This is the same Breitbart that the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to in an April “Hatewatch” report:
“Over the past year however, the outlet has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas — all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”
.. “The Alt-Right is a loose set of far-right ideologies at the core of which is a belief that “white identity” is under attack through policies prioritizing multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice and must be preserved, usually through white-identified online communities and physical ethno-states.”
.. approximately one-fourth of the 3.3 million Muslims in this country are African-American. Indeed, the Muslim faith has deep roots in the black community because many Africans brought to this country as slaves were Muslims.
Why Donald Trump’s Test for Immigrants Won’t Work
Donald Trump proposed an ideological test for immigrants, one that would allow in “only those who we expect to flourish in our country – and to embrace a tolerant American society.” Is it possible to implement a test like that
.. The practical reality is that you are dealing with people who, if they’re fairly sophisticated, are going to almost immediately learn what to say. So unless you intend to tie them to a polygraph, which is a notoriously uncertain device, you’re assuming that you are basically only going to catch the inexperienced or the stupid.
.. more and more extremist organizations are shifting to people who don’t come from a suspect country.
.. What you’re essentially saying is that if somebody is already sophisticated, educated, understands Western values, has money and comes from a country where they have no urgent reason to enter the U.S., they’re probably going to easily slip through. That is very odd criteria for a nation of immigrants. What do we do, change that plaque on the side of the Statue of Liberty?
.. in this campaign people keep using ISIS as a term for virtually all terrorism.
.. ISIS is actually a fairly small percentage of global terrorism, and it’s a fairly limited percentage of even Islamist extremist terrorism.
.. It then exploited the fact that Nouri al-Maliki, who came to office during the Bush administration, basically chose to promote both himself and Shiites at the expense of Sunnis in western Iraq and alienated so many of them that when what became ISIS invaded, there was very little resistance.
.. None of this had anything to do with the Obama administration. I think it is unfair to say that it somehow was a product of the Bush administration. The fact is that Saddam Hussein created the divided Iraq where the moment you remove the dictator, all of the divisions became critical.
.. Mr. Trump said that “we should have kept the oil in Iraq.” Could the United States have done that?
Under international law that would’ve been illegal by every possible standard.
You can’t go in to liberate a country and then somehow steal its most important resource. That frankly is not simply illegal under international law, it directly contradicts virtually every value we have as a country.
He was one of the most respected intel officers of his generation. Now he’s leading ‘Lock her up’ chants.
Flynn, who was no longer in government but received a DIA briefing on Russia before the trip, said the invitation and payment came through his speaker’s bureau.
.. Asked why he would want to be so closely associated with a Kremlin propaganda platform, Flynn said he sees no distinction between RT and other news outlets.
.. Mullen provided a written statement saying that “for retired senior officers to take leading and vocal roles as clearly partisan figures is a violation of the ethos and professionalism of apolitical military service.” Officers are sworn to execute orders without regard for political positions, an oath to the Constitution that “is inviolable and presidents must never question it or doubt it,” he said.
..“This is not about the right to speak out, it is about the disappointing lack of judgment in doing so for crass partisan purposes. This is made worse by using hyperbolic language all the while leveraging the respected title of ‘general.’ ”.. “Retired senior officers should not take lightly the impact of public commentary in a political environment,” Allen said. “I chose to do so because I believe that Trump was proposing policies and orders to the U.S. military as a potential Commander in Chief, which I believed would create a civil-military crisis. This is a matter of conscience for me, because in moments of crisis such as these, credible voices must speak out.”.. Flynn dismisses his critics as closet Clinton supporters or misguided colleagues who have put their pursuit of corporate board seats and lucrative consulting contracts ahead of their concern for the country. Most retired generals “are afraid to speak out,” he said, because they use their stars “for themselves, for their businesses.”.. Trump is a “very serious guy. Good listener. Asked really good questions,” he said.
.. He sees the nation as beset by darkness and corruption, with voters split between “centrist nationalists” and “socialists.”
.. The divide has weakened the nation’s ability to grasp what he considers an existential threat from “a diseased component” of Islam.
.. Throughout his career, he was viewed as a charismatic and unconventional officer with a talent for mapping terrorist networks
.. his hard-charging approach was at times considered disruptive or undisciplined.
.. helping to co-write a 26-page article, “Fixing Intel,” that depicted the intelligence-gathering mission in Afghanistan as a failing endeavor that was too focused on finding targets rather than understanding cultural complexities.
.. an allegation that he had inappropriately shared highly classified intelligence with Australian and British forces. “I’m proud of that one,” Flynn said in an interview. “Accuse me of sharing intelligence in combat with our closest allies. Please!”
.. In public remarks, he warned any employees who resisted his agenda that he would “move them or fire them.”
.. Former subordinates at the DIA said Flynn was so prone to dubious pronouncements that senior aides coined a term — “Flynn facts” — for assertions that seemed questionable or inaccurate.
.. Asked for evidence, he said, “I just know!”
.. “This decision to kill bin Laden . . . so what?!” he said. “What did it really do?”
How Trump Remixed the Republican ‘Southern Strategy’
in July 2005, Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ken Mehlman acknowledged the party’s “Southern Strategy” and directly apologized: “I am here as Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
.. Manafort’s appointment, followed by the ousting of Corey Lewandowski in June, was widely seen as a move to professionalize Trump’s disorganized campaign staff just ahead of the convention. But along with credentials earned from working with top GOP politicians (and a raft of international dictators from the Philippines to Somalia), Manafort also brought decades of experience as an overseer of the Southern Strategy.
.. And it was Manafort who arranged for Ronald Reagan to kick off his post-convention presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964.
.. Notably, all eight of the men who were convicted of involvement in these murders would have been free to attend Reagan’s speech. Seven were convicted in 1967, but the longest jail sentence any of them served was six years, and the person who orchestrated the murders—a Baptist preacher named Edgar Ray Killen—was not convicted until the case was reopened in 2005. As in much of the South, the inability of courts in Mississippi to seat juries that would carry out meaningful justice for the perpetrators of these murders is a good indication of racial attitudes that persisted even late into the 20th century.
.. He has characterized illegal immigrants rather than black Americans as a threat to white women’s safety. And he has redirected the Christian Right’s focus away from its preoccupation with a “godless Communism.” In its place, Trump has exploited the perception of Islam’s growing power abroad