Embedded Reporter in Charlottesville – The Chumph’s “Good People”

Those who aren’t familiar with the white-right need to understand exactly what these people are…

I have run into the guys, the last time resulting in said neo-nazi winding up with him putting his head through a plate glass window after making some remarks…Unfortunate that.

VICE’s Charlottesville documentary on Trump’s “fine people” will terrify you

“Charlottesville: Race and Terror” shows the verbal and physical violence of Charlottesville’s white supremacists

For anyone, including President Donald Trump, who thinks there are two legitimate sides to the Charlottesville riots or “fine people” attempting to preserve history mixed amongst the white supremacists who marched in that Virginia city this weekend, VICE has a rather ugly wakeup call.

VICE News’ “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” episode opens with images from the white nationalist protest on Friday in Charlottesville. Red-faced white men hold Tiki torches ablaze and chant “white lives matter,” “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil.”

Counter-protestors meet them at the Gen. Robert E. Lee statue, which Trump claimed was the sole reason for the alt-right protest. Police stand back, people are maced. When a VICE reporter asks white supremacist and speaker of “Unite the Right,” Christopher Cantwell, who he was maced by, he responds, “by Commies.”

“I’m here to spread ideas, talk,” Cantwell says, “in hopes that somebody more capable will come along and do that, somebody like Donald Trump who does not give his daughter to a Jew.”

“So, Donald Trump, but like, more racist?” VICE’s reporter questions. “A lot more racist than Donald Trump,” Cantwell responds. “I don’t think that you could feel about race the way I do and watch that Kushner bastard walk around with that beautiful girl, okay?”

Video from Saturday’s protests show Black Lives Matter and anti-facist protestors with backpacks and signs. The white supremacists facing off against them pack helmets, shields and blunt weapons. After authorities force the crowd to disperse by police and declare a state of emergency, Cantwell says, “We’re here obeying the law,” he continues, “and the criminals are over there getting their way.”

“So you’re the true nonviolent protestors?” the reporter asks. “We’re not nonviolent, we’ll fuckin’ kill people if we have to.” Soon, Cantwell’s pledge becomes chilling and devastatingly prescient.

Horrifying footage shows a car ramming through counter-protestors, bodies flying and then bodies on the ground. “We got hit by a car,” one woman screams in disbelief. VICE’s reporter on the scene seems quietly devastated as she talks to the medic who tried, and failed, to save Heather Heyer’s life.

In a final interview with Cantwell after the weekend’s riots end, he says, “We knew that we were going to meet a lot of resistance. The fact that nobody on our side died, I’d go ahead and call that points for us.” He sits next to a bed strewn with no less than four firearms he packed for the protests.

Of Heyer’s death, Cantwell says “I think it was more than justified,” he says. “I think a lot more people are going to die before we’re done here, frankly.”

As frightening as the weekend’s violence was, local activist Tanesha Hudson doesn’t find it shocking, especially for black people who live in Charlottesville. “This is what we deal with everyday being African-American,” she said, “and this has always beenthe reality of Charlottesville.”

 

New Style Yellow Stars for Jewish – Trump’s Stormtroopers

Just in case you though Jewish folks are white. Trumps Troops are going to fix that “problem”.

(((The Jewish Cowbell))): Unpacking a Gross New Meme From the Alt-Right

From every Internet niche comes a native shorthand, so we should not be surprised that includes putrescent swampy niches from the putrescent swamps of Twitter. New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman shared his war story in the paper:

The first tweet arrived as cryptic code, a signal to the army of the “alt-right” that I barely knew existed: “Hello ((Weisman)).” @CyberTrump was responding to my recent tweet of an essay by Robert Kagan on the emergence of fascism in the United States.

“Care to explain?” I answered, intuiting that my last name in brackets denoted my Jewish faith.

“What, ho, the vaunted Ashkenazi intelligence, hahaha!” CyberTrump came back. “It’s a dog whistle, fool. Belling the cat for my fellow goyim.”

Truly though ((those brackets)) are not ultrasonically subtle enough to qualify as a dog whistle and not heroic enough to conjure Aesop’s image of belling the cat. Let’s call the construction the Jewish cowbell. The cowbell is a series of parentheses, anywhere from one to three, around the name of a Jewish person, to signal Jewishness. It proliferates in the dank margins of online conservative discourse, where anti-Semitism glows like a weird mold; tweets exhort Jews to follow trails of dollar bills into ovens and warn readers, via photographs of goose-stepping Nazis, not to “piss off the white boys.”

