The National Cathedral On Decency
It can be too easy to break today's deterioration of American culture down into quibbles about what some politician "really meant" when they said something terrible-sounding, and we see actual American people arguing in defense of authoritarianism, racism, assaulting women, political corruption, and a multitude of instances of rudeness and ignorance. These quibbles address one thing at a time, as they rise to the nation's awareness -- he didn't really mean "go back to the country you came from," he meant, "go help the country you came from and come back." He didn't really mean Mexico would pay for the wall. He doesn't literally grab 'em by the pussy. He didn't mean that China was going to pay the tariffs. It's just a coincidence that he uses the word "infested" only for black and brown people. And so on. I saw someone once describe this as being like someone throwing a handful of dirt at you, and you have to swat away every particle of dust individually. You have to address each absurdity but there are so many of them you can't keep up. And even if you do try to keep up, there is no time for anything else in your life.
But of course all these individual things are part of one ugly pattern. The National Cathedral issued a statement this past week, and I think this might be a good perspective. Call it decency.
But of course all these individual things are part of one ugly pattern. The National Cathedral issued a statement this past week, and I think this might be a good perspective. Call it decency.
Have We No Decency? A Response to President TrumpIt's not about any particular thing, not about immigration or guns or trade wars or racism or greed or ignorance. It's a matter of decency. It is not hard to be kind, to be fair, to be decent.
July 30, 2019
The escalation of racialized rhetoric from the President of the United States has evoked responses from all sides of the political spectrum. On one side, African American leaders have led the way in rightfully expressing outrage. On the other, those aligned with the President seek to downplay the racial overtones of his attacks, or remain silent.
As faith leaders who serve at Washington National Cathedral ¬– the sacred space where America gathers at moments of national significance – we feel compelled to ask: After two years of President Trump’s words and actions, when will Americans have enough?
As Americans, we have had such moments before, and as a people we have acted. Events of the last week call to mind a similarly dark period in our history:
“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
That was U.S. Army attorney Joseph Welch on June 9, 1954, when he confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy before a live television audience, effectively ending McCarthy’s notorious hold on the nation. Until then, under the guise of ridding the country of Communist infiltration, McCarthy had free rein to say and do whatever he wished. With unbridled speech, he stoked the fears of an anxious nation with lies; destroyed the careers of countless Americans; and bullied into submissive silence anyone who dared criticize him.
In retrospect, it’s clear that Welch’s question was directed less toward McCarthy and more to the nation as a whole. Had Americans had enough? Where was our sense of decency?
We have come to accept a level of insult and abuse in political discourse that violates each person’s sacred identity as a child of God. We have come to accept as normal a steady stream of language and accusations coming from the highest office in the land that plays to racist elements in society.
This week, President Trump crossed another threshold. Not only did he insult a leader in the fight for racial justice and equality for all persons; not only did he savage the nations from which immigrants to this country have come; but now he has condemned the residents of an entire American city. Where will he go from here?
Make no mistake about it, words matter. And, Mr. Trump’s words are dangerous.
These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.
When does silence become complicity? What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have had enough? The question is less about the president’s sense of decency, but of ours.
As leaders of faith who believe in the sacredness of every single human being, the time for silence is over. We must boldly stand witness against the bigotry, hatred, intolerance, and xenophobia that is hurled at us, especially when it comes from the highest offices of this nation. We must say that this will not be tolerated. To stay silent in the face of such rhetoric is for us to tacitly condone the violence of these words. We are compelled to take every opportunity to oppose the indecency and dehumanization that is racism, whether it comes to us through words or actions.
There is another moment in our history worth recalling. On January 21, 2017, Washington National Cathedral hosted an interfaith national prayer service, a sacred tradition to honor the peaceful transfer of political power. We prayed for the President and his young Administration to have “wisdom and grace in the exercise of their duties that they may serve all people of this nation, and promote the dignity and freedom of every person.”
That remains our prayer today for us all.
The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington
The Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, Dean of Washington National Cathedral
The Rev. Canon Kelly Brown Douglas, Canon Theologian of Washington National Cathedral
posted by JimK at 3:40 PM
118 Comments:
If the Republican party had any decency left, they wouldn't nominate Rump for another term. There is no shortage of right-wing idealogues who can parrot the "cut taxes, cut regulations, keep all our guns, spend everything we can on the military and cut all the social services" mantra that has defined the Republicon party for 4 decades.
It's not like they're selling anything new here. It's telling that they had to go full-on white nationalist and xenophobe to get enough votes to win the electoral college in 2016.
It's even more telling, that after witnessing what Rump has done over the past 2 years that we hear nothing from the GOP of a challenge to his leadership of the GOP. There are plenty of people in that party more qualified for the office than he is, not that it take much to reach that bar.
There seems to be no cognition on the part of Republicans of the damage Rump is doing to their own party. Whatever credibility they may have once had as "the moral majority" has been shredded by a 400 pound orangutan with a bad spray tan.
Judges and tax cuts have been won by "any means necessary." Decency disappeared as a concern for them years ago. Cooperation with the other side is seen as capitulation and weakness. And there doesn't seem to be any ability to learn from their mistakes.
Hopefully, the rest of America will.
Davenport lost two cousins in the mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio Saturday night has a message for Rump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M_-RaIHK88
Davenport is the cousin of Thomas McNichols, 25, and Lois Oglesby, 27, who were among the nine killed by Connor Betts in a mass shooting in the city’s downtown Oregon District early Sunday.
“These were everyday working people that had families that cared about them, that had jobs, that had children,” he told WCPO.
In footage shown on CNN (below), Davenport grew even more emotional as he called for action on gun laws.
“People can just go and buy guns and not even be registered, or not even be qualified,” he said, adding that they can “walk into a gun store and buy high-powered equipment and walk right out and kill people.”
“This has got to stop,” he said.
Then he pleaded to Trump directly:
“My cousins did not deserve to lose their life. They had children. Hard-working people. All they were doing was enjoying a night on the town and they’re dead. Never to come home again. Never to see their family again. They’re gone. And I want the president to hear this. Donald Trump, I want you to hear this: You need to be here right now. You need to.”
Trump has not indicted if he would visit the scene of the shooting in Dayton, or the Saturday mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart in which 20 were killed.
Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based tech giant, announced Sunday it is kicking extremist forum 8chan off its network following reports that the alleged El Paso, Texas, gunman may have been inspired by discussions on the online message board.
The tech company, which provided cybersecurity and other internet infrastructure services to 8chan, said in a blog post that the suspected gunman in the Texas Walmart attack ― which left 20 dead and 26 others injured ― appears to have “posted a screed to the site immediately before” the shooting on Saturday.
In a press conference Saturday, law enforcement officials said they are exploring whether the suspect posted a four-page violent, xenophobic manifesto titled “The Inconvenient Truth.”
“Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident,” Cloudflare wrote in its blog post, referencing two other mass shootings by alleged 8chan radicals in recent months: The terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the Poway, California, synagogue shooting.
“8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate,” Cloudflare said in its post.
“The El Paso shooter specifically referenced the Christchurch incident and appears to have been inspired by the largely unmoderated discussions on 8chan, which glorified the previous massacre. In a separate tragedy, the suspected killer in the Poway, California, synagogue shooting also posted a hate-filled ‘open letter’ on 8chan.”
Cloudflare said it had already “sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time.”
Following the announcement, 8chan warned users in a tweet that they could expect “some downtime in the next 24-48 hours while we find a solution.”
“I of course am not suggesting that all Republicans are white supremacists nor am I saying that the average Republican is even racist,” wrote McCollister, who represents an Omaha-area district. “What I am saying though is that the Republican Party is COMPLICIT to obvious racist and immoral activity inside our party.”
“We have a Republican president who continually stokes racist fears in his base,” he said in his tweets. “He calls certain countries ‘sh*tholes,’ tells women of color to ‘go back’ to where they came from and lies more than he tells the truth. We have Republican senators and representatives who look the other way and say nothing for fear that it will negatively affect their elections.”
“No more,” McCollister continued. “When the history books are written, I refuse to be someone who said nothing. The time is now for us Republicans to be honest with what is happening inside our party. We are better than this and I implore my Republican colleagues to stand up and do the right thing.”
AMERICA DESERVES MORE OFFICIALS LIKE HIM TO BE ELECTED IN 2020
"Jonathan Tyree
@JonnyTyree
This is what Candice Keller, the Republican State Rep for Ohio District 53 and candidate for Ohio Senate District 4, has to say about the mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso. Please feel free to contact her to tell her your opinion at 614-644-5094"
"Candice Keller
Ohio State Representative
The breakdown of the traditional American family (thank you, transgender, homosexual marriage, and drag queen advocates); fatherlessness, a subject no one discuses or believes is relevant; the ignoring of violent video games; the relaxing of laws against criminals (open borders); the acceptance of recreational marijuana; failed school policies (hello parents who defend misbehaving students); disrespect to law enforcement (thank you, Obama); hatred of our veterans (thank you, professional athletes who hate our flag and National Anthem); the Dem Congress, many members whom are open anti-Semitic; the culture, which totally ignores the importance of God and the church (until they elect a President); state officeholders, who have no interest whatsoever in learning about our Constitution and the Second Amendement; and snowflakes, who can’t accept a duly-elected President.
Did I forget somebody? The list is long. And the fury will continue."
Yes Ma'am, you forgot all the white supremacists/domestic terrorists who encourage fear of immigrants and/or commit mass murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States
How Many Attacks Will It Take Until the White-Supremacist Threat Is Taken Seriously?
The Anti-Defamation League recently reported (Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S., ADL Finds) that right-wing extremists were linked to more murders in the United States (at least 50) in 2018 than in any other year since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh bombed an Oklahoma City federal building. The organization also found that in the past decade, roughly 73 percent of extremist-related fatalities have been associated with domestic right-wing extremists, relative to about 23 percent attributed to Islamist extremists.
Rep. Kenny Marchant on Monday became the latest Texas Republican lawmaker to announce his congressional retirement, positioning the Lone Star state to become more of a battleground in 2020.
“It is time for me to announce that I will not seek another term as Congressman from the 24th District of Texas,” Marchant said in a statement. “I am looking forward to finishing out my term and then returning to Texas to start a new chapter.
“To my colleagues in Washington, it has been an honor to serve with you and help you serve your constituents, just as you help me serve mine,” he added.
His statement comes days after Texas GOP Reps. Will Hurd, Pete Olson and Mike Conaway said they will not run for reelection.
Marchant, who has served in Congress since 2005, defeated his Democrat opponent Jan McDowell by just 3 points last year.
Democrats flipped two U.S. House seats in Texas in 2018, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) said earlier this year that it is targeting six Texas lawmakers’ seats ― including Marchant, Olson and Hurd’s ― in 2020.
“Texas is the most important battleground state in 2020,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement in January. “The future of our nation depends on us.”
Outside of Texas, Rep. Paul Mitchell of Michigan, Rep. Martha Roby of Alabama and Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah all have said they won’t be running for reelection next year.
"We have a president right now who traffics in this hatred, who incites this violence, who calls Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, calls asylum seekers animals and an infestation,” the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said, quoting earlier Trump remarks.
“You may call a cockroach an infestation, you may use that word in the Third Reich to describe those who are undesirable, who must be put down because they are subhuman. You do not expect to hear that in the United States of America in this age, in our generation, in this beautiful country that decided 243 years ago that we would not define ourselves by race or ethnicity or our differences — but by the fact that we were all created equal.”
After mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, this weekend, a Republican state lawmaker from Ohio blamed the violence on “homosexual marriage,” “drag queen advocates” and more in a bizarre Facebook post.
State Rep. Candice Keller complained about Democrats playing “the blame game” after every mass shooting in a post on her personal Facebook account. The lawmaker from Middletown in Butler County — a small city 30 miles south of Dayton, where a gunman killed nine on Sunday — wrote that the real blame should be on the “breakdown of the traditional American family” and “acceptance of recreational marijuana.”
“Why not place the blame where it belongs?” Keller asked before listing the issues she believes are to blame for mass shootings in the country:
"The breakdown of the traditional American family (thank you, transgender, homosexual marriage, and drag queen advocates); fatherlessness, a subject no one discuses [sic] or believes is relevant; the ignoring of violent video games; the relaxing of laws against criminals (open borders); the acceptance of recreational marijuana; failed school policies (hello parents who defend misbehaving students); disrespect to law enforcement (thank you, Obama); hatred of our veterans (thank you, professional athletes who hate our flag and National Anthem); the Dem Congress, many members whom are open anti-Semitic; the culture, which totally ignores the importance of God and the church (until they elect a President); state officeholders, who have no interest whatsoever in learning about our Constitution and the Second Amendement; [sic] and snowflakes, who can’t accept a duly-elected President.
Keller concluded the post, writing: “Did I forget anybody? The list is long. And the fury will continue.” The post is not visible to everyone on Facebook, but screenshots of Keller’s remarks have circulated on Twitter.
Keller announced in May that she is running for the state Senate in 2020.
I guess she didn't notice that most of these mass shootings are done by angry young straight white dudes. Or maybe she did and thought it was time to try and refocus everyone's ire on conservatives' perennial favorite whipping boys.
A federal judge said today he's considering removing the redactions from the Mueller report, citing inconsistencies between the report and statements made by Trump and Attorney General William Barr.
When the President week after week after week for 2 years gives people the message that they're under attack by rapists and criminals, increasingly people feel threatened and justified in hating the group "attacking" them. Among Trump's followers, expressing hatred and rage towards the groups Trump says are the enemies earns praise. It's a logical next step that committing the ultimate act of violence against those hated groups would make would-be terrorists willing and even eager to take that next and final step. This is the process of creating a terrorist.
Without the rhetoric from Trump and other prominent Republicans, without Fox News distorting the truth and amping up hatred, without Mitch McConnell and other Republicans silently looking the other way when asked to criticize obviously evil acts, without all these necessary acts occurring, the violence we've seen since Trump took office would not be what it has been. Every Republican in office is playing their part in creating white nationalist terrorists.
Trump has little “tells” — those moments when he goes off script. The president did so at the end of his remarks Monday, when he accidentally blessed the memory of “those who perished in Toledo” — even though the shootings were in Dayton and El Paso. (When the White House sent out an official transcript of his speech, they had simply crossed out “in Toledo” from the text).
The message that sends, O’Brien said, is “that he just doesn’t care enough, that he isn’t steeped in the details, that he wasn’t checking in over the weekend with his people, that he wasn’t making plans to go there, that he wasn’t in touch with the governor of Ohio and the mayor of Dayton.”
On Monday morning, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, a Democrat, said she had not received a call from the president but had heard he was planning a visit for Wednesday.
“And, you know,” she added, “he might be going to Toledo.”
the shooter in Ohio was a left-wing lunatic with TTF-type views
I'm sure we'll now see TTFers repent of their inflammatory language, the type of language that can stir and inspire these types
they have to do it
out of decency
A Twitter account belonging to Dayton mass shooter Connor Betts retweeted extreme left-wing and anti-police posts, as well as tweets supporting Antifa, or anti-fascist, protesters.
The most recent tweet on the @iamthespookster account was on August 3, the day of the shooting, when he retweeted a post saying, "Millenials have a message for the Joe Biden generation: hurry up and die."
The user's Twitter bio reads: "he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / I'm going to hell and I'm not coming back." One tweet used the hashtag #HailSatan.
Armed with a .223-caliber high-capacity rifle with 100-round drum magazines, Betts fired 41 shots in less than 30 seconds, killing his sister as well as eight seemingly random bystanders in the area, police said Monday. He was killed by police officers on patrol 30 seconds after he opened fire.
In the hours before the Dayton shooting, his Twitter account "liked" several tweets about a shooting in El Paso that left 22 dead, including one supporting gun control and others that called the El Paso shooting suspect a "terrorist," and a "white supremacist."
He also retweeted messages supporting Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as posts against ICE agents, including one that said, "these people are monsters," and multiple posts condemning police, and supporting Antifa protesters, who often use violent tactics.
meanwhile, protesters who share TTF views have surrounded the house of Mitch McConnell and are yelling death threats
apparently, like the high school student who dared to wear a MAGA hat in DC this winter, liberal TTF-type lunatics think McConnell has a "punchable face"
When a white supremacist gunman killed more than 20 people at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart on Saturday, he claimed a dubious honor for his cause: Right-wing terrorism is once again responsible for more deaths on U.S. soil (107) than jihadi terrorism (104) since 9/11, according to data collected by New America. (In fact, right-wing violence had been responsible for more deaths for most of this period, but jihadis had been responsible for more since the Pulse nightclub shooting of 2016.)
