TRUMPLAND THEMES AND THE MID-WINTER BLUES
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
JANUARY 31, 2019


LINKING CHRISTIANITY WITH DONALD TRUMP – THIS IS A DISCUSSION ON HOW CHRISTIANS GET AROUND THE EXCEEDINGLY “WORLDLY” LIFE OF TRUMP AND COME TO HIS FOLD AS HIS SHEEP. A CHRISTIAN FRIEND OF MINE FROM HIGH SCHOOL SAID LAST YEAR THAT “GOD CAN USE PEOPLE FOR HIS PLANS WHO ARE NOT GOOD.” I SAID NOTHING.

YES, ALTERNET IS A LEFT-LEANING WEBSITE, BUT ONE WHICH PUBLISHES A GREAT DEAL OF IMPORTANT THINKING AND DISCUSSION. SEE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNet
AlterNet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AlterNet is a left-leaning website that was launched in 1998 by the non-profit now known as the Independent Media Institute.[5][6] In 2018, the website was acquired by owners of The Raw Story. Some AlterNet content is republished on Salon.[7]

Coverage

Coverage is divided into several special sections related to progressive news and culture, including News & Politics, World, Economy, Civil Liberties, Immigration, Reproductive Justice, Economy, Environment, Animal Rights, Food, Water, Books, Media and Culture, Belief, Drugs, Personal Health, Sex and Relationships, Vision, and Investigations.[8]

AlterNet publishes original content and also makes use of "alternative media", sourcing columns from Salon, Common Dreams, The Guardian, Consortiumnews, Truthdig, Truthout, TomDispatch, The Washington Spectator, Al Jazeera English, Center for Public Integrity, Democracy Now!, Waging Nonviolence, Asia Times, New America Media and Mother Jones.


https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/evangelical-historian-explains-how-christians-came-put-trump-ahead-jesus/
Evangelical historian explains how Christians came to put Trump ahead of Jesus
written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon January 28, 2019

“How do we reconcile the white evangelical politics of fear with the scriptural command to ‘fear not’?”

John Fea is an evangelical Christian and a historian. When Donald Trump was elected with 81 percent of the self-described white evangelical vote, Fea was both stunned and surprised. “As a historian studying religion and politics, I should have seen this coming,” he notes. Yet he did not. Which was why Fea ended up writing his new book, “Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.”

On its own terms, the book clearly succeeds in making sense for Fea and others like him, with potential for reaching wavering Trump supporters as well. He identifies and lucidly explores three fundamental flaws in evangelical thinking that have led them to embrace a leader who is wholly unfit by their own once-cherished moral standards, in pursuit of ends they cannot possibly achieve — restoring 1950s America via government action. In a key passage, Fea explains:

For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and nostalgia for a national past that may never have existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe they best explain the 81 percent.

Fear is Fea’s central concern, and the one most directly at odds with the Bible. “The Bible teaches that Christians are to fear God – and only God,” Fea writes. “All other forms of fear reflect a lack of faith, of failure to place one’s trust completely in the providential God who has promised to work all things out for good for those who love him.”

That’s a specific reference to Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” But this teaching seems lost on those who shout about God the loudest and the most, and it’s far from clear how Fea’s book can help change that. What it can perhaps do is help make sense of the evangelical majority for others, like Fea, who are in the minority within that world and already inclined toward finding another path.

“Despite God’s commands to trust him in times of despair, evangelicals have always been very fearful people,” he notes, “and they have built their understanding of political engagement around the anxiety they have felt amid times of social and cultural change.”

Fear is the subject of the first three chapters of “Believe Me.” They’re presented in reverse historical order — first come the 2016 primaries, then the shaping of the Christian-right playbook from the 1970s to the present, then a selective, episodic overview from colonial times to the modern era. The fourth chapter, dealing with power, examines the role of the “court evangelicals” who have come to support Trump, while his chapter exploring nostalgia examines its centrality in Trump’s fatally vague promise to “Make America Great Again.”

Fea’s first chapter is especially riveting for the light it sheds on how evangelicals came to support Trump when they had so many other superficially better-looking options to choose from. He argues convincingly that other GOP candidates did a superior job of courting evangelical voters by traditional means, after eight years of Obama had brought more change than they could handle — Marco Rubio with an impressive advisory council, Mike Huckabee with a track record and issue positions, Ben Carson with an appealing personal story, but most of all Ted Cruz, who “turned fear-mongering into an art form,” which should have trumped everyone else, especially given his father’s history as a popular apocalyptic preacher.

But collectively, Fea writes, they succeeded too well.

Between the summer of 2015 and start of the primary season in early 2016, they were able to diagnose the crisis that the United States was facing in a way that brought great anxiety and concern to American evangelicals. But their strategy backfired. … The evangelical candidates stoked fears of a world they seemed unfit to train. Desperate times call for a strongman, and if a strongman was needed, only Donald Trump would fit the bill.
It’s a powerful, convincing explanation — though incomplete, as I’ll return to below. But Fea is not content just reflecting on what has been. “I want to explore alternatives to the fear, the search for power, and in nostalgia,” Fea writes. “How do we reconcile the white evangelical politics of fear with the scriptural command to ‘fear not’?” he asks.

“What would it take to replace fear with Christian hope?” The answer he at least prepares the way for comes from an unlikely source — the black church, as reflected in the history, spirit, and legacy of the civil rights movement, which he turns to in the book’s concluding chapter. They model a contrasting triad of hope, humility and history that Fea highlights as providing a powerful alternative model, a road not taken by white evangelicals.

But because the preceding five chapters have been so insular, concerned with the white evangelical world, this solution has the feeling of deus ex machina. Fea himself provides no model for what it might mean or how it might work, until his seemingly belated epiphany. It’s an effective cri de coeur, though as serious sociological and theological critique, much less so. Toward the book’s end, he writes:

How might hope, humility, and history inform the way we white American evangelicals think about politics and other forms of public engagement? I hope that what I’ve written here might spur conversations and initiatives born out of possible answers to this question.

Yet for the white evangelical community as a whole to arrive where Fea wishes, it will have to confront its own dark shadows that Fea only lightly touches on — most crucially, all the centuries of unspeakable evil they’ve projected onto others, in pursuit of imagining themselves pure. For those outside that community, the definitional issue of race stands out for how gingerly Fea treats it, downplaying even Trump’s crucial conservative reinvention via birtherism. This is, after all, a book about white identity politics, one that skirts the most difficult aspects of that identity’s formation.

Most dramatically, as historian Seth Dowland noted in a recent critical essay for Christian Century, “American evangelicalism and the politics of whiteness,” the Civil War radically reshaped American religious identity. “The center of evangelicalism did not — could not — hold,” he writes. “The sectional crisis and Civil War divided American Protestants regionally and racially into three groups: northern white Protestants, southern white Protestants, and black Protestants. … The near-absence of black believers in white churches was the condition for the development of a distinctly white evangelicalism.”

Like Fea, Dowland admits that his own work didn’t prepare him for the rise of Trump, but he has adjusted his thinking more fundamentally:

What most distinguishes white American evangelicals from other Christians, other religious groups, and nonbelievers is not theology but politics. More than anything else, identifying as an evangelical in the United States denotes certain attitudes about American politics and usually indicates a white racial identity. It’s not that theology isn’t important to white evangelicals; it’s just not the primary thing that distinguishes them from other religious groups.

Fea’s book is about that theology, or rather about how fear, power and nostalgia underlie its faults and distortions. “Believe Me” is extremely compelling in that regard. But it is also cut off from the wider sweep of political history, from which white evangelicals have sought to distance themselves. Race is a submerged subject here, which only emerges distinctively toward the end. Yet, race remains such a central subject, so highly charged, that it’s difficult to fault Fea’s approach — save for his lack of attention to the role of white evangelicals in the abolitionist movement, and subsequent chapters of anti-racist struggle. There are committed anti-racist white evangelicals to this day, whose perspectives, unfortunately, Fea fails to register.

Earlier, I said that Fea’s explanation of Trump’s strong white evangelical support was incomplete. This is true in at least two ways. First, it leaves out the question how Trump became a credible option in the first place, due to his lead role in promoting birtherism, which was equal parts flat-out racism and tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. Fea makes no mention of Trump’s 2011 flirtation with running against Obama, which the then-president undercut by releasing his long-form birth certificate, after Trump had spent months building up toward a paranoid crescendo.

Nor does Fea discuss how Republican doubts about Obama’s citizenship actually increased by early 2012, despite that documentary proof. Neither Trump’s means of making himself a credible option nor evangelicals’ means of disregarding unwanted evidence receive the attention they deserve. Birtherism is hardly a lone example of fantastical, conspiratorial thinking in the annals of American evangelical or racist history — a theme whose absence should be noted.

More broadly, Trump’s omnipresent conspiracy theories meshed with long-standing evangelical responses to modernism and denigrations of professional expertise — which Christopher Douglas at Religion Dispatches has described accurately as “The Religious Origins of Fake News and ‘Alternative Facts’” — as well as older traditions of confabulation and fear, tracing back to colonial America.

As I discussed here in December 2015, conflicts with Native Americans gave rise to America’s first popular literary genre, the captivity narrative, which the influential Cotton Mather used to connect all his perceived enemies together — including “captivity by specters,” in cases of witchcraft — a master conspiracy-theory prototype. “The Puritans’ captivity fears were in some sense a matter of ‘envious reversal,’” I wrote, “a switching of roles of victim and aggressor. It was, after all, the Puritans who were capturing the Native Americans’ whole world, the entire continent on which they lived.”

These represent darker aspects of American history that Fea mostly downplays in his book, even though his third chapter ably discusses a range of fear-infused episodes since colonial times, while the fifth chapter pointedly highlights how Trump tends to suggest that America was greatest during some of the darkest periods of our history. What’s missing is an analysis of how these things reflect a cultivated set of beliefs and cultural practices that repeatedly produce similar responses.

Fea recognizes repeating patterns, but only vaguely. “Despite God’s commands to trust him in times of despair, evangelicals have always been very fearful people,” he notes, “and they have built their understanding of political engagement around the anxiety they have felt amid times of social and cultural change.” That connection between fear, change and political power-seeking is the crux of Fea’s critique, but it never becomes systematic. True to his evangelical roots, Fea seems far more comfortable expressing this in terms of individual failings, even as he clearly wants to press for more supportive broader norms.

Two sets of examples from his exploration of power are instructive. The first concerns its problematic nature, the second, his overview of who the “court evangelists” are. As Fea describes, the problem with the pursuit of power is both that it distracts from the primary concern of saving souls (“Mixing horse manure and ice cream,” a Baptist saying goes, “doesn’t do much to the manure, but it sure does ruin the ice cream”) and that it fails in what it purportedly sets out to achieve. What’s more, he notes, this view has been repeatedly endorsed by those who’ve learned the hard way. The examples are individually telling, but the movement as a whole never seems to learn — nor does Fea draw any comprehensive lessons.

First came Billy Graham, who Fea notes, “was the official spokesperson for American evangelicalism for more than five decades.” After 1968, “Graham’s relationship with Richard Nixon brought him closer to the world of presidential politics than he had ever been before,” but that ultimately proved disastrous when Nixon’s profanity-laced White House tapes were released — making Graham “physically sick” — after which Nixon resigned in disgrace. “Years later, Graham admitted that his relationship with the disgraced former president had ‘muffled those inner monitors that had warned me for years to stay out of partisan politics.’”

But while Graham may have learned a lesson, he couldn’t stop others from making similar mistakes. “Journalist Cal Thomas and evangelical pastor Ed Dobson were two of the Moral Majority’s most important staff members,” Fea notes, “But in 1999, Dobson and Thomas reflect soberly on their experience with Falwell and the Moral Majority in their book Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?‘ They concluded that the answer to the subtitle’s question was a definite ‘no.'” They didn’t abandon their views, but they “were forced to admit that the strategy they forged in the 1980s had failed.”

Finally, he cites the example of David Kuo, an evangelical political operative and speechwriter who served in George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. “Very early in his tenure at the White House Kuo realized that political power and Christian compassion seemed to not mix very well. His efforts at the office of faith-based and neighborhood partnerships were largely ignored unless they were an immediate benefit to Bush’s political fortunes.” His book of regrets was titled, “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.”

The fact that all these individual experiences have not had more of a systemic impact ought to be a matter of major concern for Fea. It underscores how white evangelicals’ individualistic outlook severely limits their capacity to learn wider lessons — a problem, he should note, that has not affected black evangelicals in the same way.

Fea’s overview of the “court evangelists” suffers from a similar analytical shortfall. He divides them into three camps: The old Christian right, preachers of the “prosperity gospel,” and those Fea identifies as “Independent Network Charismatics.” The first includes prominent names such as James Dobson and Jerry Falwell Jr., but Fea focuses attention on Robert Jeffers, a Dallas preacher less well known outside evangelical circles, whom Fea once debated on NPR’s “Interfaith Voices.”

During that exchange, Jeffers said, “Look, the godly principle here is that governments have one responsibility, and that is Romans 13 [which] says to avenge evildoers. God gives government the power of the sword, of capital punishment, of executing wrong-doers.” Fea notes what a dramatic shift this marks from Jeffers’ pre-Trump position. That specific example makes his argument concrete, but adds little in the way of broader understanding.

