Jordan Peterson explains the tragedy of why men can’t control women: it’s because they’re not allowed to hit us so it’s all just hopeless, hopeless. It’s fatal for the culture, is what it is.
Power to change the world
May 19th, 2018 10:48 am | By Ophelia BensonNo I didn’t watch the RoYal WedDing, and I was pretty staggered last night to see CNN “covering” it (to the exclusion of anything else) at 5 a.m. London time when all there was to say was “Well the sun is coming up and the crowds aren’t here yet but THEY WILL BE by god”…but all the same I’m getting a kick out of the sermon the royal stiffs got to listen to.
The sermon-giver was Michael Curry, the presiding bishop of the US version of the Anglican church, aka the Episcopalian. (I was dragged to Episcopalian church a few times as a kid. It didn’t take.) He’s the first African-American head of the church. His sermon was a stem-winder. Even a non-believer can appreciate it.
Jesus of Nazareth on one occasion was asked by a lawyer to sum up the essence of the teachings of Moses. He went back and reached back into the Hebrew scriptures, to Deuteronomy and Leviticus, and Jesus said you shall love the lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength.
This is the first and great commandment and the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself. And then in Matthew’s version, he added, he said, on these two Love of God and Love of Neighbor, hang all the law, all the prophets, everything that Moses wrote, everything in the holy prophets, everything in the scriptures, everything that God has been trying to tell the world. Love God, love your neighbors, and while you’re at it, love yourself.
Now someone once said that Jesus began the most revolutionary movement in all of human history, a movement grounded in the unconditional love of God for the world. A movement mandating people to live that love. And in so doing, to change not only their lives but the very life of the world itself.
I’m talking about some power, real power. Power to change the world. If you don’t believe me, well, there were some old slaves in America’s antebellum south who explained the dynamic power of love and why it has the power to transform. They explained it this way. They sang a spiritual, even in the midst of their captivity, it’s one that says there’s a balm in Gilead. A healing balm, something that can makes things right.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. One of the stanzas actually explains why: they said, If you cannot preach like Peter and you cannot pray like Paul, you just tell the love of Jesus how he died to save us all. Oh that’s the balm in Gilead. This way of love is the way of life. They got it, he died to save us all. He didn’t die for anything he could get out of it. Jesus did not get an honorary doctorate for dying. He wasn’t getting anything out of it. He gave up his life, he sacrificed his life for the good of the others, for the good of the other, for the well-being of the world. For us, that’s what love is.
Yep, I’m still not going to watch so much as a second of the wedding or the supra-wedding carry-on, but I do like that sermon and who gave it and who heard it.
Cultural exchange
May 19th, 2018 10:13 am | By Ophelia BensonAn exchange student from Pakistan was killed in the Santa Fe school shooting.
Sabika Sheikh, aged 18, had been on the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange & Study Abroad programme (YES). The programme is run by the US state department, and was set up in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks to bring students from Muslim-majority nations to the US on a cultural exchange.
That’s something the US and Pakistan have in common: plenty of lethal violence.
Sabika Sheikh family
Her parents, Abdul Aziz and Farah Sheikh, told the BBC they heard about the shooting through television news.
They said they confirmed their daughter’s death within an hour by speaking to school administrators. Ms Sheikh’s body would be returned to her home in Karachi early next week, they said.
That’s an extra hardship for them if they’re observant Muslims, because burial is supposed to be the next day. Also, it’s Ramadan.
President Donald Trump, speaking at a prison reform event at the White House, described the attack as “absolutely horrific”.
“My administration is determined to do everything in our power to protect our students, secure our schools, and to keep weapons out of the hands of those who pose a threat to themselves, and to others,” he said.
That’s a shocking, offensive lie.
Handcuffed and shaking in the cold wind
May 18th, 2018 4:14 pm | By Ophelia BensonVia G Felis, Sam Levin at the Guardian tells the appalling story of a guy brutally arrested and held for months as a suspected “Black Identity Extremist”:
Rakem Balogun thought he was dreaming when armed agents in tactical gear stormed his apartment. Startled awake by a large crash and officers screaming commands, he soon realized his nightmare was real, and he and his 15-year-old son were forced outside of their Dallas home, wearing only underwear.
Handcuffed and shaking in the cold wind, Balogun thought a misunderstanding must have led the FBI to his door on 12 December 2017. The father of three said he was shocked to later learn that agents investigating “domestic terrorism” had been monitoring him for years and were arresting him that day in part because of his Facebook posts criticizing police.
