Is Trump Inciting An American Civil War? What A Joy For The Kremlin-- And What A Great Return On Their Investment!

Trump is clearly an accessory to the massacres at the garlic festival, in El Paso and in Dayton. But there's more to it than just that. At the press gaggle in front of his helicopter yesterday, Trump claimed he "doesn't like any group of hate-- whether it's white supremacy, whether it's any other kind of supremacy, whether it's Antifa... whether it's any group of hate, I an very concerned about it-- and I'll do something about it... i think my rhetoric brings people together." Earlier, he had tweeted, that Beto O'Rourke should "be quiet." Beto responded that "22 people in my hometown are dead after an act of terror inspired by your racism. El Paso will not be quiet and neither will I."

Conservative Republican Ross Douthat pointed out in his NY Times column yesterday that Trump's "immigration rhetoric drove the El Paso shooter to mass murder in some direct and simple way"-- the obvious, but he also pointed out that "because Trump participates in the general cultural miasma that generates mass shooters, and having a participant as president makes the problem worse."

Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way. found and captured an anti-semitic, anti-gay screed from prominent neo-Nazi/white nationalist, nose-picking Trump backer Nicholas Fuentes, which has since been edited out of his YouTube channel. [Note: Why does YouTube still give Nazis channels to spread their hatred? Is Google that hard up for more cash?] There are still members of the LGBTQ community and Jews who support Trump. If you know any, try to get them to watch this:

Monday night, Fuentes-- who took part in the violent 2017 Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia-- uploaded an episode of his podcast to YouTube that was dedicated to discussing last weekend’s mass shootings. The shooting in El Paso, Texas, was allegedly carried out by a young man who authored a manifesto expressing his white supremacist ideology and hostility to Hispanic immigrants and posted it online prior to the shooting.

Fuentes, who is hostile to immigrants himself, took issue with conservative voices who denounced white supremacists and white nationalists in the wake of the El Paso shooting, balking at President Donald Trump’s condemnation of the very extremists agitated and energized by the president’s rhetoric. Among those singled out for Fuentes’ fury was Matt Walsh, columnist at the Daily Wire, who called the accused white supremacist mass killer a “white racist scumbag” and said white supremacy was “evil, stupid, and dangerous.”

Fuentes attacked Walsh with anti-gay slurs and called him a “shabbos goy race traitor” who works for Jews. (The Daily Wire is led by Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish.) That part of last night’s show appears to have been removed from the YouTube Live rebroadcast but was preserved in the YouTube channel of a Fuentes fan.

“Matt Walsh, shabbos goy race traitor. That’s what it is, folks. I know some people don’t like to use that expression, but it’s totally true-- throwing his own people under the bus. He hates white people. Nobody else talks like that about their own people except for white people and it’s gross,” Fuentes said, going on to mock Walsh: “Yeah, OK, keep typing on Twitter dot com, faggot. Faggot. Pussy. Race traitor-- you work for Jews, you know.”

Fuentes also threw a tantrum over Dinesh D’Souza’s remarks about white nationalism, attacking one of the right’s favorite authors based on his ethnicity and over his criticisms of racist writer Samuel Todd Francis in the 1990s. In a mocking tone, Fuentes said, “Dinesh D’Souza is gonna roll up to our shore from India, from smelly, open-defecation India, and he’s going to tell us that Robert E. Lee was a racist.”

Earlier in the podcast, Fuentes had said that he had similar political complaints to those believed to have been expressed by the El Paso shooter, but also said that he did not support violent action.

“Why is it then that we are forced to accept probably the most transformative policies in the history of our country, perhaps the most transformative policies that are possible, which is the systematic replacement of the people that constitute that country. We can’t talk about it, we can’t use mass media, we can’t run for office, we can’t change policy, so at a certain point what is the expectation?” Fuentes said.

Fuentes then claimed that he wasn’t trying to rationalize violence, but then said, “The thought process in my mind is that eventually you just run out of options. You read this manifesto, you read what is said in here, and it’s an act of desperation. It says, ‘What else are we supposed to do?’”

