Trump is a Threat to Religious Freedom

For the record, I am no fan of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who I believe will prove harmful to the Democrat Party.  That said, recent attacks on her by Der  Trumpenführer further underscore the religious based bigotry that permeates Trump's view of Muslims and Islam.  Every religion seemingly has its dangerous extremists who hold animus towards those of other faiths (and sexual orientation), and Christianity is no exception.   Look no farther than the racists evangelicals who continue to support the morally reprehensible Trump. But Trump's attacks on Omar and Islam threaten a core value of the Founding Fathers who knew well the dangers of an established church and sought to protect religious freedom for all religious faiths. A column by former Republican Michael Gerson looks at why Trump's attacks on Islam are so dangerous and ultimately threaten the religious freedom on all Americans.  Here are highlights:

SO ANOTHER norm of public decency falls, like a historical building demolished to make way for one of Donald Trump's tasteless towers.

When the president of the United States goes after an American Muslim — in this case Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who came to the U.S. as a Somali refugee — using images of the 9/11 attacks, it is cruel, frightening and dangerous in new ways.

It is cruel because Trump essentially delivered his political rant while standing on desecrated graves. The images he employed not only included burning buildings but burning human beings, drafted into a sad and sordid political ploy. Is nothing sacred to Trump? When said aloud, the question sounds like an absurdity. Trump has never given the slightest indication of propriety, respect or reverence. His narcissism leaves no room to honor other people or to honor other gods.

Now, the victims of violence are treated as villains in Trump's fictional version of global threats. On the strength of such calumnies, Trump has essentially destroyed America's asylum system.

This has led to a frightening state of affairs. By all the evidence, Trump is an anti-Muslim bigot. At one campaign event in 2015, a member of the audience stated, "We have a problem in this country; it's called Muslims." And he went on to ask, "When can we get rid of them?" Trump responded: "We're going to be looking at that and plenty of other things." Imagine a normal politician on the left or right being asked about the possibility of getting rid of all the Christians, or getting rid of all the Jews. They would likely use such a moment to clarify that they aren't, in fact, insanely prejudiced monsters. Trump used such a moment to affirm the instinct of mass deportation and to promise a range of other anti-Muslim actions.

Could this have been a slip of the tongue? No, it wasn't. Trump has a long history of animus — raw animus — against one of the Abrahamic faiths. He has said, "We're having problems with the Muslims." And: "There is a Muslim problem in the world." And: "Islam hates us."

He has claimed: "You have people coming out of mosques with hatred and death in their eyes." He once called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." He has variously and publicly considered the closing of mosques, warrantless searches, and the creation of a national database to track Muslims. 

[Trump] The president claims to have seen "thousands and thousands" of American Muslims cheering on 9/11 when the towers fell — a lie and a libel. He attacked a Muslim Gold Star mother, claiming that she "wasn't allowed" to speak at the Democratic convention because of her faith — a lie and a libel. He has praised Gen. John Pershing for executing Muslim insurgents in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig's blood — a historical myth, but a revealing fantasy of anti-Muslim war crimes.

This is not only rank religious bigotry; it is the attitude most likely to alienate some Muslims from American ideals and turn a dangerous few toward radicalism and violence.

None of this requires us to believe that Omar is a wise or thoughtful public figure. She isn't. She traffics in the worst anti-Semitic tropes. But Trump's perception of religious liberty as freedom only for the faiths he prefers is a potential threat to every religious group.

Religious freedom is either rigorously equal, or it becomes an instrument of those in power to favor or disfavor religions of their choice. And those believers who are currently in favor may someday discover what disfavor is like.

Trump/Pence Cut Funding for Programs to Counter Violent Extremism

In addition to is incendiary rhetoric and wink and nods to white nationalists and Christian extremists, Donald Trump and his accomplice, Mike Pence, have done other things to allow extremism grow in America.  For one, their regime has cut funding for programs that seek to counter extremism, especially extremism involving whites.  Statistically more violence has been wrought in America by white extremists - almost all by angry white males -  than by all Islamic extremism combined.  Yet, this regime continues to turn a blind eye to this reality and, instead, demonizes immigrants and non-Christians and, of course the legitimate media.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Trump/Pence effort to kill programs that focus on fighting the extremism that more and more defines the Trump/Pence base. Here are highlights:

Set aside the question of whether President Donald Trump’s rhetorical flirtations with white nationalism enabled Saturday’s mass shooting in Pittsburgh. What’s undeniable is that his administration has hobbled the infrastructure designed to prevent such murders.

