Our Constitutional Republic faces a clear and present danger more deadly than that of the Civil War. The danger is the Republican Party, a "political party" that has sold out to white supremacy, autocracy, misogyny, and hatred of everything our Nation stands for. Republicans dismiss any sense of a common American narrative. The "Republican Party" is an outlier in our history – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of social and economic policies that have sustained us for a century; unwilling to compromise; dismissive of evidence, fact, and science; dismissive of the legitimacy of any viewpoint except their own. America needs to face the simple, frightening fact that the Republican Party is a clear and present danger to our Constitutional Republic.
In case you missed it, a lawyer from Jersey City known as a defender of civil rights and religious freedom, who has support from both the Muslim and Jewish communities, was nominated to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
This should have been an historic moment – Adeel Mangi, picked by Joe Biden, would be the highest ranking Muslim judge in American history. His young kids were there for his recent confirmation hearing before the Senate, sporting ties.
But what we got instead was an ugly spectacle, and an insult to New Jersey. Instead of asking about his impressive qualifications or landmark cases, Senate Republicans shouted at and relentlessly interrupted Mangi with irrelevant, salacious questions about Israel, Hamas – even whether he celebrated 9-11.
Notably, another judicial nominee being vetted at the same hearing, who is Jewish, was not asked about Israel, or any of this. It’s just the new litmus test for Muslims, apparently – no matter if the man happens to be Pakistani American. They all look the same, right Tom Cotton?
“Itwas a heartbreaking scene for the first Muslim American federal circuit judicial nominee to face relentless questioning on Israel, terrorism including September 11th, and the Holocaust,” said Sheila Katz, who heads the National Council of Jewish Women, one of the leading Jewish organizations to condemn this behavior from Republicans.
“He answered with grace and respect, and with the temperament of a federal judge, despite the persistent bombardment of biased queries,” she told us. “But it was deeply upsetting, it was Islamophobic, and it was very important for us, as a Jewish organization, to actually say: Not in our name.”
These attacks from folks like Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley made it clear that Republicans have nothing of substance to use against Mangi, a graduate of Oxford and Harvard Law School endorsed by the major Bar Associations; so they had to reach far and repeat themselves over and over, she noted.
He was clear the first time: He has never heard of any of the commentators on the Middle East that Republicans asked about.
The straw they’re grasping at is Mangi’s former membership on an advisory board for a think tank at Rutgers Law School called the Center for Security, Race and Rights, whose goal was to combat anti-Muslim bigotry, and which recently hosted some controversial speakers. But this board met only once a year to provide ideas for academic research, Mangi said, and had no supervisory role over the Center’s day-to-day activities or choice of speakers.
“Senator, I don’t think anyone feels more strongly about what happened on 9/11 than someone who was there, who saw with their own eyes smoke billowing from the towers,” said Mangi, who’s worked in New York City for decades. He could not have put it more plainly: He has “no patience—none—for any attempts to justify or defend” Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel and will condemn “any terrorist or any act of terrorism,” and do so “without equivocation.”
This asshole — calling himself “Senator McConnell — not only defied the Constitution by stealing a Supreme Court Seat — attacked a respected judge by asking him if he “celebrated 9-11”.
So on what basis did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell then put out a statement claiming Mangi has “an extensive record of condoning terrorist propaganda”?
We asked McConnell’s office for evidence, but got no response. That’s wildly slanderous; in any other setting, grounds for a defamation lawsuit. Imagine if we said Mitch McConnell has “an extensive record of condoning Nazi propaganda” because his fellow Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz, once defended a man who flashed a Nazi salute at a school board meeting.
This attack on Mangi is even more tenuous. It’s a rare occasion that a New Jersey-based seat opens up on the Third Circuit, which also covers Delaware, Pennsylvania and the Virgin Islands, and someone from New Jersey is chosen to fill it. And Mangi is an outstanding choice – “exactly the kind of person that we should want serving on our highest court,” said Bennett Miller, an influential New Brunswick rabbi.
Mangi, a partner at a large New York law firm, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, has done admirable pro bono work, defending New Jerseyans wrongfully blocked from building a mosque, and winning the largest settlement in New York state history for the death of a mentally ill state prison inmate. He’s served on the board of the Legal Aid Society, as an ally board member for the National LGBT Bar Association, and cultivated a coalition of more than 100 interfaith groups to defend the program known as “DACA,” which protects undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children – winning the trust and respect of leading organizations like the American Jewish Committee.
That group, which is nonpartisan, spoke out strongly against his ill treatment. Mangi was “questioned aggressively on thin pretext,” it said, and “elected officials should take a leadership role in calming the fears of and against American religious minorities, such as Jews and Muslims, not stoke them.”
“It was taking really serious issues like Israel, terrorism and anti-Semitism, and turning them into tools of a partisan attack,” said Rabbi David Levy, AJC’s regional director in New Jersey.
Mangi does not profess to be an expert on the Middle East, an area of the world he is not from, and at his hearing, said he’d “never heard of” controversial speakers at a 9-11 anniversary event held by the Rutgers Center. So why did Republican Sen. John Kennedy imagine it ok to ask him, “Is this the way you celebrate 9/11?”
Now think about the impact this has on other Muslims considering going into public service. Why give up lucrative jobs in the private sector to subject yourself to this spectacle of bullying? That is no doubt exactly what the goal is for McConnell’s shameless crew: To exclude people from the levers of government, by making it intolerable for them to participate.
The next time some bible-thumping, psalm-singing evangelical christian starts telling me how he is being persecuted, I may just persecute him with a couple of punches in the face.
You thought the “religious right” burst out of the anti-Roe v. Wade movement. WRONG. The “religious right” is founded in and continues to be dedicated to overturning all civil rights legislation of the 20th century. The “religious right” or “christian evangelicals” or Klansmen in suits.
One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.
Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
***
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
***
So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.
In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.
On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
***
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”
***
Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it hadn’t in the past. That year in Minnesota, pro-life Republicans captured both Senate seats (one for the unexpired term of Hubert Humphrey) as well as the governor’s mansion. In Iowa, Sen. Dick Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was thought to be a shoo-in: Every poll heading into the election showed him ahead by at least 10 percentage points. On the final weekend of the campaign, however, pro-life activists, primarily Roman Catholics, leafleted church parking lots (as they did in Minnesota), and on Election Day Clark lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.
