Students protest Milo Yiannopoulos’ appearance at UC Berkeley Wednesday evening. CREDIT: AP Photo/Ben Margot.
Milo Yiannopoulos calls President Trump “Daddy,” and it seems the relationship might be mutual.
Wednesday evening, UC Berkeley ultimately canceled a speech by Yiannopolous, Breitbart editor and professional provocateur, just two hours before it was to take place. The speech, organized by Berkeley College Republicans, was massively protested, and those demonstrations turned increasingly violent after masked protesters not affiliated with the university started marching on Oakland.
Early Thursday morning, Fox News commentator Todd Starnes railed against the protests:
The birth place of free speech became its graveyard. So here’s what needs to happen: President Trump should immediately issue an executive order blocking Berkeley students from receiving any federal funding. Same goes for any other public university that wants to silence conservative voices. Free speech for all or no federal money! Not a single taxpayer penny, period!
That segment aired around 5:17 am. An hour later, Trump tweeted:
If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?
Then, at the top of the 7 o’clock hour, Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared on Fox and Friends to reinforce the tweet. She mocked the students who protested, saying, “I don’t even know if they know what they’re protesting. I would love to do this big survey nationwide and ask everybody outside these airports, on the college campuses: what’s got you so in a lather?”
“Life doesn’t work that way folks,” she said. “You’re going to work with people who disagree with you. You’re going to encounter folks who aren’t just accosting you in this protective environment.”
The students know exactly what they are protesting, Madame Alternative Facts: sexism, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, and oh yes, fascism. Pretty much everyone in our now fascist government is someone I disagree with, and they are busy accosting people on every level. We know what that’s like, and so do college students. They aren’t babies, and they aren’t stupid.
Yiannopoulos himself insisted that “the Left is absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down.”
No, the left and all anti-fascist, anti-nazi peoples are simply exercising their rights, and you don’t like that at all. If anyone wants to shut down free speech, it’s the fascist-nazi people. If you’re shouting in the public square, people have the right to respond.
What Yiannopolous offers is not just speech, but bullying of the most vulnerable. He openly encourages those who are white and male to attack basically anyone and everyone else. Trump, taking his cues from Fox News, is validating his behavior.
Indeed. Yiannopolous has already proved, time and time again, that he’s perfectly willing to endanger the lives of others, while taking exception to any and all criticism. The fact that he has the support of the Tiny Dictator is no comfort.
Police officers patrol at the pyramid outside the Louvre museum in Paris,Friday, Feb. 3, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Thibault Camus.
The Tiny Dictator Trump is busy tweeting about the horror and awfulness of an attempted attack, by knife, at the Louvre in Paris.
An attacker at France’s storied museum the Louvre was shot and seriously wounded Friday morning, and the incident elicited a predictable response (in tweet form no less) from our new Commander-in-Chief.
A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in Paris. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S.
All manner of anti-Muslim idiots have been busy tweeting their little heads off about this, also. What’s interesting is what they are studiously ignoring:
The Louvre attacker allegedly tried to attack security forces outside the museum with a knife. Though details are unclear, some French media reported the attacker yelled “Allahu Akbar”— “God is great” in Arabic — while rushing a soldier. It’s important to note that the attack resulted in a whopping zero deaths.
Rewinding to Monday, a mosque in Quebec, Canada was attacked and six worshipers were killed and others wounded. Trump’s response? Silence.
The attacker, 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, “was known in the city’s activist circles as a right-wing troll who frequently took anti-foreigner and anti-feminist positions and stood up for U.S. President Donald Trump,” the Globe and Mail reported. “His online profile and school friendships revealed little interest in extremist politics until last March, when France’s far-right National Front Leader Marine Le Pen visited Quebec City, inspiring Mr. Bissonnette to vocal extreme online activism, according to people who clashed with him starting around this time.”
Also on Monday, White House Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway made up an attack in Bowling Green, Kentucky to justify Trump’s recent Muslim ban.
A right-wing troll. Anti-feminist. Trumpoid. We certainly know plenty of people just like Mr. Bissonnette, we get to deal with them every day on the ‘net, and have been for years on end. All of the people busy howling about an attempt which failed are quickly turning their heads and whistling over the six people murdered in Quebec. This too, is a result of the normalisation, and it is a terrible, deliberate misdirection, one which blatantly points out that murdering “those” people is okay. In support of that, the alternative facts lady is busy making up big batches of bullshit to shovel down gullible throats.
