Trump Throws His Weight Behind White Supremacists & Nazi Supporters

On Tuesday the world watched in sheer abhorrence as the US president, speaking at length for himself and without a teleprompter, unequivocally laid equal blame on the protests against racism and bigotry—which he called the alt-left—and the KKK, white supremacists and Nazi supporters gathered in Charlottesville.  

In the largest gathering in decades, and as if the Civil Rights Era had never happened, white supremacists descended at night on the University town of Charlottesville, Virginia with burning torches, confederate flags, nazi symbols and rifles, chanting "You will not replace us / Jews will not replace us". They surrounded a small group of non-violent counter protestors gathered at the statue of Thomas Jefferson.  Shock and horror rippled throughout the country and beyond its borders.

“I cannot believe in my heart what I am witnessing today in America. I wanted to think not only as an elected official, but as a human being that we had made more progress. It troubles me a great deal.” Rep. John Lewis.

But not, apparently, in the White House, which was mute. The next day, white supremacists, itching for a fight, attacked those protesting against them in ugly violence which culminated in a Nazi supporter gunning his car into a peaceful gathering of protestors, injuring 19 and killing Heather Heyer, a courageous young woman who had dedicated her life to fighting bigotry and hate.

Donald Trump, the man who can't control his Twitter compulsion, waited until late in the day to even comment. His repugnant refusal to name and shame the KKK, Nazi supporters and white supremacists drew immediate bi-partisan fire, Democrats not afraid to directly criticize the president. Some Republicans joined them.   

The next day, in a strangely surreal mini-speech, Trump, newly coiffed and made up, did as he had obviously been told to. He read clumsily from a teleprompter words that had been patently written by somebody else. Words that he was very uncomfortable with. Anybody who was fooled hasn't been paying attention for a very long time. Those of us who have, weren't surprised when he broke out and said what he really wanted to say on Tuesday at a "press conference" that was mean to be about infrastructure.

It didn't take Trump long to dump the script and lash out at length at the counter protesters, calling them the alt-left, blaming them for their violence and for attacking the white supremacists and fascists, giving them an unequivocal boost.

General Kelly stood behind Trump, severely troubled. Did he really think he could control this terrible excuse for a man? Kudos to him for being bothered, but he should have been severely horrified long ago, enough to refuse the job and publicly condemn Trump and his administration.

Other Republicans also reacted immediately, except for Mike Pence of course, who praised Trump for meaning what he says and saying what he means. Hard to understand the logic of that, given his teleprompted little speech the previous day. There is only one way for Republicans to illustrate that they have any integrity at all. Unequivocally condemn Trump, get rid of him, and clean out his administration. Any Republican who doesn't do that? Their words of protest now are meaningless.

America has a white supremacist supporter, a bigot, a serial sexual abuser, a snake oil salesman, a liar, a cheat and a very stupid man with severe personality disorders for a president, and too many Republicans have been fine with it. They may criticize him but they don't care enough to protect their country from him. And that's the truth.

Fortunately, the majority of America do care. Even Trump's base is dwindling. Ultimately all he'll be left with will be the KKK, neo-nazis and white supremacists. The toxic dregs of American society.

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Democrats care a great deal. They have lashed out at Trump in no uncertain terms. Stalwart of integrity, Civil Rights pioneer and icon Congressman John Lewis, who has courageously and unerringly devoted his life to defending Civil Rights and said in January that he didn't consider Trump to be a legitimate president, spoke out at a town hall meeting in East Point Georgia.

"It troubles me a great deal… Speak up, speak out, get in the way, get in trouble - good trouble and necessary trouble. We have to tell our people to get out and participate in the democratic process."

And while all of this is going on, the Russia investigation is ramping up. To date, analysts have had little faith in the likelihood of impeachment, which would need a Republican Congress to act. Recently, as Trump has gotten more and more out of control, more Republicans are either speaking out clearly against him, or drifting away. Suddenly, impeachment is starting to look like a real option, because if the GOP lets Trump stay he'll take them all down with him.

It's been obvious from the start but they haven't wanted to face it. It's becoming harder and harder to ignore. America will be rid of this scourge. The world will breathe a sigh of relief. Until he goes, a Washington Post editorial says it all. The nation can only weep.

That car in Charlottesville did not kill or wound just the 20 bodies it struck. It damaged the nation. Mr. Trump not only failed to help the country heal; he made the wound wider and deeper.

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."-Wiesel

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) August 15, 2017

Could Trump Really Ever Be President?

Click here to buy "Trump: An American Presidency"

Democrats keep saying that Trump can't win the general election. I hope he won’t but I don’t think it’s a slam dunk.

In fact I think I think that this terrible man with zero self control who despises the poor, tramples over anybody in his path, misrepresents his wealth, trashes women, quotes Mussolini, does not denounce the KKK, stirs paranoia, racism and hatred, embraces conspiracy theories, lies pathologically and has positive support from one foreign leader—Vladimir Putin—actually has quite a good chance of being America’s Next President.

