Anti-LGBT Hate Groups Surge as Trump (and Pence) Embrace Their Leaders

Trump with anti-gay zealot (and white supremacist) Tony Perkins.

The Trump/Pence regime has waged a relentless war on the LGBT community over the last 3 years, reversing pro-LGBT policies of the Obama administration, appointing virulently anti-LGBT extremists to the federal courts  (the Republican majority in the Senate rubber stamped these individuals, a number deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association), and openly embracing the leaders of anti-LGBT hate groups. Yet, unbelievably, a minority of gays - many white, educated and with social standing that they seemingly believe will protect them in a manner reminiscent of many 1930's European Jews who ended up in the Nazi death camps - continue to support the Trump regime and Republicans in general.  I find the behavior dumbfounding, especially given the rise of LGBT hate groups thanks to Trump and Pence's embrace of the toxic leaders.  A piece in RVA Magazine looks at this frightening phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

Anti-LGBTQ hate groups are rapidly growing across America, a result, the Southern Poverty Law Center says, of President Donald Trump’s leadership, including his embrace of those groups. The White House in response has issued a thin statement denying any responsibility or blame – while not even offering to make any changes or to help with the growing danger.

While overall, active hate groups of all types fell slightly in 2019 from 1020 to 940, there was a “sharp expansion,” a nearly 43 percent increase, in anti-LGBTQ hate groups, the SPLC reports, warning that the “Trump administration has demonstrated a clear willingness to embrace their leaders and their policy agenda.”

Far right wing Christian evangelicals, including anti-LGBTQ hate groups like the Family Research Council, have become emboldened, enjoying what they have said is “open door” access to the Oval Office.

“Anti-LGBTQ groups have become intertwined with the Trump administration, and — after years of civil rights progress and growing acceptance among the broader American public — anti-LGBTQ sentiment within the Republican Party is rising,” the Southern Poverty Law Center adds.

The White House issued a thin statement in response, refusing to accept any responsibility or blame. . . . the entire statement hinges on the President appointing openly-gay Trump diehard loyalist Richard Grenell as his Ambassador to Germany, then installing him – despite his absolute lack of qualifications – as his acting Director of National Security. It was Grenell who launched the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality – which exists in name only.

The SPLC also issued another dark warning: this hate and extremism “will far outlast this administration,” and not disappear when President Trump leaves office.

“As the country continues to experience white nationalist terror, extremist ideas long believed outside of the realm of legitimate politics are penetrating deeply into the mainstream, spawning public policies that target immigrants, LGBTQ people and Muslims. The Trump administration has installed members of hate groups into government — particularly those with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim or anti-LGBTQ animus — and put in place highly punitive policies that seemed unthinkable just a few short years ago. These political moves will far outlast this administration, as Trump and his allies in the U.S. Senate have pushed through hundreds of new federal judges, many of whom are hostile to civil rights concerns and will serve for decades.”

While gays are the favored targets of these groups, their ultimate goal is their form of toxic Christianity becoming a de facto established religion in America with those who fail to embrace their toxic dogma condemned to second class citizenship.

It's Time to Admit the USA Has a White Nationalist Terrorist Problem

I can't wrap my head around what level of hate motivates one to murder innocent people that one does even know and who have never done any direct harm to you merely because they have a different skin color or speak a different language.  Yet such hatred seems to be growing in America and the occupant of the White House continues to give a knowing nod to such hatred even as he on occasion makes disingenuous condemnation of violence.  Such is white nationalism in America today.  And making matters worse is law enforcement's failure to treat white national extremists with the same level of concern and surveillance as that given to Islamic terrorism even though white nationalists have killed more Americans than Islamic terrorist since 9-11.   Add to this toxic mix the fact that America's insane gun laws allow such murderers to legally buy guns with which to inflict their carnage (both shooters in El Paso and Dayton appear to have legally purchased their weapons).  An editorial in the New York Times looks at the problem over taking America that literally leaves no one safe.  As the piece notes, you are either against such violence or not and, I would add, if you are a Trump supporter, at a minimum, you tacitly support it).  Here are highlights:

If one of the perpetrators of this weekend’s two mass shootings had adhered to the ideology of radical Islam, the resources of the American government and its international allies would mobilize without delay.

The awesome power of the state would work tirelessly to deny future terrorists access to weaponry, money and forums to spread their ideology. The movement would be infiltrated by spies and informants. Its financiers would face sanctions. Places of congregation would be surveilled. Those who gave aid or comfort to terrorists would be prosecuted. Programs would be established to de-radicalize former adherents.

No American would settle for “thoughts and prayers” as a counterterrorism strategy. No American would accept laying the blame for such an attack on video games, like the Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, did in an interview on Sunday when discussing the mass shooting in El Paso that took 20 lives and left 27 people wounded.

Even a casual observer today can figure out what is going on. The world, and the West in particular, has a serious white nationalist terrorist problem that has been ignored or excused for far too long. As President George W. Bush declared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, we must be a country “awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.”

