[Special] Boing Boing: 1927 News Report [Shows] Donald Trump's Dad Arrested in KKK Brawl With Cops

By Matt Blum:

According to a New York Times article published in June 1927, a man with the name and address of Donald Trump's father was arraigned after Klan members attacked cops in Queens, N.Y.

In an article subtitled "Klan assails policeman", Fred Trump is named in among those taken in during a late May "battle" in which "1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all." At least two officers were hurt during the event, after which the Klan's activities were denounced by the city's Police Commissioner, Joseph A. Warren.

“The Klan not only wore gowns, but had hoods over their faces almost completely hiding their identity,” Warren was quoted as saying in the article, which goes on to identify seven men “arrested in the near-riot of the parade.”

Named alongside Trump are John E Kapp and John Marcy (charged with felonious assault in the attack on Patrolman William O'Neill and Sgt. William Lockyear), Fred Lyons, Thomas Caroll, Thomas Erwin, and Harry J Free. They were arraigned in Jamaica, N.Y. All seven were represented by the same lawyers, according to the article.

The final entry on the list reads: “Fred Trump of 175-24 Devonshire Road, Jamaica, was discharged.”

In 1927, Donald Trump's father would have been 21 years old, and not yet a well-known figure. Multiple sources report his residence at the time—and throughout his life—at the same address.

* * *

Fred Trump, who died in 1999, was a New York real estate developer and the father of mogul and presidential candidate Donald Trump. Born in the Bronx to German immigrants, Fred became a real estate developer in his teens; at about the time of his apparent arrest, he was constructing single-family houses in Queens, according to his obituary in the Times. At his death, his net worth was estimated at between $250m and $300m. A savvy businessman and real estate developer, his wealth enabled the junior Trump to start big.

If the man arrested at the riotous Klan parade was indeed Donald's father, it would not be his last tangle with the law over issues concerning minorities. A 1979 article, published by Village Voice, reported on a civil rights suit that alleged that the Trumps refused to rent to black home-seekers, and quotes a rental agent who said Fred Trump instructed him not to rent to blacks and to encourage existing black tenants to leave. The case was settled in a 1975 consent degree described as "one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated," but the Justice Department subsequently complained that continuing "racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents has occurred with such frequency that it has created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity."

The Full Story (September 9, 2015)

Talking Points Memo: The 8 Craziest Moments Of Trump’s Impromptu Press Conference

By Allegra Kirkland:

3. “The leaks are absolutely real; the news is fake”

Trump said that the leaks about his private phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia were “illegal” and allowing people to find out “exactly what took place.” Yet he also repeatedly claimed that the news reports based on those leaks is “fake, because so much of the news is fake.”

* * *

6. “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you have seen in your entire life”

Trump accused a Jewish reporter who asked how his administration planned to address anti-Semitic threats of being unfriendly, told him to be “quiet,” and said he found his question “repulsive.”

* * *

8. “Are they friends of yours?”

Questioned by April Ryan, a veteran reporter for American Urban Radio Networks, on whether he would include the Congressional Black Caucus in his plans to revitalize black urban neighborhoods, Trump replied, “Are they friends of yours? Set up the meeting.”

The Full Story (February 16, 2017)

Think Progress: Trump Passes on Opportunity to Denounce Anti-Semitic Violence

By Aaron Rupar:

During his joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, President Trump was asked how he would respond to those concerned that his administration promotes racism.

“Mr. President, since your election campaign and after your victory, we’ve seen a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents across the United States,” a journalist asked. “And I wonder what you say to those among the Jewish community in Israel, around the world, who believe that your administration is playing with xenophobia and racist tones?”

Trump responded by talking about one of his favorite subjects — his electoral college victory over Hillary Clinton.

“Well, I just want to say that we are very honored by the victory that we had,” Trump began. “Three hundred and six electoral college votes — we were not supposed to crack 220 — you know that, right? There was no way to 221, but then they said there’s no way to 270. And there’s tremendous enthusiasm out there.”

Trump then promised that to bring peace and stop crime and suggested that whatever racism exists in America isn’t his responsibility.

“We are going to have peace in this country,” he said. “We are going to stop crime in this country. We are going to do everything within our power to stop simmering racism and every other thing that’s going on. A lot of bad things have been taking place over a long period of time.”

