JONESBORO, Ga.—I boarded the Gone With the Wind Tour bus outside the train depot built in 1867 to replace the depot burned during the Civil War. The building now houses the Road to Tara Museum. It has displays of “Gone With the Wind” movie memorabilia including dolls of Mammy, played in the film by Hattie McDaniel, and the pantalettes and green hat worn by Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara.
Rick, the bus driver, switched on the audio track, written and narrated by a local historian, Peter Bonner. We listened to the familiar story of the noble South and its “Lost Cause.” We heard about the courage of the Confederate soldiers in Jonesboro who fought gallantly on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, 1864, in a failed effort to block the Union Army from entering Atlanta. We were told of the gentility and charm of the Southern belles. We learned that the war was fought not to protect the institution of slavery but the sanctity of states’ rights. Finally, we were assured that the faithful slaves, the “mammies,” “aunties” and “uncles,” loved their white owners, were loved in return and did not welcome emancipation.
That this myth persists and perhaps has grown as the country polarizes, often along racial lines, means that whole segments of the American population can no longer communicate. Once myth replaces history there is no way to have a rational discussion rooted in verifiable fact. Myth allows people to deny who they are and the crimes they committed and continue to commit. It is only by confronting the past that we can end the perpetuation of these crimes in other forms.
When loyalty to the tribe is more important that truth, fact or justice—a tribalism on display in the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—an open society is extinguished. Reparations for African-Americans are not only just, they are the only way we as a nation, as with Germany’s reparations to the Jews, can build a shared history based on truth, atone for the crimes of the nation and reverse the legacies of white supremacy. The Southern cause, as Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his laconic memoirs, was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
David Blight in “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory” documents that in the decades after the war whites in the South and the North furiously rewrote the history of the conflict. “As long as we have a politics of race in America, we will have a politics of Civil War memory,” Blight notes. The root cause of the war, the need to emancipate 4 million people held in slavery, was erased, he said, and replaced with the “denigration of black dignity and the attempted erasure of emancipation from the national narrative of what the war was about.” As W.E.B. Du Bois lamented in his book “Black Reconstruction,” which looked at the brief postwar period, from 1865 to 1877, when African-Americans were given some political space in the South to resurrect their lives, “little effort [was] made to preserve the records of Negro effort and speeches, action, work and wages, homes and families. Nearly all of this has gone down beneath a mass of ridicule and caricature, deliberate omission and misstatement.”
The Civil War, as portrayed in novels and films such as “Gone With the Wind,” histories such as “The Civil War” by Shelby Foote and television programs such as Ken Burns’ documentary series on the conflict, is usually reduced to stories about the heroic self-sacrifice and courage exhibited by the soldiers from the North and the South who fought as brother against brother. The gruesome suffering, widespread looting and rape and senseless slaughter are romanticized. (For every three soldiers who died on a battlefield, five more died of disease, and, overall, 620,000 Americans, 2 percent of the country’s population, perished in the war.) Meanwhile, the far more important struggle, the struggle of black people to rise from bondage to be free, is effectively eclipsed in these narratives of white self-pity and self-exaltation.
“Gone With the Wind,” the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell, has sold over 30 million copies worldwide and, according to one survey, is the second favorite book among Americans, after the Bible. The 1939 film version of the book is the highest-grossing movie ever, in inflation-adjusted dollars. The book and film are unapologetic celebrations of historical myth, historical erasure and white supremacy.
The Lost Cause romance and veneration of Confederate military leaders have a powerful hold on white imaginations, especially among those for whom economic and political marginalization is becoming more pronounced. The myth of the Confederacy resembles the retreat into a fictional past I saw in Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War, an ethnic conflict that lasted from 1992 to 1995. That retreat gave Yugoslavs—whether Serb, Muslim or Croat—who had been cast aside by economic collapse and a failed political system manufactured identities that were rooted in a mythologized past of glory, moral superiority and nobility. It allowed them to worship their own supposedly unique and innate virtues. These fantasies of an idealized past were accompanied by the demonization of opposing ethnicities, a demonization used by demagogues to fuel the hatred and violence that led to a savage war.
“He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country,” White House chief of staff and former Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly said last year of the Confederate military commander, Robert E. Lee, a slave owner. “It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today.” Kelly blamed the Civil War on “the lack of an ability to compromise,” adding that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”
During my bus ride in Georgia, a woman on the audio guide impersonated Scarlett O’Hara as music from the 1939 movie played in the background: “Now y’all sit back and enjoy this journey back into a time of cavaliers, ladies fair, and cotton fields—called the Old South.”
The theme of the tour could be summed up as “ ‘Gone With the Wind’ accurately portrays life in the South during and after the Civil War.” Over and over, incidents and characters in the novel and film were related to actual events and people. Nowhere was this more pernicious than in the portrayals of black men and women who were enslaved.
“I learned that a black servant 144 years ago so loved her ‘masters’ that she requested to be buried in their family plot. … And when I learned that her masters willingly allowed such a burial request, I had to conclude that there must have been a greater bond, perhaps a loving bond of slave for master, and master for slave,” Bonner writes in his thin book “Lost in Yesterday,” which is sold in the Road to Tara Museum. “The unique and often misunderstood relationship has been presented throughout fiction and the entertainment media, in my opinion, in a multitude of unfair portrayals.”
Bonner goes on to argue that the slaves in the book and the film—Mammy, Pork, Prissy and Big Sam—all supporters of the Confederacy and loyal to the O’Hara family, represent a true picture of many, maybe most, blacks in the antebellum South. He cites the small headstone at the feet of Philip and Eleanor Fitzgerald in the local cemetery that reads “Grace, Negro servant of the Fitzgeralds” and insists “that Grace was honored as a family member.”
That Grace was given no last name on the stone and was buried, like a pet, at the feet of those who owned her seems to escape Bonner. Did Grace have a family? A mother? A father? Brothers? Sisters? Grandparents? Aunts? Uncles? Cousins? A husband? Children of her own? Or had they been sold by her beloved owners?
We stopped outside the 1839 Stately Oaks plantation house, which originally sat on 404 acres before being moved into the city. It is now part of the Margaret Mitchell Memorial Park. The mansion hosts white re-enactors in period costumes, including Confederate uniforms, the equivalent of re-enactors dressed in SS uniforms giving cheery tours of Auschwitz.
In squalid, overcrowded shacks outside Stately Oaks, children were born, lived and died enslaved. They spent a lifetime engaged in hard labor, misery and poverty. They watched in agony as mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers were sold off, never to be seen again. They lived in constant fear and humiliation. They were beaten, chained, whipped, castrated and sometimes shot or hanged. The male slave masters routinely raped black girls and women, sometimes in front of their families, and often sold their mixed-race children.
“Like the patriarchs of old,” Mary Chesnut, a white South Carolinian, confided in her diary in March 1861, “our men live all in one house with their wives and concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”
The Southern tradition, as James Baldwin pointed out, “is not a tradition at all.” It is “a legend which contains an accusation. And that accusation, stated far more simply than it should be, is that the North, in winning the war, left the South only one means of asserting its identity and that means was the Negro.”
The ability to disregard the horror of slavery, to physically erase its reality, and to build in its place a white fantasy of goodness, courage and virtue speaks to the deep sickness within American society. Most Confederate monuments were erected under the leadership of the Daughters of the Confederacy from 1890 to 1920, a time when the terror of lynching by the Ku Klux Klan was at its peak. These statues were designed to romanticize white supremacy and divide blacks into good and bad “negros.” There are no statues to Reconstruction governors and senators or black political leaders, not to mention the leaders of slave revolts such as Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey. The few Confederate generals, such as James Longstreet, who supported black rights after the war are not memorialized, nor are the 186,000 black soldiers—134,111 conscripted from slave states—who served in the Union Army. The historian James Loewen calls the South “a landscape of denial.”
“Public monuments,” the historian Eric Foner writes, “are built by those with sufficient power to determine which parts of history are worth commemorating and what vision of history ought to be conveyed.”
One of the most outrageous public celebrations of white supremacy is Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta. Carved in the gray stone are massive figures of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and the generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The Confederate leaders, all mounted on horses, hold their hats over their hearts. The carving covers more than 1.5 acres of rock face and rises 400 feet. It is the largest bas-relief in the world. It is also the most visited site in Georgia.
William Faulkner published “Absalom, Absalom,” his searing condemnation of slavery and the Old South the same year Mitchell published “Gone With the Wind.” The hate-filled slave owner and Confederate veteran Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s novel, unlike the characters in “Gone With the Wind,” is “demonic evil.” Sutpen, who engages in miscegenation, buys his slaves “with the same care and shrewdness with which he chose the other livestock—the horses and mules and cattle.” Faulkner understood “the past is never dead. It’s not even past,” that it is subject to constant revision by those seeking to justify and hide their crimes. He warned that the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves lead to moral squalor and self-destruction.
The tour bus stopped at Patrick Cleburne Memorial Cemetery, which holds the remains of some 1,000 Confederate soldiers who died in the Battle of Jonesboro. Most are unidentified. The walkway is laid out in the shape of a Confederate flag. A Confederate flag flies at the entrance.
“In 1872, the state of Georgia pays Stephen Cars, a local cabinetmaker, to rebury the Southern soldiers’ remains and place them in the Patrick Cleburne Memorial Cemetery here,” the audio recording said. “Mr. Cars did not bury over a thousand soldiers by himself. Mr. Cars had a slave named Tom who left with a Yankee captain after the Battle of Jonesboro. When the war was over, Tom returned to Mr. Cars’ house asking for his job back. It was in 1872 that Tom and Mr. Stephen Cars reburied the Confederate soldiers in this cemetery. I told this story to the state of Georgia building authority years ago, they oversee the cemetery, and they remarked that Tom was very similar to the O’Hara slave Big Sam.”
The bus paused in front of a 10-room green house built in 1880 that once belonged to the president of Middle Georgia College.
“Under Reconstruction, five Southerners were not allowed to meet together without a federal marshal present,” Bonner said on the audio guide. “In ‘Gone With the Wind,’ meetings were held in secret. In Jonesboro, there were those secret meetings that dealt with the issues the town had to deal with, including the violence in shantytown. Shantytown was a real location in Jonesboro and many other cities that had a large population of former slaves who are without a job or a home. When this house was being restored in 1995, it was found to have a secret room in the attic, believed to have been used for those secret meetings. There was also a ladder in the wall leading to the cellar. In the cellar, people believed they had found a tunnel. However, upon further research, they found out it was not a tunnel but a bomb shelter where the city fathers planned to store the county records if and when they got back to war” (meaning if and when they resumed the fight against the Union).
It is a safe bet that this house was also a meeting place for the heavily armed goons of the Ku Klux Klan, who rode four abreast at night through the Jonesboro streets to terrorize the blacks in “shantytown.” Over 4,000 people were lynched between the end of the Civil War and World War II in the United States. Georgia had the second highest number of lynchings, with 589. Only Mississippi, with 654 murders, had more.
Lynching was a popular public spectacle in Georgia that could last for hours and included sadistic torture and mutilation. Children were let out of school and workers were given the day off to witness the events. When Sam Hose, who had thrown his ax at a white man and killed him after the man pulled a gun on him, was lynched on April 23, 1899, near Newman, Ga., 1,000 people attended. Many arrived on a special excursion train from Atlanta. Hose was stripped and chained to a tree. His executioners stacked kerosene-soaked logs around him. They cut off Hose’s ears, fingers and genitals. They flayed his face. Members of the crowd thrust knives into him. The logs were lit.
“The only sounds that came from the victim’s lips, even as his blood sizzled in the fire, were ‘Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus,’ ” writes Leon Litwack in “Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow.” “Before Hose’s body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into several pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over these souvenirs, and the ‘more fortunate possessors’ made some handsome profits on the sales. (Small pieces of bone went for 25 cents, a piece of liver ‘crisply cooked’ sold for 10 cents.) Shortly after the lynching, one of the participants reportedly left for the state capital, hoping to deliver to the governor of Georgia a slice of Sam Hose’s heart.”
On the trunk of a tree near the lynching, a placard read: “We Must Protect Our Southern Women.”
In May of 1918, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, publicly denounced the lynching of her husband, Hazel “Hayes” Turner, who had been murdered the day before. She threatened to take those who lynched him to court. A mob of several hundred in Valdosta, Ga., hunted her down. They tied the pregnant woman’s ankles together and hung her upside down from a tree. They doused her clothes with gasoline and set her on fire. Someone used a hog-butchering knife to rip open her womb. Her baby fell the ground and cried briefly. A member of the mob crushed the infant’s head under the heel of his boot. Hundreds of rounds were shot into her body. The Associated Press reported that Mary Turner had made “unwise remarks” about the lynching of her husband “and the people, in their indignation, took exceptions to her remarks, as well as her attitude.”
In commenting in 1894 on lynchings, the crusading editor and activist Ida B. Wells said, “[O]ur American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians.”
James Baldwin, in the second half of the 20th century, repeatedly warned white Americans that their relentless refusal to honestly confront their past, and themselves, would lead to grotesque distortions of the sort that decades later we see embodied in Donald Trump. There is a severe cost, he wrote, for a life lived as a lie.
“People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become,” Baldwin wrote. “And they pay for it very simply by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.”
The first recorded lynching in Georgia took place near Jonesboro in 1880. We have only the name of the victim, Milly Thompson. No one knows if Thompson was male or female. There is no record of Thompson committing a crime. But I suspect that, as in the cases of most lynching victims, the crime Thompson committed was the crime of freedom. If you were black, in this land of gallant cavaliers and Southern belles, and you objected to being human chattel and to enforced deference and submission to whites, they killed you.
There are, as Cornel West has pointed out, only two African-Americans who rose from dirt-poor poverty to the highest levels of American intellectual life—the writer Richard Wright and the radical theologian James H. Cone.
Cone, who died in April, grew up in segregated Bearden, Ark., the impoverished son of a woodcutter who had only a sixth-grade education. With an almost superhuman will, Cone clawed his way up from the Arkansas cotton fields to implode theological studies in the United States with his withering critique of the white supremacy and racism inherent within the white, liberal Christian church. His brilliance—he was a Greek scholar and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Swiss theologian Karl Barth—enabled him to “turn the white man’s theology against him and make it speak for the liberation of black people.” God’s revelation in America, he understood, “was found among poor black people.” Privileged white Christianity and its theology were “heresy.” He was, until the end of his life, possessed by what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “sublime madness.” His insights, he writes, “came to me as if revealed by the spirits of my ancestors long dead but now coming alive to haunt and torment the descendants of the whites who had killed them.”
“When it became clear to me that Jesus was not biologically white and that white scholars actually lied by not telling people who he really was, I stopped trusting anything they said,” he writes in his posthumous memoir, “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian,” published in October.
“White supremacy is America’s original sin and liberation is the Bible’s central message,” he writes in his book. “Any theology in America that fails to engage white supremacy and God’s liberation of black people from that evil is not Christian theology but a theology of the Antichrist.”
White supremacy “is the Antichrist in America because it has killed and crippled tens of millions of black bodies and minds in the modern world,” he writes. “It has also committed genocide against the indigenous people of this land. If that isn’t demonic, I don’t know what is … [and] it is found in every aspect of American life, especially churches, seminaries, and theology.”
Cone, who spent most of his life teaching at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary, where the theological luminaries Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr preceded him, was acutely aware that “there are a lot of brilliant theologians and most are irrelevant and some are evil.”
Of the biblical story of Cain’s murder of Abel, Cone writes: “… [T]he Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I don’t know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen: your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!’ ” Cain, in Cone’s eyes, symbolizes white people, as Abel symbolizes black people.
“God is asking white Americans, especially Christians, ‘Where are your black brothers and sisters?’ ” Cone writes. “And whites respond, ‘We don’t know. Are we their keepers?’ And the Lord says, ‘What have you done to them for four centuries?’ ”
The stark truth he elucidated unsettled his critics and even some of his admirers, who were forced to face their own complicity in systems of oppression. “People cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote. And the reality Cone relentlessly exposed was one most white Americans seek to deny.
“Christianity is essentially a religion of liberation,” Cone writes. “The function of theology is that of analyzing the meaning of that liberation for the oppressed community so they can know that their struggle for political, social, and economic justice is consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Any message that is not related to the liberation of the poor is not Christ’s message. Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology. In a society where [people] are oppressed because they are black, Christian theology must become Black Theology, a theology that is unreservedly identified with the goals of the oppressed community and seeking to interpret the divine character of their struggle for liberation.”
The Detroit rebellion of 1967 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. a year later were turning points in Cone’s life. This was when he—at the time a professor at Adrian College, a largely white college in Adrian, Mich.—removed his mask, a mask that, as the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote, “grins and lies.”
