a $15 billion cut to food stamps, Trump sees some parts of America as deserving of concern and others as hopelessly broken.

Struggling places such as West Virginia are victims from outside forces that must be combated, like environmentalists and drug-smuggling immigrants. Baltimore? Baltimore’s problems aren’t a function of decades of structural racism or neglect but, instead, the fault of the people who live there and represent it.

There’s a paradox that’s worth reiterating: If it’s an indictment of Cummings that Baltimore has problems, it is necessarily also an indictment of Trump. Both are in positions of political authority over it, but at least Cummings has spent time in the district.

To compare Baltimore to the border, as Trump did, exposes what the president is actually doing. Trump has direct control over facilities at the border housing migrants, facilities that have been repeatedly criticized as dirty, under-resourced and unhealthy for those interned in them. Baltimore, while part of the United States, is at enough of a remove that he can pass the buck wherever he wants. He doesn’t even need to pretend that it’s his responsibility — and his defenders quickly stepped up to bolster that belief.

A few rowhouses prove that Cummings is a hypocrite. A few news stories raising alarms about conditions at the border? Fake news.

Early last year, I was in Baltimore to see how residents felt about the president one year into his term. I spoke with a man named Oliver Spriggs, 78, who lived in Cummings’s district. He was walking with his 8-year-old grandson, Keishawn.

I asked how he thought Trump was doing.

“You really don’t want to know,” Spriggs replied.

Keishawn chimed in: “Horrible!"

"Lousy!” Spriggs said. He said that he felt Trump was a liar.

“And as far as I’m concerned,” Spriggs added, “he’s a racist in his words and his actions.”

His grandson, surprised, looked at his grandfather.

“He’s a racist?” Keishawn asked.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Rot You Smell Is a Racist Potus

It seems maddeningly repetitive to have to return time and again to the fact that Donald Trump is a racist, but it must be done. It must be done because it is a foundational character issue, one that supersedes and informs many others, in much the same way that his sexism and xenophobia does.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Representative Elijah Cummings’s district “is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” a “very dangerous & filthy place” and “No human being would want to live there.” Cummings is black, as are most people in his district.

This talk of infestation is telling, because he only seems to apply it to issues concerning black and brown people. He has sniped about the “Ebola infested areas of Africa.” He has called Congressman John Lewis’s Atlanta district “crime infested” as well as telling him to focus on “the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S.” He has called sanctuary cities a “crime infested & breeding concept.” He has talked about how “illegal immigrants” will “pour into and infest our Country.” He has called the presence of the MS-13 gang members “in certain parts of our country” an “infestation.”

None of this is about crime as a discrete phenomenon, but rather about inextricably linking criminality to blackness. White supremacy isn’t necessarily about rendering white people as superhuman; it is just as often about rendering nonwhite people as subhuman. Either way the hierarchy is established, with whiteness assuming the superior position.

A survey of Trump’s tweets reveals that his attachment of criminality to populations is almost exclusively to black and brown people and to “inner cities,” an urban euphemism for black and brown neighborhoods.

Trump has repeatedly made clear his view, from the Central Park Five case to a series of tweets he published in 2013, writing: “Sadly, the overwhelming amount of violent crime in our major cities is committed by blacks and hispanics — a tough subject — must be discussed.”

But, blackness doesn’t make one more apt to abuse others, any more than whiteness makes one apt to abuse opioids. Human beings respond to their environments, to their needs and desires, to their hopelessness and despair.

For instance, crime raged in New York City in the 1800s when there were almost no black people in the city. Indeed, in 1985, the writer and prodigious chronicler of New York City, Edward Robb Ellis, wrote in The New York Times about a citizen complaining in 1852 that “the increase of crime, the ferocity and frequency of assaults on private citizens at night in this city, and the … imbecility and inefficiency of the police is creating great alarm in the decent and orderly portion of our inhabitants.”

According to Ross, Walt Whitman himself said, “New York is one of the most crime-haunted and dangerous cities in Christendom.”

Were the white people living in New York at the time racially, pathologically predisposed to criminality? Of course not. And black and brown people now aren’t. That historical and sociological context is lost on the racists.

Furthermore, there is nothing benign in Trump’s language. Infestations justify exterminations. There is a reason that Martin Luther King Jr. said, “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.” The mouth that demeans may not always be attached to the hand that destroys, but they are most assuredly connected in spirit and in spite.