In the waning days of Barack Obama’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a set of grants to organizations working to counter violent extremism, including among white supremacists. One of the grantees was Life After Hate, which The Hill has called “one of the only programs in the U.S. devoted to helping people leave neo-Nazi and other white supremacy groups.” Another grant went to researchers at the University of North Carolina who were helping young people develop media campaigns aimed at preventing their peers from embracing white supremacy and other violent ideologies. But soon after Trump took office, his administration canceled both of these grants. In its first budget, it requested no funding for any grants in this field.  It’s part of a pattern of neglect.

In Obama’s last year, according to the former director, George Selim, the office boasted 16 full-time employees, roughly 25 contractors, and a budget of more than $21 million. The Trump administration has renamed it the Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships, and cut its staff to eight full-time employees and its budget to less than $3 million. Under Obama, the Office of Community Partnerships housed an interagency task force on Countering Violent Extremism, or CVE, that included officials detailed from the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services. Today the task force exists in name only. This decline can’t be chalked up to general budget cuts. . . . The cuts stem instead from two biases. First, in keeping with their law-and-order mentality, Trump officials would rather empower the police to arrest suspected terrorists than work with local communities to prevent people from becoming terrorists in the first place, as the Office of Community Partnerships did. Second, they believe the primary terrorist threat to Americans is jihadism, not white supremacy. The Office of Community Partnerships committed the sin of working on both. In 2017, the FBI concluded that white supremacists killed more Americans from 2000 to 2016 than “any other domestic extremist movement.” But Trump advisers have shrugged off these inconvenient facts. In an interview in 2017, White House Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka declared that there “has never been a serious attack or a serious plot [in the United States] that was unconnected from ISIS or al-Qaeda.” When critics cited the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Gorka responded,  “It’s this constant ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t.” Eric Rosand, a former senior State Department official, told BuzzFeed that Gorka “played a significant role in denying CVE grant funding to groups that work to de-radicalize neo-Nazis and other far right extremists.” When Trump supporters insist that he’s a steadfast foe of white supremacy, his critics often cite his history of ambivalent responses—or nonresponses—to anti-Semitism. But Trump’s words aren’t anomalous; he’s put his money where his mouth is.

Hyatt Hotels To Stop Hosting Hate Groups

In the age of Trump and the hate and bigotry that Trump and the GOP have unleashed, increasingly support more morality and decency will fall to private individuals and businesses.  As their actions have already shown, rather than leading a charge to uphold true decency, evangelical Christians will be loudly applauding the forces that want to normalize lies, discrimination and the reprehensible.  Thus, it was a pleasant surprise to see Hyatt Hotels announce that they will no longer book events for hate groups.  One can only hope that the definition of "hate group" will include groups like Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Alliance Defending Freedom.    It is imperative that each of us resist the forces of hate in every manner possible, not the least of which is by voting on November 6, 2018, and casting your ballot for Democrat candidates.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at Hyatt's bold announcement.  Here are excerpts(note the hate group founder's boasts of ties to the Trump White House):

Weeks after a Hyatt hotel in Virginia hosted the annual conference of an anti-Muslim organization, the CEO of Hyatt Hotels Corporation has announced that the hotel chain will no longer rent space to hate groups.

“If a group is primarily focused on disparaging a group by virtue of their identity... that’s really where we need to draw the line,” Mark Hoplamazian told an audience at a travel industry conference in New York on Sept. 27. “We’re going to apply our values to making these decisions along the way.”

On Sept. 28, the Los Angeles Times reported that Hyatt, which operates nearly 800 hotels across the country, sent a memo to employees spelling out the new policy.

On the heels of some guest and colleague feedback we received about groups, we decided it was the right time to take a fresh look at our practices around hate groups,” a Hyatt spokesperson said in a statement. “This is a complex and emotional issue, but what we’ve concluded is that we need to commit to a higher level of vetting such that groups using hate speech, primarily seeking to disparage or demean a particular group, are not welcome in our hotels.”

On Sept. 4 and 5, the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City, Virginia, hosted the annual conference of the anti-Muslim hate group Act for America.

HuffPost was the first to report on the Hyatt Regency’s decision to host Act for America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group. A spokesperson for that hotel told HuffPost at the time that it would “not unlawfully discriminate against groups who wish to hold lawful meetings at the hotel.”

But the civil rights group Muslim Advocates argued that Hyatt would be breaking no laws by refusing to host Act for America, and pointed to other hospitality companies ― including Hilton, Airbnb, Sofitel (owned by AccorHotels) and the Willard Hotel (owned by IHG) ― that have declined to host white supremacist groups.

