On Trump

[Dude#1279435]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1422906228817154050

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1422633913470570505

 

[Dude#1279435]

Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables, explained

A gaffe, an apology, and a battle about racism that she fundamentally welcomes.

www.vox.com

[excerpt]

To be persnickety about it, the problem here is that Clinton is somewhat herself.

• On the one hand, she’s saying that Donald Trump’s racist and Islamophobic statements and dog whistles have activated and energized a small minority of hardcore bigots. She’s saying that Trump has taken once-obscure websites and elevated their traffic by a factor of 100.
• On the other hand, she’s saying that the “basket of deplorables” contains about half of Trump supporters — which is to say it’s about a quarter of the electorate and not really a small fringe at all.

The upshot of Clinton’s quasi-apology is to disavow the second claim while increasing her bet on the first. Their strategy was boosted when Donald Trump Jr. responded to the controversy by Instagramming a pro-Trump meme image featuring Pepe the Frog, a common white nationalist symbol (that’s an explainer for another day, but Olivia Nuzzi’s primer is a good place to start) and then Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence went on CNN and refused to call former KKK grand wizard David Duke deplorable, suggesting the current Republican Party is in a tough spot when it comes to white nationalists.

----------

In particular, a Reuters/Ipsos polling analysis of the GOP primary showed that Donald Trump’s supporters stood out from backers of the other GOP candidates primarily in having highly negative attitudes toward nonwhite groups.

Whether the “deplorables” are really half of Trump’s current general election voters depends a bit on how you count, but it’s at least a plausible estimate.

One important nuance about this that liberals sometimes miss is that even though there’s a lot of reason to believe racial hostility was key to Trump’s rise, there’s very little reason to think that white racism in general is more widespread in 2016 than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Rather, as Lee Drutman writes separately for Vox, the issue is that “whites with strong racist attitudes turned much more sharply Republican following Obama's election, including some who had previously been Democrats.”

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, the Democratic Party was already identified as being more aligned with black interests, but the election of an actual black president combined with the growth of the nonwhite population kicked that identification into overdrive. Racially resentful whites left the Democratic Party, and Democrats decided they could build a winning coalition without them, turning racial attitudes into a powerful axis of partisan conflict.

 

[Mikado463]

So I see ole Trumpy has endorsed 'the Wizard of Oz' as he makes a run for the soon to be vacant Senate seat here in Pa. What a circus poop show politics have become.........

 

[Dude#1279435]

So I see ole Trumpy has endorsed 'the Wizard of Oz' as he makes a run for the soon to be vacant Senate seat here in Pa. What a circus poop show politics have become.........

Dr Oz???

 

[SithZedi]

If Dr Oz is elected, wonder what the impact will be on these ratings? Poop show for sure.

U.S. Congress public approval rating 2024 | Statista

Congressional approval in the United States dropped to a record low of 12 percent in February 2024.

www.statista.com

 

[Mojo Navigator]

My observation is that racists, haters, misogynists, lunatics and con artists exist in every society. Unfortunately, Fox Channel has amplified their exposure over the past 25 years. Also unfortunate, is that people mistakenly believe what they they see on TV. Recently, Fox has devolved into a conduit for Russian propaganda and propaganda is succeeding. DJT is exploiting this situation.

 

[Dude#1279435]

So I see ole Trumpy has endorsed 'the Wizard of Oz' as he makes a run for the soon to be vacant Senate seat here in Pa. What a circus poop show politics have become.........

Trump does endorse "the finest."

 

[Mikado463]

Trump does endorse "the finest."

merely his 'flavor of the week' ........

 

[Dude#1279435]

My shirt is the best.....

TRUMP
Make America Great Drink Again

 

[Dude#1279435]

Shaun on Trump's "fine people on both sides." About halfway through he uses a calendar to explain the timeline. This reminds me of some odd remarks around the time:

.....and 20 years ago Trump denounced David Duke. ---Mike Gallagher Show

I wish Trump had distanced himself from Charlottesville, but I don't think he's a racist. -- Michael Medved

Add this with the election and Jan 6th's concern over dereliction of duty and that's about how I feel on the matter.

