We need to stop acting like Trump isn't pandering to white supremacists

When Trump has a chance to condemn white supremacy, he panders to it instead.

Updated by German Lopez Aug 14, 2017, 9:33am EDT

Jim Watson/AFP via Getty ImagesWhen President Donald Trump is upset with you, he will let you know. This has been a hard rule about Trump to the point it's hard to believe any feud is too petty or too far for him. From Rosie O'Donnell to the family of a dead US military veteran, Trump has been ready to condemn just about everyone who gets in his way.
A couple weeks into his presidency, Trump even bashed the US retailer Nordstrom on Twitter: "My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!" There, he used the power of the White House to attempt to throw a job-creating US company under the bus just because it had let go of his daughter's clothing line.
But when it comes to white supremacists, Trump's statements are uncharacteristically tepid.
After white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Ku Klux Klan descended onto Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend and caused chaos and violence in the small city (leading to at least three deaths), Trump gave a strangely vague response that didn't blame anyone in particular: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides."
Asked to clarify the statement, a White House official doubled down: "The President was condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides. There was violence between protesters and counter protesters today." It was only after a day of criticism that the White House but, crucially, not Trump himself clarified that when he condemned violence and bigotry on "many sides," "of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazis and all extremist groups."
These are groups who literally want to violently rid the country of entire races and ethnic groups (some by genocide, some by forced eviction), and showed up to a small Virginia city to start trouble because it was getting rid of its pro-slavery Confederate monuments. Yet the president of the United States had trouble castigating the specific parties involved, even as other members of his political party from Paul Ryan to Marco Rubio called the problem for what it was: bigotry and white supremacy.
We can never truly say what's in Trump's heart and mind. But there's a pattern here: Time and time again, when Trump has a chance to condemn white supremacists, he panders to them instead. And that pandering is unlike what he does with nearly any other people and groups he dislikes.

Trump has condemned all sorts of people by name in petty feuds

There have been many, many articles written about how no feud is too petty for Trump. The New York Times, for instance, keeps an ongoing count of all the people, places, and things that Trump has insulted on Twitter. As of late July, he had bashed more than 350 people, places, and things.
Of course, Trump doesn't just randomly insult people on Twitter; he often does it with his mouth too.
It's helpful to look at some of the people Trump has bashed over the past few years. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it gives you a pretty good indication of how vast Trump's feuds spread:

• The Khans, the family of a Muslim military veteran who was killed in action
  
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
  
• Alec Baldwin
  
• The cast of Hamilton
  
• Meryl Streep
  
• Rosie O'Donnell
  
• Samuel L. Jackson
  
• Whoopi Goldberg
  
• Mark Cuban
  
• Paulina Vega, former Miss Universe
  
• Anderson Cooper
  
• Joe Scarborough
  
• Megyn Kelly
  
• Nordstrom
  
• Bandon Dunes Golf Resort
  
• Gonzalo Curiel, a US judge who oversaw a Trump University case
  
• James Comey, former FBI director
  
• Barack Obama
  
• Hillary Clinton
  
• John McCain, Republican senator of Arizona
  
• Lindsey Graham, Republican senator of South Carolina
  
• Lisa Murkowski, Republican senator of Alaska
  
• Jeff Sessions, his own attorney general
  
• Opinion polls
  
• The Bias-Free Language Guide
  

The list really could go on and on.
In fact, this is a crucial part to Trump's public persona. That he's so willing to stand up to anyone he sees as a threat is one of the things that made some people like Trump in the first place.
Take, for instance, his position on terrorism. Trump consistently bashed Obama and Clinton for failing to call out, from his view, "radical Islamic terrorism" never mind that there are important national security considerations for not using that phrase. To a lot of Trump supporters, this dog whistle about Muslims spoke to who the real enemy is, and they loved that he was willing to call it out even if it wasn't "politically correct."
So when there's an attack that may have been caused by a Muslim perpetrator, Trump quickly jumps on Twitter to declare it as terrorism even before the authorities have confirmed anything and will use it to push his policies, such as his travel ban.

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A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in Paris. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S.
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Yet when it comes to white supremacists, Trump takes a very different approach.

