Trump’s Only Campaign Promise: Make Bigotry Safe Again

Recently Donald Trump gave a rambling comment about his agenda for a second term if, god help us all, he were reelected to a second term.  What was striking was that he had no agenda other than being reelected and continuing his vanity show from the White House.  Meanwhile, Sunbelt states that foolishly reopened at his bidding are reeling from huge rises in Covid-19 cases and we have learned that Trump's BFF, Vladimir Putin was paying bounties for the murder of American soldiers in Afghanistan. So what is Trump response?  Pandering to white racism - something he has harbored himself for years going all the way back to racial discrimination in housing the Norfolk, Virginia area almost 50 years ago and his demands for a judicial lynching of innocent young blacks falsely accused of crime in Central Park.  Along with his narcissism, racism appears to be the one constant with Trump.  A column in the Washington Post looks at his apparent decision to use racism and fear to gain reelection.  Here are highlights:

“White power!” shouted the elderly man, raising his fist as he drove his golf cart past a group of demonstrators advocating racial justice. On Sunday, President Trump offered an “amen.”

A white couple stood outside their St. Louis mansion aiming deadly firearms — the man wielding a semiautomatic rifle, the woman waving a handgun — at Black Lives Matter protesters who were peacefully marching past. On Monday, Trump joined that hallelujah chorus, too.

In both cases, Trump offered his encouragement to white tribal fear and anger in the form of retweets on his Twitter feed. There’s plenty of bad news the president might want to overshadow: the explosion in covid-19 cases in Sun Belt states he pushed to reopen prematurely, for example, or the reports that Russia offered bounties for killing U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. But why choose “white power” as the bright, shiny object he wants everyone to focus on? Why not some other, less incendiary bit of nonsense?

The logical conclusion is that, in his desperate campaign to win reelection, Trump has decided to position himself even more explicitly as the defender of whiteness and all its privileges. Certainly, in his ideologically flexible career, maintaining the primacy of whiteness is a rare constant.

The “white power” incident took place earlier this month at The Villages, a sprawling retirement community near Orlando. . . . . Trump retweeted a video of the incident, appending the comment, “Thank you to the great people of The Villages.” The tweet was deleted a couple of hours later, with the White House claiming that Trump hadn’t heard the “white power” rallying cry. That is likely a lie, since the shouted slogan comes right at the beginning of the two-minute video clip. You can’t miss it — unless you’re just retweeting things you haven’t bothered to watch.

And if Trump didn’t mean to amplify the “white power” message, then why — one day later — would he retweet a video of the St. Louis incident? You don’t have to be a semiotician to understand the message of that video, which reinforces a message Trump has repeated over and over again: White people, when you see a diverse crowd of protesters coming down your street, be afraid. Go get your guns. Be ready to shoot.

With Trump’s hope of reelection fading, I fear this is the gambit he has chosen: using this moment to exacerbate racial animus — rather than lessen it, as any responsible leader would try to do — by heightening white fear and loathing of the nation’s growing diversity.

“Black lives matter” does not imply some sort of zero-sum game. The whole nation will benefit if we can curb the kind of police violence that led to the deaths of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah McClain and so many others. The whole nation will benefit if we finally acknowledge and then address systemic racism. What makes this moment of upheaval and protest different is that so many white Americans see how racism is a ball and chain that holds all of us back — and see what a braver, fairer, stronger nation we can be if we confront our original sin with honesty and determination.

As a political strategy, this can work only if Trump motivates enough older, white, non-college-educated voters in the Sun Belt and rural Midwest to see the coming election as a matter of us vs. them — while the Republican Party simultaneously uses various techniques of voter suppression to limit Democratic turnout. Polls suggest that all of this is unlikely to work, and that Trump may be dragging the GOP’s Senate majority down with him.

As presidential leadership, Trump’s “white power” strategy is tragically irresponsible. His narcissism leads him unerringly to adopt any course of action he sees as beneficial to himself, no matter what the potential impact on the nation might be.

His focus is on a despicable effort to make white people angry and frightened enough to give him a second term. If he sincerely wants anything beyond his own glorification, it is to make America safe again for bigotry.

As for Republican "friends" who continue to support Trump, perhaps they need to be honest and join the KKK since they are supporting the Klan's de facto leader.

Trump and Barr Consider Antifa Terrorists, But Not The KKK

Via Facebook I found a piece in the Jewish Journal that brings into sharp focus the sickness of the Trump/Pence regime and Trump's consigliere, AG William Barr.  The FBI's own records show that white supremacy groups pose the largest domestic terrorist threat, yet instead Trump and Barr want to declare Antifa - a loose organization with no leaders or organizational structure - as a "terrorist organization."  As for White supremacists in Charlottesville and other far right actions since, Trump refers to them as "very good people." Just today, Trump overruled the Department of Defense move to rename military bases named after Confederate generals in an effort to win allegiance from his white supremacist supporters. Here are article highlights:

“The United States of America will be designating Antifa as a Terrorist Organization,” President Donald Trump tweeted on May 31, the morning after American cities were engulfed with protests decrying the death of George Floyd. In major metropolises including  New York, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Dallas and Los Angeles, the demonstrations spiraled out of control, devolving into looting, vandalism and arson. 

Trump declared the lootings were “being led by antifa,” a decentralized movement threaded together by its militant, sometimes violent opposition to fascism and the far-right. 

