This article caught my eye while scanning news for this blog. Even though I already know that Racists do what Racist do, Bigots- religious, gender, ethnic or any other types do what they do. These are the folks emboldened by Mr. Trump. His tolerance of their actions before and now after the election amounts to abetting criminals as evidenced in the article below. This is not just about Race, this is about America as we want it to be and as the Constitution provides. MA
They said despicable things about the Obamas but say they’re not racists. Yes, they are
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama arrive for a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016, in Washington. Andrew HarnikAP
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama arrive for a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016, in Washington. Andrew HarnikAP
By Roger Guffey
(This column first appeared in the Lexington (Ky.,) Herald-Leader.)
Psychologists have long recognized rationalization as a defense mechanism that people use to excuse unacceptable or offensive behaviors by offering some pseudo-logical reasoning or self-serving explanations.
Perhaps we justify that sumptuous dessert because we have earned a reward for sticking to our diet. Or we tell our boss we are sick, when we really want to go to the last game of the season. Some of these excuses are harmless, but far too often they are not.
For the last eight years, people who have mounted despicable attacks on President Obama and his family have tried to rationalize their bigotries. Consider these examples:
A Republican candidate here in Kentucky won a legislative seat, even though he had posted images of the Obama family as a band of monkeys, but he says he is not a racist.
Yes, you are.
A public official in West Virginia said she will be glad to have a dignified white first lady, instead of seeing an ape in high heels. But she says she is not a racist.
Yes, you are.
In Sheridan, Ind., people made a parade float of President Obama in a toilet, but said they are not racists.
Yes, you are.
A mayor in Pennsylvania ran a picture of Michele Obama on a wagon of orangutans under the caption ‘Move-in day at the White House’, but denied being a racist.
Yes, you are.
The people who insist that President Obama is not a native-born American deny they are racists.
Yes, you are.
A candidate in Tennessee posted a billboard with the caption “MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN,” but he denied that he is a racist.
Yes, you are.
A mayor in Washington State ran an image of Michelle Obama as a gorilla, saying she could be attractive only to another monkey like her husband. Of course, he says he is not a racist.
Yes, you are.
When a gorilla escaped from a zoo in South Carolina, a GOP politician in South Carolina posted a Facebook page telling people to be on the lookout for Michelle Obama’s ancestor, but he says he is not racist.
Yes, you are.
After the 2008 election, some right-wing extremists circulated bumper stickers, quoting Psalm 109, that pray for God to kill President Obama, leaving his wife a widow and his children orphans, but they denied they are racists.
Yes, you are.
One of my favorite Abraham Lincoln stories relates his encounter with an elitist lawyer who, during a trial, dismissed him as a rustic bumpkin. Lincoln posed him a simple riddle. “If we call a tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have?’ The smug lawyer replied, “Five.” Lincoln corrected him. “No, he still has four legs, because calling a tail a leg does not make it one.”
People are free to engage in self-delusion if they wish, but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it is a duck, and these comments are racist. But perhaps these bigots should heed the poet Robert Burns’ advice in the poem “To A Louse.”
‘O would some power the gift give us to see ourselves as others see us.’
(Roger Guffey lives in Lexington, Ky., and is a math professor and a Sunday school teacher.)
Comments Off on We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned
I am hoping enough people read this to understand how they are manipulated into poor choices and opinions, I have mentioned many times the way we are “advertised” into saying, thinking and acting in a certain way. MA
“The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right.”
A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.
We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one.
We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. The site was registered anonymously. So we brought in some professional help.
By day, John Jansen is head of engineering at Master-McNeil Inc., a tech company in Berkeley, Calif. In the interest of real news he helped us track down the owner of Denverguardian.com.
Jansen started by looking at the site’s history. “Commonly that’s called scraping or crawling websites,” he says.
Jansen is kind of like an archaeologist. He says that nothing you do on the Web disappears — it just gets buried — like a fossil. But if you do some digging you’ll find those fossils and learn a lot of history.
