March 14, 2017

News and Views


TRUMP'S KEY PEOPLE WITH ALT-RIGHT AND WHITE SUPREMACY BACKGROUNDS IN THE NEWS

RICHARD SPENCER

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/
'Hail Trump!': White Nationalists Salute the President-Elect
Video of an alt-right conference in Washington, D.C., where Trump’s victory was met with cheers and Nazi salutes.
Daniel Lombroso and Yoni Appelbaum
Nov 21, 2016

“Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”

That’s how Richard B. Spencer saluted more than 200 attendees on Saturday, gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”

Spencer has popularized the term “alt-right” to describe the movement he leads. Spencer has said his dream is “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans,” and has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”

For most of the day, a parade of speakers discussed their ideology in relatively anodyne terms, putting a presentable face on their agenda. But after dinner, when most journalists had already departed, Spencer rose and delivered a speech to his followers dripping with anti-Semitism, and leaving no doubt as to what he actually seeks. He referred to the mainstream media as “Lügenpresse,” a term he said he was borrowing from “the original German”; the Nazis used the word to attack their critics in the press.

“America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Spencer said. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”

The audience offered cheers, applause, and enthusiastic Nazi salutes.

Here is the video, excerpted from an Atlantic documentary profile of Spencer that will premiere in December 2016.

Leah Varjacques contributed reporting to this story.



HOW MANY RACISTS/ALT-RIGHT ORGANIZATIONS ARE THERE THAT HAVE TAX EXEMPT STATUS? WHY IS THAT ALLOWED IF POLITICAL ACTIVITY ALONE IS ENOUGH TO DISQUALIFY THEM? P.S.—TAKE A LOOK AT THIS MAN’S FACIAL EXPRESSION

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-strips-richard-spencer-nonprofit-of-its-tax-exempt-status/
By EMILY SCHULTHEIS CBS NEWS March 14, 2017, 11:38 AM
IRS strips Richard Spencer's nonprofit of its tax-exempt status

Photograph -- In this Dec. 6, 2016 file photo, Richard Spencer, who leads a movement that mixes racism, white nationalism and populism, speaks at the Texas A&M University campus in College Station, Texas. AP PHOTO/DAVID J. PHILLIP, FILE

The Internal Revenue Service has stripped prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer’s nonprofit of its tax-exempt status because the group failed to file tax returns, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Spencer is a leader in the so-called “alt-right” movement, which has been energized by President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. He has said that the United States “at the end of the day, belongs to white men,” and at a November conference in Washington, D.C., he received Nazi salutes from supporters.

He runs the National Policy Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank which bills itself as “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States.”

The group stopped filing tax returns with the IRS after 2012. Failing to file for three consecutive years results in an automatic loss of tax-exempt status. There are also questions about whether Spencer, a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump, violated rules that prohibit nonprofits from supporting any particular candidates or campaigns.

Spencer said he did not believe his group was required to file federal tax returns, and told the Times that he would be appealing the IRS’ decision.

“I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to make a comment because I don’t understand this stuff,” Spencer said. “It’s a bit embarrassing, but it’s not good. We’ll figure it out.”

He also said his group has filed the required paperwork to operate as a nonprofit in the commonwealth of Virginia, but a spokeswoman for the Virginia agency which deals with charities told the Times that his group’s status was being reviewed.



REP. STEVE KING –

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-king-donald-trump-immigration_us_58c807e0e4b0428c7f1347da?pfla8ezgmqw06yldi
POLITICS 03/14/2017 01:06 pm ET | Updated 28 minutes ago
Steve King’s Anti-Immigrant Comments Aren’t New. But His Support In The White House Is.
Donald Trump’s team has echoed the congressman’s apocalyptic arguments.
By Dana Liebelson , Paul Blumenthal

WASHINGTON — Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has been widely condemned this week after tweeting on Sunday that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Some Republicans, including the office of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), rebuked the congressman. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights leader, called the tweet “racist.”

But King had a few supporters ― former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, for example, was happy with his comments ― and he didn’t apologize. Instead, he defended his stance, tweeting on Monday a riff on President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan: “Let’s Make Western Civilization Great Again!”

This was not terribly surprising, as King has been making similar arguments — and attracting support from white nationalists — for years.

The only difference is that there are now people in the White House who share some of his views. Trump, White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, policy advisers Steve Miller and Sebastian Gorka, and national security official Michael Anton have echoed King’s apocalyptic anti-immigration arguments, and they’re advancing policies for which he has long advocated.

Neither King’s office nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

TOM WILLIAMS VIA GETTY IMAGES
Rep. Steve King is interviewed by NBC News in the rotunda of Russell Building on Jan. 3, the first day of the 115th Congress.

Bannon used his position as executive chair of Breitbart News to advance an anti-immigrant message. King was a repeat guest on the “Breitbart News Daily” radio show, and Bannon introduced the lawmaker as “a mentor to me.”

