Our favorite unplanned White House resident, Donald Trump, railed during a speech to law enforcement that Democrats who had attempted to stop the Supreme Court confirmation of accused serial sexual abuser Brett Kavanaugh were “evil people” because he was proven “totally innocent.”
First, let’s repeat: the bulk of the evidence indicates that Sen. Diane Feinstein did not share the confidential letter from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford outlining her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh with any other Democrats (including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) before all the details of the letter were published by The New Yorker. Feinstein had only shared the letter with the FBI, who didn't start an investigation at the time. Instead, they added the letter to Kavanaugh’s background check documentation and shared it with the White House, all of which suggests that it was Don McGahn or other White House staffers who gave the letter to press in order to be able to better make the “victim” argument in defense of Kavanaugh.
So if there was someone “evil” who was deliberately willing to out Dr. Ford and horribly embarrass Kavanaugh for their own political purposes, those “evil” people were probably Trump and his White House rather than Democrats.
The day before Kavanaugh testified in response to Dr. Ford’s allegations before the Judiciary Committee, he was questioned by bipartisan members of committee staff via telephone about allegations from a second accuser, Yale clssmate Deborah Ramirez, and also the contents of an anonymous letter which had been mailed to Sen. Kamala Harris’ office. Again, rather than sharing it with other Democrats, Sen. Harris gave the letter to Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, which is why his staffers led the questioning. The allegation claimed that Kavanaugh and a friend had together committed a gang-rape of a young girl in a car while supposedly giving her a ride home from a party. Other than the attack no other details or dates are provided which make this allegation virtually impossible to investigate.
[Trigger Warning for survivor of Rape and Sexual Violence]
“Kavanaugh and a friend offered me a ride home,” the person wrote in her letter. “I don’t know the other boy’s name. I was in his car to go home. His friend was behind me in the backseat. Kavanaugh kissed me forcefully. I told him I only wanted a ride home. Kavanaugh continued to grope me over my clothes, forcing his kisses on me and putting his hand under my sweater. ‘No,’ I yelled at him.”
The source said that the boy in the backseat reached around and put his hand over the source’s mouth and held her to keep her in the car.
“I screamed into his hand. Kavanaugh continued his forcing himself on me,” the source continued. “He pulled up my sweater and bra exposing my breasts, and reached into my panties, inserting his fingers into my vagina. My screams were silenced by the boy in the backseat covering my mouth and groping me as well.”
Naturally, Kavanuagh denied all of this and whined a bit.
I'm amazed in the United States that you can get the amount of attention for a totally bogus, B.S. charge that this received, just made up about me and friends of mine, too. And, you know, this is just a — it's a disgrace. It's a circus. I don't know where this ends, but, you know, I always said I'm on the sunrise side of the mountain, optimistic, see the day that's coming. You know, this -- I fear for the future. That's it.
The reason I’m aware of this is because the committee posted the entire transcript of their interview with Kavanaugh on the web.
Trump suggests that all these allegations are “false,” that they are all “lies.” The Ford, Ramirez, and Swetnick allegations all have character and contemporaneous witnesses of the allegations which go back several years and this additional allegation does not. It also is missing a key ingredient that all the others include: extreme intoxication. In the fourth allegation Kavanaugh is the driver of the car and alcohol isn’t mentioned at all, so there is at least some reasonable basis to doubt this particular allegation due to its inconsistencies with all the others and the various testimonials to Kavanaugh’s drunkenness by various witnesses, including his former Yale roommate.
It would be horrible if these any of these allegations were false. It would be a terrible thing if someone concocted an elaborate lie for partisan purposes, not just to embarrass someone like Kavanaugh, but to further a very obvious and bogus lie specifically to make other far more legitimate accusers look like liars.
There’s no evidence anyone did that in Kavanaugh’s case, but someone did exactly that in the case of Judge Roy Moore when he was running for U.S. Senate and he was accused of sexual abuse against minors.
A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.
In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.
The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.
But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.
So it seems that this particular brand of “evil” is something that supporters of the GOP have already been proven to have resorted to at least once with Roy Moore. Perhaps they’ve done it twice with the letter to Sen. Kamala Harris about Kavanaugh, but at this point that remains unproven.
I’m just bringing it up so people understand and remember which party has a tendency to pull ridiculous, underhanded, Swiftboat-level political stunts on a fairly regular basis. But is that “evil” as great as many other forms? Perhaps not.
The dictionary definition of “evil” is as follows:
adjective
1.1 profoundly immoral and malevolent. "his evil deeds"
synonyms: |
wicked, bad, wrong, immoral, sinful, foul, vile,
dishonorable, corrupt, iniquitous, depraved,
reprobate, villainous, nefarious, vicious, malicious
|
noun
-
1. profound immorality, wickedness, and depravity, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.
"the world is stalked by relentless evil"
synonyms: |
wickedness, bad, badness, wrongdoing, sin, ill,
immorality, vice, iniquity, degeneracy,
corruption, depravity, villainy, nefariousness,
malevolence
|
In 2012, following a mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, The New Yorker took a stab a trying to define “evil.”
In the hours after the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, last week, one word cut through the partisan responses to the massacre, and that word was “evil.” “Such evil is senseless, beyond reason,” President Obama said. Mitt Romney spoke of the lives “shattered in a few moments—a few moments of evil.” John Boehner described the killer’s act as “evil we cannot comprehend.”
