Trumpazoids Threaten to Murder Muslims

More white-wing idjits and nutcases…

North Carolina Tea Partiers prepare to ‘start killing the hell out of’ Muslims to stop Sharia law

A group of tea partiers and other conservatives riled up by Facebook conspiracy theories gathered last week at a North Carolina seafood restaurant to discuss their plans to violently oppose Sharia law.

Nearly two dozen participants, some of whom claimed membership in right-wing militia groups, expressed fears that the Muslim minority have already imposed their religious beliefs on other Americans, reported Triad City Beat.

Presenter Tom Jones sketched out a conspiracy theory involving the Muslim Brotherhood and the “progressive left” to build mosques and Islamic schools, which he warned will then be used to undermine democratic and Christian institutions.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is behind all that terrorism and violent acts, but they’re also here operating in America in a very stealthy mode,” Jones said, according to the newspaper. “They’ve infiltrated the judiciary. They have judges that are elected to the bench. These judges are expected to make rulings from the bench here in America according to Sharia law even though it’s not a Sharia court. If you’ve got a Muslim judge he’s required to try you under Sharia law. These people are in high positions of influence often behind the scenes in government, academia, medicine, the media.”

Conservative media frequently warn about Sharia law, which loosely describes both a personal moral code and the general religious law used in majority Muslim nations, and some states — including North Carolina — have moved to ban its influence on courts.

“Do you have any recommendations as to how we could stop this?” said Frank del Valle, of Winston-Salem. “Because my only recommendation is to start killing the hell out them.”

Del Valle, whose Facebook page shows he’s a Latin musician and former federal employee, said he’d watched his native Cuba fall to the communists and wasn’t willing to see the same thing happen in the U.S.

“The Muslims are doing the exact same thing, so I am very aware of that,” del Valle said. “I have been talking about that for a long time.”

Another participant, a former field director for the Koch-backed Americans For Prosperity and an activist with Faith and Freedom Coalition, told the gathering that one of the Women’s March organizers, Linda Sarsour, wanted to impose her Islamic beliefs on the U.S.

“All those women who showed up in D.C. who appear to be mainstream and supported her, raved about how she’s so great don’t realize that she’s the same one who agrees with Sharia law and will be person who stands beside them and also the same person who slices their neck,” said Robert Watkins, the conservative activist.

Jones, the presenter, warned that Muslim Brotherhood had been operating “training centers” in the U.S. since the early 1980s — which motivated a Tea Party activist from Tennessee to plot a violent attack on a New York village identified by conservative media as a terrorist training camp.

That conservative activist, 65-year-old Robert Doggart, was convicted last week on several federal charges in connection with that violent plot.

The crowd gathered at Captain Tom’s Seafood, in Kernersville, N.C., fretted about the growing number of mosques and foreign-looking doctors they’ve seen in recent years, and Jones urged them to start making preparations for what he saw as an inevitable conflict.

“I don’t know how you say ‘deep doo-doo’ in Arabic, but we’re in it,” Jones said. “We’re in deep doo-doo, ya’ll. This is serious stuff. This is not games. These people do not play. If I put a gun to your head and ask you what you believe, you may not be able to tell, but I guarantee you these people can tell you what they believe.”

Del Valle, who the newspaper pointed out was the only attendee to specifically endorse violence, took the bait.

“I’ll shoot them before they can ask me,” he said.

 

Van Jones Destroys Chumph’s “Muslim Profiling”

The truth of the matter of Domestic Terrorism…

The vast majority of mass murder, mass shooting, and serial murders committed in America are by young white men. Removing inner city Drug wars as the motivation, a shocking 90% of all mass shootings/murders are done by white males, frequently due to right wing political motivation, racial animosity, and family issues. So…If you are going to racially profile – you would have to look for a white male in their 20’s, typically with right wing leanings, and socialization issues.

Now we know, from Police experience in stopping innocent black folks in the cities, that stopping every white male under 30 wearing cammies would be pointless. At my home in the country, come fall there is nothing unusual about white folks running around in camouflage T-shits, coats or pants – especially in the fall and winter. The vast majority of these folks are not criminals (other than having a 6 times greater probability than a black person of having a little meth or heroin in their pocket), and pose no threat to run around shooting their neighbors at the local WalMart.

Which is why profiling, when used as a method of “Broken Windows” policing is such an abject failure.

 

Yet Another Tea Bagger Trumpazoid Busted

Another typical lowlife Teabagger criminal. Just like the Chumph – who is now looking down the barrel of a possible Felony Fraud charge for stiffing his various “charities”. Maybe he will get to share a cell with the Chumph…

Tea Partier who nearly destroyed Kentucky’s libraries busted for selling opiates

A Tea Party activist who frequently argues against anti-drug measures at government meetings has been arrested for illegally selling prescription drugs.

John “J.R.” Roth was arrested Thursday night in Highland Heights, Kentucky, and charged with felony trafficking in a controlled substance after police said he sold 10 oxycodone pills to an informant, reported the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The 60-year-old Roth, who is a Donald Trump supporter and promotes “birther” conspiracy theories, is a fixture at local government meetings in Campbell County, where he complains about government spending for almost anything.

He was one of three plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit in 2012 to repeal the property tax that funds the county’s libraries.

Roth and two other members of the Northern Kentucky Tea Party hired a lawyer the year before, when the county library was considering a plan for a new branch, to investigate whether the library board was violating a state law regarding its debt level.

The lawyer determined the library had not exceeded its debt limit — but he found another statute that appeared to prohibit the library board from raising taxes without voter approval.

Roth filed a lawsuit, along with Erik Hermes and Campbell County Commissioner Charlie “Coach” Coleman, seeking to repeal the property tax that funds libraries in Campbell County.

Similar lawsuits were filed in other counties throughout the state.

The tax repeal would have dramatically cut library funding and would have resulted in branch closures, reduced hours and services, and the loss of jobs.

Tax opponents argued that library patrons wouldn’t miss much because books and movies are readily available online sellers such as Amazon — although many patrons rely on libraries for free computer and Internet access.