Trump concluded offering bromides about how he hopes he’ll “be able to do something” about how divided the country is, and mentioned the fact that his daughter Ivanka, son-in-law Jared Kusher, and their children are Jewish.

The Full Story (February 15, 2017)

Talking Points Memo: How Did Sebastian Gorka Go From The Anti-Muslim Fringe To White House Aide?

By Allegra Kirkland:

While Gorka, a former Breitbart News national security editor and fixture on Fox News, published the New York Times bestseller “Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War,” held various positions at military educational institutions and even testified before the House Armed Services Committee on the threat of “global jihadism,” he was little-known in mainstream D.C. circles before the 2016 election year.

* * *

Omid Safi, director of Islamic Studies at Duke University, was much more biting in his assessment, labeling Gorka’s book “propaganda.”

“He opines on everything from the Koran to Mohamad to jihad to Islamic history to contemporary politics but does so in a way that is inaccurate, sloppy, superficial, bigoted and ideological,” Safi said.

Gorka’s resume details a long list of short-term professorships and work for small conservative think tanks, several of which he founded with his wife, Katharine, a national security analyst who served on Trump’s Department of Homeland Security landing team. The people TPM spoke with who work on counterterrorism issues said they weren’t familiar with those Gorka-founded organizations, including Threat Knowledge Group, a consulting firm that claimed to provide strategic advice to the FBI, Army and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Threat Knowledge Group’s website, like Gorka’s own, has been taken offline since he joined the administration in late January.

Since joining the Trump White House, Gorka has swiftly become the public face of Trump’s foreign policy, making dozens of radio and cable appearances to tout the President’s focus on defeating “radical Islam” via an executive order on immigration. A White House spokeswoman on Wednesday declined to respond to TPM’s request for comment on how experts characterized Gorka’s past work and what his role as deputy assistant to Trump entails.

Gorka’s name and views appear to have a higher profile among experts on Islamophobia than in the counterterrorism community.

The Full Story (February 9, 2017)

Washington Post: Trump’s Loose Talk About Muslims Gets Weaponized in Court Against Travel Ban

By Fred Barbash and Derek Hawkins:

Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign and now into the first weeks of his presidency, critics suggested that he cool his incendiary rhetoric, that his words matter. His defenders responded that, as Corey Lewandowski said, he was being taken too “literally.” Some, like Vice President Pence, wrote it all off to his “colorful style.” Trump himself recently explained that his rhetoric about Muslims is popular, winning him “standing ovations.”

No one apparently gave him anything like a Miranda warning: Anything he says can and will be used against him in a court of law.

And that’s exactly what’s happening now in the epic court battle over his travel ban, currently blocked by a temporary order set for argument Tuesday before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

The states of Washington and Minnesota, which sued to block Trump’s order, are citing the president’s inflammatory rhetoric as evidence that the government’s claims — that it’s not a ban and not aimed at Muslims — are shams.

In court papers, Washington and Minnesota’s attorneys general have pulled out quotes from speeches, news conferences and interviews as evidence that an executive order the administration argues is neutral was really motivated by animus toward Muslims and a “desire to harm a particular group.”

His words, the two states say in their brief, show “that the President acted in bad faith in an effort to target Muslims.” The courts, they say, “have both the right and duty to examine” Trump’s “true motives.”

The states offer a multitude of exhibits, starting with a December 2015 release from the Trump campaign calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

They cite his August speech advocating screening out people “who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law.”

Another exhibit: His Jan. 27 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network in which he said he wanted to give priority to Christians in Syria.

They even hauled out Rudolph W. Giuliani’s comment on Fox News that Trump wanted a “Muslim ban” and requested he assemble a commission to show him “the right way to do it legally.”

The Full Story (February 7, 2017)

Washington Post: Bannon Film Outline Warned U.S. Could Turn Into ‘Islamic States of America’

By Matea Gold:

The flag fluttering above the U.S. Capitol is emblazoned with a crescent and star. Chants of “Allahu Akbar” rise from inside the building.

That’s the provocative opening scene of a documentary-style movie outlined 10 years ago by Stephen K. Bannon that envisioned radical Muslims taking over the country and remaking it into the “Islamic States of America,” according to a document describing the project obtained by The Washington Post.

The outline shows how Bannon — years before he became a strategist for President Trump and helped draft last week’s order restricting travel from seven mostly Muslim countries — sought to issue a warning about the threat posed by radical Muslims and their “enablers among us.” Although driven by the “best intentions,” the outline says, institutions such as the media, the Jewish community and government agencies were appeasing jihadists aiming to create an Islamic republic.

