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White Nationalists Celebrate Trump’s Victory and Early Appointments

by ElveraDelee369 Posted on November 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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White nationalists gathered in downtown Washington, DC, on Saturday to celebrate the election of Donald Trump as a victory for their movement. As protesters outside carried signs decrying racism, the mood among the approximately 250 white nationalists inside the Ronald Reagan Building was jubilant.

“The alt-right is here, the alt-right is not going anywhere, and the alt-right is going to change the world,” Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who popularized the term “alt-right” to describe the ascendant right-wing movement centered on xenophobia and often racism and white supremacy, told reporters at a press conference during an all-day conference hosted by his group, the National Policy Institute. “And you all need to pay attention to this.”

White nationalists and white supremacists have cheered Trump’s election and rejoiced in the appointments he has made so far in his administration, including former Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon as chief strategist and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama as attorney general. Spencer called Bannon’s appointment a “wonderful thing.” In July, Bannon, who was still running Breitbart, bragged to Mother Jones that his website had become the “platform for the alt-right.” Spencer said he largely agreed with that statement. “It’s clearly moved away from the conservative movement, it was pro-Trump, and it was also a site that tons of people on the alt-right liked, they get their news from, they share.”

Spencer also spoke approvingly of Sessions, who made a name for himself as the top foe of immigration in Congress. Sessions is also known for allegations that he made racist comments when he was an attorney in Alabama—charges that derailed his 1986 nomination for a federal judgeship and will come up again in his confirmation hearings to become attorney general. When Mother Jones asked at the press conference whether Spencer agreed with the neo-Nazi writer Andrew Anglin, who on Friday said that the appointments of Sessions and Bannon meant that he was getting everything he wanted from Trump, the crowd at the conference began to cheer at the mention of Sessions. “It’s getting what is realistically possible,” said Spencer. “Jeff Sessions, again, is someone who is not alt-right but who seems to see eye to eye with us on the immigration question. I think Jeff Sessions might very well resonate with something like a long-term dramatic slowdown of immigration.”

Spencer said Sessions would roll back the Obama administration’s enforcement of civil rights laws as the head of the Justice Department. “The fact that he is going to be at such a high level, I think, is a wonderful thing,” he said. “What he is not going to do in terms of federally prosecuting diversity and fair housing and so on I think is just as powerful as what he might do. So it’s about Jeff Sessions setting a new tone in Washington. I think that’s a good thing.”

Spencer’s top priority for the Trump administration is to change the country’s immigration laws to stop not just undocumented immigration but also legal immigration, with the goal of making sure the United States remains a majority-white country. “I think a goal would be net-neutral immigration with a primary emphasis on Europeans who want to immigrate to the country,” he said. Peter Brimelow of the anti-immigrant website VDARE.com later explained that the policy would mean removing immigrants currently in the country and allowing Europeans to take their place. Spencer said he believed passing such a policy through Congress would be easier than the press might think.

When a reporter asked what the movement’s top priority for Trump was, the room began to chant “build the wall.” Spencer agreed that immigration should be Trump’s “primary objective.”

“This is why he was elected,” Spencer said, “because he was the identity president.”

Controversial media personality Tila Tequila, who has identified with Nazis, tweeted from inside the conference.

An estimated 200 to 300 protesters gathered outside the conference, organized by a group called the DC Anti-Fascist Coalition. At around 1 p.m., a conference attendee who exited the conference got into a violent confrontation with protesters.

On Friday night in DC, protesters followed Spencer, and one sprayed him with a foul-smelling liquid as he dined with supporters at a restaurant.

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White Nationalists Celebrate Trump’s Victory and Early Appointments

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Look at All the Climate Change Deniers Vying for Jobs in the Trump Administration

by Donnie6686 Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is a global warming denier. He wants to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement and repeal the Clean Power Plan—the twin pillars of President Barack Obama’s efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. He’s even promised to revive the coal industry, against all odds.

But Trump won’t be able to do these things all by himself. To fulfill his campaign promise and reverse the steps of his predecessor in the fight against warming, he’s going to need an entire administration of like-minded people. Environmental officials who reject climate science. National security officials who dismiss concerns that climate change will destabilize the world. Diplomats who oppose international climate agreements. Department heads who want to drill, baby, drill.

Here’s a list of Trump appointees and possible appointees (drawn for the New York Times, Politico, E&E, and elsewhere) who deny climate change or who oppose or want to roll back efforts to deal with it. We’ll update the list as the Trump transition continues. Be afraid.

Donald Trump

Position: President

Views on climate change:

We’re going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the US rule.
We’re going to save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary Clinton’s extremist agenda.
I’m going to ask Trans Canada to renew its permit application for the Keystone Pipeline.
We’re going to lift moratoriums on energy production in federal areas
We’re going to revoke policies that impose unwarranted restrictions on new drilling technologies. These technologies create millions of jobs with a smaller footprint than ever before.
We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs. Trump campaign website, accessed 11/16/16

Mike Pence

Position: Vice president

Views on climate change: “Donald Trump and I have a plan to get this economy moving again…by lowering taxes across the board for working families, small businesses and family farms, ending the war on coal that is hurting jobs and hurting this economy even here in Virginia, repealing Obamacare lock, stock, and barrel, and repealing all of the executive orders that Barack Obama has signed that are stifling economic growth in this economy.” Vice Presidential debate, 10/5/16

Reince Priebus

Position: Chief of staff

Views on climate change: “Democrats tell us they understand the world, but then they call climate change, not radical Islamic terrorism, the greatest threat to national security. Look, I think we all care about our planet, but melting icebergs aren’t beheading Christians in the Middle East.” CPAC speech, 2/27/15