What does it mean, in the twenty-first century, to call a person like James Holmes “evil”? In centuries past, “evil” was used to describe all manner of ills, from natural disasters to the impulse to do wrong. Today it’s used mostly to emphasize the gravity of a crime, trading on the term’s aura of religious finality. The meaning of “evil” has become increasingly unsettled even as it has narrowed, yet the word has proven to be an unshakable unit in our moral lexicon. Why does “evil” persist?
[...]
The problem of evil became a secular one, and the philosophy of evil came to focus on the moral category: the evil that men do. In the post-theodicy years that followed Lisbon, Neiman writes, attempts to understand evil fell into three main strains: Hegel tried to explain evils as necessary steps in the march of history; Nietzsche argued that evil is a problem we brought on ourselves, by inventing moral categories that don’t reflect the ways of the natural world; while a third view insisted that evil was a clear moral category of its own, defined by acts of intentional malevolence. But just like the old theodicies, these three ways of thinking, Neiman argues, were devastated by the second main event of her study: Auschwitz, a word she uses as shorthand for the collective horrors of the Second World War.
It appears that “evil” is not just one thing. Instead, it exists on a spectrum and with varying levels of intensity. It’s not just one thing, and it can be many different things.
Auschwitz and the Holocaust’s mass murder of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and political undesirables stands as a single example of the ultimate evil above all others, including the Killing Fields of Pol Pot and the purges of 20 million by Stalin.
We tend to think that evil of that intensity is beyond our capacity anymore, that it will “never happen here” or could never occur again. But the fact is that perhaps to some lesser degrees, malfeasance, violence, and murder nearly as widespread and virulent as that of Auschwitz is in fact currently occurring in America right now, and many of us are totally oblivious to it. Many of us endorse it.
Malevolence, or the willful intention to do harm to others, would generally be considered a key component. However, that may be somewhat mitigated by the perception of whether the targeted person(s) has somehow contributed to the reason for that malevolence and is “deserving” of that harm rather than being relatively “innocent.” You may also have situations where there may be little direct intention to do harm by the active participants, and little direct malevolence, and yet the unintended consequences of their actions can cause great and massive harm to others—whether they are perceived to be “deserving” of such harm or not.
Additionally, perceptions of guilt or innocence can be manipulated and manufactured, distorting the justifications and rationalization for the actions taken as either being deserved or undeserved.
There may even be cases where it’s a matter of not taking action, of letting the status quo remain as is, where the greatest harm may be done rather than standing against it and stemming the tide of damage. Sometimes standing and happily grinning in the face of abject evil without complaint is all that is required to help it spread and continue upon its destructive path.
In all these scenarios the rationales may differ and the perceptions may differ, but the final results may be functionally identical. All of these cases may produce different levels of harm from temporary damage to permanent, from the psychological to the physical, and it may affect a single person, to thousands, to potentially millions of people. So even though we may gauge the levels of “evil” involved vastly different in terms of intent, we may still come to the common conclusion that whether malevolence was indeed the inspiration for events, the result of these events remains largely the same.
In many cases “evil” is in the eye of the beholder. A person that may oppose one particular view is not automatically evil for doing so, perfectly good and normal people may have what they feel are perfectly valid reasons for endorsing a policy that others may feel is damaging and harmful. When discussing the issue of “evil”, I am specifically not trying to just point a finger back at Trump’s argument about “Evil Democrats” which by definition is bigoted demonization. I’m not trying to simply suggest that “all those Republicans are evil” because that clearly isn’t the case. Unless someone is a sociopath or psychopath the vast majority of people are not simply “good” or “evil” — there are complexities to all of what we are as individuals. A person who loves their children, their family, their God and their country may not always love all of their fellow members of humanity equality. I think that’s fairly normal. They can be a perfectly good person for those that they love, but not exactly for everyone. This doesn’t make that person “evil”, but we should always take a serious look at where such a person might be willing to allow or ignore the damage and harm that may occur to certain other people particularly when they believe that doing so will protect those that they love. Decisions and choices have to be made, priorities have to be established. In the best case scenario, when individuals can not find ways to resolve their disputes we should have a structure within our public spaces for airing and resolving our differences without it escalating into a complete breakdown of discourse. We should hope that we can resolve these conflicts and disputes in a way that best implements our greatest ideals and values. Unfortunately, that isn’t often the case.
I think that in many cases “True Evil” comes not from hatred, but from fear and apathy for “others” who we may consider to be a threat to those whom we love. The best of intentions can often carve a pathway to the darkest of places. This nation has perpetrated and survived many evils, from slavery to the genocide of Native Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans, the Tuskegee experiment, Jim Crow, Voter Suppression, Male patriarchy, and more than a century of domestic terrorism and subjugation against women, immigrants, religious minorities and LGBTQ persons. Some of these ongoing conflicts have improved, some have not.
I may think nearly all of these particular past events have been evil, but also that many people at the time — and even today still — may feel that it was perfectly justified and even to some extent necessary. I don’t believe that our disagreement over such issues make those who disagree “evil people” — only people who disagree with my, and I suspect our, feeling that these policies were, and are, functionally implementations of evil from the perspective of those on the receiving end of these policies, but perhaps not from the perspective of others.
However, all reality is not relative. Facts are not fungible. The truth remains true. Despite all the best of intentions, the results and consequences of these policies, decisions and choices are what they are, no matter how we may feel about those who endorse and support them.
