#and the white house responded by tweeting that they 'had every right to defend themselves from terrorists'

[ispeaktheyburn]

Not to be all “why is no one talking about this” but there should be more outrage over the Israel/Palestine situation on here

[route22ny]

The split-screen reality of the Trump era became all too real for Stephen Richer recently, and in a very literal way. On May 15, the Arizona election official — a Republican — was looking at two computer screens. On one was former President Trump’s claim that a key election database had been deleted, an “unbelievable election crime.” On the other screen was that very database, quite intact.

“Wow,” Richer tweeted. “This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now.”

A couple of days later, he made his dismay even more explicit.

“What can we do here?” he asked in an interview with CNN. “This is tantamount to saying that the pencil sitting on my desk in front of me doesn’t exist.”

When Richer unseated a Democratic incumbent to become Maricopa County’s recorder in November, he thought he had won the most boring job in politics: maintaining the county’s voter files. But he had not reckoned on Trump, #StopTheSteal, and the most massive, audacious and successful propaganda campaign in modern American history — a campaign that has adapted Russian-style disinformation to U.S. politics with alarming success.

Fortunately, Richer and his local Republican colleagues have refused to be victimized. Instead, they have shown how to fight back.

Information warfare takes many forms, but it has an overarching goal: to divide, demoralize and disorient a political foe by manipulating the social and media environments. As Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet intelligence defector, explained in a chilling 1983 interview, “What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their family, their community and their country.”

One potent weapon of mass distraction is the “fire hose of falsehood,” a torrent of lies that aims not so much to persuade as to confuse and disorient. After Russian intelligence services got caught poisoning a defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018, the Russian government responded with a blizzard of mutually contradictory lies: Britain did it, Ukraine did it, a jealous lover did it, it was a suicide attempt and so on.

Another standard technique: conspiracy bootstrapping. First you spread a rumor. Then you demand an investigation. Failure to investigate just confirms the conspiracy, but so does an investigation with a negative finding. It’s a trap: either ignoring or debunking the conspiracy theory propagates it.

Those techniques are not new. Intelligence services and propaganda experts understand them well, and master propagandists like Josef Goebbels and Vladimir Putin have used them to powerful effect. What no one imagined was that they could be deployed by an American president and his party — and not against a foreign antagonist, but against the American public.

Pundits often say that, whatever his authoritarian tendencies, Trump is too inept and inattentive to have done much lasting damage to democracy. They are wrong: In the realm of information warfare, Trump is a genius-level innovator. It was he who figured out how to adapt Russia-style disinformation to the U.S. political environment, no mean accomplishment.

His use of the fire hose of falsehood was masterly. In his 2016 campaign, according to PolitiFact, 70% of his checkable claims were false or mostly false, a flood of untruths whose like had never been seen in a presidential campaign. He began his presidency by lying about the weather at his inauguration and also lying about the size of the crowd. By the time his presidency was over, Washington Post fact-checkers had clocked him at more than 30,000 confirmed falsehoods, with nearly half coming in his final year.

Similarly, he was a master of conspiracy bootstrapping. He retailed conspiracy theories and falsehoods on the grounds that a lot of people were saying them, although of course he was the sayer-in-chief. Truth and common decency need not apply; when a prominent cable news host criticized him, Trump peddled an absurd (and deeply cruel) lie that the host was suspected of murder.

The black arts of disinformation had the intended effect, at least from Trump’s point of view. They exacerbated the country’s divisions, commandeered the country’s attention, dominated his opponents, disoriented the media and helped him establish a cult of personality among followers who trusted no one else.

Still, he saved the worst for last. His pièce de résistance was the propaganda attack on the 2020 election. Beginning months before the election, he launched a drumbeat of unfounded attacks on mail-in voting. Pundits were puzzled. Many Republicans vote by mail, and the pandemic was especially dangerous to older voters who lean toward Trump; why discourage them from voting safely and conveniently?

But Trump was aiming for the post-election. He saw he was in electoral trouble. With the anti-mail campaign, he was organizing, priming, and testing an unprecedented propaganda network, ready for use if he lost.

And then came #StopTheSteal itself, a disinformation campaign whose likes the country had never witnessed. It mobilized the White House, Republican politicians, social media, conservative cable news and talk radio, frivolous litigation, and every other available channel to broadcast the message that the election was rigged. The Big Lie, as it was aptly named, failed to keep Trump in office, but it succeeded at its secondary goal: turning the Republican Party itself into a propaganda organ.

In April, only a fourth of Republicans believed Joe Biden was legitimately elected, and GOP politicians who insisted on truth were persona non grata.

With that as background, we can see more clearly what is going on right now in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest. In 2020, Biden carried Maricopa by more than 45,000 votes, and with it the state. The result was certified by the Republican governor, double-checked twice by the county’s election officials, and then confirmed by two independent audits.

But in classic bootstrapping fashion, Trump and state Republican leaders seized on conspiracy theories, such as that phony ballots had been smuggled in from Asia, to launch an unnecessary recount conducted by an unqualified company whose boss had promoted uncorroborated charges of election fraud. In textbook fashion, the controversial recount drove yet more public attention to the conspiracy theories, engendering yet more suspicion and spawning me-too demands for partisan “audits” across the country.

The Arizona shenanigans will not change the outcome of the 2020 election, but that is not the point. A great propaganda campaign is cyclonic and self-propelled: once unleashed, it takes on a life of its own, heedless of any underlying reality. By that yardstick, the Arizona recount is a great propaganda campaign.

Americans have never been exposed to Russian-style disinformation tactics, at least not coming from a major political party and deployed on a national scale. We are thus dangerously vulnerable to them. What can we do? There are no quick or simple answers; developing immunity requires everything from more sophisticated journalism and better-designed social media platforms to teaching media literacy, and much more.

But here is where to start: Do what Stephen Richer did. Insist loudly, unwaveringly and bravely on calling out lies, even at the cost of partisan solidarity.

Once it became clear that the #StopTheSteal campaign was escalating instead of dying out, Richer went public with a no-holds-barred denunciation of what Trump and his enablers were up to. “Just stop indulging this,” he told CNN. “Stop giving space for lies.”

At his side were all five of the Maricopa County supervisors — four of whom are Republicans. Calling the recount a sham, a con, and a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” they declared they “stand united together to defend the Constitution and the republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for truth.” They also wrote a blistering 14-page letter shredding the alt-audit in detail.

Propaganda attacks succeed when critical points of resistance collapse; they stumble when trusted voices expose lies for what they are. Individuals and small groups may not be able to shut down a propaganda campaign or neutralize all its effects, but they can strip away its facade of legitimacy and act as an anchor against runaway fabulism. That was why the Soviet Union struggled so mightily to silence Andrei Sakharov and other dissident voices, and why those voices ultimately brought down the evil empire.

And it is why Rep. Liz Cheney made a difference when she chose truthfulness over her job in the Republican congressional leadership. The day she was booted, she read her colleagues John 8:32: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” She could not end #StopTheSteal, but she could, and did, dent its credibility and embarrass Republicans whose equivocation and silence abetted the Big Lie.

In the same way, Richer and his colleagues in Arizona laid down a marker. They risked their political standing and even their personal safety (Richer has needed security protection) to expose their own party’s propaganda and shame those who spread it.

The deployment of Russian-style information warfare has allowed Trump and his authoritarian cult to usurp the Republican Party. And they are not finished. Now that they have succeeded with mass disinformation, it will be a fixture of American politics for years to come.

Countermeasures begin, though do not end, with personal integrity: standing up for facts and staying reality-based, whatever the short-term political costs. Think of it as epistemic patriotism, and pray for more of it, especially from Republicans.

***

The author, Jonathan Rauch, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.”

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-arizona-dreaming-20210522-uyd6ivuv75hd5gof2geyd5adtu-story.html

[vaguely-problematic]

the whole 12 minutes is gold but especially this part:

for too long those of us with opportunity and privilege have failed and our responsibility to look at the truth squarely and name the system of racial oppression that artificially divides Americans and benefits those already in positions of relative power.

It’s perfectly understandable to not want to do this. It’s human. No one wants to lose privileges or position. Especially when fear of that loss is magnified and stoked by political leaders for their own supposed Advantage. I say supposed Advantage because if you deny the human rights and dignity of any people you will ultimately destroy the society and civilization that you claim to protect.

58 years ago John Kennedy said those who make peaceful Revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Not only is addressing systemic racial and economic Injustice The right thing to do. It is the safest most conservative most self-protecting most self-serving thing to do.  contents Under Pressure will eventually explode and that’s not a threat that’s a law of nature. So it’s time to ask ourselves as it is always time to ask ourselves. What kind of nation do we want to live in?

that answer requires moral leadership.

Take it upon yourself to be a leader and set an example of the kind of country You want to live in.

that might mean going down to a protest or making a donation or having a tense conversation about race,

but you’re not going to get that from the White House. So we need to step up and provide it ourselves. America is now officially byop:  be your own president.

(Full speech-to-text transcription under cut)

i’m Stephen Colbert, well, we’re back after 10 days off and I never imagined that after 10 days a global pandemic would not be the lead story.

Remember when we were all afraid of our groceries. I miss those days.

No the story that has pushed 100,000 covid deaths below the fold is America’s pre-existing condition- racism.  protests against police targeting black people have broken out in dozens of cities.

So April was global pandemic May is massive Nationwide protests over systemic racism. I assume June is a plague of locusts then in July pleated pants are coming back.

That’s not just US citizens protesting racism in the United States. protesters gathered in London Toronto. Even Berlin, you know, it’s bad when Germany thinks your country is racist that’s like Jamaica telling you to put down the bong.

These protests were sparked last Monday by the extrajudicial execution of a man named George Floyd face down in a Street in Minneapolis Floyd died after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes now in civilized countries that’s called Murder.  Minneapolis police officer and cop who so dirty even his badge is crooked Derek Chauvin even adding to the outrage is that it took four days to arrest the officer even though there’s  video of him doing it.

It would be the shortest episode of Law & Order ever in the criminal justice system. The people are represented by two separate but equally important groups the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders who in this case are the police because come on we all saw the video. What are you waiting for? That’s it. I’m going to the protest. do the "dun dun”.

Even after Chauvin was arrested. He was charged with third-degree murder. That’s a pretty light charge. That’s like Prosecuting Jeffrey Dahmer for a bad case of the munchies. We find the defendant, hangry.

Plus the other three officers involved have not been charged with the crime. So if you’re wondering why people are so upset. It’s because this is so upsetting. Also, it’s not an isolated incident on the very same day that Floyd was killed. There was another viral video of a white woman named Amy Cooper who is confronted by a black bird watcher who asked her to put her dog on a leash in Central Park, and he responded by doing this and I’ve hidden please. Please call the cops. Please call the cops. African American man threatening my life. She knows exactly what she’s doing and why that man should be afraid of the police a brilliant performance. She should win the white lady Oscar.  also known as the Oscar.

now Floyd’s death comes on the heels of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arberyurry and also has Eerie similarities to Eric Garner in 2014. And in that same year, there was the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson Tamir rice and Cleveland all of those Echo Emmett Till and the Scottsboro boys, which happened in the context of Jim Crow, which itself was a soft relaunch of slavery. See really got to go back to the Triangle Trade which ultimately stems from man. Man’s inhumanity to man and are essential Fallen nature. So maybe start with the Garden of Eden actually, you know what in the beginning there was a single point of all matter and energy under tremendous pressure. But you know, there’s always a few bad atoms and the whole thing exploded

now in times like these we need empathetic and moral leadership. Unfortunately. We have Donald Trump. normally during National unrest president step up and address the nation’s pain.

Following the death of Michael Brown President Obama met with activists in the White House President Clinton comfort of the nation with a moving address after the Oklahoma City bombing. Even Richard Nixon in 1970 made a surprise trip, or he spoke to students protesting the Vietnam War who can forget his stirring words. We’ve got to come together and defeat are common. Enemy. The Jews I wrote down on this rushed

Trump can’t even match the compassion of a Nixon because as the Protests raged on Pfizer’s discuss the prospect of an oval office address in an attempt to ease tensions, but the idea was quickly scrapped for lack of policy proposals and the president’s own seeming disinterest in delivering a message of unity. Okay? Mr. President. We’re thinking a short powerful speech from the Resolute desk where you call for racial healing. I’m sorry. What’s that sir? You want to act it out with a box of Aunt Jemima. You know what? Let’s just scrap the whole thing. Today Trump had a call with the nation’s Governors to discuss the ongoing protests and he read straight from the authoritarian Playbook. Why isn’t comforting words. It reminds me of what? Mr. Rogers said about times of tragedy. Look for the dominators. Oh won’t you be? Oh you will be my neighbor you jerk.

That was mr. Rogers dominating someone.

Then Trump said something really scary, you know and you’ll never see this stuff again. So people are upset about systemic racism and a society that over polices and imprisons black people and Trump solution is to do more of that. You know, what they say those who refuse to learn from history are Donald Trump. So Donald Trump is the big tough guy going to dominate the opposition pew pew pew so naturally on Friday as

Range nearby Trump took shelter in the White House bunker. Well if history has taught us anything is that things always work out well for strong men who Retreat to underground bunkers. Mr. President. Come on. This is your moment. You’re always calling to beat up protesters at your rallies. You could shut this whole thing down just pop a couple of hydroxy xand come out of the White House swinging a 5-iron with a Confederate flag tape do it. But instead he tweeted great job last night at the White House by the US Secret Service. Service, they were not only totally professional but a very cool. I was inside watched every move and couldn’t have felt more safe adding a nobody came close to breaching the fence. If they had they would dad dad. Dad. Dad dot-dot-dot have been greeted with the most officious dogs and most ominous weapons I’ve ever seen that’s when people would have been really badly hurt at least many Secret.

Agents just waiting for Action. We put the young ones on the front line sir. They love it. I don’t know why they’re not letting him give that reassuring speech from the Oval Office my fellow Americans. Let me send a clear message to the people protesting police brutality law enforcement is just a bunch of cool guys who cannot wait for things to get crazy. They see you as target practice now a truly enjoy watching you get eaten by vicious. Dogs now, let’s all come together in peace. Come buy guns my Lord come buy guns.

The protest of the White House were specifically in response to this tweet. These thugs are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor. Tim was and told him the military is with him all the way any difficulty and we will assume control, but when the Looting starts the shooting starts, thank you. Kind of an unnerving way to end a threat. It’s like that scene in Taken. I will look for you. I will find you and I will kill you. Thank you. Stay safe. Everyone top also had some more succinct thoughts tweeting. So terrible where the arrests and long-term jail sentences. We tried to sir, but Susan Collins voted to acquit you.

Now while Trump is in hiding it’s really good to see average citizen stepping up and filling in the void yesterday in Queens police knelt with protesters while in Flint Michigan the sheriff joined the march in Brooklyn protesters protected to Target from looters and Kentucky this group of white women formed a line to protect black protesters from police in Louisville protesters formed a human barrier to protect a cop who got separated from his unit and in Minneapolis.

Group of Mennonites showed up to support the protest Tonight’s Mennonites think America’s too racist! and they live in 1840.

Now I make a lot of jokes about Donald Trump because he is a dull and dark corrupting force that is undermining America’s moral leadership around the world and sewing hatred and fear among his own citizens. So that’s fun. and during this covid crisis the president is totally abdicated his responsibility of leading the people to understand the need to do the right thing for themselves and each other and yet the large majority of Americans have done the right thing anyway,

My Hope Is that the American people will do the same thing now Because ultimately they have to for too long those of us with opportunity and privilege have failed and our responsibility to look at the truth squarely and name the system of racial oppression that artificially divides Americans and benefits those already in positions of relative power. It’s perfectly understandable to not want to do this. It’s human. No one wants to lose privileges or position. Especially when fear of that loss is magnified and stoked by political leaders for their own supposed Advantage. I say supposed Advantage because if you deny the human rights and dignity of any people you will ultimately destroy the society and civilization that you claim to protect.

58 years ago John Kennedy said those who make peaceful Revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. Not only is addressing systemic racial and economic Injustice. The right thing to do. It is the safest most conservative most self-protecting most self-serving thing to do. contents under Pressure will eventually explode and that’s not a threat that’s a law of nature. So it’s time to ask ourselves as it is always time to ask ourselves. What kind of nation do we want to live in that answer requires moral leadership?

Take it upon yourself to be a leader and set an example of the kind of country you want to live in.  that might mean going down to a protest or making a donation or having a tense conversation about race,

but you’re not going to get that from the White House. So we need to step up and provide it ourselves. America is now officially byop:  be your own president.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Deborah “Shoulder Scarf” Birx is so sorry she stood there in the White House briefing room with her thumb up her ass while Trump recommended drinking Clorox and lied about numbers of cases of COVID and masks and everything else about the virus for a year.