Trump has repeatedly pandered to white supremacists

It's not just Trump's comments on Saturday that were tepid. On the campaign trail, Trump was just as vague when it came to condemning some of the white nationalists and other extremists who had come to endorse him.
When he appeared on CNN's State of the Union in February last year, host Jake Tapper gave him what should be a pretty easy task: condemn the KKK. Trump dodged.
Here's the exchange, which is really worth reading in full to see just how evasive Trump is when asked to, out of all things, condemn a KKK grand wizard:

TAPPER: I want to ask you about the Anti-Defamation League, which this week called on you to publicly condemn unequivocally the racism of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, who recently said that voting against you at this point would be treason to your heritage. Will you unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that you don't want his vote or that of other white supremacists in this election?
TRUMP: Well, just so you understand, I don't know anything about David Duke, okay? I don't know anything about what you're even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So I don't know. I mean, I don't know. Did he endorse me? Or what's going on? Because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists. So you're asking me a question that I'm supposed to be talking about people that I know nothing about.
TAPPER: I guess the question from the Anti-Defamation League is even if you don't know about their endorsement, there are these groups and individuals endorsing you. Would you just say unequivocally you condemn them and you don't want their support?
TRUMP: Well, I have to look at the group. I mean, I don't know what group you're talking about. You wouldn't want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about. I'd have to look. If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them and certainly I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong. You may have groups in there that are totally fine and it would be very unfair. So give me a list of the groups and I'll let you know.
TAPPER: Okay. I'm just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here, but
TRUMP: Honestly, I don't know David Duke. I don't believe I've ever met him. I'm pretty sure I didn't meet him. And I just don't know anything about him.

For the record, Trump had, in the past, known plenty about David Duke. When Trump declined to run for president in 2000 as a member of the Reform Party, he said that he didn't want to be associated with Duke, who had supported Pat Buchanan's nomination for the Reform Party. Trump at the time called Duke "a bigot, a racist, a problem." This only seemed to change once he began running for president in 2015.
Trump did eventually disassociate himself with Duke a few days after the Tapper interview, when he finally said on MSNBC's Morning Joe, "David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years." He added, "I disavowed him. I disavowed the KKK." He later blamed his initial refusal to do so on Tapper's show on a faulty earpiece, which doesn't make much sense if you look at the transcript.
But even how Trump eventually rebuked Duke was uncharacteristic. When Trump finds a target, he usually uses evocative language to criticize them such as when he suggestedthat Rosie O'Donnell is a "fat pig" at a Republican debate, and when he nicknamed his Republican primary opponents "Little Marco" and "Lyin Ted." With white supremacists, he used nearly passive language.
The same issue would pop up later in the year, when Trump was elected and reporters once again asked him if he accepted the support of white nationalists. Trump used his now typical passive language for white supremacists, saying, "I don't want to energize the group, and I disavow the group."
Then came Saturday, when Trump, instead of blaming the chaos in Charlottesville on white supremacists, blamed "many sides." It was only after repeated criticism that the White House but, again, not Trump himself clarified the statement to mention "extremist groups."
Once again, the pattern repeated itself: Trump did some pandering to racists, only for him or his staff to vaguely and tepidly clarify what he was saying but only after it was too late.

White supremacists love Trump

Here's the thing: It's not just Trump's critics who see what Trump is doing as pandering. White supremacists see it this way too, and they love Trump for it.
Shortly after his remarks on Saturday, the white supremacist publication, the Daily Stormer, praised Trump:

Trump comments were good. He didn't attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us.
He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate… on both sides!
So he implied the antifa are haters.
There was virtually no counter-signaling of us at all.
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.