Arresting him with maximum fuss and terrorization, apparently in the middle of the night – and making him go outside in the cold in his underwear.
Balogun spoke to the Guardian this week in his first interview since he was released from prison after five months locked up and denied bail while US attorneys tried and failed to prosecute him, accusing him of being a threat to law enforcement and an illegal gun owner.
Balogun, who lost his home and more while incarcerated, is believed to be the first person targeted and prosecuted under a secretive US surveillance effort to track so-called “black identity extremists”. In a leaked August 2017 report from the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, officials claimed that there had been a “resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity” stemming from African Americans’ “perceptions of police brutality”.
The counter-terrorism assessment provided minimal data or evidence of threats against police, but discussed a few isolated incidents, notably the case of Micah Johnson who killed five officers in Texas. The report sparked backlash from civil rights groups and some Democrats, who feared the government would use the broad designation to prosecute activists and groups like Black Lives Matter.
A few isolated incidents don’t sound like enough reason to claim there is such a thing as “black identity extremism” let alone that it needs to be investigated let alone that it justifies sending people to jail for months while the FBI tries to come up with some shred of evidence.
Investigators began monitoring Balogun, whose legal name is Christopher Daniels, after he participated in an Austin, Texas, rally in March 2015 protesting against law enforcement, special agent Aaron Keighley testified in court.
The FBI, Keighley said, learned of the protest from a video on Infowars, a far-right site run by the commentator Alex Jones, known for spreading false news and conspiracy theories.
They have got to be kidding. INFOWARS?? They consider that a reliable source??!
Keighley made no mention of Balogun’s specific actions at the rally, but noted the marchers’ anti-police statements, such as “oink oink bang bang” and “the only good pig is a pig that’s dead”. The agent also mentioned Balogun’s Facebook posts calling a murder suspect in a police officer’s death a “hero” and expressing “solidarity” with the man who killed officers in Texas when he posted: “They deserve what they got.”
That’s interesting because when women report getting very explicit threats on social media – “I will rape you to death, I will cut your tits off, I will knock your teeth out with a brick” – the police say it’s just trolling and they can do nothing. Yet a guy says of the police, “They deserve what they got,” and wham he’s jailed for months and loses his job and his house.
Keighley, however, later admitted the FBI had no evidence of Balogun making any specific threats about harming police.
At the time of his Facebook posts, Balogun said he was angry and “venting” about the high-profile cases of police killing innocent black men and women in America, including Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. He was particularly disgusted with the way the media and law enforcement officials portrayed the killings as justified and said that when he wrote those posts “I just mimicked their reactions to our killings.”
Read the whole thing. It’s horrifying.
Cargo cult intellectualism
May 18th, 2018 11:14 am | By Ophelia BensonA representative of that strange creature, Woman, does a profile of Jordan Peterson in the Times.
Mr. Peterson, 55, a University of Toronto psychology professor turned YouTube philosopher turned mystical father figure, has emerged as an influential thought leader.
Not to be confused with an intellectual or scholar or thinker. He’s more like Jim Jones.
The messages he delivers range from hoary self-help empowerment talk (clean your room, stand up straight) to the more retrograde and political (a society run as a patriarchy makes sense and stems mostly from men’s competence; the notion of white privilege is a farce). He is the stately looking, pedigreed voice for a group of culture warriors who are working diligently to undermine mainstream and liberal efforts to promote equality.
Along with Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and so on – the brightly lit “Intellectual Dark Web.”
He lets the writer, Nellie Bowles, hang out with him for two days.
He does not smile. He has a weathered, gaunt face and big furrowed eyebrows. He has written about dogs being closest in behavior to humans, but there is something extremely feline about him. He always wears a suit. “I am a very serious person,” he often says.
He sounds unbearable already.
Wherever he goes, he speaks in sermons about the inevitability of who we must be. “You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”
Says the guy from the sex that is not represented as being chaos. It’s always fascinating to see people breezily explain why other people are consigned to inferior categories while they float above in the gilded empyrean.
[H]e was radicalized, he says, because the “radical left” wants to eliminate hierarchies, which he says are the natural order of the world. In his book he illustrates this idea with the social behavior of lobsters. He chose lobsters because they have hierarchies and are a very ancient species, and are also invertebrates with serotonin. This lobster hierarchy has become a rallying cry for his fans; they put images of the crustacean on T-shirts and mugs.
The left, he believes, refuses to admit that men might be in charge because they are better at it. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence,” he said.
In other words that men, all men, men as such, are better than women, all women, women as such. Yes, he’s right, we don’t want to “admit” that, partly because it’s obviously not true.