Pittsburgh’s chief of police, agreed. Attorney General William Barr also pointed his finger at the group, saying the protesters were using “antifa-like tactics.” However, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said,  “A number of different groups are involved in these whether it’s antifa or it’s others, frankly.”

Whether you agree with antifa’s ideology or approach, [Trump's] the president’s announcement is shocking, given that many of the most violent hate groups in the United States aren’t designated as terrorists. One notable example is the Ku Klux Klan, which for decades has used bloodshed, intimidation and crime to terrorize Americans.

“White supremacist extremism is currently the most lethal form of extremism in the U.S.,” American University professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss told Congress in September. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the far-right was the source of 73% of domestic extremist-related slayings from 2008 to 2019. 

However, Trump has been much more hesitant to declare these menacing groups as terrorists.

The first time the U.S. labeled a white supremacist group as a terrorist organization was in April. However, the Russian Imperial Movement was not American-based. The ultra-nationalist organization is widely known for plotting bomb attacks on asylum seekers in Sweden. Meanwhile, countless other home-grown neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial, neo-Confederate and Skinhead organizations remain undesignated. 

When the United States labels a group as “terrorist,” it is not a symbolic gesture. . . . .
Terrorist groups are under the purview of terror-related intelligence bodies such as the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is uniquely suited to handle these deadly organizations. Right now, the NCTC is prohibited from preventing violent anti-Semites like the Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., shooters. Trump’s National Strategy for Counterterrorism includes preventing terrorists from acquiring weapons. However, known neo-Nazis still are able to obtain firearms.

Unlike white supremacist groups, which explicitly call for victimizing racial and religious minorities, antifa’s mission is not inherently violent. One could argue that by opposing fascism, the group seeks to prevent mass violence. Antifa’s rampages normally end in property damage. It’s hard to argue that the group is lethal; the only recorded death related to antifa was in January 2019 when member Charles Landeros fired at police while being arrested. He missed and was killed by returning fire.

Compare that to self-described white supremacist Robert Gregory Bowers, who is charged with walking into the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018 and killing 11 Jews. That incident was not isolated. Patrick Crusius is charged with killing 23 people at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in August, leaving behind a white nationalist manifesto. 

Crusius had posted about his intent to kill on the website 8chan. If white nationalists were considered terrorists, the NCTC might have been able to track and potentially stop the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern American history. 

However, Trump isn’t only ignoring white supremacist terrorism but actively pushing American institutions overlook it.

According to Reuters, Trump attempted to rename the Countering Violent Extremism program to “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism” — erasing white nationalist violence from its mission entirely. Under the current administration, federal prosecutors are limited in how they can bring white nationalists to justice. 

Whether you approve of antifa’s message or tactics, it is not nearly as consequential a threat to Americans as the vast number of white supremacist groups in this country. Although it might be more politically advantageous for Trump to rail against the anarchy-loving movement, he is driving this nation, and his blind spot endangers all Americans in his backseat.

Why Evangelicals Love Trump: It's All About Race

I have followed the misnamed "Christian Right" - mainly evangelicals - since the early 1990's when they began to infiltrating the local city committees of the GOP in southeastern Virginia - an infiltration that was facilitated by cynical Republican who foolishly thought they could control these religious extremists and hypocrites. These supposed "Christians" wore their religion on their sleeves, but was limited to opposing abortion and being anti-gay. Christ's social gospel message was absent from their agenda.  So too was any shred of racial acceptance except when hated groups in all but formal designation such as The Family Foundation manipulated black pastors to urge their followers vote against their own best interests. Over this period of time, two things became obvious to me: (i) few groups are more morally bankrupt than evangelicals, and (ii) racism is a primary motivation for evangelical voting patterns.  An op-ed at NBC News looks at the reality of evangelicals' racism and their corresponding adulation of Donald Trump's message of racial division.  Here are excerpts:

Liberals have a tendency to wring their hands at the strong support President Donald Trump — he of the three wives and multiple affairs, and a tendency to engage in exceedingly un-Christian-like behavior at the slightest provocation — continues to receive from the white evangelical community. White evangelical support for Donald Trump is still at 73 percent, and more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016.

But focusing on the disconnect between Trump's personal actions and the moral aspects of their faith misses the issue that keeps their support firm: racism. Modern evangelicals' support for [Trump] this president cannot be separated from the history of evangelicals' participation in and support for racist structures in America.

They have a long history in America, and include a number of different groups, including Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists and nondenominational churches. After the schism among the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians in the 1850s over slavery, conservative denominations like the Southern Baptists — who defended slavery through their readings of scripture — came into being.

Evangelical denominations formed from these splits in the South were usually comprised of people who had made money from slavery or supported it. After the Civil War many were more likely to have supported the Ku Klux Klan and approved of (or participated in) lynching. The burning cross of the KKK, for instance, was a symbol of white Christian supremacy, designed both to put fear into the hearts of African Americans and to highlight the supposed Christian righteousness of the terrorist act.

Ronald Reagan, who also counted evangelicals among his most vociferous supporters, started his presidential campaign on the platform of states’ rights from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered by several Klansmen with the participation of local law enforcement in 1964, while attempting to register African Americans to vote. Decades later, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the evangelical leader, opposed sanctions on South Africa's apartheid regime and insulted Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize Peace winner, as a "phony."