“I felt that white liberals had killed King, helped by those Negroes who thought he was moving too fast,” he writes. “Even though they didn’t pull the trigger, they had refused to listen to King when he proclaimed God’s judgment on America for failing to deal with the three great evils of our time: poverty, racism, and war. The white liberal media demonized King, accusing him of meddling in America’s foreign affairs by opposing the Vietnam War and blaming him for provoking violence wherever he led a march. White liberals, however, accepted no responsibility for King’s murder, and they refused to understand why Negroes were rioting and burning down their communities.”
“I didn’t want to talk to white people about King’s assassination or about the uprisings in the cities,” he writes of that period in his life. “[I]t was too much of an emotional burden to explain racism to racists, and I had nothing to say to them. I decided to have my say in writing. I’d give them something to read and talk about.”
Cone is often described as the father of black liberation theology, although he was also, maybe more importantly, one of the very few contemporary theologians who understood and championed the radical message of the Gospel. Theological studies are divided into pre-Cone and post-Cone eras. Post-Cone theology has largely been an addendum or reaction to his work, begun with his first book, “Black Theology and Black Power,” published in 1969. He wrote the book, he says, “as an attack on racism in white churches and an attack on self-loathing in black churches. I was not interested in making an academic point about theology; rather, I was issuing a manifesto against whiteness and for blackness in an effort to liberate Christians from white supremacy.”
Cone never lost his fire. He never sold out to become a feted celebrity.
“I didn’t care what white theologians thought about black liberation theology,” he writes. “They didn’t give a damn about black people. We were invisible to their writings, not even worthy of mention. Why should I care about what they thought?”
“After more than fifty years of working with, writing about, talking to white theologians, I have to say that most are wasting their time and energy, as far as I am concerned,” he writes, an observation that I, having been forced as a seminary student to plow through the turgid, jargon-filled works of white theologians, can only second. Cone blasted churches, including black churches that emphasize personal piety and the prosperity gospel, as “the worst place to learn about Christianity.”
His body of work, including his masterpieces “Martin & Malcolm & America” and “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” is vital for understanding America and the moral failure of the white liberal church and white liberal power structure. Cone’s insight is an important means of recognizing and fighting systemic and institutionalized racism, especially in an age of Donald Trump.
“I write on behalf of all those whom the Salvadoran theologian and martyr Ignacio Ellacuría called ‘the crucified peoples of history,’ ” Cone writes in his memoir. “I write for the forgotten and the abused, the marginalized and the despised. I write for those who are penniless, jobless, landless, all those who have no political or social power. I write for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and those who are transgender. I write for immigrants stranded on the U.S. border and for undocumented farmworkers toiling in misery in the nation’s agricultural fields. I write for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, on the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem. I write for Muslims and refugees who live under the terror of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. And I write for all people who care about humanity. I believe that until Americans, especially Christians and theologians, can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with ‘recrucified’ black bodies hanging from lynching trees, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”
The cross, Cone reminded us, is not an abstraction; it is the instrument of death used by the oppressor to crucify the oppressed. And the cross is all around us. He writes in “The Cross and the Lynching Tree”:
The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system, proclaiming that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last. Secular intellectuals find this idea absurd, but it is profoundly real in the spiritual life of black folk. For many who were tortured and lynched, the crucified Christ often manifested God’s loving and liberating presence within the great contradictions of black life. The cross of Jesus is what empowered black Christians to believe, ultimately, that they would not be defeated by the “troubles of the world,” no matter how great and painful their suffering. Only people stripped of power could understand this absurd claim of faith. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
Present-day Christians misinterpret the cross when they make it a nonoffensive religious symbol, a decorative object in their homes and churches. The cross, therefore, needs the lynching tree to remind us what it means when we say that God is revealed in Jesus at Golgotha, the place of the skull, on the cross where criminals and rebels against the Roman state were executed. The lynching tree is America’s cross. What happened to Jesus in Jerusalem happened to blacks in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Lynched black bodies are symbols of Christ’s body. If we want to understand what the crucifixion means for Americans today, we must view it through the lens of mutilated black bodies whose lives are destroyed in the criminal justice system. Jesus continues to be lynched before our eyes. He is crucified wherever people are tormented. That is why I say Christ is black.
Every once in a while, when Cone expressed something he thought was particularly important, he would say, “That’s Charlie talking.” To know Cone was to know Charlie and Lucy, his parents, who wrapped him and his brothers in unconditional love that held at bay the dehumanizing fear, discrimination and humiliation that came with living in Jim and Jane Crow Arkansas. He, like poet and novelist Claude McKay, said that what he wrote was “urged out of my blood,” adding “in my case the blood of blacks in Bearden and elsewhere who saw what I saw, felt what I felt, and loved what I loved.”
The essence of Cone was embodied in this radical love, a love that was not rooted in abstractions but the particular reality of his parents and his people. The ferocity of his anger at the injustice endured by the oppressed was matched only by the ferocity of his love. He cared. And because he cared, he carried the hurt and pain of the oppressed, the crucified of the earth, within him. As a boy, after dark, he waited by the window for his father to return home, knowing that to be a black man out on the roads in Arkansas at night meant you might never reach home. He spent his life, in a sense, at that window. He wrote and spoke not only for the forgotten, but also in a very tangible way for Charlie and Lucy. He instantly saw through hypocrisy and detested the pretentions of privilege. He never forgot who he was. He never forgot where he came from. His life was lived to honor his parents and all who were like his parents. He had unmatched courage, integrity and wisdom; indeed he was one of the wisest people I have ever known.
Cone was acutely aware, as Charles H. Long wrote, that “those who have lived in the cultures of the oppressed know something about freedom that the oppressors will never know.” He reminded us that our character is measured by what we have overcome. Despair, for him, was sin.
“What was beautiful about slavery?” Cone asks in his memoir. “Nothing, rationally! But the spirituals, folklore, slave religion, and slave narratives are beautiful, and they came out of slavery. How do we explain that miracle? What’s beautiful about lynching and Jim Crow segregation? Nothing! Yet the blues, jazz, great preaching, and gospel music are beautiful, and they came out of the post-slavery brutalities of white supremacy. In the 1960s we proclaimed ‘Black is beautiful!’ because it is. We raised our fists to “I’m Black and I’m Proud,’ and we showed ‘Black Pride’ in our walk and talk, our song and sermon.”
He goes on:
We were not destroyed by white supremacy. We resisted it, created a beautiful culture, the civil rights and Black Power movements, which are celebrated around the world. [James] Baldwin asked black people “to accept the past and to learn to live with it.” “I beg the black people of this country,” he said, shortly after “Fire” [“The Fire Next Time”] was published, “to do something which I know to be very difficult; to be proud of the auction block, and all that rope, and all that fire, and all that pain.”
To see beauty in tragedy is very difficult. One needs theological eyes to do that. We have to look beneath the surface and get to the source. Baldwin was not blind. He saw both the tragedy and the beauty in black suffering and its redeeming value. That was why he said that suffering can become a bridge that connects people with one another, blacks with whites and people of all cultures with one another. Suffering is sorrow and joy, tragedy and triumph. It connected blacks with one another and made us stronger. We know anguish and pain and have moved beyond it. The real question about suffering is how to use it. “If you can accept the pain that almost kills you,” says Vivaldo, Baldwin’s character in his novel Another Country, “you can use it, you can become better.” But “that’s hard to do,” Eric, another character, responds. “I know,” Vivaldo acknowledges. If you don’t accept the pain, “you get stopped with whatever it was that ruined you and you make it happen over and over again and your life has—ceased, really—because you can’t move or change or love anymore.” But if you accept it, “you realize that your suffering does not isolate you,” Baldwin says in his dialogue with Nikki Giovanni; “your suffering is your bridge.” Singing the blues and the spirituals is using suffering, letting it become your bridge moving forward. “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard,” Baldwin writes in his short story “Sonny’s Blues.” “There isn’t any other tale to tell, and it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”
“I would rather be a part of the culture that resisted lynching than the one that lynched,” Cone writes at the end of the book. “I would rather be the one who suffered wrong than the one who did wrong. The one who suffered wrong is stronger than the one who did wrong. Jesus was stronger than his crucifiers. Blacks are stronger than whites. Black religion is more creative and meaningful and true than white religion. That is why I love black religion, folklore, and the blues. Black culture keeps black people from hating white people. Every Sunday morning, we went to church to exorcize hate—of ourselves and of white racists.”
There will come difficult moments in our own lives, moments when we are faced with an impulse, driven by fear or self-interest or simple expediency, to turn away at the sight of suffering and injustice. We will hear the cries of the oppressed and want to shut them out. We will count the cost to our careers, our reputations and perhaps our security, for to truly stand with the oppressed is to be treated like the oppressed. But a force greater than our own will compel us to kneel down and pick up the cross. The weight will cut into our shoulders. Our step will slow. Our breathing will become labored. We will be condemned by the powerful and ignored or reviled by the indifferent. But we will demand justice. And when we do, we will say to ourselves, “That’s Cone talking.”
An anti-government movement that advocates for a violent uprising targeting liberal political opponents and law enforcement has moved from the fringes of the internet into the mainstream in recent months and surged on social media, according to a group of researchers that tracks hate groups.
The movement, which says it wants a second Civil War organized around the term “boogaloo,” now includes groups on mainstream internet platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit as well as fringe websites including 4chan, according to a report released Tuesday night by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), an independent non-profit of scientists and engineers that tracks and reports on misinformation and hate speech across social media.
While calls for organized and targeted violence in the form of a new Civil War have previously circulated among some hate groups, the emergence of the term “boogaloo” appeared to be a new and discrete movement. NCRI researchers analyzed more than 100 million social media posts and comments and found that through the use of memes — inside jokes commonly in the form of images — extremists have pushed anti-government and anti-law enforcement messages across social media platforms. They have also organized online communities with tens of thousands of members, some of whom have assembled at real-world events.
The report “represents a breakthrough case study in the capacity to identify cyber swarms and viral insurgencies in nearly real time as they are developing in plain sight,” wrote John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general and current director of the Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience at Rutgers University, in the report’s forward.
The report comes as U.S. law enforcement officials and researchers at various levels have issuedwarnings about the growing threat posed by domestic extremists motivated by fringe ideologies and conspiracy theories. Joel Finkelstein, NCRI’s director and a research scholar at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, said the report had been sent to members of Congress and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice, among others.
“When you have people talking about and planning sedition, and violence against minorities, police, and public officials, we need to take their words seriously,” said Goldenberg, who is also CEO of the security consulting company Cardinal Point Strategies.
Good Question.
Goldenberg said the report had “gone viral” within law enforcement and intelligence communities since its limited release last week. People are reading it and distributing it “far and wide,” he said.
The current boogaloo movement was first noticed by extremism researchers in 2019, when fringe groups from gun rights and militia movements to white supremacists began referring to an impending civil war using the term boogaloo, a joking reference to “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” a 1984 sequel movie about breakdancing.
The term is used to describe an uprising against a seemingly tyrannical or left-wing government, often in response to a perceived threat of wide-spread gun confiscation. For many, the term boogaloo — silly on its face — is used jokingly, or ironically, but for others, the boogaloo memes are shared alongside violent text and images, seemingly to flame an eventual confrontation.
In the last three months, boogaloo-related conversation has grown rapidly, according to the researchers, who found that use of the term has increased nearly 50 percent on platforms like Reddit and Twitter over the last few months. Increased exposure, the researchers warn, carries the danger of indoctrination.
Boogaloo extremists have used social media to “strategize, share instructions for explosives and 3-D printed firearms, distribute illegal firearm modifications, and siphon users into encrypted messaging boards en mass,” according to the NCRI report. The report also notes how the boogaloo concept has been monetized, through merchandise advertised through Facebook and Instagram ads, and marketed to current and former members of the military.
On Facebook and Instagram, the researchers pointed to several boogaloo-themed public groups and accounts with tens of thousands of members and followers.
A Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company monitored groups that called for violence.
“We’ve been studying trends around this and related terms on Facebook and Instagram,” the spokesperson said. “We don’t allow speech used to incite hate or violence, and will remove any content that violates our policies. We’ll continue to monitor this across our platform.”
Since NCRI generated the report last week, membership in several boogaloo groups on Facebook has nearly doubled, according to an NBC News analysis. During the same period, two of Facebook’s most popular boogaloo groups that boasted nearly 20,000 followers are no longer available this week. Facebook did not return request for comment.
Much like the OK hand symbol coopted by white nationalists who later denied the association, the ambiguity of the term boogaloo works to cloak extremist organizing in the open.
“Like a virus hiding from the immune system, the use of comical-meme language permits the network to organize violence secretly behind a mirage of inside jokes and plausible deniability,” the report states.
The term “boogaloo” has also been seen in real-world activism. At the Virginia Citizens Defense League’s annual Lobby Day in Richmond in January, one group of protestors who go by Patriot Wave, wore Pepe the Frog patches emblazoned with “Boogaloo Boys.” One man carried a sign that read, “I have a dream of a Boogaloo.” The rally was held on Martin Luther King Day.
NCRI was able to trace the origin of the use of the term boogaloo to 4chan’s politics-focused message board, where racist and hateful memes often get their start. Boogaloo was often associated with apocalyptic and racist terms like “racewar” and “dotr,” a white power fantasy that imagines a time when “race traitors” will be murdered.
The report tracked events when online chatter about an impending boogaloo spiked. The analysis found a peak during a November standoff in upstate New York between an army veteran and police over a domestic dispute. The veteran, Alex Booth, chronicled the standoff on his pro-gun Instagram account “Whiskey Warrior 556,” claiming to followers that his guns were being confiscated. The incident made the boogaloo meme go viral, and gained Booth over 100,000 followers.
The second boogaloo meme peak appeared around the House’s impeachment of Donald Trump, the report found.
Donald J Trump and those who promote his brand of white supremacist, racist hate and bigotry, like the Fox News pundits such as Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity et al? Are also accomplices in this mass murder by this white supremacist in El Paso and each and every act of terrorism and murder committed by White Supremacist scum.They should be labeled domestic terrorists and treated as such.
We assess domestic terrorists pose a persistent and evolving threat of violence and economic harm to the United States; in fact, there have been more domestic terrorism subjects disrupted by arrest and more deaths caused by domestic terrorists than international terrorists in recent years. We are most concerned about lone offenders, primarily using firearms, as these lone offenders represent the dominant trend for lethal domestic terrorists. Frequently, these individuals act without a clear group affiliation or guidance, making them challenging to identify, investigate, and disrupt.
We understand that your request for today’s hearing arises from a concern about racially motivated violent extremism, which may result in the commission of hate crimes. We appreciate your interest in this issue. Individuals adhering to racially motivated violent extremism ideology have been responsible for the most lethal incidents among domestic terrorists in recent years, and the FBI assesses the threat of violence and lethality posed by racially motivated violent extremists will continue. The current racially motivated violent extremist threat is decentralized and primarily characterized by lone actors. These actors tend to be radicalized online and target minorities and soft targets using easily accessible weapons.
Violent extremists are increasingly using social media for the distribution of propaganda, recruitment, target selection, and incitement to violence. Through the Internet, violent extremists around the world have access to our local communities to target and recruit like-minded individuals and spread their messages of hate on a global scale. The recent attack at the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in Poway, California, not only highlights the enduring threat of violence posed by domestic terrorists, but also demonstrates the danger presented by the propagation of these violent acts on the Internet. The attacker in Poway referenced the recent mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, and we remain concerned that online sharing of livestreamed attack footage could amplify viewer reaction to attacks and provide ideological and tactical inspiration to other domestic terrorists in the homeland.
Statement Before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Washington, D.C. June 4, 2019
Donald Trump tweeted, “If a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here—a lynching. But we will WIN!”
The word lynching conjures the imagery of the 4,000 killed in racial terror lynchings by the 1960s, what Billie Holiday sang as “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze.” By definition, to be lynched is to be punished or killed (often by a group) without due process or a trial. The president’s claim is facially absurd because he is not being punished without process. His own tweet even indicates that impeachment is the process. If the House of Representatives formally recognizes his wrongdoing after an inquiry, then the Senate will start a trial and reach a verdict.
It is tempting to delve into the distinctions between Trump’s farcical claim and actual horrors of lynching. It is tempting to talk about the Black and brown people who had limbs, genitalia, and even babies cut from their bodies. It is tempting to describe the fetor of burning flesh, or the sight of Emmett Till’s body tied to an industrial fan, or the smiling faces of white women, men, and children as they rejoiced in Black bodies’ last gasps for air. And, to refute politicians of both parties who now suggest lynching is confined to a dark chapter in American history, it is tempting to point to modern-day lynchings perpetuated by white men who assert “stand your ground” defenses after killing Black people, or police officers who rehearse the “I feared for my life” script following their violent acts.
Fortunately, activists, politicians, and scholars condemned Trump’s comparison and his Republican backers. But it’s also important to read Trump’s outrageous claim as a common and dangerous tactic: Powerful people steal the language of those they oppress to signal to others that they themselves are victims. This carefully crafted narrative of victimhood has perpetuated its own lynchings.
