trump's Language of Hate Is Getting More Violent

If there is a blogger I quote often, it's Rude Pundit (not entirely sure the real name, just that he's from Louisiana or hails from there). And what he wrote today is worth your time (go visit and come back), of which these are the highlights: 

To be a loyal redcap stormtrooper, you gotta go along with Trump no matter which way his insistent madness drives his rhetoric. And, truly, you don't disagree with him when says, "They’re coming from all over the world. People all over the world, we have no idea. They could be healthy. They could be very unhealthy. They could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country, but they do bring in crime, but they have them coming from all over the world and they're destroying the blood of our country." But what you're agreeing with is Nazi shit. It's flat out Nazi shit. Trump can say, as he told Hewitt, that it's not the same as what Hitler said, but it is the same as what Hitler said, except Hitler was talking about Jews and Trump's talking about undocumented migrants. And Trump wants to round them up and put them in camps before deporting them by the millions. And he wants laws passed that would allow authorities to check the papers of anyone they "suspect" of not being American. It's absolute insanity that would fundamentally alter the fabric of the country. It will cause upheaval and violence and economic ruin. But Nazis don't give a shit about that kind of thing because purity matters above all. The rest will take care of itself once the blood is purified. Or, you know, un-poisoned...

Sure, sure, some Trump supporters, desperately hoping to rationalize away the stink of Nazi, will try to say that they know the "rhetoric" Trump uses is over the top and even problematic, but they just think what he did for the country was so awesome that they have to support him and, hey, he can't do all those bad things. You know what you call someone who tries to justify what a Nazi says? You call them a "Nazi..."

So, yeah, I'll call these sick motherfuckers "Nazis." If you're gonna follow someone whose language lines up with Hitler, who has praised dictators and who wants to bring their methods to the United States, who promises to round up millions of people just trying to live their lives, who threatens to attack our neighbors and break our alliances, who sees non-white people as invaders or criminals who must be dealt with harshly, who wants to "cleanse" the country of people who don't believe the same shit he does, fuck, yeah, you're a Nazi. I don't wanna wait around until gas chambers are built to finally sound an alarm.

Nothing Rude Pundit notes is in the wrong. trump is now openly threatening - after what I feared he's do when he was previously in office - to quit NATO. trump is threatening to attack our border allies Canada and Mexico, and not just with more tariff wars. trump is threatening at home to "weaponize" the Department of Justice to attack everyone who's been involved in his ongoing civil and criminal trials. As part of his revenge tour, he's also threatening to fire most of the federal civil service so he can refill all the jobs with people directly loyal to himself.

trump is bragging he will be a dictator on Day One, and although he couches that by saying "it'll be for one day only" that one day is all he needs to become Dictator For Life.

trump has been spending this third round of campaigning going further into extremist and violent rhetoric as though he's got nothing left to lose.

Because in all respects he's got everything to lose.

trump is facing up to four different criminal trials, any one of which could find him in a jail cell halfway through the 2024 campaign cycle. Granted, trump and his lawyers are doing everything they can to delay every trial until 2025, with the hope that he will "win" (most likely steal through another broken Electoral College) re-election and have legal immunity as President, during which he'll wreak havoc on the legal system both federal and state to ensure he never dies in prison. However, most of the trials are already set in the calendar, with the likelihood that if he delays one trial - say, the Mar-A-Lago documents trial set for May getting moved back to 2025 - the prosecutors in the other trials could move up to fill that vacuum. The Georgia conspiracy trial, for example, doesn't have a date set yet but DA Willis claims she can have it going within 30 days, and there's every sign the judges will let her.

And that's just the trials. If the Colorado ballot disqualification holds up in the Supreme Court, there is every likelihood the 34 other states considering that matter will use the 14th Amendment clause - to ban insurrectionists from elective office - to keep trump from either the primary ballot (denying him the Republican ticket) or the general ballot in November (denying him Electoral votes). trump may be blocked from Presidential immunity altogether.

So trump is going for broke. he is going to the most extreme, most reprehensible language he can use to rile up a Far Right voting base that's hungry for the hatred and fear that trump feeds them. It's already stirring them up to attack the Colorado judges and plotting to attack any other state officials down the road.

This is all trump knows: Angering up his base to get them to do the dirty work of scaring the rest of America into letting him get his way. Even at the expense of constitutional norms (and literal constitutional law).

A lot of this depends on what the courts will do to rein in trump's increasingly desperate violence towards everything America should stand for. If they delay his trials, they risk the possibility of trump stealing away the Electoral College by hook and crook. If they ignore the 14th Amendment, they risk the reality that trump will happily trash the rest of the Constitution when he regains the Presidency and fulfills his vow of dictatorship.

If they hold trump accountable - either by sticking to the trials he's likely to lose, or sticking to the 14th Amendment that denies him any chance of being on the ballot - they like the rest of the nation runs the risk of trump's violent rhetoric turning into MAGA's violent actions.

But that risk of violence is unavoidable. One way or another, trump will have blood shed and lives lost.

Better to hold trump accountable to the law, in spite of his bullying words. Let justice be done.