The lawsuit ultimately failed, after the Kentucky Court of Appeals reversed two circuit decisions last year that had found library districts in Campbell and Kenton counties had improperly raised taxes for decades.

The appeals court ruled that libraries may raise taxes without voter approval as long as the amount does not bring in 4 percent more revenue than the previous year.

Roth, who has been previously cited for animal cruelty and accused of domestic violence, was released from jail on bond.

If convicted, the Tea Party activist faces up to five years in jail.

 

Obama Hating Trumpazoid…Busted for Welfare Fraud!

What goes round, comes round…When the Teabag hits the fan!

Tea Party diner owner who trashed ‘Dictator Obama’ on his menu busted for welfare fraud

A Diner owner in New York who became locally famous for trashing President Obama on his menus has pleaded guilty to, of all things, welfare fraud.Syracuse.com reports that Michael P. Tassone was sentenced last month to a one year conditional discharge after pleading guilty to defrauding the government out of more than $23,000 in welfare payments.

“It was Medicaid fraud,” explained Senior Assistant District Attorney Michael Kasmarek. “They had failed to disclose income on their application. As a result they obtained Medicaid benefits they weren’t entitled to, from May 1, 2009 to April 30, 2011.”

Tassone was featured on Fox News earlier this year because his diner’s menu featured items such as the “Dictator Obama/NYS Special (King Cuomo),” which is a plate of eggs and toast that costs $3.59, plus an exorbitant “tax” of $27.99. Other menu items include the “The Anti-Michelle Obama Don’t Tell Me What To Eat Or Feed My Kids Burger,” and the restaurant itself is adorned with Tea Party “Don’t Tread On Me” flags. The menu also encourages patrons to lawfully carry weapons while in the diner.

It seems Tassone didn’t hate the government enough to not fraudulently try to acquire Medicare benefits, however, and he actually had a more serious felony welfare fraud charge dropped against him in exchange for his misdemeanor plea.

 

Is the Tide Turing Against the Wild-Eyed Witless Right?

One can only hope this is the proverbial Canary in a Coal Mine for the panderers of PT Barnum conspiracy stories, and salacious lies.

Candidate Who Called Obama a Gay Prostitute Loses Education Board Race

In a stunning comeback, State Board of Education hopeful Keven Ellis won Tuesday’s District 9 Republican primary runoff over Mary Lou Bruner, who drew national attention for social media posts touting far-right conspiracy theories and other fringe views.

The East Texas Tea Party activist and former schoolteacher had been favored to succeed in the race after nearly winning the March 1 primary outright and accumulating heavy support from influential conservative groups that typically hold big sway in low-turnout runoff elections. But Ellis, a Lufkin chiropractor who presides over the local school board, maintained a double-digit lead over Bruner throughout Tuesday night, and that lead widened as vote returns rolled in.

He ended the night 18 points ahead of Bruner, with the final vote showing Ellis hauling in 36,842 votes, 59 percent, to Bruner’s 25,420, according to complete but unofficial returns.

Ellis’ victory all but ensures his ultimate election to the 15-member state panel that reviews and approves textbooks and sets curriculum standards for the state’s more than 5 million public school students. District 9, a 31-county swath spanning northeast Texas, is a deeply conservative Republican stronghold. (Democrat Amanda Rudolph, a Stephen F. Austin State secondary education professor who was unopposed in her primary, will appear on the general election ballot in November.)

The 45-year-old’s win comes after Bruner nearly won a three-way GOP primary race March 1, falling less than 2 percent and a few thousand votes short of the 50 percent mark. (Ellis got 31 percent of the vote.) Her strong showing came despite extensive media coverage of her then-public Facebook posts, one of which said she had heard from a reliable source that President Obama worked as a gay prostitute while in his 20s to fund a drug habit.

With Texas GOP runoffs typically drawing the most conservative voters, Rice University political scientist Mark Jones had previously named the 69-year-old from Mineola a favorite to win the runoff while acknowledging a scenario where educators turned out in droves to vote against her.

“It would appear that a perfect storm occurred to defeat Bruner,” Jones said in an email Tuesday night. “Superintendents and teachers (and their friends and families) across the district rallied against her due to disagreement with her positions on education policy, the belief she would not be a good representative of the district’s interests, and the embarrassment they felt her election would bring to the region.”

Ellis said he felt “really confident that the educators turned out and voted.”

“They saw the importance of this,” he said. “They saw who I was and they saw who my opponent was and they made the right decision.”

Bruner did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Jones also noted the possible impact of a recent decision by an influential Tea Party group, Grassroots America — We the People, to withdraw its previous endorsement of Bruner, who worked in East Texas schools for 36 years, citing inaccurate statements she had made on the campaign trail and an apparent unwillingness to issue a statement correcting them.

In a recent speech to East Texas superintendents, for example, Bruner claimed that half of all public school students were in special education. It was the first time the group has ever rescinded support for a candidate, according to Executive Director JoAnn Fleming.

“Texas escaped an education train wreck tonight,” said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning group that monitors the State Board of Education. “If Bruner had ultimately won election to the board, she would have instantly become the most embarrassingly uninformed and divisive member on a board that already too often puts politics ahead of making sure our kids get a sound education.”

 

Scientists Confirm Tea Bagger Racism

Confirming the obvious, scientists studied the motivation being Tea Party and Republicans. The conclusion?

Fear of a black President. It’s the Racism – Stupid!

Scientists confirm what conservatives always deny: Tea Party driven by fear of a black president

Researchers at Stanford University found that when they showed white subjects photos of President Barack Obama with darkened skin, those people became more likely to support right-wing political organizations like the Tea Party.

According to the Washington Post, sociologist Robb Willer and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments from 2011 to 2015 in which they demonstrated that some white voters may be driven by unconscious racial biases against people with darker skin.

The study came about when Willard found himself pondering why racist hysteria has ratcheted up in this country since the election of President Obama in 2008. The ranks of white supremacist groups swelled after Obama entered the White House and watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center report that hate groups have become more active in recent years.

In Republican politics, right-wing extremist Tea Party candidates ran longstanding GOP officials out of office as conservatives in this country doubled down in opposing the president and his policies.

