Tag: birther
FBI Warning That Conspiracy Theorists May Pose Domestic Terror Threat

FBI Warning That Conspiracy Theorists May Pose Domestic Terror Threat

The FBI has issued a warning identifying several conspiracy theories aligned with Trump’s supporters as a domestic terror threat.

On Thursday, Yahoo! News reported on the existence of an FBI intelligence bulletin that was sent out in May identifying “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” as a growing threat.

“The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which didn’t actually have a basement),” Yahoo! reported.

QAnon has been a staple of Trump’s raucous campaign rallies, with supporters holding up related signs and wearing QAnon-labeled clothing. Earlier in July, Trump praised a baby at his rally dressed in QAnon clothing.

“We find the Q movement empowering because it’s a lot of patriots that are following Trump when a lot of media is bashing our president,” Roman Riselvato, the child’s father, told Rolling Stone.

The FBI expects the numbers of conspiracy theory-driven extremists are likely to grow during the 2020 election cycle, the memo states.

Trump has often used the presidency to indulge in conspiracy theories. His past is littered with advocacy for outlandish and long disproven crackpot ideas, including most famously the “birther” claims against President Barack Obama.

Trump has also insisted that a rogue “deep state” operating from within the government and in agencies like the FBI has been attempting to undermine his presidency. The theory was first popularized by Trump supporter and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Conspiracy theories have a prominent cheerleader with Trump in the White House, and now the FBI has warned the entire country that true believers of those debunked rantings can endanger American lives.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

Trump Plans Statement On Obama Birth After Refusing To Say President Was Born In States

Trump Plans Statement On Obama Birth After Refusing To Say President Was Born In States

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican Donald Trump said he planned to address President Barack Obama’s citizenship on Friday, prompting a call from Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to apologize for reviving the so-called birther movement which questions whether Obama was born in the United States.

“I’m going to have a big announcement on it today,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network, a day after he refused in a newspaper interview to say whether he believed Obama was born in the United States.

Trump was due to discuss the issue in a speech at a new hotel his company is opening in Washington.

The New York businessman several years ago led the birther movement aimed at Obama, who was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father.

The issue has not been a major factor in the campaign for the Nov. 8 presidential election and by bringing it up again Trump takes the focus of his campaign away from topics such as immigration, trade and the economy, which he has been using to hit Clinton.

Trump has recovered ground against Clinton in recent national opinion polls after revamping his campaign staff in August and taking steps to give a more polished performance on the campaign trail.

But the birther movement, which casts doubt over whether Obama is legally able to be president, incenses black Americans whose votes Trump has been trying to court.

“Barack Obama was born in America, plain and simple, and Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology,” Clinton said in an address to the Black Women’s Association in Washington. She said Trump was trying “to delegitimize our first black president.”

A few years into his presidency, Obama, the first African American to win the White House, released a longer version of his birth certificate to answer those who suggested he was not U.S. born.

Trump on Thursday declined to say whether he believed Obama was born in Hawaii during an interview with The Washington Post.

“I’ll answer that question at the right time. I just don’t want to answer it yet,” Trump told the newspaper.

His campaign released a statement later in the day saying the candidate is convinced of the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency. A U.S. president must be a natural-born citizen.

“In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller said in the statement.

“Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States,” he said.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks to the Economic Club of New York luncheon in Manhattan, New York, U.S., September 15, 2016.  REUTERS/Mike Segar

5 Reasons It’s So Easy For Trump To Make Republicans Look Like Fools

5 Reasons It’s So Easy For Trump To Make Republicans Look Like Fools

Donald Trump has claimed his first scalp. And, frankly, it’s the best-looking scalp in the GOP primary, possibly in American politics.

Rick Perry’s presidential ambitions were obliterated with one word — “Oops” — on a debate stage in Rochester, Michigan four years ago. His latest campaign was an exercise in a human being’s inability to overcome his own inabilities. A canny politician who helped cement Republican control of the Lone Star State, Perry’s well-earned image as a slighter, more authentic George W. Bush always doomed him, even if he hadn’t self-destructed on stage in a manner fitting a Spinal Tap drummer. He tried to play a serious wonk this time and gave one of the few noteworthy Republican speeches of this campaign season. But he ended up as chum for Trump.

Perry’s attempts to label the GOP frontrunner a “cancer on conservatism” were belied by the one-time GOP frontrunner’s own past rhetoric on immigration and a GOP base with a thirst for vengeance. The billionaire clowned the governor for his glasses, his lack of intellect, and his inability to secure the Texas border.

