The Times on that secret Facebook group for male Marines to degrade women.

Now the Defense Department has opened a criminal investigation and the Marine Corps is facing its latest unwanted controversy after it was revealed over the weekend that a secret online Facebook group of active-duty and veteran Marines shared thousands of naked and private photos of Marine Corps women.

The invitation-only group, called Marines United and made up of more than 30,000 active duty Marines and veterans, built online dossiers on Marine women without their knowledge or consent, listing dozens of women’s names, ranks, social media handles and where they are stationed.

…

Several Marines said the Marines United postings are an evolution of a retaliatory practice called “make her famous.” Marines would share nude photographs of girlfriends or spouses they believed were cheating through text messages to a broad swath of people, encouraging them to forward the photos.

Wow. Men would do that to women they were close to, women they perhaps “loved.”

Jason Elsdon, a Marine in his early 40s, who said he was a member of Marines United and said he played no role in posting, organizing or disseminating the photographs, argued that people were overreacting. “It was just nudes,” he said. “I scrolled past it.” He added: “I don’t feel that it’s right, but I don’t feel that people should be utterly surprised that it is happening. There are other groups, and many are civilians, that are the same way.”

Well that’s easy for Jason Elsdon, isn’t it – that kind of thing doesn’t happen to him. You could say he has male privilege.

Though all military branches face problems with integrating women, the Marine Corps has perhaps the toughest challenge. Not only does it have the smallest proportion of women of all the services — 7 percent, compared with 14 percent in the Army — it also has the highest rate of sexual assault reports. Reforms also continually collide with a culture of ground-pounding infantry fighters that despite the efforts of some in the leadership, embrace a tradition of brawling, hard-drinking and sexual exploits.

Sexual “exploits” – which include violence and degradation, right? It’s not an exploit if there’s not a touch of sadism?

“That is absolute nonsense,” said Maj. Clark Carpenter, a Marine Corps spokesman. “A true warrior carries himself with a sense of decency and compassion, but is always ready for the fight,” he said. “Those who hide in the dark corners of the internet with a shield of anonymity and purport to be warriors are nothing of the sort — they are nothing more than cowards.”

Still, the Marine Corps leadership has never fully rid the Corps of its rough ethos, and in recent years it has been hit with a number of scandals when this mentality broke into the open, including allegations that commanders retaliated against women who reported sexual assaults and recent reports that drill instructors hazed recruits, especially Muslims.

Just Muslims? Not bad hombres from Mexico?

Women in the Marine Corps say the culture has been hostile to them for years.

“When I was in Iraq, I always carried a can of black spray paint to cover up what was written about me in the port-a-johns,” said Kate Hendricks Thomas, a Marine veteran who is now a professor of behavioral health at Charleston Southern University. “I tried to laugh it off, but the harassment is so pervasive that it can have a real effect.”

It’s hard to laugh off having to work among people who have active, expressed contempt for you.

In September, a Marine veteran named John Albert was invited to join the site, and, disgusted by what he found, alerted Facebook.

“I have tons of friends who got killed in Afghanistan and have died since they came home. These types of actions dishonor their names and the entire Marine Corps,” Mr. Albert said in an interview.

Facebook took down the page temporarily for violating a ban on nudity after the complaint, Mr. Albert said, but the group apparently got around restrictions on nudity by shifting photos to a shared Google file.

Then on Saturday, a Marine veteran named Thomas Brennan, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he was wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade, and later founded the nonprofit news site The War Horse, wrote about the group.

Marine Corps officials, alerted to the site by Mr. Brennan, contacted Google and had the files removed.

Since publishing the story, Mr. Brennan said he and his family had received death threats from members of the group. He charged that one member was offering “500 bucks for nudes” of Mr. Brennan’s wife and said he was “cooperating with multiple law enforcement agencies” regarding threats to him and his family.

I’m so sick of bullies. I feel so sick about having a noisy bully in the White House.

Sarah Ditum in the Independent on Jenni Murray and the BBC and who gets to say what a woman is:

Jenni Murray has presented the BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for 30 years, and she’s been a woman for even longer than that. At the weekend, the Sunday Times published an article by her titled “Be trans, be proud — but don’t call yourself a ‘real woman’”. Under that headline, Murray criticised some claims of trans activism (and she was careful to say she was talking about the extreme of the debate): that anyone who identifies as a woman has “always been a woman” no matter the age at which they transition, and that references to the female body should be censored in the interests of inclusion.

