Credit: Ricardo Aca.
There’s a very good story: ‘Everything that my family has we have earned’: An undocumented immigrant who works in a Trump hotel stands up to The Donald.
Everything My Family Has…
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Credit: Ricardo Aca.
There’s a very good story: ‘Everything that my family has we have earned’: An undocumented immigrant who works in a Trump hotel stands up to The Donald.
The GOP leaders, however, are standing by the image, which they hand-delivered to Kirkpatrick’s campaign office and posted online. Matthew Specht with the Arizona Republican Party told the Arizona Daily Star that “no one” connected the poster’s bullet imagery with violence “until the Kirkpatrick campaign tried to use it as a way to distract the media from Ann Kirkpatrick’s absence from the campaign trail.”
Mmmhmm. Those bullet holes are just purely decorative, I’m sure.
Full story at Think Progress.
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto (Screen cap).
“A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
So said Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during this year’s DNC, and it turns out she was being prophetic.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump changed his speech on immigration at the last minute to include references to Mexico paying for his proposed border wall.
The reason that Trump decided to make this change? Because he was apparently furious that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto just posted a tweet insisting that his country would never, under any circumstances, pay for the wall.
Full story here.
Rebecca Nelson at GQ has a very good article up about the current ‘crazy for Trump’ going on, and Rick Alan Ross, a cult expert and republican was watching this all with distaste, until a bell rang, and rather loudly. What he’s watching is the rise of a cult leader. The article goes through a number of points:
Sign I: His campaign is fueled by charisma.
Sign II: He’s a raging narcissist.
Sign III: What he says is always right. Even when it’s not.
Drinking the Orange Kool-Aid.
What has long bothered (and scared) me is that no one who follows Trump is remotely interested in seeing him subject to the same things the other candidates are, it’s always “different” in Trump’s case. That did not, and does not read like enthusiastic political support. This is more “alright, we can finally set up a dictatorship and start killing all the ___! Yes!”
The final note from the GQ article:
Trump doesn’t consider all women his spiritual wives, like the Branch Davidians’ David Koresh. And we can reasonably assume that he does not have plans to kill his supporters by giving them cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, as the Rev. Jim Jones did at his Guyana compound in 1978. Still, his ascendency could very well start a nuclear war. “We’re not talking about a compound with a thousand people,” Ross says. “We’re talking about a nation with over 300 million people. So the consequences of Trumpism could affect us in a way Jim Jones never did.”
Especially if you don’t drink the Trump Kool-Aid™.
Full story here.
White supremacists (Twitter).
White nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers located mostly in the United States use Twitter with “relative impunity” and often have far more followers than militant Islamists, a study being released on Thursday found.
Eighteen prominent white nationalist accounts examined in the study, including the American Nazi Party, have seen a sharp increase in Twitter followers to a total of more than 25,000, up from about 3,500 in 2012, according to the study by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism that was seen by Reuters.
[…]
Berger said in an interview that Twitter and other companies such as Facebook Inc faced added difficulties in enforcing standards against white nationalist groups because they are less cohesive than Islamic State networks and present greater free speech complications.
Oh really. Hmmm. Interesting how there aren’t any greater free speech complications when it comes to stomping on Islamic extremism, but boy oh boy, does it ever get complicated when it’s white extremists. Sure.
The data collected, which included analysis of tweets of selected accounts and their followers, represents a fraction of the white nationalist presence on Twitter and was insufficient to estimate the overall online size of the groups, the report said.
Accounts examined in the study possessed a strong affinity for U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, a prolific Twitter user who has been accused of retweeting accounts associated with white nationalism dozens of times.
Three of the top 10 hashtags used most frequently by the data set of users studied were related to Trump, according to the report, entitled “Nazis vs. ISIS on Twitter.” Only #whitegenocide was more popular than Trump-related hashtags, the report said.
Yeah, there’s shocking news. I’ll try to work up a shocked expression or something.
Full story here.