Patrick Crusius’ attack itself was especially bloody, the most lethal right-wing attack since Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people. But the El Paso killings were a continuation of a bloody series of attacks in recent years, including the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the 2015 attack on a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, which killed 11 and nine people, respectively. And such high-profile attacks are few compared with regular incidents of low-level harassment and violence against blacks, Jews, Muslims, and other minorities.
The rise in white supremacist violence, and the lower-than-anticipated levels of jihadi killing, does not accord with U.S. counterterrorism officials’ post-9/11 focus on jihad. This varied response explains the relative success of anti-jihadi efforts and the problems stopping right-wing violence.
But right-wing terrorism itself is changing. Part of it is 9/11 itself. The attacks highlighted fears of Muslims and gave far-right groups more credibility in their claims to be defending Christian civilization. Each jihadi attack, including highly publicized attacks abroad like the 2015 Paris killings by ISIS, bolstered their claim and created a cycle of recruitment and radicalization.
The rise of Trump both reflected the greater radicalization of right-wing voices and heightened it. Trump rode to power in part on anti-immigrant and racist sentiments. At the same time, he elevated these concerns, with a regular track record of racist statements and hostility to Mexicans and other immigrants. Many white supremacists embraced Trump. Radicalization expert J.M. Berger found that the top hashtag for the alt-right is #MAGA.
Much of what explains why right-wing terrorism is so deadly while jihad at home is less bloody than expected is because of the government response and that of other important actors. The FBI devotes far fewer resources to right-wing terrorism than it does jihadi terrorism, and programs for countering violence extremism also focus largely on jihadis. Most social media companies are aggressive in trying to get jihadis off their platforms. They are far more cautious, however, when it comes to white supremacists, fearing political backlash. Legally, federal counterterrorism officials have far more power to go after those associated with international terrorist groups than they do for domestic terrorist groups, no matter how lethal. However, as terrorism expert Clint Watts points out, there is far more political attention in Congress to black identity movements and the left-wing antifa—neither of which pose remotely the danger of white supremacists—because of their political orientation.
Giving the FBI more resources, passing new laws that target domestic terrorism, and otherwise stepping up the fight against white supremacist violence and other right-wing terrorism would have a dramatic impact, as many of the individuals and groups are not used to operating in a clandestine environment. Politically, instead of playing up racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, leaders could try to calm these roiled waters. Unfortunately, Trump has not changed his tune in response to past right-wing attacks, and there is little reason to expect a new course until a new administration comes to power.
A group of young men in “Team Mitch” campaign shirts supporting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at an annual political picnic in Kentucky were captured in a photo smiling as one of them pretended to strangle a cardboard cutout of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Social media accounts of some of the men identified by Twitter users were taken down — or shut down by Twitter for inappropriate postings — by Monday. But at least one Instagram account of a local Republican backer who also attended the picnic had it up late in the day. It was also later removed.
Ocasio-Cortez slammed back at the Senate majority leader after seeing the post, asking if McConnell is “paying for young men to practice groping & choking members of Congress w/ your payroll, or is this just the standard culture of #TeamMitch?”
Some of the same men also appeared in a photo on the official “Team Mitch” Instagram account for the Fancy Farm picnic, holding aloft cutout faces of Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.
The photo was the second controversial image to come out of Team Mitch’s participation at the Fancy Farm picnic. Another photo showed cardboard gravestones, including one with the name of the Kentucky senator’s Democratic challenger in 2020, Amy McGrath. The campaign tweeted the image under the headline: “The Grim Reaper of Socialism.”
"I'm sure we'll now see TTFers repent of their inflammatory language, the type of language that can stir and inspire these types
they have to do it
out of decency"
I'm sure we'll see it right after conservatives repent of their inflammatory language, and for electing Rump to the presidency.
The shootings in Texas and Ohio that killed at least 31 people over the weekend left authorities searching for how to confront the challenges posed by mass violence and domestic terrorism, especially attacks driven by white-nationalist ideologies.
Violence committed by white men inspired by an extremist ideology make up a growing number of domestic terrorism cases, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Of about 850 current domestic terrorism cases, 40% involve racially motivated violent extremism and a majority of those cases involve white supremacists, the FBI said.
Saturday’s attack in majority-Hispanic El Paso, Texas, which left at least 22 people dead, was allegedly committed by a 21-year-old white man who was believed to have posted a manifesto of sorts that espoused anti-immigrant and white-nationalist ideology on a popular far-right website not long before the shooting.
Assailants in other recent attacks, including at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., also espoused white-nationalist beliefs.
“We are most concerned about lone offenders, primarily using firearms, as these lone offenders represent the dominant trend for lethal domestic terrorists,” Michael McGarrity, the FBI’s top counterterrorism official, recently told lawmakers. “Frequently, these individuals act without a clear group affiliation or guidance, making them challenging to identify, investigate and disrupt.”
As of Sunday night, the motive of the Dayton, Ohio, shooter, who killed nine and injured 27, was unclear, authorities said. The man was shot dead by police.
Preventing—and understanding—such crimes has been vexing for federal law-enforcement officials, who in recent years had been more focused on the threat posed by radical Islam and homegrown terrorists who pledge fealty to Islamic State. But now, Mr. McGarrity said, that approach is changing as domestic-terrorism-related arrests and killings have surpassed those involving Islamic extremism in recent years.
The young white men who have largely perpetrated the recent shootings typically aren’t on law enforcement’s radar or part of any larger organized enterprise, experts said. The ideology they often claim adherence to appears on shadowy websites like 8chan, which describes itself as “The darkest reaches of the internet.”
...In an interview, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who left the Trump administration in May, said fighting racist ideologies is a job for both law enforcement and politicians. Mr. Trump, he said, can play a role by personally condemning white nationalism.
Mr. Rosenstein, who in a tweet Saturday noted an urgent need to combat white terrorism, said the president “can deter it by making clear that he does not approve, just as he does for Islamic terrorist ideologies. The lesson of 9/11 is that the government should focus on deterring future attacks and not just condemning past killers.”
In the past, Mr. Trump at times appeared to be equivocal about such groups. After white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., clashed with counterprotesters in 2017, leading to a woman’s death, the president said there were “very fine people, on both sides.”
The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Replacement#United_States
Nice attempt at your own great replacement, troll, but it's right wing white supremacy suppporters' crimes that are on the rise these days.
The acting president read a statement from a teleprompter on Monday condemning the weekend mass shootings in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH. Clearly, he was coerced to make it. Clearly, he did not write it:
"In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul."
Donald Trump did not say he personally condemned those sentiments and racist ideology, only that "the nation" should. He blamed the Internet and video games for the body count rather than the racism, bigotry, and white supremacy he cited moments earlier (and that the alleged El Paso shooter cited for his actions). Trump blamed mental illness for the slaughter and would not address the ready availability of weapons in the U.S. and its gun culture. As if to punctuate his own disconnect from victims, Trump managed in the end to misidentify the affected Ohio city as Toledo.
His leadership in crisis was tested. He failed.
And the GOP fully supports this failed leader.
"the shooter in Ohio was a left-wing lunatic with TTF-type views"
Oh yeah?
Prove it.
Show us where Connor Betts expressed his support for medically accurate comprehensive sex education.
COLUMBUS - Ohio Republican Party leader Jane Timken has called on Ohio state Rep. Candice Keller to resign from her seat after the lawmaker's "shocking" comments about Sunday's mass shooting in Dayton.
Keller, a Republican from Middletown, Ohio, posted on Facebook on Sunday comments that blamed "drag queen advocates," the Democratic Congress, former President Barack Obama, violent video games and the hatred of veterans for the deaths of nine people and the shooter in Dayton early Sunday.
Her comments drew the ire of Republicans and Democrats alike. And on Monday afternoon, Timken called for Keller's resignation.
“While our nation was in utter shock over the acts of violence in El Paso and Dayton, Republican State Representative Candice Keller took to social media to state why she thought these acts were happening," Timken said in a statement. "Candice Keller’s Facebook post was shocking and utterly unjustifiable. Our nation is reeling from these senseless acts of violence and public servants should be working to bring our communities together, not promoting divisiveness.”
Keller, who lives about 25 miles from Dayton, is running for an Ohio Senate seat currently held Sen. Bill Coley, who is term-limited. Her GOP challengers include Rep. George Lang and West Chester Township Trustee Lee Wong.
Timken has not spoken with Keller personally about the GOP leader's decision to ask for Keller's resignation, Ohio Republican Party spokesman Evan Machan said.
Keller responded to Timken's call with a statement: "Establishment moderates have never been fans of mine because I ran against their endorsement and won. As the only conservative in this race, I will be taking my Senate campaign to the voters to decide."
Timken's request was unusual for the chairwoman, who often avoids publicity and rarely gets in the middle of political fights. This is the first time Timken has called on an Ohio official to resign since she was chosen to lead the party in January 2017.
When former Rep. Wes Retherford, R-Hamilton, was arrested after he had passed out at a McDonald's drive-thru, Timken offered a cautious statement: "If these allegations are true, Representative Retherford should resign from office.”
Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones also called for Keller to resign on Monday.
"It’s very embarrassing. She doesn’t represent the people in her community with those comments," Jones told The Enquirer. "She’s made a laughingstock out of Butler County, which is a shame."
It's about time GOPers start to know right from wrong.
A former girlfriend of Connor Betts, the man who went on a shooting rampage outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, said a number of warning signs led her to break up with the 24-year-old.
Caitlyn “Adelia” Johnson, 24, and Betts briefly dated this spring, NBC reported. She told The (Toledo) Blade the two met in their psychology class at Sinclair Community College. They bonded over their struggles with mental illness; Johnson said she has depression and anxiety, and Betts told her he was bipolar and had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
At first, Johnson found Betts "kind of charming" and intelligent, The Blade reported. She said he was outgoing and willing to start a conversation with any stranger. Johnson soon learned he had a dark side.
Johnson said Betts showed her footage of a mass shooting on their very first date. In texts released to The Blade, Betts showed off his knowledge of similar acts of violence.
“Do you know tragedies from every city?” Ms. Johnson asked him in the text.
“A fair bit of them! :D [smiley face],” he responded.
Johnson also recalled Betts taking her to a gun range where they used rifles. She said she noticed another red flag when he took her to deliver a threatening letter to the house of his ex-girlfriend. According to The Blade, when Johnson broke up with Betts she asked a friend if she could stay over because she was "scared that he might try to hurt me or stalk me.”
One of Betts' victims was his sister, 22-year-old Megan Betts. Johnson told The Blade as far as she knew, he liked his sister. She said he never spoke negatively about Megan. But he did have issues with his parents, Johnson said.
In a video interview with NBC, Johnson said Betts' actions didn't have any sort of racial or religious motive. She said the shooting was probably a result of his mental illness and a lack of treatment.
"People go every day being perfectly fine with having a mental illness, me included, and he just got the short end of the stick,'' she said. "No support system."
More details about Betts have come to light as people who knew him share their recollections and observations of his behavior. Here's what we know:
-Former classmates said Betts was suspended from Bellbrook high school for compiling a "hit list" of those he wanted to kill and a "rape list" of those he wanted to rape. The hit list was found written in a school bathroom.
-A classmate who starred in a senior year theater production with Betts said he repeatedly threatened to kill her.
-Betts was the lead singer of a band called "The Menstrual Munchies," according to Buzzfeed News. The band was "pornogrind," a type of music defined by lyrics of sexual violence.
-According to his LinkedIn profile, Betts worked briefly at Chipotle Mexican Grill and at a gas station in Centerville, Ohio.
-A Twitter account appearing to be Betts' has tweets labeling himself as a "leftist" and a supporter of presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, The Associated Press reported. Police have not confirmed the account, with the handle @iamthespookster, is linked to Betts.
"“While our nation was in utter shock over the acts of violence in El Paso and Dayton, Republican State Representative Candice Keller took to social media to state why she thought these acts were happening," Timken said in a statement. "Candice Keller’s Facebook post was shocking and utterly unjustifiable. Our nation is reeling from these senseless acts of violence and public servants should be working to bring our communities together, not promoting divisiveness.”"
why is this person not calling for the resignations of all the Democrats who blame the Texas shooting on Donald Trump?
indeed, Dems are in a rage because the NY Times had a headline paraphrasing Trump calling for national unity against racism
it's always obvious that Dems like racial tension and divisiveness
they feel like it's a big political plus for them
there's nothing Trump can do because Dems and their media allies want Trump to be a racist
and they will say and do anything to make it seem so
until November 2020, when America summarily rejects the leftist agenda, divisiveness will persist
"Show us where Connor Betts expressed his support for medically accurate comprehensive sex education."
this is one of the funniest thing I've read here
this TTFer wants us to believe that "medically accurate comprehensive sex education" is what TTF is about
in truth, virtually all TTFers here share a common set of views that is anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-freedom, ant-opportunity, and simply unconstitutional
and Connor Betts also held these views
Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines’ new resolution – S. Res. 289, “expressing the sense of the Senate that socialism poses a significant threat to freedom, liberty, and economic prosperity” – takes three pages of text to say what can essentially be said in four words: “Stop socialism. Choose freedom.”
Don’t get me wrong – Daines is to be commended for his resolution. It has gotten so bad recently that it seems necessary to put the United States Senate on record declaring that “Marxism and socialism are failed ideologies” that “pose a significant threat to the freedom, liberty, and economic prosperity of all countries and peoples around the world”; and that, because such a belief system “inevitably ends in misery and suffering … the United States should never be a socialist country.”
It would be helpful, certainly, to have each of our 100 senators cast a vote on Daines’ measure, to declare publicly whether they agree with that sentiment. Let each of us see who believes socialism is a threat to liberty, and who does not. While we’re at it, I’d love to see the House vote on the same measure, too, so the American electorate can have more information at hand next year when making their choices in the voting booth.
And just why, exactly, does Daines feel a need to have the Senate affirm what every well-read American already knows? Because, apparently, there are a lot fewer well-read Americans than we once thought, and the mainstream news media would like us to believe they’re banding together to demand silly (and expensive, and freedom-robbing) things like the Green New Deal, “Medicare for All,” cancellation of student loan debt, free college for all, decriminalization of illegal border-crossing, and various and sundry other items from a laundry list of left-wing policy proposals – in other words, the 2020 Democrat agenda.
Reading the text of the Daines resolution, one will subconsciously nod along. Yes, of course, history has demonstrated time and again that Marxism and socialism have failed everywhere they’ve been implemented; yes, of course, socialism poses a significant threat to freedom, liberty, and economic prosperity; yes, of course, socialism inevitably leads to misery and suffering; yes, of course, the United States should never be a socialist country.
That anyone would, or could, oppose such common-sense thinking in 2019 is remarkable. Didn’t the world spend the bulk of the 20th century learning, at the cost of tens of millions of lives, that Marxism and socialism don’t work? Didn’t we see the examples of the Soviet Union, and Cambodia, and Cuba, and Nicaragua, and a dozen other Third World nations?
Years ago, Bill Bennett explained what he called the “open gates” test. What would happen, he asked, if you lifted all border controls, all over the world, and let every person on the planet move to wherever he or she wanted to live? What countries would people leave, and what countries would they go to? The answer was obvious – by and large, they’d leave the socialist countries and head to capitalist Western Europe and the United States.
The truth of the Bennett “open gates” test is so obvious that if I did not know better, I would think the Daines resolution is irrelevant and unnecessary. Yet, according to the polling industry’s best practitioners, too many of our fellow citizens out there – tens of millions, in fact – seem to have been seduced by the siren call of socialism.
In a new Fox News poll, for instance, more than half the Democrat primary voters surveyed – 54%, to be exact – say that the U.S. moving away from capitalism and more toward socialism would be a “good thing,” while just 33% of Democrat primary voters say it would be a “bad thing.”
A May Gallup poll showed that 43% of Americans believe “some form of socialism would be a good thing for the country as a whole.” And an August 2018 Gallup survey revealed that Democratic survey-responders had a more positive view of socialism than they did of capitalism.
Let’s call this what it is – a knowledge problem. Far too many of our fellow citizens simply do not have the proper knowledge of world events to know what history has demonstrated conclusively: that socialism is a failed system leading to the loss of liberty and the imposition of misery. Given that multiple generations of our citizenry have now been taught by leftist instructors and influenced by left-wing media and culture, this shouldn’t be surprising.