First case in point: the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported as part of the Paris Climate Accords that the rate of temperature rise as a result of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may soon become a permanent condition after reaching a tipping point of 1.5°C over the next 12 years.
The report’s full name is Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission path ways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. “One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes,” said Panmao Zhai, Co-Chair of IPCCWorking Group
I.The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching”transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.
This has been echoed by various NGOs, who argue that climate disasters due to rising temperatures are growing more serious and deadly.
Climate shocks are already driving displacement, causing many to go hungry and are sparking or exacerbating conflicts around the globe, humanitarian workers said, cautioning that the situation is quickly deteriorating.
The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) said the globe’s surface has already warmed one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) — enough to lift oceans and unleash a crescendo of deadly storms, floods and droughts and is on track toward an unliveable 3C or 4C rise.
Gernot Laganda, who heads the World Food Programme’s climate and disaster risk reduction division, pointed out that climate shocks are already “significant drivers of displacement”, forcing 22.5 million people to leave their homes each year.
[...]
He pointed out that the world’s 10 most conflict-affected countries, including Syria, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are also impacted by extreme weather events, creating a so-called “pressure-cooker” effect.
The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” The New York Times quoted Bill Hare, an author of previous IPCC reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was part of the research funded by the 2015 Paris agreement pact.
Greenhouse gas emissions are likely to continue, at least in the United States under the current administration’s policies. The atmosphere will then warm as much as 2.7 degrees, which is above preindustrial levels. It will intensify droughts and poverty while waters creep into the coastlines. Overall, it is estimated to cost $54 trillion.
The only way to stave off the crisis is by making dramatic changes in the next year or two.
President Donald Trump touted his "natural instinct" for science, while claiming that the cause of global warming is in dispute, in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday. The transcript of this interview was released Wednesday.
Why it matters: Trump's comments come just a week after Hurricane Michael destroyed parts of the Florida Panhandle. The storm was that region's most intense hurricane on record. His statements also come in the wake of new, more urgent warnings from climate scientists about the need to reduce global warming emissions.
[Trump stated]
"No, no. Some say that and some say differently. I mean, you have scientists on both sides of it. My uncle was a great professor at MIT for many years. Dr. John Trump. And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture."
In response to the IPCC, senators from states racked by hurricane damage have completely ignored the dire new climate change report. “It’s totally unrealistic,” Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy told the Huffington Post. “They must have parachuted in from another planet.” “They might as well be calling on me to sprout wings and fly to Canada for the summer,” Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker told HuffPost. “How is that new? They’ve said the same thing before,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
Hundreds and thousands of lives are at risk here from superstorms, rising sea levels, floods, drought, famine, and wildfires, and yet Trump and his GOP cronies argue that the greatest panel of scientists ever assembled on a single issue still haven’t figured out the issue.
Now the agency plans to go one step further. It’s proposing a rule to ensure it doesn’t have to use the best available science to make public health and environmental decisions. Next week (July 17), EPA will hold its only public hearing on the proposed rule called “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.” That sounds like a good thing, but it is a deceptive title and a threat to our health. It turns out that this proposal is really an effort to allow EPA to restrict the science it uses for decision making.
In examining the relationship between public health and environmental pollution, EPA is proposing to eliminate consideration of scientific studies unless the raw study data are made publicly available — possibly including participants’ personal, confidential, and private information — data that may be subject to legal, ethical, and human subject research protections.
This requirement would eliminate human health studies that use integral medical, lifestyle, and geographic data, as well as studies that include confidential business information, such as information from studies conducted by industry to demonstrate safety of a pesticide or other toxic chemical. It could also eliminate consideration of older studies for which data are no longer available or accessible, even if the data have been reanalyzed and the studies have been validated, replicated, reproduced, and undergone rigorous and independent peer review.
An analysis by Harvard has found that these changes are putting the lives of thousands and the health of millions at risk.
Using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own numbers, two Harvard scientists have calculated that 80,000 more lives will be lost per decade if President Donald Trump's administration fulfills its plans to roll back clean air and water protections.
The researchers, terming their tally "an extremely conservative estimate," also estimated that the repeal of regulations will lead to respiratory problems for more than 1 million people. Their essay was published Tuesday in the authoritative Journal of the American Medical Association.
All this is being done, killing thousands and causing respiratory issues for a million people, specifically to pad corporate profits. Some may disagree, but I think that’s a very special kind of “evil.”
Firing a fully automatic weapon into a crowded theater (as occurred in Aurora, Colorado, wounding and killing dozens of people) could certainly be considered an “evil” act—just as firing on congressmen (who were simply trying to practice to play a bi-partisan baseball game, as was the case when Rep. Steve Scalise was wounded in 2016) is evil. These actions may have had similar methods and motivations, but they had different results. Do we consider one more evil than another simply because there was a different number of casualties and victims?
Apparently, the GOP would do exactly that—only they would consider the second case, where Rep. Scalise was wounded, to be a far more evil event than apparently anything else, ever, because it happened to a Republican. And apparently, they can’t think of any time that any conservative or Republican may have done anything similar to Eric Holder saying “When they go low, we kick ‘em” and Hillary Clinton saying “You can not be civil with a political party that want to destroy all that you care about.”
“People are comparing Donald Trump — his words — to left-wing deeds,” argued host Greg Gulfeld, whose book describes his appearance on the show as “rants” in its subtitle.
“I get it, Trump can be rude, his jokes can be mean, but there is no right-wing Antifa or Occupy Wall Street, there’s no right-wing Scalise shooting, there’s no right-wing wing mobs,” he claimed.
