Credit: Ricardo Aca.
There’s a very good story: ‘Everything that my family has we have earned’: An undocumented immigrant who works in a Trump hotel stands up to The Donald.
Everything My Family Has…
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Credit: Ricardo Aca.
There’s a very good story: ‘Everything that my family has we have earned’: An undocumented immigrant who works in a Trump hotel stands up to The Donald.
Rebecca Nelson at GQ has a very good article up about the current ‘crazy for Trump’ going on, and Rick Alan Ross, a cult expert and republican was watching this all with distaste, until a bell rang, and rather loudly. What he’s watching is the rise of a cult leader. The article goes through a number of points:
Sign I: His campaign is fueled by charisma.
Sign II: He’s a raging narcissist.
Sign III: What he says is always right. Even when it’s not.
Drinking the Orange Kool-Aid.
What has long bothered (and scared) me is that no one who follows Trump is remotely interested in seeing him subject to the same things the other candidates are, it’s always “different” in Trump’s case. That did not, and does not read like enthusiastic political support. This is more “alright, we can finally set up a dictatorship and start killing all the ___! Yes!”
The final note from the GQ article:
Trump doesn’t consider all women his spiritual wives, like the Branch Davidians’ David Koresh. And we can reasonably assume that he does not have plans to kill his supporters by giving them cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, as the Rev. Jim Jones did at his Guyana compound in 1978. Still, his ascendency could very well start a nuclear war. “We’re not talking about a compound with a thousand people,” Ross says. “We’re talking about a nation with over 300 million people. So the consequences of Trumpism could affect us in a way Jim Jones never did.”
Especially if you don’t drink the Trump Kool-Aid™.
Full story here.
White supremacists (Twitter).
White nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers located mostly in the United States use Twitter with “relative impunity” and often have far more followers than militant Islamists, a study being released on Thursday found.
Eighteen prominent white nationalist accounts examined in the study, including the American Nazi Party, have seen a sharp increase in Twitter followers to a total of more than 25,000, up from about 3,500 in 2012, according to the study by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism that was seen by Reuters.
[…]
Berger said in an interview that Twitter and other companies such as Facebook Inc faced added difficulties in enforcing standards against white nationalist groups because they are less cohesive than Islamic State networks and present greater free speech complications.
Oh really. Hmmm. Interesting how there aren’t any greater free speech complications when it comes to stomping on Islamic extremism, but boy oh boy, does it ever get complicated when it’s white extremists. Sure.
The data collected, which included analysis of tweets of selected accounts and their followers, represents a fraction of the white nationalist presence on Twitter and was insufficient to estimate the overall online size of the groups, the report said.
Accounts examined in the study possessed a strong affinity for U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, a prolific Twitter user who has been accused of retweeting accounts associated with white nationalism dozens of times.
Three of the top 10 hashtags used most frequently by the data set of users studied were related to Trump, according to the report, entitled “Nazis vs. ISIS on Twitter.” Only #whitegenocide was more popular than Trump-related hashtags, the report said.
Yeah, there’s shocking news. I’ll try to work up a shocked expression or something.
Full story here.
The Lakota people refer to warriors as “akicita” and still use this term while referring to veterans. The akicita lead the way toward the prayer site in the rain. (Photo: Thosh Collins)
Trump’s toxic mess of a speech in Arizona. You can read the transcript of the speech. I just have one comment on one small section, for now:
These are valid concerns expressed by decent and patriotic citizens from all backgrounds, all over. We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate. Sometimes it’s just not going to work out. It’s our right, as a sovereign nation to chose [sic] immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us.
Now I know Trump has no love for Indians, he makes that clear at every opportunity. Here’s the thing, though, us Indians were declared sovereign nations some time ago, so how about if we choose the immigrants to this county that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us? Seems about right to me.
A ‘Sausage Party’ movie moment between ‘Frank’ (Seth Rogen) and an Indian Chief that is a bottle of alcohol labeled ‘Firewater’ (Bill Hader), as well as the Indian’s compatriots, an African American who is a box of grits and a white man who is a Twinkie.
I admire Vincent Schilling for sitting through this mess of juvenile idiocy, sexism, and unabashed racism, so I won’t have to do it. I was absolutely appalled by the 2nd Despicable Me flick, and almost killed my own television set, because we only netflixed that monstrous mess of racism, sexism, and casual violence.
To the excitement of Seth Rogen fans, his toilet-humored animated film “Sausage Party” hit theaters this August. To the dismay of anyone with a social conscience, the movie has a slew of racially charged epithets that seem contrived to offend just for the sake of being offensive.