There are serious questions about how the United States has approached Islamic extremism, but if even a degree of that vigilance and unity of effort was put toward white nationalism, we’d be safer.

White nationalist terror attacks are local, but the ideology is global. On Saturday, a terrorist who, according to a federal law enforcement official, wrote that he feared a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” was replacing white Americans opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso. In a manifesto, the gunman wrote that he drew some inspiration from the white nationalist terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 51 people dead. The F.B.I. is investigating the El Paso mass shooting as a possible act of domestic terrorism. The motive behind another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, is under investigation.

In April, another terrorist who opened fire at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., echoed the words of the Christchurch suspect, too, and appeared to draw inspiration from a massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last fall.

An investigation by The Times earlier this year found that “at least a third of white extremist killers since 2011 were inspired by others who perpetrated similar attacks, professed a reverence for them or showed an interest in their tactics.” White supremacy, in other words, is a violent, interconnected transnational ideology. Its adherents are gathering in anonymous, online forums to spread their ideas, plotting attacks and cheering on acts of terrorism. Online communities like 4chan and 8chan have become hotbeds of white nationalist activity. Anonymous users flood the site’s “politics” board with racist, sexist and homophobic content designed to spread across the web. Users share old fascist fiction, Nazi propaganda and pseudoscientific texts about race and I.Q. and replacement theory, geared to radicalize their peers.

These communities aren’t new. . . . Yet, in recent months, conversations in one anonymous 8chan forum in particular have evolved. They increasingly focus on carrying out acts of white nationalist terror. . . . Posts actively incentivize the darkest impulses of the most dangerous users. In May, an anonymous user posted a screed on “Target Selection,” providing a blueprint on how to increase the body count during mass shootings. The community celebrates and compares the number of casualties from shooting to shooting. . . .

Technology companies, too, appear unwilling to treat white nationalist terror online the way they have dealt with the online spread of radical Islamic terror groups, such as the Islamic State. Companies like Facebook and Twitter took bold action to remove tens of millions of pieces of ISIS and Al Qaeda propaganda and accounts between 2014 and 2018. Similar standards have not been applied to white nationalists, perhaps because, as a 2018 report from researcher J.M. Berger, who specializes in online extremism, notes, “The task of crafting a response to the alt-right is considerably more complex and fraught with land mines, largely as a result of the movement’s inherently political nature and its proximity to political power.”

While its modern roots predate the Trump administration by many decades, white nationalism has attained a new mainstream legitimacy during Mr. Trump’s time in office.

“You will not replace us,” white nationalists proudly chanted at Charlottesville in 2017. (Mr. Trump himself proclaimed that there were “fine people” on both sides of that deadly event.)

In May, bemoaning an “invasion” of immigrants, Mr. Trump asked how immigrants could be stopped during a rally in Florida. “Shoot them,” someone in the crowd yelled. Mr. Trump gave a smirk and said, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff,” as the crowd exploded in ghoulish laughter.

Far more Americans have died at the hands of domestic terrorists than at the hands of Islamic extremists since 2001, according to the F.B.I. The agency’s resources, however, are still overwhelmingly weighted toward thwarting international terrorism.

Moderate members of the political right must do more to condemn white nationalists, even if the president condemns them from one side of his mouth and extols ethnonationalism from the other.

Most importantly, American law enforcement needs to target white nationalists with the same zeal that they have targeted radical Islamic terrorists. Ensuring the security of the homeland demands it.

There can be no middle ground when it comes to white nationalism and the terrorism it inspires. You’re either for it or against it.

Today's GOP: The Joy of Hatred

A Trump rally on Wednesday in Greenville, N.C.

Growing up, my parents and grandparents belonged to a Republican Party where science, knowledge, an effort to treat others decently and with respect, and a level of decorum were the norm.  Indeed, it was expected. While not members of country clubs, in retrospect, their economic position made them the equivalent of the so-called "country club" Republicans. One simply did not associate with a certain kid of people: uncouth, uneducated, and hateful people. Now, such people make up the GOP base.  My parents and grandparents have all passed away, but they would be horrified to see today's GOP lead by a lying carnival barker fixated on bringing out the worse elements of society and making them mainstream.  While the GOP continues to be the party of Christian values, its policies and, now, legitimizing of open hatred of others makes it the antithesis of such values. Nowhere is this ugly reality more visible than at a Trump rally.  Whether they like it or not, when my Republican "friends" continue to refuse to flee the GOP, they tell the world that they are part of this ugliness. A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP celebration of hate and reminds us of America's horrific history of racially motivated hatred.  Here are excerpts:

The chanting was disturbing and the anger was frightening, but what I noticed most about the president’s rally in Greenville, N.C., on Wednesday night was the pleasure of the crowd.

His voters and supporters were having fun. The “Send her back” chant directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was hateful but also exuberant, an expression of racist contempt and a celebration of shared values.

This dynamic wasn’t unique to the event. It’s been a part of Trump’s rallies since 2015. Both he and his crowds work from a template. He rants and spins hate-filled tirades; they revel in the transgressive atmosphere.