In the course of my research into Falwell’s archives at Liberty University and Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, it became very clear that the 1978 election represented a formative step toward galvanizing everyday evangelical voters. Correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement. In a letter to fellow conservative Daniel B. Hales, Weyrich characterized the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.” Roe v. Wade had been law for more than five years.
Weyrich, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer—a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience, toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay.
Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants, especially evangelicals, “have been so sluggish on this issue of human life, and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is causing real waves, among church people and governmental people too.”
By 1980, even though Carter had sought, both as governor of Georgia and as president, to reduce the incidence of abortion, his refusal to seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it was viewed by politically conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin. Never mind the fact that his Republican opponent that year, Ronald Reagan, had signed into law, as governor of California in 1967, the most liberal abortion bill in the country. When Reagan addressed a rally of 10,000 evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas in August 1980, he excoriated the “unconstitutional regulatory agenda” directed by the IRS “against independent schools,” but he made no mention of abortion. Nevertheless, leaders of the religious right hammered away at the issue, persuading many evangelicals to make support for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion a litmus test for their votes.
Carter lost the 1980 election for a variety of reasons, not merely the opposition of the religious right. He faced a spirited challenge from within his own party; Edward M. Kennedy’s failed quest for the Democratic nomination undermined Carter’s support among liberals. And because Election Day fell on the anniversary of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the media played up the story, highlighting Carter’s inability to secure the hostages’ freedom. The electorate, once enamored of Carter’s evangelical probity, had tired of a sour economy, chronic energy shortages and the Soviet Union’s renewed imperial ambitions.
After the election results came in, Falwell, never shy to claim credit, was fond of quoting a Harris poll that suggested Carter would have won the popular vote by a margin of 1 percent had it not been for the machinations of the religious right. “I knew that we would have some impact on the national elections,” Falwell said, “but I had no idea that it would be this great.”
Given Carter’s political troubles, the defection of evangelicals may or may not have been decisive. But it is certainly true that evangelicals, having helped propel Carter to the White House four years earlier, turned dramatically against him, their fellow evangelical, during the course of his presidency. And the catalyst for their political activism was not, as often claimed, opposition to abortion. Although abortion had emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.
***
The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.
One hour, 20 minutes of truth. Trump has tried to kill it. Watch it.
The film documents Donald Trump’s efforts to build a US$1.5 billion golf-course and resort on a beach that has been declared a site of scientific interest on the East Coast of Scotland. The film reveals Trump to be a bully, a liar, and a general all-around piece of shit. But you knew that.
The GOP — to keep the support of “average” American voters while they work entirely for the benefit of giant corporations, the weapons and fossil fuel industries, and the morbidly rich — have run a whole series of scams on voters ever since the original Reagan grift of trickle-down economics.
Oddly, there’s nothing comparable on the Democratic side. No lies or BS to justify unjustifiable policies: Democrats just say up-front what they’re all about:
Healthcare and quality education for all. Treat all people and religions with respect and fairness. Trust women to make their own decisions. Raise the pay of working people and support unionization. Get military-style weapons off the streets. Do something about climate change. Clean up toxic waste sites and outlaw pesticides that damage children. Replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.
Nonetheless, the media persists in treating the two parties as if they were equally honest and equally interested in the needs of all Americans. In part, that’s because one of the GOP’s most effective scams — the “liberal media bias” scam — has been so successful ever since Lee Atwater invented it back in the early years of the Reagan Revolution.
For example, right now there’s a lot of huffing and puffing in the media about how the Supreme Court might rule in the case of Trump being thrown off the ballot in Colorado. They almost always mention “originalism” and “textualism” as if they’re honest, good-faith methods for interpreting the Constitution when, in fact, they’re cynical scams invented to justify unjustifiable rulings.
Thus, the question: how much longer will Americans (and the American media) continue to fall for the GOP’s scams?
They include:
— Originalism: Robert Bork came up with this scam back in the 1980s when Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court and he couldn’t come up with honest or reasonable answers for his jurisprudential positions, particularly those justifying white supremacy. By saying that he could read the minds of the Founders and Framers of the Constitution, Bork gave himself and future generations of Republicans on the Court the fig leaf they needed.
The simple fact is that there was rarely a consensus among the Framers and among the politicians of the founding generation about pretty much anything. And to say that we should govern America by the standards of a white-men-only era before even the industrial revolution much less today’s modern medicine, communications, and understanding of economics is absurd on its face.
— Voter Fraud: This scam, used by white supremacists across the South in the years after the failure of Reconstruction to prevent Black people from voting, was reinvented in 1993, when Bill Clinton and Democrats in Congress succeeded in passing what’s today called the “Motor Voter” law that lets states automatically register people to vote when they renew their driver’s licenses. Republicans freaked out at the idea that more people might be voting, and claimed the new law would cause voter fraud (it didn’t).
By 1997, following Democratic victories in the 1996 election, it had become a major meme to justify purging voting rolls of Black and Hispanic people. Today it’s the justification for over 300 voter suppression laws passed in Red states in just in the past 2 years, all intended to make it harder for working class people, minorities, women, the elderly dependent on Social Security, and students (all Democratic constituencies) to vote.
The most recent iteration of it is Donald Trump‘s claim that the 2020 election, which he lost by fully 7 million votes, was stolen from him by voter fraud committed by Black people in major cities.
As a massive exposé in yesterday’s Washington Post titled “GOP Voter-Fraud Crackdown Overwhelmingly Targets Minorities, Democrats” points out, the simple reality is that voter fraud in the US is so rare as to be meaningless, and has never, ever, anywhere been documented to swing a single election.
But Republicans have been using it as a very effective excuse to make it harder for Democratic voters to cast a ballot, and to excuse their purging almost 40,000,000 Americans off the voting rolls in the last five years.
Right To Work (For Less): back in the 1940s, Republicans came up with this scam. Over the veto of President Harry Truman, they pushed through what he referred to as “the vicious Taft-Hartley Act,” which lets states make it almost impossible for unions to survive. Virtually every Red state has now adopted “right to work,” which has left their working class people impoverished and, because it guts the political power of working people, their minimum wage unchanged.
— Bush v Gore: The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote by a half-million, and five Republicans on the Supreme Court denied him the presidency. Florida Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw around 90,000 African Americans off the voting rolls just before the election and then, when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won, she invented a new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”
As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:
“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.
“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”
George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed Harris’s crime and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million) — was stopped when George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.
Harris’ decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary; there is no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it. The intent of the voters was unambiguous. And the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court jumped in to block the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (in violation of the 10th Amendment) just in time to prevent those “spoiled” votes from being counted, cementing Bush’s illegitimate presidency.