The “Denver Guardian” was built and designed using a pretty common platform — WordPress. It’s used by bloggers and people who want to create their own websites. Jansen found that the first entry ever for the site was done by someone with the handle LetTexasSecede.
“That was sort of the thread that started to unravel everything,” Jansen says. “I was able to track that through to a bunch of other sites which are where that handle is also present.”
The sites include NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co. All the addresses linked to a single rented server inside Amazon Web Services. That meant they were all very likely owned by the same company. Jansen found an email address on one of those sites and was able to link that address to a name: Jestin Coler.
Online, Coler was listed as the founder and CEO of a company called Disinfomedia. Coler’s LinkedIn profile said he once sold magazine subscriptions, worked as a database administrator and as a freelance writer for among others, International Yachtsman magazine. And, using his name, we found a home address.
On a warm, sunny afternoon I set out with a producer for a suburb of Los Angeles. Coler lived in a middle-class neighborhood of pastel-colored one-story beach bungalows. His home had an unwatered lawn — probably the result of California’s ongoing drought. There was a black minivan in the driveway and a large prominent American flag.
We rang the front doorbell and a man answered, his face obscured by a heavy mesh steel screen. I asked for Jestin Coler. The man indicated that’s who he was. But when I asked about Disinfomedia, he said, “I don’t know what to tell you guys. Have a good day.”
We left Coler our contact information thinking he wasn’t likely to talk. But a couple of hours later he had a change of heart. He sent us an email and we set up an interview.
Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.
“The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction,” Coler says.
He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.
“What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened,” Coler says
During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. “It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they’re about to get served,” Coler says. “It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election.”
Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.
Coler’s company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won’t say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.
At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the “Denver Guardian” that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.
“The people wanted to hear this,” he says. “So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then … our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.”
And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn’t give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.
However, Coler insists this is not about money. It’s about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was “correct.”
Coler says he has tried to shine a light on the problem of fake news. He has spoken to the media about it. But those organizations didn’t know who he actually was. He gave them a fake name: Allen Montgomery.
Coler, a registered Democrat, says he has no regrets about his fake news empire. He doesn’t think fake news swayed the election.
“There are many factors as to why Trump won that don’t involve fake news,” he says. “As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage.
Coler doesn’t think fake news is going away. One of his sites — NationalReport.net — was flagged as fake news under a new Google policy, and Google stopped running ads on it. But Coler had other options.
“There are literally hundreds of ad networks,” he says. “Early last week, my inbox was just filled every day with people because they knew that Google was cracking down — hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites.”
Coler says he has been talking it over with his wife and may be getting out of the fake-news racket. But, he says, dozens, maybe hundreds of entrepreneurs will be ready to take his place. And he thinks it will only get harder to tell their websites from real news sites. They know now that fake news sells and they will only be in it for the money.
Below are highlights of NPR’s interview with Coler.
Interview Highlights
Tell me a little about why you started Disinfomedia?
Late 2012, early 2013 I was spending a lot of time researching what is now being referred to as the alt-right. I identified a problem with the news that they were spreading and created Disinfomedia as a response to that. The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly false or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.
What got you engaged in this?
My educational background is in political science. I’ve always enjoyed the ideas of propaganda and misinformation. Then I coupled that with an interest in what makes things go viral. So that led me to finding those groups and ultimately to finding contributors. But it was just something I had an interest in that I wanted to pursue.
When did you notice that fake news does best with Trump supporters?
Well, this isn’t just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin’s famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it as. This isn’t something that started with Trump. This is something that’s been in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his supporters. When we were coming up with headlines it’s always kind of about the red meat. Trump really got into the red meat. He knew who his base was. He knew how to feed them a constant diet of this red meat.
We’ve tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You’ll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
How many domains do you own and run?
Well, I would say there’s somewhere around 25 domains that I am currently managing. National Report has been my bread and butter, where I’ve spent most of my time. I have people who work with me and for me in developing and maintaining the other sites and social media kind of stuff. [Coler later said not all his sites are fake news.] So I, for the most part, focus on National Report, and a lot of the other stuff is run by other folks on the team.