During the campaign trail, we saw similar messaging from white supremacists. As Sarah Posner and David Neiwert reported at Mother Jones, what the media largely treated as gaffes Trump retweeting white nationalists, Trump describing Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and criminals were to white supremacists real signals approving of their racist causes. One white supremacist wrote, "Our Glorious Leader and ULTIMATE SAVIOR has gone full-wink-wink-wink to his most aggressive supporters."
Some of them even argued that Trump has softened the greater public to their racist messaging. "The success of the Trump campaign just proves that our views resonate with millions," said Rachel Pendergraft, a national organizer for the Knights Party, which succeeded David Duke's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. "They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will."
That emboldening is what we saw in Charlottesville over the weekend. When asked to explain the Charlottesville protests, David Duke argued, "We are determined to take our country back," he said at the protests, describing them as a "turning point." "We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That's what we believed in. That's why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he's going to take our country back." (Although he did criticize some of Trump's remarks about Charlottesville later on.)
More than anything, this is the clearest evidence of Trump's pandering: White supremacists themselves interpret his statements favorably. They feel emboldened. And as long as Trump keeps refusing to clearly and unequivocally condemn their racist cause, that will continue.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Trump. Reverend Traci Blackmon, your response?
REV. TRACI BLACKMON: Amy, thank you for the opportunity, because I think it's important that we not leave this moment without contextualizing what happened in Charlottesville in a larger narrative, that has been promoted by this current administration. Some of Donald Trump's remarks I appreciatethe fact that he says it's been going on a long time in this country. Racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia has been going on in this country a long time. But what is happening under this current administration is permission to hate. The hateful rhetoric of our current administration, not starting with Donald Trump, but starting with the eight years of the GOP laying a groundwork for it to be permissible to denigrate and to hate people based on their targeting of a black president, a president that they didn't like before any decisions were made, a president that they met together against on the day of inauguration. So I'm not making this about the personhood of Barack Obama. I'm making this about white supremacy in this country. That laid a groundwork for the election of someone who ran, basically, on a hateful agenda. And the hateful remarks, the rhetoric that this president speaks and tweets, has created an environment where those who hate have permission to be safe in public spaces.
The thing that troubled me the most about my encounters this weekend was the factI'm from Birmingham, Alabama. I was raised there. I've seen Klan rallies before. The very last Klan rally that I witnessed in person, I was five years old, standing on a sidewalk watching the Klan rally go down the main street of Birmingham, Alabama, in the city. I don't remember my fear. I remember my puzzlement in that moment. And emblazoned in my memory are those hooded sheets that they wore, as some wereroad horses and some carried crosses and some carried flags. What sticks out for me is that we are now in a country and in a time where I witnessed masses of white supremacists walking down the main streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, emboldened enough to take the sheets off. These white people were wearing button-downs and polos and baseball caps. And I began to weep, knowing that it was quite possible that some of the people who were marching with these torches, shouting "Blood and soil!" shouting "You will not replace us!"a ludicrous notion of white fear that has been strengthened and emboldened by an administration that is filled with hateful rhetoric
AMY GOODMAN: We just
REV. TRACI BLACKMON: And we now have a president who will not even to declare, will not even denounce white supremacy right out. It is unconscionable.
AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds. Reverend Cornel West?
CORNEL WEST: I'll just say that it's very clear that Brother Donald Trump has neofascist sensibilities. His failure to condemn white supremacy and domestic terrorism means that he's complicitous in effecting consequence. It was very important to keep in mind that even under Barack Obama, as brilliant as he was, it was still the rule of big money, massive militarism. The racism coming at him was vicious, but the inequality, the inability to speak to the issues of class
AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.
CORNEL WEST: makes it easier for right-wing populism, neofascism to flow. We've got to be critical of the system.

Charlottesville:
A gun in his face, but he got the photo
By Greg Palast


(Charlottesville) Four neo-Nazis beat black school teacher Deandre Harris with iron bars and lumber. ©Zach D Roberts 2017



Don't look away. Four white neo-Nazis are beating a Black man, crawling on the ground, with their metal poles and a yellow hunk of lumber. The beating continues there's blood on the pavement.

Our photographer, Zach D. Roberts, continues to shoot even as a white militant raises a 9mm pistol to his face.

Zach got a shot of the gun and gunman, too. Luckily, the gunman didn't shoot back.
One photo has gone viral internationally. These others we bring you here because they must be seen. Including, for the first time, the gunman.

Welcome to Charlottesville, USA. Trump's America, month eight.

---

The young victim is Deandre Harris, a special education teacher in Charlottesville.
According to the President, the violence was perpetrated on "many sides." The only sides I see are the beaters and the beaten; Deandre on the ground with the alt-Right storm troopers with weapons.

Zach D. Roberts is an investigative photojournalist who has been with the Palast investigations team for eleven years.

Here is Zach's report. Deandre Harris, the school teacher, was walking down the street with friends, trading taunts with the white supremacist demonstrators.

Harris' jibes were hardly fighting words. "Go home! Leave town!" Locals like Harris resented the jack-ass invasion.

That's when fists flew and Harris was slammed by one of the white guys straight into a parking lot barrier so hard the yellow wooden arm broke.

Now Deandre fell to the ground, "alone, surrounded by all these white guysand they started beating him with the poles that almost all the white supremacists were carrying."

In the photos, you can see one white guy picking up the yellow barrier arm and raising the three foot hunk of lumber high over his head before he brings it down on Deandrewho is being kicked by another white man's boots while two others bring down metal rods on the prone man.