Stephen Bannon

Position: Chief strategist and senior counselor

Views on climate change: “Do you agree with the pope and President Obama that climate change is absolutely a path to global suicide, if specific deals are not cut in Paris at the international climate negotiations, versus focusing on radical Islam?” Breitbart News Daily via the Washington Post, 12/1/15

“The pope…has kind of fallen into this hysteria…Here you have the pope saying the world’s near suicide if something doesn’t happen in Paris.” Breitbart News Daily via Media Matters for America, 12/2/15

Myron Ebell

Position: Head of EPA transition team—possible EPA administrator

Views on climate change: Ebell, a high-profile climate skeptic, is the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a DC think tank that promotes “limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty.” He has accused climate scientists of “manipulating and falsifying the data.” The New York Times describes Ebell as “one of the most vocal opponents” of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)

Position: Attorney general nominee

Views on climate change: “The balloon and satellite data track each other almost exactly, and it shows almost no warming. So what we’re talking about is: The predictions aren’t coming true.” Washington Watch via Right Wing Watch, 11/30/15

Ken Blackwell, former Ohio secretary of state

Position: Head of transition team for domestic issues

Views on climate change: “Another false environmentalist narrative is the global warming hoax. A few decades back, environmentalist “scientists” started devising computer models that predicted man-made calamity—Manhattan submerged by rising Atlantic waters—within 10 or 15 years ago. It turns out the models were rigged, the data were falsified and, in fact, there has been no measurable warming for nearly 20 years. Most troubling of all, the lying scientists colluded to ruin the careers of honest scientists who tried to tell the truth.” Washington Times, 4/30/15

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.)

Position: CIA director nominee

Views on climate change: “President Obama has called climate change the biggest national security threat of our lifetime, but he is horribly wrong. His unwillingness to acknowledge the true threat posed by Islamic extremism will get Americans killed. His perverse fixation on achieving his economically harmful environmental agenda instead of defeating the true threats facing the world shows just how out of sync his priorities are with Kansans and the American people.” Pompeo press release, 11/30/15

John Bolton, former UN ambassador

Possible position: Secretary of State

Views on climate change: “Obama can achieve his climate change legacy only through delicate negotiations with Congress. His poor relations with the House and Senate, especially on foreign policy, appear to render success unlikely. Obama may rely on his unilateral authority to join a world climate pact in Paris, but without Congress his most important promises will be empty ones whose fate will be left to his successor.” Los Angeles Times, 12/1/15

Jan Brewer, former governor of Arizona

Possible positions: Secretary of Interior

Views on climate change: “Everybody has an opinion on climate change, you know, and I probably don’t believe that it’s man made. I believe that, you know, that weather and certain elements are controlled maybe by different things.” Think Progress, 12/3/13

Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas)

Possible positions: US Supreme Court justice

Views on climate change: “If you are a…liberal politician who wants government power, if that is your driving urge—government power over the American citizenry—then climate change is the perfect pseudoscientific theory. Why is that? Because it can never be disproven…The climate is always changing. It has been changing from the beginning of time.” Cruz campaign event via the Washington Post, 2/3/16

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.)

Possible position: National security adviser

Views on climate change: “And here we have the President of the United States up in Canada talking about climate change. I mean, God, we just had the largest attack…on our own soil in Orlando. Why aren’t we talking about that? Who is talking about that? I mean, Fort Hood, Chattanooga, Boston, people forget about 9/11!” Fox News, 6/29/16

Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the house

Possible position: “I want to be the senior planner for the entire federal government, and I want a letter from you that says Newt Gingrich is authorized to go to any program in any department, examine it and report directly to the president.” Hill, 7/20/16

Views on climate change: Gingrich used to be in favor of taking action on climate change, even appearing in an ad on the subject with Nancy Pelosi and voicing support for a cap-and-trade carbon pricing system. He later called his participation in the ad “dumb” and opposed the cap-and-trade bill backed by Obama in 2009. Last year, Politico reported that Gingrich “said it should not be a given for politicians to assume that climate change is man-made. ‘I don’t think it should be a given. The truth is, I think we don’t know. There’s a difference between political science and science,’ he said.”

Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor

Possible positions: Secretary of State, secretary of Homeland Security

Views on climate change: “The president’s wrong in linking somehow by fixing climate change if he’s gonna fix it, he’s gonna fix terrorism. That’s absurd. There’s no connection between the two things. Where it’s like two different things. It’s like saying I’m gonna fix terrorism by curing cancer.” Fox News via CNS News, 12/2/15

Gov. Nikki Haley (S.C.)

Possible positions: Secretary of State

Views on climate change: “‘The Clean Power Plan is exactly what we don’t need,’ the governor said after addressing a gathering of the SC Electric Cooperatives at Wild Dunes Resort on the Isle of Palms. ‘This is exactly what hurts us. You can’t mandate utility companies which, in turn, raises the cost of power. That’s what’s going to keep jobs away. That’s what’s going to keep companies away.’ She added that officials in Washington ‘stay out of the way.’…’We need to be able to do our jobs and continue to recruit companies and recruit jobs without additional mandates,’ Haley said.” The Post and Courier, 6/3/14

Harold Hamm, oil and gas executive

Possible positions: Secretary of Interior, secretary of Energy

Views on climate change: “Obama imposed punitive regulations to stop this oil and gas renaissance, and in his administration’s very own words, they want to crucify America’s oil and natural gas producers…President Trump will release America’s pent-up energy potential, get rid of foreign oil, trash punitive regulations, create millions of jobs, and develop our most strategic geopolitical weapon: crude oil…Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded…Climate change isn’t our biggest problem; it’s Islamic terrorism. Every onerous regulation puts American lives at risk.” Republican National Convention, 7/20/16