I am a Native American, and I grew increasingly uneasy watching the moments between ‘Frank’ (Seth Rogen) and an Indian Chief that is a bottle of alcohol labeled ‘Firewater’ (Bill Hader), as well as the Indian’s compatriots, an African American who is a box of grits and a white man who is a Twinkie. (Video Clip – Caution: Strong Language)
https://youtu.be/wRLQ0g9z0P0
The film, directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon, and written by Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is also filled with sexual references involving any phallic shaped foods, and there are a minor few funny moments reminiscent of life during recess in sixth grade, but the racially charged moments only seem to qualify themselves by continuing to attack all races without any real attempt to call forth a social commentary.
Shortly after the film gets started – it was off to the races with racially charged humor. Food products in the Chinese food section had slanted eyes and spoke in broken english, German food products were led by a Hitler looking product screaming “Kill the Juice” and the relationship between a bagel (Edward Norton) and a lavash (David Krumholtz) laid upon the issues of the Jews and Palestinians.
Shutterstock.
A Texas teacher claims she had no idea she’d chosen a misspelled racial slur to nickname one of her racially mixed classes.
The white teacher gave each of her sixth-grade classes a nickname and laid out a set of goals for students at Bell Manor Elementary School in suburban Fort Worth, reported KDFW-TV.
A parent said he learned his son’s class had been nicknamed the “jigaboos,” although the teacher misspelled the racial slur for black people, when he asked about his child’s day at school.
So the father, who asked to remain anonymous in the TV report, went to school and photographed the laminated sign, which read: “Mrs. _______’s Jighaboos are at school today to achieve our 6th grade goals and prepare for 7th grade.”
“She makes them recite that out loud,” said the father, who is white.
[…]
Officials from Hurst-Euless-Bedford Independent School District said they had apologized to the father who photographed the sign, which they agreed was not appropriate for school use.
“[We] would like to extend an apology for the inappropriate actions taken by one of our elementary teachers who failed to vet a class name,” district officials said in a statement. “We take this situation seriously and the issue was immediately addressed with the principal and classroom teacher. Both the principal and the teacher have apologized to the parent reporting this concern.”
Officials told the father the teacher was unaware she’d chosen a racial slur to nickname some of her students.
Ignorance can be corrected, but I have trouble buying the ignorance claim when it comes to teachers, who, generally speaking, tend to be a bit more knowledgeable than most people. Okay, I’m an old woman who has definitely heard ‘jigaboo’ and is aware of the racism inherent in that term. I don’t know how old the teacher is in this case, and I also don’t know if most younger people, say 20 to 35, are aware of it. That said, this teacher had to pull this term out of somewhere, it didn’t just magically pop into existence. Even misspelled, I expect a few moments of searching on the net would have let this teacher know it wasn’t appropriate. I can only hope against hope that this isn’t a case of a deeply bigoted teacher, who will find ways to introduce bigotry and stereotypes into young minds.
Via Raw Story.
Student activist protests hateful environment in schools (Screen capture).
An ad from progressive group Move On shows how around the country, nonwhite and Muslim students are getting bullied by racist whites who’ve been emboldened by the unvarnished racism of the Donald Trump campaign.
Titled “Our Kids,” the video shows excerpts from news stories in which black, Muslim and Latino schoolchildren across the U.S. have been threatened and harassed by their white peers.
In Oregon, vandals hung a banner aimed at Latino students that said “Build a wall” — a reference to Trump’s promise to build a wall along the Mexican border to keep Latino immigrants out of the country.
At a high school basketball game in Chicago, white students chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at black and Latino players and their supporters.
As the 75-second video moves from incident to incident, an ugly picture emerges of what’s motivating Trump voters, no matter what the candidate and his TV surrogates say about “economic anxiety” and “outsider politics.”
“Donald Trump is endangering our kids,” the ad says, before cutting to footage of students describing their experiences.
This country is caught in a whirlpool of shit. This hatred has to stop. Please, share this, get this out everywhere, it’s an important message for all.
Via Raw Story.
Stephen Bannon.
If you’re like me, you went “who?” Yet another nasty group of people, who revel in extremism, and one I had not heard of before. As it turns out, two Trump henchpersons have not only heard of it, they are part of it. How surprising, right?
