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A Fresh Start?

by TammaraSavoy Posted on November 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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David Frum is persuading me this morning that the tweetstorm can be a valuable medium after all. He is not buying Michael Smerconish’s suggestion that we should all give Donald Trump a fresh start:

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A Fresh Start?

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We Asked Trump Supporters About the Khan Controversy. Here’s What They Said.

by UlrikeFensterma Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s feud with the family of a fallen soldier may be generating near-universal condemnation from fellow Republicans in Washington—and throwing his campaign into chaos—but supporters of the GOP presidential candidate in a nearby suburb on Tuesday seemed to think Trump was justified in his attacks on the family. Some even repeated conspiracy theories that the late soldier’s father is part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mother Jones surveyed Trump backers at a rally in Ashburn, Virginia, for their views on Trump’s ongoing fight with the Khan family, following Khizr Khan’s emotional Democratic National Convention address about his late son, Humayun, who was killed in Iraq in 2004. Did Calvin, an attendee who declined to give his last name, take issue with Trump’s handling of the controversy, which included suggesting that Ghazala Khan had stood silently next to her husband during his speech because “maybe she wasn’t allowed to speak”? He acknowledged that Trump’s response was “very poorly worded,” but he said it didn’t affect his opinion of the candidate. “Hillary is 10 times worse than Donald Trump,” he said.

How about Christopher Abel, who was handing out business cards at the rally for the Vocal Citizens super-PAC? “My view starts with, everyone has a right to defend themselves,” he said of Trump.

Along with the Khan controversy, Trump supporters also weighed in on the GOP nominee’s recent remarks that Hillary Clinton is “the devil.” Check out their responses in the video above.

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We Asked Trump Supporters About the Khan Controversy. Here’s What They Said.

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French Prisons May Be Producing Dangerous Terrorists

by BTZBrittan Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, two ISIS-linked extremists killed a priest and stabbed another parishioner during morning mass at a Catholic church in Normandy, the 11th terrorist attack on French soil since January 2015. One of the alleged attackers was identified as Adel Kermiche, a French teenager who was imprisoned briefly for attempting to travel to Syria, likely to join ISIS. He was released into his parents’ custody with an ankle monitor in March.

While Kermiche was likely already dedicated to violent jihad, the radicalization of young Muslims in lockup is a growing concern for officials in France, where a majority of the nation’s more than 65,000 prisoners are Muslim. Two of the three Frenchmen involved in last January’s Charlie Hebdo killings met in prison, where they were radicalized by another inmate. The mastermind behind the November 2015 attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris became radicalized while imprisoned in Belgium, his father said. A man who fatally stabbed a police officer and his wife in their Magnanville, France, home last month had been flagged by prison officials for trying to convince other inmates to join him in jihad. And at least one other perpetrator of a major terror attack in France in recent years also served time—although it’s unclear what role that played in the subsequent attack.

France, hoping to curb this apparent trend, has instituted de-radicalization programs in a number of prisons. Inmates incarcerated on terror-related charges, or whom prison officials believe are susceptible to radicalization, are boxed off from the general population and offered the services of psychologists, teachers, imams, and other professionals, with the goal of coaxing the inmates toward healthier perspectives. But the preliminary verdict of some French prison officials is that the programs are not working.

Mourad Benchellali is a French anti-radicalization lecturer who spent a total of four years imprisoned at Guantanámo Bay and France’s Fleury-Mérogis prison—Europe’s largest penitentiary—for training with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He has been called in to speak with inmates in the de-radicalization units at six prisons. “If you put all these people together who are only thinking about radical Islam, who are only talking about it, it’s hard to break that mentality,” Benchellali told me. It’s also risky, he adds, to put people in the program who aren’t yet radicalized, because constant interactions with committed terrorists could push salvageable inmates over the edge.

But there’s something more fundamental at play here—something US authorities can learn from, notes Mark Hamm, a former director of education and programming for the Arizona Department of Corrections who now studies prison radicalization at Indiana State University. Many young Muslim inmates—often children of immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa—come from impoverished backgrounds, and feel alienated and rejected by French society. This makes them easy marks for charismatic radicals. “They feel like France doesn’t want them,” Benchellali says.