Dylann Roof announced, “I have to do this because you are raping our women and taking over the world,” as he murdered nine Black people at the Mother Emanuel church in South Carolina, six of them women. He lynched them. False and mischaracterized assertions of white women’s victimhood inspired thousands of Black beatings, lynchings, and prosecutions. Trump knows this well: He paid for an advertisement in the New York Times to call for the torture and execution of angry “young men,” a reference to the black teens known as the Central Park Five, who were accused—and ultimately exonerated—of raping a jogger.
Justice Clarence Thomas claimed to be a victim of a “high-tech lynching” after his former employee, Anita Hill, a black woman, testified during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings that he sexually harassed her for years. “Lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U. S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree,” he said. Pulling a page from Thomas’ testimony, Bill Cosby and singer R. Kelly borrowed the lynching language to dismiss sexual assault claims against them.
Police officers have also used the language of victimization since coming under more widespread criticism by the Black Lives Matter movement. Under the rallying cry “Blue Lives Matter,” states have passed laws and sentencing enhancements that criminalize protest and provide additional protection for any kind of action that could be interpreted as violence against police officers. But law enforcement is actually far less dangerous than many other jobs; police officer deaths have declined by more than half over the past 40 years. Meanwhile, the number of police shooting victims still hovers at about 1,000 people per year.
The false portrayal of powerful people as victims can inspire vigilantes to identify with and defend them by any means. White supremacists patrol the border to defend their country. Militias showed up to help police arrest anti-fascist protesters in Portland, Oregon, while law enforcement sympathizers have repeatedlyrammed their cars into peaceful protests against police violence and ICE.
And Trump’s imaginary victimhood is especially dangerous. He has encouraged the perception of victimhood among white nationalists in particular. He famously called white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, “very fine people” after one murdered counterprotester Heather Heyer. Online, in the press room, and at rallies, he frequently fuels the imaginary fears of an immigrant “invasion.” His campaign ran thousands of online advertisements that warned people like Patrick Crusius that they were under attack from an outside, illegal enemy. Crusius opened fire on dozens of people at a Texas Walmart on an August morning this year. Twenty died. Crusius ignored the massive policing apparatus that exists to surveil and police immigrants and decided it was up to him to stop the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” He imagined he was the victim.
This was a mass lynching. And Trump roused the rope.
As long as he continues to feign victimhood, people will defend him by attacking people of color, immigrants, poor people, and people of faith. Hate crimes have already risen astronomically since his election. But there is no strange fruit at the White House. Just rotten ones.
Donald J Trump and the new Republican Party.
Trump Will Not Apologize for Calling for Death Penalty Over Central Park Five
“You have people on both sides of that,” the president said when asked about the wrongly convicted defendants.
Why yes, many of us have come to realize that racists, religious extremists, bigots and white supremacists have all aligned themselves with the Racist Bigoted White Supremacist in Chief, Donald J Trump and the Republican party.
Hate group count hits 20-year high amid rise in white supremacy, report says
The number of hate groups active in the USA rose to its highest level in two decades last year, according to an annual survey released Wednesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The count of active groups that the civil rights organization labels as espousing hate climbed to 1,020, up from 784 four years ago, and was propelled by a rise in extremism, the center said. From 2017 to 2018 alone, the tally rose 7 percent.
The groups range from white supremacists to black nationalists, neo-Nazis to neo-Confederates.
The most significant growth was in the number of white nationalist organizations, up from 100 in 2017 to 148 in 2018, said Beirich, who wrote the report. It marks a resurgence in the aftermath of the massive rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, that focused attention on the movement.
“Much of the energy on the radical right this year was concentrated in the white supremacist milieu,” the report says. “After a lull that followed the violence in Charlottesville, which brought criminal charges and civil suits that temporarily dampened the radical right’s activism and organizing, newer groups gathered momentum.”
In its annual hate crime report in November, the FBI listed 7,775 criminal incidents for 2017, up from 6,121 in 2016.
While many groups are adding members, the SPLC found one of the best known hate groups, the Ku Klux Klan, appears to be in decline. The group, despite a history that stretches back more than a century, has been marked by infighting and difficulty connecting to a younger generation.
“The KKK has not been able to appeal to younger racists, with its antiquated traditions, odd dress and lack of digital savvy. Younger extremists prefer … polo shirts and khakis to Klan robes,” the report says.
But there is no shortage of hate-filled alternatives, whether they are neo-Nazis, racist skinheads or others who direct their anger at immigrants; lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individuals; Muslims or others.
At least one of the outfits added to the SPLC list didn’t seem to mind.
A leader of the American Freedom Party, a New York-based group that says on its website that the “core European American population” is being overwhelmed by “tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants,” was pleased.
“I am flattered,” Chairman William Johnson told USA TODAY. “It really helps elevate our reputation” when the party is lumped with groups close to the mainstream supporting Trump and those linked to Catholicism. He said the list is so broad that it becomes meaningless.
“I don’t know any organization that says I’m a hate group. I’m a love group,” Johnson said. He said the American Freedom Party has “nationalists of many stripes and races” among its members, and “white people are becoming comfortable with being proud of their heritage.”
Adolph Hitler and his Nazis? Would put each and every one of these mental midget morons, who all think they are the “Master Race”? In his ovens and gas showers, because they sure the hell do not fit or even come close to fitting his idea of the Aryan Super-race.
Murders by white supremacists in US more than doubled in 2017
Far right linked to 20 of 34 extremist murders last year, says Anti-Defamation League report
Murders committed by white supremacists more than doubled in the US last year, accounting for the majority of extremist killings, according to a report.
Far-right radicals were responsible for 20 of the 34 extremist murders in 2017, said the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Eighteen of those were carried out by white supremacists, who killed twice as many people as Islamic fundamentalists, the civil rights group’s Centre on Extremism said.
Last year was the fifth deadliest for extremist violence in America since 1970, according to research by the ADL.
White supremacists were responsible for 59 per cent of all extremist killings last year. That compares to a fifth the previous year, when six people were murdered by white supremacists, although the ADL acknowledged that figure was “uncharacteristically low”.
Seventy-one per cent of all extremist murders in the past decade were linked to domestic right-wing extremism.
“These findings are a stark reminder that domestic extremism is a serious threat to our safety and security,” said ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt.
He added: “When white supremacists and other extremists are emboldened and find new audiences for their hate-filled views, violence is usually not far behind.
“We cannot ignore the fact that white supremacists are emboldened, and as a society we need to keep a close watch on recruitment and rallies such as Charlottesville, which have the greatest potential to provoke and inspire violence.”
The death of Heather Heyer, an anti-fascist demonstrator killed in August when James Alex Fields rammed into a crowd opposing the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Viriginia, was among the 18 white supremacist murders counted by the ADL.
Following the rally, the ADL condemned US President Donald Trump for defending the far-right and claiming the “alt-left” counter-demonstrators were equally to blame for the violence.
The report also cites Jeremy Christian, an alleged extremist accused of fatally stabbing two strangers in Portland, Oregon, when they intervened in his anti-Muslim rant.
“The white supremacist murders included several killings linked to the alt right as that movement expanded its operations in 2017 from the internet into the physical world—raising the likely possibility of more such violent acts in the future,” the ADL’s report warns.
The deadliest extremist attack of 2016, however, was linked to Islamic extremism. Sayfullo Saipov, the man accused of killing eight people with a truck in New York in November, is said to have had connections to Isis.
The ADL said five murders were also carried out by black nationalists.
“Combined with other violent acts by black nationalists in recent years, these murders suggest the possibility of an emerging problem,” the report adds.
Mr Greenblatt said: “The bottom line is we cannot ignore one form of extremism over another. We must tackle them all.”
Critics have blamed the billionaire Republican’s rhetoric during the election campaign and since becoming President for the re-emergence of white supremacist groups.
Here’s a bunch of white nationalists from Orange County flashing the hand sign for “White Power”, which incidentally? Also the American Sign Language sign for Asshole.
Charlottesville: Donald Trump quietly slashed funds to groups fighting white supremacy months ago
US President’s decision to freeze funds facing fresh scrutiny in wake of deadly nationalist violence in Virginia
Donald Trump’s decision to slash funding to counter right-wing extremism in the US is facing fresh scrutiny in the wake of the Charlottesville violence that left three people dead.
The US President froze $10 million (£7.7m) of grants destined to fight violent extremism in the US back in May.
More than 30 organisations had been pegged by former President Barack Obama’s office to receive the funding, but the White House put the grants on hold pending review soon after Mr Trump took office.
Among those approved were local governments, city police departments, universities and non-profit organisations fighting all forms of violent extremism in the US.
Former white supremacist Chuck Leek, who has since become a volunteer with Life After Hate – one of the organisations that was due to receive government funding – warned at the time that white supremacy in the US was becoming more active.
His prediction came true at the weekend when deadly violence broke out between those opposed to the removal of a statue from a local park of Civil War Confederate General Robert E Lee and counter-protesters.
The rally was the largest assembly of white nationalist groups in over a decade and saw brawls between people holding KKK banners and confederate flags, and groups of anti-fascist counter protestors spill onto the streets.
Critics pointed to the US President’s campaign rhetoric for enabling far-right extremist groups in the country to regain a foothold.
Mr Trump’s slow response to the demonstrations was also condemned, after he spoke out against “violence on many sides” in the wake of the attacks – despite white nationalist James Fields allegedly ploughing a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” he said. “On many sides.”
More than 30 people were injured in the car ramming and Fields has been charged with second-degree murder.
Neo-nazis applauded Mr Trump’s first response to the violent clashes, saying that it was “really, really good” that the President did not condemn them.
Two troopers also died when a Virginia State Police helicopter monitoring the violence crashed near the city.
The White House released a statement on Monday following a second press conference by Mr Trump, saying: “The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred and of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, neo-nazi and all extremist groups.”
The US leader eventually condemned those groups directly, in a spoken statement on Monday night – in which he labelled them “evil”.
But earlier this year, the Trump administration was pushing to downplay the threat of white extremism by erasing neo-Nazis and white supremacists from the US government’s counter-extremism programme and moving it to focus exclusively on Islamist terrorism.
American officials briefed on the proposed changes said the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) initiative could be renamed “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism”.
The reclassification would remove its work combatting far-right attacks and mass shootings, such as the massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, which are rarely classified as terrorism by American authorities.
Good question for the mental midget moron white supremacist Trumpanzee supporters.
NOW? LETS SEE SOME OF THE RESULTS OF THESE RACIST PIG SHITSTAINS ON THE UNDERWEAR OF HUMANITY TRUMPANZEES.
Aug. 19, 2015: In Boston, after he and his brother beat a sleeping homeless man of Mexican descent with a metal pole, Steven Leader, 30, told police “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.” The victim, however, was not in the United States illegally. The brothers, who are white, ultimately pleaded guilty to several assault-related charges and were each sentenced to at least two years in prison.
Dec. 5, 2015: After Penn State University student Nicholas Tavella, 19, was charged with “ethnic intimidation” and other crimes for threatening to “put a bullet” in a young Indian man on campus, his attorney argued in court that Tavella was just motivated by “a love of country,” not “hate.” “Donald Trump is running for President of the United States saying that, ‘We’ve got to check people out more closely,'” Tavella’s attorney argued in his defense. Tavella, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to ethnic intimidation and was sentenced to up to two years in prison.
April 28, 2016: When FBI agents arrested 61-year-old John Martin Roos in White City, Oregon, for threatening federal officials, including then-President Barack Obama, they found several pipe bombs and guns in his home. In the three months before his arrest, Roos posted at least 34 messages to Twitter about Trump, repeatedly threatening African Americans, Muslims, Mexican immigrants and the “liberal media,” and in court documents, prosecutors noted that the avowed Trump supporter posted this threatening message to Facebook a month earlier: “The establishment is trying to steal the election from Trump. … Obama is already on a kill list … Your [name] can be there too.” Roos, who is white, has since pleaded guilty to possessing an unregistered explosive device and posting internet threats against federal officials. He was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Medford Man Receives Federal Prison Sentence for Threatening Former President Obama
On May 12, 2017, United States District Court Judge Michael J. McShane sentenced John Martin Roos, 62, of Medford, to 63 months in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to possessing an unregistered explosive device and posting Internet threats to kill then-President of the United States Barack Obama and FBI agents. After his release from prison, Roos will be on supervised release for three years.
June 3, 2016: After 54-year-old Henry Slapnik attacked his African-American neighbors with a knife in Cleveland, he told police “Donald Trump will fix them because they are scared of Donald Trump,” according to police reports. Slapnik, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to “ethnic intimidation” and other charges. It’s unclear what sentence he received.
Cleveland man threatens black neighbors with slur, says ‘Donald Trump will fix them,’ police say
Aug. 16, 2016: In Olympia, Washington, 32-year-old Daniel Rowe attacked a white woman and a black man with a knife after seeing them kiss on a popular street. When police arrived on the scene, Rowe professed to being “a white supremacist” and said “he planned on heading down to the next Donald Trump rally and stomping out more of the Black Lives Matter group,” according to court documents filed in the case. Rowe, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to charges of assault and malicious harassment, and he was sentenced to more than four years in prison.
Man to serve 4 years in downtown Olympia hate crime stabbing
Sept. 1, 2016: The then-chief of the Bordentown, New Jersey, police department, Frank Nucera, allegedly assaulted an African American teenager who was handcuffed. Federal prosecutors said the attack was part of Nucera’s “intense racial animus,” noting in federal court that “within hours” of the assault, Nucera was secretly recorded saying “Donald Trump is the last hope for white people.” The 60-year-old Nucera has been indicted by a federal grand jury on three charges, including committing a federal hate crime. Nucera, who is white, has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. He retired two years ago.
Former Bordentown Township Police Chief Charged With Hate Crime And Use Of Excessive Force During Arrest
September 2016: After 40-year-old Mark Feigin of Los Angeles was arrested for posting anti-Muslim and allegedly threatening statements to a mosque’s Facebook page, his attorney argued in court that the comments were protected by the First Amendment because Feigin was “using similar language and expressing similar views” to “campaign statements from then-candidate Donald Trump.” Noting that his client “supported Donald Trump,” attorney Caleb Mason added that “Mr. Feigin’s comments were directed toward a pressing issue of public concern that was a central theme of the Trump campaign and the 2016 election generally: the Islamic roots of many international and U.S. terrorist acts.” Feigin, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of sending harassing communications electronically. He was sentenced to probation.
Oct. 13, 2016: After the FBI arrested three white Kansas men for plotting to bomb an apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas, where many Somali immigrants lived, one of the men’s attorneys insisted to a federal judge that the plot was “self-defensive” because the three men believed “that if Donald Trump won the election, President Obama would not recognize the validity of those results, that he would declare martial law, and that at that point militias all over the country would have to step in.” Then, after a federal grand jury convicted 47-year-old Patrick Stein and the two other men of conspiracy-related charges, Stein’s attorney argued for a lighter sentence based on “the backdrop” of Stein’s actions: Trump had become “the voice of a lost and ignored white, working-class set of voters” like Stein, and the “climate” at the time could propel someone like Stein to “go to 11,” attorney Jim Pratt said in court. Stein and his two accomplices were each sentenced to at least 25 years in prison.
hree Southwest Kansas Men Convicted of Plotting to Bomb Somali Immigrants in Garden City
Nov. 3, 2016: In Tampa, Florida, David Howard threatened to burn down the house next to his “simply because” it was being purchased by a Muslim family, according to the Justice Department. He later said under oath that while he harbored a years-long dislike for Muslims, the circumstances around the home sale were “the match that lit the wick.” He cited Trump’s warnings about immigrants from majority-Muslim countries. “[With] the fact that the president wants these six countries vetted, everybody vetted before they come over, there’s a concern about Muslims,” Howard said. Howard, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights violation, and the 59-year-old was sentenced to eight months in prison.
Tampa Man Sentenced for Threatening to Burn Down a Home Being Purchased by Muslim Family
Nov. 12, 2016: In Grand Rapids, Michigan, while attacking a cab driver from East Africa, 23-year-old Jacob Holtzlander shouted racial epithets and repeatedly yelled the word, “Trump,” according to law enforcement records. Holtzlander, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of ethnic intimidation, and he was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Jacob Holtzlander sentenced for ethnic intimidation
Jan. 25, 2017: At JFK International Airport in New York, a female Delta employee, wearing a hijab in accordance with her Muslim faith, was “physically and verbally” attacked by 57-year-old Robin Rhodes of Worcester, Mass., “for no apparent reason,” prosecutors said at the time. When the victim asked Brown what she did to him, he replied: “You did nothing, but … [Expletive] Islam. [Expletive] ISIS. Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you.” Rhodes ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of “menacing,” and he was sentenced to probation.
Feb. 19, 2017: After 35-year-old Gerald Wallace called a mosque in Miami Gardens, Florida, and threatened to “shoot all y’all,” he told the FBI and police that he made the call because he “got angry” from a local TV news report about a terrorist act.
At a rally in Florida the day before, Trump falsely claimed that Muslim refugees had just launched a terrorist attack in Sweden.