Nazis, nazis everywhere. Under every rock, and we are all on extremely rocky ground right now. I skimmed an article about this the other day, but I wasn’t in a state to pay much attention. I’m not feeling much better now that I have paid attention. I don’t think it’s been any sort of secret that policing often attracts less than ideal personalities for the job; nor that many cops are bigoted as all hells. Given all the murders committed by cops every year, most of them against people of colour, handily demonstrate the bigotry and reliance on stereotypes which afflict way too many cops. This is an old, old story, as old as policing itself, and it’s a rare cop shop which truly tries to combat vicious and dangerous bigotry, and where cops with a conscience will stand up and speak out. Unfortunately, the news is worse. Nazis. Nazis who do need a stinking badge, and rely on that badge to recruit.
White supremacists and other domestic extremists maintain an active presence in U.S. police departments and other law enforcement agencies. A striking reference to that conclusion, notable for its confidence and the policy prescriptions that accompany it, appears in a classified FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from April 2015, obtained by The Intercept. The guide, which details the process by which the FBI enters individuals on a terrorism watchlist, the Known or Suspected Terrorist File, notes that “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers,” and explains in some detail how bureau policies have been crafted to take this infiltration into account.
Although these right-wing extremists have posed a growing threat for years, federal investigators have been reluctant to publicly address that threat or to point out the movement’s longstanding strategy of infiltrating the law enforcement community.
No centralized recruitment process or set of national standards exists for the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, many of which have deep historical connections to racist ideologies. As a result, state and local police as well as sheriff’s departments present ample opportunities for white supremacists and other right-wing extremists looking to expand their power base.
That last is such a massive problem, and always has been – the one way to clean up policing is for there to be strict standards, recruitment and otherwise, across the board. None of the individual states doing their own thing anymore. Yeah, I know, ‘merica, land of the stubborn asshole of “independence”. That’s gotten us nowhere except in the bottom of hole, with out of control authoritarian fantasists playing with military gear.
In a heavily redacted version of an October 2006 FBI internal intelligence assessment, the agency raised the alarm over white supremacist groups’ “historical” interest in “infiltrating law enforcement communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel.” The effort, the memo noted, “can lead to investigative breaches and can jeopardize the safety of law enforcement sources or personnel.” The memo also states that law enforcement had recently become aware of the term “ghost skins,” used among white supremacists to describe “those who avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.” In at least one case, the FBI learned of a skinhead group encouraging ghost skins to seek employment with law enforcement agencies in order to warn crews of any investigations.
Ghost skins. Regardless of the silly name, I expect most of us have known at least one person who avoids overt displays in public and around people they don’t know, but in private settings allows their bigotry to rage. I grew up with one, and I’ve known too many more.
Reforming police, as it turns out, is a lot harder than reforming the military, because of the decentralized way in which the thousands of police departments across the country operate, the historical affinity of certain police departments with the same racial ideologies espoused by extremists, and an even broader reluctance to do much about it.
“If you look at the history of law enforcement in the United States, it is a history of white supremacy, to put it bluntly,” said Simi, citing the origin of U.S. policing in the slave patrols of the 18th and 19th centuries. “More recently, just going back 50 years, law enforcement, particularly in the South, was filled with Klan members.”
Norm Stamper, a former chief of the Seattle Police Department and vocal advocate for police reform, told The Intercept that white supremacy was not simply a matter of history. “There are police agencies throughout the South and beyond that come from that tradition,” he said. “To think that that kind of thinking has dissolved somehow is myopic at best.”
Stamper said he had fired officers who expressed racist views, but added, “It’s not likely to happen in most police departments, because many of those departments come from a tradition of saying the officer is entitled to his or her opinions.”
When you stop and look, and start paying attention, the sheer magnitude of instances protecting white supremacists is overwhelming. In the States, the nazis still have “good guy” status, putting white, male, christian, and hetero on a pedestal, shot through with the poisonous ideology of superiority.
