“WTF?! The KKK guy didn’t win and the black woman did?”
I wrote a few days ago that Fairfax County Virginia is ground zero in the fight against racism and hate. The invisible line that was drawn there in the wake of nearby Charlottesville was crossed tonight and in not only the Democrats favor but in favor of upstanding and right thinking people everywhere. The polls closed a little over two hours ago on the east coast and Karen Keys-Gamarra, an “arrogant” black woman has officially wiped the floor with her Republican-KKK-endorsed opponent Chris Grisafe, in a race for a school board seat which is about so much more than just a school board seat.
Despite all Republican efforts to win this election by underhanded means, such as having a special election where voter turnout was expected to be extremely low, the usual Republican ploys did not prevail. Four percent turnout was anticipated and the Democrats rallied and raised that figure to ten percent. 62,000 votes were cast, in excess of the 50,000 max figure that was anticipated. Of those votes cast, 41,000 were for Keys-Gamarra and 21,000 for Grisafe. That’s a comfortable margin to win by.
This victory is so sweet for so many reasons. First and foremost, the Democratic candidate is wildly more qualified than the Republican candidate, earning her the endorsement of the Washington Post. The kids now have a real advocate who has pledged to address bullying and other issues of paramount importance in schools today. If that was all this election meant, we would have plenty of cause for celebration on those facts alone.
But this election means so much more. This was the first election in the country post Charlottesville and the fact that the electorate was galvanized to get out the vote and put a fine Democrat in office is not to be taken lightly. A message has been sent to Washington and not via Western Union. If Donald Trump and the GOP don’t get it, then we’ll just have to keep winning elections until they do get it and “it” is this: America is not going backwards. The blacks are not going back to the ghetto, nor the gays to the closets, nor the disabled to hiding in the shadows, nor all the plans that Donald Trump, David Duke, Richard Spencer and their ilk were rubbing their small hands together about in eager anticipation. It’s not going to happen.
Let’s see if we can keep this ball rolling. The next election in Virginia is November 7 and it is crucial to hold the line, and take back as many as possible of 66 House Delegate seats currently held by Republicans. We can do this if Ralph Northam can be successful in his quest for Governor, along with Justin Fairfax as Lt. Governor and Mark Herring (the incumbent Attorney General, running for re-election.)
It’s only appropriate to give a shout out to two key Democrats who made this happen, Karen Keys-Gamarra’s campaign manager Peter Dougherty, and 90 for 90’s Dr. Fergie Reid, Senior. These good people, along with hard working Democrats all over the country made this happen. We did this.
This is democracy in action, folks. This is what it is all about. The Republicans literally were running a white supremacist candidate, endorsed by the local Klan and the Democrats said, “Uh uh,” and did a thumbs down. This is the first of many races which are going to go thumbs down for the Republicans. It won’t take many thumbs down in the coliseum before Republicans look to abandon Emperor Trump altogether for their own survival.
Now is when the fun begins. Let’s see if Kellyanne Conway mentions this. She was so quick to jump on the marginal victory of Karen Handel over Jon Ossoff in Georgia and proclaim that that election “proved” that the people wanted Donald Trump and, by extension, his dysfunctional administration. Let’s see if she can spin something positive out of a resounding defeat like this one.
And never, ever underestimate the position of school board member. The school boards are the first line of defense against encroaching tyranny. Televangelist Franklin Graham has been advocating a Republican takeover of all the school boards in the country. Betsy DeVos and her brother Erik Prince have wanted for years now to sow the seeds of a dominionist takeover by taking over the schools and changing curricula to reflect distrust of science, homophobia, and other attitudes which match their agenda. The school boards are the first place where the line must be held. Tonight’s victory certainly shored up the school board in Fairfax County Virginia, at least for the next two and a half years, and this is just the beginning.
The president’s pardon of Joe Arpaio is revolting for many reasons. Most disgusting of all is that he did it to torment anyone who doesn’t support him.
Donald Trump gives a thumbs up to supporters at the Phoenix Convention Center during a rally on Tuesday, where he made clear he would soon pardon Joe Arpaio.
Ralph Freso/Getty Images
Friday night, Breitbart tweeted out its story about Donald Trump’s pardon of sadistic former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio with these lines: “Look what you just made me do Look what you just made me do.” It was a reference to the new Taylor Swift song, but it was also a celebration of Trump’s unhinged abusiveness.
The Arpaio pardon was monstrous for many reasons. It sent a signal of impunity to racist police all over this country. It spit in the face of people who were targeted and even tortured by a sheriff who once proudly referred to his Tent City jail as a “concentration camp.” Trump circumvented ordinary Justice Department review procedures, which both demonstrates his contempt for the rule of law and ensures that next time he issues a precipitous pardon—say, to his son—it will be slightly less shocking. He sent a message to his cronies under pressure in the Russia probe to stay strong, by demonstrating his willingness to defy all normal political constraints in letting criminal conduct off the hook. Trump supporter Don Surber, a former West Virginia newspaper columnist fired for describing the dead teenager Michael Brown as an “animal” who had to be put “down” by police, exulted on his blog: “In pardoning Arpaio, President Trump sent a message to those under investigation by two dozen Democratic lawyers. …The message of his pardon is: Donald Trump has your back.”
But one of the most revolting things about the pardon was captured in Breitbart’s taunting tweet. The president was furious about being criticized for being a racist, and so, like a violent father smacking around his wife and children, he took it out on the majority of the country that fears and abhors him.
The Arpaio pardon should be seen in concert with the news, also breaking Friday, that Trump is planning to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which allows undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children to apply for work permits and protection from deportation. Just two months ago, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced that DACA, which protects about 740,000 people, would continue. Polling showed that even broad majorities of Trump voters supported letting the DACA beneficiaries—sometimes known as Dreamers—stay in the country. What changed between now and then? Well, John Kelly, the new chief of staff, is an immigration hard-liner. But the previous policy on DACA was instituted under his auspices at Homeland Security. More significant, I think, is that the president had his feelings hurt.
Also Friday, U.S. Border Patrol refused to close immigration checkpoints along Hurricane Harvey evacuation routes, saying, “CBP will remain vigilant against any effort by criminals to exploit disruptions caused by the storm.” This means that undocumented immigrants would have to choose between waiting out the hurricane or risking arrest. As Dara Lind reports at Vox, this is very different than the way the George W. Bush administration handled evacuations for Hurricane Ike, which hit Texas in 2008. Then, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff instructed agents, “We’re not going to be bogging people down with checks or doing things to delay the rapid movement of people out of the zone of danger.” We’ll find out in the coming days if Trump’s unyielding attitude on immigration has actually started to kill people.
Trump cannot deliver almost anything he promised during his campaign. He’s not going to get rid of Obamacare, much less replace it with something at once cheaper and more generous. He will not bring back American manufacturing, or make the country respected in the world, or extricate American troops from Afghanistan. He probably won’t be able to build a wall on the Mexican border, and has already conceded that Mexico won’t pay for it. But there is one promise he can deliver on, and it may be the central promise of his maggot-hearted campaign: revenge. If his supporters felt humiliated and dislocated and eclipsed by an urbane black president, Trump would make that president’s voters feel even worse. Outside Trump’s rally in Phoenix last week, a middle-age blond woman held a sign saying, “Trump Won Go Ahead and Cry.”
One of the uniquely horrifying things about the presidency is that Trump was put there to torment us, and by us, I mean the majority of Americans who voted against him. His strongest supporters revel in his instability, in the terror he evokes and the suffering he causes. He is, to use one of his own epithets, an enemy of the American people. We’ve all lived through presidents that we hate. (The irony of referencing W. and a hurricane in a positive light is not lost on me.) But this is the first president who hates us even more, and that may be the ultimate source of his power. Surber concluded his celebration of Arpaio’s freedom: “At any rate, pardon my laughter.”
“President Trump should withdraw the Clovis nomination immediately,” Schumer announced in a statement. “If President Trump refuses to withdraw Mr. Clovis, we will vehemently oppose his nomination and urge our colleagues from both parties to come together and summarily reject him as well.”
To many voters, this might seem like a minor consideration in the grand scheme of things, but the grim fact of the matter is that the Clovis nomination is a very real threat, not just to the farmers who rely on the USDA, but to the country as a whole that depends on the food they grow. Picking Clovis is a chilling reminder that Trump doesn’t care what damage he does to this country, so long as he’s sticking it to liberals and erasing Obama’s legacy.
Much of the negative press attention devoted to Clovis, a talk show radio host from Iowa, stems from his history of racist and homophobic remarks. Equally troubling, however, is the fact that Clovis is completely unqualified for the role of chief scientist, and there’s reason to believe he’s hostile to much of the important work protecting America’s food that the people who would be working for him do every day.
“If he is qualified for this job, then I should try out for the Golden State Warriors,” joked David Lobell, a professor in Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment. “Ideally, you want a scientist doing science and leading scientists. I can’t really make sense of this.”
“Perhaps Clovis taught an economics class to undergraduates at Morningside College (or perhaps not),” Stillerman writes, “but even if he did that hardly makes him an economist. He has no economics degree and no published work in the field.”
Clovis’ doctorate is in public administration, but his life’s passion is in being a right-wing propagandist. In between teaching business classes at a small liberal arts college in Iowa, Clovis hosted “Impact With Sam Clovis” on KSCJ in Sioux City, Iowa, where he promoted right-wing conspiracy theories such as birtherism.
Most importantly, Clovis promoted the conspiracy theory that holds that climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the world’s scientists in order to enact some shadowy leftist agenda.
“Speaking with [an] Iowa radio host in February 2014, Clovis agreed . . . that climate change was a way to redistribute wealth and ‘a big hustle,’” write Andrew Kaczynski, Chris Massie, and Paul LeBlanc of CNN. “Clovis also made reference to ‘Agenda 21,’ a United Nations action plan on sustainability that right-wing figures have long claimed is an attempt by the internal organization to strip local governments of their sovereignty.”
That’s alarming, because a lot of the research work that Clovis would be managing at the USDA is focused on climate change. Some of that work is about trying to slow down and reduce climate change, but, as Lobell argued, the more pressing concern is the work being done by USDA scientists around the country in trying to help American agricultural adapt to the changes brought by global warming.
“I would say the biggest challenge is that our main commodity crops are growing where we anticipate pretty negative effects of climate change,” Lobell explained. “I think adapting some of our main commodity crops — corn, soybeans — is a really big challenge.”
No doubt many of these scientists will keep their heads down and try to keep doing their job of helping farmers adjust to changing temperatures and water supplies, Lobell added. He still worries that having a climate-change denier as boss might “cause an exodus of really good scientists.”
“We depend on good science for insuring our food supply,” he added.
“Adapting to climate change doesn’t just mean making the bad stuff go away,” Lobell continued. “It also means making sure we don’t miss new things we can do that we couldn’t have done before. Both of those take science. Both of those take long-term research to figure out what actually works.”
If this work doesn’t happen because Trump thought it was amusing to appoint a talk show host to head up an agricultural research department, farmers may start seeing their yields go down.
“The consumers of food end up paying the cost of shortages in food production,” Lobell said, at least in the short term.
In the long term, he warned, the U.S. could start seeing its agricultural dominance decline. Countries like Canada and Russia may become significantly more competitive, if agricultural research efforts in the U.S. are stymied.
Clovis’ appointment may not even be legal. Federal law stipulates that the personwho holds this position must be “from among distinguished scientists with specialized training or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics.” Barack Obama appointed Catherine Woteki, a nutrition scientist, to this key role in the USDA. George W. Bush’s appointee was Gale A. Buchanan, a scientist who researched soil.
Clovis got the nomination, according to Politico, mostly because he’s good at flattering Trump. Nearly two dozen industry groups have also backed the nomination, however, arguing that the scientists working at the USDA “do not need a peer” but rather “need someone to champion their work before the administration, the Congress, and all consumers around the world.”
That might sound good on paper, but there’s no reason to think Clovis will show much interest in championing science, especially when the researchers in questions are working to solve problems Clovis refuses to admit are real. No doubt industry groups are excited to have a business-friendly right-winger in this office, but the decision to back an anti-science conspiracy theorist is short-sighted in the extreme. Whatever short-term economic gains may result could easily be lost if, under Clovis’s management, the American agricultural system fails to adapt to climate change.
