Late Monday, coming off a long evening of responding to Gen. Mike Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser, senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway found solace in a tweet from a user named Lib Hypocrisy:
Conway not only retweeted the message but also wrote, “Love you back,” and wished her “Hapless Haters” a happy Valentine’s Day.
But there was just one problem: Lib Hypocrisy is an explicit promoter of white nationalism and other bigotry. This is evident from the account’s profile, which includes the hashtags “#WhiteIdentity” and “#Nationalist.” It features a cartoon image connoting Pepe the Frog, the adopted mascot of the racist “alt-right” movement, and a shout-out to Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch politician who wants to shut down mosques.
These are some of Lib Hypocrisy’s recent tweets and retweets:
Asked about her retweet of Lib Hypocisy by BuzzFeed on Tuesday, Conway implied that she hadn’t been in control of her account at the time. She said she “obviously” had no idea who Lib Hypocrisy was, adding, “I denounce whoever it is.” The tweets were soon deleted.
Conway’s move continues a long-standing pattern of Trump and his inner circle engaging with white nationalists and then claiming ignorance when confronted about it—as Mother Jonesdocumented in multiple investigations since last summer. Other such “mistakes” include:
Trump failing to disavow support from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke when asked about it repeatedly on CNN, and then blaming a “bad earpiece.”
Trump tweeting an image of himself superimposed over a picture of WWII-era Waffen-SS soldiers, and then blaming a mistake by an intern.
Gen. Michael Flynn sharing a #NeverHillary tweet that said, “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore,” and then claiming it was a mistake.
Those are just the cases in which Trump and his backers have backpedaled. There are many other similar instances in which they haven’t even bothered to explain or apologize:
Trump twice retweeting @WhiteGenocideTM
Trump retweeting @EustaceFash, whose header image at the time also included the term “White Genocide.”
Trump tweeting an image of himself as Pepe the frog
Trump tweeting an image of “Crooked Hillary” superimposed over a pile of cash and the Star of David
The most charitable interpretation of this behavior is ineptitude. Regardless, the result is clear: According to one study of 10,000 Twitter accounts that followed Trump, more than a third also followed the account of at least one prominent booster of white nationalism—a movement now widely regarded as having a direct line into the Oval Office.
The internet’s most hapless political blogger now has his own White House correspondent — a regular contributor with little reporting experience but ample ties to “alt-right” harassment — sitting in the White House press briefing room.
At the January 19 “Deploraball” event before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Gateway Pundit founder and “dumbest man on the internet” Jim Hoft announced that his outlet would have a White House correspondent with the Trump administration, and that Lucian Wintrich would fill the position. On February 13, Hoft posted a “reader alert” that Hoft and Wintrich will be attending the day’s White House press briefing. Hoft confusingly wrote, “Please look for us and keep your fingers crossed that one of us is asked a question.”
Hours later, Hoft tweeted a photo of himself and Wintrich standing behind the lectern in the White House press briefing room, displaying a hand signal associated with the racist “Pepe” meme. The tweet itself also included the hashtag “Pepe” and a frog emoji, commonly understood to invoke the hate symbol.
Referencing this Pepe the Frog meme:
Hoft’s political blog has often served as the single source for completely unfounded reporting that nonetheless catches fire in the right-wing internet world, until it becomes what Kellyanne Conway might deem an “alternative fact.” The frequency with which he posts hoaxes and complete fabrications as fact suggests Hoft either has a reckless and total disregard for the truth or is so incompetent he cannot separate fact from fiction.
Most recently, Hoft’s total negligence for the truth led to an internet harassment campaign against Washington Post home-page editor Doris Truong, who he wrongly reported was captured taking secret photos of Rex Tillerson’s notes at his confirmation hearing for secretary of state on January 11. Truong was not at the hearing; she is, however, an Asian-American woman (like the person photographed at the hearing), and that was seemingly enough for Hoft to run with. Truong had already been subjected to extensive racist trolling by the time Hoft quietly corrected his post. This is Hoft’s pattern: decide what a random photo or document means without obtaining any supporting evidence, post it as factual news, watch the “alternative fact” spread, quietly change the post or claim yet another mistake, then repeat.