And when it was all over — after Perry continued to trash the reality star in the last speech of his campaign — Trump didn’t even dignify those last limp barbs with a response. Like Don Rickles, he admitted it was all for show, and complimented Perry with his first truly gracious tweet of the campaign season.

So how did a guy who has never won one vote as a Republican stomp on the longest-serving governor of one of the most important states in the union?

Easily. And he’s doing the same thing to Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Bobby Jindal. Why is Trump so successful in drawing his opponents into battles they can’t win? He riffs on a Republican Party that is ripe for contemptible comedy, ridiculous rhetoric, and daring demagoguery.

Here are five reasons why Trump’s tactics work so well:

1. Unabashed race baiting feels like “truth telling” to much of the GOP base.
Trump’s campaign began with corporation after corporation severing ties with him for his insulting characterization of Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals sent here by a genius Mexican government. This dark fantasy, which has never survived a single fact check, appealed to a GOP base that was birthed on “states’ rights” rhetoric and titillated by fantasies of welfare queens. This nurtured a sense of white victimhood that was an excellent resource for the party, right up until the point it cost them the popular vote in 5 out of 6 presidential elections.

After the loss in 2012, when Mitt Romney moved right on immigration to win the primary, the GOP establishment demanded immigration reform and the GOP base demanded mass deportations. Reform proponents Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker backed away from a path to citizenship but their past stances made them seem weak and phony. Trump’s embrace of racist rhetoric seemed like a burst of sweet truth to immigration opponents and white nationalists. Thus, even though Trump continues to dissemble and revise things he says on a nearly constant basis, he seems like the honest man in Greece to voters who like their white identity politics and won’t let them go.

2. Trump isn’t dumb enough to cut his own taxes.
Marco Rubio’s original tax plan was a huge giveaway to the rich, but it wasn’t sufficiently unfair for many on the right. Then he revised it, eliminating all taxes on investments so Warren Buffett, Mitt Romney, and many of the richest Americans — who have never been richer — would pay nothing in taxes. But Rubio’s plan still didn’t slice the top tax rate enough for the 0.01 percent.

So Jeb Bush decided that he would go all the way. Jeb! peppered his tax plan with a few distractions — higher taxes on hedge fund managers and a few tax breaks for workers — to hide the fact that it’s a giveaway to the richest on par with the breaks that his brother handed out. These tax cuts would help an average worker rent a car for a week or so. It will give the richest enough to build a car factory, probably in Mexico. Yet it’s tough to make that case, which is why George W. Bush got away with so easily misleading everyone about his tax plan in 2000. It’s much easier to say, “Jeb Bush wants to cut his own taxes by nearly $800,000 a year,” which is true.

Any tax cut for the rich would yield an even larger windfall for Trump, who thus far seems to be leaning away from any attempt to be called for that foul. On taxes, immigration, and trade, Trump benefits from no allegiance to the donors who have built the GOP according to their own interests — which is to make guys like Trump and themselves richer, at the expense of workers. And he gets to rub that in his opponents’ faces.

3. The right has spent decades telling us that the rich are infallible.
“Government should be run like a business! Give your boss more money and it will make us all richer. They’re not bloodsucking industrialists, they’re job creators!” GOP rhetoric for decades has praised the rich for their infinite wisdom. So how do you tell a billionaire whose ex-trophy wives are richer than you that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about?

4. These Republican candidates are terrible.
Republicans like to say they have the best array of candidates in a generation. What do they really have? A dozen and a half uninspiring caricatures who have largely failed.

Jeb Bush benefited from a housing bubble that briefly made his brother look like a genius. Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie are reviled in their states, where the damage they’ve done will outlast their feeble attempts to seek higher office by rewriting history. Scott Walker looks impressive until you compare his record to almost any other governor and recognize he’s never won a statewide election in a presidential year. His ability to demonize his opponents is nearly useless when running against Republicans. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul’s most impressive accomplishments are variations on the theme of Congressional obstruction. Carly Fiorina’s disastrous business record is perfect fodder for Trump to stomp upon, and Ben Carson is generally one thought away from repeating another “fact” that has been debunked on Snopes.com.

5. In a demagoguery contest, the best demagogue wins.
Articulating his opposition to the Iran deal, Ted Cruz doesn’t just imagine that Iran is both genius and suicidal enough to evade inspections and destroy Israel, despite the Jewish state’s own impressive nuclear arsenal. No, Cruz imagines Iran sending a ship across thousands of miles with a nuclear bomb that can be shot up into the sky to wipe out the U.S power grid.