It is both symbolically and materially important that Schumer, leader of the Senate’s Democratic minority, has put a priority on fighting Clovis’ appointment. Clovis is a symbol of the cynicism of the Trump administration and the contempt the president has for the people he is supposed to represent. Even more worryingly, he’s a threat to the affordability of food and the health of our country’s agricultural system for generations to come.
From Paul Clements (running for Congress in Kalamazoo MI)
Friday, the President announced that he had pardoned notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio on his conviction for contempt of court. When I first heard the news, I called it “a travesty” and “an insult to justice.” Truth be told, I am still in shock. Just to illustrate why pardoning Joe Arpaio is so wrong, let me list some of the horrific, racist, and egregious action of abuse he has perpetuated:
Officers under Arpaio’s employment once grabbed a pregnant Latina woman, slammed her against a car, stomach-first, three times, and then dragged her into the patrol car and shoved her in the back seat. They left the pregnant woman alone for 30 minutes, without air conditioning, only to issue a citation for “failure to provide an ID.”
A blind man was found dead in Arpaio’s jails. At first, Arpaio claimed he had died because he had fallen from a bunk bed. But, autopsies showed that officers under his supervision had beaten this blind man. This blind man later died from his injuries.
A 13-year-old came forward that her uncle was raping her. The sheriff told her parents that there was no evidence of rape, but in reality, a state crime lab returned a rape kit that tested positive for semen. Sheriff Arpaio ignored this evidence and withheld it from her parents. The sheriff didn’t arrest her rapist, who raped her continuously for five years until she became pregnant with his child.
Pardoning Sheriff Arpaio says responsibility for conduct like this can go unpunished even when a court has ordered it stopped. Trump is moving America from a constitutional democracy toward a police state.
— We must unite to preserve our democracy and the rule of law. Please support my campaign here to help me fight Trump and his GOP enabler Fred Upton. Paul Clements.
The first daughter’s longtime friend and associate is falling afoul of his creditors—and the courts.
By BEN SCHRECKINGER | August 27, 2017
His vendors call him a “career grifter.” His father’s creditors claim he’s a fraud and a serial extortionist who shakes people down with trumped-up threats of criminal charges. With these and other allegations piling up in court records along with judgments—against him, his wife and his businesses—for millions of dollars, his lawyers are abandoning him, saying he’s a deadbeat. All the while, he’s been living in one of the most luxurious mansions in the Bronx.
For the past decade, Lax, a 43-year-old New York diamond heir and entrepreneur, has been Trump’s partner in Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, the first major venture of her business career.
Trump and her family have continued to associate with Lax even as his legal problems have mounted and Trump has been dragged into Lax’s business disputes. On election night, Lax and his wife stood at the front of the ballroom at the Trump campaign’s victory party in New York, and Lax went on to visit Trump Tower during the transition, while Tiffany Trump attended the launch party for a new Lax venture in February. Ivanka Trump has even continued to rely on Lax’s advice in recent years: In depositions they gave for an unrelated case last summer, both Trump and her brother, Don Jr., cited advice they received from Lax in assessing another business partner.
And according to court records, Trump renewed her licensing agreement with Lax in 2011, allowing him to continue using her name even after his company defaulted on payments and he violated numerous terms of their agreement.
“He cheated not just us, he also cheated Ivanka,” says Mahipal Singhvi of KGK, a company that was recently awarded a multimillion-dollar judgment against Lax, his wife and their businesses after they kept, but did not pay for, a large shipment of KGK diamonds.
Trump’s relationship with Lax and the mountain of legal and financial troubles—reported here for the first time based on dozens of interviews and public records—raise serious questions about the first daughter’s judgment, even as she continues to serve as a powerful White House adviser. In response to detailed questions sent to the White House and the Trump Organization, White House spokesman Josh Raffel requested more information about this article but did not provide comment.
Lax initially agreed to a telephone interview about his relationship with Trump, but then said he might be traveling to Washington imminently and would prefer to meet in person. In response to an email listing detailed questions about the judgments and allegations against him, Lax responded that he was the victim of a blackmail and extortion scheme by one of his creditors.
“I do have all the hard evidence that this is an extortion case for money,” he wrote. “I will pursue criminally.” Lax declined to elaborate, and POLITICO Magazine is withholding the name of the creditor, for lack of any evidence of wrongdoing.
Lax grew up in Brooklyn the son of a diamond magnate with a sideline in real estate. He began his partnership with Trump a decade ago when both were rich kids looking to make their mark in the world of business. In 2007, Lax approached Trump pitching her on a land deal in Fort Myers, Florida.
Trump found herself drawn to Lax, seeing him as a kindred spirit. “Moshe was looking to take his business to a whole new level,” she recounts in “The Trump Card,” a 2010 memoir in which the entire final chapter is devoted to her partnership with Lax. “In that way, I suppose, we were a lot alike, trying to make our own way along a path set out for us by our fathers and trying to extend that path in exciting new directions, which I guess explains why we hit it off.”
Lax was not the only person Trump would hit it off with through the proposed deal. Soon after meeting Trump, he called a meeting of real estate heirs to discuss business opportunities at Prime Grill, a steakhouse across the street from Trump Tower, according to an April profile of Lax in Mishpacha, a magazine serving the Orthodox Jewish diaspora. At Lax’s networking lunch, Trump met her future husband Kushner for the first time (in the profile, Lax joked that it was a “state secret” whether he received a match-making fee and said he had gained an appreciation for President Trump’s “decency” and “sense of humor” by working with him up close).
The real estate deal went nowhere, but Trump and Lax soon embarked on a more promising venture together. At the time, Lax had a steady supply of diamonds from his family’s business, but was having trouble differentiating his product. Trump had a famous name with which to brand jewelry and ideas about how to create a shopping experience geared toward working women buying for themselves – a break from other diamond retailers that catered to husbands and boyfriends.
The pair decided to embark on a joint business venture, Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, converting Lax’s retail space on Madison Avenue into their flagship boutique.
According to Trump’s memoir, the partnership was a homerun. “As of now, in this tough economy, we’re doing very well,” she wrote in 2010. “Actually we’re doing better than ‘very well’ … We’ve succeeded beyond my wildest expectations.”
But beneath the rosy picture Trump painted in public, there were a number of problems. In June 2011, Trump and Lax entered into a new licensing agreement. This agreement, which has since surfaced in litigation, states that Lax’s company defaulted on licensing payments to Trump and that Lax or his company committed numerous violations of the original deal, including entering into unauthorized sublicensing agreements and failing to keep accurate records. The agreement charges Lax’s company $300,000 per year and 36 percent of net proceeds for the right to use Trump’s name.
Despite those problems, Trump remained in business with Lax as troubles kept piling up.
In 2012, Lax’s company, Madison Avenue Diamonds, found itself in court after it accepted delivery of millions of dollars in diamonds but refused to pay for them, claiming that the vendor, KGK, had breached their agreement by delivering some computer files related to the diamonds late. Lax was represented by David Scharf of Morrison Cohen, who in the past had done extensive legal work for the Trump Organization (the firm later went to court with the Trump Organization over half a million dollars in disputed legal fees).
The diamond dispute entangled Trump in a web of litigation against her will. At one point, Judge Charles Ramos became agitated with Trump’s attempts to avoid testifying about her relationship with Lax.
Ramos expressed special annoyance at the fact that Trump submitted an affidavit from her lawyer in an attempt to quash a subpoena, rather than submitting one herself. “You know something, if she does not want to testify she can tell me she doesn’t want to testify,” Ramos said at a hearing on the matter. “She has not done that. She does it through counsel? Thanks a lot. The deposition will go forward.” Trump also made the unusual request that the deposition take place at her office in Trump Tower, which the judge denied.
At her deposition, Trump’s lawyer revealed that in addition to her licensing agreement with Lax, Trump had an ownership stake in Madison Avenue Diamonds through an entity called IHoldings Madison LLC. It’s not clear how large a share of the company Trump held, or for how long. In the personal financial disclosure she made this year upon entering the White House, Trump says she served as president of IHoldings Madison until this May.
In 2015, the court ordered Lax’s company and his wife, Shaindy—who had personally guaranteed payment of the diamonds and in whose name Lax conducts many of his financial dealings—to pay the stiffed vendor $2.4 million plus interest. Singvhi of KGK says that the company has still not received the payments due, which at this point amount to $3.5 million.
In the meantime, Lax has had other problems. ***
In 2008, Lax’s father died, leaving him as co-executor of a vast estate. But his father also left vast debts, including $27 million owed to the IRS and a multimillion-dollar loan guaranteed by the Brooklyn real estate developers Joseph Brunner and Abe Mandel.
The fallout from that loan has led to some of the most disturbing charges against Lax: that he has been extorting members of his tight-knit religious community, threatening to bring criminal charges against them if they do not pay him—and that he engaged in a massive financial fraud to hide tens of millions of dollars left by his father from the government and creditors.
In 2014, Brunner and Mandel sued Lax, his wife, his brother-in-law Martin Ehrenfeld, his father’s estate, his father’s family trust and various corporate entities, claiming the defendants had used a series of shell corporations to hide Lax’s father’s money and avoid paying his father’s debts. The developers say that before his death, Lax’s father showed them documentation that his net worth was $174 million. According to their complaint, Lax and his co-defendants managed to make the fortune disappear—so that when creditors came calling, the estate had no assets to repossess.
The developers also claimed that Lax attempted to extort them in a scheme to avoid paying on the debts. In a sworn affidavit, Mandel said he received a call from Scharf in March 2014 informing him that a legal complaint was being prepared that would “destroy” him and Brunner and inviting him to a follow-up meeting to discuss the issue at Scharf’s office.
At the meeting, Scharf allegedly told the developers that his client was working with a former prosecutor, was prepared to accuse them of racketeering and would demand $20 million in damages—that is, unless they negotiated with Lax and his brother-in-law “to make this go away.”
In the affidavit, Mandel also said that a private intelligence firm had been approaching his business and personal contacts, telling them Mandel and his partner were under investigation and telling a charity he had given to that his gift was made with “stolen funds.” The developers submitted business card from the firm Sage Intelligence bearing the name Herman Weisberg, a former NYPD detective, that had been left with one of their acquaintances. Weisberg declined to comment for this story.
The developers said they were not the only victims, and that the defendants had been engaging in a “pattern and practice” of extorting and trying to extort other members of the Orthodox Jewish community, to which all involved belong, through “sham” entities called Diligence I LLC and Prudence LLC.
“Brunner and I inquired in our community about Scharf, Lax and Ehrenfeld,” states Mandel in a sworn affidavit. “We learned that they have been shaking down other people in our community for large settlement payments by threatening criminal actions.”
The Laxes and Ehrenfeld have denied wrongdoing. Scharf and his firm, who were never named as defendants, also deny any wrongdoing. Morrison Cohen has since withdrawn as counsel for Lax’s father’s estate, citing a conflict of interest (in June, the firm also withdrew from the KGK case, saying Lax and Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry had failed pay them).
Morrison Cohen’s withdrawal was just one of many bizarre turns the Brunner and Mandel case has taken. At one point, an attorney for Diligence claimed not to know who actually controlled the shell corporation he was representing. At another point. Lax claimed not to know the original identities of the lenders for the loan under dispute.
Judge Shirley Kornriech later concluded that Lax was lying, and over the course of the case she grew increasingly frustrated with such shenanigans. “A theme in this case is the pleading of ignorance by defendants and their counsel,” she wrote in one court order, listing off assertions that she did not find credible.
In June 2015, the lawyer for Diligence, Steven Schlesinger, withdrew from the case, saying his client had failed to communicate with him and had stiffed him on $85,000 worth of legal fees. Diligence then got a replacement lawyer, David Jaroslawicz, but he also withdrew from the case this January.
In his request to abandon the case, Jaroslawicz said he had been retained by someone named Eldridge Glasford running a corporate services firm on the Caribbean island of Nevis— population 11,000—that he was “not computer literate” because of a disability, and that he was never paid for his work. In November, a lawyer representing Lax’s sister, Zlaty Schwartz, and his father’s estate, withdrew from the case, citing “irreconcilable differences” with the estate.
Since then, the case has settled, according to the developers’ lawyer, William Fried, who declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement.
Those cases represent only a small sample of the suits filed against Lax in recent years. In September 2013, the law firm Cohen & Perfetto sued Lax, claiming he stiffed them for $48,000 in legal fees. The case settled, with Scharf representing Lax.