And when Barack Obama was elected president, they regrouped, bought guns and became Tea Partiers who promoted fiscal responsibility and indulged in birtherism, promoted by no less than the son of Billy Graham, Franklin.

[E]vangelicals have worked to make a good show of repenting for racism. From the racial reconciliation meetings of the 1990s to today, they have dutifully declared racism a sin, and Southern Baptists have apologized again for their role in American slavery — most recently in 2018 via a document outlining their role.

But statements are not enough. Proving how disconnected they are from their statements about atoning for the sin of racism, the 2019 Annual Convention of the Southern Baptists was opened with a gavel owned by John A. Broadus, a slaveholder, white supremacist and the founder of their seminary.

So it's not surprising that white evangelicals supported the Muslim ban, are the least likely to accept refugees into the country (according to the Pew Foundation) and, though a slim majority oppose it, are the denomination most likely to support Trump's child separation policy. White evangelicals certainly are not concerned with white supremacy, because they are often white supremacists.

And Trump appeals to these evangelicals because of his focus on declension, decline and destruction, which fits into evangelical beliefs about the end times. When Trump used the term “American carnage” in his inaugural address, evangelicals listened; they too, believed America is in decline. Their imagined powerlessness, and the need for a strong authoritarian leader to protect them, is at the root of their racial and social animus. Their persecution complex is a heady mix of their fear of “socialists,” Muslims, independent women, LGBT people and immigration. . . . . Rhetoric, not morality, drives their voting habits.

All of this has made a mockery of white evangelical protestations about morality and the family. Moral issues once drove white evangelical votes but, first when Obama was elected and then when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on same sex marriage in June of 2015, what remained was their fear. Trump promised justices and a return to a time when they felt less fear, and he delivered, at least on the former. White evangelical fealty to [Trump] him is firm. Evangelicals in America are not simply a religious group; they are a political group inexorably linked to the Republican Party.

[P]erhaps we should take evangelicals at their word that they will support Trump come hell or high water, rather than twisting ourselves into knots trying to figure out why.

If one wants to witness moral bankruptcy, look no farther than evangelicals who support Trump.

Trump's Racism Is Nothing New

For the second weekend in a row Donald Trump has been tweeting racist rants directed at non-white members of Congress and, by extension, all non-whites.  Yes, his white supremacist coddling base loves it, but decent people ought to find Trump's behavior appalling and dangerous. Some argue that Trump is merely playing to his base, but a look at Trump's life and business career make it clear that he has been a racist for a long, long time and that we are merely glimpsing the real Donald Trump. Lest we forget, Trump's father was arrested for participating in a KKK march in Queens, New York in 1927.  His anti-minority mindset never changed and was a constant in his business efforts and handed down to his son.  A piece in New York Magazine reminds us of this reality.  Here are excerpts:

For the second July weekend, President Trump has tweeted offensive slanders about nonwhite Democratic House members who anger him. The latest installment involves claims that Representative Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, comes from a district that is a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.

Yet these impulsive thumb-rants amount to some of the most important and revealing communications of Trump’s presidency. For one thing, they convey the beliefs that have undergirded his career. As Victor Blackwell points out, Trump reserves terms like “infest” and “infestation” — which most people use only to describe diseases or vermin — exclusively for nonwhites. As much hate as he might generate for a target like, say, the mainstream media or transnational institutions, he would never describe the New York Times as an infestation.

Trump’s professional career began in his father’s and his systematically discriminatory housing empire. Excluding African-Americans was the basis of the Trump business model. He did not merely engage in periodic acts of discrimination, but insistently violated federal law and went to war with the Department of Justice rather than amend his ways. Trump’s association of African-Americans with crime and filth, and the assumption they must be cordoned off from other Americans, is a conviction so deep it cannot be uprooted.

As Michael Cohen testified, Trump once commented to him as they drove through a poor Chicago neighborhood, “only the blacks could live like this.” This is a window into to Trump’s obsession with urban blight. It is not a rousing call for better municipal governance curiously misdirected at the wrong branch of government, as he and his supporters tried to suggest in their post-tweet clean-up. It is an expression of his belief that urban poverty is a reflection of black inferiority. . . . He is saying that Cummings is black, the kind of person who would live that way, as a means of discredited him via his race.
 Trump has brought his lifelong patterns of thought with him to the presidency. One of the many oddities of his term in office is that he never observed the traditional break between campaigning and governing, and as a result never adopted even the pose of representing the entire country.

Since he continues to go to war against his enemies in perpetual campaign fashion, and since many of his enemies are domestic, this places Trump in the strange position of frequently disparaging parts of his own country. This is surely unique in American history. American presidents simply do not call American cities filthy and dangerous. George W. Bush may not have enjoyed much support in places like Baltimore, but he wouldn’t go around calling Democratic neighborhoods disgusting hellholes. It does not occur to Trump that the patriotic requirements of his office require representing the whole of it.

It is not merely that Trump is unfit for his job. He refuses, almost literally, to be president of the United States.

