President Drumpf intiates a Fascist Dictadorship

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/trumps-relentless-lies-demand-make-truth-telling-great/

Trump’sTrump’s relentless lies demand we make truth-telling great again relentless lies demand we make truth-telling great again

All administrations and governments lie at times, but under Trump, lying has become normalized, a calling card for corruption and lawlessness that provides the foundation for authoritarianism.

S. President Donald Trump is a serial liar who appears to exult, if not take pride, in every petty deceit, particularly if it casts him into the glare of publicity.

With Trump preparing to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore in a highly anticipated summit this week, it’s worth a reminder: Not unlike Kim, Trump lies to hide the brutality of his cruel policies. He lies to discredit reliable sources of information and to discredit those public institutions that educate a public to create informed citizens who are able to distinguish between the truth and falsehoods.


He will lie about the summit. He can’t help himself.

The Washington Post reports that in his first 466 days in office, Trump has made more than “3,001 false or misleading statements,” averaging “about nine claims a day.”

Trump has lied, along with a tsunami of other fabrications, about former president Barack Obama’s birthplace, he’s made false claims about why he did not win the popular vote, he’s stated he knew nothing about payments prior to his election to the **** star Stormy Daniels, and he’s wrongly declared that the U.S. is the highest taxed nation in the world.

He has falsely claimed 72 times that he passed the biggest tax cut in history; incorrectly states that he has eliminated Obamacare; and fallaciously argues that the Democrats were responsible for eliminating DACA (the Deferred Action for Child arrivals that he terminated).Most recently, the New York Times reported that Trump’s lawyers have admitted that the president drafted a misleading statement about a meeting his son had with a lawyer associated with the Kremlin in Trump Tower, though for months he denied it.

‘The truth is dangerous’
In Trump’s Orwellian world, the truth is dangerous, thinking is a liability, and the sanctity of free speech is treated with disdain, if not the threat of censorship.

Trump uses an endless stream of tweets in which the truth is distorted for ideological, political or commercial reasons. Under the Trump administration, lying and the spectacle of fakery have become an industry and tool of power.


All administrations and governments lie at times, but under Trump, lying has become normalized, a calling card for corruption and lawlessness that provides the foundation for authoritarianism.

As in any dictatorship, the Trump regime dismisses words, concepts and news sources that address crucial social problems such as climate change, police violence and corporate malfeasance.

In Trump’s dystopian world, words such as a “nation of immigrants,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “diversity,” “entitlement,” “climate change,” “democratic,” “peaceful,” “just” and “vulnerable” disappear into a “memory hole.” Under the Trump regime, language has become a political tool and operates in the service of violence, unchecked power and lawlessness.

For Trump, lying has become a toxic policy for legitimizing ignorance and civic illiteracy. Not only does he relish lying repeatedly, he has also attacked the critical media, claimed journalists are enemies of the American people and argued that the media is the opposition party. His rallying cry, “fake news,” is used to dismiss any critic or criticism of his policies, however misleading, wrong or dangerous they are.

Facts are erased

There is more at stake here than the threat of censorship, there is also an attack on traditional sources of information and the public spheres that produce them. Trump’s government has become a powerful disimagination and distraction machine in which the distinction between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy are erased.

Under Trump, language operates in the service of civic violence because it infantilizes and depoliticizes the wider public, creating what Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl has called, in a different context, “the mask of nihilism.”

Trump’s attacks on any criticism of his policies and the truth go far beyond the public deploying of personal insults. In the case of his attack on the FBI and Department of Justice, his penchant for relentless lying constitutes both a possible obstruction of justice and an egregious attempt to discredit criticism and corrode democracy.

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(drumpf is not concealing his desire for a fascist dictatorship, it is unconscionable that he wants the people of this country to treat him the same as a blood thirsty dicator. rahu)

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/tr...ans-obey-like-north-koreans-obey-kim-jong-un/

Trump tells Fox News he wants Americans to obey him like North Koreans obey Kim Jong-un

resident Donald Trump on Friday told Fox News that he wants American citizens to show him the same reverence that North Koreans show leader Kim Jong-un.

During a surprise interview with “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Trump said he was impressed by the respect that Kim commanded from his people.



“He’s the head of the country — and he’s the strong head, don’t let anyone think anything different,” Trump said during the interview. “He speaks and his people sit up in attention. I want my people to do the same.”

Kim Jong-un runs a totalitarian dictatorship in which people face imprisonment or execution if they criticize him. According to human rights watchdog Amnesty International, North Korea has imprisoned an estimated 120,000 people based on political grounds across four separate camps dedicated to imprisoning political dissidents.

The organization further says that people living in these camps are “subjected to forced labor as well as torture and other ill-treatment.”

Despite this, the president has praised Kim for being a “very tough” leader who “loves” the people of his country.



When asked by Doocy why he was heaping praise upon Kim despite his country’s atrocious human rights record, Trump replied, “I don’t want to see a nuclear weapon destroy you and your family.”

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(I don't get this guy sometimes.... he some right on things but then at the same time he is a die hard trump supporter rahu)


://beforeitsnews.com/police-state/2018/06/who-do-dictators-murder-first-5012.html

Who Do Dictators Murder First?


How do dictators like Kim, Hitler, Stalin or Mao increase or maintain their power, while eliminating dissent, over their people?

Psychologists and sociologists who study totalitarianism say dictators are able to spread fear among their people, often through false flags and place themselves as their only salvation. In short, they are experts at manufacturing an external threat. Hitler was the master of this as he presented the Jews as the major threat to Germany and of course, who could forget the infamous Reichstag fire?. This helps keep a society off balance and collectively paranoid as well.

False flag events become an important part of a dictator’s strategy as we witnessed on 9/11.
The manufactured 9/11 event psychologically placed America in a position to trade liberty for perceived security. What we did after 9/11 was to sew the seeds of our own destruction through the establishment of a police state surveillance grid in which the clandestine apparatus of the government watches everything you do, as managed by the Deep State.
The creation of the MIAC report was a fear-mongering tactic. It shifted America’s fear of anything from the Middle East to the newly invented “domestic terrorist”. And according to DHS, which was molded after the East German Stasi, the new domestic terrorist possessed traits, which were coincidentally identical to anyone who might oppose a totalitarian regime. According to the MIAC Report, if you were a member of the following, you were domestic terrorist: (1) Ron Paul supporter;(2) A constitutionalist (3) A Christian (4) A Supporter of the 2nd Amendment. Do you I need to go further? The MIAC further identified terrorist was pictured in DHS target practice sheet.

The MIAC report answered the question on who gets taken to the FEMA camp first to a large extent.
The Globalists Are Taking Out the Eyes and Ears of the People

The globalists rightfully blame the Independent Media (IM) for getting Trump elected and delaying their takeover of the country. Now the social media giants of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are dismantling the IM one broadcaster, one writer, one activist at a time. Trump gave the country a chance to become a nation of activists and instead we are a nation of slacktivists. Google is the biggest threat to the Republic in existence because the are limiting so much of the free flow of information. This is a classic totalitarian strategy.
With the ongoing take down of the IM (e.g. Alex Jones, Paul Watson, Lisa Haven and myself to name a few), the Rip Van Winkles’ of this country will nobody to awaken them from their slumber for the final battle. Within 6-12 months, the eyes and ears of the people will likely be all but gone. The people will never know what hit them and they certainly will not have a centralized rallying point from which to organize against this planned and final takeover.
Some have asked me why don’t the globalists just takeover right now all at once? The main answer to that question is that the globalists are to busy plundering the resources and the labor of the people, that is not cost-effective to stop at the present moment. When the last bit of blood has been squeezed from the last turnip, the end will come swiftly.
According to psychologist Alice LoCicero, a leading researcher on leadership and terrorism, dictators come in all sizes but basically, genocidal dictators rule with the practical tools of promoting fear and controlling of information.
According to Jerrold Post, director of the political psychology program at George Washington University,
Post has studied the hyper-control methods used to upend the existing order of a nation and the subsequent “Arab spring” revolts swept away despots in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and some of the Gulf states,exemplify this principle. Some wonder I am so concerned about social media’s extreme censorship. I am because these Arab Spring revolts that were encouraged in large part by information spread by cell phones and most of by censored and controlled social media. If you are a spreader of truth through dissent, you have a Deep State bullseye on your back.
Why Don’t People Just Revolt?

Many people have asked me that same question posed in the subtitle. Post stated the following in response to that question: This is exactly what the NSA-controlled police state surveillance grid is accomplishing as it represents a high tech and heavy penetration of security. Virtually, everything that you do is monitored. Soon, you will find out why.
Understanding the Independent Media’s Opposition to Hillary Clinton

All of the aforementioned experts discussed in this article, spoke about certain personality disorders of being characteristics of a leader capable of committing genocide on his people. The related personality traits of a genocidal dictator consist of the “big six six’ which consists of sadistic, paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, schizoid and schizotypal. Hitler, Stalin and Mao all had the big six and so does Hillary Clinton. In fact, when it comes to concentration camps, who can forget when Hillary tipped her hand when she stated that Americans needed to be sent to fun camps which were re-education camps.


Hillary Clinton has the solution for people who are so uptight that they actually think that conspiracies are real. Clinton actually had the audacity to to declare that Americans needed to go to Fun Camps (i.e. FEMA camps).
From the Daily Caller: Who Do the Dictators Kill First?

The people that are killed first by dictators are the purveyors of the free flow of information. This is why we should all be concerned about the antics of social media. Just this morning , YouTube banned my video in which I described the fact that Paris Hilton was selling her father’s mansion, valued at $38 million, and Hilton was only going to accept bitcoin. This is a direct threat to the globalist organization we call the Federal Reserve and Google owned YouTube has pledged their allegiance to the banker’s plan to take over the world. Hence, the ban over this innocuous story.
History speaks clearly about controlling information from a dictator’s perspective. Take the historical precedent in which Hitler gained total control of the media of his day. This last quote was the beginning of the fake news paradigm to control news and information that we see today.
To answer the question, who do dictators kill first? Generally, they follow this stereotype:

1. Political opposition. In today’s world, think the MIAC Report.
2. Those that help them obtain power because they fear the inevitable counter-revolution. Deep State puppets better beware.
3. The public opposition. Today, that would be the Independent Media.
4. Teachers and professors because they can convey the culture.
5. Christians because the religion promotes freedom of choice.
6. Anyone that the state-sponsored snitches turn in. Today, NSA surveillance takes the place of most secret police.

The following is a summary of who gets taken.


Conclusion

In April of 2016, Clinton signaled her intention to institute FEMA camps designed for people that needed to “relax”. IF we we elect a Democrat in 2020 Clinton, prognostication will become reality.
In the next installment of this series, you will surprised to learn who will be working the FEMA camps and how the camps will be run.