— Money is “Free Speech” and corporations are “persons”: This scam was invented entirely by Republicans on the Supreme Court, although billionaire GOP donors — infuriated by campaign contribution and dark money limits put into law in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals — had been funding legal efforts to get it before the Court for years.
In a decision that twists logic beyond rationality, the five Republicans on the Court — over the strong, emphatic objections of all the Democrats on the Court — ruled that our individual right to free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment also includes the “right to listen,” as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Americaand they wrote in Citizens United:
“The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.”
Without being able to hear from the most knowledgeable entities, they argued, Americans couldn’t be well-informed about the issues of the day.
And who was in the best position to inform us? As Lewis Powell himself wrote in the Bellotti decision, echoed in Citizens United, it’s those corporate “persons”:
“Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the First Amendment seeks to foster…”
“Political speech is ‘indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.’ … The inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual.”
They doubled down, arguing that corporations and billionaires should be allowed to dump unlimited amounts of money into the political campaigns of those politicians they want to own so long as they go into dark money operations instead of formal campaigns. What was called “bribery” for over 200 years is now “free speech”:
“For the reasons explained above, we [five Republicans on the Supreme Court] now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”
— Cutting taxes raises revenue: As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman notes, the idea promoted by Reagan, Bush, and Trump to justify almost $30 trillion in cumulative tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations is “The Biggest Tax Scam in History.”
Reagan first pitched this to justify cutting the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% down to 25% in the 1980s, and it was reprised by both George W. Bush and Donald Trump for their own massive tax breaks for their well-off donors and peers.
The simple fact is that America went from a national debt of over 124% of GDP following World War II to a national debt of a mere $800 billion when Reagan came into office. We’d been paying down our debt steadily, and had enough money to build the interstate highway system, brand new schools and hospitals from coast to coast, and even to put men on the moon.
Since Reagan rolled out his tax scam, however, our national debt has gone from less than a trillion in 1980 to over 30 trillion today: we’re back, in terms of debt, to where we were during WWII when FDR raised the tippy-top bracket income tax rate to 90% to deal with the cost of the war. We should be back to that tax rate for the morbidly rich today, as well.
— Destroying unions helps workers: In their eagerness to help their corporate donors, Reagan rolled out a novel idea in 1981, arguing that instead of helping working people, corrupt “union bosses” were actually ripping them off.
Union leaders work on a salary and are elected by their members: the very idea that they, like CEOs who are compensated with stock options and performance bonuses and appointed by their boards, could somehow put their own interests first is ludicrous. Their only interest, if they want to retain their jobs, is to do what the workers want.
But Reagan was a hell of a salesman, and he was so successful with this pitch he cut union membership in America during his and his VP’s presidency by more than 50 percent.
— Corporations can provide better Medicare than the government: For a corporation to exist over the long term, particularly a publicly-traded corporation, it must produce a profit. That’s why when George W. Bush and friends invented the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 they allowed Advantage providers to make as much as 20 percent in pure profit.
Government overhead for real Medicare is around 2% — the cost of administration — and corporations could probably run their Advantage programs with a similar overhead, but they have to make that 20% profit nut, so they hire larger staffs to examine every single request to pay for procedures, surgeries, tests, imaging, and even doctors’ appointments. And reject, according to The New York Times, around 18% of them.
“Advantage plans also refused to pay legitimate claims, according to the report. About 18 percent of payments were denied despite meeting Medicare coverage rules, an estimated 1.5 million payments for all of 2019.”
When they deny you care, they make money. If they ran like real Medicare and paid every bill (except the fraudulent ones), they’d merely break even, and no company can do that. Nonetheless, Republicans continue to claim that “choice” in the marketplace is more important than fixing Medicare.
With the $140 billion that for-profit insurance companies overcharge us and steal from our government every year, if Medicare Advantage vanished there would be enough money left over to cut Medicare premiums to almost nothing and add dental, vision, and hearing. But don’t expect Republicans to ever go along with that: they take too much money from the insurance industry (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court).
— More guns means more safety: Remember the NRA’s old “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”? They’re still at it, and there’s hardly a single Republican in America who will step up and do anything about the gun violence crisis that is uniquely experienced by our nation.
Bullets are now the leading cause of death among children in the US, and we’re literally the only country in the entire world for which that is true. And a child living in Red state Mississippi is ten times more likely to die from a gun than a child in Blue state Massachusetts. But as long as the NRA owns them, Republicans will never do anything about it.
— The media has a liberal bias: This canard was started by Lee Atwater in an attempt to “work the refs” of the media, demanding that they stop pointing out the scams Republicans were engaging in (at the time it was trickle-down). The simple reality is that America’s media, from TV and radio networks to newspapers to websites, are overwhelmingly owned by billionaires and corporations with an openly conservative bent.
There are over 1500 rightwing radio stations (and 1000 religious broadcasters, who are increasingly political), three rightwing TV networks, and an army of tens of thousands of paid conservative activists turning out news releases and policy papers in every state, every day of the year. There are even well-funded social media operations.
There is nothing comparable on the left. Even MSNBC is owned by Comcast and so never touches issues of corporate governance, media bias (they fired Brian Stelter!), or the corruption of Congress by its big pharma and Medicare Advantage advertisers.
— Republicans are the party of faith: Republicans claim to be the pious ones, from Mike Johnson’s creepy “chastity ball” with his daughter, to their hate of queer people, to their embrace of multimillionaire TV and megachurch preachers. But Democrats, who are more accepting of people of all faiths and tend not to wear their religion on their sleeves, are the ones following Jesus’ teachings.
Jesus, arguably the founder of Christianity, was emphatic that you should never pray in public, do your good deeds in private as well, and that the only way to get to heaven is to feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, and love every other human as much as you love yourself.
Republicans, on the other hand, wave their piety like a bloody shirt, issue press releases about their private charities, and fight every effort to have our government feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, or even respect, much less love, people who look or live or pray differently from them.
— Crime is exploding and you’re safer living in an area Republicans control: In fact, crime of almost all sorts is at a low not seen since 1969. Only car thefts are up, and some of that appears to have to do with social media “how to” videos and a few very vulnerable makes of autos.
New FBI statistics find that violent crime nationwide is down 8 percent; in big cities it’s down nearly 15 percent, robbery and burglary are down 10 and 12 percent respectively.