That critiques, or even mentions, of Trump can incite brain-atomizing gusts of anti-Semitism from certain corners of the Web is, sadly, not news. Just ask writer Julia Ioffe, who weathered Holocaust-themed abuse after she profiled Melania Trump forGQ, or journalist Bethany Mandel, who felt so intimidated by the violent threats of the #MAGA, or Make America Great Again, crowd (she was called a “slimy Jewess” and told she “deserved the oven”) that she went out and purchased a gun. But such vituperation often begins with this curious Jewish cowbell, a typographical indicator of ethnicity that hearkens back to the starred armbands Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. Looking at these parentheses is a surreal experience: Not only do they mark out Jews, but they visually contain them, sequestered as if in a camp or prison.

According to historian Sarah Werner, there are few precedents for using typography to signify particular forms of identity. In 17^th century multilingual dictionaries, various typefaces could connote various tongues: blackletter for Flemish and English; roman for Italian, Latin, and German; and italic for French and Spanish. Though most English texts switched from blackletter to roman in the mid-1500s, works that strongly evoked a shared English culture continued to be printed in blackletter, including the great national bibles, such as 1611’s King James Version.

Leaving aside clandestine methods for designating the race of potential jurors, the closest many texts come to telegraphing ethnic or regional background is dialect. Mark Twain shaped the language of black characters to mirror “Negro speech” (or his perception of it) in Huckleberry Finn; so too William Faulkner in his fiction and George Gershwin in Porgy and Bess; novels by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Zora Neale Hurston allowed men and women to voice the vernacular music of their communities.

Mic has a good exposé on the origins of the cowbell: Known to alt-right activists as an “echo,” the symbol sprang from a hardcore conservative podcast named the Daily Shoah. The Shoah “featured a segment called ‘Merchant Minute’ that gave Jewish names a cartoonish ‘echo’ sound effect when uttered,” Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith explain. When they reached out to the podcast editors for more information, they were told that the meme also functioned as a critique of “Jewish power”:

“The inner parenthesis represent the Jews’ subversion of the home [and] destruction of the family through mass-media degeneracy. The next [parenthesis] represents the destruction of the nation through mass immigration, and the outer [parenthesis] represents international Jewry and world Zionism.”

After just a few hours of research for this post, I cannot begin to describe the vile Freudian effluvium that pours out of Trump-adjacent spigots of the Internet. Think cartoons of purple-lipped black guys spilling McDonald’s drinks across the desks of white employers (to support Trump’s scorn for affirmative action) and Jews vacuuming up money through their fantastical schnozes. Men who criticize Trump can expect to find themselves starring in rococo gay sex scenarios: id-soaked fantasias of BBCs (big black cocks), cucks (cuckolds), “receptive homosexuals,” and “romping groups” of “alpha males” mingling with “subversive degenerates.” Women face gross comments on their bodies, accusations of mental instability, solicitude about their “meds,” and social Darwinist speculation on their corrupted “bloodlines.” The craziness highlights posters’ fluency in Internet porn even as it foregrounds intense erotic and racial anxiety. And all this is preceded, often, by a ((symbol)) whose clarion call-to-viciousness evokes the clang at the start of a boxing match.

“Hey, look at this fetid thing!” journalism has its limits, but its value is unmistakable in the Age of Trump, and this particular fetid thing should make us step back and reflect. The Republican nominee for president is riding a wave of support that looks for all the world like Hitler nostalgia. As a casually Jewish woman without the financial means to get my horns removed or my cloven hooves separated into toes, I am dismayed. Cowbell bigots may represent a tiny fraction of Trump followers, but they’re too toxic to be written off as a mere parenthetical.

 

Bill Maher’s Anti-Semitism

While in America we commonly confuse the term Anti-Semitism as referring to a hatred of Jewish people, Semitic peoples include Arabs.

Today, the word “Semite” may be used to refer to any member of any of a number of peoples of ancient Middle East including the Akkadians, Assyrians, Arameans, Phoenicians, Hebrews (Jews), Arabs, and their descendants.

Bill Maher has been on a tear recently in a campaign against a Islamic High School kid, Ahmed Mohammed who was arrested at his school for bringing in an electronic clock he had built to show his science teacher. This crusade is a horrific abuse of Maher’s position as a media personality reaching millions – vs a High School kid, with little or no voice at all.

Racism…Pure and simple.

Big bad Bill Maher, vs 13 year old kid

 

Bill Maher lights into 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed again: “He didn’t invent anything!”

On Friday night’s episode of “Real Time,” host Bill Maher continued to criticize liberal “ninnies” who think 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed should be lionized for what the comedian characterized as “taking the back off something.”

