ANOTHER ARGUMENT FOR ESPOUSING EVIL IS ON THE RISE – BUT IT WILL NOT TRIUMPH.
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY M WARNER
February 16, 2017



THE KEY ARTICLE BELOW BY REALNEWS (CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING) IS CALLED “THE ALT-RIGHT COMES TO WASHINGTON.” IT’S INTELLIGENT, INCISIVE DEEPLY RESEARCHED, AND PRETTY SCARY. THE CIR IS A NEWS ORGANIZATION OF LONG STANDING, AND IS WELL RESPECTED. IN SHORT, IT’S INFORMATION THAT THE PROGRESSIVE/LIBERAL WINGS OF AMERICAN THOUGHT NEED TO KNOW. ANYONE WHO WANTS THIS COUNTRY TO HANG ON TO OUR DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES SHOULD READ THIS, AND RETHINK THE IMPORTANCE OF THAT BORDER WALL IN COMPARISON WITH THE BILL OF RIGHTS AS OUR SOCIETAL FRAMEWORK. AS FOR THOSE WHO THINK THAT GOOD PATRIOTIC PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY MUST KEEP QUIET WHEN THEY HAVE A COMPLAINT ABOUT OUR GOVERNMENT, I REFER THEM TO REALNEWS’ SLOGAN: THE TRUTH WILL NOT REVEAL ITSELF.

OTHER IMPORTANT ARTICLES HERE ARE:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/democrats-trump-administration-wilderness-comeback-revival-214650
Democrats in the Wilderness

https://www.revealnews.org/blog/a-brief-history-of-presidents-telling-so-called-judges-to-get-lost/
A brief history of presidents telling ‘so-called’ judges to get lost

https://medium.com/@davepell/mike-drop-ten-takeaway-from-flynngate-283af25f4585#.ohcz7foac
Mike Drop: Ten Takeaways from Flynngate
Mike Flynn has resigned, breaking a record for shortest tenure of an administration official.

NEARER THE END ARE SEVERAL EXPLANATORY SECTIONS OF NAMES, WORDS THAT POPPED UP IN THE MAIN ARTICLES WHICH WERE UNFAMILIAR TO ME, OR WHICH BRING OUT AN IMPORTANT RELATED ISSUE ABOUT THE ALT-RIGHT WHICH WE INTERNET FOOT SOLDIERS NEED TO KNOW.



REALNEWS -- Slogan – “The truth will not reveal itself”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Investigative_Reporting
Center for Investigative Reporting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Sarajevo-based center, see Center for Investigative Reporting (Bosnia and Herzegovina).

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in Emeryville, California,[1] and has conducted investigative journalism since 1977.[2] It is known for producing stories that reveal scandals or corruption in government agencies and corporations. In 2010, CIR launched its California Watch reporting project; in 2012, it merged with The Bay Citizen; in 2015 it launched an hour-long public radio program, Reveal. Its 2016 budget is approximately $9.3 million. The current business model emphasizes cooperation with partners and other news outlets rather than competition. Robert Jon Rosenthal has been the executive director of the Center since 2007.[3] Phil Bronstein is the organization’s executive chair.







http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/alt-right-trump-washington-dc-power-milo-214629

The Alt-Right Comes to Washington

A new generation of nationalists sees a chance to ride Donald Trump’s coattails into the capital. But first they need to do some serious re-branding.

By BEN SCHRECKINGER
January/February 2017

Photograph -- Richard Spencer in Arlington, Virginia. | Stephen Voss for Politico Magazine

st Lansing, Michigan—Lounging at the back of his tour bus in a parking lot behind the Springhill Suites, Milo Yiannopoulos, the flamboyant right-wing British provocateur known for his bleach-blond frosted tips and relentless campaign against Islam, munched on a whole cucumber protruding from a paper bowl of raw vegetables and made plans for a party. He had just been asked to host “DeploraBall,” an unofficial celebration planned for the presidential inauguration weekend. Yiannopoulos described his vision for the event: As guests entered the National Press Club, shirtless Mexican laborers would be building a physical wall around them. Instead of doves, Yiannopoulos would release 500 live frogs in honor of Pepe, the cartoon mascot of pro-Donald Trump internet trolls. The room would be lined with oil portraits in gilt frames, each depicting a celebrity who had vowed to leave the country in the event of Trump’s election. At the end of the night, the portraits would be thrown into a bonfire and burned. Yiannopoulos would send a bill for the party to the Mexican Embassy.

The party is unlikely to proceed in exactly that way, or really anything like it. But the ball is real—a month ahead of the inauguration, the organizers had already booked the room and sold all 1,000 tickets—and it marks a kind of gala debut of a new clique in Washington.


Known until recently as the “alt-right,” it is a dispersed movement that encompasses a range of right-wing figures who are mostly young, mostly addicted to provocation and mostly have made their names on the internet. On the less extreme end, they include economic nationalists and “Western chauvinists” like Yiannopoulos, who wants to purge Islam from the United States and Europe; the movement also encompasses overt white nationalists, committed fascists and proponents of a host of other ideologies that were thought to have died out in American politics not long after World War II. Over the course of Trump’s campaign, these ideas came back to life in chat rooms, on Twitter and on the fringes of the internet—driven by supporters united by their loathing of progressives and their feeling of alienation from the free market Republican Party as it defined itself before Trump’s takeover.

This “new right” is now enjoying something of a moment. It’s not clear whether the movement helped fuel Trump’s rise or just rode its coattails. But energized by his success, this loose confederacy of meme-generating internet trolls, provocateurs and self-appointed custodians of Trumpism has begun making plans to move into Washington’s corridors of power, or at least shoulder their way into the general vicinity. When they look at Washington—a besuited city that moves to the rhythm of lobbying and legislative calendars and carefully worded statements—they see an opportunity for total disruption, the kind of overthrow the movement already takes credit for visiting on American politics.

So what, exactly, is the capital in for? In the weeks after the election, I tracked down the movement’s standard-bearers in Washington, New York, California and Michigan to find out what they had in mind for changing the culture of D.C., and from there the rest of the Western world. They don’t lack for grandiose ambition: Disdaining the traditional Washington think tanks as passé, they’re taking aim straight at America’s sense of its own identity, with plans for “culture tanks” to produce movies that make anti-immigrant conservatism look cool, and advocacy arms that resemble BuzzFeed more than The Heritage Foundation. They talk elliptically about internet memes replacing white papers as the currency of the policy realm, pushed out by “social media strike forces” trained in the ways of fourth-generation, insurgency-style warfare. There’s the idea of taking over the Republican Party with a wave of Tea Party-style primary challenges in 2018 that will rely on novel campaign tactics like flash mobs and 24/7 streaming video of candidates’ lives. There’s even a new right-wing hipster fraternal organization started by Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys (motto: “The West Is the Best”), which promises to serve as an amateur security force at political events, including the Inauguration.

Of course, coming in from the cold can also bring financial rewards, and some in the movement have a more old-fashioned ambition: that their coziness with the new administration will result in government contracts, and friendly regulators who won’t interfere with planned business ventures like a social media platform for people with high IQs.

For a movement that feeds on outsider energy, its members already enjoy surprising access to the inside of the incoming White House. Yiannopoulos’ official title is technology editor of Breitbart, the website formerly run by top Trump adviser Steve Bannon, with whom both Yiannopoulos and internet troll Charles Johnson say they keep in touch. Yiannopoulos and Johnson also both say they know Trump’s most influential megadonor, Rebekah Mercer. While I was spending time with another movement figure in California, he took a phone call from the son of Trump’s incoming national security adviser. (A shared spokeswoman for Bannon and Mercer did not respond to requests for comment about their relationships with Johnson and Yiannopoulos.)

At a conference he organized in Washington in the days after Trump’s election, attendees erupted in Nazi salutes following a toast in which Richard Spencer declared, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
At a conference he organized in Washington in the days after Trump’s election, attendees erupted in Nazi salutes following a toast in which Richard Spencer declared, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” | The Atlantic, via YouTube

But the new young nationalists also have a problem: They need to re-brand, urgently. In the first theatrical arrival of the alt-right in Washington, days after Trump’s election, Richard Spencer, the originator of the term “alt-right” and an open white nationalist, held a conference at the Ronald Reagan building, a couple of blocks from the White House. After dinner, once most of the national media had departed, Spencer rose to deliver a speech that crescendoed with him raising his glass in a kind of toast. As he held his arm up, he proclaimed, triumphantly, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” In response, several attendees erupted in Nazi salutes, indelibly associating the alt-right with jackbooted white supremacy and provoking an instant schism in the movement. In a video produced from the conference, the Atlantic blurred out attendees’ faces, as if the footage had been smuggled out of a criminal enterprise. Soon, the Associated Press and the New York Times issued memos that officially defined alt-righters as white nationalists.

Now, as its members move on Washington, an already fragmented movement is further split between those who embrace Spencer’s racial politics and those who, for reasons of pragmatism or principle, reject the “alt-right” label for its associations. Said Paul Ray Ramsey, a blogger who flirts with white nationalism but found the Nazi associations a bridge too far, even for him: “You don’t want to tie your brand to something that’s ultimate evil.”

Spencer has become the poster boy of the alt-right, appearing on NPR and CNN to defend what he calls “European identitarianism,” and what others call, with less varnish, racism. He sports the alt-right’s signature shaved-side haircut—the “fashy,” as in fascist—and leads the benignly named National Policy Institute, a think tank with an office in Arlington, Virginia, to push his vision for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”

Jared Taylor, at his home in Oakton, Virginia, has been called the “intellectual godfather” of the white nationalist alt-right.
Jared Taylor, at his home in Oakton, Virginia, has been called the “intellectual godfather” of the white nationalist alt-right. | Stephen Voss for Politico Magazine

He isn’t the first American figure to put a fresh face on old-school Klan-style racism, but he’s far more open about his ambitions than the generation that preceded him. I also visited Jared Taylor, 65, who is publisher of the white nationalist web outlet American Renaissance and has been called the “intellectual godfather of the alt-right”; although Taylor welcomed me to his home in Oakton, Virginia, he declined to give any hint of his plans. He cited fear of sabotage, comparing himself to a Soviet dissident. “I won’t even talk about them in the vaguest of terms,” he said, surrounded by framed Confederate bond certificates and a bonsai tree. (Taylor, who was born in Japan to Christian missionaries, can’t precisely be classified a white supremacist: He believes Asians are superior to whites.)

Spencer expressed no such hesitation. In mid-December, he announced he was considering running for Ryan Zinke’s House seat in Montana, where he lives part-time in a ski house owned by his mother. And three days before that, he took a break from scouting a new Washington-area headquarters to eat lunch at Café Milano in Georgetown and lay out his vision in detail. The last time Spencer dined at the restaurant, a decade ago, he found himself the odd man out. He recalled that Martina Hingis was playing one of the Williams sisters in a tennis match on the televisions at the bar, and that everyone else in the restaurant was rooting for the African-American player. Spencer’s loyalties, though, were racial. “I was like, ‘I’m on the side of the German,’” he told me. (Hingis, for the record, is a Swiss citizen from what is now Slovakia.)

A month after Trump’s election, Spencer, in a sweater, collared shirt and newsboy cap, was fitting right in at the tony eatery. He had just returned from Texas A&M, where he delivered a speech that had created a predictable uproar, with protests, state police in riot gear and pro-diversity counterprogramming put on by the university’s president at the school’s football stadium. Spencer is planning a national tour of campuses in 2017 and considering calling it the Dangerous White Heterosexual Tour, a nod to Yiannopoulos’ Dangerous Faggot Tour.

Spencer is now looking for a donor to finance his efforts to push white nationalism out of the shadows of the internet. “We need to enter the world,” he said. “We’ve hit our limit in terms of being a virtual institution.” To that end, midway through lunch, he took a call to arrange his next stop, Old Town Alexandria, where he was touring a prospective location for his new headquarters. Like many on the alt-right, his vision of a political movement blurs the line between politics, culture and media: In addition to office space, he was looking for a studio to launch a media operation that could field a daily news show, as well as perhaps a morning show that would be more “fun.”

“If we had a studio,” he asked rhetorically, “could we start to enter the world in the way the Young Turks does stuff? In the way Infowars does stuff?”

An open white nationalist, Richard Spencer, above at home in Arlington, Virginia, has become a poster boy of the alt-right.
An open white nationalist, Richard Spencer, above at home in Arlington, Virginia, has become a poster boy of the alt-right. | Stephen Voss for Politico Magazine

Spencer believes the answer is yes, and that the National Policy Institute could occupy a marquee headquarters in downtown Washington within 10 years. “Maybe Cato will go under,” he said, one of many digs at the old free market institutions of the Republican Party. “Maybe we’ll take over that facility.” In the short term, Spencer, 38, plans to capitalize on what he saw as the PR success of the November event with another meeting and news conference in Washington in the first quarter of 2017. If he doesn’t make it to Congress—and if former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke’s 3 percent showing in Louisiana’s December Senate race is any indication of the electorate’s appetite for undisguised racism, he won’t—Spencer believes he can use publicity to maneuver himself closer to influence.

As he tries, one of his obstacles will be the very movement he helped spawn. Other young figures of the anti-immigrant right have been distancing themselves from Spencer and his hard-core racial ideas; he wasn’t invited to DeploraBall, and the anti-immigration Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who knew Spencer when both were members of the Conservative Union at Duke University a decade ago, has condemned him.

Spencer, for his part, says he still supports the more moderate figures who have disowned him and doesn’t mind that they’re trying to keep their distance. In their popularity, he sees a gateway for new followers to come around to his views, and he doesn’t want his presence to become a distraction. “I want there to be an alt-light,” he said, using a common nickname for the less extreme threads of the new nationalism.