It’s not hard to see why they feel that way. Muslims make up less than 10 percent of France’s population but more than half of its prisoners. Muslim women are legally barred from wearing face veils in public. During the 2012 presidential election cycle, French candidates debated whether Muslim butchers were lying to their customers about selling them halal meat (akin to kosher meat). The state of emergency France instituted in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks last January has resulted in police raids on thousands of Muslim homes, mosques, restaurants, and other establishments—hundreds of Muslims have been placed on house arrest without a court order. (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International cried foul in recent reports.) French authorities have closed mosques and expelled from the country imams they deemed too radical, and the prime minister recently proposed banning foreign funding for French mosques to cut down on potential cash flows from extremist groups. And the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping Europe amid the Syrian refugee crisis was deepened by the latest wave of attacks in France, Belgium, and Germany.

In this hostile atmosphere, Benchellali says, radicalism becomes an attractive route for young Muslim inmates—separated from friends and family, and thus more susceptible to emotional manipulation—to resist a system they feel has attacked them. Radicalism makes them feel like they belong.

A recent study by the Brookings Institute found—to the authors’ surprise—that the single biggest predictor of whether a person traveled from a particular country to join terrorist groups in the Middle East was whether or not French was (or used to be) the originating country’s official language. Four of the five countries that produce foreign fighters at the highest rate—France, Belgium, Tunisia, and Lebanon—were Francophone (Jordan is the fifth). Partly to blame, the authors surmised, is the French political culture in those countries—specifically, the aggressive French approach to secularism. (Unconvinced, France’s ambassador to the United States scoffed that the study didn’t “make any methodological sense.”)

In the United States, there has been periodic worry about prisoner radicalization. Such concerns peaked in the years after the September 11 attacks, waned, and have popped up again thanks to a 2010 Senate report that cited dozens of American former convicts who had traveled to Yemen—possibly to fight with Al Qeada—and also President Obama’s proposal, earlier this year, to transfer dozens of Guantanamo inmates to US prisons. Congress introduced a bill last December that would require federal prison volunteers to undergo background checks to look for ties to terrorist groups.

The number of inmates radicalized in American prisons who went on to commit terrorist acts—whether Islamic extremists, right-wingers, black nationalists, or otherwise—Hamm says, is minute. In a study of prison radicalization in Western nations from 1969 to 2011, Hamm found just 51 such cases—nearly 80 percent of which involved radical Islamists—Benchelalli adds that radicalization is not happening “en masse” in French prisons either. Yet despite the small numbers, “the acts they commit are spectacular,” Hamm says.

The small sample size makes it hard to draw up a profile of the American inmates most likely to become radicalized, Hamm says. But there are some patterns: Radicalization tends to follow a prison gang model, with charismatic leaders calling the shots. Among African Americans—who make up the largest percentage of prisoners—many of those who become radicalized bounce from one religion to the next, converting to southern Baptist Christianity, for example, then to Islam, joining the Nation of Islam, and then progressing to yet more radical forms of the religion, Hamm says. Data on the religions of US inmates is scarce, but Islam is the fastest-growing prison religion in America, France, and other Western nations, Hamm says. Whereas a previous generation of prisoners adopted Marxism as the ideology of the oppressed, Hamm and other scholars say, the younger inmates have replaced it with Islam.

In a failed 2005 plot that received widespread attention, several radical Islamists planned to bomb synagogues and an Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, along with several military bases. The attack was planned and ordered by Kevin James, a black inmate incarcerated on robbery charges at California State Prison in Sacramento (a.k.a. New Folsom). A former Crip, James had converted to Islam in prison and radicalized a fellow convert from a rival faction of the gang who led the plot on the outside upon his release. (He was later convicted of charges related to the plot.)

American prison inmates become radicalized for reasons similar to inmates in France, Hamm told me. “The social and political contention of the times have always had an impact on prisoners,” he says. Inmates entertain themselves by reading the newspaper and magazines and watching the news when it’s available: “Identities are formed around these conversations.”