“Of course the solution, this kind of ‘terrorism’-- if that’s the kind of language you prefer-- or act of violence is not to further isolate, atomize, ostracize these kinds of people who have legitimate problems or people who have legitimate grievances from society,” Fuentes said. “It is instead to work them into the system.”

Fuentes laid the blame for the El Paso shooting on media outlets that accurately identify white nationalists, and alleged that the shooting has been a “benefit” to a supposed anti-Trump media agenda. Fuentes also claimed that the El Paso shooter wrote a “convenient manifesto for the powers that be” whom he said may be implicated in the scandal and alleged criminal activities surrounding hedge-fund billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, currently in prison awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges following news reports on his solicitation of sex from underage teenagers. The powers that Fuentes claims could be responsible for such a conspiracy, he said, are united in having “a problem with white people” and “bringing the systematic destruction of Western civilization and the people that created and perpetuate Western civilization, which is white people.”

Fuentes went on to speculate that the Dayton shooter could be Jewish, before also speculating that the shooter was connected to U.S. intelligence agencies. Fuentes asserted that “red flag” gun laws, like those proposed by the White House yesterday, were part of a slippery slope in which the government would seize weapons from white people.

Even a lame conservative like Status Quo Joe is linking Trump, even if just weakly and toothlessly, to the outbreak of white nationalist terrorism-- if just for his own partisan gain: "Trump offers no moral leadership; no interest in unifying the nation, no evidence the presidency has awakened his conscience in the least. Instead we have a president with a toxic tongue who has publicly and unapologetically embraced a political strategy of hate, racism, and division. So it’s up to us. We’re living through a rare moment in this nation’s history. Where our president isn’t up to the moment. Where our president lacks the moral authority to lead. Where our president has more in common with George Wallace than George Washington. We are almost 330 million Americans who have to do what our president can’t. Stand together. Stand against hate. Stand up for what-- at our best-- this nation believes."

Republicans generally favor autocracy, as Aaron Blake pointed out in his Washington Post column yesterday. He wrote that "Five years ago, congressional Republicans blasted former president Barack Obama as 'Emperor Obama' and compared him to a king for his executive actions, most notably those protecting some undocumented immigrants. Ten years ago, conservative activists launched the tea party movement in large part as a call for a more limited federal government. Today, conservative Republicans have moved sharply toward embracing a more powerful chief executive with fewer checks and balances. A new Pew Research Center poll, in fact, finds that a majority of conservative Republicans (52%) agree that many problems would be solved ‘if U.S. presidents didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts.’ Just 41% choose the other option, that it ‘would be too risky to give U.S. presidents more power’ to confront problems. This represents a sea change in the party. The number favoring fewer checks and balances has doubled just since last year, when only 26% favored a more powerful executive."

And, as Politico explained yesterday, Trump used this permissiveness from Republicans to quietly expand gun access, at a point when most Americans want to see less access. He claims he's done "much more than most," but that just another of the over 10,000 lies he's told since occupying the White House. "While Trump boasts of action on firearms," wrote Anita Kumar, "his administration has actually eased gun restrictions over the past two and a half years. Federal agencies have implemented more than half a dozen policy changes-- primarily through little-noticed regulatory moves-- that expand access to guns by lifting firearms bans in certain locations and limiting the names on the national database designed to keep firearms away from dangerous people. The administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn New York City restrictions on transporting handguns outside homes. And it pushed to allow U.S. gunmakers to more easily sell firearms overseas, including the types used in mass shootings."

David Cicilline (D-RI), a vice chair of the House Gun Prevention Task Force, said that Trump "has in a very intentional, sweeping way made it easier for people to access firearms, not more difficult. He’s systematically gone and undone all the protections that were put in place to try to limit the ability of dangerous people to access firearms."

Trump’s critics say they aren’t surprised by his actions after he received an early and strong endorsement from the National Rifle Association, one of his top donors that contributed $30 million [likely in completely illegal laundered money from the Kremlin] to his 2016 campaign and blasted his Democratic opponent in TV ads. After he was sworn into office, Trump vowed repeatedly to repay gun owners for their support.

