Yes, because Republicans have been all about civil liberties these days, what with Rand Paul saying he didn’t think the Civil Rights Act should bar businesses from discriminating against customers, or Southern states and the SCOTUS taking a sledgehammer to the Voting Rights Act.
There are no safeguards against internment that Trump and his GOP supporters in Congress can’t (and won’t) eliminate.
And here is the text of that Civil Liberties Act
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-102/pdf/STATUTE-102-Pg903.pdf#page=2
Quite a lot about restitution. Some things about requesting the president to issue pardons, and some things about setting up an education fund. And a written apology.
But nothing about binding government institutions in the future.
I’d like to propose MAAA as another variant, that also happens to be what I hear when they say MAGA: Make Americans Assholes Again.
It has the added benefit of sounding like something a whiny child might say;
“MAAA! The minorities and foreigners are being mean! Whhhhyy do we have to share the toys?”
Strangely that didn’t stop you at all from worrying about Trump supporters getting rounded up, though purely a fiction of your own imagining; but now is enough not to worry about actual calls for internment camps for Muslims. Just as a very few news reports of assaults on Trump supporters merited your concern, and yet countless more reports of the people they target mean nothing until it happens in front of your eyes. Or for police versus the people they shoot, or so on.
Do you imagine anyone here doesn’t notice these double-standards? The only principle that you have actually stuck to is that you are not “terribly keen on Islam”, as you yourself put it, and every other value has been invoked or forgotten accordingly.
A few times you’ve invoked your charity work as proof you are a good person, and I hope so! But all we see is the face you choose to present here, and that has been a deeply hypocritical one, apparently too polite to get flags yet consistently dismissive toward everyone but your father’s party. This has been explained to you enough that you must know on some level.
I don’t know why it doesn’t bother you; I would be mortified to find myself proved so unfair, especially if I imagined myself a centrist. But in any case, know we can all see you saying one set of things for the victors and another for their would-be victims, and so long as you continue we know any fair words from you are meaningless.
I think we have all been assuming that HRC and the democrats were going to sweep the elections. Because of that, it has seemed much more likely that excesses and crackdowns were going to be coming from the left. I understand that many here feel that left wingers are always very peaceful people, and would never slip towards violence. History shows that to be an inaccurate assumption.
If the new administration moves towards actual extremism, I will absolutely be out there with the rest of you. But so far, most of the reaction has been unwarranted. Everyone that Trump proposes for any position will be called a racist and anti-Semite. It seems like almost a reflex action. Probably some of them will turn out to have such views, but that truth will be hard to find in a sea of false accusations.
Had HRC been elected, I would be hoping for the best. I am still hoping for the best. Trump has not yet formally proposed any policies, as far as I know. His proposed immigration policy is not that different than the one Bill Clinton proposed. The thing about creating a Muslim registry does not seem to be part of his actual plan. I hope that if he actually proposed such legislation, it would not be approved. If it were approved, I think it would be found wildly unconstitutional.
There does seem to be a breathless hysteria about the election. People are vowing to disrupt the inauguration. To disrupt everything, really. Civil unrest in anticipation of Trump actually being just like Hitler is not warranted. Making up hate crimes by alleged Trump supporters is not helping. Muslim internment camps are just imaginary FEMA camps, under a new name. I don’t get the attraction of such ideas. I hear things like that, hope that they are untrue, and look for evidence.
The subject of this article, Carl Higbie, is a disgraced ex-Navy SEAL, and shameless self promoter. When this article was first published in BB, he was a “Trump surrogate”. That does not seem to be accurate. He does not seem to actually speak for anyone except his own organization. I understand the strategy of promoting him in interviews to be a surrogate or spokesman, but it does not help anyone understand the actual Trump agenda. Just like the statements of Jeremiah Wright do not reflect the positions of President Obama. I have not enjoyed listening to the “Secret Muslim” crap from the fringe right for the past 8 years, and I do not really want to listen to similar hysteria over Trump for the next four. There is not a doubt in my mind that he will impulsively say vulgar and inappropriate things on a regular basis. He is the opposite of Kennedy in that respect.
I am honest about my views on Islam. I have at least read the Koran and Hadiths, and visited mosques all over the middle east. I was respectful and open to the experience. I have no issues with their philosophy or traditions over there. It provides a framework of civil order. But most of the people who have tried to kill me personally have had Islam in common, and my identity as an infidel as the primary motivation for their aggression. I did not take it personally when I was in the military, but the treatment was them same when I have been there on civilian, strictly humanitarian missions. I would not like my daughter or wife (or gay sister) to have to live under the restrictions that are normal in most Islamic countries. I am also terribly fond of books and cinema. So I prefer that we do not adopt that way of life in the US or Europe.
I don’t claim to be a good person because of charity work. I don’t even claim to be good. I claim to try. I do humanitarian work because it feels better than the application of violence. I am not sure that what I have done in either job is actually making things better for most of the people we were trying to help.
also- I have tried to never actually defend Trump. I have sometimes defended Trump supporters, because the ones I know are decent people, undeserving of the racist deplorable label that everyone wants to slap on them. I don’t debate whether there are some real scary right wingers out there, but I think their number and influence is overstated.
I hope I am not as much of a hypocrite as you think I am.
Well, look at just how much bias there is in even this single post.
For the left, all it takes is the vague precedent that violence has happened before to merit your concern. Numbers and influence need no questioning. Evidence that Clinton, who is not much of a leftist, or her supporters might follow such a path is entirely unnecessary.