Bonus—Views on earthquake science: “Oil tycoon Harold Hamm told a University of Oklahoma dean last year that he wanted certain scientists there dismissed who were studying links between oil and gas activity and the state’s nearly 400-fold increase in earthquakes, according to the dean’s e-mail recounting the conversation. Hamm, the billionaire founder and chief executive officer of Oklahoma City-based Continental Resources, is a major donor to the university, which is the home of the Oklahoma Geological Survey. He has vigorously disputed the notion that he tried to pressure the survey’s scientists. ‘I’m very approachable, and don’t think I’m intimidating,’ Hamm was quoted as saying in an interview with EnergyWire, an industry publication, that was published on May 11. ‘I don’t try to push anybody around.'” Bloomberg, 5/15/15

Jeffrey Holmstead, energy industry lobbyist

Possible position: EPA administrator

Views on climate change: Holmstead, an assistant EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, told a Senate committee in 2015: “Given the implementation schedule that EPA has proposed for the Clean Power Plan, it will be implemented almost entirely by the next administration. And when the next administration takes office in January 2017, it is virtually certain that the litigation over the legality of the CPP will still be going on, so that the new administration will need to decide whether to defend and implement the CPP as finalized under the Obama Administration…For legal, practical, and political reasons, it would be relatively easy for a new administration to modify or simply revoke the CPP altogether and start from scratch with a more legally defensive approach…The process that led to the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act is instructive. It shows what an administration can do—even when both Houses of Congress are controlled by the opposing party—to get legislation through Congress when such legislation is a priority for the President. In my view, it is a shame that the Obama Administration has not made this type of effort when it comes to climate change legislation and has instead pursued an ill-advised and almost certainly illegal regulatory approach.”

Laura Ingraham, radio host

Possible position: Press secretary

Views on climate change: “This entire effort the Paris climate negotiations is about setting up global rules of governance. Rules that will, if instituted—which we know they won’t be—but if ever instituted would mean that we have less control over our own destiny as a country than we do today. Because Congress will have limited ability to change any treaty. Again, I don’t think it’s going to happen. But if these rules should go into place, we should expect the same compliance from countries like China that we get from China in deals like the World Trade Organization and the World Trade Organization Treaty. So, if people want less sovereignty in the United States, less independence, less oversight, our congressional authority to be meaningful, then we should all be excited about what’s going on with 150 leaders in Paris. But this has nothing to do with terrorism. It has everything to do with bringing America’s economy down, hurting the fossil fuel industry, etc., etc.—one of the few sectors that’s actually growing jobs and still paying people decent wages in the United States. So forgive me if I’m not all hot and bothered by the Paris events.” Fox News via Media Matters, 12/1/15

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas)

Possible position: Secretary of Homeland Security

Views on climate change: “‘Within the Department of Homeland Security, more money, in fact, millions of dollars, are dedicated to climate change rather than combating what I consider to be one of the biggest threats to the homeland, and that’s the violent extremists radicalizing Islamist terrorists radicalizing over the Internet in the United States of America,’ McCaul said.…That is a very narrow comparison. It concerns only the Homeland Security Department and only programs designed to prevent Islamic extremists’ use of the Internet. Within that limited frame, McCaul’s comparison holds up. However, any complete analysis would show that federal departments and agencies spend significantly more money targeting terrorists than they do targeting climate change.” Politifact, 5/14/15

Patrick Morrisey, West Virginia attorney general

Possible position: EPA administrator

Views on climate change: “Morrisey has become one of the leading Attorneys General in the fight against President Obama’s overreaching, illegal EPA regulations. In February 2016, under Morrisey’s leadership, the Supreme Court halted implementation of Obama’s signature climate change initiative, the Clean Power Plan, in an unprecedented win for AG Morrisey and the 28 other state Attorneys General.” Morrisey campaign website, accessed 11/16/16

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska

Possible positions: Secretary of Interior

Views on climate change: “I want people to be empowered to ask questions about what is being fed them from the scientific community, that something’s not making a whole lot of sense when it comes to inconsistent data that is being produced and being fed, especially to our children, when it comes to global warming or climate change—whatever they’re calling it today…It’s a problem right from the start when you’re led to believe that 97 percent of scientists all agree that there is a consensus on global warming.” Guardian, 4/15/16

Rick Perry, former governor of Texas

Possible positions: Secretary of Energy

Views on climate change: “I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think that there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change…The cost to the country and to the world of implementing these anti-carbon programs is in the billions, if not trillions, of dollars at the end of the day. And I don’t think, from my perspective, that I want America to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven and, from my perspective, is more and more being put into question.” Perry campaign speech via CBS News, 8/17/11

Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma attorney general

Possible position: EPA administrator, secretary of Interior

Views on climate change: “The EPA does not possess the authority under the Clean Air Act to accomplish what it proposes in the unlawful Clean Power Plan. The EPA is ignoring the authority granted by Congress to states to regulate power plant emissions at their source. The Clean Power Plan is an unlawful attempt to expand federal bureaucrats’ authority over states’ energy economies in order to shutter coal-fired power plants and eventually other sources of fossil-fuel generated electricity.” Pruitt press release, 7/1/15

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Look at All the Climate Change Deniers Vying for Jobs in the Trump Administration

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

by WilfordLockhart Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s transition team announced one phase of the president-elect’s plan to “drain the swamp” of corruption—a prohibition on registered lobbyists serving in his administration and a five-year lobbying ban for Trump officials who return to the private sector. Trump’s plan effectively doubles down on a policy that the Obama administration already has in place—one that many good government groups and lobbyists alike believe may have created a new problem: un-lobbyists—that is, influence-peddlers who avoid registering as lobbyists to skirt the administration’s rules.