On multiple episodes of the show, Bannon compared the refugee crisis to The Camp of the Saints, a French novel from the 1970s that is popular with white nationalists. King recommended the book on Monday during an interview with “The Jan Mickelson Show” on WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa. Its message is identical to that of King’s tweet: Nonwhite immigrants are invaders who will lead to the end of Western civilization.

Bannon also used the Breitbart platform to call the refugee crisis a “Muslim invasion” that “didn’t just happen by happenstance.” He asked radio guests whether the U.S. and Europe should shut down mosques, deport undocumented immigrants and slow legal immigration. Bannon’s major concern, as he told it, was: “Does the West have the will to win? Do they have the will to exist? Are we in a mode of self-surrender?”

Under Bannon, Breitbart also promoted right-wing nationalists in the U.S. and abroad. (Bannon called the site a “platform for the alt-right,” a phrase often used as a euphemism for white nationalism.)

One far-right leader who received especially fawning coverage from the site was Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who King praised in his tweet on Sunday. Wilders has his own author page on Breitbart, where he has claimed Islam “is primarily a totalitarian political ideology aiming for world domination.” He also attended a Breitbart “Gays for Trump” bash thrown by Milo Yiannopoulos, who was the site’s tech editor at the time.

Bannon and other members of the Trump administration have eagerly promoted King’s policy priorities. King boasted in January that John Kelly, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, visited his office and discussed national security in front of a model border wall. And after promising to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. during his campaign, one of Trump’s first actions as president was to enact a temporary ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries ― a policy that King argued he has the legal authority to enact and that Wilders has also backed.

Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, pushed for and and defended the travel ban. He worked closely with white nationalist Richard Spencer as a student, Mother Jones reported last year. (Miller has denied this, telling Mother Jones that he has “absolutely no relationship with Mr. Spencer” and “completely repudiate[s] his views.”) Miller also reportedly denounced multiculturalism.

YOUTUBE
Donald Trump appeared at a campaign event with King in 2014.

While writing under a pseudonym, national security official Anton argued last year that diversity is a “source of weakness” and that Islam is “incompatible with the modern West.” He also defended a group that invoked anti-Semitic stereotypes as “unfairly maligned.” Anton called The Huffington Post’s story on those passages “completely outrageous but sadly typical of the slander culture perfected by the modern Left.” He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on King’s views.

Gorka, another Trump adviser and former Breitbart News national security editor, has also cited Europe as a warning to the United States.

“If you look at Sweden, if you look at what’s occurred in France, Germany, the U.K., all of that put together is more than enough justification to explain, for example, our executive order on migration and refugee status,” he said last month.

Gorka was born in Britain to Hungarian parents, and previously worked in Hungarian politics with former members of the anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant party Jobbik. He now denies he knew the political background of the Hungarian politicians he formed a political party with.

Trump himself has praised King — and is helping turn some of his ideas into policy. They appeared together in Iowa in 2014 so that Trump could endorse King for Congress. King called Trump a friend and noted they share a “common cause” — the rule of law, which King connected to securing the border. Trump, in return, referred to King as “a special guy” and “a smart person with really the right views on almost everything.”

[King is] a smart person with really the right views on almost everything.
Donald Trump in 2014
Trump has even echoed King’s ideas about European migration.

“It’s terrible what they have done to some of these countries. They’re going to destroy ― I mean, they are destroying Europe,” he said last May on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

He also argued last year that Muslims have trouble assimilating into the United States.

“It’s almost, I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close,” he said during an interview with Fox News. “I’m talking about second and third generation. They come, they don’t ― for some reason, there’s no real assimilation.”

King, the president and Trump’s team are wrong about Muslim immigrants and assimilation. Although many American Muslims are relatively recent immigrants, they are highly assimilated into American society, according to two Pew Research Center surveys of thousands of Muslims.

“U.S. Muslims — 81 percent of whom are immigrants or children of immigrants — are the most socially liberal and religiously tolerant in the world and becoming more so with each passing year,” David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, wrote last year. “Muslim Americans are quickly adopting the views of other Americans.”

After sidestepping a question on Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that President Trump disagreed with King’s tweet.

“This is not a point of view he shares,” Spicer said. “He believes he is the president for all Americans.”

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

The story has been updated with White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s comment on Tuesday.

Dana Liebelson
Staff Reporter, The Huffington Post
Paul Blumenthal
Money in Politics Reporter, The Huffington Post



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-king-says-he-didnt-misspeak-when-he-said-posted-somebody-elses-babies-tweet/
Steve King says he didn't misspeak when he posted "somebody else's babies" tweet
By REBECCA SHABAD CBS NEWS March 14, 2017, 9:07 AM

Rep. Steve King on Monday doubled down on his controversial tweet supporting the views of a far-right Dutch politician, arguing that he didn’t “misspeak.”

“I did not misspeak at all. I said exactly what I meant,” the Iowa Republican said in an interview on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

If anything, King said he could have qualified his statement to add a reference to adoption.

“What I should have done, Tucker, if I had more characters in that tweet, just added, you cannot rebuild our civilization with somebody else’s babies unless we adopt them.”