Wallace’s attorney, Katie Carmon, later tried to convince a federal judge that the threat to kill worshippers could be “protected speech” due to the “very distinctly political climate” at the time.
“There are courts considering President Trump’s travel ban … and the president himself has made some very pointed statements about what he thinks about people of this descent,” Carmon argued in court. Wallace, who is African American, ultimately pleaded guilty to obstructing the free exercise of his victims’ religious beliefs, and he was sentenced to one year in prison.
Florida Man Sentenced to Prison for Making Telephonic Threat to Shoot Congregants at The Islamic Center of Greater Miami
Feb. 23, 2017: Kevin Seymour and his partner Kevin price were riding their bicycles in Key West, Florida, when a man on a moped, 30-year-old Brandon Davis of North Carolina, hurled anti-gay slurs at them and “intentionally” ran into Seymour’s bike, shouting, “You live in Trump country now,” according to police reports and Davis’ attorney. Davis ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of battery evidencing prejudice, but in court, he expressed remorse and was sentenced to four years of probation.
Gay-basher who yelled ‘You’re in Trump country now’ offers to hug his victims
August 12, 2017: On August 12, 2017, a car was deliberately driven into a crowd of people who had been peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one and injuring 28. The driver of the car, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., had driven from Ohio to attend the rally. Fields previously espoused neo-Nazi and white supremacist beliefs. He was convicted in a state court of hit and run, the first-degree murder of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, and eight counts of malicious wounding, and sentenced to life in prison with an additional 419 years in July 2019
Oct. 22, 2017: A 44-year-old California man threatened to kill Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., for her frequent criticism of Trump and her promise to “take out” the president. Anthony Scott Lloyd left a voicemail at the congresswoman’s Washington office, declaring: “If you continue to make threats towards the president, you’re going to wind up dead, Maxine. Cause we’ll kill you.” After pleading guilty to one count of threatening a U.S. official, Lloyd asked the judge for leniency, saying he suffered from addiction-inducing mental illness and became “far too immersed in listening to polarizing political commentators and engaging in heated political debates online.” His lawyer put it this way to the judge: “Mr. Lloyd was a voracious consumer of political news online, on television and on radio … [that are] commonly viewed as ‘right wing,’ unconditionally supportive of President Trump, and fiercely critical of anyone who opposed President Trump’s policies.” The judge sentenced Lloyd to six months of house arrest and three years of probation.
San Pedro Man Pleads Guilty in Federal Court to Making Death Threat Against United States Congresswoman Maxine Waters
August 2018: After the Boston Globe called on news outlets around the country to resist what it called “Trump’s assault on journalism,” the Boston Globe received more than a dozen threatening phone calls. “You are the enemy of the people,” the alleged caller, 68-year-old Robert Chain of Encino, California, told a Boston Globe employee on Aug. 22. “As long as you keep attacking the President, the duly elected President of the United States … I will continue to threat[en], harass, and annoy the Boston Globe.” A week later, authorities arrested Chain on threat-related charges. After a hearing in his case, he told reporters, “America was saved when Donald J. Trump was elected president.” Chain has pleaded guilty to seven threat-related charges, and he is awaiting sentencing.
California Man Charged with Making Violent Threats Against Boston Globe Employees
Oct. 4, 2018: The Polk County Sheriff’s Office in Florida arrested 53-year-old James Patrick of Winter Haven, Florida, for allegedly threatening “to kill Democratic office holders, members of their families and members of both local and federal law enforcement agencies,” according to a police report. In messages posted online, Patrick detailed a “plan” for his attacks, which he said he would launch if then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh was not confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, the police report said. Seeking Patrick’s release from jail after his arrest, Patrick’s attorney, Terri Stewart, told a judge that her client’s “rantings” were akin to comments from “a certain high-ranking official” — Trump. The president had “threatened the North Korean people — to blow them all up. It was on Twitter,” Stewart said, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Patrick has been charged with making a written threat to kill or injure, and he has pleaded not guilty. His trial is pending.
Polk man arrested for threatening to kill members of Congress if Kavanaugh not confirmed
Late October 2018: Over the course of a week, Florida man Cesar Sayoc allegedly mailed at least 15 potential bombs to prominent critics of Trump and members of the media. Sayoc had been living in a van plastered with pro-Trump stickers, and he had posted several pro-Trump messages on social media. Federal prosecutors have accused him of “domestic terrorism,” and Sayoc has since pleaded guilty to 65 counts, including use of a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. “We believe the president’s rhetoric contributed to Mr. Sayoc’s behavior,” Sayoc’s attorney told the judge at sentencing.
Cesar Sayoc sentenced to 20 years in prison for mailing pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, CNN
Dec. 4, 2018: Michael Brogan, 51, of Brooklyn, New York, left a voicemail at an unidentified U.S. Senator’s office in Washington insisting, “I’m going to put a bullet in ya. … You and your constant lambasting of President Trump. Oh, reproductive rights, reproductive rights.” He later told an FBI agent that before leaving the voicemail he became “very angry” by “an internet video of the Senator, including the Senator’s criticism of the President of the United States as well as the Senator’s views on reproductive rights.” “The threats were made to discourage the Senator from criticizing the President,” the Justice Department said in a later press release. Brogan has since pleaded guilty to one count of threatening a U.S. official, and he is awaiting sentencing.
Brooklyn Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening to Assault and Murder a United States SenatorDefendant Left a Threatening Voice-Message in Retaliation for the Senator’s Criticism of the President of the United States and the Senator’s Position on Reproductive Rights
Jan. 17, 2019: Stephen Taubert of Syracuse, New York, was arrested by the U.S. Capitol Police for threatening to kill Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and for threatening to “hang” former President Barack Obama. Taubert used “overtly bigoted, hateful language” in his threats, according to federal prosecutors. On July 20, 2018, Taubert called the congresswoman’s Los Angeles office to say he would find her at public events and kill her and her entire staff. In a letter to the judge just days before Taubert’s trial began, his defense attorney, Courtenay McKeon, noted: “During that time period, Congresswoman Waters was embroiled in a public feud with the Trump administration. … On June 25, 2018, in response to Congresswoman Waters’ public statements, President Trump tweeted: ‘Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has … just called for harm to supporters … of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!'” As McKeon insisted to the judge: “This context is relevant to the case.” A federal jury ultimately convicted Taubert on three federal charges, including retaliating against a federal official and making a threat over state lines. He was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.
A jury today convicted Stephen J. Taubert, age 61, of Syracuse, of making death threats toward former President of the United States Barack Obama and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. The verdict was announced by United States Attorney Grant C. Jaquith, Chief Matthew R. Verderosa, United States Capitol Police, and Special Agent in Charge Lewis Robinson, United States Secret Service, Buffalo, New York Field Office.
Jan. 22, 2019: David Boileau of Holiday, Florida, was arrested by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office for allegedly burglarizing an Iraqi family’s home and “going through” their mailbox, according to a police report. After officers arrived at the home, Boileau “made several statements of his dislike for people of Middle Eastern descent,” the report said. “He also stated if he doesn’t get rid of them, Trump will handle it.” The police report noted that a day before, Boileau threw screws at a vehicle outside the family’s house. On that day, Boileau allegedly told police, “We’ll get rid of them one way or another.” Boileau, 58, has since pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of trespassing, and he was sentenced to 90 days in jail.
Feb. 15, 2019: The FBI in Maryland arrested a Marine veteran and U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant, Christopher Paul Hasson, who they said was stockpiling weapons and “espoused” racist and anti-immigrant views for years as he sought to “murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.” In court documents, prosecutors said the 49-year-old “domestic terrorist” compiled a “hit list” of prominent Democrats. Two months later, while seeking Hasson’s release from jail before trial, his public defender, Elizabeth Oyer, told a federal judge: “This looks like the sort of list that our commander-in-chief might have compiled while watching Fox News in the morning. … Is it legitimately frustrating that offensive language and ideology has now become part of our national vocabulary? Yes, it is very frustrating. But … it is hard to differentiate it from the random musings of someone like Donald Trump who uses similar epithets in his everyday language and tweets.” Hasson faces weapons-related charges and was being detained as he awaits trial. He has pleaded not guilty.
US Coast Guard lieutenant accused of plotting ‘to kill almost every last person on the earth’
April 5, 2019: The FBI arrested a 55-year-old man from upstate New York for allegedly threatening to kill Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., one of the first two Muslim women elected to the U.S. Congress. She is an outspoken critic of Trump, and Trump has frequently launched public attacks against her and three other female lawmakers of color. Two weeks before his arrest, Patrick Carlineo Jr. allegedly called Omar’s office in Washington labeling the congresswoman a “terrorist” and declaring: “I’ll put a bullet in her f—-ing skull.” When an FBI agent then traced the call to Carlineo and interviewed him, Carlineo “stated that he was a patriot, that he loves the President, and that he hates radical Muslims in our government,” according to the FBI agent’s summary of the interview. Federal prosecutors charged Carlineo with threatening to assault and murder a United States official. Carlineo is awaiting trial, although his defense attorney and federal prosecutors are working on what his attorney called another “possible resolution” of the case.
April 18, 2019: The FBI arrested John Joseph Kless of Tamarac, Florida, for calling the Washington offices of three prominent Democrats and threatening to kill each of them. At his home, authorities found a loaded handgun in a backpack, an AR-15 rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. In later pleading guilty to one charge of transmitting threats over state lines, Kless admitted that in a threatening voicemail targeting Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., he stated: “You won’t f—ing tell Americans what to say, and you definitely don’t tell our president, Donald Trump, what to say.” Tlaib, a vocal critic of Trump, was scheduled to speak in Florida four days later. Kless was awaiting sentencing. In a letter to the federal judge, he said he “made a very big mistake,” never meant to hurt anyone, and “was way out of line with my language and attitude.”
Tamarac Resident Pleads Guilty to Making Multiple Threats to Congress
April 24, 2019: The FBI arrested 30-year-old Matthew Haviland of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, for allegedly sending a series of violent and threatening emails to a college professor in Massachusetts who publicly expressed support for abortion rights and strongly criticized Trump. In one of 28 emails sent to the professor on March 10, 2019, Haviland allegedly called the professor “pure evil” and said “all Democrats must be eradicated,” insisting the country now has “a president who’s taking our country in a place of more freedom rather than less.” In another email the same day, Haviland allegedly wrote the professor: “I will rip every limb from your body and … I will kill every member of your family.” According to court documents, Haviland’s longtime friend later told the FBI that “within the last year, Haviland’s views regarding abortion and politics have become more extreme … at least in part because of the way the news media portrays President Trump.” Haviland has been charged with cyberstalking and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. His trial is pending.
June 5, 2019: The FBI arrested a Utah man for allegedly calling the U.S. Capitol more than 2,000 times over several months and threatening to kill Democratic lawmakers, whom he said were “trying to destroy Trump’s presidency.” “I am going to take up my second amendment right, and shoot you liberals in the head,” 54-year-old Scott Brian Haven allegedly stated in one of the calls on Oct. 18, 2018, according to charging documents. When an FBI agent later interviewed Haven, he “explained the phone calls were made during periods of frustration with the way Democrats were treating President Trump,” the charging documents said. The FBI visit, however, didn’t stop Haven from making more threats, including: On March 21, 2019, he called an unidentified U.S. senator’s office to say that if Democrats refer to Trump as Hitler again he will shoot them, and two days later he called an unidentified congressman’s office to say he “was going to take [the congressman] out … because he is trying to remove a duly elected President.” A federal grand jury has since charged Haven with one count of transmitting a threat over state lines. Haven pleaded not guilty and was awaiting trial.
Aug. 3, 2019: A gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 people and injuring 24 others. The FBI labeled the massacre an act of “domestic terrorism,” and police determined that the alleged shooter, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, posted a lengthy anti-immigrant diatribe online before the attack. “We attribute that manifesto directly to him,” according to El Paso police chief Greg Allen. Describing the coming assault as “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the screed’s writer said “the media” would “blame Trump’s rhetoric” for the attack but insisted his anti-immigrant views “predate Trump” — an apparent acknowledgement that at least some of his views align with some of Trump’s public statements. The writer began his online essay by stating that he generally “support[s]” the previous writings of the man who killed 51 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand earlier this year. In that case, the shooter in New Zealand said he absolutely did not support Trump as “a policy maker and leader” — but “[a]s a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure.” Crusius has been charged with capital murder by the state of Texas.
This is a great read on the disaster that is Donald J Trump.
Anti Trump Meme Slideshow
Yeah, I can admit I hate Donald J Trump and many of these memes exposes this scumbag piece of shit, this Putin Puppet Traitor, this sell out to our country, this racist bigot, this misogynist pig, this pervert pedophile, this incestual prick, this disgusting low life sub human troglodyte, this pathological liar.
And if you do not hate his ass? Then I call you a Traitor to this Country.
Handjob Hannity the leader of the Fascist murderers and haters who loves to spread lies on Faux Nitwit NewslessAnd Tomi Lahrens breath smells just like the well used shithole she spews her shit from.
Fox News, the Turd Reich Propoganda Channel for their Hitler wanna-be dicktaker, and Putin Puppet, Donald J Trump pundits Sean “Handjob Hannity” Hannity, Tomi “Blonde Bimbo” Lahren, Tucker “Traitor” Carlson, Laura “White Trash Slut” Ingraham, Laura “Psychotic Liar” Ingle, Steven “The Pedophile Defender” Doocy, Jeanine “Hitler Wanna Be” Pirro, Brian “Dumbass” Kilmeade and many other Faux Nitwit Newsless personalities are responsible for promoting hate, bigotry, misogyny and outright lies that have gotten people murdered, attacked, terrorized and even an act of mass murder, but they sure the hell do not give a flying fuck they got blood on their hands and heads.
Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade of Faux Nitwit Newsless Propoganda Channel for Traitor Trump failed to realize that if in fact? President Barack Obama was the tyrant they claimed him to be? Their asses would have been dragged out of the Faux studio, taken into an alley and shot in the head. Didn’t happen though now did it?
The constant lies that Handjob Hannity and the rest has spewed from their well used outhouse pieholes? Has caused people to be murdered, people to be attacked and many terroristic threats. Let’s take a look at just some of the results of these scumbag Treasonous Traitors to the United States and their lies and hate has caused shall we?
29 CRIMES COMMITTED BY PSYCHOTIC TRUMPANZEES WHITE SUPREMACIST, MENTAL MIDGET MORONS, INCLUDING MASS MURDER, MURDER, TERRORISTIC ACTS AND OTHER CRIMES.
Aug. 19, 2015: In Boston, after he and his brother beat
a sleeping homeless man of Mexican descent with a metal pole, Steven
Leader, 30, told police “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need
to be deported.” The victim, however, was not in the United States
illegally. The brothers, who are white, ultimately pleaded guilty to several assault-related charges and were each sentenced to at least two years in prison.
Dec. 5, 2015: After Penn State University student
Nicholas Tavella, 19, was charged with “ethnic intimidation” and other
crimes for threatening to “put a bullet” in a young Indian man on
campus, his attorney argued in court that Tavella was just motivated by
“a love of country,” not “hate.” “Donald Trump is running for President
of the United States saying that, ‘We’ve got to check people out more
closely,'” Tavella’s attorney argued in his defense. Tavella, who is
white, ultimately pleaded guilty to ethnic intimidation and was sentenced to up to two years in prison.
SEAN “HANDJOB” HANNITY, RACIST, BIGOT, WHITE SUPREMACIST. SHITSTAIN ON THE UNDERWEAR OF HUMANITY. TREASONOUS TRAITOR. PUTIN PUPPET. HITLER DICK SUCKER. FAKE ASSED CHRISTOFASCIST PIG.
WHAT SEAN HANNITY AND THE OTHER WHITE SUPREMACIST SHITSTAINS ON THE UNDERWEAR OF HUMANITY LIKE HIM DO NOT REALIZE IS? HITLER WOULD HAVE SENT THIS PUNK TO HIS CAMPS TO TAKE A GAS SHOWER. CAUSE THIS TWISTED TROGLODYTE FOR FAUX NITWIT NEWSLESS? SURE THE FUCK DOES NOT FIT HITLERS IDEA OF HIS ARYIAN RACE.
SEAN HANNITY SHOULD FOLLOW IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HIS HERO HITLER, TAKE A GUN SHOVE IT INTO HIS PATHOLOGICAL LYING, WELL USED OUTHOUSE PIEHOLE, PULL THE TRIGGER, AND BLOW HIS TREASONOUS BRAINS OUT.