“This is a fundamental problem in this country: We simply do not take this flexible, and forgiving, and exceptionally understanding approach for combating any other form of terrorism,” said Jones. “Anybody who’s on social media advocating support for ISIS can be criminally charged with very little effort.”
“For some reason, we have stepped away from the threat of domestic terrorism and right-wing extremism,” Jones continued. “The only way we can reconcile this kind of behavior is if we accept the possibility that the ideology that permeates white nationalists and white supremacists is something that many in our federal and law enforcement communities understand and may be in sympathy with.”
That sympathy might just be reflected by the election of a president who was endorsed and celebrated by the KKK, and who has been reluctant to disassociate himself from individuals espousing white supremacist views.
We are years beyond stepping away from the threat of domestic and right-wing terrorism. Too many Americans are intent on erasing the very idea of home grown terrorists. Unlike other countries, America has dealt with one major outside terrorist event, and yes, it was awful. It was also 15 years ago. In that 15 years, pretty much everything has been done in the worst possible way, and the refusal to deal with our rising nazi problem, and the problem of out of control cops continues to not only plague us, but to make every single one of us very unsafe, every day. We need to stop being afraid to face the truth.
A member of the Ku Klux Klan who says his name is Gary Munker poses for a photo during an interview with AFP in Hampton Bays, New York on November 22, 2016 (AFP Photo/William EDWARDS).
If you support Trump and/or his “policies”, you might want to check just how much you have in common with the KKK. Obviously, open white supremacist scum love him to pieces, but there are a lot of people who aren’t white supremacist scum who voted for our tiny dictator, and you really should be aware of the company you keep.
Ending illegal immigration, building a border wall and preventing terrorists from coming into the U.S. are a handful of the points on Klu Klux Klan leader Will Quigg’s checklist for “making America great again.” And Quigg, who says the nation was “founded to be free, white and Christian,” feels confident that President Donald Trump’s promises to grow the economy and prevent “illegal aliens” from coming into the U.S. are aligned with the KKK’s visions for America.
Quigg, a Grand Dragon and King Keagle of the Loyal White Knights’ West Coast chapter, isn’t the only KKK member excited by the prospects of a Trump administration. As a high ranking member of an infamous white supremacist organization, Quigg said he sees everyday how the rhetoric of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is resonating with people who want to join or who have recently been recruited by the Klan.
“We’ve seen a rise in [Klan] membership in the last two years, well, ever since Trump put in his dollar to get into the race. And especially every time he would say something that was not socially acceptable on a mainstream level,” Quigg told International Business Times in a phone interview.
If you think things like ethnic cleansing, genocide, putting people into ovens, and so on are not good things, perhaps it’s time to have a think about your viewpoints. And, if you tell yourself bullshit lies like this:
These days, people join the Klan not because they are racist or supremacists, but because they want to help other white people, he said.
You need to stop lying to yourself and face up to the fact that yes, you are a racist and white supremacist.
Jesus Fucking Crispy Christ onna Stick. I can’t even, I just can’t. It’s all about Donny, he’s just so gosh darn great, and black people love him to pieces, oh my yes!
Pardon me while I puke. You can read all about it here and here.
Steve Bannon, senior advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, makes a call outside Trump Tower on Friday, Dec. 9, 2016, in New York. CREDIT: AP Photo/Kevin Hagen.
Several days ago, along with many other people, I posted about Bannon and the NSA. That’s very frightening news, and boy, is it ever bad news. Unfortunately, that post didn’t get the views it should have. People not only need to know about this, they need to understand just how unprecedented and momentous this move is, and how it’s going to have one hell of way of taking us straight into Naziland 2.0.
As noted in previous posts, the recent executive orders have been written and pushed out by Bannon and Miller, including the ban on Muslims. Trump is but the hand that obeys and signs. All anyone has to do is tell him [Trump] that something is his idea, and that he’s a super genius, and he’ll sign anything.
Authoritarianism experts and national security analysts are seriously disturbed by top White House adviser Steve Bannon’s newfound position on the National Security Council (NSC) principals committee, which further deepened the influence of his ethno-nationalist ideology on the Trump administration.