Lindsay “Little Lindsay” Graham bought himself a shiny new AR-15 so he can defend his house against marauding “gangs,” and probably because if you don’t own one of these things, they throw you out of the “base” on your pin-striped butt.

You remember the phrase, “there is no bottom” don’t you?  The idea, principally involving Donald Trump, that he couldn’t possibly go any lower than he just went with his latest tweet or his latest lie.  Well, I’ve got news for him.  He’s got competition.

Little Lindsay, for one.  Can you imagine this lame squeak-toy masquerading as a senator from South Carolina and his own personal assault rifle?  Don’t you wonder where he keeps it, so he can defend against all those “gangs” that are determined to steal all his antiques or take the brooch he inherited from his mommy, or whatever the hell else he thinks he’s defending?  Well, at least we know which gangs he’s not afraid of:  The Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, because of course they’re they ones who were “kissing and hugging” the Capitol Police on January 6, according to Lindsay’s golf partner and Mar a Lago lunch-buddy.  Nothing to worry about from them, no sir.  We’re not afraid of those gangs, because, you know…they’re not Black.

But it was last night’s CNN special entitled “COVID War:  The Pandemic doctors speak out,” that takes the cake for this week’s How Low Can We Go Award.  What fucking war?  There was never a goddamned “war” on COVID!  You point to one thing this country did during the 12 months or so Trump and his administration were in charge that amounted to a “war.”  Did they institute a nation-wide campaign against the disease, one in which all 50 states and Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories would all be doing the same thing at the same time to fight the disease?  If anything even remotely resembling a national unified effort was undertaken, I must have missed it.

And the very idea of collecting these nincompoops in one place with the apparent purpose of asking them what really happened?  I mean, they had 365 opportunities between January of 2020 and January of this year on any given afternoon to pick up the phone and call CNN or the New York Times or MSNBC or the Washington Post or anybody for crying out loud and unburden themselves about what the hell was really going on inside the White House or the CDC or the DHS or the FDA, because that’s where they worked, or allegedly worked anyway.  Any one of them could have called a press conference out on Pennsylvania Avenue in sight of the White House and blown the whistle on the fucking criminal enterprise that was the Trump administration’s response to the most deadly outbreak of disease in this country in a hundred years.

Nobody was stopping them.  There wasn’t a squad of D.C. cops or Secret Service agents out there preventing them from opening their mouths and telling the truth.  Birx tried to imply that somehow Trump threatened her, at least that was the question from CNN.  “I got called by the President. It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult to hear."  “Were you threatened?” CNN asked her?  "I would say it was a very uncomfortable conversation."

Oh, goodness!  She must have broken out in a sweat and got one of her scarves all damp and everything!  A very uncomfortable conversation,” she said.  What about all the “very uncomfortable conversations” happening in every fucking hospital in the country when doctors walked outside to tell family members that dad, or mom, or a son or a daughter just took their last gasp on a respirator?  How many times you figure that happened?  Ten thousand?  Twenty?  A fucking hundred thousand times?

And who in the flaming son of the devil is Dr. Robert Kadlec, identified by CNN as a disaster response official at the Department of Health and Human Services.  You ever remember hearing from or about this goof over the last year?  You would think that being the assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services for “disaster response” would put you right in the middle of the COVID pandemic, wouldn’t you?  So where the fuck was Kadlec?

Well, I had to look him up and here’s what I found.  He was the subject of a long-forgotten whistleblower complaint from way back in May of last year that I have a dim memory of.  While the COVID virus was rampaging through the country and killing at first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands a day, Kadlec was awarding a sweetheart no-bid contract for a fucking smallpox vaccine to some company called Emergent BioSolutions he had a personal connection with, at a price that was twice what the government had previously paid for the same vaccine.  So what did Kadlec do?  He proceeded to go after the guy who filed the complaint against him, Rick Bright, who was the head of BARDA, the Biomedical Advance Research and Development Authority.  Kadlec demoted him, transferred him out of BARDA and put him in a job where he had nothing to do.  So all the time Kadlec actually has something to do, an actual “disaster” to respond to, he’s running around awarding insider deals for a vaccine against a virus we haven’t had a case of in fucking decades.

And he’s one of the SOBs that CNN chose to have on its “COVID war” special.  (Rick Bright, on the other hand, was recently appointed to President Biden’s coronavirus advisory board.)

Let’s not even discuss Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC who was in charge of shutting up everyone in that once-prestigious government agency.  Or Stephen Hahn, head of the FDA, who, shall we say, didn’t exactly distinguish himself or his agency as 500,000 souls were buried under his watch.  Or Brett Giroir, the former four star admiral you used to see standing next to Trump during his Rose Garden appearances when he was screaming about “opening up” the economy and telling us the coronavirus was going to “just disappear.”  He was Assistant Secretary for Health and was put in charge of COVID testing, which we will all recall was such a success that more than a year after COVID, it is still a gigantic pain in the ass to get a test for the virus.

CNN had all these goofs on its air last night because they know “the real story behind the scenes” in the “war on COVID.”  Not one of them ever flapped so much as a corner of their bottom lip to tell what they knew about how fucked up the whole Trump administration was during the year they served under the Golfer in Chief.  Not one of them considered for even a moment resigning from their position and going public.  And now, we’re told, they are all working on restoring their reputations while there are 500,000 dead bodies out there who were buried on their watch which will never be “restored.”

I’m so glad Joe Biden made it to the White House so he could stand out there on the back lawn the other day where Trump used to tell all his lies to the press and finish answering a reporter’s question about Georgia’s new voting restrictions by saying, “You can’t provide water for people about to vote.  Give me a break.”

I’ve wanted to hear someone say “give me a break” for four long years.  Give me a break, CNN, asking all these lame fucks to tell us the truth about Trump and COVID, 500,000 lives too late.  Give me a break, Shoulder Scarf, with your whining about Trump making you feel “uncomfortable.”  Give me a break, Little Lindsay, with your brand-new shiny shootie-thingie that’s going to scare all those nasty gang guys.

Lucian K. Truscott IV

[lizacstuff]

Bunch of anons about Carina and Roswell NM drama

Under the cut because it’s long and gossipy...

Anonymous said: Whatever nonsense Carina may have been up to with Jeanine and Nathan, both the leads have seemed to keep their private issues to themselves by not telling other cast or friends. That's why it angers me that the person who leaked the information disregarded Jeanine as a person and victim.

I’m of two minds on this.  On one hand I totally agree and I hate that Jeanine’s name was drug into this and her involvement was shared by the multiple inside sources, but on the other hand I do not like Carina, I think she was awful to work for, and I think it’s a good thing if it’s know in the industry that she created friction on set and was investigated by HR.  

She was so unprofessional, just from what we could see as fans, that she should NOT be put in charge of another show any time soon. So I think for the sake of people she will work with in the future, it’s a good thing it’s out there.  She has a whole lot of growing to do before she should ever work in television again. 

You make a good point about Jeanine and Nathan keeping their business to themselves.  Carina is out there over-sharing constantly, putting every neurosis on full display, and forcing half the cast to be out drinking and entertaining her on a regular basis. While those two, kept quiet and out of the spotlight. In interviews/panels they’ve both been completely professional, doing their jobs while also being charming, funny and eloquent.  

It was obvious to those of us watching closely that all was not well between J/N and Carina when the season started shooting. Carina was bitchier when she talked about them and those characters than she had been before, and J/N were nowhere to be seen in her braggy out-partyin’-with-my-cast IG stories and posts.  

As you say, it doesn’t look like J/N tried to drag any other cast or crew into whatever the issue was. I’m not sure the same can be said for Carina, that speaks volumes about the character of all involved. 

Anonymous said: I saw that abnormallyadam is doing a live social media thing with Jeanine and Vlamis soon. I guess we might get more information then and if Jeanine decides to say anything.

How hilarious would it be if Adam gets the scoop of a lifetime!?

I’m guessing this chat or whatever it is was set up before Jeanine and Vlamis knew the studio was going to swoop in and make their lives a whole lot better by firing Carina. So it will be interesting to see if it still happens on schedule or if it’s postponed for awhile.  

If it does go on, I think they will probably cover it really quickly and superficially like Vlamis did when he was schilling his merch the other night and then move on.  They won’t deep dive into it, that’s for sure. 

Anonymous said: Carina has been tweeting incessantly today! Like tweeting about other meaningless things won't make people forget lol. Also about that anon message you received about unfollowing nathan - wowwww she used to be up his butt.

Yes, remember the days when Carina used him as her social media crutch (every post she makes like that with a hot actor or country singer is basically her rampant insecurities saying: “hey look at the hot guy(s) who hang out with me and take pictures with me, it means I have value ya’ll!”) before she moved onto Trevino and then Vlamis.  So sad.   

They were clearly friends after The Originals and she invited him to audition.  I’m glad she did, he’s great in the role. Although it sounds like he was lucky that the President of the CW saw him and told her he was a leading man, since she didn’t see him as a lead. Sometime a friend’s preconceived notions might actually hold a person back... 

Who knows what happened, but just knowing human nature and Carina’s energy, I’ve always wondered if she thought she was going to have her friend on set and he was gonna be her social crutch, her go-to to entertain her and party with her, but right off the bat he and Jeanine got together so during the first season filming he wasn’t so much interested in the single, going-out partying lifestyle that she’s clearly addicted to and that rankled her a bit. Perhaps she lost her party buddy to her leading lady, and the loss of that attention “displeased” her. (to quote Kamran who said Carina told the writers to punish actors who displeased her by reducing their screen time. Interesting thought, no?)

Anonymous said: Well the interesting thing is some of the other people she follows don't post much either and she continues to follow them. Interesting interesting.

I know. She didn’t unfollow him because of that. That was definitely a show of cutting ties with him. It was probably in a fit of rage because she can’t unfollow Jeanine (because that would look terrible).  Also she has been so humiliated between being unceremoniously fired and losing her development deal with WB, the Hollywood Reporter article making her look terrible, and that writer spilling tea, that my guess is she’s hoping to shift focus to someone else and she knows unfollowing him will make us all wonder why. 

Anonymous said: Well shoot, maybe it was Nathan and not Jeanine who went to hr? And Carina found out? Or Nathan took the fall? Sorry I'm just going down a rabbit hole of conspiracy.

In my opinion there’s no reason to think those sources got it wrong. I would guess that Jeanine was involved, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t also involve Nathan.  Those two are a self-professed team, so no reason to think they wouldn't be in this instance as well. 

Anonymous said: Does this mean she'll unfollow Jeanine too??

I’m sure she wants to, but she can’t unless she wants to confirm that, yes, there was friction on the set and, yes, there was a specific problem with her leading lady.

Carina went out of her way to try and combat the “rumors” about her and Jeanine not getting along, addressing the situation in her goodbye post-- drawing more attention to it in the process-- so unfollowing her now would just make her look foolish and like everything she said was a lie and everything from the inside sources is true.  

Anonymous said: Carina will definitely do something stupid. She can't help herself. But even though there's no reason to follow Nathan, he's been inactive on Twitter for over a year and for her to unfriend now during this drama and mess...how is that a coincidence?

As I said above, I know it’s not a coincidence.  She’s dumb because by doing that she pretty much confirmed that there was friction on the set.  If there wasn’t, she wouldn’t be unfollowing the person in the main cast who she was closest too prior to the show. 

Part of me wonders if, as an old friend, she asked him for something (to defend her or a show of support) and he wouldn't do it.  Perhaps she’s most hurt by him not supporting her since they were friends before and she did give him a lead role on a network show (and also accidentally introduced him to his girlfriend.)  Maybe she thought he owed her and he didn't step up to defend her or even just give a tacit show of support by responding to her social media posts on leaving??

I’m guessing if he had come out of social media hibernation to give her one of those paltry “Thanks for everything” responses to her IG post like the other actors she wouldn't have unfollowed him. 

Anonymous said: Someone said the writer deleted all his tweets about Carina.

Not surprising, it was a crazy spree he was on, who wants to bet that he got contacted by a lawyer late Friday night?

I’m sure Carina was doing everything in her power to threatened him and to get him to stop. 

Anonymous said: I remember the writer also referring to Nathan as Carina's "friend." Is it in quotations because they are not actually friends? Frenemy? Carina was recently saying nice things about Nathan so based on her perspective, she thinks they were still on good terms?

Well they were apparently friends before he was cast, what happened after that is hard to say. They seemed fine during the promotion of season 1, but as soon as season 2 started filming, Carina’s tone when talking about him and Max got ugly and Nathan and Jeanine were staying far away from her socially. I mean Jeanine hosted a ladies Friendsgiving at their house, where 40 women from the cast and crew came over for a Thanksgiving feast, but the female showrunner wasn’t there. Hmmmm...

However, this spring things seemed to have thawed a bit.  Jeanine and Carina would occasionally like each other’s IG post (someone pointed out to me that had stopped during summer of 2019 and they didn’t engage with each other’s posts much if at all during S2 filming) Jeanine and Carina did that IG live and Carina was talking positively about Nathan and Max and seemed to be setting him up for a big season 3 with the dual roles and talking excitedly about that, so honestly, to me, it seemed like they had made their peace.  Perhaps Carina getting fired (and the straw that broke the camel’s back on that was clearly her idiotic tirade against the UK distributor) brought back up all the issues??? Or maybe Carina blamed them because of the prior issues? Or maybe they didn’t support her with the studio when she was trying to salvage her job? All I know is that Carina’s public behavior on social media is enough grounds to fire her, so she has no business blaming anyone but herself. 

Anonymous said: Someone said to the writer that jeanine, amber and nathan are staying silent on the matter and kamran replied that "Silence speaks louder than words." just above that they also were wondering who Carina harassed and bullied into silence? was it nathan?

Who knows... ask the writer. 

Anonymous said: Carina going from Zapit straight to writing for TVD is peak white privilege. After that THR article you could tell she believed a little too much how far that privilege would get her. Good riddance. Good luck getting another job for being such a big liability. I don't see any corporation hiring her again.

I think the only way she’s getting another job in TV anytime soon is if Julie gives it to her. She’s talented, once she grows up maybe she’ll be capable of running a show, but it was clear from the peanut gallery she should never have been given that amount of responsibility that she had on RNM. 

[bountyofbeads]

This is a heartbreaking investigation into how Donald Trump's DISGUSTING 🤢, VILE, DESPICABLE, APPALLING, and DEPRAVED behavior is trickling down in our society and having REAL LIFE EFFECTS(including suicide) on our children and young people. The FISH ROTS from the HEAD. Melania it looks like your 'BE BEST' campaign isn't working out so well. Perhaps you should start by taking your husband's phone away and removing him from public view. PLEASE READ 📖 and SHARE this investigation. TY 🙏🏻🙏🏼🙏🏽🙏🏾🙏🏿

HOW THE BULLY-IN-CHIEF IS TURNING AMERICA NASTIER

By Paul Waldman | Published February 13 at 4:07 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 14, 2020 |

Sometimes we overestimate the degree to which a president can change a country, not just altering federal policy but also transforming our national life. But President Trump, there can be little doubt, will have as profound an effect on America as nearly any president in memory. The problem is that he’s doing it in all the worst ways.

As a new report from The Post demonstrates, across the country schools are reporting increased incidents of bullying and harassment directed at minority children in the time since Trump began running for office:

Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

It’s not all kids bullying kids — some of the cases involve teachers telling minority students that Trump will deport them or saying things such as “You’re getting kicked out of my country” (and there are also cases, though much smaller in number, of pro-Trump children being bullied).

Amazing what happens when you take the most repugnant human being in America and put him in the White House.

I exaggerate — but only a bit. I’m sure there are some Americans who are more morally despicable than Trump. Serial killers, for instance. But whether you like his administration’s policies, the president of the United States is a con man, a tax cheat, an accused sexual predator and the most prolific liar in the political history of Planet Earth, among other things.

But he might have been all that and not produced this kind of bullying. In fact, it was utterly predictable, because bullying is at the core of Trump’s being — and his political persona.

When he started running for president in 2015, Trump made clear that not only was he selling an agenda of xenophobia and racism, but he also wanted people to proclaim their hatreds loudly. “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap,” he said, and he wasn’t just talking about campus speech codes. He was angry at the foundational idea behind “political correctness,” that in our daily lives we should try to treat each other with respect.

The hell with that, Trump said. Every day he offered an instruction in the liberating power of being offensive. Not only shouldn’t you let a bunch of scolds tell you what kind of language to use, you should revel in the transgressive thrill of telling other people just what you think of them.

Trump plainly believes that if they see it to their advantage, people with more power should attack, victimize and humiliate those with less power. It’s something he’s known all his life, from when he was a young man being sued with his father for housing discrimination for refusing to rent apartments to black people, to when he was cheating struggling people out of their life savings, to when he refused to pay hundreds of small businesspeople what he owed them because they didn’t have the power to fight him.