So, you’re the publisher of an empire.
Well I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an empire but, yes, its several sites [chuckle].
How many people do you have writing for you?
It comes and goes, and as for actual employed writers, again these guys sort of make their own money through ad code. So I don’t say, ‘Hey, you have to write 10 stories this week’ and this and that. Really, we have a more free-form idea where people, when their creativity strikes them then they can write something. And if they’re in a slump then they just go dormant for a while. With that said, at any given time there’s probably 20, 25 contributors all over the country. …
Talk about the “Denver Guardian.”
Well, it’s kind of a side project. We have some people working on next steps in the fake-news industry, and that came from that whole discussion. We had purchased several domain names that sounded legitimate. … More local news sort of stories. The idea was to make the sites look as legit as possible so the home page is going to be local news and local forecast, local sports, some obituaries and things of that nature, and then the actual fake news stories were going to be buried off the home page.
We’ve tried lots of things in the past. The dot-com-dot-co domains were something I toyed in for a while. Those I quickly got away from because you don’t get away long with borrowing someone’s copyright or trademark. That was something that worked very well from a fake-news perspective. People were fooled into the domain name, but that wasn’t so much what we were after. So again, the next step was to go after more city-type sites. And the “Denver Guardian” was one of those sites.
You’re talking about the future of this (fake-news business) which looks more insidious because it’s more real?
That’s the way that it’s going to be. Not just from where I am. I mean, this is probably going to be my last run in the fake-news biz, but I can promise you that it’s not going to go away. It’s even going to grow bigger and it’s going to be harder to identify as it kind of evolves through these steps. …
Do you know who wrote the actual FBI Clinton story?
I do know who wrote the story, but only through an anonymous pen name. Privacy is something that we take very seriously in our writers group. The actual reasonings behind that story … it’s one of hundreds that have been written about mysterious deaths of Clinton associates or political foes. This one kind of took off more than others, I believe, just because of the nature of the story. The people wanted to hear this. So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional. The town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. Then, we had our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.
Why hide your identity?
This isn’t the safest business to be in, to be honest. Just the number of death threats I’ve received. I have a beautiful family, a beautiful life.
Some of these people that we … bait is probably the right word — are often — let’s call them the deplorables, right? They’re not the safest crowd. Some of them I would consider domestic terrorists. So they’re just not people that I want to be knocking on my door.
It seems like National Report is getting spoofier.
If you went to National Report today, it’s specifically satire. “Chris Christie nominated to Supreme Food Court.” “Sarah Palin Banning Muslims from Entering Bristol Palin.” They’re a little bit more offensive than some people care for their satire. I mean fat-shaming and slut-shaming isn’t something that is normally met with applause. But again, it’s a lot more fun in nature.
Do you make serious money?
It depends on what you would call serious money. I think I do pretty well.
Can you say how well?
I would rather not. There have been some people who have been reported on recently. The folks in Long Beach that were doing just all right stuff. They were reporting $10,000 to $30,000 a month; I think that’s probably a relative ballpark.
So you’re doing as well as those?
Yes.
You’re making money through the ads?
Yes.
Who do you work with?
We have several advertisers. Google was one, although they shut down my account last week. We’ve replaced them with other advertisers.
Can I ask who?
There are literally hundreds of ad networks. Literally hundreds. Last week my inbox was just filled everyday with people, because they knew that Google was cracking down — hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites. I kind of applaud Google for their steps, although I think what they’re doing is kind of random. They don’t really have a process in place for identifying these things. I happen to know a very successful site that, as of today, of this morning is still serving Google ads. So it seems to be a kind of arbitrary step that they’re taking either based on, I don’t know if it was my reputation within the industry or specifically the “Denver Guardian” site that angered them, or I don’t know what it is, but back to your question, there’s hundreds of people that will work with me.
What can be done about fake news?
Some of this has to fall on the readers themselves. The consumers of content have to be better at identifying this stuff. We have a whole nation of media-illiterate people. Really, there needs to be something done.
Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur?
Sure.
Are you one of the biggest in the fake-news biz?
If you look at someone who has specifically sometimes peddled in fictional news then I think that I would probably be considered one of the larger sites.
As a liberal, do you have any regrets?
I don’t. Again, this is something that I’ve been crying about for a while. But outside of that, there are many factors as to why Trump won that don’t involve fake news, right? As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage.
You don’t feel responsible.
I do not.
Do you think you would have kept doing it if it wasn’t so lucrative?
Really, the financial part of it isn’t the only motivator for me. I do enjoy making a mess of the people that share the content that comes out of our site. It’s not just the financial incentive for me. I still enjoy the game I guess.
Would you do this all over again?
Well, I guess it came to a head here and we’re talking about it. It’ll be interesting to see what happens moving forward. If I had to, if I knew specifically the “Denver Guardian” situation, that would have been handled differently. But everything else, as far as the work I’ve done with National Report, I’m very proud of, and I’m going to continue doing it.
I’ve written a lot of pretty rough things about Donald Trump over the last 18 months. I’ve called him an entertainer and an emotional extremist, a guy with a black hole t his center. I’ve likened him to P.T. Barnum and a dime store Psychic.
Not once, though, have I suggested that Trump is, personally, a racist or an anti-Semite, which are labels people throw around too often these days. He’s always struck me as an opportunist more than anything else — an act in search of an audience, which he just happened to find in some of the darkest corners of the American psyche.
I figured that if a loud chunk of conservative voters had been anxiously agitating for someone to champion, say, antipoverty programs instead of a wall, Trump would have jumped on that horse just as quickly. Whatever his flaws, I didn’t take him for a devoted bigot.
It’s only now, after another staggering week in our fast unraveling society, that I find myself asking a question I really never imagined asking.
Does the president-elect of the United States feel some genuine kinship with the white nationalists he’s managed to embolden? Or does he just think it’s not a big deal if a bunch of crazy guys go around saluting him like Nazis?
To be clear, I’ve never managed to get very excited about the white power folks who pop up in the news sporadically, marching in parades or holding little conferences in some backwoods Best Western. They’ve always seemed more sad than menacing to me, like the clowns at some crumbling, last-ditch carnival.
But if you haven’t yet watched this video of white nationalists “heiling” Trump in Washington last weekend, you should, because it’s really something.
Here’s a recognized leader of the so-called alt-right movement from which Trump has drawn support and counsel, a guy who wouldn’t look at all out of place as a swastika-clad extra in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” doing a little Hitler impression in Trump’s honor and railing against the media in the original German. (“One wonders if these people are people at all,” he says, which sounds to me like an invitation to violence.)
And this isn’t in some drab Southern banquet room, but rather in the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, a few blocks from the White House. (You’d think these people would at least have had the decency to walk across the plaza to the building named for Woodrow Wilson, who would have agreed with them when it came to mixing races.)
To keep this in perspective, which is important, we’re talking here about maybe 200 white guys in a country of 300 million-plus; it’s not like they’re goose-stepping through the streets by the hundreds of thousands. It’s also not like Trump endorsed the rally or sent a video expressing his gratitude.
But it’s not as if Trump has nothing to do with the brazenness of it, either. Even Republicans have to acknowledge that in his rhetoric and rallies throughout the campaign, Trump relegitimized a kind of racism and xenophobia that had been finally relegated to the margins of public life. He behaved like a human Ouija board, unleashing spirits better consigned to the netherworld.
This is distinct from your run-of-the-mill resentment in white, working-class enclaves, your basic backlash to political correctness gone badly awry, for which I actually have some sympathy. This is taunting Jewish journalists about going to the ovens. This is swastikas popping up again in our cities and suburbs.
This is ordinary citizens walking down the street and being told to go back to their own countries because they aren’t white. This is grown men who run around bullying every guy who doesn’t accept the superiority of white males by calling him a “cuck,” whatever that means.