Last January, Lax’s cousin, Aron, sued Lax and his sister for allegedly pursuing “unjust enrichment” by trying to evict Aron and his wife from a Brooklyn condo that they have resided in since 2006 but whose mortgage is in the name of Lax’s late father. Last October, the firm Porzio, Bromberg & Newman sued Lax for $100,000 in unpaid legal fees. And in June, the law firm Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone sued Lax for $20,000 in unpaid legal fees. The cases remain ongoing. Lax has also been named as a defendant in a number of cases claiming failures to make mortgage payments.
Lax’s problems have continued to entangle Ivanka Trump. In recent years, the state of New York has issued at least three warrants for unpaid taxes against Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, totaling over $300,000. The outstanding taxes were eventually paid.
The financial travails of Lax and his wife have also put Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry in danger of at least partly falling into the hands of the highest bidder at a public auction in order to satisfy their unpaid debts. In January, a New York couple, Michael and Rachel Goldenberg, sued Lax and his wife for stiffing them on a six-figure loan. Lax’s wife owned at least part of Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, and in April, a New York court ordered her to turn over her stake in the company to the city so that it could be auctioned off to settle the debt. She apparently failed to do so, leading the Goldenbergs to request in May that she be held in contempt of court. In July, the court ordered the Laxs to pay the Goldenbergs $675,000, and the motion for contempt has been put on hold until September 19, the deadline for paying the debt.
The Laxes’ finances are further obscured by the fact that they are sometimes conducted under the name Chana Weisz, an alias used by his wife, Shaindy. Lax will sometimes write checks from a checkbook made in the name of Chana Weisz, according to a person who has seen him do this. Theperson recently received a five-figure check from Lax out of that checkbook but said they were unable to cash it because, as an alarmed bank teller pointed out, Lax’s signature did match the name on the check.
Amid so many setbacks, Lax did score at least one massive, if temporary, reprieve thanks to some highly irregular tax relief. In October 2015, the IRS released a $27 million tax lien against his father’s estate, saying the obligation had been satisfied. But last May, the IRS reinstated the lien, saying it had been released by mistake and that the $27 million in back taxes had never actually been paid.
Michael Macgillivray, a prominent Chicago attorney specializing in tax collections and a veteran of the IRS collections department, was gob-smacked by the botched lien release. “That is extremely extraordinary,” he said. “Of the things I’ve seen in my practice, nothing has even remotely approached a million dollars when there was an erroneously released lien.”
MacGillivray added that he had difficulty fathoming the explanation the IRS offered on the form reinstating the lien—that the lien had been released “mistakenly.” A spokesman for the IRS said the agency does not comment on individual cases.
“I could not believe that on a $27 million issue somebody would just make a mistake like that. You’d think there’d be a lot of due diligence,” MacGillivray said. “I can’t say its corruption because the IRS has 80,000 employees and there are incompetents.”
As Lax’s problems mounted, Trump did not sever ties or disavow him. The continued relationship briefly came up last summer, when she gave a deposition in a dispute between the Trump Organization and restaurateur Geoffrey Zakarian, who years before had ended a partnership with Lax amid acrimony and litigation.
In her testimony, Trump recalls receiving advice about Zakarian’s character from Lax, which she passed along to her older brother, Don Jr. “I recall telling my brother to make sure that he got a good guarantee, because I had heard from a partner of mine that Zakarian had treated him very badly in a deal,” Trump said. “Moshe certainly feels that Geoffrey is not a very good human being.” Don Jr. also cites Lax’s advice in his deposition for the suit.
In November, Lax and his wife attended the Trump campaign’s official election night party at the Midtown Hilton. A few days later, with the new president-elect and his team holed up at Trump Tower to chart the course of his administration, Lax was spotted in the lobby, taking an elevator upstairs.
In March, Trump’s company announced it was discontinuing the Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry line to focus on a mass-market collection, leaving the current status of her business relationship with Lax unclear. Until his LinkedIn profile was taken down this week, it listed him as the current chairman of Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry. Pieces from the line remain available for sale alongside glamorous black-and-white photos of Trump at IvankaTrumpFineJewelry.com, a website registered to the Trump Organization.
Despite all his problems, Lax has been residing of late in a luxurious mansion in Riverdale, an exclusive section of the Bronx, according to a subpoena response submitted by his wife earlier this year. The house is named “Ochre Point” after a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, and at one point last year, it was the second-most expensive residence on the market in the entire borough, featuring “eight bedrooms, an elevator, a motor court, a three-car garage, and an outdoor pool,” with a $7.75 million asking price, according to the real estate publication Curbed. The house is part of the Villanova Heights development, where houses rent for between $17,500 and $25,000 per month, according to the New York Post.
Meanwhile, Lax has continued to pursue new ventures and keep his name in the news. Earlier this year, he launched Code, a 10,000-square-foot “conceptual fashion retail gallery harboring a Community of Designers” at 800 Fifth Avenue. Trump’s younger sister Tiffany attended the launch party, along with Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle and former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who happens to be the landlord.
In July, Lax announced a new diamond gallery, Facet of Love, slated to open on August 15, also at 800 Fifth Ave. But Lax has fallen afoul of Spitzer, according to a person close to the building, who said Lax is now being booted from it “as a consequence of his failure to pay rent.”
Facet of Love has not yet opened, and is not clear when it will, if ever. “I really can’t give a date,” said Lax’s publicist Ronni Kairney, whose website lists Trump as a former client and who also said she did not know when Lax might be available for an interview. “He’s just very busy.”
Indeed, despite it all, Lax continues to exhibit the same hustle that first drew Trump to him all those years ago. “My new associate was an entrepreneur through and through,” the future first daughter recalled in her memoir. “I admired that about him.”
While the president* was fastening on his Serious World Leader face Monday night, Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, was facing a carefully tailored audience at a CNN “town hall” in Racine. Because Ryan is the biggest fake to hit Congress since the King of the Cranks, Ignatius Donnelly, there was the usual nonsense and prevarication. (Chait puts paid here to Ryan’s outright mendacity concerning healthcare. Alas, Jake Tapper, who otherwise did a good job, whiffed on this one.) But my favorite moment came when Ryan was confronted by a Dominican nun who challenged him to square his zombie-eyed granny-starving with his Catholicism. What followed was pure Ryan, which is to say dishonest, cowardly, patronizing, and totally unmoored from either self-awareness or actual reality. Gaze in awe.
(This, by the way, is the second time this year that CNN has handed Ryan this kind of platform. I do not know why that is.)
QUESTION: Good evening, Mr. Speaker. I know that you’re Catholic, as am I, and it seems to me that most of the Republicans in the Congress are not willing to stand with the poor and working class as evidenced in the recent debates about health care and the anticipated tax reform. So I’d like to ask you how you see yourself upholding the church’s social teaching that has the idea that God is always on the side of the poor and dispossessed, as should we be.
RYAN: Spoken like a great Dominican nun. Look…
Patronizing? Check.
Sister, you may — this may come as a surprise to you, but I completely agree with you. Where we may disagree is on how to achieve that goal. As you know, we all exercise prudential judgment in practicing our faith. And for me, the preferential option for the poor, which is something that’s a key tenet of Catholic faith, that means upward mobility, that means economic growth, that means equality of opportunity. That to me means working with this guy over here at Gateway Tech to make sure that we can close the skills gap, to make sure that every person who wants a career and job can get the benefits.
We actually just passed this bill in July. Before that, we passed another skills bill. That means to me taking this 20th century poverty program that we have, which is — we’re in the 32nd year of the war on poverty. Trillions spent, and guess what? Our poverty rates are about the same as they were when we started this war on poverty 32 years ago.
So the status quo isn’t working, Sister. And what I think we need to do is change our approach on fighting poverty instead of measuring success based on how much money we spend or how many programs we create or how many people are on those programs, you know, measuring on inputs. Let’s measure success in poverty on outcomes. Is it working? Are people getting out of poverty?
CNN
Well, since, for example, the House budget cuts food stamps by almost $200 million from the food stamp program, one way people might get out of poverty is by starving to death. You will note, by the way, that we are now a loooooonnnng way from the 25th chapter of Matthew.
And what I believe, when you look at it that way — actually, I have a commission that Patty Murray and I set up that’s underway right now to focus on these measurements. We need to make sure that we bring people into the workforce. The poverty — the poor are being marginalized and misaligned in many ways because a lot of the programs that we have, well intended as they may be, are discouraging and dis-incentivizing work.
OK, so here is what I don’t get. First of all, a great many poor people work their asses off, and in the private sector, too, and they’re being patronized by a guy who hasn’t spent 15 seconds in the private sector since he went away to college. His family got rich building roads on government contracts. His father died, and he went through high school on Social Security’s survivor benefits, a program that the budget proposed by the president* would eviscerate. Since then, he’s been a congressional aide and a congressman. My question is that, when he was going through high school on my nickel, and the nickels of millions of other Americans, including the poorer ones, why wasn’t he “disincentivized”? How did he avoid the terrible trap of the government “hammock”?
We were just — no, it’s true. We were just talking about it. We were just talking about tax reform. And I was telling you about these successful small businesses in Wisconsin, they got a 44.6 percent tax rate. That’s not the highest tax rate payer. I mean, Aaron Rodgers, who deserves every salary, is not the highest tax rate payer in this state. You know who it is? It’s a single mom getting $24,000 grand in benefits with two kids who will lose 80 cents on the dollar if she goes and takes a job.
Surely you recall that passage from the gospels where Jesus talks about lowering the top rate and doing away with estate taxes. (It was in the small print, and in Aramaic, at the bottom of the scroll.) And, anyway, the budget proposed by the House of Representatives—Paul Ryan, Speaker—would cut programs that would benefit that “single mom” by over $3 trillion.
We have to fix that. And that is why we have to fix it not by just kicking people off callously…
I’m sorry, but I have to stop here. This guy is still fighting for a policy that the Congressional Budget Office says would kick 30 million Americans off their health insurance. Maybe Ryan plans not to do this “callously.” Maybe he’s going to hand out balloons and lollipops. And, anyway, wasn’t this supposed to be about the gap between his policies and the teachings of his faith? I wish that nun had a ruler.
Note: The first letters of each paragraph spell “RESIST”
Melania Trump
Honorary Chairman
John Abodeely
Acting Executive Director
Ex Officio:
Carla Hayden, Librarian Library of Congress
John Parrish Peede,
Acting Chairman
National Endowment for the Humanities
Jane Chu, Chairman National Endowment for the Arts
David M. Rubenstein, Chairman
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Kathryn Matthew, Director Institute of Museum and Library Services
Ryan Zinke, Secretary U.S. Department of the Interior
Betsy DeVos, Secretary U.S. Department of Education
Tim Horne, Administrator U.S. General Services Administration
Rex Tillerson, Secretary U.S. Department of State Earl A. Powell, III, Director
National Gallery of Art David Skorton, Secretary Smithsonian Institution Steven Mnuchin, Secretary U.S. Department of the Treasury
The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities
August 18, 2017
Dear Mr. President:
Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville. The false equivalencies you push cannot stand. The Administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions. We are members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH). The Committee was created in 1982 under President Reagan to advise the White House on cultural issues. We were hopeful that continuing to serve in the PCAH would allow us to focus on the important work the committee does with your federal partners and the private sector to address, initiate, and support key policies and programs in the arts and humanities for all Americans. Effective immediately, please accept our resignation from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
Elevating any group that threatens and discriminates on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, disability, orientation, background, or identity is un-American. We have fought slavery, segregation, and internment. We must learn from our rich and often painful history. The unified fabric of America is made by patriotic individuals from backgrounds as vast as the nation is strong. In our service to the American people, we have experienced this first-hand as we traveled and built the Turnaround Arts education program, now in many urban and rural schools across the country from Florida to Wisconsin.
Speaking truth to power is never easy, Mr. President. But it is our role as commissioners on the PCAH to do so. Art is about inclusion. The Humanities include a vibrant free press. You have attacked both. You released a budget which eliminates arts and culture agencies. You have threatened nuclear war while gutting diplomacy funding. The Administration pulled out of the Paris agreement, filed an amicus brief undermining the Civil Rights Act, and attacked our brave trans service members. You have subverted equal protections, and are committed to banning Muslims and refugee women & children from our great country. This does not unify the nation we all love. We know the importance of open and free dialogue through our work in the cultural diplomacy realm, most recently with the first-ever US Government arts and culture delegation to Cuba, a country without the same First Amendment protections we enjoy here. Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.
Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions. We took a patriotic oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.