Regarding the prosperity gospel, Fea cites the work of historian Kate Bowler, writing, “Prosperity preachers teach that faith in God combined with positive thinking and an optimistic attitude will ultimately lead to monetary wealth, good health, and victory over the difficult circumstances of life.” His broader background descriptions are adequate, but his focus on one figure, Paula White, who has a long history with Trump, is not fleshed out much.

Fea mentions but does not elaborate on Trump’s youthful experience hearing sermons from Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” and never delves into how Trump’s own business practices have reflected the influence of such figures, such as this 2011 New York magazine story about Trump’s multi-level vitamin marketing scheme. The prosperity gospel is the utmost in individualism, while at the same time relying on a powerful and persuasive social environment, which Fea’s analysis does not include.

Then there are the Independent Network Charismatics — apparently this is the new evangelical term for what used to be called the New Apostolic Reformation movement. Sarah Palin was the first nationally prominent Republican to be associated with this movement, which primarily comes out of Pentecostalism, but has a long history of being branded as heretical or even pagan, going back to its post-World War II origins in the “Latter Rain” movement. Their profound theological break with 500 years of orthodox Protestantism — proclaiming themselves “prophets” and “apostles” with authority directly from God — does not make a ripple in Fea’s account.

In short, Fea’s individualist focus truncates his analysis repeatedly throughout his book, despite his clear understanding and concern for the importance of community. This does not detract from his stated intention in writing the book, to “spur conversations and initiatives born out of possible answers” to an important question: “How might hope, humility, and history inform the way we white American evangelicals think about politics and other forms of public engagement?” It merely underscores how much broader those conversations must be in order to bear fruit.



**** **** **** **** **** ****


DONALD TRUMP, TIME TRAVELER?

SOME CONSPIRACY THEORY FANS HAVE FOUND A SET OF CHILDREN’S NOVELS, TWO ACTUALLY, WHICH THEY BELIEVE ARE REFERRING TO DONALD TRUMP, AND THAT TRUMP IS A TIME TRAVELER. IT’S A COINCIDENCE ON THE NAME TRUMP, OF COURSE, BUT THAT DOESN’T STOP PEOPLE FROM GETTING INTO THINGS LIKE THIS. THIS IS TOO TRULY “DAFT” FOR ME, BUT EITHER PEOPLE BELIEVE IT OR THEY ENJOY PLAYING ALONG WITH THE JOKE. AS FOR THE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS, I THINK IT IS THE LATTER. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO LOVE LIES, SPOOKY LIES, OUTRAGEOUS LIES, AND YES, MALICIOUS LIES, THE MORE HURTFUL THE BETTER. I BELIEVE TRUMP MAY BE ONE OF THAT SORT. READ THIS ARTICLE BY POLITICO ABOUT BARON TRUMP AND THE INTERNET PHENOMENON. DOES TRUMP SEE HIMSELF IN SOME SUCH FANTASTICAL LIGHT, PERHAPS? DID HE READ THESE BOOKS AS A CHILD? INTERESTING THOUGHT.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/07/baron-trump-novels-victorian-215689
BOOK CLUB
Trump Is the Star of These Bizarre Victorian Novels
And the Internet is losing its mind.
By JAIME FULLER October 07, 2017

The first thing to know about Baron Trump is that he can’t stop talking about his brain. While meeting with the Russian government, he talks about his glorious gray matter. As foreign women fall for him, he mentions his superior intelligence before casting them off. He once sued his tutors, alleging that they owed him money for everything he had taught them. He won.

This Trump does not exist, except in the dusty stacks of a library, digital archive or Reddit thread near you. He’s not a member of the first family, but instead the entirely fictional protagonist of a series of somewhat satirical Victorian novels for kids.


In July, a flock of internet detectives discovered the books. The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulger was published in 1889, and quickly forgotten thereafter, as was its sequel, Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Adventure. They are not timeless, and were quickly overshadowed by more compelling contemporary entries in the fanciful-travel-stories-for-children genre, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Wizard of Oz. Their author, lawyer Ingersoll Lockwood, appears in history mostly for his role in a financial tangle that occurred in the aftermath of an elderly woman's death on the railroad tracks near Philadelphia.

The most pertinent detail for modern readers, of course, is that his books are Trump-adjacent, a coincidence that somehow led a few web denizens to conclude that they were not a mere curiosity, but compelling proof that our president might just be a time traveler.

In these books, the young German protagonist, Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Von Troomp, better known as Baron Trump, travels around and under the globe with his dog Bulger, meeting residents of as-of-yet undiscovered lands before arriving back home at Castle Trump. Trump is precocious, restless, and prone to get in trouble, with a brain so big that his head has grown to twice the normal size—a fact that, as we have seen, he mentions often. No one tells Trump that his belief that he looks great in traditional Chinese garb—his uniform for both volumes—is unwarranted.

Lockwood’s books are spring break meets Carmen Sandiego meets Jabberwocky; at the start of each story, Trump sets out eager to find new civilizations—and manages to get distracted by more than one lady along the way. One of the first places he visits in Travels and Adventures is the land of the toothless and nearly weightless Wind Eaters, who inflate to beach-ball size after a meal. They are generous hosts until Trump starts a fire. The intrigued Wind Eaters draw near, and promptly explode after the air they have ingested expands thanks to the flames. As Captain Go-Whizz, “a sort of leader among them,” chases the murderer, the dog Bulger bites one of the Wind Eaters until he deflates like a punctured balloon. The pair eventually escape, leaving the briefly betrothed Princess Pouf-fah without a mate, and Chief Ztwish-Ztwish and Queen Phew-yoo with many a funeral to plan.

Cover-Image.jpg
This sequence of events—anthropological study, jilting, disaster, escape—is repeated for much of the two books, like when Trump meets the Man Hoppers, who have biker calves and puny T-rex arms, and soon runs away from their crying princess after first acquiring a book with centuries of priceless knowledge. A variation on this plot recurs when Trump visits the Round Bodies. (Perhaps a wandering life such as his was inevitable; as the book explains, he was born in the land of the Melodious Sneezers, whose alphabets consists of achoos of different length and tone.) Marvelous Underground Adventure is a slight twist on the theme, as all the societies are found deep below the dirt in Russia: the land of Transparent Folk, the ant people, and the Happy Forgetters, who dread remembering anything and will, like history, forget Baron Trump soon after he goes above ground.

Suzan Alteri, curator of the Baldwin Collection of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida, could only say that the titles are “really strange. I can’t think of a better word than that.” They are not well-known in the world of children’s books. Alteri hadn’t heard of them until I asked her for a comment.

One Baron Trump reviewer wrote in 1891, “The author labors through three hundred pages of fantastic and grotesque narrative, now and then striking a spark of wit; but the sparks emit little light and no warmth, and one has to fumble for the story.” That’s, if anything, too generous: There are plenty of things that were better left forgotten in the 19th century that people are determined to keep alive in 2017. Baron Trump seems to be one of them.

The Little Baron discharges his tutors. They leave the Baronial hall in high dudgeon. The three weary judges as they appeared at the close of my suit against my tutors.
"The Little Baron discharges his tutors. They leave the Baronial hall in high dudgeon." | "The three weary judges as they appeared at the close of my suit against my tutors."

And yet these strange little travelogues were unearthed, for the sole reason that they, like everything else that manages to inhale our attention spans lately, are about a Trump. Although his name almost mirrors the youngest of the Trump children (in Lockwood’s book, “Baron” is, of course, a title) the character seems eerily like an archetype modeled off the oldest of the clan, or at least an approximation of what he sees in the mirror. “The simple-minded peasantry,” the narrator notes in Marvelous Underground Adventure, “came to look upon him as half-bigwig and half-magician.” The young protagonist lives in a building called Trump—and did we mention that he is so smart that one might assume he went to Wharton? Like the real Trump, our fictional hero is skilled at inspiring nearly every person he meets to greet him with a personalized insult—including Little Man Lump, Little Man All Head, Man Tongs, Flip-Flop, Sir Pendulum Legs, stunted misshapen thing, and great-great-great-great grandson of a barbarian. The fictional Trump, too, greatly prefers familiar comfort foods to trying cuisine from elsewhere. The similarities do not extend much further; this Trump does not mind shaking hands and is willing to sleep somewhere other than Castle Trump.

But because nothing can simply be a coincidence nowadays, these weird tomes quickly became evidence to some wags that our president might be a time traveler. “There’s a very distinct chance,” one YouTube vlogger explained before unfurling his theory this summer, “that I am losing my goddamn mind right now. This cannot be real.” What if, he wondered, Nicola Tesla had shared time travel research with Trump’s MIT-grad uncle, setting off a chain of events that led to both the 2016 election and the publication of these books? “Although the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, I still believe this is complete horseshit.” one commenter noted. Nevertheless, the video has more than 46,000 views.

Three portraits showing the wonderful growth of my brain.
"Three portraits showing the wonderful growth of my brain."

More proof was found on Reddit, where a user noticed that the villain in the Super Mario Bros. movie looks strangely like Donald Trump, and that he tries to “take over Earth by merging their parallel dimension with ours.” Biff Tannen, the casino-owning, bimbo-loving villain in the Back to the Future movies, of all things, acts like our current president. Add it all up, and it either equals time travel or definitive proof that evidence for anything can be found on the internet.

This is not the first time time travel and the presidency have been precariously linked. Last year, a man who claimed to be a time traveler, Seattle lawyer Andrew Basiago, made an improbable and little-noted White House bid. (He will allegedly win either the presidency or the vice-presidency before 2024.) Philosopher John Hospers, who won one electoral vote in 1972, once posed the question, “Is it logically possible to go back in time—say, to 3000 B.C., and help the Egyptians build the pyramids? We must be very careful about this one.” In 2003, an op-ed writer in Asheville wondered if George W. Bush was the first time-traveling president, and in 1989 Spy magazine even jokingly noted that there was something fishy about how Donald Trump, “a man of obviously limited abilities, became fabulously wealthy buying real estate in just the right places at just the right time.” Someone took the time to self-publish a book on Amazon about an alternate reality in which Al Gore won the presidency—and is a time traveler. Obsessing over the intricacies of messing with history is not limited to chief executives. For the July 1941 issue of Weird Tales, former Massachusetts state Senator Roger Sherman Hoar wrote a short story titled, “I Killed Hitler,” in which the narrator travels back to 1899 with the help of a mysterious swami and strangles young Adolph, only to find himself transformed into the dictator when he returns to the present.

princess-chrytallina.jpg
President Donald Trump, who tends to describe the world in lazy and ominous vagueness that allows people to give one sentence an endless number of interpretations, has been accused of predicting both 9/11 and the current tensions with North Korea. His Twitter feed seems to bend the rules of physics to its will, each of his tweets opposed by an equal and opposite sentiment from the recent past. It is freakishly easy to discover a Trump tweet for any occasion, many have noted, as if @realdonaldtrump were a visitor from the future sent to warn us about the real Donald Trump.

The connections go deeper, as they are wont to do in the dust bunnies under the cabinet of good conspiracy theories. Ingersoll also wrote a satirical novella titled 1900: Or the Last President, which begins on a Tuesday in November, “a terrible night for the great city of New York.” Anarchists and socialists have laid siege to a hotel on Fifth Avenue, screaming, “death to the rich man.” In a few months, the president appoints a man named Pence to the cabinet. America seems to be crumbling.

As the internet dug into the digitized underworld of out-of-print novels, the plot seemed to thicken. What if the author possessed the technology to jump through history, instead of our president? What if Lockwood were a modern-day Nostradamus? (He would be joining a veritable pantheon of prognosticators; a Google search of “modern-day Nostradamus” shows that Ann Coulter, Michael Moore, Bill O'Reilly and—yep—Donald Trump share this distinction.)

For others, the books are just an opportunity to “troll on a level we’ve never seen before,” as pro-Trump filmmaker Leigh Scott put it on an Indiegogo fundraising appeal. He has been trying to raise money to make a movie of the Lockwood’s novels, turning “Baron Trump into a fantasy icon like Harry Potter, Dorothy Gale or Alice,” and making the first “motion picture meme,” potentially subbing out the Lockwood books’ phrenology mentions with a guest appearance from Pepe the Frog. His least compelling argument for the Little Baron Trump movie is his belief that Hollywood would jump at the opportunity to option a book in the public domain about Little Chelsea Clinton, a theory that makes considerably less sense than the idea that Donald Trump is a time traveler.


There are, of course, simpler explanations for this sort of historical déjà vu. As Joseph Mazur writes in Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidence, “coincidences are omnipresent.” Only a few years after the Baron Trump books came out, a novella called Futility told the story of an unsinkable sinking ocean liner called the Titan. Jules Verne wrote about space cannons being launched in Florida nearly 100 years before the Kennedy Space Center was built. Some people are convinced that Tom Clancy predicted 9/11. And regarding Donald Trump, it truly isn’t that hard to find coincidences that you could interpret as foreshadowing 2017 in the 19th century. I spent less than five minutes searching “Donald Trump” in the Library of Congress’s newspaper archive and found a headline from 1897 that read, “President Trump Will Preside.”

The cherry-picked Lockwood titles might seem revelatory, but when seen among the rest of his work, he doesn’t look terribly prescient. Does the author’s decision to start a club called Union of the Titans, with a membership limited to men taller than 6’2”, reveal that he knew that several presidents, including the current one, would qualify? No, it does not. It is not clear what his many thoughts about George Washington’s lack of a love life say about the present. The Wonderful Deeds and Doings of Little Giant Boab and his Talking Raven Tabib and the Extraordinary Experiences of Little Captain Doppelkopp also do not seem to say much about the future.