“Then you say there’s no shooting?” Host Juan Williams asked. “You have to admit they went into a pizza parlor in Washington.”
“How about Charlottesville? Did they run over someone at Charlottesville?” Williams asked, referring to the fatal “Unite the Right” rally that killed Heather Heyer.
Eric Holder was simply talking about not laying down when taking rhetorical abuse. He was talking about fighting back verbally, not physically.
Of course when Juan Williams tried to fight back verbally with facts about the Charlottesville murder of Heather Heyer by Vanguard America member James Fields Jr., he was shouted down. He was silenced just when he was making a good point and valid point.
The right-wing have a long, long history of using murder and violence to support their cause.
Williams could have also brought up the shooting in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay that wounded hundreds and killed dozens because that guy is not a “leftie.” He was a right-wing gun nut with a tendency to believe conspiracies theories like FEMA camp gun roundups, Waco, and Ruby Ridge, which were used by Tim McVeigh as an excuse for the Oklahoma City Bombing.
During their meeting outside a Las Vegas sporting goods shop, the man (whose name is redacted from documents, according to AP) recalled Paddock saying that someone needed to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves.
Paddock also reportedly spouted conspiracy theories, saying for example that the FEMA camps built for refugees who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and... confiscating guns.”
Another woman recalled overhearing a man that looked like Paddock talking to another man at a restaurant in las Vegas days before the massacre. She told police that Paddock was ranting about two separate events that took place in the 1990s. One was the standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, where a right-wing activist resisting federal weapons charges moved with his family to a remote cabin, leading to an 11-day armed standoff with authorities. The other was the 51-day standoff in Waco, Texas, between a Christian cult and police, which led to the deaths of more than 80 people, including 22 children.
Williams could have brought up the 2012 attack on the Sihk temple by white supremacists in Wisconsin, which killed six people.
In an attack that the police said they were treating as “a domestic terrorist-type incident,” the gunman stalked through the temple around 10:30 a.m. Congregants ran for shelter and barricaded themselves in bathrooms and prayer halls, where they made desperate phone calls and sent anguished texts pleading for help as confusion and fear took hold. Witnesses described a scene of chaos and carnage.
[...]
Six people were killed and three others were wounded on Sunday at the 17,000-square-foot Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, a city of about 35,000 just south of Milwaukee, officials said.
Williams could have brought up Robert Lewis Dear Jr., who in 2015 violently attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. He killed three people including a police officer because of faked right-wing videos which accused them of selling baby parts.
Robert Dear Jr. had a hero, Paul Hill, the murderous leader of an antiabortion group. He also had his enemies: President Obama, for one, whom Dear refers to as the “antichrist,” and Planned Parenthood, for another.
And he had a dream: “When he died and went to heaven, he would be met by all the aborted fetuses at the gates of heaven and they would thank him … for what he did because his actions saved lives of other unborn fetuses.”
[...]
After a five-hour standoff, police took into custody Robert Lewis Dear Jr., a malcontent and drifter who allegedly muttered to law enforcement about “no more baby parts” during his arrest.
[...]
At a December hearing, he announced, “I am guilty,” calling himself a “warrior for the babies.” In a 2009 email to his son, according to the documents, Dear had likewise shared a website featuring “heroes who stood up for the unborn.”
Ultimately, Dear told police he was “upset with [Planned Parenthood] performing abortions and the selling of baby parts.”
During the Obama era, Williams could have easily mentioned Byron Williams, who attempted to go on a shooting spree at the Oakland ACLU and Tides Foundation after being inspired by rhetoric from Glenn Beck that they were “evil.” He could have mentioned the Holocaust Museum shooter James Van Brunn, who killed a security guard as part of his plot to kill David Axelrod. He could have mentioned James David Adkisson, who killed two people and wounded seven at a Knoxville Unitarian Church because he hated liberals after being inspired by Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity.
“This was a hate crime,” Adkisson wrote. “I hate the damned left-wing liberals …These liberals are working together to attack every decent and honorable institution in our nation. They are trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them.”
Williams could have brought up various beatings and assaults which have been perpetrated by 30 members of the Proud Boys, including just this week outside of the Republican Club in Manhattan.
Far from being a "fringe group,” the Proud Boys have begun to make major inroads into the Republican Party, including dozens of appearances on Fox News and with GOP politicians and operatives.
The Republican club’s role hosting the event highlights how the Proud Boys have managed to insinuate themselves with mainstream Republicans, even as they increasingly make the news for their violence. But the New York Republicans aren’t alone—the Proud Boys have already managed to make their way into other mainstream GOP campaign events and conservative media.
Representatives Mario Diaz-Balart and Devin Nunes have posed for pictures with Proud Boys on the campaign trail. Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson posed in a Fox green room with two Proud Boys and Republican operative Roger Stone earlier this year.
Stone has himself taken steps to be initiated into the Proud Boys and made headlines in March, when he used the Proud Boys as a security force at the Dorchester Conference, a Republican event in Oregon. By then, the Proud Boys were already notorious in Oregon for a series of bloody Portland brawls. But Dorchester board member and former Oregon legislator Patrick Sheehan defended the Proud Boys’ attendance, telling Willamette Week that Stone “was worried about getting killed… He gets death threats constantly.”
Stone told The Daily Beast that the Proud Boys were a volunteer force.