“That left a lot of analysts slack-jawed, wondering: What was this latent force that drove the emergence of this movement?” Willer told the Post.

The research team interviewed volunteers who they separated into two groups. One group was shown photos of celebrities which included a photo of Obama with digitally lightened skin. The other group saw the same photos, but with an image of Obama with darker skin.

Among 255 white subjects, people shown the darkened picture of Obama were almost twice as likely to say that they support the Tea Party when questioned by researchers.

“The result suggests that some white Americans are more likely to oppose Obama solely because of the shade of his skin,” wrote the Post’s Max Ehrenfreund. “For them, the reality that someone with a dark complexion occupies the nation’s highest office could be a source of unease.”

The study group published the results of their work this week on the Social Science Research Network. The findings coincide with previous studies which have shown that racism has been an essential factor in Republican electoral victories.

“Polls consistently show that Republicans are more likely to hold racial prejudices, and not just in the South,” the Post reported in March. “Nationally, almost one in five Republicans opposes interracial dating, compared to just one in 20 Democrats,according to the Pew Research Center. While 79 percent of Republicans agree with negative statements about blacks such as the one about slavery and discrimination, just 32 percent of Democrats do, the Associated Press has found.”

 

How Republicans Have Derailed the New South’s Emergence

North Carolina’s Research Triangle and the Charlotte/Cary area are hotspots for tech an other development. The US Government supplies over $1.5 billion a year in research grants to the state’s public universities, money that has helped drive the growth of the Universities in the state from decidedly mediocre to competitive powerhouses. This has spurred massive growth, as the combination of a realistic cost of living, easy access to recreational activities in the mountains and shore, as well a good school systems have individualized both corporations and employees to flock to the state.

Unfortunately, like Virginia, the back woods redneck religious bigots haven’t quite dissipated yet, and with the election of a Republican majority in the state house – pushing extremist social conservatism which is an anathema to the high-tech and banking industries.That growth roll may be in for a screeching halt.

You want to keep that growing Gov McCrory, you need to cut the “Culture War” bullshit fast.

The fact is, major corporations don’t give a shit about Republican tax breaks, they do about being able to attract the best and brightest as employees, and having a stable government  which isn’t going to do something stupid to hurt their business. They need good schools, which are producing students in the fields that relate to their businesses, who are willing to stay in-state after they graduate. (As an example, the collapse of what was once referred to as “Silicon Valley East” here in northern Virginia, was in good part due to the major University in the area being taken over by conservative donors. The school produces Economists and right wing Federalist Lawyers – but not STEM Graduates needed by the local industries to grow, or to establish the sort of incubators which create the next Google. Instead we have the Antonin Scalia Law School, which is fornicating useless, both as the symbol of higher education in the fields in demand, as well as in attracting students that want to be in a top program in the Sciences, Engineering, or technology.)

They want to be able to attract experienced workers and executives. To get those people, the potential employees need to feel comfortable moving their families into the State. The sort of “Culture Wars” and racism being promulgated by the right, destroys that.

This isn’t just an issue about Transgender people, it is an issue about the future viability of the State as a business center.

Back during the South Carolina confederate flag imbroglio, one of my clients was a foreign auto company looking to put a plant there. Took one of the Senior Staff folks down there behind the proverbial woodshed, and explained to him that foreign companies, unlike their US counterparts are not willing to go into an environment where discrimination and harassment lawsuits chew up 10-15% of their profits. And as such, were looking for a place which supported a harmonious workforce, over cheap rent. The differential between labor costs between Detroit and Charleston disappears really fast paying lawyers at $500/hr over racial bullshit. They got that message apparently from more than one prospective company. American companies have finally started to get a clue about this as well.

Too bad the white winger Tea Baggers haven’t.

This isn’t just an issue about Transgender people, it is an issue about the future viability of the State as a business center.

TRANSGENDER RIGHTS AND THE END OF THE NEW SOUTH

Monday, two North Carolinians squared off over the state’s controversial House Bill 2, which requires transgender people to use the bathroom matching their “biological sex” in public schools and government buildings and invalidates local laws protecting transgender people from discrimination. Both Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina, and Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney General, grew up partly in Greensboro, a site of anti-segregation sit-ins in 1960, and Lynch recalled that history by comparing H.B. 2 to Jim Crow laws. “Let us reflect on the obvious but often neglected lesson that state-sanctioned discrimination never looks good in hindsight,” she said, as she announced that the Department of Justice is suing North Carolina, claiming that H.B. 2 violates federal laws forbidding sex discrimination.

Earlier that day, McCrory’s office had filed its own federal lawsuit, which attempted to protect the state from federal anti-discrimination action against H.B. 2. “North Carolina does not treat transgender employees differently,” according to the lawsuit. “All state employees are required to use the bathroom and changing facilities assigned to persons of their same biological sex, regardless of gender identity, or transgendered status.” Such bland assertions of neutrality have an infamous place in the law. Before the Supreme Court established a right to same-sex marriage, in 2015, North Carolina forbade gay and straight alike to wed members of the same sex. Before the Court invalidated laws against racial intermarriage, in 1967’s Loving v. Virginia, the state forbade both black and white people to marry someone of the other race. All these laws were defended on the grounds that they treated everyone alike. So, for that matter, were the original Jim Crow segregation laws. In 1896, upholding separate-but-equal accommodations, the Supreme Court held that, if “the enforced separation of the races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” this was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.”

McCrory’s suit looks more like political theatre than a serious attempt to preserve H.B. 2. On April 19th, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes North Carolina, adopted the Obama Administration’s interpretation of federal sex-discrimination law to invalidate a local school-board policy that assigned students to bathrooms by “biological genders.” The court accepted the federal government’s argument that the prohibition on sex discrimination in Titles VII and IX of the Civil Rights Act includes discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and that “biological” bathroom assignments are just this sort of discrimination. (The Fourth Circuit reported that, in public hearings on school-bathroom assignments, the plaintiff in the case, a transgender boy, had been called a “freak” and “compared to a person who thinks he is a ‘dog’ and wants to urinate on fire hydrants.”)