The Tucker Carlson Hate Machine Unplugged

Let's just get to the facts. This Monday morning, without ceremony or forewarning, Fox Not-News kicked their prime-time fearmonger Tucker Carlson to the curb. To refer to David Folkenflik at NPR:

In an austere, four-sentence statement, Fox News announced Monday that prime-time star Tucker Carlson is leaving the network, effective immediately.

"FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," the network said in a statement released by a spokesperson. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor."

Fox said Carlson's last day hosting his show was Friday, April 21. Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executives of Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp. respectively, had decided Carlson's fate on Friday, a source with knowledge told NPR...

The ouster of Fox's top opinion host comes less than a week after Fox settled an epic defamation lawsuit by an election technology company for more than $787 million. Dominion Voting Systems sued over segments promoting bogus claims that election fraud cheated then-President Donald Trump of victory in 2020...

Oddly enough, the follow-up reporting on Carlson's ouster wasn't the damaging revelations from Dominion's civil suit - although it should have been the reason - it had more to do with the pending damage involving the lawsuits from former show producer Abby Grossberg, who claimed a harmful sexist workplace and apparently had the receipts to back her up.

In a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York, Grossberg accused Carlson and Fox of sexism and harassment, alleging that his show's workplace was replete with examples of misogyny. Her lawsuit claims, among other things, that mocked-up photographic images depicted then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "in a bathing suit revealing her cleavage" and that staffers were polled — on two separate occasions — on which of two female candidates for Michigan governor they would rather have sex with.

"Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox News is, in part, an admission of the systemic lying, bullying, and conspiracy-mongering claimed by our client," said Tanvir Rahman, one of Grossberg's lawyers, in a statement Monday afternoon. "Mr. Carlson and his subordinates remain individual defendants in the S.D.N.Y. case and we look forward to taking their depositions under oath in the very near term."

All that said, let's go to the man in the street to get his opinion on how Tucker Carlson deserved this shoddy mistreatment by his billionaire bosses. (checks notes) Actually let's go to Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog for more:

Whatever is happening, it's odd. Fox put election denialism on the air in 2020 because rejecting one of the Fox audience's core beliefs was seen as likely to damage the Fox brand. But in 2023 nothing could damage the Fox brand in the eyes of viewers more than letting Tucker Carlson go. Has Rupert Murdoch stopped caring about the brand? Or does he resent Carlson's demagoguery about "globalism," which he might regard as an indictment of people like himself?

I assume everything will settle down soon. There'll be a Jesse Watters or Greg Gutfeld show in Carlson's slot and the vitriol will be flowing again as if it never stopped.

But Carlson was worse than other Fox hosts, and it will be good to have him gone -- possibly for a while. Does he have a non-compete clause? If so, how long will it silence him? For a long time, I hope.

As Steve notes, the Fox Not-News network was chugging along just fine with its brand of Far Right toxic fearmongering before Tucker showed up. After all, he filled the gap left open by Bill O'Reilly, who also departed under a cloud of sexual misconduct. And the network will happily plug in a fresh face who'll figure out the proper mix of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism that made Tucker their number one guy (until he was a millstone).

That Tucker is getting forced out over the same troubles with women that O'Reilly departed, and considering how Roger Ailes' tenure as network overlord ended over sexual harassment charges, we should all notice how misogynistic that whole network seems to be (they may hire a lot of women but they sure as hell mistreat them).

But Tucker Carlson was a monster in his own right, a horrifying blend of upper-class privilege and white-boy grievance. He began with a conservative bent and skewed further rightward towards fascism. If Tucker wasn't shilling lies about the January 6th insurrection, he was sucking up to Putin and his dreams of Russian empire.

What made Tucker truly dangerous was his mostly-open support of the odious Replacement Theory at the base of every racist, anti-Semitic attack on American norms. It formed the foundation of every rant, every outrage towards The Dread Other - immigrants (mostly Hispanics), Blacks, Jews, women - that Tucker aired on his shows.

For all of Tucker's - and Fox Not-News' - pretensions of being a journalist, this was all he ever was: A Fearmonger. He spewed lies about others in order to have his audiences recoil in fear and then respond in anger. Tucker - and many other Far Right pundits and writers and celebrities - reveled in the controversies he stirred up, playing himself a victim to "woke" critics and getting his followers more addicted to the hate he sold.

Everything about Tucker Carlson and Fox Not-News echoed the practices of the authoritarian regimes of a fictional dystopia, Orwell's 1984. In that work, the powers running Oceania behind the leadership of Big Brother organized daily sessions of Two Minutes Hate, where workers were brought together and overwhelmed by propagandistic showings of "enemies of the state":

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started...

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically...

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. - 1984, George Orwell

This was what Tucker Carlson brought to Fox Not-News every night. This is what Fox Not-News wanted every night. They served up Fear and Hate like drugs and their audiences got addicted to it even more.

And gods help us, the Fox Not-News overlords will find a replacement for Tucker who will provide another session of Two Minutes Hate for a full hour (minus the 27 minutes for ad space).

None of this is going to end until the whole nation wakes up to the reality that the Hate Speech Tucker and his Far Right allies are shilling - getting us to shout at screens at enemies of their state of mind - is a danger to us all. None of this is going to end until the Murdoch family and their business partners owning Fox can no longer profit from this Hate.