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/comparisons-us-immigration-policy-nazi-period-may-not-helpful-hard-avoid/
Comparisons between US immigration policy and the Nazi period may not be helpful — but they are hard to avoid

The renowned Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt recently rejected comparisons between the Holocaust and the Trump administration’s separation of families at the southern border of the United States. “Equating the two,” she wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “is not only historically wrong, it is also strategically wrong.”
Lipstadt argues that it is historically wrong because of the difference between mass killing and the separation of children from parents deemed illegal immigrants to the US. And it is strategically wrong, she believes, because it allows the policy’s defenders to dismiss criticisms as hyperbolic frenzy:
Glib comparisons to the Nazis provide the administration and its supporters with a chance to defend their position, something they do not deserve.
I agree with Lipstadt on the unhelpfulness of crude comparison – but based on my own recent experiences of Holocaust remembrance at the heart of American public space it is clear to me that this cannot be the end of the discussion.
Lipstadt’s article includes an argument about the specifics of Nazi policy based on a photograph included in the main exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. Taken by an SS officer, it is of Jewish deportees arriving at Birkenau camp, including a young women and an older woman and child. One of the people in the photograph survived the Holocaust and has since testified that she was the younger woman and the baby was hers. Her mother had taken it because they knew that had she claimed the baby, she and the infant would both have been sent to the death chamber. This reminds us that the Nazi policy was not separation but extermination.

By coincidence, the day The Atlantic published her article was the end of a week-long seminar I participated in at the museum with 20 other academics, and it was an event relevant to this story in ways that significantly complicate its conclusions.
On a formal level, it just happens that a key text that we were asked to read in advance of the seminar, Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory, includes in its introduction an argument against Lipstadt articulating very similar views about historical comparison in the 1990s. Rothberg’s worry was that Lipstadt’s protestations risked upholding a memory competition that “overrides other possibilities for thinking about the relation between different histories”.
But far more strikingly, we spent much of the week grappling with our group’s experience of walking through the Holocaust exhibitions surrounded by high school students wearing red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps.

One academic participant even got into a tense confrontation with a member of the public in the new Americans and the Holocaust exhibition over the precise question of comparisons with the Trump administration.
Questioning history
Walking around the Holocaust Memorial Museum – a building deliberately positioned to dialogue with the central monuments and architecture of American democracy – any attempt to avoid comparisons between the Nazi period and recent events at the Mexico border would have involved a herculean effort at compartmentalisation. One of my most vivid memories is of standing in the Hall of Witness among numerous children wearing MAGA caps under a banner that read: “This museum is not an answer. It is a question.”
Lipstadt is right that careless and hyperbolic comparisons are unhelpful – but it is the task of scholars to communicate and debate the complexity of entanglements between past and present. Events at the southern border are not an extermination – but they are driven by public opinion and policy decisions with clear parallels to other Nazi-era events that the museum highlights with unerring precision.

In the Americans and the Holocaust exhibition there are sharp and sustained criticisms of refugee policy during the era. One especially remarkable display records opinion polling in the US from November 1938, which logged 94% disapproval of German treatment of Jews combined with 71% disapproval of allowing more Jews into the United States. At the heart of this disparity is a sentiment that resonates with the contemporary determination that, as Trump put it: “The United States will not be a migrant camp.”

Having now returned to the UK, these resonances transfer to my own national context with undimmed power to ask questions of how we navigate relationships between the 1930s and the present. Directly influenced by the museum in Washington DC, Britain is currently planning to build its own Holocaust memorial and learning centre at the heart of governmental space in Victoria Tower Gardens next to the Houses of Parliament.

Due for completion in 2021, the original commission document that proposed the site remarked that:In debating the more challenging elements of Britain’s history – such as the refusal to accept more refugees or the questions over whether more could have been done to disrupt the Final Solution – Britain reflects on its responsibilities in the world today.
But this remark was relatively fleeting. More prominent were comforting assertions such as: “Britain remembers the way it proudly stood up to Hitler” – and, in the most recent government announcement of the memorial and learning centre’s design, any explicit mention of refugee policy has been dropped. The online press release’s only mention of migration is a generic link at the bottom of the page to“Visasand immigration”, offering a reminder of Theresa May’s vision that: “The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.”
When it comes to an event as ultimately extreme and emotive as the Holocaust, we should of course be wary of blunt and counterproductive comparisons. In this regard Lipstadt’s article offers a powerful corrective. But this is not the end of our task.
It is the task of historians to draw parallels, however uncomfortable. Nazism didn’t immediately descend into fully fledged terror in the Germany of the 1930s, it came in a series of legal and policy shifts. There were those, in Germany as well as in rest of the watching world – who strongly objected from the start to the laws that took away Jewish rights and protections and continued to oppose Hitler and his supporters as the nightmare unfolded. But there were also many people in whom Nazi rhetoric found all-too fertile ground.

The ConversationA similar dynamic is in operation today. The gradual “othering” of migrants to the US – and, indeed, of refugees in Europe and elsewhere – has the same feeling of an incremental downward spiral in the public’s humanity, and it is here that historians have a duty to draw comparisons rather than simply seeking to police the border between historical events.
By David Tollerton, Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Contemporary

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/pr...mps-dictatorial-ambitions-immigration-policy/

This president wants to be king’: CNN panel torches Trump’s dictatorial ambitions on immigration policy

CNN panel on Monday attacked President Donald Trump for simply wanting to rule America by decree instead of through legislation enacted by Congress.

During the discussion, panelist John Avlon said that Trump was clearly frustrated that he can’t just override Congress and the courts by ousting all undocumented immigrants from the country without due process.


“This issue is not playing the way the president would like,” he said. “He can’t make it disappear. This is a fundamental conflict between our values and policies, and when people see children crying and screaming, separated from their parents and put in cages without any receipts… that violates them.”

Fellow panelist Brian Karem shared Avlon’s view, and he said it reflected Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding about how democracy is supposed to work.

“This president wants to be King Donald Trump, not President Donald Trump,” he said. “And he really doesn’t care too much about how the constitutional separation of powers takes place. He wants to be able to have an edict and go forward, and it doesn’t work that way.”

Watch the video below.
https://youtu.be/m5w4DjDCZd0

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/sa...t-see-judge-doesnt-mean-dont-get-due-process/

Sarah Sanders defends Trump’s fascism: ‘Just because you don’t see a judge doesn’t mean you don’t get due process’

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders asserted on Monday that undocumented immigrants could receive “due process” even if they are deported without seeing an immigration judge.

During Monday’s White House press briefing, Sanders was asked about President Donald Trump’s Sunday rant on Twitter that called for immigrants to be deported without “judges” or “court cases.”

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/supreme-court-backing-putting-democracy-risk-will-stop-donald-trump/
The Supreme Court is backing down and putting democracy at risk — so who will stop Donald Trump?

The biggest question of the Trump era so far has been whether the institutions would hold under this president’s ongoing assault on the rule of law. He does not understand how government is supposed to work on the most basic level, has no respect for or knowledge of the U.S. Constitution and is an instinctive authoritarian demagogue with no sense of his own limits. His own people cannot restrain him.

By this time it’s clear that the Republican Congress is failing to perform its duty. It is a willing accomplice in the president’s continuous violation of every established rule and norm. In fact, congressional leaders are now helping President Trump evade the legal consequences of his campaign’s complicity in an attack on the electoral system.
They have likewise shown no appetite to challenge Trump on policy, allowing him free rein to enact a draconian anti-immigrant program, start a global trade war, tear up treaties and international agreements, denigrate our long-term alliances and use executive agencies to take a wrecking ball to the regulatory apparatus that keeps the citizens safe from disasters both natural and manmade. Republicans in Congress have also turned a blind eye to the rampant corruption permeating every corner of the executive branch, including the Oval Office.
The Congress, as currently configured, is beyond useless as a check on a rogue president. It is functioning as his co-conspirator.
That leaves the third branch of government, the courts. Up until now, they have been the only functioning bulwark against the worst of Trump’s impulses. As of yesterday, however, it became clear that the Supreme Court, the only co-equal branch of government that could have checked the president’s power, is also abdicating its duty. In its ruling on Trump’s “travel ban,” it pretty much gave the president a blank check when it comes to dealing with foreigners. He has a free hand now and will no doubt waste little time in implementing his most oppressive anti-immigrant policies. He may well be inspired by the high court’s deference to his power to push the envelope in any other way he chooses.


Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke for many Americans with her scathing, angry dissent in the travel-ban case, which concluded:
Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments. Because the Court’s decision today has failed in that respect, with profound regret, I dissent.
Nobody is holding Donald Trump to account for anything.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., even took a bow on social media, proud to have been the one who made it happen:
Foreign allies are closely watching this unfold. They see now that they are dealing with a U.S. government that is incoherent, hostile and aggressive toward them. Adversaries obviously see a country that is unbalanced and vulnerable. The world’s autocracies are beginning to see a country run by kindred spirits.
The disastrous G7 meeting in Quebec left all of America’s closest allies gobsmacked by Trump’s heavy-handed behavior. He has been dismissive and rude since he came into office, but this was a dramatic escalation. Now they have belatedly recognized that Trump is serious about instigating a trade war, despite the fact that he fails to understand the issue on even the most elementary level. They are left with little choice but to retaliate, which Trump sees as “unfair.”


The New York Times’ Paul Krugman described the problem:
Trump famously declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Never mind the goodness issue: It’s already becoming apparent that the “easy to win” part is delusional. Other countries won’t quickly give in to U.S. demands, in part because those demands are incoherent — Trump is demanding that Europe end the “horrific” tariffs it doesn’t actually impose, while the Chinese can’t even figure out what the Trump administration wants, with officials calling America “capricious.”

If the rest of the world expected that the Republican Congress, having spent decades ranting about free markets and railing against trade barriers, would at least exert some resistance on this issue, they have once again been disappointed. The GOP has been passive and accepting. There will be no check on him from that quarter on this issue either.

As was evident by Trump’s lobbying on behalf of Vladimir Putin at the G7 summit, Trump is clearly champing at the bit to get together with the Russian president. He has dispatched national security adviser John Bolton to set up a meeting between the two of them around the time of the NATO summit in July.

All of this has reportedly led to some serious qualms among America’s allies, who are worried that if Trump meets with Putin ahead of the NATO meeting Trump may be even more inclined to do something destructive to the trans-Atlantic alliance.

According to the Washington Post, this meeting with Putin has them spooked either way:

But worries are so high that one senior European diplomat, in a recent conversation, halted mid-sentence to muse about whether it was worse for the two to meet before the NATO summit — when many alliance leaders fear the U.S. president might make big concessions to Putin without input from them — or after, when they would be unable to mop up a mess.

Their worries are understandable since we now know that on Putin’s advice, Trump blithely gave up the joint U.S. military exercises with South Korea without consulting anyone — and got nothing in return for it. His vaunted negotiating style could end up green-lighting something far worse than a trade war.
Now that it’s clear that no one in the current U.S. government will lift a finger to stop Trump from acting like a maniac, the rest of the world has recognized that it must try to recalculate how to keep him from doing his worst. Good luck with that.