In every case the logic was the same: He had more power than them, so he did what he wanted.

This is a man who mocked a reporter for his disability and who said women who accused him of sexual assault were too ugly for him to have victimized.

A different person might ascend to the most powerful position in the world and decide not to concern themselves anymore with petty squabbles. But if anything, Trump has accelerated his feuds, increasing the frequency with which he lashes out at those who are less powerful than him. Some are public figures who may be used to that sort of thing, but others are not.

One victim after another describes the disorienting feeling of being an ordinary person and realizing that the president of the United States is going after you. Just this week, Trump decided to attack the foreperson of the jury in the trial of his friend Roger Stone.

Imagine what it’s like to be her right now. You got the notice in the mail, went to do your civic duty, and now the president is insulting you on Twitter — with the inevitable threats and harassment from his supporters to follow.

And this is critical: Trump’s amen chorus celebrates him for his own bullying and the way he encourages others to be bullies. Recall the 2017 incident in which now-Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) body-slammed a journalist to the floor. On Fox News they cheered the assault as “Montana justice,” and host Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Did anyone get his lunch money stolen today and then run to tell the recess monitor?” Trump later appeared at a rally with Gianforte and said, “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!”

That’s the ethos of the Trump era: There are no more standards of morality or appropriate behavior or even simple politeness. There is only his power, and how you have to submit to it.

When Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for lying about an affair, they responded to the argument that it had nothing to do with his official duties by saying the president is a role model, so his behavior matters. They were wrong about a lot, but they were right about that.

The difference is that back then, nobody in Clinton’s party defended him for having an affair, let alone praised him for it. Today, Trump sends the message over and over that power and status should be used to punch down, mock, degrade and humiliate those you don’t like. And his legions of lickspittles laugh and cheer.

So it’s no wonder that Trump, who has the world’s biggest megaphone, has managed to spread his particular poison throughout the country, even to children. It would have a been a surprise if it didn’t happen.

*********

TRUMP’S WORDS, BULLIED KIDS,

SCARRED SCHOOLS .... THE PRESIDENT’S RHETORIC HAS CHANGED THE WAY HUNDREDS OF CHILDREN ARE HARASSED IN AMERICAN CLASSROOMS, The Post found

By Hannah Natanson, John Woodrow Cox and Perry Stein | Published Feb. 13, 2020 | Washington Post | Posted February 14, 2020 |

Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered "Ban Muslims" at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle- schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: "This is Trump country."

Since Trump's rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children more than 300 times since the start of 2016, a Washington Post review of 28,000 news stories found. At least three-quarters of the attacks were directed at kids who are Hispanic, black or Muslim, according to the analysis. Students have also been victimized because they support the president — more than 45 times during the same period.

Although many hateful episodes garnered coverage just after the election, The Post found that Trump-connected persecution of children has never stopped. Even without the huge total from November 2016, an average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. Still, because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Post’s figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesn’t include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that aren’t directly linked to Trump but that the president’s detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.

“It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected,” said Ashanty Bonilla, 17, a Mexican American high school junior in Idaho who faced so much ridicule from classmates last year that she transferred. “They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”

Asked about Trump’s effect on student behavior, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham noted that first lady Melania Trump — whose “Be Best” campaign denounces online harassment — had encouraged kids worldwide to treat one another with respect.

“She knows that bullying is a universal problem for children that will be difficult to stop in its entirety,” Grisham wrote in an email, “but Mrs. Trump will continue her work on behalf of the next generation despite the media’s appetite to blame her for actions and situations outside of her control.”

Most schools don’t track the Trump bullying phenomenon, and researchers didn’t ask about it in a federal survey of 6,100 students in 2017, the most recent year with available data. One in five of those children, ages 12 to 18, reported being bullied at school, a rate unchanged since the previous count in 2015.

However, a 2016 online survey of over 10,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade educators by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that more than 2,500 “described specific incidents of bigotry and harassment that can be directly traced to election rhetoric,” although the overwhelming majority never made the news. In 476 cases, offenders used the phrase “build the wall.” In 672, they mentioned deportation.

For Cielo Castor, who is Mexican American, the experience at Kamiakin High in Kennewick, Wash., was searing. The day after the election, a friend told Cielo, then a sophomore, that he was glad Trump won because Mexicans were stealing American jobs. A year later, when the president was mentioned during her American literature course, she said she didn't support him and a classmate who did refused to sit next to her.

“‘I don’t want to be around her,’ ” Cielo recalled him announcing as he opted for the floor instead.

Then, on “America night” at a football game in October 2018 during Cielo’s senior year, schoolmates in the student section unfurled a “Make America Great Again” flag. Led by the boy who wouldn’t sit beside Cielo, the teenagers began to chant: “Build — the — wall!”

Horrified, she confronted the instigator.

“You can’t be doing that,” Cielo told him.

He ignored her, she recalled, and the teenagers around him booed her. A cheerleading coach was the lone adult who tried to make them stop.

“I felt like I was personally attacked. And it wasn’t like they were attacking my character. They were attacking my ethnicity, and it’s not like I can do anything about that.”

— Cielo Castor

After a photo of the teenagers with the flag appeared on social media, news about what had happened infuriated many of the school’s Latinos, who made up about a quarter of the 1,700-member student body. Cielo, then 17, hoped school officials would address the tension. When they didn’t, she attended that Wednesday’s school board meeting.

“I don’t feel cared for,” she told the members, crying.

A day later, the superintendent consoled her and the principal asked how he could help, recalled Cielo, now a college freshman. Afterward, school staff members addressed every class, but Hispanic students were still so angry that they organized a walkout.

Some students heckled the protesters, waving MAGA caps at them. At the end of the day, Cielo left the school with a white friend who’d attended the protest; they passed an underclassman she didn’t know.

“Look,” the boy said, “it’s one of those f---ing Mexicans.”

She heard that school administrators — who declined to be interviewed for this article — suspended the teenager who had led the chant, but she doubts he has changed.

Reached on Instagram, the teenager refused to talk about what happened, writing in a message that he didn’t want to discuss the incident “because it is in the past and everyone has moved on from it.” At the end, he added a sign-off: “Trump 2020.”

ust as the president has repeatedly targeted Latinos, so, too, have school bullies. Of the incidents The Post tallied, half targeted Hispanics.

In one of the most extreme cases of abuse, a 13-year-old in New Jersey told a Mexican American schoolmate, who was 12, that “all Mexicans should go back behind the wall.” A day later, on June 19, 2019, the 13-year-old assaulted the boy and his mother, Beronica Ruiz, punching him and beating her unconscious, said the family’s attorney, Daniel Santiago. He wonders to what extent Trump’s repeated vilification of certain minorities played a role.

[  More than 300 Trump-inspired harassment incidents reported by news outlets from 2016-2019]

Anti-Hispanic: 45%

Anti-black: 23%

Anti-Semitic: 7%

Anti-Muslim: 8%

Anti-LGBT: 4%

Anti-Trump: 14%

[ **Note: Some incidents targeted multiple groups and, in other cases,

the ethnicity/gender/religion of the

intended target was unclear. Figures may not precisely add up because of rounding. Source: Washington Post analysis of media reports]

“When the president goes on TV and is saying things like Mexicans are rapists, Mexicans are criminals — these children don’t have the cognitive ability to say, ‘He’s just playing the role of a politician,’ ” Santiago argued. “The language that he’s using matters.”

Ruiz’s son, who is now seeing a therapist, continues to endure nightmares from an experience that may take years to overcome. But experts say that discriminatory language can, on its own, harm children, especially those of color who may already feel marginalized.

“It causes grave damage, as much physical as psychological,” said Elsa Barajas, who has counseled more than 1,000 children in her job at the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health.

As a result, she has seen Hispanic students suffer from sleeplessness, lose interest in school, and experience inexplicable stomach pain and headaches.

For Ashanty Bonilla, the damage began with the response to a single tweet she shared 10 months ago.

“Unpopular opinion,” Ashanty, then 16 and a sophomore at Lewiston High School in rural Idaho, wrote on April 9. “People who support Trump and go to Mexico for vacation really piss me off. Sorry not sorry.”

A schoolmate, who is white, took a screen shot of her tweet and posted it to Snapchat, along with a Confederate flag.

“Unpopular opinion but: people that are from Mexico and come in to America illegally or at all really piss me off,” he added in a message that spread rapidly among students.

The next morning, as Ashanty arrived at school, half a dozen boys, including the one who had written the message, stood nearby.

“You’re illegal. Go back to Mexico,” she heard one of them say. “F--- Mexicans.”

Ashanty, shaken but silent, walked past as a friend yelled at the boys to shut up.

In a 33,000-person town that is 94 percent white, Ashanty, whose father is half-black and whose mother is Mexican American, had always worked to fit in. She attended every football game and won a school spirit award as a freshman. She straightened her hair and dyed it blond, hoping to look more like her friends.

“It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected. They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”

— Ashanty Bonilla

She had known those boys who’d heckled her since they were little. For her 15th birthday the year before, some had danced at her quinceañera.

A friend drove her off campus for lunch, but when they pulled back into the parking lot, Ashanty spotted people standing around her car. A rope had been tied from the back of the Honda Pilot to a pickup truck.

“Republican Trump 2020,” someone had written in the dust on her back window.

Hands trembling, Ashanty tried to untie the rope but couldn’t. She heard the laughing, sensed the cellphone cameras pointed at her. She began to weep.

Lewiston’s principal, Kevin Driskill, said he and his staff met with the boys they knew were involved, making clear that “we have zero tolerance for any kind of actions like that.” The incidents, he suspected, stemmed mostly from ignorance.

“Our lack of diversity probably comes with a lack of understanding,” Driskill said, but he added that he’s encouraged by the school district’s recent creation of a community group — following racist incidents on other campuses — meant to address those issues.

That effort came too late for Ashanty.

Some friends supported her, but others told her the boys were just joking. Don’t ruin their lives.

She seldom attended classes the last month of school. That summer, she started having migraines and panic attacks. In August, amid her spiraling despair, Ashanty swallowed 27 pills from a bottle of antidepressants. A helicopter rushed her to a hospital in Spokane, Wash., 100 miles away.

After that, she began seeing a therapist and, along with the friend who defended her, transferred to another school. Sometimes, she imagines how different life might be had she never written that tweet, but Ashanty tries not to blame herself and has learned to take more pride in her heritage. She just wishes the president understood the harm his words inflict.

Even Trump’s last name has become something of a slur to many children of color, whether they’ve heard it shouted at them in hallways or, in her case, seen it written on the back window of a car.

“It means,” she said, “you don’t belong.”

Three weeks into the 2018-19 school year, Miracle Slover's English teacher, she alleges, ordered black and Hispanic students to sit in the back of the classroom at their Fort Worth high school.

At the time, Miracle was a junior. Georgia Clark, her teacher at Amon Carter-Riverside, often brought up Trump, Miracle said. He was a good person, she told the class, because he wanted to build a wall.

“Every day was something new with immigration,” said Miracle, now 18, who has a black mother and a mixed-race father. “That Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.”

Some students tried to film Clark, and others complained to administrators, but none of it made a difference, Miracle said. Clark, an employee of the Fort Worth system since 1998, kept talking.

Clark, who denies the teenager’s allegations, is one of more than 30 educators across the country accused of using the president’s name or rhetoric to harass students since he announced his candidacy, the Post analysis found.

In Clark’s class, Miracle stayed quiet until late spring 2019. That day, she walked in wearing her hair “puffy,” split into two high buns.

Clark, she said, told her it looked “nappy, like Marge off ‘The Simpsons.’ ” Unable to smother an angry reply, Miracle landed in the principal’s office. An administrator asked her to write a witness statement, and in it, she finally let go, scrawling her frustration across seven pages.

“I just got tired of it,” she said. “I wrote a ton.”

Still, Miracle said, school officials took no action until six weeks later, when Clark, 69, tweeted at Trump — in what she thought were private messages — requesting help deporting undocumented immigrants in Fort Worth schools. The posts went viral, drawing national condemnation. Clark was fired.

“Every day was something new with immigration. That Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.”

— Miracle Slover, referring to Georgia Clark, her former English teacher

Not always, though, are offenders removed from the classroom.

The day after the 2016 election, Donnie Jones Jr.’s daughter was walking down a hallway at her Florida high school when, she says, a teacher warned her and two friends — all sophomores, all black — that Trump would “send you back to Africa.”

The district suspended the teacher for three days and transferred him to another school.

Just a few days later in California, a physical education teacher told a student that he would be deported under Trump. Two years ago in Maine, a substitute teacher referenced the president’s wall and promised a Lebanese American student, “You’re getting kicked out of my country.” More than a year later in Texas, a school employee flashed a coin bearing the word “ICE” at a Hispanic student. “Trump,” he said, “is working on a law where he can deport you.”

Sometimes, Jones said, he doesn’t recognize America.

“People now will say stuff that a couple of years ago they would not dare say,” Jones argued. He fears what his two youngest children, ages 11 and 9, might hear in their school hallways, especially if Trump is reelected.

Now a senior, Miracle doesn’t regret what she wrote about Clark. Although the furor that followed forced Miracle to switch schools and quit her beloved dance team, she would do it again, she said. Clark’s punishment, her public disgrace, was worth it.

About a week before Miracle’s 18th birthday, her mother checked Facebook to find a flurry of notifications. Friends were messaging to say that Clark had appealed her firing, and that the Texas education commissioner had intervened.

Reluctant to spoil the birthday, Jowona Powell waited several days to tell her daughter, who doesn’t use social media.

Citing a minor misstep in the school board’s firing process, the commissioner had ordered Carter-Riverside to pay Clark one year’s salary — or give the former teacher her job back.

[A snapshot of the harassment in 2019 ( SEE WEBSITE)]

In the three months after the president tweeted on July 14, 2019, that four minority congresswomen should "go back” to the countries they came from, more than a dozen incidents of Trump-related school bullying — including several that used his exact language — were reported in the press.

Jordyn Covington stood when she heard the jeers.

“Monkeys!” “You don’t belong here.” “Go back to where you came from!”

From atop the bleachers that day in October, Jordyn, 15, could see her Piper High School volleyball teammates on the court in tears. The sobbing varsity players were all black, all from Kansas City, Kan., like her.

Who was yelling? Jordyn wondered.

She peered at the students in the opposing section. Most of them were white.

“It was just sad,” said Jordyn, who plays for Piper’s junior varsity team. “And why? Why did it have to happen to us? We weren’t doing anything. We were simply playing volleyball.”

Go back? To where? Jordyn, her friends and Piper’s nine black players were all born in the United States. “Just like everyone else,” Jordyn said. “Just like white people.”

“It was just sad. And why? Why did it have to happen to us? We weren’t doing anything. We were simply playing volleyball.”

— Jordyn Covington

The game, played at an overwhelmingly white rural high school, came three months after Trump tweeted that four minority congresswomen should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

It was Jordyn’s first experience with racism, she said. But it was not the first time that fans at a school sports game had used the president to target students of color.

The Post found that players, parents or fans have used his name or words in at least 48 publicly reported cases, hurling hateful slogans at students competing in elementary, middle and high school games in 26 states.

The venom has been shouted on football gridirons and soccer fields, on basketball and volleyball courts. Nearly 90 percent of incidents identified by The Post targeted players and fans of color, or teams fielded by schools with large minority populations. More than half focused on Hispanics.

In one of the earliest examples, students at a Wisconsin high school soccer game in April 2016 chanted “Trump, build a wall!” at black and Hispanic players. A few months later, students at a high school basketball game in Missouri turned their backs and hoisted a Trump/Pence campaign sign as the majority-black opposing team walked onto the court. In 2017, two high school girls in Alabama showed up at a football game pep rally with a sign reading “Put the Panic back in Hispanic” and a “Trump Make America Great Again” banner.

In late 2017, two radio hosts announcing a high school basketball game in Iowa were caught on a hot mic describing Hispanic players as “español people.” “As Trump would say,” one broadcaster suggested, “go back where they came from.”

Both announcers were fired. After the volleyball incident in Kansas, though, the fallout was more muted. The opposing school district, Baldwin City, commissioned an investigation and subsequently asserted that there was “no evidence” of racist jeers. Administrators from Piper’s school system dismissed that claim and countered with a statement supporting their students.

An hour after the game, Jordyn fought to keep her eyes dry as she boarded the team bus home. When white players insisted that everything would be okay, she slipped in ear buds and selected “my mood playlist,” a collection of somber nighttime songs. She wiped her cheeks.

Jordyn had long ago concluded that Trump didn’t want her — or “anyone who is just not white” — in the United States. But hearing other students shout it was different.

Days later, her English teacher assigned an essay asking about “what’s right and what’s wrong.” At first, Jordyn thought she might write about the challenges transgender people face. Then she had another idea.

