Tag: racism

History professor explains how ‘racial resentment and brooding white anger’ have defined the GOP for decades

AlterNet logoMore than half a century has passed since President Richard Nixon launched his infamous “southern strategy,” which found the Republican Party pursuing the votes of white racists who had angrily left the Democratic Party because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And after all these years, history professor Leonard Steinhorn asserts in an October 30 op-ed for the Washington Post, the GOP is still grappling with its racism problem.

The GOP certainly didn’t start out as the party of racism. The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, who became an ally of the abolitionist movement. And when Republican Teddy Roosevelt was president in the 1900s, African-American neighborhoods in northern cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston leaned GOP. However, the Democratic Party made a lot of inroads with black voters under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal in the 1930s.

In the 1960s, Steinhorn explains, Nixon saw a golden opportunity for his party: appealing to a sense of white grievance. The professor recalls, “Nixon inflamed the ‘silent majority’ and ‘forgotten Americans’ with coded language about race and ‘law and order’ that played to their sense of grievance and victimization.”

View the complete October 30 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

‘A new low’: Washington Post media critic blows up Tucker Carlson’s absurd lies about white nationalism

AlterNet logoOn Saturday, August 3, El Paso became the scene of a terrorist attack that left 22 people dead — and the suspect, according to police, had written a manifesto indicating that he planned to target Latinos specifically because they were “invading” Texas. The attack has focused attention on the terrorist threat posed by white supremacists and white nationalists, but on Tuesday, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson insisted that white supremacy is a “hoax” — and with that comment, Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan asserts, Carlson has “hit a new low.”

To hear Carlson tell it, white supremacy isn’t a real problem in the United States. Carlson, on Tuesday, declared, “This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

In response, Sullivan writes in her August 7 column that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was no laughing matter — explaining that “the Russian attacks on America’s voting integrity, in order to help Donald Trump become president, are anything but a hoax, as the Mueller Report made abundantly clear.”

View the complete August 7 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Former neo-Nazi warns mass shootings are part of an uprising: ‘This is going to get worse’

AlterNet logoFormer neo-Nazi Christian Picciolini, who created The Free Radicals Project, explained on CNN Sunday that these mass shootings from white supremacists are just the beginning.

He explained that the white supremacist manifesto the El Paso shooter left is something that he’s heard before.

“I think that manifestos have been very similar since 2009 when James von Brunn walked into the D.C. Holocaust Museum and left a manifesto,” Picciolini recalled. “They all reference the same conspiracy theories. Lately, they’ve been referencing something called ‘The Great Replacement‘ which this theory that whites being outbred in America and will be replaced. Now, it’s all based on conspiracy theories, but what’s similar about these things is now that they’re trying to outdo each other, I think the death toll is going to get bigger and bigger.”

View the complete August 5 article by Sarah K. Burris from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

‘Outrageous’: Lindsey Graham breaks rules of his own Senate committee to advance sweeping anti-asylum bill

AlterNet logoSenate Democrats and progressive advocacy groups accused Sen. Lindsey Graham of breaking Judiciary Committee rules Thursday after the South Carolina Republican forced a vote to advance his “dangerous and immoral” anti-asylum legislation.

The bill, titled the Secure and Protect Act of 2019 (S.1494), is condemned by human rights organizations as a sweeping attack on asylum seekers and an effort to expand President Donald Trump’s xenophobic deportation force.

Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, waived the panel’s rules to force a vote on S.1494 before Democrats were permitted to speak on the legislation.

View the complete August 1 article by Jake Johnson from Common Dreams on the AlterNet website here.

FBI’s Wray says most domestic terrorism arrests this year involve white supremacy

The Hill logoFBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday that the agency has made about 100 domestic terrorism-related arrests since October, and the majority were tied to white supremacy.

”I will say that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence, but it does include other things as well,” Wray said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, referring to cases in fiscal 2019, which began Oct. 1.

The FBI is “aggressively” investigating domestic terrorism and hate crimes, Wray said, noting that the bureau is focused on investigating the violence, not the ideology motivating the attacks.

View the complete July 23 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

United Nations Blasts Migrant Detention Centers For ‘Damage’ To Children

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet slammed the current state of facilities used by the Trump administration to detain migrants families.