Thank you,
Paula Boggs
Vicki Kennedy/Eric Ortner/Andrew Weinstein
Chuck Close/Jhumpa Lahiri/Ken Solomon
Richard Cohen/Anne Luzzatto/Caroline Taylor
Fred Goldring/Thom Mayne
Jill Cooper Udall
Howard L. Gottlieb/Kalpen Modi (Kal Penn)
John Lloyd Young
400 7th St. SW, Washington, D.C. 20506 | (202) 682-5409
The front-page story in The Wall Street Journal announced, “Walt Disney Co. just became the biggest cord-cutter Hollywood has ever seen.” The iconic company announced it was starting two online streaming services that will bypass its traditional cable television distribution.
The move to offer ESPN and Disney content direct to consumers, “rather than through [cable] services that…serve as gatekeepers to audiences” follows on the success of other direct-to-consumer broadband services such as CBS All-Access.
The sine qua non that made it all possible was the FCC Open Internet Rule that the cable operators cannot deny, degrade or deprioritize Disney access to their broadband service, even when it is competitive to their cable service. This is the very same rule that the Trump FCC, at the request of the lobbyists for the big broadband companies, has announced an intention to eliminate. And the very same rule that Republican legislators are pushing content providers to help them scuttle.
Fascinatingly, one of the Open Internet’s biggest opponents, AT&T, also benefits from the Open Internet rule preventing AT&T’s DirecTV service – a direct competitor to cable – from being discriminated against on a cable system’s broadband capacity.
Yet, the Republicans in Congress and the Trump FCC continue to push to eviscerate the rule that is the law of the land and working quite well.
“Republican House leadership told Facebook, Google and Amazon that overly aggressive net neutrality activism [i.e., opposition to the Republican gutting effort] could make it harder to work together on other policy issues the firms care about,” Axios reported. If this were The Godfather instead of Washington, such a threat would be called extortion.
And speaking of The Godfather, the genius behind it, Francis Ford Coppola, wrote the Trump FCC in opposition to their effort to gut the existing rules. “The Internet was conceived and designed to be a free medium, with network neutrality assured and the resurgent power of big business held in check on behalf of the public’s greater interests. Coppola wrote, “I assure you that none of the films I or my contemporaries are known and celebrated for could exist today in such a climate.”
Despite the Republicans’ holy war in behalf of the half a dozen broadband Internet Service Providers (ISP) who dominate the market, the benefits from the Open Internet Rule accrue to everyone.
Consumers – who seldom have a choice between competing ISPs – benefit because the broadband providers are prohibited from acting as gatekeepers, determining what consumers see and assessing extra charges for certain services (like they do when operating as cable companies).
Innovators and the growth economy that produces half of all new American jobs benefit because they have open access to the entire online marketplace without having to worry that the broadband company would charge them extra or favor a deep-pocketed incumbent who could pay a special fee – or even, as increasingly the case, favor the ISP’s own video content.
Americans’ choice of video programming has exploded thanks to open access to online households. The critics talk of a golden age of scripted drama. It is happening because producers like Netflix and Amazon Prime – and now Disney – can reach consumers directly through an open Internet.
Even the handful of broadband companies that control most Americans’ access to the Internet, yet oppose meaningful Open Internet rules, have seen their revenues, profits, and stock prices rise since the rule was adopted.
Now venerable Walt Disney, home of everything from ESPN to Star Wars, is set to benefit from unfettered broadband access to American consumers that is enabled by the Open Internet Rule. Not only will the ISPs not be able to block, throttle or deprioritize Disney’s traffic, but also the so-called General Conduct part of the Rule prevents clever lawyers from inventing loopholes from the continuing obligation to provide open access.
The Open Internet Rule – especially the General Conduct Rule portion – is like Disney’s famous character Jiminy Cricket, who acted as Pinocchio’s conscience. As the Jiminy Cricket of the Internet Age, the Open Internet Rule sits on the shoulder of broadband providers to make sure they do the right thing.
Editor’s Note:
Tom Wheeler served as the 31st Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013-2017, during which time the FCC passed the Open Internet Rule.
How many times is Congressman Zeldin going to try to disavow his embrace of Trump’s pro-white supremacy, without really doing so
By Sally Persons – The Washington Times – Friday, August 18, 2017
Rep. Lee Zeldin said Friday that there were parts of President Trump’s statement on white supremacists that were “factually inaccurate.”
“There should not be anyone, who is a good person, who is participating in any type of an effort that in any way, shape, or form is associated with the KKK and Nazism and all of the evil they represent. There are parts of what the president said that you can say are factually inaccurate. There are other parts that are hard truths. But as far as the factually inaccurate piece, I don’t know of anyone who would be there, who would associate themselves with that particular protest, who are good people,” Mr. Zeldin, New York Republican, said on CNN.
But Mr. Zeldin said criticism of the president, like that from Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, was “a little broader” than he would agree with. Mr. Corker said Thursday at a media availability that Mr. Trump had not shown the “competence” or “stability” of a successful leader.
“Sen. Corker is making a statement that could be interpreted a little broader than I would necessarily agree with. Sen. Corker might have a disagreement on, for example what we just had happen in Charlottesville. Speaking for myself for sure — I’m Jewish — I have zero tolerance whatsoever for any individual that associates themselves with KKK and Nazism and the hatred and bigotry and intolerance evil that is filled within their ranks,” Mr. Zeldin said.
The New York Republican came under fire after posting his support for Mr. Trump on Facebook in the wake of white supremacists protesting in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week. Mr. Zeldin said the president was right for blaming the violence on “both sides.”
Sadly, we have arrived at a point at which the White House, the political crown jewel that the G.O.P. so ardently sought, is in disarray, which has taken down the G.O.P.-led Congress as well.
After making President Obama’s failure its number-one priority (so much so that it became an obsession), the G.O.P. worked hard to get a rich white guy — any rich white guy — to take the mantle of leadership after Mr. Obama. In pursuing its obsession, it abandoned its stated principles and abandoned those it promises to serve.
Republicans refused to negotiate honestly when Democrats spent months seeking Republican support for the Affordable Care Act. Then they tried repeatedly over seven-plus years to take away that health care — not, as it turns out because they had a better idea, but because it was Mr. Obama’s idea. Even worse, for 70-plus years Congress has worked to create, and then perfect (or try to) a safety net that would protect working-class America and the disadvantaged among us from financial and social ruin. The current Republican credo, adhered to from the top of the ticket to its most local echelons, holds dear the destruction of those protections.
Yet, in the last election cycle, all one heard from G.O.P. candidates was the mantra that working-class America had been “forgotten” and only they were the ones capable of repairing this so-called injustice. Decrying the political opposition by fomenting race-based paranoia allowed these candidates to camouflage their real agenda. It is not the furtherance of the “forgotten,” it is the furtherance of unscrupulous greed.
Help the forgotten? Not President Trump. The policies that have actually been implemented by the Trump administration, with the help of a Republican Congress, reflect a disdain for ordinary working-class Americans. Shortly after Mr. Trump took office, he and the G.O.P.-led Congress rejected numerous Obama-era regulations that were actually designed to support workers, including rules barring worker discrimination, rules designed to enhance workers’ wages, and rules enhancing workplace protection, such as barring companies with a history of wage, labor, or workplace safety violations laws from receiving federal contracts. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
So, the G.O.P. agenda has no intention of protecting the forgotten. Its true colors are shown in its efforts to rip away health care, savage the social safety net, and, in so doing, leaving the forgotten to fend for themselves. Under the G.O.P. agenda, the forgotten will soon be the trampled.
The sad truth behind the G.O.P. camouflage is that millions of hard-working Americans drank the G.O.P. Kool-Aid, believing that the party truly cared for them and would make good on promises to deliver wealth, improve health care, and preserve the all-important safety net protecting these folks. For some, it was hard not to be seduced by Mr. Trump and his G.O.P. cohorts.
However, like everyone else who has succumbed to Mr. Trump’s wiles, these voters too have been had.
And for this, the G.O.P. owes America an apology. And the lesson for voters from all this is that old adage: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Let’s not be fooled again, either in our local elections this year, or next year, when the G.O.P. Congress has to face the music. Trust not the G.O.P. Kool-Aid another time.
Trump was oddly devoid of emotion as he read his statement after Charlottesville. Where was his outrage? He lashes out with barely-suppressed venom and fury over perceived slights, but violence meted out by neo-Nazis and white supremacists doesn’t merit condemnation.
Having others in the White House clarify “what he really meant” days later doesn’t cut it. We’ve seen into his heart — it’s a hollowed-out space, corroded by his ceaseless quest for personal glory.
We are writing to publicly demand the removal of Congressman Lee Zeldin from the US Holocaust Memorial Council (USHMC) in Washington, D.C.. As a member of the USHMC, as a steward of our collective memory of atrocity, Lee Zeldin has a responsibility to work towards ensuring that identity-based hatred has no place in our society.
Lee Zeldin is failing in this primary responsibility. His official, tepid statement1 about the hate rally this weekend in Charlottesville is unacceptable in its failure to call out Nazi and white nationalist movements as the cause of the violence. Instead, he effectively put Nazis and those opposing Nazis on equal footing, calling them both “ extremes that try to tear us all apart.” Most recently, Rep Zeldin has come out to support Trump’s defense of the white supremacist mob2. While elected officials from both parties reacted immediately to condemn the president’s false equivalency as logically and morally reprehensible, as dangerous for our country, and a threat to democracy, Rep Zeldin placed himself on the wrong side of history. In Zeldin’s willingness to spread blame across white supremacist groups and those who oppose them, he gives outright license to the white supremacist cause and actions.
The Nazis are hearing these messages loud and clear. David Duke praised the president’s reaction. Neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer said: “Trump comments were good… He said he loves us all. Also refused to answer a question about white nationalists supporting him. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”
Americans all over the country are relying on our leaders to name and condemn identity-based hate immediately and in no uncertain terms. We are relying as well on institutions like the US Holocaust Memorial to uphold its mission to remind us of what happens to a democratic country when hate is used as the fastest route to power. It is unacceptable to condone—implicitly, through silence, omission, inaction, delayed action, or false equivalencies—acts of hate, while sitting on a board committed to protecting against them. Representative Zeldin should be removed from the US Holocaust Memorial Council until he acts with the integrity that the office demands by
1) demanding that Trump disavow Neo-Nazis, skinheads, the KKK, white nationalism, and fire White House staff who are allies to the alt-right,
2) demanding funding to fight white nationalism,
3) defunding Trump’s anti-immigrant budget proposals, and
4) protecting our immigrant friends and neighbors from deportation.
White nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the “alt-right” clash with counter-protesters as they enter Emancipation Park on Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
DAHLIA LITHWICK
Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate, and hosts the podcast Amicus.
On Tuesday, after a weekend that included a white supremacist mowing down and killing a peaceful counter-protester in Charlottesville and Nazis marching on the University of Virginia with torches, the president of the United States stood in front of the American people and said, “What about the ‘alt-left’ that came charging at, as you say, the ‘alt-right’? Let me ask you this: What about the fact they came charging—that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”
There were, as it turns out, a great number of Charlottesville locals present to witness the violence and lawlessness on display in this town—my town—last weekend. I asked local witnesses, many in the faith community, every one of whom was on the streets of Charlottesville on Saturday, whether there was a violent, club-wielding mob threatening the good people on team Nazi. Here’s what I heard back:
Brandy Daniels Postdoctoral fellow at the Luce Project on Religion and Its Publics at UVA
It was basically impossible to miss the antifa for the group of us who were on the steps of Emancipation Park in an effort to block the Nazis and alt-righters from entering. Soon after we got to the steps and linked arms, a group of white supremacists—I’m guessing somewhere between 20-45 of them—came up with their shields and batons and bats and shoved through us. We tried not to break the line, but they got through some of us—it was terrifying, to say the least—shoving forcefully with their shields and knocking a few folks over. We strengthened our resolve and committed to not break the line again. Some of the anarchists and anti-fascist folks came up to us and asked why we let them through and asked what they could do to help. Rev. Osagyefo Sekou talked with them for a bit, explaining what we were doing and our stance and asking them to not provoke the Nazis. They agreed quickly and stood right in front of us, offering their help and protection.