That McCrory would seek out this wrong-side-of-history position reveals a lot about the fractured and desperate state of the Republican Party. The governor took office in 2013 as the consummate country-club Republican. He had spent fourteen years as the mayor of Charlotte, a banking capital, where he presided over robust growth and—unusual in the South—the construction of a light-rail system. He was a candidate in the “New South” tradition, a political manner that is also a development strategy. In the sixties, as other parts of the white South dug in against desegregation, North Carolina’s politicians found a different formula: accept the national consensus on civil rights and attract employers with low wages, weak unions, and business-friendly laws. The state’s population more than doubled between 1960 and 2010, as a formerly rural, agricultural state developed national centers of technology and finance. The previous New South governors were Democrats, but many saw McCrory as their natural successor in a state that narrowly supported Barack Obama in 2008 but in 2010 handed control of the legislature to Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction.

Since taking office, McCrory has mostly been back on his heels as a Tea Party legislature, installed with decisive support from the activist donor Art Pope (whom Jane Mayer wrote about in 2011), has set the state’s agenda. McCrory has signed laws restricting abortion access, cutting back on early voting and requiring voter identification, slashing unemployment benefits, and repealing the state’s Racial Justice Act, which commuted the death penalty for people sentenced in racially inequitable jurisdictions. North Carolina is one of nineteen states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (and the fourth-largest, after Texas, Florida, and Georgia). The advocacy group Families USA estimates that 593,000 North Carolina residents lack health insurance because of the state’s refusal.

The Tea Party has shared McCrory’s deregulatory, tax-cutting economic agenda, but it has led with culture-war issues. The year McCrory won the governorship, the legislature put forward a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, which passed with sixty per cent of the vote. This blend of tactics defined most state-level Republican parties in the Obama years, when the Republicans took power in statehouses across the country, and McCrory seems to have made his peace with it. Polls showed him lagging in a tight reëlection race when he called North Carolina’s part-time legislature into emergency session in late March. Both houses passed H.B. 2 on March 23rd, and McCrory signed it that night. The only local anti-discrimination statute that it overrode was one passed a month before in Charlotte, where McCrory had served seven terms as mayor.

Now the New South elements of McCrory’s governing style are falling to pieces. H.B. 2 may have seemed an ordinary measure of culture-war politics when the governor signed it, but the consensus position on L.G.B.T.Q. rights has changed so fast that it may secure his place as the Orval Faubus of public bathrooms. McCrory’s Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, the state’s attorney general, who has announced that his office will not defend H.B. 2 against legal challenge, has led McCrory in every poll since the law was passed. Since H.B. 2 became law, PayPal and Deutsche Bank have scrapped expansion plans for North Carolina, the N.B.A. and N.C.A.A. have suggested that they may not hold future events in the state, and a caravan of entertainers have cancelled shows, including Bruce Springsteen and Cirque du Soleil. New South governors measure themselves by the investments they attract. When the cultural divisiveness of Tea Party politics drives out business and entertainment, it becomes New South kryptonite….More Here…

 

Does The Internet Enable Hate Crimes and Mass Murder?

 Trolls and hate. The Internet was conceptualized as an open system across which to share ideas and scientific concepts. Unfortunately none of the founders, having grown up largely in the shielded world of academia had any concept of the nefarious uses to which the tool could be put by hate groups, criminals, and the mentally and socially imbalanced.

The Internet, besides enabling new types of crime, international crime, and deviant pornography such as kiddie porn has also enabled hate mongers through the anonymous nature of the system to spew their vile hatred and to recruit weak minded children like Dylaan Root, who got much of his racial animosity for the Council of Conservative Citizens Web site(s).

The killer in the recent Oregon Colleges mass shooting has been tied to antisocial hubs (4Chan), as well as white supremacist and chrisitian Identity hate groups on the conservative Web.

So it isn’t just the “white Sale” on guns driving the carnage – it is the commercial sale of, and manufacture of hate and disenfranchisement for political and power purposes.

We can stop this, but to do so requires a large group of people to first take down the entry point to the Hate Groups. That typically is the fact free and often racist world of conservative white identity politics. It includes going at sites like The National Review which publishes articles of racial hate mongering by such folks as Heather McDonald, and Michelle Malkin. Both of whom frequently are published or have contracts with VDare, a white supremacist site which uses conservative racist authors as a entre’ into the harcore racism of their staff. The American Spectator, the International Business Daily, the NRO, the Federalist, Townhall, and the Wall Street Journal all serve as entries into the world of hardore racism through the introduction to racist “theology”. Many of the sites actively ban liberal, or non-racist posters through cutting them off from posting to assure no level of sanity, or truth interferes with their incited hate fests. Indeed, many conservative sites run like rats when someone shines the light.

Got to hit them in their rat holes. If we can force the entry points to see the light – then it takes away the respectability of the supremacist sites and their ability to recruit little tow headed trolls and murders like Root.

De-legitimize hate.

Lone Wolves in the Age of the Internet: Do Hate Crimes Happen More Because of Broadband Internet Access?

In an ideal world, the Internet would be a place of inclusivity and democracy. Instead, it’s just the opposite.

A new research study led by Jason Chan, Ph.D., shows a positive relationship between broadband Internet access and incidence of hate crimes. Specifically,race-driven hate crimes committed by individuals, rather than those committed in groups, increased.

Chan, an Assistant Professor of Information and Decision Science for the Carson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, discovered the correlation using official FBI data on hate crime incidents, compared to that of broadband provider access taken from FCC documents. Between 2001 and 2008, access to just one broadband ISP showed a 20 percent rise in hate crimes, particularly in areas of high racial tension.

“We see this from two different perspectives,” Chan tells The Daily Beast, “the consumers of hate content, and the producers of it. Hate content refers to internet posts that bring about skewed ideologies and advocating for a supremacy of one race over other races.”

The first perspective has to do with selective exposure, wherein readers intentionally seek out information that galvanizes their fringe beliefs.

“When readers go online,” Chan says, “there is a specialization of interest. This magnifies or amplifies the messages posted on it. This is contrary to what we believe. We believe, instead of making things more narrow, the Internet should make things more inclusive and democratic. However, people tend to search out things relevant to existing interests, which amplifies such narrow thoughts.”