On top of this, Proud Boys founder Gavin McGinnis recently made a viral video where he openly called for violence against the left and in support of whites and the right.
“I started this gang called the Proud Boys,” McInnes says in the beginning of the video. “We will kill you,” he says in the next segment of the edited video. “That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell.”
To be clear, McInnes appears to make some, but possibly not all, of the statements below. It is unclear, due to the video’s editing, if McInnes or someone else is making some of the statements. The video was posted to Twitter by Vic Berger, whose website says he is a video editor. (NCRM has reached out to Berger for clarification.)
McInnes is known as the co-founder of VICE Media, and now has a talk show on CRTV. He is also a Fox News guest.
Here are a few excerpts:
“Like Bill the Butcher and the Bowery Boys, we will assassinate you.”
“If you’re wearing a MAGA hat and some guy with a slightly punk demeanor says, ‘Hey, are you … pro-Trump?’ choke him. Trust your instincts.”
“Don’t listen to what he has to say, choke him.”
“Can you call for violence generally? ‘Cause I am.”
“Fighting solves everything. We need more violence from the Trump people.”
“Trump supporters: Choke a motherfucker. Choke a bitch. Choke a tranny. Get your fingers around the windpipe.” (Better clip of this statement
here.)
“Get a fucking gun.”
“Get ready to blow someone’s fucking head off.”
“Get in trouble. Get arrested. Get fired. They can’t kill us all.”
And so Fox News has a huge problem with Eric Holder saying “we kick ‘em,” but they have practically nothing to say about frequent Fox News guest Gavin McGinnis proclaiming “Choke a motherfucker, Choke a bitch, Choke a tranny.” Hmm, coincidence?
Besides having violent thugs and mass murderers in their midst, and drawing closer and closer ties to violent “alt-lite” hate groups such as the Proud Boys, there is also considerable “evil” to be considered within the causes and effects for Trump’s own policies.
Going beyond individual instances of mass violence, those who bothered to do the research have found that the vast majority of mass killings and acts of domestic terrorism which occur in the U.S. are perpetrated by white male right-wing Christians as opposed to Islamic terrorist or left-wing attacks.
- From January 2008 to the end of 2016, we identified 63 cases of Islamist domestic terrorism, meaning incidents motivated by a theocratic political ideology espoused by such groups as the Islamic State. The vast majority of these (76 percent) were foiled plots, meaning no attack took place.
- During the same period, we found that right-wing extremists were behind nearly twice as many incidents: 115. Just over a third of these incidents (35 percent) were foiled plots. The majority were acts of terrorist violence that involved deaths, injuries or damaged property.
- Right-wing extremist terrorism was more often deadly: Nearly a third of incidents involved fatalities, for a total of 79 deaths, while 13 percent of Islamist cases caused fatalities. (The total deaths associated with Islamist incidents were higher, however, reaching 90, largely due to the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas.)
- Incidents related to left-wing ideologies, including ecoterrorism and animal rights, were comparatively rare, with 19 incidents causing seven fatalities – making the shooting attack on Republican members of Congress earlier this month somewhat of an anomaly.
- Nearly half (48 percent) of Islamist incidents in our database were sting operations, more than four times the rate for far-right (12 percent) or far-left (10.5 percent) incidents.
And just for context, the above data was generated before the massacre in Las Vegas and the alt-right assault on Charlottesville.
All of these cases involve the use of guns. However, Trump and GOP have done nothing to help curb gun violence, not even attempting to close the background check loopholes and to support states who want to implement “early warning” legislation to remove weapons from persons who are emotionally disturbed. Instead, they are advocating for arming teachers, even when the vast majority of guns deaths aren’t mass killings or school shootings, but suicides.
Every day in America, 93 people die from gun violence. Fifty-eight of those deaths, or nearly two-thirds, are suicides with guns. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows suicide with a gun is the most common and by far the most deadly suicide method. Just the availability and presence of a gun in the home is a strong predictor of gun suicide.
And there’s more.
In the United States, suicides outnumber homicides almost two to one. Perhaps the real tragedy behind suicide deaths—about 30,000 a year, one for every 45 attempts—is that so many could be prevented. Research shows that whether attempters live or die depends in large part on the ready availability of highly lethal means, especially firearms.
A study by the Harvard School of Public Health of all 50 U.S. states reveals a powerful link between rates of firearm ownership and suicides. Based on a survey of American households conducted in 2002, HSPH Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management Matthew Miller, Research Associate Deborah Azrael, and colleagues at the School’s Injury Control Research Center (ICRC), found that in states where guns were prevalent—as in Wyoming, where 63 percent of households reported owning guns—rates of suicide were higher. The inverse was also true: where gun ownership was less common, suicide rates were also lower.
30,000 gun suicide deaths per year, and Trump and GOP not only do nothing, they suggest options that would only put the more guns in the hands of people who frankly are more likely to use those weapons on themselves as well as those around them.
Over the years these quickly become holocaust-level numbers, but we seem to move on without blinking as the bodies pile up, accomplishing nothing, oblivious to the carnage hidden just behind the curtain.
Another potential holocaust comes from the GOP’s repeated attempts to repeal Obama’s Affordable Care Act. They actually did manage to end the individual mandate at the end of last year, which has prompted about four million Americans to lose their health care.
About 4 million Americans lost health insurance in the last two years, according to a new survey from the Commonwealth Fund, which attributed the decline to actions taken by the Trump administration.
