Month: August 2017

Look! Away and down, south in Dixie
by Tom Sullivan

Image via Twitter.

It happened with the Confederate battle flag at South Carolina’s state capitol after the Charleston mass shooting. Now the deaths and injuries in Charlottesville, VA on Saturday have accelerated attempts to remove other Confederate commemorations to “The Lost Cause” erected across the South at the onset of Jim Crow.

White nationalists, neo-Nazis, members of the alt-right, and gun-toting militia members arrived in Charlottesville to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a city park.

Protesters in Nashville on Monday called for the removal of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest that resides between the Statehouse and Senate chambers. The Confederate general and KKK leader directed the massacre of black troops after the Union surrender at Fort Pillow in April 1864.

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam released a statement saying, “I do not believe Nathan Bedford Forrest should be one of the individuals we honor at the Capitol. The General Assembly has established a process for addressing these matters and I strongly encourage the Capitol Commission and the Historical Commission to act.”

Rep. Brenda Gilmore and other Democratic lawmakers spoke to reporters after meeting with Haslam:

“I think it has been painful to me as a black caucus member, and also other members of the General Assembly, when we pass by this symbol of a very dark period in our history that represented hate and slavery,” she said.

In other states, moves already underway to remove Confederate iconography accelerated. The New York Times reports:

In Maryland, a statue of the former Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, which sits in front of the Statehouse, has drawn ire. Michael E. Busch the House speaker, told The Baltimore Sun on Monday that “it’s the appropriate time to remove it.” Taney is best known for ruling against Dred Scott in 1857, decreeing that blacks couldn’t claim United States citizenship, and therefore couldn’t sue in federal court.

The mayor of Lexington, Jim Gray, said he would speed up a proposal to remove two Confederate monuments from the city’s former courthouse.

Mayor Jim Gray of Lexington, Ky., said in a statement on Saturday that plans to move two statues of Confederate figures from the grounds of the former courthouse there were in place before the violence in Charlottesville, in which a 32-year-old woman was killed and at least 34 others were injured. He said what happened there “accelerated the announcement I intended to make next week.”

In Durham, North Carolina, protesters took matters into their own hands:

DURHAM, N.C. (WNCN) – A crowd of protesters gathered outside the old Durham County courthouse on Main Street Monday evening in opposition to a Confederate monument in front of the government building.

Around 7:10 p.m. a woman using a ladder climbed the statue of a soldier and attached a rope around the statue.

Moments later, the crowd pulled on the rope and the statue fell. One man quickly ran up and spat on the statue and several others began kicking it.

The clashes are sure to continue. But the black-masked antifa counterprotesters get it wrong and simply play into the alt-right strategy. The better way to confront neo-nazi clowns is with real clowns, Dave Neiwert
of the Southern Poverty Law Center told me Saturday. That happened in Charlotte in 2012 when counterprotesters in red noses outnumbered Nazi marchers 5 to 1:

“The message from us is, you look silly,” Lacey Williams, the youth coordinator for Charlotte’s Latin American Coalición, told WCNC. “We’re dressed like clowns and you’re the ones that look funny.”

The real clowns met white power with noisemakers, signs reading “Wife Power,” and sacks of white flour. Everyone but the Nazis and klansmen went home with smiles on their faces.

The racist cause is still lost. The country is still growing browner. But the alt-right wants its Horst Wessel and will provoke violent clashes until it gets its martyr to white pride.

White pride: It’s what you’re left with when the only thing to be proud of in your sorry life is the skin you were born in.

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White men can’t be terrorists?

by digby

No one could have predicted:

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security in May warned of the likelihood that white supremacist groups would “continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year,” months before violence erupted Saturday at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In an unclassified joint intelligence bulletin obtained by Foreign Policy, titled “White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat Of Lethal Violence,” the FBI and DHS reviewed “lethal and potentially lethal incidents” of violence committed by white supremacists from 2000–2016.

The FBI and DHS concluded that violence in 2017 would likely “continue to be spontaneous and involve targets of opportunity,” but did not rule out the possibility of “plot-derived mass-casualty violence.” They projected that such violence would “derive from the capabilities of lone offenders or small cells, rather than the resources of larger groups, due to the decentralized and often disorganized status of the WSE movement.”

That’s quite interesting considering what this White House adviser had to say about it just last week:

Gorka appeared on Breitbart News Daily, the radio show of his former employer. Gorka responded to criticism stemming from a previous media appearance on MSNBC where he said “[t]here’s no such thing as a lone wolf” attack. The concept, according to Gorka, was “invented by the last administration to make Americans stupid.”