They unplugged Tucker Carlson today. The rest of us need to unplug Fox Not-News and finish this moment.

Look For Me On Counter Social Now (w/Update)

With all the talk the last two weeks of Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter as a corporate entity - his mass firings, driving the employees to flee under demands of "hardcore" doubling down on work, pushing for fee-based services that would drive users away, and allowing for extremist BS to spread that would drive advertisers away - most everybody hadn't actually quit Twitter because we were enjoying the drama too much, and some of us were masochistic enough to stay to watch the pending technological collapse of the media app in real-time.

It would have to take an act of sadism and cluelessness for Musk to drive people away from Twitter even as he was driving the app over the cliffs, and Musk reached that today with the announcement that he's letting donald trump - who lied, bullied, lied more, mocked people, lied a lot more, and made outrageous demands through his Twitter feed on an hourly basis until he crossed too many lines and got banned - back on twitter without restraint.

With that, I made my announcement and made my peace. Goodbye, Twitter.

I will not support a Twitter where Elon Musk brings back a lying, racist monster like trump without consequences to let him poison this forum any further. I am gone. Goodbye Twitter, and good luck. look for me on @pwartenberg@counter.social#RIPTwitter #ElonMuskIsATroll

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) November 20, 2022

I am done with Twitter now, and if it falls apart under the strain of too few workers keeping it together with duct tape and spit, then I will just have to read about it on NPR's website when it happens.

I will miss you all. Except for the ones I know on Discord and Facebook, mostly the Lost Golden Horde Battalion of the TNC.

You can find me now on the alternative social media app Counter.Social under @pwartenberg and I wish you good luck in your journeys ahead.

More to say about this hectic month later. A little too busy with NaNo and with working a vendor table at Lake County Comic Con this Sunday.

I will part with this, my most famous tweet of all time:

that's how it starts, with the oohing and the ahhing. then comes the screaming and the running... pic.twitter.com/iZDXx7T4EQ

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) April 9, 2017

Update: I'm also looking into this HIVE app, but it's mobile-only.

Even Further Update (12/5/22): Well, damn. HIVE turned out to be a bit unhelpful. Counter Social works okay but I'm having a hard time finding people and following them. In the meanwhile, Musk may have invited trump to rejoin Twitter but it turns out trump signed an exclusive rights deal with his own (failing) social media app, meaning trump legally can't get on Twitter even if he wanted to. It all turned into Much Ado About Nothing, I suppose. Anyway, Musk is turning out to be a real idiot running the company into the ground, and violating a ton of international labor laws in the process. I will see you back on the Titanic on the Twitter feed, peeps.

Even Further Revision to the Update (12/11/22): Going back to Twitter is not a good idea. Elon Musk is intentionally promoting every bad-faith right-wing meme on the site, in the process of defaming former Twitter officials in order to justify letting extremists promoting violence and misinformation to return to the site. Other people I know are going back to quitting the site, refusing to let their traffic contribute to Musk's stat numbers. Musk is intentionally starting fights to get views. It's disgusting.

Twitter Now Has a New Master

Well, back in April a fellah by the name of Elon Musk was trying to buy his way onto the board of the publicly-owned Twitter company, but got stymied by the rules and then decided to waste $44 billion to buy the social media app outright.

Well, after months of Musk trying to weasel his way out of the deal - when it proved to hurt his overall net worth - only to have the Twitter board sue in Chancery court - yes, that is a thing - to force Musk to buy them out - hey, $44 billion ain't nothing to sneeze at - this week an arrangement was finalized and Musk now owns Twitter.

Well, what the FUCK happens now?

If we go with what Shirin Ghaffary says at Vox Recode: 

Until relatively recently, Musk’s primary business interests were in building electric cars, rockets, and underground tunnels. Now, he will have to figure out a new, very different business challenge: how to effectively run a social media platform that’s used by nearly 400 million people — including highly influential world leaders, journalists, and other public figures — and deal with the political speech moderation issues that come with that. Musk also needs to figure out a better business model for the company. Twitter has never made nearly as much money as its social media competitors like Facebook and YouTube, and along with other major tech companies, it has also seen a major decline in its stock value in the past year. According to a recent report in Reuters, the service’s most active and lucrative users have been leaving in droves since the pandemic...

That last part is kind of shocking to me. Social media like Twitter was the only way we could keep in touch during the COVID pandemic! Anyway:

Musk’s most consistent messaging about why he wants to buy Twitter is that he wants it to be an open digital town square of ideas, without intervention. He has said that he will allow anyone to say anything they want on the platform, as long as it’s legal...

The recent proliferation of “free speech”-themed platforms like Parler, Truth Social, and Gettr have shown that if you let anyone say whatever they want on a social media app, there’s a good chance that app could become a hate-filled, toxic place — which is why even these relatively more lax platforms have some basic content moderation policies.

There’s a lot of perfectly legal stuff you can say that is unpleasant to look at: racial slurs, graphic violent content, bullying, spam (more on that later). That type of content is generally bad for business because most users — and advertisers — don’t want to be around it...

