Who Is Provoking Violence And Looting In The Nationwide Racial Justice Protests?

I keep hearing every elected official who talks about the protests-- and especially the looting and vandalism-- claim that the "troublemakers" are agitators from out-of-state. Which state? Someone is coming into California to rampage down Rodeo Drive and then Hollywood Blvd? I don't believe it-- and neither should you. Unless they're talking about right-wing/Trumpist domestic terrorists (self-described "Boogaloo boys"). You won't hear about it-- at least not about the the right-wingers-- on Fox News of course, but proof has been mounting that white extremist groups have infiltrated basically peaceful protests to instigate looting, property destruction and violence against police, purposely stoking some kind of race-based civil war. In fact, there are plenty of "bad apples" in various police forces who are criminal characters as well and don't belong doing police work.

Writing for the Washington Post, Isaac Stanley-Becker looked at this infiltration by agents provocateurs who are inciting riots. For example, "Police identified Brian Jordan Bartels, 20, of Allison Park, Pa., as having 'kicked off' the escalation in Pittsburgh, one of several examples of peaceful assemblies against police violence creating opportunities for pandemonium. While at heart the gatherings have been an appeal for racial justice, they also have attracted a diverse array of people with other grievances and agendas who have co-opted the moment, accelerating what has been a national unraveling as the country reels from a pandemic that has put more than 40 million people out of work."

In most American cities, people of all races appear to be participating in the violence, vandalism and looting, particularly in Minneapolis, where a crowd burned the police department’s 3rd Precinct building last week and vandals were seen smashing windows and stealing items from stores. Multiracial coalitions also have marched peacefully. But in some cities, local officials have noted that black protesters have struggled to maintain peaceful protests in the face of young white men joining the fray, seemingly determined to commit mayhem.

In footage that spread widely online, a man identified as Bartels, who faces charges of vandalism and rioting, wore a bandanna emblazoned with the symbol of the Animal Liberation Front, a leaderless international resistance movement that pushes for animal rights. In the footage, he raised his middle fingers to black protesters who begged him to stop. At Bartels’s home in a Pittsburgh suburb, officers found spray paint and firearms, according to an arrest warrant reviewed by the Washington Post.

Attempts to reach Bartels, who turned himself in to police on Monday evening, were unsuccessful.

As authorities intensified their efforts to quell the uprisings-- deploying tear gas and rubber bullets in aggressive spasms in many cities-- police officers were joined by some elected officials and protest organizers in accusing white activists and extremists of exacerbating the chaos by blocking roadways, destroying police property and lobbing bricks into businesses.

“We came together as Pittsburghers and supported a First Amendment right to gather and say more must be done,” Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto (D) told reporters over the weekend. “And then it was hijacked.”

Some local officials were even more blunt. After reviewing footage of the weekend’s events, Jenny Durkan, the mayor of Seattle, said she feared the black community would shoulder the blame for havoc others caused.

“It is striking how many of the people who were doing the looting and stealing and the fires over the weekend were young white males,” Durkan (D) said in an interview.

President Trump on Monday evening said in a Rose Garden address that he stands with demonstrators who condemn Floyd’s death, as peaceful protesters were cleared with flash-bang explosives and tear gas so he could pose for a photograph in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

“These are not acts of peaceful protest; they are acts of domestic terror,” said Trump, who earlier Monday encouraged governors to “dominate” the streets with the militaristic tactics already in use in parts of the country.

Violence had erupted in some of the early demonstrations starting last week, with protesters in Minneapolis setting several businesses on fire along with the police precinct.

But from Baltimore to Sacramento, black protesters also were filmed protecting storefronts and placing their bodies before police barricades to preserve principles of nonviolence, and to prevent backlash disproportionately aimed at them. Videos emerged, too, of them confronting white demonstrators who had usurped the mantra of “black lives matter,” which gave birth to a movement for racial justice and police accountability, in seemingly random acts of defacement.

“Don’t spray stuff on here when they’re going to blame black people for this,” a black woman admonished two vandals outside of a Starbucks in Los Angeles.

In East Liberty, a gentrifying neighborhood of Pittsburgh, a young black protester delivered a case of bottled water to a phalanx of police officers standing guard at a demonstration on Sunday outside of a Target store.

“With all this stuff going on, I just wanted to spread the positivity,” said Alexander Cash, 23, who lost his job at a nearby Residence Inn because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. “It doesn’t matter if it’s one or 45 cops standing there. I can walk up to them and still be peaceful.”

That sort of caution was being undermined by intentionally destabilizing acts, warned Tim Stevens, a longtime civil rights activist in Pittsburgh.

“People who do not have the social justice commitment at heart, people who really don’t care about George Floyd-- they care only about an opportunity to cause disruption-- how many of those people were in Pittsburgh over the weekend?” he asked. “How many were out across America?”

