Tag: racist

Trump Claims Global Jewish Bankers are Conspiring Against Him

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Trump delivered a vindictive and paranoid speech Thursday in West Palm Beach, Florida where he attacked his sexual assault accusers, his rival Hillary Clinton, and the media who he feels are all coordinating to smear his good name in this election, despite his own previous racist, sexist, and violent speech.

But lost in this speech was a line delivered by Trump that, unless you are member of the white supremacist alt-right movement or studied and are familiar with whackjob conspiracy theories, you wouldn’t have realized that he was also referencing a centuries old debunked conspiracy theory still widely used in anti-Semitic circles, that claims a vast global Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

Trump said:

It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities…
We’ve seen this firsthand in the WikiLeaks documents in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors…
This is a struggle for the survival of our nation. Believe me. And this will be our last chance to save it on November 8. Remember that.
This election will determine whether we’re a free nation, or whether we have only an illusion democracy but in are in fact controlled by a small handful of special global interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged.

At this point you may snicker and scoff at the idea of a candidate for the President of the United States from a major political party was echoing anti-Semetic conspiracy theories,  but Trump’s statement was not lost on the Jewish press, the Anti-Defamation League, and his alt-right and other white supremacist supports who are all very keenly aware of his meaning.

This article will explain to you, in very clear language, the story behind Trump’s barely coded words that directly echo one of the most ancient of all anti-Semitic libels.

The Conspiracy Theories

Make no mistake, these are all unsubstantiated ideas and any person who makes any of these claims does so without any evidence and are rooted in a history of hate and ignorance. In this racist perspective, Jews are typically painted as controllers of capital and money, “clannish,” and as having an agenda beyond what is visible. These stereotypes constitute a large part of these conspiracy theories.

The first conspiracy we’ll review is the accusation that Jews have long been controlling the global financial system. This loony conspiracy theory goes back centuries, even before the founding of Christianity, and recently has been attached to the Rothschild family, who during the 1800’s amassed the largest private fortune in modern world history.

Usually, the main accusation made by theorists is that the Rothschilds are playing both sides of every conflict, ever. The Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II, etc. Theorists claim that all sides of each war were merely puppets of the Rothschilds, who would make exorbitant amounts of cash from repeatedly prodding nations into a cycle of endless warfare. People actually still believe this today. Remember when former actor Mel Gibson once said during a 2006 DUI that “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world“? This is the same conspiracy theory he was referencing.

Jews have also long been accused of controlling the Hollywood and the media. For examples see any comedian in the past 100 years make fun of this.

Another place we see an example of this conspiracy theory is in English literature which depicts Jewish characters as “a monied, cruel, lecherous, avaricious outsider tolerated only because of his golden hoard.” Think Shylock in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” or the hooked-nose Judas in “The Passion of the Christ.”

Modern anti-Semitic conspiracy theories depicting an elaborate secret hierarchy of controlling Jewish influences, such as the idea that “the Jews” command the U.S. Federal Reserve System and in effect control the world’s money, largely take their cue from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a 1903 tract purporting to be the manual of a Jewish secret society planning world domination. It is still widely circulated and occasionally cited as “evidence” by various clueless anti-Semites despite being exposed as a fraud as early as 1921.

The Conspiracy Pushers

Donald Trump has surrounded himself with people who are true believers in these archaic and long debunked views, and at times quoted them directly in speeches and interviews.

The most famous example would be nutcase right-wing conspiracy theory pusher Alex Jones, an ally of Trump who he once called “amazing” and someone who Trump regularly quotes, who runs the crackpot Infowars.com site and disputes the idea the The Protocols is a fraud while pushing a New World Order fiction that makes Glenn Beck appear comparatively sane.

According to Jones just about every current event can be tied into the New World Order’s nefarious schemes. In short, he’s making money off of really gullible people who will believe anything, no matter the complete lack of evidence.