There are a couple of institutions that haven’t weighed in just yet, so there is still hope that America can pull back from the brink. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into serious crimes that may implicate the president is still hard at work. And in just over four months the American people will have a chance to weigh in by either validating or repudiating the president’s enabling party in the midterm elections.

If those backstops don’t work, our democracy may not make it. And much of the rest of the world will have no choice but to see this behemoth economic and military power as an existential threat.

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/mi...ie-protect-democracy-trump-fascism-door-step/


Michael Moore asks Bill Maher if people are ready to die to protect democracy from Trump: ‘Fascism is at the door step’

Bill Maher has long been warning that Donald Trump is instituting a slow-moving coup to undermine American democracy.

he found a likeminded guest in Michael Moore, who appeared on HBO’s Real Time on Friday night.


Moore laid out what he sees as the best way to fight Donald Trump—all out war and mass resistance to counter Republicans who will stop at nothing to control the majority of Americans.

“They are relentless, they are motherf*ckers to the core,” he said. “This is the beauty and the genius of Trump and why you have to step back for a second and admire him the way Patton admired Rommel. When Trump says he’s going to do something he’s going to do it. He is relentless… and we never act like that on any of the things we say we believe in.”

Moore said that he thinks Americans can stop Trump, but only if they’re all-in.

“Fascism is at the door step,” he said. “People are afraid to use the word, but I think we have got to be very serious about this. FDR and Churchill defeated fascism. And one of those people was in a wheelchair and the other was a drunkard, to be kind… if they defeated fascism, look at what we’ve got.”

Moore compared the fight to what Martin Luther King faced, and said we have much better odds now. King started getting serious death threats at age 26 and lived with them for the rest of his life while raising four young children. Is the resistance willing to do the same?

“What are people willing to commit to? What would you give your life for?” he asked. “What would you be willing to actually put yourself on the line for? That moment is now. We are going to lose our democracy if we haven’t already. We have no choice, my friends. We have to rise up.”

Watch below.



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-09-2016, 11:39 PM
In the natal/election night composite
The Donald has jupiter/venus conjunction opposed to eris which certainly is a good popularity aspect.
And then in keeping with the unscrupulous nature of the current political atmosphere,saturn is opposed nessus and the saturn/pluto midpoint is conjunct venus.
And with orcus conjunct the node with the mars/jupiter midpoint conjunct pluto and square orcus and the nodal axis, trump didn't lie, he is going to institute corporate fascism in the country.
rahu

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/need-take-donald-trumps-threats-violence-seriously-late/

We need to take Donald Trump’s threats of violence seriously — before it’s too late
ast weekend, on the Fox News program “Sunday Morning Futures,” President Donald Trump struck a new note in his constant authoritarian posturing. He vowed that his supporters would retaliate against Democrats and any others who dare to disagree with him


Given the increase in right-wing political violence in the United States since Trump began his presidential campaign three years ago, this is not an idle threat. This is what the president told the Fox News audience:
You know, there’s probably never been a base in the history of politics in this country like my base. I hope the other side realizes that they better just take it easy. They better just take it easy because some of the language used, some of the words used, even some of the radical ideas, I really think they are very bad for the country. I think they’re actually very dangerous for the country.


This is only the most recent example of Trump’s violent inclinations. We could list all the threats he has made against immigrants, protesters, political opponents and members of the press. Last week, Trump appeared to threaten Rep. Maxine Waters, a long-serving Democrat from California, attacking her on Twitter:

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!

Trump found an audience: After receiving specific threats of harm — including references to lynching — Waters canceled several public appearances.

Perhaps even more disturbing was Trump’s event at the White House the previous Friday. The president honored his “angel families” by sharing autographed pictures of people (mostly white people) who had allegedly been murdered by “illegal immigrants.” This was more than another example of Donald Trump’s malignant narcissism: It was a macabre ritual in which Trump, the authoritarian strongman, made a blood pact of revenge with his public.

Despite dishonest claims to the contrary, Donald Trump feels no real concern for those Americans who have been victims of crime. He has neither hosted nor attended rallies or other events to condemn the numerous mass shootings committed by white men during his time in office. But the obsessive scorn and rage he expresses towards Latino “illegal immigrants” who commit violent crimes give him tremendous power over his racially resentful, nativist supporters.

“We’re gathered today to hear from the American victims of illegal immigration. You know, you hear the other side. You never hear this side,” Trump told his audience at that event. “These are the American citizens permanently separated from their loved ones. The word ‘permanently’ being the word that you have to think about. Permanently — they’re not separated for a day or two days, these are permanently separated because they were killed by criminal illegal aliens.”


This a continuation of Trump’s eliminationist language towards nonwhites — especially Latino and Muslim immigrants — he has frequently employed, both during his 2016 campaign and as president. For Trump and his supporters, black and brown people and Muslims come with a vast array of negative epithets. They come from “shithole countries.” They are “rapists,” “criminals,” “snakes” and “vermin.” They “infest” the United States, like a horde of insects or a viral epidemic. By Trump and his allies’ logic, Democrats and others who oppose his policies are aiding and abetting this human poison. By implication, they are guilty of betraying the United States and should be punished accordingly.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis also called attention to real or alleged Jewish criminals as a means of legitimating widespread and systematic violence against the Jewish people as a whole.

Trump’s eliminationist language and resulting policies have already hurt people. The children of migrants and refugees have been torn from their families and put into de facto concentration and prison camps. They are likely to suffer lifelong negative emotional and physical health consequences. Some children have reportedly attempted suicide or become the victims of abuse.

Some people who have been deported because of Trump’s “soft” ethnic cleansing campaign have reportedly been killed in their countries of origin. At least one father took his own life in custody after his child was stolen from him. ICE officers and other enforcers have been involved in numerous incidents which have directly resulted in migrants, refugees and undocumented residents suffering grievous bodily harm and even death.

As documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other watchdog groups, there has been a large increase in hate crimes — including assault and murder — committed by white supremacists and others who identify with the white-supremacist “alt-right.”

On a larger scale, Trump’s efforts to close America’s borders to refugees and other immigrants are likely to serve as a literal death sentence for an unknowable number of people.

We find ourselves in a situation where the president of the United States is both directly encouraging and indirectly participating in ethnic violence against nonwhites. The Republican Party has done nothing to oppose these efforts and largely supports them. Trump’s voters are positively enthusiastic about his campaign of ethnic cleansing. They share collective responsibility for Trump’s cruelty and his crimes against human decency and international law.

None of this should be a surprise. Donald Trump previewed his twisted and malevolent version of America’s past, present and future in his infamous acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention and again in his “American carnage” inaugural address.

Yet in the face of this blatant contempt for human decency, democracy and civil rights, many liberals and moderates insist on enforcing imaginary standards of civil discourse: We must be “respectful” and “polite” when confronting Trump and his corrupt regime.

But the famous Michelle Obama mantra — “When they go low we go high” — is a recipe for defeat when facing fascists and other authoritarians. Kindness will not defeat the cruelty that the Trump administration and its allies and supporters revel in. In their hands, the concept of civility becomes a weapon to use against their enemies, allowing them to claim that civil disobedience and self-defense are “rude,” unfair or unjust.

History has many lessons for those who believe that civility and kindness are an effective response to those who advocate eliminationist policies and other forms of political violence.

As reported by the Jewish Telegraph Agency and The New York Times in June 1934, Henry Cadbury, who was chairman of the American Friends Service Committee — an honorable Quaker organization — spoke at the 45th annual convention of the Central Conference of American Reform Rabbis. He cautioned the Jewish people against resisting Hitler in angry or forceful fashion:

Persecution of the Jews in Germany by Hitler and his Nazis can be ended not by the hate that the Jews may display but by the good will which they should show. By hating him and trying to fight him, you will only help make him worse in his attack on the Jews. But if the Jews the world over would try to convey to Hitler and the people of Germany their ideals and appeal to their conscious sense of justice, the problem would be solved much sooner.

History would suggest that Cadbury’s advice was tragically and spectacularly misguided. When we hear today’s versions of Cadbury urging us to be civil, considerate and polite toward Donald Trump and his supporters, we should bear that in mind.

(with drumpf a functional fascist dictator and the bought and sold supreme court allowing arbitrary imprisonment with no due process, this country now is in a Nazi State . drumpf will start imprisoning his detractor as soon as a suitable false flag incident can be created rahu)

http://beforeitsnews.com/police-sta...-camp-detention-with-no-due-process-5028.html

SCOTUS Affirms the Right for Permanent FEMA Camp Detention With No Due Process!

https://youtu.be/AlrSVRPwu4c

The Government Is Giving Itself the Option to Imprison Americans Without Due Process
In the post-Jade Helm era, and just over five months ago, it was reported that Camp Grayling was now the site where robots are being trained to fire 50 caliber machine guns. This means that FEMA camps, at least in part, will be manned by robots!

This should be concerning to everyone, because it is clear that government is modernizing its FEMA camp facility with a specific purpose in mind.

This story is not just another FEMA camp analysis. This story is about the government giving itself the option of incarcerating American for any reason, or no reason, simply based on the “say-so” of those in charge. And now, all three branches of government are on board with this unconstitutional practice.

If true, is there a “smoking gun” document which proves the claim? There is not only a smoking gun document, there is a law that speaks to this matter very clearly. Further, there is a recent Supreme Court decision which affirms the government’s right to lock you up and throw away the key.

The Law That Obliterates Due Process
The passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) marks the codification of unconstitutional indefinite detention based on the whim of the ruling authority. Even some of the ultra-liberals are afraid of this Hitler-style law. There are not many publications more liberal than the Huffington Post. However, they are concerned and this is what they have to say about the NDAA:

These NDAA provisions (which have been re-approved by Congress and signed by President Obama every year since 2012) override habeas corpus―the essence of our justice system. Habeas corpus is the vital legal procedure that prevents the government from detaining you indefinitely without showing just cause. When you challenge your detention by filing a writ of habeas corpus, you must be promptly brought before a judge or into court, where lawful grounds must be shown for your detention or you must be released.

Under Section 1021, however, anyone who has committed a “belligerent act,” can be detained indefinitely, without charges or trial, as a “suspected terrorist.” This is a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution and our Bill or Rights. In The Federalist No. 84, Alexander Hamilton stressed the importance of the writ of habeas corpus to protect against “the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.”

Now the government can lock you up and throw away the key. I know that some will say that the Supreme Court would strike down this law if it were to be enforced. Well, as you will soon see, the Supreme Court just had an opportunity to do just that and they endorsed the practice as a result of their recent ruling in the Jennings v. Rodriguez case.

From Bad to Worse
As we have seen, even some of the liberals are frightened by the NDAA provisions for indefinite detention, by the subsequent realization that you can be locked away on the whim of the President with absolutely no due process rights. However, illegal immigrants cannot be locked away. At least they could not be prior to a recent Supreme Court decision. You simply will not believe this story.

Until recently, the courts have held the following, with regard to the indefinite detention of illegal aliens, as summarized by Cornell University Law School as recounted by the New York Times:

Courts have consistently held that anyone on United States soil is protected by the Constitution’s right to due process, even if they illegally entered the country, though people generally have greater legal protections inside the country than at the border.