It should be noted that after one day of crowing "free speech," Musk changed his tune and is "setting up a committee on content moderation" to set rules, hinting at the reality that the advertisers keeping Twitter afloat REALLY want moderation to work. But I can't see how Musk can establish a safe and working public forum if he goes through on his earlier calls to un-ban donald trump: 

...Musk’s comments about bringing back Trump, paired with his free speech mantra, has made him popular with conservatives who have long felt censored by Twitter and other social media companies, despite the fact that there hasn’t been tangible evidence of systematic anti-conservative bias and conservative influencers continue to have massive followings on platforms like Twitter.

While many conservatives would cheer Trump’s return to Twitter, it would simultaneously prompt major resistance from people, many of them liberal, who argue that his tweets pose a threat to a peaceful democracy. We’ll see how Elon is prepared to handle that blowback if he does reinstate the former president...

It won't be pretty. I know a handful of fellow Tweeters who will flee in protest if the Rioter-in-Chief is brought back without anything reining in trump's worst impulses, and I may jump off the platform myself if it happens.

The problem with trump isn't a matter of Free Speech, it's Hate Speech: trump is a prime example of how Hate Speech undermines the public discourse, and increases the risk of violence towards those regardless if they're on social media or not. I think I've argued before about the damage of Hate Speech, and that it shouldn't be given First Amendment protections. The foundation of any Hate Speech is lies - distortions and insults and defaming characterizations of people to dehumanize them - and every result of Hate Speech are acts of violence like mass shootings at churches, temples, schools, shopping malls, pretty much everywhere.

Elon Musk - who has never shown much understanding outside of marketing himself as a business genius and Futurist technophile - doesn't seem to understand the seriousness of the First Amendment debates. The constant struggle between allowing individuals the right to speak their minds but countering the civil right needs to protect other individuals who can get harmed by hateful rhetoric.

If Musk is buying into Twitter as a foothold into an effort to buy into social media to expand the app into a larger, life-dominating platform, he's going to have to come to terms with what's harmful and what's safe.

I honestly don't think he understands the pitfalls he's about to face.

I honestly think Twitter is going to get fucked up in a bad way.

Say It, Florida. Gays Exist.

(Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for including this blog in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please read this and many other articles and please leave comments, I wanna feel the love from time to time...)

Well, this is a pretty sick attempt by the Florida Republicans to take us back 20 years into denial and homophobia. The state legislature is about ready to pass a "Don't Say Gay" bill (via Joe Hernandez at NPR):

Proposed legislation in Florida would restrict how teachers can discuss sexuality and gender in the classroom, the latest effort by Republican lawmakers to remove the teaching of LGBTQ issues from schools.

Supporters say the measure empowers parents who deserve to have a say in what their children learn, but critics — who've dubbed the proposal the "Don't Say Gay" bill — argue that it will strip protections from LGBTQ kids and have a chilling effect on educators...

Under the House bill, a Florida school district "may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." The bill doesn't specify how "age-appropriate" and "developmentally appropriate" would be defined.

The bills would also give parents the ability to sue schools if they believed the schools violated any provisions of the law...

That lawsuit empowerment is tied into the "bounty" concept that the Far Right have championed to go after abortion rights, civil rights, and any other rights by granting haters the ability to bankrupt their targets. Back to the report:

The group Equality Florida, which advocates for ending discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, said the bill is "dangerous" and accused lawmakers of targeting LGBTQ young people.

"This legislation is meant to stigmatize LGBTQ people, isolate LGBTQ kids, and make teachers fearful of providing a safe, inclusive classroom," the group said in a statement. "The existence of LGBTQ students and parents is not a taboo topic that has to be regulated by the Florida Legislature."

All of this is happening even though last decade we saw the Supreme Court guarantee Gay Marriage as a right, even though we've undergone serious changes in our military and other institutions recognizing gays exist and can serve the public trust as well as the heterosexuals.

This isn't only an issue of free speech and free identity for our residents and for our kids. This is going to get worse than just banning books about LGBTQ fictional characters or real-life biographical figures. This is going to get worse than shutting down talk about social roles as our children grow into the adults - hetero and gay and genderfluid - we need them to be.

This law is going to grant license to the bullies and the gay-bashers to let loose, allow them to accuse anyone of even uttering a word about homosexuality or gender identity. This is a license to go after the teens who are gay, who are trans, who are genderfluid, and who aren't harming anyone else by their existence despite what the haters fear.

All the current problems we have in our schools with bullying will multiply as the haters will encourage their kids in schools to harass and punish anyone they deem as LGBTQ/Other and get away with it because we DARE NOT say "gay" in those schools. Teachers will get pressured to look the other way. The kids who are finding themselves LGBTQ as they grow up will suffer emotionally, if not physically. Even the kids who AREN'T gay/lesbian are going to get picked on out of fear and rumor, and will have nowhere to go for help.

Basically, the state of Florida is happy to turn their public schools into even more hostile and violent war zones.

All because to the Far Right running this state the very concept of non-heterosexual identity still terrifies them. Even after all the research that there are biological and psychological factors that are well beyond any religious morality.

Always remember this kids: The imposters, the bullies, the haters, they all will employ force instead of argument, impose silence where they cannot convince, and propagate their character - lack of - by the sword.

The Far Right religious wingnuts are desperate to impose silence about gay rights - about gays existing at all - because they cannot convince us to be as hateful and judgmental as they are.