Jones frequently invokes “globalists” as the villains behind the various conspiracy theories he discusses on his radio show and included in almost every article and documentary on his Infowars.com website has a reference to the Rothschild conspiracy theory, that there is secretive Jewish family controlling all word events for their personal monetary gain. Some examples of these articles include:

There is also the alt-right white supremacist site Breitbart.com, whose Editor in Chief Steve Bannon is currently working as the CEO of the Trump campaign. BuzzFeed reported that Trump’s speech was co-written by Stephen Bannon. Breitbart.com has long had an anti-Semetic history since Bannon took charge, writing articles like:

Reality

These racist sources that push crazy conspiracies are where Trump is getting his information from, he is personally intertwined with its players, he repeatedly quotes it, and it is wildly insane and completely soaked in racism.

You and I may have not picked up on this racist “dog whistle” at first, but now we know more about the story behind when Donald Trump makes a statement like, “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers,” does his anti-Jewish message seem more clear?

Media

Remarks at 5:15 mark.

Trump’s Town Hall Question on Islamophobia Was Shockingly Islamophobic

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During the much anticipated presidential debate Sunday evening, Republican nominee Donald Trump was finally asked by a Muslim American how he, as president, would respond to the rise of Islamophobia. It was a unique and powerful opportunity for the businessman to address the shockingly anti-Islam tenor of his campaign, which many hate-group experts say has precipitated an unprecedented spike in Islamophobic violence across the United States.

Instead, Trump responded with an answer that was not only blatantly Islamophobic, but also outright fallacious. In fact, his reply was so filled with anti-Islam sentiment that it’s worth breaking down into individual parts.

The exchange was initiated when Gorbah Hamed, an uncommitted Missouri voter and a Muslim American, asked how Trump would “help people like me deal with the consequences of being labeled as a threat to the country after the election is over.”

“Well, you’re right about Islamophobia—it’s a shame,” he began, seemingly unaware that his own candidacy is often specifically credited by hate-group experts as a driving force behind the recent uptick in anti-Islam sentiment. In fact, at least one such incident involved a report of a woman verbally and physically assaulting a Muslim woman in Washington, D.C. before justifying the attack by citing her support for Donald Trump.

But Trump wasn’t done.

“But…whether we like it or not there is a problem,” he continued. “We have to be sure that Muslims come in and report when they see something going on. When they see hatred going on, they have to report it.”

Trump has made this claim before. In the aftermath of the tragic Orlando massacre earlier this year, Trump said, “For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this.”

This accusation, both then and now, is patently false. Muslims in the Untied States do report when they see evidence of extremism, so much so that law enforcement often relies on them for tips. FBI director James Comey even said as much back in June while discussing the Orlando shootings.

[Muslim Americans] do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim,” he said. “It’s at the heart of the FBI’s effectiveness to have good relationships with these folks.”

Trump’s inaccurate assertion struck a chord with the Muslim American community, many of whom immediately took to Twitter to mock his statement using the hashtag #MuslimsReportStuff.

Yet Trump had more to say. To drive home his point about Muslims reporting violence, he claimed that “many people” saw weapons in the home of the San Bernardino shooters, implying that Muslims who knew the ISIS-linked terrorists simply did not tell police about their dark plans.

But as Richard Winton, a Pulitzer-prize winning Los Angeles Times journalist who covered the shootings, pointed out, that claim is also completely unsubstantiated.

And just in case you missed his point, Trump closed with an anti-Muslim argument that members of his own party have been using for years now: that president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “have to” use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” to ever fully combat terrorism perpetrated by those who claim to be followers of Islam.

“To solve a problem, you have to be able to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name,” he said. “[Hillary Clinton] won’t say the name, and president Obama won’t say the name. But the name is there: it’s radical Islamic terror, and before you solve it, you have to say the name.”

This argument has been dismissed by security experts for some time, many of whom say that such terms only make fighting terrorism harder. Or, as Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a former undercover FBI agent, said when asked about the term during a congressional hearing in June, that kind of language “puts us on a path to perpetual war.”

“[Such language] only serves to stoke public fear, xenophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry,” he said.

Ultimately, Trump didn’t have to spout explicitly anti-Muslim bigotry to be Islamophobic. Rather, his responses were in and of themselves Islamophobic because they were based on falsehoods that perpetuate a very specific, and unabashed inaccurate, narrative: that Muslims are generally dangerous, and those that aren’t are failing to help their fellow Americans.

Hamed herself was deeply unimpressed with Trump’s response.

