Tag: Trump racism

Trump-led GOP grows increasingly tolerant of racially divisive politics

Rep. Mia Love (R-UT), in a concession speech after losing her reelection, gave a scathing rebuke to the GOP, saying “Republicans never take minority communities into their home and citizens into their homes and into their hearts.” Credit: Evan Cobb/Daily Herald, AP

JACKSON, Miss. — Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won a racially polarizing election here Tuesday night after never fully apologizing for comments in which she suggested she would be willing to sit in the front row at a public hanging.

Then on Wednesday, Senate Republicans moved to confirm a judicial nominee who, as an attorney, defended a North Carolina voter identification law deemed unconstitutional by a federal appeals court because it sought to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The back-to-back developments this week offer a stark illustration of the state of the Republican Party and racial politics.

View the complete November 28 article by Matt Viser and Michael Scherer on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s racist border stunt means troops won’t be home for Christmas

Credit: Andrew Harnik, AP Photo

Trump is expected to extend the deployment of troops to the southern border until January.

In the midst of World War II, Bing Crosby recorded the song “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” about soldiers in Europe longing to be with their family for the holiday. At that time, Americans were fighting Nazis.

Fast-forward to 2018, and Trump (who coddles Nazis) is forcing troops to be separated from their families during the holidays — but not for any noble cause.

According to NPR, Trump is expected to prolong the deployment of thousands of troops along the southern border into January.

View the complete November 28 article by Dan Desai Martin on the ShareBlue.com website.

FBI: Hate crimes have skyrocketed under Trump

Violent right-wing extremists are more emboldened than ever by hateful rhetoric from Trump and Republicans.

Hate crimes are sharply on the rise in the Trump era, according to new data from the FBI. That makes it all the more worrisome that Trump and the Republican Party embraced an openly anti-Semitic message in a desperate last-minute bid to win midterm elections.

Trump’s hateful influence on America started with his high-profile, virulently racist 2015 campaign for president. Between 2015 and 2016, the FBI found a 6 percent increase in hate crimes reported to law enforcement agencies around the country.

But it’s gotten a lot worse since Trump took office. According to the FBI’s latest data, the number of hate crimes reported increased by another 17 percent from 2016 to 2017, rising from 6,093 to 8,437.

View the complete November 13 article by Oliver Willis on the ShareBlue.com website here.

Trump refuses to acknowledge the fraught history of nationalism

Pres. Trump speaks with French Pres. Emmanuel Macron on Nov. 10, prior to their meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris. Credit: Saul Loeb, AFP, Getty Images

The Debrief: An occasional series offering a reporter’s insights

President Trump took a peevish tone Tuesday as he revisited complaints about French President Emmanuel Macron, who used a weekend commemoration of the end of World War I to warn the president during his visit to Paris of the perils of the nationalist label he embraces and to suggest he has a lot to learn about history.

Macron called nationalism a dangerous trap and the opposite of patriotism while invoking the bloodiest episodes of 20th-century European history.

But Trump has shown little patience for the lesson Macron tried to impart or the two days of praise the young French leader has received since his not-so-veiled criticism of his U.S. counterpart.

View the complete November 13 article by Anne Gearan on The Washington Post website here.

Hate crimes rose 17 percent last year, according to new FBI data

A man places a sign of support outside the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minn., which was attacked in 2017. Credit: Aaron Lavinsky, AP

Reported hate crimes in America rose 17 percent last year, the third consecutive year that such crimes increased, according to newly released

FBI data that showed an even larger increase in anti-Semitic attacks.

Law enforcement agencies reported that 7,175 hate crimes occurred in 2017, up from 6,121 in 2016. That increase was fueled in part by more police departments reporting hate crime data to the FBI, but overall there is still a large number of departments that report no hate crimes to the federal database.

The sharp increase in hate crimes in 2017 came even as overall violent crime in America fell slightly, by 0.2 percent, after increases in 2015 and 2016.

View the complete November 13 article by Devlin Barrett on The Washington Post website here.

Two Years and Hundreds of Inflammatory Ads Later, the G.O.P. Is the Party of Trump

Supporters of President Trump at a rally in Macon, GA. Credi: tGabriella Demczuk, The New York Times

The Republican Party’s post-mortem after Mitt Romney lost his presidential bid to Barack Obama in 2012 was brutally straightforward: Expand the tent or risk extinction. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too,” party leaders wrote.

