We Must Call the El Paso Shooting What It Is: Trump-Inspired Terrorism
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51324"><span class="small">David Schanzer, Guardian UK</span></a>
Monday, 05 August 2019 14:07
Schanzer writes: "It doesn't require an overt appeal to violence to motivate an ideological extremist to engage in violence."
Bathed in the blue glow of flashing lights from numerous police cruisers, mourners stood silently at a memorial on a bluff that overlooks the Walmart in El Paso where 20 people were killed Saturday. (photo: Jim Wilson/NYT)
We Must Call the El Paso Shooting What It Is: Trump-Inspired Terrorism
By David Schanzer, Guardian UK
05 August 19
It is staggering to imagine how much more violence this president may motivate if he continues down this deeply disturbing path
ast year, when a rabid, anti-immigrant antisemite murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, I called it an act of domestic terrorism inspired by the ideology of Trumpism. The shooting took place during the height of the 2018 midterm campaign when Trump was inciting fear of an immigrant “caravan” from Central America. The shooter got the message. Hours before his bloody rampage, he accused a Jewish refugee support agency of bringing “invaders in that kill our people”.
Saturday in El Paso it was deja vu all over again.
Trump has launched his 2020 re-election campaign this summer by doubling down on the theme of racial and ethnic division and anti-immigrant hysteria. And as sure as the sun rises in the east, a mere month into this racially charged atmosphere, an extremist suspect fearful of Hispanics gaining political power in Texas decided to go kill as many Hispanics as possible at an El Paso Walmart. It is Trump-inspired terrorism yet again.
First, the assertion that Trump can be absolved of responsibility because he condemns violence by white supremacists reflects a misunderstanding of how homegrown domestic terrorism works.
It doesn’t require an overt appeal to violence to motivate an ideological extremist to engage in violence. Indeed, individuals often move from being a passive supporter of a cause to a mobilized killer when their political grievances are amplified, and their enemies are dehumanized.
So when Trump goes on Twitter and television calling migrants “invaders” and dehumanizes them by suggesting they are “infesting” America, he is motivating aggrieved individuals to take action into their own hands by using violence.
Second, the claim that Trump shares no blame for the shooting because he rejects the white supremacist ideology of the El Paso shooter is blatantly at odds with the facts. Indeed, the central political project of the Trump presidency has been reducing the political power of non-white people in America – a key tenet of white supremacist thinking.
Trump took action to reduce the number of minorities coming to America in the opening days of his administration when he halted immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and temporarily suspended the refugee program. He has subsequently dramatically reduced the number of refugees admitted to the US each year and is threatening to drop the number to zero in 2020.
Trump’s demand that the census include a question about citizenship is also consistent with a white supremacist agenda. It is firmly established that such a question would suppress census participation by non-citizens and perhaps recent immigrants as well, thereby reducing the political power of the states where they reside.
Of course Trump’s notorious policy of separating children from their parents and detaining them in squalid conditions is part and parcel of the white supremacist desire to deter migration to the United States and dehumanize those who dare attempt to gain legal residency.
And, when Trump suggested last month that four members of Congress of color who were born or naturalized in the United States “came from” other countries, he ratified the core concept of white supremacy that non-white people are not truly “Americans”.
The manifesto the El Paso shooter posted online reflects that he understood and endorsed the president’s political program to a T. The attack, the shooter wrote was “in response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”. Echoing the president’s logic that cruel conditions of confinement will deter migration, the shooter opined that his use of violence would provide a needed “incentive” for Hispanics to return to their home countries. His violent actions were necessary, he wrote, to save America from destruction.
Finally, while Trump does not overtly call for his supporters to use violence to further his agenda, his rhetoric is infused with notions of violence and dehumanization. The “send her back” chant Trump allowed to continue for 13 seconds at a campaign rally was an explicit call for the power of the state to be used to forcibly expatriate a foreign-born immigrant citizen. Last week he called a minority community in Baltimore a “rodent, rat-infested mess” – mixing images of urban minorities with inhuman pests and vermin.