Not having an opinion on these issues is presumably a personal and professional impossibility for Murray. After all, it was in a Woman’s Hour interview with Murray that India Willoughby, a former ITV news presenter who transitioned in her 40s, declared that women with unshaved legs are “dirty”. How are we supposed to interpret that – a grossly sexist comment – without acknowledging that Willoughby’s views are shaped by decades of living as a man, and, although she may not have personally felt them, did nevertheless enjoy the structural privileges that came with being male? How is Murray supposed to feel about it, knowing that the BBC and the media in general has a miserable track record of sexism and ageism?

Those are things that I wonder too. I do think decades of living as a man make a difference, and that it’s reasonable to acknowledge that and both unreasonable and unfair not to.

One more Donnie bulletin, because it’s kind of funny, and because it’s about how miserable and furious he is.

He had a bad weekend. A bad bad weekend. Ivanka and Jared were with him but they couldn’t mellow him out.

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad.

Trump’s young presidency has existed in a perpetual state of chaos. The issue of Russia has distracted from what was meant to be his most triumphant moment: his address last Tuesday to a joint session of Congress. And now his latest unfounded accusation — that Barack Obama tapped Trump’s phones during last fall’s campaign — had been denied by the former president and doubted by both allies and fellow Republicans.

Well if that made him mad, maybe he should have thought a little more before tweeting it.

Gnawing at Trump, according to one of his advisers, is the comparison between his early track record and that of Obama in 2009, when amid the Great Recession he enacted an economic stimulus bill and other big-ticket items.

Welllllll, Donnie, you’re not Obama, are you, and you haven’t been behaving the way Obama did. You didn’t prepare. You didn’t learn what you needed to know. You didn’t get good people to work for you. You didn’t do any of the things you needed to do to make your first weeks more like Obama’s first weeks. You appear to be not smart enough.

The mood at the White House on Tuesday night was different altogether — jubilant. Trump returned from the Capitol shortly before midnight to find his staff assembled in the residence cheering him. Finally, they all thought, they had seized control. The president had even laid off Twitter outbursts — a small victory for a staff often unable to drive a disciplined message.

“He nailed it, and he knew it,” said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president.

He managed to deliver a speech someone else wrote without barfing or crying. Big deal. You can tell how low their expectations are, when they get excited about that.

But anyway then Sessions ruined everything.

Back at the White House on Friday morning, Trump summoned his senior aides into the Oval Office, where he simmered with rage, according to several White House officials. He upbraided them over Sessions’s decision to recuse himself, believing that Sessions had succumbed to pressure from the media and other critics instead of fighting with the full defenses of the White House.

In a huff, Trump departed for Mar-a-Lago, taking with him from his inner circle only his daughter and Kushner, who is a White House senior adviser. His top two aides, Chief of Staff ­Reince Priebus and Bannon, stayed behind in Washington.

They were on the naughty stool.

As reporters began to hear about the Oval Office meeting, Priebus interrupted his Friday afternoon schedule to dedicate more than an hour to calling reporters off the record to deny that the outburst had actually happened, according to a senior White House official.

“Every time there’s a palace intrigue story or negative story about Reince, the whole West Wing shuts down,” the official said.

Ultimately, Priebus was unable to kill the story. He simply delayed the bad news, as reports of Trump dressing down his staff were published by numerous outlets Saturday.

Poor Reince. I’m glad I’m not Reince.

Trump was brighter Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story, the official said.

But he found reason to be mad again: Few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday political talk shows. Some Trump advisers and allies were especially disappointed in Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who two days earlier had hitched a ride down to Florida with Trump on Air Force One.

Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd to explain Trump’s wiretapping claim, Rubio demurred.

“Look, I didn’t make the allegation,” he said. “I’m not the person that went out there and said it.”

So that was Donnie’s very bad no good horrible weekend.

Jenni Murray, longstanding presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, wrote a piece for yesterday’s Times (the London one) about women and trans women. We all know what happened next.

The reporting, predictably, is not accurate. It never is, is it. Maev Kennedy at the Guardian for instance led with this:

A chorus of protest – and some support – has greeted an article by the broadcaster Jenni Murray, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, that questioned the claims of transgender women to be considered “real women”.

