Tag: racism

Swastika found etched into State Department elevator

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A swastika was found on Monday etched into the wall of a State Department elevator near the office of its special envoy to monitor and combat anti-semitism, according to a person familiar with the discovery and a picture obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: The defacement raises troubling questions about security inside the nation’s foreign policy nerve center, and the potential for antisemitism within an outward-facing element of the United States government.

  • Secretary of State Tony Blinken sent an email Tuesday to the entire department that condemned the vandalism. “The hateful graffiti has been removed and this incident will be investigated.” Continue reading.

Robert E. Lee statue taken down in Charlottesville

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The city of Charlottesville, Va., has taken down a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, marking the end of a years-long effort to have it removed.

Videos shared to social media showed the statue being hoisted off its stone base Saturday morning, with some in the crowd cheering as it was removed from the pedestal.

The city announced Friday it would remove the statue, which was at the site of the 2017 “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally that resulted in the death of a counterprotester. Continue reading.

‘Urgency’ creates a Senate path for AAPI hate crimes legislation

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Schumer, McConnell to discuss amendments

Something unusual happened in the Senate on Tuesday, when both sides of the aisle showed a willingness to debate legislation to address a rise in violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The divisive partisanship of recent years has kept even popular legislation from the kind of floor action expected for the bill, starting Wednesday, including the possibility of votes on bipartisan amendments.

But Democrats cited both an urgency to address the hate crimes against AAPI individuals and the straightforwardness of the legislation by Sen. Mazie K. Hirono, D-Hawaii, as reasons to skip the typical committee process and hold a floor vote. Continue reading.

Opinion: Mainstream Republicans have tolerated extremism for years. Can they finally control it?

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The central question in American politics right now — one with global implications — is whether the Republican Party can purge itself of its most extreme elements. Obviously this relates to former president Donald Trump, but it goes beyond him as well. The current Republican congressional delegation includes people who insist the 2020 election was stolen, have ties to violent extremist groups, traffic in antisemitism and have propagated QAnon ideologies in the past. At the state level, it often gets worse. Mainstream Republicans have tolerated these voices and views for years. Can the party finally find a way to control them?

The answer to this question could well determine the future of American democracy. In a brilliant scholarly work, “Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy,” Harvard’s Daniel Ziblatt revealed the key to why, in the early 20th century, Britain stayed a democracy and Germany veered into fascism: The conservative party in the United Kingdom was able to discipline its extremists. For years before World War I, British conservatives faced a threat from anti-democratic elements of their party, particularly radicals in Northern Ireland. The Tory Party, strong and hierarchical, was eventually able to tamp down these factions and stabilize British democracy.

In Germany, by contrast, the main conservative party, the DNVP, was weak and disorganized, dependent on outside groups for help. This provided an opening for the nationalist Alfred Hugenberg, an early incarnation of Rupert Murdoch, who used his media empire and business connections to seize control of the party and try to drive it to the right. The infighting sapped the strength of the party, and many of its voters began to flock to far-right alternatives such as the Nazi Party. Hugenberg allied with Hitler, thinking that this would be a way to decidedly take control of the conservative movement. The rest is history. Continue reading.

Illinois man found guilty of bombing Minnesota mosque

Illinois man convicted of five federal counts for planning and helping execute 2017 attack in Bloomington. 

In the end, it took jurors only half a day to reach a verdict in the trial of a man accused of bombing a Minnesota mosque: Guilty on all five charges.

Muslim faith leaders praised the swift and decisive conviction Wednesday of Michael Hari, a 49-year-old from rural Illinois who prosecutors say meticulously planned and helped execute the bombing of Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington on Aug. 5, 2017, motivated by hate for Islam and immigrants.

Hari faces a mandatory minimum of 35 years in federal prison. Judge Donovan Frank did not immediately schedule a sentencing date. Continue reading.

The Man Who Made Stephen Miller

Almost 20 years ago, anti-immigration activist David Horowitz cultivated an angry high-school student. Now his ideas are coming to life in the Trump administration.