"True portraits of Bulgur and me: I as I appeared in my oriental dress." | "Home again! This time for a good, long rest."

Besides, books always reveal far more about the place they were born than whatever future might await them. “We tend to think of these books as coming out of nowhere,” Alteri says, “but they relate to the history of the time.” The Baron Trump books would not exist without the children made hungry for adventure stories by the publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, or a country starting to look outward and meet new cultures, before deciding its own was supreme. The reviews of the book see them as a charming, fun-size version of Baron Munchausen’s adventures, which explains Trump’s title, his destination of Russia and the strangeness of the territories he visits. Lockwood’s short story The Last President is steeped in paranoia over the gold standard and fears about what would happen to a country still cleft by civil war. If anything, Lockwood’s works are disquieting because their mood of anxiety and reprisal of old battles feels so familiar.

You don’t need to believe in time travel to worry about that, though. Our own incarnation of Trump taught us that lesson all on his own.

JANUARY 29, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

DESTROYING EVIDENCE IS A CRIME, I’M SURE. IS KNOWINGLY EMPLOYING ILLEGAL ALIENS? OF COURSE. I SUPPOSE HE THINKS DOING THIS MAKES HIM SAFE BECAUSE HE HAS KEPT NO RECORDS WORKER BY WORKER, BUT I’LL BET THERE IS A RECORD OF THE LABOR COSTS FOR THE GOLF COURSE OF SOME SORT. BESIDES, SOMEHOW THE OH NO WA PO FOUND OUT. OVER A DOZEN OF THE FIRED EMPLOYEES HAVE COME FORWARD TO TESTIFY ABOUT IT, SO THAT WILL CERTAINLY BE EVIDENCE. I HOPE TO SEE MORE ABOUT THIS SOON. WHAT ABOUT HIS OTHER PROPERTIES, I WONDER? COULD HE HAVE FIRED THEM ALSO? ANOTHER POSSIBILITY IS THAT ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE AT THAT SITE COULD HAVE MADE A THREAT TO TELL INFORMATION ABOUT HIM. BUT WHY FIRE THEM ALL? A POORLY KEPT SECRET?

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/26/politics/trump-golf-course-undocumented-workers-government-shutdown/index.html
Washington Post: Trump golf course fires undocumented employees during shutdown
By Sophie Tatum
Updated 6:56 PM ET, Sat January 26, 2019

Washington (CNN)Approximately a dozen undocumented employees at Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, were fired last week, as lawmakers -- including President Donald Trump -- were in the middle of a partial government shutdown over funding for a border wall, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.

The Post spoke to the workers and their attorney who said the abrupt firing took place on January 18, despite some of the individuals having worked as staff at the club for several years.

Last year, The New York Times reported that his private club in New Jersey had employed people who managers allegedly knew were in the country illegally.

The two women who spoke to The Times last year said that supervisors at the club took active measures to help them avoid detection and hold on to their jobs, but the paper said there was no evidence that Trump or Trump Organization executives knew of their immigration status.

The Post reported that at Trump National Golf Club, the company told the workers that they found their immigration documents were fake during an audit.

CNN has reached out to the Trump Organization and the White House for comment.

Eric Trump, the President's son and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said in an emailed statement to The Post: "We are making a broad effort to identify any employee who has given false and fraudulent documents to unlawfully gain employment. Where identified, any individual will be terminated immediately."

According to The Post, Eric Trump added that it is one of the reasons "my father is fighting so hard for immigration reform. The system is broken."

Gabriel Sedano, a former maintenance worker who had worked at the club since 2005, was fired and spoke to The Post.

"I told them they needed to consider us. I had worked almost 15 years for them in this club, and I'd given the best of myself to this job," Sedano said, according to the paper. "I'd never done anything wrong, only work and work."

CNN's Veronica Stracqualursi contributed to this report.


SEE THIS MADDOW VIDEO ON THE SUBJECT OF THE FIRINGS:
Undocumented Trump employees abruptly fired amid wall hype: WaPo
David Fahrenthold, reporter for the Washington Post, talks with Rachel Maddow about new reporting on undocumented workers at a Trump golf course who were suddenly fired as Donald Trump escalated his border wall rhetoric, despite working for years with forged documents.
Jan. 29, 2019



THESE ANTI-WAR DEMOCRATS HAVE BEEN PORTRAYED IN SEVERAL OTHER ARTICLES AS BEING IN FAVOR OF MADURO’S SOCIALIST STANCE, RATHER THAN AGAINST AN AMERICAN MILITARY REGIME CHANGE EFFORT. EITHER POSITION COULD BE CRITICIZED, BUT THE REPUBLICANS ARE ALWAYS READY TO INTERVENE IN ANOTHER’S NATION IN THIS WAY. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WHAT PUTIN DID TO US LAST ELECTION IS ONE OF FORCE RATHER THAN SUBTERFUGE. TRUMP IS TALKING ABOUT SENDING IN TROOPS.

https://www.newsweek.com/anti-war-democrats-speak-out-venezuela-1305834
ANTI-WAR DEMOCRATS SPEAK OUT AGAINST DONALD TRUMP'S ACTIONS ON VENEZUELA
BY TOM O'CONNOR ON 1/25/19 AT 3:26 PM

At least three Democratic representatives known for their vocal anti-war positions have spoken out against President Donald Trump's intervention in Venezuela's political crisis.

As Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro entered his second term earlier this month, the country became increasingly destabilized by protests against what has been widely seen as government mishandling of economic woes that have led to historic hyperinflation, lack of essential goods and a mass exodus of refugees from the socialist country.

On Wednesday, opposition leader and National Assembly President Juan Guaidó declared himself president, a move recognized by the Trump administration, which then cut ties with Maduro and called for him to step down.

Critics have likened Trump's decision to a coup attempt, as well as the latest episode in an extensive history of U.S. intervention in the region. On Twitter, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota argued Friday that Trump's move was illegal, likely rooted in a desire to access Venezuela's oil reserves, and irresponsible given the government shutdown. That impasse, the longest in U.S. history, arose from a standoff over the president's $5.7 billion border wall proposal.

“We cannot hand pick leaders for other countries on behalf of multinational corporate interests. The legislature cannot seize power from the President, and Venezuela's Supreme Court has declared their actions unconstitutional," Omar tweeted. She also shared a Democracy Now article in which former U.N. independent expert Alfred-Maurice de Zayas argued that Trump's move was illegal.

"We can’t afford to get involved in costly interventions abroad when tens of millions struggle to access housing, healthcare, and clean water right here at home. U.S. meddling abroad always ends badly for us, and the people we claim to be 'liberating,'" she added. "If we really want to support the Venezuelan people, we can lift the economic sanctions that are inflicting suffering on innocent families, making it harder for them to access food and medicines, and deepening the economic crisis. We should support dialogue, not a coup!"

GettyImages-1092286678
Senator Bernie Sanders speaks as, from left, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Senator Cory Booker, Representative Ilhan Omar, Representative Joe Neguse and Representative Ro Khanna listen during a news conference on January 10. Khanna, Omar and Sanders have warned against any regime change attempts by the U.S. in Venezuela.
ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Omar became the first Somali-American, and one of the first two Muslims, voted into Congress in November when Democrats took control of the House of Representatives. She was born in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, and her family fled civil war and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya before resettling in the United States. Since taking office earlier this month, she has been a vocal opponent of U.S. intervention abroad, including its support for Saudi Arabia's war against the Zaidi Shiite rebels known as Ansar Allah, or Houthis, in Yemen.

Now she has taken on U.S. involvement in the Western Hemisphere. The Trump administration has discussed the prospect of regime change in Venezuela, a move that would follow decades of U.S. efforts to defeat socialist movements in Latin America through coups and support for right-wing forces.

As the international community reacted to the crisis on Thursday, Omar tweeted: "A US backed coup in Venezuela is not a solution to the dire issues they face. Trump's efforts to install a far right opposition will only incite violence and further destabilize the region. We must support Mexico, Uruguay & the Vatican's efforts to facilitate a peaceful dialogue."

Omar's statement followed that by another vocal critic of U.S. support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen. California Representative Ro Khanna also condemned plans to oust Maduro, whose economic policies he criticized. Khanna said in a statement, "The United States should not anoint the leader of the opposition in Venezuela during an internal, divided conflict."

"There is no doubt the Maduro’s economic policies have been terrible, and he has engaged in financial mismanagement and also political authoritarianism. But crippling sanctions and threats of military action are making life worse for ordinary Venezuelans, and the U.S. stands alone in its decision to impose economic sanctions against the Venezuelan government," Khanna said.

"We should work to support the efforts of Uruguay, Mexico and the Holy See for a negotiated settlement and end the sanctions that are making the hyperinflation worse. I plan to circulate a letter to my colleagues in the Trump Administration urging them to immediately change course in its policy toward Venezuela," he added.

GettyImages-869002854
Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii listens to testimony from Thae Yong Ho, former chief of mission at the North Korean embassy in the United Kingdom, during a House foreign affairs committee hearing on November 1, 2017. Anti-war politicians like Gabbard have supported President Donald Trump's efforts to limit U.S. intervention abroad but have condemned his attempts to expand it.
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

At least one presidential hopeful has also weighed in against Trump. Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has been outspoken in her criticism of U.S. adventurism across the globe, especially in Syria, where she traveled to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2017. Washington and its allies have accused the Syrian leader of war crimes, including the use of internationally banned chemical weapons against civilians and the U.S. sponsored insurgents attempting to overthrow him following a 2011 rebel and jihadi uprising against his rule.

Gabbard, Khanna and Omar have tacitly backed Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria, whose government considers the U.S. military presence illegal. They have also supported Trump's calls for a diplomatic solution with North Korea as the U.S. conducted an unprecedented peace process with the nuclear-armed state. But Gabbard pointed out what she felt to be hypocrisy in the administration's approach to Venezuela.

"In the morning, Trump promises Kim of North Korea, 'We won't wage regime-change war against you.' In the evening, Kim watches Trump carrying out regime-change in Venezuela. Kim looks at our actions, not empty promises," Gabbard tweeted. "The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela. Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don't want other countries to choose our leaders—so we have to stop trying to choose theirs."

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent and self-proclaimed democratic socialist, argued that Maduro's government "has been waging a violent crackdown on Venezuelan civil society, violated the constitution by dissolving the National Assembly and was re-elected last year in an election that many observers said was fraudulent."

He also noted that "the economy is a disaster" and said the U.S. "should support the rule of law, fair elections and self-determination for the Venezuelan people" as well as "condemn the use of violence against unarmed protesters and the suppression of dissent."

Still, he maintained that the U.S. "must learn the lessons of the past and not be in the business of regime change or supporting coups—as we have in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic." He added, "The United States has a long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries; we must not go down that road again."

GettyImages-1087975554
Venezuela's National Assembly head Juan Guaidó, left, and President Nicolás Maduro. On January 23, Guaidó declared himself the country's "acting president" on the anniversary of a 1958 uprising that overthrew a military dictatorship.
YURI CORTEZ/FEDERICO PARRA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Fellow democratic socialists Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, also one of the first two Muslims voted into Congress in November, and New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have not yet publicly commented on the issue. But the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which they were both members, did comment in a lengthy, deeply critical statement.

RELATED STORIES
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"We call upon the US government to immediately cease and desist all attempts to intervene in the internal politics of Venezuela and break with its shameful legacy of imperial control in the region," the organization wrote. "Further, we call upon DSA chapters and DSA-supported political representatives to mobilize in this particularly critical moment around a campaign of solidarity with the Venezuelan people, aimed specifically at reversing the US government’s disastrous and counterproductive sanctions against Venezuela."

Many Republicans have voiced support for Trump's actions on Venezuela, while Democratic reactions have widely ranged from mixed to muted. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted Thursday that "America stands by the people of #Venezuela as they rise up against authoritarian rule and demand respect for human rights and democracy."

The Venezuela crisis has also polarized the international community, with U.S. allies like Canada and the U.K., along with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru, recognizing Guaidó. Meanwhile, longtime critics of Washington's foreign policy, such as Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua as well as China, Iran, Russia, Syria and Turkey, have come out in support of Maduro.


THIS REPORT, COMING FROM SEVERAL SOURCES, IS MORE DISTURBING THAN JUST ANY OLD ADDITIONAL LIE WOULD BE. SEE THE CNN AND THEN THE HUFFINGTON POST REPORTS BELOW. IS TRUMP UNABLE TO KEEP STRAIGHT WHAT HAS HAPPENED? OR IS THIS JUST HIS SALES SPIEL ON BORDER ISSUES? REMEMBER, IT IS THE CONSERVATIVE WHITE CITIZENS WHOM HE WISHES TO SELL TO, WHICH MEANS THAT HE NEEDS TO BE EMOTIONAL MUCH MORE THAN FACTUAL OR RATIONAL. I DO HOPE SOME REAL INFORMATION WILL COME OUT TO CONFIRM OR DISCOUNT THE STORY. HOWEVER, RACHEL MADDOW HAS ANOTHER POSSIBLE SOURCE FOR THE STORY. SEE HUFFINGTON POST ARTICLE BELOW AFTER THIS ONE.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/27/us/human-trafficking-fact-check/index.html
Experts: Trump's tape-bound women trafficking claim is misleading
CNN Digital Expansion 2016
Polo Sandoval
By Sarah Jorgensen and Polo Sandoval, CNN
Updated 10:59 AM ET, Mon January 28, 2019

VIDEO -- Examining Trump's claims of human trafficking at border 03:18

(CNN) In Friday's Rose Garden comments temporarily ending the shutdown, President Trump repeated an anecdote that has become a common refrain in his arguments for the building of his border wall.

