The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
7 Deeply Troubling Facts About The United Daughters Of The Confederacy

7 Deeply Troubling Facts About The United Daughters Of The Confederacy

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

It’s helpful, in the midst of any conversation about this country’s Confederate monuments, to understand who put these things up, which also offers a clue as to why. In large part, the answer to the first question is the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a white Southern women’s “heritage” group founded in 1894. Starting 30 years after the Civil War, as historian Karen Cox notes in her 2003 book “Dixie’s Daughters,” “UDC members aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, where states’ rights and white supremacy remained intact.” In other words, when the Civil War gave them lemons, the UDC made lemonade. Horribly bitter, super racist lemonade.

This article was produced by Make It Right, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Though the UDC didn’t invent the Lost Cause ideology, they were deeply involved in spreading the myth, which simultaneously contends the Confederacy wasn’t fighting to keep black people enslaved while also suggesting slavery was pretty good for everyone involved. Lost Causers — plenty of whom exist today, their sheer numbers a reflection of the UDC’s effectiveness — argue that Confederate monuments are just innocent statues; that taking them down erases history; that we cannot retroactively apply today’s ideas about the morality of slavery to the past. The response to those ridiculous cop-outs is that Confederate monuments honor and glorify people who fought to maintain black chattel slavery; that they were erected for the explicit purpose of obfuscating history; and that the immorality of slavery was always understood by the enslaved. Excuses, excuses: get better at them.

“In their earliest days, the United Daughters of the Confederacy definitely did some good work on behalf of veterans and in their communities,” says Heidi Christensen, former president of the Seattle, Washington, chapter of the UDC, who left the organization in 2012. “But it’s also true that since the UDC was founded in 1894, it has maintained a covert connection with the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, in many ways, the group was the de facto women’s auxiliary of the KKK at the turn of the century. It’s a connection the group downplays now, but evidence of it is easily discoverable — you don’t even have to look very hard to find it.”

In 2017, after the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, UDC President Patricia M. Bryson posted an open letter claiming the UDC’s members “have spent 123 years honoring [Confederate soldiers] by various activities in the fields of education, history and charity, promoting patriotism and good citizenship,” and that members, “like our statues, have stayed quietly in the background, never engaging in public controversy.” But that isn’t true, not by a stretch. The UDC’s monuments, books, education and political agenda have always spoken loudly—in absolutely deafening shouts — on issues from anti-black racism to the historical memory of the Civil War across the South. Today, a shameful number of Americans don’t think slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War—even though the seceding states literally spelled this out in document form — in part because of the UDC’s campaign of misinformation. The most minor of gains made by blacks during the Reconstruction were obliterated nearly as soon as they were obtained, and the UDC backed that disenfranchisement full stop. Even the current UDC has mostly steadfastly refused — with rare exceptions — to take down Confederate monuments. They know the power of those symbols, both politically and socially, and they aren’t giving an inch, if they can help it.

The UDC have had a huge impact on this country, and to pretend they’ve stood “quietly in the background” would be laughable if it weren’t so insulting. The UDC both trained and became the white women of 1950s massive resistance, who author Elizabeth Gillespie McRae writes did “the daily work on multiple levels . . . needed to sustain racial segregation and to shape resistance to racial equality.” They set a precedent for a huge swath of today’s white women voters whose main political agenda is white supremacy — women who in a 2017 Alabama Senate race backed the alleged pedophile who wistfully longed for slavery and supported the presidency of a man who brags about grabbing women’s genitals when he’s not shouting his racism from the rafters. They have contributed to the construction of a “white womanhood” that has historically been and currently remains incredibly problematic, rendering “white feminism” eternally suspect. With their impact considered, and signs of their handiwork all over society — even carved indelibly into mountain sides — it seems worth understanding a few things about the UDC both then and now. Here are seven things you should know about the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

1. They published a very pro-KKK book. For children.

In 1914, the in-house historian of the UDC Mississippi chapter, Laura Martin Rose, published “The Ku Klux Klan, or Invisible Empire.” It’s essentially a love letter to the original Klan for its handiwork in the field of domestic terror in the years following the Civil War, when blacks achieved a modicum of political power.

“[D]uring the Reconstruction period, sturdy white men of the South, against all odds, maintained white supremacy and secured Caucasian civilization, when its very foundations were threatened within and without,” Rose writes.

She goes on to provide a look at the roots of racist anti-black stereotypes and language in this country, a lot of which is still recognizable in modern right-wing rhetoric. For example, she accuses black people of laziness — and wanting a handout — for refusing to keep working for free for white enslavers, and instead trying to find fortune where the jobs were: “Many negroes conceived the idea that freedom meant cessation from labor, so they left the fields, crowding into the cities and towns, expecting to be fed by the United States Government.”

In one section, with pretty overt delight, Rose highlights the methods the KKK used to terrify black people, including posting notes around towns with the “picture of a figure dangling from the limb of a tree,” and exalts the KKK’s lawless, murderous violence:

“In the courts of this invisible, silent, and mighty government, there were no hung juries, no laws delayed, no reversals, on senseless technicalities by any Supreme Court, because from its Court there was no appeal, and punishment was sure and swift, because there was no executive to pardon. After the negro had surrendered to the Ku Klux Klan, which he did by obeying their orders to the very letter, — for they feared that organization more than the devil and the dark regions, — the Invisible Empire vanished in a night, and has been seen no more by mortal man on this earth.

To be clear, Rose is here gushing about vast extrajudicial violence committed by the KKK against black people. In 1870, a federal grand jury labeled the KKK a “terrorist organization.” In 1871, a congressional committee was convened specifically to address the issue of Klan violence, and the report based on testimony from those hearings estimated “20,000 to as many as 50,000 people, mostly black, died in violence between 1866 and 1872.”

“This book was unanimously endorsed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy” at its general convention in November 1913, Rose notes, and the group “pledged to endeavor to secure its adoption as a supplementary reader in the schools and to place it in the libraries of our land.”

2. Actually, they published at least two very pro-KKK books…

…and probably many more. Another UDC ode to the KKK was written by Annie Cooper Burton, then-president of the Los Angeles chapter of the UDC, and published in 1916. Titled “The Ku Klux Klan,” much like Rose’s aforementioned book, it argues that the Klan has gotten a bad rap just because they terrorized and intimidated black people, not infrequently assaulting and raping black women, murdering black citizens, and burning down black townships. For these reasons, she suggests, the UDC should do even more to show reverence to the Klan:

“Every clubhouse of the United Daughters of the Confederacy should have a memorial tablet dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan; that would be a monument not to one man, but to five hundred and fifty thousand men, to whom all Southerners owe a debt of gratitude.”

By “all Southerners,” Burton clearly means “only white people,” which is also what she means whenever she uses the word “people.”

3. They built a monument to the KKK.

The UDC was busiest during the 1910s and 1920s, two decades during which the group erected hundreds of Confederate monuments that made tangible the racial terror of Jim Crow. This, apparently, the group still considered insufficient to convey their message of white power and to reassert the threat of white violence. So in 1926, the UDC put up a monument to the KKK. In a piece for Facing South, writer Greg Huffman describes a record of the memorial in the UDC’s own 1941 book “North Carolina’s Confederate Monuments and Memorials:”

“IN COMMEMORATION OF THE ‘KU KLUX KLAN’ DURING THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD FOLLOWING THE ‘WAR BETWEEN THE STATES’ THIS MARKER IS PLACED ON THEIR ASSEMBLY GROUND. THE ORIGINAL BANNER (AS ABOVE) WAS MADE IN CABARRUS COUNTY.

“ERECTED BY THE DODSON-RAMSEUR CHAPTER OF THE UNITED DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY. 1926”

4. Their most intense efforts focused on the “education” of white children.

Historian Karen Cox, author of 2003’s “Dixie’s Daughters,” has written that the UDC’s biggest goal was to indoctrinate white Southern children in the Lost Cause, thus creating “living monuments.

“They had a multi-pronged approach to doing that,” Cox told me. “It involved going into schools and putting up battle flags and portraits of generals. It meant getting schools renamed for famous Confederates. It was creating the Children of the Confederacy, which was their formal youth auxiliary, so that the UDC could draw membership from the group when they became adults…Children were always involved in the unveiling of monuments. They would select one child to pull the cord, and then there’d be cheers when the monument was unveiled. Children in the stands would form what they called a ‘living battle flag.’ Then they sang Southern patriotic songs.

Cox has also written about the Confederate catechism, a call-and-response style drill written by a UDC “historian” that posed as a history lesson:

“‘What causes led to the War Between the States, between 1861 and 1865?’ was a typical question. ‘The disregard, on the part of the states of the North, for the rights of the Southern or slaveholding states’ was the answer. ‘What were these rights?’ The answer . . . was ‘the right to regulate their own affairs and to hold slaves as property.’”

AP reporter Allen Breed has noted that the wording of the catechism has been “tweaked over the years,” but the version displayed on the UDC website as recently as August 2018 included this line: “Slaves, for the most part, were faithful and devoted. Most slaves were usually ready and willing to serve their masters.”

5. They’re big fans of black chattel slavery from way back.

The UDC were perhaps the most efficient agents making the ahistorical Lost Cause myth go viral. They did this through a number of methods, the most visually apparent being the 700 monuments exalting people who fought for black chattel slavery that still stand. But also, in the rare cases the UDC has “honored” black people with statuary and monuments, it has been in the form of “loyal slave” markers — an actual subgenre of Confederate monuments — which perpetuate the image of content enslaved blacks and benevolent white enslavers.

In 1923, the UDC tried to erect a monument in Washington, D.C., “in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South.” The Senate signed off on it, but the idea never came to fruition.

More successful was the UDC’s effort at placing a monument in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, that plays fast and loose with the biography of Haywood “Heyward” Shepherd (the UDC didn’t even bother to get his first name right), a free black man whom an inscription depicts as a “faithful negro” who chose slavery over freedom, as all “the best” blacks did.

The UDC was even given a place in Arlington National Cemetery for a Confederate monument that includes a weeping black “mammy” figure holding a white child and an enslaved black man marching alongside his enslaver into battle. The 1914 marker intentionally included the enslaved figure to propagate the idea that black people were willing, eager soldiers for the Confederacy — a suggestion that would mean the war couldn’t have been about slavery, which wasn’t so bad anyway. As historian Kevin Levin has documented at length, that lie has become a neo-Confederate talking point in a long list of other neo-Confederate lies.

6. They get tax breaks that help keep their workings financially solvent.

The UDC is a nonprofit. That means it’s a tax-exempt organization. That recent article about the UDC by AP reporter Allen Breed notes that the annual budget of Virginia, where the UDC is headquartered, “awards the state [division of the] UDC tens of thousands of dollars for the maintenance of Confederate graves — more than $1.6 million since 1996.”

7. They continue to exert political and social influence.

For the most part, the UDC has publicly kept pretty mum on the subject of Confederate monument removal, which has led some to conclude that the group is largely inactive, and even obsolete. Their numbers have dwindled since their heyday, but they remain tenacious about keeping Confederate monuments standing, thus continuing their cultural and political influence.

The UDC does this mostly through lawsuits. (The number of Confederate markers on courthouses has always shown the group’s keen interest in the power of the legal system.) When the San Antonio City Council voted in the weeks after the racist violence in Charlottesville to remove a Confederate monument from public property, the UDC filed suit against city officials. The Shreveport, Louisiana, chapter of the UDC has announced it will appeal a federal judge’s 2017 dismissal of the group’s lawsuit to keep up a Confederate monument at a local courthouse. The UDC threatened legal action against officials in Franklin, Tennessee, when city officials announced plans — not to take down a UDC monument to the Confederacy, but to add markers recognizing African-American historical figures to the park, which the UDC claims it owns. The city of Franklin, with pretty much no other option, responded by filing a lawsuit against the UDC.

And then there’s the case of the UDC vs. Vanderbilt University, in which the group’s Tennessee division filed suit after school administrators announced plans to remove the word “Confederate” from one of its dorms. A state appeals court ruled Vanderbilt could only implement the plan if it repaid $50,000 the UDC had contributed to the building’s construction in 1933 — adjusted to 2016 dollars. Vanderbilt opted to pay $1.2 million to the UDC rather than keep “Confederate” in the dorm name, which it raised from anonymous donors who contributed to a fund explicitly dedicated to the cause.

Kali Holloway is a senior writing fellow and the senior director of Make It Right, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

Immigration Service Won’t Deport This Nazi War Criminal

Immigration Service Won’t Deport This Nazi War Criminal

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

For the past few days, Donald Trump has spent much of his time on social media railing against immigrants and DACA, a policy his tweets prove he does not understand even a little bit. While the president persists in riling his base with nonexistent immigration boogeymen, the real deal dwells just hours from the White House. Jakiw Palij is an actual criminal immigrant who lied about his murderous Nazi background in order to get American citizenship, and is now living out his final years on a “leafy, tree-lined street” in Queens, New York. Despite efforts by local lawmakers to have Palij deported, the 94-year-old remains in the U.S., unmentioned in Trump’s rants and unmolested by ICE agents.

