Meeting the enemy

Jul 20th, 2020 10:01 am | By

Trump’s stormtroopers:

https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1285139713993650177


He rejects it

Jul 20th, 2020 9:16 am | By

Pompeo the other day saw fit to bash the 1619 Project.

“The New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’—so named for the year that the first slaves were transported to America—wants you to believe that our country was founded for human bondage,” Pompeo said in his speech in Philadelphia on Thursday. “They want you to believe that America’s institutions continue to reflect the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding.”

And Pompeo wants you to think they don’t.

But they do. Of course they do. Policing, the prison system, the court systems (bail, plea deals, 3 strikes laws, harsh sentencing, capital punishment), schools, medical institutions, and on and on. Of course they do. We never rooted out the reflections of the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding and continuance of it for more than two centuries. Of course our institutions still reflect that.

“They want you to believe that Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed. The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout this ideology,” he added. “This is a dark vision of America’s birth. I reject it. It’s a disturbed reading of history. It is a slander on our great people.”

He rejects it, does he. Easy for him. Of course it’s a dark vision of America’s birth, but that’s because it’s what happened. We as a people have been sweeping it under the rug all along and we really need to stop doing that. The white portion of America committed crimes against humanity in relation to the brown portion of America and it has still never paid reparations, never done anything like enough to compensate for the generations of harm. Instead we continue to treat brown people as either cheap labor for jobs like chicken processing (one of the worst jobs on earth) or criminals who must be stripped of all rights and locked in boxes for years. Pompeo is dead right that that’s a dark vision but it’s fucking well what happened and is still happening.

“The Secretary drew a sharp distinction between the view of the 1619 Project—that America was founded on repression—and his own view that America, uniquely, was founded on a then-new conception of universal unalienable human rights,” a State Department spokeswoman told Foreign Policy by email.

Ok but what about the repression part? The new conception of human rights was indeed a good thing, but most of the people men who came up with it didn’t even apply it in their own (cough) households. Most of them had slaves; none of them thought those rights applied to women. Pompeo’s “sharp distinction” works only if you think slaves and displaced indigenous people and women don’t matter.

“Secretary Pompeo is fully committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce representative of America’s devotion to the principle of equal opportunity. This commitment to diversity and inclusion reflects the Department’s professional ethos.”

Excuse me? Workforce? What about citizenry? Does Pompeo see us as just labor? He’s not the Secretary of Labor, he’s the Secretary of State (more’s the pity), why the hell is he referring to us as a workforce?

“Pompeo made it very clear where he stands and reaffirmed the purpose of the commission by denigrating the movement for equal justice and the call for racial reckoning and healing in America,” said one State Department official. “Everyone that I have spoken with is horrified and disgusted by the commission, his press conference, and [the] attack on 1619,” said the official.

“Everyone who works for Trump is under instructions to ramp up the culture war,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Foreign Policy in an interview. “I think Secretary Pompeo has been a loyal servant of Donald Trump for his entire tenure and he is following instructions.”

So I guess the instructions are to say that white people are the best and brown people deserved what they got.



“Being a woman is an attitude”

Jul 19th, 2020 5:10 pm | By

Really? They can’t say what a woman is?

Image

Not one of them answered the question.

Funny that the question wasn’t “What is a man?” I guess because that one’s easy, it’s just “woman” that can’t be defined?

I’d like to offer them some of my “attitude.”



Uninvited

Jul 19th, 2020 4:56 pm | By

Portland mayor to feds: gtfo.

The mayor of Portland in Oregon has renewed his call for federal troops to leave the US city, accusing them of abusive tactics against protesters.

“They are sharply escalating the situation,” Mayor Ted Wheeler told CNN on Sunday.

And they’re not invited. They’re imposed from above.

Sometimes that’s justified. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock when white mobs were attacking the nine students who were integrating the high school…but then the mayor had requested the troops. Kennedy sent troops to Oxford, Mississippi to quell riots meant to keep James Meredith out of the University (“Ole Miss”), over the governor’s objections.

It was a high-stakes showdown between President Kennedy and Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett. “I’m a Mississippi segregationist and I am proud of it,” the governor declared.