Fixing a problem first requires acknowledging that the problem exists. Before we can go about fixing this particular knowledge problem, we need to know who among our leaders are problems themselves. In the Senate, that requires a vote on the Daines resolution.
President Trump has directed the FBI to give priority to domestic terrorism cases, Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday, vowing “justice will be swift and certain” in the El Paso, Texas, shooting case.
Mr. Pence said the orders from Mr. Trump to the FBI are to use “all legal means available to disrupt hate crimes and to prevent domestic terrorism before it occurs.”
Speaking to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian religious freedom advocacy group, Mr. Pence echoed the president’s comments a day earlier calling for the country to condemn white supremacy, which appears to have been a motive in the Texas massacre.
“As the president also said, now is the time to set destructive partisanship aside,” Mr. Pence said. “Now is the time to overcome evil with good.”
White supremacy is a problem. It has been a problem as long as the United States has existed. The irrational belief that white people, or people of European descent, or however you want to refer to them, are somehow to superior to others is vile. It is a worldview that should be fought, pushed back against, and vilified. But it is not some kind of new crisis that requires us to become less free in order to oppose it.
As has been highlighted during the Democratic primary, within the lifetime of many today, there were U.S. senators who actively and publicly supported segregation and were friend with Joe Biden. Groups like the Klu Klux Klan not only operated openly, but also often had the tacit support of law enforcement and Democrats. In those days, white supremacy was not a fringe movement animated by lone wolf gunmen, but a coordinated effort to keep power in the hands of white people.
We don’t live in that world anymore. That is not to say that American society has perfected itself or that racism no longer exists, but it is to say that lunatics like the El Paso shooter with his mindless and bizarre, racist, and eco-fascist manifesto do not represent any rising mass threat. In fact, the increasingly violent and malevolent actions of these kinds of people suggest just the opposite: they are losing badly and they know it.
Thus the fight against white supremacism has morphed from attacking its genuine manifestations to using false accusations of it against political opponents. This was again vividly illustrated yesterday when a raft of Democrats attacked The New York Times for a headline reading “Trump Urges Unity Against Racism.” The president can literally denounce white supremacist racism and have that used as an occasion to call him a white supremacist racist. You can’t make this stuff up. This kind of one-sided politicization of what should be a bipartisan concern destroys the credibility of leaders on the left who claim to care about ending white supremacy, which ultimately undermines that cause.
In the wake of the El Paso and Dayton, Ohio shootings, the latter somewhat less famously having been committed by someone calling himself a “leftist,” we are hearing calls to change laws to allow law enforcement to more aggressively fight white supremacist terrorism. Why, the argument goes, should association with a foreign terror group like ISIS be a criminal activity, when associating with white supremacists is not?
The answer can essentially be boiled down to one word, which is freedom. Associating with a foreign terrorist organization is essentially an act of treason. Being a white supremacist jerk, even a potentially violent one, is not. The difference really hinges on the foreign aspect. Foreign-based ISIS organizations do not have a constitutional right to form and operate within the United States. White supremacists do.
And if we think we are only talking about leftists targeting conservatives with overreach in combating the menace of white supremacy, let’s take a moment to consider Antifa. There are those on the right who believe that this “anti fascist” organization, itself no stranger to violence and murder, should be labeled terrorists and subject to enhanced law enforcement. This is equally wrongheaded.
Just like white supremacists, Antifa is a loosely organized group of unhinged head cases that use the Internet as a hiding ground to foment all manner of awfulness. Just like white supremacists, they are wrong about pretty much everything. And just like white supremacists, they have every right to congregate, assemble, publish, and make trouble.
It was Benjamin Franklin, a different kind of troublemaker, who wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” He was right back then, at a time when many think pernicious attitudes and actions were vastly more pervasive than they are now, and he’s still right.
Should we fight with all the vim and vigor we can muster to stop white supremacy? Of course. Should we stop fueling it by erroneously pretending that our demographic identities somehow demonstrate who we are? Yes. Should we suffer less liberty in an effort to protect ourselves from dangerous fools radicalized on Internet sites? No, never.
Mass shootings are a uniquely American problem. They are unique to our nation because, for better or worse, we value freedom over safety. We are very strange in this respect. Even conservatives in the rest of the English-speaking world find our love of liberty vexing and out of step. That may be so. But we are also the only English-speaking country with a majority white citizenry on the face of the earth that has ever elected a non-white person as president or prime minister.
The point here is that yes, white supremacy is a problem, it’s a scourge, it is a disgraceful stain on the country. But it isn’t a crisis. Mass shootings might be, but even they are fairly rare. Most Americans don’t walk around in fear of them. And they come in all kinds of demented flavors. The United States is not a white supremacist country, it does not have a white supremacist president, and the vast majority of her citizens are not white supremacists.
Ours is not a nation that bends to the arc of history, ours is a nation that bends the arc of history. We are not shuffling towards white supremacy; quite the opposite. We are still in the process of creating the most free and equal society that the world has ever known. Let’s stay the course, and not let mad men lead us astray.
Young Americans are starting to think socialism is a good idea because the right has gone so far out of their way to facilitate corporate greed that crony capitalism has overgrown what used to be a healthy capitalist economy.
The conservative right has gone out of its way to destroy unions, minimum wages, and safety nets that used to keep corporate greed in check. Back in the day, one man good feed his wife and children on a blue collar job, and have a decent pension. His wife stayed home to raise the kids.
That disappeared decades ago, along with th unions. People used to be able to "get by" on a minimum wage job, but in real dollar terms, that is just a fraction of what it used to be. It's no wonder kids go into the business of selling drugs - it's a far better income than working 3 or 4 minimum wage jobs and picking up half your meals from a food pantry.
When Wall Street blew up the home mortgage market, it was Wall Street that got billions of dollars first, and much of it went to companies overseas.
Homeowners were left with some table scraps while Wall Street brokers got multi-million dollar bonuses. That isn't capitalism. In capitalism, companies that fail go out of business and get replaced by ones that do better jobs.
But Wall Street and Big Corporations own our government now, and we live in a plutocracy. Conservatives are still under the delusion that this is capitalism, but the unending corporate welfare shows otherwise.
When conservatives can bring back a capitalism that works for most of the country, no none will be thinking socialism is a good idea.
“Evil goes back to the beginning of time. There have been evil people in every single government. This is what
happens when you have someone who doesn’t fear the Lord, who doesn’t
fear God. Who doesn’t, as Mike Huckabee was saying, who doesn’t value
human life.” – Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt.
The devout christians I've asked say its perfectly fine for their god to kill innocent people in a global flood because god owns his creation and is infinitely good therefore he can do whatever he wants with his humans, even destroy the innocent.
The devout christians I've talked to say their highest priority is god, humans are secondary to god.
It's pretty clear to me that its typical right wing christians like Mike Huckabee and Ainsley Earhardt who place little value on human life.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "heterosexuality needs to be encouraged, homosexuality discouraged: you know why?"
I asked you "Why?" in the previous thread, how about you answer this time:
Why should heterosexuality be encouraged and promoted when the human population explosion is eating us out of house and home and is the ultimate cause of Global Climate Warming?
Seems more like homosexuality should be encouraged more and heterosexuality reined in, doesn't it?
Dishonest Republicans like Wyatt and Regina try to create the false impression that socialism is unconditionally a bad thing.
The truth is that Americans love their socialism and wouldn't have it any other way:
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the national highway network, police and first responders, it goes on and on. Americans aren't willing to give up any of that socialism, they love it!
Wyatt/Regina are trying to deceive TTF readers into thinking socialism is an all or nothing thing. The truth is that no government is completely socialist or completely capitalist - neither extreme works very well.
Western democracies,including the United States, have governments that are a mix of socialist and capitalist features - history shows a blend is what always works best.
When multi-billionaires like Jeff Bezos pay zero income tax in return for creating tens of thousands of low paying slave like jobs where people are hounded by technology to exhaustion, aren't allowed bathroom breaks...
You get the picture. Clearly American capitalism is broken when six Americans have as much wealth as the least wealthy half of the population does. No one is asking for anything crazy, just have the ultra-wealthy pay some income tax, for god's sake, at least half the percentage that your average teacher pays.
Wyatt/Regina:
All things in moderation, including heterosexuality.
A homicidal idiot with an axe kills far fewer people than one with, for example, an assault rifle
Both the Dayton and El Paso shooters but their guns legally. If they hadn't been able to buy them legally, they may not have been able to get a gun at all.
No matter how you consider it, one thing is obvious - fewer legal guns means fewer mass shootings.
Mass shootings greatly escalated after Republicans let Clinton's assault weapons ban expire.
Heartless Wyatt/Regina say "Do nothing,just accept it."
No healthy society looks the other way when hate crimes increase year after year as they have ever since Trump accused Mexicans of being rapists and killers. Oh and some might be good people - but Trump isn't sure about that.
Former Pastor Behind “Purity” Movement Renounces Christianity, Leaves Wife, Marches In LGBT Pride Parade
The Christian Post reports:
Former pastor and evangelical author Joshua Harris demonstrated his support for the LGBT community by marching in Vancouver’s annual Pride Parade less than a month after announcing he no longer considers himself a Christian.
On August 4, Harris, former pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, shared several Instagram photos of himself participating in the British Columbia parade, engaging in Pride festivities, and “swapping stories” with LGBT activists.
Harris’ participation in Vancouver’s Pride Parade comes after he announced that he and his wife Shannon are separating, he no longer considers himself a Christian, and he regrets having taught that marriage is a union only between a man and a woman. Harris denounced his 1997 bestseller I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which discouraged dating and influenced the purity movement.
Harris’ “apostasy and betrayal” has dominated headlines on Christian media for weeks.
Vigilante fractures 13-year-old boy's skull for wearing hat during national anthem and the judge released the vigilante on his own recognizance -- yes the vigilante is white.
SUPERIOR, Mont. (WFLA/CNN) – A Montana man is accused of assaulting a teenage boy during the national anthem at the Mineral County Fairgrounds this weekend.
Witnesses told deputies the suspect grabbed, picked up and slammed the boy on the ground apparently because he did not remove his hat during the national anthem.
Within minutes after dropping her son off at the fairgrounds, Megan Keeler says she received a phone call stating her son was on his way to the hospital.
“Dude come up and grabbed him by his neck, picked him up and threw him to the ground head first,” Keeler said.
The suspect, Curt Brockway, is accused of assaulting the 13-year-old.
Witnesses say Brockway tried to justify his actions because the boy was disrespecting the flag by not removing his hat during the national anthem.
“All the witnesses I have talked to said this was completely random,” Keeler said. “There was no exchange – nothing! He targeted Wally and took him down,” she added.
The boy was flown to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane after receiving temporal skull fractures.
Keeler says the child was bleeding from his ear for nearly six hours after the incident.
He’s since been released from the hospital and is back home where he will continue healing.
As for Brockway, he was arrested and made his initial court appearance on Monday. The state requested that Brockway’s bond be set to $100,000, but a judge ruled that Brockway can be released on his own recognizance.
Video at: https://www.wtrf.com/top-stories/man-fractures-13-year-old-boys-skull-for-wearing-hat-during-national-anthem/
"Young Americans are starting to think socialism is a good idea because the right has gone so far out of their way to facilitate corporate greed that crony capitalism has overgrown what used to be a healthy capitalist economy."
low inflation
low interest rates
low unemployment, especially among minorities
we have the healthiest economy in the world right now
the leftist public education system has indoctrinated kids as has the propagandistic leftist media
"The conservative right has gone out of its way to destroy unions,"
their greed sunk them, not conservatives
"minimum wages,"
reduces oppportunity
"and safety nets that used to keep corporate greed in check."
safety nets exist and none were ever designed "to keep corporate greed in check"
what are you babbling about?
"Back in the day, one man good feed his wife and children on a blue collar job,"
well, Trump is the only politician to address blue collar workers' concerns
one of the key reasons he won
"and have a decent pension. His wife stayed home to raise the kids."
progressives pushed women to go to work
the flood of labor screwed up the economy for years
"That disappeared decades ago, along with th unions. People used to be able to "get by" on a minimum wage job, but in real dollar terms, that is just a fraction of what it used to be."
Dems gave up on the manufacturing sector
Obama said those jobs were never coming back
Trump has started to repair the damage from this fallacious thinking but minimum wage is meaningless if you don't have a job
"It's no wonder kids go into the business of selling drugs"
are there a lot of kids doing that?
"- it's a far better income than working 3 or 4 minimum wage jobs and picking up half your meals from a food pantry."
no one, even socialist Bern, is proposing quadrupling the minimum wage
this type of disingenuous hyperbole convinces no one
"When Wall Street blew up the home mortgage market, it was Wall Street that got billions of dollars first, and much of it went to companies overseas."
you can thank Obama and Hillary for that
"Homeowners were left with some table scraps while Wall Street brokers got multi-million dollar bonuses. That isn't capitalism. In capitalism, companies that fail go out of business and get replaced by ones that do better jobs."
you can thank Obama and Hillary for that
"But Wall Street and Big Corporations own our government now, and we live in a plutocracy."
a bunch of crap
"Wall Street and Big Corporations" opposed Trump's election
"Conservatives are still under the delusion that this is capitalism, but the unending corporate welfare shows otherwise."
government gives corporations tax breaks as a way to control their behavior
it's not welfare
"When conservatives can bring back a capitalism that works for most of the country, no none will be thinking socialism is a good idea."
most of the country likes ow Trump is managing the economy
unless Dems can find another issue, they'll never win
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "government gives corporations tax breaks as a way to control their behavior it's not welfare"
When the richest corporations in the world pay no income tax whatsoever, its not a tax break, it is corporate welfare.
Corporations like Amazon transfer all the wealth created by the historic productivity of American workers to a few at the top who do essentially nothing. The government and the people provide roads, computer infrastructure, schools and everything major corporations need to succeed and corporations give back nothing in return to the people who create all the wealth for the corporations.
Its time to stop corporate welfare and see that the top 1% pay at least half the rate of income tax as your typical school teacher does instead of ZERO.
Presidential elections are won on the shoulders of a strong economy, which is why the voters are certain to reject the Democrat Party’s ongoing effort to promote radical economic change.
Out of all the Democrats running for president in 2020, none are acknowledging the significance of President Trump’s accomplishments on the daily lives of American families. Their push for dramatic changes to key pocketbook issues, including health care, taxes, and regulations, ignore a simple yet crucial political reality: American taxpayers are winning again.
The U.S. unemployment rate, for instance, is currently hovering near a 50-year low, after dropping by an entire percentage point since the president’s inauguration. More importantly, the ongoing economic resurgence is making the American Dream more accessible than ever before.
The U.S. economy has already added more than 6 million new jobs in just 2 ½ years, and employee compensation and savings are skyrocketing -- clear indications that working Americans are experiencing the benefits of this booming economy.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, the American people are well aware of the tremendous economic progress this country has made under President Trump’s leadership, and they expect the good times to keep on rolling.
A recent poll from the Pew Research Center found that a whopping 71% of Americans “expect their personal finances to improve” over the course of the next year, while only 15% expect their finances to get worse. The lopsided result reveals a remarkable degree of confidence that this president’s pro-growth policies and “America First” trade agenda are responsible for our ongoing economic success, and that’s devastating news for the Democrats.
In order to have any chance at all against Donald Trump in the next presidential election, the Democrats will have to convince millions of voters that the ongoing economic renaissance isn’t real, which is only possible by brazenly lying to voters.
The Democrats know it’s a tall order to deceive people about their own bank accounts, though, so they’re also trying to create the false impression that there are huge numbers of people in desperate need of one of their signature, multitrillion-dollar wealth redistribution schemes – including a complete government takeover of health care, hyper regulation of America’s energy sector, and dramatic middle-class tax increases.
So far, and despite their best efforts, the Democrats aren’t fooling anyone but themselves. The Pew poll found that a solid majority of Americans – 55% -- rate the current state of the nation’s economy as “good” or “excellent.” That’s 17% higher than it was under President Obama at a similar time in his presidency.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "heterosexuality needs to be encouraged, homosexuality discouraged: you know why?"
I asked you "Why?" in the previous thread and again in this one - still waiting for your answer. Its pretty clear you don't have one, even though you claim to.
Wyatt/Regina are the typical internet troll who when asked to explain themselves try to evade honest debate by haughtily exclaiming "I've explained it elsewhere!"