The eight-page draft, written in 2007 during Bannon’s stint as a Hollywood filmmaker, proposes a three-part movie that would trace “the culture of intolerance” behind sharia law, examine the “Fifth Column” made up of “Islamic front groups” and identify the American enablers paving “the road to this unique hell on earth.”

The Full Story (February 3, 2017)

Talking Points Memo: It Was Never Populism. It's Nationalism.

By Josh Marshall:

Today at the White House CEO event President Trump, leaning on the say-so and presence of big Wall Street CEOs, started ripping up the reforms put in place to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. “We have some of the bankers here. There’s nobody better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie, so you’re going to tell me about it,” Trump told JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon.

This should tell us several things. The most important is that 'populism' has always been the wrong name for what Trumpism represents. The unifying message of Trumpism is nationalism, and particularly an aggressive, zero-sum nationalism. It is also summed up simply in "Make America Great Again." The style may be 'populist' in some generic sense. But the message and agenda is nationalism. That is the focus around which all the actions of these rancorous 13 days come together into a unified whole - aggressive attacks on friends and foes alike, threats of tariffs against non-compliant foreign states, clampdowns on immigration, etc.

You'll notice that President Trump often talks about "workers" but it is almost always in the vein of protecting American workers from abuse by foreigners. Especially since the Trump virtually never speaks about wages. And he never spoke about wealth inequality, financial security provided by programs like Medicare and Social Security, let alone worker protections or labor unions. One might add job security, affordable education for children and retirement security generally to the list of the undiscussed. The real theme is one Trump articulated clearly yesterday in his National Prayer Breakfast speech: "We have to be tough. It's time we're going to be a little tough, folks. We're taking advantage of by every nation in the world virtually. It's not going to happen anymore. It's not going to happen anymore."

We may say that Trump is flipflopping or being hypocritical by embracing the individuals, policies and priorities of the country's financial elite, who he notionally campaigned against. Both are true in a way. But that doesn't tell us enough. The Trump message was about nationalism, power and aggression against the nations of the world who are 'taking advantage of" us and laughing at us. That kind of aggression against outsiders, with their domestic counterparts, the 'elites', can overlap with economic concerns. They're quite distinct.

But a proper understanding of Trumpism is also a political opportunity for Democrats. Trump is cozying up to the Wall Street barons he campaigned against. He's about to throw 25 million Americans off their health care. “We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank, because frankly I have so many people, friends of mine, that have nice businesses and they can’t borrow money,” he said again today, while he also talks about vast tax cuts for his wealthy friends and tax increases for many ordinary working and middle class families. This is a perfect evocation of government by the richest, for the richest, by the rich - and from the President's own lips. The complete indifference to the supposed interests of the people who voted for him has so many examples it's almost comical. Democrats need to be building this storyline now.

The Full Story (February 3, 2017)

Reuters: Trump to Focus Counter-Extremism Program Solely on Islam [Say] Sources

By Julia Edwards Ainsley, Dustin Volz and Kristina Cooke:

The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government program designed to counter all violent ideologies so that it focuses solely on Islamist extremism, five people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

The program, "Countering Violent Extremism," or CVE, would be changed to "Countering Islamic Extremism" or "Countering Radical Islamic Extremism," the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.

* * *

The Obama administration sought to foster relationships with community groups to engage them in the counterterrorism effort. In 2016, Congress appropriated $10 million in grants for CVE efforts and DHS awarded the first round of grants on Jan. 13, a week before Trump was inaugurated.

Among those approved were local governments, city police departments, universities and non-profit organizations. In addition to organizations dedicated to combating Islamic State's recruitment in the United States, grants also went to Life After Hate, which rehabilitates former neo-Nazis and other domestic extremists.

The Full Story (February 2, 2017)

Truth-Out: Nazis Once Published List of Jewish Crimes, Trump Now Pushing to Do the Same for Immigrant Crimes

By Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh:

The Trump administration has announced plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants living in so-called sanctuary cities, where local officials and law enforcement are refusing to comply with federal immigration authorities' efforts to speed up deportations. The plans for the weekly list, to be published by the Department of Homeland Security, were included in Trump's executive orders signed last week. We speak to Andrea Pitzer. Her upcoming book is called One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

* * *

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what President Trump has said he's going to do: keep a list of, quote, "immigrant crimes"?