That “real women” is tricksy, because in fact it’s Murray herself who put it in scare quotes, but that’s not what that sentence looks like, is it. I’ll just quote the five places she used the phrase so that you can see:

I can’t agree with Julie Burchill or Germaine Greer , whose language in their expression of revulsion at the trans woman (a man who becomes a woman) claiming to be a real woman has been unacceptably crude.

That’s attribution rather than use – she’s talking about Burchill and Greer, not herself.

But my concern, which I know is shared by numerous women who are now to be known as “cis” (short for “cisgender” – naturalborn women, in the language that’s more familiar to most of us ), is for the impact this question of what constitutes “a real woman” will have on sexual politics.

Scare quotes. The whole point of the scare quotes is to acknowledge that that’s a contested concept.

This time I was speaking to another trans woman, India Willoughby , who had hit the headlines after appearing on the ITV programme Loose Women. India held firmly to her belief that she was a “real woman”, ignoring the fact that she had spent all of her life before her transition enjoying the privileged position in our society generally accorded to a man.

Scare quotes again.

There are some trans women who willingly accept they cannot describe themselves as women and who agree that sex and gender are not interchangeable. I met Jenny Roberts a bout 15 years ago; she’s now 72 and made her transition, including hormon e treatment and surgery, when she was 50.

“I’m not a real woman,” is the first thing she said to me in a recent conversation.

Attribution, not use.

The most significant part of Jenny’s understanding of the trans woman/real woman debate came about as a result of her selling the printing business and, instead, opening a feminist bookshop in York, which she called Libertas.

That’s the closest she comes to using it herself as coming from her. She doesn’t say what Maev Kennedy accused her of saying – she said more nuanced things than that.

Anyway. Of course there are yells of anger, of course there’s a petition demanding the BBC fire her, of course the BBC punished her.

The BBC has issued presenter Dame Jenni Murray with an impartiality warning over her transgender comments as a TV presenter called for her to be sacked.

Dame Jenni, the veteran host of Woman’s Hour, has been told that she must remain impartial on “controversial topics” after she claimed that a sex change can’t make a man a “real woman”.

No she didn’t. See above. She did say there are differences, differences that matter, but she didn’t make the claim in that form.

The claims, which have been fiercely criticised by equality campaigners, have resulted in Dame Jenni being reminded that she must remain neutral on the subject.

…

Writing in the Sunday Times, Dame Jenni criticised Willoughby for claiming she was a “woman” because she had failed to acknowledge that she had spent most of her life “enjoying the privileged position in our society generally accorded to a man”.

…

She also criticised Willoughby’s apparent willingness to accept the Dorchester hotel’s strict dress code for female staff, which requires that they always wear makeup, have manicures and shaved legs.

“There wasn’t a hint of understanding that she was simply playing into the stereotype – a man’s idea of what a woman should be.”

Now for the Reveal article.

The U.S. Department of Defense is investigating hundreds of Marines who used social media to solicit and share hundreds — possibly thousands — of naked photographs of female service members and veterans.

Since Jan. 30, more than two dozen women – many on active duty, including officers and enlisted service members – have been identified by their full name, rank and military duty station in photographs posted and linked to from a private Facebook page.

In one instance, a female corporal in uniform was followed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, by a fellow Marine, who surreptitiously photographed her as she picked up her gear. Those photographs were posted on the Facebook group Marines United, which has nearly 30,000 followers, drawing dozens of obscene comments.

One member of the Facebook group suggested that the service member sneaking the photos should “take her out back and pound her out.” Others suggested more than vaginal sex:

“And butthole. And throat. And ears. Both of them. Video it though … for science.”

So much for military loyalty. So much for having each other’s backs.

The activity on the Marines United page was uncovered by The War Horse, a nonprofit news organization run by Marine veteran Thomas Brennan. Within a day of Brennan contacting Marine Corps headquarters Jan. 30, social media accounts behind the sharing had been deleted by Facebook and Google at the Corps’ request, and a formal investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has been launched.

However, it is clear that the actions taken so far have not stopped the activity: Photos of the woman followed at Camp Lejeune were posted on Marines United on Feb. 16, more than two weeks after the linking accounts had been shut down. The Marine who shot those photos has been discharged from active duty, Marine Corps officials confirmed.