Alabama Newspaper Editor Wants to Bring Back Lynching

Alabama is one of the states where Donald Trump is the most popular.  Therefore, it should be no surprise that one small Alabama newspaper in Linden, Alabama (I actually drove through this town years ago when traveling from Mobile to Tuscaloosa for law firm business) in that state's "Black Belt," has run an editorial urging for the return of lynchings and the night riders of the KKK.  It speaks to (i) the deep seated racism that still persists, especially in rural areas of the South, and (ii) the manor in which Trump has given open racists the nod to spew their hatred in public.  Perhaps Alabama has always remained racist, but at least 40 years ago when I lived in that state, people at least put a veneer of decency over their true selves.  Now, Trump has made open racism acceptable - at least among his toxic base.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the batshitery that now passes as journalism in rural Alabama.  Here are excerpts:

Goodloe Sutton is back in the news again — this time because he recently called for mass lynchings and suggested that the Ku Klux Klan should return to “clean out” Washington.

“Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again,” began a Feb. 14 editorial in the paper [the Democrat-Reporter newspaper in Linden, Alabama], which went on to claim that Democrats, along with some Republicans, were planning to raise taxes in Alabama. It concluded, “Seems like the Klan would be welcome to raid the gated communities up there.”

Sutton, who is also the paper’s publisher, could not immediately be reached for comment. He told the Montgomery Advertiser on Monday that he had written the editorial, which ran without a byline, and stood by it.

“If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we’d all been better off,” he told the paper, explaining, “We’ll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them.”

During the same conversation, Sutton argued that the KKK “didn’t kill but a few people” and “wasn’t violent until they needed to be,” the Advertiser reported on Monday. He further suggested that the Klan, a white supremacist hate group, was comparable to the NAACP. Sutton also added that people could call him, write him a letter or boycott the paper if they disagreed with his views.

When the Advertiser’s Melissa Brown asked him whether it was appropriate for a newspaper publisher to suggest that Americans should be lynched, Sutton replied, “It’s not calling for the lynchings of Americans. These are socialist-communists we’re talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?”

The editorial — which, like the rest of the paper, was not published online — first started getting attention on Monday afternoon when two student-journalists at Auburn University posted photographs on Twitter. On Monday night, Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who prosecuted two members of the Klan for their role in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four young girls, called the editorial “disgusting” and demanded Sutton’s immediate resignation. “I have seen what happens when we stand by while people-especially those with influence- publish racist, hateful views,” he wrote.

Echoing the call for Sutton’s resignation was Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.), who wrote, “For the millions of people of color who have been terrorized by white supremacy, this kind of ‘editorializing’ about lynching is not a joke — it is a threat."

When Sutton’s comments on the Klan began getting attention on Monday, longtime readers pointed out that it wasn’t the first time that the paper’s editorial page had endorsed extreme or openly racist views. In May 2015, an editorial stated that the mayor of a city “up north” had “displayed her African heritage by not enforcing civilized law.” Another, published in June of that year, called for drug dealers, kidnappers, rapists, thieves, and murderers to be hung “on the courthouse lawn where the public can watch.”
 Barack Obama was described by the paper as a “Kenyan orphan president” who was elected because Americans thought “it would be cool to have a colored man” in the White House. Later, amid the national controversy over football players kneeling during the national anthem, the Democrat-Reporter declared, “That’s what black folks were taught to do two hundred years ago, kneel before a white man.”

Since the editorials are run without a byline, it’s unclear which, if any, were written by Sutton. Archived editions of the Democrat-Reporter from 2012 to 2017 indicate that he was responsible for overseeing editorial content, and that the paper’s two or three other staff members were in charge of tasks like layout and production. A since-deleted post on a journalism forum indicates that as recently as December, Sutton had been trying to sell the paper, which he inherited from his father in the 1980s.

To some local lawmakers, the news that the Democrat-Reporter’s publisher was wishing for the return of the most notorious hate group in American history came as no surprise.

"That kind of ignorance is the reason I don’t even subscribe to the paper,” A.J. McCampbell, a Democratic state representative, told AL.com.

This kind of explicit racism will do nothing to aid progressives in Alabama in their efforts to attract new and innovative businesses and drag the state out of  the 1950's that is so pervasive in rural parts of the state.  Frighteningly, the same mindset is alive and well in rural areas of Virginia, especially Southwest Virginia.

Will Trump's Racist Nativism Backfire?

Donald Trump's rallies in the run up to the midterm elections on Tuesday increasingly sound like Klan rallies or something out of a Hitler rally attacking Jews.  The racial animus - and lies - is off the charts and, hopefully, will be found repulsive by decent people (which sadly excludes most evangelicals).  Some Republicans who basically hold the same views as Trump but who are concerned first and foremost with re-election are concerned that Der Trumpenführer's anti-Hispanic immigrant/refugee obsession will drive voters to Democrats, particularly in affluent suburban districts with college educated white voters.  Indeed, one would hope Trump's spewing of hatred will galvanize Hispanic and Millennial voters to go to the polls and punish Republicans. A piece in Politico looks at the controversy.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump hammered his hard line on immigration again on Thursday, but some Republicans wish he would shift focus to the economy, lest he drive away suburban voters and mobilize Latino communities against the GOP.

Several Republican operatives and officials described a growing sense of fear within the party over Trump’s hard-line rhetoric on border security, which he has repeated nearly every day for the past three weeks.

“You’re playing at the margins with Republicans on the issue of immigration, but there are very many more Democrats that might be mobilized by his rhetoric,” said conservative radio host and The Resurgent editor Erick Erickson, who called Trump’s immigration-heavy closing pitch “not smart politically” in a tweet earlier Thursday.