The idea of a “lone wolf attack,” Gorka says, is a ruse to point blame away from al Qaeda and ISIS when “[t]here has never been a serious attack or a serious plot that was unconnected from ISIS or al Qaeda.” Critics were quick to point to the example of Timothy McVeigh, who was not connected to ISIS or al Qaeda and killed 168 people when he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

On Wednesday, Gorka lashed out at “at [New York Times reporter] Maggie Haberman and her acolytes in the fake news media, who immediately have a conniption fit” and brought up McVeigh. He added that “white men” and “white supremacists” are not “the problem.”

It’s this constant, “Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.” No, it isn’t, Maggie Haberman. Go to Sinjar. Go to the Middle East, and tell me what the real problem is today. Go to Manchester.

Think Progress observed:

Gorka noted that the Oklahoma City bombing was 22 years ago, which is true. But since 9/11, right-wing extremists — almost always white men and frequently white supremacists — have been far more deadly domestically than Muslim extremists. A study found that in the first 13.5 years after 9/11, Muslim extremists were responsible for 50 deaths in the United States. Meanwhile, “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.”

That GOP crackup we’ve heard about for years? Yeah. It’s here.

by digby

This is a fascinating podcast from Politico Global, well worth listening to:

For this week’s Global Politico, we convened eight prominent Republicans to answer the rapidly proliferating questions about a GOP that seems increasingly at war with itself—and heard two starkly different stories about a party that might have won the White House and both houses of Congress but sounds at times like it’s more on the verge of a nervous breakdown than a national takeover.

From five top Washington insiders like Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham, Republican Main Street Partnership chief Sarah Chamberlain, and former top advisers to 2016 candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, came increasingly pointed laments about Trump’s “lack of presidential leadership,” his bombastic party-bashing tweets, absence of a governing philosophy and political compass ruled by a “collection of impulses” rather than a coherent strategy.

“This is a party that doesn’t know where it wants to go, but also happens to have all the power,” National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru says. “You’d have to say the Republican Party is in about as bad of shape as you can be while holding the White House, the House, the Senate, most governorships and most state legislatures.”

“There is a real governing problem,” adds Alex Conant, a Republican consultant and former top Rubio campaign adviser. “Look, I don’t care what the issue is, you cannot pass massive pieces of legislation without presidential leadership. There is no example in American history of major legislation passing without the president of the United States dragging it across the finish line. We just haven’t seen that at all from President Trump yet.”

It is just such thinking that infuriates Trump himself and his diehard backers, as was abundantly clear when I later interviewed for The Global Politico a second group that included strategist Roger Stone, a Trump friend and adviser of decades; Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an anti-immigration activist now heading a controversial national electoral commission for Trump; and Kentucky-based commentator Scottie Nell Hughes. Not only were they not chagrined by Trump’s contentious first six months of his presidency, they urged him to get even more combative—against enemies within the GOP perhaps above all.

Stone, for one, says Trump should “throw Mitch McConnell and the boys over the sides so fast it would make your head spin” and fire his national security adviser H.R. McMaster for alleged ties to “globalists” like liberal Democratic donor George Soros. Stone even has unkind words for McConnell’s wife, Trump Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Trump’s new chief of staff, John Kelly, came in for a warning after just two weeks on the job, with Stone saying the retired Marine general is already “on a very slippery slope” by trying to cut off Trump from hard-line supporters and the alt-right media.

“Will these quislings that he has appointed,” Stone asks of the president, “take him down?”

Hughes and Kobach, while less inflammatory in their recommendations, are equally supportive of Trump’s campaign against internal dissent and a party establishment that, Hughes insists, still hasn’t fully accepted last year’s election results. “They haven’t learned their lesson yet that President Trump won,” she says, attributing the backlash to a president who has exposed the hollowness of congressional Republicans’ repeated pledges to shake up a system they are in fact benefiting from.

The finger-pointing in both groups over the failure of efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare with a GOP alternative in many ways summed up the state of a party that is less a united team these days than a circular firing squad. Some of those I interviewed blamed Trump, some accused other Republicans of “lying” about their willingness to repeal the health-care law, and still others thought McConnell and the rest of their party’s leadership should take the fall for a failed process.

Taken together, the comments of the Trump flame-throwers along with those of the Washington insiders they love to bash suggest one incontestable fact they can all agree on: “Trump’s nomination,” as Stone puts it, “was the hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

This story used to be pre-written about the Democrats with a headline “Dems in Disarray.” But even with all the usual infighting among the center-left and the left, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this. But then the Democrats have never elected an unfit,cretinous buffoon president so perhaps it’s not a fair comparison.

Seriously, there’s never been anything like this. The modern conservative movement built a party based upon racism, xenophobia and nationalistic chauvinism and pretended it has something to do with “freedom” and “small government.” It worked for a while to contain this monstrous strain. The dam finally burst and here we are.