In the original tweet, King said, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” voicing support for the views of Dutch politician Geert Wilders who has called for ending immigration of Muslims to the Netherlands and banning the Koran.

Follow
Steve King ✔ @SteveKingIA
Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://twitter.com/v_of_europe/status/840724494113206272 …
1:40 PM - 12 Mar 2017 · Iowa, USA
8,658 8,658 Retweets 13,613 13,613 likes

In a separate interview on Fox News’ “Special Report” with Bret Baier, Speaker Ryan said he “disagreed” with King’s statement and suggested that maybe he misspoke.

“I think he misunderstands what I said,” King said about Ryan’s reaction. “It was characterized by the left as having a race component to it. But you can look down through the words and language, there is nothing in my statement that references race in any way.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called on House Speaker Paul Ryan to punish King for his remark.

Follow
Nancy Pelosi ✔ @NancyPelosi
.@SpeakerRyan must remove @SteveKingIA from chairmanship of Constitution subcommittee for his insults to Americans of every creed & color
6:24 PM - 13 Mar 2017
4,177 4,177 Retweets 8,815 8,815 likes

Earlier in the day, King attempted to further explain his position on CNN’s “New Day.”

“Of course I meant exactly what I said as is always the case,” he said. “I’ve said the same thing as far as ten years ago to the German people and any population of people that is a declining population that isn’t willing to have enough babies to reproduce themselves.”

“You’ve got to keep your birth rate up and you need to teach your children your values. In doing so, you can grow your population and strengthen your culture, strengthen your way of life,” he added.


SEBASTIAN GORKA, MICHAEL ANTON, STEPHEN MILLER, AND STEVE KING

****http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-king-donald-trump-immigration_us_58c807e0e4b0428c7f1347da?pfla8ezgmqw06yldi
POLITICS
03/14/2017 01:06 pm ET | Updated 4 hours ago
Steve King’s Anti-Immigrant Comments Aren’t New. But His Support In The White House Is.
Donald Trump’s team has echoed the congressman’s apocalyptic arguments.
By Dana Liebelson , Paul Blumenthal


WASHINGTON — Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has been widely condemned this week after tweeting on Sunday that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Some Republicans, including the office of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), rebuked the congressman. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights leader, called the tweet “racist.”

But King had a few supporters ― former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, for example, was happy with his comments ― and he didn’t apologize. Instead, he defended his stance, tweeting on Monday a riff on President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan: “Let’s Make Western Civilization Great Again!”

This was not terribly surprising, as King has been making similar arguments — and attracting support from white nationalists — for years.

The only difference is that there are now people in the White House who share some of his views. Trump, White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, policy advisers Steve Miller and Sebastian Gorka, and national security official Michael Anton have echoed King’s apocalyptic anti-immigration arguments, and they’re advancing policies for which he has long advocated.

Neither King’s office nor the White House responded to requests for comment.


TOM WILLIAMS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Rep. Steve King is interviewed by NBC News in the rotunda of Russell Building on Jan. 3, the first day of the 115th Congress.

Bannon used his position as executive chair of Breitbart News to advance an anti-immigrant message. King was a repeat guest on the “Breitbart News Daily” radio show, and Bannon introduced the lawmaker as “a mentor to me.”

On multiple episodes of the show, Bannon compared the refugee crisis to The Camp of the Saints, a French novel from the 1970s that is popular with white nationalists. King recommended the book on Monday during an interview with “The Jan Mickelson Show” on WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa. Its message is identical to that of King’s tweet: Nonwhite immigrants are invaders who will lead to the end of Western civilization.

Bannon also used the Breitbart platform to call the refugee crisis a “Muslim invasion” that “didn’t just happen by happenstance.” He asked radio guests whether the U.S. and Europe should shut down mosques, deport undocumented immigrants and slow legal immigration. Bannon’s major concern, as he told it, was: “Does the West have the will to win? Do they have the will to exist? Are we in a mode of self-surrender?”

Under Bannon, Breitbart also promoted right-wing nationalists in the U.S. and abroad. (Bannon called the site a “platform for the alt-right,” a phrase often used as a euphemism for white nationalism.)

One far-right leader who received especially fawning coverage from the site was Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who King praised in his tweet on Sunday. Wilders has his own author page on Breitbart, where he has claimed Islam “is primarily a totalitarian political ideology aiming for world domination.” He also attended a Breitbart “Gays for Trump” bash thrown by Milo Yiannopoulos, who was the site’s tech editor at the time.

Bannon and other members of the Trump administration have eagerly promoted King’s policy priorities. King boasted in January that John Kelly, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, visited his office and discussed national security in front of a model border wall. And after promising to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. during his campaign, one of Trump’s first actions as president was to enact a temporary ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries ― a policy that King argued he has the legal authority to enact and that Wilders has also backed.

Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, pushed for and and defended the travel ban. He worked closely with white nationalist Richard Spencer as a student, Mother Jones reported last year. (Miller has denied this, telling Mother Jones that he has “absolutely no relationship with Mr. Spencer” and “completely repudiate[s] his views.”) Miller also reportedly denounced multiculturalism.