By Saturday, Sept. 29, 1962, Kennedy was deploying federal marshals to Oxford, and Barnett was making a fiery speech at an Ole Miss football game. “I love Mississippi! I love her people, our customs,” he said. “I love and I respect our heritage.”

Football and die-hard racism and male bravado; booya.

But this isn’t that. Trump isn’t sending the feds to protect black students from raging racist mobs; on the contrary; Trump is sending the feds to terrorize and mangle protesters who are protesting…racism. This is Little Rock turned inside out.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday, Mayor Wheeler said there were “dozens if not hundreds of federal troops” in the city, adding: “Their presence here is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism.

“They’re not wanted here. We haven’t asked them here. In fact, we want them to leave,” he said.

His comments echoed those of Oregon Governor Kate Brown, who described the presence of federal troops in the city as “purely political theatre” from the Donald Trump administration.

And the theater is theater of racism, theater of fascism – not that of We Shall Overcome or Eyes on the Prize or This Little Light of Mine.

Oregon is suing.

Oregon’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the federal government, accusing it of unlawfully detaining protesters.

In the lawsuit, Ellen Rosenblum requested a restraining order to stop agents from the Department of Homeland Security, US Marshals Service, US Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protection Service from making any more arrests in the city.

The lawsuit said the actions of federal officers violated protesters’ ability to exercise their constitutional First Amendment right to assembly and, by seizing and detaining people without a warrant, also breached the Fourth and Fifth Amendment right to due process.

Protesting is allowed. Protesters have rights. Trump is a literal fascist.



Safe space

Jul 19th, 2020 3:56 pm | By

Via Wil Wheaton:

Image may contain: text that says 'AMA to accommodate ANTI-MASKERS we have provided this space away from everyone else where you can stare at your reflection since apparently you're the only person you care about'


Significant physical advantages

Jul 19th, 2020 2:48 pm | By

Sean Ingle in the Guardian:

World Rugby is considering banning trans women from playing women’s rugby because of significant safety concerns that have emerged following recent research, a decision that would make it the first international sports federation to go down that path.

You know, you’d think the significant safety concerns would have been there all along, given the differences between male and female bodies.

The Guardian can reveal that in a 38-page draft document produced by its transgender working group, it is acknowledged that there is likely to be “at least a 20-30% greater risk” of injury when a female player is tackled by someone who has gone through male puberty. The document also says the latest science shows that trans women retain “significant” physical advantages over biological women even after they take medication to lower their testosterone.

No shit.

As World Rugby’s working group notes, players who are assigned male at birth and whose puberty and development is influenced by androgens/testosterone “are stronger by 25%-50%, are 30% more powerful, 40% heavier, and about 15% faster than players who are assigned female at birth (who do not experience an androgen-influenced development).”

Sanity at last. Other sports please note.



93…

Jul 19th, 2020 10:50 am | By

On the one hand it’s funny, but on the other more serious hand it’s appalling.

No no no no no, says Trump, the last 5 questions are very hard, I bet you couldn’t answer them, I bet Biden couldn’t answer them.

Well one of them, says Wallace, is count backward from 100 by sevens.

No no no that’s misrepresentation, says Trump.

93… says Wallace.

Trump apparently thinks it was an IQ test as opposed to a cognitive test. Maybe one of the questions on the cognitive test should be “What’s the difference between an IQ test and a cognitive test?”



One of Trump’s fascists

Jul 19th, 2020 9:54 am | By

Trevor Timm on the DHS coup in Portland:

Virtually all of Portland’s local leaders, as well as Oregon’s leading representatives in Congress, have condemned the situation and called for an investigation.

But so far, DHS and the Trump administration do not seem deterred. The acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, released a video statement Friday lamenting that Portland had declined the department’s “offer” of “support”. So DHS went ahead and sent in its thugs anyway. DHS’s list of reasons for invading Portland and implementing its terror operation, amid what it calls “rampant long-lasting violence”, consists mostly of graffiti incidents and minor property damage.

Watch the clip. It’s extraordinary.