Multiple reports have also named Bannon as the driving force behind a series of hard-right executive orders from President Donald Trump’s desk, most notably the widely criticized Muslim ban order. The ban was “obviously an Islamophobic dog whistle,” according to Cas Mudde, an associate professor at the University of Georgia who studies radical right wing movements, and indicative of Bannon’s en
“He is running a cabal, almost like a shadow NSC,” an unnamed intelligence official told Foreign Policy. The official had originally kept an open mind about the incoming Trump administration, but FP reported he is now “deeply troubled by how things are being run.”
The directness of such decrees and the lack of input from advisers has done little to mitigate concerns that the Trump administration exhibits authoritarian tendencies.
Now Bannon’s malevolent world view — he is the person most responsible for turning Breitbart into a platform for the white nationalist “alt-right” — will have even greater influence over pressing matters of national security. Both the Muslim ban and Bannon’s prior remarks suggest he will use his NSC post to advocate belligerence to the global Muslim community.
If you aren’t scared, there’s something wrong with you, especially in light of Trump’s loose attitude about using nuclear weapons. Trump thinks sabre rattling is fun, and he has little sense, if any, about going too far.
Bannon’s words and ideas seldom appear in the media firsthand, but a speech he delivered at the religious right wing Human Dignity Institute in the summer of 2014 revealed some of how he views the world. In his remarks, he spoke of Julius Evola, an Italian traditionalist philosopher who had a hefty influence on the political ideology of Benito Mussolini.
That should be enough to wake people up, and scare the shit out them, but I’m afraid there are simply too many people who truly don’t have a problem with any of this, and will slide willingly into the boiling pot of dictatorship.
Demonstrators holds banners and signs as they protest during a march in downtown Washington in opposition of President-elect Donald Trump, Sunday, Jan. 15, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana.
Denver International Airport (DIA) began enforcing a rule on Sunday that requires anyone interested in demonstrating to submit an application seven days in advance. The regulation was challenged by protesters, including one who recorded a video criticizing Denver Police Commander Tony Lopez for violating his First Amendment rights.
There’s more about the Denver situation at the link.
But the movement toward limiting protesters’ free speech rights is not confined to the terminals of DIA. In anticipation of an active protest movement during Trump’s administration, multiple Republican-controlled states are currently pushing for legislation that would discourage and even criminalize nonviolent, public demonstrations.
In Minnesota, a billpassed a Republican-controlled committee last week that would allow cities to sue protesters in order to collect money to pay police forces required at the demonstration. Lawmakers drafted the legislation in response to massive Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in the state after a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile.
This sounds very much like what happened here in nDakota and the water protectors. People will get bilked for money, and I’d put odds on that money being used the way it was here, to purchase military toys for cop shops. All the better to threaten you with, my dear. Being able to sue anyone who protests will have the very chilling effect of shutting down effective protests, because too many people will not be willing to face such a consequence; most people can’t afford to face such a consequence. Allowing a lawsuit against people for exercising their constitutional rights, does that sound like a democracy to you? Speaking of picking pockets…
And in Michigan, Republican lawmakers are attacking both unions and protesters by pushing legislation that would increase fines against picketers to $1,000 per person per day of a picket and $10,000 per day for an organization or union involved in the picket. The bill passed the state House of Representatives in December, but was set aside by the Senate.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that will be an end to such legislation though, it won’t be.
Taking a different tactic, four other states are considering anti-protest laws that would target demonstrators who protest on the streets, according to The Intercept. The bills have all been introduced in the last few months as responses to high-profile protests by Black Lives Matter activists and opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline that shut down highways.
The Intercept summarized the bills that Republican lawmakers have proposed in North Dakota, Minnesota, Washington, and Iowa:
In North Dakota, for instance, Republicans introduced a bill last week that would allow motorists to run over and kill any protester obstructing a highway as long as a driver does so accidentally. In Minnesota, a bill introduced by Republicans last week seeks to dramatically stiffen fines for freeway protests and would allow prosecutors to seek a full year of jail time for protesters blocking a highway. Republicans in Washington state have proposed a plan to reclassify as a felony civil disobedience protests that are deemed “economic terrorism” … And in Iowa a Republican lawmaker has pledged to introduce legislation to crack down on highway protests.
“This is a marked uptick in bills that would criminalize or penalize protected speech and protest, and every person should be alarmed at that trend,” she said, calling the bills unconstitutional. “We should also be alarmed by the attitude they betray, which is that when Americans get out into the streets and make their voices heard — recently, in record numbers — their elected representatives’ response is not to listen to those concerns but to attempt to silence and criminalize them.”