Palij was reportedly a guard at the Treblinka death camp, where 6,000 Jews were murdered. He was also a member of the armed forces at Trawniki extermination camp, where participants in “Operation Reinhard,” an ambiguously named plan to massacre two million Polish Jews, were trained. According to the Daily Beast, German wartime records indicate that Palij took part in the bloody 1943 Warsaw ghetto liquidation. After initially denying allegations by the DOJ Office of Special Investigations, Palij signed a 2001 affidavit “confirming his Nazi service.” By tate’d been living in the U.S. by that time more than 50 years, having previously lied about being a humble farmer in his native Poland. In 2003, a federal judge removed Palij’s U.S. citizenship, and one year later a court ordered him deported to Ukraine.

That problem is that Ukraine refuses to take him, as do officials in both Germany and Poland. Palij cannot be tried in U.S. courts because he is no longer a U.S. citizen, and his World War II crimes were committed far from American soil. Jakiw Palij is one of 11 Nazi war criminals ordered out of the country since 2005, nearly all of whom have remained in the U.S. until their deaths. (One was successfully sent to Germany where he died in a nursing home, his body later buried in an Ohio cemetery.) As ICE steps up arrests of noncriminal immigrants, including an honorably discharged Army veteran, the father of a terminally ill child, farmworkers being paid next to nothing, and a college science professor, Palij continues to quietly live out his days in Queens.

The difference in Palij’s case results not just from foreign resistance to his being deported.

“The real issue is whether it’s a priority for anyone at the State Department, and generally I don’t think it has been,” Stephen Paskey, a former DOJ prosecutor who led government cases against other Nazi criminals, told the Daily Beast. “I don’t know for certain what they’ve done, but I think the results speak for themselves.”

In October 2017, 70 members of the New York State Assembly sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions demanding Palij’s removal from the U.S. Four months later, every member of the New York State Congress signed a letter to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, urging Palij’s deportation. A press release from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s office states that the missive requested that Tillerson “pay personal attention to this issue, prioritize it and take decisive action to complete this already-ordered deportation.”

“Removing Mr. Palij from American soil will send a message not only to the citizens of New York, but to the entire world,” the letter noted. “It will make clear that the United States does not condone hatred and will not shelter those who have committed atrocities against innocents.”

While responses to New York legislators from both the DOJ and the State Department include statements in support of Palij’s removal, both agencies indicated that officials in Germany, Poland and Ukraine had refused to negotiate the case further, and suggested there was little more that could be done at this time.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has implied the Trump administration should get involved to move the dial.

“The 13 years that Mr. Palij has stayed in this country since he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and ordered to be deported is 13 years too many,” Schumer told the Washington Post late last year. “The State Department and the entire Trump administration ought to treat this with the attention it deserves and try everything at their disposal to carry out the court order and remove this former Nazi guard from our country.”

New York Assemblymember Dov Hikind, the child of two Holocaust survivors, told the Daily Beast he has been “pushing every button imaginable” to get Palij tossed out of the country, and claims “we even got in touch with the son-in-law [Jared Kushner].” The fact that nothing has come of it is a particularly bitter pill considering this administration’s dedication to law and order, and its practice of ejecting immigrants who’ve helped make this country a better place.

“You know, we’re throwing people out of this country who have been living here for 20 years and have families, and here we have a Nazi living in Queens,” Hikind told the Daily Beast. “How can that be? How is this possible?”

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

Republicans Are Becoming The ‘Poorly Educated’ Party

Republicans Are Becoming The ‘Poorly Educated’ Party

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

There are several key attributes that define the Republican Party in its modern incarnation: its overwhelming whiteness; its self-reported religiosity; its slavish devotion to a man who boasts he could shoot someone and not lose a single vote, thus proving his point. Moving forward, that list should probably also include as a distinguishing factor the fact that the party is less educated than its Democratic political rivals, and growing increasingly more so.

That’s according to a study released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center. The polling organization now finds “the widest educational gap in partisan identification and leaning seen at any point in more than two decades” between Republicans and Democrats. In 1994, the majority of U.S. residents with four-year college degrees leaned or identified as Republican, at 54 percent; just 39 percent of college graduates leaned or identified as Democrats. As of 2017, those numbers have switched exactly, with the majority of college degree holders now leaning Dem-ward.

Voters with post-graduate degrees are even more likely to cast their votes for Democratic politicians, Pew finds. Sixty-three percent of postgraduates identify as Dems or Dem-leaning, while just 31 percent describe themselves as Republican or GOP leaning. That’s a huge difference from the mid-1990s, when postgraduates were almost equally likely to opt for either party, with 45 percent supporting Republicans and 47 percent backing Democrats.

While Dem ranks have filled with more educated voters, Republicans saw increased support from those whose highest education attainment level is a high school diploma or less. “Among those with no more than a high school education, 47 percent affiliate with the GOP or lean Republican, while 45 percent identify as Democrats or lean Democratic,” Pew researchers write in their report. That’s a shift from the late 1990s and early aughts, when a plurality of those without college degrees voted Democratic, 47 to 42 percent.

As always in America, race can’t be removed from these numbers. Since 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, Pew researchers have found that “white voters with no more than a high school education have moved more to the GOP.” In the near-decade that has elapsed since then, among voters without a degree, “Republicans have held significant advantages, including a 23-percentage-point lead in 2017 (58 percent Republican, 35 percent Democratic).” Whites with college degrees mostly leaned or identified as Democrats at 49 percent, just slightly outpacing the 46 percent who lean or identify as Republican. Among whites with postgraduate degrees, “59 percent align with Democrats and 37 percent Republicans.”

Pew notes that “white voters continue to be somewhat more likely to affiliate with or lean toward the Republican Party than the Democratic Party (51 percent to 43 percent).”

College graduates continue to shift toward the Democratic Party

An obvious contributor to the declining education level within the GOP is the party’s hostility toward higher education, which has grown more ardent in recent years, though dates back decades. In 1952, vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon labeled Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stevenson an “egghead,” a reference to both his intellect and emerging pate. People often point to William F. Buckley as epitomizing a more enlightened and pro-intellectual conservative movement, but that gives posh transatlantic accents too much credit while ignoring what’s actually being stated. In fact, the National Review founder declared in 1963 he “should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” (He also argued American blacks weren’t quite civilized enough to have civil rights, because he was awful on multiple fronts.) In his campaign for California governor, Ronald Reagan suggested that “universities should not subsidize intellectual curiosity,” an argument that collapses in on itself under the weight of its vacuousness. And George W. Bush won infinite points with the anti-intellectualism crowd when he announced he wasn’t much for “sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something.”

The cumulative effect of so much big, dumb posturing is a pervasive culture of animosity toward not just education, but sites of learning themselves. Institutions of higher learning are among the primary targets of Republican ire in the culture wars, with conservatives imagining universities as liberal indoctrination factories staffed by Marxists who transform impressionable white youth into communist feminazi agents of their own racial extinction. Last year, Pew researchers discovered that “a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58 percent) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45 percent last year.” The same poll found 72 percent of those who identify or lean Democrat believe colleges are a positive impact on society. Similarly, a 2017 Gallup survey found that just one-third of Republicans and GOP leaning voters have “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in colleges.” Conversely, a majority, 56 percent, of Democrats gave higher education a thumbs-up. Republicans and Democrats who expressed no-confidence votes in colleges did so for vastly different reasons: GOPers complained campuses are “too liberal and political,” while Dems said “colleges are too expensive, are not well-run or have deteriorating quality, or that college graduates aren’t able to find jobs.”

The GOP opposition to learnedness is also manifest in overtly anti-education policy and various other consequences. The most plainly obvious might be how Donald Trump’s know-nothingness, along with a healthy dose of racism, ultimately granted him access to the nuclear codes. (“I love the poorly educated!” Trump condescended to supporters during his campaign.) In Wisconsin, Scott Walker is currently fighting to eliminate 13 liberal arts courses from the University of Wisconsin because why know stuff you can’t immediately put a price on? Education Secretary Betsy DeVos (those four words only make sense in sequence because of the GOP war on education) is scrapping Obama-era rules benefiting college faculty and students. Teachers in a handful of red states have been forced to walk out on classes in an effort to get decent pay and per-student spending. From the White House’s proposal to hack up budgets for science agencies to its attacks against journalists reporting facts and statistics, GOP anti-intellectualism is a driver of a notable portion of its goals.

College isn’t for everyone, obviously—just ask dropout Bill Gates, whom conservatives also hate. But the devaluation of education and knowledge, and the idea that book learnin’ is anathema to societal well-being, is absurd and destructive. As a rule, in every Congress including this majority-Republican body, nearly every member has a four-year degree, and the number of House and Senate legislators who possess postgraduate educations is far higher than in the general population. If nothing else, that proves elite GOP lawmakers actually do value education, at least where they and their children are concerned. They just want their voters to shun learning and to believe that knowing less is somehow better.

 

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

How Buffalo Trampled Racist Trumpster Carl Paladino

How Buffalo Trampled Racist Trumpster Carl Paladino

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

It’s an age-old question: how do you fight a bully? Or perhaps yet more timely, how do you topple a bullying racist billionaire politician?

The new Field of Vision documentary Adversary zooms in on a town doing its best to answer this question. Buffalo is home to Carl Paladino, who amassed his enormous fortune by putting up buildings all over town and across western New York state. Formerly a Democrat who gave generously to the party, by the mid-aughts, Paladino became a Republican and an active voice in the Tea Party movement. The real estate developer self-funded a run for New York governor in 2010, with longtime Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone serving as adviser and with anti-Obamaism as his primary platform. The New York Times wrote an almost poignant paean to Paladino’s “combative style,” highlighting his “outsize, impulsive and even outrageous behavior.”

“Buffalo media trip over themselves to get access to Paladino,” wrote Western New York political site WNYmedia at the time, apparently underestimating the scope of Paladino’s free ad potential, “because practically everything he says has the potential of being hugely controversial.”

In the midst of his gubernatorial bid, that same outlet leaked emails from Paladino that included pornography, bestiality, racist Obama jokes, and at least once, the N word. Despite, or perhaps because of those revelations, the candidate defeated all GOP takers in the primary and rose to the top of the Republican ticket.

If this story sounds uncannily like that of another septuagenarian plumbing the political depths, that’s because Paladino and Trump are two of a kind. (The former would go on to co-chair the latter’s campaign in New York.) But in the general election, Paladino lost to the widely unliked establishment Democrat.

Three years after that loss, Paladino ran for and won a seat on Buffalo’s school board. He also became a prolific property developer of charter schools in the area. Adversary offers a look at the inevitable conflict that arises when Paladino, a man prone to belligerent racist outbursts, takes a spot on a board filled with a significant number of women of color in a district that’s 80 percent black and brown students.

Director Scott Cummings’ documentary is featured in its entirety above.

 

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

Is The Armed Teacher ‘Debate’ America’s Lowest, Stupidest Media Moment?

Is The Armed Teacher ‘Debate’ America’s Lowest, Stupidest Media Moment?

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

How absurd that we are here. It is dumb, shameful and internationally embarrassing that our country is having a serious discussion about why arming teachers is a bad idea. Apparently, the $54 million the NRA spent buying the GOP in 2016 paid Republicans to put on a big show of pretending not to see the underlying problem behind every mass shooting. The party that otherwise hates nuance is now acting like it couldn’t recognize a smoking gun if you paid it to, especially since the NRA is paying it so much more.

The party’s leader is now genuinely proposing that teaching entail not only educating children, but also working schools like a beat. Trump suggested Wednesday that at least 20 percent of teachers should get special weapons training so they can include “shoots to kill” under the “special skills” section of their resumes. He also said teachers should be given a “bonus” of 10 to 40 percent to carry guns because, per the president, “I want my schools protected just like I want my banks protected.” That’s a tired NRA line so out of sync with reality it actually disproves itself: The vast majority of banks, 98 percent, don’t have armed guards because studies show “the presence of armed security during bank robberies increased threefold the likelihood of a violent event.” Schools wouldn’t be any safer. Leave it to conservatives to come up with an analogy that compares children to safety deposit boxes.

And where are the funds for this monetary bonus going to come from? No really, I’m asking. Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have proposed drastic spending cuts to public education, including a $7.1 billion—or 10.5 percent—decrease for 2019. On average, teachers spend $500 to $1,000 of their own money bridging the funding gaps politicians keep deepening every time they have a chance. There are schools in this country that lack heat during bitterly cold winters, and places where clogged toilets are everyday realities. Since 2000, DonorsChoose, a website that lets teachers crowdfund costs that aren’t covered by their budgets, has been overfilled with educators begging for desperately needed dollars for school supplies. While there’s no money to restore music and art programs in schools, nor funds to give poor schools the same amenities rich schools have, Trump has somehow located billions to turn teachers into soldiers. They should take that money and give it to all the underpaid teachers who pay for erasers and toner ink out of their own pockets.