The most devastating numbers to the prospects of Democratic presidential candidates, however, come from Americans crediting President Trump with the strong economy: 21% more of the respondents believe that his policies have made the economy better rather than worse. Again, at a similar time in his presidency, President Obama’s numbers were underwater with only 27% believing Obama’s policies were making the economy better, while 34% saw his policies making it worse.
Remember, President Trump’s 2016 movement was built upon the forgotten Americans who were tired of being treated like second-class citizens in their own country. They were tired of political correctness, tired of their professions being looked down upon, and tired of watching their dreams be outsourced to faraway countries.
“America First” wasn’t just a campaign slogan, it was a real policy agenda that is already being realized. The result has been that those forgotten Americans are seeing their wages grow, their dreams and the dreams of their children are now within reach, and, thanks to the president, they feel like they are finally being represented.
But it’s not just middle-class white America that is benefiting — which is the narrative coming out of race-baiting Democrats and their allies in the media. The Trump economy is lifting up all Americans.
From the steel and coal workers in the Rust Belt to young people, single mothers, and minorities in urban cities, "America First" means every American first. And this election is about each and every one of those people who are experiencing this great American awakening first hand. It’s about me and it’s about you. It’s about our children.
Americans can clearly see that the Trump economy is working for them and that the American Dream is back. So, why would voters ever elect a Democrat who is pledging to steal it away?
The earth's resources are finite, it cannot support a human population that never stops growing.
If we don't get to zero population growth there will be a sudden and massive shortage of food, clean water that will result in billions of climate refugees, war, and mass starvation that will destroy most, if not all of humanity.
Its a hard, immovable fact - earth cannot sustain an infinite number of people. We ignore that reality at our own peril.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "“America First” wasn’t just a campaign slogan, it was a real policy agenda."
"America First" was the slogan of politicians after the second World War started who wanted to leave Europe and Britain to the Nazis. Its now the slogan of a Trump administration which seeks to destroy NATO and all American allies and allow Putin to take over the world.
"the leftist public education system has indoctrinated kids as has the propagandistic leftist media"
Right-wing propaganda has filled you with short, easy-to-remember, convenient talking point suitable for people short attention spans and no analytical skills.
More and more of the US workers' productivity gains are being funnelled to the investor class, and Trump is only increasing that inequality, and the debt they and their children will have to pay for, as Republican borrow and spend policies drive us further into debt.
Workers are slowly starting to figure out that Republican economic policies are making corporations and their owners richer while leaving them with ever more pitiful wages. Trump is doing nothing to address that - they see corporations getting tax breaks in the billions of dollars, often paying little or no taxes while there own paychecks see laughably tiny increases - and then conservatives wonder why socialism is starting to look like a viable option to some of these workers.
Just look at all those jobs in the coal industry that Trump brought back!
US coal mining jobs: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES1021210001
Dec 2016 50,600
Jul 2019 (preliminary) 52,100
Wow, 1500 hundred jobs in 2.5 years! That's AMAZING! Trump kept his promise on bringing back coal!
Pardon me if I'm not that impressed, outside of the fact that Rump didn't destroy it, like he did his casinos and airline businesses.
"you can thank Obama and Hillary for that"
A lot of us thank Obama for bringing the US out Bush's Great Recession, in spite of Republican efforts to keep us there with "sequestration," and both B & H for not inserting ourselves into another expensive never-ending war.
"Wall Street and Big Corporations" opposed Trump's election"
Of course they did - Rump has a record of failing business and defaulting on business loans.
From: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/as-a-businessman-trump-was-the-biggest-loser-of-all
"Last October, the New York Times published a monumental exposé of how Donald Trump and other members of the Trump family engaged in sham financial schemes during the nineteen-nineties, including what the newspaper described as “instances of outright fraud,” to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on the real-estate fortune that Fred Trump passed on to his children. Last month, the three reporters who wrote the story—David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner—were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting.
On Tuesday evening, the Times dropped another story that delved into the President’s financial past. Written by Buettner and Craig, and based upon “printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service transcripts” that the reporters obtained, the story further undermined the assiduously promoted fiction that Trump, before he became a reality-television star and entered politics, was a highly successful self-made businessman. He was anything but.
Between 1985 and 1994, the Times story says, Trump’s core businesses lost money every single year, and the accumulated losses came to more than a billion dollars. “In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, the Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners,” Buettner and Craig write. “His core business losses in 1990 and 1991—more than $250 million each year—were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.”
In case you didn’t take all that in, here is a quick recap: when Trump was portraying himself as a newly minted billionaire and financial genius, his core businesses were losing money hand over fist. Assuming the Times reporters’ analysis of the I.R.S. data on high earners is accurate—and there is no apparent reason to doubt it—he was the biggest loser in the country for two years in a row.
Trump was able to fool a bunch voters in sparsely populated rural states that he was some kind of business wunderkind, but folks in New York new better.
"Workers are slowly starting to figure out that Republican economic policies are making corporations and their owners richer while leaving them with ever more pitiful wages."
must be reeeaaal slow
because pollsters haven't noticed
here in America, we worry about how we're doing not begrudging the success of others
try France, they love resentment
"Wow, 1500 hundred jobs in 2.5 years! That's AMAZING! Trump kept his promise on bringing back coal!"
since the Dem alternative is to shut down the coal industry, you can see why Trump's support is unassailable in coal country
U.S. stocks seesaw as trade fears spark overseas rate cuts; Dow off 300 points after plunging nearly twice that
U.S. stocks plunged deep into negative territory Wednesday, signaling another day of volatility on Wall Street as investors absorbed a spate of overseas interest rate cuts amid ongoing uncertainty over the U.S.-China trade war.
Central banks in India, Thailand and New Zealand announced greater-than-expected rate cuts Wednesday, following signals from the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve toward monetary easing as policymakers around the globe try to mitigate the fallout from the trade war, which has bogged down two of the world’s most powerful economic engines and is threatening to stall global growth.
The Dow Jones industrial average nose-dived nearly 550 points before tapering back to a 300-point decline after the Asian Pacific central banks announced their rate cuts. The Standard & Poor’s 500 hit a two-month low before clawing back to about a 1 percent drop an hour into trading. The tech-heavy Nasdaq was down 0.5 percent in the morning.
Utilities and real estate were the only two of the 11 stock market sectors that had inched into the positive column. Financial services, energy and technology were hit the worst. Oil prices have been taking a beating in recent days because of a global oversupply amid a slowing world economy.
The stock losses collided with worries about the downturn in the closely watched 10-year Treasury yield, which has fallen to its lowest level since October 2016 as investors flee to safe harbors like bonds and gold to dodge volatility from the trade war...
The narrowing of the yield curve, which is the flattest it has been since 2007, could also signal a coming recession...
Not since 2007, just before the Great Bush Recession!
Woo hoo! Good times ahead!
Good anonymous said "Workers are slowly starting to figure out that Republican economic policies are making corporations and their owners richer while leaving them with ever more pitiful wages."
"must be reeeaaal slow because pollsters haven't noticed"
Oh, they've they've figured it out all right. Since Trump's brief (and unimpressive) honeymoon, his job approval rating has never been above 43%.
Trump's disapproval rating has spent as much time above 50% - after just two and a half years, as all the other 11 polling-era presidents did in their first four years combined.
"here in America, we worry about how we're doing not begrudging the success of others"
The "success" of America's richest man Jeff Bezos is built upon the incredible productivity of the American worker which has increased several fold in recent times while wages have stagnated all the way through the decades including Trump. And Bezos shares none of the wealth he created with the workers who create it day after day.
Its the lowly workers of America who have made all the wealth for billionaires like Bezos who pay no income tax at all and instead of sharing a reasonable amount with the workers who created it, he regulates their work with computers forcing them to work at a damaging pace without bathroom breaks.
All Americans are asking is that Bezos pay at least half of the rate of income tax that his lowly workers do - if you think that's too much to ask, you're evil.
As President Donald Trump travels Wednesday to El Paso, Texas, former Vice President Joe Biden will draw a direct link between his inflammatory rhetoric on immigration and Saturday’s mass shooting in the border city, saying the president has “aligned himself with the darkest forces in the nation.”
“How far is it from Trump’s saying this ‘is an invasion’ to the shooter in El Paso declaring ‘his attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas? Not far at all,” Biden, who leads the 2020 Democratic presidential field in the polls, will say at a campaign event in eastern Iowa this afternoon, according to excerpts of his remarks provided by the campaign.
“In both clear language and in code, the president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation.”
Biden beats Trump in the polls by double digits because Americans long for the stability, prosperity, and honesty of the Obama presidency.
One Of Trump’s First Actions Reversed An Obama Rule On Guns And Mental Impairment: Now the president wants to know what he can do through executive action.
President Donald Trump is weighing his options for executive action on gun control following a pair of mass shootings that killed more than 30 people, according to the White House.
Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, actually did take executive action on gun control not long after a gunman slaughtered 26 children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in late 2012. And one of Trump’s first actions as president was to undo an Obama regulation that would have blocked some people with mental impairments from buying guns.
The rule, which became effective just two days before Trump took office, required the Social Security Administration (SSA) to inform the FBI’s criminal background check system about disabled adults receiving benefits through a representative because they a mental impairment limited their ability to manage finances.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has long followed a similar policy, which accounts for the bulk of mental incompetency referrals to the background check system from federal agencies, according to the Congressional Research Service. Most of the 4.6 million records prohibiting gun sales due to mental incompetency in the database as of 2016 came from state and local authorities.
The SSA finalized the rule at the end of 2016, a year in which Obama touted several gun control reforms he’d undertaken without help from Congress. “The gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage, but they can’t hold America hostage,” Obama said on Twitter that year. “We can’t accept this carnage in our communities.”...
But Rump, his deplorable base and the NRA are fine with "this carnage in our communities." They hope even more mentally unstable people will buy even more guns.
One need only spend some time listening to Sister Mary Scullion (a liberal/progressive Catholic nun and activist in Philadelphia), Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg or members of an African Methodist Episcopalian (AME) congregation to realize that not all Christians identify with the brand of far-right Christian fundamentalism that President Donald Trump has been pandering to. And a group of at least 17 church leaders, united under the name Christians Against Christian Nationalism, has issued a dire warning about the dangers of far-right “Christian nationalism.”
In an official statement, the church leaders took issue with the Christian Right’s incessant attacks on other faiths and efforts to bring about a Christian fundamentalist theocracy in the United States.
“Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue or temple, America has no second-class faiths,” Christians Against Christian Nationalism asserted. “All are equal under the U.S. Constitution.”
“Christian nationalism,” according to the church leaders, goes hand in hand with white nationalism and “provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation.”
The group warned, “Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the state and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian.” And their statement also stressed that “one’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community.”
One of the church leaders who signed the letter was the Rev. Michael B. Curry, the Episcopal bishop who presided over the wedding of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan Markle.
Regular readers of Church & State are familiar with the Religious Right’s new effort called Project Blitz (See “Bracing for the Blitz,” November 2018 Church & State and “Blasting Back at the Blitz,” March 2019 Church & State).
Project Blitz is the creation of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation and operates in partnership with WallBuilders, headed by Christian nationalist David Barton; and the National Legal Foundation, which was created by TV preacher and Religious Right figure Pat Robertson.
The project promotes Christian nationalist-oriented legislation in state legislatures, some of it subtle, such as bills authorizing so-called “Bible literacy” courses and the posting of “In God We Trust” in public schools; and in other cases bills that are more revealing of its agenda to affirm the Religious Right’s vision of a Christian America, such as protecting “conversion therapy” aimed at members of the LGBTQ community.
Minneapolis’ City Pages called Project Blitz a “Christian nationalist [legislative] bill factory” after the Minnesota Senate passed an “In God We Trust” bill last year. City Pages is correct: Project Blitz’s 148-page playbook contains 21 model bills and was distributed to 750 state legislators last year. Many of these legislators are conservative Christians who have organized their own state prayer caucuses to promote this Christian nationalist agenda.
Recently, I personally experienced the power and wrath of a state prayer caucus. In March, I gave two presentations as part of the Minnesota Historical Society’s History Forum, an annual lecture series that brings scholars from around the country to Minnesota for an exploration of U.S. history and its relevance to modern life.
The Minnesota Historical Society invited me to give lectures on my 2015 book, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding. It was published by Oxford University Press, the world’s leading academic publisher, and has received widespread acclaim for its scholarly and balanced examination of this issue.
Before I could give those lectures, members of the Minnesota Prayer Caucus got wind of the invitation and tried to derail my appearance. In a series of letters to the Minnesota Historical Society, the Caucus objected to my upcoming lectures, calling my book biased and one-sided – though admitting they had not read it – and demanding that the Society cancel the events.
According to one letter signed by 25 state senators and representatives, I was “promoting a narrative about our nation’s history and founding that was patently false” and based on “false presuppositions.”
While the charges of scholarly bias stung, I’ve been called worse. (Jerry Falwell once labeled me a “liar.”) My larger concern was over the effort by the Minnesota Prayer Caucus, and a significant number of legislators, to censor a presentation simply because they disagreed with its perspective.
In his response to the Prayer Caucus, the Historical Society’s director affirmed the organization’s commitment to promoting historical scholarship and public dialogue. That did not satisfy the Caucus, which continued to pressure the Society. My lectures went forward nonetheless, although the Religious Right group’s efforts had some effect. To the disappointment of many regular attendees, the Society self-censored by deciding not to distribute an accompanying brochure containing quotations and images it usually prepares for the lecture series.
There is another aspect of this episode that is more troubling: In their letters to the Historical Society, the members of the Prayer Caucus reminded the Society that it receives considerable state funding for its operations. Sandwiched between the demands to cancel my lectures were not-too-subtle threats that the matter needed to be resolved to the Prayer Caucus’ satisfaction before the Minnesota Legislature considered its annual funding of the Society this month.
Even though the Historical Society is a private charitable organization, it houses the Minnesota State Archives and receives approximately two-thirds of its $60 million budget from state appropriations. So the Prayer Caucus’ message to the Historical Society was quite clear: censor yourself or risk your financial well-being.
This tactic does not just sound wrong, it is wrong, constitutionally. It is called an “unconstitutional condition.” The unconstitutional-conditions doctrine is a cornerstone of First Amendment jurisprudence. It states that a governmental entity cannot condition the receipt of a benefit – usually a financial benefit – on a requirement that the beneficiary surrender a constitutionally protected right.
This principle developed during the Cold War, when the federal government attempted to require veterans to renounce any communist leanings in order to receive their earned veterans’ benefits. But this was exactly what the legislative members of the Minnesota Prayer Caucus were doing: threatening the Historical Society’s general funding on the condition it sponsor only lectures and events that promote the Caucus’ particular pro-Christian nationalist perspective.
This is not a situation where the Minnesota Legislature is providing funds for a specific project advocating one perspective – such as why ice-fishing is the most exciting sport in the world. (In fact, the History Forum lecture series is funded entirely through private contributions and ticket sales.) Rather, this was a threatened quid pro quo: censor yourself or lose general funding. Even though that threat may never be carried out, it may still have the same effect if the Historical Society second-guesses its topics for future lectures. In essence, the threat chills free expression just as readily as a funding cut-off itself. That’s unconstitutional.
I fear this episode will only embolden the prayer caucuses to try to suppress free expression in the future. This is one more reason to be concerned about the machinations of this extremist group and its Project Blitz agenda.
REPORT: White House Rejected Homeland Security Attempts To Prioritize White Supremacist Terror Threats
CNN reports:
White House officials rebuffed efforts by their colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a year to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority as specifically spelled out in the National Counterterrorism Strategy, current and former senior administration officials as well as other sources close to the Trump administration tell CNN.
“Homeland Security officials battled the White House for more than a year to get them to focus more on domestic terrorism,” one senior source close to the Trump administration tells CNN. “The White House wanted to focus only on the jihadist threat which, while serious, ignored the reality that racial supremacist violence was rising fast here at home. They had major ideological blinders on.”
How unsurprising.
It wasn't "ideological blinders." The Trumpers were determined to protect their own supporters.
I think even more insidiously than that, that inciting fear and violence into a free society creates an opportunity for a dictatorship to "sweep in" for the rescue of a people who can't handle the chaos anymore. Trump is an instrument of the destruction of democracy in the united states. The higher the body count at this point, the better in Putin's eyes.
It wasn't just Trump that rejected attempts to deal with white supremacist domestic terrorism. In 2009 when the Department of Homeland Security reported that white supremacy is the US’s biggest threat for domestic terror, it was met with harsh criticism. Conservatives blasted the department for defining terror threats too broadly, instead of focusing on potential Islamic terrorists. The rightwing media machine went into a frenzy, and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ended up withdrawing the report. The Republican Party has as much blood on its hands as Trump.