Similar questions have become acute from Austin, where a racial justice group on Sunday canceled a planned assembly for fear of violent escalation by unaffiliated activists, to Fargo, N.D., where police questioned four men carrying assault rifles to a protest site in a bid to protect businesses. In Denver, police officers commandeered firearms from anti-government gun enthusiasts who self-identify as “Boogaloo boys,” part of a far-right militia movement.

“These are people who are agent provocateurs,” Chas Moore, the executive director of the Austin Justice Coalition, said of the extremists joining the protests. He canceled his group’s demonstration, originally planned for Sunday, after the chaos of Saturday night. “These are extremists and anarchists, not right or left. They want complete annihilation of the system, and they’re at the forefront of the fires and the breaking of vehicles.”

Others warned against tagging certain bad actors for responsibility, especially after Minnesota officials at first tried to lay blame for damage on out-of-state protesters, allegations that failed to find support in arrest records. Over the weekend, Melvin Carter, the mayor of St. Paul, Minn., walked back comments initially asserting that “every person” detained in protests came from other states. In fact, data showed nearly all of those arrested gave addresses in Minnesota.

Durkan said the age profile of those arrested in Seattle skewed young, and she pledged to examine the demographics more closely. Officials in Pittsburgh and Austin said they did not break arrest data down by race, making it difficult to discover whether claims of culpability were reflected in on-the-ground enforcement efforts.

“It’s very easy for the government to create this binary of good protesters and bad protesters, and it always fits their whim,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of the racial justice group Color of Change. The dilemma, Robinson said, is how to welcome new faces to the fold without inviting chaos: “We are in a really complicated moment, and we have a lot more questions.”

The complexity was deepened when President Trump, with Attorney General William P. Barr’s backing, faulted anarchists and left-wing activists for the upheaval without furnishing any evidence.

On Monday, the president’s allies trumpeted news of the charges against Bartels, a day after the president said he would designate an anti-fascist collective known as antifa as a “terrorist organization,” though he has no apparent legal authority to do so.

A former friend of Bartels who corresponded with him for several years before they had a falling out in May said Bartels never once mentioned antifa, some of whose adherents favor aggressive tactics.

The friend, a 17-year-old who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared online harassment, said Bartels was militant about veganism but otherwise espouses views that do not fall neatly along ideological lines. Another teenager who moved in the city’s pop-punk scene with Bartels said the 20-year-old seemed to loath establishment forces, no matter their partisan makeup. But neither understood why Bartels would have smashed a police vehicle in broad daylight, as police accuse him of doing.

Similar scenes of destruction appeared in numerous cities.

In downtown Austin, a crowd of several hundred protesters massed outside Austin Police Department headquarters on Sunday evening. With their numbers increasing, protesters eventually streamed over a concrete embankment and onto Interstate 35, a thoroughfare that slices Austin along racial and economic lines.

The crowd was a diverse mix of black, white and Hispanic demonstrators, but it was the young white protesters who seemed to push the limits. As the crowd walked south to an exit, white protesters were spray-painting the asphalt and a concrete median.

One white woman was observed applying an adhesive to a traffic cone in an attempt to adhere it to the roadway while a black protester walked by, turning his head in apparent surprise. Later in the evening, white protesters threw plastic water bottles at police, drawing rebuke from some black members of the crowd.

“The police are targeting black protesters out here with rubber bullets,” said Maredith Drake, 43, who had been offering first aid to injured protesters all weekend. “We think they feel like they’ll be less accountable if they shoot a black person instead of a white one.”

You don't usually hear something about the political fray from former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But yesterday, writing for The Atlantic, former chief Mike Mullen wrote about his reaction to seeing Trump's ugly stunt at St. John's in a powerful essay, I Cannot Remain Silent-- Our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so. I imagine there are a lot of military officers who feel the exact same way. "It sickened me, yesterday," he wrote, "to see security personnel-- including members of the National Guard-- forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president's visit outside St. John's Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump's leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent. Whatever Trump's goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces. There was little good in the stunt... We must ensure that African Americans-- indeed, all Americans-- are given the same rights under the Constitution, the same justice under the law, and the same consideration we give to members of our own family. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so. Too many foreign and domestic policy choices have become militarized; too many military missions have become politicized. This is not the time for stunts. This is the time for leadership."

And just a few hours ago, Trump's own handpicked former Defense Secretary , James Mattis, finally weighed in: "Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens-- much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside." Go get 'em, MAD DOG! Your country needs you now more than ever before!