The Gateway Pundit’s new White House correspondent is now attending press briefings, and it’s unclear how “brand strategist and digital creative” Lucian Wintrich, who frequently refers to the new president endearingly as “daddy,” will approach this responsibility. If his past actions and social media persona are any indication, Wintrich will follow the Gateway Pundit formula for irresponsible and dangerous reporting, and perhaps even more explicitly incite harassment from his new White House platform.
Wintrich Is Not A Reporter
Wintrich is a “gay conservative mouthpiece” primarily known as the artist behind a “Twinks4Trump” photography exhibit that debuted at the GOP convention last summer. He explained that he aims to be “the first rational voice that the American people have had in White House press in ages.” He recently wrote on social media, “I don’t consider myself a journalist, I consider myself the future of journalism.”
Indeed, Wintrich does not appear to have much experience as a political reporter prior to joining The Gateway Pundit; a Nexis search of his name for the last five years reveals only a handful of articles in which he is quoted, and no bylined pieces. He has authored one opinion piece, describing his pro-Trump art, posted on The Hill last fall. Wintrich has now written about a dozen posts for The Gateway Pundit in the past few weeks; he was previously the subject of severalposts on the blog, as well as on Breitbart.com, before beginning this correspondent position.
Wintrich is also the founder and “creative director” of Rabble Media, which bills itself as “a new type of media brand providing its audience with original reporting, underserved stories, interesting perspectives, thought-provoking proposals and occasionally, breaking news.” Wintrich says he launched Rabble in late summer; the site appears to have stopped posting articles at the end of September.
Wintrich’s experience as a writer seems to have begun with his tongue-in-cheek approach to personal harassment in college. According to a VICE profile of Wintrich, “his writings were rejected by the student newspaper” at Bard College while he was a student there, so Wintrich subsequently started a rival blog, which posted an anonymously written column referring to a fellow student’s vagina as “cold and damp” and linking to her personal Facebook page. VICE noted that “Wintrich claims that a lawyer for the school told him that his blog was perceived as a sexual threat, though he doesn’t recall why. ‘I think there was a joke about a vagina or something. It was infantile. I totally forget it.’”
Wintrich Seems To Thrive At The Misogynist “Alt-Right” Harassment Nexus
Here’s what else we know about Wintrich: He is close with figures of the racist and misogynist so-called “alt-right” who are known for launching online harassment campaigns that frequently target women. Wintrich’s art exhibit featured “contributors” like Breitbart.com editor and transphobic serial harasser Milo Yiannopoulos, “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, misogynist and racist conservative troll Gavin McInnes, and deluded “citizen journalist” vigilante James O’Keefe, among others, when he brought it to New York City in October. “We’re bringing back the Rat Pack,” Wintrich captioned a photo of Shkreli, himself, and Yiannopoulos. This group also regularly tweets about and directly at each other, praising and participating in one another’s misguided projects.
Wintrich himself has also encouraged harassment of individuals on Twitter, posting Gizmodo writer William Turton’s personal information after Turton wrote a post criticizing pro-Trump Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s business partner. Wintrich has since deleted his tweet about Turton, which listed Turton’s personal address, phone number, and email. It read, “I think that [Turton] would love a call about what you think of his villainization of Trump supporters and attacks against Thiel.” Wintrich has also repeatedly tweeted photos of Mic.com writer Jack Smith, attempting to connect Smith to the dangerous #Pizzagate conspiracy theory and tweeting, “Someone needs to investigate.” According to Wintrich, Smith’s reporting on Wintrich’s art show may have led an LGBT veterans group to reject a potential donation Wintrich planned to make from the show’s proceeds.