Operating under the assumption that talking tough on immigration can energize enough Republicans to stymie a “blue wave” of Democratic midterm voters, Trump has spent the past week unveiling restrictive immigration policies at a dizzying pace and making erroneous declarations about a caravan of Central American migrants.

Restating his vow to deploy thousands more troops to the southwest border, Trump fumed over border-crossers and said he had instructed U.S. military personnel to “consider it a rifle” if incoming migrants hurl stones at them: “Anybody throwing stones, rocks … we will consider that a firearm because there’s not much difference when you get hit in the face with a rock.”

The speech came on a day when he tweeted a dramatic campaign ad featuring an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who murdered two California sheriff’s deputies in 2014 and laughed about it in a courtroom. “Democrats let him into our country,” the ad declares [even though the man entered America during the George W. Bush regime].
Democrats slammed the ad as exploiting stereotypes about immigrants, and even some Republicans condemned it.

“The kind of voters Trump is talking to right now, there aren’t enough of them in these areas to get us over the finish line,” said one GOP campaign official.  . . . the official told POLITICO, adding that Trump “is solidifying swing voters who were already leaning Democratic and are now definitely going vote for Democratic candidates.”

Top Republican leaders have long urged Trump to make better use his rallies by highlighting the strong economy and reminding voters of the extra cash in their pockets from last year’s GOP tax cuts. As opposed to stoking fear over an “immigration crisis”, they want him to boast about the unemployment rate slipping below 4 percent, middle-class incomes returning to pre-recession levels, and surging consumer confidence.

“There’s just not enough base voters in a place like Miami to hand Carlos Curbelo a win,” said one Republican operative, pointing to a recent New York Times poll showing Curbelo, the GOP incumbent, trailing his Democratic opponent by a single percentage point in Florida’s 26th congressional district, which is nearly 70 percent Latino.

Some Republicans retiring from districts won by Hillary Clinton have also expressed dismay at the president’s decidedly anti-illegal immigrant closing argument. . . . . POTUS, out of nowhere, brings birthright citizenship up. Besides being basic tenet of America, it’s political malpractice,” said retiring GOP Rep. Ryan Costello, whose suburban Philadelphia district is ranked “solid D” by FiveThirtyEight.

Meanwhile, Democrats are claiming that Trump’s immigration obsession is only throwing momentum to their side.

“Two or three weeks ago, the No. 1 thing people were quietly worried about was apathy or low turnout with Latino voters and you’re not hearing that anymore,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, a bipartisan immigration advocacy group.

An MPR News/Star Tribune poll taken last month in Minnesota, where both Senate seats are up for grabs and Republicans are competing for the governor’s mansion, found that 52 percent of likely voters disapprove of the president’s direction on immigration, versus 42 percent who approve.

White Supremacist Group Banned From Charlottesville

Like many Virginians and certainly countless University of Virginia alumni, I was both outraged and sickened by the Neo-Nazi and white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August, and by the extremists trespassing on the University of Virginia grounds.   With family members residing in Charlottesville, I know just how furious city residents were to have outside hate merchants and bigots invade their city.  Indeed, in perhaps a slap in the face to right wing forces and politicians who pandered to racists - think Mr. Gillespie - Charlottesville voted roughly 85% for Democrat Ralph Northam in November 2017.  Now, the City of Charlottesville has reached a consent agreement that bans some of the groups that invaded the city - members of which Trumpenführer described as "good people" - from protesting in the city in the future.  A piece in The Hill looks at the outcome.  Here are excerpts:

A white supremacist group that took part in the deadly Charlottesville, Va., Unite the Right rally last year will no longer be able to protest while armed in the city, a Virginia court has decided. 

The League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group, reached a deal with city organizers on Monday to keep its members, agents or state chairmen from taking part in any future armed demonstrations in Charlottesville, according to the watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center  (SPLC).

The consent decree was the result of a lawsuit first filed in Charlottesville Circuit Court by Georgetown Law's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection against leaders of the League of the South and other paramilitary groups involved in the rally, which led to the death of one woman and injuries for several others. 

The city government and several local businesses later joined the ongoing lawsuit, which names the individual leaders of other white supremacist groups, allowing the opportunity that more groups might strike similar deals with the city. 

Spencer Borum, the group's Kentucky leader, has taken an active role in arming and training the League of the South for possible civil conflict in the U.S., the SPLC says.

Another League of the South leader, Michael Tubbs, pleaded guilty to the 1991 robbery of weapons from an Army base with the intention of arming the Ku Klux Klan, as reported by the Daily Beast. 

SPLC Sued By Hate Group Angry Over Exposing of Its Anti-Gay Agenda

Cover page of Coral Ridge Ministries  endorsed anti-gay magazine

The Southern Poverty Law Center ("SPLC") is perhaps the premier U.S. non-profit organization that monitors the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists – including the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi movement, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, anti-government militias, Christian Identity adherents, radical Christian extremists and others.  It currently tracks more than 1,600 extremist groups operating across the country. It also publishes investigative reports, works to train law enforcement officers and share key intelligence, and offer expert analysis to the media and public. Each year since 1990, it has released an annual census of U.S. hate groups.  Its founder, Morris Deas, who I met years ago, helped push for the prosecution of the KKK members who lynched Michael Donald when I lived in Mobile, Alabama.  Among the groups SPLC has certified as hate groups are a number of organizations that parade around as "Christian family values" organizations which disseminate deliberate and often grotesques lies and untruths about the LGBT community (they often also have white supremacist and/or white nationalist tendencies).  Much of their anti-LGBT propaganda is modeled on the Nazi propaganda against the Jews and does little more that change the word "Jew" to "gay."