It would be easy to prosecute a case against Trump on policy, but policies are not at the center of the creature. White supremacy, white nationalism and white patriarchy are.

The core of this man is racist in a way that is so fused to his sense of the world that he is incapable of seeing it as racist. It is instinctual for him to attack people of color. It is instinctual for him to denigrate the places they live and the countries to which they trace their heritage.

He has so bought into the white supremacist narrative that his ideology no longer requires, in his own thinking, a label. For him, this lie of it is just the truth of it, and what is “right” can’t be racist.

This is a means by which racists have operated throughout history, to rescue themselves from association with those who flayed the flesh of the enslaved, who raped the women and sold the children, who released the dogs and aimed the water cannons, who noosed the necks and set ablaze the crosses.

Those demonstrative few, those consumed by hatred and sadism, those were the racists. Not the exponentially larger groups who swallowed and regurgitated a warped view of the world, a doctored view of history, and supposedly damning “facts” without contextualization.

Trump is a racist. Say that out loud. Say it with the profundity that it deserves. That to me is the beginning and the ending of the rationale I need to stand steadfast in my resistance.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The story about Elijah Cummings’s district that Trump isn’t interested in telling

President Trump’s sweeping disparagement of Maryland’s 7th Congressional District over the weekend was obviously not informed by the district’s actual dynamics. Trump apparently saw a segment on Fox News in which a Republican activist shared videos of run-down houses in a district represented by a fierce critic of the president, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.). With a flick of his magic Twitter wand, Trump declared the district to be so toxic as to be uninhabitable.

“No human being would want to live there,” he wrote on Twitter, a wholesale denigration of the people who do live there — people who, in Trump’s eyes, either don’t want to live there or aren’t human. Trump was focused on the portion of Baltimore that Cummings represents (the dark-blue cluster in the district), almost certainly without recognizing that the district also stretches out into the suburbs and includes no fewer than 64,926 people who voted for Trump in 2016.



Cummings’s district is “considered the Worst in the USA,” according to the president’s random attack, and is “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.” It’s a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” Trump went on, and “very dangerous & filthy."

Again, Trump was responding to a few videos shared by a Republican who lives in Baltimore, but it took very little for him to extrapolate: It’s Baltimore, so it’s poor, dangerous and dirty — which is precisely the context in which Trump has always referred to the city.

The thing is, though: Cummings’s district isn’t that poor. Compared with the other 434 congressional districts, the 7th District is in the 61st percentile on median household income. White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s old district, South Carolina’s 5th District, is in the 22nd percentile for income, despite Mulvaney disparaging Cummings’s district on Sunday.



(Here, we’ve compared incomes to the Cook Political Report partisan voting index, a look at how districts have voted in the past two presidential elections. On these charts, districts that backed Trump in 2016 are in red.)

Mulvaney specifically referred to poverty, a metric on which his old district and Cummings’s are about equal, according to Census Bureau data. Maryland’s 7th District is in the 70th percentile for poverty. Poverty there is significantly lower than in, say, the heavily Republican 5th District of Kentucky, which Trump has not targeted for disparagement on Twitter.



In both of those graphs, we’ve overlaid another dimension: the density of the white population in the districts. The smaller the circle on the graph, the more heavily nonwhite it is.

Let’s compare income and race directly. Many of the most heavily black districts in the United States are also on the lower end of the income spectrum. Maryland’s 7th District has the second-highest median income among districts that are at least half black. (The highest is found in Maryland’s 4th District.)



Part of Trump’s focus on Baltimore concerns the rate of violent crime in the city. The Gun Violence Archive tracks shooting incidents by congressional district. From 2014 to now, there were 4,335 such incidents in Cummings’s district, the third-highest of any district.



This doesn’t correlate precisely to poverty at the district level. The district with the highest poverty rate in the country, according to the Census Bureau, is New York’s 15th District, represented by Rep. José E. Serrano (D-N.Y.). The district with the most shootings is Illinois’s 7th, in Chicago — a district that does have higher poverty than the median.

On average, the 15 congressional districts with the highest number of shooting incidents are in the 88th percentile nationally for poverty.



The lowest poverty rate of those 15? Maryland’s 7th District.