How much process is deemed to be “due” depends on the situation. Courts have upheld that people who entered the United States illegally and were ordered deported have a right to appeal those decisions. But the courts have also essentially said that Congress can decide that more limited procedures are sufficient for noncitizens detained at the border.

My outrage, regarding the apparent two-tiered system of justice and Constitutional protections was summarized in the following. Illegal aliens do not deserve more legal protection from detention than US citizens when it comes to illegal detention.



However, this all changed as the Supreme Court recently ruled that immigration officials can indefinitely detain immigrants during subsequent immigration proceedings which are used to determine the legal status of an immigrant following arrest

In the 5-3 decision, in which Justice Elena Kagan abstained due to previous legal work which could have construed as a conflict of interest, the Supreme Court decision of Jennings v. Rodriguez affects both illegal and legal immigrants. This Supreme Court decision affirms the NDAA and the President’s right to detain anyone, for any reason as deemed necessary by some undefined principle. In other words, our due process rights are no longer guaranteed and exist at the whim of the President. The Supreme Court missed the opportunity to rule in favor of the Constitutional liberties as opposed to tyranny, and they did not.

Implications
I have no issue with illegal aliens being protected by the Constitution. When the government can determine whose rights to protect, then none of us are safe. However, and before the readers think I have gone “rogue liberal”, illegally crossing the border contains legal sanctions that are not being enforced (i.e. jail time). Illegal aliens, like US citizens, should not be immune to prosecution and the requirement to pay for their legal transgressions. Illegal aliens, despite what the sovereignty-destroying Democratic party says, cannot have it both ways. The law is clear, the Constitution should apply to everyone, but so should the consequences for law-breakers.

It should be clear by this point there are much bigger issues here than just the detention status of illegal aliens. American citizens are not safe. A rogue future President, say like a Hillary Clinton, could imprison people indefinitely without due process. People wonder why I seem to be so concerned with FEMA camps, I just told you the reason. And if the Executive Branch was not intent on giving itself the option to imprison those that disagree with them at some future date, then why train robots to shoot 50 caliber machine guns at a known FEMA camp facility? Why would the Supreme Court reverse lower court rulings which established that illegal aliens have Constitutional protections against indefinite detention? The Supreme Court ruling, without mentioning it, just affirmed the very alarming NDAA and the government’s right to detain you based on the whim of the leadership of the government. This is why I have gone from outrage at the lower court decisions to fear of my government with regard to the recent Supreme Court decision.

Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion in which he stated:

“Detention during those proceedings gives immigration officials time to determine an alien’s status without running the risk of the alien’s either absconding or engaging in criminal activity before a final decision can be made…”

Justice Breyer wrote the dissenting opinion in which he argued the following:

“Whatever the fiction, would the Constitution leave the Government free to starve, beat, or lash those held within our boundaries? If not, then, whatever the fiction, how can the Constitution authorize the Government to imprison arbitrarily those who, whatever we might pretend, are in reality right here in the United States?”

Breyer also called the majority ruling “legal fiction.” Legal fiction? Is that what they are going to call it when the purge happens? Can anyone read this and believe that there is nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, there is no pill that can fix cognitive dissonance.

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/former-intelligence-officer-warns-cusp-losing-american-constitutional-republic-forever/

Former intelligence officer warns: We’re ‘on the cusp’ of ‘losing the American constitutional republic forever’

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has unanimously endorsed the intelligence community’s conclusion that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 presidential election, with the goal of electing Donald Trump and undermining American democracy.

Former CIA director John Brennan agrees that Vladimir Putin commanded his spies and other agents to assist Donald Trump so that he would defeat Hillary Clinton. Brennan also believes that Putin may be blackmailing Trump as a means of forcing the president to do his bidding.

Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted numerous people in connection with Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and related criminal behavior.

Trump openly encouraged Putin and his agents to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Trump continues to publicly praise Putin and make excuses for his apparent efforts to subvert American democracy. Trump now plans to meet privately with Putin later this month. It has been reported that no American advisers or other observers will attend these meetings.

If what now seems apparent is indeed true, Putin has successfully conducted one of the greatest covert operations in modern history. He and his agents have undermined the United States’ standing in the world and apparently now control a president, the Republican Party, and tens of millions of Americans who have embraced authoritarianism and betrayed their own country’s democratic values and institutions.

How was Russia able to accomplish this? Is Donald Trump actively working for Vladimir Putin and Russia or is he just a “useful idiot”? What social cleavages did Russia exploit in order to do so much damage to the United States? How does Russia’s support of Trump and American fascism fit into a much larger global plan?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Malcolm Nance, a career intelligence and counterterrorism officer for the United States government. In his more than three decades working in that capacity, Nance served with U.S. Special Operations forces, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. He has worked in the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. A frequent guest contributor on MSNBC, Nance has authored several books, including the bestselling “The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election.”

Nance’s new book is “The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West.” This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A longer version can be heard on my podcast.

It has been about a year since we last spoke about President Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election. At this point are matters better, worse or about what you expected in terms of how Trump is behaving and his impact on the country?

Things are happening as expected. But who would have thought that Donald Trump would be feeling so much pressure about being caught working with the Russians that he would feel the need to start paying them off so greatly? Trump is now warning that he may eliminate or downgrade NATO.

It’s just insane. We created NATO. It was a United States invention for the collective security of Europe. It has been a Russian desire since 1947 to break up NATO. Trump also wants to remove the United States from the World Trade Organization. He is doing this all before his summit meeting with Putin.

But in some ways Donald Trump is way worse than I thought he would be at this point. He is acting like a guy who has to rob a bank to pay off the Colombian drug lord. Every day that he wakes up alive is like a blessing. This is the level of debt and peril that I think Donald Trump is in — that he would literally take a sledgehammer to everything the United States has built in an effort to save himself.

Donald Trump is acting like Putin’s vassal. The public evidence that Trump and his inner circle colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election is overwhelming. Yet Trump’s voters, the Republican Party and the right-wing news media keeps denying the facts.

Putin is his handler. There are too many people who keep saying that they are “sick of hearing about Russia.” These people refuse to acknowledge the evidence. There is a national counterintelligence investigation targeting the White House. The president and all of his staff are implicated.

We have Michael Flynn, the [former] national security adviser to the president, pleading guilty to lying to the FBI because he covered up secret contacts with a foreign government and lied about it when confronted with the facts. The evidence is now in the realm of the Justice Department, and they’re not going to just come out and give it to you. This is what all these Republican congressmen are trying to do. For example, Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy. They’re trying to get the evidence so that they can use it to try to exonerate Donald Trump.

This is obstruction of justice on a grand scale. I suspect that when it’s all said and done and the sum total of the evidence comes out, it’ll be overwhelming and undeniable. As I told you last year, we’re entering a Benedict Arnold moment in American history. Robert Mueller is not playing games here. He cannot accelerate things because Donald Trump is taking a sledgehammer to government, although I’m certain he will accelerate things in order to make sure that justice is served. There will be more indictments, some of them very high profile. For example, Jared Kushner lied when he was asked about using Russian secret communications in an effort to hide his communications with Russia from the NSA and CIA.

Where is the mass protest and outrage among the American people? There should be massive protests and marches that disrupt day-to-day life. Is this passivity and perhaps exhaustion also part of Russia and Putin’s psy-op against the American people?

I think they chose their asset well. Donald Trump knows how to play this game. He understands that his only salvation is to manipulate the public. He doesn’t care if he destroys the fundamental infrastructure of the FBI. He has Rudy Giuliani telling him the good guys are the average field officers and the leadership needs to be completely redone because Trump wants to control the Justice Department. This is Trump’s way of obstructing justice and expanding his power.

Republicans are so taken by and loyal to Trump that they will believe and do anything he says. A good example of that is the Harley-Davidson factory and the nail factory that were shut down or may go away due to his tariffs. There have been interviews with people who said, “Well, we know it’s going to affect us firstly, but if Donald Trump says it’s for the best, then OK.” That’s cultism. Lo and behold, they actually say, “Well, Donald Trump didn’t do that. That’s the Europeans or that’s the liberals or that’s the Democrats that made me lose my job.”

We’re entering a very dangerous period in American history. It is terrifying. I was rereading my book last weekend and I really had no idea that putting all of this together in one solid package would lead to the conclusion that there is, in fact, a plot. The Russians have a plan and a strategy. They have been executing the strategy for 15 years, by finding Donald Trump and building him up as a character and fostering his betrayal of the United States of America. They clearly set out to destroy American democracy and Donald Trump is the man to do it. We are, as of this November, on the cusp of possibly losing the American constitutional republic forever.

The Russians have been doing this in Europe with ultra-right-wing groups, fascist groups and others that have their origins with the Nazis. The Russians aren’t Communist anymore. They are ultra-conservative Christian nationalists.

Their goal is to use democracy to destroy democracy. You want to get rid of democracy, have an election. But this is an election where they vote away your rights. This is an election where you lose to voter suppression and aid from a foreign power. But at the end of that loss, these enemies of real democracy then say, “Oh, no. It was all fair and square.” The Republicans want an autocracy where the rights of minorities and others are not protected. Vladimir Putin, with Donald Trump and with the European conservative movements, are building an axis of autocracies, and the United States is on the relatively quick road to becoming an autocracy and no longer a constitutional republic.

Were American conservatives particularly vulnerable to being manipulated because they are anti-intellectual and already predisposed towards authoritarianism? Or was the Russian plan just that masterful and devious?

The Russians watch very carefully. We have to recognize their president is a former career KGB officer. The goals of Russia since 1917 have been to destroy capitalism, discredit democracy and show that Communist collectivism was the greatest social and political system in the world.

The Russians realized that that the American right wing, with its hatred of Barack Obama, was a natural ally. So the Russians went about co-opting these right-wingers. I call them the “American beachhead.” Since 2005 the Russians have been hammering almost every conservative political movement in Europe — they are now funded by Moscow, particularly the neo-Nazi and the fascist ones.

The Russians really invest in these organizations because their goal is to create autocracies. To re-engineer the world away from a Washington-centric European alliance to a Moscow-centric, autocratic one.

Steve Bannon was just in Europe speaking to right-wing and fascist groups, telling them to be proud of being called racists. Trump’s former adviser Sebastian Gorka actually wore a literal medal that was awarded by a Hungarian group allied with the Nazis.

In my book I call Steve Bannon “the American Goebbels.” He is the evangelist of the American alt-right. In Europe there are groups such as Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West), which is the rabid anti-foreigner movement in Germany who got power through the AFD (Alternative für Deutschland), and went from something like 3 percent of the polls last year to now being the second-largest party in Germany with 30 percent of the vote.

Trump is pretty much riding a high wave with 40 or so percent support. Hitler won with 37 percent. Bannon was just in Europe meeting with the Hungarian government and the Jobbik Party. Bannon also went to meet with the Five Star Movement in Italy whose foreign minister, Matteo Salvini, just threatened to deport and put on trains all of the Roma people — the “gypsies” — in Italy. The last guy who put the Roma out of a country and round them up on trains was Adolf Hitler and he sent them straight to Auschwitz.