Act for America claims a (likely exaggerated) membership of 750,000 people. Although it bills itself as the “NRA of national security,” it mainly focuses on vilifying Muslims, spreading baseless conspiracy theories and lobbying legislators to pass discriminatory laws. At this year’s Act for America conference, [Brigitte] Gabriel [Act for America’s founder]  bragged that she worked “very closely with the office of the President” on issues related to national security.

“I actually want you to know we have a standing meeting at the White House once a week,” she told the audience. “We have a president that likes us, President Trump.” (It’s not clear whether Gabriel’s claim of a standing meeting is true.)

“Hyatt’s announcement is a welcome one for consumers who want their hotels to be safe spaces to relax and be themselves free from hostility and discrimination,” Muslim Advocates’ public advocacy director Scott Simpson said in a statement.

“We organized, we signed petitions, and we called their offices to tell them that there should be no room for hate at Hyatt,” he said. “Now it’s up to the other major chains to decide if they want to be resorts for racists.”

Contact other chains and demand that they cease in holding events for hate groups. Republicans control Congress and the White House (for now), but meanwhile the rest of us can use our buying power to demand businesses say "no" to haters.

The Supreme Court's New Dred Scott Decision

Justices Gorsuch and Roberts - history will not judge them kindly. 

Throughout its history, the United States Supreme Court has on occasion spectacularly failed to rule in the interest of justice and fairness.  It did so again when it narrowly upheld Donald Trump's Muslim ban despite all the evidence that religious based animus was the motivating factor for its enactment.  As in its past spectacular failures, the conservative majority of the court - made far worse by the elevation of Neil Gorsuch, a champion of special rights for Christian extremists - ratified bigotry rampant within portions of the American populace.   While not the only wrong headed ruling  by the conservative majority - it looked the other way in a racial gerrymandering case out of Texas - Trump v. Hawaii is perhaps the most hypocritical given the Court's recent deference to a Christian extremist's "beliefs" in the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling. Apparently religion and religious belief only merit protection when it is of a right wing Christian variety.  A column in the Washington Post rightly rips the Roberts Court.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court’s approval of President Trump’s travel ban barring entry to some 150 million people from five overwhelmingly Muslim countries is likely to be judged by history as one of the court’s greatest failures — in a league with Dred Scott v. Sandford, which helped bring on the Civil War, and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the wartime detention of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans and noncitizens of Japanese descent.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., perhaps recognizing the disturbing parallels, sought to distance the court from this critique by declaring, nearly 75 years after the fact, that Korematsu “was gravely wrong the day it was decided” and that it has “nothing to do with this case.” But it has everything to do with this case: In Trump v. Hawaii, as in Korematsu and Dred Scott, the court was asked to stand up for the rights of the vulnerable against the biases of the powerful — and failed.

In a 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative justices wrote that even considering all of President Trump’s anti-Muslim statements about the ban, the order should be upheld as long as the court could imagine any plausible basis for it, applying the most deferential standard of scrutiny in constitutional law. In doing so, the court effectively closed its eyes to what the world sees and rubber-stamped a ban that effectively erected a sign at the U.S. borders reading “Muslims not welcome.”

In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court in 1857 struck down a statute prohibiting slavery in the northern territories, saying that “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution,” and that African Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The decision treated human beings as property and denied Congress the power to ban slavery in the territories.

In Korematsu , the Supreme Court in 1944 upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese American citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent against a challenge that it unconstitutionally discriminated on the basis of race and national origin. . . . . the court simply deferred to unwarranted aspersions cast on an entire segment of the U.S. population by the military. In Trump v. Hawaii, there was overwhelming evidence that Trump’s ban targeted Muslims. As a presidential candidate, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” because, he asserted, “Islam hates us.” He explained that he would do so by using territories as a proxy for religion, because “people were so upset when I used the word Muslim.” One week after taking office, he did just that. In case there were any doubt, he said in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network that day that the order would give priority to Syrian Christians over Muslim refugees.

When that order and a second one were both blocked in court, Trump issued a third version, which also bars entry to North Koreans and certain Venezuelan government officials, but because almost none of them come to the United States anyway, virtually everyone affected remains Muslim.

Just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court reminded us in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission that the freedom of religion “bars even ‘subtle departures from neutrality’ on matters of religion.” The court warned that when there is “even slight suspicion” of animosity to religion underlying government action, all public officials “must pause to remember their own high duty to the Constitution and to the rights it secures.” . . . Yet the court openly abdicated that duty in a case with more evidence of religious animus than perhaps any other it has ever considered.