How does he justify his refusal to do what the governor and mayor tell him to do? By talking melodramatic nonsense about having to “defend” the federal courthouse against “violent anarchists”…and then saying he’s seen the broken doors, the broken windows, the graffiti.

Vandalism at the federal courthouse means we need border patrol in rented cars kidnapping people off the street? I don’t think so.

Portland is almost 400 miles from the Canadian border and 80 miles from the Pacific ocean, by the way. It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, allows CBP to be terrorizing the streets to hunt down graffiti artists—even if they think they can operate anywhere that’s 100 miles from a border. In other words, it’s illegal, or it should be.

So many questions. What does border patrol have to do with breaking windows at a federal building? Is border patrol legally authorized to kidnap people off the streets? Does it have any accountability to local government? How does any of this work?

Also by the way this “statement” of the acting secretary’s was made to Fox News.

And who is Chad Wolf?

He previously served in several positions in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including as Chief of Staff of the Transportation Security Administration and Chief of Staff to DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. He was an architect of the Trump administration’s family separation policy.

From 2005 to 2016, he was a lobbyist, helping clients to secure contracts from the Transportation Security Administration, his previous employer.

Awesome. Corrupt and brutal.

Back to Trevor Timm:

DHS, even in the pre-Trump era, has been an enormous waste of taxpayer resources, full of massive government waste and abuse, and a civil liberties disaster to boot. Back in 2015, I called for it to be abolished in the pages of the Guardian. Under Trump it has reached new levels of depravity. Its disturbing anti-immigration actions have shown agents seemingly going out of their way to be as cruel as possible to those they apprehend.

Anyone only has to read the news from the past few weeks to witness DHS’s corruption and creeping authoritarianism: in one story, government auditors have found that the CBP spent money meant for food and medical supplies for detained migrants on ATVs and dirt bikes for themselves. In another, DHS deployed Predator drones, helicopters and airplanes to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters in 15 American cities.

None of this is ok.



A certain freedom

Jul 19th, 2020 9:09 am | By

The Guardian followed Trump’s Fox News interview with Chris Wallace.

The interview was recorded on Friday, however. Wallace said he did ask the president about the pandemic and efforts to tackle it. But they were speaking a day before the Washington Post and then the New York Times reported that as Congress and the Trump White House negotiate the next stimulus and relief package for an economy and a nation hammered by Covid-19, the White House is seeking to block funding for testing and tracing efforts, and other key areas of the pandemic response.

Meanwhile Trump is out playing golf again.

Trump is asked about his top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci. Reports indicate the White House is looking to discredit Fauci. Trump denies he has fallen out with Fauci, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. “I spoke to him yesterday at length, I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci” he says. He also says Fauci, who has emerged as a frank public voice on the pandemic, is “a little bit of an alarmist.”

By which he means Fauci doesn’t tell cheer-up lies.

Trump adds that he believes Covid-19 will “eventually disappear”.

Ah yes, “eventually.” No doubt it will, like for instance when the sun explodes, but we don’t live in “eventually.”

Trump is asked about enforcing a nationwide mandate for masks to be worn in public. “No, I want people to have a certain freedom,” says Trump. He later says he believes masks can help stop the spread of Covid-19 though.

That’s not a kind of freedom that matters though. That’s a cheap, selfish, dime store freedom. Besides which, he doesn’t in fact want people to have a certain freedom. There are a lot of people he wants to see in prison forever; he says so himself.

He is asked about rising crime in US cities in recent weeks. “I explain it very simply by saying they’re Democrat-run cities. They’re liberally run. They’re stupidly run.”

That is “very simply,” and very crudely and very inaccurately.

How about those Confederate flags sir?

“When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism. They love their flag, it represents the south,” says Trump. He then equates Black Lives Matters flags with Confederate flags, a staggering and offensive claim given that the latter represents a system that thrived on slavery.

It doesn’t “represent the south” – it represents the slave-owning south, the south that tried to secede in order to continue slavery, the south that reinstated racial oppression in the 1870s, the south that fought the civil rights movement every step of the way. It does not, for instance, represent the huge proportion of the southern population that is descended from slaves.

Then he talks a lot of nonsense about Biden.