New Folsom, a maximum-security prison, is among the nation’s most dysfunctional, Hamm says. “Radicalization doesn’t happen in well-managed, small, medium-security prisons,” he says. “It does happen in large, overcrowded, mismanaged, maximum-security prisons where rehabilitation, treatment, and work have disappeared.”

France’s prisons are notoriously overcrowded—former president Nicolas Sarkozy once called them “the disgrace of the Republic.” And with few trained imams available for religious guidance, Benchellali says, questioning Muslim inmates turn to their peers for answers.

Hamm told me he’s skeptical about French prison officials’ assessment that the de-radicalization program—which has been in operation for a little over a year—isn’t working. “It’s too early” to tell, he says. “You need longitudinal studies” to determine that. In any case, the best cure for prison radicalization, he says, is you “give people hope and you give them something to do. You keep them busy. You don’t neglect them. You don’t let them turn into gang bangers and people who are racist.” What helped Benchellali in prison, he says, was doing things like playing sports and talking to non-radical inmates about topics other than terrorism.

Meanwhile, the anti-Muslim backlash to terror attacks will only drive more such attacks, Georgetown professor Daniel Byman argued on Slate earlier this month. “More vitriol and hostility toward French and European Muslims,” he said, makes it “easier for ISIS to gain recruits and score victories.”

Indeed, in a video released just two months before the Charlie Hebdo attack, French ISIS fighters called on French Muslims to join the Islamic State or wage jihad at home, because in France, one fighter noted, “just wearing the niqab is very difficult.”

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French Prisons May Be Producing Dangerous Terrorists

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The US Could Have Its Very Own Brexit, Samantha Bee Warns

by StefanFrank Posted on June 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Monday night’s episode of Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, our host outlined some pretty scary parallels between the UK’s Brexit vote and the United States’ presidential election in November.

“While the Brits were waking up in the ruins of their nation saying, ‘Oh God, what have we done?’ a lot of Americans were looking over and saying, ‘Oh God, what are we about to do?'” Bee said, as she showed British news clips highlighting racist outbursts, directed at Muslim and Eastern European immigrants in particular, in the aftermath of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union.

In the UK and in the US, “there’s the sad conservative leader who gambled the nation’s future on his ability to control the extremists in his own party and lost,” Bee says as the screen shows photos of Britain’s disgraced PM David Cameron and US Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

And Boris Johnson, “Europhobe and former mayor of London,” as well as the likeliest choice to become the next prime minister, is “basically Trump with his hair on backwards.”

But America is not Britain. In fact, not being British is kind of central to our brand, Bee says. While the UK is 87% white, the US is significantly more multiracial. And this diverse population is the key to ensuring that Trump not only loses the general election in November, she says, but loses “in a fucking landslide.”

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The US Could Have Its Very Own Brexit, Samantha Bee Warns

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2015 Saw a Record Number of Attacks on US Mosques

by Grace98Vohrpzxo Posted on June 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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The past three years have been difficult for Muslim-Americans, according to a new report tracking increasing Islamophobia issued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the UC-Berkeley Center for Race and Gender. Among the most eye-catching findings: the researchers recorded 78 attacks on mosques last year, the highest since CAIR began monitoring such incidents in 2009.

The report highlights the growth of many other forms of discrimination. Self-declared “Muslim-free” businesses have cropped up across the country, and bullying of Muslim students, even by teachers, is on the rise. One piece of good news is a decrease in law enforcement anti-terrorism trainings led by purported experts who spread fear and misinformation about Muslims.

The report suggests that anti-Muslim incidents spike in the wake of terrorist events, noting an uptick in violent anti-Muslim rhetoric that took place after Islamic State militants beheaded two Americans in Syria in August 2014. Additional armed anti-Islam demonstrations sprouted up in the wake of an attempted terror attack on a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas last year, where illustrators had been invited to submit caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. And after November’s Paris attacks, there was a marked increase in attacks on American mosques.