Fight back. 

Recognize that we should not be bullies to our fellows. 

Recognize that real Christian Faith calls on us to love each other, without restriction or hinderance. 

Recognize that fear is an enemy, it drives us to hate and to hurt others.

Recognize that the Republican Party is running on Hate because they cannot run on anything else.

trump Twitter in Twilight

Things have been hectic since Wednesday, when our government almost fell to a seditious riot by trumpian Brownshirts, but one major development since then has been Twitter - the social media app trump used the most to stir up rage and madness the last five years - finally banning trump for his ongoing hate-filled rhetoric. 

They first suspended his account for 12 hours because of a Tweet he posted post-riot that called for more "protests" (hint hint, more violence), with the promise he could get back online once he removed the offending Tweet. So he deleted it, and he got back on...

And pretty much posted a more rage-filled Tweet that proved he didn't learn his lesson to behave by Twitter User Agreement policy.

After all that drama, Twitter suspended his account permanently (they may recover it later, after January 20, because of national archival reasons) and then had to give a public statement to why they had to do this:

After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence. 

In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action. Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open. 

However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement...

I've gotten in a few debates about Free Speech before, regarding how Hate Speech was - and still is - a serious violation of what Free Speech stands for. We have to remember the First Amendment is NOT an absolute right. For example, shouting "FIRE" in a crowded theater to cause a panic will get you arrested. Threating to kill someone will get you arrested for harassment/verbal assault. Standing before a mob encouraging them to go storming into a government building to disrupt an election count should get you arrested for incitement to riot.

This is all trump's public speeches have been, ever since he rolled down that escalator in 2015 and launched his campaign on a diatribe against Mexicans and the Chinese. trump has been crossing the line of decency on social media for years, throughout every call to Twitter's ownership and internal security that trump was violating their code nearly every day.

It had to take an actual coup attempt with people wounded and killed in the Capitol building for Twitter (and Facebook) to realize they couldn't pander to trump's hate anymore.

What is happening now with shutting down trump's main pipeline to his rabid fanbase are arguments from trump's still-pandering Republican allies whining about how Twitter's shutdown is a threat to Free Speech. No, it is not.

This is about Hate Speech. This is about speech designed to enrage others and drive them to madness and violence. We've watched that Hate Speech roll out and infest our national psyche. We've just seen the results of all that Hate: Our nation's Capitol raided and vandalized, rioters and now a police officer dead from the violence, our global prestige degraded by trump's words (and the deeds he's driven others to commit in his "honor").

Words have power. It's one of the few things trump - the eternal lying bullshitter, the constantly grifting con artist - understands all too well. It's a power he's used to drive this nation apart.

And while trump's been cut off from his Twitter feed, he will find a way to keep lashing out at the fate that awaits him on January 20, 2021.

Gods help us, how far into madness and the void trump's Hate will drive us.

America At Our Worst: Racists Are Running the Camps (w/Update)

Update: Thanks to Crooksandliars.com adding me today to Mike's Blog Roundup! There are reports this morning that Congress will open public hearings on the mistreatment in these camps and there's an Inspector General's report I wanna link to later.

Jesus Christ (via AC Thompson at ProPublica):

Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.

What the hell.

Created in August 2016, the Facebook group is called “I’m 10-15” and boasts roughly 9,500 members from across the country. (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”) The group described itself, in an online introduction, as a forum for “funny” and “serious” discussion about work with the patrol. “Remember you are never alone in this family,” the introduction said.

Responsible for policing the nation’s southern and northern boundaries, the Border Patrol has come under intense scrutiny as the Trump administration takes new, more aggressive measures to halt the influx of undocumented migrants across the United States-Mexico border. The patrol’s approximately 20,000 agents serve under the broader U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which has been faulted for allegedly mistreating children and adults in its custody. The agency’s leadership has been in turmoil, with its most recent acting chief, John Sanders, resigning last week.

9,500 out of 20,000? Granted, there are former border agents in that Facebook page, but there's a likelihood of close to HALF the people employed by that agency being a bunch of goddamned racists.

And what the HELL is Facebook doing hosting a site like this?

The Border Patrol Facebook group is the most recent example of some law enforcement personnel behaving badly in public and private digital spaces. An investigation by Reveal uncovered hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers who moved in extremist Facebook circles, including white supremacist and anti-government groups. A team of researchers calling themselves the Plain View Project recently released a hefty database of offensive Facebook posts made by current and ex-law enforcement officers.

And in early 2018, federal investigators found a raft of disturbing and racist text messages sent by Border Patrol agents in southern Arizona after searching the phone of Matthew Bowen, an agent charged with running down a Guatemalan migrant with a Ford F-150 pickup truck. The texts, which were revealed in a court filing in federal court in Tucson, described migrants as “guats,” “wild ass shitbags,” “beaners” and “subhuman.” The messages included repeated discussions about burning the migrants up.

These are not good cops posting this crap. These are not honorable or respectable or professional people.

If you think all of the reports coming out of trump's concentration camps are "mere" exaggerations, look at these guards assigned to work these facilities and read what they're posting and sharing as jokes, mocking children who don't deserve such hate, laughing to themselves as though forcing women to give oral is just "good fun" for shits and giggles.