Disturbingly, he then refuses to say he will accept the result of the election. “Can you give a direct answer you will accept the election?” asks Wallace. “I have to see … I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes,” says the president.

Oh brilliant. The law and order guy says yes he might well try to overthrow the government.



Wait, you mean there are two?

Jul 18th, 2020 4:55 pm | By

Trump couldn’t manage a more polite or serious tribute than “saddened to hear,” and Republican senators don’t even know who Lewis was…beyond “he was one of the black ones.”

Like many of their colleagues, GOP Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska) posted tributes to Rep. John Lewis on Saturday and aimed to include photos of themselves with the civil rights icon who died Friday. Rubio even made the image his Twitter profile picture.

There was just one problem. The photos they each posted were of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, who died in October.

Well it’s not as if they’re colleagues or anything, not as if they ever had an opportunity to see them in person.

“It was an honor to know & be blessed with the opportunity to serve in Congress with John Lewis a genuine & historic American hero,” Rubio tweeted with the photo of himself and Cummings.

“A genuine hero but to be honest I don’t actually remember who he is.”

“It was an honor to have served alongside John for a small portion of his impressive career of service, and to have joined him at the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, a years-long effort of the congressman,” Sullivan wrote on Facebook with the photo of himself and Cummings outside the museum.

“Oh that’s the other black guy! Sorry sorry sorry. Make America great again.”



Penny wise…

Jul 18th, 2020 3:07 pm | By

Oh, that’s interesting – Trump isn’t just looking the other way and trying to bully everyone else into looking the other way, he’s actively trying to help the virus kill us all.

The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.

I suppose this is tied to his firm belief that if you don’t test you don’t have as many cases.

The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said.

The administration’s posture has angered some GOP senators, the officials said, and some lawmakers are trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill. …

President Trump has repeatedly questioned the value of conducting widespread coronavirus testing, arguing that if there were fewer tests conducted, the number of infections would be lower.

Yes, that’s definitely how that works. If you don’t know X then X doesn’t exist. If you don’t test for termites then you don’t have termites. Even if the house is a pile of dust, you still don’t have termites – you know this because you know you didn’t test for them.

At the same time they push cuts in testing and CDC funds, administration officials are trying to use the spending package to fund priorities that appear not directly related to the coronavirus — including a new FBI building, which has been a longtime priority for Trump, according to people involved.

Awesome. Don’t spend our money on resisting the coronavirus, but do spend it on a new FBI building. That’s all fine.



To he

Jul 18th, 2020 12:40 pm | By

Trump finally got around to mentioning John Lewis.

That’s pretty much it – he mentioned him.

It could hardly be more insultingly perfunctory. I guess he could have said “Sorry to hear about John Lewis. MAGA!” But short of that…



Oh look, you’re within the 100 miles

Jul 18th, 2020 11:41 am | By

The ACLU explains how Trump and Customs and Border Patrol can get away with this grabbing people off the street thing – how it is actually legal. It’s an eye-opener.

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects Americans from random and arbitrary stops and searches.

According to the government, however, these basic constitutional principles do not apply fully at our borders. For example, at border crossings (also called “ports of entry”), federal authorities do not need a warrant or even suspicion of wrongdoing to justify conducting what courts have called a “routine search,” such as searching luggage or a vehicle.

But here’s the kicker – the “border” is not just the border.

Even in places far removed from the border, deep into the interior of the country, immigration officials enjoy broad—though not limitless—powers. Specifically, federal regulations give U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) authority to operate within 100 miles of any U.S. “external boundary.”

Guess what. It turns out most of us live within 100 miles of any U.S. “external boundary.” I do for instance. I wouldn’t have thought so, but haha joke’s on us, our external boundary here in Seattle is not the Pacific but Puget Sound. Puget Sound! That’s walking distance from here. Down a steep hill, but still walking distance.

Check it out.

Look at that. Chicago, Milwaukee – who thinks of them as border cities? And apparently the border bulges way into California east of the Bay Area because the Bay is another “border.”

The ACLU continues:

In this 100-mile zone, Border Patrol agents have certain additional authorities. For instance, Border Patrol can operate immigration checkpoints.