The study comes after a Republican primary season that repeatedly featured anti-Muslim rhetoric. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim migration to the United States. Sen. Ted Cruz spoke at summits hosted by the Center for Security Policy, a group which has been declared an extremist anti-Muslim group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Ben Carson told Meet the Press that he believed Islam was inconsistent with the Constitution and said he wouldn’t vote for a Muslim to be president. Two-thirds of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire favored banning Muslims from entering the United States, and last September, a survey of Republican voters in Iowa found that almost a third think Islam should be illegal.

Here are some key developments highlighted in the report:

Mosque Attacks

Last year saw a spike in attacks on Muslim places of worship.

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Thirty-four mosques were targeted in just the final two months of 2015—more incidents than typically occur across an entire year. Only two of November’s attacks took place before the Paris terror attacks.

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September 2015: Three young men burned three crosses on a New York’s mosque’s lawn.
November 2015: Vandals targeted a Texas mosque, covering the door in feces and throwing torn Korans on the ground.
December 2015: A severed pig’s head was left outside a Philadelphia mosque.
December 2015: A mosque in California was firebombed shortly before a prayer service.
December 2015: Raw bacon was wrapped around the door handles of a Las Vegas mosque.

Anti-Sharia movement

Since 2010, many state legislatures have seen bills introduced to prevent the influence of Sharia law on US courts, an effort which critics say has no purpose other than to vilify Muslims. As even a writer in the conservative National Review noted, “this ‘creeping Sharia’ phenomenon supposedly going on in American courts is not even happening.” Nonetheless, anti-Sharia and anti-foreign law bills have been popular among Republican state lawmakers.

Anti-foreign law bills have been enacted in ten states.
Over 80 similar bills and amendments were introduced between 2013-2015â&#128;¨. All but one were solely sponsored by Republicans.
To date, none of these laws have been invoked in legal proceedings.

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The Islamophobia network

The report identified 33 groups whose “primary purpose” is to spread fear and hatred of Islam. Financial information collected by CAIR suggests that the following organizations had the highest average annual revenue between 2008 and 2013.

  1. David Horowitz Freedom Center
  2. Middle East Media and Research Institute
  3. Clarion Project
  4. Middle East Forum
  5. Center for Security Policy
  6. Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
  7. Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation
  8. Christian Action Network
  9. Abstraction Fund
  10. ACT for America

Textbooks

After a firestorm of complaints that school textbooks were too pro-Islam, Florida and Tennessee passed laws giving parents more power to reject certain course materials.

Muslim-free businesses

Since 2014, businesses in Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire have publicly declared themselves “Muslim-free.”

Media Bias

A 2014 study of national TV news published in the Journal of Communication found that “among those described as domestic terrorists in the news reports, 81 percent were identifiable as Muslims. Yet in FBI reports from those years, only 6 percent of domestic terror suspects were Muslim.”

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2015 Saw a Record Number of Attacks on US Mosques

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Donald Trump Goes on Anti-Muslim Warpath

by FranziskaAshburn Posted on June 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump launched a forceful, angry attack on immigration and Muslims in a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Monday, renewing his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States and saying Hillary Clinton would allow potential terrorists into the country.

“We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country, many of whom have the same thought process as this savage killer,” Trump said, referring to the man who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday. The speech was scheduled before Sunday’s attacks and was originally planned as a major anti-Clinton campaign speech, but the Trump campaign retooled the remarks to “further address this terrorist attack, immigration, and national security.”

Trump blamed lax immigration laws for the killer’s presence in the United States, erroneously saying that he was born in Afghanistan and that his father supports the Afghan Taliban. (The father, Siddique Mateen, is a television commentator whose political views appear to be incoherent.) “The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here,” Trump said.

Immigration dominated the speech, with Trump growing angrier and louder as he claimed the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton want to allow huge numbers of refugees into the United States without proper screening. “Under the Clinton plan, you’d be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of their children,” he said. As an example, he falsely cited a “tremendous flow of Syrian refugees into the United States.” In reality, fewer than 2,000 Syrians have entered the United States so far in 2016, representing less than a fifth of the intake the government had promised.