April 28, 2016: When FBI agents arrested 61-year-old John Martin Roos in White City, Oregon, for threatening federal officials, including then-President Barack Obama,
they found several pipe bombs and guns in his home. In the three months
before his arrest, Roos posted at least 34 messages to Twitter about
Trump, repeatedly threatening African Americans, Muslims, Mexican
immigrants and the “liberal media,” and in court documents, prosecutors
noted that the avowed Trump supporter posted this threatening message to
Facebook a month earlier: “The establishment is trying to steal the
election from Trump. … Obama is already on a kill list … Your [name]
can be there too.” Roos, who is white, has since pleaded guilty to
possessing an unregistered explosive device and posting internet threats
against federal officials. He was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
June 3, 2016: After 54-year-old Henry Slapnik
attacked his African-American neighbors with a knife in Cleveland, he
told police “Donald Trump will fix them because they are scared of
Donald Trump,” according to police reports. Slapnik, who is white,
ultimately pleaded guilty to “ethnic intimidation” and other charges.
It’s unclear what sentence he received.
I’ve heard some dumb ass bleached blondes in my lifetime, but never have I encountered such a mental midget moron, white supremacist, trailer park trash reject, piece of shit than this Trailer Park Trash Reject Psycho Tomi Lahren.
I mean the ameobas, eating the shit from the other ameobas asses, in this psychotic freakshows outhouse Tomi Lahren crawled out from after her mommy shit her out while taking a dump? Has more fucking intelligence than she does.
Aug. 16, 2016: In Olympia, Washington, 32-year-old
Daniel Rowe attacked a white woman and a black man with a knife after
seeing them kiss on a popular street. When police arrived on the scene,
Rowe professed to being “a white supremacist” and said “he planned on
heading down to the next Donald Trump rally and stomping out more of the
Black Lives Matter group,” according to court documents filed in the case. Rowe, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to charges of assault and malicious harassment, and he was sentenced to more than four years in prison.
September 2016: After 40-year-old Mark Feigin of Los
Angeles was arrested for posting anti-Muslim and allegedly threatening
statements to a mosque’s Facebook page, his attorney argued in court
that the comments were protected by the First Amendment because Feigin
was “using similar language and expressing similar views” to “campaign
statements from then-candidate Donald Trump.” Noting that his client
“supported Donald Trump,” attorney Caleb Mason added that “Mr. Feigin’s
comments were directed toward a pressing issue of public concern that
was a central theme of the Trump campaign and the 2016 election
generally: the Islamic roots of many international and U.S. terrorist
acts.” Feigin, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of sending harassing communications electronically. He was sentenced to probation.
Oct. 13, 2016: After the FBI arrested three white
Kansas men for plotting to bomb an apartment complex in Garden City,
Kansas, where many Somali immigrants lived, one of the men’s attorneys
insisted to a federal judge that the plot was “self-defensive” because
the three men believed “that if Donald Trump won the election, President
Obama would not recognize the validity of those results, that he would
declare martial law, and that at that point militias all over the
country would have to step in.” Then, after a federal grand jury convicted 47-year-old Patrick Stein and the two other men of conspiracy-related charges, Stein’s attorney argued
for a lighter sentence based on “the backdrop” of Stein’s actions:
Trump had become “the voice of a lost and ignored white, working-class
set of voters” like Stein, and the “climate” at the time could propel
someone like Stein to “go to 11,” attorney Jim Pratt said in court.
Stein and his two accomplices were each sentenced to at least 25 years
in prison.
Look at this Hitler saluting troglodyte Fascist pig Laura Ingraham. She fucking thinks she is oh so special cause she is white. The trouble is with this bleached blonde bimbo? Hitler would have sent her? To his concentration camp for a gas shower.
Nov. 3, 2016: In Tampa, Florida, David Howard
threatened to burn down the house next to his “simply because” it was
being purchased by a Muslim family, according to the Justice Department.
He later said under oath that while he harbored a years-long dislike
for Muslims, the circumstances around the home sale were “the match that
lit the wick.” He cited Trump’s warnings about immigrants from
majority-Muslim countries. “[With] the fact that the president wants
these six countries vetted, everybody vetted before they come over,
there’s a concern about Muslims,” Howard said. Howard, who is white,
ultimately pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights violation, and the
59-year-old was sentenced to eight months in prison
Nov. 10, 2016: A 23-year-old man from High Springs,
Florida, allegedly assaulted an unsuspecting Hispanic man who was
cleaning a parking lot outside of a local food store. “[H]e was suddenly
struck in the back of the head,” a police report said of the victim.
“[The victim] asked the suspect why he hit him, to which the suspect
replied, ‘This is for Donald Trump.’ The suspect then grabbed [the
victim] by the jacket and proceeded to strike him several more times,”
according to the report. Surveillance video of the incident “completely
corroborated [the victim’s] account of events,” police said. The suspect
was arrested on battery charges, but the case was dropped after the
victim decided not to pursue the matter, police said. Efforts by ABC
News to reach the victim for further explanation were not successful.
Nov. 12, 2016: In Grand Rapids, Michigan, while attacking a cab driver
from East Africa, 23-year-old Jacob Holtzlander shouted racial epithets
and repeatedly yelled the word, “Trump,” according to law enforcement
records. Holtzlander, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of ethnic intimidation, and he was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
an. 25, 2017: At JFK
International Airport in New York, a female Delta employee, wearing a
hijab in accordance with her Muslim faith, was “physically and verbally”
attacked by 57-year-old Robin Rhodes of Worcester, Mass., “for no
apparent reason,” prosecutors said
at the time. When the victim asked Brown what she did to him, he
replied: “You did nothing, but … [Expletive] Islam. [Expletive] ISIS.
Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you.” Rhodes ultimately
pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of “menacing,” and he was
sentenced to probation.
Feb. 19, 2017: After 35-year-old Gerald Wallace called a
mosque in Miami Gardens, Florida, and threatened to “shoot all y’all,”
he told the FBI and police that he made the call because he “got angry”
from a local TV news report about a terrorist act. At a rally in Florida
the day before, Trump falsely claimed that Muslim refugees had just launched a terrorist attack in Sweden.
Wallace’s attorney, Katie Carmon, later tried to convince a federal
judge that the threat to kill worshippers could be “protected speech”
due to the “very distinctly political climate” at the time. “There are
courts considering President Trump’s travel ban … and the president
himself has made some very pointed statements about what he thinks about
people of this descent,” Carmon argued in court.
Wallace, who is African American, ultimately pleaded guilty to
obstructing the free exercise of his victims’ religious beliefs, and he
was sentenced to one year in prison.
Feb. 23, 2017: Kevin Seymour and his partner Kevin
price were riding their bicycles in Key West, Florida, when a man on a
moped, 30-year-old Brandon Davis of North Carolina, hurled anti-gay
slurs at them and “intentionally” ran into Seymour’s bike, shouting,
“You live in Trump country now,” according to police reports and Davis’
attorney. Davis ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of battery
evidencing prejudice, but in court, he expressed remorse and was sentenced to four years of probation.
May 3, 2017: In South Padre Island, Texas, 35-year-old Alexander Jennes Downing of Waterford, Connecticut, was captured on cellphone video
taunting and aggressively approaching a Muslim family, repeatedly
shouting, “Donald Trump will stop you!” and other Trump-related remarks.
Police arrested downing, of Waterford, Connecticut, for public
intoxication. It’s unclear what came of the charge.
Oct. 22, 2017: A 44-year-old California man threatened
to kill Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., for her frequent criticism of
Trump and her promise to “take out” the president. Anthony Scott Lloyd
left a voicemail at the congresswoman’s Washington office, declaring:
“If you continue to make threats towards the president, you’re going to
wind up dead, Maxine. Cause we’ll kill you.” After pleading guilty
to one count of threatening a U.S. official, Lloyd asked the judge for
leniency, saying he suffered from addiction-inducing mental illness and
became “far too immersed in listening to polarizing political
commentators and engaging in heated political debates online.” His
lawyer put it this way to the judge: “Mr. Lloyd was a voracious consumer
of political news online, on television and on radio … [that are]
commonly viewed as ‘right wing,’ unconditionally supportive of President
Trump, and fiercely critical of anyone who opposed President Trump’s
policies.” The judge sentenced Lloyd to six months of house arrest and
three years of probation.
August 2018: After the Boston Globe called on news
outlets around the country to resist what it called “Trump’s assault on
journalism,” the Boston Globe received more than a dozen threatening
phone calls. “You are the enemy of the people,” the alleged caller,
68-year-old Robert Chain of Encino, California, told a Boston Globe
employee on Aug. 22. “As long as you keep attacking the President, the
duly elected President of the United States … I will continue to
threat[en], harass, and annoy the Boston Globe.” A week later,
authorities arrested Chain
on threat-related charges. After a hearing in his case, he told
reporters, “America was saved when Donald J. Trump was elected
president.” Chain has pleaded guilty to seven threat-related charges,
and he is awaiting sentencing.
Oct. 4, 2018: The Polk County Sheriff’s Office in Florida arrested
53-year-old James Patrick of Winter Haven, Florida, for allegedly
threatening “to kill Democratic office holders, members of their
families and members of both local and federal law enforcement
agencies,” according to a police report. In messages posted online,
Patrick detailed a “plan” for his attacks, which he said he would launch
if then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh was not confirmed as a Supreme Court
justice, the police report said. Seeking Patrick’s release from jail
after his arrest, Patrick’s attorney, Terri Stewart, told a judge that
her client’s “rantings” were akin to comments from “a certain
high-ranking official” — Trump. The president had “threatened the North
Korean people — to blow them all up. It was on Twitter,” Stewart said,
according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Patrick has been charged with
making a written threat to kill or injure, and he has pleaded not
guilty. His trial is pending.
Late October 2018: Over the course of a week, Florida
man Cesar Sayoc allegedly mailed at least 15 potential bombs to
prominent critics of Trump and members of the media. Sayoc had been
living in a van plastered with pro-Trump stickers, and he had posted
several pro-Trump messages on social media. Federal prosecutors have
accused him of “domestic terrorism,” and Sayoc has since pleaded guilty
to 65 counts, including use of a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced
to 20 years in prison. “We believe the president’s rhetoric contributed
to Mr. Sayoc’s behavior,” Sayoc’s attorney told the judge at
sentencing.
Dec. 4, 2018: Michael Brogan, 51, of Brooklyn, New
York, left a voicemail at an unidentified U.S. Senator’s office in
Washington insisting, “I’m going to put a bullet in ya. … You and your
constant lambasting of President Trump. Oh, reproductive rights,
reproductive rights.” He later told an FBI agent that before leaving the
voicemail he became “very angry” by “an internet video of the Senator,
including the Senator’s criticism of the President of the United States
as well as the Senator’s views on reproductive rights.” “The threats
were made to discourage the Senator from criticizing the President,” the
Justice Department said in a later press release. Brogan has since pleaded guilty to one count of threatening a U.S. official, and he is awaiting sentencing.
Jan. 17, 2019: Stephen Taubert of Syracuse, New York,
was arrested by the U.S. Capitol Police for threatening to kill Rep.
Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and for threatening to “hang” former President
Barack Obama. Taubert used “overtly bigoted, hateful language” in his
threats, according to federal prosecutors. On July 20, 2018, Taubert
called the congresswoman’s Los Angeles office to say he would find her
at public events and kill her and her entire staff. In a letter to the
judge just days before Taubert’s trial began, his defense attorney,
Courtenay McKeon, noted: “During that time period, Congresswoman Waters
was embroiled in a public feud with the Trump administration. … On June
25, 2018, in response to Congresswoman Waters’ public statements,
President Trump tweeted: ‘Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an
extraordinarily low IQ person, has … just called for harm to supporters …
of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for
Max!'” As McKeon insisted to the judge: “This context is relevant to the
case.” A federal jury ultimately convicted
Taubert on three federal charges, including retaliating against a
federal official and making a threat over state lines. He was sentenced
to nearly four years in prison.
Jan. 22, 2019: David Boileau of Holiday, Florida, was arrested
by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office for allegedly burglarizing an
Iraqi family’s home and “going through” their mailbox, according to a
police report. After officers arrived at the home, Boileau “made several
statements of his dislike for people of Middle Eastern descent,” the
report said. “He also stated if he doesn’t get rid of them, Trump will
handle it.” The police report noted that a day before, Boileau threw
screws at a vehicle outside the family’s house. On that day, Boileau
allegedly told police, “We’ll get rid of them one way or another.”
Boileau, 58, has since pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of
trespassing, and he was sentenced to 90 days in jail.
Feb. 15, 2019: The FBI in Maryland arrested
a Marine veteran and U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant, Christopher Paul
Hasson, who they said was stockpiling weapons and “espoused” racist and
anti-immigrant views for years as he sought to “murder innocent
civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.” In court documents,
prosecutors said the 49-year-old “domestic terrorist” compiled a “hit
list” of prominent Democrats. Two months later, while seeking Hasson’s
release from jail before trial, his public defender, Elizabeth Oyer,
told a federal judge: “This looks like the sort of list that our
commander-in-chief might have compiled while watching Fox News in the
morning. … Is it legitimately frustrating that offensive language and
ideology has now become part of our national vocabulary? Yes, it is very
frustrating. But … it is hard to differentiate it from the random
musings of someone like Donald Trump who uses similar epithets in his
everyday language and tweets.” Hasson faces weapons-related charges and
was being detained as he awaits trial. He has pleaded not guilty.
March 16, 2019: Anthony Comello, 24, of Staten Island,
New York, was taken into custody for allegedly killing Francesco “Franky
Boy” Cali, the reputed head of the infamous Gambino crime family. It
marked the first mob boss murder in New York in 30 years, law
enforcement officials told ABC News the murder may have stemmed from
Comello’s romantic relationship with a Cali family member. Court
documents since filed in state court by Comello’s defense attorney,
Robert Gottlieb, said Comello suffers from mental defect and was a
believer in the “conspiratorial fringe right-wing political group”
QAnon. In addition, Gottlieb wrote:
“Beginning with the election of President Trump in November 2016,
Anthony Comello’s family began to notice changes to his personality. …
Mr. Comello became certain that he was enjoying the protection of
President Trump himself, and that he had the president’s full support.
Mr. Comello grew to believe that several well-known politicians and
celebrities were actually members of the Deep State, and were actively
trying to bring about the destruction of America.” Comello has been
charged with one count of murder and two counts of criminal possession
of a weapon. His trial is pending, and he has pleaded not guilty.
April 5, 2019: The FBI arrested a 55-year-old man
from upstate New York for allegedly threatening to kill Rep. Ilhan
Omar, D-Minn., one of the first two Muslim women elected to the U.S.
Congress. She is an outspoken critic of Trump, and Trump has frequently
launched public attacks against her and three other female lawmakers of
color. Two weeks before his arrest, Patrick Carlineo Jr. allegedly
called Omar’s office in Washington labeling the congresswoman a
“terrorist” and declaring: “I’ll put a bullet in her f—-ing skull.”
When an FBI agent then traced the call to Carlineo and interviewed him,
Carlineo “stated that he was a patriot, that he loves the President, and
that he hates radical Muslims in our government,” according to the FBI
agent’s summary of the interview. Federal prosecutors charged Carlineo
with threatening to assault and murder a United States official.
Carlineo is awaiting trial, although his defense attorney and federal
prosecutors are working on what his attorney called another “possible
resolution” of the case.
April 18, 2019: The FBI arrested John Joseph Kless of
Tamarac, Florida, for calling the Washington offices of three prominent
Democrats and threatening to kill each of them. At his home, authorities
found a loaded handgun in a backpack, an AR-15 rifle and hundreds of
rounds of ammunition. In later pleading guilty
to one charge of transmitting threats over state lines, Kless admitted
that in a threatening voicemail targeting Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.,
he stated: “You won’t f—ing tell Americans what to say, and you
definitely don’t tell our president, Donald Trump, what to say.” Tlaib, a
vocal critic of Trump, was scheduled to speak in Florida four days
later. Kless was awaiting sentencing. In a letter to the federal judge,
he said he “made a very big mistake,” never meant to hurt anyone, and
“was way out of line with my language and attitude.”
April 24, 2019: The FBI arrested 30-year-old
Matthew Haviland of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, for allegedly
sending a series of violent and threatening emails to a college
professor in Massachusetts who publicly expressed support for abortion
rights and strongly criticized Trump. In one of 28 emails sent to the
professor on March 10, 2019, Haviland allegedly called the professor
“pure evil” and said “all Democrats must be eradicated,” insisting the
country now has “a president who’s taking our country in a place of more
freedom rather than less.” In another email the same day, Haviland
allegedly wrote the professor: “I will rip every limb from your body and
… I will kill every member of your family.” According to court
documents, Haviland’s longtime friend later told the FBI that “within
the last year, Haviland’s views regarding abortion and politics have
become more extreme … at least in part because of the way the news media
portrays President Trump.” Haviland has been charged with cyberstalking
and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. His trial is pending.