Border Patrol, nevertheless, cannot pull anyone over without “reasonable suspicion” of an immigration violation or crime (reasonable suspicion is more than just a “hunch”). Similarly, Border Patrol cannot search vehicles in the 100-mile zone without a warrant or “probable cause” (a reasonable belief, based on the circumstances, that an immigration violation or crime has likely occurred).

In practice, Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. No matter what CBP officers and Border Patrol agents think, our Constitution applies throughout the United States, including within this “100-mile border zone.”

The zone that most of us live in. Who knew?

Many people think that border-related policies only impact people living in border towns like El Paso or San Diego. The reality is that Border Patrol’s interior enforcement operations encroach deep into and across the United States, affecting the majority of Americans.

Roughly two-thirds of the United States’ population lives within the 100-mile zone—that is, within 100 miles of a U.S. land or coastal border. That’s about 200 million people.

Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont lie entirely or almost entirely within this area.

Nine of the ten largest U.S. metropolitan areas, as determined by the 2010 Census, also fall within this zone: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and San Jose.

This is very alarming.



He doesn’t hate them when they agree with him

Jul 18th, 2020 10:55 am | By

The Post reports the unsurprising news that Trump’s verbal attacks on scientists are not helping the response to COVID.

This week’s remarkable character assault by some top White House advisers on Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, signified President Trump’s hostility toward medical expertise and has produced a chilling effect among the government scientists and public health professionals laboring to end the pandemic, according to administration officials and health experts.

From Trump’s point of view that means it’s working. He wants them chilled.

Though Trump does not automatically distrust the expertise of public health officials, he is averse to any information or assessment that he considers “bad news,” that compromises his economic cheerleading message or that jeopardizes his reelection, according to several administration officials and other people with knowledge of the dynamic.

A distinction without a difference. “Trump doesn’t object to the expertise when it agrees with him.” Well no kidding; that’s the problem.

In addition to Fauci, the White House has repeatedly undermined and sidelined the CDC over the last several months, which prompted four former CDC directors to pen an op-ed in The Washington Post this week that argued no president had politicized the CDC to the extent that Trump has.

We don’t want to be exterminated by a gruesome torturous disease; that’s not political, it’s just basic survival.

Two of the White House officials with the closest and longest-standing ties to Trump, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and trade adviser Peter Navarro, attacked Fauci this past week. Navarro penned an op-ed in USA Today in which he stated that Fauci was “wrong about everything,” while Scavino shared a cartoon on social media mocking Fauci as “Dr. Faucet,” drowning Uncle Sam with a deluge of “extra cold” water.

… Fauci said the push to discredit him was “bizarre,” telling the Atlantic, “If you talk to reasonable people in the White House, they realize that was a major mistake on their part, because it doesn’t do anything but reflect poorly on them.”

If you can find any reasonable people in the White House.

“It seems that some are more intent on fighting imagined enemies than the real enemy here, which is the virus,” said Thomas R. Frieden, a former CDC director and president of Resolve to Save Lives.

“The virus doesn’t read talking points,” Frieden said. “The virus doesn’t watch news shows. The virus just waits for us to make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, as Texas and Florida and South Carolina and Arizona did, the virus wins. When we ignore science, the virus wins.”

And when the virus wins – this is important – lots of people die, and lots of other people survive but with life-altering damage.

Trump in recent weeks has been committing less of his time and energy to managing the pandemic, according to advisers, and has only occasionally spoken in detail about the topic in his public appearances. One of these advisers said the president is “not really working this anymore. He doesn’t want to be distracted by it. He’s not calling and asking about data. He’s not worried about cases.”

That could be good news, because it could mean he’s interfering less. But as a fact about him – it’s execrable. Don’t worry about all these people dying on your watch, dude! Go play golf!



A titan

Jul 18th, 2020 9:47 am | By

I think that photo is from the inauguration. I watched the whole thing – first and last time I’ve ever done that. That moment in particular…well, you know.



Giant loss

Jul 18th, 2020 9:37 am | By


Guest post: Make our suburbs sub again

Jul 18th, 2020 9:22 am | By

Originally a comment by Papito on The beautiful suburbs.