To watch raucous crowds of (mostly) white Americans unite in frenzied hatred of a black woman — to watch them cast her as a cancer on the body politic and a threat to a racialized social order — is to see the worst of our past play out in modern form.

[W]atching the interplay between leader and crowd, my mind immediately went to the mass spectacles of the lynching era. There’s simply no way to understand the energy of the event — its hatred and its pleasures — without looking to our history of communal racial violence and the ways in which Americans have used racial others, whether native-born or new arrivals, as scapegoats for their lost power, low status or nonexistent prosperity. And in that period, one event stands out: an 1893 lynching in Paris, Tex., where Henry Smith, a mentally disabled black teenager, was burned alive.

The 17-year-old Smith, “generally considered a harmless, weak-minded fellow,” according to Ida B. Wells-Barnett in “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States,” had been accused of the rape and murder of 3-year-old Myrtle Vance, the daughter of the local sheriff. The white community of Paris believed the murder was retaliation for an earlier arrest by the sheriff, and the accusation of rape was added, in Wells-Barnett’s words, “to inflame the public mind so that nothing less than immediate and violent death would satisfy the populace.”

On the day of the lynching, an estimated 10,000 people crowded along Paris’s main street to witness the killing. Smith was bound to a float and paraded across town in a theatrical performance meant to emphasize his guilt. The audience jeered and chanted, cursed and gave the rebel yell. . . . Around noon, Smith was tortured, doused with kerosene and lit ablaze, immolated for the crowd’s enjoyment.

Smith was accused of something greater than a mere crime. He was accused of violating a sacred moral order — of defiling the white home and white society. “In the minds of many white southerners,” the historian Amy Louise Wood writes in “Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890—1940,” “black men came to personify the moral corruption that they believed to be the root cause of social disorder.” Lynching, then, “acted as more than a form of political terror that restored white dominance against the threat of black equality.” It also became a “divinely sanctioned retribution for black ‘sin’ that threatened not only white authority but white purity and virtue.”

Later, in his 1935 book, “Black Reconstruction in America,” Du Bois would expand on this idea, rooting white racism in a collective bargain of sorts. “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage,” he wrote, outlining the ways in which this “public and psychological” wage strengthened ordinary white Americans’ attachment to a system that ultimately exploited them too:

They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. . . .
When this wage was threatened — by black social mobility and economic success, by black political action, by interracial contact that challenged the boundaries of caste — the response was violence. Not just as punishment but, as the lynching of Henry Smith demonstrates, as a communal defense of the existing social order.

We shouldn’t conflate the past with the present, but we should also be aware of ideas and experiences that persist through time. A political rally centered on the denunciation of a prominent black person demands reference to our history of communal, celebratory racism. It’s critical for placing the event in context, and it can help us understand the dynamic between [Trump] the president and his base.

“He gets us. He’s not a politician, and he’s got a backbone,” a woman who attended a recent “Women for Trump” kickoff event in Pennsylvania told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “He’s not afraid to say what he thinks. And what he says is what the rest of us are thinking.” 

America is exceptional alright, but not in a good way. Trump is unleashing the worse elements from the past.  As for those who attend Trump's rallies, my late southern belle grandmother - who was far ahead of her time on matters of race - would have a term for them: white trash. Is this what my Republican "friends" want to be associated with?

"Thoughts and Prayers": A BS Response to Mass Shootings

Chabad of Poway synagogue .

Yet another shooting at a synagogue - this time in the San Diego area - apparently by yet another white supremacist and what is Der Trumpenführr's response?  Thoughts and prayers for the victims.  This from the man who has striven to normalize white supremacists and who has called neo-Nazis terrorists bent on intimidation and threats "very fine people."  Meanwhile, his political party has blocked all efforts at reasonable gun control measures, including bans on assault rifles such as the one used in this latest attack which left one dead, three injured and many traumatized. Any politician who mutters the bullshit response of "thoughts and prayers" while opposing gun control is a liar and needs to be treated as such.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this latest atrocity, the perpetrator of which took inspiration from the mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue and the mosque massacre in New Zealand.  This is what Trump's four year message of racial and religious hatred has sown.  Here are article highlights:

A 19-year-old man with an assault rifle opened fire at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, Calif., on Saturday morning, leaving one dead and three injured, authorities said.

Four people were transported to Palomar Medical Center with gunshot injuries around noon, Pacific time, officials said in a news conference Saturday afternoon.

One of the victims, a woman, “succumbed to their wounds,” according to Poway Mayor Steve Vaus. The three others — a girl and two men — remain in the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Rabbi Yonah Fradkin, executive director of Chabad of San Diego County, identified Lori Kaye, 60, of Poway as the woman who was killed, according to the Associated Press. Fradkin said those injured were Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, Noya Dahan, 8, and Almog Peretz, 34.

The San Diego County Sheriff’s office identified the suspect as John Earnest. According to Sheriff William D. Gore, the assault weapon might have malfunctioned after the gunman fired inside the Chabad of Poway, preventing a more extensive tragedy. An off-duty border patrol agent fired at the shooter when he was fleeing, but missed.