For the right, such a precedent exists too but doesn’t merit your concern. Trump winning to the cheers of white nationalists and appointing members of hate groups to his transition team doesn’t merit your concern. People like this calling for internment camps just isn’t official enough to merit your concern. SPLC records some 700 incidents of harassment since the election, and not enough people have been physically injured in them yet to merit your concern.
You have the gall to talk about if there is a move to extremism, while nothing that happens isn’t dissected until you find a reason not to worry. For the right. For the left, just being left was enough to bring out hand-wringing. And I hope the new mention about not adopting the Islamic way of life in US and Europe isn’t more of the same, because that would be an even less evidenced concern.
I don’t believe that you are so thick as not to understand how this is hypocrisy. If you want to try to be a good person, work at that. If you could defend Trump supporters from the few attacks and getting called “deplorable” – which note even Clinton said only applied to some of them – you could also defend the people many are calling to hurt before you see one attacked right in front of you.
Right now, though, you are just doubling down on your double standard, and it makes both your concerns and your lack of concerns meaningless.
While there have been some brutal left-wing regimes in the world, they’ve all been the kind of illiberal left wing ideologues that have never made any headway here in the US and are always a fractional marginalized minority here. There’s always a risk of illiberal authoritarianism everywhere, though of all the places I’d fear it, none are part of the Democratic Party of the US which is quite liberal, and hardly left-wing. If I were to worry about it, I’d worry about it from the right who’ve adopted more and more illiberal authoritarian positions since Reagan, but if you’re afraid of the left, I’d worry a little about a left-wing firebrand promising to smash the corporate bosses, reign in the excesses of the banks, and radically redistribute the wealth of the 1%, not Hillary Fucking Clinton who was milquetoast-light and who struggled but failed dismally to get the left to even believe she wasn’t part of the right wing.
“Oh no, we won at all costs, and lots of people still think we’re huge jerks!”
“Well, have you considered that winning at all costs to the detriment of minorities and women makes you assholes?”
That may have something to do with the fact that:
Literally every single person surfacing as a potential candidate for high-level executive branch positions since Trump won the election has a documented history of being racist, sexist, misogynist, antisemitic, homophobic, Islamophobic, or some combination of the six. It’s not a reflex action if the people he’s choosing to associate with on a daily basis and install into seats of power within the federal government are actually provably the things we’re saying they are. This is not some stupid conspiracy theorist whisper campaign like “Obama is a secret Muslim”, or some nonsensical racist conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii. This is well-documented, evidence-based concern that Trump is appointing and hiring people who are literally actually racists and antisemites (and a bunch of other awful things besides, in addition to basically all being pathological liars).
You do realize that the difference between FEMA camps and a Muslim registration database is that FEMA camps are a fever-dream thought up by paranoid and/or exploitative right-wing conspiracy theorists (and also the X-Files movie), while a Muslim registration database is something that people associated with the Trump campaign - including Trump himself - have expressed interest in pursuing, right?
I have never liked the politics of Breitbart. They have always promoted some viewpoints that I disagree with. I have gone back and read some of the articles that allege to prove Bannon’s anti-Jewish bias. Exhibit #1 always seems to be the Horowitz “renegade Jew” article. I am pretty familiar with Horowitz, and I feel pretty confident saying that he is far from being anti-Jewish. He made the following statement about the article- “In fact, neither Breitbart nor Bannon is responsible for that statement. A Jew is. I wrote the article, which was neither requested nor commissioned by Breitbart.”
“Not only is he not an anti-Semite — he’s a fighter against anti-Semitism,” said Aaron Klein, the Jerusalem bureau chief for the Breitbart news website, which Bannon led until recently.
I am still no fan of Bannon. I am also not an expert on him. But a short review of the evidence of his antisemitism does not indicate to me that the charges are justified. Of course, it is almost impossible to disprove such an accusation.
Jeff Sessions-
“It’s scandalous that they’re trying to say he’s a racist,” he said. “They are trying to demonize the Alabama of 2016 as somehow being the Alabama of 1946. And they are trying to similarly falsely caricature Sen. Sessions. But that is not the case.”
-Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
“You really get to know a person when you interact so closely with them,” continuing “I have been an African American for 71 years and I think I know a racist when I experience one. Jeff Sessions is simply a good and decent man.” He called Sessions a “friend” who “does not have a racist bone in his body.”
-Larry Thompson, deputy attorney general under Bush
I have been reading about the accusations made against Sessions during his confirmation hearings in 1986. The hearings were led by Ted Kennedy, who apparently wanted to squash anyone nominated by Reagan. Most of the allegations against him were made by Thomas Figures, who has his own history of corruption. I do know that Sessions was a main force in prosecuting and essentially ending the KKK in Alabama, and desegregating the schools in that state. I would not be terribly surprised if someone were to find statements that are racially insensitive by today’s standards associated with a White man who grew up in Selma in the 1950s. But even so, what his opponents have come up with have been relatively tame. Once again, I accept that it is very hard to prove that someone is not a racist. Here he is crossing the Pettis Bridge holding hands with John Lewis-
I have not spent time looking at Kobach, but will do so. And Flynn as well.
more later.
Kobach, as far as I can tell, has not been offered a job in the Trump administration. He was photographed before a meeting with Trump, and apparently had a proposal to renew his NSEERS plan, which failed under Bush. I am not going to panic over him until there is some evidence that he is going to have some federal authority.
As far as Mike Flynn, He does seem to have expressed some harsh views on Islam. I hope those views will be tempered with the responsibility to protect all Americans. It is disappointing to me that we have to go from having a national security apparatus that works on the assumption that there is never a connection between Islam and terrorism, to one that believes the opposite. I think that there is a sensible middle ground. But that is just me.
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