June 5, 2019: The FBI arrested a Utah man for allegedly
calling the U.S. Capitol more than 2,000 times over several months and
threatening to kill Democratic lawmakers, whom he said were “trying to
destroy Trump’s presidency.” “I am going to take up my second amendment
right, and shoot you liberals in the head,” 54-year-old Scott Brian
Haven allegedly stated in one of the calls on Oct. 18, 2018, according
to charging documents. When an FBI agent later interviewed Haven, he
“explained the phone calls were made during periods of frustration with
the way Democrats were treating President Trump,” the charging documents
said. The FBI visit, however, didn’t stop Haven from making more
threats, including: On March 21, 2019, he called an unidentified U.S.
senator’s office to say that if Democrats refer to Trump as Hitler again
he will shoot them, and two days later he called an unidentified
congressman’s office to say he “was going to take [the congressman] out …
because he is trying to remove a duly elected President.” A federal
grand jury has since charged Haven with one count of transmitting a
threat over state lines. Haven pleaded not guilty and was awaiting trial.
Aug. 3, 2019: A gunman opened fire
at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 people and injuring 24
others. The FBI labeled the massacre an act of “domestic terrorism,” and
police determined that the alleged shooter, 21-year-old Patrick
Crusius, posted a lengthy anti-immigrant diatribe online before the
attack. “We attribute that manifesto directly to him,” according to El
Paso police chief Greg Allen. Describing the coming assault as “a
response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the screed’s writer said
“the media” would “blame Trump’s rhetoric” for the attack but insisted
his anti-immigrant views “predate Trump” — an apparent acknowledgement
that at least some of his views align with some of Trump’s public
statements. The writer began his online essay by stating that he
generally “support[s]” the previous writings of the man who killed 51
Muslim worshippers in New Zealand earlier this year. In that case, the
shooter in New Zealand said he absolutely did not support Trump as “a
policy maker and leader” — but “[a]s a symbol of renewed white identity
and common purpose? Sure.” Crusius has been charged with capital murder
by the state of Texas.
A Twitter
employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive,
algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican
politicians.
With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained.
When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for
instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic
language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of
banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.
CEO OF TWITTER, JACK DORSEY, WHO PROMOTES WHITE SUPREMACISTS, RACIST BIGOTS, AND OF COURSE, TRAITOR TRUMP AND HIS HATE HE SPEWS ON TWITTER. JACK DORSEY IS RESPONSIBLE AND SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR ALL THE ACTS OF MASSACRES, AND MURDERS COMMITTED BY TRUMPANZEES BECAUSE THIS FUCKING SCUMBAG JACK DORSEY SUPPORTS AND DEFENDS THEM ON TWITTER JUST SO JACK AND HIS BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND STOCKHOLDERS CAN KEEP RAKING IN THE BILLIONS THEY GET FROM PROMOTING AND IS IN FACT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTS OF VIOLENCE CONTAINED IN THIS BLOG POSTING BELOW.
MATTER OF FACT? CEO JACK DORSEY SHOULD REAP ALL HE HAS SOWN AND HAVE DONE UNTO HIM AS HE HAS PROMOTED TO BE DONE UNTO OTHERS.
In
separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter
hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content
because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some
instances, be Republican politicians.
The employee argued that,
on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get
swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material.
Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for
flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.
Congresswoman received death threats following video Trump posted – but he didn’t technically violate the rules
The rules just aren’t the same for Donald Trump as they are for the rest of us. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apparently admitted as much this week on a phone call with Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar.
As reported by the Washington Post,
Dorsey, often criticized for his inaction when it comes removing
hateful and threatening content from the platform, was asked by Omar why
he hadn’t taken down a video posted by Trump earlier in the month. The
video, which spliced together misleading and out of context comments
from Omar about the issue of Islamophobia with footage of the 9/11
attacks, was clearly targeted harassment to anyone who saw it.
Indeed Omar said she saw a sharp uptick in death threats after it was posted.
But since it came from Trump, and not an average Twitter user, there
was nothing Dorsey could do, he said. The tweet didn’t technically
violate the rules in any case, he added.
Dorsey has said in the past that the public interest
value of Trump’s tweets outweigh the harm of his occasional calls for
violence or threats against foreign governments or members of the media
“Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” the company explained in statement last year. “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
More recently Dorsey declined to say whether a hypothetical direct call from Trump to murder a journalist would be grounds for his banishment.
Though Twitter has rules against “abuse and hateful conduct,” civil
rights experts, government organizations, and Twitter users say the
platform hasn’t done enough to curb white supremacy and neo-Nazis on the platform, and its competitor Facebook recently explicitly banned white nationalism. Wednesday, during a parliamentary committee hearing on social media content moderation, UK MP Yvette Cooper asked Twitter why it hasn’t yet banned former KKK leader David Duke, and “Jack, ban the Nazis” has become a common reply to many of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweets. During a recent interview with TED
that allowed the public to tweet in questions, the feed was overtaken
by people asking Dorsey why the platform hadn’t banned Nazis. Dorsey
said “we have policies around violent extremist groups,” but did not
give a straightforward answer to the question. Dorsey did not respond to
two requests for comment sent via Twitter DM.
“Most people can agree a beheading video or some kind of ISIS content
should be proactively removed, but when we try to talk about the
alt-right or white nationalism, we get into dangerous territory, where
we’re talking about [Iowa Rep.] Steve King or maybe even some of Trump’s
tweets, so it becomes hard for social media companies to say all of
this ‘this content should be removed,’” Amarasingam said.
In March, King promoted an open white nationalist on Twitter for the third time. King quote tweeted Faith Goldy, a Canadian white nationalist. Earlier this month, Facebook banned Goldy
under the site’s new policy banning white nationalism; Goldy has
122,000 followers on Twitter and has not been banned at the time of
writing. Last year, Twitter banned Republican politician
and white nationalist Paul Nehlen for a racist tweet he sent about
actress and princess Meghan Markle, but prior to the ban, Nehlen gained a
wide following on the platform while tweeting openly white nationalist
content about, for example, the “Jewish media.”
JM Berger, author of Extremism and a number of reports on ISIS and far-right extremists on Twitter, told Motherboard that in his own research, he has found that “a very large number of white nationalists identify themselves as avid Trump supporters.”
“Cracking
down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of
people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters,
and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly
seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said.
“There’s going to be controversy here that we didn’t see with ISIS,
because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS
supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political
power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”
Twitter hasn’t done a particularly good job of removing white
supremacist content and has shown a reluctance to take any action of any
kind against “world leaders”
even when their tweets violate Twitter’s rules. But Berger agrees with
Twitter in that the problem the company is facing with white supremacy
is fundamentally different than the one it faced with ISIS on a
practical level.
“With
ISIS, the group’s obsessive branding, tight social networks and small
numbers made it easier to avoid collateral damage when the companies
cracked down (although there was some),” he said. “White nationalists,
in contrast, have inconsistent branding, diffuse social networks and a
large body of sympathetic people in the population, so the risk of
collateral damage might be perceived as being higher, but it really
depends on where the company draws its lines around content.”
But
just because eradicating white supremacy on Twitter is a hard problem
doesn’t mean the company should get a pass. After Facebook explicitly
banned white supremacy and white nationalism, Motherboard asked YouTube
and Twitter whether they would make similar changes. Neither company would commit to making that explicit change, and referred us to their existing rules.
“Twitter
has a responsibility to stomp out all voices of hate on its platform,”
Brandi Collins-Dexter, senior campaign director at activist group Color
Of Change told Motherboard in a statement. “Instead, the company is
giving a free ride to conservative politicians whose dangerous rhetoric
enables the growth of the white supremacist movement into the mainstream
and the rise of hate, online and off.”
NOW LETS SEE THE RESULTS OF TWITTERS CEO JACK DORSEY AND THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND THE EMPLOYEES REFUSAL TO STAND UP TO TRUMP AND THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS HAS CAUSED SHALL WE?
‘No Blame?’ ABC News finds 36 cases invoking ‘Trump’ in connection with violence, threats, alleged assaults.
A nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 36 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.
In nine cases, perpetrators hailed Trump in the midst or immediate
aftermath of physically attacking innocent victims. In another 10 cases,
perpetrators cheered or defended Trump while taunting or threatening
others. And in another 10 cases, Trump and his rhetoric were cited in
court to explain a defendant’s violent or threatening behavior.
ABC News could not find a single criminal case filed in federal or state
court where an act of violence or threat was made in the name of
President Barack Obama or President George W. Bush.
The 36 cases identified by ABC News are remarkable in that a link to the
president is captured in court documents and police statements, under
the penalty of perjury or contempt.
In many cases of assault or threat, charges are never filed,
perpetrators are never identified or the incident is never even reported
to authorities. And most criminal acts committed by Trump supporters or
his detractors have nothing to do with the president. But in 36 cases,
court records and police reports indicated some sort of link.
The perpetrators and suspects identified in the 36 cases are mostly
white men — as young as teenagers and as old as 75 — while the victims
largely represent an array of minority groups — African-Americans,
Latinos, Muslims and gay men.
Federal law enforcement authorities have privately told ABC News they
worry that — even with Trump’s public denunciations of violence — Trump’s style
could inspire violence-prone individuals to take action against
minorities or others they perceive to be against the president’s agenda.
Aug. 19, 2015:In Boston, after he and his brother beat a sleeping homeless man of Mexican descent with a metal pole, Steven Leader, 30, told police “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.” The victim, however, was not in the United States illegally. The brothers, who are white, ultimately pleaded guilty to several assault-related charges and were each sentenced to at least two years in prison.
Dec. 5, 2015: After Penn State University student Nicholas Tavella, 19, was charged with “ethnic intimidation” and other crimes for threatening to “put a bullet” in a young Indian man on campus, his attorney argued in court that Tavella was just motivated by “a love of country,” not “hate.” “Donald Trump is running for President of the United States saying that, ‘We’ve got to check people out more closely,'” Tavella’s attorney argued in his defense. Tavella, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to ethnic intimidation and was sentenced to up to two years in prison.
April 28, 2016:When FBI agents arrested 61-year-old John Martin Roos in White City, Oregon, for threatening federal officials, including then-President Barack Obama, they found several pipe bombs and guns in his home. In the three months before his arrest, Roos posted at least 34 messages to Twitter about Trump, repeatedly threatening African Americans, Muslims, Mexican immigrants and the “liberal media,” and in court documents, prosecutors noted that the avowed Trump supporter posted this threatening message to Facebook a month earlier: “The establishment is trying to steal the election from Trump. … Obama is already on a kill list … Your [name] can be there too.” Roos, who is white, has since pleaded guilty to possessing an unregistered explosive device and posting internet threats against federal officials. He was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Funny thing is? Hitler and the Nazis would have sent each and every one of these generational inbred pig fuckers to his concentration camps to take a gas shower. These fucking mental midget morons sure do not fit the description of Hitler’s Aryian Race let me tell ya. These troglodytes ought to remember their history, about how we put these rabid, foaming at the mouth dogs down in the Civil War, WWI and WWII and I guess? They just want to repeat history and get their asses stomped again like the cockroaches they are. Only this time? We of AntiFa? Will wipe these motherfuckers off the face of the earth when it comes time for these traitorous shitstains on the underwear of humanity of the US finally drop their micro nuts and pop off. We of AntiFa will not start it, but we damn sure will finish it.
June 3, 2016:After 54-year-old Henry Slapnik attacked his African-American neighbors with a knife in Cleveland, he told police “Donald Trump will fix them because they are scared of Donald Trump,” according to police reports. Slapnik, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to “ethnic intimidation” and other charges. It’s unclear what sentence he received.
Aug. 16, 2016:In Olympia, Washington, 32-year-old Daniel Rowe attacked a white woman and a black man with a knife after seeing them kiss on a popular street. When police arrived on the scene, Rowe professed to being “a white supremacist” and said “he planned on heading down to the next Donald Trump rally and stomping out more of the Black Lives Matter group,” according to court documents filed in the case. Rowe, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to charges of assault and malicious harassment, and he was sentenced to more than four years in prison.
Sept. 1, 2016:The then-chief of the Bordentown, New Jersey, police department, Frank Nucera, allegedly assaulted an African American teenager who was handcuffed. Federal prosecutors said the attack was part of Nucera’s “intense racial animus,” noting in federal court that “within hours” of the assault, Nucera was secretly recorded saying “Donald Trump is the last hope for white people.” The 60-year-old Nucera has been indicted by a federal grand jury on three charges, including committing a federal hate crime. Nucera, who is white, has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. He retired two years ago.
September 2016: After 40-year-old Mark Feigin of Los Angeles was arrested for posting anti-Muslim and allegedly threatening statements to a mosque’s Facebook page, his attorney argued in court that the comments were protected by the First Amendment because Feigin was “using similar language and expressing similar views” to “campaign statements from then-candidate Donald Trump.” Noting that his client “supported Donald Trump,” attorney Caleb Mason added that “Mr. Feigin’s comments were directed toward a pressing issue of public concern that was a central theme of the Trump campaign and the 2016 election generally: the Islamic roots of many international and U.S. terrorist acts.” Feigin, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of sending harassing communications electronically. He was sentenced to probation.
Oct. 13, 2016:After the FBI arrested three white Kansas men for plotting to bomb an apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas, where many Somali immigrants lived, one of the men’s attorneys insisted to a federal judge that the plot was “self-defensive” because the three men believed “that if Donald Trump won the election, President Obama would not recognize the validity of those results, that he would declare martial law, and that at that point militias all over the country would have to step in.” Then, after a federal grand jury convicted 47-year-old Patrick Stein and the two other men of conspiracy-related charges, Stein’s attorney argued for a lighter sentence based on “the backdrop” of Stein’s actions: Trump had become “the voice of a lost and ignored white, working-class set of voters” like Stein, and the “climate” at the time could propel someone like Stein to “go to 11,” attorney Jim Pratt said in court. Stein and his two accomplices were each sentenced to at least 25 years in prison.
Nov. 3, 2016:In Tampa, Florida, David Howard threatened to burn down the house next to his “simply because” it was being purchased by a Muslim family, according to the Justice Department. He later said under oath that while he harbored a years-long dislike for Muslims, the circumstances around the home sale were “the match that lit the wick.” He cited Trump’s warnings about immigrants from majority-Muslim countries. “[With] the fact that the president wants these six countries vetted, everybody vetted before they come over, there’s a concern about Muslims,” Howard said. Howard, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights violation, and the 59-year-old was sentenced to eight months in prison.
Nov. 10, 2016:A 23-year-old man from High Springs, Florida, allegedly assaulted an unsuspecting Hispanic man who was cleaning a parking lot outside of a local food store. “[H]e was suddenly struck in the back of the head,” a police report said of the victim. “[The victim] asked the suspect why he hit him, to which the suspect replied, ‘This is for Donald Trump.’ The suspect then grabbed [the victim] by the jacket and proceeded to strike him several more times,” according to the report. Surveillance video of the incident “completely corroborated [the victim’s] account of events,” police said. The suspect was arrested on battery charges, but the case was dropped after the victim decided not to pursue the matter, police said. Efforts by ABC News to reach the victim for further explanation were not successful.
Nov. 12, 2016:In Grand Rapids, Michigan, while attacking a cab driver from East Africa, 23-year-old Jacob Holtzlander shouted racial epithets and repeatedly yelled the word, “Trump,” according to law enforcement records. Holtzlander, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of ethnic intimidation, and he was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Jan. 25, 2017:At JFK International Airport in New York, a female Delta employee, wearing a hijab in accordance with her Muslim faith, was “physically and verbally” attacked by 57-year-old Robin Rhodes of Worcester, Mass., “for no apparent reason,” prosecutors said at the time. When the victim asked Brown what she did to him, he replied: “You did nothing, but … [Expletive] Islam. [Expletive] ISIS. Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you.” Rhodes ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of “menacing,” and he was sentenced to probation.
Feb. 19, 2017:After 35-year-old Gerald Wallace called a mosque in Miami Gardens, Florida, and threatened to “shoot all y’all,” he told the FBI and police that he made the call because he “got angry” from a local TV news report about a terrorist act. At a rally in Florida the day before, Trump falsely claimed that Muslim refugees had just launched a terrorist attack in Sweden.
Wallace’s attorney, Katie Carmon, later tried to convince a federal judge that the threat to kill worshippers could be “protected speech” due to the “very distinctly political climate” at the time. “There are courts considering President Trump’s travel ban … and the president himself has made some very pointed statements about what he thinks about people of this descent,” Carmon argued in court.
Wallace, who is African American, ultimately pleaded guilty to obstructing the free exercise of his victims’ religious beliefs, and he was sentenced to one year in prison.
Feb. 23, 2017: Kevin Seymour and his partner Kevin price were riding their bicycles in Key West, Florida, when a man on a moped, 30-year-old Brandon Davis of North Carolina, hurled anti-gay slurs at them and “intentionally” ran into Seymour’s bike, shouting, “You live in Trump country now,” according to police reports and Davis’ attorney. Davis ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of battery evidencing prejudice, but in court, he expressed remorse and was sentenced to four years of probation.