Maher played a YouTube clip of someone opening up an alarm clock and placing it in a pencil case, and claimed that it looked both exactly like what Ahmed brought with him to school and exactly like a bomb. “This is like pouring milk on a bowl of Cheerios and claiming you invented cereal,” Maher said.

“And then made it look like a bomb!” guest S.E. Cupp added.

School officials “absolutely did the right thing, thinking it looked like a bomb,” Maher said.

“But it didn’t look like a bomb, it looked like a clock,” Ron Reagan replied.

“It looked exactly like a bomb!” Maher shouted.

“Haven’t you seen any of the ‘Die Hard’ movies?” Cupp asked, momentarily confusing Hollywood with reality.

Reagan the audacity to suggest that it looked like an alarm clock, saying that “here’s the thing about bombs, they have the timer — and then those wires that come out are attached to fissile material that explodes.”

“Excuse me, Ron, but I don’t notice all that when I see that hunk of metal,” Maher said. “Try taking that through airport security.”

“An alarm clock? I think I could,” Reagan replied. “It’s a clock!”

“It’s a clock only because we were told it’s a clock,” Maher said, seemingly unaware that’s it is a clock no matter what other people tell you it is — as demonstrated in the very video clip with which he opened this segment.

Maher later accused Ahmed of not being an inventor so much as someone who “takes the back of something” electronic equipment and shows it to people.

And I would have to ask…What exactly has Bill Maher ever invented? I mean – if I link into the US Patent Office Database, would I find Bill Maher’s name under any invention except repeated applications for Patent for “more bullshit”?

I personally produced and have been awarded several US and International Patents. When I was Ahmeds age, I certainly wasn’t inventing things, but I was building things from electronics parts that others had made, and implementing them in sometimes novel ways – for which I was awarded a National Science Award. I think almost all of the people who become inventors have a curiosity and a desire to tinker, which is why they tend to contribute to and participate in social groups called “Makers”. Science doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Almost everything scientist build is based on extending a body of knowledge from a base of that created by predecessors. The first step to extending that knowledge is understanding what has already been done.

So I call Bullshit on Bill.

 

Discrimination Against Muslims

In the following video, we have the Tea Party’s official Lawn Jockey Candidate, spreading love for Muslims…

This from the DOJ, discussing the impact of Cain’s type of “love”…

DOJ official: Muslims face rising discrimination

American Muslims face a rising tide of religious discrimination in U.S. communities, workplaces and schools nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks, a senior Justice Department official said on Tuesday.

Evidence of growing anti-Muslim bigotry, aired at a Senate Judiciary hearing, poses a challenge for President Barack Obama as his administration works to foster good relations with American Muslims at a time when the United States is threatened by home-grown terrorism.

“We should all agree that it’s wrong to blame an entire community for the wrongdoing of a few. Guilt by association is not the American way,” said Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who chaired the hearing.

He said Muslims account for less than 1 percent of the U.S. population but more than 14 percent of religious discrimination cases investigated by the federal government and 25 percent of religious discrimination cases involving workplaces.

The Justice Department has investigated over 800 incidents of violence, vandalism and arson against people believed to be Muslim, Arab or South Asian, since the September 11 attacks.

U.S. homeland security officials say the United States faces a home-grown threat from Islamic radicalization, including attempts by al Qaeda to radicalize and recruit U.S. Muslims to carry out attacks here and abroad.

The hearing quickly took on a partisan edge when Durbin responded to criticism from Republican Peter King, chairman of a House of Representatives panel widely criticized for a hearing on radicalization in the U.S. Muslim community less than three weeks ago.

King said on Monday that the civil rights discussion would “perpetuate the myth that there is a serious anti-Islam issue in this country.”

But at the start of the session Durbin shot back: “Inflammatory speech from prominent public leaders creates a fertile climate for discrimination.”

“All of us, especially those of us in public life, have a responsibility to choose our words carefully. We must condemn anti-Muslim bigotry and make it clear that we won’t tolerate religious discrimination.”

Thomas Perez, the assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, said anti-Muslim bigotry has brought a surge in the number of federal discrimination cases involving zoning boards and other local authorities that have acted to prevent mosques from opening in their communities.

The Justice Department has begun 14 such cases since May 2010, around the time when plans for a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center attack in New York seized media headlines and ignited a national political uproar.

Before last May, the government had pursued only 10 land-use discrimination cases over a decade.

 

 

 

CNN Fires Rick Sanchez After Comments About Jon Stewart and Jews

This is a strange one…

Rick Sanchez Rails on Jon Stewart, Jews, Media

CNN has fired Rick Sanchez from the network after his comments on a radio program received widespread criticism.