So this is really dangerous talk that’s going on in Europe. We may be one or two elections in Europe from seeing the complete collapse of the European order that we established at the end of World War II.

In effect, Trump’s immigration policy amounted to putting the families of black and brown refugees in concentration camps. The United States has withdrawn from the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. How do these images of crying babies and broken families help Vladimir Putin’s plot against America?

This all works out for the Russians. First, note how the Russians have now shifted. Remember, last year they were starting to criticize Trump by saying that he had been consumed by the swamp. Now it is all completely reversed. Trump is a strong leader. Trump is closing his borders. Middle East and African immigration into Europe is the No. 1 platform for European conservatives. Trump is the Johnny-come-lately to the story. So Trump saying the same is a double thumbs-up for the Russians and their strategy of inciting nativism and racism and chaos.

Trump has been on Fox News and elsewhere joking about Putin and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Is he a “useful idiot” for Putin’s spies? Or is Trump actually afraid of being caught by Robert Mueller and his behavior reflects that? Either way he is acting like a guilty person.

I’m certainly been pretty vocal on this point. “Useful idiot” is a technical term. It’s a person who is an unwilling dupe, who through their own actions helps your cause. I think Trump started out as a useful idiot when it came to selling apartments and getting money from Russians who were liquidating their assets from the Soviet Union. I think he then became a willing asset when they started using him when he wanted to run for president. Trump knows everything is being done in his benefit. He is one step from being an agent. We may find out with Donald Trump that is the case. Who knows?

There are multiple examples of Trump and his confidants meeting with Russian representatives in private without American translators or media present. Trump will meet with Putin again in a few weeks. Again, this conversation will be private. How unusual is this?

It’s extremely unusual and people that should know better, like Gen. [John] Kelly, are not alarmed. They think this is just Trump’s way of doing things. But Trump meeting Putin in private is like him going in for his quarterly evaluation. I would not doubt if it actually comes out to effectively be that. As I said, I think this nation is in a Benedict Arnold moment.

Moreover, I think that there will be multiple Benedict Arnolds in the story. No other president would ever do this. No other president would be allowed to do this. Trump is getting away with this behavior because he has cowed the Republican Party with fear that they’ll be put out of office by his cult members. There is nothing Trump cannot do at this point.

Matters are very dire. I think this “blue wave” in the midterms is much exaggerated. Trump will win in 2020 — if he runs again — for a variety of reasons. What will America look like if Trump continues to get his way in terms of serving Putin’s and Russia’s interests, rather than those of the United States and the American people?

You will not recognize the United States. The country will vote itself into an autocracy. Trump and the Republican Party will suspend parts of America’s representative democracy. They will amend the Constitution. And America will see 65 percent of its people living under subjugation. Now, I don’t say that lightly. That’s an intelligence analysis based on the empirical data. I say that with experience honed with humility. Donald Trump makes no secret of his desires in that regard. His biggest problem has been democracy. I disagree with you, however, on one point. I do believe there will be a “blue wave.”

The problem with the progressives and liberals right now is that they are still treating this situation like we are in a state of normalcy.

Vladimir Putin actually warned that if Trump wins, he has to be careful of an American backlash like the one that swept the pro-Moscow government out of power in the Ukraine. He’s terrified of democracy. He’s terrified of people power. That’s my message. We have got to mobilize.

It has to be made clear that American democracy may go away this November because if the Democrats don’t win the House of Representatives, it’s done. Trump will get whatever he wants. I don’t think he will win in 2020, because at that point I hope a hero will emerge.

Michael Moore recently said that the American people must be prepared to die to stop Trump’s authoritarian and fascist movement. Do you think Moore is just being hyperbolic? Or is he correct?

I think he’s a little hyperbolic. Look, when the alt-right killed Heather Heyer the response from law enforcement has essentially run the alt-right underground. They had no idea that punching Nazis is a pretty deep-seated American value.

What would you tell people who are terrified or afraid of Trump and what he is doing to America? What advice would you give them?

I get those types of questions every day. The first thing I tell people is: “Stand fast. We will win this.” You have to understand that we are not up against one man. We are up against 40 percent of the American public who don’t understand what’s going on because they only believe Donald Trump. What we must do now is commit ourselves to the American democratic experiment and the best spirit of the founding.

If we turn out this year like it was a presidential election year, then we will win in a phenomenal landslide. You must vote like your life depends on it, because it could, if you’re a woman that might need an abortion. It could, if you’re a Latino. It could, if you’re a young black man where shootings can now essentially be written off with a rubber stamp.

When this nation was built out of my city, Philadelphia, the odds were simple. They win or they hang. And now it’s simple again. We win or we lose American democracy. We lose it forever, and I don’t think we’ll come back from autocracy.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/fa...ins-us-doomed-trump-ignores-mueller-subpoena/
The fast track to tyranny’: Ex-assistant US attorney explains how US is doomed if Trump ignores Mueller subpoena

kim Wehle, a former assistant U.S. attorney and former associate prosecutor for the independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation, warned on Monday that the U.S. is on the “fast track to tyranny” if President Donald Trump refuses to testify in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

During an interview over the weekend, Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said that the president would only agree to an interview with Mueller if the special counsel revealed how the investigation would conclude.
Wehle told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Monday that it would be “impossible” for Mueller to agree to Giuliani’s demands.

“The idea is the president gets to decide if this is a legitimate investigation in exchange for testimony,” Wehle explained. “We’ve had 23 indictments, including Russian trolls. We have three people in the campaign, we’ve got a former White House adviser. We’ve got charges of lying to the FBI, conspiracy. I mean, this is a far cry from a witch hunt.”

Wehle pointed out that Mueller could subpoena Trump, forcing him to testify.

“I think it’s more likely that Trump will kick the can down the road,” she remarked. “And see how it works out politically with the next election. And tell the voters, ‘Listen, you decide.’ Kind of like what McConnell did with the [Merrick Garland] Supreme Court pick.”

“But if it did come to a subpoena, the next step would be the president saying no,” Wehle continued. “And that could product a contempt citation and then that would certainly go to the courts to determine the extent that the president can thumb his nose at a valid criminal investigation, one that’s consistent with the rule of law.”

The former assistant U.S. attorney added: “And once the rule of law starts to fall apart, then we’re on the fast track to tyranny, regardless of political party. This is a very high stakes game of chicken right now.”

Watch the video below from MSNBC.



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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/fascism-will-doorstep-dont-act-immediately-yale-historian/
Fascism will be on our doorstep if we don’t act immediately: Yale historian
How close is President Donald Trump to following the path blazed by last century’s tyrants? Could American democracy be replaced with totalitarian rule? There’s enough resemblance that Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who studies fascist and communist regime change and totalitarian rule, has written a book warning about the threat and offering lessons for resistance and survival. The author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century talked to AlterNet’s Steven Rosenfeld.

Steven Rosenfeld: Three weeks ago, you said that the country has perhaps a year ‘to defend American democracy.’ You said what happens in the next few weeks is crucial. Are you more concerned than ever that our political culture and institutions are evolving toward fascism, resembling key aspects of the early 20th-century European regimes you’ve studied?

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Timothy Snyder: Let me answer you in three parts. The first thing is that the 20 lessons that I wrote, I wrote on November 15th. The book, On Tyranny, was done by Christmas. Which means if people read it now, and people are reading it, and it’s describing the world they are in, that means I’ve successfully made predictions based on history. We’re going to talk about what is going to come, but I want to point out that timeline—it was basically completely blind. But the book does describe what is going on now.

The year figure is there because we have to recognize that things move fast. Nazi Germany took about a year. Hungary took about two and a half years. Poland got rid of the top-level judiciary within a year. It’s a rough historical guess, but the point is because there is an outside limit, you therefore have to act now. You have to get started early. It’s just very practical advice. It’s the meta-advice of the past: That things slip out of reach for you, psychologically
very quickly, and then legally almost as quickly. It’s hard for people to act when they feel other people won’t act. It’s hard for people to act when they feel like they have to break the law to do so. So it is important to get out in front before people face those psychological and legal barriers.

Am I more worried now? I realize that was your question. No, I’m exactly as worried as I was before, in November. I think that the people who inhabit the White House inhabit a different ideological world in which they would like for the United States not to be the constitutional system that it now is. I was concerned about that in November. I’m concerned about it now. Nothing that has happened since has changed the way I see things.

SR: Let’s talk about how this evolution takes place. You’ve written about how ‘post-truth is pre-fascism.’ You talk about leaders ignoring facts, law and history. How far along this progression are we? I’m wondering where you might see things going next.





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TS: That’s tough because what history does is give you a whole bunch of cases where democratic republics become authoritarian regimes; sometimes fascist regimes, sometimes communist regimes. It doesn’t give you one storyline: A, B, C, D. It gives you a bunch of clusters of A, and a bunch of clusters of C. But factuality is really important and more important than people realize, because it’s the substructure of regime change.

We think about democracy, and that’s the word that Americans love to use, democracy, and that’s how we characterize our system. But if democracy just means going to vote, it’s pretty meaningless. Russia has democracy in that sense. Most authoritarian regimes have democracy in that sense. Nazi Germany had democracy in that sense, even after the system had fundamentally changed.

Democracy only has substance if there’s the rule of law. That is, if people believe that the votes are going to be counted and they are counted. If they believe that there’s a judiciary out there that will make sense of things if there’s some challenge. If there isn’t rule of law, people will be afraid to vote the way they want to vote. They’ll vote for their own safety as opposed to their convictions. So the thing we call democracy depends on the rule of law. And the things we call the rule of law depends upon trust. Law functions 99 percent of the time automatically. It functions because we think it’s out there. And that, in turn, depends on the sense of truth. So there’s a mechanism here. You can get right to heart of the matter if you can convince people that there is no truth. Which is why the stuff that we characterize as post-modern and might dismiss is actually really, really essential.

The second thing about ‘post-truth is pre-fascism’ is I’m trying to get people’s attention, because that is actually how fascism works. Fascism says, disregard the evidence of your senses, disregard observation, embolden deeds that can’t be proven, don’t have faith in god but have faith in leaders, take part in collective myth of an organic national unity, and so forth. Fascism was precisely about setting the whole Enlightenment aside and then selling what sort of myths emerged. Now those [national] myths are pretty unpredictable, and contingent on different nations and different leaders and so on, but to just set facts aside is actually the fastest catalyst. So that part concerns me a lot.

Where we’re going? The classic thing to watch out for is the shift from one governing strategy to another. In the U.S. system, the typical governing strategy is you more or less have to follow your constituents with legislation because of the election cycle. That’s one pulse of politics. The other pulse of politics is emergency. There’s some kind of terrorist attack and then the leader tries to suspend basic constitutional rights. And then we get on a different rhythm, where the rhythm is not one electoral cycle to the next but one emergency to the next. That’s how regime changes take place. It’s a classic way since the Reichstag fire [when the Nazis burned their nation’s capitol building and blamed communist arsonists].