ANDREA PITZER: Well, this weekly report that he has called for recalls a number of things from the past that we have seen before, which is this move to isolate and identify and then vilify a vulnerable minority community in order to move against it. When he -- I just went back last night and reread his speech from when he declared his candidacy, and the Mexican rapist comment was in from the beginning, and so this has been a theme throughout. And we see back in Nazi Germany there was a paper called -- a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer, and they had a department called "Letter Box," and readers were invited to send in stories of supposed Jewish crimes. And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic illustrations of these crimes, as well. And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like "The Criminal Jew," and they would show photos of "Jewish-looking," as they called it, people who represented different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews.

So this preoccupation with focusing in on one subset of the population's crimes and then depicting that as somehow depraved and abnormal from the main population is something we've seen quite a bit in the past, even in the US Before Japanese-American internment, you had newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle running about the unassimilability of the Japanese immigrants and also the crime tendencies and depravities they had, which were distinguished from the main American population.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, this flies in the face of all studies that have shown that the crime rate among immigrant populations in the United States is actually lower than it is among ordinary American citizens, but yet this is attempting to take isolated incidents or particular crimes and sort of raise them to the level of a general trend, isn't it?

The Full Story (February 2, 2017)

Washington Post: Trump Rants About ‘Fake News’ As He Marks Black History Month

By John Wagner:

President Trump teed off on the media Wednesday during an event held to mark Black History Month, calling CNN “fake news” and once again decrying a false report that he had removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office.

Trump’s remarks came at the top of what was billed as a “listening session” at which he sat at a conference table in the Roosevelt Room with a group of African Americans, most of whom had played a role in his campaign for president or worked on the transition.

Trump soon turned to a false report by a Time magazine writer that on his Inauguration Day a bust of King had been removed from the Oval Office. Trump and his aides have repeatedly cited the incident as evidence of media bias, despite an immediate acknowledgment of the error and an apology from the reporter.

“Somebody said I took the statue out of my office,” Trump said. “And it turned out that that was fake news. Fake news. The statue is cherished. … It was never even touched, so I think it was a disgrace, but that’s the way the press is. Very unfortunate.”

Trump later said that he didn’t watch CNN, calling the network “fake news.” By contrast, he said, “Fox has treated me very nice.”

Trump also repeated an earlier assessment, first made by White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, that the media is “the opposition party.”

“A lot of the media actually is the opposition party,” the president said. “They’re so biased, and really it’s a disgrace. Some of the media is fantastic and fair, but so much of the media is opposition party, knowingly saying incorrect things.”

Trump noted he had won the election, suggesting that that was evidence the media might not “have the influence they think.”

“But they really need to straighten out their act,” Trump said. “They’re very dishonest people.”

During the event, Trump also thanked those around the table for helping him exceed his expectations with African American voters.

“If you remember, I wasn’t going to do well with the African American community,” Trump said. “We ended up getting substantially more than candidates who had run in the past years, and now we’re going to take that to new levels.”

Exit polls showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won African American votes over Trump, 89 percent to 8 percent. In 2012, exit polls showed that then-President Barack Obama garnered 93 percent of the black vote compared with Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s 6 percent.

Trump profusely thanked Ben Carson, his pick to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for his help during the campaign.

The Full Story (February 1, 2017)

Washington Post: U.N. Experts Say Trump Immigration Order Violates U.S. Human Rights Obligations

By Mark Berman:

A panel of United Nations human rights experts said Wednesday that President Trump’s sweeping order restricting some travelers and refugees from entering the United States violates the country’s international human rights obligations.

The blunt assessment from the U.N. is the latest criticism it has volleyed at Trump’s ban, which temporarily closes America’s borders to people from seven Muslim-majority nations and suspends admission for almost all refugees for a 120-day period.

“Such an order is clearly discriminatory based on one’s nationality and leads to increased stigmatization of Muslim communities,” a group of U.N. Special Rapporteurs — experts appointed to study human rights issues — said in a statement. The group includes rapporteurs on migrants, human rights and counterterrorism, racism, torture and freedom of religion.

Trump and officials in his administration have argued since he signed the order last Friday that the measure is not a “Muslim ban.” During the presidential campaign, Trump called for a Muslim ban, a statement that remains on his campaign website, and he said the day he signed the order that he would prioritize Christians seeking admission as refugees.