Saturday’s shooting in Poway, approximately 20 miles north of San Diego, came six months after the massacre at Pittsburgh’s oldest synagogue, Tree of Life, where an armed shooter killed 11 people and injured six others in the deadliest attack on Jews in the history of the United States.

Earnest is a California State University San Marcos student, the university’s President Karen S. Haynes said, according to the Associated Press.

In a manifesto published online Saturday under the name John Earnest, the writer described plans to kill Jews, referring to himself as an “anti-Semite” and “white supremacist.” It referenced the alleged shooters at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue and the New Zealand mosques, Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler as role models. The writer expressed no remorse for his impending actions.

In the document, the writer confessed to setting fire to a mosque in Escondido, Calif., located fewer than nine miles from the Poway Chabad, a month earlier, and dedicated the arson to the alleged New Zealand shooter. The writing mirrors the alleged New Zealand shooter’s manifesto.

In a post on 8chan, an Internet message board, a user who appears to be Earnest shared the manifesto and announced his plan to live-stream his actions on Facebook and shared a link, but the social media platform blocked the profile before it gained widespread attention.

In his 8chan message, the user references the “red pill” movement, which developed on Internet message boards and revolves around the idea of men’s rights, anti-feminism and the alt-right, and generally promotes a misogynistic worldview.

Hate Groups On the Rise, White Supremacist Terror Attack Averted

Since he launched his campaign in 2015, Donald Trump has been singing a welcomed song to racists and white supremacists of every ilk.  By doing so, he has made out right racism acceptable in the eyes of his followers and has increasingly normalized the reprehensible. Worse yet, he has emboldened hate groups which have increased 30% over four years and some, such as would be terrorist,  Christopher Paul Hasson, have seen Trump's rhetoric as a green light to attack Democrats and journalists.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Hasson's thwarted terror attacks while a piece in New York Magazine looks at the increase in the number of far right hate groups.  First, highlights from the Post:

A U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist was arrested after federal investigators uncovered a cache of weapons and ammunition in his Maryland home that authorities say he stockpiled to launch a widespread domestic terrorist attack targeting politicians and journalists.

Christopher Paul Hasson called for “focused violence” to “establish a white homeland” . . . Though court documents do not detail a specific planned date for an attack, the government said he had been amassing supplies and weapons since at least 2017, developed a spreadsheet of targets that included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and searched the Internet using phrases such as “best place in dc to see congress people” and “are supreme court justices protected.”

“The defendant intends to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country,” the government said in court documents filed this week, arguing that Hasson should stay in jail awaiting trial.

“Please send me your violence that I may unleash it onto their heads,” Hasson wrote in a letter that prosecutors said was found in his email drafts. “Guide my hate to make a lasting impression on this world.”

Court documents do not detail what prompted federal law enforcement to begin investigating Hasson but contend that Hasson had been studying the 1,500-page manifesto of right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who unleashed two attacks in 2011 that killed 77 people in Norway, and echoed Breivik’s attack preparations.

[A]ccording to the court filings, Hasson developed a spreadsheet of targets that included top Democratic congressional leaders and media personalities. The list includes “JOEY,” what prosecutors say is a reference to former congressman Joe Scarborough (R-Fla.), now of MSNBC; “cortez,” an alleged reference to freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.); and “Sen blumen jew,” presumably about Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

One individual like Hasson is frightening enough, but as the New York Magazine article reports, there has been a sharp increase in the number of active hate groups.  Here are article excerpts:

There are at least 1,020 hate groups now active in the U.S., the Southern Poverty Law Center announced on Wednesday. The civil rights group, which has tracked extremist activity since the 1980s, says it’s documented a 30 percent increase in hate group activity over the last four years, a time period it says “roughly” coincides with end of Barack Obama’s presidency and the rise of Donald Trump as a political figure.

The SPLC doesn’t just track white supremacists – it also tracks the Nation of Islam – but white extremists engaged directly in promoting nativism and myths about racial superiority make up the bulk of activity included in the organization’s annual hate report. SPLC researchers documented 112 active neo-Nazi groups, 148 white nationalist groups, and 63 racist skinhead groups, in addition to 36 neo-Confederate organizations.

SPLC argues that [Trump’s] the president’s vitriolic anti-immigrant rhetoric and soft-pedaling of white supremacist violence have emboldened hate groups.
 [I]t’s undeniable that members of the far-right have been responsible for an escalating number of high-profile violent incidents over the last several years. It’s also true that Trump, and some of his surrogates in the conservative press, have helped mainstream certain white nationalist myths. Both Trump and Fox’s Tucker Carlson briefly became fixated on the alleged persecution of white South African farmers, though there’s no evidence of a white genocide unfolding in South Africa or anywhere else, and Trump frequently amplifies myths about the disproportionate criminality of immigrants. Since Trump took office, white nationalists have beaten left-wing activists and murdered one protester . . . .
 This radicalization shows no signs of abating. Hours after the SPLC released its report, Seamus Hughes of the the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism broke the news that a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard will go on trial for domestic terrorism charges. The lieutenant, Christopher Hasson, identified as a white supremacist, possessed around 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and created a hit list of liberal politicians and media figures ranging from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
 Trump hasn’t explicitly called for people like Hasson to do violence in his name. But the SPLC’s report reinforces a disturbing trend. However frustrated white supremacists may be over the border wall, others seem galvanized by the Trump presidency.

