What is Trump reading in the wee hours of the morning?

A lot of attention has been focused on Donald Trump's re-tweeting of three anti-Muslim tweets from the UK white supremacist Britain First group. Much has already been written about the racist character of these tweets and their false content. Looking at the timestamps on these tweets tells its own story. @realDonaldTrump re-tweeted those tweets around 6:40 in the morning, only 2 hours after the last of the three Jayda Fransen (@JaydaBF) racist attacks were put on the Internet by a Britain First twitter bot.

Assuming @realDonaldTrump is not a bot, he would have had to see these tweets before he could retweet them. Personally, I think I spend far too much time on twitter, and I focus on these political issues, and I never even heard of the @JaydaBF twitter handle, let alone seen these tweets before @realDonaldTrump retweeted them to his followers, which includes me. So how is it that he happened to see these tweets between 4:40AM ET and 6:40AM ET? It's not like they were trending on twitter, at least not before the president made his support for the British fascist site public.

Here are some other fun facts about @JaydaBF from twitonomy: The account has sent out 3,197 tweets between 28 June 2017 and 30 November 2017. In this period it has been retweeted 97.7% of the time for a total of 349,368 retweets, its tweets have been favorited  97.7% of the time for a total of 390,857, and it has replied to a tweet only 1 time, and that was to @realDonaldTrump.

While the twitter account @realDonaldTrump officially only follows 45 [45 get it!] others, mostly family members, and @JaydaBF isn't one of them, it seems likely that Trump is following some accounts surreptitiously that it wouldn't be prudent to list as officially being followed by the president, because when someone retweets a tweet that isn't trending within hours, it's likely they are keeping a close eye on the output of that twitter feed.

I reported earlier how some of the white supremacists that tried to bust up the meetings of the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice were convinced that Donald Trump was watching their livestreams. It has also been reported that the bodyguard of Baked Alaska, a leader both of the Santa Monica disrupters and the Charlottesville torch carriers, was visited in the hospital by an unidentified representative of the Trump campaign.

It has been widely reported that in addition to Fox and Friends, the president likes such questionable websites as Breitbart News and Alex Jones. It now appears likely that in the wee hours of the morning he is engaging with white supremacist and fascist elements more extreme than we know. These retweets are a warning. The question isn't merely: Why did he retweet them? The first question is: How did he ever happen to see them?

Here are some timestamps to consider. All times below are EST unless otherwise noted. The three Jay Fransen tweets:

VIDEO: Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!    2:40 AM 29 November 
VIDEO: Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!                                           4:40 AM 29 November
VIDEO: Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!                               3:40 AM 29 November

We don't know the exact time @realDonaldTrump re-tweeted them, but by looking at his timeline we can tell that he retweeted them between 6:32 AM - 6:49 AM 29 November 2017 because they are bracketed by his tweets.

There is another things I noticed about these tweets and this twitter account. Each of the three tweets @realDonaldTrump re-tweeted had been initially tweeted 40 minutes into the hour exactly, in three consecutive hours between 7:40 AM and 9:40 AM BST, and looking into the history of this account it is clear that it had been regularly broadcasting tweets like clockwork 40 minutes into the hour for as far back into its history as I cared to go, about 20 a day. This was true, with relatively rare exceptions right up until 7:05 AM when it thanked @realDonaldTrump for the retweets less than 30 minutes after he sent them to his 44 million followers. Since then, it has been a whole different story. @JaydaBF has now become very active with a lot of randomly timed tweets like you'd expect from a normal account, and refreshing my browser, it appears they've added 1300 new followers overnight. It appears the @realDonaldTrump has breathe new life into a twitter account that seemed largely robotic before, but the fact remains that the President of the United States was up at 6:30 in the morning re-tweeting anti-Muslim garbage put on the Internet by automation.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders broke new ground in Alt-Reality when defending the president's promotion of fake anti-Muslim videos:

“Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real. His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security.”

But the British didn't take too kindly to our president promoting their domestic terrorists:

Trump has legitimised the far right in his own country, now he’s trying to do it in ours. Spreading hatred has consequences & the President should be ashamed of himself.