This afternoon, the Washington Post reported that a growing number [of] far-right extremists who once organized mainly online have been inserting themselves into the real-world protests roiling much of the nation, sowing confusion about the nature of the protests and seeking attention for their causes. They’ve appeared, sometimes carrying assault rifles, at protests in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia and dozens of other cities, often wearing Hawaiian shirts-- a seemingly goofy uniform that, within the ranks of their movement, signals adherence to a violent, divisive, anti-government ideology. This increasingly visible spillover from radical online forums has alarmed researchers, who for months have tracked surging support for groups advocating armed rebellion as their conversations have spread from fringe platforms such as 4chan and Gab to mainstream forums on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter and YouTube. The largest groups have hundreds of thousands of followers... Some far-right groups have purposefully sown confusion by impersonating left-wing activists, adding chaos to already turbulent days of protests in which local officials have blamed unnamed outsiders and left-wing groups for the mayhem."

Writing for RightWingWatch.org Monday, Kyle Mantyla noted that "MAGA 'life coach' and proudly amoral right-wing broadcaster Brenden Dilley said during his livestream program today that he and millions of other gun-loving Americans are just waiting until President Donald Trump 'gives us the green light' to take to the streets and start gunning down activists who have been protesting all over the country following the police killing of George Floyd."

How Willing Are Republicans To Blow Up The Country To Entrench Trumpism?

Rick Wiles wants some of Fatt Gaetz's pizza

Wednesday we watched, many of us aghast, as Matt Gaetz and a pack of fascist-oriented extremists barged into an impeachment deposition and shut it down, Gaetz stuffing pepperoni pizza's down his fat face... before waddling upstairs to vote against the SHIELD Act which seeks to protect American elections from foreign interference. Thursday, sickening South Carolina closet queen, Lindsey Graham, pulled his head out of Trump's ass long enough to introduce a Senate resolution semi-condemning the House impeachment inquiry (as explicitly demanded by Trumpanzee, Jr.)

This kind of Republican Party activity inside Congress may appear laughable to normal people but it absolutely encourages crackpots like Trumpist psychopath Rick Wiles to spread venomous calls for violence. Wiles has taken the GOP civil war talk seriously, as Right Wing Watch's Kyle Mantyla reported Wednesday. Wiles is threatening murder-- against members of Congress who vote to remove Trump. Wiles in the senior pastor at a Satanic anti-Jesus church in Vero Beach, Florida and the host of a racist internet radio show. Fox News brings him out of the fringe now and then as a guest, but he's probably best known for his anti-Semitic TruNews website, a purveyor of hatred and violence. Maybe when the Secret Service finishes pestering Eminem, they'll have a talk with Wiles about something truly threatening to the country.

End Times broadcaster, rabid anti-Semite, and ardent conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles warned on his “TruNews” program last night that if President Donald Trump is removed from office, Trump supporters who “know how to fight” will hunt down Democratic legislators and kill them.

“If they take him out, there is going to be violence in America,” Wiles said. “There are people in this country-- veterans, cowboys, mountain men, guys that know how to fight-- and they’re going to make a decision that the people that did this to Donald Trump are not going to get away with it and they’re going to hunt them down.”

“I’m serious,” he continued. “If these people in Washington think that they are going to get away with it, it’s not going to happen. The Trump supporters are going to hunt them down. It’s going to happen and this country is going to be plunged into darkness and they brought it upon themselves because they won’t back off.”

Wiles said that Democrats have “waged war” against Trump voters for three years in an effort to undo the 2016 election and Trump supporters “are fed up with it and they know that if they get away with this, there is no country left.”

“They are going to go on a rampage and you’re not going to be able to put it back in the bottle,” Wiles said.

“Once the blood starts flowing, it’s nearly impossible to stop,” added co-host Edward Szall.

Far Right Anti-LGBTQ Evangelical Extremists On The Warpath For Trump And His Republican Enablers

You may recall that last cycle Blue America teamed up with a group of progressive evangelical pastors, Vote Common Good, to help progressive candidates across the country get in touch with evangelical voters who were not feeling Trump and his enablers were good for their families and our country. They helped elect more than a few Democrats to the House, including Katie Porter (D-CA) and Veronica Escobar (D-TX). This cycle they are continuing their work with Mike Siegel (TX), Kara Eastman (NE), Audrey Denney (CA), J.D. Scholten (IA).

Right Wing Watch reported yesterday that the viciously anti-LGBTQ neo-Nazi operation, Family Research Council is targeting Vote Common Good with their typical abuse against progressive organizations and are fundraising by denigrating them and lying about them.

The most recent mail item signed by Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and distributed to supporters takes direct aim at Vote Common Good, a liberal faith organization whose stated purpose is “changing the narrative that has under-girded white Evangelical and Catholic support for President Trump Republicans who, for a variety of reasons, have put other priorities over the common good.”

