Tag: Trump white nationalism

Trump getting tougher for Senate GOP to ignore

The Hill logo

Senate Republican leaders have tried to put former President Trump in the rearview mirror, rarely mentioning his name and keeping focused instead on the Democratic agenda, but Trump’s iron grip on the party’s grassroots is making it tougher and tougher to keep ignoring him.

Mainstream Republicans are getting increasingly caught up in the party’s internal battle over Trump’s legacy, with even stalwart conservatives such as Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) getting called out as insufficiently loyal to Trump or “Republicans in name only.”

Trump again showed his lock on the party’s activist base over the weekend by winning the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) straw poll with 70 percent of the vote, crushing the second-place winner, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who came in a distant second with 21 percent. Continue reading.

Adviser to pro-Trump GOP group sent out a newsletter ‘so racist’ it could ‘make a Ku Klux Klansman blush’: report

AlterNet Logo

Pro-Trump Republicans often engage in subliminal racism or “dog whistle” attacks — that is, code words that they will insist aren’t racist. But when Florida resident Rip McIntosh, an adviser to far-right Trumpista Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, sent out a fundraising newsletter on April 29, there was nothing subtle or subliminal about the racism in the newsletter. 

In the newsletter, Talking Points Memo’s Nick R. Martin reports, someone going by the pen name E.P. Unum wrote that Blacks have “become socially incompatible with other races” and that “American Black culture has evolved into an unfixable and crime-ridden mess.” Martin described Unum’s rant as being “so racist it might make a ku klux klansman blush.”

According to Martin, the newsletter that McIntosh e-mailed, “also said White people aren’t racist but ‘just exhausted’ with Black people. It portrayed post-Civil War America as a 150-year-long ‘experiment’ to see whether Black people could be ‘taken from the jungles of Africa,’ enslaved, and then integrated into a majority-White society. It said that experiment had failed.” Continue reading.

An American Kingdom

Washington Post logo

A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under God’s authority, and is central to Donald Trump’s GOP

FORT WORTH — The pastor was already pacing when he gave the first signal. Then he gave another, and another, until a giant video screen behind him was lit up with an enormous colored map of Fort Worth divided into four quadrants.

Greed, the map read over the west side. Competition, it said over the east side. Rebellion, it said over the north part of the city. Lust, it said over the south.

It was an hour and a half into the 11 a.m. service of a church that represents a rapidly growing kind of Christianity in the United States, one whose goal includes bringing under the authority of a biblical God every facet of life, from schools to city halls to Washington, where the pastor had traveled a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection and filmed himself in front of the U.S. Capitol saying quietly, “Father, we declare America is yours.” Continue reading.

The Trump administration used an early, unreported program to separate migrant families along a remote stretch of the border

Washington Post logo

MEXICO CITY — The Trump administration began separating migrant families along a remote stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border months earlier than has been previously reported — part of a little known program coming into view only now as the Biden administration examines government data.

In May 2017, Border Patrol agents in Yuma, Ariz., began implementing a program known as the Criminal Consequence Initiative, which allowed for the prosecution of first-time border crossers, including parents who entered the United States with their children and were separated from them.

From July 1 to Dec. 31, 2017, 234 families were separated in Yuma, according to newly released data from the Department of Homeland Security, almost exactly the same number as were separated in a now well known pilot program in El Paso that year. Because the Yuma program began in May, and the existing data on family separations begins only in July, the number of separations there was likely higher than 234, a prospect the Biden administration is now investigating.

Report: 2 Seattle police officers broke law during DC riots

Associated Press Logo

SEATTLE — Two Seattle police officers who were in Washington, D.C., during the Jan. 6 insurrection were illegally trespassing on Capitol grounds while rioters stormed the building, but they lied about their actions, a police watchdog said in a report released Thursday.

“They were both standing in the immediate vicinity of the Capitol Building in direct view of rioters lining the steps and climbing the walls,” the Office of Police Accountability said in its report, citing video evidence. “OPA finds it unbelievable that they could think that this behavior was not illegal, contrary to their claims at their OPA interviews.”

After the release of the OPA report, Chief Adrian Diaz said he will hold accountable any Seattle Police Department officer involved in the insurrection, including disciplinary action up to and including termination. He said he would make a decision within 30 days. Continue reading.