Less than 10 minutes later, a much larger group of the Nazi alt-righters come barreling up. My memory is again murky on the details. (I was frankly focused on not bolting from the scene and/or not soiling myself—I know hyperbole is common in recounting stories like these, but I was legitimately very worried for my well-being and safety, so I was trying to remember the training I had acquired as well as, for resolve, to remember why I was standing there.) But it had to have been at least 100 of them this go around. I recall feeling like I was going to pass out and was thankful that I was locked arms with folks so that I wouldn’t fall to the ground before getting beaten. I knew that the five anarchists and antifa in front of us and the 20 or so of us were no match for the 100-plus of them, but at this point I wasn’t letting go.
“Cornel West said that he felt that the antifa saved his life. I didn’t roll my eyes at that statement or see it as an exaggeration.”
At that point, more of the anarchists and antifa milling nearby saw the huge mob of the Nazis approach and stepped in. They were about 200-300 feet away from us and stepped between us (the clergy and faith leaders) and the Nazis. This enraged the Nazis, who indeed quickly responded violently. At this point, Sekou made a call that it was unsafe—it had gotten very violent very fast—and told us to disperse quickly.
While one obviously can’t objectively say what a kind of alternate reality or “sliding doors”–type situation would have been, one can hypothesize or theorize. Based on what was happening all around, the looks on their faces, the sheer number of them, and the weapons they were wielding, my hypothesis or theory is that had the antifa not stepped in, those of us standing on the steps would definitely have been injured, very likely gravely so. On Democracy Now, Cornel West, who was also in the line with us, said that he felt that the antifa saved his life. I didn’t roll my eyes at that statement or see it as an exaggeration—I saw it as a very reasonable hypothesis based on the facts we had.
Rabbi Rachel Schmelkin Congregation Beth Israel
There was a group of antifa defending First United Methodist Church right outside in their parking lot, and at one point the white supremacists came by and antifa chased them off with sticks.
Rebekah Menning
Charlottesville resident
I stood with a group of interfaith clergy and other people of faith in a nonviolent direct action meant to keep the white nationalists from entering the park to their hate rally. We had far fewer people holding the line than we had hoped for, and frankly, it wasn’t enough. No police officers in sight (that I could see from where I stood), and we were prepared to be beaten to a bloody pulp to show that while the state permitted white nationalists to rally in hate, in the many names of God, we did not. But we didn’t have to because the anarchists and anti-fascists got to them before they could get to us. I’ve never felt more grateful and more ashamed at the same time. The antifa were like angels to me in that moment.
Mary Esselman
Writer
My 13-year-old son and I stood by ourselves on the corner down the street from the synagogue, in front of the Catholic Church, trying to walk back home but interrupted by a stream of white extremist marchers, with their signs and firearms and crazy regalia. I felt like an idiot but tried to look each in the eye and said, “Peace,” and “Peace be with you,” with as much sincerity as I had in me, trying to reach some humanity in them, and they jeered and mocked me, called me what you might imagine, told my son, Luke, that his mom was a this and a that. And now I learn that my son and labradoodle and I, and our little “peace be with you”s are apparently “alt-left.”
Our path home was blocked by them, and we had no choice but to face them. Just us alone on that street corner, and all of them menacing, streaming past us on their way to the rally. Later, when we were a block away from where everyone was clashing and considering going to the front steps of the public library, there was a big line of white supremacists, the leader wearing some kind of yellow spiked helmet, and as they tromped toward the rally, these lovely older women standing beside us wearing sky blue T-shirts that said “Quaker” kind of trotted alongside them gently, holding signs that said “Love.” Alt-left for sure. I was armed with my iPhone and my dog’s leash. Luke was armed with his acne and hormones.
Rev. Seth Wispelwey
Directing minister of Restoration Village Arts and consulting organizer for Congregate C’ville
I am a pastor in Charlottesville, and antifa saved my life twice on Saturday. Indeed, they saved many lives from psychological and physical violence—I believe the body count could have been much worse, as hard as that is to believe. Thankfully, we had robust community defense standing up to white supremacist violence this past weekend. Incredibly brave students held space at the University of Virginia and stared down a torch-lit mob that vastly outnumbered them on Friday night. On Saturday, battalions of anti-fascist protesters came together on my city’s streets to thwart the tide of men carrying weapons, shields, and Trump flags and sporting MAGA hats and Hitler salutes and waving Nazi flags and the pro-slavery “stars and bars.”
“They have their tools, and they are not ones I will personally use, but our purposes were the same: block this violent tide.”
Out of my faith calling, I feel led to pursue disciplined, nonviolent direct action and witness. I helped lead a group of clergy who were trained and committed to the same work: to hold space on the frontline of the park where the rally was to be held. And then some of us tried to take the steps to one of the entrances. God is not OK with white supremacy, and God is on the side of all those it tries to dehumanize. We feel a responsibility to visibly, bodily show our solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized.
A phalanx of neo-Nazis shoved right through our human wall with 3-foot-wide wooden shields, screaming and spitting homophobic slurs and obscenities at us. It was then that antifa stepped in to thwart them. They have their tools to achieve their purposes, and they are not ones I will personally use, but let me stress that our purposes were the same: block this violent tide and do not let it take the pedestal.
The white supremacists did not blink at violently plowing right through clergy, all of us dressed in full clerical garb. White supremacy is violence. I didn’t see any racial justice protesters with weapons; as for antifa, anything they brought I would only categorize as community defense tools and nothing more. Pretty much everyone I talk to agrees—including most clergy. My strong stance is that the weapon is and was white supremacy, and the white supremacists intentionally brought weapons to instigate violence.
To our fellow Jews, in the United States, in Israel, and around the world:
We know that, up to now, some of you have made an effort to reserve judgment on the question of whether or not President Donald Trump is an anti-Semite, and to give him the benefit of the doubt. Some of you voted for him last November. Some of you have found employment in his service, or have involved yourself with him in private business deals, or in diplomatic ties.
You have counted carefully as each appointment to his administration of an avowed white supremacist, anti-Semite, neo-Nazi or crypto-fascist appeared to be counterbalanced by the appointment of a fellow Jew, and reassured yourself that the most troubling of those hires would be cumulatively outweighed by the presence, in his own family and circle of closest advisors, of a Jewish son-in-law and daughter.
You have given your support to the President’s long and appalling record of racist statements, at worst assenting to them, at best dismissing them as the empty blandishments of a huckster at work, and have chosen to see the warm reception that his rhetoric found among the hood-wearers, weekend stormtroopers, and militias of hate as proof of the gullibility of a bunch of patsies, however distasteful.
You have viewed him as a potential friend to Israel, or a reliable enemy of Israel’s enemies.
You have tried to allay or dismiss your fears with the knowledge that most of the President’s hateful words and actions, along with those of his appointees, have targeted other people — immigrants, Black people, and Muslims — taking hollow consolation in how open and shameless his hate has been, as if that openness and shamelessness guaranteed the absence, in his heart and in his administration, of any hidden hatred for us.
The President has no filter, no self-control, you have told yourself. If he were an anti-Semite — a Nazi sympathizer, a friend of the Jew-hating Klan — we would know about it, by now. By now, he would surely have told us.
Yesterday, in a long and ragged off-the-cuff address to the press corps, President Trump told us. During a moment that white supremacist godfather Steve Bannon has apparently described as a “defining” one for this Administration, the President expressed admiration and sympathy for a group of white supremacist demonstrators who marched through the streets of Charlottesville, flaunting Swastikas and openly chanting, along with vile racist slogans, “Jews will not replace us!” Among those demonstrators, according to Trump, were “a lot” of “innocent” and “very fine people.”
So, now you know. First he went after immigrants, the poor, Muslims, trans people and people of color, and you did nothing. You contributed to his campaign, you voted for him. You accepted positions on his staff and his councils. You entered into negotiations, cut deals, made contracts with him and his government.
Now he’s coming after you. The question is: what are you going to do about it? If you don’t feel, or can’t show, any concern, pain or understanding for the persecution and demonization of others, at least show a little self-interest. At least show a little sechel. At the very least, show a little self-respect.
To Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, and our other fellow Jews currently serving under this odious regime: We call upon you to resign; and to the President’s lawyer, Michael D. Cohen: Fire your client.
To Sheldon Adelson and our other fellow Jews still engaged in making the repugnant calculation that a hater of Arabs must be a lover of Jews, or that money trumps hate, or that a million dollars’ worth of access can protect you from one boot heel at the door: Wise up.
To the government of Israel, and our fellow Jews living there: Wise up.
To Jared Kushner: You have one minute to do whatever it takes to keep the history of your people from looking back on you as among its greatest traitors, and greatest fools; that minute is nearly past. To Ivanka Trump: Allow us to teach you an ancient and venerable phrase, long employed by Jewish parents and children to one another at such moments of family crisis: I’ll sit shiva for you. Try it out on your father; see how it goes.
Among all the bleak and violent truths that found confirmation or came slouching into view amid the torchlight of Charlottesville is this: Any Jew, anywhere, who does not act to oppose President Donald Trump and his administration acts in favor of anti-Semitism; any Jew who does not condemn the President, directly and by name, for his racism, white supremacism, intolerance and Jew hatred, condones all of those things.
To our fellow Jews, in North America, in Israel, and around the world: What side are you on?
We were all horrified by the violence in Charlottesville instigated by white supremacists. One innocent woman was killed. Two police officers died in a helicopter crash after they were called into action.
As I said this weekend, I grieve for the victims and for the Charlottesville community. But I also grieve and pray for our country. Because in the year 2017, we still have neo-Nazis and white nationalists spouting racism and inciting violence. This is inimical to everything we stand for.
No, Mr. President, there are not two sides to this. There is only truth. And the truth is that when racism and violence win, we all lose. Our nation loses.
People across the country are speaking out. The CEO of Minnesota’s 3M resigned from the President’s council over it, as did CEOs across the country. And now that council has been disbanded.
So let us stand together, defending our own rights and those of our fellow citizens. Let us seek not just common ground, but higher ground. Americans have stood together shoulder to shoulder for justice before and won, many times over. Our country is the stronger for it.
As Mayor Mike Signer of Charlottesville has said, “When I think of torches, I want to think of the Statue of Liberty. When I think of candlelight, I want to think of prayer vigils.” Our country is so much better than this. This is not just a moment to overcome. It is a moment to tell the world what America truly stands for.
The Department of Justice has requested information on visitors to a website used to organize protests against President Trump, the Los Angeles-based Dreamhost said in a blog post published on Monday.
Dreamhost, a web hosting provider, said that it has been working with the Department of Justice for several months on the request, which believes goes too far under the Constitution.
DreamHost claimed that the complying with the request from the Justice Department would amount to handing over roughly 1.3 million visitor IP addresses to the government, in addition to contact information, email content and photos of thousands of visitors to the website, which was involved in organizing protests against Trump on Inauguration Day.“That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment,” DreamHost wrote in the blog post on Monday. “That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”
When contacted, the Justice Department directed The Hill to the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment but provided the filings related to the case.
The company is currently challenging the request. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Friday in Washington.
“In essence, the Search Warrant not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration, but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website,” the company’s general counsel, Chris Ghazarian, said in a legal argument opposing the request.
The web provider published a search warrant issued by the Superior Court of the District of Columbia that asks for records and information related to the website and its owner, along with information that could be used to identify subscribers of the website.
This includes “names, addresses, telephone numbers and other identifiers, e-mail addresses, business information, the length of service (including start date), means and source of payment for services (including any credit card or bank account number), and information about any domain name registration.”
The warrant, dated July 12, says that authorities will seize any information constituting violations of D.C. code governing riots that involve individuals connected to the protests on Inauguration Day.
More than 200 people were indicted on felony rioting charges in connection with the protests in Washington on Jan. 20.
Zeldin’s bizarre bifurcation of responses to Charlottesville continues. Yesterday he went back to his original position defending Trump and blaming both sides. That weak response is also the one on his website press release page, his official Facebook page and his official Twitter feed. He condemns the KKK and Nazism by name, before going on to blame the violence on both sides: but only on his personal Facebook page and in a letter sent to select donors and the Shelter Island Reporter (now also on the “in the news” section of his website).
Trying to show donors he’ll condemn anti-Semitism, while keeping his core Trump-supporting rightwing supporters happy by calling out both sides?
Don’t take your eye off the ball! With all the distractions from the WH its easy to forget: healthcare is still in serious jeopardy. Here is why. …and where exactly does Lee Zeldin stand? Still with 45? DP
Whether lawmakers are done with efforts to repeal the ACA or not, some important changes for healthcare could be on the horizon.