So in terms of what might happen next, or what people could look out for, some kind of event that the government claims is a terrorist incident, would be something to be prepared for. That’s why it’s one of the lessons in the book.

SR: You have talked before about that kind of emergency justification—and even with Vladimir Putin in Russia. Is that what you think would happen here? Because with the exception of the judiciary, a lot of American institutions, like Congress, are not really resisting. They’re going along.

TS: They’re going along… but my own intuition would be the emergency situation arises because going along isn’t going to be enough. Paradoxically, Congress is going along and is going to pass a bunch of stuff, which is not actually very popular. Right? It’s not going to be so popular to have millions of people lose health insurance, which is what’s going to happen. The ironic things about the Republican Congress is now it has the ability to do everything it wants to do, but none of what it wants to do is that popular. Except with the few big lobbies, of course. The freedom the Republicans have is the freedom to impose their agenda on down.

The same thing goes with Mr. Trump. The things that he might do that some people would like, like building a wall or driving all the immigrants out, those things are going to be difficult or slow. In the case of the wall, I personally don’t believe it will ever happen. It’s going to be very slow. So my suspicion is that it is much easier to have a dramatic negative event, than have a dramatic positive event. That is one of the reasons I am concerned about the Reichstag fire scenario. The other reason is that we are being mentally prepared for it by all the talk about terrorism and by the Muslim ban. Very often when leaders repeat things over and over they are preparing you for when that meme actually emerges in reality.

SR: I want to change the topic slightly. You cite many examples from Germany in 1933, the year Hitler consolidated power. So what did ordinary Germans miss that’s relevant for ordinary Americans now? I know some of this is the blurring of facts. But when I have talked to Holocaust survivors, they often say, nobody ever thought things would be that bad, or nobody thought the Germans would go as far as they did.

TS: The German Jews then, and people now, don’t understand how quick their neighbors will change; don’t understand how quickly society can change. They don’t understand the fact that a life that’s been predictable for a long time, doesn’t mean that it will be predictable tomorrow. And people like to think that their experience is exceptional. German Jews might have thought, ‘Well, there were pogroms [ethnic cleansing] in Russia, but surely nothing like that could happen here.’ That’s what many German Jews thought. So one issue is people need to realize how quickly things can change.

The second thing that German Jews were not aware of, or Germans were not aware of, was how new media can quickly change conversations. In that way, it’s not exactly the same, but radio at that time often ended up being a channel for propaganda. There are parallels with the internet now, where there were hopes that it would be [primarily] enlightening. But in fact, it turns out that with presidential tweets, or with bots, or isolated habits of viewing, it isn’t necessarily enlightening. It’s the opposite. A lot of us were blindsided by the internet in much the same way that people could be blindsided by radio in the 1930s.

But here’s the other view. The one that we have that German Jews didn’t have in 1933 is we have their experience. That’s the premise of the whole book; the premise is that the 20th century showed us what can happen, and there’s lots of wonderful scholarship by German historians and others, which breaks down what can happen and how. And so, one of the first things that we should be doing is taking advantage of the one opportunity that we really have that they didn’t, which is to learn from that history. And that’s the premise of the book.

SR: All of your book’s lessons are very personal: Don’t obey in advance. Believe in truth. Stand out. Defend institutions. Be calm but as courageous as you can be. Yet the change or oppression that you are talking about is systemic and institutional. What do you say to people who say, ‘I’ll try, but I may not have the power here.’ There’s that cliche, tilting at windmills. …

TS: Well, if everyone tilted against a windmill, the windmill would fall down, right? Party of the tragedy of Don Quixote is he’s tilting against the wrong thing. So that’s not our problem. We’re pretty sure what the problem is. But he was also alone except for his faithful companion. We’re not really alone. There are millions and millions of people who are looking for that thing to do. Just by sheer math, if everyone does a little thing, it will make a difference. And much of what I am recommending is—you’re right, they are things that people can do, but they also involve some kind of engagement. Whether it’s the small talk [with those you disagree with] or whether it’s the corporeal politics. And that little bit of engagement helps you realize that what you are doing has a kind of sense, even if it doesn’t immediately change the order.

And finally, a lot of the political theory that I am calling upon, which comes from the anti-Nazis and the anti-communists, makes the point that even though you don’t realize it, your own example matters a whole lot, whether it’s positively or negatively. There are times, and this is one of those times, where small gestures, or their absence, can make a huge difference. So the things that might not have mattered a year ago do matter now. The basic thing is we are making a difference whether we realize it or not, and the basic question is whether it is positive or negative.

Let me put it a different way. Except for really dramatic moments, most of the time authoritarianism depends on some kind of cycle involving a popular consent of some form. It really does matter how we behave. The danger is [if] we say, ‘Well, we don’t see how it matters, and so therefore we are going to just table the whole question.’ If we do that, then we start to slide along and start doing the things that the authorities expect of us. Which is why lesson number one is: Don’t obey in advance. You have to set the table differently. You have to say, ‘This is a situation in which I need to think for myself about all of the things that I am going to do and not just punt. Not just wait. Nor just see how things seems to me. Because if you do that, then you change and you actually become part of the regime change toward authoritarianism.’

SR: You cite in the book something I read in high school: Eugene Ionesco’s existential play about fascism, Rhinoceros, where people talk about their colleagues at work, in academia, saying stuff like, ‘Come on, I don’t agree with everything, but give him a chance.’ Ionesco’s point is that people join an unthinking herd before they know it.

What would you suggest people do, when they run into others who fall on this spectrum?

TS: There are a few questions here. One is how to keep yourself going. Another is how to energize other people who agree with you. And the third thing is not quite Rhinoceros stuff, but how to catch people who are slipping. Like that CNN coverage last week of the speech to Congress, where one of the CNN commentators said, ‘Oh, now this is presidential.’ That was a Rhinoceros moment, because there was nothing presidential—it was atrocious to parade the victims of crimes committed by one ethnicity. That was atrocious and there’s nothing presidential about it.

Catching Rhinoceros moments is one thing. I think it’s really important to think about. The example that Ionesco gives is people saying, ‘Yeah, on one hand, with the Jews, maybe they are right.’ With Trump, people will say something like, ‘Yeah, but on taxes, maybe he’s right.’ And the thing to catch is, ‘Yeah, but are you in favor of regime change? Are you in favor of the end of the American way of democracy and fair play?’ Because that’s what’s really at stake.

With people all the way over at the end of the spectrum who are now confident about Trump—that’s a different subject. I think it’s important to maintain impossible human relations across that divide, because some of those people are going to change their minds. It’s harsh. But some will change their minds, and if they have no one to talk to, it will be much harder for them to change their minds. At different points on the spectrum, you have to think in different ways. My own major concern right now is with self-confidence and the energy of the people who do have the deep—and, I think incorrect—conviction that something has gone wildly wrong.

SR: The people who have the conviction that something has gone wildly wrong—that can describe Trump supporters and Trump opponents.

TS: That’s a good point. So much of this is personal. In the book, I don’t actually mention anybody’s name, except the thinkers who I admire. So much of this is personal that people think, ‘Well, if you say anything critical, it is about you as a person, and how you don’t like anything about someone who likes Trump.’ That’s a way for there to be no political discussion.

I think it’s useful, even though you will never win the argument, when you are talking about people who support to the administration, to stay at the level of the Constitution. To stay at the level of freedom, or stay at the level of basic issues, like, is global warming really going to be so great, when the entire Pentagon says that it is a national security threat? Or, is it really such a good idea to treat Muslims like this? Or, is it really going to be so good when millions of people lose health insurance?

Keep it at the level of issues as much as possible, because what I’ve found is the pattern that people shift to is, ‘Why are you going to be so hard on this guy? Give him a chance.’ But the issues of what’s constitutional, what is actually American, and what’s going to be a policy that they are going to be proud of a year from now—keep the conversation closest to the Constitution. It’s easiest to be dismissed when it’s personal. And fundamentally, this is the trick. It isn’t personal. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. What matters is the system, which people of very different convictions take for granted, is now under threat.

SR: You have said that the Muslims are being targeted as the Jews were targeted in Germany. But out here in California, it also feels like the deportation machinery is getting ready for undocumented immigrants. On Monday, Reuters reported that Homeland Security officials said they might separate mothers from kids when making arrests. Germany did that as it rounded up Jews. Don’t they face just as grave a threat?

TS: With the Muslims, the resemblance to anti-Semitic policy in Germany in ’33 is that if you can pick some group and make them stand in for some international threat, then you can change domestic politics, because domestic politics then is no longer about compromises and competing interests, domestic politics is about who inside the society should actually be seen and outside the society. Once you get the wedge in with the first group, them you essentially win. It could be the Muslims. It could be somebody else, is the point. The political logic is basically the same.

With undocumented immigrants, I think the logic might be a little bit different. I think the goal might be to get us used to seeing a certain kind of police power. And getting us used to seeing things happening to people in public. And then if we get used to that, then we might be more willing for the dial to turn a little bit further. It’s too soon for me to speculate confidently about all of this.

I think you’re right though, it could be the Muslims, but it doesn’t have to be the Muslims. The crucial thing is to get some kind of in [political opening] where people go along with or accept stigmatization. And the logic is there’s always some kind of threat that comes from beyond the country. And that we can fix that threat on a group of people inside the country. And if you go along with this, what else are you agreeing to go along with?

SR: To go back to your book, what you’re saying is that people should be vigilant, should know their values and participate at some level with making those values known, because that is what ordinary people can do.

TS: Yes. The point of the book is [that] we are facing a real crisis and a real moment of choice. The possibilities are much darker than Americans are used to considering. But at the same time, what we can do is much more important than we realize. The regime will only change if the gamble of the people in the White House is right: That many of us despise many others of us and that most of us are indifferent. If it turns out that there are emotions and values that are more numerous and more vibrant than indifference and hatred, things are going to be okay. That depends on us. That depends on us making certain realizations. It depends on us acting fast. In that sense it’s a test, not just collectively. Maybe there’s no such thing as a collective test. But it is a test for us individually.

Most Americans who haven’t been abroad haven’t been faced by something like this. And hopefully they won’t be faced with it again. But we are faced with it as citizens and as individuals. And I think, five or 10 years from now, no matter how things turn out, we’ll ask ourselves—or our children will ask us—how we behaved in 2017.

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/ny-times-publisher-tells-trump-face-language-not-just-divisive-increasingly-dangerous/


NY Times publisher tells Trump to his face: ‘His language is not just divisive but increasingly dangerous’
.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, said on Sunday that he took a meeting with President Donald Trump to call out the commander-in-chief’s divisive and “dangerous” rhetoric.


In a tweet on Sunday, Trump complained that Sulzberger “pent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”

Later on Sunday, Sulzberger fired back in a statement.


“My main purpose for accepting the meeting was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” Sulzberger said in the statement. “I told the president directly that I thought his language was not just abusive but increasingly dangerous.”