Had any other government official, in any other context, acted so openly out of animus against a particular religion, the court would swiftly and rightly step in to uphold the establishment clause. It did so on extraordinarily weak evidence of religious bias by a state civil rights commission functionary in Masterpiece Cakeshop. But in Trump v. Hawaii, the court reasoned that because the biased official is the president exercising his immigration authority, it should for all intents and purposes look the other way. . . . just as in Dred Scott and Korematsu, the Supreme Court failed the ultimate test of justice. It bowed to the prejudice of the powerful when its duty was to protect the most vulnerable.  Even as he repeated the court’s worst past mistakes, Roberts declared that Korematsu had been “overruled in the court of history.” So, too, will Trump v. Hawaii.

Until the hold of the "conservatives" on the Court - they are in reality, mostly racists and bigots - is shifted back to moderates, expect more horrific rulings with further erosion of civil rights of those hated by the Republican base of Christian extremists and white supremacists.  Be very afraid.  

A Night of Terror, a Year of Racism

Today is the anniversary of the Pulse night club massacre in Orlando, Florida, where 49 young gays and some of their family members were murdered seemingly simply because the were LGBT.  In the year since, things have not gotten better for either gays or those suspected of being Muslim (e.g., the two Hindus murdered in Oklahoma by a man who thought they were Muslim).  In terms of LGBT rights, Congressional Republicans continue to consider a falsely named "religious freedom" bill that would legalize anti-LGBT discrimination, Texas's governor has called a special legislative session in order to ram through an anti-transgender bathroom bill, and Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, has rescinded Obama administration executive orders granting LGBT employees non-discrimination protections and through long time anti-gay zealot, Betsy DeVos, is seemingly opening the door to increased anti-gay bullying in our public schools.  As icing on the cake, over the weekend white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and hate groups rallied against Muslims and by extension anyone who wasn't white and Christian.  It would seem that as a country, many learned nothing from the Pulse tragedy, including Der Trumpenführer who, despite his boast immediately after the Pulse massacre has proven to be a dangerous foe to the LGBT community.   An op-ed in the New York Times by a a recent college graduate who had been a Pulse regular looks at some of the ugliness.  Here are excerpts:

A year ago today, a mass shooting during a Latin-theme dance night at Pulse, a popular gay bar in Orlando, Fla., left 49 people dead, more than 50 injured and the city — particularly its L.G.B.T. and Latino communities — shaken.

I woke up to about 60 notifications on my phone that morning. Most were from friends and family asking if I was O.K. My mother was crying, worried I had been at the club.

A drag queen from “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” who I love, performed there that night, so it was entirely possible. Three years before, as a freshman at the University of Central Florida, I often went to Pulse with my new college friends, all of us L.G.B.T. in one way or another and looking for a sense of community that seemed out of reach in straight daylight.

I remember being amazed by the swift and empathetic response from the city and much of the country. The shooting started at 2 a.m., and by the time most of the city was waking up, so many volunteers had headed downtown to help that blood donation centers were turning people away. Politicians of all stripes, including those who hadn’t seemed particular pro-L.G.B.T. or supportive of Latino communities, spoke of solidarity. Rainbows were painted all over Orlando; many still remain on the walls of the Walt Disney Amphitheater at Lake Eola or on the sides of police cars.

As a gay person of color, I found something truly comforting about this response. Part of me felt accepted, understood and even coddled in the midst of this harrowing event.

Another part felt more targeted than ever. . . . . My mom is from the Dominican Republic, where I spent most of my childhood. I speak fluent Spanish and have been known to cook a mean rice and beans with tostones. But my dad is from Pakistan, and from him I inherited a thin nose, dark eyes and a full beard of coarse hair. I am used to being treated as a suspicious person.

When I fly, for example, my Spotify playlist is usually interrupted by a T.S.A. agent letting me know I’ve “been selected for additional screening.”

This stereotyping has gotten much worse since the Pulse shooting, because despite the outpouring of support for L.G.B.T. and Latino people, the tragedy became an excuse to vilify Muslims before the 2016 presidential election.

The day of the shooting, before most of the victims were identified, Donald J. Trump, then a candidate, tweeted: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.” From that moment on, it was clear that the tragedy would not become a reason to champion noble or productive causes like gun reform. Instead, it would become Exhibit A in Mr. Trump’s justification for a ban on Muslims entering the country — despite the fact that the shooter was an American and Muslim refugees have not killed anyone in the United States.

The Pulse nightclub shooting was a terrible act of violence against a marginalized group of people. Attacking another marginalized group is not the way to prevent more shootings, or to help survivors heal. 