Trump Has Given a Green Light for Attacks on Gays and Non-Whites

Some of my ancestors on my maternal side arrived in what is now the United States between at least 170 and 220 years ago and I have ancestors who are army veterans in wars from the Civil War, WWI and WWII.  For many blacks in Virginia, their ancestors began their forced immigration here in Hampton, Virginia 400 years ago.   And large swaths of America's Southwest were once part of Mexico.  Yet, in Donald Trump's America, at least in the minds of his bigoted and racist supporters, the only "real Americans" are white, right wing Christian heterosexuals.  And let's not forget Trump's statement that there were some "very fine" people among the white supremacists who terrorized Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.  Now, seemingly even black celebrities need to be fearful in Trump's America as evidenced by the attack on Jussie Smollett, one of the stars of the Fox television show “Empire" in Chicago.  This is not OK and should not be "OK" with anyone decent and moral - including Republican "friends." A piece in the New York Times looks at this disturbing incident (not the shouts about "MAGA country"): 

Jussie Smollett, one of the stars of the Fox television show “Empire,” was attacked in Chicago early Tuesday morning by two people who yelled racial and homophobic slurs and wrapped a rope around his neck, according to the police, who said they were investigating the incident as “a possible hate crime.”

Smollett, who is black and publicly came out as gay in 2015, was walking on a downtown street when two people approached him and yelled the slurs, according to a statement from the Chicago Police Department. The attackers then began hitting Smollett in the face and poured an “unknown chemical substance” on him.

One of the attackers also wrapped a rope around Smollett’s neck before the duo fled.
“Given the severity of the allegations, we are taking this investigation very seriously and treating it as a possible hate crime,” the police statement said. In a follow-up interview later in the morning, The Sun-Times reported, Smollett told the police that the attackers yelled “this is MAGA country,” a reference to President Trump’s campaign slogan.

The newspaper also reported that the F.B.I. was looking into a letter sent to Fox offices in Chicago last week that contained threatening language toward Smollett and a white powdery substance.

On Tuesday night, the police said in a statement that the area where Smollett said the attack occurred had “very high density of city and private surveillance cameras.” Detectives had viewed hundreds of hours of video but “unfortunately, thus far we have not found any helpful information on a suspect or a suspect’s vehicle to be able to share,” the statement said. The police were widening their search to cameras from surrounding areas.

20th Century Fox Television and Fox Entertainment released a statement on Tuesday expressing outrage at the attack and saying that the “entire studio, network and production stands united in the face of any despicable act of violence and hate.” Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker both wrote on Twitter that the attack was an “attempted modern-day lynching,” and Booker urged the House to take up a bill passed by the Senate that enhances penalties in lynching cases. Hate crimes have been rising in recent years; According to the most recent nationwide data from the F.B.I., they increased 17 percent in 2017 from the year before.

Of the more than 7,100 recorded incidents attributed to prejudice in 2017, roughly 60 percent were caused by biases involving race, ethnicity and ancestry. About 16 percent were attacks on sexual orientation.

Hate crimes are generally underreported. The F.B.I. survey was based on self-reporting from more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies.

If you support Trump/Pence, you support this type of ugly agenda, like it or not.

Right-Wing Violence is on The Rise in USA

Being gay, I've experienced discrimination first hand and had threats of violence screamed at me.  I've also been harassed by police officers who found  tormenting "the faggot" to be great sport. None of this abuse has come from what those on the right derisively call "liberals." As a result, I am all too aware of the dangers of right wingers who hold contempt for anyone they perceive to be "different" or "other."  Disturbingly, statistics document that those on the right are increasing feeling at liberty to put their contempt and hatred into action through violence against others.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the growing right wing violence which experts suggest is being legitimized by Donald Trump and other Republican politicians.  Indeed, Trump's order for refugee mothers and children to be tear gassed yesterday along the Mexico border will likely further embolden those already consumed with hatred. What is perhaps most frightening is that increasingly no one is safe from potential right wing violence since too often the targets are selected at random.  Being in the wrong place at the wrong time can cost one their life, especially given America's insane gun laws that make it all too easy for extremists to arm themselves.  Here are highlights from the Post article:

As a Republican, Mitchell Adkins complained of feeling like an outcast at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky. “Hardcore liberals” made fun of him, he wrote, and he faced “discrimination on a daily basis.” He soon dropped out and enrolled in trade school.

But his simmering rage led him back to campus one morning in April 2017, when Adkins pulled out a machete in the campus coffee shop, demanded that patrons state their political affiliation and began slashing at Democrats.