The feeling does not appear to be mutual. Many figures in the movement now disdain the term “alt-right,” refuse to consider themselves “alt-light” and wish Spencer would just go away. “Not interested in appearing in any piece alongside Spencer et al.,” wrote Yiannopoulos in a text message rebuffing an interview request. “We have nothing in common.”

***

Yiannopoulos’ caginess about the interview was not unusual. For a bunch of media-driven provocateurs, members of the new nationalist right can be highly particular about their interactions with the mainstream press. Longtime bloggers Vox Day and Steve Sailer agreed to answer questions for this story only in writing. Charles Johnson agreed to an interview on the condition that he would also record it, a tactic more commonly employed by prominent politicians. He also declined to be photographed, explaining that only one photographer is allowed to take his picture for publication. After asking some pointed questions about the direction of this article, Yiannopoulos’ publicist said he wouldn’t be participating in it.

But his brand is built on visibility, and Yiannopoulos, who said he was in talks with a number of major production companies about a television project, ultimately yielded when I showed up in Lansing, where he was preparing for an appearance at a lecture hall on the campus of Michigan State University. (Yiannopoulos later canceled a photo shoot for this article after learning that I had called Bannon and Mercer’s spokeswoman to ask if they would like to comment on his work.) I had last seen him at Trump’s election night party at the midtown Hilton, where Yiannopoulos posed for glam shots and paused briefly to harangue a gaggle of reporters about the evils of the mainstream media while they held recording devices up to his face.

In the past, he had identified as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, but by the time I showed up at his tour bus—this was two weeks after Salutegate—things had changed. “The small contingent of distasteful people in the alt-right became so territorial about the expression that they scared off moderate right-wingers,” he said. “And that’s what they did to me.”

“The small contingent of distasteful people in the alt-right became so territorial about the expression that they scared off moderate right-wingers,” Yiannopoulos says.

Sporting black nail polish and black sequined pants with a black shawl, Yiannopoulos, 32, huddled at a standing desk with his young roadies, who dressed and looked like college sophomores, to plan the night’s show. On a laptop, the roadies presented to him a split-screen image to project behind his speech: Istanbul’s Blue Mosque on the left and a missile launcher, its warheads aimed away from the mosque, on the right. This was not what Yiannopoulos had in mind. “It looks like Istanbul is shooting us,” he complained. “And there’s no fucking American flag on it.” By the time Yiannopoulos appeared in the lecture hall that night, a revised image was being projected onto a screen at the front of the room: A bomb with an American flag on it had been superimposed to look like it was falling directly on the mosque.

The atmosphere around the speech reproduced the dynamics of a Trump campaign event in miniature. In the crisp air outside, mostly white attendees in Make America Great Again hats queued up at the door amid a heavy police presence, while mostly nonwhite protesters stood off to the side chanting, “No Trump. No KKK. No racist USA.” Seven arrests were made.

Inside, Yiannopoulos stood between plaster Doric columns and sipped Budweiser through a straw. Wearing black lipstick and a crown of faux gold laurels, he stood before a crowd of a couple hundred college students and painted Islam as a totalitarian political ideology and an existential threat to Western freedoms. A Cambridge University dropout who describes himself as a free speech absolutist, Yiannopoulos is doubly hostile to Muslims because of his homosexuality and Greek heritage. “I have family in Cyprus,” he lamented. “They took our fucking orange groves.”

In front of the crowd, he called Jill Stein a “crazy old cunt” and Lena Dunham a “disgusting fat cunt,” prompting raucous laughter and applause.

The movement known broadly as the “alt-right” has newfound influence in the Trump era, but it is split: Milo Yiannopoulos, for instance, at center, has distanced himself from a more overtly white nationalist alt-right. | Getty Images

Lambasting Islam for the benefit of college students is not new to the Trump era: The Los Angeles-based conservative agitator David Horowitz brought his “Islamo-fascism awareness” talks to campuses a decade ago. But Yiannopoulos is a different creature, a sort of 21st-century Islamophobic Oscar Wilde. His events are well-attended and entertaining. He believes he has the formula to turn the cultural tide of the West away from progressivism, a mix of erudition, flamboyance and charisma that puts an amusing, unthreatening front on a worldview that feeds the America-first, Christian-capitalist prejudices of his largely young male college audiences.

Yiannopoulos has retained his title as Breitbart’s tech editor, where his output is reportedly supplemented by the labors of more than 40 interns, and he views social media platforms as the next battlefront in the culture war. In July, he was banned from Twitter after trashing the work of the African-American comedian Leslie Jones, tweeting that she looked like a man and calling her “barely literate,” in response to a tweet she sent him that contained a typo.

Yiannopoulos, Johnson and a number of white nationalists have switched to an upstart rival called Gab that promises not to ban users for any speech so long as it is legal. Down the road, Yiannopoulos plans to take on what he sees as the liberal biases of other social media networks, but not yet. “I need to be too big to ban before I can start going for the people who have enabled my popularity,” he said. “I will pick that fight when I know I can win it.”

Yiannopoulos has a number of personal ties to the Trump administration: Bannon hired him to work for Breitbart, and his tour bus is Breitbart-branded. He also knows the father-daughter pair of Bob and Rebekah Mercer, Breitbart investors who are Trump’s most influential megadonors and the dominant patrons of the anti-establishment right. He would not reveal who was financing his tour other than to say his funding includes money from Hollywood. When I suggested to Yiannopoulos that the Mercers and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—another deep-pocketed figure with ties to both Trump and a number of alt-light figures—might be chipping in, he responded only that Thiel would be more inclined to sponsor a highbrow cultural pursuit, like a literary journal, than a vulgar lecture tour. “Peter’s a snob,” he said. “In a good way.”

Yiannopoulos said he still talks to Bannon, but he declined to say about what. He disavowed any interest in Washington past the inaugural festivities. “Everybody in politics is a cunt,” he said. “They’re boring, untalented, unattractive people.” The real fight, he thinks, is the culture war he’s waging on college campuses. Yiannopoulos said he will leave Washington after Trump’s inauguration weekend with no desire to return.

“I’m like Cincinnatus,” he said, comparing himself to the 5th century B.C. patrician who was appointed dictator of Rome to repel an invasion and promptly returned to civilian life after the crisis passed. “I want to go do this shit and go back to my fucking farm.”

***


Blogger Mike Cernovich has no such misgivings about D.C. Holed up in the living room of his modest home in Orange County, California, on a Monday afternoon in December, he crossed his legs and laid out his immodest vision for taking over the capital.

A former lawyer, Cernovich began blogging about gender dynamics, among other topics, in 2004. A year earlier, he had been charged with raping a woman he knew, but the charge was dropped and a judge instead sentenced him to community service for battery. Ever since, Cernovich, now 39, has preached the gospel of masculinity, teaching readers how to become “a dominant man” through mindset adjustments and bodybuilding. He once tweeted “date rape does not exist” and advised readers, in a blog post about household finance, that “Hot girls are better to rent than buy.”

He advocates IQ-testing all immigrants and ending federal funding of universities, and describes himself as an economic nationalist primarily concerned with the welfare of average Americans. He has some economic ideas that veer toward the wonky—he said he would like median GDP to replace GDP growth as the lodestar of economic policy, for instance. As machines displace a greater share of labor, he is intrigued by the possibility of introducing a universal basic income, an idea supported by Martin Luther King Jr., conservative economist Milton Friedman and Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, Robert Reich. Cernovich is also an avid consumer and progenitor of conspiracy theories, such as his claim that there was more than one shooter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and that the government is covering this up to avoid panic.

Those predilections made him an early Trump supporter, and over the course of the election he shot to internet notoriety by his monomaniacal focus on Hillary Clinton’s allegedly failing health and his online feuds with Trump detractors. He has become huge in the world of pro-Trump Twitter, known as #MAGA Twitter, for Make America Great Again. In October, a Finnish publishing house specializing in science fiction and fantasy released his latest book, MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again.

His new plan is to take his brand of self-help from the home to the House by running the “Big Brother” of congressional bids, renting out a five-bedroom campaign pad, living in it with his staff and streaming the whole thing 24/7 on YouTube. There are other plans for the campaign—flash mobs, loyal readers with Go-Pros confronting and humiliating his opponents live on Periscope. “The savagery that I would bring to a campaign would be like nothing anyone had ever seen in a congressional election,” said Cernovich, the day before the birth of his first child, a girl.

That vision is contingent on Cernovich’s congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, vacating his seat to, say, join the Trump administration. If that does not happen, Cernovich still plans to recruit acolytes from across the country to deploy those tactics next year in primary challenges to establishment Republicans, a scheme he has dubbed #Revolution2018. If he can pick off just a handful of incumbents next year, Cernovich believes the entire Republican conference will come to fear, and heed, his movement. “That’s what you learn from—” he said, before catching himself. “I’m going to choose my words carefully, because I don’t want to call it ‘terrorism.’”

A blogger in Laguna Niguel, California, Mike Cernovich uses the label “new right” to describe himself. To refute those who lump him in with white nationalists, he points to his wife, Shauna, a secular Muslim of Persian descent. Their newborn daughter, Cyra (with Cernovich above), was named for the Persian emperor Cyrus.

A blogger in Laguna Niguel, California, Mike Cernovich uses the label “new right” to describe himself. To refute those who lump him in with white nationalists, he points to his wife, Shauna, a secular Muslim of Persian descent. Their newborn daughter, Cyra (with Cernovich above), was named for the Persian emperor Cyrus. | Sandy Huffaker for Politico Magazine

For a man who until recently was best known for hawking his self-published books and intentionally offending people on the internet, these are grand designs. And Cernovich acknowledges they’ll require some maturation. To that end, Cernovich has condemned Richard Spencer and disassociated himself from the “alt-right” label, even though he believes the Nazi saluters at his conference were leftist plants sent to make the alt-right look bad. (Spencer himself, it should be noted, rejects this conspiracy theory, as well as Cernovich’s claim that the CIA may be propping him up. “He needs to calm down,” Spencer told me.) The hard-core alt-right, in response, has turned on Cernovich and begun calling him “Cuck-ovich,” a play on the movement’s dreaded “cuckservative” insult.

Cernovich now uses the label “new right” to describe himself. To refute those who lump him in with white nationalists, he pointed to his second wife, Shauna, a secular Muslim of Persian descent, who lounged behind us on a couch and jumped in and out of our conversation. (The non-European partner, for what it’s worth, has become a frequent defense among the more moderate alt-righters: Charles Johnson points to his Asian wife to counter charges of racism; Gavin McInnes points to his Native American wife; Yiannopoulos says he prefers to date black men.) Cernovich’s newborn daughter is named Cyra, after the Persian emperor Cyrus (a stocking with her name on it already hung over the fireplace). When a question arose about the birthplace of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ sidekick Paul Joseph Watson, Cernovich told his wife “Google it.” Then he backtracked. “Will you please Google it? I don’t just bark orders at you.” (“Northern Britain,” she chimed in later.)

Cernovich does not view himself as a “troll” per se, because he views trolling as amoral, but instead refers to himself as a “rhetorician”—a provocateur who doesn’t literally mean what he says. Whatever he calls it, the rhetoric clearly has real-world consequences. He was a chief pusher of the #pizzagate hashtag on Twitter, the wacky conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was part of a child sex trafficking ring being run out of the back of a Washington restaurant called Comet Ping Pong. The scandal began as a rumor on Twitter, jumped to message boards like 4Chan, was pushed by Cernovich and other much higher-profile agitators, and came to be taken quite seriously by some of the internet’s more impressionable users, including the North Carolina man who drove to Washington and fired shots with a real assault rifle at the real pizza joint in a misguided attempt to free the nonexistent sex slaves.

“Right now we’re going from the underdog to the overdog,” Cernovich said. “So I’m still fighting like the underdog. But when I say things, I need to be more careful.”

When we sat down in California, it was a day after the incident, and Cernovich conceded that he had learned some lessons from the fiasco. For example, although he does believe there is an active pedophile ring in Washington that needs to be investigated, he never believed it was based out of Comet. He also claimed he did not know “Pizzagate” implied that specifically. “Right now we’re going from the underdog to the overdog,” he said. “So I’m still fighting like the underdog. But when I say things, I need to be more careful. When I say things like ‘Pizzagate,’ I need to be more clear.”

In the midst of our discussion about Pizzagate, Cernovich’s phone rang, and when he picked it up, the voice on the other end belonged to Mike Flynn Jr., the son of Trump’s pick for national security adviser. Flynn Jr., who had a transition email address and at one point was up for a national security clearance as part of the presidential transition, was also a Pizzagate conpiracy theorist, explicitly endorsing the idea that Comet could plausibly be the center of a Clinton-connected child sex-trafficking operation. Taking the call from Flynn, Cernovich hurried out onto his back patio, shut the sliding door to the living room and paced around for several minutes out back.

The Flynns, father and son, are also big on #MAGA Twitter, and have become fans of Cernovich’s work there. The elder Flynn, who like his son regularly tweets out links to fake news stories, tweeted an endorsement of Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset book; he has also called Yiannopoulos “one of the most brave people that I’ve ever met.” Cernovich declined to comment on his relationship with the Flynns, or with almost anyone else. He said he avoids knowing the names of people he communicates with, and tries to forget their names if they tell him, in case he is ever subpoenaed. He consciously models his approach to media and politics on “fourth-generation warfare”—that is, insurgency and counterinsurgency, which includes the use of fluid, ad hoc alliances. “Chuck Johnson doesn’t tell me what to do. Milo doesn’t tell me what to do,” he said. “But we talk, and we’re loosely aligned.” He has become more inclined to believe in conspiracies, he told me, now that he is part of one himself.

***

If there’s a real alt-right conspiracy in American politics, Charles C. Johnson is an integral part of it. Johnson, a self-described journalist, came up through a series of conservative fellowships and internships as a student at Claremont McKenna College, where he graduated in 2011. From there, he has made a name for himself through a series of controversies as both a debunker and purveyor of false stories.