According to an SPLC statement, Breitbart.com CEO Stephen Bannon and pollster Kellyanne Conway — hired as Trump 2016’s CEO and campaign manager, respectively — are members of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a highly secretive group that includes a roster of controversial white supremacists and rightwing agitators.
“The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called ‘culture wars,’ along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included,” wrote SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok.
The SPLC was able to obtain the CNP’s closely-guarded 2014 membership directory and found that it included “people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama ‘birther’ and the propagandist hit man responsible for the ‘Swift boating’ of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.”
Conway and Bannon’s names both appear on the CNP’s 2014 membership roster. The SPLC was unable to determine their current membership status.
The Center noted that the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret, but the membership roster opens a window on how purportedly moderate Republicans meet and network with right-wing extremists in formulating their policy agenda and crafting legislation.
The CNP roster of members includes “real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law,” the SPLC said.
Well. That’s terrifying. These are the people the so-called not completely batshit repubs are networking with, and we are now living in interesting times, with the rise of white nationalism and open bigotry. I think I could have lived without this particular knowledge, but it’s best to as knowledgeable as possible these days.
Via Raw Story.
Jennifer Dorner posted this image after dropping her kids off on the first day of school in Montreal. (Courtesy Jennifer Dorner/Facebook).
A picture posted by mother Jennifer Dorner has started yet another conversation about why not to wear costume headdresses. She took the image while dropping her children off for their first day of school at Montreal’s École Lajoie on Monday, August 29. The image shows a Grade 3 teacher in a headdress in front of the children, and according to Dorner, smaller headdresses were being handed out for the children to wear.
Sarah Dorner, Zoe’s mother, told thestar.com that her daughter refused to wear the headdress.
“We have been teaching our children that costumes like that are inappropriate,” Dorner also said. “The other kids in the class were all wearing them.”
“A lot of children aren’t necessarily taught cultural sensitivity or have much awareness about indigenous cultures,” she went on to say. “But in our family we have many indigenous friends, so it’s a conversation we’ve had many times.”
Gina Guillemette, a Margeurite-Bourgeoys school board spokesperson, told news outlets that the two teachers seen sporting headdresses have backgrounds in anthropology and history and are introducing indigenous history into the curriculum. Guillemette also told CBC News the headdresses worn by teachers were a way for the kids to know which “family, or class, to go to.”
Guillemette told the Gazette that “the teachers decided to wear hats to symbolize that they were Native chiefs,” to separate their students from another Grade 3 class.
Right. So naturally, you could not be bothered, as educators, to thoughtfully choose a particular tribe, maybe one in your actual part of the world, find out what their traditional regalia might be, and actually ask members of that tribe if it would be okay to dress in a certain item. Oh, that would be bringing Indians into things, and I guess you can’t have that in a school, it might poison young minds with the truth or something. As Adrienne Keene wrote on Native Appropriations, this is not a lightweight matter:
Adrienne K of Native Appropriations writes that a non-Indian casually wearing an Indian headdress “furthers the stereotype that Native peoples are one monolithic culture, when in fact there are 500+ distinct tribes with their own cultures. It also places Native people in the historic past, as something that cannot exist in modern society. We don’t walk around in ceremonial attire everyday, but we still exist and are still Native.” She also draws attention to the deep spiritual significance of a headdress and maintains that when a non-Indian wears one “it’s just like wearing blackface.”
Getting back to the teachers at École Lajoie, they seem to not only miss the point, they are determined to miss the point:
“No offence was intended—if any parents were offended, we apologize,” Guillemette told the Gazette. “We didn’t want to offend anyone. It was the opposite; we wanted to sensitize the students to the contributions of native communities.”
Oh For Fuck’s Sake! What about the children you offended, do they not count? And there’s that magical if – if you were offended, words of the classic notpology. You sensitize students to the contributions of native communities by appropriating a headdress unique to specific tribes, and mashing up all tribal cultures into one messy clump? You sure as hell don’t sound like educators to me, you sound like flaming assholes who live to perpetuate stereotypes.
“How can they possibly be teaching an authentic understanding of indigenous culture? Dorner asked thestar.com. “It doesn’t help their cause to say that. If anything, it makes it even more distressing.”
This isn’t the first time Dorner has addressed cultural sensitivity with the school either. In 2014, “they were doing a play where Santa goes to Africa and gets Ebola and gets sick and the local tribes are dancing around him and my daughter was going to be in blackface,” she told the Gazette.
“We managed to convince the school not to do blackface at the time, but they still kept the story line. Santa ends up being saved by scientists who come from the North Pole.”