"Women are tied up," Trump said. "They're bound. Duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases they can't even breathe."

But Sandra -- a victim of human trafficking whom CNN is identifying only by her first name for her safety -- said that this was far from her experience after being lured across the Rio Grande with promises of a better life. Sandra said she was unaware that she would be exploited by a sex-trafficking operation in the US.

"I don't know where he is getting his information," Sandra told CNN. "As a victim who was brought into the US, I was not bound or gagged with tape."

Three legal experts who regularly work with human trafficking victims in the United States interviewed by CNN all agree with Sandra's assertion that Trump's vivid descriptions of women being bound with duct tape and smuggled across the border are not reflective of the vast majority of human trafficking cases in the US.

"I have worked on human trafficking on multiple continents in multiple countries for more than two decades, and in all the work that I've done with trafficking victims, I have met one who was actually kidnapped and thrown into a car," Martina Vandenberg of Washington D.C.'s Human Trafficking Legal Center said. "It is much easier to coerce people through threats to their families. It is much easier to convince someone that they are heading towards a better life."

The White House did not respond to repeated requests from CNN for an explanation of the President's comments. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment.

Approximately two-thirds of trafficking victims in the United States are US citizens, according to Vandenberg. Of the smaller percentage of victims that are foreign-born, most legaly come into the US on various visas, unaware of the forced labor or sex that awaits them at the hands of traffickers.

Evangeline Chan of the New York-based nonprofit Safe Horizon, which helps victims of many kinds of abuse, including human trafficking, told CNN that many victims are lured into the country with false promises of a better life. Chan gave the example of a person applying for a job in the US through a recruiting agency and then entering legally with a temporary work visa to fill the job.

"So they come in legally. They come in through legal ports of entry. But once they're here they realize that the employment that's offered and the conditions that they're working is very different than what was promised them," Chan said. "But then at that point, they have been threatened with real force. They have been beaten, they have been threatened with deportation, their families may have been threatened with harm, and then they're forced to stay in that situation and they don't have means to escape."

Sandra echoed that experience, saying that the threats to her family were keeping her under the control of her pimp.

"They don't tie our hands or cover our mouths," she said. "They bring us over with threats of violence against our families. That's the reality."

In a database of 1,435 human trafficking indictments since 2009 maintained by the Human Trafficking Legal Center, Vandenberg said she found only 26 instances of kidnapping and only one mention of a victim being bound with duct tape. That case's victim was a US citizen.

"To see what the trends are in human trafficking, the trends that aren't sort of discernable when you are working on individual cases but can really only be seen from a 50,000-foot level, when you are looking at all of the aggregated data," Vandenberg said. "And you know, one case mentioning duct tape, the way Donald Trump talks about this, it makes it sound like this is common practice, that every single case has this particular fact scenario, and he's just making this up out of whole cloth."

The experts all cautioned that the President's rhetoric about human trafficking could obscure the horrific reality that most trafficking victims experience. According to Lori Cohen, of Sanctuary for Families' antitrafficking initiative, the US citizens who face trafficking include young adults emerging from the foster care system, LGBT youth who have been kicked out of their homes and adults involved in prostitution.

"I don't know where the President's information is coming from," Cohen said. "I don't believe it's coming from law enforcement. It's certainly not coming from victims, and it's not coming from the dozens of service providers who I've spoken with across the country. None of us have seen anything that looks like what the President has described."

The experts all emphasized that while the President's grim scenario was not impossible, it was highly uncommon.

"The threatened use of harm and the threatened harm to family and friends is far greater than physically restraining a person and dragging them here," Safe Horizon's Chan said. "It's very rarely seen that that's how it's done, at least in my experience."

Sandra, who is a client of Sanctuary for Families, said that the President would get a better perspective on human trafficking by speaking to people like herself.

"I don't think believe the President has ever sat down with a human trafficking victim to familiarize himself with their experience," she said. "But I don't think he'll ever do that, because the reality does not fit his fictional narrative."

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Evangeline Chan's last name.


TRUMP HAS BEEN REPEATEDLY TELLING A BIZARRE STORY, AS THOUGH HE IS OBSESSED WITH IT. IT’S TIME FOR A DECISION TO BE MADE, I THINK. HE MAY BECOME MORE DANGEROUS NOW. ACCORDING TO HUFFPO, HE HAS TOLD THIS STORY 22 TIMES IN TEN DAYS. I DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY GOT SUCH A PRECISE NUMBER, BUT IF HE TOLD IT TO REPORTERS, THEY WOULD KEEP A RECORD OF IT, I THINK. I NOTICE THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE IS PAYING ATTENTION TO THIS. I JUST GOOGLED SICARIO, AND THE WORD MEANS “HITMAN,” SO IT’S PRETTY BAD, PROBABLY. IT IS A FOUR STAR FILM FROM 2015. IF YOU’RE FEELING BRAVE ENOUGH TO WATCH IT, GO TO: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3397884/. PERSONALLY, I'M NOT.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rachel-maddow-suggests-trump-may-have-seen-taped-trafficked-women-on-sicario_us_5c4fdb9ae4b0d9f9be687570
01/29/2019 04:34 am ET
Rachel Maddow: Trump May Have Cooked Up ‘Taped Women’ From ‘Sicario’
“in any normal administration it would be insane to suggest” this, she concedes.
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By Mary Papenfuss

President Donald Trump has been obsessively repeating a horror tale of trafficked women in cars at the southern border, their mouths taped shut, so they “can’t even breathe.” The problem is that trafficked women and border officials apparently have no idea what he’s talking about. Now Rachel Maddow, along with some media outlets, believe it could be possible that Trump witnessed it with his very own eyes — on the violent movie “Sicario: Day of the Soldado.”

The film shows such a scene at the Mexican border, eerily similar to what Trump has described. There is also a scene of Muslim prayer rugs in the southern desert, which has also popped up in a Trump tweet. He has talked about the smugglers’ amazing cars, just like in the movie.

All are “plot points in the same movie — which is fiction,” Maddow emphasized Monday.

“Now in any normal administration it would be insane to suggest ... even joke about the president of the United States seeing stuff in a movie ... and maybe thinking it was real — or at least real enough to justify an actual military deployment of thousands of active duty U.S. troops to the border,” she said.

On Saturday Vox reported that an email was sent out by a Customs and Border Protection official following the president’s claims, asking agents to immediately forward “any information” about taped women. The agency has yet to comment on Trump’s stories which he repeated 22 times in 10 days.

The Washington Post reached out to border personnel, women who had once been trafficked and immigration organizations, and were unable to find a single example of what the president was talking about.

Trump’s movie-watching habits could be pertinent when the House Armed Services Committee convenes a hearing Tuesday about the border and why exactly troops were deployed.

Check out Maddow in the video above, then see if the clips below ring any bells.

Embedded video

ALT- Immigration 🛂 “immi”
@ALT_uscis
Replying to @ALT_uscis
And 25 minutes into the movie, we are at taped women in the back of a van.
The president gets his immigration crisis information from on-demand.

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ALT- Immigration 🛂 “immi”
@ALT_uscis
Replying to @ALT_uscis
And 90 minutes into the movie. The duct tape over their faces shows up. I am convinced this movie was trump’s border crisis research

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409 people are talking about this
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Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Border rancher: “We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal.” Washington Examiner People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise.

95.4K
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ALT- Immigration 🛂 “immi”
@ALT_uscis
Replying to @ALT_uscis
This is the scene

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WOMEN TIED UP WITH TAPE AMAZING CARS PRAYER RUGS AT THE BORDER AND THE DEPLOYMENT OF ARMY TO THE MEXICAN BORDER ARE TAKEOUTS FROM A MOVIE WHICH WERE USED TO JUSTIFY TRUMP’S DECLARING A BORDER “EMERGENCY.”

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/democrats-aim-for-insights-on-national-security-in-new-hearings-1433534019809
Democrats aim for insights on national security in new hearings
Rachel Maddow runs through some of the many open questions about the Donald Trump administration and national security, from Trump's cinematic justifications for a border crisis to assessments of worldwide threats.
Jan. 28, 2019



SPECIAL COUNSEL TRANSPARENCY ACT

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/these-senators-of-both-parties-have-a-plan-to-ensure-that-robert-muellers-report-becomes-public/
These senators — of both parties — have a plan to ensure that Robert Mueller’s report becomes public
written by Alex Henderson January 28, 2019

With Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation possibly coming into the home stretch, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has announced a bipartisan bill he says would guarantee that any special counsel report becomes available to both Congress and the American public.

The Special Counsel Transparency Act of 2019 was introduced by Blumenthal and Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley (who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee) along with other Committee members. The idea behind the bill, clearly, is making certain that Congress and the American public find out exactly what is in a special counsel’s final report—for example, the one that Mueller will be issuing at some point.

On Facebook, Blumenthal announced, “The Special Counsel Transparency Act is about a simple, bipartisan principle: the public’s right to know. Senator Chuck Grassley and I are leading legislation to guarantee every Special Counsel completes a report with findings and evidence—and directly discloses it to Congress and the American people.”

Blumenthal added, “Transparency matters. Our bipartisan bill would require a report whenever a special counsel finishes an investigation, is fired or resigns, assuring that the results cannot be sealed or selectively censored.”

In an official U.S. Senate press release, Grassley asserted that during the recent Senate confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee William Barr, he was “encouraged” to hear Barr “place a high priority on transparency” when asked about Mueller’s probe. But Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire has gone on the record as saying that she will not vote for Barr’s confirmation because she is still “concerned with Mr. Barr’s very broad view of executive authority, especially given that we are still in the middle of the Mueller investigation.”

On Facebook, Blumenthal also posted, “A special counsel is appointed only in rare, serious circumstances involving grave violations of public trust. In those cases, the public has a right to the facts. Our bipartisan bill makes it the default that the American public have access to the full story.”


THIS IS NOT A NEW ARTICLE, BUT STILL SO APPLICABLE. TRUMP VERY LIKELY IS TO A GREAT DEGREE INARTICULATE, BUT THE THINGS HE COMES UP WITH ARE REALLY OFFENSIVE. WHAT KIND OF COUNTRIES ARE THEY AGAIN?? NEXT TIME IT’S TIME TO VOTE, FOLKS, REMEMBER THIS.

https://www.alternet.org/2018/04/watch-charles-blow-explain-why-trumps-breeding-tweet-so-dangerous-minorities/
Watch Charles Blow Explain Why Trump’s ‘Breeding’ Tweet Is So Dangerous for Minorities
written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story
April 19, 2018

The president knew exactly what he was doing.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow was invited onto CNN’s “New Day” on Thursday morning to address a Wednesday tweet from Donald Trump about undocumented immigrants that included the curious phrase “breeding concept,” that has resulted in accusations of over presidential racism.

[THE QUOTE:
Sitting down with CNN host Chris Cuomo, Blow was asked about Trump’s tweet that read: “There is a Revolution going on in California. Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept. Jerry Brown is trying to back out of the National Guard at the Border, but the people of the State are not happy. Want Security & Safety NOW!”]

“Words matter and once again, President Trump is under fire for a tweet on immigration in so-called sanctuary cities,” host Cuomo began. “Now, the facts of this: there’s a lot of exaggeration, however the phrase, ‘breeding concept’, has some outraged. Did the president cross a line? What’s the simple answer?”

“Breed is a concept you normally apply to animals and some plants and breeding is the reproduction of those animals and plants so what his intent is, who can ever know” Blow began. “The effect is it’s dehumanizing of people, the otherizing of people and the animalizing of people and once you take a human being and reduce the humanity in that person where your fellow citizens no longer see that person as fully human, it opens the gate for you to do all manner of things to those people.”

“That is a very historical concept, that’s an ancient concept,” Blow continued. “We’ve seen that in recent history where during the crack epidemic, for instance, we had this crack science that labeled some people who were users and some people who were sellers as super predators. It dehumanized then to the point where you were allowed to then promote draconian policies because all of a sudden they weren’t human like you and I.”

“Once you define somebody as less than, then there’s an expectation they’ll be treated as less than,” host Cuomo agreed.

“Not than less than human, less than another in importance in society. Fully less than human and that’s a real thing,” Blow added. “Maybe if it was someone else, you might be able to make an argument but not with this particular person. This president has a history of problematic racial language and actions and therefore, you don’t really give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Asked if Trump’s racist dog-whistle “was serving a purpose,” now that Trump is losing the backing go GOP lawmakers,” Blow said it odd in its timing. [sic]

“Particularly for somebody that already has a re-election committee. A lot of things play into it, his problem around race plays in to it and his legal problems play in to it,” Blow explained.

Watch the video below via CNN:
[GO TO WEBSITE.]