Obama, like Trump, campaigned on a platform of aggressively rooting out the influence of lobbyists. After taking office, he put in place several major good-government initiatives, including a ban on lobbyists serving in his administration and a two-year cooling-off period before ex-administration officials could register to lobby. Once Obama’s lobbying rules took effect, there was a sharp decline in the number of registered lobbyists. Industry insiders and watchdog groups that track the influence game noted that the decrease was not due to lobbyists hanging up their spurs as hired guns for corporations and special interests. Rather it appeared that lobbyists were finding creative ways to avoid officially registering as such. There was no less influence-peddling going on, but now there was less disclosure of the lobbying that was taking place.

The problem lies with the definition of who is a lobbyist. The federal government requires anyone who spends more than 20 percent of their time on behalf of a client while making “lobbying contacts”—an elaborate and specifically defined type of contact with certain types of federal officials—to register as a lobbyist and file quarterly paperwork disclosing their clients and the bills or agencies he or she sought to sway. But by avoiding too many official “lobbying contacts” and limiting how much income that kind of work accounts for, lobbyists can shed the scarlet L, describing themselves as government affairs consultants or experts in advocacy and public policy. In 2014, the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics examined the trend of the “un-lobbyist” and found that 45 percent of the lobbyists who had shed their designation in the previous year still worked for the same employer. In many cases, the lobbyists didn’t leave their jobs, CRP found, they just changed their titles.

The Trump plan, which just tacks three years on to the Obama administration’s existing ban, does stop short of the Obama rules in one area. Under Obama’s policy, people who had been registered lobbyists could not work for agencies they had previously lobbied, though he did offer “waivers” to certain officials. According to Trump aides, registered lobbyists will be eligible for administration jobs if they de-register as lobbyists. The Washington Post reports that Josh Pitcock, a close aide to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, took the step on Monday, sending the Senate Clerk’s office notice that he is no longer a lobbyist for the State of Indiana.

In the end, said Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, the Trump plan may only perpetuate the problem of un-lobbyists.

“People are going to react to the Trump thing in the same way,” Painter notes, “by saying, ‘I’ll figure out a way to not be a lobbyist.'”

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

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This 25-Year-Old May Have Saved You From Super-Gonorrhea

by guillermoburdge Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, the United Nations announced that antibiotic resistance is the “biggest threat to modern medicine.” Nasty superbugs that have evolved to withstand antibiotics already kill 23,000 Americans every year—more than homicide—and experts predict that by 2050 they could kill some 10 million people around the world annually, more than the number of people killed by cancer. The United Kingdom’s chief medical officer describes the situation as a “nightmare.” Pretty soon, the director-general of the World Health Organization says, “common diseases like gonorrhoea may become untreatable.”

Amid the doom and gloom, scientists are buzzing over some hopeful news out of Australia: A 25-year-old researcher there thinks she may have discovered a key to averting this public health crisis. Shu Lam, a Malaysian Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne, has found a way to kill bacteria with small star-shaped protein molecules that she builds in her lab.

Rather than poisoning the bad bacteria like antibiotics do, the molecules, called peptide polymers, destroy the bacteria’s cell walls. And unlike antibiotics, which also poison surrounding healthy cells, the polymers “are quite non-toxic to the healthy cells in the body,” Lam says. That’s because they’re much too big (about 10 nanometers in diameter) to enter healthy cells—”the difference in scale between a mouse and an elephant,” Lam’s supervisor told the Sydney Morning Herald. What’s more, in Lam’s experiments, generation after generation of bacteria don’t seem to become resistant to the polymers.

Related: How Factory Farms Play Chicken With Antibiotics

The research, published in Nature Microbiology, has been described by media as a major breakthrough that “could change the face of modern medicine.” Lam has successfully used the polymers to kill six different superbugs in her lab and another superbug in mice. The technique has effectively fought off infections from drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacteria that’s involved with pneumonia, meningitis, and urinary tract infections.

But it’s still too early to celebrate. Lam hasn’t tested the polymers on superbugs in humans yet, and she could need another five years to fully develop the technique, her supervisor says. “With research, you need to have a lot of patience,” Lam told the Telegraph (which, ahem, published its article about her discovery on the “Lifestyle-Women” section of its site).

Right now there seem to be few alternatives. As my colleague Tom Philpott has reported, scientists continue to discover more cases of bacteria that have evolved to resist the antibiotics we have. And we’re not coming up with new drugs at a speedy rate: Over the last half century, the Telegraph notes, only two new classes of antibiotics have entered the market.

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This 25-Year-Old May Have Saved You From Super-Gonorrhea

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3 Key Facts About the Charlotte Police Shooting

by LilyCurrie Posted on September 21, 2016

Mother Jones

Violent protests erupted in Charlotte late Tuesday night after a police officer fatally shot Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old black man, in the parking lot of an apartment complex earlier in the day. Sixteen police officers were injured during the protests, which included demonstrators blockading a busy highway and looting tractor trailers and a Walmart.

At a Wednesday news conference, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said they’d been searching for a person with an outstanding warrant when they noticed Scott leaving his car with a gun in hand. After officers approached and gave him verbal warnings, police said that Scott left the car and posed “an imminent deadly threat.” He was then shot by a black officer named Brentley Vinson, who was not wearing a body camera at the time. In a video later posted on social media, a woman claiming to be Scott’s daughter said that he was unarmed and was instead holding a book. Putney rejected that claim, saying that officers recovered a gun at the scene, not a book. (Meanwhile, Vinson has been placed on administrative leave while the department investigates.)

