Women in Suburbia Don’t Seem Too Worried About Its Destruction

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President Trump has sought to fan fears about lower property values and crime, but polls suggest his general statements are not resonating locally.

President Trump’s effort to court suburban women by promising to protect their neighborhoods is encountering one sizable hitch: Most suburban women say their neighborhoods aren’t particularly under threat.

At least, not in the ways the president has described.

Their communities feel safe to them, and they’re not too concerned about poorer neighbors moving in, according to polls in some key battleground states by The New York Times and Siena College. They say in a national Monmouth University poll that racial integration is important to them, and unlikely to harm property values or safety. In interviews, many have never heard of the federal fair-housing rule encouraging integration that the president has often cited by name in arguing that Joe Biden would abolish the suburbs.

They’re not even all that worked up about the idea of new apartments nearby, sullying suburbs dominated by single-family homes. Continue reading.

Trump’s ‘good genes’ comment at Bemidji rally draws condemnation

Bemidji remarks about “good genes” compared to “race science.” 

President Donald Trump’s praise of a nearly all white crowd’s “good genes” came during a Friday night rally in Bemidji where he also sharpened attacks on refugees.

He opened his speech by calling the group “hardworking American patriots” and raising alarms that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would flood the state with Somali refugees. Trump said near the end of his wide-ranging, nearly two-hour speech that the state was pioneered by men and women who were tough and strong and braved the wilderness and winters to build a better life.

“You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump said. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” Continue reading.

Trump alleges ‘left-wing indoctrination’ in schools, says he will create national commission to push more ‘pro-American’ history

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President Trump pressed his case Thursday that U.S. schools are indoctrinating children with a left-wing agenda hostile to the nation’s Founding Fathers, describing efforts to educate students about racism and slavery as an insult to the country’s lofty founding principles.

Trump, speaking before original copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence at the National Archives, characterized demonstrations against racial injustice as “left-wing rioting and mayhem” that “are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long.”

The federal government has no power over the curriculum taught in local schools. Nonetheless, Trump said he would create a national commission to promote a “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history,” which he said would encourage educators to teach students about the “miracle of American history.” Continue reading.

Whistleblower Reveals How Trump Unleashed Plague Of White Nationalist Terror

While much of the media this week has been focused (appropriately) on the revelations in Bob Woodward’s interviews with Donald Trump that deliberately downplayed the virulence and lethality of the COVID-19 pandemic, the second damning disclosure this week—a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower’s complaint that intelligence assessments had been altered or shelved in order to protect Trump politically—is horrifying for much of the same reason: It revealed that Trump will manipulate information to the public allowing a plague to be unleashed on the public for his own political gain.

The report, from demoted intelligence-division chief Brian Murphy, claims that DHS chief Chad Wolf and others in the department attempted to manipulate official DHS intelligence by downplaying concerns about Russian interference in the 2020 election—but even more disturbingly, by ordering threat assessments to dilute concerns about white nationalism while playing up the right’s concocted bogeyman, ‘antifa.’

The spread of toxic white nationalism and its always-attendant violence has become, as Renée Graham at the Boston Globeobserves, another kind of pandemic that Trump has downplayed and allowed to spread. Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation. Continue reading.

Trump Is Trying To Panic White Voters — About Black People

On Wednesday, Donald Trump confessed that he had lied to the American public—over, and over, and over, and … you get the idea—about the danger posed by COVID-19. By doing so, and by purposely refusing to provide coordinated testing, or a national strategy, Trump deliberately condemned 200,000 Americans to die and 6 million others to suffer through the disease. 

But, says Trump, there was a reason: He had to keep the country “calm.” He had to “avoid panic.” Except, in the case of COVID-19, telling people the truth would have allowed them to understand that this was far worse than the flu, that it wasn’t going to go away, that it would be months before the situation improved, and that reopening schools and businesses was not safe. Telling people the truth would have kept tens of thousands more Americans alive.

