Jesus Wept.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

Oh, we are so very fucked. People in Iran are extremely upset with the Tiny Dictator, and there’s excellent reason for them to be. If Donny really wanted to do something about potential terrorists, he’d shut up, resign, and go back to watching teevee in Florida, at Mar a whatever it is. Unfortunately, he’s super busy, watching teevee in the white house. Seems to be where he gets all his information from, seeing as he doesn’t read, and his supposed intelligence briefings last around 20 minutes, while he’s preoccupied with super important shit, like how to be rude to a department store on twitter. Then there’s more teevee watching, and tweeting. Tweeting on his personal account, because apparently the POTUS account is beneath him. Or maybe it just reminds him of how fucking incompetent he is, and that he has no business in government of any kind.

On Friday morning, President Trump cited a Lawfare article in an attempt to build a case that the three judges U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit made a bad decision Thursday evening when they declined to reinstate his Muslim ban.

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

LAWFARE: “Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute.” A disgraceful decision!

Indeed, the Lawfare article in question — entitled “How to Read (and How Not to Read) Today’s 9th Circuit Opinion” — does mention that the Ninth Circuit’s opinion didn’t cite a statute pertaining to “Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President,” a statute that “forms the principal statutory basis for the executive order.”

But had Trump read the article, he would’ve seen that the author — Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution — concluded that the court actually made the right decision.

[…]

Wittes concludes his piece by blasting the Trump administration’s “incompetent malevolence.”

“Eventually, the court has to confront the clash between a broad delegation of power to the President — a delegation which gives him a lot of authority to do a lot of not-nice stuff to refugees and visa holders — in a context in which judges normally defer to the president, and the incompetent malevolence with which this order was promulgated.”

Instead of coming across the passage he tweeted out from reading the article, it appears Trump was alerted to the Lawfare piece by watching Morning Joe.

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“For a sense of what is happening outside, he watches cable, both at night and during the day — too much in the eyes of some aides — often offering a bitter play-by-play of critics like CNN’s Don Lemon,” the Times reported.

Lifting material from TV news for a tweet is far from unprecedented for Trump. As Fortune reported on February 2, “At least five times since he took office… Trump has tweeted about policy ideas and thoughts that seem directly related to news that was being shown on channels such as Fox News.”

Among the instances are a tweet Trump posted threatening to pull federal funding from public colleges that came minutes after a discussion of the same topic on Fox & Friends, another where the president threatened to send “the Feds!” into Chicago that came on the heels of a discussion of violence in Chicago on The O’Reilly Factor, and a tweet blasting Chelsea Manning as “ungrateful traitor” that came just minutes after she was called the same thing on Fox News.

Really, it’s bad enough he is such an ignorant idiot, he could at least try to pretend he’s somewhat informed. The full story is at Think Progress. As if all this wasn’t quite bad enough, “contempt of cop” is going to get a whole lot worse. Trump wants stormtrooper protections, bigly yuuuge ones.

In a vague executive order signed at the official swearing-in ceremony for new Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump instructed Sessions to work with Congress to establish “new Federal crimes, and increase penalties for existing Federal crimes” to protect law enforcement officers.

More signalling than substance, the order gives executive agencies a broad directive for change without naming specific policy preferences. But you don’t need a divining rod to see where Trump is pointing his team.

Republicans have already embraced the idea of extending hate crimes protections to police officers. Trump’s rhetoric both before and after his election win made clear he will default to the side of police in any dispute with the public they serve. And three recent high-profile, ambush-style killings of police officers — one committed by a Trump fan and Confederate flag enthusiast in Iowa — have generated a sense of political urgency around officer safety.

Yet rather than deterring such rare and devastating assassinations, Thursday’s order lays down fertilizer for a frightfully dank new crop of routine police abuses.

Oh yes. Anyone who has ever had experience with cops knows how much they love tacking on any fucking charge they can think of, even given no reason whatsoever. This is not going to go well, and of course, it’s going to impact people of colour the most. Full story at Think Progress.