The mood was quiet on Wednesday afternoon, though officials anticipated another tense evening. Scott’s shooting came just four days after Terrence Crutcher, a 40-year-old unarmed black man, was fatally shot outside his vehicle by a Tulsa police officer. The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into Crutcher’s death, and on Wednesday, US Attorney General Lorretta Lynch said in remarks at the International Bar Association annual conference that the department was “assessing” the incident surrounding Scott’s death.

Here are three things to know about the Scott shooting and the fallout on Wednesday:

Body cam footage: Last September, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police announced it would issue body cameras to all patrol officers in an attempt to increase transparency during confrontations. The directive granted exceptions for officers on the SWAT team and those in tactical units who apprehend violent criminals, citing cost and safety concerns. The Charlotte Observer reported that Charlotte-Mecklenburg officers had fatally shot four people between September 2015 and May 2016, yet only one of those incidents was caught on camera.

Putney told reporters at Wednesday’s press conference that dashcam footage was under review and had recorded parts of the police confrontation with Scott. Because it was part of the investigation, he said, the department wouldn’t release the footage at this time.

In July, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law a bill that made it more difficult to get public access to such footage. Local police departments can decide to release recordings if they want, but if they decline to do so a judge’s order is required. The American Civil Liberties Union’s North Carolina chapter has called on Charlotte police to release the footage from the scene, arguing that the new law doesn’t go into effect until October 1.

Charlotte police’s recent history: In September 2013, a white Charlotte police officer named Randall Kerrick shot and killed Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old unarmed black man and former college football player, while he was looking for help after a car accident. Kerrick was charged with voluntary manslaughter. Last August, a North Carolina judge declared a mistrial after four days of jury deliberation, and authorities opted not to pursue a retrial.

Meanwhile, as my former colleague Jaeah Lee wrote in our May/June 2016 issue, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD has been part of a University of Chicago experiment that uses data to identify troublesome cops—those who are likely to abuse their power or break the law—and anticipate future police misconduct.

Calls for an economic boycott: At a press conference on Wednesday, a group of civil rights activists questioned the police’s narrative of events. B.J. Murphy, a representative of the Nation of Islam and longtime Charlotte resident, called on black Charlotte residents to boycott local businesses to “let everybody feel the pain economically of what we feel physically when you kill us.”

“Since black lives do not matter for this city, then our black dollars shouldn’t matter,” Murphy said. “We’re watching a modern-day lynching on social media, on television, and it is affecting the psyche of black people. That’s what you saw last night.”

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3 Key Facts About the Charlotte Police Shooting

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A Silicon Valley Billionaire Just Challenged Donald Trump in the Best Way Possible

by WilliemDriscoll Posted on September 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman just made Donald Trump an offer that should entice the GOP nominee who claims to have donated millions to veterans: If Trump releases his tax returns by October 19, the date of the last presidential debate, Hoffman will donate up to $5 million to veteran groups.

The original idea came from a crowd-funding campaign started by Peter Kiernan, a veteran of the Marines who was once deployed to Afghanistan. Kiernan said he would donate to 10 veteran’s groups should Trump release his taxes and began raising money to do so on Crowdpac.com.

In a Medium post published on Monday afternoon, LinkedIn co-founder Hoffman expressed his support for Kiernan’s campaign, and upped the ante by promising to quintuple the final total raised by Kiernan, up to $5 million.

Kiernan explained his reasoning on the campaign’s site. “Any servicemember who has ever held a security clearance has been subjected to a rigorous background check, including personal finances, affiliations, and drug activity…To be the Commander-in-Chief of this group, you should be held to the same standards.”

In his post, Hoffman also noted both the tactic and the actual dollar amount should have special significance to the GOP nominee: In 2012, Trump offered Barack Obama $5 million to release his college transcripts, his passport applications, and other documents.

As BuzzFeed points out, Hoffman’s intentions might not just be about the 2016 election. He was an early investor in Crowdpac, the site hosting Kiernan’s crowd-funding campaign, so he potentially stands to benefit financially from raising the site’s profile.

In January, Trump skipped a Republican primary debate in Iowa and instead held a fundraiser for veterans during the same time slot. (He initially claimed to have donated $6 million from the event to veteran charities, but his campaign has significantly decreased that estimate following reports suggesting the initial figure was inflated.) But the nominee has also been adamant about keeping his tax returns from the public eye: Though he promised to release them in May, he has since reversed his position, saying he would withhold the records because he was being audited by the IRS. (The agency has said that’s not necessary.)

As Hoffman explains, the proposal “gives Trump a strong incentive to act but doesn’t reward him directly for something he should have already done. Instead, men and women to whom all Americans owe a great debt of gratitude will benefit from any positive action he takes.”

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Trump’s campaign chief once ran a major climate research center

by AlejandMasten Posted on August 26, 2016

biosphere the worst

Trump’s campaign chief once ran a major climate research center

By on Aug 26, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Long before Stephen Bannon was CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he held a much different job — as the acting director of Biosphere 2, a $200 million scientific research facility in the mountains outside Tucson, Arizona.

The original Biosphere project, completed in 1991 by a company called Space Biosphere Ventures and funded by a Texas billionaire named Edward Bass, was an attempt to turn science fiction into reality. Eight individuals were to live and work entirely within a series of domed and self-contained buildings, where they would grow their own food, recycle their own waste, and demonstrate that humans might be able to survive in space. But when that two-year experiment ended in disarray — it was overrun by ants and cockroaches — the company turned to a group of outsiders for help in turning it around. At the head of that effort was Bannon.

At the time he was hired by Bass to run Space Biospheres Ventures, Bannon was managing his own investment banking firm, Bannon & Co. Some Biosphere-ites were concerned about Bannon, who had previously investigated cost overruns at the site. Two former Biosphere 2 crew members flew back to Arizona to protest the hire and broke into the compound to warn current crew members that Bannon and the new management would jeopardize their safety.