The positive results of SPLC's work is that increasingly the mainstream news media has stopped giving platforms to leaders of these organizations.  A prime example if Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council who has documented ties to several white supremacy groups and who has pushed vicious lies about LGBT people.  Now, some of these groups are suing SPLC because it has rightly exposed them for what they are.  While they whine that they are being "persecuted for their religious faith" their real complaint is that they have lost influence and even more importantly, they have lost income as donors have come to recognize their deceitful lies.  A piece in Huffington Post by a blogger friend helps to underscore the true viciousness and dishonesty of these organizations and they fact that hate is their main stock in trade.  Here are excerpts:

A ministry currently suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for being designated as an anti-LGBTQ hate group may soon learn the lesson about past actions coming back to bite.

First, a little background:

D. James Kennedy Ministries, based at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, has filed a federal lawsuit in Alabama against the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center for calling the ministry a hate group. The lawsuit was filed Aug. 22 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama in Montgomery. The lawsuit alleges that the SPLC ‘illegally trafficked in false and misleading descriptions of the services offered by DJKM and committed defamation against DJKM arising from the publication and distribution of false information that libels the ministry’s reputation and subjects the ministry to disgrace, ridicule, odium, and contempt in the estimation of the public,’ according to a statement by the ministry. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center has made it clear that anti-LGBTQ hate groups are designated so because they demonize the LGBTQ community in the most lurid, inaccurate terms:

The religious right in America has employed a variety of strategies in its efforts to beat back the increasingly confident LGBT rights movement. One of those has been defamation. Many of its leaders have engaged in the crudest type of name-calling, describing LGBT people as ‘perverts’ with ‘filthy habits’ who seek to snatch the children of straight parents and ‘convert’ them to gay sex. They have disseminated disparaging ‘facts’ about gays that are simply untrue — assertions that are remarkably reminiscent of the way white intellectuals and scientists once wrote about the ‘bestial’ black man and his supposedly threatening sexuality. And that brings up to the late James Kennedy. The D. James Kennedy Ministries has a huge section dedicated to his life and his work.  One thing it doesn’t have is when Kennedy endorsed . . . . [a] 1986 comic book [the cover is at the top of this post] . . . . his endorsement is the first one on the back cover, with his official title as “Senior Minister, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church.”

Kennedy said the following in his endorsement:

Dick Hafer [the comic book’s author] has produced a very accurate portrayal of homosexuality and the problem it poses to our nation and civilization. This unique book deserves an open-minded reading by all Americans, and especially by those who serve in leadership capacities. Kennedy calling this book “unique” is a rather interesting description. If you want, you can go to this link  and this one to see the book in its entirety. But I’m warning you now. It’s not pretty. . . . read the list of endorsers again [see image below]. They include a former Congressional leader and another right-wing organization still present in D.C.

[T]he “research” from this book comes from the discredited researcher whom I have mentioned on so many occasions: Paul Cameron.  SPLC has an extensive file on him and the anti-LGBTQ hate groups who still cite his junk science.

So, basically breaking this down, there are questions which need to be answered by the D. James Kennedy Ministries before it goes about declaring that it is being “persecuted for its religious beliefs” by SPLC. Most specifically, I’m curious to know if the ministry shares the opinion “expressed” by its namesake when he endorsed that awful booklet.  If the ministry doesn’t, then I would recommend that it publicly denounces Kennedy’s past actions. If the ministry doesn’t want to do that, then I guess that answers a lot of questions as to its “hate group” status.

Paul Cameron deliberately falsified his "research" and was thrown out of every professional association to which he had belonged because of his fraudulent studies and utterly false publications.  The organizations that routinely cite his work, many of which have earned their own hate group designations, include Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Traditional Values Coalition, here in Virginia, The Family Foundation, and, of course, Coral Ridge Ministries.  Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that many of these organizations have tax exempt status since they pretend to be "educational organizations."  In short, every U.S. taxpayer is indirectly subsidizing them. This needs to end.

Racist Virginia GOP Accuses Northam of Being a "Race Traitor"

The sad reality is that for going on twenty years, if not far longer, the Republican Party has been/is a political party that panders to and coddles white supremacists who constitute a critical piece of the GOP party base.  If one has any doubts, simply look at GOP efforts to disenfranchise minority voters, especially blacks, the mass incarceration of minorities, particularly though draconian marijuana laws, and the racist dog whistle messages that have been used election cycle after election cycle.  Now, after the invasion of Charlottesville by white supremacists and Neo-Nazis, the protection of Confederate monuments has become yet another pillar of the GOP agenda, all to maintain the loyalty of racists and white supremacists who are key to GOP election turnout. Now, the Virginia GOP has attached Democrat gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam for being a being a "race traitor" and "betraying" his family's southern heritage.  The Daily Beast looks at this batshitery:

The Virginia Republican Party on Wednesday essentially deemed the state’s lieutenant governor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam a race traitor for his call to remove Confederate monuments.

“@RalphNortham has turned his back on his own family's heritage in demanding monument removal,” the party’s official Twitter account posted. “Shows @RalphNortham will do anything or say anything to try and be #VAGov - #Pathetic.”