“The Democrat Party often feels resistant to connecting with religiously-minded voters, while the Republican Party is held hostage by religious extremism. We will work hard to help both parties engage Common Good religiously oriented voters in ways that will add benefit to their political expression and not allow religion to be a wedge issue in our politics,” Vote Common Good’s website states.

But the envelope containing the fundraising letter from Family Research Council declares in bold font: “SOROS EXPOSED! His plan to send out liberal Christians quoting Scripture to deceive and divide Evangelical Voters.”

Family Research Council tells supporters in the fundraising letter that Vote Common Good “sends out ultra-liberal pastors and speakers who identify as Christians and dress up their radical political agenda in biblical terms” and asks supporters to donate “the most generous gift you can manage at this time.”

“You and I must act now to alert our brothers and sisters in Christ not to fall for this deception,” Perkins writes, going on to characterize faith leaders working with Vote Common Good as “deceivers” who “sow confusion and division among Bible-believing Christians.”

In another fundraising letter received last week, Perkins urged supporters to send Family Research Council “the most generous donation you can manage” with a signed piece of paper pledging to pray for President Trump. Perkins wrote that the signed cards would be delivered to the White House “as soon as possible.” But those who send the prayer pledge back to Family Research Council are told to keep an attached bookmark that reminds them to pray for Trump.

Vote Common Good did several successful high-visibility events in evangelical communities with J.D. Scholten in western Iowa last year. This morning, J.D. reminded me that "The Democratic Party shouldn’t automatically cede religious voters to the Republican party. It’s when we write off people and places like Rural America, and Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, that we lose elections, and our country is worse off. We need to get out there and connect directly with the people and fight for every vote. We have to show up and prove that we are the party of family values: fighting for affordable and comprehensive healthcare, quality education, safe communities to live in and raise a family, decent jobs with benefits-- the list goes on!"

It was author and filmmaker Frank Schaefer, an expert on the religionist right, who first introduced us to Vote Common Good. This morning he wrote that "America's white evangelicals were asked by Trump to choose between himself and Jesus. "They chose Trump." I asked him what to make of this attack on fellow Christians. He told me this morning that "In targeting VCG there is an echo of what Jeffress said:

I’ve literally spoken to thousands and thousands of evangelical Christians, I have never seen them more angry over any issue than this attempt to illegitimately remove this president from office, overturn the 2016 election and negate the votes of millions of evangelicals in the process. And if the Democrats are successful in removing the president from office, I’m afraid it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this nation from which this country will never heal.

"Now Trump is conducting an all-out assault on the impeachment process, calling it a coup in a pair of tweets posted on Tuesday:

As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!

What drives the depth and intensity of support for Trump? And how far are those supporters willing to go to keep him in the White House? A desire for the imposition of a whites-only theocracy is what drives the white evangelical Trump vote-- 'Christian America.'"

UPDATE: Sign Me Up:

Ted Lieu (D-CA) took note of the Family Research Council attacks on VCG as well. "Vote Common Good must be doing good work if the Family Research Council is fear mongering about them. If protecting the planet, providing affordable healthcare, and cleaning up our government is a 'radical political agenda' then sign me up!"

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.

The Women's March Is Crucially Important, And... And But...

I don't go in for identity politics at all. Voting for someone because they were born a woman, gay, of any particular religion, Asian or black, for example, is not my cup pf tea. Nor is voting for someone who is a veteran, a scientist, a doctor or part of any age group. Take women. Women make up 51% of the population but just 22% of the Senate and 19% of the House. That's outrageous. And that's why when when two candidates-- one man and one woman-- are equally good, I'll vote for the woman. But, not all women candidates are good candidates or good political leaders. Some are absolutely horrible in fact. Look at the House. Arguably, the very best member of the House is Pramila Jayapal, a woman elected from Seattle. Katherine Clark (D-MA), Judy Chu (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Yvette Clarke (D-NY) have fantastic voting records too. And you want to find incredible leadership and courageousness in Congress? Look no further than Elizabeth Warren in the Senate and Barbara Lee in the House. Bad news though. The absolute rotgut worst Democrat in the House is a woman: Kyrsten Sinema, the head of the Blue Dogs who represents a nice blue district in the Phoenix area. And she isn't the only Democratic woman who is so horrible that no one who believes in Democratic values should support her. Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL), Cheri Bustos (Blue Dog-IL), and Jacky Rosen (NV) have amassed voting records that no one but Paul Ryan and EMILY's List could possibly like. In the Senate, the worst Democrat is Heidi Heitkamp-- yes, my friends, even worse than Joe Manchin. And who voted to throw the DREAMers under the bus-- or in this case onto a bus headed for Mexico or El Salvador-- Friday night? Heitkamp and Claire McCaskill (as well as Manchin and Joe Donnelly).