What makes a suburb “successful” is a good ratio of property value to number of children. Property value is maintained by zoning. With high property value, you get rich people living there, and public schools funded by rich people’s property taxes, and a lower rate of public school attendance because rich people don’t have as many kids as poor people and so many rich people send their kids to private schools anyway.

What “abolishes” a suburb is revising the zoning to allow smaller lots, or (god forbid!) apartment buildings, increasing population density and reducing per-unit prices. Cheaper, smaller housing brings a lower ratio of property tax to children. People who are poor or who live in smaller apartments have more children per capita and rarely send them to private school. Also, though this is obviously irrelevant, there are some correlations of poverty to race. Not that making a suburb more “urban” means anything at all besides increasing population density.

The phenomenon as we see it near where I live in an American city is that the near suburbs are full of people who like to talk a lot about fair housing and fair this and that and black lives matter, but if you try to build an apartment building near them they will determine that it just wouldn’t be safe because of, you know, traffic reasons or where are we going to build a new elementary school or something. Black lives matter as long as they stay over across the interstate.



The beautiful suburbs

Jul 17th, 2020 5:31 pm | By

Trump did another publicly funded campaign speech in the Rose Garden yesterday. He promised to Keep America Racist.

The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to, at a much higher level, abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs by placing far-left Washington bureaucrats in charge of local zoning decisions. They are absolutely determined to eliminate single-family zoning, destroy the value of houses and communities already built, just as they have in Minneapolis and other locations that you read about today. Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise.

Oh, gee, I wonder what he’s talking about there. Why would zoning make crime rates go up?

Joe Biden and his bosses from the radical left want to significantly multiply what they’re doing now. And what will be the end result is you will totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. So they wanted to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement while at the same time destroying our great suburbs.

The beautiful suburbs? The “radical left” and their stooge Biden want to destroy our great and beautiful suburbs? What suburbs? Why?

It’s called white flight. It’s real. Trump thinks we need to cling to it.



The nightmare

Jul 17th, 2020 4:48 pm | By

The fascist coup is getting closer, is perhaps under way.

CBP is Customs and Border Patrol – who don’t have jurisdiction over domestic protests. Do they? That’s not how any of this works is it? Deranged fascist presidents can’t just call in bombers and prison guards and heavy artillery and Border Patrol whenever they feel like staging a tantrum, can they?

Fascism. It’s here.



The groundwork

Jul 17th, 2020 4:27 pm | By

Jeet Heer in the Nation:

Protests have been roiling Portland for over six weeks. Even prior to these protests, Portland was a site of a long-running battle between right-wing groups like the Proud Boys and left-wing activists who are usually lumped together under the antifa label. It’s possible that the antifa connection made Portland a spot of particular interest to the Trump administration, which has used the loosely organized anti-fascist groups as a scapegoat for social upheavals in the wake of police brutality.

The deployment of unidentified federal officers is particularly dangerous in a situation like that in Portland and elsewhere in America, because it could easily lead to right-wing militias’ impersonating legal authorities and kidnapping citizens.

That would be bad. Let’s not have that.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf is currently in Portland. In a statement on Thursday, Wolf said, “The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.” Wolf warned, “This siege can end if state and local officials decide to take appropriate action instead of refusing to enforce the law.”

Wolf’s strident words echoed the law-and-order theme that has come to the fore in Trump’s reelection campaign. Trump himself sounded a racist variation on the theme in a Thursday White House virtual town hall when he decried the collapse of “law and order” in cities like New York and Chicago. Trump also claimed that Democrats were trying to destroy the suburbs. Announcing the rescinding of an Obama order against racial segregation in housing, Trump said, “The suburb destruction will end with us.”

So it’s “destruction of the suburbs” to ban racial segregation in housing?

Trump hasn’t learned anything since he was sued in federal court for enforcing racial segregation in his own housing.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown has been commendably blunt in attacking Trump’s assault on protesters. On Thursday, she tweeted:

The President is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government.

I told Acting Secretary Wolf that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets. His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes. He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way.

Or just plain laying the groundwork for a fascist coup.

H/t Dave Ricks