BREEDINGCALIFORNIACHARLES BLOWDONALD TRUMPIMMIGRATION


TRUMP’S PLAYMATES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3B-tw2sB0
#newsnight
Donald Trump's business links to the mob - BBC Newsnight
BBC Newsnight
Published on Mar 4, 2016

Donald Trump now looks like the front-runner to be the Republican candidate for the US presidency. One of his big appeals is his business success - and his claim that his wealth means he can't be bought and sold. But there's evidence which not only casts doubt on Trump's wealth claims - but also reveals his history of business relationships with figures connected to organised crime. John Sweeney reports.

Newsnight is the BBC's flagship news and current affairs TV programme - with analysis, debate, exclusives, and robust interviews.


MOORE SAYS IN THIS EXCELLENT INTERVIEW VIDEO, “DEMOCRACY HAS NO SELF-CORRECTING MECHANISM.” PEOPLE WHO WANT GOOD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAVE TO FIGHT FOR THEM, HOPEFULLY WITH LAW BUT PROBABLY NOT COMPLETELY. AM I BEING HOSTILE? NO. I’M BEING REALISTIC, AND GENUINELY PATRIOTIC. ANOTHER QUOTATION: “BE YE AS WISE AS SERPENTS AND AS GENTLE AS DOVES.” WAS JESUS FOMENTING A REVOLUTION? YES, BUT ONE FOR GOOD OVER EVIL. WHY DO WE HAVE TO FIGHT EVIL SO ACTIVELY? BECAUSE GOOD HAS TO BE CULTIVATED AND EVIL GROWS NATURALLY. MIGHT IS [TO BE CONSIDERED] RIGHT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-A76FtooqQ
Michael Moore: Are We Going to Be Like the “Good Germans” Who Let Hitler Rise to Power?
DEMOCRACY NOW!
Published on Sep 21, 2018

https://democracynow.org - In his new documentary “Fahrenheit 11/9,” filmmaker Michael Moore interviews the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, who describes President Trump’s policy of family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border and the large-scale detention of immigrant children as a “crime against humanity.” Moore also looks at the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany and compares it to the rise of Trump in the United States.

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET: https://democracynow.org

Please consider supporting independent media by making a donation to Democracy Now! today: https://democracynow.org/donate
Facebook: http://facebook.com/democracynow


MOORE FROM MICHAEL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRRxG4L4upA
Michael Moore on Trump, Brexit and his new film


STAREDOWN ON THE MALL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZMzhnprCO8

NATIVE AMERICANS SPEAK THEIR PIECE BEAUTIFULLY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2mH0r79D6g


IF YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO STONEHENGE, IF YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT IS, WATCH THIS ESPECIALLY GOOD TIME TEAM SHOW ON STONEHENGE. EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT IT, WATCH IT ANYWAY, BECAUSE THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS ARE AS BUSY AS BEAVERS ALL AROUND THE WORLD, AND THEY HAVE MADE NEW DISCOVERIES. BON APETITE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GVfGUk48I
Time Team Special 36 (2009) - The Secrets of Stonehenge (Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire)

JANUARY 28, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

RACIALLY SPEAKING, NORTHERNERS DON’T HAVE CLEAN HANDS BY A LONG SHOT. UNTIL SOMEBODY SUES, NO REDRESS OCCURS. IN THIS CASE, THE ACLU HAS SUED, WITH THE POSSIBILITY OF FEDERAL FUNDS BEING WITHHELD. THIS RACISM ISN’T COMING FROM THE TOP DOWN, BUT BUBBLING UP FROM THE GRASSROOTS LEVEL. IT ISN’T ENOUGH TO BLAME HITLER FOR WHAT HE DID. IT ISN’T ONE BAD PERSON, BUT A CONDITION OF EVIL COMING FROM A LARGER NUMBER OF PEOPLE. THE CASE OF THIS STUDENT WHO USED A SWASTIKA IN A PROJECT, AND HIS TEACHER WHO CALLED IT “ARTISTIC,” IS FRIGHTENING TO ME. WHERE DOES THE CONSCIENCE WEIGH IN TO PREVENT THESE THINGS? IF THIS IS WHAT RELIGION DOES FOR US, I WILL GO TO SOME ETHICAL HUMANISM INSTEAD. TO BE ETHICAL AND HUMANISTIC ARE GOOD THINGS.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paw-paw-michigan-school-district-accused-racially-hostile-environment-aclu/
"Artistic" swastika? School district accused of racially hostile environment
UPDATED ON: JANUARY 28, 2019 / 9:58 AM / AP

The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan has filed a federal discrimination complaint alleging that there's a racially hostile environment at a southwest school district that was previously criticized for its use of the Redskin name and image as a mascot. The ACLU filed the discrimination complaint last Monday with the U.S. Department of Education against Paw Paw Public Schools.

The ACLU's complaint said "there are ongoing acts of harassment, discrimination, bullying, intimidation, and use of imagery and language that causes humiliation," including multiple incidents involved racial slurs. One instance involved a teacher allegedly saying a student's use of a swastika in a project was "artistic."

A public records request found that there were numerous instances of discrimination against racial, religious and ethnic groups at the district from 2015 through 2017, said ACLU attorney Mark Fancher. "The level of fear that appears to exist in that community among groups that have been targeted by the bigotry is such that we really felt something extraordinary needed to happen in that community," Fancher said.

District Superintendent Sonia Lark issued a statement denying the allegations, saying that the ACLU hasn't conducted sufficient research on the issue. She said the district has promptly and effectively addressed discrimination complaints.

"District staff and administration work tirelessly to promote diversity and to encourage cultural sensitivity," Lark said. "The district does not tolerate unlawful discrimination or harassment."

The school district also received attention for voting in 2017 to keep the Redskin name and image as the high school's mascot. The ACLU is asking the Education Department to launch an investigation and that the district work to eliminate discrimination.

The complaint noted that federal funds could be withheld from the district if it doesn't cooperate. The district hasn't yet been notified if the complaint will be investigated, but school officials will fully cooperate, Lark said.

First published on January 28, 2019

© 2019 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


HERE IS ANOTHER SICKENING ARTICLE ABOUT WHITES ABUSING BLACKS. WHY? JUST BECAUSE!! ONE STATEMENT HERE SAYS THAT FOR “AT LEAST TWO YEARS” THESE RACIST EVENTS HAVE BEEN OCCURRING. IF THAT IS A CLEAR BEGINNING POINT, THE MANAGEMENT SHOULD BE ABLE TO FIND OUT WHO CAME INTO A SUPERVISORY POSITION AT THAT TIME AND IS ALLOWING THESE BEHAVIORS, WHO HAS A KKK OR NEO-NAZI LINK, IN WHAT SECTIONS OF THE OPERATION ARE THESE EVENTS CENTERED, WHO MAKES DISPARAGING RACIAL REFERENCES, WHO HAS SENT EMAILS AROUND THE OFFICE OF THAT KIND, ETC. GERALD JOHNSON, HIMSELF, IS BLACK, AND A WINNER OF A NUMBER OF AWARDS WITHIN THE COMPANY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSvuapSWTMI

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toledo-gm-plant-gm-acknowledges-shockingly-racist-incidents-at-toledo-plant-amid-lawsuits/
By DEAN REYNOLDS CBS NEWS January 22, 2019, 6:40 PM
GM acknowledges shockingly racist incidents at Toledo plant

VIDEO – RACISM ACCUSATIONS, DERRICK BROOKS

Chicago — General Motors said it is urgently working to identify which of its employees turned a Toledo plant into a cesspool of racism. African American workers allege they were routinely disparaged, not only with the n-word but with nooses, swastikas and "whites only" signs on bathroom doors.

GM's admission comes after months of sidestepping claims from 11 workers.

"I'm absolutely outraged by the fact that this kind of behavior is still able to show up in any one of our workplaces. We have zero tolerance for any kind of behavior like this," said Gerald Johnson, GM vice president for manufacturing.

reynolds-gm-plant-0117en-frame-1.jpg
"Whites only" was seen written on a bathroom wall at a GM plant in Toledo, Ohio. CBS NEWS

Two federal lawsuits have been filed accusing GM of ignoring racial harassment. The suits claim that for at least two years, African Americans at the plant were called "boys" and "monkeys." They were also told to "go back to Africa where they belong."

"What's the big deal about nooses?" a white supervisor was quoted as saying during a meeting about racial tolerance. "There was never a black person who was lynched who didn't deserve it."

"I'm a black man and I'm all too familiar with dealing with these kinds of issues," said Derrick Brooks, who worked at GM from 2016 until last year. "To have to worry about coming to work and being called a certain name or being treated a certain way, those individuals need to be made whole again and the right thing needs to be done by this company."

GM said when it identifies those responsible, they will be fired.

© 2019 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.


THE LAWSUITS MENTIONED ARE DISCUSSED HERE. THE TOLEDO PLANT IS THE ONLY ONE MENTIONED, BUT IF ALL 23 COMPLAINTS COME FROM THAT ONE SITE, THERE IS NO MANAGEMENT ACTIVE THERE, JUST A KIND OF CHAOS, PERHAPS. SOMETIMES PEOPLE IN POWER FIND IT MORE CONVENIENT TO SIMPLY CLOSE THEIR EYES.

https://www.wxyz.com/news/lawsuit-claims-gm-plant-employees-were-subject-to-racist-remarks-acts
Lawsuit claims GM plant employees were subject to racist remarks & acts
Posted: 3:03 PM, Nov 29, 2018 Updated: 3:03 PM, Nov 29, 2018
By: Max White

Eight employees at a General Motors plant in Toledo, Ohio, have filed a federal lawsuit alleging they were subject to racist remarks and acts in the last couple of years.

According to the lawsuit, there were several incidents that involved nooses being found at the plant or being thrown at African American workers.

On March 22, 2017, the lawsuit alleges that three nooses were found in the Casing Machine Department on lanyards at about 11:30 p.m.

Then on April 25, 2017, the lawsuit says another noose was found hanging in the Assembly Room between the first and second shifts. Another was found against a machine on May 2, 2017.

Then, on June 2, 2017, the lawsuit alleges a White employee threw a rope that looked like a noose at an African-American employee but says GM determined it was “horseplay” and put the employee under the horseplay Rule* for 30 days.

According to the lawsuit, the African-American workers also dealt with vilification and racially hostile remarks and epithets within the last four years.”

The lawsuit lists 23 different incidents which include swastikas being painted on restroom stalls, stick figures drawn with nooses around their necks in stalls, calling African-American employees “monkeys,” African-American employees being warned because a White employee’s dad was “in the Ku Klux Klan,” a “Whites only” sign hanging from a bathroom stall and much more.

The lawsuit also mentions that a White female dating an African-American who ran for union office had her election posters vandalized with racial slurs and drawings.

According to the lawsuit, GM failed “to take prompt corrective action” about the situations that were reported and caused each of the employees to fear for their safety.

The lawsuit also states that in March, the Ohio Civil Rights Commission found on behalf of some of the plaintiffs that there was “probable cause that GM engaged in unlawful discriminatory practices.

In a statement, General Motors said:

"Every day, everyone at General Motors is expected to uphold a set of values that are integral to the fabric of our culture. Discrimination and harassment are not acceptable and in stark contrast to how we expect people to show up at work. We treat any reported incident with sensitivity and urgency, and are committed to providing an environment that is safe, open and inclusive. General Motors is taking this matter seriously and addressing it through the appropriate court process

The company also added that plant leadership looked into the allegations in 2017 and investigated, saying they “issued a strong communication to all employees making it clear that any type of harassing or threatening conduct is not tolerated.”

GM also said they continued to reinforce it through all-employee meetings, smaller team meetings, and also conducted anti-discrimination training for all employees in conjunction with the UAW.

“This training emphasizes the company’s strong anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, and instructs employees to report and react to incidents using multiple tools available to all,” the company said in a statement.

The letter dated April 12, 2017, is below.

Copyright 2018 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


“UNDER THE HORSEPLAY RULE”*

WHILE I FOUND NO REFERENCE TO “THE HORSEPLAY RULE” ELSEWHERE, EVEN UNDER UAW RULES, THERE ARE MANY REFERENCES TO HORSEPLAY ON THE JOB ON THE INTERNET. FACTORY WORK ISN’T LIKE OFFICE WORK, APPARENTLY. WHAT IS DONE CAN RANGE FROM ONE DAY OFF (PRESUMABLY WITHOUT PAY) TO A CRIMINAL OFFENSE. USUALLY IT’S TREATED SERIOUSLY, BUT THE DESCRIPTIONS OF WHAT OCCURRED ARE FUNNY IF VULGAR, UNLESS THE JOKE IS BEING PLAYED ON YOU. THIS SPECIFICALLY RACIALLY ORIENTED ABUSE IS MENTIONED SEPARATELY UNDER THE UAW RULES. THE NATIONAL SAFETY COUNCIL SPEAKS ABOUT "HORSEPLAY." IT'S APPARENTLY A COMMON PROBLEM, BUT IF IT OCCURS TO MINORITIES, THERE IS NO SPECIAL COMMENT MADE THERE. THE UNION RULES SAY VERY LITTLE ALSO. I HAVE HEARD THAT LABOR UNIONS ARE SOMETIMES HOSTILE TO BLACKS AND OTHER MINORITIES.


https://www.nsc.org/home
NATIONAL SAFETY COUNCIL (NGO)

https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/16786-horseplay-at-work-no-joke
NATIONAL SAFETY COUNCIL
Horseplay at work: No joke
March 25, 2018

Everyone remembers the school class clown – the person always getting into trouble, pulling pranks and being goofy. Harmless stuff, right? Maybe back then. If your workplace has a class clown who engages in horseplay, it’s no laughing matter.