Let the War Crimes Begin…

President Donald Trump looks at a figurine given to him by a group of county sheriffs, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

President Donald Trump looks at a figurine given to him by a group of county sheriffs, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

The Tiny Dictator, who must apparently be appeased with toys and baubles, spent some time talking with airline people, and mouthing off about how great war crimes are. Whether or not he actually understands that what he was spewing does indeed constitute war crimes, anyone’s guess. It’s getting fucking darker by the day, and I’m afraid people are just going to start letting go and slipping under. I’m seriously trying not to, but it’s getting difficult holding your head above the never ending, rising tide of shit.

After talking about the condition of American airports, Trump said, “We spent 6 trillion dollars in the Middle East. We’ve got nothing. We never even kept even a little tiny oil well. I said, ‘Keep the oil.’”

Trump suggested that the oil proceeds could fund a major government infrastructure project. “We’ve spent 6 trillion dollars in the Middle East. We have nothing, and we have an obsolete plane system, obsolete airports, obsolete trains, we have bad roads. We’re going to change all of that folks. You’re going to be so happy with Trump. I think you already are.”

Plundering a country’s natural resources is a war crime according to the Hague Conventions, which prohibits destroying or seizing an enemy’s property, and according the Geneva Conventions, which simply states, “pillage is prohibited.” The U.S. is a signatory to both.

Trump claims to have been against the Iraq War from the beginning — he wasn’t — but argues that once the U.S. went in, the military should’ve pillaged Iraq’s oil.

During Trump’s first speech to CIA agents last month, he said, “We should’ve kept the oil… maybe you’ll have another chance.”

Think Progress has the full story.

Nazis, Nothing but Nazis.

Facebook.

Facebook.

Traditionalist Worker Party. In a shorter word, Nazis.

A white nationalist group plans to instruct participants on proper marching, how to create propaganda and on being “a voice for our people” at a conference in April at Jenny Wiley State Park in Floyd County.

The Traditionalist Worker Party, which claims to “take a stand for white working families,” will gather in the “98.35 percent European” community on April 28 and 29, according to its Facebook post, which has been shared more than 500 times. The post said the event would be held in Pike County but announced that the seminars, speeches and a dinner will be at nearby Jenny Wiley State Resort Park, which is in Floyd County.

Floyd County Judge-Executive Ben Hale said the group has a Constitutional right to meet, but the vast majority of county residents would not condone its views.

[Read more…]

Who Ya Gonna Fear?

Richard Schmidt.

Richard Schmidt.

It was mere days ago that we learned that the Tiny Dictator and Crew plan to stop looking into domestic terrorism and white supremacist factions here in uStates. Then Madame Alternative Facts started lying her ass off about a terrorist action which never took place, then the Tiny Dictator himself lied left, right, up and down about terrorist acts happening and being ignored. That they have been repeatedly refuted, and proven to be lying should go without saying. There’s an absolute insistence on viewing terrorism as an outside, other thing, something which could never, ever be domestic in nature. It’s bullshit on a mean scale, but it’s being poured out at such a rate, people are getting buried by it. Naturally, all the fascists and nazis are thrilled by this insistence and consequent validation. (See the linked post for more.)

As Madame Alternative Facts will not shut the fuck up, and keeps spraying shit in everyone’s faces, let’s take a look at a terrorist action which was averted. The catch was accidental, the feds had been chasing down counterfeit sports jerseys and caps, and what they found was eye-opening, to say the least.

The year was 2012. The place was Bowling Green, Ohio. A federal raid had uncovered what the authorities feared were the makings of a massacre. There were 18 firearms, among them two AR–15 assault rifles, an AR–10 assault rifle and a Remington Model 700 sniper rifle. There was body armor, too, and the authorities counted some 40,000 rounds of ammunition. An extremist had been arrested, and prosecutors suspected that he had been aiming to carry out a wide assortment of killings.

“This defendant, quite simply, was a well-funded, well-armed and focused one-man army of racial and religious hate,” prosecutors said in a court filing.