I warned of right-wing violence in 2009. Republicans objected. I was right.
White nationalists have only gotten more dangerous since then.
When it comes to domestic terrorism, it's hard to ignore white nationalists
Daryl Johnson is the former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He now owns DT Analytics, a private consulting company for state and local law enforcement.
Eight years ago, I warned of a singular threat — the resurgence of right-wing extremist activity and associated violence in the United States as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the financial crisis and the stock market crash. My intelligence report, meant only for law enforcement, was leaked by conservative media.
A political backlash ensued because of an objection to the label “right-wing extremism.” The report also rightly pointed out that returning military veterans may be targeted for recruitment by extremists. Republican lawmakers demanded then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano rescind my report. The American Legion formally requested an apology to veterans. Some in Congress called for me to be fired. Amid the turmoil, my warning went unheeded by Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security caved to the political pressure: Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.
Since 2008, though, the body count from numerous acts of violent right-wing terrorism continued to rise steadily with very little media interest, political discussion or concern from our national leaders. As this threat grew, government resources were scaled back, law enforcement counterterrorism training was defunded and policies to counter violent extremism narrowed to focus solely on Muslim extremism. Heated political campaigning by Donald Trump in 2016 pandered to these extremists. Now, right-wing terrorism has become the national security threat which many government leaders have yet to acknowledge.
The mere existence of so many heavily armed citizens filled with hate and anger toward various elements of American society is troubling enough in its own right. They number in the hundreds of thousands. More troubling is the violent convergence now underway within right-wing extremist movements — sanitized with the label “alt-right.” Largely under the media radar, disaffected extremist groups with long histories of squabbling have been independently pooling resources, some even infiltrating our government through the outreach efforts of right-wing extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriff’s and Peace Officers Association. Over the past year, we’ve witnessed political violence erupt between right-wing extremist protesters and counterprotesters at pro-Trump rallies in Minnesota, Washington, California and now Virginia. This rebranded alt-right extremist movement has the ultimate goal to disrupt civil society, undermine government institutions and pick which laws — if any — they will abide by, and what supposed “justice” they will administer on their own authority.
But the story, in a very real sense, didn’t begin in 2017. As with the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges during the 1990s, the 2014 Bundy standoff in Nevada and the 2016 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge siege in Oregon have served not only as recruitment opportunities for anti-government and hate groups, but they also serve as a radicalization facilitator. Why? Because extremists in the 2014 and 2016 standoffs were allowed to take up arms against the federal government and threaten law enforcement officers without suffering any legal consequences.
More recently, the renewed debates over Confederate monuments, same-sex marriage and Black Lives Matter has reinvigorated alt-right extremists to mobilize toward a more radical fringe element capable of violent action at any moment. Of further concern, a new generation of “charismatic leaders” within the white supremacist movement has emerged after Trump’s election, creating an opportunity for disparate groups to unite under one banner.
Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, militia extremists, and other radical right-wing zealots march side-by-side at pro-Trump rallies across the country. Trump’s endorsement of the border wall, the travel ban, mass deportations of illegal immigrants — these ideas were touted on white supremacist message boards merely 10 years ago. Now they’re being put forth as official U.S. policy. Such controversial plans have placated white supremacists and anti-government extremists and will draw still more sympathetic individuals toward these extremist causes along with the sort of violent acts that too often follow, like Charlottesville.
Rhetoric from the president has further emboldened the alt-right. After the violence in Charlottesville, former KKK leader David Duke welcomed President Trump’s remarks: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa.” Similarly, other white nationalists praised the president for not attacking them.
America finds itself overwhelmed with domestic terrorist attacks, increased terrorist plotting and the emergence of new polarizing political issues. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has not only failed to implement an effective strategy to combat right-wing terrorism; it is afraid to even raise the subject in public for fear of political backlash or contradicting its narrow-minded terrorism narrative (e.g., terrorism only comes from Muslims).
Extremists no longer hide anymore. They number in the hundreds of thousands and are extremely well-armed. The political apparatus and the news media appears confused in their reporting of the scope of the domestic terrorist threat — some ignoring it completely. When 9/11 happened, the government made an effort to connect the dots beforehand, but failed because of a lack of communication among agencies. In this case, the government isn’t even trying — and worse, it appears to be enabling the threat to flourish.
The Islamist militants who brought down the World Trade Center’s twin towers 16 years ago (or the ones who rammed their vehicles into pedestrians in London, Paris and Barcelona recently) had no domestic constituency. Their acts weren’t enshrined instantly on social media or obliquely heralded by the president, duly elected representatives or rationalized by media ideologues dead set on preventing a political backlash. The terrorists I have dedicated my life to stopping have had all that going in their favor. This is more than a formula for disaster. It virtually invites the disaster upon us.
If you want to understand how Evangelicism found its hero in Trump, you need to understand the deliberately quiet religious power pulling the strings behind governments all over the world, going back to the "Prayer Breakfasts" back in the fifties, to the Kill the Gays bill in Uganda. It's the same secretive cabal of power hungry warriors for Jesus who see their world-wide control as proof of their rightness with God.
A tiny excerpt from "The Family" by Jeff Sharlet:
"In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it helped the Carter administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, Family leaders persuaded their South African client, the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to stand down from the possibility of civil war with Nelson Mandela. But such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s, the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most oppressive regimes in the world, arranging prayer networks in the U.S. Congress for the likes of General Costa e Silva, dictator of Brazil; General Suharto, dictator of Indonesia; and General Park Chung Hee, dictator of South Korea. "The Fellowship's reach into governments around the world," observes David Kuo, a former special assistant to the president in Bush's first term, "is almost impossible to overstate or even grasp."
An excerpt from Chapter 1 is here:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120746516
And the full book here:
http://globalchangewatch.weebly.com/uploads/5/7/2/1/5721491/sharlet_the_family.pdf
If you want to understand the seemingly paradoxical support of a sexual predator, barely closeted white nationalist president by supposedly "moral" Evangelical church goers, you need to read this; it's not about morality at all, but a covert theological power grab by any means necessary - all done with Jesus' approval of course.
"The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" by Jeff Sharlet
"...And yet, despite the Family’s theological oddities—its concentric rings of secrecy, its fascination with megalomaniacs from Mao to Hitler, its conviction that being one of God’s chosen provides divine diplomatic immunity—it is anything but separate from the world. It so neatly harmonizes with the political shape of worldly things, in fact, that it’s nearly indistinguishable from secular conceptions of social order. It’s invisible” not because it’s hiding, but because it’s not. Dismissed as “civil religion” by observers who know it only by the National Prayer Breakfast’s annual broadcast on C-Span, the Family’s long-term
project of a worldwide government under God is more ambitious than Al Qaeda’s dream of a Sunni empire. Had I not stumbled into its
heart, I would never have seen it. Since I
had, I began to ask basic questions. Was the Family’s vision simply a pious veneer on business as usual? Do its networks actually influence the world the rest of us live in? Is it an aberration in American religion, or the result of a long evolution? This last is a very different question from the one usually asked about radical religion: “What do the believers want?” An understandable concern, but one that obscures the true shape of fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged in “spiritual war” attempt to contain fundamentalism by reducing its ambitions to program, an agenda: the abolition of abortion, homosexuality, or maybe sex in general.
If the fundamentalists ever won, we tell ourselves, we would all be forced to live like Puritans, or worse—the Taliban.
Fundamentalism, we conclude, is therefore un-American and doomed to wither on our democratic soil.
But faith, radical or tepid, gentle or authoritarian, is always more complicated and enduring than a caricature. The Family has grown and taken root directly at the center of American democracy, intertwining with the world as it is. “Business as usual” is the Family’s business. The elite fundamentalism of the Family doesn’t lead us back to Plymouth Rock, much less to the Taliban’s Kabul. The Family’s faith is not that of a walled-off community but of an empire; not one to come but one that already stretches around the globe, the soft empire of American dollars and, more subtly, American gods. If we want to understand this fundamentalism, we must ask not what it wants to do but what it has done: how it has run parallel to and at times flowed into the main currents of history. We must solve the equation presented by Doug Coe: Jesus plus nothing. J + 0 =X. To solve for X, the role of elite fundamentalism, we’ll need to consider our variables: American Jesuses, plural, and nothing. Nothing, in this equation, stands for a great deal. All that fundamentalism has abandoned, the story it does not tell: the history of where it came from and how it came to live so close to the center of American power."
when you see TTFers randomly start up hate speech against Christian beliefs, they are conceding that they've lost an argument
hence, there is no argument against the performance of the Trump administration on the economy
absent a major recession, the Dems have no hope in 2020
looks like another horrible incident resulting from Dems' ongoing efforts to inflame racial tensions
I guess we should start hearing an outcry for knife control
LOS ANGELES — A man who was "full of anger" went on a two-hour stabbing and robbery rampage in Southern California, killing four people and wounding two others Wednesday.
The 33-year-old Garden Grove man was taken into custody after he came out of a 7-Eleven in Santa Ana, southeast of Los Angeles, and dropped a knife, police said.
The violence appeared to be random and the only known motives seem to be "robbery, hate, homicide," Garden Grove police Lt. Carl Whitney said at a news conference.
"We know this guy was full of anger and he harmed a lot of people tonight," he said.
All the victims were Hispanic, he added.
At least one key Fox News personality isn’t playing along with Tucker Carlson’s claim Tuesday night that white supremacy is a “hoax” and “not a real problem in America.”
Daytime news anchor Shepard Smith made it clear Wednesday on his show that white nationalism is an “unmistakable” problem.
Smith didn’t mention Carlson by name, but his words seemed directed at the fellow network personality.
“White nationalism is without question a serious problem in America,” Smith said.
Smith was offering a recap of comments by former Vice President Joe Biden, who rebuked President Donald Trump for racist rhetoric.
“In both clear language and in code, this president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation,” Biden said.
Smith summed up Biden’s speech as noting “the unmistakable rise of white nationalism and white racism in America.”
Then, in direct contrast to Carlson’s comments, Smith said Biden was “calling us to our better souls, to recognize that white nationalism is real, that white nationalism is on the rise, that white nationalism is without question a very serious problem in America and beating down those who would help facilitate it and encourage it.”
Carlson hours later announced he was taking a vacation as calls to fire him trended on social media.
America is more open, inclusive, and equal than it's ever been
white supremacists are a fringe group
you never see any polling to back up the claim that they are on the rise because, statistically, they don't even exist
what you do see is crime stats that claim "hate crimes" are increasing
but that has to do with refined definitions and enhanced record-keeping
when liberal propagandists cite these stats, they imply it's assault
but most of it is vandalism, which is not new, but has been thrown in the mix
some nuts have become more vocal because the media has convinced them they are on the rise and have the support of the current administration
our media is irresponsible and our liberals are reprehensible
the El Paso gunman railed against climate change in the manifesto he published before murdering 22 people
why is no one asking whether Al Gore's inflammatory rhetoric caused the massacre?
the Dayton shooter, who murdered nine, was a self-described ‘leftist’ who praised Elizabeth Warren
why is no one asking whether Warren's inflammatory rhetoric caused the massacre?
the terrorist who charged an ICE detention center with homemade bombs and a rifle last month was a member of Antifa and referred to his target as a ‘concentration camp’, echoing the words of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
why is no one asking whether AOC's inflammatory rhetoric caused the massacre?
Beto O’Rourke described Trump as ‘stoking racism’ and claimed there’d been a rise in hate crimes in every year of his presidency. In Britain,there is similar claims about the effect of the Leave victory in the EU referendum, but hate crime data is notoriously unreliable. O’Rourke is referring to the number of reported hate crimes, which isn’t a robust measure because various American agencies have spent millions encouraging people to report hate crimes and making it easier to do so. To see whether the overall level has increased you need to look at whether unreported hate crimes have gone up or down in the same period. That exercise was carried out by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2018 which found that while reported hate crimes increased from 104,400 to 107,900 between 2016 and 2017, unreported hate crimes fell from 92,100 to 86,900, meaning the total number actually fell in the first year of Trump’s presidency.
If you look at the past 10 years, the total level of hate crime is declining in the US, as is the amount of racism and anti-immigration sentiment, and Trump’s victory has done nothing to reverse that. Sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania published a study this year showing that Americans have become less inclined to express racist views since 2016, something true of Republican voters as well as Democrats, and a Gallup poll in June 2019 found 76 percent of Americans believe immigration is a good thing, the highest number to date. The same trends are visible in the UK: the population has become less racist and more pro-immigration since the Brexit vote. The liberal narrative about the toxic effect of the rise of far-right populism turns out to be nonsense.
It’s incredibly hard to show that inflammatory rhetoric, whether on the right or the left, causes violent crime. All we know for sure is that violent crime across the world is declining, something painstakingly documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature. For various reasons, most people have difficulty believing that and seize on incidents like those of last weekend as ‘proof’ that we’re living in an increasingly murderous age. That’s particularly true of left-wing pundits and politicians, who really should know better, given their elite educations. Trump may be a coarse, mean-spirited figure, but he’s not responsible for these tragedies.
"white supremacists are a fringe group
you never see any polling to back up the claim that they are on the rise "
Nice pirouette of bullshit.
Most domestic terrorism comes from white supremacists, FBI tells lawmakers
When politicians use terrorism as a tool for swaying voters, they usually mean a specific kind of terrorism. This became clear in the 2016 election season when then-candidate Trump falsely accused President Obama and Hillary Clinton of refusing to use specific words to describe it.
Say it with me, everyone: "Radical Islamic terrorism."
But there's another face of terrorism in the U.S. that often gets overlooked—one that looks, on the surface, like more than half of the U.S. population.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress this week that most of the domestic terrorism arrests made so far this fiscal year have been associated with white supremacy. He pointed to about 100 arrests of "homegrown violent extremist terrorists" (these are generally the "radical Islamic terrorists") and about the same number of "domestic terrorists" (violent Americans with some kind of domestic beef), clarifying that the latter were mostly white supremacists.
In other words, there appear to be just as many all-American terrorists as there are "radical Islamic terrorists" in the U.S., and most American terrorists are white supremacists.
This is nothing new. A database compiled in 2017 by The Investigative Fund (now Type Investigations) found that between 2008 and 2016, plots and attacks by right-wing terrorists—which includes white supremacists, militias, and sovereign citizens movements—actually outnumbered Islamist plots and attacks by a ratio of 2 to 1.
And it's not like the government is unaware of the fact that white supremacists pose a major threat to American citizens. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security has warned of the threat of white supremacist terrorism since early in Trump's presidency. Wray referred to white nationalist extremist violence a "persistent, pervasive threat" in April of this year.
And yet, how often have we heard the president warn Americans about the threat of right-wing or white supremacist terrorism? Why has he never harped on "white supremacist terrorism" with the same fervor as "radical Islamic terrorism"?
Because they are his base!
"Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2018 which found that while reported hate crimes increased from 104,400 to 107,900 between 2016 and 2017, unreported hate crimes fell from 92,100 to 86,900, meaning the total number actually fell in the first year of Trump’s presidency."
This conclusion is not supported when you actually find the data, which took while, but is here:
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcs1317pp.pdf
Total ESTIMATED reported & unreported numbers:
2016: 104,400 + 92,100 = 196,500
2017: 107,900 + 86,900 = 194,800
Difference in toals = 1,700
What was left out in the article was the error on the estimates:
2016, 2017 Reported standard errors: 17,464 and 16,366
2017 Unreported standard errors:16,234 and 14,306
As the difference in the crimes is only about 10% of the standard error of each measurement, this apparent drop is a small fraction of the "noise" of the measurements. Or, to put in another way, the noise in the measurement nearly 10 times larger than the difference.
The most that could be said is that there MIGHT have been a small drop in the total number of hate crimes. However, it is more likely that this difference is due to the measurement error. The true actual number could be higher or lower, by up to about 30,000 - depending on which way the errors fall for each measurement. And don't forget the note at the top of the table: the are ESTIMATES, not an actual total talley. There is no way of knowing how these numbers have been massaged by folks in the Trump administration.
As for "Sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania published..." it would be nice to know exactly who published it or at least what the name of the study was, because so far, finding that information (if it exists) has been elusive.