In December 2012, with the Republican Party reeling from a brutal election that left Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate, the conservative activist David Horowitz emailed a strategy paper to the office of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.

Horowitz, now 81, was a longtime opponent of immigration and the founder of a think tank and a campus freedom-of-speech advocacy group. He saw in Sessions a kindred spirit—a senator who could reawaken a more nationalist fire in the Republican party. The person he emailed it to was a Sessions aide: Stephen Miller. Horowitz, who recalled the episode in an interview and shared the emails with me, had known Miller since the aide was in high school.

Horowitz encouraged Miller to not only give the paper to Sessions but to circulate it in the Senate. Miller expressed eagerness to share it and asked for instructions. “Leave the Confidential note on it. It gives it an aura that will make people pay more attention to it,” Horowitz wrote. The paper, “Playing to the Head Instead of the Heart: Why Republicans Lost and How They Can Win,” included a section on the political utility of hostile feelings. Horowitz wrote that Democrats know how to “hate their opponents,” how to “incite envy and resentment, distrust and fear, and to direct those volatile emotions.” He urged Republicans to “return their fire.” Continue reading.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson abruptly announces a vacation — right after explaining why his top writer resigned in disgrace

AlterNet logoFox News host Tucker Carlson announced Monday night that he’s going on a vacation — “trout fishing” — for the rest of the week, shortly after addressing the latest inflammatory controversy that has dogged his show.

His top writer, Blake Neff, resigned last week after CNN uncovered that he has been posting online in a forum filled with bigotry. The report found he had engaged with rank racism and sexism on the platform. Many argue that Carlson’s program itself is deeply racist — and it carries overt white supremacist themes — but the language on the forums was even more explicit and unequivocally bigoted.

Carlson addressed the reasons Neff left only obliquely. Continue reading.

A small, mostly white Virginia town put up a ‘Black Lives Matter’ banner. Ginni Thomas denounced it.

Washington Post logoThe banner says “Welcome to Clifton where Black Lives Matter.”

It was posted over the tiny Northern Virginia town’s Main Street, in a space mostly used to advertise community events, after residents proposed staging a protest like the ones that have swept the country since the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police.

The gesture — which Mayor William R. Hollaway called “a first step” to beginning discussions of racial equity — drew mostly positive responses, according to the town clerk. But it prompted outrage from some residents of Fairfax County and nearby towns. Hollaway called the banner “the biggest controversy we’ve seen in many years.” Continue reading.

Hennepin County Board declares racism a public health crisis

The board voted to declare racism a public health crisis in Hennepin County.

Due to racism, Black, Indigenous and people of color in Hennepin County statistically have poorer educational outcomes, earn less, and are less likely to own homes or have access to quality health care and jobs than White people. These disparities have lifelong impacts, including higher disease rates, and, as we’re seeing now, higher rates of COVID-19.

Naming racism as a systemic cause to disparities is key to continue to move this work forward.

Read the full news release.

Fox News Personalities Uniformly Defend Monuments To Treason

In 2015, after a white supremacist gunned down nine Black worshipers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church and calls to dismantle the symbols of racism and slavery grew louder, Fox figures rallied around the Confederate flag. When state leaders, led by then-Gov. Nikki Haley, ordered the flag’s removal from public buildings, Bill O’Reilly used his Fox prime-time perch to say it “represents, to some, bravery in the Civil War because the Confederates fought hard.” Then-Fox personality Kimberly Guilfoyle speculated about whether the American flag would be next.

In 2017, when a white supremacist mowed down a crowd of protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — which was spuriously organized around the city’s plan to remove a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from a local park — the same pattern emerged. Fox figures defended President Donald Trump’s false equivalence between white supremacists and the counterprotesters at the rally. And they asked whether book burning or removing the U.S. Capitol stone by stone would come next.

Today, the Confederate battle flag and other racist monuments are back in the news. Amid continued nationwide protests over police brutality against Black Americans in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, protesters have begun toppling statues of Confederates and colonizers alike. Continue reading.