Rather than making an argument he babbles about myths.
“It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp. Yeah,” he says. “Why?”
It’s a hard one.
“Right. That’s right. You don’t know. It’s because those things hang together at a very deep level. Right. Yeah. And it makes sense that an old king lives in a desiccated tower.”
But witches don’t exist, and they don’t live in swamps, I say.
“Yeah, they do. They do exist. They just don’t exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons don’t exist. It’s, like, yes they do — the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious. You say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as witches.’ Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn’t what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can’t help but fall into these categories. There’s no escape from them.”
Or from animated mice and rabbits and whatever Goofy is, too. Those stories and animations really exist. Therefore, patriarchy is best.
Bowles mentions Alek Minassian and the ten people he killed.
Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married.
“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”
Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.
But being forcibly married will make them all ecstatic, for sure.
“Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.”
I laugh, because it is absurd.
“You’re laughing about them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look. “That’s because you’re female.”
Because he’s a Thought Leader, he didn’t call her a bitch. You know he was thinking it though.
But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr. Peterson is staunchly against what he calls “equality of outcomes,” or efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological or evil.
He’s like the new Ayn Rand, but hotter.
Bowles sits in on a paid-for Skype conversation with one of Peterson’s acolytes.
At one point in the discussion, Mr. Peterson, who had been relatively quiet, becomes heated on the topic of women who find marriage oppressive.
“So I don’t know who these people think marriages are oppressing,” he says. “I read Betty Friedan’s book because I was very curious about it, and it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby. For Christ’s sake, you — you — ”
Worth every penny of the $200 for 45 minutes.
“Jordan’s exposed something that’s been festering for a long time,” says Justin Trottier, 35, the co-founder of the men’s rights organizations Equality Canada and Canadian Centre for Men and Families. “Jordan’s forced people to pay attention.”
Mr. Trottier made headlines when his group called the anti-manspreading subway initiatives sexist. Their musty space hosts events in which men discuss the prejudices they perceive against them. One of their group’s main goals is “waking the police up” to female-perpetrated domestic violence, Mr. Trottier says.
Now, “there’s more acceptance of what we’re trying to do,” he says.
Oh lord. I know him slightly. He used to be the Executive Director of CFI Canada, and he was at the Ottawa conference in 2012. Peterson is an older Justin Trottier.
There are now regular Jordan Peterson discussion groups. The one in Toronto meets once a week at a restaurant called Hemingway’s and is run by Chris Shepherd, who used to be a professional pickup artist who coached men on how to get laid fast at a club but is now a dating coach.
Mr. Shepherd first encountered Mr. Peterson in a viral video of the professor getting yelled at by campus activists. Watching the stoic professor take on righteous liberal anger touched Mr. Shepherd.
Of course it did. Rape-advisors (aka pickup artists) are such an embattled population these days.
A few comments on Twitter.
Jordan Peterson, as rapey as you thought https://t.co/zRftag9lzi pic.twitter.com/jeEBiNcOXg
— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) May 18, 2018
trying to come up with a tweet about jordan peterson thinking that him being asked to respect people's pronouns will lead to tyranny while also being of the opinion that "enforced monogamy" is a-ok but i can't think of anything as funny as just saying it
— Shaun (@shaun_jen) May 18, 2018
It all sounds like such cargo cult intellectualism. These guys who adore him deserve better than someone dressing up “clean your room” as “be a predator like the mighty dragon, also PS women are witches”.
— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) May 18, 2018
Incisive, beautifully reported profile of phony-baloney masculinity guru Jordan Peterson: https://t.co/C7I3ihh0Yw
— Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) May 18, 2018
Here, @NellieBowles writes a superb profile of Jordan Peterson: https://t.co/bgxNdyYrjr There’s the stuff he says to her that is obviously headline-generating, such as this soulless and (in his case, ideologically hypocritical) “enforced monogamy” stuff 1/x pic.twitter.com/IkaXQyfJfq
— Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) May 18, 2018
C’est normal
May 18th, 2018 9:46 am | By Ophelia BensonMore people killed in a school shooting in Texas.
Between eight and 10 people have been killed in a shooting at a Texas high school, say police.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters the majority of the dead at Santa Fe High School were students.
A student is in custody after the attack at the school, which is about 40 miles (65km) south of Houston.
The death toll makes this the deadliest school shooting since the one in February at Parkland, Florida.
We rank them now. They’re so regular and frequent and routine that we rank them by body count and don’t bother with the ones that kill only two or three. Shootings in schools are just a US thing now, like hot dogs and racism and corruption.