A was year left out of one of the lines above - it should read:
"2016, 2017 Unreported standard errors:16,234 and 14,306"
"The most that could be said is that there MIGHT have been a small drop in the total number of hate crimes. However, it is more likely that this difference is due to the measurement error. The true actual number could be higher or lower, by up to about 30,000 - depending on which way the errors fall for each measurement. And don't forget the note at the top of the table: the are ESTIMATES, not an actual total talley."
you are missing the point
liberals and Dems constantly assert that white supremacy is on the rise
as you concede, the evidence for that is absent
and that is in spite of the fact that there has been a huge effort to encourage people to report these crimes and do so without regard to severity
an adolescent drawing on the wall of a bathroom stall is not equivalent to assault
indeed, it shouldn't even be reported
"you are missing the point
liberals and Dems constantly assert that white supremacy is on the rise
as you concede, the evidence for that is absent"
You are twisting my post to try and make your point.
My post merely pointed out the that the conclusion "meaning the total number actually fell in the first year of Trump’s presidency" was not supported by the data - some of which was conveniently left out to try and make things look better for Rump and conservatives.
I said absolutely nothing about white supremacy, or how that might relate to hate crime statistics.
It's pathetic how quick you are to try and twist other people's words to support your own conclusions.
It shows how desperate you are to try and deny what people can see and read with their own eyes.
Anyone who has been alive for the past few decades has been able to watch conservative GOPers morph their "God, country, and patriotism" schtick into "God, *OUR* country, and hatriotism." The words come directly out of the mouths of the politicians themselves. It doesn't take a vast "lame stream media" to conclude what most people find self-evident.
A former Texas judge and longtime Republican announced this week she has left the Republican Party, denouncing President Donald Trump's "ideology" of "racism" on the heels of Trump's racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color.
"President Trump is the worst president in the history of this country," Elsa Alcala wrote in a Monday Facebook post, saying also that she will vote in the Democratic primary next year for the first time in more than 20 years.
Alcala wrote, "At his core, his ideology is racism. To me, nothing positive about him could absolve him of his rotten core." She added it has taken her "years to say this publicly."
Alcala told CNN Wednesday she officially switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat.
"I needed to get the R off of my name so I had to say this publicly," Alcala wrote in the post, saying she cannot support the Republican Party in Texas or nationally because of the party's support of Trump. She wrote any of the "viable" Democratic candidates "are superior to the status quo."
"Please don't lecture me about abortion because today Trump's actions are resulting in the deaths of live humans in other ways," Alcala also wrote. "There is no moral high ground by Republicans on abortion or the value of life."
"And don't tell me to go back where I came from. My relatives have been in this Texas area since it was before the USA and I was born in the USA. My English is probably better than yours," she said.
Alcala's post came hours after Trump doubled down on racist tweets he posted on Sunday attacking the four progressive Democratic lawmakers. In the tweets, he implied the congresswomen -- all of whom are Americans and are women of color -- weren't American and suggested they "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came."
In her post, Alcala wrote she has spent 29 years in government service and appreciated the support she received from past Republican administrations, which she said were not "Trump-like (they wanted an inclusive party)."
Alcala served on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for seven years after then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, appointed her to the court in 2011, according to her biography on the website of Texas Defender Service, a non-profit where she used to work.
She previously served for nine years on the First Court of Appeals, according to the website, and as a trial judge with the 338th District Court, a position to which she was initially appointed by then-Gov. George W. Bush.
no, anyone who has been alive for the past few decades knows we are an increasingly diverse, inclusive, and equal society with equal protection under the law for everyone
we remain the only white majority democracy to elect, and re-elect, a non-white leader
let us know if you have any evidence whatsoever that white supremacy is on the rise
it's an important issue because Dems are trying to inflame racial tension or political gain
"no, anyone who has been alive for the past few decades knows we are an increasingly diverse, inclusive, and equal society with equal protection under the law for everyone"
Thank you for acknowledging the progress made by liberals in making this a more inclusive and just society for people of all races and even LGBTQ people.
...In spite of all the efforts conservatives have made to block them on many fronts.
Does that mean you guys are going to give up trying to repeal marriage for gay people with the Supreme Court Mitch stacked for you?
"we remain the only white majority democracy to elect, and re-elect, a non-white leader"
I notice you didn't mention that we've never had a woman for president, like many other countries, with both white and non-white majorities.
But I see you're focused on trying to disavow Republican racism right now. I guess we'll have to table their misogyny until a later date.
There's a few favorite lines we might want to discuss, like "Lock her up!" and "Go back where you came from!" Oh, wait a minute - wasn't that last one address to 4 women of color?
Yeah, that doesn't inflame racial tensions at all.
Wake up and smell the covfefe.
“On Sunday morning, most of your viewers right now, half of the country, are getting ready to go to church and yet tomorrow, we won’t let our kids even pray in our schools,” Patrick told the Fox News hosts. “There’s many factors that go into these shootings. It’s not a time to politicize, it’s time to look deep inside at who we are as a country.”
Patrick’s take on gun violence is a “perfect example” of how Christian nationalism — an increasingly prominent ideology within American Christianity — influences people’s attitudes towards the gun control debate, according to Clemson University sociologist Andrew Whitehead.
“For Patrick and many others, these mass casualty shootings have little if anything to do with guns, and everything to do with whether our culture is, in their view, aligning with Christianity and privileging it in the public sphere,”
Christian nationalism hinges on the narrative that the United States has a special covenant with the Christian God. People who subscribe to Christian nationalist ideas are more likely than others to say that the federal government should declare the U.S. to be a Christian nation; to advocate for Christian values; to push for prayer in public schools; or to allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces. They also tend to believe that America’s success is part of God’s plan.
Whitehead and his colleagues have argued that Christian nationalism is a unique phenomenon that transcends traditional religious denominations, and can act as a predictor for other social stances. Last January, Whitehead and other researchers published a study suggesting that Americans who believe in key tenets of Christian nationalism were more likely to vote for President Donald Trump.
In a paper published in July 2018, Whitehead and his co-authors learned that Christian nationalism was also a good predictor of where people stand on gun control. Since Christian nationalists believe the Constitution (and the Second Amendment) was inspired by the Christian God, they see the right to bear arms as something that is God-given. As a result, any attempt to restrict this right could be interpreted as an attack on God’s wisdom.
After analyzing data from the 2007 Baylor Religion Survey (the most recent and reliable national survey on this issue), the researchers found that those who agreed with Christian nationalist ideals were significantly less likely to agree that gun control is a viable answer to the problem of gun violence. This was true even after the researchers accounted for other factors, such as religious identity, age, gender, education, and even race.
This means that while Christian nationalist ideals are most common among white American evangelicals, the ideology isn’t necessarily limited to that religious group. The researchers found that evangelicals who don’t subscribe to Christian nationalism are actually more supportive of gun control than Christian nationalist Catholics, for example. In addition, Black Americans who embraced Christian nationalism were more likely to oppose gun control than Black Americans who rejected Christian nationalism.
Whitehead said the paper’s findings seem particularly timely this week, in light of the recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. He suggested that Christian nationalism could help explain some Christians’ responses to the massacres.
Many evangelical Christians believe that in addition to the physical world, there is a spiritual, supernatural dimension to reality, and that in that realm, there is an ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil. As a result, these Christians view many social problems in the world, including gun violence, as having spiritual roots.
What distinguishes Christian nationalists from other Christians is that they tend to believe that these spiritual crises can only be solved by privileging “traditional Christian values” in the public sphere. From this perspective, it’s almost foolish to try to end gun violence through legislation, without addressing perceived ruptures in America’s moral fabric first.
Ultimately, Whitehead and his fellow researchers suggest that because Christian nationalists believe the Second Amendment is a sacred, God-given right, they won’t be convinced by gun control advocates’ appeals to public safety or by statistics about how the U.S. experiences more firearm-related deaths than other high-income countries. For Christian nationalists, the gun violence epidemic is a spiritual crisis that requires spiritual solutions ― and returning America to its perceived Christian roots.
"the El Paso gunman railed against climate change in the manifesto he published before murdering 22 people
why is no one asking whether Al Gore's inflammatory rhetoric caused the massacre?"
Actually, someone has looked into this topic... it seems that the right-wing fringe have found yet another reason to hate brown people:
A manifesto posted online shortly before Saturday’s massacre at a Walmart in El Paso that the suspected shooter may have written blamed immigrants for hastening the environmental destruction of the United States and proposed genocide as a pathway to ecological sustainability.
Filled with white nationalist diatribes against “race-mixing” and the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the manifesto highlights far-right extremists’ budding revival of eco-fascism.
Titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” an allusion to Al Gore’s landmark climate change documentary, the ranting four-page document appeared on the extremist forum 8chan shortly before the shooting. Authorities have yet to confirm whether Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old Dallas-area white man arrested in connection with the shooting that left at least 22 dead, is the author.
“The environment is getting worse by the year,” the manifesto reads. “Most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”
HuffPost reviewed the document but, with consideration to the ethical concerns of broadcasting what might be a notoriety-seeking killer’s messaging, is not publishing a link to it.
The manifesto explicitly cites the 74-page message posted online by the gunman charged with killing 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March. That alleged shooter, Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old white Australian, thrice described himself as an “eco-fascist” motivated to repel waves of migrants fleeing climate change-ravaged regions of the world.
For years now, denial served as the extreme right’s de facto position on climate change. That is starting to change.
Just look, as Dissent magazine did in May, at this spring’s European elections. Following the European Green Party’s historic gains, the far-right Alternative for Germany’s youth wing in Berlin urged party leaders to abandon the “difficult to understand statement that mankind does not influence the climate,” an issue that moves “more people than we thought.”
In France, the far-right National Rally already took the message to heart. The party, led by Marine Le Pen, vowed to remake Europe as “the world’s first ecological civilization” with a climate platform rooted in nationalism. Le Pen railed against “nomadic” people who “do not care about the environment” as “they have no homeland,” harkening to the Nazis’ “blood and soil” slogan that, as The Guardian put it, described a belief in a mystical connection between race and a particular territory. Under that logic, “borders are the environment’s greatest ally,” as a National Rally party spokesman said in April.
In the United States, 70 percent of Americans recognize the climate is warming, and 57 percent understand humans’ emissions are the cause, Yale Program on Climate Change Communication polling shows. Republicans, long the only major political party in the developed world to outright reject climate science, are inching away from denialism but have yet to rally around a popular policy proposal.
“Some day Republicans are going to have to come up with some proposals that are responsive to these issues and, frankly, be more reasonable and more thoughtful,” Scott Jennings, a Republican consultant and a former campaign adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), told The New York Times last week.
More than 65 million people are displaced worldwide right now, marking—depending on how you count it—the highest number of refugees in history. Climate change is forecast to inflame the crisis. Catastrophic weather forced 24 million people to flee home per year since 2008, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the Swiss-based international organization. By 2050, that number could hit anywhere from 140 million to 300 million to 1 billion. Drought, rising seas and violent storms could compel upward of 143 million people to leave sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America alone by the middle of the century, the World Bank estimated last year.
Slashing global greenhouse gases and increasing aid to help poor countries close to the equator adapt is the obvious way to change that trajectory. The Green New Deal framework left-wing climate activists put forward late last year gained international popularity in part because its promise of good-paying jobs and meaningful work as a vehicle for wealth redistribution and ecological stability offers a powerful antidote to the toxic elixir of far-right prescriptions to social unrest.
ut as planet-heating emissions continue surging and scientists’ projections grow more dire, eco-fascism is experiencing a revival in a subculture of far-right extremism online. It comes amid a rekindled interest in Ted Kaczynski, the convicted terrorist known as the Unabomber.
Kaczynski—like his newfound online fandom, who often distinguish themselves with pine-tree emoji on social media—subscribes to “lifeboat ethics.” The term, coined in the 1970s by the neoconservative ecologist Garrett Hardin, denotes the idea that “traditional humanitarian views of the ‘guilt-ridden,’ ‘conscience-stricken’ liberal” threatens the balance of nature. The belief traces its lineage back to 18th-century English philosopher Thomas Malthus, who theorized that population growth would eclipse the availability of resources to meet basic human needs without moral restraint or widespread disease, famine or war to thin the herd.
In September 2017, the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance asked its readers a question: “What does it mean for whites if climate change is real?” The bombastic essay wondered whether the “population explosion in the global south combined with climate change” demonstrated “the single greatest external threat to Western civilization”—even “more serious than Islamic terrorism or Hispanic illegal immigration.”
“If continued global change makes the poor, non-white parts of the world even more unpleasant to live in than they are now, it will certainly drive more non-whites north,” Jared Taylor, the publication’s editor and an influential white nationalist, wrote in an email to the magazine Jewish Currents. “I make no apology for…urging white nations to muster the will to guard their borders and maintain white majorities.”
Two years later, white, male gunmen appear to be heeding his call.
"If you want to understand the seemingly paradoxical support of a sexual predator, barely closeted white nationalist president by supposedly "moral" Evangelical church goers, you need to read this; it's not about morality at all, but a covert theological power grab by any means necessary - all done with Jesus' approval of course."
Amen to that.
You can see it in the posts of Wyatt and Regina Hardiman here over the past two decades - no moral line restrains them in their pursuit of maximum power and control.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "white supremacists are a fringe group"
Its been well documented by surveys that white supremacism is well over half of Trump's core supporters. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram and the three ditzes on the couch are all white supremacists regardless of their disingenuous claims to not be.
The El Paso shooter didn't belong to any white supremacist organization and 98% of American white supremacists don't. But those tens of millions of white supremacist Americans certainly sympathize with the "white homeland" of American neo-Nazis.
Wyatt/Regina/ bad anonymous said "the El Paso gunman railed against climate change in the manifesto he published before murdering 22 people why is no one asking whether Al Gore's inflammatory rhetoric caused the massacre?".
For starters, you often lie about this sort of thing so there's no reason for any reader to believe that claim of yours.
Secondly, even if it were true, the El Paso gunman specifically and repeatedly said he was killing Hispanics in an attempt to start a race war and to stop the "invasion" into the U.S. - just as Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed there is an invasion. Obviously, if he did mention climate change, it had nothing to do with his murder rampage.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the Dayton shooter, who murdered nine, was a self-described ‘leftist’ who praised Elizabeth Warren why is no one asking whether Warren's inflammatory rhetoric caused the massacre?"
Because there is clearly no connection between his support for Warren and his murder rampage. The Dayton shooter was a maniacal misogynist, with a list of women he wanted to rape and people he wanted to kill. There was about personal grudges he had against individuals, there was no political motivation behind his killings as there clearly is with the El Paso shooter.
"why is no one asking whether Al Gore's inflammatory rhetoric caused the massacre?"
Can you be more specific please? Which "inflammatory rhetoric" are you talking about?
Where he said we needed to cut our carbon emissions? Perhaps suggesting a "carbon tax" is too "inflammatory" for you? Or was it something he said about recycling plastics?
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "anyone who has been alive for the past few decades knows we are an increasingly diverse, inclusive, and equal society with equal protection under the law for everyone
we remain the only white majority democracy to elect, and re-elect, a non-white leader"
There's no "we" about it. YOU did NOT elect and re-elect a non-white leader. YOU and all the Republicans did everything you could to prevent his election, and once he was elected to prevent him from accomplishing anything for the American people.
Obama's presidency showed just how deep and severe the racism and white supremacy is in the Republican party.
That the United States has become "more diverse, inclusive, and equal with equal protection under the law" is despite a massive effort by Republicans like you to keep that from happening, and where it has happened, to reverse that progress.
You've fought to make gays second class citizens, denying them the right to marry a partner of their choosing, denying them the right to housing, employment and any social support other Americans are entitled to. You and Tony Perkins have worked around the world to promote the oppression, imprisonment, and execution of lgbt people around the world and now you are working to bring that to the United States by making Trump dictator of a theocracy that rules with an iron fist.
Look at Sean Hannity the other night:
"We don't need gun control, all we need is a perimeter fence around every school, a metal detector and off-duty police can volunteer to be armed guards for the entire day. We need armed guards throughout every mall, in every hallway, in every public place."
Sean Hannity wants American society to be a police state where there are armed government agents on every corner, in every public building! Think about what Republicans want for the United States! Don't let it happen - you must vote Democratic if you want your country to survive Trump, Putin, and the Republicans.
Mega-hypocrites Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous talk about diversity, inclusivity, and equality and say Americans have no cause for concern but these hypocrites work tirelessly and corruptly to entrench in law legal superiority of christians over every minority they hate.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous talk about equality, diversity, and inclusiveness when they are unconditionally opposed to that and are using the First Amendment as a weapon and cover to create laws that oppress lgbt people and deny us the same rights Wyatt/Regina have.