Chan says developing online recruitment techniques for hate peddlers contributes to this rise as well.

“Content providers,” Chan says, “have changed the way in which they have to execute their propaganda. They use a strategy known as leaderless resistance. Whenever they put up propaganda to have content to provide the motivation, encouragement, and justification to people on the edge. It gives them reason why they should be outside normal thought.”

After yet another mass shooting, this one leaving 10 people dead at Umpqua Community College last Thursday, digital traces of the lone gunman in the attack are again left to the examination of law enforcement officials and reporters. Just hours after the shooter, Chris Harper Mercer, was killed in a standoff with police, several online accounts tracing back to Mercer expressed hate for organized religion. What’s worse, one witness said Mercer forced his victims to state their beliefs before heartlessly killing them, specifically targeting Christians.

It’s a pattern becoming tragically more common: a mass shooting takes place, and we later discover how blatantly the perpetrators expressed hate for their victims online. In this case, clear connections emerge between recent shootings: Mercer referred, in one post, to Vester Flanagan, the man who killed two people on live television in Virginia in August. Flanagan himself made specific reference to Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who gunned down nine inside a Charleston, North Carolina church in June.

“In Dylann’s case,” Chan says, “he happened to chance upon one of these hate sites. And slowly but surely he was convinced. Through half truths and misrepresented facts, he believed individuals of his race should be doing something to serve justice back to the people. In some cases this hate content provides instructions. This type of grooming process takes time. But people see more, there are more opticals, one event tips them over and they commit the crime.”

The paper, titled “The Internet and Racial Hate Crime: Offline Spillovers from Online Access,” published in the forthcoming issue of MIS Quarterly, also offers solutions to combat this online surge. The paper suggests that, instead of engaging in a technological race with producers of hate content, policy should be implemented to educate youth on digital media, racial and social justice, stereotypical messages, and how to interpret multiple meanings.

Another plan of attack would increase the amount of anti- hate content on the net. But even an attempt to right the skewed beliefs presented across the web would be somewhat futile.

Between 2001 and 2008, access to just one broadband ISP showed a 20 percent rise in hate crimes, particularly in areas of high racial tension.

“The chance of such content being seen by the one who needs to see it are small,” says Chan. “And technological advances are moving so quickly we believe there could be newer assets in searching for digital traces of those who are likely, or at risk, of committing crimes. Such lone wolfs, before they do something, we can see some patterns.”

Unfortunately, Chan says, problems of free speech get wrapped up in who posts what online.

“This can reach a certain threshold. We’d need to tell apart those who intend to commit hate crimes and those who have those ideologies but stay within the law.”

 

The Snow Heaux Calls BLM “Dogs”

What goes 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1? Sarah, The Snow Heaux, Palin after every speech.

Sarah Palin called Black Lives Matter protesters ‘dogs.’ Here’s why she doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

During a speech outside the U.S. Capitol to a tea party rally  Wednesday, Sarah Palin used a very loaded word to described the Black Lives Matter protesters. She called them “dogs” — actually, dogs that President Obama won’t call off. So, Palin told the crowd, she would instead offer her support and salute to the country’s police officers.

Palin is at least one of a few things: 1) obtusely unaware of the overwhelmingly black make-up of the police-protesting movement in the United States, 2) unaware of disproportionate and real way in which these issues affect black and Latino Americans, or 3) unaware of just how frequently racists have compared non-white Americans to various animals while justifying inhumane, immoral and illegal treatment. Or perhaps she has another one of her apparently believable, only mildly plausible explanations for why her comments aren’t in fact racist ready to go.

I have no doubt that we will hear that explanation from Palin and her many fans and defenders going forward. But there is a reason why Palin doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt, and that’s because Sarah Palin has a bit of a history.

There was that time in 2014 that Palin defended Mike Ditka’s defense of the Washington, D.C.-based NFL team’s name. Ditka said the only people who despised the team’s name were just “politically correct idiots.” Palin essentially agreed.

There was that time in December 2013 that Palin declared that the public’s reaction was the only real problem with “Duck Dynasty” reality TV star Phil Robertson’s claims that black people were happy, hard-working and Godly during the oftentimes brutally-enforced system of segregation and subjugation known as Jim Crow. Robertson claimed none of those positive attributes can be assigned to black people since “welfare” and “entitlement” programs have become a part of the American political landscape.

There was that time in November 2013 when  Palin said American “free stuff” (government programs) was being financed with money borrowed from theChinese that would one day come due and enslave Americans to “foreign masters.”

[Sarah Palin, American debt and Chinese foreign masters]

And there was that time in 2012 when Palin told her Facebook followers that President Obama, the nation’s first black president, should cease  his “shuck-and-jive shtick” around the Benghazi attack.

Source: Sarah Palin’s Facebook Timeline

Never mind that “Redskins” in a known pejorative term for Native Americans and one that Native Americans have repeatedly asked the team to stop using. And pay no mind to the fact that Jim Crow was a brutal system of racial subjugation and segregation with a well-documented connection to the current socioeconomic standing of black America.

And we should, of course, all train our minds to turn toward some race-neutral explanation for Robertson’s utterly false implication that African Americans are the sole or even overwhelming recipients of cash welfare aid.(For those interested in the facts, See Table 1, page 6 in the annual federal cash assistance caseload report to Congress. ) And, of course, Palin was using the term “shucking and jiving” to refer to procrastination, just the way she later claimed. Any suggestion that Palin was making reference to a black person’s attempt to subvert his powerful white overlords with disarming, distracting and demeaning forms of entertainment — the usual meaning of the “shucking and jiving” phrase — is just plain wrong.

All of that is true if Palin and her biggest defenders are to be believed. All of that is totally plausible if this country’s long and inglorious history of racial tension and antagonism deployed as a political tool did not exist and Palin had been raised on Mars. All those who would take issue with Palin and her persistently racially-coded wordplay will, for those who want to believe her, always be the real racists and the source of America’s real racial problems.…More…

Well..The old horny white guys are deserting the Snow Heaux as well…

And…

 

The Tea Party “gun toting Bible thumping … freak, bi-sexual porn addicted sex deviant” and the “Tramp”

Things are really getting Kinky in the Tea Party Delegation to Michigan’s Congress. When an anti Gay Marriage, male Tea Party Congressman gets caught having an affair with a female, bible thumping Tea Party “harlot” what to do?