Marco Rubio constantly raves about the danger of radical jihadists in the homeland, even though “nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, anti-government fanatics, and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims.” Republican candidates speak about President Obama and Obamacare as massive failures, even though Obama’s second four years — the first period with Obamacare in full effect — is on pace for the second most jobs created during any presidential term ever.

In this crowd, a guy who says the biggest problem with the Iraq War is that we didn’t take all the oil sounds reasonable. GOP leaders promised their base that if they took over Congress, all their dreams would come true. Now the base is mad at those leaders because Obamacare hasn’t been repealed, Planned Parenthood is still funded, and the president’s executive action on immigration is still in effect. They prefer the lies to reality. And whoever is lying loudest will get their vote.

Trump has proven highly successful in manhandling a parade of bland Republican politicians. To him, Carson and Fiorina present different challenges because they both possess the outsider status that elevates them over Republican officials who have to deal with reality of some sort, and they symbolize demographic groups that are some of the biggest stumbling blocks for Republicans. The party wants to show the world that it has a black friend and a lady friend.

Trump’s attack on Fiorina’s looks came off as scurrilous and cheap. Calling Carson “low energy” — as he’s called Jeb Bush for weeks — takes on a different tone with an African-American hero who forged a career as a groundbreaking surgeon. Trump could still go all the way. Carson possesses most of the “evidence” — skin, hair — that Trump used to argue that President Obama isn’t a citizen. So why not go birther again?

It was Trump’s racist attacks on Obama’s citizenship that first made him a conservative hero. And when the Republican Party didn’t reject him for that, when it did the exact opposite by accepting his endorsements and making him a fixture of right-wing media, it served up the perfect opportunity for him to make his fellow Republicans look like fools.

File photo: Donald Trump and Rick Perry, June 20, 2013 (via Governor Rick Perry, Flickr)

5 Reasons America Needs Immigrants More Than It Needs Donald Trump

5 Reasons America Needs Immigrants More Than It Needs Donald Trump

Donald Trump is still a birther.

It’s important to point this out because that’s how Trump, as he often refers to himself, first demagogued his way to prominence in the Republican Party, after decades of pretending to run for president with no major political party taking him seriously. Trump became so popular with the conservative base in 2012 that the eventual GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, stood on stage to gratefully accept the billionaire’s endorsement.

Do you remember all the evidence that Trump had that our president wasn’t a citizen?

There was Obama’s skin color. And Obama’s hair. And don’t forget Obama’s name! What relevance did this ridiculous fantasy hold to a nation struggling with the worst economic crisis in half a century? None, unless you value titillating racists and delegitimizing the first black president, which leads us to Trump’s current “campaign.”

The GOP frontrunner’s xenophobic bashing of Mexico stinks of the same sort of free-floating, evidence-free, birther-style race baiting that appeals to guys like Lou Brudnock, 71, who attended the anti-immigrant rally Trump hosted with fellow birther Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Phoenix on Saturday.

“This country today is sad, sad, sad,” Brudnock told the Washington Post. “You can’t say anything or they call you ‘a racist.’ It’s like we’re back in Nazi Germany. But look around, man. It’s people here reading and listening to his message.”

Those who think the big problem in Nazi Germany was that one couldn’t appear to be a racist are doomed to think Donald Trump is a serious candidate for president.

Of course, immigration is a serious issue, but not for any of the reasons trumpeted by Trump.

The undocumented population from Mexico has declined from its George W. Bush-era peak. And that, combined with crime being at its lowest rate since 1978, presents a real opportunity to pass reform that benefits our economy. We could then focus law enforcement on policing and deporting actual criminals, not millions of law-abiding immigrants.

These facts haven’t gotten through to people like Brudnock, who see the rise of the Latino population as the same type of existential threat that nativists saw from the explosion of Irish immigration in the 1850s. That’s why we’re hearing anecdotal cases of crime and disease that are undeniably disturbing. But these glaring aberrations are completely alien to the reality most Americans face. Still, a few gripping stories can form the basis for slurs that demonize millions — and damage any hope Republicans had for reaching out to minorities.

So while a Donald Trump nomination would likely guarantee a 2016 Democratic victory and thus improve the future of our republic, he’s still destructive to a national conversation we need to have.

Our immigration crisis is that we can’t and shouldn’t deport more than 10 million people. Even serious Republicans, if you can find them, admit that. Likewise, we can’t get rid of Donald Trump, who I assume is a citizen though I’ve never held his long-form birth certificate in my hand. But here are five reasons we’d be better off if we could.