Pro-Trump Hate Groups and Neo-Nazis Hold Anti-Muslim Rallies

As I have noted before, growing up my parents always warned us children that we would be labeled by the company that we kept and that it was incumbent upon us to avoid bad company.  Seemingly, many Trump voters missed this lesson as they allied themselves with some truly foul and horrible people.  Over this weekend, as The Daily Beast reports, an alliance of Trump supporting hate groups, Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are holding anti-Muslim rallies in 30 cities.  It goes without saying that many of these people similarly hate LGBT individuals and anyone else who differs from them.  Sadly, they are the true face of today's Republican party no matter what Republican apologists try to claim to the contrary.  Here are story highlights about those with whom "good Republicans" have climbed into bed with:

Donald Trump is Tinder for bigots. His campaign and presidency has helped countless bigots hook up with each other, and we will see another example of that this Saturday with anti-Muslim rallies scheduled in nearly 30 locations across America.

These rallies are organized by ACT for America!, an organization founded by Hanah Kahwagi, who goes by the alias of Brigitte Gabriel, and who has preached that practicing Muslims “cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.” As Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) spokesperson Heidi Beirich explained, “ACT for America is the nation’s largest anti-Muslim hate group.”

But ACT is now teaming up with Neo Nazis and white supremacists for these upcoming rallies. For example, Saturday’s rally in Arkansas “is being organized by well known Neo-Nazi Billy Roper,” Beirich noted. As the SPLC website details, Roper has been working hand in hand with ACT to organize this event, including joining a recent conference call with ACT leaders. Roper, who boasts of being the son and grandson of Klansmen, not only joined the neo-Nazi National Alliance, but also Council of Conservative Citizens which, per the SPLC, “served as Charleston terrorist Dylann Roof’s gateway into white nationalism.”

And in New York City, the lead speaker at the ACT anti-Muslim rally is Gavin McInnes, a man referred to by some as a hipster white nationalist. In reality he’s just as vile as the older generation of bigots. McInnes, a co-founder of VICE who left years ago, has written articles for the white supremacist publication VDARE, where he has denigrated Muslims as well as Asians.

He’s also an apologist for white supremacist terrorism. Just a week ago he penned an article titled “The myth of White terrorism” in which he claimed that white supremacist killings are as low as “death from spider bites.”

But to say McInnes, an avid Trump supporter, is simply a white supremacist who hates Muslims would be unfair. He’s much more despicable than that. McInnes has also blamed women for domestic violence, tweeting: “Every guy I've ever known to be involved in a ‘domestic’ was the result of some cunt trying to ruin his life.”

 And he has stoked anti-Semitism with his YouTube video, “10 Things I Hate About Jews,” where among other things he slams Jews for not being grateful enough that America defeated the Nazis and claiming that Jews have “a real hatred for white males.”
ACT is claiming its anti-Muslim rallies, intentionally scheduled for Ramadan, are actually anti-Sharia rallies. Of course the reality is that sharia law is never coming to the United States.

In reality the only people advocating for laws based on their religious text in the United States are conservative Christians. For example, Mike Huckabee has called to “amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards.” Rick Santorum also pushed for Christian sharia law declaring in 2012 while running for President that "our civil laws have to comport with a higher law: God's law." And of course Mike Pence has invoked the Bible as the basis to discriminate against the LGBT community.

I wish we could dismiss ACT as nothing more than hateful bigots on the fringes of society but we would be making a mistake. This hate group has numerous ties to Trump and his administration. ACT founder Gabriel was recently welcomed to the Trump White House with open arms.

ACT and the Trump administration are intertwined. Last year, Trump’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo proudly accepted ACT’s National Security Eagle Award. Sebastian Gorka, a Trump national security "expert," has spoken before many ACT chapters. Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn was on ACT’s Board of Directors. And Steve Bannon, while editor of Brietbart, provided Gabriel a place to spew anti-Muslim hate for years.

But now ACT is teaming up with not only the Trump administration but with neo-Nazis and white supremacist to demonize Muslims.

If you believe in an America that’s welcoming of diverse faiths and races, then please stand up and speak out. We need your voices to help drown out those spewing hate.

I can assure that if ACT is successful in its goal of marginalizing Muslims, it will next target other minority groups because its coalition of hate will demand it. And by the time they come for your community, there may be “no one left to speak” for you. 

Again, when you vote Republican, this is who you have chosen as your political allies.  For those who do this, don't go to church and play all pious and godly since your vote for the GOP will clearly underscore your hypocrisy.