He contributed to the Daily Caller’s since-debunked story alleging that New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez consorted with prostitutes, and has falsely reported that a New York Times reporter had posed for Playgirl, mistaking a spoof source article for a genuine one. After striking out with his own website, GotNews, he published the full home addresses of two other Times reporters after they published the name of a street that Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson had once lived on. Later, Johnson was among the most prominent skeptics of Rolling Stone’s since-debunked article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. In the process of attacking the story, he revealed the supposed identity of the woman who had been the anonymous source for the story. He also published a book, Why Coolidge Matters, in 2013. It received favorable blurbs from Bush administration Justice Department official John Yoo, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin and Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Like a number of alt-righters, Johnson has been banned from Twitter—in this case for soliciting donations to “take out” a Black Lives Matter activist, phrasing he said referred to opposition research but that the platform interpreted as a threat of physical violence.

Charles Johnson, who says he is friendly with members of the new administration, hopes their policies will give him leeway for even more of the internet trolling he has become known for. | Peter Duke

If other alt-right figures are plotting some kind of outside route to Washington influence, Johnson, at 28 years old, is already there. When I had last seen him in person, it was at Trump’s election night victory party sometime after 3 a.m., and he was standing about 10 yards from the president-elect. “Chris Christie will not be as powerful as he now appears,” Johnson informed me. Two days later, Christie was demoted from chairman to vice-chairman of the transition, and he has drifted further from the center of Trump’s orbit since then.

“It’s no secret that I’m friendly with people who are now in the government,” Johnson said back in Midtown three weeks later, on the second floor of the swanky Lambs Club. Johnson had returned to New York from his home in California to testify in his settlement with Gawker, which he has sued for libel over its exploration of a rumor that he once defecated on a floor in college.

He told me he had been performing various unspecified tasks for the Trump transition. He took credit for bringing Bill Clinton’s female accusers and Barack Obama’s pro-Trump half-brother Malik to the general election debates. (Malik Obama has referred to Johnson as “my friend” on Twitter.) One person close to Trump’s transition told me that Johnson had participated in some early transition-related meetings and caused headaches when he was accused internally of leaking to the news media. “I haven’t leaked anything without authorization,” Johnson responded. (Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller wrote in an email that Johnson does not have a role on the transition and has not “been tasked with any projects on the team’s behalf.”)

The Alt-Right Canon

The alt-right is a bookish bunch who often cite classics of the Western canon to make their case about race, politics and culture in America—but also their own favored list of more obscure titles. Here are seven of the lesser-known books they see as most integral to their worldview. — Ben Schreckinger
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Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer (1989)

Fischer, a historian, focuses on four regional cultures in England that sent settlers to the New World and supposedly formed the basis for four corresponding regional cultures of the United States: Puritans in Massachusetts, elites and their indentured servants in Virginia, Quakers in the Delaware Valley and the Scotch-Irish in the Appalachian backcountry.

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The Culture of Critique, by Kevin MacDonald (1998)

The third in psychologist MacDonald’s series analyzing Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, this book argues that Jews led a number of intellectual movements, including Marxism, that benefited Jews but resulted in the deaths of millions of people. Several critics have panned the book as a work of intellectual anti-Semitism.

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The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker (2002)

Harvard University cognitive scientist Pinker argues that the role of genetics in determining human behavior is far greater than is acknowledged in the prevailing social science models, which rely more heavily on the role of culture and environment. The book was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

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A Farewell to Alms, by Gregory Clark (2007)

A late entry in the canon of social Darwinism, this book argues that the Industrial Revolution and accompanying advances in quality of life resulted from the dying off of the poor in Britain and their replacement in society by harder-working and less violent—though downwardly mobile—members of the upper classes. Clark, an economist at the University of California, Davis, received mixed reviews for the book.


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The 10,000 Year Explosion, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (2009)

Two University of Utah anthropologists make the unconventional argument that the onset of civilization has actually accelerated the rate of evolution, rather than arresting it, creating more and more variation across human populations.


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A Troublesome Inheritance, by Nicholas Wade (2014)

Inspired in part by A Farewell to Alms, former New York Times science reporter Wade argues that Caucasians, Africans and East Asians exhibit genetic variance on the level of separate subspecies, and that Caucasian genetic advantages explain the dominance of the West in recent centuries. The book set off a firestorm and was condemned as a work of poor scholarship by 139 scientists in population genetics and evolutionary biology in a letter to the Times.


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The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, by Michael Walsh (2015)

Walsh, a conservative journalist, argues that the dominance of critical theory and cultural Marxism in post-World War II American universities is responsible for the deterioration of traditional values in society at large. The book received favorable coverage across conservative outlets, including Breitbart and National Review.

Among his fellow travelers, Johnson is known as a direct line to the donor class. He said he talks to Bannon and knows the Mercers. He knows Thiel. McInnes, the Vice co-founder and an acquaintance of Johnson’s, said Johnson and Thiel coordinated their legal assaults on Gawker. Johnson declined to discuss the tech billionaire other than to describe their relationship as a mere “passing acquaintance,” and a spokesman for Thiel did not respond when asked whether the pair had coordinated.

Johnson said he is concerned now with making sure Trump’s government is stocked with Trumpists rather than establishment Republicans and other “cucks,” and his WeSearchr “information marketplace,” a business he started where people can post bounties for specific pieces of information, provides him with the resources to vet potential appointees independently. In the internal struggle over staffing the administration, this aligns him with Bannon. Johnson told me he is soliciting résumés, recommending job candidates and circulating policy memos, but to whom exactly he wouldn’t say.

Johnson conceded that such tactics would need to evolve. “The trolls in some measure have to grow up,” he said. “Government by meme is kind of a scary idea.”

Despite his proximity to the Trump administration, Johnson is far less squeamish than many of his confederates about Richard Spencer. He makes no bones about knowing him, and offered to give me Spencer’s phone number. He told me he rejects white nationalism as a political philosophy—“I don’t know when something is loving being white and when it’s hating other groups,” he mused—but doesn’t totally reject the idea of applying the alt-right label to himself.

Johnson has personal goals for Washington as well. Some of these have to do with taking revenge on social media platforms that have relegated his ideas to the margins. Johnson said he would like to use his connections to the incoming administration to push for the invocation of antitrust laws to regulate Twitter and Facebook as utilities, in order to prevent what he sees as their unfair treatment of conservatives. And he wants to push the government to ensure federal antidiscrimination rules do not interfere with his plans for a social network restricted to people with IQs above 130. “I just don’t want the government to persecute my businesses,” he said.

Mostly, he said, he is interested in making money. So he will want a friendly ear at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission when he launches a predictions-market business. He is interested in crowd-sourcing cancer research, which will require a friendly Food and Drug Administration. His plans for a crowd-funding business could depend on his relationship with the Federal Trade Commission.

Johnson defends trolling, his preferred mode of political activism, as a tactic that allows a weaker party to force a stronger party to act—and a pedigreed one at that. “Jesus was a troll,” he said. (Cernovich credits the 4th century B.C. philosopher Diogenes the Cynic—who irritated the citizens of Athens and Corinth with stunts like bringing a live, plucked chicken to Plato’s academy to prove a point about taxonomy—as the original troll.) But dissimulation and juvenile humor are not traits that inspire great confidence in leaders, and Johnson conceded that, now that his candidate has won, such tactics would need to evolve. “The trolls in some measure have to grow up,” he said. “Government by meme is kind of a scary idea.”

***

It’s clear that the alt-right isn’t shy about the sweep of its claims; Yiannopoulos and Spencer, as well as lesser-known figures, tend to talk about their project in world-historical terms, framing it as a civilizational clash, or some kind of new rising tide. What’s far less clear is if the alt-right did make a move on Washington, just how many people would show up.

Before he was banned from Twitter, Yiannopoulos had 300,000 followers. Spencer had more than 30,000 Twitter followers at publication time, and Cernovich had nearly 190,000. But a social media following isn’t the same as votes, or membership, and the numbers question is now tangled in the new ambiguity about who is or isn’t part of the alt-right, or the alt-light, or new right. There is a noisy online white nationalist alt-right core that amplifies its voice by frenetically posting on Twitter, Reddit and 4Chan, often using multiple accounts to inflate its perceived size. The alt-right subreddit has more than 13,000 registered users. At Spencer’s November conference in Washington, about 200 people showed up. Johnson and others have the ear of people in Trump’s orbit, and their online visibility creates a kind of political cover for slightly more moderate versions of nationalism now represented within the White House. But it’s far less clear what kind of political groundswell they could muster if they tried.

Further muddying the waters, the alt-light and alt-right are anti-progressive cultural movements as much as political ones. Many of their members knew the late Andrew Breitbart, and they are fond of citing his maxim that “politics is downstream from culture.” The cultural component pops up in odd places: Members of the sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme have been called the “court jesters of the alt-right,” and a show created by the group’s leader, Sam Hyde, was canceled in December because Cartoon Network executives deemed it offensive.

In an increasingly image-driven political culture, the alt-righters are doubling down on image. The movement essentially has an official visual chronicler: Peter Duke, the only photographer Johnson allows to take his picture for publication, also shot Cernovich’s new softer headshots. Duke has photographed Yiannopoulos, former Breitbart columnist Ben Shapiro, Dilbert creator Scott Adams (a Trump admirer who has feuded with feminists on his blog) and George Zimmerman, the man in Florida who was acquitted in the murder of Trayvon Martin. Duke’s aspiration is to create a Vanity Fair for the right, to make it more glamorous. “One of the things that the left is really good at it is making people look good, and I mean that literally,” he said. “The right in general needs re-branding.”

Already, a new aesthetic is taking hold among the alt-light: gayer and more avant-garde. In July, Yiannopoulos hosted a “Gays for Trump” party at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, which included the cognitively dissonant spectacle of anti-Islamic commentator Pamela Geller and far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders railing against the Muslim threat from a podium flanked by erotic photos of scantily clad young men in “Make America Great Again” hats. In October, Yiannopoulos staged a pro-Trump performance art piece in Manhattan in which he bathed himself in pig’s blood to commemorate the victims of Islamic terrorism and crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. At the show, notorious pharma bro Martin Shkreli, an alt-light fellow traveler who is under indictment for alleged securities fraud, exhibited a framed red-and-blue pill. McInnes, who is white, exhibited a photo of himself as an antebellum slave.

Jeff Giesea, above, views himself as a moderating force, arguing that trolling should be used as a tactic but “constructively and ethically.”
Jeff Giesea, above, views himself as a moderating force, arguing that trolling should be used as a tactic but “constructively and ethically.” | Stephen Voss for Politico Magazine
This might seem a disorienting new politics and aesthetic for Washington, but the patron behind both events is a figure already in D.C.: Jeff Giesea, a little-known entrepreneur. The 41-year-old Giesea exudes the air of a West Coast investor; on workdays, he haunts the hip environs of Logan Circle, and he asked to meet me at a coffee house off 14th Street that is very much part of blue, Obama-era Washington. Giesea graduated from Stanford in 1997, a year after Rebekah Mercer, though he said he does not know her. He does know fellow Stanford alumnus Thiel, according to a person familiar with their relationship, and Thiel talked him out of attending law school. Instead, Giesea went to work for Thiel Capital Management, the magnate’s pre-PayPal investment venture, and then for Koch Industries’ public affairs office.

In recent years, Giesea says, he has become less of a libertarian and more concerned with the fortunes of Middle America. He says his travels in Europe and his homosexuality have made him concerned about Islamic incursions in the West. In February, he published a paper titled “It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare” in a NATO-sponsored journal, calling for using the tactics of internet trolls to thwart the Islamic State’s online propaganda; the ISIS tactics he studied have informed his own virtual pro-Trump insurgency, which he conducted in conjunction with the likes of Cernovich and Johnson, supplementing the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of anonymous pro-Trump Internet trolls.

Mag-Dovere Inauguration-Issue Lede
POLITICS
Democrats in the Wilderness
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
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LETTER FROM PEPIN COUNTY
‘What Do You Do if a Red State Moves to You?’
By MICHAEL KRUSE

Giesea confers regularly with Cernovich about taking over the Republican Party and remaking it as pro-worker, perhaps with the help of a BuzzFeed-style think tank that distills policy into memes and makes those memes go viral. He views himself as a mentor and moderating force within the Trumpist movement, and acknowledged that it has some growing up to do. “We need to evolve beyond trolling,” he said. The tactic can still be appropriate, but only within certain parameters, he said. “We need to make sure it’s used constructively and ethically.”

There are other changes in store as well. Giesea is an organizer of DeploraBall, and he invited Yiannopoulos’ involvement in the party. But his young comrade’s vision of shirtless Mexican laborers will not come to pass, and for a very pre-Trump, non-nationalist reason. “I find that offensive,” Giesea said. “My mother is a Mexican citizen.”




http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/democrats-trump-administration-wilderness-comeback-revival-214650

Democrats in the Wilderness
Inside a decimated party’s not-so-certain revival strategy.
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE January/February 2017

AN EXCELLENT ARTIST’S DEPICTION OF SENATOR WARREN AND OTHERS -- Illustration by Owen Freeman


Standing with some 30,000 people in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia the night before the election watching Hillary Clinton speak, exhausted aides were already worrying about what would come next. They expected her to win, of course, but they knew President Clinton was going to get thrashed in the 2018 midterms—the races were tilted in Republicans’ favor, and that’s when they thought the backlash would really hit. Many assumed she’d be a one-term president. They figured she’d get a primary challenge. Some of them had already started gaming out names for who it would be.

“Last night I stood at your doorstep / Trying to figure out what went wrong,” Bruce Springsteen sang quietly to the crowd in what he called “a prayer for post-election.” “It’s gonna be a long walk home.”