But what crime there is is overwhelmingly happening in Red states. Over the past 21 years, all types of crime in Red states are 23 percent higher than in Blue states: in 2020, murder rates were a mind-boggling 40 percent higher in states that voted for Trump than those Biden carried.
— Global warming is a hoax: Ever since fossil fuel billionaires and the fossil fuel industry started using the legal bribery rights five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court created for them, virtually every Republican politician in the nation is either directly on the take or benefits indirectly from the massive infrastructure created by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel barons. As a result, it’s almost impossible to find even one brave, truthful Republican who’s willing to do anything about the climate crisis that is most likely to crash not just the US but civilization itself.
— Hispanic immigrants are “murderers and rapists”: Donald Trump threw this out when he first announced his candidacy for president in 2015, saying, “They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In fact, Hispanic immigrants (legal or without documentation) are far less likely, per capita and by any other measure, to commit crime of any sort than white citizens.
— Helping people makes them lazy. The old Limbaugh joke about “kicking people when they’re down is the only way to get them up” reveals the mindset behind this Republican scam, which argues that when people get money or things they didn’t work for it actually injures them and society by making them lazy. The GOP has used this rationalization to oppose everything from unemployment insurance in the 1930s to food stamps, Medicaid, and housing supports today.
In fact, not only is there no evidence for it, but studies of Universal Basic Income (UBI), where people are given a few hundred dollars a month with no strings attached, finds that the vast majority use the extra funds to improve themselves. They upgrade their housing, look for better jobs, and go back to school.
If the morbidly rich people behind the GOP who promote this scam really believed it, they’d be arguing for a 100% estate tax, to prevent their own children from ending up “lazy.” Good luck finding any who are leaving their trust-fund kids destitute.
— Tobacco doesn’t cause cancer: Back in 2000, soon-to-be Indiana Governor and then-Congressman Mike Pence wrote a column that was published statewide saying, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” Pence’s family had made money off tobacco for years with a small chain of now-bankrupt convenience stores called “Tobacco Road,” but he was also being spiffed by the industry.
Similarly, George W. Bush pushed the “Healthy Forests Initiative” as president after big contributions from the timber industry: “healthy” meant “clear cut.” Bush also had his “Clear Skies Initiative” that let polluters dump more poison into our air. And the Trump administration, after big bucks and heavy lobbying from the chemical and Big Ag industries, refused to ban a very profitable pesticide used on human food crops that was found to definitely cause brain damage and cancer in children.
— For-profit utilities produce cheaper and more reliable electricity than government-owned and -run ones: This one goes back to the Reagan era, with Republicans arguing that the “free market” will always outperform government, including when it comes to generating and distributing electricity. In fact, each of us has only one wire coming into our homes or offices, so there is no possible competition to drive either improved performance or lower prices among for-profit utilities.
In fact, non-profit community-owned or government run utilities consistently produce more reliable electricity, serve their customers better, and charge lower prices. And the differences have become starker every year since, in 1992, President GHW Bush ended federal regulation of electric utilities. It’s why Texas, which has almost completely privatized its power grid, suffers some of the least reliable and most expensive electricity in the nation when severe weather hits.
— The electoral college protects our democracy: There was a time when both Democrats and Republicans wanted to get rid of the Electoral College; a constitutional amendment to do that failed in Congress by a single vote back in 1970. But after both George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the White house by a half-million and three million votes respectively but ended up as president anyway, Republicans fell newly in love with the College and are fully planning to use it again in 2024 to seize power even if ten million more people vote for Biden this time (Biden won by 7 million votes in 2020).
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Republicans are now defending billionaires buying off Supreme Court justices and most recently Lever News found that they’ve been spiffing over 100 other federal judges — who regularly vote in favor of the interests of corporations and the morbidly rich — in addition to Alito, Thomas, Roberts, et al.
Republicans are also claiming that:
— Trump isn’t a threat to our democracy and his promises to be a dictator are “mere hyperbole.”
— Letting Putin take Ukraine won’t put Taiwan and other democracies at risk.
— Ignoring churches routinely breaking the law by preaching politics while enjoying immunity from taxes is no big deal.
— Massive consolidation to monopoly levels across virtually every industry in America since Reagan stopped enforcement of our anti-trust laws (causing Americans to pay an average of $5,000 a year more for everything from broadband to drugs than any other country in the world) is just the way business should be run.
— Teaching white children the racial history of America will make them feel bad, rather than feel less racist and more empathetic.
— Queer people are groomers and pedophiles (the majority in these categories are actually straight white men).
— Banning and burning books is good for society and our kids.
— Ending public schools with statewide voucher programs will improve education (every credible study shows the opposite).
I could go on, but you get the point. When will America — and, particularly, American media — wake up to these scams and start calling them out for what they are?
I’m not holding my breath, although you could help get the ball rolling by sharing this admittedly incomplete list as far and wide as possible.
The 2nd American Civil War won’t be fought between opposing armies on a grand battlefield. It will be fought in the streets, in the theaters, churches, synagogues, Walmarts and grocery stores. It won’t be a battle between uniformed combatants, it will be a series of loner attacks by mostly individual or small groups of terrorist insurgents targeting vulnerable unprotected targets for their own political reasons who will be completely unsuspecting and caught completely by surprise like an IED left hidden in the streets of Falluja or Gaza city.
They’ll arrive wearing flag hats, flag shirts, flag pants, and flag underwear, claiming to be “patriots” fighting for “freedom” against the “vermin” hoards. It will seem to come completely out of nowhere, and it’s already been happening.
Here’s an article by David Newiert from the Southern Poverty Law Center discussing the issue of Right-Wing spree killings and Stochastic Terrorism.
4 years ago while Trump was still in the White House we had already suffered from Terrorist attacks in many parts of the country, but the violence and attacks actually started long before that. As the video points out there was James David Adkissan in 2008 who attacked a Unitarian Church in Knoxville killing 2 people because he felt it was “too Liberal.”
On July 27, 2008, a politically motivated fatal shooting took place at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. Motivated by a desire to kill liberals and Democrats, gunman Jim David Adkisson fired a shotgun at members of the congregation during a youth performance of a musical, killing two people and wounding seven others.
Keith Luke — the 22-year-old white supremacist accused of carrying out a racially motivated rape and murder spree in Brockton, Mass., the day after Barack Obama was inaugurated as the nation’s first black president — appeared in court last week with a jagged swastika freshly carved into his forehead.