— Brendan Cox (@MrBrendanCox) November 29, 2017

for US folk, Brendan was married to the Jo Cox, the member of parliament who was murdered last year, a week before the Brexit vote, by a far-right extremist who shouted the slogan of the group led by the woman Trump retweeted this morning https://t.co/N1drNlJLai

— Nicky Woolf (@NickyWoolf) November 29, 2017

@CNN @BBCNews @AP @hopenothate

The circled person is Thomas Mair convicted MURDERER of MP #JoCox@JaydaBF and #BritainFirst have repeatedly denied any links to him, well now there's proof.@realDonaldTrump care to delete the rt now?#breakingnews #ResistingHate#HopeNotHate pic.twitter.com/NWTr60K9G4

— lawlesstiger (@lawlesstiger_RH) November 29, 2017

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After decades of voter suppression Trump & Moore say "Let Alabamians Decide!"

When asked if President Donald Trump believed the women that are accusing Alabama Senatorial candidate Roy Moore dating them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers as young as 14, charges he denies, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, 16 November 2017:

"Look, the president believes these allegations are very troubling and should be taken seriously, and he thinks the people of Alabama should make the decision on who their senator should be."

That quickly became the response of Moore supporters around the country when asked to weigh in on the moral character of Roy Moore in the face of charges of sexually inappropriate behaviour with at least nine women. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said it's "up to the people of Alabama." Conservative commentator Ed Martin repeated "And my point is, as the president has said, let the people of Alabama decide." The letters section of the Orange County Register echoed the headline "Let Alabama decide on Roy Moore’s fate."

Let the people of Alabama decide. The perspective you spew is tainted by your establishment allegiance. We don’t care about your opinions! https://t.co/KMSGnujXtv

— Bryce (@Bryceof6) November 10, 2017

They say this about a state in which racism and voter
suppression has distorted every election it has ever had.

Alabama instituted its first measures to limit the African-American vote only two years after the Civil War ended with its first felony disenfranchisement law in 1867. At the same time African-Americans were criminalized. Jeff Manza wrote about this period in Ballot Manipulation and the “Menace of Negro Domination”: Racial Threat and Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 1850–2002:

The sharp increase in African-American imprisonment goes hand-in-hand with changes in voting laws. In many Southern states, the percentage of nonwhite prison inmates nearly doubled between 1850 and 1870. Whereas 2% of the Alabama prison population was nonwhite in 1850, 74% was nonwhite in 1870, though the total nonwhite population increased by only 3% (U.S. Department of Commerce 1853, 1872). Felon disenfranchisement provisions offered a tangible response to the threat of new African-American voters that would help preserve existing racial hierarchies.

It was written into the state constitution by the Jim Crow era 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention. As note by Manza:

[W]hich altered that state’s felon disenfranchisement law to include all crimes of “moral turpitude,” applying to misdemeanors and even to acts not punishable by law (Pippin v. State, 197 Ala. 613 [1916])...John Field Bunting, who introduced the new disenfranchisement law, clearly envisioned it as a mechanism to reduce African-American political power, estimating that “the crime of wife-beating alone would disqualify sixty percent of the Negroes” (Shapiro 1993, p. 541).

In his opening address, John B. Knox, president of the all-white convention, openly justified the law on the basis of white supremacy:

“[In 1861], as now [1901], the negro was the prominent factor in the issue. . . . And what is it that we want to do? Why it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State. . . . The justification for whatever manipulation of the ballot that has occurred in this State has been the menace of negro domination. . . . These provisions are justified in law and in morals, because it is said that the negro is not discriminated against on account of his race, but on account of his intellectual and moral condition.”

With time they learned the disadvantages of such frank expression, but the motivations and justifications have never changed. This law was intentionally vague as to what constituted "moral turpitude,” which allowed un-elected county registrars to interpret it as they saw fit. The effect was as intended. The power of the black vote was greatly diminished.