YOUTUBE
Donald Trump appeared at a campaign event with King in 2014.

While writing under a pseudonym, national security official Anton argued last year that diversity is a “source of weakness” and that Islam is “incompatible with the modern West.” He also defended a group that invoked anti-Semitic stereotypes as “unfairly maligned.” Anton called The Huffington Post’s story on those passages “completely outrageous but sadly typical of the slander culture perfected by the modern Left.” He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on King’s views.

Gorka, another Trump adviser and former Breitbart News national security editor, has also cited Europe as a warning to the United States.

“If you look at Sweden, if you look at what’s occurred in France, Germany, the U.K., all of that put together is more than enough justification to explain, for example, our executive order on migration and refugee status,” he said last month.

Gorka was born in Britain to Hungarian parents, and previously worked in Hungarian politics with former members of the anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant party Jobbik. He now denies he knew the political background of the Hungarian politicians he formed a political party with.

Trump himself has praised King — and is helping turn some of his ideas into policy. They appeared together in Iowa in 2014 so that Trump could endorse King for Congress. King called Trump a friend and noted they share a “common cause” — the rule of law, which King connected to securing the border. Trump, in return, referred to King as “a special guy” and “a smart person with really the right views on almost everything.”

[King is] a smart person with really the right views on almost everything.
Donald Trump in 2014

Trump has even echoed King’s ideas about European migration.

“It’s terrible what they have done to some of these countries. They’re going to destroy ― I mean, they are destroying Europe,” he said last May on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

He also argued last year that Muslims have trouble assimilating into the United States.

“It’s almost, I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close,” he said during an interview with Fox News. “I’m talking about second and third generation. They come, they don’t ― for some reason, there’s no real assimilation.”

King, the president and Trump’s team are wrong about Muslim immigrants and assimilation. Although many American Muslims are relatively recent immigrants, they are highly assimilated into American society, according to two Pew Research Center surveys of thousands of Muslims.

“U.S. Muslims — 81 percent of whom are immigrants or children of immigrants — are the most socially liberal and religiously tolerant in the world and becoming more so with each passing year,” David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, wrote last year. “Muslim Americans are quickly adopting the views of other Americans.”

After sidestepping a question on Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that President Trump disagreed with King’s tweet.

“This is not a point of view he shares,” Spicer said. “He believes he is the president for all Americans.”

Sign up for the HuffPost Must Reads newsletter. Each Sunday, we will bring you the best original reporting, long form writing and breaking news from The Huffington Post and around the web, plus behind-the-scenes looks at how it’s all made. Click here to sign up!

The story has been updated with White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s comment on Tuesday.

Dana Liebelson
Staff Reporter, The Huffington Post
Paul Blumenthal
Money in Politics Reporter, The Huffington Post
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Target: American Lawmakers

We should be making it easier for people to vote, not harder. That's why voter registration should be automatic for every eligible citizen.



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

Steve King
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Steven Arnold "Steve" King (born May 28, 1949) is a member of the United States House of Representatives from Iowa's 4th congressional district; the district is located in the northwestern part of the state and includes Sioux City. King is a member of the Republican Party and has been serving in Congress since 2003.

King was born on May 28, 1949, in Storm Lake, Iowa, the son of Mildred Lila (née Culler), a homemaker, and Emmett A. King, a state police dispatcher.[1] His father has Irish and German ancestry, and his mother has Welsh roots, as well as American ancestry going back to the colonial era.[1] King has also stated that he is Latino, although it has since been established that he is not.[1][2][3] King graduated in 1967 from Denison Community High School.[1][4] He is married to Marilyn, with whom he has three children. Raised a Methodist, King attended his wife's Catholic church, converting 17 years after marrying her.[1]



“Rep. Steve King stated that he is Latino….” NOT!!

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/que-que-rep-steve-king-says-hes-latino-secy-julian-n394021
NEWS JUL 18 2015, 7:05 PM ET
Que, Que? Rep. Steve King Says He’s as Latino as Julián Castro
by SUZANNE GAMBOA

Rep. Steve King, the Iowa congressman who preceded Donald Trump in angering Latinos and immigrants with incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric, claimed on Twitter that he is as Hispanic and Latino as Housing Secretary Julián Castro.

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
Steve King ✔ @SteveKingIA
What does Julian Castro know? Does he know that I'm as Hispanic and Latino as he?
10:06 AM - 17 Jul 2015
224 224 Retweets 150 150 likes
A King spokeswoman did not respond to a request by email for further comment and King's office declined to contact her. Castro's office declined comment when contacted by NBC. King is not listed among Hispanic members of the House in a list kept by the House Press Gallery.

Castro is Mexican American. His grandmother immigrated from Mexico but he was born in the U.S. as was his mother. Some have questioned his Latino identity because English is his first language although he speaks and understands Spanish, but does not claim to be a native Spanish speaker. Castro has been considered a potential vice presidential candidate on the the Democrats 2016 ticket.