What happened the next night shocked even the most pessimistic Democrats. But in another sense, it was the reckoning the party had been expecting for years. They were counting on a Clinton win to paper over a deeper rot they’ve been worrying about—and to buy them some time to start coming up with answers. In other words, it wasn’t just Donald Trump. Or the Russians. Or James Comey. Or all the problems with how Clinton and her aides ran the campaign. Win or lose, Democrats were facing an existential crisis in the years ahead—the result of years of complacency, ignoring the withering of the grass roots and the state parties, sitting by as Republicans racked up local win after local win.

“The patient,” says Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, “was clearly already sick.”

As Trump takes over the GOP and starts remaking its new identity as a nationalist, populist party, creating a new political pole in American politics for the first time in generations, all eyes are on the Democrats. How will they confront a suddenly awakened, and galvanized, white majority? What’s to stop Trump from doing whatever he wants? Who’s going to pull a coherent new vision together? Worried liberals are watching with trepidation, fearful that Trump is just the beginning of worse to come, desperate for a comeback strategy that can work.

What’s clear from interviews with several dozen top Democratic politicians and operatives at all levels, however, is that there is no comeback strategy—just a collection of half-formed ideas, all of them challenged by reality. And for whatever scheme they come up with, Democrats don’t even have a flag-carrier. Barack Obama? He doesn’t want the job. Hillary Clinton? Too damaged. Bernie Sanders? Too socialist. Joe Biden? Too tied to Obama. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer? Too Washington. Elizabeth Warren? Maybe. And all of them old, old, old.

The Democrats’ desolation is staggering. But part of the problem is that it’s easy to point to signs that maybe things aren’t so bad. After all, Clinton did beat Trump by 2.8 million votes, Obama’s approval rating is nearly 60 percent, polls show Democrats way ahead of the GOP on many issues and demographics suggest that gap will only grow. But they are stuck in the minority in Congress with no end in sight, have only 16 governors left and face 32 state legislatures fully under GOP control. Their top leaders in the House are all over 70. Their top leaders in the Senate are all over 60. Under Obama, Democrats have lost 1,034 seats at the state and federal level—there’s no bench, no bench for a bench, virtually no one able to speak for the party as a whole.

“The fact that our job should be easier just shows how poorly we’re doing the job,” says Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, an Iraq War veteran seen as one of the party’s rising stars.

The View From the Field
Rising Democratic stars around the country diagnose their party’s problems.
What did Democrats get wrong in the 2016 race?

Mag-DemsWilderness Tim Ryan
“We arrived at this point through some combination of either outright offending or at least failing to inspire nearly every segment of our party’s base voters.”
—Tim Ryan, U.S. representative, Ohio

Mag-DemsWilderness Whitmer
“Democrats failed to listen sufficiently to voters, appreciate their discontent with the status quo and articulate how they will fight for working Americans.”
—Gretchen Whitmer, former state senate Democratic leader, Michigan

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“People and polls were unfairly distracted by unintelligent, racist banter centering on anti-establishment or anti-politically correct views.”
—Shavonda Sumter, state assemblywoman, New Jersey

There are now fewer than 700 days until Election Day 2018, as internal memos circulating among Democratic strategists point out with alarm. They differ in their prescriptions, but all boil down to the same inconvenient truth: If Republicans dominate the 2018 midterms, they will control the Senate (and with it, the Supreme Court) for years, and they will draw district lines in states that will lock in majorities in the House and across state capitals, killing the next generation of Democrats in the crib, setting up the GOP for an even more dominant 2020 and beyond.

Most doubt Democrats have the stamina or the stomach for the kind of cohesive resistance that Republicans perfected over the years. In their guts, they want to say yes to government doing things, and they’re already getting drawn in by promises to work with Trump and the Republican majorities. They’re heading into the next elections with their brains scrambled by Trump’s win, side-eyeing one another over who’s going to sell out the rest, nervous the incoming president will keep outmaneuvering them in the media and throw up more targets than they could ever hope to shoot at—and all of this from an election that was supposed to cement their claim on the future.

Some thinking has started to take shape. Obama is quickly reformatting his post-presidency to have a more political bent than he had planned. Vice President Joe Biden is beginning to structure his own thoughts on mentoring and guiding rising Democrats. (No one seems to be waiting to hear from Clinton.) At the law office of former Attorney General Eric Holder, which is serving as the base for the redistricting reform project he is heading for Obama, they’re getting swarmed with interest and checks. At the Democratic Governors Association, all of a sudden looking like the headquarters of the resistance, they’re sorting through a spike in interested candidates. And everyone from Obama on down is talking about going local, focusing on the kinds of small races and party-building activities Republicans have been dominating for cycle after cycle.

But all that took decades, and Democrats have no time. What are they going to do next? There hasn’t been an American political party in worse shape in living memory. And there may never have been a party less ready to confront it.

“We’re at a space shuttle moment,” says Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, who is widely expected to run statewide soon in Georgia. “The most vulnerable time for the space shuttle is when it re-enters the environment, so that when it comes back into the environment it doesn’t blow up. The tiles need to be tight. I’m concerned about the tightness of the tiles on the space shuttle right now. We have to get through this heat.”

***

Problem No. 1: Message

What scares many Democrats about Trump isn’t any particular campaign pledge—his promises to build a wall or keep out Muslims or shut down Obamacare. Those are fights they can wrap their heads around. No, the existential, hair-on-fire threat to the Democratic Party is just how easy it was for Trump to sneak around their flank and rob them of an issue they thought was theirs alone—economic populism—even as they partied at fundraisers in Hollywood and the Hamptons.

It so happens that the most prominent advocate of this view—Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren—is, for the moment, the party’s most plausible standard-bearer in 2020. The mission now, Warren believes, can be summed up in five words: Take back populism from Trump. “The American people know what they want,” she said in an interview, urging an emphasis on economic opportunity. “If Donald Trump and his Republican Party can’t deliver on any of that, then the American people will see that he’s not on their side.”

The View From the Field
Rising Democratic stars around the country diagnose their party’s problems.
Why are Democrats lagging at the state and local levels?

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“We’ve paid an enormous price for letting our local organizations atrophy to a point of near irrelevance.”
—Ruben Gallego, U.S. representative, Arizona

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“In part, it’s because certain policy ambitions are best achieved on a national level. But that national focus has become myopic.”
—Stacey Abrams, Democratic leader, Georgia House of Representatives

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“[Republicans] had a 50-state model approach to winning the redistricting battles. We didn’t.”
—Eric Swalwell, U.S. representative, California
Trump has made it easy by stacking his administration with millionaires and billionaires whose confirmation preparations included memorizing the price of milk so they don’t seem out of touch—people like Treasury pick Steven Mnuchin, whose bank once foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman’s house when she made a 27-cent payment error.

“Donald Trump with these appointments is saying squarely to the American people that he lied to them and his promise is worth nothing,” adds Warren. “That’s the point to keep making.”

Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, seen by many as a rising liberal leader of the Senate, makes a slightly different argument. The lesson from Trump’s win, in his eyes, is how sick voters are of the status quo and pragmatism. Murphy is all for saying no to Trump, but he argues that Democrats need to come up with their own proposals, however unrealistic, and say yes—big league. Entitlement reform? Forget it, Murphy says: Now’s the time to talk about expanding Social Security, not shrinking it. “A lot of Democrats laughed at Bernie Sanders when he proposed free college. First of all, that’s not impossible,” Murphy says, but more to the point, “it’s a way to communicate a really important issue in terms that people will understand.”

Illinois Representative Cheri Bustos, a former journalist who has been tapped to help lead House Democrats’ communications efforts, is urging her colleagues to go hyperlocal—a strategy informed by her own success in a bad year for the party. She won by 20 percentage points in a northwest Illinois district that Trump carried by half a point and Obama carried by 17 points in 2012. Bustos wants each member to identify constituents who will be affected by policy shifts under Trump and have district staff promote those people in local media. Tell their stories, she says.

Every path back to power runs through figuring out how to get voters to believe again that the Democratic Party, founded on and forever about a fairer economy, is aware that millions of Americans feel the economy’s been unfair to them and think Democrats have no real plans to do anything about it.

“Trump is talking about the economy of the past, bringing us backward to an economy that doesn’t exist anymore. Rather than going back into the coal mines, we’ve got to show how hardworking people in Appalachia can contribute to the new economy,” says Moulton, who is often talked about as a candidate for statewide office and beyond. “The message has to be: ‘We need you, we want you to be a part of the economy.’ We’re not going to pretend that it’s going to be 1955 again, but there’s a new economy coming and America’s not going to succeed if it’s not responding.”

Mag-Dovere Inauguration-Issue GRAPHIC-copy-1.jpg
This has echoes of how Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992—as a champion of globalization who would make it work better for ordinary Americans—but that was before so many of the factories had closed, before the culture felt different, before the internet made everything more immediate and more immediately infuriating. Yet Obama and his 21st-century Democrats beat back the Clinton restoration in 2008 in large part by running against the incremental, crabwise approach of the ’90s. Bill Clinton was a Southern Democrat who grew up in a world of political constraints, and there aren’t too many of those anymore; what the base wants now is Warren-like progressive passion, without any of the liberal self-loathing they sensed in the Clintons.

Over emails, texts and phone calls, ad hoc networks of younger Democrats have started to form, eager to talk about a new start for the party.

“Part of the work I’m doing right now is recognizing there is nobody left. It’s pulling together my peers,” says Eric Garcetti, a 45-year old Mexican-American Jewish mayor of Los Angeles who is widely assumed to be part of the party’s future in California and potentially beyond. He wanted Clinton to win. But there’s a certain freedom in moving past Clintonism.

“It’s maybe the end of … ‘The era of big government is over,’” he says.

***

Problem No. 2: The Politics of Obstruction

It’s been 10 years since Democrats didn’t control at least one wing of the federal government, and a lot of them, argues Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat elected to the House in 2014, have forgotten what that’s like. Those who do, he says, are all basing their thinking on what they did to George W. Bush or what Mitch McConnell did to Obama. “They’re scared of the unknown. This is a new world for them. And they’re trying to find solace in what they know,” Gallego says.

Gallego points to his time as assistant minority leader in the Arizona legislature under an all GOP-controlled government, where Democrats held the line until splintered Republicans gave in, allowing them to preserve Obama’s Medicaid expansion. For what’s ahead in Washington, he’s pushing a kind of explanatory resistance, refusing any cooperation with Trump—“It’s very dangerous to give this man anything, because anything he does makes him more powerful, and he’s going to use power irresponsibly”—while using every fight as an opportunity to promote what the party stands for instead.

Trump’s pledge to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure is one of those opportunities, Gallego says. His idea: Make Trump release his taxes to show that he won’t personally benefit from any provision in the bill, while using whatever’s in the bill to make concrete and specific cases to voters about why the president and the Congress are hurting them, and why Democrats’ intransigence matters directly in people’s lives.

It sounds reasonable enough, except for one problem: There’s no way Republicans, who control every lever of power in the House, will allow it. And there’s no way the 70-year-old Trump, elected without releasing his taxes and feeling validated by every decision he has made so far, is going to suddenly become a new man once he’s sitting in the Oval Office.

“I worry that our caucus is going to pick way too many things to communicate, way too many things to display outrage about,” says Murphy.

The only mechanism Democrats have to actually shape what happens in Washington is the Senate—with 48 votes that give them an eight-vote margin for error on filibusters and the hope that three Republicans will break away on some votes to join them in the majority. Trump works best with a foil, and they’re determined not to serve themselves up to him as obstructionists.

And here, Democrats have more of a strategy than they are perhaps letting on. In essence, the idea is to focus on issues that drive a wedge through the Republican caucus. On Obamacare, they will step out of the way and let Republicans squirm among themselves. On infrastructure, the plan is to split Republicans between those leery of new spending and those who just want to get along with Trump. Either way, Democrats figure, they win: They could get a bill they support, or send the process into enough of a tailspin that GOP forces devour one another and there won’t be any bill at all. As for Trump, they will just wait him out. “If he comes much closer to where we are, we could work with him,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in an interview, “and that kind of issue unites our caucus and divides theirs.”

Many on the left view Schumer warily, suspicious of his breaks with Obama on Israel and Iran, his close ties to Wall Street and his reputation for cutting deals and hogging the spotlight. The base wants McConnell-style, uncaring and unapologetic obstruction, or at least the old Harry Reid, burn-the-place-down and taunt-the-flames kind of pushback. There’s already a vast library of liberal freak-out think pieces about Schumer’s refrain that he’s not going to say no to bills just because they have Trump’s name on them.

The View From the Field
Rising Democratic stars around the country diagnose their party’s problems.
What’s the Democratic Party’s greatest weakness right now?

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“Our as yet unmet need for a standard-bearer to move us past the disappointments of 2016 and lead the opposition effort during the Trump presidency.”
—Cyrus Habib, lieutenant governor, Washington state

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“[Democrats] are the true champions of economic empowerment for middle-class Americans and those who aspire to the middle class. … But that wasn’t successfully communicated in this election.”
—Elizabeth Brown, city councilmember, Columbus, Ohio

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“Our inclination to over-learn some of the lessons from the last election. It would be a mistake to lose sight of what has made us the best party to represent a rapidly evolving nation: our inclusiveness.”
—Crisanta Duran, speaker of the House, Colorado State Assembly
Asked about what he’s been telling Trump in their private phone calls, Schumer is coy. “I said, ‘You ran against both the Democratic and Republican establishments—if you do that as president, you could get some things done, but if you just let the hard right capture your presidency, like with the Cabinet appointments,’” Schumer recounts, “‘it could well be a flop.’”

Relentless obstruction could easily be a trap, too. “My worry is that we lose focus. I don’t know what outrage to focus on a daily basis, and I worry that our caucus is going to pick way too many things to communicate, way too many things to display outrage about,” Murphy says, “and in the end, nothing will end up translating.”