This is new, or at least resurgent, and it is profoundly frightening to an awful lot of Americans at the moment.
So what is Trump’s response, now that he’s taken on the task of making America great again?
Well, he certainly had no problem summoning outrage this week. On Twitter, he railed against the impertinent cast of “Hamilton,” which he called an overrated show, and against “Saturday Night Live,” which he thought one-sided and not funny. He found time to bitterly complain to the president of NBC News about a photo that made him appear to have a double chin. (Reality is rough, even for a reality TV star.)
But when it came to leading white supremacists raising stiff arms to him as if he were Hitler reincarnate, Trump at first said nothing, and then, under pressure, allowed his spokeswoman to release a terse statement tepidly disavowing their support.
Pushed repeatedly about this at a meeting with reporters and editors from the New York Times, Trump said, “Boy, you are really into this stuff,” as if surprised it should keep coming up. “It’s not a group I want to energize,” he said at one point, “and if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why.”
This, of course, was after he named Steve Bannon, an intellectual hero of the alt-right movement, as his top White House strategist — a pick he much more vehemently defended in the same interview. It was after he chose Jeff Sessions, who was kept off the federal bench because of his ignominious record on race, as the nation’s attorney general, and Michael Flynn, a general who regards all Islam as the enemy, as his national security adviser.
To be clear, Trump isn’t the only Republican who’s oddly reticent when it comes to white nationalists. Where’s Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell? How about loyalists like Rudy Giuliani, who ran the nation’s most Jewish city, or Chris Christie, who would never let this kind of thing go unanswered in New Jersey?
Where’s Jared Kushner, the omnipresent son-in-law, whom Trump apparently trusts with negotiating Middle East peace, and who is, incidentally, an orthodox Jew? Does he not think this might be a moment to exert some influence?
What about all those “Never Trump” leaders who were supposedly standing for a more enlightened Republican Party? I guess Mitt Romney can’t afford to get sidetracked denouncing racism, now that he’s trying to take back all the things he said about Trump and get himself appointed secretary of state.
(By the way, Mitt, when that phone finally rings, you’d better be prepared to hear laughter on the other end. This whole business of making you grovel is what they call payback in the big city.)
But Trump’s is the voice that matters most. He’s the one who ignited new hope for a racist, authoritarian renaissance — and if those hopes aren’t shared by some vast legion of white Americans, neither are they confined to a few hundred. He has some responsibility to curb that enthusiasm before windows and bones start getting smashed.
My guess is that Trump thinks these people are a little nutty, in the way that fervid supporters often are, but not really worth alienating just to please a bunch of people like me. I’m betting he believes that white men, generally speaking, have been abused by the cultural elite and overlooked by policymakers — but that’s a different thing from espousing white supremacy.
And yet if Trump really is more of an opportunist than an ideologue, then he ought to see the opportunity here, too. Some large segment of Americans voted to give him an audition in office, despite grave reservations about his temperament. The latest Pew Research poll found that a large majority of voters — including a sizable segment of those who voted for him — were disgusted by his campaign.
Trump’s success will depend a lot on how well he channels that emotion. He could do himself a lot of good right now by going after neo-Nazis and the like with at least the same fervor he reserves for Broadway actors and photo editors.
If Trump won’t assail hatred on moral grounds, then surely he can bring himself to capitalize on it.