Under his management, the focus of Biosphere 2 shifted from survival — the Survivor-like challenge of enduring two years inside a literal bubble — to planetary research. Specifically, as Bannon explained in a 1995 interview with C-SPAN, Biosphere 2 would be a place that focused on studying societal challenges like air pollution and climate change.

Breitbart News, the media company which Bannon ran for four years before taking a leave of absence to join Trump’s campaign, has adopted an antagonistic approach toward the topic of climate change, mocking climate science as “tosh” and “eco-propaganda” and claiming that the Earth is actually cooling. But Bannon sang a much different tune when he was interviewed by C-SPAN at Biosphere 2 in 1995.

“A lot of the scientists who are studying global change and studying the effects of greenhouse gases, many of them feel that the Earth’s atmosphere in 100 years is what Biosphere 2’s atmosphere is today,” Bannon explained. “We have extraordinarily high CO2, we have very high nitrous oxide, we have high methane. And we have lower oxygen content. So the power of this place is allowing those scientists who are really involved in the study of global change, and which, in the outside world or Biosphere 1, really have to work with just computer simulation, this actually allows them to study and monitor the impact of enhanced CO2 and other greenhouse gases on humans, plants, and animals.”

Bannon left Biosphere 2 after two years, and the project was taken over by Columbia University. (It is currently part of the University of Arizona.) But his departure was marred, as the Tucson Citizen reported at the time, by a civil lawsuit filed against Space Biosphere Ventures by the former crew members who had broken in.

During a 1996 trial, Bannon testified that he had called one of the plaintiffs a “self-centered, deluded young woman” and a “bimbo.” He also testified that when the woman submitted a five-page complaint outlining safety problems at the site, he promised to shove the complaint “down her fucking throat.” At the end of the trial, the jury found for the plaintiffs and ordered Space Biosphere Ventures to pay them $600,000 — but also ordered the plaintiffs to pay the company $40,089 for the damage they had caused.

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How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists

by TedBarela22815 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, when Donald Trump tapped the chairman of Breitbart Media to lead his campaign, he wasn’t simply turning to a trusted ally and veteran propagandist. By bringing on Stephen Bannon, Trump was signaling a wholehearted embrace of the “alt-right,” a once-motley assemblage of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ethno-nationalistic provocateurs who have coalesced behind Trump and curried the GOP nominee’s favor on social media. In short, Trump has embraced the core readership of Breitbart News.

“We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July. Though disavowed by every other major conservative news outlet, the alt-right has been Bannon’s target audience ever since he took over Breitbart News from its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, four years ago. Under Bannon’s leadership, the site has plunged into the fever swamps of conservatism, cheering white nationalist groups as an “electic mix of renegades,” accusing President Barack Obama of importing “more hating Muslims,” and waging an incessant war against the purveyors of “political correctness.”

“Andrew Breitbart despised racism. Truly despised it,” former Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro wrote last week in Daily Wire, a conservative website. “With Bannon embracing Trump, all that changed. Now Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.”

Exactly who and what defines the alt-right is hotly debated in conservative circles, but its proponents—who tend to be young, white, and male—are united in a belief that traditional movement conservatism has failed. They often criticize trade and immigration policies as examples of how the deck is stacked in favor of outsiders and elites instead of “real Americans” (a.k.a. Trump supporters). They bash social conservatives as ineffective sellouts to the GOP establishment, and rail against neo-conservative hawks for their embrace of Israel. While often tapping into legitimate economic grievances, their social media hashtags (such as #altright on Twitter) dredge up torrents of racist, sexist, and xenophobic memes.

Trump’s new campaign chief denies that the alt-right is inherently racist. He describes its ideology as “nationalist,” though not necessarily white nationalist. Likening its approach to that of European nationalist parties such as France’s National Front, he says: “If you look at the identity movements over there in Europe, I think a lot of them are really ‘Polish identity’ or ‘German identity,’ not racial identity. It’s more identity toward a nation-state or their people as a nation.” (Never mind that National Front founder Jean Marie Le Pen has been fined in France for “inciting racial hatred.”)

Bannon dismisses the alt-right’s appeal to racists as happenstance. “Look, are there some people that are white nationalists that are attracted to some of the philosophies of the alt-right? Maybe,” he says. “Are there some people that are anti-Semitic that are attracted? Maybe. Right? Maybe some people are attracted to the alt-right that are homophobes, right? But that’s just like, there are certain elements of the progressive left and the hard left that attract certain elements.”

A Twitter analysis conducted by The Investigative Fund using Little Bird software found that these “elements” are more deeply connected to Breitbart News than more traditional conservative outlets. While only 5 percent of key influencers using the supremacist hashtag #whitegenocide follow the National Review, and 10 percent follow The Daily Caller, 31 percent follow Breitbart. The disparities are even starker for the anti-Muslim hashtag #counterjihad: National Review, 0 percent; Daily Caller, 37 percent; Breitbart News, 62 percent.

Bannon’s views often echo those of his devoted followers. He describes Islam as “a political ideology” and Sharia law as “like Nazism, fascism, and communism.” On his Sirius XM radio show, he heaped praise on Pamela Geller, whose American Freedom Defense Initiative has been labeled an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bannon called her “one of the leading experts in the country, if not the world,” on Islam. And he basically endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s primary challenger, businessman Paul Nehlen, who floated the idea of deporting all Muslims from the United States.

During our interview, Bannon took credit for fomenting “this populist nationalist movement” long before Trump came on the scene. He credited Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)—a Trump endorser and confidant who has suggested that civil rights advocacy groups were “un-American”—with laying the movement’s groundwork. Bannon also pointed to his own films, which include a Sarah Palin biopic and an “exposé” of the Occupy movement, as “very nationalistic films.” Trump, he said, “is very late to this party.”