***

Problem No. 3: The Midterms

If there’s anyone who can lay claim to having the worst job in Washington, it’s Chris Van Hollen. A freshman senator from Maryland, he has been charged with leading the Democrats’ efforts to retake the Senate in 2018. When Schumer, who is expected to stay central to fundraising and campaign strategy, announced Van Hollen’s role, he somewhat disingenuously described him as “our first choice”—as in first choice who didn’t say no.

Schumer and Van Hollen have a complex calculus ahead of them, driven not only by the need to keep the party base energized against Trump, but also the reality that 10 of their incumbents come from states Trump won and may often align with the president for their own survival. Senate Democrats were facing a terrible 2018 map before Trump, with 25 seats up for grabs, and their prospects have gotten notably worse, with races in already difficult spots like Missouri, North Dakota and West Virginia as the baseline, and potentially new territory opened up in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, after Trump’s wins there. Republicans are defending eight seats, but only one in a state Clinton won.

A good way to make Van Hollen stop short and almost laugh is to ask him about candidate recruitment for next year. Sitting at a conference table in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s headquarters on Capitol Hill, Van Hollen makes abundantly clear that the math he’s thinking about is how to stay as close to the current 48 as he can.

“Our focus,” he says, “will be on supporting our members, so we can hold the blue wall.”

Make it through 2018. Hope for 2020.

Van Hollen, who masterminded Democrats’ pickup of 21 House seats in 2008, only to lose 60 in the 2010 midterm wipeout, is seen as one of the party’s canniest strategists. It’s early days yet, but he and other top Democrats have already been studying the 2016 election returns in detail, searching for clues that can help them staunch the bleeding in 2018. One intriguing thing they’ve found: All those people who voted for both Obama and Trump look like reliable anti-Washington voters primed to boomerang against the GOP now that the other guys are in charge. Incumbents have been told to act as if they’re the mayors of their states. There’s talk of centralizing around a few easy and direct proposals, much shorter than the Republicans’ old Contract with America. Shortly before kicking off his candidacy, Van Hollen, notably, pitched a plan that would take $2,000 off the taxes of anyone earning less than $200,000 per year, reward savings and triple the child care tax credit.

As for those vexing red-state senators, “I don’t think anyone is running toward Trump. They’re running toward the issues that are important to the people in their states,” Van Hollen says. Maybe so. But get used to headlines about Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin and Claire McCaskill going rogue.

If there is hope for the Democratic Party in the short term, it’s in the governors’ mansions they control now—and the ones they hope to control in the near future. Governors like Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee in Washington, Jerry Brown in California and Andrew Cuomo in New York are going to be blocking and tackling in their capitols, pushing state-level legislation on immigration, Medicare, environmental standards and reproductive rights. California Democrats have already hired Holder as a sort of warrior-lawyer, anticipating years of legal battles with Trump’s Washington.

On the other end of the spectrum is Montana Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat who won reelection by 4 percentage points on the same day Trump won his state by more than 20, running on a record of Medicaid expansion, campaign finance reform, equal pay and expanding public education—on top of having issued more vetoes than any Montana governor in history. Instead of raging against Trump and the Republicans in Congress, Bullock wants to ignore them. “We as Democrats need to recognize that there’s no such thing as a national issue,” he says.

The View From the Field
Rising Democratic stars around the country diagnose their party’s problems.
What should the Democratic Party’s core message be?

90Gonzalez.png
“Donald Trump co-opted our core message, which is that voters want their leaders to step up and lead on their bread-and-butter issues. If Trump can’t deliver on his promises, we need to show that progressive economic polices are the pathway forward.”
—Lorena Gonzalez, state assemblywoman, California

90Johnston.png
“We are the party of opportunity and fairness. … Opportunity requires that Americans have a path to the middle class; fairness insists that path be open to all.”
—Mike Johnston, state senator, Colorado

90Moulton.png
“Trump wants to take us back to an economy of the past, which simply doesn’t exist anymore. Democrats have the opportunity to show how all Americans can be a part of the economy of the future, and how we need the diverse talents of all our people to be at our best.”
—Seth Moulton, U.S. representative, Massachusetts
All this positioning is building up to a heady 2017 and 2018, with governors’ races in nine swingy states where a Republican has been in charge the past eight years. Add in likely pickups in blue New Jersey this year and potentially Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts next year, and Democrats could end up with a slew of new governors.

“You want models? I got models,” says Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, who’s doing another stint as chair of the Democratic Governors Association. Think Bullock in Montana, Roy Cooper in North Carolina and John Bel Edwards in Louisiana—Malloy argues that each 2018 race will need a tailored, locally smart strategy. But if there’s one tactic that binds them all together, it’s this: relentless aggression. Malloy blames 2016 on Democrats overestimating voters’ ability to see that they were being lied to by Trump and other Republicans. He has no intention of making the same mistake in 2018.

“We can’t assume anything,” Malloy says. “It’s going to be hand-to-hand combat.”

Some Democrats see a different lesson in 2016, with a takeaway best summed up by a Samuel L. Jackson line from Pulp Fiction: Personality goes a long way. On paper, Trump had none of the characteristics of a successful GOP nominee—a Manhattan billionaire who bragged about cheating on his first wife with the mistress who later became his second divorce, a closet full of skeletons and a history of cozying up to Democrats? But he was able to connect on such a visceral level that none of those liabilities mattered. What he also showed is how irrelevant parties are—before he pulled chunks of the Democratic base away from Clinton, he swallowed the strongest field of up-and-coming Republican leaders in decades, all while throwing conservative dogma in the toilet. Internalize that, Garcetti says, because “there’s no question that the next generation of voters for the next 50 years will be people who don’t wake up thinking about themselves as a Democrat or a Republican.”

Pick your movie analogy: People want more Jay Bulworth, less Tracy Flick. It often took a village of Clinton advisers just to produce one tweet; Trump pulls out his Android smartphone and lets loose. “Do your own social media for crying out loud. That authenticity is important,” New Jersey Senator Cory Booker advises. Democrats aren’t going to turn into Trump clones, dashing off grammatically challenged 140-character tirades at 3 a.m., but their politicians are trying to unlearn how to be politicians.

“Everybody who’s in elected office, who wants a future in this space, whatever you are, be it,” Atlanta’s Reed says. “Anybody can win right now. But I’ll tell you who will definitely lose: a fraud.”

***

Problem No. 4: The Obama Legacy

Several times since the election, between knocks on Clinton for running a low-energy campaign, Obama has compared this moment for Democrats to 2004, when George W. Bush was narrowly reelected, the House stayed Republican, and he and Ken Salazar were the only Democrats newly elected to a Republican-dominated Senate. Two years later, he points out, Democrats swept Congress. Two years after that, he’s the president.

What Obama conveniently leaves out is how significantly gerrymandering, enabled by state-level losses, has since tilted the House map for Republicans, how different that 2006 Senate map looked from what’s ahead, and how at this same point, four years out from Election Day 2008, it was pretty clear that Obama and Clinton and John Edwards and probably Biden and Bill Richardson and all the way down to Dennis Kucinich were going to run for president. Now, no one has any idea who the field will be in 2020, and no one outside Washington knows the names that get talked about in Washington.

“With Barack, we skipped a whole generation,” Biden told me in an interview in his West Wing office just over a week before Trump’s inauguration, when I asked him if he would run in 2020 and what that says about the party’s lack of young leaders. “There’s also been times when it looked like there were a lot of qualified people who were younger, and all of a sudden you turn to the older folks in the party.” He didn’t name any.

Warren might spark a movement, and she could almost certainly count on winning New Hampshire, but she would be 71 and make a lot of Democrats worry she would take the party too far left. Booker can, and likes to assert that he can, tap into an Obama-esque post-racial aspirationalism. Cuomo would have a socially progressive, fiscal centrist record to tout. Many are talking up Kamala Harris, though almost none of them know anything about the new California senator other than that she’s a multi-ethnic woman; few have heard her speak or couldn’t identify a single policy position she holds. Other names get tossed around—Hickenlooper, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

“There isn’t a clear tier-one level of elected officials jumping out right now,” says Mitch Stewart, Obama’s 2012 battleground states director and now a Democratic operative working with some of the up-and-coming talent. “There’s so much more oxygen in the run-up to this next election than there has been previously, that leaders in industry, leaders in nonprofit, leaders in service outside of politics can take a real look at the 2020 race.”

And so conversations tip to the likes of Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban, Tom Steyer, Tom Hanks. There’s always the George Clooney fantasy. Meryl Streep wasn’t even done with her Trump-bashing speech at the Golden Globes before that idea started going around, at least informally.

In the meantime, Democrats face a dangerous period in which it’s not clear who is calling the shots. Obama and Biden have both rethought their retirement plans to help shape the next generation of Democrats—Obama focused more on rebuilding party infrastructure, cultivating the grass roots and potentially meeting with presidential candidates as 2020 gets closer; Biden more engaged with nurturing talented up-and-comers. But both are determined to sit out day-to-day politics, people close to them say, though Trump could easily goad either or both of them back into the fray.

“What I was able to do during my campaigns, I wasn’t able to do during midterms,” Obama said. “I didn’t crack the code on that.”

Many Democrats want Obama now to be the field marshal on the campaign trail and the architect of the revival, if only out of penance for the eight years of Democratic decimation on his watch—a record that culminated in his sharing a limo from the White House to the Inauguration with a man once thought to be the most unelectable major-party nominee in generations.

“You’re right,” Obama said at his good-riddance-to-2016 news conference when I asked him about those critiques. “What I was able to do during my campaigns, I wasn’t able to do during midterms. It’s not that we didn’t put in time and effort into it. I spent time and effort into it, but the coalition I put together didn’t always turn out to be transferable.” Obama blamed some of the losses on the inherent pushback to one party being in power, some to “deep-standing traditional challenges for Democrats, like during off-year elections, the electorate is older and we do better with a younger electorate.”

“I didn’t crack the code on that,” Obama acknowledged, “and if other people have ideas about how to do that even better, I’m all for it.”

***

Problem No. 5: Trump

You could park Trump Force One in the gap between Democrats’ capabilities and their ambitions. They’re eager to crush Trump not just for the sake of stopping the changes he’s pursuing—they want to embarrass him personally, and they look at 2020 as a chance to pretend that he was never really elected, that America didn’t put him in the same seat as Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

They are petrified that everyone will keep underestimating Trump and will be busy fighting over basic values while the president and his Republican majority roll over them and roll back most of what they fought for during the past eight years. Elections are usually won on pocketbook issues; nobody really knows how it would work to run on abstract concepts like freedom of the press or transparency—but many Democrats are tempted to turn their opposition to Trump into a crusade to save America itself.

Mag-Dovere GRAPHIC-copy-2.jpg
“We’ve never had to have a conversation about reselling democracy,” says Murphy. “Liberals scoffed at his talk of jailing journalists and throwing out major portions of the Constitution, because we just sort of assumed that everybody’s on board with this thing called American democracy.”

“The conversations that I’m having in the cloakroom, in texts and on the phone, reflect a caucus that is not about politics right now,” agrees Booker. “This is a crisis moment in America.”

There is no time for any of it: no time to debate what the party should focus on, no time to recruit candidates, no time to identify new leaders, no time to rebuild Democrats’ core of operations, no time to unpack everything that went wrong in the 2016 campaign, no time to build a legislative strategy, no time to wrap their heads around how much change is coming to America and American politics.

After decades of neglect, there’s nothing else, either.

“The Democratic Party now is left literally at zero—zero dollars in the bank, zero infrastructure as the Clinton campaign closes up shop,” wrote Democratic National Committee consultant Donnie Fowler in a post-mortem ordered by outgoing interim chair Donna Brazile, “and, most importantly, zero majority control in Washington and in 33 of the states.”

On the other hand, Trump could be the Democrats’ salvation. He’s already deeply unpopular, and midterms tend to go badly for the party in the White House. It’s tempting for Democrats to think all they need to do is wait for their adversaries to defeat themselves. Or that some reporter will finally discover the Holy Grail of Donald Trump scoops—the story that will take him, and the GOP, down. Or that Republicans will continue to overreach and get eaten by a Trump tweet the way they did the very first day of this Congress with the attempt to scrap the Office of Congressional Ethics. Or that the savior candidate will come from nowhere and rescue the party by sheer force of personality—another Obama.

“Elections are only as bad as the next one,” Garcetti says, “when suddenly the impossible becomes possible.”

Whatever the truth of that statement, the next two and four years are going to be all about Trump. Anson Kaye, one of Clinton’s top media consultants, has been spending the weeks since the election giving a presentation on what happened and what he thinks has to happen now. It ends like this: “Trump is a radical. / Which makes him an opportunity. / Values first. / Stand up (for the little guy/against bullies/in the line of fire) / Talk like a normal person. / Protect the right to vote. / Treat 2018 like a national election. / Target governors and state legislators.”

Then on the final slide: “Be clear-eyed about the America we live in.”

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Edward-Isaac Dovere is chief Washington correspondent at Politico.




https://www.revealnews.org/blog/a-brief-history-of-presidents-telling-so-called-judges-to-get-lost/

A brief history of presidents telling ‘so-called’ judges to get lost
By Patrick Michels / February 8, 2017

Topics: Accountability / The Trump Era
Categories: Dig

By questioning the legitimacy of judges who disagree with him, and giving agencies room to ignore court rulings, President Donald Trump has turned a once-academic legal question — whether the president has a duty to obey the courts — into a more practical matter of current events.

“The vast majority of experts, both right and left, believe that the president cannot simply just refuse to obey,” George Mason University School of Law professor Ilya Somin said.

That’s how most of us non-lawyers understand the balance of powers, too. But in 2015, Somin was one of a handful of conservative constitutional scholars who batted around the question of whether the Constitution truly gives the Supreme Court supremacy over the president’s judgment.

Somin and most of the other scholars agreed that it does, but University of St. Thomas law professor Michael Paulsen staked out an argument for “departmentalism.” In other words, that in cases where the president and the courts interpret the Constitution differently, the president can basically tell the courts to get lost.

