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Right-Wing Media Spurred Racist Death Threats Against Election Workers

Right-Wing Media Spurred Racist Death Threats Against Election Workers

Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a former Georgia election worker, testified today about the harassment and threats she received after she was targeted in a right-wing media-driven conspiracy theory about Democrats stealing the 2020 presidential election in the state. Moss spoke to the January 6 congressional committee today about the racist threats against her which followed the widespread coverage.

Moss said she wanted to work in election administration because her grandmother emphasized that voting was not always a right that Black people had in the United States. Due to the threats and harassment she received, she's been forced to leave her job.

Moss also detailed a break-in at her grandmother’s house in which people “knocked on her door” and “just started pushing their way through, claiming that they were coming in to make a citizen’s arrest.” The committee also played footage from the testimony that her mother and fellow election worker, Ruby Freeman, gave prior to the hearing, in which she described how her life had been turned upside down by right-wing conspiracy theories.

Moss and Freeman were targeted following the release of footage that the Trump campaign claimed provided evidence of voter fraud. The footage provoked a false conspiracy theory that the Georgia poll workers unloaded ballots from a concealed suitcase in order to sway the election results. The conspiracy theory has been repeatedly debunked. By the beginning of January, Freeman had evacuated her home after the FBI concluded she was no longer safe in the days preceding January 6.

Moss and Freeman have sued The Gateway Pundit and One America News Network for their coverage of the footage that spurred the false conspiracy theory. OAN was later dismissed from the suit. Fox News and other right-wing outlets repeatedly covered the footage of Moss and Freeman, though the network never explicitly named the two workers.

  • On the December 3, 2020, edition of The Five, co-host Jesse Watters played the video and asked Fox News “straight news” host Martha MacCallum whether then-Attorney General Bill Barr would look into the footage.
  • Fox host Tucker Carlson also aired the footage on his December 3, 2020, show and called it “pretty unbelievable” that the video showed “poll workers pulling ballots out of suitcases.”
  • During Sean Hannity’s hour on the same night, the Fox host also aired the footage and singled out Moss by spot shadowing her and saying, “Look at her right there.” A Trump campaign representative, Jacki Pick, repeatedly referred to Moss as “the lady with the blonde braids.”
  • On the December 7, 2020, edition of his show, Hannity again played the footage and claimed Moss and other election workers pulled out suitcases “apparently filled with thousands and thousands of ballots, which were then counted by the workers that were allowed to remain in the room that pulled them out of the suitcases they conveniently had there, without partisan observers, without the media.”
  • Right-wing news site The Federalist also published an article on December 7, 2020, attempting to refute verified debunkings of the conspiracy theory. It claimed “Big Tech” did not even come “close” to debunking the election fraud theories.
  • At the end of December 2020, Fox began airing advertisements paid for by the Trump campaign that included the footage and repeated the debunked claims that the containers shown in the video were filled with somehow fraudulent Democratic ballots.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

House Will Vote To Condemn Trump’s Racism And Xenophobia

House Will Vote To Condemn Trump’s Racism And Xenophobia

 

Republicans will soon be forced to go on the record as to whether or not they stand behind Trump’s racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen.

A proposed House resolution to condemn Trump’s remarks was announced in a statement Monday from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi said that Trump “went beyond his own low standards” when he called Sunday for four congresswomen of color — all of whom are U.S. citizens — to “go back” to other countries. Trump later doubled down on his comments, refusing to back off even when told white supremacists were applauding him.

“The House cannot allow the President’s characterization of immigrants to our country to stand,” Pelosi said. “Our Republican colleagues must join us in condemning the President’s xenophobic tweets.”

Pelosi also noted that Democrats “will continue to forcefully respond to these disgusting attacks.”

Pelosi also included this quote from former President Ronald Reagan praising immigration: “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

While some Republicans have offered tepid criticism of Trump’s attack, others, like Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) made excuses for him.

Despite the clear racism of Trump’s remarks, the Maryland Republican insisted in a radio interview on Monday that it was not racist.