The man arrested and charged was Richard Schmidt, a middle-aged owner of a sports-memorabilia business at a mall in town. Prosecutors would later call him a white supremacist. His planned targets, federal authorities said, had been African-Americans and Jews. They’d found a list with the names and addresses of those to be assassinated, including the leaders of NAACP chapters in Michigan and Ohio.

It was widely agreed upon, that here was a man who should not have been allowed a single gun, or even a single bullet. No one knew just how he managed to amass such an arsenal, especially as Schmidt was a convicted felon (manslaughter), who was barred by law from owning any firearm. Gosh, that worked well, didn’t it?

But Schmidt wound up being sentenced to less than six years in prison, after a federal judge said prosecutors had failed to adequately establish that he was a political terrorist, and he is scheduled for release in February 2018. The foiling of what the government worried was a credible plan for mass murder gained little national attention.

Everyone feeling comforted by the fact this man will soon be out of prison? Anyone want to say it’s okay, because he’s white, he couldn’t possibly be a terrorist? That Americans just can’t be terrorists?

For some concerned about America’s vulnerability to terrorism, the very real, mostly forgotten case of Richard Schmidt in Bowling Green, Ohio, deserves an important place in any debate about what is real and what is fake, what gets reported on by the news media and what doesn’t. Those deeply worried about domestic far-right terrorism believe United States authorities, across many administrations, have regularly underplayed the threat, and that the media has repeatedly underreported it. Perhaps we have become trapped in one view of what constitutes the terrorist threat, and as the case of Schmidt shows, that’s a problem.

Oh it’s a problem, alright, and this is not the first time the government has tossed away and hushed up reports on domestic terrorism. The prime directive seems to be “if we ignore it, it will disappear.” That’s magical thinking on a high level, and there’s no question we will pay for it. Memories are short for most people, and even one of the Tiny Dictator’s minions recently said that the Oklahoma bombing didn’t count, because too long ago. People should be questioning why that is never the case with outside terrorism. Nazism, white nationalism, white supremacy, whatever moniker you assign, is on the rise once again, and they are feeling proud, strong, and validated by the current government, which refuses to face reality. How many people will have to die in order to force a reality check? I don’t want to be one of them. I don’t want anyone to be one of them. Unfortunately, this sort of dedicated ignorance always has a very high cost.

The full article is in-depth, lots of links, highly recommended.

No One Expects the Inquisition…

tumblr_lop8ixJIoH1qk38c7o1_1280

It seems it’s not enough for Bannon to be busy Nazifying everything, he’s a Catholic Nazi, and he’s not a happy camper about the almighty church’s descent in ugly, ruthless power, having been at least somewhat defanged in recent centuries. Not enough, to be sure, as the church is constantly seeking ways to impose its particular brand of brutality, such as now buying hospitals everywhere, in order to impose a compleat lack of autonomy on women, and the “outreaches” in places where the church can handily refuse medical or other help unless someone agrees to convert, and making sure they lie their unholy asses off about life-saving contraceptives, like condoms. Even largely defanged, the Catholic church continues to do as much damage and harm as possible. That’s not even getting into all the child molesting the church handwaves, nor their ongoing protection via shuffling about of rapists. Even though I don’t think Pope Francis is all that different from his predecessors, to many Catholics, it’s seems he’s viewed as close to heretical – globalism! And making noises about caring for the poor. That sort of thing just isn’t on for those who are more than attached to all the wealth the church is sitting on.

At the root of things is the fact that the pope gave the boot to Raymond Cardinal Burke, a theological reactionary and a guy who was born 500 years too late to be the high cleric of his dreams. This touched off a major squabble with the Knights of Malta. They’re serious power brokers within HMC even though they dress like Albanian ushers and despite the fact that just talking about them makes me start hearing “Hail, Hail Freedonia” in my mind. Burke was their chaplain.

There’s a genuine rebellion brewing in HMC, holy obedience be damned, you should pardon the expression. And today, The New York Times adds a bizarre—but completely predictable—bit of information to the story of that rebellion.