At Breitbart News, one of the most strident voices for the alt-right has been Yiannapolous, who was banned by Twitter during the RNC for inciting a racist pile-on of Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. Published back in March, his “Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt Right” featured an illustration of a frog taunting an elephant—the frog image being a meme white supremacists had popularized on social media. The piece praised the anti-immigrant site VDare, the white nationalist site American Renaissance, and white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, as the alt-right’s “dangerously bright” intellectual core.

On the RNC’s opening day, Yiannapolous spoke at a “Citizens for Trump” rally. He also co-hosted a party featuring anti-Muslim activist Geller and the Dutch far-right nationalist politician Geert Wilders. Yiannopolous has proved to be Breitbart‘s most vitriolic anti-Muslim presence, erasing the distinction many conservatives draw between Islam and “radical Islam.” After the Orlando shootings, Yiannopolous told Bannon on his weekly radio show that “there is a structural problem with this religion that is preventing its followers from assimilating properly into Western culture.”

Bannon has stoked racist themes himself, notably in a lengthy July post accusing the “Left” of a “plot to take down America” by fixating on police shootings of black citizens. He argued that the five police officers slain in Dallas were murdered “by a #BlackLivesMatter-type activist-turned-sniper.” And he accused the mainstream media of an Orwellian “bait-and-switch as reporters and their Democratic allies and mentors seek to twist the subject from topics they don’t like to discuss—murderers with evil motives—to topics they do like to discuss, such as gun control.” Bannon added, “Here’s a thought: What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent.”

Some Breitbart staffers who resisted the site’s transformation into a pro-Trump alt-right hub eventually resigned in protest. Several jumped ship after Corey Lewandowski, then Trump’s campaign manager, manhandled Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields at a rally. (The site appeared to side with Lewandowski, and staffers were reportedly told not to question his account.) Among the departing staffers were Fields, who now writes for the Huffington Post, and Shapiro, who has emerged as one of Breitbart‘s most vociferous conservative critics.

On Thursday, in the Washington Post, Shapiro upped the ante, describing the alt-right as a “movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism,” and Breitbart News as “a party organ, a pathetic cog in the Trump-Media Complex and a gathering place for white nationalists.” The reception he and another conservative Jewish Breitbart critic, Bethany Mandel, have experienced in the Bannonosphere is revealing: In May, when Shapiro, who became editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire after leaving Breitbart, tweeted about the birth of his second child, he received a torrent of anti-Semitic tweets. “Into the gas chamber with all 4 of you,” one read. Another tweet depicted his family as lampshades. Mandel says she has been harassed on Twitter for months, “called a ‘slimy Jewess’ and told that I ‘deserve the oven.'”

After Shapiro called out the anti-Semitism, Breitbart News published (under the byline of Pizza Party Ben) a post ridiculing Shapiro for “playing the victim on Twitter and throwing around allegations of anti-Semitism and racism.”

Back at the RNC, Bannon dismissed Shapiro as a “whiner…I don’t think that the alt-right is anti-Semitic at all,” he told me. “Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don’t believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic.”

In any case, Breitbart’s conservative dissenters are fearful of what the Trump-Bannon alliance might bring. As Mandel puts it, “There’s no gray area here: Bannon is a bad guy. And he now has control of a major campaign for president.”

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Additional reporting was done by Kalen Goodluck, Josh Harkinson, and Jaime Longoria.

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How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists

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Cows pass gas ’so they don’t explode,’ dairy industry reminds us

by NaomiTcbgaklpum Posted on August 12, 2016

natural gas

Cows pass gas ’so they don’t explode,’ dairy industry reminds us

By on Aug 12, 2016 5:48 pmShare

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

California’s attempt to curb emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is facing vocal opposition from a dairy industry that fears government meddling in the flatulence of its cows.

The California Air Resources Board (ARB) has set a goal of slashing methane emissions by 40 percent by 2030, from 2013 levels, and has targeted the belching and farting — known as “enteric fermentation” — of California’s 5.5 million beef and dairy cows, as well as the manure they create.

A strategy document produced by the regulator states that improved manure management practices, new diets for cattle and “gut microbial interventions” could help cut the amount of methane released into the atmosphere. State legislators are currently considering a bill to enforce these suggestions.

Methane, primarily emitted from agriculture and the fossil fuel industry, doesn’t linger in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide. But it is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas over a 100-year period.

California has moved to limit methane after the state’s glowing reputation for climate action received a nasty blow by a natural gas leak this year in the mountains above Los Angeles that took 112 days to plug and spewed 97,100 metric tonnes of methane into the atmosphere.

But the state’s dairy industry has criticized the crackdown on methane leaking from cattle, launching a social media and email campaign that claims the ARB is overstepping its remit and raises the specter of exploding cows.

“The focus here is to highlight ARB’s efforts at over-regulating the dairy industry,” said Anja Raudabaugh, chief executive of Western United Dairymen. “By nature’s design, [cows] pass lots of gas. Quite frankly, we want them to expel gas so they don’t explode.”

The Milk Producers Council has also lambasted the prospect of new regulation, with the lobby group’s general manager Rob Vandenheuvel stating that the methane rules plan “threatens the future of the California dairy industry.”

“This is about fighting against the ridiculously stupid ‘go-it-alone’ strategy for implementing business killing regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gases,” Vandenheuvel said.

“When the U.S. talks about going this direction, while countries like China refuse, I call that crazy. When a single state like California does it on its own, I call that absolutely insane.”