There’s also the not inconsiderable delusion of assuming teachers will be able to morph from educators to cool-handed sharpshooters in a pinch. Numerous educators have mishandled guns and shot themselves, often while classes are in session, over the last few years. That includes the Idaho State University chemistry professor who shot himself in the foot, the Utah elementary school teacher who shot herself in the leg and the Long Island University professor (and ex-cop) who also shot himself in the leg. An Atlanta high school teacher intentionally shot himself in the face last year, and since studies show the presence of a gun increases the chances of suicide, that’s something to consider when you start suggesting schools stockpile weapons.

But these teachers will be trained—we’ll just take the money out of children’s health insurance or something, some partisan hack is yelling at this very moment. That will ensure they’ll avoid those kinds of sloppy mistakes! First of all, an NRA employee accidentally shot himself at the group’s headquarters last year, and once you get past the staggering irony of the story, you note that training is no guarantee against mistakes. (Or fear: Recall that four sheriff’s deputies cowered in the parking lot as the Parkland shooting went on.) A 2008 Rand Corporation study of New York City police officers found their “average hit rate in situations in which fire was not returned was 30 percent.” When police were involved in gunfights, meaning the kinds of gunfights Trump is asking teachers to engage in, their average hit rate descended to a mere 18 percent. Again, we’re talking about accuracy rates for cops whose training focuses heavily on actually hitting the people they are aiming for. What idiot could possibly believe a panicked teacher in a chaotic moment will outscore the shooting accuracy of the police? Who really thinks accidental shootings won’t add further to the body count of mass shootings? Politicians who insist none of this is a big deal should be forced to send their kids to schools with armed guards and stressed-out teachers, just as a good-faith gesture.

On top of all this, I am petrified by what armed teachers and in-school arsenals could mean for black students and educators. Studies show that by pretty much every measurable standard, schools are more punitive toward black children than their white peers, even at the youngest ages. Black students, even kindergarteners, are exponentially more likely to be suspended and expelledthan white kids for the same infractions. School resource officers are more physically violent toward black and brown kids. Penn State sociologist and criminologist David Ramey has explained that while misbehaving white students often receive medical interventions, black kids are more likely to be seen as “unruly and unwilling to learn,” and studies show black children are viewed as older and “less innocent” than white kids. These problems virtually ensure we’d see the same life-or-death consequences in teaching as policing, with black students being shot for reasons that have more to do with white fear than black aggression. There’s little reason to trust that armed black teachers and faculty members will be instantly recognized as “good guys with guns” by worked-up cops arriving on the scene. How often might police shoot first and ask questions later? Philando Castile was a well-liked school employee and licensed gun carrier in what should have been a low-intensity scenario. We all know how the cops handled that situation.

What’s more, while this country has made a habit of not listening to teachers, it might do well to pay attention in this moment when kids’ lives are on the line. Because the nation’s teachers are basically yelling that they don’t want marksmanship to be among their required abilities. Early this week, teachers used the #ArmMeWith hashtag to request that instead of guns, Trump provide them with everything from “students with full stomachs” to “leaders who care more about the safety of our nation’s children than receiving personal profit from special interest groups.” A chorus of teachers has spoken out to say they’d rather quit their jobs than teach armed. “I served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2003-2007, I worked my way through college as a paid-on-call firefighter, and for the past 7 years I’ve worked as a special education teacher in the resource side and with students with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities on the life-skills side. On paper I’d be an ideal candidate for being an armed teacher, but I would resign immediately if I was told I was going to carry a weapon at school,” one educator wrote to the Daily Beast.

Political cover and NRA money are the real priorities of the politicians pitching this idea (44 percent of Americans support arming teachers, because some people will buy whatever you’re selling). The safety of kids and teachers has absolutely nothing to do with it. Society already overburdens teachers with unrealistic expectations, saddling them with the impossible job of correcting problems from poverty and hunger to a lack of mental health care. Now this administration is actually suggesting teachers make up for legislators’ refusal to do their jobs. Arming teachers is a losing proposition from the outset, certain only to mean more mayhem, violence and death.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

 

5 Places Where GOP Hypocrites Ban Guns (For Their Own Safety)

5 Places Where GOP Hypocrites Ban Guns (For Their Own Safety)

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

After every mass shooting, a portion of this country insists the real problem is that there aren’t enough guns. The group that pushes this absurd lie includes Republican politicians, many of whom fear that admitting otherwise would drive away NRA donor funds. There’s been a lot of recent discussion about how GOP legislators do nothing in response to gun massacres, but a 2016 Harvard Business School study proves that’s not quite true. In states with overwhelmingly Republican legislative bodies, after mass shootings, “the number of laws passed to loosen gun restrictions [increases] by 75 percent.” Despite being counterintuitive and demonstrably dangerous, more firepower is the GOP’s go-to solution because “something something don’t tread on me.”

It’s a bad-faith proposition. A party that truly believes guns are the way out of this thing, and that an even more heavily armed populace will ensure American safety, would make different personal choices. In fact, we can gauge GOP disingenuousness on the gun issue just by noting all the places Republican politicians frequent where weapons are banned. Pointing out their hypocrisy has never helped to shame the GOP into decency, but it’s worth a review nonetheless.

Here are five places hypocritical Republicans ban guns in order to ensure their own personal safety.

1. The White House

Along with making Mexico pay billions for a wall it opposed and never taking a golfing vacation, Trump promised on the campaign trail to legislate a future in which guns could legally be brought into every kindergarten classroom and nursery. “My first day, it gets signed, okay? My first day,” Trump told supporters in Vermont in 2016. “There’s no more gun-free zones.”

While it’s true no president could unilaterally scrap federal law, it’s also true that Trump’s complicit Republican Congress would probably greenlight any pro-gun horrorshow he could dream up. Yet, in the year since he took office, Trump has not spoken out once—even via his digital bullhorn at Twitter—against the anti-freedom gun ban at the White House. What better way for this president to signify his wholehearted support for gun-based lifestyles than by letting White House visitors from around the world—especially those who live under the tyranny of gun control abroad—bring all the guns they want into the People’s House?

Or maybe Trump hasn’t brought up the matter because he doesn’t actually want strangers bringing guns into the White House, seeing as they can and do kill people at the squeeze of a trigger.

2. The Republican National Convention

The quadrennial gathering of this country’s most dedicated Republicans should be a place where GOPers can briefly escape oppressive gun-free “safe spaces” and live on their own gun-riddled terms. Attendees should be permitted—nay, required—to come armed to the teeth. Downtime convention activities should be strictly gun-focused. (Think ball pits, only filled with guns. Cocktail hours, only the drinks are all guns.) At the very end, instead of confetti, the audience should be showered in loose ammo.

But instead of a three-day orgy of gun lust and ammosexuality, the Republican National Convention is a gun-free zone. Guns were banned at the RNC in 2008, 2012 and 2016, and that’s not for lack of trying by those who bothered to petition for bringing guns to the party. For some strange reason, the RNC keeps choosing venues that explicitly ban guns, almost as if it was looking for a convenient excuse. The Secret Service keeps banning guns from the events, almost as if it knows the whole “good guy with a gun” claim is a just a myth. And not a single Republican politician has raised their voice to demand guns be allowed on the convention floor, almost like they’re tacitly admitting to being iffy on the whole “responsible gun owners” thing.

3. Mar-a-Lago

A staffer told ABC News back in 2016 that guns were banned from Trump’s Palm Beach golf property, where the president spends so much time it’s hard to know when he’s doing the actual job of presidenting. That policy appears to still be in place, according to a Politico report from late last year. “Pocket knives, laser pointers, pepper spray, and any other items deemed to be a safety hazard are not permitted on property,” a letter the club sent to members cautioned. “Any items surrendered will not be returned.”

4. The U.S. Capitol Building

Surely, a Congress that has steadfastly refused to pass gun legislation is cool with guns in the Capitol building, if only to make a patriotic point. Why not let the Senate and House galleries double as shooting galleries, since guns are such a national point of pride? When are the gun-loving legislators of Congress, who believe that murdered 6-year-olds are just the price of freedom, going to change the rules so the U.S. Capitol building can become the guntopia it’s meant to be?

The short answer is never. Guns are banned on the Capitol grounds and inside the building itself, which includes the House and Senate galleries. Visitors are also warned against bringing “black jacks, slingshots, sand clubs, sandbags, knuckles, electric stun guns, knives (longer than 3”), martial arts weapons or devices…razors, box cutters, knives, knitting needles, letter openers…mace and pepper spray.”

Which all raises the question: what kind of heartless, cruel and immoral people consistently vote against gun control for most Americans’ work lives, but cynically keep guns far away from their own place of business?

5. Republican Town Halls

In early 2017, when Republican legislators realized that angry crowds were showing up in town halls to speak against repeals of the Affordable Care Act, they found two ways to avoid those meetings. The first was to label their own constituents “paid protesters.” The second was to demonize civically engaged voters as violent mobs. It was all for show, of course. In fact, as Talking Points Memo notes, “guns are frequently prohibited at GOP congressional town hall meetings, especially after the shooting of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011. Even stalwart conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan and former Rep. Allen West opted to ban firearms at their town halls.”

Texas Republican Louie Gohmert even went so far as to invoke Giffords as a political prop to get out of being berated by the people he supposedly serves.

“At this time there are groups from the more violent strains of the leftist ideology, some even being paid, who are preying on public town halls to wreak havoc and threaten public safety,” Gohmert claimed in a statement. “The House Sergeant at Arms advised us after former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot at a public appearance, that civilian attendees at Congressional public events stand the most chance of being harmed or killed—just as happened there.”

Giffords, incredibly, had to release a statement encouraging Republicans to do their damn jobs.

“To the politicians who have abandoned their civic obligations, I say this: Have some courage,” Giffords’ message said. “Many of the members of Congress who are refusing to hold town halls and listen to their constituents’ concerns are the very same politicians that have opposed common-sense gun violence prevention policies and have allowed the Washington gun lobby to threaten the safety of law enforcement and everyday citizens in our schools, businesses, places of worship, airports, and movie theaters.”

In an interview later, Giffords stated, “If you don’t have the guts to face your constituents, then you shouldn’t be in the United States Congress.”

And maybe, if you don’t have the guts to deal with the laws you force the rest of us to live under, you for sure shouldn’t be involved in making them.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

 

Melania Trump’s Parents May Be Examples Of So-Called ‘Chain Migrants’

Melania Trump’s Parents May Be Examples Of So-Called ‘Chain Migrants’

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Every year or so, Republicans politicize a new phrase, wielding it as a kind of weapon to slash away at the truth and logic. Most recently, that honor goes to “chain migration,” a 1960s academic term that the GOP has rebranded as a signifier of open borders and the browning of America. As it turns out, the expression may actually have more personal associations. First Lady Melania Trump’s Slovenian parents, who have reportedly settled in the U.S. to be near their daughter and grandson, may have taken advantage of the same so-called chain migration policies the Trump administration is trying to destroy.

The White House has been cagey about the immigration status of Viktor and Amalija Knavs, 73 and 71, respectively. “I don’t comment on [Mrs. Trump’s] parents, as they live private lives and are not part of the administration,” FLOTUS flack Stephanie Grisham recently told the Washington Post.

So with the help of immigration experts, the Post assembled a list of possibilities for the Knavses’ visa status, two of which suggest classic Trumpian hypocrisy at work. As IR-5 visa holders, Mrs. Trump’s parents would be “legal permanent residents because they are the parents of a U.S. citizen,” which is to say, they would have benefited from the same chain migration policy the GOP wants to kill. The Post also considers that the Knavses are here on tourist visas, which allow holders to remain in the country for six months but can also be extended to a year. The outlet points to this as a “relatively simple explanation, which makes it curious why the White House would not confirm it if this is indeed the case.”

Alternatively, according to the Post, Viktor Knavs, who is a former member of the Yugoslavian Communist Party, and his wife could be here as international students, which only seems plausible if they’re quietly taking classes at some online school with accreditation hanging by a thread. They might also have been given parole “based on humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons.” It’s unclear how the Knavses’ presence has served to benefit American society at large, but it seems like a fairly Trumpian path to take. (“If my parents [were] looking to move to the U.S., and if I were president, I would have them paroled,” immigration lawyer Matthew L. Kolken told the Post.) It’s a fun exercise to try to imagine President Obama circumnavigating visa rules by paroling his wife’s foreign-born, ex-Communist father and explaining it was for “significant public benefit reasons.” Impeachment proceedings would have started before the ink on the forms was dry.