In one of the cardinal’s antechambers, amid religious statues and book-lined walls, Cardinal Burke and Mr. Bannon — who is now President Trump’s anti-establishment eminence — bonded over their shared worldview. They saw Islam as threatening to overrun a prostrate West weakened by the erosion of traditional Christian values, and viewed themselves as unjustly ostracized by out-of-touch political elites. “When you recognize someone who has sacrificed in order to remain true to his principles and who is fighting the same kind of battles in the cultural arena, in a different section of the battlefield, I’m not surprised there is a meeting of hearts,” said Benjamin Harnwell, a confidant of Cardinal Burke who arranged the 2014 meeting.

Just as Mr. Bannon has connected with far-right parties threatening to topple governments throughout Western Europe, he has also made common cause with elements in the Roman Catholic Church who oppose the direction Francis is taking them. Many share Mr. Bannon’s suspicion of Pope Francis as a dangerously misguided, and probably socialist, pontiff… For many of the pope’s ideological opponents in and around the Vatican, who are fearful of a pontiff they consider outwardly avuncular but internally a ruthless wielder of absolute political power, this angry moment in history is an opportunity to derail what they see as a disastrous papal agenda. And in Mr. Trump, and more directly in Mr. Bannon, some self-described “Rad Trads” — or radical traditionalists — see an alternate leader who will stand up for traditional Christian values and against Muslim interlopers.

If it wasn’t clear already, it should be now. Stephen Bannon, the last descendant of House Harkonnen, is not someone who wants to “disrupt the elites,” or whatever techie garbage he likes to toss around. He wants to establish himself at the head of a new, worldwide authoritarian elite that will reach into every institution and that will demolish any of those institutions that stand in the way of what he wants. The man is a political thug, and Burke is a theological thug. Marriage made somewhat lower than heaven.

Given the rise of nazism and fascism across the globe, and the fascist grip firmly on uStates, it will pay to watch just where this unholy as fuck union is going to lead. Nowhere good, that’s certain, but when you combine this with the ongoing efforts to quash dissent, we are facing very dark days, and we need to gather our courage and commit to giving voice to every single wrong, every single outrage. Given the Catholic Church’s willingness to be corrupt as all hells, combining that corruption with what now taints many governments, along with the church’s unquenchable thirst for power…regardless of what people think, there are plenty of evil assholes in the church who will happily collaborate with nazis and fascists.

Full story at Esquire.

Satanic Sedition and Heads on Pikes.

ParadiseLButts1

William Blake‘s illustration of Satan as presented in John Milton‘s Paradise Lost. Illustration was made on c. 1808.

Rick Wiles has decided there’s a Satanic Panic going on, and of course it’s being orchestrated by none other than former President Obama.

“We are witnessing a full-blown Marxist/communist resistance movement, a revolution in America,” Wiles said. “The chief banker funding the Purple Revolution is billionaire George Soros and the chief community organizer directing the insurrection in the streets is none other than Barack Hussein Obama … My gut feeling says Barack Obama is on the phone day and night and he is directing the protests, he is organizing, he is giving clear instructions to the people what to do and how to carry it out.”

Waitaminute, who decided the colour of the revolution? I’m good with purple and all, but we should have been asked. Oooh, it’s Wiles’s gut! I’ll just bet it’s a fact factory, of the alternative sort. I’d love to hear from Pres. Obama! What with being super powerful and stuff, he has my number, right? As for the constant refrain of Soros!, I haven’t seen a bloody penny. If people are getting paid for activism, it’s news to me and everyone else down here in the purple.

Wiles, who repeatedlycalled for Obama to be arrested and imprisoned when he was still in the White House, said that the recent protests against Trump are nothing short of sedition, which is itself inherently satanic.

“This is outright sedition,” he declared, “and we have laws in the United States against sedition…. What the Democrats are doing, and the news media and the Obamanista bureaucrats inside the government agencies, what they are doing is, these are acts of sedition.”

Sedition is so defined: incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government. Sedition is one of those concepts that finds itself entwined on the thorny ground of hallowed free speech. It’s rarely charged, (in uStates) and when it is, most people are acquitted. In 1917, Art Young did this political cartoon (click for full size):

[Read more…]

The Forgotten and Missing Songs.