President Donald Trump, speaking at a prison reform event at the White House, described the attack as “absolutely horrific”.
“My administration is determined to do everything in our power to protect our students, secure our schools, and to keep weapons out of the hands of those who pose a threat to themselves, and to others,” he added.
But of course it’s not. He’s not. He just gave a speech at the NRA convention two weeks ago.
Your Second Amendment rights are under siege, but they will never, ever be under siege as long as I’m your president.
“Your Second Amendment rights”=absolutely no gun control of any kind…except of course inside the White House and anywhere else Trump is. He’s protected but the rest of us just have to take our chances.
Democrats and liberals in Congress want to disarm law-abiding Americans at the same time they’re releasing dangerous criminal aliens and savage gang members onto our streets.
It’s not guns, it’s those dangerous foreign brown people.
The most beautiful lake country on the continent
May 17th, 2018 6:07 pm | By Ophelia BensonMore damage Trump is determined to do, this time to a wilderness area in northern Minnesota:
Today this region, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, looks almost exactly as it appeared 10,000 years ago when Paleo-Indians lived there. Sigurd Olson, the naturalist and writer who guided there for three decades, called it “the most beautiful lake country on the continent.” Few who see it would disagree. Today it is the most visited wilderness area in the United States.
But now this special place is at great risk.
Late last year the Interior Department concluded that the two expired leases held by a Chilean-owned company, Twin Metals Minnesota, should be reinstated for copper and nickel mining near the border of the Boundary Waters. This reversed a decision made at the end of the Obama administration, which rejected the leases after the Forest Service concluded that a mine there “posed an inherent potential risk” that threatened “serious and irreplaceable harm” to the wilderness.
To the Obama administration that was a bad thing, but the Trump people love to destroy wilderness. The Trump administration says those leases must be renewed.
These actions are another chapter in President Trump’s continuing assault on the nation’s most precious natural and cultural lands. They are of a piece with the shrinking of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah by 85 percent to carve out areas believed to contain oil and gas reserves and large uranium deposits. By giving the extractive industries virtually everything they want in Utah, Alaska, Minnesota and elsewhere, this administration has sent an unambiguous message: There is no place on our public lands — or waters — that is inviolable if there are resources to be exploited.
Condos in the Grand Canyon, casinos in Yosemite, steel mills in Yellowstone.
This is not the first threat to the Boundary Waters. In the early 1960s, there were battles over logging, timber roads and the use of motorboats and snowmobiles. Though the area was included in the 1964 Wilderness Act, some logging and motor use were allowed to continue. Finally in 1978 Congress passed the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act, which expanded its size, restricted motorboat use, ended logging and banned mining in the wilderness and some adjacent lands.
But there are ore deposits there, and Twin Metals Minnesota wants’em.
The danger is that mining these sulfide ores can result in contaminated water seeping and flowing into lakes, rivers, streams and wetlands and groundwater. Because of the interconnected waterways in the wilderness area, much of the area’s watershed could become polluted. Once that happens, there is no fixing it.
TMM says don’t worry! We’ll be super super careful! It will be fine!
Twin Metals argues that the risk for pollution from the sites will be minimal. But the idea that pollution can be prevented by mitigation measures has proved wrong time and again at other mines. Studies undertaken for opponents of mining have concluded that the highly toxic waste from a single mine in the wilderness area’s watershed could continuously pollute the Boundary Waters for hundreds of years.
Balance in all things
May 17th, 2018 1:08 pm | By Ophelia BensonHuh. Speaking of absurd moral panics over “black identity politics,” here’s an item from Foreign Policy, also last October, that I saw not via the ravings of Sam Harris but via Trump’s “they’re not people, they’re animals.”
As white supremacists prepared to descend on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, the FBI warned about a new movement that was violent, growing, and racially motivated. Only it wasn’t white supremacists; it was “black identity extremists.”
Amid a rancorous debate over whether the Trump administration has downplayed the threat posed by white supremacist groups, the FBI’s counterterrorism division has declared that black identity extremists pose a growing threat of premeditated violence against law enforcement.
Oh no, it’s the black identity extremists coming to get you.
“The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence,” reads the report, marked for official use only and obtained by Foreign Policy.
Are these “extremist” perceptions of police brutality against African Americans actually wrong? Factually wrong? Has that problem been entirely fixed already?
“The FBI assesses it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since then have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement,” the report states.
Some 748 people have been shot and killed by police so far in 2017, including at least 168 African-Americans.