And no, that's not a cop on the left in the photothat's a neo-Nazi in full riot gear. (Where were the cops? Good question: this parking garage is next to the Charlottesville Police Station.)

Deandre was saved when some gutsy young Black menwith no weaponsran into the underground garage and the white posse scattered.

Except for one. The gunman.


He pulled out what looks to be a 9mm pistol, maybe a Glock semi-automatic, and positioned himself to fire on the rescue squad. But then he heard the click of Zach's camera, just three feet away, and realized he was getting photographed.
Simultaneously, Zach realized he'd left his bullet-proof vest in his car. (I'll have that discussion with him later.)

In this strange stand-off, the camera proved mightier than the bullet. In his tiny little brain, the would-be shooter figured it would be wiser to quickly conceal the weapon and flee.

Deandre "ran into the garage's staircase and collapsed bleeding profusely from the face." Zach waited with him and his protectors for half an hour but no ambulance arrived for him or the other people who were injured.

So, that's the news from Trump's USA. Nazis marching in the street, nuclear war with Korea, the "military option" for Venezuela. And it's only Monday.

'....Springtime for Hitler and Germany....' Springtime for the worst of the worst of racial and ethnic hatred, Nazism, White Nationalism, extreme-Right coming right out of the Prezidont's mouth!!! It is no surprise to me that he felt this way, but that he openly stated it clearly yesterday is amazing and I can only hope it becomes his undoing. The man belongs in prison, not in the White House! He is now aiding and abetting racism, hate, even the criminal activity including murder that goes along with that hate - from the highest office of the US [outside of the secret government offices]. Digusting!!!! Anyone who still support Trumpf for whatever reason - shame on you - your hands and ethics are as sick as his. Trump and his father have a LONG history of hating non-whites and being on the ultra-right [not that that is new in US politics]. To name but one thing Trump has done in his LONG history against civil and equal rights for non WASPs was when he placed a full page ad in the NYT against the 'Central Park Five' calling them monsters and calling for their being executed...when it turned out they were all completely innocent! Of course his birtherism was just another anti-non-white act. His entire raison d'etre is to undo everything Obama did because Obama was non-white. Again, disgusting...this man is a racist and a neo-Nazi and must be impeached and imprisoned on these or other crimes [plenty to choose from!]. I think [I hope] he just hung himself last night with what he said....though it was clear he long thought and believed what he clearly said! If it was not before, it should now be clear why Bannon and Gorka are sitting in the WH as 'advisors', as they too are professional racists and neo-Nazis. I hope this destroys the Republican Party as well as Trump...then we'll only have the Democratic Party to destroy and maybe we can then defeat the secret government and get our Country back. What a sick ship of state! What a reprehensible blob of protoplasmic hate sits in the Oval Office! This person is a fascist in the classic sense!
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Quote:Trump's Long History of Racism

[FONT=&amp]Of course his response to Charlottesville was late and insufficient this is who he is[/FONT]

Donald Trump and his father, Fred, were sued in 1973 for systematically discriminating against black people in housing rentals. The Trumps eventually settled on terms that were regarded as a victory for the government. Barton Silverman/The New York Times/Redux

[FONT=&amp]By Jesse Berney[/FONT]
11 hours ago[URL="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trumps-long-history-of-racism-w497876"]
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UPDATE: Trump gave a press conference Tuesday during which he essentially unsaid all the good things he asserted in his speech Monday. While he claimed he still condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists, he also said there were "many fine people" protesting alongside the people carrying swastika flags and shields bearing racist symbols. He expressed clearly his opposition to taking down Confederate monuments. He once again blamed both sides equally for the violence that broke out. He confirmed his complete inability to understand what systemic racism is and his own role in perpetuating it.
The moment that struck me in Trump's make-up speech Monday afternoon wasn't when he declared racism "evil" or finally name-checked the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. It was his remark about the flag. "No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws," he said. "We all salute the same great flag."