King is well known for his comments that many Latinos and immigrants have regarded as at least insulting and to some as racist or bigoted. His comments have confounded the GOP's ambition to improve its relationship with Latinos, but made him a darling of many conservatives.

He once said undocumented immigrants have calves the size of cantaloupes because they haul marijuana through the desert and those hauling marijuana outnumber those that are valedictorians.

He also suggested using an electrified fence on the border to keep out people who cross the border, saying they should be dealt with as livestock are. He suggested that senators who voted for comprehensive immigration reform wear a scarlet "A" for Amnesty.

Rep. Steve King, the Iowa congressman who preceded Donald Trump in angering Latinos and immigrants with incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric, claimed on Twitter that he is as Hispanic and Latino as Housing Secretary Julián Castro.

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
Steve King ✔ @SteveKingIA
What does Julian Castro know? Does he know that I'm as Hispanic and Latino as he?
10:06 AM - 17 Jul 2015
224 224 Retweets 150 150 likes

A King spokeswoman did not respond to a request by email for further comment and King's office declined to contact her. Castro's office declined comment when contacted by NBC. King is not listed among Hispanic members of the House in a list kept by the House Press Gallery.

Castro is Mexican American. His grandmother immigrated from Mexico but he was born in the U.S. as was his mother. Some have questioned his Latino identity because English is his first language although he speaks and understands Spanish, but does not claim to be a native Spanish speaker. Castro has been considered a potential vice presidential candidate on the the Democrats 2016 ticket.

King is well known for his comments that many Latinos and immigrants have regarded as at least insulting and to some as racist or bigoted. His comments have confounded the GOP's ambition to improve its relationship with Latinos, but made him a darling of many conservatives.

He once said undocumented immigrants have calves the size of cantaloupes because they haul marijuana through the desert and those hauling marijuana outnumber those that are valedictorians.

He also suggested using an electrified fence on the border to keep out people who cross the border, saying they should be dealt with as livestock are. He suggested that senators who voted for comprehensive immigration reform wear a scarlet "A" for Amnesty.

King was responding to a tweet from @ImmigrantNacíon, which tweeted at him:

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
Nation of Immigrants @ImmigrantNacion
The lack of #Latino support will kill the #GOPs chance to win the White House ONCE AGAIN! #TNTVote #AINF #adiosGOP
2:13 PM - 17 Jul 2015
126 126 Retweets 41 41 likes
But even if the politicians weren't commenting, the Twitterverse was:

View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
Gabe Ortíz ✔ @TUSK81
I need to check your calves first, @SteveKingIA.
10:37 AM - 17 Jul 2015
140 140 Retweets 38 38 likes
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Follow
Roque Planas ✔ @RoqPlanas
Steve King nonsensically claims he's 'as Latino' as Julian Castro http://huff.to/1Okb9nh He isn't. Here's a chart.
12:26 PM - 17 Jul 2015
7 7 Retweets 10 10 likes
Follow
Juhem Navarro-Rivera @JuhemNR
#SteveKing better start calling himself Esteban Rey if he's really serious about Julian Castro.
12:28 PM - 17 Jul 2015
4 4 Retweets 5 5 likes
Jeb Bush, a GOP presidential candidate, had to deal with the Twitterverse after it was discovered that he had once marked "Hispanic" on a voter registration form, but he quickly disavowed that as a mistake and even took some ribbing from his Mexican-American son over it.


STEVEN MILLER

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/stephen-bannon-miller-trump-refugee-ban-islamophobia-white-nationalist
The Dark History of the White House Aides Who Crafted Trump's "Muslim Ban"
Here's how Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller have been boosters of Islamophobes and white nationalists.
JOSH HARKINSON
JAN. 30, 2017 6:20 PM

Photograph -- Senior Trump advisers Stephen Bannon (left) and Stephen Miller Ron Sachs and Albin Lohr-Jones/Zuma

The Trump administration has insisted since Sunday that the president's executive order banning travel to the United States from seven predominately Islamic countries "is not a Muslim ban." But as Mother Jones first reported in a series of investigations starting last summer, the two top Trump advisers who reportedly crafted the immigration crackdown—Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller—have a long history of promoting Islamophobia, courting anti-Muslim extremists, and boosting white nationalists.

For nearly a year before stepping down as the CEO of Breitbart News to lead the Trump campaign, Bannon hosted a SiriusXM radio show, Breitbart News Daily, where he conducted dozens of interviews with leading anti-Muslim extremists. Steeped in unfounded claims and conspiracy theories, the interviews paint a dark and paranoid picture of America's 3.3 million Muslims and the world's second-largest faith. Bannon often bookended the exchanges with full-throated praise for his guests, describing them as "top experts" and urging his listeners to click on their websites and support them.

One of Bannon's guests on the show, Trump surrogate Roger Stone, warned of a future America "where hordes of Islamic madmen are raping, killing, pillaging, defecating in public fountains, harassing private citizens, elderly people—that's what's coming."