I wonder what Hitler looked like to the masses when he was on the rise and before he gained absolute power. Possibly not that dissimilar to Trump at the moment.

Apart from giving racists and bigots permission to voice their hatred he gave ordinary people permission to voice their frustration and they’re the ones he cleverly manipulated and who ended up handing him his power on a plate. But how many of them would have supported him if they had known the trajectory he was on? Probably not so many. The signs were there but they didn’t want to look. And they were carried on the wave of his peculiar kind of personal power. Look how that ended, for Jews, for the world. And, let's not forget, for Germany.

Trump is telling his supporters to raise their right hand in salute to him. He has a vitriolic hatred for poor people, is a pathological liar and a misogynist, encourages racism and bigotry, whips up anger, promotes violence, calls for curtailing freedom of the press, permits and even encourages the beating up of protesters, is running on an anti-Muslim platform if you can call what he's doing a platform. Now he's anti-Islam. It’s beyond believable.

No, beyond believable is that he had brought a bunch of his Trump Wine and Trump Water and Trump Steaks to one of his rallies. He made a big deal about the steaks. But Trump Steaks doesn’t exist as a business anymore and those steaks were from Bush Brothers’ Provision Company. Oh the irony.

How can a single thinking adult in the world support him? I decided to write to all the delegates who have endorsed him so far and beg them to see the reality and think long and hard about what they’re doing. Wiki has a page on Trump's delegates.

I started with Jeff Sessions, US Senator from Alabama. From his photo on Wiki he looks like a sensible guy. Then I read a little.

Ah. On February 28 this year he endorsed Trump. On March 3 Trump picked him as chairman of his National Security Advisory Committee.

And not such a sensible guy after all. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was born in Selma in 1946. He doesn’t appear to have been much moved by Civil Rights activities. He referred to the NAACP and the ACLU as communist-inspired and un-American because “they forced civil rights down the throats of people”. He also called African-American Assistant US Attorney Thomas Figures “boy” and said “be careful what you say to white folks.”

He said once that he thought the Klan was okay until he found out they smoked pot. He was joking of course. The Klan is something to joke about?

He was a big Bush legislation supporter, including for the 2001 and 2003 tax cut packages. He’s against same-sex marriage and opposed the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act. He also voted against adding violent acts based on sexual orientation and gender identity to federal hate-crimes law. 

He’s anti-immigration reform. And he voted for expanded construction of a Southern border fence. Of course he did.  

I guess I won’t be writing to Jeff Sessions. Not much point. Moving along, the next guy on Wiki’s alphabetical list was former US Senator Scott Brown. 

He looks like a nice guy too. I looked him up on Google images. Oh. Very nice guy. Once a model, he posed nude for a centerfold. Not surprising, given that body. His story is pretty moving, though. He had a difficult childhood. His parents divorced when he was a year old and his mother lived on welfare, then he was abused by his stepfathers and a camp counselor who threatened to kill him if he told anybody. He got into politics and not everything he did was bad. A moderate Republican, he was the first GOP Senator to support a federal ban on assault weapons after Sandy Hook..

I could write to him, I thought. I looked for more about him and found an article on abcnews.go.com.

He said “I know all of the candidates and I respect the hell out of each and every one of them” and that he endorses Trump because “I know he’ll surround himself with people who want to do it for the flag. But, no disrespect to any of the other candidates because I truly love them. Chris and Marco? I love them like brothers from another mother.”

Cross Scott Brown off the list. Two down and four hundred odd to go… Maybe it was a bad idea. But I tell you what’s a good idea, and that is to read Trump: An American Presidency by seasoned journalist Steve Majerus-Collins.

“A fictional oral history of the administration of President Donald Trump. The book examines what might really happen if Trump were to come out on top in November. Would he build his wall? Defeat ISIS? Make America great again or destroy it? It's a quick read but one that offers some perspective on a candidate like none before.”

The introduction is amusing and I thought great, I’m in for a riotous read. I was. But it was one of those books where your blood runs cold while you’re laughing because the picture the author paints should just be absolutely fantastical but it isn’t; it’s absolutely and horribly possible.

This gem of a book is only 99c. Buy it because you're worth it! Trump: An American Presidency. I hope not. For the sake of America. For the sake of the world.

Paris Reels But Courageously Rallies Against Violence

A couple of weeks ago I met somebody who said she hated Muslims because they kill and torture people. Members of other religions might point fingers, seek political domination over and say insulting things to those whose religion is different but they don’t kill them just because they say or believe something disagreeable.

What about the IRA? I said. And that the problem isn’t the Muslim religion but the seriously psychologically damaged fundamentalists, who kill in the name of Allah.