Much longer but goes into the people and security problems of that day. (More reporting should've been done on antifa's response to the alt-right.)

 

[SithZedi]

Agree with your last comment on lack of reporting on Antifa. Unfortunately for the country, there are too many examples of the media and politicians using the limited clip of Trump's comments. (the kimmel clip pretty much captures it, Biden used it during the debate and on the campaign trail too). Their agenda is clear. To sow division and hatred and get votes and ratings = $$. The media, has ratings as bad as Congress @20% approval so these youtube clips will be believed by no one but a partisan.

Trust in the media continues to dive as the Hunter scandal unravels, journalists covering for Biden on blaming inflation on Putin, no followup reporting on Pelosi's insider trading, Hillary Campaign fined by the FEC for falsifying funding the Russia 'Steele Dossier' Expenses, on and on.

Extremism? Did the media give adequate coverage to Lloyd Austin's testimony last week to the House Armed Services Committee? That would disrupt the narrative. Remember, when he took office in Jan 2021 extremism was deemed to be a real problem in the US military and that was going to be a top priority for the Pentagon and General Miley. Well after a year of spying on our troops they found 100. 100 in a @2million military! Meanwhile, Putin is in the Ukraine. The media is a clown show.

 

[Dude#1279435]

Shaun on Trump's "fine people on both sides." About halfway through he uses a calendar to explain the timeline. This reminds me of some odd remarks around the time:

.....and 20 years ago Trump denounced David Duke. ---Mike Gallagher Show

I wish Trump had distanced himself from Charlottesville, but I don't think he's a racist. -- Michael Medved

Add this with the election and Jan 6th's concern over dereliction of duty and that's about how I feel on the matter.

Much longer but goes into the people and security problems of that day. (More reporting should've been done on antifa's response to the alt-right.)

One major flaw in Trump's reasoning is there were no fine people on both sides. If that included non neo-nazi's with neo-nazi's, they wouldn't be fine people because they're on the side of neo-nazi's LOL. Or objecting to the taking down of the Robert E. Lee statue. To preserve the confederacy? LOL.

 

[SithZedi]

One major flaw in Trump's reasoning is there were no fine people on both sides. If that included non neo-nazi's with neo-nazi's, they wouldn't be fine people because they're on the side of neo-nazi's LOL. Or objecting to the taking down of the Robert E. Lee statue. To preserve the confederacy? LOL.

Trump does not earn many points for eloquence for sure. The taking down statues is another story. Objecting to taking down confederate statues does not automatically mean you support the confederacy. That's silly and ripping down statues is debatably fascist. It's a destruction of history and art.

For some perspective, in the 90s, after the Berlin Wall fell, debates raged against the tearing down of statues of Marx, Lenin and Stalin in the mob rage of the time. It too was a crime against history and art. Better to keep the statues and use them to educate the young and unknowing on why those historical figures were tragically wrong. It was wrong in the 90s, and wrong now.

Where is this going to end? Is the MeToo movement going to tear down statues of Martin Luther King because he has been accused of violence against women? I could hear this now from some college coed…”Well he was a historical figure of great importance but he did this so the statue goes because it offends me…” Our culture continues to go down the path to Fahrenheit 451.

 

[Dude#1279435]

It is quite long but is an overview of the event. There's "How Trump responded" near the bottom.....

Trump’s new defense of his Charlottesville comments is incredibly false

The 2017 “Unite the Right” rally was organized by and intended for white supremacists and white nationalists.

www.vox.com

President Donald Trump is still defending his infamous remarks in the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when he said, “You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

The latest attempt came Friday: “I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee,” Trump told reporters. “People there were protesting the taking down of the monument to Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.”

Trump isn’t alone in attempting to recast his “both sides” Charlottesville remarks; his supporters are, too. Within the past few months, Dilbert creator Scott Adams, Morton Klein, head of Zionists of America, and writers for Breitbart and the Federalist have done the same, as the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer reported a few weeks ago.

These writers argue that Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comments were meant to refer to the protesters in attendance who were attempting to stop the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a public square in Charlottesville, not the neo-Nazis and white nationalists who made up the bulk of the event’s attendees.