“As a pediatrician, but also as a mother and a former head of State, I am deeply shocked that children are forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded facilities, without access to adequate healthcare or food, and with poor sanitation conditions,” Bachelet, a former president of Chile, said in a statement released on Monday.

“Detaining a child even for short periods under good conditions can have a serious impact on their health and development — consider the damage being done every

View the complete July 8 article by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.

“He’s not hurting the people he needs to be”: a Trump voter says the quiet part out loud

A Trump voter hurt by the shutdown reveals the real reason the president attracts hardcore supporters.

On Monday, the New York Times’s Patricia Mazzei published a dispatch from Marianna, Florida — a small, politically conservative town that depends on jobs from a federal prison and thus has been deeply hurt by the government shutdown. In the piece, Marianna residents grapple with the fact that President Donald Trump, who most residents support, is playing a role in the pain created by lost wages.

Most Marianna residents support Trump’s border wall, his key demand in the shutdown fight, and don’t blame him for the fight. But Crystal Minton, a secretary at the prison who is also a single mother caring for disabled parents, had a somewhat different reaction — one that reveals an essential truth about the core Trump’s political appeal.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton told Mazzei. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

View the complete Jan. 8, 2019 article by Zack Beauchamp on the Vox website here.

Fox News refusing to say if Judge Jeanine Pirro’s show was cancelled after Islamophobic rant against Dem congresswoman

Fox News will not be airing a new episode of “Justice” with former Judge Jeanine Pirro on Saturday, Variety reports.

The newspaper noted the move comes, “just days after the 21st Century Fox-owned cable-news network said it condemned remarks the outspoken host made about Minnesota Democrat Ihan Omar.”

“We’re not commenting on internal scheduling matters,” a Fox spokesperson said.

View the complete March 17 article by Bob Brigham of Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Interview: Historian Rick Perlstein On The Conservative Roots Of Trumpism

This interview with historian and author Rick Perlstein originally appeared in the Berlin daily Neues Deutschland and is posted on the National Memo website.

After Trump won the election you published an essay titled “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” How did Trump’s election change your view of American conservatism?

The conservatives’ own story about their evolution has been that there were two streams of conservative political activity in the US: one that was extremist and conspiratorial, often viciously racist and even violent. And then there was a mainstream movement that policed those boundaries, associated with the figure of William F. Buckley and the magazine National Review. That mainstream conservatism, as the story goes, had largely prevailed, and the extremist elements were pretty much vestigial. What Trump demonstrates is that those much more feral streams in the movement never really went away. Knowing about Trump, it was a lot easier to see in retrospect how often that extremist underbrush was part of the story.

Is Trump even a conservative in the traditional sense?The National Review published an issue during the 2016 primaries titled “Against Trump,” in which various conservative intellectuals stated that a true conservative could not support Trump, because he violated conservative principles.

Yes, but if you look at the National Review website in the years before that, pretty much everything nasty and politically grotesque that we associate with Trump could be seen in National Review, too.

View the completeFebruary 2 post here.

The writer with ties to white nationalists who resigned from DHS donated to the RNC, Donald Trump, Kris Kobach, and Dave Brat

The following article by Eric Hananoki was posted on the Media Matters website August 31, 2018:

Update: Ian Smith also donated to Corey Stewart’s 2017 gubernatorial campaign

Ian Smith, a writer who recently resigned from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over his ties to white nationalists, donated thousands of dollars combined to the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Republican campaigns of President Donald Trump, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and Rep. Dave Brat from Virginia..

The Atlantic’s Rosie Gray reported on August 28 that Smith, who had recently worked at DHS as a policy analyst on immigration issues, “had in the past been in contact with a group that included known white nationalists as they planned various events.” She added that the messages “provide a glimpse into how a group that included hard-core white nationalists was able to operate relatively incognito in the wider world, particularly in conservative circles.”

The Washington Post’s Nick Miroff reported on August 30 that “Smith, a Department of Homeland Security analyst who resigned this week after he was confronted about his ties to white nationalist groups, attended multiple immigration policy meetings at the White House, according to government officials familiar with his work.”

View the complete article here.