These messages are not lost on people like the El Paso shooter: “Your president shares your view that immigrants and racial minorities are a scourge on America. They are not deserving of the privileges of citizenship and must be denied political power at all costs. They are animals anyway, so the use of violence is permissible.”
We remain 15 months from the 2020 election. It is staggering to imagine how much more violence this president may motivate if he continues down this deeply disturbing path.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43690"><span class="small">Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post</span></a>
Monday, 05 August 2019 14:03
Rubin writes: "The progressive Brennan Center for Justice is out with an alarming new report documenting the widespread use of voting roll purges."
A polling place in Cincinnati on Nov. 8, 2016. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
Just How Big a Problem Is Voter Suppression?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
05 August 19
he progressive Brennan Center for Justice is out with an alarming new report documenting the widespread use of voting roll purges. The center found: “Using data released by the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in June, a new Brennan Center analysis has found that between 2016 and 2018, counties with a history of voter discrimination have continued purging people from the rolls at much higher rates than other counties.”
The numbers are startling. “At least 17 million voters were purged nationwide between 2016 and 2018, similar to the number we saw between 2014 and 2016, but considerably higher than we saw between 2006 and 2008.” Moreover, the purged voters come disproportionately from jurisdictions that, because of their history of voter discrimination, were previously required to preclear electoral law changes with the Justice Department. That requirement has been on hold since the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. “The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.” If the numbers had been proportionate between preclearance and non-preclearance jurisdictions “as many as 1.1 million fewer individuals would have been removed from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.”
It shouldn’t surprise you that a red state such as Indiana had a much higher purge rate (22 percent) than blue states such as New Mexico (1.4 percent) and California (2.8 percent).
In plain language, since Trump was elected 17 million people have been thrown off the voting rolls. Some may have died or moved away, but some significant portion of those were infrequent voters who are more likely to be poor, nonwhite or otherwise marginalized. As the center explains, “States rely on faulty data that purport to show that a voter has moved to another state. Oftentimes, these data get people mixed up. In big states like California and Texas, multiple individuals can have the same name and date of birth, making it hard to be sure that the right voter is being purged when perfect data are unavailable.” Voters in most instances have no way of knowing if they’ve been thrown off the list “until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day — after it’s already too late. If those voters live in a state without election day registration, they are often prevented from participating in that election.”
The center recommends that before the 2020 election, “election administrators should take steps to ensure that every eligible American can cast a ballot next November.” That means “administrators must be transparent about how they are deciding what names to remove from the rolls. They must be diligent in their efforts to avoid erroneously purging voters. And they should push for reforms like automatic voter registration and election day registration, which keep voters’ registration records up to date.”
However, this assumes a degree of good faith that in the case of many officials is unwarranted. Voter purges are only one means of suppressing nonwhite and poor voters. Insufficient polling places (contributing to long lines and great travel distances to voting places), reduction in early-voting times, voter voter-ID laws and a host of other tactics like those we saw in Georgia’s governor race in 2018 suggest purges are part of a larger, deliberate plan that — oh look! — just happens to adversely affect voters you’d expect to vote for Democrats.
This isn’t merely about partisan advantage. The artificial reduction in the electorate with an eye toward boosting the percentage of white, Republican voters strikes at the heart of our democracy. The Voting Rights Act, before it was hobbled by the court, allowed millions of African Americans to vote for the first time, changing the composition of federal and state offices and changing legislative outcomes. Unless and until we expand the electorate (e.g., with voting by mail, automatic or same-day registration), we are undercutting our democracy and undercutting winners’ claim to moral and political legitimacy.
If nothing else, the 2020 election needs to be about reestablishing functional democracy. And that can happen only when everyone who wants to can vote and every vote counts.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51323"><span class="small">Katie Halper, Jacobin</span></a>
Monday, 05 August 2019 12:35
Halper writes: "When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah said that Bernie Sanders made her skin crawl, she was just sticking to the company line."
'Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and MSNBC have always had a complicated relationship.' (photo: Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Photos Getty)
MSNBC's Ridiculous War on Bernie Sanders
By Katie Halper, Jacobin
05 August 19
When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah said that Bernie Sanders made her skin crawl, she was just sticking to the company line.
hen MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah said that Bernie Sanders “made [her] skin crawl,” though she “can’t even identify for you what exactly it is,” she was just expressing more overtly the anti-Sanders bias that pervades the network.
The hostility is so entrenched, in fact, it seems to have corrupted MSNBC’s mathematical reasoning and created a new system of arithmetic. The cable news network has repeatedly made on-air and online mistakes about Sanders’s polling and other numbers — always to his detriment, and never with any official correction.
Here are some new rules MSNBC seems to follow when it comes to math and Bernie Sanders.
49 < 48
Result: Sanders goes from second to “fourth” place.
MSNBC made a handy graphic for a poll on July 7 that showed 2020 matchups against Trump among Democratic voters. The list was in descending order of candidates’ polling numbers — except for Bernie Sanders, whose name is placed under Warren’s and Harris’s, though he polls higher than both of them. (If the list is ordered by the margin between the candidate and Trump, Sanders would be in third place, behind Harris.)
5 > 7
Result: Sanders goes from second to “third” place.
Lest you think this was an isolated incident, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki placed Sanders’s name below Warren’s on July 15, when he was “reporting” on a poll put out by the Washington Post and NBC (MSNBC’s parent company). Once again, the order of the names is descending by poll numbers — except for Bernie Sanders’s, which is, once again, placed below where it should be. This time, Sanders is placed below Warren, though he polls higher than she does (both in the percentage who say they would vote for each candidate and the spread over Trump). This same order is used in the online story’s headline, which says, “Trump Trails Biden, Warren, and Sanders in New NBC News / Wall Street Journal Poll.”
But it gets worse. It was misleading to have Sanders’s name after Warren’s in the graphic, but an absolute error or lie to say Warren was second, which Kornacki, who was talking about a poll conducted by his own company, did. I had to re-watch the video to make sure I wasn’t missing something, but Kornacki does indeed say (at 1:09): “Elizabeth Warren, she’s been running second place. She is running second place on the democratic side. She leads Trump by five points.” Then Kornacki shows the person who is actually in second place and says, “Bernie Sanders, he leads by 7 points.”
+5 = -5
Result: Sanders “loses” ten points.
Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd showed a graphic claiming that Sanders had gone down five points in a Quinnipiac poll. Todd got the absolute value right, he just got the value sign wrong: Sanders didn’t go down by five in the poll, he went up by five — a ten-point difference.
25 = 28
Result: Sanders goes from first to “second” place.
After an April Monmouth poll showed Sanders polling at 27 percent among non-white voters and Biden polling at 25 percent, Velshe and Ruhle showed a graphic which somehow added three points to Biden’s numbers, putting him in “first” place.
Less Than $200 = 0
Result: Sanders goes from a candidate with one of the best records with female donors to one of the “worst.”
Rachel Maddow, on April 29, did a segment (and tweeted) about a study on the gender of campaign donors. Unfortunately, she forgot to say the study she cited only looked at donors who gave $200 or more. After praising Gillibrand for “doing the best in terms of targeting female donors,” Maddow urged her viewers to
Look at the other end of the spectrum! Just strikes me as unsustainable. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg .?.?.? Look at them! Both of them are raising twice as much money from male donors as they are from female donors. 66 and 67 percent of your donations are from dudes? Dude!
The same Open Secrets report Maddow was citing explained that its results were skewed: Since
Sanders has the highest amount of money coming from small donors .?.?.? at 74 percent .?.?.? [and] generally only donations above $200 are itemized .?.?.? the gender landscape of small donations are absent.
In fact, according to Sanders’s communications director, 46 percent of the 525,000 people who contributed to Sanders’s campaign during the first quarter were women. “It is virtually certain,” she tweeted, “that more women have donated to our campaign than any other.”