In 1985, US Attorney Jeff Sessions indicted a number of Alabama civil rights workers on false charges of election fraud for assisting elderly black citizens with absentee voting ballots. That same year the Supreme Court found the "moral turpitude” provision of the Alabama state constitution to be in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and unanimously invalidated it, but 11 years later Alabama passed a new felony disenfranchisement law, which did pretty much the same thing.

That statute led to the disenfranchisement of a quarter-million Alabamians, most of them black. 15% of Alabama's African-American voters lost their right to a ballot because of this law. Finally last May, after a long struggle led by community and civil rights organizations, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a law that defined the legal phrase "moral turpitude" and limited the number of crimes to which it could be applied to about 50. The was heralded as a great victory for voting rights and was suppose to restore as many as 250,000 voters to the rolls. But there was a big BUT: In spite of the new law, anyone who had lost their franchise as a result of a criminal conviction still could not regain the right to vote until they pay off any outstanding court fines, legal fees and victim restitution. As a practical matter, that means that most ex-felons still can not exercise the right to vote in Alabama. In effect they have imposed a new poll tax, a voter discrimination measure the 24th Amendment abolished in 1964. These policies will likely be found unconstitutional one day, but not before the help Roy Moore.

A year after a 2013 Supreme Court decision gutted parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Alabama passed a law requiring citizens to have a photo identification in order to vote. Then it closed 31 DMV offices, most in African American communities. John Archibald wrote in AL.com: “Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.” Mass protests and public exposure, and a DOT investigation that concluded:

"African Americans residing in the Black Belt region of Alabama [were] disproportionately underserved by ALEA's driver licensing services, causing a disparate and adverse impact on the basis of race," 

forced the state to reopen the shuttered offices, but the voter suppression effects of the new law otherwise remain in effect.

Voter ID and driver's license office closures black-out Alabama's Black Belt http://t.co/zqo78O3fsV #alpolitics

— Kyle Whitmire (@WarOnDumb) September 30, 2015

At the 52nd anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge that remains to this day the iconic example of Alabama's opposition to black voting rights, Rev. William Barber said about Alabama’s voter ID law "We can’t be polite about this. We can’t be casual or cavalier. We have more voter suppression in recent years than we’ve seen since Jim Crow.”

In 2016 Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (R) opposed automatic voter registration saying "if you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and to go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to go vote, then you don’t deserve that privilege.” The year before he insisted: “The closure of 31 DMV offices will not leave citizens without a place to receive the required I.D. card to vote...All 67 counties in Alabama have a Board of Registrars that issue photo voter I.D. cards." To the ex-cons that the new law is intended to allow to vote, Merrill reminds "In order for you to have your voting rights restored, you have to make sure all your fines and restitution have been paid," Merrill is a Roy Moore supporter and plans to vote for him, of Moore's accusers he said "I don't know whether they're making it up or not, because I don't know their intention."

I endorsed Luther Strange in the Alabama Primary. He shot way up in the polls but it wasn’t enough. Can’t let Schumer/Pelosi win this race. Liberal Jones would be BAD!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2017

The last thing we need in Alabama and the U.S. Senate is a Schumer/Pelosi puppet who is WEAK on Crime, WEAK on the Border, Bad for our Military and our great Vets, Bad for our 2nd Amendment, AND WANTS TO RAISES TAXES TO THE SKY. Jones would be a disaster!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2017

So, after more than a century of rigging the Alabama vote to insure that bigots like Roy Moore can keep getting elected, they can all sound so fair and democratic by saying "Let the people of Alabama decide," when really, that is their worst nightmare.

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Why the Moore-Trump approach to sexual assault is so toxic

It is beginning to look like the Harvey Weinstein revelations have initiated a deep and far ranging sea-change in women's acceptance of sexual abuse and misconduct. What may have been awakened by the sexually abusive bragging of criminal misconduct by a candidate for the presidency and the United States, and then proven by more than a dozen women who bore witness against him, has turned into a tsunami with the charges against Roy Moore, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, John Conyers, and so many others, most not nearly so famous.

This social transformation is likely to require an extended period of social introspection and change to right the many historic wrongs. Donald Trump and Roy Moore have exampled one way of dealing with these allegations - deny, deny, deny. Al Franken has exampled another - admit past wrongdoing while asking for further investigation and forgiveness.