Come out with a memo apologizing for getting caught with a gay male escort!

Hmmmm…

Michigan Expels Republican Lawmaker Cindy Gamrat Over Sex Scandal, Cover-Up

One socially conservative Michigan lawmaker was expelled from office and another resigned early Friday after they were embroiled in scandal over their extramarital affair and an attempt to hide it with a strange fictional email.

Republican Rep. Cindy Gamrat became just the fourth legislator to be kicked out in state history shortly after 4 a.m. An hour earlier, GOP Rep. Todd Courser resigned, effective immediately, when it became clear majority Republicans had secured votes from enough Democrats for his expulsion in exchange for the House asking the attorney general and state police to investigate the lawmakers.

Both were immediately escorted out of the chamber.

The self described deviants

“I put everybody through a whole bunch — across the state, my own family, the constituents, the people in this room,” Courser told reporters. “Whether it was the third vote or the fourth vote or the fifth vote, they were going to eventually get me.”

Gamrat, who was tossed on a 91-12 vote, declined comment while leaving the Capitol.

“I have done everything I can to redeem the situation,” she said shortly before in her speech asking for a censure, which would have let her stay on the job with restrictions. “I am sincerely sorry for what it’s caused.”

Courser, 43, of Lapeer in Michigan’s Thumb region, admitted sending an “outlandish” phony email to GOP activists and others in May claiming he was caught with a male prostitute. The email was intended to make his affair with the 42-year-old Gamrat appear less believable if it were exposed by an anonymous blackmailer who Courser said was demanding his resignation.

The self-smear email called Courser a “bi-sexual porn addicted sex deviant” and “gun toting Bible thumping … freak” and Gamrat a “tramp.”

Gamrat, from Plainwell in the southwestern part of the state, said she discussed the plot with Courser but did not know the email’s sexually explicit content before it was sent.

On Thursday, a special House committee recommended the expulsion of both legislators. But the full chamber then deadlocked for hours, as more than two dozen Democrats refused to vote.

They attacked the “sham” investigation as rushed and self-serving. They questioned why two “whistleblower” aides to Courser and Gamrat were allowed to be fired by GOP leadership, since the speaker’s office had known of problems in the lawmakers’ combined office.

The House was six votes short of the two-thirds supermajority needed under the state constitution. More than two dozen minority Democrats initially abstained from voting and criticized the process.

In calling for both legislators’ expulsion, Rep. Ed McBroom, a Republican from Vulcan in the Upper Peninsula who chaired the disciplinary panel, said: “These two members have obliterated the public trust. They’ve obliterated the trust of their colleagues. And each day that they continue here they reduce the public trust in this institution.”

The scandal unfolded last month after a staffer the couple shared was fired in July. Ben Graham gave The Detroit News a secret audio recording of Courser demanding that he send the email to “inoculate the herd,” an apparent reference to Courser’s supporters. While Graham refused and the email was likely legal, the plot was unethical, according to a House Business Office probe that alleged dishonesty, misconduct and misuse of public resources extending beyond the affair and fictional email.

State police are investigating the alleged blackmail and this week obtained a warrant for records from a phone company related to a prepaid, or “burner,” phone from which Courser said he received threatening text messages.

 

Geez, whatever happened to just ‘fessing up and copping a plea?

 

Confederate Flag Auto Plates

In my state there are at least 200 different License Plate designs you can choose from. It is a good deal for the State, which tacks on an additional $10 a year fee to purchase the plate. Most States have followed suit, vanity plates being an easy source of revenue.  One of the Virginia Plates, , the “Sons of Confederate Veterans” Plate has come under attack in the state post Charleston.

My view of the SCV is that it is a legitimate organization. A lot of what they promote is historical reinvention and falsehood (which any of my more savvy readers can suss out with a quick glance at their Web Page) but, in the spirit of “Live and let Live” – I really don’t care about what they want to do, as long as it doesn’t infringe upon the rights of other people. These are the guys who historically are more likely found dressing up in the Grey for a historical reenactment than driving their pickup trucks adored with the confederate flags through black neighborhoods. Unfortunately, they have been invaded by the racist whackjobs , and there is contention over the direction of the group. They, as a group wholeheartedly buy into the Southern Myth.

9 States, all except Maryland in the South offer plates with the SCV Logo. Florida offers a “confederate Heritage” Plate, which is a bit more questionable in my view.

Poll: Virginians Split on Confederate Flag License Plate Option

Virginia voters are divided 46 – 45 percent on whether the Confederate flag should be removed from state license plates, according to a Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll released Monday morning.

In Virginia, support for eliminating the option of ordering a license plate with a Confederate flag is 73 – 19 percent among Democrats and 48 – 42 percent among independent voters, with Republicans standing by the Stars & Bars 71 – 24 percent.

Black voters say 73 – 16 percent eliminate the Confederate flag option, while white voters say 55 – 37 percent keep it.

The plate I personally have the most problem with is this one…

There is no Republican, or Democrat, or Green plate – why exactly should there be one for the Tea Party?

 

Black confederate Head Case

Geez…Virginia resident Karen Cooper described why she joined the Virginia Flaggers, a group that defends the rebel flag against those who “worship ignorance, historical revisionism and political correctness.”

 

White Supremacists and Facts – Defeating the Racist Lies on the Internet

Said I was going to talk a bit about how to dissect the racist blathering by conservatives. This is Lesson #1

Actually have a picture of my Mom teaching in one of these old schools with a potbelly stove to heat the classroom… And that was in the early 50’s. This isn’t it.

The right absorbs racism from many of their right wing Internet sites. One of their favorite topics is black crime. The second is interracial crime claiming that white folks are under attack by black folks. All with numbers from seemingly unimpeachable sources such as the DOJ Annual Crime Reports.

Since about 1992, when Dinesh D’Souza and white supremacist Jared Taylor published their books – this (mis) information has been rattling around Internet, and taken as Gospel by many conservatives.