Authorities said Luke somehow managed to carve the swastika himself within a special unit at Plymouth County Jail, where he’s locked down for 23 hours a day and monitored by camera in his cell. As the Brockton daily newspaper The Enterprisereported: “It was not known exactly how he was able to etch the swastika into his flesh, but Luke is given a disposable razor to use for 20 minutes, three times a week.”
Dannie Roy Baker, Miramar Beach, FL: Baker, a former GOP volunteer angry about immigration, opens fire on a roomful of Chilean students, killing two and injuring three. He pleads no contest to murder.
At approximately 7:11 a.m. EDT, 22-year-old Richard Poplawski opened fire on two Pittsburgh Police officers responding to a 9-1-1 call from Poplawski’s mother, who was attempting to get the police officers to remove her son from the home. Three police officers were ultimately confirmed dead, and another two were seriously injured.
According to Pittsburgh Police Chief, Nathan Harper, Poplawski was armed with a semi-automatic AK-47-style rifle, a shotgun and three handguns (a .357 Magnum revolver, a .380-caliber handgun and a .45-caliber handgun), protected by a bulletproof vest, and had been lying in wait for the officers. According to police and witnesses, he held police at bay for four hours as the fallen officers were left bleeding nearby, their colleagues unable to reach them. More than 600 rounds were fired by the SWAT teams and Poplawski.
[…]
Edward Perkovic, a friend of Poplawski, said the gunman feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon”. Perkovic also stated that Poplawski “didn’t like the Zionists controlling the media and controlling, you know, our freedom of speech” and that “He didn’t like the control of the guns that was about to happen. He believed everything our forefathers put before us and thought that it was being distorted.” Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said that Poplawski feared President Obama was going to take away his rights.
WASHINGTON An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the capital’s most visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.
The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials as James W. von Brunn, who embraces various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups and at one point waged a personal war with the federal government.
The white supremacist charged with the deadly shooting at the national Holocaust museum last year originally wanted to kill White House senior adviser David Axelrod, Time magazine reported Thursday.
James von Brunn, who died in January in a prison hospital awaiting trial, reportedly viewed Axelrod as a priority target who was easier to reach than President Obama”Obama was created by Jews,” he wrote, according to Time. “Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do.”
WICHITA FALLS, Texas – A 22-year-old man with a violent history shot up a crowded bookstore cafe, wounding four women, then walked down the street and killed a bar worker before holing up in a home where he killed himself, authorities said Wednesday.
Ross William Muehlberger’s rampage, which ended early Wednesday after he shot himself in the head, may have been motivated by racial hatred, police Sgt. Joe Snyder said.
“A recurring theme from witness statements was that the suspect was yelling racial epithets,” Snyder said.
Witness Harmony Langford told the Wichita Falls Times Record News that the gunman shouted “White power!” before fatally shooting 23-year-old bar doorman Tim Donley.
PORTLAND, Ore. – David Joseph “Joey” Pedersen, 34, of Portland, was sentenced today to life in prison, without possibility of release, for carjackings resulting in the death of Cody Faye Myers, of Lafayette, Oregon, and Reginald Alan Clark, of Eureka, California in October 2011. U.S. District Judge Ancer L. Haggerty imposed two life sentences, to be served concurrently. Pedersen was previously convicted and sentenced to life in prison in Snohomish County, Washington for the related murders of his father, David Jones “Red” Pedersen, and stepmother, Leslie Mae “Dee Dee” Pedersen in September 2011.
But while his motive may never be known, the details of his life suggest that the path toward his final act began at a U.S Army base that was home to a thriving neo-Nazi underworld during the time Page was stationed there in the mid-1990s.
Page’s journey down that path took him deep into the world of hate music and, more recently, into the “patched” membership ranks of a violent skinhead crew. It ended on Aug. 5 in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek, where he murdered six Sikhs, including the temple’s president and three priests, and wounded four other people. Lt. Brian Murphy, the first police officer to confront Page at the scene, survived the encounter but was shot in the throat and hit by eight more bullets when he came to the aid of Page’s victims. Page was finally felled by an officer’s rifle shot to the stomach as he stood firing in the temple’s parking lot; Page then put his pistol to his own head and fired.
“White men have become the biggest cowards ever to walk the earth. The world has never witnessed such yellow cowards. We’ve sat back and allowed the Jews to take over our government, our banks, and our media. We’ve allowed tens of millions of mud people to invade our country, steal our jobs and our women, and destroy our children’s futures. America is no longer ours. America belongs to the Jews who rule it and to the mud people who multiply in it.” –Radio ad in U.S. Senate campaign, 2010
“Today, true statistics be told, we’re less than half. And we’re dropping fast, while the dark peoples multiply like rats all around us, and as more tens-of-millions of them invade our country from all over the world. Our race is drowning literally in seas of colored mongrels. Our people buy almost twice as many caskets as cradles. Your race is dying before your eyes.” –“Attention White Youth!” Miller’s website, March 12, 2010
Elliot Rodger killed six people in a stabbing and shooting spree in Isla Vista, California, in May 2014.
Before he turned the gun on himself, the 22-year-old posted a “retribution” video to YouTube and emailed a lengthy autobiographical document to almost two dozen people he knew. Son of a Hollywood filmmaker, he grew up in a life of privilege and relative affluence. The 141-page document he distributed in his final hours explores that upbringing, his mental health and his deep-rooted loathing of women, fuelled by an intense frustration over his virginity.
In the document Rodger proclaimed: “I am the closest thing there is to a living God”
On the video he posted to YouTube, Rodger sat in a BMW car his family had given him and complained about being a virgin at 22, saying he had “never even kissed a girl”.
Jerad and Amanda Miller had a reputation for spouting racist, anti-government views, bragging about their gun collection and boasting that they’d spent time at Cliven Bundy’s ranch during a recent standoff there between armed militia members and federal government agents, according to residents at an apartment complex where it appeared the couple lived. […] Miller’s online presence over the last year includes dozens of Facebook posts and 20 YouTube videos posted under the username USATruePatriot.
The posts and videos depict Miller as a man frustrated with the government to the point where he considered violence.
“To stop this oppression, I fear, can only be accomplished with bloodshed,” Miller wrote in a lengthy rant posted on June 2.
One video posted on Oct. 15, 2012 shows Miller dressed up in full face make-up as the Joker, Batman’s comic book nemesis. The video, titled “joker for president” shows a costumed Miller ranting in front of an American flag.