1. People like Trump crashed our economy.
Immigrants didn’t issue millions of bad mortgages, bundle them and then sell them to suckers, leading to the loss of trillions in wealth and 8 million jobs. Speculators like Donald Trump did. And though the richest were among those who helped engineer the crash, they’re also among the very few Americans who are soaking up the gains of the recovery.

Our nation’s greatest economic problem is income inequality. It’s slowing our growth, depressing our economic mobility, and corrupting our democracy. The idea that the rich know best for America has resulted in one thing: The richest getting richer.

That’s the point of Donald Trump’s candidacy and the goal of the Republican Party. And it’s wrecking our middle class.

2. People like Trump are polarizing our government.
Republicans told themselves to pass immigration reform after losing in 2012. When a bipartisan bill passed the Senate — a bill that would have doubled the number of border patrol agents — the House GOP refused to vote on it. Instead they voted to deport law-abiding undocumented immigrants, over and over.

Why? The House GOP does not need to win one Latino vote to keep its majority. And while Latinos care about far more than immigration, the issue is hugely consequential and symbolic, as it shows whether your outstretched hand is open to new Americans, or making a fist.

For decades Republicans have used racial resentment to win elections and gut the policies that built the middle class. Now they need minorities to win the White House, and the seeds of distrust and division they’ve planted have grown into vines that threaten to strangle the party itself, the same way they have cut off all air to reform.

3. Unlike Trump, immigrants have every interest in steering clear of wrongdoing.
Every murder is a tragedy, but Trump’s attempt to turn Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez into a new Willie Horton betrays a cynical dismissal of reality that rises on a pungent cloud of xenophobia and opportunism.

“We know that as a group, immigrants are actually much less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans,” Paul Waldman wrote in the Washington Post.

The logic is pretty simple. Immigrants come here to work to support themselves and their families. Going to jail or back to Mexico screws this plan up. Avoiding law enforcement is the goal, to the point that crimes against the undocumented often go unreported, to avoid the risk of deportation. The exploitation of those in the shadows by criminals and employers is one huge reason that humanitarian groups and the Catholic Church support reform.

Trump, in an effort to seem less racist, argues that Mexico is capriciously sending criminals north. As if saying, “Not all Mexicans are rapists, just the ones in America” is any less offensive. And while his racist invective definitely has an audience, it’s likely to be less effective than George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton attacks for a simple reason: Violent crime was actually spiking in the late 1980s, and Republicans didn’t need minority votes to take the White House.

While undocumented immigrants have every reason to avoid gamy interests and multifarious questionable practices, we can’t say the same for Trump.

4. Immigration reform will extend the life of Social Security.
Donald Trump could help extend the life of America’s retirement guarantee by arguing that people like him who have benefited the most from America should pay into Social Security on all their income, the way the middle class does.

Since the current Republican Party exists to make sure rich people don’t pay taxes, this simple fix to the country’s most invaluable social program isn’t likely. But the Senate passed a bill in 2013 that could have extended Social Security — immigration reform.

“Here’s how the math works,” The Daily Beast’s Eleanor Clift wrote. “Five percent of the U.S. workforce is undocumented, which is some 8.1 million people. Thirty-eight percent of the 8.1 million pay Social Security taxes, which comes to roughly $12 billion a year, according to CAP estimates. That’s a pretty nice cushion for a graying America.”

This is a common-sense way to keep the program going without asking America’s hardest-working people to work even longer.

5. Immigrants can help solve our biggest economic problems.
Given that President Obama has led the longest private sector expansion in American history—which has seen the unemployment rate cut faster and more dramatically than even Mitt Romney promised, as we’re on pace for the second-highest number of jobs ever created in one president’s term—Republicans have to find other numbers to whine about. Their current fixation is the labor force participation rate. It is falling, as it has for decades, mostly because those pesky Baby Boomers actually thought we were serious when we said Americans should be able to retire.

I know Republicans just like to complain instead of trying to solve problems. But if they really want to increase labor force participation, immigration reform is the way to do it. Immigrants have showed a higher labor participation rate recently, and could help replace — and support — the legions of retiring Americans.

Forcing all workers to join in a legal labor market, where they can’t be exploited, would also help to address our second biggest problem: stagnant wages. Immigrants have already raised wages for American workers between 0.1 and 0.6 percent. And with these workers invited to participate in and contribute to our economy, they can advance the efforts to raise salaries through a higher minimum wage and a new overtime threshold that will pay millions of Americans more for work they’re already doing.

Illustration: DonkeyHotey via Flickr