“The students were making fun of us because we were different, like our hair and skin tone,” Jordyn wrote. “How are you gonna be mad at me and my friends for being black. . . . I love myself and so should all of you.”

She read it aloud to the class. She finished, then looked up. Everyone began to applaud.

t's not just young Trump supporters who torment classmates because of who they are or what they believe. As one boy in North Carolina has come to understand, kids who oppose the president — kids like him — can be just as vicious.

By Gavin Trump’s estimation, nearly everyone at his middle school in Chapel Hill comes from a Democratic family. So when the kids insist on calling him by his last name — even after he demands that they stop — the 13-year-old knows they want to provoke him, by trying to link the boy to the president they despise.

In fifth grade, classmates would ask if he was related to the president, knowing he wasn’t. They would insinuate that Gavin agreed with the president on immigration and other polarizing issues.

“They saw my last name as Trump, and we all hate Trump, so it was like, ‘We all hate you,’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘Why are you teasing me? I have no relationship to Trump at all. We just ended up with the same last name.’ ”

Beyond kids like Gavin, the Post analysis also identified dozens of children across the country who were bullied, or even assaulted, because of their allegiance to the president.

School staff members in at least 18 states, from Washington to West Virginia, have picked on students for wearing Trump gear or voicing support for him. Among teenagers, the confrontations have at times turned physical. A high school student in Northern California said that after she celebrated the 2016 election results on social media, a classmate accused her of hating Mexicans and attacked her, leaving the girl with a bloodied nose. Last February, a teenager at an Oklahoma high school was caught on video ripping a Trump sign out of a student’s hands and knocking a red MAGA cap off his head.

And in the nation’s capital — where only 4 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016 — an outspoken conservative teenager said she had to leave her prestigious public school because she felt threatened.

In a YouTube video, Jayne Zirkle, a high school senior, said that the trouble started when classmates at the School Without Walls discovered an online photo of her campaigning for Trump. She said students circulated the photo, harassed her online and called her a white supremacist.

A D.C. school system official said they investigated the allegations and allowed Jayne to study from home to ensure she felt safe.

“A lot of people who I thought were my best friends just all of a sudden totally turned their backs on me,” Jayne said. “People wouldn’t even look at me or talk to me.”

For Gavin, the teasing began in fourth grade, soon after Trump announced his candidacy.

After more than a year of schoolyard taunts, Gavin decided to go by his mother’s last name, Mather, when he started middle school. The teenager has been proactive, requesting that teachers call him by the new name, but it gets trickier, and more stressful, when substitutes fill in. He didn’t legally change his last name, so “Trump” still appears on the roster.

The teasing has subsided, but the switch wasn’t easy. Gavin likes his real last name and feared that changing it would hurt his father’s feelings. His dad understood, but for Gavin, the guilt remains.

“This is my name,” he said. “And I am abandoning my name.”

Maritza Avalos knows what's coming. It's 2020. The next presidential election is nine months away. She remembers what happened during the last one, when she was just 11.

“Pack your bags,” kids told her. “You get a free trip to Mexico.”

She’s now a freshman at Kamiakin High, the same Washington state school where her older sister, Cielo, confronted the teenagers who chanted “Build the wall” at a football game in late 2018. Maritza, 14, assumes the taunts that accompanied Trump’s last campaign will intensify with this one, too.

“I try not to think about it,” she said, but for educators nationwide, the ongoing threat of politically charged harassment has been impossible to ignore.

In response, schools have canceled mock elections, banned political gear, trained teachers, increased security, formed student-led mediation groups and created committees to develop anti-discrimination policies.

In California, the staff at Riverside Polytechnic High School has been preparing for this year’s presidential election since the day after the last one. On Nov. 9, 2016, counselors held a workshop in the library for students to share their feelings. Trump supporters feared they would be singled out for their beliefs, while girls who had heard the president brag about sexually assaulting women worried that boys would be emboldened to do the same to them.

“We treated it almost like a crisis,” said Yuri Nava, a counselor who has since helped expand a student club devoted to improving the school’s culture and climate.

Riverside, which is 60 percent Hispanic, also offers three courses — African American, Chicano and ethnic studies — meant to help students better understand one another, Nava said. And instead of punishing students when they use race or politics to bully, counselors first try to bring them together with their victims to talk through what happened. Often, they leave as friends.

In Gambrills, Md., Arundel High School has taken a similar approach. Even before a student was caught scribbling the n-word in his notebook in early 2017, Gina Davenport, the principal, worried about the effect of the election’s rhetoric. At the school, where about half of the 2,200 students are minorities, she heard their concerns every day.

But the racist slur, discovered the same month as Trump’s inauguration, led to a concrete response.

A “Global Community Citizenship” class, now mandatory for all freshmen in the district, pushes students to explore their differences.

A recent lesson delved into Trump’s use of Twitter.

“The focus wasn’t Donald Trump, the focus was listening: How do we convey our ideas in order for someone to listen?” Davenport said. “We teach that we can disagree with each other without walking away being enemies — which we don’t see play out in the press, or in today’s political debates.”

Since the class debuted in fall 2017, disciplinary referrals for disruption and disrespect have decreased by 25 percent each school year, Davenport said. Membership in the school’s speech and debate team has doubled.

The course has eased Davenport’s anxiety heading into the next election. She doesn’t expect an uptick in racist bullying.

“Civil conversation,” she said. “The kids know what that means now.”

Many schools haven’t made such progress, and on those campuses, students are bracing for more abuse.

Maritza’s sister, Cielo, told her to stand up for herself if classmates use Trump’s words to harass her, but Maritza is quieter than her sibling. The freshman doesn’t like confrontation.

She knows, though, that eventually someone will say something — about the wall, maybe, or about how kids who look like her don’t belong in this country — and when that day comes, the girl hopes that she’ll be strong.

______

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

______

What is your school doing to stop politically charged bullying?

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[xtruss]

Rashid Khalidi: Israel & UAE Deal to Normalize Relations Is New Chapter in “100-Year War on Palestine!”

In a deal brokered by the United States, Israel and the United Arab Emirates have agreed to fully normalize relations after years of secretly working together on countering Iran and other issues. Under the deal, Israel has also agreed to temporarily halt plans to annex occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank, which had already been on hold due to international condemnation. We speak with Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, who says the agreement is being falsely characterized as a peace deal. “I don’t see that it has anything to do with peace,” he says. “On the contrary, it makes the chance of a just, equitable and sustainable peace much, much, much harder.”

— August 14, 2020 | DemocracyNow.Org

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Israel and the United Arab Emirates have reached an agreement to fully normalize relations after years of secretly working together on countering Iran and other issues. Under the deal, Israel has agreed to temporarily suspend plans to annex the West Bank — a move that appeared to have already been on hold due to international condemnation. The UAE is the first Gulf Arab country to normalize relations with Israel and just the third country in the Arab world to do so, after Egypt and Jordan.

President Trump announced the UAE-Israel deal on Thursday in an Oval Office event, flanked by U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, his former bankruptcy lawyer; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: By uniting two of America’s closest and most capable partners in the region, something which said could not be done, this deal is a significant step towards building a more peaceful, secure and prosperous Middle East. Now that the ice has been broken, I expect more Arab and Muslim countries will follow the United Arab Emirates’ lead.

AMY GOODMAN: The Palestinian Authority rejected and denounced the trilateral deal and recalled its ambassador to the UAE. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted Israel may still annex the West Bank.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] There is no change in my plan to apply our sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, in full coordination with the United States. I am committed. It has not changed. I remind you that I am the one who put the issue of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria on the table. This issue continues to remain on the table.

AMY GOODMAN: Critics of the Israeli occupation decried the deal. Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the first female Palestinian congresswoman, tweeted, quote, “We won’t be fooled by another Trump/Netanyahu deal. We won’t celebrate Netanyahu for not stealing land he already controls in exchange for a sweetheart business deal. The heart of the issue has never been planned, formal annexation, but ongoing, devastating apartheid,” she said.

Meanwhile, CodePink’s Medea Benjamin warned the deal is aimed at bolstering the, quote, “Israel-US-Gulf alliance against Iran.”

We’re joined now by Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, author of several books, including his latest, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

Professor Khalidi, thanks for joining us. Can you respond to this surprise announcement yesterday?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, in a sense, it’s another campaign in the hundred years’ war on Palestine. This is a great victory for Arab reaction. It’s a great victory for the annexationist government in Israel. It’s also a boost for President Trump. The Trump regime, which is one of the most authoritarian in American history, has now gotten a diplomatic victory.

So, I don’t see that it has anything to do with peace, of course. The United Arab Emirates was never at war with Israel. On the contrary, it makes the chance of a just, equitable and sustainable peace much, much, much harder.

AMY GOODMAN: So, were you surprised by this announcement? And can you explain how it came about? And then respond to the Palestinian leadership’s denunciation and rejection of the deal.

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, it came about partly because of the blowback against the Trump-Netanyahu plan to overtly annex territories, which, as Rashida Tlaib said, are already under Israeli control, and, as Netanyahu said, he still plans to annex. But the blowback was so severe that both Trump and Netanyahu were forced to recalibrate.

And this is something that has always been ongoing, the plan to bring the most reactionary, most absolute monarchies in the world into an open public alliance with Israel, as part of the Netanyahu-Trump obsession with Iran, which is something that these regimes are also obsessed with, given that they have — they do not depend on consent of the governed, they do not have any kind of domestic legitimacy, they’re anti-democratic. They are the forces that fight against democracy throughout the Arab world. The United Arab Emirates is not a force for peace. It’s at war with the people of Yemen. It’s at war in Libya. It has never been involved in a war with Israel.

So, this is making overt a relationship that was already covert. This is making even more salient an alliance against Iran, which is the wet dream of both Netanyahu and Trump, to dangle Iran in front of people’s eyes to distract them from the kinds of reactionary dictatorships or absolute monarchies. Those monarchies are so reactionary that they make Henry VIII and Louis XIV look like Tom Paine and Robespierre. They are the most — they are the most absolute monarchies in the world today. The fact that the United States is supporting them is an absolute disgrace.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on Thursday, President Trump was questioned about whether Israel may still annex the West Bank. This is what he said.

REPORTER: The prime minister was pretty clear today at his own press conference that he considers this to be a temporary suspension and that the deal would still be open to him at some point in the future. I’m asking what you think he should do. Should he actually [inaudible]?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, right now all I can say: It’s off the table. So I can’t talk about some time into the future; that’s a big statement. But right now it’s off the table. Is that a correct statement, Mr. Ambassador?

DAVID FRIEDMAN: Yes. The word “suspend” was chosen carefully by all the parties. “Suspend,” by definition — look it up — means “temporary halt.” It’s off the table now, but it’s not off the table permanently.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the U.S. ambassador to Israel on the sidelines of the press conference, David Friedman, the former bankruptcy lawyer for —

RASHID KHALIDI: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — President Trump. Rashid Khalidi, President Trump had said, “I wanted it to be called the Donald J. Trump Accord.” The national security adviser, Robert O’Brien said President Trump should be the front-runner for the Nobel Peace Prize.

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, as I’ve said, the United Arab Emirates has never been engaged in war with Israel. On the contrary, the United Arab Emirates’ air defenses, its missile defenses, are manufactured in Israel and are probably controlled from Israel. So, this is an ally of Israel in practice. It always has been. Now this has been made public.

Whatever the president and his ambassador to Israel say, I would take Netanyahu at his word. There is no change in his plans. He said it. You ran a clip from him, speaking in Hebrew. They will continue the ongoing colonization of the West Bank. They will continue to control it absolutely. Israel will continue to be the only sovereign between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. And it will continue its discriminatory policies whereby Israelis have one set of laws and Palestinians, under occupation, basically have the law of the jungle, i.e. military occupation, military courts, in which everybody is always guilty and in which about 20% of the Palestinian population has been sent to prison. So, we’re talking about a jackboot regime which is going to be sustained and continued by this deal. That’s not peace. That’s continuation of colonization and occupation, whatever the president says.

AMY GOODMAN: Brian Hook, the State Department’s outgoing special envoy for Iran, also spoke at the White House Thursday.

BRIAN HOOK: Peace between the Arabs and the Israelis is Iran’s worst nightmare. And no one has done more to intensify the conflict between Arabs and Israelis than Iran. And what we see today is a new Middle East. The trend lines are very different today. And we see the future is very much in the Gulf and with Israel. In the past, it was with the Iranian regime.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, CodePink’s Medea Benjamin warned the deal is aimed at bolstering the “Israel-US-Gulf alliance against Iran,” Professor Khalidi.

RASHID KHALIDI: Right, right. I’m glad you ran that clip by Brian Hook, because one of the greatest falsehoods that these people peddle is this idea that there is a conflict between the Arabs and Iran. There is a conflict between nonrepresentative, anti-democratic regimes and Iran.

Arab public opinion considers Israel a great danger. There are polls every couple of years, run by the Arab Center, which show that across a dozen Arab countries, the Arabs, the people, most of them unrepresented by these dictatorships and absolute monarchies, consider Iran a minor threat. It’s a problem, but it’s not the number one problem.

For these regimes, which have no domestic legitimacy, which do not depend on consent of the governed, of course Iran is a problem. Moreover, they need the United States and Israel, because they can’t defend themselves, given the fact that — against their people, let alone against external threats, because they have no domestic legitimacy.

So, I think this is not something between the Arabs and Iran. This is something between unrepresentative and undemocratic Arab regimes, notably the absolute monarchies of the Gulf, and Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, President Trump is feeling somewhat embattled. Former vice president, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden responded to his Middle East deal saying in a statement, quote, “The UAE’s offer to publicly recognize the State of Israel is a welcome, brave, and badly-needed act of statesmanship. … Annexation would be a body blow to the cause of peace, which is why I oppose it now and would oppose it as president.” Can you respond to the Democratic position?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I think that the leadership of the Democratic Party, from Biden to Senator Harris to the people who run it, the Schumers and the Pelosis and the Clintons and the Obamas, all of them are behind the times. The Democratic Party, its base, the people who are going to vote for the Democrats and will hopefully defeat Trump in November and take back the Senate and increase the progressive trends in the House, don’t feel that way. They strongly believe that Israel should be sanctioned for its violations of Palestinian human rights. They don’t have the position that the Democratic Party leadership has.

So, a lot of work is going to be necessary to force the leadership to do what the people want — that is to say, its own — the people who will vote them into office, should they win in November. They don’t represent the people that they claim to represent, on this issue at least. And it’s going to require a lot of pressure on these people, who are basically mired in the past positions of the Democratic Party, which were always blind to Israel’s faults and blind to the Palestinians.

This is not new, and it’s unfortunately been further entrenched by Biden and Harris becoming the nominees for the party. There were several other candidates — obviously, Senator Sanders and Senator Warren, but others — who had more nuanced positions, much more in tune with the base of the Democratic Party on this issue, on the issue of Palestine. So, a lot of work is going to be necessary to force a leadership, that is, as I’ve said, completely blind to Israel’s faults and doesn’t see the Palestinians, to do the right thing.

AMY GOODMAN: In the Gaza Strip, just as this was being announced, Israeli tanks and warplanes attacked Palestinian neighborhoods overnight for the fourth time this week. Israel said the raids were retaliation for incendiary balloons launched by Hamas, one Israeli missile striking a United Nations elementary school in the crowded al-Shati refugee camp but failed to explode, prompting an evacuation. This is a 12-year-old student, Lianne Al-Musawabi.

LIANNE AL-MUSAWABI: [translated] I was shocked. I went home and told my mother what happened, and I was crying, “Why are they hitting the school?”

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Khalidi, do you see a connection between the announcement and what’s happening in Gaza now and the significance of that?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, Israel has been engaged in what one Israeli once called “mowing the grass,” you know, periodically bombarding Gaza, periodically using overwhelming force against the Palestinians, partly in order to keep the Palestinians divided, which is an Israeli objective, and to keep Hamas off balance.

Israel and Hamas have been engaged in a secret negotiation for the better part of a year, actually more, with the objective of getting a real ceasefire in place, in return for which Israel would lift some of its incredible restrictions on movement and on the transfer of goods into and out of the Gaza Strip. And this is part of that tit-for-tat between the overwhelming force used by Israel and the relatively minor irritation of balloons that burn some crops. So, Israel will bombard with bombs and missiles, and what comes from Gaza is basically minor in comparison.

The importance of it, really, I don’t think, relates to — I don’t think relates to this larger deal involving the Emirates. It is part of a policy of divide and rule that Israel has adopted over a very long period of time, and that Palestinian division helps. So, the Palestinian leaderships in Gaza and the West Bank, that refuse to put the interests of the Palestinian people ahead of their own narrow self-interest, are playing Israel’s game — both of them, regrettably — and deserve to be sanctioned by the Palestinian people for their blindness.