There’s a complicated overlap among race, crime and income. There are long-standing systemic reasons for Baltimore’s poverty, explored by The Post during unrest in the city in 2015. As Emily Badger wrote then:

“Just a few years ago, Wells Fargo agreed to pay millions of dollars to Baltimore and its residents to settle a landmark lawsuit brought by the city claiming the bank unfairly steered minorities who wanted to own homes into subprime mortgages. Before that, there was the crack epidemic of the 1990s and the rise of mass incarceration and the decline of good industrial jobs in the 1980s.”

“And before that? From 1951 to 1971, 80 to 90 percent of the 25,000 families displaced in Baltimore to build new highways, schools and housing projects were black. Their neighborhoods, already disinvested and deemed dispensable, were sliced into pieces, the parks where their children played bulldozed.”

“And before that — now if we go way back — there was redlining, the earlier corollary to subprime lending in which banks refused to lend at all in neighborhoods that federally backed officials had identified as having ‘undesirable racial concentrations.’”

But again: As that first map shows, the district isn’t all Baltimore. There’s another gap that’s worth highlighting, in fact. The median household income for white households in Cummings’s district is 2.25 times the income for black households. That’s a higher discrepancy than in all but 13 other districts — including Illinois’s 7th District.



Despite that gulf, black household incomes in Cummings’s district are in the 61st percentile among congressional districts — the same position white households hold. Why the above gap, then? White households in his district have incomes that are in the 91st percentile. About a third of the district is white, according to the Census Bureau. Voter data from the data firm L2 suggests that those white voters are more heavily Democratic than Republican.

It’s a complicated picture, one that Trump obviously isn’t interested in. He often presents blue districts — particularly urban, heavily nonwhite blue districts — as representations of the worst of America. That fails to capture the complexity of the situation. Here, the goal is obvious: Bash Cummings. Picking out one part of a district to impugn an elected leader, though, means that Trump might be held more accountable for Baltimore than Cummings himself.

In the 2016 election, the Republican running against Cummings pulled in 21.8 percent of the vote. Trump did a bit worse, getting 20.2 percent and about 4,000 fewer votes.

Given the weekend’s tweets, it seems quite possible that Trump might do worse in 2020.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Gilroy Garlic Fest Shooter Plugged a White Power Manifesto on Instagram

On Sunday afternoon, a gunman opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, an annual summer festival in the quiet city of Gilroy, California, located about 30 miles south of San Jose. The gunman killed three people, including a six-year-old boy, and injured at least 12 others. Police said the gunman had been shot and killed and that authorities suspected he may have had an accomplice, who was still at large.

Although authorities initially did not reveal the identity of the shooter, local news station KPIX 5 reported he was a 19-year-old man named Santino Legan. Police recovered a backpack filled with ammunition at the scene, and they later searched his home and a second location.

Little is currently known about Legan: Though witnesses claim to have heard him say he was “really angry” while he was opening fire on the crowd, there’s not much indication as to his potential motive for the shooting. While his social media platforms appear to have been deleted as of Monday morning, one post on his alleged Instagram read: “Ayyy garlic festival time. Come get wasted on overpriced shit.” Another post on the now-deleted Instagram included a picture of a Smokey the Bear sign advocating for forest fire prevention, with Legan writing in the caption: “Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to cater to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?” then plugging the text Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.

A 19th-century text of unknown authorship (its origins have been attributed to everyone from British author Arthur Desmond to Call of the Wild novelist Jack London), Might Is Right has long been considered a key text in the white supremacist movement, says Keegan Hankes, a senior analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s intelligence project. “It’s widely popular and present among ethnocentric white nationalists of all levels, from suit-and-tie white supremacists to neo-Nazis,” Hankes tells Rolling Stone.

The text, which has been banned in multiple countries, essentially advocates for social Darwinism, or the idea that members of certain races or ethnicities are inherently better equipped for survival than others. The author argues that true egalitarianism does not and cannot exist, and that the “white race” is inherently biologically superior to other races.

Although the social Darwinist arguments in the text were not considered all that radical in the 19th century, when the eugenics movement was at its height, it has since been embraced by everyone from noted satanist Anton LaVey to Katja Lane, the wife of white-nationalist-organization The Order founder David Lane, who wrote the preface for its 1999 reprinting. It is also available on the white supremacist website Counter-Currents, and the PDF version has become a staple of white supremacist digital libraries and forums.

“The most important thing [about the text] is this belief in ethnocentricity and biological determinism that is getting pulled from the late 19th century to this current day,” says Hankes. “The ideas are ubiquitous today in white supremacist circles.”