Read what these men are calling the families and children that are supposed to be under their care: "shitbags," "beaners," "subhuman." These are NOT terms of endearment.

That "subhuman" description should terrify you. It's that kind of dehumanizing talk the haters use to justify their violence against the people they hate. It's the language of the Klansman accusing Blacks of being "rapists and thieves," of Nazis accusing Jews of being "vermin."

This isn't free speech. This isn't anyone's right to say what they want. Because this is the kind of language and beliefs that kills people.

I hope to God there's an investigation. I hope to God every current Border Patrol officer found on that Facebook page loses their jobs, because GOD HELP US THOSE MEN SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE OF THE SAFETY AND WELL-BEING OF ANYONE ELSE.

This is horrifying.

CLOSE THOSE GODDAMN CAMPS. There are better ways to handle migrant families. There are humane, CHRISTIAN ways of keeping immigrant families intact and healthy while we get them either home or established here to a path of citizenship.

GODDAMN THIS NATION IF WE ARE ALLOWING THESE BULLIES AND SOCIOPATHS FREE ACCESS TO HARM THE ONES THEY OPENLY DESPISE.

What the hell, America?

A Cruel Month for a Cruel Administration (w/Update)

April is the cruelest month. - T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

(Update 12/29/19: Thanks to Batocchio for accepting this as my Jon Swift submission for 2019!)

There's so much to go over and it's all coming in too fast I can't keep up with the blogging outrage. But here's where we are at halfway through April 2019:

trump is continuing to treat the shutdown of the Mueller Investigation as "vindication" even as evidence piles up his new Attorney General Barr gave the order to shut it down. Adding onto that is Barr's refusal to give Congress an unredacted copy of the Mueller Report - which never seemed to happen to previous Special Counsel reports, definitely not Starr's Report on Bill Clinton - meaning trump is covering up whatever Mueller found out that hadn't made it to the courts for trial.

trump is dropping more public statements about going after his critics and political opponents, accusing them of "treason" over unfounded beliefs that he was being wrongly investigated. He's been pushing Barr - and his new AG seems willing - to open investigations into the investigators.

The Democratic House finally had a committee - the Ways and Means - request trump's hidden tax returns and did so in a way the IRS and Treasury Department could not block without facing the threat of jail time. trump's buddy Secretary Mnuchin refused to turn over the tax returns. It's now a question of what the committee's response will be (right now they've extended the deadline but at some point someone's going to have to flinch in this Game of Chicken).

The problems at the southern border are getting worse, where the immigration system we had that was working is at the point of collapse. trump's obsession with ending illegal immigration has intermixed with the legal system of asylum seekers. As a result the asylum courts are backlogged to forever with no relief in sight.

trump wants to physically shut down the border with Mexico altogether, mostly out of spite. The fact this move would immediately destroy a multi-billion import/export economy means nothing to him.

trump has been asking about intentionally transporting the millions of incarcerated immigrant families to Blue State "Sanctuary Cities" with the intent of punishing those cities for defying him. While the Sanctuary Cities are mostly saying "Let them come, we will shelter them" the reality of such a sudden influx of people would overwhelm their social services ranging from housing to food to basic medical care. The likelihood of the humanitarian crisis turning into a deadly disaster goes high, with trump and his Republican Hate League certain to blame it on the cities' inability to cope.

We still don't know what happened to thousands of stolen children.

On top of that, verifiable reports are coming out that trump is telling law enforcement underlings - especially the Border Patrol people - that he wants them to lie to judges and he wants them to break the laws constraining trump's desire to shut the entire asylum system down. And that when they get arrested for breaking those laws, trump is promising to pardon them in a blatant abuse of pardoning power. trump is basically telling people to break laws for him, period.

And just to show trump isn't all focused on hating Mexicans and Central Americans, he's spent this weekend bashing Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to the extent that her personal safety is in danger. Going on a selectively edited quote from a false extremist, a fellow Congressman Dan Crenshaw accused Omar of attacking 9/11 victims and trump followed through on that crap.

At this point, you need to follow this link to Adam L Silverman's article at Balloon Juice and read the whole thing. As a foreign intelligence guy and terrorism expert, Silverman can see exactly what's happening here:

There is much more exposing the fraud that is Mohamed Tawhidi at the link. Unfortunately, all Congressman Crenshaw saw was someone claiming to be a Muslim cleric bashing Congresswoman Omar for saying something she didn’t say, which gave him both an excuse and a rhetorical weapon to go after Congresswoman Omar to score political points. This was, unfortunately, all Congressman Crenshaw was actually interested in.

So what did Congresswoman Omar actually say? Not the barbered clip taken out of context, but the actual remarks? I’m glad you asked. Here are the full set of the remarks before the barbered clip put out by Tawhidi and then amplified by Congressman Crenshaw. This portion of her remarks begin around the 12 minute mark of her speech and immediately follow Congresswoman Omar discussing how Muslims, in regard to fully claiming their civil liberties, can liberate themselves...