Wintrich’s Social Media Is Riddled With “Jokes” About Women’s Equality, The Transgender Community, And Sexual Assault
Wintrich’s Twitter account has included disparaging comments about women and hate rhetoric aimed at transgender individuals, as well as jokes about sexual assault:
One more of these asinine #debate questions, and Donald Trump needs to grab Anderson Cooper by the pussy.
A senior national security official in the Trump administration wrote under a pseudonym last year that Islam is an inherently violent religion that is “incompatible with the modern West,” defended the World War II-era America First Committee, which included anti-Semites, as “unfairly maligned,” and called diversity “a source of weakness, tension and disunion.”
Michael Anton, who served as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, joined President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this year as a staffer on the National Security Council. But in the year leading up to the 2016 election, Anton operated as an anonymous booster of then-candidate Trump. Using the pen name Publius Decius Mus (the name of a self-sacrificing Roman consul), Anton promoted Trump’s anti-Islam, anti-immigration platform on fringe websites. The Weekly Standard revealed Publius to be Anton last week.
As Publius, Anton is best-known for his September 2016 article, “The Flight 93 Election,” which argued that, like the passengers on the aircraft hijacked by al Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans in 2016 needed to “charge the cockpit” and prevent Hillary Clinton from winning the election — or die. The article, which ran in the Claremont Review of Books, was circulated widely on conservative and white nationalist websites. The New Yorker declared it “the most cogent argument for electing Trump” but cited the responses by Ross Douthat of The New York Times that he’d “rather risk defeat at my enemies’ hands than turn my own cause over to a incompetent tyrant” and by Jonah Goldberg of National Review that its central metaphor is “grotesquely irresponsible.”
“The Flight 93 Election” wasn’t Anton’s only — or most provocative — defense of his future boss. In March, six months before the Flight 93 piece began circulating, Anton published a longer and lesser-noticed essay, “Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism,” in the Unz Review, a website that hosts both far-right and far-left commentary. Journal of American Greatness, a blog that closed last year, republished the 6,000-word piece, and Breitbart, a news site known for promoting white supremacist and anti-Semitic views, which openly supported Trump’s election, ran an excerpt. (American Bridge, a Democratic opposition research group, noted the Journal of American Greatness version of the essay in an email to The Huffington Post.)
According to an editor’s note on the Journal’s website, a “(semi-)prominent conservative think-tank” — presumably the Claremont Institute—rejected the piece because its arguments against immigration were grounded in emotion rather than logic. (The institute’s Claremont Review of Books did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Anton devoted 1,000 words of the March essay to defending Trump’s “America first” slogan, which is eerily reminiscent of the America First Committee, a group that urged the U.S. to stay out of World War II, sometimes by invoking anti-Semitic stereotypes. When American Jews urged the U.S. to intervene on behalf of Jews facing genocide in Nazi Germany, AFC spokesman (and famed aviator) Charles Lindbergh accused them of “agitating for war.” Jewish Americans’ “great danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” Lindbergh said in 1941.
Lindbergh’s comments were shocking, even at a time when outright anti-Semitism was more publicly acceptable. “The voice is the voice of Lindbergh, but the words are the words of Hitler,” The San Francisco Chronicle wrote in an editorial.
But the America First Committee, according to Anton, was “unfairly maligned” and the whole episode represents only “an alleged stain on America’s past.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Anton did not respond to a request for comment before publication. He addressed this article four days later in an interview with the editors of the website American Greatness, where he is a former contributing editor. The website appears to be run by the same team as the now-defunct Journal of American Greatness blog.
The America First Committee was “primarily an isolationist movement, but there were anti-semitic elements that supported it,” he told American Greatness in the interview published Sunday. “What the Left has tried to do ― with much success, unfortunately ― is retcon the committee as primarily an anti-Jewish group when that’s not what it was,” he continued.