In any case, FLOTUS spokesperson Grisham responded to the Washington Post list by stating that “None of those options apply.”

The Post article doesn’t even mention that Mrs. Trump’s older sister, Ines Knauss, may also have come to the U.S. through chain migration policies. In February 2017, CNN searched public records and found that Ines “lives just blocks from Trump Tower in the Trump Park Avenue property.” A subsequent report noted that “neither [Ines], family attorneys nor the White House answered an inquiry about whether she was sponsored for a visa or residency by her sister.”

The same shadiness that hangs over Melania Trump’s family’s status extends to her own immigration history. It’s been more than a year and half since Trump announced on the campaign trail that he would explain inconsistencies in his wife’s immigration story by holding a “little news conference.” An AP investigation just days before the 2016 presidential election found that before she had the proper paperwork, Mrs. Trump worked illegally in the U.S., perhaps taking jobs away from American-born fashion models. Since moving to the states, Mrs. Trump has gone on television to vocalize support for her husband’s racist birther campaign against the first black president; lied under oath about her nonexistent college degree; plagiarized a speech by Michelle Obama; pretended to start, and then totally dropped a cyberbullying campaign; and cost taxpayers ungodly amounts in private jet travel and security for her extended Trump Tower penthouse stay.

Even beyond Melania, “chain migration” seems to be a longstanding tradition in the Trump family. Donald Trump’s Bavarian grandfather arrived in the U.S. in 1885 and “moved in with his older sister Katharina—who had emigrated in 1883.” Mary Anne MacLeod, Trump’s mother, boarded a ship from her native Scotland to New York City in 1929. (According to the New Yorker, “On at least two ship manifests and in the 1930 census, her occupation is listed as “maid” or “domestic,” exactly the kind of unskilled labor Trump wants to keep out of the country.) Trump’s first wife, Ivana Zelníčková, came to the U.S. from what was then Czechoslovakia. She gave birth to three Trump offspring before becoming a U.S. citizen in 1988.

If chain migration is indeed the plague the Trump administration and the GOP keep making it out to be, it seems like the first family might be the first place to sound the alarm. The absence of merit-based immigrants (sorry, appearing in low-budget insurance commercials is not a “high skills” occupation) among the Trumps seems like an obvious cause for concern.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.


New Study: White Nationalists Are Worst Terror Threat

New Study: White Nationalists Are Worst Terror Threat

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

Last June, the Trump administration rescinded funds previously earmarked to counter right-wing extremism and white supremacist violence. Just two months later, 19 people were injured and protester Heather Heyer was killed by a neo-Nazi demonstrator in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. Though Charlottesville has become the most cited example of contemporary right-wing terror, it hardly offers a full picture of the threat posed by those Trump described as “very fine people.”

A new study from the Southern Poverty Law Center finds there have been more than “100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called ‘alt-right’—a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young recruits.” The SPLC report tracks the rise in alt-right related violence beginning in 2014, when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured 14 others in Isla Vista, California. Like many alt-right adherents, Rodger’s radicalization began in men’s rights forums, which helped stoke his racism, misogyny and self-loathing. The study identifies 13 killers who have collectively killed 43 people and injured 67 others. “While some certainly displayed signs of mental illness,” the media tendency to depict these violent right-wing extremists as troubled loners is conveniently misguided. The SPLC notes that the most conspicuous unifying background trait among these individuals is a “history of consuming and/or participating in the type of far-right ecosystem that defines the alt-right.”

A healthy number of those identified in the report are outspoken fans of Donald Trump, the report notes. Nicholas Giampa, who in December murdered his ex-girlfriend’s parents before killing himself, was an “enthusiastic supporter of then-candidate Donald Trump [who] often used racist slurs to attack Trump’s critics.” Charlottesville killer James Alex Fields’ social media pages were reportedly filled with Trump and Pepe memes. A Daily Beast report found Sean Urbanski, the alleged killer of U.S. Army Lieutenant Richard Collins III, “apparently liked memes about Donald Trump, white supremacy, and the alt-right.” Alexandre Bissonnette, the Quebec mosque murderer and the lone Canadian in the group, was reportedly an avid supporter of both Trump and Marine Le Pen. In July 2017, former Breitbart intern Lane Davis stabbed his father to death; a little over a year before, he wrote a rap ode to Trump he posted on YouTube. (Choice lyrics: “Finger on the trigger/Trump might use a nuke, boy/But he’d rather use a tariff/And that’s superb.”)

The alt-right’s visibility has grown alongside Trump’s political career, and the two appear inextricably linked. Nine of the attacks cataloged by the SPLC occurred in the shadow of the Trump presidency, leading the organization to cite 2017 as the most violent year of the alt-right’s existence thus far. Overall, the mean age of far-right killers is 26, with the youngest just 17. Members of the alt-right have been open about their efforts to appeal to young, impressionable minds. An Anti-Defamation League report released late last month noted that there has been a drastic increase in the amount of “white supremacist propaganda—flyers, stickers, banners, and posters—appearing on college and university campuses.” Racism and misogyny have also been allowed to grow unchecked online in spaces such as 4chan and Reddit, and more recently, “alt-tech” sites such as Gab and WASP.love (a racist dating site).

Back in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security published a report on right-wing extremism that warned of increasing violence from militias, hate groups and other right-wing terrorists. Following pushback from GOP lawmakers who leaked the report, as well as their conservative reporters, the document was officially retracted by DHS and “the Extremism and Radicalization Branch was quietly dismantled,” according to the New York Times. Yet multiple recent studies have shown that white nationalists now pose a far greater terroristthreat to the U.S. than ISIL. The Trump administration’s sympathy for the alt-right and other white supremacists and its refusal to counter their terror, means these fanatics will likely only grow more dangerous. Daryl Johnson, the counterintelligence analyst pushed out of the DHS for his prescient report, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post just after the Charlottesville tragedy, again attempting to offer a warning.

“Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, militia extremists, and other radical right-wing zealots march side-by-side at pro-Trump rallies across the country,” Johnson wrote. “Trump’s endorsement of the border wall, the travel ban, mass deportations of illegal immigrants—these ideas were touted on white supremacist message boards merely 10 years ago. Now they’re being put forth as official U.S. policy…Extremists no longer hide anymore. They number in the hundreds of thousands and are extremely well-armed. The political apparatus and the news media appears confused in their reporting of the scope of the domestic terrorist threat — some ignoring it completely. When 9/11 happened, the government made an effort to connect the dots beforehand, but failed because of a lack of communication among agencies. In this case, the government isn’t even trying—and worse, it appears to be enabling the threat to flourish.”

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

 

California Cops Found Aiding Neo-Nazis

California Cops Found Aiding Neo-Nazis

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

After violence erupted in 2016 between neo-Nazi groups and anti-racist activists in Sacramento, the head of the white supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party went on a well-known racist radio program to gloat about the number of attacks his group had carried out.

“They got one of ours, but we got six of them,” Matthew Heimbach proudly announced, according to the SPLC. “Six antifa on the way to the hospital.”

A year and a half after what is now grimly called the 2016 Sacramento riots, lawyers for anti-fascist activists involved in the protest say they’ve turned up documents proving investigating officers are working on behalf of the racist attackers. A report from the Guardian finds that court papers document “officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity” while also seeking “the prosecution of activists with ‘anti-racist’ beliefs.” Three anti-fascist counter-protesters, Yvette Felarca, Mike Williams and Porfirio Paz, are looking to have felony charges dismissed, citing a “cover-up and collusion with the fascists” by prosecutors and law enforcement.

California Highway Patrol records show TWP member Derik Punneo was asked by officers to review audio and pictures of antifa activists in order to help identify them by name. Law enforcement investigators reassured Punneo that they are “pretty much going after [the anti-racist activists],” but that they would be treating him “as a victim.” As Heimbach alluded in his radio appearance, multiple people were stabbed during the Sacramento incident, and police records indicate Punneo was carrying a knife at the rally. The friendly police interview took place when Punneo was brought in for unrelated domestic violence charges.

While they attempted to identify antifa protesters, CHP officers helped Traditionalist Worker Party members avoid public identification. CHP officer Donovan Ayres told another TWP member, Doug McCormack, that he didn’t know the source of a public records request about the incident, but noted that, “If I did, I would tell you.” He also told McCormack he planned to “suggest that we…redact your name or something until this gets resolved.” McCormack, police files indicate, was also carrying a knife during the Sacramento melee.

In addition to McCormack and Punneo, police records show “three other TWP-affiliated men…were armed with knives.” None face charges.

In contrast with his handling of the neo-Nazis’ cases, Officer Ayers treated the anti-racist activists like seasoned criminals. The investigator’s report describes at length past activism by Felarca, whom the Los Angeles Times reports “sustained a bloody blow to the head” during the riot. Ayers went so far as to dig up Facebook photos of an African-American counter-protester giving a fist salute to justify claims that he had “intent and motivation to violate the civil rights” of the racists on hand that day. That protester left the rally in an ambulance, having suffered stab wounds to the hand, chest and stomach. (“The Nazis [went] after the black people,” a medical assistant on the scene told the Sacramento Bee.) Ayers “recommended the man be charged with 11 offenses, including disturbing the peace, conspiracy, assault, unlawful assembly and wearing a mask to evade police.” He has not been charged.

The Guardian’s revelations are a reminder of longstanding reports linking law enforcement with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. In 2006, the FBI issued an intelligence paper titled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement,” which acknowledged that “white supremacist groups have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement communities.” Speaking to the Intercept writer Alice Speri last year, Chapman University sociologist Pete Simi helped historicize the ties that bind police and hate groups, pointing to U.S. policing’s roots in slave patrols, night watches and violent suppression of African-American communities.

“If you look at the history of law enforcement in the United States, it is a history of white supremacy, to put it bluntly,” Simi told Speri. “More recently, just going back 50 years, law enforcement, particularly in the South, was filled with Klan members.”

It’s impossible to cite hard and fast numbers on law enforcement membership overlapping with white supremacist groups, but that’s kind of the point of getting a foothold in both. The 2006 FBI report includes a reference to “ghost skins,” a term originally employed in white supremacist circles to denote movement affiliates who publicly downplay their racism in order to more stealthily spread their beliefs. Racists might trade in sheets for police uniforms, or alternately, khakis and boat shoes. Only a fraction of those covert operatives in police ranks are discovered, and even then, it’s likely the notorious blue wall prevents an unknowable percentage from ever being publicly revealed. Speri enumerates a handful of cases dating back to the 1990s in which white supremacist cops tipped their hands:

In Los Angeles, for example, a U.S. District Court judge found in 1991 that members of a local sheriff’s department had formed a neo-Nazi gang and habitually terrorized black and Latino residents. In Chicago, Jon Burge, a police detective and rumored KKK member, was fired, and eventually prosecuted in 2008, over charges relating to the torture of at least 120 black men during his decades long career. Burge notoriously referred to an electric shock device he used during interrogations as the “nigger box.” In Cleveland, officials found that a number of police officers had scrawled “racist or Nazi graffiti” throughout their department’s locker rooms. In Texas, two police officers were fired when it was discovered they were Klansmen. One of them said he had tried to boost the organization’s membership by giving an application to a fellow officer he thought shared his “white, Christian, heterosexual values.”

More recently, as the Guardian notes, police invited an alt-right protester to aid them in arresting an anti-racist counter-protester at the same rally. There was also the well-publicized case of DeAndre Harris, an African-American man badly beaten by a mob of racist thugs in Charlottesville, who somehow ended up being charged with a felony. The charges, after sustained outcry, were dropped in December.

Donald Trump stepped on the national political stage just as the covert racism and implicit bias that often underlie police brutality were getting a national airing. The administration has helped reset progress, which had moved a few nanometers at best, on the issue. Since taking office, Trump has canceled funds earmarked to oppose violent white racist groups, despite studies proving white nationalists are a bigger threat to public safety than ISIL. Alt-right influenced attackers have killed and injured more than 100 people since 2014, according to the SPLC. Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has essentially restarted Cointelpro, creating out of thin air the designation “black identity extremists,” a vague category that seems to implicate any politically outspoken African American. Alongside all this, the president peddles the well-worn lie that fighting against neo-Nazis is as bad as being a Nazi, which is dumb but absolutely in keeping with his character.

The last two years have seen an easing of the longstanding social prohibitions around public displays of racism, and Trump plays no small part in that. (In fact, TWP claimed the Sacramento rally was “a statement about the precarious situation [the white] race is in” as evidenced by make-believe “brutal assaults” by protesters at Donald Trump rallies. Ironically, TWP head Heimbach participated in the actual 2016 physical assault of a young black woman protester at a Trump rally.) That has only worsened law enforcement’s already outsized racism problem. Prosecutors in the Sacramento case claim information in the motion to dismiss is “inaccurate or fabricated.” As the case’s outcome is weighed, we can expect these issues to become yet more familiar.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

 

White Nationalists, Coming To Your Local College Campus

White Nationalists, Coming To Your Local College Campus

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

In early 2017, Donald Trump took to his medium of choice to simultaneously defend alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and admonish those who had protested his appearance at a California campus.

