This is what Trump’s America looks like

And it is ugly . What we are witnessing in Charlottesville, VA are the results of Trump’s racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric having emboldened the worst elements of society. Unfortunately this will not be the last because Trump’s administration will do nothing to disavow them but will continue to send signals that he is on their side.

In the middle of Emancipation Park in Charlottesville on Saturday, two young women, one white and one black, took each other’s hands and held them tightly, and with their other hands they gripped the steel barrier in front of them.

A few feet away, a young white man with a buzzed haircut and sunglasses leaned towards them over a facing barrier. “You’ll be on the first f*****g boat home,” he screamed at the black woman, before turning to the white woman. “And as for you, you’re going straight to hell,” he said. Then he gave a Nazi salute.

For the third time in a few months, white nationalists had descended on the small, liberal city of Charlottesville in Virginia, to protest against the planned removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee.

This time they came under the banner of the so-called “alt-right”, for a rally they called “Unite the Right”. They were a motley crew of militia, racists, and neo-Nazis, and some who said they simply wanted to defend their Southern history.

They gathered early in the morning at Emancipation Park – formerly Lee Park – where the statue sits, some dressed in full tactical gear and openly carrying rifles. Others wore black shirts, helmets, and boots.

In a column they surged into the park, using sticks and their fists to shove aside anti-fascist counter-protesters. Then they blocked off the entrance with shields. Inside, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, grinned and waved as the crowd, almost entirely white and male, cheered him on, chanting his name and putting their arms up in Nazi salutes.
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In the park, in a pen ringed by steel barriers, they shouted anti-immigrant, anti-semitic and racist slogans and targeted white women counter-protesters, calling them “traitors” who “needed to get subjugated”. Outside, anti-fascist protesters threw bottles of water at the white nationalists and chanted “Off our streets, Nazi scum”. Pepper spray, used by both sides, filled the air.
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The speakers booked for the rally in Charlottesville were all men. The people who came to attend the rally were almost all men, and across the country the following of the so-called “alt-right” is overwhelmingly male.

The Republican party’s coded racist rhetoric opened the door to Trump getting elected. Trump does not even bother to code and thus we see the full flowering of the Southern Strategy unleashed by Richard Nixon.

When will the Trump party come into being?

We know that Donald Trump the narcissist loves to slap his name on to everything he is associated with and even charge organizations for that ‘privilege’. We also know that he sees the Republican party as his own possession now, and that all the other Republican elected officials are there to simply go along with whatever he wants.

So how long will it be before he demands that the Republican be renamed to the Trump party since the party is now run, like his businesses, as a family concern, to be handed down from generation to generation? While they have been content to grovel before him up to now, even as he insults the party leaders, will they go along with move? While I am being somewhat facetious, this is not out of the bounds of conceivability.

The ups and downs of the ACLU

Since the election of Donald Trump, the ACLU has seen a massive surge in membership, almost quadrupling its size. I have long been a member and recently on two separate occasions I met two of the leading members of the Ohio branch and I commented on this new support. They both said that while it was a good thing since it enabled them to hire more lawyers for the proliferation of lawsuits now underway, they were cognizant of the fact that a lot of the new members were likely not aware that the ACLU stood for principles based on the constitution and defended anyone whose rights were violated and were not aligned with any partisan political party.
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Australia to have non-binding referendum on same-sex marriage

Commenter sonofrojblake was prevented by a glitch from posting this useful bit of information as to why same-sex marriage has hard such a hard time in Australia, so I am adding it as an update:

Unfortunately, both major political parties have a strong religious streak. The Liberal Party had a long history of protestant spirit while Labor was infected with the Roman Catholic virus. The grate Labor split of the 1950’s saw Catholics leave to form a splinter party, but since the 1970’s have returned to Labor.

The Marriage Act (1961) was amended in 2004 with almost unanimous support from both sides. Now, tor the first time, the Marriage Act would contain a definition.

marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.

and inserted a new section:

88EA Certain unions are not marriages
A union solemnised in a foreign country between:
(a) a man and another man; or
(b) a woman and another woman;
must not be recognised as a marriage in Australia.[11]

This was done without being party policy at an election campaign, without a plebiscite, without a postal poll, in fact, without any reference to the people at all.

Australia is one country that you would have thought would have legalized same-sex marriage a long time ago. And yet surprisingly, it has not done so. But next month it will hold a voluntary and non-binding postal vote on the issue as part of the process of moving towards that goal. Voting is normally compulsory in Australian election.
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My talk on genius

I have been invited to give a talk on the topic of genius on Friday, August 18th. The talk is part of a series of monthly events organized by a group known as the Cleveland chapter of Creative Mornings. It is a global program with chapters in cities all over the world and each month all chapters feature programs on a single theme and this month it is genius. You can learn more about the event here and on Facebook and on this month’s theme here.
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An LGBTQ brigade is fighting ISIS in northern Syria

It is not easy keeping track of the many, many militant groups that are currently engaged in a macabre dance of death in the Middle East with ever-changing partners and all identified by a confusing alphabet soup of acronyms. But Meredith Tax writes about a development in an autonomous Kurdish region of northern Syria called Rojava that took me completely by surprise.
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Nice optical illusion

I have always been intrigued by optical illusions, seeing them as providing fascinating insights into how the brain works as well as warnings that what we think we see may not accurately represent what is actually there. I found this illusion (via David Pescovitz) to be particularly intriguing because the contradiction is so stark. You know that the four horizontal blue lines must be parallel because the background black and grey objects are all the same size, and yet to my eyes the top and third line unmistakably slope up to the right while the second and bottom lines slope down.
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Why the pre-dawn raids?

Today comes a new report that the Trump team was rattled by learning yesterday that the FBI had conducted a pre-dawn raid on the home of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and taking away boxes of stuff. The raid was presumably done at the request of Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating various charges involving the Trump campaign and Russian involvement in it plus matters arising from it.
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