AMY GOODMAN: And you also have both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu under fierce attack for how they have dealt with the pandemic. Thousands of Israelis have been in the streets protesting Netanyahu. It has one of the worst outbreaks in the world. Do you see a relationship with what’s going on now, with this announcement? And also, how would it play out? Do you see this happening before the U.S. election? And how do you feel people in the U.S. would respond to this?

RASHID KHALIDI: Do I see annexation happening? Is that your question, Amy?

AMY GOODMAN: No. Do you see this deal being signed off on?

RASHID KHALIDI: Oh, the Emirates deal. Oh, yes, absolutely. This is a feather in — Trump sees this as a feather in his cap, as does Netanyahu. Both of them are facing enormous public opposition because of their terrible handling of the pandemic, because of their appalling handling of the economic issues, not to speak of issues of racial discrimination and police brutality in the United States, not to speak of the Palestine question and the oppression of millions and millions of Palestinians by Israel, in the case of Israel. So they both have enormous pressure on them from the street. We have demonstrations in the street; they have demonstrations in the street in Israel.

Both rulers have the kinds of autocratic tendencies — I think they wish they could be Mohammed bin Zayed or Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, where they could simply rule by fiat. And the president is moving towards that, trying to move towards that in this country, and Netanyahu has been moving towards that himself. So, they are under enormous pressure from below. And this is a — this is meant by both of them, in terms of domestic public opinion, as a distraction.

AMY GOODMAN: This is from The New York Times, Rashid. Dennis Ross, the former Middle East negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations, said another lure for the Emiratis was the possibility of obtaining advanced weaponry they’ve long sought, which the United States sells only to countries at peace with Israel to preserve its qualitative military edge in the region. Your thoughts?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, the United Arab Emirates, as I mentioned, already has a anti-missile defense system, which is manufactured by Raytheon, largely from and in Israel. Obviously, it’s an American company, so they maintain the illusion that they’re buying American equipment. I am sure they would like more of this, but they can already get whatever Israel produces. Now what they hope to get, I assume, is equipment that the United States produces.

So, it is a cozy — it’s a business relationship, as Rashida Tlaib, Congresswoman Tlaib, rightly said. At base, bin Zayed is paying for protection from the local bullies on the block, the United States and Israel, from his own people, from the Arab peoples, and from external enemies. And he needs the weaponry, with which he can defend himself against these external enemies. So, yes, I think that is actually part of the deal. Ross, unusually, is right on this.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, what do you think a just deal would look like in the Middle East and between the Israelis and the Palestinians?

RASHID KHALIDI: A just deal means equal rights for everybody. A just deal means that national rights have to be accepted for both people. The nation-state law — Israel is a Jewish nation-state — in 2018, said there’s only one people entitled to self-determination in the land of Israel. And that cannot stand. There are two peoples there. Any solution that doesn’t accept that and give them equal rights — what is paraded as a, quote-unquote, “two-state solution” is a one-state solution. One state has sovereignty and control; the other state does not. One state controls movement of everybody in and out; the other so-called state, the Palestinian state, under a so-called two-state solution, would have no control over immigration, import/export, groundwater, airspace — it would not be sovereign. Moreover, Palestinians would be restricted to a tiny fraction of the Occupied Territories, let alone of the entirety of Palestine. This is not just. And the current situation is not sustainable. So, there has to be equality of rights between both people, on every level — religious rights, personal rights, political rights and national rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Rashid Khalidi, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, author of a number of books, his latest, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

When we come back, as calls grow to release people from prison in the United States, especially amidst the pandemic, a new series by filmmaker Messiah Rhodes looks at why breaking the cycle of incarceration is so hard, especially for women, including his own mother. Stay with us.

[popolitiko]

Lindsey Graham's Queer Predicament

Why the South Carolina senator's sexual orientation is a story for journalists Michelangelo Signorile - Jun 7

Let’s begin with Aaron Schock, while I have your attention.

First elected in 2008, he’s the disgraced, former Republican congressman from Illinois who stood against LGBTQ rights — including voting against “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, and coming out against marriage equality — though it was an open secret in Washington and in queer circles that he was gay throughout that entire time. There was discussion that he was gay even before the White House picnic in 2010 and the photo of him in white pants, teal belt and pink gingham shirt that went viral, but he’d denied it in 2004 in an interview.

Schock resigned in 2015 after a report about his Downton Abbey-inspired office set off a chain of investigations about his lavish lifestyle using taxpayer dollars and campaign funds. He was eventually indicted on 24 counts ( though, with a good lawyer, he struck an outrageous sweetheart deal in which all charges were dropped if he paid back the IRS and his campaign).

Then, this past March, Schock finally came out as gay, after living it up as a private citizen for some time, visiting gay vacation destinations and party spots, enjoying the very liberation that he worked with our enemies to try to destroy. 

Twitter lights up with #LadyG

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, too, has been discussed as gay for years, with those on both the left and the right hinting at it or saying it outright.  He, too, has denied he is gay, most recently in 2018.

And yet, the discussion persists — as it did with Schock — and over the weekend, as reported by Towleroad, Twitter lit up with claims that an army of sex workers may be coming forward to speak out about Graham having hired them in the past, after gay adult film actor Sean Harding tweeted on Friday that it was time to reveal the truth about a “homophobic Republican Senator who is no better than Trump,” whom he referred to as “LG.” Harding claimed “every sex worker [he] know[s] has been hired by this man.”

“LadyG and “LadyGraham” — the alleged nicknames used by the sex workers — were soon trending, and tweets went viral that came from people claiming they had evidence, some of them claiming it was first hand. Harding, overwhelmed with inquiries, eventually set his Twitter feed to private, and on Sunday he tweeted:

Due to death threats against me and my family — and having my mom call me pleading to make it stop I will no longer be commenting on the LG story here. I know one individual has spoken to two prestigious media outlets with evidence but I'm not sure when that story will break.

It would be nice to think that mainstream media — or as Harding put it, “prestigious media outlets” — are finally getting it right, though I’ve learned not to hold my breath.

........

"Outing” really doesn’t exist

I’ve not used the word “outing” here, by the way, because there really is no such thing. This term was coined in 1990 by the late William A. Henry III, a closeted bisexual Time magazine cultural critic (whose wife revealed his sexual orientation to me after his death, responding to an article I wrote)

There is only “reporting.”   Certainly if they are engaged in hypocrisy, working against the LGBTQ community, it is relevant to report.

Since being gay is not  a bad thing — even now according to the courts in a defamation suit — reporting it about a public figure who hasn’t hidden it from people in his/her life, but just wants it censored from the public for business or whatever reasons, isn’t wrong per se.

....

Many LGBTQ people don’t get it either, and many heterosexual journalists take their cues from them. Some queer people don’t realize this isn’t about indiscriminately “outing” the average person, the private citizens just trying to live their own lives. It’s actually about protecting them from the corruption of those who are public figures — people who go into public life knowing their lives will be open for discussion — who want to deceive people to benefit themselves and their benefactors.

Senator Lindsey Graham has promoted a horrendously anti-LGBTQ agenda and now is one of the strongest defenders of a president who is the most anti-LGBTQ president in history, rolling back rights that have been won.

                👇 📖 👇            👇 📖 👇                 👇 📖 👇

https://signorile.substack.com/p/lindsey-grahams-queer-predicament?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=text

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Comments:. DeZaad:   Someone of Graham's power is susceptible to blackmail. If he is an out gay person, there is no leverage. But, a closeted gay person is completely easy to blackmail. As a gay person, I am asserting this is far more important than his anti-gay legislation, though I think that too is a perfectly good reason for reporting on this subject.

[wsmith215]

Coronavirus latest: ICYMI: Top takeaways from this week’s “Face the Nation”: White House pushes ahead with post-COVID plans

This week on “Face the Nation”, as Americans push to end the racial divide, there is frustration and lack of unity between the people and our leaders on how to get there.

Here’s the big takeaways from Sunday’s episode of “Face the Nation” with Margaret Brennan

1. Barr: Active-duty troops should only be deployed in U.S. “as a last resort”

Barr says active duty troops should only be deployed within the U.S. “as a last resort”

Attorney General William Barr on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s decision to have active-duty troops at the ready to respond to protests in Washington, D.C., saying the military should only be deployed to U.S. states and cities as a “last resort.”What Barr said: “Our position was common, which was that they should only be deployed as a last resort,” Barr said on “Face the Nation,” referring to the stance he, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took regarding the use of active-duty troops in the U.S. to quell protesters in the nation’s capital.Rice however, was strongly opposed: Asked if she would ever advise President Trump to use the active-duty troops, Former Secretary of State Condoleezza was adamant against it:  “I would absolutely advise against it, particularly at this time…the National Guard’s the right answer. Our military isn’t trained to do this. Our military is trained for the battlefield. And this isn’t a battlefield in that sense.”A tale of two stories: The Trump administration has come under criticism for its handling of the demonstrations in the nation’s capital, sparked by aggressive efforts by law enforcement outside the White House on Monday to clear Lafayette Park.Federal officers used pepper spray and rubber bullets to forcefully disperse the protesters, most of whom were demonstrating peacefully, and after the area was cleared, Mr. Trump walked from the White House to St. John’s Church. Barr accompanied the president on the walk across the empty Lafayette Park and stood beside Mr. Trump in photos outside the so-called “Church of the Presidents.” Barr on Sunday rebuffed the suggestion that the protesters were peaceful, noting that 150 officers had been injured in the last week alone.What Barr said: He said the efforts to move protesters was “not an operation to respond” to the crowd, but rather to move the perimeter around the White House by one block. Barr said the actions by law enforcement were appropriate once officers “met resistance.””Police have to move protesters, sometimes peaceful demonstrators, for a short distance in order to accomplish public safety, and that’s what was done here,” he said.On systemic racism in policing: As “defund the police” has become a rallying cry for many demonstrations across the country, AG Barr argued that the law enforcement system in the U.S. is not systemically racist.”I think there’s racism in the United States still but I don’t think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist. I understand the- the distrust, however, of the African-American community given the history in this country. I think we have to recognize that for most of our history, our institutions were explicitly racist. Since the 1960s, I think we’ve been in a phase of reforming our institutions and making sure that they’re in sync with our laws and aren’t fighting a rearguard action to impose inequities,” Barr said. Why this matters: CBS News reported that in a contentious Oval Office meeting on Monday, the president demanded the military deploy 10,000 active duty troops to U.S. streets after protests against police brutality erupted from coast to coast. But some of Mr. Trump’s top officials, including Barr, Esper and Milley, objected to the president’s demand, a senior administration official told CBS News. In an effort to address Mr. Trump’s request, Esper and Milley urged the nation’s governors that day to activate the National Guard in their states.Barr characterized the “last resort” as needing to “restore order in a situation that is out of control and where life and property is endangered.” 2. Rice to Trump: “put tweeting aside for a little bit”

Condoleezza Rice to Trump: “Twitter and tweeting are not great ways for complex thoughts”

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged President Trump to take a break from Twitter and focus instead on fostering dialogue with the American people amid the swelling movement in support of racial justice and ending police brutality.   What Rice said: “People look to the Oval Office as we’ve looked to the Oval Office throughout our history for messages, for signals, and as I said, the president has used some language that I really very much admire, like the ‘resilience of the American people,'” Rice said on “Face the Nation” in an interview that aired Sunday. “Just be careful about those messages. I’m not advising the president, but if I were, I would say let’s put tweeting aside for a little bit and talk to us, have a conversation with us. And I think we need that, and I think he can do it.” “Thank you for your support, but please look in the mirror” : Rice had a clear message for leaders like China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Putin when it comes to demonstrations:I really don’t need to be lectured by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping about peaceful protest when they have themselves used their own force just because people wanted to criticize the government. That is not is what is happening here.Trump 2020? The lifelong Republican who served under President Bush in mutliple capacities wouldn’t say if she’d support Mr. Trump in November: “As I’ve often said, when I’m ready to speak about American politics, I’ll come back to you. And I’ll- you’ll be the first to know when I want to speak about American politics.”Why this matters: Mr. Trump has faced criticism for his rhetoric toward protesters who have participated in marches and demonstrations nationwide following the death of George Floyd. Days later, the president on Twitter referred to protesters in Minneapolis as “thugs” and said in a tweet “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” which was flagged by Twitter as “glorifying violence.” Mr. Trump later tried to clarify his tweet, saying “looting leads to shooting” and that the expression was “spoken as a fact, not as a statement.”Rice cautioned the president to “think about the historical context before you say something, because it is a deep wound” adding that Mr. Trump should instead “speak in the language of unity, the language of empathy.”3. Gottlieb: “no question” protests will increase coronavirus spread

Gottlieb says there’s “no question” protests will increase coronavirus spread

As tens of thousands of demonstrators have marched in cities across the country calling for an end to police brutality, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, warned Sunday there’s “no question” the protests will lead to a spike in coronavirus infections.   What Gottlieb said: “We’re certainly going to see transmission coming out of these gatherings. There’s no question about that,” Gottlieb said on “Face the Nation,” adding that in the U.S., the prevalence of coronavirus infection is about one in every 200 people. “I think the idea of reducing the risk from these protests is a shared responsibility. There’s steps that the protesters can take, and you see many of them wearing masks in these protests and understanding the risks.” What can protesters do to march safely? Gottlieb said there are precautions that both law enforcement and demonstrators can take to protect themselves from getting infected and spreading the virus to others, including the wearing of masks, practicing social distancing when they can and avoiding coming into contact with the elderly or other vulnerable populations.”The protesters understood the risks, many of them,” he said. “I think that’s evidenced by the fact that they wore masks and they made a judgment that they were worth the risk in terms of going out and protesting what are legitimate underlying grievances.”    Why this all matters: Americans in many states have been encouraged to wear masks to protect others and follow social distancing measures. But the protests against Floyd’s death and other unarmed African Americans by law enforcement have brought thousands together in city streets. The coronavirus has also disproportionately impacted African Americans, as well as Hispanic and Latino Americans, which Gottlieb told us just last week was a “symptom of broader racial inequities” that need to be resolved.

Missed Sunday’s episode? Click here to watch the show. “Face the Nation” airs Sunday mornings on CBS. Click here for local listings.

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[marrincostello]

Trump to sign executive order on social media amid Twitter furor - POLITICO

Early Wednesday morning, he had vowed to "strongly regulate" biased social media companies, or even "close them down."

Democrats, meanwhile, have complained that Twitter has been too slow to respond to a litany of abusive, inaccurate or inflammatory tweets from the president, including his recent insinuations that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may be guilty of murder.

POLITICO reported last year that the White House was circulating a draft executive order to address long-standing accusations from conservatives about bias by social media companies. CNN later reported that the order would task the Federal Communications Commission with developing regulations to clarify when social media companies qualify for crucial liability protections, and would have the Federal Trade Commission “take those new policies into account when it investigates or files lawsuits against misbehaving companies."

But the executive order was never unveiled.

That proposal targeted the online industry's prized liability shield over user-generated content, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The 1996 law broadly protects websites from lawsuits over what their users post, and for taking good-faith efforts to curb illicit material.

But those protections, which have been fiercely defended by the tech industry, have come under scrutiny from officials on both sides of the political spectrum. Republicans have charged that the shield has enabled social media platforms to crack down on their viewpoints with impunity. There's no conclusive evidence of an anti-conservative bias on social media, and the companies have consistently denied the charges.

Trump's dust-up with Twitter rekindled Republican calls for Congress to roll back the legal shield.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump surrogate who has accused Silicon Valley firms of censorship, announced Wednesday that he’s drafting his own proposal to roll back those protections if companies engage in “editorializing” or “opine as to the truth or falsity” of statements online, like those made by Trump regarding mail-in ballots. Gaetz said he is “working with my Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee” on the legislation, but did not elaborate on the timing for its introduction.

In a similar vein, GOP tech critic Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) wrote in a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday that the company's “decision to editorialize regarding the content of political speech raises questions about why Twitter should continue receiving special status and special immunity from publisher liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. "And he later teased on social media plans for a separate proposal to "end these special government giveaways."

"If @Twitter wants to editorialize & comment on users’ posts, it should be divested of its special status under federal law (Section 230) & forced to play by same rules as all other publishers. Fair is fair," Hawley tweeted.

Some Democratic lawmakers have also advocated restricting the industry's Section 230 protections, but for very different seasons — such as failing to fact-check politicians like Trump.

The GOP calls got rhetorical support Wednesday night from FCC member Brendan Carr, a Republican who some see as a potential future chairman of the agency. Appearing on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight," he singled out Twitter’s fact check of Trump’s tweets as imposing a “partisan political viewpoint” and slammed Facebook’s recent creation of an independent review board to review the company's content decisions.

“I think going forward if these entities want to be political actors ... like every other political actor, they have First Amendment rights, though they shouldn’t necessarily have these special bonus protections that only that set of political actors have in Section 230,” Carr said.