“That goes against the very fabric of our constitutional democracy, and legislators introducing these bills should be ashamed,” she added. “To try to silence those who are speaking up right now is a betrayal of American values.”
Yes, they should be ashamed, but they aren’t. That’s because there is no democracy anymore. Gone, vanished, set on fire and up in smoke. Silence people, quash dissent, order compliance. If you can’t see where we are headed, it’s because you refuse to see.
Full article at Think Progress. Mano Singham has a post up about the revival of an old quash favourite: COINTELPRO. Oh, such bad news.
A crowd welcomes passengers as they exit customs at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. CREDIT: Jack Jenkins/ThinkProgress.
Our dictator ordered a ban, called it a ban. The ban was on Muslims, every country except those the dictator does business in, which was terribly convenient. People have been upset, and rightly so, there were many protests, still are, over the chaos and cruelty being inflicted on people. The thin-skinned tyrant now has his little cadre of hench people trying to spin it, in an attempt to expunge the word ban in favour of “extreme vetting”. Someone should point out that the switch doesn’t make the ban sound any less of a ban, or in any way, better. Use of the word extreme isn’t going to help. We already know that Trump is extremely unstable, and this latest round of idiocy and alternative facts is accomplishing nothing outside of emphasising the lies, bullshit and instability.
During his Tuesday press availability, Trump administration Press Secretary Sean Spicer insisted that the travel ban implemented by President Trump via executive order last Friday isn’t actually a ban at all.
“It can’t be a ban if you’re letting a million people in,” Spicer said, referring to the fact that Muslims who don’t hail from the seven Muslim-majority countries included in the ban can still travel to the U.S. “If 325,000 people from another country can come in, that is by nature not a ban… that is extreme vetting.”
Emphasis mine. This is open pandering to willful idiots, bigots, and nazis everywhere. And all the willful idiots, bigots, and nazis are swallowing this massive lie whole.
Spicer’s explanation prompted reporters to refer back a tweet posted by Trump on Monday morning in which he referred to his travel ban as a “ban.” Trump also referred to it as “a very, very strict ban” on Saturday.
In fact, in a White House press release distributed Sunday, Spicer himself referred to the ban as “a 90-day ban.”
But during Tuesday’s press availability, Spicer insisted that any confusion over whether or not Trump’s executive order constitutes a ban is the media’s fault.
“He’s using the words the media is using,” Spicer said of Trump’s tweet. “I think the words that are being used to describe it derive from what the media is calling this. [Trump] has been very clear that it is extreme vetting.”
Ah yes, it’s the media’s fault, natch. Thing is, no one in media could have reported on this at all until the Dictator and his gleeful goons implemented the ban, taking everyone, including half of those in government, by surprise. It was the implementation of a ban. It was called a ban. In action, it’s a ban. The executive order: ban. Ban, ban, ban, ban, ban. This is not the fault of media, it’s the result of a faulty brain and ginormous ego.
Likewise, because non-Muslims from the seven countries included in Trump’s travel ban are banned from entering the U.S. and because Muslims from other countries can still enter the country, Spicer and Trump supporters argue that Trump’s action doesn’t represent a “ban.”
The actual facts are as plain as the nose on your face, but those supporting Trump have not only swallowed this, they believe it, and are pushing this fancy all over the place. “It’s temporary, not a ban!” “It’s just vetting, to keep us safe!” and so on. These people are proud to be xenophobic assholes.
But Trump has been clear about his intentions all along. His December 2015 statement “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” is still on his website. And during a Fox News appearance on Saturday, Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani said that Trump’s executive order stemmed from a desire to ban Muslims, but to do so with the veneer of legality.
“So when [Trump] first announced it, he said, ‘Muslim ban.’ He called me up. He said, ‘Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally,’” Giuliani said. “And what we did was, we focused on, instead of religion, danger — the areas of the world that create danger for us. Which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible. And that’s what the ban is based on. It’s not based on religion. It’s based on places where there are substantial evidence that people are sending terrorists into our country.”