The National Review is one of the right wing publications with a less than sterling reputation in terms of it’s writers spewing racism. Manning the racism desk there are several folks, among them Heather McDonald, who spew virulent racist crap for a living.

Check out this article –

The Shameful Liberal Exploitation of the Charleston Massacre

Let’s look at those numbers which she got off one or the other white supremacist site….

In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites (excluding homicide), and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence (excluding homicide) against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author. Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population.

Now assuming she didn’t lie about the overall statistic (which is probable)…There are 6.2 white folks for every black person in this country.

Here is how it is done properly –

http://www.stats.indiana.edu/v…

The crime rate for white folks committing violent crimes against blacks is 100,000x 99,403/40,000,000 = 2485 per 100,000

The black on white violent crime rate is 100,000 X 560,600/248,000,000/ = 226 per 100,000

Ergo a black person is 11x  (2485/226 = 10.99) more likely to have a violent crime committed against them by a white person than vice versa.

And THAT is why the DOJ and FBI ALWAYS express their numbers in terms of rate per 100,000. What McDonald is done is standard white supremacist trickery, by lying about how the numbers actually work and ignoring the population differences.

Now – the white nationalist sites the author is quoting depend on existing white predilection to racism, poor intellect,  or pure stupidity to sell their tawdry racist wares.

And McDonald is a racist POS for repeating this crap, when if she had an IQ above table salt she would have known better. The National Review apparently supports this. And she repeats the various versions of the white racist song over and over in virtually every article she writes.

Dylann Root was recruited by the same sort of numerical trickery – which is the objective of promoting this sordid racist propaganda.

 

How the White Supremacists Punked the Tea Party and Republicans…

And created little monsters like Dylann Root.

This is a great article discussing how the white supremacist type flood the web with lessons learned from a site called 4CHAN.

 

Dylann Roof, 4chan, and the New Online Racism

To understand Dylann Roof’s thinking, he tells us, we have to go back to 2012. To Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, the moment that Roof writes in his manifesto that he was reborn as a white nationalist. Roof’s inspirations are clear in a way that his psychology is not. They go back further than the Martin case into centuries of American history and, along another path, less clearly marked, to the peak years of a now widespread Internet culture, when a new kind of reactionary sensibility was hatched.

A reactionary, defiantly anti-social politics has been emerging for the last decade. It was well known under the auspices of “trolling” and well hidden by its pretense of trickstersism. It was actually juvenile fascism and vitriolic racism but, because it grinned and operated in cyberspace, it was a sensation when it first appeared less than a decade ago. Excitable theorists, bored journalists and naive political activists looked at its strange, adolescent face and pronounced on its revolutionary potential.

According to the accepted wisdom, trolls were fiercely apolitical pranksters up until they put on Guy Fawkes masks and became the radical progressives known as “Anonymous.” But Anonymous doesn’t have a monopoly on trolling’s political legacy. They are only its nominally left-wing manifestation. Something else has been growing in the online ferment they came out of—something that Anonymous and its supporters want to disown—a politics that is temperamentally of the right, not quite coherent, though Anonymous isn’t always either, but unified by certain passions, a conspiratorial bigotry and anti-black racism above all.

This is another legacy of 4chan, the infamous online message board that spawned trolling culture. It is a different branch of politics than the hackitivism associated with Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, but its roots are the same. While Anonymous has gotten most of the attention, the trolls they left behind on 4chan have seen their influence spread as well, though without a catch-all name or striking avatar to easily refer to them. You can see this other side of trolling’s inheritance spreading on popular sites like Reddit and in the widespread adoption of the rhetorical style they developed: using bombast and absurdism to hide racist tropes in conceptual riddles.

If Roof was not directly shaped by that Internet culture, he nonetheless moved in the world it helped create.

We know that Dylann Roof had a history of taking drugs and that friends say he had expressed interest in committing a mass shooting, but little else about his psychological state leading up to his massacre. We know from what he told the woman he left alive to explain what he’d done, since he apparently intended to kill himself, and from his manifesto that he believed he had no choice but to murder defenseless black people—he specified defenseless; he wanted a slaughter, not a fight—in service to his white nationalist ideology. And we know where the ideas in Dylann Roof’s manifesto first appeared: almost verbatim on a neo-fascist website inspired by 4chan’s politics.

Back to Trayvon Martin. If there is a single event that sparked the current period of social unrest, the national controversy around race and policing, and the largest protest movement of President Obama’s second term, it is the night in February 2012 when a mixed-race Florida man, alarmed by the presence of an unarmed black teenager in his community, confronted and killed him after a struggle.

The fault line exposed by the killing of Martin is still sending out aftershocks. It inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and its more radical offshoots, including a group that named itself after Martin, despite objections from his family, and became notorious after leading a chant calling for “Dead cops” in New York.

The Martin case, and the mainstream media’s handling of it—marred by bothcasual slanders of Martin and outright distortions about Zimmerman—reverberated in the Internet’s ideological echo chambers, the former inspiring the nascent protest movement that reemerged in Ferguson, the latter inspiring a right-wing counter-movement online.

A story that had started on Twitter before it was picked up by news continued to spread on the populist Internet.

The racial and political divisions revealed by perceptions of Martin’s death and the media’s handling of it attracted activists to the cause. Some organized protests. One anonymous Internet user hacked Martin’s email and social media accounts and posted the results online in an effort to depict him as a thug and drug user, and justify his shooting death. The hacker, who went by the name Klanklannon, posted an edited, slideshow version of the messages stolen from Martin’s accounts. Klanklannon, as the name suggested, was a white supremacist, and a member of 4chan’s political message board, “/pol/,” which is where the hacks were first posted.

“The event that truly awakened me,” Dylann Roof wrote before walking into a church in South Carolina and killing nine of the black parishioners who had invited him into their Bible study group, “was the Trayvon Martin case.”

It’s not all that far from the mainstream of American discourse to the places where Roof dwelled online, but the distances get skewed by perspective.