...“We have done much more than most administrations,” Trump said in his first public remarks on the shootings Sunday. “It’s … really not talked about very much, but we’ve done, actually, a lot. But perhaps more has to be done.”

But those changes were narrow, lengthy and, in the case of the bump stock ban, could be reversed by the next president because it is not written into law.

William Vizzard, who spent nearly three decades at the ATF, described the restrictions as modest. “On a scale of 1 to 100, they’re about a 2,” he said.

The White House and the NRA didn’t return requests for comment. In an earlier statement, the NRA said it “welcomes the president's call to address the root causes of the horrific acts of violence that have occurred in our country.“

Before he ran for president, Trump had supported several Democratic-backed proposals, including a ban on assault weapons and waiting period for firearms purchases. But after his inauguration, he made policy changes backed by the NRA. Most of them bypassed Congress, where firearms changes are difficult to pass.

“The response has largely parroted the talking points of the NRA,” said Chelsea Parsons, vice president of gun violence prevention at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Perhaps the most significant change was revoking a regulation making it harder for people with mental illnesses to buy guns that his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, enacted after the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

The Obama regulation had required the government to add those eligible for Social Security Administration mental disability payments to the national database and block them from buying guns. The Obama administration estimated it would have added 75,000 names to the database.

In addition, the Trump Justice Department narrowed the definition of “fugitive,” excluding people from being added to the national database and barred from buying a gun.

Hannah Selinger noted in HuffPo yesterday that perhaps the time had come for her to start keeping her racist, Trump's-supporting in-laws away from her children.

“I don’t understand why anyone lives in Los Angeles,” my mother-in-law said to my husband over the phone a few months ago. “It’s full of immigrants.”

This offensive “observation” was not a stand-alone comment. It was only the latest in a series of bigoted sound bites from my in-laws. Both in their 70s, they live on Florida’s Gulf Coast in a predominantly white, older community saturated by conservative talking points. They see themselves as tolerant, life-loving Catholics. But their tolerance extends only to people they know and understand-- and those people are white, straight, “American” people.

Actually, it isn’t just racism that muddies the water in my relationship with my in-laws. It’s sexism and homophobia, too. Sometimes, it’s even veiled anti-Semitism. (Note to non-Jews everywhere: Telling a Jewish person how much you love Jewish people is, on its face, a message of marginalization.) My father-in-law once had to leave the room when two men kissed on TV. “Disgusting,” he whispered under his breath, within earshot of my son.

My in-laws have always been conservative. They have always been Republican. But, before 2016, they were Catholics devoted, specifically, to the “problem” of abortion. That was the issue they cared about, and it was the issue that ignited their ballot box passion. What my husband and I have witnessed, however, has been an ideological shift, from a relationship with religion to blind idolatry.

In the past two years, fueled by a president who “tells it like it is,” my in-laws have said a spate of problematic, objectionable and, often, straight-up hateful things. My sweet mother-in-law, who cries at the very notion of a dog’s death, wanted to know why Senate hopeful Roy Moore’s teenaged accusers didn’t come forth with their claims sooner, thereby dismissing their claims. When my 1-year-old threw a tantrum and I accused him of being a “drama queen,” she gently corrected me: “It’s drama king.”

My father-in-law clucked when, in a scene in the movie Moonlight, an impoverished Black drug dealer pulled up in a decked-out low-rider. It was an expensive car, and my father-in-law wanted us to know that people of that sort were always spending above their means. “That’s just what they do,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s just what they do.” He meant Black people-- all of them.

For a while, my husband and I tried to rationalize-- if not excuse-- my in-laws’ beliefs. They’re older, we told ourselves. They don’t know that the world has changed. But eventually it became impossible to keep exonerating them. For the most part, my political contact with them was passive-aggressive ― heavy on the aggressive. I directed Facebook posts at “any and all Trump supporters, including family members,” but I didn’t single them out specifically.