“There was never any ambiguity about why he did it,” said Tristan Reynolds, 22, a witness to the attack, which left two women injured.

Over the past decade, attackers motivated by right-wing political ideologies have committed dozens of shootings, bombings and other acts of violence, far more than any other category of domestic extremist, according to a Washington Post analysis of data on global terrorism. While the data show a decades-long drop-off in violence by left-wing groups, violence by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency — and has surged since President Trump took office.

This year has been especially deadly. Just last month, 13 people died in two incidents: A Kentucky gunman attempted to enter a historically black church, police say, then shot and killed two black patrons in a nearby grocery store. And an anti-Semitic loner who had expressed anger about a caravan of Central American refugees that Trump termed an “invasion” has been charged with gunning down 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history.

While Trump has blasted Democrats as “an angry left-wing mob” and the “party of crime,” researchers have identified just one fatal attack in 2018 that may have been motivated by left-wing ideologies.

The uptick in right-wing terrorism comes amid a renewed national focus on hate-driven violence. The Anti-Defamation League documented a 57 percent surge in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017, especially at schools and on college campuses. Meanwhile, FBI statistics released this monthshow reported hate crimes jumped 17 percent last year.Terrorism researchers say right-wing violence sprouted alongside white anxiety about Obama’s presidency and has accelerated in the Trump era. Trump and his aides have continuously denied that he has contributed to the rise in violence. But experts say right-wing extremists perceive the president as offering them tacit support for their cause.

After the violence in Charlottesville, for example, Trump asserted that “both sides” were equally to blame and that there were “some very fine people” among the far-right demonstrators, many of whom wore “Make America Great Again” caps while chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans.

More recently, Trump rallied crowds in the run-up to the Nov. 6 midterm elections with incendiary rhetoric about Muslims and immigrants, . . . .

“If you have politicians saying things like our nation is under attack, that there are these marauding bands of immigrants coming into the country, that plays into this right-wing narrative. They begin to think it’s okay to use violence,” said Gary LaFree, criminology chairman at the University of Maryland and founding director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, . . . “The current political rhetoric is at least enabling, and certainly not discouraging, violence,” Figliuzzi said.

The results show that unlike the turbulent 1970s, when environmental, antiwar and other left-wing groups were responsible for historically high rates of terrorism in the United States, today’s attackers are far more likely to have right-wing sympathies.

Joshua D. Freilich, a criminologist at John Jay College and co-director of the Extremist Crime Database, an open-source database of violent and financial crimes committed by political extremists, said that right-wing attacks not only happen more often but also are more likely to result in fatalities than left-wing attacks.

Stacey Hervey, a criminologist at the Metropolitan State University of Denver who has studied radicalization, said the attackers generally fit one of three archetypes: thrill-seekers, such as teenagers who paint swastikas on the sides of buildings; reactive attackers, who lash out suddenly at perceived enemies; and mission-oriented attackers, who aim to send a specific message or achieve a certain political goal.

Even more menacing, Hervey said, are the mission-oriented attacks. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was the deadliest act of anti-Semitic terror in the United States since an April 2014 shooting rampage by Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., a former KKK member and white supremacist who has been sentenced to die for killing three people at a Jewish Community Center and a Jewish retirement home in suburban Kansas City, Kan.

“When politicians speak and talk the politics of hate and division, people who don’t know us see us as an enemy,” Omar said. “These three guys came all the way from a small town in Illinois to throw a bomb at people they never met.”

Be very afraid for the future of this country.

Trump’s America Is Not a Safe Place for Jews - or Those Labeled as "Other"

A column in the Washington Post laments that America is quickly becoming a place that is not safe for Jews thanks to the growing anti-Semiticism made normal by the occupant of the White House.  The piece recounts the ways in which Trump has embraced the Alt-Right which has long targeted Jews along with pretty much all minorities as well as LGBT Americans.  It's a trend that reminds one of the rise of dictators in Europe in the late 1920's and early 1930's not to mention the white nationalists who are seeking to reassert their power in places as disparate as rural areas of the United Kingdom supporting Brexit, to Hungary and Brazil where an extremist just won the presidency.  The trend throughout is the dehumanizing of those who are perceived as different which in turn opens the door for violence against those targeted.  Disgustingly, here in America, Trump and far right Republicans disclaim any responsibility for the hatred they are unleashing.  Here are column highlights:

George Washington, in his 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., told Jews they would be safe in the new nation.

“The government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” he wrote. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Though that assurance has been tested, the United States has endured as a safe haven for Jews.

Now President Trump has violated Washington’s compact. He has given sanction to bigotry and assistance to persecution. After the shooting in Pittsburgh, which the Anti-Defamation League believes is the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, there is no longer safety under the vine and fig tree.

I had been dreading and expecting this day, and more like it, for two years. This was more than predictable; it was predicted.

After Trump’s presidential campaign began with genteel anti-Semitism, progressed to dog whistles and ended with a full-throated targeting of Jewish “globalists,” I wrote on Election Day that the results would be coming in on the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the infamous night of Nazi violence and vandalism against German Jews: “I pray that on this solemn anniversary, Americans tell Donald Trump and the world that we are never going back there.”