Throughout the essay published last year, Anton argues that immigration inevitably hurts the U.S. Here’s one passage:
[One] source of Trump’s appeal is his willingness — eagerness — gleefulness! — to mock the ridiculous lies we’ve been incessantly force-fed for the past 15 years (at least) and tell the truth. “Diversity” is not “our strength”; it’s a source of weakness, tension and disunion. America is not a “nation of immigrants”; we are originally a nation of settlers, who later chose to admit immigrants, and later still not to, and who may justly open or close our doors solely at our own discretion, without deference to forced pieties. Immigration today is not “good for the economy”; it undercuts American wages, costs Americans jobs, and reduces Americans’ standard of living. Islam is not a “religion of peace”; it’s a militant faith that exalts conversion by the sword and inspires thousands to acts of terror — and millions more to support and sympathize with terror.
Anton acknowledged in the March essay that Trump may have gone too far proposing a ban on all Muslims from entering the U.S. — surely business travelers from Dubai should be allowed in, he argued. But he praised Trump for his broader effort to limit the number of Muslims who are allowed to live in America. It is obvious, he wrote, that “Islam and the modern West are incompatible…. Only an insane society, or one desperate to prove its fidelity to some chimerical ‘virtue,’ would have increased Muslim immigration after the September 11th attacks. Yet that is exactly what the United States did. Trump has, for the first time, finally forced the questions: Why? And can we stop now?”
Pew estimated last year that about 1 percent of the U.S. population is Muslim.
Anton wrote that he accepts that “not all Muslims are terrorists, blah, blah, blah, etc.” But even so, he asked, “what good has Muslim immigration done for the United States and the American people?”
Over the past 20 years, immigration has had a positive effect on long-term economic growth in the U.S. and minimal effect on the wages and employment levels of individuals born in the U.S., a panel of prominent economists concluded last year.
In the American Greatness interview published on Sunday, Anton said that America has previously benefited from immigration, but that time has passed. “My view is that we long ago passed the point of diminishing returns and high immigration is no longer a net benefit to the existing American citizenry,” he said.
Anton’s heterodoxies aren’t limited to issues of immigration. It’s not America’s job to “democratize the world,” he argued in the March essay. “The Iraq War was a strategic and tactical blunder that destroyed a country (however badly governed), destabilized a region, and harmed American interests.” But like Trump, who initially supported the invasion of Iraq but has repeatedly claimed otherwise, Anton’s position on the war seems to have shifted over the years: According to The Weekly Standard, he was part of the team within the Bush administration that pushed for the invasion. (After this article was published, Anton told American Greatness that he supported the invasion of Iraq, but now believes it was a mistake. He added that he believes the subsequent troop surge was the right thing to do and that the U.S. withdrew too soon.)
“As the experience of Europe has decisively shown, we in the West don’t have the power to change Muslims,” he wrote last March. “The reverse is true: when we welcome them en masse into our countries, they change us — and not for the better.”
Anton’s apocalyptic warnings about Islam, immigrants and diversity echo the ideology of Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart News before becoming Trump’s chief strategist. Although Trump has also staffed his White House with establishment Republicans, including two former Republican National Committee leaders in Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Press Secretary Sean Spicer — it is Bannon’s worldview that appears to guide high-level policy decisions.
Bannon reportedly played a key role in creating Trump’s travel ban. When the Department of Homeland Security concluded that the ban shouldn’t apply to legal permanent U.S. residents, Bannon pushed back, CNN reported. (Days later, the White House announced that green card holders were exempted from the travel ban.)
The Journal of American Greatness, the blog that republished Anton’s essay, was taken down in mid-2016, but its posts are still viewable using a digital archive tool.
“The inspiration for this journal was a profound discomfort with the mode of thought that has come to dominate political discourse — an ideological mode that makes nonsense of the reality of American life,” the journal’s editors wrote in a farewell note to readers. “The unanticipated recognition that we have received, however, also makes clear that many others similarly felt the desirability of breaking out of conservatism’s self-imposed intellectual stagnation.”