As RealClearPolitics’ Steve Cortes argued, “Despite the clear evidence of Trump’s statements regarding Charlottesville, major media figures insist on spreading the calumny that Trump called neo-Nazis ‘fine people.’”

But here’s the thing: He did.

Unite the Right was explicitly organized and branded as a far-right, racist, and white supremacist event by far-right racist white supremacists. This was clear for months before the march actually occurred. So by casting the rally instead as a sort of spontaneous outpouring from Confederate statue enthusiasts, Trump is rewriting history.

What Trump should have known about Unite the Right
The Unite the Right rally, which was scheduled to take place on August 12, 2017, was the most visible display of white nationalist and white supremacist hate en masse in the United States in years. And it was branded as such long before it took place.

The Unite the Right rally was the third such event in Charlottesville in 2017 — and each of these rallies was led and supported by self-proclaimed white nationalists and racists, apparently invigorated by an April 2017 decision by the Charlottesville City Council to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Park.

At the time, Confederate statues and monuments across the country were under increased scrutiny, especially following the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by an avowed racist who enjoyed Confederate symbology.

In May 2017, white nationalist Richard Spencer led a rally and torchlit parade through Lee Park, where attendees chanted “You will not replace us” and “Blood and soil.” In response, the chair of the Charlottesville Republican Party released a statement saying, “Whoever these people were, the intolerance and hatred they seek to promote is utterly disgusting and disturbing beyond words.”

In July 2017, members of Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan also protested against the removal of the Lee statue in Charlottesville, with one member telling USA Today that he was protesting the “cultural genocide” of white people he believed was behind the call for the statue’s removal.

So by August 2017, when the Unite the Right rally was scheduled to take place, it was fairly clear that the organizers behind the rallies on behalf of keeping the Lee statue in place had a very specific ideological bent. That was clear in a police affidavit detailing who was expected at Unite the Right — including roughly 250 to 500 Klansmen and more than 150 “Alt-Knights,” the military division of the Proud Boys.

The affiliations of the organizers were also clear. Jason Kessler, a “pro-white” activist, filed the permits for the rally.

On a radio show before the event, Kessler said, “the number one thing is I want to destigmatize Pro-White advocacy. … I want a huge, huge crowd, and that’s what we’re going to have, to come out and support not just the Lee monument but also white people in general, because it is our race which is under attack.”

In fact, going back through the promotional materials for Unite the Right, it is fascinating just how little the statue of Lee, or honoring Confederate veterans, seemed to matter to the organizers and attendees of Unite the Right, an event that, despite its name, had nothing to do with conservatism writ large.

Take, for example, this image created for the rally and approved by both Kessler and Richard Spencer.

The names listed here are of prominent white supremacists and alt-right activists: Spencer, Kessler, Holocaust denier and failed Senate candidate Augustus Invictus, Matthew Heimbach (a white nationalist who headed the Traditional Workers Party), and Pax Dickinson, formerly the chief technology officer for Business Insider before he was forced out over misogynistic tweets and became a “neoreactionary.”

Just so we’re extremely clear, here is a video of some of Heimbach’s supporters at a neo-Nazi rally in Pikesville, Kentucky, held after Unite the Right. The man in the foreground giving a fascist salute is wearing a shirt emblazoned with the acronym “RAHOWA,” which means, in white supremacist parlance, “racial holy war.”

Other white nationalists were later added to the program — including Mike “Enoch” Peinovich, an American neo-Nazi and founder of the neo-Nazi podcast The Daily Shoah (an insulting reference to the Holocaust), internet figure and noted anti-Semite Baked Alaska, fellow anti-Semite and Daily Shoah contributor Johnny Monoxide, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell, and Michael Hill, co-founder of the League of the South and a slavery proponent who lambasted “organized Jewry” on his group’s Facebook page.

The attendees of Unite the Right were crystal clear as to what the event was supposed to be — not a show of support for history, but a “pro-white” activist event. Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin described the upcoming Unite the Right rally as in a post on the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer on August 8, 2017:

Although the rally was initially planned in support of the Lee Monument, which the Jew Mayor and his Negroid Deputy have marked for destruction, it has become something much bigger than that. It is now an historic rally, which will serve as a rallying point and battle cry for the rising Alt-Right movement.