The next few years will be interesting. We have a “business man ” in the White House and his influence in the election has brought out the worst elements of America. If we compare the varied factions that have appeared in this past election to the factions in the middle east we could find several similarities. These assorted and varied factions on both sides all appear to want the same outcomes except for the extremes of each. The worst case in each is the “I want what I want and I want to blame someone else for my issues while getting it”. Mr. Trump has tapped into that sense and has gloried in it. His ascension has unfortunately left us with void that will be filled with the “less than what we need” people to run things. I do not believe Mr. Trump expected (perhaps hoped not to) win but now the real job begins, he will have to put up or shut up. Being an entertainer is a world away from Government (regardless of Ronald Reagan). At best we can expect Congress(?) to step up and do something right, at worse we can expect our trading partners and the outlier Nations to get bolder in their interactions with us. The Real issues we as voters need to pay attention to are the one the Congress address and how they address them. The Congress will use the ineptitude of this administration to do their worse to us, the voters. We can only hope that some one in Congress will continue to push back on the issues that will harm us in general. It is especially important that we as voters pay more attention to detail in this administration as well as the 535 seat fillers who really are the Government. Forget about getting the real story from the media, concentrate on reading for your self and ignore what the Congressional leaders say as they have lied before and will continue to do so. Unfortunately too many of us have missed the shift in the separation of Church and State that the Constitution calls for due to the hype put out by the extreme elements of our society. If we do not press for the return to the real purpose of the Constitution we will soon find that the extremists will have us all in camps for as simple a thing as being a voter and use the misreading of the Constitution as the reason.
Donald Trump’s 60 minutes interview covered a lot of campaign issues and statements. Some statements were walked back and some were not. In a nutshell (my opinion) the bell once rang cannot be unrang! The statements made on the campaign trail that rallied the Alt- Right and Racists to him caused an uptick in Racial violence on the streets of America. This all on top of the tension over police shootings. The folks who voted for Trump because “he tells it like it is”, fail to understand that this is not how the world works. In the real world and on the streets a person who tells it like it is will probably end up in a fight! The tension in America was already high in that the White extremists were already in a Lynching mood because of President Obama’s election now they are emboldened and ready to attack anyone who is not with them. These are the same people who stole people from Africa, decimated the native American population and attacked anyone who is not “white American”. These are the folks who uplifted Trump but for their own purposes not the country’s. It will be interesting to see what occurs in these post-election years. Recently after announcing some staff selections there has been some talk of these selections being Racist or otherwise questionable. People who say some folks are not Racist may be people who have never experienced first hand Racism. When that happens to them perhaps the thinking will change. The real issue here is that many alt right, conservatives , liberals or any of the many labeled factions fail to realize that they have many more commonalities than they realize , with that realization can come some better election outcomes in the future. Remember the change that was mocked in Obama’s first election?, that change was openly mocked and challenged by the “establishment” politics and Trump (which Trump has vowed to disrupt if elected). This election was based on change but what is the nature of the change?, will it be business as usual under the guise of making it better? Pay careful attention to what comes out of Washington in the next few years as the New Government has the same Congress that has performed so poorly for 20 plus years. The alt-right and extremists who want to take America back have now been emboldened but have not improved their knowledge of the effects these changes will have on them as well as the “other” Americans that they so detest.
Politically speaking many people assume labels of Conservative, progressive or liberal with several iterations in between. Too often the selection of a label to describe your views cannot be defined with a single description. Too many of us allow the talking heads to define us. If your view is more complicated than a single issue or view then you basic view is not definable with a single label. Would it not make more sense to use no label and vote using the issues that closely parallel your own? It is unfortunate that too many of us pick the most polarizing idea to follow while abdicating their conscience as a person. Being unlabeled is a freer way to look at the issues of voting. Each candidate has a theme but each theme has often underlying influences. If you are undecided as to your label, then you are possibly a better educated voter whether you realize it or not. This indecision pushes you to investigate perhaps or consider a different or altered view. The reality of politics and voting is akin to advertising: every one is working to get you to buy something! With that in mind “Caveat Emptor” applies. Move beyond your single issue and look at the down the road effects of your vote since you will not be able change your Congressional Representative or C.I.C for 2 to four years.
Comments Off on The Election is Rigged After All — Against African Americans
Unfortunately the Dupublicans are in the camp of old time segregationists and racists. They have supported and Implemented voting restrictions to suppress the Non white vote . What if they spent as much time doing their jobs instead? MA
Voting rights advocates have won a string of court battles, but state election officials have found ways to restrict early voting anyway—often at the behest of GOP leaders
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
People stand outside the Supreme Court before the start of a rally during arguments in the Shelby County, Alabama, v. Holder case on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013, in Washington.
