Get Over Yourself - Trump's Campaign For President Was Largely Based On Race

Mod: Pollyanna cocktail chatter about America being a "post-racial society" is now a thing of the past. The folks behind the Trump campaign, which needs to include their Russian confidantes, had a very different and far more cynical understanding. They surmised that if they ran a campaign based on race, they would win. Throw in some face saving cover about the "disenfranchised and alienated white working class," and how unfair trade pacts with Mexico like NAFTA have been, and the picture was complete. With Trump now planning the deportation of 800,000 DACA kids (and what a sight that is going to be), I am not sure how there can be any doubt about what has really gone on here. Will they be put into boxcars like Nazi Germany did with their hated minorities? And then left in the desert just south of the Rio Grande? Imagine how that will be viewed by the rest of the world.

The First White President (The Atlanticlink): It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it.

Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican“rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint.

Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue.

So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.

Mod: There is a lot more to this article, and you can access it through the above link.


The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election (The New York Timeslink): Sometimes an international offensive begins with a few shots that draw little notice. So it was last year when Melvin Redick of Harrisburg, Pa., a friendly-looking American with a backward baseball cap and a young daughter, posted on Facebook a link to a brand-new website.

“These guys show hidden truth about Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other leaders of the US,” he wrote on June 8, 2016. “Visit #DCLeaks website. It’s really interesting!”

Mr. Redick turned out to be a remarkably elusive character. No Melvin Redick appears in Pennsylvania records, and his photos seem to be borrowed from an unsuspecting Brazilian. But this fictional concoction has earned a small spot in history: The Redick posts that morning were among the first public signs of an unprecedented foreign intervention in American democracy.

The DCLeaks site had gone live a few days earlier, posting the first samples of material, stolen from prominent Americans by Russian hackers, that would reverberate through the presidential election campaign and into the Trump presidency. The site’s phony promoters were in the vanguard of a cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.

Russian firm tied to pro-Kremlin propaganda advertised on Facebook during election (Washington Postlink): Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that the social network has discovered that it sold ads during the U.S. presidential campaign to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings.

Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said. A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said, although they declined to say which candidate the ads favored.

Most of the ads, according to a blog post published late Wednesday by Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”

The acknowledgment by Facebook comes as congressional investigators and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III are probing Russian interference in the U.S. election, including allegations that the Kremlin may have coordinated with the Trump campaign.

Mod: Here is a case study on why politicians that attain high office should not hire their moron kids. Trust me, this product of Trump's union with a fashion model is not bright.

Trump Jr. Says He Wanted Russian Dirt to Determine Clinton’s ‘Fitness’ for Office (The New York Timeslink): Donald Trump Jr. told Senate investigators on Thursday that he set up a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer because he was intrigued that she might have damaging information about Hillary Clinton, saying it was important to learn about Mrs. Clinton’s “fitness” to be president. But nothing came of the Trump Tower meeting, he said, and he was adamant that he never colluded with the Russian government’s campaign to disrupt last year’s presidential election.

In a prepared statement during an interview with Senate Judiciary Committee investigators, the younger Mr. Trump said he was initially conflicted when he heard that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, might have damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Despite his interest, he said, he always intended to consult with his own lawyers about the propriety of using any information that Ms. Veselnitskaya, who has ties to the Kremlin, gave him at the meeting.

Mr. Trump has given differing accounts of his contacts last year with Russians. He told the Times in March that he never met with Russians on behalf of the campaign, a statement his lawyer has since said was meant to refer to Russian government officials. In July, he described the Trump Tower meeting as primarily focused on the issue of Russian adoptions, before eventually acknowledging that he took the meeting because he was told Ms. Veselnitskaya had damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.

Wife of Trump Organization Ethics Lawyer Arrested After Alleged Tryst With Inmate (The Daily Beast link): The wife of a lawyer tasked with monitoring ethics in President Donald Trump’s business trust was arrested Tuesday afternoon after “suspicious” activity with a Virginia inmate in the backseat of a car outside a jail.

Teresa Jo Burchfield, 53, was outside Virginia’s Fauquier County Adult Detention Center when deputies charged her with a crime of her own. Burchfield and an unnamed 23-year-old inmate were spotted in the backseat of a car, along with a bag of pills and other contraband items that Burchfield had allegedly given the inmate. Burchfield’s husband, Bobby Burchfield, is an ethics advisor to the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, an entity intended to keep Trump’s business and political ties separate.

“The defendant was caught in the backseat of her vehicle with an inmate," according to a criminal complaint obtained by the Fauquier Times. "When the inmate exited the vehicle, he handed me a bag of brown pills that he claims to be workout pills."

The inmate, who told police he and Burchfield had been having sex, also had other contraband items on his person, including cigarettes and vitamin supplements, according to the complaint.

Bannon: Catholic churches ‘need illegal aliens’ (The Hilllink): Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon in a new interview slammed the Catholic Church for its stance on immigration, saying leaders “need illegal aliens to to fill the churches."

Bannon told "60 Minutes" that the Catholic Church has been “terrible about” immigration when Charlie Rose noted that Cardinal Timothy Dolan in New York opposed President Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. “You know why? Because [they have been] unable to really, to come to grips with the problems in the church. They need illegal aliens. They need illegal aliens to fill the churches. It’s obvious on the face of it,” Bannon said.

Mod: As I am sure you are aware, the KKK hates Catholics, too.

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