Unfortunately Congressman Crenshaw’s political and rhetorical attack was picked up and transmitted by Brian Kilmeade, the left boob of Fox News’ morning show A Blonde with Two Boobs on a Sofa, which is also doing business as the President’s Daily Briefing. And that’s how it got to the President who then decided to take the gasoline pump, turn it on, pump gasoline all over, light a match, and throw it in. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post decided that wasn’t a visible enough conflagration, so they threw a crate of fire crackers onto the pyre.

All of this, from the fake imam who conservatives and extremists on the right love to quote to Congressman Crenshaw doing exactly what you’d expect him to do in amplifying and weaponizing Tawhidi’s rhetorical hit job to the President finding a way of making it all about him because he cannot stand it if anyone else is getting any coverage to Rupert Murdoch’s minions making it worse, the die has been cast. Right now, somewhere in the United States, at least one white man who most likely describes himself as both a “patriot” and a “good Christian”, but possibly a “good Jew”, is planning to assassinate Congresswoman Omar in order to save the Republic from her. And at least one of these white men will be smart about what they are doing. They will hold their planning close. They will not make a threatening phone call and leave their real names with a staffer. They won’t tweet that they’re going to shoot her or cut her throat or whatever other snuff fantasy gets them off. They will, instead, quietly plan all while stewing in their own juices until their own internal pressure has built to the point where they decide to take action. And that day, which will, unfortunately, eventually come, will be a very, very, very bad day for America...

If you think angry rhetoric is just venting, that it's just the price for Free Speech... Just remember what happened to George Tiller. It's the same goddamn thing happening with the media over-inflating the danger, riling up the easily riled wingnuts, and just waiting for a fuse to get lit. And then when (not if) Omar is attacked - even if she gets out of it wounded - those same demagogues will step back and say "oh we didn't MEAN for it to happen, First Amendment bitches" and move on to the next target of their hate speech.

I've been primed for a while now for this darkest timeline to get worse, and the last six months IMHO there's been an escalation in hostility among the Far Right. The shit has been getting real, but damn I know that this is just DEFCON 3 level of madness. All it's gonna take is one more crazy plan by trump to become "law" and we're DEFCON 1 and the mess turns bloody.

And I haven't even touched on the goddamn wingnuts going after abortion on a scale that could lead to women getting the death penalty for anything the wingnuts deem as baby-killing (just let the hypocrisy of that world-view horrify you for about, oh, the rest of your life).

We are so very extremely royally fucked right now.

Blood On the Streets Of Squirrel Hill

And today there was another mass shooting this time in a Pittsburgh suburb.

This time a Synagogue. A man with military firepower showed up reportedly shouting "Kill all the Jews" and opened fire. The body count is currently at 8 dead. At least three police officers were shot and wounded, there may well be more wounded (and dying) as well.

For what's been found about the shooter, his social media apparently marked him as a rabid Antisemitic bastard. His recent tweets were about the "Caravan" trump had been ranting against the past few weeks, and how the shooter believed "the Jews" were behind that "invasion" about to doom the entire nation.

In an odd twist, the shooter may have been a Far Right wingnut but he hated trump... because trump had Jews (his son-in-law Jared for example) on his staff. That's right. We're dealing with an asshole who thinks trump isn't enough of an asshole worth his support.

So here's your thread. This entire week (and it's not even over yet) has been one violent attack after another by angry men driven to that edge by Far Right Republican rhetoric.

• Angry White Guy in Kentucky with a history of domestic violence and signs of racism (posting rants against Black Lives Matter) goes off on Wednesday, tried to break into a Black church service, then settled on shooting dead two Blacks at a Kroger store before getting caught. Another White guy in the parking lot heard the shots and pulled his own gun on the murderer, only for the killer to beg mercy because "Whites don't shoot Whites." (THAT is the fucking White Privilege mindset in one goddamn quote)
• Angry White/Filipino Guy with a criminal history who obsesses with being Pro-trump wanted to kill everyone on trump's Enemies List, so he ships off more than a dozen bombs across the nation. Luckily most of the bombs were reportedly intentional duds (a scare tactic), but a handful of them were working when the bomb squads got to defuse them...
• Angry White Guy in Pittsburgh hated Jews, found justification in the Caravan fearmongering, and went on his killing spree.

All three of them with key similarities:

• Anger
• Fear of Diversity, or that the rights of minorities will override the rights ("the superiority of" in their eyes) of White (men)
• History of domestic violence (so far in the first two, the Squirrel Hill shooter's full background hasn't been made public yet. But I'd lay good odds he's got at least one restraining order from an ex-wife/ex-girlfriend)
• Existing within a media bubble of Far Right Narrative (the Kentucky shooter didn't show as much of it, but right now the MAGABomber and the Squirrel Hill shooter are both well-documented in social media thriving in that wingnut bubble)

Like Silverman noted before, which I quoted from yesterday: The rhetoric of the Far Right media - bashing Jews, bashing Blacks, bashing Women, bashing Gays, bashing Liberals, bashing everyone not of the Far Right Tribe - is creating a toxic environment where the most unstable and least-controller fringe members are likely to get "triggered" and turn into killers.