“The power of constitutional interpretation is a divided, shared power,” Paulsen argued, “incident to the functions of each of the branches of the national government — and to instruments of state governments, and of juries, as well — with none of these actors literally bound by the views of any of the others.”

In the chaos following Trump’s ban on refugees and visa-holders from seven mostly Muslim countries, lawyers at airports across the country said that U.S. Customs and Border Protection and court officers were failing to follow court orders suspending the ban.

Although judges in New York, Boston and Los Angeles called on the U.S. Marshals Service to make sure their orders were followed, there was no sign that they got involved.

The Department of Homeland Security’s contradictory pledge to continue enforcing Trump’s order and abide by the court orders against it only added to the confusion.

Once federal Judge James Robart issued a temporary restraining order against the ban on Friday, Trump finally backed down — and then questioned the legitimacy of the “so-called judge,” suggesting the judiciary be held accountable for its meddling should “something happen.”

On Tuesday, Trump’s lawyer told a judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that Trump’s travel ban shouldn’t be subject to review by the court, because it deals with national security. Trump continued badmouthing the judiciary today, calling the hearing “disgraceful” and comparing the judges to bad high school students. The president’s comments have reportedly alarmed his own nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch.

To lawyers and legal scholars, Trump’s statements, and his agencies’ behavior so far, are reminiscent of a very few episodes from America’s past when the balance of power between the president and the courts was so strained.

“The system depends on the president feeling an obligation to follow court orders,” University of San Diego Law School professor Michael Ramsey said.

When the president has been headed for a showdown with the Supreme Court in the past, one side usually finds a graceful way out.

The most notable exception is Abraham Lincoln, who suspended the writ of habeas corpus to jail suspected Confederate sympathizers at the start of the Civil War. Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that the Constitution gave that power to Congress, not the president. But Lincoln ignored the ruling — and if it was a constitutional crisis, well, America in 1861 had a few of those already.

Should Trump imagine himself at the helm of a Lincoln-grade crisis someday, the first weekend of his travel ban offers a glimpse at how things could play out.

Darius Amiri was one of a few lawyers in Los Angeles who saw that a nationwide ruling from a judge in New York wouldn’t necessarily be followed by customs officers on the West Coast. When he and a group of attorneys lobbied U.S. marshals to serve Customs and Border Protection officers with a court order against the ban, he said they were simply referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Amiri noted that the marshals — the courts’ only means of enforcement — fall under the Department of Justice, which answers to Trump. “It’s their job to serve notice of district court orders to executive agencies if there’s a court order,” Amiri said. “We’re asking them to do their job.”

“We have a very unique situation that has never happened in the history of our country,” agreed Faith Nouri, another of the lawyers. “In the old days, when President Nixon did something wrong, the other branches were not afraid to do their jobs.”

In July 1974, President Richard Nixon claimed that executive privilege entitled him to withhold recordings from investigators. The Supreme Court disagreed, ordering him to hand over the tapes. The court’s ruling was unanimous and unequivocal: “No person, not even the president of the United States, is completely above the law,” justices wrote. The only question left was whether Nixon would hand over the tapes or keep fighting.

It might’ve made a great reality TV cliffhanger in another era, but Nixon didn’t leave much suspense. As the Washington Post reported immediately after the decision, “The President said he was ‘disappointed’ by the decision but said he would comply. … Only a few times in its history has the court grappled with such large assertions of governmental power. As in most of those encounters, the justices concluded that the judiciary must have the last word in an orderly constitutional system.” Two weeks after the court’s ruling, Nixon resigned.

When Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus and Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett defied the Supreme Court over school segregation, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy had to decide how far they’d go to enforce the court’s rulings. They sent federal troops and took control of each state’s National Guard. But presidents haven’t always felt such a duty to impose the court’s will on state executives — another possible test of Trump’s deference to the courts.

In 1832, President Andrew Jackson sat back and let Georgia Gov. Wilson Lumpkin ride roughshod over Cherokee land rights that the Supreme Court had asserted in Worcester v. Georgia. He mused to a friend, ”the decision of the Supreme Court has fell stillborn, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”

There have been other close calls, when presidents toyed with the notion of ignoring the courts.

At the start of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested he would try a group of German saboteurs in a military tribunal, whether or not the Supreme Court agreed it was right. (The court took Roosevelt’s side.) Two court rulings on prisoners’ rights at Guantanamo Bay conflicted with President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 national security strategy. (Bush acquiesced to the court.) And in 2011 Newt Gingrich once vowed that, as president, he would disobey the courts in accordance with his judgment. (Gingrich never got the chance.)

Lincoln’s refusal to defer to Chief Justice Taney during the Civil War is the nearest example of direct defiance that experts could name. Having already generally defied a Supreme Court’s defense of slavery, Lincoln specifically flouted Taney in the case of John Merryman, a Maryland militia member charged with treason. Merryman’s lawyers demanded a justification for his imprisonment; Taney wrote that only Congress, not the president, could suspend habeas corpus.

As Paulsen, the University of St. Thomas professor, wrote in a book co-authored with his son, Luke: “Implicit in Lincoln’s action was his belief that he was not bound as President to obey a judicial order he believed incorrect as a matter of constitutional law — the boldest challenge ever made to judicial supremacy in constitutional interpretation.” Michael Paulsen has jauntily dubbed this the president’s “Merryman power.”

Somin says there’s no recent case law that justifies such a power. But then again, should Trump take such a “departmentalist” reading of the Constitution, he probably wouldn’t worry much over the legal precedent. “The whole point of departmentalism means that ‘I’m allowed to go against the court if I want,’ ” Somin said.

Before the election last fall, Somin and Paulsen were among a group of conservative constitutional scholars who co-authored a statement of “Originalists Against Trump,” doubting his judgment in nominating Supreme Court justices and warning that “we do not trust him to respect constitutional limits in the rest of his conduct in office.”

Trump’s presidency so far has been a reminder, Somin said, that “the whole structure of political power rests on political norms, and not just legal procedures.”

Patrick Michels can be reached at pmichels@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @patrickmichels.



https://medium.com/@davepell/mike-drop-ten-takeaway-from-flynngate-283af25f4585#.ohcz7foac

Mike Drop: Ten Takeaways from Flynngate
February 14, 2017

Mike Flynn has resigned, breaking a record for shortest tenure of an administration official.

Fake News propped Flynn up. Real News brought him down.

Sally Yates warned the Trump team about Flynn a month ago. Three weeks later, she warned them about the futility of defending their Muslim ban in court. For those scoring at home, that’s Yates 2, Trump 0. She must be getting tired of all the winning.

A Pence spokesperson said that the VP first learned that Flynn had lied when he read a Washington Post story on the topic (although his curiosity was piqued when Flynn kept showing up to meetings smelling of borscht). Either the media isn’t the opposition party, or Pence just joined it.

Nixon: What did he know and when did he know it? Trump: What did he know and when did he lie about it.

Mike Flynn and Mike Flynn Jr (fired from the same administration within nine weeks of each other) both spread the Pizzagate fake news. Now, they probably couldn't even get a job at Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria.

The gravest danger to the republic is that 40% of American still approve of Trump’s performance. (I’m guessing they’re also still holding on to their Pets.com stock, just in case of a turnaround.)

I have three rules in my house: 1. Be considerate. 2. Clean your room 3. No inadvertent briefings with incomplete information.
I’m pretty sure Flynn misspelled President Bannon’s name in his letter of resignation.

Trump tweeted: The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc? (I’d say that the North Korea related leaks are more likely to come from one of the waitstaff working at at Mir-a-Lago last weekend.) Hopefully, the Potus understands that the majority of leaks are coming from his own team — because they’re scared as hell. This adminstration has more leaks than the Oroville Dam.

Does this mean that Omarosa is one step closer to the presidency?

(And one bonus thought: This scandal is gonna get a lot worse.)

Dave Pell writes NextDraft: You Should Read Real News.




https://www.revealnews.org/blog/a-brief-history-of-presidents-telling-so-called-judges-to-get-lost/

A brief history of presidents telling ‘so-called’ judges to get lost
Topics: Accountability / The Trump Era
Categories: Dig
By Patrick Michels / February 8, 2017

By questioning the legitimacy of judges who disagree with him, and giving agencies room to ignore court rulings, President Donald Trump has turned a once-academic legal question — whether the president has a duty to obey the courts — into a more practical matter of current events.

“The vast majority of experts, both right and left, believe that the president cannot simply just refuse to obey,” George Mason University School of Law professor Ilya Somin said.

That’s how most of us non-lawyers understand the balance of powers, too. But in 2015, Somin was one of a handful of conservative constitutional scholars who batted around the question of whether the Constitution truly gives the Supreme Court supremacy over the president’s judgment.

Somin and most of the other scholars agreed that it does, but University of St. Thomas law professor Michael Paulsen staked out an argument for “departmentalism.” In other words, that in cases where the president and the courts interpret the Constitution differently, the president can basically tell the courts to get lost.

“The power of constitutional interpretation is a divided, shared power,” Paulsen argued, “incident to the functions of each of the branches of the national government — and to instruments of state governments, and of juries, as well — with none of these actors literally bound by the views of any of the others.”

In the chaos following Trump’s ban on refugees and visa-holders from seven mostly Muslim countries, lawyers at airports across the country said that U.S. Customs and Border Protection and court officers were failing to follow court orders suspending the ban.

Although judges in New York, Boston and Los Angeles called on the U.S. Marshals Service to make sure their orders were followed, there was no sign that they got involved.

The Department of Homeland Security’s contradictory pledge to continue enforcing Trump’s order and abide by the court orders against it only added to the confusion.

Once federal Judge James Robart issued a temporary restraining order against the ban on Friday, Trump finally backed down — and then questioned the legitimacy of the “so-called judge,” suggesting the judiciary be held accountable for its meddling should “something happen.”

On Tuesday, Trump’s lawyer told a judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that Trump’s travel ban shouldn’t be subject to review by the court, because it deals with national security. Trump continued badmouthing the judiciary today, calling the hearing “disgraceful” and comparing the judges to bad high school students. The president’s comments have reportedly alarmed his own nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch.

To lawyers and legal scholars, Trump’s statements, and his agencies’ behavior so far, are reminiscent of a very few episodes from America’s past when the balance of power between the president and the courts was so strained.

“The system depends on the president feeling an obligation to follow court orders,” University of San Diego Law School professor Michael Ramsey said.

When the president has been headed for a showdown with the Supreme Court in the past, one side usually finds a graceful way out.

The most notable exception is Abraham Lincoln, who suspended the writ of habeas corpus to jail suspected Confederate sympathizers at the start of the Civil War. Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that the Constitution gave that power to Congress, not the president. But Lincoln ignored the ruling — and if it was a constitutional crisis, well, America in 1861 had a few of those already.

Should Trump imagine himself at the helm of a Lincoln-grade crisis someday, the first weekend of his travel ban offers a glimpse at how things could play out.

Darius Amiri was one of a few lawyers in Los Angeles who saw that a nationwide ruling from a judge in New York wouldn’t necessarily be followed by customs officers on the West Coast. When he and a group of attorneys lobbied U.S. marshals to serve Customs and Border Protection officers with a court order against the ban, he said they were simply referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Amiri noted that the marshals — the courts’ only means of enforcement — fall under the Department of Justice, which answers to Trump. “It’s their job to serve notice of district court orders to executive agencies if there’s a court order,” Amiri said. “We’re asking them to do their job.”

“We have a very unique situation that has never happened in the history of our country,” agreed Faith Nouri, another of the lawyers. “In the old days, when President Nixon did something wrong, the other branches were not afraid to do their jobs.”

In July 1974, President Richard Nixon claimed that executive privilege entitled him to withhold recordings from investigators. The Supreme Court disagreed, ordering him to hand over the tapes. The court’s ruling was unanimous and unequivocal: “No person, not even the president of the United States, is completely above the law,” justices wrote. The only question left was whether Nixon would hand over the tapes or keep fighting.

It might’ve made a great reality TV cliffhanger in another era, but Nixon didn’t leave much suspense. As the Washington Post reported immediately after the decision, “The President said he was ‘disappointed’ by the decision but said he would comply. … Only a few times in its history has the court grappled with such large assertions of governmental power. As in most of those encounters, the justices concluded that the judiciary must have the last word in an orderly constitutional system.” Two weeks after the court’s ruling, Nixon resigned.

When Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus and Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett defied the Supreme Court over school segregation, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy had to decide how far they’d go to enforce the court’s rulings. They sent federal troops and took control of each state’s National Guard. But presidents haven’t always felt such a duty to impose the court’s will on state executives — another possible test of Trump’s deference to the courts.

In 1832, President Andrew Jackson sat back and let Georgia Gov. Wilson Lumpkin ride roughshod over Cherokee land rights that the Supreme Court had asserted in Worcester v. Georgia. He mused to a friend, ”the decision of the Supreme Court has fell stillborn, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”

There have been other close calls, when presidents toyed with the notion of ignoring the courts.

At the start of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested he would try a group of German saboteurs in a military tribunal, whether or not the Supreme Court agreed it was right. (The court took Roosevelt’s side.) Two court rulings on prisoners’ rights at Guantanamo Bay conflicted with President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 national security strategy. (Bush acquiesced to the court.) And in 2011 Newt Gingrich once vowed that, as president, he would disobey the courts in accordance with his judgment. (Gingrich never got the chance.)

Lincoln’s refusal to defer to Chief Justice Taney during the Civil War is the nearest example of direct defiance that experts could name. Having already generally defied a Supreme Court’s defense of slavery, Lincoln specifically flouted Taney in the case of John Merryman, a Maryland militia member charged with treason. Merryman’s lawyers demanded a justification for his imprisonment; Taney wrote that only Congress, not the president, could suspend habeas corpus.