The Republican commissioner also blasted these social media companies for framing themselves as politically neutral before Congress and then engaging in what he deemed utterly partisan behavior. “That’s the type of unfair or deceptive business practice that would get a lot of other companies under a lot of federal scrutiny, including from the Federal Trade Commission,” Carr remarked.

Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a jab at Twitter, telling Fox News in an interview made public Wednesday that social media companies "shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online." Still, Zuckerberg expressed skepticism about the president's threat to “strongly regulate” social media companies or even “close them down” if they “silence conservative voices.”

"In general, I think a government choosing to censor a platform because they're worried about censorship doesn't exactly strike me as the the right reflex there," Zuckerberg said.

The White House's announcement of an incoming executive order Wednesday triggered fears in Washington tech circles that the Trump administration will revive its push to empower regulators to reconsider those liability protections — though major questions remain about how it would be executed.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, continued to portray the GOP's bias allegations as political theater.

"Twitter’s milquetoast labeling of two Trump lies — out of thousands — prompts horrifying demagogic response: shut down the internet," Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) tweeted after Trump's Wednesday remarks. "His fear-mongering & conspiracy theory peddling is irresponsible, inexcusable, & authoritarian."

The push to weaken Section 230 has also faced opposition from within Trump's own party. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the top Republican on the House Energy & Commerce consumer protection subcommittee, cast such campaigns as ill-conceived.

“I want to be very clear: I’m not for gutting Section 230. It’s essential for consumers and entities in the internet ecosystem,” she said at a House hearing in October. “Misguided and hasty attempts to amend or even repeal Section 230 for bias or other reasons could have unintended consequences for free speech and the ability for small businesses to provide new and innovative services.”

The push to have the government step in on social media moderation practices even drew a rebuttal from Carr, who last year criticized Zuckerberg for suggesting that public officials should assume a role in setting rules for vetting speech on social media. "Outsourcing censorship to the government is not just a bad idea, it would violate the First Amendment," Carr tweeted then. "I’m a no."

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also weighed in Wednesday against government interference in the online world — in a tweet apparently that seemed aimed at countries like China instead of Trump.

"The U.S. stands against, and will not tolerate, government-imposed Internet shutdowns and other forms of censorship during or after this pandemic," Pompeo wrote.

John Hendel contributed to this report.

This content was originally published here.

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: Congresswomen Targeted by Trump’s Racist Tweets: ‘This Is the Agenda of White Nationalists’

The four freshmen Congresswomen who President Donald Trump attacked on Twitter issued a scathing joint rebuke Monday, calling his remarks “hateful,” “the agenda of white nationalists” and “a distraction.”

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib delivered their response Monday evening on Capitol Hill, right before they headed to the floor for votes. All four members had responded to the President on Twitter, but had remained largely silent on Monday, declining to speak publicly in the halls of Capitol Hill until their joint presser.

“This is a president who has openly violated the very values our country aspires to uphold. This is the agenda of white nationalists,” Omar said. “He would love nothing more than to divide our country based on race, religion, gender orientation or immigration status.”

The Democratic Congresswomen said Trump’s attacks distracted from bigger, more important issues, including the conditions of migrants being held in federal custody.

“Weak minds and leaders challenge loyalty to our country in order to avoid challenging and debating the policy,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “This president does not know how to make the argument that Americans do not deserve health care. He does not know how to defend his policies, so he’s attacking us personally.”

Tlaib added: “I represent the third poorest district in the country, one that is made up of working people, who continue to be targeted and harmed by the actions and rhetoric of this administration.”

The public response––the first time the four had jointly addressed the matter––represents the latest escalation in the growing feud between the President of the United States and the liberal lawmakers. It began on Twitter, but quickly spilled over into the halls of the White House and Capitol Hill, raising questions about the President’s racist proclivities.

The members of Congress said they had received support following the President’s attacks, with Pressley saying even critics approached her at the airport to say, “‘I disagree with some of your policies… but I think what he did was wrong and he won’t apologize so I am going to apologize.”

The four did not respond directly to Trump’s claims about their criticism of the U.S. When asked about Trump’s false statement that Omar praised al-Qaeda, the Minnesota Congresswoman replied, “I won’t dignify that with an answer.”

Omar said it was “complete hypocrisy” for Trump to the Congresswoman to leave the country for criticizing the U.S.

“When this President ran and until today, he talked about everything that was wrong in this country and how he’s going to make it great,” she said.

She added that her criticism of American government was rooted in a desire to make the country better. “Every single statement that we make is from a place of extreme love for every single person in this country,” Omar said.

On Sunday morning, Trump attempted to capitalize on a growing rift between this quartet of progressives––who have dubbed themselves “The Squad”––and House leadership. In a series of tweets, he claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would help arrange for them to “go back” to their countries of origin. (All are U.S. citizens, which is a requirement to serve in Congress. With the exception of Omar, all were born in the United States.)

Trump did not specify who he was talking about, but Democrats interpreted the tweets as a reference to the four Congresswomen. Outraged, the entire caucus quickly put aside differences to rally around their colleagues, with top Democrats calling the tweets “xenophobic and racist.” On Monday, Pelosi announced that Democrats would introduce a resolution condemning the tweets, and urged Republicans, who have largely remained silent on the issue, to join them. “The House cannot allow the President’s characterization of immigrants to our country to stand,” she wrote in a letter to her colleagues Monday.

The four Congresswomen did not mention the resolution, but Tlaib and Omar did call on Congress to pursue impeachment proceedings. All four have previously supported impeachment.

The President appeared emboldened by the swift condemnation. He continued to issue similar tweets throughout Monday morning, and doubled down on his sentiments later in the day. “A lot of people love it but if you are not happy in the U.S. if you are complaining all of the time very simply you can leave,” he said Monday at a separate event. “You can leave right now.. he Come back if you want, don’t come back, that’s OK, too.”

Trump defended his tweets while speaking in front of the White House on Monday, saying “As far as I am concerned if you hate our country, if you’re not happy here, you can leave. That is what I say all the time.”

When asked if he was concerned about his tweets being seen as racists, Trump replied, “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me.”

Five minutes before the four women were to start their press conference, he tweeted again, doubling down on attacks he had made earlier in the day: “We will never be a Socialist or Communist Country. IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY HERE, YOU CAN LEAVE! It is your choice, and your choice alone. This is about love for America. Certain people HATE our Country….”

By Alana Abramson and Josiah Bates on July 15, 2019 at 06:53PM

[xdirtyhalox]

An Open Letter to Warpaint and Their Fans

It seems that there are some things that need to be clarified, in the name of integrity & clear communication:

1. Harry Styles’ fans (HSF) were quite excited that Warpaint was opening for Styles during his upcoming 2018 world tour. As is our way, we tend to be extremely supportive of anyone who is involved professionally with Styles & any member of One Direction. As has happened with Steve Aoki, James Corden, Zedd and more, we open our hearts, our family and our pocketbooks to show our respect and appreciation. Warpaint received the same warm welcome.

2. It is due to our general respect and excitement for Warpaint that we were so taken aback, and yes offended, by the remarks in Monday, 3 July, 2017’s interview. Both in context and on their own merit, the comments had an unfortunate condescending air, and (inadvertently or not) a lack of respect or appreciation for HSF as individuals or as a fandom, as well Harry Styles and his music. 

To be written off as “young [unfiltered] ladies” who needed an opportunity to listen to “good” music was both frustrating and heartbreaking. This fandom is made up of a wonderful variety of individuals, a majority of which are female, though well outside of the “young [unfiltered] ladies” moniker, a label that is well known as disparaging and dismissive towards women of any age. 

Furthermore, the insinuation that being a fan of a major artist discredits your musical taste, or means that you need to be educated is frankly insulting. The beauty of our fandom is that we are wildly different – but equally worthy – people. We find love in all sorts of music: indie, rock, blues, soul, country, EDM, R&B, and yes– pop. The same person who loves Harry Styles’ decidedly rock album is the same person who loves Pink Floyd or John Paul White or The White Stripes or Tina Turner, Katy Perry, John Mayer and so on. Being a fan of Harry Styles means you’re organically a fan of Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, and the up and coming indie artists, including Warpaint. We are diverse in tastes and title, and we are fervently proud of that. To be brushed off due to our love of one artist is simply wrong. The statement was based on many assumptions and logical fallacies. 

The same can be said of needing an indie band to create an opportunity for self-exploration. The lovely thing about a fandom such as ours is that it creates a safe haven to explore many of our intimate or outspoken desires. Have the secret wish to be a singer or play guitar in an all-girl group? Here are thousands to millions of people cheering you on, telling you that you can do it, making connections around the world with other inspired people. We don’t need new opportunities – we’ve made several on our on. And, as previously mentioned, we have such a range of musical tastes that the doors have been opened many, many times. While we certainly appreciate Warpaint’s style and genre, to insinuate that only through their music we will grow is both wrong and absurd. 

Styles himself did not seem to fare better in the perceived eyes of Warpaint. Though certainly glowing at times, there seemed to be a fundamental assumption that Warpaint was more credible and that Styles’ music was lesser somehow. It seemed to be a slap in the face of an artist who obviously respects the band enough to have them on tour. This sickened us as no one wants to see their favorite singer shaded by those he clearly likes. 

3. No other opening act of Harry Styles’ upcoming tours has felt the need to comment openly or negatively about Harry Styles or HSF. Of the four artists, only Kacey Musgraves and Leon Bridges have name recognition to the general public. Of the four artists, only Kacey Musgraves is listed outside the indie label (even Leon Bridges, playing significantly different music, is still considered an insider’s artist, a key component to ‘indie status’). Yet of the four artists, only Warpaint felt it necessary to comment publicly in any forum in any way that can be perceived as negative, disparaging or inappropriate. Muna is a phenomenally wondering indie-dark pop band known for its independence and unwavering allegiance to its beliefs. Bridges is a man who has never shied away from his roots or his view of music, truth, and accountability. Musgraves is lauded in her genre, a seemingly dark horse who remains authentic and unbending to the expectations of her chosen genre. None of them sound anything like Harry Styles. None of them have the worldwide success or popularity that Harry Styles have. They have received the same questions and interview requests Warpaint has, the same eyebrow raised that Warpaint was apparently responding to. Yet none of them have felt the need to say anything but positive things, if anything at all. By opening their mouths, Warpaint opened the door to interpretation and, most likely unknowingly and unwillingly, joined the chorus of lesser, those who put others down in order to lift themselves up or remain afloat at their current standing. It was a cheap shot, even if made with the best intentions. 

4. Our fandom has a fairly tough skin. After seven years in the game, it is safe to say that we’ve been through quite a lot, and have been called many, many things. While it certainly irks us, we’ve learned to brush it off due to the overwhelming appreciation and vocal respect given by Harry Styles (as well as Niall Horan, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson).

The issue with Warpaint’s comments is that we don’t expect such sharp and unsubstantiated, belittling claims from inside the house. There is a true and understandable hurt that comes from backing a band and showing them love, only to receive a glib brush-off in the name of “musical integrity.” There is true and understandable hurt that comes from giving a band an opportunity to operate authentically on an entirely different, and wider platform, and having that band shade or snub him, again in the name of “musical integrity.” We had open arms and felt summarily rejected.

This could have all been a simple mistake. People misspeak and tempers flare. However, since the fall out, there has been no attempt on Warpaint’s part to clarify their statements, or to reach out to fans and assure them that they meant no harm. Instead, there was some likes of tweets that painted us as silly and dramatic, and Warpaint as some sort of victim.

Let this be explicitly clear: Warpaint are not victims of anything except their own blunder. Actions have consequences. It is fairly clear that they have no plan to clarify or mollify, which supports the superiority narrative that the interview spun. 

5. Fans are absolutely allowed to show their displeasure. In the light of the circumstances, fans are more than in the right to desire a different opener. It has nothing to do with Warpaint’s music, but the perception (that, again, four days later has still not been addressed or corrected) that they feel above us as people and music lovers, and Harry Styles. 

Music is a universal language full of patterns of truth. Concerts are sacred events where people of all walks come together, and, just for a moment, a sliver of a day, forget who they are and become one. There is beauty in that. There is great honor as well. So it is incredibly understandable that people wouldn’t to enter that space with others they feel don’t respect them. You don’t piss on our home and then expect to be invited in warmly. 

Throughout this situation, we have been constantly told to sit down, shut up & enjoy the opportunity to listen to Warpaint. We need not to sit and we need not be silent. And our point is that we will be unable to enjoy Warpaint’s product when they don’t respect us. 

We’ve been told we don’t have a right to complain. We as consumers have the right to complain. At the very end of the day, it’s our money, and we have a right to withhold it if we feel it’s being used against us in some way. “We think you’re silly, but thanks for the money.” No, no thank you. 

(Please note: I am not saying, suggesting or insinuating that Warpaint is only touring with Harry Styles for the money and/or platform. That’s an entirely different conversation, one that I am not engaging in here. I am saying that concert tickets cost money and that money goes to the artists and their teams.)

We’ve been told that there are better, more mature ways to state or displeasure. Yet, at every invitation for suggestions on those better, more mature ways, we’ve been met with dismissals and jeers. 

6. In my years in fandom, I have never seen such contentious and cruel fighting as I have with Warpaint fans. The trolling of our fandom, the remarks about our appearance, weight and size, intelligence, credibility, sanity, taste and more – the hits seem both never-ending and deeply personal. I can certainly understand the need to protect or defend a beloved musician or band; but I do not understand attacking people’s morals and character, and constantly belittling someone. If it makes you feel important, I am sad for you; my importance has always been tied to what sort of positive and lasting impact I’m making on my fellow humans. 

I’m also befuddled by the “They didn’t say that, but we believe it’s true” defense that is coming from Warpaint fans. You believe that Warpaint would never disparage HSF or Styles himself that way, but you believe us to be young, unfiltered, dramatic, unimportant, annoying girls, Styles to be purely pop with no substance or standing? How do those go together? How are we supposed to interpret Warpaint’s words as innocent when their fans are using them as daggers?

7. In Harry Styles’ seven year career, never once have his fans had to defend his actions and/or speech. Never. That should speak for itself. 

8. Harry Styles does not need Warpaint for credibility. This narrative is both ludicrous and unfounded. Harry Styles’ credibility comes from the strength of his music, his character and his own accolades. Harry Styles credibility comes from his reputation and reception. Harry Styles the album was critically lauded for ushering in a new era of rock-centric music. It was acclaimed by countless reputable critics and outlets. And if all that was for naught, Harry Styles’ fans include Ronnie Wood, Elton John, Stevie Nicks and Paul McCartney. No matter what spectrum of the musical landscape you find yourself on, you absolutely cannot discredit the aforementioned legendary artists. Their fervent and vocal support of Harry Styles as a person and a musician speaks volumes and, along with the aforementioned, cement him as a credible and well-respected artist. He and his team chose Warpaint as an opener because of his/their appreciation of the music and what they felt was a great opportunity. 

In conclusion:

No, we aren’t sensitive children with no musical taste or perception of the world around us. You and your band aren’t better than us because you’re indie, and our artist and us aren’t better than you because we’re rock and pop. The level of platform does not denote anything other than popularity, and while we can all disagree, there’s never a place for personal attacks and wounds meant to last. It’s music and it’s beautiful, so let’s allow it to be that way. 

B🌸

[jcoin7]

And You Look The Other Way

A friend of mine posed the following question: “Who would trust Trump to be alone with their young adult daughter?”

Hmmmm....Obviously this is someone who doesn’t trust Trump in general, and knowing him I can say with certainty that he is firmly on the Liberal side of the political spectrum. Which I am not. Well, not until recent events caused me to find myself labeled a Liberal by people whose leanings I realized were so far right that they can’t go fishing for fear of capsizing every boat they are in. But then something interesting happened, and by interesting I mean something that caused my hair to catch fire I was so mad at the jackass who responded with the following: “In the White House with Trump, yes. In the White House with Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton, no.” 

See what happened there? The respondent (Let’s call him “Jack”) somehow decided that not only is Trump trustworthy enough to be left with a young woman alone, but that both Bill and Hillary Clinton are NOT. And when he was questioned on his statement he went even further, stating, “Only 2 presidents have a history of grabbing the pussy or letting sperm fly in the White House, and they are Kennedy (D) and Clinton (D).” That’s an exact quote so don’t blame me for the shitty writing, I do well enough with that on my own. 

With that comment Jack has done two things. First he has implied that Presidents Clinton and Kennedy’s affairs make them LESS trustworthy for young women to be around than a man who has been caught on tape admitting to grabbing women’s genitalia and getting away with it because he’s famous, and admitting to walking in on underage girls in beauty competitions he funds while these underage girls are in various stages of undress. Second he has implied, by including the aforementioned Presidents’ political affiliation, that Democrats are somehow less trustworthy around women than a man who between 1987 and 2012 changed his Party affiliation FIVE TIMES (1987 Republican, 1999 Independence Party, 2001 Democrat, 2009 Republican, 2011 No Party Affiliation AKA Independent, 2012 Republican). And that’s just since he moved to Manhattan back in 1987).