After Charlottesville, when Trump said there “were very fine people” marching among the neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” I wrote about my daughter’s fear of returning to Hebrew school because of violence; armed white supremacists had chanted “Sieg Heil” and forced worshipers to flee a Charlottesville synagogue.

Consider some of the many times Trump gave sanction to bigotry before 11 worshipers were shot dead at the Tree of Life:

Telling Jewish Republicans they wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.”

Tweeting an image from an anti-Semitic message board with a Star of David atop a pile of cash.

Saying “I don’t have a message” for supporters who threatened anti-Semitic violence against a Jewish journalist, and Melania Trump saying the writer “provoked” the threats.
Branding his campaign with the “America First” slogan of the anti-Semitic pre-war movement.

Alleging that “blood suckers” and “a global power structure” including “international banks” are secretly plotting against ordinary Americans.

And, when urged by the Anti-Defamation League to stop using traditionally anti-Semitic tropes, repeating the tropes in an ad with images of prominent Jews, including George Soros.

Once in office, in addition to making common cause with the Nazis of Charlottesville, Trump stocked his administration with Stephen K. Bannon and other figures of the nationalist “alt-right;” hesitated to condemn the rise of anti-Semitic threats and vandalism; issued a Holocaust remembrance statement without mention of Jews; lamented the attempts to silence Alex Jones, who peddles anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; and, declaring himself a “nationalist,” increased verbal attacks on “globalists,” particularly Soros.

Whatever Trump’s motives, his words and deeds inspire the hateful and the violent. The man accused of sending pipe bombs to a dozen favorite Trump targets (including Soros) eschewed politics, his family’s lawyer says, until he “found a father in Trump.” The accused Pittsburgh gunman, though apparently rejecting Trump for being insufficiently nationalist, embraced on social media the themes Trump has popularized: the “globalist” danger, immigrant “invaders that kill our people” and an “infestation” of undesirables.

[P]roceeding with a rally mere hours after the massacre, he galvanized the crowd with the same complaint the alleged Pittsburgh killer cited in social media before the carnage: the migrant caravan. Trump told the crowd, “No caravans, right? We don’t want caravans. We’re not having caravans.”  “Build the wall!” the crowd chanted.

Be very afraid.

The Struggle to Track Rising Extremism

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Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center ("SPLC") and the Anti-defamation League are working overtime trying to track the rising extremism gripping America which is being fanned daily by Donald Trump and many within the GOP who have given license to extremists.  What was once dog whistle messaging has now been replaced by open racism and the open dissemination of hate. And it is not just Neo-Nazis and white supremacists who are marketing hatred.   In Virginia alone, SPLC identifies 37 active hate organizations that range from white Nationalists, anti-immigrant extremists and anti-LGBT extremists (go to the SPLC site and check out your state).  With the advent of the Internet and social media, the venues for spewing and fueling hatred and organizing acts of violence has exploded.  A piece in The New Yorker looks at the growing difficulty is tracking extremism and warning law enforcement of the growing threats.  Here are highlights:

Heidi Beirich has worked for the Southern Poverty Law Center for almost two decades. She oversees the organization’s yearly tally of “hate and hard-line, anti-government” groups. On Saturday, she was at the airport in Montgomery, Alabama—she was flying to New Orleans, where the S.P.L.C. is having its board meeting—when she saw a CNN report about the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

“My first thought was, Oh God, this could be one of ours,” she told me by phone Saturday afternoon. The S.P.L.C. maintains an enormous database of extremists and extremist groups. When acts of violence and domestic terror take place, the group runs the suspects’ names against its database to see if there’s a match. If there is, they take that information to law enforcement, and share it with reporters and the public.

I asked Beirich for her thoughts on the news coverage of acts of mass violence, and the debate over the merits of broadcasting perpetrators’ beliefs. “I understand the argument: don’t give these people too much ink, or airtime, because you’re just spreading the propaganda,” she said. “But the truth is these people are committing so much violence, and their ideas are actually influencing public policy—the Muslim ban, the immigration stuff thats going on—I don’t think you can ignore it.”

Even for Beirich and her team, who study the nexus of hate and violence professionally, this week—with the pipe bombs mailed to prominent Democrats, and the deliberate shooting of two black people by a white man in Kentucky—was overwhelming.

But it hasn’t been just the past week—it’s been the past few years. Hate crimes increased in both 2015 and 2016, according to the latest F.B.I. data, and the Anti-Defamation League says that anti-Semitic incidents spiked in 2017. . . . The F.B.I.’s data may not even be the full picture, she pointed out, saying, “Not every state has a hate-crime law, many that do don’t cover the L.G.B.T. population, and there’s no training for law enforcement.”

The suspect in the Pittsburgh shooting was identified on Saturday as Robert Bowers. He killed at least ten people before being arrested. He wasn’t in the S.P.L.C.’s system. “I’m not that surprised,” she said. “We try to collect everything we can about white supremacists, but this is a huge world.” Beirich’s team found Bowers’s posts on Gab, a social network popular with white nationalists and the alt-right.  “Gab, where this guy was posting, is, like, four hundred thousand people,” Beirich told me. “We don’t have information on four hundred thousand people.”