“I told him that although the phrase ‘fake news’ is untrue and harmful, I am far more concern about him labeling journalists an ‘enemy of the people,'” the publisher continued. “I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.”


Sulzberger said that he warned Trump that he is “putting lives

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/donald-trump-lead-america-catastrophe-desperate-attempt-escape-legal-trouble/

Here is how Donald Trump could lead America to catastrophe in a desperate attempt to escape legal trouble

s it now time to imagine how far Trump and his Republican cronies in Congress might be able to push things? And how we, as Americans, might respond?


This isn’t the first time such a question has been raised.
A bit more than a week before the election of 2016—a week before Trump won the election—one of the few people on earth who’s really and truly studied Donald Trump up close and personal, Tony Schwartz, granted an interview to the British newspaper the Independent.


Schwartz, who wrote Trump’s book The Art of the Deal and spent months with Trump to gather information for the book, predicted that Trump would declare martial law. Not as a possibility, but as a near-certainty.


Schwartz predicted that Trump would do three specific things, although not necessarily all at once or in any particular order: He’d attack the free press; he’d compile an enemies list and begin getting revenge on those he thinks slighted him; and he’d declare martial law to solidify his power.


“When I said that,” Schwartz told the Independent, “I got a lot of rolling of the eyes from people in the media and other people to whom I was making that case. I think today, people do really begin to understand that this is a volatile man with very low self control.”


How would this happen? Andrew Buncombe, who interviewed Schwartz for the Independent, wrote: “Asked how Mr. Trump would go about undertaking such a drastic measure, [Schwartz] said many of Mr. Trump’s supporters were police, members of the border guards force and the ‘far right wing’ of the military.”


It’s enough to make you think that Charlottesville was just a dress rehearsal for our version of the Brownshirts, and that Trump is counting on the support of these “very fine people” if he ever needs them in a pinch. Our very own version of Kristallnacht could be not far off.


For example, imagine that Trump, his family members, and numerous Republicans are indicted for actual crimes, and, particularly with the Nunes faction of Congress, for conspiring to conceal or obstruct investigations of those crimes. And the indictment comes right after the election in November when Democrats have won control of one or both houses of Congress, but Republicans are still in charge until January.


This combination would present Trump and his GOP with both a problem and an opportunity.


The problem, of course, is that Trump, Jared, Don Jr., and the Republicans who’ve conspired with Trump like Devin Nunes (for example) might all be heading toward jail, and possibly even impeachment after the first week of the New Year.


The opportunity is to create a constitutional crisis and grab even more power and immunity for themselves, possibly even “temporarily suspending” the 2020 presidential elections.


There are numerous possible scenarios; I’ll just outline a few trigger points, and you can fill in the rest.


Trump thrives on creating crises, and then “solving” the crisis he, himself created. He did it with DACA, with Obamacare, and with North Korea. It seems he’s trying the same playbook with Iran and immigration/asylum.


But what if the crisis he creates in this case involved what looked like widespread violence?


The Constitution gives Congress (controlled by the GOP) the power to “suppress insurrections,” while numerous laws including the Patriot Act and its successors give the president the power to declare various levels of emergency or even martial law. (It’s been done before; Lincoln did it and even suspended habeas corpus, which was clearly unconstitutional.)


In 2004, the Congressional Research Service (a federal agency that researches legal questions for members of Congress) looked into whether a president could suspend elections in a time of crisis. They concluded: “While the Executive Branch does not currently have this power, it appears that Congress may be able to delegate this power to the Executive Branch by enacting a statute.”


Is it inconceivable that our current Congress might do such a thing? Wouldn’t it depend on how many people were in the streets protesting (after the election it was a million-plus) and how many right-wing open-carry armed thugs show up?


If Heather Heyer was only the first anti-Trump protester murdered by white supremacists, and dozens or hundreds more were to fall to the guns or bombs of Trump’s Very Fine People, Congress may well consider it a state of emergency.


This was, after all, the exact scenario that Timothy McVeigh thought he would bring about. Following the Turner Diaries script, known to every white supremacist, McVeigh believed that President Bill Clinton would react to the Oklahoma City bombing with widespread gun control, which would cause all the good well-armed white people to start a killing frenzy against people of color and bring about the Aryan forces’ “triumph.”


And McVeigh’s thinking on the subject is widely shared in the hard-right-wing underground today.


We Americans tend to think of ourselves as totally unique, but numerous democratic republics have gone down this or similar roads in past generations. As Trump biographer Tony Schwartz noted, “Just look at any country that has been taken over by the military. He’d say there is a threat to the republic and the military needs to crack down and he would start with curfews, and the stop and frisk of anyone who is not white, male and rich.”


But what about the power of the Article III courts to restrain Trump, you might ask?


So far, with his Muslim ban and his brutal confinement of refugee children, Trump has gone along with the courts. But consider his presidential hero, Andrew Jackson, the man whose picture Trump hung by his desk in the Oval Office.


Not just the lower courts, but the Supreme Court itself told Jackson that he couldn’t do things—twice—and both times he simply defied them. One was ending the second National Bank, and the other was the genocidal Trail of Tears.


John Marshall was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time. President Jackson simply ignored the earlier SCOTUS ruling in the constitutionality of the bank (McCulloch v Maryland), and ignored legislation supporting the Court and the bank that passed through both the House and the Senate.


Ignoring the law and legal precedent, Jackson proceeded to shut the bank down, an action that, in part (along with paying off the national debt), produced the deepest and longest depression in the history of the United States.


And when Marshall ordered him not to forcibly relocate the Cherokee Indians from Georgia to Oklahoma (indirectly; the case had to do with a Vermont man held in Georgia who was going to be relocated along with the Cherokee), Jackson was said to have bragged to his friends, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”


So, what if Trump were to simply follow the example of his hero, Jackson?


If Mueller used federal courts to indict Trump and his merry band, and Trump directed the police agencies of the U.S. to ignore the order (as Jackson directed the U.S. Army to ignore the Supreme Court and relocate the Cherokee, and they complied), then Mueller may find that he has precisely as much power over Trump and his family and friends as Chief Justice John Marshall had over Andrew Jackson.


This wouldn’t just provoke a constitutional crisis; it’s the very definition of one.


As Alexander Hamilton noted in #78 of the Federalist Papers, “The judiciary… has no influence over either the sword [President] or the purse [Congress]; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” (Capitals Hamilton’s.)


But Trump doesn’t need a fight with Mueller in the courts to provoke a crisis: war works just as well.


FDR declared martial law in Hawaii (which wasn’t even a state then) after Pearl Harbor, and [then-General] Andrew Jackson declared martial law in New Orleans during the War of 1812. (There’s that name again…)


Provoking Iran or North Korea into a limited war may give Trump all the power he needs.


And, as George W. Bush noted to his biographer Mickey Herskowitz in 1999, war gives a president political capital. Bush even thought he’d get enough political capital from invading Iraq (this was before he was elected, keep in mind) that he could use it to privatize Social Security.


“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker that Bush told him.


“My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it,” Bush said, adding, “If I have a chance to invade…. if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”


(Much like Schwartz writing Trump’s autobiography, Herskowitz wrote the first draft of George W. Bush’s autobiography A Charge to Keep. We should attend to the warnings of presidential biographers.)


Privatizing Social Security was very, very important to George W. Bush (maybe as important as staying out of jail is to Trump). Bush ran an unsuccessful campaign for the House of Representatives in 1978 in Texas on that singular platform.


And, after winning reelection and being sworn back into office in 2005, Bush began a campaign, traveling all across the country, trying to convince people privatization was a good idea.


As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington Bureau Chief Marc Sandalowwrote the day after Bush won reelection, “President Bush proclaimed his election as evidence that Americans embrace his plans to reform Social Security… Bush staked his claim to a broad mandate and announced his top priorities at a post-election news conference, saying his 3.5 million vote victory had won him political capital that he would spend enacting his conservative agenda.”


“I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” Bush told reporters. “It is my style.”


The more Bush traveled pitching the idea, though, the more people hated it. He ultimately gave it up, as Brookings reported.

But if Bush was willing to start a war with Iraq to get himself reelected and privatize Social Security, imagine how much more motivated Trump may be to start a war—with anybody, anywhere—if he saw his financial empire slipping away, his presidency imperiled, and his children facing jail time.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (that country’s version of NPR/PBS) is reporting right now that Donald Trump is studying plans to bomb Iran as soon as a month from now. To quote the article that is rocking Australia right now: “Senior figures in the Turnbull Government have told the ABC they believe the United States is prepared to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, perhaps as early as next month, and that Australia is poised to help identify possible targets.”

If Trump believes that Bush was right that war is good for politics and lifts war-making presidents and parties, perhaps this is his midterm strategy in the face of terrible poll numbers. Tragically, such a bombing could well bring Iran’s allies, including Russia and China, into a larger war, triggering World War III in a manner similar to how World War I spiraled out of control.

Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, and early in the Trump presidency, it was nearly impossible to imagine the things that he would later do and get away with.

That failure of imagination has cost us dearly.

While the time for freak-out is hopefully far in the future, imagining and gaming out our response to some of the worst-case and most extreme possibilities is not at all a hysterical reaction. If anything, it’s the essence of prudence.

What do you think he could do? And how should we best react?

An entire generation of Germans, Italians, and Spaniards are aging into their twilight years right now wishing they’d had such imagination in the early 1930s.


It’s time for a conversation.

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/08/ne...thority-close-news-outlets-behave-badly-poll/

Nearly half of Republicans say Trump should have ‘authority to close news outlets if they behave badly’: poll

According to a new poll, a plurality of Republican voters want President Donald Trump to be able to shut down media outlets if he decides they have engaged in “bad behavior.”

The Ipsos poll, first reported by The Daily Beast, found that 43 percent of Republicans believe “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Thirty-six percent of Republicans surveyed said that the president should not have the power to silence the press.


About a quarter of Republicans also said that Trump should shutter mainstream outlets like CNN and The Washington Post. Twenty-eight percent agreed with Trump’s statement that the media are an “enemy of the people.” And 79 percent said that media treats Trump “unfairly.”
Only 12 percent of Democrats said that Trump should be able to shut down outlets he disagrees with. Twenty-one percent of self-identified independents also agreed that Trump should have the power.

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https://www.rawstory.com/2018/08/wa...-trump-foreign-despots-scathing-rebuke-msnbc/

WATCH: John Brennan compares Trump to ‘foreign despots’ in scathing rebuke on MSNBC
https://youtu.be/2BAmm7wsfMM

wednesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders shocked political observers when she announced that the Trump administration was revoking the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan.

Brennan had been critical of the president’s handling of the controversy surrounding the release of Omarosa Manigault

book on twitter







Quite a few observers pointed out that the administration’s actions appear to be politically motivated, as well as driven by the president’s need to shift the narrative away from Omarosa’s damning claims.

Wednesday afternoon Brennan appeared on MSNBC and aired his concerns about the ramifications of Trump’s actions.

“I pushed out a tweet expressing my concern about what I think is a politically motivated action by Mr. Trump,” he told Nicolle Wallace.