More ominously, Trump suggested that American Muslims are operating as a fifth column by hiding attackers like Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, and the couple that carried out the San Bernardino terrorist attack last year. “They have to work with us, they have to cooperate with law enforcement,” Trump said of American Muslims. “They knew that he was bad. They knew that the people in San Bernardino were bad. But they used the excuse of racial profiling for not reporting it.”

By attacking radical Muslims, Trump also tried to cast himself as a defender of the gay community. He started the speech with a moment of silence for the victims of the shooting and called the attack “an assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want, and express their identity.” Trump, who opposes same-sex marriage and has vowed to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that made it legal nationwide, later called Clinton’s immigration policies a betrayal of the gay community. “Hillary Clinton can never claim to be a friend of the gay community as long as she continues to support immigration policies that bring Islamic extremists to our country who suppress women, gays, and anyone who doesn’t share their views,” he said.

The speech was not the first time Trump addressed the Orlando attack. On Sunday, Trump published tweets thanking his followers for the “congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism” and calling again for a ban on allowing Muslims into the United States, a proposal other Republicans have said he should drop. Trump then suggested on Monday that President Barack Obama may purposefully be turning a blind eye to terrorism, winking at conspiracy theories that Obama is secretly Muslim and anti-American. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understand,” Trump said during an interview on Fox & Friends. “It’s one or the other.” He repeated variations on the claim during other media appearances on Monday.

On Monday, Roger Stone, one of Trump’s close friends and advisers, also suggested that Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Clinton, might be a terrorist operative. “She has a very troubling past,” Stone said on the Breitbart News Daily radio show. “She comes out of nowhere. She seems to have an enormous amount of cash, even prior to the time that she goes to work for Hillary. So we have to ask: Do we have a Saudi spy in our midst? Do we have a terrorist agent?”

Clinton gave her own speech on Monday, in which she decried Trump’s “inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric” without mentioning him by name.

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Donald Trump Goes on Anti-Muslim Warpath

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Trump Delegate Says Current US Leaders May Need to Be "Killed"

by StephanChristian Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last December, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign approved David Riden to be a delegate candidate on the Tennessee ballot, and when the state held its primary in March, voters selected Riden to go to the Republican National Convention. When Riden represents Trump there in July, it will not be his first time as a delegate to a political gathering. Seven years ago in Illinois he attended the so-called “Continental Congress of 2009,” where he and other delegates put forth “Articles of Freedom” that called for abolishing all federal firearms laws, replacing the Department of Homeland Security with citizen militias, and, if necessary, launching an insurrection against the federal government.

Riden explains that his views today go even further than those of the Continental Congress of 2009—his involvement in which he says he explicitly disclosed to the Trump campaign when he applied to be a delegate. Riden told Mother Jones in an interview that US leaders who violate the Constitution may have to be done away with: “The polite word is ‘eliminated,'” he said. “The harsh word is ‘killed.'”

Riden said he keeps in contact with a militia group based in Tennessee, though he is not a militia member himself. He said all three branches of the US government are “way off away from the Constitution right now.” Americans may need to attack with assault weapons and bombs in the nation’s capital and elsewhere, he said:

There’s only one reason why the Founding Fathers put the Second Amendment…If the federal government were to follow the path of all other governments, at some point it will turn to tyranny against the people. And at that point, when it stops to uphold and abide by the Constitution—and we’re talking about the Supreme Court, Congress, and the executive branch, all three are way off away from the Constitution right now—the people have the right to assemble, bear arms, go to Washington, DC, or wherever necessary, and go into military battle against the government and replace those in government with individuals that will uphold the Constitution. The Constitution should remain, but the people that are abusing it should be, the polite word is, eliminated. The harsh word is killed. And they’re killed by American citizens with weapons. And if people have tanks, assault weapons, if they have bombs—they need to have the weaponry necessary to be able to overthrow the federal government.