In its statement, the group of U.N. experts alluded to people who have been detained at airports across the country, saying they were worried people flying to the United States “will be subject to detention for an undefined period of time and then ultimately deported.”

The Full Story (February 1, 2017)

Washington Post: Trump’s Hard-line Actions Have an Intellectual Godfather - Jeff Sessions

By Philip Rucker and Robert Costa:

Sessions’s nomination is scheduled to be voted on Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but his influence in the administration stretches far beyond the Justice Department. From immigration and health care to national security and trade, Sessions is the intellectual godfather of the president’s policies. His reach extends throughout the White House, with his aides and allies accelerating the president’s most dramatic moves, including the ban on refugees and citizens from seven mostly Muslim nations that has triggered fear around the globe.

The author of many of Trump’s executive orders is senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, a Sessions confidant who was mentored by him and who spent the weekend overseeing the government’s implementation of the refu­gee ban. The tactician turning Trump’s agenda into law is deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn, Sessions’s longtime chief of staff in the Senate. The mastermind behind Trump’s incendiary brand of populism is chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who, as chairman of the Breitbart website, promoted Sessions for years.

In an email in response to a request from The Washington Post, Bannon described Sessions as “the clearinghouse for policy and philosophy” in Trump’s administration, saying he and the senator are at the center of Trump’s “pro-America movement” and the global nationalist phenomenon.

“In America and Europe, working people are reasserting their right to control their own destinies,” Bannon wrote. “Jeff Sessions has been at the forefront of this movement for years, developing populist nation-state policies that are supported by the vast and overwhelming majority of Americans, but are poorly understood by cosmopolitan elites in the media that live in a handful of our larger cities.”

The Full Story (January 30, 2017)

[Special] Revisiting the First Immigration Ban

Lawfare: Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump’s Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas by Benjamin Wittes (January 28, 2017)

What’s more, the document also takes steps that strike me as utterly orthogonal to any relevant security interest. If the purpose of the order is the one it describes, for example, I can think of no good reason to burden the lives of students individually suspected of nothing who are here lawfully and just happen to be temporarily overseas, or to detain tourists and refugees who were mid-flight when the order came down. I have trouble imagining any reason to raise questions about whether green card holders who have lived here for years can leave the country and then return. Yes, it’s temporary, and that may lessen the costs (or it may not, depending on the outcome of the policy review the order mandates), but temporarily irrational is still irrational.

Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.

To be sure, the executive order does not say anything as crass as: “Sec. 14. Burdening Muslim Lives to Make Political Point.” It doesn’t need to. There’s simply no reason in reading it to ignore everything Trump said during the campaign, during which he repeatedly called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Washington Post: Judge halts deportations as refugee ban causes worldwide furor by Jerry Markon, Emma Brown and Katherine Shaver (January 29, 2017) -

A federal judge in New York blocked deportations nationwide late Saturday of those detained on entry to the United States after an executive order from President Trump targeted citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Judge Ann Donnelly of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn granted a request from the American Civil Liberties Union to stop the deportations after determining that the risk of injury to those detained by being returned to their home countries necessitated the decision.

Minutes after the judge’s ruling in New York, another came in Alexandria when U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a temporary restraining order to block for seven days the removal of any green-card holders being detained at Dulles International Airport. Brinkema’s action also ordered that lawyers have access to those held there because of the ban.

Time: Republicans Begin to Break With President Trump by Philip Elliott/Indian Wells, Calif,Alex Altman (January 29, 2017) -

By Sunday evening, more than a dozen GOP members of Congress had spoken out against Trump’s executive order on immigration. Among them were an array of the party’s most influential figures. The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said the United States should not implement a religious test. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio said the plan to strengthen vetting of refugees was itself not vetted. And the political and policy groups led by Charles and David Koch offered their first public criticism of Trump, whose candidacy the billionaire brothers found so unpalatable they sat out the 2016 election.

The wave of criticism marks the end of a startlingly brief honeymoon period for a new President who has been in office for scarcely a week, and even set the White House on defense as it backtracked on the ban applying to green-card holders. And while much of the blowback was driven by Trump’s immigration orders, the controversial plans he has on the horizon suggest the rest of his term could be just as rocky.