“Horseplay is rough or rowdy play or pranks that occur at the workplace,” states the Division of Safety and Compliance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It can involve “joking that includes physical contact, playing around, racing, grabbing, foolish vehicle operation, social pressure to participate in unsafe acts, harassment and unauthorized contests.”

What’s the harm?

On-the-job horseplay shouldn’t be viewed as harmless fun. “Workplace horseplay incidents may lead to serious injuries at work, divide the workplace and prevent employees from getting their jobs done,” U of I cautions, adding that, in some states, horseplay-related incidents that result in injuries can lead to criminal prosecutions – some courts have determined these incidents to be deliberate acts.

Even if a horseplay incident doesn’t result in an injury, practical jokes and misbehaving can lead to “humiliation, embarrassment, anger, hurt feelings, distrust and even a desire for revenge” among co-workers, U of I notes.

Prevention
How can employers prevent horseplay incidents?

For starters, make it known that workers are responsible for each other’s safety.

It should be clear to employees that they’re to refrain from engaging in unsafe behaviors on the job, follow all workplace rules and regulations, and ensure equipment is used properly, U of I states. Supervisors and managers have a responsibility to keep their employees’ work environment safe and free of harassment by monitoring for and preventing horseplay.


BERNIE MAY BE THE 2020 CANDIDATE, BUT IF HE IS HE'S GOING TO HAVE TO FIGHT FOR IT, I THINK. IF HE DOES RUN, THOUGH, I'LL VOTE FOR HIM. I'M NOT SO TERRIFIED OF DONALD TRUMP THAT I WON'T SUPPORT HIM FULLY. THIS YEAR THE DEMS NEED TO GET BEHIND A PROGRESSIVE AND PUSH HARD TO SUPPORT THEM. THEY CAN GO BACK TO INCREASING THEIR OWN WEALTH AFTER TRUMP AND HIS RIGHTISTS ARE DEFEATED.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/28/opinions/bernie-sanders-may-not-be-a-2020-presidential-favorite-obeidallah/index.html
Bernie Sanders in 2020? Progressives are split
By Dean Obeidallah
Updated 3:16 PM ET, Mon January 28, 2019

VIDEO -- Source: CNN
Mark your calendar: 400 days until Iowa Caucuses 05:44

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio's daily program "The Dean Obeidallah Show" and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him @DeanObeidallah. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)On Saturday, Twitter was abuzz with the news that Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator, might be "imminently," as Yahoo News reported, jumping into the 2020 race for president.

But it was readily apparent from the trending hashtag #NeverBernie that Sanders' entrance into the 2020 race would be far different and likely even more challenging than 2016.

When Sanders announced in May 2015 his run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, he was only viewed unfavorably by 12% of those polled by Gallup.

His unfavorable rating, however, in that same poll in late 2018 is closer to 40%. And more than that -- and this truly surprised me -- was the level of opposition and even anger directed at Sanders by some of my fellow progressives on Twitter on Saturday.

No, Kamala Harris is not a 'female Barack Obama'

In 2016, I supported Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary. After Hillary Clinton became the nominee, however, I became a surrogate for the Clinton campaign, speaking on her behalf to the Arab and Muslim American community since I'm a member of both.

So when I speak of the reaction to Sanders' possible run in 2020, I do this as someone who supported him in the past for championing issues that leading Democrats were not discussing at the time -- from railing against the "billionaire class" -- which he declared "controls the political life of our country" -- to speaking of Palestinians as human beings who not only deserve their own state but should also be treated with "respect and dignity."

Sanders' greatest impact, though, is likely on the issue of a single-payer health-care system which he dubbed "Medicare for All." During the 2016 campaign, Clinton rejected the proposal, even running an ad slamming it where she declared: "The American people can't afford to wait for ideas that sound good on paper but will never make it in the real world."

Flash forward and a 2018 Reuters poll found that not only do 85% of Democrats support "Medicare for All" but many of the leading Democratic presidential candidates have embraced it, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand.

The biggest mistake Democrats could make right now

Despite that, as I learned first-hand Saturday, there are many Democrats -- even past supporters -- who either are looking for a new candidate in 2020 or passionately oppose him. There were several distinct themes that emerged among the countless people who were tweeting in connection with the #NeverBernie hashtag.

The first thing that I noticed was anger over the possibility that Sanders could consider running as a Democrat again. Countless people raised the point -- which is certainly valid -- that Sanders had long identified as an Independent and only became a Democrat to be able to run in the 2016 Democratic primary contests. Then in 2017, Sanders declared that he was running for re-election to the US Senate as an Independent, rebuffing efforts from Democratic Party leaders to formally join the Democratic Party.

Trump's nightmare: A Latino taking his job

That was the main source of contention among self-identified progressives, but close behind was the belief that Sanders had cost Clinton the election in 2016.

While others made it clear they held no personal animus towards Sanders, they expressed fears that if Sanders ran it would reopen the wounds of the Hillary-Bernie fight we saw in 2016. As these people noted, in order to defeat Trump in 2020, progressives must be united. And they were concerned that a Sanders' candidacy could undermine that.

What was also unexpected were the number of people on Twitter -- some I have interacted with or known for years -- who said that they had supported Sanders in 2016 but simply wanted someone younger in 2020. One friend, who was truly a big Sanders supporter in 2016, tweeted that if Sanders, who is now 77, is elected he will be the oldest president ever elected and for this reason he preferred a younger candidate.

RELATED ARTICLE -- Kamala Harris is making history in the 2020 race

There were several other themes raised by those who opposed Sanders such as the way he dragged his feet to release his tax returns in 2016 and the fact that he opposed sanctions against Russia in a 2017 Senate vote. In a statement, Sanders said that he supports sanctions on Russia for interfering in our 2016 election but voted against that sanctions bill because he had concerns it would undermine the Iran nuclear deal since the bill had proposed sanctions against both Iran and Russia.

Another issue that clearly upset many progressives were the actions of the so called "Bernie Bros," purported Sanders supporters, who had reportedly engaged in harassment of Clinton supporters and reporters during the 2016 campaign.

Some of these "Bros" spewed hateful and often sexist comments. While Sanders did denounce the Bernie Bros tactics as "disgusting" in 2016, for many those words weren't enough.

Obviously, there are countless people who still passionately support Sanders today. Indeed, a December CNN poll of Iowa Democrats found Sanders in second place behind Joe Biden. And if Sanders runs in 2020, he could very well win the nomination.

The stark reality is that in 2020 -- as opposed to 2016 - -the field is not just Sanders versus Clinton. Currently, there are eight confirmed candidates, but the number could go up to 14 candidates or higher, many of whom will be espousing positions just as progressive as Sanders.

And, clearly, if Sanders enters the 2020 race he will have some built-in opposition that he didn't have when he first ran in 2016. But win or lose, Sanders' legacy will be that he played a major role in moving the Democratic Party to the left, especially on health care, which may just help the ultimate Democratic presidential nominee win the White House in 2020.


THE VIRAL BERNIE CLIP – MORE FAMOUS THAN IMPORTANT. IN FACT, I MUST DESCRIBE IT AS CUTE, OR RATHER, HE IS CUTE! HIS HAIR WAS LONGER AND CURLY, IT COVERED HIS WHOLE HEAD, BUT IT WAS ALREADY WHITE. THE HALF-SHY SMILE IS THERE. THAT WAS 1988. BERNIE AND HIS NEW WIFE JANE TOOK A HONEYMOON IN RUSSIA, AND TOOK IN THE TOWN (NOT MOSCOW.) THIS NEXT HEADLINE FAILS TO SAY THAT ALL OF THOSE IN THE VIDEO ARE DRINKING AND ALL THE MEN ARE SHIRTLESS, WHICH IS THE CASE. THEY ARE IN A SAUNA. THE ARTICLE SAYS HE WAS SINGING, BUT I COULDN’T HEAR THAT. I HEARD HIS DEEP VOICE SPEAKING, THOUGH. I THINK IT IS PROBABLY TOO GRAVELLY FOR HIM TO SING MUCH, ALTHOUGH SOME OF YOU WILL REMEMBER THE GREAT SATCHMO’S SINGING. ALL IT REALLY TAKES TO SING IS THE COURAGE. HIS WIFE JANE WAS WITH HIM THE NEXT DAY ON THE STREET, AND SHE WAS QUITE A LOOKER. AFTER THIS GO TO BERNIE’S VOICE RECORDING ON THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND AND SEVERAL OTHERS.

https://sputniknews.com/viral/201901281071901499-Shirtless-Sanders-Sings-Soviet-Sauna/
Feel the Bern: Shirtless Sanders Sings in 1980s Russian Sauna (VIDEO) © AP Photo / Alex Brandon
VIRAL
23:13 28.01.2019(updated 23:19 28.01.2019) Get short URL

When 30-year-old footage of Vermont’s independent senator, Bernie Sanders, singing drunk and shirtless in a sauna complex in the Soviet Union emerged on Twitter Monday, folks had a field day with it. Some found it endearing and amusing, but others were enraged by him palin’ around with Russians.

The footage comes from an archive compilation assembled by Channel 17 in Bernie's hometown of Burlington, Vermont, where he was mayor from 1981 to 1989. In 1988, Bernie and his wife, Jane, ventured to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and met with communist officials, who shared with them the secrets of urban planning and social services, according to Politifact. Devious? Scandalous? Treasonous? Nah, just part of his duties as mayor: Bernie and his city staff had gone to Burlington's sister city of Yaroslavl, 160 miles north of Moscow, as part of a cultural exchange program.

Clearly, the Sanders got a generous helping of Russian culture, although the cultural exchange factor is also on display, as they sing "This Land is Your Land," a patriotic song by American folk singer Woody Guthrie.

m. mendoza ferrer
@mgranville1
BREAKING: @SenSanders like you’ve never seen him!!

Bernie and Jane on their honeymoon in Russia singing “This land is Your Land” with their Russian comrades!!

Trigger Warning: Bernie is sitting at a table shirtless in his briefs. So are most of the rest of the men...

4,035
8:36 AM - Jan 28, 2019

According to the program, which is still running today, visitors between the two cities have included "mayors, business people, firefighters, jazz musicians, youth orchestras, mural painters, high school students, medical students, nurses, librarians and the (Yaroslavl) ice-hockey team." It's unclear from the website how many of them undressed to their briefs and drunkenly sang folk songs, but we like to think it was most of them.

Twitter had about the reaction you would expect: some were disgusted (what, there aren't shirtless old men in your town?), others were amused or found the humanity on display endearing. More worrisome were the many who found it suspicious or incriminating to see Sanders, who vied for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2016, being friendly with Russian people, who in America in 2019 have become a mustache-twirling nation, Enemy Number One.


TOᑭ ᖇOᑭE TᖇAViS
@TopRopeTravis
NEW: Recently discovered footage from 1988 reveals a shirtless Bernie Sanders with his wife, Jane, on their honeymoon in the USSR, drunkenly signing “This Land Is Your Land” with a group of presumed Soviets.

H/T: @mgranville1

5,259
10:33 AM - Jan 28, 2019


While "Presumed Soviets" would make an excellent band name, the wording is sort of odd. First of all, there is no "soviet" nationality — "soviet" means "council" in Russian, and since Yaroslavl was in the Russian Federative Soviet Socialist Republic (RSFSR), there stands a decent chance that the fellows they're raising their wrists with are also Russians.


Amy for President!
@ThEnemyIsUs
Replying to @mgranville1 and 2 others
Jesus Christ. The Soviets?! Those were the bad guys Bernie.

5
10:20 AM - Jan 28, 2019


Yes that's right, the bad guys! One is reminded of Russian poet Alexander Blok's sardonic poem "Scythians," which perhaps a cultural exchange program like Bernie's might have familiarized these Twitter posters with:

"Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians —
With slanted and greedy eyes!"

It seems to reflect the attitudes of perennial distrust shown to Russians by some people in the West who think the Cold War never ended.


Russell
@RussellSieg
Replying to @mgranville1 @SenSanders
The couple that Treasons together stays together...

3
10:39 AM - Jan 28, 2019

Oh my, treason in a granchak! Seems to water the word down a bit, don't you think? Not that that hasn't happened already.


Little Harsh Gab
@LittleHarshGab
Replying to @Salems_Bot and 2 others
Proves he has a soft spot for them though

62
10:31 AM - Jan 28, 2019


Is there something particularly illuminating about the fact that Sanders has a "soft spot" for the Russians? Is that an incriminating or delegitimizing act?

Fortunately at least one person saw through the Russophobia:


Proprietress
@proprietress
· 9h
Replying to @mgranville1 @SenSanders
Sort of an Anthony Bourdain moment. Cool.


kareema.
@CreoleHoneyy
I agree. Are we supposed to be shocked that he treated russians likw humans or that he took a trip to his citys russian sister city to encourage diplomacy?

34
1:45 PM - Jan 28, 2019

Maybe it's best if we just let Bernie's memories live and take this person's sage wisdom to heart:


Ryan Hall
@cornpuddy
Replying to @mgranville1 @SenSanders
the 80s were a wild time

1:43 PM - Jan 28, 2019



FOR THE OTHER BERNIE FANS, WATCH THESE YOUTUBES AS WELL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZMzhnprCO8
#BernieSanders #berniesandersforpresident2016 #FeelTheBern
The Bernie Sanders For President Fight Song, Reach Way On Down In Your Soul

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzgBkpY-6mE
#FEELTHEBERN
BERNIE SANDERS SONG FEEL THE BERN!!!