At least one part of the healthcare industry is still looking to Washington D.C. after the flurry of activity last month, if only for one action. In addition to the highly public failure to pass major healthcare legislation before leaving town for a month, Congress and President Donald Trump also left the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchange markets in a dangerous flux by not taking action on the cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments for insurers.
It’s not clear whether Congress will continue to take up Republican healthcare legislation to repeal the ACA when it returns. Even within the party, senators are singing different tunes, while President Donald Trump continues to pressure lawmakers to get an ACA repeal bill on his desk. A bipartisan group with members from both chambers has a few ideas, but the majority of lawmakers appear ready to move on. Regardless, they will still have to take up reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in September, potential reigniting some debates around the ACA.
If GOP leaders do declare ACA repeal off the table for this year, its opponents will look to the executive branch for efforts to weaken the law and its effects. Here’s what to look out for.
Cost-sharing reduction payments
Payers have been begging for assurance that CSRs will continue to be paid, but the White House and Congress have so far refused. The result has been many payers pulling out of the exchange markets or reducing their footprints, as well as premium hikes of 30% or more. Just last week, Anthem announced it is pulling out of the Nevada and Virginia exchange markets and reducing its participation in Georgia.
Not paying the CSRs would increase federal spending, because the higher premiums will require higher premium subsidies for the 84% in the exchangeswho qualify for help. That’s not to mention the 30,000 or more who would have no insurance options.
Trump hasn’t been shy about his plan to halt any efforts that stabilize the exchange markets (like CSRs) in an effort to sabotage the ACA and force unwilling Democrats to cooperate on a repeal bill. Others in the GOP, however, have been reluctant to hurt constituents with such an overtly political play.
America’s Health Insurance Plans has said it is imperative the CSRs are funded. “These benefits are essential to making coverage and care affordable for American families who receive them,” the organization said. “Clarity and commitment to this funding is needed to eliminate confusion and anxiety for consumers.”
It may soon be too late for CSR payments to matter for next year. Payers must sign their contracts with HealthCare.gov by Sept. 21. The CMS and some states have tried to give insurers more flexibility because of the uncertainty by pushing back rate filing deadlines. Connecticut said it will allow payers to refile their rates if the CSR payments are eliminated, and California allowed them to file two sets of rates, one of which assumes no CSRs.
Weakening the ACA
Trump’s threat to “let Obamacare implode” may go beyond refusing to shore up the exchange markets. His administration has already pulled advertising and promotion of the exchanges, and is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office for pushing the GOP healthcare bills in official HHS communication channels. Immediately after his inauguration, Trump signed a wide-ranging executive order instructing federal agencies to “exercise all authority and discretion available to them to waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay any provision or requirement” of the ACA that imposes a fiscal or regulatory burden.
No major changes have resulted from the order so far, but it could be used to roll back benefit requirements for preventive care, contraception and mental health services.
HHS Secretary Tom Price could also make changes that weaken the ACA’s individual mandate. Repealing the mandate would mean 15 million fewer Americans would have coverage by 2026 and result in premium increases of about 20%, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Watering down the requirement instead of ditching it completely would have less drastic results, but there would still be an impact.
Price could create more exemptions for the mandate or attempt to force the Internal Revenue Service to stop enforcing it. Either of these actions would add turmoil to the exchanges markets and undermine the efforts of the ACA.
Reauthorizing CHIP
Those watching health legislation in Congress are eyeing CHIP reauthorization as a possible vehicle for changes to the ACA. Lawmakers will be hesitant, though, as CHIP is a successful program with bipartisan support.
The program, which turned 20 years old this past weekend, covered nearly 9 million children in fiscal 2016. CHIP coverage is more affordable than employer-sponsored or marketplace coverage, while children covered under CHIP are more likely to have a usual source of care and regularly attend well-child visits, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, which recommends Congress extend CHIP funding through 2022.
The commission estimates more than a million children would lose coverage if CHIP loses funding.
Bipartisan legislation and state waivers
A bipartisan group of about 40 members of the House is proposing some relatively small changes to the ACA that have received support from both sides of the aisle in the past. The plan is to put them in a bill that would also immediately fund the CSRs.
Their suggestions include exempting smaller businesses from the employer mandate, a fund states can go to for help covering people with high care costs and more flexibility and guidance for states looking to apply for ACA waivers. Another possible measure is repeal of the medical device tax.
Their proposal is to change the employer mandate by having it apply only to businesses with 500 or more employees, instead of the current requirement for businesses with 50 or more workers. Analysis from the Urban Institute and Rand Corporation has shown the employer mandate has little effect on the number of people who have coverage, partly because nearly all businesses with at least 50 employees offered coverage even before the mandate went into effect.
The ACA has always given states the option of applying for a waiver that allows them to eschew essential health benefits and other requirements — as long as they can prove their plans will cover the same number of people with coverage that is just as comprehensive and affordable. HHS under President Barack Obama was careful in ensuring that state proposals met those guidelines, but current HHS Secretary Tom Price has said he wants to encourage more waivers and will be less strict with approvals of those waivers and Medicaid demonstration waivers.
With this in mind, some recent proposals have included aspects that would have previously been rejected. Last week, Maine applied for a Medicaid demonstration waiver that includes work requirements and asset testing. Those measures are likely to restrict access to coverage for people with low incomes.
Many of the options available for Congress and the executive branch could roil the industry, but some bipartisan options could provide much needed clarity. Summer is usually pretty quiet in Washington D.C., but this year has not been business as usual. Healthcare leaders would be wise to be ready for new developments with the ACA and beyond.
From Huffington Post — By Lydia O’Connor, Daniel Marans
Trump Condemned Racism As ‘Evil.’ Here Are 16 Times He Embraced It.
It took more than 48 hours, but President Donald Trump finally denounced the white supremacist groups whose rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend sparked deadly violence.
But his Monday proclamation that “racism is evil” means little coming from a man who largely has not backed away from the racism upon which he built both his campaign and his real estate business.
Not only did Trump’s condemnation pale in comparison to those from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, celebrities and even the maker of the tiki torches used at the rally, but it also came after he blamed “many sides” for the violent protest.
Throughout his campaign and after his election, HuffPost kept running lists of examples of Trump’s racism dating as far back as the 1970s. We’ll continue to document those incidents here as they happen.
Trump speaks to the press about protests in Charlottesville on Saturday at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.JIM WATSON VIA GETTY IMAGES
Some of his top advisers and cabinet picks have histories of prejudice
Since winning the election, Trump has picked top advisers and cabinet officials whose careers are checkered by accusations of racially biased behavior.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor, was executive chairman of Breitbart, a news site that Bannon dubbed the “home of the alt-right” ― a euphemism that describes a loose coalition of white supremacists and aligned groups. Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart increased its accommodation of openly racist and anti-Semitic writing, capitalizing on the rise of white nationalism prompted by Trump’s campaign.
Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn ― who worked as Trump’s national security adviser until resigning in February amid revelations that he discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador ― has drawn scrutiny for anti-Muslim comments he has made over the years. In February, Flynn tweeted that “fear of Muslims is rational.” Over the summer, he said that there is a “diseased component inside the Islamic world” that is like a “cancer.” Flynn has defended Trump’s past proposal of banning Muslim immigration and suggested he would be open to reviving torture techniques like waterboarding.
In addition, Trump has nominated Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to be attorney general of the United States. The Senate refused to confirm Sessions as a federal judge in 1986 amid accusations that he’d made racially insensitive comments, including that the only reason he hadn’t joined the Ku Klux Klan was because members of the extremist group smoked marijuana. Civil rights groups condemned Trump’s nomination of Sessions, while leading white nationalists celebrated it.
And Steve Mnuchin, who Trump tapped to serve as Treasury secretary, faces allegations of profiting from racial discrimination. As a hedge fund manager, Mnuchin purchased a troubled mortgage bank, sped up its foreclosure rate and sold it for a killing several years later. Along the way, Mnuchin’s bank came under fire from housing rights groups for racist practices like lending to very few people of color and maintaining foreclosed-upon properties in neighborhoods that were predominantly black and brown less than in white neighborhoods.
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Steve Bannon, chief strategist for President Donald Trump.
Trump denied responsibility for the racist incidents that followed his election
While the hate speech and racist violence emboldened by his campaign only escalated after his win, Trump downplayed the incidents and half-heartedly denounced them.
There were nearly 900 hate incidents across the U.S. in the 10 days following the election, a report released last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center found. Those attacks include vandals drawing swastikas on a synagogue, schools, cars and driveways; an assailant beating a gay man while saying the “president says we can kill all you faggots now”; and children telling their black classmates to sit in the back of the school bus.
In nearly 40 percent of those incidents, the SPLC found, people explicitly invoked the president-elect’s name or his campaign slogans.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Anti-Defamation League have also tracked significant growth in racist and bigoted attacks.
“We’ve seen a great deal of really troubling stuff in the last week, a spike in harassment, a spike in vandalism, physical assaults. Something is happening that was not happening before,” ADL national director Jonathan Greenblatt told The New Yorker.
Despite those findings, Trump insisted on CBS’ “60 Minutes” the Sunday after his election that there had only been “a very small amount” of racist incidents.
“I am so saddened to hear that,” Trump said when asked about the racist incidents. “And I say, ‘Stop it.’ If it helps, I will say this, and I will say right to the camera: ‘Stop it.’”
He also accused the media of overstating the attacks. “I think it’s built up by the press because, frankly, they’ll take every single little incident that they can find in this country, which could’ve been there before ― if I weren’t even around doing this ― and they’ll make it into an event, because that’s the way the press is,” he said.
Trump’s denouncement of hate-fueled violence was relatively mild, especially compared to the zeal with which he routinely attacks other targets ― like, say, “Saturday Night Live,” or the cast of “Hamilton,” who addressed Vice president-elect Mike Pence at a recent performance in New York that Pence attended.
“[Trump] hits the news media when he thinks there’s a story that’s unfair, he tweets when he is outraged about something in the media,” CNN host Wolf Blitzer said last month, after Trump criticized the cast of “Hamilton” for singling out Pence, whom the audience also booed. “But he doesn’t seem to go out of the way to express his outrage over people hailing him with Nazi salutes.”
He launched a travel ban targeting Muslims
In an executive order since blocked by the courts, Trump restricted Syrian refugees and travel by immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.
While White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer later insisted that it was “not a Muslim ban,” Trump said the day he signed it that he would prioritize helping Syrian Christians and made an exception for admitting refugees who are religious minorities in those countries.
Trump has characterized people from that region of the world as being “terror-prone,” despite there having been zero fatal terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 1975 by immigrants from the seven targeted countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
A blanket ban on travel from those countries and anti-Muslim bigotry in general is “essentially an extension of the fear and vilification of not only Muslims but everyone perceived to be Muslim that’s been taking place for centuries,” Khaled Beydoun, a law professor at the University of Detroit who also works with the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, explained to Vox.
He attacked Muslim Gold Star parents
Trump’s retaliation against the parents of a Muslim U.S. Army officer who died while serving in the Iraq War was a low point in a campaign full of hateful rhetoric.
Khizr Khan, the father of the late Army Captain Humayun Khan, spoke out against Trump’s bigoted rhetoric and disregard for civil liberties at the Democratic National Convention on July 28. It became the most memorable moment of the convention.
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Khizr Khan, a Goldstar father, speaks on Feb. 2 about Trump issuing an executive order to ban travelers from seven countries.
“Let me ask you, have you even read the U.S. Constitution?” Khan asked Trump before pulling a copy of the document from his jacket pocket and holding it up. “I will gladly lend you my copy.” Khan’s wife, Ghazala, who wears a head scarf, stood at his side during the speech but did not speak.
In response to the devastating speech, Trump seized on Ghazala Khan’s silence to imply that she was forbidden from speaking due to the couple’s Islamic faith. “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News that first appeared on July 30.
“Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could?” she wrote. “Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?”
He claimed a judge was biased because “he’s a Mexican”
In May 2016, Trump implied that Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over a class action suit against the for-profit Trump University, could not fairly hear the case because of his Mexican heritage.
“He’s a Mexican,” Trump told CNN. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico. The answer is, he is giving us very unfair rulings — rulings that people can’t even believe.”
Curiel, it should be noted, is an American citizen who was born in Indiana. As a prosecutor in the late 1990s, he went after Mexican drug cartels, making him a target for assassination by a Tijuana drug lord.