The report, dated Aug. 3 — just nine days before the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned deadly — appears to be the first known reference to “black identity extremists” as a movement. But former government officials and legal experts said no such movement exists, and some expressed concern that the term is part of a politically motivated effort to find an equivalent threat to white supremacists.
Can we call the FBI White Identity Extremists now? Would that be fair?
A former senior counterterrorism and intelligence official from the Department of Homeland Security who reviewed the document at FP’s request expressed shock at the language.
Just in case we were inclined to think of the FBI as the anti-Trump, this is a useful corrective.
Some experts and former government officials said the FBI seemed to be trying to paint disparate groups and individuals as sharing a radical, defined ideology. And in the phrase “black identity extremist” they hear echoes of the FBI’s decades-long targeting of black activists as potential radicals, a legacy that only recently began to change.
…
The FBI is linking the people discussed in the report based only on them being black, rather than on any sort of larger ideological connection, the official said. “The race card is being played here deliberately.”
Michael German, a former FBI agent and now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, said manufacturing this type of threat was not new. He has criticized earlier FBI reports on “black separatists,” arguing that they conflated radical groups operating in the 1970s with attacks in 2010 and later, even though there was no obvious connection.
The use of terms like “black identity extremists” is part of a long-standing FBI attempt to define a movement where none exists. “Basically, it’s black people who scare them,” German said.
Ta-Nahisi Coates! Black Identity Politics! Auggghhhh!
In 2009, Daryl Johnson, then a Department of Homeland Security intelligence analyst, warned of the rise of right-wing extremism, setting off a firestorm among congressional critics. Johnson, who left the department in 2010, said he could think of no reason why the FBI would create a new category for so-called black identity extremists. “I’m at a loss,” he replied, when asked about the term.
“I have no idea of why they would come up with a new term.”
There have been concerns about rising violence among black separatist groups in recent years, he said, but it does not approach the threat of right-wing extremism. “When talking about white supremacists versus black supremacists, there are way more white supremacists,” Johnson said.
For historians and academics who have looked at the history of FBI surveillance of black Americans, the report also smacks of the sort of blatant racism the bureau has worked hard to leave behind. From the time J. Edgar Hoover took over the anti-radical division in the FBI at the height of the first “red scare” in 1919, the bureau began systematically surveilling black activists.
It goes all the way back. You could argue it’s a product of the white guilty conscience translated to paranoia about a Likely Uprising.
Lately, that seemed to be changing. As FBI director, James Comey famously kept a copy of the Martin Luther King Jr. wiretap order on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s past abuses and made new agents learn the history of the FBI’s pursuit of the civil rights leader.
The FBI also appeared to be focusing more attention on the threat of white supremacists. In May, the FBI warned that white supremacist violence was growing, according to a report obtained and published by FP. That same report noted that white supremacists were responsible for more attacks in the United States than any other extremist group, including Islamic extremists.
Little did we know they were trying to “balance” it with talk of Black Identity Extremists.
Sam says we have to get out of the identity politics game
May 17th, 2018 11:18 am | By Ophelia BensonUpdating to add: I forgot to point out that the tweet is from last October.
Sam Harris is unbearable.
Sam Harris attacks BLM & @tanehisicoates, calls them delusional & insists there's no racism in America because Obama served as POTUS. pic.twitter.com/A8RM1gBIL9
— Saeen (@_Saeen_) October 27, 2017
I recommend listening to that one-minute clip, to get the full sense of how his flat cold affectless voice combines with his smugly confident words on a subject he knows NOTHING about to create a monster of I’m Not a Racistism.
Virtually everything that’s said, in the identity politics space, about what’s happening, is at best slanted. There are Trumpian levels of dishonesty on the left around these topics, and it’s harmful. And BLM is part of that problem, and if you’re going to argue that in the aftermath of having a two-term black president, that nothing has changed with respect to race – if you’re going to be like Ta-Nehisi Coates, and endlessly beat the drum of black identity politics, as though we’re living in the first years of Reconstruction, and not acknowledge any gains that we’ve made against racism in our society…you’re delusional, and insofar as people believe what you’re saying, what you’re saying is harmful. And BLM has some of that in it, so I just think we have to get out of the identity politics game.
Says the prosperous white man.
A textbook case of how dehumanizing rhetoric works
May 17th, 2018 10:09 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump’s “They’re not people, they’re animals” is not being forgotten in the onslaught of news.
Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot all called their opponents "parasites" or "vermin" or "animals." Dehumanization is what you do to unwanted social groups before killing them https://t.co/5nMMSZzeP9
— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) May 17, 2018
Read this thread if you think “he was talking about MS-13!” is a meaningful response to Trump’s disgusting comment yesterday. https://t.co/2ZS7OAwyUz
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 17, 2018
So I did read it; it’s outstanding. A few highlights:
This is a textbook case of how dehumanizing and racist rhetoric works. The question references a hypothetical MS-13 member. Trump immediately pivots to a vaguer “people trying to come into the country” who we’re “taking out.”
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) May 17, 2018
There’s always some real crime by some specific member of a disfavored group that gets invoked to rationalize the move to talk about the more nebulous “they” who are animals and savages. But the specific case is always a pretext for indulging the generalization.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) May 17, 2018
On the occasions Trump finds time in his busy schedule to condemn murderers who aren’t brown, the focus is typically on the act, rather on what biological category it puts the perpetrator in.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) May 17, 2018
When Rob Porter is very credibly accused of beating up women he’s dated, we need to pause and show empathy and consider how it may ruin a good person’s life if the charges are false.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) May 17, 2018
This hateful language reflects who the president is, not who immigrants are. https://t.co/CmTSkFBVDl
— ACLU (@ACLU) May 16, 2018
Happy annivs Don
May 17th, 2018 9:42 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump watches his morning Fox, flips out, composes wrathful tweet.
President Trump marked the first anniversary of the special counsel’s Russia investigation Thursday by repeating accusations that the FBI had a confidential informant inside his 2016 campaign and by calling the probe “disgusting, illegal and unwarranted.”
Trump tweeted: “Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI ‘SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.’ Andrew McCarthy says, ‘There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.’ If so, this is bigger than Watergate!”
I’m not sure Watergate is the analogy he’s looking for.
Giuliani told The Washington Post and other news organizations Wednesday that the special counsel’s team informed the president’s attorneys recently that prosecutors do not believe they can charge a sitting president with a crime under Justice Department guidelines, signaling they would leave it to Congress to address any possible findings of wrongdoing by Trump.
Giuliani is working for Trump. He’s not an impartial legal expert, he’s a Trump stooge. What he says about the investigation can’t be taken as expert information.
The top-secret intelligence source has been the subject of a showdown between key Trump allies in Congress and the Justice Department.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has sought classified documents from the Justice Department, saying he needs to review the records as part of his congressional oversight duties.
But, as The Post reported earlier this month, senior FBI and national intelligence officials notified Nunes that doing so could endanger a top-secret intelligence source and risk lives.
But of course Nunes couldn’t care less about that. His one purpose is to Protect the Boss.
How it starts
May 16th, 2018 3:43 pm | By Ophelia BensonLeon Mugesera called Tutsis “cockroaches.”
In 1992, then an official in Rwanda’s ruling Hutu party, Mugesera told more than 1,000 party members that they should kill Tutsis and dump their bodies in the river.
Milošević called Bosnians “internal enemies.”
Hailed as “the new Tito”, Milošević propagated a message of extreme Serbian nationalism, calling for the expansion of the Serbian state into Bosnian territory. In a 1988 Belgrade speech, Milosevic identified Bosniaks as the “internal enemy”, a gesture eerily similar to Hitler’s pre-WWII demonization of the Jews in Germany.
Trump said immigrants are not people, “they’re animals.”
Our own Wannsee conference
May 16th, 2018 3:10 pm | By Ophelia BensonHe says it. He says it.
President Trump during California #SanctuaryCities Roundtable: "These aren't people. These are animals."
Full video here: https://t.co/alyS47LI5V pic.twitter.com/ifXicTHHP0
— CSPAN (@cspan) May 16, 2018
Fingers crossed behind back ok sir?
May 16th, 2018 12:24 pm | By Ophelia BensonTrump’s lawyer basically told Walter Shaub that Trump’s financial disclosure wasn’t true and asked if that would be ok, USNews reported a year ago:
President Donald Trump’s attorneys initially wanted him to submit an updated financial disclosure without certifying the information as true, according to correspondence with the Office of Government Ethics.
Attorney Sheri Dillon said she saw no need for Trump to sign his 2016 personal financial disclosure because he is filing voluntarily this year. But OGE director Walter Shaub said his office would only work with Dillon if she agreed to follow the typical process of having Trump make the certification.
He put it more strongly on Twitter just now.
The strangest moment in my entire career was when Trump's attorney, Sheri Dillon, asked me to allow Trump's financial disclosure form to be the *first* out of all of the millions filed not to contain the filer's certification that its contents were true. https://t.co/2fYDM2hISy
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) May 16, 2018
Back to the story:
The documents indicate that after OGE pushed back, Trump now plans to certify the information by mid-June [2017]. But his attorney’s effort to sidestep certification of his personal financial disclosure marks another departure from the norm. Each year, the OGE processes thousands of those forms, all of which are certified.