4th Circuit Rules 10-3 Against Trump Muslim Ban

Donald Trump ranted against the 9th Circuit when his first attempt at a ban against Muslims went down in flames. Now, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has struck down Der Trumpenführer's second attempt at banning Muslims from entering America.    In its ruling, the Court recognized the motivation behind the executive order: religious based  intolerance and animus. The ruling will not sit well with Christofascists but ought to be encouraging for those who continue to believe in true religious freedom - not the perverted Christofascist version - and the First Amendment.  Salon looks at the ruling which will likely push the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Here are highlights:

Yet another federal court ruled against President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from six majority-Muslim nations. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the so-called Muslim travel ban executive order “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” The court refused to lift a nationwide injunction blocking the ban.  

In a 10-3 ruling, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, noted that President Trump’s power to deny entry to immigrants, while “broad,” isn’t “absolute.”

[A]n Executive Order that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination. Surely the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment yet stands as an untiring sentinel for the protection of one of our most cherished founding principles—that government shall not establish any religious orthodoxy, or favor or disfavor one religion over another. Congress granted the President broad power to deny entry to aliens, but that power is not absolute. It cannot go unchecked

Trump’s revised ban “cannot be divorced from the cohesive narrative linking it to the animus that inspired it,” Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote.

Trump’s revised ban was announced in March after the first version of the ban was shot down by federal courts. But the ban on people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the U.S. for 90 days and all refugees for 120 days never got off the ground because federal courts blocked it just hours before it was set to go into effect.

Trump Has Mainstreamed the Alt-Right, Racism and Bigotry

Threats against Jewish community centers across the country have sky rocketed, anti-LGBT violence is on the rise, and the dehumanization of Muslims and Mexican immigrants has the imprimatur of the White House.  Yet, many Republicans continue to close their eyes to what is happening and most certainly disavow any responsibility for the hate and ugliness that is now being mainstreamed and made acceptable (at least in some quarters) by Der Trumpenführer and his inner circle, many of whom are reminiscent of the thugs and losers who comprised Hitler's inner circle.  I believe that Republicans and other Trump voters need to be held personally accountable for what they have set in motion be it due to their own hatred towards others who are different, their laziness in not bothering to educate themselves on what they were voting for, or general indifference.  Republicans like to talk about "personal responsibility" and "holding people accountable,"so it's time to apply their words against them.  A column in the Washington Post underscores the responsibility of Trump and his Republican enablers in mainstreaming white supremacists and other hate merchants.  Here are column excerpts:

Leading conservatives have taken to pretending that the alt-right is a fringe movement that they and President Trump have disavowed. In recent interviews and at a high-profile conservative conference last month, conservatives have taken great pains to distance conservatism — and the Trump administration — from any alt-right influence.

But here’s the reality: The alt-right’s deep influence over this White House is on display daily — in Trump’s rhetoric and his administration’s policies. The alt-right influence on Trump matters: it means the most powerful man in the world is under the influence of a racist and white nationalist movement. And conservatives should reckon with this more forthrightly.

For instance, note this podcast that the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart conducted with American Conservative Union president Matt Schlapp. Capehart pointed out that Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller are Trump’s top White House advisers, and asked: “Doesn’t that mean, that despite the concerns, the alt-right is now mainstreamed, if not the power within the White House?” Schlapp flatly denied that the alt-right had been mainstreamed in this manner.

Bannon — who is now Trump’s most influential adviser — told me last summer, when he was chairman of Breitbart, that his site was “the platform for the alt-right.” Capehart questioned Schlapp about this, but Schlapp argued, implausibly, that this is not as significant as it appears.

Yet Breitbart was and remains one-stop shopping for readers looking for anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee rhetoric and disinformation, as well as stories about “black crime.”

This echoed similar head-in-the sand denials that were on full display last month at the ACU’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

The reality is that it is under Bannon’s influence that the administration has taken its actions that most thrill the alt-right, most notably his moves to step up deportation of undocumented immigrants, and ban refugees and migrants from Muslim-majority countries.

When Bannon and I spoke this summer, he tried to deny to me that the alt-right is a white nationalist movement, although he did concede that white nationalists and anti-Semites could be attracted to “some of the philosophies of the alt-right.” But, as I have written after Trump tapped him to head up his campaign, Bannon nonetheless praised the deeply Islamophobic ethno-nationalism on the rise in Europe, like the National Front in France, led by far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.

And then there’s Trump’s choice of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. During the transition, alt-right leaders were delighted with the Sessions pick, pointing to his opposition to immigration as well as their hope that he would stop enforcing civil rights laws and might even prosecute Black Lives Matter protesters.

As Emily Bazelon writes, Sessions has long been a devoted Breitbart reader, and met regularly with the site’s writers. Trump’s dark vision of America as besieged by inner city crime, immigrants, and refugees, Bazelon notes, “provides clear justification for policies that will advance Sessions, Bannon and Miller’s divisive nationalism.”