And frankly, it doesn’t sound like any of these Republicans have grappled with the real problem yet.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Stickin’ it to the Blue States

by digby

You don’t like our Trumpie? Well lookee here at the latest health destruction idea from good old Lindsay Graham:

I told you they would never quit…

A weird little coincidence

Maybe he should offer to put all the Confederate Monuments on his winery’s property and charge people to come see them. So much winning.

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Toxic sharing: how the Nazis learned about Zyklon B

by digby

In light of the events in Charlottesville, there’s been some necessary discussion on twitter about the fact that Nazis studied US history and American slavocracy. Considering our current President’s policies on immigration, this seems pertinent as well:

In Ringside Seat to a Revolution, author David Dorado Romo reveals some of his findings from the National Archives in Washington DC:

I discovered an article written in a German scientific journal written in 1938, which specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B. At the start of WWII, the Nazis adopted Zyklon B as a fumigation agent at German border crossings and concentration camps. Later, when the Final Solution was put into effect, the Germans found more sinister uses for this extremely lethal pesticide. They used Zyklon B pellets in their own gas chambers not just to kill lice but to exterminate millions of human beings.

Just saying. These types of people share their toxicities in more ways than one.

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Our cretinous leader

by digby

The New York Times’ Bari Weiss, with an overview of the bipartisan disgust with President Trump:

“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” That was the last Facebook post of Heather D. Heyer, a 32-year-old woman who went out on Saturday to face down white supremacists in Charlottesville and was murdered before the day was done by 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. Her death, and the injury of a reported 19 others when Mr. Fields rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, was the horrific capstone to a weekend of violence in the Virginia college town. 

Outrage is something Donald Trump typically has in no short supply. As Stephen Hayes reminds readers in The Weekly Standard, this president is promiscuous with his denunciations. “Brit Hume is ‘a dope’ and a ‘know-nothing.’ Mika Brzezinski is ‘dumb as a rock’ and ‘crazy.’ Bill and Hillary Clinton were ‘the real predators.’” Trump is always ready to blast those he believes — often wrongly — to be worthy targets. See: Judge Gonzalo Curiel and the Khan family. 

But when it came to white nationalists who’d spent the day brandishing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” our mad-libbing president offered uncharacteristic restraint: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. On many sides.” 

Columnists across the political spectrum, including Josh Levin at Slate and Michael Gerson in The Washington Post, rightly tore into the president for the utter moral failure of this statement. So did many lawmakers. The one group that celebrated it, as our Editorial Board points out, were the white nationalists themselves. 

There has been no shortage of powerful pieces and tweets over the past 48 hours, but there are three that shouldn’t be missed. The first is this moving symposium in The Times. Let these thoughtful University of Virginia students take you into the eye of the storm. 

National Review writer David French and his family, especially his black daughter, have been viciously targeted by the alt-right as a result of his longstanding and outspoken opposition to Donald Trump. Read his short piece about how this weekend’s violence was nothing less than the alt-right’s chickens coming home to roost. 

Dahlia Lithwick is a Charlottesville native who owns a home that “carries a racially restrictive covenant. No blacks, no Jews.” In other words, she owns a house “that could once have been taken from me by the force of law.” In this powerful rebuttal to the white nationalists’ slogan, “you will not replace us,” she shows how history proves their rallying cry to be “a bald-faced lie.” Amen.

By the time this posts he may have finally choked something out. But I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t.

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Billionaire Judge Dredds
by Tom Sullivan

WNYC’s “On The Media” examined the trend in plutocrats taking over more of the functions of democracy because they can.

Bob Garfield interviewed Brian Knappenberger whose documentary, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, examines how wealthy individuals — people who already buy the legislation they want — have moved into silencing the media outlets they don’t already own by suing them or buying them. They’ve got the legislative and executive branches. They are working on the judicial branch. Free press? No, they paid good money for it.

The film looks at how Silicon Valley magnate Peter Thiel secretly backed Hulk Hogan’s sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker. Knappenberger tells OTM that at one point in the case it became clear that something bigger than Hogan’s privacy was involved. Eventually, Forbes revealed Thiel was backing the legal case against Gawker to punish them for outing him in 2007.

Garfield: There’s a point where we learn that they actually reduced their claims in the case for the specific reason of making sure that they could inflict the most pain not only on the corporation Gawker Media, but on founder and CEO Nick Denton and other editors at the publications.

Hogan would get less because insurers would pay less. But Thiel could inflict more pain on individuals he most wanted to hurt.