The organized political groups that inspired Roof, like the Council of Conservative Citizens, have, while courting influence, been considered disreputable for decades. That’s a far cry from the kind of ambivalent, if not adulatory treatment, offered to the avatars of 4chan’s bleeding-edge web culture, who were fêted by academics and journalists even as their much pondered trolling cleared out a space online for a new breed of fascist websites, like the one Roof appears to have visited online.

There’s something immediately familiar about The Daily Stormer, where whole passages from Roof’s manifesto first appeared. Its name is taken from Hitler’s paper of record, the Nazi propaganda organ Der Stürmer. The site owes as much, perhaps more, to the style and mode of political rhetoric developed on the 4chan message board as it does to any tract published by the KKK or American Nazi party. (…the nitty gritty here…)

Now – there is a way to fight this – and I will get more into that over the next few weeks (hopefully). Some people have already started using the trolling method to counter, making most conservative sites even quicker on the trigger to ban liberal folks than usual. You also have to be prepared to be persistent, as in many places where there are racist types working the board – you will get a slew of complaints instantly from the trolling group to try and knock you off almost immediately, for even mild deviance from the racist mantra being spewed. They truly hate it when you blow up one of their racist memes with facts.

Step 1 always is to understand the problem.

 

The Rotten Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree – Ron/Rand Paul

Rand Paul is the brand new Republican Party outreach to the black community farce…

Ron Paul addresses the neo-confederate faithful Libertarians

 

The Michigan GOP is seeking to increase the party’s visibility in the Democratic stronghold of Detroit, 97.5 percent of which voted to reelect Barack Obama in 2012.

The solution? Open a new outreach center for Detroit voters, named the “African American Engagement Office.”

The GOP has tapped Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to headline the official opening of the office on Dec. 6, which will highlight “the Michigan Republican Party’s outreach efforts and our commitment to revitalizing Michigan’s urban centers,” according to the Eventbrite listing.

Paul will already be in Detroit to speak on the city’s bankruptcy crisis at the Detroit Economic Club, where he will “unveil his new legislative proposal to remove bankrupt Detroit and other economically blighted areas from poverty and the shackles of big government,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

Both the name of the office and the outreach strategy are already attracting their share of detractors. One Republican strategist told The Huffington Post that it sounds like Michigan Republicans are opening a “‘separate, but equal’ office in Detroit.”

Now – to most black folks who know of Rand’s daddy’s romance with white supremacists, and Rand’s opposition to the 1965 Civil Rights Act…

This is a bit like appointing your local KKK Leader as the Director of Diversity.

Perhaps why in his first speech in Detroit in the shiny new Minority Outreach Center… Only white folks showed up.

Not the least reason of which would be Rand’s ties to neo-confederates…

Rand Paul’s former staffer…”The confederate Avenger”.Sen. Paul says the white supremacist tendencies of Jack “The Southern Avenger” Hunter was just youthful indiscretion. In 2007 the former League of the South member wrote that if immigration levels remain unchecked, “A non-white majority America would simply cease to be America for reasons that are as numerous as they are obvious – whether we are supposed to mention them or not.” He was 33, and three years later he was co-writing Rand Paul’s book.

Ties to Secessionist Sympathizers? Don’t Worry, Rand Paul Will Still Endorse You

If there’s any Republican who needs to tread carefully when it comes to race, it’s Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Between his erstwhile opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his ties to Confederate sympathizers, and the baggage of his father’s past, pundits and observers are primed to pounce on any missteps, like his ill-received speech at Howard University this summer.

But Paul doesn’t seem to know that he’s on shaky ground with racial issues. To wit, earlier this fall, he endorsed Greg Brannon, a Republican primary candidate for Senate in North Carolina. As Molly Redden reports for Mother Jones, Brannon is far outside the mainstream of American politics. He opposes public education, rejects the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over national law, and has lent his support to a pro-nullification rally held by the League of the South, a self-described “Southern nationalist” organization that is an obvious vehicle for neo-Confederate and white supremacist ideas.

Like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Brannon sees the late Senator Jesse Helms, who represented North Carolina from 1973 to 2003, as a model for legislative behavior. “He was the one I most identified with,” said Brannon during a gathering this summer, “Senator No.” Helms, it should be said, was an unrepentant segregationist who used his power to institutionalize homophobia with attacks on gays and assaults on AIDS funding. To Helms, LGBT Americans were “weak, morally sick wretches,” and AIDS education was “obscene” and “revolting.”

Brannon stands with ugly forces in American life, and is the kind of far-right candidate who ought to be attacked and marginalized by Republican leaders. Like extremist candidates in Indiana, Missouri, and Nevada, his presence in the “tent” of the GOP is certain to alienate the voters who want to shift political gears without giving the car to a maniac. But, with endorsements from Rand Paul—“I support Greg Brannon, and expect him to be North Carolina’s next Senator”—and conservative activists like Red State’s Erick Erickson, there’s a fair chance he’ll make it through the primary and into the general election. And with a high profile comes a greater chance for disaster; given his history, I would be surprised if Brannon didn’t say something on race or gender that embarrassed him and his party.

Conservatives don’t just hate accusations of racism or racial insensitivity (that’s reasonable), they almost always deny that they have any substance, regardless of circumstance. It doesn’t matter that the right-wing indulged “birtherism” and called Obama a “food stamp president” and “Kenyan anti-colonialist”—it’s simply unreasonable to stamp those as racial. Likewise, when asked about his relationships with neo-Confederates and others on the far-right of American politics, Rand Paul has dismissed the questions as nonsense. “I don’t accept all of that and I don’t really need to or spend the time talking about all of that,” he said this summer in an interview with John Harwood of NPR, “If you want to talk about issues and what I stand for, I’m happy to, but I’m not going to really go through an interview reciting or respond to every yahoo in the world who wants to throw up a canard.”

Well, here’s the thing: If Rand Paul wants to avoid these questions, then he should avoid people who sympathize with white supremacists. And the same is true of the GOP writ large; if Republicans want to avoid accusations of prejudice or insensitivity, then the first step is to end the party’s association with lawmakers, officials, and activists who can’t help but indulge their worst instincts. After all, the Republican Party isn’t racist, and it shouldn’t be too hard to filter these people from the pool.