“[Trump’s response] wasn’t an answer, actually, it was kind of like an accusation,” she told The Huffington Post.

Trump’s remarks were, in effect, a very honest “answer” to her question: if elected president, Trump, assuming he continues to voice the kinds of arguments he repeated last night, will “deal” with the rise of Islamophobia the same way he has throughout his campaign—by making it worse.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Media

Trump Stands By Racist Claim That Exonerated ‘Central Park 5’ Are Guilty

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Donald Trump has stood by his decades-old claim that the group of five men blamed for a 1989 rape and beating in Central Park before being exonerated were actually guilty.

In a statement to CNN as part of a retrospective on the case, the Republican presidential nominee maintained, despite DNA and other evidence to the contrary, that the men were guilty of raping and beating an investment banker who had been jogging in Central Park at night.

“They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”

The five men, who became known as the Central Park Five, were exonerated in 2002 when an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney found DNA evidence linking the vicious crime to a previously convicted rapist. That man admitted to acting alone in the crime.

New York City settled with the five men in 2014, agreeing to pay them a collective $40 million for time spent wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. The hasty conviction of the men, who were ages 14 to 16 at the time, was widely viewed as a symptom of racial biases and the pressure prosecutors and law enforcement felt to find culprits amid fear of crime in the city amid a spiraling crime rate.

Trump, then as now a prominent Manhattan real-estate figure, took out a full-page ad in The New York Times shortly after the jogger was attacked calling for New York to revive the death penalty.

“I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”

Trump also previously complained in an op-ed article in the New York Daily News that the settlement between the five men and New York was a “disgrace,” saying the “recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city” to settle for an amount as high as $40 million.

Trump’s campaign has previously defended his demonization of the wrongfully convicted men.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, an adviser to Trump’s campaign, touted the ad earlier this year during an interview with an Alabama radio station, saying that it showed Trump was committed to law and order.

“Trump has always been this way,” Sessions said. “People say he wasn’t a conservative, but he bought an ad 20 years ago in The New York Times calling for the death penalty. How many people in New York, that liberal bastion, were willing to do something like that?”

(h/t Business Insider)

Reality

Donald Trump called for, and still today is calling for, the execution of five men for a crime they didn’t commit. How is that for “law and order?”

The case was notable for its racial politics: Four of the Central Park Five were black and one was Latino while the victim was a white banker.

Trump, Under Oath, Claimed Mexicans Are Rapists

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Video footage from a legal deposition of Donald Trump released Friday suggests the Republican presidential candidate planned to call Mexicans “rapists” when he first announced his candidacy.

The offensive remarks were premeditated, Trump suggested under oath in a sworn video deposition taken June 16.

The deposition was part of a lawsuit Trump launched against a restaurateur who pulled out of a deal to open a restaurant in the billionaire businessman’s new Washington, D.C. hotel in response to his racism.

The deal fell apart after Trump made his offensive comments on the campaign trail.

It is one of two lawsuits Trump leveled against restaurants who said his nasty remarks were reason enough to end their business relationship.

“They thought I made statements that were inflammatory in some form,” Trump said, complaining of the response he’d received for his incendiary remarks.

Asked if he had planned “in advance” what he was going to say in that now-famous speech launching his campaign, he said “yes.”

“I mean, I’ve tapped into something. I’ve tapped into illegal immigration,” he said a minute later, bragging about his big primary win.

Trump’s team fought the video becoming public, but a judge ruled Friday that the candidate’s argument that it could be used in attack ads against him wasn’t enough reason to keep it sealed.

The GOP candidate said that he did “virtually nothing” to prepare for the sworn deposition, similar today his approach heading into the first presidential debate.

(h/t New York Daily News)

Media

Trump Campaign Chair in Ohio Resigns Over ‘No Racism Before Obama’ Remarks

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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.”

(h/t The Guardian)

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Trump Says Black Communities Worst Off Ever, Forgets Slavery

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Donald Trump has faced criticism after declaring that African Americans are in the worst shape “ever, ever, ever”, in a town named after a slaveholder.

The Republican nominee’s latest outreach to black voters, at a North Carolina rally, drew a swift backlash.

Many on social media questioned whether Mr Trump had considered the US history of slavery and segregation.