Moore, Trump, Fox News et al, have taken the tack of demanding harsh punishment for Franken, based on his admission of guilt, while opposing any for Trump or Moore based on a presumption of innocence flowing from their denials no matter how strong the evidence against them is. For example, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said

"I think in one case specifically Sen. Franken has admitted wrongdoing and the president hasn't. I think that's a very clear distinction."

We have all heard Trump admit to a practise that most would call sexual assault, but we are suppose to give him a pass because he doesn't see it as wrong.

This is a very dangerous tact to take at this historic juncture.

The message to men who may have been guilty of sexual misconduct in the past is: Whatever you do, don't admit it. If you do you may be summarily and severely punished. It's much safer to hide behind the presumption of innocence and force your accusers to prove their case in a court of law. It will likely never come to trial, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is statute of limitations.

While recent headlines have highlighted the news about the "rich & famous," the problem of male sexual misconduct is one that is rampant throughout society and is one that affects people of all strata. Most cases will never come to trial or even a legal conclusion. Only the worst or most famous cases will. If society is to get through this sea change so that humanity can rise to a higher plane with a minimum of bloodshed and a maximum of healing, the process must look a lot more like the "Truth and Reconciliation" process which South Africa went through than the Nuremberg Trials.

That being the case, Al Franken has shown us the way forward and is to be commended for his honesty. This is the example all men who know they are guilty of sexual misconduct should be encouraged to follow. A spirit of forgiveness should also be encouraged. If the abused woman isn't demanding punishment, who rightly should?

Moore, Trump, Fox News et al, claim they are demanding punishment for Franken's admitted past deeds. As a practical matter they are demanding punishment for Franken breaking the code of silence and admitting to his bad past acts. They also example how to avoid that. Given the scope of the social wrongs that must be corrected, this position is a very dangerous one. Their example encourages men to fight these changes by denying past bad acts for fear that any willful admission is the surest path to punishment.

Moore, Trump, Fox News et al, are taking their approach for self-defensive and partisan political advantage, but they are also advocating social policy at this world historic juncture of the relations between the sexes, and it is very toxic social policy.

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#ThemToo: America's sexual violence blindspot

Sexual violence by some men against other men is endemic in America's prison system and that fact is well known. We can deduct that by the way it is casually referenced in our culture. Everyone knows that a young man, or boy, that is not well connected or well protected, is subject to being repeatedly raped in prison. Here's an example:

Option A, Brandon takes the deal.

Option B, Brandon goes up to the penitentiary and gets his rectum resized about yay big.

Considered as a revelation, this is certainly one of the least shocking revelations in Breaking Bad, because Saul Goodman is just telling us what most already know.

Nobody knows how widespread this type of sexual violence is within our prison systems because few care, and nobody is keeping count.

Generally speaking, it isn't even considered. For example, following Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, this is the way Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, described the problem of sexual assault on Democracy Now today:

My thoughts about this are that—exactly what Tarana said earlier, that this kind of violence is as American as apple pie. I am both heartbroken by all of the stories that I have seen being shared—there’s more stories being shared every day. And lots of people that I know, that I’m in community with, and people that I don’t know, are asking themselves, “What do we do about this epidemic of violence—violence against women, violence against women of color, violence against black women, queer people, trans people? And even, what do we do about violence against men?” Right? Cis men, trans men.

Sexual assault that is regularly visited upon mostly heterosexual men in the form of violent homosexual anal rape in our prison system gets mentioned by no one.

This is a type of sexual violence which is entirely within the state's ability to control. It does not because it is used by the state, as also exemplified by the above Breaking Bad quote. The "criminal justice" system quite deliberately uses this threat of sexual violence to enhance the deterrent value of incarceration. The fictional scene above is replayed many times a day in real world lockups. In weighing his options, that image of having his rectum resized, more than just about anything else, is likely to persuade the young defendant to take the deal even though it has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence. Externally, they use sexual violence as a deterrent. Internally they used it as a lever of control over the prison population. They welcome it as a beneficial parasite that is useful to the prison host, and so they feed it what it needs.