“If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Trump wrote in a pre-dawn tweet nearly a year ago to the day.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s threat was empty, since presidents can’t single-handedly cut off federal loans to educational institutions. But more important than the substance of his tweet was its subtext: in the fray between the racist alt-right and its opponents, the president was stating his unequivocal support for the racists. Months later, Trump would restate his position when he referred to a group of white nationalists and neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”

There have always been racists in this country—the U.S. was founded on and prospered from genocide and slavery—but this president’s open support has given extremists a bold new confidence. Trump might be happy to know that the white supremacists he publicly sympathizes with have stepped up their recruitment efforts on campuses all around America.

Over the course of a year, there has been an exponential increase in incidents of “white supremacist propaganda—flyers, stickers, banners, and posters—appearing on college and university campuses,” according to a new study from the Anti-Defamation League. Researchers note that during the fall semester of 2016, there were 41 reports of these incidents on campuses around the country. One year later, that figure increased by more than 3.5 times to 147 incidents. Since September 2016, the ADL has tracked 346 examples of white racist propaganda on “216 college campuses, from Ivy League schools to local community colleges.” In 2018 alone, there have already been 15 reports.

The ADL stresses that these incidents have happened throughout the U.S., “in 44 states and the District of Columbia.” White supremacist organization American Vanguard papered the UT Austin campus in early 2016, putting up flyers urging students to “imagine a Muslim-free America.” At Central Michigan University last Valentine’s Day, students received an anti-Semitic card featuring an image of Adolf Hitler and the words “my love 4 u burns like 6,000 jews.” Posters were found on both the George Washington University and University of Maryland campuses exhorting white students to “report any and all illegal aliens” because “America is a white nation.” Those incidents, based on ADL’s count, are just the teeniest fraction of what’s happening on schools from coast to coast.

The groups spreading hate at American colleges belong to the longstanding tradition of U.S. white terrorist groups using paraphernalia both to make their presence known to potential new members and to intimidate people of color and other targeted groups. Jonathan A. Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, highlighted these goals last March as he spoke about the rise in white racist college recruitment efforts in the New York Times.

“Flyers allow them to not only recruit but get public attention. It’s not only part of the way they can identify sympathizers but terrorize marginalized communities,” Greenblatt stated. “Social media allows them to go to very targeted audiences in specific ways. Flyers starting to show up saying that any one of these organizations is here and present will not only raise eyebrows but I think really heighten concerns among organizations of students and that’s what they want.”

With the ascent of Trump, who revealed his own racist attitudes as both a candidate and president, alt-right activists have made colleges a centerpiece of their recruitment strategies. Figures such as Richard Spencer (one of the giggling neo-Nazis seig heiling in this video) have rushed to college campuses under the guise of defending free speech. Putting colleges on the defensive for not showing the proper enthusiasm while letting fascists take the lectern is a neat trick, and it’s worked incredibly well. Many universities have bowed to alt-right pressure and allowed figures like Yiannopoulos, who planned to publicly announce the names of undocumented UC Berkeley students, to appear (the talk was later canceled). The result is that students are left to raise their voices against the speakers, and protests can erupt beyond expectations. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of dollars schools have had to shell out for the costs of hosting these vainglorious extremists and quelling the scenes they provoke.

Numerous white racists have been vocal about their goal of increasing the number of students in their ranks. “We will not rest until alt-right ideas are represented on campuses nationwide,” read a 2017 tweet from the founder of white supremacist group Identity Evropa, Nathan Damigo, whose Italian surname would have kept him out of any “white” power group in the early part of the last century.

“People in college are at this point in their lives where they are actually open to alternative perspectives, for better and for worse,” Richard Spencer told Mother Jones in 2016. “I think you do need to get them while they are young. I think rewiring the neurons of someone over 50 is effectively impossible.”

“It’s striking a blow directly at the heart of our foes,” Matthew Heimbach, a vocal white supremacist who physically attacked a black girl at a Trump rally in 2016, told the Washington Post. “It lets them know that there are people that are radically opposed to them, that aren’t afraid of them, that will challenge them. It shakes their thought that they’ve got the campus environment locked down and lets them know that people who oppose them go to their school or are a part of their local community.”

ADL head Greenblatt notes that we find ourselves in a “political environment where white supremacists have felt more welcome than any time in recent memory.” He suggests colleges find ways to highlight the fact that racist propaganda is a fringe view that has no rightful place on campus or in society at large.

“While campuses must respect and protect free speech, administrators must also address the need to counter hate groups’ messages and show these bigoted beliefs belong in the darkest shadows,” Greenblatt said in a statement, “not in our bright halls of learning.”

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

6 Things Trump Actually Deserves Credit For

6 Things Trump Actually Deserves Credit For

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

Donald Trump is not telekinetic. His brain may be a medical marvel, but for terrible reasons, not because he can move objects with his mind. Nonetheless, Trump recently took credit for keeping airplanes all around the world from crashing in 2017.

“Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation,” the (I still can’t believe this person is) president tweeted Tuesday morning. “Good news – it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!”

Yet there hasn’t been a fatal airline crash in the U.S. since 2009, and the current head of the FAA is Obama appointee Michael Huerta. If we’re going to go around arbitrarily assigning credit for planes staying in the sky, maybe we should give it to the guy whose job description includes “the safety and efficiency of the largest aerospace system in the world.” Or maybe pilots, or possibly airplane mechanics. Or according to Trump’s logic, every single person in the world who took a flight this year, since I’m sure we all were “very strict” about our wish not to die in a plane crash.

Trump regularly takes credit for things he had no part in, from job deals struck under Obama‘s presidency, to coal jobs that don’t exist, to ending mandatory jail sentences for saying, “Merry Christmas.” If he demands credit for every good thing—including the stuff he just makes up—that means taking the blame for the bad as well. Particularly since he actually played a part in a lot of awful recent events.

With that in mind, here are just six things for which Trump actually deserves credit.

1. The worst year in mass shootings.

“This isn’t a guns situation,” Trump claimed in a mind-boggling statement after a man with a gun killed 26 people at a Texas church. (The guy was white, thankfully, or it would have been terrorism.)

That shooting came roughly one month after a gunman killed 58 people and injured more than 500 others in Las Vegas, a situation Trump nonsensically described as a “miracle.” If the shooting had been in Chicago (both the city and the GOP racist dog whistle), it would have triggered a threat to “send in the feds!”

Instead, Trump ($30.3 million from the NRA) and his complicit congressional Republicans ($54 million from the NRA in 2016) did nothing but issue useless post-massacre “thoughts and prayers.” At the very least, they deserve to split credit for 2017 being the deadliest year for mass shootings in modern history. There were 345 mass killing incidents, resulting in 574 deaths.

2. The death of more than 1,000 Americans in Puerto Rico.

Hurricane Maria was a devastating natural disaster, but there was nothing natural about the death toll that followed the storm. Trump’s response wavered between callous indifference and general ineptitude, and both were echoed throughout his cabinet and party. As Puerto Ricans struggled without drinkable water or electricity, Trump tweeted insults about the island’s debts, claimed relief efforts were hampered by “big water…ocean water,” and nodded to his racist base with complaints that survivors “want[ed] everything to be done for them.”

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz’s increasingly impatient appeals for help were met with rude, misogynist responses, which Trump tweeted from the comfort of his luxury golf course. Meanwhile, survivors were driven to drink from toxic water sources out of sheer desperation. When Trump finally did visit the island, he was his typical buffoonish self, demanding praise from local politicians and essentially insinuating residents should be grateful thousands more hadn’t perished. Did I mention he thought it was a good idea to pelt survivors with rolls of paper towels? Because Trump is the worst. Not worst president. Just worst ever.

The official death tally for Puerto Rico remains at 64, but that gross underestimate is based solely on the number of people killed by the storm. Far more have died as a result of the Trump administration’s abysmal response. A New York Times investigation puts the toll closer to 1,050. On December 29, the governor’s office announced that “approximately 55 percent of the customerswho are able to receive electric power have their service restored.” An unacceptable number of people remain without potable water.

Back on the mainland last week, Trump visited one of his golf courses for the 92nd time since he was elected. According to Trump Golf Count (a site that does just one thing, but stays awful busy), the estimated cost of those visits to taxpayers is at least $46,239,580.

3. A three-year high in coal miner deaths.

In the rare moments when they were not being interviewed about their unwavering support for Trump by the New York Times, coal miners mostly watched as their jobs continued to disappear. (By simply lying about the number of new coal jobs, Trump easily countered this observable reality among his gullible base.) Even more tragically, the number of coal miner deaths rose to 15 last year after hitting a record low of 8 in 2016.

In mid-December, the Trump administration’s mining regulators wrote that they may be considering getting rid of Obama-era rules around coal and rock dust designed to safeguard against black lung. “I think it’s a very bad signal for coal miners…I don’t think the Trump administration has coal miners’ best interests at heart. They’re aligned with coal mine operators as opposed to miners, and the only reasons they would want to reopen these rules or revisit these rules are to weaken them,” Tony Oppegard, a Kentucky attorney who represents miners, told the Associated Press.

Back in 1990, Trump told Playboy magazine, “The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then hisson. If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination–or whatever–to leave their mine. They don’t have ‘it.’”

4. Hate crimes soaring.

During his overtly racist campaign, assailants involved in numerous hate crimesbegan citing Trump as their source of inspiration. That pattern continued following Trump’s election, with the SPLC tallying 1,863 bias crimes between November 9 March 31. After a rise in anti-Muslim crimes during Trump’s candidacy in 2016, a recent report by the Council on American-Islamic Relationsidentifies 2017 as one of the worst years on record for Islamophobic attacks. The Anti-Defamation League found that by September 30, there were more anti-Semitic incidents, “including physical assaults, vandalism, and attacks on Jewish institutions” than in the whole of 2016. Also in September, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino catalogued a precipitous increase in hate crimes in large cities, including those filled with “liberal” types:

In New York City, hate crimes jumped 28.4 percent; in Los Angeles by 13 percent; in Philadelphia by 9 percent; in Chicago, by 8.3 percent, and in Phoenix, Arizona, by a whopping 46 percent. Houston, the nation’s No. 4 city, bucked the trend, reporting five incidents through July 31, the same number as last year.

Richard Collins III, a black Bowie State University student and serviceman, was stabbed to death by a white racist in October. Timothy Caughman, an African American, was murdered by a sword-wielding white supremacist who said the killing was a “practice run” for a rash of racist killings he planned to undertake. A bunch of “White Lives Matter” thugs, including uber-Nazi Matthew Heimbach, attacked an interracial couple in Tennessee. Symbols of racist terror, including a series of nooses left at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, abounded.

Trump said a group of white racist marchers in Charlottesville, among them the man who struck and killed Heather Heyer with his vehicle, included “some very fine people.” The quote led countless detractors to accuse Trump of being a white supremacist, but that’s only because he totally is.

5. Related, the precipitous rise in schoolyard bullying.

The Racist-Bully-in-Chief has led by example from the moment he hit the campaign trail:

In a survey of K-12 educators in the months before Trump’s election win, the SPLC found a precipitous rise in incidents of racist bullying. In the weeks after November 8, a poll of 10,000 K-12 teachers, counselors and administrators found an uptick in the “use of slurs and derogatory language, and disturbing incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags.” Roughly 90 percent of respondents said the “school climate has been negatively affected, and most of them believe it will have a long-lasting impact.” Similarly, “80 percent describe heightened anxiety and concern on the part of students worried about the impact of the election on themselves and their families.”

A Buzzfeed News analysis of data from the Documenting Hate Project turned up “more than 50 incidents, across 26 states, in which a K-12 student invoked Trump’s name or message in an apparent effort to harass a classmate during the past school year.” A survey from the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California at Los Angeles, found “more than 20 percent of teachers reported heightened polarization on campus and incivility in their classrooms…[and] 27.7 percent of teachers reported an increase in students making derogatory remarks about other groups during class discussions.” A number of teachers interviewed “described how the political environment ‘unleashed’ virulently racist, anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic, or homophobic rhetoric in their schools and classrooms.”

“Individuals who do harbor perspectives and racism and bigotry now feel empowered to offer their views more naturally in class discussions, which has led to tension, and even conflict in the classroom,” one Indiana teacher stated.

“I had students stand up in the middle of class and directly address their peers with racial slurs,” an Ohio teacher said. “This is not something I have seen before.”