Riden, a retired nuclear engineer, is one among an unknown number of Trump supporters with ties to the Patriot Movement, a loose-knit array of right-wing militias, nativists, and so-called “sovereign citizen” groups. These groups have swelled during the Barack Obama presidency. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, nearly 1,000 anti-government groups now operate in the United States, including as many as 276 armed militias, which have increased more than sixfold in number since Obama was elected in 2008.

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

A different Trump delegate wrote an article, obtained by Mother Jones, that was published in the 1990s by a group opposing the federal government. And that delegate’s son—also a Trump delegate—was arrested recently on federal weapons charges.

Collins A. Bailey of Waldorf, Maryland, who was approved by Trump as a delegate from that state’s 5th Congressional District, wrote an article in 1995 that appeared in the newsletter of a Patriot group called United Sovereigns of America. Back then the militia movement was mushrooming in the aftermath of violent government crackdowns at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Bailey wrote about the Christian beliefs of America’s Founding Fathers: “These were men of conviction, men who had ‘No King But King Jesus.'” Bailey lauded a speech by Patrick Henry about organizing militias against the British, though he made no references to contemporary militias. An accompanying article in the newsletter, however, urged readers to “stockpile food, water, guns and ammunition,” and to “never surrender your weapons.”

Bailey is well known in Maryland Republican politics, having run unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008 and 2010. His campaigns have sounded themes of constitutional fundamentalism popular with the Patriot Movement. “Things are out of control,” he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2008, around that year’s GOP national convention. “We should be a nation of laws under the Constitution; we should have the rule of law, not the rule of man.” Bailey used starker language on his personal MySpace page: “The Second Amendment does not address duck hunting,” he wrote in 2008. “Our Founding Fathers…wisely made many provisions to guard against tyranny, including tyranny from our own government.”

Reached briefly by phone and asked about the 1995 article, Bailey told Mother Jones: “No, we don’t have any ties to any militia groups, and I don’t remember ever submitting that to the organization you’re talking about. And that’s the only comment I can give you.” Then he hung up. (Mother Jones was unable to reach the Oklahoma-based United Sovereigns of America that published the 1995 newsletter; it appears to no longer exist.)

Read our investigation of the Patriot group called Oath Keepers.

By “we,” Bailey was also referring to a question about his son, Caleb A. Bailey, whom the Trump campaign also approved to be a delegate from Maryland to the Republican National Convention. The Trump campaign announced on May 19 that the younger Bailey would be “replaced immediately,” after Mother Jones and other media reported that he was indicted on federal weapons and child pornography charges. Unidentified federal investigators told local TV news station ABC 7 that when they raided Caleb Bailey’s 75-acre gated compound in Waldorf they found a fortified subterranean room under his home stocked with grenades, tear gas, and illegal machine guns.

It is unclear what Bailey’s intentions were for the stockpile, which federal prosecutors further described at a court hearing for him on May 26 as “a vast array of weapons found in an underground bunker.” Among the charges brought against Bailey, prosecutors allege that he attempted to mail ammunition and explosives to an individual in Wisconsin whose identity remains unclear. According to the US Attorney’s Office, “The contents of the package included 119 rounds of reloaded .50 caliber cartridges with M48A1 incendiary projectiles, and 200 rounds of 14.5mm M183A1 spotting projectiles which contain an explosive charge.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives (ATF), which led the raid, declined to comment specifically about the weapons discovered under Bailey’s home. Approached at the May 26 court hearing by Mother Jones and other media, Caleb Bailey’s attorney declined to comment.

The Patriot Movement, after quieting during the Bush years, has returned with a vengeance since Obama became president, animated by conspiracy theories including Mexican plans to “reconquer” the American Southwest and the infiltration of the United States by Muslims. As Obama’s reelection campaign ramped up in 2011, Trump became a ringleader for the conspiracy theory that Obama is not a native-born citizen of the United States. “I want to see the birth certificate,” Trump said on NBC’s Today show. “How come his family doesn’t know which hospital he was born in?” Trump later suggested that Obama might be withholding his long-form birth certificate for fear of revealing that he was born a Muslim. The New York business mogul became so well known for leading this line of attack that Obama (a Christian, born in Hawaii) was moved to rebuke him in what proved a memorable moment at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner.