Rachel Maddow: You’re a Rhodes scholar, have a nightly news show, earn $7 million a year, and missed or failed to disclose that the study only looked at wealthier dudes and dudettes? Dude!
23 Minutes = 5 Minutes
Result: Sanders goes from highlighting his opposition to racism and sexism to “not mentioning” them.
In March, MSNBC’s Alex Whit hosted a panel to discuss Bernie Sanders’s March 2 campaign kickoff speech. Panelist and MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell said: “I clocked it. He [Bernie Sanders] did not mention race or gender until twenty-three minutes into the speech.”
As Sanders surrogates, journalists, organizers, activists, and people on Twitter pointed out, Sanders most definitely mentioned race and gender five minutes into his speech, when he said “the underlying principles of our government” will “not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and religious bigotry.” Sanders starts his speech thirty-one seconds after he gets on stage so, to be charitable to his critics, he doesn’t mention gender or race until 5:31.
Maxwell, a former Hillary Clinton staffer, though MSNBC didn’t mention that when they introduced her, did delete a tweet which had said, “OK 23 minutes in Bernie finally mentions race and gender.” But she was far from contrite:
I’ve rewatched since yesterday and while I can acknowledge that I missed the passing line at 6 minutes I stand by my point since talking about criminal justice is not the same thing as talking about race and gender and if you don’t get why Bernie won’t win.?.?.?.?. again.
Sanders spoke about race and gender outside of the context of criminal justice, which anyone who watched or rewatched the speech would know. But accuracy seems not to be the point so much as it is putting down a candidate who makes your “skin crawl,” for reasons that you can’t quite explain. Citizens, including the ones MSNBC claims to speak for, deserve better.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51321"><span class="small">Juliette Kayyem, The Washington Post</span></a>
Monday, 05 August 2019 10:36
Kayyem writes: "White-supremacist hatred isn't just a poisonous belief held by isolated individuals. It is a group phenomenon that is, according to the FBI, the greatest terrorist threat to America."
Law enforcement officials block a road on Sunday at the scene of a mass shooting the day before at a Walmart in El Paso. (photo: John Locher/AP)
There Are No Lone Wolves
By Juliette Kayyem, The Washington Post
05 August 19
here are no lone wolves. A mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso on Saturday was allegedly perpetrated by a young, white male, according to police, who appears to have posted a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto online minutes before the attack, declaring the need to fight the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Such white-supremacist hatred isn’t just a poisonous belief held by isolated individuals. It is a group phenomenon that is, according to the FBI, the greatest terrorist threat to America. The El Paso shooting, which left 20 dead and more than two dozen wounded, was followed hours later by a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, that killed nine. The shooter also died, and on Sunday, police were still unsure of his motive.
If the El Paso massacre turns out to have been the hate crime that police suspect, it will be one more example why viewing what is happening in America today as anything short of an ideological conflict — with one side heavily armed, the other side shopping for school supplies at a Walmart — is to disengage each individual incident from the terrorist rhetoric that breeds it.
White-supremacist terror is rooted in a pack, a community. And its violent strand today is being fed by three distinct, but complementary, creeds. The community has essentially found a mission, kinship and acceptance.
First, the mission. Young white men today are the last generation of Americans born when white births outnumbered those of nonwhites. Seven years ago, the Census Bureau reported that minorities, particularly Hispanics, were the majority of newborns in the United States, a trend that will continue. The development can be viewed as natural for a nation of immigrants or, in the white-supremacist interpretation, a “white genocide” controlled by Jews.
In other words, this strain of white supremacy doesn’t simply dislike the “other”; it views the other’s very existence as part of a zero-sum game. The sense of “the great replacement” seeps beyond the bounds of their in-group, finding a voice even among politicians who may inadvertently bolster that view, as when Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) in June tweeted, without providing a comment or context, an article from the Texas Tribune with the headline: “Texas gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident last year.”