As Paulsen, the University of St. Thomas professor, wrote in a book co-authored with his son, Luke: “Implicit in Lincoln’s action was his belief that he was not bound as President to obey a judicial order he believed incorrect as a matter of constitutional law — the boldest challenge ever made to judicial supremacy in constitutional interpretation.” Michael Paulsen has jauntily dubbed this the president’s “Merryman power.”

Somin says there’s no recent case law that justifies such a power. But then again, should Trump take such a “departmentalist” reading of the Constitution, he probably wouldn’t worry much over the legal precedent. “The whole point of departmentalism means that ‘I’m allowed to go against the court if I want,’ ” Somin said.

Before the election last fall, Somin and Paulsen were among a group of conservative constitutional scholars who co-authored a statement of “Originalists Against Trump,” doubting his judgment in nominating Supreme Court justices and warning that “we do not trust him to respect constitutional limits in the rest of his conduct in office.”

Trump’s presidency so far has been a reminder, Somin said, that “the whole structure of political power rests on political norms, and not just legal procedures.”

Patrick Michels can be reached at pmichels@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @patrickmichels.



WHAT HAPPENED AT THE AIRPORTS – THIS IS ALL OVER NOW, BUT THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES SOME VERY DISTURBING THINGS ABOUT THE AIRPORT EVENT. MAYBE WE SHOULD NAME IT AIRPORTGATE. ONCE IT WAS OUT OF THE NEWS DUE TO COURT RULINGS, I HAVEN’T SEEN MUCH ABOUT THE SUSPENSION OF THE RIGHT TO SEE AN ATTORNEY, ETC.

https://www.revealnews.org/blog/detainees-at-airports-cant-talk-to-lawyers-despite-court-order/

Detainees at airports can’t talk to lawyers, despite court order
Topics: Accountability / Border Patrol / Inequality / National Security / The Trump Era
Categories: Dig
By Patrick Michels and Andrew Becker / January 29, 2017

As late as Sunday afternoon, some travelers ensnared by President Donald Trump’s executive order were still being held in airports without access to legal counsel, according to their attorneys.

Following a court challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union, a federal judge issued a temporary stay of removal Saturday night, saying that Trump’s executive order barring arrivals from seven mostly Muslim countries could not apply to anyone in federal custody or already bound for the United States.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials began releasing people from airport holding rooms soon after. A second federal judge also ordered that travelers being held at Dulles International Airport be given access to attorneys.

However, lawyers reported some border agency officers flatly refusing to follow the court orders, at times explicitly citing orders from higher-ups.

Trump’s order and ambiguous direction from the Department of Homeland Security related to the court orders have raised the specter of a full-on constitutional crisis, in which officers acting on the president’s authority simply ignore an order from the judiciary.

The sudden order from Trump’s office — his chief of staff Reince Priebus has said it was a strategic surprise — left rank-and-file border agency officers scurrying to figure out how to enforce it. The court rulings only added to the confusion; rather than direct officers to comply with the courts, the White House issued a statement that its order remains in effect.

The official word from the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection’s parent organization, wasn’t much clearer. In a statement issued Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security promised to both “comply with judicial orders” and “continue to enforce all of President Trump’s Executive Orders” — two apparently contradictory courses of action.

With a strength of more than 40,000 officers, including blue-shirted customs officers and the green-shirted Border Patrol agents, Customs and Border Protection is the nation’s law enforcement agency. (Trump has already said he wants to hire thousands more officers.)

On Sunday afternoon, dozens of lawyers assembled at Dulles, pressing border agency officers to speak with anyone detained at the airport. Damon Silvers, an AFL-CIO attorney who spent hours observing and tweeting from the scene, said it remained unclear whether anyone is left in custody. But lawyers, and even members of Congress, have been turned away, contrary to the judge’s order.

Silvers said the situation raised legal questions similar to those surrounding the federal court order allowing James Meredith to enroll at Ole Miss in 1962, overruling Mississippi segregation laws. President John Kennedy dispatched 500 U.S. marshals and then the Army, to carry out the court order over the objection of state officials.

In Virginia, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema didn’t mention the U.S. Marshal Service, but the judges in Boston and New York both directed marshals “to take those actions deemed necessary to enforce” the orders. But if there’s any discussion within the Marshal Service related to enforcing the court orders, spokesman Dave Oney said, “I haven’t heard anything about that.”

“Right now, at this point there’s no action that we’re taking,” said Chief Jim Elsik in the Marshals’ Eastern District of New York office. “That’s a discussion that we’re going to have with the judge in concert with our headquarters in Washington.”

The question of “judicial supremacy” — whether the president should be bound by the courts — has most recently been the subject of theoretical debate, including at the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, two conservative groups that Trump consulted as he drafted a list of Supreme Court nominees. Until now, these were theoretical questions; in 2015, an editor at Reason considered how, if elected, President Hillary Clinton might subvert the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. As a presidential candidate in 2011, Newt Gingrich pledged to disobey “dictatorial and arrogant” federal judges on national security.

There is some historical precedent. President Andrew Jackson, whose portrait graces Trump’s golden Oval Office, defied Chief Justice John Marshall’s court in 1832, after a ruling that would have protected the Cherokee Nation from a land grab by officials in Georgia. The ruling would have protected Native Americans’ claims to their land, but Jackson refused to enforce it. To a friend he dispatched to negotiate with the Chickasaw Nation, Jackson wrote, “the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” And although Abraham Lincoln once said it “would be revolution” to disregard the Supreme Court’s decisions on constitutional questions, he may have defied the court, too, to suspend habeas corpus in the early days of the Civil War.

Ralph Basham, who served as commissioner of Customs and Border Protection during the George W. Bush administration, told Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting that the front-line officers deciding who gets to visit detained travelers have to rely on orders from their superiors. By issuing such a blunt executive order, followed by a muddled response to the courts, the Trump administration has complicated the already difficult job of screening people entering the country.

“I’m at a loss to say how (Customs and Border Protection) should approach this,” Basham said, “but I truly feel for the acting commissioner over there and the challenge he has with the front-line troops, trying to come up with a protocol.”

Basham said the Trump White House can’t ignore the federal agencies that have to implement his orders.

“The folks at the White House need to be vetting (their plans) through the agencies,” he said. “All of this was avoidable. They could have gotten the president what he wanted, but they should have engaged with Justice, (the Department of Homeland Security). It’s a mess.”

Instead of preparing with the agencies for another 72 hours, the Trump administration left its plans vulnerable to the court-ordered delays, he said.

“This is not their first rodeo,” Basham said about those federal agencies. He likened the rollout of the executive order to the hasty response with some actions after 9/11 and the avian flu crisis in 2006. But because the White House controlled the timing of the order issued Friday, he said, such confusion was entirely avoidable in this case.

Contact Patrick Michels at pmichels@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @patrickmichels.



QUESTIONS –

WHAT IS GAB?
https://gab.ai/
GAB | Free Speech for Everyone
https://gab.ai/

GAB. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the ...


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)

Gab (social network)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gab.ai Logo - Gabby the frog.gif
Type of site
Social networking service
Available in English
Headquarters San Mateo, California, United States[1]
Owner Gab AI, Inc.

Industry Internet
Slogan(s) Free Speech for Everyone [1]
Website gab.ai
Registration Required

Users 150,000[2]
Launched August 15, 2016; 5 months ago (beta)[3]
Current status Active (in beta)
Written in PHP

Gab is a San Mateo, California-based[1] social networking service that allows its users, called Gabbers, to read and write short messages of up to 300 characters called gabs. The site also offers limited multimedia functionality. Gab describes its mission as "to put people and free speech first" by limiting censorship to filtering options made available to Gabbers.[4] Currently, Gab is only accessible to registered users, who must obtain an invitation to join.[5]

History[edit]

Gab was created in August 2016[6] as an alternative to social networks like Facebook and Twitter.[7] Founder and CEO Andrew Torba cited dissatisfaction with "the entirely left-leaning Big Social monopoly"[7] as part of the inspiration for Gab, which he created "after reading reports that Facebook employees suppress conservative articles".[8] Torba said in November that the site's user base had expanded significantly following censorship controversies involving major social media companies,[9] including the permanent suspensions from Twitter of several prominent conservative and "alt-right" accounts.[5]

As of December 2016, the service was still in beta and invitation-only,[5] and submitting an email address placed the user on a waiting list.[10]

A frog named "Gabby"[8] is the current logo of Gab which was designed by artist and designer Brandon Perler.

Controversy

The site has drawn criticism for providing a platform for users banned from other services,[5] including Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopolous,[12] Tila Tequila,[9] and white nationalists such as Richard B. Spencer[6][8] and "Ricky Vaughn",[5][8] as well as for not explicitly prohibiting hate speech.[11] The only restrictions on expression on the site are on threats of violence, promotion of terrorism, illegal pornography and doxing.[4]

Although Torba states that the choice of a frog logo was inspired by Bible verses (Exodus 8:1-8:12 and Psalms 78:45) and various other traditional symbolic meanings, it quickly drew comparisons to Pepe the Frog, an internet meme popular with the Alt-Right.[8][13] He denies that Gab is "designed specifically for conservatives"[9] and has stated that "we welcome everyone and always will".[6] Torba also says that "We want everyone to feel safe on Gab, but we’re not going to police what is hate speech and what isn't."[11]



TILA TEQUILA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tila_Tequila

Thien Thanh Thi Nguyen[1] (born October 24, 1981), better known by her stage names Tila Tequila, Tila Nguyen and Miss Tila, is a Vietnamese American television and social media personality. She first gained recognition for her active presence on social networking websites. After becoming the most popular person on Myspace,[2] Tequila was offered to star in her own reality television series. Her bisexual-themed dating show, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila (2007), aired for two seasons and became MTV's second highest-rated series premiere of that year.

. . . .

In 2010, she released her second EP Welcome to the Dark Side. Her book, Hooking Up With Tila Tequila: A Guide to Love, Fame, Happiness, Success, and Being the Life of the Party was published in 2008. She has subsequently received negative attention for her support of Hitler, as well as antisemitic and white nationalist comments,[3][4] which led to her expulsion from Celebrity Big Brother.[5]




PROUD BOYS
https://medium.com/@willsommer/the-fratty-proud-boys-are-the-alt-rights-weirdest-new-phenomenon-7572b31e50f2#.ybkxdnm2k

The fratty Proud Boys are the alt right’s weirdest new phenomenon
Excerpted from Right Richter, a weekly newsletter on right-wing media
Will SommerFollow
I do Right Richter, a newsletter about conservative media.
Feb 5

The first-ever Right Richter Special Report covers the phenomenon that is the Proud Boys adult “Western chauvinist” fraternity. It’s like Old School, but with uncomfortable racial and sexual subtext!

Photograph -- Lord Humungus becomes a Proud Boy

[MY OPINION ON THIS PHOTOGRAPH -- this is disturbing to see because, to me, it is more than a little bit twisted, but it also seems to be a satire of itself. It’s funny. Don’t worry. A subculture like this will never REALLY rise to the top because it’s too blinking silly. The comparison of some of these people to Oscar Wilde is definitely fitting, except for one thing. Oscar Wilde, besides being blatantly gay, was also a highly talented writer. He was in my 1890-1920 course, and his work in my view is excellent.]


The first-ever Right Richter Special Report covers the phenomenon that is the Proud Boys adult “Western chauvinist” fraternity. It’s like Old School, but with uncomfortable racial and sexual subtext!

I suspect that the Proud Boys will soon get a good amount of media attention, now that antifascist protesters crashed their founder’s NYU speech last week. Unlike many alt-right developments that have scored press, the Proud Boys actually do have members who show up to real-life events.

Be warned, though: this is a mindbender. As one right-wing critic of the Proud Boys said in a video explaining their rules: “I shouldn’t know about any of this… I can’t relate to anyone in my life anymore.”

Consider the Proud Boy: An angular young white man stands in what looks like a poorly decorated frat house.
“Ready, go…Cheerio!” he says, before getting punched in the face.

A friendly beating ensues. He’s well on his way to being a Proud Boy.

Proud Boys Origins: Where does a young man looking for fellowship turn to in a world where, according to some, masculinity is a sign of shame? To hear Vice co-founder turned neo-masculine reactionary Gavin McInnes tell it, the answer is the Proud Boys, a “pro-West fraternal organization.”

Launched last year by McInnes, the Proud Boys take their name and #POYB hashtag from “Proud of Your Boy,” a song in the Aladdin musical.

Aladdin apologizes to his mother for his rascally ways. When McInnes heard the song at a school recital, though, he thought that no one could truly be proud of a boy singing such an apologetic song. McInnes, a newly former Fox News contributor who says he quit the network because it wasn’t conservative enough, now looks to move the Proud Boys from his own fan club to something more significant.

The Life of a Proud Boy: Today the Proud Boys’ public Facebook group has thousands of fans, with several requests daily for admission to the private Facebook group.

They’re starting to make news — Proud Boys scrapped with antifascist protesters at one of McInnes’s speeches, and one account from “antifa” activists describes Proud Boys in “Make America Great Again” hats brawling with protesters at the Berkeley riots outside a Milo Yiannopoulos last week. A Proud Boy apparently got roughed up in the action.

The Proud Boys operate on tenets that McInnes has been pushing in his second career as a right-wing provocateur: unapologetically rowdy and pro-Trump, the Proud Boys operate under the credo that “the West is the best.”

The Proud Boys welcome gay and non-white members — as long as people of color who hope to be Proud Boys “recognize that white men are not the problem.” Other Proud Boy doctrines are similarly politically conservative and lame, including “glorify the entrepreneur” and “venerate the housewife.”

What a World: The Proud Boys were thrilled with Trump’s election:

Proud Boy Ethos: Being a Proud Boy seems to be mostly about getting drunk and shoving antifascists. A Politico video shot on inauguration weekend sums up what a Proud Boy meet-up is like: weird pseudo-intellectual stuff and street scuffling with leftists. McInnes reads from Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West, leads the Proud Boys on a march to the Deploraball — and licks a protester’s face along the way.