Trump backed off the birther talk once Obama released his long-form birth certificate and Trump’s own presidential campaign began—though when pressed about it by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump continued to float doubts about whether Obama was born in the United States. “I don’t know,” Trump said last July. “I really don’t know. I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records.”

Birtherism has remained a focus for Riden, the Tennessee delegate for Trump. “I am 100 percent convinced that Obama was not born in Hawaii,” he said.

Riden said he listed the Continental Congress of 2009 on the resume he submitted as part of his delegate application to the Trump campaign. He said he also included it among the subjects he wanted to discuss with the media during the Republican National Convention.

“There is no question that Trump is giving these groups more fuel,” says Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center. Patriot groups have thrilled to Trump’s calls to deport undocumented immigrants and ban Muslim refugees. The leader of the anti-immigrant Minuteman Project, Jim Gilchrist, who recently endorsed Trump for president, hailed him last year for having “unified” the Patriot Movement’s fractious groups: “He is the go-to guy.”

Trump has also courted these constituents with subtler messaging. He criticized Obama for not swiftly evicting an armed group that occupied a federal office in early 2016 in rural Oregon. But Trump also tacitly legitimized the occupiers—led by the infamously anti-government Bundy family—telling the New York Times that if he were president, he would personally invite them to meet with him in Washington.

“This is dog-whistle politics,” says Beirich. “He is directly energizing sections on the extremist right.”

Riden said his wife, Perry Riden, who is an alternate Trump delegate from Tennessee’s 3rd Congressional District, also thinks Obama is dangerous. “My wife looks at me and says, ‘Remember, he is one of them.’ Meaning he is a Muslim, he is on the side of the terrorists, he will…let Iran have nuclear weapons, which would destroy Israel and the United States, because his way of thinking is right in line with Iran, North Korea, and Russia.”

After Mother Jones broke the story in early May that Trump had selected William Johnson, a white nationalist leader, as a delegate from California to the GOP convention, the Trump campaign blamed Johnson’s inclusion on a “database error.” That came not long after Trump refused in a CNN interview to denounce an endorsement from a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. He later blamed that on a “bad ear piece.” Trump has also brushed off criticisms for perpetuating racist and anti-Semitic content spread by his followers on Twitter.

When it comes to Trump answering for his most controversial supporters, says Beirich, “He knows exactly what game he is playing.”

Additional reporting contributed by Russ Choma.

Link to article – 

Trump Delegate Says Current US Leaders May Need to Be "Killed"

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Donald Trump’s Feuds Now Span the Atlantic

by MarshallMattes Posted on May 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Let’s be fair at the outset. British PM David Cameron has called Donald Trump’s Muslim ban proposal “divisive, stupid and wrong.” On Monday, a spokesman confirmed that Cameron stood by his comments. At the same time, newly elected London mayor Sadiq Khan said Trump’s views were “ignorant, divisive and dangerous.”

So: stupid, ignorant, dangerous, wrong, and divisive x 2. You have to figure that Trump won’t let that stand. You’d be right:

Asked about Cameron’s remarks, Trump said he didn’t care, but then added, “It looks like we’re not going to have a very good relationship. Who knows, I hope to have a good relationship with him but it sounds like he’s not willing to address the problem either.”

He continued: “Number one, I’m not stupid, okay? I can tell you that right now. Just the opposite. Number two, in terms of divisive, I don’t think I’m a divisive person, I’m a unifier, unlike our president now, I’m a unifier.“

….Trump also had words for Sadiq Khan, who became the first Muslim to hold the office of mayor of London when he was elected earlier this month….”Let’s take an I.Q. test,” Trump said Monday, adding that Khan had never met him and “doesn’t know what I’m all about.”

“I think they’re very rude statements and frankly, tell him, I will remember those statements. They’re very nasty statements.”

I recommend the Wonderlic test. It’s nice and short, and will also provide some idea of which man would make a better NFL quarterback.