Another frequent guest was Pamela Geller, the president of Stop Islamization of America, whom Bannon described as "one of the top world experts on radical Islam and Sharia law and Islamic supremacism." Geller told Bannon that George W. Bush's description of Islam as a "religion of peace" was something "we all deplore," that there had been an "infiltration" of the Obama administration by radical Muslims, and that former Central Intelligence Director John Brennan may have secretly converted to Islam. Bannon never pushed back against any of those unfounded claims.

In other exchanges on the show, Bannon described the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that defends the rights of Muslims, as "a bunch of spin" and "a bunch of lies." He accused the mainstream media of "basically going along the lines of being Sharia-compliant on blasphemy laws." He warned of "Sharia courts taking over Texas" and said that he opened a Breitbart News bureau in London in order to combat "all these Sharia courts [that] were starting under British law."

Bannon has lauded Miller, who previously worked for Sen. Jeff Sessions. "Whether the issue was trade or immigration or radical Islam, for many years before Donald Trump came on the scene, Sen. Sessions was the leader of the movement and Stephen was his right-hand man," Bannon told Politico in June.

As a member of the Duke Conservative Union, Miller worked closely with Richard Spencer, a Ph.D. student who would later coin the term "alt-right" and become a leading white nationalist.
Miller has long been an advocate of framing the fight against terrorism in religious terms. In 2007, while an undergraduate at Duke University, he started the Terrorism Awareness Project, an effort to make "students aware of the Islamic jihad and the terrorist threat, and to mobilize support for the defense of America and the civilization of the West." The group promoted "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" on college campuses and took out ads in college newspapers titled, "What Americans Need to Know About Jihad." After many papers declined to run the ads, Miller appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss the controversy, saying, "How are we going to win a war on terror if we can't even talk about the enemy?"

As a member of the Duke Conservative Union, Miller worked closely with Richard Spencer, a Ph.D. student who would later coin the term "alt-right" and become a leading white nationalist. Spencer told me that at Duke, Miller helped him with fundraising and promotion for an on-campus debate on immigration policy that Spencer organized in 2007, featuring influential white nationalist Peter Brimelow. Miller vehemently denied to me that he had any connection to Spencer or his ideas, but another former member of the Duke Conservative Union confirmed to me that Miller and Spencer worked together on the Brimelow event. And at DCU meetings, according to another past member of the group, Miller denounced multiculturalism and expressed concerns that immigrants from non-European countries were not assimilating.

Last July, Bannon boasted to Mother Jones during the Republican National Convention that Breitbart News was "the platform for the alt-right." The site regularly publishes anti-Muslim content; since Sunday, Breitbart has defended the new Trump policy crafted by its old boss, including with a piece headlined "Terror-Tied Group CAIR Causing Chaos, Promoting Protests & Lawsuits as Trump Protects Nation."


MILLER’S SOCIETAL COMPLAINTS AS EARLY AS HIGH SCHOOL AND CONSERVATIVE CLUB AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/stephen-miller-a-key-engineer-for-trumps-america-first-agenda/2017/02/11/a70cb3f0-e809-11e6-bf6f-301b6b443624_story.html?utm_term=.cdb85366bd5a
Politics By Rosalind S. Helderman February 11
Stephen Miller: A key engineer for Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda

Photograph -- Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus in the foreground, has been at President Trump’s side for more than a year. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

As a young conservative in liberal Santa Monica, Calif., Stephen Miller clashed frequently with his high school, often calling in to a national radio show to lambaste administrators for promoting multiculturalism, allowing Spanish-language morning announcements and failing to require recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Miller’s outrage did not appear to subside after he graduated. As a Duke University sophomore, Miller penned a column, titled “Santa Monica High’s Multicultural Fistfights,” in which he ripped his alma mater as a “center for political indoctrination.”

“The social experiment that Santa Monica High School has become is yet one more example of the dismal failure of leftism and the delusions and paranoia of its architects,” Miller wrote in the 2005 article for the conservative magazine FrontPage.

In the years before he became a top adviser to President Trump and a leading West Wing advocate for the executive order temporarily halting entry into the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, Miller was developing his skills as a culture warrior and conservative provocateur eager to condemn liberal orthodoxy — particularly on matters of race and identity. Like Trump, Miller forged that identity while immersed in liberal communities, giving him cachet with fellow conservatives for waging his battles on opposition turf.

Starting as a teenager, with his frequent calls to the nationally syndicated “Larry Elder Show,” Miller made a name for himself in conservative media circles for his willingness to take controversial stands and act as a champion for those on the right who felt maligned by a culture of political correctness.

How Stephen Miller became one of Trump’s most influential advisers Play Video3:15
The Post’s Rosalind S. Helderman looks at the influence that Stephen Miller, President Trump’s senior policy adviser, holds inside the White House. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

He produced a canon of searing columns on race, gender and other hot-button issues and, at Duke, became known to Fox News viewers as a leading defender of the white lacrosse players wrongfully accused of raping a black stripper. By his late 20s, Miller was a key aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), helping to torpedo a long-sought goal of immigrant advocacy groups to put millions of unauthorized Hispanic immigrants on a path to citizenship.