In May, the Obama administration unveiled new rules to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by up to 45 percent by 2025, from 2012 levels. The rules are part of a number of executive actions taken by the president this year — including on emissions from aircraft and refrigerants — in the face of escalating global temperatures.

The world has just experienced 14 consecutive months of record heat, with scientists expressing alarm at the pace of temperature increase and resulting impact upon glaciers and sea levels.

Neither California nor the federal government, however, has yet adopted an idea from Argentina’s government that large backpacks be strapped onto cows to trap methane and turn it into green energy.

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Cows pass gas ’so they don’t explode,’ dairy industry reminds us

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2 Months, No Food: The Story of a Transgender Inmate’s Hunger Strike

by MYZJeffrysi Posted on August 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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A transgender inmate at a local San Francisco jail just ended a dramatic two-month hunger strike in protest of her housing situation. Over the course of her strike, Athena Cadence lost 40 pounds and was sent to the hospital at least three times, according to trans rights advocates working on her behalf. On Wednesday, she was taken to the hospital after a judge ordered for her release from jail.

San Francisco County doesn’t house prisoners according to their gender identity. Instead, trans inmates are currently held together in a segregated area of a men’s facility, at least until the county decides how to handle their housing in the long term. Before going on hunger strike, Cadence said she had been mocked by inmates, deputies, and other staff for being transgender. She filed multiple grievance forms to express her frustration. But she says they did little to make the harassment stop.

When I visited her in July, 35 days into her hunger strike, Cadence was drained of energy. During her protest, she refused all solid foods, only consuming rehydration salts in water and vitamins, amounting to about 150 calories per day. She told me she couldn’t stand for more than a short period of time and spent most of her days napping. But her cheeks were still rosy and she spoke clearly. “Playing ball the way the sheriff’s department wanted to through paperwork and meetings wasn’t going to work,” she told me. “I didn’t feel like I had anything to lose.”

The vast majority of transgender inmates across the country are housed according to the gender they were assigned at birth, putting them at risk for abuse. In 2012, the Department of Justice instructed jails and prisons to give serious consideration to transgender inmates’ placement preferences—rather than just housing them according to their “genital status.” But those guidelines were rarely followed, according to the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on criminal justice. So in March, the DOJ doubled down, releasing a new directive that again emphasized that any housing policy “must allow for housing by gender identity when appropriate.”

For the past two years, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department has been working with advocates on an updated policy that allows trans inmates to be housed according to their gender identity. In September 2015, the Sheriff’s Department announced that the new policy would be in place by the end of the year, and the city was heralded as a leader in the correctional community. But December came and went, and inmates continued to be held in a segregated wing of the downtown facility while the new sheriff, Vicki Hennessy, carried on drafting the policy.

According to Eileen Hirst, chief of staff for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, changing the way the jail handles trans inmates has been a priority from day one, but it’s more complex than it would seem. “There’s a tendency to think this is about putting trans women in women’s housing and trans men in men’s housing, and everything’s fine,” she says. “But it’s a lot more complicated. What needs to happen is a change in policy from the moment an individual walks in the door to be booked into custody.” New guidelines would need to address inmate classification, searches, and programming access—not just inmate housing.

Before she ended up in San Francisco County Jail, Cadence was a soldier in the Army. In 2006, she was deployed to Iraq, where she came out as trans to some of her fellow soldiers and presented as female off base. Even in the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, she described her gender identity as mostly a “nonissue” while she was enlisted.

But that wasn’t the case in the San Francisco County Jail. “Of course I’ve experienced some harassment before thism but never so violent,” she said of her experience there. Cadence said that even though trans inmates are held separately from the general population, they are often cat-called and harassed by male inmates in neighboring cells. “Men stare at us a lot,” she said. “They stare at us in bed.”

Being in a male detention area also meant being searched by male deputies. Cadence told me she’d been strip-searched by men four times since she arrived. That changed in June when Sheriff Hennessy ordered supervisors to first ask for a female volunteer to conduct a strip search if a trans inmate requests it. However, if no women deputies volunteer, the directive says the jail should stick to its current strip-search policy, which is based on “the genitalia of the individual.”

Although the sheriff’s department says that housing trans inmates separately from the general population is meant to protect them from harassment by other inmates, Cadence said it didn’t protect them from harassment from staff. During a strip search, one staff member allegedly told her that she should chop off her genitals. In another incident, she says, a deputy bent her fingers backward so far that her knuckles turned black and blue. The Transgender Law Center, which has been representing her, says Cadence filed multiple complaints related to verbal harassment and misgendering by staffers. Hirst said she couldn’t comment on specifics but said that the jail is investigating Cadence’s claims “as we do any complaint from a prisoner.” The jail has also been working since last year on developing trans-awareness training for all members of the department.

Abuse of transgender inmates by staff members is a problem across the country, both in jails and in prisons. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that between 2011 and 2012, about 18 percent of trans inmates experienced sexual victimization by jail staffers, compared with just over 2 percent of inmates in the general population. Transgender inmates who’ve been harassed are often placed in solitary confinement—which ends up being more like a form of punishment than a means of protection.

This week, Cadence’s hunger strike came to an end. On Tuesday, a judge determined that she had served enough time and ordered her released from the jail’s custody. The next morning, she was sent to the hospital to begin reintroducing food.

But the rest of the transgender inmates at SF County Jail remain in the men’s section of the facility. Last week, advocates sent a revised policy proposal back to the sheriff’s department for review. Hirst says she doesn’t know when the new housing policy will be finalized. Still, she expressed admiration for what Cadence has put herself through: “An individual who feels strongly enough about the issue to have a hunger strike, who is very committed, and who is seeking social change—that has to be respected.”

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2 Months, No Food: The Story of a Transgender Inmate’s Hunger Strike

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