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2015/10/09/bernie-sanders-debate-style-democrat-presidential-candidate-kaye-pkg-ac.cnn
What is Bernie Sanders' debate style?
Anderson Cooper 360

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has already posed a significant challenged to Hillary Clinton's campaign, but how will he do in the debate? CNN's Randi Kaye reports.


https://sputniknews.com/politics/201603031035704922-us-candidates-russia/
This is How the 2016 US Presidential Candidates Feel About Russia © Flickr/ Gage Skidmore
POLITICS
11:48 03.03.2016(updated 12:04 03.03.2016)

The 2016 presidential primaries and caucuses are taking place across the United States. Candidates are seeking to win delegates in each state to capture their party’s nomination for the presidency. Some of them have withdrawn. Currently, six candidates – two democrats and four republicans – are running for president.

One of the hottest topics of the ongoing campaign is US foreign policy, including posturing against Russia strengthening its positions in the global arena. The candidates have avidly discussed relations with Moscow during the campaign.

Here is what Russia means for each of the 2016 US presidential hopefuls.

Bernie Sanders

Sanders is the most distinctly leftist candidate for the US presidency since the 1970s. He has called for radical reforms, including free health care and education (following the example of Scandinavian countries) and income taxes of up to 70 percent on the rich.

As for foreign policy, Sanders is not that radical though, as he does not plan to dissolve NATO or abandon nuclear weapons. He has proposed a course very close to liberal interventionism, which means that the US should play an even more active role in the international arena, but first of all with diplomacy, not wars.

Bernie Sanders has a long relationship with Russia. Back in 1988, he visited Yaroslavl, as part of a delegation from Burlington, to promote friendship and cooperation. He used to ironically notice that he had to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. He also met with Yaroslavl activists who then visited Sanders’ hometown of Vermont. Sanders has already gained a large number of supporters in Russia.

PHOTOGRAPH -- US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders smiles after winning at his 2016 New Hampshire presidential primary night rally in Concord, New Hampshire February 9, 2016.

However, this has not stopped Sanders from criticizing Russia after the Crimean referendum. He also urged President Barack Obama to strengthen sanctions against Moscow. At the same time, Sanders warned against a military solution to the "Russian problem," instead calling for serious discussions. In November, he proposed to form a new version of NATO that included Russia and other countries in order to fight terrorism.

For Sanders, foreign policy is a peripheral issue because his campaign is targeting the dominance of Wall Street and major banks. If Sanders is president he will probably focus on domestic issues and address only major global events.


https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/bernie-sanders-trump-a-fraud-a-pathological-liar-and-a-racist
Bernie Sanders: Trump 'a fraud, a pathological liar and a racist'
by Naomi Lim
| January 28, 2019 06:43 PM

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday hurled insults at President Trump in a fundraising email, ginning up support as he continues to mull the possibility of a second tilt at the White House.

"We are living in a truly unprecedented moment in history and the actions we take now, together, will determine not only the future of our country but the entire world. If there has ever been a time in American history when our people must stand together in the fight for economic, social, racial and environmental justice - now is that time," Sanders wrote.

The independent senator from Vermont, who caucuses with Democrats, added, "The bad news is that we have a president who is a fraud, a pathological liar and a racist. The good news is that the American people are standing up, fighting back and are demanding fundamental changes in our economic and political system."

Wall-to-wall politics

Sanders, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination against Hillary Clinton in 2016, is rumored to be close to a decision regarding whether to run again. The 77-year-old senator has repeatedly said he would launch a campaign if he is "the best candidate to beat" Trump. Yahoo News reported last week that his presidential aspirations had been buoyed by a slew of early polls that showed him and former Vice President Joe Biden as the favorites to earn the party's nod.

Sanders has used similar language to describe Trump before. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he told a crowd in South Carolina that the president was "intentionally, purposely" "trying to divide us up by the color of our skin, by our gender, by the country we came from, by our religion."

"Today we talk about justice and today we talk about racism, and I must tell you it gives me no pleasure to tell you that we now have a president of the United States who is a racist," Sanders said.

News Bernie Sanders Race and Diversity 2020 Elections


THIS IS A BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN ARTICLE TO ME. SIMPLE ENOUGH, CLEAR ENOUGH, AND BOLD.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26065308/wall-street-democratic-primary-elizabeth-warren-bernie-sanders/
The Masters of the Universe Are Terrified of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders
Wall Street wants a "centrist." Does anyone else?
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
JAN 28, 2019

Image: Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth WarrenGETTY IMAGESBILL CLARK

You have to hand it to Politico. Howard Schultz's vanity exercise is still theoretical, but Politico has tracked down every single member of his fundamental constituency who cannot be found in Howard Schultz's mirror every morning while he's shaving.

Early support from deep-pocketed financial executives could give Democrats seeking to break out of the pack an important fundraising boost. But any association with bankers also opens presidential hopefuls to sharp attacks from an ascendant left. And it’s left senior executives on Wall Street flailing over what to do.

“I’m a socially liberal, fiscally conservative centrist who would love to vote for a rational Democrat and get Trump out of the White House,” said the CEO of one of the nation’s largest banks, who, like a dozen other executives interviewed for this story, declined to be identified by name for fear of angering a volatile president. “Personally, I’d love to see Bloomberg run and get the nomination. I’ve just never thought he could get the nomination the way the primary process works.”

Oh, dear. What's a master of the universe to do when the universe turns against him?

Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz Discusses Role Of Public Global Companies
Howard Schultz
Getty ImagesAlex Wong

After mentioning Bloomberg, Wall Street executives who want Trump out list a consistent roster of appealing nominees that includes former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California. Others meriting mention: former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, though few [re]ally know his positions.

Bankers’ biggest fear: The nomination goes to an anti-Wall Street crusader like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or Sanders. “It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders,” said the CEO of another giant bank. “It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.”

Clearly, they're not afraid that Senator Professor Warren or Bernie Sanders "can't win," but, rather, they're struck into incoherence that one of them can. Somewhere in the gated community holding their souls, they know that there still is a considerable reckoning out there for what they did throughout the Aughts, and that scares them to death. And now, there are popular vehicles through which that reckoning can be wrought. The universe may be shopping for new masters.


POPULISM – A GOOD WORD, A BAD WORD, OR A SOCIAL CHAMELEON?

ON THE EMOTIONAL LEVEL, I AM A POPULIST. THE WEALTH DIVIDE IS NOT MERELY UNFAIR, BUT DAMAGING TO MOST OF THE POPULATION, AND THAT MAKES ME ANGRY. IT IS HARD TO BE FULLY HEALTHY OR WELL-EDUCATED OR BEAUTIFUL IF YOU’RE POOR. THAT HURTS, AND THE DISCOURAGEMENT OF IT MAKES SO MANY PEOPLE JUST GIVE UP. THOSE WITH VERY STRONG EGOS AND HOPEFULNESS WILL FIGHT TOWARD THE TOP, THOUGH. I WANT SUCH A PERSON TO BE OUR LEADER, ESPECIALLY NOW WHEN A POLLUTED AND EXTREMELY WEALTHY GROUP ARE IN CONTROL. THAT, TO ME, IS BERNIE SANDERS.

IT ISN’T THAT “THE PEOPLE” ARE “PURE,” BUT THAT THEY DESERVE A MUCH MORE EQUAL CHANCE TO SUCCEED. MOST OF THEM ARE WELL-MEANING IF LESS THAN SUCCESSFUL, AND DEEPLY UNWILLING TO DO SOMETHING INTENSELY UNETHICAL TO WIN. THE MORE I WATCH WORLD EVENTS, THE MORE I SEE HOW CORRUPT SO MUCH OF THE WORLD OF GREAT WEALTH IS. PEOPLE WHO ARE UNWILLING TO CHEAT ARE CONSIDERED WIMPS OR EVEN UNINTELLIGENT.

IN COLLEGE I CAME ACROSS THE TERM “THE SOCIAL CONTRACT,” IN MY COURSEWORK. IT IS AN UNWRITTEN CODE BETWEEN RULERS AND THE SOCIETY AT LARGE, AND IT IS BASED ON AN ASSUMPTION THAT WORKING WELL AND HONESTLY WILL GIVE YOU ENOUGH MONEY TO LIVE ACCEPTABLY IF NOT BECOME ONE OF THE MASTERS. RELIGION THEN ASSURES US THAT BEING HONEST WILL BE REWARDED WITH ONE, TWO OR MORE STEPS UP THE INVISIBLE LADDER. WHAT IS NOT STATED IS THAT MANY OF THE “MASTERS” WILL TRY THEIR BEST TO KNOCK US OFF THE LADDER IF WE MOVE UP TOO FAST OR DEVELOP SOME USEFUL TOOLS FOR THAT, SUCH AS A LABOR UNION.

WHEN SOMEONE LIKE SANDERS COMES ALONG WHO WANTS TO ENERGIZE “THE PEOPLE” SUFFICIENTLY THAT THEY WILL BE MUCH STRONGER IN THEIR EFFORTS AND IN THE WAR WE HAVE TO WAGE AGAINST THE MOST POWERFUL. THAT’S NECESSARY TO A DEMOCRACY, SO WHEN THOSE “MODERATES” GET INTO LEADERSHIP POSITIONS AND START GIVING AID TO THE WEALTHY RATHER THAN THE POOR, I FOR ONE WILL NOT PASSIVELY SUBMIT TO THAT. THAT IS HILLARY CLINTON’S PROBLEM, AND NOT THE FACT THAT BERNIE SANDERS RAN AGAINST HER VIGOROUSLY AND INTELLIGENTLY. HE SHOULD HAVE DONE SO THEN, AND I DO HOPE HE WILL DO THE SAME THING AGAIN THIS NEXT YEAR. IF HIS HEALTH WILL ALLOW IT, AND HE STILL HAS “THE FIRE IN THE BELLY” TO HAVE ANOTHER GO AT IT, I CERTAINLY WILL VOTE FOR HIM. I WANT TO HAVE CANDIDATES THAT I REALLY DO FEEL AN ENTHUSIASM TOWARD TO VOTE FOR. THE RIGHT TO VOTE ISN’T NEARLY AS ENJOYABLE IF THE CHOICES ARE LITERALLY BORING OR REALLY OBJECTIONABLE.

WE HAVE TO REALIZE THAT THE OFTEN CLOWNISH, OFTEN BOORISH, OFTEN AUTOCRATIC REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT TRUMP IS ALSO A MAN WHO IS UNFAIR TO THE LEAST OF US AND DISHONEST WITH THE REST. IT IS SO IMPORTANT TO DEFEAT THEM, THAT WE NEED SOMEONE STRONG MENTALLY, PHYSICALLY AND IDEOLOGICALLY RIGHT NOW. BERNIE SANDERS IS SUCH AS MAN. PEOPLE WANT SOMEONE TO ADMIRE AND TRUST. FOR DEMOCRATS TO WIN, IT TAKES A POWERFUL PUSH FROM BELOW, WITH A STRONG AND INTELLIGENT LEADER WHO HAS A CLEAR WILL TO WIN, IF WE ARE TO EVEN OUT THAT DYNAMIC. OUR CURRENT DEMOCRATS ARE FOR THE MOST PART NOT STRONG OR CREATIVE, NOR ARE THEY “FOR THE PEOPLE.” THEY ARE FOR THEIR OWN BEST CHANCE. WORSE, THEY ARE TREADING WATER, CONSTANTLY AFRAID OF DROWNING. THEY CAN’T DO SOMETHING BOLD IF THEY WON’T STRIKE OUT AND ACTUALLY SWIM.

TO ME, POPULISM IS A PHILOSOPHY OF WHAT IS GOOD VERSUS EVIL, TRUE, BUT MORE THAN THAT, IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO OVERCOME THE WEALTH AND POWER OF THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS. WHEN WE DEMOCRATS DO WIN AGAIN, HOWEVER, ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS WE NEED TO DO IS CHANGE THE LAWS ALLOWING A RULING PARTY TO REVISE THE PLAYING FIELD TO THEIR GREAT AND UNFAIR ADVANTAGE. I AM REFERRING TO THINGS LIKE THE GERRYMANDERING AND VOTER SUPPRESSION THAT GOES ON ENDLESSLY, SO THAT THE VERY POOR CAN GET LITTLE IF ANY RELIEF FOR THEIR LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES, AND EVERY TIME THEY GAIN A LITTLE GROUND, THE RIGHTIST POLITICIANS ERASE IT AGAIN IMMEDIATELY.

LABOR LAW IS ANOTHER CASE. BUSINESSES ARE NOW ALLOWED TO FIRE UNION MEMBERS. THAT’S BECAUSE OUR DEMOCRATS WERE NOT LIBERAL ENOUGH, STRONG ENOUGH, ALERT ENOUGH, INSISTENT ENOUGH AND HONEST ENOUGH. I SEE NO POSSIBLE RELIEF FROM THAT EXCEPT THROUGH A POPULIST WAVE FROM THE POOR AND MIDDLE CLASSES, AND OUR BEST LEADER FOR THAT IS SANDERS.