The blog had started as “an inside joke,” they noted. But at some point, they wrote, it “ceased to be a joke.”
Steve Bannon, former president of the incendiary Breitbart News and more recently chief executive of Trump’s campaign, is taking on a role as Donald Trump’s “chief strategist and senior counselor.”
Bannon’s new position was listed above the announcement of RNC chair Reince Priebus as Trump’s new chief of staff on a statement issued Sunday. It said Bannon and Priebus would be “equal partners.”
Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart espoused anti-Semitic and nationalist views. The site faced regular criticism — including from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — for its close ties to the “alt right,” an online-based counterculture movement associated with white nationalism.
Under Bannon, Breitbart.com has long had an white supremacist history since he took charge, publishing articles like:
After Jewish editor Ben Shapiro quit the site in protest of its Trump coverage, a piece was written sure to note he was an Orthodox Jew and featured an image of his face with a yellow pointed star.
But following the tweet by the Republican presidential candidate’s son, the company that owns Skittles, Wrigley, stepped in.
“Skittles are candy. Refugees are people,” said Denise Young, vice-president of corporate affairs for Wrigley America.
“We don’t feel it is an appropriate analogy,” she added. “We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing.”
Meanwhile the photographer who took the picture of the Skittles said the picture was used without his permission and revealed that he was himself a former refugee.
In the US, each year, you are far more likely to die due to choking on candy than due to a terrorist attack by a refugee. According to the US National Safety Council and Cato Institute you have a:
1 in 3,408 chance of choking to death on food
1 in 3,640,000,000 chance of being killed by a refugee in a terror attack
The fact is, the refugee resettlement program is the single most difficult way to enter the United States. So refusing refugees was truly about preventing some “Trojan horse” terrorist, it is such a highly ineffective policy that should put into question the very qualifications of this candidate.
Instead this follows a pattern of white supremacist from Donald Trump Jr. and his father and keeping brown people with different beliefs from them out of the country. Some examples include:
On March 3rd, Donald Trump Jr. appeared on a radio show and took questions from a known white supremacist.
On July 5th, Donald Trump Jr. liked a tweet by one of the worst and most active member of the “alt-right” neo-Nazi movement on Twitter.
On August, 29th, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a post from known white supremacist Kevin MacDonald.
On September, 10th, Donald Trump Jr. shared a meme with him next to a white nationalist symbol.
Donald Trump’s campaign chair in a crucial Ohio county has resigned after an interview with the Guardian in which she said there was no racism in America until the election of Barack Obama.
Kathy Miller, who was coordinating the Republican nominee’s campaign in Mahoning County, apologized for her “inappropriate” remarks on Thursday and said she would no longer have a role with the campaign.
Her resignation came just hours after the release of the first film in a series of election videos, Anywhere but Washington.
The video included an interview with Miller in which she said there was “no racism” during the 1960s and claimed black people who have not succeeded over the past half-century only have themselves to blame.
“If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she said.
“You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.”
Miller added: “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this … Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.”
Mark Munroe, the Mahoning chair for the GOP, said he immediately contacted the Trump campaign in Ohio asking for Miller to be dismissed over her “insane comments”.
He told the Guardian that Trump had undertaken impressive steps to appeal to minority voters and that Miller’s remarks risked jeopardizing his standing in Ohio. “We should not let those really inappropriate comments affect the Trump campaign.”
Miller’s resignation follows in the wake of months of commentary from Trump about race that African American commentators have widely interpreted as offensive.
During the primaries Trump was condemned for initially failing to disavow support from a former Ku Klux Klan leader and last month asked black voters “what do you have to lose?” by supporting his bid for the White House.
On Tuesday, Trump told supporters in North Carolina: “African American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. Ever, ever ever.”