A photo of the lost spool. Photo: University of Akron.

A photo of the lost spool. Photo: University of Akron.

A long-lost wire spool — containing recordings of German songs that Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were forced to sing, and Yiddish songs they sang in rebellion – was recently located by accident in the University of Akron archive where it had been mislabeled, the UK’s Daily Mail reported on Friday.

According to the report, the retrieved spool was one of a set of 200 recordings of interviews conducted right after World War II with displaced Holocaust survivors in Germany, Italy, France, and Switzerland. The interviews, with at least 130 Jews, were conducted by Dr. David Boder in 1946 for the purpose of preserving the history of the “unspeakable horrors” they had endured at the hands of the Nazis. During Boder’s talks with the survivors, some recounted and sang the songs in question.

According to the Daily Mail, all the oral histories that Boder recorded were transferred in 1967 to the Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron in Ohio.

Because Boder had mentioned the songs, recorded at a refugee camp in Henonville, France, in his subsequent writings, researchers were puzzled as to why they did not feature on any of the spools. The mystery was solved when media digitizer Jon Endres sifted through the three boxes in the Cummings Center archive that contained the recordings and came upon a spool that had mistakenly been entered into the system with a typo. Rather than being filed as the “Henonville Songs,” it was labeled as the “Heroville Songs.”

After digitizing the recording, Endres wrote in a blog post, he was “blown away.”

Dr. David Baker, the Margaret Clark Moran Executive Director of the Cummings Center, said of the find: “I think it is one of the most important discoveries from our collections in our 50-year history. That we could give the world the melody to a song sung by those sentenced to their death through forced labor during one of the most unspeakable horrors of the 20th century is remarkable.”

One example of such a song is “Undzer shtetl brent” (Our Village is Burning) by Mordecai Gebirtig, performed by Gita Frank, who explains in the introduction that it was once sung by the composer’s daughter in the cellars of a Krakow ghetto. Intended to inspire Jews to rebel against the Germans, the original words were changed to “The Jewish People Are Burning.”

You can read more here, here, and here. The last link has full sound clouds. So much sorrow here, and we find ourselves surrounded by those who think such horror is just fine.

Sunday Facepalm.

Donald Trump and Wayne Allen Root (YouTube/screen grab).

Donald Trump and Wayne Allen Root (YouTube/screen grab).

There’s a bowlful of facepalm this Sunday. We’ll start with Smarm-master Wayne Allen Root, who has decided that all people who oppose Tiny Dictator Trump are mentally ill.

“There is not much that needs to be said,” Root declared. “They’re unhinged, they’re off the rails, they’re mentally ill. The Democratic Party has Trump Derangement Syndrome and they are no longer an opposition party or a leading party; they’re not willing to come to the table and work, they’re not willing to vote on Supreme Court nominees, they’re just looking to block and boycott. They’re crazy and so we have just got to run the country and ignore them … I think we have got to erase Obama like he was never there.”

Root went on to encourage the state of California “to leave the union” because “it would be the best thing to ever happen to America, conservatives, the Republican Party [and] patriots. My God, if California seceded with its fifty-plus electoral votes, we win every election for the rest of history.”

“We don’t want California as part of this country anymore,” Root continued, adding that he’d also love to see New York, Illinois, Maryland and all of New England likewise secede and “let this country be a nice conservative country run by people like Donald Trump and Wayne Root.”

Just the idea…*shudder*. You would either find me out of the country, or in a seceded state. Interesting, I suppose, that it doesn’t at all occur to Root what would happen to their dictatorship if California, New York, Illinois, Maryland and all of New England did leave all the conservative idiots on their own. Not only would their economy bottom out, but there would be one heck of a brain drain. RWW has the full story.

We now move on to Pastor Carl Gallups, who is railing on about immigration, and how it’s ‘god’s’ punishment. I wish these jackasses would be specific. Really can’t see Set or Dionysus or a host of other gods doing something so psychopathic and petty.