6. International travel to the U.S. plummeted.

As early as March, the travel industry was forecasting a decline in the number of visitors to America from other countries and predicting a loss of billions in tourism dollars. The drop-off was dubbed the Trump Slump, mostly because the president is awful and his name should be associated with the awful things his presidency causes. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce National Travel and Tourism, international travel to America fell 4 percent last year over 2016. While there was a drop-off in visitors from every world region, the decline was most pronounced with Middle East visitors from obvious reasons.

The only region that saw an increase in U.S. visitors was Canada, and they’re only coming here to remind Trump he lost that handshake battle with Trudeau.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

 

The 5 Worst Fox News Lies And Errors Repeated By Donald Trump

The 5 Worst Fox News Lies And Errors Repeated By Donald Trump

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

Most U.S. presidents get their briefings from the experts on their staff. Donald Trump gets his information from Fox News. The New York Times reported early this month that Trump watches up to eight hours of cable TV news a day, and Fox News is his absolute favorite. As he guzzles Diet Cokes and scarfs fast food, Trump keeps on eye on the Faux News anchors and pundits who offer him their constant adoration. Everything else he denigrates as fake news, particularly if it offers an unflattering truth.

This would be problematic by any standard, but it’s made all the more insidious by the fact that Fox News is garbage. Studies have found that viewers who watch Fox News aren’t just less informed than other news consumers, but know less than people who don’t watch any news at all. That’s the result of Fox’s endless stream of alternative facts, the very thing that keeps the network in favor with the Trump regime.

Trump often promotes Fox errors and misinformation because they serve his agenda. Here are five examples of Fox lies and misinformation Trump has repeated since his election.

1. When he tweeted Fox News’ lies about his campaign manager’s crimes.

In late October, Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort—who made his name doing PR for dictators—was indicted on a dozen charges, including money laundering, conspiracy and tax fraud. Court papers specified that while Manafort’s crimes date back to 2006, the allegations included actions in 2016 and 2017. Fox & Friends quickly got to work spreading the lie that Manafort’s wrongdoing had occurred “many years before he joined Trump.” Fox News talking heads ran with their assigned angle, with Geraldo Rivera tweeting that Manafort’s “corruption predates time w @realDonaldTrump” and contributor Byron York stating Manafort’s “alleged crimes…if they took place, took place years before he joined the Trump campaign.”

Shortly after Fox’s inaccurate reporting, Trump seized on the useful lie and used it in one of his own defensive tweets. “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign,” Trump wrote in his message, blathering on about “Crooked Hillary & the Dems.”

2. When he repeated Fox News’ false reporting about James Comey.

In their feverish haste to impugn former FBI director Comey, Fox & Friends writers totally misread a report from reputable news outlet the Hill. The source article indicated that of the seven memos Comey wrote detailing his troubling conversations with Trump, four contained classified information. Comey had previously stated, testifying before the Senate, that he shared one memo that did not contain classified information with a friend to leak to press. But a Fox & Friends segment and subsequent tweet claimed Comey had leaked “top secret information” to a friend, a declaration with no relationship to the truth.

“James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media,” Trump tweeted, his obvious source the bad information provided by Fox & Friends. “That is so illegal!”

The following day, after numerous outlets reported on the lie, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy issued a correction—though not an apology—for the error. The Trump correction is definitely on its way any day now….

3. When he was confused by Fox News about the Swedish terror attack that never was.

In their ongoing efforts to demonize Muslims both at home and abroad, Fox News put its spotlight on a documentary linking the increase in violent crime in Sweden with the arrival of brown migrants. (On a not-so-side note, the Guardian cites a Swedish Migration Agency report showing that is totally made-up Islamophobic garbage.) After watching the report on a Friday night, a confused and fact-indifferent Trump told an audience on Saturday that a terror attack had just occurred.

“You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this?” Trump lamented to a Florida crowd. “Sweden, they took in large numbers, they are having problems like they never thought possible.”

He went on to mention the cities of Nice, Paris and Brussels, all of which had experienced terrorist attacks in recent years.

The news shocked no one more than the Swedes, who had no idea what Trump was talking about and quickly recognized that he didn’t, either. “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking?” Swedish politician Carl Bildt mockingly asked.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that his “statement as to what’s happening in Swedenwas in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden.” Of course.

4. When he tweeted falsehoods about President Obama because he misunderstood a Fox News report.

In the early morning of March 7, Fox & Friends quickly cycled through the day’s headlines. Trump’s attention may have been caught by a report that the “Trump administration just killed a former Guantanamo Bay detainee [Yasir al-Silmi] released by Barack Obama…He had been released back in 2009 even though the Department of Defense recommended that he stay behind bars. One hundred twenty-two prisoners released from Gitmo have returned to the battlefield.”

Fox reiterated that announcement in a tweet that again stated “at least 122 former Gitmo detainees have re-engaged in terrorism.” Trump could easily have asked any of the experts in his orbit about a numbers breakdown, but instead he decided to wing it, posting a tweet incorrectly blaming Obama. “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield,” Trump wrote in the Twitter missive. “Just another terrible decision!”

That’s a fairly funny claim from the king of terrible decisions. The Daily Banter gets to the heart of the problem here:

Naturally, Trump leaped to the conclusion that all 122 detainees mentioned in the piece were released by President Obama. They weren’t. In fact, according to the Director of National Intelligence’s website, President Bush released 532 detainees from Guantanamo Bay, and 113 of those former detainees returned to “the battlefield.” Meanwhile, Obama released 161 detainees, with just nine returning to the battlefield. So, no, Obama didn’t release 122 “vicious prisoners” from Gitmo who returned to terrorism. He released 161, but only nine of them rejoined al-Qaeda.

Trump lied.

5. When he even retweeted a Fox spelling error of his own words.

While delivering a speech in Poland last summer, Trump declared that “the West was saved with the blood of patriots.”

Fox News aired the speech, but instead of Trump’s actual words, the chyron offered a misquote that read, “POTUS: WEST SAVED BY THE BLOOD OF PATRIARCHS.”

The error itself isn’t that extraordinary. Tickers, chyrons and other onscreen graphics are often written quickly, and mistakes are bound to happen. That, or Fox News believes Trump truly meant to say that bloodthirsty dads, fighting to the death, are the real heroes. Both of these things seem equally likely.

In any case, Trump tweeted the Fox News clip featuring the typo, despite the fact that it contained a total misstatement of his own words.

As another Twitter user noted, footage from just after the speech seemed to show Trump aimlessly moving around the stage with no sense of where to go or what to do. I guess that fits well with not remembering his own speech.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

 

12 Most Insane Rules From The Biggest Neo-Nazi Website On The Internet

12 Most Insane Rules From The Biggest Neo-Nazi Website On The Internet

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

The Daily Stormer is an online hub for racists, white nationalists, anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and other assorted angry white men. It’s run by Andrew Anglin, who’s been in hiding for months avoiding an SPLC lawsuit charging stochastic terrorism against a Jewish woman in Montana. (Even underground, Anglin has managed to pull in a healthy sum in donations from supporters.) Among the confirmed readers of Anglin’s site are Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine black parishioners in a South Carolina church, and James Harris Jackson, who murdered a black man in New York City using a sword last March.

HuffPost writer Ashley Feinberg recently got a bit more insight behind the curtain of Anglin’s operation via the site’s 17-page style guide for contributing writers. The document lays out a few standard rules and protocols, from good HTML practices to proper grammar dictates, as well as a few rules that apply only to racist bloggers. The guide is packed with writerly advice on how to promote Anglin’s goals, which begin with expanding readership and end with an all-out race war. The key, per Anglin, is to maintain the site’s veneer of “non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism.”

Here are 12 of the most insane pieces of advice from the biggest neo-Nazi website on the internet.

1. Always blame the Jews.

Anglin writes that the Daily Stormer is “designed to spread the message of nationalism and anti-Semitism to the masses.” To that end, he notes that authors’ “prime directive” is singular: “Always Blame the Jews for Everything.”

“As Hitler says, people will become confused and disheartened if they feel there are multiple enemies. As such, all enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance. So no blaming Enlightenment thought, pathological altruism, technology/urbanization, etc. just blame Jews for everything.”

Anglin goes on to assert that Jews should be blamed “for the behavior of other nonwhites” as well as white women. “Women should be attacked, but there should always be mention that if it wasn’t for the Jews, they would be acting normally.”

2. Go easy on the swear words, heavy on the racial slurs.

Contributors are discouraged from “an overuse of profanity” which “can come across as goofy.” But Anglin recommends liberal use of racial epithets, and even offers a helpful list of specific “allowed and advisable” slurs.

•Negro/Negroid
•Monkey
•Ape
•Spic
•Wetback
•Beaner
•Beanperson
•Kike
•Yid
•Sheeny
•Christ-killer
•Haji
•Sandperson
•Paki (can be used for non-Pakistani Moslems, especially Arabs, because that’s funny)
•Muzzie
•Chink
•Gook
•Zipperhead
And others

Anglin adds that while the n-word is also cool, it “shouldn’t be used constantly.” Let spontaneity be your guide, he seems to suggest. Keep people guessing about what new and disgusting way you’ll express your racist self!

3. Demean women, gays, black folks and, of course, the Jews every chance you get.

Anglin shares that “[f]*ggots can be called all the words for f*ggot,” though scatological references are frowned upon. He gives a specific list of words recommended for describing women, and the word “woman” doesn’t appear on it once. Instead, it features “slut,” “whore,” “bitch,” “harlot,” “trollop,” “slag,” and “skag.”

This is yet another moment when Anglin slips in a reminder to writers to shoehorn in more anti-Semitism amidst the misogyny. “Whenever writing about women,” Anglin requests, “make sure to follow the prime directive and blame Jew feminism for their behavior.”

4. But also, be sure to keep things fun and funny so people want to join the…clan!

The most insidious aspect of Anglin’s style guide is its repeated insistence on a stealth recruitment strategy that relies on humor and lightheartedness to get young white readers excited about white nationalism. He repeatedly admonishes writers to cool it with the super angry racist diatribes that might scare newbies off. Instead, he suggests, authors should infuse their racism with lots of jokes, like the hipster racism of Vice circa 2003. (Ironically, in this same document, Anglin trashes Vice co-founder and hipster-racism aficionado Gavin McInnes as a “bottomless bucket of lulz.”)

“While racial slurs are allowed/recommended, not every reference to non-white should not be a slur and their use should be based on the tone of the article. Generally, when using racial slurs, it should come across as half-joking—like a racist joke that everyone laughs at because it’s true. This follows the generally light tone of the site.”

Here’s the key, though: “It should not come across as genuine raging vitriol. That is a turnoff to the overwhelming majority of people.”

Anglin reaffirms that the goal is to lure new readers, and potential new adherents to the alt-right’s racist agenda, above all. And the way to do that is by dressing the message up in internet memes and provocative jokes, and then to drive the (racist) point home over and over again.

“[T]hough we do mean to keep readers who are already in the know informed and entertained, it should always be considered that the target audience is people who are just becoming aware of this type of thinking,” Anglin writes. “The goal is to continually repeat the same points, over and over and over and over again. The reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor, and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points.”

You know how you can end up knowing the words to a song you hate if you hear it enough on the radio? Repetition works. And Anglin’s betting that his writers can beat the audience over the head with their message until it’s gotten inside their heads.

5. Again, avoid overt hatred, despite the fact that it’s precisely what you’re peddling.

“Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred,” Anglin restates in another section of the document. “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self deprecating humor—I am a racist making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously.”

He adds, “There should be a conscious agenda to dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths. So it isn’t clear that we are doing this—as that would be a turnoff to most normal people—we rely on lulz.”

To put a very fine, super ugly point on it: “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.”

6. Quote liberally from mainstream media sources to borrow their validity and authority.

Anglin urges writers to recycle “large parts” from articles in mainstream news outlets as a way to siphon legitimacy toward his own site. The idea is to do a good enough job of combining verifiable facts with nonsense racist propaganda that the two start to blend together.

“Being able to see the mainstream source quoted allows us to co-opt the perceived authority of the mainstream media,” Anglin writes, “and not look like one of those sites we are all probably familiar with where you are never certain if what they are saying has been confirmed.”

7. Note the media outlets covertly helping us do our dirty work.

While suggesting that writers find concise versions of real news stories to incorporate into their posts, Anglin notes that two news outlets seems to share a similar worldview.

“RT and Breitbart have the benefit of being closer to our own spin on many issues,” Anglin writes, “meaning….they are more likely to include points of interest.”

8. Take inspiration from—who else?—Adolf Hitler!

A quote from Anglin, without commentary: “The basic propaganda doctrine of the site is based on Hitler’s doctrine of war propaganda outlined in Mein Kampf, Volume I, Chapter VI. If you have not read this, please do so immediately.”