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Trump delivers a statement in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 14.
Even members of Trump’s own party slammed the racist remarks. “Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said, though he clarified that he still endorsed Trump.
The comments against Curiel didn’t sit well with the American public either. According to a YouGov poll released in June 2016, 51 percent of those surveyed agreed that Trump’s comments were not only wrong, but also racist. Fifty-seven percent of Americans said Trump was wrong to complain against the judge, while just 20 percent said he was right to do so.
When asked whether he would trust a Muslim judge in light of his proposed restrictions on Muslim immigration, Trump suggested that such a judge might not be fair to him either.
The Justice Department sued his company ― twice ― for not renting to black people
When Trump was serving as the president of his family’s real estate company, the Trump Management Corporation, in 1973, the Justice Department sued the company for alleged racial discrimination against black people looking to rent apartments in the Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island boroughs of New York City.
The lawsuit charged that the company quoted different rental terms and conditions to black rental candidates than it did to white candidates, and that the company lied to black applicants about apartments not being available. Trump called those accusations “absolutely ridiculous” and sued the Justice Department for $100 million in damages for defamation.
Without admitting wrongdoing, the Trump Management Corporation settled the original lawsuit two years later and promised not to discriminate against black people, Puerto Ricans or other minorities. Trump also agreed to send weekly vacancy lists for his 15,000 apartments to the New York Urban League, a civil rights group, and to allow the NYUL to present qualified applicants for vacancies in certain Trump properties.
Just three years after that, the Justice Department sued the Trump Management Corporation again for allegedly discriminating against black applicants by telling them apartments weren’t available.
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Black Lives Matter protestors stand in a fog of tear gas during clashes at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12.
In fact, discrimination against black people has been a pattern throughout Trump’s career
Workers at Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, have accused him of racism over the years. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $200,000 in 1992 because managers would remove African-American card dealers at the request of a certain big-spending gambler. A state appeals court upheld the fine.
The first-person account of at least one black Trump casino employee in Atlantic City suggests the racist practices were consistent with Trump’s personal behavior toward black workers.
“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, told The New Yorker for a 2015 article. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”
Trump allegedly disparaged his black casino employees as “lazy” in vividly bigoted terms, according to a 1991 book by John O’Donnell, a former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
“And isn’t it funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” O’Donnell recalled Trump saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
“I think the guy is lazy,” Trump said of a black employee, according to O’Donnell. “And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump told an interviewer in 1997 that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true,” but in 1999 accused O’Donnell of having fabricated the quotes.
Trump has also faced charges of reneging on commitments to hire black people. In 1996, 20 African-Americans in Indiana sued Trump for failing to honor a promise to hire mostly minority workers for a riverboat casino on Lake Michigan.
He refused to immediately condemn the white supremacists who advocated for him
Trump’s response to the Charlottesville chaos wasn’t the first time he appeared hesitant to condemn white supremacists.
Three times in a row on Feb. 28, Trump sidestepped opportunities to renounce white nationalist and former KKK leader David Duke, who’d recently told his radio audience that voting for any candidate other than Trump would be “treason to your heritage.”
When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he would condemn Duke and say he didn’t want a vote from him or any other white supremacists, Trump claimed that he didn’t know anything about white supremacists or about Duke himself. When Tapper pressed him twice more, Trump said he couldn’t condemn a group he hadn’t yet researched.
By Feb. 29, Trump was saying that in fact he did disavow Duke, and that the only reason he didn’t do so on CNN was because of a “lousy earpiece.” Video of the exchange, however, shows Trump responding quickly to Tapper’s questions with no apparent difficulty in hearing.
It’s preposterous to think that Trump didn’t know about white supremacist groups or their sometimes violent support of him. Reports of neo-Nazi groups rallying around Trump go back as far as August 2015.
His white supremacist fan club includes The Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi news site; Richard Spencer, director of the National Policy Institute, which aims to promote the “heritage, identity, and future of European people”; Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a Virginia-based white nationalist magazine; Michael Hill, head of the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist secessionist group; and Brad Griffin, a member of Hill’s League of the South and author of the popular white supremacist blog Hunter Wallace.
A leader of the Virginia KKK who backed Trump told a local TV reporter in May, “The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in.”
Later that month, the Trump campaign announced that one of its California primary delegates was William Johnson, chair of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. The Trump campaign subsequently said his inclusion was a mistake, and Johnson withdrew his name at their request.
After the election, Spencer’s National Policy Institute held a celebratory gathering in Washington, D.C. A video shows many of the white nationalists assembled there doing the Nazi salute after Spencer declared, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
He questioned whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States
Long before calling Mexican immigrants “criminals” and “rapists,” Trump was a leading proponent of “birtherism,” the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is thus an illegitimate president. Trump claimed in 2011 to have sent people to Hawaii to investigate whether Obama was really born there. He insisted at the time that the researchers “cannot believe what they are finding.”
Obama ultimately got the better of Trump, releasing his long-form birth certificate and relentlessly mocking the real estate mogul about it at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that year.
But Trump continued to insinuate that the president was not born in the country. “I don’t know where he was born,” Trump said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2015. (Again, for the record: Obama was born in Hawaii.)
In September, under pressure to clarify his position, Trump finally acknowledged that Obama was indeed born in the United States. But he falsely tried to blame Hillary Clinton for starting the rumors ― and tried to take credit for settling them himself with his racist pressure campaign. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Trump said. “I finished it.”
He treats racial groups as monoliths
Like many racial instigators, Trump often answers accusations of bigotry by loudly protesting that he actually loves the group in question. But that’s just as uncomfortable to hear, because he’s still treating all the members of the group ― all the individual human beings ― as essentially the same and interchangeable. Language is telling, here: Virtually every time Trump mentions a minority group, he uses the definite article the, as in “the Hispanics,” “the Muslims” and “the blacks.”
In that sense, Trump’s defensive explanations are of a piece with his slander of minorities. Both rely on essentializing racial and ethnic groups, blurring them into simple, monolithic entities, instead of acknowledging that there’s as much variety among Muslims and Latinos and black people as there is among white people.
How did Trump respond to the outrage last year that followed his characterization of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists?
“I’ll take jobs back from China, I’ll take jobs back from Japan,” Trump said during his visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in July 2015. “The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.”
The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.Donald Trump, July 2015
How did Trump respond to critics of his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.?
“I’m doing good for the Muslims,” Trump told CNN last December. “Many Muslim friends of mine are in agreement with me. They say, ‘Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant and so fantastic.’”
Not long before he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the country, Trump was proclaiming his affection for “the Muslims,” disagreeing with rival candidate Ben Carson’s claim in September 2015 that being a Muslim should disqualify someone from running for president.
“I love the Muslims. I think they’re great people,” Trump said then, insisting that he would be willing to name a Muslim to his presidential cabinet.
How did Trump respond to the people who called him out for funding an investigation into whether Obama was born in the United States?
“I have a great relationship with the blacks,” Trump said in April 2011. “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.” Even when Trump has dropped the definite article “the,” his attempts at praising minority groups he has previously slandered have been offensive.
Look no further than the infamous Cinco de Mayo taco bowl tweet. Former Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) offered a good summary of everything that was wrong with Trump’s comment. “It’s like eating a watermelon and saying ‘I love African-Americans,’” Bush quipped.
In an apparent attempt to win favor with black and Latino voters in the final months of the campaign, Trump fell back on his penchant for stereotyping. At the first presidential debate in September, Trump claimed African-Americans and Latinos in cities were “living in hell” due to the violence and poverty in their neighborhoods. The previous month, speaking to an audience of white people, Trump asked “what the hell do [black voters] have to lose” by voting for him.
Trump’s treatment of longtime White House correspondent April Ryan during a February press conference left many wondering if Trump assumes all black people are friends with one another. When Ryan, a black reporter for the American Urban Radio Networks, asked Trump if he would hold meetings with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to help craft his urban development policy, he asked her to handle the introduction. “Well, I would. I’ll tell you what, do you want to set up the meeting?” Trump asked. “Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?” “No, I’m just a reporter,” Ryan replied.
He trashed Native Americans, too
In 1993, Trump wanted to open a casino in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that would compete with one owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Nation, a local Native American tribe. He told the House subcommittee on Native American Affairs that the Pequots “don’t look like Indians to me… They don’t look like Indians to Indians.”
In the 1980s, Donald Trump was much younger, but just as racist as he is now.
He encouraged the mob anger that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five
In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City-area newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in New York and the expansion of police authority in response to the infamous case of a woman who was beaten and raped while jogging in Manhattan’s Central Park.
“They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump wrote, referring to the Central Park attackers and other violent criminals. “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.”
The public outrage over the Central Park jogger rape, at a time when the city was struggling with high crime, led to the wrongful conviction of five teenagers of color known as the Central Park Five.
The men’s convictions were overturned in 2002, after they’d already spent years in prison, when DNA evidence showed they did not commit the crime. Today, their case is considered a cautionary tale about a politicized criminal justice process.
He condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester
At a November 2015 campaign rally in Alabama, Trump supporters physically attacked an African-American protester after the man began chanting “Black lives matter.” Video of the incident shows the assailants kicking the man after he has already fallen to the ground.
The following day, Trump implied that the attackers were justified.
“Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the protester is part of a larger, troubling pattern of instigating violence toward protesters at campaign events, where people of color have attracted especially vicious hostility.
Trump has also indicated he believes the entire Black Lives Matter movement lacks legitimate policy grievances. He alluded to these views in an interview with The New York Times Magazine where he described Ferguson, Missouri, as one of the most dangerous places in America. The small St. Louis suburb is not even in the top 20 highest-crime municipalities in the country.
He called supporters who beat up a homeless Latino man “passionate”
Trump’s racial incitement has already inspired hate crimes. Two brothers arrested in Boston in August 2015 for beating up a homeless Latino man cited Trump’s anti-immigrant message when explaining why they did it.
“Donald Trump was right ― all these illegals need to be deported,” one of the men reportedly told police officers.
Trump did not even bother to distance himself from them. Instead, he suggested that the men were well-intentioned and had simply gotten carried away. “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”
He stereotyped Jews and shared an anti-Semitic image created by white supremacists
When Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition last December, he tried to relate to the crowd by invoking the stereotype of Jews as talented and cunning businesspeople.
“I’m a negotiator, like you folks,” Trump told the crowd, touting his 1987 book Trump: The Art of the Deal. “Is there anyone who doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room?” Trump said. “Perhaps more than any room I’ve spoken to.”
Nor was that the most offensive thing Trump told his Jewish audience. He implied that he had little chance of earning the Jewish Republican group’s support, because his fealty could not be bought with campaign donations.
“You’re not going to support me, because I don’t want your money,” he said. “You want to control your own politician.”
Ironically, Trump has many close Jewish family members. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism in 2009 before marrying the real estate mogul Jared Kushner. Trump and Kushner raise their three children in an observant Jewish home.
In July, Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic image that featured a photo of Hillary Clinton over a backdrop of $100 bills with a six-pointed star next to her face and the label “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”
“Crooked Hillary – – Makes History!” Trump wrote in the tweet
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HUFFPOST
The religious symbol was co-opted by the Nazis during World War II when they forced Jews to sew it onto their clothing. Using the symbol over a pile of money is blatantly anti-Semitic and re-enforces hateful stereotypes of Jewish greed.
“The sheriff’s badge ― which is available under Microsoft’s ‘shapes’ ― fit with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it,” he said in a statement.
Mic, however, discovered that the image was actually created by white supremacists and had appeared on a neo-Nazi forum more than a week before Trump shared it. Additionally, a watermark on the image led to a Twitter account that regularly tweeted racist and sexist political memes.
He treats African-American supporters as tokens to dispel the idea he is racist
At a campaign appearance in California in June, Trump boasted that he had a black supporter in the crowd, saying, “Look at my African-American over here.”
“Look at him,” Trump continued. “Are you the greatest?”
Trump went on to imply that the media conceals his popularity among black voters by not covering the crowd more attentively.
“We have tremendous African-American support,” he said. “The reason is I’m going to bring jobs back to our country.” Ultimately, Trump won just 8 percent of the African-American vote, according to the NBC News exit poll.
It may not be surprising that Trump brought so much racial animus into the 2016 election cycle, given his family history. His father, Fred Trump, was a target of folk singer Woody Guthrie’s lyrics after Guthrie lived for two years in a building owned by Trump père: “I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts.”