The emerging rifts come amid mass protests in cities around the U.S. against an executive order that would block millions of people from entering the United States. Legal permanent U.S. residents were detained at airports, refugees were trapped en route to the United States and judges from coast to coast stepped in to stop the unprecedented White House action. The chaos knocked the White House back on its heels and prompted Trump on Sunday night to release a defense of the policy.

Talking Points Memo: Bannon's Deathly Hand

By Josh Marshall:

The White House announced today that the decision not to mention Jews or anti-Semitism in its announcement commemorating Holocaust remembrance day was intentional. According to White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks, the statement made no mentions of Jews out of respect for the non-Jews who died in Nazi labor camps and death camps during World War II. Hicks told CNN: "Despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered."

It is true that millions died under the Nazis who were not Jews. They included targeted ethnic groups like Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, left-wing dissidents, people with disabilities, etc. But it has long been a trope of Holocaust deniers and white nationalists to insist that Jews were only incidentally targeted.

In any case, there are no word limits in presidential statements. A more logical and worthwhile approach would be to note the various groups who were victimized. This isn't accidental. The new administration is riddled with anti-Semites and those who want to cater to anti-Semites.

The Full Story (January 28, 2017)

[Special] Revisiting Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017

All articles from January 20, 2017.

The Atlantic: 'America First' - Donald Trump's Populist Inaugural Address by David A. Graham

Reciting a litany of horribles including gangs, drugs, crime, poverty, and unemployment, Trump told the nation, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

The inaugural address was unusually dark and political, delivered in a forum where new presidents have tended to reach for a language of unity, positivity, and non-partisanship. In many ways, the speech drew directly from the tone and approach of Trump’s often very-negative campaign rally speeches, once again showing that the “pivot” many observers have long expected Trump to make toward a more unifying and detached tone, is not coming. President Trump so far looks much the same as candidate Trump, and his speech was a strange milestone in a strange rise to power, one that was viewed as impossible just months ago.

Billboard: Kanye West Not Invited to Perform at Trump Inauguration Because It's a 'Typically and Traditionally American' Event

By Gil Kaufman:

A spokesperson for president-elect Donald Trump's inauguration committee told CNN that Friend of Donald Kanye West was not invited to perform at the real estate mogul's inaugural because 'Ye's music wasn't right for the "typically and traditionally American event." Tom Barrack, chairman of the Presidential Inauguration Committee, told CNN's Erin Burnett that the inauguration wasn't a "fitting" venue for West, who famously met with Trump in December and posed for a stiff photo at Trump Tower afterwards and whose music is about to be the subject of a course at Washington University in St. Louis called "Politics of Kanye West: Black Genius and Sonic Aesthetics."

"He's been great, he considers himself a friend of the president-elect, but it's not the venue." Kanye, who was born in Chicago and performs a style of music, hip-hop, that was invented in the United States on the streets of Trump's New York in the late 1970s, performed at MTV's Inaugural Youth Ball in honor of President Obama in 2009. "It's going to be typically and traditionally American, and Kanye is a great guy, we just haven't asked him to perform. And we move on with our agenda," Barrack added.

The Full Story (January 19, 2017)

Truth-Out: Trump's Lesser-Known Homeland Security Adviser Espouses Anti-Muslim Policing

By John Knefel:

Some of President-elect Donald Trump's most controversial cabinet nominees face Senate confirmation hearings this week, but one top adviser will not have to be approved by the Senate: Thomas Bossert, who will serve as the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism. Bossert will occupy a powerful position in the White House, though little is known about his current political positions. The few indications of his political leanings that are available are not reassuring; for example, Bossert retweeted an Islamophobic Twitter post in 2015 -- a choice that could potentially foreshadow the incoming administration's homeland security policies.

Unlike many top Trump aides, Bossert maintains a low public profile, but his previously unpublicized retweet raises concerns about his willingness to promote anti-Muslim rhetoric. In the hours following the Paris attack in November 2015, Bossert retweeted a post from former NSA official and conservative columnist John Schindler that read: "The liberalism I was raised in was not a societal death-wish. If you think political Islam is a plan for progress or diversity, get help." (Schindler has also, however, tweeted statements denouncing Trump's Muslim ban and praising Muslims who fight against ISIS.)

