We Resist: Day 522

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, June 25, 2018
a black bar with the word RESIST in white text

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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Earlier today by me: The Unbearable Pouting of Jimmy Fallon and I Write Letters.

Here are some more things in the news today...

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse. Covers entire section.]

Maria Sacchetti, Kevin Sieff, and Marc Fisher at the Washington Post: Separated Immigrant Children Are All over the U.S. Now, Far from Parents Who Don't Know Where They Are. "The children have been through hell. They are babies who were carried across rivers and toddlers who rode for hours in trucks and buses and older kids who were told that a better place was just beyond the horizon. And now they live and wait in unfamiliar places: big American suburban houses where no one speaks their language; a locked shelter on a dusty road where they spend little time outside; a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents. ...U.S. authorities are compiling mug shots of the children in detention. Immigration lawyers who have seen the pictures say some of them show children in tears."


And a pointed reminder that this is all manufactured outrage to justify a nativist, white supremacist agenda:


Much of Trump's rhetoric around MS-13 is also rooted in lies. Hannah Dreier at ProPublica: I've Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year: Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong. "This all matters because the gang really is terrorizing a portion of the population: young Latino immigrants in a few specific communities." It matters hugely that Trump gets this wrong, deliberately so, because he uses his mischaracterization of MS-13 to stoke fear among his white base and justify his reactionary policies.

The truth is, MS-13 is mostly a danger to young Latinx immigrants — and less so than Trump himself is.

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[CN: Racism; misogyny; threats]


Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee at NBC News: Mattis Is out of the Loop and Trump Doesn't Listen to Him, Say Officials. "The president is relying less and less on the advice of one of the longest-serving members of his cabinet, the officials said. 'They don't really see eye to eye,' said a former senior White House official who has closely observed the relationship. ...'He's never been one of the go-tos in the gang that's very close to the president,' a senior White House official said. 'But the president has a lot of respect for him.' In recent months, however, the president has cooled on Mattis, in part because he's come to believe his defense secretary looks down on him and slow-walks his policy directives, according to current and former administration officials."

1. So much for that much-lauded "moderating influence" Mattis was going to provide. 2. How many of those "current and former administration officials" were named Tronald Dump and Beve Stannon?

Robert Barnes at the Washington Post: Supreme Court Sends Case on North Carolina Gerrymandering Back to Lower Court. "The Supreme Court on Monday sent back to a lower court a decision that Republicans in North Carolina had gerrymandered the state's congressional districts to give their party an unfair advantage. The lower court will need to decide whether the plaintiffs had the proper legal standing to bring the case. The Supreme Court recently considered the question of partisan gerrymandering in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. The court has never found a map so infected by politics that it violated the constitutional rights of voters."

Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress: Gorsuch Says He'll Repeal and Replace the Fourth Amendment with Something Terrific. "As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump offered a vague promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with 'something terrific.' On Friday, Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat on the Supreme Court that Senate Republicans held open until Trump could fill it, brought a similar amount of thoughtfulness and coherence to the question of when police should be allowed to conduct a search without a warrant. Gorsuch's dissenting opinion in Carpenter v. United States is an odd piece of writing. It reads less like a judicial opinion and more like the sort of essay that an overworked law professor might toss off after they suddenly realize that they have a symposium paper due at the end of the week." (Just go read the whole piece, because YIKES.)

Nicole Lafond at TPM: Restaurant That Trump Called 'Filthy' Actually Has a Glowing Health Record. "Despite [Donald] Trump's dubious claim that a restaurant's exterior appearance will unfailingly mirror its interior cleanliness, the restaurant in Lexington, Virginia that gave White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders the boot over the weekend actually has a glowing health record, according to county health department documents. ...Red Hen's last inspection was completed on Feb. 6, 2018, when it received a clean bill of health with no violations or required follow up visits. ...While much larger than the Red Hen, by contrast, the kitchen of Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort was hit with 13 health violations in April 2017 and was slapped with 15 violations in the club's two kitchens in a follow-up visit in November 2017."

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[CN: White supremacy]

Sebastian Murdock at the Huffington Post: White Woman Threatened to Call Cops on 8-Year-Old Girl Selling Water. "An apparent competition over who can threaten to call the police on people of color for no good reason is really ramping up. In a video posted to Instagram on Saturday, a white woman in San Francisco was captured apparently calling the police on a nonwhite girl who's 8 years old. The child's supposed crime? Selling water 'illegally.' But the woman...said that 'this has no racial component to it' and claims she only 'pretended' to call the police. ...'I have no problem with enterprising young women. I want to support that little girl. It was all the mother and just about being quiet,' she said."


Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani at Think Progress: White Woman Who Threatened to Call Cops on 8-Year-Old Black Girl Says She's 'Discriminated Against'. "She added that she has been getting threats online and now 'feels discriminated against.' 'It was stupid,' she said. 'I completely regret that I handled that so poorly. It was completely stress-related, and I should have never confronted her. That was a mistake, a complete mistake. Please don't make me sound horrible.' ...Ettel is the latest in a long list of white women calling the police on people of color for ordinary things, like holding a barbecue in a public park, napping in their dormitory's common room, and wearing black clothes during a university campus tour."

Fellow white women: Please stop calling police on people of color, except in cases of extreme emergencies. You are risking their getting arrested, harassed, harmed, and/or killed. Stop.

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Gabriel Debenedetti at NYMag: Where Is Barack Obama? Good question. "Obama is monitoring the destruction, but he spends the bulk of his time on two projects, building his foundation and writing a memoir." Oh.

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