Among candidates for Congress this cycle, people such as Nina Ahmad (D-PA), Katie Porter (D-CA), Jenny Marshall (D-NC), Lisa Brown (D-WA), Jess King (D-PA), Antoinette Sedillo Lopez (D-NM)... are simply the best people running for Congress. It's stupid to call them the best woman candidate when they are just the best candidate, period. I remember how Joni Mitchell used to curse critics at reviewers who called her the "best woman songwriter." You can't imagine how offended she was by that. She was the best songwriter-- end of story. How about that? Those candidates are not the best women candidates; they are the best candidates. Period. You could say Nina Ahmad is the best woman candidate born in Dacca and, technically, you'd be correct. It makes more sense to say she's the best candidate running for Congress. Someone might want to argue with you-- maybe, say, proponents of Randy Bryce or Marie Newman, who might say one of them is better-- so fine, make the argument... but it's not about anyone's plumbing.

Another awesome congressional candidate, a woman, running in the Houston area, is Dayna Steele. She's amazing and would make a fantastic member of Congress with a unique and much-needed perspective. Yesterday she emailed he supporters about the woman's march: "One year ago, I marched with my husband and youngest son in downtown Houston. Expecting to see maybe 500 people, I was stunned to find over 30,000 women, men, and children. That scene repeated itself all over the world, where people gathered to take a stand.  When the march was over my young son asked 'What good will this do? What will you do moving forward?' After much thought and counsel, I decided to run for Congress. Today, with the government shut down because folks like Brian Babin won't do their job, I’m marching again with my husband and youngest son, this time as a candidate for the 36th district of Texas. If you support women’s rights, equal rights, healthcare for all, quality public education, DACA, CHIP, and making people‘s lives better, I’m asking you to support our campaign today." Support her here.



"Activists," wrote Michelle Price and Anita Snow, "are returning to the streets a year after a million people rallied worldwide at marches for female empowerment, hoping to create an enduring political movement that will elect more women to government office... A rally Sunday in Las Vegas will launch an effort to register 1 million voters and target swing states in the midterm elections. The 2017 rally in Washington, D.C., and hundreds of similar marches created solidarity for those denouncing President Donald Trump’s views on abortion, immigration, LGBT rights and more. Afterward, a wave of women decided to run for elected office and the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct became a cultural phenomenon. 'We made a lot of noise,' said Elaine Wynn, an organizer. 'But now how do we translate that noise into something concrete or fulfilling?' Linda Sarsour, one of the four organizers of last year’s Washington march, said Las Vegas was slotted for a major rally because it’s a strategic swing state that gave Hillary Clinton a narrow win in the presidential election and will have one of the most competitive Senate races in 2018. Democrats believe they have a good chance of winning the seat held by embattled Republican Sen. Dean Heller and weakening the GOP’s hold on the chamber."

Too bad [male] puppetmasters Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer handpicked one of the worst Democrats in the House, Jacky Rosen, as the Democratic candidate for that Senate seat. I'd vote for a pool of puke on the street before voting for Jacky Rosen. And the DCCC just endorsed a garbage candidate for Rosen's seat in the House, an incredibly wealthy, Mafia-connected socialite-- and Pelosi crony-- Susie Lee. If you want horrible-- albeit horrible without a penis-- you've got two to support right there in Las Vegas. And then you can feel like you've been cheated next year when they start voting like Heitkamp and McCaskill.

Instead, we should be putting our energy into electing great candidates-- many of whom are women-- who are shunned by corrupted slime like Reid and Schumer and the DCCC. Another Blue Dog in the House who is beyond horrible is Chicagoland walking garbage pile Dan Lipinski. He joined Paul Ryan to speak at the counter-rally against Choice on Friday. And his opponent is not just better than he is; his opponent is fantastic and someone who will make Congress a better place. Oh, and she happens be a woman: Marie Newman. Robin Marty, writing for Right Wing Watch wrote about that anti-Choice movement's rally and the horror of what's behind it. This is a lot more salient than electing crap candidates in Las Vegas.

When tens of thousands of abortion-rights opponents gather in Washington, D.C., this week to protest the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, many will be lobbying the Trump administration and Congress on measures that they hope will chip away at and ultimately lead to the repeal of Roe. But a smaller group of activists are taking a much more direct approach to their efforts to stop legal abortion. Quietly, the anti-choice “rescue” movement has been trying out new tactics to test the limits of the FACE Act, the 1994 law that stopped them from physically blocking the entrances of abortion clinics in order to deny women access.