Eff you Wyatt and Regina Hardiman.
Mike Huckabee said mass shootings are caused by "disconnecting from a god".
I'd say its the opposite.
When you teach children that humans are of far less importance than the god in their head, it devalues people and encourages the believer to treat others as though they matter less than the god in their head.
When you teach children that its good and right for a god they never interact with to kill innocent people "because they are his creation", it makes human life a lower priority than religious doctrine - you can see that clearly in Wyatt/Regina's regular "jokes" about imprisoning, assaulting, and executing the innocent lgbt people they so hate.
We would never accept that parents have the right to kill or abuse their children however they feel like because they created the children. If we're moral people without double standards, we can't accept that from our God either.
Meanwhile, back in the real world...
USA:
Church attendance: 47%
School shootings (2009-18):288
UK:
Church attendance: <20%
School Shootings: 0
Sweden:
Church attendance: 5%
School shootings: 0
How insane is it that Trump's plan to do something about drug costs isn't to do something about drug costs in THIS country, it's to make it easier for people in the US to buy drugs from Canada. You know, the country with that awful socialized medicine that would be so terrible if we had it.
The reason there’s a 700% difference between the Canadian and US price for [insulin pens] the drug is likely down to socialized medicine, in which the government says “we won’t buy it at that price, we’ll prescribe a different drug.” I never said the drug companies themselves were socialized.
Man Who Fractured Boy’s Skull Over National Anthem “Disrespect” Says He Acted On Orders From Trump
The Billings Gazette reports:
The attorney for a 39-year-old man charged with assaulting a child who didn’t take his hat off for the national anthem says his client, compromised by a traumatic brain injury, believes he was acting on an order from President Donald Trump.
Superior resident Curt Brockway was charged Monday with felony assault on a minor. His defense attorney, Lance Jasper, told the Missoulian Wednesday the president’s “rhetoric” contributed to the U.S. Army veteran’s disposition when he choke-slammed a 13-year-old, fracturing his skull, at the Mineral County fairgrounds on Aug. 3.
“His commander in chief is telling people that if they kneel, they should be fired, or if they burn a flag, they should be punished,” Jasper said. “He certainly didn’t understand it was a crime.”
'Blood on their hands': the intelligence officer whose DHS warning over white supremacy was ignored
- Daryl Johnson’s DHS team faced an official backlash 10 years ago when it issued a briefing on rightwing extremism
https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2F2019%2Faug%2F07%2Fwhite-supremacist-terrorism-intelligence-analyst%3A4MYrU9_yBQJsPbLf-RfQCVfkBFQ&cuid=1478235
'Ten years ago, the Department of Homeland Security sent American law enforcement agencies an intelligence briefing warning of a rising threat of domestic rightwing extremism, including white supremacist terrorism.
The economic recession and the election of America’s first black president would create fertile ground for rightwing radicalization, the 2009 report concluded. Military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular, would be attractive targets for recruitment.
Republican politicians and conservative pundits reacted with outrage and demanded a retraction. The report was politically motivated and unfairly demonized conservative views, they argued. “Americans are not the enemy. The terrorists are,” the head of the American Legion, a veterans group, wrote.
The head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publicly apologized. The small team of domestic terrorism analysts who had produced the report was disbanded, and analysts were reassigned to study Muslim extremism, according to Daryl Johnson, the career federal intelligence analyst who had led the team. By the next year, Johnson says, he had been forced out of the DHS altogether.
Since then, Johnson has watched a rising tide of white nationalist terror attacks around the world. On Tuesday, as federal officials announced that two deadly mass shootings within a single week were being investigated as domestic terrorism cases, he spoke to the Guardian about why the DHS’s own warning about rightwing terror was ignored, and what should be done to confront the threat of white nationalist violence.
Trump Bragged About Crowd Sizes To El Paso Victims
Mediaite reports:
According to recently released video, President Donald Trump marked his visit to an El Paso hospital treating victims of a mass shooting by bragging to staff about his crowd sizes and attacking Beto O’Rourke as “crazy.”
percentage of mass shooters that go to church: 0
percentage of mass shooters who get all their information from extremist blogs: 100
percentage of TTFers who get all their information from extremist blogs: 100
percentage of mass shooters with mental problems: 100
percentage of TTFers with
Research shows most mass shooters have no history of mental illness.
These are ordinary, everyday people who've been radicalized by right wing media, starting with Fox "News" and Trump.
"Can you be more specific please? Which "inflammatory rhetoric" are you talking about?"
oh, sure
I can be more specific
you know, all that rhetoric about how anyone who doesn't agree with Gore's flawed views are complicit in the ongoing extinction of our species
that might cause a nut to take drastic action
extremist environmentalists have a long history of violence
remember when the Manson gang shot at Jerry Ford to save the redwoods?
"I notice you didn't mention that we've never had a woman for president, like many other countries, with both white and non-white majorities."
well, we weren't talking about that
but, as long as you bring it up, in 2016, a woman was nominated by a major political party for President and received a significant number of votes
she might have won except she was lying, conniving, corrupt and it was discovered she couldn't be trusted with the nation's classified information
also, she called blue-collar Americans "deplorable", wouldn't release secret speeches she made to bankers to kiss up to them, supported a "right" to kill children up to the moment of birth, and wanted to eliminate or change the 2nd amendment and the Bill of Rights
and she stopped campaigning early while the GOP candidate blitzed the country until the wee hours of Election Day
but she almost won
turns out the nation that isn't racist is also not sexist
you can't say the same about the media and Dem politicians who falsely attacked a woman the GOP nominated for VP years earlier
Children are our future. But maybe you shouldn’t have any.
That’s been the confusing drumbeat coming from liberals lately: Kids are our precious hope, but they are also bad for the environment, and we should make fewer or none of them.
In a conversation about the environment with anthropologist Jane Goodall, to be published in Vogue’s September issue, Britain’s Prince Harry answered “two, maximum!” when Goodall said she hoped he wouldn’t have “too many” children.
The royal added that he has “always had a connection and a love for nature,” and presumably that means he wants to have fewer children to enjoy that connection and love for nature. But wait: Wasn’t the whole point of preserving the environment to pass it on to future generations? If human birthrates flat-line and eventually decline, who would be left to enjoy nature?
Prince Harry is far from alone, or the most extreme, among those on the left following this inhuman logic. Last week, on the BuzzFeed Web site, writer Ash Sanders declared: “I believe having children is no longer just a personal decision, but a decision with ethical implications for all of humanity and the planet we live on.”
Sanders added that “Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s provocative 1968 bestseller, ‘The Population Bomb,’ had urged the US to slash birthrates in order to protect the environment and avoid mass famines they warned would hit as soon as the ’70s.”
Never mind that the Ehrlichs’ doom-and-gloom predictions never materialized. The bigger problem for Sanders is that, though she calls herself a “birth striker” and the title of her essay is “I Chose Not To Have Kids Because I’m Afraid For The Planet,” she actually does have a daughter.
That’s the thing about her, Prince Harry and many other zero-population folks. They are still having children. Even the scoldy Jane Goodall has a son. Perhaps these environmentalists are having fewer children because they . . . just want fewer children, and getting to lecture others about climate change is a virtuous side benefit.
It’s reminiscent of people who said they wouldn’t marry until gay people could get married and proceeded to stay unmarried even after gay marriage became a reality.
The same leftists somehow celebrate children as our moral leaders on the issue of climate change. Sixteen-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg is on the cover of that same Vogue issue. What if the push to have fewer children produces fewer Greta Thunbergs? Who then would solve the climate-change problem?
Google's extravagant climate change Camp mocked as party for 'entitled fools'
When the zero-population crowd turns its attention to the developing world, the rhetoric takes a more repellent turn. Discussing African development at a Gates Foundation summit last year, French President Emmanuel Macron linked fecundity with ignorance.
He said: “I always say: ‘Please present me the lady who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight, nine children.’ ” That prompted a deluge of social-media posts showing highly educated women the world over with their large families. African activists, meanwhile, bristled at the childless Macron all but insinuating that the world would be better off with fewer black children.
But the hypocrisy of this anti-natal movement is what’s most galling. In June, the UK Royal Household published its latest financial report, which includes carbon emissions. It found that the family’s carbon emissions from international business travel jumped to 3,344 tons, up from 1,687 tons in the previous reporting period.
As CNN reported, the figure didn’t even include all of the family’s international trips, like the one Prince Harry took to Australia and New Zealand, “as that was paid for by those nations’ governments.”
If the royals are concerned about the environment, limiting their airplane trips would be the first step, not discouraging the less fortunate from having children.
We’re reaching a hysterical apex on climate change, where faux environmentalists try to outdo each other with their climate purity with ever more inane prescriptions. It’s one thing to let the hypocrites lecture us to use paper straws and reusable bags as they fly around in their private jets. It’s another to have them dictate the size of our families.
Don’t let them.
And in case anyone was in doubt - Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous fabricated all the "statistics" in his/her post above.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous go to church, they are deeply involved in their church. And yet the have no qualms whatsoever about making up whatever story they think helps promote their racist anti-democratic agenda.
When you teach people that the god they envision is more important and valuable than actual people, you get people like Wyatt/Regina who couldn't care less about others.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "it was discovered she couldn't be trusted with the nation's classified information"
Oh dear, that's a MOUNTAIN of hypocrisy. You Republicans made a big deal about how Hillary was supposedly careless with classified information although there was no evidence anyone ever got a hold of it on her private server or that it was ever hacked.
Meanwhile, Trump uses unsecured cell-phones daily even though his security people have warned them that any foreign adversary can listen in at will to his conversations. Trump has been blabbing classified information to the Russians and Chinese ever since he took office and Republicans like Wyatt/Regina couldn't care less. Its all about non-stop lying with them.
Trump's children and Jared Kushner all use an internet encryption application that hides their communication from the American govenment even though the law requires they make ALL of their communications available for the official presidential records app. Foreign adversaries have leaked some of their communications that shows they are making criminal deals behind America's back and filling in security agency foreign targets on what American Intelligence agencies know.
It is one massive, ongoing transfer of classified information from Trump and his administration to foreign adversaries intent on doing harm to the USA and all western democracies.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "extremist environmentalists have a long history of violence"
And yet somehow we rarely if ever hear of instances of violence motivated by environmentalism, instead we have dozens of incidents each year of Right Wing extremists committing mass murder.
The FBI has been worried about Right-Wing extremest violence since 2009 and Republicans have angrily demanded they stop trying to analyze and stop right wing violence. No wonder Right Wing terrorism is on the rise since Trump made it socially acceptable to demonize those of other races. "shithole countries", "rapists and murderers", "an infestation", "an invasion", "stop all Muslims from coming here". It never ends.
"you know, all that rhetoric about how anyone who doesn't agree with Gore's flawed views are complicit in the ongoing extinction of our species"
Please be specific about Al Gore's quote - and the one that you claim is so inflammatory. Conservatives here have a long history of hyperbolic rhetoric, especially about Democrats, making their claims highly dubious. Kind of like our current president, who apparently racked up 10,796 false or misleading claims by Jun 10th of this year.
"But wait: Wasn’t the whole point of preserving the environment to pass it on to future generations? If human birthrates flat-line and eventually decline, who would be left to enjoy nature?"
If human birth rates flat-line, there would still 7.53 BILLION people on the planet. If birth rates decline, then yes, slowly over time, there would be somewhat less that 7.53 billion people on the planet. Maybe it would drop down to 6 billion over a century or so.
The implication that no one "would be left to enjoy nature" is typical of the farcical nature of right-wing rhetoric. Someone says we should consider keeping our birth rate to a reasonable level to help protect the planet that sustains our very life, and all of the sudden, somehow, the birth rate has declined so dramatically that suddenly the whole human species is on the verge of extinction.
And then you complain about "elites" who call out your ludicrous arguments for the stupidity they actually are.
If you don't want to be considered stupid, stop making stupid arguments.
China's draconian and tragic "One child policy" was in place for roughly 35 year, and the population of China INCREASED from about 1 billion to roughly 1.4 billion people over that time.
Heterosexuals breed like horny rabbits. There will be no shortage of humans for the foreseeable future, even if some of them decide to have fewer children.
Can you at least TRY to make some sense - at least once in a while?
"Can you at least TRY to make some sense - at least once in a while?"
you mean like when I pointed how great the economy was under Trump and how we live in the most inclusive, diverse and equal American society in history and how we are the only white majority democracy to elect and re-elect a non-white leader and how white supremacy ideas are not on the rise and neither are hate crimes?
seems like you all become very agitated when I make sense
With the Mueller investigation producing a big, fat zero and impeachment looking uncertain at best, Democrats are turning to accusations of white supremacy as their next gambit to drive President Trump from office.
Since two mass shootings horrified the nation last weekend, Democratic presidential candidates and others on the left are increasingly tagging Mr. Trump with the label, which is among the most abhorrent in politics.
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts all have lobbed the accusation of “white supremacist” at Mr. Trump in recent days.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden was asked by reporters Thursday whether he thinks Mr. Trump is a white supremacist and said it may be worse than that.
“I believe everything the president says and has done encourages white supremacists, and I’m not sure there’s much of a distinction. As a matter of fact, it may be even worse,” he said.
The definition of “white supremacist” is a person who believes the white race is “inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races,” according to Merriam-Webster.
Republican strategist John Feehery said Democrats “look desperate” by leveling the accusation against Mr. Trump.
“They are making these accusations because they make their base happy and because they believe that, short of impeachment, the only way they beat Trump is making him so toxic that suburban voters won’t vote for him,” Mr. Feehery said. “I think they have gone way overboard because they aren’t just attacking Trump; they are attacking everybody who voted for him.”
Mr. O’Rourke, who is polling around 2% in the Democratic presidential primary, has been one of the most vocal in labeling the president a white supremacist.
“He is — he has made that very clear,” Mr. O’Rourke said Wednesday on MSNBC. “He dehumanized those who do not look and pray like the majority of people here. He said I wish we had more immigrants from Nordic countries because those from Haiti bring AIDS, those from Africa are sh—hole nations.”
Alveda King, a niece of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. and a Trump supporter, had a question for Mr. O’Rourke.
“President Trump is not a racist. He’s not a white supremacist. I’d like to ask anyone who calls him that, have they ever met one?” she said on Fox News.
Ms. King, who survived the bombing of her family’s home by white supremacists, said most liberals accusing the president of racial intolerance cannot claim the moral high ground.
“Everyone who’s calling President Trump a racist and white supremacist, most of them support killing in a very brutal way, called abortion,” she said. “They’re using that word ‘moral,’ but they’re doing some of the most immoral deeds that America and humankind can ever see. … So I really just don’t buy into this racist banter and this race-baiting.”
The president told reporters Wednesday that he is “concerned about the rise of any group of hate.”
“Whether it’s white supremacy, whether it’s any other kind of supremacy. Whether it’s antifa,” he said, referring to the far-left, “anti-fascist” movement. “Whether it’s any group of hate, I am very concerned about it. And I’ll do something about it.”
The president tweeted later in the day, “The Dems new weapon is actually their old weapon, one which they never cease to use when they are down, or run out of facts, RACISM! They are truly disgusting! They even used it on Nancy Pelosi. I will be putting out a list of all people who have been so (ridiculously) accused!”
The White House has invited representatives of tech companies to a meeting Friday to discuss violent online extremism in the aftermath of the shootings, which claimed 31 lives.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, applauded the effort Thursday.
“From extremist ideology, to copycat manifestos inspired by the Christchurch massacre, to secret hate groups by Border Patrol agents, online extremism is fanning the flames of hatred and violence across our nation and the world,” he said. “We need better solutions to remove any content that incites violence proactively while recognizing and protecting First Amendment rights.”
Critics point to Mr. Trump’s comment after the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the demonstrations, and his use of the term “invasion” to describe illegal immigration across the Mexican border, as incitement to white supremacists.
Mr. Trump also said after the Charlottesville incident, “Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs.”
On Monday, he said in response to the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.”
The Trump campaign this week highlighted 14 examples of his denouncements of racism, hate crimes and other bigotry since taking office, and seven interviews on TV in which he condemned the KKK, David Duke, white supremacists and neo-Nazis dating to February 2000.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a post on Twitter that Democrats and media spent two years falsely calling Mr. Trump a Russian agent and then “Spent last 5 days recklessly calling him a mass murderer & white supremacist.”
“Same goes for all his supporters, according to them,” he tweeted, adding that when Mr. Trump responds to the “endless onslaught, Media & Dems freak out.”