But Giuliani’s comment about “areas of the world that create danger” being the basis for the ban is belied by the facts. As the Wall Street Journal reports, of the 161 people charged with jihadist terrorism-related crimes or who died before being charged since 2001, only 11 were identified as being from the seven countries included in Trump’s executive order — Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, and Somalia.
The veneer of legality. Yeah. A spray on veneer, like a choking cloud of Aquanet. All this to catch nothing. There are terrorists here, but they aren’t at any airport. We have plenty of homegrown terrorists, and there’s a sadistic terrorist sitting in the highest office of the land.
Via Think Progress. This morning, I watched the advert Budweiser is going to air over the Superbowl (American Football), and if you think you need some insight into how Trumpoids think, along with their terrifying inability to think, head over and skim the comments.
Just one here, head over to Think Progress to see, in the faces of people, and in their own words, how families are being ruthlessly torn apart for no good reason.
Roozbeh Aliabadi, a former consultant and soon-to-be PhD student in international relations, told ThinkProgress that the order is keeping him from his wife, who lives in Iran.
Roozbeh said he met his wife there about a couple years ago. They had a legal marriage in Iran in June of last year, and decided to hold off on having a small ceremony with friends and family until his wife was able to come to the states.
Her application for permanent residency was approved on January 17, just three days before Trump’s inauguration, and they were informed that she needs an immigrant visa to enter the country. But since Trump’s order, it’s no longer clear that she will be able to come at all.
“We wanted to start our life together. She’s an architect, I was in consulting business, soon-to-be PhD student. We can’t do it,” he said. “I haven’t seen my wife for about seven months, and this, in a way, gives us two options. Number 1: I have to move out of the U.S. Or we have to get divorced. I don’t think the latter is an option.”
“If this continues, he’s not forbidding people to come over here. He’s essentially kicking out a lot of families from the U.S.,” said Roozbeh. “I’m very sad, very heartbroken by what he did.”
“I told my wife, Mr. Trump gave me another reason to love you more. This is definitely not going to change our relationship. It might make it physically more distant, but we’ll get through this as well.”
Everybody’s talkin’ about it, the firing of Sally Yates. Before I head into town today, I want to take a somewhat different focus on this – language. Language is important. When you can’t look at the person saying something, language provides all the vital clues we need to analyse information received. Here it is, click for full size:
This goes right back to the post on Trump’s constant assertion that he’s smart, super smart, genius smart, the smartiest of the smarty pants, the bigliest IQ ever, and his complete lack of a vocabulary, in spite of all that smart. The article linked in that post goes into detail, including analyses of Trump’s favourite words, of which, one is the word weak. I’ll concede that Trump is smart in the same way Wile E. Coyote is smart. Trump is no Roadrunner.
What concerns me in the above missive though, is the use of the word betrayal. Trump’s order isn’t, and wasn’t legal. Ms. Yates didn’t betray her office, or anyone else, but that’s language that is highly disturbing. When you use betrayal, traitor and traitorous is far behind. In a post yesterday, I asked people to note the use of the word comply. All these not so small signals are mounting up to be a screaming red alert. The fact that we’re now under a fascist dictatorship could hardly be more clear, and that’s being advertised, loud and clear at every opportunity. There is no “reasonable” in this, there’s no “necessary” either. What is there is yet another Trump Toddler Tantrum, screaming in disbelief that anyone could have the spine to not only disagree, but stand up to him. Ms. Yates was fired, not disappeared, but it’s only been two weeks. This is not going to get better.
The language is there. The signs are not only there, they are screaming. It’s full red alert, and that fact is going to slip right by way too many people. There’s already a move across the land to shut down any and all who protest. Here in my state, it’s been made legal to run down protesters. Hundreds of protesters and journalists in Washington are sitting under felony charges. Protesters in Denver were told they didn’t have a permit to exercise free speech legally. And so on, and so it is going. We are moving inexorably into a state where the words betrayal and comply are going to have a terrible weight, and the sword of Damocles is upon our heads. Speak now. Speak loud. Be Strong. Be Brave. Reject Silence. I understand scared. I’m scared. I’m wearing those pants into town today, into the heart of nDakota. Yeah, I’m fucking scared, but you all give me courage, and I wrap that around me like a cloak, and keep that strength and love and trust close.