The House resolution will force Trump’s party to decide how much more of his bigotry they’re willing to tolerate in exchange for political power.

 

Published with permission of The American Independent.

Trump: ‘Many People Support’ His Racist Remarks

Trump: ‘Many People Support’ His Racist Remarks

 

Trump outright admitted Monday that he doesn’t care if people object to his racism — because “many people agree” with him on it, including white nationalists.

Trump was asked by reporters on Monday about the nationwide backlash to his blatantly racist attack on four Democratic congresswomen.

“Does it concern you that many people saw that tweet as racist and that white nationalist groups are finding common cause with you on that point?” a reporter asked.

“It doesn’t concern me, because many people agree with me,” Trump replied. “And all I’m saying: They want to leave? They can leave.”

Trump sparked outrage on Sunday when he called for Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), all of whom are women of color and U.S. citizens, to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

White supremacists have applauded Trump’s attack and echoed his vitriol against the congresswomen.

Trump is a racist who has repeatedly used the presidential platform to espouse racist views, particularly against women of color.

And now Trump has confirmed what’s been obvious for a long time: He has no shame about using racism to pander to his bigoted base.

Published with permission of The American Independent. 

Trump Doubles Down On Racist Tweets Against Congresswomen

Trump Doubles Down On Racist Tweets Against Congresswomen

If you try to defend President Donald Trump, you will always end up having the rug pulled out from underneath you. It’s a law of nature.

And yet, so many of the president’s allies have failed to learn this simple lesson. So when Trump launched a new attack at progressive Democratic lawmakers that was one of his most obviously racist smears, inevitably, some of his defenders tried to deny the obvious truth.

His screed attacked a group of women who have come to define the left wing of the Democratic caucus, which includes Reps. Ilhan Omar (MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Rashida Talib (MI), and Ayanna Pressley (MA). Though only Omar is an immigrant (she was a refugee from Somalia as a child), Trump seemed to assume all four women of color weren’t born in the United States, and most egregiously, he suggested they should “go back” to other countries:

Matt Wolking, a deputy director of communications for the president’s re-election campaign, was one of the first to defend the president, by bizarrely claiming he didn’t say what he said.

Of course, saying “go back to your country and then come back” includes the statement “go back to your country,” so his statement was absurd on its face. To read the argument as generously as possible, though, Woking might have been trying to argue that Trump’s statement couldn’t echo to the racist trope of white Americans telling minorities to “go back to their country,” because that trope doesn’t usually include an invitation to return. However, even this argument is clearly nonsense, because there’s no reason Trump’s claim that the congresswomen should “help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” and then “come back and show us how it is done” should be seen as anything but disingenuous.

First of all, most of the women that he’s clearly referring to were born in the United States, so there’s nowhere for them to “go back” to. They are fighting to improve the only country they’ve lived in. Second, even telling someone like Omar, a refugee, that she owes more allegiance to “fix” the country her family fled as a child is still patently racist. And the idea that we should take Trump seriously when he says he would want to learn from Omar if she were able to “fix” Somalia’s problems is so ridiculous that Wolking should be ashamed to ever speak publicly about politics ever again.

But even more humiliating for Wolking is that on Monday, Trump decided to annihilate even this tissue paper-thin defense of Trump’s tweets.

“These are people that hate our country,” Trump said at the White House. “They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.”

He continued: “If somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave.” He said nothing about them “coming back.” (And of course, this is completely hypocritical, as Trump has been extremely critical of the United States in recent years. In 2015, he literally published a book called “Crippled America” — and yet no one thought the fact that he had criticisms of the country meant he should find somewhere else to live.)

And CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out that Trump’s new comments also undercut the defense from Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD). Harris said Trump’s tweets were “clearly not racist” and the congresswomen to “go back to the district they came from — to the neighborhood they came from.”

Of course, Trump’s original tweets and his doubling down on the remarks make it clear that this isn’t at all what Trump meant.