9. By all means, stir up the anger and rage of violent racist readers, but do it in a way that ensures we can feign innocence in court.

As he notes in a section titled “Violence,” Anglin is well aware that “It’s illegal to promote violence on the internet.” But as someone holding out hope that the U.S. will break out into a wide-scale race war, he’s dedicated to surreptitiously urging violent attacks by his racist followers en masse.

“If you’re writing about some enemy Jew/feminist/etc., link their social media accounts,” Anglin advises writers for his site. “Twitter especially. We’ve gotten press attention before when I didn’t even call for someone to be trolled but just linked them and people went and did it.”

He also suggests that “it’s totally important to normalize the acceptance of violence as an eventuality/inevitability.” So murderous racists like Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik are hailed as heroes using language so over-the-top it borders on comical.

“This is great because people think you must be joking,” Anglin cynically notes. “But there is a part of their brain that doesn’t think that…[E]ven when a person can say to themselves ‘this is ridiculous,’ they are still affected by it on an emotional level. Whether they like it or not.”

10. Use popular culture as a vehicle for the white nationalist message.

People like what they know, and so Anglin aims to replicate recognizable and widely known media to engage readers in a way they understand. Early on in the style guide, Anglin admits that the Daily Stormer “is in many ways modeled off of successful liberal blogs such as Gawker.” (Anglin has reportedly previously cited Vice and Infowars.) He recommends writers fill their posts with “pop culture gifs of the style that Buzzfeed uses.”

But beyond just mirroring cultural digital ephemera, Anglin suggests that writers subvert—or rather, “hijack”—popular memes to give them a racist twist.

“Cultural references and attachment of entertainment culture to Nazi concepts have the psychological purpose of removing it from the void of weirdness that it would naturally exist in, due to the way it has been dealt with by the culture thus far, and making it a part of the reader’s world. Through this method we are also able to use the existing culture to transmit our own ideas and agenda.”

The site got lots of attention when it dubbed Taylor Swift an “Aryan Goddess” and suggested the singer is “a secret Nazi.” (For the record, Swift tried to sue a blogger who essentially demanded she disavow the alt-right, at least until the ACLU intervened on the blogger’s behalf. Conversely, Swift has never threatened to sue an actual white nationalist for claiming she supports their cause.)

Anglin also notes he turned 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” into an anti-immigrant song, because racists are lazy, garbage culture vultures who steal black people’s stuff while complaining about the browning of America.

11. There’s no such thing as bad press.

Remember how stoked the alt-right was when presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave a speech about how awful they were? That’s because you can’t shame a movement bereft of morals and principles from jump. Also, because the alt-right’s unofficial motto is “there’s no such thing as bad press.”

“We should always be on the lookout for any opportunity to grab media attention,” Anglin affirms. “It’s all good. No matter what.”

12. Even the payment system is a ‘jokey’ homage to Hitler.

Feinberg found that neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer, who also serves as systems administrator for the Daily Stormer, recently shared this information with a group of prospective contributors: “[O]kay basically, it works like this, you can write articles, if we dont like them you can put them on your own blog or whatever, if we accept them for publication we will pay you $14.88.”

1488 is a popular number among white supremacists and other garden-variety racists. Fourteen is a reference to the “14 words,” a racist slogan favored by white nationalists and the like. Two eights—the eighth letter of the alphabet—stands for HH, as in Heil Hitler. (During the 2016 presidential election, a PBS docu-special happened to catch an enthusiastic Trump supporter’s gigantic “88” hand tattoo.)

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

 

Trump’s Accusers Offer New Revelations

Trump’s Accusers Offer New Revelations

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

On Monday morning, three women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual abuse appeared on Megyn Kelly’s NBC Morning Show and took part in a press conference led by Brave New Films to demand a congressional investigation into the charges against the president.

Jessica Leeds says Trump groped her repeatedly on a plane three decades ago. Rachel Crooks, a former receptionist for a real estate development company with an office in Trump Tower, has alleged that Trump tried to kiss her several times in 2005. Samantha Holvey, who represented the state of North Carolina in the 2006 Miss USA pageant, says Trump would appear backstage to leer at her and other contestants. At least 16 other women have accused Trump of sexually inappropriate behavior.

Here are seven of the most disturbing allegations to emerge from their interviews.

1. Trump verbally insulted one of the women years later.

Leeds says that three years after he assaulted her on a plane, she ran into Trump at a gala.

“I recognized him, immediately,” she said. “He’s the guy on the airplane. But he stands there, as I’m handing him this table assignment, and he says, ‘I remember you. You were that…woman from the airplane. He called me the worst name ever.”

“You don’t want to say it out loud. Does it begin with a C?” Kelly asked.

“Yes,” Leeds responded.

2. They were disappointed by the majority of white women voting for Trump.

Kelly asked what the women made of the fact that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump, despite at least a dozen women having accused him of sexual assault and/or harassment, and the emergence of a 2005 video in which Trump boasted about grabbing women by the genitals.

“That’s what hurt the most,” Holvey responded. “That women, who have lived through this—everybody has their own story of a man touching them inappropriately…This is not an incident that only happens once in a blue moon. This is a daily thing for women. And for [white women who voted for Trump] not to say, ‘You know what? That’s wrong. I don’t support that. I’m not voting for that. I don’t want that person to be leading my country.’ And that was so painful.”


Read the full article here.

9 New And Crazy Revelations About Unhinged Trump

9 New And Crazy Revelations About Unhinged Trump

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

On Saturday, the New York Times offered a lengthy look at Donald Trump’s presidency from the inside with an article informed by “60 [presidential] advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress.” The piece is a portrait of a president who has made almost no strides toward being a competent statesman and instead continues to do things his way, in the hope he can reinvent his role on his own ill-defined terms. The Trump presidency has largely been defined by the president’s highly visible insecurities and outsized ego. “Despite all his bluster, [Trump] views himself less as a titan dominating the world stage than a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously.” Also, the guy seems able to tear himself away from his television only long enough to take in a few rounds of golf.

Here are nine of the craziest revelations from the Times article.

1. He watches a ton of television, but lies about it.

As soon as he wakes around 5:30am each morning, Trump turns on cable news and channel-hops throughout the day. Fox News shows like “Fox & Friends,” along with programs hosted by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro, which offer unfailingly fawning coverage, give the president “comfort and messaging ideas.” Trump reportedly “hate watches” MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and CNN, particularly Don Lemon, in order to get “fired up.”

Those close to the president told the Times they “estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted.” (According to staffers, “[n]o one touches the remote control except Mr. Trump and the technical support staff — at least that’s the rule.”)

He also lies about his level of TV consumption. During a recent trip to Asia he insisted reports about his television obsession were based on “fake sources,” out of fears it would bolster “criticism that he is not taking the job seriously.”

2. He’s erratic, and his behavior is often determined by how his news coverage looks.

Trump basically starts tweeting from his iPhone shortly after waking and taking in cable news headlines, even dashing off messages “while propped on his pillow.” Staffers are careful to keep an eye on “Fox & Friends” live in the morning for a guide to the president’s headspace and a sense of how difficult the day will be.

“If someone on the show says something memorable and Mr. Trump does not immediately tweet about it, the president’s staff knows he may be saving Fox News for later viewing on his recorder and instead watching MSNBC or CNN live — meaning he is likely to be in a foul mood to start the day.”

But moodiness means that the president is unpredictable at every turn; cranky and volatile one moment and personable the next. “Several advisers said the president may curse them for a minor transgression…then make amiable small talk with the same person minutes later.”

3. He still doesn’t read and needs briefings tailored to his short attention span.

Trump has previously admitted that he doesn’t read because he imagines he has “a lot of common sense.” His disdain for knowledge has been a consistent marker of his approach to U.S. intelligence. Post-election, Trump defended his practice of skipping most daily briefings by noting he didn’t need “to be told the same thing in the same words every single day” since he is “like, a smart person.” He now gets verbal updates each day, with staffers noting he has “become more attentive during daily intelligence briefings thanks to pithy presentations by Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director.”

“He really loves verbal briefings,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told the Times. “He is not one to consume volumes of books or briefings.”

4. He drinks up to 12 Diet Cokes a day.

According to a new book by erstwhile campaign Trump staffers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, “On Trump Force One there were four major food groups: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza and Diet Coke.” (Another Trump staffer told Axios, “Big Macs were served on silver trays in his private jet.”) The Times reports that Trump puts away two six-packs of Diet Cokes every single day, which he guzzles while (what else?) channel surfing and spouting off to anyone within earshot.

“Watching cable, [Trump] shares thoughts with anyone in the room, even the household staff he summons via a button for lunch or one of the dozen Diet Cokes he consumes each day.”

5. For all his complaints about his news coverage, he absolutely hates not being talked about.  

According to insiders, Trump gets sad when he doesn’t see himself prominently featured among the day’s stories. Who would have thought a narcissist with the most fragile of egos would desperately need any kind of attention he can get.

To an extent that would stun outsiders, Mr. Trump, the most talked-about human on the planet, is still delighted when he sees his name in the headlines. And he is on a perpetual quest to see it there. One former top adviser said Mr. Trump grew uncomfortable after two or three days of peace and could not handle watching the news without seeing himself on it.

6. He persists in fabricating his own reality.

Nearly everyone in Trump’s orbit Times writers spoke with “raised questions about his capacity and willingness to differentiate bad information from something that is true.” That jibes with a recent report from the Washington Post that even behind closed doors, the president traffics in falsehoods and conspiracy theories, raising absurd questions about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, insisting he actually won the popular vote and suggesting 2005 Access Hollywood footage of him bragging about grabbing women’s pussies may not be real.

7. He thought being president would be like ruling a monarchy.

Trump had never held a role in the military or government before the election and was clearly uninterested in politics or policy. During the campaign season, he promised to defend nonexistent Articles of the Constitution, while as president, he revealed complete ignorance about Abraham Lincoln’s membership in the Republican Party of yore. After eight years of enduring racist taunts about every move he made, the Wall Street Journal reported that President Obama had to “spend more time with his successor than presidents typically do” because Donald Trump was so out of his depth coming into the job.

In April, Trump told Reuters that being president is “more work than in [his] previous life,” and that he’d thought leading the country “would be easier.” Which is dunderheaded for all the obvious reasons, but also because Trump essentially thought winning the U.S. presidential election was akin to becoming king, per the Times report.

Mr. Trump’s difficult adjustment to the presidency, people close to him say, is rooted in an unrealistic expectation of its powers, which he had assumed to be more akin to the popular image of imperial command than the sloppy reality of having to coexist with two other branches of government.

The story goes on to note that “Trump expected being president would [entail]…ruling by fiat, exacting tribute and cutting back-room deals.”

8. Nancy Pelosi offered this blatant and totally undisguised shade.

“[H]e was utterly unprepared for this. It would be like you or me going into a room and being asked to perform brain surgery. When you have a lack of knowledge as great as his, it can be bewildering.”

9. Despite the mere five years that separate them, Trump made fun of Bernie Sanders’ age.

While giving a White House tour to four Democratic legislators, Trump began speculating on who might run against him in 2020. He suggested Bernie Sanders would almost certainly run “even if he’s in a wheelchair,” and then mocked both the aged and disabled by “making a scrunched-up body of a man in a wheelchair.”

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

Trump’s Mad Delusions Endanger Us All

Trump’s Mad Delusions Endanger Us All

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

 

Delusion, and lots of it, is pretty much a prerequisite for dictators. The New Yorker‘s David Remnick notes that Finnish autocrat Urho Kekkonen reportedly opened his public orations with the line, “If I die…” Ugandan dictator Idi Amin decreed his official title was “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.” Saparmurat Niyazov, the insane strongman of Turkmenistan whose prolific lunacy demanded an astonishing number of gold statues be erected in his image, once conceded “there are too many portraits, pictures and monuments [of me],” and claimed that while he did not “find any pleasure” in the ubiquity of his visage, benevolently allowed for it because “the people demand it,” as Paul Theroux noted. Ferdinand Marcos, whose 20-year rule of the Philippines was marked by terror, corruption and brutality, repeated his public lies in his private journals, which biographer William C. Rempel has written were “riddled with falsehoods and self-serving fictions” and “blatant, bald-faced, and occasionally comical” untruths. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi told journalists that there were “no demonstrations at all” even as protesters crowded the streets of Tripoli and cities around the country calling for the end of his regime. “All my people love me,” Gaddafi insisted in a 2011 interview. “They would die to protect me.”

Donald Trump, who (for now) remains a mere lowly president, but whose autocratic aspirations have been endlessly noted, has consistently shown a similar propensity toward magical thinking at odds with objective reality. To be sure, Trump has always had a contentious relationship with the truth, preferring to dispense what he called “truthful hyperbole,” a forerunner to “alternative facts.” “Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he reportedly instructed an architect just before a 1980 press conference, encouraging him to lie about how grand Trump Tower would be.