“Rescues” or abortion clinic sit-ins, are nothing new to the anti-abortion movement. In 1991, as many as 500 protesters a day gathered in front of abortion clinics in Wichita, Kansas, blocking patients from entering the buildings. The anti-abortion “rescue” movement was at its height then, with thousands gathering at national events to shut down clinics, while dedicated local activists focused on regular daily or weekly “rescues” that involved barricading elevators, blocking the vehicles of abortion providers, even locking themselves to buildings, cement blocks or cars so they couldn’t be removed from the premises.

The FACE Act put an end to almost all of those tactics. Signed into law in 1994 by Democratic President Bill Clinton, FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) made it a federal crime to physically obstruct a clinic entrance or use force, threat of force or intimidation against anyone attempting to provide or procure an abortion, or to intentionally damage or destroy the property of a reproductive health services facility. (FACE’s rules also applied to anyone trying to block access to a place of worship.)

The FACE Act brought a quick end to the rescue movement as it existed in its heyday, ending the ability of anti-choice activists to physically prevent women from accessing abortion. But the strength of the law depends on how aggressively the federal government is willing to enforce it. In the five years that the FACE Act was in effect under President Clinton, the administration used it to file charges in 46 criminal or civil cases. During the two-term presidency of Republican George W. Bush, on the other hand, the Department of Justice had a 75 percent drop in criminal FACE Act violation charges, and filed just one civil case in eight years. Aggressive enforcement began again with the election of Democratic President Barack Obama, whose administration prosecuted 11 criminal and nine civil FACE Act violations in his first term alone.

With another Republican president in the White House-- one who anti-abortion groups worked zealously to get elected once they accepted the fact that he would be their inevitable nominee-- it is still unclear how aggressively the Department of Justice will enforce the FACE Act. Last year, the Trump Justice Department showed that it was willing to prosecute the most flagrant FACE violations after the radical anti-choice group Operation Save America attempted an old-school clinic blockade in Louisville, Kentucky. Police arrested 11 anti-abortion activists associated with Operation Save Americain May after they sat and directly blocked the front doors of the only abortion clinic in the state. Ten of the activists were ultimately charged with civil FACE Act violations, and a temporary restraining order was issued to keep them from the clinic property when they returned for a national event two months later. A full trial on the charges will occur this spring.

Whether the Trump administration will pursue less clear-cut cases remains to be seen. In response, anti-abortion activists appear to be nibbling around the edges of the law, trying out new strategies to test how far the Justice Department will allow them to go.

...More anti-abortion activist groups are staging marches and protest events like this outside abortion clinic doors to thwart patients from obtaining legal abortion care. If a patient approaching a clinic for medical care is confronted with a sea of thousands of protesters, that can hardly be seen as anything other than intimidation of a person attempting to access an abortion. Yet these marches, because they are currently being organized in a permissible way in public thoroughfares, often come with the assistance and tacit support of local government and law enforcement agencies.

While the Trump administration is in power, it remains very unlikely that we will see many activists charged with FACE Act violations-- that is, unless we see more blatant Operation Save America-style clinic-door blockades like we saw in the spring of 2016. But as for, more tentative steps into potential FACE violations pacifist clinic trespasses, city-issued and permitted mass marches and similar tactics-- it is safe to expect these to multiply, especially as federal authorities stick their heads in the sand and local law enforcement provide little more than wrist slaps in response.

And considering that this was how the original rescue movement grew from local nuisance to a national threat to access, that could be the most alarming development of all.

This is Dan Lipinksi's world. Last Thursday, when the Republicans brought up the enabling legislation for another of their ugly and vicious anti-Choice bills, the so-called Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, only two "Democrats" voted with the Republicans to allow the bill to move forward, vile Blue Dogs Dan Lipinski and Collin Peterson. The DCCC will never quit Dan or Collin. But supporting Marie Newman and helping her replace Lipinski is a far more effective way to bring about real change than backing Reid's, Schumer's and the DCCC's godawful women candidates in Nevada. We're not asking you to support Marie Newman because she's a woman-- although I'm happy she is and that's a crucial part of who she is-- but because she is the best candidate and because will make Congress a better place because of what she's got between her ears. If you click the ActBlue congressional thermometer on the right, you'll find Marie Newman... and a whole slew of awesome women candidates-- and awesome male candidates. These are the people we should be supporting if we want a better country, not Jacky Rosen, not Kyrsten Sinema and not Susie Lee.

The choice couldn't be more clear

I Wonder If There Are Still Any Gays And Lesbians Who Support Trump

This week Roy Moore, who still refuses to concede defeat in the Alabama Senate race, attacked Doug Jones' gay son, Carson for... being gay. (Moore's own son is a serial felon who has been repeatedly arrested for a variety of crimes.) Carson Jones is a zookeeper in Denver who specializes in taking care of elephants. Trump's detestable sons shoot elephants for fun. And Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and vice president, Mike Pence, where named by the advocate this week as two of the three worst homophobes of 2017.