The uninsured rate was up significantly compared with 2016 among adults with an individual income of about $30,000 and a family income of about $61,000.
Additionally, people who identified as Republican also had significantly higher uninsured rates.
The uninsured rate among Republicans rose from 7.9 percent in 2016 to 13.9 percent in the current survey period, which was conducted between February and March of 2018. The uninsured rate among those who identify as Democrats stood at 9.1 percent, statistically unchanged from 2016.
This is happening while additional studies indicate that the odds of dying from preventable illness are greater when someone is uninsured.
The 2 National Health and Nutrition Examination Study analyses that include physicians' assessments of baseline health show substantial mortality improvements associated with coverage. A cohort study that used only self-reported baseline health measures for risk adjustment found a nonsignificant coverage effect.
Most, but not all, analyses of data from the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study have found that coverage in the near-elderly slowed health decline and decreased mortality.
Two difference-in-difference studies in the United States and 1 in Canada compared mortality trends in matched locations with and without coverage expansions. All 3 found large reductions in mortality associated with increased coverage.
A mounting body of evidence indicates that lack of health insurance decreases survival, and it seems unlikely that definitive randomized controlled trials can be done. Hence, policy debate must rely on the best evidence from observational and quasi-experimental studies.
In addition, other studies indicates that if Trump and GOP manage to completely repeal Obamacare, about 22 million Americans could lose all access to care and that could kill between
25,000 and 36,000 people per year.
Nearly 36,000 people could die every year, year after year, if the incoming president signs legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act.
This figure is based on new data from the Urban Institute examining how many people will become uninsured if the law is repealed, as well as a study of mortality rates both before and after the state of Massachusetts enacted health reforms similar to Obamacare.
….
The Massachusetts study examined how much mortality rates dropped after that state enacted its Obamacare-like reforms in 2006. It estimated that “for every 830 adults gaining insurance coverage there was one fewer death per year.” Applying this formula to Urban’s estimation that nearly 30 million people will become uninsured if the fiscal provisions of Obamacare are repealed indicates that about 36,000 will result ever year from such a repeal.
Alternatively, should Congress repeal the entire law, thus avoiding the collapse of many health insurance markets that will result from partial repeal, an estimated 22.5 million people will still become uninsured. In that scenario, the Massachusetts study suggests that more than 27,000 people will die every year who otherwise would have lived.
Using the lower estimate as a baseline, the sabotage of the ACA already accomplished by Trump could mean untreated illnesses by those without health care could lead to as many as 4,800 Americans per year, every year.
This may not be the intention or the deliberate goal of Trump and the GOP. In fact, I’m fairly sure they would deny the reality of these figures or they frankly don't care about people dying in the emergency room from treatable conditions like diabetes, heart conditions, and cancer. Still, nearly 5,000 dead people per year may literally be the result of their efforts and I for one, would tend to consider that to be an act of “evil.”
On top of all this, we have the Trump administration now revoking the Temporary Protective Status of hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants who came to America specifically to escape from national catastrophe and disasters, even though they know full well that the conditions which forced them to flee in the first place have not been corrected.
Tens of thousands of Hondurans who have lived in the United States for up to two decades must prepare to leave, government officials announced Friday, a decision that effectively spells the demise of a humanitarian program that has protected nearly half a million people who had sought refuge from unstable homelands.
The Trump administration is ending temporary protected status for Hondurans who have been allowed to live and work in the United States since 1999, after a hurricane that ravaged their country. With an estimated 86,000 people currently registered, Hondurans represent the second-largest group of foreigners who have benefited from the program.
Determined to rein in both legal and illegal immigration, the Trump administration since last year has scrapped protections for more than 300,000 citizens from countries, mainly in the Caribbean and in Central America, that have suffered natural disasters. On Friday, the Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, said she had determined that conditions have improved sufficiently in Honduras to warrant suspension of protected status for its citizens in the United States, according to a department statement.
Although Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has said that the conditions in their native countries have changed, allowing them to return, that simply isn’t the case. They LIED about it.
Explosive new documents obtained through a FOIA request from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reveal that the Trump Administration knew that deteriorating conditions within Haiti warranted an extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) but terminated the program anyway. The Administration claimed that conditions in Haiti were improving to the point where families could return, even though their own secret report said the opposite. .
Tossing out 300,000 Hondurans, 200,000 Salvadorans, and 200,000 Haitians is fairly bad, but since they’ve been in the U.S. for as long as 20 years, they’ve had more than 100,000 children who are American citizens, who Trump and Nielsen would like to throw out of the country too. At least this was the plan until this effort was blocked by a federal judge.
The Trump administration's plan to kick out thousands of immigrants who had fled to America from ravaged homelands had been proceeding on schedule – until late Wednesday, when a federal judge in California essentially said, "Not so fast."
How the Kavanaugh Supreme Court is going to look at this issue remains in question.
That’s on top of the Trump administration’s illegal efforts to arrest asylum seekers at the border and separate them from their children.
Today, the ACLU and its partners, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Human Rights First, and Covington & Burling LLP, filed a class action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s pattern of illegally locking up immigrants who are seeking asylum in the United States. The plaintiffs are fleeing persecution, torture, or death in their countries of origin. Like Damus, they all followed procedure and presented themselves at the border to apply for asylum, were screened by a government official, and found to have a credible asylum claim that should be heard in court. Instead of offering a humane response, the Trump administration has locked them up indefinitely while their cases are adjudicated.
