We Resist: Day 397

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Here are some things in the news today:

Earlier today by me: Yes, This, Thank You, Finally, Etc. and The Latest from Mueller.

[Content Note: School shooting. Covers entire section.]

Kia Morgan-Smith at the Grio: Outrage After Donald Trump Golfs While Funerals Are Held for School Shooting Victims. "While Florida parents were preparing to bury their children, who were killed in a gruesome Florida high school shooting, [Donald] Trump was reportedly teeing off just miles away. While White House officials have not confirmed whether Trump was golfing, they did say that he avoided playing over the weekend as a mark of respect for the victims." So, in other words, yes he was golfing Monday, just not over the weekend. "Last Friday, Donald Trump sparked criticism after meeting with shooting victims and taking photographs with the police officers and medical staff with a broad smile and a tasteless thumb's up pose." JFC he is awful.

Melissa Ryan at Media Matters: Pro-Trump Media Launch Attacks on Student Survivors of Florida School Shooting.

What’s different about the Parkland shooting is how quickly and powerfully survivors began speaking out. Some students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School immediately took to social media calling on [Donald] Trump and Congress to do something about guns...

And now, Parkland survivors are targets for fake news campaigns, conspiracy theories, harassment, and doxxing. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has already suggested that the entire shooting is a false flag, which implies that all of the survivors are actors in an elaborate hoax. As survivors speak up, there are already attempts to attack and discredit them individually.

Survivor David Hogg has been the target of conspiracy theories since he began speaking out. The day after the shooting, one far-right account noted in a since-deleted tweet that Hogg was suspicious for speaking so eloquently.

Both the #Qanon conspiracy theory crowd and Gateway Pundit's Lucian Wintrich are claiming that Hogg is a plant because he is the child of an FBI agent.

Right-wing cable news channel One America News Network shared Wintrich's post, and Gateway Pundit's video of Hogg is currently one of the top posts on The_Donald subreddit. Hyperpartisan site True Pundit also ran with it.

Donald Trump Jr. liked tweets sharing the conspiracy theory.

...One popular theme that is making rounds online is that the survivors are "crisis actors."

And Jack Kingston, the stupidest man ever elected to Congress, asserted this morning on CNN that the Parkland survivors are being coached with "left-wing talking points."

There are dozens of things wrong with Jack Kingston suggesting Parkland survivors are being coached with "left-wing talking points" because they're kids, as if kids don't have their own damn thoughts. And it's a remarkable concession that the left owns "plz don't kill us w/guns."

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) February 20, 2018

It's unfathomably deplorable to attack children who are begging for meaningful gun reform because they watched their classmates be slaughtered in a massacre. But that's where we are.

And the media continues to "both sides" everything, despite the fact that conservatives have utterly conceded decency on this subject and every other.

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[CN: War; death] Kareem Shaheen at the Guardian: 'It's Not a War. It's a Massacre': Scores Killed in Syrian Enclave. "Pro-regime forces continued to bombard the opposition-controlled enclave of eastern Ghouta in Syria on Tuesday, leaving dozens dead, after more than 100 people were killed and hundreds wounded on a day of 'hysterical' violence on Monday. The surge in the killing came amid reports of an impending regime incursion into the area outside Damascus, which is home to 400,000 civilians. More than 700 people have been killed in three months, according to local counts, not including the deaths in the last week. ...'The bombing was hysterical,' said Ahmed al-Dbis, a security official at the Union of Medical and Relief Organisations (UOSSM), which runs dozens of hospitals in areas controlled by the opposition in Syria. 'It is a humanitarian catastrophe in every sense of the word. The mass killing of people who do not have the most basic tenets of life.'" My god.

E.A. Crunden at ThinkProgress: As Syrian Children Die in Latest Massacre, UNICEF Issues Blank 'Statement'. "The U.N. organization dedicated to protecting children issued a completely blank 'statement' regarding the current status of Syrian children on Tuesday, indicating that the situation is beyond description. 'No words will do justice to the children killed, their mothers, their fathers, and their loved ones,' United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) regional director Geert Cappalaere stated in a press release. The comment is followed by a stretch of blank space and then a footnote: 'UNICEF is issuing this blank statement. We no longer have the words to describe children's suffering and our outrage. Do those inflicting the suffering still have words to justify their barbaric acts?'"

UNICEF issued a blank statement today.

The relief agency has nothing left to say about the killing of children in Ghouta. pic.twitter.com/1S2RPhBrUz

— AJ+ (@ajplus) February 20, 2018

Sob.

Just a reminder that Donald Trump's BFF Vladimir Putin supports the Assad regime in Syria.

