Tag: ralph northam
Kaleb Franks, Brandon Caserta, and Daniel Harris, Michigan terrorists

Accused Michigan Terrorists Also Discussed ’Taking Out’ Virginia Governor

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

Federal courts reporter Robert Snell of The Detroit News has been reporting on Tuesday's hearing to determine whether three accused Michigan terrorists—Kaleb Franks, Brandon Caserta, and Daniel Harris—should be released on bond pending trial. FBI Special Agent Richard Trask outlined new details about the terrorist conspiracy, including the fact the group discussed "taking out" another governor in addition to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam.

Where would they get the idea to target both Whitmer and Northam? Where indeed.



Make no mistake about it, there's a straight line between Donald Trump's dangerous rhetoric and the violence these men were planning. In fact, as Trask outlined in court today, these men went far beyond brash talk. They mapped out Whitmer's home, did surveillance on her vacation home as recently as September, trained with weapons deep in the woods of Michigan, traveled to Wisconsin for weapons training, used encrypted apps to conceal their communications, discussed using a boat as the getaway vehicle for the Whitmer kidnapping, and even talked about abandoning the governor in the middle of Lake Michigan.

The name of their group chat was "Fuck Around and Find Out." They assigned code names for each member.


Two of the 13 accused men, Harris and Morrison, are former United States Marines.

Given the number of conspirators, the vast amount of evidence the FBI compiled, the growing threat of far-right extremism, the encouragement of the current occupant of the White House, and the disturbingly close connections to law enforcement like Sheriff Dar Leaf of Barry County, Michigan, and elected officials, it is likely these charges are just the beginning of this conspiracy, not the end.

Ralph Northam

Gov. Northam, Militia Target, Hits Trump’s ‘Deadly’ Rhetoric

Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam's office blamed Donald Trump for inciting violence from his supporters, saying Trump's rhetoric is dangerous.

A spokesperson for Northam made the comment after the FBI announced on Tuesday that right-wing extremists who were allegedly plotting to overthrow and kidnap Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer also talked about carrying out a similar plot against Northam.

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GOP Governor Blasted Trump's Testing Claims As 'Absolutely False'

GOP Governor Blasted Trump's Testing Claims As 'Absolutely False'

Donald Trump's attempt to blame governors for the lack of adequate nationwide coronavirus testing by falsely claiming there are plenty of available tests was shot down by governors of both parties on Sunday.

"They don't want to use all of the capacity that we've created," Trump falsely stated at a Sunday press conference. "We have tremendous capacity. ...They know that. The governors know that. The Democrat governors know that; they're the ones that are complaining."

Trump is wrong, according to Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland."To try to push this off, to say that the governors have plenty of testing and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren't doing our job, is just absolutely false," Hogan, who is also chair of the National Governors Association, said Sunday on CNN.

"It's not accurate to say 'there's plenty of testing out there and the governors should just get it done.' That's just not being straightforward," Hogan added.

Hogan was not the only governor to call out Trump's lie.

"That's just delusional to be making statements like that," Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) told CNN on Sunday. "We have been fighting for testing," Northam said. It's not a — it's not a straightforward test. We don't even have enough swabs, believe it or not. And we're ramping that up. But for the national level to say that we have what we need and really to have no guidance to the state levels is just irresponsible, because we're not there yet."

Scientists at Harvard University estimate that the United States needs to test between 500,000 and 700,000 people per day in order to be able to reopen the economy by mid-May, the New York Times reported on Friday. Currently, the country is testing less than 150,000 people per day on average.

On March 10, Vice President Pence vowed that 4 million tests would be available by the end of the week. On March 13, Trump promised 5 million tests would be available by the end of March.

The administration broke those promises.

More than a month after Pence and Trump made the declarations, the number of Americans tested stood at 3.6 million on Friday, according to the Times.

The Trump administration was slow to ramp up testing after refusing to use a testing protocol published by the World Health Organization, and then an initial test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was flawed.