Photo illustration by Sagmeister & Walsh. Set painters: Colossal Media.
The rethuglicans were floating on a wave of frenzied victory, assured in their ability to bend Trump to their will. They could finally institute all the terror, hatred and bigotry they wanted, and maybe finally get that theocracy, too. As well as the unfettered ability to be as corrupt as they wished. Unfortunately for them, the taste of fear is on their tongues.
Rather than the hoped-for collaborative new relationship between the White House and Congress, GOP officials complain that Trump is brushing aside their advice, failing to fully engage on drafting tough legislative packages on tax reform and Obamacare, and bypassing Congress by relying on executive actions, something they frequently complained about under President Barack Obama.
At the same time, Trump’s unilateral moves continue to blindside Republicans and direct the national focus toward topics many in the party would rather avoid, whether that’s how to pay for building the border wall with Mexico, warming ties with Russia, investigating false claims about voter fraud or, most recently, implementing sweeping new policies on refugees and visas.
Just about anyone could have told you that it’s not possible to control a narcissistic maniac with delusions of grandeur. It’s not as though any of that were some kind of secret, you all knew this well before hand, but you just couldn’t resist the chance to eat the country whole.
Today marks the birthday of Fred Korematsu, a man who never gave up his fight for justice, even though it was a fight he needed to pursue for decades. His bravery, his light, his dedication should light a fire in all of us, renewing our personal commitment to see justice done, and to protect, help, and fight for those being victimized. Too many Americans are more than content to let the ruinous and immoral past repeat itself, while remaining blissfully ignorant of history. Just a bit here, the full story is at Think Progress, and of course, at http://www.korematsuinstitute.org/.
Here are six comments from Japanese Americans that have an important message for the Trump administration to learn from:
No one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.
When I was a teenager, my father told me that our democracy is very fragile, but it is a true people’s democracy, both as strong and as great as the people can be, but it is also as fallible as people are. And that’s why good people have to be actively engaged in the process, sometimes holding democracy’s feet to the fire, in order to make it a better, truer democracy.
Even after we were released, I, along with other Japanese-Americans, faced anti-Japanese slurs and insults in a post-World War II America. We developed a sense that somehow we had done something wrong. It was my father who helped me realize that our “crime” was simply being of Japanese ancestry. In a post-Pearl Harbor craze, this lineage was sufficient for the federal government to pass orders to detain and imprison an entire segment of American society — we were guilty solely by association.
Dr. Satsuki Ina, Professor Emeritus, California State University, Sacramento, 2015
I was born behind barbed wire 70 years ago in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison camp for Japanese-Americans in Northern California. My parents’ only crime was having the face of the enemy. They were never charged or convicted of a crime; yet they were forced to raise me in a prison camp when President Franklin Roosevelt signed a wartime executive order ultimately authorizing the incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent. We were deemed a danger to the “national security” and incarcerated without due process of law.
People don’t believe this. If you go beyond — maybe a few states here — they don’t believe that the United States had a concentration camp! They don’t call it that. You can call it what you like, but they put people in who are entitled to every citizen right of anybody else. People don’t believe that!
When you see pictures of black men hanging from trees, and I don’t know how we can do things like that to each other. Sometimes I think if I were on the other side of the fence, would I go to Tanforan [a temporary incarceration camp to hold Japanese Americans] with a whole bunch of buckets and soap? Do I have that kind of something inside of me — that I would do something like that for other people? It’s a big question mark. I can’t say that I would, because I think it’s more comfortable to write a check or even worse, just do nothing.
Chizu Iiyama, activist, social worker and educator, 2009
I don’t have advice. I just say to learn from your own — to study and learn about your history; history of our government and history of all these things that happened. If you are a minority person, learn your history, so you’ll know again what happened in the past so you’ll be sure to deal with the present in a more enlightened way.
There’s a very interesting article up at Raw Story about Trump’s never ending insistence that he’s smart. So smart, super smart, bigly smart! It’s a low level annoyance, because it’s obviously not true, and as pointed out in the article, most people who are smart have no particular need to say so. That said, there are people who are, at least, technically smart, who seem to have a pathological need to parade that fact, and I’ve always found that to be nothing more than insecurity. When you’re a kid, it’s not fun being the egghead. Maybe that’s changed, I don’t know, but back in the day, you’d get ganged up on for being a smarty pants, so mostly you didn’t go around bragging or anything. Just tried to stay invisible in the corner, with your stack of books behind you. I don’t care about IQs, those are meaningless, and as for grades, well, those aren’t exactly a reliable indicator, either.