It follows a report that his charity used funds to settle lawsuits for which he was personally liable.

At Tuesday’s campaign event in Kenansville, the White House hopeful said: “We’re going to rebuild our inner cities because our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before.

“Ever, ever, ever.”

He continued: “You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.

“They’re worse, I mean honestly, places like Afghanistan are safer than some of our inner cities.

“And I say to the African-American communities, and I think it’s resonating, because you see what’s happening with my poll numbers with African Americans. They’re going, like, high.”

The businessman-turned-politician is continuing his outreach to African-American voters by meeting a group of pastors Wednesday in Cleveland, Ohio.

The BBC’s Anthony Zurcher says Mr Trump’s recent overtures to the black community may be aimed primarily at assuring moderate white voters of his racial sensitivity.

According to recent polls, he still faces an uphill climb in winning over even a modest level of black support.

Aside from a blip in one unconventional tracking poll, Mr Trump’s black support continues to be mired in low single digits.

This is roughly equal to the levels earned by the Republicans who ran against Barack Obama, the first black US president.

Last month, Mr Trump also raised eyebrows when he asked black voters: “What do you have to lose?”

He told a nearly all-white audience in Michigan that African Americans “are living in poverty” and their “schools are no good”.

Mr Trump said his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, “would rather provide a job to a refugee” than to unemployed black youths.

(h/t BBC)

Reality

One need not be a scholar to be familiar with generations of slavery, discrimination, state-sanctioned bigotry, red-lining, lynchings, segregation, and Jim Crow laws.

But as NPR points out, the data shows Trump is wrong. For example:

  • The black unemployment rate is more than 8 percent – that’s more than three points higher than the national average. But it’s halved from the recent post-recession high of 16.6 percent.
  • Plus, black employment rates have always been higher than the national average.
  • Eighty-six percent of African Americans are high school completers.
  • African Americans with a bachelor’s degree or more has more than tripled (from 6.6 percent to 22.2 percent 40 years ago) and roughly one-third of 18-24-year-olds are enrolled in college.
  • Because of the Obamacare that Trump is vowing to begin repealing on his first day in office, the number of uninsured African-Americans dropped by nearly 10 points over the last three years.
  • While there was a slight uptick in some cities since last year, crime is at an all-time low.

Media

Trump Says Cops Need to Engage in Racial Profiling to Carry Out Counter-Terrorism Duties

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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.

(h/t New York Daily News)

Reality

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.

Racial profiling is patently illegal, violating the U.S. Constitution’s core promises of equal protection under the law to all and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Just as importantly, racial profiling is ineffective. It alienates communities from law enforcement, hinders community policing efforts, and causes law enforcement to lose credibility and trust among the people they are sworn to protect and serve.

Science has also proven, across multiple peer-reviewed studies, that racial profiling is no more effective than a random screening.

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.

UNC Professor Charles Kurzman and Duke Professor David Schanzer explained last June in the New York Times, Islam-inspired terror attacks “accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years.” Meanwhile, “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.”

Media

Donald Trump Jr. Casually Makes A Holocaust Joke

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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.

(h/t Huffington Post)

Update

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.

Media

Trump Surrogate Mark Burns Tweets Cartoon of Clinton in Blackface

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Pastor Mark Burns, a prominent surrogate for Donald Trump, on Monday tweeted out a cartoon that accuses Hillary Clinton of pandering and portrays her in blackface.

Burns, who spoke at the Republican National Convention and has appeared on TV frequently as Trump intensifies his pitch to African-American voters, shared the meme of the former secretary of state, which shows her behind a lectern marked by her signature “H” logo and the text “Hillary 2016.”

The graphic shows Clinton wearing a black T-shirt that reads “No hot sauce no peace!” and wielding a placard that says “#@!*✶ the police.”

“I ain’t no ways tired of pandering to African Americans,” the text next to Clinton reads, emphasizing the word “pandering.”

“Black Americans, THANK YOU FOR YOUR VOTES and letting me use you again..See you again in 4 years,” Burns tweeted, apparently conveying a message from Clinton to black voters.

The South Carolina evangelical dismissed the graphic as a “satire drawing” and maintained that while the blackface element may be offensive to African-Americans, what’s more offensive is the number of black people on welfare and food stamps.