Insisting that this is all part of “spiritual warfare,” Gallups said, “What’s happening now is a big, heavy dose, a seismic shift of common sense, rule of law and human decency is beginning to come back in vogue and the left and their counterpart in the demonic realm, they are screaming, ‘Oh, it’s utter chaos, it’s utter chaos.’”

I haven’t been in any demonic realm, nor have I been screaming “oh, it’s utter chaos” either. I have been doing my best to wake people the fuck up, that’s a bit different. Fighting and Resistance are not the same as quivering in panic, just so you know.

He went on to explain that while “the world is so concerned about the flood of refugees and illegal immigrants that are violating our boundaries and borders,” it can all be traced back to God’s punishment on America for teaching evolution and allowing gay rights and legal abortion.

No, no, no, no, no. I’m not at all concerned about refugees. I am concerned about all the things which are forcing people to flee their countries. I’m fine with the people, it’s all the war, intolerance, and other nastiness I’m primarily concerned with, because it’s those things which need to change. No one has been violating boundaries or borders. It’s a fucking nonsensical concept anyway. Human imposed borders have been shifting for as long as there have been humans. Same thing goes with migration. People move. *Shrug*

“Here’s what I have been saying for years before this date,” he said, “and that was: Look, we have violated the borders of our children’s minds, for 100 years we have told them that they come from monkeys and that there is no God. We have violated the borders of their souls and their spirits. We have violated the borders of the womb in America and have destroyed 60 million children. We have violated the borders of sexuality, we have violated the borders of family, we have violated the borders of marriage, we have violated the borders of gender. And now, as a judgment from God or as discipline from God, our own geographical borders are now being violated.”

Oooh, yes, introducing children to the concept of thinking, then teaching them how to think, yeah, that’s evil. We don’t come from monkeys, you dipshit. We’re apes. It’s an ‘all in the family’ kind of thing. Can’t we have a law somewhere that prohibits idiots from spouting off about biology until they have had to study it? Yeah, yeah. I can dream.

“The borders of the womb.” :chokes: There’s no one uterus, dude. Individual uteruses are not parts of a hive-uterus. A uterus is a bodily organ, not an entity. A uterus is not an individual. Said organs are inside many individuals, who supposedly have control of them, just like the rest of their organs. Many individuals with uteruses aren’t remotely interested in you or anyone else’s opinion on them. As far as my uterus is concerned, consider it an undiscovered country. No one is welcome.

Borders, borders, borders. You’re boring me to death with this obsession. So Jehovah has gotten all pissy and decided to just now do this immigration thing, eh? So, you’re a dyed in the wool idiot, too. I have to say, ol’ El Shaddai has lost his touch. It got so bent out of shape over a lack of hospitality that he crispy crittered two cities, and turned a sorrowful woman into salt, for the great crime of grieving over her lost family and home. If continuing immigration is all it has, I think your god is past its used by date. Just sayin’. RWW has the story.

Last is right wing lawyer, Larry Klayman, who thinks he’s really onto something with suing our former president:

Right-wing attorney Larry Klayman appeared on Steve Malzberg’s Newsmax program today to discuss the lawsuit he has filed against former President Obama for allegedly inciting a protestor opposed to President Trump’s ban on refugees and immigrants from several predominantly Muslim nations to “assault” him at Los Angeles International Airport over the weekend. That “assault” apparently consisted of carrying a sign and yelling at passengers.

“Someone with an Arabic accent, a female, charged at me and others in a very aggressive and provocative way,” Klayman said, “causing us fear of immediate bodily injury or death—that’s the standard for assault. She was obviously egged on by President Obama after he left office, in his private capacity, when he was giving a call to arms, in effect, to protesters to continue this mayhem and destruction.”

Obama was likewise responsible for the violent protest at Berkeley University last night, Klayman said.

Klayman insisted that his lawsuit “has great merit” and that he looks forward to proving that Obama “is responsible … for assaulting me Sunday evening.”

I have run right out of comment. I am so tired of dipshit idiots. RWW has the story and video.

Trump Shall Set Us Free…

CREDIT: AP Photo/Jay Reeves.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Jay Reeves.

