Tag: Trump white supremacy

In new book, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen describes alleged episodes of racism and says president likes how Putin runs Russia

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President Trump’s longtime lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, alleges in a new book that Trump made “overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election” and that the future commander in chief was also well aware of Cohen’s hush-money payoff to adult-film star Stormy Daniels during that campaign.

In the book, “Disloyal: A Memoir,” which was obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its Tuesday publication date, Cohen lays out an alarming portrait of the constellation of characters orbiting around Trump, likening the arrangement to the mafia and calling himself “one of Trump’s bad guys.” He describes the president, meanwhile, as “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

The memoir also describes episodes of Trump’s alleged racism and his “hatred and contempt” of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s only African American president. Continue reading.

White House directs federal agencies to cancel race-related training sessions it calls ‘un-American propaganda’

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Administration seeks list of contracts for those that refer to ‘white privilege,’ according to memo

President Trump is moving to revamp federal agencies’ racial sensitivity trainings, casting some of them as “divisive” and “un-American,” according to a memo by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

In the two-page memo, OMB Director Russell Vought says Trump has asked him to prevent federal agencies from spending millions in taxpayer dollars on these training sessions. Vought says OMB will instruct federal agencies to come up with a list of all contracts related to training sessions involving “white privilege” or “critical race theory,” and do everything possible within the law to cancel those contracts, the memo states.

The memo, released on Friday, also tells all federal agencies to identify and if possible cancel contracts that involve teaching that America is an “inherently racist or evil country.” Continue reading.

Exact definition of racism’: Bill Barr blasted for inane remarks on police shootings of Black men

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Attorney General Bill Barr is under fire for what many are calling his racist remarks related to police shootings of Black men. Barr appeared on CNN Wednesday evening and made highly controversial and often false comments about race.

Among the most controversial, Barr said there are cases where Black people are treated differently in the justice system, but, “I don’t think that’s necessarily racism.”

Barr also insisted that it’s “very rare for an unarmed African American to be shot by a white police officer.” Continue reading.

Trump Administration Promise to Focus on Extremism Remains Unfulfilled

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A year after the Department of Homeland Security promised to focus more on violent extremism, the plan to carry out that shift remains hidden while the atmosphere worsens.

WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security started an effort a year ago this month to address domestic terrorism, white nationalist threats and other acts of homegrown violence, a major shift for an agency created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to protect the country from foreign terrorism.

Today the plan to carry out that new mission remains stalled in a bureaucratic morass as clashes between protesters and counterprotesters have escalated to precisely the violent acts that the plan was supposed to address.

Instead, a new crop of Department of Homeland Security leaders, led by the confrontational acting secretary, Chad F. Wolf, appear to be doing the opposite of what had been promised. Far from cooperating with local governments and citizens to combat domestic unrest, particularly from the far right, they have joined President Trump in lashing out at American mayors and governors while deploying federal tactical teams to cities — often expressly against the wishes of the local governments with which they had pledged to cooperate. 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.

Longtime GOP consultant: This election ‘is the most dangerous period since the Civil War’

In response to the civil rights movement and Black America’s embrace of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party chose to make racism the centerpiece of their electoral strategy.

From the “Southern strategy” and Richard Nixon’s summoning of “law and order” to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” and appeals to “states’ rights”, Willie Horton, the Tea Party and “birtherism” — and now to Donald Trump’s naked racial authoritarianism — racism and white supremacy have paid electoral dividends for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

But this devil’s bargain rests upon a very slippery foundation: as the country’s racial demographics change from an absolute white majority toward one where white people are “just” a plurality as compared to Black and brown people, the Republican Party’s power as a de facto “whites only” party is imperiled. Continue reading.

‘I knew I would be here today’: Thousands demand racial justice at March on Washington

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Just past dawn Friday, more than a half-century after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the Lincoln Memorial’s marble steps and offered his vision for a fair and righteous America, thousands of protesters descended on the nation’s capital at the end of a summer that has laid bare just how distant the fulfillment of his vision remains.

Among them was Marilyn Boddy, 62, who had never attended a protest. As a decades-long federal employee, Boddy had always been reluctant to join in public demonstrations, but that changed when she heard the Rev. Al Sharpton eulogize George Floyd, who died in May beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

“It was right there, in the emotion of that moment, that I knew I would be here today,” Boddy said, describing the anger and anguish that shot through her while watching the televised service from her New Jersey living room. Continue reading.

A Kenosha Militia Facebook Event Asking Attendees To Bring Weapons Was Reported 455 Times. Moderators Said It Didn’t Violate Any Rules.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the reason the militia page and an associated event remained online after a shooting that killed two people was due to “an operational mistake.”

In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.” The page and an associated event inspired widespread criticism of the company after a 17-year-old suspect allegedly shot and killed two protesters Tuesday night.

The event associated with the Kenosha Guard page, however, was flagged to Facebook at least 455 times after its creation, according to an internal report viewed by BuzzFeed News, and had been cleared by four moderators, all of whom deemed it “non-violating.” The page and event were eventually removed from the platform on Wednesday — several hours after the shooting.

“To put that number into perspective, it made up 66% of all event reports that day,” one Facebook worker wrote in the internal “Violence and Incitement Working Group” to illustrate the number of complaints the company had received about the event. Continue reading.