With that in mind, what does the Great Calmer have to say on the morning after he’s confessed to the greatest lie in American history? Well, he’s put out a warning that the suburbs will be “overrun with anarchists, agitators, looters, protesters” and the dreaded “low income projects” (i.e. Black people). Another tweet filled with lies about how voting by mail will lead to massive fraud. Multiple tweets about the attempted “coup” by the Deep State conspiracy. And, of course, a tweet demanding that Democrats open schools—in spite of just confessing that he knows COVID-19 is deadly and affects young people. Continue reading.

The Trump campaign goes all in on conflating ‘protesters’ and ‘criminals’

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In a summer where movie trailers are otherwise in limited supply thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump’s reelection campaign is filling the void.

A pair of videos shared by the campaign and the president on Thursday offer a preview of coming attractions: rampant violence and danger under a prospective Joe Biden presidency. And each leans heavily on an increasingly common conflation, blending the former vice president’s stated support for peaceful protests with scenes of turmoil, violence and vandalism.

Even simply considered on their own merits, each of the ads is a bit odd. Continue reading.

Trump retweets video tying BLM, antifa to an assault. Neither group was involved.

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Amid deadly clashes between protesters and counterprotesters, President Trump continued to fan partisan tensions this weekend, calling for federal forces to quell protests and denouncing local Democratic leaders. He also shared misinformation on Twitter, falsely tying Black Lives Matter and antifa to a 2019 crime on the New York City subway, implying that Black people are the same as antifa. Let’s take a look.

The Facts

On Sunday, Trump retweeted this video of a Black man assaulting a White woman on the New York City subway with share text that blamed Black Lives Matter and antifa. However, the video was from October 2019 and had nothing to do with either group. New York police saidthe man in the video was charged in connection to the incident. According to local news reports, he had a long history of arrests related to New York City public transportation.

Trump retweeted the group TDN_NOTICIAS, a Spanish-language account that appears to have an anti-Biden, pro-Trump slant. The video was originally posted by the account “I’m with Groyper.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, “groypers” are associated with the alt-right and supporters of white supremacists. CNN contacted the user and said he “identified himself as an advocate of White people creating their own ‘nations’ for supposed ‘protection’ from racial minorities.” Continue reading.

Trump’s illuminating defense of Kyle Rittenhouse

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At the start of and throughout his news conference Monday evening, President Trump attacked Joe Biden for condemning violence but not specifically left-wing perpetrators of it.

By the end of the news conference, Trump not only pointedly declined to condemn right-wing violence at the same demonstrations, he voluntarily defended it.

The president offered his first public comments about Kyle Rittenhouse, a supporter who was charged with murder in Kenosha, Wis., as well as other Trump supporters who converged on Portland, Ore., and apparently fired paintball guns and pepper spray at protesters. Continue reading.

Trump, Vicar of Fear and Violence

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He continues the old practice of stoking white victimhood for votes.

The use of white fear and white victimhood as potent political weapons is as old as the country itself. Donald Trump is just the latest practitioner of this trade.

As Robert G. Parkinson wrote in “The Common Cause,” his book about patriot leaders during the American Revolution, politicians used fears of insurrectionist enslaved people, Indian “massacres” and foreign mercenaries to unite the disparate colonies in a common fight.

Does this sound similar to Trump’s rhetoric on Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, Black Lives Matter and supposed anarchists? Continue reading.

Trump Called Into a U.K. Radio Show and Talked About Brexit, the Election and Meghan Markle. It Caused Chaos

It’s common in the U.S. for President Donald Trump to call into friendly radio or TV shows like Fox & Friends. But such a thing is unheard of in the U.K. Which could explain the commotion Trump caused when he phoned his pal Nigel Farage’s radio program Thursday and weighed in on Brexit, the upcoming U.K. election and Meghan Markle’s public battle with the British press.

Trump’s interview was criticized by many U.K. politicians, including opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who accused the U.S. President of interfering in Britain’s Dec. 12 election.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to scurry to make a statement to defend his Brexit deal Friday morning after Trump criticized it and said it would make it impossible for the U.K. to strike a trade deal with the U.S. after leaving the European Union.

View the complete November 1 article by Rachael Bunyan on the Time website here.