So I decided to tell him that no, he wasn’t correct. And a LOT of “NO” wound up coming out.

No, other Presidents have had numerous liaisons both in and outside of the White House.

No, they were not all Democrats. Like Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican (the ideological predecessor to the modern Republican Party), who had an affair with a slave and fathered five children with her. Can you imagine if he’d have been a Democrat? NO ONE would have let their slaves near him knowing how lecherous those pesky Dems could be! Or Warren Harding, a Republican, who allegedly had TWO affairs, and whose second mistress was actually paid $50,000 BY THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE so that she would not come forward and expose their affair as Harding had just won the Republican nomination to run for President. Boy, if he’d have been a Democrat I’m sure that he’d have dies much sooner from his untrustworthy ways than the manner in which he allegedly DID go - poisoned by his wife for cheating on him just three years into his Presidency! Whew! Good thing he was a Republican!

No, you were not asked to elaborate on the question so as to draw attention away from President-elect Trump's proclivity for physically assaulting women. You may (and I’d venture a guess WILL) continue the current Trumpist strategy of “Defense By Distraction,” but I would also venture a guess that such a tactic will eventually blow up in your collective faces.

No, it is not okay to state that "Only 2 presidents have a history of grabbing the pussy," since it completely ignores the fact that President-elect Trump has a history of doing just that, which is known because HE HIMSELF SAID SO. That’s right, you remember don’t you? He actually said that himself, it wasn’t someone claiming that he heard it, or some “11th hour victim” as you and others have called them, who you claim only came forward to try to hurt Trump’s chance of being elected. Even though a number of those women have been either attempting to get their story out for years or had previously told their story only to have it ignored because, well, the man wasn’t running for President at the time. Excuse me for a moment.

Okay, I’m back. I felt the need to wipe the feeling of disgust off of myself, for having to explain such things to a fellow human being who is apparently fine with slandering possible assault victims as well as blatantly making things up to suit his guy’s case. It’s sickening. And now to continue....

Yes, you can and probably will spend the next four years defending a man who, before he has even taken the Oath of Office, has reneged on many of the campaign promises that you voted him into office because of. A few quotes, and their current state of being: “I WILL build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it!” NOPE. “I will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton.” NAH. “I will repeal Obamacare and replace it with something much much better.” SORRY. “I will drain the swamp.” HAHAHAHAHAHAHANOOOOOOPE!

Yes, other Presidents have made mistakes.Clinton slashed both military spending and Intel spending to the point that the Agencies that collected Intel hoarded it and kept things from each other in order to make themselves look important, which indirectly led to the failure of Intel that was 9-11. But I’m sure his affair with an intern was MUCH worse since that is ALL YOU EVER TALK ABOUT when Trump’s sexual misadventures are brought up. And Obama spent so much time trying to get social programs through Congress that he ignored a large swath of the American public who were also hurting but felt that they had no voice anymore, which indirectly led to Secretary Clinton losing votes and helping Trump get elected. But hey, HILLARY STOOD BY BILL EVEN AFTER HE HAD AN AFFAIR! WHAT A BAD PERSON! That’s way more important, since you remember THAT but not that Trump is on his third marriage after cheating on his first two wives, while Bill and Hillary are still together even AFTER all that they went through. Family values, only Trump understands them.

No, you will not actually be able to point to the mistakes of these and other Presidents for the next four years in order to distract from the dumpster fire on top of a train wreck that is ALREADY becoming the Trump Presidency.

So there are my nos, along with some yeses just to keep it positive. But you may ask at this point, “Preacher, exactly WHY do you feel that the impending Presidency of Trump will be suck a massive clusterfuck?” Well, here are just a FEW things that I told good ol’ Jack when he continued to try defending the sweet potato with legs that is about to take charge. Mind you, ALL of these are FACTS unless I otherwise mention, and I DO mention it if it’s simply speculation or opinion for the sake of fairness:

The man admitted to grabbing female genitalia and getting away with it because he's famous and to intentionally walking in on young women while they were getting dressed. It’s him, on tape. And you looked the other way.

The man berated and belittled women. He called a former beauty queen “Miss Piggy,” he alluded to Megan Kelly having her period to explain why she, in his words, treated him “unfairly.” And you looked the other way.

This man mocked a reporter with a disability on national television. And to DEFEND HIM, right-leaning news outlets showed videos of him mocking OTHER PEOPLE. So the argument was that he wasn't mocking the disabled (which the video actually shows that he WAS), he just MOCKS LOTS OF PEOPLE. Which is unconscionable in a Presidential candidate, let alone the actual President. And you looked the other way.

The man pointed to completely fake news stories in order to besmirch the names of his political opponents. He actually cited an article in the Enquirer to explain how Ted Cruz’s father may have tried to kill Kennedy. On television. And you looked the other way.

This man got the news that the last true Socialist dictator, Fidel Castro, had died the same time the rest of the world did. And while the sitting President released an eloquent letter on what Castro's death and the ongoing normalization of relations between our two countries meant for Cuba and for the world, YOUR man tweeted, "Fidel Castro is dead!" That's it. From the next leader of the free world. And you looked the other way. 

The man used hatred in order to incite violence among his followers. He once told a crowd at a rally that he loved “the old days” because a protester who was interrupting him would be “carried out on a stretcher, folks,” and told another crowd in reference to a man who was punched and kicked for protesting that “maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” The man was protesting. Nothing else. And you looked the other way.

The man showed on national television that he was unaware of some of the key aspects of our national defense strategy. When asked about our nuclear triad, the man SIMPLY HAD NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL THAT WAS. HE flailed about speaking on various topics from his opposition to the Iraq war (sigh - you’re on tape with an opposite statement there too guy), President Obama being wrong about global warming being important, and, oh yeah, his commitment that nuclear proliferation should be halted. And if that last one sounds great, it would except that shortly after this interview he went on record saying first of all that OTHER NATIONS SHOULD HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS, and that he himself was not opposed to A NUCLEAR STRIKE IN EUROPE in order to win a war. Which. I’m sorry, is as terrifying as it is absolutely fucking insane. And you looked the other way.

The man stated numerous times during his campaign that he would release his tax returns after the election. Then after the audit was completed. And most recently that it doesn't matter if he releases them because only the media cares. Which is completely false as well as a smack in the face to people, like Jack, who ACTUALLY DEFENDED TRUMP by saying that after he WON, the tax records would come out and then “boy will you Liberals look stupid!” And yet here we are. And you continue to look the other way.

The man stated, in clear language and in NO uncertain terms, that he would build a wall on the border between the United States and Mexico, and that he would make Mexico pay for that wall. Unequivocally, without any reservation, with no room for gray area, he told the American people that Mexico would pay for the wall. And within a month of his being elected he stated that the United States would build the wall and that Mexico would "reimburse us," which is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT than what he said would happen. And the SAME DAY that he announced this, the President of Mexico reiterated AGAIN in a statement that Mexico will NOT PAY FOR A WALL. And you looked the other way.

The man said that if he won the Presidency that he would put his businesses into a blind trust run by his children. Which is NOT A BLIND TRUST. Not by the business definition and CERTAINLY not by the legal definition. These are holdings that CAN and in fact already HAVE caused ethical issues stemming from the fact that foreign nations could show preferential treatment to his businesses in order to get preferential treatment from OUR NATION. And you looked the other way. But wait, this one gets worse. Because now that you have elected him, he has gone back on the promise to divest himself from his business holdings or come even CLOSE to putting them into a blind trust, instead openly stating in his first press conference that the day-to-day running of his businesses will be done by his sons, and that he and his daughter will have nothing to do with the running of said businesses. He will STILL OWN THE BUSINESSES THOUGH. Which, yes, is actually against the United States Constitution. That, in case you forgot, is the document that you and others like you were afraid that President Obama and Secretary Clinton if she were elected would tear to pieces, the same document that YOUR GUY is about to violate. And his daughter is as of today still in talks with a Chinese company about a Trump project in China, a company that is majority owned BY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT. Neither she nor her father have made any move to cut her out of these negotiations. And you continue to look the other way.

The man stated that he would repeal Obamacare and replace it with "something much better." his own words. He also stated that no one would be left without coverage when Obamacare was repealed because he had "so many ideas" (again, his own words) for what to replace Obamacare with. And Congress has just moved to begin the repeal of Obamacare, something of which Trump approved, with NO REPLACEMENT AT ALL. AT ALL.  Let me say that again, NO REPLACEMENT AT ALL. Because of this, over TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE will at least temporarily and over half of them permanently LOSE THEIR HEALTH INSURANCE. This is tantamount to murder, as one of the biggest provisos of Obamacare has always been the inability to be turned down due to preexisting conditions, which is ALSO coincidentally one of the FIRST things that Congress JUST VOTED THE OTHER DAY TO END. And you continue to look the other way. 

The man, AND the sitting President, were briefed on CREDIBLE INTELLIGENCE that members of President-elect Trump's campaign had DIRECT CONTACT with the Russian government during the election. This is not the bed-pissing nonsense, I could not care less about whatever deviancy he practices or does not practice in his bedroom or in a Russian hotel room, for that matter. This is a detailed report based on real Intel that has caused the FBI to begin an investigation into whether members of the Trump election team colluded with the Russian government to sway a United States Presidential election. And you continue to look the other way.

But hey, at least he’s surrounding himself with “good people, smart people.” Once again, his words. How’s that going....

The man said that he would "drain the swamp," and that he would begine to rid Washington of lobbyists, insiders and big-business types who were only there for their own good and not the good of the people. And once he was elected he proceeded to nominate two Goldman Sachs executives, the CEO of the largest corporate entity in the world (Exxon-Mobil), and a handful of lobbyists to Cabinet and leadership positions. And you CONTINUE to look the other way.

The man appointed Stephen Bannon, who is responsible for articles such as “There’s no hiring bias against women in tech, they just suck at interviews” (totally misogynistic and written in such a gender-biased way as to be laughable),  “Trump 100% vindicated: CBS reports ‘swarm’ on rooftops celebrating 9/11″ (completely debunked to the point that CBS ran a story just to let people know that this was false news), and “Racist, pro-Nazi roots of Planned Parenthood revealed” (a hit piece written with such a slant that there is not an ounce of verifiable factual information in it). And when the man had his first press conference, he berated a CNN reporter and called the network “fake news” for reporting NOT that Trump likes to pay Russian prostitutes to pee the bed (that was Uproxx and others after that), but that he and President Obama had been briefed on “unverified intelligence from a credible source” that the Russian government might have information that could be used to blackmail the President-elect. That’s what CNN reported. NOT the pee-pee diaries. And your man conflated them with Uproxx. And then Trump took a question from Breitbart News. I shit you not.  And you looked the other way.

The man nominated a man who has a questionable track record regarding civil rights, who opposed repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to give people of all sexual orientations the right to serve their country and who supported a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage to head our nation's largest law enforcement body. Senator Sessions lost a bid to be a Federal Judge due to racist comments, and led his State’s defense of a school funding bill that was eventually found to be UNCONSTITUTIONAL due to its favoring of wealthy, mostly white schools over poor, mostly black ones.  And you looked the other way.

The man nominated a man to run the Office of Housing and Urban Development who has publicly stated that he DOESN'T THINK HE KNOWS HOW TO RUN SUCH AN ORGANIZATION. Ben Carson has ZERO experience running such an Agency, and has just as little experience in government. Oh yeah, and you and your friends AND TRUMP made Carson out to be a complete idiot during the Primaries who couldn’t run a Burger King. And you looked the other way.

The man nominated a man to run the Department of Energy who has publicly stated that he would DO AWAY WITH IT, though he COULDN'T REMEMBER THE AGENCY'S NAME WHEN HE WAS ASKED IT. Former Governor Perry is a climate change denier, and is STILL ON THE BOARD of the company that is trying to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. And you continue to look the other way.

The man nominated a woman to run the Department of Education who has a long and vociferous history of OPPOSING PUBLIC EDUCATION. Betsy DeVos is a billionaire who advocated for charter schools and the privatization of the public education system, something that has been repeatedly proven to favor the wealthy and to disproportionally affect the poor.  And you continue to look the other way.

In a few days this man will take the Presidential Oath of Office under a cloud of possible ethics violations, under a cloud of question over his leveraging of national power to make money for his businesses, under a cloud of suspicion over whether he will keep ANY of his campaign promises, most of which he’s already broken, and under a cloud of doubt as to his ability to actually do the job of President. The United States will have a possible Constitutional crisis on its hands from day one.

The fact that he has admitted to inappropriately touching women without their permission and to walking in on underage young ladies in various stages of undress are only two of MANY reasons that I would not trust the man alone with ANYONE, least of all my daughter. And she’s not even a year old yet. Which is good, because at least I can hope that by the time she understands stuff like politics, the Trump era will have become just an extremely embarrassing memory.

- Preacher

[sinrau]

Federal customs officials said Friday that their agents had detained a demonstrator in Portland, Ore., in a widely seen video circulating online that showed two men in apparent military garb taking a young man wearing all black into custody, defending the apprehension by describing the man as being suspected of attacking federal agents and property.

This defense came as federal authorities were under criticism for their tactics from elected officials, civil rights activists and demonstrators, including one in Portland who described being “terrified” during a similar encounter.

In a statement on Friday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that its agents had taken the action in the video and that they “had information indicating the person in the video was suspected of assaults against federal agents or destruction of federal property.”

When the agents approached him, CBP said, “a large and violent mob moved towards their location. For everyone’s safety, CBP agents quickly moved the suspect to a safer location for further questioning.”

The agency also disputed suggestions that they were operating only as unidentified federal agents.

“The CBP agents identified themselves and were wearing CBP insignia during the encounter,” CBP said in its statement. “The names of the agents were not displayed due to recent doxing incidents against law enforcement personnel who serve and protect our country.”

A similar encounter left Mark Pettibone, a 29-year-old demonstrator, shaken, he told The Washington Post in an interview.

Pettibone said he was scared when men in green military fatigues and generic “police” patches jumped out of an unmarked minivan early Wednesday. Pettibone said that when several men in fatigues approached him, his first instinct was to run.

He did not know whether the men were police or far-right extremists, who frequently don military-like outfits and harass left-leaning protesters in Portland. In his account, the 29-year-old said he made it about a half-block before he realized there would be no escape.

Then, he sank to his knees, hands in the air.

“I was terrified,” Pettibone said. “It seemed like it was out of a horror/sci-fi, like a Philip K. Dick novel. It was like being preyed upon.”

He was detained and searched. One man asked him if he had any weapons; he did not. They drove him to the federal courthouse and placed him in a holding cell, he said. Two officers eventually returned to read his Miranda rights and ask if he would waive those rights to answer a few questions; he did not.

Almost as suddenly as they had grabbed him off the street, the men let him go. The federal officers who snatched him off the street as he was walking home from a peaceful protest did not tell him why he had been detained or provide him any record of an arrest, he told The Post. As far as he knows, he has not been charged with any crimes. And, Pettibone said, he did not know who detained him.

“Arrests require probable cause that a federal crime had been committed, that is, specific information indicating that the person likely committed a federal offense, or a fair probability that the person committed a federal offense,” Orin Kerr, a professor at University of California at Berkeley Law School, told The Post. “If the agents are grabbing people because they may have been involved in protests, that’s not probable cause.”

During a video news conference Friday, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler twice called the federal police in his city President Trump’s “personal army” and said that he is joining a chorus of Oregon’s elected officials in sending a clear message to Washington: “Take your troops out of Portland.”

“This is part of a coordinated strategy out of Trump’s White House to use federal troops to bolster his sagging polling data, and it is an absolute abuse of federal law enforcement officials,” Wheeler said. “As we were starting to see things de-escalate, their actions last Saturday and every night since have actually ratcheted up the tension on our streets.”

Federal officers from the U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security have stormed Portland’s streets as part of Trump’s promised strong response to ongoing protests. Local leaders expressed alarm at news of Pettibone’s detention and echoed calls for the feds to leave that have grown stronger since Marshals Service officers severely wounded a peaceful protester on Saturday.

“A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump’s secret police,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a Thursday tweet that also called out acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf. “Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.”

Civil rights advocates suggested the Trump administration is testing the limits of its executive power.

“I think Portland is a test case,” Zakir Khan, a spokesman for the Oregon chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Post. “They want to see what they can get away with before launching into other parts of the country.”

Jann Carson, interim executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, called the recent arrests “flat-out unconstitutional” in a statement shared with The Post.

“Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street, we call it kidnapping,” Carson said. “Protesters in Portland have been shot in the head, swept away in unmarked cars, and repeatedly tear-gassed by uninvited and unwelcome federal agents. We won’t rest until they are gone.”