And yet... among all the other blatant and absurd lies Trump told on the campaign trail in 2016 was that he would be a friend to the LGBT community. He's been anything but a friend... except in the case of gay billionaires and gay Wall Street executives. This week Peter Montgomery examined the impact of Trump's first in the Oval Office on the gay community for Right Wing Watch.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump thrilled conservative gay leaders. He promised to “do everything in my power to protect LGBTQ citizens” and described himself as “fine” with marriage equality, which he said had been “settled” by the U.S. Supreme Court. Gay Republicans, who have had little experience with candidates expressing anything other than hostility, lost all sense of perspective. Chris Barron, a co-founder of GOProud, pronounced Trump “a better friend to the LGBT community than Hillary Clinton could ever be.” Breitbartista Milo Yiannapoulos went even further, declaring, “Donald Trump is the most pro-gay candidate in American electoral history.” Both statements were obviously and wildly untrue, as Trump’s damaging first year in office has made clear. As Miranda’s recent post noted, this was the year that the Religious Right moved into the White House. And the consequences for LGBTQ people have been predictably awful.

It is true that Trump once held up a rainbow flag someone handed him at a rally. But more often he was on stage at Religious Right events waving his Bible and pledging to make Christian conservatives more powerful while giving them the Supreme Court of their dreams. There was no way that Trump could keep his promises to the Religious Right-- which delivered an overwhelming majority of white evangelical voters to Trump-- without sacrificing the rights and well-being of LGBTQ Americans.

Indeed, last December, anti-LGBTQ extremist Scott Lively celebrated the election of Trump, who he said wisely concealed his anti-equality agenda as a candidate. Lively predicted that after Trump named new Supreme Court justices, “Kennedy and his homosexualist fellow travelers will presumably never again be able to repeat their past acts of violence to the Constitution and its Biblical foundations.”

Many LGBTQ people have been or will be harmed by broad-based Trump-GOP policies, like the tax bill and its assault on the Affordable Care Act, that also affect millions of non-LGBTQ Americans. But LGBTQ Americans are also facing very focused attacks from the Trump administration. That’s why NBC called Trump’s first 100 days “fear-inducing” for LGBTQ Americans. And by mid-year, German Lopez at Vox was calling Trump’s campaign promises to the LGBTQ community “total bullshit” and Luke Darby at GQ was calling the administration “a disaster for LGBT Americans.” The Human Rights Campaign’s Sarah McBride went even further, writing in Cosmopolitan that the Trump administration has “revealed itself to be the ugliest, most explicitly anti-LGBTQ presidency in U.S. history.” Journalist Michelangelo Signorile seconded that emotion in September.

Here are some of the low points:

Anti-Equality Judges

Trump’s tepid support for marriage equality-- the Supreme Court “settled” the issue and he was “fine” with it-- was always in conflict with his pledge to name Supreme Court justices from a list pre-approved by two right-wing organizations, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. The Federalist Society is committed to bringing about right-wing ideological domination in the federal judiciary. And the Heritage Foundation is explicitly committed to waging a multi-faceted campaign to reverse the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. They defiantly insist that the Supreme Court’s ruling-- which they denounce as illegitimate—settled nothing.

It’s worth noting that months before Trump’s “fine” comment, he sang a different tune when speaking with the Christian Broadcasting Network. Speaking to that audience, he called the marriage equality ruling “shocking” and said he had been “very much in favor of letting the states decide” whether to let gay people get married. He assured CBN’s David Brody that conservative evangelicals “can trust me on traditional marriage.”

Trump had pledged to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant for more than a year by Antonin Scalia’s death-- and Republican senators’ unconscionable refusal to even consider President Barack Obama’s nominee-- with a judge in the mold of the intensely anti-gay Scalia. The Religious Right was thrilled with the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, who showed his stripes with an ideologically strident but legally and logically flawed dissent in a case involving the rights of gay parents. Shannon Minter, a prominent LGBTQ legal advocate, accused Gorsuch of “deliberately trying to muddy the waters” and “trying to provide a road map for hostile state courts” to treat same-sex couples differently from other married couples.

Among Trump’s other awful nominees for lifetime jobs on the federal bench: Matthew Kacsmaryk, deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute, who opposes anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people; Damien Schiff, who slammed an anti-bullying program for promoting the “homosexual lifestyle”; and Jeff Mateer, who called transgender children part of “Satan’s plan.” Mateer’s nomination was drawn after it faced intense criticism.

In an exposé of the anti-equality Alliance Defending Freedom, journalist Sarah Posner noted that Trump’s solicitor general, Noel Francisco, is an ADF-allied attorney, and that at least four of Trump’s judicial nominees have ADF ties.