[URL="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-trumps-condemnation-of-neo-nazis-has-been-so-underwhelming-w497641"]
[/URL]Why Trump's Condemnation of Neo-Nazis Has Been So Underwhelming Trump has surrounded himself with people who've espoused racism or have ties to white nationalist groups

Maybe Trump should have watched the news a little more closely this weekend. If he had, he might have seen large numbers of Americans carrying and saluting flags that weren't the Stars and Stripes. Confederate flags, obscure racist insignia and straight-up swastikas were all on display.
The racists and Nazis and white supremacists of all stripes who carried that flag were heartened by Trump's failure to denounce them or their ideology in the immediate aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer. And his tepid, reluctant, TelePrompTer-fed denunciation of racism days later appears to have done little to discourage their belief that he supports them in the deepest, darkest, most wizened recesses of his heart.
Though it's technically true that no one but Donald Trump knows what's in Donald Trump's heart, he's given us some pretty good clues. He likely thinks swastika-toting Nazis and hood-wearing KKK members are bad guys those are the easy targets everyone knows we're supposed to denounce but the entitled, clean-cut, polo-wearing, torch-bearing racists chanting about how they won't be replaced? Those are the people who put him into office. They're his people. And they know he's their leader because they know Donald Trump is, like they are, racist.
Oh, they wouldn't put it that way. They think the real racism is the affirmative action that gives people of color a chance in a world that hands people who look like me privilege from birth. They believe the real racists are the ones who declare black lives matter. ("What, ours don't?") But like the president they cheer, they're racist as hell.
You don't even have to look into Trump's heart to see his racism. You only have to look at all the things he's done and said over the years from the early Seventies, when he settled with the Justice Department over accusations of housing discrimination, to Monday, when just hours after his speech news broke he is considering pardoning anti-immigrant sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Arpaio was also Trump's partner in crime in pushing the birther conspiracy that promulgated the ugly lie our first black president was born in Kenya. We've conveniently forgotten (if not forgiven) how Trump spent years years! pushing a conspiracy based on nothing more than the assumption that a black man with a funny name couldn't possibly be a genuine American, not like we are.
Trump also has a weird obsession with the superiority of his own genes in the face of all evidence to the contrary. That may explain why racism so often seems like his default setting, like the time he took out a full-page ad demanding the execution of five kids of color accused of raping a jogger in Central Park. Even in 2016, years after they were proven innocent, Trump stood by his actions.
Last year was when Trump put his racism on full display for the country to see. From launching his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, to going to war with the parents of a Muslim soldier killed in battle, to encouraging violence against minority protesters at his rally, to promising to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, he built a presidential campaign on racial resentment and fear. Those were deliberate choices he made. His campaign stoked white entitlement and outrage at every turn, sending out dog whistles and sometimes glaring billboards that this was the campaign for angry white people.

President Donald Trump called protestors attacking white supremacists "alt-left."He didn't improve as president. There was no pivot. Just weeks ago, he gave an ugly speech to a group of police officers during which he described gang violence in creepy, almost loving detail in a ham-handed attempt to smear immigrants as violent criminals. He started a commission to perpetuate the myth of rampant voter fraud part of a long-running conservative scheme to deny black people and others their right to vote.
And just hours after he grudgingly gave his speech condemning racism in the wake of enormous public pressure, Trump retweeted Jack Posobiec, a prominent alt-right figure who's been featured on the racist conspiracy site Infowars and who brought a sign reading "RAPE MELANIA" to a protest to frame anti-Trump activists.
The same day Trump called racism "evil," he mollified his base of racists by promoting a racist on his huge platform. These are not the actions of a man who is genuinely concerned about racism.
His speech wasn't enough. It's not just that it came three days too late, or that he read it with all the conviction of a hostage video. If Donald Trump wants to say anything meaningful about racism, he needs to acknowledge his own complicity. He has to admit to his past sins, and commit to a future of activism from the most powerful perch in the world to fight racism in all its forms. And I'm not holding my breath for that.
Racism isn't limited to the thugs marching in Charlottesville. It pervades American culture like humidity in the D.C. summer air. You don't get to say guys in hoods are bad and declare the job done. For white people, fighting racism (and all bigotry) must be a constant effort that includes self-reflection.
Self-reflection isn't Trump's strong point. He may well believe it when he says he's the least racist person in the world. But we don't need to read his mind to know the truth. He has built a legacy of race-baiting throughout his career from his apartment buildings in the outer boroughs right into the White House.