Northam discovered earlier this year that his ancestors on Virginia’s Eastern Shore owned slaves. Several months later, he called for the relocation of Confederate statues to museums.

Northam is currently running for governor against Republican candidate Ed Gillespie. The party later deleted the tweets and released a classic non-apology via a third tweet: “Our previous tweets were interpreted in a way we never intended. We apologize and reiterate our denunciation of racism in all forms.”

As note in prior posts, like Northam, I have Confederate ancestors from New Orleans, some of whom likely owned one or more slaves, although no family records exist on the issue.  None of us is responsible for the actions of our ancestors.  What we are responsible for is how we treat others and recognize the common humanity of others and their equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  And, if we learn that our ancestors acted dishonorably or inhumanely, we are responsible to disavow their misdeeds.  Northam has done this and is an honorable man whom I have known for 10 years.

But back to the foulness of today's GOP, including the Virginia GOP and, by extension, many of the. Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly.  A piece in The Guardian looks at the manner in which the GOP does the bidding of white supremacists.  Here are a few excepts:

We should not commend Republican party elected officials who claim outrage on social media at Trump’s remarks, often without daring to mention his name. The phony claimed outrage becomes dangerous if it convinces anyone that there is a distinction between Trump’s abhorrent comments and the Republican Party agenda.

The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the neo-Nazis are. It is the unmasking of the Republican party leadership. In the wake of last weekend’s horror and tragedy, let us finally, finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda of voter suppression, renewed mass incarceration and the expulsion of immigrants.

There is a direct link between Trump’s comments this week and those policies, so where is the outrage about the latter? Where are the Republican leaders denouncing voter suppression as racist, un-American and dangerous?

Words mean nothing if the Republican agenda doesn’t change. Governors and state legislatures were so quick to embrace people of color in order to avoid the impression, they too share Trump’s supreme affinity for the white race. But if they don’t stand up for them they are not indirectly, but directly enabling the agenda of those same racists that Republican members were so quick to condemn via Twitter.

Gerrymandering, strict voter ID laws, felon disenfranchisement are all aimed at one outcome: a voting class that is predominantly white, and in turn majority Republican.

The white supremacist chant of, “you will not replace us,” could easily and accurately be the slogan for these Republican politicians. Their policies will achieve the same racial outcome as Jim Crow – the disenfranchisement and marginalization of people of color.

KKK Issues Plea for Members to Kill Gay People

Last week in the aftermath of the Chralottesville and again last night, Der  Trumpenführer, has given license to hate-filled, far right extremists to direct violence against those who oppose their agenda - and those they simply dislike. And the forces of hatred are feeling emboldened to call for violence.  A case in point: the Louisiana chapter of the group have distributed fliers urging people to join their group and slaughter gay people in an effort to “save our land, join the Klan, white power.”  This is ultimately what "friends" who voted for Trump have supported.  One has to wonder when someone will literally be murdered as a result.  Pink News looks at the frightening mindset in Louisiana.  Here are excerpts:

The Ku Klux Klan is taking aim at the LGBT community – who they believe should be killed in order to end the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Leaders from the Louisiana chapter of the group have distributed fliers urging people to join their group and slaughter gay people in an effort to “save our land, join the Klan, white power.”

“Stop Aids: Support Gay Bashing,” one of the flyers read. “Homosexual men and their sexual acts are disgusting and inhuman.” “Our race is our nation,” reads another.

The fliers are signed “Loyal White Knights of the KKK” and include a website address and phone number to call for those interested in joining the genocide.

WSBTV reports the Newton County Sheriff Office has launched an investigation, following several complaints by residents who found the flyers placed on their driveways and lawns.

Bessemer Deputy Police Chief Mike Roper told AL.com the flyers were “very offensive”.  Another woman who asked not to be identified told the news station that she is “extremely hurt by” the fliers.  “As a member of the gay community,” she said, “I think it shows the ignorance of society still.”

The FBI said it is investigating the issue.

Trump’s Aides Tried to Conceal His Crazy, Racist Beliefs

Back during the 2016 presidential campaign, a number of clues pointing to Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer's racist beliefs came to light.  One was a lawsuit Trump settled with the Department of Justice over discrimination against blacks in apartment facilities in Norfolk, Virginia. The, of course there was the arrest of Trump's father at a KKK rally in the 1920's, suggesting that racism is a family tradition.  Last Tuesday, Trump put all of the venom he holds towards minorities on open display when he more or less supported the "fine people" with the KKK members and Neo-Nazi thugs in Charlottesville, which prompted The Economist to feature Trump on its cover using a Klan hood as a megaphone.  All of this in turn raises the question of the morality of Trump's advisers who seemingly know his real animus towards blacks and other racial minorities.  What kind of person works to support a malignant person like Trump?  A piece New York Magazine ponders this question.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump’s aides have been angry with him frequently — indeed, usually — since the beginning of his presidential campaign. But they have rarely registered their dismay as nakedly as they did Tuesday night, when he spontaneously altered a plan to deliver remarks on infrastructure without taking questions into a free-form defense of white supremacists. One official told NBC News that Trump had “gone rogue.” Mike Allen reports that chief economic adviser Gary Cohn is “between appalled and furious,” and that there is a danger one or more high-level officials could resign. Chief of Staff John Kelly’s disgust was registered on his face. . . . It is impossible to recall a presidential aide contemporaneously broadcasting his disgust with his own president.