“This is not at all typical; in fact I’ve never heard of anyone trying this,” said Marilyn Glynn, an OGE employee for 17 years before retiring in 2008. Her positions included acting director and general counsel. “It would be as unusual as not signing your taxes.”
It’s downright absurd. “Is it ok if we don’t include the bit that says ‘this is all true and accurate’?” Erm, no, that’s not ok, because the goal is disclosure, and you can’t call it disclosure if you don’t want to say it’s true.
The certification means that if a person knowingly included incorrect financial information, the OGE can seek a civil penalty such as a fine, or even make a referral to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
Glynn said OGE has indeed used those tools to enforce the integrity of certification.
The letters indicate Shaub and Dillon talked through the importance of Trump presenting true information and signing off on it as such. OGE typically works with federal employees and their representatives and also certifies the financial disclosures.
Talked through it? Because what, she didn’t understand that before?
These people are just nuts.
Any inquiry you may be pursuing
May 16th, 2018 11:31 am | By Ophelia BensonThe Times on Trump’s oopsie:
President Trump’s financial disclosure, released on Wednesday, revealed for the first time that he paid more than $100,000 to his personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, as reimbursement for payment to a third-party.
That is, this is the first time Trump has admitted it to the feds.
Mr. Trump’s disclosure of the 2016 payment to Mr. Cohen raises the question of whether he erred in not reporting the debt on last year’s disclosure form. The document released Wednesday said that Mr. Trump was reporting the repaid debt “in the interest of transparency” but that it was “not required to be disclosed as reportable liabilities.”
Yet a letter accompanying the report sent to Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, from the government ethics office’s acting director, David J. Apol, said that the Office of Government Ethics had determined “the payment made by Mr. Cohen is required to be reported as a liability.”
Let’s see the rest of what the letter said:
Dear Mr. Rosenstein,
I write to you in connection with the complaint by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington on March 8, 2018 with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE). Specifically, the complaint requested that DOJ and OGE investigate whether a payment made by Mr. Michael Cohen to a third party constituted a loan to President Trump that should have been reported as a liability on his public financial disclosure report signed on June 14, 2017 (for calendar year 2016), and if so, whether the failure to report it was knowing and willful.
Today I certified President Trump’ s financial disclosure report signed on May 15, 2018 (for calendar year 2017). OGE has concluded that, based on the information provided as a note to part 8, the payment made by Mr. Cohen is required to be reported as a liability. OGE has determined that the information provided in that note meets the disclosure requirements for a reportable liability under the Ethics in Government Act. I am providing both reports to you because you may find the disclosure relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing regarding the President’s prior report that was signed on June 14, 2017.
Then his signature. Notice he doesn’t address the knowing and willful part.
With omission under false statement liability
May 16th, 2018 11:07 am | By Ophelia BensonThis could get interesting.
SIREN: by disclosing Cohen debt on his just-released 278, Donald Trump just substantiated our @crewcrew criminal complaint that he should have disclosed it last year as well. Form is here https://t.co/vgHYnPwTqE and our criminal complaint is here https://t.co/gunUDr90Cw
— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) May 16, 2018
SIREN: by disclosing Cohen debt on his just-released 278, Donald Trump just substantiated our @crewcrew criminal complaint that he should have disclosed it last year as well. Form is here https://oge.app.box.com/v/Trump2018Annual278 … and our criminal complaint is here
BREAKING: @OfficeGovEthics agrees with our @CREWcrew analysis that Trump was required to report Cohen debt & sends last year’s form with omission under false statement liability to DOJ & Rod Rosenstein in case “relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing”! https://t.co/7Lz1aYT3JF https://t.co/fpesbMzVsT
— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) May 16, 2018
BREAKING: @OfficeGovEthics agrees with our @CREWcrew analysis that Trump was required to report Cohen debt & sends last year’s form with omission under false statement liability to DOJ & Rod Rosenstein in case “relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing”! https://oge.app.box.com/v/OGELettertoDOJ …
Well. No doubt Trump will explain it all in a tweet.
Don’t forget the Tupperware
May 16th, 2018 10:56 am | By Ophelia Benson[Jessica] Mock was about to check out Sunday at the Publix near Lake Jackson when she realized she’d forgotten to pick up Tupperware. She left her cart in the lane to get some and found another woman trying to check out ahead of her when she returned.