The Lakota people refer to warriors as “akicita” and still use this term while referring to veterans. The akicita lead the way toward the prayer site in the rain. (Photo: Thosh Collins)
Trump’s toxic mess of a speech in Arizona. You can read the transcript of the speech. I just have one comment on one small section, for now:
These are valid concerns expressed by decent and patriotic citizens from all backgrounds, all over. We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate. Sometimes it’s just not going to work out. It’s our right, as a sovereign nation to chose [sic] immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us.
Now I know Trump has no love for Indians, he makes that clear at every opportunity. Here’s the thing, though, us Indians were declared sovereign nations some time ago, so how about if we choose the immigrants to this county that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us? Seems about right to me.
Student activist protests hateful environment in schools (Screen capture).
An ad from progressive group Move On shows how around the country, nonwhite and Muslim students are getting bullied by racist whites who’ve been emboldened by the unvarnished racism of the Donald Trump campaign.
Titled “Our Kids,” the video shows excerpts from news stories in which black, Muslim and Latino schoolchildren across the U.S. have been threatened and harassed by their white peers.
In Oregon, vandals hung a banner aimed at Latino students that said “Build a wall” — a reference to Trump’s promise to build a wall along the Mexican border to keep Latino immigrants out of the country.
At a high school basketball game in Chicago, white students chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at black and Latino players and their supporters.
As the 75-second video moves from incident to incident, an ugly picture emerges of what’s motivating Trump voters, no matter what the candidate and his TV surrogates say about “economic anxiety” and “outsider politics.”
“Donald Trump is endangering our kids,” the ad says, before cutting to footage of students describing their experiences.
This country is caught in a whirlpool of shit. This hatred has to stop. Please, share this, get this out everywhere, it’s an important message for all.
Via Raw Story.
Stephen Bannon.
If you’re like me, you went “who?” Yet another nasty group of people, who revel in extremism, and one I had not heard of before. As it turns out, two Trump henchpersons have not only heard of it, they are part of it. How surprising, right?
According to an SPLC statement, Breitbart.com CEO Stephen Bannon and pollster Kellyanne Conway — hired as Trump 2016’s CEO and campaign manager, respectively — are members of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a highly secretive group that includes a roster of controversial white supremacists and rightwing agitators.
“The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called ‘culture wars,’ along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included,” wrote SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok.
The SPLC was able to obtain the CNP’s closely-guarded 2014 membership directory and found that it included “people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama ‘birther’ and the propagandist hit man responsible for the ‘Swift boating’ of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.”
Conway and Bannon’s names both appear on the CNP’s 2014 membership roster. The SPLC was unable to determine their current membership status.
The Center noted that the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret, but the membership roster opens a window on how purportedly moderate Republicans meet and network with right-wing extremists in formulating their policy agenda and crafting legislation.
The CNP roster of members includes “real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law,” the SPLC said.
Well. That’s terrifying. These are the people the so-called not completely batshit repubs are networking with, and we are now living in interesting times, with the rise of white nationalism and open bigotry. I think I could have lived without this particular knowledge, but it’s best to as knowledgeable as possible these days.
Via Raw Story.
CNN’s Carol Costello speaks to Angela Rye and Thomas Rodgers (screen grab).
Apostle Thomas Rodgers, Sr. of Antioch Road to Glory International Ministries in North Carolina told CNN host Carol Costello that black Americans should receive “dual citizenship” so that they could find jobs in Africa.
“African-Americans are the only people in the world who do not seek dual citizenship,” Rodgers said. “That’s why Chicago gangs, California gangs, the Crips and the Bloods and Detroit in Michigan — we have gangs in the streets because blacks have no vision, they have no leadership.”
“You’ve also talked about building a road back to Africa,” Costello noted. “Can you explain that?”
Rodgers replied: “Matter of fact, where our ancestors came from, from the Indian Ocean all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, that’s 4,000 miles and we want to go back and help with the highways all the way across, to create jobs, train rails, pipelines, oil, petroleum. They create jobs for young people that can’t find jobs here, that the Democrats have not did.”
“I think it would give young people in prison [jobs] just like Great Britain did,” he opined.