And last fall, a news report from 1927 surfaced on the site Boing Boing, revealing that Fred Trump was arrested that year following a KKK riot in Queens. It’s not clear exactly what the elder Trump was doing there or what role he may have played in the riot.
To affirm that vicious race-based violence is ‘not who we are’ is to erase our very recent, collective past. By JOSHUA ZEITZ August 13, 2017
“These people are not from here,” Rep. Thomas Garrett affirmed in the wake of an American Nazi and Klan rally that descended into smoke and violence in his Virginia congressional district on Saturday. “It blows my mind that this many racist bigots actually exist in this country.” White supremacists, he continued, do not reflect “who we are as Americans.”
It’s a little surprising that Garrett is surprised. Even as he spoke, a photograph circulated of the congressman meeting recently with Jason Kessler, a white supremacist from Charlottesville who organized the rally. The purpose of the meeting, Garrett’s office insisted, was unrelated to yesterday’s rally; the two men discussed a range of issues, including President Donald Trump’s anti-terrorism and immigration restriction initiatives.
To be fair, Garrett might not perceive the tight spectrum that runs between between racialist policies and white supremacist violence. He may also genuinely believe that aggrieved white men marching in lock step by torchlight do not reflect “who we are as Americans.” Indeed, many public figures on both the left and right—people like Sally Yates, Tim Kaine and Ana Navarro, whose anti-racist and anti-fascist credentials are unimpeachable—echoed this well-meaning sentiment.
But as the historian and New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb observed, “The biggest indictment of the way we teach American history is that people can look at #Charlottesville and say ‘This is not who we are.’” It is part of the myth of American Exceptionalism that blood and soil movements like Nazism are foreign to the United States—that jackbooted fascism of the variety that infects democratic institutions is an invasive weed that can be easily plucked out of our national garden.
To affirm that this is not who we are, one has to erase the history of American race relations from our very recent, collective past.
***
Politicians and pundits often invoke the idea of American Exceptionalism with little understanding of its origins. A woolly concept with roots that extend back to the era of colonial settlement, it views the United States as somehow immune from the forces of history. The term assumed prominence in the middle part of the 20th century, as social scientists working in the aftermath of two world wars attempted to understand why endemic social, economic and political divisions that drove a century of combat, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Europe were seemingly non-operative in the United States. Was it because America lacked a feudal past? Because it was a land with greater material bounty? Was it the leveling influence of the frontier that made us different?
The entire debate was an exercise in national innocence. In retrospect, it’s remarkable that some of the country’s best minds even stopped to ponder the question. To believe that the United States had been immune to the forces that produced blood-and-soil fascism, they had to write off a great deal of recent history.
By a conservative estimate, between 1890 and 1917 white Southerners lynched roughly three black people each week. “Back in those days, to kill a Negro was nothing,” a black man from Mississippi later recalled. “It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake.”
Many of these murders took place under cover of darkness, but many didn’t. So-called spectacle lynchings—like the execution of Sam Hose, who was burned alive by a large white mob in Georgia in 1898, or Luther Holdbert and his wife, whose fingers were chopped off one-by-one, and whose eyes were torn from their sockets in front of an admiring crowd of one thousand of their white neighbors before their death—were premeditated and well-attended acts of public amusement. They were announced in advance by newspaper advertisement. Day laborers and middle-class professionals traveled by specially chartered trains just to participate or bear witness.
“Some ladies were present,” a newspaper observed of a typical lynching in Mississippi in 1909. “A few were nursing infants who tugged at the mother’s breasts, while the mother kept her eyes on the gallows. She didn’t want to lose any part of the program she had come miles to see, and to tell the neighbors at home.”
This wasn’t just a story of Southern terror. It’s also the story of race riots that befell over three dozen cities, north and south, in 1919, usually triggered by organized white mob violence against black citizens, some of them fresh from military service in World War I and still donning uniforms.
In the same way that mid-century scholars ignored the homespun violence so prevalent in their recent history, today, well-meaning people on the left and right have glossed over resurgent American tendencies on display yesterday in Charlottesville. The pathetic specter of suburban white men donning camouflage uniforms and bearing long guns and clubs may conjure images of Berlin in 1932, but it should also invoke memories of the United States in the 1920s.
During the 1920s, roughly 5 million men, and 500,000 women, were at one time dues-paying members of the second Ku Klux Klan, an informal fraternal organization that also functioned in many communities as an extralegal citizens’ militia. Though many of its local chapters bore closer resemblance to the American Legion than to the shadowy band of vigilantes who terrorized the Southern countryside a half-century before, others were unusually violent—particularly the Texas Klan, headed by Hiram Evans, a former Dallas dentist with a burning hatred of the organization’s usual roster of victims: Jews, Catholics and African Americans. As early as 1921, a damning expose in the New YorkWorld chronicled a nationwide KKKterror campaign that included four murders, 41 beatings and 27 tar-and-feather parties.
The second Ku Klux Klan drew many—perhaps most—of its members from cities and metropolitan areas. Its rosters included a fairly even mix of small businessmen, professionals and manual workers. While all Klansmen were white Protestants, many attended mainline churches. Unlike the original Klan, which was a Southern phenomenon, the new organization drew from a cross-section of white Protestant America and was especially influential in Midwestern states like Indiana.
Like their predecessors of the 1860s, Klansmen were primarily concerned about maintaining white Protestant supremacy, but they also fashioned themselves as great moralists, often calling for more vigorous enforcement of Prohibition laws. In some cases, they stepped in to fill the void left by local police, as when they conducted highly publicized raids on private stills in Oklahoma and “arrested” 140 violators of anti-liquor laws.
Above all, they feared the corrosive effects of modern culture on traditional family values. An apparent rise in illicit sex and marital infidelity drove the Klan to undertake a bizarre, often sadistic, campaign of vigilante justice against men and women who most conspicuously flouted 19th-century social conventions. In Texas, Klansmen beat a man from Timpson who had separated from his wife and a lawyer from Houston who “annoyed” local girls. In Tenaha, they stripped, flogged and tarred and feathered a woman who stood accused of remarrying before filing for a proper divorce. In Grove Creek, Klan riders broke into the home of a recently divorced woman who was convalescing from an illness; they dragged her from bed, chopped off her hair and beat her male visitor senseless with a flail.
Naturally, the Klan particularly reviled “the revolting spectacle of a white woman clinging in the arms of a colored man.” But more pedestrian violations of Victorian propriety also vexed members of the order. In Evansville, Indiana, William Wilson, the teenaged son of the local Democratic congressman, remembered that Klan riders ruthlessly patrolled back roads in search of teenagers embroiled in petting parties or improper embraces. Armed with their National Horse Thief Detective Association badges—emblems of a 19th-century vigilante organization—the KKK “entered homes without search warrants” and “flogged errant husbands and wives. They tarred and feathered drunks. They caught couples in parked cars.” In an almost pornographic ceremony that was repeated dozens if not hundreds of times, Klan members hauled “fallen women” to remote locations, stripped them naked and flogged them.
Above all, the Klan’s advocacy of “100 percent Americanism,” racial purity and moral order were different but compatible parts of the same crusade against the most unsettling features of modern culture and society. At a parade in Texarkana, Arkansas, Klansmen carried various signs that spoke to the unity of the organization’s otherwise diverse interests:
LAW AND ORDER MUST PREVAIL.
COHABITATION BETWEEN WHITES AND BLACKS MUST STOP
BOOTLEGGERS, PIMPS, HANGERS-ON, GET RIGHT OR GET OUT.
WIFE-BEATERS, FAMILY-DESERTERS, HOME-WRECKERS, WE HAVE NO ROOM FOR YOU
LAW VIOLATORS, WE ARE WATCHING YOU. BEWARE.
GO JOY RIDING WITH YOUR OWN WIFE.
WE STAND FOR OLD GLORY AND 100% AMERICANISM
The ugliness on display in Charlottesville in 2017 is not foreign to American tradition. Neither are the interconnected grievances of would-be militiamen who entangle their racial resentments with morbid fears of same-sex marriage and transgender bathroom laws. They’re an absolutely American story. They’re part of who we’ve always been.
***
Violence in the service of preserving white Protestant supremacy is woven firmly into the fabric of our national history. In this sense, the violence in Charlottesville is an entirely American phenomenon. So is thesteady unraveling of democratic norms, civilities and institutions—the rise of fake news, the flagrant mendacity of White House spokespeople, political attacks on public education and universities, degradation of civic discourse and parliamentary procedure—that concerns so many opponents of the Trump administration. These phenomena, too, are of a piece with what happened yesterday in Virginia. In our not-so-distant past, the United States has willingly torched its democratic traditions in the service of enforcing white supremacy.
In Mississippi in the 1950s—the “Magnolia Jungle,” as a liberal newspaperman called it at the time—democracy was effectively non-operational. It’s not just the story of Emmett Till, a young black boy from Illinois, who, while visiting relatives, was brutally lynched. It’s the story of the White Citizens’ Councils, which claimed over 25,000 middle-class businessmen and professionals as members. Preferring methods of non-violent coercion, they besieged civil rights activists, black parents who attempted to enroll their children in all-white schools, and a small number of white clergymen and educators who opposed Jim Crow. Targets suddenly found their mortgages or business loans called in, insurance policies canceled, teaching jobs revoked.
For many white Mississippians, preserving racial privilege took precedent over enforcing democracy. A grand jury in Jones County demanded that the state screen library books to weed out those with subversive, pro-civil rights messages. The state chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution demanded censorship of school curricula and materials. The Citizens’ Council worked actively to ban an educational film, The High Wall, that the Anti-Defamation League had produced. (The film didn’t concern race relations, strictly speaking; it highlighted prejudice against a white ethnic family in a predominately Protestant town. No matter: It was dangerous enough.)
White Mississippians also walled themselves off from real news. When Thurgood Marshall appeared on the Today Show in September 1955, the local NBC affiliate pulled the plug in mid-interview. The episode established a powerful precedent. In the coming years, national television news casts frequently went dark. “Sorry, Cable Trouble,” became a familiar screen filler.
Decades before Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Breitbart were accused as functioning as state media outlets for the Trump administration, the Hederman brothers—Robert and Thomas—operated the only two statewide daily newspapers in Mississippi. With a combined circulation of 90,000—formidable given the place and time—their outlets were heavy on white grievance and light on fact. “To read the Hederman press day after day,” wrote one contemporary, “is to understand what the people of the state believe and are prepared to defend.”
It wasn’t just Mississippi that traded civilization for white supremacy. In Virginia, the scene of Saturday’s riot, the legislature repealed the state’s mandatory school law in 1959 rather than comply with court-ordered de-segregation. Several jurisdictions, including Norfolk, Charlottesville, Warren County and Prince Edward County shuttered their elementary and high schools and handed out vouchers that white parents could use at private institutions. These private subsidies helped spur the rapid growth of segregated Christian schools that became a training ground for the newly awakened Religious Right.
***
If it’s historically inaccurate to claim this is not who we are, or who we have been, it’s essential to believe that this is not who we should be.
The white supremacy on display in Charlottesville is not a betrayal of American history. It is a return to our darker past. It’s crudely revanchist, it threatens the very core of our democracy and for the first time in a long time, it enjoys safe harbor and nurture in the highest corridors of power.
After the attack, our quick-thumbed president, never shy about denouncing enemies both real and imagined, couldn’t bring himself to denounce white supremacy.Couldn’t bring himself to denounce the Klan. Couldn’t even be moved to denounce Nazis.On Sunday, the White House released a statement denouncing white supremacists, but Trump himself still remains silent. He knows his base. Andas long as Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Julia Hahn, and Sebastian Gorka—all of whom have actively promoted and endorsed racialist ideology and policies—work in the West Wing, this is not a fringe movement. It is mainstream. It represents the governing philosophy of the governing party—the Republican party.
The country, and especially the GOP—which controls 34 governorships and majorities in both houses of Congress—stands at a crossroads. One road leads forward, and the other winds backward. We can return to being the kind of country we were in 1925 or 1955—the kind of country that knowingly sacrificed democratic norms and institutions to enforce white supremacy, often through violence and force—or we can join other advanced, civilized nationsin embracing the future. Many of these nations, particularly in Europe, are also contending with the rise of right-wing populist movements. But they are deeply aware of their past—a past that includes ethnic cleansing, genocide, and race laws—and arguably better positioned to deal with their present.
Part of making an informed decision is understanding our history.
R&R - Reachout and Rebuild 