Tag: Republican racism

Kevin McCarthy argued GOP is the party of Abraham Lincoln, not racism. It did not go well

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After four years of a Republican President who worked almost daily to spread or lend support to racism, white nationalism, or white supremacism – including having top advisors inside the White House who embraced those ideologies – House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy is having a hard time tamping down the Pandora’s Box of hate Donald Trump unleashed.

McCarthy has refused to take a strong stand against the most dangerous members of his caucus, trying to allow the extremist Congressmen and Congresswomen to actively lie, disrupt House business, and spread hate on a daily basis. Because they are raising millions.

In response to Republican white supremacist members of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona announcing they are forming the “America First Caucus,” McCarthy tried to stand up to those radicals, as Forbes notes, via tweet. Continue reading.

Secret Facebook groups reveal America’s top soldiers’ racist beliefs, election lies and QAnon theories

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A disturbing number of Facebook users who belong to America’s military and other special forces have deep-rooted beliefs and views on racism and other conspiracy theories such as the QAnon movement and the falsehoods surrounding the presidential election. 

NBC News has conducted an analysis of hundreds of social media posts shared in four secret Facebook groups for “current and former Rangers, Green Berets and other elite warriors. The publication notes that most of the politically charged content was shared within two groups—SF Brotherhood – PAC and US Special Forces Team Room.

Collectively, there are more than 5,000 Facebook users within those two groups with some users belonging to both private groups. Across the board, the U.S. Special Operations Command consists of approximately 70,000 personnel. Additionally, the special operations forces also have thousands more retired members. The highlighted Facebook posts cover a vast canvas of conspiracy theories. Continue reading.

Stephen Miller Pursues White Nationalist Agenda With State Lawsuits

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Stephen Miller, a white nationalist and senior aide in the Trump White House, is working behind the scenes through his organization America First Legal to assist Republican attorneys general who are suing the Biden administration over immigration issues.

Miller was responsible for designing some of the Trump administration’s key policies targeting immigrants, including the separation of immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border and the ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries entering the United States.

Appearing on Fox & Friends on Wednesday, Miller disclosed his group’s work behind the scenes. Continue reading.

Think Cross Burnings Targeting Black Families Are Hate Crimes? This GOP Senate Hopeful Disagreed.

New comments emerge from Jason Lewis’s past as a conservative Minnesota broadcaster.

Before launching his 2020 campaign to become a Minnesota senator, Jason Lewis spent more than two decades as a conservative broadcaster. While in 2016 he parlayed his media perch into a single term as GOP congressman for the state’s second district, covering suburban tracts south of Minneapolis, his true career has been as a “conservative bomb-thrower” rousing and exciting a radio audience. His less-noticed television work centers on his time as the right leaning co-host on a Crossfire-style talk show that aired in the mid-‘90s and early ‘00s. In recently surfaced footage of an episode from 1999, Lewis casts doubt on the need for hate crime statutes in dismissive tones, at one point describing the hypothetical burning of a cross in a Black couple’s lawn as “trespassing.”

During the April 1999 episode of the Sunday morning show, Face to Face, Lewis—who is challenging incumbent Democrat Sen. Tina Smith this November—railed against legislation introduced in the state senate that would expand Minnesota’s existing hate crime statue. At the time of taping, only a few offenses, like assault, were eligible for prosecution in the state as hate crimes. The bill would have widened the pool to include more than a dozen other crimes, including trespassing or interference with religious observance. Richard Cohen, a Democratic state senator who introduced the measure, appeared on the show to promote it. 

Lewis’s opposition was forceful. “You’re balkanizing America here, Dick,” he said. Victims of crimes not motivated by hate, Lewis reasoned, would be relegated to second class citizens with less protections than hate crime victims, calling it “un-American.”  Continue reading.

Court Blocks Trump’s Attempt To Change Who Counts For Allocating House Seats

A special three-judge court in New York on Thursday blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to make an unprecedented change to who is included in the census numbers that determine each state’s share of seats in Congress. 

The president, the court concluded, cannot leave unauthorized immigrants out of that specific count.