She argued that I was wrong. The IRA were fighting for independence from the British; they weren’t going into other countries around the world killing, torturing and maiming innocents because they weren’t Catholics. She had a point. And admittedly it’s been a while since the Spanish Inquisition. But hallo, what about the damage done to Iraq on a trumped up justification for war? She didn't want to hear it. Something about Islam, she said, produces these ruthlessly violent, egotistical men who have an absolute absence of general humanity and integrity. Yeah, but what about westerners who open up on a school? I said. Her comeback was quick: they don’t do it in the name of religion.

What’s the big deal about the religion thing, I asked her. No matter what you’re doing violence in the name of you’re still hurting people. She said it’s doing violence in the name of that which stands for peace, love and tolerance; it’s twisting what is good into what is evil and using something that most of us have profound respect for and that many live by as justification for violence.

I don’t like it any more than she does but I argued that it seemed to me to be more complicated than her perspective. Muslims who immigrate to foreign countries in search of a better life and who often aren’t even particularly religious are rejected and relegated to the outskirts of society if they’re poor, which they often are, as are those who are second generation even. That kind of demoralization does a lot to a person and the first thing to fragment into a thousand pieces can be integrity. It can happen to anybody regardless of their religious beliefs. Then fundamentalists provide what’s missing and create such a bond of loyalty that they can easily brainwash their subjects into believing that maiming, torturing and killing is a good thing and that Allah wants them to do it.

Exactly, she said. And are those fundamentalists Christian or Buddhist or Mormon or Protestant? No, they’re not. They emerge from Islam. There’s some kind of underpinning permission for men in it that allows for the emergence of that kind of person.

As there is in the cultures that produced the Mafia, apartheid, white supremacists and the KKK, I said, not to mention the CIA sociopaths. Boiling a problem down to something so one-dimensional doesn’t allow for a helpful solution. If anything, we need to look at what young men are missing that attracts them to that violence; why do we reject them, what is it in us that makes us so scared of them? Is it as basic as “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out”? Could we embrace them instead and find out that if we share, nobody is the loser? If we did, fundamentalist ‘scouts’ wouldn’t have any power over them.

My friend was unconvinced. We parted still arguing but without any desire to level a Kalashnikov or anything at one another. Then a few days later she called me up and said have you seen the news?
In Paris two masked gunmen had burst into the offices of political satire newspaper Charlie Hebdo, that has been firebombed previously for its disrespectful cartoons about Mohammed and Allah. The gunmen slaughtered 12 people - in the name of Allah. Then a policeman was shot dead and Amedy Coulibaly, an ally of the two gunmen Said and Cherif Kouachi, held hostages in a kosher store. Eventually, in separate incidents, the police killed all three, along with some of the kosher store hostages. Horrific.

You see, my friend said, I was right. That conversation went nowhere, too. I’ll admit that I don’t like a religion that’s so prescriptive towards women and not nearly as much towards men or from which has emerged secular law that dictates amputation for stealing, stoning of women who dress incorrectly, execution for blasphemy and the slaughter of your enemies. I think it’s barbaric and I believe it gives men an unnatural entitlement, one that they too often don’t have the integrity to wield for the good of all. That’s just my opinion. But even if Islam is inherently at fault for producing so many violent psychopaths, it also produces millions of peaceful, kind, decent people. Who are as horrified as everybody else. Who want it to stop as much as everybody else. So is Islam a good religion or a bad one? Statistically, it's a good one.

After 9/11 the rage against Muslims in general was frightening. But whilst racism, xenophobia and right-wing radicalism are on the rise everywhere, so is tolerance amongst the level-headed. It’s been impressive to see that so many people at all levels and in so many countries have make the clear distinction between the fundamentalists and Muslims in general while Paris reels.

I've also been so inspired by the courage of Parisians who have made that distinction in the face of such trauma and who have risen en masse to protest just the jihadist violence, as people have in other French cities and around the world.

At the giant rally today were, amongst other leaders, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, the most prominent Muslim leader scheduled to be there, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. At least 3.7 million people marched through Paris. And there was no violence.

I don’t believe that a solution for dealing with jihadism will emerge from believing that the problem is the culture or the religion. And we want a solution, right? We don’t want to perpetuate the hatred.

We highlight the end result of a process and it sticks in our minds because it’s violent and frightening. But until we wake up to the actual process that leads to that end result as it’s happening, nothing’s going to change. And it’s kind of a human thing that we don’t change until the consequences of our own behavior explode in our faces. This I know: we can’t change jihadism, we can’t wipe it out with violence of our own. But we can start to look at impoverished communities where Muslims, immigrants or not, live on the edge without enough support and social enablement. Societies and Governments can do something about that. Build on the love. And while we're about it, we could stop manufacturing guns and tighten laws on gun ownership.

My heart goes out to the families of those killed in Paris. May their loved ones rest in peace.