Tag: david bossie
Bannon Deploys ‘Homeschooling Moms’ To Promote Far-Right Agenda

Bannon Deploys ‘Homeschooling Moms’ To Promote Far-Right Agenda

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Steve Bannon has a long history of promoting the homeschooling movement. Back in 2010 — seven years before he became White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration — Bannon and his ally David N. Bossie pushed homeschooling in their documentary Fire from the Heartland. And journalist/author Heath Brown, in an article published by the Daily Beast, outlines some ways in which Bannon is using homeschooling moms to promote his MAGA agenda during the Biden era.

Bannon, on his "War Room" podcast, recently urged parents to sign a pledge to homeschool their children as a way of protesting against mask mandates in public schools. The COVID-19 pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has killed more than 4.6 million people worldwide — including over 662,000 people in the United States. But the far-right Bannon, like many other allies of former President Donald Trump, has been pushing the idea that Americans need to worry about masks, vaccines and expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci more than COVID-19.On "War Room," Bannon recently declared, "The firestorm that you're about to see is the American mothers. When you've got to go back to school and Fauci's been talking about vaccinating the kids and using the school, going back to school as a forcing function between the mask and the CRT (critical race theory)."

Critical Race Theory is a type of academic study that can be found in some colleges and universities. CRT, which argues that racism of the past continues to affect institutions in the present, isn't even being taught in grammar schools, middle schools or high schools. But that has stopped MAGA Republicans from relentless fear-mongering over CRT, as they are always in search of new ways to terrify White voters.Brown, author of the 2021 book Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State, explains, "It's not the first time that Donald Trump's former chief strategist has put together women, race, and education. It was an undercurrent of his 2010 Citizens United movie, Fire from the Heartland, which featured conservative leaders like Phyllis Schlafly, Michele Bachmann and Dana Loesch, who'd each been vocal advocates for homeschooling as a socially conservative respite from all that was supposedly wrong with public education. And now, it's key to Bannon's 2022 congressional electoral strategy."

In his article, Brown digs into the history of the homeschooling movement, noting that far-right Republicans were railing against what they saw as a liberal agenda in public schools back in the 1970s. One of those Republicans was Bob Dornan, who spent many years in the House of Representatives back when Orange County, California was a hotbed of conservatism. Heath's article includes video of Dornan speaking at a 1970s event in Sacramento before he became a congressman:Dornan is now 88, and Heath cites him as an example of someone who has viewed schools as a culture war battleground. Now, according to Brown, Bannon is pushing that type of message.

"For Bannon, it would seem, schools are battlegrounds of belonging and ownership," Brown observes. "Forbidding schools from teaching about racism is a way to defend the neighborhood, whether it is in Charleston or Richmond."

Donald Trump

Trump Fires Pentagon Advisors, Appoints Cronies And Denies Briefings To Biden

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

On Friday, the White House fired nine members of the Pentagon's Defense Business Board and installed people loyal to President Donald Trump, Politico reports. At the same time, Trump's Pentagon officials have refused members of President-elect Joe Biden's transition team to meet with officials at U.S. intelligence agencies.

The aforementioned board members were all fired via form letter email that told them that their terms had expired — even though that wasn't true for three of the members — and they were neither given any warning nor thanks for their service.

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Bossie Confesses: There Was A Right-Wing Conspiracy Against Clinton

Bossie Confesses: There Was A Right-Wing Conspiracy Against Clinton

More than 20 years after the fact, following decades of smug denials, one of the operatives in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” has confessed to its existence.

The longtime far-right activist David Bossie of Citizens United offered that confession on Fox News Sunday, where he appeared to promote a new book he co-authored with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Bossie, who also toiled in the Trump campaign and remains close to the president, blurted the truth to host Chris Wallace almost inadvertently. But with someone who lies almost as routinely as his idol Trump, Americans have to be satisfied with his moment of truth.

Describing several White House aides attacked by Bossie and Lewandowksi, Wallace said that “they wanted to control the president instead of, as you said in your first book, to ‘let Trump be Trump.'”