Sheldon Adelson, the richest man in Nevada, in 2015 secretly purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a regular thorn in his side. The paper’s own reporters uncovered his involvement. From The Guardian review:

The new management promptly declared that star columnist John L Smith could no longer write about Adelson, who had in fact already sued him. Most of the paper’s talent quit, but it was an extraordinary putsch.

The OTM interview continues:

Garfield: Alright, this is America. Historically rich people buy newspapers and they use them to flog their own politics, their own values, their own personal interests. There’s nothing new about that. Why is the Adelson case so concerning?

Knappenberger: It’s the secrecy. And it’s the same thing that bothers me about the Thiel example. That, combined with the fact that we’re in a kind of new period now in which inequality has gotten so staggering — it’s been growing for decades. And you pair that with the fact that media in general has become so vulnerable. Particularly, independent watchdog journalism has lost a lot of its revenue and financial underpinnings to the Internet and others while the über-rich have gotten much, much richer and much more powerful. So that’s the moment that I am trying to describe here.

Media-abusing Donald Trump too has made a pact with Sinclair Media for more favorable coverage. Sinclair is buying up local TV stations projected to reach 72 percent of American households with nightly right-wing commentaries its local outlets must run.

NYU professor Jay Rosen ties the three threads together in the film:

I think the common thread among the Peter Thiel story, the Adelson story, and the Trump story is billionaires who are proclaiming, We are not vulnerable to truth. We are invulnerable to the facts. And it simply doesn’t matter what you say, what the press does. We are more powerful than the truth.

Knappenberger sums up the interview:

Knappenberger: I found that statement by Jay to be very powerful. I do think that’s essentially what we are facing now. This notion that the truth doesn’t matter if you’re rich enough.

“I am the law!” declared Judge Dredd. Billionaires have declared themselves the truth. And the lawmakers. And the courts. And now the press.

If unchecked, the only places these trends can lead are unpleasant. Like Charlottesville, only more systematized.

Now would be a good time to get off the couch.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

They love him, they really love him

by digby

And why shouldn’t they love him?

The popular white supremacist site Daily Stormer called Trump’s remarks “really good,” noting that he “didn’t attack us.” They were also pleased he ignored a question about white supremacists after making his statement.

Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us.

He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate… on both sides!

So he implied the antifa are haters.

There was virtually no counter-signaling of us at all.

He said he loves us all.

Also refused to answer a question about White Nationalists supporting him.

No condemnation at all.

When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room.

Really, really good.

God bless him.

Some commentators on the white nationalist message board Stormfront also praised Trump, with one noting that the president’s comments could just as easily be read as a criticism of Black Lives Matter.

Josh Marshall:

Where does this come from? Who knows who wrote this text for Trump. But many of Trump’s most important speeches were written by white nationalist aide Stephen Miller, who came from Jeff Sessions’ senate office. Miller literally worked with Alt-Right leader (he coined the phrase) Richard Spencer on racist political activism when he was in college at Duke (Spencer was a grad student at the time). This isn’t some vague guilt by association. He’s one of them.

When Gabriel Sherman asked what he identifies as a ‘senior White House official’ why the White House didn’t denounce the Nazis in Charlottesville, he got this: “What about the leftist mob? Just as violent if not more so.” Maybe I’ve missed some other background comments out of the White House. But I haven’t heard anything that approaches that level of venom about the nazis or white supremacists. When the top ideologues at Trump’s White House look at yesterday’s spectacle, they instinctively see the counter-protestors as enemies.

Was that official Miller? Who knows? It could have been Bannon or Gorka or frankly a number of others. There are plenty to choose from. That’s the point. This wasn’t resistance to making a conspicuous denunciation or being cute. Those were Trump’s supporters. He recognizes them as supporters, indeed as part of his movement. And he supports them. This is probably largely instinctive on Trump’s part. It’s more ideological and articulate on his aides’ part.

He’s one of them. Let’s stop pretending.

And they recognize one of their own too. But why wouldn’t they? He is the guy who wrote this:

They were innocent

QOTD: Rich Lowry

by digby

“if these monuments are going to become rallying points for Neo-Nazis, maybe they do have to go” — @RichLowry

Yeah, well, they’ve been a rallying point for white supremacists from the beginning. What’s the difference?

Update: QOTD II. The mother of the driver of the car that mowed down protesters yesterday:

Field’s mother, Samantha Bloom, told The Associated Press on Saturday night that she knew her son was attending a rally in Virginia but didn’t know it was a white supremacist rally.

“I thought it had something to do with Trump. Trump’s not a white supremacist,” Bloom said.

“He had an African-American friend so …,” she said before her voice trailed off. She added that she’d be surprised if her son’s views were that far right.

Yes, Trump IS a white supremacist. And having a black friend doesn’t mean you aren’t one.

Those are two things too many Americans failed to understand in 2016.

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