Virginia ‘Bible study’ group was cover for violent militia plans, prosecutors say

Washington Post logo

After storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, a Northern Virginia man began forming his own militia-like group in the D.C. suburbs and building up a supply of explosives under the guise of a Bible study group, according to federal prosecutors.

Fi Duong, 27, appeared in court Friday and was released to home confinement pending trial, over the objections of prosecutors who sought stricter terms. According to the court record, at the time of his arrest he had several guns, including an AK-47, and the material to make 50 molotov cocktails. Details of the case — one of the first if not the first in which the government publicly disclosed it had someone undercover to continue monitoring a Jan. 6 defendant — were made public Tuesday.

An attorney for Duong declined to comment. Continue reading.

Conservative explains why the Trumpified GOP now resembles the China’s ‘authoritarian’ Communist Party

AlterNet Logo

When then-President Donald Trump called for mandatory “patriotic education” for all U.S. students in September 2020, Susan Rice (former national security adviser under the Obama Administration) slammed his authoritarian idea as profoundly unamerican and told CNN’s Erin Burnett, “I thought I was listening to Mao Tse Tung running Communist China.” Rice, however, isn’t the only one who sees parallels between Trumpism and the regime in Beijing. Never Trump conservative Max Boot, in a scathing Washington Post column published on July 5, argues that the Republican push to abolish the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools and replace it with “patriotic education” is exactly the type of thing the Chinese Communist Party would do.

“Woe to any person in China who challenges the official version of the past; that is a crime for which you can be sent to prison,” Boot explains. “The United States is different. We are a free country where nothing is off-limits. We can talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. Can’t we? Yes, we can — but Republicans are doing their level best to change that. How ironic that the GOP, which claims to be the ‘tough on China’ party, wants to make America more like China. As the party of white America, Republicans seek their own political legitimacy from history by trying to minimize the impact of racism.”

Critical race theory — which argues that in the United States, the racism of the past continues to have an impact on the institutions of today — has become a source of hysteria in the Republican Party and right-wing media. Far-right pundits at Fox News claim CRT is an attack on white Americans in general, which, of course, it isn’t. Continue reading.

In Oklahoma, the 1995 bombing offers lessons — and warnings — for today’s fight against extremism

Washington Post logo

OKLAHOMA CITY — Most years, the flashbacks start in April, images of blood and brick that return Fran Ferrari to the morning when she was nearly killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

 This year, however, Ferrari’s memories arrived early when she heard glass shatter during news coverage of the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. The noise instantly took her back to the rubble of her downtown office in 1995. The rioters yelling on TV sounded to Ferrari like an alarm bell, a warning that the deadly extremism that upended her life had resurged.

 “All those faces. All I think is that it’s a bunch of Timothy McVeighs and his buddies,” said Ferrari, 66. “Maybe people’s definition of domestic terrorism is after it happens, but I define it when you see the seeds.” Continue reading.

St. Louis couple who pointed guns at protesters plead guilty, will give up firearms

Washington Post logo

A St. Louis couple who gained notoriety for waving guns at racial justice protesters last summer pleaded guilty Thursday to misdemeanor charges and agreed to give up the guns they used during the confrontation.

Video and photographs of rifle-wielding Mark McCloskey and pistol-toting Patricia McCloskey in front of their mansion on June 28 captured the attention of the country, including then-President Donald Trump, who spoke out in defense of the couple. Trump and other Republicans considered the McCloskeys law-abiding homeowners defending their property. Others saw the couple as overly aggressive toward protesters who were marching through the gated community to the home of then-Mayor Lyda Krewson amid nationwide protests after a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The couple, both personal injury attorneys, faced felony firearm charges after the menacing display in front of their marble-faced palazzo home but ultimately pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Continue reading.

Trump supporter pleads guilty after firing his gun into car full of Black girls

Raw Story Logo

A supporter of former President Donald Trump has pleaded guilty to intimidation with a dangerous weapon and willful injury after he fired multiple shots into a car filled with Black girls last year.

Local news station KCCI reports that 26-year-old Michael McKinney is now admitting to “causing the occupants to fear serious injury from my action” and also seriously injuring a 15-year-old girl whom he shot in the leg.

McKinney shot into the car while attending a pro-Trump rally at the Iowa Capitol building in December, exactly one month before the deadly January 6th pro-Trump riot that took place at the United States Capitol building. Continue reading.