Today, at 31, he has emerged alongside former Breitbart News chief Stephen K. Bannon as a chief engineer of Trump’s populist “America first” agenda that has roiled the Washington debate over immigration and trade and sparked alarm among traditional U.S. allies abroad.

Miller, whose White House title is senior adviser to the president for policy, has been at Trump’s side for more than a year, joining his campaign in January 2016 when Sessions, who was sworn in Thursday as attorney general, was one of the only Republican officials to endorse the businessman’s candidacy.

While Trump at times revamped his campaign leadership, with Bannon joining relatively late in August 2016, Miller remained a steady presence whose profile and influence grew over time.

He wrote some of Trump’s most strident speeches during the campaign, including his Republican National Convention acceptance address in which Trump declared that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

And Miller sometimes served as the warm-up act for Trump at his large campaign rallies, including a rip-roaring speech in Wisconsin during the Republican primary when Miller thrashed Trump’s chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), for supporting increases in legal immigration that would result in more Muslims entering the country — a position Miller charged that Cruz held with “no regard, no concern” for how it would “affect the security of you and your family.”

After reports of Miller’s central role crafting the order imposing a 90-day ban on citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the United States, the young aide has drawn uncomfortable new scrutiny. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, host of the “Morning Joe” program that is a Trump favorite, recently blasted Miller as a “very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your Cabinet agencies to go to hell.”

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For Miller, though, working in the Trump White House is a natural culmination of his young career — a chance to work for a president who appears to share his zeal for getting under the skin of political opponents.

“The way that people on the left abuse and slam people on the right — that’s probably the thing that’s most concerned Stephen,” said Elder, the Los Angeles-based conservative talk-show host who Miller describes as a mentor. “The lack of fairness. The left wing dominance in academia. The left wing dominance in the media. The left wing dominance in Hollywood.”


Miller’s ideological awakening found its roots in a left-leaning high school where he has written that social life and academics were badly segregated, despite what he saw as a devotion among teachers and administrators to multiculturalism.

“My best judgment at the time was that the educational answer that had been provided, which was to reject the melting-pot formula in favor of an educational formula that focused on all the things that made us different, was not working,” he told The Washington Post in an interview.

Miller said he rejects the “provocateur” label, saying it suggests that his intentions are to seek attention rather than what he says is his true goal — “to battle against slim odds, a stacked deck and powerful entrenched forces, in pursuit of justice.”

Miller said he turned away from the more liberal politics of his parents as he grew up in Santa Monica after buying a subscription to Guns & Ammo magazine and becoming familiar with the writings of actor Charlton Heston, a longtime president of the National Rifle Association.

Miller began appearing on Elder’s show, a local broadcast that is aired in 300 markets, after the 9/11 attacks, when he felt his home town lacked sufficient patriotism.

Elder said that Miller called in the first time to voice objections to his school’s failure to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily as required by state law.

In writings at the time and later, Miller said he lobbied for the pledge recitation against a recalcitrant administration that refused to put the practice in place even after he had flagged the legal violation. “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School,” he wrote in a letter to the editor at the time.

“It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which the instructional environment on campus was breathtakingly PC,” Miller said in an interview.

Mark Kelly, who was the principal at the time, said he did not recall the episode as a major fight. When Miller flagged the issue, Kelly said he researched the law and realized that the school, indeed, needed to change its policy and institute the recitation of the pledge. Miller was invited to lead the pledge after it was reinstated.


“Stephen was right,” Kelly recalled.

The victory was a validation for Miller of the necessity to fight powerful figures who opposed his views.

Miller pushed the school administration over his desire to host an on-campus speech by David Horowitz — a onetime Marxist, then controversial far-right conservative — who became an early mentor and would later introduce Miller to Sessions.

Horowitz recalls being immediately impressed with Miller. “One of the things that struck me when I became a conservative was that conservatives don’t have any fight,” Horowitz said. “They don’t have any stomach for it. . . . Stephen Miller had that from the get-go.”

Cultural-identity issues appeared to particularly animate Miller. In a column in his high school newspaper, titled “A Time to Kill,” he urged violent response to radical Islamists.

“We have all heard about how peaceful and benign the Islamic religion is, but no matter how many times you say that, it cannot change the fact that millions of radical Muslims would celebrate your death for the simple reason that you are Christian, Jewish or American,” Miller wrote.

Ari Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who edited the student newspaper at time, recalled that Miller was especially critical of a Mexican American student group.

“I think he’s got a very sharp understanding of what words and issues will poke and provoke progressives, because he came up around it and really cut his teeth picking these fights that had low stakes but high offense,” Rosmarin said.

That skill led Miller to become a mini-celebrity in conservative intellectual circles because of his passion, age and home town. He appeared 70 times on Elder’s show before his high school graduation, according to the host.

“He found a really unique role to play that was deeply attractive to national conservatives,” Rosmarin said. “He was like a lonely warrior behind enemy lines.”