The manias of mass murderers are always particular. But the massacres in Pittsburgh and Jeffersontown—and the pipe bombs sent to a dozen Democratic leaders this week, allegedly by the Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc—share some obvious common causes. They are the toxic politics of the President, and the racist, nationalist fervor that has been inflamed by his rise, and the success and the militancy of the gun lobby, which for decades has refused to acknowledge the obvious: that one way to have fewer killings is to make it harder for Americans to possess guns. Each of these is a national crisis on its own.

What should be plain now is that each crisis is escalating, as is the frequency of political violence. Trump, asked about the Pittsburgh shooting, said, “If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better.” The moral inadequacy is vast. Murderous acts of hate have occurred, on a national scale, several times this week. It is a tragedy that [Trump] the President is not able to see them for what they are.

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.

Fascism: Why It Can Happen Here

In a matter of days the husband and I will head to Europe for two weeks - as usual, we have the house sitting/dog sitting lined up - and it will be interesting to see first hand how America's image is tattered in the eyes of long time allies.  A year ago while in the United Kingdom, the popular contempt for the Trump/Pence regime was palpable, especially as the violence exploded in Charlottesville and made the front page of every major London newspaper.  Britain, of course has its own problems with white nationalism, xenophobia, and dreams of lost empire that resulted in the Brexit vote - another election where Russia sought to breed hate and discord - which may yet destroy Britain's economy and eliminate any claim it clings to as a world power.  All thanks to what boils down to racial animosity. France, where we visit first, fought back Russian efforts to bring fascism to power yet still has its problems, not the least of which is its favored status as a target of Islamic terrorism - it represents everything religious extremists hate.  As we prepare to set off, America seems poised at a precipice where democracy may die if Democrats fail to prevail in a blue wave that blocks Republican efforts to turn the country into a democracy in name only.  A column in the New York Times looks at the perilous situation.  Here are excerpts:

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend of mine — an expert on international relations — made a joke: “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path — fascism.” Even at the time, his quip had a real edge.  And as of 2018 it hardly seems like a joke at all.

[In[ Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead.

In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.

And it could all too easily happen here. There was a time, not long ago, when people used to say that our democratic norms, our proud history of freedom, would protect us from such a slide into tyranny. In fact, some people still say that. But believing such a thing today requires willful blindness. The fact is that the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Law and Justice or Fidesz, exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule. Just look at what has been happening at the state level.

In North Carolina, after a Democrat won the governorship, Republicans used the incumbent’s final days to pass legislation stripping the governor’s office of much of its power.

In Georgia, Republicans tried to use transparently phony concerns about access for disabled voters to close most of the polling places in a mainly black district.

In West Virginia, Republican legislators exploited complaints about excessive spending to impeach the entire State Supreme Court and replace it with party loyalists.

And these are just the cases that have received national attention. There are surely scores if not hundreds of similar stories across the nation. What all of them reflect is the reality that the modern G.O.P. feels no allegiance to democratic ideals; it will do whatever it thinks it can get away with to entrench its power.

[A]t the national level? That’s where things get really scary. We’re currently sitting on a knife edge. If we fall off it in the wrong direction — specifically, if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November — we will become another Poland or Hungary faster than you can imagine. This week Axios created a bit of a stir with a scoop about a spreadsheet circulating among Republicans in Congress, listing investigations they think Democrats are likely to carry out if they take the House. The thing about the list is that every item on it — starting with Donald Trump’s tax returns — is something that obviously should be investigated, and would have been investigated under any other president. But the people circulating the document simply take it for granted that Republicans won’t address any of these issues: Party loyalty will prevail over constitutional responsibility.

Many Trump critics celebrated last week’s legal developments, taking the Manafort conviction and the Cohen guilty plea as signs that the walls may finally be closing in on the lawbreaker in chief. But I felt a sense of deepened dread as I watched the Republican reaction: Faced with undeniable evidence of Trump’s thuggishness, his party closed ranks around him more tightly than ever.

This goes even for politicians who once seemed to have some principles. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was a voice of independence in the health care debate; now she sees no problem with having a president who’s an unindicted co-conspirator appoint a Supreme Court justice who believes that presidents are immune from prosecution. Senator Lindsey Graham denounced Trump in 2016, and until recently seemed to be standing up against the idea of firing the attorney general to kill the Mueller investigation; now he’s signaled that he’s O.K. with such a firing.

But why is America, the birthplace of democracy, so close to following the lead of other countries that have recently destroyed it?

Don’t tell me about “economic anxiety.” That’s not what happened in Poland, which grew steadily through the financial crisis and its aftermath. And it’s not what happened here in 2016: Study after study has found that racial resentment, not economic distress, drove Trump voters.

The point is that we’re suffering from the same disease — white nationalism run wild — that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And we’re very, very close to the point of no return.