[FONT=&amp]The president of the United States is now a neo-Nazi sympathiser


[FONT=&amp]Richard Wolffe[/FONT]


[FONT=&amp]Donald Trump's press conference was a grotesque display of empathy for violent racists. At least it united the Republicans in disgust at their president
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Sadly for Trump, there is only one side to the political reaction to his comments: sheer disgust.' Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

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[FONT=&amp]Wednesday 16 August 2017 03.37 BSTFirst published on Wednesday 16 August 2017 03.28 BST[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]D[/FONT]onald Trump the neo-Nazi sympathizer has achieved what Donald Trumpthe president has singularly failed to do: unite the nation.
An immensely fractured country riven by race, class, culture and politics finds itself transfixed by one grotesque display of empathy for violent racists. These are the same violent racists whom White House aides previously called, in remarks that Trump read out loudly and very carefully: "criminals and thugs."
But that was so Monday. One short day later, the leader of the nation that daily proclaims its commitment to liberty and justice for all declared there were "very fine people" in Charlottesville, who simply joined a neo-Nazi rally to protest about a statue.
"You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest, and very legally protest because I don't know if you know, they had a permit," Trump helpfully explained to the astonished press corps at Trump Tower. "The other group didn't have a permit. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story."
Sadly for Trump, there is only one side to the political reaction to his comments: sheer disgust. As an apologist for racist protestors even though they obtained a precious permit Trump has magically created a sense of spine in his own Republican party.

This is something of a biological miracle because people like Marco Rubio, his vanquished former rival the man he used to deride as little Marco was previously classified by entomologists as an invertebrate.
"Mr President, you can't allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame. They support idea which cost nation & world so much pain," tweeted the Florida senator. "The #WhiteSupremacy groups will see being assigned only 50% of blame as a win. We can not allow this old evil to be resurrected."

10h
[URL="https://twitter.com/marcorubio"]Marco Rubio
@marcorubio[/URL]

The organizers of events which inspired & led to #charlottesvilleterroristattack are 100% to blame for a number of reasons. 1/6

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[URL="https://twitter.com/marcorubio"]Marco Rubio
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Mr. President,you can't allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame.They support idea which cost nation & world so much pain 5/6
11:53 PM - Aug 15, 2017

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Even in the abbreviated hashtag world of tweets, this counts for something. No doubt, Rubio will return to his spineless state when the next vote comes around. No doubt, he and his fellow Republicans in Washington will later excuse the abuse of a nation as the drunken talk of an otherwise good-hearted man.
But at this moment of testing, there is no excuse for standing on the sidelines in silence. Those who speak out deserve some praise for doing the right thing, if only to remember what the right thing looks like next month, when Congress returns.
So mazeltov to Paul Ryan for siding against the anti-Semites like this: "We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity."

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We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.
12:01 AM - Aug 16, 2017

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Of course this country also stands for the statues of Confederate generals. In fact, those statues were themselves erected in a concerted effort to resurrect the old evil that Rubio describes.
There's a reason why so many of them rose up in the 1920s, a generation or more after the Civil War. This was the era when the KKK was reborn, thanks in no small part to the new media of its day: specifically, the moving picture known as The Birth of a Nation.

Those statues were the larger-than-life resurrection of the dead and defeated Confederacy at a time when lynchings were the strange fruit of the south, and the civil rights struggle was led by a relatively new group known as the NAACP.
Those Confederate statues had nothing to do with the statues erected to commemorate the slave-owning founding fathers, as Trump argued on Tuesday.

"So this week it's Robert E Lee," complained Trump. "I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"
"You're changing history," he added. "You're changing culture."

Never mind that these statues themselves were an effort to change history and change culture. Never mind that the culture they represent was an abomination on America's history and a moral affront to the values enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
There is no finer expression of the white supremacist mindset than this kind of cultural defense. The so-called citizens' councils of the 1950s also argued they were just trying to protect their culture from sliding down the slippery slope of civil rights, integrated schools, voting rights and economic opportunity for minorities.
What drives Donald Trump to such extremes? Yes, we know he has a long history of racism: from his belief in the guilt of the Central Park Five to his announcement speech riff about Mexican immigrants as rapists. Yes, we know Ivana Trump said he kept a copy of Hitler's speeches by his bedside. [FONT=&amp]
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How Donald Trump emboldened the US far right But it would be an omission to leave out the driving force of his candidacy and his presidency: his visceral hatred of Barack Obama. Trump has no clear ideology and no clear purpose to his presidency, other than his obsession with overturning everything Obama stood for. His presidential campaign began with a racist lie about Obama's birth certificate; his presidency continues to smolder with resentment about the enduring life of Obamacare.
As they say on Scandal, and in too many American homes for too long, you have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have. How it must pain Donald Trump to know that his predecessor was twice as good at everything from inauguration crowds to legislative victories.
Let's be honest. Trump's sympathy for neo-Nazis is no more shocking than his pussy-grabbing boasts, his continued profiting from the presidency, his coddling of (and alleged collusion with) the Russians and his obvious obstruction of justice by firing the FBI director.
There is, amid all the random tweets and undisciplined press comments, a remarkable consistency to Donald Trump. He is the very man Hillary Clinton warned us that he would be.