“We need to be brutally honest with ourselves and each other: This behavior hurts fellow Marines, family members, and civilians. It is a direct attack on our ethos and legacy,” Sgt. Maj. Ronald L. Green, the most senior enlisted Marine on active duty, wrote in an email response. “It is inconsistent with our Core Values, and it impedes our ability to perform our mission.”

I hope it is. I hope it’s inconsistent with their Core Values. But core values can turn out to be quite impoverished when you look closely at them. They can rule out lying, cheating and stealing while saying nothing about torture and brutality, let alone rape and stalking and harassment.

The service is deeply concerned about the damage the incident could do to the Marines, according to a document provided to generals Friday warning them of the upcoming story.

The 10-page “Office of Marine Corps Communications Public Affairs Guidance” lists resources for victims, including a website to report crimes, and provides talking points for other media and members of Congress – who, it suggested, will want answers. It also outlines another possible blow to come: inappropriate responses from Marines.

“The story will likely spark shares and discussions across social media, offering venues for Marines and former Marines who may victim blame, i.e., ‘they shouldn’t have taken the photos in the first place,’ or bemoan that they believe the Corps is becoming soft or politically correct,” it said.

You can count on it.

This distribution of photographs without the women’s consent can threaten their mental health, according to Dr. Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist, founding board member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and former associate director of the National Institute for Mental Health.

“It impairs the ideal of a brotherhood and sisterhood, being able to count on somebody,” said Ochberg, who pioneered the post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis in 1980. “Within the military, this is a violation of family. … There are few organizations held to such esteem as the Marine Corps. They stand for honor, courage and commitment.

“This destroys honor. … This is sadistic. … This is disloyalty.”

That.

Remember Tailhook? This may be even worse.

The Marine Corps is looking into allegations that an unknown number of potential Marines, as well as current and former service members, shared naked and compromising photos of their colleagues on social media, Marine officials said Sunday.

The allegations were first reported by the War Horse and published Saturday through the website Reveal. The author, a Marine veteran and Purple Heart recipient, as well as members of his family, have received numerous death threats since the article was first published. It is unclear how many people are involved in the scandal and how many photos were posted online.

I read the War Horse/Reveal account yesterday last thing, when I didn’t have the energy to share it here. It’s hair-raising.

The War Horse’s report focuses on one Facebook group with more than 30,000 members called Marines United. In January, a link to a shared hard drive containing photos of numerous female Marines in various states of undress was posted to the group, according to the War Horse’s report. The hard drive contained images, as well as the names and units of the women pictured. Many of the photos were accompanied by derogatory and harassing comments.

That’s the part that really makes me sick. It would be bad enough if it were just “dayum I want to fuck her” but when that leads directly to the hostile violent fantasies…I just want to live on some other planet.

Photos of Marine Lance Cpl. Marisa Woytek were taken from her Instagram account and posted to Marines United multiple times in the past six months without her consent.

“Even if I could, I’m never reenlisting,” Woytek said. “Being sexually harassed online ruined the Marine Corps for me, and the experience.”

Woytek said she was alerted to the hijacked photos by others on social media and were shown the comments that accompanied them. She said that many of the comments included allusions to sexual assault and rape.

Imagine how that makes women in the military feel.

Many of her female colleagues have experienced similar incidents, she said, and added that they have been reluctant to speak out for fear of retaliation from the group’s thousands of members. With the War Horse’s report Saturday, Woytek said that she and others “have a voice now.”

But they also have thousands of colleagues who share that kind of contempt and hatred for women.

The Journal.ie publishes, via Catherine Corless, the names of the 796 children who died at the Tuam “Mother and Baby Home” i.e. prison for unmarried mothers and their babies.

Very few pictures from the home exist but thanks to the tireless work of historian Catherine Corless, we do have the names of 796 children who died there between 1925 and 1960.

The infant mortality rate at the home was double that of even other mother and baby homes around the country at the time. Young children in the Tuam home succumbed to deaths from afflictions as heartbreakingly banal as the flu and, although only in a small number of cases, ear infections.

Flu is far from always “banal,” but that’s a detail.