(Oct. 1) — Television anchor Rick Sanchez makes a living talking to America, but it looks like the folksy CNN commentator put his foot in his mouth on a radio talk show.

Appearing Thursday on the Sirius radio program “Stand Up! With Pete Dominick,” Sanchez, who was born in Cuba and grew up in Florida, repeatedly took aim at Jon Stewart, calling him a “bigot.”

When pressed by Dominik as to what he meant, specifically, Sanchez gave the following explanation.

“I think he looks at the world through his mom, who was a schoolteacher, and his dad, who was a physicist or something like that,” Sanchez said, according to transcripts provided by the radio program’s blog. “Great, I’m so happy that he grew up in a suburban middle-class New Jersey home with everything you could ever imagine.”

Dominick then asked what group it was that Stewart held a prejudiced view toward.

“Everybody else who’s not like him,” Sanchez responded. “Look at his show, I mean what does he surround himself with?”

Later in the program, Sanchez retracted the word “bigot” from his criticism of Stewart. “All right,” Sanchez said. “I’ll take the word bigot back; I’ll say prejudicial, uninformed.” But as the conversation continued, Sanchez hammered away at Stewart, and after Dominik noted that, being a Jew, Stewart had a sense of what it was to be an oppressed minority, Sanchez laughed.

“Very powerless people,” Sanchez said with a snicker. “He’s such a minority, I mean, you know. … Please, what are you kidding? I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”

Sanchez argued that Jews don’t experience the same level of discrimination as blacks and Hispanics.

“I grew up not speaking English, dealing with real prejudice every day as a kid; watching my dad work in a factory, wash dishes, drive a truck, get spit on. I’ve been told that I can’t do certain things in life simply because I was a Hispanic,” Sanchez said. “My friends who are black, I’ve seen that with them; I’ve seen that with a lot of minorities. I can’t really think — although I understand the plight of Jews, and all the experiences, and the things that have happened historically for them — but I can’t say that my buddy Glen or my buddy Izzy who I grew up with in South Florida ever were prejudiced against directly simply because they were Jewish. There may have been jokes around them or about other things, but it’s kinda — you know what I’m saying, it’s kind of a different thing.”

 

Burka Rage!

Wow! This is much less productive than that annual Filene’s Basement “Running of the Brides” sale  every year that results in a hoedown or two between the ladies (and unfortunately this year several tramplings) –

Veil Ripped off in French ‘Burka Rage’

The first known case of “Burka rage” has erupted in France where a furious female lawyer ripped the veil from a Muslim woman in a clothing store in the town of Trignac. The lawyer made “snide remarks” about the other shopper’s burka and said she couldn’t wait until France enacted a burka ban now winding through the legislature, according to cops. The attorney compared burka-wearers to the fictional French horror demon Belphegor, who haunts the Louvre and wears a black face mask to hide his hideous features. Suddenly, the women were scuffling, and the veil ripped off, reports the Telegraph.

The store owners broke up the pair, and they were hauled in by cops. The Muslim woman has accused the lawyer of racial and religious assault, and the attorney has accused her fighting partner of assault. The veil ban measure before the French legislature declares burkas and other forms of Islamic dress to be “an affront to the nation’s values.” Such a ban has already been enacted in Belgium. Critics say the bill unfairly targets women, who are often ordered to wear the veil by their husbands.

Damn! Ripping off her veil?

After checking out our new Miss USA Rima Fakih, it might just be worthwhile to cop a seat on the beach in the French Riviera…

And wait for a Bikini-Burkini fight!

 

WWWF Bout – Rev. Jeremiah Wright vs. Drugbo

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

The Minister the right wing loves to hate is at it again, with another case of hoof-in-mouth.

HAMPTON, Va. — The Rev. Jeremiah Wright says he does not feel any regrets over his severed relationship with President Barack Obama, a former member of the Chicago church in which Wright was the longtime pastor.

“Regret for what … that the media went back five, seven, 10 years and spent $4,000 buying 20 years worth of sermons to hear what I’ve been preaching for 20 years?

“Regret for preaching like I’ve been preaching for 50 years? Absolutely none,” Wright said in an interview late Tuesday.

Wright also said he hadn’t spoken to his former church member since Obama became president, implying that the White House won’t allow Obama to talk to him. He did not indicate whether he had tried to reach Obama.

Wright is in Hampton, Va., this week attending Hampton University’s 95th Annual Ministers Conference.

Wright said that when he went to the polls, he did not hold any grudge against Obama.

“Of course I voted for him; he’s my son. I’m proud of him,” Wright said. “I’ve got five biological kids. They all make mistakes and bad choices. I haven’t stopped loving any of them.