Since his election to president, Trump has promoted “1,628 false and misleading claims,” a number that grows daily, according to the Washington Post’s count. But Trump’s willingness to fib has always seemed to be linked to a pathological inability to sort fact from self-aggrandizing fiction, and recent reports suggest the president may be more than just the world’s most recognized liar. In private conversations with friends and staffers, Trump has begun raising the same lies and obfuscations as he does in public, indicating he may be so delusional he actually believes his own fabrications.

According to the New York Times, Trump has recently held “closed-door conversations” to revisit the racist birther campaign he used to launch his political career, again raising the non-issue of President Obama’s birth certificate. Aides note that Trump has “repeatedly claimed he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud,” a theory widely debunked by multiple voting experts with actual research and numbers on their side. In a general sense, staffers report, Trump “continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact” and Axios notes Trump is now particularly “prone to confidently indulging wild conspiracies and fantasies.” The president has “expressed certainty” the Russia investigation will wrap within the next six weeks, “complete with an exoneration from Robert S. Mueller III,” according to sources who spoke with the Washington Post. Trump has even suggesting that 2005 footage of him bragging about grabbing women’s pussies—which he previously verified as authentic and even tepidly apologized for—may not be real. “We don’t think that was my voice,” Trump told an anonymous senator, according to the Times.

To be honest, while all this is a bit worrisome, none of it is particularly shocking, considering Trump’s track record. Self-delusion has always been an integral part of the Trump brand, and is nothing short of a defining trait of the Trump presidency. Along with callous indifference toward others, as well as paranoia, narcissism and schizotypal thinking, the failure to recognize plainly observable reality is a classic marker of aspiring despots and tyrants; a character and personality flaw that, to put it mildly, tends to get worse as time and power accrue. What’s far more alarming than Trump being Trump is the response from those around him, who recognize how aberrant his behavior is, but do nothing as his decline accelerates. The most frightening aspect of Trump’s deteriorating mental state is how many of his confidants, colleagues and advisers seem totally okay with pretending everything is fine, at least publicly, indicating their willingness to endanger us all.

The Times cites a senator who listened as Trump ranted about Obama’s birth certificate and “chuckled” when he “recalled the conversation,” as if it was a bit of comic relief and not an awful sign about the president’s lack of mental clarity. Trump seriously attempts to float the idea that the Access Hollywood tape is part of some grand conspiracy against him, and instead of sounding a warning bell, “most of Mr. Trump’s aides [have] ignored his changing story.” When Trump asks advisers to support his completely unbelievable new storyline about the video, they simply keep things rolling, despite the elephant of mental illness in the room. (“[P]eople would kind of say, ‘Okay, let’s move along,’” one source told the Washington Post.) Complicit politicians have gotten on board with the mission to keep Trump’s condition under wraps, according to the Times report. “Mr. Trump’s journeys into the realm of manufactured facts have been frequent enough that his own staff has sought to nudge friendly lawmakers to ask questions of Mr. Trump in meetings that will steer him toward safer terrain.”

As they fail to address Trump’s affliction, those involved in this illusion continue to baby the president, showing him only those polls “designed to make him feel good”; advising other world leaders to “compliment him on his Electoral College victory”; ensuring only only positive news crosses his desk; and gingerly guiding him away from his kneejerk tendency to make irresponsible, dangerous and irrational decisions. (“You either had to just convince him something better was his idea or ignore what he said to do and hoped he forgot about it the next day,” former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res told Politico. “[H]e reacts to everything, and he is always reacting.”)

Basically, the sycophants in the White House and the self-serving politicians filling the seats of Congress are not just standing idly by as this president slips further into what sounds like serious mental wreckage, they are actively enabling him. As Trump shuttles from one self-created disaster to the next, belligerently baiting foreign powers and ratcheting up racism and xenophobia at home, the country slides closer to chaos. But this matters little to a group more dedicated to its billionaire donors than any other other cause. They will continue to look past the president’s delusions, no matter how harmful they are to the country and the well-being of its citizens. This, it seems worth mentioning, isn’t unlike what happens in dictatorships. As Trump’s condition gets worse, so will the situation as a whole.

“Trump has internalized the belief that he can largely operate with impunity, people close to him said,” a Washington Post report stated on Wednesday. “His political base cheers him on. Fellow Republican leaders largely stand by him. His staff scrambles to explain away his misbehavior—or even to laugh it off.” With no expectation that the 25th Amendment solution will be employed, Trump is likely to be more reckless, and yes, dangerous to the country and quite possibly the world. “White House officials,” recognizing the inevitable downturn of any untreated mental instability, “expect Trump to be even more outrageous and cocksure in coming months,” Axios notes.

“The more stress he’s under, the more delusional he’s going to become, the more out of control and, from a danger standpoint, the more enraged he’s going to become,” Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes told Newsweek. “He is a far more sick person than people realize or want to realize. To say for example that he is even a con man is way too benign. He loses track of reality when it comes to a challenge to his sense of himself, which is extremely fragile. It’s out of his control—he is not clever like a fox, he is just very, very sick.”

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

 

I Hate Sports, But Love Watching Trump Be Enraged By Black Millionaires Who Tell Him Where To Get Off

I Hate Sports, But Love Watching Trump Be Enraged By Black Millionaires Who Tell Him Where To Get Off

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

I do not like sports. There are lots of other things I hate more—cancer, genocide, lite jazz—but ultimately, they’re all separated by a matter of degrees. I don’t care who won last night’s game, who’s in anyone’s brackets or how great the Whatchamacallits are “looking this year.” But while the sporting aspect of sports may strike me as boring, for the past few years, I’ve been pretty taken by the on- and off-field political commentary coming from sports stars using their platforms to call out oppression and social injustice. This refusal to be apolitical is a sign of the times that speaks to both the historic importance of this cultural moment while simultaneously underscoring all the awful reasons why their voices are needed.

That, and there’s nothing like watching Donald Trump’s rage at having black millionaires tell him where to get off.

You can basically sum up this country’s political spectacle for the last two years as crazy, racist, old man Trump yelling at people of color to get off his lawn, a patch of land known as America. But no group stirs Trump’s—and his followers’—ire quite like rich black folks, whose success they believe is always unearned, more prima facie evidence of a system that now gives black folks a leg up over deserving, hard-working, real—and thus definitionally white—Americans. Rich black folks who dare criticize this country instead of endlessly thanking mythical, benevolent white America for successes their own talents and ambition actually garnered are the particular targets of Trumpian anger and racial resentment. In a recent Politico piece attempting to explain Trump voters’ unwavering support for their president, Michael Kruse concludes, “it’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting,” a list that includes “NFL players (boy oh boy do they hate kneeling NFL players) whom they see as ungrateful, disrespectful millionaires.”

That’s fitting for a political movement without a single unifying element except its rejection of eight years of leadership by an African American so uppity he thought his rightful place was in the White House. “For Trump,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in a recent Atlantic piece, “it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally.” Trump and his supporters appear to feel just as insulted by the reality of millionaire black sports stars. It’s true that Trump’s belligerence is boundless, his outsized insecurity fueling his counter-attacks against even the mildest of perceived slights. But Trump goes after powerful black folks with a particular vengeance that is both politically expedient—his base absolutely eats these displays up—and attributable to his own deep-seated racism.

More than a year ago, Trump suggested that Colin Kaepernick “should find a country that works better for him.” The San Francisco 49ers quarterback had already begun sitting, and then out of respect for veterans, kneeling, because he asserted, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” Since then, Trump has used the office of the presidency to demand an apology from a private citizen, ESPN sports reporter Jamele Hill, who rightly declared via her personal Twitter account that “Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.” Trump embarrassed himself by angrily attepting to disinvite Warriors point guard Steph Curry from the White House a day after Curry had already said he would turn down any such invitation to show he doesn’t “stand for basically what our president…the things that [he’s] said.” Trump tweeted that NFL players, 70 percent of whom are black, have been given the “privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL,” as if talent, hard work, and years of rigorous physical training have nothing to do with it. A day earlier, Trump called peacefully protesting NFL players “sons of bitches”—a stark contrast to his “very fine” white nationalist and neo-Nazi supporters in Charlottesville—and demanded their firing, a direct assault on their First Amendment rights. (In that same speech, Trump bemoaned NFL rules designed to protect against traumatic brain injury claiming players “want to hit”; just the language a white racist would use to animalize black minds and bodies he imagines exist solely to be brutalized for his own entertainment.)

But for all Trump’s efforts to silence black sports figures—even those quasi-stars on the periphery, which I’m just about to get to—he’s failed miserably. There may be no better case than the recent back and forth between Trump and LaVar Ball. Trump petulantly demanded, and received, a thank-you for his alleged part in obtaining the release of Ball’s son LiAngelo, one of a trio of black UCLA players accused of shoplifting in China. When the elder Ball refused to praise Trump and downplayed his role in facilitating the release, the petty president sent a series of tweets insisting “IT WAS ME” who deserved both credit and profuse thanks, claiming Ball “could have spent the next 5 to 10 years during Thanksgiving with [his] son in China,” and calling him an “ungrateful fool” and a “poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair.” (In the midst of this pre-dawn tirade, Trump inexplicably wedged in a complaint about Oakland Raiders running back Marshawn Lynch, figuring while he was attacking “the blacks” in sports, he might as well throw another one on the pile.) In the CNN interview that preceded Trump’s outburst, Ball dismissively stated, “I would have said thank you if he put [LiAngelo] on his plane and took him home. Then I would have said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Trump, for taking my boys out of China and bringing them back to the U.S.’ There’s a lot of room on that plane. I would have said thank-you kindly for that.”

I’d never thought much either way about the senior Ball before. He’s famous enough that he’d appeared in my non-sports-oriented news feed, mostly with the dubious distinction of being a class A sports dad. His recent resistance to standing down for Trump has basically made me a fan by default. It’s true that in Ball, Trump met his match, the only other public figure with a mouth as big and an ego as undeservedly huge. But Ball’s refusal to comply with Trump’s belief that black celebrities must acquiesce to his every demand comes off as a political act. It’s not a coincidence that black players who refuse to stop acknowledging the reality of systemic racism are consistenty accused of being unappreciative. As Shaun King noted in a recent tweet, “Ungrateful is the new nigger.” Trump’s consistent record of playing the race card—which is how that phrase should properly be applied going forward—managed to do what I’d never previously thought possible. As long I don’t have to actually participate in any organized sports, I’m fully Team Ball.

Ditto my support for LeBron James, who on the heels of Trump’s miserable failure to diss Steph Curry, blasted Trump as a “bum” and noted that “going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” In a video followup, James stated he was “a little frustrated because this guy that we’ve put in charge has tried to divide us once again,” adding that for Trump to “use [sports] to divide us even more is not something I can stand for and it’s not something I can be quiet about.” Jamele Hill, after a two-week suspension from ESPN that Trump likely hailed a victory that would shut her up, pointedly stated in an interview that she “will never take back what [she] said.” Colin Kaepernick, proving this was never about Trump—who’s just the most obvious symptom of America’s problems—has kept on being awesome, charitable and outspoken on all the right issues despite an obvious conspiracy to keep him off the field. Steph Curry called Trump’s response to his non-RSVP “surreal” but also intimated that Trump was stoking racial flames, an issue we should never stop talking about.

“I don’t know why he feels the need to target certain individuals rather than others,” Curry told reporters following a Warriors practice. “I have an idea of why, but it’s kind of beneath the leader of a country to go that route. It’s not what leaders do.”

That’s also true. Trump has been deafeningly silent in response to white sports figures who have criticized him, from Warriors coach Steve Kerr (who has called Trump a “blowhard” who “couldn’t be more ill-suited to be president”) to San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich (who dubbed the president a “soulless coward”), to a number of NFL, NBA and MLB owners who have criticized Trump and defended protesting players. Trump even ignored Eminem’s BET cypher in which he labeled the president a “racist grandpa,” among many other insults. “I feel like he’s not paying attention to me,” the rapper said Friday, and I’m sure we can all guess why.

Friday, Trump lamented that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell “has lost control” of a league in which “players are the boss,” which is to say the help have forgotten their place. That was the day after Thanksgiving, when he enthusiastically replied “Make America Great Again” in response to a tweet criticizing his racist attacks on “high-profile” black folks. (Some have theorized it was a technical “mistake,” which is not how you spell “Freudian slip.”) Trump will keep tossing red meat to the white supremacists who comprise the bulk of his base, and he doesn’t mind sharing the meal. And those sports stars who have spoken up will hopefully keep telling him exactly where he can stick it. I’m not hailing this as a revolutionary act, or pretending those words are going to radically transform white racists into decent people. But every time Trump is reminded it’s 2017 and uppity black folks are still talking, there’s a tiny bit of joy to behold.

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.