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[CN: Rape culture; assault] Eli Saslow at the Washington Post: Is Anyone Listening? This Trump Accuser Keeps Asking Herself That, But She Plans to Keep Talking About That Day in 2006.

Crooks, 35, had been publicly reliving this story for much of the past two years, ever since she first described it in an email to the New York Times several months before the 2016 election. "I don't know if people will really care about this or if this will matter at all," she had written then, and after Donald Trump's election she had repeated her story at the Women's March, on the 'Today' show, and at a news conference organized by women's rights attorney Gloria Allred. Crooks had spoken to people dressed in #MeToo sweatshirts and to her rural neighbors whose yards were decorated with Trump signs. In early February, she launched a campaign to become a Democratic state representative in Ohio, in part so she could share her story more widely with voters across the state. And yet, after dozens of retellings, she still wasn't sure: Did people really care? Did it matter at all?

Despite her story, and the similar stories of more than a dozen other women, nothing had changed. Trump, who had denied all of the accusations, was still president of the United States, and Crooks was still circling back to the same moments on Jan. 11, 2006, that had come to define so much about her life.

[CN: Nativism] Alice Ollstein at TPM: The Senate Failed to Save DACA. What Happens Now? "When the final gavel came down Thursday afternoon, marking the Senate's failure to pass any one of four immigration bills up for debate, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) left the chamber with a spring in his step. Asked by reporters what Congress will do now for nearly 700,000 young immigrants at risk of losing their work permits and legal protections after March 5, the anti-immigration hardliner grinned and replied: 'We move on to confirming judges and banking reform.'" Fucking asshole.

[CN: War on agency] Teddy Wilson at Rewire: State-Level Republicans Pour Taxpayer Money into Fake Clinics at an Unprecedented Pace. "Anti-choice clinics will receive an unprecedented $40.5 million in taxpayer dollars from 14 states this fiscal year — even as lawmakers in these states slash funding for public health initiatives and increase requirements for people with low incomes to access public assistance programs. An analysis by Rewire of state budgets, agency contracts, and other public documents found little transparency and limited oversight of the essentially unregulated organizations receiving millions in funding from Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. 'It's an abuse of public funds to provide even a penny to anti-abortion fake clinics that systematically deceive and shame people seeking abortion care,' said Erin Matson, co-founder and co-director of ReproAction, a pro-choice organization."

Oliver Milman at the Guardian: 'Sloppy and Careless': Courts Call out Trump Blitzkrieg on Environmental Rules. "The reversal of Obama's environmental legacy has been spearheaded by Scott Pruitt, who heads the EPA, the agency he repeatedly sued as Oklahoma attorney general. Pruitt, who accused Obama of 'bending the rule of law' and federal overreach, has overseen the methodical delay or scrapping of dozens of rules curbing pollution from power plants, pesticides, and vehicles. Ironically for Pruitt, who has touted a 'back to basics' approach rooted safely within the confines of the law, this rapidly executed agenda has run into a thicket of legal problems, causing the administration to admit defeat in several cases."

[CN: Police misconduct] Ericka Blount Danois at the Root: These Police Stole, Sold Drugs, and Covered Up Killings; Now Baltimore Must Pick Up the Pieces. "The federal conviction of eight of Baltimore's City Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force officers, former detectives Daniel T. Hersl, Momodu Gondo, Evodio Hendrix, Jemell Rayam, and Maurice Ward, Sergeant Thomas Allers, Wayne Jenkins, and Marcus R. Taylor — for levels of corruption that range from breaking into citizens' houses and robbing them for cash, robbing drug dealers with ski masks and selling the drugs, racketeering conspiracy, covering up police involved killings, filing for unearned overtime pay, planting evidence, performing searches without warrants, and illegal stop and seizures — has reverberations for their victims who are seeking justice. The State's Attorney's office estimates that 'thousands' of cases have been tainted by the convictions of officers. Defense attorneys like Deborah Levi, who leads an initiative by the public defender's office to track police misconduct, and Ivan Bates estimate it at around 3,000 cases after a case search."

[CN: Sexual harassment] Bethania Palma at Snopes: Did 'Bots' Force Al Franken to Resign? (Nope!) "Although the gist of the stories was that Democrats had been duped into pushing Franken out by a propaganda operation run by Russia and the alt-right, the accuracy of these stories is being challenged. They reported that the attack against Franken was orchestrated in part by 'weaponizing' an article by author and writer Ijeoma Oluo to hasten his downfall. But both Oluo and a researcher who tracks Russian-influenced social media activity told us the reports got key details wrong." The "bots" framing also completely disappears the women who accused Franken, of course.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?