May 3, 2017:In South Padre Island, Texas, 35-year-old Alexander Jennes Downing of Waterford, Connecticut, was captured on cellphone video taunting and aggressively approaching a Muslim family, repeatedly shouting, “Donald Trump will stop you!” and other Trump-related remarks. Police arrested Downing, of Waterford, Connecticut, for public intoxication. It’s unclear what came of the charge.
May 11, 2017:Authorities arrested Steven Martan of Tucson, Arizona, after he left three threatening messages at the office Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz. In one message, he told McSally he was going to “blow your brains out,” and in another he told her that her “days are numbered.” He later told FBI agents “that he was venting frustrations with Congresswoman McSally’s congressional votes in support of the President of the United States,” according to charging documents. Martan’s attorney, Walter Goncalves Jr., later told a judge that Martan had “an alcohol problem” and left the messages “after becoming intoxicated” and “greatly upset” by news that McSally “agreed with decisions by President Donald Trump.” Martan, 58, has since pleaded guilty to three counts of retaliating against a federal official and was sentenced to more than one year in prison.
Oct. 22, 2017: A 44-year-old California man threatened to kill Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., for her frequent criticism of Trump and her promise to “take out” the president. Anthony Scott Lloyd left a voicemail at the congresswoman’s Washington office, declaring: “If you continue to make threats towards the president, you’re going to wind up dead, Maxine. Cause we’ll kill you.” After pleading guilty to one count of threatening a U.S. official, Lloyd asked the judge for leniency, saying he suffered from addiction-inducing mental illness and became “far too immersed in listening to polarizing political commentators and engaging in heated political debates online.” His lawyer put it this way to the judge: “Mr. Lloyd was a voracious consumer of political news online, on television and on radio … [that are] commonly viewed as ‘right wing,’ unconditionally supportive of President Trump, and fiercely critical of anyone who opposed President Trump’s policies.” The judge sentenced Lloyd to six months of house arrest and three years of probation.
August 2018:After the Boston Globe called on news outlets around the country to resist what it called “Trump’s assault on journalism,” the Boston Globe received more than a dozen threatening phone calls. “You are the enemy of the people,” the alleged caller, 68-year-old Robert Chain of Encino, California, told a Boston Globe employee on Aug. 22. “As long as you keep attacking the President, the duly elected President of the United States … I will continue to threat[en], harass, and annoy the Boston Globe.” A week later, authorities arrested Chain on threat-related charges. After a hearing in his case, he told reporters, “America was saved when Donald J. Trump was elected president.” Chain has pleaded guilty to seven threat-related charges, and he is awaiting sentencing.
Oct. 4, 2018:The Polk County Sheriff’s Office in Florida arrested 53-year-old James Patrick of Winter Haven, Florida, for allegedly threatening “to kill Democratic office holders, members of their families and members of both local and federal law enforcement agencies,” according to a police report. In messages posted online, Patrick detailed a “plan” for his attacks, which he said he would launch if then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh was not confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, the police report said. Seeking Patrick’s release from jail after his arrest, Patrick’s attorney, Terri Stewart, told a judge that her client’s “rantings” were akin to comments from “a certain high-ranking official” — Trump. The president had “threatened the North Korean people — to blow them all up. It was on Twitter,” Stewart said, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Patrick has been charged with making a written threat to kill or injure, and he has pleaded not guilty. His trial is pending.
Late October 2018:Over the course of a week, Florida man Cesar Sayoc allegedly mailed at least 15 potential bombs to prominent critics of Trump and members of the media. Sayoc had been living in a van plastered with pro-Trump stickers, and he had posted several pro-Trump messages on social media. Federal prosecutors have accused him of “domestic terrorism,” and Sayoc has since pleaded guilty to 65 counts, including use of a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. “We believe the president’s rhetoric contributed to Mr. Sayoc’s behavior,” Sayoc’s attorney told the judge at sentencing.
Dec. 4, 2018:Michael Brogan, 51, of Brooklyn, New York, left a voicemail at an unidentified U.S. Senator’s office in Washington insisting, “I’m going to put a bullet in ya. … You and your constant lambasting of President Trump. Oh, reproductive rights, reproductive rights.” He later told an FBI agent that before leaving the voicemail he became “very angry” by “an internet video of the Senator, including the Senator’s criticism of the President of the United States as well as the Senator’s views on reproductive rights.” “The threats were made to discourage the Senator from criticizing the President,” the Justice Department said in a later press release. Brogan has since pleaded guilty to one count of threatening a U.S. official, and he is awaiting sentencing.
Jan. 17, 2019:Stephen Taubert of Syracuse, New York, was arrested by the U.S. Capitol Police for threatening to kill Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and for threatening to “hang” former President Barack Obama. Taubert used “overtly bigoted, hateful language” in his threats, according to federal prosecutors. On July 20, 2018, Taubert called the congresswoman’s Los Angeles office to say he would find her at public events and kill her and her entire staff. In a letter to the judge just days before Taubert’s trial began, his defense attorney, Courtenay McKeon, noted: “During that time period, Congresswoman Waters was embroiled in a public feud with the Trump administration. … On June 25, 2018, in response to Congresswoman Waters’ public statements, President Trump tweeted: ‘Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has … just called for harm to supporters … of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!'” As McKeon insisted to the judge: “This context is relevant to the case.” A federal jury ultimately convicted Taubert on three federal charges, including retaliating against a federal official and making a threat over state lines. He was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.
Jan. 22, 2019:David Boileau of Holiday, Florida, was arrested by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office for allegedly burglarizing an Iraqi family’s home and “going through” their mailbox, according to a police report. After officers arrived at the home, Boileau “made several statements of his dislike for people of Middle Eastern descent,” the report said. “He also stated if he doesn’t get rid of them, Trump will handle it.” The police report noted that a day before, Boileau threw screws at a vehicle outside the family’s house. On that day, Boileau allegedly told police, “We’ll get rid of them one way or another.” Boileau, 58, has since pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of trespassing, and he was sentenced to 90 days in jail.
Feb. 15, 2019:The FBI in Maryland arrested a Marine veteran and U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant, Christopher Paul Hasson, who they said was stockpiling weapons and “espoused” racist and anti-immigrant views for years as he sought to “murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.” In court documents, prosecutors said the 49-year-old “domestic terrorist” compiled a “hit list” of prominent Democrats. Two months later, while seeking Hasson’s release from jail before trial, his public defender, Elizabeth Oyer, told a federal judge: “This looks like the sort of list that our commander-in-chief might have compiled while watching Fox News in the morning. … Is it legitimately frustrating that offensive language and ideology has now become part of our national vocabulary? Yes, it is very frustrating. But … it is hard to differentiate it from the random musings of someone like Donald Trump who uses similar epithets in his everyday language and tweets.” Hasson faces weapons-related charges and was being detained as he awaits trial. He has pleaded not guilty.
March 16, 2019:Anthony Comello, 24, of Staten Island, New York, was taken into custody for allegedly killing Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali, the reputed head of the infamous Gambino crime family. It marked the first mob boss murder in New York in 30 years, law enforcement officials told ABC News the murder may have stemmed from Comello’s romantic relationship with a Cali family member. Court documents since filed in state court by Comello’s defense attorney, Robert Gottlieb, said Comello suffers from mental defect and was a believer in the “conspiratorial fringe right-wing political group” QAnon. In addition, Gottlieb wrote: “Beginning with the election of President Trump in November 2016, Anthony Comello’s family began to notice changes to his personality. … Mr. Comello became certain that he was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself, and that he had the president’s full support. Mr. Comello grew to believe that several well-known politicians and celebrities were actually members of the Deep State, and were actively trying to bring about the destruction of America.” Comello has been charged with one count of murder and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon. His trial is pending, and he has pleaded not guilty.
April 5, 2019:The FBI arrested a 55-year-old man from upstate New York for allegedly threatening to kill Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., one of the first two Muslim women elected to the U.S. Congress. She is an outspoken critic of Trump, and Trump has frequently launched public attacks against her and three other female lawmakers of color. Two weeks before his arrest, Patrick Carlineo Jr. allegedly called Omar’s office in Washington labeling the congresswoman a “terrorist” and declaring: “I’ll put a bullet in her f—-ing skull.” When an FBI agent then traced the call to Carlineo and interviewed him, Carlineo “stated that he was a patriot, that he loves the President, and that he hates radical Muslims in our government,” according to the FBI agent’s summary of the interview. Federal prosecutors charged Carlineo with threatening to assault and murder a United States official. Carlineo is awaiting trial, although his defense attorney and federal prosecutors are working on what his attorney called another “possible resolution” of the case.
April 18, 2019:The FBI arrested John Joseph Kless of Tamarac, Florida, for calling the Washington offices of three prominent Democrats and threatening to kill each of them. At his home, authorities found a loaded handgun in a backpack, an AR-15 rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. In later pleading guilty to one charge of transmitting threats over state lines, Kless admitted that in a threatening voicemail targeting Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., he stated: “You won’t f—ing tell Americans what to say, and you definitely don’t tell our president, Donald Trump, what to say.” Tlaib, a vocal critic of Trump, was scheduled to speak in Florida four days later. Kless was awaiting sentencing. In a letter to the federal judge, he said he “made a very big mistake,” never meant to hurt anyone, and “was way out of line with my language and attitude.”
April 24, 2019:The FBI arrested 30-year-old Matthew Haviland of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, for allegedly sending a series of violent and threatening emails to a college professor in Massachusetts who publicly expressed support for abortion rights and strongly criticized Trump. In one of 28 emails sent to the professor on March 10, 2019, Haviland allegedly called the professor “pure evil” and said “all Democrats must be eradicated,” insisting the country now has “a president who’s taking our country in a place of more freedom rather than less.” In another email the same day, Haviland allegedly wrote the professor: “I will rip every limb from your body and … I will kill every member of your family.” According to court documents, Haviland’s longtime friend later told the FBI that “within the last year, Haviland’s views regarding abortion and politics have become more extreme … at least in part because of the way the news media portrays President Trump.” Haviland has been charged with cyberstalking and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. His trial is pending.
June 5, 2019:The FBI arrested a Utah man for allegedly calling the U.S. Capitol more than 2,000 times over several months and threatening to kill Democratic lawmakers, whom he said were “trying to destroy Trump’s presidency.” “I am going to take up my second amendment right, and shoot you liberals in the head,” 54-year-old Scott Brian Haven allegedly stated in one of the calls on Oct. 18, 2018, according to charging documents. When an FBI agent later interviewed Haven, he “explained the phone calls were made during periods of frustration with the way Democrats were treating President Trump,” the charging documents said. The FBI visit, however, didn’t stop Haven from making more threats, including: On March 21, 2019, he called an unidentified U.S. senator’s office to say that if Democrats refer to Trump as Hitler again he will shoot them, and two days later he called an unidentified congressman’s office to say he “was going to take [the congressman] out … because he is trying to remove a duly elected President.” A federal grand jury has since charged Haven with one count of transmitting a threat over state lines. Haven pleaded not guilty and was awaiting trial.
Aug. 3, 2019:A gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 people and injuring 24 others. The FBI labeled the massacre an act of “domestic terrorism,” and police determined that the alleged shooter, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, posted a lengthy anti-immigrant diatribe online before the attack. “We attribute that manifesto directly to him,” according to El Paso police chief Greg Allen. Describing the coming assault as “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the screed’s writer said “the media” would “blame Trump’s rhetoric” for the attack but insisted his anti-immigrant views “predate Trump” — an apparent acknowledgement that at least some of his views align with some of Trump’s public statements. The writer began his online essay by stating that he generally “support[s]” the previous writings of the man who killed 51 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand earlier this year. In that case, the shooter in New Zealand said he absolutely did not support Trump as “a policy maker and leader” — but “[a]s a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure.” Crusius has been charged with capital murder by the state of Texas.
Dorsey has said in the past that the public interest value of Trump’s tweets outweigh the harm of his occasional calls for violence or threats against foreign governments or members of the media
Well Jack Dorsey, your promotion of Trump has in fact? Caused people to be murdered. Has caused people to be massacred. Has caused people to be beaten. Has caused terroristic acts against Democrats, Liberals, Muslims LGBTS, blacks, and many others.
BUT YOU DO NOT GIVE ONE FLYING FUCK ABOUT THAT NOW DO YOU JACK DORSEY?
THEIR BLOOD AND DEATHS ARE ON YOUR HANDS JACK DORSEY. THEIR BLOOD AND DEATHS ARE ON THE HANDS OF ALL YOUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS: OMID KORDESTANI: EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF TWITTER, PATRICK PICHETTE: LEAD INDEPENDENT DIRECTOR; FORMER SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER, GOOGLE, MARTHA LANE FOX: FOUNDER AND CHAIRPERSON, LUCKY VOICE GROUP; CHAIR PERSON, MAKIEWORLD; CROSS BENCH PEER, HOUSE OF LORDS, , NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA: SENIOUR ADVISOR, LAZARD LTD , DAVID ROSENBLATT: CEO, 1STDIBS.COM INC , BRET TAYLOR: PRESIDENT AND CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER SALESFORCE, ROBERT ZOELLICK: FORMER PRESIDENT OF WORLD BANK GROUP.
AND ALL OF THESE WORKERS OF TWITTER: NICK PICKLES TWITTERS DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC POLICY, PARAG AGRAWAL; TECHNOLOGY LEAD, LESLIE BERLAND: PEOPLE AND MARKETING LEAD, KAYVON BEYKPOUR: PRODUCT LEAD, DANTLEY DAVIS: HEAD OF DESIGN AND RESEARCH, MATT DERELLA: CUSTOMERS LEAD, BRUCE FALCK: REVENUE PRODUCT LEAD, VIJAYA GADDE: LEAD COUNCIL, MICHAEL MONTANO: ENGINEERING LEAD, NED SEGAL: CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER, AND ALL THE EMPLOYEES OF TWITTER.
Each and every one of these employees of Twitter from their CEO Jack Dorsey, to all their Board of Directors, to their Main Employees? Should all be arrested and charged with promotion of terrorist actions by Trump and his Trumpsters and be charged with being accessories to first degree murder and terrorist acts because they just do not give a flying fuck that people are being murdered, threatened, terrorized, attacked, beaten and shit upon because these fucking scumbags of Twitter believe that it is perfectly alright for Trump and his Trumpsters and White Supremacists and Nazis and KKK scumbag shitstains on the underwear of humanity have a right to promote their hatred, their bigotry, their misogyny and their Fascism on Twitter and so the fuck what if it causes violence, murder and mass shootings.
These scumbags of Twitter are putting money over the safety of other human beings all to promote this agenda of white supremacy and hate and bigotry of Donald J Trump his Trumpanzees and others.
And upon conviction? Each and every one of these motherfucking promoters and purveyors of white supremacy, bigotry and racism, should be given the death penalty, because they have far fucking proven that they put money and hate over the lives of other human beings and by their actions? Have in fact? committed murder of others.
THE CEO OF TWITTER, JACK DORSEY AND THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF TWITTER, SHOULD BE ARRESTED AND PROSECUTED FOR THE PROMOTION OF HATE CRIMES AND MURDER
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey should be arrested and prosecuted for the promotion of hate speech which has led to several mass shootings and murders of lgbts, atheists and others by the white supremacists and that shitstain Donald J Trump that Jack and his Twitter Board of Directors have decided that they can keep spewing hate and bigotry and white supremacy on Twitter cause if they attempted to stop it? It would remove far too many Repugnants, including Donald J Trump.
Congress has called out both Facebook and Twitter for the promotion of hate speech and even terroristic acts.
While it appears that Facebook is now putting a stop to white supremacists on Facebook and the spreading of their hate? It seems the CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey and the Board of Directors of Twitter will never do the same to stop the spread of hate and white supremacy and their racist bullshit on Twitter. Why? Because it turns out of they actually went after the White Supremacists spreading hate on Twitter? Why they would be having to ban a whole lot of Republican Politicians, including that proven bigot, racist, misogynist pig, treasonous Cock Sucker for Putin, Donald J Trump and the rest of his white supremacist cunts Trumpanzees whose tweets would violate those algorythyms that show white supremacists spreading hate on Twitter.
Why can’t Twitter stop Trump’s hateful tweets about Ilhan Omar?
Congresswoman received death threats following video Trump posted – but he didn’t technically violate the rules
The rules just aren’t the same for Donald Trump as they are for the rest of us. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apparently admitted as much this week on a phone call with Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar.
As reported by the Washington Post,
Dorsey, often criticized for his inaction when it comes removing
hateful and threatening content from the platform, was asked by Omar why
he hadn’t taken down a video posted by Trump earlier in the month. The
video, which spliced together misleading and out of context comments
from Omar about the issue of Islamophobia with footage of the 9/11
attacks, was clearly targeted harassment to anyone who saw it.
Racist, bigot, misogynist pig, rapist, pedophile pervert, fucker of daughters, pathological lying, Putin Dick Sucking Puppet and Treasonous Traitor who deserves to be brought to GITMO along with #MoscowMitchMcConnell and the GOPig Traitors and lined up against a wall and fucking executed for TREASON….Donald J Trump.