The most common causes of death were “debility from birth” (25%), 15% from “respiratory diseases”, 10% each from influenza and the measles, 8% born too premature to survive, 6% from whooping cough and in smaller numbers of epilepsy/convulsions, gastroenteritis, meningitis, congenital heart disease and congenital syphilis, skin diseases, chicken pox and one per cent – 10 children – of malnutrition.

As of yet, we do not know how many of these children are among the remains found but Corless supplied the names of all of the children, and their age when they died, to TheJournal.ie.

In lieu of an inscription of each child’s name on a physical memorial, we publish them all here today.

Here’s one year:

1937

• Mary Kate Cahill 2 weeks
• Mary Margaret Lydon 3 months
• Festus Sullivan 1 month
• Annie Curley 3 weeks
• Nuala Lydon 5 months
• Bridget Collins 5 weeks
• Patrick Joseph Coleman 1 month
• Joseph Hannon 6 weeks
• Henry Monaghan 3 weeks
• Michael Joseph Shiels 7 weeks
• Martin Sheridan 5 weeks
• John Patrick Loftus 10 months
• Patrick Joseph Murphy 3 months
• Catherine McHugh 4 months
• Mary Patricia Toher 4 months
• Mary Kate Sheridan 4 months
• Mary Flaherty 19 months
• Mary Anne Walsh 14 months
• Eileen Quinn 2 years
• Patrick Burke 9 months
• Margaret Holland 2 days
• Joseph Langan 6 months
• Sabina Pauline O’Grady 6 months
• Patrick Qualter 3 years
• Mary King 5 months
• Eileen Conry 1 year

The page goes on forever.

H/t Dave

Olivia Becker at Vice reports that reproductive rights activists are resisting the right wing campaign to make women prisoners of their own pregnancies, in Republican strongholds as well as less hostile territory.

In Missouri — which has some of the harshest anti-abortion laws on the books —  Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill to recognize abortion “as an essential component of women’s healthcare” and that it “shall be made affordable and accessible throughout the state and integrated into the health care safety net.”

…

Some of these bills have already been shot down. In Virginia, Democrats introduced one of the most comprehensive pro-choice measures this year in the form of Whole Women’s Health Act, which sought to make sure that “any statute that places a burden on a woman’s access to abortion without conferring any legitimate health benefit is unenforceable.” It died earlier this month before leaving committee.

…

Many of these measures seek to overturn the wave of abortion restrictions that Republicans have passed in rapid succession in recent years. In the past five years, nearly 300 anti-abortion laws have been enacted in states across the country.

“Since 2011 we’ve seen an absolute avalanche of attempts to attack women’s healthcare,” said Allen. “But it’s important to remember that that wave of anti-choice legislation did not happen because the public asked for it.” About 7 in 10 Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, a level of support that hasn’t really wavered in the four decades since the 1973  landmark decision that affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion.

Following their sweeping electoral victory in the 2016 election, Republicans have wasted no time in trying to restrict access to abortion and reproductive healthcare for women.

Well it’s a core issue. Restricting women’s freedom is often the first thing reactionaries do when they get power. Reactionaries cannot tolerate women who have the freedom to shape their own lives.

This backlash is not limited to protecting abortion rights. Another wave of bills seeks to expand access to contraception and make it easier for women to pay for it. Bills like Missouri’s HB 233, New York’s A579, and New Jersey’s AB 2297 would allow women to receive a 12-month supply of birth control at a time instead of six months, which makes it easier for women to obtain contraception now, when it’s still covered by insurance. Other measures, in Iowa, Oregon, South Carolina, and Hawaii are “pharmacy access bills” that expand the kind of birth control that pharmacies can give women over the counter.

This year has seen an uptick in bills specifically concerning insurance coverage — specifically, attempts to protect the provision under Obamacarethat made all types of birth control free, said Elizabeth Nash at the Guttmacher Institute. These include bills like New Mexico’s HB 284, New York’s AB1378, Hawaii’s SB 403, and Oregon’s HB 2232, which seek to enshrine the mandate on insurance companies to provide contraception at no cost to women.

H/t Seth

This is heartbreaking. Ashoka Mukpo at NPR:

When James Harris rushed his wife, Salome Karwah, to a hospital at the edge of Monrovia on the night of February 19, he expected that she’d be treated as a priority case. Salome was a prominent Ebola survivor and ex-Doctors Without Borders employee who’d graced the cover of Time magazine in 2014 as one of the “Ebola Fighters” named persons of the year. And the hospital — run by an international Christian aid organization affiliated with the U.S.-based charity Samaritan’s Purse — had earned a reputation for providing care to survivors.