Er…is he referencing what I think he’s referencing? Holy isht. No, no, that’s not a good idea. Nope. You can read the rest of his, um, ideas here. There’s video, too.
John F. Kennedy. Whitehouse.gov.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy often gets credit for serving as president during the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, but the man beloved for championing African-American rights and working to eradicate poverty was assassinated before he could fulfill his promises to Native Americans.
Just 11 days before winning the 1960 election, Kennedy called for a “sharp break” from past Indian policies. That included termination policy, which severed tribes’ special relationships with the federal government, divided reservations into private ownership and sought to assimilate Indians into full citizenship.
Kennedy pledged to reverse termination policies, making a “specific promise of a positive program to improve the life of a neglected and disadvantaged group of our population,” he wrote in an October 28, 1960, letter to Oliver La Farge, president of the Association of American Indian Affairs.
“My administration would see to it that the Government of the United States discharges its moral obligation to our first Americans,” he wrote, promising better education and health care, access to federal housing programs, increased economic opportunity and “genuinely cooperative relations” between Indians and federal officials.
“Indians have heard fine words and promises long enough,” he wrote. “The program to which my party has pledged itself will be a program of deeds, not merely of words.
Yet Kennedy failed to live up to those words, said Thomas Clarkin, a history professor at San Antonio College and author of the 2001 book Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Kennedy, who was assassinated after serving 1,036 days in office, was a transitional president, bridging the gap between the termination policies of the 1950s and the more sympathetic Indian policies enacted during the ‘60s and ‘70s.
White supremacists protest outside Houston, TX NAACP (Photo: Screen capture).
White Lives Matter has hit the big time, they’ve been noticed and classified by SPLC as a hate group. At first, I was inclined to be dismissive, just another bunch of disgruntled bigots, but it looks more serious than that.
Activists with the “White Lives Matter” movement will be aligned with other white nationalist groups like the KKK or skinheads, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map.”
The map is released each year to show hotbeds of racist activity across the United States. Heidi Beirich, head of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, told VICE News this week that the “movement” is “clearly white supremacists” who should instead be operating under the slogan “only white lives matter.”
According to an SPLC report from earlier this month, the Black Lives Matter movement came out of a response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin and advocates largely for accountability and equal rights by law enforcement.
The White Lives Matter movement, by contrast, goes beyond what mainstream conservatives have advocated as an “all lives matter” position. Instead, their group is lead by 40-year-old Rebecca Barnette of Tennessee. Barnette also serves as the vice president of the women’s division of the racist skinhead group Aryan Strikeforce. They promote a pro-whiteness agenda, claiming that the race is under attack from immigration, integration and other race-mixing.
Barnette’s focus is to create a “new world” for whites, where they can be safe from the dangers of persecution from non-whites and non-Christians. The SPLC cites a post from Barnette on a Russian social networking site used by many white supremacists and neo-Nazis in which she claims Jews and Muslims have formed an alliance “to commit genocide of epic proportions” of the white race. Now is the time, she adds in the same post, for “the blood of our enemies [to] soak our soil to form new mortar to rebuild our landmasses.”
These groups are out in full force, recruiting and advocating for their support of whiteness. Just last week, armed white supremacists stood outside of an NAACP headquarters in protest, waving Confederate flags and “White Lives Matter” banners along with signs with slogans frequently used in the white supremacist movement.
Full story here.
Image Credit: Lance Wallnau: God is raising up Trump as a Cyrus to destroy political correctness.
Trump’s Wall ‘Isn’t About Mexico,’ it’s About Biblical Prophecy, so sayeth one Lance Wallnau. I hear a chorus of “whos?” In honesty, I don’t know, I hadn’t heard of Mr. Wallnau until today. It seems he’s not a pastor, but a Seven Mountains Dominionist theologian, or so people say. His current attempt at convincing Christians to vote for Trump is that Trump is just like Cyrus in the bible, an unbeliever who was used by god.
Seven Mountains dominionism advocate Lance Wallnau has been one of t he most creative defenders of Donald Trump on the Religious Right, explaining that Trump has an “anointing” from God similar to that of King Cyrus, whom God used despite the fact that he was not a believer.