We must consider these victims too. Anyone who thinks we can end sexual violence and sexual abuse, while leaving this state sponsored incubator intact, is on a engaged in "a task that has little to no chance of being successful or beneficial."

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The liberal soul of "neoliberalism"

Today Portside carried a link to an article by Kean Birch published earlier in The Conversation titled "What Exactly is Neoliberalism?" and since I must admit to my own share of confusion about what people are talking about when they use this very popular term, that title was "click bait."

Kean Birch aims to set us straight as to the true meaning of the term neoliberalism and in the first sentence he calls it "a problematic economic system we might want to change." Gee, I always called that something else, but when he says "I struggle with neoliberalism" he means the definition of the term not class struggle:

As a result of its growing popularity in academia, media and popular discussions, it’s crucial to understand neoliberalism as a concept. We need to know its origins and its definition in order to understand our current political and economic mess, including the rise of nativism that played a part in Brexit and Donald Trump’s election a year ago.

Neoliberalism is regularly used in popular debate around the world to define the last 40 years. It’s used to refer to an economic system in which the “free” market is extended to every part of our public and personal worlds. The transformation of the state from a provider of public welfare to a promoter of markets and competition helps to enable this shift.

When was the capitalist state "a provider of public welfare?" Is that when America was great before? Neoliberalism as a concept, as a reference to an economic system, and as a term that has been popularized over the last 40 years, is an intentionally vague term used by those who don't see our current problems as a result of overripe capitalism, which must be overthrown. They see it as something else, a deviation from acceptable capitalism to something they call neoliberalism which, presumably can be gotten rid of without revolution.

Sometimes the distribution of words can reveal a lot about a piece. For example, since Birch sets out to define "neoliberalism," it's not surprising that the term is used 34 times in his article, with "neoliberal" used another 9. What is surprising is that the term "capitalism" shows up only once, and even then it is "neoliberal capitalism." All the world's troubles flow from "neoliberalism," whatever that is, so we can pay capitalism, with its distinct property and class relationships, history and course of development, no nevermind.

He traces the origins of the word all the way back to a Monthly Review article in 1884. This means there were "neoliberals" even before there were Nazis, let alone neo-Nazis. How old can something be before "neo" no longer applies? This definition of "neoliberalism" covers the entire span of the imperialist development of capitalism. It's pretty clear that "neoliberalism" is alt-speak for capitalism.

Nativism is another alternative word that is often matched with "neoliberalism." Birch speaks of "the rise of nativism that played a part in Brexit and Donald Trump’s election a year ago." Terms like "racism", "white nationalism", and "white supremacy" are foreign to his narrative. They are being replaced by more opaque language, alternative words like "nativism" and "tribalism," except "separate but equal" was never the true goal of white supremacy. "Nativism" and "tribalism" are cover stories. They are terms the white supremacists are comfortable with.

This a real shame because the fight against white supremacy is the defining struggle of our time. Just look at Dotard Trump's morning Twitter feed. All this was before 5AM. This hateful obsession bodes very bad things for black people, and "neoliberals" trying to rebrand it as "nativism" are most unhelpful.

It wasn’t the White House, it wasn’t the State Department, it wasn’t father LaVar’s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence - IT WAS ME. Too bad! LaVar is just a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair. Just think..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017

...LaVar, you could have spent the next 5 to 10 years during Thanksgiving with your son in China, but no NBA contract to support you. But remember LaVar, shoplifting is NOT a little thing. It’s a really big deal, especially in China. Ungrateful fool!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017

The NFL is now thinking about a new idea - keeping teams in the Locker Room during the National Anthem next season. That’s almost as bad as kneeling! When will the highly paid Commissioner finally get tough and smart? This issue is killing your league!.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2017

The confusion around the term "neoliberalism" is so profound that it rightly belongs in the dustbin of alternative terms along with "nativism" and "tribalism." [as they are being popularized by white supremacists.] We have a president that hates black people and so-called leftists who think neoliberalism is a plague on capitalism and prettify white supremacy as "nativism." Let's hope 2018 brings in a better crop.

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