Second, the kinship. White-supremacist terrorism has what amounts to a dating app online, putting like-minded individuals together both through mainstream social media platforms and more remote venues, such as 8chan, that exist to foster rage. It is online, much like Islamic terrorism, that white supremacy finds its friends, colleagues who both validate and amplify the rage. When one of them puts the violent rhetoric into action in the real world, the killer is often call a “lone wolf,” but they are not alone at all. They gain strength and solace from like-minded individuals. No one would have said an individual Klansman attending a Klan meeting in the woods was a lone wolf; 8chan and other venues are similar meeting spaces in the digital wild.
Finally, the acceptance. It is too simplistic to blame President Trump and his inflammatory rhetoric for the rise of white-supremacist violence. But that doesn’t mean his language isn’t a contributing factor. Historically, racist ideologies don’t die; Nazism survived World War II, after all. They just get publicly shamed. Communities evolve to isolate once acceptable racism or xenophobia. But they can also devolve back to hate.
The similarities between Trump’s language about Hispanics, immigrants and African Americans marks them as the “other” and is mimicked by white supremacists. He fails to shame them. His rhetoric winks and nods, curries favor, embraces both sides and, while not promoting violence specifically, certainly does not condemn it (until after it occurs).
Public speech that may incite violence, even without that specific intent, has been given a name: stochastic terrorism, for a pattern that can’t be predicted precisely but can be analyzed statistically. It is the demonization of groups through mass media and other propaganda that can result in a violent act because listeners interpret it as promoting targeted violence — terrorism. And the language is vague enough that it leaves room for plausible deniability and outraged, how-could-you-say-that attacks on critics of the rhetoric.
Trump fails to shame white supremacy. That is all anyone needs to know. And a responsible president — one who was appalled that his language might have been misconstrued and was contributing to the greatest terror threat in America today — would surely change his rhetoric. The failure to do so doesn’t mean Trump welcomes the violence; it does mean that he isn’t shaming its adherents.
After the white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville in 2017, Trump uttered his now infamous remark that there were “very fine people on both sides.” No wonder those young white men, rallying for their hatred and brought together by online organizing, were parading their anger in broad daylight. There was a time when they might have worn hoods not only to terrorize but also to hide their identity.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51193"><span class="small">Bernie Sanders, Bernie 2020</span></a>
Monday, 05 August 2019 08:38
Sanders writes: "The days of the NRA controlling Congress and writing our gun laws must end."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Bernie 2020)
2 Mass Shootings in 24 Hours - It's Time to Act
By Bernie Sanders, Bernie 2020
05 August 19
esterday afternoon, we watched in horror as we learned that a young man fueled by racism and xenophobia shot and killed 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
Then, this morning, we woke up to the news that it happened again. Another mass shooting. This one at a bar in Dayton, Ohio shortly after 1 am. Nine more dead and more than two dozen injured.
All in less than 24 hours.
There may be division in communities across the country on a number of important issues, but when it comes to the issue of gun violence prevention there is none:
Democrats, Republicans, Independents and even gun owners agree, ENOUGH is ENOUGH, it is time to stand up to the NRA and take action to make our communities safer from gun violence.
Just now, Gabby Giffords called on Senator Mitch McConnell to call the Senate back from August recess immediately to address this issue, and I agree. He should. Now I want you to add your name, and to take action to support Gabby and her organization:
Sign my petition: tell Senator Mitch McConnell to call the Senate back from August recess and to debate and vote on legislation that will make our communities safer from gun violence.
The days of the NRA controlling Congress and writing our gun laws must end.
My colleagues know that there is action we can take to stem this slaughter. And we know this because ours is the only major country on Earth with this level of gun violence.
We can do it this week. We can take steps that we know will make us safer.
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ast year, when a rabid, anti-immigrant antisemite murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, I called 
he progressive 
hen MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah 
esterday afternoon, we watched in horror as we learned that a young man fueled by racism and xenophobia shot and killed 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