In the face of Donald Trump’s declarations that this election is “rigged” and his requests to his backers to watch the polls in “certain areas,” voting rights advocates have labored to set the record straight that voter fraud is a myth and that “ballot security” often adds up to intimidation.
But as early voting gets under way in states around the country, the election is starting to look rigged after all—against voters of color. From Georgia to Texas and Wisconsin, election officials are asking voters for IDs where none are required, failing to process thousands of voter registrations, and limiting early voting so drastically that voters are standing in line for hours. Invariably, the voters affected are African Americans or Latinos, who tend to be more likely to cast their ballots in favor of Democrats.
It’s exactly what voting and civil rights advocates predicted three years ago, when more than a half-dozen states mostly controlled by Republicans enacted a slew of sweeping new voter ID and other limits on voting. GOP legislatures around the country sprang into action within days of the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder to toss out key Voting Rights Act protections.
At the time, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented that weakening the Voting Rights Act was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Now it’s raining all over African American voters, despite a string of recent voting rights court victories.
Having convinced several lower courts to nullify strict state voting curbs as discriminatory, voting rights advocates have discovered that winning lawsuits is not enough. In many states, election officials have either directly flouted orders handed down by the court, or have found other ways to sabotage access to the polls—often at the direction of Republican Party leaders.
In Texas, a federal appeals court in July explicitly blocked the state from enforcing its voter ID requirement, one of the most stringent in the nation. (The state had approved only a driver’s license or a gun license for voting.) A federal court agreement specified that voters without IDs may still cast ballots if they sign a declaration and show an alternate ID, such as a utility bill.
But this week, civil rights advocates reported hundreds of complaints from voters turned away from the polls for lack of an ID, and provided documentation of polling places that display signs and flyers incorrectly stating that voters must have IDs. Part of the problem is the nation’s notoriously ill-trained army of mostly volunteer poll workers. But it probably doesn’t help that some Texas GOP officials exhorted election workers in at least one email “to make sure OUR VOTER ID LAW IS FOLLOWED.”
“Across Texas we are seeing local election officials undermine the weight of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling striking down the state’s photo ID law as discriminatory,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in a statement. “Instead of changing the rules, some counties across Texas continue to impose the strict photo ID law and are posting signs that suggest to voters that the photo ID law remains in effect. This is simply unacceptable.”
In North Carolina, another July federal appeals court ruling struck key provisions of a far-reaching state law that had restricted early voting, limited registration, and imposed new ID rules. But the North Carolina GOP’s executive director nonetheless encouraged Republican election officials to reduce early voting hours, limit polling sites and close the polls on Sunday.
Now that early voting has begun in North Carolina, the impact on voters is measurable.
Now that early voting has begun in North Carolina, the impact on voters is measurable. A half-dozen counties have cut early voting, prompting a 50 percent decline in early balloting compared to the 2012 election, according to Liz Kennedy, director of democracy and government reform at the Center for American Progress, which has put out a series of state-by-state issue briefs on preventing problems at the polls.
In Guilford, a county of 517,600 people where 42 percent of the residents are nonwhite, election officials cut early voting sites from 16 in 2012 to one this year, according to Michael P. McDonald, a voting expert at the University of Florida. The upshot is an 85 percent decrease in the number of in-person Guilford County voters on the first Thursday and Friday of early voting this year, compared with the same window in 2012.
In Georgia, a recent Washington Post report pointed to several particularly egregious voter suppression efforts. Election officials in Georgia have failed to process as many as 100,000 voter registration applications. As in North Carolina, one of the state’s largest counties made early voting available only at a single polling place, forcing voters to wait up to three hours to cast ballots. And in Macon-Bibb County, local officials moved a polling place in a largely African American region from a gymnasium that was under renovation to the sheriff’s office.
“When we complained, we were told if people weren’t criminals, they shouldn’t have a problem voting inside of a police station,” Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project, a progressive group, told the Post. After activists objected, the polling site was moved to a church.