In the halls of Santa Monica High School, though, where students and teachers took pride in their ethnic diversity and liberal values, Miller was becoming something of a pariah. That environment prompted Miller to become even more assertive, recalled one of his former teachers.

“He had to come on a little strong as a defense mechanism — just to survive,” said the teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for how colleagues would react to the defense of an alumnus so closely associated with Trump. “He came under a lot of fire, even from teachers.”

At Duke, Miller wrote a biweekly column for the student newspaper that regularly aroused the ire of classmates.

“Men and women are in many ways the same, but they’re also innately and magnificently different,” he wrote in one column that argued laws requiring men and women to be paid equally would hurt businesses and that the pay gap largely resulted from women taking time off for childbirth, being less willing to ask for raises and being less likely to take part in hazardous work.

“The point is that the pay gap has virtually nothing to do with gender discrimination,” he wrote. “Sorry, feminists. Hate to break this good news to you.”

In a column titled “The Case for Christmas,” Miller, who is Jewish, argued that the holiday should be more widely recognized as a “crucial American holiday.”

“Christianity is embedded in the very soul of our nation,” he wrote.

Miller stepped into the national spotlight after three white lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape in a case rife with racial tension. The players were eventually cleared and the local district attorney was disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct in the case. Miller wrote a series of columns about the case and appeared on national television to discuss it.

“This travesty has been allowed to continue because we live in a nation paralyzed by racial paranoia,” he wrote in November 2006, writing that professors and others were frightened to speak in defense of the students because the district attorney had turned the case into a racial crusade and opposition “would be perceived negatively by the black community and that there would be a political price to pay.”

Speaking years later about his role as an advocate for the players, Miller told The Post: “The one takeaway I have from it is that in a difficult moment, I took a stand on principle — and I was correct.”

Reflecting more broadly on his college-era columns, Miller said his writings were a good reflection of his views at the time. But, he said, “I would surely hope that any person who was a writer about political and controversial topics in college would find that their thoughts had matured on a variety of issues.” He declined to outline where his own views had changed over time.

Miller’s outspokenness in the lacrosse case first brought him to the attention of Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who was a Duke graduate student at the time. Spencer said he became friendly with Miller through the Duke Conservative Union in fall 2006.

“He was very out in front, very bold and strong,” Spencer said in an interview.

Spencer last year told the Daily Beast that he was a “mentor” to Miller, which Miller has angrily denied.

“I condemn him. I condemn his views. I have no relationship with him. He was not my friend,” Miller said.

Miller noted that he served on campus as the executive director of the leading conservative group, which put him in contact with Spencer. “Our interaction was limited to the activities of the organization, of which he was a member, and thus ceased upon graduation,” Miller said.

But Spencer said that the two met frequently during their Duke days. As first reported by Mother Jones magazine, they both helped organize an immigration debate between Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration activist whose website has been labeled a hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Peter Laufer, who advocated for opening the southern U.S. border. Spencer praised Miller’s media savvy and organizational skills in advance of that event.

David Bitner, a friend of Miller’s who also belonged to the conservative club at Duke, said the two did interact in the small group. But Bitner called it “scurrilous libel” for Spencer to claim he was Miller’s mentor.

“Richard Spencer believes in white identity politics. Stephen Miller disavows identity politics,” he said.

Nevertheless, Miller’s role in the White House has been greeted with enthusiasm by Spencer and other white nationalist figures.

“He is not a white nationalist,” Spencer said. “But you can’t be this passionate about the immigration issue and not have a sense of the American nation as it historically emerged.”

After attending Trump’s inauguration, Jared Taylor, another high-profile white nationalist, posted a piece to his website in which he wrote that Trump is “not a racially conscious white man” but that there “are men close to him — Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller — who may have a clearer understanding of race, and their influence could grow.”

In an interview, Taylor said he was “speculating” and that he has not met or spoken with Miller.

Miller said he has “profound objections” to the views advanced by Taylor and Spencer, saying: “I condemn this rancid ideology.”

Elder, who is black, said he has never heard Miller speak of Spencer or Taylor or express what he considers racist views.

Instead, Elder said, Miller believes as he does: “Race and racism are no longer major problems in America. This is the fairest majority-white country in the world. If you work hard and make good decisions, you’ll be fine.”

Miller said that his views at the time were best summed up in a 2005 column in the Santa Monica Mirror, titled “My Dream for the End of Racism,” in which he argued that Americans should focus on how far the country has come in overcoming such prejudice. “No one claims that racism is extinct — but it is endangered,” he wrote. “And if we are to entirely extract this venom of prejudice from the United States, I proclaim Americanism to be the key.”

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Focusing on “multiculturalism,” he wrote, has had the effect of keeping different groups separate.

Miller’s White House role is in many ways a departure for an activist who has mostly seen himself as representing an oppressed political minority. Now he holds the power, helping to drive the government while working steps from the Oval Office.

Bitner said he wonders how Miller’s tactics will translate.

“I don’t think he’s had the opportunity to practice this,” he said. “These are all outsiders, many of them people who have been vocal minorities. How do you transition from there to governing?”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.