Tag: bigots

White Supremacists, foreign and domestic, are a terrorist threat…

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The Fake President and his governing Republican Party don’t think so!


Click to enlarge – This was in Georgia, 2018

Rep. Max Rose (D-N.Y.) and former FBI agent Ali Soufan warned on Tuesday that U.S. law enforcement has not kept pace with the threat posed by international white supremacist extremism in an op-ed published in The New York Times.

The two claimed that the enemy the United States currently faces is white supremacy and that these kinds of groups are organizing in ways similar to jihadist organizations in the past…

Soufan and Rose, a U.S. Army veteran, cited global organizations such as the American militant group The Base, the Scandinavia-based Nordic Resistance Movement and the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, all of which have allegedly threatened or targeted both men.

Rose and Soufan said these groups are interconnected, prompting individuals in different countries — such as the Australian man accused of killing 51 people at two New Zealand mosques last year — to commit acts of violence…

The problem, the lawmaker and former FBI agent asserted, is that the U.S. government has yet to designate these groups as foreign terrorist organizations, thus prohibiting law enforcement’s efforts to curb the threat the groups represent.

“Terrorism is terrorism, however its perpetrators justify it inside their twisted minds. If these peddlers of hate hoped to silence us by attacking us online, they have failed. They’ve only hardened our resolve,” the op-ed concluded.

Not that there’s anything new or surprising about racism in the GOUSA. That includes terrorist acts of violence and murder. The question to be resolved is will the American electorate do anything about it?

SCOTUS says coppers need warrants to track your cellphone — so, Trump just buys locations online

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ICE arrest in Los Angeles

Companies that sell your cellphone location data to marketers are also selling that information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the government body known for detaining children in cages. According to a new report by the Wall Street Journal, ICE and its affiliated organizations at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been using location information for “millions” of cellphones bought from marketers to track down and arrest undocumented immigrants at the US-Mexico border…

Experts told the Journal that these are the “largest known troves of bulk data being deployed by law enforcement in the US.” Venntel, a company that licenses location data and is affiliated with the mobile ad company Gravy Analytics, has received $250,000 in contracts in the past few years from DHS, which operates ICE. Public records show that Venntel has also received a contract from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

“This shows the overlap of immigrant rights and data privacy rights,” Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Recode. “Our society has failed to protect consumers from companies that harvest and monetize their personal information, including their sensitive location data. Now, reportedly, the federal government has purchased access to that data, and is using it to locate and deport immigrants.”

Not that the Fake President’s base of voters cares a rat’s ass about what happens to immigrants. Or, what should be important to everyone – he’s using taxpayer dollar$ to buy location info from the creepy online traders who profit from tracking data lifted from the Web. SCOTUS rulings be damned! Trump’s War on Brown People is much more important to the quasi-fascist tool this Republican administration has become.

Facebook to ban two white nationalist groups

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Megan Jelinger/Anadolu Agency

❝ Facebook will no longer allow Red Ice TV and Affirmative Right to use its platform, following a Guardian report on the continued presence of prominent white nationalist organizations on the site eight months after a promised ban.

A Facebook spokesperson said on Tuesday that the company has now determined that Red Ice TV and Affirmative Right violate its policy against “organized hate”. The ban will include the pages of the Red Ice TV hosts Lana Lokteff and Henrik Palmgren, as well as their internet radio show, Radio3Fourteen…

❝ YouTube banned Red Ice in October for repeated violations of its ban on hate speech.

❝ Facebook has for years failed to proactively police its site for hate groups and white supremacists, despite a longstanding ban on “hate”. As white nationalist terrorist attacks rose around the world, the company maintained a policy distinction between white supremacism and white nationalism until March of this year, when it finally agreed to ban white nationalist content. The company still allows Holocaust denial content, though it says that it works to prevent such content from spreading…

What? Did you think foot-dragging was wholly-owned by the Republican Party. The only part that surprises me is these dilettantes of democracy believe folks angry over backdoor support for bigots will simply forget about them after a while.

AIPAC splits with bigots Trump & Netanyahu, over visit by Omar and Tlaib to Israel

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Two courageous women feared by bigots & fake presidents — Tom Williams

❝ The prominent pro-Israel group American Israel Public Affairs Committee…opposed a move by Israel — and supported by President Donald Trump — to bar Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering the country.

AIPAC, which advocates for a staunch alliance between the US and Israel, has frequently sided with Trump administration policies that have supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, making its opposition especially notable.

Notably conservative, even AIPAC recognizes the bigotry of Trump — some would say unpatriotic use of presidential powers — asking a foreign head of state to deny legislative privileges assigned to elected members of Congress in the course of exercising their responsibilities regardless of party or ideology, religion or color.

Trump couldn’t care less about the traditional dignity and requirements of office. Netanyahu is his lapdog.

That rotten smell in the White House is a racist, our fake president

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❝ It seems maddeningly repetitive to have to return time and again to the fact that Donald Trump is a racist, but it must be done. It must be done because it is a foundational character issue, one that supersedes and informs many others, in much the same way that his sexism and xenophobia does.

❝ On Saturday, Trump tweeted that Representative Elijah Cummings’s district “is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” a “very dangerous & filthy place” and “No human being would want to live there.” Cummings is black, as are most people in his district…

None of this is about crime as a discrete phenomenon, but rather about inextricably linking criminality to blackness. White supremacy isn’t necessarily about rendering white people as superhuman; it is just as often about rendering nonwhite people as subhuman. Either way the hierarchy is established, with whiteness assuming the superior position.

❝ It would be easy to prosecute a case against Trump on policy, but policies are not at the center of the creature. White supremacy, white nationalism and white patriarchy are.

The core of this man is racist in a way that is so fused to his sense of the world that he is incapable of seeing it as racist. It is instinctual for him to attack people of color. It is instinctual for him to denigrate the places they live and the countries to which they trace their heritage.

This commentary by Charles Blow in the NYTimes is detailed, profound, in addressing our fake president’s racism. I shan’t waste time and space trying to convince Trump’s supporters. They must be aware of racist content – and not decrying it, not rejecting the front man for this racist attack on America’s body politic – they are willing to be complicit.

The task is to explain this to that larger, sweeping body politic who wish to move forward from the stink of racist populism that now owns the Republican Party.

Fake President caves on census — stamps his little foot and marches on with predictable executive orders

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Tweedledee and Tweedledumb bookend their master — Nicholas Kamm/AFP

❝ …Trump retreated from his quest to add a question about US citizenship to the 2020 census on Thursday, declaring instead he would ask government agencies to provide records that could determine a head-count of citizens without polling census-takers directly.

The turnaround comes after Trump repeatedly said he would continue fighting to insert the question despite a Supreme Court ruling that dealt a blow to the effort last month. It reflects legal reality intersecting with Trump’s desire to bolster his image as an immigration hard-liner as he moves ahead with his 2020 reelection bid…

❝ In announcing the decision, Trump insisted he would be unrelenting in seeking out citizenship information from alternate sources. He said agencies would be required to provide the Commerce Department with documents and records of citizens and non-citizens, which he said would help provide an accurate picture of US citizenship…“We will leave no stone unturned,” Trump said.

Then, he crawled back under the rock where he sleeps most of the time…