“Year after year I’ve watched you Americans, my fellow citizens, vote for tyranny,” Miller said. “His other online posts mention having visited the Bundy ranch during Cliven Bundy’s showdown with the federal government in April. They also touch on topics ranging from Benghazi to gun rights to the militia movement.
And again in 2014 white supremacist Dylann Roof radicalized to believe that black people pose a violent threat to white people goes to the Emmanuel AME Church and kills 9 people.
Before killing nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof learned to hate in a classroom of his own making. A classroom entirely online, its climate angry, its claims inaccurate at best, inflammatory at worst.
His final thesis: a manifesto cloaking white nationalism as a martyr’s cause. Roof believed the white race was in danger and complained there was “no one doing anything but talking on the internet.” In his mind, the logical next step was to take the culture war offline—and turn hateful words into one of modern history’s most extreme acts of hate. But the initial step that led Roof to murder nine people was not extreme: He took a curiosity and turned it into a Google search.
Roof’s curiosity was first piqued by the trial of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. He searched for the case he kept hearing about on the news and, after reading a Wikipedia article, determined that Zimmerman was “in the right” to see Martin as a threat.
Roof then typed “black on White crime” into the search engine, hit enter and fell into a wormhole. Top results sent him to the website for the Council of Conservative Citizens, which offered page after page featuring what Roof referred to as “brutal black on White murders.”
In 2015, John Russell Houser – inspired directly by the shootings committed by Roof and his manifesto, stages his own murder spree going into a movie theater with a gun killing 2 people and wounding 9.
John Russell “Rusty” Houser – the gunman in Thursday’s movie theater shooting – quietly arrived in Lafayette, Louisiana, this month, a 59-year-old man with a string of arrests and a record of “extreme erratic behavior,” according to court documents. He’d been evicted from his house the previous year.
He also left an online record of far-right, anti-government ideas that alarmed the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Houser praised Hitler for his “pragmatism” and lauded former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the Westboro Baptist Church, among others, the SPLC website said.
SAN FRANCISCO — A former U.S. Air Force staff sergeant and alleged member of the “boogaloo” extremist movement pleaded guilty Friday in the fatal shooting of a federal security officer in the San Francisco Bay Area amid large 2020 protests against police brutality. Steven Carrillo, 33, changed his plea to guilty to a federal murder charge in the killing of David Patrick Underwood and to the attempted murder of Underwood’s colleague after federal prosecutors last month agreed not to seek the death penalty. The men were shot on May 29, 2020, while they stood in front of a federal building in Oakland as hundreds marched on the streets.
[…]
“I aligned myself with the anti-government movement and wanted to carry out violent acts against federal law enforcement officers in particular,” Carrillo said.
On top of all that, various far-right groups have been staging terrorist attacks on the power grid, using guns to destroy transformers and knock out power to thousands of customers.
Sarah Clendaniel
Far-right groups are increasingly talking about attacking the US power grid to cause chaos and advance their cause, terrorism experts say.
The warnings come as the founder of a neo-Nazi group and a woman appeared in court on Friday charged with plotting to attack power installations around Baltimore.
Brandon Russell, 27, and Sarah Clendaniel, 34, both pleaded not guilty. They face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
In messages revealed in court filings, Ms Clendaniel described their alleged plot as “legendary” and hoped it “would completely destroy the whole city”.
The pair were arrested before the alleged attack was carried out. Prosecutors said thousands would have been left without power if it had gone ahead.
Attacks against infrastructure are a long-standing obsession of far-right and white nationalist groups, and they are increasingly being discussed in extremist spaces online.
[…] In addition to the alleged Baltimore plot, investigators are looking into several recent attacks on power installations, including incidents in North Carolina, Oregon and Washington state.
The North Carolina attack, in Moore County in early December, knocked out power to 35,000 people for several days. Nobody has been arrested and the investigation is ongoing.
Authorities say there’s no known connection between the alleged Baltimore plot and the North Carolina attack, and the motive for most of the other attacks is unknown.
Mr Russell is the founder of Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group that has been linked to murders, bombings and plots in the United States and other countries. It is banned in the UK and Canada. He spent time in prison on explosive charges, and while locked up met Ms Clendaniel, who was convicted of armed robbery, according to an indictment.
Once they were released, the pair allegedly began planning to attack electricity substations in the Baltimore area, looking at openly available material about power stations and attempting to obtain a gun. But – prosecutors claim – a person who they thought was a potential co-conspirator was actually an FBI source.
In 2020, five men, including three former US Marines, were indicted on weapons and conspiracy charges. Authorities said they had plotted to attack the power grid during a meeting in Ohio. The following year, three white nationalists pleaded guilty to plotting to attack power installations.
All of these men and women were motivated directly by Right-Wing hate. It may have varied from hating the government, hating Jews, hating black people, hating immigrants or women, but all of it was hate. Hate which has been stoked to greater and greater heights online, on right-wing media and directly by politicians such as Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.
Most of these killings happened before Trump entered the White House and made hate and anger the main central tenant of the Republican party. Since then the “Great Replacement Theory” has become one of the key rallying cries of the party.
Like the rambling manifestos of Elliot Rodger and Dylann Roof this theory has been used at least 5 times to sponsor mass killings around the nation and world.
It was used in Christchurch New Zealand in a shooting that killed 51 Muslims, the shooter leaving a manifesto of his own that praised Donald Trump as the “savior of the white race.”
On March 15, 2019, at approximately 1:40 PM local time, Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian gym trainer with no previous criminal history1 who was active on extreme-right internet forums, entered the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he allegedly shot dead 42 people. Exiting the mosque, he allegedly shot another person on the pavement before driving the short distance to Linwood mosque where he allegedly continued his killing spree. In the space of 36 minutes, Tarrant allegedly killed 49 people. Two more subsequently died of their wounds, bringing the death toll to 51.2 New Zealand, which until this point had experienced terrorism as a “latent” threat rather than a “lived reality,”3 suffered the single largest loss of life to terrorism in its history.
“The horrific attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27, 2018, stole the lives of 11 innocent victims, shattered their families, gutted their congregation and the Pittsburgh community, and struck fear in the lives of Jewish people across the country,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Hate crimes like this one inflict irreparable pain on individual victims and their loved ones and lead entire communities to question their very belonging. All Americans deserve to live free from the fear of hate-fueled violence and the Justice Department will hold accountable those who perpetrate such acts.”
EL PASO, Texas (AP) — A white Texas gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart in 2019 returned to court Wednesday for sentencing in a mass shooting that targeted Hispanic shoppers in the border city of El Paso.