Wallnau continued explaining his spiritual defense of Trump in two recent podcasts with Charisma magazine founder Steve Strang, explaining that Trump has an “unappreciated prophetic gifting” and that the candidate’s calls to build a border wall are not about the border at all but about instigating a revival among American Christians.
Wallnau recalled that Cyrus issued a decree that “opened a gate in heaven” and led the way for spiritual revival in Jerusalem.
“He opened a gate, Stephen,” Wallnau said, “he opened a gate in heaven with proclamation so that all the prophecies and prayers that were stored up for Jerusalem could suddenly begin to be manifested, beginning with the House of God getting revived and continuing on through Darius and to Artaxerxes until Nehemiah, on the basis of Cyrus’ decree, petitioned to build the wall.”
“And then I started looking at, my gosh, there’s more prophetic dialogue on Trump than Christians realize,” he continued. “This whole thing about building a wall isn’t about Mexico, it’s about in the Bible, from my perspective, Nehemiah’s project was to restore the boundaries around that which had collapsed where God’s people were concerned.
“I think that in the Bible, building a wall has to do with like Proverbs 25, ‘a man without self-control is like a city without walls,’ it’s broken down. Our fiscal situation is broken down, our race relations are broken down, our definitions of sexuality and gender are broken down. I believe that if Trump is allowed to be president, there will be a release of that stored up potential that we’ve been praying, fasting and prophesying into for the past 20 years for revival in America.”
Wallnau went on to describe to Strang how “if God can anoint a secular individual, then they are operating in a sense with God’s wisdom and guidance on them.”
Trump, he said, “has a remarkable and uncelebrated, I think, or perhaps I should say unappreciated prophetic gifting.”
He recalled how Trump told conservative religious leaders at a recent meeting in New York that “leadership is about seeing the future,” something that he said Trump had demonstrated with his predictions about radical Islam, the national debt, the inner cities, terrorism in Belgium and the fact that “he saw the Brexit before it happened.”
Liberals say that Trump’s rhetoric is “dark and dystopian,” he said, but “in fact, he’s merely describing, like a Churchillian gift, what is on the horizon.”
So, there you have it. Trump is an anointed prophet of Churchill’s caliber. Yes indeedy. Via RRW. There’s a bit more information about Wallnau’s nonsense here, but you’ll need a tanker full of salt, and some way to guard yourself from fatal eyerolls. The comments, while depressing, are an interesting insight as to how christians are handling this political mess.
Yesterday, I posted about the extraordinarily racist governor of Maine: “You Shoot the Enemy.” Guess Who the Enemy Is? – and Stephen King, a very famous Maine resident, has responded.
“Our governor, Paul LePage, is a bigot, a homophobe, and a racist. I think that about covers it,” King tweeted.
LePage made news this week for claiming that most drug dealers are black or Hispanic, and then calling a lawmaker who criticized his comments a “son-of-a-bitch socialist c*cksucker.” The incident provoked Maine’s largest newspaper to apologizing on behalf of the state for electing LePage.
It looks like LePage has pretty much the whole state cringing in embarrassment.
This is not the first time that King, who lives in Maine, has criticized his state’s Tea Party governor.
“One must admit LePage has elevated assholery to a level far past the extraordinary and into a rarified sphere that might be termed divine,” King said in January after LePage complained that urban drug dealers named “D-Money” were coming to Maine and impregnating “young, white girls.”
Then, in March, he said LePage was “full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green” for claiming he had moved out of the state to avoid taxes. “Tabby and I pay every cent of our Maine state income taxes, and are glad to do it,” King continued. “We feel, as Governor LePage apparently does not, that much is owed from those to whom much has been given. We see our taxes as a way of paying back the state that has given us so much. State taxes pay for state services. There’s just no way around it. Governor LePage needs to remember there ain’t no free lunch.”
It’s a genuine pity LePage will not be out of office until 2019. I think perhaps people of Maine should look to possible ways to boot LePage now.
Via Raw Story.