But it is important to understand the precise nature of their distress. It is emphatically not because they are shocked to learn their boss is a racist, a fact that has been established through numerous episodes, such as Trump’s insistence a Mexican-American judge was inherently biased against him, his call for a Muslim immigration ban, his slander of Ghazala Khan, and so on. They are angry that Trump revealed beliefs they wish to keep hidden. “Members of the president’s staff, stunned and disheartened, said they never expected to hear such a voluble articulation of opinions that the president had long expressed in private,” reports the New York Times.

This raises the question once again of why they are working for Trump at all. A legitimate public rationale can be made for serving the administration in certain roles. The federal government plays a vital role in domestic and global security, Trump is a dangerous and erratic figure, and somebody needs to try to steer him away from decisions that would provoke unalterable tragedy. That justification covers serving Trump as a foreign-policy adviser, or as homeland security and disaster-response officials.

But what justification can the domestic and political advisers offer? Any benefit they can get by helping produce what they regard as better policies is surely offset by the cover they (and their policy successes, should they produce any) provide him.

Trump certainly has revived certain aspects of the political excitement of the 1930s: Nazi torchlight parades, presidential attacks on the media as enemies of the people, and street battles between armed extremist factions. He has not yet revived the infrastructure build-up that supplied a great deal of the Nazi party’s political capital. The apparent objective Trump’s domestic advisers hope to achieve is to create a political constituency for a president they consider racist, while concealing his racism as best as they can.

A West Wing official tells the Times that Trump has “expressed sympathy with nonviolent protesters who he said were defending their ‘heritage.’” (This is a rally that began with chants like “Jews will not replace us.”) Preventing Trump from doing something damaging is a legitimate and even noble calling. But that admirable motivation can easily mutate into rationalization. Are Trump aides really working to protect the country from him? Or are they working to keep the country from seeing his real nature?

Trump Reveals His Inner Bigot/Racist/Fascist

Many continue to express shock at the behavior and statements of Donald Trump, yet I am dumbfounded by their claimed shock.  One needed only to look back over Trump's career all the way back to when his companies were hit with civil rights law suits here in the Norfolk, Virginia, area for discriminating against blacks to know that the man has racists inclinations.  Then of course, there is Donald Trump's arrest at a KKK rally in Queens, New York, in 1927 (Der Trumpenführer denies that the arrest happened even though documentation proves that it happened).  Add to this Trump's embrace of birthers who were outraged by a black man occupying the White House.  The evidence of Trump's foulness is available at every turn, including the course of his business dealings for decades. No one hid any of this.  Instead, people simply chose to close their eyes and allow themselves to support a toxic, amoral man.  To now plead surprise over Trump is to either admit that one is an idiot or a disingenuous liar.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality:

President Trump’s initial response to events is always the truest expression of his outlook. The scripts that follow are post-facto damage control by his staff and never stick. In the case of Trump’s remarks on the horrific events in Charlottesville — his third go-around — he not only undid his aides’ handiwork but also confessed the words he read on Monday didn’t represent his true views.

“First, he tried to argue that he initially hesitated to condemn the explicitly racist elements at Charlottesville only because he didn’t have enough information to do so.” When has Trump ever required facts to make an assertion? Indeed, after three days he decided that the facts as we all had seen them — neo-Nazis and white nationalists chanting anti-Semitic statements, bearing tiki torches, engaged in street battles, and one of their ilk committing an act of domestic terrorism, killing one and injuring dozens — didn’t really matter. He alone was convinced there was equivalence between the neo-Nazi and the protesters objecting to the white supremacist message. . . . But only one side killed someone, right? Trump did not make that distinction.

And to top it off, he equated Robert E. Lee, who waged war against the United States and fought to continue enslavement of fellow-human beings, with George Washington. Plainly, the New York education system, Fordham University and Wharton School of Business have failed Trump, promoting him without ensuring that he possessed basic reasoning skills and a grasp of American history. But in these institutions’ defense, he is unteachable, we have learned.

Unless and until Republicans are willing to censure the president, withhold endorsement for a second term and vigorously pursue avenues for impeachment, they are wasting their breath and our time.

How bad was his press conference? Well, when you lose Fox News you might as well throw in the towel. (Fox News’s Kat Timpf declared, “It’s honestly crazy for me to have to comment on this right now because I’m still in the phase where I’m wondering if it was actually real life what I just watched. It was one of the biggest messes that I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe it happened. . . . It shouldn’t be some kind of bold statement to say, ‘Yes, a gathering full of white supremacist Nazis doesn’t have good people in it. Those are all bad people, period.’”

We  should be clear on several points. First, it is morally reprehensible to serve in this White House, supporting a president so utterly unfit to lead a great country. Second, John F. Kelly has utterly failed as chief of staff; the past two weeks have been the worst of Trump’s presidency, many would agree. He can at this point only serve his country by resigning and warning the country that Trump is a cancer on the presidency, . . .

Finally, Trump apologists have run out of excuses and credibility. He was at the time plainly the more objectionable of the two main party candidates; in refusing to recognize that they did the country great harm. They can make amends by denouncing him and withdrawing all support. In short, Trump’s embrace and verbal defense of neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be disqualifying from public service. All true patriots must do their utmost to get him out of the Oval Office as fast as possible.