Smart is what you do with it. People who are curious, who read, and delight in a lifelong love of learning, that’s smart. People who are capable of thinking beyond all the tropes, clichés, stereotypes, and other bullshit, that’s smart. And so on. I love reading, I’ve had my nose in a book since always, and for me, people that read, I find them to be reassuring and comforting. And generally speaking, not only willing to think, but they love to think.
Trump doesn’t read. At all. That disturbed me no end when it first came out, and it still does. His compleat lack of a vocabulary disturbs the hell out of me too, I’ve often commented on the fact that he talks like a child. Bush Jr could barely string a sentence together, and he looks like a bloody rocket scientist next to Trump. “That’s the big stuff.” That’s what he says about major governmental decisions and policy. Anyone who is capable of thinking is left wondering “what does that mean?” Turns out, lately, what that means is “look what a big bully I am! Do what I say!” A stupid, unthinking, short-sighted bully, that’s our dictator. As the criticisms and doubt amp up, Big Bully Donny is going to get a whole lot worse. It’s barely been two weeks, and already…
Anyone who feels compelled to boast about how smart he is clearly suffers from a profound insecurity about his intelligence and accomplishments. In Trump’s case, he has good reason to have doubts.
Trump has the kind of street smarts (what he calls “gut instinct”) characteristic of con artists and hucksters, but his limited vocabulary, short attention span, ignorance of policy specifics, indifference to scientific evidence, and admitted aversion to reading raise questions about his intellectual abilities; his capacity to absorb and analyze information and ideas.
Many observers have noted that Trump has a difficult time expressing himself and speaking in complete sentences. A linguistic analysis by Politico found that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level. A study by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University compared last year’s Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in terms of their vocabulary and grammar. Trump scored at a fifth-grade level, the lowest of all the candidates.
Some might suspect this is not an intellectual shortcoming but instead Trump’s calculated way of communicating with a wide audience. But Tony Schwartz, who spent a great deal of time with the real estate developer while ghostwriting his book The Art of the Deal, noted that Trump has a very limited vocabulary.
Anyone who has ever bothered to skim what Trump supporters have to say, in letters, comments, tweets, what have you, there’s a noted similarity in smarts. And that’s frightening. You don’t need to be a bloody genius, but most people should at least want to be able to think, and to be able to parse things correctly, and have the means to communicate effectively.
The appeal to stupidity and ignorance is a dangerous one, and it has already proved to the be the match which set the fire.
Here’s a fine example of happy to be stupid and ignorant Americans:
“I feel that if a Muslim woman wants to move into this country, she needs to leave her towel home,” Bill explained. “Because the reason this country is here and safe today is because of Jesus Christ.”
It’s a hijab. Simple word, not at all hard to learn. It’s not a towel, it’s a head covering, much like those rags on your heads, oh, I mean hats. While you probably should always have your towel, that’s a universe thing, per Douglas Adams. That’s one of those book things.
He continued: “We were one nation under God. The Muslims are into Allah.
:Bangs head into wall: PLACEHOLDER. The word “god” is generic, it does not point to any particular god, that requires a name. It means ‘supreme being’. Allah means “god”, yep, ‘supreme being’. In point of fact, it happens to be the same fucking god, and I’m damn tired of pointing that out. Abrahamaic based religions: Judaism, Islam, Christianity. Same books, same god, different interpretations. And there was no “one nation under god” until genocidal assholes found their way to Turtle Island, and of course that sort of shit was reinforced during the cold war. For Chrissakes, learn something. If willfully stupid people are going to insist on being stupid, the least you could do is shut the fuck up. Try to read a book or something.
Oh, and what was our super genius president doing yesterday, as one crisis after another was unfolding? Having a private screening of Finding Dory.
CNN producer Kevin Liptak revealed on Sunday that the president’s family had chosen to screen Finding Dory, Pixar’s film about a cartoon fish who is torn apart from her family and placed in a public aquarium.