How he can continue as commander-in-chief of the world's most diverse military force is something of a mystery. How he can continue as the leader of a big tent Republican party is inconceivable.
Perhaps the civil rights movement itself holds some lessons of what lies ahead: the moment of most violent white-lash is the moment when civil rights takes its biggest steps forward.
When James Meredith enrolled as the first black student at the segregated University of Mississippi in 1962, there were riots from a white mob, quelled only by federal troops. After a year of studies, racial harassment and protection by US marshals, Meredith graduated in a peaceful commencement ceremony.
Four decades later, Meredith returned to see his son graduate with the top honors from the business school at Ole Miss. He said he was far more proud of his son than he was of his own time there.
For his part in changing its culture and its history, the university made an important statement about Meredith, the man it had so roundly abused: it installed a statue of him striding towards its entrance.



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Fascism Made Charlottesville Violence Inevitable

Screen shot / YouTube
In his unhinged news conference on Tuesday, Trump equated what he called the "alt-left" (which is not a thing) with the alt-right. He characterized the latter as good people who were just protesting removing a statue of the traitor Robert E. Lee and wondered if statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (not notably traitors to the United States of America) would be removed next.
At one point he asked who the alt-right are.
The answer is only knowable by how they behave. The racist, violent throng in Charlottesville revealed themselves by their tactics to be fascists.
Trump as usual sidestepped all the really important issues. Charlottesville was not about ideas or statues. It was an attempt to demonstrate the political efficacy of acting unconstitutionally, as a menacing mass able to intimidate people. Fascism doesn't have many ideas, and isn't the same in each country. Mussolini, Franco and Hitler were all very different in policy and style, and all of them are different from Trump. That's one reason why the easy resort to Hitler analogies is usually not very illuminating (though you have a sinking feeling that we may need to entertain more such analogies now).
People don't come to mere rallies with Klan torches and bats and shields and brickbats and even guns. The Unite the Right mob invasion of Charlottesville was not a political protest. It was intended as a Kristallnacht, as the breaking of the windows of the shops of the liberal Jews and Blacks, who the alt-right believes runs the small college town of Charlottesville.

The organizers of this mob action got enormous bang for their buck. A few hundred people, many of them armed and dangerous, were able to model for the whole country how it is possible to sidestep democratic institutions and go straight for the public jugular, with visceral hatred and identity politics and whipping up fear.
The ISIL-style vehicular terrorism that killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others, sending bodies flying, was only one instance of wanton violence perpetrated by the alt-right. (And by the way, Trump's impassioned defense of the creeps is still not matched by any praise for Heather.)
A white gang also beat DeAndre Harris to within an inch of his life.


The fascists were emboldened to perform this demonstration project by the knowledge that the president is a right wing billionaire who is generally supportive of their goals. Fascists are mostly lower middle class but they want to get rich and join the billionaires, and so are willing to act as the shock troops of the anti-social section of the rich (i.e., Trump and the Kochs, not Warren Buffett). In return, they get to categorize themselves as in the same faction as Donald Trump, as though suddenly thereby their toilet seats will turn into gold, as well. They get to be better by simple mantras of racial exclusivism, than Jews, Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Muslims. They get to rise to the top of the heap, not because of hard work or special insights or striving for higher education, but just by being free to throw around racial slurs and stick their chests out and brandishing assault rifles they have courtesy the pro-Right NRA Lobby.
Here is how Alan Zimmerman described the situation at his synagogue in Charlottesville on Saturday morning:

"On Saturday morning, I stood outside our synagogue with the armed security guard we hired after the police department refused to provide us with an officer during morning services. (Even the police department's limited promise of an observer near our building was not kept and note, we did not ask for protection of our property, only our people as they worshipped).
Forty congregants were inside. Here's what I witnessed during that time.
For half an hour, three men dressed in fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles stood across the street from the temple. Had they tried to enter, I don't know what I could have done to stop them, but I couldn't take my eyes off them, either. Perhaps the presence of our armed guard deterred them. Perhaps their presence was just a coincidence, and I'm paranoid. I don't know.
Several times, parades of Nazis passed our building, shouting, "There's the synagogue!" followed by chants of "Seig Heil" and other anti-Semitic language. Some carried flags with swastikas and other Nazi symbols."