Indeed Omar said she saw a sharp uptick in death threats after it was posted. But since it came from Trump, and not an average Twitter user, there was nothing Dorsey could do, he said. The tweet didn’t technically violate the rules in any case, he added. (Anyone who has used Twitter will understand the frustration at trying to parse what exactly those rules are.)
The call with Omar came the same day Dorsey met with Trump in the
White House, a meeting in which the president is said to have largely
complained about his follower count.
“During their conversation, [Dorsey] emphasized that death threats, incitement to violence and hateful conduct are not allowed on Twitter,” the social media platform said in a statement to the Post. “We’ve significantly invested in technology to proactively surface this type of content and will continue to focus on reducing the burden on the individual being targeted.”
Dorsey has said in the past that the public interest value of Trump’s tweets outweigh the harm of his occasional calls for violence or threats against foreign governments or members of the media
“Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial
tweets would hide important information people should be able to see
and debate,” the company explained in statement last year. “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
More recently Dorsey declined to say whether a hypothetical direct call from Trump to murder a journalist would be grounds for his banishment.
Yes, Traitor Donald J Trump, you racist, pig fucking, pedophile, rapist, misogynist pig, shitstain on the underwear of humanity, pathological liar, and of course Putin Puppet Penis Puffer, do the whole world a favor. Make America Great Again by placing a gun up against your fucking head, pull the trigger and blow your unstable, shitty brains out. I would even go piss and shit on your fucking grave if you did on a daily basis.
The permissive double standard applied to Trump on Twitter hasn’t stopped him from regularly suggesting that he is himself being treated unfairly. This week Trump tweeted that Twitter doesn’t “treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory…”
In fact it seems more probable that Republicans such as Trump are given much more leeway than others.
A recent story from Motherboard reported that one of the reasons Twitter has had trouble removing white supremacist content from the platform, as they have largely done with the Islamic State, is that the algorithms they use might end up affecting Republican politicians.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump once said in a prescient boast.
When it comes to his behavior as reported in the Mueller report, as
well as his social media habits, it seems like Trump behaves like he can
get away with anything. So far he’s right.
I am willing to bet that if Donald J Trump shot Congresswoman Omar on 5th Avenue and videoed it? Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would allow him to tweet the video and still not ban this racist piece of shit from Twitter. Right Jack?
Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too.
A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive, algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians.
At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt
question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off
its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?
An
executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law, and a
technical employee who works on machine learning and artificial
intelligence issues went up to the mic to add some context. (As
Motherboard has previously reported, algorithms are the next great hope for platforms trying to moderate the posts of their hundreds of millions, or billions, of users.)
With
every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a
platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it
can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language
broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS
for inconveniencing some others, he said.
In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.
The employee argued that, on a technical
level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by
algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning
politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging
all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.
There is no
indication that this position is an official policy of Twitter, and the
company told Motherboard that this “is not [an] accurate
characterization of our policies or enforcement—on any level.” But the
Twitter employee’s comments highlight the sometimes overlooked debate
within the moderation of tech platforms: are moderation issues purely
technical and algorithmic, or do societal norms play a greater role than
some may acknowledge?
Though Twitter has rules against “abuse and hateful conduct,” civil rights experts, government organizations, and Twitter users say the platform hasn’t done enough to curb white supremacy and neo-Nazis on the platform, and its competitor Facebook recently explicitly banned white nationalism. Wednesday, during a parliamentary committee hearing on social media content moderation, UK MP Yvette Cooper asked Twitter why it hasn’t yet banned former KKK leader David Duke, and “Jack, ban the Nazis” has become a common reply to many of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweets. During a recent interview with TED that allowed the public to tweet in questions, the feed was overtaken by people asking Dorsey why the platform hadn’t banned Nazis. Dorsey said “we have policies around violent extremist groups,” but did not give a straightforward answer to the question. Dorsey did not respond to two requests for comment sent via Twitter DM.
Twitter has not publicly explained
why it has been able to so successfully eradicate ISIS while it
continues to struggle with white nationalism. As a company, Twitter
won’t say that it can’t treat white supremacy in the same way as it
treated ISIS. But external experts Motherboard spoke to said that the
measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white
supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously
flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the
very least, their supporters. So it’s no surprise, then, that employees
at the company have realized that as well.
Well at least these generational inbred, farm animal fucking, deluxe outhouse dwelling, shitstains on the underwear of humanity, who all have black blood in them in the first place, and their hero Hitler would have sent these mutts into his Concentration Camps gas showers that they at least know? They are fucking assholes. And these are the people that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and the rest of Twitter’s Board of Directors defend and support. Cause they allow them to spread their hate, their bigotry and white supremacy through their fucking loudmouth Hitler Wanna Be Donald J Trump.
This is because the
proactive measures taken against ISIS are more akin to the removal of
spam or child porn than the more nuanced way that social media platforms traditionally police content,
which can involve using algorithms to surface content but ultimately
relies on humans to actually review and remove it (or leave it up.) A
Twitter spokesperson told Motherboard that 91 percent of the company’s
terrorism-related suspensions in a 6 month period in 2018 were thanks to
internal, automated tools.
The argument that external experts made to Motherboard aligns with
what the Twitter employee aired: Society as a whole uncontroversially
and unequivocally demanded that Twitter take action against ISIS in the
wake of beheading videos spreading far and wide on the platform. The
automated approach that Twitter took to eradicating ISIS was successful:
“I haven’t seen a legit ISIS supporter on Twitter who lasts longer than
15 seconds for two-and-a-half years,” Amarnath Amarasingam, an
extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told
Motherboard in a phone call. Society and politicians were willing to
accept that some accounts were mistakenly suspended by Twitter during
that process (for example, accounts belonging to the hacktivist group Anonymous that were reporting ISIS accounts to Twitter as part of an operation called #OpISIS were themselves banned).
That same eradicate-everything approach, applied to white supremacy, is much more controversial.
“Most people can agree a beheading video or some kind of ISIS content should be proactively removed, but when we try to talk about the alt-right or white nationalism, we get into dangerous territory, where we’re talking about [Iowa Rep.] Steve King or maybe even some of Trump’s tweets, so it becomes hard for social media companies to say all of this ‘this content should be removed,’” Amarasingam said.
“There’s
going to be controversy here that we didn’t see with ISIS, because
there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and
white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US
and Europe than ISIS ever was.”
In March, King promoted an open white nationalist on Twitter for the third time. King quote tweeted Faith Goldy, a Canadian white nationalist. Earlier this month, Facebook banned Goldy under the site’s new policy banning white nationalism; Goldy has 122,000 followers on Twitter and has not been banned at the time of writing. Last year, Twitter banned Republican politician and white nationalist Paul Nehlen for a racist tweet he sent about actress and princess Meghan Markle, but prior to the ban, Nehlen gained a wide following on the platform while tweeting openly white nationalist content about, for example, the “Jewish media.”
Any move that could be perceived as being anti-Republican is likely to stir backlash against the company, which has been criticized by President Trump and other prominent Republicans for having an “anti-conservative bias.” Tuesday, on the same day Trump met with Twitter’s Dorsey, the President tweeted that Twitter “[doesn’t] treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory,” Trump tweeted. “No wonder Congress wants to get involved—and they should.”
JM Berger, author of Extremism and a number of reports on ISIS and far-right extremists on Twitter, told Motherboard that in his own research, he has found that “a very large number of white nationalists identify themselves as avid Trump supporters.”
“Cracking
down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of
people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters,
and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly
seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said.
“There’s going to be controversy here that we didn’t see with ISIS,
because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS
supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political
power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey must be one of these white sheet and pointy hat wearing fans of racist, bigoted, misogynist pig Donald J Trump and his KKKlan of White Supremacists, Nazis and KKK faggots.
Twitter currently has no good way of suspending specific white
supremacists without human intervention, and so it continues to use
human moderators to evaluate tweets. In an email, a company spokesperson
told Motherboard that “different content and behaviors require
different approaches.”
“For terrorist-related content
we’ve a lot of success with proprietary technology but for other types
of content that violate our policies—which can often [be] much more
contextual—we see the best benefits by using technology and human review
in tandem,” the company said.
Twitter hasn’t done a particularly good job of removing white supremacist content and has shown a reluctance to take any action of any kind against “world leaders” even when their tweets violate Twitter’s rules. But Berger agrees with Twitter in that the problem the company is facing with white supremacy is fundamentally different than the one it faced with ISIS on a practical level.
“With
ISIS, the group’s obsessive branding, tight social networks and small
numbers made it easier to avoid collateral damage when the companies
cracked down (although there was some),” he said. “White nationalists,
in contrast, have inconsistent branding, diffuse social networks and a
large body of sympathetic people in the population, so the risk of
collateral damage might be perceived as being higher, but it really
depends on where the company draws its lines around content.”
But just because eradicating white supremacy on Twitter is a hard problem doesn’t mean the company should get a pass. After Facebook explicitly banned white supremacy and white nationalism, Motherboard asked YouTube and Twitter whether they would make similar changes. Neither company would commit to making that explicit change, and referred us to their existing rules.
“Twitter
has a responsibility to stomp out all voices of hate on its platform,”
Brandi Collins-Dexter, senior campaign director at activist group Color
Of Change told Motherboard in a statement. “Instead, the company is
giving a free ride to conservative politicians whose dangerous rhetoric
enables the growth of the white supremacist movement into the mainstream
and the rise of hate, online and off.”
Twitter and YouTube Won’t Commit to Ban White Nationalism After Facebook Makes Policy Switch
Following a Motherboard investigation, Facebook banned white nationalism and white separatism. But Twitter and YouTube, two platforms with their own nationalism problems, won’t commit to following Facebook’s lead.
Keegan Hankes, a research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Intelligence Project, told Motherboard in a phone call Tuesday “I think there is absolutely a need for other platforms to adopt similar policies” to Facebook. “Both YouTube and Twitter have been amongst the worst at getting this content dealt with on their platforms,” Hankes added.
Hankes added the SPLC does have a relationship with YouTube, but with Twitter not nearly as much.
“They’ve been very, very stubborn and basically unwilling to ban people
that are outright white supremacists from their platform,” he added.
When they do ban people, they’re happy to play a game of whack-a-mole,
instead of having a systematic approach, he added.
“They’re still basically at square one for the most part,” Hankes said.
Tech Platforms Obliterated ISIS Online. They Could Use The Same Tools On White Nationalism.
Before killing 50 people during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and injuring 40 more, the gunman apparently decided to fully exploit social media by releasing a manifesto, posting a Twitter thread showing off his weapons, and going live on Facebook as he launched the attack.
The
gunman’s coordinated social media strategy wasn’t unique, though. The
way he manipulated social media for maximum impact is almost identical
to how ISIS, at its peak, was using those very same platforms.
While most mainstream social networks have become aggressive
about removing pro-ISIS content from the average user’s feed, far-right
extremism and white nationalism continue to thrive. Only the most
egregious nodes in the radicalization network have been removed from
every platform. The question now is: Will Christchurch change anything?
A 2016 study by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism shows that white nationalists and neo-Nazi supporters had a much larger impact
on Twitter than ISIS members and supporters at the time. When looking
at about 4,000 accounts of each category, white nationalists and
neo-Nazis outperformed ISIS in number of tweets and followers, with an
average follower count that was 22 times greater than ISIS-affiliated
Twitter accounts. The study concluded that by 2016, ISIS had become a
target of “large-scale efforts” by Twitter to drive supporters off the
platform, like using AI-based technology to automatically flag
militant Muslim extremist content, while white nationalists and
neo-Nazi supporters were given much more leeway, in large part because
their networks were far less cohesive.
The answer to why this kind of cross-network deplatforming hasn’t happened with white nationalist extremism may be found in a 2018 VOX-Pol report
authored by the same researcher as the George Washington University
study cited above: “The task of crafting a response to the alt-right is
considerably more complex and fraught with landmines, largely as a
result of the movement’s inherently political nature and its proximity
to political power.”
But tech companies and governments can easily agree on removing violent
terrorist content; they’ve been less inclined to do this with white
nationalist content, which cloaks itself in free speech arguments and
which a new wave of populist world leaders are loath to criticize.
Christchurch could be another moment for platforms to draw a line in the
sand between what is and is not acceptable on their platforms.
Moderating white nationalist extremism is hard because it’s drenched in
irony and largely spread online via memes, obscure symbols, and
references. The Christchurch gunman ironically told the viewers of his
livestream to “Subscribe to Pewdiepie.” His alleged announcement post on
8chan was full of trolly dark web in-jokes. And the cover of his
manifesto had a Sonnenrad on it — a sunwheel symbol commonly used by
neo-Nazis.
And unlike ISIS, far-right extremism isn’t as centralized. The
Christchurch gunman and Christopher Hasson, the white nationalist Coast
Guard officer who was arrested last month for allegedly plotting to
assassinate politicians and media figures and carry out large-scale
terror attacks using biological weapons, were both inspired
by Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik. Cesar Sayoc, also known as the
“MAGA Bomber,” and the Tree of Life synagogue shooter, both appear to
have been partially radicalized via 4chan and Facebook memes.
It may now be genuinely impossible to disentangle anti-Muslim hate speech
on Facebook and YouTube from the more coordinated racist 4chan meme
pages or white nationalist communities growing on these platforms.
“Islamophobia happens to be something that made these companies lots and
lots of money,” Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse
University whose research includes online harassment, recently told BuzzFeed News. She said this type of content leads to engagement, which keeps people using the platform, which generates ad revenue.
A spokesperson from Twitter provided BuzzFeed News with a copy of its
policy on extremism, in regards to how it moderates ISIS-related
content. “You may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the
serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of
people,” the policy reads. “This includes, but is not limited to,
threatening or promoting terrorism.” The spokesperson would not comment
specifically on whether using neo-Nazi or white nationalist iconography
on Twitter also counted as threatening or promoting terrorism.
Like the hardcore white nationalist and neo-Nazi iconography used by the
Christchurch gunman, the more entry-level memes that likely radicalized
the MAGA bomber, and the pipeline from mainstream social networks to
more private clusters of extremist thought described by the Tree of Life
shooter, ISIS’s social media activity before the large-scale crackdown
in 2015 had similar tentpoles. It organized around hashtags, distributed
propaganda in multiple languages, transmitted coded language and
iconography, and siphoned possible recruits from larger mainstream
social networks into smaller private messaging platforms.
Twitter CEO Jack Patrick Dorsey should in fact, along with the Board of Directors of Twitter be held responsible for any acts of violence, or any acts of murder committed by Twitter White Supremacist Users, or encouraged by Donald J Trump or any White Supremacist.
As we can see from the stories above? Twitter CEO Jack Patrick Dorsey and the Twitter Board of Directors: Omid Kordestani, Patrick Pichette, Martha Lane Fox, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, David Rosenblatt, Brett Taylor, Robert Zoellick and Twitter’s CFO Ned Segal, should be held accountable for all the hate, all the bigotry, all the misogyny, all the shit that Donald J Trump spews on a daily basis to his psychotic, white supremacist twitter followers, to all the white supremacists, all the Republican racists, who also spew racist, bigoted, misogynist bullshit on Twitter. This also includes all the hate, all the bigotry and all the lgbtphobia spewed by White Supremacist Christians who use Twitter to spread their hate and bigotry.
These actions of Trump and his racist punks are in fact, responsible for some of the mass murders and the incredible high murder counts of lgbts in the US and across the world.
If Twitter’s CEO Jack Patrick Dorsey, and the Board of Directors Kordestani Pichette, Fox, Okonjo-Iweala, Rosenblatt, Taylor, Zoellick and CFO Segal are going to rake in millions of dollars in profits, and place the revenue of advertisers, that Racist Trump and his white supremacists bring into the coffers, bank accounts and pockets of these people? And if these actions of hate spewed by these white supremacists by Donald J Trump or by ChristoTaliban Fascists on Twitter caused a death? Then they should be held responsible for it.
BECAUSE QUITE FRANKLY AND HONESTLY? TWITTER CEO JACK PATRICK DORSEY, CFO NED SEGAL, AND THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF TWITTER, ALONG WITH TWITTER STOCKHOLDERS?
SHOULD NOT PROFIT FROM THE SPREAD OF HATE, THE SPREAD OF BIGOTRY, THE SPREAD OF MISOGYNY, THE SPREAD OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR OTHER FORMS OF HATE, SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY ARE PERPETRATED BY THE SUPPOSED PRESIDENT, DONALD J TRUMP, OR WHITE SUPREMACISTS WHO HAPPEN TO BE REPUBLICAN, OR CHRISTIAN WHO SPEW HATE AND DEATH AND BIGOTRY ON TWITTER AND HIDE IT BEHIND A RELIGIOUS RIGHT.
AND AS SUCH? JACK DORSEY, NED SEGAL AND ALL THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF TWITTER SHOULD HAVE TO PAY FOR THEIR CRIMES.
Atheist Militants Rising 
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