The two argued, and the victim moved to a different lane. They both checked out about the same time and left the store only seconds apart. Before leaving, the victim used an expletive and said, “I’ll meet you outside.” Mock replied, “I’ll see you outside.”
The victim unloaded her groceries and returned her cart, running into Mock again along the way. Mock pulled a small handgun from her waistband.
One minute it’s a quarrel over queue-jumping at the supermarket, the next it’s somebody pulling a gun.
“(Mock) pointed the gun at (the victim),” the report says. “(The victim) stated she blacked out near this time. She stated she was in fear for her life when this occurred.”
The encounter didn’t end there. After the victim drove away from the parking lot with her two children, Mock followed them. The victim called law enforcement, who stopped Mock as she followed behind the victim on Fred George Road.
Mock denied being armed inside Publix, brandishing a gun or intentionally following the victim. However, deputies searched her car and found a holstered, silver revolver in the center console. They also found the victim’s vehicle tag written on a note. Mock was taken to the Leon County Detention Center and released Monday on $1,000 bail.
People are too unstable and anger-prone to be allowed to carry guns.
You’re asking about a private organization’s dealings
May 15th, 2018 4:37 pm | By Ophelia BensonVanity Fair asks: is China straight-up bribing Trump?
So it was a bit odd to see Trump pull a complete 180, suddenly insisting that the company and its 75,000 Chinese jobs must be saved, though to be fair, tweeting “Look, China just pumped $500 million into a Trump Organization project so I had to do them a solid” might not have gone over so well.
Oh, that’s right—according to multiple news outlets, the president’s total about-face on China came just 72 hours after the developer of a theme park outside Jakarta, known as MNC Lido City, with whom the Trump Organization has an agreement to license its name, signed a deal to receive $500 million in Chinese government loans, in addition to another $500 million from government banks. According to Agence France-Presse, the Trump Organization will rake in almost $3.7 million in licensing and consulting payments from Lido, along with another project in Bali. The company will also earn management fees, and be “eligible for additional unspecified incentives.”
That’s all $$$ in Don’s pocket. Little Don and Eric are running the org but Don still gulps down the profits.
The White House, naturally, isn’t commenting on any of this. “You’re asking about a private organization’s dealings that may have to do with a foreign government. It’s not something I can speak to,” Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said Monday when he was asked about the Lido City deal.
That’s rich, isn’t it – getting all huffy about asking questions about “a private organization’s dealings” when the organization belongs to the fucking president. The press people damn well ought to be able to speak to it, and they ought to be compelled to tell the truth about it, too. All the truth.
Wait – change of plans
May 15th, 2018 4:05 pm | By Ophelia BensonNorth Korea appears to have sprung the trap on Trump.
North Korea is casting doubt on next month’s summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump over joint Air Force drills taking place in South Korea, which it says are ruining the diplomatic mood.
…
North Korea suggested that the drills were putting the proposed summit between Trump and Kim, scheduled for June 12, in jeopardy.
“The United States will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-U.S. summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities,” said KCNA, the North’s Korean Central News Agency.
Aw. Donnie was all excited about his Nobel Peace Prize.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the United States has not received a notice of any change or cancellation. She said the government is continuing to plan for the summit and is confident that Kim understands the need for exercises.
Really? Do Trump’s people really think Kim is just fine with military exercises that are mostly a threat aimed at him?
A Pentagon spokesman, Army Col. Rob Manning, said Tuesday that the exercises are part of the U.S.-South Korean alliance’s “routine, annual training program to maintain a foundation of military readiness.”
…to attack North Korea should the need arise. They’re not aimed at repelling chicken thieves.
Manning said the purpose of the exercises is to enhance the alliance’s ability to defend South Korea.
From North Korea.
North Korea, as it has in the past, disagreed.
“This exercise targeting us, which is being carried out across South Korea, is a flagrant challenge to the Panmunjom Declaration and an intentional military provocation running counter to the positive political development on the Korean Peninsula,” KCNA said.
…
By mentioning the Panmunjom Declaration, North Korea was referring to the agreement signed last month by Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in following their historic summit.
They agreed to work to turn the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War in 1953 into a peace treaty that would officially bring the war to a close, and also to pursue the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula.
Which would be great, but let’s not pretend Kim has suddenly turned into a cuddly bunny.
At the same time as threatening to scupper the summit with Trump, North Korea canceled talks with South Korean officials that had been scheduled for Wednesday, less than 24 hours after agreeing to them.
He’s messing with us.