Mahoning, the eastern Ohio county where Miller was coordinating Trump’s campaign, is a historically Democratic stronghold that includes Youngstown, a former steel city that has experienced decades of economic decline.
The county is reputedly “ground zero” for disaffected white, working-class Democrats who are drawn to Trump’s promise to boost manufacturing by renegotiating international free-trade agreements.
Before the primaries, some 6,000 Democrats in Mahoning switched party affiliation to Republican, reportedly to vote for Trump.
As well as chairing the campaign in Mahoning, a volunteer role, Miller was an official Ohio elector to the electoral college for the Trump campaign. She said in a statement that she had decided to resign from both positions.
“My personal comments were inappropriate, and I apologize. I am not a spokesperson for the campaign and was not speaking on its behalf,” she said. “I have resigned as the volunteer campaign chair in Mahoning County and as an elector to the electoral college to avoid any unnecessary distractions.”
Bob Paduchik, Ohio state director for the Trump campaign, said he had replaced Miller with another local campaigner. “Our county chairs are volunteers who signed up to help organize grassroots outreach like door-knocking and phone calls, they are not spokespeople for the campaign.”
Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday morning decided to re-up a column from an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant British activist blaring that “Western woman will be sacrificed at the alter of mass migration.”
After tweeting an anti-immigrant message featuring a white supremacist meme on Monday night, the eldest son of the GOP nominee tweeted:
Europe’s Rape Epidemic: Western Women Will Be Sacrificed At The Altar Of Mass Migration https://t.co/BkguApQqvQ via @BreitbartNews
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 20, 2016
He linked to a 2015 post from Anne-Marie Waters, a British activist and member of the fervently anti-immigration UK Independence Party, which she penned for Breitbart’s London offshoot.
In the post, Waters recounts being sexually harassed and intimidated by “Middle Eastern-looking men” across Europe to set the stage for her takedown of “suicidal” immigration polices that she says allow Muslim men to rape white women.
“In England, it’s been rape after rape – tens of thousands of young British girls are brutalised, tortured, beaten and raped by organised gangs comprised almost exclusively of Muslims,” she wrote.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration polices “opened the door to the rape of German women,” Waters wrote. She went on to claim rape, sexual assault and “forced prostitution” are “rampant within the refugee camps in Germany.”
With the exception of an incident in Germany on New Years Eve in 2015, where there was a reported 5 rapes and 1,200 sexual assaults by “Arab or North African appearance,” and sexual assaults at a camp in Greece, there are no widespread reports to back up Waters’ claim.
Donald Trump on Monday said police officers across U.S. can’t effectively carry out their counter-terrorism duties unless they’re allowed to engage in racial profiling.
“Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said during an interview with “Fox and Friends” after he was asked for his idea on how cops should investigate and respond to terror plots, like the explosion that rocked Chelsea Saturday evening. “They are afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling. And they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”
“We don’t want to do any profiling — if somebody looks like he has a massive bomb on his back, we won’t go up to that person and say I’m sorry because if he looks like he comes from that part of the world we’re not allowed to profile,” he added. “Give me a break.”
Trump, throughout his campaign, has pushed for the use of racial profiling — particularly in Muslim communities — as a policing tactic departments should use to combat terrorism, consistently disregarding the fact that such practices have not only been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court but have been deemed ineffective by multiple studies.
Trump, on Monday, went on to claim that Israeli officials practice profiling and that the U.S. should look to its Middle Eastern ally, which is constantly under attack, as a model.
“You know in Israel, they profile,” Trump said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job — as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in … They will take that person in. They will check it out.”
At a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Fla., later Monday Trump didn’t mention his fondness for profiling, but delved into his proposal to institute “extreme vetting” measures for anyone immigrating to the U.S.
“Immigration security is national security,” Trump said. “And we can’t have vetting if we don’t look at ideology.”
All of his claims were quickly rejected by several civil rights groups and lawmakers, including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Let us (be) vigilant but not afraid,” she said. “We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going to go after an entire religion.”