WE ALSO NEED TO BUILD UP OUR PARTY MEMBERSHIP AND ACTIVITY LEVEL IN BETWEEN ELECTIONS SO THAT WHEN AN AUTOCRAT TRIES TO DISMANTLE OUR STRUCTURE OF ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP, WE THE LOCAL LEVEL DEMS CAN TAKE ACTIONS. WE NEED MORE POP-UP GROUP OPPOSITION TO THE THREATS WHEN THEY EMERGE. PROTESTORS SHOULD BE SEEN MUCH MORE OFTEN THAN THEY HAVE BEEN IN RECENT YEARS. IT’S NOT A CAMPAIGN, IT’S A WAR. I DON’T TAKE PLEASURE IN THAT, IT’S JUST A FACT.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/03/what-is-populism-trump-farage-orban-bolsonaro
How to spot a populist
Trump flag at a Britain First rally
The p-word is much misunderstood. It’s as old as democracy, and has perhaps never been as popular as it is today. So who are the key protagonists?
Mon 3 Dec 2018 01.00 EST
by Mark Rice-Oxley and Ammar Kalia

What is populism?

That’s a vexed question. Populism is usually described as a strategic approach that frames politics as a battle between the virtuous, “ordinary” masses and a nefarious or corrupt elite.

It can be used by politicians who are either left- or rightwing, and occasionally neither.

It is not sustained by a single consistent ideology or issue position. In the words of the leading populism scholar Cas Mudde, it is “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’”.

He also says that populists tend argue that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people, while others stress populists often have a “Manichean” world view, breaking politics into a binary view of good or evil.

For example, in the words of the archpopulist Donald Trump, from his January 2017 inauguration address: “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”

Who are the populists?

Populism is as old as democracy itself. The sophists of Athens’ golden age were at it hundreds of years before Julius Caesar brought his populist touch to the Roman republic.

From the 19th century, populist instincts can be detected in pro-peasantry agitation by Russian intellectuals in the 1860s and an agrarian movement in the US that grew into the People’s party 20 years later.

In the mid-20th century, academics have used the p-word to describe everything from Peronism in Argentina and McCarthyism in the US, to Nasser’s Egypt and the Poujadiste movement led by Pierre Poujade in 1950s France.

Given so many politicians – of such different stripes – can be populist, some argue the term is useless. But with so-called populists on the left and right experiencing a resurgence in the 21st century, the term is once again in the spotlight.

On the right, Trump, Viktor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte and Matteo Salvini are often characterised as populists – and so too is the Tea party movement that emerged out of the 2008 financial crisis.

Scholars have long-described some leftist politicians, particularly in Latin America, as populists, such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador or the late Venezuela president Hugo Chavez. In Spain, the anti-austerity party Podemos is characterised as populist, and so too is the Democratic senator Bernie Sanders in the US.

Not everyone agrees about all this. The influential political scientist Jan-Werner Müller has cast doubt on whether some of these leftists are true populists.

Are all populists the same?

Absolutely not. One of the reasons the word has proven so problematic is that politicians who adopt populist styles – or their supporters – balk at the idea they should be compared to their opposites on the ideological spectrum. The fact a politicians uses a populist strategy does not need to define them. Their dominant ideology – socialist, neoliberal, authoritarian – can be much more relevant to the kind of politician they are.

Some scholars argue rightwing populists tend to be “exclusionary” (omitting, say, migrants or ethnic minorities from their conception of a virtuous people), whereas leftwing populists have a broader, inclusive concept of who counts as “the people”.

Are they popular?

Increasingly so. Populists have broken through in India, Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil and the US to win power in recent years.

In Europe, Guardian research has established that populists have tripled their vote over the past 20 years, such that more than one in four Europeans voted for populist parties on average at their last election. While 12.5 million Europeans lived in a country with at least one populist cabinet member in 1998, in 2018 that had risen more than tenfold, to 170.2 million.

In Germany, the far-right populist party Alternative fur Deutschland increased its vote more than sixfold in 2017 to become the third-largest party in parliament. In Italy, populists performed even better in 2018, with three populist parties in the top five, gaining between them more than half of the vote.

In the UK, Ukip drove its vote tally from 100,000 in 1997 to almost 4 million in 2015, though it fell back two years later once the party’s core policy – leaving the EU – had been all but delivered in the 2016 referendum.

In the past 10 years, populists have also gained power in Greece, Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic, and a have share of power in Austria and Norway.

Why have the new populists emerged now?

Globalisation. Recession. Mass migration. Soaring inequality. The perceived failure of the political establishment to deal with any of the above. A slew of factors have combined in recent years to create the impression – some would say, the reality – that the world is run by plutocrats, oligarchs and semi-detached politicians in the interests of the few not the many.

A quarter of a billion people are on the move around the world, providing more ammunition than ever before for rightwing populists who argue that political elites have failed to get a handle on the kind of immigration that they say threatens jobs, wages and social cohesion.

Meanwhile, the number of billionaires has jumped fivefold in the last 20 years, to more than 2,200, according to Forbes, as globalisation opened up new markets for entrepreneurs to tap while at the same time making it possible to shield capital, assets and income from the taxman. The world’s eight richest people own as much as the poorest 3.5 billion. The amount of money offshored by the financial elite is put at as much as £10 trillion – that’s a number with 13 zeroes.

But there are also many non-economic factors that may offer partial explanations for populism’s rise: a cultural backlash against elites, a technological revolution that has rewired our politics, a convergence of now indistinguishable left and right political parties on a technocratic centre.

Exactly what mix of factors has created such a fertile backdrop for populists is a subject of much debate. But as Benjamin Moffitt puts it in his book, The Global Rise of Populism: “The time is ripe for canny political actors who can speak effectively in the name of ‘the people’ to make great political gains.”

Are they democrats?

By definition, yes. Populists operate within democratic systems, even though, once in power, some have a habit of chipping away at the tenets of liberal democracy, as Orbán has done in Hungary.

In fact, it could be argued that as populism galvanises a large, disillusioned base of overlooked voters and offers them fresh representation, it is quintessentially democratic.

So is populism good or bad?

That depends on who you ask. It is probably fair to say populism has acquired negative associations, particularly in Europe, where divisive rightwing populists are on the rise. Research by a global network of academics – Team Populism – found that by privileging majority rule populists often erode tents of liberal democracy like minority rights and the separation of powers. But they say that populists in government can also have a modest, positive effect on voter turnout and dignify forgotten sectors of the population.

Some leftwing political theorists, such as the late Argentinian academic Ernesto Laclau and his widow, Chantal Mouffe, at the University of Westminster, have long argued that populism is an effective political strategy that can – and should – be used to revitalise politics on the left.

How can you spot a populist?

Populists tend to resort to a similar kind of rhetoric to win over their audiences. Kirk Hawkins, an associate professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, says it is not as simple as a single word or a catchphrase; a broad rhetorical lexicon tends to recur in populist oratory.

“You will see a leader talk about ordinary people in a way that reifies and romanticises them,” he says. Examples might be referring to “the will of the people” or dropping in adjectives such as “ordinary”, “hard-working” or “taxpaying” to describe the noble masses.

“The other element you will see is a reference to the evil elite,” Hawkins says. “One thing you’ll see is an emphasis on things that are clearly meant to question their fundamental dignity as political actors if not human beings.”

For example?

It is time to free the French people from an arrogant elite” – Marine Le Pen

People want to take back control of their countries and they want to take back control of their lives and the lives of their family” – Donald Trump

The European elite has failed, and this failure’s symbol is the European Commission” – Victor Orban

Brexit was about ordinary people rising up to defeat the establishment and we’ve now seen the same happen in the US” – Nigel Farage

What else do they tend to say?

Some resort to nicknames to vilify their opponents – “Crooked Hilary”, for example. “They’ll use verbs and adjectives to describe actions to show it’s not just incompetence but an intentional betrayal,” Hawkins says.

But it is not just what they say but how they say it. Some academics argue that populism necessarily comes with a performative element: it is about the style, the show. Charismatic populists need crowds, a stage, the limelight, usually coupled with a plain-speaking approach that everyone will understand.

“Populist politicians are revolutionising the ways in which politics is being performed, and they are performing it,” says Claudia Alvares, an associate professor at Lusófona University in Lisbon. “They are not just operating within rightwing or leftwing boundaries because it transcends those affiliations. It is more of a style.”

Who votes populist?

Support for populism strongly correlates with lower personal life satisfaction, frustration with democracy and how it is working, and conspiratorial thinking among voters. Blame is a standard populist tool.

On the other hand, minorities of all stripes tend to reject populists because of the narrative, on the right, that identifies the “people” in nativist terms as those who have historically inhabited a country.

A Guardian quiz, devised by political scientists, but answered by a self-selecting group of readers, found that almost half a million respondents subdivided as follows:

Women of the world, unite
What’s the opposite of a populist?

It depends on the populist. Technically speaking, some argue the opposite of populism would be pluralism* or elitism.

But different populists have varied adversaries: the Davos set, the Bilderberg group, Christian democrats, social democrats, liberals, technocrats, centrists, totalitarians, minorities. (And journalists.)

What next?

Latin America faces a big moment in 2019, as its two most populous countries, Brazil and Mexico, are to governed by populist leaders – Jair Bolsonaro and Andrés Manuel López Obrador – that come from opposites sides of the political spectrum.

A few months later, Asia’s two biggest democracies will hold general elections. In India, the rightwing populist Narendra Modi looks likely to secure re-election in spring polls. Indonesia faces its own high noon in April with a populist challenger to the incumbent, Joko Widodo.

The European parliament elections of next May will be key in assessing populist progress on the continent. Hitherto populists of the right and left have been fairly marginalised, with just a few dozen seats in the 751-seat parliament.

Besides that, there are elections next year in Finland, Ukraine, Belgium and Denmark, in which populist parties will be vigorously contesting seats.


How populist are you?

Further reading
Populism: A Very Short Introduction by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation by Benjamin Moffitt
For a Left Populism, Chantal Mouffe
What is populism? by Team Populism


TRUMP’S WEAKNESS IS HIS NEED FOR POPULARITY, SAYS FOX TEAM

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/01/28/trumps-favored-fox-news-hosts-fault-him-caring-way-too-much-about-people-media/
Arts and Entertainment
Trump’s favored Fox News hosts fault him for caring ‘way too much about people in the media’
By Alex Horton January 28 at 12:38 PM
“Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeade twiddled his thumbs, seeming to know the word was coming.

President Trump had given an interview with the Wall Street Journal in which he was asked about the fallout between him and conservative pundit Ann Coulter over ending the shutdown without funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Co-host Steve Doocy summarized the attacks from Coulter and the four-letter word she used: “wimp.”

Kilmeade reacted to the word with a not-subtle eye roll and a hand gesture but waited for Doocy to read the counterattack Trump offered the Journal, which included calling Coulter “very hostile” and speculating that maybe she was mad because he didn’t “return her phone call or something.”

But when Kilmeade, who hosts a show well-known for being closely watched by the president, finally offered his take, it contained more than a touch of irony.

“I just think the president cares way too much about people in the media,” he said. “He is president. He is not a candidate . . . he has got to make some tough decisions and he is not an absolute monarch.”

[‘Maybe I didn’t return her phone call’: Trump ridicules Ann Coulter, slams Fox News in fallout over wall]

As The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi and Sarah Ellison have noted, Trump and the hosts of “Fox and Friends” appear to have a deep mutual affinity.

Fox News Channel’s perky morning show is typically a safe space for Trump and his surrogates, a home for flattering live interviews and relentless cheerleading on everything from building his proposed border wall to highlighting the supposed threat of a Central American migrant caravan.

Trump, a regular F&F viewer, frequently returns the favor by live-tweeting things he’s seen and heard on the show, turning a program derided by liberal critics into one of the most influential news sources on the air.

True to form, “Fox and Friends” offered Trump back-up in his war of words with Coulter on Monday.

Guest David Brody. a political analyst for the Christian Broadcasting Network, criticized the right-wing provocateur, calling her an “outlier for sure” and “off her rocker.” Kilmeade responded that Trump has to “almost ignore people, whether it’s me or you one day, Ann Coulter today, and just do what he knows is best.”

Cracks have shown at times, however, in the support from “Fox and Friends” hosts. They blasted Trump for repeatedly suggesting that reporters are the enemy of the people and criticized him for mocking Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school.

In December, Kilmeade scrutinized Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, saying it would be a “big win” for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But if there was any acrimony on Trump’s side, it wasn’t evident soon after Kilmeade’s comments Monday.

In his trademark style, Trump tweeted praise of himself, quoting remarks by political commentator Deroy Murdock.

“In the Media’s effort to destroy the President, they are actually destroying themselves,” Murdock said. “Given all of the tremendous head winds this President has faced, it’s amazing he has accomplished so much.”

Trump was flattered by the remark. “I agree!” he wrote on Twitter, noting that it came from a trusted source: “Fox and Friends.”

“In the Media’s effort to destroy the President, they are actually destroying themselves. Given all of the tremendous headwinds this President has faced, it’s amazing he has accomplished so much.” DEROY MURDOCK @foxandfriends I agree!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2019
Read more:

‘He lied about it’: Ann Coulter rips Trump for failing to secure border wall funding

Trump will secure border ‘with or without Congress,’ Mulvaney says

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Alex Horton
Alex Horton is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post. He previously covered the military and national security for Stars and Stripes, and served in Iraq as an Army infantryman. Follow


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