Patrick Crusius, 24, is set to receive multiple life sentences after pleading guilty to federal hate crime and weapons charges in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. Although the federal government did not seek the death penalty, Texas prosecutors have not taken lethal injection off the table under a separate case in state court.
Ten people were gunned down at a Buffalo supermarket May 14 in a horrifying mass shooting that officials were quick to label as “pure evil” and racially motivated.
The shooting stunned a community basking in a warm May afternoon, with shoppers filling the Tops in a predominantly Black neighborhood at 1275 Jefferson Ave.
Of the 13 people shot, 11 were Black and two were white, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said. All 10 of the victims who were killed were Black, said Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn Jr. The suspect is white. The killings are being investigated as a racist hate crime.
It was out of this world that the thirty-two-year-old Anders Behring Breivik stepped when, on the afternoon of July 22, 2011, he set out from his mother’s flat in Oslo’s West End, changed into a police uniform, parked a van containing a bomb, which he had spent the spring and summer making, outside Regjeringskvartalet, lit the fuse, and left the scene. While the catastrophic images of the attack, which killed eight people, were being broadcast across the world, Breivik headed to Utøya. That was where the Workers’ Youth League had its annual summer camp. There Breivik shot and killed sixty-nine people, in a massacre that lasted for more than an hour, right until the police arrived, when he immediately surrendered.
He wanted to save Norway. Just a few hours before detonating the bomb, Breivik e-mailed a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto to a thousand recipients, in which he said that we were at war with Muslims and multiculturalism and that the slaughter of the campers was meant to be a wake-up call. He also uploaded to YouTube a twelve-minute video that revealed, with propagandistic simplicity, what was about to happen in Europe: the Muslim invasion.
Over and over again, this virulent tribal hatred has been driving people to commit mass murder. It’s hatred for Muslims, it’s hatred for Jews, for Black people, for Latinos, for Asians, for LGBTQ people, and for Women.
And just this week there have been a steady series of hundreds of bomb threats issued against Airports and synagogues across the south.
There has also been an uptick of violence and murders against the gay and trans community where 33 of them have been killed during the last year.
All of this is stoked and fired up by the right wing. Just in this past week, we had Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ranting in public and on camera about the “Great Replacement Theory.”
And he doesn’t get any push-back or even comment about it from the other candidates or the moderators. He gets celebrated.
CNN analyst Van Jones went after Ramaswamy for his dangerous comments, but then Ramaswamy told him to “Just shut the fuck up, man” to laughs by a MAGA crowd. He then posted a video of Jones talking about accepting demographic changes which will mean that eventually, the nation will no longer have a white majority. That’s just factually true, but it won’t happen for decades. He wasn’t saying it was Democratic policy to replace white people, Jones was just admitting that the demographics will change over time, it’s not a “plan” it’s accepting reality. But that change doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be a simultaneous political shift from Right to Left, particularly since the undocumented migrants they complain about can’t legally vote, so that remains to be seen. Only their children, born in the U.S. will be able to vote in 18 years. Even migrants who come legally can’t become citizens and gain the ability to vote for at least a decade. So the “plan” is to wait for 10-18 years for it to all go into effect? Really?
Instead of admitting this reality, people on the right claim that the Trump base is “out for more blood” as Reince Priebus stated this weekend.
“Not particularly, because I think you’re all misreading the electorate,” Priebus insisted. “I think that the electorate is not looking for less blood. I think they’re looking for more blood.”
“I think, as I’ve said before, people are looking for a bigger middle finger this time than they were in 2016,” he added.
Or they try to claim that Trump’s comments about “poisoning the blood” of the nation were really just a criticism of Democratic policies.
[Abby] Phillip asked Malliotakis directly: “Is Trump right that immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country?”
But the congresswoman tried to deflect.
“I don’t think that’s what he was saying,” she said. “When he said ‘they are poisoning,’ I think he was talking about the Democratic policies. I think he was talking about the open border policy.”
“You know, what’s actually poisoning America is the amount of fentanyl that’s coming over the open border,” she added, trying to steer the conversation.
But Phillip wasn’t standing for that, blasting Trump’s “rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini.”
“Congresswoman,” she said, “You’re saying that’s what you think he is saying. But he was pretty clear, he was saying that the immigrants that are coming in, he says that they are poisoning the blood of the nation.”
“He never said immigrants are poisoning, though,” Malliotakis said. “He didn’t say the words immigrants, I think he was talking about Democratic policies.
Clearly frustrated, Phillip hit back: ”He was talking about people.”
Malliotakis then tried to explain that Trump really loves immigrants.
“He was married to immigrants,” she said. “He’s hired immigrants.”
Yes, Trump has been married to immigrants – but both of them have been White-skinned Slavic European immigrants. He would never claim that they’ve “poisoned his blood” because he’s a eugenicist and white supremacist.
And actually what Trump said was this:
“You know, when they let — I think the real number is like 15, 16 million people into our country — when they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said.
He was very definitely talking about immigrants.
But as I’ve stated many times, the border is not “open”, 65-70% of those encountered at the border — which means literally over 4 million people — have been arrested and expelled by Biden’s Homeland Security. That’s not at all “open.”
And lastly, instead of getting GOPers to condemn this dangerous rhetoric, or even ask for Trump to apologize, we have people like Malliotakis rationalizing and excusing it, Ramaswamy repeating it, and Tommy Tuberville doubling down on it.
“I’m mad he wasn’t tougher than that because if you’re seeing what happens at the border.,, we’re being overrun,” he told the reporter.
The worst part however, is the deluded denial these people live in. Trump has now said he’s “never read Mein Kampf” as if being a plagiarist is the worst part of what he’s said lately.
The January 6 attack on the Capitol was the largest single terrorist event in history — but Trump, the GOP and their supporters can’t bring themselves to admit that. They can’t even admit that what happened was a coordinated terrorist event implemented by thousands of people all at once. They repeatedly say it was “just a peaceful protest.”
Yeah, right.
It doesn’t matter that Trump himself set the time, date and place. It doesn’t matter that Rudy Giuliani called for “Trial by Combat.” It doesn’t matter that Trump said “Fight”, “Fighting” and “Fight like Hell” 20 times because he also said “Peacefully” once. [How exactly do you “Fight like Hell – peacefully?”] It doesn’t matter that he personally sent a crowd he knew was armed to march on the Capitol – even though they didn’t have a permit for that march because they didn’t take security precautions – as if he didn’t know exactly what they would do once they got there. It doesn’t even matter that he watched the entire thing on television while sitting on his hands for almost 3 hours instead of calling the Capital Police, the Secretary of Defense, the National Guard, Homeland Security, the Secret Service or the FBI. He called no one, he did nothing. There’s no better evidence than his inaction that he wanted the attack to happen.