Gov. Cuomo later warned against the very same idea.
Donald Trump on Monday said police officers across U.S. can’t effectively carry out their counter-terrorism duties unless they’re allowed to engage in racial profiling.
“Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said during an interview with “Fox and Friends” after he was asked for his idea on how cops should investigate and respond to terror plots, like the explosion that rocked Chelsea Saturday evening. “They are afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling. And they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”
“We don’t want to do any profiling — if somebody looks like he has a massive bomb on his back, we won’t go up to that person and say I’m sorry because if he looks like he comes from that part of the world we’re not allowed to profile,” he added. “Give me a break.”
Donald Trump brags about breaking Chelsea bombing news
Trump, throughout his campaign, has pushed for the use of racial profiling — particularly in Muslim communities — as a policing tactic departments should use to combat terrorism, consistently disregarding the fact that such practices have not only been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court but have been deemed ineffective by multiple studies.
Trump, on Monday, went on to claim that Israeli officials practice profiling and that the U.S. should look to its Middle Eastern ally, which is constantly under attack, as a model.
“You know in Israel, they profile,” Trump said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job — as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in … They will take that person in. They will check it out.”
At a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Fla., later Monday Trump didn’t mention his fondness for profiling, but delved into his proposal to institute “extreme vetting” measures for anyone immigrating to the U.S.
Trump’s profile in ignorance
“Immigration security is national security,” Trump said. “And we can’t have vetting if we don’t look at ideology.”
All of his claims were quickly rejected by several civil rights groups and lawmakers, including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Let us (be) vigilant but not afraid,” she said. “We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going to go after an entire religion.”
Gov. Cuomo later warned against the very same idea.
Jimmy Fallon defends questions to Donald Trump on ‘Tonight Show’
“We cannot lose who we are in effort to protect this country. We are a nation of immigrants,” he told MSNBC.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan), whose district includes the Chelsea neighborhood that was rocked by the Saturday night blast, compared Trump’s ideas to what the “Gestapo” secret police were tasked with doing in Nazi Germany.
“The idea that police are handcuffed because of PC is ridiculous. You can’t arrest somebody unless you have some reason to suspect them, you can’t bug someone’s home, unless you get a warrant,” he told the Daily News. “The idea of going to a situation like police states in Europe or China … I don’t think you want to go there. We want to be safe and keep our liberties.”
“We don’t want to become a police state, we don’t want our police to be like the Gestapo, and we’re doing a great job of keeping people safe while protecting our liberties,” he added.
“Israel isn’t a police state either, they have rules about warrants and bugging people without reason,” Nadler said.
The New York Civil Liberties Union said Trump was “talking out of both sides of his mouth” and suggested he didn’t even know how to correctly refer to various police tactics.
“Suspicion based policing is the opposite of racial profiling, which is unconstitutional. Based on the latest reports, it was suspicion based policing, not randomly rounding up thousands of innocent people who happen to be Muslim, that resulted in the arrest of the suspect in the Chelsea bombing,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said.
In fact, since the NYPD disbanded a controversial unit that had been dedicated to surveilling the Muslim communities in April 2014, the department has thwarted at least 20 terrorist attacks.
The Demographics Unit, which was created in 2003 and later renamed the Zone Assessment Unit following uproar over disclosure of its activities, was closed in April of that year after it was revealed that the unit had overseen infiltrating Muslim communities, eavesdropping on conversations and had built detailed files on people’s eating, praying and shopping habits.
And on Sunday, shortly before being sworn in as the new NYPD commissioner, James O’Neill maintained that his department had nevertheless “over the last two years … foiled 20 plots in New York City.”
“That was done by a very professional highly trained law enforcement agencies,” he said.
Despite that fact, Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, suggested Trump’s calls should be heeded and repeated his own suggestion that U.S. law enforcement must target the Muslim community with extra surveillance.