As of Monday morning, there are more than 753,000 confirmed cases in the U.S., according to the New York Times, and at least 36,109 people have died.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Oust Ralph Northam? Most Black Voters In Virginia Wouldn’t

Oust Ralph Northam? Most Black Voters In Virginia Wouldn’t

 I have long loved the Commonwealth of Virginia, and everything else being equal might have chosen to live there. The sheer beauty of the state’s pastoral and mountainous landscapes soothed a New Jersey boy’s heart. Walking across the University of Virginia campus along the white-pillared porticoes on The Lawn afforded me a glimpse of an ordered life I’d hardly dared imagine.

And then I met this Arkansas girl at a reception in one of Thomas Jefferson’s serpentine-walled gardens, and never looked back. We went to hear Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys at a high school gym in the Nelson County boondocks. The music, see, bluegrass and blues, had drawn me southward. It would be years before the Arkansas girl confessed that she’d never really liked either one.

But I digress. “Mr. Jefferson’s academical village,” as it’s called, stands as a sort of eighteenth century theme park—a monument to a serene life its creator idealized but never lived. As a slave owner who wrote the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was one of the great men of the age; also among history’s great hypocrites.

Yet today, his white and African-American descendants—cousins all—meet yearly to acknowledge and celebrate their mutual heritage.

That’s Virginia.

So no, it’s not astonishing to me that a Washington Post poll reveals that Virginia’s African-American voters favor giving Gov. Ralph Northam the benefit of the doubt by 58 to 37 percent. They’ve been dealing with history’s brutal ironies for 400 years. Virginians overall are evenly divided at 47-47 percent about whether Northam should be forced to resign in the wake of that dreadful blackface/KKK photo in his medical school yearbook.

As an historical artifact, the offending photo is both sickening and absurd. Sickening in the unspoken assumption behind “blackface”: that African-Americans are essentially clownish and inferior, figures of fun. Also in the understanding that the Ku Klux Klan in their hoods and robes are an equally comical lot, socially inferior to very clever medical students playing dress-up at a Halloween party.

Absurd too in that as recently as 1984, intelligent white people would not only think it appropriate to wear such demeaning costumes, but to publish the photos memorializing the event. Amazing.

However, it was also amazing to me, as a Virginia grad student at the same age Northam was when the offending photo was taken, that just south of the James River, Prince Edward County closed down its public schools altogether rather than integrate. “Massive resistance,” they called it, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch was all for it. Most white Virginians were.

The way I saw things, it was a bit like living in a foreign country: not my responsibility. I do recall once making a remark in a class on Southern literature to the effect that I was getting tired of lamentations for the Confederacy. A high school teacher in the front fixed me with a glare.

“Ever since the war,” she began, “and there was only one war…”

She pronounced it “woe-ah.”

OK, enough nostalgia. The point is that Virginia has been a very different place within living memory. Actually, several different places, and the Eastern Shore, where Gov. Northam grew up on a farm outside the rural community of Onancock has never been a hotbed of social justice. Separated from mainland Virginia by the Chesapeake Bay, it struck visiting reporters from the Postlast week as “a place apart from the rest of Virginia, yet a place where the history of black and white is as painfully enduring as anywhere.”

But, see, there’s also this other yearbook photo of Ralph Northam, depicting him as one of two white players on the Onancock High School basketball team. When the local schools integrated during his sixth grade year, Northam’s family disdained the private seg academies that sprung up. Nobody there depicts him as either a saint or an ogre, but neither does anybody recall his using racial slurs—ever in his life.

No rebel flag for him, he once told a friend: Because that war is over.”

“Friends, neighbors and schoolmates—liberal and conservative, black and white,” the Post reported, “rallied around Northam last week, not simply because he is from their town, but because they believe he is not what his yearbook page implies.”

For the past 13 years, Northam and his family have attended a black-majority Baptist church down the highway in Capeville, VA. A pediatric neurologist who long volunteered at a children’s hospice in Portsmouth, Northam ran for governor on a platform of racial reconciliation and Medicaid expansion, issues that earned him 87 percent of the African-American vote.

Northam made an ugly mistake 35 years ago, and he’s made a downright hash of explaining himself. Even so, it would be heartening to see a seemingly decent man survive one of these made-for-TV festivals of recrimination that have turned American politics so ugly.