The arbitrary imprisonment of people like Damus is part of the administration’s larger strategy of deterring immigrants from seeking refuge in the U.S. even though our laws permit them to. This same cruel and abusive deterrence strategy underlies tactics like brutally separating parents from their children, and criminally prosecuting individuals who cross the border to seek asylum.
This situation has been serious enough for Amnesty International to issue a report against the practice.
Under orders by the Trump administration, thousands of asylum seekers fleeing dangerous living situations are being arbitrarily detained, forced to return to their country of origin, and separated from their children. According to a scathing new report from Amnesty International, these actions by the U.S. government violate human rights.
The U.S. is prohibited from sending asylum seekers back to countries or territories where their lives or freedom would be threatened, either directly or indirectly, yet that is exactly the policy of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Seeking asylum is not a crime, yet the Trump administration continues to treat those who arrive at ports of entry in search of a better life as if they were criminals.
Secretary Nielsen has claimed that these asylum seekers could or should simply apply for entry at the designated border crossing, but again, she’s lying because DHS has specifically shut access to these crossings down, leaving people little choice but to cross the border between the official points. Under international and U.S. law, this is perfectly legal as long as they surrender to apply for asylum within one year.
“We are not turning them away. We are saying, ‘We want to take care of you in the right way; right now, we do not have the resources at this particular moment in time — come back,’ ” she said at a White House press briefing. There have been several reports that the U.S. has closed ports of entry for those seeking asylum.
She denied that the separation policy was meant to be a deterrent.
The Trump administration has had to rapidly increase their detention capacity dramatically, but this is actually part of their own fault since they begun a policy of arresting and trying to depart the family of the children their detaining if they happen to come forward as sponsors causing the number of detained children to explode from 4,300 to over 13,000 during 2017.
Washington (CNN)Federal officers have arrested dozens of undocumented immigrants who came forward to take care of undocumented immigrant children in government custody, and the Trump administration is pledging to go after more.
[...]
On Tuesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement senior official Matthew Albence testified to Congress that, after Health and Human Services and ICE signed a memorandum of agreement to background-check and fingerprint potential "sponsors" of immigrant children, ICE arrested 41 people who came forward.
In response to an inquiry from CNN, an ICE official confirmed that 70% of those arrests were for straightforward immigration violations -- meaning they were arrested because ICE discovered they were here illegally.
The number of immigrant children in HHS custody has been skyrocketing to record levels, with more than 13,000 in custody as of Thursday. The average length of stay in custody has nearly doubled since 2016, to an average of 59 days, and the rate of release has dropped by thousands of children each month. The crowding has prompted HHS to triple the size of a temporary tent facility it opened in Texas at the height of the family separations crisis.
So the number of migrant children being held in internment tent camps in the middle of the Texas desert is going literally through the roof, even when they and their parents have valid asylum claims and the history had been that those who were released would return for their hearings at a rate of nearly 98%.
In recent months, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency within the U.S. Department of Justice that adjudicates immigration removal cases, released data showing that the vast majority of families do in fact show up for court dates. This data, however, has been misconstrued—some have even claimed that 85 percent of mothers are not appearing for their hearings.
In fact, the data actually shows that the majority of families do appear. Appearance rates can be brought even higher by addressing deficiencies in the provision of information and through provision of counsel. Ninety-eight percent of families who are represented by counsel show up for their hearings. In individual cases determined to need additional support, alternative measures, which are much more cost effective and humane than detention, achieve very high compliance rates.
The idea that these families have to be held in indefinite detention is completely bogus, but by doing this Trump “looks tough” on immigration when in reality he’s just imprisoning children at tax-payer expense, maintaining his own little jobs program for the crony Republican donors who run these facilities.
The GEO Group’s PAC and executives have given $32,900 to Houston Republican Rep. John Culberson’s campaign this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org. GEO is Culberson's largest donor.
In Texas, GEO operates detention centers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Karnes City, Laredo, Pearsall and Conroe.
Let me just say I’m not a fan of these policies which Trump says, despite Neilsen's denials, are absolutely is meant to be a deterrent.
During a brief gaggle with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House Saturday, Trump was asked about reports that his administration is considering a new family separation policy at the border.
Trump did not deny this, and conceded that the administration is “looking at a lot of different things having to do with illegal immigration.”
Trump was then asked whether he thought “the original family separation policy from this summer was effective in deterring people from crossing at the border.”
“If they feel there will be separation, they don’t come,” Trump said. “You know, if they feel there’s separation, it’s a — it’s a terrible situation.”
Then he repeated, “If they feel there’s separation — in many cases, they don’t come.”
But they are still coming. In fact a new caravan of 4,000 Salvadorans escaping poverty and violence are making their way toward the U.S. and Mexico through Guatemala right now, for which Trump has threatened to stop all aid to Honduras.
“The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!” Trump said on Twitter.
It was not clear how Honduras would be able to exercise control over people who had already left the country.
Then there’s the fairly strange situation with WaPo Journalist Jamal Khashoggi who vanished two weeks ago and appears to have been the victim of a “hit team” of his native Saudis attempting to kidnap and interrogate him as he visited the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. It seems they “accidentally” killed and dismembered him using a bone saw that just happened to have been brought by the autopsy specialist who managed to tag along. Although U.S. intelligence now seems to increasingly feel that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman was personally involved in this murder, Trump continues to defend him,
claiming that he “totally denied it” even though the
entire gruesome event was recorded on Khashoggi’s Apple Watch.