The rambunctious but socially awkward vibe is very odd-kid-in-middle-school-who-isn’t-really-a-nerd, or guy-who-got-into-a-fraternity-only-because-he’s-a-legacy. Which leads us to…

The Masturbation Thing: A recurring trope on various parts of the fix-your-life internet, whether it’s Reddit’s “nofap” page or pick-up artist forums, is the idea that abstaining from masturbating will bring about a wholesale life change.

McInnes promotes a similar idea called “#nowanks,” saying that masturbating more than once a month drains one’s interest — especially for millennials — in sex. The caveat: Proud Boys can always masturbate within a yard of a woman, with her consent.

Proud Boy Initiation: Proud Boys membership operates on three degrees. The first is just declaring yourself an “out” Proud Boy. The third is getting a Proud Boy tattoo — in a prescribed font, naturally — and keeping with the masturbation regimen.

Getting a shot (or not!) at the third level, though, means running a true gauntlet at the second: the cereal punching. In this initiation, Proud Boys enthusiasts punch a hopeful (albeit not around the face or testicles) while he cries out the names of cereals.

You must get the crap beaten out of you by at least five guys until you can name five breakfast cereals. If you hammer out, “Chex, Cheerios, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, and Special K” in a matter of seconds, you’re free to go. If you get flummoxed by the punches and cannot think straight, well, sorry, you’re going to get pounded.

This sounds like nonsense, but it’s real.

Proud Boy “Culture”: The Proud Boys have a uniform — a black Fred Perry polo shirt with yellow stripes. (Coincidentally or not, Fred Perry is also a popular brand for skinheads.) They have a catchphrase, “uhuru,” a slogan they cribbed from a video calling for reparations over slavery.

They also have a fan song that centers on the “Uhuru” refrain, and it’s weirdly catchy.

Proud Boy Feuds: Naturally, an alt-right, all-male movement is riven with feuds, both internal and external.

Despite how bizarre their politics can look from outside of Trump circles, the Proud Boys actually fall on the moderate side of the alt-right.

On far more extreme sites like the Daily Stormer, writers blast McInnes as a “cuck” for refusing to discuss the “JQ.” That’d be the “Jewish Question,” or the deranged idea that a Jewish conspiracy runs the world.

One video, shot in a mocking take on the Proud Boys usual throwback 1980’s style, summarizes what Nazis don’t like Proud Boys:

“We’re the Proud Boys, we don’t talk about race / I even let a black guy fuck my wife in my place. Don’t talk about Jews. Please, don’t talk about Jews. Please.”

What to Make of the Proud Boys: I think the Proud Boys are too weird to ever become more than an oddball off-shoot of the alt-right. Their name is terrible, and who wants to hand over their sexual activities to Gavin McInnes?

Still, the Proud Boys offer a bizarre, structured look into the new era of white male identity politics. It’s one that’s willing to fight, even if their looks are very bad.

Donald TrumpPoliticsProud BoysGavin McinnesAlt Right



https://medium.com/@davepell/mike-drop-ten-takeaway-from-flynngate-283af25f4585#.ohcz7foac

Mike Drop: Ten Takeaways from Flynngate
By Dave Pell
February 14, 2017


Mike Flynn has resigned, breaking a record for shortest tenure of an administration official.

Fake News propped Flynn up. Real News brought him down.

Sally Yates warned the Trump team about Flynn a month ago. Three weeks later, she warned them about the futility of defending their Muslim ban in court. For those scoring at home, that’s Yates 2, Trump 0. She must be getting tired of all the winning.

A Pence spokesperson said that the VP first learned that Flynn had lied when he read a Washington Post story on the topic (although his curiosity was piqued when Flynn kept showing up to meetings smelling of borscht). Either the media isn’t the opposition party, or Pence just joined it.

Nixon: What did he know and when did he know it? Trump: What did he know and when did he lie about it.

Mike Flynn and Mike Flynn Jr (fired from the same administration within nine weeks of each other) both spread the Pizzagate fake news. Now, they probably couldn't even get a job at Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria.

The gravest danger to the republic is that 40% of American still approve of Trump’s performance. (I’m guessing they’re also still holding on to their Pets.com stock, just in case of a turnaround.)

I have three rules in my house: 1. Be considerate. 2. Clean your room 3. No inadvertent briefings with incomplete information.

I’m pretty sure Flynn misspelled President Bannon’s name in his letter of resignation.

Trump tweeted: The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc? (I’d say that the North Korea related leaks are more likely to come from one of the waitstaff working at at Mir-a-Lago last weekend.) Hopefully, the Potus understands that the majority of leaks are coming from his own team — because they’re scared as hell. This adminstration has more leaks than the Oroville Dam.

Does this mean that Omarosa is one step closer to the presidency?

(And one bonus thought: This scandal is gonna get a lot worse.)

Dave Pell writes NextDraft: You Should Read Real News.

Photograph -- How Many Flynns have resigned in disgrace from this administration? See image for answer.


Dave Pell
I write NextDraft, a quick and entertaining look at the day’s most fascinating news.
Go to the profile of Dave Pell



http://www.gq.com/story/why-angry-white-men-love-calling-people-cucks.

The problematic history of the alt-right’s favorite new insult.
BY DANA SCHWARTZ
August 1, 2016
Illustration by GQ/Getty

If you’ve been on Twitter in the last few months, chances are you’ve come across “cuck,” a word that you’d previously only seen while your browser was in Incognito Mode.

Its literal meaning references a submissive man sexually cuckolded by a woman. Now, it is a catch-all among the alt-right, in the dark corners of the internet where #feminismisacancer hashtags are a badge of pride and the real enemy is PC culture, where “cuck” has become shorthand for any perceived weakness, or rather, perceived reluctance to exploit strength.

Although “cuckold” has been used since the thirteenth century (the word itself derived from cuckoo birds, which lay eggs in another’s nest), “cuck” was added to Urban Dictionary in 2007. Any more exact tracing of its origins is lost in the dense knot of the internet and the speed with which its population seized upon an insult to emasculate others.

The word gained political potency during the 2016 election in the portmanteau “cuckservative” (cuck + conservative) used to imply that the mainstream conservatives of the Jeb Bush variety are weak and effeminate. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is not a cuckservative. He says what he wants and doesn’t care if it’s offensive. In reference to Trump’s comments about Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her wherever,” radio host Rush Limbaugh snarked, “If Trump were your average, ordinary, cuckolded Republican, he would have apologized by now.”

But Donald Trump doesn’t apologize. He went on to win the Republican presidential nomination as Jeb Bush, the one-time favorite, was irrevocably set back by a simple insult from Trump delivered with an invisible wink: “low-energy.”

EDITOR’S PICK
News & Culture
Twitter Banning Milo Is an Empty Gesture

Since The Donald bested the field of cuckservatives with his manly virility and full head of hair, those who couldn’t see a good insult go to waste have continued to use it in its shortened form—cuck—which applies first to anyone supporting Hillary, but also anyone who would challenge Donald Trump on his spelling, his logic, or his facts.

So now that a word previously only used for pornography or in 4chan has achieved mainstream political significance, it’s time to ask the question: Why has the word “cuck” resonated with so many angry white men?

An insult is, by nature, telling of its source: you never insult with something that you don’t think is insulting. A woman would never sneer that another woman is fat if she herself would be comfortable with her body at any size, if “fatness” weren’t something she feared. A man mocking the size of another man’s genitals broadcasts his own belief that the length of one’s penis is something to be either proud or embarrassed about.

“Cuck” is a concept borne out of insecurity.

The cultural importance of the cuckold in America is rooted in racism: in pornography, the wife of the cuckolded (almost exclusively white) husband is most commonly sleeping with African-American men, meant to provide an additional layer of humiliation if the white husband sees that man as “inferior.” In the world of pornography meant to elicit humiliation as an erotic sentiment, cuckold porn takes advantage of its viewers’ racist perceptions.

After the Civil War, the white supremacist movement radicalized its supporters with the fear of black men raping white women. Even Shakespeare evoked the sexual element of racial angst: in Othello, Iago attempts to pit Desdemona’s father against his Moorish son-in-law by evoking very specific imagery: “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe.”





UNKNOWN WORDS, PEOPLE, ETC. FROM THE ARTICLES ABOVE


EP – THIS SIMPLY MEANS “EXTENDED PLAY,” WHICH MEANS LESS THAN AN ALBUM OR LONG PLAY, BUT MORE THAN ONE SONG

CUCK – SHORT FOR CUCKOLD. IT’S IN POPULAR USAGE ON THE RIGHTIST NET FOR PEOPLE LIKE MODERATE CONSERVATIVES, OVER THOSE REAL MEN CONSERVATIVES THE ALT-RIGHT. SPECIFIC EXAMPLE, JEB BUSH. POOR JEB. I’VE ALWAYS LIKED HIM PERSONALLY. HE HAD THE GUTS TO MARRY AN HISPANIC WOMAN, WHICH SHOWS HIM TO BE NOT A CUCK. POLITICALLY AND ECONOMICALLY, HE’S STILL A REPUBLICAN, HOWEVER, AND WHEN GOVERNOR OF FL, HE DID SOME SOCIALLY UNFAIR THINGS.

FOR MORE INTERESTING IF DISGUSTING STUFF ON “CUCKS,” SEE BELOW – THE ALT-RIGHT IS ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY MADE UP OF YOUNG PRIVILEGED MEN, WHO ARE APPARENTLY HIGHLY INSECURE SEXUALLY. THE TERM ALSO HAS A RACIST MEANING, REFERRING NOT MERELY TO CUCKOLDS, BUT TO THOSE WHOSE WIFE IS BEING ROMANCED BY A BLACK MAN. SEE THE INTERESTING HISTORY BELOW.

THE RADICAL ANTIFEMINISM IS ALSO SHOWN IN THIS ARTICLE. I’M PUTTING ALL THIS IN, PARTLY BECAUSE READING THESE MADE ME FEEL THE WAY I DID WHEN A ZOOLOGY GRADUATE STUDENT WITH MY FIRST HUSBAND AT UNC-CH DECIDED TO STUDY TARANTULAS – UNABLE TO LOOK AWAY AND UNABLE TO LOOK AT IT AT THE SAME TIME. I’VE NEVER LIKED VERBAL DESCRIPTIONS OF SEXUAL ACTS EVEN WHEN THEY ARE NORMAL, AND THIS MATERIAL ISN’T NORMAL. AND THEY THINK THEY ARE SUPERIOR TO ME??


OMAROSA – OMAROSA MANIGAULT IS A BLACK TRUMP FOLLOWER AND NOW ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS


“CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER” – THIS IS ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE HIGHLY UNREALISTIC “REALITY SHOWS,” ONLY THIS ONE IS BRITISH. (YAWN.)


PEPE THE FROG (THIS IS ALSO A YAWN, BUT WITH A RETCH ON THE SIDE.) THIS CHARACTER’S NAME ISN’T PRONOUNCED, “PAY PAY,” BUT “PEE PEE.” HIS SIGNATURE CARTOON SLOGAN IS “FEELS GOOD, MAN” AND REFERS TO THE FACT THAT HE IS DRAWN “WITH HIS PANTS DOWN TO HIS ANKLES” “GOING PEPE.” THIS IS THE KIND OF DRIVEL THAT THESE YOUNG UBERRICH MALE SUPREMACIST NITWITS FOLLOW ON THE INTERNET.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog

Pepe the Frog is a popular Internet meme. The fictional green anthropomorphic frog with a frog-like face and a humanoid body is originally from a comic series by Matt Furie called Boy's Club.[2] It became an Internet meme when its popularity steadily grew across Myspace, Gaia Online and 4chan in 2008. By 2015, it had become one of the most popular memes used on 4chan. Beginning in 2016, his image has increasingly been appropriated as a symbol of the controversial alt-right movement. Because of the use of Pepe by the alt-right, the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe the Frog to their database of hate symbols in 2016, adding that not all Pepe memes are racist.[3] Since then, Pepe's creator has publicly expressed his dismay at Pepe being used as a hate symbol.[4]

The meme's original use has evolved over time and has many variants, including Sad frog, Smug frog, Feels frog, and "You will never..." frog.[5]

History

Pepe the Frog was created by American artist Matt Furie. Its usage as a meme came from his comic, Boy's Club #1. The progenitor of Boy's Club was a zine that Furie made on Microsoft Paint called Playtime, which included Pepe as a character.[6] He posted his comic in a series of blog posts on Myspace in 2005.[5][7]

In the comic, Pepe was found urinating with his pants pulled down to his ankles and the catchphrase "feels good man" was his rationale.[8][9] Furie took those posts down when the printed edition was published in 2006.[5]

"My Pepe philosophy is simple: 'Feels good man.' It is based on the meaning of the word Pepe: 'To go Pepe.' I find complete joy in physically, emotionally, and spiritually serving Pepe and his friends through comics. Each comic is sacred, and the compassion of my readers transcends any differences, the pain, and fear of 'feeling good.'"

–Matt Furie, 2015 interview with The Daily Dot[2]


http://time.com/4530128/pepe-the-frog-creator-hate-symbol/

Pepe the Frog's Creator: I'm Reclaiming Him. He Was Never About Hate
Matt Furie
Oct 13, 2016



THIS IS THE END OF A LONG AND SOMETIMES RAMBLING RANT (WHAT ELSE IS NEW?) I WANTED TO INCLUDE THE ARTICLES. THEY ILLUSTRATE INFORMATION ABOUT THE TRUMP FOLLOWERS WHICH I’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE. I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND HIS APPEAL. IF YOU FOLLOWED IT ALL THE WAY TO THIS POINT, THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION. GOD BLESS.