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Donald Trump’s Feuds Now Span the Atlantic

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BinC Watch: Trump Knows All the Best People

by RonnySchubert Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has based his entire campaign on the idea that the government is managed by idiots and will run better once he appoints smart people to head things up. The smartest, in fact! So who has he appointed so far? Let’s take a look:

VP search: Ben Carson, then Corey Lewandowski. Carson is the guy whose ignorance during the debates was so stupefying that even the Republican base rejected him. Lewandowski’s job is to follow Trump around wherever he goes.

Foreign policy: Keith Kellogg, Joseph Schmitz, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares, and Carter Page. Huh? “I don’t know any of them,” said a former official in the George W. Bush State Department. “National security is hard to do well even with first-rate people. It’s almost impossible to do well with third-rate people.”

Muslim ban commission: Rudy Giuliani. Nuff said.

Tax plan: Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore. Kudlow is a CNBC talking head. Moore is the Heritage Foundation hack who wrote a column so riddled with errors that the Kansas City Star announced, “There will be no future Heritage pieces published that don’t get thorough factchecking.”

The best and the brightest! I can’t wait until the federal government is fully staffed with people of this caliber.

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BinC Watch: Trump Knows All the Best People

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Trump’s Foreign Policy Doesn’t Improve When Read From a Teleprompter

by CalebB87yltepl Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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I kinda sorta listened to Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech this morning. You know, the one we were all looking forward to because it was written by an actual speechwriter and would be delivered via teleprompter. That’s Trump being presidential, I guess.

So how did Trump do? That depends on your expectations. For a guy who never uses a teleprompter, not bad. By normal standards, though, he sounded about like a sixth grader reciting a speech from note cards. On content, it was the same deal. Compared with normal Trump, it wasn’t bad. By any real-world standard, it was ridiculous.

Fact-checking his speech is sort of pointless, basically a category error. Trump is a zeitgeisty kind of guy, and that’s the only real way to evaluate anything he says. In this case, the zeitgeist was “America First”—and everyone’s first question was, does he know? Does he know that this is a phrase made famous by isolationists prior to World War II? My own guess is that he didn’t know this the first time he used it, but he does now. Certainly his speechwriter does. But he doesn’t care. It fits his favorite themes well, and the only people who care about its history are a bunch of overeducated pedants. His base doesn’t know where it came from and couldn’t care less.

So: America First. And that’s about it. Trump will do only things that are in America’s interest. He will destroy ISIS, crush Iran, wipe out the trade deficit with China, eradicate North Korea’s bomb program, and give Russia five minutes to cut a deal with us or face the consequences. Aside from that, Trump’s main theme seemed to be contradicting himself at every turn. We will crush our enemies and protect our friends—but only if our friends display suitable gratitude for everything we do for them. We will rebuild our military and our enemies will fear us—but “war and aggression will not be my first instinct.” We will be unpredictable—but also consistent so everyone knows they can trust us. He won’t tell ISIS how or when he’s going to wipe them out—but it will be very soon and with overwhelming force. He will support our friends—but he doesn’t really think much of international agreements like NATO.

Then there was the big mystery: his out-of-the-blue enthusiasm for 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and cyberwar. Where did that come from? In any case, the Pentagon is obviously already working on all three of these things, so it’s not clear just what Trump has in mind. (Actually, it is clear: nothing. Somebody put these buzzwords in his speech and he read them. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what any of them mean.)

So what would Trump do about actual conflicts that are actually happening right now? Would he send troops to Ukraine? To Syria? To Libya? To Yemen? To Iraq? Naturally, he didn’t say. Gotta be unpredictable, after all.

But whatever else you take away, America will be strong under Donald Trump. We will be respected and feared. Our military will be ginormous. No one will laugh at us anymore. We will proudly defend the values of Western civilization. This all serves pretty much the same purpose in foreign policy that political correctness, Mexican walls, and Muslim bans serve in Trump’s domestic policy.

And there you have it. Did he really need a teleprompter for that?

Originally posted here – 

Trump’s Foreign Policy Doesn’t Improve When Read From a Teleprompter

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