Burns said he posted the picture to draw attention to Clinton’s pandering, decrying her policies as bad for African-Americans and condemning black voters for giving Democrats their votes without having to earn them.

“The tweet is a frustration that I have as a black man here in America and how I see African-Americans in many cases — not every case but in many cases — are suffering throughout this country and to see how en masse we have been voting for the Democratic Party en masse and yet we have very little to show for it,” he said during a phone interview on MSNBC. “It’s a vexation to me to see how the Democratic Party, and especially Hillary Clinton, what I call tap dance for the black vote, get it and then disappear for four more years.”

Trump himself has only recently begun reaching out to minority voters for the first time in his campaign, blaming Democrats for the plight of African-Americans who live in inner cities as he asks for the support of black and Hispanic voters in scripted speeches across the country.

The real estate mogul on Sunday acknowledged the 53rd anniversary of the March On Washington with a brief statement honoring the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and all who marched alongside him.

The campaign also announced Sunday that Trump would be speaking to The Impact Network, a black-owned national Christian television network, in Detroit on Saturday.

“Mr. Trump will answer questions that are relevant to the African American community such as education (including HBCUs), unemployment, making our streets safe and creating better opportunities for all,” Burns said in the statement released by Trump’s campaign. “He will then give an address to outline policies that will impact minorities and the disenfranchised in our country. Citizens around the country will see, as I’ve have seen, the heart and compassion Mr. Trump has for all Americans, which includes minority communities whose votes have been taken for granted for far too long.”

(h/t Politico)

Update

Mark Burns later apologized for the post, saying it was “not at all my intention to offend anyone.”

“The tweet is a frustration that I have as a black man here in America and how I see African-Americans in many cases — not every case but in many cases — are suffering throughout this country and to see how en masse we have been voting for the Democratic Party en masse and yet we have very little to show for it,” Burn said during a phone interview on MSNBC earlier this week, explaining his original blackface tweet. “It’s a vexation to me to see how the Democratic Party, and especially Hillary Clinton, what I call tap dance for the black vote, get it and then disappear for four more years.”

Trump Avoids Speaking to Black Voters Because “He’s Not Safe in Their Communities”

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In what has become a seemingly endless series of CNN panels arguing over GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s awkward play for black votes, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski tried out a new — and possibly more insulting spin — on Trump’s avoidance of black voters.

He wouldn’t be safe addressing them in their own communities.

Lewandowski was part of a panel Monday night hosted by Anderson Cooper when he was asked why Trump doesn’t appeal to black voter by actually meeting with them instead of talking about them in front of predominately white audiences.

“You know what’s amazing to me is that no one remembers Donald Trump went to go have a rally in Chicago at the university. And remember what happened?” Lewandowski  began. “It was so chaotic and it was so out-of-control that the Secret Service and the Chicago Police Department told him you cannot get in and out of the facility safely. And that rally was cancelled.”

Several panelists jumped in with the same question: “What does that have to do with communicating with the black community?”

Look!” Lewandowski shot back. “That is a black community. He went to the heart of Chicago to give a speech to the University of Chicago in a campus that is predominately African-American to make that argument. And you know what happened? The campus was overrun and it was not a safe environment.”

Panelist Angela Rye replied, “Would you acknowledge that not all black communities all over the country are still not monolithic. So if he tried the same thing in Cleveland–”

Lewandowski immediately cut her off, saying “He tried to go to Chicago and wasn’t allowed to make the speech–” as Rye shot back, “What about Dallas? What about Los Angeles?”

Lewandowski then complained that they were complaining about the venue and not the content of Trump’s speech, when Rye cut in again.

“I just tried to tell you it’s not monolithic,” she stated.

“So whose fault is that that that particular event in Chicago was completely destroyed?” he asked.

“It’s not all black people!” Rye hit back, only to have Lewandowski reply, “I didn’t say it was.”

Conservative CNN commentator Tara Setmayer then joined with Rye, going after the Trump advocate by pointing out that the Chicago audience was “predominately white” just like the others Trump has appeared before.

Lewandowski stated that the event was open to the public so there must have been “some African-Americans” inside which caused Setmayer to throw up her hands.

(h/t Raw Story)

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