Just as he decided to be good friends with dictators and murderous despots like Kim Jong Un, Rodrigo Duterte, and Vladimir Putin, he continues to undermine the rule of law and human rights as authoritarianism slowly rises all around the globe.
“Fascists create an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a past that is racially pure, traditional and patriarchal,” he explains. “From Mussolini to Hitler to Erdogan, fascist leaders position themselves as father figures and strong men. As long as he — and yes it’s always a he — remains in power, everything is possible.”
Stanley then goes to explain how fascists then pick out scapegoats as reasons that this mythical past no longer exists — and he says that maintaining power requires “pitting groups against each other.”
“Once you divide, it’s easier to control,” he says.
The next step fascists take is to simply attack the truth — whether it’s in the form of broadsides against the news media or against the scientific consensus on climate change.
“This environment creates a Petri dish for conspiracy theories,” he says “No one can agree on what’s true anymore — and fascists love it when that happens.”
Now rather than be entirely negative about Trump, it's only fair to point out that the economy—the same one President Obama painstakingly rebuilt from near disaster—has been doing relatively well. Trump still hasn’t managed to create more jobs during his first 18 months than Obama did during his last 18 months, but it's not that bad.
Trump himself claims that this particular accomplishment has been predicated on his many other policy initiatives. His push to cut regulations and environmental protection has unlocked business confidence, and his aggressive stance on immigration has been good for American workers even if they haven’t yet seen it show up in their paychecks yet due to inflation.
Trump essentially makes the case that the economic prosperity we currently enjoy would be endangered if he stood up to Crown Prince Bin Salman for murdering a journalist and they canceled their proposed arms contracts with us. He argues remaining in the Paris Accords and taking strong steps to mitigate global warming would be “bad for business,” even though the survivability of hundreds of thousands of people is at risk from floods and famine.
Trump supporters are very happy about what he’s done with the economy so far, they happily cheer on his efforts to protect the U.S. business community and his tax cuts, which have increased corporate profits even as it has driven the U.S. federal deficit back up to $1 Trillion per year. Now Trump is saying that there needs to be a massive 5 percent cut to all programs including Medicaid and Medicare—something he repeatedly promised he wouldn’t do—in order to bring the budget back into balance.
They will hang with him no matter what he does or says, as long as they feel he’s looking out for them.
There’s no doubt that Donald Trump has said many things that would have been political suicide for any other Republican candidate. And almost every time he made one of these shocking statements, political analysts on both the left and the right predicted that he’d lose supporters because of it. But as we have clearly seen over the past year, they were dead wrong every time. Trump appears to be almost totally bulletproof.
The only thing that might be more perplexing than the psychology of Donald Trump is the psychology of his supporters. In their eyes, The Donald can do no wrong. Even Trump himself seems to be astonished by this phenomenon. "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."
Unlike others, I don’t think they unwavering support is merely the result of being “ignorant” of what Trump is really doing. I think they know.
Some believe that many of those who support Donald Trump do so because of ignorance — basically they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crime is skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it’s ever been, they simply take his word for it.
The seemingly obvious solution would be to try to reach those people through political ads, expert opinions, and logical arguments that educate with facts. Except none of those things seem to be swaying any Trump supporters from his side, despite great efforts to deliver this information to them directly.
I think they know who Trump is and they know what Trump is, they just don’t care.
It could be argued that Trumpsters have almost literally made a “deal with the devil,” even those among them who don't necessarily approve of his calling a woman “Horseface” or how he generally treats people he disagrees with, and who don’t necessarily approve of verbally attacking the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, because she accurately stated that thousands of people were dying of neglect in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Even if they disapprove of his personal behavior, they nearly all agree with his overall agenda and with his apparent “results” so far.
Although it’s not really working out the way he promised that it would.
The Trump administration's proposal for rolling back federal power plant regulations could affect the short-term fate of some plants, but utility companies appear likely to maintain their long-term course in a market where coal power can no longer compete with natural gas and renewables.
Energy analysts say the administration and coal interests can do little to change the industry's trajectory.
The market points inexorably toward continued closing of coal plants in favor of renewables and natural gas. Gyrations in U.S. energy policy are making companies less likely to make investment decisions that assume the latest policy will endure. And some big states, especially California and the Northeastern states, are moving in the opposite direction from Trump with cap and trade carbon regulations on all power plants or laws demanding a steady shift to renewables.
All they care about is his economic success.
Despite the fact that this isn’t the “best economy in history,” the GDP has been higher than the unemployment rate many times in the last few decades while Trump’s trade wars and tariffs have caused Harley Davidson to open plants overseas and Ford Motor Company to lay off thousands of workers while losing $1 billion in sales.
Despite the overwhelmingly negative coverage of his administration, President Donald Trump's approval rating is as high or higher than half of the previous six presidents at this point in their first terms. You won't believe who scored better.
Trump has been enjoying a rare string of good news. The economy is humming and the jobless rate just hit a 49-year low. Trump won an intense battle over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. He secured a replacement for Nafta. His poll numbers are edging up. And Republican prospects in the midterm elections appear to have improved.
So they're pretty much happy and just think all the rest of us are ungrateful complainers.
Just one question for them: Don’t you think that trying to selfishly enrich yourself economically in the short term, which has a direct consequence of causing permanent physical and emotional pain, suffering, and literally death for thousands and potentially millions of others, is just about the quintessential definition of “evil”?
Because I certainly think that it is.