In fact, Salome had just been discharged from the same hospital a few hours earlier. She’d given birth to her fourth child two days before, undergoing a Caeserean section despite a dangerously high spike in her blood pressure, which Harris says had periodically popped back up in the days after the procedure. Privately complaining to Harris that she was being neglected by hospital staff, Salome returned home on the 19th to tend to her newborn son. Not long after, Harris says, she collapsed, foaming at the mouth and wracked by convulsions.

But when Harris reached the hospital — known as ELWA, or Eternal Love Winning Africa — he says the doctor on duty refused to treat Salome. A doctor who specializes in treating Ebola survivors wasn’t present, and Harris was told he’d have to take her to a different hospital. In anguish, Harris says he pleaded with the doctor, growing increasingly agitated as his wife convulsed in the front seat of his car outside.

“[The doctor] was checking Facebook,” Harris says. “I had to rush into the emergency room myself to get a wheelchair, but I was struggling to take her from the car to put her in it. Other nurses came to help me, but the doctor told me that she would not touch her, and that if [Salome] stayed [at the hospital] she would die.”

A doctor who specializes in treating Ebola survivors did eventually get there, but Karwah died.

They both had Ebola but survived.

Doctors Without Borders staff noticed that Harris and Salome had shown an inclination to care for the other patients and hired the two of them to serve as psycho-social counselors to the sick.

“She was so caring,” he remembers. “They told us we should only spend 30 minutes in [protective gear], but sometimes she would stay in the ward for 2 or 3 hours, just talking to patients and telling them to have hope.”

Interviewed by NPR in 2014, Salome Karwah said, “”It was not hard to come back [to the Ebola treatment center]. Of course I lost my two parents here … but if I can help someone survive, I will be very happy.”

But she couldn’t get prompt treatment in an emergency so she died.

Now, in the wake of Salome’s death, both Harris and  [Salome Karwah’s sister] Josephine are accusing staff from ELWA hospital of malpractice, saying that she was stigmatized and discriminated against because she was an Ebola survivor.

“We look at it as stigma,” Harris says. “The doctor said that the other doctor who normally works on survivors wasn’t around to treat the ‘special’ patient. I said because she’s not around my wife will die? And [the doctor] told me yes.”

ELWA hospital is managed by a Christian aid organization called Serving in Mission, which made headlines during the Ebola crisis when two American doctors working with the organization contracted the disease in 2014. It’s considered to be among the best health facilities in Monrovia, operating a special clinic for Ebola survivors that treats secondary complications like vision loss and joint pain.

Maybe they should waive the rule about needing specialists to treat Ebola survivors when it’s an emergency?

At any rate, it’s heartbreaking.

This time it’s a Sikh man. From the Seattle Times:

Kent police are looking for a gunman who allegedly walked onto a man’s driveway and shot him, saying “go back to your own country.”

The victim, a 39-year-old Sikh man, was working on his vehicle in his driveway in Kent’s East Hill neighborhood about 8 p.m. Friday when he was approached by an unknown man, Kent police said, after talking with the victim.

An altercation followed, with the victim saying the suspect made statements to the effect of “go back to your own country.” He was shot in the arm.

The Kent police have consulted the FBI.

“We’re early on in our investigation,” Kent Police Chief Ken Thomas said Saturday morning. “We are treating this as a very serious incident.”

Jasmit Singh, a leader of the Sikh community in Renton, said he had been told the victim was released from the hospital.

“He is just very shaken up, both him and his family,” Singh said. “We’re all kind of at a loss in terms of what’s going on right now, this is just bringing it home. The climate of hate that has been created doesn’t distinguish between anyone.”

Singh said Puget Sound-area Sikh men in particular have reported a rise in verbal abuse and uncomfortable encounters recently, “a kind of prejudice, a kind of xenophobia that is nothing that we’ve seen in the recent past.”

To Singh, the number of incidents targeting members of the religion, which has its roots to the Punjab region of South Asia, recalls the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“But at that time, it felt like the [presidential] administration was actively working to allay those fears,” he said. “Now, it’s a very different dimension.”

Trump keeps stoking the hatred instead of working to allay the fears.