The decision comes after the July release of a memorandum by President Trump that directs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the U.S. Census Bureau, to provide Trump with information needed to exclude immigrants who are living in the United States without authorization from the apportionment count. Continue reading.

Loeffler leans in to Trump’s culture war in battle with WNBA

When Georgia business executive Kelly Loeffler was appointed to replace the ailing Sen. Johnny Isakson in December, it was clear that her ownership of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream could become an issue during the 2020 special election to fill out the term.

The league, which is 83 percent women of color, is known for its frosty relationship with President Donald Trump, a politician who dominates the political landscape with culturally inflammatory and racist rhetoric. Some right-wing activists were angry at Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for not picking Rep. Doug Collins, a staunch Trump ally who became known for defending the president from his perch as ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.

“The WNBA has been an outspoken supporter of Planned Parenthood, even partnering with the pro-abortion organization in opposing President Trump’s pro-life policies,” the Concerned Women for America, a socially conservative evangelical group, said in a statement at the time. Continue reading.

Tucker Carlson: It’s ‘probably illegal’ for Biden to only consider women of color for vice president

AlterNet logoFox News host Tucker Carlson, who once dismissed white supremacy as a “hoax” and “not a real problem,” falsely claimed on Monday that it was “probably illegal” for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to only consider women of color for the vice presidency.

Carlson — who has long used his show to push white grievance politics and echo white nationalist and white supremacist talking points — singled out three Black women on Biden’s short-list for attack, even though the former vice president has also considered white women candidates. Among the names were three senators: Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Biden has since said he would pick a woman of color, but his list is not limited to Black women, with Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who is of Asian descent, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., who is Latinx, reportedly under consideration. Continue reading.

Lindsey Graham’s campaign gets caught using racist imagery in ad against his Democratic challenger

AlterNet logoAlready this week, Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue had to pull an ad for anti-Semitism after The Forward showed that it included a picture of Perdue’s Democratic—and Jewish—opponent, Jon Ossoff, altered to make his nose appear larger. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, though, isn’t taking down an ad that darkens the skin of his opponent, Jaime Harrison, who is Black.

“It’s sad that detractors are making up fake accusations about this graphic,” according to a Graham campaign spokesman, who admitted that the ad used an “artistic effect.” You know, the artistic effect of making a Black man look darker and therefore ostensibly scarier.

Graham’s campaign also insisted the “artistic effect” was innocent because the same effect was, they said, used on Graham recently in a video. Okay, if that happened, was that video from the Harrison campaign? One somehow feels the Graham campaign would mention it if that were the case. Additionally, there’s something different about showing someone’s face thrown into shadow as a frame or two of a video and darkening a still photo. And, oh, right, racism exists and it’s different to darken a Black man’s skin. Continue reading.

Democrat Jon Ossoff denounces ‘anti-Semitic’ ad by Sen. David Perdue that made his nose look larger

Washington Post logoDemocrat Jon Ossoff on Monday denounced a now-deleted Facebook ad by Sen. David Perdue’s (R-Ga.) campaign that appeared to make Ossoff’s nose look larger, accusing Perdue of playing on anti-Semitic tropes.

Perdue’s campaign blamed an outside vendor and described the altered photo as an “unintentional error” that was caused when a filter was applied.

According to the Jewish news site the Forward, which first reported on the ad, the black-and-white photo of Ossoff was “changed by having his nose lengthened and widened, even as other parts of his face stayed the same size and proportions.” Continue reading.

Tom Cotton: Schools that teach real history of slavery shouldn’t get funding

But the Republican senator has previously argued the government shouldn’t interfere with state and local decisions on education.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) wants to withhold federal funding from school systems that the New York Times’ acclaimed project on the history of slavery in America. This comes despite Cotton’s longstanding position that the federal government should not micromanage state and local decisions when it comes to education.

On Thursday, he introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, a bill aimed at stripping funding from schools that use the Times’ “1619 Project” in their curriculum.

In a press release, Cotton said his bill would bar any use of federal funds to teach about the project in “K-12 schools or school districts” and punish them by making them “ineligible for federal professional-development grants.” Continue reading.