His post also includes the 14 Words — a phrase coined by a white supremacist who killed a Jewish radio host in 1984.

The Daily Stormer created a poster touting its involvement in the event.

None of this was very subtle.

In Discord chats and discussions revealed by legal proceedings that have taken place since Unite the Right, attendees and organizers stated again and again what the point of the event was: “If you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August.”

How Trump responded
On August 15, 2017, Trump made his third statement on the events of Charlottesville. (On August 12, Trump said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” National Review called his remarks “vague and equivocal,” while Anglin hailed them.)

You can watch his August 15 remarks below or read them here.

Those wishing to defend Trump on this issue have focused on this part of his remarks:

Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

His supporters have taken that as the totality of his comments on Charlottesville. As Morton Klein said during a House Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, “In that statement, he condemned neo-Nazis and white nationalists. He did not mean that they are fine people.”

But Trump said a lot more, which his defenders seem strangely unwilling to reckon with. Here is how Trump described what took place at Unite the Right:

TRUMP: I am not putting anybody on a moral plane, what I’m saying is this: you had a group on one side and a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch, but there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You’ve just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.

REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?

TRUMP: I do think there is blame – yes, I think there is blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.

REPORTER: The neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville.

TRUMP: Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

As should be clear by now, there were no “very fine people” who were part of the organizing or promotion of Unite the Right. Unite the Right was an event planned not by traditional conservatives, but by groups and individuals that despise traditional conservatives, like Peinovich, who helped coin the term “cuckservative” to refer to traditional conservatives who spoke out against racism and anti-Semitism.

And during that same press conference, Trump added this:

No, no. There were people in that rally, and I looked the night before. If you look, they were people protesting very quietly, the taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call ’em. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know, I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country. Does anybody have a final – does anybody have a final question? You have an infrastructure question.

“The night before” is referring to the Friday night torchlit rally of August 11, where more than 200 attendees held tiki torches on the campus of the University of Virginia and chanted “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil.” Whatever this event may have been, it was certainly not “people protesting very quietly.”

In short, Unite the Right was organized not by individuals who, in Trump’s words, “felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee,” but by ardent white supremacists and white nationalists.

On multiple occasions before Unite the Right, attendees stated that the Confederate memorial that was supposedly their purpose was actually the least of their concerns. We have their statements, their videos, their posters, and their words.

We also have the transcript and video of how Trump responded. He did, indeed, refer to the people who attended Unite the Right, people who were likely well aware of and supportive of its messaging, as “very fine people,” and he downplayed the tiki torch parade as “people protesting very quietly.”

Unite the Right was a horrific event in our nation’s recent history — and to come to terms with it requires doing so in good faith and honesty, something the president and his defenders appear unwilling to do.

 

[Dude#1279435]

Paul Ryan even says Trump's comments on Judge Gonzalo Curie was sort of like textbook racism..... (admirably he says it's a choice between Trump vs Clinton's policies)

Marco Rubio on the campaign trail back in the day denouncing Trump on David Duke and the KKK.....

 

[SithZedi]

Paul Ryan even says Trump's comments on Judge Gonzalo Curie was sort of like textbook racism..... (admirably he says it's a choice between Trump vs Clinton's policies)

Marco Rubio on the campaign trail back in the day denouncing Trump on David Duke and the KKK.....

Yeah, Ryan hits on the essential problem for Repubs, policies vs the rest of the package.

 

[SithZedi]

This clip makes me wonder about the future, the current definition of highly educated, and what's being taught on college campus.

 

[Dude#1279435]

Tapper asks Trump to condemn David Duke and the KKK. Trump says he doesn't know anything about these groups.

I like the part from Trump about I don't condone violence with the examples shown hehehe......

 

[Dude#1279435]

Some subtle points I disagree with but overall think it's poignant.

 

[SithZedi]

Poignant indeed. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a series of educational videos on extremism and how it divides society. Will "Wokeism and Communism/Marxism" be next? Look forward to his thoughts on that.