Trump’s false claims about voter fraud are straight out of the ugly maw of alt-right meme-making, portraying supposed voter fraud as a scourge perpetrated by African-Americans and undocumented immigrants — a possible signal that a crackdown on voting rights is coming, one that Sessions would likely help carry out from the Justice Department.

[T]he reality is that Trumpism would not exist without the alt-right. Conservatives can pretend it’s fringe and has little to no influence on the Trump administration — but the proof is in the policy.

Virginia Federal Judge Issues Strong Rebuke of Trump Travel Ban

AG Mark Herring in 2013 at our home - yes, there will be a 2017 fundraiser

Lost in all of the turmoil surrounding the resignation of Der Trumpenführer's national security adviser is yet another judicial set back for Der Trumpenführer's Muslim ban.  This time the ruling came in Virginia in response to a lawsuit filed by Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring.  While the ruling is not nationwide in scope - largely because a nationwide stay is already in place - it got to the core of the ban: it was a ban targeted at a specific religious group.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

A federal judge in Alexandria has issued a preliminary injunction against President Trump’s travel ban, dealing another blow to the White House attempt to bar residents of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.

The executive order, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema concluded, probably violates the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of religion.

Brinkema’s order applies only to Virginia residents and students, or employees of Virginia schools. A nationwide freeze has been in place for several days, having been issued in Washington state and upheld by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

In her opinion, Brinkema wrote that the Commonwealth of Virginia “has produced unrebutted evidence” that the order “was not motivated by rational national security concerns” but “religious prejudice” toward Muslims. She cited Trump’s statements before taking office, as well as an interview in which former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) said that the president wanted a “Muslim ban.”

“The ‘Muslim Ban’ was a centerpiece of the president’s campaign for months, and the press release calling for it was still available on his website as of the day this Memorandum Opinion is being entered,” Brinkema wrote.

The case against the order in Virginia is being litigated by the state’s attorney general, Mark R. Herring (D). It was originally brought by lawyers for the Legal Aid Justice Center who were representing two Yemeni brothers turned away after landing at Dulles International Airport. The brothers have since been allowed into the country.

At the hearing, a lawyer for the Justice Department produced only a copy of the order as evidence, while arguing that Virginia has no standing to challenge the ban and federal courts have no power to weigh in on its rationale.

Brinkema rejected that argument. “Maximum power does not mean absolute power,” she wrote. “Every presidential action must still comply with the limits set by Congress’ delegation of power and the constraints of the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights.”

She also dismissed the idea that a halt on the ban would cause any harm. On the other hand, she said, the Commonwealth produced evidence that the ban is having a negative impact on students and faculty who can no longer leave the country for fear of losing their visas or who are no longer sure they can study in the state.

The judge concluded it was irrelevant that the ban does not cover all or even most Muslims, as long as Muslims were the target.  “It is a discriminatory purpose that matters, no matter how inefficient the execution,” she wrote. 

Is Trumpism A Recast Version of the Culture Wars?

In some respects, the ascendancy of Donald Trump represents what will hopefully be a short-lived last gasp of white, heterosexual conservative Christians trying to impose their fantasy view of what America once was onto the majority of the population that either does not conform to this whites only world view or who recognize that the "good old days" the Christofascists long for were anything but good for many, many people.  Indeed, Trump and his supporters are fighting against modernity itself be it scientific knowledge that challenges myth based religious belief or changing economic circumstances that challenge the 1950's white nuclear family model that Trumpist desperate cling to. An undercurrent of this movement is cruelty towards others who adre diiferent in any way, be it in terms of race, religious belief, national origin, and sexual orientation.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the backward looking theme of Trump and his supporters.  Here are excerpts:

The chaos of Donald Trump’s opening weeks should not come as a total shock. The first president with no experience in government, surrounded by a chief of staff, a chief strategist, and a son-in-law who also lack any government experience and who seem to be competing ruthlessly with each other for power, is not a formula for quick success. The administration’s incompetence manifested itself most visibly in the rapid execution of a cruel, overbearing immigration restriction that provoked protests nationwide and even grumbling from some Republicans in Congress.

At another level, though, the travel ban might be seen, from the ideological perspective of the people who crafted it, not necessarily as a failure at all. Despite its ostensibly narrow scope, the operation was extraordinarily ambitious, designed to send a message to the world about who Americans are, who can become American, and, most especially, who cannot. The mayhem, inconvenience, and heartbreak it caused were in fact its very intent.