On Thursday, internet racists celebrated another perceived victory: Reports that President Trump will soon remove white nationalist groups from a federal effort to study and neutralize extremist radicalization, and rebrand the program to focus solely on groups associating themselves with Islam.

The Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program partners government agencies with community organizations in hopes of preventing people from being radicalized into various types of terror and hate groups. Its primary focus has always been in Muslim communities, but the Obama administration designed it to also encompass the American far-right groups that propagandize to people like Dylann Roof.

News of Trump’s plan to reverse that symbolic recognition of right-wing threats prompted a wave of celebration in white nationalist circles.

“Donald Trump wants to remove us from undue federal scrutiny by removing ‘white supremacists’ from the definition of ‘extremism,’” the founder and editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer (which takes its name from a Nazi propaganda publication) wrote in a post on the site. “Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.”

This interpretation overstates the scope of Reuter’s report somewhat. The meme-filled Daily Stormer post alleges that changing the CVE program and renaming it to focus solely on “Islamic extremism,” as Trump puts it, would also extend to to calling off FBI scrutiny and taking white supremacists and neo-Nazis off of extremist databases. That would actually require separate action from Trump.

But in Trump’s move to take even some measure of scrutiny off of far-right extremism, The Daily Stormer sees a direct parroting of their own writing and a reward for the far-right’s role in getting Trump elected.

“It’s fair to say that if the Trump team is not listening to us directly (I assume they are), they are thinking along very similar lines. We helped get Trump get [sic] elected, and the fact of the matter is, without Alt-Right meme magick, it simply wouldn’t have happened,” the post continues. “This is absolutely a signal of favor to us.”

And so it goes among the fascist nazi crowd all over. They are crowing, beyond happy, because they feel validated. They have been validated. Another excruciatingly clear message that killing “those” people doesn’t matter, it’s okay really, just don’t kill white people.

“Amazing my government no longer targets me as an enemy,” wrote one. “It’s now officially understood at the the highest levels that we are soooo much better than the kidnapper terrorist pedophile left,” wrote another.

I don’t, I just don’t have words today. Right now, I need more tea and a bout of dinosaur watching, just to assure myself we aren’t up in flames. Yet.

Full story at Think Progress.

Early Warning Signs.

U.S. Holocaust Museum.

U.S. Holocaust Museum.

A short road to fascism: Experts on authoritarianism are even more concerned about Trump’s dictator-like tendencies in week two than they were in week one. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that this poster from the U.S. Holocaust Museum outlining the disturbingly familiar warning signs of fascism went viral this week.

From This week in Trump’s America: Week 2: The Muslim ban, Neil Gorsuch, and the “worst call yet.”

And my personal explosive Oh Fuck! for the day:

Nawar al-Awlaki. CREDIT: video screengrab.

Nawar al-Awlaki. CREDIT: video screengrab.

In the Tiny Dictator’s completely botched “military raid”, this beautiful little girl was killed, eight years old. Unfortunately, hers was not the only death. Young Nawar’s death brings back words of the Tiny Dictator:

In December 2015, Trump said he would kill the family members of terrorists to stop ISIS.

“We’re fighting a very politically correct war,” Trump said during a Fox & Friends interview. “And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. They, they care about their lives. Don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families.”

Well, he’s made good on his word, adding baby killer to his less than impressive list of feats. If you’re going to have such an attitude, you really shouldn’t be surprised if those on the ‘other side’ adopt it. All’s fair and all that, yeah? This is fucking devastating, dangerous idiocy, and the military knows that. It’s a fucking pity Donny doesn’t, and thinks slaughtering children is okely dokely.

In a statement released shortly after the al Bayda raid, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group expressed concern about President Trump’s first raid and what it signals about his approach to extremism.

“The first military actions by the Trump administration in Yemen bode poorly for the prospect of smartly and effectively countering AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula],” the statement said. “The use of US soldiers, high civilian casualties and disregard for local tribal and political dynamics… plays into AQAP’s narrative of defending Muslims against the West and could increase anti-US sentiment and with it AQAP’s pool of recruits.”

Via Think Progress.

Donny & Milo: A Fascist Love Affair.