Robert McCraw from the Council on American-Islamic Relations said he found the tweet to be concerning, especially in the larger context of the people Trump is surrounding himself with. "Bossert's retweet is just another troubling example of the Trump administration's comfort in mainstreaming Islamophobic messages," he told me in a phone interview. "A number of the Trump administration's national security, homeland security and intelligence appointees and nominees express a deep fear and mistrust of Islam and Muslims."

The Full Story (January 15, 2017)

Washington Post: Trump’s Feud With John Lewis Echoes a Long, Difficult Relationship With African Americans

By Janell Ross and Vanessa Williams:

The attack on John Lewis, however, underscores Trump’s tense relationship with black voters and seemed to echo some of his past confrontations with African Americans.

Trump started his presidential campaign with huge disadvantages among African Americans, in part because of his years-long questioning of whether President Obama was born in the United States. Trump also drew criticism for taking out a full-page ad in New York newspapers in 1989 urging the death penalty for five black and Hispanic teenagers accused of raping a woman in Central Park. Even after the young men were exonerated, Trump criticized the city for awarding them damages for the years they had spent in prison and continued to argue that they were “guilty of something.”

In the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump began appealing to black voters to give him a chance. Speaking at rallies, to overwhelmingly white audiences, Trump described black people as living “in hell,” stuck in crumbling, crime-ridden neighborhoods and failing schools. “What do you have to lose?” he asked.

For some people, Trump’s attack on Lewis — as well as his inaccurate description of Atlanta, a longtime haven for middle- and upper-middle-class African Americans — brought it all back.

Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, said that if Trump was serious about reaching out to the black community, he would have to take responsibility for a campaign whose tone was “divisive at best, seriously offensive at worst” and “dangerous” with reports of an increase in racist behavior and actions directed at minorities by some whites. She said he will have to meet with and apologize to the civil rights community and young activists in the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The burden of proof is on you. It’s not on everybody else to warm up to you because you’re the president,” she said of Trump. “Because the rhetoric came out of his mouth, the burden of proof is on him to show that he’s changed, he’s sensitive and he cares about those issues.”

The Full Story (January 15, 2017)

Truth-Out: Donald Trump Is Not the Enemy We Prepared For

By Andrew Reszitnyk:

Trump is the organic expression of a sinister faction of right-wing thinkers that have up until now been restricted to the dark corners of the internet: the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, extreme religious traditionalists, anti-Semites, anarcho-capitalists and hardcore libertarians that together make up what white nationalist Richard Spencer describes as the "alt-right." This host of regressive political communities also includes the so-called Men's Rights Movement, the group responsible for instigating the Gamergate cyber attacks upon women in the video game industry. Jared Taylor, the head of the white nationalist New Century Foundation and one of the chief "intellectuals" of the self-described alt-right, has said that the president-elect, "instinctively, clumsily stumbled upon some of the policies that we've been promoting for a long time." These are the people for whom Trump was not a protest candidate but instead a champion, the first high-profile figure to openly espouse their extreme cause. This movement embodies a violent identity politics for straight white men that rejects the very principle that all people on Earth deserve equal protection and dignity.

The white supremacists and other right-wing activists who describe themselves as the alt-right are united less by coherent shared policy positions and more by a number of strong feelings -- mostly angry, hateful feelings directed toward the media, government institutions, universities and the so-called culture of political correctness. Members of this group describe the efforts of left-leaning academics, politicians, media outlets and celebrities to call out racism, sexism and homophobia when they see it as tyrannical developments that have stripped white men of their "rightful" power. Claiming that feminist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic political movements represent a turn away from universalism, and that efforts to criticize offensive speech amount to censorship, this group rejects both mainstream Democrat and Republican parties. Some members of the alt-right have hijacked the language of feminism in order to describe their movement as an intersectionalism of the right, which blends a wide spectrum of prejudices. The self-described alt-right gives a home to all who reject the idea that the government should provide for its citizens and that all people are equal. Trump's vocal supporters -- KKK leader David Duke, anti-Semitic media chairman Steve Bannon, anti-feminist and Islamophobic journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, and an army of anonymous internet trolls posting racist Trump memes on 4chan and 8chan -- comprise a veritable "who's who" of the alt-right.

The Full Story (January 10, 2017)

[Special] Washington Post December 2016 Smorgasbord

After sharing a mega-post of January Washington Post articles a week ago, I thought it would be worthwhile to go further back in time and share some Post articles from December (in reality, the last few articles in the queue for 2016 were all WaPo, so may as well close it out in one shot). End of year articles after the jump.