Nightly protests have seized Portland’s downtown streets since George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in late May. For more than six weeks, Portland police have clashed with left-leaning protesters speaking out against racism and police brutality. Tear gas has choked hundreds in the city, both protesters and other residents caught in the crossfire. Protesters have spray-painted anti-police messages on the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center, which serves as the local jail and a police headquarters.

After Trump sent federal officers to the city, allegedly to quell violence, tensions escalated. The feds have repeatedly deployed tear gas to scuttle protests, despite a newly passed state law that bans local police from using the chemical irritant except to quash riots. On Saturday, federal agents shot a man in the face with a less-than-lethal munition, fracturing his skull. Local officials, from the mayor to the governor, have asked the president to pull the federal officers out of the city.

“I am proud to be among the loud chorus of elected officials calling for the federal troops in Portland’s streets to go home,” Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said in a statement shared with The Post on Sunday. “Their presence here has escalated tensions and put countless Portlanders exercising their First Amendment rights in greater danger.”

Pettibone says he was simply exercising his free speech rights on Wednesday when he was detained. He and a friend were walking to a car to drive home after a relatively calm demonstration in a nearby park. He said he did not do anything to instigate police that night, or at any of the other protests he had attended over the past six weeks.

“I have a pretty strong philosophical conviction that I will not engage in any violent activity,” he told The Post. “I keep it mellow and try to document police brutality and try to show up for solidarity.”

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night, and likewise did not answer questions from Oregon Public Broadcasting. The Marshals Service told the radio station its officers had not arrested Pettibone and said the agency always keeps records of its arrests.

“We’ve done a great job in Portland,” Trump said at a news conference on Monday. “Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail. We very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we’ll quell it again very easily. It’s not hard to do, if you know what you’re doing.”

Yet the scene on Portland’s streets late Thursday reflected a different reality.

Protesters once again filled the streets in downtown, defiantly moving fencing meant to keep the crowd away from the Multnomah County Justice Center. And once again, federal officers launched tear gas into the protest.

As police, both local and federal, have responded to demonstrators with increasing force, the protests have grown more unwieldy and determined. Neither side appears ready to surrender.

“Once you’re out on the street and you’ve been tear-gassed and you see that there’s no reason — the police will claim that there’s a riot just so they can use tear gas — it makes you want to go out there even more to see if there can be any kind of justice,” Pettibone told The Post.

Emily Gillespie in Portland contributed to this report.

Correction: A previous version of this story stated incorrectly that a video circulating online showed Customs and Border Protection personnel detaining Mark Pettibone. The identity of the protester in that footage remains unclear.

‘It was like being preyed upon’: Portland protesters say federal officers in unmarked vans are detaining them

[thisdaynews]

President Pence? Facing impeachment, Trump latches on to his sidekick

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/president-pence-facing-impeachment-trump-latches-on-to-his-sidekick/

President Pence? Facing impeachment, Trump latches on to his sidekick

The out-of-the-blue reference triggered questions about the vice president’s role in the latest mess and the unusual relationship between the pair of leaders. If Trump falls alone, Pence becomes the 46th president of the United States — a development many mainstream Republicans would prefer. If Trump and Pence go down together or in quick succession, it’s President Nancy Pelosi — a prospect that would not be lost on Senate Republicans voting on whether to oust their party’s leaders.

Trump’s offhand remark was a stark reminder of the eternal risks to the people in his orbit, particularly as the notoriously unpredictable president navigates the delicate politics of impeachment.

Responding to a question about the president’s U.N. news conference, Tom LoBianco, author of the new Pence book “Piety and Power,” asked, “You mean when he gutted Pence on live TV?”

“He tends to flash this paranoia every now and then that Pence is after the job,” Lobianco said. “It’s like joking not-joking. But I was shocked that he was so out in the open this time .”

Pence allies say there’s no reason to think the president will toss his No. 2 under the bus — something Trump has done to past advisers, Cabinet secretaries and White House aides.

“Trump is very loyal to people who have been loyal to him,” former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said. “You look back where there’s been separations, and it’s often where someone has gone off in a different policy direction and been public about it.”

Some people close to Pence, who spoke with POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, saw the president’s recent comment as nothing more than Trump’s typical stream of consciousness — an innocent statement meant to convey that neither he nor the vice president are guilty of wrongdoing.

“He’s largely above reproach. No one ever accuses the vice president of doing anything like that,” said one person close to Pence, referring to the allegations at the center of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

“The president was trying to put himself on the same ground as that,” this person said.

A senior administration official dismissed the notion that Trump would throw Pence under the bus if he ever sensed disloyalty. “That is silly. It’s the opposite, meaning that [Pence’s] calls are fine, too,” the official said of Trump’s latest remark. “Think this through: POTUS and VP are gone and Pelosi becomes president? Please.”

The past several weeks have been a minefield of loyalty tests for Pence, culminating with the whistleblower complaint that prompted Pelosi to embrace impeachment after months of cautioning her progressive colleagues not to rush toward it.

Pence met with Zelensky on Sept. 1 during a last-minute trip to Poland. He told reporters afterward he did not mention Biden during their conversation but did communicate his “great concerns about issues of corruption” in Ukraine. The vice president was not a participant on the July 25 call between the president and Zelensky, according to a senior administration official, who pushed back against a report saying he urged Trump not to release a transcript of the conversation earlier this week.

Before the Ukraine scandal burst into public view, Pence was recovering from a series of other controversies that put his allegiance to Trump on full display.

On Sept. 9, the president claimed he had nothing to do with Pence’s stay at a Trump-owned property in Doonbeg, Ireland, far away from meetings the vice president had planned in Dublin. Trump’s denial of involvement in the arrangement contradicted a prior explanation provided by Pence chief of staff Marc Short, who said the president had suggested his resort as an overnight accommodation. When Short and Pence later said the vice president made the decision on his own — because of his family ties to Doonbeg — it was widely seen as an attempt to rescue Trump from accusations of emoluments clause violations.

That same afternoon, Pence and his team found themselves in cleanup mode again. This time, the vice president pushed back on reports that he had disagreed with Trump’s decision to invite Taliban leaders and the president of Afghanistan to Camp David for a secret round of peace negotiations.

“More Fake News!” Pence tweeted in distinctly Trumpian prose.

Pence’s reaction was consistent with how those in his inner circle expect him to behave as the impeachment inquiry unfolds on Capitol Hill: with a mix of caution and chameleonic performances that endear him to the president.

Indeed, Pence’s first public defense of the president amid reports of the whistleblower complaint came in a fiery interview Monday night on Fox News’ “Hannity” — a prime-time program Trump watches religiously.

“Here we go again. The assume-the-worst media takes one report, runs with it. Democrats on Capitol Hill immediately start to denounce the president before anybody has the facts,” the vice president said .

Pence also came to Trump’s defense on Wednesday in a series of statements from his official Twitter account that landed right as the president was calling attention to his conversations with Ukrainian officials. Quoting from an interview he did with Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs, the vice president — who wasn’t at Trump’s news conference in New York — denounced Democrats’ “reckless accusations.” He also repeated the president’s erroneous claim that Biden threatened to withhold U.S. aid from Ukraine if a prosecutor — whom Trump has falsely claimed was investigating Hunter Biden — weren’t removed from his position.

“The vice president is just as solid and loyal as he can get,” DeMint said. “He is just very thoughtful and strategic and over the next few weeks, he will be the president’s top adviser.”

The co-dependency between Trump and Pence has long been demonstrated by their policy portfolios, their synchronized talking points and the role both men play in energizing their MAGA base. Trump, a political neophyte with major character flaws in the eyes of his most ardent evangelical supporters, has allowed his vice president, a devout Christian, to assume powerful roles on foreign policy, health care and religious freedom. As long as Pence remains his dutiful deputy and greatest defender, he gains an automatic head start for his own presidential ambitions in the post-Trump era.

“He would never take out Trump because if you are ever seen trying to kill the king, you lose the base,” LoBianco said.

But even after three years of Pence’s obedience and non stop flattery, there have been signs that Trump is unwilling to reciprocate the same degree of loyalty.

Earlier this summer, the president began soliciting advice from close friends on whether Pence should remain his running mate in 2020 amid reports that he was facing pressure from his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, to swap out the vice president for a female running mate.

And when Trump was pressed in a June “Fox & Friends” interview to endorse Pence as his natural successor, he attempted to dodge the question.

“Well, it’s — I love Mike; we are running again. You’re talking about a long time, so you can’t put in that position,” Trump said, adding he was merely willing to give it “very strong consideration.”

Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.

Read More

[christianworldf]

New Post has been published on Nehemiah Reset

New Post has been published on https://nehemiahreset.org/christian-worldview-issues/republicans-criticize-minority-lawmakers-as-far-left-while-chastising-trump-for-over-the-line-tweets/

Republicans criticize minority lawmakers as ‘far-left’ while chastising Trump for ‘over the line’ tweets

Felicia Sonmez

National reporter on The Washington Post’s breaking political news team

Mike DeBonis

Congressional reporter covering the House of Representatives

Paul Kane

Senior congressional correspondent and columnist

July 15 at 9:35 PM

A day after President Trump said four minority congresswomen should “go back” to their home countries, Republicans criticized the quartet and cast them as the face of a socialist, left-wing Democratic Party while chastising the president in language that stopped short of fierce condemnation.

Republicans were largely silent Sunday in the face of Trump’s tweets, decried as racist, urging Democratic Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

But by Monday evening, several GOP lawmakers responded by taking a swipe at the Democratic women, and then criticized the president.

“While I strongly disagree with the tactics, policies, and rhetoric of the far-left socialist ‘Squad,’ the President’s tweets were inappropriate, denigrating, and wrong,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said in a tweet. “It is unacceptable to tell legal U.S. citizens to go back to their home country.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who is close to Trump and was praised by the president in tweets last week, repeatedly insisted to reporters at the Capitol Monday that “the president is not a racist” and that the president had spoken out of “frustration.”

Asked if Omar should return to Somalia, McCarthy said, “No, they’re Americans. Nobody believes somebody should leave the country. They have a right to give their opinion.”

But he later sought to turn the tables by noting that Ocasio-Cortez made comments last week accusing Pelosi of “singling out… newly elected women of color.”

“The speaker of the House, she claimed, was a racist and was attacking these women of color. That was a comment last week. Now this week we’re accusing somebody else of it,” he said, before referencing comments Omar and others have made that prompted claims of anti-Semitism.

All four of the Democratic lawmakers are U.S. citizens. Three were born in the United States, and Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and became a U.S. citizen as a teenager.

All House Republicans will probably be forced to go on record on Trump’s tweets in the coming days as Democrats in the chamber introduced a resolution condemning the president’s words. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said that the resolution could be brought to the House floor as early as Tuesday. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Monday that Senate Democrats are preparing a companion resolution.

Congressional Republicans were left largely to chart their own course Monday in the absence of any unified messaging effort by their party, aides said. One Senate Republican chief of staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss the party’s response, said that there was only “commiserating” at such moments, “no coordination.”

“Every man for themselves,” said a House Republican close to party leadership, who spoke on similar terms.

But common themes quickly emerged. In responding to Trump’s tweets Monday, several Republicans echoed the president’s claim that the four women “hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion,” while others cast them as lax on border security.

“I disagree strongly with many of the views and comments of some of the far-left members of the House Democratic Caucus — especially when it comes to their views on socialism, their anti-Semitic rhetoric, and their negative comments about law enforcement — but the President’s tweet that some Members of Congress should go back to the ‘places from which they came’ was way over the line, and he should take that down,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in a statement.

In an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump’s most vocal allies on Capitol Hill, called the Democratic lawmakers both socialist and communist while saying that their ideas were “anti-Semitic” and that they “hate Israel.” But he also counseled Trump: “Aim higher. They are American citizens. They won an election. Take on their policies.”

Omar apologized this year after making comments that were interpreted by many as anti-Semitic. Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, has advocated what has been dubbed a “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Trump has repeatedly seized on their comments to argue that the lawmakers are insufficiently supportive of Israel, a claim the Democrats have denied.

Other Republicans criticized Trump’s remarks Monday with no mention of the policies of the four women.

“I am confident that every Member of Congress is a committed American. @realDonaldTrump’s tweets from this weekend were racist and he should apologize. We must work as a country to rise above hate, not enable it,” said Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio).

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said the Republican Party “has a stronger platform to talk about; that’s what we should be focusing on.”

Asked whether she found Trump’s comments racist, Ernst replied, “Yeah, I do. They’re American citizens.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said “there is no excuse for the president’s spiteful comments — they were absolutely unacceptable and this needs to stop.”

She added: “We have enough challenges addressing the humanitarian crises both at our borders and around the world. Instead of digging deeper into the mud with personal, vindictive insults — we must demand a higher standard of decorum and decency.”

And Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said that Trump “failed very badly yesterday and today,” calling his comments “destructive and demeaning and in some ways dangerous.”

Several former officeholders, including former senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and former Ohio governor John Kasich, rebuked Trump as well.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), meanwhile, issued a defiant defense of the president, arguing that his remark was “clearly” not racist.

“He could have meant go back to the district they came from, to the neighborhood they came from,” Harris told Bryan Nehman on Baltimore talk radio WBAL.

Rep. Doug Collins (Ga.), the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, chalked up Trump’s racist remarks to frustrations over Congress’s lack of progress on a bipartisan immigration reform deal.

“The president is frustrated that Congress has not acted to solve the crisis at our border, and he expressed his frustrations in a way that didn’t promote reconciliation across the aisle and across the country,” Collins said in a statement.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), too, defended Trump from accusations of racism and said that “it’s weird to me that our politics is all, you know, people calling each other racists.”

But he said that the president had sent “a dumb tweet, if for no other reason than it takes attention off of some of the, I think, dangerous and dumb policies that AOC and her crew are advocating for.”

And Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) issued a full-throated defense of Trump, saying in a tweet that “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals.”

“This is America,” he said. “We’re the greatest country in the world. I stand with @realDonaldTrump.”

In a scathing floor speech, Schumer said Trump’s comments “drip with racism” and are in line with the president’s history of birtherism, his administration’s ban on travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries, his disparaging remarks about a federal judge of Mexican descent and his use of the term “shithole” to describe some countries in Africa and Latin America.

“My Republican friends, he’s not backing off,” Schumer said. “Where are you? . . . Those who fail to condemn the president are fellow travelers on his racist road, whatever their motivation.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made no mention of Trump’s comments in his floor remarks. In response to questions from reporters, he said he would address the issue at his weekly news conference Tuesday.

Keisha N. Blain, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the African American Intellectual History Society, said that by telling the Democratic lawmakers to “go back” to their countries, Trump “was employing a tired racist trope that white Americans have long used to try to silence and intimidate people of color in this country.”

“In so doing, he was essentially saying that they are noncitizens of this country and therefore have no basis for offering a critique of U.S. policies,” Blain said. “The reality, of course, is that they are American citizens. They have a right — and as public servants, an obligation — to critique the administration’s policies and demand immediate changes to improve the country they love and serve.”

By Sunday night, more than four-dozen House Democrats had used the words “racist” or “racism” in denouncing Trump’s tweets. But on Monday, only a handful of congressional Republicans — including Rep. Will Hurd (Tex.) and Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the only black Republicans in Congress — used similar language to describe the president’s words.

Hurd said in an appearance on CNN that Trump’s tweets were “racist and xenophobic” as well as inaccurate, given that three of the four Democratic women were born in the United States. Scott issued a lengthy statement that focused on Democrats’ own intraparty debates over race before going on to denounce Trump’s “unacceptable personal attacks and racially offensive language.”

As much as anything else, multiple House Republicans complained privately and on the record that Trump had essentially managed to at least temporarily quash the internal battle among Democrats that had exploded last week between party leaders and the four freshmen.

“I think Napoloeon had a quote about that, didn’t he?” said Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-Mich.), pulling out his phone to read it off: “Never interfere with enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.”

“I think it applies,” he added. “Why would you step in someone else’s dumpster fire?”

Among those declining to weigh in on Trump’s remarks was Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who said it’s “useless to engage in that rhetoric.” Capito is up for reelection in 2020, along with Collins, Daines and Ernst.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) also ducked media questions about the controversy. The son of a Cuban emigre, Cruz was born in Canada before his family moved to the United States. Trump eviscerated Cruz during the 2016 presidential contest, including making false claims that Cruz’s father played some role in the Kennedy assassination.

“I have a long-standing policy that I don’t comment on tweets,” Cruz told reporters. Informed that Monday’s controversy came from Trump’s own comments, carried on live television from the White House grounds, Cruz smiled, entered an elevator in the Capitol and said nothing.

Shane Harris, Seung Min Kim, Erica Werner and John Wagner contributed to this report.

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