That was before.

Then, shortly after Heather Heyer was run down and murdered by driver spurred on by fellow white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and after the president said that there were “good people on both sides,” I sent my mother-in-law a text. As a Jewish woman with half-Jewish children, I wanted her to know that her support of a president who says incendiary, race-baiting things affects people like me. It affects my kids.

In a winding, wending message, I told her how Jews have been targeted since the dawn of time, and how the particular brand of hate espoused by white supremacists, and, tangentially, the president, was pretty familiar to me; I had experienced it my entire life. It was likely her grandkids would, too. I was hopeful that a human connection-- that the world through the eyes of a real, live liberal (and her daughter-in-law, no less) and not just a Fox News caricature-- could convince her that words and actions matter. I was hopeful that she might show courage in the face of an obvious wrong.

“Thank you for your note,” she wrote back. We never spoke of it again.

This was probably when I started to believe that my in-laws would never change. Once it occurred to me that this problem was going to haunt me forever, I started brainstorming solutions in hopes of not having to cut them out of our lives. Except, in the case of this deep kind of intolerance, there is no solution. I believe it has to be vanquished, entirely. I can’t just pretend they aren’t who they are. They have become completely indoctrinated, and, what’s worse, they don’t really seem to care. They know, fully, that there are consequences to all of this. But still they pursue a course of belief that seems at odds with morality.

And that means that I can’t just go on pretending that we’re a normal family. It’s not like I can just leave them with the kids for the night and hope they don’t say something awful about a marginalized group of people while I’m out enjoying a martini with my husband. That safety has been stolen from both of us.

When I asked them to stop watching right-wing cable news in the living room of our home (“You’re afraid of the truth,” my father-in-law snapped back), they rerouted to their computers. They now take solace at the kitchen table, laptops kissing, where they sift through whatever degradation the right happens to be pushing at that moment. Tucker Carlson drones on, and then Sean Hannity. They cannot get enough, and they will not stop. Days fade from bright to bruise as they sit at their computers, happily held hostage by alternative facts.

Their hatred is expanding, and it’s expanding quickly. These days, it manifests itself through conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, antifa and Black Lives Matter. My in-laws oppose abortion in any and all circumstances, but they appear unbothered by the idea of migrant kids in cages at the country’s border. The media sources they ingest, of course, are intentionally dishonest, and our conversations with them reveal a view of the world that’s disturbingly removed from reality.

Recently, my mother-in-law sent a doctored video in an email to my husband, along with a message in which she told him that she didn’t want her grandkids surrounded by Muslims. We’ve asked that they broaden their perspective and that they stop watching cable news altogether (although that won’t remedy the persistent fake news internet problem). I’ve told them that my policy is to tolerate none of this around my children.

...I can tell my children, definitively, that the man we call president is a bad person. Can I say that about their grandparents, who support the same ideas? But what if it’s true? Perhaps this is a pat rendering of a real-life conundrum. We talk about good and bad guys in the movies, but actual people are dynamic and complex. In real life, I like my mother-in-law. She’s unintentionally funny, and says “darn” and “fudge” and “shoot” instead of swear words, and she can’t remember her email password, not ever-- even though I know hers by heart. My father-in-law and I share a lifelong love for the Yankees. He’s a former runner, and while I still like to say “current,” if I’m being honest, I’m a former runner, too. But I also find their politics-- and how they manifest in what they say and share-- repugnant. This is a matter, now, of fundamental human decency.

...[A]s my in-laws’ bigotry grows more entrenched, fomented by American radicalism, the idea of them in our lives seems less and less possible. And what I need to be sure of, 20 years from now, when I look at my grown children down the telescope of their lives, is that I did everything to protect them from evil, everything to make their lives bright and happy and productive. I need to be sure that I didn’t contribute to a worse world, that I left things a little better off for them. How we all arrive there, in a better place, is up to no one but ourselves.

Have you heard the new mix of the Republican Fight Song, "Kill U?" by Revboy. Totally rocks.