Indeed, liberals have been increasingly applying the “white supremacist” label and similar “racism” criticisms to all Trump backers, based merely on that support.
Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross is coming under fire from one of his players and other liberals for his plans to host a fundraiser for Mr. Trump on Friday at his home on Long Island, New York. The president is expected to attend the big-ticket event, in which the price for a private roundtable discussion with Mr. Trump is $250,000.
Dolphins receiver Kenny Stills said Mr. Ross’ support of the president conflicts with the mission of his Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality, which aims to combat racial discrimination through sports.
“You can’t have a nonprofit with this mission statement then open your doors to Trump,” Mr. Stills tweeted.
Others are calling for a boycott of fitness brands Equinox and SoulCycle, in which Mr. Ross is an investor. Comedian Billy Eichner, a voice actor in the movie “The Lion King,” tweeted that Mr. Ross is “enabling racism and mass murder” by supporting the president.
I see you completely ignored the human birth rate issue that highlighted your stupidity. It's like you think no one will notice.
"how we live in the most inclusive, diverse and equal American society in history and how we are the only white majority democracy to elect and re-elect a non-white leader"
Enlighten us, how many of your conservative friends voted for that non-white leader - even just once. Obama got there without any help from the angry right-wing fringe, and then got pilloried for years by our current president about his birth certificate, with many on the right claiming he wasn't legitimate, was born in Kenya, and was secretly a Muslim. Yeah, that sounds just like the "diverse and equal American society" everyone dreams about.
NOT.
You and your ilk had absolutely NOTHING positive to do with getting Obama elected. The only thing Republicans can take credit for on that front is Bush tanking the economy, proving Republicans had no clue as to what they were doing. You have no right whatsoever to take credit for Obama's election, whom you and many others on the right vilified as the worst president in history, despite Bush's hand in collapsing the world economy, and Hank Paulson socializing the American banking system and using public tax payer dollars to cover his Wall Street friends' private corporation losses.
"seems like you all become very agitated when I make sense"
Let me know when you think you make sense, and I'll let you know if I'm agitated or not.
"Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts all have lobbed the accusation of “white supremacist” at Mr. Trump in recent days."
The Rumpster started his presidential campaign calling Latinx immigrants murderers and rapists. There's precious little indication Republicans have any problem with that all. Especially considering how many women have accused the Rumpster of sexually assaulting them.
Democrats got rid of Al Franken for far less.
"With the Mueller investigation producing a big, fat zero and impeachment looking uncertain at best, Democrats are turning to accusations of white supremacy as their next gambit to drive President Trump from office."
Numerous Benghazi investigations turned up nothing to charge Hillary with and cost millions of dollars. That didn't stop them from having more and more of them in their smear campaign to keep her out of office.
"Since two mass shootings horrified the nation last weekend, Democratic presidential candidates and others on the left are increasingly tagging Mr. Trump with the label, which is among the most abhorrent in politics."
Republicans have been touting for years now that they like how the Rumpster is "not politically correct" and "tells it like it is," and "doesn't pander to liberal snowflakes."
Now you're whining like a snowflake because some liberals used some harsh language. It sounds like they're learning from Trump. Not a good sign.
I don't know if the Rumpster really believes the white race is superior to other races or not. It's clear he thinks HE is superior to everyone else. It may be that white nationalist is a more accurate description for him than white supremacist. It is clear though that both of those groups are hearing exactly the kind of rhetoric from him that they've been hoping for for years.
That in itself is enough to disqualify him as leader of "the most inclusive, diverse and equal American society in history," especially if we want to maintain that title.
If you were really concerned about American society, you'd be doing everything you could to make sure there was just about ANY other Republican on the presidential ticket come 2020 than the orange abomination that appears to be the only choice now.
"the only way they beat Trump is making him so toxic that suburban voters won’t vote for him"
I got news for you Feehery, even if some of the Dems weren't making those accusations, he'd still be too toxic to vote for.
And those murderers and rapists Rump wanted to round up and deport? Where did he find them? Working at half a dozen food-processing plants in Mississippi while their children were at school.
I guess Rump's base can sleep better now that there food is being packed by less brown people.
"Mr. Trump also said after the Charlottesville incident, “Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs.”
Yeaaaahhh. People know when his damage control team comes up with stuff the Rumpster has to read from the teleprompter to give a facade of civility.
They also know what he says at his rallies, or unscripted, or when it comes off the top of his head, or off his twitter feed. It ENTIRELY undermines what his damage control team does.
The problem with a president that has lied over 10,000 times while in office, is that he has ZERO credibility.
Why do you think Americans are still buying his gaslighting?
A North Carolina man fired as a sheriff’s deputy after refusing to train a new female officer because of her gender alleges in a lawsuit he is a victim of religious discrimination.
Manuel Torres, an evangelical Christian and former Lee County sheriff’s deputy, asserts that his faith prohibits him from being alone with women who aren’t his wife ― which he said is exactly what would happen if he agreed to train a female deputy.
The 51-year-old is suing the Lee County’s Sheriff Office, claiming he was fired for asking to be exempt from training the woman.
The suit, filed in federal court in North Carolina on July 31, also names as defendants two other small towns Torres says subsequently denied him a job because of his religious beliefs about interacting with women. He seeks more than 300,000 in damages, as well as reinstatement by the sheriff’s office.
Torres, a Southern Baptist, is a deacon and regular attendee at East Sanford Baptist Church in Sanford. He believes that a tenet in the Bible prohibits married men from spending time alone with women who aren’t their wives, according to his lawsuit.
So how long do you think it will be before Christians ask for "special protections" so they can stone adulterers?
On the other hand, given how we've seen a number of top male Republicans treat women, perhaps not leaving them alone with one is a pretty good idea.
"Mr. O’Rourke, who is polling around 2% in the Democratic presidential primary, has been one of the most vocal in labeling the president a white supremacist."
Republicans have nothing to worry about on that front.
Earlier this week, Carlson claimed on his show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that there is no white supremacy problem in the United States and that it’s a “hoax” proliferated by the media.
Surely, no one is going to believe a white supremacy hoax. Thank God Tucker Carlson is keeping the nation's news straight; just like a heterosexual. Which he is, of course.
Once upon a time, you had meaning. You knew you had meaning because you had a mom and a dad who told you so, a God who loved you, and a community that needed you.
Once upon a time, if something happened to you, a significant number of people would mourn your death — not only because you were a good person and a good friend, but also because the community would suffer without your presence and skills. Now, the vast majority of people can barely count on one hand the number of people whose life would be truly altered by their passing.
For the most part, it can easily feel like no one cares about you anymore. Your skills are ubiquitous, you have no true community, and God doesn’t exist. So what, you may ask, is exactly the point?
We have created a society that now offers almost none of the things that make people truly happy. Family, community, spiritual belonging — these are the foundational and primal building blocks of human happiness, and they are rapidly disappearing.
With the destruction of the family, the church, and the community, the reasons people have traditionally had for their very existence are in danger of receding into the past. And the outcome is predictable: isolation, depression, anxiety, despondency, drug abuse, and death.
When we talk about gun violence, just about no one talks about these root causes. It is not as if we haven’t had large numbers of powerful semi-automatic weapons in this country for many decades. In fact, when I was in high school, my classmates regularly kept rifles in their truck gun racks in the school parking lot.
In light of these facts, the only sensible question to ask is, what has changed? Instead, politicians and pundits ask all the wrong questions. Do we have too many guns? (We always have.) Are video games and movies too violent? (They always have been.) Do we need more laws? (We have more than we can keep track of.)
No, the thing that has fundamentally changed is that we have discarded those regulating social institutions that have helped people understand their value and place in this world for thousands of years. Their decline is not just mirrored in the rise of mass shootings, but more broadly in a host of statistics that reveal an epidemic of despair.
For example, between 2000 and 2017, the rate of deaths due to drug overdose increased 400 percent, from 3 per 100,000 to 15 per 100,000. The suicide rate has increased from 10.4 per 100,000 in 2000 to 14 per 100,000 in 2017. These horrific increases have literally reduced the life expectancy in the United States from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.6 in 2017.
These statistics mirror the death of the family and the decline of faith. Children born out of wedlock increased from 20 percent in 1985 to more than 40 percent in 2013, with crime statistics tracking this trend almost exactly. Church membership declined from 70 percent in 1998 to 50 percent today. Taken together, these statistics of despair demonstrate what happens when people feel they have no place, no purpose, and no value in our world.
Technology exacerbates this phenomenon by allowing and encouraging us to isolate ourselves. Technology allows people to live their lives completely alone. People can sit in front of video games and indulge in violent fantasies. They can view endless pornography or isolate themselves into ideological bubbles that reinforce their desperate ideas.
The only antidote to this toxic brew is to engage with other people in ways that are beneficial for human flourishing. The only remedies are the institutions that have satisfied the human condition over millennia: family, community, and faith. And we are losing them. In fact, we are killing them.
Human beings are not designed for isolation. We require deep and meaningful connection. We need family and community. We are desperate for life and the love of others. We need people and institutions to help us navigate the world, to help us see that we have purpose, to help us understand right from wrong, and to imbue us with a sense of moral clarity that will hold us up during the desperate times we will all face.
Why would anyone be surprised that when we take away the foundational social structures that have allowed for the flourishing of humanity, bad things will happen? We all know very well what happens when more and more children grow up in single-parent homes. Increased suicide, drug use, drop out, teen pregnancy, and mental disorders.
We know what happens when communities deteriorate. Isolation, loneliness, and a decline in social norms. And when we destroy the church, the very institution that has been our bedrock of values, morality, and redemption for thousands of years? Despair, immorality, desperation, and evil.
Combine all three, and we know exactly what happens. An opioid epidemic so severe that it has literally reduced our average life expectancy. A suicide rate that continues to climb for almost all demographic groups. Mass shootings.
Destroy the family, abandon the community, raze the church to the ground. What could go wrong? Everything.
"I see you completely ignored the human birth rate issue that highlighted your stupidity. It's like you think no one will notice"
is there a human birth issue?
please give us some details
"Enlighten us, how many of your conservative friends voted for that non-white leader - even just once"
it's actually racist to imply that someone should automatically vote for a non-white
my point is that liberals exaggerate the extent of racism is the only white-majority nation to elect a non-white leader and re-elect him
remember, in Obama's first month in office, he had a 70% approval rating
the whole Dem assertion that white supremacy is on the rise is malarkey
racism is not increasing, hate crimes are not up
it's a hoax
"Let me know when you think you make sense, and I'll let you know if I'm agitated or not"
you're on notice
"The Rumpster started his presidential campaign calling Latinx immigrants murderers and rapists"
that's a lie
"Numerous Benghazi investigations turned up nothing to charge Hillary with and cost millions of dollars. That didn't stop them from having more and more of them in their smear campaign to keep her out of office"
I don't know why you don't understand that every time you say this, you confirm that the Mueller investigation was investigating a hoax, based on political motivations
but thanks for doing so
"Now you're whining like a snowflake because some liberals used some harsh language. It sounds like they're learning from Trump. Not a good sign."
whining? conservatives nationwide are cheering the Dem descent into electoral catastrophe
Dems are gonna have a Dana-Beyer type defeat in 2020
at this point is 1971, Dems were so sure that they would beat the incredibly unlikeable Nixon that they figured they could go all in and nominate an extreme liberal
in 2020, Dems will be lucky to win Massachusetts
"I don't know if the Rumpster really believes the white race is superior to other races or not"
here's an idea: stop saying something if you don't know if it's true
"That in itself is enough to disqualify him as leader of "the most inclusive, diverse and equal American society in history," especially if we want to maintain that title"
so, you concede we now have that title
don't worry: Americans aren't changing
"what he says at his rallies, or unscripted, or when it comes off the top of his head, or off his twitter feed"
like what?
"The problem with a president that has lied over 10,000 times while in office, is that he has ZERO credibility"
that's why Obama 70% approval rating disappeared
"Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson said that there is no white supremacy problem in the United States and that it’s a “hoax” proliferated by the media"
hard to argue with
Back in the summer of 1982, about 18 months into the Reagan presidency, the Washington Post wrote an editorial that sneered, “Reaganomics is now a failure for all to see.” Two months later began one of the strongest and longest economic revivals in American history, with growth rates that surged above 7 percent. Whoops! The timing of the Washington Post editorial could hardly have been worse. Reagan used to say joyfully, “I knew our economic plan was working when they stopped calling it Reaganomics.”
A recent column in the New York Times by the economist Paul Krugman entitled, “Why was Trumponomics a flop?” It is fair to say that Krugman has never been anything but a savage critic of the economic agenda of President Trump, and he has rooted against the economy ever since Election Day 2016. The day after Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Nobel prize winning economist predicted a stock market collapse, which was slightly off the mark, given that the stock market is up near 50 percent and $10 trillion in wealth has been created since Trump was elected.
But that did not stop the Krugman screed from going viral, as liberals celebrated the news that Trumponomics has crashed and burned. What is striking about the column, and the joyous response to it, is just how divorced it is from the reality that most normal people see and feel every day. We have today the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 50 years, low and stable inflation, the biggest wage gains in a decade, the highest stock market ever, and a record 7.5 million unfilled jobs. Those blue collar jobs in construction and manufacturing that President Obama declared would never come back are up by almost 1.2 million jobs in less than three years.
Recent Commerce Department revisions in income gains during 2017 show 5 percent gains for the middle class, which is significant given that inflation is almost nonexistent outside of education and health care. So is Trumponomics really a flop? Only in the sense that “Gone with the Wind,” “Becoming” by Michelle Obama, and LeBron James can be called flops.
This is not to say that we have an A+ economy. Krugman is right that the trade war with China and other tariffs have subtracted from growth this year. Business investment, which is greatly incentivized under the Trump tax cuts, has been decent but not as strong as we had hoped so far. Federal deficit spending is way too overboard. Still, if Obama had ever produced economic prosperity as we have today, he would have led an entire marching band down Pennsylvania Avenue playing “Ode to Joy.”
Krugman grudgingly admits the obvious that unemployment is lower and growth is higher under Trump than under Obama. But he ascribes the Trump prosperity to high budget deficits and easy money Federal Reserve policy. This is absurd for two reasons. First, government spending and printing money does not cause growth. If it did, Venezuela would be the richest nation on the planet. Second, the budget deficits under Obama were almost twice as high as a share of gross domestic product during his first term than they have been under Trump. Big federal borrowing and “shovel ready” projects should have sent the economy out of this world under Obama. Instead, we got the flimsiest recovery in half a century.
A recent Gallup poll found 70 percent of Americans rating the economy as good or great, roughly double the number during the Obama presidency. The disparagement of the Trump record by Krugman reminds me of the old joke about an eternally joyful fellow who is always full of cheer, and the miserable people grouse, “He thinks he is happy, but he really is not.”
About 24 hours after the Krugman piece about Trumponomics flopping was published, the latest jobs report came out with 160,000 more jobs added.
Whoops!
(FERGUSON, Mo.) -- Community members in Ferguson, Missouri, will hold several events on Friday to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the officer-involved shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Brown, who is black, was unarmed when he was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in 2014, sparking national protests over police brutality and marking the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement.
One of the biggest events will be the opening of "As I See You: A Tribute to Mike Brown Jr.," an exhibit at the Urban League Ferguson Community Empowerment Center.
"We would be honored to have you join us to commemorate the tragic loss of Mike, Jr. that shook the world, to acknowledge the healing that has taken place this far and to unite with us for the change we still work to see," The Michael Brown Chosen for Change Foundation, the organization behind the exhibit, said in a statement.
The exhibit will be open Friday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
The tribute is one of the many events planned to mark the city's "5th Annual Michael Brown Memorial Weekend," a three-day celebration organized by the foundation, which was established by Brown's father, Michael Brown Sr.
A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson in November 2014, and the U.S. Justice Department declined to prosecute him in March 2015, citing evidence and witnesses supporting Wilson’s claims that Brown attacked him. Wilson resigned from the police department in November 2014.
Both the shooting itself and the government's decision not to charge Wilson incited violent riots in Ferguson.
Brown's family was eventually paid $1.5 million in a settlement after they sued the city of Ferguson.
Other events will be held in the area too, including a memorial service at the Canfield Green Apartments complex, where Brown was killed. Residents decorated the spot outside the apartments where he died with stuffed animals and flowers made of paper this week ahead of the anniversary.
There will also be a free community event featuring vendors, food, music and children's entertainment in honor of the slain teen.
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