Students protest Milo Yiannopoulos’ appearance at UC Berkeley Wednesday evening. CREDIT: AP Photo/Ben Margot.

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.

Via Think Progress.

A Chilling Silence.

Police officers patrol at the pyramid outside the Louvre museum in Paris,Friday, Feb. 3, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Thibault Camus.

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.

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

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.

Via Think Progress.

Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.

Texas high school students (Twitter / @louismccorgilee).

Texas high school students (Twitter / @louismccorgilee).

CYPRESS, Texas – Several controversial photos of students from Cypress Ranch High School are circulating on social media.

The pictures show a group of students, some with their hands in the air making what appears to be a Nazi salute.

In an email to KPRC Channel 2, a student who witnessed the incident but asked to remain anonymous said students were shouting “Heil Hitler” and “Heil Trump. The student also said it was at least 70 or so people and, “It was pretty terrifying.”

The photos were taken on Tuesday, picture day for the senior class. One photo was supposed to be serious, the second was supposed to be funny.

But no one is laughing about it now.

The email from the Cypress Ranch student went on to say, “Most people may think it was just kids just joking around but in the current political climate and the fact these kids are seniors in high school, it’s beyond unacceptable.”

I’m very weary of the “funny! joke!” bullshit. No, it’s not funny. No, it’s not a joke. There are people who can do such a thing right, like Mel Brooks, but this is plain old ugly nazism, performed by a bunch of young white men, about ready to launch themselves into the world at large. Not remotely funny.

From a letter written by the principal of the school:

“This letter is to make you aware of a situation that occurred on our campus today while our senior class was taking a large group panoramic picture. Several of our students made the poor choice of displaying inappropriate gestures during this time. Unfortunately, many of these images have been shared on social media. This is extremely disappointing as this is not an accurate representation of our student body.

“We are currently conducting an investigation and those implicated will be punished according to the Student Code of Conduct.

“We ask that you talk to your students regarding the posting and sharing of negative social media as this perpetuates a false image of Cy Ranch HS.

No worry at all about the fact they have a large group of nazis in their school. No, this is all about image. Dammit, nazi boys, we told you, be discreet! This is a disgusting response, to say the least. What’s the punishment going to be, a course in proper nazi etiquette? Going by the Raw Story article, there were teachers present, but not one of them said a word, or told the nazis to knock it off. So normalised already that fully fledged adults turn their heads away from nazi youth. Great sign, ennit?

Via Click2Houston and Raw Story.

In the same vein, white supremacy was on view at a basketball game:

Video has surfaced from the controversial Dover and Jefferson basketball game on Friday during which members of the Jefferson crowd shouted racial remarks at an African-American player on the Dover team and “Build the wall” during their pre-game warm-ups.

The incident came to light Monday when Jefferson Superintendent Patrick Tierney apologized after students “allegedly made racist and/or offensive statements directed at the Dover athletes” during Friday’s game. Dover Superintendent Robert Becker issued a statement hours later in which he identified two of those statements, saying Dover students chanted “ashy knees” at a player, as well as, “Build the wall.”

Video obtained by NJ Advance Media shows several instances of members of the Jefferson crowd shouting “ashy knees” when an African-American player steps up to the free throw line for several foul shots. Occasionally, one area would shout “ashy,” and the other area would follow with “knees.”

The theme for the night was American pride, and several people in the video were dressed in clothes featuring the American flag — and one member of the crowd waved a full-sized American flag. Earlier chants combined with the flags, upset some Dover parents.

Michael Moore, a parent of a Dover High School basketball player, told NJ Advance Media he believed the Jefferson crowd’s intent was to disparage Dover — a town with a significant Hispanic and African-American population.

“Their intent was disrespect,” he said. “Not to promote the country as a whole.”
Moore, who was in attendance at the game, said he placed the blame on the adults in the Jefferson group as they “allowed this and put this together.”

If you click on over to the full article, you’ll see the incredibly flimsy, bullshit excuses provided by adults for their little nazis in training. Disgust isn’t strong enough. There’s also video at the link.