There are three different aspects of the Trump presidency at play. One is simply characterological: The president’s distinct troubled-adolescent behavior pattern, which, via regular bouts of insult-spewing, braggadocio, ignorance, extravagant promises, wild lies, and absolute intolerance of criticism, frequently throws the policymaking process into disarray.

The second component, and the largest, is standard Republican policy, developed in Congress and conservative think tanks for decades, which Trump has begun to implement fairly smoothly. 

The final and most mysterious element — the one that created the travel ban — is Trumpism. This is the ethno-nationalistic aspect of the president’s governing ideology, which springs both from Trump’s own impulses and from ideas nurtured by a handful of his closest aides, including Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and several staffers brought over from the alt-right publication Breitbart. Trumpism combines an instinctive belief in zero-sum relations between countries with a narrow and retrograde definition of American identity. 

The executive order halting admission of refugees and cracking down on immigration from seven Muslim-­majority countries was a narrower codification of the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” that Trump had promised during the campaign. The implementation was a fiasco. . . . Families were separated, children and elderly people terrified. Parents of a 4-month-old with a serious heart condition had to cancel their baby’s planned heart surgery in Oregon. On and on the tragedies mounted. Beyond the humanitarian costs, the toll on business and intellectual life was immediate. 

A pillar of Trumpism is the refusal to distinguish between peaceful and violent Muslims. Trump has said “Islam hates us,” and when asked if he distinguishes between radical Islam and the religion as a whole, he brushed off the distinction: “It’s very hard to separate, because you don’t know who is who.” Bannon has repeatedly emphasized his belief that Islam as a whole poses an existential threat to Christianity. (“Islam is not a religion of peace,” Bannon has said. “Islam is a religion of submission.”) Trump has falsely implicated the entire Muslim-American community in the terrorist attacks of domestic radicals in San Bernardino and Orlando.  . . . . Punishing innocent Muslims for the threat posed by terrorists is not a side effect of their policy but an expression of its tenets.

The collateral damage to academia and tech firms from the ban may, too, have been part of the point. There is a plausible argument that low-skilled immigrants depress wages for workers in blue-­collar fields and that their numbers should thus be reduced. But leaked memos suggest the administration is designing crackdowns on highly skilled immigrants, despite mounds of evidence showing that such immigrants increase incomes for Americans of modest means. 

Trumpism is a culture war sold through chimerical economic and security gains. Michael Anton, a national-­security staffer in the administration and a key Trumpist intellectual, wrote an anonymous essay during the campaign predicting that Trump’s election would stanch what Anton called “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” America has long been defined — unlike France or Germany or Japan or Russia — as a country lacking a singular race. The ambition of Trumpism seems to be to create a blood-and-soil American nationalism, an identity from which Asian, Muslim, and Latin American immigrants are excluded permanently.

Trumpism’s greatest vulnerability lies not in the buried qualms of his Republican partners. It is in the American public. January was a month of citizen protest unlike anything this country has witnessed in decades. . . . . it took Trump to inspire Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others to join together in demonstrations of patriotic, ecumenical solidarity. At the moment, they are the strongest defense of the American idea against an ideology determined to thwart it.

Obama Rejects Trump Immigration Orders, Backs Protests

With the Trump/Pence regime embarked on a campaign that makes a mockery of what most decent moral people view as American values and likely appeals only to white supremacists and Christian fanatics, former President  has finally released at statement that (i) condemns Trump/Pence's anti immigrant actions, and (ii) applauds ad encourages the large scale protests taking place across the country.  No doubt Der Fuhrer will launch a twitter rant against Obama, but thankfully Obama is saying what needs to be said.  It is crucial that decent moral Americans begin to shout in one huge voice that Trump/Pence is NOT acceptable and that the majority of us condemn them and their policies. Despite his delusions of grandeur, Trump lost the popular vote and the vast majority of Americans did not vote for him.  He has no mandate and he is not above the law or the U.S. Constitution.  NBC News has details on Obama's statement.  Here are excerpts:

Breaking his silence only 10 days after he left office, former President Barack Obama backed nationwide protests against President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration Monday.

In a strongly worded statement issued through a spokesman, Obama said he was "heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country."
"Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake," he said.

Shortly afterward, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates — a holdover from the Obama administration — sent a memo to Justice Department lawyers ordering them not to defend the executive order against several legal challenges that were filed over the weekend.

The former president rejected Trump's contention Sunday that his executive orders restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries were "similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months."

The 2011 order did not ban visas for refugees, who by definition don't travel on visas. It tightened the review process for citizens of Iraq and for refugees from the six other countries, while Trump's is a near-blanket order applying to nearly all residents and citizens of all seven countries.

It should be obvious by now to any sentient individual that if Trumps lips are moving, he's lying.