“There should be much more surveillance of mosques,” King told The News. “It’s political correctness that we don’t do it.”
King declined to address Trump comments directly but called the actions of the disbanded NYPD Demographics unit “the way it should be done.”
“What the NYPD did for years for years was the right thing to do,” he said.
“President Obama and Hillary Clinton, when they say we need more outreach to the Muslim community, that’s a politically correct statement. There’s no harassment at all towards the Muslim community that’s all just propaganda,” King added. “As a general policy we should be surveilling the Muslim community, absolutely. That’s where the threat is coming from, and it’s totally constitutional.”
“The same thing was done in the Italian and Irish communities,” he said, referring to targeted policing of the Westies Gang and Italian mafia in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Donald Trump is putting forth a proposal that would be a clear violation the 1st, 4th, and 14th amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as existing laws.
Racial profiling is the practice of targeting individuals for police or security detention based on their race or ethnicity in the belief that certain minority groups are more likely to engage in unlawful behavior.
However, should America decide to go trough with a President Trump’s suggestion, we should be racially profiling white Christian males because you are more than 7 times as likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than by Muslim terrorists.
In an interview on Trump’s plane in Canton, Ohio, Trump tried to blame Clinton and her allies for creating the term “alt-right,” although the term has been used within the movement for years.
Clinton and her campaign argue that some Trump backers are racist and misogynistic and have sought to link him to the “alt-right” movement of self-avowed white nationalists, many of whom have rallied around his candidacy.
“The alt-right. You know they came up with the term ‘alt-right.’ I think the term itself is ridiculous. The alt-right. When did it come into existence? It was just made up.”
Later in the interview Trump said he was unconcerned that moderators during the upcoming debates may decide to fact-check during the forums.
“I don’t care. My facts are good. My facts are good. I don’t get enough credit for having my facts right,” Trump said. “They’ll say I’m wrong even when I’m right.”
Trump rarely gets his facts right. We have over 150 instances of Trump not getting his facts right and we’re positive we missed quite a few.
The term “alt-right”, or Alternative Right, was not created by Hillary Clinton but was coined in 2008 by Richard Bertrand Spencer, who heads the white nationalist think tank known as the National Policy Institute, to describe a loose set of far-right ideals centered on “white identity” and the preservation of “Western civilization.
Donald Trump famously hired alt-right leader and former Breitbart editor as his campaign CEO, signaling his embrace of the movement and pushing hate and racism into the mainstream.
Donald Trump’s son, a primary surrogate for his presidential candidacy, alluded on Thursday to the mass killing of Jewish people in Nazi Germany while laying out what he sees as a media double standard in campaign coverage.
In an interview with Chris Stigall on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, Donald Trump Jr. made the argument that Republicans would be punished if they lied or schemed in fashions similar to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And then he decided to talk about gas chambers.
“The media has been her number one surrogate in this. Without the media, this wouldn’t even be a contest, but the media has built her up,” Trump Jr said. “They’ve let her slide on every indiscrepancy (sic), on every lie, on every DNC game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of this thing. If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.”
A reference to gas chambers is the type of remark that under typical campaign conventions would be met with profound rebuke and alarm. But while criticism came in quickly on Twitter, a senior member of the Republican National Committee still blasted out the interview.
Trump Jr. has gone down similar paths before. As the group RightWingWatch noted, he has “posted an image to Instagram that included “Pepe the frog,” which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a meme “constantly used by white supremacists” and “appeared on a radio show with James Edwards, host of the white supremacist radio show Political Cesspool.”
The Trump campaign has also been accused in the past of pushing anti-Semitic memes. Donald Trump himself got into trouble over the summer for tweeting an image of Clinton pasted over money with a Jewish star badge next to her.
Trump Jr. told NBC News that he was referring to corporal punishment, not the Holocaust. The reaction from some anti-Semitic Trump supporters on Twitter, however, suggests that they comfortably took it as a Holocaust reference.