Led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, voting rights advocates have set up an election protection hotline and deployed volunteers to monitor voting irregularities around the country, as they do every year. But many new voting laws are still being fought out in court, potentially confusing election officials and voters alike. And the number of polling place watchdogs deployed by the Justice Department will be much smaller this year. That’s because the Shelby ruling concluded that states with a history of discrimination no longer need special federal oversight. As this year’s early voting demonstrates, that finding was woefully premature
The current elections have shown how divided we are as a country. This division is not new but has been accented by this Presidential race. Race became an issue when President Obama ran and won twice! The division was always there but once a man of color ran and won the Racists and bigots surfaced in droves spurred on by the likes of the Drump and many members of our illustrious(?) Congress. Skin color, sex or religious belief has nothing to do with ability and intelligence. Our problem starts with the lack of reading and understanding what is really happening in the world and our Congress. If we were “smarter” as voters we would give less weight to the political ads that interrupt our TV time, our dinner and assail our senses. The political system has come to rely on half truths and outright lies to get our votes. It is in our best interests to ignore this deluge of garbage and research the candidate for ourselves. We have to remember a political campaign is just advertising in a different form. Our future is in the hands of the people we elect and unfortunately we fail to follow-up on them after they get into office. This lack of follow up is why they fail us (but not themselves).Once they fail we become disenfranchised and stop paying attention to them while looking for the next best thing. There is no next best if we continue to follow the same pattern of apathy (which the electeds depend on) until the next election cycle. I wish we were smarter, smarter means put aside the rhetoric you hear and look for the results. Look at the track record of the candidate (incumbent or new) and stop being a single issue voter. There are always multiple issues in a campaign and they affect all of us no matter who you are. The way to affect change in government is to be a smarter voter. Disappointment will always follow the uninformed.
This political race and previous ones have shown that several so called political pundits and media hosts have one objective and that is to sell their books and their opinions (no matter how flawed). Bill O’Reilly has killed off several Presidents, Ann Coulter has shown she can’t tell one person of color from another. The issue is that in modern American the Racial divide is alive and seemingly living well. These well known (if not well read) writers have the ability to do better things with their writing but with their implied if not implicit bias they have only increased the ignorance in understanding other “races”. First we need to examine “Race” . We are ALL members of the “HUMAN RACE!”, that being said would it not make sense as members of the same world wide group that we work together in the face of truth to make the world we live in better? Forget the politics of Brexit, ISIS, Al Qaeda and other semi political groups (some of whom hold up their cause as religiously based). The aforementioned writers/ pundits have one goal and that is to sell books! Do your self a favor do not buy the books but read them on line or at a library then decide the validity of their writings and the facts(?) behind the text. As humans we have capability to get beyond these common misconceptions by simply talking to one another and understanding that each division of the human race aside from religious views have similar if not exactly the same views on more issues than is known. The divisions are political ploys to keep us separate with overblown explanations of non issues.
The definitions below should be looked at closely and remembered when the so called representatives of the “American People” come to call (usually election time). Taken in context we are not the power behind the throne so to speak. We tend to blame the President for everything because our local electeds tell us to. If we are the power then we need to become n more informed about the process of governing including the tax system beyond the annual April “tithing”. Without taxes the country, state and local governments cannot function. How those funds are spent is the bigger issue. First look at what we pay our electeds- These are the people who enacted a law securing their pay with cost of living increases. Their health benefits are better than most. The cost to keep them in Washington or the state capitol is paid by our taxes. Now before picking up the pitchfork, understand that in a unified front voters can change all of that. First step is vote them out or give them a good scare but if we voters do not step up these electeds will continue the practice of putting us in the barrel. Pay particular attention to the last synonym.
re·pub·lic /rəˈpəblik/ noun noun: republic; plural noun: republics a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.
de·moc·ra·cy /dəˈmäkrəsē noun noun: democracy a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives. “capitalism and democracy are ascendant in the third world”
synonyms: representative government, elective government; More self-government, government by the people; republic, commonwealth antonyms: dictatorship “a multiparty democracy”
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