The leaders of the Far Right know what they're doing: they get to fill the airwaves with their Fearmongering - based more on emotional hype than on the facts or reality - to trigger enough idiots listening in, and then get to pose on the mainstream channels to beg off "oh well, it wasn't really what we said" or "free speech, bitches" or "he's just a Lone Wolf, you shouldn't portray an entire mob of Angry White Guys like that."

We have a lot of other things out there that can cause or trigger bad behavior in people: Drugs, violent video games, what have you. We take those things into context when dealing with the monsters who get triggered, and we try to keep those sources out of reach by restricting their sale or access, or at least try to counter with counseling and education.

But how can we counter this unending storm of toxic worldview? The Far Right is riling up their base to commit wholeheartedly to the final stage of a Culture War that means violence upon every minority and "non-person" on their checklist of targets.

This isn't a rehash of 1968. This is a bloody remake of 1860.

God help us.

How To Identify Hate Speech

It looks a lot like this:

Yet Terry Jones, the pastor who organized a mock trial that ended with the burning of a Koran and led to violence in Afghanistan, remained unrepentant on Saturday. He said that he was “saddened” and “moved” by the deaths (note: as of 20 dead so far), but that given the chance he would do it all over again.

What Jones did was Hate Speech:

Hate speech is, outside the law, any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristic. In law, hate speech is any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected individual or group, or because it disparages or intimidates a protected individual or group.

When Jones burned the Koran, he knew full well the Muslim community across the planet would be outraged.  He knew that violence would follow.  He may not have known who would get killed in the process, but he had to know there would be at least one death at the hands of an outraged mob.

Jones incited others to acts of violence.  And he revels in it now, glorying in the attention we're giving to his sad sorry ass.

What is sad is that there are so many in the media/journalism world - Sullivan, Benen, some of the others I read online - that are rushing to Jones' defense, claiming what he did was "wicked" but that "hey, it's protected by the First Amendment."

I call bullshit.

What Jones did: This is not protected speech under the First Amendment.  He intended for an act of violence to follow what he said and did.  This is in my mind no different that a Klu Klux Klansman burning a cross on a black family's yard.  This is no different than an anti-Semite smearing accusations of blood libel on the wall of a synagogue (using pig's blood, no less).  This is no different than some racist bastard saying and doing something that gets a riot going in a street.

And getting a riot going is EXACTLY what Jones did.

Jones may not have pulled a trigger of a gun or swung a machete or committed a direct act of murder on the streets of Afghanistan this weekend.  That blame falls directly on the hands of the murderers themselves and the mullahs who incited the mobs to march on the UN office in Mazar-I-Sharif.  But Jones gave them the outrage: Jones gave them the motivation.

Jones' action makes it harder for the United States to handle itself on the world stage, especially now as the U.S. is trying to steady the entire Middle East during the uprisings between Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  Good Lord, Afghanistan.  From the 1800s onward, that place has never known a day of peace, has it?  And Jones, reaching out from his pathetic little church building in the woods of Florida, is making it worse:

In speaking with Afghans about the incident, it’s surprised me how many people support the spirit of the protests. No one I’ve talked to supports the killings of the UN workers. But even well-educated, informed Afghans tell me that it’s good that people are speaking out against the desecration of the Quran.
Much of the support stems from the inability of many people here to contextualize the March 20 Quran burning. A translator who works for a fellow journalist here in Kabul did not know that Florida pastor Terry Jones was the same person who threatened to burn the Quran last September.
This led to the perception that many Americans share his beliefs, even if he heads a small church of about 30 people who have so little support that they’ve had to sell their furniture on eBay to stay afloat. Mr. Jones is now trying to sell the church property.
In a place like Afghanistan, where the vast majority of the populace is illiterate and many lack regular access to reliable news outlets, perception and rumors often become more important than facts. Now that the story of the Quran burning has spread, it almost does not matter how strongly US officials – from President Barack Obama to Gen. David Petraeus – condemn Jones’s actions. The damage has been done.
After almost 10 years of foreign troops and international aid groups, the Taliban is still a serious threat and it’s difficult to see what tens of billions of dollars of foreign aid money has bought for the country. Patience is wearing thin among many Afghans, and incidents like the Quran burning provide a vehicle for their growing anger...

Jones and his ilk "accused" the Koran of inciting crimes such as murder and rape during that mock trial of his leading up to the book burning.  By his own legal argument, he's as guilty as that Koran he burned.

Jones is trying, through his acts of outrage, to condemn an entire religious belief, to condemn millions of Muslims who really aren't all violent rabble.  If they DO get violent, Muslims are no different than Christians and Jews who go rioting in the streets when THEY get offended as well.

If any condemnation of violence and murder should be applied, it should be based on their ACTIONS, not their belief.  Jones could have believed in what he thought about Islam and the Koran, and it would have remained an offensive but protected belief under the guideline of the First Amendment.  BUT HE ACTED ON THAT BELIEF, and in that action committed an atrocity that drove others to respond with murder.  That makes it Hate Speech: His actions a Hate Crime.  He's as guilty as the bastards who killed in Mazar.

Jones should go to trial for that Hate Crime.  A REAL TRIAL.  And found guilty in a court of law governed by Men, as Jones should be found.

The trial awaiting Jones for his sins in Heaven with the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Ishmael, is already a foregone conclusion: the deepest pit of Hell is not enough for Jones...