She met with the school multiple times in 2014, according to the Gazette to discuss “cultural appropriation and this kind of insensitivity and was hoping that we had come to some kind of understanding, but apparently not. Which is why I’m particularly upset this time. The message doesn’t seem to be sinking in.”
Canadians, please, wake the fuck up. This school, and its staff, should be shamed into the ground by a whole lot of very angry people. Apparently, the open bigotry at this school strikes too many people as just fine, and that is seriously fucked up.
Full story at ICTMN.
Colin Kaepernick.
Finally, people have spoken up for Colin Kaepernick’s sit down in an attempt to bring attention to the ongoing murders of brown people, and those people are veterans.
In the days since San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem as a way to protest the oppression of people of color in the United States, journalists, fans, and NFL players both past and present have expressed their outrage.
Most of their criticism focuses in on the disrespect that Kaepernick was supposedly showing the flag and the U.S. military members who have fought and died for our freedom.
Well, on Tuesday, veterans from all over the country took to social media, not to attack Kaepernick for his actions, but rather to show their support. The #VeteransForKaepernick hashtag took off and ended up trending worldwide.
Don't use my service–or that of any veteran–to justify the silencing of black Americans. Not on my watch. #VeteransForKaepernick
— Charles Clymer (@cmclymer) August 31, 2016
#VeteransForKaepernick Although my grandfather served two tours in Vietnam, he couldn't even rent a home near his base b/c he was black.
— Blorenzo (@blorenzo) August 30, 2016
My grandfather, a black man, was denied a hotel room WHILE IN HIS SERVICE DRESS. #VeteransForKaepernick
— blasianbri (@blasianbri_) August 30, 2016
My fiance served not 1 BUT 2 tours in Iraq and STILL gets pulled out of his car, handcuffed and sat on the curb by #VeteransforKaepernick
— Ms.Bordeaux (@InezBordeaux) August 30, 2016
And others pointed out that black veterans are not immune from being shot by police once they return to civilian life. Just last September, India Kager, a 28-year-old navy veteran, was shot and killed by police in her parked car while her four-month-old son was in the backseat.
#IndiaKager Served her country. Police served her a death sentence. #VeteransForKaepernick pic.twitter.com/2HcnMP1MlB
— ChuckModi (@ChuckModi1) August 31, 2016
My thanks to all the veterans who stood up and put those nasty bigots in their place. Full story and more tweets at Think Progress.
CREDIT: AP/MICHAEL DYWER.
You didn’t think I was serious, did you? Okay, well LePage sorta kinda apologized, except not really. He’s sorry he made noises about stepping down.
All of this morning’s headlines focused on Maine Gov. Paul LePage apparently apologizing for an angry voice mail he left a state lawmaker, suggesting during a radio interview that he might even resign.
By the end of the day, the headlines were about LePage taking back the idea of quitting.
Lost in the political intrigue is that LePage didn’t apologize for using a gay slur. (He repeatedly called Rep. Drew Gattine a “cocksucker.”) He’s instead apologizing for losing his temper. LePage said he nearly couldn’t breathe after a reporter told him Gattine had said the governor is racist.
LePage also certainly isn’t apologizing for endorsing racial profiling. In a news conference Friday after LePage got caught leaving that short-of-breath, furious voice mail, the governor defended himself by saying “people of color” are “the enemy.”
[…]
LePage is aware that what he’s saying is considered racist, though he’s equally certain he’s not racist.
“Now they’re saying, ‘Well, you can’t do this,’ every day they’re saying, ‘You can’t do it because of the racially charged atmosphere in our country,’” he said. “But the same token is all lives matter. That’s the bottom line: All lives matter. And the majority of people dying are Mainers.”
Yes, yes, dying at the hands of those awful brown people from out of state. This, when he openly admits all the meth in Maine is being manufactured and dealt by white Mainers. But it’s the brown people’s fault, and no, he’s not racist, not one whit.
The governor issued a much less apologetic statement before his radio interview. In it, LePage acknowledged he’d purposely called Gattine “the worst word I could think of.” He didn’t apologize to LGBT people. He didn’t take back the proposal to racially profile people entering Maine.
“I make no apology for trying to end the drug epidemic that is ravaging our state,” he said. “Legislators like Gattine would rather be politically correct and protect ruthless drug dealers than work with me to stop this crisis that is killing five Mainers a week.”
