We Resist: Day 651

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Thursday, November 01, 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: Trump Whips Up the Deplorables at Another Rally. And ICYMI late yesterday: Trump Says He Will Send up to 15k Troops to Border.

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

Josh Rogin with the Washington Post tweets: "Today in Miami, John Bolton will announce a new policy toward Latin America to confront the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, calling them the 'Troika of Tyranny.'" The Troika of Tyranny. For fuck's sake. They're just openly fucking with us.

Allegra Kirkland at TPM: Ex-Trump Aide Lands New TV Show: America in the World with Carter Page. "After spending the last few years caught up in investigations into Russia's 2016 election interference, Carter Page has a new pursuit: Hosting a show for conservative outlet One America News Network. ...The program will debut with a midterms-focused episode on Saturday, according to the Daily Beast." Cool.

Meanwhile, in Finland...


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[Content Note: Bigotry; hatred; stochastic terrorism; threats of violence] Ed Pilkington at the Guardian: Feel the Love, Feel the Hate — My Week in the Cauldron of Trump's Wild Rallies. This entire piece is a must-read, but this passage in particular stuck out to me:
Tonight in Wisconsin, the crowd are focused on only one thing — hearing their leader. It includes Steve Spaeth, 40, who runs a home exteriors company in West Bend. I ask him who he regards as his political enemies, and whether "hate" is too strong a word.

"Not at all," he says. "I have a deep and absolute disgust for these human beings."

Which ones?

He rattles off CNN, Soros, Clinton, Waters, Booker, "Pocahontas" AKA Elizabeth Warren, and others.

Why do you hate them?

"They want to turn America into a socialistic country. It's disgusting."

I ask Spaeth how far he is prepared to take his hatred. In reply, he tells a story. The other day he talked to his sister, who is liberal and votes Democratic. He said to her: "If there is a civil war in this country and you were on the wrong side, I would have no problem shooting you in the face."

You must be joking, I say.

"No I am not. I love my sister, we get on great. But she has to know how passionate I am about our president."
So, just to be clear, a white Republican dude says — on the record, using his real name, and offering additional identifying details to an international publication — that he would shoot his own sister in the face because she's a Democrat. These folks constantly talk about how Donald Trump is the only person who can keep "us" safe, but that guy clearly already feels safer than I have ever felt in my entire life.

[CN: Terrorism] Kia Morgan Smith at the Grio: CNN's Don Lemon Not Backing Down from His Statement About White Men. "CNN's Don Lemon took issue with the wave of violence against minorities and flat out stated that 'the biggest terror threat' in the United States 'is white men.' ...'We keep thinking that the biggest terror threat is something else — some people who are marching toward the border like its imminent, and when the last time they did this a couple hundred people came and they, most of them didn't get into the country. Most of them got tuckered out before they even made it to the border. So we have to stop demonizing people, and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them." That's not Lemon's opinion. That's a fact.

[CN: Anti-Semitism]


[CN: Harassment; threats] Brian Howey at Reveal News: Right-Wing Groups Are Recruiting Students to Target Teachers. "Ponce is one of dozens of educators — if not many more — who in the past two years have been featured in conservative media pieces, placed on watchlists, and targeted by the internet outrage machine. ...'The attacks on faculty and institutions of higher education we see today have created a climate as hostile to academic freedom in the United States as in any historical period in the 20th century,' said Hans-Joerg Tiede, associate secretary for the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance at the American Association of University Professors."

[CN: Terrorism; white supremacy] Betsy Woodruff and Spencer Ackerman at the Daily Beast: 'Homeland Security' Ignores White Terror, DHS Veterans Say. "As the country reels from the latest spate of white supremacist murder, nine law-enforcement veterans say that combating violent white supremacy simply isn’t a top focus for the federal agencies mandated to protect Americans from terrorism. ...Under Donald Trump's presidency, experts say the threat has only grown — and without commensurate efforts to mitigate it. DHS gutted an interagency task force that represents the only federal effort at preventing radicalization for any form of terrorism. White supremacy was among its targets."