“Exactly,” replied Bossie (although his diction isn’t always easy to follow). “Let us remember what is going on here. There’s a vast left-wing conspiracy going on that has been going on since the president won this election. All throughout the transition and during those first two years — a vast left-wing conspiracy. Very similar words to what I’m using to what Hillary Clinton called the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Wallace said, “Which didn’t turn out to be true.”

“No, it did turn out,” he insisted. “There was an effort by the conservative movement to undermine President Clinton.”

Wallace replied, “I understand, but he did have a relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”

For the full story of Bossie’s role in the conspiracy against Clinton — which dated back to his dirty tricks campaign during the 1992 campaign — see my account with Gene Lyons in The Hunting of the President. Among his allies in that crusade was the late “Justice Jim” Johnson, diehard segregationist ringleader in Arkansas and a close Bossie pal.

The more things change, the more dismally they remain the same.

h/t to Crooks and Liars

 

 

 

 

 

The Racism Isn’t Surprising Anymore

The Racism Isn’t Surprising Anymore

Can we stop pretending to be shocked when a member of the Trump administration — or one of its prominent supporters — emits a squib of stinking racism?

In the latest episode, which should have surprised exactly nobody, former Donald Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie shouted at an African-American guest on a Fox News show: “You’re out of your cotton-pickin’ mind.” The guest naturally took exception, noting that his family members had picked cotton as slaves. Fox News officially scolded Bossie, an employee of the network, with a two-week “suspension” — and he tweeted a dutiful apology.

But while everyone noted the apology and moved on, the underlying problem remains. The political culture embodied by Fox News, Donald Trump, and David Bossie is steeped in racial antagonism as both strategy and ideology. And to anyone who knows the history of these people and institutions, their outbursts of bigotry are numbingly routine.

Look more closely at Bossie, a figure whose history on the Republican right dates back to the Reagan era, when he dropped out of college to work on political campaigns. He soon joined up with Floyd Brown, the Citizens United impresario responsible for the infamous “Willie Horton” ad that helped to bring down Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988. That ad featured a mug shot of Horton, a convicted murderer, with a frightening scowl and a bushy Afro. This race-baiting classic was so offensively divisive that George H.W. Bush sought to avoid any association with it — although there was plenty of evidence that his campaign consultant Roger Ailes had been involved in its production. At Citizens United, where Brown worked closely with Bossie, they were proud to claim credit for the Horton ad.

That Bossie was attracted to the vilest of racists became even clearer four years later, when he and Brown showed up in Arkansas to bring down Bill Clinton. They latched onto “Justice Jim” Johnson, a vintage segregationist politician whose corrosive hatred and ancient prejudices were a parody of extremism. He had run for governor as the candidate of the White Citizens Councils, a marginally more respectable version of the Ku Klux Klan. He had whipped up the mobs that assaulted black students during the historic 1957 confrontation at Little Rock’s Central High School. He even lived on a farm that he named “White Haven,” where he plotted against Clinton with Bossie and Brown.

When the pair published a ludicrous anti-Clinton booklet titled Slick Willie, which accused the Arkansas governor of a long list of offenses that included promoting socialism and witchcraft (as well as coddling the state’s black citizens), its acknowledgments included a “special thanks” to Johnson.

Flash forward to 2018, and here is Bossie, a top political lieutenant of an openly racist president, appearing on the cable network that Ailes created, where he blurts a stupid racial epithet. Bossie is an appalling character with a long rap sheet, but he is really nothing special on today’s Trumpist right — where ambitious hustlers like him have long been eager to promote prejudice, against any vulnerable minority, if that advances their candidate or party.

Does Bossie hate people of color, or Mexican-Americans, or the little immigrant children this administration is victimizing? Did Roger Ailes? Does Trump? It is impossible to know their hearts. But by their poison fruits, we already know them. These “conservatives” have spent decades doing what they still do every day, which is to weaken our country by dividing its people against each other by race and ethnicity for personal gain. More and more, they are assisted by a hostile foreign power in that effort.

We all can see where this is leading, as we watch the victimization of disfavored people, the abrogation of their human rights, and the building of camps to imprison them. Don’t act surprised when we get there.