The worst word you could think of was cocksucker? Really? Wow. I get the feeling LePage doesn’t think much of women, either. As for your crisis of five Mainers a week dying, perhaps you need to focus on more social programs which could help people when it comes to drugs. Are you working to make sure people have clean needles? Do you have needle drop off stations? Free clinics with counseling? Low cost rehab? Anything? Because just being a racist twit who wants an excuse to go homicidal on brown people is not going to help your problem, Gov.
The Advocate has the full story.
Donald Trump and Wayne Allen Root (YouTube/screen grab).
Wayne Allyn Root, a Donald Trump admirer who often claims to be in frequent contact with the GOP candidate has led campaign rallies for him in Nevada, said yesterday that people who receive federal benefits such as Medicaid, welfare and food stamps should lose their right to vote, as should women who use “free contraception” under the Affordable Care Act.
Root’s plan would cut a large swath of Americans from the voter rolls: Roughly one in five Americans benefit from means-tested benefit programs, while 67 percent of women with private health insurance use copay-free contraception through the Affordable Care Act (which, by the way, is paid for by insurance companies, not by the federal government).
Root told Virginia radio host Rob Schilling yesterday that much of the energy behind Trump’s campaign, as he discusses in his new book “Angry White Male,” is that the country is “evenly divided between the makers and the takers,” so “the middle class is basically paying, paying, paying and the poor get everything free, and it’s a disaster.”
One time, we needed to apply for help, because serious broke, no food, no anything. We sat in an office for over 8 hours only to see someone who wanted us drown in a swamp of red tape, when we explained that a new job was in the works, just needed help for two weeks. Much frowning, sighing, and grumbling. Then a pronouncement: if you have a job, you don’t qualify for aid. “We. have. no. food.” Frowning, sighing grumbling part II. Wanders off to talk to other people. Finally comes back with a “I really shouldn’t do this…” Okay, I can give you two food vouchers. We received paperwork for $80.00 worth of food to cover the two weeks. In return, we had to commit to 80 hours (each) of community service. Anyone who thinks poor people get anything for free needs to be most seriously smacked.
Root said that he had recently seen a map on the internet showing that if only “taxpayers” had been allowed to vote, the 2012 election would have been “a Republican sweep.”
“So if the people who payed the taxes were the only ones allowed to vote, we’d have landslide victories,” he said, “but you’re allowing people to vote. This explains everything! People with conflict of interest shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you collect welfare, you have no right to vote. The day you get off welfare, you get your voting rights back. The reality is, why are you allowed to have this conflict of interest that you vote for the politician who wants to keep your welfare checks coming and your food stamps and your aid to dependent children and your free health care and your Medicaid, your Medicare and your Social Security and everything else?”
Root quickly amended his statement to say that receiving Social Security and Medicare shouldn’t disqualify someone from voting, but “in general most of the things I just rattled off should preclude you from voting.”
We could get landslide victories by denying Christian straight white conservative men from voting, too. Hmmm.
“Social Security should not, Medicare should not, because you paid into the system,” he said. “But all the other stuff, all the other goodies, free Obama phones, free contraception, you know what, you can get them but you shouldn’t be allowed to vote, it’s a conflict of interest. Take that away, we’d win every single election in this country.”
:chokes on tea: Free contraception? On what planet? Here’s a thought – you pick up the tab for 20 years of contraception for 5 women, plus the pink tax they have paid for those 20 years. Then tell me what you think about free contraception.
Via RWW.
CNN’s Carol Costello speaks to Angela Rye and Thomas Rodgers (screen grab).
Apostle Thomas Rodgers, Sr. of Antioch Road to Glory International Ministries in North Carolina told CNN host Carol Costello that black Americans should receive “dual citizenship” so that they could find jobs in Africa.
“African-Americans are the only people in the world who do not seek dual citizenship,” Rodgers said. “That’s why Chicago gangs, California gangs, the Crips and the Bloods and Detroit in Michigan — we have gangs in the streets because blacks have no vision, they have no leadership.”
“You’ve also talked about building a road back to Africa,” Costello noted. “Can you explain that?”
Rodgers replied: “Matter of fact, where our ancestors came from, from the Indian Ocean all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, that’s 4,000 miles and we want to go back and help with the highways all the way across, to create jobs, train rails, pipelines, oil, petroleum. They create jobs for young people that can’t find jobs here, that the Democrats have not did.”
“I think it would give young people in prison [jobs] just like Great Britain did,” he opined.
Er…is he referencing what I think he’s referencing? Holy isht. No, no, that’s not a good idea. Nope. You can read the rest of his, um, ideas here. There’s video, too.