Regardless of the results on Tuesday, that playbook is gone, burned and buried, and it is not going to be easy to retrieve it from the dump. The Republican Party is now the party of President Trump.

The dark politics of anger, division and fear were on display in campaigns across the country this year, as Republican candidates for Congress and governor — and fringe groups who support them — embraced the racially inflammatory brand of politics that Mr. Trump unleashed in 2016. With the presidential campaign of 2020 effectively underway on Wednesday, there is little reason to think Mr. Trump will back away from a tactic that clearly rallies his base.

View the complete November 6 article by SHeryl Gay Stolberg on The New York Times website here.

Men convicted of hate crime blame Trump’s violent rhetoric

Violent criminals are saying Trump’s anti-Muslim rage should let them get away with shorter prison sentences.

Lawyers for three members of a Kansas militia group who were convicted of an anti-Muslim hate crime argued in court this week that the men should be granted leniency in their sentencing because their violence was incited by Trump and his incendiary campaign rhetoric.

Patrick Stein, Curtis Allen, and Gavin Wright were each convicted for taking part in a conspiracy to kill Muslim refugees before the 2016 election.

The three men reportedly planned to bomb an apartment building in Kansas that housed a mosque and a large population of Muslim Somali refugees, but they were arrested before they could carry out the attack.

View the complete November 1 article by Caroline Orr on the ShareBlue.org website here.

Trump’s new immigration ad was panned as racist. Turns out it was also based on a falsehood.

Luis Bracamontes smiles at the audience in Sacramento Superior Court on Feb. 9 as the verdict was read in the killing of two law enforcement officers. Credit: Rich Pedroncelli, AP

The expletive-filled advertisement President Trump released this week, seemingly to raise fears about immigration in advance of the midterm elections, was widely denounced, with Democrats and even some Republicans criticizing it as racist.

But beyond the outrage, the ad was also reportedly based on a falsehood.

The 53-second video, shared by the president on Twitter, focuses on the courtroom behavior of Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant who was convicted of killing two sheriff’s deputies in California in 2014 — and repeatedly bragged about the slayings during his trial.

View the complete November 2 article by Eli Rosenberg on The Washington Post website here.

Vets rip Trump for using US troops in ‘craven political stunt’ at border

‘I have no words for my anger over this,’ one veteran writes.

Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP Photo

Veterans are calling out Trump’s unprecedented decision to send armed troops to the Mexico border just days before the midterm elections, denouncing the move as a political stunt.

“Donald Trump thinks unarmed people who are fleeing horrors and are still 1,000 miles away are a national security threat a week before election day?” says Will Fischer, a former Marine now with the advocacy group VoteVets.

“I don’t think so. It’s a political ploy to blow upon the embers of racism and nativism, and he is using the military again as a political prop to advance his own agenda.”

View the complete October 31 article by Eric Boehlert on the ShareBlue.com website here.

What history reveals about surges in anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiments

The shooting at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh is believed to be the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. Eleven people were killed when the gunman burst in on the congregation’s morning worship service carrying an assault rifle and three handguns.

The suspect, Robert Bowers, is reported to be a frequent user of Gab, a social networking site that has becoming increasingly popular among white nationalists and other alt-right groups. He is alleged to have regularly reposted anti-Semitic slurs, expressed virulent anti-immigrant sentiments, called immigrants “invaders,” and claimed that Jews are “the enemy of white people.”

The magnitude of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre may be unprecedented, but it is only the latest in the series of hate crimes against Jews. In February 2017, more than 100 gravestones were vandalized at a cemetery outside of St. Louis, Missouri, and at another Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia. Indeed, hate crimes have been on an increase against minority religions, people of color and immigrants. In the 10 days following the 2016 presidential election, nearly 900 hate-motivated incidents were reported, many on college campuses. Many of these incidents targeted Muslims, people of color and immigrants, along with Jews.

View the complete October 28 article by Ingrid Anderson, Associate Director of Jewish Studies, Lecturer, Arts & Sciences Writing Program, Boston University, on TheConversation.com website here.