“It should worry all Americans.”

He added: “I’m going to continue to speak out.” He also compared Trump to “foreign despots.”

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/...ere-trump-learned-to-attack-and-sow-division/

Trump, McCarthyism and Cohn: Where Trump Learned to Attack and Sow Division

Trump critics have long found similarities between Trump and McCarthy as they both regularly launched unfounded accusations against opponents as a means of discrediting critics and creating division

Editor’s note: Trump is being disingenuous to say the least when he compares the Mueller investigation to the McCarthy witch hunt. Roy Cohn is the link between Trump and McCarthy and a slimy, nasty link indeed. Cohn was the master manipulator and schemer, a man who simultaneously worked for the Mossad and the US Kosher Nostra; he was Israel’s political hitman in the US, the man who used the Mossad’s assets to gain compromising blackmail material on anyone who dared to oppose Israel’s plans to gain total control over the US. Cohn also created Trump, in effect, it is Cohn we have to thank for the Trump presidency. If you truly understand who Cohn was and what he represented, then there is no escaping the conclusion that Trump is an Israeli-Kosher Nostra puppet and his presidency exists. Ian]
On Sunday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of attacks on Twitter against the New York Times and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Trump made one claim in particular which quickly drew scorn on Twitter, writing that, “Mueller and his gang make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby!”


Trump using former Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy as a means of attack on Mueller and the Russia investigation immediately drew surprise and condemnation, given Trump’s close relationship with McCarthy’s protege Roy Cohn.
Cohn served as McCarthy’s chief counsel for the Army–McCarthy hearings during the so-called “red scare” of the 1950s and was a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – which resulted in their executions.
According to NPR, “Trump met Cohn in 1973 in a Manhattan nightclub. The two became friends, allies, business associates. Some say Cohn was Trump’s mentor, or even his surrogate father. This much is clear: Cohn was Trump’s model in the handling of public relationships and media warfare.”
Trump himself praised Cohn in the “Art of the Deal,” writing, “”Tough as he was, Roy (Cohn, McCarthy’s protege) always had a lot of friends, and I’m not embarrassed to say I was one. He was a truly loyal guy…a great guy to have on your side…”
When New York disbarred Cohn in 1986 for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation,” Trump testified on his behalf at the hearing. Cohn died of complications from AIDs in August of that year.
Trump critics have long found similarities between Trump and McCarthy as they both regularly launched unfounded accusations against opponents as a means of discrediting critics and creating chaos.
Ron Elving wrote that Melania Trump once said during the 2016 presidential campaign that “when you attack Donald, he will punch back 10 times harder.” “That was Cohn’s modus operandi for many years before he taught it to Trump,” said Elving.
In June 1954 Senator Ralph E. Flanders, a Republican from Vermont, said “I have been led to remember the part which the Senator [McCarthy] played in the investigation of the Malmedy massacre and the strange tenderness which he displayed for the Nazi ruffians involved. Perhaps this would not have been enough to perpetuate foreboding, but his anti-Communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the heart of any defenseless minority.” Flanders added, McCarthy, “spreads division and confusion wherever he goes.”
Flanders criticism of McCarthy was echoed throughout the U.S. media in August of 2017 when Trump refused to unequivocally condemn deadly violence by neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Below are three articles from 1953 to 1954 from the Jewish Telegraph Agency documenting criticism of McCarthy for claiming attacks again Roy Cohn were anti-Semitic:
Jewish Groups Assail Mccarthy for False “anti-semitic” Issue
July 24, 1953
NEW YORK (Jul. 23)
The American Jewish Congress, the Jewish Labor Committee and the 34 other national and local Jewish organizations affiliated with the National Community Relations Advisory Council today issued a joint statement assailing Senator Joseph R. McCarthy for charging with anti-Semitism, those who criticize his Jewish investigators Roy M. Cohn and David Schine.
The statement pointed out that every American has the night to express his views regarding the statements and actions of public official or his critics has no relevance or place in such discussions, it emphasized.
“Senator McCarthy’s characterization of criticisms of Messrs. Cohn and Schine as anti-Semitism is an irrespsonsible attempt to thwart the legitimate right of criticism, ” the statement said. “The injection of religious considerations in areas where they have no pertinence is a favorite device of demagogues. It is sadly ironic that this standard stock in trade of Communists and other totalitarian societies should be employed by one who claims to be in the forefront of the fight to preserve democratic institutions.
“As responsible Jewish bodies, we have never hesitated to challenge and identify those who falsely inject religious or racial issues into a discussion of national affairs. We condemn such attempts to mislead the American people and denounce such fraudulent efforts to confuse and distort public opinion. We shall continue with equal vigor to expose anti-Semitism and false charges of anti-Semitism from whatever source they may emanate, ” the statement concluded.
The National Council of Jewish Women, in a telegram to Sen. McCarthy, said: “One of the inexcusable devices of demagoguery is to avoid meeting public criticism on an issue by charges unrelated to it.” It added: “As American citizens, the Jews of the United States are accustomed to taking their chances in public life on the basis of merit and character. Nothing could be more inflammatory of anti-Semitism than the kind of irrelevant charge which you have made.”
Mccarthy Denounced for Charging Sen. Monroney with Anti-semitism
July 21, 1953
WASHINGTON (Jul. 20)
The American Jewish Congress, the Jewish Labor Committee and the 34 other national and local Jewish organizations affiliated with the National Community Relations Advisory Council today issued a joint statement assailing Senator Joseph R. McCarthy for charging with anti-Semitism, those who criticize his Jewish investigators Roy M. Cohn and David Schine.
The statement pointed out that every American has the night to express his views regarding the statements and actions of public official or his critics has no relevance or place in such discussions, it emphasized.
“Senator McCarthy’s characterization of criticisms of Messrs. Cohn and Schine as anti-Semitism is an irrespsonsible attempt to thwart the legitimate right of criticism, ” the statement said. “The injection of religious considerations in areas where they have no pertinence is a favorite device of demagogues. It is sadly ironic that this standard stock in trade of Communists and other totalitarian societies should be employed by one who claims to be in the forefront of the fight to preserve democratic institutions.
“As responsible Jewish bodies, we have never hesitated to challenge and identify those who falsely inject religious or racial issues into a discussion of national affairs. We condemn such attempts to mislead the American people and denounce such fraudulent efforts to confuse and distort public opinion. We shall continue with equal vigor to expose anti-Semitism and false charges of anti-Semitism from whatever source they may emanate, ” the statement concluded.
The National Council of Jewish Women, in a telegram to Sen. McCarthy, said: “One of the inexcusable devices of demagoguery is to avoid meeting public criticism on an issue by charges unrelated to it.” It added: “As American citizens, the Jews of the United States are accustomed to taking their chances in public life on the basis of merit and character. Nothing could be more inflammatory of anti-Semitism than the kind of irrelevant charge which you have made.”
Mccarthy Charged in Senate with Causing “foreboding” Among Jews
June 2, 1954
WASHINGTON (Jun. 1)
Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was charged today on the floor of the Senate with causing “foreboding” among Jews. The charge was voiced by Sen. Ralph E. Flanders, Vermont Republican, who devoted a portion of a speech in the Senate to assailing McCarthy’s tactics.
Describing these tactics at great length, Sen. Flanders stated that besides other activities, Sen. McCarthy “spreads division and confusion wherever he goes. Note, for instance, the foreboding he inspires in our fellow citizens of Jewish blood and faith. Among them this is well nigh universal in spite of the fact that his two closest associates are Hebrews.”
In seeking the origin of what he described as “foreboding” on the part of American Jews, Sent Flanders said: “I have been led to remember the part which the Senator played in the investigation of the Malmedy massacre and the strange tenderness which he displayed for the Nazi ruffians involved. Perhaps this would not have been enough to perpetuate foreboding, but his anti-Communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the heart of any defenseless minority.”
Sen. Flanders said Americans should always remember “that Communism and Nazism and other dictatorships resemble each other far more closely than any of them resembles the free world into which we were born and in which we hope our children and grandchildren will live.”
It is “not the Jews alone” who have “reason to be troubled,” he said. He pointed out that Sen. McCarthy was responsible for selecting J. B. Matthews as staff director although Mr. Matthews “charged the Protestant ministry with being in effect the center of Communist influence in this country.” Sen. Flanders also pointed to the concern he said was felt by many Catholics and cited the criticism levelled against Sen. McCarthy by Bishop Sheil of Chicago. He asserted that Sen. McCarthy is trying “to inflame religious and racial bigotry.”
MCCARTHY CHALLENGES SEN. FLANDERS TO TESTIFY UNDER OATH
Upon learning of Sen. Flanders’ speech, Sen. McCarthy temporarily interrupted the televised McCarthy-Stevens hearings to make an answer. He attacked Sen. Flanders’ speech and mentioned that Roy Cohn, the McCarthy committee chief counsel, is Jewish. He called the Flanders’ statements “vicious and dishonest.”
Sen. McCarthy urged that Sen. Flanders be requested to appear before the committee headed by Sen, Karl Mundt and he required to testify under oath. At first, McCarthy demanded that Sen. Flanders be subpoenaed but he changed his mind and had this striken from the record, replacing it with a demand that the Vermont Senator be “requested” to appear to face Sen. McCarthy and Mr. Cohn.

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( the use of violence is the gold standard of fascists. hilter had his brown shirts before he became chancellor and Mussolini had his facistas who used violence to in still fear I the electorate . rahu)


https://www.rawstory.com/2018/08/trump-stoking-fears-violence-doesnt-lot-tricks-bag-ny-times-reporter/

Trump is stoking fears of ‘violence’ because ‘he doesn’t have a lot of tricks in his bag’: NY Times reporter

resident Donald Trump this week told evangelicals behind closed doors that there will be “violence” against them if Democrats win back Congress this fall.


Appearing on CNN Wednesday, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said that Trump’s low approval ratings despite having a good economy meant that he didn’t have many other options other than to scare his voters into believing their lives are at risk if Democrats win.






“He has been warned there are problems with that kind of language,” Haberman explained. “He doesn’t care. It’s where he wants to go and what he thinks will have the most impact. He bases a lot of his actions on shock, and we’ve seen this before. So this isn’t a surprise because he doesn’t have a lot of other bags of tricks because, even in a great economy, they are still facing a potential loss of the House.”


Elsewhere in the conversation, Haberman said that Trump has had to be repeatedly told that it would be a disaster for him to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions — an action that Haberman compared to a child touching a hot stove.


“The last time he touched a hot stove, he fired James Comey — and he got Mueller,” Haberman explained. “So, in some ways, Mueller has been job protection for Jeff Sessions.”


Watch the video below.

https://youtu.be/r6S1l4-iznU

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https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/war-and-conflict/2018/2470275.html

This Is War": Michael Moore Compares Trump to Hitler in New Documentary +Videos

Filmmaker Michael Moore has compared President Trump to Adolf Hitler in his new documentary, “Farenheit 11/9″ which premiered Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival to a sold-out audience.