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[CN: Nativism. Covers entire section.]

Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress: Reporters Fell into the 'Both Sides' Trap While Covering Birthright Citizenship. "To be clear, there is genuine uncertainty about whether a Supreme Court dominated by Republicans — a Court whose newest member appeared to threaten revenge against Democrats during his confirmation hearing — will side with Trump. But if Brett Kavanaugh and his fellow partisans uphold an executive order stripping Americans of their citizenship, they will not be resolving an unsettled question. They will be upending 150 years of settled law, defying the explicit language of the Constitution, and ushering in an age of judicial lawlessness... The question of whether the Constitution mandates birthright citizenship is exactly as uncertain as the question of whether the Constitution forbids chocolate cake."

Miriam Zoila Pérez at Rewire.News: Latinx People Born Outside Hospitals Face Scrutiny over Citizenship — and Lawyers Say Tactics Are Escalating Under Trump. "Gwyneth Barbara was surprised when, on April 16 of this year, she received a query in response to the passport application she had submitted just a month before. [She] was born in the United States — in her parents' Kansas farmhouse, to be exact. The letter Barbara received from the U.S. Passport Agency said that because she was born outside of an institution, her birth certificate was not enough to prove her citizenship. ...For decades, Barbara has successfully used that birth certificate to renew her driver's license, and even to receive a prior passport. But this letter requested additional documentation to prove her citizenship."


Angelina Chapin at the Huffington Post: ICE Is Throwing a Record Number of 18-Year-Olds into Adult Detention on Their Birthdays. "Since June, when the government made the process of vetting sponsors more arduous, multiple legal organizations told HuffPost that the number of 18-year-old clients who are sent to ICE detention on their birthdays has increased, and in a few cases, at least doubled. ...In an email, an ORR representative told HuffPost that the agency would not 'speculate and has no specific data to confirm this theory' that increased vetting has led to more age-outs. When HuffPost asked ICE about whether it was sending 18-year-olds straight to adult detention in violation of federal law, a representative responded that '18-year-olds are not minors.'"

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[CN: Sexual harassment and assault; rape culture. Covers entire section.]

Jason Abbruzzese and Alex Holmes at NBC News: Google Employees Begin Walkout over Handling of Sexual Misconduct by Executives. "Google employees in company offices around the world began staging a walkout on Thursday to protest the company's handling of senior executives accused of sexual misconduct. ...The walkout was organized in response to a report by The New York Times published last week that found two senior Google executives had been paid tens of millions of dollars in exit packages after they left the company following allegations of sexual misconduct. A third senior executive named in the Times article had been allowed to stay at the company but resigned on Tuesday."

Olivia Messer at the Daily Beast: Top TSA Official Promoted After Settling Sexual-Harassment Lawsuit with Taxpayer Money. "Branch manager Charles 'Chas' Cook was the subject of a 2014 federal lawsuit and an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Complaint over alleged sexual misconduct and physical assault toward one of his employees. ...According to the lawsuit, after Labosco reported the incident, '[Cook] immediately began to discriminate against her in the workplace and created/participated in a hostile work environment'... Then Labosco was demoted. ...Once the lawsuit was settled with taxpayer money — and both the external and internal investigations were concluded — Cook was promoted."

Benjamin Haas at the Guardian: 'They Considered Us Toys': North Korean Women Reveal Extent of Sexual Violence. "Women in North Korea are routinely subjected to sexual violence by government officials, prison guards, interrogators, police, prosecutors, and soldiers, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch, with groping and unwanted advances a part of daily life for women working in the country's burgeoning black markets. ...Men in power operate with impunity and 'when a guard or police officer 'picks' a woman, she has no choice but to comply with any demands he makes, whether for sex, money, or other favours,' the report said."

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