Yeah, but what we saw right in front of our own eyes didn’t happen. It was undercover FBI, secret informants and magical Antifa — not actual Trump supporters implementing the attack and the violence on police and threatening to “Hang Mike Pence.” It’s like it was all a Jedi Mind Trick.
“These are not the MAGAs you’re looking for.”
We’re constantly told by those same MAGAs that if Trump is convicted criminally for this, trying to steal the 2020 election with fake electors or he loses again in 2024 the “country will explode’ — as if they’re trying to hold the entire country hostage to their whims, but I’m here to tell you it already has been exploding. All of this rhetoric has led to hundreds of death threats, dozens hate-fueled attacks and political mass murders that have already been going on. They’ve been happening for years.
They’ve already been primed for violence as former FBI counter-intelligence Frank Figliuzzi explained this week on MSNBC. All they need is for Trump to say “Go.”
Donald Trump could be a guy who faces conviction on a number of charges in which a number of his followers, possibly a majority of his followers, maybe an overwhelming majority of them, think that these are unfair prosecutions… in one way or the other. What do you think about that because we, do, as a country need to think about that?” asked MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
“It really makes the challenge of countering the threat of violence, the threat of domestic terrorism perhaps greater than we have seen in modern history because we have a candidate whose bread-and-butter approach is to attack institutions,” explained the national security expert.
He cited some of Trump’s language about not being from Washington or being an “outsider” who opposes bureaucrats and career civil servants.
“Now, lo and behold, Exhibit A, the very people I have been attacking and we don’t trust anymore because I’ve told you not to trust them, they’re going to put me in prison,” Figliuzzi continued, characterizing Trump’s thoughts.
It’s why if Trump is put in jail for breaking the gag orders it will add “wind to his sails,” he explained.
“It is going to convince his hard-core followers that he was right, that the institutions are wrong, and that we do need to break the mold,” Figliuzzi closed. “Sadly, breaking the mold may be literally violence for some of those followers, and law enforcement’s challenge is to get out ahead of this. And it is almost impossible to do every single time.”
And frankly, this fascist plan is broader than Trump himself as Jeff Sharlet, author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War has discussed on Democracy Now.
JEFF SHARLET: But in terms of not taking it seriously, I’m glad a lot of the press is still covering this race like it’s a horse race, as opposed to a last gasp of the closest thing we could — you know, let’s hold on to what we have of American democracy. We’re starting to look at something called Project 2025. This is a 900-page blueprint put together by Trump’s allies, the Heritage Foundation, funded by Koch money. Press has made a lot of Koch — about the Kochs endorsing Nikki Haley, but they’re covering their bets. A 900-page blueprint for day one. Remember, Trump says, from day one — “On day one, I’m going to be a dictator,” which is another bit of language that I think he’s kind of rope-a-doping the press. “I’m going to be a dictator. I’m just joking. No, no, on day one, I’m going to be a dictator. Just joking. What was that word I kept saying? Dictator.” Again, even more important than the substance is the spectacle, the drama, that makes him the exciting and, in fascist terms, the man of action. Then you’ve got this 900-page document that lays out, agency by agency, with every right-wing think tank on board, with the personnel, 20,000 personnel, already figured out, recruiting 5,000 lawyers to fight for this, with — talking about concentration camps, domestic surveillance, all the facets of a full-sized fascist government. He doesn’t have to have read that, just like he doesn’t have to have read Mein Kampf, to hit those notes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, in the 2025 document that people should understand, this 30-chapter, as you said, 920-page document funded by the Heritage Foundation, the Koch brothers, talking about defunding the Department of Justice, dismantling the FBI, breaking up the Department of Homeland Security, Departments of Education and Commerce — and your title of your book, the subtitle of The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War, can you tease that out as we move into 2024, what you mean by a “slow civil war”?
JEFF SHARLET: I think the slow civil war — I mean, first of all, we look at the casualties of — that are already happening, people, pregnant people, forced to have children or suffering physically, even dying, the epidemic of trans and queer suicide, all these facets of a growing concentration of fascist policy. But the slow civil war also takes place through lawfare, through the laws that prevent people from getting the things they need. They are casualties of that.
What we see in that document is the blueprint for a massive acceleration of it. It’s an eight — the plan is based around 180 days. And they go back to — Heritage Foundation made its name by making a similar document for Ronald Reagan in 1980, 60% of which was implemented within the first six months of his administration. They cite that, and they say, “OK, but that was for Reagan. Now we’re in the age of Trump. We need to go much further.” That’s the term that they actually use, “much further.”
It won’t just be the MAGA loaners who will be a danger, under any future GOP President the entire federal government will be turned into a weapon against the people. Public services and healthcare for the vulnerable will be cut, police and federal forces will become an occupying army against the people, media outlets that dare to criticize the regime will face prosecution and defamation charges.
If, and likely when, Trump is convicted and he again loses his bid for the White House, his base will likely again erupt in outrage and anger. They will again point fingers, concoct excuses and conspiracy theories and they will lash out violently.
They will attack.
Their targets will be Jews (who they see as “globalists” implementing the Great Replacement and Great Reset theories), Muslims (who they blame for Terrorism), Asians (who they feel are responsible for Covid-19), African Americans (who they blame for rampant crime and the theft of the 2020 election), LGBTQ persons (who they blame for “tricking” their children into falsely believing that their gay or trans) and Women (who frequently vote for Democrats and in favor of emasculating man-hating feminism and reproductive rights.) They’re also likely to target the “corrupt” FBI, and perhaps the ATF as did Timothy McVeigh so many years ago in retaliation for the siege of Waco as he peddled copies of the Neo-Nazi The Turner Diaries around the country.
They will be the same targets that they’ve had for over two decades. Most of the attacks will probably be by more and more “Lone Wolves.” Most of them will be using guns. Some will use bombs as Super-Trumper Cesar Seyoc attempted when he sent faulty pipe bombs to Democrats and members of the media. Heaven help us if they pool their resources and gather yet again for a giant mass attack of dozens or thousands as they did on January 6th.
This will be worse, more chaotic and violent than ever.
But it won’t be new – it’ll just be more and more of what we’re already going through.