Stripping protections from LGBTQ students, parents and families

One of the first official actions by the Trump administration was the rescinding of an Obama administration letter that had urged public schools to respect the right of transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms appropriate to their gender identity. Then-press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump saw this is a “states’ rights issue.”

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in May at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing that states should be free to funnel tax dollars to private schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students and families.

Ban on Transgender Servicemembers

Trump announced via Twitter that he would ban transgender people from serving in the armed forces “in any capacity,” a policy adopted at the urging of Religious Right leaders like Tony Perkins and over the objections of military leaders. The policy change, while yet to be fully implemented, threatens to upend the lives and careers of thousands of trans people now serving honorably in the military.

Defending Anti-Gay Discrimination

The Department of Justice reversed itself and staked out a legal position in opposition to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, telling a federal appeals court that the ban on sex discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not apply to discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Reinforcing the Religious Right’s Weaponization of Religious Liberty

Religious Right leaders have made a major strategic push to redefine religious liberty as a weapon against laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. Trump brought anti-gay Religious Right leaders to the White House to celebrate his signing of an executive order on religious liberty; while it did not go as far as conservative evangelicals had hoped, the order left it in Jeff Sessions’ hands to develop the policy. When it comes to protecting civil rights, you really don’t want to be in Jeff Sessions’ hands. Sessions’ guidance on religious liberty included vague but broad language, saying “at least some for-profit corporations” can refuse to hire workers whose beliefs and conduct are “consistent with the employer’s religious beliefs.”

In a behind-closed-doors speech to the anti-gay Religious Right legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, Sessions praised the group’s work to create religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws.

The Trump administration has urged the Supreme Court to back a Colorado baker who ran afoul of the state’s anti-discrimination law by refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern called the administration’s brief in the case “cynical, dishonest, and embarrassing.” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed comments made by the solicitor general’s office and said Trump would have no problem with businesses hanging signs saying they don’t serve LGBT customers.

Trump also supports passage of the First Amendment Defense Act, which would enshrine the Religious Right’s desired right to discriminate into federal law.

Empowering an anti-LGBTQ inner circle

In addition to Cabinet nominees like Sessions, DeVos, and Ben Carson, Trump has surrounded himself with anti-LGBT Religious Right activists and leaders and given them powerful positions within the Executive Branch. For example, Roger Severino, a former Heritage Foundation staffer with what a dozen U.S. senators described as “a long history of making bigoted statements toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people,” is now leading Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The intensely anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council has bragged of its victories, which include placing former FRC staffers in “top positions” at the Department of Health and Human Services. FRC’s Ken Blackwell, who says that homosexuality “defies barnyard logic,” led the domestic policy operation for Trump’s transition team.

ProPublica revealed in April that James Renne, who was part of Trump’s transition “landing team” at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence before snagging a senior job at the Department of Education, had helped to orchestrate a scandalous purge of LGBTQ employees and information at the Office of Special Counsel during the George W. Bush administration.

Trump has also boosted the public profile of anti-LGBTQ activists like Robert Jeffress, one of Trump’s earliest and most ardent evangelical supporters. Jeffress was chosen to preach at a private service before Trump’s inauguration and has remained a high-profile defender of the administration. Jeffress calls homosexuality “a miserable lifestyle,” said that marriage equality is “the greatest sign of the End Times that we see in our country right now,” and declared that “as a nation, we cannot be blessed by God if we’re rejecting God.”

Appointing anti-LGBT activists to United Nations Delegation

Trump appointed officials from C-Fam and the Heritage Foundation to the U.S. delegation to UN Commission on the Status of Women. C-Fam, also classified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is so committed to resisting any recognition of the human rights of LGBTQ people in international agreements that it has teamed up with some of the world’s most repressive regimes to safeguard “traditional” notions of gender, sexuality and family.

Praising Anti-LGBTQ Groups

Trump’s first year in office has been one long thank-you to the conservative white evangelicals who voted overwhelmingly to make him president. Trump and Pence joined other GOP leaders at Ralph Reed’s Road To Majority conference in June; Trump spoke at the opening luncheon, where he said, “I will never, ever let you down.” A few months later, Trump was back before Religious Right activists at the Values Voter Summit, which is convened by the Family Research Council, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.

Supporting Roy Moore

Roy Moore, twice removed from his position as Alabama’s Chief Justice, was the most extreme anti-LGBTQ candidate in recent memory. Moore’s hostility to gay people extends far beyond marriage equality; he believes homosexuality should be criminalized. Yet Trump not only backed Moore’s candidacy with speeches and robocalls, he also dragged the Republican National Committee into spending money on Moore’s behalf.