While it’s still unclear whether the shooting was racially motivated, or if Legan had any other concrete ties to extremist circles, this would not be the first time that a mass shooter had been influenced by old-school white supremacist writings. The manifesto of the Christchurch shooter, for instance — while primarily designed to incite division and troll its readers — also contained allusions to Oswald Mosley, a 1930s British fascist known for his Nazi sympathies and xenophobic ideology, and to the writings of David Lane.

“Unfortunately, this is starting to feel all too common,” says Hankes. “There’s a tragedy and we look for a connection to white supremacy, and these are exactly the types of breadcrumbs you might expect.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump attacks Al Sharpton hours before a news conference in Baltimore

President Trump attacked the Rev. Al Sharpton on Monday as “a con man” and someone who “Hates Whites & Cops,” just hours before Sharpton held a news conference in Baltimore to decry Trump’s derogatory weekend tweets directed at the city and an African American congressman.

Sharpton, a former Democratic presidential candidate and MSNBC talk-show host, appeared in Baltimore alongside Michael Steele, who formerly chaired the Republican National Committee and served as Maryland’s lieutenant governor.

At the event, held at a Baltimore church, Sharpton said Trump had attacked the city and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) in “the most bigoted and racist way.”

“He has a particular venom for blacks and people of color,” Sharpton said of Trump.

Steele, the first African American elected statewide in Maryland, criticized Trump for “reprehensive comments” and invited him to come to Baltimore.

“Put the tweet down brother, and show up,” Steele said.

In tweets beforehand, Trump said he had known Sharpton for 25 years. He said the two “always got along well” and attended boxing matches together.

“He would ask me for favors often,” Trump said. “Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score. Just doing his thing. Must have intimidated Comcast/NBC. Hates Whites & Cops!”

Sharpton’s news conference came two days after Trump criticized Baltimore as a “rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live” and attacked Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who represents part of the city. Cummings chairs the House Oversight Committee, which has been holding an array of hearings critical of Trump administration practices.

Sharpton responded Monday morning on Twitter by sharing a photograph of Trump attending a 2006 conference hosted by Sharpton’s organization, the National Action Network. The photo also included singer James Brown and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.

“Trump at NAN Convention 2006 telling James Brown and Jesse Jackson why he respects my work. Different tune now,” Sharpton wrote.

Trump soon responded on Twitter, saying that Sharpton would “always ask me to go to his events” as “a personal favor.”

“Seldom, but sometimes, I would go. It was fine,” Trump said.

Sharpton later continued the back-and-forth on Twitter, writing: “Trump says I’m a troublemaker & con man. I do make trouble for bigots. If he really thought I was a con man he would want me in his cabinet.”

Trump also renewed his attacks on Baltimore and Cummings on Monday, asserting in a tweet that the city of more than 600,000 people “has the worst Crimes Statistics in the Nation.”

“25 years of all talk, no action!” Trump wrote. “So tired of listening to the same old Bull...Next, Reverend Al will show up to complain & protest. Nothing will get done for the people in need. Sad!”

Steele also spoke out about Trump over the weekend, raising a question in a tweet about “how much more of Trump’s incessant whining, tweeting, bullying, & racism are we willing to put up with.”

Trump launched his attacks on Cummings two weeks after he started taking aim at a group of four liberal minority congresswomen known on Capitol Hill as “the Squad.”

In the first of his tweets attacking the freshman lawmakers, he said they should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” — remarks that drew a rebuke from the House.

Only one of the four women — Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali refu­gee who became a U.S. citizen in 2000 — was born outside the United States. The others — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — were born in the United States.

In another tweet Monday, Trump referenced the four lawmakers again.

“If the Democrats are going to defend the Radical Left ‘Squad’ and King Elijah’s Baltimore Fail, it will be a long road to 2020,” he said.

Trump’s advisers have concluded that the overall message sent by such attacks is good for the president among his political base — resonating strongly with the white working-class voters he needs to win reelection in 2020.

Sharpton also saw a political motive in Trump’s attacks. During a call Monday morning into MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he said, “I think this is Trump getting ready for reelection.”

Later Monday morning, Trump struck a more hopeful note about Baltimore and suggested that the city’s leaders call him.

“The fact is, Baltimore can be brought back, maybe even to new heights of success and glory, but not with King Elijah and that crew,” he said. “When the leaders of Baltimore want to see the City rise again, I am in a very beautiful oval shaped office waiting for your call!”

#Resist