Cornel West also reported of the white nationalist thugs,

"But what happened was, they held us hostage in the church. We could not leave after the service, because the torch march threatening the people who were there…"
… You had a number of the courageous students, of all colors, at the University of Virginia who were protesting against the neofascists themselves. The neofascists had their own ammunition. And this is very important to keep in mind, because the police, for the most part, pulled back. The next day, for example, those 20 of us who were standing, many of them clergy, we would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the antifascists who approached, over 300, 350 antifascists. We just had 20. And we're singing "This Little light of Mine," you know what I mean? So that the
AMY GOODMAN: "Antifa" meaning antifascist.
CORNEL WEST: The antifascists, and then, crucial, the anarchists, because they saved our lives, actually.

If these individuals really were there to protest the removal of a statue in a democratic way, they had other choices. They could have joined in local politics, gone to city council meetings, walked neighborhoods, tried to elect a different city council. But how likely would they have been, you ask, to succeed in a liberal college town? One of the more essential elements in democratic practice is that the losers in a political contest accept defeat and go home. Where that doesn't happen, as in Libya in 2014 and after, you get civil war. Democracy isn't a guarantee of your views winning and being implemented. It is a guarantee that you get to make a reasoned, public appeal for them before people vote on them.
Trump, and Faux News's phony equivalence of the fascist mobsters with the counter-protesters is easily refuted. How many people did the counter-protesters put in the hospital? What policy did they attempt to force illegitimately on the democratically elected leaders? How are they, like Trump and his corporate backers, trying to poison our water, spew toxic carbon dioxide into the air and take away people's health insurance, for the sake of corporate profits?
Shouting "Sieg Heil" at a synagogue is not democratic process, it is thuggery. And ultimately, all fascism is is commonplace mass thuggery.
The novelist E. L. Doctorow wrote in "Billy Bathgate" that mobsters view death as a form of garbage. When a gangster loses his temper and kicks a man to death, he has to call cleaners to take out the trash. The criminality of fascism is likewise just a way of making a healthy society into sewage, with hobnail boots and brandishing of weapons and marching and torches and angry racial slurs. It is as banal as turds in a toilet. It builds nothing, makes nothing, invents nothing. It just swallows up everything that is good and turns it into shit.
That, Mr. President, is what your alt-right is. And if it is what you identify with, then so are you.

Vice's documentary on Charlottesville is really worth watching

It shows the white supremacist protesters for what they really are.

Updated by German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez@vox.com Aug 16, 2017, 9:38am EDT

If there was any doubt about what kind of person went to protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, Vice News's documentary should put those questions to rest: One side was white supremacists, some of whom openly endorsed violence.
The documentary, posted online on Monday, follows a group of white supremacists, led by white nationalist Chris Cantwell, as they march and protest through Charlottesville purportedly to stand against the city's plans to take down Confederate monuments, but really to spread a message of white supremacy.
Here are a few quotes from the white supremacist protests and participants, made up of members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists:

• "Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!"
  
• "When the Trayvon Martin case happened, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and all these different things happened, every single case it's some little black asshole behaving like a savage, and he gets himself in trouble, shockingly enough. Whatever problems I might have with my fellow white people, they generally are not inclined to such behavior and, you know, you gotta kinda take that into consideration when you're thinking about how to organize your society."
  
• "This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal n*****s! That's exactly what it is." "And that's true, by the way."
  
• "We didn't aggress. We did not initiate force against anybody. We're not nonviolent. We'll fucking kill these people if we have to."
  
• "Right now we have people on the ground at the statue with equipment, and they're being told they're not allowed to have a vehicle come through and pick them up or anybody come and pick them up. I'm about to send at least 200 people with guns to go get them out if you guys do not get our people out."
  
• The car attack by a Nazi sympathizer on counter-protesters, which killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer, "was more than justified. The amount of restraint that our people showed out there, I think, was outstanding."
  
• "I think a lot more people are going to die before we're done here, frankly. … People die violent deaths all the time. This is part of the reason we want an ethno-state. The blacks are killing each other in staggering numbers from coast to coast. We don't really want to have a part of that anymore."
  

This is who showed up to protest plans to take down a Confederate statue in Charlottesville. This is who President Donald Trump argued is equivalent to the counter-protesters who showed up to stand against racism and fascism.